If you need yet another recipe for a nice, big rib roast, this is a good one. From a cooking class with Phillis Carey several weeks ago. I took photos of it, but they didn’t come out very well, so I found one on the internet and asked permission of St_Gleam at Flickr – she kindly said yes, I could use her photo.

The roast itself is not prepared or cooked in any unusual manner, really. It’s slathered with a bit of unsalted butter, some dried thyme and pepper. It’s roasted. In the interim time you make the delicious – that’s dee-lish-us – sauce to go alongside. It has bacon and port in it – and red wine. All things that give it plenty of punch and fantastic flavor. I couldn’t get enough of that sauce. And it looks just like that sauce in the photo, there. I could have had a little bowl of the sauce and spooned it right into my mouth!

Try this recipe – it’s a good one. And for SURE make the sauce!

printer-friendly PDF
MasterCook 5+ import file – right click to save file, run MC, then File|Import

Tweet

Oh my goodness, were these delicious. But then, what’s to complain about when you’re eating beef tenderloin? You can make this with top sirloin, and since the meat marinated for several hours, it should be sufficiently tender. But the tenderloin, well, it was just perfection. I’d make these any day – well, probably for a company meal since it’s a special occasion kind of meat.

Although you’ll see a lot of ingredients listed below, the marinade comes together very easily. The meat marinates for 2-8 hours, then you grill the kebabs and serve over rice with some of the sauce (set aside, but made from the marinade before you add the meat). The rice is a good vehicle so soak up some of the great-tasting sauce. It’s really an easy dish to make. This was from a Phillis Carey cooking class some months ago and on my notes I wrote “fantastic.” That’s my code for a really special recipe, meaning Phillis outdid herself on this one!

You can make this with leg of lamb, and I don’t know why you couldn’t make it with chicken (thighs, I’d suggest) as well. Or a firm fleshed fish would be fine too. It’s really the method you just have to get down – nothing more than combining the marinade in a heavy-duty plastic bag (sealing type). Make this, okay?

What I liked: the flavor is just stupendous. And since the marinade also becomes part of the finishing sauce, it’s really easy. I mean REALLY easy. And it’s nice that this can be served with plain rice, so that’s a part of the meal that doesn’t require some special preparation. It also looks really attractive on the plate with the green onions and toasted sesame seeds on top.

What I didn’t like: nada, nothing.

printer-friendly PDF
MasterCook 5+ import file – click to run MC or right click to save file

Tweet

Usually when I post a meat recipe I will post the side dish separately, but these two are just so good together, I’m recommending you to make this side dish right along with it. This is a special occasion kind of meal, obviously, since you’re going to buy filet mignon, but you’ll thank me for it (well, unless you’re counting calories, or fat grams, that is). Don’t send the nutrition police my way – just blame the creator, Phillis Carey, who makes these fantastic combinations so hard to resist.

The filet mignon is a cinch to make. The hardest part will be making the trek to buy good meat somewhere. Ideally buy it 1 1/4 inches thick, or even up to 1 1/2. You season the meat with salt and pepper, grill it 5-7 minutes per side (depending on whether you want med-rare or medium), then you put some little pieces of Gorgonzola (not Blue – Gorgonzola, please) on top, close the grill lid for the 2nd half of the cooking time, garnish with slivered sage leaves and you’re done.

Meanwhile, you will have gotten all the prep work done on the pasta – cook it, obviously, and make the mushroom creamy sauce (with Tawny Port added in). What I’ve done is go to buy a bottle of Tawny Port (it’s not the most common of ports – but it’s ideal for cooking). I think mine came from Trader Joe’s. That way I always have it when I need it for cooking. Phillis likes using Tawny Port – just the right amount of mild to sweet taste. Anyway, make this!

printer-friendly PDF
MasterCook 5+ import file – click to run MC or right click to save file

Tweet

Ever even heard of picadillo? That’s pee-ca-dee-yo in Spanish. Actually this has a Mexican derivation. And its much beloved in the culture. We’re on our way home from our trip today, so I’ve set this up to post ahead of time.

Oh gosh was this ever good. It probably doesn’t look like much – a ground meat mixture on top of something. Yup. So delicious. So easy to make and just bursting with flavor. Traditionally, Picadillo is a Latin American dish, but variations exist in many countries, including Cuba. All the variations include something a bit different. This recipe, which came from Dean Fearnley-Whittingstall’s book River Cottage Meat Cookbook, is most aligned with the Mexican version, although it does contain a couple of ingredients from one or more of the other country’s variants. And then I added chives. Not typical. So I suppose that then becomes my variation. And I served it on grits, which makes it even more unusual. Southern cooking is not anything like Mexican or Latin American cooking. Ah, forget all that. Just make it.

