IT'S ALIVE!!!!

I feel like a real Frankenstein.  I have created a living thing! No, seriously: I made yogurt.  Greek yogurt, to be precise!

This morning I raced to the oven and was happy to see that it still felt warm in there (I still can't believe the light kept it toasty enough!).  When I took the lid off, voila: yogurt!  But I couldn't dig in yet, because it has to be strained to remove the whey (like as in curds and whey, Little Miss Muffet style).  I got home from work tonight a little too excited to check my creation, and it was perfect.  All the watery whey had strained out, and I was left with Greek yogurt!!!  I stirred in some vanilla extract, because I am not one to eat plain Greek yogurt.  Then it was time to work on my mix-ins!

I had frozen strawberries, so I decided to try making the sauce with those.  The recipe says to use peaches, raspberries, or blueberries, but it worked just fine with strawberries.  It is really easy and quick to make - probably takes less than 20 minutes.  I am now excitedly waiting for the sauce to cool so that I can stir some into my yogurt, and revolutionize my life.

Short post tonight...I barely slept last night... but I had to share my excitement.  More yogurt, and new mix-ins to attempt tomorrow :)

Recipe:
yogurt mix-ins

Breakfast Attempts

Good news: the bagels came out okay!  I was worried yesterday about them, since there was no time for the dough to rise.  Then today, they failed the proof test repeatedly (you're supposed to put them in a bowl of water, and see if they float... and in my other 3 batches that I've made, they float immediately... as for these guys, they sunk like a freaking stone!).  Finally I gave up on passing the test and just threw them into the pot of boiling water (without baking soda, mind you... another thing that made them different from my other recipe!)

I was near panicked, but I can gladly say they came out fine.  I still think the other recipe is better, because they were a bit puffier, but these have been devoured and we only have a few left!  Whew!  Still, I am sticking with my old recipe next time.  While it was nice to have an easier recipe with a million shortcuts, you get what you pay for.

Then tonight I was doing some brainstorming.  Saturday is our ALS 5K and walk, and we always invite the team to our house in the morning for pictures and to hand out our tee shirts.  I was thinking that it would be nice for us to have breakfast ready for the people who have volunteered their time for our favorite cause.  Kenzie pointed out that the runners won't want a big casserole or anything heavy, so I might still make something like that for the walkers, but the runners need good protein to keep them running without weighing them down... and thus we had the perfect opportunity for me to try out the idea that has been percolating in my head since I saw the recipe a couple weeks ago: Greek yogurt.  Yes, I am trying to make my own Greek yogurt. 

I know it sounds crazy, but you don't need any fancy ingredients or cooking supplies.  You need milk, and 2 teaspoons of yogurt (as the starter, so you can have the live cultures).  You boil the milk (to kill the dairy enzymes so they don't mess up aything), cool it down, incubate it for 12 hours, strain out the whey, and voila!  Yogurt!  It's incubating right now in the oven; that is the only tricky part, because you keep the oven off but you can't let the temperature go out of the 110-120 degree range, or it won't incubate.  Apparently if you preheat the oven for a couple minutes, shove the bowl in there wrapped with towels, and leave the light on, it will be okay.  Fingers crossed.  I will know tomorrow if it worked, and after school I can taste it.  I am pretty excited. 

Now, I am not one who loves Greek yogurt, but comments on this recipe said the yogurt was milder and less sour.  Also, the same blog (my beloved Annie's Eats) later posted recipes for 3 different fruit mix-ins, so if the yogurt works out, I will be trying those out later this week.  I also have an idea to try out my own granola.... but I should take this one step at a time! Fingers crossed that I actually have yogurt tomorrow morning!

Recipe:
Greek yogurt

Not So Relaxing

Today I had expected to have a lovely, leisurely day in the kitchen, but unfortunately it did not quite work out that way.  I made cinnamon raisin bagel dough (bagels to be baked tomorrow) and strawberry chocolate cupcakes, but nothing quite turned out the way I wanted them to.  I still do not handle mistakes well, but I'm trying to deal with failure a bit better than I used to!

