Pork-upines in a Skillet - A super simple one pan recipe

Now here's a style of blog post I haven't written in a long time. This #FoodPornFriday I share something I cooked myself. It's something I'm calling Pork-upines in a Skillet.

Now I am not what anyone would call a cook in any way. I didn't just make this up off the top of my head. It's based on a recipe called Porcupines In A Skillet I found over at Thirty Handmade Days. One of the main things I changed was using Ground Pork instead of Ground Beef, thus the name change.

The great thing about this dish was how easy it was to make and how quickly it came together. Then there was the bonus of it tasting damn good. I got a lot of compliments on this one from the family. My only mistake was not making enough.

Stuff you need:

1lb Ground Pork
1.5 Cup Water
1 package of seasoning (I used Club House Superburger. The original just used onion soup mix).
A few pinches of other seasonings to kick it up a notch (I used Old El Paso Burrito)
1 cup of Jasmine Rice (not instant rice)
1 can of tomatoes (next time I would use 2)
A bunch of Shredded Cheese (I used Kirkland Tex-Mex from Costco)

So here's how you make it:

Brown about a pound of ground pork
Drain if needed (the thing with pork is you probably won't have to, I didn't)
Toss everything but cheese in with the browned pork.
Turn skillet down to low, cover and cook about 35 minutes until rice is cooked.
Serve and cover with shredded cheese to taste.

That's it. Seriously. The entire thing is: brown meat, toss everything else in there and simmer for half an hour. It couldn't be easier.

What I would change next time:

The biggest problem was that it wasn't enough food for five of us. Three adults and two kids. I'm thinking I may just double everything but I'm not sure my skillet is big enough for that. I will definitely add more tomatoes and some other veggies. I'm thinking green pepper and onion will go well. It didn't feel like it needed more meat but more rice wouldn't have hurt. 

If you try this recipe out please let me know how it turns out. If you try anything new with it I would love to hear about that too.

Support local Scouting with some amazing popcorn

Anyone interested in some Scout Popcorn?

My oldest daughter is a Beaver and her Troop is raising money by selling gourmet popcorn and I'm looking you, my friends, family and colleagues for support.

60% of the proceeds go to Scouts Canada. More importantly to me and my girl is that all of that goes right to Gwen's Troop: the 44th, and 20% of that goes directly to my daughter to pay for gear, camping, trips etc.

The delivery date is mid to late November and I'm sure we can figure out some way to get your popcorn to you. Just send me an email or comment below to tell me what you would like.

http://www.scouts.ca/popcorn/products.html

Saw a pic that went viral on Facebook and just had to make these Pepperoni Rolls

The image that inspired it all.

Have you seen that picture there on the right there? That one with those delicious looking pizza bite things? Sure you have. The damn thing has been all over Facebook and Twitter.

Unlike many people who just saw this pic and replied with Yum or OMG WANTZ! or whatever, I actually decided that looked so good that I had to make it.

So I did a google image search and found the original source. I had to do a search because most of the shares of the picture have that nice watermark in the bottom corner cropped off. Note: don't do this people, if something this awesome comes up, give credit where credit is due.

So that image search led me to The Gunny Sack, a decent food blog with tons of recipes and other tips and tricks. I thought it was cool to find out that these pizza balls were the authors first ever recipe post and the fourth post ever put up on the blog.

My helpers flattening and stacking

So anyway. I saw this great looking pic, decided I wanted to make these myself, did a bit of digging and found the full recipe here: Easy Pepperoni Rolls.

Amazingly it was pretty much as easy as it looks. First I had to pick up some ingredients. As usual I rushed things a bit. While out for groceries last weekend I saw a bag of pepperoni and said to my wife "Hey I can make those pizza ball things" and we bought it. I knew that the recipe called for Pillsbury Biscuits, so I grabbed one of those as well. I also needed cheese. This one I decided to save up for.

Just before wrapping

Here in Windsor we are known for having really good pizza. Windsor Style Pizza is a thing. Something people have tried to duplicate in other regions. For many years it was a secret as to part of what made Windsor Style Pizza so good. A couple years ago that secret finally got out. It's the cheese. Specifically mozzarella cheese made right here in Windsor by Galati Cheese Company LTD. Since the cat got out of the bag every pizza place in the city now has "made with real Galati cheese" signs on their doors and menus. I needed some of this cheese for my pizza balls. Plus it gave me an excuse to pick up two 'balls' of Twist Cheese (this is a knotted ball of Mozarella and Fenel that is fantastically stringy and tasty that we love to buy for snacks).

