Beer Bread Wonderland

Never have I ever met a bread with such versatility as I did when I made this little gem. Literally, so many different things you can do with it and this will NOT be the last post on this delicious concoction.

I have no idea how to make bread. I’m intimidated by it, I’m not a 40’s housewife and it’s just too big of an endeavor for me to embark on. Sorry.

So, I found a recipe for this stuff and went for it. The recipes for this stuff are pretty universal. There’s no big differences in them besides the additions, flair and of course, beer. Some vary on amounts of sugar, which makes sense.

So let’s cook some bread.

Start with a six pack of your favorite craft beer. You only need one for the bread, but you’ll need something to do while it bakes, right?

This beer, is not my favorite craft beer. It’s a beer that a friend of ours left behind from a party we had. It’s disgusting. No offence to Sam Adams, the man knows what he’s doing, usually, but this hoppy brew was just not for me. At all.

However, it made some delicious bread. I figured by the taste of it, how much sugar to use, so I’d suggest drinking at least a bottle before you start, so you can make a fair judgment of the other ingredients. It’s only fair.

SO, follow this general recipe and twerk, I mean tweak, it to fit your taste and burr.

From the windows, to the walls, let’s make some drunk bread.

INGREDIENTS:

3 cups of flour
1/3 cup of sugar
1tbsp of baking powder
1/2tsp of salt
1 12oz bottle of beer
3tbsp of butter, melted

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 350, my oven sucks, hence the slightly charred bread. Don’t judge, it was tasty!

Mix dry ingredients, add beer, throw into a greased loaf pan and cover with the butter and bake for about 60 minutes!

I read you can use soda in place of beer, but, pardon my French, but fucking ew. You wanna shovel that crap into your poor kids, that’s on you, but you won’t even catch me cooking with that crap. /endrant

You can freeze the cooked loaf, I’m sure it’ll stay good for a while!

Onion Rings 101

How good are YOUR onion rings?

I ask because, I never knew how to make them. I use to be at the mercy of whatever fast food joint served em up the best.

Not anymore.

You can even freeze these. No joke. Straight from the freezer to the deep fryer, or so I hear… My freezer is too jam packed #apartmentproblems to handle any more goodness.

But, I’ll be experimenting soon and, of course, report my findings. Maybe.

Anyhoo, let’s get to those delicious, crunchy, crispy, hot and sexy onion rings, shall we?

 

 

INGREDIENTS:

1 onion, sliced
1 1/4 cups of flour
1 tsp of each salt and baking powder
1 egg
About a cup of milk
About 3/4 cup of panko bread crumbs. I mix regular and panko, half and half. Just for shits and giggles.
Oil, whatever you want to fry these bad boys in… I use veggie oil.
Seasonings… I use garlic powder, salt, pepper and arbol chile powder, because it takes VERY little to get a lot of heat as opposed to an ass load of black pepper or using red pepper flakes, which would be clinging and killing the sexy look of these precious rings.

DIRECTIONS:

Get your oil heating in a large pot, I use a sauce pan, because I’m ghetto and don’t have a deep fryer, yet. It’s on my Christmas list, don’t you worry. You want about an inch or two of oil in the bottom of the pan.

In a small bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt. Toss the onion rings around in the flour mixture until well coated. Set them aside.

Mix the egg and milk into flour mixture to make a batter, adding the seasonings, too. Also, in another bowl mix your bread crumbs and get it close by your oil to make transitioning quick and as mess free as possible. The first time I made these, I was like a new born fawn. Fucking bull in a China shop status. I made a mess, burned them, cried and by the end, had a seamless process that worked like butter. Or clock work. Or buttered clock work…

See the above picture for my layout.

Anyhoo, I used a fork and dropped the floured onion rings into the batter, coated them on both sides, shook off the excess and tossed them into a bowl with the bread crumbs. I shook the bowl and grabbed some tongs to get the little devils from there to the oil.

The oil is ready when a drop of batter sizzles like crazy and floats to the top, immediately. Fry a few at a time, so they don’t stick together, you’ll have to flip them to ensure they fry evenly on both sides. It takes about 90 seconds per ring. I keep a pie plate with a paper towel on the back of the stove, obvi not on a hot burner, duh, and when I get a pile of rings in the plate, I dump them onto a cookie sheet, in the oven, which I’ve pre-heated to about 200. Just to keep everything warm and crispy until you’re ready to eat.

