Datenight Dinner at Home

Sometimes, as much as you'd like to, it's just too much work to go out on a date with your spouse. You have to find a babysitter. Wash your hair. Apply makeup. Drive somewhere. I know, it's just exhausting.

Seriously though, before kids my husband and I used to cook together every Friday night after a long week at work, rent a movie and stay in. So when shiitake mushrooms came in The Produce Box this week, ribeyes went on sale at Harris Teeter, and my husband got a craving for stuffed figs all at the same time we decided to resurrect an old tradition. We fed the kids pasta, put on a movie for them and met in the kitchen.

Now my husband swears he can't cook but look at these Baked Stuffed Figs with Prosciutto, Goat Cheese, Rosemary and Honey before they went into the oven. He bought all the ingredients from our local Harris Teeter (minus the rosemary which came from our garden) and found the recipe at the TasteFood blog.

Meanwhile, I was in charge of grilling the ribeyes and getting the mushrooms tipsy. Don't worry, they didn't complain although the ribeyes did sizzle. In my humble opinion ribeyes need very little prep other than a dry massage with course sea salt and ground pepper and the kiss of a high-heat grill just long enough to keep them from mooing. Mushrooms, however, need more persuasion.

Take three tablespoons of butter and and melt it in a pan with a few cloves of minced garlic and a little olive oil. Warm the garlic until your house smells like you've died and gone to Italian heaven.

Add the mushrooms and cook until tender, ten minutes. Add in the wine. In this case I had a half pound of mushrooms and used 1/2 cup of wine. Simmer in the wine sauce for another five to ten minutes.

The wine and butter sauce will thicken and reduce and soak into the mushrooms until it looks more like this when it's finished.

 Spoon the mushrooms over the ribeyes, saving the larger portion for your spouse. Now, that's love.

The steak and mushrooms in red wine sauce were a nice contrast to the baked stuffed figs, which turned out jammy and lush and perfectly infused with rosemary flavor. What's sexier than cooking and then eating a meal together, except a glass of wine and a bar of dark chocolate for dessert while your husband does dishes?

Now for the less romantic details. The ribeye was on sale for $6 and I butterflied it to make two steaks. The mushrooms were $5.50. The figs ran $.79 each and the goat cheese cost $5.99. Add in a $10 bottle of wine and you get a sumptuous dinner for two for around $30. And we didn't even have to pay a babysitter or argue over how much to tip the server.

Feeding Four featured on Strictly Homemade blog today

My good friend Maridith featured some of my recipes on her fabulous blog Strictly Homemade today. Check it out.

Tangy Fall Apple Salad

Mom used to make this salad growing up. It's a great way to take advantage of the gorgeous fall apples out right now. Serve as is or toss with chopped iceberg lettuce or baby spinach. Add in baby marshmallows or substitute dried cranberries or yellow raisins for the regular raisins. Dad says my great grandmother used to add chopped bananas. For more color, leave some of the skin on the apples.

Tangy Fall Apple Salad
3 large apples (mix of crisp/sour and sweet like Granny Smith and Concord), cored, peeled and chopped
4 small boxes raisins
1/4 chopped pecans
1 celery stalk, chopped small
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1 Tb apple cider vinegar
3 Tb sugar (adjust according to your apples and taste)
pinch fresh ground black pepper
Optional: baby marshmallows and iceberg lettuce or baby spinach

1.) Toss apples, raisins, pecans and celery in a medium bowl.
2.) Whisk mayonnaise, vinegar, sugar and pepper in a small bowl.
3.) Pour dressing over apple mix and toss well to combine.

Score FREE spices and teacher gift at Penzey's Spices--$14+ value

Stop in at your Penzeys Spices store right now and get a free 1/2 cup jar of Forward spices, normally $5.39. Use it to add flavor to meat, veggies, rice or pasta. No purchase necessary. There's a coupon in this month's catalog to get the Forward free but I couldn't find mine. The folks that work at Penzey's are usually very helpful and friendly, so ask and you might receive. I did! Or if you're shopping online use the coupon code 15958C at checkout.

You can also score a FREE teacher's gift set with any purchase, normally valued at $8.78. If you don't have a Penzeys in your area you can also score this deal with any online purchase using the coupon code 83018c at checkout. Of course you'll have to pay S&H, $3.95 for a minimum order. You can use both coupons at checkout online with a minimum purchase. (Order an empty glass spice jar for as little as $1.39.)

