Heading South

When it comes to food, I'm a Southern girl at heart.  There is just something about Southern food that warms you up inside and makes you feel happy.  Sadly I don't come across many recipes for Southern food that are healthy enough for me to eat them every week.  There are recipes where someone thought it was a good idea make a dish like fried chicken and then they go an bake it.  Did you REALLY enjoy that baked "fried" chicken?  Did it make you drool and crave more?  I doubt it!  As they say, everything in moderation!  Don't try to make a dish that is amazing and totally bad for you into something healthy, it won't work.  You won't be satisfied.  Just suck it up and cook the unhealthy way every once in awhile.  It's worth it!

So I was browsing one of my favorite food sites Serious Eats and came across a recipe for Sauteed Andouille,and Green with Grits.  Just looking at the picture my stomach started to growl.  I couldn't wait to go out and get the ingredients for this dish and cook it up!  This recipe required three pots/pans on my stove at once (that always freaks me out!) and only some minor prep work.

In the big pot I boiled the collard greens for about 8-10 minutes.  Yum, I love greens!

While they were cooking I started the grits.  Bring some salted milk and water to a simmer then turn the heat down so you get a low simmer and whisk in the grits.  These will cook for 20 minutes or so.  Meanwhile you should drain your greens and move on to cooking the rest of the vegetables and sausage.  Brown your sliced sausage for a few minutes on each side.  Remove the sausage from the pan and sautee the shallots (I love these things and I love that fact that I have been using them a lot lately!) and red bell pepper in the sausage fat.  My sausage didn't have a lot of fat, so I had to throw in some olive oil.

Once the peppers are cooked, add the greens and sausage to the shallot and pepper mix.  Mix them together and cook until warm. 

When the grits are cooked stir in some butter and cheddar cheese. That's it! Finished!  So while there were a lot of pots, there wasn't really a lot of work involved (there was a lot of clean up though). 

Final Product:

 
My thoughts:  Yum, yum, yum.  Comfort, comfort, comfort.  This was good!  I added some sriracha (hot sauce) to mine since I love everything as spicy as possible. The one ingredient that doesn't need to be included is the red bell pepper.  I didn't feel like it really brought anything to the dish, but it did up the vegetable quotient which is always good.  Cheesy grits are so delicious.  They just melt in your mouth.  This dish can work with shrimp or as a vegetarian dish too without losing it's comfort factor.  You can make it even more comforting by adding some cornbread to the mix.  I just made a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix and added some cheese and chopped jalapenos to it.  If you are going to go the unhealthy route take it all the way to the top!

I was also curious how budget friendly this dish was:

Sausage/$4.79
Grits/$1.89
Collard Greens/$1.99
Shallots/$0.70
Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix/$0.55
Red Bell Pepper/$2.99
Block of Cheddar Cheese/$2.29

Total/$15.20

Nowhere near as economical as I have been lately! Although when you really think about it this was a dinner for two, plus enough left over for two lunches.  $15 really is cheap when thought about it in those terms!

Next up:  Mark Bittman's Lentils and Potatoes; Salsa Soup with Cheese Quesadilla's 

Broiled Fish Fillets and Cheesy Grits

Day 13-This should have been an unlucky night, but it wasn’t. Thank goodness! After a few days of restaurant food and take-out it was time to get back to cooking. I tried to plan a menu this week that Anthony might enjoy. I tried to keep meals with a lot of veggies away and bring in some side dishes other then rice. I knew that he was going to like what I was making tonight. I first encountered Justin Wilson while I was living in Pensacola, Fl. I watched an old episode of his show. He was from Louisiana and cooked Cajun food. Most of his food is hearty and you can tell that he really liked to eat. I choose to make the one recipe in his cookbook; Justin Wilson’s Homegrown Louisiana Cookin’ , that he states was diet food for him.

Anthony has made this recipe a few times. I figured I couldn’t go wrong then, in trying it myself. The recipe leaves it up to you to decide what sort of fish fillets you would like to use. I choice catfish fillets in keeping with the Southern theme of the meal. We like catfish and used to eat it a lot more often when we lived in the South. You can follow his recipe exactly and I’m sure your fish will turn out quite tasty. I didn't follow his recipe completely. Anthony and I are really into the taste of Frank’s Red Hot and use it on everything. So to make this recipe have some more kick to it, we make the sauce with more hot sauce then his recipe calls for. So after remembering to halve the recipe I took ½ a stick of butter and melted that in a small sauce pan. Then I added ½ tbsp of lemon juice, ¼ tsp of onion powder, ½ tbsp dried parsley and the biggest change, ¼ cup of hot sauce. Yum!! If you don’t love hot sauce as much as me, then you might just want to stick to the original recipe. If you want to give it some pizzazz, then give it a try.

Then instead of spreading the butter onto the broiler pan, we spread it on both sides of the catfish. Put it in the broiler, until the fish is cooked. It turns out this was the one issue I had. I have never cooked catfish, it’s a little thicker then the only fish I’ve ever cooked which is tilapia (besides my recent foray into salmon). So I left it in for 12 minutes, checked it and put it back in for 3 more minutes. It really did looked cook! Meanwhile as the fish is cooking, I decided what better to pair with this dish then cheesy grits with some hot sauce in them. There is nothing like down home southern cooking. The only things missing were the cornbread and collard greens. I probably put a little too much cheese in the grits, but it’s cheese who doesn’t love cheese?!

The fish was now cooked and I spread some more of the butter hot sauce mixture on top. Once I plated the dish and we started eating the fish, we realized that the thicker parts were not completely cooked. Oh well, you can’t win them all. I’m certainly not the first one to undercook something; I see it happen a lot on those reality cooking shows I talked about earlier. We just ate around the uncooked part. I have to tell you though cooking seems to either be becoming easier or I’m just picking easier things to cook. Let’s just says it’s a combination. That will make me happier!

Final Product:

Not pretty, but tasty!

I will be making this dish again and I will be adding some collard greens to the meal. Yum! I love this style of food. It makes me feel all happy inside. The grits recipe is available, along with all the other recipes I have made through the link on the right, Recipes Used for The Hesitant Cook.

Totals: 15 minutes cooking time, 2 pans. Hmmm noticing the lack of prep time needed to make this recipe, I’ve now decided this is why I didn’t hate cooking last night. Well at least I now know why I liked it.

Next up: Blackberry Chicken Skewers