BaconBaking's Recipe Guestie Returns

Salsa Verde

I love cooking, but I really love cooking for family and friends. Since my sister is in college, I can't cook for her every day, but I do like to make food in bulk, freeze it and then send her off with it when she comes home. Last night she was home for the evening and I got the chance to pack her a box of foods as well as load her up on freezer foods: ham and bean soup, cabbage soup, baba ghanoush, tomato sauce, and her favorite, salsa verde.

I love making salsa but I think the best way to make it is to roast all the vegetables first. You can see I'm really not committed to any particular recipe. One batch below has hot peppers and banana peppers, while the other is heavier on the onions. Both have tomatillos and tomatoes. Really, I’m just using what I get in the CSA box this time of year. In the summer I will add in corn or peaches.

I roast all the veggies on the pan. Just washed and as is. No oil. About 30 minutes at 400 degrees.

The veggies should be dark in some spots, with the tomatoes and tomatillos ready to burst. I put everything in the food processor with a heavy handful of cilantro and juice from 1-2 limes. You should end up with something that looks like this:

I Smoked Hog for 7 Hours

A guest post by BaconBaking. Our favorite chef, Hugo from the Dub, hooked us up with a smoker for no other reason than he is a very nice guy. Last Sunday, while I stressed out over a grad school project, BB went to work...

A couple weeks ago our good friend and chef extraordinaire gave me and Mr. BaconBaking a gift. A brand new charcoal smoker. While we enjoy grilling on our propane grill the traditional burgers, brats, dogs, and chicken, this was a mighty big culinary step.

This weekend Lesbopeep and I tried out the smoker while Mr. BaconBaking worked on his school project. Our first culinary adventure was a smoked pork shoulder.

After reading every website I could find, we decided to use 100% hardwood briquettes—not the self-starting ones. I only used lighter fluid to get the fire started, but let the fire burn for a solid 20 minutes to get rid of the lighter fluid. While I was getting the fire started, I left the pork out on the counter for like 45 min to an hour with a homemade dry rub. The rub was a mix of brown sugar, paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne, cumin, oregano, and thyme. I was told not to put tooooo much rub on, but you can see how much I used.

Keeping the temp up was the hardest part for me. Anytime I threw in more charcoal the temp would dip. I was told that I should make a small fire in an old coffee tin with holes in the bottom and throw in hot burning briquettes instead of cold ones and then the temp wouldn’t dip. I’m lazy, and that sounded way difficult for my first go at it. I was also told I should have spritzed the pork with apple cider to keep the pork moist, but the smoker we have has a water bowl and I made sure that was at least ½ full throughout the entire process. It was a little tricky to refill the first time, but after you get the angle and such you are golden.

It took about 7 hours to come to 180 degrees. (7 brutal brutal hours of tanning on the patio, chatting and catching up on reading. Smoking is hard work.) 180 was good for slicing and falling apartness, but not quite to pulled porkness. I think you have to be up to 190 to 200 for that and I got a late start. After we took it out of the smoker, we let it rest for a solid 30 minutes. I read it should rest for at least 30 min-1 hour. That is a brutal part of the process because you want to dive in.

I was super excited that I had a smoke ring (the red edge right under the bark) and that while I sliced the pork, it was really starting to fall apart. We ate the pork straight up with BBQ sauce the first night, the second night it was tacos…with homemade tortillas of course, and tomorrow I’m going for a smoked pork pizza.

Don’t Throw Away the Chicken Carcass

Has it even been a month since the last recipe? Who knows. But we welcome all content here. Besides, it's a semi-recurring bit now, and those are few and far between for us. So here's your next G:TB Recipe of the Month.

Whether you bought a chicken roaster at the grocery store or you roasted one for Sunday dinner, don’t throw it away. Make soup. (from the carcass) No its not soup season. I probably make more soup than anything else. My freezer is full of little containers labeled with the type of soup it is. Soup is one of the easiest things you can make, the cheapest, and can be popped out of the freezer for lunch, easy dinner, etc.

Asian Chicken Soup

Need:

Chicken carcass

Water

Onion

Garlic

Mushrooms

Swiss chard

Soy Sauce

Cayenne Powder

Udon noodles (not to be confused with national title winning Uconn noddles. - lame ass TJ joke)

Cover a chicken carcass with tap water

Simmer until the bones and meat are falling apart.

Drain the liquid and save it in a bowl. You now have a poor man’s stock. (real stock would have onions and vegetables in it, but you will add those to your soup)

Pick out all the meat and toss into bowl with stock and discard bones and skin and fatty parts. Or have your kid do this.

Sautee 1 large onion or 2 small onions and a few cloves of garlic in the same pot you made your stock.

Add in your stock/chicken you saved in a bowl. (depending on how much water you added you might not need all of it—you can save some for other stock uses—it freezes well)

Add in chopped swiss chard or other greens (bok choy, spinach, kale)

Add in chopped mushrooms

Add in soy sauce to taste. I used the annoying little packets that were floating around in the back of the fridge.

Add in spice—cayenne, chili powder, a dash of thai chili paste, etc

I didn’t have ginger, but ginger would be good here.

If you are eating carbs, add in udon (uconn) noodles.

Top with cilantro, lime juice.  

The awesome thing about making chicken soup is you can have a completely different recipe with the same process if you add in carrots, celery, peas, and turnips with thyme and oregano and take out the veggies and soy sauce above. Super traditional chicken soup. Or add in black beans, tomatoes, corn, peppers, and onions for a tortilla soup. And they all give you a lot of soup to eat/freeze with something that could be easily be tossed.

GTB Recipe of the Month(ish)

The wounds of the week aren't entirely salved, but we're getting better. Since I'm running a marathon on Sunday and I can't drink heavily, I've been thinking a lot about food. Specifically, what food I'm going to demolish once I can eat without regard to glycogen storage, race nutrition, and fear of bonking. And in thinking about food, I naturally thought about a new recurring feature that may or may not recur.

Here, courtesy of @baconbaking, is the very first GTB Recipe of the Month:

Beer Bread

1 cheap beer--Miller, Coors, Budweiser--Light version totally ok.
3 cups self-rising flour--this if flour that already has baking powder and salt in it. You can use regular flour and add them in.
2 T sugar

You'll want to bring the beer to room temperature. Just leave it on the counter for an hour. You can take it straight from the fridge if you're in a hurry. It will rise higher if the beer is at room temp.

Preheat oven to 375.
Melt 1 to 1/2 stick of butter. Depending on your heart.
Grease 9x5 bread pan with some of the butter.
Mix beer, flour, and sugar in bowl.
Dump in pan.
Top the dough with the remaining butter. It will look crazy like your dough is swimming in butter. Trust me here.
Sprinkle with salt.
Bake for 50 - 60 minutes.

Try not to eat entire loaf of bread in one sitting. Beer bread is really tasty the next day toasted topped with jelly, jam, honey or peanut butter.

This is not the place for craft beer. You can use craft, but it will taste completely different. You can mix it up and add a porter and chocolate chips or a blue moon and add in orange zest or even a pumpkin beer and sprinkle with cinnamon, but I'm a purist and like the original the best. Its super impressive to make the bread for folks and it's so simple you can make it for mid-week dinner.

We eagerly await your foodporn pics from your own efforts to make this. Let us know how it goes, and send any GTB ROM submissions to gtbfood@gtb.com.