Ready to go into the oven

So now that I had my cheese it was time to make these things. Remember that bit about rushing it? Well, I hadn't really read the recipe in full and even the once over I gave it was a now a couple days in the past. I totally missed the fact that I needed three cans of biscuit mix. I also needed to pick up Garlic Powder as we didn't have any in the house. So I headed back out for some last minute groceries.

Okay now we are ready to cook!

Know what else is so great about this recipe? I can get the kids to help! My girls loved helping me flatten out the biscuit mix. They laughed at the Pillsbury can pop. They had a great time stacking slices of pepperoni and cheese, and they were better at wrapping everything up into balls than their dad was. I let the oldest help whisk the eggs and paint the little balls of dough and both of the kids helped me sprinkle on the Italian seasoning, garlic and Parmesan. Overall we had a great time putting everything together.

All baked up with sauce ready for dipping.

The girls and I cleaned up our mess while the whole thing baked for about 18 minutes. Was the house ever starting to smell good. I couldn't help but turn the oven light on, pop open the door and toss a quick pic up on Twitter.

Oh man, these things looked great when they came out of the oven. I kept checking on them panicking and expecting them to burn the second I turned away, but it didn't happen. They came out perfect. Nice and browned on the top with not even a hint of black to be seen.

My wife heated up a bowl full of our current favourite pasta sauce: Jamie Oliver Keep It Simple Tomato & Basil, and I put everything out on the table.

Wow was everything hot! Too hot. It took forever for these too cool off enough to eat. It was worth the wait though. Not only were these really easy to do, fun to make with the kids, looked great, and smelled great, they also tasted great. I got the official permission from my wife to cook these again, any time I wanted to.

Took some will to pause and take this pic

I think next time I'll play around with it a bit more. This time around all I did was grab my favourite local cheese instead of the marble suggested in the recipe. I think next time I'm going to play around with different pizza ingredients. Maybe some sausage for me and some mushrooms and olives for the girls. I'll also cook the meat a bit first. I think slightly crispy pepperoni would have made these even better.

So here was my experience trying to make one of those great easy looking recipes shared on social media. Turned out pretty damn awesome actually. Have you ever tried to cook something based on one of these viral pictures? How did it turn out?

I had some Tex-Mex cheese and needed something to do with it.

As I've mentioned before, I've been trying to help out my wife by taking care of dinner one night a week. Often this means delivery or take out, but now and then I actually decide to make a mess in the kitchen. This past Thursday was one of those cases.

The plan:

I actually got the plan to cook this on Monday when I noticed that we still hadn't touched the two giant bags of Kraft Tex-Mex cheese I picked up at the last time we were at Costco. During some downtime at work I googled "Kraft Tex-Mex", fully expecting to easily find a bunch of recipes created specifically for this shredded cheese. Oddly I didn't find that. Actually it looks like Tex-Mex is a Canadian thing, in the US they have Mexican but not Tex-Mex shredded cheese. They also don't have the big Tex-Mex recipe section I expected. So I continued my googling; trying a bunch of things like Mexican Cheese, Kraft bag of cheese, Mexican lots of cheese -tacos, etc.

Eventually I found a recipe on allrecipes.ca called Chicken Nacho Bake. Amusingly it noted that the recipe was submitted by "Kraft Shredded Cheese" This looked rather good and really easy. Just chicken, salsa, tortilla chips and Tex-Mex cheese. It also called for sour cream but I never touch the stuff so I skipped that part.

As Thursday came rolling around I realized I probably should cook more than just some chicken with toppings on it, so I started looking for a recipe for good Mexican rice. You know, the yellow/redish rice with tomato and such in it. It didn't take me long to find a recipe called Best Spanish Rice that used a lot of the same ingredients that I had just picked up; perfect. I also considered some re-fried beans but figured I would probably have more than enough with what I had picked out already.

Execution

I started with the rice since it involved chopping stuff and grilling onions and I figured that would take a while. I decided to start with some Cold-Press Canola Oil from Mighty Trio that I received from the Manitoba Canola Growers at the Canadian Food Bloggers Conference earlier this year. That combined with some Dainty Jasmine rice smelled fantastic. 

