T-Bone Nostalgia

Autumn is here.  I’ve found that fall is my favorite time to make food, because so many of the things I really like to make fit better into an autumn cuisine.  I decided to kick off fall with a good steak.  T-bone steaks were on sale, so that was a good start.  I’ve always thought that T-bones and Porterhouses were the same thing, except that T-bones were served at truck stops and Porterhouses were served in fine dining establishments.  Turns out, there is actually a difference.  They’re more or less the same cut, but just from different sides of Bessy, so that the T-bone has a smaller filet section than the Porterhouse. 

Beverage(s): Rye Bourbon Manhattan and Mad Dog Spanish Red Blend

Appeitzer: Scampi-stuffed tomatoes

Main Course: Porterhouse au poivre with Dijon portobellos

Sides: Rosemary Potatoes Romanoff and asparagus with espresso-almond butter

Rye is the grain that is primarily responsible for 2 of the greatest consumable delicacies: the perfect manhattan and an authentic reuben sandwich.  One is named for a booming metropolitan island and the other for a son of Abraham – neither have anything to do with rye.  The rye Manhattan is becoming popular again because of Mad Men – a positive, unforeseen consequence of the hit.  Just for the record, Breaking Bad is a better drama than Mad Men, all things considered.  However, popularizing crystal meth is not as cool as bringing back the Manhattan. 

I know that a dry cabernet is the wine that goes best with steaks, but I didn’t really feel like paying more than $10 for a bottle.  I really try not to buy cabs less than 3 years old.  I’m not trying to be elitist, it’s just that cabs are such a big grape, that they need a few years to mellow.  You don’t have to spend $50 for a good one,  you just have to look a little harder.  The thing about Spanish wine is that they pretty much all go well with food, in fact, they go better with food.  It’s also very rare that I get a Spanish wine I dislike, so this was a pretty easy choice.

I’m pretty excited about the stuffed tomatoes.  (You can spot the filling in the picture to the right of the wine bottle.)  I wanted to make a surf n’ turf meal, and I had some shrimp in the freezer.  I was just going to chop up the shrimp and cook it scampi style, but then I realized I could make it look like shrimp cocktail, so it would be very confusing for me when it came time to eat. This is essentially a mix of bruschetta and shrimp scampi.  The mixture consists of shrimp pieces topped with a little bit of parmesan cheese before baking. 

Potatoes Romanoff has a special place in my heart.  You can trace back my enjoyment and adventure-focused cooking to my first ever episode of potatoes Romanoff.  My mom used to cater dinners for our church all the time when I was growing up.  Being too young to drive and too chubby to run long distances, I became my mom’s assistant in the kitchen.  I was probably 10 or 11 and I helped my mom make this potatoes Romanoff recipe for 300 people.  Right as I got done spreading out ungodly amounts of potatoes smothered in sour cream, onions, and cheese I realized I had never had this for dinner before.  I inquired of my mom when she had made this before, because why would you make something for 300 people that you’re planning on spending eternity in heaven with when you haven’t made it for 3 people.  My mom told me she had never made it before, but how could potatoes in sour cream and cheese ever be bad.  Truer words have never been spoken – in fact, my mother found them in the Gospel of Mark.  I decided to stay true to my myth of potatoes Romanoff and change it up a bit.  I forgot to get sour cream, so I turned to the staple of Greek yogurt and added goat cheese and rosemary.  How could it be bad?  It wasn’t. 

The asparagus was a successful combination of several failed attempts.  Almonds were cheap, so we bought a good handful and I roasted them in my toaster oven.  I have this handheld food processor that I was going to use to make almond butter, but a part came loose, so it wasn’t working.  Enter the coffee grinder.  It was free of ground coffee, but I thought, why not add a little ground espresso to spice things up.  In hindsight, I would use a shot of espresso, because almond butter can use a little liquid to make it better to spread.  So the asparagus doesn’t look too pretty, but it was tasty (and I think it sounds cool). 

