Panini Press Quesadillas

When we bought our panini press we also picked up a small book called "Panini" from Williams-Sonoma. I've gotten a few good ideas out of it so far. Usually what will end up happening though is that i'll tweak whatever recipe I decide on so that it fits more closely with what we like to eat and what I did and didn't forget to get at the grocery store.

We eat a fair amount of chicken around here and finding new ways to use it is somewhat of a challenge. Karen and I both enjoy quesadillas, however, so I decided I'd give the recipe a shot as well as making a easy and delicious fresh tomato salsa to go along with it. Plus, it gave me a chance to play with the new Le Creuset grill pan I got from work.

Fits over one burner, pretty convenient.

Firstly, I seasoned the chicken breasts with a chili lime spice rub mixture. I could do with this particular spice rub being a bit hotter, but I like the flavor otherwise. This recipe would certainly work with a simple salt and pepper seasoning,or any taco or fajita seasoning you like. After the grill pan heated up I placed the chicken breasts on and smiled with relief that they barely fit.

I was a little nervous. Didn't know if there would be room for all three.

While the chicken was cooking, I began chopping away on all the vegetation that would be required for my salsa. There's no real recipe to it. I usually just chop up one to two medium tomatoes, 3-5 green onions, using the white and the green part after trimming the ends, 1-2 jalapeños, and approximately half of a white onion. When I'm making salsa for my family's events I will often add roasted red bell peppers. After that, some lime juice and salt to finish off. Sadly with this batch I got a little carried away with the lime juice. Oh well, it was still good.

The last little bit of prep to do was grating some nice Jack cheese to go inside the tortillas. Luckily for me I had a lovely assistant to capture action shots of the grating in progress. Exactly what this blog needed. Action. And shots?

ACTION!

The assembly was sort of unique, as the recipe called for you to spread a sour cream and green onion mixture on the tortillas along with the chicken and cheese. In the future i will most likely skip this part and opt to have any sour cream involvement be strictly limited to the outside of the quesadilla device. After a nice sear in the panini press to get those pretty grill lines, I did some quality control and it was so good I forgot to take a picture of the finished product until half-way through. Oops!

The finished product. Half of it, anyways.

I really enjoyed this meal and, even though tweaks were made and further tweaks likely required, will probably do it again. Maybe even with steak!

Super neat tip if you don't have a panini press: Get a clean new brick, wrap it in several layers of aluminum foil like you were wrapping a present, brush with melted butter. Prepare your sandwich or other device to be squished, place said device in a fry pan, heat, and apply brick. Cook until brown on one side, then flip and cook on other side. Easy machine-less pressed sandwiches!

Next week: What happens when Rob finds out that Whole Foods is only a mile away from work? Burgers, apparently.

-R

Pops and Pawns

The regularly scheduled post will be up tomorrow but I wanted to make a tiny post to share one of my favorite things about moving back to the north oklahoma city area. Pops.

Pops is a gas station/soda shop/diner/route 66 landmark. It's located in a town called Arcadia. Awesome town name, for one, and an even more awesome giant soda bottle shaped neon sign out front. I've never eaten at the diner, though it is usually busy when we go. This most recent trip it was busier than most, due to some sort of motorcycle show occuring out front.

The big attraction to me is the wide selection of different "pops" they carry in the soda shop portion. Pops carries everything from bizarre novelty flavors like bacon and candy cane, to the slightly out of the ordinary strawberry, grape, peach, and other fruits, to the more standard cola, root beer, and cream soda. There are generally several different brands of each variety to try, and it's hard for me to leave with only one 6-pack of bottles.

The one i'm most excited about is the Leninade.

It's definitely worth making the trip at least once if you live anywhere close. If you are anything like me with regards to trying new and interesting sodas you'll be back multiple times.

-R

Sort of kind of toffee. Maybe.

I've started to take goodies almost every week we go over for games, and last week I got it into my head to once again do battle with my ancient nemesis: Sugar cookery. I have a long list of failures cooking sugar behind me. With that in mind, I resolved to try again even if it would mean having to clean up a big pot of black sugar once more.

