Macaroni and Cheese with Ham on the Big Green Egg

Prep Time about 20 minutes, Cook Time: 45-60 minutes; recipe serves 6-8. The leftovers should make for some mean fried Mac and Cheese cakes!

INGREDIENTS
• 1 Lb. Elbow Macaroni
• 5 Tbsp. Salted Butter
• 5 Tbsp. Enriched Flour
• 1 Tbsp. Corn Starch
• 1 ½ Tbsp. powdered Mustard
• ¼ Tsp. Cayenne
• 4 Cups 2% Organic Milk
• 1 ½ Tbsp. Pimentos
• 1-12 Oz. Can Evaporated Milk

• 2 Cups Monterey Jack and Mild Cheddar, shredded

• 1 Cup Sharp Cheddar Cheese, shredded

• ½ Cup Parmesan Cheese, shredded fine

• ½ Cup Sweet Onion, finely diced

• ½ Tsp. Paprika
• 1 ½ Tsp. Kosher Salt
• Fresh black pepper
• 1 Slice (approx. 12 Oz.) Baked ham, diced

TOPPING:
• 3 tablespoons butter and 1 cup Panko Bread Crumbs

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat Big Green Egg to 325 – 350 degrees F (at the dome)

2. In a large pot of boiling, salted water cook the pasta to al dente.

3. While the Pasta is cooking melt 5 Tbsp. butter in separate pot.
4. Whisk in the flour, cayenne, paprika, salt and powdered mustard, stir until slightly browned (keep it moving constantly); simmer for 10 minutes making sure it is free of lumps.

5. Stir in the milk, evaporated milk, onion and paprika. Simmer for ten minutes then stir in 3/4 of the cheese & season with salt and pepper.

6. Fold the diced ham, pimentos and macaroni into the mix and pour into a 2-quart casserole pan.

7. Top with remaining cheese.

8. Melt 3 Tbsp. of butter in a sauté pan and toss the bread crumbs then top the macaroni with the bread crumbs

9. Place on indirect (plate setter legs down) and bake for 30 minutes. Remove from BGE and rest for TEN (10) minutes before serving.

Ham and/or Pea Variation – Add ½ cup frozen peas; substitute deli sliced ham or eliminate the ham altogether.

...just HAD to try ONE Baked Apple with Sniker Bar tonight!

While cookin up tonights Wok Rib Eye dinner...I snuck a apple onto the grill with some brown sugar and snickers. Wrapped in foil and left on during dinner while the egg cooled off (closed down). It was delicious!

Wok Seared Rib-Eye Steak, Green Onions and Baby Portobello Mushrooms

Portobello mushrooms are sautéed with green onions and removed from the pan. Then the steak is sliced into ¼” strips and cooked in Canola Oil. The mushrooms are returned, along with a big glug of soy sauce, to cook until they get nicely coated. You don't even need salt. There's enough in the low-sodium soy sauce to make everything properly seasoned. Serve this with some plain rice and steamed broccoli. Serves 1 to 2; adapted from SeriousEats.com.

Ingredients

Canola Oil

1/4 cup Green Onions, chopped (optional – shallots)

10 Baby Portobello Mushrooms, stems removed, thinly sliced (Option – Shiitake)

EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)

1 boneless rib-eye (about 14-16 ounces) Low-sodium soy sauce

1 ½ Cups steamed Long Grain White Rice

3 Medium stocks of steamed Broccoli

Garlic Pepper

Water

Procedure

1. Fire up the BGE to full T-Rex (high heat).

2. Place wok on grid and pour in 3 cups of water. Add the broccoli into a Bamboo steamer and steam until tender then set aside.

3. Steam or cook 1.5 cups of Long Grain White Rice and set aside.

4. After broccoli is done, remove water from Wok and pour in the canola oil and bring up to temp.

5. Toss in the Onions and Mushrooms and cook until they are soft, stirring constantly for 2-4 minutes then remove and set aside.

6. Pour off any excess Canola Oil and add the EVOO into the wok or skillet. Slice the Rib eye into ‘stir fry’ size pieces and season with Garlic Pepper to taste.

7. When hot, add the steak and seer until medium to medium rare. Sear for 2 to 3 minutes a side. Remove the steak and set aside.

8. Reduce the heat a little while meat rests.

9. Add the mushrooms and shallots back in. Pour in the soy sauce and cook until it coats the mushrooms in a sauce, stirring continuously.

10. Remove from heat and pour the mushroom and soy sauce on top of the meet. Serve with white rice and broccoli.

Cast Iron Cooking Primer

Cook Eat Share

COOK EAT SHARE is a fantastic cooking site, blog, recipe, group cooking site that I recently discovered and joined.  Any Egg Heads out there can find the "group" I created out there for Big Green Egg Heads by signing up for the site.  Thousands of members and recipies...surfed it for hours.  Check it out!

Tony Hall

view my recipes

Chicken Chorizo One Dish Meal on the BGE Happy V Day !

This dish combines the flavors of Chicken Thighs and Spanish Chorizo (sweet or spicy sausage) in a tasty ‘One Pot’ brown rice Dutch oven dish.

There are many varieties of Chorizo but Spanish chorizo is typically the most readily available in the grocery store. It is made from coarsely chopped pork and pork fat, seasoned with smoked pimentón (paprika) and salt. It is generally classed as either picante (spicy) or dulce (sweet), depending upon the type of smoked paprika used.

Chorizo comes in short, long, hard and soft varieties, some of which are suited to being eaten as an appetizer or tapas, whereas others are better suited to cooking. Leaner varieties are typically better suited to tapas, eaten at room temperature, whereas fattier versions are generally used for cooking. A general rule of thumb is that long, thin chorizos are sweeter and short chorizos are spicy, although this is not always the case.

