Today we are going to talk about our second entry in our Wines under Nine series, the Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc hailing from Marlborough New Zealand.
The Sauvignon Blanc’s are a light crispy and refreshing varietal that are easy to drink and perfect for a hot summer day.
The Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc is one of my favorite examples of this varietal regardless of the price. When you consider its price tag of only $8.99 it’s an absolute steal.
Here are some the characteristics to look for you drink it:
- The nose is clean with strong citrus characteristics
- Your first taste will definitely present those citrusy flavors that you smelled but there will an almost “grassy” flavor as well.
- The finish is crisp and clean without the tannic aftertaste of something like a big red wine.
- This wine doesn’t need a ton of time to breathe to get the best possible flavors. It’s going to be pretty much good to go as soon as you open the bottle.
- As with any white wine, I prefer to drink them chilled.
- This wine pairs best with fish but we have also paired with poultry to good effect.
- Like the Peachy Canyon before it, this wine is remarkably consistent. We have also been drinking this one for years and have always enjoyed it.
I typically purchase this bottle from Trader Joes but it is also available in local super markets here in southern California. If you can’t find this particular bottle, I highly recommend experimenting with other Sauvignon Blanc’s from the Marlborough New Zealand area. They all have a similar citrusy flavor which I think that you will enjoy.
We have tried several bottles from the region and even though we think the Nobilo is the best bang for your buck, they have all been pretty good.
If you do pick up a bottle, let us know what you think!
Thanks for reading.
Beer Can Chicken and Potatoes
This weekend was a bit colder than normal which us allowed to do a favorite cold weather recipe of mine, beer can chicken. What’s so great about this recipe is that not only is it delicious but it makes the entire house smell amazing as you prepare it.
Ingredients You’ll Need
- One chicken, I prefer organic but it’s up to you.
- One small bag of baby red potatoes.
- One small bag of baby yellow potatoes.
- Rub for the bird, I used my Father in Law’s proprietary blend.
- Two cups of Chicken stock (I used the homemade stock we discussed in our first post).
- One can of the beer of your choice.
Food Prep
- Check the chicken for gizzards, you really don’t want to be baking those accidentally in your meal.
- Put the beer can inside of the beer can chicken rack and put the chicken on top.
- Put the chicken & rack on a deep baking pan
- Apply the rub on the chicken, it’s ok if some of it falls to the bottom of the pan, which will add to the flavor of the potatoes. In fact I often apply my Father in Law’s rub liberally because it makes the potatoes taste a whole lot better.
- Cut the baby potatoes into halves and place them inside of the baking pan.
- Pour the chicken stock on top of the potatoes.
- Wrap the chicken completely in aluminum foil, this will help to keep the juices inside of the bird.
Cooking
Once the prep is done you have literally done 99% of the work to make this dish. All that’s left to do is heat your oven up to 400 degrees, put the bird inside and wait. On my oven, it normally takes about 1:45 minutes.
You will want to make sure you keep an eye on the internal temperature of the chicken so you don’t overcook the bird, 165 degrees is your magic number.
What I love about this recipe is how juicy the chicken turns out. It’s a combination of the beer moisturizing from the inside while the foil keeps the juices trap from the outside. The juices that do fall down go to the potatoes, infusing them with flavor.
If you don’t have the beer can chicken rack, here is the link to Amazon.
Give this recipe a try and let us know what you think!
Thanks for reading
Product Review – The Spiralizer
We have recently begun a Paleo/ Low Carb style diet to lose some weight and get healthier. If any of you have attempted this lifestyle change, you know that you begin to miss certain types of foods and textures.
I’m married to an Italian, and so the concept of not having pasta or something that even resembles it is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of trying to go paleo.
Enter the Spiralizer.
This product allows you to slice fruits and vegetables in all shapes and forms. In our recipe, we made “noodles” out of healthy foods like Zucchinis or Squash. Do they taste like pasta? No, of course not, they taste like the vegetable that you used to make the “noodles” but the can still be delicious.
How to use
Using the Spiralizer is easy you simply cut the ends off of the vegetable you are going to use and secure it to the Spiralizer.
Once secure, all you have to do is crank the handle and the vegetable or fruit you put on will become noodles or whatever form you choose to attach. In this recipe we are choosing to make noodles out of zucchini.
