We Still Cook!!!

We have been bugged for the last few days to make something Mexican for dinner, so tonight we decided to go ahead and make enchiladas.  The real trick to good enchiladas is delicious, tender, shredded chicken.  How do you accomplish this at home without spending hours? Simple, start with a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store.  The meat is already cooked and generally nice and tender, so it’s a fairly easy matter to pull the breast off and chop up.  Once you put it in a pan and season it with a packet of fajita seasoning till it falls apart.  From there, all I had to do was wrap the chicken in to some corn tortillas and bake them with sauce and cheese for about 20 minutes. The corn tortillas are very important to get the right texture, otherwise they’re just burritos.  I served that with a side salad and some re-fried beans to make it a meal worthy of any Mexican restaurant.

Tonight we decided to make Greek-Style Turkey Burgers with Yogurt Sauce, but we didn’t want just a couple of burgers.  I posted the link to the recipe prior and have a category of “Recipes” so that it’s quick referencing for later.

Ben made the recipe as instructed but placed 2 patties on Pita bread with the yogurt sauce, pickled onions, black olives, and sliced tomatoes.  Ben looked at this  as his home version of a Gyro.  Because this was served with a side salad, I think that there should have been more sauce because it would’ve made a great salad dressing.  I also felt there should have been some cucumber on the sandwich.  Someone else suggested bacon.

The idea of this is to take a base recipe and build off of it to make it your own. Playing and experimenting is the fun part of cooking.

After work we ran some errands, and then of course it got late and the subject of dinner came up.  So we decided to do an experiment and see, how long does it actually takes to make dinner?  Mind you we currently need to do an actual grocery shop so we had no quick chicken to grab.  Because of this dinner tonight was going to be our typical quick/easy dinner of steak-tips and steamed broccoli with cheese sauce.  We use to also have some kind of rice or mashed potatoes, but recently we’ve gone to a low/no carb diet.

So Ben hit the store and spent $30.09 on around 2lbs of steak-tips, 6 broccoli crowns, and block of Skellig Sweet Cheddar Cheese (a new favorite of ours that we recently found, http://www.kerrygoldusa.com/products/skellig-cheese/ )  Now this is for four adults so it would calculate out to be $7.52 per person.  In NH the price of a Big Mac meal is $7.25.

When we got home, Ben immediately began to season the steak-tips with salt, pepper, garlic, paprika, and bay-leaf. So that cooking would happen at the same time he began the prepping of everything else. He then prepped the broccoli to put in the gallon Ziploc bag which he made sure to cut slits into and shredded the block of cheese. He then arranged the steak-tips on the broiler and began to broil them on high for 4 minutes.  While that was cooking he began the cheese sauce with 2T of butter and 2T flour till bubbling, and then add 1C of milk till it boiled. (we typically use Almond milk and we haven’t found any difference).  Once this white sauce is created remove it from heat and you’re suppose to add 1/2C of cheese.  But there is no such thing as too much cheese and we add the whole 7oz. block.  He then pulled and flipped the steak-tips to broil for an additional 2 minutes.  At this point he started the broccoli in the microwave for 5 minutes.  This allows the steak-tips to rest before plating.

Ben began plating after 50 minutes.

And we believe that this looks and taste a lot better than a Big Mac meal.

So our real life has been keeping us very busy and we have been failing to post daily like we had wanted.  But that also made us realize that everyone has this same situation.  Have to work late, so why not just grab take out.  It’s quick and easy, but at the same time it is typically overpriced, mediocre food.  So what do we do to help in these situations?

When we grocery shop we usually buy a couple of the family packs of boneless, skinless chicken breast.  And we individual wrap and freeze each breast so that when we know we’re gonna be late we just pull them out in the morning.  It sounds like more work than it actually is.  Jan had found these freezer bags, but we have yet to find them since so currently we use good old fashion sandwich bags. They work great. We then put them in a jumbo 2.5 gallon Ziploc freezer bag.  Remember when thawing them to put it in a bowl, or plastic ware, because they will leak when they thaw.  On days that we forgot to pull them we typically will take a half hour and thaw it under running water, or use the microwave.

Currently our household is four adults so this bulk buying and freezing makes it easier for each of us to cook when we want, and the amount they want, without an issue.   This concept doesn’t have to be just chicken, you can freeze ground beef in 2 lb blocks so that it was easier to pull for spaghetti or burgers.  And you can’t use the excuse that you don’t have a freezer chest.  We have yet to get one, and we typically keep 40 lbs of chicken breast in our standard side-by-side fridge/freezer.

Tonight is our first time writing about dinner, so to celebrate we made a special meal.  Pan seared ribeye steak with steamed broccoli, cheese sauce, and a side salad.  That sounds delicious, and I assure you it was, but it is also one of the easiest meals to make.

At this point Jan and I have decided that it’s not worth ordering steak at restaurant anymore because we can make it better at home.  I used to broil or grill my steaks and do a pretty good job, but I picked up a trick watching one of the many Gordon Ramsey shows.  That is the art of pan searing.  To do it right you have to get the pan really hot, it should sputter like crazy when you throw in your herbs.  Once the pan is hot enough take your well-seasoned steak and gently lay it in the oil.  Let it cook about 2 minutes on each side, and then put it strait in to a 425°F oven for about 5 minutes right in the pan.  When it comes out of the oven take it out of the pan and let it rest on your cutting board for a few minutes before serving.

I also have a great trick for steaming the broccoli.  I trim it down to florets and put it in a gallon size Ziploc bag, put a small slit in the top of the bag and you can steam it right in the microwave.  A full bag takes 5 minutes, ½ bag would take about 3.  Before you freak out about chemicals in your food take a look at the box your Ziplocs came in, it has instructions on it for using the bags in the microwave to reheat.  If you can reheat in the bags there is no reason you can’t steam in them.

The cheese sauce will have to be for another time because it’s so simple, but with so many kinds of cheeses the possibilities are endless.  I wonder what we’ll come up with next time.

So today we, Ben & Jan, decided we’d start sharing what we do in the kitchen.  We have always joked about being “Food Snobs”, but over time we started to realize we really were.  We typically choose not to go out to eat because we can make a much more appetizing meal, definitely a better steak, for a fraction of the cost.  Though don’t get us wrong, we enjoy the fine dining when the food & service is worth it.  And more often it’s more about meeting up with friends than actually enjoying the food.

Recently we were chatting about how often our friends eat out and calculated how expensive that was.  More than we spend in grocery per year.  Even joked about the overpriced prepped meals that can be delivered to your door for you to cook dinner so you don’t have to cut or measure things.  To us it feels that society over time has taken a very simple “making dinner” and gave it the illusion that it’s so difficult that you must have hours and be a gourmet chef to fulfill.  Well that’s definitely not the case!!!

We’ll be writing what we make for dinner each night, and let it grow from there. We hope that maybe it will encourage other’s to try something new.