Archive: Crafty/Tasty

I printed out the recipe for guacamole salad after seeing Ina Garten prepare it for the episode of Barefoot Contessa one where she makes lunch for her grillin’ girlfriends in some scenic locale. The idea of a chunky, avocado-based salad was appealing, and it worked for this week’s Whip It Up theme of fresh produce. JG and I hunted around for something to accompany it, and he pulled out a recipe from the binder for Ina’s tequila lime chicken. A dinner of new Ina Garten recipes! I could hardly wait.

Method
I got home from work rather late yesterday, so JG was eager to fire up the grill and cook the chicken that had been marinating all day. Even with a simple process, the salad took me longer than it should have, partially owing to a stubborn avocado pit that refused to loose itself from its home. I made the following tweaks to the straight-forward recipe:

• I did not use a whole pint of tomatoes, since JG doesn’t like them that much.
• I omitted the jalapeños for my own safety.
• I added a slosh of vinegar to the dressing because it seemed too oily to me, but then I realized that it was a 1:1 ratio of acid to oil, so I figured that Ina meant it to be that way, since acid helps to prevent the avocados from browning.

Taste
With the caveat that the avocados I picked up were not as ripe as they should have been, the salad’s taste was only so-so. I liked the lime vinaigrette, but I thought the proportion of black beans was too heavy, and I have a special affection for that little legume. JG and I agreed that we preferred our typical black bean salad over this one, and that was disappointing.

Repeat appearance
It pains me to say it, but the recipe printout for the guacamole salad did not graduate to its own plastic sleeve. We would just rather have regular guacamole that we can smash to a pulp. This salad is comparatively fussy and without that much payoff. As if to add insult to injury, the chicken was middling, too. The flavor may have been affected by JG’s use of margarita mix instead of straight tequila, but the dish was not anything special for us. That said, I think these are good recipes to try, especially with ripe avocados, but they didn’t make a mark with us to warrant immortalizing in the binder. Alas, Ina, I knew you well.

Continue reading →

For this week’s Whip It Up theme of vegetarian dishes, I went for my go-to meat substitute: mushrooms. I have always loved mushrooms, and it is a point of pride for me that I have converted JG to my side since we got married. When you live in the Mushroom Capital of the World, it’s downright shameful to not love the charming little fungi, and I think JG and I pull our weight for per capita consumption. After last night’s yummy dinner of spinach-artichoke stuffed portobellos, courtesy of Rachael Ray, it’s fair to say that our faithful mushroom love has only increased.

Method
I am a huge fan of Rachael Ray. I used to think she was really appealing in that girl-next-door, not-insanely-skinny, accessible way, but I then was bombarded by catch phrases! Crazy hand gestures! A talk show! A magazine! Oh, Rachael, you are too much for me. JG takes umbrage with the unreasonable premise that her meals will take thirty minutes to prepare, but I choose to wave that aside because I imagine that the recipes would take me that long if I were a really fast chopper, all of my vegetables were rinsed and prepped, and I didn’t mind dirtying up half a dozen pots and pans. So, you know, that time estimate is kind of valid.

Ultimately, I like to think that Rachael has helped to encourage more people to cook at home, and for that, I give her a big thumbs up. This stuffed portobello mushroom recipe is a great example of a simple preparation that looks a lot more labor-intensive. If I hadn’t been so terribly inefficient, I may have had this supper on the table in less than half an hour! Instead, I futzed around with my asparagus side dish, dawdled while cleaning the mushrooms, and did not use my time well, generally. I chose to roast the mushrooms instead of grilling them, and the process was very easy to follow. I halved the recipe so that JG and I would each have two mushroom caps for dinner, and I guessed that they would not heat up so well after the fact.

Taste
JG and I each polished off two portobellos with astonishing speed, even with a tasty side dish of roasted asparagus. The meal is light, but filling, even for two carnivores. As far as taste goes, I love mushrooms, so I loved this dish, which is basically a light spinach-artichoke dip slathered on a giant mushroom. Anti-mushroom folks (boo!) will probably not like this dish because there is no hiding the mushroom-y goodness. Could I say “mushroom” any more? Mushroom!

Repeat appearance
Once I made the appropriate notes on the recipe for future iterations, that printout went straight into its half of a clear plastic sleeve for certain repetition. Next time, I’ll try adding about a quarter cup of bread crumbs to the filling (for a half batch) to help hold it together a little more. I suspect that the portobellos would benefit from a longer initial roast, because our finished mushrooms were slightly soupy. Instead of roasting them for 5-6 minutes, I’d increase that to 8-10 minutes. I may try out additional ingredients for the stuffing, like roasted red peppers or sun-dried tomatoes. I definitely recommend this dish: all of the ingredients are easy to come by, it comes together really quickly, and it’s a relatively low-fat meal. The only down side for us is that this meal wouldn’t produce good leftovers, so it’s not completely ideal for a staple dinner, but it would be a great lunch on the weekend.

Continue reading →

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.)

- - - - -

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.

- - - - -

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.

Continue reading →

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!

Continue reading →