Valentine's Day 2014: Home Pedicures and Bourbon Steaks

For a lot of couples, Valentine's Day means a long wait in a crowded restaurant for an overpriced meal. We like to keep our February 14th an at-home celebration, which not only saves money, but lets us do plenty of things you can't get away with in public.

Yeah, while I was talking about *that* thing that first just jumped into your mind, I also meant our at-home pedicures! Below you can see our Valentine's Day spa kit. First we fill a bath with epsom salt and bubble bath to soak our feet, when we use our exfoliating gloves on each other's feet and legs. Next up is the drying, scrubbing, clipping, and covering in lotion, before a refreshing face mask treatment - all for significantly less than it would cost to actually hit a spa or nail salon, and we can do it in our pajamas!

But what about dinner? We've been trying out different cuts of meat than we normally use after the fabulous success of the skirt steak with chimichurri we made earlier this month, so for Valentine's Day we went with a beef favorite that doesn't usually hit our table: New York strip steak.

The night before we mixed together a marinade of Fighting Cock bourbon, dijon mustard, liquid smoke, garlic, brown sugar and oil.

The steaks are marinated in a ziploc bag for about 24 hours so the flavor really has time to soak in and the steaks get nice and moist. Before we start cooking though, we've got to prepare one of our sides, which will be simple baked vegetables: broccoli, baby carrots, zucchini, and yellow squash.

After dicing the veggies, they get tossed in oil, sea salt, and pepper and then baked in the oven.

Now it's finally time to pull those steaks out of the marinade and throw them on a super hot skillet for a few minutes on each side.

The New York steaks were so big we ended up cutting them in half and having part 2 of this meal the next night! Here's one fresh off the skillet with a cooked outside but slightly rare inside.

Besides the veggie side, we're also having cheddar biscuits and loaded mashed potatoes.

To take these biscuits up a notch we're not only baking cheddar in them, we're topping them with a melted butter sauce.

Here's my finished plate: delicious tender steak with a sweet bourbon flavor, baked veggies, buttery biscuit, and mashed potatoes blended with sour cream and chives and topped with bacon and cheddar.

Trying new ingredients: baby bok choy and hoisin sauce

Continuing a theme from our recent Asian noodle soup and its revamped counterpart from previous weeks, we recently put together another Asian themed meal, again using ingredients we've never had the opportunity to use before.

This one's actually pretty easy and only has a small number of ingredients: baby bok choy, pork chops, sushi rice, hoisin sauce, cola, rice wine vinegar (you only need a splash at the end) and salt and pepper.

If you recall from the soup we made before, Megan wasn't big on the new ingredients we tried, especially the bok choy. With that in mind we decided to try baby bok choy, which is both more aesthetically pleasing and has a different flavor.

To start our meal, we cut the baby bok choy in half, as they will be cooked whole instead of diced.

We cooked each piece with the inside facing down to bring out the vegetable's natural flavor.

After heating through, we pulled off the baby bok choy, seasoned our pork chops with salt and pepper, and cooked them through briefly.

The pork chops are also removed from the heat, then we mix together the cola and hoisin sauce and cook it in the same skillet. If you haven't tried hoisin sauce before, it has a distinctly Chinese style flavor, but with a little sweetness courtesy of licorice root. It's an interesting flavor you won't find elsewhere, and I recommend giving it a shot.

After the sauce is whisked together, we throw the pork chops back into the skillet to be coated in the sauce.

To finish it off we lay everything down with a bed of cooked sushi rice, which we splash with rice wine vinegar. Spoon some extra sauce over everything and you've got a quick and off-beat but very tasty dinner!

Beer Chicken, More Asian Noodles, and a Failed Experiment

Hey again everyone! Our camera's memory card recently went kaput and had to be formatted, so we lost some photos, but not to worry: we've still got lots more coming your way.

Today we're serving up a triple helping of kitchen experimentation, some of which worked out amazingly well, and some which didn't. Awhile back we tried making an Asian noodle soup after watching "The Mind of a Chef," which has several episodes covering the Ramen culture in Japan.

I've been continuing to try new ways to make this style of soup, which we'll look at shortly, but first we need bones for stock - and that means making chicken! We've done "beer butt" chicken before during a Honkey Tonk Homicide murder mystery dinner, but this time we decided to go a different route. Rather than just placing a can of beer inside the chicken, we injected a flavored raspberry wheat beer directly into the meat - creating some of the best chicken we've ever had!

Of course, we also went with our normal mode of cooking whole chicken, where a mixture of seasonings is worked under the skin by hand. To match the sweet flavored beer, we went with dijon and honey mustard, melted butter, and standard seasonings.

