I was in the mood to cook yesterday but I couldn’t think of anything to cook. I didn’t feel like cooking meat and … I just drew a blank. Randomly, I flashed back to the moment I consumed the most amazing dip. It was made by my friends’ sister for her bday party and let me tell you, when I say people were feening for that shxt, I MEAN it. (speaking of feening, this chick brought some sweet potato cookies she made to the party. Those shall DEF be an upcoming disaster) This dip was doing so much. I never thought I could be so hype for some dip. But as I said, it was amazing. So I asked the creator of greatness what’s in the magnificent dip, she says nonchalantly ( like she didn’t just make the best dip ever in life), ” Just cream cheese, real bacon pieces, and tomatoes”. I was so shocked. All I could say was, “That’s it???? Are you serious????” and yeah confirmed it again. So, I decided to give it a go and make it myself since it sounded so easy. I cut up one tomato, used 3/4 of the bacon pieces bottle, and a whole package of cream cheese. All I can say is the original dip was better. I probably didn’t have enough real bacon pieces in it. By the way, real bacon pieces are amazing. Didn’t realize they even existed until I had this dip. And since this dip has no real name, I shall coin it the 1100 calorie dip (yes, I calculated it). So if you’re feeling a little Paula Dean esque, enjoy!
This past Sunday was Halloween/game day/football day/ whatever guys refer to it as being. Due to this, my friend Chiarra decided to make some finger foods for our friends of the opposite sex enjoying the game… Or games? I don’t know but I helped her with the empanadas.
First, onions, red peppers, and green peppers were cut up and cooked. Ground beef was cooked also with some red peppers and adobo seasoning. The veggies and ground beef were mixed together and simmered in a pan to cook a little longer. Then we took empanadas patties, put the meat mixture in it, and added cheese to some of them. Our friend Hector decided to make pizza ones with pizza sauce and cheese. We folded the empanadas over and pressed them closed with forks. We put butter over them for flavor and color then we put them in the oven.
So I’m here with my so far expertise taste tester Virendra and his culinary buddy Carmen who is a SPC alum. Tonight we are working together to make turkey burgers. Now I’m not quite sure how much of a disaster this is going to be considering that Virendra knows how to cook and Carmen is enrolling in the HCC culinary program. I’m the least experienced :-(. Oh well, gotta start somewhere!
So here we are and we started with the sauce. Yes, a sauce. I’ve never heard of making a sauce for hamburgers that you mix with the burger mix but then again, a lot of people are surprised at my concoctions. The sauce included:
Cinnamon water
Parsely flakes
Garlic
Black pepper
Ketchup
Virendra’s aunt’s special recipe for Pepper sauce
Paprika
Grapeseed oil
Soul seasoning *don’t ask what that is because we don’t know either*
Then, we mixed the beef with the sauce, added red pepper flakes, grated oranges, put grape seed oil in a baking pan, placed cut up onions in the pan, and shaped the burgers and put them in the pan. We put the pan in a bistro oven and broiled it, letting it cook for 520-525~ degrees 6-8 min on each side. Carmen even cut up oranges and placed them on a plate in a culinary form.
Sooo this disaster ended up really being a disaster lol. It seems that when we cooked the burger on the stove in a pan with grapeseed oil, it creates a lot of smoke. When I pressed down on the burger to make sure it was cooking through, a bunch of smoke came out and the fire alarm went off. Now we changed the oil to vegetable oil spray. Now the apartment got really smokey again and the alarm went off so now we’re thinking it’s the onions.
Overall, it was a smokey mess but the product ended up being good.
I’ve been putting off this recipe for awhile. I’ve had the ingredients for a couple of weeks, but when it came down to making a dish I would go out of my way and go shop for ingredients for another dish. I was actually going to make fried chicken this week, but my week has been kind of busy and going to the store is time consuming. Therefore, I told myself, “Just use what you have, stop bullshitting.” So I did.
But why did I put off making the dish you ask? Because it’s BORING. I mean, it tastes good but anything that has to do with casseroles, mashed potatoes, and loafes sound like something an old lady would cook. A boring one at that because I’ve met some crazy and interesting old ladies with a story. I’ve also noticed that I made a lot of contradictions in a past sentence. I definitely made homemade mashed potatoes. I definitely made a meatLOAF. Both dishes qualify as falling into the BORING category according to me. What I do have to say in my defense is, they were exceptions lol. I made the meatloaf because I wanted to see if I could make it like my mom so the dish was actually a x variable. Lastly, the mashed potatoes weren’t just your regular bland, mashed potatoes. My mashed potatoes had a lot of flavor to them and it had roasted garlic bits in it. How many times do you hear about roasted garlic bits in mashed potatoes??
Anyway, this is how I made it. I took cream of mushroom soup and put it in a big mixing bowl. Then, I noticed the second container I had was cream of asparagus, not mushroom. I taste tested both to see if the flavors would clash and I decided to try both together. After, I took 3 cans of green beans, drained them, and added them to the bowl. Drained a can of mushroom stems and added it to the mixture. Took one cup of sour cream and added as well. Mixed in a little of cheddar cheese and fried onion rings. LAstly I added some salt and pepper and mixed everything together. I put the oven on for 350 and put the mixer into a baking dish, covered it with cheddar cheese, and then fried onion rings. Cooked the green bean casserole for 30 minutes and called it a day. Now I think I should have put the onion rings on after the casserole was cooked because they burned a little. I just thought about it, maybe I should have added tuna or chicken? I wanted to add red pepper flakes for spice but after taste testing the soups, I figured there would be too many strong flavors.
