Ranch Gordo Good Mother Stallards are the beans that you see there. They were unlike any beans I have ever eaten. The pot liquor alone was worth the price of admission. They were tender but not mushy and really, really buttery. I soaked them for about 4 hours and then let then simmer for 3 hours with a ham hock. These ain’t no ordinary bag’o beans from the supermarket. The folks over at Rancho Gordo call them their “come back” beans. Now I can see why. If you try any of the RG beans, let them be the these.

Oh yeah, and I made some pork chops…

I wanted to try the method that I read about in a magazine. They illustrated the results of cooking the chop quickly starting with a hot pan and cooking the chop slowly starting with a cold pan. The hot - quick method yielded 5 tablespoons of juice left over in the pan whereas the slower - cold pan method yielded only two. If the juice is in the pan, well, it ain’t in the chop. Since I am not a fan of this so called “enhanced” (read: injected with salt, water, and who knows what else) pork, I used natural pork chops. When I buy pork, I don’t think it should come with an ingredients label with more than pork as the ingredient. I can enhance them myself. In an effort to make them even more juicy and flavorful (read: enhance them) I brined them in a maple syrup mixture. Topped with a quick Dijon mustard pan sauce, these were some juicy, tangy, chops.

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There are plenty of items that I love on a Mexican retaurant’s menu, hard tacos de carne, burrito supremo, taco loco, queso fundido, and a bunch more. But there is nothing I like more than a chimichanga. It is really quite basic yet I understand that in Tuscon Arizona, the “chimi” has reached celebrity cult status. It is simply a burrito filled with beans, beef or chicken, and deep fried. Restaurant after restaurant in Tucson have their own variation of the chimi and naturally each claiming to have the best.

Where chimichangas were invented is impossible to pinpoint other than to say it was probably somewhere in a Tucson restaurant. Legend has it that either Monica Flin or Cameron Strukoff, circa 1922, accidentally dropped a burrito (some say pastry, but burrito fits better here) in the deep fryer and uttered a swear word aloud. With young family members around, she changed the word to “chimichanga” which is supposed to be the Spanish equivalent of “thing-a-ma-jig.” Other restaurants claim to have invented it in the 1950s. To me, it’s only curiosity as to the chimichangas historical origin; I mean I never researched a taco.

This is another one of those things I usually only have in restaurants that I decided I can make at home. I have a deep fryer, why not give a chimi a try. Well, you can tell by the pictures that it was a success. I teamed the chimi up with the usual suspects, guac, sour cream, and pico de gallo (salsa would be great here as well). I also made tortilla chips and re-fried beans. The beans went into the chimichanga and were enjoyed as a side dish along with Spanish rice.

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Baked eggs with polenta, cheese, and bacon! Yes!

First, let me thank Robin at Caviar and Codfish, formerly known as Clumsy Cook who grew as a cook into a great cook, IMHO. She made this dish in her $10 or $12 dollar cast iron ramekins from Wal-Mart. I saw them on her blog and as I can get sometimes, I got enthralled. So much to the point that I just had to taste it. I HAD to! And alas, I did. And It was good.

I didn’t stray from her recipe at all except for the fact that I bake my bacon and I couldn’t find those cast iron ramekins. I did find some similar ramekins though; they were considerably more expensive, but like my blogging friend Erin from Erin Cooks will tell you, it’s okay to have a little All Clad in your collection. Isn’t it?

My baked eggs came out perfectly although they did not look nearly as pretty as Robin’s. I would suggest that you push an indentation in the center of the cheese/polenta layer before cracking the egg so that the egg will be centered. My bacon began to um, how you say, “creep"? It was still crisp though.

The biggest problem we had was that these nice pots never, NEVER, would release their heat from the oven so that we could actually eat the damn dish! We had to wait and we couldn’t. I felt like a Pavlovian dog with a large piece of meat three inches from me and yet I couldn’t reach it. We painstakingly got to eat, “eat from the outside in", as my great grandmom used to tell me when I was eating something hot like cream of wheat. So we applied that method. It somewhat worked.

They were so good that Beck told me that they had to be now added to our breakfast rotation which has been growing full of the normalcy of most breakfast dishes, scrambled, baked, or fried something or other. Tons of frittatas and pancakes, but this, this, was pure go-right-back-to-sleep material. On the sleepy scale they are a 5 and that is as high as it goes. This is a Sunday morning dish ONLY! We felt so comfortable and fulfilled from this breakfast that I will not EVER make it before waxing the cars! Remember, we gave it 5 sleepies! You heard me? You’ve been warned.

Check this recipe if you dare. We did and it was…was…was…zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

I made this dish last month and it came out pretty good. I used big sprouts in it then, but I didn’t really like the way they came out; kind of limp and squishy. No one likes a limp sprout.

This dish, though inspired by a half a dozen recipes that I’ve seen on the web, is my entry in the Royal Foodie Joust. I was going to use the dish I made last month in the contest, I decided to make it again. Becky was very pleased with that idea.

The ingredients for this month are:

1. Seafood
2. Lemon or lime
3. Coconut

I chose lobster, mussels, bay scallops, prawns, and a coconut-lime curry. I have been venturing into the Asian aile at the market looking to prepare some Asian inspired dishes over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this dish is a winner!

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These sandwiches are definitely a crowd pleaser in my book. Can they even be called sandwiches? I read somewhere that the taco is actually a variation of the gyro. Whatever, they are tasty and without a doubt the great taste is a combination of the garlicky tzatziki sauce with the roasted lamb and mint. In this preparation, I think i minced up 12 cloves of garlic. We like garlic. We simply did not breathe after eating the gyros. Actually, it wasn’t anything that a few Listerine strips couldn’t handle, but oh did they sting!

I remember my first gyro was in a mall in Willow Grove Pennsylvania, oh some 1375 moons ago. Naturally I, as did most everyone else, called them “jy-rows". It wasn’t until later when my stepfather, who was Greek, corrected me. I think I actually argued the point, but then again, I didn’t like him very much, so the correction was ill received.

I didn’t realize how easy gyros are to make until an episode of Good Eats when Alton made them. He made two varieties, one over a grill on a spit, which I assume is more traditional, and one in a loaf pan. I chose the latter for mine, as I don’t have use of a spit.

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