Cheeburger, cheeburger, cheeburger no coke, pepsi!

What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef :) Now, I should end my post with that phenomenal joke but I will continue because you're probably dying to know what I did with the pounds upon pounds of natural ground beef in my refrigerator. The ground beef is generally saved for taco night and it's generally amazing. Since that would be a four-line post, I'm going to instead talk about these amazing burgers that I made the other night. To begin, I must admit that my mom makes the BEST burgers (for full disclosure I've never had a juicy lucy) so I come from a line of great burger makers. That being said, I'm generally not allowed to make hamburger patties or grill them because they end up being little ground beef balls rather than patties.... but things are going to change! This time I made some mix between a patty and a ball!!! Almost there.

Here's how it all happened...

I got some awesome burger like stuff together and threw it in a bowl with 1 pound of ground beef

I used these things:

Oils and sauces and spices, oh my!

Step 1: Throw olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, salt, pepper, and South African Smoke Spice from Trader Joes. That stuff is SO good and I highly recommend you pick up a bottle next time you see a TJ's.

Step 2: Put a healthy amount of each of those things in with your beef and mix it up real good. You're going to have to use your hands to make the patties so you may as well mix all the stuff with your hands and just get jiggy with it.

Step 3: Start to make the patties. I have no tips for this... Ms. Joy might have some tips so you could consult her. Really I just want the little burger patty press my mom has. Add it to the registry! Until then, I'll do my best!

This is me doing my best

Step 4: I don't have a grill so I just put those suckers on the stove. They had so many fabulous things mixed in with them that I don't think they really lost too much flavor.

Step 5: BACON!!!!!! Here's another little lesson for you. From my experience and generally speaking, people from the south have family rooted in the south for many many many generations. People in the north and midwest can trace their family back to their roots (or ruts if you're from the midwest) outside of the US in 2-3 generations. Example: Whit's last name is Winslow. Winslows are a dime a dozen in Eastern, NC because there was a Winslow that came over on the Mayflower. No joke. Similarly, my dad's side of the family has roots in Tennessee and our family has apparently been traced back to manifest destiny days. My mom's family, on the other hand, is from Cleveland area (I love Cleveland). My grandparents are from Slovenia/Slovakia/Hungary. We love sour cream. In Cleveland there are butcher shops and restaurants serving European fare from people 1-2 generations fresh off the boat. This means a few things: 1) I eat like a boss when I'm visiting my family in Cleveland; 2) I get to stay connected with my eastern European roots; and 3) I get to bring home so many Slovenian smoked meats from artisan butchers whenever I leave Cleveland. My uncle calls my mom and I meat smugglers. He's right. Weeping Radish Brewery in Manteo has bacon artisan butcher made bacon. I suggest you buy all of it and then give it to me for my birthday.

Step 6: Step 5 wasn't really a step.

I think I love this bacon more than most things...

Step 7: Take your delicious artisan butcher cut bacon and throw it in a pan until it's all crispy-like.

Step 8: Put a little Munster cheese on your burgers (I once asked my mom for cheese to put on my burger and she called me high maintenance (again, that's another story for another day)).

Step 9: Remove the burgers from the stove, add your delicious cooked bacon, and some avocado slices. Oh yes. Avocado bacon cheese burgers! How do you think I keep this figure? It's not with salad.

Step 10: Assemble your burgers and enjoy. SO delicious!

Delicious Level: 5/5 Noms (om nom nom nom nom nom)

Difficulty Level: Pretty easy. Bacon access is limited though.

Lesson Learned: Buy a freaking patty press. My inability to make a quality patty is out of control.

Here's to eatin' good and eatin' local! Cheers and uff-da!

Laissez le bon temp rouler!!!!

Tuesday was Fat Tuesday!!! This time last year I was in New Orleans celebrating Mardi Gras with my brother and some of our closest peeps. Traveling to places like New Orleans during Mardi Gras or Brazil during Carnival really makes you understand the culture and atmosphere that surrounds those holidays (if you’re traveling right (that’s another topic for a whole other day)). When James and Parker cooked for us in New Orleans, we ate like kings and queens (Andrew, you’re in the queen category). When we went out to eat, it wasn’t as good (we’re poor people). We had Boudin, won a king cake, and so many other delicious meats and meals.

This Mardi Gras Jordan and I were way too broke to head back down to New Orleans to defend our Mardi Gras Frisbee tournament championship title and drink copious amounts of alcohol for three days. We stayed in Greenville, drank wine and beer, and played Headbanz with the rest of the members of the Tar River Compound (Garrett, Kristy, Whit, Jenelle, Nick, Janna, and Erin).

