Ordinary to Extraordinary Part 2: Pizza And Asian Noodles

While we love to put together big production meals, complicated dishes, or grilled dinners that take hours to finish, unfortunately we also have to live on a budget, which means we're always on the lookout for ways to make cheap food into something worth getting excited about.

Back in April we posted up the first in a series about taking ordinary ingredients to produce extraordinary meals, covering how to turn $1 seafood into an amazing dinner. This time around we'll be covering two separate dishes we recently made using low-cost base materials.

To start off with, we randomly found a take-and-bake pizza on clearance for $3.49 at Smith's that was due to expire the next day. $3.49 is even cheaper than a Papa Murphy's take-home pizza, and we had plenty of ingredients already sitting in the fridge that would jazz it up nicely.  For a gourmet twist, we also picked up a pack of clearance pancetta (thinly sliced cured Italian bacon).

Here's the full assortment of what will be going on our pizza: pancetta, red and yellow bell peppers, roma tomato, green onion, and poblano pepper. Because all the other ingredients were already needed for other meals that week, we only ended up spending about $5 for a gourmet pizza.

Here we've added on some extra cheese (white cheddar!), along with the diced peppers and green onions.

Finishing off the pizza are slices of the pancetta on the top of the rest of the ingredients.

After about 20 minutes in the oven, the finished pie is crispy, cheesy, and ready to be devoured.

A few months back we discovered our local Big Lots has a variety of different flavored Asian noodle packages, which are essentially higher class (ha!) Ramen noodles, but are still incredibly cheap. To make a package of the noodle soup more exciting, I threw in some ingredients we would be using for salads and stir-fry's later that week. Here's I've sliced up cabbage, green onion, and radish.

I cooked the radish and cabbage in the boiling water with the noodles so they become a bit softer and less firm.

To make this more like a restaurant style meal, I topped the noodles with sesame seeds and spicy Sriracha sauce. If you've never had Srirarcha before, it's frequently used in Asian restaurants and can typically be found in the Asian section of any supermarket - even Walmart.

Great food doesn't have to break the bank, and living on a budget doesn't mean you have to live with bland and boring meals. Now that we've taken a little side trek into our ordinary-turned-extraordinary meals, next month we'll jump into more grilling adventures, different ways to cook pork, and a culinary trek to Canada to try out cuisine inspired by recipes from north of the border.

Grilling Season '12: Pork Baby Back Ribs

Taking a break away from our culinary world tour that kicked off with Mexican Posole, we're getting back into grilling now that the temperatures are headed up again. Wanting to take things up a notch and really make something spectacular, we decided to try a food totally new to us: pork baby back ribs. We found an amazing looking slab on clearance for $8 that needed to be used the same day and couldn't resist the temptation. It's more than we'd normally spend on a piece of meat, but we wanted another way to try out our injecting needle after injecting a pork roast with a sweet pineapple sauce.

Here's the slab, bottom side up, after being washed and trimmed. It's sitting on plastic wrap as things are about to get a little messy and it will need to be wrapped up. We're using a two-stage method for flavor: first a rub, then an injection.
 

Since this was our first time grilling a slab of ribs, we're using a store bought rub to add on a smoky flavor. Here I'm covering the top and about to start rubbing the seasonings into the meat.

After rubbing the top and bottom sides, the ribs are wrapped up tightly and then put back in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavors properly mingle.

Fresh out of the fridge, the now perfectly seasoned meat is ready to get started with the injection process.

For our first attempt, we mixed together melted butter, store bought barbecue sauce, Worcestershire sauce, onion and garlic powder, and pepper. Although this was a fantastic mixture, we ended up changing this injection sauce quite a bit for future attempts, which will be covered in new blog entries down the line. We have even started making our own barbecue sauce, which has turned out fantastic, but I'm getting ahead of myself :)

The meat in-between each rib bone segment is thoroughly injected with sauce, and a good deal inevitably ends up pooling upward on the top, which is spread across with a kitchen brush.  The leftover injection sauce is saved for basting on the grill.

Cooking ribs on the grill is a "low and slow" process that requires indirect heat, as heating directly on flaming coals (like you would with burgers or chicken) will make the meat tough and burnt. We got the grill going until the fire had burned down and all the coals were white-hot (giving plenty of time to down a few beers out in the sunshine!) and then we spread out the coals so half were on one side, half on the other, with an empty strip down the middle of the grill. The ribs are placed over the empty section so there isn't any direct heat being applied.

