3.03.2010

eat food. win a prize. GIVEAWAY 55

the giveaway is at the bottom if you're a opportunistic whore bag and didn't come here to read my diatribe. but ha ha, if you want to win you're gonna have to read it. suck it! (p.s. j/k ILY)
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okay, remember our superbowl cooking bonanza? where i raved about my mom's 8-layer mediterranean dip? well i have the recipe for you. but you have to promise you'll give the next two recipes down a fair shot.

nummy -nums to the maxxi-mums
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genia v's mt. olympus mediterranean dip
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ingredients (layer them from bottom to top):
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8 oz of hummus (plain or whichever flava you like)
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1 C chopped spinach (pictured on top here b/c my mom forgot til the end)
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1 C diced roasted red bells (in the jarred pickle section)
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6 oz jar of artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
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1C plain greek yogurt (i hate this stuff alone but love it in this)
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1/2 C sliced kalamata (purple) olives
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1/4 C (about 4 sprouts) of chopped green onion
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optional layer: 1/2 C chopped sun dried tomatoes
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top it off with crumbled feta
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serve with pita chips or toast your own pita bread in the oven for homemade chips. y'alls, this stuff tastes like it was scraped off of the rippling glutes of apollo the sun-god himself. so greek, so orgasmo. prometheus would have been punished even more harshly if it had been him instead of me who snatched this recipe from the cookbook of the gods (entitled Hestia's Bests: All-star Meals from the Goddess of Hearth and Home) and gave it unto mere mortals. have mercy on me, zeus. okaaaay, and that is the extent of my greek mythology knowledge. OH, no wait! hubris. trojan. smurfette. there. i'm done. mmmmmARTEMIS!
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ok, this next one might take some convincing. but just remember, i gave you the greek dip, so don't doubt me now!

last thursday was jesse's night to cook. on the schedule was pork chops. i told him i didn't care how he marinaded/cooked them just to make them tasty. i get home from shopping (FLYER DAY!) and he comes out to the driveway to help me with the groceries. from about 15 yards away from the open door i get hit with an airborne meaty aroma that made me weak in the knees. i walk inside and am greeted by this sight:


pork chops, grilled onions (NOT albino roach wings), and a rice pilaf side. the pork chops are all that matter here right now.

meat with a golden brown patina is always a good sign. i couldn't quite tell what he had done to make these just by looking at them. so i decided to try them out and then guess.

i took my first bite and literally almost fell on the floor. and by "the floor" i mean "into bed with jesse because this pork chop is the sexiest thing on earth."

i detected the slightest hint of breading. definitely not crunchy, but more substantial, rich and flavorful than our usual ginger dressing marinade/glaze. i started guessing: panko bread crumbs? nope. corn flakes? nope. french's fried onions? nope. i was making wilder and wilder guesses with each subsequent bite sending my into paroxysms of delight. cheerios??? cheez-its??? discarded skin cells from the chiseled body of robert pattinson??? no, no, and sick.

he gave me the hint that the secret ingredient was something we don't normally have in our house because i lack self control and would eat the entire supply (are you SURE it's not something from R-Pattz?). so i thought about it and said to my self, well then why would we have it in the house now? and then i remembered his high school boys' bible study we host at our house on mondays. jesse buys snacks for that and sometimes has some leftover. so i said, "hmm, well i know for sure these aren't doritos since they aren't artificially colored and taste nothing like them." and jesse says, "or ARE they? cool. ranch. doritos."

jaw, meet floor. i seriously dropped my fork and am ashamed to say that i said "fuck you." i realize this is not what you should say when your hubs cooks you a delicious dinner that is a culinary revelation, but i was so flabbergasted that he had pulled one over one me 10,000%. it tasted nothing like cool ranch anything and there weren't the telltale signs of green and red specks of fake flavoring. i felt like i had been duped into raving about his gourmet skills and then he tells me he made them with an ingredient out of a rest stop vending machine. like those idiots on the commercials who think they're eating at a fancy pasta restaurant and it turns out to be pizza hut cheesy-noodle sludge. alright, where's the hidden camera mo-mo fo-fo's? so much for my sophisticated palate. i felt like a fool. an enraptured, pork-filled fool.

when i regained composure i told him it was literally the best piece of pork i had ever had in my life and that if i had paid $30 for it at a restaurant that i would not have been disappointed and would have considered it money well spent. so here is Genius McRito's newly beloved recipe. if it sounds outrageous, i don't care. puh-lease try it...i would have never believed it and maybe wouldn't have even taken the first bite of it if i had known about the doritos on the front end, but i am trusting you guys to be more open-minded than that.

jesse's "will you accept sexual favors in exchange for that?" pork chops

ingredients:

4 pork fillets (6 - 8 oz each)

1 egg

1/4 cup flour

1 cup cool ranch doritos (finely crushed)