That’s it!

Now, you can stop at the bread crumb part, lay the onion rings on parchment paper in your freezer, and when they’re good and solid, chuck em in a bag.

Enjoy this recipe while it’s up. If my venture on Kickstarter.com is successful, a lot of these will be coming down as I’ll be the proud owner of my own food truck. Boom.

Vanilla Granola & Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

The other day we made a trip to Sprouts, because they have like, THE best sales, EVER and a ton of bulk product.

 

I got my hands on some delicious, organic, vanilla granola. Think of it as the honey bunches part of Honey Bunches of Oats. Just vanilla granola and some almond slivers. Yum.

 

The other day, my Boo asked me to bake some cookies and so I tried something new and threw the granola in, where I’d usually throw in oatmeal or whatever else. And, of course, chocolate chips.

 

You’ve gotta have chocolate chips.

 

 

INGREDIENTS:

1c margarine/butter, softended
1c granulated sugar
1c brown sugar
2 eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
2c all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1tsp baking soda
1tsp salt
2 – 3 cups of granola, depending on what kind, how dense and so on
1c chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

Cream butter and sugars until smooth; beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine and blend thoroughly flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt; beat into creamed mixture. Stir in granola and chocolate chips.

Bake at 375 for 7-9 minutes.

 

Enjoy!

Tex-Mex Chili

The picture doesn’t do it justice. Like any chili, you have to TASTE it… So read on, then get your ass in the kitchen!

Like I said in my previous post… I’ve been busy… WE’VE been busy, all of us, so I wanted to make something that would feed us for days.

Chili is always my favorite thing to make, because it’s soooo hard to screw up and there’s endless ways to make it different, literally, every time. I don’t think I’ve ever made the same chili twice. Now, usually, I use turkey everything, except bacon and chorizo… This time, I used beef. I don’t know what possessed me to buy a pound of ground beef, but I did. I don’t even like the way it smells when I cook it, but added to chorizo, it all worked out just fine.

This is a FAT KID version of chili. I have healthier and alternative recipes too…

Chipotle Carnitas Chili
Simple Three Bean Chicken Chili

I take that back, apparently I only have two! Oops.

Let’s get cooking, shall we?

Oh, and it goes without saying, this is freezable, thawable, enjoyable. Moving on…

INGREDIENTS:

Kidney & Black Beans – You can use canned, I did for this one to save time. I usually cook my beans ahead of time and freeze them in can sized portions to use in recipes or refry for my son. For this, you’ll need 2 cans of beans, drained.
1 Can of Sweet Corn, drained
1-2 Yellow Onions, diced
3 Green Bell Peppers, diced
1lb Tomatillos, chopped
1lb Roma Tomatoes, chopped
1 Head of Garlic, diced
1lb Ground Beef
1/2 lb Pork Chorizo
1/2lb Bacon
Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce
New Mexico chile powder
Black pepper
Knorr Chipotle cubes (this adds the Chipotle favor, without the heat. If I wanted the heat, I’d use the chipotle in adobo that comes in the little pull tab cans.)
Thyme
Salt
One, lonely beer. Preferably Corona or another Mexican style beer, XX or Modelo will work.

DIRECTIONS:

Grab your crock pot, turn it on high and add the beans and corn.

In a large, non stick pot, start browning the beef and chorizo, together. Drain off most of the excess fat and ditch it, we’re using bacon fat for the veggies. Add that meat to the crock pot and stir. In the same pot, cook the bacon. While it’s cooking, mince the garlic. When the bacon is almost finished, add the garlic and cook until it’s a  little brown. Drain the bacon fat into another little dish, crumble the bacon and add it, and the garlic to the crock pot and stir.

Then, with your diced veggies, start with the bell peppers first, then the onions, cooking them until they’re soft, in enough bacon grease to keep them from sticking to the pan… You want the heat around medium-medium-high, enough to blacken the veggies while you’re cooking them, just a little. It’s okay if you have a little mess in the bottom of your pan, you’re cooking it off, later.

