Best Tuna Melt EVER!

Best Tuna Melt EVER.  And delicious homemade tomato soup.

Yup.  Had to start that one right off with a picture so you all could get to drooling.  By the by, this awesome pic is courtesy of Dante.  Mine were all blurry... :-(

So yeah, we're kind of on a greens kick lately.  Dante's been making up lots of greens.  He uses a mix of collard greens, turnip greens, kale, and rainbow chard and cooks them down with some sauteed onions, garlic, bacon (if we have it), and other spices and they're AMAZING.  Very tasty.  The only other collard greens I'd had before he cooked these were from a can and were basically just salt.  lots of salt. 

As a result of all the greens-cooking going on, we have leftover greens in the fridge quite often, and have been playing with different things to do with them.  This is probably the biggest success yet.  After we made some DELICIOUS greens/cheddar/bacon/cheese sauce potato skins for brunch, Dante suggested that it could be good to make a tuna melt with greens in it.  I definitely agreed.  We both thought it could use something to dress it up a bit, so after watching a couple hours of The Chew (we have been recording it on the DVR and are currently playing catch-up), were inspired and decided on caramelized onions with balsamic vinegar.  That was a good choice........ a very good choice. I was afraid they might overpower the other flavors of the sandwich, but no such problem.  They were flavorful but not overly potent.  We made the sandwiches on wheat bread and I put provolone cheese on mine.  Dante put Smoked Cheddar on his, and we cooked em up on the electric griddle.  They were FAN-TAS-TIC!  For reals, if you're looking for a good sandwich, this is definitely the way to go. 

To go with our awesome sandwiches, we made Clinton's Creamy Tomato Soup from the Chew. We did use red onion in place of the white, and fat free half and half in place of the heavy cream.  It turned out super fresh and tasty, and I'm not even usually a tomato soup fan!  I like to dip my grilled cheese in it, but I rarely eat more than a couple spoonfuls of Campbell's plain (seriously, I'll put mine in an espresso cup when we have sandwiches because that's enough to dip, but I don't have to feel wasteful when I don't want to eat it).  This, I cleaned my bowl.  My big, real people sized bowl.

So next cool day, or just if you're feeling like some pure awesomeness for dinner, I highly recommend you try both of these.


Tuna Melt with Mixed Greens

Cooked Mixed Greens (recipe will be in next post)
Tuna Salad, seasoned to taste (I used miracle whip, garlic, onion, thyme, salt, pepper, and italian seasoning)
1 Red Onion
1 T Olive Oil
2 T Balsamic Vinegar
Provolone or Smoked Cheddar Cheese
Wheat Bread
Butter or Margarine

Caramelized Onions:
1. Slice red onion into thin half-moons.
2. Sautee onion in a medium pan with olive oil until onions soften and start to brown. 
3. Once onions start to brown, add Balsamic vinegar and stir. 
4. Cook another 2 minutes, stirring often. 

Sandwiches: (Note: all quantities are approximate.  I didn't measure.  Just eyeball it and adjust based on your tastes!  After all, it's your sandwich...)
1. For each sandwich, butter two slices of bread.  Tip: Put the two pieces of bread butter sides together and put your sandwich fillings on top, then when you're ready to cook them, lift the top piece of bread (with fillings) onto the griddle, butter side down, and top with the remaining piece of bread (butter side up).  This keeps you from somehow getting butter all over the kitchen during the sandwich prep.  I learned this from my mom, who's a genius. :-D
2. Drain/press as much liquid from the greens as possible.  Put 1/4-1/2 cup greens on one slice of bread, on the non-buttered side.
3. Add 1/2 c tuna salad on top of the greens and spread to cover evenly.
4. Add 2-4 T caramelized onions on top of the tuna and again, spread to cover evenly.
5. Top with cheese and transfer to hot griddle (I had ours at 350 and it worked beautifully).  Add second slice of bread, butter side up.
6. Cook until golden brown and delicious.  Flip and repeat.
7. Cut in half and serve with Clinton's Creamy Tomato Soup.  Enjoy!

Cabbage, cabbage everywhere...

And so much stuff to eat!

So, given its versatility, amazing "healthiness", and super cheap price tag, we felt cabbage was something we should explore, since neither one of us really knew what to do with it beyond boiled dinner (which is also pretty amazing). 

So, we started with some awesome coleslaw which, due to the red cabbage in it, turned a pretty pink/purple color! lol.  But it was also quite tasty.  We blended a couple different recipes, though it was mostly based on Alton Brown's Coleslaw recipe, with a little tweaking here and there.

