Tag: Recipe

Butter Chicken and Naan

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I tried making butter chicken sauce once.  It took most of the day in the slow-cooker and turned out….alright.  With that said, we will typically pick up a jar of pre-fab butter chicken sauce at Costco. The bottles are a bit bigger than the usual VH sized ones at your grocery store and we really enjoy the sauce.  I’ll stretch it a bit more by adding a 1/2 cup of yogurt or sour cream when it’s simmering.

So the bulk of the meal looks like this…

Chicken – 2 chicken breasts cubed, seasoned with paprika, pepper, curry.  Fry in a touch of olive oil in a pan.  Once done, drain any juice if you want, add the butter chicken sauce and simmer.  Add a 1/2 cup of yogurt (mango flavoured is amazing in this).

Rice.  4 cups water, 2 cups rice.  Cover, bring to boil.  Once boiling, turn down to about 30% heat for a slow boil, stir, cover, then leave it alone for about 40 minutes.

NOW…here is where I play and have fun with this meal.  The Naan.   Fresh made bread is hard to beat.  Here’s the recipe I’ve used that works amazingly well.

Naan

I usually just use vanilla yogurt instead of greek yogurt.  Sour cream works good too.  Basically you just need a high fat content dairy in there.  I avoid the melted ghee and cilantro for garnish and instead add some powdered garlic, tumeric and fennugreek.  (I saw that combination at a bakery once, and it tastes pretty good in this spice universe).  I never really measure the spice I put it, more of an eyeball thing, but if I had to guess I’d say about 1 tablespoon of each.  If you think you’ve put too much in, you’re probably right where you need to be flavour wise.  Heads up that tumeric can and will stain just about anything (my plastic mixing bowl is now a permanent shade of yellow in places), but it’ll usually come off your countertop if you get at it right away.  I’ve resorted to a Lysol disinfectant wipe on occasion if it’s being particularly ornery.

I’ve discovered through trial and error that you need to really roll the dough pretty thin for it to bubble and puff up.  I burn these a bit on purpose on the griddle and skip the ‘hold over open flame’ as described in the recipe.  I’m sure that would work great, I just don’t have a gas range handy to pull that off.

We have a couple picky eaters in our house, but this one is a 5 star win across the board and that surprised us.  There’s a bit of spice, but again, if you thin it out a bit with yogurt or sour cream that will take some of that heat off.

I usually serve with a side of peas.  Want to go vegetarian?  Swap out the chicken for paneer (if you can find it).  It’s a hard style of cheese that gets used in Indian cooking a fair bit.  Not all grocery stores carry it.  My best success in Saskatchewan has been at the Independent chain of stores, which probably means you’ll find it at Superstore as well.

There!  I think tomorrow we’ll delve into one of the all-time favourites around our place.  Nana’s Meatloaf!

-g

BBQ (no bacon) Grilled Cheese

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Okay, this one is just a fun and silly one.  My kids got hooked into Cool Math Games at their previous school.  It’s a fun and (almost?) educational website they can go on to learn math skills or in some cases, how fast they can click the mouse button (future console button mashers represent!).

One of the games on the site that is a big ‘win’ around our place is Papa’s Cheeseria.  It is one of a whole series of “Papa’s” games that has the kids running a virtual restaurant.  They learn how to accept an order, cook the meal to spec, and then deliver it to the customer who passes judgement on how well they followed their directives.  In Papa’s Cheeseria, you’re running a bespoke grilled cheese shop, and interestingly enough, some of the combinations they have listed in the game sound quite delicious!  On that front, it’s made lunchtime around here pretty interesting some days when one of the kids decides that a standard grilled cheese sandwich, just isn’t going to cut the mustard. Enter, the BBQ (no bacon) Grilled Cheese.  I say no bacon as we didn’t have any bacon just laying around the house once this had been requested, so I substituted as best I could in the 5 minutes I had in front of me.  You might be able to read the order ticket, but if you can’t, here’s the basic rundown.

  • Bread
  • Bacon (I substituted with a slice of processed turkey breast sandwich meat)
  • BBQ Sauce
  • Lettuce (romaine works just fine)
  • Ketchup
  • Bacon (repeat previous subsitution)
  • Bread

Oh!  and don’t forget…

  • P.S. – put in some cheese

They almost forgot the most important part of a grilled cheese sandwich!

