• 1 stick of butter
• 1/2 pound of mushrooms, sliced
• 2 cloves ground garlic, minced
• 0.8 lb of pork chops
• 1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
• 1 13.5 oz can of coconut milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp ground red pepper

Method

1. Melt butter in Dutch oven. Throw in mushrooms and garlic. Saute till the mushrooms are soft. Remove mushrooms to a bowl.
2. Brown pork shops in remaining butter. Remove. Cut into bite size pieces.
3. Add coconut milk to Dutch oven. Add spices. Bring to simmering. Add bell pepper. Bring to simmering. Add mushrooms. Bring to simmering.
4. Add pork. Simmer for 20 minutes, covered, and another ten minutes uncovered to thicken the sauce.

Result: very tasty. Definitely a repeater.

Notes for next time

To make the pork more tender, I think I would simmer it forty minutes covered and see if that made the difference.

I used this recipe for a reference. I might want to consider it again next time.

Makes 20-30 meatballs

Ingredients

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 pound bulk Italian sausage
• 2 teaspoons dry minced onion
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 cup parmesan cheese grated or (2 ounces)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Method

Mix all of the ingredients in a large bowl using your fingers. Mix until the meat no long feels slimy from the eggs. Shape in golf ball size meatballs and place on a large baking sheet with sides. Bake at 375º for 15-20 minutes until the meatballs are done all the way through. Rinse in a colander to remove any egg and cheese that has leaked out.

Departures

Instead of using minced onion, I used onion powder. I forgot the parmesan. No rinsing was needed. These turned out great. They tasted good all by themselves, but I served them with "Cream sauce for meatballs," which was quite good.

2014-12-14: Just made the recipe a second time. Remembered the parmesan this time. Have to say it didn't seem to make much difference in the taste. Perhaps because I used cheapo parmesan in a can? In any case, the recipe can clearly be made without the parmesan.

Again I paired it with cream sauce for meatballs. That's okay, but it is not an ideal pairing with the Italian spices of the sausage.

I think it would be more interesting taste-wise to use instead of Italian sausage, standard farmer's sausage, and then mix in a cup of rehydrated cranberries or a cup of lingonberries. That would work better with the cream sauce.

2016-01-10: I made this again for the 4th or 5th time. It's definitely a go-to recipe now.

2020-04-01: I made these again. This time only used beef because Food City had no ground pork. Still very tasty.

2024-03-24: Made them in the Speedi on bake/roast at 350°F for 11 minutes. Didn't have parmesan, so I used feta instead. Had to cook them in two batches.

Fry's Grocery has in the butcher case pre-spiced Malibu chicken breasts that look pretty good and are about $3.49 a pound, which is currently a reasonable price. "Malibu" just means the savory/peppery spice rub on them. I bought a couple and asked the butcher how to cook them. He said 15 maybe 20 minutes at 350°. Idiot. I don't think he has actually cooked these things. They are pretty thick, and it took me 30 minutes at that temperature, with one opening of the oven. Next time I'll 25 minutes before checking. I think 30 made them just a bit dry.

Ingredients

• 2 pre-spiced chicken breasts

Method

• Put them on a baking sheet in the oven for 25 minutes at 350°.

Result

Not bad at all. The spice rub may have had too much salt in it. Either that or my tongue was mistaking some of the spices for salt. I'll definitely try this again with their lemon pepper breasts.

I've been meaning to make chocolate-covered bacon for some time using the recipe mentioned on Primal Toad. Today I did it. Here's my variation.

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb. of thick-cut bacon. Don't use the skinny crap they sell in dairy case. Get it from the butcher.
• 3.5 oz of good quality chocolate, chopped
• 1 tbsp of butter

Method

1. In a small frying pan melt the butter over low heat.
2. Add the chocolate, stirring to smooth it out.
3. Dip the bacon in the chocolate. Transfer it to a wire cooling rack. Put it in the fridge for a couple of hours to firm up.

This turned out pretty good, although it probably won't become part of my regular diet.

I picked up a tri-tip roast from Costco. It weighed 3.13 pounds. The directions said to cook it at 425° until it gets to 145° in the thickest part. Alas, it didn't give a time reference. I took a look at my meat cookbook. It recommended 450° for 20 minutes and then some other behavior I ignored.

