It's Broccoli's Time to Shine!

Broccoli is good to eat all year long but the holiday season kicks its popularity up a notch. The holiday season + cooler weather=the perfect excuse to make Broccoli Casserole.

Click here for my "cheater" version of Broccoli Casserole.

I have a better version with ingredients that are all made from scratch. I haven't gotten around to posting it yet. For that version it's best to plan ahead a little bit so you can make cream of mushroom soup and real cheese sauce instead of the "gloopy" canned stuff. The wholesome version still adds calories but has no unnecessary chemicals and other crap. In the meantime, check out the cheater version. 

Cooked Broccoli that's ready for some casserole action!

A Restaurant Review to Tempt Your Taste Buds

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this restaurant closed several years ago. 

Bad me! I haven't posted since October! I've been really busy lately with many things, including an additional writing gig with examiner.com. The presidential election also had me spellbound and I had some articles published with Yahoo! Contributor about the local scene during the election. I have a lot of material for the blog that I need to add as soon as possible. In the meantime, here's the link to a review of a restaurant I visited in October. It was a most excellent meal! Click on "Feast" below to visit my review and then go visit the restaurant itself if you're near Houston. Add it to your itinerary if you're planning to visit Houston.You will be happy you did!

Feast

 

Vatrushky Night...Fun with Food!

A Lovely Vatrushka

Vatrushky, (the plural of vatrushka, much like kolache is the plural of kolach), are Russian cheese tarts that are savory instead of sweet. These tarts are very popular in the Ukraine and often served with dishes such as borscht.

I was doodling around one night, looking in a cookbook when I ran across a recipe for vatrushky. Had to try it out, of course.

The recipe called for cottage cheese which had to be drained for a few hours. For those interested, I used the entire tub of cottage cheese (16 ounces), and ended up with 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese swill. (Which would have been great to use in another recipe, but alas! I didn't save it.)

These tarts are rolled out by hand but if you have some of those nifty mini-tart pans, those would do, too. Heck, you could get away with using a pie pan and just making one big one. But in the interest of making them the traditional way, I rolled them out.

These tarts are gooooood. The dough is superb. I think that it would be great in place of regular pie dough to make pies. I'm telling you, this is the closest recipe I've had where the dough tasted like communion wafers. If it was rolled thin enough, it would almost be spot on.

Anyhoo, I'm sure it was the sour cream in the recipe that made the dough so heavenly. Here's a link to a good vatrushky recipe if you're interested: Ukrainian Classic Kitchen. This is not the same recipe I used when I made my vatrushky, but it's close enough for a handshake.

Please enjoy my pictorial vatrushky adventure:

Roll out the dough: 4" circles

Crimp the sides

Add the filling

Glaze the whole tart with egg wash

The finished vatrushka!!

Happy Eating, Boys & Girls! :) 



Beef Stroganov

This is a dish that I hadn't made from scratch in at least 10 years, until last night. I used to live with someone who didn't like "wet dishes," that is--any dishes that were a "one-pot" meal with meat, veggies & gravy. The only exceptions were chili, soup, stew and even "Hamburger Helper" once in a while.

Even so, I made "wet dishes" on occasion and they were eaten and enjoyed. Some of them were even accepted into the house menu. Unfortunately, Beef Stroganov (or, if you prefer, Stroganoff), wasn't one of them.

There are a lot of variations for this recipe. Most of them contain beef, onions and sour cream. That's usually where the similarity ends. Some recipes have mushrooms and tomato sauce, but not all. Some recipes call for service with egg noodles; some call for rice.

I found a recipe that was shared with a traveler and it's supposed to be authentic. The preparation is a bit unusual. The onions are placed in the pan and the meat is placed on top of them and cooked on top of the onions until it has a "gloss." Only then are the sauce ingredients added. Then everything is mixed together and served with a Russian version of fried potatoes. There are no mushrooms in the authentic recipe.

The recipe, (and some history regarding Beef Stroganov), can be found here: "Vikalinka." 

I'm planning on trying the Vikalinka's recipe very soon. The recipe I used last night was a lot less labor intensive than the recipe I used over 10 years ago. It calls for beef, mushrooms, onions, wine, butter, powdered mustard, a touch of sugar and only 1/2 cup of sour cream. It's a good recipe, and we had our Stroganov served over fusilli. It's not a very colorful dish, but it's damn good.

Beef Stroganov
Fresh Green Beans
Fresh Kale with Bacon & Onions

 

I found another Russian recipe I'll be making in a few days or so. I like to make these recipes not just for eating, but because it's fun to shout out the recipe in Russian when someone asks what I'm making. Almost as fun as it is shouting in German. :)

Have a great day, great adventures in your kitchen and happy eating! :)

Peaches 'n' Cream Pie

I love it in the laboratory and this pie was cobbled together on the fly with leftover dough and leftover pastry cream. I guess it should have been a cobbler instead, ha ha ha!

I didn't have quite enough dough to make a fancy, fluted crust for the edges so I studded the crust with some ground pecans. It didn't need a long baking time so the pecans were perfectly safe without one of those crust protectors.

The peaches were organic frozen peaches poached in organic peach preserves + their own juices. No other sugar was needed. Trust me on this! This particlar jar of peach preserves is very lovely but the preserves are so sweet they knock you right on your butt! We've been searching for alternative uses for these insanely sweet preserves besides using them for glazing fruit. I even added some to the leftover pastry cream (mixing well).

So I guess this is a "Frankenstein" pie...but we'll call it a "Frazier-stein" pie. Because...well, why not? Making things fun in the kitchen always brings great results! I know that there are people who are nervous in the kitchen and afraid of messing up but you just have to relax and have fun. Get in "THE ZONE." That's when you'll kick some serious butt! :)

Peaches-n-Cream Pie