Thai Food Birthday Extravaganza

Today we had a family gathering to celebrate the kids birthdays. Ashley and Zach will be 21 on Oct. 20 and Crystal will be 23 on Nov. 3. Everyone, of course, requested Thai food. I thought I'd share another Thai recipe and a few pics...

Made homemade Thai Eggrolls, Toy's Chicken PotPic, boneless as requested by Zach

and Fried Beef as requested by Ashley and Crystal.

The rice on the left is sticky or glutinious rice and goes with the fried beef. On the right is jasmine rice for the pot pic.
My Birthday Babies ~ Zach, Crystal and Ashley


Grandma Toy's Pot Pic

2 lbs. chicken breast, cut into bite size pieces 1 Tbs fresh grated ginger
8 – 10 cloves garlic, peeled 10 -15 Thai peppers
1 tsp. chicken/onion/garlic spice mix* 2 Tbs. oil
1 can bamboo shoots 1 Tbs. fish sauce
1 Tbs. Sugar


Add ginger, garlic, peppers, ginger and spice mix to a food processor and combine until smooth, adding a little water to make a paste. Add mix to medium size cooker and cook on medium high till water is evaporated. Add 2 Tbs. oil and cook a minute. Add chicken and stir to coat. Cook on medium till chicken is no longer pink. Add bamboo shoots, fish sauce and sugar. Serve with hot jasmine rice.

* The chicken/onion/garlic spice mix is available at Asian markets. All the words on the package are in Thai so I call it chicken/onion garlic spice mix. Could substitute by using equal parts chicken buillion, onion powder and granulated garlic.

PS. I almost forgot to say thanks to Jenny and Jonathan for always talking about the deliciousness that is pan sludge. Today, the best part of my whole meal was the pan goo from the Fried Beef. omg.

Recipe: Polenta Arrabiata

Easy for camping. Even easier at home on a lazy hungry night. I can be eating this in about 20 minutes.

Polenta Arrabiata

1 Tbs. olive oil

1 small onion, rough chopped

4 cloves garlic, chopped

1 large can roasted diced tomatoes

cayenne pepper flakes

salt and pepper

fresh basil, chopped (any fresh herb really)

1 tube polenta

1 Tbs. olive oil (I used a garlic chili oil)

In a medium saucepan or cooker, add olive oil and heat to medium. Add onion and sautee for a couple minutes. Add garlic and cook a few minutes more. Add tomatoes and stir. Cook until the sauce is thickened, about 10 minutes. Add cayenne, salt and pepper to taste. Add chopped fresh herbs and remove from heat.

While sauce is cooking, slice polenta into 1/2" thick rounds. Add oil to a cast iron or other nonstick skillet and pan fry polenta rounds over medium heat until crispy and brown.

Pour the spicy sauce over crispy polenta and enjoy!

Recipe: Greek Melt

Mmmmmmmm Cheesy! Fast and easy. Who could ask for more?!

Greek Melt

2 Tbs. butter
1/2 lb. Muenster cheese, chopped or sliced
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 lemon
Warm crusty bread

In a cast iron skillet over medium-low heat, melt butter. Add cheese and garlic evenly around pan and heat until the cheese begins to bubble around the edges. Remove from heat, sprinkle with lemon juice and serve in the skillet with warm crusty bread.

WCN! This Wednesday ~ Campfire Cuisine

Tune in to 88.7 WMMT at 6pm on Wednesday September 1st

for the world's only live radio cooking show (that we know of) What's Cookin Now!

This months show finds Jenny, Jonathan and Tricia exploring the wide world of Campfire Cuisine. You will be amazed at the delicious delicacies and tasty tidbits that can be created over burning wood. Camping doesn't have to mean your stuck eating beanie weenies. potted meat and cheetos. Join 3 geeky campicureans for camp cooking tips, witty commentary, sexual innuendo and as always, yummy food.