This started out because I defrosted a pound of ground pork from our most recent 1/4 pig purchase – a Berkshire pig from a local 4-H kid. I went to my kitchen computer, to Eat Your Books website and typed in ground pork and scanned the recipes from my own books. Not only does it tell me where the recipe is, but it lists the most common ingredients. Yippee! I had everything needed. Except tortillas to serve it on or with. So I improvised. And it called for ground beef too, but I just used the ground pork instead.

First I started sweating the minced onion, red bell pepper and chiles. A friend had given me a lovely Cubanelle pepper a few days ago. Perfect for this. It’s not a hot pepper, but it added nice green color and flavor too. I added some chipotle chili in adobo sauce to the dish to give it a bit more character.

Then I added all the other ingredients – garlic, salt, pepper, sugar (just a little bit), the ground pork, raisins, some olives (I used a bottled product called Olivetta – a mixture of lots of different olives (and a few other things), all minced up – something I buy at my local Italian market), some diced tomatoes, and some tomato paste, along with some pork stock (which was just a dip into my jar of Penzey’s pork soup bases that I use so often). While that simmered I made the cheesy grits (recipe up tomorrow). Then I just served it like a sauce on top of the grits, with some slivered almonds sprinkled on top along with some chopped chives (optional). Dave and I talked about going back for seconds, but we decided we shouldn’t, even though the tastes of everything beckoned us. So, make this, okay? You won’t be sorry!

What I liked: oh gosh, everything. Flavor, texture, comfort food, warm on the stomach. Worth making for sure. Also, it’s versatile – serve it on rice (more traditional), tortillas (or even chips) or mashed potatoes (which would be great for using up leftovers). I think the raisins (that little bit of sweet) is what “makes” this. It’s like finding pineapple in a curry sauce.

What I didn’t like: ah, nothing. I’ll definitely be making this again.

printer-friendly PDF
MasterCook 5+ import file – click to run MC or right click to save file

Tweet

Imagine my surprise a few months ago, at a cooking class with Phillis Carey, when she looked over at me and said, “this is your salad dressing, Carolyn.” Wow, really? Phillis came up with the salad components, but she used my Creamy Blue Cheese Garlic Dressing. It’s one I’ve been making for years (it’s probably my favorite salad dressing), but just recently put up on my blog, purely an oversight that it hadn’t been “up” on my blog before. It’s one that isn’t overwhelming with the blue cheese. It’s more like a creamy blue cheese vinaigrette, really. You can see from the photo above – it’s not a gloopy sour cream based dressing as there isn’t any sour cream or mayo or anything “creamy” in it except 2 ounces of blue cheese – so all you see is oil and lime juice on the lettuce. It has a bunch of other stuff in it too, but it’s a simple dressing.

Anyway, I was quite thrilled. Thanks, Phillis! Now on to the salad. Phillis has you season a nice, big sirloin steak with a Cajun/Creole seasoning mix. If you don’t have a jar of something on hand, click over to this site for a recipe for a Cajun (spicy hot mixture) to make your own. In my recent reading of Mary’s site, Deep South Dish, she uses a seasoning mix she buys, called Slap Ya Mama. Our local stores here in Southern California usually carry some of Emeril’s jars, but not much else. I may have to order some of this mixture just for fun. As with any kind of spice mixture, you know, don’t you, that once you mix up a variety of spices they tend to become one and they lose their pungency within a few months. Five different spices kept separate will keep fresh for at least a year (oh, I keep mine far longer than that) but once combined give it just a month or two at most. Keep that in mind.

