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.

Honky Tonk Homicide And Delicious Beer Butt Chicken

Our previous experiment with the Italian murder mystery dinner went exceedingly well, so we've been doing more murder mystery evenings with family friends, and of course - food!  Our latest was "Honky Tonk Homicide," which had everyone dressing up as various patrons of a hony tonk cowboy bar.  To keep up with the theme we made "beer butt" chicken, which sounds odd, but is incredibly tasty.

The idea with beer butt chicken is to have both beer and regular seasonings adding to the chicken's flavor. To start off, about half a can of beer is emptied and then a variety of seasonings are spooned into the can.

Our version of this meal gets three distinct stages of seasonings.  The second stage is done by mixing seasonings with butter and applying them underneath the skin, between the skin and the actual chicken meat.

The beer can and seasonings are stuffed up the chicken's backside, which stands the entire chicken upright.  The third stage of seasonings are then rubbed over the skin.

And here's our two finished delicious chickens straight out of the oven, crispy, seasoned, and smelling great!

Megan played the local sheriff, while Glen and Cristal were a televangelist couple. Glen even died his hair gray and went for the cheesy bolo tie, while Cristal got the perfect Tammy Faye style hair and makeup.

Here I am with Megan as "Dusty Diamond," good old boy and country karaoke master.

Matt managed to successfully hold both the beer can and the befuddled expression the entire evening.

Joining live via webcast - Jayne as the bar waitress, unwed mother, and all around floozie.

But the chicken wasn't the only thing on the menu of course!  For Megan's birthday she wanted to try out some new spices, including something we'd never used before - whole vanilla bean.  The bean was used for an amazing layered cake the likes of which we'd never tasted.

Here's Megan slicing open the whole vanilla bean and harvesting the flavorful gunk inside.

The cake had several layers and ended up being a towering masterpiece. Here are the first two layers getting ready to be covered.

Here's all the layers together, along with the recently applied cream cheese frosting.

And here's the final amazing product - insanely rich and layered pumpkin/carrot cake!

Lemon Chicken And Jalepeno Mac

We may be a full week into September, but apparently somebody forgot to notify the Montana skies, as we're still regularly getting high 80 temperatures.  Despite the lack of proper Fall weather we decided to brave the oven anyway and start making some fun baked meals.  Before getting into that though, here's another look at one of our grilled kebab adventures.

This time for a little more fun and flair we wrapped thin slices of zucchini in an "S" shape around the marinated chicken and vegetables.

Here's a look at a similar meal where we grilled large pieces of bone-in chicken, but also threw on mushrooms and veggie strips, which were dipped into a delicious garlic/yogurt mixture.

Now onto the real goods: a whole chicken stuffed with boiled lemon and baked inside a dough crust!  We got this one from an episode of "Oliver Twist" on Netflix. You can also see an herb mixture we ground up in our mortar and pestle in the picture below.

Boiling the whole lemon for a few minutes gets it hot and releases more flavor so the chicken gets cooked from the inside from the lemon and from the outside via the oven.

After putting the lemon inside the chicken, the whole thing gets covered in an herb mixture and then tied up with kitchen string.

A simple flour dough made from scratch gets wrapped around the chicken to keep all the juices and heat inside.

Here's the finished chicken right out of the oven before the dough barrier is cracked open to get at the lemony delicious goodness inside.

To complete the meal we had a salad covered in fruits and vegetables, along with cornbread stuffing and a generous helping of gravy.  It's amazing how much the lemon flavor soaks into the chicken - and not just the skin!  Every bite of the meat has a definite lemon zest going on.

For another fun baked meal this past week we decided to put a twist on the standard baked pasta dish and went with a jalapeno theme.  Rather than breadcrumbs, the top of the pasta was covered in jalapeno flavored chips, which gave just as much crunch and way more flavor. Chopped jalapenos also went inside the pasta, of course.

Hopefully the temperature will start to dip soon so we can get into more Fall baked goodness.  Coming up soon we'll be having a new murder mystery dinner meal, along with more pasta and chicken dinners.

Oh, and just because it was stupidly awesome and I'm still basking in its glow, go back and check out our Fried Chicken Benedict from last year!

Making Our Own Burgers

We've still got a few more great grilling experiences to share before summer comes to a close again.  Lately we've been a bit worried about what exactly goes on during the process of making ground beef and what they may be putting in there to extend the product, so we decided to try making our own ground beef. 

What was amazing is how incredibly easy this process really is. I had an image in my head of needing some industrial machine that glops the beef out in those noodle like strings, but honestly all you need is a food processor and a big chuck steak.  If you normally use a pound of ground beef for a meal, get a steak that's slightly bigger or up to a pound and a half.

To get things started Megan trimmed off the largest pieces of fat and then cut the steak into large chunks.

The meat goes into the food processor and is pulsed until it reaches the right consistency, and we discovered we didn't even need to add in egg or oil or anything to get it to stick together.  It's literally as simple as meat + mixing = ground beef.

The end result was pretty similar in consistency and color to ground beef you'd buy in a package, although the texture is noticeably different (read: better).  Our own home made ground beef formed into patties just as well as anything we've ever bought at the store.

We wanted to make our burger patties unique and have more flavor than just what comes from the beef, so we also ground up two kinds of mushrooms and white onion.

The two ground mixtures were mixed together, and then we added in a host of seasonings like garlic powder, spicy pepper seasoning, and of course salt and pepper. We were out of Worcestershire sauce, so a few dabs of A1 steak sauce went in its place.

Here are the finished patties, which stuck together easily and didn't require any extra work to put together.  The extra vegetables and seasonings make these smell great!

That same day we found a new grill on clearance, as the grilling season is ending and all the grocery stores are trying to get rid of them. We actually paid less for this nice one than we did for the our other rickety, tiny grill.

The end result was amazingly juicy burgers as good or better than what we would have made with store bought ground beef, and we'll definitely be going this route again in the future. We may try different types of steak in the future, as well as possibly other methods of seasoning, such as marinating the steaks ahead of time.

Here's our finished meal, complete with side salad. It's not really clear from the picture, but we like a lot of fruits and veggies on our salads.  This one has peach, nectarine, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and more.  For my burger I threw on avocado, tomato, cheddar, onion, ketchup, and steak sauce.

That's it for now, and we'll be back soon with the end of our grilling adventures and the start of the fall season. Coming up this fall will be whole chicken with lemon baked in dough, chili made in a pumpkin, and more!