What is your favorite recipe, of all time? Will you share it with us?

All you had to do is ask!

I don't know that this is THE favorite of mine, but it's one of them.

SHRIMP SCAMPI

Ingredients:
2 pounds of shrimp, peeled and deveined (I also like to remove the tail for easier eating, but that's up to you. Most sizes will work. I personally prefer 20-25 ct. size.)
2 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP garlic, minced
1 cup white wine
1 shallot, minced
1 TBSP lemon juice
1/4 cup butter, sliced-up
1 TBSP chopped parsley
cooked pasta or rice
Directions:
1. Mix the shrimp with the olive oil and garlic. You can let it marinate for a few hours, but it's okay if you don't.
2. In a large skillet, saute the shrimp with the oil and garlic over medium heat for just a minute until the shrimp is pink on both sides.
3. Add the wine, minced shallot and lemon juice. Cook for several minutes, stirring the shrimp so it cooks evenly, until the wine reduces by about half.
4. Crank the heat up to high, add the butter and stir just until it melts. Add the parsley and serve immediately over cooked rice or pasta.

Interesting.

I guess I don't really have a favorite recipe so much as I have favorite dishes. I suppose that's because I didn't learn to cook from recipes. What I know about cooking is more preparation / process / method oriented than it is governed by ingredients.

I like eating and preparing: soups, stews, chowders, ragouts, casseroles, cassolettes & the like. I guess I have a preference for slow cooking - although pasta dishes are always good, as are curries, stir fries, and Mexican style meals. And eggs dishes are hard to beat: omelets/frittatas, quiches, scrambles, and just plain sunny side up.

For red meats, poultry, and fowl, I prefer roasting, braising, broiling or grilling over frying. For fish I prefer grilling or broiling - though poaching and steaming are also options.

Baking is fun: yeast breads, quick breads, cakes, cookies and the like. But I've given up hope that I'll figure out how to come up with anything more than an acceptable pie crust.

I also enjoy making sausages and cured & pickled meats - DYI corned beef or pastrami beats most anything you buy in a store and is easy to do.

Many cultured / fermented dairy products are simple to prepare and tasty too. I'd guess just about anyone can make cottage cheese, farmers' cheese, pot cheeses/cream cheese, and the like. Cultured milks (something similar to what they call buttermilk in the stores) are easy as is cultured sour cream. Homemade yogurt is as simple as simple gets.

We recently made Choucroute Garni using yearling wild goose. We still used some smoked sausage and bacon, but substituted goose for the ham or ham hocks that some recipes call for. I don't know that is my "favorite recipe," but it was a most excellent meal.

Here's the basic story behind Choucroute Garni - it's a dish that allows you to play with the ingredients a bit to suit what you have on hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...ute_garnie

Watched today an interesting show on the Food Network that showcased the favorites of those featured. I think it is titled something like This is the best thing I have ever eaten.

Anyway it sparked a discussion with my husband and I about our favorites and believe me we have them. We live to eat, not eat to live.

His top two are lobster tails and drawn butter and rare prime rib with horseradish sauce.

My top two are charbroiled raw oysters (with garlic butter and parmesan) and Eggs Benedict especially when the poached egg yolks are runny. I also like various renditions of Eggs Benedict, like some from New Orleans -- Eggs Sardou, Eggs with smoked salmon, etc. Actually most of my favorite dishes/foods are from New Orleans as are my husband's! However, he has those two favs above which are generally available everywhere.

I will send recipes for the best chargrilled sauces for oysters sometime this week. They are the chargrilled with garlic butter and parmesan, the chargrilled with Rockefeller Sauce, and the chargrilled with Artichoke cream sauce. We had a party last year in March with these recipes as well as freshly shucked oysters. WE had over 300 oysters to shuck and served about 40 people. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun.

I don't have a recipe for it, but one of my favorites (and I have many)is my fruit pizza. I start with a moist yellow cake mix and add sugar and eggs--when it's a thick batter, I pour/mold it into my biggest cookie sheet (it takes up the whole oven!) and bake it (it's done when a toothpick comes out clean). Then for the "sauce" I mix Cool Whip (thawed of course) with powdered sugar, cream cheese and some vanilla extract, then spread that on (I love a pretty good layer of that). Then I put on whatever fruits I feel like--usually it ends up being sliced kiwi, sliced strawberries, sliced bananas, and raspberries. THEN I stick it in the fridge until a couple hours after dinner and then make a pineapple glaze (some 100% pineapple juice and cornstarch heated over the stove on med-low until warm and thick and bubbly--don't boil it! Then drizzle over the "pizza", slice and serve--store in frige! Really yummy, and it's a little different each time I make it cuz I just throw stuff in/pour stuff in without measuring (what's the fun in that???)

I make a chocolate cinnamon meringue torte that is to die for. It uses whipped cream, not the plasticine stuff in a plastic tub that tastes the same as the contents, egg whites and egg yolks (WARNING: OLD RECIPE so you don't cook the egg yolks) cinnamon and chocolate. It's a pain to make but hot darn! If you like Mexican chocolate. . .

My husband is the master chef and even manages a might tasty meatloaf. We keep considering putting together a recipe book of some of his finest.

That could be pretty cool. Way back when, on my mom's side of the family, all of the women got together and made a cookbook of their own recipes and published it. I got my grandma's when she passed away, and I LOVE it! Granted, I don't follow recipes, but it has a lot of history in it--some geneology, poems that my great aunt wrote, etc. etc. It's a really neat book. It would be pretty cool if all of the women in the family could get together and add more to it and republish it, but that will never happen---to many family feuding LOL!
BUT I digress.
Another one of my recipes that I make often is my hamburger stroganoff. I cook egg noodles as usual; brown hamburger, some fresh garlic and onion (I chop them up and throw them into the food processor!), then throw it in with the burger while it's cooking. When the burger is done, I throw in a cream of mushroom soup and sour cream, cook till hot, then serve over the noodles! Really yummy--my husband's not keen on sour cream OR mushrooms (and I don't like mushrooms either), but this is REALLY GOOD!

Oh yeah, another, and this is a good one, is homemade pizza! I usually even make the crust from scratch (unless I'm in a hurry, then I'll use storebought--Pilsbury, maybe?)
For the crust, I mix flour, baking powder, milk and salt (the dough can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours, too). I "mold" it into my largest cookie sheet (it dang near fills the whole oven rack!), then put regular tomato sauce on--I don't put too much on, cuz there's a point of having too much! Then I put either "pizza seasoning" or Italian seasoning on top of that. Sometimes a little garlic salt instead. Then goes on pepperoni, sometimes ham lunchmeat, cut into squares; Canadian bacon, hamburger, black olives, sometimes saurkraut (I know--it doesn't sound very good, but it really is! Though I can't get hubby to eat saurkraut, so have to keep it off of about 3/4 of it!), & shredded cheese--I use the 4 cheese blend and mozzarella. Plus it's a big hit when we have company over, either with or without kids!!!!

German Pizza
http://www.classiccitybre...pizza.html

That actually sounds pretty good!

Love the fruit pizza idea. Gonna try that soon. Thanks for that.

[This message has been edited by Schmitz - Matt (edited 2/4/2009).]

This is a family favorite anytime, but especially in the cold:

Minnestrone Hotdish
6 cans Campbells Minnestrone Soup
1 Family size can Cream of Mushroom soup
1 pound ground beef/ browned
4-5 medium potatoes

Throw it all in a crock-pot until the potatoes are done.
Serve with hard dinner rolls.

This is a great meal after a hard day of hunting, sledding or ice skating

Coke Jello and Raisin and Ketchup cookies are two of my favorites.