Comfort food at its finest. This recipe is adapted from Cook’s Illustrated’s Slow Cooker Revolution, and was indeed cooked in a slow cooker, although it could just as well have been cooked on a stove top or in the oven. It has a mild sweet/sour taste from the sugar, caramelized onions, and vinegar. 4 Read More …
I had a big bag of chicken wings in the freezer starting to get freezer burned, and a quart of cranberry juice I did not know what to do with, so I solved two problems by making a variation on Greasy Little Birds (aka Apple Smoked Cornish Game Hens). I prepared the 6 lbs. of Read More …
Yesterday, I found myself with a request for dessert and more milk in the refrigerator than was needed. I decided to make a batch of rice pudding based on a recipe which Mark Bittman wrote when he had “The Minimalist” column in the New York Times. The basic idea is to slowly bake the pudding Read More …
This pie was adapted from a recipe in King Arthur Flour’s The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook and was a hit at a family party last night. Flaky Pie Crust – full recipe for a double-crusted pie 30 oz. fresh blueberries (~6 cups) 1 tsp. lemon zest 2 Tbs. lemon juice 1 cup sugar ¼ cup Read More …
This posting shows the current way I have been making pie crusts, most recently for blueberry and pecan pies. It is an adaptation of the Easy Pie Dough recipe from Serious Eats, and includes some useful tricks to get a flaky crust. This is the first pie dough I made where I felt that the Read More …
In St. Louis, pork butts are commonly cut into steaks and grilled. In the rest of the country, this is not common, although we were able to get the butcher at Kroger to do this for us. If pork butt steaks are unavailable, the alternatives are to cut a boneless pork butt into steaks, or Read More …
We had a zillion blueberries around the house after some blueberry picking, so Carol suggested I make blueberry ice cream. Here is the result, which was adapted from a recipe for cherry ice cream in The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. The key step to this is to properly make the custard base. ¾ cup Read More …
Since we have quite a lot of blueberries in the house right now, Carol asked me to make a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast. This version is adapted from Mary Meade’s Country Cookbook, which is a good source for standard mid-20th century Midwestern cuisine, since the author was the longtime food editor of Read More …
After making a batch of Tasso a few days ago, I was looking for a dish to use it in and hit on jambalaya, the Cajun dish of meat, vegetables, and rice. In the true spirit of jambalaya, I used what I had on hand, which were bags of frozen chicken wings and shrimp in Read More …
Tasso is a spiced and smoked ham which is used as an ingredient in a number of Cajun dishes, such as jambalaya. When I bought a pork butt for carnitas, I found that that butts were all about 8 lbs. even though I only wanted 4 lbs. for the carnitas. I ended up Read More …