You Don't Get Your Burgers Out of a Can...

…and you shouldn’t get your go-withs that way, either. With burgers up for Saturday night, I needed a couple easy but untrite accompaniemens…accompanamuns…side dishes. And, dammit, I was makin’ ‘em homemade or I wasn’t makin’ ‘em at all.


Baked beans. Classic, right? And if you make them from scratch, a two day job. Dude. This is the 2010s. Here’s how to make really, really delicious baked beans with little time and essentially no work.

First, mix the ingredients pictured above

in a baking dish of size appropriate

to the number of guests you’ll have

at your table. Add them to your taste.

Around here, we like plenty of mustard,

Worcestershire, and a scoop of tomato 

sauce in lieu of catsup (although catsup

works. Hell, this is baked beans. Pretty 

much ANYTHING is gonna work).

Don’t forget your secret ingredient. In this 

case, a small piece of fresh orange peel stuck

with a clove. To be honest, I was out of ground

cloves and I couldn’t figure out how to put in a 

whole one in such a fashion that I could retrieve 

it later so that nobody would chomp it and freak out.

The orange peel idea was sheer genius. 

Don’t forget your other secret ingredient. Bacon.

There is pretty much nothing on earth that isn’t 

better with bacon. 

Anyway. Mix up your sauce, add a couple slices of bacon diced, put in beans from a can (avoiding the necessity of planning a day ahead so beans can be soaked overnight, I didn’t drain the canned beans in advance, just slurped ‘em out with a spoon draining them as I went so that a modicum of the starchy liquid accompanied them), gently stir the whole thing.

I used Goya pintos. All Goya 

products are outstanding, 

especially their beans. 

Sauce ready for beans. 

Beans and sauce ready to be 

baconned. 

Beans, sauce and bacon ready for

the oven.

Stick the little pot of baconned beans into an oven at lowish temperature (say 300 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit) for as long as it takes to get them simmered, thick, and crisped (the latter for the bacon on top).

Beans finished and ready to 

rock and roll. 

Ok, we got burgers topped with choice of French and Danish blue cheeses or cheddar served on those nifty little frozen European style roles that are mostly pre-baked but take 5 minutes in the oven to brown and crisp. We got really, really rich and spicy beans. Now we need something lighter, fresher. Something, say, slaw-ish.


Assemble slaw-ish dressing ingredients. I only used high quality, unfiltered cider vinegar and a bit of not-completely-refined sugar. Oh, plus salt and pepper.

Pretty much all you need

to dress some slaw-ish.

Assemble some slaw-ish vegetables. In this case, a kohlrabi, half a jicama, and a big apple.

Slaw-ish vegetables.

Julienne the vegetables. Dress them. Put them in the frig for a couple hours, spooning the dressing over them whenever you think of it. 

Slaw-ish ready to rock and roll.

Chow down. Hard to come up with a simpler or more delicious Saturday night dinner. Or at least simpler. I was the only one who ate much of the slaw-ish. But the beans and burgers were certainly popular!


Anyway. If you're snowed in and need some entertainment, please wax up those skis (do you know that you put wax on the bottom of skis but the top of surfboards? Hard to believe in the 2000s that we need to use wax for ANYTHING in either case) and scoot on over to:
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/


Thanks for stoppin' by!

Got Leftovers?

Get quiche. I haven’t made one in decades. But Molly, who doesn’t eat eggs or egg dishes, came back from France making—and consuming—quiche frequently. I figure, what the hell, I can switch from omelets to quiche. It’s a fine line. Really, except for the crust, it’s no line at all.


And of course, the primary use for omelets is to soak up leftovers. So here goes a leftovers quiche. Or quiches. Because I made breaded chicken cutlets for the non-seafood crowd the night Molly and I ate fritters made with some gorgeous New Zealand mussels I found in the freezer case at the Oriental Mega-Mart. The frig had a bag of the fried chicken slices and one big uncooked boned and skinned breast from the pack I thawed on Sunday evening. So I made one breaded and one un-breaded chicken quiche.


Like this. First, I roasted a handful of diced Kunzler bacon with a couple thin-sliced onions in a touch of olive oil and butter with some basil (the latter because I’m out of dried thyme at this time). 

