Chocolate Peanut-Butter Fondue

One Saturday night, hubby and I had the sudden and urgent need to make chocolate peanut-butter fondue. He was the one who first verbalized it, but once it was out there, there was no going back. It just had to happen. I actually did a lot of searching for a good recipe that incorporated both chocolate and peanut butter. I didn’t find one on allrecipes.com, though there were several that I could have altered. There was one that came in the manual for my fondue pot, but it didn’t look great, either. All I wanted was something that came really, really close to the fondue that we’d gotten once at the Melting Pot. Finally, I found this! It only had two reviews, but the two reviewers were unanimous in their glowing praise of the recipe, both for its simplicity and its deliciousness.

Basically, it’s melted chocolate (we used the same shredded Ghirardelli chocolate that we’d used the last time I made chocolate fondue), sugar, milk, and peanut butter. I think I substituted half-and-half for the milk, though, and used crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy because that is what I had.

To be completely honest, I was making something fairly complicated for dinner that night and had no intention of blogging the dessert. I viewed it as a treat, not something that I should pour too much effort into. So I didn’t bother taking pictures of the process.

But then I found myself loving the fondue so much that I decided it needed to be shared here. It’s so simple and decadent, so why not? My camera came out at that point. You’ll have to use your imagination for the stove-top preparation. 

For dippers, we had angel food cake, chocolate brownies (apparently you can buy a plastic pan of ready-to-bake dough… these are the things you learn when you send hubby to the grocery store), and fresh strawberries. My favorite is always the strawberries, but everything was just plain delicious. We didn’t get bananas because I think they’re gross, but I suppose they’d be good dippers if you’re into that kind of thing.

If you ever want to earn brownie points with a significant other or impress a special someone, this is the way to go. Promise. <3

Recipe in Tastebook shortly.

Philly Shrimp (2nd attempt) and Honey Pecan Green Beans

You may remember a post a while back for Philly Shrimp. It’s basically shrimp sauteed in butter, supplemented with a sauce made from diced tomatoes and melted cream cheese. I made it while hubby was away, and I liked it a lot. It was simple and tasty. But I was pretty sure the recipe suffered from a lack of regular cream cheese (all I had was whipped), plus I didn’t have fresh spinach to add.

Not that long ago, I found myself with about a pound of shrimp, so I thought I’d give it another go.

This time, I used a package of lemon-pepper linguini that I had in my cupboard. I’d received it as a gift ages ago and honestly wanted to use it a million times, but I always chickened out because it seemed like lemon-pepper linguini would require a certain recipe and I wasn’t sure what that recipe was. However, since I was making this dish for hubby and he tends to think that pasta is boring and bland, I decided to go ahead and finally use it.

While I was taking that last picture, I noticed a bowl of unused Roma tomatoes chilling on on the counter. Figuring that they could add some extra flavor intensity, I chopped a few of them up. The Sam Adams was there to facilitate the cooking process, of course.

Then I cooked the linguini according to package directions. Well, actually, the package didn’t have directions, so I cooked it as I would regular linguini. Pretty sure you can’t screw this up too badly.

Measured out some cream cheese and licked the spatula clean because you all know how much I love cream cheese.

And the rest went pretty much as it had the first time. Melted butter and sauteed minced garlic, then added the shrimp, tomatoes, and cream cheese.

And stirred until it was creamy. It was definitely creamier than when I used whipped cream cheese, but I don’t think anyone would be surprised by that.

And this time I had fresh spinach to toss with the linguini, unlike last time. The recipe called for 2 cups worth, and I was happy to use all that because my spinach was starting to go limp and wouldn’t have been good for very long beyond this, anyway.

I tossed the chopped spinach with the linguini, then picked out some of the spinach because it seemed like an awful lot. Maybe it would have been better if I’d actually chopped the spinach into smaller pieces, rather than simply tearing it haphazardly.

Lastly, I mixed in the shrimp and tomatoes with the creamy sauce.

So that was the main course! It was looking better than my first attempt, for sure.

Now for the vegetables. Buckle up, because this is an amazingly simple, delicious, and different veggie recipe. My vegetable side dishes always end up being pretty savory, with salt, pepper, and whatever spices I choose to add (often red pepper flakes). I was in the mood for something a little different, something sweet. And I found this.

First, steam some green beans (I started with frozen ones).

Next, take a lot of butter (I never said this was healthy, did I?)…

…and melt it in a pan.

Add about two tablespoons of cashews. I didn’t have cashews, so I used pecans. It worked beautifully. Put them in the butter and saute for about 2 minutes, or until the nuts start browning.

Then add a tablespoon of honey.

And stir in your green beans.

That’s it! It’s that simple. Takes just a few minutes and adds a subtly sweet side to a savory main dish.

Voila! Dinner is served. None of it took very long, and it wasn’t complex. It’s a nice weeknight dinner. And for the record, hubby cheerfully told me that it wasn’t, in fact, bland. The leftovers were certainly more enjoyable than the first time I made the Philly shrimp, that’s for sure.

