apple pie a la mode

....without the boring "pie" part. :)

I just chopped up apples and made the spiced sugary filling out of them, then baked them in a covered dish instead of bothering with a pie crust. It produced a REALLY delicious, syrupy apple-pie-insides kind of thing. I took one taste and realized it has to be dumped over vanilla ice cream for best effect, so I am getting some of that later tonight. :D

delicious dish

Ripped off from my beloved Mommie, of course--who better to steal tasty recipes from???

1 link (1 lb) of turkey kielbasa (just as yummy as the pork stuff but MUCH less fatty)
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 cup rice
about 1 tomato can's worth of added water (at least for my rice, which is proving to be somewhat incorrigible about water quantities and cook times)

Throw it all in a skillet and simmer it until the rice is tender.

DONE!

And it's ridiculously good. You wouldn't even believe it. Bo was feasting delightedly on the grains of rice I gave him, because they were so tasty he thought they must be meat.

a cooking frenzy!

Tonight I made giant batches of beef stock, beef stew, chicken stock, chicken pot pie, and followed it all up with a loaf of delicious soup bread (made with beef stock instead of water). I am soooooooooooo tired! I think I was in the kitchen for at least 3 hours straight. But I probably made enough to feed me and Alex for the better part of a week. :D

EDIT: I forgot to mention the jello (with blueberries from the farm down the street) and the mac & cheese that ended up being dinner!

bread experiment

I was getting sick of the tiny bit of sweetness that shows up in my Favorite loaf of bread, so I decided to try a batch with NO sugar added.

Well, it really didn't rise much, ultimately, even though I gave it more time. I did know that the sugar is there to feed the yeast, so I'm not too surprised. It tastes good anyway --it's just about 1/2 the size of usual loaves!

gorgeous bread!

I have a favorite bread recipe, which I make pretty much whenever the weather's not too hot. I prefer making bread at home to buying it in the store anyway. I made this today:...and then in the spirit of what Alison and I have been talking about, I got to wondering whether/how economical it really is to make my own bread. I did a bunch of research, and here's what I came up with:

1 package yeast --67 cents
1/4 cup warm water
7/8 cup warm water
1 1/2 tsp salt --1 cent
1 1/2 tbsp sugar --2 cents
1 tbsp vegetable oil --4 cents
3-3 1/2 cups flour --56 cents

Whole loaf: $1.30
Comparable loaf from the store: $3.89
Saved: $2.59!

Even if you're just getting a loaf of Wonder Bread, it's $3.19. I'd much rather have mine!

free yeast

A while ago I did a survey for Fleishman's (NO idea how to spell that!) yeast, and they sent me coupons for SIX free packets of yeast. What do I make? Cinnamon rolls? Coffee cake? A new kind of bread? :)

yum yum

I came up with a big pile of sliced tomato, avocado, orange bell pepper and cucumber with a light drizzle of Greek dressing. It was REALLY good!

heat wave

As soon as this durned heat wave calms down, I am going to make kind of a hybrid chowder. I can't quite face eating clams, so I am going to put in some cooked lobster-ish meat (kind of like krab) instead. Also, instead of corn I'm putting in some peas, so we'll see how that goes.

As far as the heat, though, I am just waiting and waiting for a break! I even thought of the obvious solution of cooking at night so the apartment would be cool, but the temperature isn't going down at ALL! What happened to those nice daily thunderstorms we were getting to clear all the humidity and heat out?

My mom's ALWAYS saving the day

Isn't she helpful? :)

"So here's what you do about bland gravy. Taste the cooking liquid before you thicken it. It should taste just about how you want the gravy to taste but just a bit stronger. If it is not strong enough you take out the meat and veggies and boil the liquid till it is stronger tasting. This is called "reducing". Then thicken it and it should be right. Oh - and don't leave out salt. It belongs in gravy and makes it taste "gravy like".

Mum"

pot roast turned out well

I did it by my mom's method. (It's my favorite way to get acquainted with cooking a new food--try it how my mom does it and then play with it from there, if I even need to!)

In this case it meant I browned it on all sides, then nearly submerged it in water and gave it a good simmer until it got really tender. I also threw in some carrots and potatoes to boil in the meat water as the meat finished up.

