Remember that Friends episode where the guys get into a bet about who know more about whom, and the girls end up betting their apartment over the lightning round? Whenever someone asks me what my favorite food is, I remember this part of that episode. (click to play):

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Yeah, so replace “Joey” with “Kit” and that’s what goes through me head. There’s nothing quite like a good sandwich. Sandwiches may be my favorite comfort food, with cold cereal running a close second.

I had a bunch of fresh veggies laying around and some decent hoagie rolls, and I got to thinking what the best way to combine them all would be. Then I remembered this:

George, we’re using the toaster more often for grilling our chicken, but tonight, sir, your little grilling wonder will be put to good use.

So, first, I coated a chicken breast liberally with some italian parmesan dressing we had in the fridge and grilled that sucker to 155, letting it glide on up to 160.

While that was grilling, I caramelized some onions, mushrooms, and bell peppers (which came from my garden!).

Then I sliced the roll in half and coated the insides with a conservative amount of mayo. The mayo forms a nice seal so the bread doesn’t get too soggy. Then I layered.

1. chicken down first, sliced, laying as flat as I can manage
2. layer of fresh spinach leaves
3. tomato slices (also from the garden!)
4. caramelized veggies
5. a layer of colby jack — all I had — pepper jack would have been awesome

Then I gave it a firm mush before I lightly coated the outside with a little olive oil, then down on the George Foreman Grill it went. I gently pressed it flat, and five minutes later I had this:

I didn’t wait enough time before I bit into it, and I burned the heck out of my mouth, but it was so worth it! Between the flavors of the food I selected, and the crisp toastiness of the bread, this was a seriously tasty sandwich. I’ll be looking for excuses to try this again before the week is out.

(Photo credit: Confessions of a Pioneer Woman)

I’m not going to bore you with my rundown of this recipe. We found it at Confessions of a Pioneer Woman — a lovely and funny blog of itself.

What I will say is that this recipe combines my favorite elements of my two favorite potato dishes — pan fried and baked — all in one tasty and easy dish.

I had to stop myself at four. And I’m not happy about it.

(Because Heidi agrees with her Mom’s suggestion that lard makes the BEST pie crust. Gotta get that recipe posted.)

Jean said she had all of the fixins for burgers and stuff, but we couldn’t go empty handed. Didn’t your mammas teach you that? Anyway, we saw this cool pie without a pan thing. A country tart. And we had granny smiths!

3 C apples, peeled & sliced
1/4 C sugar
1 T flour
1 t pumpkin pie spice
1 egg
1 quantity of pie dough

Mix flour, sugar, and spices in a medium bowl. Toss with the prepped apples.

Roll out the dough to a 13″ circle-ish shape. I had good luck with the two-sheets-of-waxed-paper method.

Transfer the rolled out dough to a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Spread out the apple mixture on the dough, keeping it about 2 inches from the edge. Now go around the edge and fold up over the apple like in the picture.

Add 1 T water to the egg and beat it up. Egg wash time. Spread the mixture over the tops and sides of the dough. Sprinkle a little bit of sugar over the dough for extra fun.

Bake it up in a 350° to 375° oven for about 40-45 minutes. After about 30 minutes, lay a little bit of foil on top of the outer crust to keep it from browning too much. Pull it when the time’s up. Let it cool for about 30 minutes then plate it.

If only I had a little bit of home made vanilla ice cream or whipped cream… But it was good by itself. And now it’s all gone. Tell us before you come by and I’ll whip another one up.

Though it may be a variation with peaches and nutmeg instead of apples and cinnamon. You’ll just have to see.

This is one of my favorite recipes. I first had it in my childhood in El Paso, TX, and I have some really positive associations with it. (If you knew more about my childhood, positive associations with anything is really saying something.) The recipe was lost, however. In an effort to quell my cravings, I decided to look around for the recipe online, but none of the versions I found seemed quite right.

So I improvised a little — nailed it. Here’s what we have.

1 T butter
1 t minced garlic
1 T dehydrated onion flakes
1 C uncooked rice
1 3/4 C chicken stock

1 chicken breast

1 C sour cream
4 oz chopped green chiles
3 C colby jack or monterey jack cheese, grated

Melt butter in 3 qt saucepan. Add minced garlic and onions. If you want to add fresh onions, please do. I didn’t have any, so dehydrated are fine. Sauté garlic and onions for a moment. Add cup of uncooked rice and coat with butter-onion-garlic mixture. Toasting the rice a little bit is fine here.

