Hobbit Stew

I have several friends that are really good cooks, at least their pictures of food look AMAZING!  And sometimes I'm lucky enough to get a recipe! Today is one of those days!  My friend Derek has made this stew before and I'm pretty sure I drooled on my phone and begged for the recipe....yesterday he wrote it out and tagged me in the post!  So tonight we are eating Hobbit Stew!

Cooking enough for an army.

Maybe it's the time of year, or maybe it's just me being pregnant and knowing that in a few months I'm not going to want to do much cooking....but I have started putting together some freezer meals that can just be pulled out and cooked, or reheated.  I'm also making some to take up to a neighbor that has recently had her first child.  Pinterest is full of yummy recipes, and I am starting to re-organize my "food stuffs" board into categories like Poultry, Beef, Pork and Venison.  Today I am making Slow Cooker Kalua Pig which when done will give me several servings to eat, and to freeze!  This recipe is also from the Paleo diet if that matters to anyone.

Recipes are guidelines, right?

I've said it before.  I hardly ever follow a recipe exactly.  Even when baking I add more spices than required because I love flavors!  Tonight my pregnant self decided to try a new recipe I found on Pinterest.  The name of the blog that featured this yummy photo is Bacon, Butter, Cheese & Garlic.  The recipe?  Baked Italian Chicken And let me tell you, the picture is SUPER enticing! See?

baconbuttercheesegarlic.blogspot.com

You want to make it now too don't you?  And remember I'm pregnant, duh, so any blog that features some of my favorite ingredients must be a hit!  The only issue I had with this when I started gathering my ingredients was that I noticed that the recipe doesn't include bacon....an oversight I'm sure!  I also switched out minced garlic for the garlic powder.

The artichokes are being drained...hence the reason they are not pictured

So I decided to add bacon!  It is a common pairing with chicken (at least in my house), so why not?

While the bacon was starting to cook I got to chopping....onions and tomatoes

The onions go into the pan with the bacon and the mushrooms (I got the pre-sliced)

While those are cooking I put the chicken in a pan...

And melted the cream cheese and mixed in everything else, and ran out of room in my bowl to add the spinach, so I just covered the chicken with it...

Then topped it with the cheesy-bacony-yummy sauce!

And popped it in the oven at 350, for 30 minutes...I think it is going to take a lot longer than 30 minutes, I checked it halfway through and the chicken is still VERY raw looking.....we shall see...in the meantime I am having a VERY hard time not eating the other half of the Italian bread I purchased to go on the side....VERY hard....

Once I determined we would actually be able to eat this meal sometime tonight...I started the Linguine I am serving the chicken on. And put the garlic bread in the oven.   And sprinkled the shredded cheese all over the top of the dish!

Next time I am going to brown the chicken in whatever is leftover from the bacon onion and mushroom pan....give it a head-start to cooking!  But this time, I'm just going to chow down, because I'm hungry and this smells soooooo good!!!!

Enjoy!

It'll kill you!

Looking back over the years I fondly remember a professor I had my senior year of college.  He was my Residential and Commercial Construction/Auto CAD teacher, and almost every day like clockwork, we as a class learned about something new that could kill you, from faulty buildings, to lightning, to radiation...and my favorite, Cast Iron pans.  Cast iron pans are heavy, but he didn't mean that getting beaned upside the head would do you in, it was the fact that the metal expanded, trapped food particles in the voids when it cools and then allowed those particles to rot before releasing them the next time you used your pan.  I believe that day we were discussing the properties of metals used in construction... This has not stopped me from using my various cast iron pans.  I LOVE my cast iron pans!!!  The more I use my pans for various dishes, the better I get at using them!!!  And having a cast iron scraper (or two) has made the total difference in how often I use them!!!

Front and back of a scraper, love this thing!

Last night I found a recipe for fried apple pies...of course I decided to use my small round cast iron skillet.

And they turned out soooooo good!!!

So this morning I got out some leftover meats and made up some breakfast bowls.  Start by baking your tater tots, or crispy crowns, or regular hashbrowns.  If you ever have leftover french fries from a restaurant, you can rough cut those up and throw them in the oven for this breakfast too.  I found tater tots in the freezer, so that's what I decided to use!  While those are baking chop up whatever meats you want to use.  I had some delicious ham from our neighbor, and some sausage links leftover.  There are two pans, because I didn't want sausage, and he didn't want garlic or basil.

 

You don't want to start warming the meat in your skillet(s) until your potatoes are almost done.  You can put whatever extras in that you want, mushrooms, onions, peppers, other veggies.  Sky is the limit, whatever you taste buds are wishing for!  Once the meat is warm and a bit browned, then push it off to the side and add your eggs.  He likes his yolks runny, I'm a scrambled or fried over hard girl.

While the eggs are cooking the tots should be done.  Divide them into the bowls (or one bowl if you are flying solo) and top with a cheese of your choice,  his is cheese slices, mine is an italian mix.

Once the eggs are done add them to the bowl, top with the meat/veggies, and of course more cheese!

Then dig in and enjoy!

This is why you should plan ahead!

