A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Robin Miller's Upside Down Pizza

I don't necessarily like a lot of Robin Miller's recipes but I do like the techniques she uses.  I'm the same way about Sandra Lee.  I don't have anything personally against either one of them but I can't claim to be a huge fan either.  With Robin, I like the idea of being organized and prepping meals for the week rather than playing it by the seat of my pants from night to night. Without a little plan going in my head I end up ordering in or going out for pick-up too much.  With Sandra I like the idea of applying my efforts to the amount of time I have vs. what will make me crazy in the kitchen.  When I have time to make from scratch, I do it. When I don't. I cut corners where I can. Nothing wrong with buying a rotisserie chicken to use in recipes.

Gene and I were cruising channels one day with the satellite on Robin Miller when she started making this Upside Down Pizza. She said a friend of hers had given her the recipe and that it's perfect for potlucks or casual entertaining.  GENE said "That looks interesting."  It ended up on our dinner table that night.

I have to say it was fun. And quick.  I'm adding it in to my recipe box for the occasional dinner.

Pizza isn't hard but this had the advantage of being pretty quick so it's perfect for nights when I really don't want to cook. We used sausage, onions, black olives, and mushrooms but I can see how you could literally add anything that appeals to you.  Personally, next time I'd love to add cubes of ham, pepperoni, and pineapple, my favorite pizza.

And one note about the recipe vs. photo.  The recipe calls for using a 9"x13" pan but I used something smaller than that, maybe 8"x10" so my dish came out taller and juicier. For a more pizza-like casserole be sure to use the size pan given.

The Comfort Foods Keep on Playing

Last night we had taco casserole for dinner that our neighbor gave me the recipe. I'm sure this is something that everyone but me has but I'll give the recipe after the click anyway.  I was thinking last night that I'm kind of the anti-casserole queen and I was wondering why.  When I was growing up my mom made a few casseroles but not that many. She's not with us anymore so she's not around to ask why. I'm not sure if she didn't like making them, or more likely, if it was because dad was such a meat and potatoes kind of guy. We ate a lot of fried chicken, pork chops, ribs, etc., with separate potatoes and veggies. Then, in my adult life I did a dozen years in the hotel business, mostly in convention and banquet planning, so again, my whole menu planning experience was all about thinking in terms of entree:  steaks, chicken, chops, veal, etc., starch side:  rice, potatoes, pasta, etc., and vegetable sides, the more high falutin' the better. 

So now, here I am an old lady in my 40's :-) suddenly during these few weeks of crappy weather carnage on a child-like joyous quest for simple casserole comfort food recipes because, quite frankly, I'm really enjoying making and eating them. It's giving Gene and I a whole new dining experience.  Sometimes you simply get bored and want something different for a while so I've been going back to the more comforting one casserole dish type meals with gusto.  Okay, albeit, going back to them only with better vegetables and less Campbell's soup than what I'm told on most of the recipes, I admit. My chicken and rice the other night had no soup in it and all fresh veggies and it was very good. I'll be making it again. It's perfect and perfectly easy, especially with going back to work and having less time to spend in the kitchen. 

This taco casserole recipe, I'm sure, has been in a million women's magazines but I got it from the neighbor. It was simple, quick, and really tasty, sort of a cross between chili and frito chili pie. Best of all, it used up the half bag of tortilla chips I was sick of looking at on the counter.

The Poetic Dance of Comfort Food

Mine and Gene's week of comfort food continues, as does the cleanup outside our front window in the city.  We just heard a press conference from the mayor that they're down to a little less than 20,000 homes without power, over one hundred stop lights are fully functional, 19 are flashing, and only 9 are still dark.  We did hoot and "holler" at still being a small town at heart when our Sheriff got up with his report to say that they had caught thieves who had tried to steal the generators from railroad crossings (power to the crossing arms and warning lights) to sell and he actually called them, on local tv, "low-life scumbags" and announced that he's going to have their names printed in the local paper after charges are filed so that everyone will know who they are what danger they put everyone in.  I love our Sheriff. He brooks no bulls***.  They've announced drop off spots for the debris but asked people to not clean up yet, until the temps warm up and the ice melts so that people aren't under limbs that might continue to come crashing down.  So in small steps our world is coming back to normal.

Our friend James, one of the unlucky ones still without power, came over last night to catch up some laundry and share a home cooked meal.  When you've been without power for almost a week, even a humble chicken and rice casserole hits the spot. And then when I served him warm chocolate cake with cinnamon ice cream...he felt he could go back and face his house.  He does have a generator to run the furnace so he has heat, and we did offer to let him stay with us but he insisted he wanted to sleep in his own bed. I understand that.

