Don’t go in my kitchen.

Seriously. It’s gross in there, like a cesspool of tomato sauce and salmonella. It’s been a busy couple days, so I thought I would take advantage of an afternoon off to make another of my mother’s fabulous recipes: porcupine balls. They’re basically meatballs with rice in them (which, in a world not populated by a dumbass cook, sticks out like porcupine quills) served in tomato sauce, so I assumed it would be a quick and easy dinner that I could throw in the Crockpot for a while and go watch Judge Judy.

Allow me a second here to laugh at my naïveté. Nothing ever goes as planned in the world of the Dumbass Gourmet, and this dinner was no exception. I started with a bowl full of ground turkey, which I figured would be a good substitute for ground beef. I added in the rice, some diced onions and garlic, milk, an egg, and italian seasoning, then set about making breadcrumbs because we were out of the handy kind that come in a canister. The Husband recently bought a nifty little food processor that I’ve avoided for fear of slicing my finger off, but I screwed up my courage, ripped up a piece of bread and carefully fed it into the grindy-place. Aside from a faint burning smell, the processor worked really well … except when I tried to dislodge the blade. I struggled with it for a moment, then finally wrenched it free and in the process flung bread crumbs all over the counter.

In the meantime, tomato sauce mixed with Spatini and sugar had been warming in the Crockpot, so I mixed up the meatballs and began to carefully dunk them in the sauce. I got about six of them in there before the thing threatened to overflow, so I dug around with a spoon and began to bail out some of the liquid, while at the same time managing to mash up most of the meatballs. I looked at the Crockpot and at the bowl that contained the rest of my meatball ingredients and sighed the sigh of a person who would really, really like a beer right now.

It was then I realized we were out of Yuengling. *horror movie scream*

Aggravated, hungry, and covered with bits of ground turkey, I dumped the contents of the Crockpot into a pot on the stove, mushed the remaining ground turkey into vaguely meatball-like shapes, slammed a lid on top of the whole business, and ignored it for an hour or so. Turns out, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do:

These are actually separate meatballs even though they look like one great big lump of mush.

There was a bright spot in my frustrating dinner preparation: When I was looking over the garlic bread box I noticed the fine people at Pepperidge Farm have decided their garlic and cheese bread “takes meals to a whole new level.” I figure that, since my cooking is below average and this garlic bread is apparently above average, dinner works out to be just about edible. Thanks, garlic bread people!

When I was small and not feeling well, my mother would make either chicken corn soup or what I came to call “sick soup,” which was basically rice with a bouillon cube and too much water. I’ve been sick these past few days, so when I staggered in the door bruised and breathless from roller derby practice tonight I reached for the Herb-Ox and rice. It’s amazing how much comfort a bowl of such a simple soup can bring. It tasted better when my mother made it, but, then again, everything did.

White soup in a white bowl on a white counter. Possibly the most boring picture ever.

It’s been seven years this month since my mother died. She taught me how to cook, so I’d like to spend October making the same dinners she used to make for my family. None of her recipes were overly complicated, but she knew how to take something plain and make it delicious … and she was, unlike her daughter, definitely not a dumbass. I think I remember a grand total of two times that something she made had to be thrown out because it was inedible — once because I stuck a thermometer into a pot of potato soup and it burst (in my defense, my brother told me it was a good way to fake a fever) and once because she opened the wrong side of the pepper tin and dumped half of it on the mashed potatoes.

Here’s what I have so far: chicken corn soup, porcupine balls, macaroni and cheese, and that fluffy Jell-O salad she always took to family reunions. Family members, please chime in with your suggestions and I’ll get to cooking!

The problem with being Dumbass Gourmet is that it’s become slowly impossible for me to just cook something. It used to be that coming up with a new recipe every week (or whenever) was a ginormous chore, so I was both amused and annoyed last week when the idea of putting naked chicken breasts in the oven bothered me into looking up recipes. Used to be I could put a sprinkle of Mrs. Dash on my piece and a few twists of sea salt and pepper on The Husband’s and everyone was happy, but those days are apparently gone.

