I rarely eat soup in warm weather but with highs in the 30’s (cold for here) predicted for 10 days, we decided to have a soup-a-thon beginning with chili on Friday before the predicted winter storm. We used our normal Anson Peckham’s Chili Con Carne recipe and once again we thought it was delicious. This is Bev's topped with cheese and onion.
While I’ve previously used a couple of their recipes, I recently added “Serious Eats” as one of my regular blog reads and I’ve been learning a lot from the site such how to make the perfect beef stew. I normally would not make another beef stew blog post if it were not for what I learned from this one. The recipe along with a lot of how-to’s came from their All-American Beef Stew post and I’ll let you visit the site for the details but here are their 13 rules: Select your meat wisely, Sear your beef before cubing, Go easy on the flour, Separate your vegetables, Booze makes it better, Use chicken stock, not beef, Break out the umami bombs, Don’t waste flavor, Powdered gelatin FTW, Yukon golds make for cleaner stew, Use the oven, not the stove, Don’t overcook it, Don’t eat it today, eat it tomorrow, it doesn’t matter.
Seafood Bisque
After eating the cioppino for Thanksgiving, there were five cups of super tasty, somewhat chunky broth remaining. As you likely know, I’m more of a recipe follower than a real cook, but I decided to give real cheffing a try and turn the cioppino leftovers into a seafood bisque. Per the web, “bisque is a smooth, creamy, highly seasoned soup of French origin, classically based on a strained broth of crustaceans.”
I HOPE YOU HAD A WONDERFUL THANKSGIVING WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS
As I continue to work through our supply of frozen fish while Bev is gone, we had two remaining pieces of Halibut and we opted to cook them using the recipe for Halibut In Prosciutto Herb Cream Sauce from the “La Bella Vita” blog. The two pieces of fish were very different which is one of the reasons I cancelled my subscription from Wild Alaska Seafood Co. as I believed I was just getting the leftovers for a very high price.
Visit from Riley
We had a recent long-weekend visit from granddaughter, Riley, who is a student at the College of Charleston in South Carolina where she is majoring in Psychology and Religious Studies. It’s been about a year since we saw her and it was really nice catching up with her life. Here she is with her Meme and Aunt Pat engaged in girl talk.
Riley brought her cat and kept it in her bedroom and this is Romeo trying to look under the door the check it out.
Cindy Salmon
Cindy made a very good Salmon dish recently and I didn’t do a post about it as it required typing in the entire recipe. The recipe for Salmon With Creamed Spinach & Parmesan Sauce came from Tieghan Gerard in an unknown magazine and it was very good.
We still had ham left from Christmas and some chicken breasts in the fridge that I decided to marry and Chicken Cordon Bleu came to mind but I didn’t want to make the traditional rolled and breaded version. I wanted to grill the chicken and not roll it up and Bev is not a fan of Swiss cheese so my dish became something very different but still using Chicken Cordon Bleu as the inspiration. I looked around the web for recipes and settled on the recipe for Chicken Cordon Bleu from Nagi on her “Recipe Tin Eats” blog to use as a guide. I used her recipe for the sauce but my own technique for the chicken.
When Madison (granddaughter) lived with us the first time, she was in 8th grade and, even though we had two dogs, we decided to get her a dog of her own. After some looking around we ended up with a cute little Maltese puppy that Madison named Bodie and we all grew to love him so we were disappointed when she moved back home and opted to take Bodie with her – but of course we understood.
When Madison went off to college, Bodie ended up with Rhett
and Beth, which is the current situation but since they both retired in
October, they have been traveling extensively and Bodie ends up being boarded a
lot. Since they plan on more traveling,
we all thought it would be best for Bodie if he stayed with us for a while,
which of course we will also like.
To get him we each made the approximately three-hour drive
to Asheville, NC and met for lunch at an interesting little place called HomeGrown which is a converted old house. I borrowed some of the pics from the web.
Bev had saved this recipe for 4-Ingredient Spinach and White Bean Soup from “Simply Recipes” and we decided to give it a try one day when we wanted a quick meal. I wasn’t optimistic that it would be blog worthy so I took no pics of it - this one is from their site and ours looked just like it. I followed the ingredients list but changed the instructions so as not to have to scoop out half the soup.
Tradition has it here in the South that black-eyed peas should be eaten on New Year’s Day for good luck in the coming year. It’s hard to know if it really helps but we eat them and seem to enjoy good luck and no since tempting fate so we had them again this year. It’s been 13 years since we used this recipe so I decided a redo was in order but I made several changes to the recipe as shown with the strike thru's. Also, I tried to add as little heat as possible for Bev and Cindy although the Kielbasa had some.
