Catching Up On Recent Meals

It's been awhile since our last food blog update and we've made quite a few new interesting things to catch up on. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and various other parties we've been cooking up a storm.  Before getting into all that let's check out some of the regular weekly meals we've made over the last few months that take regular ingredients and turn them into spectacular, restaurant-worthy dinners.

After our fantastic meals like the fried chicken Benedict,it should come as no surprise that Megan and I are pretty big fans of cooking shows.  Throughout the summer we made our way through the various Jamie Oliver T.V. shows and Megan even got a couple of his cookbooks for her birthday and Christmas. Taking a page from his uniquely British cuisine, we tried out several variations on Bangers and Mash.  The star of the show for this dish is the sausage, which is rubbed with a combination of seasonings and oil before baking in the oven.

To qualify as "bangers and mash" the sausages need to be placed on a bed of mashed potatoes, but there's still a wide range of options to use for the topping sauce.  For our first attempt we made a gravy style sauce using three different kinds of onions sauteed over low heat. It had a fantastic savory-yet-slightly-sweet flavor that perfectly complimented the buttery flavor of the potatoes and salty taste of the sausage.

Here's another version of the same basic dish, but this one using a more standard sausage gravy and with a seafood salad side.

We love using baked bread or a buttery garlic French loaf to accompany any pasta dish, but lately we've gotten a bit tired of the standard garlic bread from the bakery section of the grocery store. For a little more variety, we've tried our hand at making our own garlic-butter mixture and spreading it over several different kinds of bread.  Below are our versions of garlic bread with English muffins (a fantastic texture!) and a whole wheat roll. Using different marked down breads from the bakery and buying them the day we intend to use them, we get to experiment with a range of flavors, textures, and styles.

Three years back Megan, Matthew, and I took a trek to Seattle to catch an Opeth concert and, of course, sample all the amazing food. Although there was a bevy of delicious dishes over that trip, one of the most flavorful things we tasted actually wasn't at a sit-down restaurant, but rather was a Butter Chicken dish at an Indian place in a mall food court.  We tried to recreate the amazing taste using this recipe as our base. Although it sounds simple, the finished product placed over rice is an explosion of both well-known and surprisingly unexpected flavors.

And to finish off this whirlwind tour of dinners over the last few months, here are two simple but very tasty versions of  roast chicken thighs.  One was basted in barbecue sauce with a sweet potato side, and the other with butter and Italian seasonings and a side of cheesy Parmesan rice.