Once the onions and peppers are done, add them to the crock pot. Then add the chopped tomatoes to the pot… Cook them, over medium heat until they start to fall apart a little, which should take like 5 minutes. You can cover them to help them along as well.

During this 5 minute break… Bust out that cerveza, crack the top and drink about 1/3. Make sure it’s ice cold though, for maximum refreshment in that hot ass kitchen, girl.

Now, add those tomatoes to the crock pot… Have a mess in your original cooking pot? Throw it back on the burner and add the beer. Whisk like crazy until the bottom of the pot is clean, simmer just a minute or two and add that mess to the crock pot.

Season to taste, as it’s getting’ sexy in the crock pot, using a big healthy squeeze of Sweet Baby Rays. This gives it a little smoky sweetness amid all the delicious hearty chili flavor.

Cook it in there, really, as long as you want… You’ll want to use the biggest crock pot, ever, or adjust your ingredients to fit in yours. I think mines about 5quarts and concoction came right to the top, I left the crock pot on high, half uncovered (sue me) for about an hour, stirring frequently, to try to cook off some excess liquid. It worked well!

You can serve it with chips, bread, in a bread bowl, with a fox or in a box. It’s really, really, really good. It’s one of the first batches of chili that I actually didn’t GET to freeze any of… It all got eaten!

Enjoy!

My Salsa… Part Dos.

Just before Thanksgiving took over, I posted about a green salsa I made and LOVED.

Well, it was not made alone.

Here is my second salsa, a red salsa. Salsa Roja, if you will… Whatever you call it, it’s delicious.

I don’t like my red salsa to be chunky or crunchy or as “fresco” as the green one. I like my red salsa to have a bit of a heartier flavor, a lot more heat and a smoky-ness to it that really only comes from roasting the shit out of those tomatoes!

So, let’s get to it!

 

INGREDIENTS:

Again, this amount of ingredients is going to yield about a gallon of salsa. Plan accordingly… (It freezes well!)

4lbs tomatoes, halved, I used Roma and regular old hothouse
3 red bell peppers, halved
4 jalapenos, halved, the amount depends on the heat you want. I keep jalapeno juice in my fridge to spice it up a lot more, since we like one bite of salsa to send us into fits of sweats…
3 white onions, quartered
1 head of garlic, peeled
1 bunch of cilantro, more if you like the taste, I was surprised how much I needed…
Cumin, salt, pepper, chili powder, cayenne, thyme

DIRECTIONS:

Follow the directions in the link to the green salsa above, roasting the veggies a bit longer, allowing them to get REALLY charred under the broiler.

Blend well, season to taste… I have more spices than I can name on my fingers and toes, it’s what you do to your food that makes it YOURS. Remember that things like cumin and chili powder may seem frivolous, but if your salsa tastes off, they can bring it back to a normal taste in a jif. As a “White Girl” venturing into a world of cooking beyond Easy Mac and Uncle Ben’s, I didn’t know WHAT flavors I was tasting when I ate certain foods, and although I feel I’ve mastered a lot of dishes, even this threw me off a bit. It just tasted like veggies until I started seasoning away. Cumin made a world of difference and so did the chili powder, which I wouldn’t have thought of the latter, off the top of my head…

Anyway, that’s all there is to it. It’s best to let the flavors hang out over night and get friendly with one another. The longer it sits, the better it tastes… Well, until it goes bad, then it obviously takes like crap, amiright?

Enjoy!

My salsa…

Makes all the pretty girls dance and want to take off their underpants….. My salsa.

Yep, I went there.

Ladies and gentlemen, I made, SALSA.

No, but seriously, last Sunday Funday we had a little too many margaritas at our “Avacado” party and got to eating a TON of my salsa I brought over. I decided to TRY to make both red and green kinds, they turned out well and I thought they’d be a nice addition to the part-ay.

Little did I know I did SUCH a good job on them, that Char used the green one in her Chicken Bites and her guy Jason actually kept half the jar! I keep forgetting to ask her if she liked the rest of it and what she did with it, but will be asking today, for sure!

Needless to say, it was a hit. We love having fresh salsa in the house and use it on everything. But this post is not about my love of the salsa. It’s about how this white girl makes some mean salsa.

