Cauliflower Mushroom and Ham Soup

So, I've been trying to use our Blend-tec blender more often, and I've also been cooking with cauliflower more often as well because it's a nice texture/consistency to add flavors to.  My most recent concoction is a pretty hearty soup.  Now typically I am of the mind set that soup is not a meal.  It's more like a side dish or an appetizer, so I wanted to try to make a full meal kind of soup and here's what I came up with...

Ingredients:

Dried Black Eyed Peas

Ham

Cauliflower

Mushrooms

Garlic

Vegetable Stock

Onions

Cayanne Pepper

This recipe requires a bit more preparation than other things I've made, so I recommend that you being the first step of this meal after you eat dinner one night, so that you can get things ready for the next night's meal.

Step 1 - You need to soak your black eyed peas.  I soaked 1 cup of dried black eyed peas in 4 cups of water over night and into the next day.  (You don't have to soak them this long, but really it's not going to hurt them, you really need roughly 8 to 10 hours of soaking.)

 

Step 2 - An hour before you're going to eat drain your blacked eyed peas and add 2 cups of vegetable stock and put them on low/medium heat on the stove top.  Watch and stir every once and a while, making sure that the vegetable stock covers all your black eyed peas.

Step 3 - While the peas are cooking go ahead and wash and chop up a head of cauliflower and throw it in

your steamer.  Do the same with about 2 cups of sliced mushrooms.  STEAM!!!! This takes about 20 minutes.

Step 4 - While your veggies are steaming, and your peas are cooking go ahead and get out a frying pan.  Chop up about 1/4 cup onions, a couple of cloves of garlic, and about 1 lb of ham into big chunks.  Add everything to your frying pan with a tiny bit of butter or olive oil and season with cayenne, salt and pepper.  Kind of push things around constantly so the ham doesn't stick and so that everything gets covered and cooked nicely.

Step 5 - Place your steamed veggies in the blender.  Drain the peas and pour the chicken stock they've been cooking in, in the blender as well.  BLEND!!!  AFter it's blended to the consistency you like pour the mixture back in the pot with the peas.   Stir in the ham, onions and garlic.  BAM, you're done!

When I made this I didn't have any really good ham in the house, so we just used sandwich meat, which was okay but big chunks of ham would have been so much better.

We had a bag o' salad with our soup, just to add more greens.  As another idea I think you could cook the ham with the peas if you really wanted to, rather than using a frying pan.  But who knows!

Enjoy!!!

 

 

 

Mama's Fish House

Mama's Fish House is DELICIOUS!  It's also amazingly beautiful and will make you feel like you're living in a Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe.  The restaurant is a collection of old sails and weird ship-like things.  The entire restaurant is open air, there is a roof, but you can feel the cool breeze of the ocean throughout the restaurant, and there are gigantic oriental rugs all over the floor.  And the food is phenomenal!

We made reservations for lunch at 1pm, and lounged around until we needed to get to the airport - the airport is only about 10 minutes away from Mama's.  I was driving so I started off my meal with a virgin passion fruit daiquiri, and it was wonderful, not too sweet just perfect.  We ordered: the wasabi crusted calamari, lobster guacamole, and a sampling of their sashimi.  The wasabi calami was absolutely the best, it was cooked perfectly and had a nice citrus bite to it.  The sashimi sampler was neat because it was tuna, salmon and a white fish (can't remember which one) and each choose had it's own special kind of salt to go with it, which I thought was pretty awesome.   There's pink salt, who knew!  The lobster guacamole was good, but I think we could have done with out it.

We split our main course because we'd ordered so many of the appetizers and we wanted to save room for dessert.  We ordered the House Special which is Stuffed MahiMahi - Stuffed with lobster, crab and Maui onion, baked in a macadamia nut crust.  It was melt in your mouth delicious.  Order this, there's a reason it's the house special.

We were super full but couldn't help ourselves and still ordered dessert.  I had the chocolate pie, and a mocha.  Bob had the creme brûlée.  The mocha was HUGE, had I known how big it would be I wouldn't have ordered one, it was a dessert in itself, delicious but huge.  My chocolate pie was sooooo rich, Bob and I should definitely have shared it.  The creme brûlée was really good as well.  We just ordered way too much food, but it was so good so we kept eating ourselves into a food coma.  It's a good thing we had time to sit there and digest before going to the airport.

