Category: Recipes

“Cold-Smoked” Chicken with Black Pepper Vinegar Sauce

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

Bobby Flay has a new cookbook, “Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain Cookbook,” chock-full of recipes from his New York restaurant Bar Americain.  We’ve never been to his restaurant, but we’re big fans of his recipes from his other books.  He has a creative, yet no-nonsense and relatively simple approach to cooking that we find easy to adapt to our home cooking and grilling.  Although many restaurant-based cookbooks can be quite intimidating, this first recipe we tried from Chef Flay’s book wasn’t difficult at all, and the result was restaurant-quality food at home.  The chicken was perfectly roasted with a slightly smoky flavor, and the black pepper vinegar sauce was one of the best sauces for chicken we’ve ever tasted.  The sauce is the star of this dish and it is crazy simple to make.  It might also be good as a salad dressing.  Heck, I could almost drink it, it’s so good.

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Slow-Cooker Beef Stroganoff

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Recipes, Red Meat

Now that it’s officially Fall and the temps are finally under 100 degrees, it’s time to dust off our slow-cooker and indulge in more comfort food recipes.  We found this one in the book “Slowcook” and adapted it after researching some other beef stroganoff recipes online.  We love how the flavor turned out — rich and meaty — but the sauce was a little more thin and broth-y than we would prefer.  We talked about creative ways to thicken it up next time — saute the mushrooms before adding them to the pot or do something different with the flour — but concluded that the easiest solution is also the most obvious.  Next time we make it, we’ll put in less beef broth and that should do the trick.  As Homer Simpson would say, “S-M-R-T!”  Update:  We got a super smart tip from our good friends Paula and Matt — use cream cheese instead of sour cream.  Adds more flavor and might help thicken up the sauce.  Thanks Guys!

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Tortellini with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Prosciutto

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Pasta, Recipes

We’re always looking for new sources of recipes for easy but delicious weeknight meals.  On a recent trip to the grocery store, we found a magazine titled “30-Minute Suppers” by Cook’s Illustrated.  The source is an old favorite, but the magazine itself is new (and should still be available in stores until October, if you’re interested.)  Cook’s Illustrated’s cookbook “The Best 30-Minute Recipe” is one of our most-used books, so we figured the magazine would have lots of recipes we would enjoy as well.  So far, we have tried two recipes from the magazine and were happy with the resulting meals that tasted like they took a lot of effort, but were on the table in just half an hour.  We liked the combination of flavors and textures in this tortellini dish very much:  cheesy tortellini, peppery arugula, sweet and slightly chewy sun-dried tomatoes, crispy prosciutto, bright lemon and rich olive oil.  The only thing we would change is to create more of a sauce for the finished dish.  Next time we make it we’ll see if we can tweak the recipe a bit and post an update here.

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Lobster Cobb Salad (with leftover lobster)

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Recipes, Seafood

We found this recipe in Ina Garten’s cookbook, “Barefoot Contessa Family Style,” and loved it.  Ina recommends that you “make this elegant salad when your mother-in-law comes for lunch,” but unfortunately, my mother-in-law doesn’t prefer lobster.  More for me!  Only kidding (Hi Elaine!) — you can also make this salad with chicken or shrimp and it will still be delicious and decadent.  We think it’s the combination of Dijon in the dressing, bacon and blue cheese topping, peppery arugula and creamy avocado that make this salad exceptional.  As Ina says, “this is a special meal for times when you really want to please someone.”

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Grilled Buffalo Wings

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

Dan’s favorite season has finally begun.  No, not Fall — it’s Football Season!  While I don’t share Dan’s love of the NFL, his penchant for watching games allllllll day on Sunday, or his obsession with tracking the scores from BOTH of his fantasy football leagues, I will support the marriage team by watching Steeler games, and I do enjoy the food that comes with this time of year.  This season, we decided to cook some of our football-watching bar food favorites at home, starting with buffalo wings.  We researched several recipes, expecting to find at least one with some secret ingredient for making the buffalo sauce so delicious.  Turns out that there really is no secret, or if there is a special ingredient, it’s being kept secret.  Pretty much all the recipes we found called for the simple combination of “hot sauce,” butter and vinegar.  In some recipes, the wings were grilled, others called for frying them, and some required baking them in the oven.  In the interest of making them just a teeny bit more healthy, we decided to grill our wings.  The resulting grill flavor complemented the buffalo sauce nicely.  We’ll make these again and maybe tweak the sauce a bit to come up with our own secret ingredient. 

