Beef Stir Fry with Sweet Chili Bourbon Sauce

Eat me! 

Here's a thing I made up last week that is really tasty. See I was all "Hmm, I got this stir fry beef in my CSA. I should probably make a stir fry." But then I thought about it for a while and I was all "Yeah, but you know what? Stir fries can be kinda boring, so I don't think I want to do that." But then I felt guilty about having this delicious meat and trying to ignore it, so I was all "Self, this is your chance. You can create a non-bland stir fry and save that poor sack of meat from sitting unloved in your freezer. It will be delicious and amazing and you'll be a hero among men." So that's what I did. And I am a hero now. It's a pretty sweet gig.

Beef Stir Fry with Sweet Chili Bourbon Sauce

Ingredients
For the stir fry:
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 pounds stir fry beef (that's like little chunks of sirloin. You could just get a steak and chop it up. But do not, and I mean this, DO NOT, get beef stew meat. That'll be all tough and your teeth will hurt from trying to eat it. Don't do it)
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
⅛ teaspoon pepper
⅓ cup each, chopped fresh sugar snap peas, bell pepper, broccoli, and baby carrots
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 little can of water chestnuts

For the sauce:
¼ cup bourbon
¼ cup brown sugar
1 cup sweet chili sauce
1 tablespoon 5 Spice Powder
1 tablespoon Aji-Mirin
2 tablespoons Orange juice

Other stuff:
zest of half an orange
Hot cooked rice or noodles (technically optional, but who really just wants to eat a bowl of saucy meat and veggies? Bring on the carbs, clowns)

Instructions

First, get out your wok and heat it up. If you don't have a wok... well that's just a sad thing and you should probably try to organize yourself a sham wedding just so you can register for a wok. But anyway, heat up a wok (or a skillet) and add some sesame oil. Get it all nice and hot and popping so it burns you when you add the meat and veggies.


While that's heating up, get your meat ready for its debut, by sticking it in a ziploc bag flour, salt and pepper. Shake it like an epileptic at a rave until meat is evenly coated with the flour mixture.

Add the beef  to your oily popping wok  and cook for about 5 minutes. Now throw in all the vegetables and the garlic. Cook it until stuff starts to get tender, but hasn't yet gotten soggy, about 7-10 minutes.

In the meantime, combine the sauce ingredients. Once the vegetables are done add the sauce to the wok. Bring the sauce to a boil and cook until it begins to thicken, about 5 minutes.

Remove skillet from heat. Dump the deliciousness over rice or noodles and top with orange zest. Put in your mouth. Smile.

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Bacon!!! I'd get it myself but I don't have thumbs!

The other day my friend Caroline and I were at dinner eating something that was not bacon and somehow, following a deep philosophical conversation about sexting, we ended up talking about the delicacy of bacon. We discussed the importance of thick cut over thin; the proper fat to meat ratio; whether it should be peppered or sugar cured; and then we moved on to all the crazy things people are making with bacon these days - bacon soap, bacon mouthwash, bacon gum, those crazy bacon cinnamon toast crunch cupcakes we saw on pinterest. And then we thought, "Bacon and cinnamon and sweets, now that's a great idea. Someone should do a bacon snickerdoodle."

So after Caroline and I parted ways, that's exactly what I did. I came up with a bacon snickerdoodle. But not just any snickerdoodle, oh no. See I pondered this thing for two days. And in so doing, I thought to myself, "You know what would be better than cookie with sugar and meat? A cookie with sugar and meat and booze!" Thus, the end result:

Bourbon Bacon Snickerdoodles


Ingredients
1/2 pound brown sugar cured bacon (cooked and chopped somewhat finely)
1/4 cup cold bacon grease
1/4 cup butter (room temp)
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 Tbs bourbon barrel aged vanilla extract (I guess you could use regular vanilla, but it'd be kinda lame)
1 3/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 Tbs + 1 tsp milk
1 Tbs bourbon
1/4 cup brown sugar + 1 TBS Cinnamon

Instructions
First, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Then, beat the butter, bacon grease and sugar together until it is a fluffy, gooey, diabetes-heart attack ambrosia.  Now, throw in the egg, bourbon, and vanilla, so that it is a fluffy, gooey, alcoholic-salmonella-diabetes-heart attack ambrosia. Do not eat.

Stir in flour, baking powder and salt. Mix until just combined then add milk and mix for another 5-10 seconds. Throw in about half of the chopped up bacon bits. Shape into one big ball. Refrigerate for about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice, take the rest of the bacon bits, sugar, and cinnamon and toss them into  food processor. Whirl it around until everything gets to about the consistency of sand. Dump it out on a cutting board.

