musings of a bardic kitchen witch

I've got too many tabs open, and I need to save all this stuff because I'm planning to reference back to or make some of this stuff in the very near future. So here we go! 17 Uses for Stale Bread Spinach and Pancetta Strata Best Tuna Casserole Sunday's Apple Pie Also, have I mentioned my love for Cooking Channel and Food Network?  I've found a few really fantastic new blogs to follow through them, specifically The 99 cent Chef and Casserole Crazy .  I was already following Fancy Fast Food , and you should too.

Opened up my facebook today and one of the local area grocers -- PCC Natural Markets, had this great link to this fantastic article.  I knew some of them, but not all of them.  Butter Nuts Block Cheese Baked Goods Milk Flour Pesto Herbs Cream Cheese and Sour Cream Jam  Save money by buying in bulk and making use of your freezer. » http://pcc.coop/wEywuH

Making a modified Soy Vay Crock Pot , and BBQ Pulled Pork .  Lots of delicious noms tomorrow. Also making chicken stock with my $5.99 whole roasted chicken remains.  And just to strengthen the flavors further, I took the 2-quarts of stock I made last time and used that as the simmering liquid.  So I'm sure this next batch will be double-strong.  Nothing wrong with that, IMO. It's only been about an hour, and my house smells so good oh god.  I'll take pictures and post them tomorrow.

I had a ton of potatoes.  Too many to go through quickly, to be honest.  I am not as much of a Meat and Potatoes person as my pops is, so they started sprouting.  Now don't get me wrong, I love potatoes, but I couldn't think what to do with them with what I had on hand. My first thought was to make potato chips.  I had a pint of oil in my cabinet, and salsa in my fridge.  So I put the oil on, cranked the heat, and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to put a lid on it to help it heat faster.  Understand: I don't fry things often.  I hate how the house ends up smelling after food is fried.  So I have almost no experience frying outside of using the fryers at Arby's and McDonald's, and in both cases it was almost completely automated.  Which brings us to our second problem: I didn't have a wire spoon to get the chips out, and I wasn't using a basket fryer, so I decided to nix the idea.  So I go to lift the lid of...

I have tried the Ginger Gingerbread and the Cinnamon Bread .  I have the Beer Bread on standby, and will probably be making it to eat with my Grillin Beans for dinner in the very near future. In both cases, I did not have eggs on hand.  I did, however, have overripe bananas.  Since the first two things I made were dessert breads, it worked out fine by me.  The Cinnamon Bread was amazing.   It was moist, it was light and tender, the flavors were fantastic.  I made an apple-pear compote and ate it like dessert and breakfast until it was gone.  Fantastic, and highly recommended. I'm not a huge fan of gingerbread in truth, but it was tasty and had the same moistness as the cinnamon bread.  It definitely needs the glaze that it suggests on the side of the package.  I would suggest adding vanilla to the glaze though, or maybe a bit of sweet orange juice.  You could even try seasoning the milk with chai tea bags or orange pekoe.  ...

I had sour cream about to turn in the fridge, and I knew there was cream of mushroom soup in my cabinet, so I decided it was time to make stroganoff. But, I also had a bunch of potatoes that were starting to sprout, so instead of going noodle-y, I went with sliced potatoes, which meant a casserole. So I did a little allrecipes search just to see if it had been done before, and I came up against something pretty close , and used that as my ratio monitor. I didn't like the under-seasoned look of the recipe, so I kicked it up with roasted garlic, fresh cracked pepper, and Mediterranean sea salt. Instead of just frying the onion and beef, I took it up another level: I carmelized the onion, and char-grilled the beef on my George Foremann, then finished off the cooking with the onions and drained it off. I mixed sour cream and just a little bit of milk with cream of mushroom soup. Layers potatoes, soup-sauce, beef-onion mix, then topped the whole shebang with shredded medium cheddar...