Another pressure cooker adventure! Also another Skinnytaste recipe. We had this with cauliflower mash. Definitely one worth repeating.
Beef
Baked Ziti
My favorite baked ziti recipe – easy and always awesome. I usually just make it with ground beef and season a lot, but it would also work with ground turkey or sausage, as the original recipe (from Smitten Kitchen) suggests. We’ve also done this with shirataki and liked it just as much. 🙂
Roast Prime Rib
This was simple, came out perfectly, and is a definite do over. With a thyme au jus, mashed potatoes, sprouts, and yorkshire pudding, it was an excellent Christmas dinner. This is a Bobby Flay recipe. The leftovers were awesome, too!
Slow Cooker Beef and Broccoli
Always on the lookout for new crockpot recipes to try, and this one was very good. Easy and a good riff on the takeout classic. I might add a hair more garlic and some Sriracha next time, but just being picky. You could serve this over rice or noodles, but we actually just had it on its own and enjoyed it that way.
Hoisin Grilled Flank Steak
This was an easy and tasty modified Cooking Light recipe – modified because I marinated it for 8 hours, rather than putting sauce on it and cooking it. Being a flank steak, I was skeptical of how tough it would be if it had no marinade at all. This came out well, especially because Shawn grilled it – thank goodness we’re getting back to grilling weather! 🙂 We had this with spiral zucchini, carrots, and radishes as a “noodle” side, tossed with some soy sauce and black vinegar.
Zucchini Lasagna
We’ve been meaning to try zucchini lasagna for some time, and I’m glad we finally got around to it – we loved it! It was a bit time consuming to make sure the zucchini lost some of its water content, but totally worth it. I normally avoid reduced fat cheeses, but in this case, it was not noticeable when included in a very flavorful casserole. This used up the last of our tomato sauce from last summer, but a good use for sure. 🙂 The picture isn’t the most beautiful, but you get the idea. This came from skinnytaste, and other than using my own sauce, I followed it exactly. Don’t skip grilling the zucchini – it’s worth it. 🙂
Meat Pies
It seems like only yesterday that we went to London and Brussels, but it has been three years! Time really flies. To celebrate, we had a weekend of food we enjoyed there, from pubs around here with lovely Belgian and English beers on tap, to mussels and frites, baked beans (Shawn loves a full English breakfast 🙂 ), and finally meat pies. I won’t lie, I actually got the idea to make them to go with Shawn’s awesome beans when I picked up our Harry Potter cookbook and saw, “Molly Weasley’s meat pies.” How could I resist that? Coupled with the fact that Shawn had been wanting to make them for a while made it a no-brainer to give them a shot. We made two hand pies, a traditional beef and onion British pie, and a Tourtiere, which is a French-Canadian pork meat pie. We preferred the beef, but the pork was good too and with some adjustment (more gravy – it was a bit dry) would be excellent. These were a lot of fun, and if you make hand pies, you will have plenty to freeze for later!
Meat and Chinese Chive Dumplings
Another awesome dumpling from Andrea Nguyen’s “Asian Dumplings” book. I had wanted to try one we’d never made before. These are actually pot stickers, and as bad as I am at pan-frying, I still gave it a go. Verdict – filling is awesome, but I should stick to steaming or boiling our dumplings. I overcooked these bad-boys like whoa. But they were still good, which stays pretty much everything you need to know about how ridic they are. Luckily, we have another 30 or so dumplings from this batch frozen for another day, and I am super excited to steam them next time!
Roasted Herbed Beef Tenderloin
We decided on roast beef tenderloin for Christmas dinner this year, and we were VERY happy with the results. I didn’t do much to it – it stood out on its own for sure. A little compound butter and in it went for what I would say was by far the best Christmas dinner I have ever done. We’re swimming in leftovers, but I’m not complaining. This method came from Chow.
Slow Cooker Pot Roast
I’m not a huge fan of pot roast in the slow cooker – I’d really rather just do a roast in the oven. But this has been an out-of-control work month, and the slow cooker is about the only cooking that happened. This was a really great recipe, actually, the red wine made a difference. We had this with spinach and the veggies from the slow cooker.
Om nom nom! 