Roll dough into little balls. Then roll that doughball in the bacon-cinnamon-sugar mixture you just dumped on a cutting board. Place it on a cookie sheet. Now, before you put them in the oven, pretend those little doughballs are your favorite frenemy and vigorously smash the little bastards flat (Not only is this is a good way to let out some pent up aggression, but it also keeps your cookies from baking up into big round tumors that will just crumble apart. Both are important).  Bake for 8-10 minutes. Eat.

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Wherein I Pledge my Undying Affections to a Meatloaf Recipe

4-ever.

I love me some meatloaf. I know. Its one of those things that you're not supposed to like unless you're an elderly church lady or lumberjack (Speaking of lumberjacks does anyone else remember this awesome Molson commerical from like the late nineties/early 2000s? "Lumberjacks and curlers" pops into my head every time I hear the word lumberjack.) Anyway, I acknowledge that dainty foodie gals aren't supposed to love meatloaf. But there's just something about a well crafted meatloaf that just beckons to me. I love it.

The key there is that it has to be a well crafted meatloaf. To say I am incredibly picky when it comes to meatloaf would be a gross understatement - maybe that's because I'm neither a lumberjack (and curler) nor an elderly church lady. Most meatloaf I cannot abide. To me, most meatloaf is either cardboardy, a loaf-shaped ketchup burger, slimy or some other form of general abomination.  I absolutely refuse to order meatloaf in a restaurant because there's a better than room temperature chance it won't meet my high standards. Before I'll go for it, a meatloaf has to have it right on three essential categories - texture, flavor and the meat to loaf ratio.  It is a rare meatloaf that can do this.

But holy curling brooms, guys. The other day I found one that not only gets it right on all three essentials, but one that frakkin' nails it on all three essentials.  Allow me to introduce you to the newest love of my life- a most amazeballs meatloaf recipe from the lovely and talented Jewel Staite (who recently called Joey sweetheart and pretty much made his year decade semicentury. Yay!).

Internet people, meet amazing meatloaf.
Amazing meatloaf, meet internet people. 

Anyway, it is a beef and pork meatloaf with a homemade fresh tomato relish, topped with thick cut bacon. The fresh tomato relish adds a layer of sweet and tangy that the normal ketchup or tomato sauce topping cannot. The bacon is baked atop loaf allowing the delicious nectar that is bacon grease to seep down and soak through the entire loaf - making it extra moist and giving it the slightest hint of bacony flavor without being all slap-you-in-the-face BOOM BACON! And like all good meatloaves it is even better on day two when you slather it in mustard and put it on a sandwich.

So here it is copied and pasted in all its glory. You should try it. Like now.

INGREDIENTS:

For the Relish:

2 red bell peppers, cored, seeded, and chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped

half a bottle of good quality ketchup (preferably something organic, since we’re using a lot)

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

a few sprigs of thyme

2 bay leaves

For the Meatloaf:

1 lb extra lean ground beef

1 lb ground pork

3 slices whole grain bread

1/4 cup milk

about 1 tbsp chopped thyme leaves

2 eggs

half a package of good quality bacon,

salt and pepper

WHAT TO DO:

Start your relish: heat the extra virgin olive oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Cook the red peppers, onions, and garlic for a few minutes until the veggies start to soften. Add the tomatoes and cook another few minutes. Add the vinegar, letting it burn off for a minute or two. Add the worcestershire sauce, honey, ketchup, thyme sprigs, bay leaves, salt and pepper. Bring it all up to a bubble, then turn the heat down to medium-low and simmer for 2o minutes.

Preheat the oven to 35oF.

Get a baking/cookie sheet ready. Spread some foil over the top (easy clean-up, you’ll thank me later) and grease it lightly with a little olive oil.

Cut the crusts off the bread. Break up the slices into mid-size cubes or crumbs, and soak them in the milk. Drain them and squeeze out the excess liquid, then place them in a large mixing bowl. This seems weird, I know, but it keeps your meatloaf nice and moist. Mix your breadcrumbs up with all the meat, the eggs, the thyme, salt and pepper, and about a cup’s worth of relish. Once it’s all combined, dump the whole kit n’ kaboodle on the foil lined baking sheet. Form the meat mixture into a meatloaf-style log. Spoon a few spoonfuls of the relish over the top and spread it out evenly. Cut your bacon in half once vertically so the strips fit over the top of the meatloaf. Lay the strips of bacon from one end of the meatloaf to the other.

Bake for 1 1/2 hours until the bacon’s nice and crispy. Let it rest for ten minutes before slicing it so the juices redistribute. Serve with extra relish at the table… and mashed potatoes, of course.

And so there you have it. Next time I think Imma get buck wild and experiment a little with adding some ground veal, but truly I think from now until eternity this will be the only meatloaf recipe I ever use. 

Original recipe can be found here at the Happy Opu blog. Ya know, in case you suspect I didn't really copy and paste it properly and was trying to screw you over.

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Happier Than a Pig in.... Barbecue Apple Relish?

