I threatened it, and here it is, just in time for a late in the day Meals Monday.
As the title says, first, I started with the whole chicken breasts that I grilled a couple days ago:
Preserved in a ‘Food Saver’ vacuum bag, so still perfectly fresh. 😉
Then we add fresh pasta, and cheeses for the sauce:
The cheese in the ziploc bag is Parmigiano-Reggiano. The recipe for the Alfredo sauce is in my post on my vaguely Italian, redneck nachos, LOL. By the way, if you’ve never had fresh pasta like the Buitoni above… Well, once you do, you’ll never go back to the dry stuff again. Soooooooooo much better.
After cutting up the chicken, cooking the pasta and the sauce, then mixing it all together, we have a couple of delicious plates of pasta:
The other half wanted mushrooms also, so there you are. 😊
I’m playing ketchup (lol) with posts today as we get ready to put the house back on the market. Ergo, “Wildcard Wednesday” is “Meals Monday” for this post. 🙂
A while back, I promised my readers a post with my pesto recipe. I’m here to deliver! This is a traditional Genovese basil-based Pesto sauce. My step father brought it over from Italy (he was born there) so it’s authentic. Also named after him here. His original Italian first name was Attilio.
Just a quick note before I get started: This recipe is going to make a large amount of pesto. A cup is usually plenty to do pasta for four people. Pesto keeps fairly well in the fridge (not indefinitely however), and it can be frozen with minimal loss of flavor. It defrosts fairly quick also.
Note this is also all U.S. measurements. Converting them to Metric equivalent can be done at this site or similar sites:
3 Tablespoons of Romano, Pecorino, or more Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Preparation:
All you need is a Cuisinart or similar food processor. Add everything in and blend well. The basil should be broken down to small, crumb sized pieces.
Alternatively, if you’re a fan of pine nuts, you can blend everything except the pine nuts, then add them to the food processor and give it 3 quick presses of the button to chop them up without breaking them down to tiny pieces. This gives the pesto a little more texture and makes the pine nut flavor a little more noticeable.
On the flip side, if you hate pine nuts, you can leave them out or substitute another nut for them. Walnuts are a common option in other recipes I’ve seen.
Final Notes:
The most important thing I can add here is that pesto is a sauce that you add to food AFTER it’s cooked. If you cook it with the pasta, etc… you’ll lose much of the flavor. I can tell you first hand that it looses all visual appeal if you try to add it to vegetables while they’re grilling. WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE FOOD IS COOKED, then put it on top or mix it in.
Also, pasta with pesto added is how at least most Americans see this used. I can tell you that it goes well on top of grilled chicken and fresh steamed or grilled vegetables as well. I have no idea how traditional those uses are, BUT pesto is a fairly versatile sauce. Give yourself permission to experiment with it a little. I imagine it could go well over a milder flavored fish for example.
When my family makes the above recipe, we put the excess into seal-able containers that are about 1 cup in size, and store them in the freezer. When we’re ready to use more, we pull it out and set it on the counter. It will defrost in an hour and a half to two hours in my experience. DO NOT defrost using a microwave! It’ll do nasty things to the oil and cheese.
The recipe doubles nicely also if you want to store a large amount for future use.
LASTLY: As with ALL cooking, the quality of the ingredients makes a HUGE difference. Find the freshest basil you can find, make sure the olive oil IS Extra Virgin, not Walmart trash, there is a massive difference between authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and Kraft Parm, etc…
I’m watching the Puppy Bowl and snacking on my most successful insane culinary experiment ever.
The Origin Story:
At our house, the Superbowl is more an excuse to relax,snack and watch the commercials than anything. We wanted something different this year. Nachos came up as a suggestion but I wanted somthing other than the standard Tex-Mex snack. A quick Google search turned up Italian Nachos as a common spin on nachos.
“Italian” nachos use wonton wrappers for chips (apparently Chinese is more Italian than Latin is, LOL), alfredo sauce in place of salsa, grilled chicken and italian sausage for the meats, and then you can top with italian cheeses, diced tomatoes, parsley and whatever else sounds exciting and vaguely Italian, LOL.
