Thursday Night Recipe Swap – Mardi Gras (Gumbo!)

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I’m getting ready to travel again, so I’m swamped with getting everything done at work and home. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still celebrate Fat Tuesday with some New Orleans style food and drink. Bring on your party recipes. And next week let’s go vegetarian.

I wanted to do gumbo, but didn’t have time to recipe test anything this week, except a death-by-chocolate Texas Sheet Cake, and I find my own gumbo recipes lacking. Luckily when it comes to gumbo, JeffreyW runs circles around me. Here’s his take on a shrimp gumbo:

I was rummaging about in the big freezer and turned up a stick of Andouille sausage. That put me of a mind to make a pot of gumbo. I noticed that Alton Brown was touting a method of making a brown roux in the oven that seemed to be foolproof, and didn’t require one to stand over the stove stirring for a half hour and more:

Place the vegetable oil and flour into a 5 to 6-quart cast iron Dutch oven and whisk together to combine. Place on the middle shelf of the oven, uncovered, and bake for 1 1/2 hours, whisking 2 to 3 times throughout the cooking process.

Seemed to work pretty well:

This was after 90 minutes. It could have spent a little longer and been a bit more brown but I went with it as you see it. More or less following Alton’s recipe, I put it over a medium flame on the cooktop and stirred in diced celery, green peppers, and onion. The roux turned right away into thick mud but I kept stirring it until the veggies softened a bit, about ten minutes. Next was several cups (4-5?) of the stock the chicken I used was cooked in, fortified with some Creole seasoning, along with the canned tomato bits I used in lieu of fresh. I did have fresh thyme and even grow my own bay leaves now. That simmered for a half hour before I added the cooked chicken, thawed pre-cooked shrimp, and the sliced and browned Andouille sausage.

Serve over rice, and be sure to have a bottle of hot sauce on the table lest you be taunted.

Open Thread: Thursday Recipe Exchange – Slow Cookers

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

Years ago, when I was first learning to ski, I was very frustrated by the amount of time I spent on my ass and not skiing. Someone told me that if I wasn’t spending a lot of time picking myself up, I wasn’t really skiing. I needed to push my limits to get better. In other words, it was all good. I find that information works for a lot of things in life. Cooking is no exception.

This week, I spent a lot of time on my figurative ass, playing with the new crock-pot making various recipes. There were epic failures. The first thing I tried was a slow cooker meatloaf. It called for a basic meatloaf recipe – I have a favorite – and then cook all day on low. The results were not stellar. More like steamed meatloaf. An unappetizing color and texture. Not the nice deep brown of a good baked loaf. I was able to salvage it by cutting it into thin slices and frying it up for sandwiches.

The next failure was the scalloped potatoes. This called for a slightly modified recipe, a bit more moisture than in the baked method. The flavor was fine, the texture was horrible. Kind of like if you reheated some that you baked. Rubbery and chewy. I’m not sure how you could modify the recipe to get a creamier texture. I’d love to hear any ideas in the comments.

The rest of the week was spent making traditional slow cooker foods – soups and a lovely pot roast. It wasn’t a total loss. I did learn that for a fool-proof slow cooker recipe it’s best to have a recipe that can cook, unattended, all day without risk of ruin. Both the potatoes and the meatloaf really could not have cooked any longer than they did. They would have turned out even worse.

So that was adventures in cooking this week. What foods do you use your slow cooker for successfully? Anything usual that we’ve never thought of? Hit the comments. Next week I think our theme will be Mardi Gras, and I’m hoping you’ll come prepared to share some favorite drinks as well as Cajun food recipes. Someone should bring the King’s cake recipe, too.

Here’s one of my favorite fool-proof slow cooker recipes:

Portuguese Beef & Pasta
This works best if you cook the pasta separately and either add it to the beef the last 15 minutes or serve the beef over the pasta. This is one of those slow cooker recipes that the longer it cooks, the better it gets, usually 10 hours minimum for best flavor. More »

Open Thread: Thursday Night Recipe Exchange – Super Bowl

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

It’s that time again. Super Bowl Sunday, when you sit down to stuff your face with favorite snack foods, drink beer and watch the Super Bowl Commercials. I think there is some football in there somewhere. What’s on your Super Bowl party menu? Do you make your own snacks or go for the quick and reliable chips and dips? Need some ideas for quick and easy snacks?

You can’t go wrong with nachos – easy and easy to pile high with your favorites ingredients. Here’s rather healthy (?) version: Black Bean and Corn Nachos, JeffreyW gets a little more creative with his pizzas, here, here and here (the man does love a good pizza).

I’ll never turn down nachos, or pizza for that matter, but when I was thinking about favorite party foods, tortilla pinwheels came up pretty quickly. So many things you can do with them. Four variations follow.

