Cheeks Has a New Home!

My Christmas Gift this year - a FANCY new home for Cheeky Kitchen.  Visit it today (still under construction.....check back often!) I've migrated all this content over to my fancy new home, and maybe in the coming months I'll unveil even more special surprises....

http://thecheekykitchen.com

Tacos Al Pastor, Fake-Out Style

Remember that post where I said if you have rice noodles and pad thai sauce in your cupboard, you will always have a dinner on hand?  It was true.  But I forgot to mention one important thing.

Tacos.

Did you know that you can put lots of things in a tortilla?  Like…ANYTHING.  Veggies, beans, meat, it don’t matter.  Saute it all up with some spices, roll it up in a tortilla, and you have yourself tacos.  If you keep a package of flour tortillas in your fridge (and they keep for a surprisingly long time…thanks artificial preservatives!) then you’re already one step closer to dinner.  Corn tortillas are better, and more authentic, but they also have a very short shelf life.  If you're lucky enough to live in Chicago or any city with a strong Hispanic presence, though, you can buy still-warm corn tortillas in many an ethnic grocery store across the city.

The key here is not to think about Ortega and “gringo tacos” with lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc.  Sure, you can always go that route, but making an improve taco dinner requires a bit more imagination…more finesse.  Plus, you surely can make a better taco yourself with less meat and less salt than those ground-beef-and-giant-MSG-packet dinner kits.  

Tangerines floating in the marinade...

Or use the meat & spice kit, but think of add-ins to the meat and spice mixture to help "stretch" the filling (Or how one big chicken breast can be stretched to fill 10 tacos).  One of my favorite, not-quite-expected additions is diced potatoes.  Brown the meat, then cook the potatoes in the same skillet to crisp them up in all that luscious animal fat.  Black beans (or any beans, really) is a super simple addition too, and a great one at that.  And peppers, c'mon, peppers are basically begging to be added to tacos.  Have a leftover roast and veggies?  Chop it up, fry it up, season it up, and a traditional meal can become an exotic (OK, mexico is not exotic) feast.

Don't have the spice kit?  Seriously, you can use anything to flavor the mixture, and you probably need a whole lot less seasoning too, since you're adding in more flavor.  I prefer cooking up onions, meat, and veggies and then liberally seasoning with my handy stove-side spice drawer wide open - garlic, onion, oregano (the mexican kind is best), chili powder, hot sauce, etc. Give it a little moisture with, really, just about anything -  salsa or tomato/enchilada sauce is an easy fix; chicken stock will do. 

Really, though, what I usually do is marinate.  Marinate a bunch of chopped up meat for an hour, a day, however long, then quickly stir-fry it with whatever add-ins you please.  The marinade forms an automatic sauce for the meat and veggies.  You can even freeze the whole mixture of meat-in-marinade, then pull it out whenever the taco craving strikes.  And it will. 

See what I'm getting at here - a taco is nothing more than a blank palate for whatever you put insdie of it. And on top? Forget the American-style salad bar. In mexico, they top tacos with nothing more than onions and cilantro.  I never turn away a little cheese, and if Sour Cream must be had, try 2% greek yogurt - just as tangy and cool, and much better for you.  So you can have that third taco.   

These turned out very well - but very spicy!  Guess I need to watch myself when carelessly not de-membraning peppers.  You can really taste the smoky chipotle alongside the sweet citrus.  In a tortilla, they need little or nothing else, since the veggies are all cooked up in the skillet with them.  But a little sour cream never killed anyone.   

Indian-Spiced Potato Samosas with Curry Lime Yogurt

My favorite part of any meal is the appetizer.   For some reason, these small tasting portions hold a spell over me, tempting me from the left side of the menu to abandon the large entrees on the right and run away together.  Be it a relish tray, appetizer, tapas, tasting menu, amuse bouche, or any other small-plate derivative, if it comes before the main course I'm dying to have a love affair with it.