So I guesstimated 30 minutes. Checked. Not close. 40 minutes? Closer. I took about 45 minutes before it got to about 135°, which is when I removed it. Then I let it rest for 15 minutes to let it finish cooking and redistribute the juices.

I'll have to reconsider the time. I haven't eaten enough of the roast yet to figure out whether the middle was too raw, but I think next time 40 minutes for a similar size roast would be good enough.

2014-11-21: I've been eating the roast for several days now. It actually turned out really, really good. The middle has a bit of pink left. Very tasty. It rocks. I bet 40 minutes without interruption would work great for this weight.

Turkey bigos with cumin and chipotle

The recipe for unstuffed cabbage is one of my favorite these days, and I keep on trying a variety of variations. Today's version uses ground turkey and canned tomatillos. "Bigos" is a Lithuanian/Polish dish with chopped cabbage and meat, so I'm claiming it for my generic name for the dish.

Ingredients:

• Olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 lbs ground turkey, as fatty as you can find it
• 1 chipotle, say about the size that would give you 1 tbsp ground
• 1 tbsp whole cumin
• 1 tsp black pepper kernels
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 28-oz can of tomatillos
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 small head of cabbage, chopped

Method

1. Fry the onions until soft in a big frying pan.
2. Add turkey. Fry till mostly cooked.
3. Grind chipotle, cumin and pepper in a spice grinder
4. Add spices to meat and onion mixture.
5. Put garlic through a garlic press. Add to the meat/onion mixture. Cook for about a minute.
6. Drain tomatillos, reserving the brine. Run the tomatillos through a blender. Add to the meat/onion mixture. Add maybe a half a cup of the reserved brine. Add salt.
7. Add chopped cabbage to mixture. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally until cabbage is soft. Serve.

This turned out adequately, but no great shakes. Next time I do it, instead of adding 1/2 cup of the brine, I'll add a cup of chicken broth (from powder or bouillon cubes), which I think would change it from being merely okay to tasty.

This is a dish I cook fairly regularly with variations on the spices. This time around I'm using some Indian chile that the Tadjik lady at my local market said would be spicy.

Ingredients

• sunflower oil
• 5-6 small onions chopped coarsely (two ordinary onions)
• 4 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 1 tbsp of whole cumin seed, ground in a spice grinder or pestle
• 1 tbsp of Indian chile
• 1/4 of a huge head of cabbage (half of a medium head), chopped
• 750 grams of ground chicken (~ 1 2/3 lbs)
• 1 cup of boiling water
• 1 chicken bouillon cube

Method

1. Chop onions coarsely.
2. Pour enough sunflower oil into the bottom of a frying pan to cover it. I'd guess the pan can be from anywhere from nine to twelve inches in diameter. Put the frying pan on medium heat.
3. Pour in the onions. Stir occasionally so that they all approach transparency together.
4. Once the onions are barely beginning to brown, add the garlic and cook till fragrant, which should be about a minute, maybe two.
5. Add the cumin and chile. Cook for one minute or so, stirring, to release the flavors into the oil.
6. Add the ground chicken. Fry. Stir occasionally, breaking up the chicken into smaller and smaller chunks.
7. Pour the boiling water into a cup. Add the bouillon cube. Mix it up till it is a broth.
8. Once the chicken looks roughly cooked, add the cabbage. Add some of the broth. Cover. Let it cook a while.
9. Stir occasionally. Add more broth if it seems like it needs it. The goal is to get the cabbage cooked and all the flavors mixed.
10. As the cabbage approaches being done, remove the cover so that the excess broth begins to evaporate and concentrate. It's okay if there is some liquid left, but we aren't aiming at a full-fledged stew.
11. Once done, turn off heat. Cover with a splatter guard so that more liquid escapes and flies don't land on the finished product.
12. Once you think it's ready, serve.

Notes:

Any time a Russian tells you that something is spicy, don't believe ’em. This recipe did have a minor bite, but it was not as spicy as the spice lady at the farmers' market said that ?Indian chile? would be. Okay, she was actually a Tadjik, still...

Nonetheless, this dish turned out great.

