Cul-UN-ary

Check it out! I’ve got carrots growing. Nothing else survived the winter but for some reason these little guys are still going.

Clam Spaghetti Thing

I don’t know what to name it, but it was good. I was going to have raw clams for dinner, because I’d really like to try them, but we ended up deciding to do a recipe. Which we only sort of half did because we used our own stuff for a lot of it. I think it was pretty darn good.

I started off with Fregola with Clams and Mussels by Giada De Laurentis, but that didn’t really work out. I didn’t use fregola, I used spaghetti because we had a lot of spaghetti left over. I didn’t use mussels because we expected to eat raw clams tonight. There was no chicken broth boiling or anything of the sort. What I did do is as follows:

Ingredients:
Salt and pepper, to taste.

Enough pasta to feed your group of people. Make your usual amount of spaghetti, however much that may be.

1/4 cup olive oil.

1 medium onion, chopped.

2 garlic cloves, minced.

1 cup Marsala wine.

1 cup cherry tomatoes.

A bag of clams, cleaned.

1/2 cup Parsley.

Directions:
In a lightly salted pan, boil spaghetti until it is fully cooked. While the pasta is cooking, add the olive oil to another large pot and heat. Add in the onions and stir until they are translucent and soft. Add in the garlic and cook for about a minute. Pour in the marsala and the tomatoes. Stir and cook for a couple minutes. Add in the clams. Mix them into the sauce a bit, and then cover them. Let the clams steam until they are all opened. Put the spaghetti in a large bowl, and then pour the entire contents of the clam pot into the bowl. Add in parsley and toss.

I hope it is to your liking. I’ll definitely make it again. A little suggestion: Grate your own Parmesan cheese to garnish the pasta.

1 note

Rachel Ray’s Clam Bake Stoup

It is not often I am critical of a dish. (That is a lie, but go with it.) This time, I’m afraid I must be. Two days ago I cooked Rachel Ray’s Clam Bake Stoup. It seemed easy/fun enough to make, with interesting enough ingredients and hey, there’s clams in it. I love clams.

It’s true, it was easy enough to make. I’m sure if I were a little more organized (ha) I would’ve had it done in at or under the 30 minutes most of her meals take. Lots of veg to cut. I like cutting veg.

After a quick stop at the local Whole Foods and snipping some herbs off the garden on the back porch, it was time to knuckle down and start cooking. My grandparents were along for the ride and we pretty much divided the work into equal thirds.

Everything went fine until it was time to add the broth. I let everything cook in the VERY dry pot for the amount of time it said, and then decided to moisten it up a little. Nobody wants burnt veggies. Come time to add the broth, most everything was cooked except for the celery. It was very hot, but very hard. I left it to simmer in the broth with the rest of the veg. It took about 15 minutes to get the celery to a good enough softness.

Aside from that, the whole cooking part went off without a hitch. The taste, though, I did not care for. There were clams present, but you don’t taste them or the shrimp in the soup. All that’s there is the overpowering odor of the fish seasoning and the saltiness of the kielbasa (a meat which I do not care for in the slightest anyway.) If you were to take the fish or the beef out of the soup, you would have something very nice. Together, though, the flavors were to competitive for me to enjoy them.

I think I’d rather just have some plain clams. And I did.

I forgot there were even hash browns in the stoup.

My grandparents loved the recipe.

If you’re interested in downloading and trying out this recipe for yourself, you can find it at the following site:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/clam-bake-stoup-recipe/index.html

I must say that I did not make the garlic bread croutons for the stoup. I feel like I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if I had.

MANBURGER

Now you might think that with all the Fleur-de-lis decoration and fancy french food that I am the kind of guy who looks at shows like Epic Meal Time with disgust, but really it’s just the opposite. I’m all about the dripping, cheesy, artery clogging, bare handed, beard dirtying goodness. I just save it for special occasions, like today: Veterans’ Day.

Sauté some mushrooms in a pan. Toss in some garlic. Oil and Butter plentiful.

Scoop those out and drop in a burger. Bacon helps too. Nice.

Get out some Worcestershire Sauce. Pour it on. Same with Frank’s Red Hot.

Cheese. Get it out. Slap it on.

Pull out a bun. Mayo. Slap on the mushrooms. Then rip up some onion and lay it on flat. We don’t want any space wasted.

Smack down that burger. Add the bacon. A1 on top. Squish down that top bun. A1 running down the sides. Beautiful.

Devour without blinking.

I must be doing something to this dirt. These weeds are huge!

And then I realized they were the carrots that I planted last year. They’re kind of scrawny for such a long time underground. I don’t think they’re actually good to eat, since I was supposed to get them about three months ago, but never thought to.