Thanks to retailmenot.com and hip2save.com for the coupon codes.

Spicy Sweet Potato Sausage Hash

School's in session, and after carpool, the after-school snack, and homework I'm all about the one-dish dinner. It's healthier and faster than a casserole, which usually has some kind of cheesy sauce and needs to bake. And with dishes like this I don't feel bad skipping the salad. Cilantro counts as a leafy green, right?

Spicy Sweet Potato Sausage Hash
1 sweet potato, peeled, chopped
1 lb turkey sausage
2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 Tb apple cider vinegar
2 Tb brown sugar
15.25 oz black beans, rinsed and drained
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
salt & pepper to taste


1.) Boil the potato until soft, about 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

2.) In a separate pan (this dish all comes together in one pan but you dirty two dishes to make it this way), fry the sausage until mostly done. Add the spices and cook for five minutes.

3.) Toss the vinegar in the pan and stir, scraping up the dark bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the brown sugar and toss in the black beans. Add in the sweet potato and cook just until it's all heated through. Toss in the chopped cilantro. Salt and pepper to taste.
4.) There's so much you can do with this hash. Eat it as is or scoop it into a flour tortilla and drizzle on some heated enchilada sauce from a can. Or take the same enchilada sauce and pour enough on the hash to make it moist and serve it on rolls like a sloppy joe. If you have little ones who won't eat food that's touching anything but air you can serve the separate portions like the picture below. The possibilities are...well, there's a bunch.

Enchilada style

Make your own homemade bread in a Dutch oven

I recently picked up Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman. I was intrigued by the author's promise to become unchained from recipes. I imagined myself freely inventing in the kitchen with a few basic figures and techniques to light my way. Bye-bye cookbook collection! Well, of course, it didn't really work out that way. Turns out you can't exchange years of schooling and real-life experience for a $16 book. Shucks. But I will say that Ratio  is full of essential information, techniques and tips that have started to change the way I cook.

For starters, I now own a digital scale so I can measure ingredients by weight (ounces) instead of volume (cups) if a recipe calls for it. (I'm so proud of myself). And I overcame my fear of yeast. Those little buggers have broken my heart time and again. Hours of rising and punching down and kneading and all that lovely flour gone to waste. It's enough to make a girl curse...the yeast, of course. The Ratio recipe was not fool-proof, because, well, I was cooking. The dough came out very sticky and gooey in my KitchenAid mixer with the dough hook.

 I fought back tears, covered it in Saran Wrap and tossed the whole lot in the fridge. I might have eaten a few of those Fudgey Cheerios bars in the background for consolation. Two days later and the cold, dry atmosphere of the fridge had apparently whipped the dough into submission. I was able to shape the dough into a boule or round loaf.

I let it rise again in an oiled Dutch Oven, cut an "x" into the top and sprinkled it with fresh rosemary and sea salt. Okay, actually, I cut it and sprinkled it with rosemary and then let it rise. Next time I'll follow Ruhlman's instructions and wait until the dough rises first so my "x" doesn't get so spread out. And I'll work the rosemary into the actual dough and give it an egg wash for shine before sprinkling it with the sea salt. I did follow his instruction to place the Dutch oven's lid on for the first 30 minutes and then take the lid off for the remaining time.

 When my thermometer read between 180'-210' (another great tip from the book) I took it out of the oven. Ta-da! Gorgeous. Delicious. A crispy exterior and chewy interior and it only took me two days to get there. No wonder we just buy this stuff in the store now. 

I'm sure with more practice I'll get better at this. I mean, you can't put a price on homemade bread fresh out of the oven, can you? Okay, maybe you can, but it's the principle of the thing. I can't wait to try a couple of his bread dough variations, like chocolate cherry bread and grilled focaccia. When I get a hang of bread dough, I'll move on to pasta dough. That's kind of the way this book works, moving from one passion or obsession to another. You learn as much as you can about one recipe--sorry, ratio--and move on to the next. I'm still going to need this book as a crutch for a while, but maybe one day I'll be able to set it aside.

Update 9/14/11: I have since made this bread again and got it in the oven in a single afternoon, in time for a late dinner. Hurrah! The dough was a great consistency, not at all sloppy and wet like the first time.

