Chicken, Bacon, and Caramelized Onion Tortilla Pizza

First let's talk about these:

Those are green onions which I've been growing from the leftover roots of some that I bought in the store! They are insanely easy to grow - just put the roots in a cup of water. That's it! And they grow really fast, this picture is less than 2 weeks of growth (the shorter ones have been going for about 4 days), you can even see growth after the end of a day. Try it!







So now, we need to discuss the meal. This was so delicious, and pretty much made with random things around the house. Some leftover chicken breast, cut into cubes and cooked with chopped bacon and diced tomato. Then I added some leftover caramelized onions and let them all cook together. Tortillas were spread with tomato paste and then covered in slices of whole mozzarella. Top with the chicken, bacon, onion mixture and put in the broiler until the cheese is melted.

Top with green onions and you have one delicious meal!

Holy Cow!

Does it get better than this??  I'm seriously in an ice cream phase. And they had an absurdly good Breyer's ice cream sale at our grocery store so I bought two tubs and then when I told Ruchir about it, he went and bought two tubs also!  So now we have 4 huge tubs of ice cream and I'm lovin' it!  I really like sauces on my ice cream so I decided to spoil myself and make 2.  The first is a chocolate sauce, basically just chocolate ganache.  I melt chocolate chips in the microwave, but just barely, so that they still hold their shape but they are melted inside.  Then add some non-microwaved chocolate chips and stir briskly.  The heat from the microwaved chocolate chips will melt the other ones and they will all meld together.  Adding in some non-microwaved chips is basically what's called "tempering" and it keeps the chocolate shiny and glossy.  Then mix in some heavy cream to make it more of a sauce - and that's basically ganache.  And boy is it delicious!  I also made some homemade whipped cream (easy, just cream and sugar plus a splash of vanilla) and some homemade caramel sauce.  Now this was not as easy, but boy is it worth it!  Plus I wanted to try out my new sauce pan that Mom got me for my birthday.  The trick is to not stir once the sugar comes to a boil - otherwise you'll get crystals in the caramel and it won't be smooth.  I've used different recipes in the past but this is the one I used today.

http://marzipanmom.blogspot.com/2010/03/homemade-caramel-sauce.html

Caramel Sauce

adapted from Classic Stars Desserts by Emily Luchetti

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup water

1 cup heavy whipping cream

In a heavy nonreactive saucepan, stir together the sugar and water. Place over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves and the mixture comes to a boil.

Doesn't the new sauce pan look beautiful?

Increase the heat to high and cook, without stirring, until the mixture becomes a golden amber color. Remove from the heat and let the bubbles subside for a few seconds. Stir in the cream, very slowly and carefully.

YOWZA! Add to the above ice cream picture and thank your lucky stars that you live in a world with such deliciousness.

Keema

This something I whipped up after I told Mom that I had leftover ground beef to use up. It's called keema (no idea if I'm spelling that right) and it's basically ground beef with the usual curried spices. So basically ginger, garlic, onions, green chilis, and that complete masala mix that Mom gave to me. Then some chopped up tomatoes and yogurt to make it lees dry. Pretty tasty way to use up leftover ground beef but I don't know if it's delicious enough to plan to make it.

Healthy - kind of!

I've had pretty much one of two things every Friday during lent so far - either shrimp or fried tilapia. Today was a fried tilapia day! I'll show you one from today and one from a few weeks ago. I like to think these meals are healthy because they have fish in them and some type of greens, but in reality, they aren't healthy at all I'm sure!

This is the one from a couple weeks back. Tilapia breaded and fried, served over some romaine lettuce and the homemade salad dressing I've talked about before. (No bacon grease though!)

And this is the one today. The tilapia I had for today was prettier, so I took a before picture! These were breaded like last time, except that I mixed in a bunch of orange chipotle seasoning in the breadcrumbs.

It was served on a bed of mashed potatoes and spinach leaves (they are hidden under the fish). On top are just some tomatoes cooked with some chili flakes. Green onions are scattered around. Oh, I have a new source for green onions - growing my own! But that will be for another day.

