Upside Down Ravioli

I wrote this on our weekly menu list and Evan stared at it and then looked at me funny. "Um, if it's upside down ravioli...isn't it the same? Ravioli looks the same on both sides."

I have no idea why it's called this, but it was super yummy. And not ravioli like whatsoever.

The ingredients:

8 oz. jumbo shells; 1 lb. ground beef; 2 Tbsp. olive oil; 6 oz. baby spinach, chopped; 1 C. finely chopped onion; 1 garlic clove, minced; 1 tsp. salt; 1/4 tsp. pepper; 1/8 tsp. nutmeg; 1 egg; 1/4 C. parmesan cheese; 26 oz. marinara sauce of your choosing; 1/2 C. reserved pasta water. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cook the jumbo shells while you brown the beef and onions together in a large skillet.
While all of that is a bubblin' and a brewin', take that lovely spinach...
and chop the living day lights out of it.
Add it to the beef once it's browned and drained of grease.
Now, add the olive oil...
the garlic that I totally forgot to put in the ingredients picture...

the reserved pasta water...
Stir like you have never stirred before!! Remove the skillet from the heat.
Now, add the salt...
the pepper...
and the nutmeg. Let the mixture cool for a few minutes.
Once the meat mixture is cooled, as the parmesan...
and the egg. Stir again.
In a 9x13 dish, pour 1 Cup of the marinara sauce into the bottom of the pan and spread it around.
Take your jumbo shells and fill them with the meat mixture.
Line them up in the dish. (Does this remind anyone else of the story from Alice in Wonderland when the walrus eats the clams? Anyone? Anyone???)
Pour the rest of the marinara sauce over the top of the shells.
I tried to put them directly into the oven to cook, I really did!! But, I just couldn't. They looked so naked. So, I grabbed a bag of mozzarella cheese and dumped some on top.
Phew. I feel so much better about this dish now.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Mmm...melted cheese. You make my pasta dishes so deliciously beautiful.
We ate our Upside Down Ravioli with salad and Italian bread.
I loved this dish. I found the meat mixture super yummy and different than other stuffed pasta dishes that ask for a lot of cheeses to be in the mixture. It made for good leftovers, too.

Evan does not like jumbo shells. He can not give me a reason why. I think he's just a complete weirdo, but that's just my humble opinion. Despite the pasta I used, he did like the dish and agreed with me about the meat mixture being yummy.

This would be a great dish to make for company or if you have a larger family because it definitely makes a lot.

Enjoy!

Hamburger Stroganoff

It's a new year and one of my goals for the year is to continue cooking through my cook book collection!!!

I realized that, although I turn to my Betty Crocker cook book when I can't find answers to cooking questions on line, I never take advantage of all the fabulous recipes in the cook book.

So, I've added Ms. Betty to my rotation of recipes for my meal planning and this recipe was one I used for last week.

Evan loves beef stroganoff, so I figured he might like a hamburger version.

The ingredients: (I'm sorry that the ground beef in the picture looks so grotesque. No matter how much I asked and pleaded, it just would not put on it's pretty picture face.)

1 lb. lean ground beef; 1 medium onion, chopped; 1 clove garlic, finely chopped; 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup; 1 can (4oz.) mushrooms, drained; 1/2 tsp. salt; 1 C. sour cream or plain yogurt; 1 pkg. egg noodles, cooked; paprika, salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste.

Ok, so I did not buy soup because it was not on my grocery list because I neglected to write it on my grocery list and if it's not on the grocery list it does not get bought! (Or so I preach to Evan and Elisabeth and apparently need to preach to myself as well.) Thankfully, I had a bag of frozen mushrooms in the freezer and I decided to make my own ding dong cream of mushroom soup. It was surprisingly simple. Let me show you...

First, take 1/2 a pound of the frozen mushrooms and cook them in one cup of water for 15 minutes. No boiling, please.
Drain the mushrooms (but keep the liquid!) and put the mushrooms in a skillet with 2 Tbsp. of butter and cook them together for about 10 minutes.
Add 1 Tbsp. of flour to the mushrooms and stir until all the mushrooms are coated in flour.
Add 3 C. of milk (preferably whole, but I only had skim and it was just fine for this recipe) and
the mushroom liquid you saved. Stir and allow it all to cook together for about 5-10 minutes. Then, remove the soup from the skillet and save it for later on in the recipe.
Now, brown that beef (go ahead and use the same skillet because you're just going to combine them all again in it soon anyway) along with...
the onion and the garlic. Make sure you drain all of that icky grease!

Ok, I stink and totally didn't take pictures of the rest of the process, so just pretend like you are watching me do the next few steps, ok? Thanks.

Stir in the soup we made (or the can you bought), the remainder of the frozen mushrooms (or the can you bought) and the salt into the beef. Simmer, uncovered, until a good portion of the homemade soup we made has evaporated and then lower the heat to low. I'd say that I simmered it all for about 15 minutes and then let it cook on low for another 5 minutes.

Now, taste the sauce. Evan and I found it bland, so we added salt, pepper, paprika and garlic powder until we found it perfect. Just keep sprinkling, stirring and sampling until you find it to your liking.

Stir in the sour cream until it is blended into the sauce and hot.

We served our hamburger stroganoff with green beens and salad.
This is definitely a comfort food dish. The girls loved the noodles (of course) and asked for the "stroganoff" part on the side. Elisabeth eventually mixed them together and liked them. Everyone (including our dinner guest, one of Evan's co-workers) had seconds. The leftovers were eaten just as quickly!!!