Hope everyone is safe and warm and eating well.

Bad Weather Equals Comfort Food in Our House

Because of the weather, not only did I work my normal weekend last weekend, I also worked overtime trying to help out with the staff shortages. Of course there were lots of people who live outside town who weren't able to come in.  So now that I'm off for a few days I decided to go back to our comfort roots and treat Gene to some of his favorite meals. Especially since he had sit at home by himself playing solitaire by gas firelight, eating whatever he could scrounge, the one day we were without power.  I teased him on the phone that day from work asking if he remembered how to play solitaire with an actual deck of cards. He laughed and said it took a few minutes but it's like riding a bike, you eventually remember the feel of the cards in your hand instead of the click of the mouse.

Last night was Salisbury steak with cream gravy, succotash which I've shown here before, mashed red potatoes with skins, and garlic bread sticks from the freezer.  You would have thought I'd served him a 5-star meal. It's always amazing and slightly confusing to me how the meals we grew up making our mother's sides, the ones that we cook on autopilot and choose because we really don't feel like putting effort into cooking for whatever reason, those are the meals that get the ravest reviews at my house.  Sure, when I go all out, Gene is appreciative.  But the biggest literal gut satisfaction is from the basic southern comfort food we grew up on.  There is something soul-satisfying about eating the food of our youth, although Gene being a smart and sweet man, tells me all the time I'm a much better cook than his mother.  :-)

Oven Baked Fried Chicken...that's the ticket

Gene and I are still up to our sinuses in the respiratory infection so we're still big babies about food.  We're not eating much during the day because we can't smell which equals not being able to taste which equals not being really hungry until our stomachs rumble loudly at dinner time. And then what do we want? Comfort food, of course.  Last night was oven baked fried chicken and mashed potatoes. 

There is no real recipe for this but I do make it a little differently, I think, than most people. It is a lighter version of fried chicken than being completely immersed, deep fried, but the object in mine isn't really so much to strip all the calories as it is to make it as tender and juicy and easy on me as possible. 

Last night, I used thighs and I didn't skin them.  They're dipped in salted flour and then milk and then a half flour/half bread crumb mix that's seasoned with salt, pepper, and cayenne.  Then they're browned in just a couple of tablespoons of expeller pressed canola oil on the stove top before being baked in the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  The outside retains the crispy while the inside is tender and juicy.  This is Gene's favorite meal in the whole world.

Just in case you were wondering. Yes, I made him cream gravy with the skillet drippings to go with the mashed potatoes. Not brown gravy as we laughingly fight over with our friend from Boston. Brown gravy is for roast beef.  Cream gravy is for fried chicken and mashed potatoes. She'd never heard of making gravy with cream (or milk) until she moved to St. Louis.  In truth I used fat free half and half, not real cream but you know what I mean. It works and tastes the same.

Real Cake for Real People

This is how we do real cake at our house. We both had a sweet tooth after dinner last night and the only thing that would satisfy it was cake.  The obvious choice was brownies but neither of us wanted chocolate.  Was it decorated cake? Of course not. Was it from scratch? Oh no, that would take too much time.  Was it frosted?  Bite your tongue.  But was it delicious?  Oh honey...you know the really moist leavings on the cake platter after you cut a piece of cake? That little film of cake goo that we all scrape up with the cake server, lick off, and roll our eyes back into our heads and think "I wish I had a plate full of THAT?"  Yeah, that's what this cake is like eating. 

And here's how I do it.  I take a Betty Crocker yellow cake mix. Forget the directions. Add 2 large whole eggs, 1/2 cup no sugar added applesauce, 1/3 cup sour cream, 1/2 cup expeller pressed canola oil, 1/3 cup water, 2 tsp almond extract, and 1 Tbsp pure vanilla extract.  Beat on medium speed with a mixer for 2 minutes. Pour into a greased 9"x13" pan and bake on 240 degrees convection (sorry, I have and only bake cakes using convection so I don't know the times on standard, start with this and go from there, watching carefully) for 20 minutes or until the pinch test shows the cake is still gooey on top but the structure is set up underneath. See my cake baking rules from my previous posts here.  When the cake has partially cooled or as each piece is served, dollop a spoonful of your favorite ice cream sundae caramel on top.  No frosting needed.