Now it’s your turn, what are you planning on making this Sunday and more importantly what beer are you serving? Who has the best recipe for hot wings, a football must have food? (Up next week: Slow Cooker/Crock-Pot ideas)

Basic Tortilla Pinwheels

• 1 (8 ounce) package whipped cream cheese
• 10 (10 inch) flour tortillas
• 1/2 cup green onions, chopped
• 1/4 cup black olives, chopped (optional)
• 3/4 cup chopped ham slices
  
  You spread the ingredients on the tortillas, roll them up and slice them into 1 inch pinwheels. Couldn’t get much easier.
  
  So how do we add some dazzle? Flavored tortillas and a variety of fillings.
  
  Here are some ideas I had:
  
  Jalapeño & Cilantro Tortillas and Black Bean Tortillas
• Cream Cheese
• Pickled jalapenos
• Sliced green chilies
• Turkey
• Salsa
• Black olives
• Shredded cheddar cheese
  
  Roasted Red Pepper Tortillas and Sun-dried Tomato & Basil Tortillas
• Cream cheese mixed with crushed roasted garlic
• Spinach
• Pepperoni
• Grated parmesan
  
  Plain Tortillas and Whole Wheat Tortillas
• Cream cheese
• All-fruit style strawberry preserves
• Crushed red pepper flakes
  
  The list is endless, limited only by your creativity.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Recipe Exchange – Spinach

(JeffreyW via Whats4dinnersolutions.com)

From TaMara, Recipe Goddess:

I thought last week went really well. Thanks for playing along. This week we delve into spinach recipes. I used to hate spinach. This is probably because I am a child of the 70′s and the only spinach I ever saw was canned or frozen, with the consistency of slime. As an adult I discovered fresh, baby spinach and I never looked back. One of my favorite spinach recipes is Spinach Lasagna.

I also make a pretty good Tomato-Spinach Soup, here’s nice recipe for Chicken and Spinach Wraps, and JeffreyW has a lovely Stuffed Manicotti that uses spinach. So now it’s your turn. What are some of your favorite uses for spinach? Hit the comments and share.

To get us started:

Spinach Lasagna

This is one of my most requested recipes. Every time I make it, someone wants the recipe. Since the prep time is so much, I usually only break it out for special occasions. It freezes well, so you can make a double batch and freeze two 8×8 pans of uncooked lasagna for two more meals. Thaw the night before (in the refrigerator) and cook until heated through, about 45 minutes to an hour. This recipe is great vegetarian, or you can add ground beef and sausage if desired.

This recipe takes about an hour to prepare and another hour to cook. It easily serves 6 – 8 More »

Thursday Night Recipe Exchange

(Photo from JeffreyW’s mouth watering collection)

New weekly feature—assuming y’all respond as you should. Welcome back to TaMara, Recipe Goddess of What’s 4 Dinner Solutions:

Aloha Balloon-Juicers. I’m back. I wish I could say I was back from a long trip abroad, but no, life has just been very busy. That has not changed, but after quite a few requests, I think I have figured out a way to bring recipes back to Thursday nights with the limited amount of time I can devote to it. Unfortunately, for now, I won’t be doing full menus.

What I proposed to John and Anne Laurie was to have a recipe exchange. Each Thursday we’d have a theme (I’m a sucker for a theme) or an ingredient to focus those recipes (but by no means restrict them) and everyone could share their favorites. Each week I’ll give you the next week’s ingredient or theme so you have a whole week to think of something great to share. Anne Laurie would probably gladly accept photos, too.

Now I expect all those people who emailed me and touched base with me in open threads wondering when I might post recipes again, to participate in this endeavor. Don’t make me come in there!

This week we’re starting out simple with my favorite comfort food and a recipe I thought many of you would have a favorite variation they could share. Like most of my recipes, this is pretty simple and even a novice cook should be successful. Experienced cooks will tweak it beyond recognition, as all good cooks do.

Next week our secret ingredient will be spinach. So come prepared to share a favorite recipe with spinach in it, in some shape or form. Here’s some baked macaroni and cheese to start things off. Hope you enjoy – TaMara (BHF)

Baked Macaroni & Cheese
More »

“The Consequences of Cooking”: Small Steps, Big Improvements

There’s some stories that got overlooked last week, what with the holiday fooferaw. Since the endless labors of billions of women and children to provide cooked food fall into the ‘Vagina Outrage’ category for me, I was interested to read Jonathan Alter at the Washington Monthly on “Toxic Dinner“:

The consequences of cooking may be the least-known major health problem in the world. According to the World Health Organization, almost 2 million people a year — mostly women and children — die from diseases (pneumonia, cancer, pulmonary and heart ailments) that are connected to smoke from dirty stoves and open fires. Toxic fumes from cooking in poorly ventilated dwellings kill more people than AIDS and tuberculosis, and twice as many as malaria.

