Orzo "Everything" Soup with Out Of This World Stock

Over time Six-Seven-Eight has developed several regular "columns," which cover specific types of food or methods of cooking, such as "Interconnecting Meals," "From Ordinary to Extraordinary," "Grilling Season '12," and so on. Today sees the collision of two of those regular entries in our blog series, as this soup we're about to explain in detail is both a look at "Novel Noodles" and "Interconnecting Meals!"

Earlier this month we showed how to make coffee rubbed whole chicken, which ended up getting stretched into several different meals, as well as maple-molasses coffee pork ribs for an all Fall-themed dinner. When those amazingly flavorful meals were finally all gone, we still had the bones remaining - which meant it was time to make an absolutely out of this world soup stock.

To get this stock started, chop up carrots, onions, green onions, and poblano pepper into large pieces. The addition of the poblano is a new twist for our standard stock recipe, and a great choice, as it's not very hot but still packs a lot of flavor.

All the ingredients are cooked in a pan along with hot oil until they start to soften up and release all those wonderful aromas. Feel free to add in any seasonings that strike your fancy and will go well with whatever bones you happen to be using. Garlic powder, pepper, and salt are a good starting combination, but go wild and add spicy ones like crushed red pepper, or add in things like celery salt, oregano, or any other seasoning in the spice rack.

Next add in several cups of water until your pan is nearly full and throw in the bones of whatever meat you've recently finished. Here we've both got the chicken carcass and the bones from the ribs, adding in two very potent flavors and ensuring we completely use everything we buy and get the most bang for our buck at the grocery store.

Bring the stock to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for several hours, stirringly occasionally. Turn off the heat and allow to cool, then place strain out all the bones and vegetables. Place the remaining liquid stock in a tupperware container and set in the fridge. We recommend letting the flavors mingle in the fridge for a full day before either using for a soup, or freezing to use later. Trust us on this - if the stock is good when it cools, it will be amazing a day later after the flavors have time to develop. Our finished stock, with all those different flavors mingling together, was good enough on its own to simply drink straight as broth!

For our soup we've decided to use a pasta that almost never sees a place in our cabinet: orzo! This is a fun little pasta that's almost more a type of rice, and it plumps up nicely and soaks in liquids, making it great for soup.

To start the soup, we've chopped up fresh spinach and the leftover chicken meat from the whole chicken. You can also see below the leftover pinto beans from when we made bean and rice enchiladas earlier in the week. As always, we recommend getting bagged beans and soaking them yourself instead of buying canned. Not only is the flavor better, but you save money, and they will cause less unpleasant gas if you change out the water frequently. If you aren't sure what to do with a whole bag of fresh spinach, we recommend using the remainder in omelettes or breakfast skillets.

This "everything" soup needs some more veggies, so we're going to use a frozen bagged medley that features carrots, green beans, cauliflower, red bell pepper, and zucchini. You can of course use fresh, but this was actually the cheapest way to get that many vegetables, and they come pre-chopped.

We don't have any vegetables that need to be sauteed first here, so the stock we made previously goes straight into the pan along with all the other ingredients and we bring everything to a boil.

For the orzo however, we do want that to be a bit crispier before it goes into the soup. To start the orzo, melt some butter, and then pour the pasta in and cook for a few minutes.

When the orzo hits this beatiful golden brown color, you are good to go.

The orzo is poured straight into the boiling soup, and then the heat is reduced to simmer.

Here's the soup after simmering a brief time, and all the flavors are now really coming together. It's not quite ready yet, however, as it needs at least an hour (or possibly longer!) to reach full flavor and have the pasta soak up more of the liquid.

This is a finished bowl of delicious "everything" orzo soup. Notice how the orzo has plumped way up? It makes this soup very hearty and less thin tasting. Bake some french bread for dipping and you've got a full meal ready to go, filled with both proteins from the chicken and beans, but also lots of veggies for a well rounded dinner.

A Fall Themed Dinner: Maple Coffee Ribs and Pumpkin Cheesecake

Our frequent movie companion and cosplayer extraordinaire Cristal had a birthday not too long ago, which meant something special needed to be in the works for dinner. With the seasons changing it seemed like a good idea to whip up an all Fall themed dinner that still had a nod to the rib frenzy of our summer grilling season.

During the delicious success of our coffee BBQ sauce experiment, we ended up making more coffee rub than got used at the tail end of the summer months. For a fun Fall twist on the coffee seasonings, the leftover base rub was mixed together with a specialty maple cinnamon ground coffee.

We've had the good fortune to find pork babyback ribs on clearance at one particular grocery store with some frequency, so we haven't ended up having to spend and arm and a leg to get a beautiful piece of meat like this one.

The new Fall-themed coffee rub is sprinkled across the cleaned and trimmed ribs, which are sitting on plastic wrap for easier clean up and storage. We recommend tightly wrapping your ribs and allowing the rub flavors to really work into the meat in the refrigerator for a few hours prior to the actual cooking process.

