Genoese Minestrone

Since it's been getting cooler, we figured it would be a great time to try making soup.  A quick survey of what ingredients we had versus ingredients called for in various recipes convinced us to try a minestrone recipe.  This turned out great and we had leftovers - enough to enjoy, but not so much that we didn't like the soup anymore.  Pernfect.

From World Kitchen - Italy

Notes:

• This does take some time to make - there is a lot of prep work involve in cutting up vegetables to go in the soup.  However, some effort was reduced by buying pre-cubed prosciutto (instead of pancetta) from Kroger.  Overall, this was an afternoon project.
• Instead of borlotti beans, we added some red kidney beans that were still around from making red beans and rice a little while back.  We also used some Italian cut green beans instead of runner beans (might actually be the same thing).
• Deletions: cabbage (we didn't want to buy one to just use 1/8-1/4), pesto, and Parmeasan cheese.  The pesto and cheese are meant to be added when served, and so were not viewed as necessary.
• The recipe said to just peel the potatoes and add them in whole, but we used cubed unpeeled redskin potatoes.  This seemed to work out just fine, and it goes along with our tendency to only peel potatoes when necessary (which is rare).
• We used some Barilla mini penne that we had instead of ditalini, but it seemed just fine.  The pasta will get softer and mushier for the leftovers, but it will still be very good!

Cooking the onions, prosciutto, sage, and parsley; already smelling great.

Then you cook the vegetables a bit before adding the chicken broth.

Delicious finished soup, ready to be consumed.

Verdict:  Would definitely make again.  The end result is definitely worth the prep work.

World Kitchen - Italy (2010), p. 24-25

Moscato cupcakes

Among the (admittedly few) wines that I drink is moscato.  Among the (admittedly many) desserts that I think are very tasty are macarons.  So when Kroger has a wine sale and Macaron Moscato is among the discounted varieties, I go for it.  Sadly, the wine was not as good as one might have expected.  There was a very strange and sort of artificial taste that I'd never tasted in a moscato before which led to something hitherto never seen before--us not finishing a bottle of wine we'd bought.  So, what to do with the rest of the bottle?  Make something delicious out of it, right?

Cute label, but the wine was not so good.

The magic of the Interwebs led me to this recipe for moscato wine cake.  Not owning a Bundt pan, I decided to do cupcakes instead, which led me to some ad-filled blog that probably tried to install malware on the University's network (ha! denied!).  But it did have a recipe for moscato cupcakes that I hastily copied and pasted into a comparatively safe Word document.

Reception to these was mixed.  I thought they would have been better with better wine and not using a boxed cake mix.  But when Dom took them to his office, apparently they were a big hit.  Like many of our other culinary experiments, this one could benefit from a bigger sample size!

Our notes:

• I didn't search for too long, but all of the recipes I found used a boxed cake mix.  Now, prior to this, I had not used a boxed cake mix in years.  I discovered that boxed cake mixes have quite a few ingredients that don't sound all that appetizing, and also that there is no inherent difference in the mixes for "yellow" and "butter recipe yellow" cakes; it's the end user that has to add the butter to the mix in the latter case.  Still, to be faithful to the recipe the first time trying it, I bought a boxed cake mix (just regular yellow cake--not yellowcake, mind you).  Next time, I'd just make my own cake batter, and adjust the recipe as needed, which in my case means "until the batter looks about right".
• A better wine would have led to tastier cupcakes, but then I suppose that's the classic case of "you get out of it what you put into it".  I could still taste that weird slightly metallic taste in the cupcakes which means that, amazingly, we still have unconsumed cupcakes in the apartment five days after baking.
• There was no frosting for these things.  We didn't have enough powdered sugar to make frosting; neither did we have enough wine left to flavour it according to the recipe.  By all accounts these didn't really need frosting, and frosting probably would have just decreased the shelf life anyway.
• The photo below shows some cornbread-looking cupcakes.  The recipe produced 17 cupcakes; this came out to one full 12-cup muffin tin and one 6-muffin tin that only had 5 cupcakes.  To save time, I just put both tins in the oven at the same time, with the 12-muffin tin on the top rack and the 6-muffin tin on the bottom rack.  The 12-muffin tin produced the cornbread-looking cupcakes, but the 6-muffin tin produced cupcakes with very smooth tops that were more a beige-y colour rather than the cornbread color.  It didn't really matter too much in this case, but just some interesting tidbit of information that may come in useful sometime in the future.

Verdict: Probably something I'd try again, but with my own cake recipes.  Also, it would mean not drinking all of a bottle of moscato in order to save some for the cupcakes, which would be sort of difficult for me.

Cupcakes with wine in them, not cornbread muffins without wine.

Cranberry orange bread

To be fair, this was originally a cranberry walnut bread, but since I don't really like nuts in breads, we decided to omit those and just go with cranberry orange.  The cranberries just recently showed up at our local Kroger, unless they showed up while I was on vacation...in which case then no, that wasn't so recently that they showed up.