Kids, I don't like to brag. At all. But I'm going to do it today because I made up a pretty frakkin' amazing recipe and I'm ridiculously proud of it. 

This week's CSA challenge ingredients were pork chops and apples. Now usually that means something like a baked pork chop with a cinnamon apple glaze. But this week, when it is still 80 degrees outside, it still seemed too summery for such a fall-y dish. 

So I challenged myself to come up with a summer twist... with pork and apple goodies I could eat on the back porch with iced tea. I succeeded.  The result - a grilled pork chop with barbecue apple relish. It was ah-maze-ing.

Oh hey there apple face. You're pretty.

Grilled Barbecue Apple Dapple Pork Chops 

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup molasses
• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 2 cups boiling water 
• 3 cups ice cubes
• 2 boneless pork loin chops 
• 1/2 medium-size sweet onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 pinch ground ginger
• 3 (ish) Tbsp cinnamon
• 1 (ish) Tbsp sage
• 1 pinch ground cloves
• 1 1/2 cups ketchup
• 1/2 cup apple butter
• 2  apples
• 2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 
  
• HOW IT WORKS
• 
  
• First things first, I've often found that as tasty as they may be, grilled pork chops tend to come out somewhat dry. So I started out by brining them to help them hold in some juicy goodness. Because this was a regular old weeknight, I didn't have all day and all night to do a traditional brine, so I tried out Southern Living's 30 minute brine. I was skeptical (I shouldn't have been) and moderately concerned the ice and the boiling water will cause my pork to erupt in a thunderstorm. Maybe I should have paid more attention to Mr. Wizard as a child. (Side note: does anyone else remember the "stand in the door frame and press your arms against the frame for 20secs, let go, and watch your arms raise" episode of Mr. Wizard? It was and is probably the coolest thing ever.)

My pork chops are floating around in a bowl of ice. 
Does that seem right to you?

Anyway, to do this quick and easy brine bath combine 1/2 cup of the molasses and 1/4 cup Kosher salt in a big bowl; add boiling water, stirring until the salt dissolves. Stir in ice cube and toss in the pork chops. Let it sit for 30 minutes.

While the pork is at the brine spa, start working on the delicious relish.  Chop the onion into little dicey bits and sauté it in hot oil in over medium heat for a couple of minutes. Once it gets good and tender (or as was the case in my kitchen, once you get done head banging to the ridiculous 80s rock that came on the radio,  add in about 2 Tbsp of the cinnamon, the garlic and ginger, cloves, ketchup, apple butter, the other 1/2 cup of molasses, apple cider vinegar and chopped up apples. At this point, you'll have to stop head banging, because you need to stir constantly, for about five minutes until the gorey looking mixtures starts to bubble.

If it looks you're an evil witch stirring a saucepan full of gore,
you're doing it right.

Once your cauldron of gore starts bubbling, reduce the heat down to low and simmer 30ish minutes or until the sauce thickens up.

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice, remove the pork from the brine spa and pat dry with paper towels. Season with salt, pepper, sage and the remaining cinnamon.

Grill pork on medium high heat 5 to 6 minutes on each side.

"It's not day for wor-ork, it's a day for catching tan. 
Just lying on the grill and having fun..."

Serve topped with the barbecue apple relish. Watch as your spouse and dog go nuts over its deliciousness.

Omnomnomnomnom.

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Eggplant Ala Short Man Syndrome, Or Eggplants for Pedro

Tina, come get some eggplant, you fat lard!

One of the most fun things about joining a CSA has been learning to eat seasonally. And one of the most fun things about eating seasonally is the sense of adventure it brings. It means I'm constantly cooking with new ingredients. And that's just fun.

As it turns out late summer / early fall is eggplant season. It also turns out that if you subscribe to my CSA you get, on average, 3,976,000 pounds of pasta in a given month. That means we eat a lot of pasta and a lot of Italian-y themed things around my house. So naturally when I picked up this week's goodies and discovered two big, beautiful, shiny eggplants and another 46,791 pounds of pasta, I opted for an Italian-y eggplant dish. Having already pledged my heart to zucchini parmesan some time ago, I didn't want to go with ye-olde standard eggplant parm. Instead I opted to create Eggplant ala Short Man Syndrome, or Eggplants for Pedro... or as some unfunny people call it - Eggplant Napoleon. It was incredibly simple and ooey gooey cheesy fab.  Here's how it works

Eggplant ala Short Man Syndrome, Or Eggplants for Pedro, Or Just Plain Eggplant Napoleon if You're a Dullard

INGREDIENTS

1 Eggplant
1 Ball Fresh Mozzerella Cheese
1/4 cup(ish) Panko bread crumbs (seasoned Italian Style)
1 handful fresh basil, chopped up
1 cup(ish) marinara type sauce of your choosing (I went with a roasted red pepper garlic sauce)
1/4 cup(ish) Parmesan cheese

HOW IT WORKS

First, heat up your oven to 450. While that's going on, cut your eggplant into 1(ish)" thick slices. Be sure and cut some of the fat part of the eggplant as well as the skinnier top part.

