BEEF ENCHILADAS

My arbitrary food inspirations have really been kicking in at odd times recently. This past Sunday, I opened up the pantry, saw a can of refried beans, and decided that I wanted to try to make beef enchiladas. I know, really random, right?

Ingredients
(Makes 8 enchiladas)
~ 1 package of 8 corn tortillas
~ 1 lb. ground beef
~ 1 small onion, minced
~ 2 cloves garlic, minced
~ Salt & pepper to taste
~ Chili powder to taste
~ 3 cups of shredded cheddar cheese (I had a full package of mozzarella lying around, so I used that)
~ 8 oz. jar of enchilada sauce (I used the Ortega mild)

Process
Go ahead and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. After that, the next thing that needs to be done is to make the beef mixture that goes into the tortillas, so to prep for that go ahead and cut up the onions and the garlic. After that’s done, fire up the stove on a nice medium-high and warm up a large skillet with some oil in it (a lot of natural oils come out of the beef, so you don’t need a ton of oil on the surface). Start to cook down the beef and be sure to watch it as it is cooking. Add some salt, pepper, and the chili powder to the meat for seasoning. I also threw in some Chipotle Tabasco sauce (that stuff is awesome!) as well to give the meat a little more kick. Please note that it is imperative that you cook it just enough so that the red has disappeared and not too much over that, since we don’t want to dry out the beef. When the beef is finished cooking, put it into another bowl. Now, start cooking the onions and garlic, and mix those together. Once the onions have started to go translucent, throw the beef back into the skillet. Turn the heat down to medium, just mix everything together, and after a few minutes remove it from the heat.

Take a 9″ x 13″ baking dish and pour about 1/4 cup of the enchilada sauce into the bottom of the dish and spread that around. Take each of the corn tortillas, spread some of the beef mixture into it, top it off with some of the cheese, then tightly roll it up and place it into the baking dish. Repeat this process until you’ve used up all of the beef mixture. I only was able to squeeze out about 7 enchiladas, but if I spread out my beef mixture more during the preparation, then I’m sure that I could have accommodated for 8. When all of your wrapped tortillas are snugly fit into your baking dish, pour the rest of the sauce over the them, and top it off with the rest of the cheese. Throw the dish into the oven for about 15 – 17 minutes, or until you see that the cheese is melted and the sauce is bubbling. Leave it in there for too long, and the sauce will dry out from the baking.

The ironic thing is, the can of refried beans that gave me the idea to make enchiladas in the first place, I didn’t even use because I thought that having two enchiladas per person would be enough to eat!

CHICKEN CACCIATORE

I still distinctly remember learning about chicken cacciatore for the first time while watching an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay. I was thinking to myself that the ingredients to the dish were very basic, it looked pretty straightforward to make, and it really sounded good. So, the journey began to learn how to cook chicken cacciatore. After going through a few recipes, here is my hybrid version.

Ingredients
~ 1 green bell pepper, chopped
~ 2 cups diced tomatoes
~ 1 cup mushrooms, roughly chopped
~ 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
~ 2 chicken breasts, cut into 1″ – 2″ pieces
~ 1/2 cup all purpose flour
~ 1 egg
~ 1 tsp salt
~ 1/2 tsp pepper
~ 3  tbsp olive oil
~ 1/4 tsp oregano
~ 1/2 cup red wine
~ 2 cups marinara / spaghetti sauce
~ 1 tsp basil
~ 2 1/2 cups (dry) penne pasta

Process
Our first step is that we need to prepare the chicken portion for the dish. Crack an egg, beat it, and then put it aside. Take a Ziploc freezer bag and put the flour, salt, and pepper into it. Shake it to mix up the coating and to get everything even inside the bag. Dip the chicken pieces, maybe two or three at a time, into the egg first and then into the freezer bag, shaking to coat it. Once you’ve got all the pieces coated, take a frying pan and put the olive oil down and start warming up the pan. Once the oil starts to ripple a little bit, it’s all ready for the frying. If the oil starts to smoke, then it’s too hot and you’ll burn the chicken if you put it on there; we want a nice, golden color to all of the chicken pieces. Cook all of the pieces until both sides are golden brown and then remove them from the heat.