I asked Mom what kind of food I should make her while she went to visit my grandfather.  She said cinnamon raisin bread. Since I have made cinnamon raisin bread twice - and it's tricky - I decided to try a different form of cinnamon and raisins.  I noticed that my favorite blog had a recipe for them, but in the spirit of branching out  and trying new things today, I checked out another of my frequeently-visited blogs and found a different, quicker, easier recipe.  I went for that. Once the dough was made and resting in the refrigerator, I started to doubt my decision.  I have now made bagels 3 times, and they always require a lot of time to rise.  In fact, every yeast bread I have ever made needs time to rise, because that is the whole point of yeast.  And yet, this recipe calls for no rise time.  It calls for the dough to be made, formed into rolls, rolled into ropes, pressed into bagel shapes, and off they go into the fridge overnight.  Since the dough has to be warm to rise, the refrigerator time does not count as rising time.  And I like the other way to form bagels: make a roll, then press your thumbs through the middle and slowly widen the hole.  Making ropes and then cinching the end seems... not so bagel-like. So, I used the old way.  Still no time to rise though.  I guess we will see how it all goes tomorrow after I bake them, but I have my doubts. Unfortunately, this all went through my mind when it was too late.   I wish I had looked into the recipe a bit closer before I started! Next time, I stick to Annie's Eats.

As if I needed more stress, then I had a little cupcake catastrophe.  I wanted to surprise Mom with strawberry chocolate cupcakes; she had been craving a chocoalte cupcake with strawberry frosting and we had just talked about it earlier.  I found a recipe, made the cupcakes, put them in the oven, and then made the frosting.  While I was pureeing strawberries (yes, it was that involvled), I peeked into the oven... and gasped.  My cupcakes looked like tar.... bubbly and black and spreading out across the pan... and also very sunken.  And they stayed like that.  Sunken and horrible.  Kenzie tried it and said they tasted fine, but my strawberry puree buttercream frosting was just way too good to put on these crappy things.  So, I made the hard decision to throw out all 20 failures.  Normally I'd probably say that maybe the kitchen and I were not mixing well today and I could call it a day... but I had made the frosting.  I had to try again with the cupcakes.  So I did, and thank god they rose normally and turned out just fine.  Gram and Nick both loved them, even if Mom claimed that the frosting was "salty."  At this point, I was so sick of those damn cupcakes that the slightet criticism would ruin my day, so you can imagine that I took it really well.

Yikes...

So, what went wrong?  The only thing I can think of is that I used water from my Keurig during cupcake round 1.  The recipe called for boiling water... perhaps the water isn't hot enough?  I suppose they ask for boiling water for a reason... who knew it actually had to be actively boiling?  I don't know.  Rough resolution day, though. At least Neely Mouse lucked out and got to eat one of the weird, hardened cupcake tops from round 1!

Happy mouse!

Recipe:
cinnamon raisin bagels
strawberry chocolate cupcakes

Meatless Thursdays

Although I am still sick, I have been missing the kitchen, so tonight I dragged myself back in to make some dinner!  I knew it was only going to be me and Mom for dinner tonight, so I could make something small... meaning it was the night to experiment :)

Over vacation, Mark took me to Barnes and Noble and let me peruse the cookbook section.  I found one book that I fell in love with but am far too cheap to buy for myself ($40 for a cookbook!?).  It was called Meatless Mondays, by the McCartney family.  You know, like, Paul McCartney?  They created this idea that every Monday, people should not eat any meat, and they should eat healthy, veggie-filled meals and snacks all day long.  The book gave an entire year's worth of Monday recipes, from breakfast to lunch to dinner and side dishes and snacks!  It was amazing.  Anyway I was happy to see, once I got home, that Meatless Mondays has a website with lots of great recipes on it for my cheap ass.  I skimmed through it and found a vegetable lasagna.  Now I have said this before: I have always hated lasagna, and they depress me because it's always the meal of choice for people to bring us when Dad is in the hopsital.  However, my Mexican lasagna made me realize that maybe I just hate meat lasagna- since, after all,  I hate meat.  So I found a white vegetable lasagna - low fat, nonetheless - and I had to give it a try.  I ran to the grocery store quickly to pick up some rather bizarre ingredients for a lasagna (cottage cheese?  Spinach? Broccoli?) but I was ready to experiment with the Lotsa Green Lasagna!