After the chicken was gone (which didn't take long, it was amazing!) we used the carcass and a handful of vegetables to create stock. Some of it went towards a chicken soup, but we also reserved a portion for my latest Asian bowl creation.

Last time we used steak, but this time around I used chicken tenderloins, marinated in a mixture of hoisin sauce, soy sauce, pepper, and sushi rice vinegar. The sauces and seasonings were mixed up and then poured into a ziploc bag with the chicken, which then sits in the fridge for a few hours to marinate.

Here's the vegetables I'm using for the Asian bowl this time around. Instead of ginger and bok choy, I decided to use radish, broccoli, green onion, white onion, and fresh horseradish root (more on this vegetable's presence in our kitchen later).

Here are the chicken tenderloins and vegetables cooking in the leftover marinade.

As with last time, I'm using Maifun rice noodles. Since the soup ended up a little bland before, I decided to cook the noodles directly in the broth instead of using water. The end result was tastier, but I've come to the conclusion that rice noodles don't seem to hold flavor as well as other varieties, even though I love the texture, so I'll be switching to a different kind in the future.

And here's the finished product: cooked rice noodles with broth topped by vegetables, chicken, a soft boiled egg, and diced green onions.

Now, you'll recall how I mentioned that some of our experiments didn't end up so well...

We make lots of interesting dishes, but we don't do nearly as much with mixing up drinks. Wanting to try something different, I thought about the sorts of vegetables that are used in vodka drinks like the Bloody Mary, and how things like horseradish and hot sauce are added for kick.

Running with that line of thinking, I decided to juice parsley, radishes, and horseradish root for a mixed vodka drink, and then threw in a pinch of celery salt to cut the heat.

On the first sip I actually enjoyed what was going on with the flavors, as it ended up sort of like an organic smoothie, but with booze. Unfortunately as the flavors mingled it became more sharp, earthy, and tart, and by the time I was halfway through the glass I actively hated what was in my mouth and wanted to get far, far way from it.

Oh well, live and learn! While this was frankly a disaster, I think this would actually work well as an infusion instead of a pulsed drink. For a slightly spicy vodka, I may try putting horseradish or radishes in a full bottle of vodka and leave it in the cupboard for a few weeks to infuse, like with the green apple, basil, lemon, and habanero vodkas we made several years ago.

Skirt steak with chimichurri

As frugal shoppers always on the lookout for a deal, we get the opportunity to try interesting things that wouldn't normally be on our weekly shopping list. Hunting for clearance meat (and then tossing it in the freezer until its needed) in particular is one of our favorite ways to expand our culinary horizons, and this week we found skirt steak - a cut of beef we've never actually cooked with before.

For this nicer cut of beef we wanted something spectacular, so we decide to put together a restaurant style meal with Mexican leanings. We'll be having thin slices of the skirt steak topped with a chimichurri sauce, with rice and beans on the side.

Here are our main ingredients for the sauce: dried basil and oregano, fresh cilantro and parsley, diced garlic, a red chili pepper, lemon, lime, olive oil, and an onion.

Before making the sauce we've got to marinate our meat. If you haven't seen skirt steak before, it's got thin scoring all along the sides, so there's no need to stab it with a fork or directly inject the meat, as the marinade is going to soak in nicely by itself.

Here we've put together our own marinade of oil, fresh herbs, lemon and lime juice, and silver tequila. Be sure to enjoy a shot or two while cooking!

After marinating for a few hours, we throw the steaks on a very hot skillet and let it sizzle (yeah, that's a lot of smoke there!)

Here's one of the steaks, blackened on the outside but still medium-rare on the inside, which is how I like. Megan prefers her's very well done, so it's still cooking away on the skillet on a lower heat.

Now it's time to put together the chimichurri, which is simplicity itself - just dice and chop all the previously mentioned ingredients, throw them in a blender and lightly pulse until it's mixed through (you could use a food processor if you want it more thick and less saucy), and then set in in the fridge for about an hour to set. This is a fantastic alternative to sour cream sauces or super spicy hot sauces, and the fresh cilantro creates a fabulous flavor, making this a great addition to any Mexican style meal.

Here's my plate ready to go with several slices of skirt steak covered in chimicurri sauce, along with sides of rice and black beans.

Seeing those beautiful cuts of skirt steak, Cristal decided she wanted hers like an enchilada, so we pulled out the tortillas and used the chimichurri in place of sour cream and salsa. This is an equally delicious way to enjoy the meal!

Asian Noodle Soup

Recently we've been watching "The Mind of a Chef" on Netflix, which covers a lot of Japanese food culture and the many amazing things they do with ramen over there (which has very little to do with our concept of cheap packaged ramen noodles in the States).

