Seafood stew on a cold, rainy day

Today was cold, rainy, and the best sort of weather for staying indoors with a good book or video game, and it just so happens to be the day slated to try out Seafood Stew. When I first decided to cook through the list of Tales of Symphonia recipes, I just looked up the names of the recipes on Google. Most of the recipes came from allrecipes.com, as is the case for Seafood Stew, which is a thick, American-style stew. Here is the recipe, courtesy of allrecipes.com:

Seafood Stew

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups chicken broth 1/2 cup uncooked long grain rice 2 teaspoons chili powder 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained 3/4 cup julienned green pepper

3/4 cup julienned sweet red or yellow pepper 1/2 cup thinly sliced onion 8 ounces orange roughy or red snapper fillets, cut into 1-inch pieces 4 ounces uncooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined 3/4 cup orange juice concentrate

Directions:

1.

In a saucepan, bring broth to a boil. Add the rice, chili powder and garlic; return to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until rice is tender. Add the tomatoes, peppers and onion. Cover and cook over medium heat until vegetables are tender. Add fish, shrimp and orange juice concentrate. Cover and simmer for 2-4 minutes or until the fish flakes easily with a fork and the shrimp turn pink. I also included dried seaweed (like the stuff that goes around sushi) to replace the kelp that the game requires, some lemon juice (no scurvy for us!) and some black pepper because, as I think I've mentioned, I put black pepper on almost everything. We're having this flavorful stew with a side of cornbread, courtesy of a Jiffy cornbread mix. :-)  And the verdict is.... It's... different. Not quite what I was expecting. If you like citrus and fish, you'll probably like this stew. And that's all I have to say about that.

Hamburger steak, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans -- a meal fit for a queen! Or maybe an empress. Or maybe just us.

One of the recipes in Tales of Symphonia is steak with onions. I had a pound of hamburger meat thawed, and time to work on a Tales recipe, so I decided on that Southern classic: hamburger steak. At least, I think of it as Southern because my grandmother makes it pretty often, and I tend to see it in home-cooking restaurants in my home state of Mississippi. So, what did I do first on that Sunday that I decided to make hamburger steak for the first time? I called my grandmother, of course. In any case, here’s Granny’s recipe for hamburger steak:

Ingredients:

1 lb. hamburger meat

Some oatmeal (the real stuff, not the instant)

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 Tbsp steak sauce

1 egg

Salt & pepper to taste

3 Tbsp chopped onion

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients together. Make into patties.

2. Cook slowly in a frying pan until they are done.

3. Pour off some of the grease, chop onion, and add a little flour to remaining grease to make gravy, or simply slice onion and bell pepper and sautee in remaining grease instead. In either case, cook until the onions are translucent.

And here’s how I actually did it (and then wondered why hers tastes so much better!)

Ingredients:

1 lb. hamburger meat

1 Tbsp of extra thick Worcestershire sauce

Salt & pepper & garlic powder to taste

3 Tbsp chopped onion

the rest of half of an onion, chopped

1/2 red bell pepper, sliced

1 Tbsp flour

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients together. Make into patties.

2. Cook slowly in a frying pan until they are done.

3. There wasn't much grease left, so I just added a tablespoon of flour and the rest of the chopped onion I had... yeah, turns out I don't really know how to make gravy ... so I added about a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and kept using my wooden spatula to scrape up the thin roux (I think that's what it's called) that tried to stick to the bottom of the pan, and proceeded to cook chopped onions and bell pepper slices. 

 

Next time, I think I'll make brown gravy from a mix and sautee some sliced mushrooms and pour that over the top. My favorite hamburger steak (from a restaurant) is at the White Star Cafe in Water Valley, MS. Yum... brown gravy, mushrooms, and lots of black pepper. That's the trouble with moving to a new state. You have to find new favorite restaurants that don't break your budget. :-) 

On the side with the hamburger steak, we had twice baked potatoes and green beans. Here are the recipes: 

Twice-Baked Potatoes for Two 

2 medium russet potatoes 

1 tablespoon light ranch salad dressing 

shredded cheese (We like the "Mexican" blend that we get at the Hy Vee, which is similar to Wal-Mart's "fiesta" blend.)

1 chopped fresh Roma tomato 

cooked and chopped bacon would be good, but I thought of that one too late to add.