I will say that this took me a while - although I must admit that I am still a rather slow chef.  I can whip up baked goods like nothing, but give me a knife and I will slice in slow motion.  And this needed a lot of slicing: carrots, broccoli, scallions, garlic!  Plus cooking the lasagna noodles, mixing up the cheese mixture, and then making the cheesy sauce thing... it took me a while.  And I started to get nervous.  I wasn't doubling the recipe, since it was just the 2 of us eating, but it seemed like I was making about a cup each of the 3 fillings!  I started to be afraid that it was going to be dry.  Luckily, it was great! 

There are layers of noodles, and then layers of cheese :low fat cottage cheese, low fat mozarrella, and goat cheese.  Can there be a better, healthier cheese mix!?  I had been afraid that it would be dry, but the cheeses all melted and spread out perfectly.  On top of that was my sauteed vegetables, and then a spinach parmesan sauce, mostly made of milk and flour and only 1/4 cup of Parmesan.  I can promise you that it didn't taste low fat in the least.  Lots of great flavors.  I can proudly say that Mom and I practically ate the entire thing ourselves (and she gave it a 9 rating!).  I am already pretty pumped to eat it tomorrow at lunch.

The only things I changed about the recipe were a couple substitutions.  It called for frozen spinach - but everything else was so fresh, and I could not bear to put anyfrozen vegetables in there, so I grabbed fresh baby spinach (since I like it better).  Then it called for freshly grated Parmesan, but the store didn't have it, so the pre-grated stuff worked just fine.  If  you try this recipe, you'll definitely want to double it for a family; trust me, it will go :)



Mom being proud that we both ate a ridiculous amount of lasagna

P.S. Go to www.meatlessmonday.com and see if you can find a meatless meal for your family :)

Recipe:
Lotsa Green Lasagna

Strawberry Streak

I am on a real strawberry streak lately.  I think it is because they seem to be always on sale at every store I walk into.  Currently we have 3 containers of strawberries in the fridge (or at least we did before I baked with them tonight!)  I was searching on Pinterest for some way to use some berries, and I came across strawberry and Nutella muffins.  When I brought up the idea to my mom, she unsurprisingly acted like it sounded gross, but I was interested.  Kenzie was making dinner tonight, so I could just bake away the stress of the first day back to work!

These were pretty quick to mix together.  One good thing that happened is the buttermilk incident.  The recipe called for buttermilk.  I swear, 75% of the time that I need buttermilk, I don't have it.  My mom taught me that you can make your own with milk and vinegar, but I've always had to Google it just to be sure that I had the right measurements.  Tonight was the first time that I just did it.  I finally memorized it!  This is nothing huge, because it's just a cup of milk and a tablespoon of vingegar, but I take it as a sign of my confidence in the kitchen! I finally trusted myself and only got nervous after I poured it in.  Luckily, I was okay :)

Surprise! Nutella inside!

Strawberry and Nutella muffin

The good news is that everyone loves them!  The recipe only makes 9 muffins, which I was happy about because we always seem to throw out my baked goods, but I actually think there is a chance these will all go.  Mom, Kenzie, Mark and Rachael already had one.  Mom, who was a big doubter, was pleasantly surprised and rated it a 8.  Kenzie refuses to give numbers because she says she is against the "Richter scale," but she said she likes them better than any other muffin I've made.  Success!

Mark is excited to try his muffin

Recipe:
strawberry and Nutella muffins

6 More Mondays...

Well, the last week has been wonderful, but unfortunately, it went by way too fast!  Vacation is already over and it's back to work tomorrow.  This has me quite depressed.  The good news is that we only have 7 more weeks of school before summer vacation!!!  And, since we have Memorial Day, it's only 6 more Mondays.  This is going to be my mantra to get me through tomorrow.

The last couple days have flown by in a blur of graduation parties, going out to eat, and being sick :(  I've had a pretty nasty cold since Friday, but I'm trying to ignore the fact that it feels like it could turn into bronchitis; I wanted to squeeze every last enjoyable second out of my last days of vacation.  So I have been doing a little work in the kitchen and hoping I am washing my hands enough not to spread my germs!

For Seth's graduation party yesterday, I made my taquitos, per Tracy's request!  I've posted about them two times before, and they are quite a hit.  In fact, they all went at the party!  Considering the insane amount of food at this party, I think it is safe to say that these are fool-proof party appetizers!  You should make them the next time you have to bring something to a party :)  The good part is that you can do most of the work before the party.  I actually mixed up the filling Friday night.  I was worried they'd get mushy sitting in the fridge overnight, so I stuffed them Saturday morning, and then baked them once I got to the party.  We served them with sour cream and salsa on the side.  Mmmm!

