Carnitas

I don't have a picture unfortunately, but I felt that I needed to post this on the blog because I don't want this recipe to be lost to Google when the next time I want to make carnitas comes up and I don't remember the wording I used to find the great recipe we used tonight!!

Ingredients

3-4 lb pork butt or pork shoulder roast
2 tbsp Fajita seasoning
1 1/2 cups green chile sauce (we used green chile enchilada sauce, but I'm not sure what exactly the difference is?)
1 jar salsa (we used chunky style, but at the end of the cooking the chunks get lost, it might be worth it to get non-chunky salsa that might have a better flavor)
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Juice of 4 limes

This is probably the easiest recipe in the world. Really you just put all of the ingredients in a crockpot and set it to low for 8-10 hours or high for 6-8 hours. When we cooked it, we did it on high because we started at around 2pm, and to be honest I don't know what cooking it on low would benefit because this recipe ended up being perfectly juicy and tender.

When you come to the end of the cooking, Lex and I decided that draining the pork would be best--BEFORE pulling the pork! We didn't drain it and the burritos we made with the carnitas ended up a little too moist. So anyway, drain the pork, put it back in the crockpot and shred it with two forks until it's totally in pieces and voila! The best thing to do with this is put it in tortillas and make it a burrito and it's totally delicious!

Note: Lex liked the spiciness of the carnitas, but suggested we eliminate the cayenne pepper so that he can use his favorite red chile sauce. I don't like his salsa so I think the best comprimise is to maybe halve the cayenne pepper, I think we'll do that next!

Another note is that after doing various styles of pulled pork, I think you can pretty much do anything to a pork butt flavor-wise and leave it in the crockpot on high for 6-8 hours and be fine, with a careful mind to having plenty of moisture. This recipe is almost all sauces so there was no worry for moisture!

Pear Custard

I haven't updated this in so long, I apologize! But I come back from my annual Maryland trip with a brand new recipe! This pear custard is a new recipe to my grandma too who got it from a coworker. She actually just made it as a birthday gift to one of her friends because she couldn't think of anything to get her and she loved it!

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 3 medium eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup butter (melted)
• 2-3 bartlett pears

First, you'll want to grease your 9" Pyrex pie glass and preheat your oven to 350 degrees. After greasing the Pyrex, peel and core your pears and slice them lengthwise-- alternating the pears pointing in and out (as seen in the picture kind of!).

After that's done, mix all of the above ingredients together in a blender (Author's note: My grandma told me to use a blender but I figured using a hand mixer would be fine, but the custard batter ended up being not smooth and homogenous enough. I'll use a blender from now on) and blend until completely smooth. Pour the mixture over the pears and bake in the oven for about 45 minutes.

You'll know that the pear custard is ready when it's golden brown all over. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, my custard was a little too bubbly because of my use of the mixer, so it was bubbly as it was baking and the bubbles got a little burned, but the rest of the custard should be pretty tasty. Let the custard rest for about 5 minutes, it will collapse like most custards and be a lot flatter than when it first came out of the oven.

You can serve either at room temperature or chilled!

Pasta Salad

I feel bad about not posting a picture, AND not having posted in forever, I'm sorry guys (Megan). But tonight I improvised something that I think tasted really good!

Ingredients:
1/3 Can of Peas
1/2 Can of Artichoke Hearts (optional)
About 1 Cup of Sweet Grape Tomatoes
1/2 Can of Baby Corn
1 Clove of Garlic, diced
About 3 Stalks of Green Onion, sliced
1 Chicken Breast (prepared as my Grandma's Lemon Chicken)
1/2 lb Pasta (something small and shapey, like wheels or rotini)
About 4 tbsp of Red Wine Vinegar, to taste
About 3 tbsp of Extra Virgin Olive Oil, to taste
Salt, to taste

Basically, put it all in together. I put the vegetables and fruit in first with the garlic and the vinegar and oil and sort of let it marinade while the chicken and pasta was cooking. The chicken was prepared the same way I made the lemon chicken drumsticks earlier, with the same time and everything, even though there was only one chicken breast.