At least to me, one of the most straightforward things to do with cooked sugar is make butter toffee. You basically take a lot of butter and some sugar, pour it in a pot, cook it to the appropriate temperature, then spread it on a silicone mat and let it cool and harden. Do not let this seemingly easy chain of events fool you, however. Sugar seemingly gets very angry when cooked, and will fight back at every turn.

This is what a pound of melted butter looks like. Mmmmm.

A word about safety; Hot sugar is no joke. Especially as it gets up to the several hundred degrees required to form hard candies like brittle and toffee. If you happen to somehow drip some on yourself, or it bubbles out of the pot for some reason, your first instinct will likely be to put whatever body part now has boiling hot sugar syrup on it into your mouth. Resist this instinct fiercely if it occurs. This is a lot easier if you have remembered to set up a bowl of ice water beforehand. When you plunge even boiling sugar into ice water, it will harden almost instantly, turning it from sticky painful burning into minor swearing and a lump of sugar you can casually pull off.

Seriously. This will be your buddy.

Back to the task at hand. The one major failure I had in my series of events was using too high of a heat. Remember how I said sugar likes to fight you? Give it any excuse and you'll start smelling the horrible smell of very burnt sugar. Since I was using too high of a flame, my butter and sugar didn't get quite to the temperature called for in the recipe before the bottom began to burn. I evacuated the contents onto my waiting silicon mat and was punished for my hubris by only a thin black layer on the pot. Small payment for the goodies to come. Work quickly to spread it out after evacuation, as it will begin to set up as soon as it's off the fire. I used a long metal offset spatula.

The darker swirls are evidence of my punishment.

After it sets up you can either leave it as is, which is totally acceptable if you are only after the sweet buttery goodness, or you can melt some chocolate and pour it over your toffee and let that set up as well before breaking it into shards the size of your choosing. Often the shards will be of the toffee's choosing. Even after being thoroughly cooked, the sugar still has some fight left.

Reminds me of something I saw in an art gallery once.

If you are feeling adventurous you can choose to add nuts, candy bits, salt, spices, or other goodies to the melted chocolate before allowing it to harden. Traumatized as I was by the near disaster, I preferred the chocolate plain.

Next time: Panini Quesadillas with Fresh Tomato Salsa

Recipe used was from the Pioneer Woman website and can be found here: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/12/lias-butter-toffee/

This post is a real Pita.

Even though the majority of my food TV viewing these days is in the form of Amazon Prime or Netflix I still manage to keep up a bit at least with some of my favorite chefs. Anne Burrell in particular is fantastically entertaining. The fact that she is rather talented is a nice bonus. When I saw that she was doing a whole wheat pita bread recipe it awakened in me a craving I had not previously known that I had.

The dry goods. I really need to come up with other things to use that whole wheat flour in. Not pictured: wet goods

I decided that I would have to take a stab at this magical food containment device called the pita bread. I am still not entirely sure how it works even after making it. Something about gluten and air and yeasts burping their little gases all over the place i'm sure. Some fun in-progress shots are below. I didn't quite get as many pictures of anything but the dough as I should have. The dough was completely captivating.

After the dough rose for about an hour, I portioned it out into 8 approximately equal pieces and rolled it out to what I believed to be an appropriate size. I'm pretty doubtful that they were the size called for in the recipe. Often when i'm rolling out dough i'll just stop when I decide i'm finished. The results are nearly always tasty!

Eight "equal" pieces. What?

They were super quick to cook once they rested the second time. I was pretty surprised at the amount of browning they took on in just the 6 minutes they were in the oven. They were pretty good though. Not overly wheaty from the whole wheat flour but there was a definite flavor hit from not using only all-purpose. The cayenne was a pleasant addition as well.

I had already decided that the protein for these lovely breads would be chicken, but I didn't do anything specifically fancy except for grill it with a bit of salt and pepper. I did end up making a quick and very easy yogurt sauce though, just yogurt and garlic with a bit of lemon juice. For some freshness and a bit of heat I very roughly chopped up some tomato and red onion. For as simple as it was, I really enjoyed this as a meal, and will definitely be doing it again.

Pita bread recipe from : http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/anne-burrell/lamb-burgers-recipe/index.html

Labor Day!

I decided that I needed to get a post out about what we did over labor day while the memory was still fresh. Teasing about upcoming posts is just a bonus.