Since it was too cold out for grilling, the ribs are going to be cooked indoors in the oven this time. This necessitates a few changes in the cooking process. Here the rubbed ribs are set on foil on a large cookie sheet.

An injection can really make a huge difference in the flavor of finished ribs. Some folks like to do a marinade, a rub, or an injection, but not more than one at the same time - and we think that's crazy. There's no reason your meat shouldn't be as flavorful as you want it to be. Remember the root beer BBQ sauce we made a few months back? That base idea was tweaked several times over the summer, including an orange soda variation. For our injection here, we've taken some of that orange BBQ sauce and cooked it down a bit with caramel to add another aspect of Fall to our meal.

After being injected, the ribs start out facing meat side down, bone side up as they first go into the oven.

To get the best flavor and texture, you want to cook ribs "low and slow" style. For the oven instead of the grill, you want to cook at about 225 degrees for several hours. For extra flavor, brush on some extra sauce periodically.

Towards the end of the cooking process the ribs are flipped over and the tin foil comes off for the last half hour or so to get a little crispiness on the edges.

Even cooking with such a low heat the ribs still ended up with a much different texture than when grilled over coals in the backyard. These Fall-themed ribs came out almost like the most delicious pot roast ever, as the meat fell straight off the bone. I didn't even need a knife to cut them apart!

The meal was rounded out by a baked potato (with sour cream, shredded cheddar cheese, and green onions) and dinner rolls.

There's no question this was a filling and immensely satisfying meal, but for a birthday bash we also needed something sweet to round the night off (albeit a few hours later after our tummy's had settled down...) For the dessert we put together a "pumpkin pie" cheesecake. Here' we've taken our base cheesecake recipe and modified it to included canned pumpkin.

After cooking and then cooling, the cheesecake is topped first with "easy caramel." To make easy caramel, simply put an (unopened) can of sweetened condensed milk in the crock pot, and then fill the crock pot with water until the can is submersed. Throw on the lid and cook for about eight hours. When it's done, the sweetened condensed milk inside the can has turned into perfect caramel that requires no effort at all on your part. Simply open the can and spoon the caramel wherever needed.

In addition to caramel, we add a crunchy element by throwing on some various nuts. Pecans and walnuts are good choices.

Normally we would do a graham cracker or Oreo crust, but for to match the pumpkin flavor we instead did a ginger snap cookie crust.

It's finally time to get a slice of heavenly pumpkin cheesecake and dig in!

Coming soon we'll have more on interconnecting meals (including making a truly amazing stock using both chicken and pork bones), more ways to use pasta outside the normal spaghetti and tomato sauce, and a final look back at some of our 2012 Summer grilling.

Novel Noodles: Maccheroni Rustica with Sausage and Fusilli

There's a reason pasta is such a staple in many kitchens across the globe: it's simple, it's filling, and it can be out-of-this-world tasty if done right. With grilling season gone we've moved towards more hearty indoor meals now, with a focus on dinners that don't cost much but still taste just as good as something you'd eat at a nice sit-down restaurant.

From my time as a vegetarian when I was younger I've acquired quite a few pasta recipes, and there's a whole lot more than just "white" or "red" when it comes to sauce options. We will now be periodically adding new entries to Six-Seven-Eight on novel ways to put together pasta that are much more exciting than just spaghetti and tomato sauce, starting today with a bean and sausage based pasta.

This pasta dish was inspired by a "maccheroni rustica" recipe found in a vegan cookbook, which we ended up modifying heavily by using more of what we had on hand. This goes well for a "Meatless Monday" dish if your family eats vegetarian meals every now and again. For a meat-free version, simply omit the sausage, or replace it with any number of veggie sausage brands.

To start we're going to cook some whole garlic cloves in olive oil. We want the end result to be crunchy and very fragrant, so we're going to cook them until they are *almost* overdone - brown and crunchy, but not yet burned or black.

While the garlic is cooking we've got several Italian sausages heating up in the oven. We didn't need all five for the pasta, so several would be refrigerated and saved for a later meal.

Along with the sausage and garlic we wanted some colorful and flavorful vegetables, but they needed to be more exciting than just doing a standard pan fry. Here we've seasoned up mushrooms, tomato halves, and red bell pepper slices and broiled them in the oven until the skins start to blacken.

After the garlic comes out of the pan, the cloves are chopped into small pieces. These are delicious on their own, and great as a dip if mixed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, but instead we'll be using them for a little extra texture in our pasta.

Now that everything has been heated up we slice, dice, and chop into manageable portions to mix with the pasta.

The sliced sausage is put back into the pan with some butter and a smattering of traditional Italian seasonings - basil, oregano, and so on.

After the edges of the sausage get a bit crispy we throw in the garlic and remaining vegetables so they can soak up the seasonings.

For a real twist beyond what you'd normally see in pasta we're adding small red beans. Instead of using canned, we buy dry beans in bags (which is far more cost effective) and then soak them ourselves. One bag goes a long way and can be used for several different meals over the course of a week or longer.

Now it's all starting to come together as the beans heat up and all the flavors are intermingling.

