Scrumdeliocious: 2010

Eat The City: Pupusas, Yuca, and Tamales Oh My!

So we didn't cook this week, burn out don't you know, but that's okay because it gives me a good starting point for a new feature on the blog. We eat out at least once a week, (I know, I know) but we always try to make it fun and different. So I've decided that I want to highlight a few of the places, and dishes, that we try here in the Greater Dallas area. Hopefully it will inspire you local readers to get out and try more eclectic eats. Even if you're not in the area, I bet you can find similar places in your area.

Now that we will all spend the rest of the day with flashbacks to The Breakfast Club in our heads, let me start this post by thanking all of you for sticking around. I must apologize for the lag in posting, but I work a high stress day job and we've come into my busy time. Meanwhile, Shorty has just been promoted at work (Yay, Shorty!!) and is taking on new responsibilities and demands. We talked last night and both agreed to try and post more frequently. With that being said Shorty and I have continued our game and have been cooking like crazy. In addition, we've made several non-game related, but super delicious, dishes and we even had some special guests help out in the kitchen. We love you guys so keep checking back with us. There is a lot of fun, yum-tastic stuff coming your way.

Again, I'm behind with my post... As much as I love cooking and taking the photos, it just seems that the posting part gets away from me... I spend all day on a computer at work, and by the time I get home, staring at a computer screen is the last thing I want to do... So today...I decided to do my blog at work! :-) Just kidding...or am I...????

My recipe this week came from the book Ten: All the Foods We Love and Ten Perfect Recipes for Each by Sheila Lukins. I really love the concept behind this book, but must admit I was a bit scared when I pulled it off the shelf, because there is a crown roast on the front cover, and from what I hear, those aren't cheap!

Regardless...the recipe I did this week was Zuni Roast Chicken. According to the book, this recipe came from a restaurant, and is the juiciest chicken ever; I promise--it didn't disappoint. I started by preparing the whole chicken by patting it dry, sticking some sage and thyme under the skin near the breasts and thigh (and I added some dill and basil that a coworker gave me from her herb garden; so fresh!!!), and then generously coating the outside with coarse salt and black pepper.

Where's the Beef???

Note: This post is not for the Vegetarian. Keep that in mind before scrolling down.

Okay, as many of you may have noticed, we have never featured beef on this site. Even though I love vegetarian dishes, neither of us is a vegetarian, as should be apparent by the chicken and fish dishes we have featured. So here's the deal... I'm allergic to beef. Yup, you heard me right. My body can't process it. I can hear your gasps of disbelief, but it's true. I'm from Texas and I can't eat cow. To make it even weirder, I worked on a ranch in my early 20s as an honest to God cowboy. I worked the cows all day, but I couldn't eat them.

Now before you feel sorry for me you should know that I can make almost everything beefeaters eat in poultry, pork, seafood, or vegetarian options. It's actually not bad, there are so many options and I've become good at making things work. In fact, I have beef eaters who can't tell the difference between my vegetarian dishes and real beef. Remember, it's all in how you season and cook. So, needless to say, you will never see me make a beef dish on here. Sorry, but if the game pulls a beef option I will either rework it so I can use other options or I will roll again.

Wait, wait, don't go away!! We will do our best to accommidate all types of eaters here at Scrumdeliocious. I said that "I" would never make a beef dish, but Shorty LOVES beef. He makes beef dishes regulary, I just don't eat with him. So if you're a beef lover, just be patient. I'm sure Shorty will find a way to sneak something up here soon enough. In fact, the image is from his most recent evening with his best friend. They had a sudden hankering for steak and eggs so they grilled up a man sized portion of beef and fried up three eggs each. My arteries hurt just looking at it, but he swears it was delicious.

Breakfast for Dinner

Ok...so who doesn't love breakfast? Especially when you can have it for dinner! I love eating breakfast for dinner...because normally breakfast is such a rushed meal, but when you have it for dinner, you can to relax and enjoy the goodness...