After the first half hour the ribs were turned around to ensure all the edges heat evenly. After the next half hour the ribs are turned over, and then 30 minutes later turned around again for even cooking. With the exception of during the turning times, the grill remained closed to keep the lower heat trapped inside and make a fantastic smoke flavor. The whole process, from lighting the grill to finished product, took about two and a half hours.

At each turning point we basted the remaining sauce all over the top of the meat, preventing it from drying out and ensuring these ribs would be bursting with smoky flavor.

Here the ribs are nearly finished and have acquired one hell of a beautiful char.

A meal can't just be meat though, so here we've got corn, husks removed and cut and half, which we've put in tin foil and are cooking along with the ribs.

For a full and filling meal, we threw together a fresh salad with strawberries, avacados, and cheese, along with a baked potato. The ribs were amazingly tender on the inside and charred on the outside, with a flavor that can't be beat and was well worth the long cooking process. I've never had meat this good before, and there was absolutely no extra sauce needed - the pork stood alone with its out-of-this-world flavor. The ribs ended up more black than we intended however, so for our next attempt we layed down tinfoil partway through to prevent the outer layer from getting so much char.

Hopefully we've inspired you to try your own grilling adventure to spice up your cooking exploits, and be sure to check back soon for more on making ribs, taking cheap food and turning it into something amazing for a fantastic dinner, and the continuation of our culinary world tour as we try out Canadian cuisine.

Culinary World Tour: Mexico (Posole)

The wait is finally over: we are now officially kicking off our "culinary world tour," sampling the tastes of countries from around the world as though we were globe trotting - but from the comfort of our own kitchen!

Our very first stop takes us down south of the border for a taste of Mexico. Mexican cuisine is already well-known worldwide, and for good reason. While we could have just made some tacos and called it good, the point of our world tour isn't just to make dishes from different cultures, but to use different ingredients and cook in different ways than we would normally use for any given dinner.

Instead of anything involving tortillas or shredded beef, we found a recipe for posole (sometimes spelled pozole instead), which is a hearty soup that nears on a stew consistency and has a very long history in Mexico.  We chose posole because we don't make soup as often as other kinds of meals, and it let us use a ingredient we absolutely never utilize: hominy.

For our version of this spicy soup, we used both the mild poblano and the spicy serrano. Fore more ideas on how to use these very different peppers, check out our recently posted pepper comparison guide here. These are the two poblanos going into the mixture.

The base vegetables for our posole are poblano, serrano, onion, and garlic. As you can see in the picture below, the serranos were cut in half length-wise but not actually chopped, and the seeds are remaining inside. You'll see how this works out as the ingredients start getting mixed together below.

Many of the traditional posole recipes seem to use pork, but we went with what was already in the freezer to save during grocery shopping day: chicken leg quarters.

Here the leg quarters are in the crock pot and are covered with a generous helping of diced fresh garlic.

In go the poblano and onion, and then the seasonings: cumin, cayenne, salt, and pepper. At the end of the process we'll be throwing in fresh cilantro for an extra kick.

Before the actual cooking starts, the base of the soup is finished off with several cans of both tomatoes and hominy, as well as couple of cups of chicken broth (homemade is best - check out our version here!)

Here the serranos are going on top without getting diced so that the soup soaks up the flavor and heat as it slow cooks over several hours.

After a few hours of simmering the chicken becomes incredibly tender and easily pulls off the bone. There's two ways to go here: either leave the leg quarters intact and put each in a large bowl surrounded by the soup for a more hearty, fork and knife style meal, or instead pull out the chicken and shred the meat from the bones. We went the second route so the end result is more like a soup and can easily be eaten with just a spoon. For more heat, you can also chop up the serranos and throw them back in. If you only want things a little on the hot side, be sure to remove the seeds firsts.

After the shredding and chopping, the meat and peppers go back in for some extra time cooking together.

The finished product is then garnished with sour cream, shredded cheddar, fresh cilantro, and diced avocado.  The hominy was surprisingly good in this, and the end result is a soup filled with flavors both familiar and excitingly new.

Posole from Mexico was just the beginning - our next stop is Canada, as we'll be skipping the U.S. and coming back later on for a state-by-state cooking adventure down the line. 

Before resuming the world tour, we'll also be taking side treks as we learn the ins and outs of barbecuing pork and beef ribs low and slow, making our own BBQ sauce, and even some more quick, fun, and low cost meals like homemade corn dogs and pork burgers. Check back soon for more cooking adventures!

