What Do You Do When You’ve Been Snowed In for Three Days Because of a Major Winter Storm

  Posted on January 24, 2016  by Dad  No comments

Why, you cook of course!

Our day started out like any other Saturday watching back to back episodes of the Pioneer Woman on Food Network at 9:30 AM. Ree’s recipe for scalloped potatoes with ham caught our eye and we knew we had to make it. We are absolutely crazy over cheesy potatoes. The addition of ham in the mix just seemed too good to pass up. Fortunately for us, we had stocked the kitchen right before winter storm Jonas was set to arrive so we had everything we needed. By mid morning, this was assembled and ready for the oven.

Note to Self: Replace the worn out Cuisinart or buy a mandolin. Slicing potatoes that thin is a real pain in the ass!

Now for a main dish. Having eaten beef almost every night over the past week I was worried about contracting another case of gout. Chicken seemed to be the appropriate remedy and I remembered a recipe from one of my favorite cook books of all time, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen for Chicken Sauce Piquant. We had never made this dish but were excited to try.

Chicken Sauce Piquant is fairly complex with a lot of steps and ingredients. This is the type of recipe where Lisa and I really shine in the kitchen working together with complete fluidity. We can change roles from chef to sous chef without a word and it really makes things work so much more easily. By 3:00 PM this one was in the bag and ready to go.

Lisa thought something green was in order and since we had a bunch of brussel sprouts, what we call fart bombs, we decided to add our tried and true recipe for them to the menu. I remembered having seen Trisha Yearwood adding pistachios to hers so I suggested we might try this. Our family loves pistachios so this was an easy sell.