Fried Crappie & Catfish with Brown Butter

A couple of years ago, I mistakenly cooked the butter too much while sauteing some Royal Red shrimp and we all loved them in brown butter (especially Big Daddy Dave).  Not sure why, but I don’t believe we’ve made something with browned butter since but then I saw this very simple recipe that needed to be tried.  Amanda’s recipe on her Crafty Cooking Mama blog calls for baking the haddock but I opted to use crappie & catfish and give it a quick pan fry.  Click on the above link for her recipe and more pics like this one.

Carb-a-thon For Christmas – Biscuits & Gravy and Potato Soup – And A White Christmas

For those of you eating more of a Keto diet, you may want to skip this post as our planned Christmas meals were on the opposite end of the spectrum.  It all started when Bev decided upon one of her favorite holiday meals for this year’s Christmas supper - potato soup with cornbread.  Then she was looking on-line and saw several biscuit recipes and said she’d like to try them sometime so I suggested Christmas breakfast as a start.

Merry Christmas and Turkey Salad Melt

MERRY, MERRY, CHRISTMAS

I borrowed this pic from our friends Facebook page as I thought it was a perfect shot.  Hope that's okay Dick and Marge.

Turkey Pot Pie

You may remember that rather than the typical Thanksgiving meal, we had Gumbo but we found we missed the leftover turkey dishes we normally enjoy so we bought a 12 pound turkey and an 8 pound breast in mid-December.  I seasoned them then cooked with orange, lemon, and onion slices and chopped celery.  I roasted them in a 350F oven, covered then uncovered, to an internal temperature of 160F.

Chex Mix & Women’s Hair

Bev decided she wanted to make Chex Mix this year so we added the ingredients to a recent Walmart pick-up grocery order – our first time for this and it worked very well.  We basically used the chex mix recipe from our friend Laurie (Big Daddy Dave’s wife) but changed the ingredients a little to make more.

Homemade Pizza & Swimming Critter Taste Test

I have a wife who makes great homemade bread.  I have a wife who loves pizza. I have a wife who makes great homemade pizza.  This day, she made a double bread dough recipe which she turned into three loaves of bread and one 16” pizza crust.  Her pizzas are generally topped with whatever we have on hand usually includes these veggies.

Polish Gołąbki (Cabbage Rolls)

While it was not my intent, I think this post counts as an around-the-world meal, of which I haven’t done many of during the pandemic - it's been hard to be inspired.  We enjoy cabbage rolls, a classic Eastern European dish, but are rarely willing to put in the effort to make them, however we were motivated when seeing them made on an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives which included the recipe below from Food Network which we doubled and amended a little. 

Braised Beef & Root Vegetables And Covid-19 Hits Close

We last made this dish in March, 2018 and decided it would be a good meal for our Thursday delivery on a cold December day.  I had adapted the recipe from Emeril Lagasse and used the same one again but made 1½ recipes so we would have some as well.  I won’t reproduce the recipe here but it can be found at this LINK.   I only used four cups of beef broth and thickened with seven tablespoons of cornstarch mixed with some water before adding the root vegetables and it was just right.

Disappointing Beef But Good Breakfast

The closest supermarket to us is the Food City in Vonore, TN which is 6-7 miles away and it has become our go-to store since Covid – used to be the much more crowded Walmart in Maryville since we regularly drove by it.  Food City advertises their beef as upper choice, Angus Beef and I’ve not had any complaints until now. 

They had a great deal ($9.99/lb.) on a thick prime NY Strip Steak a few days ago and I couldn’t pass it up.