Breakfast Burritos And Guacamole

Over the past month we've gone over several different ways to have a hearty, egg-based breakfast beyond just the standard over-easy or scrambled eggs and toast, such as the breakfast skillet or even the breakfast sandwich. Now it's time to take a look at my personal favorite and what may just be humanity's greatest culinary creation: the breakfast burrito.

I don't know who first decided eggs needed to go in a tortilla, but that person forever altered the way I eat and what I prefer for my morning meal. It's just genius - everything that would be in a taco, just with breakfast fixings instead.

To start the perfect breakfast burrito, whisk together a few eggs with either a dab of milk or sour cream. I like 3 - 4 eggs and usually end up putting them in two separate tortillas, while Megan generally goes for just 2 eggs.

Pour this pure gold concoction onto a hot skillet with some melted butter or a teaspoon or two of vegetable oil, like you were making fluffy scrambled eggs.

There are a whole lot of different ways to make breakfast burritos depending on what flavors you like and just how hearty you want your meal to be. On the pepper comparison guide we put together earlier this month we mentioned canned green chillies, and these are perfect here, as are chopped fresh anaheim or poblano.  In the picture below we're using the canned variety, which have a softer texture and go fantastic with the eggs, especially if you plan on also using sausage or bacon.

For our first type of breakfast burrito we'll start off with a warmed flour tortilla, a thin layer of sour cream, and the finished eggs and chillies.

For a truly filling and delicious meal, sometimes we like to take these up to the next level and throw in chili! Any canned variety will do, but homemade chili made with thick chunks of beef are the best. If you go canned, I personally prefer the spicy, no-bean variety, but just about anything works here.

Finishing off these magnificent early morning creations are a layer of verde salsa and some shredded cheddar cheese.

Here's another version of the same basic idea, but this time with Gimme Lean soy sausage, egg beaters, and some tomato salsa.  A steaming mug of coffee with french vanilla creamer is the also the way to go here.

If chilli isn't your thing, or you'd like to make this more like a regular burrito, you can instead go with refried beans.

For a full-on burrito theme, spread out a layer of fresh guacamole. Don't bother with the store bought variety - the best kinds are mostly avocado anyway and will end up costing you five or six dollars, whereas making your own fresh guacamole will only end up costing about two dollars and will taste better. A crash course of avocado creation can also be found below.

Here we've spread the heated refried beans over the guacamole on a tortilla briefly warmed on the stove (the microwave works too if you are running out of burners!)

Because we've always got to find new ways to make already delicious things even more stuffed with amazing flavors, we're also going to throw breakfast potatoes into this burrito. To use up leftovers and keep our meals connected, for this burrito we used well seasoned french fries we had made from scratch and baked (instead of fried) for dinner the night before.

Here it's all coming together: the fluffy eggs, the crunchy potatoes, and the delicious combination of guacamole and beans.

Of course a layer of shredded cheese needs to go on top to finish it off. You can have fun by changing up the type of cheese, from the standard cheddar to something more exciting like pepper jack.

To make hers more like the breakfast burritos sold at fast food restaurants, Megan instead slapped on a slice of American cheese, which melted over the hot potatoes.

 

There are plenty more methods for putting together your perfect breakfast burrito - from cooking up sausage or bacon first to using more exciting wraps like spinach or sun-dried tomato tortillas. The sky is really the limit here, as there really isn't a wrong way to put together a breakfast burrito.

Now, on to a little look at how to make guacamole. Again, the store stuff usually isn't worth it. We once bought a $1 guacamole that literally tasted like french onion chip dip - just colored green. Instead of shelling out for the more expensive varieties, just pick up two avocados, which are usually on sale for around 79 cents a piece at Smiths or Albertsons.

Slice off the outer skin and then pull the sections of the avocado away from the hard inner pit, which should then be discarded.

We're going to mix in a few extras with the avocado for a more exciting flavor. Here we've got cilantro, tomato, and jalapeno, all of which we already had in the fridge to use for another meal that week.

Use a fork or spoon to mash the ingredients together along with some garlic powder and the juice from a lemon or lime and presto - restaurant quality guacamole right at your home table.

This is going to be our last look at heavy breakfast meals for awhile as we move on to exciting new things at Six-Seven-Eight, including the start of grilling season. Also up shortly is the culinary world journey we've mentioned in a few previous blogs, where we will be challenging ourselves to cook new recipes in new ways outside our comfort zones from countries across the globe, starting with Mexico.  See you again soon!