Anyway, our notes:

• Of course, we omitted the walnuts, partly because I don't like using nuts in bread, but also for a reason explained below.
• The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar.  If you know us at all, then you know that we don't like too much sugar in our recipes.  We used something less than 1 cup and the end result turned out fine; one could probably use about 3/4 cup of sugar and it would still turn out fine.
• I have no idea how much orange zest I actually used.  Since I wasn't about to zest the orange and then determine how close to 1 Tbsp. I was, I just figured that the zest of 1 orange was sufficient.  The end result didn't seem to suffer from any lack of orange zest.
• Perhaps because of the layout of the back of the bag of cranberries (where I got the recipe), I somehow missed that I was to have "coarsely chopped" the cranberries before tossing them into the batter.  This didn't seem to adversely affect things, though it probably would have turned out marginally better had the berries been chopped.
• Also speaking of the cranberries, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of them.  Somehow I assumed that this was the entire package, so not only were they not chopped, there were also way more of them than the recipe had said to use.  Oops.  Only after I'd dumped all of the cranberries into the batter did I notice that the serving size for the package was a 1/2 cup, and that there were 6 servings in the bag.  So apparently I was to have used only half the bag.  But then I realized that it wouldn't have been as easy to use the leftover half of the bag (all the other recipes on the bag used the entire thing), and since the final product was tasty, we figured that this wasn't a bad thing to have thrown all of the cranberries into the batter.  This was a contributing factor in the decision not to use walnuts; there was barely enough room in the bowl for all of those cranberries, so we figured that the batter wouldn't also be able to hold chopped walnuts.

This was definitely a recipe to keep, especially with our modifications.  I'd like to say that next time I'll probably make at least some effort at chopping those cranberries, but most likely I'll chop one or two handfuls, call it good, and then throw the rest in whole.

Whole cranberries.

Lavazza: Qualità Oro

Bought this because I liked that other Lavazza.  With a name like "Qualità Oro", I expected some high quality coffee, but sadly, it did not meet the exacting standards I set out for it.  Lavazza's website claims that this blend is "a selection of the finest 100% Arabica coffees from Central America and the African highlands" and lists it first among its selection of coffee blends.  So why didn't I like it?

• Weaker flavour compared to the "Caffè Espresso" blend: I prefer my coffee tasty, not tasting like it's a bit watered down.  Lavazza's website gives it a 4/5 for "Intensity"; Caffè Espresso had gotten a 5/5 for that one.  Was this part of the issue?  Perhaps...
• Price: rather more expensive than the espresso blend, and to make matters worse, the price listed on the shelf did not match the price it scanned for at checkout.
• The most egregious offense: for whatever reason, it was effectively a decaf coffee, and when it's 6.45 AM, that is most definitely not what I'm looking for.

Verdict: would not buy again.

Qualità oro? More like, qualità piombo, I'd say.

Slow cooker tapioca pudding

I wanted to make some tapioca pudding.  However, as the minute tapioca at Kroger was selling for an exorbitant price, I decided to get a bag of tapioca pearls for $0.99 at the Chinese grocery store.  I found a good recipe and went to work.

My notes:

• This really could not have been easier: mix ingredients; turn on slow cooker.  Not too difficult.  It didn't even require soaking the tapioca pearls beforehand.
• A few of the reviewers at AllRecipes mentioned that the eggs were more for texture rather than taste.  I'd probably only use one egg next time instead of two.
• The recipe didn't call for vanilla but I threw some in.  It probably ended up being somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 teaspoons since I just used whatever we had left in the bottle.
• Our slow cooker doesn't have a "medium" setting; it has "high", "low", "simmer", and "warm".  So I set it for 1.5 hours on high, then turned it to low for about 15 minutes, after which I thought that was too much heat and set it to simmer for the last hour of cooking.  This seemed far under the time that recipe said the pudding would take, but it seemed to be nicely thickened at this point, and based on evidence it didn't seem to be getting any thicker with the longer cooking.  Rather than risk it burning, I just turned off the heat.
• If anything, I'd reduce the sugar a bit, maybe to half cup; 2/3 cup seems a bit excessive.
• I used nonstick spray on the liner of the slow cooker.  I don't know if this helped, but I certainly didn't want to find out how fun cleanup would be without it.

Definitely a recipe I'd try again.

Delicious!

Cloverleaf rolls v3.0

This recipe for cloverleaf rolls even says in its title that they are "fantastic".  This, unfortunately, was not my experience with them.  From an imbalance of liquid and dry ingredients to a lower yield, this was not anywhere near as good of an experience as I'd had on Wednesday with making cloverleaf rolls.

My notes:

• The recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour, but I ended up using a little more than 4 cups, and even then I did not really get a dough, but more of a stiff batter.  I didn't want to add more flour because of a dire warning in the recipe about flour amount.  Maybe this was a mistake on my part.

Cake batter?

• There was a lot of liquid in this recipe: 3/4 c. water to dissolve the yeast, 1 c. milk, 1/4 c. melted butter, and 1 egg.  By contrast, the recipe I used on Wednesday only used a little over 1 c. milk, 1 egg, and 6 (not melted) tablespoons of butter.  Maybe this is why I should have added more flour.
• However, it did seem like a good idea to dissolve the yeast in what amounted to sugar water.  Get the yeast to really start eating before it even got to the flour, right?
• Because of the point at which I'd stopped adding flour, I ended up with what was essentially a thick batter, but a batter with gluten (there was definitely gluten forming in this stuff).  By the time I finished dividing the dough into 12 muffin cups, I felt like one of those people in the commercials for the faucets that you only need to hit with your wrist to get to turn on.  I had anticipated this and had, against my environmental science bachelor's degree, turned on the water before I started dealing with the dough.

Before 2nd rising: they look like biscuits, or something.  There was no way this stuff was going to be formed into any other shape than 'blob'.

After 2nd rising: at least they look more like rolls, now. 

They may not be "cloverleaf" rolls, but they turned out to be rolls nonetheless.

