Easy Pepper Steak

For tonight I went with a Flank steak recipe that I found on Pinterest. As usual the pictures are stunning. What a delicious looking meal. It was certainly what drove me to try a flank steak. My experience with flank steak is usually one where the piece of meat I end up with could be used to resole shoes, or replace roof shingles, or maybe patch semi-truck tires. But since this meal looked so good and introduced a new style of cooking flank steak that I haven't tried before (and it seemed quick), I thought I'd give it a try.

This meal came from Gimme Some Oven. http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/easy-pepper-steak-recipe/#_a5y_p=1010485

So this is mine. I'm not going to necessarily call this meal a fail as far as comparing it to the picture I was shooting for. My creation certainly isn't nearly as pretty as the original but it's probably as close as I've gotten so far. Also, and this will only be a short rant, I've started to realize that some blogs work as hard on their pictures as they do their recipes. Which is ok, just so it's known, I'm less of a photographer than I am a cook. Rant over. Plus my pictures come from the meals mer moments before they are eaten for dinner. I spend just enough time to make them look pretty before we tear into them. A lot like making your bed right before going to sleep.
For this meal, I put my twist on it right away. I bought a 1.6lb flank steak, the recipe called for 1lb - so I doubled the marinade. I was also lucky enough today to be able to marinade the steak for nearly 5 hours. The thought was - if 15 minutes to marinade is good, 5 hours should be Super. Since the recipe called for sweet peppers but no spice, I cut up 2 jalapeno peppers and cooked them with the other peppers. The heat was just right and there were all sorts of flavors. The meat was put over a bowl of quinoa.

Unfortunately, this recipe won't make the rotation. I'm just not sure there's a way to cook flank steak without ending up with a material that can repair concrete walls. Actually I'm being harsh. Marinading the meat for so long actually made for the best, softest flank steak I've made. If I were to make any changes, well, anymore changes, I'd add a little more soy sauce.

Overall this was an easy recipe and there are many flavors to be had. If you're a fan a flank steak, you'll enjoy this recipe (it's in the link above).

Seattle Asian Salmon Bowl

Ok, so this one isn't even close but it's totally worth it. The secret to this dish is the sauce. If you're a little congested, if your nose is a little stuffy, make this dish and don't be shy with the wasabi. This is possibly the tenth time I've made this meal and there has only been one time that I didn't include the wasabi - Big Mistake. The wasabi gives the edge this meal needs. Another beauty about this dish is that it doesn't need an excuse. It's not comfort food. It's not necessarily a seasonal dish. It's just tasty. It can be tasty any time of year for any reason.
I'm not a huge fish fan unless it's sushi, but this meal definitely is on the regular rotation. The way that I've changed the recipe certainly needs to be adjusted but only to see if I can find a better way. All recipes can use adjusting, that's the beauty of cooking.

This meal comes from SkinnyTaste.com http://www.skinnytaste.com/2015/01/seattle-asian-salmon-bowl.html



This is my version of the dish. Certainly not as organic and green as the original but still really good. The sprouts have proven difficult to find. And to be honest, I've made this without looking at the recipe so many times that I've forgotten about some of the ingredients of the original. With the idea of the sauce being the money maker here, I've decided that it doesn't really matter how the salmon is cooked. My salmon just gets about 25 minutes in the oven at 350 with some salt and pepper. The store I shop at has a piece of salmon called "Salmon Select cuts". It's about 6 ounces of a nicely cut piece of fish - that's my go-to. The rice is just a brown rice, nothing special. A decently ripe avocado and an english cucumber and you're in business. Of course you need the ingredients for the sauce. Chances are, if you cook any sort of stir fry or oriental style dishes, you already have most of what you need sparing the wasabi. About the wasabi, get the wasabi paste - trust me. I foolishly tried using the wasabi powder - not good, bad decision, don't do it, not the same thing. The nori strips I haven't worried about as well as the seeds.

So since I'm thinking about it, I believe the next time I try this recipe I'm really going to try to more closely follow it. I'd like to see if I can get closer to what the author of this recipe intended. As good as I think my version is, I'm sure I'm missing out on what the original recipe has intended. Maybe a Whole Foods has those sprouts.

