She put Corned Beef in the oven, you'll never guess what happened next!

It cooked!

I go a bit crazy during March. A madness, perhaps. A madness for corned beef! It's so darn cheap! Alongside turkey, I firmly believe that corned beef should be had outside of its designated holiday. But a brisket is pricier than I'd like for regular consumption. Therefore when it's March and everyone wants to be Irish, I stock up! I have 3 beautiful slabs of corned beef in my freezer, around 3.5 lbs each. They keep very well so I can eat them all year round. Plus they were pretty cheap, about $6 each! 

I used to cook my corned beef in a CrockPot, but I like the texture of braising more, with less water than is used in most slow cooker recipes. I set the temperature  to 250F, liberally apply pickling spice to both sides of the corned beef brisket (that packet they include is much too small) and place it fat side up in my dutch oven. I'll add water to about halfway up the meat, cover it and cook it for around 50 minutes a pound, or until it's hella tender.

Rather than boil vegetables, roasting them in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper makes for a much tastier side. 

For cabbage, I still love steaming quarters and dousing them with malt vinegar, as my Moogie always did, but I like to switch it up sometimes. This year I did a simplified version of Linda Bastianich's Braised Red Cabbage, and I added extra vinegar.

Sláinte!

Hot Wet Rice

I'm always watching some cooking show of some kind, for inspiration and ideas. PBS's Mind of a Chef got me heavy into anything David Chang related, but I'm out of episodes so I've been watching Chef's Table on Netflix. One episode focuses on Chef Massimo Bottura. He has some pretty fun dishes, such as a cheese dish that's inspired by the crispy part of lasagna.  He also came up with a risotto recipe to aid the parmesan makers affected by a major earthquake. Rather than let thousands of damaged wheels of cheese go to waste, all the inventory was bought up by people wanting to make his dish. 

Talk about a trendsetter. 

I've also never made a risotto before this, so YAY LEARNING! 

Here's the recipe for Risotto Cacio e Pepe. In a nutshell; you boil parmesan, then use the cheese broth to cook the risotto. I found the making risotto part pretty easy, if not at least a bit labor intensive. It's the making of the cheese broth that adds an extra layer of work to the dish. Very very tasty. We had so much I made croquettes for dinner the next day, and those were equally good. I'll definitely branch out into other, possibly simpler, risottos too. 

Bonus: Watch this episode of The Katering Show, they make risotto and it's hilarious. 

She Sells Stuffed Shells

Part 2 of Tom's Food Anniversary gift, super cheesy stuffed shells with a chunky meat sauce.  I much prefer shells to lasagna, despite the two having similar ingredients. Maybe it's me, but most lasagna I make end up watery. My shells always come out perfect (not to brag). 

For my shells, I use Ree Drummond's recipe. Only I add more veggies to the sauce, and instead of just 3 cheeses, my recipe uses 4! FOUR CHEESES! Am I mad?! Probably.  

These freeze really well, but they usually don't last long enough anyways. 

Happenin' Grasshopper Pie

Valentine's Day is our anniversary. Our first date was a semi-blind date the weekend prior, and on Valentine's Day Tom sent me a candy heart that said "Hot Lips" in World of Warcraft. We didn't really have an official start date, so February 14th was chosen because it's easy to remember. 

Tom is not one for wanting presents. It's like pulling teeth when my family wants to know what to get him for Christmas. So to keep me sane, he gets a dessert and dinner of choice for his birthday, Christmas and our anniversary. As February drew closer, Tom kept replying with "Uuuuuh" and "Iiii don't knoooow" whenever I'd ask him what he wanted. I finally threw my copy of Christina Tosi's cookbook, Milk, at him and told him to pick something. 

He picked a pie. Because "Pies are easy." Easy as Pie, right? 

Weeellllll. 

Another backstory: I made the Dulce De Leche cake for his birthday a couple years ago. Christina's recipes are adapted from her bakery, Milk Bar. Everything makes sense if you're making a million batches. So everything has separate recipes for all the components. The cake had 3 different recipes to make that came together in one towering Voltron of a dessert. 

The pie is no different. 

Now mind you, each component of a Tosi recipe is easy, and assembly is easy, it's just a lot of plates to spin to bring it all together. And when it's something made for your Love, a little extra work is worth it. 

So don't be turned off from the Milk cookbook, I'd say it's intermediate. Just nothing that you'd use at midnight to whip something up for the bake sale in the morning.

The only hitch I found making this recipe was the weather. There was a wind chill of -25F and my apartment isn't the most airtight. The two layers of pie filling are essentially ganaches, and they resolidified in the cold before I was able to get a good swirl with the green and brown. 

