Goat Cheese Fritter

Goat cheese fritters make great appetizers. These are really easy to prepare and are very pleasing to the eye. You will need,

Flour

Eggwash

Bread crumbs

Mix greens

Cherry tomatos

Balsamica Viniagrette

To begin form your goat cheese into little round cakes of 2-4oz of goat cheese a piece.

Roll your goat cheese cakes in flour until well coated. After that submerge the cakes in eggwash. Transfer the cakes from the eggwash to the bread crumbs and coat them completely. Brown the quickly on each side in a smoking hot cast iron skillet with a little olive oil. Serve on top of some mixed greens tossed in balsamic dressing and garnish with a few cherry tomatos. Serve immediately. Overall time for this dish is lees than five minutes if you move fast, about a half hour if you move like a snail.

Horseradish Cod

Horseradish encrusted cod is one of my favorite dishes to prepare as well as to serve. Preparation is as follows. You will need,

Eggs

Flour

Bread crumbs

Cod fish

Horseradish

To begin using fresh cod liberally coat the fish with fresh ground horseradish. Next dredge the cod in flour on both sides. After this beat eggs with water to form an eggwash. Make enough eggwash to completely submerge the cod. Submerge your cod in the eggwash and then transer into the bread crumbs. Now you are ready to cook! Leave a cast iron skillet with olive oil in it on the burner until the oil is smoking. The reason we use cast iron is for the hard sear and nice color it will give the cod. Brown the cod on each side and then finish in a 350 degree oven for about ten minutes. I like to serve mine with mashed potatos and vegetables, but many things go well with this dish. I like to garnish with a lemon wedge and a little chopped parsley.

Turkey

Ok, so for all of you who are planning to roast a turkey this thanksgiving, don't do it.
This guy posted a great entry on his blog about roasting turkey, and it made a world of sense to me. Here is the link.

http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/chickenturkeymore/a/turkeytrouble.htm

Chicken Parmesan

Today I sold a couple of chiken parmesan, a dish that is as easy to make as it is good to eat. Basically all you need is chicken breast, marinara sauce, eggs, flour, bread crumbs, and cheese. I like to bread the chicken breast after seasoning it with salt and pepper. I bread it by dredging it in flour, dipping it in eggwash, and last the bread crumbs. After this I brown the chicken in a hot cast iron skillet and cook it in an oven of 350 degrees until the chicken is done. I won't give you an exact amount of time with this recipe as your mileage may vary and with chicken one should always cut it open and look to see if it is done just to be safe. Anyway when it is done I put some already heated marinara on it and a little cheese (I prefer sharp cheddar). Then I melt the cheese in the oven. In this time usually I heat up my rice, pasta, or bread, whatever I am serving the chicken on today. Thats it. Some parmesan cheese on top and maybe some herbs. This is sooooo good. Hope it works out for you!

Just a small note.

Got a digital camera today, so soon I will start posting photos of my food as well. I think it will help to illustrate some things.

Duelling Soups

Ok, today I made a soup using a technique I really enjoy. I call this the dueling soup technique. Its a fairly simple thing to do, but thats the whole point here. In my opinion this soup is brilliant in it's simplicity. I'll explain this technique a little more in-depth before I go more into the individual soup itself.
Basically prepare two really vibrantly colored soups with a similar thickness or consistency. Pour these two soups into a bowl at the same time and they will not merge with one another. If done right it looks like a yin-yang. If you really want to go all out do not make the separate soups perfectly balanced flavor wise. Plan so that when the two soups are mixed together the flavor then becomes complete. This is a little hard to explain if you don't understand what I am talking about. It's kind of like one half of the soup not having any salt but its kind of bitter, and the other half being salty and sweet. Together they should meld into something nice. Now if your flavor combos work together as well you have a fairly impressive soup on your hands. Today I made roasted red pepper tomato vs. spinach and celery with lemon. I used a nice little creme fraiche to tie it all together.
If you are stumped for flavor combos just remember to keep it simple. Think really basic and about what you might like to eat yourself, or perhaps what the person or people you are cooking for might like. This usually helps me.

Funnel Cakes and Meatball Subs

Ok, so today the two items I prepared today that stand out most to me are meatball subs and funnel cakes. I had never actually heard of a funnel cake before, and my variation is quite simple to make, but i'll get to the recipe itself in just a little bit. I was discussing deep frying with my sous chef and realizing we had thrown just about everything we could possibly think of into the fryer as of late when we had the wonderful Idea to make funnel cakes. They turned out pretty nicely, I was satisfied anyway. We covered them with maple syrup, chocolate syrup, whipe cream, sugar, all kinds of good stuff. Here is the recipe;

1 store bought pancake mix (the just add water kind)

2 water

Procedure: Mix it up, leave it thick (almost like cookie dough). When your batter is finished procede to ladel it into 350 degree fryer oil and fry until dark brown. Top with whatever, these things rock.

So on to the meatball subs. Who doesn't love these things aside from vegetarians? Marinara, meatballs, cheese, that easy. Keep it simple. Thats why meatball subs rock. For me as a chef it is also a low food cost meal for my staff that takes all of ten minutes to prepare, and most everybody loves. Its kinda hard to go wrong with canned marinara and frozen meatballs, combined with par baked breads. I have seen people mess this up, but its pretty hard.