Pappy's Smoke House

I promised a post about Pappy's, so here it is! This is a BBQ restaurant in St. Louis that is supposed some of the best BBQ here but actually I wasn't that thrilled. In fact, I thought some of it was kind of bad!

Here is my meal: ribs, potato salad, and sweet potato fries. Sounds like it would be great right?
Unfortunately the ribs were kind of dry; they had lots of sauces available, but nothing really made it much better. I think it's the style of cooking as these are smoked instead of grilled. I like the kind that are literally falling off the bones and juicy and delicious - Barnelli's ribs from around the Chicago area are the perfect ones in my opinion. These aren't like those at all, but they are still popular so I guess some people like this - just not me! Also, there are these sweet potato fries which I normally love. These were especially odd those because they were doused in sugar!! See all that white stuff on the fries?? Weird isn't it? Then there was the potato salad, not bad, just not great.

Here's Ruchir's plate. He got a pulled pork sandwich, cole slaw, and deep fried corn on the cob! The sandwich was definitely better than the ribs but nothing to write home about. Cole slaw was eh, but I always hate cole slaw. Then there was this odd deep fried corn on the cob. It was actually kind of good, but would have been better if it was crunchy like I thought it would be. It was kind of chewy instead, maybe because it had been sitting out for awhile? It also needed a kick, like some of that lime juice/chilli powder mix that Aunt Molly puts on corn would have been delish.

Anyway, verdict - I probably will not return. Ruchir liked it though and said he probably would get it again.

Messy Joe's

I still had a lot of that ground beef from Aldi (previous use was the wontons), so I decided to make some sloppy joes. I don't personally like them too sloppy...so I made them messy instead! It's just ground beef with onions that was already cooked from before and then I mixed in some garlic powder, a little tomato paste and then a bunch of BBQ sauce. We actually had a variety of sauces from when we went to Pappy's Smokehouse (a post about that is on it's way!), but I ended up just using good old Kraft BBQ sauce. This one is on wheat bread for Ruchir; I had mine on white of course!

Scarf!

Hooray for wontons!

I love wonton wrappers, they are so versatile! They can be fried, boiled, steamed and it all tastes good. Plus the filling options - whoa they are endless. You can used them to make ravioli, you can put chocolate and bananas in them, you can make crab rangoon, or just regular meat filled wontons etc etc! One of my favorites, and Ruchir's too, is just a simple ground beef and onion filling with some sweet chili sauce. I was all out of my usual sauce today but I whipped up a good approximation with some orange ginger stirfry sauce combined with chili paste. Just mix with cooked ground beef and onions and voila, you have your filling! I made a few cream cheese and green onions ones too which I like, but Ruchir doesn't.

Then it's time to put a dollop of filling in the middle, wipe the edges with water, and seal them up! I usually just fold them over into triangles, but I made a few of these packet type versions as well.

Then it's time to fry! Bubble bubble my little darlings!

And the result, mouth watering fried goodness! I'm thinking I should use the rest of the wrappers for a dessert, something with chocolate and whipped cream. Add in the fried factor and you know it's going to be delicious!

Pork Tenderloin

I bought a pork tenderloin on a major deal from Aldi's and froze it because we already had plenty of food in the fridge. Now that our fridge has become slightly more bare, I decided to thaw this bad boy and cook it up! It was already spiced and coated in pepper so I just followed the directions on the package which was top pretty much just put it in a shallow pan and bake until the inside temp was 160 F. Luckily I had just gotten a replacement thermometer for the one that mysteriously vanished during the moving chaos of last summer.

Yum!

Then the sauce. I again wanted to clean out our fridge of random leftovers. This sauce mostly contained some cranberry sauce (the jelly kind, Ruchir apparently has to eat turkey with this or won't eat it at all) and orange juice. Reduced down with some spices, most prominetnly the orange chipotle mix from the spice shop in the Soulard Farmer's Market, and the whole thing became one tasty accompaniment!

And when plated over a bed of mashed potatoes....mmmm. Overall verdict was good but next time I think I'll get the unspiced version and do it myself because this had a slight citrus taste (I think it was supposed to be lemon pepper) and it was ok, but not spectacular. I can do better!