Several years ago I made up a batch of the the spice mix I use for my grilled Corn with 10-Spice Rub. I thought I was so clever – I made a really huge batch just at the beginning of corn season and put it in a small pint sized plastic bag and set it on a shelf in my walk-in pantry. Mistake #1 was putting it in a plastic bag – should have been sealed in a tight lidded jar. Anyway, I used some of it a week or two later. And again. Then it sat on the shelf for about 3-4 weeks. This time I walked 15 feet to my kitchen island and realized a steady stream of the spices were in a trail on my hardwood floor. Oh my. As I held the bag in my hand, it was moving. Eek! Yikes. The bag was just crawling with critters. This was back when I had an infestation of different kinds of critters in my pantry – not only weevils, but another kind of tiny speck of black bugs that ate my chocolate. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you read all about it. I had to throw out many, many pounds of food (pasta, flours, grains, spices that weren’t sealed in cans or jars, and about 20 pounds of chocolate). THAT was a painful lesson. Now nearly everything is either jarred, canned or sealed up in big plastic bins in my pantry. The Container Store was my best friend back in those days.

There are differences between Cajun and Creole cuisine – Cajun tends to be more spicy (although it doesn’t have to be), Creole has more subtle flavorings (often tomato-based and with more French or Spanish heritage). Spice Hunter does make a single combo mixture of both seasonings, if you can find it. If you’re interested in learning more about the differences, I found a website called ochef, which explains a bit more. According to his information, as years have gone by – and a century or two of cooking, the two styles have married and intertwined a lot and there’s less and less distinction between them.

This salad is just perfect for a late summer harvest of vegetables – the corn, heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, etc. If you prefer a really tender steak you can use a ribeye or a New York. If you stick with the sirloin, you might want to tenderize it a bit – marinate it in some kind of acid (like a vinaigrette) for an hour before grilling, then add the Cajun seasoning. Sometimes sirloin steak can be a bit chewy – it may depend on what part of the steak you get on your plate!

What I liked: all the flavors in this salad – and topped off with the blue cheese dressing. If you’re a lover of blue, you could also add a few small chunks of it to the salad. You will hardly know there is any blue in the vinaigrette.
What I didn’t like: not enough onion! I just adore roasted or grilled red onion, so I’d add more to the salad. That’s it!

printer-friendly CutePDF
MasterCook 5+ import file – click to save file, run MC then File|Import

Tweet

Am sure I’ve mentioned before that I Tivo all of Ina Garten’s new episodes. And even though it’s summertime and the weather is warm and muggy, when I watched Ina make this easy-easy Bolognese sauce, I was hooked. I went online to download the recipe and noted a few comments from others who had made it (suggesting cooking a little longer than the 10+ minutes and reducing the salt). So I added a quarter of an onion to the sauce (sautéing it first), greatly reduced the salt in the sauce, and I also added a little dollop of beef soup base (my Penzey’s favorite flavor enhancer) to the sauce also.

Using orecchiette pasta was different – usually I opt for linguine – but I’m very glad I used the orecchiette because it did exactly what Ina said – it provided little “cups” to hold sauce. The only other unusual thing in this is 1/4 cup of heavy cream. What a great idea – and wow, did it ever add a delicious richness to the sauce. She also has you add 1/4 cup of the red wine toward the end – it does simmer off the alcohol in the 10 minute cooking then – but she said it added lots of good flavor. Some sliced basil was added in at the end also. Oregano and a pinch of red chile flakes are all the herbs that flavor the dish.

My DH loved it. I mean, he nearly licked the bowl. He raved about it. And raved about it. I thought it was delicious. And I mentioned above how EASY it is. If you don’t want to, or can’t add wine, use good, flavorful beef stock instead. I’m looking forward to the leftovers, for sure.

What I liked: how easy it was to make, beginning to end about 45 minutes; liked the added flavor from the heavy cream – it’s just 4 T. of it; really liked the orecchiette pasta too – would definitely do that again. It should freeze well, too. Next time I’ll make a double batch and freeze half.

What I didn’t like: nothing at all. Would and will make it again, sooner rather than later.

printer-friendly PDF
MasterCook 5+ import file

Two years ago: Red Pepper and Walnut Spread, with pita bread
Four years ago: Chicken Bamako (very easy baked chicken breast and bacon dish)

Tweet

This is one fantastic recipe. The kind that if I were a swearing person I’d be saying OMG! But I don’t say that, so just take my word for it! I cannot tell you how absolutely off the charts this was. I created the recipe myself – I had fresh baby spinach – and I’d defrosted some lean ground beef. And a new favorite recipe was made.

First of all, you mix the ground beef with a few slices of very finely minced crisped bacon. In reading a recent cooking magazine it was mentioned that some East Coast chef was frustrated with his bacon burgers because the bacon slices fall off or out of the burger (this being one with buns, I suppose). So he started adding raw bacon to the raw meat. There was no recipe – it was merely mentioned in an article. That got the idea brewing in my head. I decided to try it myself, but cooked the bacon first. I mixed the bacon, some dried thyme, salt, pepper and eggs with the ground beef and made patties. I let them rest in the refrigerator for a couple of hours, then lightly they were dredged in flour before frying them in grapeseed oil.