Today, we’ll be making the green kind. Salsa Verde, to me is different than Chile Verde. Some disagree, some agree, whatever floats my boat in my kitchen, amiright? Yep. SO, the uncooked, chip friendly version we’re making in this post, would be, to me, salsa verde. The cooked, amended version would be chile verde, suitable for burritos and worthy of an addiction. I have mastered this too, and will show you later, grasshopper.

So, this is pretty easy, it’s just time consuming. It’s best to do this when you know your grocery store or local market is having a sale, sometimes, if you don’t know where to look, tomatillos can be a rip off. As can chiles of all sorts. We shop at Food City. They’re close, cheap, and grow locally. Sold.


Now, you might be asking yourself… “What the crap is a tomatillo?”
You may not have as potty-mouthed of an inner voice as I do, but, let’s pretend.

A tomatillo is NOT a green tomato. It’s not a un-ripe tomato, it’s not part of the tomato family. It is it’s own entity.

A delicious entity.

So head out to your local Mexican market and get your hands on some of these sticky bastards. You’ll be hooked… I am.
Especially when they’re 3lbs for $1… Right?!

INGREDIENTS:
This recipe makes over a gallon of salsa. It freezes well, thaws beautifully and lasts surprisingly long in the fridge, when kept in a mason jar.
3lbs tomatillos, cleaned and halved with stem scars removed
2 large white onions
1lb hatch chiles, halved
1 green bell pepper, halved
2 pasilla chiles, halved
3 jalapenos, halved
2 heads of garlic, peeled
1 bunch of green onion, diced
1 Bunch of cilantro, you can leave it whole, or chop it slightly, this all goes in a blender anyway
Juice from 3-4 limes, really depends on your love of tang. Get it?
1tbsp cumin, thyme, black pepper, salt, red pepper flakes (make a the largest tbsp of cumin down to the smallest tbsp of red pepper. I don’t even own measuring spoons, so I’m always guessing on the seasonings, and I use my hands to measure. Always season to taste!)
You will also need a blender or a food processor and a couple baking dishes. Tongs are helpful because the dishes are HOT when they come out of the oven. Obvi.

DIRECTIONS:
Roast all the veggies, except the green onion and cilantro, in the oven under the broiler, in glass baking dishes. These tomatillos have been roasted too long for salsa. You don’t want that much charred skin, you just want to soften everything and bring out the heat in the peppers. These were for chile verde, because I wasn’t sure the salsa was going to work when I made it, I didn’t take a lot of pictures. We’re still living off our freezer supply, so I’m making do with my own stock photography.

Repeat until all the veggies are roasted. I use a glass dish to keep the roasted mess in until it gets blended. Make sure you throw all the juices and seeds into the bowl too!

Now either in a food processor or a blender, blend everything REALLY well, adding some green onion and cilantro to every batch, to make sure it’s evenly chopped and distributed. I do it in small portions, to ensure it’s all mixed well. And then scoop it out and do it again. Before you blend everything for the second time, taste it, season it and remember the flavor will be stronger, spicier and better tomorrow and every day from then on. So don’t over season!

The salsa should sit in the fridge over night, if not 2 nights, to let the flavors become friends, don’t forget this part. Taste it again, after and make sure it tastes right to you, if not, re-season!

From there, I usually line some Tupperware bowls with plastic wrap and portion out 2 cups in each, freeze and when they’re solid, I take them out, wrap the plastic wrap the rest of the way around, wrap again in tin foil and label. They stack nicely in the freezer because I freeze everything in the same size Tupperware, every time. 2 cups is about half a mason jar, which lasts us 2 weeks or so.

I hope you try this, next freezer meal day, or any day! It’s WELL worth the effort. Mo eats salsa on his eggs, in his breakfast burritos and on anything else he can think of, some days!

Enjoy!

Old Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies

I’m trying to watch the first season of Walking Dead, and write recipes for cookies. Zombies and treats, yay, Friday! Haha….

I’ve searched and I’ve searched for an oatmeal cookie recipe that I actually liked, one that used real oats, not powdery quick oats, and one that my son would like, without being too sweet.

Couldn’t find it, so I made it up.