Saturday after the party, I attempted to pretend I wasn't feeling sick, and my favorite food blog had recently posted a recipe for blueberry bagels!  I love making bagels, and blueberry bagels are among my top flavors, so I had to make it.  Mark and I bought dried blueberries for them earlier in the week, and since I was home alone and had nothing else to do, I thought it was a good time to get the dough started.

Despite my love for bagel-making, blueberry bagels are a bit more stressful.  You don't add the berries until the dough is already made, and bagel dough is tough.  Literally.  It's very stiff,  and so it is no easy task to shove 2 cups of dried blueberries into it!  That part took a while, and I was getting frustrated, and some of my berries squashed a bit and made for some messy-looking bagels, but I can say it's worth it.  If you try the recipe, don't give up at this point!  One more note: the recipe says it makes 12-14 bagels, but I think they are too large.  I made smaller bagels, and made 20.  They aren't tiny, but a perfect size for a breakfast!

I boiled and baked them this morning, and Mom said they were the best bagels she ever had!  Kenzie claimed it was the best thing she ever put in her mouth.  They both rated them a 10!  They are a huge hit.  Somehow my berries seem as though they haven't been dried a day in their lives.... soooo juicy and flavorful!  As much as I hated these bagels when I was trying to incorporate the berries, I have to admit that I love them now.

Time for bed now... 6 more Mondays...

Recipes:
creamy chicken taquitos
blueberry bagels

Beastly Yeast

Today Mark and I went to lunch in Providence and met up with my mom and sisters at the Wrentham Outlets.  I had no interest in this place whatsoever because I hate shopping, but that was before I noticed all the cooking and baking stores!  In a whirlwind of shopping, I ended up witha lot of great deals on some fabulous things, including a spoon spatula, a cupcake corer, a frosting decorator, an avocado knife - and, my favorite purchase: a Le Creuset Dutch oven set!  I've wanted a Dutch oven for a while, but they can be pricey.  This one was on sale, and it even came with 4 little individual-sized Dutch ovens!  Not sure what I will do with them, but they are very cute.  They're all blue and beautiful and very exciting.

When we got home, I immediately set about looking up the recipe I've been wanting to try out once I got a Dutch oven: Dutch oven bread.  It actually bakes in the pot!  The real name is blooming herb bread, because you slice the top with a big X, and it "blooms" while it cooks and kind of looks like a flower.  Also, you can choose any herb you want to flavor it.  We had chives leftover from my potato casserole, so I tossed those in.  The only thing that was a bit weird about the recipe was that everything was in ounces... including butter... but I found out that 4 ounces is one stick, so that was okay.  Then the butter was supposed to be mixed with the herbs, but it never says how much herbs!  I just winged it and put in what looked like an acceptable amount.  I whipped up the dough quickly, and then waited for it to rise... and waited... and waited.  It's been an hour and a half now.  The recipe says to let it rise for 1-4 hours, which is quite a range, but by this time, it should look at least a little bigger!  I have made enough bread by now to know this.  I have a hunch that my yeast went bad; it was in a foil packet that I poured into a jar and kept in the fridge for a couple weeks.  I Googled non-rising bread dough, and cool temperatures or bad yeast are the culprits. To rule out cool temperatures, I am snuggling up with my bowl of dough for now.  If it rises, perfect, and if not, I blame the yeast and try again tomorrow!

Recipe:
blooming herb bread

Rating Systems

I've been a bit slacking in my cooking these past couple days.  I can easily blame it on the weather: who wants to be stuck in the kitchen when it's 80 degrees out and you happen to have the week off from work?  I spent Monday getting sunburned in the yard and going for frozen yogurt at Woo Berry, and yesterday at the beach house hiding my red skin under an umbrella! It was just way too nice to be anywhere but outside.  A wonderful two days.  Today I was glad the temperatures dropped a bit and I could allow myself to be inside again! 