1 tablespoon salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

-Combine crushed chips, flour and salt in a wide shallow bowl and mix well

-Beat the egg in a separate bowl

-Dip pork fillets in the egg and coat fully

-dip egg-coated fillets in flour/salt/chip mixture one at a time and dredge through the mixture until fully coated

-Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large saute pan on medium high heat

-Carefully place pork fillets in the pan and cook for 3-3.5 minutes on each side for medium rare, 4 minutes for medium

-Allow meat to rest for 3-5 minutes, snicker about the idea of "resting meat" and then salt to taste and enjoy

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ok, one more. i have to admit that even though i like to pretend to be super-organized, violently domesticated and all things good and holy i do have one shortcoming. it is embarrassing, but i am ready to confess.

i have never used our crock pot.

whenever my fellow house-broken wifely friends would rave about their's (dan, marisa, lena) i would just get a glazed look in my eyes and try to nod and smile and pretend like i was in the club. kind of like i would do back when all the girls got their periods in middle school and mine didn't come until the summer before 11th grade so for years i tried to fake like had mine so they wouldn't all have the suspicions that i did: that i wast the bastard child of missing ovaries. so for a few years i was all, "OMG, y'all, i am sooooo bloated, my umbros hardly fit." and, "yeah i am totally breaking out because i am PMS'ing harcore." luckily, since i was young for my grade and wasn't 16 yet, i did escape the dreaded distinction of learning to operate a car before learning to operate a tampon...by about 4 months.

so right, crockpots. i can never plan that far ahead and usually by the time i am hungry, i don't have 8 hours to wait around for a farking brisket to soften up on me. once i tried to use it to make cheese dip (which only takes like an hour) and gave just up and put in the the microwave. when mama needs liquid cheese, she needs it now, peeps.

well i am a crockpot virgin no more, my friends. i found a stupidly easy recipe via iheartpublix which is an AWESOME resource that gives you the best deal and coupon matchups for the weekly ads (FLYERS!). but then they link to another site that solves a dilemma i have encountered: hey, i just bought all this food for cheap as dirt, now what the hell can i cook with it? well she has an answer.

the first recipe i happened to hit when i discovered her site was italian beef sandwiches. lo and behozzle, its a crockpot recipe. so i bought the ingredients (all 3 of them) that thursday and decided to give it a whirl yesterday.

on mondays, i make dinner for elena anyway, so while i was doing that i went ahead and dumped the jar of peppers over the beef in the crock and stuck it in the fridge (overnight marinating wasn't required by the recipe, but i thought it would help me in my drunken-stupid fog of a workday morning to not have to handle meat and peppers before 7 am). i put the outer part of the pot on the counter, (after cleaning off the inch-thick layer of scuzz that had been building up on top of it's neglected carapace for these 3.5 years). in the morning i dubiously dropped the crock inside the casing, put on the top, plugged her in and set her for 8 hours.

all day at work i kept giggling thinking about my mechanical slave at home doing my bidding and cooking my dinner for me (you'll never get the best of me, robots! know your role, bitches!). but i was still a little doubtful that it would be any good: the recipe itself OR the cooking method. beef shoulder + a jar of peppers doesn't = heaven to this girl.

well i got home (the smell of the pepperocini's was pretty potent) and went to do the last step of shredding the once-brontosaurus burger-sized hunk of meat and mixing in the seasoning. i have shredded meat in the past and have had to rip it one piece at a time all by hand. so i got out a fork and a plate on which to get my shred on. well, i went to pick up the big hunk from the pot with my fork and the whole thing just fell apart. it was so tender that i just had to poke my fork in and twist it around a few times and the whole thing was in shreds in no time. i let it keep ticking away while i sewed waited for jesse to get home like the dutiful wife i'm is.

we served the beef on leftover hotdog buns and added a little shredded pepper jack cheese on top. it was dragostea din tei, you guys. it tasted like something that should be sold at the varsity (without the cornary-inducing orange fluid). i am not showing a picture of it because it kind of looks like diarrhea on a bun, but it tastes at least twice as good as that would.

Jennie's Not-Diarrhea Italian Beef Sandwiches

ingredients:

2-3 lb. Beef Shoulder Roast On Sale $3.29lb

1 jar Pepperoncini Peppers (i used a big jar of sliced ones)

1 Package AuJus Seasoning MixUse Publix brand, about $.49 each

Shredded pepper jack cheese (optional)

Hoagie Rolls/Hot Dog buns

-Trim fat from roast (if you're weird. i personally live for meat fat. not a joke)

-Place roast in crock pot, cover with entire jar of pepperoncini peppers (liquid too).

-Cook 8 hours on low. Remove peppers (or not...we only removed about 2/3 of them)

-Shred beef and mix in Au Jus Seasoning.

