Archive: Crafty/Tasty

One of my objectives during this Whip It Up period has been to try out recipes that I could potentially use once the school year starts, and our schedules are more taxed because of the volleyball season. Last year, I was caught unaware by the sudden increase in activity, but I intend to be prepared this year, and that’s why my dinner selections for the challenge have been a little heavier than typical summer fare. I’m looking for meals to produce leftovers that are fast and easy, in addition to candidates for making ahead and freezing or using my slow cooker. If there are any suggestions out there, I would love to see them.

Over the weekend, I tested two recipes in this vein The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook because, apparently, all I am about is pitching this cookbook. Detailed descriptions are below, but the moral of the story is: Make the skillet chili mac tonight! And if you have six spare hours, make the chicken cacciatore!

(Oh, and Moral #2 is that meat is not exactly photogenic. Ahem.)

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When it comes to looks and sophistication, this chili mac will not score any points. It’s not a meal for impressing mothers-in-law or appeasing a discerning palette; however, what it lacks in refinement it makes up for in ease, taste, and quality of leftovers.

Method: Remember the penne with chicken and broccoli that I cooked to death because I missed the memo that the pasta was supposed to soften in the sauce? This chili mac is in the same family of recipes, and I did not make the same mistake twice. Hurrah! Instead, I made a mess of my preparations and neglected to read the procedure properly, and the result was a messy kitchen, an encrusted pan, and a flustered cook, none of which was the fault of the recipe. In helpful notes, however, I substituted ground turkey for the beef, as the recipe suggests, and we did not notice one bit.

Taste: How can you go wrong with pasta, chili, and cheese? You can’t! The dish tasted great, thanks to the chili powder and cumin, and the cheese oozed through the pasta. We ate steaming bowls of chili mac hot off the stove, which meant the sauce was roughly the temperature of molten lava. I don’t mind scorching the roof of my mouth, but JG opted to start with his salad. It was one of those meals that I wanted to just eat and never stop, but we restrained ourselves, and I packed up three lunches’ worth of leftovers. So far, they have warmed up very nicely, and I can’t wait to eat the last portion this afternoon.

Repeat appearance: I will definitely, absolutely, certainly, redundantly make this dish again. It gives me my chili fix without six hours of simmering in the crock pot, and the preparation is fairly simple, if one does not make silly makes like I did. Using turkey instead of beef made us feel a bit more virtuous in the nutrition department without giving up on taste. Next time, I will throw together a batch of corn bread to go with it because, you know, what it really needed was more carbs. Heh.

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For this week’s theme, old favorites, I chose a recipe for chicken cacciatore because that was one of my most-loved meals when I grew up. My mom, the Make It From Scratch Queen, made a really delicious version, and I have never tried it for myself. The ATK rendition here uses a slow cooker, which made me think it would not be labor-intensive, but — hoo boy! — that was not the case at all.

Method: I trust the ATK implicitly, and I don’t think that any of the steps here were superfluous, despite the mountain of dishes they created and the hours spent on my feet. The straight-forward, though involved, process had what felt like twelve hundred steps, not to mention the strong reminder that I am still a huge wimp when it comes to a hot pan of oil and placing meat into it. JG said that I used too much oil in the pan, which made for a lot of spattering, and that is a straight shot to panic for me. I intend to face my fear eventually, but I will wait until the weather is cool enough for me to cook in clothing that is more substantial than bare feet, shorts, and a tank top, thank you very much. Two hours elapsed while I prepared the ingredients for their four-hour simmer, and then I spent another half an hour after that finishing the sauce. By the time I had turned on the crock pot to low and collapsed on the couch, I was already doubtful that the final dish would be worth it.

Taste: I laid out the chicken on a platter and draped it with sauce, served myself a portion alongside a scoop of pasta, and took a bite. Oh, my. The chicken was flavorful and tender. The sauce had a mellow roundness of red wine with the hearty vegetables throughout. It was nothing like my mom’s marinara-based cacciatore, which was slightly disappointing, but this was fantastic and comforting.

Repeat appearance: Sigh. Maybe. I might do it again if JG and I worked together on the chopping and the chicken-browning, because it was really good. I just can’t get past what I consider to be a huge amount of prep time. If I’m going to be in the kitchen for two hours, I figure that I should have something to show for it, other than four hours of waiting. Even then, I used up so many pots and pans before I served anything! I also like my slow-cooker meals to be the type that I can assemble the night before, keep in the fridge, and turn on before I go to work, and four hours of simmering will not fit the bill. I’m torn because the end result was delicious, but I can’t bring myself to be excited to make it again. On the bright side, this recipe produced about a gallon of sauce, so I froze a container of it for the future. I figure that I can grill some chicken, make some pasta, and throw together a quick, fake chicken cacciatore.

