Homemade Pesto!

When we were in Australia for a month last summer, I got on a HUGE pesto kick. It's not Aussie, really, but maybe their food was so terrible that I sought out the known comforts of other countries :). I must say, I had a bad pesto experience in the past, in a pizza place on M street in DC. (If you are ever there, don't order the pesto/potato pizza.) However, pesto has redeemed itself and more since then. Below are the ingredients I used, though I would have preferred block cheese.

I made Matt buy me a mortar and pestle and he agreed, because he knows I'm pesto-obsessed. You can use a food processer to make it, but food processors go too far above and beyond the abuse that the basil needs in order to transform into a tasty sauce. Afterall, the etymology of the word "pesto" originates in the action of pounding or crushing, not of slicing and dicing. So I mortared and pestled and muscled through it.

Next I added some pignola nuts (pine nuts) which I chose not to roast, but rather added them fresh. I crushed those up too, then added the EVOO, (thanks, Rach), the parmesan cheese, a dash of pepper, and a bit of kosher salt (it's a little more airy than table salt).

A little bit of pesto goes a long way on pasta, (and I can't wait to throw some on my newly acquired bucatini! Which isn't necessarily the best pasta for pesto because there's not much for it to absorb, but I just love it!), so I made pesto ice cubes out of most of the sauce before refrigerating a bit to toss with some pasta at a near future time. In the distant future, I can unfreeze one cube at a time to throw into a meal and still get that homemade pesto taste! It's amazing how much better fresh pesto tastes than jarred pesto sauce... it's worth the few minutes! Buon Appetito!

Southern Flare

...Ok. So I wanted to make Chili on my Master Chef video, but I just didn't have all of the ingredients available to me that day, nor did I have the time after cooking for 7 hours. I make several different types of chili, but I think my newest flavor is my favorite. I started out making Taco Chili (use taco seasoning instead of chili powder). Matt liked it because it had corn in it. It was a beefy man chili, so of course I loved it too. Then we upgraded (healthwise) to ground turkey. Then I tried a white chicken chili. (We like chili in this house). The white chicken chili had white beans instead of the brown varieties in my meaty chili. From there, I read about a lime/cilantro taco chicken soup, and decided, why not make that into something heartier? So I did. My latest and greatest chili is pictured below. It is comprised of shredded chicken (I prefer rotisserie), black beans (they look better against the stark white chicken and bright greens and reds), diced tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapenos, (anyone know how to make the squiggle above the n?), tomatillos, dried & fresh cilantro, diced limes, lime juice, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I think I threw in some white chicken chili seasoning. I crock pot that mix for lots of hours, basically until Matt comes home to turn it off because I leave it cooking when I go to work. I miss eating with him. Then I serve it up over rice and crumble some tortilla chips and sprinkle some mexican cheese on top, and give it another lil' squeeze of a lime slice. Anyway here it is:

So last night I got a special treat. Matt and I had a delicious low country boil at his Aunt Mimi's house over Christmas (in NJ! but the people who made it were from NC)... anywhoo, I decided to try it out myself last night. I threw in some potatoes, (russet, though I would prefer/reccommend red potatoes, but I had lots of pounds of russets leftover in the fridge from homemade gnocchi experimentation), kielbasa, shrimp (raw, so it doesn't overcook), corn on the cob, and last but not least, a lobster! mmm mmm good. and there are leftovers... (not of the lobster!)

Catching Up

So it's been quite a while since my last post... the past few weeks have been insanely busy in many different ways... but I have still managed to get some quality cooking time in the mix, just no time to share about it on here, so this post will include pictures from several different meals...



...The first of which, I didn't cook, I am just sharing it now because it was so good that I wouldn't want to share it if it was sitting in front of me and you were sitting next to me. I ordered this dish at La Vera Cucina, a quaint and DELICIOUS Italian restaurant hidden in a large house in Monroe, NY. It was my second time being there, the first being in the summer, which was nice because they serve food on their giant wrap-around porch. This lobster/pasta dish was the special that night, and before we even left the restaurant, I couldn't wait to eat the leftovers... unfortunately I left them in Matt's parents' car when they dropped us off in Brooklyn and then continued on to Virginia, but they said it was delicious too... The dish incorporated shrimp, three lobster tails, and of my favorite types of pasta... perciatelli. I love how the sauce gets snoodled (I made that word up but it seemed most fitting) inside of the pasta straws. I am excited because yesterday I found some bucatini in the local area back here in Missourah.