The spanner in the works was that I wanted to use stuff we already had; specifically, the Cameo apples sitting in the fridge. After at least an hour of Googling and rejecting all the recipes that included apple juice (we didn’t have any and I’m too lazy to puree the apples), I landed on an organic, gluten-free blog that had a recipe for roasted rosemary chicken with apples and balsamic vinegar. As a true Pennsylvanian, I love my vinegar — especially on french fries, which everyone in Kentucky thinks is insane — so I was definitely sold. Problem was, the recipe was for a whole chicken and fresh rosemary, but I substituted our chicken breasts and dried rosemary, which I rolled between my fingers until it crumbled into smaller pieces rather than the spikes that come out of the container.

I drizzled the chicken with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then sprinkled the rosemary on top. The recipe suggested putting the apples around the chicken, but I decided to slice mine thinly and put them on top of the rosemary as well as around the edge of the pan:

I flipped the apples over halfway through cooking so both sides got the rosemary flavor.

The Husband made some mashed potatoes — my favorite food ever — and I dumped out some frozen peas to round out the dinner. The aroma of the vinegar, rosemary, and apples cooking together was amazing, and I could hardly wait to taste the finished product:

For some reason, I can’t embiggen this picture. Trust me, it looks awesome.

I’m happy to say I finished my plate before The Husband even started his. It was absolutely delicious, and I was thrilled to find that we had not one, but two leftover servings of mashed potatoes. Honestly, I would eat mashed potatoes every day if it wouldn’t blow me up like a balloon. Although, as usual, no one can come close to my mother’s cooking, The Husband’s offerings are a close second.

I love eggplants in theory. They’re a gorgeous purple color, they’re delightfully smooth and oval, and my knife makes a very satisfying sound when slicing through them. I’d never had an eggplant before, so when my chiropractor offered me one that an Amish patient brought him I seized it and ran out the door before he changed his mind. I stashed it safely in my laptop bag, but when I took a particularly hard turn it rolled out and spent the rest of the drive rocking gently on the passenger side floorboard. That’s definitely not the worst thing that’s happened to a piece of food I was planning to eat (see: floor spinach), so I wasn’t fazed.

Amish eggplant is obviously superior to regular eggplant.

When I got home, I was presented with the dilemma of what, exactly, to do with my eggplant. I poked around on the internet for a while before deciding to slice it, bread it, and bake it — almost like a parmesan, but without the tomato sauce. (When you eat spaghetti as much as we do, you get sick of tomato sauce pretty quickly.) I sliced the eggplant as evenly as I could (not very) and then debated what to do with the lovely purple rind on the outside of each slice. One recipe I saw suggested you slice off the rind, while another one said you should leave them on … and, since the Dumbass Gourmet always defaults to the culinary path of least resistance, I left them on.

On a side note, how freaky is a sliced eggplant?

Was I supposed to seed this thing?

So I dipped ‘em in egg, rolled ‘em in breadcrumbs, and sprinkled ‘em with parmesan cheese, followed by a tanning session in the oven for about 10 minutes on each side. There was half a box of rigatoni in the cupboard, so I tossed it with some garlic and butter (after cooking it, of course — I’m not that dumbass-ish) as a side. Except it turns out all our dinner dishes were in the dishwasher, so I had to get creative with bread plates instead:

This is The Husband’s, obviously. The tomatoes make it look less grody.

So … eggplant. The Husband has never liked it but was willing to give it another shot, albeit tentatively. I was a little braver with my first bite — not that it mattered, because I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. The next day at lunch, my friend Jim said maybe I cooked it for too long, but it wasn’t mushy, just blah. It didn’t really taste like anything. I’m very sorry to say we didn’t finish it, because I hate to throw away perfectly good food. I know some of you out there love eggplant, so tell me — how do you prepare it? I’m not averse to giving it another try, but only if it actually tastes like something.

I’m totally psyched for dinner tonight. I’m going to make ask The Husband politely if he’ll make mashed potatoes, my favorite food of all time, to go with the chicken breasts and whatever random vegetable I dig out of the freezer. Corn, maybe? Happy eating!

Editor’s Note: Just because the Dumbass Gourmet was on a month-long hiatus a while back doesn’t mean I quit cooking. (The Husband only wishes he were so lucky.) Here are a couple dishes I made while waiting for the new site to get up and running.

Apple-stuffed pork chops

Let me set the scene: I had a lonely apple and a slowly-getting-stale loaf of bread sitting in the fridge, and we had recently scored some butterflied pork chops on manager’s special for something like $2. I hit AllRecipes for ideas, and found a recipe for apple-stuffed pork chops that sounded absolutely heavenly. Add in some edamame and a baked potato, and we had a huge dinner that left both of us feeling like beached whales — but beached whales who’d just eaten a delicious meal.

