Pizza Meat Pie

Freezer kit

Another South Beach Diet cookbook adaptation.  This sounds so odd, but is so good.  If you think crust on pizza is a waste of stomach space (I know who you are LOL), this is the pizza pie for you. 

I elect to use oatmeal as a binder rather than the SBD-sanctioned whole wheat breadcrumbs since I grind up bread to make my own crumbs and sometimes I just feel lazy.  I also reduce the salt called for and use totally different toppings.  Use whatever toppings you like.

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Pork Rind Bean Patties

I've heard about using ground-up pork rinds as a low-carb substitute for breadcrumbs for some time, but have never tried it.  Until today.  I decided to try the bean patty recipe again and try making it more low-carb as beans are already right starchy little buggers.  The only significant differences I noticed were that the pork rind crumb coating was perfectly adequate in a single layer (as opposed to the crumb-egg-crumb double layer for breadcrumbs) and that the pork rind crumb coating didn't brown quite as dark as a breadcrumb coating. 

When you make these patties, whether you use breadcrumbs or pork rind crumbs, the mixture will be SOFT.  Don't add more crumbs to firm it up or you risk having dry, crumbly bean patties.  The right texture is like a soft cookie dough.  To make it easier to handle, refrigerate it for an hour or more before shaping.  Use a spoon to plop a blob of bean patty mixture into the crumbs, roll it around a little, then do the egg-wash and more crumb thing if you want.  Take a deep breath, it will be messy and that's ok. 

Making the crumbed patties and freezing them ahead makes them MUCH easier to fry, since you cook them from their rock-solid frozen state.  When you flip, use two spatulas...use one to gently lift the patty, and turn it onto the 2nd spatula held at about a 90-degree angle to the first, then lower the patty gently to the pan from the 2nd spatula.  It makes a much gentler turn than slamming the delicate patties a full 180 degrees with just one spatula.

One 6 oz. bag of pork rinds blitzed down in the food processor yielded about 2 1/2 cups of crumbs, just right for this recipe.  Don't add any extra salt as the pork rinds are already salted.

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Chicken Francese for a crowd

I love chicken francese, but it's a fairly last-minute intensive dish to prepare...frying those cutlets can really eat up time, especially if you're cooking for a crowd. 

I tried a new twist for a "dinner party" (can you really call it a dinner party when you're eating off paper plates?) wherein I baked many chicken breasts that were seasoned with lemon pepper and served the lemon-caper sauce as a relish on the side.  Captures the same flavors with far less work.

If you prep this in advance and put your chicken in a baking dish in the fridge, plan for extra cooking time (I screw up so you don't have to).  The cold dish slows down the chicken's progression to an appropriate final temperature, and it took an extra 20-25 minutes of cooking to get my chicken up to temp.  Better yet, prep the chicken, store it in a ziptop bag and put it in the baking dish at the last minute. 

I don't have pictures because it was a dinner party and I had better things to do than take pictures of food LOL

Edited to note...this is evidently my 100th "freezer" recipe!  I guess I do more of this sort of thing than I realized!
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Baked Brie with crostini

This doesn't have to be party food, but it's best to make it for an occasion that won't leave too many leftovers.  After a day or two, the baked brie will start to dry out most unattractively.

If you make this in advance, be sure to wrap the puff pastry really well with plastic wrap.  I screw up so you don't have to.  Also, if you take it right from the fridge to bake, it will probably need 5-10 more minutes in the oven than if it's at room temp.

I happened to find a pre-sliced ciabatta loaf at my supermarket for the crostini...saves some time and the aggravation of trying to get thin, even slices by hand.

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Spiced Braised Pork Chops

Adapted from Art Smith's Back to the Table.  I was looking for a recipe that would suit bone-in pork chops and discovered Art Smith's Spiced Pork Loin with Vidalia Onion Sauce.  I am using thick-cut pork chops rather than a loin and regular onions instead of sweet, but you can make changes to my changes.  If you want to make this for a roast, make up a double batch of the braising/spice mixture and cook the roast for 1 1/4 hours. 

This sauce mixture is so easy to put together, you should consider making extra for more than one kit.  Or you can make a double batch, cook one half for dinner tonight and freeze the rest to get two dinners for one night's work.

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Stay-in Take-out: Pork Lo Mein

This is an America's Test Kitchen recipe originally, which means it's absolutely delicious but persnickety and step-heavy.  If you want to try it Chris Kimball's way, you can prep it ahead for same day or next day cooking with no problem...assemble the marinade for the meat and get that started, make the sauce, chop the veggies and grate/mix the ginger-garlic and set all that aside in the fridge.  But you can't freeze it ahead as a kit well, and the final cooking process comes to way more than 3 or 4 steps which my mental processing limit at 6pm.