I borrowed an idea from my serving days for the steak.  My former restaurant, Max & Erma’s, had a filet they served on top of grilled portabello mushrooms with a Dijon butter sauce.  I thought I would combine the mushrooms and Dijon.  I mixed some butter and mustard with spices and then had Emily spread it over the portobella slices.  I put in some capers as well to add some green and start thinning out the refrigerator for the move.  I sautéed them until cooked and my steak topping was done.  They were good, but I would like something a little bit saucier to go on top of the steak. 

Au poivre is just the fancy French way of saying “obscene amounts of pepper.”  I think Williams & Sonoma sells an au poivre spread for like $15.  That’s the best part of being rich – you get to waste money and be stupid.  I’ve found that grilling a steak is not always the absolute best way to cook steak.  With a thick steak on a bone, cooking it in a cast iron skillet has worked really well. 

You sear the outside (about 2 minutes on each side) and then throw the whole thing in the oven for a few minutes.  It’s like Julia Childs meets Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

Southern Quarter-Centennial Birthday

Emily celebrated her 25^th birthday at the beginning of September.  I like to break out all the stops for a birthday meal for her.  Last year I made “birthday pasta,” which is still her favorite.  How hard is it to fill a bowl with made-from-scratch pasta and pounds of fresh seafood and it not be good?  This year I decided to go a little different route.  I’m somewhat skeptical of any fresh seafood we can get in a landlocked desert state bordering on Mexico.  I wanted to tackle some official southern cuisine.  I lived in South Carolina, worked at a southern seafood restaurant, and I know who Paula Dean is.  In hindsight I found this to be a pretty rad decision as it was the highlight of Emily’s birthday.  This may seem to be an egotistical statement, but my competition was a 17.5 hour journey across the country, a missed dinner reservation, not 1 but 2 stops at Waffle House (within 3 hours of each other), failure to see most of her hometown, and a trip to an auto mechanic.  It’s the type of game I like to play. 

The difficulty with my chosen assignment is that making southern food delicious and good for you is kind of like rooting for the Yankees and the Red Sox.  It’s not possible, and if you think it is, you don’t know anything about baseball or different philosophical principles of life.  Most of the reason for this is that after the Civil War was won (by the north for my southern readers), despite the governments best intentions of reconstruction, they did not allow public health research or information south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Thus, southerners have only discovered that items such as butter, tobacco, and heavy cream are not good for you only 10-15 years ago.  I do not have the experience to handle such a difficult situation at this point, so I did what I could, but focused more on making things authentically.

I have another pet peeve to share this week.  I hate pansy waiters.  Emily and I had happy hour at a wine bar with some friends from work.  It was good times and great conversation.  At the end we asked our waiter to split our checks.  He was immediately confused, because it’s “very difficult” to figure out what 4 people ate and ordered.  He then offered up his advice that next time, we should let him know ahead of time if we want separate checks.  Was he telling us how to go out to eat?  How about you be average at your job before you whine about having to do something that might take more than 30 seconds of your life.  Please.  Take your sophistication and put it in your man-apron pocket. 

Salad: Spring greens with candied almonds and “Sexy” dressing

Meal: Blackened Alaskan Cod with Charleston sauce, collards, and jalapeno cheese grits

I made a dinner for some friends of ours the night before this, but I failed to take pictures, which is unfortunate, because I was really, really happy with the entire turnout.  I made this salad the night before and got such reviews from my 4 star reviewer, that I made it again the next night and took pictures.  The salad had greens, cherry tomatoes, the almonds, red onion, figs, and gorgonzola cheese.  The dressing is what I like the best.  One our friends who came out for dinner the night before primarily drinks champagne.  I wanted to incorporate champagne into the meal in somewhat, so I decided to use champagne in the salad dressing.  Then I got the idea to use strawberries in the dressing, so it was a combo of sexy staples, strawberries and champagne.  I thought about crumbling up some dark chocolate into the salad, but was afraid with all those romantic elements, things would have gotten really weird during dinner with our friends.  I didn’t think those 2 would go together perfectly without a 3^rd element, so I used some mint to even it out. 

