easy holiday recipes!

    It's December! Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Solstice, or whatever you choose to celebrate or not celebrate during this time of year that may or may not be merry and bright for you.
 
    I found the most ridiculous list on the internets (they never fail to give you an endless load of things that can really piss you off and shake your faith in humanity) of stores that you NEED TO BOYCOTT because their ads don't say MERRY CHRISTMAS. They seem to find it 'un-American.' Yes, apparently the "american family association" as they call themselves frowns upon anyone who doesn't celebrate christmas. Sorry, Jews, you're not real american families. Any of you pagans that put the tree in your house to have the evergreen represent life through the dead season? You don't count either. Don't even get them started on the gays.

Look! A distraction! I made some awesome anise seed cookies!

    Speaking of poor vision (how do you like that transition there?), I also read an article that my good friend Lauren posted about how 85% of people don't take proper care of their contacts. "A new survey found that people have turned to beer, baby oil, Coke, petroleum jelly, lemonade, fruit juice, and butter as oh-so-wrong alternatives to contact lens solution. That was from an August 2011 survey in the United Kingdom by Bausch + Lomb, a lens solution manufacturer." WHAT ARE PEOPLE THINKING THAT ANY OF THOSE ARE ACCEPTABLE SOLUTIONS?! Now don't get me wrong, I love butter almost as much as Paula Deen, but DO NOT USE IT AS CONTACT LENS SOLUTION. 


    I seem to have gotten off topic. Christmas dinners! You need something to take, but you don't want to spend too long (or too much money!) but you still want to seem quite fancy. Well, my dear friend, I have 3 different recipes that will make you look like you're an amazing cook with only the smallest amount of effort involved!


#1 - Appetizer
    Courtesy of Anne Burrell and her amazing cookbook "Cook Like a Rock Star."

Figs stuffed with Gorgonzola & Walnuts
    (at this point you may be nervous with the words "fig" and "gorgonzola" used up there, but i've already made this for 3 separate events and they're always a huge hit!)


Takes about 15 minutes. SUPER EASY.




Ingredients:
12 fresh Black Mission, Brown Turkish, or (in a pinch) dried figs
    I've always made them with dried Calmyrnia figs because i've never been able to find fresh figs. Best of luck.
balsamic vinegar
kosher salt
8 ounces Gorgonzola Dolce, at room temperature
1/2 cup walnuts, toasted for 5 minutes at 350º


1. Preheat the oven to 350º
2. Slice the figs in half lengthwise, place them on a baking sheet, and dig a little hole in the middle with your pinky finger. Drizzle the fig halves with 2 or 3 drops of balsamic vinegar and sprinkle with salt.
3. Fill each fig with Gorgonzola and top with a quarter of a walnut. Bake for 5 minutes or until the cheese is melted and bubbly. 


Fig out!


I love her little notes like "fig out" or "eggs-tradorinary!" throughout her cookbook. Definitely one of the best i've bought this year!


BUT DAN, you're thinking, I NEED TO BRING SOMETHING MORE SUBSTANTIAL THAN FINGER FOOD! Ok, ok, but please stop yelling. The next super duper easy recipe is a hearty soup that you will love.


#2 - First Course


Carrot Ginger Soup
Prep: 30 mins
cook time: about an hour
makes about 8 servings

Ingredients:
2 tbsp butter
2 onions, peeled and chopped (you can chop pretty coarsely, it's all getting blended later!
6 cups chicken stock
2 pounds carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
1 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper
sour cram
fresh parsley






1. Put butter and onions in a big stock pot and cook them, stirring often, until onions are limp.
2. Add broth, carrots, and ginger. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until carrots are tender when pierced. (about 30 minutes)
NOW COMES THE BLENDING!
3. If you have an immersion blender, your life is about to be incredibly easy. If you have a blender, it's not as easy, but still not hard. Remove from heat and let cool for 10 minutes. Transfer the soup IN BATCHES to the blender. Don't fill the blender more than halfway. COver the blender and then hold a kitchen towel over the top of the blender. Be careful when blending hot liquids as the mixture can spurt out of the blender HENCE WHY I TOLD YOU TO GET A TOWEL. Pulse the blender to start it and then puree until smooth. 
4. After it is all blended, return it to the pan and add the heavy cream, stirring it over high heat until it comes to a boil, then reduce and season to taste with salt and pepper. I even added about 1/2 tsp of allspice to help bring it together.
5. Ladle into bowls, add a dollop of sour cream, and garnish with fresh parsley. 


#3 - Side
    This recipe is courtesy of my Grammy. She's a badass. If she were an animal, she'd be a honey badger. A crazy honey badger that chairs political campaigns and cooks like a champ.


Grammy's Sweet Potatoes
prep: 30 mins
cook: 30 mins
makes 6-8 servings


Ingredients:
6 sweet potatoes, peeled and quartered
1/2 cup Karo Corn Syrup (there's a "brown sugar" variety that is especially good on these)
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg (freshly grated, if available)


1. Preheat the oven to 325º
2. Boil the sweet potatoes until they're tender. Drain well.
3. Arrange sweet potatoes in a single layer in a 9x13 pan, bake at 325º for 15 minutes
4. In a sauce pan, combine corn syrup, brown sugar, heavy cream, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir frequently and bring to a boil over medium heat.
5. Pour mixture over sweet potatoes and baste frequently until glazed, about 15 more mins in the oven.


