Lazy Monday

 Taking it easy after the horrifically long black Friday weekend by expressing my independence and doing all the Christmas things I never did growing up.

 

 Like putting up the white Christmas tree I'd pined for since I was a kid and trimming up my whole house with ridiculously gaudy decorations. Before December 1st!(gasp!)

Thanksgiving For Two

Ever since I can remember, my brother, sister and I would all pile in a car with my mom and drive three + hours (usually stopping 6-10 times to pee and 4-5 times to get some toy from the trunk) to Grandma Ella Mae's house for thanksgiving. We'd visit with family, wander around her HUGE yard and of course, eat amazing food. Over the years my tastes grew and changed but the one thing I'll always remember is her cornbread dressing. It is truly a thing of wonder and like anything else wondrously made by a woman of the south it is maddeningly made straight from her mind (read: no recipe) and it relies heavily on the ability to make good cornbread (as Alton says "crap in, crap out"). My mother claims to suck at making cornbread from scratch but I don't know because she's never made any since I've been around. And I have spent many years appreciating cornbread and food in general but up until a few months ago was never heavy into cooking.

"Cauliflower-Onion Linguine" or "The Anemic Plate"

This recipe in Food Network Magazine drew my attention because it was two things I had never tried before;
1)Cauliflower as the main event
2)French fried onions

To most people I guess french fried onions are pretty old hat at this point, but I didn't grow up eating green bean casseroles like (at least the Campbell's soup commercials imply) most people did. In fact I'd never even tried a green bean casserole until a couple of years ago and even then I think somebody had rooted through and scooped all the french fried onions off for their own greedy lips. This called for 1/2 cup french fried onions chopped with a 1/4 cup panko and some olive oil and two garlic cloves toasted together in a span on the stove-top, which after several samples during the cooking process, has totally won my heart. It basically tastes like the most amazing topping to the best casserole ever, without actually adding butter or baking it in the oven. I'm convinced I will use this combo for many many more things in the future.

And as for the cauliflower... I just went along with it because that was the recipe. I could sit here and say that I've always had some sort of long lasting love for the most pallid member of the  family cruciferous but I think anybody who says that is probably being sarcastic.Cauliflower... it's not really something you seek out. It's just there. And honestly in this recipe  just like every other  time I've ever tasted cauliflower, just there was really all it was.

But the worst part was, it didn't just hang out in the background not adding to the party. It sort of stuck out, in that terrible way that it seemed all vegetables did when you were a kid eating anything that wasn't mac and cheese or hotdogs.

 

It was like, "Hey, cauliflower... dude... could you uh... maybe leave some room for something else?"

And to top it all off, if you pick it out (which I almost guarantee you will) the spicy noodle part doesn't even seem worth your time on its' own. It doesn't make sense really, in fact the whole dish pretty much follows a no fail formula of salty/cheesy/carbs and yet it's still ho-hum and borderline unappealing.
And it doesn't even look appetizing! I had a hell of a time trying to photograph this incredibly pale dish with only red pepper flakes and basil to give it any life. Aren't professional chef's always saying "you eat with your eyes first"?!
I kept imagining how much better this would be with some chicken and cream sauce but then I realized I was just wishing for chicken carbonara which is basically the noodles and cheese without everything else. Hm... imagine everything else is gone....

Final thoughts, panko + french fried onions = whole heartedly approve
Everything else = snore

Vince Camillo, I give you a sad face :(

Feta Cheese Turkey Burgers with sweet potato fries on Peter Reinheart's buns

So far November has basically been a wash, it's the later part of Autumn and mostly it's just rainy and crappy during the day.And Really all it's made me want to do is stay inside and eat hearty food that reminds me of summer and good times. So when I discovered this recipe for Turkey burgers over at Erin's Food files I knew this was just the thing to make me feel better. Funny thing is, as soon as I got all ready to make it, the sun came out.

But I had plans to be fancy and make my own hamburger buns from a recipe in Peter Reinheart's Artisan Bread's Every Day ( a book I discovered and had a brief love affair with this summer) and since everything in that book takes at least 8 hours to ferment in the fridge I was pretty much determined to finish what I'd started yesterday and kept on trucking with my burger plans.  And while my little buns were proofing on the kitchen counter I went for a stroll in the five minutes of sunshine and took a few pictures.

Number 51 Maple Blondie

This flavor came out a while ago but I've always ignored it for some reason, maybe because for years I always thought of blondies as the less fun sister of brownies. Brownies were heaven's perfect chocolate square like cake and fudge come together with a decadent flaky layer on top. And blondies were pale baked squares without a ounce of chocolate in sight. It wasn't until I was much older that I even bothered to try a blondie and realized not only how good they were  but  that I even sometimes liked them in place of brownies especially when it comes to added ingredients like butterscotch chips, pecans, etc. 
 

This however did not taste like a blondie to me, at least not most of the time. What this really reminded me of was pancakes with whipped cream and really good maple syrup. You know, the expensive kind. Which I'll tell you isn't a bad thing. In fact it was amazingly good and not way too sweet either (unlike pancakes with whipped cream). It has just the perfect balance of bits to smooth ice cream so you're not fishing around for the good parts or chewing on too many hunks of pancake...er... blondie.

Despite its' perplexing name (I guess if they called this flavor "Pancakes with Whipped Cream and Syrup" nobody would buy it? Okay, maybe I would but really, would you?)I'm definitely diggin with this one. Love!