Irish Soda Bread

I'm not sure that the origination of this recipe is from Ireland. One website I reviewed suggested that this form of bread came from Native Americans where it has allegedly been documented they used Pearl Ash, a natural soda formed from the ashes of burnt wood to make bread.  The author suggested that the Irish somehow found out about this and started using bicarbonate of soda to make bread following their potato crop devastation in the 1840s.  This sounds like nonsense to me.  Just how did the Irish have recipe reciprocity with Native American tribes?  And where is it documented that Native Americans made bread from wheat? The carbohydrate of choice among Native Americans, like their South American cousins, was corn, not wheat. Wheat was an old world crop that did not, in fact, find its way to the Caribbean or to either of the American continents until the Colombian Exchange after the late fifteenth century.  So it is highly unlikely that the Irish got their inspiration for this bread from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It more likely came from somewhere closer to home.

Skillet Asian Fried Rice

I have other Asian fried rice recipes, of course, like, Korean Style Fried Rice (Maybe), Year of the Tiger Forbidden Fried Rice,  and Chinese Fried Rice as part of A Chinese Dinner - Part Duex. 

But on this occasion, I was in the mood for a quick, easy, fried rice recipe and didn't want to rig up my stainless steel, Szechwan-style wok to make it, and I didn't want any leftovers. I threw this together based on what I had on hand.

Banana Avocado Nut Bread

During the 2020 CoVid lock-downs, I came up with a low carb version of banana avocado nut bread made with almond flour and a couple of over-ripe bananas.  It was sorta okay the first time I made it, but the second time something went wrong and it just would not set up no matter how many extra minutes in the oven I gave it. I'm guessing that through the CoVid fog, I might have left something out.

Yesterday, I completely revised the recipe without the low carb approach, using all-purpose flour.  It came out beautifully, and so I am re-posting this recipe without the low-carb moniker. I am baking at an altitude above 5,000 feet, so if you're closer to sea level, the loaf will not take quite as long to cook through.

Jamaican Pork Roast with Pickapeppa Gravy

This is an update to a recipe originally posted in early 2012 but the recipe itself is at least a decade older than that.  I don't remember the inspiration for this dish, but it was one of my preferred methods for preparing a pork shoulder roast.  I made it for My Number One Fan several times and it was a favorite of hers.  Then, we sorta forgot about it.  Some time later, I resurrected and published it to Kitchen Tapestry for posterity.  I've modified the recipe over time, so it was time to update.

Oven Fried Chicken Tenders

Here's the thing and there's really no way of getting around it:  if you want honest-to-god, Southern-style, crispy fried chicken, you're going to have to deep fry it. Period.  Not in an airfryer; not in an oven or in a convection oven; but in a cast iron skillet, a Dutch oven or a deep fryer appliance with about three inches of 375°F vegetable oil.  There is no other way.

But you can get close.  Very close.  Lord knows, I've been trying and have some pretty good recipes for a reasonable facsimile of fried chicken, including:

• Low Carb Oven Pan Fried Chicken
• The Ultimate Oven Fried Chicken Wings
• Low Carb Airfryer Fried Chicken
• Airfried Boneless Chicken Thighs
  

Andouille Sausage Hush Puppies with Cajun Mayo Dipping Sauce

Further to the post, Gadget Grub, here's a recipe I made with another kitchen gadget, a Fry Daddy Deep Fat Fryer that My Number One Fan gave me perhaps five years ago which I never got around to using.  Deep fried foods is something not routinely on my diet and to be honest, I was a little intimidated by using a deep fryer.  My parents had one when I was growing up and I recall my dad getting splashed with hot grease one time while frying some shrimp.  It was a scary moment, however, the shrimp were delicious and my dad was not severely injured beyond his pride. But still, it left an indelible impression.

Shrimp Creole

In honor of Mardi Gras week, this is a revised recipe originally posted in 2009.  I've made several modifications including paring down the quantity for serving 6-8 people.  My earlier recipe would have easily served 10-12. The original recipe also called for two cups of shrimp stock, made by boiling the shells and tails in water with onions, celery and some seasonings for a hour.  Having made this recipe numerous times using store-bough chicken stock, I cannot tell any difference in flavor that justifies this additional task, so I have modified the ingredients accordingly.

