Sauces

Chipotle mayo is a pretty hot condiment whose popularity is well-deserved. With just a few ingredients, you can create a complex mixture of spicy, cool, earthy, and smoky that becomes an excellent spread for sandwiches and burgers, or a dip for fries, chips, and veggies.

A sweet, salty, smoky, spicy and down right tasty bacon jam that is the definition of umami! This bacon jam goes well on toast for breakfast and makes for a great condiment in sandwiches and burgers of all sorts!

With fresh, home-grown tomatoes from the garden, it's time for homemade marinara sauce. It doesn't get any better than this!

Here ketchup, bacon, vinegar, brown sugar, and bourbon are mixed with lots of spices for a sweet, tart, smoky barbecue sauce. Play around with the ingredients: Add more bourbon, less vinegar, different spices, or swap out the sugar for agave nectar, honey, or maple syrup. This sauce is great on ribs but as you know, barbecue sauce has endless uses.

A great sauce for cooked veggies! Use a french whisk for best results.

Have you ever browned butter? It's an easy way to take a recipe that relies on butter up a notch in flavor. Just by cooking the butter a little past the melting point results in the milk solids in the butter browning, and creating a wonderfully nutty aroma. It's fun to do with butter-based sauces, baked goods that call for melted butter, or with vegetables such as winter squash that you sauté in butter. Just be sure to keep your eye on it while cooking; it's pretty easy to go from browned to burnt.

 You can serve this over cucumbers, cabbage or baby spinach.

For the blue cheese I went with a nice creamy gorgonzola dolce. The steaks cooked easily and quickly and the mushroom and blue cheese sauce was nice and straight forward to make. The results were absolutely amazing!! There was a nice slightly crisp crust on the outside of the steaks and the insides were nice and moist and tender and perfectly medium rare. The mushroom and blue cheese sauce was nice and creamy and tangy and oh so lick your plate clean good!

For pulled pork I like a vinegar based sauce as opposed to traditional, thick barbecue sauce.  This Carolina sauce is on the thin side and has a real TANG to it.  If you feel the vinegar would be too strong for you, you can always cut it down by half, taste it and add accordingly.

I absolutely love this sauce squeezed on pulled pork and put between two pieces of white bread.  Yum.