Tamale Casserole

Confession: I love casseroles! Whew! Glad that is out, now I can move on. I could eat a casserole every night and not tire of them. For someone who does not like his food to touch, and eats one thing at a time you would think that casseroles are on my "no" list, yet I just love them. I can remember as a kid watching my parents and grandparents eating family meals and being amazed with my grandparents ritual of taking the last 1/4 of each item on their plate and mixing it all together. It just did me in, every time. I know it all mixes together eventually, however I do not care to see the results of, that, mixture. It's weird. I'm weird. How about a casserole?

This is THE casserole to eat if you love tamales. The combination of subtle southwestern flavors come together with the sweet cornbread and hit every nerve in your body saying, "this is it." I've just about decided to make these casseroles in half pans and freeze one for later use. My family of four never eats a whole casserole for dinner. We can take out half of one, but the other half just sits in our fridge lonely and desperate for consumption. Served with a crisp green salad and southwestern dressing, dinner is done.

Tamale Casserole

• 1 1/4 cup shredded 4-cheese Mexican blend cheese
  
• 1/3 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
  
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon oregano
  
• 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
• 1 (14 3/4-ounce) can cream-style corn
• 1 (8.5-ounce) box corn muffin mix (I use Jiffy)
• 1 (4-ounce) can chopped green chilies, drained
• Cooking spray
• 1 (10-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (such as Old El Paso)
• 2 shredded cooked chicken breast
  
• 1/2 cup sour cream

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400°.

2. Combine 1/4 cup cheese and next 10 ingredients (through chilies) in a large bowl, stirring just until moist. Pour mixture into a 13 x 9–inch baking dish coated with cooking spray, or portion out the mixture into your baking dishes. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes or until set. While cornbread is baking: place shredded chicken in a bowl, add just enough enchilada sauce to moisten chicken, set aside.

3. When cornbread is set, remove from oven and pierce entire surface liberally with a fork; pour remaining enchilada sauce over top. Top with chicken; sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake at 400° for 15 minutes or until cheese melts. Remove from oven; let stand 5 minutes. Cut into 8 pieces; top each serving with 1 tablespoon sour cream.

Life in the fast lane

Do you find yourself busy as a beaver...a cranberry merchant at Christmas...a long tail cat in a room full of rockers? Are you sick of feeding your family through a drive through and find yourself just wishing that you could eat something that wasn't wrapped in paper? Well if you are in this boat then this recipe might just help you out. It's super simple, limited ingredients, and varied as your imagination can make it. This dish can have dinner on the table in a matter of minutes! How's that for getting your family out the door and on your way with a home cooked meal?

First the cast of characters:

1 lb. of ground beef

1 can of beef broth

1 box of Rice A Roni

1 stick of butter (you won't use all of the stick)

2 tsp. Garlic Powder (or 2 cloves crushed fresh)

2 tsp. Onion Powder (or 1 cup of chopped fresh)

Salt and Pepper

That's it, nothing more that you need to get dinner on the table lickity split!

Place your ground meat in a large skillet, into which you have poured 1 T. of olive oil and fry over medium heat until it is browned. Once you see the meat starting to brown, add your seasonings (and if using fresh veggies, those too) and continue to cook until the meat is brown. Remove from your skillet and place on a plate to rest while you get the rice a going.

Let's talk for just a minute about frying meat. There's not much in the world I hate more than wormy meat. When meat is fried unattended and cooks without being broken up, looking wormy. It's just not fun for me. One of my good friends, Ana Marquez, who lives in Fort Worth, TX share a secret that her family uses in their restaurant business, a potato masher! That's right friends, a potato masher.

Using a potato masher allows the meat to be broken up, giving you an even texture and making your meat consistently smooth and no clumpy and wormy. I, for one, like smoothly textures ground meat and not all huge clumps. Maybe you are different, but I can tell you this--use a potato masher up until the "clumpiness" you prefer and you'll want to buy me a Starbucks gift card (worth $100 please email me for the address).

Look at this picture to the left, remember we're cooking turkey so that's why it's not more brown. But you can see that there is even texture, and that there are no clumps or worms. At this point you can add your sauce, taco seasoning, or whatever. Hey freeze the stuff and have it on hand for an even quicker week night meal! I think I'm done...are you convinced that you need to mash your ground beef? I sure hope so.