Gadget Grub

An Airfryer and a Crock Pot are two indispensable cooking gadgets that you can do without, but the culinary world is a whole lot richer with them in it.  Once, the same could be said about a microwave, but the microwave oven became elevated way beyond gadget status in the '80s to where there are few households today without one, and aisles upon aisles of products at your neighborhood grocer are dedicated to foodstuffs cooked in virtually no other fashion.  Does anyone make Jiffy-Pop popcorn anymore?  Only around a campfire.

Tater Tot Sausage Casserole

I've written about this before, but it irks me that there are food bloggers out there who quite obviously, once you attempt their recipe, never actually made it themselves or else they are just immensely stupid.  Case in point with this recipe, inspired by a website called thesouthernladycooks.com.  This is an enormous casserole, easily able to feed six hungry people, using two pounds of Tater Tots, two pounds of sausage and nearly a dozen eggs, yet the author steadfastly insists all of this and more will fit into a 9" x 13" baking dish.  Balderdash!  I had to change cooking vessels mid-stream, and altered the recipe to add more eggs. You need a 10" x 15" Pyrex casserole dish at the very least, the kind that is just 2" high.

Hot Buttered Rum

It took a snowy day for me to learn how to make a hot buttered rum.  It's really very simple, but requires a little patience, mostly to allow time for the butter to come to room temperature. If you're in a hurry, then I suppose a zap or two in the microwave oven would do the trick.  Make sure you're using a premium dark rum, like Pyrat XO Reserve or Myers's Dark.

Classic Cheese Fondue

It seems fondue is having something of a resurgence in popularity these days and like everything else over which the Internet food bloggers become aflutter, there are tons of variations, many of which seem to originate from over-zealous, would-be culinarians vying online for a few more revenue-producing website click-throughs to Amazon links. And while there are a few who get it right, inspiration for my recipe comes straight from the marketing department of Cuisinart, maker of the electric fondue pot I was given for Christmas by My Number One Fan.

Asian Pork Roast with Napa Slaw

This is a re-post of a recipe that I recreated in 2009 while on a low carb diet. It was a Sunday and I wanted something that I could be cooking down all day while I lounged about the house.  I really wanted a beef pot roast, but potatoes and carrots were not on my diet and I had a pork shoulder roast on hand that I needed to use, so I concocted this dish with an Asian flare that includes traditional Chinese ingredients of soy sauce, sherry, sesame oil and shallots. I've made it several times and every time I do, I wonder why I don't make it more often.  I have revised the method of preparing this roast by adding back the gravy thickening ingredient as flour, rather than egg yolks, as originally prepared.  However, I've retained Splenda as a sweetener because I don't like to add sugar to my diet.  You can substitute brown sugar for Splenda.

Tamale Pie

My Number One Fan was excited to make this dish for me, finding it on the-girl-who-ate-everything website, one of the many food bloggers she follows in order to occasionally present various recipes to me for inspiration.  The concept here is to take those ingredients from a beef tamale and reassemble them in a casserole fashion for considerably less work than actually making tamales.  And unless you are living in a Hispanic family with a Mexican Mamacita, it is unlikely that you make or have ever made tamales. They are intensely laborious.

Southern Pecan Pie with Texas Whiskey Whipped Cream

My Number One Fan is decidedly Southern.  I was born and raised in Texas.  We've had debates about whether or not Texas is truly Southern. Granted, Texas joined the Confederacy at the onset of the Civil War, but that doesn't mean it shares the same culture as one might find in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana or Mississippi. For one thing, slavery was not allowed in all parts of Texas and Governor Sam Houston was a staunch Unionist who opposed secession.  But secede it did, for a second time.  Texas is called the Lone Star State because it was, in fact, its own country following its independence from Mexico in 1836 and until being annexed to the United States in 1846.  An independent spirit has always been at the kernel of the Heart of Texas and the state is so large that it doesn't really embody one, specific culture.  