The pork chops smelled unbelievable — all apple-y and onion-y. I’m drooling a bit just remembering them.

High-falutin’ edamame with sea salt.

Rigatoni

When I was little, I loved to watch my mother cook. She let me help, too, although most times I managed to eat more than I prepared. I still do that — snack as I cook — which means by the time the food is done I’m no longer hungry. (Of course, I eat it anyway.) One of my favorite jobs was to stuff the rigatoni, which sounds like an unfortunate euphemism but is literally what I did. I got to slice cheese into little rectangles, then stuff them into unsuspecting pasta:

Om nom nom.

Rigatoni noodles also double as fashionable fingerthings:

Coming soon to a Tiffany’s jewelry store near you!

The rigatoni turned out absolutely delicious, just like mom’s:

Cheesy!

As usual, we had some random fruit laying around in the crisper, so I chopped it up and put it on some spinach:

I wish I had something witty to say here.

I’ll leave you with a picture that makes me smile every time I see it. I spotted these containers when I was at my dad’s house in July, and they immediately made me nostalgic. Why? Because we have owned these spices for as long as I can remember. Seriously — they’ve been sitting in the spice cabinet for at least 20 years, if not more. Not only that, but they’ve survived three, maybe four, moves to different houses, and they now reside on the lazy susan in Daddy’s kitchen:

Sunriiiiiise, sunset, swiftly fly the years …

The Husband and I tried eggplant for the first time last night. Was it awesome? Did it suck? Stay tuned for another edge-of-your-seat Dumbass Gourmet!

Debbie, she of the gorgeous kitchen in the last post, joined a co-op this summer and is knee-deep in fresh produce, which she willingly shares with anyone who will have it. Since The Husband loves tomatoes (and since I didn’t buy him a present for his birthday yesterday), I scored a few and stashed them in the fridge. He came home early from work today not feeling well, so I decided to make him some bruschetta to cheer him up and make tonight’s dinner of spaghetti (which we have at least once a week) a little less common.

My faithful Betty Crocker cookbook didn’t have a recipe, so I took to the internet to figure out what all goes into bruschetta. Tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, and balsamic vinegar seem to be the accepted ingredients, so I tweaked it a bit to help get rid of the lonely onion sprouting on the top shelf of the fridge: onion, tomatoes, olive oil, italian seasoning, olive oil, and black pepper. The recipe was fairly straightforward, but I stopped short after reading the first step — parboil the tomatoes so the skin comes off easier.

Let’s get one thing straight: The Dumbass Gourmet doesn’t parboil. I also don’t braise, poach, or chop up celery, onions and carrots into mirepoix, which I only know about because they do it all the time on the Food Network. (For one, onions are gross and carrots turn you orange.) What I do do (haha) is throw things into a pan and keep my fingers crossed.

Tomato skins never hurt anyone, I reasoned as I grabbed the knife, tomatoes, and cutting board:

Sleep easy, my pretties.

… but I was nice enough to painstakingly scoop out all the seeds and guts:

Red’s looking a little nervous.

It was at this point that I slipped on a slick spot on the kitchen floor and almost went down. Was it water? Tomato guts accidentally slopped off the cutting board? No … it was grease from the meatloaf I made earlier this week. Please don’t ask me how it got on my kitchen floor (and how it went unnoticed for three days), because I don’t know. What I do know is that I should purchase stock in lemon-scented Clorox wipes, and possibly hire a housekeeper.

After chopping the garlic and onion and giving the mix a good shake of olive oil and italian seasoning, I toasted some leftover multigrain bread from a local steakhouse (the Dumbass Gourmet strives to clean out the fridge above all else, except for that “don’t kill people with your cooking” thing) and spooned the bruschetta on top. A twist of fresh peppercorns, and here we go:

I really wish I liked tomatoes.

It got a big thumbs-up from The Husband, and I’m officially the Best Wife Ever. I try to remember these moments so I have a cache of goodwill upon which to draw when I do something like dump a plate of spaghetti on my laptop. The Clorox wipes came in awfully handy then, too.

(If you don’t now have this song stuck in your head, we might not be friends anymore.)