The food is a little more expensive but all the fish is caught that morning so it's super fresh, and our waitress was awesome.  Go here, it's worth every penny, you'll have a wonderful time.

 

Faux-babs, Salads and Cheesy Garlic Cauliflower Mash!

Tonight's dinner was pretty darn delish, and super duper easy to make.  I highly recommend you give it a try, you only need about an hour and then dinner will be on the table.

As an aside, I decided to make the cheesy garlic cauliflower mash because we're trying to be a little healither but at the same time I have a great love for potatoes, mashed potatoes in particular.  I read an article in the latest issue of Rachel Ray's cooking magazine about mashed cauliflower and it sounded sooo yummy so I thought we'd give it a try.

Okay, so before you begin you dinner of awesome you'll need to pick up your ingredients.

 

- meat!  (I usually plan on 1/2 lb per person and will typically choose tenderloin)

- 1/4 cup mushrooms

- 1/4 cup red pepper (you can use green but I feel like the green peppers have a really overpowering taste)

- 1/4 cup onion

- 1/2 a tomato

- seasoning!!! (I like Angelo's BBQ rub, it's awesome and super spicy!)

- 1 head of cauliflower

- 1/4 cup garlic jack cheese

- 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream

- 1tbsp butter

- 1 bag of whatever grocery store salad you'd enjoy

- salt and pepper to taste

- aluminum foil

- cookie sheet

- steamer

- blender

All right, so now that you have everything you need here's what you do.

Step 1 - Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.  While the oven is heating up chop your onion, red pepper, tomatoes and mushrooms into large chunks.  (You can really throw any veggie you want in here.)  Go ahead and chop up your head of cauliflower and set it aside.  Now cut up your chosen meat into kebab sized chunks.

Step 2 - Lay our a large sheet of aluminum foil and place your large chunks of meat on your foil.  Toss your seasoning for the meat over the top of the chunks and roll them around a little to get them nice and coated.  Now place the mushrooms, onions, red peppers and tomatoes over the top of the chunks of meat and place another piece of foil over the top of your yummy creation.  Roll up all the sides of your aluminum steamer and place the foil steamer on the cookie sheet and place it in the oven.  (You'll let this cook for about 35 minutes.)

Step 3 - Butter the bottom of your steamer so it doesn't burn your cauliflower and toss your cut up cauliflower in the steamer and start it a' steaming!

Step - 4 While your cauliflower is steaming and your faux-babs are baking go ahead and clean up your mess, and then cut up about 1/4 cup of your garlic jack cheese.  Get out your blender and get ready.  Mix your bag o' salad and set aside.

Step 5 - Your faux-babs should be awesome, so pull the cookie sheet out of the oven and place it on top of the stove to sit for a minute.  Don't open the foil container yet though, wait until right before you serve it.  While the faux-babs are sitting toss your cauliflower in the blender with the garlic jack cheese and 1/4 cup of whipping cream, add some salt and pepper to taste and BLEND!!!!!  And now you're ready!

Serve and eat your awesome meal!!!!!

Surf - In New Hampshire

Bobicito and I are currently visiting New Hampshire to celebrate a new baby and a wedding.  We thought the best thing to do while here would be to eat some darn good seafood, and we have.  We checked out a new restaurant in Portsmouth called "Surf,"  it was delish!  We ordered way too much food, but loved almost all of it.

We started with the Parmesan-Fried Calamari - Tossed with parmesan cheese and cherry pepper vinaigrette.  We ate every last bite and it was so cheesy and good, it melted in our mouths.  I could have eaten an order all by myself and been perfectly happy.

Because we wanted to try a whole bunch of stuff we also ordered the on special tuna tartar, spicy ceviche, and raw lobster.  We were disappointed with the tuna tartar and spicy ceviche.  The tuna tartar had a weird olive tapanade and boiled egg, the olive tapanade was really overwhelming on the taste.  The spicy ceviche was the worst ceviche we've ever had.  It was like the restaurant took some mango pico di galio and then threw in some scallops with lemon juice.  It just didn't go together, and tasted really weird.    The lobster was of course delicious.

Bob had the Surf and Turf - Two grilled tenderloin medallions on chive mashed potatoes, topped with
two Jonah crab cakes, bearnaise sauce, and grilled asparagus.  The tenderloin medallions were cooked to absolute perfection, so good!  The crab cakes were not the best, but okay.   I think the crab cakes would have been better with a little more seasoning.

