pot roast ... err beef burgundy ... bah one of the two!

I made a pot roast yesterday that came out very good. I didn't get any pictures because 1) my camera was low on battery and 2) i forgot. The basic recipe is the same one I use for pot roast most often. Chuck Roast, seared with saltnpepper, onions and broth with a couple bay leaves and a few random spices into the oven at 350 for an hour with a cover, remove the cover for an hour and then add veggies for the last hour covered. Veggies included carrots, potatoes, rutabaga (yellow turnip), and mushrooms. Remove everything, fish out the mushrooms and set aside ... strain the juices into a pan and reduce and thicken slightly with corn starch then reintroduce the mushrooms to the finished gravy. The variation this time was I seperated the potatoes out of the veggie mix after cooking and mashed them to serve under the gravy and serve like a beef burgundy rather than a north eastern pot roast dinner. I also went down the burgundy line by adding about 1/3 a bottle of pinot noir to the broth to begin with and another 2/3 cup during reduction of the sauce. As a bonus I served the remaining wine with dinner (to michelle who will actually drink wine, I won't) and she liked it( doublt odd is that it's a red and shes not fond of reds in general).

cookies.... more cookies .. and did i mention cookies?

Since Thursday the thing to do around our house has been .. mix, roll, buy ingredients for, cool, bake, package, sample, burn (my fault there) and decorate cookies. I think we are approaching 20 types... not dozen but types and usually atleast 2 or 3 dozen of each type. Here are some pics.


Cookies cooling (some biscotti on the bottom there)


Some finished in a box waiting to be divided amongst the shipping containers.



Just so the doggies aren't completely left out these were leftover spritz cookies that Michelle put carob drops on and baked. Lu and Gideon can't be left out of the cooking ya know!

so umm maybe i need to update this more... Green chile turkey stew

I seem to be having issues keeping this up to date....

After having had a couple of thanksgiving meals (a small one i cooked at home for just us and one at a friend's house) the thought of turkey was starting to get old but I still had some turkey meat leftover. I decided to make some stew.

Green Chile Turkey n Dumplings
the recipe isn't real exact .... potatoes, carrots, onion, green beans, chicken broth, leftover turkey, salt, pepper, bay leaves, thyme, parsley, Bisquick... umm some other stuff if you have it ...




Green Chile Turkey N Dumplings


A single serving

bah! updates .. i always forget... some food!

Friday night was bad on the healthy eating scale but so good on the tasty meter. Salt Lick in Round Rock. Shorter drive now yay! .. and booooo for wastelien and wallet.


This weekend we went to Boerne (you might think that is pronounced like born ... but you would be wrong .. its bernie, liek Weekend at Bernies) for a yarn/wool thingy at the fairgrounds there. Kinda neat but lame too, no easily accessible llamas to pet, what's the point? While there we had some decent sausages at a restaurant called the Dodging Duck. Really good pretzel too. Before leaving for Boerne we stopped at the farm stand that is usually in Jonestown on saturday mornings but this week was at their farm, love their fresh veggies. Check them out at http://angelvalleyfarms.com/. Sunday evening I cooked some of the veggies and a pork chop (pic below)


Roasted Beets onions and tomatoes. Tomatoes were topped with an asian greens mix that had been saute'd with a small amount of butter and onions. Pork chop was a thick cut butterfly loin with olive oil salt and pepper.


I worked from home on Monday and wanted to use up some meatballs I got at IKEA and one of my favorite meatball recipes aside from spaghetti is meatball stroganoff. This isn't really a classic stroganoff recipe but it does have sour cream in the sauce and looks kinda brownish gray. Tasty though. I was out of egg noodles (my favotrite stroganoff starch) so I made some from scratch and they came out fairly good, next time i will run them through the pasta press one more time after they have been cut fromt eh sheets to make them thinner but the flavor was decent. Pic of finished noodles drying below

weekend food, no pics ...

Saturday
Breakfast: oatmeal and grapefruit
Lunch: Kobe, VERY good but expensive, we shared and entree and still paid about $40.
Dinner: I forget, probably ate though

Sunday
Breakfast: umm, juice maybe?
Lunch: Dim Sum at Chinatown in north Austin (Mopac and Greystone) awesome, but again expensive
Dinner: umm, continued to digest lunch

Working from home... oh look a kitchen!!!

Working from home has a lot of perks and a few minuses... One of the great eprks is that my kitchen is like 30 feet away. Today's breakfast woudl normally have been something snagged from teh fridge or more than likely fast food on teh way in to the office but today I made myself 2 breakfast tacos from fresh tortillas from HEB, eggs, cheddar cheese, leftover hash (butternut squash, potatoes, onions and elgin sausage) and some hatch chiles. Lunch was another shot at ratatouille which came out much mroe stew like and less soupy. yay for working from home!


hatchy bfast tacos


ratatouille v2.0

Freebirds

Those of you in Austin (hmm ok so the one person who reads this might be in Austin) will probably have heard of Freebirds. They are one of the measures for lunchtime overstuffed burritos. They make have more options and the environment inside their restaurants is much warmer than Chipotle. While I was in the Boston area working for the past 9 months or so apparently someone finally pulled their heads outa the sand and opened a new Freebirds just down the street from my office. Makes life much better when there is a close by lunch place that isn't Taco Deli, Mangia or the Cafe (ok so if you know anything about Austin, there are a ton of other close by restaurants near IBM on Burnet, but I wanted something fast and good and NOT McDonalds. Next time I think a 1/2 bird is in order though because the full Freebird (not the Monster) is just more than I can comfortably eat. Gone are the days when I could eat that much. The other bit of good news is the same new shopping center that has Freebirds also has a Firehouse subs. That is on the list for later this week, they make very decent subs, though if it were a Deleware Subshop I would have been describing a steak and cheese to you and expressing my thoughts about the proper way to make one instead of spouting off about burritos.