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One of the most fun things to make in the kitchen is wontons/dumplings/ravioli with unexpected fillings. Pasta wrapped things are generally a favorite of mine, growing up with tortellini and ravioli, but when you start to get really creative with the fillings the results can be magical. Mandi and I have wanted to make potstickers for awhile, but last night we weren't feeling the usual combo of pork and cabbage. After bouncing around some ideas we came up with this recipe.
Some fun wallpapers today from the past few months of posts. I have to say, sorry for the downtime yesterday, the server my site is hosted on died, and I had to swap all the data. Good thing the hard drive was still readable!!! Don't worry, good old TFimB is all backed up on my own computer, but it would have been a huge process if I had to build it all from my backups. Anyway, I really like the wallpapers for today, I think I will be rocking the mushroom one for awhile. Let me know which you use! I am starting to get a huge directory of food wallpapers together here. Check out the archives and try some on!
I have been making kebabs for ages. It is such a great party food! It is especially fun because people like to help with the assemblage and cooking. There is one huge issue I have though with most kebab recipes. See, the chef types like to put a bunch of the same ingredient on one kebab. This way, things with different cooking times can cook for different lengths. Then at the end, all the kebabs are emptied onto a pile of rice or cous cous, and everyone grabs a plate. Ok, I'm sure this tastes great, but if I wanted grilled meat and rice, I would have made a steak! To me part of the whole fun of kebabs is eating them off the stick! Also, as the assembler of the kebab, you are giving the eater a gift on a stick. A suggestion of how to eat it. A progression of food from the top to the bottom. Before we begin, here are some pics of me making kebabs from like 5 years ago! Told you guys I was a natural born food blogger.
Hello! Hello hello, sorry I've been away so long! I never meant to leave you... I have to admit, I got the idea for these burgers from Throwdown. You know, Bobby Flay's show where he challenges people at their own specialty? I normally don't like the show very much, but there was nothing on, and it was a burger challenge. If anyone can do burgers, it's got to be Flay. The competitor was pretty interesting too. I kept the channel on and was pretty happy with all the burgers they made. My favorite was the one Bobby made to be the burger version of a Cuban sandwich. His method of pressing the burgers with a brick right on the grill was pretty neat. I liked it too because when cooking burgers for a bunch of people, normally everyone wants their bread toasted and it is kind of annoying keeping track of everything. This way you can build all the burgers on the grill and just hand them out to people.
Ok, so to catch you guys up from Monday: friends staying the weekend, making food for their arrival, baked beans, proud of recent original recipes despite these two I am ripping direct from other sites, but they are pretty perfect so why change them. Why don't you guys just read the bean post? Jeeeez do I have to do everything around here? Last time on TFIMB, there was lots of bacon, Lassie got lost in the woods, Michael Scott started his own paper company, and Mr. Burns got shot.
So what to go better with pork filled baked beans than more pork? I have slow cooked a brisket on my charcoal grill before, so smoking a boston butt seemed like no big deal. I followed this plan and recipe pretty much exactly.
So I was planning on posting the continuation of yesterday's baked beans, but I have had a crazy past few days and didn't have time to do the post justice. But that's ok for you guys, cause it will give you all plenty of time to check out Foodie Fights Battle #3 - Raspberry and Cauliflower!!! The challengers put out some pretty awesome stuff this week, and I am excited to see who will be the winner!
Talk to you tomorrow with that beautiful pulled pork.
I had a few friends visiting all weekend. I knew I wanted to cook something good for them, but I also knew that once they arrived I wouldn't have much time to put a lot of effort into a meal. My plan was wake up on Friday morning at 8am and cook all morning until they arrived at 1:30. Everything went really well! Tomorrow I will post the pulled pork sandwich I made that morning, but today I have some simple yet amazing baked beans. I have to say that recently, I have been very proud of the number of original recipes on the website. I have been improvising and having fun in the kitchen and posting many less recipes directly from another source. Today and tomorrow however are pretty much direct from other places. These recipes were so amazing that I just couldn't pass them up! These are Alton Brown's baked beans. They are one of the highest user rated recipes I have ever seen on the whole FN site.
This is going to be the last post that is diet related for awhile. Overall it went pretty well. I did great the first week, but after skipping Friday and Saturday and having an amazing weekend, I kind of lost steam this week. I still did 10 times better than a normal week though, so all around good things. I feel much better than I did 2 weeks ago, and am excited for the coming weekend. Lot's more writing after the jump...
A lot of people talk Anna's Taqueria in boston. They talk Boloco, Mexicali, and Baja Fresh. Boca Grande, and even the king of burrito chains Chipotle. As far as I am concerned, all that talk is trash. With me, talk of burrito chains starts and ends with Qdoba. There was a Qdoba downstairs from my old job working in boston. I had a card that got me one free burrito for every 10. I must have had 5 free ones by the time that year was up.
