Quiche

Well that was easy. Note - makes TWO quiches. So. Think about that.

Ingredients

• Custard
• 2 pie shells
• 5 eggs
• 3 egg yolks
• 2/3c skim milk
• 1/3c butter (about 5tbsp), melted
• 1tsp salt
• 1/4tsp black pepper
• 1/4tsp nutmeg
• 1/2tsp rosemary
• about 1c summer sausage (or ham), cubed
• Other fillings
• 1/2 a red onion, chopped
• 1/2 a red bell pepper, chopped
• 4-8oz mushrooms, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic
• about 1 bag of fresh spinach
• about 1c shredded dill havarti
• olive oil, as necessary

It looks complicated but it's not. Take the pie shells out of the freezer and set aside to thaw. Preheat the oven to 350. Mix all the custard ingredients together. Now, saute the vegetables, then wilt the spinach in some olive oil. Place all that in the bottom of the pie tins. Sprinkle the cheese evenly over the tins, then pour the custard over everything. Place in the oven for 45 minutes, or until the egg is set. Remove and let cool for 15 minutes or so. Also great re-warmed the next day!

Thoughts: This was awesome. We might adjust the veg ratios in the future, but it wouldn't be necessary. One possibility would be to see if cutting out the butter would still work. I think typically you're actually supposed to use 2%, whole, or half-and-half, but we didn't have that so we made do with butter and milk. I'm not sure how much the butter added, though - a lot of it kind of melted and then floated to the top of the quiches when they cooked. Even so, it's so good that maybe we don't want to mess with it. I don't know.

Disaster Index: 1/10

Slow-Cooker Cassoulet

This started out as some kind of slow-cooker chicken and then evolved from there. I didn't use a recipe, so this is completely made up.

Ingredients

• 4 skinless chicken thighs (we used boneless, but whatever) with excess fat trimmed off
• 1 small yukon gold potato, cubed (we used 1/2 of a huge potato)
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1-2tbsp lemon juice
• 4 sprigs of fresh thyme (or equivalent dried?)
• 1tsp dried rosemary (fresh would have been better)
• 2 bay leaves
• a few red pepper flakes
• 1 can cannolini or great northern beans (slow cookers don't get hot enough for dried beans to not be poisonous, apparently)
• 1/2lb smoked beef sausage

To a slow cooker, add the chicken, stock, lemon juice, thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, and red pepper flakes. Set to low and cook for about 4-5 hours. Then add everything else. Cook for another 2-3 hours. Season to taste.

Thoughts: Ridiculously easy, but amazingly delicious. The only problem we had was that once we added everything else, the slow-cooker wouldn't heat up enough. We couldn't get it back to a simmer, so we ultimately had to throw everything in a big stock pot and simmer it for 5 minutes or so to make sure it was done. Even so, worth it. Claire said a touch more salt the second day since the potatoes absorb some salt.

Disaster Index: 1/10

Turkey Gumbo

After Thanksgiving, we went to Jeff's house and had amazing leftover turkey gumbo. Pat & Eleanor had given us the turkey carcass from our own feast, so Claire and I were inspired to try it. The recipe we made was ENORMOUS but good. You will almost CERTAINLY want to alter the amount of stuff in this.

Ingredients

• 1/2c oil or leftover bacon grease or something similar
• 1/2c all purpose flour
• 2 large onions, chopped
• 2 red bell peppers, seeded, chopped
• 4 celery ribs, chopped
• 8 cloves worth of garlic
• 1 tsp cayenne
• 1/4c white vermouth
• 1 tbsp dried thyme
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 28-ounce cans diced tomatoes with juice
• 4-6ish cups turkey stock with turkey
• 1 package (?) andouille sausage (I think about 1 lb), cut into 1/2" slices
• 1 16-ounce packages sliced frozen okra
• 1 lb peeled (tail off) de-veined shrimp.
• Salt to taste
• Gumbo filé to taste

So, it's important to note before you start that we made the turkey stock as follows: chop up the turkey carcass and place in a slow-cooker. Cover with water, and leave for about 24 hours. Fish out any bones. DONE.

In a huge pot, add the grease / oil. Heat until quite hot, then add the flour. Stir around this paste, cooking over medium heat, for about 5 minutes. If you use oil, at least, it's supposed to turn reddish-brown through this process. Ours started out that color, so who knows. Anyway, add the onions, peppers, and celery. Cook until everything is quite soft - about 20 minutes. Then add the garlic and cayenne and cook another couple minutes. Then add the vermouth, thyme, and bay leaves. Turn to high heat and cook for a minute, before you add the tomato, stock, and sausage. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes, then add the okra and simmer for another 10 minutes. Finally add the shrimp and cook until just fully opaque (3-5 minutes). Salt to taste (ours needed quite a lot).

Serve.

Thoughts: Great flavor. Claire and I agree that we could have used more turkey - we could have had more, but we ate a lot of the turkey before we tried this. I think the amount of shrimp and sausage was good, though. We agree that the flavor was great.

