Recipes and Reviews

Dave is on his drive back home right now, the kitchen is all cleaned up, so I decided to transfer our chili notes to the web-site. While this batch was not our best chili - it is too early in the season to get the variety of fresh chiles in the Pacific northwest - it is a good guide to getting to our best chili.

I've been trying to make a few meals a month that are as close to completely homemade/homegrown as possible. This lasagna is one of my most complicated yet. The sauce and veggies are from my garden, the pasta is homemade, and for the first time, I made most of the cheese. Where I didn't go homemade, I did try and buy local. The meats, milk and eggs were from local farms, and even the spelt for the flour was grown a few hundred miles from here. I guess I could have ground the meat myself, but I have to leave a few challenges for next time.

While it was time consuming to make all the different parts, it was also a lot of fun. And there is no arguing with the results, as it was one of the best lasagnas I ever made.

I got a good price on short ribs at the market a while back and I had several pounds cut into thin strips across the ribs - flanken cut. After eating batches of ribs with BBQ sauce, orange sauce, and chili sauce - I wanted to try something a little different. This curry dry rub is really nice on the beef ribs and the ribs went nicely with stir fried broccoli seasoned with my teriyaki glaze and a baked sweet potato.

For the past 6 months, I've been experimenting with more whole grain pastas, with spelt being my new default. The nutty flavor of the spelt really comes out with tomato sauce based dishes, and the rougher texture holds on to the sauce. I use more liquid than I do with white wheat and semolina flours, and I let it rest longer to absorb all the liquids.

I currently use a food processor to make the dough, but you can use a stand mixer or mix it by hand.

This flavourful soup was created to feed my need for some chiles and salsa on a snowy day.

This is an easy one dish dinner that my wife and I like to have every now and then. Use this recipe more as a guide to create your own warm pasta salad meals.

It has been fairly cold for the past few weeks and I wanted a nice hearty soup to warm me up so I came up with this recipe after looking through the freezer and pantry. Cooking the pasta in the stock helped give the soup a really nice texture and added a lot of flavour to the pasta.

This simple orange sugar syrup is really nice on whole wheat cocoa cinnamon pancakes. (Guess what we had for breakfast this morning.)

After many disappointing attempts to make carne asada using marinade recipes I found on the web, I decided to go back to basics. In this recipe, I'm going with a fairly simple rub of salt and the basic Mexican spices, with just a light drizzling of lime. The final destination of my current batch of carne asada is tacos over the coming week, but nibbling on the pieces as I was slicing the steaks confirmed that it would be delicious as a steak dinner, served with rice and beans, or used in burritos or fajitas.

I already planned on having the smoker going today to make some pulled pork, and decided to try smoking the meat for carnitas, instead of going for the more traditional lard cooked, or the more recent roasting. I'm glad that I did, because it's some of the best and easiest carnitas I've ever had. It wasn't quite as moist as the lard cooked, but the smoke added a lot more flavor.

I really doubt that I will make smoked carnitas if I'm not already planning on smoking something else, but I think that I will pick up a small roast whenever I'm planning on smoking another pork product. It might also work out with some turkey or chicken smokes, since they tend to use similar woods. I don't think It would turn out very good smoking it with beef because of the harsher smoke that comes with mesquite.

After smoking some ribs for Christmas Eve, and portlandpiper told me he was planning on pizza for Christmas Day, I decided to try making some pizza with the leftover ribs. Sometimes ideas in the kitchen work out way better than planned, and this is one of those times. The juicy shreds of pork, with the spicy sweet dry rub on the ends, made for an incredibly tasty pizza. I went light on the sauce, and chose smoked mozzarella, cheddar and provolone as my cheeses of choice. Pizza restaurants are really missing out by not including this on their menu.

I'm not including any specific quantities in this recipe, because people all seem to have their own preferences when making pizzas. I've included links to my crust and sauce recipes if you want to try my favorites.

Several years ago, my girlfriend had to give up wheat for a while, and we discovered the wonderful flavor of spelt. Spelt is a wheat relative whose proteins are just different enough from those in wheat, that some people with wheat sensitivity can eat it. She can eat wheat again, but for a lot of things, we prefer the flavor of spelt, and this is one of them.

I've made variations on this recipe several times in the past, and decided that it would be a good choice to inaugurate my new smoker. On Christmas Eve, with snow all around and the temperatures hovering right at freezing, the thermostatically controlled, insulated smoker did an amazing job. This is a straight forward, simple dry rub recipe that I adapted from the Smoke & Spice cookbook for my slightly spicier tastes. When I make this recipe, I usually make half of it dry, and the other half gets a BBQ sauce mop during the last hour of cooking. Why pick wet or dry when you can have both?

I was introduced to the Greek version of french fries when I went to a festival at a Greek Orthodox church a few years back, and it has now become my favorite way to eat fries. There are lots of different viewpoints about the proper way to prepare the fries, sliced into thick chips, cut into wedges, cooked in olive oil, baked, etc. I'm not going to get into that battle in this recipe, I like them all sorts of ways. While I love to make them with potato wedges, for a quick snack I'll resort to frozen french fries in the toaster oven, and they fill the need just fine. That's just the way I made them today to hold me over till dinner time. I'm not giving any quantities because it will depend on how many potatoes you make and your taste.

This was one of my mom's favorite Christmas cookies when I was growing up. At the time, I would eat a few, but preferred sweater cookies. As I got older, I found myself gravitating more and more the the spritz. This year, during a snowstorm I really got a craving for them, so I went on a quest to find a half-way decent cookie press during a break in the weather, so I could make some spritz. I lucked out and found one on sale at Kohl's, and set to work to restart the tradition.

Spritz has got to be one of the easiest cookies to make. The only concerns are that the dough doesn't get too warm, and that it is the right consistency to work with your cookie press.

A lighter version of chicken paprikash.

A soft and rich loaf that is great toasted with a bit of butter or battered and pan fried for French toast.

I picked up some really nice tomatillos from Dave this past week and turned them into some delicious salsa. This salsa is great as a sauce on eggs, chicken, and pork. It can also be used as a base for a tomatillo soup and is a nice addition to green chile.

For me tomatillo salsa has to be kept simple. I have seen and tasted many recipes that include many extra spices and seasonings, including sugar, and they all taste wrong. Use fresh ingredients and treat them right and you will be rewarded.

Freeze the extra in small containers or ice cube trays for use throughout the winter.