I followed the rice recipe pretty much exactly. Onions in the canola oil until soft, then add in the rice. Once the rice was brown I tossed in the 2 cups of chicken stock. Next was one 1 cup of salsa, for which I used Garden Fresh Gourmet mild. I think I owe Garden Fresh a lot of the credit for how well this meal turned out. 

The rice had to simmer for 20 minutes so I moved on to the chicken. Here I played with things quite a bit. First of all my wife had grabbed two huge chicken breasts, the original recipe called for small breasts. I'm sorry, but I'm not a fan of small breasts, so these were going to have to do. The recipe suggested slicing into the top of each chicken breast three times. Since I wasn't going to have any sour cream for the toppings to stick to, I thought it would be wise to cut each piece more often than three times, giving some room for the bits to get stuck. For the actual toppings themselves; I put on the required salsa and nacho crumbs but didn't stop there. I also chopped up some fresh cilantro and tossed that on and then put some black olives on for good measure. I was worried that just chicken, cheese and salsa wouldn't be enough. 

Just before putting the chicken in the oven (400F for 20 minutes) I checked on the rice. So, I guess you have to stir simmering rice. The recipe didn't note that. It did tell you to stir the rice earlier and even stir frequently, but once it was set to simmer it just said simmer covered for 20 mins. Well that's a lesson learned and a pan that will have to soak for a while. Despite this problem the rice looked and smelled awesome. Tasting a bit I found out that it tasted at least twice as good as it looked. Nice!

There weren't really any other problems. Everything went smoothly. When the oven beeped the first time I took the chicken out and covered it with about three times the recipes recommended amount of cheese and tossed it back in for 10 minutes. I was worried I was going to end up with a burnt mess and kept checking on things but all was good. Man the house smelled awesome too.

The end result was very impressive. It not only looked great but tasted great as well. The rice was fantastic and is something I think I will be making as a side with any future Mexican dishes I decide to make. The chicken was good. I was glad that I thought to add more to the original recipe though, I'm now certain it would have been very plain without the extra toppings. Actually come to think of it I wish I had tossed some green onions on there as well. 

The thing with both of these recipes though is that I think both of them are going to be very dependent on the salsa you choose to use. If you used a hot and spicy salsa both dishes would be hot and spicy. I'm very happy with out things turned out with the Garden Fresh stuff we grabbed but I worry that a poor quality salsa would result in a lousy meal.

If you try either of these recipes out, the originals or my modified versions please let me know how they turned out.

Went looking for cheesy and ended up with a ricotta, spinach and mint terrine

I mentioned in my last cooking post that I'm no cook. The kitchen is probably the room I spend the least time in. This is something I'm trying to change. My wife insisted suggested that I start taking care of dinner one night a week to give her more time to work on her Mommy Blog. Now she did note that she didn't care if all I did was pick up fast food or ordered pizza, she just wanted one night out of the Kitchen. I've decided to take the opportunity to step up and actually learn to cook more than Kraft and scrambled eggs. This week I ended up cooking a terrine. Before starting this quest I had no idea what a terrine was.

I'm a big cheese fan. A huge cheese fan. I eat a lot of cheese. So step one for deciding what to make this week was to google recipes with lots of cheese. This led me to the 100% Canadian Milk website: All You Need is Cheese. After browsing the very appealing graphical spread of recipes I found a recipe for Ricotta, Spinach and Mint Terrine. The picture for this recipe just looked awesome. It listed 2.5 cups of cheese in the ingredients and mentioned under 2 hours prep and cooking time. Googling "terrine" I learned that it's basically a loaf that's similar to a pate. This one was egg and cheese based and my wife and I love quiche and frittata so I thought it would be a good fit for our family. Now I will admit mint seemed a bit odd, but what the heck, lets try it.

Awesome Canada Beef tablet holder.

So we grabbed ingredients from our favourite local interdependently owned grocery store: Remark Farms. Reviewing the recipe I noticed something I missed. A 1 hour cool down in the fridge. Wow, I guess I really should read these things closer before rushing off to buy ingredients. Due to this I started getting ready as soon as I got home from work.

One of the first steps was to set up the awesome Canada Beef tablet holder we received at the first ever Food Bloggers of Canada Conference. This thing is great for cooking with. Besides holding up your tablet at a good angle (portrait or landscape) it also includes a washable stylus so that you don't get your tablet all messy with food bits.

One of my helpers.

I gathered, cut and prepped all the ingredients and had them ready to go before I started cooking. I had a couple little helpers for this one that really speed up the process. Especially pulling stems off of fresh mint and spinach and cracking eggs.

