S'mores Casserole

Behold! The Casserole of S'mores!



So good it should be illegal
I first tasted this amazing recipe of delicious wonderfulness when a friend brought it to a potluck a few years ago, and I've made it at least a hundred times since then. I've given it as a thank you gift, included it in my holiday baking for friends and neighbors, and last night I made it in lieu of birthday cake by request of the birthday boy himself. Since I was already making a batch for him (using local products such as Adluh Flour, of course), I doubled the recipe and plan to bring a plate of individually wrapped bars to CJ's swim meet tonight to raise funds for our team, the Edenwood Seamonkeys.

This yummy goodness is known by many names: We've called it "mouth heroin", "mouth crack", "breakfast", "lunch", "dinner", and eventually we settled on "s'mores casserole", because Tracy is a genius and as such decreed that if it comes in a casserole dish, it can be eaten as a meal. The original recipe, however, is called S’more Cookie Bars, and was originally published by Nicole Weston of BakingBites.com in 2007.

What's For Supper?

Soup! Soup is what's for supper tonight, the recipe for which comes our way thanks to my lovely and talented friend Beth, who brought over a big pot of this crazy deliciousness while I was trapped on the couch recovering from a badly sprained knee and fractured ribs.

Her recipe was modified from the original, and my recipe was modified from hers. As longtime readers of this blog know, my cooking tends to be measured via somes-of-this or until-it-looks-rights of that. So, what follows is how I ended up making the soup pictured here.

Ingredients:

2 tubes Jimmy Dean ground sausage
6 cloves fresh garlic, shaved
1/4 cup onion flakes
Pinch red pepper flakes
1 can white beans
1 can mini red beans
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 3oz jar pesto
Fresh baby spinach
Chicken stock paste

In a large soup pot, brown sausage over medium heat. When mostly cooked, add sliced garlic cloves, onion flakes, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Add the beans - I didn't drain mine, but if you're making this, it's yo thang, do whatcha wanna do.

Next, add as much or as little water to get the amount of soup you want. Add a little chicken stock paste, and adjust to taste. Stir in the pesto and Parmesan; and a few big handfuls of spinach. Simmer until the spinach has wilted.

Serve with a nice crusty bread, and share some with friends. They'll rave about this soup's comforting goodness and go on and on about it on the internets. Feeding the people you love (or even people you mostly just kind of tolerate :) is a good deed indeed.

BBQ Chicken Pizza

See, Renée said that she loves it when I post about cooking, so here I am again. You can blame it on her, okay? Because as long as I know I've got one entertained reader, you won't ever get me to shut up.

Today we are going to be talking about What I Made For Dinner Last Night, or OMG Neither Kid Complained About Supper At All Not Even Once. To wit: BBQ Chicken Pizza. Capital Letters.

BBQ Chicken Pizza is one of my favorite things to eat, but I don't make it very often, and I don't really know why that is. It's not like it's hard, or takes a lot of obscure ostrich egg-type ingredients, because it's actually pretty darn easy. So, onward!

BBQ Chicken Pizza

All photos can be clicked to embiggen

• Pizza dough, well-rested (I buy this pre-made from Publix. Do what you will.)
• Sweet Baby Ray's Honey Barbecue Sauce. This is my favorite.
• 1 bag of shredded Italian style cheese (2 cups)
• 1 Green bell pepper
• 1 Red onion (I only used one half, because I suffer for the happiness of my children.)
• 3 Roma tomatoes
• Pre-cooked refrigerated grilled chicken breast strips, chopped
  
  

Set your oven to stun (or 450) and begin working with your dough. I'm not going to explain how, because I mostly follow His Majesty Alton Brown's instructions, so I'll just let him tell you his own self.

Once you've got the dough prepared and on whatever surface you have selected (I've got a standard half sheet pan in use, but if you've got a pizza stone, knock yourself out), sauce it. Here we're using barbecue sauce instead of the traditional marina-type sauce. Squirt it on. Spread it out.

Now turn your attention to the vegetable matter. What you see below is one entire green bell pepper, one half of a red onion, and yield from three Roma tomatoes, seeded.

