So, it happened. Hard.
I Made Loaded Baked Potato Skins, Bacon Wrapped Asparagus Bundles with Lemon, Honey Barbecued Beef Sausage Bites, and Fontina and Fuji Apple Crostini.
Loaded Baked Potato Skins
Ingredients:
4 Medium-sized Russet Potatoes
6 to 8 Strips of Bacon
Salt
Pepper
Chili Powder
2 Cups Shredded Cheese
1/2 Cup Chopped Green Onion
1/2 Cup Chopped Red Bell Pepper
1 Clove Garlic - Finely Chopped
1/4 Cup Sour Cream
1 Egg
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Poke the potatoes several times with a fork. This allows steam to escape the potatoes as the cook. No holes = EXPLOSIVE POTATO! The potatoes will take about 45 to 60 minutes to bake... unless you microwave them for 5 minutes first. Then, the tots will only take about 20 to 30 minutes in the oven. Anyway, get the tots in the oven.
While they cook, chop the bacon into small pieces and fry it up to your desired crunchiness. Just a heads up, the bacon is going to get a second cooking in the oven later, so cook it slightly under what you want. Drain the bacon, but save the grease.
When the tots are done, cut them in half length-wise and scoop out some of the flesh, leaving about a 1/4 inch along the skin. You can discard the flesh, or hit it with some butter and dig in. Brush the 8 skins with the bacon grease and set them on a cookie sheet, skins side up. Sprinkle the greased up skins with generous amounts of salt, pepper, and chili powder. Put the skins back in the oven for 5 minutes.
Mix together the cheese, green onion, bell pepper, garlic, sour cream, and the egg. Take the skins out of the oven and flip them over so they are skin side down on the cookie sheet. Divide the cheese mix equally into the 8 potato halves and topp with the bacon bits. Back in the oven for 7 minutes and enjoy!
Serving Suggestion:
Arrange the skins on a large white plate and garnish with a zig-zag of sour cream, extra chopped green onion, and hot sauce or crushed red pepper flake for some heat.
Bacon Wrapped Asparagus with Lemon
Ingredients:
1 lb Asparagus
5 Thin Slices of Bacon
Salt
Pepper
Chili Powder
Garlic Powder
1 Lemon
Preheat oven to 400 Degrees.
I like to use baby asparagus for this recipe, but if you can only find big asparagus, it works just as well. Start by trimming about an inch off of the bottom of the asparagus. The bottoms tend to be tough and woody. Then, rinse the asparagus under cold water and dry them thoroughly.
Take your bacon and cut the slices in half, so you have 10 short pieces of bacon. Then, take each half and slice it length-wise so you end up with 20 skinny half slices of bacon.
If you're using baby asparagus, bunch 4 of them together, but if you're using regular asparagus, just use one or two for each piece of bacon. Wrap the bacon around the asparagus or the asparagus bundles and place them on a baking sheet.
Sprinkle the bundles with salt, pepper, chili powder, and garlic powder. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the bacon is cooked to your desired crispyness. When the asparagus come out of the onion, ligthly juice half of a lemon over the bundles.
Serving Suggestion:
Sticking with the white plate them, arrange the bundles witht he asparagus tips facing outward in a circle, kind of like a flower. Slice 5 lemon wheels from the other half of the lemon and decoratively place them between or under the bundles.
Honey Barbequed Beef Sausage Bites
Ingredients:
2 Large Beef Sausage Links
1/2 Cup BBQ Sauce
1/4 Cup Ketchup
1 Tbsp Honey
1 Tbsp Brown Sugar
1 Tsp Chili Powder
1/2 Tsp Garlic Powder
This one is super easy. Cook the sausage in boiling water according the cooking directions on the package, usually around 10 minutes, flipping them over half way through.
In a small sauce pan, combine the BBQ sauce, ketchup, honey, brown sugar, chili powder, and garlic powder and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once the sauce starts boiling, lower the heat to low and stir occassionaly until the sausage is done.
When the sausage is cooked, remove it from the water and let them sit for at least five minutes before you start cutting them. If you cut them right away, all the juices will rush out of the sausage leaving you with a saucey mess and dry sausage. Sad day.
After the sausage rests, cut it into about 3/4 inch pieces and add them to the honey BBQ sauce. Stir them around to coat them in the sauce and they're ready to go.
Serving Suggestion:
I place the sausage bites in a shallow serving dish and dump the rest of the sauce over top of them. I stick a toothpick into each of the bites so people can just grab the toothpick and pop the sausage in their mouth without messing around with forks and such.
Fontina Fuji Crostini
Ingredients:
One Skinny Baguette
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 Fuji Apple
1/4 lb Fontina Cheese
1/4 Cup Honey
Tsp Salt
Tsp Cinnamon
Couple things about this recipe. Number one, EVERYBODY and their mother loves it. Number two, some of the ingredients might not be familiar to everyone. First of all, crostini are like little open faced toasts. They can be sweet or savory. This crostini is a little bit of both, which is why it is so goooood.
Baguettes are skinny loaves of French bread. Baguettes have great crusty exteriors and are super soft and fluffy inside. Some stores have them baked and ready to go, others sell them as take and bake, in which case you need to finish baking them off in your own oven at home.
I've tried a couple different kinds of apples for this recipe and I've found that Fuji are my fav. Naturally, you can use whatever kind of apples you have on hand, but I reccomend trying out the fuji. Same thing goes for the Fontina cheese. I've made this same recipe with cheddar cheese and brie too, but Fontina is by far the best.
Ok, if necessary, bake off your baguette according to the cooking instructions on the package. Preheat your broiler. Then, slice the baguette at a 45 degree angle into quarter to half inch slices. Cutting the baguette at an angle will give you longer slices, and they look fancier too.
Lay the slices on a cooking sheet and brush them with the olive oil. Place the slices under the broiler for about a minute, just until they get a little toasty. Be careful, broilers are tricky and can burn your toast in a matter of seconds.
Take the crostini out of the oven and brush them generously with the honey. Then, sprinkle a little salt over each crostini. Quarter the apple and cut out the core. Thinly slice the apple into half moon-shape pieces. Thinly slice the Fontina so it is similar in size to the apple slices, maybe a tish smaller.
Place one apple slice on each of the crostini and top with a slice of Fontina. Then, sprinkle the tops of the crostini with the cinnamon. Place the crositin back under the broiler for 30 secodns or so, until the cheese just barely starts to melt. Remove from the broiler and serve.
Servining Suggestions:
I like to use a small white plate and feather the crostini out from the center, like flower petals.
