We have been doing a sides only dinner a bunch lately. A slab of meat is always nice, but we make some rocking sides and enjoy them. Tonight was skillet fries, cheddar bay biscuits, and Daniels sweet corn.

With the weather being so nice and the windows open all day I made up a batch of five minute a day dough. I have been wanting to make pizza shells for a while for lunches. Made up 3, but one was a bit thick so I tested it out last night.

It was pretty good with the thicker crust, but I still prefer it thin when I make my own. I used the toaster oven last night, but I have the oven set to turn on before lunch so I can have a hot stone to bake it on. Yum.

Trying to eat our way through our freezer. Figured some grilled pork chops would be good. We had some bread and always have lots of Nebraska sweet corn. Theresa wanted some potatoes too. Easy meal.

Are you boiling those chops? Click below to find out.

Actually I am brining the pork chops. They were still a bit frozen so brining helped thaw them too.

So why brine? Well pork these days are really lean. Brining will help lock the moisture in the pork. I am sure you would rather have a juicy chop over the dried and tough one.

This comes from Alton Brown on good eats.
pork chop episode part 1
pork chop episode part 2

The brine (for about 5 chops)
# 3/4 cup kosher salt (DO NOT use regular white table salt!)
# 1 cup brown sugar
# 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
# 1 tablespoon mustard powder (do not use prepared mustard!)
# 2 cups cider vinegar (heated until hot)
# 1 lb ice cubes

We are only having 2 chops so I chopped (tee he he) the brine in 1/2 and left stuff out. Was pretty much just salt and sugar.

Garlic Bread

Softened butter, garlic salt, granulated garlic, parsley, and parmesan cheese. I should of used fresh garlic, but I forgot because it has been a while. Cooked in toaster oven on 400 for a few minutes. I made the video below of it a while back. It is before we remodeled the kitchen and the old toaster oven.

Pan fried taters

Pretty simple. I slice them decently thick, put some oil and clarified butter in a non stick pan set to medium. When they get close to done I salt, pepper, and add greek seasoning.

Grillin

I get my grill rocket hot and those chops cook quick as heck. Some Misty’s seasoning works great for chops. Turn them 90 degrees to get the pretty marks, flip and a few minutes more and they are good to go.

Great meal with not too much work from stuff we just had around. No clue what to make tonight though.

Bruschetta sure tastes great with stuff off the grill. Theresa has been making it for years and has it down. Our tomato plants are huge this year so we will be enjoying it often. She uses tomatoes, Garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil, salt, and some parm cheese. We use Le Quartier bread since it is a bit warm to be baking. Theresa infuses olive oil with garlic and basil and lightly brushes the bread with some shredded parmesan.

In the pic above on the right is some risotto. Theresa has that down really good too.

First try making bread on the grill did not go so well

Since it is nice out and we are always looking to create something new and a bit healthier, we figured some foil wrapped meals would be fun to try. Figured chicken would be a good meat for this since Theresa is not fond of seafood. We really like the flavor for a good seared piece of meat, so the idea was to partially cook the chicken in a very flavorful pouch and then finish it off on the grill.

Was kind of hard to decide what to include in the foil with the chicken. We were thinking something like a marinade coating the chicken and some fresh vegetables to impart their flavor.

Decided to use carrots, celery, onion, red pepper, and garlic for the main flavors. I put all of those along with some olive oil, basil, and lemon juice into a cup and used my stick blender to make up a goop to coat the chicken.

Made up some bread. I am so loving making this bread. It is soooo good. I need to figure out how to cook it on the grill somehow this summer. As long as the windows are open I will keep making it though.

Halved fingerling potatoes and carrot slices all gooped up will be our side.

I had a monster chicken bewb and flattened it and let it soak in the goop for about 30 minutes. Then made a bed of the vegetables on the top and bottom with all the goop in there along with some butter.

Both packs flipped a bunch and peeled the foil on the chicken. It smells amazing. The chicken looked done and I for some strange reason took it into the house and cut it in half to see if it was done. Would have been a great time to use my new fancy instant read digi thermometer. Doh. It was still raw on the inside so back on the grill it went.