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“Italian Sub” Chop Salad

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Recipes, Vegetable

Sub, hoagie, grinder, hero — whatever you like to call it, Dan is a big fan of this type of sandwich, especially when filled with Italian meats, a little provolone cheese, assorted veggies and accompanied by Italian dressing.  While he likes a good sub sandwich, I’m more of a salad girl.  I especially like a good chop salad, where all the ingredients are chopped up small enough that you get a little taste of each component in every bite.  This salad is a nice compromise between our taste preferences — I get the chop salad texture while Dan gets the Italian sub flavor.  Win win.  Even better, the chop salad is really versatile and can be made with whatever ingredients you prefer or happen to have on hand — no recipe required.  The ingredients that work to create a salad that tastes like a sandwich Dan would order from our local pizza joint include:  lettuce, celery, cucumber, red onion, pepperoncini, kalamata olives, provolone cheese, salami — all tossed with a creamy Italian dressing.

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Horseradish-Maple Glazed Pork Chops

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Pork, Recipes

We often use leftover pork for a second meal during the week, including such dishes as stir-fried pork, banh mi sandwiches and moo shoo pork.  Sometimes I prefer pork as a leftover because so many of these dishes have a sauce or other components to liven up the pork, which otherwise can be a little bland.  These chops are anything but bland, yet not too flavor-specific that they can’t be turned into a totally different second meal (we used our leftover chops in fried rice.)  I found the recipe in one of Bobby Flay’s cookbooks, “Boy Meets Grill.”  Chef Flay writes, “think about these three flavors going together — grilled pork chops, pungent horseradish, and sweet maple syrup — it makes sense.”  We initially thought that pairing horseradish with syrup actually does not make sense, but we are not accomplished chefs, nor Food Network stars.  So we took Bobby’s word for it and were pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoyed the sweet, yet spicy flavor.

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Chicken Stew with Green Olives

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Poultry, Recipes

Now that it’s September, cooler weather is FINALLY on the way, and we could not be happier.  It’s been a brutal summer here, but we have been blessed with glorious temperatures in the low 80s for the last couple of days and we are excited for fall.  In addition to a break from the hot weather, fall means cooking more of our favorite soups, chili and other comfort-food dishes.  This stew, adapted from a recipe in Glamour magazine, is a great dish for the transition from summer to fall.  The olives and basil give it a bright, summery flavor, while the broth and tomatoes provide richness.  It’s also really easy to make with simple ingredients:  chicken, leeks, olive oil, garlic, white wine, tomatoes, chicken stock, green olives and basil.

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Pork Fried Rice (with leftover pork)

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Recipes, Rice

As promised, here is another of our favorite uses of leftover pork, Asian style.  We adapted the recipe from “The Best 30-Minute Recipe” cookbook (which we can’t recommend highly enough), but the dish is pretty flexible in terms of both ingredients and sauce.  This version is what we prefer, but you can always put your own spin on it, which is one of the many reasons we like this recipe.  We also appreciate that it’s a quick, easy and delicious use of leftovers.

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Pasta alla Carbonara

Posted By under Main Courses, Main Ingredient, Pasta, Recipes

This is our second attempt at this pasta dish, which was originally inspired by the Rigatoni Alla Carbonara we had at Tra Vigne on our trip to Napa earlier this summer.  The pasta at Tra Vigne was one of the best meals of the trip, and we were excited to try to recreate it at home.  According to Tra Vigne’s menu, their rigatoni includes guanciale bacon, onion, eggs, cracked pepper and Parmesan.  Sounds easy enough.  So we made a special trip to Central Market to get the guanciale (Italian bacon made from the pig’s jowls or cheeks), researched some recipes and whipped up our first batch of Pasta alla Carbonara.  We used all the same carbonara ingredients as Tra Vigne and expected ours to taste at least similar to theirs, even if it didn’t turn out quite as delicious.  But ours wasn’t even close.  While the pasta at Tra Vigne had a rich and hearty bacon flavor, ours had a slightly gamey taste unlike any bacon we’ve had.  Carbonara Fail.  Since at first we did not succeed, we tried again — this time using pancetta instead of guanciale, and the result was much more successful.  Still not as good as the rigatoni at Tra Vigne, but our second batch was way better than the first — rich and creamy with nice bacon flavor. Continue reading “Pasta alla Carbonara”