This week, well--last week, I ended up with another blog...and I've put off writing my entry as long as I could. You see, I'm actually in the process of cooking THIS week's meal, so this post must be done! This post comes from Breakfast-And-Brunch-Recipes.com. The site consists mostly of quiches and casseroles it seemed, so I just picked a basic one and went with it. After reading the ingredients, there was no way it could turn out bad.

I know, I know, I'm a week behind again. I have been sick for over a month. I got over bronchitis only to get better and immediately succumb to the worst allergies, EVER!! Thankfully, I'm almost back to normal and it's time to get caught up. So here I sit with my cup of tea (I'm a huge tea drinker. I have about 20 flavors on hand at any given time.), a waiting book, some great music, and a post I haven't been looking forward to doing. Not because I'm tired of sharing with you wonderful people (There are people out there, right? I hope. Hello?), but because it was just so lackluster it bores me to even think about it again.

...because we used them to make Vietnamese Baked Banana Cake! As I've mentioned before, I hate to throw out food. so when my bananas get ripe I always end up making banana bread. This isn't a bad thing by any means since I love banana bread. However, I found this new recipe over at Almost Bourdain that made me drool instantly and decided to try it, instead of my old standard, the next time. So I waited, and waited, for my bananas to reach the right stage. Of course, I waited longer than suggested, but one can only sit watching bananas ripen for so long before a shower is needed.

At this point I must mention that I used six standard bananas rather than the twelve finger bananas the recipe requested. Hey it's six of one, half dozen of the other, right? I also didn't have the correct sugar, but I learned via the wonder that is the internet, that I could throw standard sugar into my super-duper food processor and make it into the sugar I wanted. The was extremely simple and took almost no time so don't let it stop you from making this dish if you can't find the sugar the recipe requests.

Although I'm not a Northerner by birth, I love the North, especially the North East. I spent several years in NYC and NH, before coming back home for family. I found I really thrive in the cold and have my fondness for their seafood, in all its many forms, knows no bounds. So when I ended up with Clam Chowder this week for our game I was ecstatic and, honestly, a bit nervous. I've always thought chowder or chowdah, as the New Englanders call it, would be difficult to make. I was amazed at how wrong I had been.

Can't talk...must cook...

So it's not quite time for another weekly challenge, but I've been cooking all week, and taking pictures, and I need to share them with someone!

For St. Patrick's day, I took some advice from a coworker of mine, and made cake balls. I could go into detail about how it's done, but I'll just let you check out Bakerella's Blog. This dessert is really her domain. These are so amazingly delicious...and so easy to make. You should go buy a cake mix right now and make them. I'm not kidding...go now!!!

Quickfire Challenge - Cheese Sticks

So last Friday (my day off for the week) I was watching the Rachel Ray show, and she had chef Rocco DiSpirito on as a guest: he made baked fried cheese! Talk about comfort food!!! And the best part...there were 3 main ingredients!!! I had to try this recipe as soon as humanly possible...

So I got my ingredients together; string cheese, egg whites, and bread crumbs. Chances are most of us have these three things already in the house. His recipe says to beat the eggs until foamy, but peaks haven't formed (I beat them a little too long, but oh well...) He also calls for Panko bread crumbs, but I couldn't find any at Wal-Mart that day, so regular bread crums would have to suffice.

Why pizza, of course! What? You don't? Well, truthfully, neither did I, until we started playing this game. I'm a week behind again. I've been battling the flu, so please forgive me. Anyway, I ended up with TV again, what is up with that, and this time I had Grill It! with Bobby Flay. I'm not a huge Flay fan, but his Grilled Pizza with Spicy Hummus, Vegetables, Goat Cheese, and Black Olives recipe sounded really interesting, especially since I've never tried grilling pizza. Now we have an actual outside grill, but it was raining this week when we made it so I substituted and it worked wonderfully. Plus it will hopefully show you that you can make something this elaborate from your apartment kitchen too.

Happy Pi Day!

Nope, that's no typo...today is March 14...as in Pi (3.14)!!! So happy Pi Day to you all! And there's no better way to celebrate than with pie!!!

This week the challenge led me to the television show Chopped. I decided to give it my all, and use all of the ingredients provided for one of the courses. The secret ingredients provided for the dessert course included celery, blood oranges, frozen pie dough, and jaggery.

