2. Week Two - On to the Frugal Gourmet

Friday July 19

This week I am digging into the Frugal Gourmet Cookbook to get that ground pork recipe I was after. 

Friday August 2

Well, make that two weeks. It's been a very busy couple of weeks. And this book was fraught with fails. Mostly on my part. 

Orange Sausage Meatballs disaster

Ok it wasn't meant to be a goulash. 

The meatballs had orange rind in them, making them slightly bitter. And then other ingredients like cinnamon. So it seemed rather Fall-like right? The book said "cook in a light tomato sauce". Looking back, I imagine he really only wanted me to put them in tomato sauce. But overachiever that I am, I added all kinds of spices from Italian herbs to garlic and it became something else. And I thought, well this needs some kind of noodle. I added the only noodle I had, which was a macaroni. 

It certainly looked good. But you know when you get all your friends together and some of them just don't mesh? They both end up looking at you like "why are you even friends with this guy" and everyone is uncomfortable. That's what this dish tasted like. It's not Jeff Smith's fault, he only told me to add tomato sauce. 

But that was too vague for me. I needed more information or I go rogue and then bad things happen. 

    

On to the chicken!

Stuffed Chicken Thighs 

So this was kind of a weird method, in my opinion. You basically poach the chicken, pop out the bone, put in ham, and keep cooking with a roux. Not realizing I was meant to get bone-in chicken thighs, I got boneless, so they fell apart when I tried to poach them. I still, with the help of toothpicks, made some kind of stuffed chicken breast. But then I wanted a noodle again, so I boiled the tortellini to go with it. Well you can't eat it dry, so I thought, hey the chicken has a sauce, why not toss it all together?

Remember the chicken? Yeah it had toothpicks in it. That doesn't work well tossed together with pasta, so I removed the toothpicks, cut up the chicken and ham and tossed it all together. 

I'm not sure what Jeff would think but this was really tasty and I added a side of broccoli for veg. 

Next we have breakfast for dinner...

Crepes and Bacon

Crepes stuffed with Swiss and Bacon

So the Crepes I've made before - the technique was not new to me. 

They're pretty easy; just blend the ingredients ina blender, pour out half the width of a small pan, swirl, cook and flip. 

What made these different was the call for a beer. 

Now, we aren't really beer drinkers, as evidenced by some old beer in the utility room that is collecting dust. I wanted to get something fresh, so I ended up on a segue out to Lansing to check out Horrocks. If you get a chance, take a couple hours out of your Saturday and immerse yourself in a very large food market, garden center, beer garden and pizza place. Outstanding!

They have an entire room of beers, and a huge selection of single beers to choose from. 

Turns out Crepes with beer in the mix is good. Vicky-approved. This with the Swiss cheese and bacon made for a very rich dish. 

Fruit Salad - skip the cherries

Since we were going for richness, I figured we needed some sweet acidity and fruit salad fits the bill. 

However, when all you have is blackberries, blue berries, and kiwi, there isn't enough color. So I added maraschino cherries. It wasn't the best idea. Unmarinated cherries would have been better. Or strawberries. C'est la vie. 

Crab and Cucumber Salad

I swear it's not cat food. 

I know it looks like it. 

The recipe means well but I think it would have worked better with full on imitation crab flakes. Maybe. Or real chunks of real crab assuming you can afford it. 

So you slice the cucumbers thin and salt them and wait. (you have to WAIT?!) Then you drain out the water from the cucumbers. 

I did. I tasted it. Salt. Ugh, so I rinsed them. Better. 

Then you add low sodium soy sauce. 

Let me digress a second... when they tell you low sodium, LISTEN TO THEM. I didn't have it. 

I used full on salty soy sauce and this was too much. 

I dumped in the ingredients. and the salting of the cucumbers kept them weeping water, creating more sauce. Crap. It was wet and now the brown of the sauce mixed with the white flakes of canned crab meat turned the meat reddish, which, incidentally looks exactly like cat food. Dammit. 

And it was too salty. 

But if you close your eyes and eat it with a relatively bland accompanyment of flat iron steak , it was okay. 

But since we tend to eat with our eyes, make sure you set aside your glasses for this one. 

Cheesecake Fail - image not mine but you get the idea. 

There shouldn't be pictures for this one. And I didn't feel like taking a picture. 

I messed it up, I admit. 

It was my husband's birthday and I was making this New York cheesecake. It was looking good. I wont get into the search for the 9 inch spring form pan, let's suffice it to say it hid on me in another pan. 

So the last step after making the cheesecake is to broil it so it gets these nice browning on top. I had no idea, and the book did not say, how long. So I guessed 4 mins. I guessed wrong and ended up burning the top. at 1130 at night before my husband's birthday. I was not pleased. 

I removed the burned part but the cheesecake underneath was now chopped up like the backroads in Michigan, and now I had to get something else for his birthday. 

I naively made macerated strawberries to mask the lumpiness of the cheesecake. But in the end, got a bumpy cake and called it good. 

I still cut up and gave away slices of cheesecake covered in strawberries. It was good. It just didn't look it.  

Double Chocolate Muffin Poundcake

This had nothing to do with the book, really. I just wanted to prove to myself I can still make something. 

The oven crapped out on me - fautly starter - so I made this in the toaster oven. 

This was a rousing success!

Take that, fate!

Next week we dig into an Amish cookbook. 

See you then!