Bring the chicken stock to a boil in the device of your choosing — I chose the microwave. Add the boiling stock to the rice, stir it around once, then cover and simmer on low for 20 minutes. If you choose to add four or five strands of saffron to the rice, now is the time to do that. (HA!)

While the rice is going, broil the chicken breast to an internal temp of 145-150° F. White meat is done at an internal temp of 160, so why not take it all the way? Because you’re going to be adding the chicken to piping hot rice in a few minutes, and that will take it the rest of the way to done.

Simple seasoning is great for the chicken: put a little olive oil on the breast, little kosher salt, little cracked pepper, broil in the toaster oven. Why not cook it on top on the rice, you ask? You’re full of questions today. It’s really easy to completely and utterly overcook the chicken when poaching it on top of the rice. Trust me. Chicken leather is not tasty.

When the chicken hits 145°, pull it out and let it cool for a moment. Your rice will be done momentarily, but before it is, get the cheese, sour cream, and green chiles ready. Canned is fine for the chiles, really.

Cut the chicken into bite-sized morsels.

After your 20 minutes for the rice is up, immediately put the rice, chicken, sour cream, and chiles into a medium-large bowl. Combine two-thirds of the cheese. Spread mixture into the bottom of an ungreased 9×9 dish. Top with the remaining third of the cheese.

You can serve the dish at any time now, once the cheese on top gets all melty. Bonus flavor points if you stick the whole thing under the broiler for a few minutes and gently toast the cheese on top.

We have successfully recreated yet another item that I had previously only bought at restaurants: The Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich. A sandwich among sandwiches, the PCS is my second favorite sandwich of all time.

It’s also exceptionally easy to make.

Ingredients
1 Onion
1 Bell Pepper
1lb Steak, Shaved or sliced really thin
Provolone, Sliced
1 t Garlic, minced
1/2 t Salt
1/4 t Black Pepper
Oil
Hoagie Rolls

Those amounts aren’t set in stone by any stretch. This recipe is sort of a piece of string recipe. How many sandwiches do you want? It depends on how much you like your onions or red meat. Me, I love me some caramelized onions. I’ll tell you what I did, and you can do what you want.

Slice up the onions and the bell peppers. Not so much strips like you’d use for fajitas, but not diced, either. Think bite-sized portions at about 1 inch per piece. I use the Texas 1015 onions. I think they have a nice sweetness to them when sautéed, and Vidalia onions aren’t always in good supply around here. I haven’t been disappointed with the 1015s, but your milage may vary.

ProTip: chill the onions first. It helps keep you from crying. So, why do onions make you cry, anyway? Glad you asked.

When you slice the onions, you break cell walls. Breaking cell walls means you end up releasing a volatile sulfur compound that wafts up through the air indiscriminately. The kicker is that when the sulfur hits your eyes, it combines with the moisture on your eyeball to form sulfuric acid. That hurts. It also reminds me of a chemistry rhyme we used to tell:

Johnny was a scientist’s son,
but Johnny is no more.
For what he thought was H₂O
was H₂SO₄.

In case you didn’t know it, I’m a geek. But I digress.

So, acid on the surface of the eyeball will tend to make you cry, but more ready water molecules means more raw materials for the sulfur compound to glom onto. You see where I’m going with this? So, chill your onions.

Get your skillet nice and hot over medium-high. Sure, you can go non-stick with this, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You really need a cast-iron or smooth skillet for this one. To get the heat you need for a good sauté, most manufacturers wouldn’t recommend their teflon pans. Add a couple of tablespoons of the oil to the bottom of the pan, dump in your bell peppers and onions, and immediately turn them around to get them nice and coated with the oil.

Make sure you use a sturdy oil, too. You might be tempted to go with the nice flavor of an olive oil, but olive oil’s relatively low smoke point make it unsuitable for this recipe. Do a standard vegetable oil. We use canola because that’s what you can buy bulk at Sam’s. Remember to stay away from the steam, by the way. Acid, you know.