I haven’t been cooking much, but we put in a bunch of new stuff, and after we’ve got the floor in I’d like to start cooking again. I’ve come across a bunch of new recipes that I haven’t been able to try out yet.

You’ve Heard of the Housing Crisis

Since I was little, I’ve made gingerbread houses with my Grandma. It’s one of our Christmas traditions, and we’ve always done a good job.

Above is my ten-second MS Paint Rendition of the “finished product” of our ginger bread house this year. I put “finished” in quotation marks because the house itself never was officially done.

It all started with a box. It was a thin, heavy cardboard box. It was red with white boxes displaying the directions on putting together a gingerbread house and two pictures of finished products made by people that, as my Grandmother lovingly put it, “have talent.” Included were 6 sections of the house, 5 bags of candy, and a large bag of delicious white icing that I was told to knead for a minute, immediately before being told to “stop that and help me get this table cloth off.”

Perhaps the icing wasn’t properly kneaded, but I blame the fact that the gingerbread house had been sitting in my garage freezer for, more or less, a year. The candy was still good. The gingerbread smelled fantastic. The icing was tasty, white, and bore the consistency of very soft clay, without the “stick to everything” properties that clay usually possesses.

So we start building the house. The front stuck perfectly to the side. It stuck perfectly to the other side. They fit seamlessly into the back. The roof went off without a hitch, and then we started decorating it. ”Put on the wreath already so it doesn’t get ruined.” I add on the solid-sugar wreath with a plentiful amount of icing. It stays. ”Let’s add some doorknobs.” We use gum drops as door knobs on the small cookie doors. ”Wait, the doors are supposed to be white.” We are viewing the side of the box for a basis of our creation. We detach the gumdrop doorknobs, and try our best at smearing the sewer sludge onto the doors, and begin going for the roof.

“Wait, my roof is falling off. Grab the gumdrops.”

I grab as many gumdrops as I can off of the point of the house.

“Grandma, your wall is collapsing.”

“Just get the roof.”

We fix the roof, and the wall continues to fall into itself.

“Grandma, the wall’s stuck. I can’t get my finger in.”

“Maybe we should just throw the whole thing out and try again next year.”

“I can fix it.”

I try wrestling my fingers into the small crack and try to pull the wall back up from its 45 degree angle, to no avail.

“Alright, let’s toss it.”

Black Bean Soup: The Cul-Un-Ary Super Anticlimax Edition

If you’ve read my blog before, you will know that I tend to make things without any boxed or canned ingredients. At least that’s how I do it with main courses. From scratch, following a recipe. Last night I made Black Bean Soup out of a can. I got the rice from Chinese take-out from a couple nights before, and the only actual work I did involved chopping a quarter of an onion and stirring the soup.

I had never cooked a bean from scratch, and I didn’t think it would come out the way I wanted it to if I tried, so I went with the good ol’ (the only one in the store) Goya canned Black Bean Soup. I was trying to match the relatively simple recipe from the Columbia Restaurant in St. Pete, Florida.

As I said before, all I had to do was open the can, dump it into a pot, stir for 5 minutes, and put it over a bowl, quarter-filled with rice. The chopped onion went on top, and then it was the consumer’s job to mix it all together. The soup was nice, except a bit lacking in sauce, and it wasn’t far off from my goal.

If you want a great appetizer that’s done in 5 minutes, make this soup. If you’re looking for a meal, bring an extra can.

Great Scott! I’ve created life!

So I started up my annual garden again, and three days later, look what I’ve got to show for it! Of course, I can’t remember for the life of me which is which, but I’ve planted zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, onions, and something else I think. I was supposed to make a diagram, but there you go.

I can’t wait to start cooking with some of this stuff.

Happy Easter, everyone!

I made a lot of things, but unfortunately I didn’t chronicle them. I’ve got a while off and perhaps something might show up. Who knows?

Shepherd’s Pie

A lot of people make their shepherd’s pie with chopped beef. It’s a shepherd’s pie. Shepherds herd sheep. I would only see it fit that they also eat one or two of them.

Either way, I made shepherd’s pie, and took my own artistic liberty to it. Of course I used lamb, and I had to look hard for a recipe that used it, but I also used my good ol’ tried and true sauteed mushrooms. Just add them in just before you put on the mashed potato. Mix them in well.

The recipe was borrowed from Alton Brown. It’s a little too long to post, so I’ll just link you to it.

Alton Brown’s Shepherd’s Pie

I used red potatoes rather than Russet. Be warned, this recipe takes a while to make, especially if you’re a little disorganized. Thanks to grandma’s help, we got finished and cooked in about two hours. It might not be speedy, but it is delicious.

Edit for eloquence. 9:16 PM.