I came across a recipe for a salt-crusted pork shoulder recently and, both of us being big fans of pork and salt, M and I agreed that we had to make it. On a recent Saturday we did, changing the recipe slightly to match what we had on hand, and the results were fantastic – some of the most moist, tender pork I have ever had.
I had not made lasagna in a bunch of years, but wanted to do something a little bit different. As evidendced by our eggplant parm pizza recipe, we’re kind of fans of eggplant. I figured, if eggplant parmesan was good on its own or on pizza, it should work in lasagna as well. I still included some meat in the sauce, but this could easily be a vegetarian lasagna if you excluded the sauage. When I made this lasagna, as I had most times cooking lasagna in the past, I made some extra and froze it. I’d highly recomend this as a reheated lasagna really does taste nearly as good as a freshly made one.
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dpetc Italian, Recipes, Uncategorized
I made this soup one weekday when I was feeling kind of sick. It was actually incredibly easy and tasted fantastic, much better than a lot of the hout & sour soups you get in restaurants. it’s particularly fun to make because you’re familiar with the basic taste but can tweak it to your liking. In my case, I added a few additional splashes of vinegar, several extra turns of black pepper and the noodles, which all contributed to it being a non-standard hot & sour soup.
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dpetc Asian, Recipes, Uncategorized
So the blog has been admittedly poorly updated as of late. We faced a series of hurdles over the early part of the summer which prevented us from posting too much. But now, we have more than zero functioning laptops between the two of us again and are ready to get back at it.
We made enchiladas at our last dinner party and wanted to do something a bit different. We decided we could both control the flavor better and be a bit more impressive if we made our own salsa. We’d never made salsa verde before but had recently become big fans at our usual rotations of taco carts, lunch stops, and the like. We were a bit concerned getting started about finding tomatillos. A first call to Whole Foods revealed that they usually had them but the staff had just used all of them to make salsa verde. Great. However, a few days later when we needed them, a new shipment had arrived and we moved on. All in, this was extremely easy to make and really fantastic. Having control of which peppers you use, onion to tomatillo ratio etc… really allows you to perfect the taste. The roasted flavor was fantastic and we’ll surely make it again.
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dpetc Mexican, Recipes
This is a great colorful summer salad to make on the grill. I’ve made it two ways. The first time I added pretty much only corn and portabellos and found the salad needed a bit more. In this incarnation I added a couple of more ingredients and an Asian dressing alongside some Teriyaki swordfish. This could served alongside a number of different dishes and wouldn’t have to have an Asian dressing as well.
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dpetc Appetizers, Recipes
One recent Friday we decided to make a bunch of pizzas. The beauty of pizzas is that they’re really quite easy to make and allow for a wide variety of flavors and tastes in a single meal. Also, while there are a bunch of steps here, most of them can be done in little pieces ahead of time. Dough should be made well ahead of time and the sauce and toppings can all be made hours ahead kept in the fridge. This means a quick finish of just putting the pizzas together once you get hungry.
On this occasion, we were going to just make three pizzas. We tried a Lasagna pizza, with ground beef and ricotta, an Indian-inspired pizza with Saag as the base and chicken and a Thai pizza with a peanut-Siracha sauce and chicken. We had some leftover dough and sauce so added a traditional cheese pizza to the mix as well.
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dpetc Chicken, Indian, Italian, Pizza, Recipes
If you were to ask five people what is the best way to make scrambled eggs, you’d almost certainly get back five different answers. On the face, this is surprising. Scrambled eggs are simple in concept – cook eggs over heat, stirring to “scramble” them, and serve. And yet everyone seems to have their own method for making scrambled eggs that they claim is the best. I tried a few of these methods out before settling on my own favorite – pancetta scrambled eggs.
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dpetc Breakfast, Recipes
We were at Whole Foods recently and one of the free samples was a jalapeno hummus. We tried and liked it, so we bought some. When we got home and looked at the ingredients, we realized that all that was in it was chickpeas, oil, lemon, jalapenos, and seasoning, which seemed absurdly easy to emulate. A few Mondays later we created two of our own hummus dishes.
The first was basically a replication of the one we had bought at Whole Foods. After tossing around a bunch of ideas for the second we settled on a caramelized onion and feta hummus. Both worked out extremely well. It seems that there is basically no reason for us to buy pre-made hummus again; this was delicious, was very easy to prepare and made a lot at minimal cost. Note: this version does not use any tahini, the ground sesame paste; feel free to add some if you’d like.
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dpetc Appetizers, Recipes
As I often do on Fridays, I had a strong desire to make a burger when I got home from work. While I have made tuna and regular burgers in the past to meet this desire, I wanted to do something a bit different. After spending more time than my boss would probably like thinking about it at work, I settled on a buffalo chicken burger. It ended up being really satisfying given the nice heat and creamy blue cheese spread.
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dpetc Burger, Chicken, Recipes