Now, I used to slather up some bread with butter and toss on the frying pan, but as of late, I’ve avoided that.  I’ll give a warm grill just a quick shot of cooking spray before tossing the bread down.  It works, will help add some nice toasty brown/black colour, and not be quite as artery-clogging.  I’ll toss the sandwich on the grill, get a good toast on both sides, then I do a little bit of magic.  Steam.  You want ooey, gooey grilled cheese that’s insanely melty and leaves behind what my kids call “cheese bridges” when they bite in and there’s a foot long trail of cheese between their mouth and the sandwich when they pull it away?  You need steam.  Have a squirt bottle handy.  Spray the grill, just off to the side of the sandwich you’re toasting, and then immediately drop a big pot lid over top of the sandwich and the now steaming wet spot on the grill.  If you do it quick enough, you’ll capture the steam under the pot lid, it will help turn the cheese into liquefied awesome, and your Cheeseria ranking will go through the roof.

Now, as for this specific recipe…with lettuce involved, what I wound up doing was just making a grilled cheese with two pieces of sandwich meat in the middle…after the bread had been toasted and the cheese melted, I pried apart the sandwich between the meat slices, added the condiments and lettuce and then flipped everything back over.  Is this a fantastic recipe?  Ug.  Far from it.  But it was what my 8 year old ordered and I got a hug and 2 thumbs up, so, hey – that’s a winner in my books.

-g

Bird’s Nest Pie (aka Fancy Spaghetti)

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Hey, welcome back from the weekend!  I took a bit of a break as we had built up a fair amount of leftovers from the last week and didn’t really get to pull together anything new.  I’ll share some of our familiar family favourites, but I’m aiming to keep the blogworthy recipes to the new stuff.

My wife inherited a copy of Once A Month Cooking.  When I head back to work I’m envisioning us working on something like the meal plan outlined in that cookbook.  One crazy hectic day of prep, 30 meals that get dropped in the freezer, ready to heat and serve.  In the meantime, I’ll probably be going through the recipes now and again to see which ones will be winners in our house.  First up…Bird’s Nest Pie!

Bird’s Nest Pie

The link there has flax instead of egg.  Use 2 eggs.  I mean, if you’re making the recipe (it includes a pound of Italian sausage, you’re obviously not vegan…)

This recipe was a winner for the adults.  The kids found it to be a bit…complex?  I can see where they are coming with.  Honestly, I had a hard time placing the flavours and textures.  It really winds up being a ‘fancy spaghetti’, but there are hints of lasagna in there along with the spaghetti crust that actually comes out tasting a bit like quiche in part thanks to the egg.  There’s lots of tomato flavour in this, plenty of mozzarella…it really checks off a lot of boxes for me personally, but I think I would default to making plain ol’ ordinary spaghetti for the amount of time and effort involved.  It just doesn’t hold its structure as a ‘pie’ when you’re serving it anyway and winds up being a mishmash on the plate.  Take the flavours, simplify the work, I’d call it a winner at that point, this is really getting fancy for the sake of being fancy.

For those playing along at home, I went with 500g (that’s about a pound) of mild Italian sausage.  Glad I did that as it felt spicy enough.  Any hotter and I don’t think our mild Canadian tastebuds would have held up to the heat. 😉

Budget wise?  I’d say it worked out to about…

– sausage – $6
– tomato paste – $1.50
-onion – $0.75
-spaghetti – (leftover from spaghetti night actually, but i’d guess… $0.50?)
-mozzarella – 4oz…about – $2

So… all totaled, probably a bit over $10 (give or take).

-g

Ginger Glazed Pork Roast

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When you’re working on a budget, you grab the deals.  So yes, when you have the chance to snag an entire pork loin for relatively little cash, you grab that deal, you chop it up into meal sized roasts and you go with it.  One thing I’ve noticed when you’re working with a particular cut of meat is getting into a rut with how you prepare it.   For me (and I’m shaking my head as I write this) the ‘old standby’ is a bbq pulled pork (I’m shaking my head as I presently have one in the crockpot…).  Sometimes you just need to shake it up, and with a little help from Google and some more seasoned bloggers, sometimes you stumble upon something quite amazing.  I give you…

Ginger Glazed Pork Roast

Now the usual words of warning I’ll give when doing anything in a slow cooker.

  1. Make sure you have plenty of time…it’s called a slow cooker for  a reason.
  2. Try to make sure your meat has been thoroughly thawed overnight if you’re working from a recipe and checking out their cook times.

