Slow-Cooker Pulled Game Hen

So remember that cornish game hen I mentioned? Well here you go. For those who aren't familiar with game hen. It basically a chicken, but way smaller. Perfect for two people to gobble up. Three, maybe four if you're serving it with other dishes. Anyway, the weekend was beautiful and sunny here in LA. It was a much needed break from the huge downpour we had. So to keep myself relaxed and stress-free from having to worry if I cooked my meal appropriately I busted out the slow-cooker. I've been meaning to experiment with it more and I thought this would be the perfect time to do that.

I prepared the game hen and cut it into pieces. Placed everything in slow-cooker. Poured the bbq sauce and some chopped onion in there as well and let it cook for 4 hours on high. The bbq sauce is something I've use for many years and it a bit of a secret recipe. But you can use your own recipe or the ready made kind. Give it your own twist. When the chicken is done, the meat came clean off the bone. Do you know how tempting it was not to just dig in right then and there? But I shredded the meat and place it in between a couple slices of bread. Make a pulled chicken sandwich. You can also use the leftover sauce that's blended with the juices of the game hen/chicken as an au jus sauce for tip the bread.

Serve 2-3

Slow-Cooker Pulled Game Hen

1 cornish game hen or 1-2 lbs of chicken
2 c BBQ sauce

Wash and clean cornish game hen, inside and out. Pat dry with a paper towel. Cut the game hen into appropriate piece and season with salt and pepper. Place in a the slow cooker and pour over the bbq sauce. Cook on high for 3-4 hours until chicken is nice and tender anc come clean off the bone.

Serve as a sandwich or with other side dishes. You can also use the leftover sauce as an au jus to dip the meat and bread.

Pinoy Style Fried Rice Redux

The one thing I love about fried rice is the different combination you can create with them. Then again the same rule applies to cooking. There's no one way to make a dish.

With lent approaching fast, we'll get into that later, I'm slowly eating the last bits of meat I have stocked in my fridge and freezer. What's left are few bacon strips and two hot dogs with cheese (click here to know what I'm talking about). I do have a whole cornish game hen and some ground pork that I need to cook up. But I'll make something those in the coming days, if I haven't by now.

Saturday morning consists of a trip to the farmer's market. Sometimes when I get home, I'm pretty hungry. This is where leftover white rice comes in handy. A Filipino breakfast is usually some fried rice (called sinangag in tagalog) and whatever have in the fridge (eggs, sausage, etc). So I cook up the traditional pinoy fried rice. Instead of adding  butter I cooked the rice in some of the bacon drippings. Cooked the garlic until crisp and gave the hot dog some nice char marks,. Add the rice and mix in the egg, causing it to coat every morsel. Top it off by crumbling the bacon in. Mmmm... a Filipino breakfast redux. You can serve it with a side of white vinegar or ketchup. It's a one plate kind of dish.

Serve 2-3

Pinoy Style Fried Rice Redux

3-4 c cooked rice
6 bacon strip
2 hot dog links - sliced into 1/4 to 1/2-inch coins
2 eggs - beaten and season lightly with salt
2 garlic cloves - minced

In a non-stick skillet, cook the bacon until browned and crisp. Place the strips on a paper towel to drain. If there's a lot of bacon drippings in the pan, remove but 1 tablespoon of the dripping. Then cook the garlic until it's browned then add the hot dog.

Cook the hot dogs roughly 2-3 minutes. Give them an occasional stir. Then add the rice. Break them apart stirring constantly and mixing well until the rice is once again soft. Roughly 5 minutes of so. Then stir in the egg. Again stirring until the egg is completely cooked.

Shortly before serving crumble the bacon into the rice.

Serve warm with a side of white vinegar or ketchup.

Wheat Cinnamon Rolls

Who doesn't love a good cinnamon roll? I remember going into Cinnabon and buy one of their large rolls with extra frosting. Of course that was way back when. See with the rain comes endless amounts of time spent in the office or at home. In my case, on this particular day, it was spent in my home office. The rain pouring and I'm trying to do some writing for a new script, but with no success. So into the kitchen I go.  I was originally going to make my usually loaf of bread, but then I got the sudden urge to make cinnamon rolls.

