Dinosaur Parmigiano: Why I'm Way More Awesome than Sandra Lee

Have you guys heard of Sandra Lee and her "semi-homemade cooking" phenomenon? I hadn't until just recently, when I read something about her using baby food and muffin mix and trying to pass it off as homemade (well, semi-homemade) and I was slightly disgusted. It's not that I have a problem with taking shortcuts. I can totally understand using a muffin mix. I've done it myself. The problem that I have rests in her tendency to act like her creations take skill and to tell her audience that nobody will know that it's only semi-homemade. Oh, right--and the fact that this somehow has a show on the food network. If you want to be outraged, go to her page on the food network's site and watch the short videos on the bottom. There were one or two that I found acceptable, and the rest were just absurd. Nobody's going to think that a grocery-store cake with melted lemonade concentrate brushed on it, coated with canned frosting with lemon extract mixed in, is anywhere near homemade, yet she finishes every single "recipe" saying "And no one will know that it's semi-homemade!"

Sandra Lee, the gig is up. I'm about to beat you at your own game. LET'S GO.

RECIPE: Dinosaur Parmigiano

I made this up, like, six years ago. Because I love dinosaurs.

Ingredients:

-1 package Perdue dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets

-1 box spaghetti

-1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

-1 jar pasta sauce

-1/4 lb of the cheapest mozzarella you can buy

-about a teaspoon of Italian seasoning

-about a teaspoon of garlic powder

-freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese

-a couple fresh basil leaves (garnish, optional)

Yeah. This stuff. A good-quality sauce is key to making people think you have mad kitchen skills.

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to the temperature that the package of chicken nuggets says.

2. Get a pot of water boiling.

3. Put the sauce in a pan on medium heat.

4. Shred the cheese.

5. Spread the chicken nuggets out on a cookie sheet. Use your fingers to sprinkle a tiny bit of Italian seasoning and garlic powder over each one. Press down on them (to sort of embed the seasoning into the breading). Flip over and repeat.

6. At this point, the sauce should be bubbling. Spoon a little bit of sauce over each dinosaur, then top with some shredded mozzarella. Stick in the oven for 8 minutes.

7. Your water should be boiling, too. Put the pasta in there and cook it until al dente, also about 8 minutes. When it's done, strain it, put it back in the pan (off the heat) and add the olive oil to keep it from sticking.

8. When the dinosaurs are done, take them out of the oven. You can now assemble your plates. Scoop a pile of the spaghetti onto each plate. Cover with sauce. Add 4-6 dinosaurs. Sprinkle with the freshly grated parmesan/romano and garnish with a basil leaf. POOF! Semi-homemade.

See the seasoning on there? That little added flavor will completely convince your guests that you made this all from scratch. Seriously. They'll have NO IDEA. (At least, that's what Sandra Lee would have you believe.)

You shredded that cheese yourself. What more can your guests possibly ask of you?

And with a gorgeous presentation like this, how could anyone suspect that you pretty much bought everything pre-made at the store?

Okay, that's enough sarcasm for now--I'm starting to feel nauseous just pretending to think like her. Now it's time for the important thing: why I'm better than her. I'll make a list for that, too.

Reasons I'm Better Than Sandra Lee:

1. I'm not actually going to pretend any of this is homemade. In fact, by using the dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets instead of the less-obvious tenders or something, I'm admitting right up front that I put zero effort in. In short, I'm not going to lie to you.

2. I understand that, while sometimes you don't have time to cook an intricate meal for your family, shortcuts like this are neither as healthy or as tasty as what you'd make yourself if you had the time. I therefore don't encourage cooking like this all the time.

3. I would never, ever, EVER feed this (or anything like it) to guests. I mean, maybe if the "guest" were a little kid, sure--but I'm not going to have company over and serve them things I bought pre-made at the store.

4. I actually know how to make every aspect of this meal from scratch--the pasta, the sauce, the breaded chicken...okay, maybe not the cheese. But the rest, yes.

5. I think it bears mentioning twice--I'm not lying to you.

6. Come on. I used friggin' dinosaurs. How much more awesome could it get?

I promise to someday give you guys a real chicken parmesan recipe that isn't making fun of anyone. Someday. But for now...

Yes, we did actually eat this. And honestly? It's actually pretty tasty, as long as you don't expect real homemade flavor. I have no problem with boxed or jarred food items. It's easy and quick. This took about 45 minutes from me leaving to go to the grocery store and get the ingredients to putting dinner on the table, and you just can't do that with real homemade food, and most people don't have a lot of time to cook an intricate meal every day. There are plenty of better options out there for quick meals, but occasionally, this is just fine. The only real problem that I have is with people pretending it's something that it's not.