# 2 is where I ran into an issue on this one.  I didn’t take the roast out and let it thaw overnight, so I went straight into the slow-cooker and had to crank it up to high to finish in time for dinner.  Bad move.  I have a little chart that shows pork roasts should hit at least 145 degrees F to be considered done.  I went WELL beyond that.  Still edible, but almost to the point of crunchy.  What can I say?  Rookie move.  But that’s why we eat every day, right?  Plenty of chances to learn, adjust and excel on the next attempt.

That’s the roast.  I had about a 1.5 lb cut…I would trim back the amount of rub as there was PLENTY left that really just went to waste.  Now for the star of the show.  There’s a pizza place in Regina that has the marketing slogan “The Sauce Is Boss”, and that is definitely an adage that is in play with this meal.  It works, it is the spotlight and dang is it tasty.  I’m not just saying that as I completely over-cooked the roast and the sauce was the only thing that turned out, this glaze just ‘works’ and it is quite easy to do.  A notable change I made to the linked recipe?  I found that my glaze was just a bit too runny and the cornstarch wasn’t really having an impact on thickening things up while it was on the burner.  I added some more and it sorted itself out.  One quick reminder on that – NEVER add cornstarch directly to a sauce without first making it into a paste with a very small splash of water.  Straight cornstarch just turns into little clumps you’ll wind up straining out before using (unless you’re a fan of some little flavour powder shots in your meals – just like Grandma used to make!).  A little water, a little whisk and you’re good to go.  And when you DO start adding some cornstarch to thicken, do it a little bit at a time.  You can very quickly go from a rather runny sauce, to straight up pudding.

I followed the glaze recipe verbatim with the exception of substituting white vinegar for rice vinegar (it’s what I had on hand) and using powdered ginger rather than fresh (again, I had it on hand).

This one is going in the rotation.  And the slow-cooker a little earlier next time so I can roast it on “low”.

-g

 

YXE Le Burger Week – challenge accepted!

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I guess before I go on any further, I should mention and clarify a few things…

  1. If I mention a product or business, it’s because I use said product or business.
  2. If somebody ever (for whatever reason) decides to toss some cash or comp’d product my way, I’ll be quite transparent about said endorsement.

All good?  Let’s proceed.

It turns out this is Le Burger Week in Saskatoon, my new hometown.  From what I gather, something like 15 different restaurants are crafting their best/wildest/most delicious burger concepts and letting the public and their patrons decide the winner.  I’m not a chef, and the concept of a gourmet $20 burger gives the Scottish skinflint in me the chills, but through trial and error here’s my take on a scratch made burger that’s a winner around these parts.

Jo-Ella’s 2 hour buns

The buns.  I said “scratch-made” and I meant it.  If I have time, I’ll knock out a batch of these.  Takes around 2 hours to start getting your first batch out of the oven.  They’re light and fluffy and you get to knead and punch dough which can help you burn through some frustration.  This recipe can apparently be found on the big bags of Ellison’s All-Purpose Flour that at one point (maybe even still) could be purchased at CostCo.  I’ve never had a pantry big enough to house one of those bad boys, so I don’t use their flour, but the recipe is a very versatile one (and very forgiving).  Mrs Friesen (not my mother-in-law) back in my hometown of Calgary used to use this recipe all the time for buns, cabbage buns, cinnamon buns…it’s good.  I go 50/50 whole wheat and all-purpose white flour, I find the whole wheat dries things out more so you’ll probably need a bit less flour overall than if you went straight all-purpose as listed in the recipe.  After making a few monstrous buns, I have since learned that about 75grams of dough will give you a good ‘burger size’ bun following the final proof and bake.  My wife bought me a digital kitchen scale for Christmas this past year.  It comes in handy!

The fries.  Okay, I lied about it ALL being from scratch.  With the oven being claimed by the fresh baked buns, I really didn’t have time to knock out some roast potatoes (to do ’em right takes about an hour and change…) so good ol’ McCain SuperFries to the rescue.  They only take about 25 minutes which I was able to manage while my buns were on their final proof.

The burgers!

We don’t have a barbecue at the new place yet (have a natural gas hook-up though – I can’t wait until grilling season gets here!), but our trusty old George Foreman grill does a serviceable job on making the meat hot.  Again, while the Chef’s at all the restaurants will be breaking out crazy meat blends featuring chuck and steak and whatnot, I’m on a budget here.  This is my quick and dirty burger blend.

