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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Porcupine Roadkill

I LOVE my mom's porcupines.  Big ground beef and rice meatballs simmered in tomato sauce and rice, it's one of those things that tastes better the next day.

Make some meatballs of ground beef, minute rice, an egg, garlic, and oregano.  My mom always made them pretty big, but I never quite got the hang of frying the big ones so that the center was done and the outside wasn't burnt, so I just make smaller ones.  Someday I will master the (small) fist-sized meatball.  When they are cooked through, put some tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, water, and rice in the pan and simmer it all together until the rice is done.

Of course, sometimes you want a porcupine after a long day of work.  You could simply plan ahead and have some frozen meatballs ready to go in a pan with tomato sauce and rice, but that would be too easy!  So some nights I make porcupine roadkill.

Here we have some pearl rice, crushed tomatoes, dried whole oregano (if your herbs don't smell, they won't taste!), and some leftover tomato soup.  After browning the ground beef with some garlic, I added the whole lot plus some water.  Well, not all of the oregano.  Just two small palm fulls.

After it simmered over low heat for awhile, the rice was done, and I got my porcupine fix.

This is a play on depression era food.  You would have used rice to stretch out the meat, you would have grown some oregano and maybe garlic or even left them out completely (still tasty by the way), and probably used tomato soup, or whatever tomato product you could find.  Maybe even some tomatoes from the garden.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Clearance Chicken, Macaroni and Cheese, and Pasta Salad

Elliot found a great buy in the markdown bin the other day:  Pappy's seasoned bone-in chicken breasts.  These things were HUGE!  I have a relatively small  (rectangular brownie) baking dish that fits quite well in the little roaster oven.  Only two of the three chicken boobs fit.  So I baked them up and made some macaroni and cheese.  I don't have an actual recipe for macaroni and cheese, I just make by eyeball enough bechamel sauce to cover the macaroni and add cheese until it tastes good ;)  I added bacon, just a little cayenne, a teaspoon or two of lemon juice (it needed a little sharpness), and the thing that made it just perfect... the drippings from the chicken, along of course with the medium cheddar cheese and the usual small handful of parmesan.  The drippings were that one tiny little flavour that made the dish taste JUST RIGHT.  I'm going to keep that in mind from now on.  Using half a package of macaroni made enough for a big serving that night (there's no such thing as just a little macaroni and cheese anyway lol) and two more large servings for lunch.


There was enough chicken left on the cooked boobs for pasta salad (and heck I STILL have that one uncooked piece), so I made some up for the week.  I made a half recipe of this ranch dressing by a poster by the name of Kittencal on food.com which was formerly recipezaar only I used yogurt in place of the sour cream (hey gotta work with what you got, and yogurt is a common substitution for sour cream, as they are about the same texture and tangy), and used 1/2 teaspoon of seasoned salt instead of the quarter that would have been asked for in a half-recipe, and some granulated onion in lieu of the fresh (just to taste as I don't know what the conversion is off-hand). 


I boiled the other half of that macaroni with PLENTY of salt in the water.  Seriously, try adding several (SEVERAL) pinches of salt next time you make pasta (or a small palm full as I usually do) and try telling me the pasta doesn't taste just a bit better and require less salting of the sauce. 


I then mixed some (erm.... Ok as usual I didn't measure...) frozen peas, one coarsly grated carrot, and one thinly sliced celery stalk with the leftover chicken from the night before with the cooked pasta.  The hot pasta thawed the peas.  After letting it cool, I added the dressing and three string cheese sticks I cut into chunks.  Turned out great and we have enough to last at least half if not the whole week for lunches :)














I even kept the bones to freeze.  Between these and another package of whole chicken legs (thigh and drumstick), I should have enough bones to make a nice bit of chicken broth next week.