Over labor day we went up to my mother's lake house on the lake of the Ozarks. This house was owned by my grandparents before her and it's a place I've been going to since i was a small child. I'm happy to have had the chance to share it with not only her but also her mother and brother.

We headed up to Tulsa on Friday evening, spent the night, and then left for Missouri the day after. It's a 5 hour drive to get there plus a bit of time stopped for groceries and gas and such along the way. We arrived in the late afternoon to the humid heat characteristic of places near water and set about cooling down the house from sitting unused with the thermostat up since the last visit my mom had made several weeks earlier.

After all the unpacking finished it was time to prepare dinner. We made a pretty typical labor day weekend menu of hamburgers and sausages with corn on the cob. It was rather enjoyable. The next few days followed a simple pattern of waking up whenever we felt like it, playing games, cooking, some light baking, and enjoying the company.

As usual, Karen cleaned up at Ticket to Ride, winning every game we played. There was also a very tense game of Forbidden Island that we somehow managed to win with 6 or 7 of the initial locations remaining. One or two games of munchkin were played as well, being one of our favorites.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, though Karen's brother experienced an acute lack of internet, given that the remoteness of the lake house prevented stable cellular connection. Personally I have grown to enjoy that fact much more than i would have in earlier years. I imagine the prevalence of handheld video games to fill evening board game gaps has something to do with it though.

I doubt we'll get back up there again this year for much more than cleaning, winterizing, and storing the boat. Those tasks are a small price to pay for all the enjoyment we get out of vacationing up there. The only downside at all is that i constantly want to invite all of my lovely internet friends to join me but they are too scattered to make that a viable reality. Perhaps at some point I will be able to organize a grand gathering. Until then, I'll just have to enjoy it with family.

-R

Caprese Pasta Salad!

My wife enjoys pointing out and mocking a time in my life when i claimed to not be picky about food. This was, and remains to be, a huge lie. I have been getting much better though as evidenced by the recent realization that i don't actually hate balsamic vinegar or basil.

After a tasty appetizer-ized (totally a word) caprese salad on tiny toasts made by some friends of ours I decided to combine my love of pasta salad with my new not-hatred of balsamic and basil to create a caprese pasta salad. I think it turned out wonderfully. Do enjoy these pictures.

Here we see what those in the cooking industry, or those in the 'went to culinary school and now just watch a lot of food network' industry, might call mise-en-place. This is a fancy french term for 'get all your stuff together before you start.' The tiny mozzarella balls were surprisingly hard to find until I broke down and went to whole foods. Lesson learned.

I absolutely love bowtie pasta. I think in future pasta salads I will return to rotini or something similar, but bowties always make the food look that much more interesting to me. You'll never take my tiny little neckwear inspired pasta! Never!

A quick halving of the tiny mozzarella balls and similarly tiny tomatoes, and I mixed them with some chopped fresh basil. My only complaint with fresh herbs is that I can never seem to use them all up before some blight or disease or rot claims them. Guess that's an indictment of me, though. Robert Steele, Herb Murderer.

I think I went to highschool with Herb Murderer......

The finished product! I tossed together a balsamic vinaigrette with the oil and vinegar plus dijon mustard, a bit of garlic, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Lightly dressed, the tiny ties are ready for their closeup. As we enjoyed, I noticed that occasionally the halved tomatoes and mozzarella balls would sometimes stick back together and form an almost perfect sphere. Those were the best bites.

Aside from having to run all over town to acquire the cheese, this was a relatively quick and easy meal to put together. We had a decent amount left over for cold midnight snacking and my wife and I both agreed that we would definitely be doing this one again.

-R

Totally a Reasonable Amount of Time Between Posts.

Quite a few things have happened since we last spoke, fair blog reader. Chief among them is that my lovely wife finally got a job after months of searching! Yay! The villagers rejoiced, and so on.

Offer in hand, we packed up and moved down to beautiful scenic Oklahoma City to start our new lives. Hers as an engineer intern, and mine as a part time kitchen-goods salesman and most-times house-husband, chef, baker, and cleaning crew.

We're slowly rebuilding our boardgame crew, as well as venturing into new and exciting culinary territory. With any luck, there should be one new post a week from now on.

All that having been said and out of the way, let's return to our regularly scheduled program.

-R