I think the love comes from the smaller size - for, logically, if it's smaller than an entree I need to eat more of them.  Thus, I get to try more food, instead of being stuck with just one type of food on my plate.  Gluttony, it seems, knows no bounds.  Of course, with the way serving sizes have grown exponentially, an appetizer from a restaurant is usually more than enough food for a normal person's meal.  Even a not-so-normal person like me.

But aside from their adding more food to a meal, appetizers have a different sort of feel than a main course.  They're smaller, more playful.  Many are made to be eaten with fingers, so wrapped up in a pastry or on a stick. Dolloped with sauce or dipped into a bowl, they're just more FUN than big food.

Because of this fascination with appetizer foods, I have tons of recipes bookmarked to try.  Problem is...i just don't make appetizers in my day-to-day life.  And who does?  I'm going to come home from work and assemble a ton of mini crab cakes before making dinner?  NO.

So when C asked me to bring an appetizer to her dinner party on Saturday, I just about leapt with joy.  Finally the excuse I've been craving - I get to make a finger food!  Whatever one I want!  And I can eat as many of them as I want before I go to the party too!

Scanning through the bookmarks, I was instantly drawn to a Cooking Light makeover of samosas, the traditional Indian snack.  Typically filled with curried potatoes and peas, then deep-fried and served with chutney, Samosas seem exotic but are a food common across many cultures - dumplings.  And who doesn't like a dumpling!?  This version replaced deep-fried dough with phyllo dough, keeping the crunch while removing the calories.  I made many tweaks on the spices, potatoes, and amounts, but otherwise stuck fairly close to the recipe as written.  I also decided that any finger food worth its salt needs a dip, so I combined some curry and lime with greek yogurt for a cooling, different twist.

Maybe because the three couples at the party with us are about the nicest people on earth, but these samosas got rave reviews.  I almost wish I had been a shadester and stolen the leftover dumplings to take them back home with me...but knowing that our kind hosts got to have an extra helping is more important.  Besides, I have another roll of phyllo dough in the freezer and no scruples to stop me from making another batch.

Snappy Joe, or Sucio Lucio?

I'm starting to like the Sucio Lucio

Snappy Joe, originally a recipe from mommie.  I LOVE the sandwiches, but yeah, the name of this easy-peas dish is the dumbest thing ever.  I’m sure it comes from a cutesy women’s magazine trying to cover up a fairly bland, “healthy” makeover of boring sloppy joes with a fancy new name, a snappy new name that looks great with the model’s stirrup pants, permed hair and caked-on blue eyeliner. SNAPPY.

Then again, I’m the one who made it the other night, so my sitting here making fun of it isn’t really helping my cause at all.  And sharing the fact that I spent 2 hours after dinner “crafting” homemade xmas cards doesn’t lend a lot of weight to the “I’m so cool” movement either. Cutting edge, I’m not, but at least I don’t have a perm.

Since A was supposed to be at a work event the night in question, I didn’t plan a dinner, figuring I could just eat leftovers or weird things I eat when nobody’s watching. (I’m not alone – check out these two books I really, really want to read.) 

With nothing planned, I went into safe mode, much like my archaic computer does when trying to run any program with a birthdate after 2007.  Spying a pound of sirloin and some random sausage buns in the freezer, and a recipe began to take shape.  Based on my mom’s “Snappy Joes,” a sillily named turkey and cabbage-based take on sloppy joes, I wanted to really snap these Joes up a bit.  Yeah, I’m going all out on this snappy theme. 

A few too many jalapenos in the fridge, some chorizo in the meat drawer, and an extra can of goya tomato sauce meant I was taking these Joes into spicy territory. (Somebody help me.  Why am I writing like this?)  I cut up a bunch of peppers, jalapenos, and onion, then sautéed them with ground sirloin.  AND I FORGOT THE CHORIZO.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Anyway, then you add in some tomato sauce, BBQ sauce, hot sauce, and some shredded cabbage, and let it simmer away for 10 minutes.  DONE. 

Rachael Ray, who probably would LOVE the name Snappy Joe, did a running series once where she took Sloppy all around the world.  She made Messy Giuseppes (Italian), Sloppy Cubanos (with pickles and swiss), and a few other versions.  I tried a couple, being an avowed Sloppy Joe fan (comfort, messy, sandwiches).  

