Who else’s pantry is running low? Despite several quick trips to the market for essentials, my pantry is starting to feel mundane. I’m sure you’re feeling the same way. There’s only so many more times I can have spaghetti or taco night.
Well our friends at Epicurious Magazine are feeling the same way and developed an awesome new tool. Check out the Pantry Recipe Finder.
Select what you have from either Pantry or Freezer items (red circles) and fresh ingredients (brown circles). There’s even an option for dietary restrictions (blue circles). Then, based on what you select, the site digs through a library of recipes to help you pick a recipe.
I thought it was super cool. Hopefully you can try it out. If you do, let me know what you cook!
After many weeks of working – what feels like – non-stop, Jeremie and I took a break. We have some friends who have land way out in Grand Junction, Tenn. with a pond stocked full of fishies. Jeremie had been out there before, but this time, I needed a mental break and asked to come along.
Saturday was gorgeous a perfect 55 and sunny day with a little bit of a breeze. We got up, packed our lunches, and headed eastward. Grand Junction is about an hour or so outside of Memphis, so it felt like we were on a trip, complete with road trip snacks and songs.
We spent the day enjoying the beautiful weather and simply fishing. Jeremie grew up fishing and when we started dating, I had little interest or experience in the fishing world. But I know this is something he loves, so I thought I would give it a try. On our engagement trip to California, we were able to go deep sea fishing and I caught my first fish — ever!
Since our fishing trip on the open sea, I have gone out with him a couple of times, but never had any luck. That changed on Saturday, thanks to Doug’s well-stocked pond. We took home SIX catfish! While I might have reeled them in, we absolutely caught these together, since he had the task of pulling them in with the net and unhooking the lines. And in the process of helping me, missed several of his own fish.
I now completely understand why fishing appeals so much to him, and why over Thanksgiving weekend he tends to escape to the Tennessee River when we are with my family. It’s just you, some fresh air, the quiet and your line. I won’t always tag along with Jeremie on his trips, but I needed some of that therapy on Saturday.
For an added bonus, we had ourselves a good ole fish fry for dinner on Sunday evening. Doesn’t get much better than fish you just caught.
Jeremie took care of the the fish, but I got to make the hush puppies – my favorite part. Jeremie usually uses a can of creamed corn with his hush puppy mix, but in the time of COVID-19, we were out. I made it using frozen corn kernels. This isn’t a creamed corn that I would use as a side dish, because I was really shooting for the consistency of the canned stuff. However this was quite yummy.
Creamed Corn Hush Puppies
1 tablespoon bacon grease 1 cup frozen corn 1 tablespoon of flour 1 1/2 cups chicken stock 1 tablespoon of sugar 2-3 tablespoons of heavy cream 1/2 onion, minced 2 cups House Autry Hush Puppy mix with onion flavor
First for the creamed corn, melt the bacon grease in a small pot and add the corn. Careful – the cold, watery corn will cause the grease to splatter. Cook the corn for 1-2 minutes to warm up the corn. Add the flour and create a roux. Cook the roux for 3 minutes to cook the flour. Then, add the chicken stock and sugar and cook until thickened slightly. Let cool until ready to make the hush puppies.
Now for the pups, in a mixing bowl add the hush puppy mix, onion, heavy cream and creamed corn together. Then add enough water to create a thick batter – like thick pancake batter. Let sit for at least 5 minutes.
Heat the oil to 350 degrees in either a large dutch oven or Fry Daddy. Using a cookie disher, drop heaping portions into the hot oil and cook until deeply golden brown and float. Remove from the oil, and drain on a sheet try with paper towels. Season with salt as soon as they come out of the fryer.
Guess who’s back? Back again – sourdough’s back, thanks to a friend.
(You see what I did there? huh, huh? Clever right? Or maybe it’s the quarantine crazies. You pick.)
I had zero intention of picking sourdough back up this quickly, but one of my friends who also started his sourdough journey while in quarantine gave me a gift. Jonathan’s starter has been going gangbusters for the last few weeks, and last week, he very generously offered to share. So Saturday, Jeremie did a drive by starter pick up from the Chu house on his way to go fishing.
Jonathan’s Beautiful Starter GIft
My Newly Fed Starter
Now the real pressure is on to keep this thing alive, because I feel like I owe it to Jonathan’s hard work to keep it going. So far so good. Jeremie did a grocery run on Sunday and found a bag of unbleached flour, so I feel like this is our second chance.
