Welcome to the new What’s Cookin’ at Uncle Bubba’s. If this is your first visit, I’m glad you’re here and hope you enjoy yourself. If you’ve been here before, I hope you like the new look. My goal is not only to provide an aesthetically pleasing frame appropriate to the culinary artistry that has been displayed on these pages in the past, but also to facilitate an epicurean community by providing tools that will help us share our knowledge and experience. Please post comments using the links at the end of each post and let me know what you think.

Interested in posting your own culinary creations? Leave a comment below and we’ll see about getting you setup.

Ok, so the day before Mother’s Day my dad comes to me and asks me to cook dinner for the next day. Not much time to plan a big dinner. So, I started thinking about dinner and knew immediatly that I wanted to make chicken and something with spinach.

My mom noticed me writing down my menu (there went the surpise) and said a cheese sauce sounded really good.  And with that, I decided to make chicken in a cheese and spinach sauce. 

As my sides, I made a parsley pesto pasta (try saying that three time fast) and citrus asparagus.  

This dinner was a complete improvisation and the cheese sauce was somewhat difficult, so I was very pleased at how well it turned out.  Unfortunately, in the chaos of things the next day, I didn’t think to write down the recipe. 

For the cheese sauce I decided to go with 8oz Gruyere, 5oz Fontina, and a good handful of Parmagiano Reggiano - they all melt well and have great flavors that compliment each other well.  I grated the cheeses, brought some white wine and a little lemon juice to a simmer and slowly whisked in the cheeses until it reached a nice smooth consistency.  The important thing was that my mom loved it, so it was another sucessful Mother’s Day!

Okay, so Bolognese sauces aren’t really Bolognese sauces if there is no meat in them. But in the recipe’s defense, I got the original idea off of food network where one of my favorite chefs, Giada de Laurentis, was making the vegetarian sauce. The episode inspired me to make my own spin-off of the dish. Instead of meat, I used a variety of mushrooms. Mushrooms are a great meat substitute because of how hearty they are. An hour or so after the episode’s end, I had the recipe made and down on the table.

Ingredients:

• 1-ounce dried chanterelle or porcini mushrooms
• 1 1/2 cups hot water
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 1 onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
• 2 garlic cloves
• olive oil
• pinch of dried thyme
• pinch of dried oregano
• salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 5 ounces assorted mushrooms (like shiitake, cremini, and brown) chopped
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 1 pasta
• Fresh Parsley
• Parmesan Cheese

Preparation:

Place the dried mushrooms in a small bowl and cover with 1 1/2 cups very hot water. Put the mushrooms aside so thy can hydrate.

Place the carrots, onion, bell pepper, and garlic in a food processor. Pulse the veggies until finely chopped but still chunky. Place the olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the chopped vegetables, thyme, oregano, salt, and pepper and cook until the veggies are soft. Add the chanterelle mushrooms and the water they were in . Also add the fresh mushrooms, and tomato paste and red wine. Bring the liquid to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and cook for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until done. Drain pasta, reserving 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid and add to the vegetable mixture. Add some of the reserved pasta cooking liquid, if necessary, to moisten the sauce. Add Parsley and Parmesan Cheese.

OK - how many times am I going to go to the grocery store, grocery list in hand, organized in order of department (produce, deli, bread, seafood, etc., etc.) and with blind trust placed in that list, pick up YET ANOTHER box of the brown stuff to your left?

Remember that potsticker recipe? One stinking little teaspoon. See that unopened box to the right? That was for the potstickers.

So now what? Sounds like a job for Cindy. Always ready to take on a good challenge, she cranked up the laptop and embarked on an arduous search using a single term “brown sugar“. The goal, find the recipe calling for the largest amount of this stuff possible.

After reviewing five or six sites she came across a winner that called for a whopping 1-1/4 cups of the stuff and, as an added bonus had a list of ingredients all of which we had in stock here at the homestead. This Oatmeal Cake was a big winner proving once and for all that you can have your brown sugar and eat cake too. If any of you have other ideas on how we might whittle down our fallout shelter sized sucrose supply, please leave a comment below.