                This little get together and celebration was somewhat of a last minute decision. Since we had some pork sausage in the refrigerator that we had no idea what to do with, I figured we’d make a makeshift (wordmaster word) jambalaya in the crockpot. Here’s how that went down:

• 4 pork sausages 
• 1lb chicken breast
• green bell pepper 
•  1 large onion 
•  2 ribs celery
• 1 can chicken broth 
• 1 28oz can of diced tomatoes 
•  2 teaspoons Cajun seasoning
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 tsb dried pasley
• 2 cups cooked rice

Step 1: Cut everything into little bite size pieces and throw that junk into a crock pot (except the rice. Don’t cook the rice yet)

Step 2: Set the crock pot for whenever you’re going to come home to eat the food

Step 3: Your peeps are arriving so go ahead and make the rice. This is my little twist which I enjoyed a lot! If your jambalaya is looking really watered down in the crock pot then substitute the water for cooking the rice with the juices from the jambalaya. You can mix half water/ half jambalaya juice but I had a lot of juices so I just cooked my rice completely with jambalaya juice. 

Step 4: Throw the rice in the crock pot, stir it up, serve yourself, and then tell everyone it’s ready.

Serve and enjoy!

Jordan likes it

Step 5: Have a friend make the beignets. They’re delish

Step 6: Bead up! It’s time to party!!!!

Delicious Level: 5/5 Noms (om nom nom nom nom nom)

Difficulty Level: SO Easy!

Lesson Learned: None? That was really really really easy.

Here's to eatin' good and eatin' local! Cheers and uff-da!

Little darling, stir it up!

After reading this you may rethink my qualifications for having a cooking blog. I've never made stir fry before. I've never even cooked rice before. There! I said it! phew glad I got that off my chest!


We had some new beef stir fry meet ready to be cooked so I figured I'd go ahead and tackle it. We didn't have soy sauce (bought it, left it in Raleigh), sesame oil, peanut oil, or cooking wine. We also had no rice, carrots, onions, or bean sprouts. Basically the only thing we had in the fridge was the beef stir fry meet. Oops. In insight next time I make this meal I'll probably make it a 'clean out the fridge' type deal.

What you need for beef stir fry a la alison:
1 onion
3/4 cup of sliced mushrooms
white rice (or whatever kind of rice you choose to use)
1lb beef stir fry meat
head of broccoli (is that a measurement?)
handful of beansprouts (somewhere between Shaq's handful and Jen Arnold's handful)
Peanut oil
Sesame oil
vegetable oil
white cooking wine
soy sauce
garlic clove
ginger root (Ginger?! Whatcha doin, Ginger?!)

No, not that Ginger!!

Step 1: Find all of these things.
Step 2: chop up all the vegetables into delicious sized pieces and mix them together (bean sprouts are fine the way they are (just like you ;)))
Step 3: chop up the garlic and some ginger (Ginger?!) and throw it in your massive pan that you will use non stop throughout this meal. Make sure it can hold ALL the crap you plan to throw in it. Seriously.
Step 4: Chop up your stir fry meat into little cubes.
Step 5: Throw some peanut oil, sesame oil, vegetable oil, soy sauce and some of that nice cooking wine into a pan with your garlic and make it nice and steamy in your house. This combo should make your house smell like an Asian restaurant (in a good way). If it doesn't smell like an Asian restaurant then add some more of your favorite oil from the ones you already put in.
Step 6: Toss in the meat! Oh yeah! Cook it on medium heat so it slow cooks and cooks evenly. Your apartment should smell like deliciousness even more now.

This picture reminds me... go ahead and cook your rice. It doesn't have to be hot when you add it into the pan, just cooked.

Step 7: Remove the meat from the pan and put it in a bowl beside the stove. Add some more veggie oil and some more of that rice wine... maybe some more of the other oils too if you're feeling saucy (see what i did there?). Make sure it's all mixed up real nice like.
Step8: Throw all your veggies into the pan and stir it up. It should continue to smell like delicious. If it no longer smells like delicious then you put something gross in your stir fry. Don't do that again. Stir the deliciousness around for a while until it's all coated in the sauce and make sure the broccoli is cooked all the way. Your mushrooms won't cook through because as we learned from Julie and Julia, you can't crowd the mushrooms if you want them to cook and honestly we just threw them into a big ol' pot of grand central station at 5pm so you're a little S.O.L. on the 'not crowding' thing.

Step 9: Throw the Meat in. This will make it browner and meatier and deliciouser. If you don't eat meat, I don't know why you read this blog as all of the recipes have amazing meat in them. You should start eating meat.
Step 10: Seriously. Start eating meat. It's so good if you do it right :D
Step 11: Add the rice and keeps stirring. 

Good grief that looks amazing.

Step 12: Put it on a plate and freaking crush that stuff! It was super tasty.

Step 13: Say bye to your man as he walks out of the house for the weekend, leaving you with this:

Oops. That was way too many dishes for this simple of a meal. My b.

