Hello, I’m Donald and I’m a brownie phreak!

I will admit, amongst all available sweet, delicious, fat inducing, indulgences one could have, I will take a warm brownie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream over anything. I haven’t go a clue as to what it is, but it is what it is.

I saw these brownies over at Cathy’s Noble Pig and I felt something just weaken in my bones. Probably my will power. I could not, in any way, resist these brownies on steroids.

Don’t be fooled by the appearance, these babies are really loaded. Try taking your normal delicious chocolate brownie, then add Nutella, peanut butter, and topping it with a glaze and chocolate chips. Yeah, eye popping and gut busting goodness, yes? Nothing dry about these.

We took a few creative liberties with these. We used freshly ground peanut butter, Ghirardelli cocoa powder, and white chocolate chips, but the recipe is basically the same as Cathy’s.

Trust me with this, if you don’t yet know Cathy, click on over to her blog. You will return as it is excellent. And please, please, make these brownies.

Here’s a random thought, if you are standing by an elevator, and you or someone in the vicinity has, you know, pressed one of the applicable buttons for transport, and the doors open when the car arrives, WAIT!!!!! There might actually be humans exiting the car!

I don’t know how many times I have almost lip-locked some mind-wandering sportnik who anticipated the spreading of the doors, trying to get on the car before I can get off the car. It really is amazing to me. I can count on this happening at least once a day. I actually had a woman screen me in such a way that she got on while I was attempting to exit. Then she just stared straight ahead. You know, if they don’t look at you, you aren’t really there; my pup tries this trick too.

Well…there is a way that I get some of these car jumpers back. I remain on the car with them and I will move in really close to them, into their critical space, and when they make eye contact with me, I’ll say, “I have on new socks today.”

…crap pisses me off…

I almost forgot what I came here for. The food.

So…

I made hummus for the first time. I had some Ranch Gordo garbanzos that I had recently purchased and I was all like, what to do with these. So I put some in a soup, and the rest, meaning the ones I could wrest from my wife who was popping them like candy, I put into this hummus.

I have seen so many variations and flavors of hummus and the mega-mart some are really pretty good, but somehow I knew, this was going to be far greater an experience because of the RGs. Yes…

So, I roasted a pepper on the stove, roasted a bulb of garlic and the rest came together quite nicely.

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What a luxury in depressing times, huh? Well when one thinks about it, it is much cheaper to stay at home and prepare a luxurious meal, provided one has the skills, than it is to roll out to the steakhouse and order a la carte. This was the Valentine’s day meal I prepared for Beck and myself.

I have cooked many a filet in my time, but I never have roasted up a chateaubriand. For those who may not know, the chateaubriand is the center cut from the beef tenderloin. Now I used to buy whole tenderloins from Sam’s club, because they were relatively inexpensive there, and I would trim them down to steaks and stew meat; never a roast. Well that’s not entirely true, now that I think about it, I did do a horseradish crusted roast of filet once, but that’s not the same thing!

A chateaubriand has become rather commonplace for Valentine’s day due to its appeal of being just the right size for two. The typical chateaubriand cut weighs in at about 1 - 1 1/2 pounds. You can see the perfect specimen salted and waiting obediently below:

Anyone who has read my blog knows that I am giddy for good beef. When I am not ordering USDA prime steaks from the interweb, I “settle” for the grass fed beef that my local Whole Paychex carries. I won’t buy anything but chuck roast from my local supermarket.

Last August, I was took a weeknight cooking class at WF. It was steak night. I mean, for $60 we got all the wine we could drink and lessons in preparing steaks and pan sauces as well as a few other items that, if I were younger, I’d recall. I really didn’t need the instruction as some of the other participants did. So I ended up manning the grill and giving instruction. That was kinda fun, kinda.

At one point all the other participants were called back inside, away from me and the grill, to learn about preparing pan sauces for the steaks - I didn’t really need any learning in this department either. What was cool was I got to chat with Will Harris from White Oak Pastures. His farm, in southern Georgia, is the supplier of the grass fed beef to WF. He an I chatted about his farm, his humane treatment of his heard, my grilling technique, and drank more wine. That was truly and enlightening experience for me.

When asked “how does one, lovingly care for an animal it’s entire life — and then send it to slaughter?” Will responded: “When I first started meeting the folks that buy my beef, I did not know how to respond to this. My immediate answer was that it is what my folks have always done, it is how folks have fed their families for centuries, and it is what i am supposed to do. This is all true, but somehow it seemed flippant to me. It took a lot of soul searching for me to finally be able to express the feelings that are in my heart. The fact is that I love my herd as much as you love your companion animal. I have a dog that is my constant companion. But, I do not feel the same kind of love for the individual animal within the herd. If I lost my herd, I would grieve for it and I would never get over it. But this is not the way that I feel about the individual animal within the herd. In my mind the herd is a dynamic body. It is a river and not a lake. This said, we never let even one animal within the herd suffer if I can prevent it. I am their steward and they are my responsibility. This is probably a lot more than you wanted to know.”

Gotta love this guy. I liked him even more after he gave me four packs of free ground beef!

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So I wanted to throw together something spicy, lipsmackin’, and quick. Weeknight dinners are always a challenge. And no, I do NOT believe that one can pull off a Rachel Ray meal in 30 damn REAL minutes. Do you? I mean it’s okay if you do, but in my kitchen, we don’t have commercial breaks where stuff gets magically prepped. Don’t get me wrong, RR is okay by me, in a chalk-board-fingernail-scratching sort of way. You know what I mean kids?

Some nights, I just sit in my chair and think about how tasty the meal I am not making would be, despite having planned it out, purchased the goods, I just will not be moving my ass to make. It’s really pathetic some nights. I just look at the wife with tired eyes and say, “I’m not really hungry tonight.” To wit she replies, “okay, I’ll have a brownie”

As I have been, more and more, coming of age, culinary speaking, I have begun a small arsenal of whip-em-up week-nighters. Some are good, most really, and some are followed by the sentiment “call the pizza guy I can’t eat this crap!” Sometimes experimentation can be most gastro-challenging.

Well, one of my winners, this dish, my interpretation of shrimp and grits. I wasn’t really thrilled with the idea several years ago when I had first heard of this dish. This because no one from Philadelphia would ever think of putting grits with seafood unless it was a seafood omelet and some of the seafood got pushed over into the grits. But, you see, rarely were there ever grits on a breakfast plate in Philadelphia. Common items would be home fries, scrapple, and cream of wheat, no grits. Here is the South seafood and grits is relatively commonplace.

Well, we were having dinner in some restaurant a while back and Beck ordered shrimp and grits, jalapeno cheese grits to be precise, and I found that they were extremely good. As were these…

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