And there you go! 3 easy recipes that are inexpensive, easy, and really give you the most bang for your buck! If you make a soup people will already think you're a stud, and once they taste the soup, you may as well be Santa. My Grammy's sweet potatoes have made grown men cry, and figs are just exotic enough that you look classy and it will cost you under $10 and be greatly memorable.


I close with a picture of santa that I snapped a couple of years ago at a Colorado Mammoth lacrosse game. Merry Christmas to all, and to all some delicious food (and drinks!)

Slow Cooked Asian Pork Chops

I'm back! ... kind of. School started up, marching band is in full swing, and my turtle is very high maintenance. I'm sure you understand.

Anyhow, with life being so crazy I am all about food that is really easy to make and delicious. I'm just starting to learn how to use my crock pot and let me tell you I am starting to think it may be one of the best inventions ever. With 6 hours, a couple of pork chops, and a few other ingredients you can make THE MOST DELICIOUS PORK CHOPS EVER*.

*may be slightly over exaggerated, but they're damn good.

Slow Cooked Asian Pork Chops
serves 4
prep time: 10 minutes. Even if you've never cooked before and you're doing this in the dark.
cook time: 6 hours
eating time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:
4 boneless pork chops
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup ketchup
2 cloves garlic, crushed
salt and pepper

the best part? THERE IS ONLY ONE STEP TO FOLLOW.

1. Combine everything but the pork chops in the crock pot. Stir them together, then add the pork chops and cook on LOW for 6-ish hours.

BOOM. DONE.

Once they're done, you'll notice there is still quite a bit of that amazing, delicious sauce on the bottom. Cook up some rice and put just a tablespoon or 2 of the sauce in the rice and give it a good stir. CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST TIED YOUR MEAL TOGETHER. Put some rice on the bottom, put the chops over it, and put a sprig of rosemary or chop a couple of scallions over the top. It's fabulous.

Just for fun, here's a picture of my turtle. HAPPY COOKING! :-D

Swedish Saturday, ja!

    Colorado is a very exciting place. You can hike 14,000 ft. mountains, ski, snowboard, go see dinosaur fossils, find sand dunes, alligator farms, and on July 30th we had a delightful new addition to the things to do in Colorado: we got our very first Ikea store.

    If you're from the east coast or Europe, shut up. I know you've had them for a long time already, you're not excited about them because *sigh* they're just everywhere out here and you don't see what the big deal is... I get it. But don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter. Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter. DON'T BRING AROUND A CLOUD TO RAIN ON MY PARADE. (+5 bonus points if you know the musical i'm quoting; an extra +5 if you can name the character!)

blue shirt. yellow undershirt. boom.
and yes i have a bright green wall.

    To celebrate Swedish Saturday, Julia and I had some very exciting things planned. We both wore the blue of the Swedish flag, we were making a pilgrimage to IKEA, vowed to eat lingonberries, and then went to an ABBA cover band concert. Also we enjoyed SPELLING THINGS WITH CAPITAL LETTERS. Please stop trying to hide that you're jealous of how awesome my life is.

Eating at the cafeteria of the Ikea was a fun experience by itself, even though there were at least six million people there with us and it took  us about 35 minutes to get through the lines, but we decided that it was like a Swedish Taco Bell. (Tåco Bëll?) Swedish Meatballs and Lingonberries, raspberry cheesecake (that we pretended was lingonberry), Lingonberry juice, lay's potato chips, COULD WE GET ANY MORE SWEDISH?! (except for Pickled Herring which was quite a hot item for the swedes when I worked in a Swedish Christian Retirement Home through high school... no joke)


    When I got home, I realized I needed more lingonberries in my life and was trying to think of a recipe I could make that would highlight lingonberries as the star without making them too overpowering. There is a recipe that I made for the first time about 6 months ago with one of my dear friends Kelley that I adapted to successfully include them!

Swedish Pork Chops!
-or-
Seared Pork Chops with Apple, Fig, Lingonberries, and Goat Cheese

Time from prep to table: about 35 minutes
Serves: 2-4

ingredients:
2 boneless pork chops
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup flour seasoned with salt and pepper
2 granny smith apples (the firmer apple will hold up better to cooking), peeled and sliced medium thin
6 oz. dried fig (look by the raisins at the grocery store), halved
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
3/4 to 1 cup chicken stock
3 tbsp. lingonberry sauce
2 oz. goat cheese
4 oz. butter


1. Pour olive oil enough to make a small layer in the bottom of the pan. If you don't need a full 1/4 cup, don't use it. No one likes oily pork chops. Heat the oil over medium high heat while you're coating the pork chops in the flour mixture, shaking off any excess flour. Put the chops in the oil (stand back!) and cook them about 5 minutes on each side until they're beautifully golden brown. Once they're done, pull them out of the pan and keep them somewhere warm to let them rest until you're done with the rest of the meal.