I’m going to throw this idea into my overall repertoire to use at later times too.  It turned out really well. 

The collards took the most time to prepare, because you have to boil the ham hocks for a while to get the right juice to cook the collards in and the collards need to cook for a long time to be tender. 

Collards were originally used to fan white women in the southern heat until they found out that if you rip them, boil them in delicious flavors for hours, they’re good to eat.  This was my first opportunity to cook with ham hocks.  Hocks are not necessarily the most appealing part of a pig.  I’m actually not sure which part it is, and I don’t think I want to know, but they do make delicious collards.  After a few hours of boiling the hocks, it was time to rip up and add the collards. 

Steinamite Hockeyes

If you recall my earlier comment about not really trying to make anything healthy, I have now turned the corner and used my cooking this meal as an excuse to make things as delicious and horrible for you as possible.  Why not just blacken fish in butter, when you can do the same thing with blackened shrimp and andouille sausage?  And I didn’t want to throw out the heavy cream I bought for dinner the night before, so I might as well use that too. 

The result was Charleston sauce – something we had at my old restaurant.  I assumed that this was a southern specialty served at all fine dining establishments.  Then as I went to other establishments, I found that no one had ever heard of Charleston sauce…ever.  I’m now bringing this cuisine to Pima County.  It’s essentially shellfish, garlic, wine, and cream sauce.  I had a few tips of salmon from the night before, so I put those in too to give a little more flavor. 

The grits were an interesting phenomenon.  Emily told me to make sure I add them in slowly and stir so that they don’t turn into a large matzah ball clump and are ruined.  I did as she told me to and that was fine.  The problem was that for some reason in my mind, I assumed the grits naturally turned into rice and should be cooked the exact same way.  This was incorrect.  After waiting patiently, I wanted to know why my grits essentially looked like a milkshake.  A quick stir revealed the 5 inches of thick grits at the bottom of the pan.  Fortunately, only ¾ inch was burned an unuseable, nothing some cheese and jalepenos couldn’t fix.  The grits were somewhat healthier than normal, but only because I forgot to put in extra butter at the end. 

Blackening fish is a fascinatingly horrible way to cook food.  I made my own blackened spice (I sound like I’m turning into that guy who sounds like he’s getting ready to join a commune and raise his own root vegetables for income).  This grocery store down the road has like 75 spices that you can get as much as you want.  When you can get a new flavor for $.35, you can have this kind of fun. 

Anyway, blackening food is a pretty healthy way to cook, because there’s not butter or oil for the most part, just spice.  Although, to do it so the spice actually turns black requires copious amounts of butter. 

There you have it.  The Charleston sauce was a little less saucy than I would like, but I’m fairly sure that was due to poor timing.  It was finger lickin’ good time that reminded me of when I was in the navy in Savannah. 

Leftover BBQ

I have been completely slacking lately, at least, as far as blogging goes.  I’ve been traveling all over the most fantastic destinations of the southwest searching for 5 minutes of rest.  Can you blame me though?  If you were in the suburbs of Dallas or Albuquerque, you would be completely mesmerized too.  I have 2 new meals ready to blog about and 2 new meals that will happen this weekend, so I need to get cracking.  Not to mention that in my old age, I can barely remember what I was thinking about 2 hours ago, let alone 2 weeks ago.  This meal is for everyone who reads and says “great, this looks delicious, but I have WAY better things to do than spend 30 minutes scouring the grocery store and an hour cutting up vegetables.”  As much as I would like to have all the time in the world to do that, I’m still 32 years, 218 days, and 17 hours away from retirement.  If the market continues in its current trajectory, that number jumps to 84 years and some change. 