Dad’s Turn To Cook – burgers

  • 1 lb lean ground beef
  • 0.5 lb ground pork (yup – keeps things very tender)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 handful of oats (can also use breadcrumbs or crush up some crackers)
  • 1 teaspoon minced garlic
  • 1/4 cup diced onion – chopped REALLY fine so the kids don’t notice 😉
  • quick shake of cinnamon (shrug…I like it?)
  • 1 tablespoon mustard
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • and then a few cranks of salt and pepper from our grinder (I usually overdo it)

Form them into patties.  With that amount of meat, that should make 8 of them.  I usually vary the patties in size a bit.  A couple bigger ones for Dad and a couple smaller ones for our younger kids.  It’s a veritable Burger Family!  Toss them on the grill (or Foreman) and cook them until the internal temp is in excess of 160 degrees F.  The other Christmas gift I got was a digital cooking thermometer.  I LOVE that thing.

That’s it!  Burgers!  Add your toppings how you like and you’re good to go.

As for the budget, all in all, you’re looking at about $2 (and some time) for the buns.  I got 20 burger size buns out of that recipe and then a behemoth to use up the rest of the dough for the fun of it.  The ground beef worked out to about $3.50/lb, the ground pork was about $2 for a half-pound.  Add it all up, including the SuperFries, and I knocked out 8 scratch-made burgers for the family for about $10 (plus condiments).  I’ll take it!

-g

Sunday Pancakes

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Hope you enjoyed your Sunday.  I’m pretty new at this blogging world and am still trying to find my feet and a content schedule as to how often and how much I’ll be putting out into the digital universe, I do know that I’ll most likely be taking Sunday’s off from publishing anything.  Personal preference, we try to keep things as ‘screen free’ as we can for at least one day a week, and Sunday seems like the best fit overall.

It’s also the day that we typically wind up working through any leftovers from the previous week, so not a lot of new tastes being manufactured in the DT2C Kitchen!

I will pass along a recipe that I’ve been knocking out weekly for the past 10 years at least.  Sunday Pancakes.  It’s a family tradition…everybody needs some of these.  A special meal you eat exclusively on a certain day, whether it be a holiday, or a weekend.  We have a few such traditions around here.  1) Christmas morning waffles.  That one started up about 30 years ago when my brother and I teamed up to buy Mom a waffle maker for Christmas and we all just couldn’t wait to try it out.  and 2) Sunday Pancakes.  To be honest, this was really the start of my foray into the kitchen.  I took ownership of making Sunday lunch for one meal a week to help my Wife out and give her a break on a day that always seemed to be rushed and harried getting everybody gussied up and out the door for Church that morning.  It’s fairly quick, almost impossible to screw up (believe me, I’ve pulled it off a few times) and if there’s leftovers they’re a quick snack later in the week.

Here’s the recipe I’ve been using.  I had to go hunt down the card in the recipe box as I make this one so often it’s been ingrained in my memory.  Although I do need to refresh myself on occasion if I’ve taken a week off due to travel, etc.

Sunday Pancakes

– 3 eggs
– 2 1/4 cups milk
– 3 cups flour (I use 1.5 cups white and 1.5 cups whole wheat)
– 3 tablespoons sugar
– 3 tablespoons oil of choice (canola usually, we’ve used melted coconut oil too)
– 1.5 tablespoons baking powder
– 1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Crack the eggs into a large bowl, whisk the until fluffy.  It doesn’t really get ‘fluffy’ per say, but the yellow yolk lightens a shade or two and you start seeing some air bubbles in there.

Add remaining ingredients.  I start with flour, end with milk.

Mix it all up.  Don’t under-do it or you wind up with ‘flour bombs’ as my one child puts it.  Don’t over-do it or you’re making glue.

Warm up a griddle.  When you can sprinkle some water on it and the water sizzles and dances, you’re good to go.  Spoon batter on.  Wait until the bubbles in the batter stop popping and you can see a bit of a ‘curl’ on the edge of the pancake forming, then flip.

This makes about 24 pancakes.