On that note, you can often find just single chicken breasts in a particular part of the meat section that is oriented toward single-person dinners, but if you don't see that, don't be afraid to go up to the person behind the meat counter and be like, "I'd like a half of a chicken breast please!" That's another thing, the chicken breasts you get at the store are HALVED, so get halved chicken breasts!

Anyway, after you take the chicken out of the oven, let it sit for several minutes to have the juices seep into it, so it won't be dry when you cut it. Slice up the chicken into bite-sized pieces, and put it in with the pasta, and toss it all up! I say the artichoke hearts are optional if you like them but they ended up being my least favorite thing about the pasta salad. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love artichokes, but my favorite part about them is the stems, not the hearts, especially precanned ones that still leave the hard outer layer on them that I would leave off.

Lex's note is that he would have left out the grape tomatoes, or maybe put in milder ones because they were so sweet and overpowering, but I really enjoyed them in the salad and it really makes for a really good summer meal. For added summery-ness, prepare ahead of time and leave it in the refrigerator to get it nice and chilled!

Mussels with Salsa

There are some foods that seem really awkward to eat and cook, and in my opinion, a lot of them are in the seafood category. Like shrimp, are you going to get it deshelled when you start cooking? You have to leave the tail, there's that horrifying vein fact that everyone knows. For a while, I also thought mussels were awkward and weird to cook. Theyre just...a shell, and you see tiny little ones on rocks at the beach. I'll also let you in on a secret and tell you that for a long time I totally hated cooked fish (I've always loved sushi) and just thought it wasn't for me. LB is still of this opinion and I don't think I'll ever change his mind.

But the thing that got me back into seafood in a big way was mussels. This is definitely another Chilean Grandma recipe (Happy Birthday, Grandma!) that was prepared for me one winter break and I got absolutely hooked. Apparently Chileans typically eat mussels raw which is a little too intense for me, but this recipe is super refreshing and light and doesn't have a strong "seafood" taste that a lot of people are averse to.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup Water
1 lb Mussels
1 1/2 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Black Pepper
1 Tomato
1 Clove Garlic
2 "stalks" Green Onion
~1/4 cup Cilantro
2 tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

First, what I like to do is pour the water into a large pot and put it by the sink. Then you have to wash or scrub the mussels as you're putting them in the pot. Important! When you're washing off individual mussels, see if the mussels are clamped shut. If they aren't, put them aside and maybe knock them around a little, next to the pot. Then when you're done scrubbing the mussels (also, pull out the "beards" of the mussels, the stringy things coming out of it) look back at the mussels you put aside. You'll find quite a few of them have clamped shut because they were like, "Hey, who's this jerk knocking me around? I'd better clamp shut so they don't eat me." Unfortunately for them, this has only sealed their fate. The ones that are still open are probably dead, and you don't want to cook mussels that are not completely fresh.

Now take the pot over to the burner, and pour in the salt and pepper and set the stove to low-medium. Note: You know that random trivia you know about how lobsters "scream" when they're boiled alive, but in fact it's air escaping from their shell? The same thing happens with mussels. I don't really think it sounds like "screaming" but there definitely is a noise as the mussels heat up. But while I might find this a little horrifying when cooking an animal with eyes, let's face it, mussels don't exactly have a lot of personality. Don't feel guilty!

While the mussels are cooking, get a bowl and chop up the green onion, tomatoes, garlic, and cilantro. Mix them up with the apple cider vinegar and olive oil.

Every once in a while, look back at the mussels. They'll start to open up! The bad news is that means you've killed them. The good news is they're delicious! When they're all done opening up (or mostly all done, as I'll explain later), take them off the heat quickly so they don't get to be a weird rubbery, unpleasant texture. Expect them to be any color from pink to orange (even a bright salmony orange color!). Then put the salsa you've just made on the mussels! This is way easier if you take off the top shell, which is easy.

