Get Inspired: Pepper-Crusted Steak

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I made this last night for our New Year’s Eve dinner.  However, I only cooked two steaks, but I made the regular amount of sauce, too much hassle to halve it, and it might not work so well halved, anyway.

I used a cast iron skillet to cook the steaks in, as it’s the best thing for getting a nice sear.  I found that 4 minutes per side made the steaks a perfect medium-rare.  This is an excellent recipe, you don’t need to do a thing to change it to make it better.  We got the strip steaks on sale for $4.99 a pound at Shaw’s, as this was the recipe of the week there.

To serve with the steaks, I made the Gorgonzola Stuffed Potatoes recipe that I saw on the Katie Brown Workshop.  You can find the recipe on this page.

I’m not a huge fan of Katie Brown.  Frankly, I find her perkiness a bit annoying.  Also, when I have watched her show, I’ve seen her cook some rather nasty stuff.  She’s shilling for Jello and Cool Whip these days, and she made this pumpkin pie wout of Jello pudding and Cool Whip.  Just about the only ingredient I would have used for a pumpkin pie was the canned pumpkin, but as long as it’s pure pumpkin, and not with spices or other crap thrown in.  I prefer to add my own seasonings.  Also, Cool Whip is evil, it’s not even real whipped cream.  That’s why they have to call it a “whipped topping”.

Katie is not as bad as Sandra Lee, though.  Some of her stuff is okay, but she can keep all of that Sandra-esque crap made with over-processed ingredients.  I can also do without some of her craft projects…in the same show where she made the potatoes (it was a New Year’s themed show), she also made this DOG-awful tacky looking table ornament out of a huge Styrofoam ball and some silver Christmas tree garland.  That one was right up there with Sandra’s tacky “tablescapes”.

This episode was part of a holiday cooking show marathon on the Create channel.  I was about to change the channel, but kept it on when she talked about the potato recipe…I love Gorgonzola cheese.  In fact, I will soon be making another Shaw’s “Get Inspired” recipe that uses up the rest of the wedge of Gorgonzola that I bought to make the potatoes.  It will be posted after I make it.

The stuffed potato recipe looked good, nothing weird or over-processed in it.  And when I made it, it was very tasty.  The steak recipe that she had on to serve with it looked yummie, too…but filet is just too pricey.  So I made the less-pricey New York strip pepper steaks instead.  The pototoes go just as nicely with that as they probably did with the filet mignon.

Anyhoo, stay tuned for the next “Get Inspired” recipe, coming soon.  It will be a dish of Rigatoni with Portobellos and Gorgonzola Cream, which sounds to me like a nice vegetarian dish (for vegetarians who consume diary, that is).

Enjoy!

New Year’s Food

With the weather what it is here…one day hot, one day, snow…I’d love to take off for New Year’s to some Wilmington NC real estate…not gonna happen this year. So we will stay at home and make the best of it.

For New Year’s Eve dinner, we are having another Shaw’s *Get Inspired* recipe, for pepper crusted steaks.  As a side dish, I want to make a recipe I saw on the Katie Brown Workshop, which is potatoes stuffed with Gorgonzola.  The recipe can be found on this page.  Who knew I’d ever use a Katie Brown recipe, but this one looks yummie!

For New Year’s Day, we have to have a dish called Hoppin’ John…which consists mostly of black-eyed peas and rice.  According to southern tradition, serve Hoppin’ John with a dish of greens, and you will have luck and prosperity in the New Year.  We also serve a roast chicken or duck with the Hoppin’ John and greens (usually spinach for us).

What are you planning for New Year’s Eve/Day?

Get Inspired: Easy Chicken Cordon Bleu

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I made this last night. It was very tasty, but the recipe, as printed, has a couple of flaws that I want to point out.

First of all, it only calls for two TEASPOONS of Dijon mustard.  In Step 2, it tells you to add two teaspoons of mustard to the pan, along with the cream, wine, tarragon, salt & pepper, after the chicken has browned.  Then, in Step 3, it says, “spread 1 teaspoon remaining mustard over each breast.”  What remaining mustard?

