Smoked Mozzarella Risotto

Risotto. Riz owe toe. Scary word. At least, in the kitchen. If you know what risotto is (and I've had people who said they didn't when I told them about this), it seems like a high-class restaurant dish, a side for only the experienced. Guess again. Yeah, apparently, you can make this stuff at home, and it's actually not hard!

A few months ago, I found this on Pinterest

Tasty-looking, yes? It's from the amazingly delicious blog Homemade by Holman (and the picture is 100% courtesy of them until I find the one I took). I had to make it. No matter how intimidating it looked, and she swore it wasn't hard, even for cooking newbies. She wasn't lying.

Smoked Mozzarella Risotto

1 tbsp butter
1/2 small white onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup arborio rice (apparently this is the rice to use for all risottos)
1/4 cup dry white wine (Again with the wine, I just used more chicken stock since I'm not a wine fan)
3 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes
2 oz smoked mozzarella cheese ,chopped into small pieces
1 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Salt to taste

In a large enough pot, heat the 3 cups of stock over medium heat.

In a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. When completely melted, add the onion and garlic and saute until the onion is translucent. Add the rice and stir it up to make sure the onion and garlic are distributed. Toast the rice, stirring frequently for about 2 minutes. Add the wine (or if you're like me, 1/4th cup of stock) and cook until almost all the liquid is gone.

Start adding the warmed broth 1 ladle at a time, being sure to stir often. Add another ladle of broth when the first ladle is almost all gone, just like before. Keep this up until you've added all but the last of the broth. The rice should be creamy and a bit runny, but still have a little bite to it. Add the sun-dried tomatoes with the last bit of broth and again cook until the rice has absorbed most of the broth.

Turn off the heat and add the mozzarella and the spices (except the salt. Only add the salt if you think it needs it)

And that's it! You've made risotto! Now, mine had a few hiccups. I think I mixed up the amounts of the thyme and the basil, so it was VERY thyme-y. Also, the cheese absolutely refused to melt. Wouldn't do it. I think next time I'll try adding the cheese a bit before taking it off the heat to try and melt it down more. Despite the hiccups, this was delicious, definitely a new dish to add to our regular sides. I'm keeping an eye out for other risotto dishes, too. It's really not as intimidating as it sounds!

Steak and Taters!

A usual day for me involves spending a full day at work and coming home to Hubby, who cooks dinner shortly thereafter. He's a good cook, and we're pretty much learning things together. Wednesday nights, though, Hubby's schedule keeps him out later than me, so it's up to me to see us fed. A few weeks back, a friend of mine sent me a recipe for Ranch Roasted Potato Wedges and swore by them as an amazing side dish. "What does it go well with?" I asked, and she replied, "Steak."

Steak and potatoes. A classic. A classic I have never before attempted in my life and has nearly smoked out our kitchen on previous attempts at meaty perfection. Hubby's pretty much perfected his stove-top steak method now, and tonight, a bag of baby red potatoes and a pair of ribeyes at my side (with plenty of directions), it was time for me to test my might against this mammoth of meals.

Roasted Red Potatoes
2 pounds small red potatoes, quartered
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 packet (1 ounce) Hidden Valley® Original Ranch® Salad Dressing & Seasoning Mix

Place potatoes in a gallon-size Glad® Food Storage Bag and add oil; seal bag. Toss to coat. Add salad dressing mix and toss again until coated. Bake in ungreased baking pan at 450°F for 30 to 35 minutes or until potatoes are brown and crisp.

Easy peasy. Cut, shake, shake some more, and into the-

Oh, the directions want a baking PAN. This is a baking SHEET. Okay, scramble into the drawer under the oven, luckily we had at some point purchased a lasagna pan (which I totally forgot we even had). Problem solved. Spray some PAM (recommended by my friend who gave me the recipe, the skins stick), and into the oven! A few minutes later, Hubby got home just in time for me to get started on the steaks. No recipe here, we just sprinkle the steaks with a Mediterranean Sea Salt mix, pepper, and garlic powder, rub it in, pop those babies into a pan with a small amount of butter and olive oil, and let them go.



