Eating Dinner With My Family

I decided to make this because of the lovely green beans I got from Front Porch Pickings .  They were  my favorite part of this salad.  Over all I would give it a 3 (or 3.5) The green beans were tasty and just the right size.  I don't like them when they are woody and these were just right!  The salad dressing was awesome too.  (for the herbs I used 1/2 chives and 1/2 parsley)  Everything else was pretty good.  I personally didn't care for the anchovies just laying on the salad.  I would preferred them in smaller bites.  I ate mine with the eggs.  I am also not a huge fan of hard boiled eggs.  Those two things took away from the salad for me.  I was the person who liked it the best.  The boy and husband are not fan's of 75% of the ingredients.   Nicoise Salad For the dressing 1/4 c  champagne vinegar 1/2 t  Dijon mustard Salt Freshly ground black pepper 1/2 c  extra-virgin olive oil 2 T...

Ok, I am going to be merciless on this recipe.  I discovered, after I bought the ingredients for it, that it was from Rachael Ray.  I can't stand her, and if you would like to read why, you can check out the post Tilapia With Balsamic Browned Butter And Creamy Farfalle With Bacon, Tomato to hear me rant about her:).  Well, I decide to make it work.  It looks pretty plain, so I decide to make a Parmesan, garlic and sage cream sauce to go with it.  I had some fresh sage on hand, and I remember loving a pork saltimbocca I had as a seasonal special at Stonewood that  had a similar cream sauce on it.  So while the devil lady's chicken tenders are cooking, I decide to improvise a sauce.  The chicken was ok, we guess, we were too busy slathering it with the uber tasty sauce I made.  (I know it's a bit immodest, but that wasn't my summation, it was my husbands;)  I have an additional dig to make at Ms. Ray, the recipe, which I copied exactly ca...

Update:   I had the eggplant, hummus, pickle and tomato/cucumber salad on a pita the next day for lunch and I loved it.  Maybe it was that it was all cold, or the sit over night melded the flavors of the salad,, but I thought it was a million times better the next day. I had such high hopes for this dish.  So may of my favorite things are in it, and it wasn't bad, but the consensus around the table was that it was a 3.  I even went out and bought these Mediterranean pickles I had at a local Mediterranean restaurant to try and make it how it should be.  My issues, since it is my blog and I was the one poised to love it, were that it was a bit soggy, and therefore sloppy, and I thought the potato was useless.  I wouldn't bother with it next time.  I didn't make my own pita and I got the only "sturdiness" available, so that may be part of the issue.  There was flavor, but it didn't deliver like I had hoped.  That aside, we are spoiled ...

The family consensus is that this is a 4 or a 5 depending on who you ask.  For me personally it is a 4.5 that could be bumped up to a five because of it ease of preparation and economical price tag.  This dish and a salad would cost about $10.  It would depend on where you are and how inexpensively you could get the ingredients.  For  example, I got the Publix goat cheese that was exactly a 1/4 lb and it was $3.99 and the most pricey ingredient in the whole thing.  I got sliced salami because I didn't really read the recipe ahead a time, but it worked fine. I do think cubes would be better texturally.  This recipe was one of those delicious yet easy ones that made my son ask to have a college cookbook file created on the computer.  DONE!  I also think it would be a great thing to give friends that are setting off to college.  The only deviation was that I had an open carton of beef stock and I used that.  I also used half ...

Bear with me, the recipe is worth it!  A while back, I found this great site called Foodbuzz.  It was like facebook for food bloggers.  It helped us connect with each other, trade recipes and help promote others doing what we do.  Then Foodbuzz decided to take a perfectly great thing and ruin it.  It is now kind of a newsletter of what's hot right now. :/  Why am I ranting about this now, many months later?  Well, this recipe was from a fellow blogger and I noted the web address through Foodbuzz.  That page no longer exists and I can't find the recipe with a Google search.  I really tried and went through pages and pages of the search.  So, I can't give credit where credit is due and provide a link for the source of the recipe.  If through some quirk of fate, the person who posted this or someone who knows the person who posted this, reads this, PLEASE let me know so I can use a link to your recipe.  OK!  Blogger stuf...

Well this one I had to change up a bit.  My husband picked this weeks dinners;  I had been avoiding this one only because I was worried that I couldn't find the pickled plums.  I did find some at a local speciality food store, but they were stuffed with cheese.  Not sure they were very pickled, despite being called that.  They looked like they were in oil.  Searching on the internet only tuned up umeboshi plums.  And a further look at those turned up that they are really apricots and seasoned a bit.  As umeboshi weren't specified, I can only assume that they were not the ones that should have been used, but they were the only I could find to buy and if I made them myself, just how should I season the pickles.  (I eventually found several recipes for pickled plums)  I also don't do veal, so I used 1 cup beef and 1 cup pork.  So, all those changes most likely contributing to this dish being a 3 for all of us.  It was odd at first...

While I happened to love this dish, there were some issues to note and some of the family weren't as enthusiastic.  This was a quick and tasty meal if you keep one thing in mind, the last ingredient line is the only sauce/ seasoning that this dish really has.  Without it, there is just a little bit of soy sauce and sesame oil.  I had a fermented pepper paste. (see picture below) that I had gotten for my friend's Korean Pork BBQ.  I seem to remember looking up 'spicy Korean red bean paste' when I first got this recipe and my stuff came up as an image, so I used that and it made it wonderful.  My husband thought with out the sauce it was a 2 and with it a 3.  I thought with the sauce a 4.  My blog, so I call it a 4:D.  The most amazing thing about tonight's dinner, MY BOY LIKES SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS!!!  This from the kid who gags at the thought of mushrooms.  He has enjoyed their flavor when they are ground up in something, but has always sai...