Oh--and I promise that, someday, I'll give you a real chicken parmesan recipe. It won't involve dinosaurs. But until then, why don't you go read about some awesome new discoveries that paleontologists are making? (I really, really love dinosaurs.)

Sandra Lee, our game is done sir.

Thank you for a lot of fun sir.

Sausage Stir-Fry with a side of Nostalgia

One thing that frustrates me as a person who likes to cook is the barrage of questions that I frequently have to face when feeding new people. "Where did you learn to cook?" "Where did you get this recipe?" Sometimes it isn't questions so much as assumptions--"Wow, your mom did a great job teaching you to cook!" The questions and assumptions on their own wouldn't be all that bad, but people always seem so disappointed in my responses. I learned to cook from reading cookbooks and following the directions. When I didn't know what something meant, I looked it up. More recently, I've expanded my skills using online tools (such as other blogs or sites like Recipezaar). Chances are, I found the recipe online; I think I have a total of two "old family recipes" that I can toss together from memory in my repertoire.

My point here is that, no, my mom didn't teach me how to cook, and I don't think that's a bad thing as so many people seem to. Why is it that everyone always seems disappointed when I say I got a recipe online, or that I taught myself with the help of numerous cookbooks and weeks of my life staring at the computer screen? My mom isn't a bad cook (though she would probably tell you otherwise)--I quite like her cooking, and when she does cook I think it's excellent, but she doesn't love it like I do. We never spent time in the kitchen when I was little with her showing me exactly how she makes a pie crust, and I think it's okay that I found out from a book.

However, the passion and interest must have come from somewhere, and that credit goes to my dad. He never really taught me a recipe, because I'm not sure if he ever really followed a recipe, but I do remember him busy making something for dinner and asking me if I could pit the olives, which was my favorite job because I ate most of them. (I got yelled at for this. Sorry, Dad.) He would chop up peppers for a stir fry and give me slices so that I could learn how much sweeter red peppers are than green peppers. There were nights that my mom and brother and I searched the refrigerator and cabinets and pantry for something to make for dinner, finding an old tomato, some peanut butter, three or four gallons of milk, huge jars of spices, and nothing else. Somehow, on these nights when there was nothing in the house and we were all too lazy to go grocery shopping, my dad could come home and whip up some simple, excellent meal out of our total lack of ingredients.

I never learned to be quite that resourceful, unfortunately--I either plan a meal out and go to the store and get everything I need, or I don't plan a meal and I go to the store wandering around until I find something that inspires me. I also never learned the knife skills that my dad tried to teach me; they're getting slightly better than they used to be but it still takes me at least 6 minutes to chop up a pepper. (I'm getting good at carrots, celery and rhubarb, though.)

So...nobody really taught me how to cook, and I find my recipes wherever I feel like, but I think my dad taught me how to play with my food and enjoy my time in the kitchen. He taught me to triple the garlic in any recipe I read and to like pepper far more than is perhaps healthy. And, without him, I never would have learned to buy twice as many olives as I planned to put in a dish. This recipe is based on one of those things that he used to come home and throw together, leaving the rest of us wondering where the ingredients came from but in the end quite satisfied with our meals. It's quick, simple, and delicious.

RECIPE: Sausage and Pepper Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

-1 package of sweet Italian sausages (usually contains 5 or 6) (If you'd like, use half a package of sweet and half a package of hot for some more variety--freeze the rest!)

-1 or 2 green peppers

-1 or 2 red peppers

-2 tomatoes

-1 large onion

-a whole lot of garlic

-some cooked pasta (homemade if possible!)

-ground pepper (or whole pepper in a grinder) (I like to use peppercorn medleys instead of just plain black pepper, but I don't really know what the difference is, so use whichever you prefer)

-extra virgin olive oil

-freshly grated romano or parmesan cheese

Instructions:

1. Heat some olive oil in a large frying pan. Once it's hot (a drop of water sizzles and evaporates immediately), add the sausages whole. Fry on each side for a few minutes, until lightly browned and partially cooked through. When you're not tending to the sausages, chop the peppers and onion (and, of course, garlic).

2. Remove the sausages from the pan and slice them into medallions. (If you don't fry them whole first, they won't slice properly and you'll get sausage-balls with little strips of sausage casing, and you don't want that.) Return to the frying pan. Lay as many flat as possible.

3. Fry the sausages until cooked through, flipping occasionally. Once they're done (or mostly done, since they'll still be in the pan) add the peppers, onion and garlic. Sauté until slightly softened, but still crisp enough to crunch a little when you bite it--you don't want soggy vegetables.