But, as you're taking off the top shells, you'll notice not all of the mussels opened all the way. With the ones that are basically impossible to take the top shells off with just your hand, I like to throw those away too because that's also a sign of them having already been dead. You don't want to take chances with not fresh seafood!

With mussels, I often just eat them on their own, as a sort of appetizer (but enough to make it a meal). Tonight, I put it over a bed of pasta and I actually got pretty dang full. It helped that I only had to throw away about three mussels, as opposed to the first time I made mussels where I had to throw away almost half the bag!

Another important note is that when you're buying mussels, if you aren't planning on cooking them that day, wrap them in a damp towel and that'll keep them alive. But that's what I did the first time and they died anyway because I didn't regularly dampen the towel. Just getting the mussels day-of is a much easier way to go, I think. Seriously you guys, this is sooo easy and so delicious and it looks pretty impressive too! Like something you'd see at a legitimate restaurant!

Abuela-style Pork Chops

These pork chops are actually D's grandma's recipe, but she is like too lazy to cook or some crazy thing, so tonight I am taking the reins. I swear I used to dislike pork chops but these ones make me very happy so try it out if it looks good.

The first thing you need to do is peel and dice an onion. You want fairly small pieces of onion, it doesn't have to be too fancy but you need to create a lot of surface area so I cut them into thin strips. The best way to do that, by the way, is to make your cuts horizontally across the onion rather than from top to bottom.

Once you have your onions cut, put them in a pan with some olive oil, making sure they cover the bottom of the pan, and let them soften a bit. You want to be careful with this recipe and use a fairly low heat; the first couple of times I made it I burned it. It cooks for a fairly long time so you don't have to worry about cooking too hot, I usually cook it on low-medium.

While your onions are cooking, prepare a couple of thin cuts of pork by rinsing them off, and salt and peppering both sides fairly liberally. Put these over the bed of onions you've made and add some diced garlic on top for flavor. Make sure to cover the pan with a lid (this is vital) and set a timer for 17 minutes.

Once your timer goes off, flip the pork chops and set the timer for another 17. Your meat should already look pretty cooked; the purpose of the last part of cooking is to make sure it's cooked evenly and to steam the meat so that it gets soft. Once you've flipped the pork, pour about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of tomato sauce into a sauce pan, and pour in some milk, mixing until it is an orange-ish salmony color. (The rest of your sauce will go bad within a week or two of opening it and you're going to have a lot left, so plan on making pasta soon.) Once your sauce mix looks good, pour it over your pork, again making sure to cover the pan.

Once that timer goes off the second time, you have some delicious pork chops. As an added bonus, the leftover onions and sauce in the pan are tasty over a bed of mashed potatoes.

The last step, of course, is to have D clean up.

Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes are easy to make, easy to clean up, and insanely delicious. They should be a staple of every non-cook's repertoire. Megan: make some mashed potatoes!

First things first: get a pot of water boiling. You need a fairly big pot, but you don't need to fill it up too full, I usually aim for about half-way to allow for the extra room potatoes are going to add, as well as boiling. The important thing is just to get your potatoes covered.

Add a dash of salt to your water as you put it on.

While you're waiting for the water to come to a boil, start preparing your potatoes. For one person, two or three mid-sized potatoes are probably enough, but potatoes are cheap enough and delicious enough that I usually prefer too many to too few. I use Yukon Golds for mashing but baby reds or whites work well too. Usually, you want to use them before they've been sitting out long enough to grow eyes, so that they don't look like that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa puts oatmeal on Bart and Homer's faces and they think they have leprosy. If they do though, you can just cut eyes off and the potatoes are still fine.

(As a side note, do not buy or eat potatoes with a greenish hue. This is caused by exposure to the sun, which makes the potatoes form a chemical called solanine. In addition to being bitter, enough solanine is actually toxic to humans. Eyes contain a high amount of solanine too, so when you cut them off make sure to be thorough, and cut out the green areas around them too.)