I like this one the best.  Should we name it -- a Sucio Lucio, perhaps?  It’s easy, quick, and sneaks in a bunch more veggies than you would think.  It’s also awesome cold the next day, scooped hastily onto crackers or corn chips.  Not like I’ve ever done that, or anything.  Sloppy told me.

Smokey Corn & Cheddar Chowder

Oh, man.  You have no idea how good this is.  And I'm not even blaming copious quantities of butter and cream -because there aren't any!  Score one for the good guys.

Yes, it's not usually hard to figure out why people love creamy soups.  Chowders, Cream ofs, Bisques, you name it.  These beauties often get their richness from copious quantities of heavy cream, used to thicken up the broth or finish a blended soup or just make something so humble as mushrooms be elevated through the power of CREAM.  And who can blame chefs? If it's thickened with cream, you can bet it'll be a top seller.

Anyway, creamy soups can be really good - but also really, entirely, too rich.  Sometimes, following a "more is more" ethos that I usually espouse, cooks will just use tons of the stuff, leading to a heavy taste, where cream's fatty richness overpowers everything else.  Plus, although I'll occasionally yield to the desire for cream of asparagus or lobster bisque in a restaurant, it's a lot harder for me to justify buying a quart-size heavy cream if I have the urge to make creamy soup myself.

Which I did the other night.  What to do, what to do....

Um, milk?

But the problem is, milk’s relative leanness just can’t compensate for all that lost butterfat.  People try to blend their soups, but this usually (to me) results in an off-putting graininess.  Instead, I go a three-fold starch route, using the natural starches in flour, corn and potatoes to thicken the soup and trick you into thinking it’s really creamy.  And, add some of that butter fat back in, along with extra flavor, in the form of CHEESE.  Clever, am I.  Oh, yes.

First, you just have to use a good knob of butter (yeah, in addition to some of the bacon fat – but not much) plus flour to build a nice, golden roux.  This will give the initial soup a good deal of body.  If you’re using homemade stock, instead of broth (stock is made with bones, broth with meat), the stock’s collagen content will add a thicker “mouthfeel” and give the soup more body as well.  Next, cook potatoes and corn right in the pot.  These will let off starches that will further enrich and thicken the soup.  Finally, stir in a handful of cheddar cheese at the end.  Not only does it taste gooood, but it amps up the creamy factor with a lot fewer calories than cream itself.

People, this soup is good.  It’s based on Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, but I’m recounting my lower calorie (and scaled-down) version below. 

Alas, we were far too busy eating it to take any pictures, but trust me on this one – you want to make this. 

Claire's Dad's Muffins

Yet another weekend has passed us by, and yet another Monday morning finds me reluctant to leave the warm confines of my nighttime oasis to begin another week of work.  Good thing that I had a personal day I had to use in the next 3 weeks, because playing hooky never feels better than on a Monday in the wintertime.

But staying home from work also means that my drawer full of oatmeal packets and honey nut cheerios, what I keep stashed in my desk for at-work breakfasts, are far from my belly.  Good thing I spent the weekend cooking - making samosas for a dinner party, testing Christmas cookie recipes, whipping up a batch of dough for weekday pizza/calzone making, and baking a batch of fruity oatmeal muffins as a small thank-you for the hostess with the mostess.  And, since they were her dad's recipe, it was one homemade gift I knew would be well received!

I do have to shout out C's generosity (not to mention the AMAZING peppery arugula pasta with shrimp and scallops and chopped greek salad upon which we feasted on Saturday!) for sharing this special recipe with me.  It's her dad's muffin recipe, special in itself for the many memories they are sure to contain, but even more special for its location in a family heirloom recipe book.  If I have my facts right, C's sister assembled many of their family's traditional recipes into one custom cookbook so that everybody would always remember how to make the meaningful dishes that fed their family's bellies and souls.

Do me a favor and ignore the dirty stove.  We cleaned after this photo was taken...

