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Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side
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| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_sandwich
I grew up eating horseshoe sandwiches. Now, as a rule, the horseshoes I had were sauced with whatever generic cheddar cheese sauce the restaurant had, and I don't think I ever had one in Springfield. Which is a pity, because I used to spend a lot of time in Springfield.
And there's this "Cue Shoe" you can supposedly get at a place in Urbana, Dammit. I lived in Shampoo-Banana for 5 years, and I never heard of this thing. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I have successfully made my first tomato sauce.
I started out by chopping and boiling some tomatoes I got from Sun Fresh. I let them cook down for a few minutes, then took a potato masher to them. Cooked 'em some more, mashed 'em a little more, then took my hand blender to 'em. This gave me a pretty good consistency, although it left me with bits of (tomato) skin in the sauce. while the tomatoes were cooking down, I sauteed some garlic and oregano in olive oil in my cast iron and added that to the sauce. Unfortunately, I added too much oregano, so I had to go out and get some more tomatoes to thin out the oregano a little. I got some heirloom tomatoes from Wild Oats, and rather than taking the potato masher to 'em, I chopped 'em up and put them in my electric food chopper. This was an excellent idea - it gave the tomatoes a wonderfully smooth consistency (apart from the seeds. *g*). I threw the chopped-up tomatoes into the pot, let it cook down for half an hour, 45 minutes, threw in some fresh-ground pepper and a bit of parsley, and it was ready. :)
![[info]](http://www.inksome.com/img/userinfo.gif) hlynna and I had it on pizza (Boboli crust, Hautly mozzarella, and Hormel pepperoni) last night. Tonight I had some on fettucine with sauteed mushrooms. It freezes very well - I froze it last night, thawed it tonight, and it tasted just as good. compare this with my alfredo, which tends to separate when frozen. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| So last night hlynna and I had royal_spice and her husband over last night for dinner and gaming - this was the first time we'd ever been able to host them for dinner, rather than the other way around, as we now have a spiffy new dining room table and chairs for 4. :) I (with royal_spice serving as a very able sous chef) made pizza - one veggie, with portabella mushrooms, green peppers, banana peppers, and kalamata olives, and one chicken, green peppers, and half portabella mushroom. Both were sauced with Alfredo, rather than marinara or some other tomato-based sauce, and here's the recipe for my marinara. :) Based on Alfredo Sauce Supreme.
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 cloves garlic -- pressed
- 1/2 package (4 oz.) cream cheese -- cut up
- ~ 1 cup fresh-grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/2 cup half and half
Cook the garlic, butter, and olive oil in a saucepan over medium-low to medium heat (sorry, I don't have an IR thermometer to tell you how hot the bottom of the saucepan ought to be). Try not to brown the garlic, but don't worry overmuch if you do. After it's cooked a little while (5 minutes or so), add the half and half. Give that a minute or two to heat up, then add the Parmesan and cream cheese. Stir constantly until all the cheese is melted. At this point, the sauce may be a bit thick - you can add some half and half if you think it's too thick. And that's it.
For pizza, what I did was to take that sauce and spread it evenly on the crust, add the toppings and cheese, then throw it on my pizza stone for 5 minutes, in the case of the veggies, and 7-8 minutes in the case of the chicken. Note that the pizza stone had been in my oven at 500° for 30 minutes prior to me putting the pies on the stone.
To quote Rachael Ray (she got a purty mouth): "Yum-o!"
Oh, and as for the gaming? We played Time's Up and Ticket To Ride. In the former case, royal_spice and her husband (it's a team game) beat us 55 - 45. In the latter case, hlynna won, but I came in dead last. *shrug* Ah well. :) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| My uncle Wally makes great sweet potatoes1. I recently found a letter in which he explains to me how they're made. In the interest of reducing the number of pieces of paper I have floating around my house, I am posting the recipe here.
Ingredients:
- enough sweet potatoes to fill your baking dish
- 1/2 stick of butter (1/8 of a pound), cut into small pieces
- handful of brown sugar (maybe 1/4 cup or so)
- 1/4 of a small bottle of Karo dark corn syrup
- Enough small marshmallows to cover the potatoes
Peel sweet potatoes if desired. Cut potatoes into halves, or quarters, or whatever shape you like - bonus points for 3-dimensional projections of 4-dimensional solids - and cook just until soft. You should be able to stick a fork or a toothpick in the potatoes and not find any hard spots. When the sweet potatoes are cooked, put them into a 9" x 12" baking dish and put the butter in with the sweet potatoes - try and get an even coverage, but don't worry too much about it. Pour the Karo syrup over the sweet potatoes, then sprinkle the brown sugar over them. Bake at 350° for about 40 minutes, and in the last 5 minutes or so, sprinkle the marshmallows over the sweet potatoes and let them finish baking.
If you're travelling with this dish, you may want to wait to put the marshmallows on until you get to where you're going - just put the marshmallows on and pop the baking dish into the microwave for a few minutes to heat them up.
1 in the classic Midwestern style, sweet, involving Karo syrup, butter, brown sugar, and marshmallows. Carb-a-licious! | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I tried a can of Progresso fava beans from Publix today, and did not care for them. There's a funky taste, like they've gone off or something. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| So my girlfriend got me two sets of chopsticks for my birthday. Since I don't eat lots of Chinese/Asian food, I thought that I ought to try and put these chopsticks to use more often. To this end, I have been trying to eat lunch and dinner for the past couple of days with the chopsticks. So far, I have found:
Spaghetti is tough. The noodles don't want to stay on the chopsticks, and twisiting them around and around doesn't help. However, spaghetti covered in chili is a bit easier - tonight I made spaghetti topped with chili and ground beef. Seems that the chili helps to bind the spaghetti together.
Salad varies. If it's a very leafy salad, like the garden salad I bought tonight from Publix, the chopsticks don't work so well. You can pick up a couple pieces of lettuce and that's it. If there are lots of big veggies, however, like the salad I got from Jason's Deli salad bar, the chopsticks work well.
I'll post more as I try different things with the chopsticks. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | And you're into Italian food, go to this place called Angela's Restaurant in Thornburg. It's right off of I-95, at 5414 Mud Tavern Rd. in Thornburg. Yummy as all hell. I had the chicken and portobello ravioli in pink sauce. hlynna had the fettucini Alfredo. I will highly recommend both. And the garlic knots! | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This is a brand of frozen microwave Asian food that I bought at Wal-Mart.
I microwaved the box according to the instructions in the microwave here in the Physics Reading Room, removed the wrapper, stirred up the stuff, and had a bite. The verdict: not worth it. The food was bland and tasteless. The cashews were mushy, and the breaded chicken pieces were not crispy at all.
I have three more boxes of this stuff (three different dishes) so maybe one of those will be better. I'm not holding my breath, though. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side
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