Ok, back to the show. When we last left our pan, it was lonely having just said goodbye to some perfectly fried ground turkey. Place two tablespoons (use the package directions on the Rice A Roni and go by what they say) of butter in your skillet and melt it. Pour in the rice and vermicelli and brown. You'll want to let this set for 1-2 minutes before stirring because you want to get the vermicelli browned and toasty. It's very important for you to not leave your post because you can burn this quick and then you would have to unwrap your food from paper through a drive-through AND clean up the kitchen to boot. Just stand there for 3-4 minutes and stir the stuff, ok?

My personal preference for "perfect" Rice A Roni" is to have some of the vermicelli browned but not completely browned all the way through. It is probably more of a fear that I will burn it, because I have burned my fair share of Rice A Roni over the years. This picture is of what I would call perfect rice. Now, you are ready to pour in the Beef Broth (instead of the water called for on the box directions.) which I love because it increases the beefiness of this dish 100% especially if you are using ground turkey! After you pour in the beef broth, you'll add the seasoning packet and give it a quick stir, so all the powder is completely mixed in. Add the ground beef, stir, cover, and cook it according to package directions. I think it's like 25 minutes or something, covered on low. How about this shot I took of motion? On a camera phone none the less. I love to read Pioneer Woman's blog and she takes motion pictures all the time and wondered if my phone...i mean camera...would do it--viola! It does.

While this is cooking, you have time to cut up fruit and throw in a bag of Steamfresh veggies to finish off the dinner. I usually put some crescent rolls in the oven because by the time the oven heats up and the bread bakes the rice is ready and the hot fresh bread is ready. You can do salad or whatever you like with this dish.

Here it is all done. If my kids didn't do convulsions at the sight of green stuff, I'd add some fresh parsley, or some mushrooms. It's really versatile and super easy to do. Plus the bonus is one dish, one skillet, that will fit in the dishwasher.

You could use Pork Rice A Roni with Sausage, and chicken broth to mix it up. You could do ground chicken, with Chicken Rice A Roni and chicken stock. It's really up to you to decide how far to take this. This dish is one of all my kiddos favorite things to eat because they all love ground beef, rice, and having them together with nothing else to corrupt is just bonus all the way around.

I do want to let you know how awesome these steam fresh bags are. I just love them because the veggies are perfect every time with out any failures at all. We usually dump the veggies into a bowl and season with 1T of butter and Mrs. Dash or whatever we have on hand, but you could just serve these from the bag on to the plates to save time and another dirty dish.

I love this medley because it has crunchy, sweet white corn, yellow corn, carrots, and asparagus. It is really good. There are a ton of varieties and they really, really do work. You can trust me on this. Do make sure you read which side needs to be up--it matters. Also holding it where it says matters, unless you like steam burns.

How green is your bean..

We celebrated my Mom's birthday a few days ago and left the door wide open on what she wanted. She loves pork steak and chose that. Pork steak is cut from the shoulder. Growing up our pork steaks were tenderized which made them look like a huge slab of hamburger. This is not what we had. I'm not a huge fan of pork steak, but I am a huge fan of my Mom and if she wants pork steak, she gets pork steak. I would recommend a marinade for the steaks to tenderize and my favorite is a bottle of Italian dressing. That's right, just grab your favorite bottle of Italian dressing and pour it in a zip top baggie and marinate away. Everything you need for a great marinade is in there. If it can make lettuce taste good...think what it can do for meat!

This post really isn't about the pork, or the baked Yukon gold potato (which is my favorite potato-hands down), but the green beans. Let me just say that these are hands down, without a doubt the BEST green beans I have ever eaten. I have eaten my fair share of green beans and for me to say that these are the best is saying something--trust me. There is a recipe, or rather a ratio, for these babies that I have used for years. I've already told you about my favorite cookbook here so I won't bore you with the details again. The ratio for these green beans came from that cookbook and I have only altered it a little because the results are spot on.

Great Green beans

5 (14.5 oz.) cans of Cut Green beans
7 strips of Bacon, cut into pieces
1 Tablespoon of cracked black pepper
1-2 teaspoons of Kosher salt

In a 3 quart heavy bottom pot, add bacon pieces. Cook bacon over medium heat until bacon is crisp and very brown. Add the juice from each can of green beans (CAREFUL: the first blast of steam will burn!). Bring the bacon and juice to a rolling boil, add green beans and pepper, stirring to incorporate the bacon. Bring to a simmer and reduce heat to low, cover and cook for 1 hour.

If you don't have the time to cook the beans for an hour, at least make sure you bring the juice to a boil before adding the beans and let them cook as long as you can on medium.

You may doubt that this will work, but trust me it will and it's fantastic!