Not being very experienced with cooking I try to follow recipes exactly and don't like to mess with them at all. In this case I stuck with that. We did have one small change and that was due to not having unsalted butter in the house. I just ended up using regular and putting less salt in later. For everything else I followed the recipe.

All the ingredients gathered.

My first roadblock was when I had everything in the mixing bowl. This thing was thick! So thick that it actually bent the whisk I was using to stir. At that point my wife came to the rescue with an antique hand blender she inherited from her grandmother. That made things much easier. Now it wouldn't be me in the kitchen if something didn't go wrong and well it was that blender that caused the problem. I'm sure you can guess what happened. It took over half an hour to clean up.

It wouldn't be me in the kitchen if
there wasn't at least a small disaster.

Moving on from there things seemed to be going really well. I learned that fold the spinach doesn't mean fold in half and place into the goopy mess by hand thanks to my wife. I also learned that a dry toothpick doesn't mean not moist but rather no stuff stuck on it. The big eye opener for me though was that recipes don't include downtime, and this recipe had a lot of downtime. By downtime I'm talking about things like "wait for X to cool" After wilting the spinach and mint I had to wait for it to cool. After pulling the baked terrine out of the oven I had to wait for it to cool. I then had to put it in the fridge for an hour to let it cool. None of this cooling and waiting is listed in the hour and fifteen minute time this recipe said it was going to take. This made for a very late dinner for the kids.

Once everything was said and done I ended up with a really appealing looking terrine. I was amazed by how much it actually looked like the pictures on the 100% Canadian Milk website. It took about two hours more than I expected but the house smelled great and the food looked great. At one point my wife came in and decided to bake up some fresh local asparagus as she thought my meal needed a side.

Out of the oven

My final step for this meal was to choose a beer pairing. My wife and I recently returned from an anniversary trip to Toronto and while there we picked up a fridge full of new beers to try. At first I debated grabbing something thick and rich and chocolaty. A strong porter perhaps. Something to off set the mint. Instead I decided to go for something lighter with more hops than malt and grabbed an Amber Ale: Grand River Plowman's Ale.

So how was it? It was good. Not great but good. For something with 2.5 cups of cheese in it I expected a much stronger cheese taste. Especially when half a cup of that is something as strong as Parmesan. Then there was the mint. The mint was just odd, especially for a main dish. I even double checked to make sure this wasn't meant to be an appetizer or hors d'oeuvres. Nope it say "Main" It wasn't bad, it was just odd and the more you ate of it the more the mint taste seemed to grow. The beer choice was also good but not great. The Plowman's was very hoppy for an Amber Ale. It had a lot of Pale Ale qualities that were a bit overpowering.

My youngest daughter loved it devouring three slices. My oldest didn't seem to like it much though she said she did, she only had one slice but ate a ton of the fresh asparagus. My wife had pretty much the same opinion I did.

If I ever tried to make this again I would play with it a bit. I would probably double the amount of spinach and add some more stronger cheese. Maybe some swiss or sharp cheddar. I think I would also go with my original beer idea of a porter. Overall we had a decent meal, I learned a lot more about cooking and my wife got time to get caught up on some work. A good night in my books.


FYI: In case you missed the link above, the recipe I used can be found here: http://www.dairygoodness.ca/cheese/all-you-need-is-cheese/recipes/ricotta-spinach-and-mint-terrine

Nordic Ware Dutch Oven Duel for #FBC2013

So tonight I cooked dinner. This is a rare thing. My cooking skills are pretty much limited to breakfast, where I have my own special recipe for scrambled eggs everyone seems to love. I literally caught a kitchen on fire boiling water to make Kraft dinner at our first apartment. I usually stay out of the kitchen.

Well I'm going to the Food Bloggers of Canada Conference starting tomorrow afternoon. As a guest one of the promo items I received was a Nordic Ware dutch oven. There's a contest deal where you show off what you did with it. Much to my wife's surprise I thought it would be cool to enter. I get to try out the new 'toy', she gets a night off cooking, it's win win.

My wife is also going to the conference and she runs a mommy blog called Maple Leaf Mommy. She came up with the idea to make this a bit of a contest. So last night she cooked this really amazing Lemon Chicken with Curds thing. You can read all about her entry here: http://www.mapleleafmommy.com/2013/04/dutch-oven-lemon-and-milk-chicken.html

The Nordic Ware Dutch Oven
Who knew this was a cooking tool?

