I hope you like mushrooms. I mean I hope you really like mushrooms. If you don’t you might as well hit up some other food blog today because I think that this recipe borders on insane when it comes to the amount of mushrooms.
But if you like mushrooms. Well. Then you are in for a treat!
I should note that the original recipe for this dish was mushroom-packed, but not mushroom-explodingly-packed. The thing is that when I put it on the poll last week I thought it was a vegetarian recipe. This is largely due to my inability to read the English language.
Anyway, only after the recipe had secured victory did I realize that it was, in fact, pretty meat-packed. So I decided to make it vegetarian. That meant substituting about 2 pounds of ground beef with 2 pounds of mushrooms and vegetables.
Honestly, I didn’t even think it would work. Luckily, it not only worked, but turned out to be very delicious!
Sometimes the only thing I want for dinner is a really good plate of pasta. Maybe it’s the 1/4 Italian running through my veins but if I don’t get a big plate of pasta once a week, I get pretty cranky.
I usually don’t do anything too fancy with the pasta, but one thing that I haven’t done in a very long time is use a jarred sauce. To me, they are always a bit sugary and gloopy and not even that flavorful. So I usually skip the jars and make my own sauce with canned tomatoes.
But hey. It’s summertime so I try to use fresh tomatoes these days. Of course the traditional way to make sauce is to buy large tomatoes, peel them, cook them down for hours, and flavor them with all kinds of spices.
I like that method just fine, but I don’t always have time for that business. This is the way to cheat at tomato sauce by using cherry tomatoes!
If you live in the U.S. (and haven’t been living under a rock), you probably know that we’re having a bit of an egg problem here these days. Over the last few weeks over half a billion (WITH A B!) eggs have been recalled from stores all over the nation.
As tends to be the case when there is a food recall, the situation has been a bit confusing and so I did some research on what exactly the recall means for you and I’ll give you my thoughts on the whole deal as well.
Are Your Eggs at Risk? In terms of this recall, it’s very easy to find this out. The FDA has a thorough database of egg products that you should not purchase or use at this time. Check out their Shell Eggs Recall Product List and you can search by brand name or bar code or any number of other methods to find out if your eggs are recalled.
If the eggs in your fridge are on this list you should trash them or return them to the store right away.
In the long term, the question of egg safety is a much larger one and one that requires a bit more background.
This dish has maybe taken me longer to post than any single dish ever on Macheesmo. It’s not because I kept screwing it up either. It’s because I kept somehow losing the photos! The photos in this post are from the third take on this dish.
While I was mildly irritated at making the same dish three times just from a posting point of view, I was perfectly happy making this dish three times from an eating point of view, because man is it good.
Mojo chicken (pronounced Mo-ho) is a Cuban dish. You can actually mojo a bunch of stuff: shrimp, pork, etc. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen mojo veggies though. It’s usually meat. I went with chicken just out of simplicity here.
Now I’m not Cuban. I’ve never been to Cuba. I’ve eaten mojo-something like maybe half a dozen times. My point is that I make this my own way but it might not be traditional. Don’t be afraid to tell me off in the comments, or set me right, if you disagree with my mojo.
This may come as a complete surprise to you, but I do most of the cooking in our house. I know. Shocking right?! But one area where Betsy has me crushed is in the daily breakfast department.
Before we started living together I used to not really eat breakfast at all. My breakfast started with a big cup of coffee. Of course, I was starving by lunchtime and would gorge myself on all kinds of snacks and stuff throughout the day.
Betsy on the other hand liked breakfast but she wasn’t much into heavy breakfasts. She used to eat cereal everyday.
These days, however, we are both all about the breakfast smoothie. This is her department entirely. I rarely make one. She’s been trying lots of different mixes over the last few months and she finally landed on one that I think is really solid.
We’ve been having this every morning for at least a month and I’m not sick of it at all. It gives me lots of energy. In fact, I get grumpy now if I don’t start my day with one.
Betsy and I have a number of friends from out of town coming to DC this weekend and I don’t believe that any of them are coming for the Glenn Beck Extravaganza. But, turns out, that when the Beckites come to town, they take all the restaurant reservations!
That leaves me cooking for a crowd. Obviously I consider this a bonus because it means I don’t have to change out of my PJs.
The thing that makes this weekend more interesting (and a trend that I’m starting to notice) is that these visitors actually know about Macheesmo. Therefore, they expect me to make really amazing food when they come over.
I’ll do my best to please of course. Usually, when I know I’m cooking more than one meal for the same group, I try to do one surefire winner and one slightly more experimental dish. That way they’ll get at least one good meal and one meal in the life of a food blogger (might be good or might be FAIL-city).
I’ll give you a hint about the experimental dish. It’s a brunch dish. And it involved curry. You’ll see it next week, fail or no fail.
In other news, the new Bon Appétit has some really good stuff in it. Let’s make something!
A few links!
10 Culinary Tools and Tricks – Some of these I knew, but some were new to me. I definitely have never thought of using a PedEgg in the kitchen, but hey… why not? (@ HuffPo)
No Knead Pizza Dough – I’m a big fan of Jim Lahey’s no knead bread and I’ve heard about this pizza dough deal but haven’t gotten around to trying it. I have a pretty solid pizza dough recipe and it would have to be as good and a lot easier for me to switch I think. The verdict is still out. (@ TFIMB)
Canning Tomatoes- I swear the day after I have a pantry, I’m gonna start canning everything I can get my hands on. You watch. (@ The Bitten Word)
Pink Frosting with NO Food Coloring – This is fairly amazing. I didn’t think it was possible to come up with something so pink without using artificial stuff. Mark it down as the one billionth time I’ve been proven wrong. (@ Cupcake Project)
Mermaid Lotion – Of course, if I made this it would be MerMAN lotion, but either way this looks like a fun thing to make. Maybe I’ll expand Macheesmo into the homemade products area… (@ The Hungry Mouse)
Last week I went on a bit of a rant about canned soups (I’ve been ranting a lot lately). After that it only seemed fair to actually make some soup. As usual, when I posted a poll about soup last week, the one that I thought would win placed dead last and the option that I didn’t think had a chance won by a huge margin.
And so it goes…
Before the butter Nazi’s show up, I’ll admit that there’s some cream and butter in this guy, but there’s also a ton of fresh veggies and none of those odd preservatives that they put in the canned varieties. Betsy and I have eaten this soup all week (because it makes a lot) and I’ve fallen in love with it.
Comments