Turn those veggies over every so often until they get nice and golden and soft. One recipe I found online claimed that you would only need to invest about six minutes to caramelize the veggies. That’s crazy talk. Took me at least fifteen minutes to get the veggies the way I like ‘em. You may like them more crunchy, and that’s okay — I won’t hold it against you. But me, I don’t like onions to crunch. Since we have the time, let’s consider caramelization, shall we?

Caramelization is a wonderful and woefully misunderstood process that has several hundred things going on all at once, but the one part of the process that we’re the most concerned about with this recipe has to do with sugar. Veggies are wonderful things. They store energy from the sun in the form of carbohydrates, among other things. Carbohydrates have another name, you know: polysaccharides. Poly, meaning many, and saccharide, meaning sugar. Still with me? Good. Long carbon-based chains of molecules that are essentially long sugars all hooked together end to end. As such, they don’t taste much like sugar, but there’s a hidden potential there.

Whack these polysaccharides with enough heat, and something interesting happens: they become unstable. Right around the Hydrogen and Oxygen bits. So much so, that when you get them hot enough a polysaccharide will get a whole water molecule knocked right out of them — in our sauté, this will come out with the steam. What’s left behind is a less complex sugar. The process repeats until you’re left with few polysaccharides and many many molecules of glucose and sucrose. This is the sweet stuff. This is the stuff that your body can actually use. Your skillet has pre-digested those carbs for you! Clever skillet.

Of course, if you keep going, you’ll knock the water out of the glucose and sucrose, too, leaving you with nothing but carbon. And that means that you burned it. So, get them dark, but not too dark. Okay, that was about fifteen minutes. Push those veggies to the side of your still-hot skillet, and drizzle a little more oil into the center.

Now take the steak you sliced up. You did keep the meat frozen when you sliced it, didn’t you? Of course you did, because you know that it’s much easier to shave the frozen solid steak than the squishy defrosted meat. Dump the steak right into the middle of your hot oil. Quickly add the salt, black pepper, and minced garlic.

Now the meat’s going to stick a little, yes. That’s okay. You’ll take your metal spatula and scoop it right off the bottom in about a minute. Then turn it over and cook the other side. This is only going to take you a few moments to get he meat done while keeping it a little tender. Scoop your veggies back in the middle and stir it all up.

You can turn off the heat now.

Start toasting your buns, if you like toasted buns. I like mine toasted.

Take your provolone and lay a few slices right on top of the mixture in the skillet. By the time the toaster dings, the cheese will get nice and melty and turn into a bit of a sauce right there in the pan. I added a little more cheese to the bottom half of my bun before I took that same metal spatula and scooped a heaping portion of cheesesteak onto the bread. Then a little more cheese on top, press the top down, and there you have an extremely tasty sandwich.

There is some debate about the proper type of cheese to use on a PCS. I go for the provolone. I like the smoothness of the taste and the good melt over the meat. Others swear that Cheeze Whiz is the way to go, or at the very least, melted American cheese. Let’s get something perfectly clear here. American cheese is “Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food” — Cheese food. It’s what you feed cheese. No thanks. Provolone, please.

These proportions made four hearty sandwiches. On our second round, we made some garlic mayo and spread that on the top buns. Very tasty addition.

For variety, feel free to add some mushrooms to the veggies. Some PCS sandwiches feature those, but I didn’t have any on hand.

Happy sandwiching!

We were going to do Greek. Grilled chicken gyros, to be precise. Heidi had the chicken marinating, we made the tsatsiki sauce with yogurt we made from scratch, I bought a perfect tomato (because Bennett is still a tomato assassin), yet we hadn’t purchased or made any bread suitable to the task for gyros.

Yes, in the past we had made the phoenician bread for the purpose, but we didn’t do that this time. We were toying with the idea of using tortillas, but rather than cause a cultural paradox that resulted in the implosion of the universe, I decided to find a suitable recipe for the creation of pita bread. How hard could it all be? Turns out, not very.

I found a number of recipes when I did the google, but the one that jumped out at me was written by a lady out in Missouri.

Without further ado, here’s the skinny:

Farmgirl’s Pita Bread After Bernard Clayton
Makes 8

2-1/2 cups bread flour (regular AP flour worked fine for me), plus more for sprinkling while kneading & rolling out dough
2 teaspoons salt
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 Tablespoons good olive oil
1 cup warm water (105-110 degrees)

8 8-inch squares of aluminum foil for baking pitas

Foodiefarmgirl’s post is very thorough, but she’s a professional baker whereas I’m a schmuck who likes to cook. Read her post: it’s quite informative. Anyway, here’s my process and some observations.

