Success and Failure and Success
I have pretty new kitchen knives. Unlike knives I've had in the past, these are sharp and cut things. I've been having a grand old time slicing things, and as of this posting all my fingertips are intact. I don't usually cook enough to justify getting pretty new kitchen knives, but I'm trying to change that. If any of you know of good cookbooks with easy, relatively quick, and (preferably) healthy recipes, I'd love to get some recommendations.
We had a barbeque tonight, and I modified a recipe I found online to put together some fabulous hamburgers. They were hot and spicy and cheesy and beefy and sausagey (not so much with the healthy, but what the heck). They were:
1/2 pound Andouille sausages, finely chopped
2 pounds ground beef
1 tablespoon Spanish smoked paprika
1 tablespoon Urfa peppers
1 tablespoon Aleppo peppers
4 ounces blue cheese
A generous splashing of habanero sauce.
The bottom hamburger bun was covered with pepperjack cheese, and the top bun was covered with bluejack cheese. That was a success.
The bottom bun was also covered with some caramelized onions I cooked up. That was, in a sense, a failure. The recipe called for 1 1/2 pounds of onion, a tablespoon of brown sugar, two tablespoons of olive oil, and three garlic cloves. I've never really cooked with fresh garlic before. I figured I'd put in a little less than the recipe called for, and use only two cloves. I thought that the heads of garlic, rather than the little things inside, were the cloves. And so, after merrily chopping and mincing away, I put somewhere between 15 and 18 cloves into the mix.
Whoops.
The final success? Caramelized garlic with onion turned out to be pretty good, even though it wasn't what I was aiming for, and two of the people at the barbeque kept raving about it. Which was sort of too bad, because it meant I didn't get to use my pretty new kitchen knives to chop up a new, less garlicky batch of onions.
We had a barbeque tonight, and I modified a recipe I found online to put together some fabulous hamburgers. They were hot and spicy and cheesy and beefy and sausagey (not so much with the healthy, but what the heck). They were:
1/2 pound Andouille sausages, finely chopped
2 pounds ground beef
1 tablespoon Spanish smoked paprika
1 tablespoon Urfa peppers
1 tablespoon Aleppo peppers
4 ounces blue cheese
A generous splashing of habanero sauce.
The bottom hamburger bun was covered with pepperjack cheese, and the top bun was covered with bluejack cheese. That was a success.
The bottom bun was also covered with some caramelized onions I cooked up. That was, in a sense, a failure. The recipe called for 1 1/2 pounds of onion, a tablespoon of brown sugar, two tablespoons of olive oil, and three garlic cloves. I've never really cooked with fresh garlic before. I figured I'd put in a little less than the recipe called for, and use only two cloves. I thought that the heads of garlic, rather than the little things inside, were the cloves. And so, after merrily chopping and mincing away, I put somewhere between 15 and 18 cloves into the mix.
Whoops.
The final success? Caramelized garlic with onion turned out to be pretty good, even though it wasn't what I was aiming for, and two of the people at the barbeque kept raving about it. Which was sort of too bad, because it meant I didn't get to use my pretty new kitchen knives to chop up a new, less garlicky batch of onions.