 

So I keep the best parts of this recipe (the sauce, the cut of pork and the basic method of cooking) and reconfigure all the other parts to achieve simplicity and freezability.  If I do say so myself.  For vegetables, you'll need about 8-9 cups of veg...it seems like a lot, but it cooks down.  I park some frozen veggies in the freezer kit and plan to make up the remainder with fresh vegetables purchased the week I'll make this dinner or canned stirfry favorites like water chestnuts or bamboo shoots.  Use what you like in any combination. 

 

For the "lo mein", I've used udon, soba and whole wheat linguine, all with perfectly good results.  Just make sure to read the package directions since each type requires a different cooking time.

 

The sauce ingredients are perhaps a bit outside of the usual pantry staples, but are worth finding if only to duplicate this recipe many times over.  Oyster sauce is in the Asian foods section of even my podunk grocery stores, and it's like a steak sauce but much less vinegar-y.  Hoisin is an Asian-style barbecue sauce, and 5 spice powder is a mix of pepper, fennel, cloves, cinnamon and anise (at least my jar is).

 

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Broccoli packets for roasting or grilling

Blackberries, lemon-thyme salmon
and broccoli packet

This doesn't have to be done with broccoli or Boursin.  It's just a framework for an easy make-ahead/freezable side dish.  You could do carrot slices, cauliflower, asparagus, squash or zucchini and any kind of soft, flavored cheese.  To make it freezer-friendly, use pre-frozen vegetables and omit the extra liquid. 

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Pasta mezzavera

Everyone knows pasta primavera...the heavily sauced pasta dish with tender early spring veggies.  This is pasta mezzavera, made with heartier mid-summer veggies, fresh herbs and a light lemon-infused olive oil.  I like using zucchini and broccoli, but any combination of fresh, seasonal produce will work.  For a slightly more rib-sticking meal, add a cup or two of cooked white beans.

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Fried Green Tomatoes

I couldn't wait for all these gorgeous tomatoes hanging on our tomato vines to come ripe (and I'm a little scared of how many tomatoes we'll have when they do), so I thinned the herd and made fried green tomatoes. 

I prefer Paula Deen's buttermilk-and-flour recipe to the cornmeal-dredged recipes I've eaten before.  Using actual buttermilk (rather than reconstituted from dry buttermilk powder) produces a thicker batter coating, but you can get tasty results with the thinner reconstituted buttermilk as well.  The upside to a flour-egg wash-cornmeal coating, however, is that you can do all the dredging ahead and freeze those guys.  Just fry them from their frozen state.  The flour coating will turn into glue in the freezer.  So pick your process and product.

You can also can sliced green tomatoes for future frying.  If you still have a bumper crop of green tomatoes right before your first killing frost in the fall, you can put them up same as you would ripe tomatoes.  Slice them, pack them into clean canning jars, add 2 tbsp of lemon juice to each quart canned, fill with hot water and process for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath.  They'll come out softer than if they were fresh, but they're still dredge-able and fry-able. 

Lastly, an A.Ma.Zing thing to do with leftover fried green tomatoes is make paninis with bacon and provolone...put a few fried green tomatoes on a hoagie roll with a slice of provolone and a couple slices of bacon, and toast it up in a sandwich press (or a George Foreman grill, which is our ersatz panini press).

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Sesame Almond Chicken Wings

Almond Sesame Wings with sauteed zucchini
and Sichuan Peppercorn Dry Drip

This is the wing recipe I mentioned a few posts ago regarding grinding almonds for pie crust.  I saved a few tbsp for this very recipe.  You don't have to make pie crust to make these wings though ;)

The original recipe is from the Frugal Gourmet's Three Ancient Cuisines, but I gotta say that the Frug was awfully stingy on his dredging mixture.  I've doubled the marinade, the wet dredge and the dry dredge for the same number of wings.  It was scrumptious btw.  The kids didn't want any, but they had Other Issues tonight and I think I could have served them ice cream covered cheese sticks with a side of cookies, muffins and bananas and they still wouldn't have touched it.  Whatevs, more for the grownups.

Rice flour is probably not a pantry staple at your household.  I have some b/c I had a fit of DIY-osity awhile back and thought I would be making my own baby powder.  I made some, it's great, but I don't need so much as to use up an entire 2 lbs. of rice flour.  Rice flour also makes meltingly tender shortbread and is a useful gluten-free wheat flour replacer.  If you need ideas for using up 2 lbs of rice flour.  Or you can use enough all-purpose flour and cornstarch to add up to the required amount of dredging material and skip the rice flour (conversely, if you want gluten free, you can skip the AP flour and use rice flour and cornstarch...also be sure to skip the soy sauce, if you do GF).

