Lamb & Berry “Barley-otto”

July 29, 2015July 29, 2015 Oatmeal and Ice CreamLeave a comment

This recipe came about the other day when Oatmeal went to a dinner and a movie with a friend while I relaxed at home. Since I work long hours, I rarely get the apartment all to myself, so I wanted to make the most of it! Normally, that means consuming an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s straight from the box while sobbing hysterically because none of my research works and I’ll never graduate from school. However, I’ve promised Oatmeal I’ll stop doing that (is it too late for take-backsies?), so I decided instead to make a meal with ingredients that Oatmeal usually gives me a hard time about: red meat and alcohol.

Lamb is one of my favorite meats, and red wine goes perfectly with lamb (especially Bordeaux, the one wine pairing I can ever remember!). I knew that red wine usually contains notes of dark, red fruit such as cherries, so I decided to add some of those into the mix. The rest is history!

This dish is really, really good! There is a nice taste of lamb throughout, accented by tender morsels which burst with flavor and are complemented by the light flavor of wine and berries. The cherry halves provide a dash of sweet to accentuate the meal, and the barley serves as a nice, creamy base for all of it, resulting in a refreshing, comforting dish.

Lamb & Berry “Barley-otto”

1 lb ground lamb
1/3 cup crushed raspberries
¾ cup crushed black berries
¾ cup stemmed, pitted, halved cherries
2 cups washed, uncooked barley
1 yellow onion, chopped
Olive oil
1 ½ cups red wine (Bordeaux)
Around 3-4 cups chicken broth

Preheat the oven to 350 °F.

In a 9 x 13 in., deep baking dish (2 in. deep should be fine), mix the lamb, raspberries, black berries, and cherries until uniformly mixed. Cover the top of the dish with aluminum foil, and bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes.

Now, we’re going to cook the barley like a risotto, so let’s cover how that’s done. As ol’ Mamma Ice Cream taught me, “The rice should never look dry.” Despite working with barley, the same principle applies here. The barley should always look wet or creamy, never dry. Whenever the barley starts to dry out, add another ½ cup of liquid to it (in this recipe, we use either wine or broth). A good way to tell if you need to add more liquid is by scraping the bottom of the pot with your spoon, and seeing how quickly the barley-liquid mix fills in. If it fills in immediately or quickly, you’re still good. If it lags behind by a second or so, it’s time to add more. Check the video for examples!

While the lamb is cooking, sauté the onions in the olive oil until translucent. Stir in the barley, and cook while stirring until it reaches a boil. Add a ½ cup of the wine and stir constantly. When the wine has boiled off appropriately (check the video for an example), add another ½ cup of the wine. Let it boil down once more and add the last ½ cup. From here on out, switch to the chicken broth. Continue to stir the barley, adding chicken broth as needed to keep it from drying out. After 30 minutes of cooking, (counting from when the barley hit the oil/onions,) taste the barley to see if it’s cooked (like al dente, it should have a nice give, but not be too hard or too soft.

Once the barley is ready, add the lamb/berry mixture to the barley, and stir until evenly combined. Continue to cook it until the excess liquid has boiled off and the “barley-otto” is at your desired consistency.

I prefer to add salt at the table, since it’s always easier to add salt than to remove salt.

Enjoy!

Notes on How to Improvise Meals

July 16, 2015July 14, 2015 Oatmeal and Ice CreamLeave a comment

Part of our goal on this website is to not only give you cool recipes to use, but to also help you learn how to improvise your own meal based on your unique circumstances. So let’s start with the thought process for how to plan out the meal, using the previous recipe as an example.

First, we need to decide what the main feature of the dish will be. In this case, we’ll use the chicken patties that we made previously. Having decided this, we have to choose either to emphasize the existing flavor (in this case, mustard), or de-emphasize it and use other flavors. To decide this, let’s make a quick inventory of the ingredients we have available. In my case, I have onion, garlic, bananas, grapes, chocolate, beer, chickpeas, canned tomatoes, eggs, mustard, and spices. You might notice that I included some things that people might not traditionally include in a dinner entrée. If you’re going to take one thing from this website, let it be this: when you’re low on food, ANYTHING can be an ingredient!

So, taking a look at the ingredients we have on hand, we can definitely choose to accentuate the mustard flavor of the dish. Beer will go well with the mustard (just think of drinking beer and eating honey-mustard pretzels), and bananas, being high in carbohydrates and relatively mild in flavor, will probably go well with the dish. Since we’re adding more ingredients, we’ll need to add more mustard to make sure the flavor doesn’t get lost. We’ll use onion to complement the sweet taste of the bananas and mustard. Lastly, we’ll turn this into a pasta sauce, since we have boxes of pasta ready to use. Also, because I love pasta!

(Important note: it’s always useful to have a big bag of onions and garlic in your fridge at all times. They’re cheap, a great way way to add flavor, and a key ingredient in many recipes!)

Lastly, if you ever have any doubts about whether two ingredients will go well together, you can get a preview of their combined taste by smelling them. First, smell one ingredient, and hold onto its flavor. Then, smell the other one, and decide if the two go well together.

So remember, have no fear, and keep experimenting!

Mustard Banana Chicken Pasta + Beer

July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 Oatmeal and Ice CreamLeave a comment

I have to admit, I’m worried that none of you are going to try this recipe, which is a shame, because it’s really spectacular! Spectacularly good, that is, just so we’re clear.