These turned out to be more like brioche: soft, buttery, sort of eggy, a little sweet.  This would have been great had I been going for something like a brioche (which, honestly, had been next on my list of breads to try), but this did not make for good cloverleaf roll dough.  The recipe had promised 12 large cloverleaf rolls, but I ended up with 12 comparatively smaller brioche.  So, this turned out to be not so bad of a result as I had thought at the start; I might keep the recipe around for brioche, but then I might just find a recipe that specifically says that it's for making brioche!

Lavazza: Caffè Espresso

I have one of these coffee pots:

The Bialetti Moka Pot.

It was a great pickup and it's already saved me a lot of trips to the coffee shop.  I only wish I'd found out about these in college!

I drink coffee every weekday and the moka pot gives me two mornings' worth of coffee, so I end up using this 2-3 times each week; the day-old stuff isn't nearly as tasty as the fresh, but it's no less effective.  Since the time that I bought this back in September, I've been trying out different brands of coffee, so I figured I should start keeping track of which brands work out and which...not so much.

Lavazza Caffè Espresso

This Lavazza passed the test: not so strong as to be bitter but certainly flavourful.  Only too late did I realize that all of the info about the coffee itself is on the side of the can, but that info is also at Lavazza's website.  It's a medium roast suitable for all coffee makers but optimized for espresso makers--the moka pot is technically not an espresso maker, but the coffee still seems to work just fine.

Verdict: would buy again.

Cloverleaf rolls v2.0

After the cloverleaf fiasco of earlier this month, I found four new recipes online and resolved to try each of them.  We tried one of those this evening, the results of which far exceeded my expectations.

Extended Narrative
The recipe calls for "1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons milk", which conveniently measured out to about 250 mL.  Huzzah for the metric system, right?

We also don't keep bread flour; the recipe calls for 4 cups of that.  I started out with 3 cups of all purpose flour and added just under 1 more cup during the mixing process.  The dough ended up being slightly sticky but not unlike our pizza dough, so I figured it was all right.

I was so excited about how things were turning out, even early on in the process, that I took way more photos than I usually do.

The stand mixer with dough hooks once again came through for us.

The recipe said something about running the stand mixer for 6 minutes; I probably came in at around that amount of time after having added that last cup of flour rather gradually.

I made sure to punch down the dough after the first rising which was not specified in the recipe.

When the time came to shape these I realized that this was a lot of dough.  Fortunately, I'd purchased a 12-muffin tin after the last experiment with these rolls, which worked out very well and had a nonstick coating to boot; as an experiment, I only sprayed half of the cups with nonstick spray.  The dough for most of the rolls filled the muffin cups (unlike last time).  I didn't bother to coat these with melted butter, mostly because I didn't feel like putting in that extra effort.

All cozy-like.  Rolls on the right are in the zone of nonstick spray, while the rolls on the left  are the control group.  As it turned out, there was no difference (statistically significant or otherwise) between the two halves of the batch.

Being somewhat paranoid, I set the timer for 30 minutes for the second rising, while the recipe called for 45 minutes. When the timer went off I realized that this would actually work out well as I still had to preheat the oven (our oven takes a while and there's no telling where it might be at any given point in the preheating process).  Here's the result of the second rising:

WHOA.

Rather different from that first time, eh?

These got baked for 14 minutes rather than the specified 15-20 minutes.

NOM.

About five minutes after this photo was taken, that roll on the top right was gone.  Soft, rich, and buttery; if there were any modification I'd make to the recipe, I'd probably add slightly more sugar--but that's really just trying to find something to have to change.  The recipe was fairly quick (edit: I should say that the active part of the recipe was fairly quick; obviously there was an hour and a half there where I didn't have to do much!); it didn't require a lot of ingredients; and it was pretty foolproof even for someone like me, inexperienced as I am (was?) with yeast breads.

Of course, I'd still like to try the other cloverleaf roll recipes that I'd found, but this is going to be hard to beat--but was it only because of the first failure that this success seemed so great?

The finished cloverleaf roll.  Look at that crumb.

Chicken paprikash

This experiment came about from three factors:

1. We had a container of sour cream in the fridge that I didn't know what to do with.
2. We always want to broaden our culinary horizons.
3. Captain Sisko cooked chicken paprikash on a recent episode of Deep Space Nine that we watched ("Family Business"--of course, Sisko was still a Commander at the time...).

Joy of Cooking gave us a relatively easy recipe to go on, and we even had a good supply of sweet paprika to use.  This turned out to be incredibly tasty and not too spicy.  We would definitely make this again, which is typically my criterion for deeming whether or not a recipe is a keeper.

Our notes:

• This was a straightforward recipe, but not one for a hot day; though we used only one skillet, that particular burner on the stove was on for the entire cooking time and I had to be standing there for most of that time.  Fortunately we managed to keep the smoke detector from going off (it's gone off from us boiling pasta in the past).
• We used chicken tenders rather than the "3 1/2 to 4 1/2 pounds of chicken parts" called for in the recipe.  This definitely cut down on the prep work and cooking time, and they didn't dry out in the cooking or anything.
• In the interest of using the sour cream as quickly as possible, I probably put in more than was called for; would definitely cut back next time.
• There was, not surprisingly, a large quantity of paprika in this: 1/4 cup for the full recipe, and 2 Tbsp. for a half.  It gave the dish just enough spice to prevent us from finishing our plates in a hurry--always a good thing.
• We served this over rice, but it would probably work just as well with spätzle, egg noodles, potatoes, or other dumplings.

Flavourful!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 431-432

Blueberry Cornbread

Hello all - this is a guest post is by Dom, so bear with the brevity - I'm but a simple engineer.

