Watch Good Eats – S1E11 – Pantry Raid I – Use Your Noodle in Educational & How-To |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

We had decided to make our pasta with portobello caps, asparagus, tomatoes, and shallots. Here Jill practices her knife skills on preparing the veggies.

We opted for whole grain wheat pasta for the health benefits and the earthy flavor.

We did a quick sauté of the mushrooms, asparagus, and shallots in olive oil. Ingredients that were nearly cooked were moved the outside of the pan as to no over-do them while new ingredients were added.

The tomatoes were just barely heated through in a skillet before joining the medley.  Over cooking tomatoes turns them into mushy goo.

The naked pasta sits, waiting in the wings for us to plate it up.

After ladeling big spoonfuls of the toppings on our pasta, we finished it quickly with a little squeeze of lemon and…

Grated parmesan cheese!  This dish turned out very flavorful! When we went back for seconds, we put the lemon and parmesan directly onto the noodles as well as onto the toppings which made it even better.

See you next time and keep cooking!

Part one up top, part two here.

What could be more simple than browning a pound of breakfast sausage?

We did our best to let this cook down to render out as much of the fat and produce lots of good yummy bits on the bottom of the pan.  Even then, we had to add some bacon fat to have enough in the pan for the roux.

A little 2%, off the heat, and whisk continuously!

Hey, this is really starting to look like gravy!

Keeping with the “breakfast for dinner” theme, we made some over-easy eggs and added some tomatoes for their acidity, and for a little pop of color.  Because, let’s be honest, without them this is a plate of brown food.

The gravy came out a tad thick – so definitely heed AB’s tip well – a sauce will always thicken on it’s way to the table.

Oh, in case you haven’t connected the dots, hidden under those goopy piles of gravy are the biscuits we made from The Dough Also Rises.

See you next time and keep cooking!

This is part one, go here for part two.

Here’s everything for the “dry team”. The flour was measured by weight but everything else was added by measure

Same story here.  Weighed the buttermilk, butter, and shortening.  And yes, the buttermilk is lowfat – if this choice was detectable in the end-product we’d be surprised – they were fantastic.

When Peter first started cutting in the fat, he wasn’t sure if he was doing it right, but sure enough that cornmeal-like texture came together after a few minutes.  P.S. this stuff becomes super sticky once you add the buttermilk.

The dough rolled out ready for cutting.  Wait, what did you say Jill?  We don’t have a biscuit cutter? Oh for crying out loud, we knew we were doing the biscuit Good Eats, why didn’t we buy a biscuit cutter?  Well crap. Now what?

Ahhh, improvisation.  I think AB would approve of our use of this can-previously-known-as-green-giant-corn-niblets.

Zoë thumbs dimples into the center of each biscuit.  The recipe says it will make 12, but we ended up with eight. Errr, seven and three-fourths.  We attribute this difference to our non-standard-sized “biscuit cutter.”

Golden-brown and delicious! These were quite easy to make and most certainly tasted better than anything coming from a can w/that fat little dough boy on the label.

Stay-tuned for how we plated these in the next post!

See you next time and keep cooking!

!!! WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG READING !!!

!!! TO BRING YOU THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE !!!

We discussed this at great length, but ultimately decided not to do this episode, at least not right away.  The idea of making ice-cream in the middle of winter just didn’t appeal that much, especially since both of us are trying to be at least somewhat mindful of our caloric intake this year.

Also, the notion of buying an ice-cream machine just to do this show felt, well, exorbitant.

So look for us to come back to this episode.  Perhaps we’ll make the granita when the weather warms up.

If you still want to watch this episode in the mean time, here are parts one and two.

See you next time and keep cooking!

This is Part 1 of the epiosode “A bird in the Pan”.  Alton only makes one recipe in this episode so make sure to watch part two also for the full lesson.

As AB always encourages, here is the full mise en place for the herb stuffing that will go under the skin: Lemon Zest, 4 cloves of garlic, peppercorns, salt, thyme, and olive oil.

Jill butchering the chicken (purchased from our local butcher) – first bit to go is backbone. In the foreground you can see some leftover potatoes from This Spud’s For You, which we would mash later.

Filling in the space between skin and meat with the stuffing mixture

After-shot.  We placed the chicken in a roasting pan with celery, carrots, and onions and put it all under the broiler on high for 12 minutes skin-side up, and 15 minutes skin-side down. Since it still was not quite done, we turned the oven to “bake” and put it back in until the breast meat was at 165°.

The final product was served with the aforementioned mashed potatoes and seared/braised leeks. We also made the jus from the episode, but did not take any pictures of that. Sorry

See you next time and keep cooking!

The above is part two, make sure to catch part one also!

Heeding AB’s advice well, we made sure to prepare our own croutons.  It even helped us save money because we bought day-old bread from the discount rack at the grocery store.