It all sounded good, but today was the first day in ages that looked good for BBQing, and we wanted to make use of what we already had around the house. Tri-Tip quickly got substituted for the shredded chicken. Likewise, the normal Italian sausage got replaced by a chicken basil & black pepper sausage we had on hand.
Getting Cooking:
The first thing I had to do was smoke the tri-tip. We had picked up a couple of prime grade pieces at Costco:
To move things along, they got my usual rub of salt, pepper and garlic powder, then slow cooked in the smoker. A few hours later:
If you’re not familiar with smoking, that probably looks raw. Smoking leaves red-pink smoke ring around the outside of the meat. Do it REALLY low and slow like I did, and the smoke coloring can permeate the entire piece of meat. I cooked the meat to a nearly perfect medium rare. The sausage above, I waited and cooked in a pan since I wasn’t sure how fast the beef would cook. Grilling times can vary with outside temperature and wind.
So with the tri-tip,we have our redneck aspect of our confused nachos. We used a bag of Tostitos corn chips instead of buying wonton wrappers. So we’ve added a little Latin influence. My next obstacle was Alfredo Sauce. The only bottled one I’ve tried that I didn’t hate was by Emerril. The stores here stopped carrying it since the philistines here prefer Ragu. That left me with making my own. Something I’ve never done before believe it or not. Well, it turned out fabulous! Enough so that, to paraphrase Scarlet O’Hara; “As God is my witness, I’ll never eat bottled Alfredo sauce again”. LOL.
I looked up a few recipes and then improvised my own:
Silk’s Cheesy Alfredo Sauce
3 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of olive oil
4 cloves of minced garlic
2 cups of heavy cream
1 1/2 cups of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 cup of grated mozzarella cheese
(Yes, this makes some cheesy sauce)
1 tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper
Put the butter, olive oil and garlic into a medium saucepan on medium heat. When the butter and garlic start to brown, add the heavy cream. Give it a minute or so to warm, then add the cheeses, Cook until the cheeses are melted and smooth, then add in black pepper and stir. Give it a minute or so longer and it’s ready to go.
The only trick or caution is to stir frequently so nothing burns on the bottom of the pan. If it starts bubbling, reduce the heat also.
Spread some chips out on a plate, then ladle on the alfredo sauce, then add the sausage and tri-tip:
From there, you can add a little more alfredo sauce. Then I added grated parm, mozzarella, and smoked gouda cheese. After that top with onions, diced pepperoncini peppers, diced tomatoes, olives or whatever else sounds exciting.
I’m thrilled with the way this turned out. The beef, the sausage and the gouda all had a smoked flavor and blended together perfectly. The alfredo sauce will put Olive Garden to shame too, LOL.
I got bored with the idea of a normal sausage and eggs breakfast for dinner, While digging for ideas I remembered an OLD recipe for Breakfast Pizza. My mom originally found this in the newspaper or a magazine back in the 1980s.
History aside, let’s answer the obvious question for some of you: What the heck is a breakfast pizza?
You use croissant roll dough for the crust, then pile on sausage, eggs, cheese and shredded potatoes, and bake. 🙂 The original recipe is pretty simple and designed to be thrown together quickly.
INGREDIENTS:
1 Pound of bulk pork sausage (I like Jimmy Dean sage sausage)
1 package of refrigerated crescent rolls (Pillsbury or similar)
1 cup frozen loose pack hash brown potatoes, thawed
1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese (8 ounces) – can use Monterey Jack, Swiss or a Blend)
5 Eggs
1/4 Cup of Milk
1/2 teaspoon of Salt
1/4 teaspoon of Pepper
2 Tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano if you want to do it right. Trust me, there IS a difference)
PREPARATION:
In a skillet, cook sausage until browned, then drain off excess fat. I put the sausage on a plate with a couple of paper towels underneath it. 😉 Place the dough in an ungreased 12 inch pizza pan with points towards the center (see pic below). Press over bottom and up sides to make a crust. Make sure to seal perforations.
Note; I used a skillet since I didn’t have a pizza pan. A round casserole dish or similar should also work as long as it’s 12 inches in diameter. I also used cooking spray on the pan.
Spoon sausage over crust. Sprinkle with potatoes. Top with cheddar cheese (or cheese of choice). In a bowl, beat together eggs, salt, pepper and milk. Sprinkle Parmesan over all.
