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Pulled pork is an easy and delicious way to feed a crowd, but how do you switch it up so you aren't serving the same shreddy pork time and time again? The way I do it is cook the pork in a variety of new liquids instead of just your standard BBQ sauce. This time around, I made a nice Thai Red Curry as a braising liquid and the results were great.
Sometimes a cooking failure is funny. Sometimes food doesn't work the way you want but it still at least tastes good. But sometimes the whole ordeal is just pointless and stupid, you don't even learn anything, and you are left with nothing to eat. Exhausted and starving I ransacked my cabinets for something, anything to cook, but I had previously depleted my supplies and was desperately in need of a grocery run. I almost always have eggs and pasta. I noticed some hidden cream and ricotta with lingering expiration dates. (thank you ultra pasteurization!) I just needed that one final linchpin ingredient to hold this recipe together. Sometimes in the summer my roommate keeps a pack of emergency hot dogs in the freezer. Sometimes you gotta make hot dog carbonara.
These guys have been in my fridge all week and it's been pretty awesome just grabbing one anytime I need a sweet break in my day. They have the perfect level of peanut butter with just a slight kick at the end. Make this Spicy Peanut Butter Carmel Fudge this weekend and you won't regret it.
This past weekend I had some friends over for dinner. I had just gone to a tomato tasting with Backyard Farms tomatoes, so I was all fired up about how delicious these tomatoes were. I also took a bunch home from the event and wanted to use them while they were still fresh. I settled on a summery tomato basil ceviche that came out really tasty! So good in fact that multiple people who "don't like fish" loved it. This is a simple recipe that relies on extremely fresh ingredients, so don't try and make it if you can't get quality stuff!
Have you guys had Thai Larb? It's essentially a Thai salad with ground chicken and vibrant flavors like tons of lime and mint. It's served cold with some sticky rice that is used to pick it up and eat it. It's the perfect dish to eat when you are having an insane heat wave like we have been having here in Boston. I actually had to cook some taco meat for work a few days ago in the scorching heat(my life is hard) and I decided it would be perfect in a mexi-thai twist on larb.
I'm on a sticky rice kick. Got another one for you guys tomorrow, but today on Tablespoon check out the recipe for Coconut Chicken Sticky Rice Balls. It's the perfect sweet and salty single bite appetizer, and it's served cold which is nice for this little heat wave we seem to be having.
My mom is single handedly holding this blog together. Every time I feel like I am a little behind on posts, I happen to be visiting my parents, and she happens to be cooking another crazy dessert. This one is packed with potato chips, so as you can imagine it's right up my salty-sweet alley. This recipe is from the most recent issue of Martha Stewart Living.
I think it's fairly obvious, visually at least, that this salad is a take on the Vietnamese dish Bun Vermicelli. You guys may have noticed that I have been pretty obsessed with that dish as of late, and I try and recreate it any way I can think of. This most recent riff on the dish swaps out some of the traditional ingredients with stuff more commonly associated with Italian cooking. It came out great, with just enough flavors retained from the original dish to meld perfectly with the new one.
A sweet, spicy, flavorful sauce that tastes great on anything you could grill and only takes a few minutes to prepare. Check out the recipe for Passion Fruit and Basil Chutney on Tablespoon.
Something came up this week and I will be out of town and unable to post until Monday. Talk to you guys next week.
Another round of wallpapers and Facebook headers for everyone! I've been using a bunch of these for a while now, so I know they are good. Hey, that's more testing than most of the recipes on this site get! You know the deal: Most of these have a dual monitor option(2560x1024) for two 1280x1024 monitors next to each other. Also, please don't use these commercially without asking. I've built up a huge wallpaper collection, so be sure to check out the archives. And as always, let me know if you end up using any of these!
Last week I set out to make my favorite childhood frozen treat, the good humor "strawberry shortcake" ice cream bars. I LOVED these things as a kid. They even had them at my middle school and high school, and I ate one about 50% of the days that I was in school those 7 years. I wanted to recreate them not only for the challenge of it, but also because it's strawberry season and I thought they would taste 10 times better with homemade ingredients and fresh local berries. On top of that, the packaged version contains 46 ingredients, not counting "natural and artificial flavors". Mine has a whopping 8. Milk, milk powder, cream, sugar, strawberries, butter, flour, vanilla. Also salt if you wanna count that.
These bars proved to be a bit harder than I initially expected. First of all, I haven't made ice cream since I left my gelato production job in February, and even then, I was used to making it in a professional environment with all the best equipment. I failed the first try. I also winged a cookie recipe with some of the strawberry puree in the dough in an attempt to make some of the crust red. That cookie was NOT good. After all this work, I couldn't even find popsicle sticks, so I had to buy the cheap 1 dollar HFCS specials at the store and melt them down to harvest my own sticks!
It's a hearty oatmeal style breakfast that will really get you going in the morning. It's straw-na-wa. Also known as Strawberry Banana Breakfast Quinoa. Check it out!
My favorite part of blogging by far is when people email me and tell me that they made one of my recipes and that they loved it. It (might be) the closest I will ever get to actually cooking for you all. You must be good at cooking, because most of the time I don't even post a recipe! I sometimes still can't believe what this website has become, and I really can't say thanks enough to all my fans. Here is a small sampling of some of the pictures you guys have sent me in the past. Please don't hesitate to send me some pics if you make any of my recipes! Click through to read more...
To make up for the dessert failure last week, here is a delicious and easy to make dessert to kick off this one. I always love it when I am home at my parents for the weekend and my mom happens to be baking. I just follow along with my camera and end up with a nice easy blog post! Oh, and these bars were insanely delicious. I mean, the recipe pretty much states: Take a bunch of different candy, toss into a baking dish, top with condensed milk, and bake until awesome. How can it possibly be bad?
© 2009 The Food In My Beard
