Kennyz wrote:I've got two 4-pound bone-in pork shoulders which I browned and are now braising in sierra nevada pale ale, brown stock, cinnamon sticks, cumin, bay leaves, and a mix of onions, garlic, and serrano peppers that I sweated in chorizo fat. When the meat's done in a few hours I plan to shred it, add it back into the liquid along with the chorizo I cooked earlier to render the fat, and mix in a puree of tomatillos and roasted poblanos. That ought to keep me (and an army of people, should they choose to descend upon my condo) warm for the weekend.

The above dish is about to be entered into a "chili cookoff" being hosted by a friend in about an hour. The dish was executed as I had planned, except (A) I did not puree the roasted poblanos and instead rough chopped them before adding to the "chili"; and, (B) I added some reconstituted, pureed ancho peppers along with a bit of the soaking liquid. I'll report back about the outcome of the contest, but I must say that I'm pretty sure this'll be a contender. The pork came out beautifully tender and moist after about 4.5 hours, and shredded perfectly. The cinnamon-cumin scent, faint heat, and rich pork flavor should be crowd pleasers. We'll see.

Pn my way home from the dentist yesterday, I stopped by Hungry Hill Sausage Co. and picked up several pounds of their wonderful fennel sausage. Yesterday afternoon I put together a large batch of stuffed shells and threw them in the oven with the sausage in a separate roasting pan. Dinner last night was perfect for the cold weather, and I have more than enough leftovers for another meal.

Today the husband and I ran to Costco in the morning and he grabbed a beef roast and threw it in the cart. It is now roasting in the oven with some carrots and I have potatoes simmering on the stove. Mashed potatoes, carrots and roast beef for dinner tonight. I have some tortellini salad verde that I picked up at Hungry Hill for my younger daughter.

I still have several pounds of ground chuck in the fridge. Tomorrow night we will have chili mac. We will then rotate our leftovers for dinner for a couple of nights and I won't have to do more than heat up and add some vegetables.

I never got around to the soup I planned to make, but we have so much sausage left over, I might soak some beans tonight and put them together with some root vegetables, herbs and some of the sausage for yet another meal.

Suzy

Final count for my weekend:

Beef Vegetable Soup
12 pound ham ( I used the Alton Brown recipe with the gingersnaps)
Potato Salad
Layer Salad
Corn Pudding (from the Salvation Army recipe here, and my family loved it!)
Chocolate Chip Cookies

I'll have enough left over ham to put it into a Navy Bean soup later this week, and a nice ham bone to use for split pea soup.

Liz, YES! We are excited here too. This kind of weather is a great reason to turn on the oven and cook and bake all day. Great idea for a discussion thread.

Stevez, did you grill your brisket? Did you lose any toes or fingertips?

Sassafrass, did you make your lamb shanks with lentils? We had two big fat beautiful shanks in the freezer from Schmeisser’s meat market (an egg in the photo for size reference). These were not cheap, nearly $10 each, but very very meaty.



Browned in a large skillet, doesn’t that one bone look like an eye? It looks like some kind of ugly sea eel or something in the photo. But boy did it smell lovely.



Transferred into crockpot. We needed to run a few errands, otherwise I would have done these on stovetop or in the oven. The butcher had cracked the bones halfway. Not sure why they do this. To allow the marrow to get out? In any case, it was easy to cut them the rest of the way so that they fit well in the bottom of the crockpot.



Sauté carrots, onions, celery. The recipe I use does not call for garlic but, please, could you imagine making this without garlic? I usually throw in about five to eight cloves.



Add one 15 oz. can of diced tomatoes and juice, maybe a cup of red wine. Cook down until it reduces a bit.



Pour over shanks in crockpot and cook for 3 hours on high. Or return shanks to skillet and cook covered on stovetop for 2 hours. I thickened the crockpot sauce/juices with a bit of cornstarch slurry. The lid of the crockpot was pulling condensation out of the air and sort of diluted the juices. This does not happen as much on the stovetop.

Can you believe that I did not take a photo of the finished product! Usually I serve this on white beans or mashed potatoes. This time I used up a tube of readymade polenta, sautéed in olive oil in a cast iron skillet. The shanks were fall-apart tender.

Thanks for the inspiration, you LTHrs! --Joy

Schmeissers Home Made Sausage
Niles, IL 60714
847-967-8995

My weekend turned out to be just fine. I started Saturday with the Cook's Illustrated French Onion Soup recipe.

This:


After about 2 3/4 hours in the oven and another hour on top of the stove tunned into this:


From this brown delicious mess of onions, I completed a stock and, topped with some baguettes from Bennison's Bakery and some Reserve Gruyère from Whole Foods, had some lovely bowls of French Onion Soup for my neighbor and ourselves.

Sunday morning just before sunrise when the temperature was still -8, I started my brisket.

Brisket Ready to Go


Around 6.5 hours into the cook, the WSM was still holding a steady temp of 285.

Brisket Half Way There


3 - 4 hours later, the brisket was done. I was very surprised at how well the WSM held temp in this cold whether. The use of a sand pan rather than the usual water pan was important to get this cook done on time. While I really didn't plan on being outside yesterday, it turned out to not be so bad.

Brisket Ready for Carving

I think I have finally figured out how to post my pictures from my big cooking weekend. Here are breakfast strata:[IMG]

Beef stock:

Hungarian goulash:

I forgot to take a picture of the plated food. When I defrost what I have left I will take one & post it.

Well, here we are in another frigid weekend!

Today's kitchen efforts are producing:

Golabki (stuffed cabbage rolls)

Curried chicken salad with apples & green onions

Pork roast served with potato pancakes & red cabbage with apples (apples were on sale) This will be today's dinner. The others are weekday dinners & lunches.