4. While the peppers and onions are softening, chop the tomato. Once everything else is done, add the tomato and a a few grinds of pepper, stir, and cook until the tomatoes are hot.

5. Serve over a bed of pasta with a generous amount of cheese to top each dish. Make sure to get some of the juices from the pan onto your plate--they're excellent!

Tasty sausages!

Yum! Mike and I use a ton of vegetables when we stir-fry--that's a BIG pan full of them. We usually end up thinking that we should have used less, but we never do the next time, and we fill up on healthy food and don't have room for ice cream. (Which is really sad--there's key lime and graham cracker gelato in the freezer that we keep being too full to eat.)

That looks like a ton of food, but it's mostly a pile of vegetables. We used leftover homemade whole wheat noodles, which wasn't true to my childhood memories at all but they were perfect with this dish.

I was originally going to post this on Father's Day, but then I had to go to my cousin's graduation party, and then I forgot about it, and then I realized that I never really posted anything for Mother's Day and I didn't know if it was okay to post something for Father's Day and not Mother's Day, and THEN I figured, well, my dad was always the cook, so it makes more sense, and I also gave my mom an awesome scarf and baked her a pie. So, consider this a very belated Father's Day post. (I think he also deserves credit for my tendency to cook with peppers, tomatoes and onions.)

How about you guys? Did you teach yourselves to cook, or did you have a parent or grandparent to show you the ropes? Any family recipes?

I hope everyone (well, everyone in the US) has a great 4th of July tomorrow--we're going to my family's annual grilled-meat-fest (seriously: sausages, steak tips, burgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken, and it's all too good to pass up--I think I'll skip breakfast).

pesto 3-in-1

This is another favorite that I discovered on Recipezaar ages ago, "ages" here being defined as "7 or 8 months." It's easy and delicious and I have a bunch of basil plants now because I want to make pesto out of basil I grew myself. This is ambitious and may never happen, but I remain hopeful.

You can buy pesto to make this, but I much prefer to buy a bunch of basil and pine nuts and romano and garlic and olive oil and make it myself. It keeps for about a week in the fridge if you seal it, or you can freeze it in ice cube trays and have little single-portion cubes of frozen pesto to melt whenever you feel is appropriate.

RECIPE: Basic Basil Pesto

Ingredients:

-about 4 cups loosely-packed basil leaves

-about 1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese

-about 1/3 cup pine nuts

-3 or 4 cloves of garlic

-about 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Instructions:

1. Put everything in a blender or food processor and puree. If it's too dry, add small amounts of olive oil until you achieve your desired consistency.

Ooh, yeah--make sure to wash the basil first! I try to avoid including any stems. I'm not sure what the normal protocol on stems is.

You may find it easier to blend the basil before adding everything else, especially if you're using a blender. I used my mini-food processor and did the basil in small batches before putting everything else in the blender, but my blender is pretty lame and doesn't work so you'd probably be fine just putting everything in at once.

Once it's done, put it in a container and refrigerate until you're ready to use it! I love the bright green of a fresh pesto--you don't get that from the jarred varieties.

Okay, so that was pretty much the easiest thing ever, right? If you have the basil, it's absolutely worth it, but basil can get pretty expensive so you might want to skip the 'making pesto' step and buy pesto instead to make this chicken. Because it's SO GOOD. I call it "caprese chicken" because, well, it's tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, but I think "pesto chicken" works just as well.

RECIPE: Caprese Chicken

Ingredients:

-6 thin-sliced chicken breasts

-3 plum tomatoes

-pesto (above)

-a ball of fresh mozzarella (or a bunch of the tiny ones)

Instructions:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Wash the chicken and trim any excess fat off the edges.

2. Slather the pesto all over each chicken breast and place on a foil-lined baking sheet.

3. Place chicken in the oven for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, slice the tomatoes and grate (or slice) the mozzarella.

4. After 15 minutes, remove the chicken from the oven. Lay slices of tomato on chicken and coat with mozzarella. Return to oven for 3-5 minutes, until cheese has melted.

5. Remove from oven. Serve on a bed of pasta (with pesto!) and with some vegetables. Enjoy.

I scoop some pesto into a bowl and cover about 2 thin chicken breasts with it, then add more. This isn't properly coated--it's just to point out that this recipe does get quite messy at times.

Apparently I didn't get a good picture of how the chicken looked once it was thoroughly coated, and you shouldn't go by this because it looks less coated once it's baked. This is the 'slices of mini mozzarella' version.