Finally, bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 to 30 minutes.
Aside from some small commentary, that’s the recipe verbatim from the original article. Here’s a couple of observations from my first time remaking this in decades:
1: Make sure that the hash browns are indeed thawed. If you add them frozen, they’ll be very mushy. In fact you may want to try partially cooking them first if you want a more crispy texture.
2: If you use pre-packaged crescent rolls or croissant dough, the “Grands” (large) size rolls will make a thicker crust. I prefer the regular size. My personal advice would be to stick with plain ones also. If you go with buttery flavor, etc… you’re going to have really greasy crust that tastes like pure butter. We did regular and it was still a bit too close to that for me. My next experiment will be using Phyllo dough instead. There are several options a creative cook can play around with here,including making croissant dough from scratch.
3: As with any recipe, you can always adjust the seasoning. The original is not much salt and pepper, but it’s easier to add later than to take away after too much has been added. I personally like about double the parm cheese in the recipe also. It would be easy to throw some bacon or turkey bacon in the mix also. As a final note, I used 6 eggs, not 5 with no adjustments to cooking time (done in 30 minutes).
Regardless of whether you do it the easy way above or get closer to cooking from scratch, this is a hearty, flavorful meal that should easily feed a family of four. It only took 2 slices to make me full.
You can see how thick the “crust” is with the “grands” size Pilsbury crescent rolls used.
A quick apology to those on the metric system also. The measurement conversions should be fairly easy for you to look up online though.
In between all the chores, I did find time Monday to apply my tasty slow cooking techniques to some beef Tri-Tip from Costco. It’s just taken a couple days to get to blogging about it.
Half the time, I’ll use my dual grill method and slow smoke until the meat hits an internal temperature of 100 degrees, then put it on a hot charcoal grill to put a nice sear on the meat and get the IT to 135 degrees. This time, I didn’t feel like fussing with two grills. I slow smoked at 180 degrees for a little over an hour to get the meat to 100 degrees, then I just cranked up the heat on the pellet smoker. So, no grill marks, but it did turn out very tasty:
Perfect medium rare with great smoke flavor
And for those who are curious… Yes, just basic salt, pepper and garlic for a rub. That’s almost all I ever use. Good meat doesn’t need sugar and other fluff. 🙂
It’s FINALLY time! Yep, the pictures are downloaded and I finally have time to tell the tale. Easily offended vegetarians, vegans, kosher and halal eaters may want to leave now. 😀
That said, here’s the run down on the BBQ a couple of days ago. St Louis style BBQ ribs were the main course.
For anyone who doesn’t know the difference, St Louis style spare ribs (keeping it simple) are from the thicker belly ribs on the pig. Baby Baby back ribs (a.k.a. loin ribs, back ribs, or Canadian back ribs) are taken from the top of the rib cage between the spine and the spare ribs, below the loin muscle. St Louis ribs are flatter, have a slightly higher fat content (which can make for good flavor), and brown more evenly. Baby Backs do come from adult pigs, and some people think they’re more tender. It’s more about how either is cooked though.
The same can be said with the meat content for either rib. St. Louis style come from the belly, so the thicker the meat on the ribs, the less bacon and pork belly you get from the pig. It all depends upon how both pieces of meat are cut and trimmed. I look for packages with nice thick ribs. 🙂
THAT is the bone side of the ribs. You want to cook the ribs with that side facing the heat to avoid drying out the meat. That layer of white across 2/3 of it is called silver skin (at least it is in cooking circles here). It’s a connective membrane that helps keep meat together and connect fatty tissue to meat. Now if the silver skin is thin, you can ignore it and let the cooking weaken it. THIS is really borderline, and I probably should have skinned it off. If it’s thicker or especially if you’re doing a competition, you want all silver skin gone. It can not only be tough, but it also blocks flavor from smoke or seasoning from getting through.
Now this is the other side. Almost all the meat on St Louis ribs are on this side or between the ribs. This side rarely has any silver skin, BUT…
That’s a perfect example of way too thick silver skin. I had to get my trusty Cutco fileting knife and cut that out. It would have been like having a piece of rubber in the ribs otherwise.