Chicken stock (from the carcass of the roasted chicken used for the salad) which I will then turn into

Cream of tomato soup.

Asparagus, yukon gold potatoes, red peppers & onions - roasted in the oven with garlic cloves, olive oil & pepper. (Any tips for how to avoid this from becoming a dried out mess are appreciated. I never roasted asparagus before. Should I tent it with aluminum at first, you think?)
I'll have this to serve alongside a slab of prime rib that I plan on grilling midweek.


Isn't it funny how you can make so many different dishes all at the same time & have basically the same size mess to clean up as if you had only cooked one thing? Saves on a lot of clean up time.

What are you making??

spaghetti and meatballs.

Homemade sauce recipe passed down for generations, each of us tweaks a a little as we go along so mine tastes a little different from my mom's, whose sauce in turn tastes a little different from my grandmas.

Homemade meatballs. Part beef, part pork part veal.

Sauce is simmering very very low, hubby and i are having a little afternoon glass of chianti and some tallegio with crusty italian bread. Good sunday in my book!

I was actually out running errands for the better part of my morning. So my plans for staying in on Sunday and cooking went a bit off kilter.


I did manage to make stuffed peppers, and then a pot of spenot kremleves, which is a Hungarian creamed spinach soup.

Yesterday evening I made some chocolate dipped pretzels. It's been a pretty light weekend cooking-wise at my house.

Erzsi wrote:I was actually out running errands for the better part of my morning. So my plans for staying in on Sunday and cooking went a bit off kilter.


I did manage to make stuffed peppers, and then a pot of spenot kremleves, which is a Hungarian creamed spinach soup.

Yesterday evening I made some chocolate dipped pretzels. It's been a pretty light weekend cooking-wise at my house.

Creamed spinach soup you say? Care to share the recipe? Sounds, well, spectacular.

Today I made Alton Brown's Shrimp Gumbo. I was thinking I'd make some granola just for the sake of having the oven on while I was in the kitchen, but I ended up not bothering as the roux is made in the oven. Maybe I'm the only one who didn't get the memo on this, but I'm a changed woman and I'll never stand over the stove stirring roux again. You just mix the oil and flour, put it in cast iron and bake! Stir a couple times. It turned out great and was just the right thing after being out today.

I had a pound of mushrooms in the fridge that didn't make into last weekend's beef stew, so I whipped up a cream of mushroom soup. It was a perfect answer to the bitter cold outside (and so easy to make!)

Guess when it gets super cold I get on a Mexican kick, as that is what we made yesterday. Had a bone in pork butt vac sealed in freezer that I decided to turn into burrito/taco filling. The pork was cooked in a 4 hour braise with onion/paprika/chipotles/tomato/cider vinegar, and turned out really well.

This was served with homemade mexican rice and jalapeno/cheddar cornbread with some chocolate/peanut butter brownies as dessert. Was a great day to have 2 fireplaces going, as well as the oven for 6+ hours

Jamie

I have an easy cream of spinach soup recipe:

1 package chopped spinach (frozen) thawed
finely diced onion
butter
2 cans Carnation evaporated milk

Saute the onions in butter, add the spinach, after about 10 minutes add the canned milk & heat til warm.

That's it!

You can do the same thing with sliced mushrooms instead of the spinach. Or you can add both, that's very good too.

Cooked alot this weekend after we returned from Chuck-E-Cheese with our daughter Saturday afternoon.

Saturday dinner:

Braised 2 different varieties of pork butt. On in a beer, bbq sauce and vinegar mixture, and the other in beer, chili paste, sriachi, honey, vinegar, & ketchup mixture. After 3 hours they were both easily shredded with a fork.

The pork butt in the bbq mixture became the filling for egg rolls, and the hotter mixture became a pulled pork sandwich.

I also deep fried a few dozen chicken wings.

Sunday:

Lunch was easy, a sandwich heaped with corned beef, and swiss, and a can of bean with bacon soup.

For dinner we had crab fettucini alfredo, and a nice green salad.

Tonight is the leftover pork, I am combining the two batches, and having a pulled pork sandwich topped with coleslaw

How do you make the eggrolls? That sounds really good.

Liz in Norwood Park wrote:How do you make the eggrolls? That sounds really good.

got the idea from a recipie that Guy character on Food Network had on:

braised the pork butt, and shredded it. Made coleslaw, and using egg roll wrappers just stuffed them with the pork, and coleslaw. Rolled the eggrolls, and dipped the whole rolled egg roll in egg wash, and deep fried @ 350 degrees until they were brown.

Turned out really good.

bananasandwiches wrote:Creamed spinach soup you say? Care to share the recipe? Sounds, well, spectacular.

Generally when I make this I make enough to have it for just one evening, but you can enlarge your portions accordingly.

1 package of frozen chopped spinach, or, 1 package of fresh spinach
1/2 a stick of butter
1/4 C of flour
3-4 cloves of garlic minced (this is up to how much garlic you like)
2 cups+ whole milk

1 egg, optional

Cook your spinach for about 5 minutes in salted water. Drain well, wring the excess water from your spinach, and chop again, or pulse in a blender briefly.

In your pan melt your butter, add in your garlic, then add your flour, essentially making a roux, into that add your two cups of milk, and then your spinach, cook that for another 10-15 minutes minding that you don't scald your milk. The amount of milk that I add depends on who's eating it and how thick you want it to be. Add more milk if necessary if you prefer a thinner soup.

After that I dish it into bowls and serve it with a fried egg on top, sunny side up is traditional, but over easy is just as good.

As an additional note, when I make this for the family, I usually make it with fried bread, sliced polish rye, dipped in egg and milk, pan fried until crispy.