Background:

After we first made the delicious flour tortillas previously posted, I really wanted to try making corn tortillas.  However, this turned out to be much more difficult than the flour tortillas, and not as tasty (in our opinion).  Thus began a quest to find other recipes that use some of the 5 lbs. of masa corn flour we bought for the corn tortillas.

The recipe for the blueberry cornbread is from food.com.

Note:

We did not have buttermilk, so I used 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice with enough milk to make a cup.  I was supposed to let them sit together 5-10 minutes and then stir before using, but forgot - oops...  However, this did not seem to matter as I let the wet ingredients sit mixed while I got the dry ingredients ready.

Result:

Tasty cornbread that is gritty but not dry, with blueberry deliciousness in every bite!  We would definitely make this again.

Final Product - with a couple of pieces taken out.

22 July 2012: Addendum from Caroline!  After about three days this started to go bad, so we would recommend making this only if you intend to finish it quickly.

Cloverleaf rolls

Recently I became enamored with cloverleaf rolls.  The ones I had were soft, moist, at once pillowy yet dense, and more than twice the size of the muffin cups they'd been baked in.  So you see, I may have some unreasonable expectations when it comes to these things.

I really wanted to like this recipe.  I had the utmost faith in Joy of Cooking's methodology but the rolls I cooked up with its recipe came out more like hard biscuits than the pillowy creations I'd known before.  They didn't even fill the muffin cups of the pan when they came out of the oven.

Sad cloverleaf rolls.  At least the copious amount of nonstick spray worked as advertised.

This was my first time making yeast-leavened rolls; I've made biscuits in my time, but recipes for those can be summarized thus:

1. Mix.
2. Bake.
3. Consume.

I've also made pizza dough, but if I've been messing that one up, then those have been some tasty mistakes.

Looking back, perhaps it was a combination of errors that led to an unfortunate final product.  Let's see, shall we?

• It's probably best to make these on a day when it's cooler than 100°F outside; even with the air conditioning on, the rising times were altered and the 425° oven was not so pleasant.
• Punching down dough after the first rising is more important than I'd realized; we don't do this for pizza dough (and yet it's still darn tasty) and I haven't yet made many other breads.  Important!
• Just as it's important to let the dough rise, it's equally important to not let it rise for too long.  I suspect that this was the main culprit behind the hardtack biscuits that resulted.

So it's probably not the recipe itself that's to blame after all, but the ol' "user error".  We'll probably try this one again, but a lot of Interweb sleuthing has turned up four more promising recipes for cloverleaf rolls, all of which I intend to test.  Will I find a recipe that results in my vision of the ideal cloverleaf roll?  We shall see, shall we not?

Sad cloverleaf rolls are sad.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610

Almond pudding redux

After our failed attempt at making almond pudding some months ago, I wanted to try it again seeing as how we still had a few envelopes of gelatin left.  Accordingly I found another easy recipe for almond pudding; it only required a few ingredients and some quick calculations to scale it down.  This turned out much better than our first try, and we had a nice refreshing dessert.

Our notes:

• The prep time for this is pretty minimal.  I decided for sure to make this at 5.30, and by 6 PM we were out the door for Dom's hockey game, with the dessert reposing in the fridge.
• The finished product was not overly sweet.  Sugar content is a recurring theme for our recipes since neither of us likes super-sweet desserts.  This recipes qualifies as-is but I might reduce the sugar even more next time (probably closer to 1/4 cup rather than the 1/3 called for).
• We used an 8"x8" dish for the pudding; this translated to about a 1/2" of dessert.  While this doesn't affect the taste at all, I'd probably try to use a smaller dish next time to get thicker cubes of dessert; alternatively, I might double the recipe since there's no such thing as too much almond pudding.

This recipe worked out much better than that last one we'd tried, and it was a fabulous dessert for a 100°F day.  You'd have to ask Dom as to whether this was a good after-hockey snack though...

Almond pudding: always good with fruit cocktail.  Sadly, our can of Del Monte had roughly 4 halves of cherries--and way too many pears.

Strawberry icebox cake

I first saw this recipe for a no-bake strawberry icebox cake in summer 2010 and wanted to try it out immediately.  Peak strawberry season and the vicissitudes of life being what they are, I didn't get a chance to make one until this spring.  It's an easy recipe, the results are just scrumptious (it really is like a strawberry shortcake), and it makes for an excellent dessert choice for informal spring or early-summer dinners.

Our notes:

• You can't get away with throwing subpar, underripe, pale strawberries in this; we had a couple of these, and I'd thought that they might be hidden under the flavours of all the other strawberries.  This was not the case and there was a big taste difference between areas of each slice that contained visibly ripe strawberries versus areas that had the underripe ones.
• Going strictly by the recipe, I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to put the graham crackers directly on top of the strawberries (implied in the recipe but not as structurally stable), or to put whipped cream and then the crackers on the berries (more stable).  I ended up putting the crackers directly on the fruit, partly because I prefer to follow the recipe as much as possible the first time through, and partly because the whipped cream was the limiting factor in this endeavour.  It seemed to work well, though I'll try the other method next time to see how that goes.
• I have yet to make a good ganache in all the times I've tried.  Maybe I'm not patient enough to keep stirring something for the time needed for all the chocolate to melt.
• We found it best to go conservative on the powdered sugar to put in the whipped cream, even though the recipe calls for a relatively low amount as it is.  We didn't want to the berries to be overpowered by any more sugar than was absolutely necessary to get the cream to not taste like Vitamin D milk.
• I didn't want to over-whip the cream and end up with butter, so I erred in the opposite direction and came out with more of a "Cool Whip lite" consistency.  I don't know if this is ideal or not, but since thicker cream seems like it would lend a better aesthetic to the finished product (by looking slightly less messy), I'd probably whip the cream for a little longer next time.
• The recipe said to let this chill in the icebox...refrigerator for about 4 hours before consuming.  Because I'd made this late in the evening on a Wednesday we didn't get a chance to sample it until Thursday dinner; the graham crackers still had a little body to them.  By Friday and Saturday we thought the flavour and texture had gotten even better, but on Sunday I noticed a small decrease in quality, though nonetheless still good.  The following days showed a continuing (but shallow) downward trend in quality, with the graham crackers becoming more and more insubstantial in both texture and taste.

