Some comfort food porn for you

As promised, I made meatloaf last night. There are about a million ways to make meatloaf. This is a recipe I've been using for about five years. It is really good. You start with a pound or so of ground beef, 1/2 cup oatmeal, 2/3 cup of evaporated milk (a small can), 2 tablespoons of (dried) minced onion, a teaspoon of salt and a 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. That's for the meatloaf. For the sauce, you will need 4 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, 2/3 cup of catsup and 1/3 cup of water:

 OK, so throw your meat in a bowl. It is less painful than it sounds:

 Add the oatmeal:

Add the minced onion:

And the pepper:

And the salt:

You know what to do, people. Mix it up right:

With your hands, which I am sure you washed. Then use nonstick cooking spray on a meatloaf pan, which on other days might be a bread pan:

Shape the loaf and put it in the pan:

Now, get your sauce ingredients. In no particular order, add the water:

Add the catsup, then add the Worcestershire and vinegar:

I usually add the water last to rinse out the catsup that stuck to the measuring cup. Didn't this time. Now mix it up right, people:

Not with your hands, this time. Now slather the meat with a portion of the sauce, save the rest:

Bake at 350 for one hour, then let it rest for 15 minutes or so:

You can put some sauce on your slice of meatloaf if you like:

Bon appetit.

Not-really-snowbound food porn

Temperatures hit the 50s Friday, and there was a lot of melt-off, so we're not really snowbound. The roads are clear and folks are moving around as normal for the most part. But that doesn't mean I can't have some more snowbound food porn!

Last night's entry was a hamburger casserole -- excellent wintertime comfort food that happens to be really, really good. It starts like this: a cup of uncooked wild rice, a can of cream of mushroom soup, 1-1/2 lb ground beef, 1 can cream of chicken soup, a small can sliced mushrooms, 1 cup beef bouillon, 3/4 cups chopped celeger, 1/2 chopped onion (I think you should just use a whole small onion. What do I know?), 1/2 cup slivered almonds and 1 bay leaf:

About that wild rice -- hard to find in grocery stores outside of an Uncle Ben's mix. If you're OK with cannibalizing the rice from a mix and tossing the Uncle Ben's seasoning, that works. Otherwise, if your grocery store doesn't carry plain old wild rice, I have a suggestion:

Ordered online, I now have a lifetime supply.

First, pour 4 cups of boiling water over the rice, and let it soak for 15 minutes:

Now, chop up the onions and celery, and sautee them together:

Drain the wild rice (assuming the 15 minutes have passed):

Now add the cream of mushroom soup, the cream of chicken soup, the beef broth and the seasonings. It can get too salty if you use all three salts, so you might want to sub onion powder and garlic power for the onion and garlic salts, and just go with the celery salt. Up to you.

Add the sauteed onions and celery:

 Mix it up right:

Brown the hamburger and toss it in with all the other stuff:

Mix it up right, people, then pour the whole shooting match into a casserole dish:

Top with sliced almonds, cover and bake for 90 minutes. Bon appetit:

A little comfort food porn for you

With no meaningful game food porn, does that mean I will leave you hanging on the food porn front? Oh, hell no! We have comfort food porn today, in the form of chicken and dumplings. I don't actually have a written recipe for this. I learned how to make it from my (former) brother-in-law when I lived down in the Florida panhandle and was the roadie/sound man/backup singer for a blues band. Good times, kids. Anyway, he taught it to me, I'm teaching it to you. Pay attention.

It begins, as so much of life does, with a whole chicken and a bunch of vegetables:

 You'll want some onions, carrots and celery to go with that chicken. Some salt and pepper will probably come in handy, too. Later, at least. But first, toss the chicken in a pot of water and bring it to a boil:

Once you have boiled that bad boy for about 20 minutes, pull that bird out of the water and let it cool. Do not toss the water -- leave it in the pot.

Also, while letting the bird cool, don't let rats, mice or Mrs. Wolves get at the bird:

Once it has cooled, strip the bird of meat:

Put the bones back in the pot in the water you did not toss after boiling the bird in it. Got that:

Bring that to a boil again. Boil those bones for another 20 minutes or so. Longer won't hurt.

Take your onions, celery and carrots (in the numbers and proportions that make you happy -- I use two medium onions, about a pound of carrots and four to six ribs of celery. Do what you like -- and chop those suckers up:

Strain the bones and other funky stuff out of the water in which you have been boiling them. We now like to call this water "chicken stock."

