Carnitas

J. enjoys roasting large chunks of meat. Today we tried carnitas. We used this recipe from our favorite blogger:

http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2011/11/homesick-texan-carnitas/

They turned out a bit dry, but delicious nonetheless:

We assembled them into tacos with TJ salsa and avo, as follows:

Remade on:

2015-02-12 with fancier meet from local butcher and kept moister

Vegetable Juicing

We got a fancy juicer for Christmas this year.  It's exciting.  We're using it to make vegetable juices with just a hint of fruit to have them be nominally healthier.

Today's juice ingredients:

Here's how it looked as the juice & the waste come out of the device:

We've found that the presence of beets totally governs the color of the juice, while a bit of ginger totally dictates the flavor.

Remade on:

2015-01-12 when our 25lb bag of carrots arrived from grubmarket.com

2015-01-17 in honor of 99 cent kale at the corner store

2015-02-28 for N. by N.

Beef/Turkey Chili

Our next adventure in Dutch oven use involved making chili.  We used this recipe from AH^2 as an inspiration:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/simple-turkey-chili/

But, we modified it as follows:

- used 1/2lb of ground beef instead of 1lb ground turkey
- added 3 strips of bacon, chopped
- used mostly Guinness instead of water
- doubled the oregano & added basil
- used smoked paprika instead of regular
- added sliced carrots to the mirepoix
- added kale towards the end of cooking

Here's the result:

The seasoning level was a bit high for N., but J. liked it.  We served it with leftover cornbread.  Overall, it was a success.

Remade on:
2015-01-18 with 1lb ground turkey this time; added extra liquid to make it more soup-like
2015-03-17 with celery in the mirepoix as well

Turkish Spinach Stew

One of our goals for the year is to use our shiny new Dutch oven more.  To that end, we've solicited everyone for their favorite Dutch oven recipes.

This one was from AH^2:

http://seasonalcookinturkey.blogspot.com.tr/2014/01/spinach-with-mince-and-onionkymal.html

Here's how it looked:

We found That it had great texture, but was slightly underseasoned.  Added some strange red spice powder J. picked up in India.  That somewhat helped, but further seasoning tweaking may be in order.

We served this with Greek yogurt.