This is cheating just a little, because it's not something I made last night, but rather last weekend. Chris wanted to have tacos out of the frozen fish planks we got, and I had some frozen shrip so I figured what the hell.
The problem with tacos of any kind is that we always pine for those tasty refried beans you get at Mexican restaurants. The canned beans at the store are a poor imitation, maybe it's something to do with the shelf stability. Of course for all I know those are actually what restaurants use and I'm just swayed by the fancy serving (styrofoam bowls at Taco Bell are totally fancy, right?)
So I decided to try making my own, using a slightly modified version of Buffy's Refried Beans, adding 1/2 tsp garlic powder, 1/2 tsp cumin, and 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper.
Since I wasn't sure about shelf-stable lard from the store I just bought a package of bacon and saved the drippings. I wasn't paying attention when I bought it and didn't notice it wasn't sugar cured, and damn it was salty. Or at least I thought it was. Looking at the recipe, I thought 3 cans of beans was excessive, so I divided it into thirds. Won't do that again - it was barely enough for two since we both love beans!
I used about 3 tablespoons of the bacon grease, which was pretty much all of it, and I also added a little drizzle of vegetable oil just to make sure there was enough. I think oil or butter would be okay to make up if there wasn't quite enough of the drippings left over, but I'd be a little hesitant about using only those. They'd probably do in a pinch though.
No extra salt because of the salt level of the bacon, and I tasted them once and thought "bah! too bland! more cayenne pepper!" Naturally, my careful efforts to just add a tiny sprinkle more were dashed when a clump dislodged. Scooping out the excess didn't go as well as I thought, because those beans were HOT. Definitely hotter than they tasted at first, and long after dinner was finished my mouth was still on fire. Being from Texas failed to bless me with some kind of superhuman ability to tolerate spicy shit, but that didn't stop me from eating all of the beans. Tasty! Definitly will make those again... two cans at a time instead of just one.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
First real entry and I'm already failing.
Weekend before last, I actually went wild cooking. Pot roast one night, baked pork chops with a white wine and cream of mushroom sauce, baked ziti rigatoni, and other stuff I've forgotten. But now, as previously discussed, I've forgotten what I did and didn't like about those recipes, so I'll have to come back to them again later. It was mostly tasty, though.
If I were to write a letter to my 15 year old self, I'd tell myself to start trying to cook and promise myself that I'd enjoy it more than I'd think. And that, for a woman who once neglected to take a frozen pizza off the cardboard before baking, I'm surprisingly good at it when I pay attention to what I'm doing. The trick is paying attention, because I have almost no attention span. Only the imminent threat of things boiling over or burning down the apartment keeps me on track (let's not talk about the time I wandered off and left the water running, filling the sink for dishes. The sink didn't overflow and that's all that matters).
Anyway, last weekend we were having BBQ chicken - simplified with the helpful suggestion of "why don't you just use bottled BBQ sauce?" That's easy as shit - thaw chicken breasts, season with whatever you like on chicken (garlic powder, Mrs. Dash and maybe a little onion powder for us, since I try not to use salt if I can help it). Lightly spray a baking dish with cooking spray, cover with foil and bake chicken breasts 20 minutes at 350. Remove, drain any fat, cover liberally with sauce, and bake uncovered for another 15-20 minutes. This was highly simplified, considering that I was trying to make my own sauce too. Maybe another time... although sometimes it's not worth the trouble.
Some kind of potatoes were wanted, but not regular mashed potatoes, so we decided to try Cheesy Potato Bake instead. I should have read the comments, because they were right about it being runny. Of course, I made them the cheater's way - I used a bag of microwave mashed potatoes. Those always work better for me if I smash them up first, and I usually use my giant serving fork before I take after them with a hand mixer. Sure I could buy a potato masher, but I always forget. My grandmother swears that potatoes will do something weird if you beat them too long (get sticky, maybe? turn into wallpaper paste? cthulu-mogrify themselves?) but I've yet to manage to ruin a batch of them. Not for lack of beating, either.
That being said, I shouldn't have measured out 3 cups. Stick to the whole bag, and gradually add the cheddar cheese soup until it hits a consistency you like. This dish will NOT thicken as it bakes. The top gets browned slightly, yes, but underneath it will be as runny as a new tie-dyed shirt (ask me later about the time a Christmas gift turned me into a smurf). Letting it sit a few minutes in a bowl before eating helps some, but even then it's kind of like really thick mashed potato soup. It is, however, really really good. I'll admit that I didn't even cut up the green onions with a knife. I washed a bunch and then went after them with freshly-washed kitchen scissors because I didn't want to drag out a cutting board. Hey, I never claimed these were going to be any kind of pro cooking tips here, so feel free to skip over any potentially failure-from-the-Health-Board stuff I might unwittingly be doing. Neither of us have gotten food poisoning or brain worms from pork yet, so I figure we're okay.
If I were to write a letter to my 15 year old self, I'd tell myself to start trying to cook and promise myself that I'd enjoy it more than I'd think. And that, for a woman who once neglected to take a frozen pizza off the cardboard before baking, I'm surprisingly good at it when I pay attention to what I'm doing. The trick is paying attention, because I have almost no attention span. Only the imminent threat of things boiling over or burning down the apartment keeps me on track (let's not talk about the time I wandered off and left the water running, filling the sink for dishes. The sink didn't overflow and that's all that matters).
