I’ve been craving Gruyere lately, especially Gruyere with Dijon mustard, so I picked up some boneless, skinless chicken breasts last night and whipped this up in no time this evening. Less than an hour from start to finish… actually quite a bit less, which is a good thing since I forgot Cat had to leave early for work tonight and I wound up with 30 minutes less prep time than I thought! This is one of those things for which I really have a hard time writing down a recipe, since I pretty much winged my way through it, but I’ll give it a shot.

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I wanted to try doing something interesting with some of the venison my neighbors so graciously shared with us, so I played fast and loose with my Mom’s Arabian schwarma recipe. My *only* regret is that I forgot to wrap one up for myself, to take to my Mom’s house this week.

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My picture-taking skills seem to have deteriorated lately, but this dish turned out so well that I decided to post it here anyway. You can’t really go too far wrong with pork, in my book, but this was a lot of fun, as well. Tishie loves the Orange Chicken we get at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond, so I was going for something at least similar. What I wound up with was not a ringer, by any stretch, but it was good enough for the rest of the crew to ask about a dozen times, as they do when they love something I’ve made, “You DID write this down, right?”
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So it’s not the most original after-holiday leftover makeover, but at least I had fun with it. Mom suggested that I try her pie crust trick with the puff pastry… so what you see is (ahem) my (errr) interpretation of a turkey.

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As you might have noticed, I’ve been on hiatus these past two weeks or so, getting ready for our the SpiralGround Halloween Festival. There was a whole lot of fun food there, but it was, alas, too hectic to document as I went along. I did, however, manage to snap a picture of what I made for my family after the hordes had departed — Buffalo Bleu Chicken Pizza.

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I’m in Richmond, VA this weekend visiting my family, including my adorable grandbaby, TJ. Last night I made one of my son’s favorite dishes. I have a tendency to forget, being from the South, and from a family of cooks, that there are people who might need or want an actual *recipe* for fried chicken… so here’s mine. This can be used not only on chicken tenders, but on cut-up fryer pieces, as well… you’ll just need to adjust the cooking time (and they do far better in a cast iron skillet, with a lid. I’ll do those one day and post the exact method. Here’s the short version, since I don’t want to cut into my Mammie time too much. (more…)

Here we are again, needing to go to the grocery store, so I was playing pickup poker with things in the freezer in order to make dinner tonight. I discovered a languishing box of puff pastry, and some fresh pork sausage from a local friend (home-raised, on good stuff, and no nasty nitrates and such!) and decided to make a stuffed puff pastry.

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I’d had macaroni and cheese on my mind for a while, and last night seemed to be conducive… there was a slight chill in the air, a harbinger of autumn weather to come, which always makes me want comfort foods such as this. My plan was to use and review a published recipe: Alton Brown’s “Baked Macaroni and Cheese” from Good Eats. I started waffling on that plan at lunchtime when, in a pasta fugue, I cooked the macaroni for supper, too (I had to have macaroni salad, for some reason.) Pasta salad, nice and simple, is wonderful; however, if I’m going to make plain-jane mac ‘n cheese, I might as well buy a box of the blue stuff, and not spend a couple of hours and five times the money on it, ya know? Homemade mac n’ cheese should always, always be over the top!

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Well, I started out to make fajitas, but got sidetracked along the way, and wound up with yet another bastardization of a common dish! Sometimes these experiments go *really* well, and fortunately for us, tonight was one of those times. Well, at least in terms of how yummy the end product was. We’ll… just gloss over the part when I almost burned down the kitchen…

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Sorry for the blurry picture, but I did *kinda* get the steamy goodness. Anyone who can point me to a website with some tips about food photography? I’d be really grateful. I might even send cookies. (Ok, I’d be grateful enough to send something I could actually *make* instead.)

Red beans and rice has been one of my favorite dishes for a long time. Sadly enough, I have to admit that my first taste did not, however, come from my Cajun friend Janie’s mother, a native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, who introduced me to real jambalaya, boudin, and other yummy staples of that region. It was, inauspiciously, a now-defunct (I think) restaurant chain called Po Folks. We went there when I had young children because a) it was relatively consistent, if not exactly innovative, b) it was cheap, and c) said young children, of which there were a flock, could eat for free.

At this place, red beans and rice was served differently than I make it now. You got your rice, and you got your red beans on top, and you got a chunk of smoked sausage and a chunk of cornbread to the side. It was not bad, and I sensed further potential, but it wasn’t for years and years that I explored it further.

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