My way of doing this, as opposed to following Betty's directions, changes the chemistry of the cake in that less water makes for less leavening reaction so less rise. The applesauce and fat from the sour cream and extra oil create a denser cake with a coarser crumb.  And the slightly lower temp and watching the baking time keep the cake nice and moist. Perfect for more of what they marketed as a "snack" cake in the 70's, rather than a wedding cake type cake.  Maybe coffee cake texture is a better description.  Don't care.  Yummy works for me.  After it cooled, Gene was in the living room with the pan in one hand and a fork in the other hand while he watched Mandy Patinkin in Criminal Minds.  His theory was "Why dirty a plate?"  It's half gone this morning.  That's all the compliment I need.

WOBAT Round up #3 End of August

This WOBAT round up is going to be short and sweet because it's August and even though I personally didn't go on a long vacation and I don't have children going back to school, everyone else does.  But I'm figuratively there with all of the rest of you folks. Where has this month gone? It has flown by for everyone I've talked to in the last week. I can't believe it's Labor Day Weekend and the kids are back in school.

So the point of all that rambling is that we only have two entries this time for round-up and I just barely got mine done or Sher would have been on her own for MY event. 

When you get a chance, wander over to What Did You Eat for Sher's delicious Potato Chip Crusted Wild Salmon filet, her excuse to buy her once a year allotment of potato chips.  You can almost smell it through the computer screen.  Doesn't that look divine?  Make it, tell the food snob in you that it's Panko and to shut the heck up, and enjoy it.

Here at A Fridge Full of Food, my entry is that good old standby taken right off the back of the Knorr (or Lipton) dehydrated vegetable soup mix box:  Spinach Dip It's a simple throw together dip that's embarassingly easy but I've never had a party where the bowl wasn't empty at the end of the night and, as common as it has become, there's always one person in the crowd who's never heard of it.  (There's also a recipe for Washington Apple Martinis on the same page.)

WOBAT Round up Mid August

We've traveled a far distance culinarily for this WOBAT, everywhere from Braunschweiger to Fried Okra to Fritos to Cool Whip.  Take a little tour with me.

Sher, over at What Did You Eat? chose to put together a Bibb lettuce salad with Fried Okra croutons and buttermilk dressing. She mentions that most people find okra to be obnoxious in any form and I can attest to that too. Personally, I love it, but in college about a million years ago, I had Canadian roommates who had never heard of it and wished they'd never heard of it even after I served it to them.

Pat at Up a Creek Without a PATL chose to make rich velvety chocolate fudge pudding but she admits that she picked a Cooking Light recipe specifically to avoid the egg yolks and heavy cream of the real thing.  She also mentions that the pudding would be great layered as parfait with ribbons of that WOBAT staple, that's right my friends, the big CW, Cool Whip.

Incidentally, Cool Whip was born the same year I was, 1965. No wonder it was thought of as manna from heaven during my childhood growing up in the 70's. It was the new uber-cool kid on the block as far as convenience for home cooks.

And from here at A Fridge Full of Food, I served up two WOBAT recipes:  Braunschweiger Pate' and home-made Frito Chili Pie, which both make me think of that old Heehaw skit "What's for dinner, Grandpa?"

The next WOBAT round up will be at the end of the month. Anyone who would like to participate, please send your blog links or your recipes and photos if you have them to me at Marie9949(at)sbcglobal(dot)net by August 31st. 

Oh MY! Frito Chili Pie in the Sky! Mid-month WOBAT

For mid-month WOBAT, I made Frito Chili Pie:

It may be obnoxious in concept but don't even think about trying to tell me it doesn't look yummy to the tummy.  As digustingly fat-riddled and bad for you as it can be at times, like when you go get it from Sonic, you don't have to make it out of a can and it can lean more towards a taco salad kind of meal.

This is my little variation on the theme. I started with my idea of Frito Chili Pie from childhood, which is almost a camping phenomenon where you heat up canned chili and spoon in into individual Frito bags and eat it right out of the bag, and then made a left turn at a casserole recipe a roommate of mine in college (the first time), cough-twenty-cough years ago, used to make called Sour Cream Chili Bake, and ended up with what Gene and I ate for dinner last night.  No way could it be considered "diet" but take a look at how I made it and see if you don't agree that Frito Pie might have gotten a bit of an unfair bad rep over the years from people making it with obnoxious ingredients.

Some Thoughts on Church Basement Recipes & WOBAT

Life is too short to lock yourself into any one style of anything. I know there's a way of thinking out there that dictates that, in life, you have to dress to fit an image, have a career, spouse, car, home, 2.5 kids, etc., or whatever it takes to fulfill that image people see of themselves.  I understand it but it's not my way of thinking.  I see it much more simply:  live everything, taste everything, be everything, experience everything. Life is too short and too incredible to bypass any thing, any experience, or anyone just because we don't think they fit into a mold we've created of ourselves.