Ingredients

 2.5-3.0 lbs - Bone-in skin-on chicken thighs

 .75-1.0 Lb. - Chorizo cut into bite size pieces (.75-1”)

 1 ½ cups - Long Grain Brown Rice (not instant)

 1-2 each - 4 oz. bottle White Zinfandel wine (or substitute ½ bottle white cooking wine)

 3 each - Roasted Red Peppers cut into thick slices (canned or prepared ahead of time on the grill)

 1 large - Sweet Onion, sliced paper thin

 3 cups - Chicken Broth

 1 cup - Frozen Peas

 Sea Salt and Black Peppercorns (season to taste)

 Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)

 2 Tsp. - Oregano (if fresh chopped use 2 Tbsp.)

 ½ Tsp. - Crushed Red Pepper (flakes)

 6 cloves - Fresh Garlic, minced

 1 each - Bay Leaf

Preparation

1. Preheat Big Green Egg to a decent flame with grid in place for initial cook.

2. Season chicken with salt and pepper to taste. In the Dutch oven (or separate cast iron skillet) heat up the EVOO and add the chicken (skin side down) and let cook until golden brown (6-8 minutes). You may have to work in batches and set aside.

3. Pour off excess fat if cooking in the Dutch oven and cook the Chorizo stirring frequently until browned (4-5 minutes max.) then transfer the Chorizo to a plate and leave the excess fat in the Dutch oven.

4. With Dutch oven still on the grid add the Oregano, Pepper flakes, Garlic, Onion and Bay Leaf and cook, stirring frequently until Onion begins to brown and get soft. Add the Rice and cook, stirring frequently until glossy (1-2 minutes) then add the wine and bring to a boil stirring frequently and reducing by about fifty percent.

5. Place Chicken, Chorizo and peppers into the rice mixture and bring to a boil, stirring frequently then remove from grid.

6. Remove the Grid and place the plate setter (legs up) in the egg. Stabilize dome temperature at 400 degrees and place the Dutch oven on the plate setter. Add the Chicken Broth, salt and pepper (to taste), cover and let cook for 60 to 70 minutes.

7. Remove from heat and uncover, stir in the frozen peas with a fork, cover Dutch oven and let sit for 10 minutes. Option: Roast the red peppers first if not using canned roasted peppers); serves 5-6.

...one Rare and one Medium Rare Organically Raised Kansas City Steaks!

Kansas City Steaks; 1.5" One Rare and One Medium Rare for Valentines Day dinner. 

Sustainably raised beef this stuff cooks and tastes like no other...on my!  Combine that with some baked potatoes and a salad, topped off with some Oregon Pinot Nior.

Snow = Higher Chicken Prices

(taken from Prepare to Pay More for Poultry: Chicken Farms Crushed by Snow By SARAH GILBERT)

Snowstorms that hit the Eastern Seaboard this week could mean shortages and high prices at the grocery store -- not just for milk and bread, but for chicken. At least a dozen poultry houses at chicken farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore and in Delaware, as well as one in Shenandoah, Va., suffered collapsed roofs due to heavy snow over the weekend, causing damage in the millions of dollars. And that was before the week's second storm, which dumped around another foot or more on the region. Delaware Secretary of Agriculture Ed Kee predicted far more damage to come this week.

Maryland and Delaware are the eighth- and ninth-largest U.S. producers of broiler chickens (the chickens typically used for meat -- everything from nuggets to rotisserie), together raising and selling more than 540 million of the country's 9.01 billion broilers each year. University of Delaware extension specialist Bill Brown told the Associated Press that delays in deliveries of feed and propane to heat chicken houses could also cause a huge number of birds to die of exposure, reducing poultry availability still further and impacting prices in the region.

Chicken farming today is quite different than it was even as recently as the 1960s, and poultry flocks are far more susceptible to unusual weather conditions. Fewer than eight billion pounds of poultry were produced in 1968; that rose to more than 50 billion pounds by 2008. As the number of birds skyrocketed, so did the average size of each bird, while at the same time, the number of weeks chickens lived grew smaller and smaller. It took 16 weeks for a chicken to grow to the average market weight of 2.7 pounds in the 1930s; in the 1990s, specially bred chickens reached an average market weight of 4.7 pounds in fewer than seven weeks.

The price of faster growth and shorter lifespans is far less hardiness; chickens which in the 1950s and 1960s would have been fully-feathered (and thus hardy enough to withstand cold weather) for more than half of their lives now barely reach that age (four to six weeks) before the are slaughtered. In addition, the extremely high density of chicken farming means they're packed in flat-roofed structures that need not meet the same structural-integrity standards as human housing.

After 10 to 12 more inches of snow fell on the region Wednesday, the chicken farmers of Delaware and Maryland may already be suffering from record losses to match the record precipitation. A few areas in Delaware are still without power. And another snowstorm ("possibly less intense") is forecast to arrive early next week. Conditions for the two states' biggest sources of farm income bode ill for the price of poultry in the coming months.  THANKS MOTHER NATURE!   KEEP ON EGGIN'

Lighting your Big Green Egg

Many an EggHead has preached the virtues of dozens of ways to fire up their BGE's...I've settled on the LANDMANN Fire Starter.  If you look hard on the internet you can buy for $3.85 for 24 or buy them retail for $6.99. Don't waste your time with any other method (my two cents) and ...

Cast Iron Chicken and Rice

Super Bowl Dinner was unbelievable!!!! 

Spiessbraten or Schwenkbraten (pork steak German Style)

'ICE' Cream