Cranberry Brie Bites

This is a recipe that is more assembly instruction than it is culinary preparation, but it is unique, delicious and will surely make as big a hit with your guests as it did with mine.  The cranberry topping obviously lends itself well to an hors d'oeuvres best served around Thanksgiving or Christmas time, but no one would object if you served them before an Easter brunch or a Independence Day barbecue.

Chicken & Rice Casserole (No Labor Version)

What good family recipe blog wouldn't have a basic can-o-dis chicken & rice casserole recipe? In fact, this one does, since 2016.  Looking for a way to prepare leftovers from my Easy Breezy Roast Chicken and Rice, posted in 2015 and found here, I created a recipe that reminded me of the potluck suppers I would go to with my mom as a kid in the late '50s and early '60s that were either church or Cub Scout related. In fact, I called that recipe Potluck Chicken and Rice Casserole, found here. It's a good, basic casserole recipe, but it requires preparation time that includes cooking the rice in advance and sautéing the onions and celery before anything is assembled as a casserole or put in the oven.

Baked Acorn Squash with Dried Cranberry Brandy Sauce

I cannot think of a dish the screams autumn like this one does, and it really hits on all cylinders.  It's easy, elegant, visually appealing and delicious.  I found this recipe after searching for fall/autumn dinner side dishes and made few modifications if any, but I didn't make note of its original creator.  This accompanied a dinner that included my Mini Meatloaf Rings, found here, and Scalloped Potatoes au Gratin, found here, in a menu created for a family dinner right after the Autumnal Equinox and titled, "Fall is in the Air." This recipe provides four portions, but you'll have sauce leftover and so you can easily prepare more squash if needed.  If you have particularly large acorn squash, cut them into quarters.

Smothered Crock Pot Cube Steaks in Brown Gravy

I've previously written about Swiss Steak, which uses tough cuts of top round or top sirloin beef that have been put through a butcher shop's meat tenderizer and sold as "cube steaks" or "minute steaks." My recipe for Swiss Steak can be found here. Tenderizing in this manner means that the meat is pierced and punctured to make it less tough, which becomes still more tender when braised over a long period of time, the way Swiss Steak should be made.

"Oven Barbecued" Beef Brisket

This is a revision and re-post of my oven-barbecued brisket recipe that I originally published in 2009, because many perfections have been made over the last decade or so.  I've discovered after all this time that simplification of preparation and use of ingredients has yielded better results.

You may think that "oven barbecue" is an oxymoron, and you would be correct. Barbecue means slow cooking over relatively low heat during a long period of time with intermittent use of smoke, mostly hickory but cherry and apple woods are not uncommon.  Barbecue cooked indoors in an oven without smoke isn't technically barbecue.

Hot German Potato Salad

The Germans, like most of Europe, didn't accept the potato as human foodstuffs until a couple of hundred years ago, even though it had found its way to the continent through Spanish conquests of the New World a couple of centuries before that.  It took a lot of cross-breeding and experimentation to get the potato as we know it today before it became accepted as human food and apparently, Frederick the Great was largely responsible for its adoption. When cool, wet summers destroyed wheat crops in the mid-eighteenth century, Fred saw the lowly tuber as a means to feed his army and in 1754 issued a proclamation that farmers were to begin to plant and harvest potatoes for human consumption.  

Slow Cooked Beer Braised Short Ribs on Cheddar Mashed Yukons

This will be my eighth beef short rib recipe to post on Kitchen Tapestry as I am always looking for ways to balance flavor and preparation of this delicious beef cut with minimal effort.  Here is a post that includes links to all of my Short Ribs Recipes, which I call the Short Rib Repository.

One of the things I've learned is that briefly sautéing short ribs in hot oil prior to roasting or braising them, the latter being the preferred method of preparing an otherwise tough cut of beef, produces something known as the Maillard reaction. It's been so named after the French scientist who in 1912 first described the chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars to create melanoidins, the compounds which give browned food its distinctive flavor. In culinary parlance, this is simply known as "browning."