While you weren't looking, I chopped up the chicken and sprinkled it evenly over the sauced dough, then topped it with the entire bag of cheese. I love cheese. Sometimes we invite friends over just so we can eat cheese together. True story.

You'll note I put the chicken under the cheese. This is how I've always done it, for no special reason other than I like it that way, and it's my pizza, so that's how I make it. Follow the cheese layer with your vegetables, like so:

Notice anything there? That's right, there's more sauce, this time on top of the vegetables. Again, because that's the way (uh huh, uh huh) I like it. Now your pizza is ready for the oven: 20 minutes at 450, or until the crust is GBD and the sauce and cheese are burbling. I do love a good burble.

See? That wasn't a hardcore cooking experience at all. You could even add all sorts of different topping variations to make this how you might like it. Jalapeños might be good. Maybe some mushrooms, or an olive or three. I'm pretty sure that the original pizza that inspired this recipe (from a delivery joint in Tigard, OR, nigh 20 years ago) included kidney beans. That's a bit cowboy for my taste, but who am I to judge?

French Onion Soup

A few days ago, I tweeted that I felt a batch of French Onion Soup (hereafter referred to as FOS) coming on. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it. By the time I left work it was pretty much a foregone conclusion: There! Would! Be! Soup! I only make it two or three times a year, and it's always a big hit in Husbandville when I do. Okay, I like it a lot too, but wouldn't bother making it just for myself.

This is one of the many meals for which I do not follow a specific recipe. When I first started making it I used a recipe that, if I recall correctly, involved a dark beer. It's been over a decade since then; I no longer remember the recipe or where it came from, and I've modified my approach to better suit my own cooking style. This time I kept track of what I did as I cooked, so as to share my "recipe". As with most things I cook, it's a little bit different every time, depending on what I have on hand (cartons of broth versus bullion, for example), but the end result is usually more or less the same.

Before I list out the ingredients, let me give you the following caveat: I made a gigantic batch of soup. The recipe below fed three hungry adults and two children, with enough left over to serve leftover dinner for four the next day (and even lunch the day after that!). What I'm saying is: LOTS of soup. If you're making this for, say, two people, you may want to halve it (and still plan for leftovers).

French Onion Soup

• 10lbs Frenched onions (sweet or white. I personally believe Walla Wallas to be the gold standard, here)
• 1/2 stick butter
• Bread for toasting (I like Food Lion's take'n'bake, but any baguette will do)
• 4 cans Campbell's Beef Consomme
• Beef base (I used Superior Touch Better Than Bullion), bullion, or broth in cans/cartons
• 1T Cornstarch
• White wine (or whatever liquid)
• Kosher salt
• Pepper
• Granulated Garlic (I did not have minced garlic on hand or I would have used it instead)
• Pam spray (butter or olive oil)
• Cheese (I used two bags of shredded Swiss. Gruyere is great on FOS, if you can find it).

First things first: Prep your onions. I cut off the root and stem, slice in half from stem to root, and then peel each half. When they are all cut and peeled, French cut them. Onion prep (the slicing and the caramelizing) is the most time-intensive part of this recipe - it will take a good hour+, but it's pretty fast moving after that. This is what ten pounds of Frenched onions looked like in my big soup pot:


There are many schools of thought on how to caramelize onions. Some people do it in a crock pot, some do it on the stove over super low heat, and so on. I do it on the stove top, over high heat. (Sidebar: This is not for the faint of heart. Searing, burning, and sticking are all real risks of doing it like I do, and if you're new to cooking or unsure of your ability to manage this, use a lower heat and more time until you're more familiar with the high heat method.)

Melt the butter, add all the onions, crank the heat, and stir constantly. Once the onions start to soften, add a big pinch of salt. Continue stirring. Should the bottom of your pot start to get uncomfortably dark and crusty, deglaze with wine (or broth/water/whatever), and continue cooking, but don't let it get so dark that it's close to burning.

What you're looking for here is a rich dark reddish brown color, but you don't want seared crispy edges. The softening and collapsing of the onions takes the bulk of the time, and once the color starts appearing, reduce the heat just a bit (keep stirring!) and watch closely.Burning can happen quickly here if you're not careful.

