Party Like a Rock Star with Pulled Pork Nachos

About a month ago, I challenged myself to come up with a menu for my boyfriends birthday based on Creeper's heavy metal album, "Welcome to Room Number 9".

The good news is that I finally purchased a new camera. The bad news is that the food was such a hit, it went fast, so I wasn't able to get photos prior to serving...lol.

:)

Menu

Timmy - BBQ Pulled Pork Nachos * The Magic - Deep Dish Antipasto Pizza

Push It - Mini Cheese Cakes

Pulled Pork Nachos

Ingredients:

1 bottle Merlot

1 Pork Tenderloin

1/2 cup BBQ sauce
Tortilla chips
2 cups shredded Mexican style cheddar and jack cheese

2 oz Chipotle Mayonnaise

3 Tbsp Sour Cream
2 tsp Sweet Relish

1 can Green Chilies

The night before.

Sear tenderloin in fly pan along sides to brown. Placed seared tenderloin in a crock pot and fully cover with a bottle of Merlot wine. Place on warm and let set until ready to serve.

The next day.

Just prior to serving, remove tenderloin from crock pot and using two forks "pull" pork meat so it has a shredded texture. Place in sauce pan on low heat with BBQ sauce. Set aside.

Preheat over to 500 degrees. Layer a deep dish aluminum pan with a single layer of tortilla chips. Cover with shredded cheese. Top with another layer of chips, and repeat at least 3 layers. Set some of cheese aside to cover once pork is added. Place chips and cheese in oven for a few minutes, only long enough to melt cheese. Remove from oven and cover chips and cheese with pulled pork tenderloin and place back in oven until the cheese has melted. Add chipotle mayonnaise and sour cream to a zip lock bag. Snip end with scissors and draw mixture in a thin line on top. Top with green chilies and sweet relish.

Having a fabulous Sous Chef always helps. Thanks Sparkie.

Deep Dish Antipasto Pizza

This is a recipe

http://www.pamperedchef.com/our_products/recipesearch/recipedetail.jsp?recipeId=9576

Mini Cheese Cakes

Ingredients:

3 8 oz packages cream cheese

1 cup sugar

5 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

Topping

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup sour cream

1/2 tsp vanilla

Mix until smooth. Line a cupcake pan with metal cup cake tins. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes. Do not brown. Once complete, mixed 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup sour cream and 1/2 tsp vanilla. Dab 1 tbsp of sour cream mixture on each cake and bake an additional 5 minutes. Refrigerate until ready to serve (or freeze).

This was my mother's recipes, and pulling out her personal, cookie bake, recipes lead me to my quest to make each of her cookie recipes (133) over the course of this year. I vowed to myself I wasn't going to change the integrity of her recipes, but I did decide to add 1 tsp of cherry pie filling just prior to serving as a variation. Typically my mom would use fresh strawberries.

I am so thankful I had not one but two Sous Chef's. My friend Shannon came over the night before the party and we made the cheese cakes and toffee (which I decided not to serve) and my friend Tal assisted with the pizza and nachos at the party.

Link to digital download:
http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-To-Room-9-Explicit/dp/B007FH3F94

Metal music was relatively new to me...but I was a big 80's hair band fan and I must confess...I love love love Creeper, the album and the amazing friends I have because of metal.

:)

I'm ready to make my grocery list and plan for the first few cookie (I use the term loosley) recipes

One of the secrets to baking and cooking is to have a plan and the ingredients at your finger tips. I decided that as I venture out to the grocery store today for the ingredients for the Peanut Butter Bon Bons, I should have the ingredients for the next few recipes I'm planning on making on hand.

Day 1 - Sunday (Today)
Peanut Butter Bon Bons (recipe was posted yesterday)

Day 2 - Monday
English Toffee

Day 3 - Wednesday
Lil Butter Cookies

Day 4 - Friday
Mini Cheese Cakes

Grocery List

9 sticks butter
7 eggs
6 Hershey bars
4 cups flour
4 cups sugar
3 8 oz Cream Cheese
2 cups graham cookie crumbs
2 tsp vanilla
2 cans frosting (1 vanilla, 1 of any choice - I'm thinking chocolate)
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sour cream
25 foil cupcake cups 

1 large package chopped walnuts

lemon

concentrated lemon juice

salt

Okay...I now have no excuses. While I'm at it, I'm going to pick up the ingredients I need for Paula Deen's Sour Cream Muffins. It's a fabulous muffin that I make often. That adds 2 additional sticks of butter to my grocery list, 1/2 pint of sour cream and 2 cups SELF rising flour.

Peanut Butter Bon Bons - Cookie Recipe #1

First thing tomorrow morning, Alyson and I will begin production of cookie recipe #1, Peanut Butter Bon Bons.