The Philly shrimp recipe is already in my TasteBook, and the green beans recipe will be in there soon. Or you can just check out the link to allrecipes.com that I posted above – the only change I made was substituting pecans for cashews.

Happy cooking.

Good news!

I am one of those people addicted to my smartphone, I admit it. I <3 Android. I do everything on there – manage my grocery list, navigate myself to anywhere I need to go, search my email for a phone number that I need to call, and catch up on facebook.

If you’re like me and spend more time catching up on blogs on the phone than you do at the computer, I have good news! This site is now optimized for smartphones. Rather than viewing the webpage in its entirety and having to zoom in a million times and scroll to see everything, now there’s a mobile optimization that makes it much, much easier to view my blog on a phone.

Is anyone as excited about this as I am?

Anyone?

Ah well. I will enjoy the upgrade, at least

Brown Sugar and Ginger Glazed Salmon

I posted a while back about Broiled Tilapia Parmesan, which turned out to be an amazingly delicious and quick meal. I hadn’t done much broiling since then, but thought it might be about time.

Prior to finally getting over my fear of broiling, I picked up a recipe card from the seafood counter at Safeway (our grocery store) for Brown Sugar and Ginger Glazed Salmon. It calls for broiling, which made me nervous. There is a similar recipe on allrecipes.com, which also called for broiling, but the reviewers had also laid out a method for baking the fish for 30 minutes at 375 degrees instead. I tried that several months ago and it was delicious, albeit without the crunchy glazed-sugar texture that was originally intended.

So I thought I’d try again with a fillet of salmon that I had frozen, but I forgot to thaw it in advance so I put it in a large zip-lock bag in a sink of cool water. I’ve read that you should never allow things to thaw at room temp because the bacteria will grow on the surface, and I was afraid to put it in the microwave (which technically has the same problem but I often do it anyway with meat) because I didn’t want the fish to cook.

Then I set about making my glaze, which calls for brown sugar, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, and ground ginger.

All stirred up, it looks like this – a crunchy, sticky mixture.

When the salmon’s thawed enough, season the plain side with salt and pepper.

Then place it on a greased rack (I just put tin foil over a baking sheet), skin side up.

Broil it for a few minutes, then turn it over and put the glaze on.

Broil it for a few more minutes, then cut into it and discover that the salmon is not nearly as thawed as you thought it was.

Curse yourself for not cutting the fillet into smaller pieces in the first place and for not thawing it fully, tell your husband that dinner is going to be a lot longer than you expected, and lower the oven temp so that you can bake it to get the center cooked.

Serve it with rice and steamed broccoli ages later, after hubby has already fallen asleep since it took so damn long. Ooops.

Already printed this recipe so it won’t go into my Tastebook. Comment if you want it, or else try the link above for a similar recipe (just cut down on the brown sugar and Dijon and add some soy sauce and ginger).

Happy eating!

Meatloaf

I have been on the search for the perfect meatloaf recipe for a while now. It’s not that I am a huge fan of meatloaf, but sometimes you just want something meaty and hearty for dinner (the fact that it’s easy to put together is a plus!). I’ve tried recipes that use bread crumbs and those that use oats, those that use ketchup and those that use tomato sauce, those that use diced onions and those that use onion powder. I think I finally found something that works pretty well for me. I think it’s a combination of a few different recipes that I’ve found online.

When I went to make this dish, it was probably about May 14th or 15th (I know, I’m behind on sharing it with you!). I had purchased the meat 3 or 4 days before that at the grocery store. When I looked at the package, though, this is what I saw:

February 6th? But I had JUST purchased it. The meat still looked pink and fresh, so I opened the package to sniff it. It smelled fresh and normal, and I even took a tiny taste. Everything seemed fine to me. If I’d pulled it out of the depths of my own fridge, I’d have been more cautions, but this was seriously just purchased. I decided that it was a typo and went ahead and used it. I didn’t really have the time or energy to storm back to the store, anyway.

I love how easy meatloaf is. I put the meat in a bowl, added bread crumbs, egg, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese, an envelope of dry onion soup mix, oregano, salt, and minced garlic.

Mixed together, it looked like this.

I served the final product with some of my Grandma Dorothy’s German potato salad and topped it with ketchup.

Last time I made this recipe, I used ketchup instead of tomato sauce and it was just okay. This time, hubby and I both really enjoyed it. I’m also not sure if I actually included the dry onion soup mix last time, but I did this time and it gave it that nice onion flavor without all the onion chunks that I’ve never liked in my meatloaf. As for the bread crumbs vs. oats debate, I’m not sure if I have anything against the oats other than I think I like the smooth texture of bread crumbs better. But both work.

I guess I have a meatloaf recipe that I’m satisfied with, after all. And I guess the meat wasn’t expired because neither of us ended up with food poisoning or horrible stomach problems or anything. Not that I was worried. Of course.

Leave a comment if you’d like the recipe – it’s not going in the tastebook because it’s already printed.

Cajun Crawfish Boil

Hubby and I just returned from our Memorial Day get-away in the small town in Louisiana where he grew up. Not everyone in his family managed to come back to town for the weekend, but we did get to hang out with his parents, four of his five siblings, and his siblings’ husbands/ wives/ kids, so that was a blast.

