Friday, January 27, 2006

 

Red


Straight from western PA, the rare Cherikee Red. A lovely birthday present for me from my parents. Hopefully next they'll send us out some Vernor's.

 

Dough in Progress

Proofing the yeast. (Yeast in 1lb bag also from Whole Foods, I go through about 1 of these every year.)





Shaggy dough ready for kneading.







After 10 minutes of loving, with cookbook in background.

 

Rainbow Orange


During our last trip to Whole Foods we managed a couple interesting finds. Along with the Virgils Cream Soda we managed to find sunchokes and also these interesting Blood Oranges. The pictures didn't turn out great but not only are they orange on one side and red on the other but the taste of the orange changes along with the color. The red part is sweet with a raspberry flavor and the orange part was filled with tangy zesty orange flavor.

 

Best Italian Cookbook and Pizza


First off Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is the best Italian cookbook. She is a bit snobby about fresh ingredients and such but just ignore it and use frozen spinach and canned artichokes or whatever and the dishes still come out delicious. She's also big on the pancetta, which is hard to find but you can just substitute bacon! The cookbook is also in our favorite format, lots of info and stories to go along with the recipes, so you can sit down and read bits here and there as you please.

Tonight we used her recipe for pizza. Homemade dough with a simple cooked down tomato sauce (no spices just a bit of olive oil) basil, mozzarella and Parmesan along with other toppings as you choose, perfect!

Cook-Mykal
Time-4 hours, mostly just rising time for the dough

Monday, January 23, 2006

 

Sunday Morning Sun

I love our apartment. During the winter months we get a lot of nice strong morning sun into the living room and kitchen. This Sunday we enjoyed the sunny warmth while eating some fresh lemon waffles (served with blueberries!) that I made up with a recipe from Molly Katzen's Sunlight Cafe, which is an excellent breakfast cookbook. I also finally remembered to make up a double batch of lemon waffles so we have 4 ziplock baggies of waffles waiting for quick breakfasts in the future, they reheat perfectly in the toaster.

 

Oatmeal Rolls


We decided we needed something hearty to go along with the baked beans so I made up these yeast risen, no knead oatmeal rolls. Very easy to prepare with only some vigorous mixing and no kneading, after baking you get a nice roll that's really more muffinish, with a nice chewy moist center and crispy oatmeal covered top. They worked perfectly for mopping up the extra baked bean sauce.

Cook-Mykal
Time-20 min active, 2 hour start to finish

If anyone is interested in the recipe just let me know and I can copy it.

*Edit* Recipe!

No-Knead Oatmeal Rolls
From More Breaking Bread by Father Dominic Garramone, OSB

1 1/2 cup rolled oats
1 cup boiling water
2 packages active dry yeast
1/2 lukewarm water
2 cups lukewarm milk
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tbsp salt
1/2 butter melted
5 cups all purpose flour
additional rolled oats for topping

Put oats in large bowl. Pour boiling water over oats, stir throughly. Let cool to lukewarm.

Sprinkle yeast over lukewarm water in a small bowl, stir until disolved. Let stand about 5 min. Add yeast mixture and milk to oats, stir until mixed. Stir in sugar, salt and melted butter. Add flour 1 cup at a time stirring after each until throughly incorporated. Cover bowl with a cloth and let rise in a warm place 30-45 min or until doubled.

Stir batter down and beat vigorously for 2 min. Spoon 1/4 cup batter in lightly greased muffin cups. Sprinkle with a few uncooked oats. Let stand 15 minutes until batter rises to top of muffin cup. While batter is rising preheat to 400F.

Bake rolls 25 min or until brown on top. Remove from pans and let cool on wire racks. Serve warm. 24-30 rolls.

 

Baked beans


For our first try at baked beans we went with Alton Brown's Baked Beans and it was an excellent choice. With an overnight soak for the beans and then a little chopping and frying the were very easy to prepare, but then you must wait for 6 hours of cooking for them to be done. It's worth the wait! We went with our new clay pot for the cooking device and it once again performed excellently, the beans cooked evenly without burning or any need for stirring, and the clay pot cleaned up pretty easily too.

Cook-Tom, some help from Mykal
Time-15 min active time, ~18 hours for everything else(dry bean soak, 6 hours baking)

Friday, January 20, 2006

 

Winter where are you?




