tommi blue – Page 6 – the adventures of a brown eyed girl and her brown eyed dog

January 22, 2012January 22, 2012

Hot Legs (Who’s that knocking’ on my door?)

Bonus points if you know what the heck I’m talking about…

Anyfootballsnackfood – there was a giant package of chicken drumsticks in my fridge, and I was hungry. And the playoffs were on. Hot legs!

I originally intended to deep fry these, but it just seemed like too much work. I’m tired from shoveling snow and sledding with the dog and trudging 2 miles through knee-high snow to Dunkin Donuts (uphill both ways). Baking sounds good.

Line those little legs up on a cookie sheet or two lined with parchment paper. Aren’t they cute?

Salt & pepper them. I used Hawaiian black salt. Mostly because I just bought it at Eataly last week and really wanted to use it.

Bake at 375° until they are cooked to your likeness. I can’t stand any undercooking in my chicken so I left them in there for about an hour. Your experience may vary. A poultry thermometer is handy to make sure they are done.

When they are safely done, leave them in the oven to keep warm and make the sauce. Since I’m being low carb these days, I started with about a third of a cup of reduced sugar ketchup.

Add to that one stick of melted butter. Yes, butter. I’ve heard that fake butter/margarine won’t work as well because it breaks down differently…

Hot-Legs-Butter-and-Ketchup — Butter. Ketchup. Nice.

Whisk that up and start adding your favorite hot sauce. I like Frank’s Red Hot. It doesn’t have that weird rotten egg smell that another popular brand has. I’m sure some of you will want to use something with more heat.

I use about a quarter cup of hot sauce, but this is really where you need to taste as you go.

When you get the hot/sweet ratio right, toss in those drumsticks and coat them well.

Make sure they are well coated on all sides…

Chop up some celery, pour out some blue cheese dressing, grab the beverage of your choice and you’re ready for game time!

Hot Legs

12-18 chicken drumsticks
Salt & Pepper
1/3 cup ketchup (I used reduced sugar)
1 stick butter, melted
1/4 cup hot sauce (or to taste)

Place salt & peppered drumsticks on baking sheet(s) lined with parchment paper. Bake at 375° until poultry thermometer indicates they are done. In a large bowl, mix melted butter and ketchup. Add in hot sauce a little at a time until sauce reaches desired hotness. Toss warm drumsticks a couple at a time to coat and transfer to a bowl or platter with rounded edges (so the sauce doesn’t run everywhere – it’s what sauce does). Serve with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing.

I love ya honey! (Whatever happened to Rod Stewart?)

January 22, 2012January 27, 2012

Bratwurst Pie

Eating very few carbs is fun, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world. You need a good, solid go-to dish that travels well, can be used as a snack or a meal, and is easy to make in large quantities. For me, that’s Bratwurst Pie. Oh, how I love bratwurst.

This started out as sausage pie at some point, but I like to make a lot of it and the bulk sausage they sell at my local Sam’s Club has carbs. But… the bratwurst doesn’t. Score! There aren’t too many ingredients: eggs, cream, onion, cheese, salt & pepper, and, of course, brats.

Start by chopping up your onion and squeezing the brats out of their casings. Cook these up together, crumbling the brats as you go, and drain.

Brat-Onions-1_22_12 — Chopping onions makes me happy. It also makes me cry. Go figure.

When that’s done, put into a lasagna/baking dish and mix in the cheese. Different cheeses make slightly different pies, so use what you like. Today I grated some Red Leicester (an Irish cheddar) and mixed it with bagged Mexican mix. There is Havarti in the picture, but I decided not to use it and keep to the cheddars. A mix of Swiss and Gruyère is also really good. Play around with whatever you have/like. Mozzarella and Havarti would probably be good.

Brat-Grated-Cheese — Grated Red Leicester

While all that cheesy brat goodness sits there waiting, mix up the eggs and cream and salt & pepper in a bowl. Pour this as evenly as you can over the meat and cheese.

Shake the dish a little and the creamy stuff will fill in the gaps. Now pop that in a 350° oven and find something to take your mind off of it for 40 minutes or so.

Be careful when you take the dish out of the oven, there tends to be a little bubbling oil around the edges.

Hey – I said it was low carb – NOT low fat! 🙂

And that’s that!

Word to the wise – start with a small portion. It’s wicked good, but very rich.

Bratwurst Pie

2 lbs of bratwurst (about half of the package pictured)
8-10 oz grated cheese of your choice
1 onion, chopped
4 eggs
1/2 cup heavy cream
salt & pepper to taste (I use about 1/2 tsp salt and slightly less pepper)

Remove the bratwurst from its casing and brown in a large skillet along with the chopped onion. Drain. Spread into a baking pan large enough to hold the meat and egg mixture. Mix in the cheese. In a medium bowl, mix the eggs and cream until combined, add in seasonings and pour over meat and cheese. Bake for about 40 minutes at 350°.

I think I’m going to add in broccoli and mushrooms next time I make this.

Sooooo good!

January 21, 2012January 22, 2012

Cable Alternatives

Not every TV in this house gets cable. Or at least not the premium, box-requiring kind. But that doesn’t stop me. There are more TVs than people, and even more than there are rooms to put them in. We are people against quiet. Noise, background noise, rocks. And since the iPods and iPhones have taken over the world, actual rock isn’t really an option. Hooking them up to something that sounds decent is such a pain. I kinda miss my old boom box stereo… (moment of silence for the 1900s………..)
Of course, I still need cable to get the WiFi thing, but I’m growing fond of services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. All those widgets that came with my newest TVs. They let me watch all kinds of random programming whenever and wherever I want. Stuff I might have missed before TiVo came along.
Today I started watching The Riches. Made it through 3 episodes while organizing the laundry room and puttering. It’s pretty good so far. My secret crush on Eddie Izzard helps.

Oops, I guess it’s not such a secret anymore.

Good show, tho.

January 21, 2012January 22, 2012

Laundry Room Makeover

Well, more of a cleanup, I guess. This morning, all the reusable grocery bags that I’ve been collecting and shoving in the corner of the laundry room came crashing down. It was snowing, there was nothing else to do right at that moment, and something came over me – it was time to clean up the laundry room.

Before…

I then proceeded to do something I’m not really known for – clean. I mean really clean. I pulled absolutely everything out of the room and started scrubbing. Sponges and rags weren’t cutting it – I found some rather, um, nasty crevices here and there around and in the machines. It was steamer time! It was so much fun. Gross, but fun.

What wasn’t so much fun was organizing all those baskets full of miscellaneous debris. But it’s done now and I have a room that I’m ok sharing with you. And my mother.

January 3, 2012January 20, 2012

Hello world!

Here we go!
I’d love to learn everything there is to learn about blogging before I start, but then I’ll never start. I’ve been trying to do this for years as it is. Soooo… Let’s learn as we go.
Woohoo!!!