A Feast for the 4th

My dear friend Zoe and I got together to make an elaborate feast for America's birthday.  It came out pretty spectacularly.  Our menu included:

 Salt and vinegar potato salad

Chipotle-caesar salad with grilled avocado (we omitted the corn, however)

 My special delicious burgers (see recipe below)

And these patriotic cookies, adapted from Sprinkle Bakes (I dunno how hers came out so nice, but I am determined to make a more beautiful spiral cookie).

Here is Zoe reveling in sugary patriotic goodness:

It was a wonderful feast (though way too much for us to eat on our own).  Here is a (very) approximate recipe for the burgers:

Ground beef
An egg
Bread crumbs
Milk
Worcestershire sauce
Salt
Pepper

Mush all those thing together in a bowl.  I have faith that you can use your best judgment on the proportions.  Make them into patties and grill 'em up!

A Savory Interlude: Quick and Easy Tomato Sauce

I've been baking a lot recently, but I do like to cook actual food as well.  This weekend I have the house to myself, so I'm making my own dinners.  We had frozen meatballs that we bought from Ikea (Ikea makes meatballs--who knew?) which I suspect were meant to be Swedish meatballs, but a meatball is a meatball really.  So I wanted to make pasta, but didn't feel like making the elaborate tomato sauce my mom makes (which is really the best).

Then I remembered this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, which I have made a few times before.  It's not the most thrilling sauce, but it is delicious, easy and cheap.  Perfect for nights like tonight!

The recipe has only 3 ingredients:

one 28 oz can whole peeled tomatoes
one yellow onion, peeled and halved
5 tbsp. butter

Put the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat.  Lower the heat to keep the sauce at a steady simmer, stirring occasionally and crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pan with the back of a wooden spoon.  After about 45 minutes, or when drops of fat float free of the tomatoes, remove from heat and discard the onion.

Easy, isn't it?  And it has a simple but fresh flavor.  The recipe says it makes 4 servings, but I prefer a lot of sauce so I found it only made two.  What a glutton.

A Cautionary Tale

So my friend Hannah and I decided to try out a mac 'n' cheese recipe from Evil Shenanigans.  But, we didn't end up making that mac 'n' cheese.  Instead we invented one on the fly.  We learned something today: evaporated milk goes bad.  And the evaporated milk I had in my pantry went bad in 2007.  Luckily we figured this out before we tried to eat it, or even cook with it.  So my advice to you: check the date on your evaporated milk before you open it.  It's gross when it's old.  Like really gross.  Also we had some cayenne pepper drama, which is too icky for me to recount.

So instead of making the recipe we planned on, we had to wing it.  Thus, I don't know exactly what measurements we used, but mac 'n' cheese is the kind of thing that you should adjust to your personal tastes anyhow.  Here are the ingredients (with approximate measurements) and procedure:

Approximate measurements:
8 oz. macaroni
6 oz. grated cheddar cheese
1 tbsp. butter
1/3 c. milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp. chili powder
salt and pepper (to taste)

Put water on medium heat.  When it boils, add the pasta, and cook it until it is al dente (follow directions on package).  Drain the pasta and put it back in the pan.

Cooking over low heat, add the butter and stir until melted.  Stir in the milk, egg, and chili powder, and stir for about 3 minutes.   Remove from heat.

Stir in the cheese in 4 additions, making sure that each section is fully incorporated before adding the next.  Season with salt and pepper.

Now I enjoyed the our impromptu macaroni, but I'd still like to try the Evil Shenanigan recipe, which looked deliciously gooey.  Here you see Hannah delighting in our achievement:

Kawaii desu ne?  Also, COMING SOON:  Death By Chocolate Brownies, which we made for dessert!  They are literally too gooey for me to take pictures yet.

Pasta with Shrimp and Tomato-Cream Sauce

So today I fell very suddenly and mysteriously ill.  I spent the entire day reading food blogs, and wishing I could cook instead of being in bed.  When I found this recipe on The Pioneer Woman, I decided to make it tonight, mysterious sickness be damned.

Om nom nom, right?  So let's do it.