At the last minute I decided I wanted to make some gravy too. I don't really know the first thing about gravy, except that you start with a roux, and that it involves flour and meat juices, but it turned out okay--a bit bland but definitely edible. Some salt and bay leaf fixed that up okay, and the meat was tender and moist enough that it didn't really need gravy anyway. The thing I ended up being proud of with the gravy was that I didn't burn it to the bottom of the pot. :)

delicious artichokes

0. chop off annoying stem and leaf-tops
1. steam artichokes
2. melt butter
3. peel off leaves
4. dip and devour
:)

EDIT: Just to be clear (after reading Chris's comment) I love artichoke leaves. I just meant I was cutting off the very top where the leaves are all spiny and don't have tasty parts anyway. But as far as I'm concerned the whole POINT of artichokes is the leaves! :)

new things to cook with

Alex and I were grocery shopping and I got inspired by artichokes and pot roast. Not that I've ever cooked either.... but I will! And they're going to be GOOD. :)

family time :)

Alex and I love cooking together. We are working on cooking together every day, and have been doing pretty well at it! We don't do something hugely fancy every day, but it's always nice to spend some time hanging out and making something we both can enjoy.

Today we made a salad with REALLY good tomato, salami, grated cheddar and Italian dressing. We tossed it in a big salad bowl, and it looked so good that we just grabbed a couple of forks, sat on the couch together and ate the whole thing out of the big bowl. :)

It was so yummy, I made seconds for tomorrow!

Easter dessert decided

I'm going with a sort of ice cream/sorbet hybrid. Unless it totally sucks, in which case I'll go to the (delicious) standby of apple pie. :)

hmm...

I am in need of a good Easter dessert.... I'm shopping around now. :)

perfect pizza topping

Okay, so the absolute BEST cheese combination to put on a pizza is mozzarella, sharp cheddar and a sprinkling of Parmesan over the top. I am not kidding--it's to DIE for!

yummy, yummy bread

I've been having some trouble with my bread: Every time I got to the kneading part, the dough would end up tough, with holes busting out all over it, and yet seemingly under-kneaded rather than over-kneaded (because the bread wouldn't hold a rise properly).

It was a BIG mystery, and no matter what I tried, I kept getting the same weird, unhappy result.

I finally pulled out the big guns by asking my mom to make bread with me and show me what I'm doing wrong. Yaay, mommie!

It turns out that in the beginning, when you first mix together the yeast with some sugar and flour, there is some heavy stirring to be done, to activate the gluten right then.

There is also a very successful family kneading technique, but it can't really be explained in writing--you just have to watch someone do it. I can say that it involves leaning on the dough from the shoulder rather than trying to knead it with the wrists.

Needless to say, these two elements have greatly improved my breadmaking!

The next development is that now, with these two elements in, I find that I can add much less flour to the dough before going on to kneading, which handles a lot of the toughness that I was encountering.

Woo!

food today

I had some extra time today so I did some cooking.

YUM, as it turns out. :)

I started with potato soup, since Starbucks had some whole milk that was expiring, so I took it home to cook with. Don't worry, I made sure it hadn't actually spoiled before I threw it in the soup.

Alex and I ate the whole pot of soup in maybe half an hour. :) AND I am thinking about making a whole extra batch tomorrow. I made it from a recipe that was pretty bad, so I wrote in my changes for next time (more potatos, add cayenne pepper, things like that...).

I am really happy because in Oregon you could pull cans of potato soup off ANY grocery shelf, and in New England you just can't find potato soup without YUCK CLAMS. AKA clam chowder, which people around here are crazy about despite the presence of, well.... clams.

And then, I was having such a good time cooking that I made a chocolate cake. But chocolate cake is so much better with fruit sauce! So I made some sauce out of a bunch of mixed berries, and the cake soaked up a bunch of it really nicely. It was deeeelicious.

Just when I was running out of steam and couldn't face cooking for myself, Alex made TWO grilled cheese sandwiches for me in the knick of time. :)

epic project :)

Somewhere along the line I noticed that I have collected up about a million (conservative estimate) handwritten/magazine clipped/mail order/etc. recipes that hang out with my cookbooks.

Their main function in life seems to be "look messy and be really hard to sort out". They have been sitting on the counter in a pile with my cookbooks, looking like crap and basically hindering everything.

Well, well, well. What is a girl to do?

I don't remember if it was my idea or Alex's, but the idea came from somewhere that these loose recipes need to be captured and put in a binder between those neat-o plastic sheets (which I love because I spill egg on EVERYTHING when I cook).

Well, I'm doing it and I'm actually almost done. AND everything is getting sorted by category, so my seventy five bread recipes, for instance, are all actually hanging out together!

This project has been a long time coming, and I'm so glad to finally be doing it!

grilled chicken

So I don't know how I did it (especially since all my past attempts have basically sucked), but I made really yummy pan-grilled chicken. I laid down just a bit of olive oil and then sprinkled the chicken with garlic, salt and basil. It was deeelishus. :) Maybe it's because I used a different pan this time?