Meanwhile I made the spinach – I sautéed some red onion finely minced up – then added the spinach just before the burgers were done – so the spinach was barely wilted. I added some salt, pepper, ground nutmeg, a tiny little drizzle of cream, a bit of feta cheese and lastly a speck of butter.

The burgers were crisped up in the pan, then removed to a heated plate. Be careful not to over cook them! I poured off all but a speck of the oil, then added some vermouth. It bubbled away until it turned to a light slurry. Then I added a little splash of sherry vinegar, cooked that for a minute or two, and off heat I added a tablespoon or so of unsalted butter. On each individual dinner plate I scooped some spinach, placed the burger on top, spooned the sauce over each one, then sprinkled the top with some additional feta cheese. Voila! If I’d wanted to serve anything else with it I’d have made mashed potatoes. Or some steamed and pureed cauliflower made to act like mashed potatoes. If so, I’d have increased the volume of sauce so there would be enough to drizzle over some of that potatoes. I think I would have placed the spinach and the potatoes side by side, put the burger right smack in the middle, and drizzled the sauce over both – but mostly it goes on the burger.

This would make a scrumptious company meal – the only problem is it must be cooked at the last minute. But the flavors were superb, if I do say so myself. Maybe I’ll try making these with ground turkey, or half turkey and half beef. Maybe it could be done with a chicken breast too. I’ll let you know how that tastes!

Some of the idea for this came from my old standby, French Hamburgers, a Julia Child recipe I’ve been making for about 45 years. At least, the sauce did. The rest of it just came to me as I was cooking along. I do hope you’ll give this a try. So very delicious!

printer-friendly PDF and MasterCook file (click link to open recie)

Tweet

That’s sliced pot roast in the foreground, laid partly on pasta, and the sort-of red sauce that got whizzed up in the food processor after cooking the meat in the pressure cooker.

I’m on a kitchen mission. A mission to work more diligently to clean out my freezer. I not only have a huge full freezer in my kitchen, but I have a second lower-drawer freezer in the refrigerator/freezer in our garage. That latter freezer holds mostly meat. And it holds a LOT. Enough that, were we to have a catastrophe of major proportions, I think we could live (with a generator, mind you, keeping the meat frozen) for at least 3 months without buying any meat. At a guess, 3 months. Veggies – well that’s a different matter. I have some canned stuff and a few frozen bags, but mostly my freezer is full of meat products, at least 5 pounds of different kinds of nuts, a few oddball things like frozen limeade, squeezed lemon juice from our Meyer lemon trees, chutneys of a few varieties, and some ordinary things like chili, soup (lots), bread, bacon, sausage that we have for breakfast most days, a few cookies, one dessert I made a couple of weeks ago, and some chipotle chiles.

My DH, darling that he is, often tells people how much meat we have in our reserve freezer, and that all he must buy is a Coleman stove and we’d be in business. We could set up a local soup kitchen. But we’d need that stove first, which we haven’t purchased. We should. All part of earthquake or emergency preparedness. We don’t have a generator, either. So, the next best thing is to start eating up the meat.

Therefore, I defrosted a 3-pound chunk of boneless chuck roast a few days ago. It was nicely sealed up in plastic (I have one of those FoodSaver things that seals foods of all kinds so they don’t get freezer burn). My guess is that there are other people out there like me – who really know how to pack a freezer. Right? We’re almost to the point that our kitchen freezer door must be opened carefully – like Fibber McGee’s closet, for fear something will fall out and break your toe. Most of you readers are too young to remember Fibber McGee and Molly, a long-running radio program (1935 – 1959), where one of the long-standing jokes was about somebody inadvertently opening the hall closet to a long, noisy crash of stuff. I vaguely remember the program because my parents loved the show. Once we got a television (about 1946, when I was 5) we didn’t listen to much radio anymore. But the joke about the closet lives on and it always ended with Fibber’s comment: I’ve gotta clean out that closet one of these days. My freezer, therefore, is my Fibber McGee’s closet!

