Last Week's Easy BBQ

My first recipe for the blog was from a book called 'The Weeknight Cook', and it was a simple BBQ beef sandwich. I made it a week ago, but work, meetings with our real estate agent and other scheduled events (like a burlesque show on Saturday) have brought another Monday before a new post.

The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 large yellow onion, chopped
- 3 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
- salt & freshly ground pepper
- 1 1/2 cups barbecue sauce
- sandwich rolls

Execution:
Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Saute the onion and garlic over medium heat until softened. Add the beef, season with the salt and pepper, and cook until browned. Add barbecue sauce and reduce heat to low, cooking until meat is coated and sauce is heated through. Assemble beef into sandwiches on toasted rolls.

There was also a coleslaw recommended to accompany the meal:
- 1/3 cup mayonnaise
- 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
- 1/2 head green cabbage

Now. I've made this recipe before, by the book, and it was pretty decent. The coleslaw, though, had an incredibly intense vinegar flavor, and was practically inedible. So this time through, for the coleslaw, I doubled the mayonnaise and dijon mustard, but I reduced the apple cider vinegar to a single tablespoon. At this point, it tasted much better, but it still needed something more. I was on the phone with my grandmother while I was making the meal, and she is an excellent cook - a treasure trove of recipes and tricks of the trade. We were discussing the various ways of making coleslaw, and she mentioned adding sugar to the recipe. Ding ding ding! I added a quarter cup of sugar to the slaw and mixed it up, and it tasted great. Honestly, if sugar is going into the recipe, I could probably add another tablespoon of vinegar, as well. I'll try that next time.

For the barbecue, I wanted to change it up a bit - not much, because the simplicity of the recipe is the reason I chose it for the evening, but it needed a little help. In the beginning I added another onion and three more garlic cloves to the saute. I also used two pounds of beef, but that's only because my fiance had purchased a two-pound container at the store, and I didn't feel like putting the leftover half-pound in a plastic container in the fridge and then forgetting about it. For the sauce, I used Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce, which is a really good, really sweet and slightly smoky barbecue. To change it up a little bit, though, I decided to add a quarter cup of spicy brown mustard to the barbecue sauce, which came out to a 3 to 1 ratio. Mixed in and sauted with the beef and the extra onion and garlic, it turned out really well. It was a great combination of sweet and tangy flavors - although I think it tasted more like a really great and interesting sloppy joe than barbecue.

Overall, I really like how simple it is, and how easy it is to make a tasty sandwich with the recipe. The coleslaw is great for serving along with the sandwich, especially if you serve it on the sandwich. The combo of flavors with the BBQ and the coleslaw are really yummy.

I do have my grandmother to thank for the slaw, though - she totally saved it by mentioning sugar. After I added the sugar I called her back to tell her she perfected my slaw, which she thought both silly and funny.

Grade: B+ (because the effort required wasn't much)
Recommend to others: Yes, with changes

The First Bite (sorry, I couldn't help it)

A blog. About food. A novel idea, right?

What I'm really doing here is combining two things I love to do: cook and write. I want to become better at both of these activities. So, I've come here with a plan to blog about the things I cook in my kitchen at home. Another plan of mine is to attend culinary school in the coming fall; I've previously attended college for creative writing, although I figured out early on that four-year institutions were not my cup of tea. I do look forward to getting back into the learning game, though - and I look forward to finally receiving that degree I've always wanted. Maybe when I'm finished I'll frame it and hang it in my kitchen.

I didn't always have this passion for cooking. I did always have a passion for food, however - good, delicious food has always been my biggest vice. My first recollection of really loving food was when I was about seven or eight - my memory is bad, just warning you - and there was this Mexican restaurant in Greenwood called Casa Miguel's. My parents and I went there all the time. Now my parents tell me that it's a pizza place that serves seriously sub-par slices and has no ambiance whatsoever. When it was still Casa Miguel's, we went every year on my birthday for the 'big sombrero': there was a giant sombrero (I think it was turquoise velvet) that they plopped on your head, sang you Happy Birthday in spanish, and gave you this awesome snickerdoodle-vanilla ice cream dessert bowl.

But I digress. The food experience I had at Casa Miguel's was the 'Chimichihuahua': basically, a smaller version of a chimichanga, served with sour cream and salsa, refried black beans, and some very delicious (and authentically not-too-spicy) spanish rice. A chimichanga is basically a deep-fried burrito - a flour tortilla filled with shredded or ground meat, beans, cheese, or rice. The Chimichihuahua only had shredded beef and cheese, but I loved it. It's not hard to love fried things; but sitting next to my father who rarely eats anything spicy and wolfing down this nice little package of spicy beef and cheese was a revelation. Granted, after that, Mexican and Chinese were the only kinds of foreign foods that I would eat for a long time; I have my fiance to truly thank for opening up my culinary world.

After coming to love food so much at such a young age, it seems strange to me that the love of cooking didn't arrive until relatively recently. I've always been able to put together a recipe with no problem, but I didn't start loving it until I was making a dish called Chicken Milano for dinner about a year ago. I'd made it before; it's actually the first meal that my fiance and I cooked together. But this time around, I found it easy, and I found myself really enjoying the cooking process, and I finally discovered that I was really good at it! Again, a revelation.

With this blog, I will be bringing in the recipes that I cook at home, the changes that I make to them, and of course, the results. I'll probably be giving myself a letter grade for every recipe, based on what I think, along with my fiance's opinion. That's the main premise; considering how much I tend to ramble, other topics will be covered, I'm sure. For anybody who ends up reading this, I welcome questions, comments, recipe recommendations and links, anecdotes of your own - whatever you feel like saying, really.

Now I've got to jet, or I'll be late for work.