I took this before the ganache went on because I had a suspicion that the chocolate would make this less photogenic.  That may have been correct, but the finished icebox cake was only enhanced by the addition of the chocolate.

12 July 2012: Addendum!  We made this for an Independence Day celebration and it turned out very well to whip the cream a little longer.  Dom did up the decoration on top:

Festive, no?

Round and round pasta

We saw this pasta recipe on an episode of Giada at Home and it looked like a good springtime meal.  It turned out to be an interesting mashup of flavours and included our new favourite summer produce: zucchini and summer squash.  It also gave us an excuse to buy mascarpone.

Our notes:

• This recipe took a lot of time to prepare: cooking, cooling, and slicing sausages; slicing shallots; slicing carrots; slicing zucchini and summer squash; slicing tomatoes; mixing the dressing.  The given prep time of 10 minutes seems a bit on the optimistic side, though I suppose once everything is chopped the actual cooking doesn't take too long.
• I had cooked the sausage long before Dom got home so that it would have enough time to cool.  This saved time later, but it's my opinion that this recipe is not for those who work full time.  Maybe on weekends or something but definitely not for a weekday.
• Because we had only decided to make this earlier that day, the sausages were still frozen.  I cooked them on low heat in a covered skillet with about 1/2" of water, and kept checking on them for 15-20 minutes.  Worked great.
• Even with "medium" zucchini, 1/2" slices seemed rather hefty.  Though it would destroy the aesthetic of having all round items in the dish, I'd probably cut each piece of zucchini in half or quarters to get bite-sized pieces.  Either that or buy tiny zucchini.  (Side note: the photograph at the recipe's webpage has zucchini slices about the same size around as the pasta, and not as thick.  This was NOT reflected in the recipe's numbers.)
• I would use more than a 1/4 cup of orange juice for the cooked zucchini.  This barely covered the bottom of the pan and there wasn't a whole lot left after the "cook until the juice thickens" step.  Yes, I know it doesn't say "reduce" so I kept vigilant watch over it.
• The recipe calls for rotelle (wagon wheels), but I bought ditalini as our local Kroger doesn't have rotelle.  I always forget just how much volume a pound of ditalini takes up versus a pound of a larger pasta, and mixing together all of the ingredients was a bit dicey even in the pasta serving bowl that we have.  Guess we should just get penne next time if we don't have time to hunt down rotelle--the sauce-to-pasta ratio would probably be a little better with larger pasta.
• Perhaps I didn't allow enough time for the mascarpone to come to room temperature, but there was no way that stuff was going to be whisked, much less "poured" over the finished pasta.  However, the 'dressing', as it were, of mascarpone, lemon juice, and salt, was really quite delicious (once I worked it into the pasta) and provided a nice salty-and-sour contrast to the hint of orange juice that the zucchini had been cooked in.  We actually cut down the amount of salt in the dressing to about 1/2 teaspoon as a full teaspoon seemed excessive.
• Speaking of mascarpone, hearing someone say it "mars-ca-pone", in the same way that people pronounce my name as "Carolyn", sort of irritates me.  (It's closer to "mas-car-pone-eh", and my name is not "Carolyn" in the same sense that it isn't "Marie" or "Jordan".)  Since I've learned over the years that no one likes a know-it-all and since this really isn't a big deal in any case, I usually just brush it off and ignore the momentary and slight rise in blood pressure.  So to save myself a little hypertension, whenever someone pronounces it "mars-ca-pone", I'll just pretend that they're referring to that rum-running Capone family of Mars.  They've got an in with Starfleet, you know.

So all in all, this was a relatively labour-intensive dinner and it's not a good hot-weather dish only in that it requires three different uses of the stove.  However, it was very tasty and the end result was a not-too-heavy springtime dinner that we'll probably end up making again sometime--it'd be a great make-ahead dish as the flavours get better with a little time.

Avocados and pasta: a winning combination

Tagine

Inspired by a friend who lived in Morocco during her stint with the Peace Corps, I've wanted to try tagine ever since she mentioned it in her own blog.  I found at stovetop version at Allrecipes which looked easy enough and would only require us to buy a few things we wouldn't have bought normally.  I really don't know if this particular recipe is authentic in any way, but it afforded us the opportunity to try something new.

This was an interesting flavour combination and I was a little hesitant at first, but by the time the title sequence came up for the episode of Deep Space Nine* we were watching, I was a big fan.  I'd make it again so long as we purchase a vegetable peeler before trying to peel a butternut squash (see our notes).  Also, that will not be my job.

Our notes:

• Butternut squash is tough.  This was the first time I'd purchased one myself and probably will be the last that I try to peel with a knife.  I'm not a fan of risking severe injury in the name of food.
• Coriander is cilantro--didn't know that one.  We didn't miss it in the stew, but it would have been nice to know at the time.
• We added dried cherries for a bit of sweetness, and also because we didn't have any other dried fruit like apricots.  This added another layer to a dish already containing an amalgam of flavours.
• Store-brand vegetable broth works just fine, which is nice because the Kroger down the street doesn't have any other brand of vegetable broth for some reason.