(edit – we’ve been using this one for so long, I forgot where it came from – my Wife tells me this can be found in Betty Crocker’s Entertaining Basics – only real change we’ve made is to go 50/50 with the flour and I believe the original recipe asked for 4 eggs, so we’re at 75% of the remaining ingredients)

You can serve these however you want really.  We thaw some blueberries and strawberries and put some syrup on the table.  My one child eats them plain, my other coats them with chocolate peanut butter.  On the side we fry up some Butterball turkey bacon (waaaaay less grease and hassle than regular bacon) and usually serve some orange juice to drink if we’ve remembered to pick some up.  It’s easy, it’s simple, the kids can learn stove safety and help measure in the ingredients and flip the pancakes.  I like it.  If the batter winds up too runny, add some flour.  If it’s too thick, add some milk.  If you add too much sugar, you’re basically making a cake.  I have honestly forgotten at least one ingredient in this recipe at least once over the years and it somehow still seems to turn out – it’s pretty ‘DOH!’ resistant.

-g

 

Spinach Pork Tenderloin Pasta Toss

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Yeah, I made that.

I thought it was about time to actually share a recipe on here.  After picking up an absolute killer deal on pork tenderloins at Safeway the other day (seriously, I think it worked out to about $3 each in a pack of 5) we’ll be burning through some pig.

Tenderloin is of course a very tender (hence the name) and easy to cut to cook.  It’s also very lean.  Doesn’t have a ton of natural flavour, we’ll get to that.  Having gone through my ‘usual’ pork tenderloin recipe a few days back, I decided to shake it up and try something different and this one I found on the Kraft site was a definite winner.

Spinach Pork Tenderloin Pasta Toss

A few substitutions on my end.  We used ‘regular’ parmesan cheese to finish before serving.  Didn’t feel like buying a bottle of ‘shredded’ for one recipe.

I also substituted regular mustard for dijon (personal preference) and fusilli pasta instead of rotini (again, we had fusilli pasta on hand and curly pasta is curly pasta).  I made more pasta then they recommended.  I like pasta and it lets you stretch this a bit more.

This one worked out great.  Thumbs up from all the family, even “the picky kid” who really only asked if I could make it without spinach next time.  No.  I can’t.  Spinach totally finishes this.  It feels like you’re putting a whole salad bar into the pot, but MAN that stuff will shrivel down when it finally catches the heat and starts to wilt.

This is a very soft taste on the palate and will definitely be going into our tenderloin rotation.  If anything, as mentioned above, the tenderloin could stand a bit of seasoning prior to going into the pot to kick it up a bit.  With the mustard/pepper/spinach already in the dish…hmm…I think I’d go for a bit of garlic and curry powder.  I’ve got this recipe bookmarked so I’ll try that out in the future and document the results.

Budget:

Tenderloin (on-sale) ~ $3
Spinach (uses most of a bag) ~3
Chicken broth ~$1.50
Cream cheese ~$1

Breaking it all down, even if you don’t get a sweet deal on the protein, you’re looking at about $10.  This fed our family of 5 and had a little bit left over for my Wife to take to work as leftovers.  Again, add some more pasta if you want to stretch this a bit.  It’s a very liquidy sauce and having some extra surface area to soak it up doesn’t hurt one bit either.

-g

Men In The Kitchen

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I’ve enjoyed cooking for a number of years.  Really, I did take a good decade off there after marriage when we had our first child and my Wife was staying at home.  I guess we went back to the 60’s there and did life a little more old-fashioned than most would these days.  What can I say?  Having a parent at home was more important to the two of us than having a big fancy house and lots of shiny things.  This recent return to the culinary arts is exactly that for me, a bit of a return.  Prior to marriage I had a small handful of standby dishes I could whip up as needed.  Stirfry’s were always quick and easy.  Following the instructions on the box to make some Minute Rice, fry up some frozen veggies and a protein and slather in sauce?  Voila!  A quick penne and marinara?  Delicious!  And a step up from the one and only meal my Dad knew how to make (I think it’s still his only hot meal in the rolodex…he does however order up a MEAN take-out).  Now I may get in trouble for giving away all the family secrets, but in the interest of setting out a benchmark for those reading this blog, I’ll break his recipe down for you here and now.  If you can pull this one off without difficulty, congratulations, there may just be hope for you yet.

Grandpa’s Pasta Dinner

1 – box of macaroni noodles.  Bring water to a boil, add noodles and cook, when soft strain noodles and return them to pot.

Add – 1 can tomato soup.

Stir and enjoy.

It’s quick and cheap, I’ll give him that.  As society changed over the years, and as both men and women entered the workforce, it has become much more commonplace for guys to get in the kitchen – I think that’s a great thing.  That’s where the food is.

But enough throwing MY Dad under the bus.  Let’s hear about yours?  What’s YOUR Dad’s ol’ standby?  Hit me up and comment below.

-g