Smoked Chorizo Jumble with Skillet Homefries

I admit it, I love breakfast for dinner. Especially savory breakfast. There's just something comforting about it, something that reminds me of childhood... ahh nostalgia. However, I honestly can't ever remember having a dish like this growing up. In fact I'm pretty sure I just made this up. Whatever. It was scrumptious!

Skillet Homefries

• 5 medium or 4 large russet potatoes
• 1/4 cup bacon grease (or butter)
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• salt and pepper to taste

Smoked Chorizo Jumble

• 1 small onion
• 3-4 crimini mushrooms
• 4-5 mini sweet peppers
• 14-16 oz smoked chorizo links
• 3 eggs
• 2 tbsp milk
• salt and pepper to taste

First things first, let's cut up the potatoes! Potatoes are on my list of five super foods (bacon, butter, onions, potatoes, eggs!) Cut them up into a medium dice. I would like to point out that I eat organic. I don't wash the dirt off my potatoes before using them.

Well, unless they're really dirty. Then I say forget that organic business I'm washin' these puppies.

Next take a large skillet and heat up the bacon grease between medium and medium-high until it smells fragrant and feels hot when you hold your hand over (not in, over) the pan. Now is the time to throw those potay-tays in. 

The last of my bacon grease. I guess we'll be cooking more bacon tomorrow.

So now comes the fun chopping part!! I lovelovelove chopping things. I also love folding laundry. I find something satisfying about putting things in order, does that make me weird? Aaanyway. Get out all of the ingredients you need to chop, like so.

Now you're going to have some residue from the potatoes on your knife and board so I'll tell you a trick. Rinse your knife and just flip your board over! Saves time, energy and water cause you're going to wipe down your counter after this anyway, right? 

QUICK! Stir those potatoes up a bit. At this point add your garlic powder, salt and pepper. If it looks like they aren't cooking or are cooking too fast, adjust the heat as needed. Remember to keep stirring them occasionally. Preheat your oven to 250 degrees so you can keep them hot while you make the jumble.

Back to the jumble. Chop in order, onions small dice, mushrooms medium dice and sweet peppers lazy-woman's julienne.

Oh so pretty! Now I want you to quarter the links of chorizo lengthwise and cut them into half inch pieces. The finished product. And by the way, I have no qualms about this meat-to-vegetable ratio.

Your potatoes should be getting along nicely at this point. Throw them on to a half or quarter sheet pan to keep them warm in the oven. Don't cover them because that will cause condensation to form and it'll just be kinda gross.

Using the same skillet used for the potatoes (yes! the unwashed pan!) saute on medium heat the chorizo and onion- notice how I kept it separate in the photo? Yep. This is the reason. While that is all sauteing up nicely, whisk together the three eggs and milk.

If your onions are translucent at this point and the sausage is sizzling nicely, add the mushrooms and peppers. Cook for 4-6 minutes or until the peppers are soft. Gently pour in the egg mixture, stir and let it cook until the eggs are all firm. Salt and pepper to taste and serve with hot sauce(s!?) ketchup, mayo, whatever.

Aaaand a close up!

Enjoy. :)

Much love,

Tirienne

A Quick Tutorial- Onion Dicing

I realized yesterday while making dinner that I take for granted my ability to perfectly dice an onion in less than a minute. This is not a post where I'm saying I'm more awesome than you. This is a post where I hope to pass along some knowledge that I didn't always have in hopes that when you are running late with dinner you, too can ninja-chop an onion.

Let's look at an onion. We shall call the fluffy stringy part of the onion the "north pole" and the papery layered end of the onion the "south pole" (even though the north pole is the one that grows down into the ground... meta.) Cut off the south pole completely like so.

Also, please note that I am left-handed so yours will probably be backwards. Place the flat side of the onion down on the board and cut right through the middle of the north pole so you have two even halves. Peel back and tear off the skin. At this point the onion should look like this.

This is the fun part! Cut even lines running perpendicular to the north pole that don't quite reach the top of the onion, repeat on the second half. Okay, here's the hard part, now cut the onion halves in half like this.

I'm glad I took a picture because I can't even think how to describe that. Anyway. Make sure you do this part gently or else you're going to shear the top half off and ruin it. At this point, starting where you cut off the south pole, cut the onion straight down trying to match the width of the perpendicular lines. The end result is a perfectly diced onion!

Chicken Salad!!

