Cooking for Christmas – Pizza Bread

Look what I made for Christmas Eve dinner.

This first one is a pizza dough bread. The dough is stretched out like making a pizza but is only covered in olive oil, some black pepper and garlic salt. Use plenty of olive oil to give it that brown all over look.

This second one is the same as the first but it is also topped with Parmigiano cheese.

Both are cooking on a pizza stone that was preheated at 400 degrees before using.

Time to cook varies. Just eyeball it.

Orecchiette and Broccoli Rabe (Sausage Optional) – Cooking Without Recipes

This is a pasta and vegetable dish with optional sausage. The main thing to remember with this dish is that it comes down to how you flavor the orecchiette and cook the broccoli rabe.

Broccoli rabe
This is the way I cook the broccoli rabe.
Cut the bottoms off, slice however you like and set aside. Boil water with salt and blanch broccoli rabe in boiling water for about 1 minute. Strain and set aside the blanched broccoli rabe.
In a separate sautee pan combine some fresh garlic (cut to your liking), olive oil and crushed red pepper. Heat this for a few minutes and then add the blanched broccoli rabe and toss a bit to mix with garlic and red pepper. Add salt and pepper as you like. Next pour in some white wine (I have used both chardonnay and sauvignon blanc) and let it cook down. If the broccoli rabe starts to lose the bright green color, remove from heat and drain the liquid. That is about it for the broccoli rabe.

Orecchiette
Boil water and cook pasta to your liking

My sauce
I’m not sure if this kind of sauce has a name or not but this is what I put on the pasta.
I blend together fresh basil leaves (as many as you like), a little crushed red pepper, salt, pepper, and oil olive. Set this mixture aside.

The Optional Sausage
I remove the case from sweet italian sausage and make mini size meatballs from the ground sausage. Throw these in the oven until cooked.

Putting it all together
Over low heat, in whatever pan you want, add the cooked broccoli rabe, orecchiette, the sauce and the sausage. Stir together, heat and salt to taste.

This dish is inspired by a similar meal I had at Spigola.

Making a Sauce – Cooking Without Recipes

Made burritos last night and I was interesting in doing something different with the chicken. I decided to make a sauce out of things I had in the apartment. Obviously I wanted something that was Mexican tasting.
I started with 2 garlic cloves that I crushed, and diced a quarter of a jalapeno pepper. I kind of wished I hadn’t used the garlic. I put this in a small pot with some olive oil and let that cook up for a few minutes. I then dumped a little cumin into the pot along with a can of tomato sauce. I followed that up with a 1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (from a can), some chili powder, some chipotle pepper powder and salt. I let this simmer for a few minutes.
At this point the sauce just tasted like liquid chili powder. I decided to sweeten the sauce up a bit so I added some agave nectar. This didn’t sweeten it up as much as I liked so I then added a bit of honey. I let it simmer some more.
The sauce had a better flavor now but still now quite what I wanted. I this point I added some dark cocoa powder. I know mole sauce contains some chocolate so I though this couldn’t really hurt the sauce and if it did I could just throw it away. So I add around a teaspoon or so of the cocoa powder and again let it simmer.
In the end we used the sauce on our chicken in the burrito. I tasted very good when it mixed with the sour cream in the burrito. If I made it again I would probably remove the garlic as it kind of gave the sauce a smell I didn’t like.