Culinary World Tour: Greenland (Suaasat)

It's been quite awhile since our last culinary world tour stop, but now it's time to get traveling again as we hit Greenland! If you missed our last world tour meals, we've previously made posole from Mexico and poutine from Canada.

Our Greenland meal is a traditional soup called suaasat, which is generally made with seal or wild game like reindeer. While we couldn't readily get our hands on seal (and Megan hates seafood anyway - which is going to be something to overcome when we hit a few other countries...), we were able to acquire some deer thanks to our hunting family members. Suaasat is actually a fairly simple meal with only a few basic ingredients, pictured below. We used barley, deer chops, baby carrots, onion, rosemary, sage, and the standard seasonings like garlic powder and pepper.

The deer is cut into smaller chunks for a size about what you'd want for a stew or thick soup. We've never really cooked with wild game before, so we weren't expecting the differences in smell and texture. The deer was a beautiful red color, but also much softer and less firm than beef or pork.

First the deer is cooked in a large pot with a small amount of oil. While we were prepared for the game taste, we didn't expect the game smell - which was quite pungent and overpowering.

Here the dish is starting to come together and look more like a soup or stew as we add in the veggies and lots of crushed garlic.

After a few minutes of cooking and throwing in all the seasonings, the less-than-pleasing aroma became much more what we were used to and far more pleasant.

After the meat is browned and the veggies are softened we poured in several cups of water to get the soup going in earnest.

Although there was a large amount of seasonings used, we noticed it was still a bit bland as the cooking progressed, so we threw in some beef bouillon as well.

Here the barley is going into the soup, which will plump up as the cooking progresses and offer a nice firm texture.

The end result was a very attractive looking soup that's almost thick enough to be called a stew instead. Unfortunately we weren't super in love with the flavor of the deer or the combination of flavors here, which was disappointing, as this has been the first meal from another culture we've tried that we didn't love. This is likely just a matter of personal preference though, and we'd recommend others try it, as Megan's brothers loved it and had several bowls each.  Some recipes we've seen called for putting in cherries, which might add an interesting new flavor to a simplistic dish.

Since this one wasn't as pleasing to the palette as we expected we were left with a huge pot of leftovers, which weren't going to get wasted no matter how much we didn't care for the dish. To make sure we didn't end up throwing away all that food we decided to bake the remaining soup into a casserole.

First the soup goes into the bottom of a casserole dish, then we whipped up some mashed potatoes.

The finished mashed potatoes are layered on top of the soup as a soft "crust" of sorts, and then everything is baked for about 40 minutes. If you want something more firm, putting biscuit batter or day old biscuits on the top or bottom would be a great addition.

Here's the leftover casserole with a side salad, topped our own homemade smoky jalapeno ranch dressing. We'll be covering how to make that amazing dressing in a new blog coming soon!

While the Greenland stop of our "world tour" wasn't what we'd hoped, we're still glad we tried something new and went outside our comfort zones. One little speed bump won't be slowing the tour down, however, as next up we're headed to Iceland: gateway to Europe and home to soul shatteringly awesome metal band Solstafir!  See you again soon!

Breakfast Revisited (Again)

Cooking and enjoying breakfast together is something we try to do most days, and we're always on the lookout for new ways to enjoy old favorites.  Not too long ago we revisited our standard breakfast offerings to try new things like bell pepper toad in the holes and french toast breakfast sandwiches.  Today we'll revisit breakfast again to try a few twists on our normal early morning meals.

With all the vegetables and sausage we use for things like skillets and breakfast sandwiches, we frequently have small amounts of leftovers at the weekend. One great way to use all these different ingredients nearing the end of their usefulness is to put together a sort of casserole we call the breakfast bake. Here we've layered crumbled sausage, tomato, onion, and a variety of peppers with a layer of shredded cheese in a small casserole dish.

Next we pour in a few eggs whipped together with a little milk or sour cream and pour it over top the ingredients, creating something between a casserole and a quiche, but still using all the basic breakfast ingredients.

If you have some leftover day old biscuits, these can also go fantastic by placing them over top along with another layer of shredded cheese. Pop the whole thing in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes.

Just like with any other breakfast, a slice of this bake can be served up with buttered wheat toast and some cottage cheese. Some hot sauce or even a little gravy further jazzes up this little-bit-of-everything meal.

