Saturday Lunch - Pork with Camembert

Along with trying new dishes or creating new variations on old standards is the maxim that I stay within a $20 budget for purchasing meats, spices, or any other ingredients that might be needed. Today's dish stretched that $20 mostly because I did not have the main ingredients in the house.

Pork with camembert is pretty easy to concoct. It consists of fried pork and a creamy cheese sauce. Start with a pound of pork - the recipe (from a cookbook entitled Around the World in 450 Recipes) calls for pork tenderloin cut into steaks about 1/2 inch thick; I used pork chops with the bone cut off. Same principle applies. Seasoned the pork with pepper, and fried the pork in butter until just cooked through.

Now to the cream sauce: Using the juices from the pork, I added 3 tbsp of a dry white wine - I picked up a cheap bottle of chardonnay. On a side note, I read somewhere that cheap wine for cooking will taste just that way - cheap. I'm not that much of a gourmand to tell the difference... Yet. Anyways, bring the wine to boil. Add 3/4 cup of sour cream, plus 1 tbsp of mixed herbs (marjoram, thyme, and sage - according to the recipe). I substituted 1 tbsp of herbes de provence (rosemary, marjoram, thyme, savory, and lavender). This packs most of the flavor in this dish. Bring to boil - I found that low heat kept a nice boil, but didn't burn the sauce.














Camembert cheese - I've never eaten it before. Got to take the rind off before slicing into the sauce. It's kind of expensive, too (Then again, I've been accustomed to generic cheddar or colby jack for most of my life, let alone Kraft processed "cheese"). 4 oz. of Camembert cheese - half the package - is melted in. Plus 1 1/2 tsps of Dijon mustard - stirred in. Voila! A creamy Camembert cheese sauce! Drizzle sauce on top of pork. Ooh lala! French cuisine!

Supper - Sunday, 1/16 - Variations on Impossibly Easy Italian Chicken Pie

It's a long weekend, so lots of opportunities to cook!
My wife suggested making an Impossibly Easy Italian Chicken Pie for supper tonight - the recipe comes from General Mills/Bisquick/somewhere on the Internet. Relatively (probably impossibly!) easy to make. Except for one little detail - no Bisquick baking mix.
So to Plan B: We had Pillsbury Grand biscuits in the fridge, so the recipe was modified to use those instead of baking a pie.

The basic ingredients for the modified dish are as follows:
2 chicken breasts
Olive oil
1 can of diced tomatoes in juice
Some garlic
Some onion
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 bag of frozen mixed vegetable (peas, carrots, corn, green beans)
Biscuits

Directions:
Cube the chicken and cook it in olive oil
Bake biscuits, following package's directions
Toss in garlic and onions with chicken - cook through
Dump in veggies, tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, and Italian seasoning
Heat through
Spoon on top of opened biscuits

Easy enough - it turned out really well. I put in more Italian seasoning than the modified recipe - that was a predominant flavor, but not to the point of annoyance. The family, all around, ate it.

However, no pics tonight - not the most visually satisfying dish - pretty much a mishmash, but tasty nonetheless.

Lunch - Saturday, 1/15 - Spaghetti with eggs, bacon, and cream

Today's recipe comes from a cookbook I got for Christmas - Main Courses 365 - one for every day of the year. The choice: spaghetti with eggs, bacon, and cream. I modified the recipe a little (I tend to do that quite often) - half an onion (instead of whole), 10 strips of bacon (instead of 8), 5 eggs (instead of 4), a pound of spaghetti (as opposed to 12 oz.), and sour cream in place of creme fraiche. Sadly, creme fraiche could not be found in the dairy aisle at the local Safeway.
This is not the most nutritious meal to make - the fat from the bacon was not drained but thrown into the mix when the spaghetti, egg mixture, and bacon were tossed together. But it was delicious! I'm not a fan of onion, thus the smaller used in the recipe. I think though that it was the most flavorful part of the dish. A little bit more would have made the dish even better! Next time, I will try to follow the recipe more closely, especially since we have a ton of leftovers.
Here are a few pics documenting today's dish:

The sauce was kind of like an Alfredo sauce, but not as thick. The garlic and onions really brought out the flavor.











Must have been good - my 3-year-old son, Benj, ate a whole bowl of it!












That's it for today. Looking forward to the leftovers!

Something New

So, here I am with a new blog. I'm not the world's best cook, but I love to do it. Any opportunity that I can get to cook I take. It doesn't happen too often, so no daily posts. However, when I do post, I will try to take pictures to include. Enjoy!