In a separate skillet (one that does have a cover), add the green peppers and garlic together with some oil. Sauté them until the garlic is browned up a bit, after which add in the chicken, diced tomatoes, the red wine, and the oregano. Simmer this with the cover on and have the stove turned to medium-low heat for about 30 minutes. When the timer hits about 15 minutes left, go ahead and start to boil a pot of water for the penne. Get that cooking and we want to have that ready by the time the sauce is ready. When the timer does ring, now add in the mushrooms and the marinara sauce and simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

After those 10 minutes are up, then go ahead and taste the sauce to see how you like the flavors. Use salt and pepper to adjust accordingly, because once we add in the pasta, it might be a little more difficult to adjust the sauce flavoring. Finish off the sauce with the dried basil, and once the pasta is done, just transfer it right over from the pot to the skillet with the sauce in it. Put everything together, mix it up, and KABOOM, you now have chicken cacciatore. It’s a pretty hearty dish, with a good array of vegetables, pasta, and chicken, and a good base if you want to try to play with it by turning up the heat level or adding other vegetables. This is my third time making this variation of the dish and I’m still making very minor adjustments to it. Although the prep time for this dish might be a little longer than some, it’s definitely worth it.

ITALIAN BURGERS

Tonight, we were all in the mood for something on the grill and wanted to take advantage of such amazing weather we were having today. I took out a burger recipe that I used a while back and tweaked it up a bit to try to bring out some more flavors. Here’s how they came out.

Ingredients
~ 1 pound ground beef
~ 1/4 tsp garlic powder
~ 1 tbsp olive oil
~ 1 tsp salt
~ 1 tsp pepper
~ 3/4 tsp basil leaves

Process
First, take a potato masher (or something that has some surface area) and press out the meat. This way, the seasoning will reach the majority of the meat and when you fold it back together, the spices will have a much more even distribution. Add in the garlic powder, salt, pepper, basil leaves, and olive oil. Start to mix all of it around and make one burger patty. If you feel that the meat is a little too moist, or that it’s kind of falling apart when you’re making the patty, sprinkle in some breadcrumbs to help absorb the excess moisture.

Once you’ve pounded out the patties, put them right onto the grill and cook them on each side for about 4 minutes or so. If you’d like, put a slice of mozzarella cheese while they are still on the grill, and then serve on hamburger buns once the cheese has melted. We also added some lettuce, tomatoes, and a pan-cooked portobello mushroom onto the burger to finish it off. The meat was really flavorful and juicy, and there was plenty of flavor in the burger as a whole to round it off. This burger does have a little more spices than a traditional burger does, but if you’re in the mood to be adventurous, give this a shot.

PIGS IN A BLANKET

I’ve always enjoyed pigs in a blanket as a snack food at various parties I’ve been to, but this year I wanted to give a shot at making them from scratch during a small party my friend, Bryan Postelnek, and I held before an annual fireworks display in our town.

Ingredients
~ 1 package cocktail franks (we used a Nathan’s brand and it had 42 franks)
~ 1 tube Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough (roughly enough dough for 42 franks)

Process
Set up an area where you can have the package of cocktail franks on the side and the rolling area for the pigs in a blanket (I’m going to call them PIBs for simplicity) on another side. When you pull out the crescent roll dough, it will have these pre-cut triangles in the dough. Tear these off one at a time and just put it onto a flat surface. You don’t really need a whole lot of dough to roll each PIB, so don’t be afraid to cut out a smaller piece (around 1.5 inches) and try rolling it up. It might take a few tries to get the measurement down right, but remember that the dough is stretchy and even if you cut a smaller piece by accident, you can stretch the dough out a little bit before rolling it up. The point is that you don’t want it to have a ton of dough on the outside for each bite. So, as you’re making the PIBs you can put the finished products onto a greased cookie baking tray, like the one you see in the picture above. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and pop these guys in the oven for about 20 minutes. They are definitely best served right out of the oven, so plan accordingly if you want to time this appetizer with guests arriving.