Our stovetop, hard-anodized, Calphalon version of a tagine (pot).
Also known as the "3-quart covered saute pan".

Served over rice because that's the staple grain for us.

*We're halfway through Season 3, and I am so excited to watch the series all the way through with Dom since it's one of my all-time favourite television shows.

Homemade tortillas

After seeing this recipe at AnnArbor.com, we decided to make our own tortillas.  We ended up using the Joy of Cooking recipe due to logistics.  In any event, this was a resounding success.

Our notes:

• These were absurdly easy to make.  Five ingredients total: flour, baking powder, salt, vegetable shortening (or, in our parlance, "olive oil"), and water.
• The two recipes differed only in the amounts of baking powder and shortening.  Joy of Cooking called for less baking powder but far more shortening: 2 tsp. shortening vs. 1/4 cup (!).  The tortillas we made tasted heavily of olive oil--not a bad thing but next time I think we should try the recipe that uses less oil and see if that makes a difference in the texture.
• We used our handy griddle rather than a skillet.  This worked fabulously.
• Our tortillas came out a bit thicker and denser than store-bought ones, and they seemed to be less pliant (i.e. they would tend to crack if you tried to roll everything into a burrito).  Perhaps we should have used more baking powder?  Or less oil?
• The original recipe I had seen called for vegetable oil, and we used olive oil instead.  As a result our tortillas had a stronger taste than if we had followed the recipe more closely, but the substitution did not seem to affect the cooking time at all.

Resting the dough before cooking.

Once again, the griddle came through for us.

Stack o' tortillas.

yum.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 608

Key lime sherbet

For the key lime pie, we had only used about half of the lime juice as what we had gotten from the bag of limes.  What to do with the other half, we asked ourselves?  Once again, it was Joy of Cooking to the rescue with a lime sherbet recipe.

Our notes:

• Unbeknownst to me before the fact, this sherbet recipe called for gelatin as an agent to keep the finished product smooth.  Due to our previous almond pudding mishap we had a few envelopes of gelatin in the cupboard.  Much better results this time!
• The recipe called for 1 cup of sugar and we used somewhat less than a full cup; even so, my first impression upon tasting the finished product was one of overwhelming sweetness.  Probably reduce the sugar to 3/4 cup or even 2/3 cup next time.
• The sherbet had a better consistency after putting it into the freezer for a day than it did right from the ice cream maker.  I suppose it'd be the difference between soft serve and what I call 'real' ice cream.
• Our past experiences with our ice cream maker from the 1980s led us to believe that after churning and then storing the finished ice cream, you'd end up with a solid block of frozen product rather than something resembling a scoopable ice cream since the freezer wouldn't freeze it quickly enough.  That was not the case with this sherbet recipe, for which I credit the gelatin.  Surprisingly enough for our homemade ice cream (and related products), this was actually better not directly from the ice cream maker.

Soft serve sherbet.  Delicious, but it melted very quickly.

After one day's storage in the freezer.  Delicious, and it still has a smooth consistency.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 838

Key lime pie

We saw a bag of key limes at Meijer for $1.99 which I was naturally unable to resist due to my affinity for key lime pie.  Once I found out how easy key lime pie was to make (3-4 ingredients plus the crust), there was no stopping it.  I used elements from multiple recipes which were more or less all the same: beat egg yolks, add condensed milk, add lime juice (and zest if wanted), pour into crust, and bake in order to kill bacteria.

Our notes:

• Juicing the limes was the hardest part of the whole endeavour.  We probably used about half of the bag to get the 1/2 cup of juice needed, but at the same time, that's really only about $1 worth of fruit.
• I used about 1 1/2 tsp. of lime zest.  This was probably too much for the resultant pie we had; at first glance it looked like I had made a quiche with green onions in it.  Ordinarily I would have just slathered on a bunch of whipped cream (none of that Cool Whip stuff, thanks) to cover any blemishes, but because of the circumstances I couldn't do this.  So the solution is to either use more lime zest and cover the pie with whipped cream or meringue, or not use much (if any) zest and just serve the pie straight.
• However, the amount of filling the recipe produced only filled the pie shell maybe 2/3 of the way up.  Given this, I would tend to just use the lime zest and then use whipped cream to fill the rest of the pie shell.
• One of the few variations among the recipes I looked at was baking time.  Technically, key lime pie does not need to be baked due to the chemical properties of the ingredients, but with bacteriological concerns today most recipes tell you to bake the pie.  I baked mine for 12 minutes; it's hard to say whether a longer baking time would have resulted in a firmer consistency as this pie was a bit softer than I had been expecting.
• This is definitely not a pie to eat before chilling it for several hours.

Multiple people gave their approval; I would consider that a success in any culinary adventure!

Not Pac-Man.  Also, not a quiche.

Slow cooker Cuban braised beef and peppers

Real Simple lived up to its name with a very easy slow cooker recipe that did not require much prep work (my kind of recipe).  The result was several hours of amazing aromas wafting through the apartment followed by a very tasty dinner.

Our notes:

• We generally cut the recipe in half since there are only two of us; we only used half an onion, one red pepper, and one 14-oz. can of tomatoes.  However, we probably used more than half of the amount of flank steak called for.
• We had an abundance of canned stewed tomatoes in the apartment, so we used those rather than diced tomatoes.  Breaking up the tomatoes a bit before cooking rendered them indistinguishable from the diced variety.
• Cumin was not used.  We don't keep cumin around and I usually don't like buying an ingredient that will probably be used only once.
• Cooking time: 4 hours on high and then intermittently on low and warm (our slow cooker switches to warm when the timer ends; when I remembered to I turned it back to low to cook it a little longer)
• We also did not use fresh cilantro.  While I find cilantro delicious, we figured that the dish would be all right without it (and it was).
• Avocado was a fantastic accompaniment, but then there are very few things that I would not say that about.