The conclusion I came to was that this is a typo on the recipe card.  Being that you need to spread 1 teaspoon of mustard over each of four chicken breasts, and you need two teaspoons for the sauce, that means you need SIX teaspoons of mustard IN ALL.  And being that there are 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, the recipe should have read “2 TABLESPOONS Dijon mustard.”

I also didn’t like the use of shredded cheese here.  I did buy shredded Swiss, though, because I almost always want to make a new recipe as instructed the first time.  But the shredded cheese kind of went all over the place, it didn’t stick on very well.  Sliced cheese would have been better, and I will use that next time.  The Ritz cracker crumbs didn’t adhere very well, either.  It would have been more manageable, once again, with a slice of cheese instead of a mound of the shredded variety.  In the oven, it did all melt okay, though.  But I would have preferred more of the crumbs to have stuck to the top, rather than fall off into the sauce.

My friend Kat has a much easier version of chicken cordon bleu.  There is a video on that blog post, as well, that shows you how to do it.  She does it as a roll-up, with the chicken pounded thin first.  The slices of ham and cheese go on the chicken, and it gets rolled up, then it gets rolled in bread crumbs.  Since the chicken meat is kind of moist, the crumbs will stick better.  Then she cooks them on a George Foreman grill.  Due to the fact that the chicken breast were pounded thin, this takes very little time to cook.

Kat’s recipe does not call for mustard, but I see no reason why you can’t spread some on the chicken, before you put the slices of ham and cheese on, if you wanted to.  And you could also use the Ritz cracker crumbs instead of bread crumbs if you felt like it.  You could use any kind of cracker or bread crumbs you have on hand.  I didn’t feel lik dirtying up my food processor, so I just put the crackers into a small ziploc bag and crushed them, in the bag, in my hands.

And before any of you “green” people go nuts on me, I do wash and save plastic bags that I use for this purpose, and reuse them until they break.  The only time I would NOT recycle a plastic bag is if it was used to store raw meats, fish, or poultry.  So, needless to say, you would NOT recycle the plastic wrap used when pounding the chicken.  But in addition to this being mess-free, it’s also a food safety issue.  The more you expose raw poultry to surfaces in your kitchen, such as counters and cutting boards, the more chance you have of cross-contamination, which can make you and your family sick.  And being sick can cost you a lot of “green”, if you get my drift.  Never take chances.

So, next time I want to make chicken cordon bleu, I will take the best of both of these recipes and do it that way.  Enjoy!

Get Inspired: Broiled Salmon with Potato Crust

Click on image for larger printable recipe, will open in new window.

It’s been a while since I posted one of these, but I will be getting back to this regularly.  I have been collecting the recipe cards at the Shaw’s store every week, and I have a whole bunch I haven’t tried yet.

This recipe first appeared, in a slightly different form, in the very first season of the America’s Test Kichen TV show on PBS.  It appears in the companion book to the season, The Best Recipe.  It involved roasting a whole side of salmon in this manner.  It’s very nice, but it might be a bit much for some people.  If you were having a big dinner party, it might be nice.  But this version here is for an average family, you just buy and cook as much salmon as you need, no waste.

Potato chips on salmon may sound strange, but give it a try!  It’s very tasty!

Get Inspired: Garlic-Rosemary Pork Chops

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This is yet another winner from the Shaw’s “Get Inspired” series.  I have a lot of the recipe cards from the store, many I haven;’t tried yet, but my promise to you is to cook my way through them all, and post them for you.

Pork is often called “the other white meat”, and the pork loin is indeed a very lean piece of meat.  You will not need to whip out the diet pills if you eat it. In fact, today’s pork is so lean, you have to be careful not to dry it out when cooking.

Also, the trichinosis has pretty much been bred out of pork as well, so it is no longet necessary to cook it to death.  So that makes it all the more easier to not dry it out.

The recipe here calls for bone-in pork, but the coordinating pork product on sale was the whole boneless loin, for $1.88 a pound.  This is about three feet long, way more than you need for this dish.  But I bought it anyway, the rest can be frozen and used later for other meals.  Also, it is really hard to find a thick pork chop in the supermarket, buying a whole roast lets you cut your own chops to your own desired thickness.

Anyhoo, this came out really well, cooked according to the instructions.  I served it with rice pilaf and lima beans, which is the way Mike likes to have his pork.

Enjoy!