I had the Lobster Kristina - Steamed & shucked native lobster flambéed with cognac, lobster stock, chives, cream and butter, served with jasmine rice & grilled asparagus.  That lobster was absolutely delicious, we ate every last bit of it.

The price was actually pretty reasonable considering the amount of food we ate.  I'd recommend the calamari and the two different entrees we had, absolutely delicious.  The raw bar seemed to be hit and miss.

:)Margaret

Pork, it's what's for dinner...tonight anyway!

In an effort to use our ridiculously expensive blender more I've decided we are now a soup eating house hold.  So tonight we are having home made Tomato Cheese Soup.  I'm quite pleased.  I found a recipe online and then adjusted per usual, for instance the original receipt didn't call for garlic or jalapenos.  Who has a recipe for tomato soup with out garlic of jalapenos, that's just wrong!   Now, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "wait a moment, I've been misled, the title of this post was about pork, this isn't pork!"  And right you are, but don't worry meat eaters, we're also having stuffed pork chops with our soup, as well as a delish salad that I'm whipping together as we, errr, I type.

Tonights pork chops come to us courtesy of Mollie Stone's Market in the Castro.  According to the gentleman working in the butcher shop tonight, these are pork chops stuffed with spicy italian sausage with spices and parmesan.  I'm quite excited about this, who knew you could stuff meat with other meat?  Okay, i knew you could do that because I've had turducken, but this is completely different.  There's also a nice layer of parmesan on the outside of the pork chop.  Okay, on to the recipes and cooking directions....

(Cheesy) Tomato Cheese Soup

Ingredients: The ingredients with parenthesis around them are the original recipe ingredients and portion suggestions.

tomatos ( 1 large)

onion (1/4 cup)

cheese (1/4 cup)

vegetable bouillon (1 tsp)

tomato paste (1 1/2 tsp)

salt and pepper (to taste)

water (1 cup)

cayenne pepper - shake it, you know what you like

jalapenos - I threw in half of one, seeds and all

garlic - about 4 little cloves

I only used the recipe as a basic guideline for my creation.  I used two medium-ish tomatoes.  Who really knows what a "large" tomato looks like anyway?  Anyway, I used 2 medium tomatoes, a handful of diced onions, two handfuls of cheese (a blended mix of something or another that's also good for quesadillas), a couple scoops of tomato paste, and a scoop of vegetable bouillon - which by the way I'd never seen before.  I then threw in the half a jalapeno, and the garlic along with a few shakes from the salt and pepper shakers and a little cayenne pepper to top it off.  I threw all these ingredients into my blender and smoothed it out nicely.  The original recipe then tells you to add a cup of hot water to the mix and then eat it.  That's silly, why would I do that when I've made such delicious soup?  I halved the amount of water (okay I just eyed it) and then put the mixture on the stove top to heat up slowly and deliciously.  I've been taste testing ever since, and damn is it good.  Mmmmmm.  I highly recommend this if you like tomato soup, you will never eat campbell's or another canned tomato soup again.

Pork Chops

I'm not going to list the ingredients because I didn't make it.  And I already told you what was in the stuffed pork chops at the beginning of this post.  I will tell you how I chose to cook them.  My favorite way, wrapped in tin foil in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour.  Yum, moist and perfect.

Apple Salad

Ingredients:

spinach

pine nuts

cayenne pepper

apple/s

feta

My fav olive oil dressing concoction

So you don't have to use the pine nuts, you can also use almond slivers or walnuts if you want it to be easier.  I just happened to have pine nuts in my fridge that I needed to use.  I used red apple slices from the Chiquita snack pack because I didn't want them to go to waste.  I used the equivilant of probably 1 and a half apples and we had more than enough salad for two of us.  Four people could have enjoyed the salad, it was spicy, but sweet and I'm quite pleased with my decision to use some cayenne pepper while browning the pine nuts.

Overall it was a very yummy and pretty healthy dinner.  Look at me cooking at home!

:)M

The Awesomeness of Olive Oil, Vinegar, Lemon Juice and Pepper

While this is not a new concept I thought I'd write a little bit about my love of the combo of: olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper.  I feel like it's one of the most versatile concoctions you can use with food.  I've used this combo as for pasta salad in place of using a mayo based dressing, I toss it on almost any green salad, and it's great as a marinade.  When ever I need to add a little "umph" to something I immediately turn to my trusty combo and I'm never disappointed.

