Sweet potato, rosemary and pancetta waffles, rosemary roasted pork tenderloin and a maple mustard sauce

So waffles eh? That seems to be a trend I am hearing about in the last few days. First Kerrie tells me about a conversation she had with her mom about falafel waffles and brownie waffles, the Cooking Channel Blog is all about waffles,  a couple weeks back I was thinking about Alton Browns Sweet Potato Waffles, and just last week my favorite local bar had fried chicken on special which led to a chicken and waffles discussion.

It seemed waffles and I were heading for a collision course.I just had to figure out where we were going to collide.

I decided to give sweet potato waffles a try but I wanted to go full on savory rather than attempting to make breakfast waffles with a twist. I have a fantastic waffle recipe that I love and don't really need to mess with (no it isn't posted yet, yes I will get around to it.)

I looked over Alton's recipe and started formulating some ideas, then I found this recipe on a blog called Food With Legs

I must say the author did most of my thinking for me on the waffles. I really only made one change and that was baking the sweet potatoes instead of steaming. Roasting the requisite garlic at the same time just makes sense. I think baking them brings an additional layer of flavor that you don't get from steaming.

One other note of caution about the recipe. It calls for 6 beaten egg whites about midway through the instructions but does not show them in the ingredient list. Just be sure you have them on hand.

The end result was delicious. The rosemary, sweet potatoes and garlic really played off of each other. Contrary to the authors opinion I think the pancetta was a bit too mild and got lost in the mix. It was a nice crunchy textural element but I think a little smokiness would have been welcome. I may try it again with sliced pancetta instead of cubed.

Now of course the next step was what to serve with it. I have to make a confession, I have never made fried chicken. I love fried chicken and I seek it out wherever I can. I just have never gotten around to making it myself.  It shames me. I would have tried to make it tonight but it just seemed like too much, and too much fat. So I started thinking of alternatives and I remembered this maple mustard pork chop recipe I made once upon a time and a recipe was born. Instead of chicken and maple syrup I would make roasted pork tenderloin with the maple mustard bbq suace.

The sauce comes from an often used cookbook called BBQ USA: 425 Fiery Recipes from All Across America. Every recipe I have tried has been a winner. You will need

1 Tbsp Butter
2 slices bacon cut into 1/4 inch slivers (replaced with pancetta today)
1 small onion finely chopped ( about 3/4 cup)
1 clove garlic minced
1 Tbsp tomato paste
3/4 cup maple syrup (grade b if you can find it)
6 Tbsp Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
kosher salt and black pepper to taste.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the onion garlic and bacon. Saute until the bacon is crispy then add the tomato paste. Stir for a minute or two then add the mustard, syrup and vinegar. Bring to a boil then reduce hit to low and simmer 10- 12 minutes.  Add salt and pepper to taste. You can serve it hot or at room temp

Since I was using it as maple syrup I just drizzled it on the waffles at room temp.

The pork tenderloin was pretty simple, I had a couple of big flavors going already so I just wanted to the pork to taste like pork. I coated it in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, I jammed a branch of rosemary in each end then seared it on all sides. 2 minutes a side or so. Then I put it into a 375 degree oven and baked it until it hit a temp of 150.

Slice up the pork, lay it on a waffle and drizzle with the sauce. It was a great combination of savory and sweet. If you love chicken and waffles then you really should try this. If chicken and waffles has always sounded crazy then try this and you may reconsider.

I long overdue update, I hope it's worth it.

I have been on the road a lot since the beginning of the month so cooking has not been easy. I went all Sandra Lee on a pork tenderloin last week and it was great (Kerrie said I was being too hard on myself but it started with a bottle marinade). Venison pot roast graced the table last night and while the meat was delicious I didn't do anything special. Tonight on the other hand I served hoisin barbecued chicken.

The original recipe comes from a cookbook book I love called The Wine Lovers Cookbook

The recipe is designed for game hens and done on the grill, it also has a Chinese style vegetable recipe that I did use last summer when I did the grilled game hens. It was an excellent accompaniment.

It was too cold and snowy to grill and I didn't have any game hens so a nicely butterflied chicken got the treatment. The BBQ sauce is really the star. The sauce needs to cool to room temp before use so you can do this well ahead. For a whole chicken I doubled it but the orginal measurements are

1/2 cup reduce salt soy sauce (this sauce leans towards salty even with it so be careful)
1/4 cup Mirin, sweet sake or riesling ( I used a semi dry vidal I had on hand)
2 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 Tbsp fermented black beans ( I have not seen fermented black beans outside of an asian market, I found a nice versatile substitute in a black bean sauce with garlic, just reduce the garlic to one clove if you use it. It is readily available)
2 tsp sesame chili oil ( this is a staple in our house, it is the key in the spicy mayos you see in sushi, if you have regular sesame oil and some crushed red pepper and go ahead)
2 tsp fresh lime juice
2 Tbsp ground ginger
1/3 cup chopped cilantro

Add all the ingredients to a saucepan and bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 7-8 minutes.

