Dancing screaming itching squealing fevered/Feeling hot hot hot - G&W jalapeno bratwurst

Sometimes simple is all right and last night I certainly didn't feel like any complicated cooking maneuvers. I've been thinking about the jalapeno brats I bought at G&W Sausage and it seemed like a good idea to thaw them out. I waited too long to start cooking so I was pressed to think of a quick side dish and pasta salad seemed a good idea. Keeping it as simple as possible, I prepared about 8 oz. of large shells in my beloved Pasta Boat, adding a handful each of frozen snap peas and sliced bell pepper in the last 3 minutes of cooking. After draining and rinsing the pasta in cold water (and doing it a second time to cool it all down) I simply splashed in some honey mustard dressing and a bit of grated cheddar. It was serviceable, if a bit boring.

I grilled the bratwurst and they looked absolutely lovely after browning. Sadly, the hotness of these brats was just too much for me. All I could taste was hot and very little brat flavor. I think, in general, I do not like hot sausages; I am not a fan of andouille either. The Boy thought they were tops though and he usually turns nose up a bit at the mention of jalapenos. But, I will be sticking with the garlicky, paprika-y Hungarian brats as far as G&W is concerned.

Friday I Have Thrifting on My Mind

I was home early from work, the Boy was off work, the rain had stopped. We had a couple of errands to take care of and then it seemed natural to run to St. Vincent de Paul for a bit of rummaging through the thrift.

They have this fabulous bin at the front of the store full of purses for 25 cents each. I'm crazy for thrift store purses, particularly at a price which barely computes as costing anything at all. I'm even more crazy lately for '70s/'80s clutches.

All of the wall art is currently 50% off, which made this photograph of Union Station marked at $3 a serious bargain.

How about a Lefton crazy eyed cat planter?

If you doubt the crazy eyes...

Once I knew the origins/make of this planter. Now I cannot recall. Can anyone help me?

I recently coveted the wooden vessel collection of some anonymous online entity. I am on my way to acquiring my own. I love this rustic bowl (and the MCM spreader in it).

Boomer likes the bowl too. Fits her perfectly.

Foxy Brown thought Boomer might be a tasty meal.

 

 

Take a chance with me/Poured out in wine/Chance to run away/Take a breath - Greek chicken and tabouli

I've had a gorgeous bouquet of mint decorating the kitchen table all week (thanks, Rene!) just waiting for me to make some tabouli. Today was the day, finally. It's a pretty simple recipe: cracked wheat soaked in hot water; chopped cucumber, tomato, green onion, parsley and mint; and a dressing made of fresh lemon juice, olive oil and salt and pepper. It's a fresh, light salad perfect for summer.

To go with the tabouli I thought grilled chicken would be good. I marinated a couple of bone-in breasts (I do not particularly like boneless chicken breasts - too tasteless) in more fresh lemon juice, lemon zest, olive oil, oregano, garlic and salt and pepper. Even only marinating for a couple of hours put a lot of flavor into the finished chicken; it was charmingly lemon and herb infused.

And because I had to inject some trash into the meal, there were tater tots. So sue me.

Pad Thai!

I'm not sure what put it into my mind to make pad thai, but I had leftover pork, some deep fried tofu chunks, and some frozen shrimp. Plus I had purchased some rice noodles at Jay's the day before so I was in pretty good shape, ingredient wise.

I did an internet search for recipes and perused a few, thus learning the basic ingredients and cooking techniques for the dish (which, frankly, I should intimately know judging from the stack of takeout containers from King and I, each having held pad thai). First and foremost, most recipes gave instruction on getting the sauce made and waiting standby for use. While I should have had tamarind paste, I substituted white wine vinegar (I will definitely get some tamarind paste for the future), added an equal amount of fish sauce (pppppeeeeee U!), a hunk of palm sugar, some rooster sauce and lime juice. One recipe (at least) suggested heating the suace on the stove, and boy did that help the fish sauce to disperse its delightfully fetid odor throughout the house. In the meantime I cooked my noodles (I hadn't bought exactly the right noodles for pad thai, but the rice vermicelli worked fine) and rinsed and drained them.

All the recipes declared a smoking hot wok necessary and the strips of tofu I tossed in the pan (with some oil) sizzled accordingly. Then, slices of leftover pork and a few shrimp were added along with a bit of the fish sauce mixture and a handful of snow peas. Once that liquid was almost absorbed I added two beaten eggs to the wok, after moving the meat aside. I let the eggs scramble thoroughly before stirring them in and adding the noodles and the rest of the sauce. I incorporated the meat and sauce throughout the noodles and kept the heat high. At nearly the end of cooking I added a big handful of bean sprouts and chopped garlic chives. After dishing the pad thai out, I garnished each of our servings with a generous sprinkle of crushed peanuts.