This time I actually did forget about dinner. My sister, Miriel has been visiting for the past two weeks and today was her last day in town so I was at our other sister's hanging with her and Baby G. (Baby G is very cute as you will realize when you see his giggling mug. :) ) So anyway, I was on my way home a bit after four and suddenly it dawned on me. DINNER. I forgot about dinner. UuuuuUUUGHHhHH. Usually, I try to pull out frozen meat the day before but today I'm pulling the super classy hot water quick-thaw method on some chicken. Jeff's gonna be home in less than an hour and we have a very busy evening in front of us. I'd better get crackin'

The FAST Chicken Salad!*

• 3 chicken tenderloins
• salt and pepper to taste
• bacon grease/butter/oil for the pan
• 1 medium onion
• finest of week old lettuces, enough for 3 portions
• 1 cup grated cheddar cheese (I used white habanero)
• oil and vinegar, salt and pepper to taste

Okay, just pulled my chicken out of its hot water bath. Now I shall salt and pepper it to taste and slam it into a greased saute pan that has been heated to medium-high. BOOM! While that is cooking (6-10 minutes, flipped once) I shall quickly dice my onion into medium/large dice. When the chicken is done, add more grease and throw in the onions. Saute them until they are brownish and translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Turn off your pan! Now quickly, cut up the lettuce however you prefer (I was lazy. People can cut up their own lettuce)

This is how you cut a head of lettuce in thirds.

Layer the chicken, onions and cheese on to make it look like you actually remembered about dinner and drizzle with the oil and vinegar or your favorite high-fat dressing! Voila! Dinner. 

Much love,

Tirienne

*For those of you in the know, this is a reference to my nephew, Blaise. Aka, "The Fast Blaise." :)

Bacon Grease Browned Butter Brownies

So  I guess I'm digging the bacon grease thing right now because I made some brownies with them. Yup. Not only that, I made brownies with browned butter. Even crazier, IT WAS THE SAME RECIPE!!! I mean this even blew my mind (in a good way!) I gave them to a friend for her birthday and she seemed to enjoy them so I hope you will, too.


Bacon Grease Browned Butter Brownies*

• 1 stick butter
• 2 tbsp bacon grease
• 3/4 cup cocoa
• 1 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour (wheat or your favorite gluten-free blend)
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup chocolate chips**

So first, you're going to need to turn your oven on to 325 degrees. Next, prepare an 8x8 pan with parchment paper. I don't recommend greasing your pan for this because there is so much fat in the mixture to being with that it just ends up sticking to itself. If you don't have parchment try aluminum foil, tightly folded. Now in a medium pan on medium heat, melt and brown your butter. I like this illustration of browned butter.

You will know it's starting to brown when the butter foams up. At that point watch it closely so you don't get the burnt version. Once it is satisfactorily browned, take it off and quickly dump in the two tablespoons of bacon grease. Stir that in until it is melted. The next thing is to add the cocoa powder. Essentially what you're doing is reconstituting the chocolate with a different fat than the cocoa butter. (Considering how yummy butter and bacon grease are, I think this is okay.) Once that is fully stirred in, add the sugar and then the eggs. Now comes the hard part. Vigorously stir the whole mixture until it is thick and shiny and sticking together nicely. Once you think it seems right add the flour and salt and stir until fully incorporated. The batter should be thick, sticking to itself and easy to pour (more like plop) into the pan. You can decide if you want to add the chocolate chips to the batter or on top, it doesn't matter. Spread the batter evenly in the pan and shove those suckers in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean (or with a couple crumbs if you like more fudgy brownies.)

Pull out the finished brownies and run a knife along any part that is touching the pan. Let them cool in the pan for about 10 minutes before moving to a different surface to cool. Once they're fully cool, cut into small, tiny pieces and eat slowly, savoring the smoky bacon flavor amidst the sweet, rich chocolate and die a little bit inside. Enjoy!

Much love,
Tirienne

*Recipe adapted from Bon Appetit's "Cocoa Brownies with Browned Butter"
** Be warned to read your bag label!! Make sure that the chocolate chips you're adding are made with real cocoa butter and not with hydrogenated palm or soy oils, otherwise it's going to ruin the texture and flavor of your brownies!

The Musical Fruit... I Mean Legume

Okay. Confession. I remembered about dinner this time. In fact I remembered the day before. That is why I started soaking my pinto beans. This was so mouth-wateringly delicious I have to share it with you.

Frijoles Pintos de Tirienne

• 1 lb dry pinto beans
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• water

• 32 oz beef stock
• 16 oz water
• 2 large cloves garlic, whole
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp chili powder
• salt to taste
• hot sauce (Louisiana style is delicious on this)

Okay, so sorry people if you were looking for a fast recipe, keep looking. This one is going to take all night (literally.) In a large container or bowl dump your pinto beans and cover them with the lemon juice and at least three inches of water. Soak overnight. I didn't tell you to sort through your beans and pick out the bad ones because 1. I'm lazy and never do that myself and 2. I've never actually found a bad bean/stone/beetle/dry booger in a bag of beans. 