There was a little left further under that fold of fat and meat to the right but it was thinner and I didn’t want to cut away half the meat to chase, so I left it.
After that, it was time for the rub:
There’s BBQ folks that put 20 different seasonings in secret combinations to create a fancy rub. Almost all of them have brown or white sugar also. I believe in keeping it simple. Just like with my last few food posts, it was salt, pepper and garlic, then some of Costco’s mesquite flavoring.
With my family’s roots in Texas, I’m not big on sugar in cooking (baking is another story, hehe). Never mind it’s unhealthy, and hidden in everything we eat too. Even my BBQ sauce recipe (four generations old at this point) is only tomato, water, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, lemon juice and a little Tabasco. Tangy and savory without being sickeningly sweet like the bottled stuff at the grocery stores.
Once all three racks of ribs were done, into the smoker they went:
Yep, it’s a big smoker, but we wanted one that would let us entertain.
Now in competition, the big thing with smoking ribs anymore is the “3-2-1” method. You start out low and slow for 3 hours, misting the ribs as you go, then at the 3 hour mark, you pull them, put them in a ‘boat’ of aluminum foil, add some apple cider, seal it up and throw the ribs back on for 2 hours. This lets them steam in the apple cider. Pork and apple are a good pairing, so if you want to do sweet, that’s a good option. This also supposedly keeps the ribs from drying out due to the prolonged cook. Then the last hour, you pull them back out of the foil and cook them “naked” again to finish cooking and hopefully put a little bark on the ribs.
Me… I have to be different, LOL
Here’s what I don’t like about the 3-2-1 method. First, the few times I tried it, I tasted more apple than pork. No bueno. Secondly, the time spent steaming in the apple cider tended to make the ribs a little mushy. Yes, I went fairly light on the cider too. 🙂 The mushiness wasn’t horrible, but you just couldn’t get a good looking bark or crust to the ribs. Lastly, the method is really intended for an old fashioned ‘stick burner’ smoker. Those are designed to operate around 250 degrees F (121degrees C) or so. Using a pellet grill, I am able to keep a very constant heat as low as 180 degrees. I just do a straight cook through, spraying the ribs every half hour or so to keep them moist. When they’re within 30 or 40 degrees of done, I turn up the temperature on the pellet grill and finish them off, putting a nice bark on them:
Do those look dry at all? LOL Because I go low and slow, I’m able to get smoke flavor and coloring all through the ribs also. I had one guest as me if they were done because of that even pink color. 😀
One thing I didn’t cover was the “spritz” AKA what I spray them with while cooking. Apple cider is again a common choice. Too sweet though, especially if you’re doing the 3-2-1 method also. What I use on either beef or pork is a mixture of broth, water and pepsi or coke. 1 part Pepsi to two parts water to 4 parts broth. Using broth as a primary ingredient keeps the flavor pure. Just use beef broth for beef and pork broth for pork. The water keeps the broth weak enough that the meat doesn’t taste like soup, and helps with moisture. The soda pop helps the spritz stick, adds a little browning and just a touch of sweet without overpowering the meat’s flavor.
One last note: Ribs are properly done when they have an internal meat (not bone or fat) temperature of 185 to 200 degrees. At that point, the meat should stay on bone, but still come away easily with a light tug of the fingers or teeth. If it’s tough, it’s undercooked. If it falls apart, it’s been cooked to death. My own personal experience vs conventional wisdom is that 185 to 190 is about the ideal temperature.
And that’s it for Silk’s scrumptious Southern style BBQ ribs. 🙂
We also had leftover Brisket and chicken, along with that homemade BBQ sauce I mentioned, green beans and bacon, smoked portabella mushrooms sauteed in marsala and garlic, biscuits, a green salad and raspberry and yogurt fruit salad sort of thing I found on Pinterest.
All of that would take an entire second post however, lol.
I’m a bit late paying this one off, but I was exhausted after babysitting the brisket 16 hours and cleaning house, etc… Overall the brisket turned out pretty good, but was probably my least successful yet. It was still far better than anything I could buy at a restaurant here. It reached 210 internal temperature and was a little on the crumbly side. Flavor was there though and it was moist too.
Major smoke ring as you all can see, but I’m a perfectionist with my cooking. I’d give it an 8 out of 10.
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