The joys of going out to EAT at HOME

Katie and Jon Bjerning of Grafton didn’t need a pandemic to encourage them to stay home and cook.

The couple shares a passion for creating delicious dishes and devouring others’ creations at restaurants. When the coronavirus stopped the latter, they relied on the former.

“Since we weren’t able to go to places, we knew we could make good things,” Katie said.

Their specialities in the kitchen, however, differ.

“I am definitely more a baker than a cook,” Katie said. “If I was going to choose a meal, I make a pretty mean breakfast.”

For Jon, it’s anything with pork.

“I like to grill,” he said. “Loins, roasts, ribs, you name it.”

Some of their ingredients come from their backyard. They grow rosemary, basil, lemon thyme and oregano.

Katie said they like to change what they grow from year to year but they always have basil “because it makes the tomatoes taste better.”

John and Katie experiment with a host of dishes, but their favorite cuisine is Mexican.

“Our cooking has definitely changed with the pandemic,” Jon said, including being creative with a frequently replenished supply of leftovers.

They recently made an entire Thanksgiving dinner, including the side dishes. The leftover turkey was used for enchiladas, Tetrazzini, sandwiches and stock for soup.

“You can use every bit of the whole carcass,” Jon said. “It’s not hard to do.”

Both grew up in and around the kitchen, helping with family meals, and have worked in restaurants. Jon even went to culinary school in Arizona.

Katie, a Port Washington native, is the second oldest of nine children ages 41 to 26. She often helped take care of her siblings or make dinner.

“There were so many of us in the house. If my mom wasn’t cooking, she was doing laundry,” she said.

Katie used to work on a farm and developed a veggie Benedict with zucchini, onions, spinach and tomatoes.

“I had to get creative with vegetables because I had so many of them,” she said.

Today, Katie works at Tochi Ramen in West Bend.

At family gatherings, she is known as the trifle maker. Fruits are her most popular kinds, but she also makes chocolate versions.

“That started with one recipe that I altered every time I made it,” she said.

Jon is from Wausau and moved to Arizona while he was in high school. He and his older sister were taught to cook at an early age.

“As kids, my parents involved us in making dinner and family meals,” he said. “They bought us a kids’ cookbook.”

Jon entered the restaurant industry at 18 and liked it so much he went to culinary school. He never intended to be a chef, but would like to run a restaurant someday.

In the latest dish that he “just kind of made up,” Jon fried a pork loin in butter, then laced it with a mix of cream cheese and herbs. Bourbon-braised peaches were spread over that, and then he wrapped it all in bacon.

“Because there wasn’t enough pork in it,” Katie said with a laugh.

But the sounds of “mmm” filled the dining room when they tasted the dish.

“It was decadent,” Jon said.

Every meal, he said, needs a sauce. Some of the best are the natural sauces used to cook the meal.

Even the traditional St. Patrick’s Day dish gets sauced.

“With corned beef and cabbage, you’ve gotta make a Swiss cheese sauce,” Katie said. “You can’t just eat it plain.”

Katie’s latest concoction altered a breakfast biscuit-bake recipe that called for sausage and a cup of sour cream. She didn’t have any sausage, so she used ham.

The dish turned out “awesome,” she posted on the Facebook group What’s Cookin’ Port Washington?

That technique is one the couple advise in cooking. Swapping ingredients in recipes can work, but Jon said it’s a different story in baking.

“Follow the recipe. Don’t deviate,” he said.

He and Katie have three freezers full of food they are eating through.

When Jon grills, he prepares more than just meat. In summer, it’s fresh produce as well.

“You’re firing up the grill. You might as well make as much as you can,” he said.

Jon and Katie have been married for five years but didn’t share their love of cooking right away. Both were single and making meals at their restaurant jobs when they met online.

“It’s very nice when you walk your dishes over to the sink and somebody will clean it up,” Jon said.

Since restaurant employees work weekends, their dates were on Mondays and Tuesdays.

For some of Katie’s favorite recipes, see page 4C.