We then took said coleslaw and put it on the sandwiches in the above picture.  They were a grilled chicken breast with BBQ sauce (Sweet Baby Ray's, of course), Roasted Red Pepper, Coleslaw, and honey mustard on a pretzel roll.  We served these tasty, but super-messy, sandwiches up with the coleslaw and a home version of the Bavarian Inn's butter noodles.  Basically, homemade fettuccine with a sauce of melted butter and Frankenmuth chicken seasoning, topped with lightly-toasted pulverized Club crackers.  Dante says they're just like the ones from Bavarian Inn.

Our next use for the coleslaw (and one of the motivating factors for MAKING coleslaw) was Reubens.  MMMMmmmmmm Reubens.  I worked in a bakery/deli that served reubens and was never at all intrigued by them, but fortunately, Dante had me try one a while back, and I'm completely addicted.  Course, ours and the ones from the deli down the road are MUCH better looking than the ones I used to serve... Anywho... our reubens were on a rye/pumpernickel swirl bread with corned beef and Dante had pepper-crusted pastrami on his as well, with our fresh coleslaw (strained of some of its liquid), Swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing, assembled and grilled on the Foreman.

Since we used less than half of each head of cabbage and made a  GIANT (and I mean Giant... largest one we have) mixing bowl FULL of coleslaw, we needed a good way to use up some more of the cabbage before it went bad (which fortunately, isn't too fast).  So we decided to try a beefy cabbage soup.  And oh my goodness did we have a lot of soup.  The picture below is the very pretty "before" picture, and that's an 8 Quart Stockpot.  Like I said, a lot of soup.

Our soup had red and green cabbage, carrots, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, baby bella mushrooms, celery, onion, and garlic with a little browned beef steak all cooked up in a beef broth base with two packets of Lipton Beefy Onion Soup mix and assorted spices.  Unfortunately, what started as this beautiful, colorful mass of vegetables cooked down to look rather less appealing and very ... brown (See below).  But it was VERY tasty.

 

We ate this with a slice of the leftover swiss melted on top and cheater (from a mix) biscuits.  YUM!



And that about wraps up the cabbage post, although we still have 6 pints of this soup in the freezer, so we'll be reliving it for a while! (In fact this may be dinner for tonight... hmm........)



Happy Cooking!

Fall Food Festival!

Also known as... I just found pics on my SD card from NOVEMBER!  yikes!  So, just to showcase the awesomeness, here goes!  Back to more detailed posts soon, I promise.  Playing MAJOR Catch-up right now.

#1: Gruyere potatoes with cream sauce and green onions

#2: Brunch, inspired by Geoffrey Zakarian's "Ballpark Brunch" on Next Iron Chef

Includes tomato and fresh mozzarella toast, Creamy avocado with egg yolk, and shrimp

#3: Sandwiches: Tomato, garlic, basil, and ham with fresh mozzarella on french rolls

#4: Pumpkin Apple Soup.  DELICIOUS. Not sure of the link,

but I can look it up if anyone wants the recipe.

...and we had just a little pumpkin to use up... I think there were 12 of these initially, though as I strained some of the water out, I think i cut it down to about half that.

So there are the lost food files from November.  Hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for more, because it's been a DELICIOUS week here, and I'm not even kidding...

Happy cooking!

Food Catch-up, August Edition

ok, so got all caught up on the (2) bentos this morning.  Now for some other food catch-up.

Modified Tom's Chicken Soup

So we found a recipe called "Tom's Chicken Soup" in one of my cookbooks that looked really good.  But, being me, I couldn't just FOLLOW the recipe... So this is my version.  It's got Chicken, Fake Bacon, Potatoes, Shallots, Garlic, Chicken Stock, Mushroom Stock, Milk, and "Cream" (reconstituted dry milk at high concentrations...).  It was good and hearty. Served with Italian Herb and Cheese biscuits.  Yum.  

 Mini S'mores Bears

Fourth of July.  No marshmallows, Hershey's bars, or graham crackers anywhere in the apartment.  What's a girl to do? Pull out the chocolate frosting, marshmallow fluff and Teddy Grahams!!  Cute and tasty!

 Coffee Baked Alaska

This was the one specific food request Dante made for his birthday.  And I was only too happy to oblige.  This is pound cake and coffee truffle ice cream covered in coffee-flavored meringue, baked for just a couple mins, and drizzled with chocolate sauce and mini chocolate chips. 

Red Velvet Pancakes 

These were the breakfast part of Dante Birthday celebrations!  They have cocoa powder and such in them.  Found the recipe online here: http://cookingequipment.about.com/od/breakfastrecipes/r/Red-Velvet-Pancakes-With-Cream-Cheese-Glaze.htm  Mine turned out rather PINK instead of red, but... it takes a LOT of food coloring to get them even this red.  And I was using paste colors.

I think that's all of the highlights, at least that we have photos of.  Hope you enjoyed!

Happy bentos!

-Rowan