Warning - since these recipes are from my Mother's collection, I'm not making any changes, even when mincemeat is required (bleck).

Peanut Butter Bon Bons

Ingredients:

1 can ready to spread vanilla frosting

1 cup peanut butter

1/4 cup butter or margarine softened

2 cups graham cookie crumbs

1 can any flavor ready to spread frosting

Combine vanilla frosting, peanut butter and margarine until well blended, stir in crumbs until mixed, form into balls and chill one hour.

Melt remaining frosting over low heat stirring occasionally. Dip balls into frosting, allow excess to drip on racks over waxed paper, let stand about six hours at room temperature.

Makes 48 to 52.

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Pretty obvious why Aly and I decided this recipe MUST be done first. Easy, yet scary. Kind of like a traffic accident, "can vanilla frosting", "any flavor can frosting"...this is a I can't look away from recipe. I've never seen anything like this. Got to love the 1970's.

:)

133 Days of Cookies (Respectively)

My mother was a fabulous baker. My cousin Gina can both bake and cook. I think people who can do one of the two is amazingly talented, but people can do both, just take my breath away, so just like in the that movie, where the writer (yea...I've got several hundred pages of fiction stuffed in a drawer) aspires to make every recipe from that famous cookbook.

I can be more specific...but I know everyone already knows what I'm talking about.

Anywho...I believe someone can do anything if they try, over and over and over and over. I'm that way with everything, kind of like a bull in a China shop. I will succeed over my own dead body. And yes, one day I'll get going my novel again. A quick side note, in 1993, it was read by an editor who thought it could fly as juvenile fiction. Well I was insulted. I felt I had been completely misunderstood. Today I look back and think...umm Harry Potter, Twilight...uggg, I missed my window.

Enough of that.

:)

Back to cookies. The number 133 (1133, 33) is my lucky number. Since 1988 that number has given me strength and courage, and persistence and the feeling that I'm not as alone as I feel sometimes. One of the treasures I have from my mother is her personal cookbook of cookies from her Cookie Bake parties when I was a child. I pulled the recipes down a moment ago because I'm going to make her mini cheesecakes next Saturday for my boyfriend's birthday and I thought, I really should bake more. I wonder how many recipes there are in this book...

Guess how many there were...133.

Okay, so now I know I MUST do this. I'd love to do a recipe a day, but sadly enough, my daughter and I are wimps when it comes to food volume. Last Thursday we went to an Italian Restaurant (shhh...don't tell anyone, it's all stuff I can make with my hands tied behind my back at home, but I wanted to be catered to) and I ordered an appetizer, and soup. She ordered soup and a main course. Three bites into the appetizer and soup both our of our eyes were rolling back to our head from being full. She ran to catch the waiter and cancelled the entree.

We're total wimps...ohhh and we still took food home.

So if I make a batch of cookies a day, even if I only make a dozen, that is 10 that will be put into a jar or the freezer. So at the end of the week, that is 70 cookies in a jar or the freezer...931 cookies after 133 days. My freezer won't be able to take it. I have a refrigerator with french doors and two pullouts for the freezer...no bueno. I don't have room for anything in there.

So ship my cookies off with my kiddos...well my older 2 don't eat nuts, so that won't work. My boyfriend's daughter is a baker...(let's get it straight, he's a biker, she's a baker - we spent several minutes last week specifically talking about cake balls) and a good one, so he's surrounded by treats all of the time, and for the most part, doesn't eat them when he's here. Now if I didn't have bananas and yogurt...that would be another story...

I'm not sure how I'm going to make it work, but I'm going to try for 2 to 3 recipes a week. That should take me the calendar year. Wish me luck.

:)



Finally...I've made Quesadillas without using the Microwave!

Sigh, I must confess, when my parents purchased a microwave, I started making Quesadillas. Ummmm or so I thought.

Less than 30 years later (I'm sure it was less than 30 years, 25 years...well...who knows) I was watching my cousin Gina in my kitchen making Quesadillas for her daughter. And she didn't hit the power button on the microwave once.

I noticed she used 6 qt, stainless steel pot. Very smart.

I didn't think about it again, I'm sure my daughter still made Quesadillas the way I taught her, in the microwave...but I made a mental note that if "I" was making Quesadillas, I'd make them Gina's way.

Flash forward 20 months later...yea, I mentioned I don't "cook" often...to continue, flash forward 20 months later and a coworker, Chris, casually mentioned he made Quesadillas.

I went flying down the hall to his desk and said, did you use a 6 qt sauce pan?

"I used a griddle." he replied.

"Ohhh a griddle." I said. "How?"