Delicious Level: 4/5 Noms (om nom nom nom nom) - Super delicious but still haven't topped those short ribs!

Difficulty Level: Kind of a pain in the neck in terms of cleaning up and having enough hands to get it all cooked at once but overall it was pretty easy.

Lesson Learned: Use less dishes. Dear lord.

Here's to eatin' good and eatin' local! Cheers and uff-da!

Tackling the HAM!!!!

I have been cooking from my CSA lately but honestly it hasn't been exciting enough for a blog post. Delicious sausage patties to go with some pancakes when I realize 'oh no! we're out of cereal' is not a bad way to start a morning but that story is hardly worth making you read. The CSA delivery for December was entirely pork. Outside of cooking Johnson's Italian pork sausage, I really have no experience cooking pig... and I love pork. Our december CSA consisted of 6 sausage patties, 4 pork sausages, and a ham. Jordan loves ham but I don't know that I've ever made a ham when it didn't come with a package of sugary seasoning that said: "1) Put on ham. 2) Bake ham. 3) Serve after 15 minutes." Despite those directions being ridiculously easy, I was still nervous about cooking a ham that had already been smoked.

Hold the phone, there honky! Do that thing say what I think it do? Weeping Radish Brewery?! Zoom in there for a second.

Weeping Radish! I knew it! Now I'm going to go ahead and drop a bit of knowledge on you. Weeping Radish Brewery in the glorious Outer Banks of North Carolina was the first brewery to open in North Carolina post-prohibition. The owner of this glorious brewery helped to motivate the brewing industry by driving down to the capital city and demanding the legal ABV of a malt beverage be raised to 15.4% and that free tastings be allowed during tours. Now that he has somewhat gotten brewery laws to a good place, he's moved on to butcher shops. A LOT of meat in NC was being produced in NC in humane ways but because of butchering laws farmers had to send their meat to Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and other states to be butchered. Uli Benowitz of Weeping Radish said 'ENOUGH' and is now lobbying for butchering laws to be relaxed in NC so that people like me (and hopefully you) can buy your meat from a farmer 50 miles away, have it processed and packaged within another 50 miles of that, and then dropped at your door with minimal gas miles on it.

This message brought to you buy my thesis.

Moving along.... I decided to cook the ham tonight. Boneless 3 lb smoked ham. I looked up some recipes and since I'm a broke college student I decided to make do with what I had in the kitchen and just buy oranges and cloves to complete the recipe. By the way, Ms. Joy of Cooking was very little help for this meal. Anyway, here's my modified smoked ham recipe**:

1 3lb ham (or whatever size they give you at your local butcher shop)

1/2 cup Honey 

2 Oranges

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup brown sugar

Buttload of whole cloves

**all measurements for this recipe were eyeballed and then guestimated for your cooking ease.

Oh... you noticed my oranges are on a Krispy Kreme box? Let me explain. 1) The hot sign was on and you know I can't not stop when the hot sign is on. 2) It says 'fun' right there on the box and I'm always down for a good time. 3) The Krispy Kreme Challenge is in less than a month and I had just gone on a run and I'm in training mode.

Step 1: Go to school, work, play with the dog, go for a run, then take the ham out to thaw (oops). I would recommend moving the ham to the refrigerator before doing all those things I just said.

Step 2: Thaw ham in the microwave for about 5-7 minutes

Step 3: Ham still a little too frozen to stab the cloves in? Grab those tongy things from your grill kit (you know the giant fork with only two prongs) and stab your ham multiple times so you can put the cloves in the newly created holes.

Step 4: Combine honey, cinnamon, and brown sugar in a mixing bowl. Squeeze the life out of the oranges so you get as much juice out of them as possible into the mixture. Put some of the pulp in there too for good measure (and then eat the remaining pulp)

You should now have a very stabbed ham and some orange goop that smells amazing. If you don't  have these two things.... I don't know what to tell you. This is a very easy recipe.

Step 5: Crap. Did you preheat the oven? Go with 375. Seems to be a good temperature for meats.

Step 6: Put the ham into a shallow baking dish and dump the orange gobbledygook on top. It should appear something delicious looking like this:

Ok. If this doesn't look/smell awesome already then you should probably give up the vegetarian game and start eating meat. For the record... ham does not photograph well. This looks like every picture of spam from housewife manuals from WWII

Step 7: Put the ham in the oven and throw an aluminum tent on top of it. This should help it cook through without drying out; like a turkey. Every now and then go baste it. It should really just take an hour to cook but mine took more like and hour and 15 or an hour and 30. It's done with your meat thermometer says 130ish. Since it's already smoked it should be good to go.

Step 8: Make all the other sides... broccoli is always delicious and you probably have some in your freezer or buried back in the depths of your vegetable drawer. Now is a good time to eat that. Ham also always comes with mashed potatoes because mashed potatoes are the best. Make sure to use 1 stick of butter per 3 potatoes in your mashed potatoes. Don't worry... you went for a run today so you're allowed to eat the whole stick of butter.