Here are the ingredients:
1 lb. penne (Or whatever you want.  I'm not judgmental like that.  Plus I won't even know)
1 lb. shrimp
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
1/2 c. white wine
8 oz. tomato sauce
1 c. heavy cream
3 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. olive oil
basil and parsley, to taste (I recommend about a tablespoon of each)
salt and pepper, to taste

First, peel, de-vein and rinse the shrimp.  Heat a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil in a skillet, and fry those suckers up.  A couple minutes should do the trick.

 Okay, now you might want to put some water on to boil.  And, when it boils, maybe put that pasta in.  I'm not going to tell you when to do it, so pay attention.  I know you're on top of it.

Now, chop some onions and garlic.

I'm pretty good at chopping onions, but I suck at chopping garlic.  Slippery little bastards.  So sometimes I use this really handy thing.  You just stick some garlic in and roll it around on the counter.  It's great.  A little tricky to clean.

Now, briefly return to your little shrimps.  Cut them up into bite sized pieces.  I had a system where I cut the heads and tails off in one slice, and then cut the body in half.  But do your own thing.

Once that's done, heat the rest of the butter and oil in a pan.  The pan should be pretty large: eventually it'll hold the pasta, shrimp AND sauce.  When the butter is melted, stir in the onions and garlic.  Then, add the wine.  Mmm, sizzly.

Then add the tomato sauce, followed by the cream.

Yum.  Okay, now we chop our herbs.  Then, add things to our sauce, in this order:
Shrimp-->Herbs-->Pasta (did you forget about the pasta?  Because it should be cooked and strained by now)

Stir it up and it's ready to eat!  It really was delicious.

A Bacon Explosion

This is my first post, and it is actually several months late.  But my page was looking so gloomy and empty that I couldn't wait to make something new, I wanted to post something I'd already done.

So here is our Valentine's Day Bacon Explosion.

Pretty glorious, eh?  Neither of us have much interest in Valentine's Day really, but we do like an excuse for ridiculous quantities of meat.  So when we saw the recipe for the Bacon Explosion, we had to try it.

Many have blogged about it, and now I number among them.  The recipe is pretty simple, and not terribly exact.  So here goes.

2 lb. bacon
2 lb. Italian sausage
1 jar of barbecue sauce
1 jar of barbecue seasoning rub

Now, preheat your oven to 225 degrees.  And in the immortal words of Liz Cheney: let's get cookin'!

Okay, the first step is a lattice of bacon.  I like the squishy-squishy feeling between my fingers.  You should use about half the bacon.

To me, this is fantastic.  Is anyone totally grossed out?  Then don't scroll down.

Fun with close-ups!  Yaaay.  Okay, next step: sprinkle some of your barbecue rub over the lattice.  Sorry I don't have a picture of this step, I'm very new at this.  Now, once you've got it all seasoned and delicious, smoosh the sausage over the lattice.  Yes, all of it.

Less delicious looking, huh?  Don't worry, the lattice comes back.  But first, we have to fry up some bacon.  You know how to fry bacon right?  If you don't, google it or something.  Anyhow, here is a picture of that action:

Mmm, bacon.  Also, don't make fun of our crappy stove and lame-ass paper towels.  We're cooking in a dorm kitchen, we do what we can.

Now, once the bacon is all fried up and drained, you crumble it into small pieces, and sprinkle it on top of the sausage.  Then you load that up with barbecue sauce and rub.  Then, you start to roll it into a log.  It's very important to roll the sausage first, and THEN roll the bacon around it.  Like so:

MMMMMMMMmmmmmmm....

Once your log is finished, it should look like this.  My boyfriend and (vegetarian) roommate were pretty stoked.

Then you slather the outside of your meat log in barbecue rub, and stick it in the oven.  It should cook an hour for each inch of diameter.  Example: ours was about 3 and a half inches thick, so we cooked it for 3 and a half hours.

Exciting, no?

Here's the trick though: you can only eat this on Valentine's Day, because, as we all know, that is the day that calories don't exist.  Also Thanksgiving, but you have to make it with turkey bacon.

As far as serving suggestions go, it's pretty great just on its own.  But we also tried slicing it into hamburger-sized wedges and eating it on rolls with cheese and extra barbecue sauce, and that was worth doing as well.

Enjoy, my fellow fatties!