I don't typically measure my combos but just eye how much I'm adding.  I use an olive oil base with a splash of lemon juice and vinegar and then throw in some pepper until I feel satisfied that I'll taste it with out being overwhelmed.

To celebrate this awesomeness I'm sharing three of my favorite ways to enjoy the combination:

1 - Pear/Apple, Almond, Feta and Spinach Salad

- 1 pear or granny smith apple sliced thinly

- handfull of slivered almonds

- as much cheese as you'd like, I usually put in about the same amount as the almond slivers

- spinach leaves

- olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper mix

Mix all the ingredients together and then pour the combo on top and toss.  You won't need a lot because it'll cover everything pretty nicely.

2 - Pasta Salad

- rotini noodles

- yellow pepper

- red pepper

- orange pepper

- cherry tomatoes

- zucchini

- onion

- black olives

- sauteed chopped garlic

- pepperoni/salami/ham cubes (pick one or all)

- parmesan cheese

- -olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper mix

Cook the noodles and then set them aside to cool.  Chop up the peppers and zucchini into cubes, cut the cherry tomatoes in half and do whatever you'd like with the olives.  (I also like green olives in this salad but not everyone enjoys them quite like I do.)  Sauté your garlic, or you can use garlic powder, but fresh sauteed will be better.  Add all the ingredients together, I like a lot of cheese but feel free to add however much you like, and then again drizzle the combo on top and toss.  Ready to go!  (You do not need to cook the zucchini, I like it better uncooked, but if you must blanch it real quick.)

3 - Marinade

- garlic

- onions

- basil

-  olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper mix

So this recipe is by taste, so whatever taste you enjoy the most, you should add more of that.  I typically chop up about ten little garlic pieces, half an onion and just a small chunk of basil.  You can use this on pretty much anything, chicken and pork is the best but you could also use it with beef.  Let the meat marinate for a few hours and then prepare however you'd like.  Delish.

So there it is, my love letter to olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and pepper.  mmmmmmm, yummy.

:)M

 

 

 

Brisket, just like my Daddy makes!

Bob and I have mostly moved into our new condo (hooray) and we want to have an awesome house warming party so I thought we should make something awesome, like....my Dad's brisket!  But I didn't want to test out the brisket when we have the party so I had a test run yesterday and I must say, I am most definitely my Daddy's Gal because it was delicious.

I bought a 4 lbs brisket from our local market, Bi-Rite, rubbed it down with Angelo's Beef Rub, put it in a deep roasting dish, covered it with foil and let it cook on 250 degrees for almost 24 hours.  I cut up an onion and placed it all over the top of the brisket.  I pulled the brisket out of the oven after about 10 hours and scooped up the juices and poured it all over the top of the brisket to keep it moist.   When I pulled it out of the oven after the 24 hours I was a little nervous that it was going to be burnt, but after slicing into the brisket we were pleasantly surprised to see that it was wonderfully juicy, and after tasting it....delicious!

To go with this delicious piece of meat made corn on the cob and covered it with butter and cayenne pepper.  I popped it under the broiler for a few minutes to help make it kind of crunchy and turned out great.

We also had blue cheese potato salad.  I found the recipe online and I must say I was kind of disappointed with it.  I wanted some bite to the potato salad and it was just so-so.  I'm thinking some dijon mustard would have helped quite a bit.  If you'd like to try the salad for yourself you can check it out here.  Who knows, you might like it more than we did.

I mixed up a garden salad with mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, onions, orange pepper, avocado, and blue cheese.  I was going to make my grandfather's awesome dressing for the salad but ended up not really having everything I needed at the last minute, it's okay we'll try again next time.

To satiate our practice guests I picked up a fruit platter and a couple of different kinds of cheese with rye triskets, and made my own guacamole to go with chips and salsa.  As per usual, especially with my family, I made way too much food so we ended up with a lot of leftovers.  The brisket was a success and we ate almost all of it, there's just enough left over to make fajitas.  I'm pretty excited about this plan and will update you on how delicious it is.

We now know that I can replicate the awesome brisket and we're really excited about the house warming!

:)M