Once it cools, use it as a marinade for whatever meat you are going to serve. For chicken or game hens it should be at least 3 hours or longer.

After you remove your meat from the marinade add the marinade to a sauce pan and bring it back to a boil, simmer for at least 3 minutes before using as a basting sauce.

If using this on the grill you want to use indirect heat and baste frequently, if you are oven roasting the you will want to keep the heat at about 375, with all the honey and sugar in the wine it will burn easily so you want to keep the temp a little lower. Baste each side frequently, every 15-20 minutes or so.

The skin will wind up this incredible dark mahogany color that will lead to a fight over tasty skin bits. I really should have taken a picture tonight.

Serve with the same wine you use in the sauce and enjoy.

Chicken Cordon Bleu with a white wine cream sauce

Kerrie's Birthday was mid week this week so we delayed her birthday dinner until Friday night so I would have time to cook. She decided she wanted Chicken Cordon Bleu this year so I went to work finding recipes. In the end I kind of combined two that appealed to me and the results were excellent.

The main recipe was from Tyler Florence,  while he can be a bit of a tool at times I generally like his recipes.
I didn't really diverge from it at all other than adding some paprika and garlic to the flour before dredging the chicken. I also used a really nice aged gruyere cheese instead of swiss.

the other recipe I pulled from was for a non breaded chicken cordon bleu recipe. The recipe itself might be worth trying at some point but it's lack of breading ruled it out for birthday dinner. The sauce however looked great and I thought it would be delicious to serve with the chicken and the steamed asparagus and broccoli I was serving on the side.

One major problem of course, I could not make the sauce in the way described in the recipe without soaking my nice crispy breading. That would not do.

Enter whole chicken breasts. Whenever possible I like to avoid buying boneless skinless chicken. there are many reasons for doing so, cost is a big one but flavor drives me. The other advantage to buying bone in breasts is that you always get the tender. Those got their own coat of breading for the kids to eat. Sometimes they are included on boneless skinless breast but there is no guarantee.

So after separating the breasts and tenders from the bones and skin, I took the "waste", seasoned them up with some salt and pepper and tossed them into a hot pan with some olive oil. This gave me a nice pan full of tasty browned bits to make the wine and cream sauce with.

One other wrinkle to this meal was I had to stage it so I could carry everything to Kerrie's mom's house. Kerrie's mom is laid up with a broken leg and can't travel yet so we brought birthday dinner to her house.
The chicken is easy, you roll and bread it and set it in a baking dish for cooking later. Realistically you could freeze it at this stage and have a meal in the can for anytime.

For the sauce I added the butter to the browned chicken bits and then deglazed the pan with the wine. I seasoned and reduced it then set it aside to bring with us.

Once I put had the chicken in the oven for 10 minutes or so I reheated the sauce and added the cream and cornstarch mixture as directed so it was hot and fresh to serve with dinner. With all that cream and butter I was pretty sure it wouldn't reheat well and would most likely turn into a pasty thick slop. It wasn't worth the risk.

One other really interesting offshoot to the recipe was around portion size. I liked the idea of slicing the chicken and serving it up family style. I made 5 portions and sliced up 3 and 1/2 for service for 4 adults. We didn't come close to finishing what I had sliced and had 1.5 breasts left untouched. Typically with Codon Bleu you give each person a whole portion and if they are anything like me, they eat what is on their plate. It was a nice way to apply some portion control without looking like a skimpy plate.

I served it with a loaf of Wegmans Garlic Tuscan bread.  and the remaining wine,which was a Standing Stone Semi dry vidal

If you live near a Wegmans and have not tried the tuscan garlic bread then shame on you, go buy some, now.
If you don't live near a Wegmans, well I'm sorry.

A simple composed meal

Sometimes I can't help myself, I have to get cute with my food. While I usually try to stay within a general theme for a meal I rarely put much thought into carrying flavors from one dish to another or make sauces to tie all the elements together. Sometimes it happens naturally, sometimes, like today I have a plan.
We decided to have a late dinner tonight so we could eat like civilized adults after the kids went to bed, which gave me the opportunity to focus on the meal. I would be lying if I said that a good sprinkling of kid free silence was a key ingredient.


