catching up and a little hiatus

I'll be back in a few weeks to start up posting again but here's a few things I made since my last.

rainbow swiss chard and bean sprouts in a garlic & soy butter sauce over fried brown rice: 



Meat "gravy" with spare ribs, meatballs and italian sausage over rigatoni. I eventually turned this into a baked rigatoni dish with ricotta and mozzarella cheese on top.











Peach cobbler cake with a healthy dash of rum and  brown sugar, pecan and peach layers baked in:


Chocolate cupcakes with ganache frosting. Callebaut and Guittard chocolates were involved. They like each other.






Till then. =) 

short ribs with tomatoes, butter beans and calvados


So I had calvados left over from my pork chops and I didn't have anything else to reduce in my pan once the short ribs were browned.

To start I rendered the fat from a few strips of bacon and browned the slightly frozen short ribs all over.

I then deglazed the pan with a large onion that I'd cut in thin slices.

In went the calvados and then some chicken stock.

In went a can of diced tomatoes with garlic and something and a larger can of crushed tomatoes.

In went some salt and 2 cans of butter beans.

Into the 350 degree oven went my cocotte.

Then I raided for 3-4 hours.

Out came this.

phy-lily, fi-lily, phyllo, filo!


I had more filo dough left over from the pigs inna blanket. I ALSO had some mashed potatoes left over from this weekend.

So here's what I did.

I cooked some lean ground beef in a pan with sweet onions and garlic. Then I added some nutmeg, cayenne, paprika, salt and pepper.

I put a large can of tomato paste in with this and let it cool a little.

I laid out 4 sheets of filo dough in the bottom of a glass pan with butter brushed on the first sheet and the last. Then I crumbled the cold mashed potatoes as a bottom layer on top of the dough.

I scooped all the meat sauce on top of the potatoes and crumbled a liberal amount of domestic feta cheese on top of that.

I topped it off with layer upon layer of filo till I ran out of butter to brush each sheet with.

Here's what it looked like out of the oven!