Nice lookin', huh? Six to seven minutes on a side, and the steaks finished just before the potatoes did. Move the steaks to a plate to sit, pull out the potatoes and...



Hm. A little crispy. Whoops, but the crispy bits pull right off.



There we go. Nice looking potatoes. A salad on the side with a vidalia onion salad dressing, and we've got a nice meal.



Victory! Steak and potatoes - Conquered!

Red Lobster Copycat Biscuits

Last week, I decided I was going to make my darling husband a wonderful dinner. His favorite is meatloaf and mac & cheese. I make the meatloaf myself, and I've attempted the mac & cheese, but so far, Kraft does it better (two different recipes, either just bad or bland. Third time's the charm?) Well, I figured I'd kick the dinner up a notch with some imitation Red Lobster Biscuits from a recipe I had. I used the recipe from The Girl Who Ate Everything (found on Pinterest)

Biscuits:
2 1/2 cups Bisquick
4 Tbsp cold butter
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
3/4 cup milk
1/4 tsp garlic powder

Butter Glaze:
3 Tbsp butter
1/2 tsp garlic powder
3/4 tsp dried parsley flakes

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease or line one cookie sheet with parchment; set aside.

Combine Bisquick with cold butter in a medium bowl with a pastry cutter or, if you don't have one, two forks. Don't worry about mixing the butter in completely; there should be small pea-sized chunks of butter in the mix. Add cheddar cheese, milk, and garlic powder. Mix by hand until combined into a dough, but don't over mix, there will still be small chunks of butter. Warning: it will be sticky!

Drop 1/4 cup portions of the dough onto the lightly greased or parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake for 13-15 minutes until the tops of the biscuits begin to turn light brown.

While they're baking, make the glaze by melting the butter is a small bowl in the microwave. Stir in garlic powder and dried parsley flakes. When the biscuits are done and out of the oven, use a brush to spread the garlic butter over the tops of all the biscuits. optionally, sprinkle a little kosher salt on the freshly coated biscuits (I didn't do this and it didn't taste necessary). Makes about one dozen.

Pretty simple, right? I set the oven to preheat, laid out some wax paper on the baking sheets, mixed up the batter and laid out 11 biscuits.
Do you notice the problem in that previous statement? Read it again if you need to, I'll wait.

Got it yet?

If you said "Wait a second Maxwell, wax paper's not supposed to go in the oven!", then ding ding ding, you're right! And you see, I had that same thought. But I checked the box of wax paper and saw that you could put it under a cake mix for easy cake removal. So it's okay to go in the oven! Pop those babies in and let's get started on the loaf!

A few minutes later, while I'm wrist-deep in a mixture of ground beef, egg, ketchup, breadcrumbs and milk, I notice the stove's back burner is smoking. That's weird. The burner's not on. It feels really hot hovering over it. Must be something wrong with the stove. I'll let Hubby know to contact the office tomorrow. It's still smoking. Okay, let's get the vent on high. Oh crap, the apartment's getting hazy! Open the windows, start flapping towels! No fire alarm, no fire alarm, no fire alarm... no fire alarm. Phew. All right. Oh, there's the timer. Biscuits are done. Let's take 'em out and see how they...

WHOOMP

So that's where the smoke was coming from. Hubby got home while I was attempting to detatch the biscuits' utterly burnt bottoms from the crispy sheet of wax paper. Luckily he had the common sense to turn on the living room fan (DURP! I still don't know why I was running around flapping a dishtowel like an idiot when I could have just done that...) No alarms were set off, and after a bit of research, we figured out that
1) Wax paper only gets baked when there's something COMPLETELY covering it, like cake mix
and 2) You will not die eating something cooked with burnt wax paper. When topped with the garlic butter, the biscuits were actually quite good (more than could be said for the homemade mac & cheese that meal. Way too much sauce and there was something bitter about it.) Next time, I'm gonna listen to my gut instinct and put down aluminum foil instead. And there will be a next time because if they were as good as they are baked with wax paper smoke and partially burnt, they'll be divine done up right.