I've always had the regualr white bread versions of them and I thought why not have a wheat version. It's still bread, right? I make the dough and waiting for it to proof. I get all my other ingredients ready.

Once ready, I roll it out into a large rectangle. Spread some butter, sugar and cinnamon and "massage" into the dough. Then I roll it up and cut it into 12 pieces and bake. Now I couldn't leave it with just that. You need to have frosting to go with cinnamon rolls. It's like the quintessential ingredient that makes it so good to eat. I go for a cream cheese frosting on this one. Luckily, I still had some cream cheese left in the fridge.  I patiently wait for the rolls to bake. you can smell the cinnamon wafting through the air. Who need an airfreshener when you have the sweet smell of cinnamon inhabiting the room?

Once bake, I spread the frosting and dig in. Really good. A cinnamon roll is a cinnamon roll with a tiny twist. I think I'll go have another one right now.

Makes roughly 12 rolls.

Wheat Cinnamon Rolls

Dough
2 c All-Purpose Flour or bread flour
2 c wheat flour
1 package of rapid rise yeast
6 Tbsp olive oil
2 c lukewarm water (120˚F-130˚F)
6 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt


Cinnamon filling
1 1/2 Tbsp unsalted butter - plus extra
1/3 c sugar
1/4 c cinnamon
1 c chopped walnuts


Frosting (optional)
4 Tbsp cream cheese
4 Tbsp powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract


Combine the yeast and water in a small bowl. Add a teaspoon of sugar and stir once. Let it sit for 5 min.

Combine the flour, remaining sugar, butter or olive oil and salt in a large bowl and add the yeast. Mix it all together until it form into a dough blob.

Remove from the bowl and on a well-floured flat surface, knead the dough for a good 8 min until it feels elastic.

Lightly oil another bowl, place the dough in it and cover with plastic wrap and a towel and place away from light. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hrs or until the dough doubles in size.When the dough has doubled, punch down the dough to let the gases out and knead it again for a couple of minutes.

Preheat oven to 375˚F

On a lightly floured surface, rolls out the dough into a rectangle 1/4 to 1/2-inch thick. Spread the butter evenly over the surface, then sprinkle the sugar and cinnamon. With your hands or spatula mix all three over the surface. Sprinkle the walnuts o top and carefully the dough into a log. Cut them into 12 pieces and place them on a lightly grease a baking sheet or pan. Before placing them in the oven baste the tops of each rolls with a little bit of butter.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

To add frosting: combine all cream cheese, powdered sugar and vanilla until well blended and spread a generous helping on each cinnamon rolls.

Serve warm.

Cheese inside a hot dog?

 
Nothing beats a good grilled hot dog. This isn't much of a recipe but as to how you can create so many variations into topping a hot dog. You can top it with so many things or you can have them plain in the bun.

 

But first to answer that the question that is the title of this post. Yes, Cheese inside a hot dog. Not wrapped or strategically placed. I mean literally inside the casing embedded with the meat. There's this product from the Philippines that has hot dogs with cheese inside them. I don't know how they do it, but there's cheddar within the meat when you bite into it. Take a bite and you can see the cheese slightly ooze out. Crazy huh? I haven't seen this anywhere else, but I may be wrong.

I grilled mine with good ol' Georgie. I topped it with some of the usual mustard and relish. It's a must for me no question about it. When I was a child I was all about the ketchup. I still like it. But my tastes have changed the older I get. Then I remembered I still had just little bit left of the tomato red sauce from my spaghetti. So that would be the "chili" portion. I'm glad to say I don't have any more left of that. I was beginning to wonder when I'd finish it off.  Finally to top it off, I cooked up some balsamic caramelized onion. Beats going out to Pink's (though, this wouldn't stop me from going to Pink's for one of their famed hot dogs).  Cheese is optional.

Can you see the melted cheese within the hot dog lightly oozing out in that last picture?It's not much, but it's definitely there.

 

Stir-Fry Veggies on Ramen

With the heavy downpour that was here, I wasn't in the mood to spend a long time in the kitchen. For some odd reason, rain equals "lazy mode," doesn't it? I remember I had a few ramen packs in the pantry. A variety of different flavors. I pull out the shrimp kind. Now I usually just use the noodles. But this time around I decided to save one of the seasoning packets and use them with the veggies I wanted to pair it with. Noodles are pretty self-explanatory. Just like making pasta. I had gotten one of those steamfresh veggie packs from the market. You know, where you can microwave the bag and it steams the veggies right away. Those things are so cool. It cuts the time in half in terms of steaming veggies.