Because this is a quick meal, we decided to utilize the community grill.  Ironically, it’s difficult to grill out in AZ, or at least in our apartment complex.  We usually get a thunderstorm right around dinnertime and I don’t have any recipes that are improved by rain water.  I also tried to use some of the leftovers from previous meals to make things tasty and easy.

Main Dish: Peppercorn and bourbon-marinated chicken breast

Sides: Grilled Vegetables with chili-cream sauce and wild rice with goat cheese

Dessert: Grilled chili spiced mangoes and ice cream

The chicken sounds delicious and I would like to tell you that I scientifically crafted and selected the ingredients, but it’s actually a store-bought marinade that cost $1.50.  I cut the chicken breasts up and put it in the marinade for about an hour and a half before we grilled out.  The secret to this chicken is actually the charcoal.  As tasty as grilling over charcoal is, it’s really a pain.  I feel like I need use an entire day’s worth of coal just to get the fire hot enough to cook.  Cooking chicken over charcoal is difficult for me, because you want the coals hot, but not so hot that it will char the outside of the chicken before the middle cooks.  Medium rare chicken is not nearly as good as medium rare beef.  I got my pyramid shaped charcoal, added a little lighter fluid, then added a little bit more, lit the charcoal, then like all men need to do to prove their manhood, drenched the fire with more lighter fluid pretending that my life could actually be in danger. 

The vegetables were a little bit of a risk.  We had some mushrooms and zucchini in the refrigerator, so I wanted to season and skewer the vegetables to grill.  I put about a tablespoon of olive oil over the mixed veggies with some cumin, salt and pepper, but there was definitely not enough moisture to handle all the spices.  I didn’t want to add any more oil (still trying to keep it real and healthy here), so I thought, let’s turn to the ole’ standby and threw in a few spoonfuls of Greek yogurt.  I’ve never done this or even heard about it before, but how bad could it turn out?  I got all that mixed together and then skewered the vegetables to get ready to grill.

I had a decent amount of the red chili enchilada sauce leftover from my previous meal.  I had Emily mix the rest of that with more Greek yogurt to make the chili-cream sauce.  So in 2 minutes, we had a spicy, flavorful, fat-free cream sauce to spoon over the vegetables.

The wild rice is pretty straightforward.  Measure out water, put in chicken bouillon cubes, boil, add rice, simmer, fluff, eat.  My mother reads my blog, so I won’t make any jokes about that series of verbs.  I don’t understand why wild rice is so much more expensive than normal rice.  Was the rice wild, did something stupid and got arrested so that you have to pay for its time in prison and parole?  I buy it though, because it has more flavor and it’s more “fibrous” than white rice, meaning that it takes longer to break down the carbs.  Think Wonder Bread vs. raw oat bran with a slight chicken flavor.  Once it was done, we sprinkled a little goat cheese on it, mixed it in, and it was ready. 

The meal turned out really good (and fast). 

We don’t normally eat dessert, but we decided to really live it up on that Friday night and go on a date to the grocery store to get some light vanilla ice cream.  Don’t be jealous of my life.  Emily bought some mangoes earlier in the week, so they were ripe and ready to eat.  She cut them up and we used the ancient Boy Scout art of wrapping them in aluminum foil to grill.  That’s actually true, well, not the ancient part.  I was in cub scouts at one point in my life.  My parents thought it was a cheap babysitting option.  Besides catching the largest fish in a polluted lake in upstate New York, I also learned the aluminum foil trick.  Basically, when you have something small or cut up you want to grill, you put it in aluminum foil, add some spices and a little liquid, and throw it on the grill or in the campfire for a few minutes to cook.  So we added brown sugar and chili pepper to the mangoes and threw them on the grill.  They turned out really tender in this sweet, thick slightly spiced sugar sauce. 

We poured that over the ice cream and I ground up some peanuts to put on top.  I talked Emily into turning back the clock to her sexy barista days and making us some espresso to go with dessert.  It was a perfect combo (and less than 225 calories).