It wasn't King and I, but it was a reasonable facsimile and the Boy was very pleased.

Meatless Monday - Tofu red curry

It was another beautiful day with much lower temperatures so when I came across cheap pickling cucumbers at Jay International today, I thought I'd do another batch of dill pickles the proper way, with the water bath processing and all. They seem to have worked fine, but next I want to pickle some other vegetables, like green beans or okra.

Since it was Monday, I got the ingredients for a nice vegetarian Thai red curry. That spicy, coconut milk sauce is my favorite curry flavor of all the curries. In today's I put fried tofu puffs, onions, orange bell pepper, baby bok choy, green beans and some bean sprouts. So good over rice.

Weekend Wrap Up

After a week of impossible, horrible, soul-crushing hot weather a magical thunderstorm rolled in Friday night and brought delightfully cool temperatures with it. On Friday night, in the midst of the storm, it was time for bed and the Boy did not feel like doing his nightly duty of taking Foxy Brown for a short walk, so I volunteered for the job. It's always a risk taking her out during a storm since she is very afraid of thunder and lightning, but I knew she had to pee so I took the chance. I hesitated slightly as I had spent the evening in just a shirt and underpants (in my defense, the shirt is long and pretty much covers my ass) and didn't feel like putting on anything else. Considering it was 11:30pm and pouring down rain, I took the chance. What do I care if someone sees my underwear clad tush? Foxy trotted along, unwilling to stop, so I did get soaked but the lower temperature was invigorating. I was cold and loving it so many days of heat and sweat.

Saturday wasn't exactly cool, but there was a good amount of cloud cover and it never got much above the mid-80s. I spent the afternoon running around, buying pottery glaze and vegetables. For a late dinner, I warmed up the leftover grilled chicken thighs, roasted some gorgeous little Yukon gold potatoes and made a salad of cucumber, tomato and onion with my version of Hendrickson's dressing. If you see Southern Illinois tomatoes for sale, buy some! They smell and taste like actual tomatoes!

I also bought some pickling cucumbers and made two jars of a quick, improvised spicy-sweet dill pickle. I used equal parts white vinegar and water, sugar, turmeric, cayenne pepper, garlic, black mustard seeds, salt and a little bit of fresh dill. I took a little taste today -- they were not quite ready -- and they seemed like they were well on their way to goodness. I will work on the recipe and actually can another batch rather than just make a refrigerator version.

Sunday dawned wonderfully cool and all I could think of was baking. My friend Rene had posted a recipe for a summer strawberry cake several days ago and while it was tempting there was no way I was turning on the oven in our no-central-air house. So today was the day! While I was at it, and buying strawberries, I wanted to make more strawberry preserves and can them properly. And while making my grocery list in the morning, I finally remembered to add heavy cream so I could make a batch of butter. As long as I was making butter, and the oven was going to be on, I decided to make a loaf of bread, baked in the Dutch oven to give it a nice crust.

The strawberry cake is a fairly easy recipe, apparently adapted from one by Martha Stewart. This version appeared on the blog Smitten Kitchen. Make a batter, cover it with halved strawberries, sprinkle with sugar, bake. The cake, before baking:

And the cake when done:

While the cake was baking (it takes an hour at a low heat to get the strawberries all gooey), I started the preserves. Two pounds of strawberries, hulled and cut into chunks were tossed in a heavy large saucepan with 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice and four cups of sugar. Slowly bring it to a boil and then let it go for about 10-15 minutes. Between the smell of the cake baking and the aroma of the preserves, my stomach was growling in anticipation of strawberry goodness. The berries cooking:

In the canner (okay, really just a large pot with a round rack in the bottom, waiting for the water to boil:

And all sealed and ready for the pantry shelf:

At the Memorial Day barbecue thrown by my sister Carol, my nephew Chris brought a container of 40% heavy cream to make into butter.  I've been wanting to do that for ages, but I never seemed to remember when I was at the grocery store. It seemed to take a lot of shaking effort on his part and I lost a little interest...at least until I remembered again on Sunday to buy the stuff. I let the cream sit out for about an hour or so in the warm kitchen before I poured it all into a jar and started shaking. For the first few minutes (really, probably less than five minutes) it sloshed around like you'd expect but then suddenly I couldn't really feel the liquid jostling around so I stopped to take a peek. And there was butter!

