- 1 (15.5 ounce) can black beans, drained
- 1 (15.5 ounce) can black-eyed peas, drained
- 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained
- 2 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
- 1/2 medium onion, chopped
- 1/4 green bell pepper, finely chopped
- 1/2 cup chopped pickled jalapeno peppers
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
- 1 cup Italian salad dressing
- 3/4 cup chopped cilantro

Directions

1. Mix beans, peas, tomatoes, corn, onion, bell pepper, and jalapeno peppers in a large bowl. Season with garlic salt. Add dressing and cilantro; toss to coat. Refrigerate for 20 minutes or until ready to serve.

My original thought for dinner was to marinate the chicken in something and then grill them, then wrap the asparagus in the prosciutto and grille that… then make some potato dish.

Sounded good on paper, but then I had NOTHING, I mean NOTHING to marinate the chicken in!  Oops…

Plan B.

Google Chicken, Prosciutto, Asparagus and see what comes up!

I came across the following recipe – since I didn’t have the exact ingredients, I’m going to give you MY version.  Much to my delight EVERYONE LOVED IT!  This recipe will easily serve five (two adults and three kids)… adjust accordingly for your family size.

Ingredients:

Olive Oil (to cook the asparagus in, and to put in the pan with the potatoes)
1 bunch of asparagus spears – roughly a dozen or so spears (I cut the bottom 1/3 off because it’s usually kind of tough and the kids won’t eat it)
Salt and pepper to taste
5 boneless chicken breast halves
dried basil
10 pieces of thin sliced prosciutto (you’ll want about two slices per chicken breast)
parmesan cheese (the kind you’d sprinkle on pasta)
2 good tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup or so water
1/4 to 1/2 cup light cream

Directions:

Heat oven to 375F.

In a roasting pan, put your potatoes, roughly cut into 1″ cubes.  Put just enough olive oil to cover the potatoes, then add seasoning.  I used a packet of seasoning we got from Yankee Candle (called Harvest Thyme, basically a thyme/rosemary/parsley/spice pre-mix)… coat the potatoes with the seasoning and put in the oven uncovered.

Heat a 12″ ovenproof skillet – I use a cast-iron skillet, it’s just perfect for this type of meal.  Over medium-high heat, add about 1 1/2 Tbsp of oil and add the asparagus.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  As the asparagus saute, shake the pan often to prevent them from burning.  You don’t want to overcook the asparagus!  I find that adding a bit of liquid, say a 1/2 cup of water, at the beginning helps steam the asparagus while it cooks.  Take a taste after about 2 to 4 minutes.  You’re looking for “al dente” NOT mush.  So if they still have a bit of crunch, they’re probably done.  Remember, they’re going to cook a bit more when you put them in the chicken.

Lay the chicken on a cutting board OR better yet, I put plastic wrap on my counter (granite) and put the chicken between another piece of plastic wrap to hammer them to a consistent width.  Basically, you want to pound out the breasts until they are a uniform thickness so they cook evenly and are easy to roll out.  Use a meat mallet or a heavy skillet to flatten out the breasts.

When they are all pounded out – lay out the breast long way (from right to left, not top to bottom) and start arranging an even layer in this order: a light but even sprinkling of dried basil, a light but even layer of the parmesan cheese, prosciutto, and then the asparagus.  I used enough to cover the middle portion of the chicken – depending on how big, between 6 and 8 asparagus spears.  With the long side of the breast facing you, roll the chicken away from you, folding it tightly over itself.  Use a couple of toothpicks (or more) to seal the rolled area.  Season with a bit of salt and pepper.

Put the skillet back on the heat (medium-high) add about two more tablespoons of olive oil and put the chicken rolls in.  Cook the chicken on all sides until they are browned, about 3 minutes or so per side.  Remove chicken to a plate for the moment, and add the two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.  Scrape all the chicken that might have stuck to the pan and let cook about a minute – now add the 1/4 cup of water.  Put the chicken back into the pan and coat with the mixture.  Loosely cover the chicken and put in the 375F oven.

Give them a good 10-15 minutes… basically once the potatoes are done, the chicken is done too!

The only thing missing from the recipe was that there wasn’t really much “sauce”, so I took the chicken out of the pan (oh, by the way, that frickin’ pan is 375F HOT, use kitchen mitts and for goodness sake DON’T FORGET the PAN IS STILL HOT – I burned my hand!).  I added about 1/4 to 1/2 of light cream and let the mixture cook a bit – I could have probably made a better sauce, but it was SO GOOD!  I’ll work to perfect the sauce someday, but for now, it’s quick, simple and everyone loved it!

Let the chicken rest for a couple of minutes, cut the rolls diagonally (because it makes it look so pretty) and serve with a spoonful of the sauce.  OR do like we do and serve from the pan and we all dip into the pan for the sauce!

Enjoy!

Gnocchi are very easy to make and if you have a bunch of people involved, everybody can get in on the action.