The chicken comes out juicy and flavorful. I love trying to get everything in one bite--the chicken, pasta, tomato and cheese. I also tend to always serve this with asparagus, but that's just because I love asparagus!

Okay, so you can clearly see that I made 7 chicken breasts, even though I said 6. The package came with a different amount than usual. The thing here is to make a lot of leftovers--I was serving two people with this, but everything left goes to good use: it makes the best sandwiches ever! Which I'm ALSO going to tell you how to make! (In addition, the sandwiches are why I use thin-sliced breasts. If you don't care to make sandwiches, then you can use thicker breasts if you'd like, but I think this provides an awesome ratio of pesto to chicken.)

To make the sandwich, take your favorite kind of bread--I highly recommend rye in this situation, but your tastes may be different--and slather some of your remaining pesto on each slice, the same way you did the chicken in the first place. Grate some leftover mozzarella onto one side. Heat the leftover chicken, then put it on the inside, wrap in tinfoil, and toast (I use the 'dark toast' setting). Or, if you have a panini press, this would be a great time to bust it out! I, sadly, don't. These are excellent, sandwich-shop quality sandwiches that you make at home with leftovers from a really simple dinner.

Like this.

Holy blurry picture, Batman. Sometimes there's nothing I can do to stabilize my camera. But you can still see this, and just look at all the delicious layers in there. The pesto gives the sandwich a super creamy texture inside, and the bread is nice and toasty.

So, there you have it: how to make pesto, what to do with it once you've made it, and what to do with the leftovers. Now I'm starving! I wish I still had some left.

I also can't help but wonder how this chicken would fare on the grill--has anyone grilled pesto before? Does it work? (Maybe I'll try it and let you know.)

Pesto

SAUCE ADVENTURE!

Remember way back when I wrote about my pasta adventure? You probably don't, since that was only my second post and I have a lot more followers now! Welcome to those of you I don't know, it's so great to know people are reading my blog! Anyway, at some point in that post I mentioned that maybe eventually Mike would let me document/blog about his sauce recipe, and today is that day! (Well, documented a while ago, finally had the time to resize all the pictures and post today.) I apologize in advance for the picture-heavy post: this sauce takes five hours to cook and has a lot of steps! It's a family recipe passed down from his great grandmother, who moved here from Italy, so he likes to think it's pretty authentic but we don't know for sure. (I'm pretty sure my Italian professor told us that spaghetti and meatballs is an American thing.)

Okay! Since this is so picture-heavy, I'm going to try to ease off the irrelevant writing and stick to the recipe. It's sort of complicated, so bear with me.

RECIPE: Five Hour, Multi-Meat Pasta Sauce

Ingredients:

-2-3 medium white or yellow onions

-1 whole bulb of garlic

-A tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil

-1 6oz can tomato paste

-1 8oz can tomato sauce

-1 29oz can tomato puree (We highly recommend using Contadina for all of these.)

-1 package sweet Italian sausage (5 or 6 sausages, not one of those giant packages) (You could use hot Italian sausage if you wanted to. We wouldn't be upset. Mike just isn't a fan of spicy. You could also use one of those herb-y or garlic-y sausages. Seriously. It's up to you.)

-1 lb lean ground beef or buffalo (surprisingly buffalo is available in most grocery stores and doesn't really cost all that much!)

-1 cup Italian-seasoned breadcrumbs (we haven't gotten quite ambitious enough to make our own yet, but if you want to, by all means go for it--just add some Italian seasoning!)

-1 cup finely grated Romano cheese (Parmesan would work just as well; we use Romano because Mike prefers it)

-1 egg

-Copious amounts of Basil, Italian seasoning, and Rosemary

-Frozen leftover pieces of steak and/or pork chops and/or chicken (make sure it's all boneless)

Special Equipment

-8-quart stockpot (6 would work, but you'd have to let everything simmer down for a few hours before adding the meat so it doesn't overflow, and having all the meat in the whole time makes it more awesome)

-A roasting pan with a wire rack that allows grease to drip under the meatballs instead of letting them absorb it (I mean, you could probably use a cookie sheet if you wanted, but this is healthier and they cook more evenly)

-A tiny rubber spatula that will fit into the tomato paste can

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees (don't forget to do this first because forming the meatballs doesn't take very long).

2. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef/buffalo, breadcrumbs, grated cheese and egg. Mix thoroughly. Divide and form into about 12 balls, or whatever amount of balls you think makes a good size. We like this size.

3. Spray the roasting pan (with wire rack in it) with cooking spray (Pam makes an olive oil spray that I prefer over most others) and place the meatballs on top of the wire rack, evenly spaced. Put the meatballs in the oven and bake for 1 hour.