-Cook another 30 minutes on low in crock pot. Serve on hoagie rolls with shredded cheese on top.

you will have enough for 7 or 8 buns worth so it goes the distance.

sucessfully using my crockpot made me feel so hip and sexy. when i think back on it, i picture me badassedly extracting peppers, sprinkling au jus and shredding beef with a gangsta lean while twerking my badonk to a soundtrack of usher's "yeah". next time i will film myself because it was so hot it def belongs in the extended video footage:

THE GIVEAWAY***updated:

since i will probably never ever ever convince you to try these recipes with just my words, i am offering a bribe (but seriously, they're so good, you should be bribing me, you scummy freeloaders). the first (as if there will be lots, ha!) two people who cook 3 recipes from any post on the entire blog (search by the FOOD tag) and photograph themselves with each dish will receive the handmade project of their choice sewed by me. they can be any 3 recipes you found here and one of them has to be one of the above recipes from today's post.

for the prize, you can choose from any of the things i have ever made on here except a christmas stocking. please don't cook them all in the same day or something insane like that (lena, joanna, i am looking at you). take your time and only do it if you want to eat these things, you can get 3 dinners out of this blog post alone...but remember only one of the 3 recipes HAS to be from this post. email me the pictures at keight8 (at) gmail (dot) com. and post a comment on your reviews of each recipe (do this even if you dont want to enter!)

peace up. a-town down

11 comments:

  1. I will just say that I am making the greek orgasmo on Sunday night for a birthday party and this will be my THIRD time since you posted about it and it will be the culmination of all creation including roasted red pepper hummus, chopped black olives (because I don't know what kalamata is), and chopped grape tomatoes (because those are easy to find). My special hint is to just freaking put the greek yogurt on top of the hummus layer because it's so dang hard to spread it around if there are veggies and slippery things under it... Thank you very much!

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  2. Ok I have a slight problemo here... I recently tried to make cornflake covered pork chops the exact same way (except with cornflakes) and they burned to high heaven in my skillet before getting done! So then I had to put them in the oven for an HOUR because that's how long it takes to cook p-chops in the oven. It was terrible. I'll follow every specific command here for the Dorito cruncho and we'll see how ugly it looks :-P

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  3. Try pork filetes Jo. Ours were butterflyed so it cooked pretty quick. The olive oil will help too since it kinda soaks into the meat through the breading. This post is hilarious btw.

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  4. I'm totally going to win. Enough with the random drawings that we all know aren't random at all.

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  5. OMG I wish I had my crock-pot! You made me miss her so much. I wish I could cook some recipes but lets be honest I can't read all the ingredients in German...o well.

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  6. I like the idea that I was chosen on purpose and not randomly. Either way, victory is so very sweet.

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  7. I swear I used pork filets, they didn't have bones... I'm going to give this a whirl, the fuck you sold me on it!

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  8. so I totally made your meatloaf last week. Does that count? Here is the review: It tastes nothing like traditional meatloaf although the texture is the same. It tasted like taco meat. My only criticism is that it was WAY spicy (especially to a 2 year old). I am pretty wimpy but Noah even thought it was hot. I think it was the red pepper flakes. It made a ton of food. Last night we broke it into pieces, added black beans and cheese, and turned it into quesadillas and they were SO good. I really want to try the Jesse's "will you accept sexual favors in exchange for that?" pork chops. I'll let you know what Noah offers, I mean thinks. (haha)

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  9. Ok, so I am totally de-lurking for the first time ever. Its Lyndsey Miller--the one from good 'ol WA. The reason for my de-lurk is two-fold: a) Judah is the most perfect little human manchild I've ever seen; b) I made the "sexual favors" pork chops over the weekend and have been trying to work out ways to incorporate gas station food items into unsuspecting meals ever since...(twinkie tiramasu...its got legs!). Anyway, I love your blog (I have my own as well, though it is not nearly as interesting, creative, or hilarious as yours, I do still enjoy it as a hobby). I am so glad to see that you are doing well, and I promise to de-lurk on a more frequent basis!

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  10. Now that you have dusted off your crock pot, try this super easy recipe I tried tonight. Because of my cholesterol and constant ways to cut sodium, I tried this from another blog http://crockpot365.blogspot.com Lemon and Herb Crockpot Roasted Chicken. Throw in a whole chicken or cut pieces, two lemons, lemon pepper seasoning (the kind without salt),6-8 buds of fresh garlic, a bunch of fresh rosemary. Add it all to the crockpot with no water. Blaine said it was so delicious he definitely wanted it again. I'm trying to use the crockpot so I can go exercise. Like you and Jesse, he cooks some and I cook some. I just find on my nights, the extra 15 minutes of prep in the morning, pays off big time. And I used my kitchen shears and cut off most of the skin. YUMMY! Aunt Jo

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