It uses very little flour, little sugar and is essentially a baked, flavored, cereal. Which is perfect because everybody eats them for breakfast sometimes, especially the baby… He says, “Cookie?” Yes, you can have a cookie. You can have anything you want with that face… Smh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are obviously, only a slight difference in my three types of cookies. One are plain, one have chocolate chips and the others have chocolate and peanut butter chips. They all bake the same.

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 Cup all purpose flour
1/2 Tsp baking soda
1 Tsp Cinnamon
3/4 Cup brown sugar, packed
3 Cups of whole oats
1 Tsp Salt
1/2 Cup mix in’s of your choice
3/4 Cup butter, softened or melted
1 Tsp vanilla
1 Egg
A splash of milk, trust me.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Mix dry ingredients… Mix wet ingredients… Combine.

Bake at 350 until brown at the edges but SOFT in the center. It’s better to be on the soft side, when they’re hard, they’re like granola. Which might not be bad, if that’s what you’re going for! I like them soft in the center though, especially the chocolate chip ones!

Enjoy!

Cream of Onion & Celery Soup with Black Rice

Oooooh happy Friday in about 15 minutes. This week has been LONG! I re-discovered a old favorite grocery store and have been occupied with their sales, buying over 10lbs of produce and making it into salsas, tomato sauce and chile verde. I sat down at 11pm tonight for the first time since I walked into the kitchen to bake cookies at 9am. I’m effin’ exhausted.

Anyway, I wanted to try this out ahead of time, to see if I could make my own “cream of something” soup. Because they over charge you in the store for the teeny cans, it doesn’t look like food, and it’s full of sodium, chemicals and crap. So I wanted my own, customizable cream-of-whatever-the-fuck-I-wanted, soup. Twas a smashing success, if I do say so myself…

A quick low-down on black rice, if you’ve never heard of it… And since I’m tired I’m going to quote straight from Wikipedia: “Black rice is high in nutritional value and contains 18 amino acids, iron, zinc, copper, carotene and several important vitamins.” Pretty bomb little grains. And they’re tasty! I bought this brand below, just because it was the first one I saw, ever. Hopefully it becomes more popular and cheaper. I hate myself for saying that. Ugh, consumerism.

Back to the soup.

INGREDIENTS:

3Tbs butter, I use unsalted
3Tbs all purpose flour, I use unbleached
1Qt milk, I use 1%, I’d normally have used some buttermilk too, but I didn’t have any. I’d say about 1/2 a cup.
1Cup white onion, diced
1Cup celery, chopped
1Clove garlic, minced
Salt, pepper, tips of celery to garnish

DIRECTIONS:

Follow the directions on your package of black rice, cooking it fully before adding it to your soup.

In a medium sauce pan, on medium heat, melt the butter. Add the flour and whisk until fully incorporated, and cook until it starts to brown nicely. Slowly add the milk, whisking to incorporate the flour fully after about a cup of milk, then adding the rest slowly. Reduce the heat, after it reaches a boil, and simmer, whisking almost constantly (sorry!) until it reaches your desired soupy-ness.

Add the rice, garnish with the tips of the celery stalks you used!

This soup was delicious, not expensive and I will be making it again VERY soon. I’m working hard to build my soup recipe stash before winter hits… Ooooh, hard winter we get here in the desert. lol

Cinnamon Streusel Banana Bread

I had to post this in addition to my original banana bread because, it’s amazing. I made a loaf for the house and my lovey asked me to make a few for his bosses too! Needless to say, it’s a big hit!

There is no big difference from my original banana bread recipe which can be found here, except that about a half table spoon of cinnamon is added in with the sugar.

The difference is in the topping. Which is too easy.

Take about 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar and mix in another table spoon or 2 so of cinnamon. If your brown sugar isn’t so fresh or was left open and is hard as a rock, microwave a chunk for about 30 seconds. It will get soft and you can crumble it by hand. But be sure to go through it carefully and remove all the really tiny hard pieces. When the sugar gets older it forms tiny sugary rocks that can actually chip a tooth if you’re mid-munch.

Sprinkle the mixture over the banana bread before it goes in the oven. Take a toothpick and swirl the topping into the top of the batter.

The bread, with the topping, will take a little bit longer than an hour to cook. Just keep an eye on it after about an hour and fifteen minutes, until a knife inserted into the middle of the loaf, comes out clean.

This bread also freezes incredibly well!

Enjoy!