We really wish we could put the smell of these golden bread cubes of awesome here on the internet, but sadly we cannot.  Maybe web 4.0.

We know that AB prepares this with just the smaller, whole leaves from the heart of the head, but we opted to be more economical and used more of the lettuce.

Jill bought Peter this gorgeous pepper mill for his birthday last year.  It has been pressed into good use nearly every day since

After adding the juice of a lemon and three shots of Lea & Perrins, we threw caution to the wind and proceeded with the coddled eggs (boiled for a minute and then shocked in ice water) and we’re glad we did – the end result was amazing.

Note: Traditional caesar salad does not actually feature anchovies, a popular misconception, because Worchestershire contains anchovies.

Since this was our dinner, we added some seared and roasted chicken, which itself was liberally coated with the garlic that was strained from the oil during the making of the croutons.

Now is the time for brutal honesty, kids.  We think this is one of the best caesar salads we’ve ever had, second only to table-side prepared caesars at fancy-pants restaurants.  And the kicker?  It’s easy. Get in your kitchen and make one of these this week!

See you next time and keep cooking!

We actually did this episode and the next one (Salad Daze) on the same night.  And yes, we were good little boys and girls and ate our dinner first, but this episode comes first in the chronology of the show so deal.

The above is part two, make sure to catch part one as well.

Mis en place! (Yes, that’s a whole stick of butter)

Jill’s superb zesting of this lemon is second only to her zest for Peter (Ed Note: Peter wrote this line)

Twelve-plus minutes of stirring is taxing on anybody but the seasoned chef, or perhaps an octopus. We basically worked on the WWF “tag-team” style of taking turns, taking three or so minutes each at a time.

The last of butter melts in as the curd takes on a glossy sheen.

While preparing to take this picture, Jill discovered that our camera has a “cuisine” setting which she promptly employed.  I think it came out pretty well – what do you think?

Oh, did I forget to mention how it tasted? I’d say it was a perfect balance of lemon tartness and buttery smoothness.  The best part is that, according to AB, it will last a month in the fridge so we don’t have to feel guilty about not eating it all in just a couple days!

The above is part two, since we chose our recipe from the 2nd half of the show. Catch part one if you want to start there.

If you’re wondering which one of us shrunk to peel some potatoes, don’t.  That’s Peter’s daughter, Zoë. Good to know kids are useful for some manual labor

We (surprisingly) didn’t actually own a mandoline or v-slicer before tackling this episode’s dish, so this brand new one was purchased just minutes earlier at Sur la Table.

We didn’t really want to make a bunch of servings, so our gratin went into a 9×9 casserole instead of the 9×13 in the show.

Doesn’t it look beautiful? Clearly Jill was in charge of layering while Peter toiled away slicing potatoes and onions.

Here it is all together just before the addition of the dairy. WARNING! If you forget to season each layer with salt and pepper, you will have to employ your latent gymnast skills to disassemble your gratin using every spatula you own plus a couple flexible cutting mats to fix that error.  Not that we know from personal experience or anything…

All done after the exact cooking times in the show.  We made our gratin from bacon, white onion, and spinach. The cheese we used was a three-cheese blend of asiago, parmesan, and fontina which was purchased at Whole Foods.

Ready to eat!  Not the prettiest dish (nor the prettiest photo) but it was damn tasty. We paired our gratin with a roasted pork tenderloin into which we stuffed whole garlic cloves and sage leaves.  Also, if you’re wondering why the plate is so empty looking, well, it’s the new year and we are watching our portion sizes!

See you next time, and keep cooking!

First post!

Enter, the first ever Good Eats.

(Don’t forget part two!)

And now, it’s our turn.

These two beautiful Angus ribeye steaks were purchased locally at the VonGeertsem Butcher Shoppe and we can say without hesitation that the quality of this meal started right here. Go visit Greg Geerts and tell him Jill and Peter sent ya.

We dutifully followed AB’s instructions and liberally seasoned our meat with salt and pepper, rubbed frugally with canola oil.  Notice the official Good Eats salt cellar

Our pan plucked from the 500 degree oven received the first steak with a hearty sizzle. (The pan in the back has the warm bacon vinaigrette for our salad, FYI)

A mere 30 seconds of searing produced this mouth-watering crust. That’s right folks, we’re doing real cooking on this blog.

Back into the hot oven for two minutes per side. Again, following AB’s instructions we checked the internal temperature of the steaks for doneness and begrudgingly stuck them back in the oven – they were about 20 degrees short of our target of 135.  Remember, your times, temps, and ovens will vary!

Voila!  We served our steaks with a warm blue cheese-bacon vinaigrette-dressed salad of spinach and pecans (the blue cheese was also purchased locally from Scardello). Peter added more of that same cheese to his steak.

We definitely chalked up our inaugural Good Eats dinner as a success!

See you next time and keep cooking