Buffalo Chicken Pizza

In my experience, getting a buffalo chicken pizza results in getting a regular pizza, with chicken as a topping, and some buffalo sauce drizzled on top.  In my opinion, this is really leaving a lot on the table, as it's failing to truly incorporate  that heat.  So why not attempt to bring it fully into the recipe?

Ingredients:

1 Pizza Crust

2 Chicken Breasts

Frank's Buffalo Sauce

Italian Seasoning

1 bag Mozzarella Cheese

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350

Chop Chicken in Chunks

Fry in a pan with oil and Italian Seasonings

Spread a layer of buffalo sauce over the pizza crust

Add chicken to the pizza

Top with cheese

Bake for 20 minutes

This initially didn't turn out great.  The buffalo sauce was too thin, the cheese wasn't firmly enough anchored, and the chicken was way too big.  Luckily, the pizza crust I bought came in packs of 2, and I bought an excessively large bottle of buffalo sauce.  So I opted to give it another shot.  I mixed the buffalo sauce with some bleu cheese dressing to thicken it up, cut the chicken finer, and made sure that the cheese went past the sauce to the crust itself.  These alterations allowed it to hold together considerably better.

Spaghetti and Meatball Salad

Pasta Salad is food that is almost totally dominated by a handful of pastas.  Rotini, Penne and Bowtie seem to have the market cornered, except for Macaroni, which has elbowed out of the market altogether and started it's own salad racket.  Why is Spaghetti, the cornerstone of American pasta habits, so unjustly underrepresented in the salad game?  

Ingredients:

1lb Spaghetti

1lb bag frozen meatballs

Italian Dressing

Lettuce

Instructions:

Cook Spaghetti according to instructions on the box

Add to a bowl and mix in some Italian Dressing

Add meatballs and some dressing to a pan and cook over medium heat until browned

Stir meatballs into the spaghetti

Put bowl into the fridge for a few hours

Serve with lettuce and dressing

This turned out pretty well.  The spaghetti is a bit cumbersome, but not really any moreso than how it normally is.  There are a few things I would do differently though.  The meatballs are a bit on the large side and I should have used a smaller sized meatball so they could be eaten more easily with the spaghetti and lettuce.  Additionally, I'm not sure that I would add the dressing while cooking the meatballs, as it was fairly poppy, in a not great way.

Pressure Brats

After acquiring an InstantPot, one of the first things I wanted to see was how well one of my preferred CrockPot recipes would hold up and how much less time it would take, so I decided to put my beer brat recipe under pressure.

Ingredients:

1 12 pack of brats

1 onion

Some Garlic and Herb spice mix

Several Beers

Instructions:

Slice the Onion and add to the bottom of the InstantPot

Add the grating overtop of them

Perforate the brats with a fork and add to the pot

Add spices and douse with beer

Cook on manual for 8 minutes, allowing for natural release.

This turned out really well.  The recipe translated perfectly from slow cooker to pressure cooker.  I've actually made this several times, with various alterations made to the recipe, including that I've stopped using the grating altogether, and replacing the spice mix with curry powder results in a nice currywurst.

The Whitest Meal U Know

I was browsing the sauce aisle of my local grocery store, trawling for inspiration, when I stumbled across Saz's Spicy White Barbecue Sauce, and it spoke to me.  I tried this on a couple of sandwiches, but wasn't really feeling it's flavor, so I decided to go all in on finding a way to use it.

Ingredients:

1 package of 4 chicken breasts

1 package of frozen cauliflower

1 package of instant mashed potatoes

A third to a half a bottle of Saz's Spicy White Barbecue Sauce

1 cup of water

Instructions:

Add chicken, BBQ sauce, and water to the InstantPot

Cook on Manual for 5 minutes, allowing for natural release

While that's happening, cook the cauliflower with salt and pepper on the stove over medium heat

While that's happening, cook the mashed potatoes according to it's instructions

When the pressure seal releases, shred the chicken

Serve on white bread with provolone cheese alongside the cauliflower and potatoes.

This turned out fairly well.  Despite not being a fan of how the sauce tasted cold, I feel like either the heat, or the way that it was distributed via the pressure and water, it became something I quite enjoyed.  In hindsight, I should also have attempted to use the sauce water mix as a gravy of sorts for the potatoes.

Pizza Roll sized Egg Egg Rolls

After the previous excursion with cabbage and corn, I still had a bowl full of raw cabbage in my fridge.  Outside of recipes with it in the name, there's only one type of food that I know of that utilizes cabbage is egg rolls.  However, I didn't want to make egg rolls that would only have eggs in the wraps, but actual egg egg rolls.  Sort of a breakfast egg roll if you will.  Unfortunately, things didn't quite go according to plan.