Here’s the basic (very basic) recipe:
Potato:
2 medium Yukon gold potatoess – can substitute with russet potatoes
1/2 tsp Kosher salt
2 tsp Water

Preheat your oven to 400º degrees Fahrenheit. Put the potatoes onto some foil, add the salt and water, and wrap. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, or until cooked through. I’m pretty sure it took closer to an hour, but at that point we had already started drinking wine!
Peel the potatoes while they are still hot. Cut and rice the potatoes, don’t pile them in one spot. Let the potatoes cool completely! If you don’t, you’ll wind up cooking the egg and have mashed potatoes with scrambled eggs…

Sprinkle the potatoes with a good amount of flour. Aerate the potatoes with a bench scraper, and then add the salt, nutmeg and white pepper. Mix up the egg yolks and pour them over the potatoes. Cover the surface again with more flour. Continue to cut and gently lift the dough.

Test the dough by squeezing it gently in your hand. It shouldn’t stick. Add a bit more flour, if needed.

Once done, shape the dough into a rectangle and fold it a few times, using your fingertips to bring it together. Flatten the dough out until it is about the thickness of your finger. Sprinkle with flour and let rest about 5 to 10 minutes.

The last bit was to cut them into about 1″ pieces then roll them down the back of a fork… it’s tricky at first, but once you get the hang of it, you get the fork mark on one side and an indent on the other side, great for catching all that great sauce!

Unpaid help makes the best gnocchi

We made two sauces: one quick marinara type sauce, whatever your favorite will do and another was a sage-butter sauce:
4 tbsp Unsalted butter
8 fresh sage leaves
1 large pinch Kosher salt
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

I heated the mixture in a steel bowl over the boiling water – THEN to make it really interesting, I put it all into a “magic bullet” device, with some olive oil and puree’d it all… it sort of emulsified and thickened a bit – Oh Soo good!

The gnocchi cook FAST so have your boiling water ready and do them in small batches so as not to make the water cool and take a long time to bring back to a boil. We did about 1 to 1.5 dozen at a time. We scooped them right from the water right into a pan of either sauce or the sage-butter mixture… and then served.

** We actually thought about taking this show on the road, it was that much fun!  Keep your eyes peeled, we might be pitching it to TLC, Discovery, Food Network, MTV, Oprah TV, A&E, CMT and/or BET in the very near future ***

In the meantime, please enjoy all the pictures from that night!

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Morning light thru the trees, originally uploaded by JamMastrJ.

I was backing out of our driveway to bring the kids to school and I actually stopped, got out, grabbed my camera and took this shot… it was too cool to miss…

I circled it… that little plug next to the Canon S9000.  I NEVER saw that before!  I’m sure it’s something that’s been in OS X for years, I just never had a situation where one of my printers was UNPLUGGED!  I guess now I  know if I see that little icon, someone kicked the plug .

Now I remember, it must have been when I was playing with Tethering my camera to my iMac.  I wanted to see if it worked and I must have inadvertently pulled the wrong USB plug out of the hub!  Phew, I feel better now.

The tethering DID work.  Aperture has this ability built in – Lightroom, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy.  After a bit of digging I did find a plug-in and I’ll talk about that a bit more in-depth in another post.

I made ribs this week – they were so yummy!  Best part was the leftovers – let me tell you.

To start, I took babyback ribs (pork) and hit them with a rub.  I wrapped them in foil and stuck them in a bar-b-que stand thingy (do you like my technical lingo?).

I smoked them over indirect heat for about five hours – and then to finish them, I took them off the bar-b-que grill and put them on the regular grill.  I put a slather of bar-b-que sauce on them and just let the sauce caramelize on the heat.

Whoa, they were DELISH!

So, I had a bunch of leftovers because Lizzy and I are the only ones that will eat the ribs.  What to do with the leftovers??

I grabbed my trusty crock pot this morning and put the ribs in along with a couple of bottles of Guinness 250 and some bar-b-que sauce (I used Sweet Baby Ray’s).

Holy smokes, GOOD EATS!

Here are some pics for you:

I recommend you try this, you’ll love it!!!

(FYI, I’m too lazy to do it right now, but next batch I’ll take step-by-step pictures as well as give you the exact rubs, etc.)

It came with 10.5 (Leopard) installed, but had the 10.6 (Snow Leopard) upgrade disk in the box – so I upgraded, of course!

Overall, I like the UI improvements.  There are a few really neat items like being able to scroll thru the contents of a “quick preview” of say the Downloads folder or the Documents folder (from the Dock).  One thing I’d like to see is once you have the folder (Downloads or whatever) open, to have the ability to hit the space bar AGAIN to see the contents of the file selected without having to open it (10.6.1 ??).

Here’s a great article on Gizmoto on the 15 Snow Leopard Tricks You Have To Try.  There are some really slick things, the one I especially like is the ability to sync my contacts to BOTH my MobileMe account AND my Gmail account.

The problem I’m running into right now is that Aperture is crashing every time I try to run it… so far, upgrading it to 2.4.1 hasn’t worked.

I like using Aperture, it has a few features that Lightroom doesn’t have – I transitioned my library over to Lightroom earlier this year, but continued using Aperture for the small tasks it does well.

I just tried AppZapper to wipe out Aperture – we’ll see if completely cleaning it out and reinstalling it then upgrading it to 2.1.4 does the trick.

I’ve unsubscribed so many times now that it’s a joke.  This last time, I got a message that “an error occurred” – you think I can find anything on their website to direct me to a contact of ANY sort?  It makes me nuts that I can’t unsubscribe by just replying “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

ugh!

Perhaps if I cancel my service? Hmmm… that might do the trick