The darker your caramelizing the better for FOS, really, but I was hungry and thus gave up about here:

See how the volume of onion has reduced? Switch to medium heat; add a pinch of salt, a few grinds of pepper, and a liberal sprinkle of granulated garlic. Ordinarily I would add a couple of tablespoons of minced garlic from a jar, but I had run out. Stir to combine, cook for a minute or two.

Add all the cans of Consomme. At this point I added hot water about to the level the onions were pre-cooking, and two big scoops of beef base (even if I were making half of this recipe, I would still use all four cans - I would just use less broth.) Then, because I like a little bit of body to my soup, I mixed the cornstarch with some wine and added it in, too. When the soup comes to a boil the cornstarch thickens it just a bit.

So let's pause here to taste what we've got. Adjust for any seasoning you think you may need. More beef base? More garlic? Maybe more salt or wine? Add it in now, and taste until you've got what you want. Let the soup simmer over low heat, and while that's happening, turn your attention to the bread. Slice it, lay the slices out on a cookie sheet, spray with Pam. A sprinkle of garlic, salt, and Parmesan won't hurt, but aren't necessary. Stick them under the broiler (watch carefully!), remove, flip, repeat. Like so:


Most FOS soup recipes are going to instruct you to ladle the soup into individual oven-safe bowls at this point. I'm not, and I'll tell you why: Because it is a bitch to deal with. It just is. Moving multiple bowls full of molten liquid on to a cookie sheet, into the oven, out of the oven... I did that all of once, and never will again. The burns did heal nicely, though, thanks for asking. Anyway.

Turn off the burner under your soup, and set an oven rack to a position which will accommodate your pot. Gently drop slices of toasted bread on to the surface of the soup, being careful not to submerge. When the surface is covered with bread, proceed to cover the bread with cheese. No big clumps at a time or you risk it sinking, but the surface of bread can really handle a truly startling amount of cheese, if you add it evenly. Carefully move your pot into the oven, and broil until the cheese is brown and bubbly, and then ladle it into individual serving bowls. Here is the finished product:


Hooray! Soup! This took me 1.5 hours, from start to finish. You guys, it was really good (if I do say so myself).
For leftovers: I refrigerate the soup in this same pot. To serve I return it to the stove to heat through, then repeat the bread/cheese/oven step.

Monte! Cristo! Sandwiches!

On birthdays, the person whose birth is being celebrated gets to choose what dinner shall be. It can be anything: Dining out, take out, fast food, or something I cook. This year, CJ chose mom-made Monte Cristo sandwiches.

Stop right there, because I know what you're thinking. Entire sandwiches coated in egg, deep fried in oil, and then served with sugar and a side of jam? Have the crash cart on standby! Jesus take the wheel! Somebody call FLOTUS! But all things in moderation, kids. I make these maybe once every couple of years. There's also this thing about how three years ago, when last I made these, I lifted one out of the pan and hot oil ran down the inside of the tongs into my hand. Hot oil. My hand. That kind of thing will stay with you.

Anyway. I didn't take a lot of photos, but I did snap a couple of progress photos to share the recipe with you. I'm pretty sure I learned how to make these from my mom.

Monte! Cristo! Sandwiches!

• Pepperidge Farm Buttermilk White bread
• Sliced Swiss cheese
• Thin-sliced honey ham
• Thin-sliced turkey (I used to buy Boar's Head expensive deli meats, but you know what? Oscar Mayer works great.)
• Eggs (It always ends up needing more than I thought. I used 10, should have used 12.)
• Oil for frying
• Seedless red raspberry jam
• Powdered sugar
• Toothpicks
• Candy thermometer

Assemble your sandwiches! One slice of bread. One slice of cheese. Five slices of ham. Five slices of turkey. One more slice of cheese. One more slice of bread. What you have now looks a lot like a boring old sandwich! But wait, there's more!

Make two diagonal cuts across the sandwich so that you have four triangles. Now: Three toothpicks per triangle. No more! No less!