We've done a few in-depth looks at different kinds of breakfast skillets based around meals we'd had at diners. What can be an interesting twist is to actually use leftovers from the diner in a new skillet. Here we've got some potatoes, steak, and broccoli leftover from a Denny's breakfast.

Cooking these up with eggs, mushrooms, and a variety of veggies we've got a nearly ready-made skillet that still has a homemade touch.

We did this same thing again a few weeks later with a Denny's meal that had diced chicken and potatoes.

Get the coffee flowing and the hot sauce lined up and you've got a delicious restaurant style breakfast at home.

The almighty breakfast burrito is another favorite that gets any given day started right, and we've covered a variety of ways to make it with guacamole, salsa, and other ingredients. If you want something a little more heavy and hearty though, you can swap out the avocado and extra veggies and instead throw in cooked sausage and white gravy.

Here's the finished sausage and gravy burrito, complete with some shredded cheese, hot sauce, and a steaming mug of coffee. For this one we used large spinach wraps to add in a different flavor outside the standard tortilla.

Gravy goes surprisingly well with any of our egg-based breakfast meals, like topping an egg and veggie breakfast skillet.

Here's another look at a different breakfast burrito creation, this one using sliced turkey sausages, several different bell peppers for color, and some jalapeno for heat.

Mix up a few eggs with a little milk and some pepper before adding it so they end up smooth and uniform in texture.

Pour the eggs in with a little butter into the cooked meat and vegetables and start cooking until the eggs begin to set.

Cheese is of course a necessity for the breakfast burrito, and just about anything works well. Cheddar and mozzarella are old standbys, but provolone, pepper jack, or pretty much anything your heart desires is suitable.

For these burritos, we're using tomato-basil flatbread found on clearance at the grocery store bakery topped with sour cream, sliced avocado, and cherry tomatoes.

If you couldn't tell, a selection of hot sauces is a vital finishing component to anything breakfast related for me :)

For more breakfast ideas, check out our avocado eggs benedict here, and be sure to come back soon for more amazing dinner creations. We'll soon be resuming our culinary world tour with a look at a traditional soup from Greenland, as well as recapping the end of grilling season with more ribs, chicken, and pork.

Cuban Style Black Beans With Fried Corn Tortillas

While there has been a focus on the mouth watering meat we cook up, especially during grilling season, Megan and I generally have at least one meatless meal a week. Besides the health benefits, this can also be incredibly cost-effective, as vegetarian meals are easy to connect into other dinners or use as a side for meat dishes later in the week. Lately we've been putting together one bean-based meal a week and then using the leftovers to come up with other lunches or dinners. Rather than buying canned beans, instead we buy bulk bagged beans and soak them ourselves, which is much cheaper.

One of our recent concoctions has been "Cuban style" black beans. To start out, the beans are soaked for around a full day in water, and the water is changed out every few hours. After soaking, we minced up onions, red and orange bell pepper, and garlic. The veggies are cooked first to soften up, and then everything is mixed together with the beans and water.

There are plenty of recipes that can be found online for this type of black bean mixture by just simply performing a Google search. We used standard seasonings like garlic and onion powder while the beans cooked, but at the end it still tasted like something was missing, so we deviated from the base recipe and added in cumin. While this left the Cuban flavor and went more Mexican, it definitely gave us the taste we were looking for.

Here are the finished beans, which are hearty enough to be eaten on their own like a bowl of chili, and the meat is barely even missed.

A plain bowl of beans is a bit too spartan for our tastes though, so we had to jazz it up with some extras. First we fried some cheap corn tortillas in a small amount of oil to make our own custom chips.

Since we make them ourselves, we have total control over the seasonings. We recommend garlic pepper, or garlic powder, pepper, and salt.

The fried tortillas can be used like a flat tostada with everything piled on top, but instead we broke ours up into a few large pieces to use as dipping implements.

To add in a few extras and turn this into more of a complete meal, next we put a dollop of sour cream and some chopped avocado.

Shredded cheese is of course a necessity, and there's plenty more tortillas in the background waiting to be used up.

There was far more beans and tortillas than we could eat in one sitting, so we interconnected our meals and re-used these ingredients again for both a lunch and a dinner. Here we've put the beans on top of some brown rice and we're having them with clearance enchiladas from the super market deli for a meal that's fast, cheap, and easy.

