rub-a-dub-dub

About a year ago, my husband was introduced to the notion of a rub - for meat typically going to be grilled. It's come up a few times, but a couple of weeks ago, he was ready to give it a go. There are recipes out there, but he wanted to make one up. Works for me. Love a good recipe but sometimes ya just wanna try your hand at it and see what happens. Now me - I'm all about just throw stuff in there and make it work. We'll worry about replication later. He, ever the chemist *smile* wanted to go ahead and use actual measurements and get it on paper. Cool. I served as the scribe. 

He went thru the spices and we talked about what we want, don't want, might want... blah blah blah until we settled on our rub would consist of. Next - quantity... Umm... not sure how much we had, call it a pound or so of boneless, skinless chicken breast cutlets I think. So to make sure there was enough, we settled on 1/2tbsp of each. Figured we could taste and tweak as necessary. Went ok, one thing accidentally got a whole tbsp, a couple things we doubled on purpose. Mixed it on up and applied it. Messy process - good thing I was just the scribe hee hee.

Part of his inspiration came from something I'd made with pork a while back. It was actually with one of the McCormick's recipe inspriations things. It was Apple Sage Pork Chops or something like that. It involved apple and  he dug that, so he wanted to incorporate that into what we did. Sooooo, when it came time to let the meat sit for a few hrs before cooking it, we put thinly sliced apple in along with. It gave me an opportunity to test out the apple slicing skills I'd hones up on watching Master Chef. 

A few hours later we took it out and threw it on our foil lined cast iron grill. Foil? Cuz that joker can be tough to clean. The chicken still had pretty grill marks...tho it's a li'l tough to see that on the picture, but whatever. So, how'd it turn out? Spiiiiicy!! What isn't necessarily baaad. It made for a really great sandwich if your tolerance is a li'l lower for the heat. I thought it'd be tasty with some pasta & alfredo, so I'll be trying that experiment at some point. Two of the boys liked it a lot which is cool. Hubs was a li'l disappointed at first b/c it didn't ome out like he'd wanted it, but once the 10 & 11  year old were fans he felt better. Then when he made a sandwich of it later, he was hooked. In retrospect, brown plate not the best for photo opp but we almost neglected to take one at all, so it is what it is.

Next time? Tweak the recipe so it has a li'l less fire. Or keep the fire and make alfredo. Probably would also help if it the meat was thicker... All in all, pretty decent first go at it. Can't wait to try again. I haven't done ribs in a while... Hmmm... Take 2 perhaps... We shall see...

ingredients by the pound

Finally! I made this joker over a week ago but hadn't managed to get the pics on the computer...then once I did, I hadn't uploaded them... finally did that this morning. So my first attempt at a pound cake went deliciously well. YAY! I mean it wasn't that tough - put a bunch of stuff in a bowl (and by that i mean a BUNCH of stuff. It was a 'classic' pound cake, so a pound of this, a pound of that, a pound of the other) and mix, put in pan and bake. But then again, I tend to believe that at the very least, if you can read you can cook, but I'm told that ain't so...


But I digress. So here it be.At first I did think hmm was there something I should have done to ensure flatness of what would become the bottom... But that was fleeting. I know it's really just a matter of needing to slice off the excess, but as you can see that's a good hunk of excess, so I just left it. It was stable enough. When I need to do it for an event, I'll likely reconsider and come up with a way to repurpose the part that I have to cut off.

I had purchased white chocolate chips a while back for use in another project, but ended up not going that route. I also had some frozen mango in the freezer... so i decided that for icing/glaze/sauce I'd make a white chocolate mango something. I figured that I could work the chips like a ganache and work in the mango. It seemed like a reasonable combination... I did get a li'l chicken the day of and googled "white chocolate mango" just to see if anything came up and it did. Which just confirmed that it was indeed decent combination. I didn't keep digging for a recipe, just went w/ my plan. Essentially make a white choc ganache (tho it's not quite the same consistency as w/ the semi sweet choc chips) and add pureed mango. Yum-mmy!