Still very delicious! The best part is, it freezes nicely so we were able to take our time eating it. 

AbracadaBars

Bacon has become quite passe after a few solid years of being everyone's favorite breakfast meat. Much like a gaggle of Weeaboos, the Internet cultures over indulged and over exposed the pork product, making the rallying cries of Bacon! cause cringing and embarrasment. It has certainly become mainstream-uncool, like your parents on Facebook, with Stop and Shop declaring it, along with Maple as the current Flavor they're marketing. When did this excess start? Were the Bacon Weaves of Epic Meal Time to blame? Or was it the influx of bacon flavored popcorns, sauces and air fresheners that were all pretty terrible?

I've never been a Bacon Fadist. Ever since working in a breakfast restaurant in high school, it's been my favorite thing to have with french toast, or on an egg sandwich. I still believe in Bacon. Even David Chang uses it to flavor his stocks for Momofuku Noodle Bar. It has a place in cuisine. It's smokiness, saltiness, and the unctuous yet crispy texture of the fat are hard to replace. But rather than add it to literally everything, it needs a reason to be there. 

I love Magic Bars. Layers of graham cracker, coconut, pecans and chocolate all bound by sweetened condensed milk make for quite the treat. But none of the recipes I browsed addressed the one flavor that was missing. Salt! I could probably have finished the bars while the chocolate cooled with some Fleur de Sel, but bacon has proven itself in previous desserts I've made. So, as one of my Superb Owl treats, I made a basic Magic Bar recipe, and added to it a pound of quality thick cut bacon, cooked until crisp and chopped finely. Cooking the pound of bacon also helped restore my bacon drippings stock, as I had tossed a lot of stuff when I moved a few months back. 

The resulting bar is pretty much on point. I could tweak it some more, possibly replacing the graham crust with almond meal for a different texture and taste, but they are very rich and I don't think I can on good conscience make it too often. 

This new year brought a lot of lists discussing what's Hot for 2016 in the food world. Stop it. Let's not find the new Kale, or the new Bacon. Let's enjoy new foods, and not ruin it for ourselves. Too much of anything is not just bad for health, but bad taste.

Corndawgs!

Took a break from all the Asian-inspired grub I've been having recently, as well as a break from all the well-balanced meals I make during the workweek. 

Corn dogs are pretty perfect, no? They check off a lot of boxes; Fried, Sweet, Salty, On a Stick.

Using Riley's recipe from ChefSteps, I found them to be pretty straightforward. You definitely want to invest in a food scale if you don't have one yet. ChefSteps recipes use grams as their unit of measurement, as there is a lot of chemistry going on. Corn Dogs are one of their more simple recipes but as you go up in difficulty, the measurement accuracy becomes very very important. 

Anyhooose. 

I made mine buckwheat, but with a beefy interior. When the batter got too low to dip regular hotdogs I cut them down and made corn dog bites. Then when I was out of hot dogs, I saved the batter for Sunday morning pancakes! Yum!

I'm certainly adding these to my regular fried repertoire. 

Ssämday

I find when I cook asian dishes, I can never make just one, and I usually go on a spree. So here we are, another weekend of cooking from Lucky Peach! Once again, from Peter Meehan's "101 Easy Asian Recipes" I made the Red Roast Pork. Then I did a small Bo Ssäm spread a la David Chang's Momofuku. 

The pork was marinated in a mix of Chinese 5 Spice, Hoisin Sauce, Soy Sauce and Honey. Then it was cooked in my oft used dutch oven for the afternoon at low heat. 

Sides and sauces for the spread included David Chang's Scallion & Ginger sauce, Ssäm sauce, some very bubbly kimchi from Vermont, cucumbers and butter lettuce. 

Hopefully I'm not jinxing myself by saying this but I think I'm going to make Char Siu Bao with the leftover pork.

Unphogettabowl

To start the new year, and this blog correctly, I made Pho. The winter weather has finally arrived, and there's nothing better than a hot bowl of something. The recipe comes courtesy of Lucky Peach from  their "101 Easy Asian Recipes" book I got from my sister.

I'm not one for substitutions in recipes I'm not familiar with, but I did use neck bones instead of short ribs. They were much cheaper, and I know other Pho recipes use them. It's a slow-cooker recipe, but my Crockpot is too small, so I used my dutch oven and set the oven to 250F. 

Then we couldn't find our sriracha, so we made do with Ssam sauce. I would definitely do this recipe again. I'm probably going to low-carb it for lunch by substituting the rice noodles with shredded cabbage, or more bean sprouts.