Even Oatmeal was skeptical when I first mentioned my plan. She was all, like, “Banana’s in a pasta sauce? With mustard and beer? That’ll never work!” Now, if you tell Oatmeal this, I’ll deny it, but I was pretty nervous about it too! I had already grouped the three ingredients together and smelled their combined scent, and was happily surprised to find their perfume pleasant. But even I balked at the thought of mixing bananas and mustard!

However, once Oatmeal starts questioning me, it makes me want to prove her wrong even more, so I decided to go ahead with it. And it totally worked! This sauce is fantastic! It’s sweet, tangy, and flavorful! It’s something that deserves to be tasted at least once, if not many times!

Mustard Banana Chicken Pasta + Beer

Olive Oil, to coat the skillet
1 small yellow onion, chopped
3 chicken patties (or 3/4 lb other meat), chopped
3 ripe bananas, mashed
Slightly less than ½ cup Dijon Mustard
½ cup Beer (light ale)
Salt
1 lb pasta (I use farro pasta, but you can use whatever you have on hand)

Combine the mashed bananas and the mustard in a small bowl. Set aside.

Start boiling a pot of water for the pasta, and add a small handful of salt to the water.

Cover the bottom of a large skillet with olive oil and place over medium high heat. Add the chopped onion and sautée it until the onion becomes transparent. Add the meat and sautée for another 3-5 minutes. Add the banana-mustard mixture and stir until fully incorporated. Stir while cooking for another 1-2 minutes. Add the beer (I tend to use a light, Belgian Ale. Anything darker tends to add flavor, making it more unpredictable in recipes), and reduce heat to medium. Let it cook without stirring for 5-10 minutes, until the alcohol has cooked off.

While the sauce is cooking, add the pasta to the boiling water. Pasta is always best al dente, which means that it should be firm, but not crunchy, and certainly not soft! Usually, I start tasting the pasta two minutes before the box says it should be done. My box says seven minutes, so I start checking after five.

Once the five-ten minutes are up, stir the sauce and remove from heat. Strain the pasta and combine it with the sauce, and it’s ready to be served!

The dish should be tangy, flavorful, and sweet! The mustard is powerful, the banana is slightly noticeable, and the beer hides in the background. Not to mention all those lovely morsels of chicken packed in every bite. Enjoy!

Mustard Chicken Burgers with Farro

July 6, 2015July 10, 2015 Oatmeal and Ice CreamLeave a comment

Hello, and welcome to Oatmeal and Ice Cream, where we take leftover food and ingredients and make strange, but delicious, new meals! However, you can’t use leftovers if you don’t have any left over food to begin with! So here’s a little recipe to start us off.

The idea behind this one is that Oatmeal and I were eating a dinner which consisted of chicken burgers topped with rice, pesto sauce, and a lightly fried egg. As I was eating, I asked myself: “Could I cook the rice inside the patty without it getting mushy?” This recipe is an experiment to answer that question! What results is a delicious burger with a consistency you wouldn’t normally expect.

Now, Oatmeal tells me that I need to describe how the burgers taste so that you guys can make sure that you got the recipe right. Look, if the end-result tastes good, who cares if it’s the same result I got?! But here’s my description, just in case you’d like a guide.

The meat of the burger should be soft and tender, but the farro is cooked al dente, so when you bite into it, there should be a nice chew to it. As for taste, the onion and garlic will sing out from the burger itself, while the mustard adds a very nice sweet/tangy flavor. The tomato will add a refreshing, sweet burst at the top. Overall, the dish is slightly sweet, tangy, and flavorful, with a satisfying chew. It should not taste burnt or caramelized (unless you like that sort of thing! In which case, instead of searing the burger, I would sautée it in olive oil at a high heat for 3-5 minutes per side instead of 1-2 minutes without oil.) If you have any other questions, feel free to ask them in the comments!

And remember, save some of the leftovers so you can use them in another meal!

Mustard Chicken Burgers with Farro

1 yellow onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (or pressed)
1 cup uncooked farro, washed (If you’d like, you can substitute with rice or other similar grain)
1 egg
2-2.5 lbs ground chicken (You can substitute with turkey or other white meat).
Salt and pepper to taste
Dijon mustard
Two tomatoes, cut into thick slices

Preheat the oven to 225°F

In a large bowl, mix together the chopped onions, garlic, farro, egg, chicken, salt and pepper until thoroughly combined. (I didn’t add any salt or pepper, so add these at your own discretion.) Divide the mixture into eight, thick patties, and set aside on a strip of parchment paper (or on anything, really. Just something to get them out of the way without creating more dishes to clean later). Place a non-stick skillet over a medium-high flame, and let it heat up until drops of water sizzle on contact. Once the skillet is hot, place the patties in the skillet and sear them for 1-2 minutes. Then flip and sear them on the other side for another 1-2 minutes, before moving them to a baking dish.

Once all of the patties have been seared and placed in the baking dish, spread a layer of mustard on top of each of the patties. (Make note: The mustard is really the star of this dish, so don’t skimp on it! You can definitely use way more than what is shown in the accompanying pictures.) Put a slice of tomato on top of each patty.

Cover the baking dish with aluminum foil and bake it in the oven for 30 minutes at 225°F, or until the chicken is thoroughly cooked and the mustard is just starting to brown. (I put them on the bottom shelf of my oven, but you’ll have to adjust for your own oven’s quirks.)

Once the burgers have been cooked to your liking, take them out of the oven and remove the aluminum foil. They are now ready to eat! You can eat them on their own, with a side of vegetables, or you can put them in a bun and eat it like a regular hamburger. We enjoyed them with an extra dollop of the mustard. Be sure to keep experimenting!