Along with the clay pot we received some mango, chipolte marinade/grilling sauce for Christmas. With all this crazy warm weather lately we decide hey it's warm enough to grill! We marinated the pork chops overnight and then grilled them up and it was excellent, a nice sweet mango-y sauce with a smoky, hot bite from the chipolte peppers. Perfect.

Cook-Tom
Time-overnight marinade, 15 min to grill
Tasty-YES.

 

Virgils



We've long been fans of Virgils root beer with it's distinctive licorice and mint flavors, so when we saw Virgils cream soda we figured we had to try it. It's quite good, a nice smooth vanilla and carmelized sugar flavor. We'll have to keep our eyes out for it because we found it at Whole Foods and we don't head there that often, hopefully they'll start stocking this besides the Virgils root beer at Shaw's.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

 

Sesame Chicken: Clay Pot Cooking


Although the recipe was called seseame chicken it was more of a five spice, peanut sauce over the chicken. The clay pot was awesome, the chicken baked up in 45 minutes and remained moist and tender. The recipe and clay pot were both great. Tom and I are both very excited for more clay pot cooking! I think up next we will be trying Alton Brown's baked beans, it's not a bean pot, but close enough.



Cook-Mykal
5 min prep time, 45 min baking
Recipe from: The Best of Claypot Cooking

 

Tomato soup and cous cous dumplings

A couple of years ago someone, I think Erin and Mike D maybe, made a spicy Bulgarian soup recipe out of Sundays at Moosewood. It was a homemade tomato soup with cous cous dumplings, a really great recipe but very time consuming. Tom and I loved the cous cous dumplings so we've started making them with canned tomato soup, which makes for a quick easy dinner.

Recipe:
2 cans tomato soup
1/3 cup dry plain cous cous cooked up per box directions
1 egg beaten
some flour
a little grated cheese(we use cheddar usually)
dried herbs per your choosing(about 1/2 to 1 tsp, we used herbs de Provence last time

You just have to mix up the cooked cous cous with the egg and flour until you can form it into dumplings, add the cheese and herbs and mix, form up dumplings and drop into boiling soup for a minute or two. Serve and eat!

3-4 servings reheats very well
Cook and recipe creator-Tom
20 minutes

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

 

Empanadas

Another sucess for the tasty team. We used the recipe from Sundays at Moosewoods. The filling is potatoes, corn, pimentos, cheese and peppers. Very tasty. With Tom and I working together we were able to get 8 large empanadas done in just over an hour and half too! I made up and rolled out the dough while Tom made up the filling. We had plenty for dinner and reheated the rest for lunch the next day, reheated they were less crispy but still really awesome. These are great, if anyone is interested I will copy the recipe.

Cooks-Tom and Mykal
Time-1 hr 30 min

(I need some sort of tasty scale but haven't quite decided what to do for that yet.)

 

Black Rice Pudding

This pudding was great. It uses black rice and coconut milk as a base. The coconut gives it a really great mellow flavor and the black rice adds a nice depth on top of that.

Tasty and easy to make, although takes an hour to boil and then a few to properly chill.
Cook-Mykal
Time-15min active, 1hr cooking, 3 hours for chilling

*Update, also great for breakfast!*

Thursday, January 12, 2006

 

Late christmas presents!!

Look what just came in the mail. Looks like we'll be doing some clay pot cooking this weekend. We can finally make some authentic baked beans!

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

 

Coming soon: Cookbook reviews


We have a quite a collection of some pretty excellent cookbooks. I think I'll give a few short reviews in the future of our favorites.

 

Meal Planning

The past year or so we have really gotten into the meal planning thing. Not having to come home every night and decide what to eat and then go to the grocery store and then cook has prevented a lot a hassle and tension around the apt. Sat or Sun we usually do up a meal plan and then grocery list and go out shopping. Having everything on hand and planned out really has meant we do a lot more cooking b/c it's not this huge hassle every night to shop and cook.

This week:
Sun-chicken korma
Mon-chicken and egg on rice
Tues-collards and bacon over pasta
Wed-veggie pot pie with havarti sauce
Thur-Cabonera sauce
Fri-lazy food(spagetti or something mostly premade) or go out to eat/take out

Monday, January 09, 2006

 

Chicken and egg on rice


Tom made up our favorite Japanese recipe tonight. It's perfect for winter, very filling and warm. Chicken, egg and scallions in a dashi soup base.

 

So uhhhh....

I love food. I love to cook and I like to talk about all the tasty food we make. Let's see how this goes...

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