Chow Daddy Recommends: Albanese's Gourmet Pasta Sauce

OK, finally had a chance to try the sauce. We put it on a shrimp and scallop angel hair pasta dish. We used the sauce as is and did find it to be a mild sauce with a fresh taste.

The sauce can be easily personalized to suit individual tastes and different proteins. It also has a slow simmered texture and is a good sauce to have on hand if friends show up on short notice and you do not have several hours to cook a sauce.

I'm not a big wine connoisseur but we have a local winery here in NW Ohio called Mon Ami. Their Pink Catawba would be an excellent pairing with this sauce, especially with a seafood dish.

We enjoyed the sauce and the meal. Two thumbs up!

Note: Manufacturers of our recommended products can use all or an excerpt of our recommendation in their advertising without charge and may place on their food label "Recommended by Chow Daddy" without charge or royalty.

Burger Time

Spring has sprung, so, it's time to do some grillin'. 

If you have a hankerin' for a good burger, try this one out:

It's a 10oz pre-cooked weight ground beef patty on a Ciabatta bun with melted Muenster cheese, tomato, bacon, avocado slices, refrigerated Dill pickle slices and a light swipe of mayo.

The best part is if you can find most of these ingredients on sale, you can crank these puppies out for around $2.25/each. If you decide to go out to a mid-priced family restaurant for one , you'll pay $10.99 and up (at least in my area).

OK, what about leftover mac-n-cheese?

 

 

 

 

So, you've got a few kids to feed and you generally make food by the batch.

 

 

After hooking the kids up with a hearty meal of macaroni and cheese, you pack up the leftovers and stick them in the fridge.

 

 

Fast forward a day or two. Certainly, you can use your imagination as well as I can regarding what to do with leftovers, but I offer the following:

 

 

Always keep some flour tortillas and extra cheese around if possible. Take your leftover mac-n-cheese and scoop a dollip or two onto a  flour tortilla. (Taco and tostada shells work too.) Add some shredded cheese and nuke it for 30/40 seconds or so and voila, mac-n-cheese burrito. You cam also add sour cream.

 

 

For more adult tastes, sliced tomato and/or avocado can be added. If you have some leftover meat such as ham, chicken or hamburger you can add that too.

 

 

It's inexpensive and tasty. Enjoy.



Kicked Up Mac-N-Cheese

 

 

 

 

One of the reasons this blog was started was that I have noticed an ever increasing number of men who have custody of their children. 1 Peter 3:7 mentions women as "the weaker vessel." While undefined in scripture, any man who has been married can state the reasons for this designation.

 

Women tend to function more on emotion rather than logic, have a natural enmity towards men and generally lack accountability and reason. Thus, it is not surprising that during possibly the worst economy in our history, (due to population differences, more people are suffering now than during the Great Depression) more women are losing their marbles. Couple this with the feminization of America where more women are doing things that only men used to and it's easy to see why more men are getting custody of/taking care of the kids.

 

In a way, I'm kind of surprised more men don't cook regularly since the operation is similar to assembling machine components, but, instead of ending up with a functioning machine, you end up with a functional meal, provided the ingredients have been properly put together. So, although women have traditionally been associated with cooking, I'd still rate cooking as a masculine thing.

 

Now, a lot of people today are selfish and consider their kids more of an inconvenience rather than the gift they are, but if you are a conscientious father and love your kids and want to take proper care of them, then hook them up with some good food.

 

Ideally, we should be feeding our children fresh non-genetically modified food but the reality is that you buy what you can afford. At a minimum, you can provide a tasty meal for your children dads.

 

Most kids love macaroni and cheese, but there are some things you can do to make a good thing better:

 

1) After following the box directions on how to make your mac and cheese, add a couple of tablespoons of sour cream and mix it in. My son and his friends love this.

 

2) You can make bacon mac and cheese. If you do not want to cook the bacon yourself, you can buy it pre-cooked or just get a jar of real bacon bits and stir in the bits. YUM!!

 

3) You can do seafood mac and cheese. An 8oz package of fake crab legs, cut up and stirred in is really tasty. You can use shrimp or whatever other similar seafood you want as well.

 

4) If you have leftover meat such as pork, steak or chicken then cut it up and add it to the mac and cheese. (Cut up hot dogs work well also.)

 

You can also buy shredded cheese and add extra cheese to the already cheesy goodness.

 

You don't have to get too fancy, just do something that is a bit extra that will further reinforce how much you love your kids. The memories of dad's semi home cooking will stay with them forever.

 





Mushroom Soup

Well, it may not be the most appetizing looking soup, but it is hearty and can be relatively inexpensive. The recipe below serves 4 and we made a double batch which serves 8, but feeds four. The double batch cost less than ten dollars because the mushrooms were on manager's special. So, you can feed four people a hearty meal of mushroom soup for about $2.50/person.

You Need:

1.5 to 2 lbs shrooms, sliced.

4 tbsp butter

one good sized onion, chopped

about 3 tbsp all purpose flour

2 tbsp vinegar or wine or lemon juice (do not overdo it on the vinegar)

about six cups chicken stock

two thirds cup of heavy cream

salt and pepper to taste

garnish with sour cream if you wish

Prep: Melt about half the butter  in a skillet (medium heat) and add mushrooms and salt and pepper. Cook until done. Remove from heat.

                          

Melt rest of butter in a saucepan and add onion. Cook until sweated and then add flour and cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the stock and vinegar or juice/wine.

                         

                        

Add mushrooms, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes or so. Stirring now and again.

                    

                   

Allow the soup to cool a bit, then puree until smooth. (hand blender/blender/food processer--all work fine for the puree step)

Add cream and cook for a few minutes until the soup heats back up. (thicken with flour or corn starch, if you wish)

You can also garnish with some sliced shrooms and parsley or just eat it as is.

Again, a relatively cheap and hearty meal.