I’m thrilled to have a camera again! After several follies, I received a replacement from Best Buy for the camera I lost to unknown circumstances a few months back. I still have to eat, so it’s not as though I haven’t been cooking. But I don’t feel great about publishing any recipes without a visual to accompany it.

In celebration of the occasion, I decided to make a simple, elegant and delicious meal. When I think simple luxury, Filet Mignon is never far from my imagination. Here’s a quick and easy recipe.

Ingredients

Beef Tenderloin Filet
Sea Salt
Fresh Ground Pepper
dash Cayenne Pepper

Trumpet Mushrooms

1 4oz package (about 6-7) Trumpet Mushrooms
2 tsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 cup milk or cream
1/2 cup beef broth
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp Sage
2 tsp lemon juice
salt
pepper
cayenne

Cover a cookie sheet with foil. Top with your Filet(s). Season both sides with salt, pepper, and (lightly) cayenne. Preheat oven to Broil or get your grill going nice and hot.

Heat oil over medium heat in a skillet until hot. Add mushrooms and turn until browned on all sides. Add Worcestershire, stir to coat. Pour excess liquid over your Filet(s).

Reduce heat on your mushrooms. Add milk/cream and broth, and stir gently until combined. As this sauce reduces, continue to turn mushrooms individually with tongs so they remain firm, cook evenly, and don’t break up from overly zealous stirring. This will take about 25-30 minutes. As the sauce thickens, add sage and stir around and over the mushrooms.

Place the Filet tray into the oven or onto the grill. For medium rare (on the rare side), I cook 1-2 minutes per side to sear and a total of 6-8 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for a minimum of 5 minutes before serving.

Plate the Filet(s). Adorn with a couple mushroom, and ladle the sauce over all. Grind a little fresh pepper over the top and provide salt at the table. Perfection! I served mine with a vinaigrette of roasted green beans and slivered carrot, plus a scoop of brown rice tossed with steamed leeks and roasted garlic. If you went cream instead of milk, you might as well toss some butter in there. I learned to resist.

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Ingredients
1 lb lean ground beef
1 pkg french bread dough
cherry, strawberry, or grape tomatoes
mini kosher dill pickles
red onion
endive or other greens
1 lb thick sliced bacon

mustard
mayonaisse
ketchup

Preparation

You’re going to have 3 major components in this dish. First, a large relish tray that will serve as the lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle and condiments. Second a thin length of french bread loaf rolled in ground beef and grilled. Last, but not least, a weave of bacon cooked, then stuffed with a bed of cheddar cheese and the hamburger roll.

Slice greens, onion, and pickle and arrange on two sides of a large serving plate. Douse each liberally with mayo, ketchup and mustard.

Make a weave of bacon slices on a baking sheet lined in foil. Weave over and under until you have a square shape of equal length and width.

Season ground beef as you like, then divide in half and gently knead and roll it until it’s a little greater in length than your bacon weave. I tend to like garlic, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, possibly oregano, and onion. Refrigerate these two rolls so they will respond well to being shaped over your bread when finished.

Using about half a tube of french bread dough, divide in half lengthwise then cook as per instructions. If you want to make use of the remaining bread right away then you can make 1 1/2″ balls of dough to use as “mini-buns”. Simply cook them and slice. The key here is that your main tube of bread only measure about 1 1/2″ in diameter, and should be equal to the length of your bacon weave. You can trim the bread if needed, but a little advance shaping and sizing can save the trouble.

You could of course make your own bread. Between grilling, baking and prep I find this homemade enough (meaning plenty of work already) without doing the bread making too, but that’s up to you. You want something at least as crusty as french bread. It has to stand up to the grease of the hamburger cooking around it, so it’s got to be nice and toasted when done, and allowed to cool and dry adequately before adding the hamburger layer.

After you take out the bread, set your oven at 350 degrees and add the bacon weave in. You’re only going to half cook it, and only cook only side (literally). Remove when the bacon is still soft, as it needs to be pliable. Add a few layers of paper towel on top, then “flip” twice onto clean paper towels to remove grease.

Light your grill, and apply a thin layer of olive oil to what should be a very clean grate.

Next flatten each roll of hamburger out side-by-side. Add the bread to the top of one portion, then carefully lift the remaining portion over the top. Gently press the hamburger around the bread so it is completely encased. The burger should be about an additional 1/2″ layer on top of the bread, for a total size of between 2-2 1/2″. Any larger and you’ll have difficulty with the meat cooking enough, or with it fitting into your bacon weave later. Keep it thin.

Grill your burger roll very gently, using a spatula and tongs. Take care not to lose any meat, and reclaim any that might separate. You can fuse any lost bits back on in the final construction.

Place the bacon weave on a foiled baking sheet, with the original “less cooked” side down. To this add a hefty layer of cheddar cheese, about 1 bag finely shredded. Place your hamburger roll along one edge, then carefully begin to roll up the bacon wrap. Add to a 400 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Remove the bacon wrap from the oven and serve on your relish tray. Serve at once. Easiest to serve if sliced.

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The process is extremely simple.

Materials

• Gather together some lint, I keep a plastic bag right by the clothes dryer
• Gulf wax (grocery stores in the canning section)
• Non-stick pan
• Wax paper
• Shoe box (or similar sized box)

First line a shoe box with a couple sheets of wax paper. This is your work surface. Your mold may leak a little wax, which is fine. It’ll peel right off the wax paper when cool and can be reused in your next batch.

