Couple of Cooks in Love

I hope I got you hungry for Prime Rib with a photo lead for a change!  The temperature as I am writing this is -4°.  I know I mention the weather a lot when writing about our meals, but it really dictates what we eat.  If we lived in Hawaii we would be eating seafood with fruit salsa.  Alas, we are not in Hawaii so the meal tonight; Prime Rib!  I love prime rib and I never have to talk Daryl into having one.  Cooking a prime rib is pretty straight forward other than the standard debate: do you start at a high temperature and then reduce,  or just do slow and low the whole time?  Either way,  you basically just put it int he oven.   Thankfully, Daryl can spread his cooking wings on the sides, and the aus jus. The sides that we are having are a brussel sprout hash, and smashed potatoes. I am going to include all the recipes here.   Aus Jus 1 pound beef shank 1 carrot 2 celery stalks 1 onion water 2 bay l...

Just makes you want to take a bite, doesn't it? If you follow our post you will see that yesterday we brought Twice Baked Potato Casserole to Christmas dinner where my brother made ham as the main dish.  We were lucky enough to take home leftovers of both!  In addition, one of the perks to making the Twice Baked Potato Casserole is that you have potato skins left over. Today was a day to relax for us and we had a refrigerator filled with left overs, so we decided to create a recipe that would make use of all of the food, including left overs, that we had on hand.  This is one of the main reasons we decided to start sharing the foods we create on this blog.  We don't like to waste, food prices aren't exactly going down, so we try our best to incorporate ingredients that were left over from previous meals, and have actually found it to be very gratifying and fun to find creative ways to use what we have on hand.  You'll find it makes you a better cook. ...

Merry Christmas 2013! We are going to my brother's house to celebrate Christmas later this afternoon.  He is making a ham and the rest of us are bringing the side dishes.  Daryl and I are going to bring potatoes and like I said in yesterdays post;  spinach balls. This is the same recipe that we brought last year.  It was so good that I decided to make it again.   There are certain rules I like to follow when choosing a recipe that we are going to have to bring to some one's house.  It has to travel well. Preferably in a 9 X 13 casserole dish because we have a thermal carrier that works great for transporting food in a situation like this. I'm sure like me, most of you like a creamy potato to go with ham - think a cheesy scalloped potato.  This recipe has a nice balance of cheese, cream, butter and potatoes.  One of our favorite side dishes as a family is my mom's creamed cabbage (recipe another time)  and that is very creamy so I tr...

This is a recipe that my mom made for us while I was growing up.  She would make them for special occasions like Christmas, but also for just a Sunday night dinner.  She served them as a side dish, and in our house growing up we always had a lot of side dishes!  We loved them more than the main dish - I still do!  As I have gotten older and found the recipe on-line, I have seen it served as an appetizer also. When we were first married I wrote done all of the recipes that my mom made that were my favorites.  I put them into an old fashioned, before the internet, recipe box.  Then I started to gather some recipes of my own and I wanted them stored in a way that made them easier to find so I started a 3-ring folder system.  I don't really keep it up anymore, but I still use the recipes in it. Rustic, but it still works! Be prepared because they are a little messy to make.  You hands will get dirty!  They're great to make in advance, f...

Today is Christmas Eve.  Crazy. Yes, I know everyone always says how fast it happened. It actually did happen fast this year.  The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was shorter this year than most years.  I just finished my shopping today.  I have it in print now...next year I'm starting early.  In fact, I think I'll start right after Christmas! We spend Christmas Eve with Daryl's sister and her family.  This year we were asked to bring an appetizer so we decided to bring Chicken Rillettes.  Years ago we ate at a wonderful restaurant here in  the Twin Cities called Craftsman .  We ordered pork rilletes as an appetizer and were blown away by how good they were.  Flash forward to this year when we were at Tilia in Minneapolis, and again ordered rilletes as an appetizer, again we were blown away.  After that meal I was in search of the recipe.  I found one in of course, bon appetit!  We made it this summer and fell i...

Christmas week.  It's a busy and cold time of year! This past weekend we had pizza, and tomorrow which is Christmas Eve, we will have an assortment of appetizers, and for Christmas it will be a ham dinner.  I needed some red meat, and I knew Daryl would certainly appreciate it. Today, here in Eagan MN, we were at -1° at 4:00 P.M. I think our high today was 4.  So a warm comfort food sure sounded good to me this morning.  We have a cookbook form The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) that is one of our go-to cookbooks. Even with the Internet I still appreciate a good old fashioned cookbook.  Especially one form the experts. I didn't have to work today to I decided to make stew, and I chose the recipe form our CIA cookbook.  One of the reasons I chose it was because, although I was home from work today I had one final gift to buy.  I didn't have time to make a traditional stew that takes 8 - 10 hours so this recipe was perfect. I was warm and so t...