He gave me some brief instruction and I merged the two ideas together in my head. I made a mental note that "when" I was going to make Quesadillas again, I would not use the microwave.

As it turns out, my youngest daughter committed to making Quesadillas for a school project. Nice timing huh?

You should have seen the look on her face when I informed her we were NOT going to use the microwave. I thought she was going to fall over.

Today we went out for the ingredients: 8 inch flour tortillas, shredded Mexican style cheese, sour cream, salsa and...wait for it...butter.

Now, everyone who still uses the microwave is confused...(I know for a fact I wasn't the only one)..."butter". Yes butter.

Step 1, butter the tortillas on one side
Step 2, put a small amount of butter in the pot, set burner to high
Step 3, after the pot has a moment to preheat and the butter is bubbling, place the first tortilla, butter side down in the pot. Cover with 1/4 cup of shredded Mexican style cheese. (You can never use too much cheese, so if you use more, no worries).
Step 4, place last tortilla, butter side up on top of the cheese
Step 5, after several moments, use a spatula to check if the tortilla on the bottom is browned, if it is, it's time to flip
Step 6, once both sides have browned cut into 8 pieces and garnish with sour cream and salsa if desired

This was so quick, easy, tasty and CHEAP (my favorite), I know it will be a go to dish I'll make often. A picture will follow soon, my camera is broken so I have to use my cell.

Mother's Day Menu - The Happiest of Days

A happy happy happy belated Mother's Day to all of the Mother's out there. Yesterday was quite honestly, the happiest Mother's Day I can remember, plus it was all about "me". When I was a new mom, since I was a single mom much of my children's lives, Mother's Day focused on my own mother, who was such a critical part of my life and support system. She enabled me to have it all because she helped me so much raising my three children (21, 20, 15), I was able to still have a very successful career. On July 7, 2008, my mother passed away, my life changed on a dime, and the next several years focused on my grief from not having a living mother and how much I missed her.

Yesterday, about 6 pm, I thought about my mom, and when I did, I had the distinct memory that I was moving forward with my grief and I almost woke up this morning feeling "guilty" for not thinking more about her yesterday, so I opened Facebook and did an appropriate tribute.

It was literally the first time in my memory that I felt like a matriarch of my family.

Since it was my day, things went my way...which meant I cooked breakfast. I love love love to cook, but I don't do it as often as I'd like, so I took the opportunity.

Mother's Day Menu

 

Munka - A Swedish Pancake

(also known as Æbleskiver)

 

Apple Syrup

 

Maple Coffee

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Munka
Ingredients:
2 c. buttermilk
3 eggs separated
2 c. flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tsp. Baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
Granulated sugar for rolling

Beat egg yolks and stir in buttermilk.  Sift dry ingredients together and stir in buttermilk and egg yolk mixture.  Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites.

Heat the munka pan on the stovetop at medium heat with butter or shortening in each slot (you can also use applesauce). My munka is cast iron, it belonged to my mother. I use a toothpick to turn the munka which will bubble like a pancake will when it's time to turn.

Roll in granular sugar prior to serving. You can also use a ligonberry jam, powdered sugar...anything in your imagination you would typically put on a pancake. I use granulated sugar, because it's a tradition.


Apple Syrup
Ingredients:
1 can Apple Pie Filling
1/2 cup Maple Syrup

An apple flavored munka is not uncommon, thus why I will occasionally use applesauce in the slots, however, I wanted to make it the traditional meal my mom did, thus I used butter. To compensate, because my boyfriend loves apple pie, and it's the easiest thing in the world (to me) to make a flavored syrup, I used a can of apple pie filling. I love to make flavored syrup because it's basically open a can of fresh fruit and add maple syrup, and as Will Farrell said in the movie "Elf", maple syrup was one of the primary food groups, or something like that. I don't feel like looking up the quote, or the spelling of Farrell. You can also use jam. If you use jam I try to make it equal parts syrup to jam. Heat on stove top at medium heat until combined and warm. Serve warm.


Bacon

Bacon is the that in my opinion gives me the most bang for my buck so to speak. I've been dieting "years", in fact, as of today, it's official, I'm 127.2 lbs down (yip yip yip yahoo) and bacon is a food that for the amount of calories it packs, brings a punch of flavor. About 50 to 75 calories a slice, the key is to keep it at 2 slices...I have nothing less to say about that.

Sometimes I'll do bacon in the oven, 425 - 20 minutes on a cookie cooker that is sitting on top of a cookie sheet, but I'll also do bacon in my dutch oven on the stove top. Depends on how crispy I want it. If I start with frozen bacon, I'll use the dutch oven. Using the dutch oven makes the color crispy and black, but sometimes you are just in the mood for lightly burnt bacon.