Ugly truth beautiful ending

I experienced a perfect storm in the kitchen recently when making my Mom's birthday cake. My Mom has always loved hot cake just out of the oven with no frosting. Once the cake has cooled she's pretty much done with it, unless it's a pound cake. My favorite pound cake to make is a Sour Cream Pound cake. What does it for me? Well, two things the first of which is the crust that develops on this cake. Secondly is the tenderness of this cake while at the same time being dense as pound cake should be. I think cake people call this a crumb, but I don't have good connotations with that word, so I'll just leave it at what I said.

It had been a while since I last made this cake and I forgot one of the issues I've had before...my bundt pan is too small for the amount of batter this cake makes. I remember reading an article in a magazine (I think it might have been Southern Living) that you could pour water into your Bundt pans to know exactly what the yield is. Normally I use my Bundt pans for cake recipes in which I start with a boxed cake, and the ones (I have six Bundt pans) I have are perfect for these recipes. As I poured the batter into my cake pan I can remember thinking, "this sure is a lot of batter for this pan." But I passed it off thinking that there wasn't that much leavening in the batter and that it wouldn't rise that much. I did have the wherewithal to put the pan on a cookie sheet. I'll pause from the story to just say two words about that one particular move, "Thank God!" Having the cake oozing out of it's vessel was unsettling enough, the real horror occurred when it came time to release it from the pan.

I hate to have cakes stick! Hate it! I can well remember my one and only brush with silicone bake ware and the completely disastrous results, never again silicon, never again. I usually have great luck with cakes not sticking because I make sure they are adequately greased and floured. I have an old tube pan which was my Mother's and turned our perfect angle food cakes all the while I grew up, but I've been afraid to use it because I just can't stand for cakes to stick. As I just said, I normally hand grease and flour all my cake pans but didn't bother with that process [what was I thinking]because I thought spraying it with non-stick spray and having it in a non-stick pan would be sufficient. What I didn't consider until it was too late is the amount of sugar compared to the amount of flour this cake has and that I would have needed to grease and flour this pan especially for this cake. The cake stuck. It clung to the pan like a preschoolers first day of school.

As you can see from the picture above there was nearly 3/4 of the cake that stuck. Did I mention that I also had the oozy cake on the sheet pan which amounted to about a cupcake size portion? NO, well there was cake everywhere. I knew I was doomed from the get go when it started to spill over. Then came the real test and I didn't hear the classic release that comes form adequately greased and floured pans. So troubling, especially since it was for my Mom's birthday.

I did persevere and I have to say that this cake is delicious! If you love pound cake make this one. You will not be sorry. I would suggest you buy this pan or separate the batter into two Bundt pans.

Sour Cream Pound Cake

• 1 1/2 cups butter, room temp
  
• 3 cups sugar
• 6 large eggs
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 (8-oz.) container sour cream
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Preparation

1. Beat butter and sugar at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy, about five minutes. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until the yolk disappears.

2. Sift together flour, salt, and baking soda. I don't usually do this, I just add the soda and salt as the butter and sugar are mixing, and then pour in the flour with the same results. Add flour to butter mixture alternately with sour cream, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat batter at low speed just until blended after each addition. Stir in extracts. Pour into a greased and floured 12-cup tube pan.

3. Bake at 325° for 1 hour and 20 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes or until a long wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack 10 minutes. Remove cake from pan, and cool completely on wire rack.

Note: You can add any citrus zest to this cake with it's accompanying extract to change the flavor of this cake. I've always wanted to try to make a chocolate pound cake with this recipe and see what happens. If it does happen, you'll be the first to know.

The crust of this cake is just wonderful, crunchy and sweet, making me wish there was a cake of just that. The beautiful part of this cake is that it really stands up to strawberries and ice cream. We opted not to have the ice cream, but the strawberries were perfect with this.

As you can see from this picture the ugly duckling turned into a beautiful swan! You can cover up a multitude of sins with fresh strawberries and ice cream! Happy Birthday, Mom! Love you.

Broccoli Salad

I can almost recount the first time I tasted a broccoli salad, knowing the first bite that this would be in my life until I died.  It's the same way I felt when I tasted cornbread salad for the first time.  There are just times when you take a first bite and know that this dish must stay with you forever.  I'm not a fan of lettuce salads but find I like more side salad dishes, broccoli salad being among my top favorites.

This salad has my spin on the original recipe, among the most notable is the use of broccoli slaw instead of fresh broccoli crowns.  If you haven't had broccoli slaw, give it a try because it's so good.  When we make lettuce salads for dinner parties we like to add broccoli slaw because it's so good for flavor enhancement. This salad does need to spend the night in your refrigerator to maximize the flavor, but doesn't have to if you are in a pinch.  Save a bowl of it though and eat it the next day just to see how much better it

 is.

