Please excuse our brief hiatus. We are took the last two weeks off from the blog because we’ve been shooting our food themed webseries, Pairings. We’ll be back this Thursday with a blog for Easter.
Meanwhile, here a few photos to enjoy from our filming.
ALAN making Madelines
JADE (Jessica Mills) teaches ALAN (yours truly) how to play guitar
Jodie makes a cameo
Spaghetti and Meatballs
DREW and ALAN converse over coffee and chocolate croissants
ALAN on a date with JILL
I want to be clear. I love Corned Beef and Cabbage, but you probably have you Corned Beef recipe by now if you celebrate St. Patty’s often. But, if you want something different this year, or, if you’re like me and you throw a huge St. Patty’s party and want more than one option for your guests, or maybe you’re going to a potluck, my Bangers and Mash recipe is one of my favorites. I make it year round.
Bangers are a style of British or Irish peasant sausage that is made with rusk. And since that explains everything nicely, I’ll move on to the recipe.
Bangers & Ma- what’s that? You have know idea what rusk is? Why that would make it a peasant sausage or what that has to do with the name ‘banger’? Oh, I’m sorry, I am shocked that it wasn’t clear.
Well, rusk is basically bread. Specifically a wheat product used in the stuffing of the sausage to help the meat go farther. More rusk, more sausage. Hence, why it was good and cheap for the peasants. Rusk has the tendency to expand while cooking, causing the casing to pop very suddenly, creating a banging sound. To avoid this you should pierce each sausage with a fork several times to let the juices escape a little and keep the sausage from splitting (this is not a good practice for sausages without rusk. The rusk soaks up the juices of the meat, keeping the sausage moist, where piercing a regular sausage would dry it out.)
See, that was simple really. You would have figured it out on your own, right? Right.
Serve your bangers over mashed potatoes (the ‘mash’) and top with a gravy made from beer and carmelized onions. The onions take 50 minutes to an hour to carmelize and cannot be rushed, so while this recipe is not hard, leave yourself a good hour and a half to cook.
Bangers & Mash with a Scotch Ale Onion Gravy
2 Tablespoons olive oil
½ stick (1/4 cup) butter
6 to 12 bangers
4 to 6 onions, sliced pole to pole
2 sage sprigs, leaves removed and coarsely chopped
1 cup scotch ale (Scotch ale is a type of pale ale, but with dark roasted nutty overtones. Often called Wee Heavy or Kilt Lifter)
½ cup chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste
Welcome to my first Equipment Review on 5iveDollarFeasts. Today I’m going to take a quick look at the Chef’s Envy, one of the many home mandolins that have recently come on the market.
Recently, the Chef’s Envy has begun to have product demos at your local grocery store. You may have heard the announcements. Someone will get on the P.A system and announce that they are, “giving away a free gift in five minutes! Just meet our representative in the produce department!” If you wander over to the meeting area, you’ll see a little cutting board and presentation area set up. Soon, the same gentleman who made the announcement shows up dressed like a chef.
He proceeds to show you some little knick knack, like a plastic juicer or vegetable peeler, demonstrates how to use it, and the tells you he’ll give you one for free at the end of the demonstration.
“Here we go,” you’ll think because we are naturally skeptical of anything free, “I’m not going to sit through a boring half hour demonstration for a free vegetable peeler. I’ll give him a couple minutes. At most.” And then he’ll bring out the Chef’s Envy, a mandolin for the home chef, and proceed to show you how to use it. While there will be some showmanship (I mean, mandolins have been around for a long time, and they talk as if this were a new invention) you’ll actually be suitably impressed at it’s ease of use. Then he’ll offer it to you for $29.99 with 3 blade attachments and hand out your free gift.
This all happened to me a few months ago. I accepted my knick knack and turned to leave because I was sure it wasn’t as easy to use as he made it look. My skepticism was actually overcome, however, because I’ve actually been wanting a mandolin to get nice easy slices for catering and food styling. I always feel that if something is too good to be true it probably is, but after thinking about it, it seemed like a good deal, but not so good as to be too good to be true.
Rationalizing that I was doing a service to my blog readers by buying the product and testing it, I went ahead and grabbed one.
And I have to say, I am very glad I did. I use it almost once a week for six months now, and I am surprised the blades have stayed sharp. I don’t want to say it is perfect. The safety grip is a bit unwieldy for most vegetables, and it can be tricky to store, but the benefits outweigh any problems. Professional mandolins or slicers normally cost over $100 and this does the job nearly as well.
I would give the Chef’s Envy 3.5 out of 5 stars and say it well worth the $35 price tag on their website. I love them for dicing lots of onions quickly and easily.
Try making my pesto caprese salad recipe below; the Chef’s Envy makes slices the tomato perfectly. It’s also great for the vegetable toppings at a burger night or just to slice lemons or limes.
I am in no way associated with Chef’s Envy. I just want to give you my professional opinion on the product. I will have more equipment reviews in the future.
Oh, I almost forgot! While I like the vegetable peeler I got for free the plastic juicer they gave me that is meant to be stuck straight into the top of a lemon or other citrus is useless. It was free, but if you’re not thinking about buying the Chef’s Envy and they are offering the juicer, don’t stay for the free gift.
Pesto Caprese Salad
Pesto sauce below (retain a few basil leaves for the salad)
1 tomato for each salad, sliced on a mandolin (If you can find affordable heirloom tomatoes they are best, but any tomato will work. Roma are often the cheapest.)
Mozzerella in salted water (Di Buffala is a amazing, but likely not available for a 5ive Dollar Feast budget. I recommend ovaline. Broncini is awfully small for a caprese salad)
Pesto Sauce
2 cups basil leaves, stems removed
¾ cups pine nuts (For a Five Dollar Feast, you will probably have to substitute almonds or walnuts, preferably toasted if you can buy them that way. Hint: Trader Joe’s has sliced toasted almonds very cheap.)
½ cup parmesan, grated
½ cup olive oil
2 to 3 cloves garlic, peeled and halved
salt and pepper to taste
These days, for some unknown reason, most people are under the impression that you shouldn’t eat the skin of salmon. Well, I am here to tell you that you should. Nothing is quite as breathtaking a crisp salmon skin.
First, season the salmon very simply with salt and pepper. Then the trick is to heat a few Tablespoons of olive oil in a pan or skillet until good and hot. The oil will take on a shimmering sheen when it is ready. Now, add the salmon, skin down, to the hot olive oil and let it get nice and crispy. Then when you flip it to cook the other side, the crisp skin will be on the top of the salmon and should be served that way. Use a sharp knife to cut down through the skin and into the meat of the salmon underneath and eat the whole piece skin and all. Delicious.
A good way to enjoy this fish can be topped with a fruit salsa. This time I made a pineapple salsa, but you could also use a mango avocado salsa.
With both Pineapples and wild salmon (don’t used farmed, please, it is bad for you and bad for the planet) on sale this time of year, this is a great spring meal. Serve this with your favorite side of wild rice, pilaf, pasta, or in my case polenta. I just followed the instructions for corn meal mush on the side of my cornmeal box.
Crispy Skin Salmon
3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 filet of salmon, halved
salt and pepper
Pineapple Salsa
1 fresh pineapple
½ red onion, finely chopped
1 jalepeno, seeds removed and minced (optional)
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped coarsely
lime juice to taste
salt and pepper to taste
This salsa is great on large variety of foods. You can use it to top fish, a carnitas taco, or even serve it in a hollowed out pineapple shell for a fancy party treat served with colorful tortilla chips.