4. Peel and chop the onions and garlic (yes, the whole bulb) and put them in the stockpot with a few tablespoons of olive oil. Turn the heat on medium-high and sauté until the onions become clear and soft.

5. Ideally at this point the meatballs have been in the oven for about half an hour.

6. Add the tomato paste, sauce and puree. Make sure to get all the tomato-y goodness out of the cans! (This is why you have the tiny rubber spatula.) Fill the tomato puree can (the largest one) with water and pour it into the stockpot. Repeat two more times so you have three cans of water in there.

7. Grab your seasonings. Sprinkle enough basil on top of the sauce to cover the entire surface, then stir it in. Repeat with italian seasoning, then cover only half the top with rosemary. (This was the first time we'd used rosemary, so we didn't want to add too much, especially considering it's a fairly strong herb. Mike couldn't really taste the amount that we put in, I could detect a hint--next time we'll probably coat completely like with the other spices.)

8. Stirring frequently, bring the mixture to a soft boil, then reduce heat so that it reaches a low simmer. Put the lid on the pot slightly ajar.

9. Put the sausages in a medium frying pan and put enough water in with them such that the sausages are about 2/3 submerged. Stab them all over with a knife. TRUST ME. (See picture for explanation.) Put on medium heat. Flipping the sausages occasionally, allow the water to boil off completely, then increase the heat and brown the sausages on both sides. Turn off the heat.

10. When the sauce has been simmering for half an hour, add the sausages, meatballs (which, ideally, have just come out of the oven) and any frozen leftover meats that you have (we had two small steaks and two pork chops). TIP: If you enjoy making sauce, make and save leftovers. If you're cooking for two, make three steaks/pork chops/chicken breasts, toss them in plastic bags, and toss those in the freezer. Label them if you think you'll be confused. They are excellent in the sauce and that way, if you want them, you don't have to cook them while you're also doing everything else--they're ready to just drop in.

11. Stir. Let the sauce continue to simmer, stirring at least every half hour. When you're not stirring it, keep the lid ajar.

12. When the sauce has been simmering for about two and a half hours, get the herbs out again. Sprinkle the basil and Italian seasoning over the top just as you did before (so that it covers the surface), and the rosemary again to cover half of it (and next time we make sauce, we'll know whether we should completely cover with rosemary both times, but for now I'd say stick with half). Stir, cover (ajar) and resume stirring every half hour. (If you're making fresh pasta or gnocchi, this is a good time to start it!)

13. When the sauce has been simmering for five hours, it should be reduced to the perfect consistency (if you like a really thick sauce, though, you might want to simmer it a little more). Taste the sauce--it's probably pretty acidic. If it is, add a tablespoon or two of butter (I think we used two) to reduce the acidity (so you don't end up with awful heartburn after eating the sauce because that would be bad). Once the butter is melted and stirred in, the sauce is ready to eat!

Step 2! This seems to be a good size for the meatballs. And also this is what I mean about the roasting pan.

Step 4: It looks like so much garlic, but we couldn't really taste it--next time we'll probably add two (possibly three) bulbs, and throw it in halfway through the simmering with the second round of spices, instead of at the beginning. That might give it a stronger garlic-y taste. (This was the first time we'd added garlic, though--we're learning!)

Also step 4: the onions and garlic (and olive oil) ready to start. Yay!

Step 6: after adding all the cans of tomato, but before adding the water. It can be hard to incorporate the tomato paste well!

Step 7: Now you've added the water and the seasoning and your entire house should start to smell REALLY GOOD.

Step 9: I was so skeptical when Mike first showed me how to do this and he boiled the sausages, but it gets a lot of the unnecessary fat out of them--just make sure to prick them in a bunch of places with a knife. Otherwise they develop large pockets of grease and you stab them and they sort of explode and you're covered in hot grease. NOT COOL.

Also step 9: When they look roughly like this, they're done and ready to go in the sauce.

Step 10(ish): meatballs right out of the oven. If you can tell me why the meatballs are nice and round and pretty when they go into the oven and come out all deformed like this, you'll win a prize. (Not a good prize. Probably just gratitude and the knowledge that I'm slightly less confused. But I'm calling it a prize. Maybe that guy who does the show about food and science on the food network should answer this for me.)

Also step 10: Mike drops a little frozen steak into the sauce.

Step 13: yay butter!

