I had such success with my slow cooker french dip the other week, I couldn’t wait until I had the opportunity to break out my slow cooker again for another dish. My trip to Dallas put me in the mood for some barbecue and I decided to try and adapt one of my favorite recipes to the slow cooker: pulled pork. Pulled pork is traditionally cooked by smoking the meat (usually a pork shoulder or pork butt) for hours at a low temperature, infusing the meat with a nice, smoky bbq flavor and creating a super tender texture where the meat simply falls apart at the touch of a fork. You don’t really get the smoky flavor with a slow cooker, but you can easily replicate the long, low-heat cooking process with excellent results.

I picked up a nice big pork shoulder at Whole Foods and put it into my slow cooker with some homemade barbecue sauce. I noticed, when I was researching various different pulled pork recipes, that most don’t call to use that much cooking liquid/bbq sauce in with the meat. I’ve always found that things in my slow cooker work best when there is quite a bit of liquid and so I ended up making a really big batch of sauce. I put half into the slow cooker to infuse the meat and reserved half, pouring it onto the finished pulled pork when I served it on top of my homemade yogurt sandwich rolls. More barbecue sauce is generally a good thing in my book, especially with a tangy one like this.

The pork turned out to be incredibly moist and tender. It’s hard to find good barbecue out here in So. Cal., so I would even venture to say that it is the best I’ve had in a while - high praise, considering that the meat wasn’t smoked and the recipe took virtually no “active” work time! I’ll make this again and again and it’s definitely something I would break out to serve at a big, casual party. You can use a different bbq sauce if you have a favorite, although tangy sauces are pretty standard for pulled pork.
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If you’ve never had a French dip sandwich, you’re missing out. The sandwich starts out with beef that is roasted until extremely tender, which is then thinly sliced and put onto a not-too-crusty roll, either with or without cheese. The juice from cooking the meat is collected, seasoned and poured into a small dish. As you eat the sandwich, you dip each bite into the juices on the side, making the meat extra juicy and getting a huge boost of flavor.

The sandwich is not french at all. The name comes from the fact that it is made with a french roll - a medium sized white bread roll that resembles a baguette with a softer crust and makes good sandwiches in general - and it is dipped into beef juices as you eat it. Dipping does not make the bread soggy, much as dipping a cookie into a glass of milk does not make it soggy as long as you pick up the cookie and eat the milk-soaked bit immediately; prolonged soaking will cause sogginess, but that is why the sandwich is called a dip and not a soak.

I love this sandwich, but not all restaurants do it well, so I’ve been wanting to try and make it at home for some time. I started with an extremely popular recipe from Allrecipes that calls for using a slow cooker to make the meat tender. I used the same technique, but changed some of the flavoring ingredients and used a different cut of beef. The result was amazing. The beef was incredibly flavorful, as was the “au jus” that the recipe produced. I made three huge sandwiches with it but if I had used smaller rolls, I would have been able to easily satisfy 4-6 people. This is definitely a new staple recipe for me.

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A sandwich doesn’t need to be complex to be delicious, but it does need quality ingredients to come out well. In most cases, it also helps if the sandwich is toasted, as well. I always have a method of toasting a sandwich at home, so once I hit the store to look for filling ingredients, the sandwiches seem to make themselves.

This sandwich was completely inspired by one I saw a while back on This Daddy Cooks, where caramelized onions are used in place of uncooked in the filling. I love the melty sweetness of caramelized onions and couldn’t resist giving the whole concoction a try. I used roast beef (from Whole Foods, but leftovers will work equally well), havarti cheese and sweet panoche onions. I also used a whole-grain mustard, chock full of mustard seeds for lots of flavor and a little bit of texture, in addition to a little bit of mayo on the bread. I caramelized the onions in advance, as they can be stored in the fridge if you don’t have time to work on them right before assembling the sandwich.

I chose some simple panini rolls at the bakery for these sandwiches and used a technique I saw once on the Food Network for making panini, where the rolls are sliced in two and turned inside out. The filling is placed on what was once the outside of the sandwich and grilled. This way, you can use good, crusty bread without the crust getting so toasted that you can’t bite into it; the soft interior of the bread toasts up perfectly and the crust gets soft because it is exposed to melting cheese. I don’t butter the outsides of my bread before toasting it, as I’m not a fan of a greasy sandwich, but feel free to do so if you like.

This guide for the recipe, which is loose, makes two really large sandwiches. Serve with chips and have someone to share with.

