We smoked a brisket the other day and have been cutting thin slices off the slab as needed. I’ve been heating them in a skillet with a spoonful of water for steam.
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Recipes
Summer Staples
Around here this cucumber and tomato salad with sweet onions is almost always in the fridge. I added some blanched broccoli to this batch as a change of pace. It’s in a simple vinaigrette of seasoned rice vinegar and oil with a sprinkle of garlic powder, onion powder, and thyme.
Pot Pie Pr0n
The gravy for this one is made with broth, milk, heavy cream and buttermilk. The last two because I just had a little left of each and wanted to use them up.
It’s thick – I think there is nearly 1/2 cup of flour in the roux. I managed to collect the chicken fat from the roast chicken and that is what it took to make the roux look right in the sauce pan.
Bacon Mac & Cheese
With a side of chili oil chicken and three bean salad. This batch of one pot mac wasn’t as good as the last one we fixed. I didn’t use any broth in this one to stretch the milk and as a result the pasta was not as soft as I prefer. I didn’t have any of that gouda cheese left, either, and went with all cheddar. I think next time I make this I’ll have plenty of broth to start it and then add milk as the pasta takes on the liquid.
Dragon Fruit
Our local greengrocer carries these things on occasion. I grabbed one the other day because I’ve never eaten one. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I knew what they looked like but wasn’t sure how to eat one.
Turns out that they are easier to eat than an apple. I understand that there is a variety that has red pulp that is said to taste better than these white ones. The pulp is slightly sweet and tastes good – not best thing ever! good, just OK.
Chili Oil Chicken
This is just a simple stir-fry. It can be done in one pan – chicken first and then the veggies. Remove the chicken when it’s nearly done and then do the veggies, then add sauce and return the chicken. The cooking sauce is a basic brown sauce with black bean and garlic paste, chili oil, and a thickener. I added more chili oil to mine at the table. You can use the broccoli stems without peeling if you cut them into 1/8 inch slices.
These days I’m steaming the veggies separately from the chicken in the wok because I have plenty of room on the stove-top and I think I get better consistency that way. In this case because the carrots are so much smaller than the broccoli I added them to the steamer a bit later in the cook.
I like to steam the veggies and then cool them under running water so that they are ready to be added to the wok just prior to service for rewarming. They go in and then the sauce is added and allowed to thicken and to coat everything nicely.
Lemon Cream Chicken
One thing I like about Google search is that by entering some of the ingredients you have on hand and appending ‘recipe’ as the last term in your search string, you usually you get pages of recipes to browse through – if you can get past the top result. Image search is always fun as well.
I searched for lemon and chicken and this recipe was in the top spot. I told them they could show me targeted results and they know me pretty well, now. I’m a sucker for cream sauces.
I may have overcooked mine. It was not hurt other than the cream sauce is not as cream-saucy looking as in the photo on the recipe page. I looked a few times at that recipe and didn’t see anything about how long the chicken should bake so I set a 30 minute timer to remind me to give it a look. It ended up spending 40-ish minutes in the oven plus the 6-8 minutes browning atop the range.
Modified Hot Mess
We’re not sure what to call this. It started to be a basic hot mess with diced and browned garlic breakfast sausage. There is cheddar in there with a sour cream/bbq sauce dressing. I can’t explain how the steamed broccoli came to be a part of it other than “it sounded good at the time”. Broccoli makes any dish healthier so I balanced that with more butter. I peeled the sweet potato after it came out of the oven this time. It comes off easily.
Turns out that it works pretty well. Mrs J says the dish should go into the regular recipe rotation.