Shorty's cake recipe didn't use as much of the Guinness Beer as we had anticipated so we had leftovers. Although he likes beer, he's not much into the dark lagers and I'm not into beer at all. We couldn't just toss it aside, though, so we decided to have some fun and make Irish Car Bombs. I had only had them once before so I was definitely game for the adventure.

Shorty dug out the Irish Cream and poured a couple of shots. The remainder of the Guinness was poured into two pint glasses. Each ended up being about half full. (Hey, I'm an optimist at heart!) The object here is to drop the shot glass full of Irish Cream into the pint full of Guinness and then slam the resulting concoction. Shorty swears they taste like beery chocolate milk. I didn't notice a flavor as much as a texture. The drink was smooth, like the beer, initially and then creamy once everything mixed. In the end, it definitely added a little zaniness to our cooking experience.

Beer and Chocolate

It almost sounds like the title of a B-Movie, doesn't it? Perhaps...but it's also the two main ingredients in my challenge last week: Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Guinness Cake.

So I ended up with quite a bit of leftover sweetened ricotta after making my Tomato Ice Cream and, as Shorty and my waistline will attest, I hate to throw food away. Now I won't lie, I was tempted to just squirt it straight from my make-shift pastry bag into my mouth, but I'm trying to be creative here. You can not imagine the willpower it took though, that stuff is delicious! I finally decided I'd just set it back in the fridge and figure it out later, but then Shorty pulled out some frozen blueberries to snack on and it hit me. I tossed a cup of frozen blueberries into a bowl and then covered them in the ricotta. Okay, just remembering how delicious it truly was is making my knees quiver. Shorty mixed it up a bit and sprinkled cinnamon on top of his mixture. This actually added just the right amount of warmth to the flavor. Definitely give this one a try.

I would also like to mention that keeping fruit in your freezer is a good idea. It keeps the fruit from going bad quickly and it ensures that you will always have some delicious fruit on hand for any strange culinary experiments you may come up with on a whim. We use them for smoothies and often just as quick snacks. Frozen blueberries have a creamy texture and wonderful flavor when eaten straight from the freezer. Yum.

To-may-to, To-mah-to

No matter what you call it I bet you never expected to see a tomato used in this manner.

I'm a week behind on my part of the game from last week (it was one of "those" weeks), but, thankfully, I had time Sunday to finally get in the kitchen. So last week I pulled TV, again, and ended up with Iron Chef America. As Shorty noted, Food Network was running an Iron Chef-a-thon that weekend so we found ourselves with a challenge within our weekly challenge. Unfortunately, my secret ingredient ended up being one of my least favorite fruits, the tomato.

So I have to make something interesting from a tomato. Hmmm. Well I watched the episode, but I didn't really groove on their recipes so I decided to have some fun. We have a running joke about Iron Chef (Japan and America) and the ice cream machine. They will turn anything and everything into ice cream. So I thought to myself "Shorty got an ice cream machine for Christmas so why not?" Thus it was determined that I would make tomato ice cream. Yes you heard me correctly: Tomato Ice Cream.

Iron Chef: Eggplant!!!

This is Shorty again with another exciting installment of IRON CHEF: SCRUMDELIOCIOUS!!!

So while Peanut ended up with Iron Chef tomato (a fruit he despises) for his challenge this week, I not only ended up with Iron Chef also (thanks to Food Network's Sunday night Iron Chef-A-Thon), but of all ingredients to use...I get EGGPLANT!!! Now...it's not that I hate eggplant, because that's completely untrue. But what are the chances that I would chose that as my secret ingredient, only days after cooking eggplant parmesean on a complete whim?! Now what do I do?!?!? Not only that..I had to go to three different grocery stores to find the stupid vegetable!

Ugh...but enough ranting...on to cooking...

This is Shorty coming at you again. So this morning on my way to work, I stopped by the 99 Cents Only store to pick up a few things for work like dish soap and sponges, and noticed they had huge, beautiful eggplants in the produce section - 2 for a dollar!!! I've never been a big fan of eggplant, and I've NEVER cooked it at home, but how do you pass up that deal?!