The rest of the photos are of dishes I made. This one is enchiladas, but kind of fajita-style too. Instead of just meat & cheese, I add a little bit of onion, green pepper, tomato, and jalapeno to it, for a little kick and some extra veggie servings.

Then I add the sauce, roll 'em up, and bake the whole thing in the oven until the outer cheese gets nice and melty.

I also whipped up another Thai dish, though not nearly as yummy as my homemade peanut sauce. It was a chicken dish that had thinner noodles than my lo mein dish, and although I used my own judgement in type and quantity of sauces and spices to cook the chicken in, which turned out yummy, I tried a pre-mix red Thai chili sauce for the dish and it was vomitous. In keeping with what I learned about Asian cuisine, I added some crunch to the noodles with sesame seeds and some julienned shallots, etc. Overall, a dish that looks nice and would have tasted much better if I'd stuck to my own devices.

Lastly for this entry, which is getting quite lengthy, I made some Indonesian Ginger Chicken, courtesy of my wedding cookbook a la Catherine. Very simple to do, and the sweet honey soy ginger sauce was great over rice. Excuse the photo, I was hurriedly eating this dish, unfortunately, as I made it one morning prior to work, and never really got to enjoy it as a sit-down meal.

...More to follow!!

Panko Pork

Switch it up a little. Green.

So last night I decided to make Panko crusted pork loin chops. I generally followed a recipe I found on Food&Wine, but with a few minor adjustments. Instead of just salting and peppering the pork, I marinated it for a few hours in a mix of honey, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper. When I coated the pork with the panko and some parmesan cheese, I realied I didn't have any sage, which the recipe called for, but instead used some rosemary and thyme, and some garlic powder. For a green bean side I added more soy sauce, garlic, dried minced onion, and some mirin (Asian wine sauce). We had a few white yams in the pantry so I heated those up too, for a starch. Kind of random, but pretty delicious.

The pork was great. We ate the two leftover chops, beans, and yam for lunch today too, (along with the last of the lasagna that was in the fridge.) I wanted to make an Indonesian Ginger Chicken recipe tonight (from Catherine's cookbook), but it snowed really badly yesterday so I didn't get to the grocery store, and it has to sit overnight in the fridge before you cook it. Hmmm... what to make!

Cameras Rolling

Yesterday was filming day for my Master Chef video. I started out with a quick little introduction and a mini-tour of the kitchen and my cookbooks in the dining room. I also introduced Marley to the lobster I was about to cook. And what a day of cooking it was! I began this little venture around 2:30pm and put the last of the food in the fridge at 9:30pm. I made my signature Master Chef dish, the Thai lobster with noodles, and had 5 friends over for dinner (6 including baby Caleb, but he ate some noodles too!), and plated them some dim sum appetizers and sushi to start. In the meantime, while filming snippets of this cooking process, I also assembled and starting baking a homemade lasagna. After they left and I cleaned up all the plates, I made some gnocchi with butternut squash, asparagus, and pine nuts, as previously featured. I wanted to make enough food to show off several different styles of cooking, but also to feed us for the next three days, because I have three 12-hour ER shifts in a row. The one thing I didn't get to was a white chicken and lime chili that I was going to crock pot, but only because I was going to use a rotisserie chicken for it, and neither the commissary nor Price Cutters had any yesterday, and within the 7 hours of cooking and entertaining, I had no time to go back and get one.

It all turned out well, despite my spilling the leftover lasagna sauce (Mar cleaned it up for the camera) and my (inadvertent) setting off of the smoke alarm for the cameras too... Woops! Hopefully they like my video... if I can get it to burn! (Don't rename the video files if you have a digital camcorder! They won't play back on the camera again!) Bon Appetit!