Tricia will show us how to make an easy cheesy garlicy appetizer on the fire. Follow that up with some pan fried polenta and spicy arriabata sauce. What are Jenny and Jonathan cooking!??! Well, you'll just have to tune in to find out! Don't miss this hour full of fun and deliciousness.

Be sure to friend us on facebook. And if you like what you hear on WMMT, make a donation to support public community radio.

that's right Saturday night.

Today was a day for nesting. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry and more cooking. I've been thinking alot lately about Grandma Toy's Thai Eggrolls.

If you are one of the 5 people who regularly listen to What's Cookin' Now! then you already know but just in case... Grandma Toy is my husband's ex-wife/baby momma's mom and is from Bangkok, Thailand. She is a wonderful cook and gracious hostess. She invited me into her kitchen and taught me a few of her classic recipes.

I must admit that I change the eggroll recipe a little. I add carrot because I think it makes them prettier.They are more a fried springroll than an eggroll but she calls them eggrolls so I call them eggrolls too. Who am I to argue with her about Thai food names!??! Anyway, I haven't made them in forever because it takes a while when your kitchen helpers are away at college. But I was craving them... Soooo, I cooked a pound of ground beef and boiled 1/2 pound of shrimp. Chopped onion, celery, green onion and cilantro, shredded carrots, soaked and chopped bean thread, added some seasonings and got Sam to mix it all up. I ended up rolling 27 eggrolls.

Fried a few because you have to test to make sure they are good! We ate 6. Yes, 3 each for dinner and put the rest in the freezer for future easy deliciousness.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

The dipping sauce is made of pancake syrup, white vinegar, sweet chili sauce and salt. Weird huh? But soooo tasty.

Then, I needed to use up a bunch of tomatoes that my nice co-worker Kasey gave me so I decided to make a from scratch spaghetti sauce. Blanched, peeled and tossed those ^ tomatoes (2nd batch was a ton of tiny tomatoes) into a pot with a little water and a little salt and put it on medium heat. A couple hours went by, stirring sometimes and adding water if needed. The more it cooked, the more seeds came out. seeds, seeds, seeds. They were everywhere. It was waay too seedy to make spaghetti sauce so I decided to try a blended tomato basil soup. Sauteed some garlic and onion in a little olive oil till it was soft, picked some basil off the back porch, chopped it up, added everything to the tomatoes and pureed the whole mess with my immersion blender.

If you don't have an immersion blender, buy one. They are affordable, handy, easy to clean and kinda fun to use. The soup turned out great. It needed a little salt, black pepper and a dash of cayenne to be perfect. And then I succumbed to the power of cheese. I added a little fresh grated Parmesan and let that melt in. It was so much more perfect-er. I'm going to take it and some good bread to share share with my sisters in the ville for lunch tomorrow. Jenny has her fancy tasting spoon and this is mine. Handmade by Appalachian Artisan Center Studio Artist Michael Holliday.

See you on the radio! Next show Campfire Cuisine. It's gonna be hot! Don't miss it!

Bacon! (Part the First)

I've done some pretty good things in my life. I've cared for thousands of sick people.  I've entertained all kinds of people with words and music.  I like to think I've been a good husband, a good son, a good friend, and a good citizen.

But if I died tomorrow, I imagine people would say one thing: "He sure made some tasty bacon."

It was only about a year ago that I dove headlong into charcuterie, using Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's excellent book as my guide.  I haven't ventured in as far as I'd like, limited somewhat by materials (and even more by laziness), but I've been floored by how good even first attempts have come out.

As it turns out, the hardest part of making bacon is tracking down fresh pork belly.  But sometimes all you have to do is ask:

This came from Food City right here in Haz Vegas.  I happened to ask the meat guys one morning while I was shopping, and they had just gotten a box of pork bellies in.  They usually sell it sliced, but you want it whole, or at most cut in half.