Nearly every Wednesday night for the past three and a half years, I’ve made tracks for my friend Debbie’s house for Soup and Game Night. As the name implies, we eat dinner (usually soup, although the summertime usually brings lighter fare) and play card games, board games, video games — you name it. I love the group because we’re all smart, funny, and able to take a joke, so we spend a lot of time discussing intelligent things, which then devolve into ragging on each other about pretty much everything. Debbie, the matriarch of the group, usually takes care of dinner, but was all too glad to turn food-making duties (ha!) over to the Dumbass Gourmet.

I’ve found that lasagna is fairly foolproof, even in my hands, so I decided that’s what we’d have for dinner. I love making lasagna because of the part where I get to mix the ricotta/mozzarella/seasonings/egg blend with my hands and then smear it on the noodles — I’ve always been a fan of mixing things with my hands, which is why there is at this very moment a meatloaf basking in the summery heat of my oven. Like Play-Doh, I like to feel it squishing between my fingers.

Anyway, I constructed the lasagna in my kitchen and transferred it to Debbie’s for the cooking phase. She offered her kitchen for the whole process, but I declined because her kitchen looks like this:

Jealous!

… and mine more often than not looks like someone threw up dirty dishes and tomato sauce all over the place anyway:

The floor is equally grody.

I seem to learn things the hard way, like don’t wear a sleeveless shirt while poking sizzling ground beef with a spoon because you will get burned, then flail around like an idiot trying to find a towel to wipe off the grease. Sometimes I just don’t learn, though, because for as long as I’ve been making lasagna, I’ve forgotten to rinse the noodles with cold water before grabbing them to layer in the pan. (That burns, by the way.) I built a respectable lasagna and covered the dish with foil, then set out for the short drive to Debbie’s house. I watched with nervousness as the dish gently slid along the passenger’s side floorboard — hills are the norm in Bowling Green — but we made it there, me and the lasagna, and it emerged from the oven an hour later looking like this:

Weird Al accordion solo!

I’ve recently discovered a love of artichokes, so I was delighted to see Debbie’s offering:

Artichoke salad with onions, red peppers, and cheese/vinaigrette dressing

I’m pleased to say that dinner was a hit! It’s been nearly a week and no one’s died yet, so I think it’s safe to say that yet another dish escaped ruination at the hands of the Dumbass Gourmet. We’ll see if tonight’s meatloaf is so lucky.

It figures that my balcony garden is as stubborn as I am, yielding only tomatoes (which I hate) while the beets, broccoli, green peppers, and strawberries (all of which I love) languish in that delicate balance between life and yellowy death. On a recent trip home I gazed with envy upon my father’s garden, which gives forth beans, kohlrabi, beets, potatoes, corn, herbs, tomatoes, and all sorts of other stuff with little complaint — unlike my troughs of ungrateful sprouts — and decided the Dumbass Gourmet could do potentially tasty things with its offerings.

After some debate and much recipe-searching online, we decided on chicken breasts with a peach-herb marinade, Szechuan green beans from our man Guy Fieri, and lemon parsley red potatoes. This is the kind of spread that I could never make in my apartment-sized kitchen, but my father and stepmother have a marvelous place with plenty of counter space and an abundance of cookware. (Conversely, the Dumbass Gourmet only has the two pots and one frying pan I purchased from Wal-Mart five years ago.) First things first: we needed peaches, conveniently located on the trees in the backyard. The recipe called for a mango, but we didn’t have one of those.

Apparently “mango” is what Pennsylvanians sometimes call a green pepper. Weirdos.

The marinade had about a million ingredients in it, all of which could be found in the pantry. Also in the pantry was a box of generic dog treats called “Companion Biscuits,” which made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe. One could argue that companion biscuits are what Harris and Kalie produce following the consumption of dog treats, but hey — we’re eating here!

Peaches and Herb.

The chicken poses next to the bottle of Bergwein, which we added to the marinade.

My stepmother had already picked fresh green and purple beans from the garden, so the only thing left to do was dig up some potatoes. Well, first we relocated a baby frog from the window well to underneath the porch:

Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal …

My father wielded the pitchfork and we found a few good spuds, then traipsed back to the house bearing the potatoes and some Queen Anne’s Lace. When we were kids, we’d pick these flowers, put them in colored water, and, sure enough, within a day or two the buds would turn whatever color the water was. Unfortunately, mine remained stark white:

The USDA apparently considers this a “noxious weed.” So’s your face.

