Still tired? Red Eye Gravy helps..

So, I'm a firm believer when you get a good base for something, you save it. Last night there was a lot of pork-yummy-filled coffee with some pork bits in it. Know what this sounded like to me? Red eye gravy. Never had it? Really? Find the closest Southern Person you can find, and start begging. Maybe offer a handy-j. Not going to go that route? Well.. There are a LOT of directions, but instead I'm going my way - yo. You'll also see a lot of "Crap I don't have..." and "How can I make this work.."

Kobold goes back to his roots, dawg.

So this isn't my standard post, with complete directions, and all that. Instead it's a post about improvisation. Making do. Gettin' the job done. 

 

What are you looking at here? So I was dumb, went to the store for dinner. And forgot egg, even though I wanted to bread the chicken. No buttermilk, regular milk, yogurt.. Crap how am I going to get this breading to stick?! After a few minutes on Google, it looked like a lot of people used some watered down mustard. Ok I got this.

I'm not going to go into everything about breading your chicken. But I like flour and corn starch. It makes a nice coating. I like to add spices until I can see them pretty. It makes it yummy.

So I'm not smart enough to own a steamer. But thanks to the lovely Momma D, aka my momma, I have colanders a plenty. A little foil, a partially filled pot of water. Poof, how I steamed some green beans. 

Garlic toast holds a special place in my heart. Not just because I love garlic AND toast, but.. Because it's memories. Back when I wasn't quite yet a Kobold, and couldn't really see over the counter good, I still wanted to help Momma D in the kitchen. But I've always been a klutz. So, she convinced me that garlic toast was such a big deal and hard to make. Somewhere along the lines she quit even pretending and just let me make it. I was good at making the buttery just garlicy enough. Knowing when to add what. It wasn't that big of deal, but she made it out to be.

Over the years I've done so many things, including garlic oils, powders, granulated, fresh garlic, butter, margarine, etc..etc..

My method is simple: I often use margarine because, well, it's cheap to make HUGE globs of. I cover the top of it in granulated garlic. Then I mix it in. Then I add more. Then I slice garlic cloves. Add those. Mix it all. My implement of covering, as you can see, is a fork. Why? I don't know. It's what mom started me with, and what I'm good at using.
Butter one side, lay it, butter the other side. The sneaky part? Sprinkle just a little Kosher Salt (my salt of choice) over the top of it all. Not much, really just a little here and there. It goes a long way. 

So, let's continue with last night's coffee yummy. First, make your roux. Butter + Flour. Melt butter, add flour, stir a plenty. Brown it. Add your coffee-fat left overs. Stir and cook. If thin, add flour/corn starch until it's as thick as you want. 

What did all of this make?

A lovely, Southern Inspired Treat

Not All Package Food is Bad....

So we all grew up eating packaged food. If you didn't ever have to eat some sort of Hamburger Helper, or didn't grow up thinking Rice came in a box, well, you suck. So does your face!

But for the rest of us, there comes a point where we start to hate them a bit. For a while, I'd rather eat out than to eat from a package of pre-seasoned...stuff.

And then I realized I had bills, debt, and, well, a lazy. So I started picking up packages of noodles, rice, and that sort of thing.

This all leads me to this past week. A coworker was bragging about his fried bananas. Little Asian Bananas (To quote my awesome Cambodian Co-worker "They are smaller (hands toward crotch) like Asians!") fried.. Hmm.. Off to the market we go!!!

But if we are there, we might as well get dinner, right?

Whatcha Whatcha Gonna Need

Bananas:

• 8-10 small, firm, bananas. 
• 1 box of this awesome stuff pictures above
• Some water - Ours was probably about 1 cup
• Oil in your deep frying vessel

How are you gonna do this?!

• Peel some nanners
• Slice them longways into about 4 pieces

• Mix your batter according to the directions on the box - I made mine a bit runny
• Dip bananas

• Deep fry until freaking yummy
• Put them on some paper towels (we were out :( ) to get extra grease off

Serve with: Honey, ice cream, vanilla something, coconut something, etc. etc. etc. Our plate is gooey with honey!!

Ha so we had a LOT of batter left. What to do? Add honey, a bit of corn starch, thicken it and cook it like funnel cake!! 

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So what did we do for dinner?
Chicken, potatoes, and carrots. Simple right?
But we found another packet... This one is all Pepper and Garlic nommy

• Chop your chicken into about 1" cubes. I used a large cleaver, because you can buy them cheap at the freaking Asian Market!!

• Slice your Carrots and Taters kinda thin.

• Deep Fry your meat
• Drain like 99% of your oil

• Fry your taters and carrots
• Add your meat and make it all friendly.

• Add your packet of seasoning and cook until the seasoning is all up in that food.
• EAT IT!!!

Chicken n Cake!

So a friend sent me a link, that I promptly lost, to a very simple chicken meal. How simple? So simple that Rabbit could have done it. BAM!