Due to extenuating circumstances, we had a small amount of leftovers even a week later, but these were still edible and, more importantly, quite tasty.  Next time I would probably make a full recipe in order to have a better amount of delicious leftovers.

A lot of flavour for not a lot of prep work.  My kind of recipe.

Pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana

In a quest to try new pasta recipes I found one for pasta all'amatriciana, typically a tomato-based sauce with pancetta and pecorino cheese.  While grocery shopping yesterday, we decided to make this for dinner and consequently we had to substitute for items not commonly found at Meijer stores since we didn't want to have to make another stop on the way home.  Thus we called it: pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana.  It was still quite delicious but probably not anything like traditional.

Our notes:

• Meijer does not carry pancetta which is hardly a surprise.  Thus we used both Canadian bacon and regular bacon as a substitute (though if it had been up to me, I would have skipped the Canadian bacon and only used regular bacon...).
• Meijer also does not have bucatini pasta (again, not a surprise).  Linguine worked fine.
• The recipe called for a can of plum tomatoes which would then be run through a food mill.  Not owning a food mill, we opted for a can of crushed tomatoes.  Our dish looked much like the photo from the recipe's original site so this was probably all right.
• The addition of a very small quantity of baking soda (<1/8 tsp.) near the end of cooking reduces the acid in the sauce nicely without much affecting the overall taste.
• Red pepper flakes are not as inexpensive as you might think given that every single pizza joint has a jar of them on every table.
• We used closer to 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes; even I think I could have put in a few more to make it a bit spicier.
• A bit of black pepper made a fine addition to the sauce.
• BelGioioso Romano cheese was perfectly serviceable.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, though with a little more planning next time around in order to get the traditional ingredients.  What we made was delicious already but presumably with the actual ingredients called for it would be even better.

An American interpretation.

Chicken pot pie

We've made it before, usually using the version on the back of the Bisquick box, but we wanted to try the Joy of Cooking version.  It ended up taking much longer than we'd thought to put everything together and we discovered Joy of Cooking's interesting method for information organization, but we ended up with a pretty delicious meal.

Our notes:

• There was the recipe for chicken pot pie, but the first step was to make creamed chicken.  The first step of the creamed chicken recipe was to make poached chicken which was itself its own recipe.  Only too late did we see that there was a "quick creamed chicken" recipe that used cream of chicken soup rather than making a sauce out of flour and butter.  Oops.  There went several minutes, but the results were worth it.
• The recipe called for a lot of flour relative to the amount of butter, but despite my misgivings it did not seem to be a problem.
• The actual chicken pot pie recipe called for us to cook the carrots, onions, and celery before throwing it into the baking dish with the chicken.  It was later than our usual dinner time, and we didn't want to have to wash another pan, so we didn't bother to precook anything.  I thought this added some nice texture to the chicken pot pie.  I view homogenous textures as the epitome of boring food.
• BUT, the poached chicken recipe told us to poach the chicken with onions and celery; instead of discarding these as the pot pie recipe called for, we just threw them in with everything else.  A good idea as they added some flavour and texture.
• The pot pie recipe did not call for any spices except for some chopped parsley.  Dried parsley did just as well.
• We made a half recipe, which included making a half recipe for the top crust.  Would make somewhat more than a half recipe of batter next time as there didn't seem to be enough.
• The top crust turned out more like drop biscuits--better than a solid crust over the entire thing.
• Cooking time: 18 minutes in an 8"x8" glass baking dish

No photo as we were both too excited to finally eat after all of the prep work, but definitely a recipe to make again as there were also no leftovers.


Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 103

Various varieties of carbohydrates.

A busy several days as you get not one, not two, but three different foods with this one post.  The value!

First, Dom made a batch of fresh pasta using our pasta maker, a snazzy drying rack that we'd gotten as a wedding present, and the Joy of Cooking recipe.  (I was busy being all professional with Adobe Illustrator which is why I wasn't helping at all.)  We'd only made fresh pasta once before, but just comparing the drying rack to having sheets and sheets of waxed paper with pasta all over the countertops and dining table, I'd say the drying rack wins by a lot.  The pasta was dry after 24 hours, though that may also be influenced by making pasta on a dry winter evening versus making pasta on a humid May evening.

The pasta turned out delicious, but much lighter than we had expected it to be.  Perhaps something to do with the drying process, or the use of the new stand mixer to mix the ingredients together...it looks like we need a larger sample size and a more rigorous experimental design.

Direct from Italy.

Second, we made pancakes using Greek yogurt because the carton of Chobani I'd picked up at the store had a recipe on the side (and, perhaps more importantly, a photo of a stack of pancakes).  The batter was intensely think and made pancakes roughly 3/8" high.  Flavor was good especially with the addition of a few blueberries, but as both of us prefer thinner pancakes made with milk rather than thicker pancakes made with buttermilk or yogurt, we will most likely not be using this recipe in the future.  Not to mention that these leftovers were not as delicious for subsequent breakfasts as compared to those made with milk-only recipes.

The griddle was an excellent registry item.

Lastly, and representing the largest time commitment of all three of these projects, I decided to make sakura mochi: red bean paste, sticky rice, an association (in my mind, at least) with cherries, and a lovely pink colour?  Sold.