The last few days I’ve been more than a bit under the weather. But I’d defrosted this roast before I got my cough/cold thing I have, so on day 3 of my cold I dug out my Fagor Duo Stainless-Steel 6-Quart Pressure Cooker and fired it up. Referring to a recipe in one of my 3 pressure cooker cookbooks, I settled on an Italian style roast because I knew my DH would enjoy having just a little bit of pasta on the side. We don’t eat much pasta because Dave’s a diabetic, but once in awhile we celebrate and always savor every bite!

The pot roast took about 20 minutes of prep (browning the meat, cutting up all the veggies and cooking them briefly), and about 1 1/4 hours to cook it all under pressure. Then I removed the meat and tented it with foil while I prepared the sauce. All of the stuff left in the pan, the veggies (except the fat I was able to spoon off the top) went into my food processor and I whizzed it up to a smooth puree. I tasted it for seasonings, then poured it out over the sliced beef and the pasta. With a green salad, that was a complete dinner.

Bottom line: it was good. Certainly not as good as my tried-and-true French Pot Roast a la Mode that I’ve used for years. That takes innumerable hours to make and bake. But since I was in sort of a hurry, it was very good. My DH loved it – really loved it. And it was on the table in about 2 hours.

printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Stacked Chicken Enchiladas
Two years ago: A list of travel websites
Three years ago: Chocolate Scones (fantastic!)

Tweet

See all those shallots? And all the bacon. And the tender filet mignon underneath? And the gravy flooding the plate. Oh my goodness. Is this ever delish! Over the top. I wanted to lick the plate that sauce is so gosh-darned good.

Phillis Carey made this at the bacon cooking class several months ago and I just hadn’t gotten around to posting about it. The combination – bacon, shallots and port just are a match made in heaven. You combine them and put them over a tender filet, and oh yes.

This takes a whole lot of shallots. At the cooking class they buy already peeled, fresh shallots from Sysco (a wholesale food company). Shucks. We can’t buy from them. So, you and I will have to trim our own shallots. Just buy large ones, which will make the process a bit easier. They are roasted for half an hour. Then you reduce (boil down) a mixture of beef broth and port. Phillis talked to us at length in the class about the tawny port needed in this recipe. You can buy domestically bottled port (mostly from here in California), but it’s premium stuff, with a steep price tag. Phillis suggested Trader Joe’s Portuguese tawny port. (Real port is all made in Portugal.) She thought it was about $8 a bottle. You do use a good amount of it, so don’t use an expensive bottle in this case. Generally I follow the adage that you don’t want to use any wine unless you’d drink it yourself, but in this case, Phillis assured us it was really just fine! Anyway, the steaks are browned in the bacon-fat laden skillet, then roasted in the oven for about 8-10 minutes (depending on thickness and your preference). You make a butter/flour roux and add that to the port gravy to thicken it a bit. Allow the steaks to sit for about 5 minutes before serving, with the sauce. Decorate with some watercress if desired.

If you really want to be decadent, serve the filets with Yukon Gold potatoes with bacon and Parmesan (also from this class). But whatever you do, DO serve this filet mignon dish for a special dinner.

printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Italian Chicken Sausage and Peppers
Two years ago: Crockpot Chicken Paprikash
Three years ago: Hot and Spicy Tofu Dip (it’s really good – you don’t know it’s tofu)

Tweet

Oh my, was this delicious. What’s there not to like about tender, juicy beef tenderloin? And succulent roasted mushrooms? The recipe is from a cooking class with Phillis Carey – such simple sounding fare, but just over the top delicious, I must say. It’s all made in the same pan and if you’ve timed your dinner just right, it all comes together perfectly. You need a good meat thermometer and a good roasting pan (not a rimmed cookie sheet) and you’re in biz.

You use the center third or so of a whole beef tenderloin. Now, I know buying a beef tenderloin is dear, but you’ll get ample meals out of it. This is just that middle portion (2-3 pounds or so) which will make an elegant dinner party extra special.

Do buy good mushrooms – you want the variety of oyster and shiitake as well as the crimini ones too. The mushrooms are so good when pan roasted, especially nestled up next to a beef tenderloin. If you want to serve a larger crowd, this recipe can be adapted to roasting a whole tenderloin – just increase the herb rub accordingly and fold the tapered end under so it doesn’t over cook. The baking time will be the same, just make more of the brandy sauce to go with it.

printer-friendly PDF

A year ago: Pork Mini-Roast with Memphis Rub
Three years ago: Chocolate Steamed Pudding

Tweet