In addition to diligently feeding this guy, I’ve also been doing some more research lately. Watching a bunch of videos and reading all I can, in hopes that this time I will not fail. Just in case, I put Jonathan’s gifted starter in the freezer.
Just a short post to say that we’re moving onward. I’ll update when I think we’re ready to start the bread making process. I’m also feeling a little guilty about the discard situation. So I’ll share with you some ideas I’ve found for using the discard.
There are a few recipes that I research regularly. Things that I am so intimidated to try. They feel too complicated or the technique is unfamiliar or has an ingredient that feels too expense to mess up. I will watch video after video or read recipe after recipe, but I still don’t get the courage to try it.
Thanks to COVID-19, I have been given the gift of time at home, so one of my excuses is gone. And on Saturday, I gave one of those recipes a shot. My fiancé had escaped the house and went fishing for a couple of hours. I sat on the couch alone wondering what I would do with the afternoon, and the closet project I’ve been telling myself to do for weeks still didn’t sound like fun.
Then, I remembered I had just gotten a new box of pastry bags, and decided that Saturday would be the day that I tried to make pâte à choux dough. Don’t worry – I went ahead and got Google to translate it for you. (Did you listen to the pronunciation? Isn’t the headline funnier now?) Like all things French it sounds very fancy, hard and intimidating, and no wonder I have not attempted this dough in at least a decade.
Pâte à choux dough is the basis for so many yummy items that you know and love, like eclairs, cream puffs, churros, profiteroles (my favorite of the bunch) and cheese puffs. They are dry and crunchy on the outside, and hollow, eggy and moist on the inside – perfect for stuffing with pastry cream or ice cream.
What intimidates me about this recipe is that the dough starts on the stove by boiling water, butter and sugar, if sweet, then the flour is added. This the extremely thick paste is cooked on the stove. Don’t know about you, but this step alone scares me a little. Continuously mixing a dense ball of dough on the stove, and it doesn’t burn? Highly suspect.
Then, once the dough ball comes together on the stove, you take it off the heat and add eggs. Somehow you’re supposed to end up with a silky mixture perfect for piping and not scrambled eggs. I wasn’t so sure.
But with nothing but time, and after reading the Bon Appétit recipe on my computer about sixty more times, I got up the courage to try for myself. I wasn’t in the mood for sweets, and Jeremie had bought fancy cheese board at Costco a few weeks ago that I had saved, so I decided to try my hand at gougéres. Oh goodness, there I go again with the French. Gougéres are cheese puffs – pâte à choux made without sugar and added cheese. The recipe calls for comté or gruyère, but I didn’t have those – so I used a nice white cheddar instead. It seemed to work out fine.
Y’all! I did it. I wouldn’t say that it was easy, definitely a level 2.5 or 3 in difficulty. There’s plenty of opportunity for failure here, but I wouldn’t say that this was the hardest thing I’ve ever made. I kept my eye on the timers and made sure to follow the recipe closely, and my gougéres came out perfectly – crunchy on the outside, perfectly puffed and hollowed on the inside. Cheesy and slightly eggy. So good.
I’m not going to pretend to write out a recipe – this is no place for home cooks. Bon Appétit’s recipe was fantastic and very easy to understand. I’ll let them lead you down the path to puffy greatness. Try it and let me know what you think.
A couple months ago I stumbled across something brilliant. I mixed up a casserole dish of Poppy Seed Chicken, but when I was preparing my Ritz Cracker topping, I realized I was completely out of poppy seeds. As I dug through my cabinet looking for a potential hidden stash of poppy seeds, I saw a bottle of Everything Bagel seasoning from Trader Joes.
This popular bagel topping has all the things that you love – sesame seeds, dried onion, a little salt, garlic and of course poppy seeds – all in a little jar. Lots of other companies jumped on this seasoning train, so you don’t need to go to Trader Joes to find it. Most grocery stores have it these days.
It turned out really delicious and added a little extra flavor to a very simpIe casserole.
This casserole is a great pantry staple dish, perfect for our current COVID-19 quarantine situation. It is simply cooked chicken, sour cream, cream of chicken soup and ritz crackers.