Oatmeal Cake
Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups boiling water
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 cup flaked coconut
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup cream

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9 x 13 pan.
In a small bowl, pour boiling water over oats. Mix well, and cool.
In a large bowl, combine butter or margarine, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup white sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, spices, and salt. Add cooled oatmeal mixture, and stir to combine. Pour batter into pan.
Bake for 35 minutes.
While cake is baking, combine 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, coconut, melted butter or margarine, vanilla, and cream in a mixing bowl. Remove cake from oven, and turn on broiler. Drop mixture by small spoonfuls on top of cake. Spread evenly and carefully. Broil for 2 to 5 minutes, until topping is bubbling and lightly browned.

I know, I know - it’s been way to long since my last post. (insert Foghorn Leghorn accent) Where is your resolution son? Your tenacity, your perseverance, your fortitude? Keeping up any blog, much less a food blog, is a difficult task in itself. Add to that 1lb of work (like my real jobby-job), a pinch of disincentive, and 2 TBS of indolence and you’ve got the perfect recipe for blog fade. I mean, this whole thing started out with my brother and I emailing each other pictures of dinner taken and sent from our cell phones. The pictures for this post are an homage to that old school process and were taken with my surprisingly disappointing iPhone camera (the Nikon D-40 sold on eBay before the new camera shipped).

All I can say is thank you Kelsey (currently in Jamaica performing charity work with her church) for picking up my slack.

So what’s a worn down, uninspired, disenchanted foodie to do?
Read on my friend »

Soon after my spring break started recently, I realized I was going to be very bored. So to keep myself occupied, I began coming up with a list of recipes to try out over my break. I did my best to come up with a recipe that embodied different food groups.

First on my list, was seafood. Lately, I’ve been craving Asian cuisine, and at the same time, have been craving one of my favorite foods, scallops. Now that I had picked the main focus of the dish, the rest was easy. Sifting through a list of veggies and other seafood, my recipe slowly developed. Read on my friend »

Now the guests at our dinner party were satisfied with the Spinach and Artichoke Dip, but for the main course, I wanted to make something unique and full of pizazz and I knew just the thing to do.

I dove into my polish heritage and came up with Stuffed Peppers and Halupkis.

It makes a ton of food, and is super tasty.  This is great served with Mashed potatoes and sour cream.  The leftovers are also really good.

Read on my friend »

* Kelsey is 13 (soon to be 14) and is truly inspiring. Her culinary prowess extends well beyond her years and her love of cooking is infectious. One of her dreams is to open a small neighborhood bistro where she can prepare 1 or 2 entreés a night. I’m there! Here is her first post to what’s cookin’.  I’m looking forward to many more. - UB

Once again, my Dad’s dinner party came around, and it was my job to make the dinner.

Since the entreé would take a while, I needed something easy to make that would satisfy our guests until the actual main course was ready. And what did I pick? One of the easiest and yummiest recipes I know; spinach and artichoke dip.

But instead of serving it the typical way (letting people dip their crackers), I thought it would be cool to arrange them on a plate already set up.

It didn’t take long for our guests to clean of the plates (hey, less dishes for me). Read on my friend »

Today, while browsing through my Chinese cookbook, (author- Kathy Man) I came across this fairly simple but very flavorful recipe.

I love meat. I’m part of the school of thought that it is not really dinner if there is no meat product or some kind of protein that once had a face.

I have canine teeth, I am a predator, a carnivore, I am MAN.

That is one of the things that attracted me to this recipe…the word BEEF. How can you go wrong with soup that has red meat in it?

Another thing that attracted me was the relatively low number of ingredients, which usually means an affordable dish. And so, as I am usually working on a very tight budget, this recipe won it’s place at my dinner table this evening.
And I’ll tell you, I’m damn glad it did!

Read on my friend »

Today was a really busy work day.  I knew I wanted to make some salmon thinking it should be fairly quick and easy.  So, I started hitting the usual haunts and came up with a few decent recipes. 

The recipe I decided to go with sounded nice.  Good, simple, and healthy.  Unfortunately, I just “gleaned the essence” of the preparation section and missed the whole part about “roast tomatoes at 250 degrees for 2-1/2 hours“.  Needless to say, we ordered out (Jason’s Deli - much better than the pizza we get around here).

The good thing is that I was freed up to do the roasted tomatoes a day ahead.  This should make tomorrow a breeze.  Plus, there was no stress.  I had a bunch of fun making these tomatoes and really got into the photography. 

Read on my friend »