A Day of Pizza

I am really going all out with pizza today. But not in the traditional sense.  I am taking the expected ingredients–marinara, cheese, and pepperoni–and using them in strange ways. First up this afternoon was pizza biscuits. I took the regular whomp biscuits, cut slits into them, and slipped in a spoonful of marinara sauce, spoonful of ranch sauce (why not?!), a pepperoni or two, and a large pinch of cheese. Then I sealed up the edges and baked them like normal biscuits. Henry said: Can you make these always forever? (not the child, the adult).  Needless to say, they were a hit.

Tonight, I am turning those same ingredients into Pizza Pasta. Here’s the breakdown.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound whole wheat pasta, your choice of style. I used penne.
• some meat sauce I had in the freezer. Several cups? Use however much you’d normally use for a pound of pasta.
• 1/2 cup ranch mixed with 1/2 cup ricotta
• Grated cheese
• Pepperonis

Method:

1.  Boil the pasta, but do not cook it all the way. Leave it a little raw. It will continue to cook in the oven.

2.  Layer the pasta down on some meat sauce in a baking dish. Half of the pasta goes down. Put down a sprinkle of cheese and all of the ricotta/ranch mixture. Then add the second half of the pasta, and the meat sauce on top of that. Then more cheese, and then your pepperonis.

3.  Bake it at 425 until it’s done. 30-45 minutes, I think. 

What a(n) (ice) day

Snow and snow and snow and ice and sleet and ice and ice.

But I am wearing clean pajamas and I did do a lot of organizing and cleaning around the apartment today. I have a roast beef in the crockpot that needs about another hour or so. Roasted butternut squash and mashed potatoes. And the best part: sweet potato biscuits. I may never make regular biscuits again. Granted, I did grate an entire stick of frozen butter into these puppies, but I’d like to think that including an entire baked sweet potato into the biscuits counterbalances the butter. Right? Right. (right?)

Over 5300 people in Eugene are without power at the moment and out local electricity company said to expect outages even if we haven’t had any issues so far. So, yeah. Henry went to the store to get beer, candles, and hot cheetos. That’s all we need to be snowed and iced in–and without power.

Please make these biscuits. I didn’t change a thing about the recipe. Some reviewers said that grating frozen butter was difficult, but it was so easy and weird that it was almost a novelty.  Ooh! Grated butter!  Even Henry smiled at it.

Fried Chicken Potpie with Heirloom Squash and a Parmesan Buttermilk Biscuit Topping

It was a rough sort of week. It was a week of goals being met, tears being cried, frustrated, whispered arguments, and exhaustion. For every high we had, the lows arrived on schedule.

Here we are, Saturday afternoon and we have survived. Henry has started college, got his driver’s license, and I got nominated for the Oregon Small Schools Teacher of the Year. It was a gorgeous afternoon. We went to the park this morning and have really enjoyed our day together. Now Henry is off to work, and the kids and I are settling into our evening.

Since Henry started school, he reduced his hours at work and is only working weekend nights. I rushed to make a good dinner for us before he left, and I really threw it together. I made a huge mess in the kitchen and spilled flour all over the flour.

But dinner turned out and it’s worthy of a blog post, so here it is. It’s really approximate, so use your own judgment if you choose make it.

Ingredients:

• chicken tenders, cut into chunks
• 1 squash, roasted in the oven, diced
• 1 onion, diced
• some celery, diced
• flour
• milk and chicken stock
•  butter and/or oil
• baking mix
• buttermilk
• parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper, thyme, and sage

Method:

I floured the chicken chunks with flour seasoned with sage, salt, and pepper. I fried the pieces in batches, and then put them into the bottom of a casserole dish. In the meantime, I had the squash roasting and when it finished, I cut it out of its skin and diced it. I layered the squash over the chicken.

When the chicken was all done, I sauteed the onion, garlic, and celery in the same pan the chicken fried in. When the veggies were a little soft, I added a tablespoon of butter, some flour, and made a roux. Then I added stock and milk until I got the gravy to the right consistency.

I seasoned to taste and poured the gravy over the chicken and squash. Then I measured out the baking mix, added buttermilk and parm, then dropped large spoonfuls of the biscuit batter over the chicken and gravy.

Then I baked it in the oven at about 400 degrees for 30 minutes. It was was fast for a casserole dish, and super satisfying on a crisp, fall day.

Dinner Breakfast Sandwiches (made with love)

Sometimes the kids are good eaters. Sometimes they are dubious. When I first started making meals for these little people, I had to really sell my food. One night, I made pork chops or something, way back when Henry and I were first dating. “Is this chicken?” one of the kids asked. “Nope. It’s pork.”
“What’s pork?”

Henry, whispered: “Say it’s chicken.”

