I was looking for a different chicken recipe for our Friday group and since I have always had success with those from Kevin’s “Closet Cooking” blog, I went there first. We really enjoy Cuban mojo sauce so his recipe for Grilled Mojo Chicken sounded just right. I tripled the amount of sauce for the four pounds of chicken that I had but you can click on the above link for the original recipe and more pics like this.
When I asked Bev what she wanted to eat on Valentine’s Day, I was expecting to hear some sort of grilled meat and most likely beef tenderloin. But after s few days of thinking about it, she decided she would like fondues. For dessert, she decided to just melt some Ghiradelli Chocolate Flavored Melting Wafers and for the cheese, we opted to use a copycat recipe from the Melting Pot Restaurant that I found at CopyKat Recipes I substituted white wine for beer and changed the instructions as we don’t have a fondue pot.
Many years ago, I used a recipe for French Onion Soup that cooked the onions in the oven for hours and it made a delicious soup. When we wanted the soup again recently, I couldn’t find the recipe (I must have made it pre-blog) so I used another one and it wasn’t very good. After a warm spell, a cold front came through and it was once again soup weather, so I went on line searching in earnest for the recipe and I found it. The recipe is titled “French Onion Soup: The Cook’s Illustrated Way” and it is shown below. I followed the soup recipe as written but deviated for the crouton.
I’ve been wanting to make some Canadian Bacon for a while as I really like it and it’s a great meat for my diet – about 30 calories per ounce and no carbs. I couldn’t believe it when I looked back and discovered that my last batch was in 2013. In the past I have used a dry cure but this time I opted to use a liquid brine and after research I decided on the recipe from “Serious Eats” for “Maple Cured Candian Bacon.” I followed the recipe as shown below which is half of the original. I prefer to use the single muscle half of the loin but the one with two muscles on part of it is all we could find.
We had couple of pork tenderloins in the freezer and I wanted to grill them whole but Bev wanted Pork Marsala. The recipes I found all called for pork chops or medallions but I decided to still grill the pork whole and use the Pioneer Woman’s Marsala Sauce recipe pared down for the less sauce that I needed (we weren’t serving it over a starch).
When I saw Kevin’s recipe for Ropa Vieja on his Closet Cooking blog, I knew I wanted to try just for a different version of shredded beef. I amended the recipe for the additional beef that I had and I made it the day before to give the flavors more time to marry. I also changed the directions to reflect use of my slow cooker. You can get the original recipe by clicking on the above link.
It’s hard to believe how fast January went by and how much the temps dropped between December and January. I enjoyed having fires in the fireplace and used my full rick of wood. But on this 60 degree first day of Feb, it was time to fire up the grill.