"We're sliced. Tomorrow we march on Dresden!"

Then grease up a cookie sheet. Get it nice and greasy because if there's one thing worse than an eggplant with short man syndrome, it's an eggplant with short man syndrome that's stuck to a cookie sheet. It's just not pretty. Put your beautiful eggplant slices on the lubed up pan and pop 'em in the oven for about 15 minutes, til they start to get kinda squishy and brown.

Meanwhile at the Hall of Justice slice up your mozzarella into about 1/8" slices. Pro tip: if you pop a soft cheese like mozzarella in the freezer for a few minutes before you start cutting it, it'll be infinitely easier.

"Oh my God! It's just so so cold! I... I.. can't... I can't go on!"

While we're at it, here's another pro tip: if you clean your oven once in a while, there won't be grime on it that will catch fire when you try to roast eggplants and you won't have to do a ceremonial dance for the smoke detector.

"Allow me to sing you the song of my people. Now dance, monkeys, DANCE!"

But, I digress.  Now that you've put out small kitchen fires and sufficiently sliced the mozzarella cheese, it's probably time to take those eggplants out of the oven. When you do get out a brownie pan and grease it up. Yeah, we're dirtying another pan. We need to make the dish boy earn his keep. What's that? There is no dish boy? But, but... he seemed so real... and so sudsy sexy. 

Ahem, anyway, in the bottom of your greasy brownie pan, place your three largest eggplant slices. Dollop a gob of marinara type sauce on them. Dollop some basil on top of that. Then lay down a slice of mozzarella. Now make it rain parmesan cheese. Tada. You've made one whole layer. Keep repeating the process til you run out of one of your ingredients.

It's like Jenga... with groceries.

Once you've run out of one or more of your ingredients, it's time to top them off. Sprinkle the bread crumbs all over the top of those suckers. Then stick 'em back in the oven for about 20 minutes til they get ooey gooey melty cheesy and the bread crumbs get brown.

I made you a delicious eggplant. Gosh!

And that's all there is to it. You should have an ooey-gooey stack of deliciousness that isn't exactly going to be winning any awards for food porn star of the year but tastes so awesome you don't care it isn't pretty.

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I'm baaaaack...

She's baaaaack! Duhn duhn duh!

Well friends, I've been gone far too long. Since our last rendezvous, I got a new job and moved... twice. Now this is noteworthy, not only because it kind of sort of explains where I've been for the last two years, but because I now live in Foodlandia, where I try out amazing restaurants on the regular and have a subscription to probably THE most awesome CSA type thing to have ever existed. Which means, of course, that I now have a renewed fervor for food and cooking and thus a renewed fervor for telling strangers on the internet all about my passion for noms, my cooking successes and fiascoes, and the fabulous restaurants I fall in love with.

So I'm back. I'll be posting regularly about the creations (good, bad, and ugly) that I whip up from all the wonderous food I get from my CSA, my adventures in baking and decorating, and my [very] amateur restaurant reviews.

So get excited. I am.

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Summer Summer Summer Tiiiiiiiime: Pasta with Asparagus, Chicken and Orange Gremolata

Heeeey, gremolata face. How you doin?

Three is a magic number. Or at least that's what Schoolhouse Rock told me. Because I like to make magic, here comes post number 3 for today.

This is one of my absolute favorite summertime recipes. I found it over at Yeah, That Vegan Shit and couldn't resist trying it after reading about what fun you can have saying GRRRRREMOLAAAAATA. And hey, turns out making it and eating it is as fun as saying it. I made a few changes to the original recipe, most notably adding some meat, but either way is a guaranteed good time. Try out both, you'll be glad you did... because if nothing else, then you can join the Gremolata Gang, too!

Pasta with Asparagus, Chicken and Orange Gremolata

1 bunch thin asparagus, cut diagonally into 1-1/2 inch pieces
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
1 lb. pasta, penne or some other festive shape
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
Grated zest of 2 oranges
Juice of 2 oranges
1/2 cup pine nuts
1 chicken breast, cooked and diced
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Asiago cheese, to taste

Over medium high heat, sauté asparagus and chicken in olive oil. Season with salt and pepper.

Sauteed so hard the camera blurred.

Meanwhile, back at the hall of justice, cook the penne in salted boiling water for about 10 minutes.

Once pasta is cooked, drain and save 1 cup of the pasta water. Add the asparagus, pine nuts, remaining olive oil, reserved pasta water, garlic, parsley, orange zest and orange juice to the pasta. Mix it all up!

It's just... so very... ZESTY!

Top with cheese and nom!

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