Our apologies go out to Guy Fieri, he of the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” because we seriously butchered his recipe for Szechuan green beans. First off, cilantro was out because it’s gross. Secondly, we not only didn’t have hoisin sauce, we had to look it up to see what it even was. Finally, we cut out the hot chili garlic sauce and substituted hot sauce and garlic instead. A few shakes of sesame seeds and the sauce was ready to go, so my father bravely shook the colander of green beans into some hot oil to fry:

Flames … burning on the sides of my face …

After my dad thwacked himself on the head with the ceiling fan trying to get an overall shot of the table, I decided to play it a bit safer with a close-up shot:

Food just tastes better served off Pfaltzgraff plates.

It was delicious, especially the green beans, which were garnished with chopped peanuts. I admit to scraping the green stuff off my potatoes because I despise parsley. Like onions, it’s not necessarily the flavor I dislike but the unpleasant feel of it crunching between my teeth. I just shuddered a little thinking of it.

Big news is brewing on the DG front, but I can’t tell you what quite yet. Patience, my dear grasshoppers! In the meantime, bon appetit!

Whenever we have company overnight, I make sure to roll out my mother’s breakfast casserole recipe because, to be honest, it makes me look good. There isn’t much you can do to screw it up, which is perfect for someone who routinely wanders off while pots and pans are left to burn on the stove. On Father’s Day weekend, The Husband’s father and younger brother were staying with us, so after everyone had their fill of wine, watermelon, and beer and had retired to bed, I set to work making the casserole so it’d be ready first thing in the morning.

I encountered difficulty immediately:

Any good cook realizes the benefits of adding Yuengling to the cooking process.

That cylindrical beauty rolling about in the saucepan would be a frozen lump of ground sausage because I forgot to defrost it. I literally had to cut it out of the wrapping, then squeeze it like a tube of toothpaste until the whole thing clunked into the pan. It took a little bit longer to cook as I had to keep constantly turning and scraping it, but pretty soon the beer was gone and the sausage was finished. This is where The Husband stepped in and mixed it all together with egg and milk while I cubed some bread, which went into the bowl before the whole mixture slopped into a casserole dish. A bit of time in the oven the next morning and this is what we had:

Breakfast casserole!

I know I’ve been off-schedule lately, but hopefully this heralds a return to dumbassery for me. Bon appetit!

This is a good weekend, blogfriends. I passed my thesis defense with flying colors yesterday — the former department chair said it was one of the best theses she’s seen come out of this department — which makes me (almost) officially Dumbass Gourmet, M.A. We celebrated last night by going to a gallery showing featuring some works by my favorite local artist, followed by a heartbreaker of a game at the local minor league ballpark, followed by some red velvet cake ice cream at a downtown cafe. Today, The Husband’s father and brother came to town to visit so we traveled up the highway to Maker’s Mark for a bourbon distillery tour, then came back home just in time for dinner.

Naturally, that’s where I come in. Earlier this week I located a recipe for chicken marsala in a cookbook we bought by mistake several years ago — the absentminded Husband forgot it was in his hand when he went up to the cash register — so I decided to tackle it. We didn’t have marsala wine, so I substituted in a Yellowtail cabernet for the sauce, which is a mix of diced garlic, wine, chicken stock, flour, Worcestershire sauce, and heavy cream, with a healthy dose of mushrooms mixed in for good measure. Betty Crocker kindly offered up a recipe for rosemary onion potatoes, so I shoved those into the oven and got to work on the marsala sauce.

Turns out it takes a while to make marsala sauce. The potatoes were roasted nicely before the chicken was even cooked through, so then commenced a juggling act in which I attempted to cook the chicken, stir the marsala sauce, keep the potatoes warm, and make a salad. And you know what? It actually turned out OK:

Salad with blueberries, blackberries, apples, and mushrooms.

The main course.

Of course, quick work was made of the rest of the cabernet, and now we’re settling in for some watermelon and Yuengling. Look for a bonus Dumbass Gourmet this week, since I’m planning to make the famous breakfast casserole for tomorrow morning. Of course, if the brewskis keep coming, I might decide to scrap that plan and give everyone plain toast instead.