Cooking Thought of the Week

Always cook double when making Mashed Potatoes.

Later in the week you can use them for a fast Shepherds Pie.  Consider this also if you are grilling/smoking/roasting meat to go with those initial mashed potatoes, because the chopped up left-over meat will taste kinda extra fancy in the pie in place of ground meat.

Wouldn't it be nice if this blog had audio, and I could hire Jack Handy to read these entries to you?

Fast Sauces/Dips

If I were more web-savvy I would make a special page just for sauces.  Although nearly all of mine start with one key ingredient: Greek Yogurt, and that may not make for a very interesting page.  However these sauces have really helped me sell dishes in the past so I feel I should pass them on.

Greek yogurt
garlic salt
chopped basil
one small squirt of Dijon mustard

this is really good on eggs.

more to come as they occur to me...

Tilapia Asparagus Pie

Well I had to kind of wing with with the fillo dough.  I folded about 5 layers spraying cooking oil between each sheet.

Spread:
4 oz creme fraiche (sour cream would be fine)
4 oz grated Parmesan
4 oz cream cheese
1 tbsp minced garlic

smooth that out on the fillo, i had to use my fingers because the spatula was ripping up the fillo.

on that, chopped and sauteed asparagus (sauteed in evoo salt and pepper), about 6 stalks
on that, oven baked tilapia (2 fillets), broken up

5 more layers of fillo. sprayed with oil.
bake for 15 minutes at 300.

Delish.  Husband and I could have easily polished this off between the two of us.  If I make this again I will double it and use a larger pan.  I used a 6x10 baking dish this round.

Fillo Love of Pastry!

In case I've inaccurately portrayed myself as anything but a dingbat in the kitchen, I'd like to talk about pastry in order to make it clear that I don't know what the crap I'm doing.

I accidentally bought fillo sheets in the freezer section at Whole Foods when I meant to buy "Puff Pastry."  When I've bought puff pastry in the past it's been Pepperidge Farms brand and I've had great luck making various fish pies, veggie tarts, etc.

So thinking of puff pastry, you can imagine my surprise when I unrolled 20 sheets of cobweb-fragile paper-I-mean-dough.

Need to break.  On cue, children are requesting we visit a restaurant 10 minutes before dinner is ready.

.....