What's cooking?

When the corn's fresh and sweet enough, I often don't even bother cooking it.

 

Simple dinner, hot sausage with peppers and onions. Finished it with a cool salad.

 

All sorts of steaks gave up their bones for this stock..

 

Sunday dinner. Pork chop, rice and gravy, field peas with snaps, and cabbage.

 

Now that's my kind of dinner Rick!

 

Looking mighty tasty Rick!

 

Brown gravy over rice? Never tried that.

 

I like brown gravy on rice, but milk gravy on rice...MMMMmmmm!

 

Simple Monday dinner. Roast chicken thigh with pan sauce, rice pilaf, sautéed cabbage.

 

It's been too hot to cook lately and too smoky from wildfires to air out after, so when we had a decent day we had a chicken test--2 different brands of chicken cooked the same to do a taste test.




Now that it's hot and smokey again, we can have cold chicken, cold Gjetost cheese, cold local blueberries and not heat up the house. Not the most colorful plate, but tasty.

 

Which one was better? They both look delicious.

 

Chicken on the right was Mary's chicken. Third time we've tried it in different forms. I don't care for it. On the left is Ranger chicken. Locally grown, and much better. Juicier, better flavor (IMO), and even less expensive. And it doesn't mess up the oven (the Mary's chicken splattered like crazy and now I have a mess to clean up.) A win for the Ranger on all points! We've tried Mary's a few times now since we've seen some rave reviews, but haven't had good luck with it. I will say that I like air chilled chicken better than water chilled. I really like Smart Chicken, but our grocery store dropped it for the Mary's. And now Tyson has bought Smart Chicken, so no telling how badly they'll muck it up. We need to make a run to a butcher about 20 miles away to get some Smart Chicken for another taste test vs Ranger. There's a little hole-in-the-wall diner just by the butcher that has a little deck that hangs out over a river, and you can feed your face while worrying about falling down into the water, so it's a nice outing.

 

Venison stew. With garden veggies. Except for the corn.

 

That stew looks GOOD! I haven't had venison in years. Was this a visitor to your garden?

 

Ha! No. Surprisingly I’ve seen only 1 deer since living here. A fella from church gave us a couple shopping bags full of venison. We did roast one night then stew with the left over roast the next night. Two great meals!

 

Made some Italian sausage. Parsley & Cheese and hot. The hot was made with Spanish smoked paprika and Calabrian hot pepper sauce. Not spicy, but very tasty.



Tom

 

Looking good Thomas!

 

Yum! I know people that just have to put sausage in a bun. That’s good and all but I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer it without the bun. You can actually taste the flavoring of the sausage.

 

Started Thanksgiving preps Sunday:



More preparations yesterday:


(my favorite knife for mass quantities of garlic!)





And ready to go in the oven:



You can tell Mr. Lucretia the OCD one did the final assembly--every piece will have the same number of pepperoni slices and there will be cutting trails so no pepperoni will be dismembered at serving time. Now comes the hard decision--whether to have beer or wine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Chicken/feta/spinach sausage with rice (turkey broth/sausage bits/etc.), and Greek salad (olives/sun dried tomatoes/feta/capers/ etc.)