Lasagna Time

When I was a kid, we used to go on skiing trips to June Mountain with a few families. we would rent a big house for all of us to stay in. We always made a menu for the week to save money an not eat out every meal. One of the staple meals we would have is a frozen Lasagna from Smart & Final (CostCo like store). It was easy to make and filling for a large group. Other than on those trips, I never really ate lasagna. Now that I like to cook and with the new gadgets I got form Christmas, I decided to make Lasagna. Once I started thinking about it, I realized I can make almost everything from scratch. Well, I did and it ended up taking 2 days, but it was worth it at the end.

Oven "Pulled Pork" Fajita's

Tonight I knew I wasn't going to have any time to cook dinner because I had band practice for 2 hours. When trying to decide what to cook the night before, I realized I had 1/4 of an onion, 1/4 green & red bell pepper, and 1/4 of a jalapeno. I didn't have any meat in the freezer other than a small amount of pork shoulder that I had cubed left over from when I was making sausage. I decided to defrost it and think of what to make the next day.

Let's Get Saucy

I recently started making pasta and pizza dough from scratch. I usually make my own sauces just out of a can of tomato sauce and adding to it, but never just an all purpose red sauce. Here is what I came up with.

No Soup For You

Last week, I bought a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store. If you read my blog, you know what that means on the weekend. I'm making chicken stock. If you haven't read my blog on how to make chicken stock, click here.

Beware of the Sausage - Part 2 of 2

Day 2 of sausage making. If you missed out of day 1, click here. Today is all pork and more traditional sausage. The sausages of the day are Hot Italian, Hot Louisiana, and Bratwurst. I used a boneless pork shoulder, cut it up into pieces and froze it just like the chicken. I decided to do a pound of each type and then an extra pound Italian, which I wasn't planning on stuffing into casings. I made it for a different recipe (which I'll blog about later, so stay tuned). I found the recipes for these online, but its just a bunch of different spices and herbs for each. Below you can see the Italian grind prior to stuffing.

Beware of the Sausage - Part 1 of 2

Since I purchased my KitchenAid mixer and meat grinder attachment, I've been researching and reading different sausage recipes. I've made a few small batches just to try out the grinder and get used to using it. I've been waiting to make a big batch of sausage but I've had a hard time finding the sausage casing. After driving all over town, I finally found a small European sausage shop that would sell me casing.

Kitchen Gadget's

A few years ago when I started getting into cooking, my parents and brother found it extremely weird when for my birthday I asked for nothing but cooking stuff. Back then, it was simple stuff like pyrex pans, lemon zester, nice cutting board.... Now that my parents actually believe that I like to cook and am actually ok at it, they expect me to ask for cooking stuff for my birthday & Christmas.