Step 9: Begin preparing all the things together and yell at everyone in the living room to pause the movie so you can watch too (rude).

Step 10: Serve and enjoy.

Delicious Level: 4/5 Noms (om nom nom nom nom) - Tasty but dosent hold a torch to those short ribs!

Difficulty Level: totes whatevs

Lesson Learned: Thaw ham before cooking. Derp.

Here's to eatin' good and eatin' local! Cheers and uff-da!

Braised Short Ribs, Sweet Potato Fries, and Broccoli

We got braised short ribs in our meat CSA from Nooherooka farms about a month ago. They've been sitting in our freezer. We have no money and need to eat everything in our fridge before the holidays/we get a new fridge from our apartment complex. So i finally mustered up the courage to attempt some short ribs. I looked online and found a recipe from food network for braised short ribs:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/anne-burrell/braised-short-ribs-recipe/index.html

300+ reviews and the average is 5 stars? With an easy rating?! Yes, please. Let the cooking begin.
We're having sweet potato fries instead of mashed potatoes because my mom decided to grow mutant giant sweet potatoes this summer and she gave Jordan and I one. We have eaten this potato twice and we still have enough to feed 2-3 as a side for dinner tonight. Erin left to go back to Minnesnowta and I told her I would eat the leftovers in her fridge too (because I'm a good friend) which is where the broccoli comes from. Also Jordan and I invited Garrett and Kristy over (our wunderbar neighbors) for dinner and Kristy said she'll make dessert. Kristy's desserts are the BOMB so we know that if dinner sucks, at least we know dessert will be baller.

Step 1: Thaw the beef
Step 2: Figure out how to blend the vegetables together without a food processor. Here's to hoping the blender will work! - Slowly but surely
Step 3: Brown the meat - using a non-dutch oven because we don't have one and we're too broke to go out and get one now. We'll use the hand-me-down giant pan from my mom.
Step 4: Fill the apartment with smoke and move every fan to the kitchen area and open the windows.
Step 5: Put the 'whipped/chopped/pureed/liquified/blended' veggies in the bottom of the pot.
Step 6: Reposition the fans so they're blowing smoke away still :D
Step 7: Move the veggies around until they're brownish - then pour red wine in until you have about 1/3 of the bottle left.
Step 8: Sip the wine and see if it's good
            a) not good - offer it to guests
            b) good - drink the rest
Step 9: Stir around the wine and veggies until they're reduced by half.
Step 10: Add the beef to the pot, throw on 2 cups of water, and throw it in the oven at 375 for 3 hours.
        -oh! Your pot doesn't fit in the oven with the lid on? Remove the lid and add aluminum foil (this         will work, right? meh. why not?)

classy

Step 11: Halfway through flip the ribs over and put it back in the oven
Step 12: For the last 20 minutes remove the 'lid' or whatever you're using as a lid
Step 13: Realize your sweet potatoes are awfully limp and send your man to the store to get russet potatoes because you know they'll go better with the meal anyway.

I know this picture is blurry but if you had to sit in my apartment and smell this dankness cooking for 3 hours you wouldn't have time for fancy photography either

Delicious Level: 5/5 Noms (om nom nom nom nom nom)
Difficulty Level: meh
Lesson Learned: buy an apron/ wear tie dye when cooking this meal

Here's to eatin' good and eatin' local! Cheers and uff-da!

Introduction to cooking in a limited kitchen with unfamiliar foods

My program at ECU and discussions with local farmers and farmers markets introduced me to the idea of Community Supported Agriculture programs. Right now Americans are paying a very small fraction of their income for food compared to what they have paid historically. As a result, farmers have been suffering financially and food in the grocery stores is just not as fresh. I grew up eating food fresh out of my mom's garden and eating sustainably without knowing I was eating sustainably. This past Summer I decided to sign up for a CSA from Beausol Farm in Pittsboro. I looked at a few, what they had to offer, and how much they were for how long. They had the most variety for the cheapest amount over the longest period of time. We ended up eating kale, boc choy, AMAZING tomatoes, strawberries, basil, parsley, and so much more that I can't even think of right now. It was fresh off of the garden and my money went straight to the farmer.

Now I'm in Greenville, NC. You see a ton of farms on either side of the road no matter how you drive into Greenville. A lot of them are cotton, tobacco, and soy but where are the vegetables being sold? There is one CSA in Greenville that I know about and it's the Locavore Market that draws from several farms in the Eastern, NC area. Through that same site we also found Nooherooka farm. They sell beef and pork in their CSA. I've never cooked a beef stew, beef stir fry, or short ribs. So through this CSA not only am I supporting local farms and farmers, I'm getting to learn about how to cook foods I never cooked before.