Asian Braised Baby Bok Choy

Bok choy is a cruciferous vegetable, related to Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.  In fact, it is cabbage that originated in China.  The only recipe thus far in which I use bok choy is in my Pork & Mushroom Lo Mein Recipe, found here, and it is an invaluable contributor to the success of that recipe's texture and flavor profile.

Miso Glazed Salmon with Chinese Butter Fruit Dressing

Inspiration for this dish came from another recipe that at first blush might look very similar, Broiled Salmon with Avocado Cream Sauce, found here.  Aside from the titular ingredients being alike, the two recipes are very different in terms of the flavors, textures and degree of unami (a Japanese word that describes an indescribable savoriness).  

"Butter Fruit," or 黄油水果 in simplified Chinese, is what we know as an avocado.  As recently reported in the Financial Times, "Avocado imports soar as China develops a taste for butter fruit..unheard of a few years ago...driven by demand from its burgeoning health-conscious middle-class...."

Grilled Cheese Hot Dog Sandwiches

Okay, allow me to go off the rails in terms of culinary art.  This is not culinary art.  This would more likely qualify as Waffle House fare (and I do not mean that in a derogatory sense - I happen to like Waffle House fare a great deal).  But this blog is as much of a family recipe cookbook as it is a public recipe source and I feel like this absolutely delicious sandwich deserves a mention because my family loves 'em.  It started as a simple grilled cheese sandwich, and if you omit the hot dogs, that's what you'll have - a simple grilled cheese sandwich and the absolutely perfect way to construct it.  Add the hot dogs and you have something akin to, well, carnival eats.  I shan't apologize any further.  Here it is for posterity's sake.

Ausonia Appetizer

I had a lot of difficulty coming up with a name for this dish.  I feel sure I'll revisit it in the future with revisions because of its versatility and endless possibilities. Technically, this is a "can-o-dis" recipe because its basis is a refrigerated, canned roll of Pillsbury pizza crust dough.  I know that any proud Sicilian, denizen of Rome or even a New Yorker would condemn me in the strongest possible terms for using such an abomination of industrialized, processed foodstuffs, but I don't care.  There are other ways to make a decent pizza crust, but none easier, and I'm as much an old man as I am a proud culinarian. This is delicious.  Prove me wrong.

Crock Pot Chicken Cacciatore with Parmesan Polenta

This is an update to a recipe originally published in 2013.  "Cacciatore" means "Hunter" in Italian, so Chicken Hunter-Style is what this original recipe was all about and in its traditional form, it is a time-consuming dish to make.  Chicken pieces are dredged in flour and skillet fried, then placed in a stewing pot with tomatoes, mushrooms and herbs for a period of time until done, served with rice, pasta or as is presented here, polenta.  In the South, this method of preparation would be called "smothered," and more likely served along side mashed potatoes.

The Salad Dressing Repository

 

Originally posted in 2010, this salad dressing repository has been updated with many more recipes I've created over the years.  I basically use two kinds of salad dressing: mine and Paul Newman's when I am too lazy to make my own. Newman's is made the way I would make it at home, with no preservatives or stuff with unpronounceable names. It has olive, vegetable and canola oils, red wine and distilled vinegars, onion, spices, salt, garlic and lemon juice.  I'd skip any oil other than olive oil if I were making it from scratch, but the Newman Foundation was obviously trying to keep their production costs low.

Leftover Steak Enchiladas

I never quite know what to do with leftover steak, whether it has been brought home from our favorite neighborhood steakhouse, or the uneaten portion of rib eyes grilled on my Weber. I've tried zapping them in the microwave briefly to munch on as a snack.  But I'm never happy with the results.  After all, if the steak was perfectly cooked before, any further heat will only serve to cook it beyond that very small spectrum of steak deliciousness. So, somewhere along the way, I got the idea of throwing together some enchiladas, where overdone beef is almost a prerequisite.