First off I had no idea a Dutch Oven was a cooking tool. Come on, I know I'm not the only one. So first I had to ask my wife what exactly it was we received here and do a bit of research online. After figuring out it's kind of like a Crock-Pot that you can put on the stove and move right into the oven and back (or do some really cool stuff using coals outdoors) I started to look for recipes online.

Eventually I found this Goulash Recipe on the Food Network website.  It sounded quick and easy, plus it will let me face that fear of making Macaroni (I wasn't joking about the fire).

Reading through the recipe I already decided to make some changes. The first and main one was to get rid of the House Seasoning. Pepper doesn't sit so well with me and I really dig a mix of oregano and Parmesan with a touch of thyme and garlic salt as a spice mix (there's a bit more to it then that but I'm not giving away my scrambled egg secret), so I planned on using that. The other main complaint I had just reading this was the total lack of cheese. That's not something I can live with so I knew I would be adding cheese at some point. Well more cheese than the Parmesan I was already planning to add. Have I mentioned I like cheese?

Here's what I finally went with:

2 packs of lean ground beef
2 large onions
3 big cloves of garlic
3 cups of water
2 cans of tomato sauce
2 cans of diced tomatoes
1 Tablespoon of Garlic Salt
A few dashes of Oregano
Enough dashes of Parmesan cheese to cover everything before stirring.
2 tablespoons Italian seasoning
3 Bay Leaves
3 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
1 Tablespoon Seasoned Salt
2 cups of Macaroni
About half a big bag of Kraft Tex-Mex cheese

With it I served some pre-made Dempster's garlic bread (with cheese to be added on top).

How I cooked it:

Beef browned and veggies cut.

Browned the beef, breaking it up as I went and draining fat along the way. Remember to next time buy leaner beef. Added the veggies (onion and garlic) and cooked them until they were soft. I dunno maybe 8 minutes or so for that. Added the water, tomatoes, and all the seasonings (everything but the Mac). Figured out I didn't have a big enough dutch oven. Panicked  Skipped one of the cans of tomato sauce. Put a lid on it and and really hoped it would simmer down a little, while updating the blog about my panic. Fully realizing that by having the lid on that probably wouldn't happen.

The solution to the emergency.

Okay, new plan: let it cook for about 20 minutes. Then take half of it out and put it in a bowl, all nice and cooked (still minus the macaroni). Split the second can of tomato sauce between the bowl and the oven. Add only half the macaroni or so to the dutch oven and continue to follow the recipe from there. Then a couple days later we can toss all of the stuff in the second bowl, already prepped, back into the oven and toss in a cup of Mac and we should be good. At least I hope so. I haven't lit anything on fire so far so I think things are actually going pretty well.

Almost finished just needs cheese.

So I proceeded according to plan B. I took out a little under half of the goulash mix and added just over a cup of Macaroni. Realized that I'm not sure exactly what we will do with the other half since we are heading up to the Conference tomorrow. Right now it looks and smells like it would be a great stew, so probably going to go that way later. For now it went into the freezer. As of then I had half an hour, some of which I'm used to update this here. Oh and I remembered to get some more pictures. Actually I've been good about that, I was worried I would forget about the picture thing.

Well the next step was easy enough. I turned off the heat and let it sit. I've got to say at this point the house sure smelled awesome. About half an hour later I cut up the Demptster's bread and tossed some of the cheese on it. At the same time I tossed a ton of cheese on top of the Goulash. I put both in the oven at 400 degrees for 8 minutes.

So how did it turn out?

The finished meal before serving.

Rather good I do have to say. The Macaroni was a little softer than I would have liked, but that could have easily been caused by not splitting the liquid well during that emergency in the middle. The meat tasted fantastic. It had absorbed all the other flavours. I was slightly tempted to just drain it all and use that ground beef as a base for a Spaghetti Sauce (something I may actually try sometime in the future). I think baking the cheese on top at the end really finished it off. My wife liked it enough that she went back for seconds. Not something she does often. The kids seemed to dig it, though they both said they preferred Kraft Dinner.

My plate, well my first plate.

Overall I'm really happy with how things turned out. The Nordic Ware Dutch Oven worked great, even if I did underestimate how much I could fit in there. I loved being able to take the finished goulash, toss some cheese on it and transfer it right to the oven for a quick broil. If I ever made this recipe again I would cut all of the ingredients in half. As it stands I think we have enough left for at least four more delicious meals.