So very lucky am I indeed that this recipe was shared with me.  As I'm not a baker, I loved the casual an almost improvisational tone of the recipe. It's also healthy, loaded with whole oats, fruit and yogurt, with hardly any oil or egg in the batter. The resulting muffins are deliciously moist, subtly spiced, and naturally sweet.  Toasted and topped with a smidgen of butter, one of these muffins warmed up this very cold winter day and made Monday seem not so bad after all.

Turkey Cranberry Strudel

Operation use up thanksgiving leftovers, part three. 

Turkey.  What to do, what to do, with those giant chunks of leftover turkey.  The freezer is always an option, true.  Save it for either stock or broth, or even an upcoming soup.   I’ve been seeing a lot of recipes for turkey hash as a creative way to use up the meat after turkey sandwiches lose their appeal.  But as I’m apparently ahead of the hash-trend curve, and having already made up my other go-to leftover user (Turkey a la King), I needed fresh ideas.

Then, like a bright beacon of light, an image came to me…turkey, nuts, cranberries, all encased in a golden shell of….CRESCENT ROLLS!  Yes!  The much esteemed by sissy and me, deliciously kitschy Turkey Cranberry Ring my mom concocted long, long ago, based perhaps on a Papered Chef recipe, was calling to me.  It was then that I knew.  I must make it.  Now. 

It's a fairly simple idea.  Use crescent rolls as pre-made struedel dough, wrapping the rolls around a filling bursting with turkey, nuts, fruit, and a little bit of cheese (because, when does cheese ever hurt?).  You can use whatever is on hand, swapping in what you have and leaving out what you don't.  It's simple to assemble and looks like it took a lot more effort than it really did.  Perfect for a weeknight, or a buffet, or anytime.  

This seriously was an embarrassing combination of leftover bits n pieces we had laying around.  Four old pieces of pre-cut celery that had gone uneaten in the week’s lunches, a hardening handful of dried cranberries left in the bottom of a bag, some aging swiss cheese slices that had outlasted their sliced turkey companions.

But you know what?  You would never know that this delicious combination was anything other than a planned-out dish.  It tastes rich but isn't too unhealthy.  It stretches a lot of odds and ends into several meals worth of food.  Try it with broccoli and cheddar instead of cranberries and almonds.  Or peppers and pepper jack.  Or whatever you have on hand.  Probably due to my inexplicable love for crescent rolls, I bet that whatever you throw down the middle would be good.    

Because I’m cheap, I had saved the lone egg white left over from mixing a yolk into my Shepherd’s Pie potatoes.  That one lone egg white would now be brushed on the top of my log of cranberry goodness, helping it to brown up into a rich, golden, glistening shell.  A shell of love.  The most delicious shell in the world!!!!!!!!!

Really into the hyperbole today, it seems. But describing this odd, lovable recipe calls for a little bit of promotion.  It was a favorite growing up, and it's a favorite still. 

Shepherd’s Pie, or the Home for Leftover Potatoes

Operation use up thanksgiving leftovers, part two: Shepherd’s Pie.

I don’t love mashed potatoes.  They’re alright, I suppose.  When heavily laden with cream and butter and garlic and god knows what else, sure, they can be pretty damn good.  But the usual, more restrained, version just doesn’t do it for me.  I like potatoes plenty, but there are just so many better ways to enjoy them than all smashed up.

Thus, leftover mashed potatoes usually languish unloved in my fridge.  I’ve tried making potato cakes from them, or mixing in the loaded baked potato fixins and heating them up.  You can stir mashed potatoes into soups to thicken up the broth.  There are probably 500 ideas you all have on how to use them up.

Me, I could only think of one – shepherd’s pie.  I had never made one before, so that was a plus, as I’m trying to step outside of the same-6-recipes-I-make-over-and-over comfort zone. I had the basic ingredients on hand – ground beef, carrots, frozen peas, onions, and beef stock.  And I had a ton of mashed potatoes that would invariably be thrown away unless I could make them palatable again.  

A traditionally English dish, shepherd’s pie isn’t something I make, but it speaks to my simple, comforting sensibilities.  A pot-pie like filling on the bottom, browned and creamy potatoes on the top, it is a meal in one dish, and a cheap one at that.  Now that the temperatures are closer to zero than 100, it’s the sort of warm, homey winter-friendly food that I can’t get enough of. 