More than 3 billion people worldwide live in homes where food is cooked with wood, dung, makeshift charcoal or agricultural waste as fuel. That means that almost half the world’s population is vulnerable to severe health problems from the smoke that such fuels produce…

Other severe environmental and social problems flow from the absence of modern stoves. A substantial amount of deforestation has been linked to the combined effect of cutting down trees for fuel and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through burning. Old approaches to cooking are simply unsustainable. Experts in East Africa estimate that in 25 years, supplies of firewood will run out altogether.

In the meantime, women in the developing world spend 20 hours a week, on average, searching for wood and other fuel for cooking. This is time that could obviously be better spent helping in the fields, educating children and building small businesses. If they live in war zones, these women and girls face the threat of assault or rape when they leave home searching for fuel and other necessities….

The good news is that the world is finally mobilizing. Last year, I watched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appear before the Clinton Global Initiative and announce a new public-private Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, with the aim of distributing 100 million of the new appliances by 2020.

Unlike open fires and old stoves, the new cookstoves — run on electricity or gas, depending on the model — recirculate smoke through filters to reduce pollution. They can now be manufactured at a relatively low cost, sometimes as low as $15…

In the U.S., officials from the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other agencies, are placing new emphasis on the issue. Recently, one technologist designed a new fan for old cookstoves that reduces pollution sharply without replacing the old units…

Kudos to the Obama Administration, Secretary Clinton, the NIH, the CDC, and all the researchers who are dedicated to this important work, even if it doesn’t get much attention from the Media Village courtiers.

Homemade Pasta

Going to be experimenting with this the next couple weeks while I have some time. I’m trying to think of ingredients that would be easy to add to the pasta. Basil is an obvious choice, but what else would you recommend? When in the process do you add it? After flour, pre-egg? How much does the recipe change depending on the addition of extras, if at all.

As usual, I am clueless while approaching this, but am going to give it 100%. Plus, I’m fat, so I will eat it anyway even if it sucks. But really, how do you screw up pasta? It’s egg and flour.

Also, I bought a machete today to clear some stuff, so I predict some interesting posts in the future.

Cooking Question

I have about a dozen or so people coming over tomorrow for dinner. I’m making a spinach lasagne (I’m doing that as we speak and then cooking it tomorrow), hot sausage sandwiches, a hearty tossed salad, then a nice fruit salad with strawberries, papaya, pineapple, blackberries, bananas, blueberries, etc. However, it feels like I am missing something and need a vegetable side dish. Figure there is enough starch with the pasta and sandwiches.

What do you think?

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I have some good news and some bad news. Tonight marks our last Thursday Night Menu. That’s the bad news. The good news is I’ll still be food blogging and I’ll still occasionally post full menus. I have at least a dozen recipes in the queue that I want to try out, so there will still be cooking adventures to come. But I have a new project I must put my full attention to for a while and a lot of travel in the coming months, so something had to give and it was the full menus on Thursday.

On the more good news side of things, I have a full year of menus (about 500+ recipes) formatted in a searchable database, if you’d like a copy, send me an email and I’ll send you a copy. So to summarize, the What’s 4 Dinner Solutions blog goes on, but Thursday Night Menus will morph into an occasional full menu here and there. Thanks to John Cole at Balloon-Juice for suggesting the Thursday Night Menu and hosting it and to Anne Laurie for posting it each Thursday. And to all of you for popping in for a look and for those who let me know how the menus turned out at your house. It’s been so much fun.

And in some final good news, tomorrow is Opening Day! Rockies have a home opener while the Red Sox will be on the road. Tomorrow I’ll post the ultimate opening day menu. See you then…

On the final board tonight:

1. Skillet Lasagna
2. Vegetable Sauté
3. Italian Bread
4. Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Pecans

Recipes and shopping list, as ever, at the link.

Note from Anne Laurie: TaMara, I’ll miss looking forward to your weekly menus, but I hope you’ll still drop by here often. Sometime soon (despite the wet snow falling outside right now) we’ll all be trading stories about our gardens and the local farmers markets!

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

As the weather warms up I find myself wandering the grocery aisles looking for fresh foods to cook with, not wanting any more root vegetables or winter squash. It can be challenging because I want fresh – not shipped from a thousand miles fresh. But I settle for what I can find, which are peppers and asparagus. The linguine calls for red and green peppers, but red, green, yellow and orange were all on sale, so I’m going with that in mine. It will make for a nice spring presentation. Add to that a bunch of tulips for the table and I’m in full Spring mode at my house. What are you doing to chase away the remnants of winter this weekend?