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Two weeks after I visit my sister in DC, she and her boyfriend are coming up to our house to hang out. They’ve never met Ted, so we’ll hang out at the house, play Guitar Hero, and go out for food, and I am so excited. It’s fun to see them in DC, but it’s even more fun to show them around our little Pennsylvanian hamlet, not to mention share the charms of our puppy.

Whenever I see my sister, there is one staple: baked goods. She claims she can’t bake, but I think it’s a front to coerce me into making something for her, as though I needed second bidding. We were chatting about the visit up to “the country,” as she calls it, and I reminded her to let me know what she wanted me to make ahead of time so that I could have it ready, rattling off items that have elicited jealous pangs from her. Pretzels? Big cookies? Raspberry bars?

“How about cream cheese brownies?” she asked.

Uh, way to suggest something I’ve never made, Zeister.

But, hey! This week’s Whip It Up theme is cheese, so what better time is there to experiment? Nic pointed out correctly that cream cheese is not actually cheese, in the production sense, but for the purposes of this challenge, we have let that detail slide. With that, I found a suitable recipe for the brownies at Smitten Kitchen and got to work.

Method
From the start, I fidgeted with the recipe because I did not need a 9×13″ pan of experiment brownies, and I figured that I could halve the ingredients and end up with a nice 8×8″ batch for testing purposes. Most of the reduction was a piece of cake, but eyeballing one half of a beaten egg for the cream cheese filling was no fun. If nothing else, for the purpose of reducing the cake flour and sugar measurements for the brownie batter, I learned that there are four tablespoons in a quarter cup. Who knew? I work better in the metric system, where the conversions make sense, for the love of all that is good.

The process was very easy to follow, which was not surprising since Deb adapted her recipe from what I’m sure was an already sound method from Cook’s Illustrated. I was rather inefficient with my use of dishes because I did not catch the detail that I would add everything to my melted chocolate, rather than the other way around, so do yourself a favor and melt your chocolate and butter in the biggest bowl you can. Also, I highly recommend the use of the foil sling for brownies to make removal and cutting so significantly easier. However, beware of using “the tip of a knife” to swirl the cream cheese and chocolate layers together; I was sure at certain points that I had punctured my foil lining. Next time, I would use the handle of spoon or a chopstick for a narrow, blunt swirling utensil. What, I wasn’t supposed to use a steak knife?

Taste
I cut up the brownies to have as dessert for a get-together this week, but JG and I shared one to make sure they were, uh, edible. I chose a brownie with a higher proportion of cream cheese swirl so we could properly test that portion of it, and we both took thoughtful bites. The brownie was moist, very chocolate-y, and pleasantly sweet, but we couldn’t exactly taste the cream cheese. In fact, if I had been blindfolded I may not have even picked up on the swirled layer.

Repeat appearance
JG had a quick solution to the wimpy cream cheese taste: double the filling. So, next time (because, oh, there will be a next time), I will halve the brownie batter as I did this time, but make a full portion of the cream cheese batter. That’s more of a relief than anything, since I won’t have to guess at what half of an egg looks like. I think I might try out one more test batch to make sure the proportion is right; after all, someone has to make sure that my sister doesn’t eat an out-of-whack brownie. I’m taking one for the team!

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Of all the “to try” pockets in my recipe binder, the tightest-packed one is definitely the pasta pocket. I adore pasta. I will eat it in any form, at any temperature, for any meal, at any time. It is my carb of choice; I will eschew the bread at Italian restaurants so as to leave room in my stomach for the main event. For one of my birthdays, my mom threw me a “pasta fest,” with three different types of pasta with all different sauces. I think I should do that again sometime…

To satiate my bottomless pit of pasta love, I am constantly searching out new way to work with what some (misguided) folks may consider a tired, has-been foodstuff, and last night, I tried a recipe for lemon fusilli that I had seen on Barefoot Contessa. I know, it’s been all lemons, all the time around here! Here’s the thing — up until recently, JG was under the impression that he did not like anything lemon, which sharply turned my love of the tangy citrus to an unrequited one. After I made a lemon basil pasta salad a couple of weeks ago, he came to the realization that he didn’t like lemony things that were meant to be sweet, like lemon squares or lemon meringue pie, but savory things were fair game.

I’ll take it! Trot out the lemony recipes!

Method
Ina’s recipe was surprisingly simple and easy to follow. Whenever I watch her, I have my doubts that the processes are so clean and easy, because her garlic comes peeled, her water comes boiled, and her baking sheets come greased. It must be nice! This time, I took cautionary measures against being flustered (as is my custom with a new dinner recipe) by chopping the garlic, zesting and juicing the lemons, and reducing the broccoli to florets before I started anything else. I took a little longer to make the dish than I should have, but at least I wasn’t stressed out.