This time, we had the sauce with freshly made whole wheat pasta. I always hated whole wheat pasta when I was a kid because the texture was too grainy, but when you make it yourself it comes out way better. That could, however, be due to the fact that I used half whole wheat flour and half pasta flour. To replicate this pasta (which was delicious and will probably be how I make pasta from now on), combine two cups whole wheat flour and two cups of pasta flour. Make a mound with a dip in the middle like a volcano and put four eggs into the hole. Stir the eggs, slowly incorporating more and more flour. When you're out of egg and need to get the rest of the flour in, add a little bit of water at a time. An important thing to keep in mind is that the whole wheat for some reason becomes a stickier dough, so when you're rolling it out later you'll want to keep flouring the surfaces with the pasta flour.

Once it's all rolled out and cut, hang the noodles on something and let them dry a little. My dad uses a ski pole; we used a hockey stick. Whatever you use, just make sure it's clean! This amount of pasta gives you lots of leftovers--to keep them, nest them in ziploc bags and toss them in the freezer. (If you don't have a pasta maker and want uniform noodles, flour the rolled-out pasta sheets well and them roll them up. Then, with a sharp knife, cut at the width you want your noodles! This way they're a uniform width the whole way through without you having to be really obsessive about cutting straight lines.)

Boil the pasta for a few minutes (fresh pasta cooks so fast!) and toss it with some sauce to coat. Then let everyone add more sauce to their liking and pick the pieces of meat they want out of the pot. (I keep wanting to call it a bucket because it's so huge.) Sprinkle with cheese, mix everything up, cut the meat into bite-size pieces, whatever you want--just enjoy your meal, you've been working on it all day!

UPDATE: When I first posted this I'd totally forgotten where I read the tip about rolling up the pasta sheets, but I googled it and found it! If you're making pasta without a machine, whether it's whole wheat or not, go here for some more great tips and an overall lovely blog. :)

Thank you so much, Mike, for letting me share your awesome family recipe here!

Black Garlic Mac & Cheese

I first saw Black Garlic in the store months ago. I had no idea what it was or why it existed, but I read the label and discovered that it is aged and fermented and for some reason this turns it black. It sounded, frankly, a little disturbing. At some point, though, I decided that as a Food Blogger it is my duty to my readers to try weird food that I find in the grocery store and tell you about it. (Tangent: Don't buy pummelos. They're sorta tasty, but they're way more trouble than they're worth and I wish I had the hour of my life that it took me to eat the damn thing back.)

I started searching for recipes. Recipezaar let me down (for the first time ever) and didn't have anything. Neither did any of the other websites I generally go to for recipes. So I went to Google and searched for Black Garlic and came across the Black Garlic Website. I guess there's only one company that makes it. Anyway, the site told me that "Black garlic is sweet meets savory, a perfect mix of molasses-like richness and tangy garlic undertones. It has a tender, almost jelly-like texture with a melt-in-your-mouth consistency similar to a soft dried fruit. Hard to believe, but true. It’s as delicious as it is unique." Sounds strange, but tasty, and since I love garlic so much it was definitely worth a shot. However, the next thing on the site almost scared me off: "Imagine garlic without all of the annoying stuff. Bad breath? Nope. Pungent odor? Nope. Acrid bite? No sir." Aren't all these things the point of garlic? Why would I eat garlic without the smell and "acrid bite"? Isn't that stuff the appeal of garlic? I guess the Black Garlic guys don't think so. Anyway, Black Garlic is being touted as "the new superfood" and is supposed to have "hell of properties."

Anyway, I finally found a recipe that looked halfway decent for Black Garlic Mac & Cheese. I'd been craving comfort food, and it sounded like a delicious twist on the original. The recipe was kind of annoying to follow because it's written as "use this much per serving" and I prefer to make a ton and have a lot of leftovers, so I had difficulty deciding how much of each ingredient to put in. So I'm posting it here (adapted) for six people to make it easier to follow, and if you're not serving six people, you'll have leftovers.

Black Garlic Mac & Cheese: Recipe

Ingredients

-2.5 cups elbow macaroni (dry)

-About 6 cups of milk

-Enough roux or cornstarch to thicken the milk considerably

-1.5 cups freshly-grated sharp cheddar (I recommend Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar)

-About 1/2 cup freshly-grated parmesan

-4-6 cloves black garlic

-3 cloves NORMAL garlic (my addition)

-Salt and pepper to taste (optional, I usually leave this for people to add individually since I'd put way more pepper in it than anyone would actually want)

-Breadcrumbs to cover

Instructions

1. Simmer the milk with the salt and pepper (if you're using them) in a large saucepan. Add the roux or cornstarch and mix with a whisk or hand blender until the milk thickens. How thick you want it is up to you--I like mine more solid, but I know plenty of people prefer it saucy.

