Archive for the 'recipes' Category
I love slow cooked, chiapas style pork, but I don’t always have 4 hours to wait for dinner. That’s when I turn to
Mexican Pork Tenderloin
Tenderloin is such a great ingredient because it cooks quickly, but it tastes great. You can use it in so many wonderful dishes…like this one.
I was actually really surprised at how cheap I can find pork tenderloin in the store. We were able to buy two-packs of them from the store for about $3.50 a pound. That meant we had enough pork for two meals for about $12-13. That was a real shocker given how expensive beef tenderloin. All in all, not bad.
Not bad at all.
Anyway, this recipe came out of a dinner engagement I had last week. Most times I’d just grill the tenderloins, maybe give them a little glaze or something. Not last week!
I was taking dinner over to a friend’s house and I wanted to do something my friends wouldn’t forget. (For long time readers of the blog, this should imply that I actually had time to plan the meal, something you know rarely, if ever, happens in my house.) What I decided to do was marinate the pork (technically I brined it) overnight in the fridge before searing it off in a hot pan and then letting the oven finish the job.
Again, long time readers of my blog are probably a little surprised the title of this post is Mexican pork since my first inclination is usually to go Asian. However, I didn’t have enough sides to do Asian right, but I did have some rice, some avocado, and some refried beans. Therefore, we were going South of the border with this one.
Fruit Tarts at Skies on Mother’s Day
On Mother’s Day, I took the special mother in my life and our son to Skies’ Restaurant in Kansas City. For those not hip to the Kansas City culinary scene, Skies is the tallest restaurant in the area. It sits proudly atop the Hyatt Regency hotel (one of Kansas City’s snootier fancier hotels) and spins contentedly all day, every day.
Yes, not only is it a very tall restaurant, it’s a revolving restaurant.
Which is pretty cool when you hear about. If you’ve never eaten in a restaurant that spins (and frankly, I don’t think there are many left), I recommend doing it at least once. Just try to keep your bearings so you can remember where the bathroom is.
Anyway, I digress. Upon making my reservations to Skies, I had a certain level of trepidation. I have had some of the most expensive meals in my life at Skies. I just didn’t enjoy them very much. Except for the spinning thing, which really does lose it’s appeal when you decide that you kind of like being about to look out the window and know what you’re going to see.
(The other exception is the Mile High Sky Pie, an eighteen inch high dessert that my wife and I have gone to Skies to order on more than one occasion. I enjoyed those times very much.) So, you may be wondering why I picked Skies as our Mother’s Day restaurant. Honestly, because Caenen Castle and the American were full.
Lucky for me they were full. Let me say in no uncertain terms, the meal I had at Skies was the best Mother’s Day meal I can remember.
Skies was divided into two sections: lunch and breakfast. The breakfast section had omelets to order, French toast, smoothies, breakfast meats, fruit, and other delicacies. The lunch section (where I met chefs John and Nathan and forced them to cook a truly heroic quantity of tenderloin for me) was also excellent. My favorite tenderloin had a nice dijon demi that perfectly accented the meat and went nicely with the pasta made to order. There was also baked chicken in a nice orzo, roasted pork in cranberry sauce, and desserts. Lots of desserts.
However, the highlight of the meal were these little fruit tarts they served. They were just strips of puff pastry with fresh fruit (mango, strawberries, black berries, and blueberries) with a little glaze to hold it all together and to add sweetness. Had I known Tina would like them so much, I would have made something very similar years ago. Because I love them, too.
Here is the recipe if you want to make them.
Slow Cooker Chiapas-Style Mexican Pork
If I was stranded on a desert island and could only bring one cooking tool with me, it would be my slow cooker. (Don’t read too much into that sentence since if I was on a desert island, I could fashion a grill from native trees and rocks and probably an oven, too, if I was smart. What I am saying is how much I like my slower cooker. And yes, I know I’d have to have some sort of battery for it, but if the Professor can figure it out, so can I.)
Anyway, I my slow cooker rocks because it transforms tough (read: cheap and flavorful) cuts of meat into something tender and sublime. Even better, whatever you cook in slow cooker absorbs all of the flavors around it, meaning you can create some true masterpieces in 4-6 hours.
Masterpieces like…
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So, it must be grilling season because now we’re doing
Grilled Leeks
This is a follow up to grilled green onions, a post in which I talked about the Well Done family’s desire to find new foods and grill them. The inspiration for this little gem struck in the grocery store when we were picking up some green onions.
Suddenly, Mrs. WellDone spots some nice, fresh leeks and asks “Would those be good grilled?”
Which then launched us into the following culinary adventure.
Grilled Green Onions
It’s not May and I’m already bored with the usual cast of grilling characters. In the WellDone household, we do the usual suspects on the grill: chicken breasts, steaks, flank steaks, carrots, onions, and peppers. Sometimes we even do tomatoes to make a nice fire roasted salsa.