Jenn: “It’s chicken. And I made it with love.”

From then on, for every single meal I’ve made for them, they always ask if I’ve made it with love. One time, I made chili and put in a can of diced tomatoes. Like clockwork, the oldest asked, “Jenn, did you make this with love?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Are these pieces of your heart?” She was, of course, referring to the chunks of tomato in her chili. And she doesn’t like tomatoes.

“Yes,” I said confidently.

Henry cut me a look that said: Did you really just tell her she’s eating your heart?

I grinned and she took a bite.

We’re a weird bunch.

Tonight I made breakfast sandwiches with canned biscuits, homemade sausage, muenster cheese, and eggs.

They were cute, filling, and made with lots of love.

Sausage recipe:

• 1.5 pounds of ground pork
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp pepper
• 2 tsp fresh sage (minced finely)
• 2 tsp fresh thyme (minced finely)
• 1/2 tsp fresh rosemary (minced finely)
• 1 T brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp chili flakes

Mix thoroughly. Form into small patties for sandwiches. Fry. Or use to make sausage gravy with those biscuits. Do whatever. It’s good.

(Adapted from Alton Brown’s recipe)

Happy Spring! Sausage Gravy and Snow Days…

I woke up Wednesday morning to a text from a work friend who told me it was snowing. Uh…thanks? Why the text at 5am? 30 minutes before my alarm is set to go off? Then another text: 2 hour delay. Oh. I quickly sat up in bed and threw open the blinds. More snow in Eugene than I’ve seen since moving here. I set my alarm for seven and was woken up around six by another text that said school was canceled. So, here today, Thursday, school is canceled again. With spring break technically starting next week, it looks like I get a week and a half off instead of the standard week. And before falling asleep last night, I told the boyfriend that if I didn’t have school today, I’d get up this morning and make sausage gravy and biscuits for breakfast. It looks like I gotta make good on my promise.

Ingredients:

• Milk
• sausage
• butter
• flour
• onion
• garlic
• chicken stock
• whomp biscuits

Start by browning your sausage in a large skillet. I bought some bulk country sausage yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the sausage fries for awhile, add a quarter of an onion, finely diced, and a few cloves of garlic, minced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After it all fries together for a bit, add a couple tablespoons of flour to the pan. Alternate milk and chicken stock (stirring continuously) into the roux until gravy starts to form.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fry some eggs. Plate it all up. (Oh, yeah. Make some biscuits.)

Surprise Breakfast

I got to sleep in this morning.  I look forward to the end of the week because Friday is the special, special day of sleeping in, moseying to work, and teaching a class that starts at 12:30.

The only time I’m not fond of Friday mornings is when I end Thursday night with an argument with the spouse.  Which happened.  We made up before we fell asleep, but I hate fighting, and I hate the unsettling feeling that comes after letting yourself lose your temper.

Sleeping in this morning did help.  The husband got up at five and asked me at six if I was ready to get up.  I said, “grrmmmggmghh.”  He woke me up at six thirty and asked me if I was ready to get up.  I ignored him.

At seven, he told me to get up.

I obliged.  After I crawled out from underneath my comforter, he called from the kitchen:

“Hurry up! Breakfast is almost ready.”

The husband makes breakfast for us every other day, so this morning’s declaration wasn’t a surprise.  Also, I really don’t like eating breakfast upon first waking up.  I like to drink my coffee, take a shower, and then eat breakfast.

But I obliged.

He said: “Don’t go into the kitchen and look.  I want it to be a surprise.”

Hmm, I thought.  Oatmeal and fried eggs are the only two breakfast foods in his repertoire, so neither of those would have surprised me. He must be up to something.

Trying to push back my irritation of being made to eat breakfast so soon after waking, I waited for him to finish.

In a couple short minutes, he put two plates in front of us.

Two plates that looked like they held two piles of gravy.  “What is this?”

“Biscuits and gravy!” he chirped.

His chirping was cute, and my irritation disappeared.

“Biscuits and gravy, huh?  Where are the biscuits?”

“Underneath the gravy, silly.”

I looked underneath the gravy, saw something, and tasted it. Tasted like a biscuit.

Didn’t look like a biscuit.

He saw me examining the food, “Something went wrong with the recipe.”

“Hmm.  You know there is Bisquick in the cupboard, don’t you?”

“Oh.”

“Well, tell me about your recipe.”

“It turned out soupy,” he explained.

“Your biscuit dough was soupy? That’s not supposed to happen.”

My dear husband couldn’t, for the life of him, think of what had gone wrong.  He said the recipe called for 1 1/3 cups of milk.  That’s a lot!

Aha!  He halved the entire recipe, but waking me up threw him off his game, and he added the full measure of milk.

Poor guy had to bake his biscuit “batter” in a sheet pan.

I love him.