Maple Coffee
Ingredients:
1 part Half and Half
1 part Maple Syrup
2 parts Coffee

It's magical...trust me, it's my Christmas go to and I was out of coffee creamer at home. Please don't listen to my boyfriend who said he'd wait until next Christmas to try it...

:)

Cook on the stove top, at low to medium heat. Top with whipped cream if you wish. This dish translates beautiful to a very low cal treat, use fat free milk, or fat free half and half with sugar free maple syrup!

Make me a panini...pppplllllleeeeeeaaaaasssssseeeeee.....

Nine O'clock on a Tuesday night. My shoes are on, my sink is polished (aka no dishes), I'm sitting on the couch editing my last blog (From April...uht oh) and just as I was getting ready to shut down my computer and settle in for the evening...

"Mmmmmmooooooooommmmmmmm. Can you make me a panini?" My daughter said.

I tried to ignore her.

"Please." She said.

I looked up, and I tried to look as tired as possible.

"Ppppppllllllleeeeeeeaaaaaassssseeee."

Since looking tired wasn't working, I gave in, and reopened the kitchen.

Truth. A traditional Italian salami sandwich is very simple. Good bread, olive oil, salt, pepper, salame. Period. Any questions?

I've been known to vary my panini ingredients, but typically, I'll keep it simple. The secret to a good panini, is an excellent panini maker. Here is mine. It's one of the best on the market. A brick from my house. Hey I paid $XXX,XXX for that brick.

Next you need good bread (a challenge in Dallas...but there are places, like Eatzi's you can get some good, quality, Italian bread).

And lastly, good meat and good olive oil. I chose a traditional salame, calabrese and capocollo. (Forgive me for the pictures...I used my cell phone...no bueno.)

Drizzle the olive oil on both sides of the bread. Sprinkle bread with salt and pepper. Place the deli meat in the sandwich and place the closed sandwich in a hot fry pan (with more oil). Place the brick on top of the sandwich, use a plate if you need to for balance. Flip when browned and serve.

From Couch to a Clean House

Draft from April 23, 2012

Quick Note: Since I have not taken the time to revisit this post since April 23rd...I thought I should give an update.

1. My shoes are on (and it's 8:30 pm.)
2. Me: "Do we have any dishes in the sink?"  Aly: "No".  I'm not going to get up and check.
3. Confession...I didn't make my bed this morning, but I still think I'm on the right track.
4. I have an amazing friend who comes by once a month and helps me with my housekeeping but she hasn't been here in about six weeks. I'm happy because she's coming in a few days! Yahoo.
5. I've made it a point to read (an actual book) for at least 15 to 30 minutes 4x a week.
6. I threw a little pool opening party last weekend for some girlfriends...I don't remember if I kept my shoes on or not...
7. It's official. I own more than one pair shoes that have laces. I purchased them a week ago from Old Navy while with some girlfriends in San Marcos/Gruene.
8. Aly is asking for a panini so I have to get up off the couch...recipe to follow...maybe a photo too.

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End of day 1, getting my life back. I'm pretty pleased with myself. I found an article/website/blog about getting "couched to organized" in baby steps. I'm not really unorganized, but there are nights I go to sleep with a messy kitchen and living room, especially when I'm not cooking for my 15 year old daughter...(shhhh...that means she cooked for herself so I didn't make the mess), so I thought it was a good place to start. Plus I have someone help clean once a month and today was her day. I pay her in advance, it hadn't arrived yet (sent it on the 18th) so she didn't come. I kind of thought, well, here's my chance to save some money in the future.  Anyway, step one of the article was to clean and polish your kitchen sink every night before going to bed. It even mentioned wiping the water drops out of the basin AND keeping a dish pan under the sink for dirty dishes in the am if you don't have a dishwasher (or your family refused to use it). A little too far out of the park for me, but I get the point. Having no dishes in your sink means an unloaded and loaded dishwasher plus a clean counter top. And if you're like me, and your kitchen is 100% visible from your living room, it even motivated me to put the pillows in the proper place on my couch. I am even going to dare to attempt something I haven't done since I've filed for divorce. Read...like an actual book before I go to sleep. At least a few pages to help wind down and create a habit. Tomorrow's task (in addition to the empty sink) is to wear my shoes all day. Huh? That one struck a cord with me. Even if I'm throwing a formal dinner party I will attend my own party without shoes on. The task is based that if you don't have shoes on, your not prepared to work, thus as the tasks get harder, it will be easier to ignore them or procrastinate. And by shoes she means fully dressed. Even if it's a track suit. Showered, hair, make up, jewelry, dressed, shoes. Sigh, this one will be harder on weekends and when I get home, but I'll give it a whirl. Wish me luck. <3


Ref: http://www.flylady.com/