\Also, today I came up with the idea to have my family rate my foods.  Mom had said that she was reading over old blog posts and remembering her favorite things, and sometimes I never even mention that she loved it; on the other hand, sometimes I wrote that she liked something when she hardly remembered it.  So I figured I could have people rate the things on a scale from 1-10; it will help me remember what they love and don't love when I am trying to cook specifically for the very different people in my house :)

I made dinner, a side dish, and a dessert tonight! I am quite proud of myself because timing an entire meal is still a bit of a struggle for me.   And I was cooking for 7 people, so I had to make sure I was going to fill everyone up.  I had decided earlier to make a recipe I'd found on Pinterest called tortilla and black bean pie.  It's from Martha Stewart, and she knows what she's talking about!   I decided that Mexican rice would go with it perfectly, and I had already planned on making a bundt cake for dessert.  It's a strawberry bundt made with Greek yogurt and a lemon glaze: fresh strawberry yogurt cake.  Just the name sounded delicious, so I was excited to try it all out.

I started with the cake.  This is probably not the correct way to plan out an entire meal by starting with dessert when everyone is already getting hungry, but I wasn't sure how else to get it to finish up after we ate!  It came together pretty quickly, although compared to those damn scones last weekend, anything is simple!  I generously buttered the bundt pan because I am very sick of bundts sticking, and I finally have figured out the trick: use way more butter than you expect!  The cake came out beautifully.  I whipped up the glaze really quickly - just powdered sugar and lemon juice - and dripped it over the cake.  The cake was a huge hit!  In fact, my grandmother was here for dinner and rated it a perfect 10, as did my mother.  Rachael gave it a 9.  I am very happy with how this cake turned out; it is a perfect summertime dessert!

Okay now back to dinner.  I started panicking as I was cooking, because I read some of the comments at the bottom of the page and people said that it was kind of bland.  I decided I needed to take things into my own hands and start adding ingredients based on what I know about Mexican food.  For me, this is rather frightening, because I love following recipes, but when I tasted the bean mixture, the sauce was pretty bland.  The only flavoring was onion, garlic, beer, and cumin.  The recipe called for a jalapeno, but I obviously cut that out.  So I added some lime juice and cilantro, and changed up a mixture of beans insgtead of just black beans.  I can happily say that my experimeny worked out perfectly!  The pie was not only beautiful, but it was delicious.  It was similar to my Mexican lasagna, but with tortillas instead of lasagna noodles.  I was going to love it no matter what, because it has fresh cilantro in it, which I am obsessed with.  Mom rated the dinner a 9, and Gram even cleared her plate (plate, mind you, not a saucer like she usually does!)  I am so happy when everyone likes my meals - especially when that meal is vegetarian!  :) 

Recipes:
fresh strawberry yogurt cake

tortilla and black bean pie
adapted from Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

4 flour tortillas (10 inches)
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 large onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
course salt and fresh ground pepper
2 cans (15 ounces each) of beans, drained and rinsed: the recipe called for black beans, but I used 1 black and 1 pinto
12 ounces beer
1 package frozen corn
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 teaspoon lime juice
4 scallions, thinly sliced
8 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Trim tortillas to fit a 9-inch springform pan; use the bottom of the pan as a guide.  Set aside.

2.  Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat.  Add onion, garlic, and cumin; season with salt and pepper.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, 5-7 minutes.

3.  Add beans and beer, and turn up heat; bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to medium; simmer until almost all liquid has evaporated, about 8-10 minutes.  Stir in corn, scallions, lime juice and cilantro, and remove from heat.  Taste and adjust for seasoning. 

4.  Fit a trimmed tortilla in bottom of springform pan; layer with 1/4 of the beans and 1/2 cup of the cheese.  Repeat 3 times, using 1 cup cheese on the top layer.  Bake until cheese melts, about 20 minutes.  Remove side of pan; sprinkle pie with more fresh chopped cilantro.  To serve, cut into wedges and serve with sour cream.

Another New Hobby

Today I began what will hopefully be my next new hobby, although it is closely connected to my new love for cooking.  I am sick of running to the store to buy basil, parsley, rosemary, thyme, etc.  So Mark and I came up with the ingenious idea of starting an herb garden this summer.  With the weather today being so great, we thought it would be a good day to start it, but it's still too early in the season to plant anything in the ground, so we went to Home Depot to get supplies to plant things indoors for now. Rachael and I went to get pedicures and trusted Mark and Alex to get what we'd need.  We ended up with basically every type of seed known to mankind! (I shouls have known!).  Where I had planned on an herb garden, I still ended up with things like strawberry plants, brussel sprouts, and seeds for squash, cucumbers, etc.!  Oh well; we will have the best tasting salads around :)

Delilah was verrrry curious about the planting project!