Anyway, last weekend we were having BBQ chicken - simplified with the helpful suggestion of "why don't you just use bottled BBQ sauce?" That's easy as shit - thaw chicken breasts, season with whatever you like on chicken (garlic powder, Mrs. Dash and maybe a little onion powder for us, since I try not to use salt if I can help it). Lightly spray a baking dish with cooking spray, cover with foil and bake chicken breasts 20 minutes at 350. Remove, drain any fat, cover liberally with sauce, and bake uncovered for another 15-20 minutes. This was highly simplified, considering that I was trying to make my own sauce too. Maybe another time... although sometimes it's not worth the trouble.
Some kind of potatoes were wanted, but not regular mashed potatoes, so we decided to try Cheesy Potato Bake instead. I should have read the comments, because they were right about it being runny. Of course, I made them the cheater's way - I used a bag of microwave mashed potatoes. Those always work better for me if I smash them up first, and I usually use my giant serving fork before I take after them with a hand mixer. Sure I could buy a potato masher, but I always forget. My grandmother swears that potatoes will do something weird if you beat them too long (get sticky, maybe? turn into wallpaper paste? cthulu-mogrify themselves?) but I've yet to manage to ruin a batch of them. Not for lack of beating, either.
That being said, I shouldn't have measured out 3 cups. Stick to the whole bag, and gradually add the cheddar cheese soup until it hits a consistency you like. This dish will NOT thicken as it bakes. The top gets browned slightly, yes, but underneath it will be as runny as a new tie-dyed shirt (ask me later about the time a Christmas gift turned me into a smurf). Letting it sit a few minutes in a bowl before eating helps some, but even then it's kind of like really thick mashed potato soup. It is, however, really really good. I'll admit that I didn't even cut up the green onions with a knife. I washed a bunch and then went after them with freshly-washed kitchen scissors because I didn't want to drag out a cutting board. Hey, I never claimed these were going to be any kind of pro cooking tips here, so feel free to skip over any potentially failure-from-the-Health-Board stuff I might unwittingly be doing. Neither of us have gotten food poisoning or brain worms from pork yet, so I figure we're okay.
Every New Beginning
Here we go.
I'm starting this blog as a way to keep track of a new project, and also as a way to pass the time until a big event. See, in... 80-something-too-many-days, my partner and I are taking my mother-in-law to Walt Disney World. It's the first ever trip for them, and the first for me when I'll be old and (hopefully) coherent enough to remember.
I went once with my parents when I was maybe... 7? 8? I'm not sure how old I was at the time, partially because my memory is horrible in general, and partially because I was too busy looking for coins the entire time. Seriously. We were there... a few days, I'm guessing? I remember riding It's A Small World until my dad refused to go anymore, I vaguely remember Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I got violently ill from a ride that involved a round projection dome and possibly hang gliding? Although maybe my memory is fucking with me and that was somewhere else. My memory is a bitch like that, but I remember sitting on the floor with my head buried in my knees. Mortifyingly, I do clearly remember saying that the day had been AWESOME, not because of the rides, but because I found almost a dollar in change. To be honest, I'm surprised my parents didn't sell me to Disney to be bolted into place in It's A Small World. Those aren't robots. They're real brainwashed mechazombies. True story.
We're also going to go up to the Georgia Aquarium. Because they have whale sharks. And I cannot tell you how much I need to see whale sharks. Seriously. It's on my bucket list, right below petting a Galapagos giant tortoise while actually in the Galapagos, which I scratched off while in college.
Needless to say, I'm excited. We're all excited. I've printed up screenshots of Google maps for directions and hotels along the way. I've mapped out and gotten directions to gas stations. I've calculated distances between towns so I know how far away the next toilet probably is. I've located non-Houston-available places that we want to eat while we're on the trip. I'm having to forcibly stop myself from inventing more things just so I can map and print them out of sheer need to do something in order to distract my brain.
Which is where this blog comes in.
Recently, in a fit of boredom with our usual rotation of meals, we had a discussion about how bored we were with all of our normal vegetables. Countless hours later I was still on allrecipes.com, gleefully throwing things into my recipe box and crowing things like "ZUCCHINI! Ooh, look, I could make my own bbq sauce. Mmm, stew..."
I'm sure that got old fast, but bless Chris for just making the appropriate yummy noises and ignoring my ranting until I actually started making sense. Except when suddenly there was yelling about how I'd been swearing I was going to make stew for years and there still wasn't any fucking stew (got me there, and we still don't have any, but only because 100 degree weather is not stew weather and I am totally going to make stew this fall, shut up). Unlike all the other times I've claimed that I was going to start cooking, though, I actually did this time. Some of the stuff went well, some of it didn't. The problem? I'll never remember what I thought "huh, I need to change xyz later, and next time I need to cook z first because that was done WAY too early" about unless I write it down.
Maybe I'll take pictures of the food eventually, though my disaster of a kitchen post-cooking might keep me from doing that. Or maybe it'll encourage me to clean up more often! (Yeah right.) Regardless, I'm trying to cook one new thing at least every weekend. I'm not trying to Julie my way through the Julia Child cookbook or anything. There will be no pot-popping lobster boiling going on in my kitchen, mostly because the biggest things I can bring myself to kill are roaches and I totally don't have a pot big enough for lobsters anyway, plus I ride the bus home from work. And while you can take animals on the bus, provided that they're properly contained or serviced (service dogs, you pervert)... I can't imagine that they'd be thrilled about me bringing on a bag of lobsters. Bag? Box? Whatever. But what a conversation starter THAT would be!
And now you know why I called this blog Cooking Inanity. Maybe I should have called it cooking rambling instead...
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