I didn't put the sauce on the cake itself but added it to the plate. My plating skills need work before I head to Chopped or Iron Chef, lol. Tho I can't believe I neglected to take a SINGLE pic of a slice w/ the sauce *hangs head in shame*. I'll do better next time. Next time... so not sure what's next on my overall agenda but i did hear about brown sugar pound cake which I'm likely to try. And I'm also envisioning a lemon lb cake with a citrus berry glaze... or mixed berry compote... or... who knows!

blanket ambition

i've got two babies due at the end of this year... ok not ME per se, but two people near and dear to me. i just put out there today that if i finish my daughter's blanket, i'll knock out a few for the new cherubs... i even rationalized it - see the amt that i have done now on the one i'm working on is certainly big enough for a baby, so knocking out two of those will be far eaasier than the behemoth i'm working on now... and as long as we don't discuss how long it's taken me to do that much then the logic works ;)

excited abt pound cake

is that weird - be excited about pound cake? the making of it to be exact. i'm going to make a pound cake this weekend. i've been wanting to make one, like a for real for real old school pound cake, like with a pound of this and a pound of that (or so). so i found a recipe and this weekend imma make it happen. i know the lb cake is to speak for itself but i'm also gonna make some sort of glaze/icing/topping/whatever to go with it, even if just to have it avail on the side, cuz i do, of course want to just taste the lb cake alone, so we'll see. but i'm excited! i do have a plan for the glaze/icing/topping/whatever i just hope it works like i want it to... hmmm yummm i can taste it already. field trip to Target this afternoon for a pan, among other things, then the groc store for ingredients. i think the fam is going out tonight, so i'll save the baking adventure for tomorrow... mmm... caaaaaaaake...

magic? not just yet (egg salad)

i boiled eggs a few days ago w/ the intention of making tuna. never quite got around to the tuna... this morning i decided to whip up some egg salad to take with me to work for lunch. while getting out the necessary ingredients i considered dicing up some cheddar cheese to put it in then thought, hmmm how bout a wedge of laughing cow queso fresco & chipotle. was hoping for egg salad magic. so i grabbed one, mixed it w/ a li'l mayo, opted out of the relish this time, diced up and mixed in the egg, li'l salt and pepper, tasted it and couldn't taste the cheese at all, so i added another one. could actually taste it this time, not bad at all. i've just eaten it on a bagel and the bagel kinda overpowered the the chipotle. so it pretty much just tasted like egg salad. prob shoulda went w/ the crackers... edible? yes. tasty even. just not magic. now i'm trying to figure out what else to put in it that'll help enhance it for next time... stay tuned...

making progress

last year some time i decided to knit my daughter a blanket. a whole blanket for her twin bed. thus far i hadn't done much other than scarves... and by other i mean a washcloth or two and practice. figured it was time for me to branch out into at least a larger quadrilateral. what better than a blanket? so i looked for patterns and found nothing that i liked. so i used what i was finding to determine how many stitches i had to cast on in order to have something wide enough (provided of course, my stitches were the right size...) and then made up my own pattern. given the size of the thing and  my still relatively novice status, i decided that i'd just knit (no perls, no combination) but use different colors of yarn to make it interesting Her favorite color at the time was purple, it's since, apparently, become red but whatever. purple is the theme. at this point i can't actually remember when  i started it, but after a haitus, i've gotten back to it and plan to keep at it until it's done. hopefully it's finished before she graduates from high school (she's 7)...

i don't recall how many stitches across it is. it's a lot. Not sure how many rows i've done or how long it'll end up being aside from needing it to be as long as a twin... xl twin perhaps so she can take it to college, lol. i can say it's providing much practice. i think i've done pretty well at keeping the stitches relatively consistent, there are only a couple holes, and i've gotten better at spotting a potential issue and being able to fix it before it's a big problem (added stitch, dropped stitch, etc.). I've been using the... American method I think it is, where you have the working yarn in the right hand. I'm considering trying the other one, Continental?, where you have the working yarn in the left hand. I can see how that would be faster. I tried it the other day and lasted about half a row. I'm not sure if the change in motion made my hand hurt more quickly or if my hand was just having a bad day... but we'll see... but progress is being made which is kind of exciting.

smoothie on a whim

So, I'm home today w/ the kids b/c the spouse has jury duty. I opened a couple of cans of fruit for the daughter for lunch (part of it anyway) and a li'l bit ago decided I needed a snack and to avoid eating a(nother...) piece of cake, I'd polish off the fruit. A couple bites in I decided hey, I'll whip up a smoothie. So, I pulled out the blender and tossed in some canned peaches and pears, added the juice from both (they were packaged in pear juice, not heavy syrup - cuz makes THAT much difference, lol). Added some ice and then thought hey, I'll toss in the rest of the frozen strawberries and raspberries while I'm at it. Added some honey and there ya have it. Granted there's not a darn thing fresh about this smoothie outside of the notion that it was all fresh at some point in time... but hey, it's pretty and it's yummy and refreshing so hey, I'll take it.

 


I do need to remember to make sure that none of the honey is touching the sides cuz well, good chance it'll stay there if no chunks of ice happen by to scrape it off. Traumatic? Not by any stretch, it's just nicer if when it's all done, there aren't li'l clumps of honey on the side, lol. There's something to be said for the asthetic.