As you can see, the end result are some beautiful zucchini “noodles”. In this case, we sautéd the “noodles” with some olive oil, butter, salt, garlic powder and granulated onions. The end result was a delicious side dish that paired nicely with our meal.
Cleanup
Once you are finished using the Spiralizer, the main components can also be easily removed and washed individually so cleaning up after using is easy to do.
I highly recommend this product, especially if you are cooking paleo or low carb meals.
Here is the link to Spiralizer in Amazon
If you end up picking up a Spiralizer and using it, let us know what you think.
Thanks for reading.
Wines Under Nine – Peachy Canyon Incredible Red Zin
Today we are going to be talking about wine.
I want to start by saying that I love wine, probably as much as I love food. The problem with drinking wine is that it can become a very pricey proposition. Don’t get me wrong, I indulge from time to time and when you taste a really high end wine you understand exactly why the bottle costs what it costs. Frankly, it’s no different than going to to a high end steak house and getting a perfectly aged steak and really enjoying it.
But most people cannot go to a high end steak house every day or even every week. The same goes with high end wines. Most of us aren’t consistently drinking $50-$100 dollar bottles of wine. Heck, most of us aren’t even spending $20-$30 dollars on wines we would consider “Daily Drinkers”.
So my friends and I came up with the wines under nine challenge. The premise is simple, find a good drinkable wine for under nine dollars. At this price point, many of the wines are just not going to be good at all. These are the diamonds in the rough, the wines that give the most bang for the buck.
Don’t expect these wines to be on par with with good high end wines (Notice I didn’t say expensive wines because expensive is not always good). What you can expect are very tasty wines that won’t break bank. They are great as daily drinkers or as bottles that you can get for a party or event.
Peachy Canyon Incredible Red Zinfandel
For those of you that have not had a Zinfandel but have had other red wine varietals think of this Grape as happy medium. It’s not light and delicate like a Pinot Noir but it’s also not as bold or tannic as Cabernet Sauvignon or Petite Sirah. This makes it a very versatile wine because it’s bold enough to be eaten with almost any meal yet it’s mellow enough to have without food.
The Peachy Canyon Incredible Red is a fine example of a good Zin. Here are some of the taste characteristics you can expect when you drink it:
- The nose is very jammy with a strong berry characteristic
- When you you have your first taste, the berry and jammy characteristics are very much present. Think a mix between raspberry and blackberry.
- It is full bodied with medium amount of tannins
- I recommend you let the wine breath for a while, it will be much smoother drinking about 15-20 minutes.
- Lastly, the biggest selling point for me about this particular bottle of wine is that it has remarkable consistency. My friends and I have been drinking the Incredible Red for years and it’s always been good. That is why I didn’t include the vintage year in my review.
If you are looking to purchase a bottle, we typically get it from Trader Joes for 8.99. Our local markets in Southern California typically sell it for the same price.
I strongly recommend you pick up a bottle, try it for yourself and let us know what you think!
Thanks for reading
Salt Block Cooking – Skirt Steak
I was recently given a Himalayan Salt Block as a birthday gift by one of my closest friends and his wife. They know that I love to get creative with my cooking and this seemed like a totally new and interesting way of cooking that they new I hadn’t tried.
So what is a Himalayan Salt Block? Well its a large, heavy pink block of salt that looks like this:
The concept behind the Salt Block is that you put it over a heat source and cook on the salt as if you were cooking on top of a pan or a grill. As you cook on the salt, trace minerals get absorbed by the food giving it a delicious and unique taste.
I know what some of you are thinking and the answer is no, the food does not come out over salted when you cook with this.
Instead of just a recipe, I’m going to also include the steps I took after reading up from various sources on how to properly cook with this device.
Meat Prep
All I did to the meat was season it with some black pepper. I really wanted to make sure i was able to taste the flavor that the Salt Block was giving the food.
Steps to Cook
- Heating the Salt Block – Make sure you heat the Salt Block Slowly. 15 – 20 Minutes on low, 15 – 20 Minutes on medium and 15-20 Minutes on High. If you Heat the Salt Block too quickly you run the risk of damaging it.
- The test to know if it’s its hot enough is to sprinkle some water salt block, if it quickly evaporates, you are good to go.
- I sprayed un a light amount of Olive Oil prior to putting the Steak on because the cut did not have a ton of fat on it. This step can be considered optional.
