Eat your veggies! ... in bacon fat

I was feeling a bit peckish tonight and looked around for something to snack on.  After throwing out a box of perfectly once perfect ginormous strawberries cause i let them sit and mold, i remembered i bought some baby carrots a while ago.  I had also leftover bacon fat grease all over the pan that i hadn't tossed out yet, mainly cause i can never bare to throw out perfectly good bacon fat grease.  So i rolled the carrots all over the fat and roasted it for 25-30 minutes @ 350 degrees.  S & P if you please, and i also rolled it in this dill mix i have. MMMMM this will pass for "healthy" for now... at least its good for my eyes!

Ricotta Stuffed Chicken + Chocolate Covered Strawberries

Yesterday my dreams came true and I acquired  myself a housewife/husband. And it was awesome. Came home after work, the place was cleaned and tidied up, there was a home cooked meal sizzling in the (stupid) toaster oven, ready to be consumed after a hard day's work. I can get use to a wife.

It really tasted as delicious as it looked, and it was awesome too because this was a first ever attempt.  The filling, if I remember correctly, is ricotta, fresh parmesan, bacon, garlic, salt and fresh ground pepper, chilli flakes and hot cayenne pepper. The chicken breast was cut in half and pounded out, and topped with a rose sauce with pancetta, more parmesan and bacon.  And baked, I would go for 350 @ 30-35 mins probably. While turning up the heat at the last throws of baking it to crisp up the top.  The side salad is a basic balsamic + olive oil dressing.

Had some fresh strawberries in the fridge and decided a good way to end dinner for my wonderful housewife/husband was to make some chocolate covered strawberries.  My first attempt and it was easy peasy.  Makeshift double boiler to melt some 75% dark chocolate, put in some butter, dipped, froze, eat.  

I also made some whipped cream, with vanilla extract cause we're over the top that way. All in all. A really delicious dinner :)

Jessica's Famous Seafood Chowder

hehe this is totally in my arsenal of jessica's go to dishes cause it's sooooo easy, and soooo tasty, and soooo satisfying and a crowd pleasure for sure.  the only pain is chopping up all those dang veggies, but otherwise, its a completely painless process.

it all started one day when I was in the gym catching up with my food network (cause i only get basic cable now :( ) and  it wasThrowdown with Bobby Flay: Salmon Chowder challenge with these guys at Seattle's Pike Place, and i was like, this is so easy! Im gonna make it.  Bobby used crab stock and crab meat, and the pike place guys used a shrimp/prawn based stock, but i chose to use lobster, cause I wanted to eat lobster meat.  This is actually my second go at making this, so this time this was a 3 lb lobster (my first one was 3.5).

So step 1: Cook and eat a delicious lobster and save the shells, brains, goo, everything. 

While i was cooking the lobster, i was simultaneously cooking a shit load of bacon for the chowder. Funny useless fact, we ate the lobster with a lemon bacon butter.... how awesome is that! haha.  

Threw the lobster shells in with water, 1 lemon cut in half, onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 bay leaves, fresh thyme, celery, corn husks, couple peppercorns, salt, and.... i think that's it. Cooked it for an hour and a half.

And here it is, an hour and a half after, check out all its guts against the pot... mmmmm. lobster flavoured water.

At the same time i was making the stock, i was chopping up all the veggies... its a tiresome activity, and no a slap chop would not help. I used 1 large carrot, 1 large onion, 4 stalks of celery, 3 yukon gold, and 3 baking potatoes (they used yukon gold on the show, and i know why, it retains its shape and bite), kernal from 4 corn cobs, I "sweated" it in my roux (butter + flour, is that what you're even suppose to do? who cares). and then my bacon!

Strained the sock and added it to my pile of veggies and let it boil for a while... then i added half and half cream and all my seafood which were: Salmon Chunks, Seabass chunks, and scallops. What i should have done, was fried the scallops in the bacon fat... next time.

And there you go, seafood chowder for your family and your neighbours. which i did feed as well. haha.

Ta da! I ate this for like...6 straight meals.... if it wasnt THAT GOOD, it would be down the toilet. .. yeah i ended up giving it away to my neighbour... hahaha. but still... its THAT GOOD.