To simplify this recipe even more, I actually use precooked chicken from Costco. They sell their rotisserie chicken, shredded and sealed in two-pound packages. I always pick up a couple of packages to throw in the freezer. It freezes really well and easy to thaw in the refrigerator and it’s the perfect amount for this recipe.
I like to serve over steamed white rice. If I’ve planned ahead and have already cooked some rice, I will sometimes add the rice to the bottom of the casserole dish before adding the chicken mixture on top. In 30 minutes or so, you can have dinner on the table. Easy!
Try it out and what you think! Let me know in the comments.
Everything Bagel Chicken Casserole
Ingredients 2 pounds of chicken breast, cooked and chopped 8 ounces of sour cream 1 can of condensed cream of chicken soup 1 sleeve of Ritz Crackers 3 tablespoons of butter, melted 1 tablespoon of everything bagel seasoning
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Mix together the sour cream and chicken soup. Add the chicken and stir to combine. Transfer to a 13″ x 9″ casserole dish. In a zip top bag or bowl, crunch up the ritz crackers and add the melted butter and seasoning. Mix until all of the crackers have soaked up a little butter. Sprinkle on top of the chicken mixture.
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until the casserole is bubbly around the edges and the cracker topping is golden brown.
A lot has changed in my life since I started this little blog. So let’s catch up.
I’m getting MARRIED! A little more than three years ago, I started dating the love of my life – Jeremie, and last July, we got engaged in Los Angeles. He was worth every extra moment waiting for the right guy to come along. He’s kind, funny and generous. He’s also a phenomenal cook.
We’re planning an October wedding and hoping really hard all of this COVID-19 stuff is behind us by then.
Very early on in our relationship, a couple of meals became very important to us — weekend breakfasts and big Sunday evening suppers. Both of these meals allowed us to slow down, take our time and cook together. Unlike our weeknight meals that are usually just a race go get food on the table at a decent time, on the weekends we can enjoy our time together. Cooking together has always been something that we love — giving us that important time to talk and laugh while something delicious is bubbling away on the stove or smoking on the smoker.
But sometimes – Jeremie likes to cook solo. He wants to cook his favorite foods without me trying to make them fancy. And this year, despite all happening around us, he was committed to make a big Easter dinner. My only contribution was dinner rolls and official taste tester. My goodness he did not disappoint.
Our dinner took over 24 hours to cook, starting the smoked ham on Saturday night to avoid Sunday’s stormy forecast. On Sunday, he spent the afternoon making the rest of the fixings, his stepmother’s sweet potato casserole with brown sugar and pecans, our favorite stove-top macaroni and cheese and the classic green bean casserole.
Even though our Easter holiday looked very different for all of us this year, I hope that you also indulged in the meal that ties you back to your family and roots. This was comfort food at it’s finest – at a time when we are all needing some comfort. We didn’t get to spend the day with our families as planned, but we have leftovers for days and days. I was also able to save the ham bones for stocks and soups. So the love and comfort will keep coming in the months ahead.
It’s days like this that remind me how insanely grateful I am that we found each other when we did. I can’t imagine quarantining without him.
So I guess you’re wondering, if my sourdough starter has failed, then what bread am I making? Because y’all know I’m still baking.
Well, this is the Mauck family bread recipe – well my chicken scratch version written in college while my mom read it to me over the phone. I have probably been making this particular recipe since I was a little girl. My mom kept the original recipe for “Food Processor Bread” in the recipe box beside the stove – the most used and most trusted. I have made it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. While I grew up in the South, my parents are from Indiana. We didn’t grow up on biscuits or cornbread like many of my friends, instead we always made yeasted bread or rolls. And almost always, it was made from this recipe.
This dough is so versatile – our pizza dough, dinner rolls, sweet cinnamon rolls – in addition to just a perfect loaf of white bread. This makes a great standard loaf of sandwich bread. Great flavor, and a dense enough crumb to hold together a sandwich.
The ingredients are interchangeable. You just need a flour, a fat, a sweetener, water and yeast. Swap out a wheat flour for wheat bread – easy. Sometimes I use olive oil – for pizza dough or focaccia. Or butter for a buttery roll or bread. For cinnamon rolls, I’ll increase the sugar. Or add honey for wheat bread. It really is up to you – perfect for times like these when we are cooking from our pantries and ingredients are running low.
We also pull together in a food processor. While not required by any means, it definitely cuts down the manual time needed to kneed the dough. The food processor does all the work. You could also pull this dough together in a stand mixer with the dough hook as well.