Ingredients:

7 Eggs

A bowl of chopped Cabbage

Bacon Bits

Sweet and Sour Sauce

1 package dumpling sized Wontons

Instructions:

Fry cabbage in a medium pan

Once it's mostly cooked, stir in 6 eggs 1 egg yolk, bacon, and sweet and sour sauce

After the eggs are fully scrambled remove from heat

Add a spoonful of the mixture to a wonton, wrapping in a cylinder, using egg white to seal the deal

Repeat until there is no more mixture

When the preparation is becoming tedious, or is taking long enough that your hunger is getting the better of you, eat some of the mixture to sate your hunger and lessen your workload

Bake at 425 for 15 minutes

This did not turn out at all the way I'd expected, in the best sort of way.  I'd been hoping for normal sized egg rolls, that I could freeze, then reheat for my commute to work in the morning.  That was the reasoning behind adding the sweet and sour sauce in the egg roll rather than dipping the egg roll in the sweet and sour sauce.  Unfortunately, the store I went to only had one size of wontons, which were clearly not intended for egg rolls.  This in turn greatly increased the effort of this recipe, as it takes more time to roll a dozen tiny egg rolls than a couple of normal sized ones, and each one requires more attention to boot.  Because of this, the mix should have been enough for more than 15 of these egg rolls, but I'd eaten a decent portion of the mix during the wrapping process.

Overall they turned out well though, but it's hard to recommend them given the amount of effort that they require to make.  There main thing I'd change about these, besides buying larger wontons, is to keep the sweet and sour sauce outside the egg rolls.  With as small as they are, it'd work well to have them as a snack with something to dip into.

How to Eat Bacon and Tell People You're Eating Vegetables

St. Patrick's Day is typically celebrated by eating corned beef and cabbage.  Well, that and copious drinking, but that's besides the point.  However, the last time I'd been looking for corned beef in the store, I'd struck out.  So I opted to go for the only other recipe I knew with cabbage featured prominently, which is cabbage and corn.

Ingredients:

1 head of Cabbage

1 bag of Frozen Corn

1 lb of bacon

Instructions:

Cut the bacon into thin strips

Fry the bacon in a large pan

Chop the cabbage

Remove bacon from pan, leave the grease in the pan

Add cabbage to bacon grease pan

Realize that 4 lbs of cabbage is a LOT of cabbage

Attempt to mash down the cabbage with the lid's pan

Fail spectacularly

Remove some cabbage and refrigerate for later

Cook the cabbage down a bit

Stir in corn

Cook it down some more

Stir bacon back into the pan

Cook it down some more

Serve with Guinness (it is St. Patrick's Day after all)

This is a pretty simple and easy meal.  The hardest part of it is cutting the cabbage, because those suckers are dense.  The great thing about this recipe is that the cabbage by and large absorbs the flavor from the bacon grease, so while you can tell people that you were eating cabbage, you were basically eating bacon.

An Oven BBQ

Recently several of my friends had been going on and on about a chain of smokehouses in So-Cal called Lucille's.  Every time they would bring it up I'd realize that I hadn't had BBQ since it became winter and food trucks stopped coming to the office park where I work.  With each passing mention I wanted some BBQ more and more, until eventually I decided it was time to take action into my own hands.  And since no BBQ is quite complete without at least a side, I decided to go all in on the BBQ and try to get rid of one of my bottles of Sauce at the same time.

Ingredients:

4 Baking Potatoes

1 cup Sour Cream

1 cup Shredded Cheese

1 cup Milk

Bacon Bits

BBQ Sauce of choice

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400

Bake potatoes for an hour

Begin prepping ribs

Remove potatoes and lower heat to 350

Cut potatoes in half and scoop out centers

Mash potato scoopings

Mix mashed potatoes with sour cream, milk, bacon, shredded cheese, and BBQ sauce

Add potato mixture to hollowed out potatoes

Cover with cheese

Bake for an additional 20 minutes

Lower heat to 300

Ingredients:

1 rack of Pork Ribs

1 packet of Memphis Pit BBQ rub

BBQ Sauce of choice

Instructions:

Cut ribs in half 

Rub rub into ribs

Add rubbed ribs to gallon bags and let set (one until oven is ready, the other until you're ready for more ribs)

Remove ribs from bag and place in a baking pan and cover in foil

Bake for an hour per pound of ribs

Remove foil from ribs

Move ribs to broiler and broil for 5-10 minutes

Remove from broiler, cover with foil, and let set for 5-10 minutes

Serve alongside the potatoes (which will need to be reheated) and a side salad

This turned out extremely well.  The potatoes turned out better than I'd really expected, though I could have added a more substantial layer of cheese on top of the mixture.  They also freeze extremely well, so this is a meal that can keep on giving.  The rub gave the ribs an extremely good flavor, and after baking with a broiler finish, they were tender with a nice bit of crispiness on the outside.  There was one mistake I made with the first half rack.  I'd added sauce to the ribs before the broiler step, which resulted in the ribs having a layer of char over the top of them.  With the second set I added the sauce while the ribs were tented and resting, and it turned out a lot better, and in all honesty, the sauce isn't really necessary with the rub.  This is something that I'd absolutely recommend.