Cookin again

[UselessTriviaMan]

Last night for our anniversary I grilled T-bones for my wife and I. Baked potatoes, sauteed mushrooms with a bit of minced garlic, and frozen sweet corn. (The corn is taken straight from my farm family's sweet corn patch every summer, cut, blanched and sealed in quart freezer bags. It tastes just like fresh corn on the cob, but year-round.)

It was simple fare, but Iowa's not known for our seafood. Beef. Corn. It really don't get much better, in my opinion.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sounds like something I'd eat, for sure!

(And I say that as someone who is mildly allergic to corn. It's one of my favorite veggies, but I have to limit my intake.)

 

[UselessTriviaMan]

Corn allergy?? I am saddened to learn that such a thing even exists. I'm genuinely sorry to hear that, Danny.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Worse, I'm also slightly allergic to chocolate.

Which means I'm not going to follow up my fried catfish & cornbread dinner with a piece of chocolate silk pie ever again. Well...unless I'm on death row. Then, the resultant anaphylaxis may well buy me another day.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Thanksgiving of 2015, I did a lot of tasty dishes, including turnip greens with smoked turkey wings.

Well, this Sunday, I made them that way again, and I have to say...I'm thinking about that method becoming my new default for the recipe instead of bacon or sausage.

I also did some country style ribs. I really had no choice: at 88¢/lb, they wer begging me for a ride home. @$13 later...

I marinated them overnight in a mix of bay leaf, lemon peel, black pepper, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce and 4 bottles of Shiner Bock beer. Because of the nasty weather, I couldn't put them on the grill, so I had to make do with using the oven. Liberally seasoned with garlic pepper and arranged on a pair of oiled sheet pans, they spent a little time browning nicely.

Not only were they tender, their flavor was such that it was borderline criminal to use BBQ sauce on them.

The pan drippings will be going into some cabbage later this week.

 

[UselessTriviaMan]

With both of us working hectic schedules, dinner is very often a slapped-together, quick and easy affair. (Or fast food, far too often.) That said, I only recently found a really easy way (that doesn't involve packets of taco seasoning) to turn browned, loose hamburger into tasty taco meat. Add a small tube (like, half a pound) of chorizo sausage to the hamburger as it browns. It completely changed taco night.

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to some, but I'd bet many have never tasted the pleasure that is chorizo.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hey, sometimes the obvious isn't actually obvious!

I make hot sausage using an old family recipe that used to be sold in NOLA commercially, pre-Katrina. I've change some minor things, like reducing the amount of water in it so it is former and doesn't need to be in a casing. This solves a lot of issues: dietary/religous ones about the casing's origins, storing casing in the freezer, stuffing the damn things, etc. Instead, we just make it into 1lb rolls which we stuff into ziplocks and freeze.

Since it is free form, that meat can easily be formed into burger patties, sliced into gumbo, and so forth.

But, like you, one of the "discoveries" was the ease with which I could then incorporate it with unseasoned ground meat to make casseroles, meat loaf, stroganoffs...you get the idea. Made a "creole lasagna" with it last month that went over pretty doggone well.

Took us 2 years of sausage making for us to figure that out.

 

[UselessTriviaMan]

Next time you feel like having a slow-cooked beef stew, cube up a corned beef brisket instead of a beef roast.

I can't even begin to describe how good this is.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not a fan of corned beef at all...but brisket? Maybe. Maybe.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My Mom has issued me a cooking challenge. She didn't phrase it that way, but that's he substance of what she did,

A few weeks ago, I made a pretty killer chicken & sausage gumbo. Prior to that, I had made a dish that was served over penne pasta, and we had leftover pasta. Well, in the interest of frugality, my parents ate some of the gumbo over penne instead of rice (which I wound up killing almost all by my lonesome).

They really liked it. The gumbo was thick enough that it really stuck to that penne. Dad even added some cheese to his one evening.

So the challenge is this: reimagine the chicken & sausage gumbo as a pasta dish. Now, that might not sound difficult, but consider that gumbo is usually made in 10-18qt batches, with multiple chicken thighs and 2 different sausages. In contrast, a pasta sauce may only be a quart, and certainly won't contain 6lbs+ of meat. I'm going to have to radically alter ingredient & seasoning ratios to get this to work. I might cheat a bit and make it as a pasta casserole. Gumbosagña?