1. Scrub potatoes and then poke holes in them with a fork. Cook in microwave until they've softened a bit. It took about 5 minutes total in my microwave. 

2. Cut open potatoes and scrape out most of the insides. Mix the inside of the potato with salad dressing and a little shredded cheese. Here's where you would also add chopped cooked bacon if you thought ahead.

3. Spoon filling back into potatoes and top with shredded cheese. 

4. Place potatoes on a cookie sheet and bake until the cheese is melted at 350 degrees F. 

5. Put potatoes on plates, and sprinkle chopped tomato on top.

6. Enjoy!

I'll be honest, I'm about the pickiest person on the planet when it comes to how canned green beans are prepared. I like the way my grandmother makes them (complete with bacon fat), and I like the way I make them. 

Green Beans

1 can French-style green beans

black pepper

garlic powder 

1. Open the can, drain the green beans, and then rinse them at least three times to get rid of the taste of the can. Double Luck brand green beans are the best, but I don't even know where to begin finding that brand now that I no longer live in the South. 

2. Pour in half a can of water with the green beans and cook over medium heat until the water has evaporated. Sprinkle garlic powder and black pepper to taste. Personally, I love black pepper and garlic powder, so you may see a trend in this blog. :-) 

Enjoy the Southern classic, blogged far from home.

Quiche-y

I give up on using the Dwarven Vows for titles. It was one of those ideas that sounds great until you actually implement it, and then, it looks cheesy. Or maybe kitschy. Like quiche-y? 

Anyway, so I'm behind in my blogging (not that it really makes any difference in the long run, whatsoever), which means that I have several recipes to report. First, the quiche: It was one of those "make it up as you go along" kind of Saturday mornings, and it was begun with the greatest of intentions without realizing that three eggs are really not enough for a deep-dish pie crust. Oops.

Fortunately, there's a grocery store around the corner, and my quiche turned out to be what my husband referred to as something along the lines of "best I'd made." Quiche is one of those easy-ish delicacies that everyone can put their own spin on, but there are some basic ingredients it must have, IMHO, including eggs, cheese, and crust (unless you're going low-carb, in which case the crust is unnecessary). In any case, here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 deep-dish pie crust 
3 eggs
about 1/4 cup milk
handful of shredded cheese
about 1/2 cup frozen spinach (preferably thawed)
4 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled up
3 more eggs
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pat of butter
4 button mushrooms
more cheese (I probably used about a cup to a cup and a half of cheese in the entire thing.)

Directions:
1. Poke holes in the crust using a fork and bake in the oven until the crust is a light golden brown. (For my oven, it was about as long as it took to preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.)
2. Beat three eggs in a bowl. Add milk to mixture. (You can skip this, I think, but it does make the eggy mixture go further.) Dump in spinach and cooked bacon. Mix together. Pour into pie shell and realize that the shell is only half-full.....
3. Turn off the oven, and run to the store to pick up a new carton of eggs. :-/ Come back, turn the oven back on, cut up mushrooms, and cook them a la Julia Child -- fry a pat of butter in olive oil, and then cook the mushrooms over medium-low heat until they brown. Don't crowd the mushrooms if you want them to brown. Yummy -- real butter AND olive oil!
4. Mix together three beaten eggs, cooked mushrooms, and a small handful of cheese and pour in a second layer over the spinach-bacon-egg mixture. Of course, you don't have to layer your quiche, as I'm sure that you, dear reader, were better prepared than I! :-)
5. Sprinkle cheese on top.
6. Bake the quiche in the oven at 400 degrees F until the egg mixture sets. I think it was roughly half an hour, but if you're unfamiliar with quiche recipes, you probably want to check after twenty minutes and then every ten minutes after that. About the time that your kitchen starts to smell delicious with cheesy goodness is about the time you'll probably need to watch it more closely.
7. The most important step: ENJOY YOUR QUICHE.

Cutting the quiche

The first piece!

If only I could mess up more recipes and have them still turn out with quiche-y goodness! In any case, I guess "being prepared" is the lesson to be learned here. Also, after you've cooked a dish a couple times and looked at several recipes, ranging from your grandmother to Paula Deen to allrecipes.com, you can kind of wing it and come up with something that's pretty good. :-) So....necessity is the mother of invention, and practice makes perfect, and, um.... a penny saved is a penny earned and all you need is love. And stuff.