We had a very similar meal again a day later, taking one of those massive $1.25 beef burritos from the deli, cutting it in half, and then turning it into a sort of chimichanga by frying it on the stove. By planning ahead and buying a few cheap items from the store during the week, we stretched one meal into three and tried out a variety of interesting combinations we wouldn't have otherwise made.

Wing Sauce, Fried Chicken, and More Potato Salad

Now that we've got barbecue sauce making down pat, it's just made sense to try making our own homemade versions of many other sauces, dressings, and condiments. One of my personal favorites is buffalo wing sauce, so when reaching the bottom of a bottle one day it was obvious we needed to try making our own.

We've now done homemade wing sauce twice so far, and he's the ingredients used the first time around: garlic powder, paprika, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, butter, garlic hot sauce, and a few dabs of buffalo flavored tabasco.

All the ingredients are whisked together thoroughly. If you've got too much heat from the hot sauce or it isn't the right color or consistency, you can also throw in some extras, like brown sugar, ketchup, or tomato sauce.

While the flavor will already be almost-there just by mixing together, I recommended heating on the stove along with some extra butter for at least a half an hour so the flavors mix together better.

For the second batch, I ditched the tabasco and brown sugar, threw in some chili powder, and switched out the garlic hot sauce with the "Bull Snort" brand Texas Tail Torcher sauce. The end result was spicier, but had a much more spot-on buffalo flavor and the proper bright red color. Most of the recipes I've read online (and even one of our Facebook fans!) recommend using Frank's Red Hot as the base sauce, but I wanted to use things I already had on hand to keep the cost down, as a bottle of Frank's Red Hot is already as much or more than a bottle of ready made buffalo sauce.

For the finishing (and punishing!) touch, I carefully put a few drops of Satan's Rage sauce into the final product.

Now that we have our sauce, what to do with it? We had some chicken thighs in the freezer and decided to try out a twist on fried chicken. For our version, we're injecting the chicken with buffalo sauce and using a spicy coating. In the picture below you can see me putting on the initial coat of seasoning consisting of flour, cayenne, chili powder, garlic powder, and pepper. There are a lot of variations you can use here as well. For extra crunch, smash up some plain corn flakes and throw it in as well.

After the first coating the chicken is dunked in a bowl of milk, and then returned to the flour mixture and thoroughly covered again. At this point I inject the buffalo sauce directly into the meat using the red injector needle you can see at the lower-right corner of the image.

Normally we bake or grill our chicken, but in this instance we decided to go the messier and less healthy route and fry in oil.

Our wing sauce injected chicken thighs took about 16 minutes to cook in the bubbling hot oil - your times may vary depending on size and what part of the chicken you are using, as this could easily work with drumsticks, breasts, or wings. Don't forget to save your oil when done, as it can be used to fry things again. Simply turn off the heat and wait a few hours for it to cool, and then pour back into its original container or any other plastic container you've got lying around. We re-use an old plastic potato salad bucket.

Here's the first beautifully golden brown fried masterpiece coated with slightly spicy seasoning on the outside and pleasantly hot wing sauce on the inside.

Injecting the meat worked better than I expected for a fried meal, and we'll be doing this from now on with a variety of different sauces. It takes the already-awesome crunch of fried chicken and adds in a completely different and totally unexpected dimension of flavor.

Fried chicken alone isn't a meal of course, and this particular day happened to be perfect picnic weather, so we put together a potato salad to go with it. For a step-by-step on how to make potato salads, you can see our previous blogs covering standard veggie or chicken bacon ranch varieties, as well as a look at southwest and Italian versions.

This particular kind we made to go with our fried chicken was dubbed "Potato Salad Supreme," because it takes the standard veggie version of potato salad and ups the ante with everything delicious. Here are the cubed and boiled potatoes with shredded cheese, diced hardboiled egg, anaheim pepper, and both red and green bell pepper.

To make the dish more exciting, we cooked and finely chopped a whole mess of crispy bacon.

All the ingredients are then blended together with a combination of mayo, dijon mustard, standard yellow mustard, and about half a ranch dressing seasoning packet.

At the end of all that hard work we finally had a picnic meal ready to take out to the beautiful Ryan Dam island for a fantastic lunch, complete with a side of seasonal melon.