Chicken & Roasted Red Peppers with Pasta

Posted on September 24, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Peg had a meal out the other night that was good, but didn’t hit the mark. Thinking I could come up with something better…

2 chicken breasts, 3/4″ dice
2 Italian sausages, 1/2″ slice
1/2 small onion, finely diced
2 t minced garlic, about 1 clove
2 T vegetable oil
2 roasted red peppers ( I roasted my own, or use a medium jar of them) 1/2″ dice
2 oz sun-dried tomatoes, reconstituted, 1/4″ slice
1 small jar of artichoke hearts, halved
1 C water
1/2 C light cream
3/4 C grated parmesan cheese
1/2 # dried pasta, or 1 # fresh pasta

In a large pot, heat salted water to a boil, and cook the pasta until tender.

In a large skillet, heat the oil and saute the onion until tender.
Add the garlic and chicken breasts, saute until chicken and sausage are browned.
Add the peppers, tomatoes, and artichoke hearts and saute five minutes.
Add water to saucepan and stir, deglazing the skillet in the process.
After most of the water has evaporated, lower the heat.
Sprinkle the cheese over the skillet’s contents, add the cream, and stir until cheese and cream are well incorporated.

Serve over pasta. Have a salad.

Nota bene – Peggy actually liked this dish, although it didn’t meet her dream expectations. I thought it was a little “busy” what with the tomatoes and peppers AND artichoke hearts. I might try simplifying it by dropping the tomatoes and artichokes, upping the peppers, and lightening it a bit by cutting back on the cheese and substituting yogurt or sour cream.

Back to la cuchina.

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Posted in Pasta

Potato Leek Soup with Chicken

Posted on September 23, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Serves 2

3 leeks
2 potatoes
1 medium onion
1 T minced garlic (about 2 cloves)
1 chicken breast
salt
pepper
adobo seasoning (I like Goya – they have several flavors)
2 T chicken base
1/2 C light cream (optional – maybe low-fat yogurt?)
1 Qt water
2 T vegetable oil

Chicken breast was diced 3/4″, seasoned with adobo, and
sauteed.
Onions were coarsely chopped, leeks (white part only) halved, sliced, and washed. Potatoes were diced 1/2″.
Saute onions, leeks, and garlic until just soft.
Add potatoes, chicken base, and water. Bring to a boil and simmer until potatoes are tender.
Puree with hand blender, add cream, blend well.
Add chicken, serve.

Washing the leeks is key. I forgot that step in my last batch of potato leek soup, and well, the leftovers went down the drain. It wasn’t worth chewing through the grit in the leeks.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Summer Stew

Posted on August 29, 2015 by | Leave a comment

I don’t really know what to call this. I accidentally made it one year and it turned out pretty good, so I continue to make it on occasion. Sometimes Peggy even requests it. And it’s vegetables!

It should be no surprise that the fresher the vegetables, the better the taste. #1 – your garden #2 – the farm stand #3 – the grocery store

2 T vegetable or olive oil
1 onion, rough chop
1 t – 1T chopped garlic
2 zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced
2 yellow summer squash, halved lengthwise and sliced
3 large garden tomatoes. roughly cubed (or a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, hand crushed)

Heat the oil and add the onions. Cook until tender, and add the garlic.
Cook until the onions are caramelized, just starting to brown,
Add the squash, and let it saute for a bit.
Add the tomatoes, lower the heat, and let it simmer for 20 minutes or so.

A little salt, a grind or two of fresh pepper, voila!

I often serve this over rice for a hearty side dish. Start the rice right after you add the tomatoes, everything is done at the same time.

I’m too lazy to make rice the right way. I use medium grain rice most of the time. And it’s usually Goya rice if you can find it in your area.

2 C water
1 C rice
pinch of salt

Heat the water until boiling (or almost boiling if you’re in a rush like I normally am)
Stir in the rice and add the salt.
Reduce to very low heat and cover.
20 minutes later you have rice.

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Posted in Side dishes

Deviled Eggs

Posted on August 18, 2015 by | Leave a comment

I have for a number of years been experimenting with deviled eggs as a warm-weather picnic bring-along. I have some devotees who ask “where are the deviled eggs?” even at Christmas. But I was always just winging it, never using a recipe, per se, and never getting consistently good eggs. Too salty, too spicy (too bland was not a complaint I’d heard). It was time to grow up and create a recipe. So here goes for my base line, which turned out pretty good.