No matter the exact ingredients you use, the process is still the same.
First, bloom the yeast. I added one package of active dry yeast to 1/4 cup of lukewarm water and at least one tablespoon of sweetener (sugar, agave, or honey – all work great.) Mix all of these items together, and let it sit on the counter for at least 5 minutes. This gives enough time for the water and sugar to wake up the yeast and get it moving. After 5 minutes or so, you’ll start to see lots of bubbles.
This is what you’re looking for – bubbly and frothy.
If you don’t see bubbles, one of two things might have happened. One, check the expiration date on the yeast. Expired yeast won’t bubble and work. Second, your water might have been too hot. I usually turn on the hot water tap and as soon as the water starts to feel warm – not hot – that’s the right temp. If your water gets too hot, it will kill the yeast. If you’re worried, get out your thermometer and check the temp. You’re looking for 105-110 degrees. If the water is too hot, just let it sit to cool off before adding to the yeast.
After the yeast has bloomed, it’s time to start your dough. The second step is to mix together the flour, fat, salt and the bloomed yeast. If you’re making a more sweet dough add more sweetener to this step – up to 3 additional tablespoons. At this point, the water from the bloomed yeast will start to hydrate the flour and the mixture will look like wet sand.
The last step is to start adding cold water (roughly 3/4 – 1 cup) until the dough starts to form a ball. This isn’t precise. Lots of factors affect the amount of water you will need – the type/brand of flour you use, the humidity in the air, etc. What you are looking for is a smooth dough to form. Once the dough forms a ball – let the food processor work for 3-5 minutes to knead the dough.
Once your dough has finished kneaded, it’s time for the first rise. Transfer the dough to a large bowl with about a tablespoon of oil. Coat the dough with the oil so that it stays moist and doesn’t dry out. Cover with a kitchen towel or plastic wrap, and let your dough rise for 1-2 hours or until it has doubled in size.
Before
After
As you can see after a couple of hours my dough grew and was very smooth.
Now it’s time to shape your dough. Today, I decided to make dinner rolls for our Easter dinner on Sunday. So I divided my dough into 15 little balls and placed in a greased 13″x9″ metal pan. But this is where your recipe can go any where. Form into a loaf, and make sandwich bread. Make it into a pizza! Roll it out, cover with butter and cinnamon and sugar for cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Roll it out cut into circles or squares and fry for doughnuts. It really is up to you.
My dinner rolls after formed them into balls and let rise a second time.
Once you’ve shaped your dough, let it rise a second time – this is the bench rise. Again, cover with a towel, and rise for 1-2 hours until the dough has doubled again. This will allow your dough to get extra fluffy before going into the oven.
When your bread is ready to bake. Pop it into a preheated oven at 350 degrees and bake until golden brown and internal temp of 205 degrees.
All done!
Once out of the oven, I spread the finished rolls with butter to get all melty. I will let these rolls cool, and then pop in the freezer until Sunday. On Sunday, I’ll just rewarm these yummy rolls at 325 degrees for 10 minutes or so until they’re warm all the way through.
This recipe is quite simple, and easy to do. Just a few simple steps, and you can make a great bread…or rolls…or pizza.
On March 8, life in Memphis, Tenn. changed. Dramatically. March 8 was the day the Shelby County Health Department announced it’s first case of COVID-19. I work in communications for a hospital system, and immediately I started working. My team and I had been loosely planning for this moment, but all of a sudden it got real. Like real, real.
Just one week later, after self-isolating for a few days, I started a sourdough starter. My #selfisolationstarter. Then all of a sudden, I saw people across my social media channels also starting sourdough starters. Felt like we all were trying our hand at getting as close to the basics as possible – water, flour, nature and time.
I know why I started my starter. On the surface, it was because I was afraid that yeast would be the next item the hoarders would gobble up. But deep down inside, I know that bread is the most comforting of all the comfort foods. Nothing makes me happier that a piece of delicious bread smothered in a thick-ish layer of decadent salted butter. It’s indulgent, but simple. And it connects me to my family.
Day 1 – So may hopes and dreams.
But here’s the thing. I failed. Twice. Even after posting an SOS message to the Bon Appetit Facebook group. The first try ended up molding and being extremely acidic, so I threw it out on day 3. On my second try, I got through the initial start and began my daily feedings, and eventually it just stopped getting bubbly despite feedings.