It really kind of was like magic! I shook it a bit more after this stage, just to make sure I had collected all the fat out of the liquid. The next step involves draining and rinsing the butter. You have to get rid of all the milky liquid to avoid the butter going rancid quickly. I rinsed it in the jar a few times with cold tap water, but then attempted to get the butter into a [way too small] piece of cheesecloth. That was kind of a disaster because at this point in the butter's life, it is still rather soft (particularly in warm weather) and it kind of sticks to the cheesecloth. After that somewhat failed experiment I opted to squoosh the butter into a ceramic dish and repeatedly stir in and then drain off cold tap water. At some point in the process, I stirred in some kosher salt (I like butter to be a bit salty), but that's up to your own personal tastes.

Try this at least once. It's really delicious.

As long as I was making butter and turning the oven on, it seemed to follow that I should make a loaf of bread. Expert bakers will be appalled at my bread making methods. Generally I measure nothing and today was no exception. Here's my bread recipe: Put some warm water in a big bowl to proof the yeast (along with a little glug of sugar for the yeast to eat) and then dump some flour in after the yeast proofs. I happened to have a glob of very melted butter handy so I put that in along with perhaps a teaspoon of salt and some more water. Mix it up, turn out onto a floured surface and knead for several minutes. Like this:

Put a little oil in a bowl, plop the dough in and let it rise till it's about doubled. Punch it down and knead again for a few minutes, then back into the bowl for a second rise. About 30 minutes before you are ready to bake, put a heavy Dutch oven (including the lid) into a hot (400F) oven to heat up. When you're ready to bake the loaf, gather up the ball of dough, toss a palmful of corn meal into the pot and set the dough atop the corn meal. Whether this does anything or not, I'm not sure, but I generally run a bit of water on the inside part of the lid (be very careful as it's really hot and will steam up) precisely to put some steam into the pot to help the bread. Now I will confess that I'm not sure exactly what this does, but I know it's supposed to be a good thing.

 Bake for about 30 minutes or so (I swear I'm not being obtuse - I really don't remember how long - somehow I just know when it's done...). About 10 minutes or so before the bread should be done, take the lid off the pot and let the bread get a nice golden brown. Again, be very careful as things are very hot! This method makes a nice crusty loaf.

And it goes really well with freshly made butter (add some strawberry preserves and you have my breakfast).

My friend Rene also inspired the evening's cocktail as she offered bunches of mint. I didn't want to drink rum so I made vodka-based mojitos, but I think they suffered a bit without the rum flavor. At any rate, they were refreshing.

Dinner was grilled pork boneless country ribs and buttered noodles with leftover tomato and cucumber salad.

And of course strawberry cake for dessert.

Now I'm contemplating making more pickles and two different Asian-inspired dishes for dinner...

Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper/Tryin' hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)/Come let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks or umbrellas in their mitts - Taco Thursday

It's still too hot to live, particularly without central air, but we can't eat takeaway every night. Tacos seemed like  a good idea - minimal cooking and lots of vegetables, easy peasy. Still, I nearly burned up just cooking the ground beef. Tomorrow I'm going to have to think of something cold to eat maybe.

The Boy bought extra large hard taco shells (yeah yeah, not authentic, but I love the crunch...perhaps we should do tostadas instead) and held a lot of filling. Yay!

I suppose I've set it up that we can only have tacos on days of the week that start with a "t"...

Eat beef, eat beef it's a mighty good food/It's a grade A meal when I'm in the mood - Sirloin with caramelized pears and gorgonzola, Indian-spiced okra

Beef! Finally, beef! I went to the grocery store today on my way home from work and encountered a lovely sirloin steak, my favorite cut. Inspired by my great-niece Kyrie, who had posted a photo of her porterhouse steak with pear and bleu cheese, I bought a nice ripe red pear and some gorgonzola (I prefer the salty tang of gorgonzola to the moldier taste of bleu). When I was strolling through the produce department I spied the fresh okra and remembered this recipe.

The okra was very good, though, like most of the commenters on the recipe, I should have doubled the spices. The flavors were rather subtle, but they worked really well with the okra. I didn't realize that okra was a vegetable eaten in India; they call it bhindi. I like that name better. The only way I veered from the recipe as written is that I added about a half cup of water to pan about 10 minutes before the bhindis were done.

For the steak, I seasoned and grilled as usual. In the meantime I sliced the pear and caramelized it in a pan with a little butter. I added a little pink salt and some pepper just to make sure it was properly savory. Once the steak was done I piled a some pear on each serving and sprinkled with the crumbled gorgonzola. The combination of steak and pepper and sweet pear and cheese was very delicious.

Alongside I also steamed a couple of potatoes and chopped them up with a bit of butter, salt and pepper.