Put the chopped vegetables in the chicken stock along with the meat you stripped from the bird earlier and bring it to a boil. Then immediately take it down to a simmer. Now, get out your Bisquick. Follow the directions on the box, more or less -- you will want about 3 cups of Bisquick and a little more than a cup of milk:

Mix that up right to get a nice, thick dumpling mix:

Spoon that mix on top of your simmering chicken and vegetables pot:

Cover and cook until it all looks done, probably about 15 minutes. Slop that stuff into a bowl, salt and/or pepper to taste and enjoy. 

Great stuff on a chilly afternoon.

Comfort food porn

No Packers' game today, so we are going with slightly generic food porn as opposed to game-oriented food porn.  Naturally, I root for the teams that are playing teams in the Packers' division. Not easy when you have Bears-Lions. Did what I could. So today we did comfort food: pot roast in the crock pot. It's really easy. You start with a roast-type cut of meat (in this case, a top sirloin), an onion, some potatoes, carrots and a can of french onion soup:

Quarter them there potatoes.  I don't know why people call it that  -- if you cut a potato the way people are talking about when they talk about quartering a potato, you wind up with eight pieces. We won't talk about that, though.

Chop up an onion. You'll feel better.

I used so-called baby carrots (which are just carrot pieces that are run through a machine to smooth them over). You can do what you want. Anyway, toss the carrots, onions, and potatoes into a crock pot. Put that big slab of meat on top. Yes, you can put celery in this recipe, and sometimes I do. Not today, though.

Pour a can of French onion soup over that, cover and put on low heat.

Now go away. On low, this is going to take at least eight hours to cook, and the longer, the better. The meat gets more and more tender the longer you cook it. After at least eight hours -- ten is better -- you will have a steaming heap of goodness that looks like this:

Put it in a bowl, put it on a plate, it don't matter. This is good.

Eat it, people.

Everyday food porn

Wasn't sure what to call this post, since it is food porn, but not game food, not exotic and basically nothing more than what is often called comfort food these days. Didn't want to call it "comfort food porn," though, because that just sounded wrong. Take out the food -- what is comfort porn? Porn involving well-padded furniture and no foreign objects? Hell, I don't know, I just didn't like the sound of it.

Anyway, Sunday night I fixed a roast chicken. Nothing weird, exotic or complicated, but food porn is food porn, and we're still a few weeks away from game food porn. Only two weeks until Labor Day food porn, though, so stay tuned.

The chicken is important, but a roast chicken  starts with the vegetables. I usually go with potatoes, carrots, onions and celery. Other people throw in garlic, mushrooms and all kinds of other stuff, but the basics are always good. In this case, the potatoes, carrots and onions all came from the home garden:

Also had celery, but had to buy that -- didn't grow celery this year. Anyway, you'll want about a half-dozen medium potatoes, a half-dozen carrots, the equivalent of two medium onions and about a half-dozen celery ribs. Peel the carrots, clean up the celery, cut the celery ribs in half and split them lengthwise:

Chop those suckers up. I usually just cut chop them all perpendicular to the long axis, so that you have nice, cute circular slices of carrot and smiley-face celery slices. However, you can cut your carrots into slices, as is most commonly seen for veggie dips. Note the carrots on the left:

Take your pick. Now, get your onions.

Quarter them.

You can peel your potatoes or not. I left the skins on. Cut them into chunks, though -- smaller than quarters, but size is up to you.

Now, get out the bird. Mine was a five-pound roaster. Put it in a roasting pan on a rack.

Salt and pepper the bird to taste, then baste it with some olive oil. Or butter. Yes, I was drinking beer at the time. It is not necessary for the recipe. Also, I had jarred some tomatoes, as you also can see. Please, don't feel as if you are not worthy to enter my kitchen simply because you do not grow and can your own vegetables. But therapy will help.

Put all those chopped-up vegetables in the roasting pan surround the chicken.

Add about 1-1/2 cups of chicken broth to the roasting pan to keep the vegetables moist. You can tent the chicken with aluminum foil, but be sure to take the tent off for long enough to brown the chicken.

 Preheat the oven to 325 F. Allow about 15 minutes per pound of bird, and don't be afraid to go 20 minutes per pound. You can make gravy -- I did from the drippings (and, of course, the chicken broth you put into the vegetables) although it is not required. Fix some kind of bread, and bon appetit.