Eliza and family didn’t make it down until Saturday for us to celebrate Christmas with her and for a meal on a rainy day we opted for a soup to use more of the leftover ham from Christmas dinner. After looking around the web, I settled on the recipe for Neighborhood Ham And Bean Soup from Food.com. But before we get to the meal lets have a look at Eliza having her second Christmas with Bev’s help. As a seven year old, she walked in the door, gave me a hug, said Merry Christmas then asked "do you have presents for me." 😊
Our RV club has been the Tennessee Travelers Chapter of FMCA (Family Motor Coach Assoc) but this summer we decided to dis-affiliate with FMCA and just be a group of friends who like to travel together. So, our last official chapter event was a Christmas lunch at the Chop House in Knoxville attended by 13 members – here we are around the tree.
One of Bev’s favorite lunches is refried beans which she makes and freezes when we cook a big batch of pintos – they are not really refried but are mashed and doctored with several items. After bragging about the white beans served to me at Angie’s Kitchen a couple of times, Bev suggested we make some white beans so she can see how they work for her refried beans. Rather than going to the store, we used a pound each of navy bean and great northern beans that we had on hand and I started with our pinto bean recipe and adjusted it to get the one below.
I had baked a 2 lb. salmon filet with the plan to turn it into salmon cakes but I caught a little head cold and wasn’t willing to put in the effort required to make the cakes. So, I opted to turn it into salmon chowder, which we haven’t had in many years. I looked at several online recipes and settled on one that sounded good and for which I had all of the ingredients. The recipe comes from the “Salt and Lavender” blog but I made several changes beginning with doubling the ingredient amounts. Since I like a hearty soup, I completely changed the cooking method by adding the liquid as I went along and ended up with two cups of chicken broth vs. six called for in the recipe. To see the original recipe, just click on the above link.
We invited Eliza and her family down for Sunday supper and since her mom (Wende) just had a birthday, we asked if she had a request for the meal. She chose Manhattan Clam Chowder, which was uncanny as I’d been thinking about it recently myself – haven’t made it in several years. The original recipe is for a slow cooker and makes about three quarts, but since I wanted enough for leftovers and to send home with Wende, I doubled the recipe to get the one below.
Before we ate, Eliza enjoyed the 60F temperature to take
a spin in the big wheel, which is kept here, and she invented a new way to play T-ball.
I’ve been trying to make Sundays a pasta day but with plenty of leftovers in the fridge, I thought I’d have to miss this week, but when I opened up my email that morning, there was Chef Lea Ann’s post for Stove-Top Cowboy Spaghetti with a pic of chili over pasta. So, I read the post and realized my chili didn’t fit her recipe nor did it fit Cincinnati chili which contains many of the flavors in Jerk Seasoning (eg. cinnamon, cloves, allspice).
So, I’ll just call mine "Pasta Topped, Chili, Onion, and Cheddar."
Happy New Year and thanks for stopping by my blog this past year.
Here are some meals we’ve made recently but I didn’t want to do an entire post on. The first one is breakfast hash that was inspired by Pam’s post for Skillet Potato Hash WithMushrooms and Bacon on her "For The Love Of Cooking" blog. I made it to use some mushrooms we had in the fridge and some leftover boiled potatoes. I generally followed Pam’s recipe except I just used bacon grease rather than cooking bacon and I started with cooked potatoes. I topped the hash with three small eggs for a delicious breakfast.
We had our annual club Christmas Luncheon at Chesapeake’sSeafood House in downtown Knoxville on Dec 5. Thirteen of us were able to attend and as always it’s good to have one final visit with friends before winter and the end of our rallies until April.
When I saw Chef Lea Ann’s recipe for Pork Green Chile Stew on her "Cooking On The Ranch” blog, I thought it would work well for our Hispanic food loving Friday card group. So, when this chilly, drizzly Friday came along, it became the meal choice.
One her blog, Lea Ann described it as “A hearty stew
brimming with Chile Peppers, cubed pork loin roast, potatoes and hominy.
Slightly spicy, slightly tangy and mostly mouthwateringly delicious.” I made it
sorta by the recipe except I used canned chilies, but the original along with pics
can be found by clicking on the above link.
During a recent visit to the Mennonite Farm Market, Bev picked up some purple-hulled field peas (similar to black-eyed peas) and after shelling she had four cups. I went in search of recipes that would be different than just cooking them like dried beans and what I found was the recipe for Classic Hoppin John’s on the Southern Living site. Since we like to have the peas on New Years Day for good luck, we decided to make the hoppin john’s now for supper and freeze the leftovers to eat on Jan. 1 for good luck.
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