I am a self proclaimed Bloody Mary connoisseur.   It is my go to drink when we go out, always.  I tend to just drink wine at home. It's too expensive out, and we have much better wine at home anyway.  Occasionally I will go for a Margarita, but only if I know that it will be made from scratch, which is rare.  I used to be a waitress and a bartender and I am fully aware that most margaritas, at most bars and restaurants, have them pre-made on a "gun".  No thank you.  Back to my Bloody Mary addiction. Many bars use a bottle mix for Bloody Mary's, which doesn't bother me as much as the gun margarita, but I prefer one that is made from scratch.   I love tomatoes.  I could eat them every day - I actually do in the summer when we can get them fresh off the vine.  Here in MN a tomato in the winter doesn't even resemble a real one. I have found the perfect Bloody Mary recipe in our bon appetit subscription a few years ago.  It is light an...

We love pizza, we don't love most of the pizzas that we can get out.  So about a year ago Daryl decided to make his own, crust and all. He makes a deep dish and a thin crust, this is our thin recipe.  The dough is an extra step, and you may find it, initially, a bit of a challenge.  The difficulty lies in forming it because it's wet and sticky.  Over time this will become less challenging. I love that we each get our own pizza because the toppings I want are very different than what Daryl wants on his.  He actually creates a menu for me and I get to check off the ingredients that I want.  Today he is making us two pizzas each.  (We love left overs. )  The choices were:  prosciutto, red onion, tomatoes, caramelized onion, meatball (homemade by Daryl and put into freezer a week ago), mozzarella, goat cheese, Parmesan, comte cheese, oregano, garlic, salami, red pepper flakes, and brussel sprouts.   My absolute favorite combination...

Good Eats ,  a show on the food network, is one that Daryl has watched for years.  He enjoys learning about the chemistry, or scientific approach,  to cooking.    One recipe that he was drawn to right away was the old fashioned chocolate chip cookie.  The ratios of the ingredients, for reasons he really doesn't remember, allow the cookie to become thin and have an inner gooiness, yet still have a crunchy outer layer.  Alton Brown calls it "The Thin", and it is truly the best chocolate chip cookie we have ever tasted.  Like I said, it has a chewy middle,  crunchy sides,  it's buttery, chocolaty, and I love that it has just a  hint of salt to it too.  Just pure cookie goodness! We have never made a batch to eat here at home, just for us.  That would be dangerous given the fact that I can easily eat 3-5 in a single sitting.  I find it's better to make them for special occasions and then just keep a few around for ...

Another cold Minnesota Saturday.  Spent the day Christmas shopping so we didn't have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen, but we still wanted to have a nice meal at home. Another thing to add about us is that we are home-bodies. We love our house, our life with our dog and cat.   We love being at home.  We are not Mr. and Mrs. Exciting, but like our blog post says, we are in love.   Married 20 years, and more in love now than 20 years ago...... maybe I could do my next blog on being happily married.  One sentence of advice:  be happy, be grateful, and serve someone other than yourself.   I am on Twitter and I follow all of the great chefs. One of them is our local boy Andrew Zimmern.   We have had a couple really memorable meals courtesy of his recipes.   So when I saw his post on Twitter about the best Seafood Chowder he's had, of course I thought of Daryl and how he would like it and that we had to try it.      Corn...

Whenever we have a fresh batch of Pomodoro al Forno in the house one of my favorite week night meals is to use them in a salad. There are so many things you can do with the tomatoes,  but my favorite is just a simple salad.  I tend to not eat meat during the week. It's not a rule, if a meal happens for me that has meat in it I'm not passing it up, but I actually prefer meals that don't have meat in them so when I can make my own, I choose to go meatless.   No preaching, I just feel better and it's better for the environment.  I guess this is as good as time as any to bring up the meat that Daryl and I do eat.  It's only locally raised, purchased at our fabulous Farmer's Markets or Co-ops.  We especially like to get our meat at  Heartland  which is a 4 star restaurant in Lowertown St. Paul, but they also have a small market next door that sells house made products and locally farmed produce and meat. The salad for me is a meal, but do with it as...

Our usual Saturday morning routine, after walking the dog, and enjoying a good cup of coffee is deciding what we want to have for dinner.   Coffee.  We love good coffee. There is a saying that I refer to often, and wholeheartedly agree with: there is nothing better than the first cup of coffee in the morning or the first beer after work.  So true!  The coffee that we drink, and highly recommend, is made from the roasted beans of our good friends, Mike and Julie French, who own and operate, Stonehouse Coffee  in Nisswa Minnesota. Nisswa is where we have a summer cabin, but we order his beans all year long from their website. Back to dinner- it's not scientific its more like-  what are we in the mood for?  Today, here in good 'ol Eagan Minnesota the actual air temperature,when I got up to walk the dog at 5:30 AM, was -10 degrees.  Yes, you read that correctly MINUS TEN DEGREES.  The high temp for the day was 4.  All I wanted was comfor...