Whatcha Need

• Chicken breast - I used just over a pound for two nice boobies.
• Half a package of bacon
• Jar o Pesto
• Melty Cheese

Whatcha Whatcha Gonna do Gonna do

• Lay out 3 or 4 strips of bacon
• Split a rather anatomically naughty looking V into the chicken breasts. You can probably do 2 or three per.
• Put that breast on bacon

• Fill those V Bags with Pesto
• Add some cheese

• Wrap the bacon around it. I like to kind of braid my bacon.
• Maybe put more cheese on top.
• Bake at 400 for like 25- 30 minutes. 
• I use a lot of silicone sheets, so mine was at 350 for almost 40 minutes.
• Next time I'm not going to use silicone so I can bake at 400, and then at the very end broil for a few minutes to get things crispy.

We served it with noodles and left over cheesy sauce from a previous post. 

CAKE!!
Rabbit made cake. Rabbit writes about cake. Aaaand GO

Spaghetti C-asserole - Fun with noodles. Plus dessert!

That's what she said!

Casserole is a bad word to a lot of people I know. And not in the fun four letter words you try to freak out grandma using kind of way. Instead it's a word often associated with dissonant mixings of Hamburger Helper or hot dogs and ice cream. But, you know what? I'm pretty sure casserole just means "Shoved together and baked." **Editor's note: (AKA: Rabbit is typing now) A casserole is, by definition, either the dish or serving vessel that the food that it is cooked in - being that casserole is from the French word "case," ie: casserole pan or casserole dish - or the food inside the dish; usually comprised of meat, vegetables and a starchy binder (flour, potatoes, rice, pasta, etc...) as well as a crunchy or cheesy topping. Don't let him fool you, he knows this.**

So, Miss Rabbit in her wondrous research capacities found us something from The Food Network gave us what they called Chicken Spaghetti. Me? I called it casserole and did what I could do to make it feed far less than an army of starved Tolkien Dwarves.

The last part only kind of worked. We also mainly swapped normal onions for Shallots because we are freaking fancy, dammit.

Know what goes well with it? What we politely called Very Confused Irish Cannoli Pie.

Chicken Spaghetti Casserole 

Doesn't that look awesome? I think I ate 3 times that much, and Miss Rabbit about that much too. And then we ate dessert .

Ingredients

• 1/2 a chicken
• 8 ounces Cheddar cheese
• 1/2 a Red Pepper
• 1/2 a Green Pepper
• 1 can of Cream of Mushroom soup
• 2 Shallots
• 1/2 lb of Spaghetti noodles
• 1/4 Tbls. Black Pepper
• 1/8 Tbls. Salt
• 1/4 Tbls. Cayenne
• 1/4 Tbls. Mrs. Dash because I'm lazy

Cookin' It

Boil a chicken for about 35-40 minutes. I'll be honest, I threw in some cheater Italian Seasoning in right on top while it boiled.

Slice n Dice your peppers and shallots

Break your sketti into 1/3s

When your chicken is done, pull it from the broth.
Take 1 cup of your broth and set it to the side.

Cook your noodles in the broth left in the pot. You cool then until they are Al Dente, pretty much half cook them, give or take. You want them soft, but chewy.

Skin and bone your chicken.
Add the veggies, 3/4 of your cheese, the noodles, and soup together.
Remember all those spices? Toss them in there too.
From there mix that bad boy of a mess. It will be messy. I love it.

Sprinkle the rest of your cheese right on top.
From there you bake it 350 for about 40 minutes. 

It's freaking fabulous, right? I mean, go Food Network for their idea!

Very Confused Irish Cannoli!

This came as a whim. We wanted cookies, then we wanted frosting, but nothing in the frosting isle looked good, but then I saw the pie pans, and well, I had an idea.

**Editor's note: It is frequently a good thing when Kobold has an idea, so I usually just let him run with it. This one scared me a little, to be frank. That is, until he laid out what he was going to do with it. Then I grabbed my chocolate chips and let him have at it. My only real contribution, I might add, was the chips. To be fair, I'm usually the one that does dessert/baking but I was feeling lazy and it WAS his idea, after all. We can't always be winners at everything. I promise I'll quit being lazy and put up some more delicious/enticing desserty type things later. **

Ingredients

• A package of cookies - We did sugar cookies
• 2 packages of instant vanilla Jello pudding
• 2 cups of milk
• 3/4 cup of Irish Cream
• Chocolate Chips for yumminess

Not Quite Cooking

Smash your cookies up and moosh them into the pie pan

Mix your Jello mix, milk, and choice of Irish Cream

Pour that in the Pie Crust, sprinkle your chocolate chips.
Let this whole thing set up for a while.

We made this while the chicken boiled, so it sat up for a while. In the future I'll probably make the cookie crust from scratch so I can make a whole crust. This does not serve like a pie. You scoop out as much as you can with a serving spoon, mix it together, and nom it until your eyes cross.