Weeknight Dinner - Pepper Steak

La Diva Cucina (former contestant on The Taste - Bwahahaha...sorry, I couldn't help myself) did a blog  a couple of weeks ago on a Meat and Potatoes Challenge that she undertook.  I mentioned to her that I was going to make my own meat and potatoes dish (actually meat and rice) and that maybe I'd post on it.  So here it is.

The Mrs. insists on doing most of the food shopping because she doesn't trust me to buy healthy food.  I like desserts and snacks - sue me.  Last weekend she came home with a London Broil (on sale).  Probably the most difficult (for me) cut of meat to work with because it always comes out tough.  I do have a soy-based marinade that works pretty good, but I have to know a day in advance that I'm going to make it and I'm getting a little bored with it. 

Those of you who know how I cook know that I usually don't know what I'm making until I get home from work - and then I have like 45 minutes to throw it together.  So knowing I had the London Broil in the fridge, I did some recipe searching in advance of "steak night".  One other thing that is new to the nightmare that is my life - I need to get everything approved by The Mrs. ahead of time because of her fickle and bland taste in food.  The last time I strayed off this path, I made a dish with a cream based sauce that she refused to eat ("don't you know cream and cheese upsets my stomach?" ... "no?  I didn't?") and she didn't talk to me for several days.  Lesson learned.

I did some research and found Maria's Pepper Steak recipe on AllRecipe.com.  It sounded good, had good reviews and there were no ingredients on The Mrs.' no-fly list.  All I needed was her approval, which I received. *ding ding ding ding ding - winner!*

This recipe is pretty straight forward.  I noted several reviewers said that it could be salty or thin, so I kept that in mind as I prepped and cooked.  Also, I added a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce.  After I had it all in the pan, the smell was very vinegary.  I tasted it and it did taste salty, so I added a couple of tablespoons of sugar.  And the sauce wasn't reducing and thickening as much as I wanted, so I added a tablespoon of cornstarch (mixed in a little water) and that thickened it up nicely.  What do you think?

After Action Report:  When The Mrs. came home from work, she immediately commented on the vinegar smell.  I started to get nervous.  But it was too late to do anything else but serve it (over rice).  This tasted great!  The steak could have been a little more tender (I may cook it a little longer next time) but the flavor was outstanding.  It had a slight sweetness, tangy from the Worcestershire sauce and not too vinegary or salty at all.  The Pudge had seconds.  And The Mrs. really seemed to like it.  Unbelievable!  This is a keeper.

Colcannon Revisted

A couple of weeks ago, I made a Colcannon recipe for the Culinary Smackdown competition. You'll recall that I used red cabbage and the dish turned an unappetizing blue/purple.  Well, I remade it for this weeks St. Patrick's Day office potluck.  I used a bag of shredded cole slaw cabbage that had some carrots in it it too.  It looked much better and was a pretty big hit at lunch.  Three people asked for the recipe.   I only had enough left overs for my lunch today - and it still looked (and tasted) appetizing.

Colcannon with much better coloring.



Culinary Smackdown - Cabbage

There's an Irish Song that goes like this:

Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?
With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.
Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake
Of the creamy, flavoured butter that your mother used to make?"

The chorus:
Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it sure the nearer I'm to cry.
Oh, wasn't it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.

Yeah, I never heard of it either.

Anyway, Grumpy Granny is hostessing this month's Culinary Smackdown and she has named the theme - Cabbage!   These smackdowns encourage experimentation and the trying new recipes.  So I'm going for the latter because experimentation with cabbage just sounds wrong.  When I think of cabbage, I think sauerkraut or cole slaw, both of which I have made numerous times.  And of course, being close to St. Patty's Day, there is corned beef and cabbage.  And that jogged my memory on a recipe I came across several years ago while looking for something to make on St. Patty's - Colcannon.  Although it's a pretty simple recipe, I've never made it before, so it satisfies he challenge as far as I'm concerned. 

I looked at several recipes on Allrecipe.com and found this Colcannon recipe.  The actual name of the recipe is called "Diane's Colcannon" which I thought was a play on Dyan Cannon who I loved in The Last of Sheila.  Anyone? Bueller? She was hot back in the 70s and at one time was married to Cary Grant - but I digress.  Turns out the recipe was submitted by Diane F., go figure.

