Tag: bacon

After seeing this completely and totally awesome page for minestrone linked off of wikipedia, I felt it was my patriotic duty to make minestrone. After all, I do live in Las Vegas, and anybody who lives here knows that italian restaurants outnumber any other kind of restaurant by a factor of approximately thirty-seven to three. I especially liked the basic assumption- that you can pretty much just buy seasonal vegetables, completely at random, throw them all together, and make some soup. I mean, you basically don't need to know how to do anything. How could this possibly go wrong?

So I went to Sunflower Market, since they sell local produce, and bought twelve of every vegetable they had. If you could screw up minestrone, I was going to figure out how. I came home, got a big stock pot out, and started my soffrito- a fancy word to say I rendered the fat out of some bacon and then threw in some onions, leeks, and shallots.

I also didn't have pig trotters or marrow bones or anything like that, so for thickening I waited until my 'soffrito' was pretty much sweated, then threw in some flour, like a roux. Then I spent TWO. HOURS. cutting up vegetables and throwing them in. I cubed the turnips. I chopped up the zucchini, summer squash, celery root, spinach leaves, potatoes, and carrots. It looked like I was carving up the grisly aftermath of a war against the vegetables, a war which I handily won. All of it drowning in six cans of chicken broth and a pitcher of water, with a sprig of rosemary (I fished that out after everything started smelling like rosemary), a bay leaf, and a parmesan crust. Then, because I was pretty much throwing in everything I had, I put in two cans of kidney beans and a cup of orzo. By this point I was in such a rut that I might have diced my children and thrown them in, had they wandered into the kitchen.

It cooked for HOURS. Three and a half hours. I felt like a witch, sitting there and stirring my massive cauldron of stuff. And then something magical happened. It started to smell like delicious.

So, basically, you'd have to try way harder than I did to screw up minestrone.

Last night, I decided to do away with a bunch of leeks by whipping up some sort of soup with them, mostly because I'd wanted to try vichysoisse for months. I can now say that, whatever it is I made last night, I ate it and it was fantastic.

• 3 leeks, chopped fine
• 6 red potatoes, cut thinly
• 2 cans of chicken broth
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 4 pieces bacon
• 1 pint cream
• garlic salt
• pepper to taste
• 1/4 tsp celery seed
• 1/4 cup mild cheddar, shredded
• 1/2 cup romano, grated
• 1/4 cup portobello mushrooms, chopped
• 1/4 cup butter

Little did I know what was going to happen when we broke open the two bags of Fresh Express: BLT Caesar salad we had sitting in the fridge, awaiting a special moment such as 'not knowing what to cook for dinner'.

The little packets are nigh impossible to open; using the combined powers of my fork and teeth I managed to sever the ironclad baggie of sundried tomatoes, which have to be the most potent and wonderful tomato flavor I have ever purchased; the little baggie of real, cooked bacon bits, which smelled kind of like human waste but tasted pretty fantastic overall; the parmesan-romano-asiago packet; and the caesar dressing. Overall, it was pretty darn fantastic for what I expected to come from a bagged salad. I wouldn't mind eating it regularly. But do yourself a favor and do not open the bacon bits with your teeth, or bring the baggie close to your face after it is opened.

This weekend, I once again proffered my fantastic cookery in two dishes- one sublime, one subpar. Not to say the subpar one didn't come out alright...

The night before grocery day is always a bit of a scrounge for miscible ingredients, since there's not much to plan a main course around. While the Tart was telling me the same three ingredients she'd been mentioning every night for a week - eggs, bacon, and potatoes - I used my fantastic powers of looking at things and discovered a bag of thin egg noodles.

Since we stock about twenty billion cans of broth just in case we need one, I salvaged two cans of chicken stock and set both of these out. Now, I needed something interesting, something that would keep this from turning into a generic chicken noodle soup.

After poking around in the fridge, I found a third of a ham steak in a tupperware container. Now, I remembered this ham steak. Sort of. Kind of. You see, we'd had it for quite a while. I might have named it had I remembered it existed.

I lifted the lid and sniffed. Okay, this smells bad. Or does it? I remembered something I heard a teacher say in high school- if you accidentally switch sodas with someone else, the first sip always tastes like the soda you were expecting. Human suggestibility is prominent in our sensory awareness, being the point. So I sniffed again and convinced myself that what I felt was the florid odor of decay was, in fact, just the inscrutable hamminess of... well, ham.

I mean, back during the Great Depression they threw rashers of bacon out in the streets, right? Bacon lasts forever by dint of its high salt and low moisture content. Isn't ham cured pretty much the same way? Waste not, want not. With all those things I convinced myself to cook.

So, I diced the ham steak and fried it with some butter in a large skillet, then added the broth and noodles. Nice and simple. Nobody would suspect that this was Hindenberg ham. Would they?

Figuring that if we were all going to die from some ungodly taint, I'd rather be hung as a sheep than as a lamb, I made sure to add extra chunks to my serving. I couldn't get the thought that I was serving this to small children out of my head.

You know what? It turned out pretty good. I didn't get sick. The ham was kind of tangy though. Nah. It's all in my head.

I was feeling relatively lazy, but wanted to whip up something for dinner, so here's the not-quite carbonara I pulled out:

• 1 lb angel-hair pasta
• 5-6 strips of bacon
• 1/4 stick butter
• 1 bulb garlic
• 1/2 cup grated romano
• 1 egg
• olive oil

While boiling the pasta, I baked the garlic at 350 degrees and shredded the bacon into small pieces. Then, I put the bacon and butter on medium-high heat until crispy. After taking the garlic out and mashing it, I mixed it, the butter and bacon, the egg (beaten heavily), and the romano into the pasta. Pretty fantastic stuff, and less work than it seems from the description.

Note that the egg is not cooked before adding, which probably freaks out the salmonella gang. I think it got pretty well cooked by the hot pasta and butter, and none of us got sick, so that's par for the course.

This one starts off as a bit of a disaster.

I had four great tastes that I figured would taste great together- spinach, salt pork, artichoke hearts, and mushrooms. Unfortunately, my quantites were a bit off, and the cumin I added really didn't help the dish much; in addition, the artichokes were marinated in a bit saltier liquid than I'd hoped for.

Were I to do it again, my next recipe would look more like this:

• 1 lb bacon, cooked on low until all the fat is gone
• 2 cups chopped mushrooms, cooked in the bacon grease
• 1 lb sauteed spinach, seasoned with garlic and onion powder
• 1 can of artichoke hearts

Hey all. Just thought I'd mention that the gift card / review thing isn't going to happen this week. The gods of financial prowess hath bestowed bounty upon mine wallet, and thus I was able to buy real food. Maybe next week? although I think all we'll have next week is pilgrim sandwiches with the turkey.. or, turkey sandwiches with... er.. nevermind. Now grab my bacon grease and slather me up some homies!