Overall, the casserole was really flavorful. I tasted really good. The onion rings were kind of crunchy but still good. I have no complaints. I actually want some more.
For this week’s disaster, I decided to go with what inspired me the most, steak. I’ve never made steak before. At all. I mean hey, everything I’ve made on this blog I never made before and it was my first time trying it. And yet, I always end up adding my own twist to it. Even so, I thought, “I can’t just make steak by itself. That would be boring.” So of course, the first thing I think of as a side is mashed potatoes. I flirted with the idea of using instant mashed potatoes. I know, GASP. I think that’s because my mom never made homemade mashed potatoes so I was just use to her instant ones. I uickly put down that idea because that would be like cheating, anything not made from scratch seems like it would be cheating. What’s the fun in instant? That’s boring. what do I look like featuring instant dishes as my main dish? *Mind you I said MAIN, because I definitely featured a Bertolli meal-in-a-bag in a past blog lol* Anyways, the decision was made, steak and homemade mashed potatoes it was.
As always, I looked around at different recipes. One I found out of a Food Network book called How to Boil Water. It called for broiling the steak. I think I have a broiler under my oven but I don’t trust SPC campus apartments enough to look into it. Anyways, I looked for a broiling pan in Shoprite but there were none so I decided to consult my mom. She told me I could pan-sear it instead. I knew this but it seemed like it would be a bit complicated being that I didn’t even have a recipe to tell me what temperature to have the oven on at and how long to cook it for. When I got home from food shopping, I looked in my book and saw there was actually a recipe for pan-searing steak. That book definitely came to the rescue. That was the only recipe I really used. As for the mashed potatoes, I just quickly looked over some recipes jut to see variations and figure out how to make it my own.
Ok, time to cook. I started off with the steak. I really thought making the steak would be the hardest part and the most time consuming but it really wasn’t. The mashed potatoes actually ended up taking wayyyyyy longer. Anyways, I got a small bowl, added extra virgin olive oil, ground pepper, grill makes spicy monterrey steak spice, picante pepper mustard, worcestshire sauce, and wisked it all together. This is actually my adaptation of the sauce for the broiler recipe. I dipped the steaks in the sauce completely and put it in the pan to cook. I ended up using most of the first batch on the first steak so I ended up making the second batch just from my head without measuring. Did I get the measurements completely right? No but it got the job done. This is what I wanted to be able to do as a cook, measure ingredients without using measuring cups and what not. I call this soul food; cooking from your head. Most people just think soul food is African-American dishes but I’ve definitely seen Italian, Spanish, and other people of different races make soul food being that they make it off the top of their heads. I guess you can say that correlates with the soul, depending on how into cooking one is. But I’ve diverted. I cooked the steaks like this, 4 minutes on one side, and 2 on the other. Then, I put the steaks in a baking pan in the oven at 450 for about 16 minutes…probably little more. Before the steaks were done, I cut up some green peppers, put them in the pan, put garlic and pepper on them, then put them in the baking dish with the steaks to continue cooking. And that’s all for the steaks.
NOW for the mashed potatoes. OMG it was so annoying to get the potatoes soft from boiling them. I took 4 potatoes, cut them up into cubes, then put them in a pot with salted water to boil. Wasn’t working. So I decided to drain the pot of the water, take some chicken broth made with garlic, and put it in the pot with the potatoes instead. Worked wonders. I kept the potatoes on the stove until the chicken broth evaporated. I helped this process go faster by using a technique I came up with while cooking it. I ended up taking the pot of potatoes and cooking it on it’s side so all the broth would drain to one side and get heated all at once…or atleast be more concentrated and exposed more to evaporate. Either way my technique worked really well. Then, I took the potatoes and put them in a large bowl. I took a stick of butter and melted it in the pot. I also cut up some fresh garlic and cooked them in the pan so they were roasted. I got this idea from my friend who brought it up while I was cooking. I added the melted stick of butter, the roasted garlic, garlic powder, pepper, and salt to the potatoes and mashed them up with a masher. This was the part where I had to keep trying it to see how it tasted and adding ingredients/spices to make it taste better. I guess I got that from when I was in culinary school and I would be on mashed potato duty. Overall, they were GREAT. The roasted garlic was the perfect touch. I also kept pieces of potatoes in the mix because when I think of homemade potatoes, I don’t think of smooth whipped potatoes. I think of instant potatoes when I think of smooth, whipped potatoes. The steak was spicy, which I loved. The green peppers went really well with the steak and they were flavorful. I loved this meal and I’m glad I finally know how to make them.
But don’t take my word for it. Watch my friend Matt taste test my meal for me.
So I went to Dean & Deluca this past Tuesday after looking for a perspective interviewee who I was looking for the day before. After my second attempt of trying to find my interviewee, I decided to stop and find something to eat because I was starving. Well, I didn’t find anything to really eat quickly but I ended up getting an apple cider drink and a vitamin c boost packet.
Even so, I always love going to Dean & Deluca for their creativity in their food. Always something different. I especially like their Earl grey tea fudge.. Or chocolates? Whatever you want to call them….
One thing that caught my attention were some things called panna cotta. I’ve heard of it before but never really knew what it was. I looked it up and the best way for me to describe it is flan mixed with jello. Still interesting nonetheless .
Follow the Instructions 