Anyway, here are the ingredients I used.  I bought shredded cabbage (because I just happened to see it at the store) and I had leftover bacon from Sunday breakfast (did he say leftover bacon? - yeah, I know but I had cooked up 1/2 lb for 2 of us). 

The Ingredients.  I cut corners using shredded cabbage and leftover bacon.

The potatoes are boiling and the mis en place - are in place

Because I didn't have any bacon grease, I used butter instead.  After I cooked the cabbage and onion for about 10 minutes, I added in the bacon to heat it up and get some of that flavor into the cabbage.  My mom use to keep a jar of bacon grease for this kind of cooking.  She used it a lot in her tomato sauce.  I need to start doing that.

Cabbage and onion are cooking in butter and I diced the bacon.

Colcannon in the pot, 1 minute old.

Here's dinner.  Yeah, big deal, but it's all I had time to do.  I actually had intended to do a ham steak, but we were out because someone left it off the shopping list.

Monday dinner.

The Verdict:  The Pudge and I thought this was really good.  You definitely get the cabbage and bacon flavor.  The onion not so much. And I don't know if green cabbage would have been better than red, but it would have fit the song better.  And like most of my smackdown food, I always have leftovers for lunch.  I will tell you that after a couple of days in the fridge, the Colcannon started to take on a bluish/purplish hue.  Not the most appetising thing to look at, but it still tasted good.

The Mrs. (who claims to be Irish) said it was just OK.  In fact, she never even heard of it before.  She offered a criticism that the bacon needed to be chopped finer than it was.  And I agree with her.

My office is going to have a potluck lunch for St. Patty's Day and I've already rogered up to make this.  We'll see how that goes.

Winter Camping with the Boys

Ohhh, son-of-a...another scouting story?  Scouts has been taking a lot of my time lately, so it's only fitting that I torment all of you with my miserable life.  And you know it won't end here.
Our troop's winter camp was the 3rd weekend of January at one of our local state parks. We were really on the fence about going because the weather forecast was not good.  But, because of schedules, postponing the trip most likely meant cancelling and we would have lost our deposit for the site.  So off we went.

A view of the lake.

The temperature never really got above freezing, we had about an inch of snow Friday night (fortunately it was after we got set up) and we had freezing rain most of the day Saturday.

A very large pavilion with the lake just beyond.

Rather than tent-camping, we had "Lean-tos".  These were wooden houses with 4 walls, floor, roof, door, windows and a wood-burning stove.  The weekend before, The Pudge, The Scoutmaster, Simple J, Birch and I went to a church that needed some downed trees cut up and taken away.  This was perfect for the firewood we would need for the stoves and I ended up taking down about half a chord of wood - and it helped the church out too.  This was to be an advancement weekend. We would work on a bunch of the outdoor-type rank advancements that the boys needed. That didn't work out as good as we had hoped but we did get some done. 

A typical Lean-to.



Inside the Lean-to.  These stoves could throw some heat, but they had to be fed wood on a regular basis.  Getting someone to do it in the middle of the night was tough.

One of the main things the boys do on these trips is cook. We had 15 boys (whittled down to 13 because of illness) and broke them into 3 patrols for the purpose of patrol cooking.  The troop has organized patrols for meetings, but because you never know who will be going camping, we form temporary patrols on camping trips with temporary patrol leaders.  We also selected "Grub Masters" for each patrol.  Grub Master develops the menu (with input from the patrol), develops a shopping list, checks the troop gear locker for leftover non-perishables (like hot chocolate), does the food shopping and serves as the main cook during the trip.  He also assigns duties to the rest of the patrol members during the meal, such as food prep, table setting and cleanup. 


Our kitchen area.

 Demonstration of the Grub Master duties during a camping trip is also a requirement for the rank of 1st Class. The Pudge and 2 other 2nd Class scouts took on the challenge.  The adult leaders have the option of tagging along with a patrol for meals, individual cooking or adult leader patrol cooking.  We all chose the latter with more on that in a minute.

The adult leaders have been noticing a trend in the patrol cooking of - not really cooking.  Instant oatmeal, sandwiches and Dinty Moore stew keep showing up on menus with increased regularity.  I have taken an initiative to come up with a collection of standard meal recipes that would have instructions, utensil requirements and fill-in-the-blank quantity calculators that would make it easier for  patrols to cook with fresh ingredients.  I will do this after the Neckerchief Craft Night is history.  We also decided not to rock the boat on this trip because of the extreme weather element in this cooking challenge. 