The pork belly is beautiful meat on one side and pig skin on the other, with that nice big seam of fat in between.  You can take that skin off at this point, and you have to if you're going to do a rolled-up preparation like pancetta.  But for this purpose, you should leave it on--it's much easier to take off after it's done, and a big hunk of cured and smoked pig skin is the best friend a pot of beans ever had.

You should trim the belly into a nice rectangle.  You can toss the trimmings with some basic dry cure (see below) to make salt pork, or save them to add to some sausage later on.  But this belly came nice and trimmed already, so all I had to do was split it in half and throw each chunk in a Big Ass Ziploc.

(Can I say how much I love the Big Ass Ziploc?  They come in two and 2 1/2-gallon sizes, and they're awesome for all kinds of things.  They're especially useful when you're traveling; for instance, you can put your laptop in one inside your laptop bag to keep it dry in a downpour.)

So next we need our cure.  You can add just about any flavor you want, but unsurprisingly, my favorite is garlic and lots of it.

Left to right, we have about nine bay leaves, a tablespoon or so of really coarse cracked pepper (use your grinder wide open, or a heavy skillet and all your aggression), about 18 cloves of garlic smashed up, and about a cup of Basic Dry Cure, which is 8 parts (by weight) kosher salt, 4 parts sugar, and 2 parts "pink salt".

Pink salt is sodium nitrite, often sold as Insta-Cure #1.  It helps preserve the bacon in several ways--it keeps it from going rancid, it preserves its red color with cooking, and it inhibits bacterial growth, especially our friend C. botulinum.  It isn't naturally pink; it's colored that way so you won't mistake it for regular salt.  It's available all over the internet, and a few bucks will buy you more than you'll ever use.

From here the process gets complicated: you mix all this stuff up and rub it all over the pork belly.

Don't worry about covering every square inch; as juice drains from the belly it will dissolve the salt and spread the flavors all over the meat. Just spread it kind of evenly on both sides.

Finally, seal up the bags and stash them in the fridge as flat as possible.

These will live in their bags in the fridge for 7-10 days, or until they're pretty firm in the middle. Every other day you'll want to flip the bags over and redistribute the cure all over the meat.  (I like to put a schedule up on the fridge for doing this, so I don't forget.)  And that's when we'll move on to Part II--when the meat hits the smoke.

Green Tomato Pickles

Every summer I fall in love. As I work to take advantage of the bounty of summer produce, I stumble on a recipe that I can't stop thinking about and talking about, a recipe that I want to run home and make again night after night.  Last summer it was dried tomatoes, and more specifically dried tomato butter, especially with a little bit of garlic and some aleppo pepper. I think this summer's winner might be green tomato pickles.

I was looking around for a quick pickle to do for this past weekend's Supper Club, and I stumbled on this recipe in Food and Wine from the Lee Brothers. (SAT time: Lee Bros. : Paula Deen :: Chuck D. : Flavor Flav.)  Green tomatoes suck up the brine so well that people couldn't believe these had only been made earlier in the afternoon.  My only quibble with Matt and Ted was that I felt they needed more sugar, but this is probably because my tomatoes were especially tart.

If you have a mandoline, it's just insane how quick and easy this recipe is.  As long as I have a source of green tomatoes, I'll definitely have a batch of these in my fridge.

Green Tomato Pickles
from Matt and Ted Lee
3 small, green (unripe) tomatoes (12 ounces), cored
1 medium white onion
1 cup water
1 cup white wine vinegar
3 garlic cloves, mashed to a paste
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon sugar (I upped this a lot--probably two tablespoons)

Using a mandoline, very thinly slice the green tomatoes and white onion. Layer the slices in a heatproof 4-cup measuring cup. In a small saucepan, combine the water with the vinegar, garlic, peppercorns, salt and sugar and bring to a boil. Pour the hot brine over the tomatoes and onion and let cool to room temperature, about 1 hour. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour, then drain and serve.

NOTE: These will keep in the fridge, drained, for about two weeks. Don't try to can these, since the vinegar solution isn't acidic enough for that; if you want to can some (and you should), find a recipe specifically for canning.