2. Boil the pasta and run under cold water. Put aside for later.

3. Add cheeses and garlics to the milk-sauce over low heat and stir until the cheese has melted completely into the sauce.

3.5. Preheat the broiler.

4. Add the macaroni, stir to cover the pasta. Let cook for about two minutes.

5. Put the whole mixture into a large bowl and top with breadcrumbs. If you didn't preheat the broiler when I told you to, turn it on now.

6. Put the bowl on a low rack under the broiler (if it's too high, the top will just burn and you'll have black breadcrumbs in addition to black garlic.) Leave it in for one minute. Really. Not longer. It'll burn.

7. Remove from oven. Allow to cool for a few minutes and serve.

I served mine with canned diced tomatoes. I don't know if this is really a common thing to do, but it's how I grew up eating mac & cheese so it's how I like it. If you haven't tried it, it's tasty--Not Your Average Joe's does a similar thing with their mac & cheese so it can't be all that weird. I also topped it with some pan-fried chicken (another idea stolen from Not Your Average Joe's) which is the top-secret chicken recipe I'm working on and will share when I decide it's ready. The point is that chicken is pretty tasty with this too. The original poster of the recipe is apparently a chef at some big restaurant somewhere and adds lobster meat. I hate seafood, so I wouldn't, but you might want to.

Chicken marinading...yum

Everything ready to go in the pot!

It doesn't look like anything special, but it was damn tasty. (Also, I completely forgot to take pictures of the finished product the first time around because I was too busy going "OM NOM NOM" so these are the leftovers. Sorry.)

Anyway, the verdict on Black Garlic: if you really, really love garlic, this isn't the garlic for you. It just doesn't have the garlicky flavor that I've been addicted to since I was a kid. However, it's pretty cool, and would probably impress people if you were making something fancy for a dinner party. I mean, it sounds fancy. And if you're not a huge garlic lover, this might be just the thing for you. It has a slight garlic taste, but it's subtle, and won't leave you smelling like garlic for a week. (It's also squishy and difficult to mince, so you'll end up with bigger pieces, but that's okay.) The mac & cheese was absolutely amazing, though--super creamy and rich and plain delicious. Black garlic or not, this will probably remain my go-to recipe when I'm in desperate need of comfort food. (Thanks to AGreatChef for the inspiration!)

Featured Recipe: American Chop Suey brought to a new level

American Chop Suey conjures visions of...well, I don't think I ever had it outside a school cafeteria until recently, so it was never something to get excited about. At most, it was a decently satisfying, non-disgusting meal you could get with the two-fifty your parents gave you in the morning (or however much lunch cost back then). I never expected that it would become something I could look forward to, even crave...until now.

A while back, my mom brought home a big container of American Chop Suey from a bakery down the street (I call it a bakery, but really it is just a Delicious Food Place, as they have all sorts of things you can buy and eat). A month or so later, she went back there, hoping for more of their delicious chop suey, but they didn't have any that day. She instead returned with a pound of ground beef from the butcher and told me of her craving. I began searching for recipes that were more than ground beef, macaroni and tomato sauce, and was eventually brought to my favorite recipe site, Recipezaar. I went through the recipes, attempting to assess how tasty they would be by looking through the ingredients. Finally, I came across a recipe for the ages: Denise's American Chop Suey.

It's delicious. It's absolutely amazing. It takes some effort (lots of vegetable-chopping), but it yields well to experimentation (I have added both cinnamon and balsamic vinegar and it came out perfectly both times [I haven't added them together yet, mind you]). It is especially delicious with some well-buttered rye toast on the side and plenty of parmesan or romano cheese.

Seriously, go make this. You won't regret it. And you'll be SO full afterwards.

Pasta Adventure, with original Garlic Bread recipe

So! Yesterday's pasta making was quite the adventure. I've never used a machine before and had no idea how it would come out, but I absolutely *love* it and will pretty much never go back to rolling it by hand. It's so easy this way!

I make my dough with half semolina flour and half all-purpose flour (2 cups each), and four eggs. It all goes in a bowl together:

Technically, you're supposed to make a pile out of the flour and a little well for the eggs, but I'm clumsy and know I would manage to knock over an edge of the well and spill eggs everywhere, so I use a bowl. You may notice the egg carton in this picture is symmetrical. I do that. In fact, if someone else doesn't do that, I fix it. I always thought I was strange until my boyfriend mentioned that he does the same thing (though of course, he's pretty strange, so we might both just be weirdos).