I'm not sure what I did wrong the first time but I think it probably had to do with too much water. This time I incorporated the rosemary into the loaf instead of sprinkling it on top and let the dough rise before cutting the x in the top and adding the oil and salt. It worked great. Good recipe and I'll be making it over and over.

Dilly Cheese Dinner Rolls

Do the grocery stores get together and have meetings about what sales to try next? For a while double and triple coupon sales were big. Seems like the coupon people are wising up though because lately the coupons have been less than stellar. Then it was 4 for $10 or 5 for $10 deals. Now I'm seeing BOGO sales all over the place. Not that I'm complaining. I like to save money. But sometimes I get sucked into sales that aren't really great deals. Like BOGO cottage cheese. I don't even eat cottage cheese. Well, I didn't when I bought two 16 oz containers for the price of one. But I was bound and determined that for that price someone in my family sure as heck was going to. That someone turned out to be me as my three boys (including one man) turned up their noses and left me with 32 oz of low fat, small curd cottage cheese. Oh yeah, and less than two weeks before it expired

Allrecipes.com came to my rescue with this lovely little recipe for Dilly Rolls. (Apparently from the reviews this recipe is originally from Taste of Home magazine/cookbooks.) I know, not more yeast dough recipes! This time it didn't take me 2 days to get it to work. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this rise and knead and punch down and rise again stuff. Best of all, the rolls are healthy and they freeze and reheat great. I assume everyone else is as paranoid as I am about working with yeast dough, and so I included lots of step-by-step photos and instructions here.

Dilly Rolls
Makes 24


16 oz (2 cups) small curd cottage cheese
2 Tb butter
2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water (110'-115' F)
2 eggs
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons dried minced onion
1 tablespoon dill weed
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
plus more flour (see #4, #9)
cream or half-n-half for brushing on top

1.) Heat the cottage cheese and butter in a saucepan on medium heat. Set aside to cool to around 110'.

2.) In a separate container proof the yeast in the warm water.

3.) Add cottage cheese, yeast, and the eggs through the baking soda. I didn't have dill or dehydrated onions on hand so I used 2 heaping Tbs of a Penzey's Spices mix called Sunny Paris with dill, shallots, chives, pepper and terragon. The results were mild enough that when they baked up I could still enjoy the rolls with some jam and butter.

4.) Add the flour, mixing as you go, a cup at a time. Add enough additional flour to get a soft dough. I added another cup and a half for almost 6 cups total. Flour your surface and hands and add additional flour as you knead. Sorry no photos on that step. I was on my own and my hands were pretty sticky. You can also let the dough hook in your mixer do the work. You know the dough is ready when it doesn't tear easily when you try to form a rectangle with a small hunk of dough. Also, when you press in the center of the dough it springs back slowly. Here's what your dough will look like after 8-10 minutes of kneading. Do a search on You Tube for videos on how to knead dough by hand if you're not familiar with it. This dough is oiled already which accounts for the wet look. You can still see some chunks of cottage cheese. It will melt into the final product.

5.) Form dough into a smooth ball and place in an oiled bowl, turning once to oil both sides. Cover and let rise until double, about an hour. Of course, make sure you put it in a bowl large enough to accomodate the rise or you'll end up with this. Reminds me of what it feels like to be 8 months pregnant, bursting out of everything you wear.

6.) Punch the dough down. Shape it into a long rectangle and score with a knife into 4 by 6 squares like so. This just helps you get more even sized rolls.

7.) Form into 24 balls and place in a greased 9" x 13" pan. These rolls were so tall and luscious next time I'm going to try and make two pans and make the rolls smaller. I think they'll cook more evenly that way too.

8.) Let rise until doubled, another 45 min to an hour. Preheat oven to 350'. Brush with cream and place in oven.

9.) Halfway through baking, dust with flour. If the rolls on the outer edge start to get too brown before the ones in the center cook through then cover with foil. Bake 20-25 minutes.
10.) Remove from the oven and let cool slightly before tearing off the rolls you want for your meal. When the leftovers are entirely cool, place them in a container in the freezer and reheat for another meal.

Mmm, chewy, soft moist dinner rolls you can pull from the freezer for dinner...

...or breakfast.