On the board tonight:

1. Linguine w/Garlic & Peppers
2. Italian Asparagus
3. Mixed berries & whipped cream

Recipes and shopping list at the link.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

Via our Food Maven, TaMara:

It’s that time of year when we are getting our gardens ready for the spring planting. The garden shops beckon, the seed catalogs tantalize and black dirt looks inviting. JeffW is taking stock of his root cellar to see what he needs to plant this year, I’m hoping for a better crop of tomatoes and my garden buddy is readying her beds for a dazzling floral display again this year. I saw my first crocus yesterday. Spring is less than 72 hours away, what plans do you have for your garden this year and are you as excited as I am to get back into the garden?

It looks like the weather will be warm and sunny all weekend for many of us. I can’t imagine anyone will want to spend too much time in the kitchen, so I pulled out a kid friendly menu that is quick and easy. The Enchilada Pie recipe is from one of my brothers, it’s very tasty and the kids love it, which is always a plus. All the flavor of enchiladas without all the work. I love black beans and the Black Bean Confetti adds a bit of color and a variety of flavors to make it a tasty side – and I have no idea why I insist on calling it confetti, except it looks festive when it’s all together. A raw vegetable tray with some favorite dressings rounds things out. And we end the meal with Banana Sundaes. These are based on great sundaes I used to get as a kid at a restaurant near our house on Cape Cod. I’m pretty sure they made their own ice cream. I figured if I was going to do a kid’s menu, might as well go all out and relive a little of my childhood, too.

On the board tonight:

1. Enchilada Pie
2. Vegetable Tray
3. Black Bean Confetti
4. Banana Sundaes

Recipes and shopping list, as ever, at the link.

(And thank you for reminding me, TaMara, that I need to get my second tomato-plant order finished.)

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Maven, TaMara:

I’m anxiously waiting for Daylight Savings Time. I hate losing the hour of sleep, but love the opportunity to ride every evening. Yesterday was a challenge as I battled unexpected headwinds and 20 mile gusts. I felt like Almira Gulch in the tornado.

One of the guys was stuck in the office with me today, so I ran the options for tonight’s menu by him. He decided the chicken sounded good. We’ll go with the other option next week.

On the board tonight:

1. Crispy Potato Chicken
2. Steamed Carrots in butter
3. Banana Foster Ice Cream

Recipes and shopping list at the link.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I’m always looking for something different to do with pasta that is flavorful and moves away from the traditional tomato based sauces of my childhood. Tonight’s main course is just that. Butternut squash with a bit of heat and a bit of sweet, all brought together by smoky bacon and creamy chèvre. Finish off the meal with a light, sweet Panna Cotta Parfait. Panna Cottas are traditionally molded desserts, but I think we been doing this together long enough that you know I’m all about keeping it simple. And Panna Cotta is as simple as it gets, unless of course you choose to mold it, then a thousand things can go wrong between placing it in the ramekin and serving it to your guests. Thanks but no thanks, it looks quite elegant in a wine glass, topped with a pretty berry topping. And I don’t have to worry that the last 5 minutes of prep are going to leave me with a blob of great tasting shapelessness on a plate. But that’s just me.

On the board tonight:

1. Bacon and Squash Campanelle
2. Tossed Salad (try these)
3. Panna Cotta Parfait

Recipes and shopping list, as ever, at the link.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

Have been under the weather with a pesky cold all week. Too much travel, not enough rest and exercise. Lots of homemade soups, though, so there is an upside. Tonight is about recipes that have a bit more flair to them, but are still simple to prepare. If you’re not a fan of fish, you can easily substitute boneless chicken breasts: pound them flat and increase cooking time. Find a really nice whole grain bread and maybe some honey butter for the spread to compliment the fish, with broccoli and shortbread rounding out the meal.

On the board tonight:

1. Crispy Pecan Fish
2. Hearty Bread
3. Broccoli w/Garlic Wine Sauce
4. Shortbread

Recipes and shopping list at the link.

Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I’m still getting my feet under me after being in the Boston area for a week, it is amazing how much stuff can accumulate when you are gone. I haven’t even had time to go near the kitchen and cook anything beyond the basics, very happy to come home to 60 degree weather, though. Makes me long for grilling season. Tonight’s menu is a favorite. Pasticcio is kind of like a Greek mac‘n cheese, but the cinnamon and nutmeg give it a rich, exotic flavor. Every time I bust this one out at a dinner, the guests want the recipe. Continuing the Greek theme, the salad is full of fresh flavors with a little touch of honey to sweeten the deal. You can finish up with some baklava, but I prefer the apples and walnuts over ice cream.

On the board tonight:

1. Pasticcio
2. Salata Meze
3. Chopped Apples w/honey & walnuts over ice cream

Recipes and shopping list at the link.