Last year we purchased a quarter of a cow.  I was sooo sure that we would go through that in a years time...well this last year has flown by and we still have quite a bit of meat in the deep freezer.  So I pulled the brisket out of the freezer because the sky is getting dark and it's gonna rain...so no grilling!  I found a recipe I wanted to try (click here) and I realized that making a brisket is an easy 24 hour process!  I used my microwave's defrost mode to get it started defrosting and gathered the rest of my ingredients.  I did not follow the recipe exactly, I substituted a lot of the seasonings.  I used onion powder, celery salt, Durango Hickory Smoked Salt, minced garlic and a secret ingredient.

Every recipe I read said to line the pan with foil, and I used three layers to make sure that cleanup would be easy.

< Meat goes in the pan

Then cover with liquid smoke >

and sprinkle on the rest of the seasonings.

then cover with foil and let it marinade overnight...the next day pour off the liquid smoke and add a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. And by a few dashes I mean cover it with liquid.

This gets put in the oven at 250 for six hours, I cooked mine from 8:30am till 4pm, 7 1/2 hours total

The original recipe says to  pull the foil off, pour a bottle of BBQ sauce on it and bake it for another hour . But I didn't want BBQ, so I left it off and as I stated before, it was baking for over seven hours.

So yummy I couldn't stop tasting this!!!

I used the liquid that was left from baking it as a gravy, and served this delicious meat with mashed potatoes, corn and toast.

Enjoy!

When in doubt add bacon...

Roasted garlic is delicious...and bacon roasted garlic sounds even better!

There are two ways to roast garlic, in the skins cutting the top of the garlic bulb off, or by peeling each clove of garlic...Either way you decide to go, it's gonna be yummy!  I set my oven at 375

I wanted to maximize my garlic output so I peeled three bulbs of garlic

I then grabbed my jar of bacon renderings from the bacon jam and heated up a few scoops so it would liquefy

I lined a pan with foil, put the garlic in the bottom and then poured the bacon renderings over the cloves. sprinkling with Durango smoked sea salt from Spice Agent (tell them I sent ya) and some black pepper.

Seal the foil packet and pop in the oven

40 minutes later

YUMMY GOODNESS!!!

I'm going to stick these beautiful gems in a jar, in the fridge...and will use them later this week when I make my bacon garlic and mushroom pasta dish...stay tuned!

God gave us food, the Devil gave us recipes!

Tea towel by Peg's Pantry

Oh how true.  And tonight it no exception!  I am making Coq au vin, thanks to my mom mentioning that it had...wait for it...bacon in it...and then turned my cook book to that page before she left today...so why not?

So I will be making the above, with green beans and potatoes on the side. I started by washing my vegetables and thawing my chicken.

I washed it all at the same time...

Make the Bouquet Garni

Fry the bacon....and while that is frying I chopped all of the veggies for the main dish and the side dish.

I never get tired of pictures of bacon frying...

Coat the chicken in the flour mixture then it's time to brown the chicken in those yummy yummy bacon drippings!

Add the onion and mushroom (I also added the carrots)

Add the remaining ingredients










Simmer for 1 hour.  It already smells DEVINE!




In the meantime I have the cast iron skillet with bacon, butter and onion starting to cook in the oven, with the yukon gold potatoes on top of it all.

With only 25 minutes left to cook I added the green beans on top of the potatoes and stirred it up as best I could to get everything coated in bacon and butter.

Serve it all together on a plate!

Enjoy!!!

Another way to eat bacon

Today is going to be a WONDERFUL day!  Why you ask?  Because right now there is a large cast iron dutch oven in my oven being seasoned

oooh, smoky!

And that means my blog readers...that today is the day...the day we have all been waiting for (well I know several people have been waiting for it).  I have thought about this day, and waited until I had everything I needed (the cast iron dutch oven) and today I will be making...dun dun dunnnnnn...

BACON JAM!!!!  (click here for recipe)

At 1:47pm I gathered all of my ingredients...I decided to double the recipe. And use 4oz jars, so that way I get 10 whole jars (which turned into 11, plus another spoonful...).  Especially because my partner in crime, her boss, my bestie, and my local cousin all want some...

Start with a non stick skillet and fry the bacon up in small batches then set aside...

And watch out for the hazards of cooking over 4 lbs of bacon...the trip hazards...otherwise known as my dogs.

After all 4 pounds of bacon have been fried (I finished a little after 3:30 pm), throw in the onion (I used Vidalia because that's my favorite onion) and the garlic and cook on medium heat until the onion is translucent, takes about 10-15 minutes.

I chose to use the metal sieve to drain the grease from the onion and garlic, and I am saving it for other cooking adventures...

Now bring out the cast iron dutch oven and put the 1 inch chunks of bacon, the onion and garlic and the rest of the ingredients (sans water) on the hot burner and simmer for 4.5 hours...stirring every 25-30 minutes (and adding 1/4 cup water if needed at that time)  I went ahead and set alarms on my phone to remind me to stir every 30 minutes, and then the final alarm at 4.5 hours to finish processing...It's going to be after 10pm before this is done and in jars...I wonder if this could be altered to be done in a crock pot...maybe next time...

Well it's FINALLY done, well done cooking!






Now time to put it bit by bit into my food processor so it can blend till semi-smooth.

Because it's done in batches I put it all into another bowl, so I can do the final tasting and add the honey...

The it's into a large collander for 20 minutes to let whatever liquid is still around drain off...

And drumroll please...into the jars...

Now to put this on breakfast biscuits, sammaches, hamburgers and anything else that bacon goes on!


Till next time!  ENJOY!