So here’s what I learned. Y’all, I don’t have the patience for sourdough. My self-diagnosed ADD and need for instant gratification overwrote any potential joy and satisfaction I think I would have gotten from a homemade sourdough loaf. Maybe one day, I’ll revisit making a sourdough starter when I have done more research – like buy a couple more cookbooks – and making sure I have the right ingredients – like unbleached flour. Maybe in another time when I find myself at home regularly enough to dedicate the time I need to tend to a starter.
Until then, I have a nearly full jar of active dry yeast in my fridge, so I’ve got a couple more weeks of home baked bread in my future. More on that to come.
And for those of you who are more patient than me. Here are a few starters to try. Give it a shot and let me know how yours turns out. Let me see that bread!
Hello? Is anyone out there? It’s been about 7 years since I posted to this trusty little blog, and I have contemplated several times over the years of picking it back up. Every time I thought about getting started again, I would decide against it. Thinking to myself that I didn’t have enough time, or I wasn’t feeling creative enough.
And then it happened. A crisis of unimaginable magnitude. A little virus called COVID-19 spread throughout the world and made life come to a screeching halt. All of a sudden, we have been forced to stay in our homes. No more going out to dinner. No more evenings with our friends. Heck, for a lot of us – no more going into work.
I’m not sure about you all, but that is when anxiety started to creep in. Hard. I am not typically someone who experiences generalized anxiety. So when I started to experience it, I was quite ill-equipped to handle it. My lack of control over the world around me left me grasping at anything and everything I could control. Did I overreact at times? Absolutely. Did I give myself and others around me grace for reacting the same way? One hundred percent.
I started to realize that the biggest thing that I could both control and loved to do was cook. All of those hours of watching the Food Network and Bon Appetit on YouTube had left me with a million ideas, and COVID-19 has left me with a good deal of time.
On a recent family chat, my brother suggested that I pick up the blog again. I laughed to myself thinking about the recent dinner we had of sloppy joes, and thought that nobody wanted to read how I opened a can of Manwich and air-fried some potatoes and called it dinner. But then again, maybe you do? In the time of COVID-19, this is real life, right?
So here we go. I’ll share with you the real life. The successes, the failures – even that leftover sloppy joe mix that I vacuum-sealed and threw in the freezer. It will be dinner again soon I am sure.
I am a glutton for stuffed green peppers. I think that a bell pepper is just begging to be filled with a delicious mixture of ground meat and vegetables. And while I love a traditional stuffed pepper with tomatoes, beef and rice, this time I wanted to mix it up a bit. So I took inspiration from the Southwest.
This dish is also pretty light, and if you’re looking for a healthy, low carb option – this might be it. Instead of using a grain like rice, I chose to use black beans and corn instead. I also substituted the ground beef with 93% fat free ground turkey. I figured I could go pretty lean on the protein because eventually it will be mixed diced tomatoes and cheese which will add moisture and a little fat.
If you want to feed more folks – have no fear, just add in some brown rice or quinoa, more seasoning and a little moisture – water, chicken stock, more tomatoes. Don’t forget about the freezer too! This dish would be a great freezer meal. Just make a double batch or extend the stuffing with rice, and put half in the freezer. Perfect for single serve meals straight from the freezer.
Ingredients
8 oz ground turkey1 small white onion chopped
1 garlic clove minced
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp coriander
salt and pepper
1 can black beans, drained and rinced
1 cup yellow corn, frozen
1 can diced tomatoes, with juice
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, plus extra for the top
4 whole large bell peppers, tops and seeds removed
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a skillet, heat the olive oil then brown the ground turkey, onions and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. When the turkey is cooked, add the spices and cook for 30 seconds. In a large bowl, mix together the turkey, drained black beans, corn, diced tomatoes and cheese.
To prepare the bell peppers, remove the stems and seeds, leaving as much of the whole pepper as possible. If your peppers are uneven and don’t stand on their own, just slice off a small bit of the bottom “feet” to stabilize. Make sure that you don’t cut too much or you’ll create a whole in the bottom.
Stuff each pepper with quarter of the mixture, and place in a baking dish. Cover and cook in the oven for 30 minutes. Remove the foil, add a sprinkle of cheese to the top and cook uncovered for another 10 minutes.
a girl, a fork and a spoon 