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Many times, the flaky and buttery crust is the best part of a quiche, supporting the filling and adding a wonderful contrasting texture to the dish. But crusts can be a bit time consuming and more than a bit fattening. I like this crustless quiche as a quick and relatively low fat dinner. It takes about 15 minutes to assemble and get into the oven - and I will never be one to complain about food that is tasty, healthy and fast.

Although I’m calling this a crustless quiche because it doesn’t have a pastry crust, it does have a crust of sorts. The flour mixed in to the egg mixture separates during baking and forms a very thin crust along the bottom and sides of the pan. It’s not the same as a “real” crust, but it does help keep the quiche slices together neatly and adds a bit of substance to what would otherwise be just some baked eggs. If you’ve had a clafoutis, which is a relatively hardy baked custard dish, or even a Dutch Baby pancake, you’ll probably notice some similarities in consistency.

You can use just about any base you want for this dish, which means you’ll get a lot of variety with just one basic recipe. I almost always have onions and fresh spinach on hand, as it’s a popular combination in my kitchen. Some diced up sausage, ham or leftover, shredded chicken would work well in here, too. I like the feta cheese on top for extra saltiness and flavor, but again, you can opt for a different type of cheese if you prefer (parmesan and cheddar are nice) - or even skip it entirely if you want to go cheeseless. Regardless, it’s always satisfying to make and eat.

This can be a simple dinner or an easy breakfast dish, but it can also be served as an appetizer or first course by slicing it thinnly for several guests.

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 You can’t really go wrong with a cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen. Even if their personal preferences aren’t quite identical to yours, the recipes are practally fail-safe and they are very, very well thought out. One of my current - or perhaps I should say “still” as the book has been around for a couple of years - ATK favorites is Here in America’s Test Kitchen because I like the way that the book groups recipes into categories and includes the tips and reviews that accompanied the recipes when they were featured on the ATK television show.

This lasagna recipe is a good one that is made over and over in my family, both for quiet weeknight dinners and for entertaining. It’s very cheesy and has a decent amount of meat in it, where you’ll get some in with every bite, but won’t ever run out of sauce or cheese to go with it.

It’s very easy to make, primarily because ATK calls for the use of no-boil lasagna noodles. These noodes require no pre-cooking and can simply be layered into the baking dish along with the cheese; they cook fully (and very reliably) in the oven during baking. The test kitchen recommends two brands as the best: Ronzoni Oven Ready Lasagna and Pasta DeFino No Boil Lasagna. The runner up is Barilla Oven-Ready No Boil Lasagna, if you can’t find either of the other two brands, though they are both very widely available in supermarkets.

I cheated on the sauce for this lasagna, so this batch was even easier than your average no-boil batch. The ATK cookbook includes a recipe for tomato-meat sauce, but I skipped out on it in favor of using jarred sauce. It’s not that I can’t make pasta sauce from scratch, but there are several brands (mostly from TJ’s and Whole Foods) that I like enough to use in just about any pasta dish. For this one, I opted for a combination of traditional, plain maranara sauce and roasted garlic sauce. Try any sauce combination that you like as long as it comes out to about 48-oz. If you make big batches of sauce from time to time and freeze them, this is a great opportunity to pull a container out of the freezer and put it to use. Otherwise, pick up the cookbook and check out the ATK recipe for yourself.

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Does anyone besides me have leftover turkey around the house today? 

Thanksgiving is one holiday where people look forward to leftovers just as much as they do to the actual dinner. There is always a ton of food to work with (especially if your family is anything like mine and tends to overcook for the original meal) and there are lots of things you can do with those leftovers for a whole weekend of variety.

My favorite thing to make with leftover turkey, as I’ve mentioned before, is a good sandwich. Sandwiches just seem like so much less effort than anything really cooked, like soup or a similar dish that requires lots of prep, and are incredibly satisfying. This particular sandwich is a good one, too. It’s a combination of turkey, cranberry sauce and brie, toasted until it is a hot and melty panini sandwich. The cranberry sauce (or cranberry jelly) adds tartness and a lot of moisture to the sandwich, while the creamy brie holds it all together. It is absolutely idea for leftover chicken or turkey, but will work just as well with deli-sliced turkey on a non-holiday basis.

If you don’t have a panini maker or are simply want something a tiny bit quicker than a hot sandwich, you can easily use this combination for a regular sandwich. Just soften the brie at room temperature to make it easier to slice and layer everything on your favorite sandwich bread and eat it that way. It won’t have the same meltiness as the panini, but as you can see from the photo below, it still looks plenty tempting.

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