Bacon and onions roasted and

ready to rock and roll. 

I diced up the uncooked chicken and heaved that into the pan to roast up with the bacon and onion. While that finished up I blind-baked two refrigerator-case pie crusts in springform pans sprayed with nonstick stuff. When they cooled, I sorted the chicken out of the bacon pan and laid that in one crust, and chunked up the breaded chicken into the other. On Molly’s advice I grated a drift of parmesan over each. Then distributed the bacon and onion into the two pans. 

Two quiches ready for custard.

Meanwhile I beat a dozen eggs with a big container of good Greek yoghurt and big slug of Tabasco sauce. Into this I mixed the leftover egg noodles from chicken cutlet night, diced into pieces roughly the size of the bacon pieces from the other pan. 

Custard base with egg noodles

added ready to dump over the

chicken.

Poured the batter over the chicken, grated more cheese atop, and baked ‘em until Molly said they were done. Served them with a salad and the good cheese bread from the Giant. 

Finished product.

Salad to accompany.

Best use of leftovers ever? Well, it’s not an omelet. 


But it is almost!


PS--if you can spare a few minutes, wax down your board and surf on over to:


http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/


Thanks for stopping by!

Super Bowl Food 2011

When in prior years we researched St. Louis and Indianapolis food, we didn’t get much useful. Having been to both places repeatedly, and eaten Italian or upscale steak house stuff that could have been in Chicago, New York, or Atlanta, there wasn’t much to choose from. We cooked New Orleans style and let it go.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Green Bay Packer fan. This wasn’t quite the idle success chasing it might seem. I loved Ray Nitschke’s busted schnoz, read Jerry Kramer’s book repeatedly, and Vince Lombardi, of course, was from a couple towns over in north Jersey. I memorized the depth charts, and I can still diagram the Green Bay sweep, weak side and strong. When Tom Brown intercepted that pass in the end zone in 1966, and Starr carried it over behind Kramer in 1967, I was glued to the black and white television.

When I got to spend a lot of time in Green Bay for project work in the 2000s, it was just awesome. One frigid night I briefed a big meeting of an angler’s club in a big bar right at the stadium. For meetings in Green Bay or Milwaukee, the law-firm pastry selection always included an odd semi-Danish ring-shaped thing called a “kringle”. It was always way sweet, but seemed to be a real regional specialty. Along with breaded and fried walleye and yellow perch, you had the makings of a good meal anywhere along the lake shore.

For unclear reasons, Molly recently began working on baking kringle. Her recipe is not at all too sweet, in fact it’s a delicious Danish breakfast pastry. For Super Bowl Sunday, we made one not sweet and added a cream-cheese based crab dip as a topping. This was simply frickin’ awesome!

Molly’s crab dip kringle. A truly

delicious appetizer before the

big game with Green Bay on the field.

Now, with a long afternoon of working on

lesson content, and the hugely massive

Premier League game between Chelsea

and Liverpool (with Fernando Torres and

Didier Drogba together terrifying me but not

Liverpool who came up 1 – nil) for warmups,

we siphoned off some of the crab dip, baked up

little tiny Bisquick biscuits to heap it on, and

chowed down with a preliminary glass of wine.

OK, kringle and seafood covers Green Bay. What about Pittsburgh? Well, it turns out that Pittsburgh was and still is the manufacturing home of Klondike Bars. Can you believe it? Dessert doesn’t get easier. And you can divert the kringle to antipasto!

Pittsburgh-based dessert.

Main course? Cover both towns.

Good fresh sauerkraut cooked with

chardonnay, chicken broth, a couple

bay leaves, with a topping of nicely

browned onions and apples, and heaps

of sliced kolbase and something called

 “hardwood smoked chicken sausage”.

Oh. And sautéed potato and cheese pirogies, right out of the freezer case at the local grocery market.

In conclusion? About the best—and easiest—Super Bowl Sunday food ever. We’ll be looking for you to be here next year. Even if it’s St. Louis and Indianapolis. We’ll come up with something. Trust us. 

PS. If you got a little time to kill, boogie on over to the awesome companion blogs:

http://docviper.livejournal.com/

http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/

http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/

thanks for stoppin' by!