Life in Louisiana pretty much revolves around food. Of course, it was required (by hubby) that we hit all the traditional home-town eats, which include a run-down old Mexican place with dubious-looking floors and spectacular nachos, a little restaurant where no one looks at a menu but simply orders “The Special,” and a pizza place that’s got a little something for everyone.

I was there to relax, so I didn’t go too crazy with the camera. But I suppose I should have taken a few pictures to show my northern family and friends what a real BBQ consists of. Apparently grilling is not the same thing as barbequing. My family’s idea of a BBQ is tossing some burgers on the grill (and I’m not knocking that!). Hubby’s family takes BBQ pretty seriously, though, spending hours upon hours smoking things to perfection. His brother had prepared 35 pounds of brisket and 12 pounds of pork in advance, spending all day in the backyard BBQ pit. Well, he had prepared some ribs, too, but the cooking time on those was miscalculated so they got charred (from what I heard). Nevertheless, yesterday we feasted on smoked brisket, pork, coleslaw, and rice dressing. A good Southern meal.

But the star of the weekend’s menu was the crawfish. In the past, hubby’s dad has picked up three sacks of crawfish for this big family gathering. This year, we expected a few more people, so he decided to get four instead. Somehow, he ended up with five sacks of live, wriggling crawfish. Here are three of them.

The first thing to do is to purge them, or basically rinse them until all the dirt is all washed away and they drain clear water. They’re bottom feeders so this can be a process.

Let them sit for a bit, then drain them and do it all again. Here they are soaking in clean (ish) water.

Sometimes they escape when you try to drain them. Then you have the fun task of picking these buggers out of the grass (or you could be like me and take pictures while your husband does the dirty work).

I do like the division of labor along gender lines, though. The boys take care of the hard stuff (boiling the crawfish), while us ladies get to take care of setting the table. This consists of laying down a plastic table cloth on a picnic table, covering it with newspapers to absorb liquid, and attacking the whole thing with masking tape to keep it from blowing everywhere. The black trays that you see in the picture here are for the shells and heads and claws and pretty much every part of the crawfish except for the meat of the tail.

This is the cooking set-up. The crawfish are boiled in batches in that basket you see on the ground. The basket is dipped in that big pot next to it, which is heated by a burner with a  propane tank.

They’re boiled with a mixture of Cajun spices (the brand mix is “crab boil”), cayenne pepper, salt, butter, and either lemon juice or vinegar. After a little while, they look like this.

Give them a moment to drain and cool, then dump them on the picnic table. This is batch #1 out of… maybe 6? 8? 10? Who knows, you loose track after 2 or 3. But it was a lot.

Batch #1 wasn’t spicy enough, so after the kids were given their chance to dig in (I think one kid may have taken 1 crawfish, the rest avoided the whole operation), hubby’s sister took that giant container of crab boil (it comes in both powder and liquid forms) and applied it generously over top of the pile. Mmmm that ratcheted up the flavor and spice a bit.

To eat them, you grab the tail in one hand and the head in the other, and twist off the head. Toss that aside, then peel off the top ring of the shell on the tail. If you’re good at this, you should be able to pinch the tail meat with your fingers or mouth and pull the whole thing out. If you’re me, though, you’ll just tear it to shreds and spend the next few minutes trying to dismantle the rest of the shell because you suck at getting the meat out. It’s worth the effort, though.

Each batch got spicier and spicier. I’ve got to be honest, fellow Buffalonians, you’ve got nothing on these crazy Cajuns. These were so spicy that your fingers began to hurt after a while. I learned from last year to be VERY careful about wiping my running nose on a paper towel that I’d already wiped my hands on, so I used too many paper towels and still had to make an emergency trip or two to the bathroom to wash off my burning upper lip. Thank God I didn’t have any paper cuts.

Oh, but it was so worth it. So delicious.

That big pot on the table contains potatoes, mushrooms, and corn on the cob. The veggies were boiled in the same water as the crawfish and were pretty delicious, but I didn’t get pictures because I was avoiding touching anything with my burning fingers

 

It’s kind of embarrassing that out of ~120 lbs of live crawfish, we only had ~20 lbs left (about 2-3 lbs of meat). Someone will get some pretty delicious leftovers to make etouffee with this week.

For me, though, it’s back to the diet. *sigh*

Ready….set…. go!

School is done for the quarter, and hubby & I are going to Louisiana for Memorial Day weekend. I’ve been working a lot of extra hours this week to make up for the time off, so I haven’t had time to blog, but rest assured – good things are coming. I’m all set to share with you the results of a few different recipes (i.e. brown sugar & dijon glazed salmon, my award-winning chili, hubby’s incredible gumbo, my search for a good meatloaf recipe, updates on my philly shrimp, and honey-pecan green beans). And since life in Louisiana revolves around food, I’m sure I’ll be posting about that. After all, the biggest reason we’re going down there is for a family crawfish boil, and that is just begging to be blogged. So I will be back, faithful readers (and those who aren’t so faithful – I love you all). I promise!