No Japanese ancestry?  No problem for Google.  I loosely adapted a recipe I'd found after multiple searches and ended up using one that required making your own bean paste.  I found that, while soaking beans for 18 hours is less than ideal (see the red beans and rice experiment below), soaking them for 5 hours is also less than ideal; I ended up cooking with a ratio of 1 cup of beans to 3 1/2 cups of water (about 1 1/2 cups more water than called for in the recipe), and the paste turned out fine.

The rice traditionally has no actual cherry flavouring in it, though it can be coloured pink.  Because I wanted both, I cooked the rice with half a cup of tart cherry juice along with the sugar and water.  It worked like a charm.  I used plastic wrap to shape these so that the rice wouldn't just end up on me and managed to make nine more-or-less rounded sakura mochi, minus the pickled cherry leaf.

Red bean paste on the left and pink, cherry-flavoured rice on the right.  I'm so Asian.

The lovely pink colour seems to have come out best in this photo.  That's probably too much red bean paste for the amount of rice, at least for how I had been making them, but I think this was the first one I assembled.

They were delicious fresh, but they were even better after a day in a Ziploc container (no joke).

So, while these were not what you'd get if you were in Japan for Hinamatsuri, it was still a fun experiment.  Oddly, these seem to have gotten better with a few days' age; peak awesomeness was reached the second day after making these, after which the rice finally became a little dried out (though still edible).  Packing these four to a Ziploc container separated with waxed paper may have helped keep them moist for the few days after making them.  Definitely a keeper of a recipe.


Pasta recipe: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 324

Almond pudding/jelly/Jell-O

Whatever it might be called in a cookbook or at a restaurant, it's delicious.  I came across this recipe while flipping through a dim sum cookbook; I got the impression that the cookbook as a whole was designed for people like me who know and enjoy dim sum but are slightly nervous about attempting it at home.  Since the recipe in the book only required one ingredient that we didn't already have, I figured it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, the finished product had no business calling itself "something delicious that you would want to consume".  When I took the dish out of the fridge it was still a liquid and nowhere near set, even after 18 hours.  Upon closer inspection, I discovered some watery milk (milky water?) lying atop a sickly-sweet almond-flavoured morass of still-grainy gelatin.  It wasn't even one of those culinary mishaps that still taste all right, like the Great Annapolis Pizza Fiasco of 2009.  This went into the sink immediately.

Our notes:

• Total time elapsed from measuring out the sugar and water to putting it in the fridge to set: 15 minutes, from 11:01 PM to 11:16 PM.  Not too bad, though see the point below about letting the gelatin soften.
• There was a very strong almond flavor, more than even I would want in this dish.  Perhaps 1 or 1½ teaspoons would be more appropriate rather than the 2 specified, though this may not have been an issue had the gelatin set as expected.
• The recipe only said to let the gelatin soften for 5 minutes; the box of gelatin (consulted long after the fact) called for 10 minutes. Might this have been part of the issue?
• Apparently, you can't just go by appearances on this one: on the stove the water-sugar-gelatin solution looked like just that, but as we would discover later, the gelatin had not, in fact, dissolved into the sugar water.
• Like the red beans and rice experiment, this recipe seemed like it was designed for beginners, calling for gelatin rather than the more traditional agar. Next time we'll try and get actual agar; we live right down the street from a fairly large Asian grocery store so I don't think this will be a problem.

It's very sad when a recipe doesn't turn out even after following the directions to the letter.  We'll try a different recipe for almond pudding next time.


Blonder, Ellen. (2002). Dim sum: The art of Chinese tea lunch. New York: Clarkson Potter.

Red beans and rice

First up: red beans and rice, because I always like cooking food that reminds me of fabulous vacations, and because we wouldn't need to buy too many things that we wouldn't buy normally.

Our notes, in no order:

• The recipe called for kidney, pinto, or small red beans; we used small red beans (Michigan-grown, which had been the deciding factor at the store) which were all right, but the dish didn't seem as satiating as it should have been.  Should try pinto beans next time as they seem to be better about this.
• For a dinner, soak the beans in the morning rather than overnight; based on what we'd done, it seemed that the beans could only soak up so much liquid, and thus the final product was more on the liquid-y side than what I recall from Mother's Restaurant in New Orleans (my current standard, which, I suppose, is not directly transferable to a home kitchen in Michigan).  This particular recipe takes 2-3 hours on the stove, but only for about half that time are the beans in the pot; even getting up late on a weekend still gives plenty of time for the beans to soak before cooking.  OR, maybe we left the pot lid on for too long during the cooking time, preventing excess water from boiling off.  Either way, don't soak beans for 16 hours.
• We did not use the half teaspoon of ground red pepper as called for in the recipe, which was fine for both of us!
• This particular recipe did not call for mashing some of the beans at the end of the cooking process; this might have helped the texture a bit.

The finished dish had some good flavor, and we liked that there was no added salt--and it didn't need any.  A good recipe for beginners like us, though we may try a different one next time we do red beans and rice.

Red beans and rice on...Sunday.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 256
Writeup background music: Mario Kart Wii soundtrack

New culinary adventures.

Hi, it's me again, the pseudo-librarian formerly staying in that nebulous region known to Michiganders as "Up North" for eight weeks of the summer.  Because I have this blog URL and because Dom and I are trying out new recipes thanks to a wedding gift of The Joy of Cooking (2006 edition), I'll be using this to archive recipes and reviews for things we try that are not our usual pastas or stir-fries.  Feel free to read or not, but the narrative probably won't be too exciting!