Enjoy!

Evan's Ribs.

It's Evan again.

I really like ribs. However, I had a dilemma: restaurants usually don't do them quite right and I don't own a smoker like my dad does. What to do? Turn your Webber kettle grill into a smoker!

You need: pork ribs. smoke. bbq sauce. hunger. 5 to 6 hours.

But really, you'll also need two aluminum foil trays, a regular source of water, and at least half a bag of charwood (not charcoal, it is too ashy)

And that's about it. There's really not much of a recipe going on here. It's mostly meat and fire, which is a wonderful thing.

First things first, I make a dry rub to put on the ribs. I don't measure or have any real rhyme or reason to it (which is why none of these ingredients are in the above list). Just mix until you like the smell, taste, or color. I enjoy randomly combining things to make rubs, sauces, and chili, and since I am making it up as I go, it's never the same twice. Oh well.

This is a mixture of lots of ground black pepper, lots of paprika (Hungarian and smoked--I love paprika), celery salt and onion powder, a bit of cayenne pepper, an incredibly small amount of cinnamon, and some kosher salt. Go easy on the kosher salt. I put too much in this time and they were a bit too salty. However, if you're even more careless with it, you'll have salted jerky and not smoked ribs.

I like baby back ribs, and St. Louis style baby back ribs are even better because they come with the extra stuff cut off already. But you can more or less do it yourself.

Okay, first you need to trim your ribs. On the back side there is a membrane you need to cut off. It is tricky but if you don't get at least most of it, it can make the ribs very chewy. Make an incision with your boning knife and shove your fingers in there, as pictured. It'll rip off eventually.
Next trim the floppy meat side that isn't connected to any bone. This is what will make it a sort-of St. Louis cut. Plus, when I defrosted this set of ribs, as you can see, this part cooked a little. So it had to be removed.

The finished trimmed product. There are a few other floppy parts or fatty portions that are good to remove. If you don't feel like it, I don't think it's a game changer. After all, it's still meat. And meat is good.
Sprinkle on your rub. Then rub in your rub. You can see that we didn't have a pan large enough for these ribs.
After rubbing, put them in the fridge. I did so overnight, covered with aluminum foil. I didn't take a picture of them wrapped in aluminum foil because that would be boring.
The next day, let them reach room temperature before smoking them. While you're doing that, start your fire.
I use a chimney starter because it doesn't stink like lighter fluid and because I really don't want the charwood to absorb all those chemicals. The ribs aren't being grilled, they're being smoked; toxic smoke doesn't sound good.

Apparently the chimney starter is an odd thing to use from the looks I get from people. So I'll briefly say how to do it. Fill it with charwood on the top. I mix in old, not-quite-burned-up charwood from the last time, too. I'm efficient and cheap. Then rip up a sheet of newspaper into strips. Put it under the charwood and light it on fire. Repeat until the newspaper self-ignites from the heat. This takes anywhere from 3 sheets to 8 or so depending on how much ink is on the paper and the quality of the newspaper.

Once it has sat smoldering for 3-5 minutes, I'll dump it. Okay, now the smoker set up must be explained. Basically, put one aluminum foil tray on the charcoal rack, piling the charwood up about 5 inches on the opposing side. Put a layer of non-lit charwood down, then dump the burning stuff on top of it. This tray will be the drip tray and the meat with go on top of it. Next put the cooking rack on and put a tray directly over the fire. This will hold the water that will keep the fire from being too hot and produce more smoke. The meat does NOT go directly over the burning wood.

Fill the tray with water. Your neighbors will surely think you're crazy when you spend 10 minutes starting your grill at 9am then start spraying your garden hose into it.

Do you like how the grass won't grow in the crappy Colorado sand? But how it'll grow on the patio? I want a giant "I am renting this house" sign. Despite that, it still all looks 100% better than it did when I moved in.

Again, the meat is not directly over the fire. Indirect cooking and smoke will be the order of the day.
Smoke one side for 1.5 hours. Then flip it over and smoke the other for 1.5 hours. Check every 45 minutes or so to make sure a) the fire is still on and b) that the water hasn't completely evaporated. It'll need refilled with water every hour or so.

Then wrap them in aluminum foil and smoke covered for a hour. I forgot to take a picture of this, but it should be fairly self evident. The charwood will likely need to be replenished at this point.

Okay, now they need bbq-sauced. If you like them dry, don't do this part, but make sure the last hour has regular water bottle squirting instead. I like Curley's bbq sauce for this. Brush a thin layer of sauce on one side every fifteen minutes, flipping when you do so. This will make the sauce sticky and char the first layer, which VA likes.

Then they're done. They should be rather hard to flip at this point because they're falling off the bone. This time around, it was 90 degrees, about 10% humidity and oppressively sunny outside when I did these, so they were a bit dryer than when I did them on a comparatively damp spring day or on my birthday in Illinois' July humidity. To compensate, I should've had more aluminum foil time and less non-covered time. But otherwise, they were very good.

These are my favorite things to make!

They're not burned. The darkness is the sauce charring a bit. If you don't like that, don't sauce them so often and so early. They would be fine dry with a sauce put on once they're removed from the grill, if you prefer.
And that's it. It's a very flexible thing to make. And delicious, too. Once you figure these out, you won't be able to order them at most restaurants because they'll be too chewy, too broiled, or have the consistency of having been microwaved.