Fear and Roasting in Tucson

There are two things you never hear people say.  The first is “I want to grow up to be a junkie.”  The second is, “I’m glad I drank tequila last night, because I made a lot of good decisions.”  Hence, the title of my blog this week. I’m proud that I have managed to go this long without making Mexican food.  This week’s dinner came about through a strange set of thoughts and ideas.  I wanted to make something spicy, and that made me think to make a drink from mint so it would have that cooling sensation to compliment the spice.  I was going to make a mint syrup and mix it with Absolut Mandarin.  Mandarin has a special place in my heart.  Very early on in my alcohol education, I found myself at House of Blues in Chicago.  At that time I learned that Corona comes in cans and that you can sell cans of Bud Light for $5.  I discovered that Absolut Mandarin was priced at $5.50, so the most bang for the buck was that.  I proceeded to drink and order rounds of Mandarin and cranberry for my friends.  We would have been quite fashionable, had it been eighties night. 

I have always wanted to make enchiladas from scratch, meaning, enchilada sauce.  I had some decent ideas of a good, original Mexican meal with enchiladas as the main course, but obviously, if that was the meal, vodka would not be welcome, so I had to switch to tequila. 

Main Course: Citrus-Chipotle Chicken Enchiladas

Sides: Margarita Succotash and Roasted Tomatillos with Pepper Jack Sauce

Beverages: Mintarita and Dos Equis

Emily’s Proclamation: So delicious it disrupted my lunar cycle. 

I was really nervous about mixing mint and tequila.  I wasn’t sure I could make it taste good.  I’m not really much of a tequila drinker.  I bought my best friend a shot of Santa Fe’s finest tequila when we were driving through.  A shot should never involved swallowing multiple times even after you pour half of it down the front of you.  Needless to say, the next morning was a little rough.  So I made concentrated mint syrup and mixed that with fresh squeezed OJ, agave nectar, and tequila.  It wasn’t horribly pretty (the mint leaf garnish helped) but it was quite tasty. 

I have a friend at work who was born and raised in New Mexico.  At happy hour, she gave me a lengthy dissertation on how to make authentic New Mexican enchilada sauce.  I took this as a sign.  I bought a large bag of dried Colorado chiles and some freshly ground cumin.  I was going to make chicken stock from scratch from the chicken bones left over from the chicken thighs I bought to make the chicken filling.  However, I ran into a small snafu.  In the excitement of the moment, I bought the boneless, skinless thighs on sale.  If you’re going to make chicken stock from chicken bones, you need to purchase those with the meat you buy.  Awesome – 2 master’s degrees and I still can’t remember to read the only 4 words on the package.  Fortunately, chicken stock was on sale at the other grocery store. 

I washed the chiles and then ripped them open to de-seed them.  Why does everything awesome have to have tons of seeds?  I decided to get a habanero to make sure the sauce had the right amount of heat.  However, I’ve wised up a little bit and decided to wear gloves while handling the pepper.  The problem with this is that I could not find food handling gloves, so I had to improve.  Michael Saranhands.  I browned garlic, onions, chiles and then slowly added water and chicken stock to rehydrate the peppers.  I put in some other spices and then poured the mixture in with a few diced tomatoes and blended till smooth.  I had to add a little extra liquid to get the right consistency, but I got there.  Then I poured the mixture back into a pot and simmered for hours.  I didn’t really simmer for hours, but it made it sound like it was going to excellent, just because I said that.  I did let it simmer for a little while, just not hours.   

The margarita succotash I think is the most intriguing menu item this week.  When I was a kid, I thought succotash died with the pilgrims and their biological warfare against the native Americans.  However, the restaurant I worked at in South Carolina had succotash as a side and it was delicious.  (No comment that a South Carolinian restaurant serves pre-Civil war cuisine as average fare)  My understanding of succotash is that it contains corn, beans, and is flavored with some type of fatty, salty pork.  How hard can that be?!  I needed to give this a hispanic flare, so I used black beans and chorizo, instead of bacon, and then added jicama. 