The effort that goes into a bowl of authentic Japanese ramen really got me thinking it's something we should try, but I wasn't ready to jump in with both feet quite yet. As a sort of practice run, we put together an Asian noodle soup that's a little less involved.

To start our soup, we're of course making our own stock. Luckily we had made a whole chicken the week before and had the carcass ready to go. Here we're boiling the chicken bones with carrots, bell peppers, and minced garlic in about four cups of water.

For our soup we needed some Asian style ingredients outside the norm of what we're comfortable cooking with, so we picked up a head of bok choy and some rice noodles.

We also wanted to try some more exotic mushrooms, so we went with shiitake and oyster. These are more expensive (between $9 - $12 a pound), but we only needed a handful so it ended up being less than two dollars total for them. We're also using red onion, a red chili pepper, and a bulb of fresh ginger (the gray looking guy in the middle underneath the onion).

We diced or tore up most of the ingredients, which will get cooked on the stove top. The bright yellow slices in the back are the ginger. We've never used fresh ginger before, which has a very interesting taste that's "sharp" without being spicy. Before slicing it you also have to peel off the barky outer skin.

Our soup is going to be topped with slices of meat, and we went with a very thin beef steak. I didn't want a traditional steak flavor though, instead wanting flavors from other cultures, so I coated the beef in cumin instead of pepper or other seasonings.

The steak gets pulled off the heat after it's browned, and then we toss in our diced vegetables to soften.

What's this goop down here? That's our finished stock after it's been strained and placed in the fridge overnight to let the flavors set in.

Our soup will have rice noodles (we used Maifun), which is cooked a bit different from regular pasta. To cook this, bring a pot of water to boil, throw the noodles in, then turn the heat off and let it sit for 10 minutes. It's ready immediately, so if the rest of the meal isn't prepared yet, strain out the water and then toss the noodles in a bowl of ice.

The rice noodles are tossed in directly with the vegetables, and then we ladled in a few cups of stock. Everything cooks for a few minutes so the stock can flavor the noodles.

Here we start constructing our soup bowl by spooning in a handful of noodles and vegetables.

Next we ladle the stock over the noodles - just enough to cover them, but not enough to fill the bowl.

We finish off the bowl by layering on sliced beef and cracking open a beautiful soft boiled egg. For more heat you can also drizzle on some sriracha hot sauce.

Despite all the interesting ingredients going on here, the end result was a subtle and somewhat bland flavor in the soup itself, and unfortunately Megan didn't like it at all. I actually enjoyed it, but if we do this again I'll definitely change up some of the seasonings for a stronger flavor. I'm glad we made this though, as the experimentation was worth it and the fresh slices of ginger were fabulous.

Quiznos Night!

Megan loves her some Quiznos - especially their broccoli cheddar soup, which was weirdly the best in town. You may have noticed I wrote "was."

Unfortunately all the Quiznos shops in Great Falls have closed, and we didn't find out until we recently tried to go there for toasted subs and soup and to our dismay found the building empty.

We weren't going to let something like a restaurant closing prevent us from eating at it though! In honor of the departed fast food sub shop, we put together our own take on the broccoli cheddar soup and toasted sandwiches.

It seems likely the restaurant probably uses freeze dried or powdered broccoli, but that's not how we roll at home, so of course we're going with fresh broccoli - a whole mess of it!

Once the broccoli is chopped, we got down to the arduous task of grating a whole bag of baby carrots.

As with many soups, we'll be starting ours by cooking diced onions and several cloves of diced garlic in a tablespoon of oil. Put in a few tablespoons of flour and butter to make a roux, which will cause the soup to thicken as it cooks.

After the onion softens and the garlic becomes fragrant, we add in our primary liquid ingredients: half and half, evaporated milk, and homemade chicken stock. For a creamier soup, you could instead use heavy cream, but it also adds a lot more fat.

When it starts to heat through, we add in our chopped broccoli florets, shredded carrot, and 8 oz. of shredded sharp cheddar (it's not, as you might suspect, Velveeta) and let it simmer.

Eventually it will start to thicken and you'll get a consistency that is amazingly close to what we had at Quiznos.

But what about the sandwiches? Here we've cut some wheat bolillo rolls in half and slathered with them a mixture of mayo and sun-dried tomato infused garlic, then layered on sliced tomato, turkey, and cheese.

Since Quiznos toasts their subs, we decided to go the same route, putting the sandwiches under the broiler for about two minutes.

And here's the finished product - a bowl of soup even better than its inspiration and a custom made toasted sandwich. The restaurant may be gone, but it's spirit will live on in our kitchen whenever the urge strikes!