2. Drain most of the oil from the bottom of the pan, leaving only enough to coat the bottom. Add the apples and fig and let them cook up and absorb a little of the flavor from the pork and soften. After about 5 minutes, add the chicken stock. Depending on how many you're serving or how many apples you use, you may want to only use 3/4 cup or if you love apple and you sliced up 3 or 4, you should probably use the full cup. Also add the cinnamon and nutmeg now and stir it all together and let it cook.

3. What makes everything better? BUTTER. Take half a stick of butter and just let it melt in to your sauce to give it a gorgeous rich flavor. In fact, this makes the sauce so much better that it gets its own step.

4. Time to plate! Plating entrées is my weakness as I can never make it look great, but I think I did ok with this one. I like to put the cinnamon-nutmeg apples down first, then place the meat on top of it. Add a modest spoonful (about 1 1/2 tbsp. per chop) to the top and crumble goat cheese over the top.

These pork chops are so easy to make and well worth the time to put in to them that it'll have you saying Mamma Mia! These are tasty! You'll feel like Edna Turnblad when she sees a Christmas ham.

Oh, and if you're having a hard time finding Lingonberry sauce, try Whole Foods and look around the jellies. Again, totally worth it.




p.s. I found this picture and I didn't know quite how to incorporate it in, so it's just a treat at the end. Here's ABBA brimming with Swedish pride. Happy cooking!

the best noodles i've ever made

    I don't cook a lot of noodles because I find them a little boring. Sure, you can put tasty things on them (like butter) and give them flavor, but on their own they're really not that exciting. There are a few notable exceptions, like the homemade pasta at Pagliacci's downtown, but on the whole if I have a choice between eating a bowl of noodles or something with flavor, i'll choose the latter. This is an incredibly easy and delicious weeknight meal.

   "So Dan," you're thinking, "how did you actually make noodles that are delicious?" That's a great question, and one of the main reasons I like you. You always come up with intelligent questions, not to mention you're quite attractive. Well, I will share that with you right........ now.

chicken and linguine with grape tomatoes and mozzarella


serves 4, prep to table should be about 30ish mins.

What you need:
4 chicken breasts, seasoned and cooked (if you want my marinade which goes really well i'll put it after the pasta recipe.)
1 package Linguine (or your favorite pasta. Not sure if the capellini would work as well though.)
1 26 oz box of Chicken Stock
8-12 oz grape tomatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
8 oz fresh milk mozzarella (smoked mozzarella or gouda would go well also!)
Salt and Pepper






1. Turn the chicken on about medium low heat and let it cook as you're doing all of this. I'm not going to explain how to cook chicken because you should know that by now.

2. Preheat oven to 400º. Pour a bit of olive oil, approx. 1 tbsp, over the tomatoes in a bowl to evenly coat them. Season them liberally with salt and pepper. On a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, pour the coated tomatoes and place them in the hot oven for about 12 minutes to roast them until the skin looks like you've been in the bathtub far too long.

the poor, unsuspecting tomatoes.
they're so trusting.

3. Heat the chicken stock in a saucepan over medium/med high heat. In a skillet pan put the raw pasta and turn it on medium low to just gently warm the pasta. Once the chicken stock is boiling, pour it about 1 cup at a time over the noodles. Go ahead and turn that pasta pan up to medium now, too. As the pasta starts to soften KEEP STIRRING otherwise it may stick together. When the noodles have almost completely absorbed the first cup of liquid, add another. And once that's all absorbed, guess what? Add the rest and don't stop stirring and it will absorb all of the liquid.

4. Cut the mozzarella in to about 1" cubes and stir in to the pasta. It should start to get deliciously melty about now. Don't add the tomatoes first because they'd just fall apart while you're stirring and getting that cheese worked through the dish. Once you're satisfied with the meltiness (i just made that word up) of your cheese, gently fold in the tomatoes, plate up, top with the chicken breast, and enjoy!


Chicken Marinade, Re di Italia


This chicken marinade may or may not ACTUALLY be the king of Italy, but i'll let you decide. You can do this 15 minutes or 8 hours before, and the longer you let it marinade the more flavor you'll have imbued in to your breasts. Chicken breasts, that is. (Low brow joke #1 of the day.)

What you need:

1 1/4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 clove of garlic finely grated
2 tbsp dried Italian Herbs (I used Spice Islands brand blend which I found to be pretty tasty, but just about every brand consists of a mixture of Oregano, Marjoram, Savory, Thyme, Basil, Rosemary, and Sage)
1/4 cup olive oil (this is about the only way I will cook chicken anymore. Most homemade marinades require olive oil and it makes the chicken so moist and flavorful I highly recommend it.)
1 tbsp dijon mustard (sounds weird, but go with it)

Put these all in a zip lock bag and mix it up, add the chicken and let it flavor for as much time as you can afford. It'll take you 5 minutes to put this together and the payoff is tenfold.


With a meal so delicious and beautiful, you'll be able to fool anyone that you spent all day working on it. In fact, I recommend you don't dispel that idea either; they'll feel bad and do all the dishes.

Happy Cooking!