Crack your eggs into a bowl, and beat them well. Pour a few inches of oil into your pan (use one with high sides, please), affix your candy thermometer, and set about heating your oil to 360 degrees.

Checklist: Is your oil hot? Is the bowl of beaten egg directly next to it but not on the heat? Is your pile o'sandwiches directly next to the egg? Congratulations! Let's cook our sandwiches!

Add a sandwich to the egg, turn it all around to coat, drip off the excess, and carefully place it in the hot oil. The size of my pot allows me to cook an entire sandwich (four triangles) without letting the oil drop below 350, but ymmv.

Turn them once (I like to use tongs. Yes, still.) and fry until you've achieved allover GBD. Remove to whatever your drying rig may be (I put down a cutting board, cover it with a kitchen towel, and cover the towel with a layer of paper towels. People smarter than me use a rack over newspaper on a sheet pan.) and rest until they are no longer too hot to handle (but not too cold to hold).

Now it's time to serve. Arrange your sandwiches on a plate, and then dust them with powdered sugar. Add a side of raspberry jam (I like to use a monkey dish (as pictured) but I won't tell anyone if you want to just plop some on the plate.

Now, recite the following to each diner as they receive their plate:

There are three toothpicks in every sandwich. Three. No more. No less. Count each toothpick as you remove it, verifying that there are indeed three toothpicks per triangle. Not more. Not less. We will not be going to the emergency room tonight because you have impaled the roof of your mouth on a Toothpick of Carelessness. Understand? Good. Enjoy.

Alton Smoothies (Not Smoothies Made of Alton)

I haven't seen Alton Brown's "Live and Let Diet" episode yet, but everywhere I look people are talking about his Buff Smoothie. I've been pondering my own struggles with breakfast and vegetation lately, and while there are many things with which I struggle, today I address just those two:

Breakfast and vegetation. I don't like 'em.

Which is to say: I need to be awake for at least an hour before food sounds even remotely appealing (all I want to do is drink coffee for two hours, and then go to work), and if it grows out of the ground I don't really want to eat it. There are a variety of problems caused by these dislikes; one of which is evident to everyone around me if I don't eat for awhile: I become what one might call... "difficult". Yeah, we'll go with "difficult".

So recently when Jim mentioned buying a huge bag of frozen fruit and Ferrett leapt on the Buff Smoothie Wagon, I was reminded that I've been meaning to try smoothie-making. I've been using AB's recipe as a guideline, but I add in whatever I have on hand... What follows is the story of smoothie today, which is different than what will be smoothie tomorrow.

Click to embiggen

Here we have some vanilla protein powder (there was one scoop left, 23g protein), vanilla soy milk (I'm going to try a nut milk next, I can probably find almond at Publix), V8 V-Fusion, frozen fruit, and just look at this awesome banana. I've done wrong here, for the sake of the photo: Usually the liquid goes in before the frozen fruit. Yeah, I do have a little guilt.

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I'm pretty sure there's some pineapple hiding in there, under the peaches, strawberries, and blueberries. Maybe some mango? I don't know: I started with a bag of frozen Dole mixed fruits, and I've added to it, so I'm not sure what's actually there, or not. One thing I am sure of, though, my god y'all the drama when I tried adding blackberries. Never again!

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There's 1 cup of each soymilk and juice. And then the frozen fruit, and protein powder. Banana lies in wait until the rest is mostly blended before getting dropped in. I follow AB's instructions, blending on a lower speed until the vortex appears, and then really sticking the power to it thereafter.

And then? Smoothies!

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There's a Tim serving, a me serving, and a Mer serving. CJ actually laughed in my face at the idea that he will ever "in a million years" drink a fruit smoothie of any sort. Oh yeah? Game on, little man!

Gentleman Vegetables*

"Give me cauliflower, or give me death!", I bellowed at Tim as he got into the car. Okay, so that's a lie, but I did tell him I was going to die if I didn't get some carrots and cauliflower. This prompted a brief "What? Since when doesn't Tim like cauliflower?" conversation (apparently it doesn't count as "liking cauliflower" fingerquote fingerquote if it's also "covered with cheese" fingerquote fingerquote), and we aimed our car for our friendly neighborhood Food Lion. We performed a synchronized couples shop with Tracy and Aaron (he gave me a parking ticket! Not my spatula! Exclamation point! Bang!) and then: Vegetables! Were! Purchased!