If you’ve never had jicama before, it’s awesome.  It looks like a rutabaga, feels like a potato, tastes like a sweet French fry, and eaten by people with great tans. 

I was really happy with the chorizo too, because it was way lean.  I didn’t expect that.  So I used all those ingredients and added a roasted poblano, fresh lime juice, and tequila.  I let that simmer and boil for an hour or so, and named it after a delicious drink.  I liked it, because it was tasty and looked good too. 

I’ve become a big fan of tomatillos, because they’re really cheap out here and easy to cook.  They have a flavor very similar to fried green tomatoes, just a tiny acidic sourness to them.  I thought they would be an easy and healthy addition to the meal, after all, it’s un-American to only have 1 side dish for dinner.  So I roasted these under the broiler on both sides and then made a low-fat pepper jack cream sauce with some garlic to drizzle on top.  I know, you think cream sauce automatically means unhealthy, but I used 2% milk and non-fat Greek yogurt to get the right consistency.  I would have used skim milk, but it wouldn’t help with the spiciness of the food.  I had this manager at a restaurant who was addicted to spice-induced pain.  Honestly, he would order hot sauce over the internet and then put small drops on whatever fish was being served to see if he could handle it.  Dumb.  I love spicy food, but at a certain point, you sacrifice flavor for heat.  I digress.  You’ve heard people say to drink milk when you eat something spicy, because that will help, right?  The reason for that is that spice-heat from chiles is caused by a chemical called capsaicin.  Capsaicin isn’t soluble in water (or saliva), but it is in fat or oil.  So if you have a food with a little fat in it, it will help cool the heat.  That’s why I didn’t use skim milk, but 2%, because it would help cut the spice of the enchilada sauce. 

After all the cutting, chopping, simmering, sipping (gulping), blending, sautéing, and braising, it was time to put everything together. 

I wrapped the chicken mixture in the tortilla, filled the pan, poured the sauce over everything, threw on some cheese and baked it for 20 minutes or so. 

That’s dinner.  It’s not the absolute healthiest thing I’ve made, but I only used 1 ½ tablespoons of oil in the whole thing.  The worst thing was the cheese and I didn’t use that much.  So it could have been better, but it also could have been a whole lot worse. 

I included one of those obnoxious pictures of a southwestern sunset, but it is really pretty.  That was what the sky looked like while we were cooking.  I’m traveling next week, so there may be a post, there may not be.  It depends on whether or not I eat in the next 2 weeks. 

Tuscany via Wyoming

This week some new and fun things.  I learned all about how to boil an egg and Emily was given some garlic from Wyoming by a coworker.  Before I get into the fun stuff, I’m going to rant about a trip to the grocery store.  When I came out to get into my car, I was parked next to an SUV with a vanity plate that said “BOTOX.”  Seriously?  First of all, if Congress wanted to really do something worthwhile, they should pass a law that states if you don’t have something interesting or clever to put on your license plate, don’t freaking get a vanity plate.  Of course, that would probably evolve into some type of national crisis with one party threatening to close down all the highways to avoid doing anything.  Second, “BOTOX,” if you’re that big of a fan, you probably shouldn’t be telling everyone about it. 

This week’s meal was a little bit easier to come up with than the turkey burgers.  I was planning on having some of our friends out for dinner this weekend, and one of them is allergic to gluten.  And, I needed something Italian to go with the lemoncello, hence a gluten-free Italian meal – enter Tuscany (I’ve heard they don’t use a lot of actual pasta there, at least, that’s my theory for this week).  The other thing that worked out well is that Emily and I decided to have a picnic in our parking lot, so we got some meats and cheeses that I could double up with the meal on Sunday. 