I'm currently in Russia. Back in the States we often cook with neutral tasting oils like safflower oil or Canola oil or mixed vegetable oil. That's understandable. They allow the taste of the ingredients to come forward. But I find myself liking Russian sunflower oil more and more. It has a distinct odor as it cooks, and a pleasant, subtle flavor in the resulting dish. Frankly, I'm tempted to try cottonseed oil and mustard oil before I leave Russia. The latter is legal here, but not in the States.

Ingredients

• Vegetable oil
• 4 small onions, chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 1 tbsp cumin, crushed
• 1 tbsp ground chipotle
• 1 tsp pepper
• 750 grams of ground chicken (about 1.5 pounds)
• 1/2 head of cabbage, shredded
• 2-3 cups boiling water
• About 1 tsp salt

Pour vegetable oil into frying pan. Add onions. When they are almost translucent, add garlic. Cook for a minute. Add cumin, chipotle and pepper. Cook for a minute. Add chicken. Fry till done, stirring and breaking up into reasonable bite size. Add water and salt. Add cabbage. Bring to a slight boil, cover, and cook until the cabbage is soft. Remove from stove. Serve.

For the chipotle I used ground chipotle powder I had found at Cost Plus (World Market). Awesome. A tablespoon of that stuff gave the dish a bite, despite the fact that the chipotle had sat on the shelf for a year.

The ground chicken I used was made from breast meat, which is nearly fat free. It meant the broth was kind of boring. Next time I'll through in a bouillon cube.

Notes: Properly speaking, bigus is made with both fresh cabbage and sauerkraut, some kind of meat, and often has prunes added, but people in Russia sometimes fudge and call any nondescript mix of meat and cabbage bigus, so that's the name I'm giving this dish.

Next attempt. This time I had opened a bottle of Fetzer Gewurtztraminner. I had thought a sweet wine would not work for poached chicken, but what the heck. Why not give it a try.

Method

1. I sliced a medium sized yellow onion thin. Began to sauté it in a frying pan with olive oil.
2. In the meantime I sliced a boneless, skinless chicken breast into two cutlets.
3. Once the onions have got a little bit of brown, I removed them from the pan. Added the cutlets. Sprinkled the top side with garlic powder and black pepper.
4. Flipped the cutlets. Cooked a while.
5. Removed the cutlets. Returned the onions to the pan. Added some steamed asparagus to the pan that I had made previously to warm them up.
6. Once they were warm, I removed them to the plate. Drizzled all the extra sauce over the veggies and the chicken. All done.

To my surprise, this was pretty tasty. Mild flavor, but no salt needed.

Now I'm curious to try it with a really assertive red wine.

I decided to try this recipe myself in an attempt to duplicate Diane's lovely dinner.

1. Sauteed a thinly sliced onion in olive oil. Removed the onions to a bowl once sweet.
2. I started with three skinless half-breasts of chicken. To reduce cooking time, I cut the thick parts away from the thin parts, and then sliced the thick parts longwise in half. Then I browned them (not very brown) on both sides in the olive oil from the previous step. Removed the chicken from the pan.
3. Returned the onions to the oil. Poured a glass of red wine into the pan. Brought to a gentle boil. Added the chicken back to the pan. Poached about ten minutes on one side. Sprinkled lightly with table salt, black pepper and garlic powder.
4. Turned the chicken to the other side. Sprinkled lightly with table salt, black pepper and garlic powder. Added more wine as needed to continue poaching.
5. Removed the breasts after 10 minutes.
6. Served the chicken with onions and sauce over it.

It came out edible. This time the preparation was more interesting than the actual result. Thoughts for next time:

• For wine I used a Fetzer Merlot. My theory was that chicken has a gentle flavor, and I didn't want to overwhelm it with too spicy a red, whereas in fact generally I favor very peppery cabernets. Frankly, it was a bit dull. Next time I'll try the peppery cab.
• Next time I'll brown significantly longer, hoping for a bit more umami, carmelly meat taste, and I'll poach longer to soften the meat more, probably fifteen minutes per side.
• Next time I'll put more time into the sauce after the chicken has been removed, maybe adding some vinegar and lemon, perhaps guided by this recipe. Then perhaps I'll run it through the blender before serving.
• I like the idea of a bay leaf in the poaching sauce.