Roasted Vegetables

• Vegetables (On this day: 3 sweet potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, 1 pint of button mushrooms and 1 lb baby carrots)
• Lube (olive oil works, but so does sesame oil, or whatever oil, or Pam spray)
• McCormick Slow Cookers Savory Pot Roast Seasoning

Directions

Preheat oven to 425.

While that's happening, clean and dry your vegetables, cut up whatever needs cutting (sweet potatoes, I'm looking at you) so that everything is more or less the same size, then apportion across as many sheet pans as necessary to achieve one single layer. For this batch, it was two half sheet pans, but do what you gotta do. Apply the lubricant of your choice; I sprayed them with Pam. Sidebar: If you're using mushrooms, don't put them in now. Set them aside for a bit.

Next, and this is honestly the very super most important part: Sprinkle on the seasoning (save a little bit for mushrooms later). Sure, it's made to go in a slow cooker, but so what? Now, I don't know about you, but I know about me, sort of, and I know about the people to whom I've served these vegetables. Even heathens who "hate vegetables" like these, and it's because of the seasoning. It's magical. I'm not going to come right out and say that it's made of baby giggles and unicorn love and rainbows, but... pretty close. (When you add this to your vegetables, they come out tasting like roaring fires and grandma's house and the Snuggie-dreams of generations past.) Post-sprinkle, agitate. Your lubricated and sprinkled vegetables should look similar to this:

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Put them in the oven, and ignore them for awhile. 20 minutes, maybe. Then, add your mushrooms (sprinkle them!), and put them back in for another ten minutes or so. Because I like "caramelization", I use the broiler, too. I'm not ashamed. When the vegetables are the color and texture you prefer, take them out. For me, they look like this:

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I put these in a big sealed container, and stuck them in the icebox last night. This morning I nearly plotzed when CJ, who "hates vegetables", loaded up a monkey dish and chowed down. That's right, people. They're that good.

*I will never again be able to use the word "vegetables" without hearing James May say "gentleman vegetables" in my head.

Aunt Julie's Cabbage Salad

In honor of my mother's sister, my Adorable Aunt Julie (who I also call Auntie Ted, but never Auntie Julie or Aunt Ted - always Aunt Julie and Auntie Ted), I offer you one of my favorite recipes: Cabbage Salad. I made this last night to send with Tim for his office potluck today; he ended up with five requests for the recipe.

Since I typed it up to send him, I figured: Why not post it, too? Oh, and if you look over there, at the photo: That's Adorable Aunt Julie the tiny pixie, and my bigass pumpkin head.

What follows is the original recipe that Adorable Aunt Julie gave me a decade ago, with my modifications/notes in parentheses (which is to say that's how I do it, when I make it):

Aunt Julie's Cabbage Salad

1 head cabbage, chopped (2 bags pre-sliced/bagged 'slaw' without carrots.)

4-5 green onions, chopped (Just buy and chop one whole bunch, green part only)

3oz sesame seeds (I just use one of those little 1oz McCormick containers sold near/with the spices.)

1/2c sliced almonds (Or whatever quantity you prefer. I like a lot of almonds.)

2 packages uncooked ramen noodles (Break up before opening the package. Either throw out the seasoning packets, or amass a stockpile you'll never ever use.)

Dressing

1/2c sesame oil

1/2c vegetable oil (I omit.)

6T rice vinegar (or more, to taste; I like 8.)

4T sugar

1t salt

1t pepper

Brown sesame seeds and almonds, using your favorite method (stovetop, oven, microwave), but do it separately as they brown at very different speeds. I'm partial to the microwave, although they go from 'raw' to 'Aiie! Fire! Fire!' super fast - after the first 3 minutes or so (almonds), stir every 30 seconds.

In a large bowl, whisk together all the dressing ingredients. Throw in the rest of the ingredients, toss. I think it's better the second day, but good luck waiting. :)