Starter: Truffle marinated mushrooms

Salad: Classic Caesar

Entrée: Chicken Saltimbocca w/ figs and stuffed portabellos

Emily: The sage n’ fig sauce was the 2^nd best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

Beverages: Lemoncello and Vipra Rossa Super Tuscan

Lemoncello is best served ice cold and in tiny glasses.  I’ve always had it served to me ice cold, but not necessarily in small glasses.  THE most memorable “medium” sized glass of lemoncello I had was at our weekly poker game.  I took my first sip of lemoncello at 7:10.  I was out of the poker game at 7:32.  Small glasses. 

I’ve been trying to get into Italian wines more, but I find it more overwhelming than French wines.  I saw a map of Italy’s wine regions, and there’s like 30 of them.  But I did learn a few things this week.  First, chianti almost always has white wine mixed in with it.  News to me.  I was trying to find a Sangiovese, because it tends to be a lighter red wine, which would go well with the chicken.  I don’t have anything against chianti, but I think it should only be had with pasta and a tomato based sauce.  I also learned that “Super Tuscans” are wines made with the original Italian grapes but have been blended with merlot or cab or another new world wine.  I lucked out to find one that was Sangiovese and Merlot and affordable. 

I didn’t really plan on making marinated mushrooms, at least, not how they turned out.  When I decided to make Caesar salad, I wanted to spice it up a little bit, so I thought about adding marinated mushrooms.  I got really excited, because I’ve been eyeing this truffle oil at the store, but haven’t had a good excuse to take the plunge.  But then after some further thought, I realized mushrooms don’t really belong in Caesar salad and would look bad.  I always like to add egg and roasted garlic to my Caesars and I figured that would be original enough.  But I really wanted the truffle oil, so I got the best of both worlds.  So some truffle oil, balsamic, spices and overnight in the fridge with some feta (on sale!) sprinkled on for an appetizer. 

I’ve always wanted to make my own Caesar dressing.  I’ve never had the nerve to order a Caesar salad with anchovies at a restaurant, even though the dressing always has anchovies in it.  I made it a little too lemony and it was hard to make it “light.”  Salad dressing from scratch always needs way too much oil.  So I subbed with my old standby, yogurt to give a little body and cut the lemon a little bit.  And now this brings us to mine and Emily’s egg-off (done strictly for research purposes).  I’ve always boiled eggs by throwing them into boiling water and then neglecting them for 20 minutes or so and then they’re done.  However, there is a reason it’s called an “egg timer.”  I’ll spare you all the details, but I am going to give a general table for future reference regarding boiled eggs.

1 minute egg: Don’t bother

2 minute egg: Still really gross

4 minute egg: Edible after not eating for 3 days

6 minute egg: Perfect for breakfast, like an over easy egg

8 minute egg: Great texture and solid enough to slice for salads

So all that for Caesar salad. 

And now on to the main course.  I’m taking a page out of Mark Zuckerberg’s book.  I may not have killed my chicken before I ate it, but I certainly made sure it was dead.  I pounded those chicken breasts like the wheelbarrow with a broken wheel. 

I put in some prosciutto and mixed spinach, garlic, and goat cheese and put that on top of the ham and rolled it up to cook.  I had to use a toothpick to hold everything together.  I really hate using toothpicks for that.  I feel like it’s cheating.  I wish someone would develop edible superglue that tasted like bacon to use in such instances. 

The stuffed mushrooms are filled with bruschetta.  Emily and I got smoked mozzarella for our picnic so I used that with the tomatoes to add some flavor.  She loved the cheese.  I thought it tasted like creamy charcoal gum, so I mixed in a little regular mozzarella as well. 

What topped the whole meal off was the fig sage butter sauce I made for the chicken.  I thought that Arizona was enough like Tuscany to find fresh figs.  Fortunately, this is America and not only do we have the freedom to act like jackasses when it comes to our license plates, but we can buy dried figs.  They added a really nice texture to the sauce.  It also had some shallots, wine, and of course, butter (not much though).  Sage is such a great fresh spice and not commonly used, so it still has a unique flavor. 

 That's it for this week.  Next week I have a twist on a nostalgic drink and I'm thinking something spicy...very spicy.