Disaster Index: 1/10, but it made so much we'll be eating it for like 2 weeks.

Sausage and Swiss Chard Lasagna

Ingredients

• 1 lb Italian sausage (casings removed), chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced or chopped or whatever
• 1 can tomatoes (14.5 oz) - we used "fire roasted," which worked really well
• 2 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1.5 tsp salt
• 10-12 lasagna noodles
• 1 16-oz package of shredded mozzarella cheese
  
• 1 container ricotta cheese (1.75 cups)
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 tbsp dried parsley
• 2 eggs
• 1-2 ozs chevre cheese (we used herb & garlic chevre)
• 1/4 fresh basil, shredded
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 (large) bunch swiss chard, bottom inch of stalks removed
  
• 1 yellow summer squash
• 6 oz frozen spinach

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Brown the sausage over medium-low heat until it's pretty cooked through. Add the garlic, tomatoes, dried basil, dried oregano, and 1.5 tsp salt. Simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. You can add some water to it if it gets too thick. Remove from heat.
Boil some pasta water in a large pot and cook the lasagna noodles in batches.
In the meantime, saute the onions over medium-high heat until almost translucent.
While you're sauteing the onions, prepare the Swiss chard. This is how you do it:
remove the stalks from the leaves and chop the stalks into smallish pieces. Chiffonade the leaves.
When the onions are almost translucent, add the stalks of the Swiss chard. Cover and cook for around 8 minutes, or until the stalks are tender, stirring occasionally. When tender, remove the onion/chard mix from the heat and set aside.
Take the chard leaves and add them to a smallish pot with the 6 oz. of frozen spinach (which you need to thaw ahead of time. Do it now if you haven't yet.). Cook the chard leaves and spinach, covered, over low heat. Add a few tablespoons of water to facilitate wilting. Cook for 5 minutes, or until wilted. Remove from heat and mix with the onion/chard mixture.
In a large bowl, mix ricotta, mozzarella, eggs, fresh basil, dried parsley, Parmesan, and some salt. Mix thoroughly. When the onion/chard/spinach mixture has cooled a little, add it into the cheese mixture and mix thoroughly.
Wash the summer squash and chop off the ends. Slice length-wise into sheets and grill until softened.
Now assemble the lasagna:
Coat the bottom of a glass lasagna with olive oil.
Put as many noodles as you'd like on the bottom. Put a layer of tomato/sausage mix on the noodles. Then add a layer of yellow squash. Then add a layer of the cheese/vegetable mixture. Then more noodles, then more tomato sauce, then more squash, then more cheese/vegetables, and then a final layer of noodles. On top of that we drizzled some olive oil and then the chevre.
Put in the oven and cook for 30-40 minutes.

Thoughts: Delicious. We based this loosely on a recipe we found online, and then added all sorts of stuff (swiss chard, spinach, yellow squash, chevre, onions, fresh basil). The flavor was fantastic. Maybe it was the sausage, maybe it was the swiss chard, maybe it was the yellow squash, but either way, it was fantastic. We didn't have as much tomato sauce as I would have liked, so we didn't get to put a layer of tomato sauce on top of the whole concoction. So next time I would have added another can of tomatos or something. I don't know. Fantastic.

Disaster Index:1/10

Dirty Rice

Ingredients

• 2 cups extra long grain rice
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 4 cloves minced garlic
• 1.5 cups diced white onion
• 1 cup diced green pepper
• vegetable oil
• salt and pepper
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 hot sausage, chopped and quartered
• 1/4 lb ground pork
• 1 bunch green onion, chopped

Cook the rice: rinse rice in cold water several times (about 6) until the water runs completely clear. Place rice in pot and add chicken stock. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Do NOT stir. You will mess it up.
Meanwhile, saute the garlic, onion, and green pepper in the vegetable oil until soft (15 minutes). Add the salt, pepper, oregano, and cayenne. Mix well.
Add this mixture to the cooked rice. Stir.
Cook the meat together in another pan and then add it into the rice.
Turn heat to low, and cook for another 10 minutes. Eat.

Thoughts: This was pretty delicious. In retrospect, the rice was a little more mushy than I like - we cooked it according to the directions in the recipe, rather than using our own failsafe method, which usually yields less mushy rice. So in the future, we will use that method, and then rather than adding the various ingredients into the rice and stirring over and over again, we're just going to cook the vegetables and meet together, and then put it all in with the rice at the last minute. This will also decrease the mushiness of the rice. I thought that the rice: stuff ratio was a little off. I would have preferred more stuff to rice. Also, this recipe can feed like, 12 people, so we'll also halve the recipe next time we make it.