Anyway, Sometimes steamed or boiled veggies can get a bit bland. I sauteed the them in a little paprika, worchestershire sauce (I could never pronounce that correctly, let alone spell it) and the shrimp seasoning from the ramen packet. It brought the veggies a nice flavor. Voila -- easy 30-minute, five dollar meal for two.

Serves 2

Stir-Fry Veggies on Ramen

1 package mixed vegetable - defrosted
2 packet ramen  - including seasoning
2 shrimp shrimp seasoning from ramen
1 Tsp paprika
1 tsp worchestershire sauce
extra virgin olive oil
pepper

Boil some water and add one of the shrimp seasonings to the water. Once boil add the noodles and cook the ramen noodles for about 8 minutes until tender. Drain and drizzle a little olive oil to keep the noodles from sticking. Give them a little toss.

In a small pot, pour a tiny drizzle of olive oil. Add the vegetable. Saute for a couple of minutes until tender. Add the paprika, shrimp seasoning and worchestershire sauce. Sauce to roughly 5 minutes.

Mix together with the noodles and serve warm.

Cobb Salad with Balsamic Dijon Dressing

In 1937, Brown Derby owner Robert H. Cobb went into the restaurant's kitchen to fix a late-night snack for Sid Grauman, operator of Grauman's Chinese Theater. He browsed the refrigerator for ingredients, and chopped them up finely. Thanks for wikipedia for that last bit of info. You can read more on it here. Cobb salad was a mish mosh of iceberg lettuce, tomato, bacon, chicken breast, hard-boiled egg, avocado, and roquefort cheese.

But I didn't have all those ingredients on hand. I did have the lettuce and tomato. I had used my last avocado in the grilled cheese. I did have the last three slices of honey baked ham that I needed to eat up and some shredded mozzarella. Oh, not to forget the two persimmons sitting patiently in my fridge for the past couple of weeks. I'm sorry I had neglected them for so long. Hard boiled egg is pretty easy to make. So I chopped away and tossed everything together. To give this salad some taste, I made a simple balsamic vinegar and dijon mustard dressing. A good combo I might add. It was filling, but at just the right amount.

Serves 2 -3

Cobb Salad with Balsamic Dijon Dressing

1 head of lettuce - choped
1 tomato - deseeded and chopped
2 ripe persimmons - chopped
3/4 c chopped ham
3 hard boiled eggs - chopped
2 c croutons
1/4 c shredded cheese - your choice

Balsamic Dijon Dressing
2 Tbsp dijon mustard
1 1/2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 large garlic clove - finely chopped
juice of 1/2 lemon
a pinch of salt and pepper to taste

Combine all the ingredients for the dressing together until well blended. Set aside.

Toss to lettuce, tomato, ham, persimmon drizzle in the dressing and mix well.

Divide them into 2 or 3 salad bowls. Top each with the shredded cheese, egg and croutons.

Grilled Cheese and Avocado

 We've all heard of the old fashioned grilled cheese sandwich, grilled cheese and tomato, grilled cheese with apple, grilled cheese with _____. So now it's time to add avocado into that blank.For those who've been following this blog for a while now may may know of my love to avocados.

Served this with some good ol' fashioned creamy tomato soup. Grilled cheese is on the top list of ultimate comfort foods. It doesn't get any simpler than that. The cheese I used is shredded mozarella and a couple slices of sourdough bread.

Makes 2 sandwiches.

Grilled Cheese and Avocado

4 slices of bread
1 c shredded mozzarella
1 ripe avocado - pitted and sliced
butter

Spread some butter on all 4 slices of bread. Take two slices and divide the cheese and avocado evenly between the two top with the other two slices buttered side out.

Heat a skillet, place on side of the sandwich down and toast the bread for 2-3 minutes on medium heat until the bread is browned. Flip the sandwich and cook for another 2-3 minutes until browned.

Serve warm with some soup or alone.