In a large bowl, combine 1 cup flour with the salt, sugar, and yeast. Add the oil and water. Beat well for a few minutes until the consistency is smooth and the top is a little frothy, then stir in the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time. When the dough comes together it’ll be a little sticky. This will be taken care of in the kneading.

Flour a surface, flour your hands, and start kneading. Set a timer for six minutes. As the dough gets tacky again, dust your surface and your hands and keep going. When you’re done, your dough will be exquisitely soft an pliable. Cut your dough into eight equal portions (pie-style). Roll those eight pieces into balls, arrange on a clean surface (I used our flexible cutting board), cover with a damp tea towel, and wait for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 500°. No, really. 500° F. And put the rack on the lowest level of your oven. Of course, you’ll want to move the rack before your oven is preheated.

Flatten the balls out with your hand, then roll out to about 3/16th of an inch thick and 6 inches round. It was pointed out by foodie farm girl, that, while you’re getting out your gimmie ruler you got at the local fire station open house, use its thickness as a gauge, not the gradation on the ruler itself. Don’t worry about the roundness. It’ll all work out.

Place your extremely flat pita rounds on the sections of aluminum foil. (Though the next time I try this, I’m going to dust the foil a little with flour first — the pitas threated to stick when removed from the oven.) Then take the unbaked pitas and put them with the foil gently, directly on the bottom rack of your scorching hot 500° oven by threes or fours. In my oven they took five minutes.

Now while you’re waiting for those five minutes to elapse, let’s talk about what’s happening here. Dough in the oven has moisture and air pockets. Those little yeast are eating voraciously eating sugar, creating alcohol and belching out carbon dioxide. The alcohol cooks off, and the burps raise the roof. In normal bread, you let those little yeast burps raise the bread, you punch it down a few times to build strength, and when all is said and done, you load the dough up in the oven to slowly cook some of the moisture out while maintaining the lattice structure of gluten and tiny yeast burps.

Pita bread is really nothing like that. The rising phase is to build a little strength in the outside of the dough. The pocket comes from the heat. The little aluminum foil squares get the bread as close to the heat as you can get without scorching the whole mess, and the shock of the heat turns the dough’s moisture to steam while the skin starts baking almost instantly, rather like pâte à choux — but that’s a discussion for another day. Any slower, and the pitas would be flatbread rolls, but as they are, they puff beautifully. The kids and I turned on the oven light and crowded around our favorite cooking show just to watch them puff.

At five minutes — time varies due to variances in ovens, of course — they’ll start to brown nicely, take them out before they scorch, gently remove them from their foil and wrap them gently to let them rest for several minutes before you try to cut them open. Steam burns, you know. Wrapping them keeps the tops from drying out into crackers while you prep the rest of your greek dinner.

Even if they don’t puff perfectly — we had three duds in a batch of eight — they’re still perfectly tasty for just about any purpose you care to use bread for. The kids enjoy them plain or with PB&Honey. At about an hour start to finish, we’ll be making these again. Though next time, we’ll be using our wheat flour for extra flavor.

I just made 138 french toast sticks (2 loaves of bread.) And they are so good. We did the pre-freeze prep on cookie sheets then bagged them up for easy breakfast pre & postpartum. YUM! Next up is the oatmeal cookies we’re converting to a granola bar/breakfast cookie and the muffins/breads. Focusing on breakfast ideas this week.

This recipe was from a friend with four little ones that was sharing baby prep ideas. One loaf of Texas Toast uses up two batches of this batter so be sure to double it if you want enough to freeze. These are sweet enough to serve without syrup but would be delicious with a strawberry sauce.

2 eggs
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk
2 T maple syrup (we did 1 t vanilla)
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon (we did 1/2 t)
8 slices white bread, cut into 4 strips each (Texas Toast works best)
3 T butter, divided (we just buttered griddle as we went)

In a shallow dish, beat together the eggs, sugar, milk, maple syrup, and
cinnamon with a fork until well blended. Dip each bread strip into the
egg mixture, coating completely. In a large skillet, melt 1 T butter
over medium heat. Cook the bread strips a few at a time for 2-3 min per
side, or until golden, adding more butter as needed. Serve immediately,
or flash freeze by placing in single layer on cookie sheet in freezer,
then store in ziplock bag when frozen. When ready to serve, reheat in
the oven or toaster oven for 3-5 min, or until heated through.