Disaster Index: 2/10

Pasta with Sausage and Mushrooms in Cheese Sauce

Ingredients

• ~1lb smallish pasta, like rigatoni or radiatori
  
• 2 hot Italian sausage links, chopped into 1/2" slices
  
• 2-3c cremini mushrooms, quartered
  
• olive oil, cooking wine, salt, pepper
  
• about 1c half-and-half
  
• 2oz chevre cheese
  
• 10-20 kale leaves, steamed, or a roasted red pepper, seeded and chopped
  

Set the pasta cooking. In a separate pot, cook the sausage in some olive oil until it gets some caramelization. Add the mushrooms and continue to cook, stirring occasionally. Once they are fairly well cooked, add a splash of cooking wine and scrape the bottom of the pot to get the well-caramelized bits of sausage up. Set aside.

In the mean time, blend together the cooked kale or pepper, the half-and-half, and the chevre. Don't add all the half-and-half at once - slowly add it until the thickness looks right (and it blends). In the case of the kale, we had to return the mixture to the stove, cook for a while, and then return to the blender. Kale can be kind of tough.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain it (thought not necessarily all the way - the starchy pasta water helps the sauce stick). Combine all the parts of the recipe together and stir to coat. Season as needed.

Thoughts: This was great, both times we did it. It would be really easy to modify the recipe by using frozen spinach, which is easier to come by, or you could just use tomato. It was really easy to make (especially with both of us working on it). I would continue to talk about the virtues and flexibility of this recipe, but I can't think of anything else, and I'm watching the Oscars right now. It's kinda tough to concentrate.

Disaster Index: 1/10

Xinxim

Possibly one of the strangest recipes we've done so far.
Ingredients

• 1.5lbs of chicken thighs, cut into thick pieces
  
• 3 limes, juiced
  
• ~4 cloves garlic, crushed
  
• salt and pepper to taste
  
• 1/2lb pre-cooked shrimps (if not pre-cooked, just add them a little sooner. The original recipe called for raw, but we didn't have 'em)
  
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
  
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  
• 2 large ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped (why seeded? I don't know.)
  
• 1c chicken broth
  
• ~1/2c dried shrimp
  
• ~1/2c cashews
  
• ~1/2c toasted peanuts
  
• 1 lobe ginger, peeled and finely chopped
  
• 2tbsp palm oil
  
• 1 can coconut milk
  
• (optional) cilantro
  
• 2 spicy sausage links, cut thickly (chorizo would work, we just used "hot italian sausage" we found at the grocery)
  

Mix lime juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. Place chicken and sausage in one bowl and shrimp in another, and put about 1/3 of this mixture over the (non-dried) shrimp and the remaining 2/3 over the chicken and sausage. Stir to coat. Let marinate for 15 minutes. In the mean time, place the dried shrimp, cashews, and peanuts in a cuisinart and crush them down to a fine meal. In a pan, heat some oil with a high smoke point (peanut oil, for example). Put the chicken and sausage in and cook until they're more or less done. Set aside (back in the bowl of marinade, possibly).
In the same pan, add the green bell pepper and the onion and sautee until soft. Then add the tomatoes, chicken & sausage (and all the marinade they were sitting in), and the chicken stock. Let simmer on low for 30 minutes. Add the nuts/shrimp meal and the ginger. Let simmer for another 5 minutes. Then add everything else, stir well, and let simmer another 5-10 minutes. Serve.

Thoughts: Really great. We could use more soup liquid - more stock. The taste really matured after refrigerating a day (leftovers were really great). Dan felt it was a little greasy - maybe less or no palm oil next time. Also, we could chop the peanuts and cashews up a LITTLE more finely than we did. This made a LOT of soup - next time we could cut the recipe in half and still have enough leftovers for a week. Finally, skip seeding the tomatoes. Just use 1 can of chopped tomatoes. This recipe was really complicated, so anything to simplify it.

Disaster Index: 2/10

Sausage Risotto

For this dish, just use a standard risotto base. I've listed it below.

Ingredients

• 1 cup arborio rice
• 1 chopped onion
• 3 Italian sausages, sliced
• 1-1.5 cup chicken stock
• 1/2 cup marsala wine
• 1/2 cup chopped parsley
• salt, pepper, olive oil
• Lots of hot water
  

Add onion and garlic to a pot with some olive oil. Add a little salt and pepper and sautee over medium-low heat until the onions are tender. Add the rice and stir it around, letting the oil coat the rice well. Let that cook for a few minutes over medium-high heat, stirring often to prevent the rice from sticking too much. This develops a richer flavor. Now add the marsala wine and stir well to deglaze the pot. Add the chicken stock and stir well.

As the stock cooks off, continue adding more (preferably boiling) water, a cup or so at a time, and then stir that in and let it cook off at a boil. Adding the water while it's boiling develops the starch in the rice. Between you and me, I can't really tell a difference when the rice is made with or without boiling water, but that's the way you're supposed to do it.

When the rice is cooked, add the parsley and stir. Cook to the desired consistency, and serve.

Thoughts: We've made this a few times, and it works really well. Afterward I discovered that it is close to a traditional recipe. Huh. In the future, I might try adding mushrooms to the recipe. I think they might go well.

Disaster Index: 1/10