Cindy Cooks Mushroom-Sausage Ragu & Anniversary

It was Cindy’s night to cook supper and for her meal she chose Mushroom-Sausage Ragu using a recipe from Food & Wine and she followed it except she used the whole pound of sausage and served it over hominy grits rather than polenta which is make from more finely ground cornmeal. 

Mushroom- Sausage Ragu – Slightly adapted from Food & Wine

The Ingredients:

1 cup dried morel mushrooms

2 tablespoons olive oil

5 2 sweet Italian sausages

1/2 pound shiitake caps, quartered

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 thinly sliced shallots

6 water chestnuts, sliced 1/4 inch thick

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Chopped parsley, for garnish

The Directions:

1. Soak the morels in 1 1/2 cups of boiling water until softened. Rinse and pat dry; reserve the soaking liquid.

2. In a skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil. Add the sausages, cover and cook over moderate heat until no longer pink within; slice 1/4 inch thick.

Greek Night At Almost Heaven South - Around The World Meal

The inspiration for a meal can be pretty well out there sometimes as evidenced by this one.  Bev had a cucumber that she had grown and wanted to use and decided she’d like to make it into Tzatziki sauce.  But what are you going to do with it was the next question to which she came up with a souvlaki recipe from Food & Wine.  Then I suggested that we just use this meal as our regular Thursday night offering for our friends and we make Greek potatoes as a side.  So this whole meal began with one over sized home-grown cucumber.

Stewed Okra and Tomatoes

Believing I wasn’t much of a fan, it’s been years since I’ve eaten stewed okra and tomatoes, much preferring my okra to be fried but Bev decided it would be a good way to use our extra tomatoes and the okra we were given so I reluctantly agreed.  It was delicious and while the plan was to put some in the freezer, we ate it all over a couple of days so we had to wait a few days to gather more tomatoes and okra before making the freezer batch using the recipe below which was modified from the one from Spicy Southern Kitchen.  The original recipe and more pics like this one can be found by clicking on the link.

A Few More Random Meals & Events

I sure wish I had more to write about than food, such as RV travels, but we’re just not ready to risk much yet – we are thinking about a short fairly local trip though.

A while back, I posted about my first brisket on the grill and I advised that the meat was a little overcooked but I did find a couple of ways to eat it that were very good.  One of those, which won’t surprise you, is breakfast food achieved by turning it into hash with the addition of onion, green pepper, and par-boiled potatoes.  Topped with a couple of sunny side up eggs, it was very good.

Redneck Tacos (Pulled Pork + Hoecakes)

I’d seen this while watching a TV food show where they feature a food type, a city, or a restaurant, and one of the dishes was Redneck Tacos from a restaurant in Nashville, TN.  So, I added it to my make-someday-list for the next time I cooked pulled pork which came about this past week. 

Pulled Pork Enchilada Verde Casserole

It was once again time for the Thursday meal for our friends and since I had pulled pork from my recent BBQ cook, a big pack of corn tortillas from the local maker, and have been wanting Mexican, enchiladas made the most sense.  I’ve learned after several months that casserole type dishes work best for delivery so I decided on an enchilada casserole.

I did not find a single recipe that I liked, so after reading several to get a sense of the proportions they used, I came up with the one below.

My First Brisket On The Grill

 If you follow my blog regularly, you know, I have recently been barbecuing meat on my grill, which is equipped with a smoker box, and I decided it was finally time to try a beef brisket – the most difficult cut of meat to get right.  And since I was cooking, I decided to do a pork butt just to have some pulled pork on hand.  And since I was cooking the pork, Bev wanted me to wrap it in banana leaves ala Hawaiian Luau.

I used my normal pork rub and harvested a couple of big leaves from our hardy banana to wrap it with.

A Few Recent Meals

For meal one, we had several green tomatoes we needed to use and opted to make a green tomato BLT since we love BLT’s, we love fried green tomatoes and we often see them on menus.  We used the recipefrom Meatwave, homemade bread, and Benton’s bacon.  The first shot shows my bread ready with mayo (Duke’s), bacon, lettuce, and colby jack cheese and it’s followed by two views after the deep fried tomatoes were added.