Carroll Shelby's Chili my way.

Tonight was a great dinner. I'm calling it great because there's no before picture to compare to. Here in Tampa it's been rainy and overcast. We can't call it cold here, it almost never gets cold here. But it was just a really good day for a chili. Chili is great in general, there are no rules with chili. Chili doesn't judge you or make you feel bad. Chili is a reflection of who you are as a cook. In tonight's example, I lazily left the spices up to Mr. Shelby. I didn't have to measure anything, which was nice. I did add enough of my own ingredients to justify to myself that I can call this chili mostly mine. I also changed up how I normally make my chili and honestly I have the recipes I've tried so far to thank. Following recipes has opened me up to new styles of cooking that I know I wouldn't have thought of myself.

This is my chili, I'm very happy with how it came out. The presentation could have been a little better if I would have used more of a traditional bowl but it was hot and using this bowl allowed us to spread out the chili so it would cool. So this post won't necessarily be any sort of review based on my limited knowledge but I'll give a recipe of my own. Of course there's the Carroll Shelby's Chili mix. In the box is a bag of chili mix, a bag cayenne pepper, a bag of salt and a bag of masa flour. I've used the Carroll Shelby Chili mix for years, it's my favorite. I've added different ingredients and cooked the chili up in all sorts of different ways. Tonight though, I really feel like I've found the a great combination with a new style of cooking the chili. So here it is.

This is based on my level of spice that I like and that my wife can tolerate. And like I said, chili is whatever you want it to be, so make the chili you want, but here's what I did.

1 box of Carroll Shelby's Chili mix.
1 1/2 Green Peppers cut into small squares.
1 Avocado sliced - this is optional, it helped cool the spice of the chili without using sour cream.
1 Yellow Onion diced.
1 can Ro-tel tomatoes Original.
1 can Ro-tel tomatoes Hot. If I use 2 cans of the Hot my wife won't eat it. Only took once to figure that out.
1 can 15oz Kidney beans.
1 can 8oz tomato sauce.
Some cooking oil.
2 lbs ground meat. I look for the most lean meat I can find.
Some Sharp Cheddar Cheese - optional and only if you like cheese.

This time I used my dutch oven to cook the chili. If you don't have a dutch oven, stop reading this and go get one. Get a good one, spend some money on it. There are so many things you can cook with a dutch oven. Your kitchen isn't complete until you have one. Without a dutch oven, it's like trying to cook a fried egg without a spatula. So just get one.

Start with the onion. I put some cooking oil in the dutch oven and threw my onions in over medium heat. I put a cook on the onions for about 5 minutes. Then I threw in the meat. That cooked until is was browned. I'd try to give a time but it really doesn't matter, cook the meat until it's brown and cooked.

Once the meat was cooked, I drained the grease and returned the onion/meat to the dutch oven.

Then I started adding the goodies. Based on the recipe from Carroll Shelby, I added the chili mix, the cayenne pepper, salt, tomato sauce, 16oz of water (fill the 8oz tomato sauce can twice, duh). I also add the 2 cans of Ro-tel tomatoes. The Original can I didn't drain, I just added the whole thing. The Hot tomato can I sort of drained off some of the liquid just to try to help tone down the heat. I also add the green peppers. Let this simmer for a while, like at least 20 minutes or so, really if you can give it more time it's better. Like maybe 40 minutes.

Drain and rinse off the Kidney beans. At some point while the chili is simmering, throw these things in too.

Now the masa flour. This is optional and it's used if you want a thicker chili. We like a thicker chili so we use it. Put the masa flour in a small bowl and add a bit of water. Stir. Add more water if the powder isn't turning into a paste. I think the Carroll Shelby recipe tells you how much water to add but I just sort of eyeball it until I have a nice, some what lose paste. Add that and cook for about 5 or 10 more minutes.

Then you're ready to eat. Start a bowl and add whatever you want - like I said - no rules. Avocado, sour cream, cheese, whip cream, I don't care, whatever makes you happy.

If anyone tries this I hope they enjoy. Then you can show me what you came up with and how my recipe blows.