Last thought...if you fry these in a deep-fryer, you'll probably have a lot of sesame seeds loose in the oil afterwards.  You might want to consider frying in an electric skillet or making this the last use of the oil in the deep-fryer if you want to maintain pristine frying oil.  I screw up so you don't have to.

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Savoy Cabbage Rolls

The first time my parents went out of town and left my teenaged brother and I home alone for the night, I seized freedom with both hands and...cooked cabbage rolls.  What a rebel I was ;)  I have ever since had a soft spot for all sorts of cabbage rolls, as I mark that recipe as the first time I ever *really* planned and cooked a meal.

The original recipe comes from the behemoth European cookbook "The Silver Spoon", though I have experimented wildly with storage and delayed-cookery options, rewrote the recipe to use less weird measurements and upped the vegetable ante.  SS assumes that you will have time to prepare the leaves, prepare the filling, roll the rolls and cook them all at once.  Bwahahahahahaha!  I made the rolls and froze them individually, then cooked mine from the frozen state on the stovetop.  Turned out really well.  I'd guess that the crockpot will work just as well, though thawing the rolls first would make fitting them into the pot (on the stovetop or in the crockpot) easier.  You can also bake them in the oven, but that will take longer and you really will need to thaw them first. 

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Pistachio Tilapia

Sort of a lower-carb fish amandine recipe.  Suitable for a freezer kit or prepping ahead for same-day or next-day cookery.

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Looed Ribs

Looing Sauce, Use #3 (I think?).  I wanted to do a little something different with ribs, and I thought I'd try this...delicious!  The Asian flavors of the looing sauce come through subtly and are played up with a hoisin sauce-ketchup glaze.  The oven braise-then-broil (or grill) technique keeps the ribs tender and still gives a crunch of bbq bark.

To make this as a freezer kit, freeze the ribs separately from the looing sauce.  Mix ketchup and hoisin, and freeze in small container. 

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Crockpot Onion Soup

It's not really *soup* season but it is sweet onion season, so now's the time.  The crockpot is a beautiful thing for this recipe...you use it to caramelize the onions overnight and then cook the soup.  I have seen recipes that call for one process or the other (or ofc for doing it all on the stovetop), but not both and quite frankly I think doing both is a brilliant proposal.  Especially when I do not want to babysit a pot of soup on the stove or even turn on my stove right now. 

Like any soup, leftovers reheat very nicely so you can make this totally in advance if you wanted.  Though since it goes in the crockpot, all you need for convenient cooking is to premeasure the second-stage ingredients and have them ready to dump in after the onions are brown.

I really like a little heat in this recipe.  The sweetness of the onions mellows the chipotle, and the chipotle keeps the onions from being sickly-sweet.  But if you don't do heat, don't add the chipotle.  One can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce will go a LONG way.  I go ahead and chop up the whole thing, and freeze the leftover smoosh in ice cube trays or pressed thinly in a ziptop bag for future recipes. 

A classic element of French Onion Soup is that melty, cheesy mess on top.  I loathe that part.  It's a pain to execute and a pain to eat.  I prefer to have grilled cheese alongside an unadorned bowl of soup.  I figure a grilled cheese sandwich hits all the same flavor and texture notes as a broiled cheesy baguette slice.  If you are *really* pressed for time on Dinner Day, you can butter the bread and stack the sandwiches the night before when you start the onions and just put the prepped sandwiches in a panini press or on a griddle, saving you a few minutes' prepwork and cleanup.

You do want to use the biggest crockpot you have, a 6 quarter preferably.  A 4 quarter will be very full, but if you reduce the amounts of the ingredients to 75%, you should be ok.  For one of those cute little 2 quart crockpots, you could reduce the ingredients by half and have a nice little dinner for 2.

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Roasted red peppers: Roasting (or grilling or broiling)

If you're playing "Mystery Dish" with me at home and you've bought some on-sale red bell peppers, it's time to roast them! 

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Mint (or cilantro or parsley) chimichurri (or gremolata)

Come summer, I really don't like to do too much to my food.  It's too hot for one thing to be doing fancy-schmancy cooking, and everything is at its freshest and best during the season so you don't need to do much to get the best flavor.

I like chutneys, chimichurris and gremolatas because they dress up a very plainly prepared protein or vegetable without overwhelming the innate best flavor of the ingredients.  They're easy to put together, keep in the fridge for days and can be used as a quick finish to any number of simple meals. 

They're also a great way to "split" a menu to accomodate different palates at the same table...you cook the protein the same way and offer the chimichurri to those who want a stronger, more complex flavor and leave the dish plain for those who prefer a milder, simpler flavor.  I would serve this with chicken breasts, steak, pork chops, burgers, bean patties or even a heartier fish.

