Twice-Baked Potatoes

If you've been around Charm Hour before (or know me in real life) it comes as no surprise that I love potatoes.  I love basically every starch, especially ones you can put cheese on.  This is yet another post where my two true passions of cheese and carbohydrates combine.  The premise of the twice baked potato is that you bake your potatoes, scoop them out and mash them, then put them back in the oven to get nice and crispy.  Just beautiful.

Now, I don't make these little treats too often.  They take more time and effort than your average potato dish, so it's a little bit of an act of love.  Like a night with family and a good steak, or showing someone you love them by feeding them.  But they're super delicious and totally worth it.

See that on the right hand side?  That's a pool of cheese.  Heaven in a potato skin.

You'll Need:

Potatoes

Sour cream

Cheddar Cheese

Salt and Pepper

Dash of milk

(or your preferred mashed potatoes ingredients)

Any extra fixings- bacon, chives, shredded cheese, etc.

The Recipe:

Start with the obvious- bake your potato.  A fork should be able to go into it without too much resistance when in it's done.  I honestly don't remember how long it takes exactly, maybe 45 minutes to an hour on 350.

Once they're done, slice them in half and scoop out the potato.  Put the stuff you scoop out into a mixing bowl.

Now mash those potatoes!  My mother's way involves a large dollop of sour cream (probably 1/4 cup for 2 potatoes) and some chunks of extra sharp cheddar cheese.  I also mix in a dash of milk, salt, and garlic pepper.

I use a hand masher, but of course you could use a mixer if you have one.

If you like an extra crispy skin, you can rub it with a little olive oil and rock salt to make it extra tasty.  Scoop your mashed potatoes back into the skins.

You can sprinkle the top with seasonings or shredded cheese if you like here.  I mixed my cheese into the mashed potatoes, so I just sent mine back in to bake at 375 for 20 minutes or until the top is nicely browned.

And that's it!  Top with chives or scallions if you're feeling fancy, or just keep it simple.


P.S. If you also love potatoes, we've got a few more recipes you can try:

Hearty Potato Soup
Scalloped Potatoes
Baked Sweet Potato Fries
Oven Roasted Potatoes  (with a dinner of filet mignon with goat cheese sauce)
Baked Potato Chips  (a snack while I made Irish Soda Bread)

Karen's Crab Cakes

I seriously love crab.  And fortunately for me, my mom has spent her life on the east coast so she's an expert in seafood.  She grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and spent a big chunk of her graduate school/ young adult years in Maryland so she's got all that knowledge and love.   Last time I was home she suggested crab cakes for dinner and I leaped at the opportunity to not just eat them but blog them so all of you lucky readers can make amazingly delicious crab cakes too.

These little babies are freaking amazing and you should definitely try them.

You'll Need:

1 lb crab meat

1 cup crushed Ritz crackers (about 1/2 a sleeve)

1 egg

2/3 cup mayo

1 tsp dry mustard

1 tsp Old Bay seafood seasoning

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

a dash of salt and pepper

optional: panko breadcrumbs

 

This scrumptious recipe uses canned lump crab meat.  Our family believes the lumpier the better when it comes to crab cakes, but to each his or her own.  You can always break it up a little more in your mixing process if you'd rather it have a more shredded-up feel.  

In a medium bowl, crush up your Ritz crackers.  Alternatively, you could use seasoned breadcrumbs.
Add your dry mustard, Old Bay, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.

Next mix in your egg and a scoop of mayo.  If you want to go healthier, you can use a little milk instead.  Then slowly and carefully mix in your crab lumps.

As I said earlier, we're in the lumpier-the-better camp.  If you are too, then you'll want to gently fold the crab in with a big spoon like my momma's doing in the picture below.  If you don't mind it being broken up, then you can just stir it in and not worry a bit.

Once you're mixed in, make them into palm-sized little cakes.

Once your cakes are made, you can press some panko bread crumbs into each side.  It makes it a little bit more crunchy, but they'll be delicious either way.

Now that you're ready to cook, you might as well open up your wine if you haven't already for Charm Hour.  Usually they say you should have white wine with seafood, but we had this super special white cabernet sauvignon that actually looks like a rosé.

 This wine is made with cabernet sauvignon grapes- which usually make a dark, dry red wine.  But with this wine they remove the skins early in the fermenting process, leaving the wine with a hint of pink color, but a lighter taste that you'd associate with a white wine.  It's absolutely delicious.  It comes from Silver Springs Winery on the east side of Seneca Lake in upstate New York.  If you're in the area you should stop through for a tasting, and if not you can always consider ordering some.

 Back to those crab cakes!  Let's get cooking.  Heat up some olive oil and butter in a pan.

You can tell it's hot enough when A.  the butter is melted and B. if you splash a drop of water on the pan it sizzles.  Carefully place your little cakes into your hot pan and let them sit.

When they start to brown, gently scoop and flip them over.  The crab is already cooked, so it's really just heating it enough to cook the egg in there and make the outside crispy so don't worry too much about how long on each side.  

To round out our meal we also cooked up some salt potatoes and threw together a salad.

And now for the final product:

And now, as Joe keeps saying next to me, "I'm hungry for crab cakes just looking at them".  I think I'll be making these again myself one day soon.

More than anything, I'm thankful that I was able to get home to see my family and spend some time together.  Here's to you Mom, for instilling in me a love for crab (and wine).  I love you!

p.s.  If you're looking to make crab legs rather than using just the meat, check out my snow crab dinner here.  

Crepes!

I really really like crepes.  I particularly love having an excessive number of leftover ones to keep in the fridge so I can wrap anything and everything in one for the next week.