Sriracha Chicken Quinoa Bowl

Now this dish was right up my alley, spicy, simple, chicken and rice - or quinoa. Apparently quinoa is a super food according to my wife. I've been avoiding recipes that called for quinoa simply because I wasn't sure where to find it and I was too lazy to look. Rice would work. As it turns out, I didn't have to go any further than my pantry where my wife had already bought a bag - who knew. And who doesn't love Sriracha?? That is just a magnificent sauce, and I really enjoy spicy.

Prep time about 15 minutes.
Cook time about 30 minutes (there's some overlap so it was a pretty quick meal)

The picture looks just as amazing as possible. The recipe came from Kim's Healthy Eats and I found it on Pintrest. Not all of the recipes that I try are on Pintrest but lately most of them come from there. I like the idea of seeing what the meal is supposed to look like. http://www.kimshealthyeats.com/sriracha-chicken-quinoa-bowl/

This is what I came up with. Yeah, probably another fail as far as trying to get my meal to look like the pictures. It was a tasty dish though. I just couldn't get the sauce to thicken up like the pictures suggest. What I noticed is that after the chicken was cooked, there was a bit of juice/liquid in the pan. Maybe I should have discarded that juice before adding the sriracha sauce mixture. The recipe said that after the chicken is cooked, add the mixture and cook for 5 more minutes. I gave it about 8 minutes but the mixture was still pretty lose, it just wasn't thickening like I wanted.

This recipe will be done again. There has to be a step or two that isn't included in the recipe to get that nice thick sauce to stick to the chicken and be all richy red like the pictures.

Tonight I really thought I would be able to match the picture but I was just off...by a lot of shades. I got more of a weak pink instead of a rich red. But I'll try this again at some point. I'm wondering corn starch should have been used but I don't want to mess up the taste because it's really good, even with what I came up with.

Slow Cooker Tuscan Chicken Stew

Tonight is the first entry for this blog. Full disclosure, I'm not a cook. I have a not so unique ability to read, measure, and follow simple directions. However, like everyone else, I also have my own ideas. That makes me feel like I have better ideas than the recipes I try. Sometimes it works out, and other times not so much. This blog is a guy trying to follow some recipes and how they turn out. It's hard to say they are true reviews because sometimes I change things. But if I try the recipes again, I'll likely forget what I've done before and something new will be made.

For tonights review, I decided to cook a Slow Cooker Tuscan Chicken Stew originally found on Pintrest but it looks like it came from Sweetpeasandsaffron.com http://sweetpeasandsaffron.com/2014/09/slow-cooker-tuscan-chicken-stew.html (hopefully that's enough credits). The picture is beautiful, I would have loved to have eaten it. I came up with something a little different looking - kinda like when you go to a restaurant and order based on a picture but what comes to the table is something very different looking.

Yeah, that's mine. A sad comparison. So for the most part I did follow the recipe for a while. Typically, I always put in a little extra vegetables and meat. In this case, the recipe asked for 2 carrots and 2 celery stalks, well that just looked slim. So I added a few more of each. I stayed on the high end for the recommended meat but stayed within the suggestions. The recipe called for 4-6 hours in a slow cooker at it's lowest temperature setting. This is where things started going down hill for me. After 4 hours, the potatoes and carrots were still raw hard. And honestly, it was getting late and my wife and I were getting hungry.

So I broke out my trusty dutch oven, I love my dutch oven. I dumped the whole thing into the dutch oven, covered, and cooked for another 45 minutes. The potatoes were nice and soft but the carrots were still a little touch - which is ok, I really didn't mind.

As for the taste....it's a good, healthy, lightish meal. Maybe other than the fact it calls for chicken thighs, there really isn't anything that bad for you in the stew. The fennel seed taste comes through the most. It does take some more salt to give the potatoes a little edge.

All this being said, the meal fell apart on me since it didn't seem to cook. It felt like it would have needed another 4 hours. So if I was able to leave it in the slow cooker, maybe the tastes would have come together better.

Not sure I'll cook this again. There was a lot of prep work, at least 30 minutes. Cook time was 4 hours in the slow cooker then another 45 minutes in my dutch oven. For the taste, I just don't think it's worth it to me.