My Number One Fan's Butter Baked Potato

I've said this before, but the great thing about the Internet is that you can find a lot of information in a nanosecond.  The bad thing about the Internet is that there is a lot of misinformation written by stupid, misinformed people who pass off their opinions as fact.  Take any recipe that says it is "The Best Whatever," or "The Perfect This or That." Or the most egregious of hyperbole, "The World's Best....".

Food is - quite literally - a matter of personal taste. So any adjective to describe its relative favored position is entirely subjective. The only "Number One" in the name of this recipe is it in its origin - this is the way My Number One Fan has been making baked potatoes in our household for years.  And I can say without equivocation, this is the best baked potato I've ever had.  That's not to say it's the best baked potato that you will ever have; it may or may not be and honestly, I don't really care.  But man oh man, is there ever an Internet controversy over her baking method.  You see, [cue the suspenseful orchestral riff], she bakes her potatoes in aluminum foil.

Summer Shrimp Salad or Shrimp Po'Boy

This is a revision of a shrimp salad recipe I created in 2010.  While originally it was meant to be made with jumbo shrimp (U-15s) and served on a bed of cold, crisp greens, it also makes a wonderful filling for a shrimp po'boy when using small bay shrimp.

At the outset, I found several recipes for shrimp salad on the internet, all of which I pared down to this original dressing recipe.  Make it ahead of time and let it sit for several hours or overnight while all the flavors marry and amalgamate. This is a bit of a variation on a shrimp dish I made previously and served with crab muffins.  Click here to go there.

Green Bean & Wild Rice Casserole

This is a real can-o-dis casserole recipe that is easy to throw together, but time consuming if only because wild rice takes a good hour or more to properly cook.  You could add shredded rotisserie chicken, ground turkey or even ground beef to make this a complete one-dish dinner, however on this occasion it served as an accompaniment to leftover Bacon Lattice Wrapped Meatloaf, the recipe for which can be found here.

Bacon Lattice Wrapped Meatloaf

This will be the fourth meatloaf recipe that I've posted.  They're all a little different in terms of ingredients and complexity.  This recipe has less of a tomato profile and is a variation on a recipe for bacon-wrapped meatloaf found on the Whitney Bond website.  It pairs well with brown gravy, the recipe for which can be found here.  My other meatloaf recipes can be found here:

Greek Style Orzo Stuffed Bell Peppers with Lemon Basil Tomatoes

We've had a package of orzo on our pantry shelf since before they started putting expiration dates on everything.  I made a bold assumption that pasta is dried for a reason - to preserve it for a very long time.  It turns out my assumption was true but I had to cook the rice-sized pasta about twice as long as directions on the package recommended.

Airfried Boneless Chicken Thighs

Here is a very simple, basic recipe for cooking boneless/skinless chicken thighs in an airfryer.  There are many variations on this recipe that you can make by altering the seasonings or spice mixtures.  But this is a start.  This was a serendipitous discovery as I was planning on making my Low Carb Airfryer  Fried Chicken recipe, found here, but we had taken boneless/skinless chicken thighs out of the freezer to thaw by mistake and so, I had to improvise.

Shrimp Santorini

This is an update to a recipe I originally posted in 2010. One of my former co-workers is a chow-hound like I am.  She and her sister made this dish and knowing I would probably like it, brought me the recipe, originally found on allrecipes.com.  It was posted there by a Chicago denizen after she made this dish with her sister.

It is an easy dish to make ahead of time, throwing everything together at the last minute in a casserole dish, and baking for an hour.  For convenience, buy frozen, peeled, de-veined shrimp and thaw at the last minute in a colander under cold, running water, tossing occasionally until all the shrimp have thawed, about twenty minutes.

Breakfast Enchiladas and Hash Brown Casserole

This is a terrific breakfast casserole idea - if I could just get the cheese sauce right!  I think I made it too thick and it wasn't a very good recipe to begin with, thanks to the Southern Living website.  On a re-heat, I zapped some jarred salsa con queso (the Tostitos brand, to be exact) and sauced-up the leftovers. The dish was enhanced significantly!  I'll post the recipe as I made it with the exception of the cheese sauce.