I made a few tweaks to the ingredient list:

• I used tricolor rotini because I couldn’t find fusilli at the store.
• I omitted the third lemon to save JG’s taste buds, and I didn’t quite understand why Ina just tosses one in at the last minute.
• I substituted baby spinach for the arugula.
• I only used a handful of tomatoes because I would be the only one eating them.

I also opted to use the same water to blanch the broccoli and cook the pasta. Even with our household “you cook, I clean” policy, I like to be economical with my dish use. Why dirty up two pots when they were both for boiling water? Sure, the broccoli turned the water a little green, but that didn’t make a difference. The only trouble I had with the process was getting my cream sauce to simmer properly, but that is no fault of the recipe; I still have not figured out how to do it on our electric stove. One would think that almost three years in a house would have taught me that, but alas, no. Overall, the recipe proceeded just as Ina had predicted, and there were no unpleasant mishaps along the way.

Taste
The tradition at our dinner table is that whoever doesn’t cook gets to take the first serving, so JG dug in to the pasta before I got a chance. Now, I had already given him the disclaimer that I had reduced the lemony goodness so that there would be less chance of a “too much lemon!” complaint, but JG smacked his lips and said, “It’s definitely lemony, but it’s good!” I sprinkled Parmesan cheese on my helping, and took a bite. Yes, the two lemons’ zest and juice made the dish distinctly lemony, but the creamy base softened the acidity. The pasta had soaked up the sauce nicely, and there was barely any left pooling at the bottom of the dish. This dinner didn’t need meat to be filling because it was plenty hearty from the broccoli, tomatoes, and spinach.

Repeat appearance
JG declared, “Put it in the rotation!” and the recipe is now safely tucked away in one side of a clear plastic sleeve. This dish is easy and filling, and I packed up three lunch-sized portions after dinner. I’m glad to add it to the repertoire, and it’s a handy meatless option. In the future, I will retain the changes I made to the recipe, in addition to lightening up the sauce a bit by using equal portions of cream and milk. JG also requested that I chop the spinach more finely than I did last night, since I just ran my knife through it roughly. But don’t misinterpret my tinkering! This lemon fusilli is simple to make and really tasty, and I highly recommend it.

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It’s time to kick off Whip It Up, the challenge to try at least one new recipe each week for two months! My first experiment for the challenge came from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which is just one fabulous cookbook choice up for grabs for the successful Whip It Up participant who wins the raffle.

Anyway! I have always wanted to try to make strawberry shortcake. It’s one of those nostalgic, American dishes that people can’t help but enjoy, and I am always on the quest for non-chocolate desserts. For our little 4th of July celebration at home, JG made a grilled potato salad to go along with enormous New York strip steaks, and the strawberry shortcake was a lovely, light dessert.

Method
Although the process was somewhat lengthy, the recipe instructions were very straight-forward. Since the dessert was just for JG and me, I halved the original recipe, and the only tricky part was estimating half of a beaten egg for the shortcakes, which I made before dinner. I did not have a biscuit cutter, so I used a medium-sized drinking glass, instead. Once the shortcakes came out of the oven after 12 minutes of baking time, I realized that I had forgotten to brush the tops with egg white and sprinkle them with sugar. Oh, well.

The strawberry filling was easy enough, although using a potato masher was a bit violent for my taste. The only thing left was the whipped cream, which was my only new technique of this recipe. I had made biscuits before, though not sweet ones, but the whipped cream was a whole different animal. Its short recipe was rife with pictures showing the dire consequences of overbeating, so I erred on the side of caution. Regardless, watching my half cup of heavy cream transform into a fluffy whipped topping was nothing short of magical, not to mention knowing that it was not infused with preservatives or any such chemicals.

Taste
I carefully assembled the first shortcake for JG, and I was pleased that the biscuit split easily down the center with a fork, like an English muffin. I warily watched him slide his fork into the layers of shortcake, whipped cream, and fruit, and then take that first bite.

“It’s good!”

Phew. I made up my own serving, but with blueberries for a more patriotic feel, and it was light, summery, buttery, and sweet. I hardly missed the forgotten sugar glaze on the shortcake, and the fruit oozed pleasantly into the bottom half of the buiscuit. Americana, here I come.

Repeat appearance
I would definitely make this strawberry shortcake again. The combination of flaky shortcake, sweet fruit, and light cream was exactly what I wanted, and the constituent parts of the recipe were not excessively challenging. Next time, I would try not to forget the sugar glaze on the shortcake, and I might simply chop up the strawberries, rather than using the potato masher, to have a more visually pleasing filling. In the case of a larger party, I would make the shortcakes ahead of time, but I think both the strawberry filling and the whipped cream could be prepared about an hour before serving and kept chilled. However, it is noteworthy that the time spent from making the biscuits, preparing the fruit filling, whipping the cream, and assembling each serving is significant, so I would not undertake the full recipe under any sort of time restraint. That said, the shortcake is delicious. If you have the time and energy, this dessert is worth it.

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