The Pudge cooking up spaghetti and meatballs for his patrol's dinner.

The adults decided that each of us would take a meal (there were 5 adults). I got dinner because I'm really the only one who cooks on his own. The others all apparently have talented wives to cook for them (I wonder what that's like?).  So while the other guys made meals of a western omelet, homemade chili, campfire brandies (the adult "snack" portion of the trip) and raisin bread french toast with turkey bacon (this was good), I decided to get fancy.  I made Penne and Shrimp with Camp Fire Green Beans and Bananas Foster for dessert (I love Allrecipes.com).  The toughest part is that I only have 2 propane burners and limited cooking utensils.  Trying to boil water in a 10 MPH wind with no lid is challenging (I used tin foil) too.

This is how the men cooked.

I made the beans at home and brought them in a ziplock. After I heated them on the burners, I had one of the men put the pot on a lean-to stove to keep it warm (a scout uses his resources).  The beans turned out good and may be one of the packaged recipes I develop for the scouts.  I will use fresh beans over canned next time.  The rest of the meal was pretty straight forward and I got it all in the mess kit - hot.

Penne and Shrimp with Camp Fire Green Beans (Almondine).

The dessert was a thing to behold. The boys gathered around to watch the flaming spectacle. Actually, a lot of the boys were watching me cook in between their cooking duties, and that was what I was hoping for.  I wanted them to see that with the proper planning, cooking is not that difficult and there are many choices other than stew. 





It's hard to cook when you have to keep putting your gloves on.



I think because of the cold air, the flambe didn't flame that much. But man was this good. I almost made a 2nd batch for the boys but thought better of it because of the rum. I told The Pudge we would make this at home.


Dessert - Bananas Foster.  This is flambe-ing but it's hard to  see in this picture.

 All-in-all a challenging trip for the boys. On Saturday, we gave the scouts the choice of staying in their lean-tos to play games that they brought with them or do advancements. The majority chose the games - and who could blame them? But the others that made some progress on advancements made the trip worth while. I led a handful of scouts on a short hike around the lake (after the rain finally stopped) and that was worth the trip for me. We broke camp late Sunday morning and everyone was glad to get home. The ski trip is next month...of course, I won't be going, but The Pudge will.

Dam at the end of the lake.

Some very dirty snowmen.  I think it was some kind of Calvin and Hobbes tribute.

Culinary Smackdown - Battle Tofu?

Boxer is hostessing this month's Culinary Smackdown and she has named the theme - TOFU!   I'm actually Okay with this. Part of the reason we have the smackdowns is to use ingredients we may not normally use or try recipes we've never done. Tofu fits both of these criteria. 
I never bought or cooked tofu before. And, as I soon discovered, there really aren't that many recipes that feature tofu. And to complicate things, I need to find some way to get The Mrs. to eat it. Those of you who follow me know that finding something The Mrs. will eat is - a challenge.

Then I had an epiphany. But a back story first. A neighbor on the street owns an Asian Fusion restaurant that's right out side of our development. The food is very good and we try to frequent it as often as we can. A couple of months ago, The Mrs. and one of her friends went there for a girl's-night-out dinner. She told me about an outstanding soup that they had recently been added to the menu. It was a crab and asparagus soup - and it had tofu in it too. I remembered this story because The Mrs. doesn't like asparagus and I've never known her to eat tofu.  So I set out to find a similar recipe. The best I could do was Chinese Shrimp and Tofu Soup.   I substituted asparagus in for the peas (because The Mrs. won't eat peas either).  

So here's another back story to show what influences my cooking.  The day I wanted to make the soup I discovered a hole in the fascia board behind the gutter on the 2nd floor roof.  The Boy had been hearing something in the ceiling/wall of his room.  I set out snap traps a couple of nights before and caught 2 mice, but decided to get the binoculars out and do a perimeter check of the roof (good maintenance tip for those of you with a 2nd floor) when I found the hole.  I then discovered that my extension ladder was too short to reach the area of repair and none of my buddies had a longer one.  So I had to run out to a rental store, rent the ladder, and it needed to be back by 3:00PM or they'd charge me an extra day - and it was lunch time. 