I use mint as the base for this chutney/chimichurri because I have a ton growing in my garden and because I am one of those people to whom cilantro tastes like rubber.  But if you prefer cilantro or parsley, by all means, use one of those herbs (or any combination of the three) as the base.  You can make this sauce thinner and more pourable by adding a bit more olive oil, or you can make it sprinkable (as a gremolata) by halving the oil and stirring in breadcrumbs.  Again, so many choices here.

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Teriyaki Tofu and Roasted Pineapple

I make my own teriyaki sauce for this dish because the sauce is so prominent in this recipe and store-bought teriyaki sauce is just foul.  I make up the sauce a day before I'm going to use it, so I'll start pressing the tofu and make the sauce the night before Dinner Day, strain out the garlic cloves and ginger chunks and start marinating the cubed tofu the morning of, and then drain off the marinade to roast that night.  If you make this as a freezer kit, I'd freeze the teriyaki sauce separately from the pressed but uncut tofu block.  When you thaw it, cube the tofu and marinate at least an hour before roasting.

You can substitute just about any protein you want in this dish...marinate chunks of chicken breast or pork loin and roast for the same amount of time and at the same temperature.  It's a great way to accomodate vegetarians and non-vegetarians at the same meal without making completely separate main dishes.  If you do use tofu however, you can strain, freeze and reuse the marinate once more (if you marinate chicken or pork, chuck the remaining marinade).

I nearly always serve this with broccoli, steamed or roasted.  Tonight, I'm roasting broccolini on the same sheet pan with the fruit to save creating more heat with the stovetop.  And tonight's oven-use three-fer (#1 tofu/pineapple, #2 broccolini side dish)...a blind-baked crust for strawberry pie! 


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BBQ Chili Mac

Chili mac is an awfully versatile recipe that has gotten a bad rap from the versions found in product recipe books and fundraiser cookbooks.  It does not have to be high in fat or salt or low in vegetables and nutritional value.  It also does not have to be boring.  Please take a look at the recipe below.

I use up odds and ends of pasta for chili mac.  You can use any shape or combination of shapes, but I tend to break up the 2 or 3 lasagne noodles that are almost always left in the box into large "rags" of pasta.

You can do this recipe in 30 minutes, start to finish, without any prior prepwork, if you can devote 30 minutes to attending without distraction to chopping, sauteing and so on. 

You can chop the veggies and measure the liquid/sauce ingredients the morning of or night before Dinner Day.  Then it will still take 30 minutes to cook, but you can be more distracted during that time.

You can chop the veggies, measure other ingredients, and freeze them in a freezer kit.  Saves you night-before or morning-of prep time. 

OR you can cook the chili mac ahead of time, freeze it along with pre-measured cheese, then bring just reheat (from the frozen state, even, no thawing required) on the stovetop or in the microwave, and throw the cheese on at the end.

Choices, choices...

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Broccoli Salad

This is a creature I had not encountered before moving to the Midwest.  I am not going to engage in culinary anthropology and draw the sweeping conclusion that this is therefore a Midwestern dish (as my lack of exposure may derive merely from a vegetable-deficient upbringing rather than geographical particulars), though there is clearly a link between the Midwest love of mayonnaise-covered fruit and most broccoli salad recipes.

I have discovered a superior dressing recipe (originally for pasta salad, thanks again Cooking Light!) that is ideally suited to a vegetable salad such as this.  It doesn't break (as many a typical mayo-and-vinegar broccoli salad dressing does), but stays creamy even when made a full day in advance.  It also employs buttermilk which significantly reduces the fat content of the dressing versus a full mayo dressing.  And it's got a little zing from chili (or chile) powder.  This dressing works well for other vegetable salads as well, including coleslaw.

I am using chive flowers right now b/c 1) I'm just so tickled you can eat them, 2) they've got only another couple of days before they dry up in the garden, and 3) they're really pretty in the salad.  Use 1/4 cup chopped chives or red onion instead, if you want.

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Salmon Pastrami: Condiments



Salmon pastrami on a cracker with
crême fraîche and raw capers

My preferred combination of toppings for Salmon Pastrami rolls is sour cream, caramelized capers and blanched onions.  Crême fraîche, pickled onions, caramelized onions, raw capers and chopped chives are also good choices. 

Blanching onions takes the raw, heartburn-y bite out of them, but leaves their flavor and crunch.  While briny, raw capers cut the richness of salmon, caramelizing capers transforms them into a sweet-but-tart condiment with a caviar-like pop in the mouth.  Crême fraîche is a milder cousin to sour cream, but is often hard to find (and expensive when you do).  Making it at home is a snap with buttermilk powder.

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