I searched online for a recipe idea, trying to avoid the obvious Eggplant Parmesean, but in the end, that's whaat I decided to go with. I figured..."eggplant parm should be easy enough to whip up!" Let me warn you know...that is NOT a dish you can just "whip up"... While delicious, we didn't end up eating until 9:45pm last night.

Regardless...as this is a random post, and not part of the blogging game we're playing, I'm going to try and make it short and sweet:

Tonight's Winning Numbers Are...

Well, apparently we're lazy bloggers...we played our new food game for the first time last Sunday...and we're just now getting around to posing about it! Shame on us, I know! Also, Peanut has come down with a nasty cold, and since he's the one who is really "running the show" our blog has taken the back burner. So...tonight, I'm going at it solo! Well...he's on the couch watching American Idol, and coaching me through the blog process. So let's get started...

My winning numbers were 1-8-288. That brought me to "Taste of Home: Winning Recipes" and I had a choice between Spinach Artichoke Pie and Cheesy Zucchini Saute. As I'm a huge fan of spinach artichoke dip, I had to go with the pie tonight.

I prepared my pie dish by brushing it with olive oil and coating it with bread crumbs, just like preparing a cake pan with butter and flour.

Next, I sauteed some mushrooms in some olive oil. Once they were tender, I added the spinach, artichokes, bread cubes, and cheddar (can't go wrong with cheddar!), pimientos, eggs, and garlic powder.

Spread it into the pie dish, sprinkle with more cheese, and bake for about 30 minutes. It doesn't get more simple than this!

While delicious, I must admit that the artichokes made the dish a little salty, but it was a good dish all around.

Peanut's winning numbers were 3 and 12. That led us to "Down Home with the Neely's" or "Big Daddy's House". While I'm sure Peanut would have a lot to say about either one of these shows...let me just put it this way--the hosts are annoying! However, that's how the dice fell, so we went with what sounded the best: the Neely's "Rustic Apple Tart". And best of all, it was so easy to make!

We cored, peeled, and sliced 2 Granny Smith and 2 Golden Delicious apples, and tossed them with a little brown sugar, cinnamon, and kosher salt.

Then we rolled out a frozen pie crust large enough to cover the bottom of a 12-inch cheesecake pan. While that's not really the norm for making a tart, we figured baking it in the pan would be an easy way to keep things round and uniform.

We laid the apples in a pretty little spiral pattern, then folded up the outside of the dough. Aww...how rustic!

Finally, we brushed the entire thing with melted butter. So Paula Deen, but so delicious! Time to bake!

Once the tart came out of the oven, we brushed the entire thing with melted peach preserves. Mmmmm...that really made the flavor pop!

The only criticism I have about the tart is that it probably could have baked just a little bit longer. The crust wasn't quite golden enough, and the apples were still a little crisp. But that didn't stop me from loving the end result.

Games in the Kitchen

So we've just begun this blog and already we've decided to take it in a new direction. Although we cook almost everyday, we found that we weren't photographing and blogging about our basic meals. So we decided to spice things up a bit. We will continue to post the random leftover creations and new recipes throughout, but now that we have a direction for the blog, we'll work a little harder to make sure our pictures and posts actually make it on there.

The other day I came across a couple's blog dedicated to re-creating recipes from their massive cooking magazine collection/subscriptions. We don't receive any magazine subscriptions, but we do have quite a large cook book collection (that continues growing, thanks to my mom's generosity). Since it's about time they got some use and since I can't get enough of other blogs and the Food Network, we decided to us them to create a new game for ourselves. Each of these categories (cookbooks, food blogs, Food Network) has been assigned a number set: 1/4-Cook Books, 2/5-Food Blogs, 3/6-Food Network. We'll let a simple little dice, and the help of a random number generator found at http://www.random.org to determine our stomachs' fate...

