Breakfast Scramble for Dinner

I love having breakfast for supper.  It started back in my childhood when my Mom, I'm sure out of exhaustion or frugalness or a combination of both, would serve us grits and eggs and bacon for supper.  It was cheap, easy and we all loved it so EVERYBODY was happy at the Smiley ranch.

SO I've continued that tradition into my adult life, but with some variation on the grits/eggs/bacon theme.  My sister sent me a box of Vidalia onions and one of the first dishes I wanted to make was a breakfast-supper dish - onions with potatoes and sausage.

I started by par-cooking the potatoes (after cutting them up) in the microwave for ten minutes or so to get them soft, then sauteeing 1/2 an onion in a little oil with kosher salt to which I added the potatoes and some leftover sausage.  

A few spices, a bit of pepper, and a grate of aged parm and voila! - a great cold-weather dish!  Easy, quick and economical - Mama would be proud.

Biscuits, but more importantly, jelly

I'm not a baker - I'll be the first to admit it.

I'll spend hours on a braise or slow-cooked stew or preparing just the right julienne - but baking?  I don't do it.  So I'm not even going to pretend that the biscuits below are "mine".  They are the individual frozen ones from the regular supermarket (and, in my absence of ability to cook them, they're pretty good too).

The purpose of the pics is to express my delight with blackberry jelly.  My Mom's blackberry jelly, actually.  She's made it as long as I can remember.   And, as evidenced in the pictures below, it's FANTASTIC.  It tastes even better than it looks.

Mmmmm ... cupcakes ...

Tonight I spent the evening at my buddy Ken's house.  We had decided earlier in the week that we wanted to get together and try this recipe from an old church cookbook that my Mom and Grandma gave me years ago.  

This idea morphed to a lets-get-together-and-play-showtunes-and-cook-all-night kinda night.  Which was FINE BY ME.  We made the cake (from the old cookbook) and he had pre-made cupcakes before I arrive and we made fresh pasta, from scratch, rolled it, pressed it, cut it, cooked it ... and ate it.  

I took tons of photos and I'm in the process of going through all of the pasta photos and editing them trying to find just the right ones - in the meantime I wanted to share our cupcakes.

The frosting was a ganache really, made from cocoa, powdered sugar, heavy cream and a little vanilla.  Because the cream was whipped in, the frosting had a really light and fluffy texture and the good (I think it was kinda spendy) cocoa gave it a wonderfully deep chocolate flavor.

Here are some pics:  

Cocktail, anyone?

Just a quick post - no long diatribe about how I feel about it or the history of it or how my family used to make it.  Just some really pretty pictures of the vodka tonic I made tonight to watch the Project Runway finale!

REDUX - Me and Joe are A-OK

A little over a year ago I wrote about my giddy delight with Trader Joe's - you can read about it here:

http://smileyeats.blogspot.com/2007/05/me-and-joe-are-ok.html

Suffice it to say, I'm still in love. AND, I still have a major crush on the Tarte d'Alsace.

I'll not go into how much I don't "do" frozen, prepared foods (except in the case of an extreme comfort food craving I have for chicken fingers) but even after a year of trying Trader Joe's prepared meals, with very few misses, I still enjoy the tangy tart.

A flatbread, almost filo, with creme fraiche, ham, Gruyere cheese and caramelized onions, this French-inspired "pizza" takes only 8-10 minutes in a 475 degree oven. The crust is crispy and light and with really amped up flavors like the onions and Gruyere, it satisfies a gourmet taste, without the fuss and mess.

I love it. If you have a Trader Joe's near, give it a shot - it's really inexpensive and a great go-to-I-don't-wanna-cook meal.

Here's some shots:

Risoooooooh-to

I've been on a risotto kick lately and having developed (what I think is) a burgeoning dairy intolerance, I wanted to crank out a good, creamy, and flavorful risotto without adding cream or cheese (much, anyway), or a lot of butter.

I decided to use a very potent vegetable stock as the liquid, a scant two tablespoons of butter and I garnished with a just a bit of aged Parmesan. Adding snap peas brought a sweetness to what might have been an otherwise boring (albeit savory) dish. It was a bit unconventional but ultimately, it worked.

Slow cooking, paddle stirring (for paddles I used wide bottomed silicon spatulas) and a really good starter rice - yes, in this case more expensive means better - helped to make my risotto creamy without adding lots of cheese or any cream.

Pics are below -

Simple-Ton-Of-Flavor

We weren't wealthy growing up. My parents both worked and always provided what we needed and some of what we wanted but we were far from wealthy. So naturally my Mom had to come up with a number of ways to feed the four of us - my Dad, my sister, and me, a fledgling foodie.

One of her tricks, and probably one of the simplest delights I can remember from her kitchen, is what she called a hoe-cake. It's not a traditional hoe-cake as there is no corn or corn meal in it. Merely flour, water and, on her stove, bacon drippings.

Conincidentally, opposite the "hoe-cake" moniker, my Grandpa (my Father's father) called it "leather bread", I guess because the outside becomes like a thick skin, sometimes resembling leather if you let it set out very long.

She'd start by heating a cast iron skillet with a few tablespoons of bacon grease (which she always had around). Then, she'd sift a cup (maybe two when we got older) of self-rising flour and mix in just enough water to bring it to the consistency of really thick pancake batter.

Then she'd pour the mix into the skillet, and wait. She'd drip a few circles of bacon grease on top so that when flipped, this savory bread-cake would get dual-sided flavor. (Smart woman, my Mother).

I remember it being crispy on the edges and warm inside and salty and filling and the perfect vehicle for soaking up whatever might be left on your plate. It's really one of the things I miss most.

SO - I decided to make one. Naturally, I don't have bacon drippings lying around so I substituted browning some butter for flavor. It's close. Very close to hers but not quite.

Here's some photos of what I wound up with -