This week's crepe invasion started as many do- I have way too many strawberries.  Three pounds of strawberries, to be precise.  They were only five dollars and I couldn't resist!  But now I have to figure out how to eat three pounds of them before they get mushy and gross.  Therefore, Joe gets sucked into over an hour of crepe cooking!  He's a very good sport about all this, really.

Before you get started, know that they take a long time.  At least they take me a long time, because as I said, I make about 5 times more than I need (I doubled the recipe below).  Dozens of crepes!

The recipe itself is simple.  Mix together 1 cup flour, 1 tsp sugar, and a dash of salt in a small bowl.  Mix 3 eggs and 2 cups of milk in a big bowl, stir in that flour mixture until smooth and a little frothy. Add 2 Tb of melted butter.  Pour a few tablespoons worth into a buttered pan on medium heat, flip when browned, and serve as you like!

As a note:  the first crepe is always terrible as it picks up all the pan's butter and looks ugly.  But from then on your pan should be just greased enough that you can just keep on churning them out.

 after you pour, turn your pan to get an even layer

You can tell this one's ready to flip as the edges are crispy, it looks mostly cooked through, and the underside is browned nicely.

 perfect!

stack 'em up! 

My all-time favorite filler is nutella and strawberries.

Simply spread your nutella in the middle:

throw on your berries:

And roll up burrito-style!

we always eat while cooking. 

The Amazing Rochestarian Chicken French

Although I'm in Chicago now, I occasionally get a tad homesick for the beautiful land of Upstate New York.  I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, near the Finger Lakes.  Most of my friends here, if they know it at all, know it for the casinos. Which I did not realize was that much of a thing.  But it is a stunning countryside with lots of lakes and trees and farms and our little city in the middle.

Food-wise, we're close enough to have fantastic Buffalo wings- or as we call them wings. Which should only be served with bleu cheese, for the record.  When restaurants ask if I want ranch it just makes me sad I even tried to order them in the first place.  

We also have the Garbage Plate- a late night/hangover staple that is as bad for you as it is delicious.  Home-fries and mac salad, with two meats of your choice (I go with cheeseburgers), all smothered in meat sauce.  So good.  

But the focus of tonight's post before I get myself even more distracted is the Rochester classic Chicken French.  From some rigorous research on google I can tell you that everyone had a different story.  The best was that some italians invented it at a world's fair in New York City in 1939 to attract customers to buy it as french cuisine was all the rage.  However it came to be, somehow this stuck in Rochester but no where else.  It's a standard at Italian restaurants throughout Upstate.  I didn't realize it was actually a Rochester thing until I had a hell of a time hunting down a recipe online.  I've taken a few into my cookbook as reference, but it always ends up with me winging it in the end.

Regardless of how it came into being, Chicken French is delicious.  It's a light egg-battered chicken in a white wine, lemon, garlic, and butter sauce that's usually served over spaghetti (but also makes quite the scrumptious sandwich).  

Baked Sweet Potato Fries

I was never a sweet potato person growing up.  My dad detests them, so we only had them on Thanksgiving.  We make them in a casserole with brown sugar and marshmallows melted on top- and it never really appealed to me.  

Fast forward to a few months ago, and we were given sweet potato fries by accident instead of tater tots while out at dinner.  I was hungry and they're in french fry shape so there's really no arguing with trying them, and I found out how very delicious they are.  

They were on sale at our grocery store, so I figured it couldn't be that much more complicated than baking potato chips.  Turns out it's easy and delicious and it's actually fairly healthy.

Filet Mignon with Creamy Goat Cheese Sauce

So Joe and I are pretty poor.  I mean we pretend we're not because we get "paid" our loan overpayments at the start of each semester so we can do things like eat and pay rent.  Now that things like my impending graduation and the necessary period of at least two months between me graduating and taking the NCLEX, and then between taking it and getting my scores so I can apply for jobs are becoming more of a reality we're trying to be a little more budget-conscious.  But then again, you still have to celebrate now and then!

I took a standardized test yesterday morning that I did quite well on (yay!) and then had our syllabus day for one of my summer courses and realized that apparently that is our ONLY day of class other than presentation days (double yay!) and that I have 13 days before I even have to go back to school for anything (triple yay!) so I was in a very good mood.  I texted Joe on the way home to grab some cans Old Style at the store because it is a day for day drinking and corn hole (a.k.a. Bags, as they call it in IL)!  But that's for another post...

After some lazy afternoon drinking, we headed over to Trader Joe's to pick up some groceries.  Several beers deep, we picked up a successfully strictly-to-the-list bag of groceries and headed home to cook!  As I had reason to celebrate and Joe is on spring break (that lucky duck!), we splurged a little on some filet mignon and schemed about a sauce to go on top. Bleu cheese is a little overpowering for such a scrumptious steak, so we opted to invent a goat cheese sauce (Hannah- you'd be in heaven, I swear).

Our final menu consisted of:

Steak

Creamy Goat Cheese Sauce

Green Beans

Roasted Potatoes

Okay so at this point I segue over to Joe for the meat expertise, cause it's basically a foreign language to me.

Peanut Noodles

Due to the great success of Joe's last entry, we're in for another delicious and exciting edition of Joe's Cooking Corner!

And because we still had half a box of snow peas left we opted for another asian dish- this time a Thai influenced peanut noodles dish.  This originally came from Joe's mother, Sarah, who is a magnificent cook. You can dial up the heat by adding red pepper flakes, but I am a total wimp when it comes to hot and spicy, so Joe took mercy on me and made it nice and mild.  But as with most things this can be easily adjusted to be more sweet or salty or spicy, depending on how much you add of each ingredient so don't hold back from tasting as you go.