Each category has it's own set of rules:

Cook Books - If the die lands on 1 or 4, we'll let random.org tell us which cookbook to use (we have a total of 40, so far) counting from left to right. Once the book is chosen, we will input the number of pages into the generator, and the resulting page number will be our launching point. Multiple recipes on one pages means we get to have a choice in the matter :-)

Food Blogs - If the die lands on 2 or 5, we'll follow the same principle as with the cookbooks and random.org. We have our favorite blog sites numbered in a spreadsheet and then we'll either break the recipes down by alphabetical order or use the creator's category list. (Shorty wants to simply create the blog's most recent recipe, but I want more diversity.)

Food Network - If the die lands on 3 or 6, we get to watch TV!!! Just kidding...but this is, in my opinion, the most difficult option. Random.org will select a number from between 9 and 24 to determine from which time slot we must pick a recipe. (Early AM on the Food Network is normally used for paid programming and other silly infomercials, so we've left out the time slots 1am-8am). Once a slot has been decided, we'll skip ahead to the next occurrence of that time slot on the cable listings, and see what's on the menu. If two half-hour cooking shows happen to fall into that slot, then we get lots of options! We can pick any one of the recipes being made on either show. If a one-hour show, like Iron Chef or Chopped fall there, we'll challenge ourselves to create a new recipe with "today's secret ingredient." However, if a show such as Ace of Cakes or Unwrapped is on we'll skip to the next day's options since those types of shows don't lend themselves to this type of game.

We're both excited about this new idea and have already made our first selections. We decided that Shorty and I would both play separately to increase the fun and recipe opportunities. So look for a new post tomorrow detailing today's cooking adventures, and hopefully excluding any reports of visits to the local hospital! Now lets get cooking!!!

Mustard in a Muffin????

I am an avid reader of many food blogs, especially those involving baking since that is one of my dream jobs. Anyway, I was perusing the Cupcake Project and I ran across this fascinating recipe. The writer of this blog is so creative and this recipe is a fine example. When Shorty heard the "secret ingredient" he was determined to make it. He's a huge fan of odd ingredients. So here you have it:

MOM Muffins (Maple Oatmeal Mustard)

Since we borrowed the recipe from another blogger you can find it here:

Maple Oatmeal Mustard Muffins

Shorty did make an alteration in that he used regular, vanilla flavored yogurt instead of the Greek yogurt. It fit our finances better and we are all about doing things on the cheap. :o)

Now I know the idea of mustard in a muffin is throwing some of you off, but they look delicious don't they? Actually, I was a little leary of the mustard as well, but Shorty had faith. I'm glad he did. These are delicious!!! They're like a hearty bran muffin with a wonderful maple glaze on top. Mmmmm!

The muffins have a rich, warm aftertaste that I can only attribute to the mustard. They also have a unique texture due to the mustard seeds which reminded me oddly of nuts or poppy seeds in other muffins I've eaten. We will definitely be making these again!

Rediscover Leftover: No Leftover Left Behind

Several days ago Shorty made this wonderful squash soup with cornmeal dumplings on top. I really felt it was more of a stew than a soup. It was hearty and full of lots of chunky veggies. Drool! Anyway, the leftovers found their way into the fridge and, sadly, we kept overlooking them. Tonight we decided we had to correct this oversight, but neither of us really wanted it again. Then he announced that he was going to throw it in the blender and make a creamy soup. Blender? Creamy soup? Bring it on! I love it when he gets all creative and decides to play. So I let him do his thing and was surprised at the result.

I came into the kitchen to find that not only was the soup now thick and creamy with just the right amount of chunkiness, but he had also fried up some spicy Italian sausage and warmed up some ready made dinner rolls (hey, sometimes you've got to bring a little of that semi-homemade in when you don't have a lot of time.) We filled our bowls, mixed in the sausage, and dug in. Let me just say..... Yum! Shorty added a hint of rosemary to the soup and it was perfect. This was one time when a good dish was better as a leftover. Sadly, we're still new to the food blog world and our bowls were empty before we remembered photos. :o(

Pages

Eat The City: Pupusas, Yuca, and Tamales Oh My!

Don't You Forget About My Delicious Caramelized Onion & Sausage Pizza

Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad

Where's the Beef???

Breakfast for Dinner

Vegetables in a Cobbler?? Well, Why Not?

Yes! We Have No Bananas, No Bananas Today...

Wicked Cool Chowdah!