Per “brick” of tinder, use 3 sticks of Gulf wax. You can use a butter/margarine box or the Gulf wax box itself to form your tinder in. This will be your “mold”.

Over low heat, add wax to a non-stick pan and heat until melted. In your work box, place your mold on the wax paper. Pack it full of lint and compress it, but don’t overfill the top.

Next, carefully and slowly pour wax into your mold. Distribute it evenly over the surface as you pour. If you take your time doing this, you’ll spill less and have less drain out. You may find it useful to create a cardboard funnel to help guide the wax. Simply fold a thick piece of cardboard in half to form a “V”.

Allow this to cool completely. You can burn this tinder by the box (ala Duraflame) which is probably enough to start a bonfire. A better option is to slice off chunks and use them as you need them. This tinder will light when wet, even when floating on water. Burn time for a 1″ cube is typically a couple minutes.

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You may be wondering what a Sea Kitten is. PETA decided people should start calling fish “sea kittens” instead. Upon what authority, I do not know. You can read all about Sea Kittens on the PETA Website. I customized my own Sea Kitten, using their Flash Sea Kitten creator application, and named him Tasty.

Suffice it say that I enjoy myself a Kitten of the Sea from time to time, and whatever you want to call them I’ll still continue to eat them. This is a really simple dish, and actually requires no cooking. It’s perfect for a summer day, although I created it in the dead of winter–I’m in denial about the prevailing (sub-freezing) temperatures of late. If you’re looking for a side item, there’s really no arguing against how well Sea Kittens go with Hush Puppies.

Ingredients
2 tuna steaks, cubed

2 lemons
3 limes
2 tbsp roasted fire chilis, minced to a powder-thin pulp (not fire-roasted–roasted “fire” chilis)
2 tbsp roasted shallot, finely minced
2 tbsp pinot noir
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp fresh cilantro, minced
2 tsp olive oil

sugar snap peas
rice wine vinegar
bacon bits
smoked almonds, coarsely chopped
salt
pepper

You’re going to “cook” the fish in citrus. This takes 1-3 hour–mine was perfect in about and hour and a half. This is the ceviche method of cooking in acid, and there are a number of variations all over the world. The common elements are the acid and heat.

Juice 2 lemons and 2 limes into a medium bowl. Add tuna cubes, stir well, the cover with plastic wrap, place in the refrigerator or over ice and allow to sit for at least 1 hour. Next add wine, sugar, shallot, chilis, olive oil and cilantro. Salt and pepper to taste. This is ready to serve immediately but benefits from at least another half hour in the refrigerator once items have all been combined.

“Shock” sugar snap peas by adding to boiling water for < 1 minute to make them crisp and dial in a dark green color. You can easily do this by heating water in a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, then tossing in your peas. Dump them into a collander immediately and rinse with cold water to arrest the cooking. Add pea pods to a mixing bowl. Combine juice from a lime, 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar, and a healthy splash of salt (to taste) with the peas and stir liberally.

Serve the Tuna over a bed of snow pea pods, making sure to spoon a little of each sauce over their respective tuna/pea components. Garnish with a surefire PETA-pleaser–bacon bits! I made my own, but any real bacon bits will do. To top it all off, sprinkle with bits of smoked almonds. It’s a light and refreshing ensemble. Mmm…add tasty Sea Kitten to your diet today!

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Everyone has their weakness in the kitchen. For me, it’s always been rice. Based on a few health tips, I decided about a year and a half ago to try to incorporate more whole grains into my diet. Brown rice tops many lists as a low-cost and healthy choice. For me, that posed a problem.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been terrible at cooking rice. I can make very complicated dishes, yet bungle rice! It boggles my mind. It may be because rice has so often been a last-minute endeavor for me (as a side), when I’m focused on other things. Whatever the problem, the inevitable outcome is either rice with an unsavory crunch, or I carelessly overcook it.

One thing for sure, I fare far worse with brown, and especially wild, rice. If I make ho-hum white rice, then I make miserable whole grain rice. That is, until I followed a suggestion to invest in a rice cooker. Why would I spend $80 on something I should be able to cook in any pot on the stove?

I’ve gotten every cent worth out of my rice cooker. I use it every week, or possibly even several times in that span. What it it does best, is work on weight. Ratios vary by variety, but for white rice you use 2:1 water to rice. Meaning, you measure those, pour them into the rice cooker, close the lid, and press a button. You’re well on your way.

The rice cooker steams based on the total weight, then shuts off and moves it to a “warm” mode. Almost magically, because of the heating being tied to weight, your rice is perfectly cooked. Spices, substituting broth for water, etc. are just tools to put you over the top, to that val halla moment where people want your rice recipe. That’s a moment I never expected!

My rice cooker comes equipped with a steaming basket. You can steam vegetables and cook the rice at the same time. It also incorporates a slow cooking function/timer. It’s non-stick, and quick to clean up because the cooking pot removes from the main housing.

What’s really sold me on the value, is looking at all the things I’ve cooked in the rice cooker, and how often I’ve actually used it. Beef short ribs, roasts, soups, beans, lentils, and, of course, all manner of rices. I was afraid I buying another kitchen appliance that would end up as a dust collector or conversation piece. I was pleasantly surprised.

I have a KRUPS 10 cup. Its’ features and cost put it about middle of the pack. Greater features and more capacity come at a premium. This is perfect for me, and I highly recommend it after a year of heavy use. Shop around–I’m sure you’ll be able to find something that fits your needs, and if you keep it out where you can use it, I’m sure it’ll get some great mileage.

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