Today we decided to try to put cheese in ours, but a lot of it ended up melting out. So, if you do want to try it with cheese, I would suggest wrapping the entire cocktail frank, along with the cheese, inside the dough so that way it doesn’t ooze out and you can still capture the best of both flavors (something I will definitely try out when I make these again). We found that although the PIBs were still a bit soft when they came out of the oven, they still tasted really good. We made 84 PIBs tonight and they were all gone! But something that I would like to try next time to try to make them a little more crispy would either be to increase the oven temperature to 375 degrees and cook for about 10 minutes, or to use the 350 degree cooking avenue and finish it off with a 1 minute broil on high. Either way might work, so I’ll experiment a little bit. But feel free to let me know below how it turns out if you give it a shot!

CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA MUFFINS

It’s been quite a while since I’ve really made anything in the kitchen. I happened to look back on my last cooking post today and it was dated almost a month ago. Holy cow! Well, that changed today as I used up some things that we had lying around in the pantry to make some muffins.

Ingredients
~ 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
~ 3/4 cup sugar
~ 1 tsp baking powder
~ 1 tsp baking soda
~ 1/2 tsp salt
~ 1 egg
~ 1/4 cup olive oil
~ 1/2 cup milk
~ 1 tsp vanilla extract
~ 2 mashed ripe bananas
~ 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Process
First, take a large bowl and add together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, mix together the egg, olive oil, milk and vanilla extract. Take the wet mixture and add all of it into the dry mixture, but only stir maybe 3 – 4 times, just enough to start to get a bit of the dough going. You don’t want to turn all of it into dough before you’ve added in the bananas and the chocolate chips!

At this point, go ahead and start preheating the oven to 350 degrees. Fold in the mashed bananas and chocolate chips into the dough mixture and finish stirring that up. Take out a muffin tray and put some paper liners down into the holes. From my dough distribution, I made about 18 muffins, but  it can vary to anywhere from 16 – 20, so you might need two pans like I did. The key is to fill each liner two-thirds of the way through with dough, so I used a 1/4 cup measurer from the measuring cup set to make the job easier. Throw the muffin pans into the oven for 23 minutes, or until you poke a toothpick into the muffins and it comes out clean. Wait about 5 minutes for the muffins to cool off, and then take them out of the trays and set them on a plate.

The texture of the muffins is similar to banana bread, so you do get a little bit of that same sponginess, but it’s really rich in taste and the chocolate chips certainly combo up great with the banana flavor of the muffin itself. It was really easy to make and didn’t take long at all.

THE SIEGE OF WHITE CASTLE

Address: 247 State Route 35, Eatontown, NJ 07724

Man, it’s been too long. The last time I came to White Castle was two years ago over winter break when me and three other friends downed two Crave Cases that night. We celebrated the achievement at the time, but our bodies (and digestive systems) definitely didn’t thank us in the 24 hours following that. Tonight, we took a return trip to the famed institution that was made famous by one particular movie.

Whoops, meant to upload some pictures from the visit.

In previous visits, I had incrementally increased my tolerance for the number of sliders I could stomach. The first time: 5. The subsequent visit: 7. The visit after that: 10. The visit prior to today’s: 14. I usually got to about 7 sliders before I felt the initial wave hit my digestive system, and today I felt pretty confident that I could take on the challenge once again.

We got an entire Crave Case filled with 30 cheeseburger sliders and immediately set to work on it. Each of us had the mission: finish 10 sliders out of the box and we would be golden. We could say that we have finished yet another treasure trove of Golden Goodness. But alas, that was not the case. I did manage to finish off the 10 allotted to myself, but the mission to finish off the Crave Case did not complete as planned. I think it’s safe to say that both of my friends’ stomachs thanked them for showing mercy. Mine just growled at me.

White Castle is just one of those places you take a trip out to once in a while just to say that “you did it.” Some might say it’s disgusting, some might say it’s delicious, but at the end of the day, it boils down to how grand of a sculpture that you can build with your empty slider boxes. We managed to get an archway going today, but last visit we built some random snake-looking thing that was taller than our heads when we sat at the table. Now that was awesome.

But, we left with our heads held high and ready to fight another day. The Castle has survived the siege. . . for now.