Mixing the eggs in is fun--you stir them with a fork until they're broken up, and then start slowly bringing in flour from the sides until it gets tough enough that you need to knead it with your hands. (I always need to add small amounts of water so the flour will all stick, otherwise it's too dry and doesn't work. I could probably do with a fifth egg, but this way works just fine and I can play with it to just the right consistency.) By the end, it looks kind of like scrambled eggs:

Or something. That gets pushed together until it's all stuck in a ball, then you break off pieces, roll them out a little bit with the rolling pin (otherwise it won't go through the pasta machine; I tried). Then the exciting machine-related part happens! I was so nervous for this. It's probably unreasonable to be nervous about using a pasta machine, especially when it's not even a machine because there's nothing mechanic about it, but it was new and therefore scary.

But there was nothing to be scared of! It's a little tedious at first--you have to put it through on the widest setting a number of times, folding it in half each time so that it eventually becomes rectangular instead of having ragged edges, but I expected the actual turning of the handle to take more effort than it did. Once I got all the dough through (with the knob on 5, it seemed an appropriate thickness) it was time to make noodles out of it! This was probably the most exciting part. I was nervous about this too, because the instructions for the machine say that if your dough is too moist it won't cut, and mine was sort of moist, but it came out beautifully:

I loved how it made a curtain of spaghetti. (That's the thinner, round setting; the other one wasn't cooperating for pictures. I felt like I was dealing with a six-year-old, but in pasta form.) Everything piled together looked pretty awesome:

That is, it looked awesome until I realized that it had to dry for a while, and we had to sit down and separate all the slightly-sticky noodles. It was, however, well worth it.

Delicious! My (half-Italian) boyfriend makes homemade sauce with meatballs, which is pictured here, but not documented because he made it about a week ago and froze it. I find that sauce sort of works like soup, where it's almost better for having been cooked a while ago. He does the whole cooking-for-five-hours thing; perhaps some day he'll teach me and let me document it or share the recipe here (though it's an old family recipe; I wouldn't be surprised if he were protective of it). The pasta came out to about two pounds--twice as much as we needed for the sauce, and I hope my mom figures out something to do with the rest because I disappeared for the weekend and don't know how to store fresh pasta yet.

The garlic bread pictured is my own invention; I needed something to soak up the sauce remains on the plate once we'd eaten our pasta and it worked great. I only had a vague idea of what I was doing when I made it, but it came out so well that I'm posting the recipe here for all to see and steal. (Seriously, steal it. It was delicious.)

GARLIC BREAD RECIPE

Ingredients:

-1 loaf Italian bread (bought at the grocery store works just fine, but you can make it if you're ambitious. I'm not.)

-1/2 stick butter

-Lots of fresh, finely-minced garlic--I used about 8 cloves, but they were tiny, so maybe about 4 or 5 normal sized ones (though I'd probably use more next time, just because I love garlic so much).

-About 1 tsp italian seasoning

-About 1 tsp garlic powder

-A dash of salt

-1/4 cup parmesan or romano cheese, finely grated (optional)

-1/4-1/2 cup olive oil

Instructions:

1: Slice the loaf of bread in half lengthwise so you have two big flat pieces of bread.

2: Mince the garlic.

3: In a small pan on low heat, melt the butter with the garlic, italian seasoning, garlic powder and salt. Allow to bubble for a little while so the garlic flavor infuses into the butter, but not for so long that anything burns (probably around 8 minutes, I wasn't timing myself).

4: Using a kitchen brush, brush the liquid in the butter mixture over the fleshy (not crusty) parts of the bread until they are mostly covered. Then, using a spoon, spread the garlic that you didn't pick up with the brush over the bread as evenly as you can. If you're using the cheese, sprinkle it over the bread now.

5: Pour a small amount of olive oil into a bowl. Using the same brush, cover the buttery garlicky (and possibly cheesy) bread with olive oil. The goal here is to saturate the top layer of the bread so that it's nice and mushy when it's done.

6: Put the two halves of the loaf together again. Using the brush, get whatever you didn't get out of the pan earlier and brush it on top of the loaf. (This mostly just makes it look pretty--shiny--but it also gets some flavor into the outside of the loaf. I didn't brush the bottom, but it would probably be delicious if I had.)

7: Wrap the loaf in foil and allow to sit for a few hours. Flip it over every half hour or so; this way, any moisture that is seeping through the bread will seep through in both directions.

8: Heat the oven to 350 degrees and bake (in the foil) for 15 minutes. Remove from tinfoil, place on cutting board, slice and enjoy!

Step 4

All in all, my pasta-adventure was quite successful. We all had a wonderful meal and were afraid to move for a while afterward because we'd eaten so much.