Tag: Grub For Guys (Page 8 of 15)

      1-2-3 chicken soup

      November 4, 2011 /

      Last weekend I was caught by the smell of the rotisserie chickens in the grocery store. Sometimes I can walk right by them and sometimes I shop hungry, which is always bad for the wallet. And it’s especially bad when confronted with especially delicious smelling roasted chicken. I got home and we had chicken sandwiches for lunch and picked it all off the carcass to save for recipes or chicken salad. Sometimes I throw the bones away, but as you should do with a cooked chicken or turkey, I wrapped it up and made soup on Sunday.

      Making homemade chicken soup is so easy, a monkey can do it, especially when you have grocery stores that roast the chicken for you. Anyway, here is how to do it…

      Put the carcass in a large soup pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, while adding chopped carrots and celery and some parsley sprigs. Add some salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, thyme, a bay leaf, and pinches of onion powder and garlic powder. Lower heat and simmer for about two hours, adding more water as necessary and adding more salt and pepper to taste. When cool enough, remove bones, and make sure you leave the meat in the soup (or add in meat you may have taken off the bone earlier). Then cook some noodles or rice separately and add to the cooked soup or in individual bowls to serve. Nothing is better than homemade chicken soup. To me, canned soups are for some reason becoming more and more disgusting. I’m not sure if it’s the preservatives or the weird spices or thickening agents used, but blech. So yeah, make my soup instead!

      Food on a Budget, Grocery stores, Healthy, Ingredients, Recipes, Your Kitchen

      Perky Jerky in prime time

      November 2, 2011 /

      Last year, we reviewed a product called Perky Jerky on the Bullz-Eye blog and then this past January, the company sent us the new Turkey Perky Jerky which was reviewed here on Mikey’s Kitchen. So last night I was watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and as she was talking about the “Best New Thing in the World” and promo-ed it by saying that the best new thing was going to be caffeinated meat, I knew right away what she meant–Perky Jerky.

      Since many of you probably began searching for this product after watching Rachel try to re-create it by stirring Red Bull with a Slim Jim, and then pouring Red Bull into a bowl of jerky like milk on cereal, I thought it might be appropriate to plug the product again. And it’s especially appropriate because Brian Levin, the founder of Perky Jerky, is running the NYC Marathon this weekend dressed up in a coat made of Perky Jerky packages. Now that’s marketing. But having Rachel pimping his product couldn’t have hurt either.

      Anyway, go check this stuff out–it’s tasty and it works!

      Food TV, Healthy, Product Reviews

      Product review: Schwan’s mini meatball sandwiches and mini mozzarella bites

      October 19, 2011 /

      You’ve probably seen those yellow delivery trucks that are essentially refrigerators on wheels. These vehicles carry Schwan’s Foods. What you may not know is that you can order these products online now to be delivered to your door, but not necessarily by yellow refrigerator truck.

      Anyway, I have never tried anything that Schwan’s made but I have heard that their food is mighty tasty, something you can’t always say about frozen foods. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was pitched two new products from Schwan’s–mini meatball sandwiches and mini mozzarella bites–as the company tries to appeal to the football watching public. So I popped them in the oven (the meatball sandwiches require about twice the time so I put those in first) and ate them–you guessed it–on Sunday while watching football.

      Chef JimThe mini meatball sandwiches are kind of like mini Hot Pockets, but with one difference (no offense to the folks who make the aforementioned pockets)–they taste really good. The crust is actually nice and flaky, despite being a frozen product, and still house a good amount of whole grains without being grainy tasting. The meatballs do not taste like mystery meat, and don’t even have a weird texture as some frozen meatballs do. The only thing I would have liked more of is the tomato sauce, but this can be easily rectified by nuking some spaghetti or pizza sauce and dipping the sandwiches.

      Chef JimIn fact, you might want to nuke extra sauce to go along with the mozzarella bites. For some reason, I was expecting breaded cheese sticks, but these were more like tiny pillows of dough with mozzarella cheese inside. Just like the sandwiches, the crust was nice and flaky and these were nice little bites. These have no sauce–it’s basically dough and cheese, but still delicious and perfect dipping into warmed pizza sauce.

      Grocery stores, Healthy, Product Reviews, Tailgating, Your Kitchen

      Bacon woes

      October 11, 2011 /

      I had good intentions with another bacon recipe to post this past weekend, but lo and behold, not every recipe I develop is any good. My plan was to take refrigerated crescent rolls, and fill them with bacon and sausage and cheese. Mmmmm, breakfast-y goodness, right? Well, not really, and this makes me wonder how many recipes out there that are really good actually fail sometimes and fail as miserably as my breakfast sandwich.

      I cooked a bunch of bacon, and our 4-year old son ate more of it than I needed. That’s my boy. I was left with two slices. I cooked a link of turkey breakfast sausage. Then I took the rolls out or should I say, Mrs. Mike and I (mostly her) had to fight to open the package, which should have been our first sign. I won’t say the brand, because I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus here, but I will say this–the crescent rolls I bought were butter flavored. Now, you’d think that anything’s better with butter, right? The catch here is I don’t think it’s real butter we’re talking about.

      Anyway, I assembled the roll by pinching two triangles together to make a rectangle, and then I laid down some cheese, bacon and the sausage link and rolled that sucker up. I baked it for a few minutes longer than what the recipe suggested, and took a bite. B-L-E-C-H. I took another bite. B-L-E-C-H. It was the butter flavored roll, not anything else that made it disgusting. I imagine that with normal crescent rolls or biscuits, this sandwich would taste really good. But I haven’t recovered from that vile butter taste to give it a go.

      I will say this, though…..it’s been fun writing about bacon and coming up with recipes, so why not extend bacon week for another little while? I’ll be preoccupied for a few days but will deliver more bacon posts next week and into the following week before turning our attention to Halloween candy. Sound good? I thought so.

      Grocery stores, Ingredients, Recipes, Your Kitchen

      Maple-y bacon breakfast sandwich

      October 6, 2011 /

      Psst, don’t tell your cardiologist about this one.

      Last week, I saw Eggo French Toast Waffles, which are more of a waffle and less like French toast (the key is there is maple syrup baked in), in the freezer case at the grocery store. I thought our 4-year old would like these, so I picked them up. Then of course, I realized it’s bacon week and anything goes.

      So this morning, I toasted two of these “waffles,” and scrambled some eggs. I cooked up two slices of thick cut bacon in the microwave. When the pillows of maple goodness were toasted, I put a slice of cheese down on one of them, then topped with the scrambled eggs and the bacon slices and put the other waffle on top. And there you have a breakfast sandwich that is every bit as tasty as it sounds, and looks (above).

      Grocery stores, Ingredients, On the Grille, Recipes, Tailgating, Your Kitchen

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