Crawfish Boil!

Well, missed the Texas Crawfish Festival in Old Town Spring...again.  The plan was to go Saturday but the rain ruined it all!  So I had my own crawfish boil with my folks.  It was sort of planned yet last minute.  My brother had asked the previous week, but I forgot about it.  First thing was first,  call the stores to see if they had crawfish. 

I like my crawfish with tons of flavor so I sauteed some onion, garlic and ginger for a while and then tossed in the fruit uses and the citrus fruit.  Louisiana's Crawfish Boil seasoning is great, but we wanted more heat...in went the Sriracha. 

We had grabbed a sack of crawfish, about 35 Pounds, and just had unlimited crawfish. Of course I threw in some mussels and sausage into the boil.

The crawfish was just full of flavor and then you take a bite of the corn! I like heat, but corn just absorbs everything!!! Corn is like Pringles...once you pop it, you can't stop it. Oh yeah...the mushrooms were just a huge sponge full of spicy deliciousness!

The initial set up

My Sous Chef...

...being immature!  Grow up!

The broth just turned all red!

Boudin from my Dad.

The Final Product!

It was well worth it.  As much as a I love crawfish, this may be my last time this season to eat crawfish.  Throwing in the towel!



Asian Skirt Steak with Stir Fry Veggies with Jasmine Rice

 

Tonight's dinner was thrown together quickly.  I had some skirt steak in the fridge and was in the mood for Asian food again.  This of course is still part of the clearing out the fridge week. 

Ingredients: skirt steak, asparagus, carrots, onion, garlic and leftover jasmine rice.

I seasoned the salt simply with just salt and peper while I prepared everything else.  I whipped up a quick Asian glaze and proceed to cut up my veggies.

I stir fried the veggies and hit it was the Asian glaze and set that aside.  While the pan was still hot, I added a little bit of oil to the pan and got it nice and hot to sear the skirt steaks.  After, the steaks seared off, I hit it with the remainder of the sauce to let it soak into the meat. 

The reserved sauce in the pan went nicely with the rice. 

Stuffed Huevos Ranchero

So much sounded good this morning, but I wanted to create a dish that would use up more of the groceries in the fridge.  After some deep thought, Huevos Rancheros sounded very good. 

Ingredients in the fridge: cherry tomato, carrot, cilantro, onion, garlic, corn tortilla, black beans, 3 eggs, 3 hard boiled eggs, cheese, left over Mexican rice and corn. 

To make the hot salsa, I threw everything in the blender with some spices and cooked it down until it became a thick sauce.

I sauteed some garlic and shallots and threw in the black beans that I had mashed to make refried beans. 

I was going to just double up on the tortillas to just use it up, but opted to "stuff" it with my refried black beans and cheese.

From there I just started layering everything.  It looks like another one of those hot messes, but all the flavors just worked so well together.  The pics below was enough for 2 people. 

Here we are....Huevos Ranchero at its finest!

The tortillas were stuffed with black beans but it was too good not to have more.

 

Single serving.

 

Huevos Ranchero cut open with the yolk flowing into the black beans.

 

 

Great way to start the morning!  I love the days where I am cooking just to clean out the fridge...the creativity comes out in me!

Pizza Pizza!

This week's goal is to clear out the fridge of all the produce before it goes bad.  We had tons of veggies and tomatoes was one of the most abundant items.  Realizing that I had pepperoni in the freezer that I had made a couple months ago, the natural thing was to make pizza.  I had done the major prepping last night such as making the pizza sauce with all the tomatoes. 

Lets get on the story of how the pizza dough came to be.  I wanted a wheat pizza dough so I did a 1:3 ratio of whole wheat flour to AP flour.  I went ahead and added all my water in that I had measured out for the flour.  WAY TOO MUCH WATER!!!  The dough was too wet and I had used all the flour I had already.  I was just going to let it be until I opened the pantry and found the tapioca starch.  I threw some of that in to make the dough more dry and crossed my fingers and wished for the best!

The end result of the dough was a nice crispy and chewy crust!  I am not sure what the tapioca starch did for the dough, but I would have to say, it does rank up there to your gourmet pizzas.

Veggies in the fridge included asparagus, squash and spinach. I cut up the asparagus into bite sized pieces, sauteed the spinach with some onion and garlic and sliced the squash thinly.

For the cheese, I had a block of Apple Smoked Gouda that I grated.

The homemade pepperoni recipe was inspired from a food blogger (I will give credit once i remember who it was) that I had made couple months ago. This was a long tedious process from curing to cooking time.

 

Ingredients before.

Pepperoni

 

 Ingredients ready to go on the pizza.

Pizza before it visited the oven.

The END RESULT!!!!!

I have plenty of leftover pizza dough and ingredients and will be making this again during the week!  Tell you guys what...I did not feel guilty after eating this pizza!

Pulled Pork Cornbread Pancakes and Sausage Cornbread Crepe with Corkscrew BBQ

If you have not been to or heard of Corkscrew BBQ in The Woodlands, you have no idea what you are missing out on.  This husband and wife operation has been taking the BBQ world by a storm since they first started about 19 months ago.  The people that I take to Corkscrew BBQ for the first time and they ask me what is good...I tell them everything...and I mean it.  There is not a bad thing on their menu from meats to their sides. 

 

Here is a little teaser of their Pulled Pork and Sausage

My top to favorite items there are the Pulled Pork Potato Corkscrew Style and the Whole Hog Sandwich.  The potato is loaded with pulled pork topped with a slaw, pico de gallo and green chili ranch...who would have thought to put slaw and pico de gallo on topped of a pulled pork baked potato!  Everything works so well together.  I top mine off with fresh jalapeno!

Now the Whole Hog Sandwich is a story of its own!  Imagine a sandwich topped with a layer of pulled pork, then a layer of pork sausage and....I repeat the "and"...a dinosaur size pork rib!  At this point, it really is not a sandwich anymore!  Of course topped with fresh jalapeno and slathered in their BBQ Sauce!

Check out their website and you will just start drooling.  www.corkscrewbbq.com

Any who...I had gotten some of their Pulled Pork and Sausage to create two dishes.  I asked them not to sauce the meat so I can create my own sauce.  I had made BBQ Cornbread  Pancakes at a friends lake house several months ago and I wanted to improve on it and make Crepes at the same time.  With the Pancake and Crepe in mind, I automatically think of something sweet so I created a Candied Jalapeno Peach BBQ Sauce.

Candied Jalapeno Peach BBQ Sauce:
Especially with pancakes, people would normally associate it with syrup.  With that in mind, I made a fruity sweet bbq sauce with a kick from the jalapeno.  I Had pureed the whole sauce, but left chunks of peaches and pieces of candied jalapenos.

Pulled Pork Cornbread Pancake with Candied Jalapeno Peach BBQ Sauce:
Cornbread is one of my favorite things to eat especially with corn and jalapenos in it.  I made a quick cornbread batter with corn and jalapenos in it and made pancakes.  I have been making these for a while, but never thought of it going with BBQ.  I took some of Corkscrew BBQ's Pulled Pork and let it soak in the BBQ sauce that I made.  And I just covered the pancakes with the delicious meat. 

Sausage Crepe with Candied Jalapeno Peach BBQ Sauce:
I wanted to add the corn and jalapeno to the crepe batter, but crepe being so light, I figured it would tear it.  For the batter, I just made the cornbread batter but just lighter.  I did the same thing with the sausage, I let it soak in the BBQ sauce for a little while and stuffed the crepes.  I had made a quick corn salsa as a topping.