Food is one of those things.  There is everything great and wonderful and inspiring about working an organic home garden, shopping at farmer's markets and co-ops, dining in the finest, most chi-chi restaurants, etc..  Let me repeat that.  There is everything desirable about striving to eat the freshest and most natural of foods, and of being in awe of all that is unique in each other's cultures.  Expanding one's taste repertoire is something we should all be invested in, BUT, along the way to meet the wizard, I caution you not to miss out on pleasures in your own backyard in Kansas.  In food, the backyard Kansas dishes are what I respectfully call Church Basement Recipes. 

Please don't mistake my intentions and tone here in writing.  I don't mean to sound chideful at all, maybe rather re-mindful to myself more than anyone else that some of the best things in life really are simple, uncool, and unpretentious.  Yes, we should go out of our way to cultivate expansive tastes and we should seek the freshest and most unique in food and food culture, but food culture, like the tortes from my old cake decorating days, have many layers and some of them are not the stars of the cake, they're the structure holding it all together.  As I have said at another time and in another place, the A-list anything has my complete and total admiration, but the D-list is no less fascinating to me. 

Church Basement recipes are the D-listers and structure in food life. These are the recipes you see at every potluck, in every family gathering, and on the dinner tables of some of the best amateur cooks I have known.  They're usually simple, prepared from ingredients easy to find in any market, and are as unpretentious and down home as Paula Deen. Quite frankly, that's why I like her and enjoy watching her butter drenched shows.  She so reminds me of my mom and aunts getting together to make a holiday meal.  She's the Church Basement Recipe Poster Girl, and I'm not being sarcastic. I say that with utter adoration for someone who has created a career out of stepping in front of a camera, being authentically herself, and having the guts to say with gusto that pickled okra, smashed white bread, and cream cheese sandwiches are not only tasty, but "worth the weight" tasty.  And it's not even that I don't believe her.  Paula's never led me astray.  It's that I admire her cojones to tell the truth as she sees it and to be her giggly, buttery self all the way.  I honestly don't know that the food snob in me could be that bold but I'm working on it.

Just as an aside, Sandra Lee, does nothing for me. I find her neither charming, nor real, nor...anything. Where Paula knows who she is and calls her food style what it is: down-home and unpretentious, Sandra's gig is big sweet pile of nothing but a good paycheck. Nothing wrong with a good paycheck but her slipshod, slap it together and serve it up on the gauche tablecloth method doesn't work for me.  I personally don't bear her any ill will. I admire anyone who can land a good gig.  But I don't get it. 

That brings me to why I created WOBAT: Weekend Obnoxious But Amazingly Tasty food blogging.  I want to always remember that above and beyond everything else, food is just food and it's fun.  It is art and it is life but it's still just food. Berries off the bush and lettuce picked off the ground are food.  It's the combinations and preparation that bring along the wonder.  Actually, I have to take that last statement back. I've container gardened for a few years and I will say there is infinite wonder and awe in watching a seed sprout and a plant grow that beats any food show or event I've ever attended so what I said before wasn't really accurate.  But you know what I mean. 

After spending my first career planning banquets and always attending to the most impressive, I now like to remind myself once in a while that there's a reason kids play with their food-- Because it's fun.  WOBAT is my way of remembering that little nugget about life.  Food is meant to be joyous.  Joyous as in all definitions from the religiously pure and sublime to the giggling snort of "No way! Ya gotta taste THIS!". 

So in that tradition I give you the second WOBAT: Weekend Obnoxious But Amazingly Tasty food and this time from me it's all about good old Oscar Mayer Braunschweiger.  I found this recipe for "Braunschweiger Pate'" in our local Junior League cookbook. It made me laugh. Pate.  Uh huh.  Technically, pate is simply any spread made from finely chopped or blended and seasoned meat.  So TECHNICALLY this recipe is pate', but let's be real. This is a down-home fun dip.  And it is tasty. I have never served this at any party that I didn't get asked for the recipe and that's even by people who think they hate liver. By the way, the rosemary lavosh is excellent with this.

Follow the jump to get the recipe.

And for anyone interested in joining me in Weekend Obnoxious But Amazingly Tasty blogging, just send your links to me at Marie9949 (at sign) sbcglobal (dot) net by Sunday evening about 6pm central time to be in the round up on Monday.  Anyone who wants to join but doesn't have a blog, just send your recipe (and photos if you have them) to the same email address and I'll post them for you.  Don't forget--this is all about having fun!