Monday, November 29, 2021

Grilled Chicken and Twice Baked Potato Casserole

We had some chicken breasts in the fridge that needed to be cooked and for a side, I’ve been itching to try the recipe for Twice BakedPotato Casserole since seeing it last week on Trisha’s “Mom On Timeout” blog.  I decided to turn the chicken into a version of chicken parmesan using the leftover sauce from our Thanksgiving meal.  This is our normal method for the chicken.

Friday, November 26, 2021

Thanksgiving 2021

I’m not a big fan of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner and we’ve often done very different cuisines and this year we decided on Italian.  Since some of the invitees were unavailable on Thanksgiving Day, we opted to have our meal on Wednesday – ain’t retirement great.

We had 12 diners so we used both the dining room and sun room tables – I called it the kids table.  Here’s a shot of the big table that was empty then but soon filled up with food.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving

    



Bev and I have so much to be thankful for and our wish for you is a safe, healthy, and happy Thanksgiving.
 

Even though it’s called a Christmas Cactus, ours always blooms at Thanksgiving.


Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

11/25/21 event date

Monday, November 22, 2021

Hunters Schnitzel & Potatoes

When I bought a whole pork loin a while back, I sliced some of it at 3/8”-1/2” thick to use for schnitzel and when I saw Claudia’s recipefor Hunters Schnitzel  on her "What’s Cooking Italian" blog I knew it was the one I wanted to try.  The German name for schnitzel with mushroom sauce is Jägerschnitzel and I’ve eaten it in several German restaurants.   I followed her recipe as shown below but you can visit her site for some good how-to photos.

Friday, November 19, 2021

Mexican Chopped Salad

I wanted to have something different with our ChileColorado and searched the web for a Mexican salad that sounded good and came upon an interesting looking recipe on The Café Sucre Farine blog.  It had lots of ingredients and I didn’t followed the recipe exactly so I noted my changes.

Monday, November 15, 2021

Chile Colorado

I bought the dried peppers for my first attempt at Chile Colorado some time ago after seeing the recipe on Pam’s “For The Love OfCooking” blog.  Upon noticing that the recipe she used came from Isabel Eats and my recent success with her Chile Rellenos, I knew those peppers had to be put to use if these two good cooks made the recipe.  I had a couple of pieces of flank steak in the freezer needing to be used so they were the meat of choice and since I wanted to use a slow cooker, I varied the directions to do that.  I also varied the chiles as shown. You can click on the above link for the original recipe and more excellent pics like this one.


Thursday, November 11, 2021

Chuy’s Burrito

As I mentioned in the last post , I made carnitas so I would have them to make the Chuy’s Burritos that I had seen on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.  The secret to this burrito is the inclusion of a chile relleno in the stuffing and we started making them with our home grown poblano peppers.  With our first predicted freezing weather, Bev picked our remaining peppers and all of the poblanos on top came from a single plant.



Monday, November 8, 2021

Pork Carnitas & Santa Maria Style Pinquito

While watching an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives recently, Guy visited Chuy’s Taco Shop in San Diego, CA and one of the dishes they highlighted was Chuy’s Burrito which was stuffed with a chile relleno and pork carnitas and it just had to be tried.  I’ll cover the burrito in the next post so this one will be about the carnitas.  I didn’t care for Chuy’s recipe for the them so I found one from Downshiftology that I preferred so I used it for that part of the meal and I adapted it for my 10lb. Boston butt to get the recipe below.

Friday, November 5, 2021

Dock Closing Party 2021

We hadn’t done this in a while and since we had a nice day on Oct 31, we decided we would have a dock closing party, which we haven’t done in a few years – it’s really just an excuse to get together.  We had ten neighbors join us for a fall menu of grilled hot dogs, chili, mac and cheese and and several desserts.  We had the mac and cheese because I had recently seen an appealing recipe for chili mac and since we had the chili, I decided to make the mac and cheese and combine them in my bowl.

Fortunately, we were able to pick a sunny, 62F beautiful fall day for the event and we ate at five to be done eating and visiting before it turned too cool.  This shot is from our parking area while I was using the burners to clean the grill.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Green Tomato and Country Ham Soup

We’ve made and posted about this soup previously, but Bev wanted to make it a little differently this time so I updated our recipe to reflect that.