Tag: Casserole

Cabin Casserole

The very name Cabin Casserole conjures up something hearty and comforting.  Something the Ingalls family might have eaten on Little House on The Prairie.  And the recipe for Cabin Casserole from the American Chapter of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery did not disappoint.  For my readers in the Northern Hemisphere who are heading into winter and who are looking for an easy tasty meal, this one needs to go onto your rotation list ASAP.

Cabin Casserole 1

What is Cabin Casserole?

Cabin Casserole is layered tomato and onions with bacon and chops that have been sprinkled with curry powder and salt.  I used lamb chops for my casserole but pork chops would also work.  Also, don’t stint on the salt.  I only used a little salt because I thought the bacon would bring enough but I had to add salt at the end. Having said that, for a recipe with so few ingredients, this is really tasty!

I also did not use dripping to fry my chops, I fried the bacon first then used the bacon fat to fry the chops.

I served my cabin casserole with little potatoes wrapped in Proscuitto and a sage leaf and some grilled zucchini with feta cheese.  The Cabin Casserole would  be super with mashed potatoes!

Cabin Casserole 2

 

Little House on The Prairie – The Lost Cabin Casserole Episode

Further to my mention of Little House on the Prairie, I can almost imagine the episode which would be called “Give them curry, Laura”.  The Olesen’s start selling the very exotic ingredient of curry powder in the Mercantile.  Nellie teases Laura that her family is too poor to ever even taste it.  A fight ensues a little like this one.  Just substitute “Your pa’s too poor to buy curry powder” instead of smelling like a horse.

Laura is required to go to the Mercantile and apologise to Nellie.  She also has to help out in the store for a week.  We see in a store work montage that she works very hard and is so polite to the customers that through the week she makes a little tip here and there.

At the end of the week, she has enough money to buy herself some candy or maybe a toy.  Instead, she asks for some curry powder which she takes home and gives to Ma.

That night the Ingalls family feast on Cabin Casserole.

The moral of the story is that hard work and not giving someone curry is the key to getting curry.

Cabin Casserole 3

Here’s the recipe

 

Have a wonderful week!

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Cowboys, Caviar, Casseroles and Cocktails

Dear readers

I had such high hopes for this post.  Then they were totally dashed by a twist of fate that…well…I guess if I’d seen it coming it wouldn’t be a twist would it?  But I’m jumping ahead of myself.  First, I was totally delighted when Greg from Recipes4Rebels asked if I would join in a cookalong for Cowboy Day!  This event occurs on the fourth Saturday of July each year and is celebrated all over the world!

Cowboy Caviar 1Obviously, this is not the fourth Saturday in July, however, as I will be sunning myself on the beach at Sanur in Bali that day, with Greg’s blessing I am posting my ventures into Cowboy Cookin’ early!  And it’s a three course meal y’all. (Because 1 that’s how cowboy’s talk and 2 cocktails are a course aren’t they?  This one is almost a meal!  But again, getting ahead of myself!)

So now onto my foiled grand plans.  My idea was that I would find a cocktail called a Bali Cowboy – possibly a more tropical version of this cowboy cocktail and I would make it for my post and then, on the day itself, I would tweet another picture of me in Bali with with my Bali Cowboy and it would in a glass as big as my head and it would be blue and loaded with umbrellas and pineapple wedges and all the other tropical cocktail paraphenalia.

Cowboy Caviar 2A quick google soon showed me that there is such a thing as a Bali Cowboy.  It is NOT a cocktail.  Turns out that a Bali Cowboy is a male prostitute who hangs around Kuta Beach willing to sell his services to any rich (ie all) Western women who care to pay for them. So, whilst I’m not 100% ruling out a photo of me with a Bali Cowboy on Cowboy Day, the likelihood of it happening has dropped significantly!

So, new ideas had to be found.  Starting with some caviar.  Because we’re classy cowboys!  It’s Cowboy Caviar of courseCowboy Caviar 4Where has this salad / dip been all my life?  If this is what cowboys eat, then I want to be a cowboy.  It’s all kinds of beans and corn and tomatoes and avocado . Truly delicious!  I loved this!

So, for the second course, I went straight to the top.  And by that I mean Mr John Wayne himself.

John wayne casserole recipeTurns out The Duke and I share a love of eggs, cheese and chillies.  Now, just one thing about the John Wayne casserole…. To my mind, when you combine egg yolks to beaten egg whites with other stuff, in this instance cheese and chilli and you them put that in an oven and cook until it’s all puffed up and golden, that’s not so much a casserole as a soufflé.

You be the judge:

John wayne casserole1I’ll sit quietly over here and let my case speak for itself.

By the way, cooking this for an hour would be way too much.  You are seeing about 35 minutes and I think it was over.  I would cook this…half an hour max.  Also, the tomato didn’t do much.  I would actually leave it out and cook this for 20 minutes total.

John Wayne casserole2The soufflé casserole was good but I think I was so blown away by the Cowboy Caviar that it kind of paled by comparison.  I will definitely make it again though!

John Wayne casserole3And now for my grand Cowboy finale, I am turning to to person who started all of this, yep, Greg.  This cocktail /dessert  is A-MAZING!  So, so good.  Cowboys and cowgirls, can I present, the Giant Martini!

Giant Martini2There is no other word for this but absolutely divine! The giant in the Giant Martini doesn’t refer t to it’s size (but you could scale it up very easily)  but to the fact that it was created on the set of Giant by Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson.

Git along little doggie, this cocktail is all mine!

Giant MartiniAnd you too!

Giant Martini3jpgAh yes, Greg’s site on the PC, a cocktail in front of me and The A-Z of Cooking behind it.  Just a regular day round these parts!

Many, many thanks to Greg, this was so much fun!  Thank you so much for including me!  I always say this but you hear so much about the internet being a a horrible vicious place, I am always delighted and totally honoured to make new friends, like Greg, on here.

Ok, I’ve gotta go, 5:30am start tomorrow!  But I’m loving and leaving you with some some super rhinestone cowboy singing!

Find out all about the Cowboy Day Cook A Long here.  Hopefully my attempts will inspire you to bigger and better things on the day!

The recipe for Cowboy Caviar I used came from Cookie and Kate.

The Giant Martini recipe is here.

Kiss me and smile for me, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks but if you can’t smile without me, I’ll be tweeting and instagramming from Bali throughout.

Loving you, leaving you, now!

Signature 1 Vintage Valentine Quick as Wink2

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