Pan Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Mango Salsa

This is a revisited and revised recipe I originally created in 2009.  The mango salsa recipe is unchanged, however, the pork tenderloin is a different interpretation of a recipe I originally made with a sauce from Williams-Sonoma that is no longer available.  This recipe makes its own delicious pan gravy and perfectly compliments the salsa.

Chicken Stuffed Poblano Peppers

Enlightened by the culinary excellence and deliciousness of stuffed chili peppers, I embarked on a quest that began with cheese stuffed Anaheim peppers, which I called Pimientos de Anaheim con Queso, found here, and Barbecued Brisket Stuffed Poblano Peppers with Mexican Cole Slaw, found here.  Both are great recipes to be sure, but this one might be the best yet.  Preparing stuffed chili peppers for dinner is something of a recent evolution for me. I've eaten them all my life but until now, I'm embarrassed to say, I never actually made them.

Ham & Split Pea Soup

This is a very simple, hearty soup for a chilly, rainy day especially if you have some leftover ham to eat. Pea soup has a very old lineage dating to antiquity.  Greeks and Romans cultivated the seeds from the pods of the Pisum Sativum plants as early as 600 BC and there are historical accounts of vendors selling hot pea soup on the streets of Athens.  The soup is mentioned in a play, The Birds, written by the Greek comic playwright, Aristophanes, in 414 BC. Today, pea soup in many forms is eaten virtually around the globe.

Garden Turkey Burgers

There is only one way to cook these, and that's on an outdoor grill: charcoal grill, gas grill, hibachi....doesn't matter.  In fact, I've cooked these on both a charcoal and gas grill; but don't attempt to skillet-fry them.  It just doesn't work well. The original recipe called for them to be broiled.  That doesn't work nearly as well nor do they taste as good as rendering them over an open flame.

My Number One Fan found this recipe in the mid-'90s and made a copy of it directly from the recipe book or magazine it came from.  The recipe has survived but there is no identifying text that indicates from where it originated; but we've made this recipe dozens of times and they are a delicious alternative to beef burgers on the grill.

"Oven Barbecue" Pulled Pork

This is an updated recipe originally posted in 2019.

I've already defended myself against the merits and demerits of calling something cooked in an oven "barbecued", when in fact it isn't.  Read my arguments in the posting "Oven Barbecue" Beef Brisket found here.  Blah. Blah. Blah.

This is really yet another braised pork butt recipe, of which I have a considerable number.  You can find a repository of all of them here.  This one was originally from a website called SmartCarbCooking, and it is the basis of the low carb barbecue sauce that I used in the brisket recipe mentioned above, but I've taken the time to rewrite it here for convenience.

Bangers & Mash with Onion Gravy

I was in London in the mid-1990s for a business-turned-leisure trip and even though I worked for a UK-based company at the time, I somehow didn't know about Bangers & Mash.  If I had, I definitely would and absolutely could have ordered it in virtually any pub in the city.  Considered basic, if not mandatory menu fare, or "Pub Grub," at any public house, Bangers & Mash is considered the national dish of the UK along side Fish & Chips and Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding.  But it took the creativity of a local butcher shop that makes their own in-house sausages to spark my curiosity about this dish, including the origin of its name.

Crustless Quiche Lorraine

This is an update to a recipe originally posted in 2017.

Maybe you'll remember a time back in the late 1970s and early '80s when quiche was all the rage.  Restaurants of any caliber had their version of Quiche Lorraine on the menu and some restaurants wholly revolved around this dish, offering as many ingredient options as a pizza joint has toppings.  Quiche has been around at least since the eighteenth century, when it was named after the Lorraine region of France where household staples of cream, eggs and cheese were combined in a tart shell to create this light, airy, savory dish.  The quiche craze culminated with a 1982 book that practically ended it, "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," a tongue-in-cheek exposé about the evolving definition of masculinity.  Quiche went out of vogue shortly thereafter for a thirty-five year hiatus.