- Cook the steak for 3-5 minutes on each side. The time of course will vary depending on how you like your steak.
- Make sure you flip the steak with a metal spatula.
- When you are done cooking give the the block plenty of time to cool down before cleaning it. DO NOT use soap to clean the block. Instead, use a moist sponge and scrub of the particles and then wipe it down. It’s OK if it doesn’t look like it did out of the box, salt is a very poor breeding ground for bacteria so it is safe to use and re-use.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed cooking with the Salt Block. The meat came out delicious and it was a new and exotic way too cook delicious food. I will definitely be making follow up recipes on the Salt Block for future posts. One thing to note is that this is NOT something you use if you want to whip up a quick meal. Sure the actual cooking only took about six minutes to complete, but there was a solid hour of pre-heating the block so make sure you allot time for that.
If you want to pick up the Salt Block I used you can fine it on Amazon and it’s Prime. If you want to pick one up, here is a link to it on Amazon – http://amzn.to/2FRfL6I
If you pick one of these up, let me know what you thought of cooking with it.
Thanks for reading
Super Simple Chipotle Aioli
Today we are going to talk about making sauces. Making your own sauce is the single easiest way of making an ordinary meal much more tasty and exotic.
While some sauces can be complex and time consuming to create this is not one of cases.
In fact, there are only 4 Ingredients that you need to have and you can whip this up in less than 2 minutes.
Here are the ingredients:
- 4 Tablespoons of Mayo
- 5 Table Spoons of Chipotle Powder
- ½ of a Lime
- 4-5 Shakes of salt from a Salt Shaker
All you need to do is pour the ingredients into a small bowl and mix them together with a Spoon.
As with all of the recipes that we talk about, you don’t need to follow this to the letter. If you don’t like spicy food? Tone the chipotle back. Like your like your food more salty? Crank up the salt.
The best part of cooking is experimenting with the ingredients and making it your own.
Here is what the end result looks like:
So what does this sauce work well on? Well if you like spicy food it works on a whole lot. We have put this on fish tacos and it works really really well. We have also had great results with Burgers.
Frankly, it’s so easy to make I say just make a batch, have a taste and decide for yourself!
Thanks for Reading.
Quick and Easy Homemade Chicken Broth
How many times have you gone to a place like Costco or your local market an picked up a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken for a quick meal on the way home? If you are like me, it happens pretty frequently. After all, you are busy, the chickens can be pretty tasty and it requires almost no effort before you are eating something.
Is it as good as buying a chicken and preparing it yourself? Of course it’s not. But let’s be realistic, most of us don’t have time to prepare a whole chicken on a random Tuesday.
So you have your dinner, you enjoy the chicken and you are left with something that probably looks like this…
This is where post really begins. For the longest time I would do what you likely do today. Chuck that thing in the trash and go about my day.
Here is the thing though, I use chicken broth all the time all forms of cooking. Basically i was throwing away a fresh chicken so i could go spend money buying canned broth to use in my cooking.
So i decided to make my own broth and let me tell you the difference in taste is night and day. Just like with all cooking the key is all about control. You get to choose the ingredients that are appropriate for what you are trying to do.
For example, if the end result of this is going to be a chicken soup, you may want to toss in all kinds of things like carrots and celery to go along with the spices that will be mentioned below. In this this case i wanted something that was more of a cooking broth.
Here is what i used:
- Chicken Carcass
- Filtered Water – You don’t have to filter the water but i promise you it will taste better.
- Fresh Parsley from my Herb garden (About 3 bushy stems)
- One Shallot – Doesn’t need to be finely chopped
- Three Bay Leaves
- Onion Powder – Here is an amazon link to the one I used (Link)
- Garlic Powder – Here is an amazon link to the one I used (Link)
- Italian Seasoning – Here is an amazon link to the one i used (Link)
Now notice I didn’t give any detailed specifics on how much of each ingredients that I used. There will be other recipes that will require more precision, this is not one of them. Put ingredients that you like in, taste the broth and add more as needed. The whole point is that you can use something that you would normally throw away to create a product that is going to be superior to something you are likely buying already in the store.
Once you strain the soup, I highly recommend putting the broth into various small containers and freeze them. This allows you to only thaw what you need when cooking. This final step is less important if your goal is making soup.
So take a little extra time after you are done eating and use the rest of the bird to make broth. You will be saving money and ending up with a much better tasting product!