As the rest of the ingredients were heating, we cooked up a box of fusilli pasta, but you can use any kind that strikes your fancy. We like the spiral type pasta here because the small garlic pieces and beans get stuck to them easier, but penne, mostaccioli, cavatappi, or rigatoni would be good fits as well.

Adding the fusilli directly to the pan makes it easier to mix all the flavors together instead of just spooning the topping over the cooked pasta.

A finished bowl of mixed pasta is now looking great, smelling amazing, and just begging to be eaten. While the lack of a liquid sauce might seem strange, the combination of butter and juicy vegetables prevents this from getting dry.

But first, we've got to top it with some shredded cheese!  Parmesan is an obvious choice, but we've gone with mozzarella instead.

There are many more unique and unconventional ways to make pasta night something to remember, and we'll be exploring a whole lot of them down the line. Check back soon for more ways to spice up your home cooking!

Interconnecting Meals: Coffee Chicken To Stir Fry To Barley Soup

There are enough bills already to worry about each month without piling on unnecessary expenses at the grocery store, which is why we work to interconnect different meals through common ingredients or one main ingredient as we map out our weekly dinner plan.

Earlier this year we previously showed how to make orange chicken and take it further by later making chicken salad sandwiches, as well as putting together jalapeno mac and cheese with leftover ingredients. Now we're going to take a personal favorite and regular fixture in our fridge - the whole chicken - and turn it into three to even four separate meals.

For our whole chicken we're only going to dress it up with a single style of seasoning - some of the leftover coffee rub from when we grilled up coffee BBQ ribs earlier during the summer.

The rub is massaged onto the chicken inside and out - both over and under the skin - which looks messy but is worth the effort.  Obviously you may not have homemade coffee rub on hand in the cabinet, but that's OK, because any seasonings will work here. You can get a great flavor just by mixing softened butter with sage, salt, and pepper and rubbing the mixture beneath the skin, or instead use any number of store-bought BBQ sauces.

This time around we didn't inject the meat with any extra flavors since we'd be using the chicken for several very different dishes. Here's our finished chicken after cooking for a few hours - notice the drippings that form in the bottom of the pan, as we'll be using these as another cost saving measure.

There's no need to buy gravy at the store during your regular grocery shopping day, as the chicken provides it's own gravy base. Simply whisk together flour and milk...

...and then combine with the chicken drippings in a large pan on the stove.

After warming up and mixing you'll get this amazing gravy that has a flavor you won't find in a jar. Salt and pepper are recommended, and if you want more of a Thanksgiving style feel, throw in some sage as well.

My plate is practically overflowing with mashed potatoes and homemade chicken gravy, along with a few pieces of our coffee-rubbed chicken.

After a filling and heavy meal like that we wanted a change of pace the next night and decided to go with an Asian style stir fry using some of the leftover chicken. To start our second meal using the whole chicken, we cook up some bell peppers and broccoli pieces in a skillet. After the veggies start getting soft we diced up some of the remaining chicken and tossed it in the skillet.

To keep this cheap but still have an exciting meal that's just as fun as going out, we got $1 egg rolls from the frozen section at Albertsons and microwaved them for half of the recommended time. Instead of finishing in the microwave, we placed them in a small skillet with a thin layer of hot oil. The finished egg rolls are much crispier that way and taste more like something you'd get at a Chinese restaurant, but without paying an eating-out price.

The base of our stir fry is going to be just standard ramen noodles with some crushed red pepper and sesame seeds. Oriental is a great choice, but beef, chicken, or pork all work fine.

The vegetable and chicken mixture is tossed on top of the noodles, and a few dashes of soy sauce finish this off. If you want it spicier, drizzle some Sriracha hot sauce on there as well.

Here's my bowl of stir fry with a crispy chicken egg roll on the side. Put out a small bowl of either soy sauce or sweet and sour for dipping and you've got a satisfying meal that cost next to nothing.

After making suaasat for the Greenland stop of our culinary world tour, we decided we wanted another go at a barley based soup, since that one was rather disappointing. Going with a flavor and meat we knew well seemed like a great choice, so for the third meal of our whole chicken we're making a barley soup that starts with carrots and onion cooked in a small layer of oil.

At this point in the week here's what remains of the chicken. Even after slicing some off directly the first night, using more for the stir fry, and even cutting a few slices a late night sandwich, we've still got a good amount of meat leftover.

After the onions and carrots are cooked, we poured in several cups of water and threw in some sliced chicken.

Bouillon cubes and some barley add the final flavors, and then the soup simmers until everything is cooked through.

This bowl of soup is thick, hearty, and has a great homemade taste. The barley gives a different texture than either stew or thin soup and was a great change of pace during the week's meals.

Some leftover bread torn into pieces finishes off the meal and is perfect for mopping up what's left in the bottom of the bowl!

So now we've taken one whole chicken - which only cost about $3 at the store - and stretched it across a full three meals that were all vastly different and immensely satisfying. Don't throw those chicken bones or skin away though! They can be turned into stock for more delicious soups down the line, and we'll be covering our latest stock creation in a new blog coming soon.