1 dozen eggs, plus a couple spares

Eggs are best prepared a day in advance [1]. Best if put in the pot in one layer, laying on their sides, with enough water to cover them by an inch or so. I use a liberal amount of salt (as much as 1/4C) and perhaps a like amount of vinegar. The salt raises the boiling point of water; the vinegar keeps the whites at bay should little leaks evolve. Bring the eggs to a rolling boil, cover, remove from heat, and let stand for 15 minutes. Drain, cover with ice and cold water. The more ice the better. Let them stand for an hour or more, then refrigerate overnight (I don’t have to say “after draining off the water”, do I?).

Peel the eggs, halve the eggs, reserve the yolks in a shallow bowl. “Imperfect” whites can be eaten, fed to the dog, or discarded, your preference. On a good day you’ll have 24 halves, on bad day, 18. No matter. (The deviled egg container I have has 20 indentations. I thought that was a stupid number, until I figured out that I routinely screw up two eggs per dozen. 20 is the perfect average number of indentations.)

Mash the egg yolks with a fork until smooth. This it the only way. Trust me.

Add
1/4 C Miracle Whip
1 T prepared mustard
2 T hot sauce (Tabasco or your favorite)
2 T sweet pickle relish (Cain’s is the local favorite)
1 T Worcestershire sauce (Lea & Perrins is the best)
1 T cider vinegar
1/2 t salt
1/2 t coarse ground pepper

Mix well, and taste. It might need more salt, or hot sauce. If it’s too thick, add a bit more Miracle Whip.

Spoon about 1 t of filling into each of the egg halves, and garnish with smoked paprika, or a sprig of chive, whatever blows your skirt up.

[1] Eggs are also best purchased a week or so in advance. It makes no difference in the flavor, but they are much easier to peel, increasing your final yield.

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Posted in Appetizers

Leek and Potato Soup

Posted on August 3, 2015 by | Leave a comment

(Apologies to Alton Brown. I read his recipe, and other than leeks and potatoes, rather dismissed it.)

Oh, I also don’t really use recipes per se (so you know this is John, and not Peggy), so these quantities are approximations. This soup is so easy though that you don’t need a recipe, per se…

3 slices of bacon
3-6 leeks (depending on size – the leeks were maybe 1.25-1.5 inches so I used 6 tonight)
5-6 medium potatoes (I used gold potatoes tonight, any boiling potato will do.)
2-4 T Irish butter (really, this stuff is SO good)
2-3 T chicken base (it’s essentially bouillon paste – I no longer use broth of any kind)
1.5 Qt water
salt & pepper to taste (I used no additional salt tonight. There’s plenty in the bacon and chicken base.)

Preparation:
Slice/chop the bacon into little tiny pieces.
Wash the leeks, cut off the green stems and the roots. Slice lengthwise and then slice the rounds finely. Rinse the leeks under plenty of cold water. They tend to get kind of gritty due to the way they’re grown.
Peel and dice the potatoes (always dice before cooking – they’re easier to handle and they cook faster and more uniformly).
In a 6-8 qt soup kettle, melt the butter and saute the bacon until rendered. It doesn’t have to be crisp.
Add the leeks and saute for five or six minutes, until soft.
Add the potatoes, chicken base, and water.
Bring to a boil, turn down and let simmer for fifteen minutes, until the potatoes are tender.

Use an immersion blender or food processor to puree the soup. (The immersion blender is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, even though I maintained for years that we didn’t need one. I was wrong.)

Season to taste – just a good grind or three of pepper us usually enough.

Optionally, a half cup or so of heavy cream makes it just delightfully creamy, but with the bacon in this batch, I passed.

There you have it. Serve with Oyster crackers or Saltines if you’d like, but it’s pretty good all by itself.

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Posted in Soups

Field Day 2015 (Hot Milk Sponge Cake)

Posted on June 25, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Mom’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake

I was foolish enough to volunteer this year to cook dinner for our club’s Amateur Radio Field Day. Not really a daunting task – hamburgers, hot dogs, rolls, chips and the other usual stuff. Beans, German potato salad, and tossed salad are being done by my elves, so I just concentrate on the big stuff. But dessert. What would be good for dessert? Ah, yes! Peg’s Mom used to make us Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Without the pineapple, it stands on its own as an excellent Sponge Cake.