The potato and carrots were done perfectly so we sat down to eat…….

Meh…. on all accounts. Hardly any flavor for both foil packs. The chicken only had a slight bit of flavor and the potato/carrots were bland as heck. It was kind of crushing because of how much work went into the meal with so many ingredients.

Things we learned:
* the chicken was not in the pack with all the veg long enough. It did not have enough time to pick up the flavors
* I should of tenderized the bewb more and maybe cut the chicken up to allow it to get more flavor
* more juice/marinade would not just impart more flavor, but would of steamed it more
* it is the flavor that counts, not the char from direct cooking

Not sure what the next foil pack adventure will consist of, but we are determined to keep at it till we get it right. Doing this on the grill reduces the dishes we need to do and it just awesome to be grilling again. We have used Itilian dressing in a foil pack with chicken before and it is super awesome. Will make my own dressing for the next one. If you guys have any good recepies for foil packs on the grill I would love to hear from ya.

Theresa and I met at Papa John’s 13 years ago. I was a manager and she worked in store. We have made thousands of cheesestix in our lives. Since I have been doing the bread and making pizza crusts, I figured this would be easy. Made up a batch with homemade garlic butter and some liquid evil from Papa John’s.

Clarified butter with microplaned garlic. Theresa made up a dipping sauce.

Bel Gioioso fresh mozz cheese

Rolled out a bit of the fridge dough and docked it with a fork to keep bubbles from forming and let the garlic butter seep in

500 degree oven with a rocking stone

Pretty good. I did not dock enough, put enough garlic butter on, or put enough cheese, but it was really good.

Same method, but docked both sides with the fork and rolled it thinner. Papa Johns garlic butter spread and then topped with fresh mozz

They were really close. The bottom crust was a bit tougher, but other than that they ruled.

I will work on my own version. Would hate to buy 20 garlic dips as a walk in one day

Left is dinner rolls without any steam in the oven (forgot to put a cup of hot water in the preheated
broiler pan)
Right with steam, but still undercooked.

Been making bread and pizza shells every day for a week and took a couple days off. This dough recipe makes a dense crumb. I have tried diff amounts of letting it rise, but it is usually the same. It is really close to sourdough in so many ways, but not sour. When I get a good crust on it it is really good.

We got more books and I have gotten a bit of read on. Theresa got Alton’s one about baking. Gave up soda, but eat a lot of bread and butter now. I call it a draw.

Took some of the refrigerated dough yesterday and made a few pizza crusts. Roll out and place on hot stone for about 3 minutes to set the dough and kill the yeast. Today I made a pizza and put it on a hot stone just so I could know what that was like. My goal is to do these for lunch and I will not be able to get the stone hot for that, but they should do fine in the toaster oven.

Froze it over night in a bag

olives and some fresh basil

granulated garlic

Crust was perfect, but a little thin. I made 3 more crusts today and made them thicker. Too easy.

We roast chickens often and normally make chicken noodle soup, but I thought a soup with rice in it might be good. Used the pressure cooker to make a stock from the chicken leavings with onion, carrots, celery, garlic, peppercorns, bay leafs, and water. An hour cooking made it very flavorful. Made the rice with canned chicken broth and it turned out pretty decent. The rice just sinks to the bottom though.

^ Before pressure cooking ^ Did not get an after, but it pretty much obliterates everything. Strain, rince to get all the god stuff, and remove the fat with a separator.

I have picked up a baking stone and made my third batch of dough. For tonight I made some dinner rolls and they were really good, but a bit small. I did some other cool stuff with the dough and will let you know after lunch Monday if it all works out.

Same dough, 2nd day of baking. Got a few more tips. Letting the oven go about 20 minutes after preheating will ensure the whole oven is at the temp you want and hold it better. This time I let the dough rise a bit more before I baked it. It came out better and still tastes really good, but it is still a bit dense. I want those huge holes like swiss cheese. In the pic below you can see how it looked from being sliced.

I am guessing not getting the first initial rise has hurt this first dough I made. So I have made another batch and will wait till it starts to fall before I put it in the fridge. Will post how that goes and then work on perfecting it.