I got The Boy to help (mostly steadying the ladder), went up the ladder, pulled the gutter back, discovered the hole was rotted wood with no evidence of teeth or claw marks, and proceeded to cut out the rotted wood with my sawzall (I love that sawzall).  Then I did about another 30 trips up and down the ladder, cutting pieces of wood, getting tools and screws and caulk and aluminum flashing and slapping it all together so it was watertight and rodent proof.  I got the ladder back to the rental place at 3:10PM and fortunately, the guys were still there.  This whole thing felt like the final scene from Goodfellas where Henry Hill is doing coke, cooking the veal, stirring sauce and being chased by a helicopter.  That's how I feel every day.

What does all of that have to do with cooking?  I didn't have time to go shopping for ingredients.  The Mrs. volunteered.   And she actually got me all the ingredients I needed, including pre-diced tofu.  Who knew there was such a thing?

Here's all of the ingredients including the stuff The Mrs. bought.  That's the pre-diced tofu in the strainer - straining.

Here's a closeup of the tofu. 

The garlic, shrimp and ginger.  Another thing The Mrs. did right - pre-shelled and veined shrimp.

The chicken stock with asparagus.

The Mrs. made a salad to go with the soup.  She actually hard-boiled some eggs - HARD-BOILED!

The finished soup.

The Verdict. The Pudge and I liked it a lot. I may have gotten a little heavy-handed with the ginger, but it had a good flavor and the tofu was an interesting, spongy texture. I don't thing the tofu really brought any flavor to the soup, rather, it was an absorber of flavor. The Mrs. - didn't like it. When I explained how I was trying to replicate the soup from our neighbor's restaurant, she started telling me all of the difference between that soup and mine. The asparagus was sliced paper thin, there was a hint of soy and there was not that much ginger (in fact, don't ever put ginger in my food again). These were things I would have liked to have known when I asked her to read the recipe. I'll have to try the neighbor's soup to see if it's all that (it probably is - he makes great food).

Christmas Traditions - Christmas Eve Escarole Soup

 For as long as I can remember, my mother always made Escarole Soup for Christmas or Christmas Eve Dinner.  I'm not sure what started this tradition (a traditional Italian soup, my mother was Irish-Polish-French) or where the recipe came from, but it remains a staple of the Kill Family Christmas Eve Dinner. 

Since my mother's passing 4 years ago, this tradition has been taken up by me.  My oldest sister K has taken up hosting the family dinner and making the traditional Kill Family meal of lasagna, meatballs and sausage (and sometimes braciole).  She actually had to break with tradition this year because of new floors being installed (way behind schedule) in her house.  She went with a simpler menu of ham, beans and potatoes.  But I still brought the soup.


My mom's original recipe - created on a typewriter.



My marked-up version of the recipe.



The boys helped me this year and rolled all of the little meatballs.  Usually, they start to get bigger toward the end, but they stayed pretty uniform in size this year.



The Pudge actually does wash his hands.  That's the escarole draining after it was cooked.



The finished product.  I waited until I got to my sister's to add the egg-cheese mixture.

I forgot to take my camera to my sister's house to show the finished product.  You'll have to take my word that it was good (I only had one serving left that I had for lunch a few days later) and that we drank a lot of wine. Belated Merry Christmas to everyone!

The Spawn of a New Year - Navy Bean Soup

So I had this really nice ham bone left over from the "real" New Years Eve Party at Stately Kill Manor. I decided to make some Navy Bean Soup. The only deviations from the recipe were to add a cup of white wine and celery (also left over from the party) and to use the ham bone and some ham chunks instead of bacon. This had really nice flavor and it thickened up pretty good after simmering for about 3 hours.

The beans were nice and tender but not mushy because I also did a quick soak on the Navy Beans by cooking them in boiling water for 2 minutes and letting them rest in the water for an hour. Otherwise you're suppose to soak them in cold water over-night and I didn't have the time.

Here are some bad pictures of the effort.

La Diva had a great suggestion about blending half of the soup to thicken it up. That is a brilliant suggestion that I failed to think of. And the Mrs gave me a new Immersion Blender for Christmas that would have been perfect for blending the soup.

In the words of Jack Sparrow - If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it. Damn.