Herewith her recipe:

  • 4 eggs
  • 2 c. sugar
  • 2 c. flour
  • 2 tsp. Baking powder
  • 1 c. hot milk
  • 1/8 tsp. Butter
  • 1 tsp. Vanilla
  1. Beat eggs until light and fluffy, approx. 5 minutes.
  2. Add sugar and beat again until light and fluffy.
  3. Mix flour and baking powder together in a separate bowl and set aside.
  4. Heat milk and butter in small pan over medium-high heat until milk just starts to boil.
  5. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.
  6. Add dry ingredients and liquid alternately until all are incorporated in the batter.
  7. Add vanilla and stir well.
  8. Bake in greased floured 13×9 pan at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

The Pineapple Upside-down Part –

  • 1/2 C butter
  • 1/2 C brown sugar, light or dark
  • 1 – 20oz can sliced pineapple
  • Maraschino cherries
  1. Instead of greasing and flouring the baking pan, melt the butter in the pan
  2. mix in brown sugar, stirring well
  3. Drain a big can of pineapple slices and lay the pineapple rings on the brown sugar mixture.
  4. If you’re being really cool, put maraschino cherries inside the pineapple rings. Very pretty!!
  5. Pour the batter gently into the pan and bake as directed above.
  6. Cool the baked cake for about 5 minutes or so and shake the pan around to loosen the cake.
  7. Invert it onto a serving platter and you get a really decent looking cake.

(Peg’s note)

This was my grandmother’s recipe. The amount of butter in the cake was originally passed down as whatever “fits on the tip of a knife”

(John’s note)

I made this in a 14×10 pan. The 13×9 died years ago (Peg had it before we were married…)

And I let the milk boil by inattentiveness – it came out OK nonetheless.

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Posted in Dessert

Baked French Toast

Posted on February 16, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Our friend Betsy was coming to stay for the night, so I thought feeding her breakfast would be a nice idea. I was shopping the day before and picked up a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread thinking it would make nice French toast.

Peg mentioned a recipe for baked French toast with Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur in it, and a little bit of searching on the internet provided something like this (original is at tablespoon.com). Quite coincidentally I used Irish butter, which at $3.00 for 8 ounces is both terribly expensive and wonderfully delicious.

  • 1 loaf of cinnamon-raisin swirl bread
  • 2 C whole milk
  • 1/3 C Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur
  • 3 large eggs
  • 3 T sugar
  • 1/2 t salt
  • 2 T butter

FrenchToast

I used a bit more butter to liberally grease a 9″ ceramic casserole dish, then arranged the bread in layers until the dish was nearly full. You can be as fastidious as you like to fill the dish, but I just rotated each 3-slice stack enough to fit them in nicely.

Mix all the other ingredients except the butter with a whisk until they are very well mixed, and pour the mixture over the prepared bread. Let the mixture soak into the bread for a good 15 minutes, or overnight, refrigerated.

Slice the butter into six or eight pieces, and dab over the surface of the soaked break.

Preheat the oven to 425F.

Bake for 25-35 minutes, until a knife or skewer comes out clean.

Rest it for 10 minutes, slice, and serve with syrup and, dare I say, more butter.

Serves 6 if my Aunt Joann is watching, otherwise serves 4.

 

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Posted in Breakfast

Debut recipe for Peggy’s Home Cooking blog

Posted on February 16, 2015 by | Leave a comment

Pancakes (contributed by John, adapted from Betty Crocker)

  • 1 C all-purpose flour
  • 1 C milk
  • 2 T vegetable oil
  • 1 eff
  • 1 t baking powder
  • 1/2 t salt
  • 1 t sugar

Mix the dry ingredients together. Add oil, egg, and milk. Whisk together quickly.

Pour 1/2 C of batter onto a hot skillet, cook until bubbles set up, then carefully flip over. Cook for another minute or so until golden brown.

Server warm with butter and syrup.

 

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Posted in Breakfast

Greetings!

Posted on February 16, 2015 by | 2 comments

I have been thinking about what I want to put on this site and I’ve almost decided. It’s going to be something of an instructional, how-to blog, I’m almost certain. Cooking isn’t taught in school any more and moms who work outside the home don’t necessarily have the time to teach their kids how to cook. Heck, they barely have time to cook for their families at all.

My good friend, Nancy Binetti, started a mini cooking school for her daughter Molly and her friends when Molly was at Marquette University. Molls would bring her friends home on the weekend and Nancy would have devised a simple meal plan for them to make. The girls loved it. The meals weren’t all that fancy – just some basic survival cooking.

There will also be some old favorite recipes of mine – and John’s. He would never let me do this without adding in his two cents worth, as evidenced by his addition of a recipe before I ever got to type a word. Maybe I’ll cook even more of the multitude of recipes I’ve posted on Facebook and share the results here. Don’t worry, failures as well as successes will be included.

If any of you have a recipe that I *simply must* put on here, let me know. I’m happy to share my space and will give full credit to the originating chef. If there is a topic you’d like me to investigate or elaborate upon, let me know.

Wish me luck! After all, you all will be the ones eating my recipes in the end.

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Posted in Commentary