But me, I want something more. So we’ve been playing around a lot on the grill and we’ve really become fans of grilled green onions.
Recipe: Cooking With Your Kids: The Sushi Chef’s Noodles
Author: Chris PerrinApril 13, 2010I can’t believe I haven’t shared my recipe for
The Sushi Chef’s Noodles
Seriously, this is one of my son’s absolute favorite dishes in the world.
What is it?
It’s the noodles we get when we go to “sushi.” Which to the rest of the world is usually called “Japanese steakhouse,” but in my family goes by the name sushi.
Why do we call it sushi? As the story goes, I love sushi. Love it. Love it. There’s only one problem. As a restaurant experience, waiting for a platter of artfully arranged raw fish takes time, especially in the quantities in which I like to order it. Sadly, the amount of time it takes to make the sushi far outweighs the patience of a typical one, two, three, or four year old.
Enter Japanese steakhouse and the fire, the onion volcano, the banging on the stove with wooden sticks, etc. All of that is more than enough excitement to keep a little one entertained for as long as his father needs to wait (un)patiently for his sushi.
Even better, my son will actually eat the food at the Japanese steakhouse, including the noodles, which he loves so much we always have to order extra. Here then, is the recipe for those noodles.
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Recipe: Cooking With Your Kids: Homemade Spaghetti and Meatballs
Author: Chris PerrinApril 10, 2010Homemade Spaghetti and Meatballs
So as coincidence would have it, tonight my son wanted to make homemade spaghetti and meatballs. Never one to turn the boy down, I thawed out some hamburger, found the flour, and we started cooking.
As a meal to make with your kids, spaghetti and meatballs is pretty good. Most kids like it and though there is a not-so-trivial effort in handmaking noodles and meatballs, a lot of that effort can be done by even the youngest child. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a speedy process. In order to constantly give your children tasks to do, make sure you follow the order as I have it laid out here. That way, something is always cooking.
Ready for something a little daring, try
Purple Cabbage Slaw
(Note: purple cabbage = red cabbage, but at home we call it purple cabbage.)
Okay, as a “kid dish” this slaw is a bit of a risk. First and foremost, it’s a slaw. That means lots of vegetables and in the case of this slaw, there’s no sugared mayonnaise to mix in to mask the presence of so many vegetables. Secondly, the flavors are a bit more, shall we say, mature.
On the other hand, the flavors are not so far out there that kids should get turned off. Plus, this is something they can help to make. Younger kids can mix the dressing and the slaw while older children can shred the cabbage (as long as they are well supervised.)
Of course, all of this misses the obvious point: the slaw is purple. And kids eat purple.
Ready for man food with
Hegan Thursday Seitan Kebobs
So, you’re probably wondering what “Hegan Thursday” is. Well, for the first time today, I was exposed to the term “hegan,” which is a man who has adopted the vegan lifestyle for health reasons. Mrs. WellDone doesn’t care for the term, but I think it’s brilliant since there are far fewer male vegans than female.
Plus, I like hegan since it evokes all sorts of manliness and grunting and all that good stuff. As far as I am concerned, if you’re going to go vegan, intense manliness is just a good a reason as any!! (Second only to perhaps health benefits.)
Anyway, since I’m always devilishly trendy (or not, depending on your definition of trendy), I’m going to do my best to support all the hegans out there with man food done meatless. Like today’s kebobs.
When sent a bottle of Tribal Moose Cranberry BBQ Sauce, what can you do but make
BBQ Meatballs
Nothing, right?
Okay, I get it. If this were Iron Chef, I’d probably not score too high in the inventiveness department, but I wanted BBQ meatballs and I had a great BBQ sauce. Ergo, Tribal Moose BBQ Meatballs.
First thing’s first, what is Tribal Moose Cranberry BBQ Sauce? Well, Tribal Moose is a company based out of Stayton, Oregon that specializes in producing cranberry based sauces like Cranberry BBQ sauce, Cranberry ketchup, Cranberry steak sauce, and spicy Cranberry steak sauce.
They sent me a bottle to try of their Cranberry BBQ sauce and I approached it like everything involving the word cranberry and not also involving the word “cocktail”: apprehension. I have found that in the range of cranberry culinary creations, there are basically two extremes: those that are really good and those that are really bad. Since I am reviewing said product, you can guess where Tribal Moose fell.
Tribal Moose’s Cranberry BBQ didn’t have the sour, sometimes bitter taste, one often associates with non-cranberry-cocktail cranberry dishes. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even tasted cranberries if I hadn’t seen it on the label. The sauce was sweet with a surprising depth, but it wasn’t fruity. In the world of savory applications (which BBQ often is) that’s a plus in my book.
So on my meatballs the BBQ sauce went.
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