Thursday, March 11, 2010

Random meal

This is just a quick random meal I threw together and have thrown together before. I take some bacon and cut it up into small pieces, toss it into the frying pan, do the same with some chicken. Let that cook for a while, then add some green beans and carrots. I like to serve it on some whole grain pasta. This time I even made a (mostly) homemade sauce. I diced some onion, put it into a pan, added a can of tomato paste and one cup of water. While it was simmering I added some minced garlic. And since this dish was going to be heavily chicken and bacon orientated, I added in some barbecue sauce, which I think gave it a nice taste, making it different from normal tomato spaghetti sauce. I tried adding some Frank's Red Hot sauce to give it some spice, but I couldn't really taste it. Next time I think I'll just add a bunch more.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Bacon Sandwiches

I had some leftover mats from the hot dogs I made the other day, so I decided to make something else. I cut the sub rolls in half like you would a proper sub, tossed them into the oven for a bit to toast them. Once deliciously toasted I put down a layer of cheddar cheese, two strips of bacon and then the rest of the cheese. I was about 2 slices of cheese short to properly cover the bacon in cheese, so that's why there's a some missing. I decided to make them into sandwiches and closed the rolls, but I think open faced would have worked just as well. It could have used maybe a little something more, like some sort of condiment. But it was pretty awesome with just the bacon and cheese.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Hot Dogs

So at work, instead of working, we were watching some Man v Food, the Tucson episode. In it he tried this hot dog that was wrapped in bacon and covered with a ton of things. I can't even remember what all was on there. Jalapeño sauce, peppers, onions, mayonnaise, maybe some other stuff. But this inspired us and we set out to make our own.

I started with just some Ballpark Franks and wrapped them in Oscar Mayer Hearty Thick Cut Bacon. Tossed those into a frying pan with some butter. I also diced up some green pepper and onion and put that into a second pan and did what I thought was sautéing, but apparently was just pan frying. I don't know, I don't really know how to cook. This is just me faking it.

So I need some rolls for this, something a little bigger than standard hot dog rolls. At the advice of a coworker I went with some Wegmans Italian Sub Rolls, which I think worked quite nicely. Though in the future I'll try and find longer hot dogs to better fill the length of the bun.

As you can see, there was some extra bun compared to the hot dog, but it still turned out well. From here I just put on a slice of cheddar cheese so that it completely covered the hot dog and put them into the oven on broil for a few minutes, just long enough to melt the cheddar. Then I added some Picante Pepper Mustard I have that is delicious and covered the whole thing with the peppers and onions.

The meal was delicious. And I feel that I learned something, cooking wise, from doing it. At least getting the experience, which is half of what I'm after. The other half being a delicious meal. I was worried about the wrapping the hot dogs in bacon, and how to cook that but it worked out pretty well. I kept turning them over trying to get all sides done evenly. The only problem was that one of them came kind of unwrapped. If you noticed that I only had one of them pictured for the pre-cheese shot that's because the other one looked less like a bacon wrapped hotdog and more like a hot dog next to a piece of curled bacon that's partly overlaying it. Which is an awkward picture caption, so I went with the better looking one. The peppers and onions turned out well, I'm going to have to do that again for other dishes in the future. I'm getting much better with dicing vegetables, not quite as fast as the guys on TV, but I can at least keep the knife in constant motion while moving the vegetable. No more pausing every three slices or so to reposition everything.