About 8-9 hours before you want to serve your beans, meaning around 9:00am drain your beans and add them, the stock and water to your slow cooker.

What I'd like you to do next is add all of your espicy things! EXCEPT FOR! This is very important, EXCEPT FOR THE SALT. Otherwise you will compromise the beans' integrity and besides that being morally awkward ('cause I like to think of y'all as the morally upright kind who wouldn't want to compromise anyone's integrity) it's just going to be unpleasant in your mouth.

Now that you've added all the nice things to spice it up, give it a good stir, cover it up, set it on low for 8-9 hours and go about your business. Ahh... time to pour a nice beverage.

PEOPLE. Seriously. That is grape juice and sparkling water. It's 9:00am for goodness sake. And I will never be enough of a lush to drink that much wine at once. Yikes. 

While we are waiting for the beans I want to tell you a little story. Which is that in our current (but not for much longer) apartment we have a really cool pantry cupboard. It has about a zillion slots and when we moved in our landlord said he had never seen anyone fill it. To me this meant only one thing. CHALLENGE!! So while I was waiting for my beans, I went shopping and then took photographic evidence to show that I'm doing a pretty darn good job filling this sucker up. Check it out. 

Yes, we really do own that many chips. But it's pretty good, right? I mean come on. Notice in the last photo my secret gluten stash in the bottom right corner of the last photo... shhh...

Anyway! It is about thirty minutes before you want to serve up your beans they should look like this.

Now is the time to salt liberally. Grab that container of salt and sprinkle away! If you want to now is the time to throw some other food on to cook, maybe like these bad boys.

Bratwurst burgeoning with cheddar cheese and jalapenos... mmm so good. We also had a simple green salad to go with this. Your beans should be about done by now, creamy on the inside slightly firm on the outside. You by no means have to do this but when our bratwurst were done I turned the pan up high and added a few spoonfuls of beans to get them really hot. It was delicious... Enjoy responsibly.

Much love,
Tirienne

Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Nut Free, Egg Free... Chock Full of Bacon Fat

Let's be real the lipid hypothesis is bunk. That's right, people. I've turned from a fat-vocate into a fat-vanegelist. Fat is actually good for you. Our grandmothers knew it, their grandmothers knew it and my parents (wisely) never bought into the whole low-fat/non-fat business and neither me nor any of my five siblings is obese. It doesn't really take a scientist to figure out why heart disease has skyrocketed AFTER our society adapted the low-fat diet. That is why I have no qualms telling you that for these two recipes you will need either a whole stick of butter (making it not dairy free anymore) or the proceeds from a full pound of bacon. :) Cheers. I made these as part of a brunch which was absolutely delicious and consisted of roasted cauliflower, sweet potato hash browns, bacon and a spring mix salad with warm bacon vinaigrette because YUM.


Simple Roasted Cauliflower

• 1 head cauliflower cut into florets
• 4 tbsp butter or bacon grease, melted
• kosher salt and pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. On a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, drizzle the sweet, fatty goodness all over the cauliflower and then generously nay, liberally salt and pepper it. When the oven is pre-heated roast the cauliflower for about 35-45 minutes or until the underside of it is starting to turn a dark brown color. Serve immediately.


Sweet 'Tater Hash Browns

• 1 large sweet potato
• 1 medium onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 tbsp butter or bacon grease
• salt and pepper to taste

One of the prettiest things in the world to me is the color of sweet potatoes. So, I want you to peel your sweet potato and grate it on the large holes in your box grater. I grated mine right into a mixing bowl. Careful, though. Since being trained to have knife skillz (aw man!) I have never cut myself ... except on a box grater. Grating the sweet potato takes a bit of force so don't say you weren't warned! Once that's done, cut up the onion into a small dice. Press your garlic and add both to the bowl of shredded sweet potato. Fire up a griddle or large saute pan to medium/medium high. Melt your fat onto there*. Once it is sizzly hot throw in the mixture and season with the salt and pepper. Now the trick to this is to try and leave it alone. Obviously, you don't want it to burn but what you do want is for it to get caramelized. Oh boy. So, so good. Flip the hash browns from time to time with a large spatula. You'll know they are done when they are all darkened in color to a dull orange and there are large patches of brown throughout. 

Anyway, guys. I hope you enjoy this. We certainly did. Two days in a row in fact. :)

Much love, Tirienne

*Note! If your griddle is like mine and has this little hole in it for grease to drip through, partway through cooking you may have to pull out the tray and dump the fat back into the mixture.