Redneck Thanksgiving – Redneck cooking
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving. And despite all of the advertisement, it’s not a day off from work to go shopping for so-so deals on so-so electronic gizmos to give away for Christmas. Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks for all that is right and good in your life. A day to spend with family and to show them how much you care about them and how much they mean to you by spending the whole day slaving in a hot kitchen to give them a feast to eat that they will probably complain about anyways.
The traditional Turkey dinner with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, and a vast variety of cakes, pies, puddings and other sweet desserts takes a couple of days to prepare and minutes to plunder. By the end of the day, it looks like the Food Network has exploded all over the kitchen. There are plates, bowls, and pie tins everywhere with varying amounts of leftover food in them. The ritual of putting all of those leftovers in the fridge has become an art form of crafty stacking of plates, bowls, and tins that were never meant to be stacked together empty, let alone with food still in them.
This year for Thanksgiving I plan to stay away from the family and have a quick non-traditional dinner.
It’s so easy to be cheesy – Redneck Cooking
Happy Halloween everyone. I hope you all are having a good Halloween. I thought about writing a piece about some cool spooky Halloween kind of dish. I came up with the idea of making a meatloaf into the shape of a hand or a foot or something. Then I came across the Not Martha website. This is a cool looking meatloaf and my wife and I thought it would be fun to make one of these the next time we get the whole family together so I am now on the hunt for a hand shaped mold. So now that the meatloaf body part has already been perfected by someone else I decided to go with my original idea and give you my lasagna recipe instead.
Mushroom lasagna with pancetta and sage – Recipe test drive
It’s Laura’s birthday today, so I offered her the dinner of her choice last night. After much hemming and hawing, she settled on lasagna. I found an intriguing recipe for mushroom lasagna with pancetta and sage on Cook’s Illustrated (subscription required). It’s a little more involved than the dishes this busy cook usually attempts, but what are birthdays (and sisters) for? And, for the record, the extra effort was totally worth it. This is the best lasagna I’ve had in ages. The recipe has several things going for it: a mushroom triple threat, flavorful cheeses and pancetta. I can’t wait to dig into my leftovers!
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