When "researching" different recipes, I came across this charming story about how shepard's pie got its name because the shepherd's wife would make the pie in the afternoon, but it would stay warm until whenever the shepherd returned home because the rich filling was insulated by the top crust. A good shepherd's pie would stay warm for hours, until the top crust was broken and the steam could escape.  Alton Brown advised cooks to start spreading the potatoes at the edges to be sure you get a good seal going. 

A word of caution, though.  Put a cookie sheet under your dish, especially if you aren't sure if you achieved the proper seal.  We didn't, and I soon heard telltale sizzling letting me know that boiled-over gravy was hitting the oven floor.  At least the smoke alarm didn't go off!  After resting for 10 minutes, we dug into this bad boy with gusto.  It's good.  Just, good.  Not breaking any boundaries, not challenging any traditions.  Just good.  

Cranberry-Orange Compote & Ultimate Thanksgiving Sandwiches

The Ultimate Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich, version one.

Honestly, I cannot take credit for this genius sandwich.  It was sourced on a Silver Cloud sammich sissy and I shared a few weeks back, when our eager tummies sought a taste of the rapidly approaching thanksgiving holiday.  Served on white bread with canned, jellied cranberries and Stove Top stuffing, it hit a nostalgic spot on the taste buds and got us both salivating for the feast to come. 

When Sunday night following Thanksgiving rolled around and heating up yet another round of leftovers seemed, somehow, boring, I reached into the not-too-deep recesses of my food memory bank and found this sandwich waiting there.  I wanted to copy that interesting, dumbed-down version with the fancy-ass delicious leftovers now crowding my fridge.  So I checked our leftover stock to see if it could be possible: seedy whole-wheat bread, check; sage & mushroom ciabatta dressing, check; lots and lots of leftover cranberry-shallot glazed turkey, check.  Yet, alas!  We had no more cranberry sauce left! 

Boiling away...

A Thanksgiving dinner is nothing without that tiny dollop of tart cranberry sauce.  We always had two in our family – my grandpa’s traditional cooked cranberry sauce, and the tarter orange-cranberry relish that is uncooked.  To properly enjoy your turkey, you needed both.  And to properly enjoy my leftover turkey sandwich, I needed at least one. 

Lacking cranberries, I remembered K’s basic instructions on how to make a chutney – “you need fruit, spices, sugar, and vinegar.”  Would dried cranberries suffice?  I thought I could plump them up by cooking them with some acid and juice.  I threw in a handful of raisins, too, to beef up the berreis’ relatively low number.  A hearty squeeze of lemon juice stood in for the vinegar, and a tangelo (skinned, sectioned, and squeezed) complimented the tart berries with some sweet citrus, instead of sugar.  Oh, and a Tablespoon or so of cranberry juice concentrate and apple jelly added intensity of flavor and a bit more substance, respectively. 

The assembly line

Boiled down until syrupy, this improvised cranberry orange compote really popped.  It just fell in love with the turkey, but I can see this tarty mixture giving herself equally well to a pork tenderloin or perhaps even atop a nice creamy brie....

So on to the sandwich!  First, I set four slices of grainy wheat breat to toast, so that they’d be sturdy enough to hold their husky fillings.  I added a bit of stock to the stuffing to remoisten it, then after heating it up (microwave) I mashed it lightly with a fork – going for a more cohesive, spreadable texture here.  I thinly sliced some white-meat turkey, and then set to assembly: bread, thin layer of mayo, stuffing, turkey, cranberry, bread.  Some reheated green beans went alongside.

This is just a flipping awesome sandwich.  Bright, tart fruit flavors on the sandwich are needed to cut through the relatively heavy layers of turkey and stuffing.  This, dare I say, may have topped the “leftover turkey and plochmann’s mustard on grandma’s dinner roll 4 hours after dinner” as my all-time favorite leftover thanksgiving sandwich.  But, you know, I’m not done with all those leftovers yet either…