 The menu

Grilled Pork Chops, Caramelized brussel sprouts, and a cucumber ribbon salad.

While the kids were eating their oh so tasty dinner, I made the dressing for the salad.  Really the whole idea for the salad came from the the fact that I had half a cucumber sitting on the cutting board  left over from the kids. I figured I would hit it with the peeler and figure out what to do with it from there.

I looked up a few recipes while I planned and I found one that had most of the flavors I was after.
However I wanted something creamy to make it a bit more reminiscent of tzatziki sauce but with a different overall flavor. So I added a scoop of Greek yogurt, some honey and a touch of buttermilk to loosen it up. I added some mixed field greens and baby spinach to a bowl, mounded the cucumbers on top and added the dressing. A few kalamata olives later and it really came together.

I went back to the well with the caramelized brussel sprouts, I omitted the feta this time for no real reason.
The pomegranate molasses was going to be the thread for the whole meal. It's origins are from the Middle East and it is used in a lot of Mediterranean dishes so those are the flavors I was focusing on.

We got some great pork chops from Sweet Grass Farms which I coated with a bit of olive oil, kosher salt, black pepper and cumin. While they rested and came up to room temp I cut and prepped the sprouts. heated up my grill pan for the chops and a big frying pan for the sprouts.

Once both pans were nice and hot I got to work, getting all the sprouts down on the cut side to develop their lovely brown color and dropping the chops onto a hot pan.

I cooked the chops for about 6-8 minutes per side to an internal temp of 150-155. With good quality pork I don't mind a bit of pink inside. Really it won't hurt you and your delicious tender pork will make you a  happier person. Let the pork rest for a few minutes before serving.

I drizzled the pomegranate molasses over the chops and the sprouts on the plate and enjoyed, added a mound of the salad and voila, a complete meal.

The juice from the pork, the molasses, and the dressing all blended very well on the plate and each bite of the different dishes carried the flavors of the others.

All in all it turned into a nice quiet tasty meal.

Easter Cheese Bread for Rebecca

1 LB grated Romano Cheese (you can use a Parmesan Romano blend but all Romano is the best)
1/2 cup sugar (a scant 1/2 cup)
1 tsp salt
1/2 Cup crisco
2 Cups scalded milk

1  2 oz yeast cake
dissolved in 1/2 cup lukewarm water

8-12 eggs beaten ( the variance is based on size of eggs, when this recipe was written by my great grandmother eggs were pretty inconsistent)
11 cups (or less) flour
1/2 (or more) tsp black pepper

I have a 4.5 quart Kitchen Aid mixer which cannot handle this recipe as a whole batch so I split it in two. If you have a big 6 quart mixer you might be able to do the whole thing.

Add the first 5 ingredients to your mixing bowl. I like to leave a few chunks of Romano cheese in the mix. They provide a happy little bite of cheese to the lucky souls who find them in the bread.



Blend together in the bowl of your mixer, the scalded milk should melt the crisco pretty nicely. Be sure the mixture is not to hot then add your yeast. Mix well, then add the beaten eggs, mix well. Then add the pepper and 4-5 cups of flour. Start mixing and add flour about 1/2 cup at a time until the dough forms a soft sponge. This is the step that takes the most practice and feel. The dough will still be pretty sticky and you should be able to see bubbles in it. It won't be a typical elastic bread dough.

Place the dough in a warm oiled kettle or mixing bowl, cover with a picee of wax paper and a clean kitchen towel and let it rise.

After it rises the first time punch it down and divide into 4 loaves. Place each loaf into a greased bread pan or suitably sized  vessel. It is part of the tradition in our family to to make at least one loaf in a different shaped or sized thing. Most of that stems from my mother never owning four loaf pans but having a lot of cool pottery that was made by my Aunt and/or Uncle.

Cover the loaves and let the dough rise again in the pans.

Preheat the oven to 425

Brush each loaf with beaten egg.  Now at this point if you aren't careful the loaves will collapse a bit in the pan so I usually plan on letting them rise for 10 minutes or so after I have brushed them.

Bake at 425 for 15 minutes then reduce the temperature to 350 and bake for an additional 15 minutes.

The tops of the loaves should be a dark mahogany color and the loaves will be surprisingly light for their size. Let them cool before cutting, it will be hard because they smell amazing but if you cut them too soon they tend to fall apart a bit.

As much as I love this bread fresh and served with Easter dinner, it is really the toast it makes the next day. Toasted Easter cheese bread with butter is a delight that I look forward to every year.

The two full rises and the process of putting this bread together turns it into a long project which is why I only make it once a year. It is very well worth it.