Rinse your potatoes in warm water. If you don't like skins, you can peel them; I leave mine on. I also dice my potatoes so they cook faster, but if you leave your skins on and have some extra time, you may want to leave them whole (side note two: this prevents the water from leeching vitamins out of the potatoes, and makes them a bit healthier.)

I also add some crushed garlic to my pot. Take the skin off of a clove of garlic, then place the side of a knife on top of it and press down with the butt of your hand. This causes the oils to seep out and flavor the potatoes. I used to dice garlic and mix it with the potatoes, but this way you get more bang for your buck.

Put your potatoes into the pot by carefully sliding them down down your cutting board into the water, so that none of it splashes down at your hands. Then bring it back to a boil and take the heat down to about medium. You want the water to be boiling but not too hard. After about 20 or 25 minutes, poke one of the potatoes with a fork. If it feels done, take them off and strain the water out. (Side note 3: if they still have the skins on and you want them off, pouring salt over them will cause the skins to shrink and make them much easier to peel off.)

For these potatoes, I used 3 tbsp of butter and 1/2 cup of milk. If you're making less, put in less-- it's not too hard to eyeball it. Make sure to pour the milk in slowly, you probably need less than you think. Then just mash them, salt and pepper to taste, and you're set. (Side note 4: don't mash the potatoes too hard or with an electric mixer: it will break down the starches in the potatoes and make them gluey.)

All set! If anyone can find a longer or more unnecessarilly detailed set of instructions for mashing potatoes, let me know and I will add a couple more paragraphs.

Dinosaur Cupcakes

Happy Valentine's Day! I have been planning what I was going to do for LB for a couple weeks now, which was make a cupcake dinosaur. Without knowing this, LB decided we HAD to make cupcakes a while ago and we were able to try out Betty Crocker's Milk Chocolate cake mix and decided that was a good one for cupcakes because it was lighter than our normal cake mix we get, Triple Chunk Chocolate (ugh, that's really LB's love, not mine).

Anyway, I sent LB off to our neighbor, Cody's, apartment (who has been in on both our Valentine's day gifts the whole time) while I did the baking! Obviously, I started out with just making the cake mix as normal, but I was pretty nervous about the oven temperature. Normal cupcakes call for 350 degrees, but it was kind of ambiguous for various baking pan materials, so I lowered it to 325, which had to be lowered even more because our oven is a little hotter than it should be. This picture is seriously like, 5 minutes after I put it in the oven, I had to fill the things up to pretty full so that they would fill up completely and then I could trim off the bottom so that it'd lay flat. I had a fair amount of scraps so that's what I presented to LB when he first came in to see his special surprise! Of course, he then got to see the little beauty you can see at the very top!

Surprisingly, LB's surprise for me were shrinky-dink stegosaurus earrings that he apparently has been working on for weeks! LB works at a craft store so he has easy access to shrinky-dinks. Meanwhile Cody was snickering at how both of our Valentine's Day gifts were dino-themed! We actually still haven't even had the dino-cakes because we went out to dinner and are soooo full, we'll probably hold off and have them as a midnight snack. No clean up picture for tonight! I cleaned up as much as I could tonight as I was baking, but I still have one huge bowl of cake batter, one bowl of blue icing, and one blue of green icing.

By the way! I'm thinking of suing Deco-Cake! I was all excited for the lime green frosting I was going to color, and I got the green out and the yellow out. When I dropped the green dye in, I thought it looked suspiciously red, but I figured it might be like hair dye, where it develops it color once you mix it in. NOPE! All of the labels were WRONG except yellow, the most harmless color. Awesome. Luckily I improvised and made what should have been lime green into sky blue, and made the belly lime green on my second try.

Meanwhile, this is what the cats, HD and RC decided to do all day. What cuties, huh?