I’ve not been cooking a whole lot lately, as I’ve been very frugal.  I’ve been looking for new work and just trying to cut back until something comes through that I think is a good fit.  Coupled with that, my new venture into the Adopt-a-Blogger program by Kristen has me thinking sandwiches, thanks to my adoptee, Kathy at Panini Happy.

In the meantime, we had remnants of Hurricane Ike come through Ohio, as I stated before.  What that meant to us was that we were without power or water for just over a week.  Staying at the home of friends, I called our house at midnight last night, and our answering machine picked up, so we got power sometime between 8 pm and midnight.  We went right home to make sure everything was good, and to enjoy the night in our own bed, with our cats and electricity and water and all that stuff.  The lasting result of the storm for us is that loss of our favorite oak tree, which will be sorely missed, but it could have been so much worse, and is still worse for many.  My prayers go out even more to the people in Texas that are still dealing with the aftermath of the full hurricane.

Anyway, the switch to trying to be a bit more stingy in my food buying had me voluntarily eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch.  As this happened, someone on the BBQ Brethren forum asked for pb&j variations to try… Something none ‘que but still good.  I did a couple of variations, then continued that with some other sandwiches, and I thought I’d share the stuff I came up with.

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Kristen over at Dine and Dish came up with a great idea a while ago of pairing up bloggers to help new bloggers.  I figured I’ve done this for a while now and could help out, so I tentatively said I’d help out as an ‘experienced’ blogger.  Well, I recently got my adopted blogger!

It’s Kathy from Panini Happy.  And while she’s only been blogging for 9 months, I think we need to switch to her adopting me instead of the other way around!  She has some really tasty looking panini recipis, some of which I’m going to work on doing on the grill since I don’t have counter space for a panini grill.

We’ve been emailing a bit, but that’s been difficult with me being without power and water this week.  We got the remnants of Hurricane Ike all the way in Ohio.  84 of 88 counties were affected, but our area was hit the hardest.  This is officially my first hurricane in Ohio.  We were blessed by only losing a few trees out of the thousands around us, but my favorite oak tree, right out the front windows, fell while my wife and I watched it.  I’m sad to see it go, but it will now fuel a lot of cooking.  We’ve been without power and water since Sunday at around 2 pm, and it looks like it may be this next Sunday before we get power back (we get water back as soon as the pump works again).

Take a minute and visit Kathy’s site… If nothing else to help me figure out what the heck I can even do to help her.  I think she’s doing a great job already; maybe I can get her to help me!  The one thing I’m planning on working with her on is using more of her camera on manual mode; she’s taking great shots with her Canon, already, as you can see below.

Here some examples of her work (her photos look great, too!) (all photos copyright Panini Happy)

Even panini dessert!

What’s a locavore?  The word was the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, and it means someone that eats foods produced locally.  And there are some that think it’s a big deal to do so in today’s world.

I think it’s a good thing.  The idea is to eat foods that are mainly grown with a certain distance from where you live, like 100 miles.  There’s even a local grocery in Dayton, Ohio, that has foods that are within 250 miles of the store, which is great for a market to do.

The push behind this is that we’ve done a lot of our food is grown and processed for convenience and with the shipping times and methods in mind.  This means picking things upripe, processing in quantities that provide economies of scale, spending a lot of time and money transporting from huge farms or processing centers to markets, and so on.

One of the advantages I see in being a locavore, over and above the “I’m doing something good for the planet” part (which is actually somewhat debatable) is that I get to talk to the people that produced the food that I’m going to eat.  I buy eggs from a farm about 10 miles away, and I’ve seen the chickens that lay those eggs.  I go to a farmers’ market, and I get to talk to the farmers that brought in their meats and produce to sell.  There’s something about that personal interaction that makes me feel good about the foods I’m eating then.

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I love college football, especially the Ohio State Buckeyes.  Last Saturday was the start of the 2008 season, with a potential big year for the Buckeyes, coming into the season rated very high (that school up north is nowhere to be seen in the rankings, of course).  To herald in the season, my wife and I decided to make my version of wings and rings.

For the wings, I haven’t yet found anything I like better than smofried wings.  Smofried wings were shown last winter in my post about Superbowl Foods, with a description of how to cut down chicken wings to make them more like Buffalo wings.  It’s so easy that it’s not worth paying your grocer/butcher extra to do it for you.

I won’t recap all the steps of making wings, since it’s outlined well in the earlier post, but what I will describe ’smofried’.  It’s simple; it comes from ’smoked’ and ‘fried’, though I don’t do them in that order.  The problem with only smoking chicken is that the skin usually ends up rubbery, which isn’t very appetizing, especially on wings!  So what I do is deep fry the wings first, for 5 minutes, just to thoroughly cook the skin more than the meat itself.  Then I put the wings in a pan, sauce them and put them on the smoker until cooked thoroughly.

My go-to sauce for wings has become Nando’s Peri-Peri sauce.  It’s just good stuff, and as hot or mild as your tastes.  For my wife, I tried something a bit new: I tried mixing honey with medium and mild Nando’s.  She loved it, even suggesting we try using that on chicken in competition.  I used straight Garlic Nando’s, though I also love Wild Herb (I was almost out of it, though).

The result?  Deliciousness for the OSU opener against Youngstown State.  Now before you all laugh about the YSU matchup, all the big teams play lower tier teams by agreement between conferences, but the Buckeyes did win 43-0, and held YSU to -11 yards rushing (that’s right, minus rushing yardage).  The one downside was when Chris Wells got hurt; hopefully, he’ll be up to speed and ready to go by week 3 against USC!

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