Pretty productive day, not too many contractions either.

Update: oatmeal cookies done! But we changed up this recipe some more - we did whole wheat flour instead of white, cut the butter to almost half, cut the white sugar to half and the brown sugar to just over half. I think that’s it. And we doubled the batch and added craisins and we’re calling them “Granola Breakfast Balls” or something else to convince the kids they are not eating cookies for breakfast. But it really is almost identical to our granola bar recipe so I’m okay with this method of getting oatmeal into our kids. I scooped the dough into balls and we’re doing the quick freeze method again then storing them for fast breakfasts/snacks postpartum. Feeling closer to ready. You know, now that I’ve got 4 dozen cookies breakfast balls in my freezer. And the french toast sticks? Delicious, the kids are begging for more. Don’t serve with syrup, they are very sweet already and a great snack. We’ll try those next with homemade wheat bread.

Making some changes to Mojo menu. This one is pretty heavy on the protein since we don’t normally eat a lot of meat. We also need stuff without dairy as a staple since most of our kids react badly to dairy while I nurse. And I wanted EASY, easy so I can prep meals in the few minutes I’ll have. This is also giving us our final shopping list for pre-baby, since I’m 34 weeks today and that means I’ve probably got 4 weeks until this little one is going to arrive - and possibly less! Time to get moving…

Pizza Hut (Mo’s request)
Mr. Chopstix (C’s request)
Outback steakhouse (Mommy’s request)
Chipotle (Kit’s request)

But after the take out budget dies, then what??

Dinners (add veggies and/or salad):
- creamy chicken with pasta
- beef burgundy w/pasta
- mini meatloaf with cheesy potatoes
- chicken caccitore
- spicy tropical steak
- garlic lemon chicken
- pizza

- calico bean soup
- german pancakes
- sausage rice scramble
- tator tot casserole
- stroganoff
- omlettes
- taco salad
(more…)

That’s what Kit calls it since it does bear a strange resemblance to my favorite oatmeal cookies.

Combine in saucepan over medium low heat:
1 1/2 cup oats (quick or old fashioned)
1 cup whole milk & 1 1/2 cups water (or do all water - I need the fat.)
sliver of butter (optional)
1/4 t salt
1 t cinnamon (optional)

Boil until good consistency, then add:
2 T sugar or brown sugar
dash vanilla
craisins & coconut
Next time I may try a tiny dash of almond extract and some slivered almonds. Mo says it tastes like cake. YUM! OH, this is amounts for 3 servings.

We had the missionaries over for dinner (we’re trying to have them once a month at least until the baby comes) and they sat on the couch for a minute with the kids while we got dinner on… the kids gave them a book and the patient elders were kind enough to read it to them. “Go, Dog, Go!” As Christopher listened he announced, “Hey, this is about prepositions!! I’m learning those!” One missionary says, “It’s about what?” with a big grin and we all laughed. I’m happy something is sinking in with our language lessons.

And actually those language lessons are getting HARD, we’re half way through the second grade work but Christopher just memorized the definition of a preposition and is now memorizing a LIST of prepositions which means I have to memorize them, too… aboard, about, above, across, along, after, before, behind, below, between, etc, etc, etc. It’s a LOT! My brain is having to work in ways it’s not worked for years…

Missionary dinners - so far we’ve done homemade pizza & salad and cookies for dessert; ham (one of those big ol’ pig legs we love) & cheesy potatoes with peas and buttermilk cake for dessert; buttermilk pancakes, sausage, orange juice, strawberry sauce, homemade pancake syrup, and fresh fruit (grapes, plums, apples.) Not sure what we’ll do next, I think we can manage one more dinner before Mojo arrives. I need to figure out what to serve…

Yum! And funny moment. It’s a good chance for us to practice dinner manners with the kids in front of guests, entertaining and polite dinner conversation, and a chance to serve the missionaries. And they aren’t picky guests so it’s a low pressure way to help them out.