Cauliflower & Cheese Casserole

Ah, the lowly cauliflower, a member of an unusual vegetable species known as Brassica Oleracea which also includes broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collard greens, and kale. I hate it. And actually, a lot of people do, which is why the cauliflower has undergone something of a Renaissance in recent years being used as something other than the de facto vegetable it is.  In fact, cauliflower products have increased 71% in the U.S. since 2017 and cauliflower production since 2013 is up by over 63%. Cauliflower mashed "potatoes" came about more than a decade ago during the low carb craze, a recipe for which I have posted here and have made countless times.  But more recently in the Keto and gluten-free hysteria, all manner of cauliflower dishes as a substitution for something else have come to market, like, cauliflower pizza crusts, cauliflower breadsticks, cauliflower fried rice and cauliflower bread substitute.

Eggs Benedict Casserole with Hollandaise Sauce

If you've ever made or tried to make Eggs Benedict, you no doubt found it very difficult to do well.  Poaching eggs seems like it would be simple, but it is not.  Technique is everything and restaurants that serve Eggs Benedict have special equipment and a structured procedure to poaching eggs, toasting English Muffins, heating Canadian Bacon, and they make their Hollandaise Sauce in large quantities generally using a commercial blender.  This process allows the restaurant to get your Eggs Benedict to you while the dish is still hot, and trust me, Eggs Benedict loses its heat very, very quickly.

Keto Cheddar Biscuits

Readers of Kitchen Tapestry, both of them, may recall me promoting cheddar biscuits as an accompaniment to such dishes as Shrimp Étouffée Over Cheesy Biscuits, found here, and Crock Pot Beef Stew, located here.  Specifically, I touted a commercially prepared product by a national restaurant chain, Red Lobster.  The last time I ate at a Red Lobster was in the mid 1990s and then, only because a hotel I supervised in Beaumont, Texas had leased out space to one and I felt politically obliged to dine there. 

Black Bean & Avocado Fresco Salad

Last fall, I experimented with using legumes as an ingredient in a salad and came up with a Southwestern Black Bean & Corn Salad, the recipe for which can be found here.  On this occasion, I wanted a variation on that theme without the corn, using a light lime vinaigrette and a delicious Mexican cheese called Queso Fresco.  The two salads are similar with the prime titular ingredient, of course.  But they are otherwise quite different in flavor with this salad having far fewer ingredients, making it simpler to prepare.  This salad was meant as a side dish to My Number One Fan's Chicken Enchilada Soup, the recipe for which is here.

Korean-Style Fried Rice (Maybe)

I'm not sure just how Korean-style this fried rice recipe is.  I found the recipe on the Internet and transcribed it, but I didn't make note of the website from which I found it and I can't seem to relocate it.  As I looked at a number of websites with various Korean-style fried rice recipes, I realize that there is no such thing as the definitive Korean Fried Rice Recipe.  Fried Rice among Asian cultures might have some generally distinct attributes but regionally, fried rice recipes are all across the board.  It's easy to understand why.  Fried rice was a way for families to use previously cooked rice adding whatever ingredients they had on hand.  So there can be literally billions of variations on the same theme:  cooked rice, fried in a wok, with added vegetables and proteins, seasoned with soy sauce first and then the sky is the limit.

Homemade Croutons

My Number One Fan used to make homemade croutons by the bucketful years ago, and then stopped making them and then, we both forgot about them. Recently having two loaves of bread that we were not going to eat, one whole wheat and another Jewish rye, I announced that I'd reclaim them as croutons.  She remembered the Pioneer Woman website recipe that she had used years ago.  It's a fine recipe, but I found it - as well as nearly every other recipe I researched online - to be finite about the measurement of ingredients.  I don't think that model works very well.

Duck Breast dans la Poêle

There are hundreds, if not thousands of recipes on the Internet for preparing the breast of a duck, and virtually all of them will title themselves "Pan Seared."  But this is wrong.  That's not how this works.  That's not how any of this works.