Black Bean Soup

Jason makes a simple black bean soup. It's a pound of black beans, eight cups of water and about a tablespoon of salt. Cook until the beans are tender, approximately four to six hours. The soup is then topped with fresh ingredients of your choosing. We used purple onion, jalapeno, cilantro and queso fresco.

Hush Puppy, It's a Catfish

I wasn't born there but, I really like Louisiana food. Something I have made a few times now is the catfish po'boy. Po'boys may also be known as such things as a sub sandwich or a loaf. I tend to use catfish in the sandwich for no better reason than I like how it tastes. The catfish is pan fried, placed on the French bread loaf and topped with coleslaw and possibly pickles, if you're into that sort of thing. I also experimented with homemade hushpuppies this time. I once, many moons ago, attempted to make hushpuppies from a box mix. It didn't go well. Tonight was much better. Excellent dough consistency and nice flavor. It's about three hours post dinner and I'm still stuffed.

Carbonara Fruitcake

Spaghetti alla Carbonara and fruitcake have absolutely nothing to do with each other except that they both attended the same party in my stomach. The first is a rich Italian pasta dish. It's like someone said "Let's have breakfast for dinner and hey we have wine too!" and carbonara was born. A sauce of white wine, eggs, bacon, olive oil and cheese gets stirred onto the hot pasta. There is enough heat off the pasta that the eggs get cooked. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend you do.

Fruitcake. Jason and I were talking about foods with a bad reputation one day (meatloaf, fruitcake etc). Fruitcake is the butt of jokes. It's that Christmas present that nobody wants. Hard as a rock and flavorless, I've heard it makes a mighty fine doorstop. But, if fruitcake really is so bad, why did it ever get made more than once? It's full of dried fruit which doesn't come cheaply, so we had to think there was something to it that made people want to repeat the experience. Homemade meatloaf is awesome too.

 

We found a fruitcake recipe with great reviews for a little post Christmas holiday cheer. I have to say it is wonderful. Full of flavor and spice, it is the exact opposite of what fruitcake is made out to be. We wondered how long it might maintain its quality, but I don't think any of it will be around long enough for us to find out.

 

 If you need more fruitcake love, there's always the Jimmy Buffett song "Fruitcakes". He may be talking about people though and not the edible variety.

 

Half baked cookies in the oven
Half baked people on the bus
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

Carbs + Cheese

 

I like carbs. No, scratch that. I love carbs. Tonight's meal had a little carb on carb action. I made four smallish loaves of "no-knead crusty white bread" and crispy risotto cakes out of Wednesday's leftover risotto.

 

 

This was my first time making this particular recipe and I was pleased with the results. It is possible to let the dough sit in the refrigerator for several days to further develop flavor, but I had to make it in a shorter time frame today. There were about four hours of total rise time. If you're interested in trying it out yourself, you can follow this link to the recipe.

 





To create the risotto cakes I took the leftover risotto and shaped them into medium size cakes. I then added about a tablespoon of mozzarella in the middle of a cake and hid the cheese inside. Dipped the cake in an egg wash and bread crumbs and fried until golden brown.

"Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash."

Or at least that's what they say in "When Harry Met Sally". Dinner tonight was chicken paprikash and French bread. Jason made the paprikash and I made the bread. Paprikash is a Hungarian dish but, it actually reminded me a lot of coq au vin, which is French. It has the same general idea of stewing chicken in an awesome wine based sauce. In truth though, the two dishes taste nothing at all alike. That could be because there is almost as much paprika as there is wine in the paprikash.

Risotto

A couple of months ago, I came across the recipe for risotto in one of my books. I would have tried it then, but I didn't have any white wine and we live in a dry county. This week, we are concentrating on recipes with white wine in them. The bottle is opened up and it won't stay fresh forever. I made the basic recipe which needed about 50 minutes of cooking time. Once finished, I topped with roasted squash, zucchini and tomato and a few shaves of parmesan. Later this week, I'll use the leftovers to create crispy risotto cakes.

Irish Heritage

Jason has Irish ancestry. Sometimes, when I ask really nicely, he'll talk with an "Irish" accent (bogus) - which I very much enjoy hearing. Tonight, he made colcannon soup. I don't have the pronunciation done, so it's good that this is typed. The soup is a combination of cabbage, potatoes, onion and leeks with bacon and chives as a garnish. He substituted in green onions for the chives since they were on hand. I made a grilled cheese sandwich with a little Tillamook cheddar as a companion piece and had a bottle of Bedford's Ginger Beer to drink. Bedford's is a soda company out of Port Angeles, Washington where I lived last year. P.S. I didn't take the time to bake bread for the sandwich and yes I do feel a little guilty using store bought. In my defense, it needed to be used up.