Broccoli Salad

2 (3 ounce) packages Beef-flavored ramen nood

les

2 (12 ounce) packages Broccoli Slaw mix

1 cup toasted Almond slivers

1 cup toasted sunflower kernels

1 cup Craisins

1 cup sliced green onions (about 1/2 bunch)

1/2 cup sugar

3/4 cup Canola Oil

1/3 cup Red Wine Vinegar

1 tsp Salt

2 tsp black pepper

Squeeze the packages of noodles until crumbled.  Open package and remove flavor packets, set noodles aside.  In a small bowl add flavor packets, sugar, oil, and vinegar with salt and pepper. Whisk until thick and combined.  Set aside.

In a large bowl add slaw mix, seeds, nuts, onion, and craisins tossing until combined.  Pour over dressing and mix to combine.  In your serving bowl, add the noodles, evenly.  Carefully pour the slaw mix over the noodles, cover with plastic wrap and put in fridge until next day.  Before serving, toss to combine the noodles.  Add some fresh chopped green onions and serve.  I think this would be really good with bacon added to it.  What doesn't bacon taste good with?

Cobbler

I love desserts! Whew! I said it, now I feel much better. I have inherited a sweet tooth from both sides of my family. I can't tell you how many times I saw my Granny eat a spoonful of sugar, "just for something sweet" as she worked in the kitchen. I haven't resorted to just ingesting sugar, but I think the day will come.

Cakey type desserts are among my favorite things to eat. I especially love cobblers. Growing up I remember loving warm cobbler with ice cream. I was perfectly happy fishing around for the crust, juice, and ice cream--everyone else could have the fruit. My Mom used to make cobblers for my Dad's lunches and my sister and I used to dig out the bottom crust because it was just too good to pass up. Blackberry cobbler is probably my favorite one hands down.

This recipe is for a different type of cobbler than that which I grew up eating. It doesn't have a rolled crust, but rather a batter into which you put fresh or frozen berries. I love this cobbler and the sweet spongy, cake that enrobes the berries. This recipe will deal with blackberries, but you could just as easily put blueberries, raspberries, peaches, you name it into this cobbler with great results.

Don't forget the ice cream!

1 cup Milk
1/2 cup melted butter
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 generous cups blackberries (or your favorite fruit)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 2 quart baking dish with cooking spray, set aside. In a large bowl, add melted butter, sugar, flour, and next three ingredients stirring well. Pour in milk and whisk until smooth. Pour batter into greased dish, distribute fruit evenly among the batter. Bake for one hour, ten minutes before the cobbler is done, lightly sprinkle the top with sugar.

Panini

Do you like panini sandwiches? I do. However, I do not own a panini maker. I have this philosophy that I don't own things that can't be used for more than one purpose, it has to serve at least a dual purpose. We received a Belgian waffle maker for our wedding, 12+ years ago, and have used it sporadically over the years, but only for...waffles. Yesterday I was craving a panini and since I had planned to stay planted at the house and not leave, I knew I was stuck to finding something else. Finding something else when you taste buds are screaming for one thing is no fun. That's when the thought hit me~~I have a waffle iron hmmm... Fundamentally the machines are the same, with just a few adjustments. Not enough to make owning a panini maker I assure you.

I broke the waffle iron out, then set up the station. Light bread, buttered on one side, ham, cheese, hot waffle iron. How bad can that be? It wasn't. I enjoyed a ham and cheese panini-at home!! The design was a little different, my brain was seeing a "waffle" but ate a panini. Kendra had taken Titus to karate and to get his hair cut while this whole experiment was going on. She came home right as the panini was finished.
"Try this?"
"You made a grilled cheese with our waffle iron?"
"It's a panini? try it."
"That's delicious, I want one."
That's high praise, let me tell you. Titus enjoyed one too. We have a new use for our seemingly single use machine.

Just a few tricks. First, don't press the waffle iron down and shut the clasp. There is quite a bit of steam that escapes and the cheese will squeeze out of the sandwich, it's much better on the inside. Second, spray the iron with non-stick. Even though I did butter the bread I had one stick, just a bit. Third, sandwich the cheese between the ham slices, two slices of cheese was just a little too much.

I'm planning to play around with this new direction for my waffle iron. Oh yeah, I have a Belgian waffle iron, perfect for two slices of wonder bread.

If you try it, let me know what you think.