We are all brand whores to a certain extent, no matter how much the food snob inside has taken over. Here are 17 brand logos. Can you name them all? I have made this quiz easy (I think) because most of my quizzes are crazy hard! It's been awhile since we have had a quiz huh? Remember to tell me your score at the bottom. And now for my favorite part:
What kind of brand whore are you?
16 - 17 - Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman
14 - 15 - Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas
11 - 13 - The Hooker that bit off Chris Farley's nose in Dirty Work
5 - 10 - Deuce Bigalow
1 - 5 - Deuce Bigalow - European Gigolo
Click through to take the quiz!
I have made green curry paste a lot on the site. Soo much so, that I even have it as one of my basics posts. But I realized recently, I have always used the paste on pizza, on some veggie noodles, in soup, and as a marinade, but never actually on plain green curry! I made green curry with vegetables this past week because it was acceptable for the diet I have been talking about recently. Except I cheated and had a little bit of white rice instead of brown!!! SHHH don't tell!
Lentils and brown rice are acceptable in moderation on the diet I have been talking about the past few days. The first thing that came to my mind was dhal! Dhal is the rice and beans of india! There are a million ways to make it, and this was my first attempt so it was a pretty basic one. This is one of the less healthy meals I have had over the past few days, but it was far from bad for me, and was extremely satisfying when you have been eating mostly vegetables. I mixed some cauliflower in with the brown rice to add texture, and up the veggie intake.
Just because I am on a diet, doesn't mean you need to be too! Summer is approaching fast! Here are some awesome summery posts from last year! Great BBQ ideas and some tasty pasta salads. Makes me want to throw a party just looking at them!!!
Chicken Haloumi Basil Skewers grilled on secret beach!
Grilled Fish with a Bulgur Citrus Zucchini Salad
Mandi's Favorite: Taco Burgers with Avocado Spread
The very scary FRANKINBURGER!!!
Fun BBQ post with bacon wrapped peaches, pasta salad, ribs and more!
Green Curry Marinated Steak, with Basil Fried Rice
Meat on a Stick grilled right on the beach
Post Beach BBQ with grilled fish and squash, and a spicy rice
You guys may be shocked to hear this, but I have been on a diet for the last 4 days!!! Time to pack in the shredded meats, curries and mac and cheese for a few weeks and shape up for the summer. Every year I do something like this. A bit of an extreme diet for a few weeks. Now I can already see some of you health freaks planning your comments in your heads. BUT DAAANNNNN!!!!! Binge diets are sooo bad for you!!! Well I am going to pre-refute all of your statements after you click into the post.
I have a short post today, because remember, you all have a job to do over at foodiefights! All of the dishes look great!
Today, as with last year, I have a mistaken cinco de mayo post! I didn't plan to do anything, but I happen to have made salsa on Friday and realized I could post it today. Now it isn't usually my style to make and repost recipes that have recently been around on other blogs, but this just came around at the perfect time. Mandi and I have been perfecting our salsa slowly, and grilling the ingredients really put it over the edge into incredible! There are a few things we did differently than the original recipe. For one, we like both red and green salsa, but we find that we end up just using them both on the same chip or taco! Because of this, we just make salsa with tomatoes AND tomatillos. The second difference was that we grilled more of the ingredients than just the tomatillos. We got everything nice and charred up.
There is a restaurant here in Bermuda that I love to hate. I don't know why I hate them so much. I still go for lunch fairly often, and they have really good pizza for Bermuda standards. This is the one great meal they have that isn't pizza.
One of my coworkers got me a sushi kit for Christmas. I was surprised, because I hadn't thought to get anyone at work anything! It was a very thoughtful gift as well because she knew how much I love to cook and eat. I decided bringing sushi into work would be a nice return gift for her and for everyone. Since that day, they have been asking for more! This time I had everyone bring in a little cash, and I brought in the lunchtime sushi rolls. I call them lunchtime sushi for a few reasons. One is that we obviously eat them at lunch, but the second reason has to do with what is in them. When I first made the rolls for everyone, I had a few obstacles to figure out. For one, some of my coworkers were just getting into the sushi world, and still unsure about raw fish. Second, I would have to make the rolls the night before and serve them at lunch the next day. This caused me to start looking for other options for fillings that would stay fresh better overnight. I got inspiration from lunchtime sandwiches, and that's where I came up with these rolls. I won't really be talking about the sushi rice and rolling process, for that information, you can check this old post, or Alton Browns sushi rice recipe.
© 2009 The Food In My Beard
