I Have Moved!

My new blog, Cooking With Wolfes, is up and ready to go!  I will no longer be updating this blog and have moved all of my Food Buzz and related operations to the new one.  You can find the blog at cookingwithwolfes.blogspot.com and you can email me at cookingwithwolfes@gmail.com.

You can also access me via Foodbuzz

The new blog focuses on seasonal and on-sale items to create budget-friendly and tasty meals.  Enjoy!

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Retooling

Recently I have been thinking about how to move this forward.  To me, food blogging is my hobby, but it's also a passion and something that I truly have a lot of interest in.  So I'm changing.  My blog, perhaps my approach, websites, probably a lot!  I want to expand and hopefully brand my unique perspective of cooking in a way that people can find it approachable and fun.  So give me a few weeks and look forward to some big new things!

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Garden Update- Rabbit Food

I'm about 2 months into my garden and things are progressing. "Progressing nicely" might be a stretch, mainly because I'm not really getting the total yields I want, but I think that has a lot do with a) this is my first garden and b) the weather can't make up its mind. But I'm actually harvesting veggies, so I really shouldn’t be complaining.

I have two separate gardens going, one a raised bed, and one a converted flower bed (I think that's what it was) that I have most of my herbs and viney things in. The raised bed recently yielded all the radishes it was going to give me, fewer than I expected though. I may have not thinned them enough, understandably, because I hate thinning things, it's like killing a bunch of plants! But they have finished and now I have planted beans in their wake. I'm up to my ears in lettuce now as well. If you have not ever grown your own lettuce, I highly recommend it. It just tastes so much more…lettucy. There is no other way to describe it, really.

I have tomatoes in now, I believe 10 plants. Yes, I do realize that's a lot, but we really like tomatoes. I can't wait for those. And I have a pretty sound herb rotation going as well, something I'm also fond of because having them on hand is easier and cheaper than buying them.

So why write all this? Well, it's nice to show off what I've been doing, sure, but it's also lessons people can use to either avoid or do what I did to better their own garden. I will update again in July, hopefully I can keep the birds and rabbits out until then.

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Frying the Turkey

Over Memorial Day we decided to have a cook out (as is tradition). I decided to do something a little bit different this year, though. I received a frying/boil kit for Christmas last year, so I decided to give turkey frying a go. I have deep fried one other turkey in my life, at Em's house for Thanksgiving one year. And it was awesome. So why not?

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Burritos with Tomatillo Sauce

A burrito is something of a perfect storm. A tortilla wrapped around loads of meat, veggies, beans, or even rice, it just makes sense. I would even call it better than a sandwich (but hey, I'm biased). The one thing we are lacking though, are burritos we eat with forks and knives. I'm referring to burritos served enchilada style, something fairly common in the Southwest, but not so much in other places. In fact, only one place I know of serves them this way in my area. Why? It's such an enticing concept, take a burrito, smother it in sauce and cheese, and bake it. I drifted away for a few seconds thinking about that last sentence. Seriously.

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Fajitas

I remember a time about 10 years ago when I was eating fajitas once a week. I worked in a Mexican restaurant as a busboy, and as is the norm for family restaurants, staff got to eat whatever was leftover at the end of the night. Wednesday night was fajita night and one of my shifts, so I often got at least a little bit of the leftover grilled steak or chicken. I honestly never tired of it. Now I think I make fajitas every few weeks, especially during the summer months, it's a meal that is just so tasty, simple, and downright fun to eat.

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Real Men Eat Quiche

I love quiche, and I think I know why.  It's an egg and cheese pie in a crust.  How could you not like that?  Well, ok, my wife doesn’t care for it, or at least, she didn’t before.  It's hopefully another dish I have converted her on (see cake, carrot).  I made it the other night and did a little fiddling with the recipe I usually use and what do you know, she liked it!  And so did I.

Quiche can be a finicky beast because of introducing such a wet filling into a delicate crust.  I pre-bake my crust, which I believe is the standard.  But I tried baking it a little longer this time so the bottom would crisp up and not get too soggy.  On a tangent for a moment, I don’t use pie weights.  I think they are a waste of money.  I mean, you have to use aluminum foil anyways to line your pie and then add weights, so why not use something cheap?  Like beans!  I keep a bag of dried pinto beans that I use for pie weights.  I like it.

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Grilled Fish with Pineapple Salsa

Growing up I ate a decent amount of fish. Most of it was in the form of canned tuna, but we also fished during the summer and I had trout or various other wild caught fish. But living in Arizona, we really did not see a lot of things like Mahi-Mahi, snapper, or tuna steaks, the only exception being when someone brought back fish from a deep sea fishing trip. That's how I came across the original recipe for this (from Emeril), one of my first external recipes I tried outside of my parents cooking. Over the years I have scaled back the overkill of the preparation for this dish, and I am really quite happy with it now. It's perfect for a warm evening to grill outside.  It's also wonderfully healthy.

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Garden Me

It's spring time here at Boilermaker Kitchen, which can only mean one thing. A garden! Yep, it's my first spring in an actual house since I left the desert air of Arizona behind. I had some summer gardens in Connecticut while I was there, but this will be my first all season plot. I'm a little excited, and a lot freaked out. I joined the Lafayette gardening online community to get some tips and hints with this part of the country. My main goal is to not over water my plants (this is because in Arizona you water your garden twice a day thanks to the blistering heat).

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Beef Stroganoff

Stroganoff is one of those dishes that I grew up making one way, only to find out you can make it an entirely different way only a short time ago. Beef tenderloin as the meat source? That still boggles my mind, as I would never use such an expensive cut of meat in a dish that I consider old fashioned home cooking. But maybe that's just me being cheap. I also tried the revamped recipe from Cook's Illustrated, which used sirloin tip (a somewhat cheaper cut), but surprisingly I did not like their recipe at all. Odd, I thought to myself, rarely do I not enjoy a recipe from ATK. Well, as it turns out, it just was not for me.

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