Planting was fun; Mark got a planter kit, and we had to water the little pods and then stick the seeds inside.  Delilah thought we had some kind of delicious food that we were keeping from her, so most of our time was spent ensuring that she wasn't eating peat moss or drinking the muddy water.  We planted one tray of rosemary, basil, oregano, parsley, peppers and thyme.  The other things need to be planted directly into the garden in May.  Poor Mark is already impatient for our little plants to shoot up, but we've got at least a week to wait :)  I'll keep you posted!

Tonight I made some muffins before going out to dinner with Mark, Kenzie and Nick.  Since we were leaving Mom, I wanted to make her something good, and I had had this recipe in mind for a while: coconut banana muffins.  I know she likes coconut, and she likes banana, and she likes muffins - so I figured this was perfect!  I was trying to get it done quickly before we left, so I did a crappy job spraying my muffin tins: will I ever learn!?  Some of them stuck, but luckily Mark's gorgeous nonstick pans made it bearable.  They whipped together pretty quickly, and I only ate a hunk of one that got stuck in the tin, but so far, they are pretty good.  The recipe made 2 dozen, so if anyone is hankering for a tropical banana muffin, come on over tomorrow :)

Muffins reflected in my gorgeous mixer :)

In other news, yesterday I put the link to my blog on Facebook.  Within a couple hours, I had lots of views, likes, and some very sweet comments.   I had been so nervous about what people would say, but everyone was so nice.  Laura even pinned my braciole recipe on Pinterest!  It was quite the day for my little old blog :)  If anyone tries out any of my recipes, leave me a comment!  I'd love to hear about it.

Recipe:
banana coconut muffins

Vacation Barbecue

Tonight we are celebrating a number of things.  First, vacation! It's only the first day, and having a whole week off stretching ahead of us is a great feeling. 

Second, today is the date that I set randomly in my head back in December as the day that I make my blog public.  By public, I mean that I will post it on Facebook.  I have literally not even told my best friends about it, and basically my only readers are my mom, my aunts, Laura, and Anne!  I did not set out to make a blog that was interesting reading for others; the point of it was to create a list of the foods that I tried to make this year, along  with what went well (focaccia, stuffed shells, caramels) and what went not so well (ricotta gnocchi, beer bread).  It's more for me than anyone, but I understand that people who have a love for cooking like I do might be interested in checking it out. And by the way, if you told me back in December that I would have a love for cooking in 4 months, I would have laughed at you!  So hey, maybe reading about my enormous transformation will get some of my friends pumped about kneading bread dough, and then it will be worth it if I make myself look like a bit of a dork :)

So back to the celebratory dinner.  I was planning on making sweet potato veggie burgers.  I loathe burgers, and yet my family makes them often, so I am trying to find a good alternative.  I love sweet potatoes and cannellini beans, which get mashed together to make these burgers, so I figured it was a pretty good idea.  They were fairly easy to make: bake the potatoes, mash them with the beans, add the flavorings, roll in panko crumbs, and saute in safflower oil.  They taste absolutely fabulous, if I do say so myself.  I love the mix of the potato, beans, and the maple syrup and tahini!  It's such an interesting combination of flavor.  Allie, Kenzie, Mom, and I all ate one (and Nick even took a bite, which is impressive since he refuses anything healthy/made of vegetables).  I stuck fairly closely to the recipe, except I used 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes instead of 1 large, and I had no lemon pepper seasoning, so I just added 1 lemon's zest, pepper, and salt.  Mmmmmmmm!  Mom even asked if I will make them again - which she doesn't always do, so we have success.

Of course, my family can never be content with vegetarian meals, so they bought chicken to grill.  I decided to help out a little and make a barbecue sauce from my good old Food Network magazine.  The recipe calls for chicken  quarters, which for the record makes me sick to think about a chicken being quartered (wasn't that a Revolutionary War-era type of torture?!) , but Kenzie had bought chicken breast and I figured it would be close enough.  After a run to the liquor store for ginger beer, I was ready to try out grilled ginger-beer chicken.  We cut the recipe in half, since we only had about 3 pounds of chicken. What I can say about this recipe is that you'd better plan ahead; the sauce takes a very long time to make, but is very worth it.  The ginger beer gets boiled for 30 minutes, then you steep tea bags in it for 10 (I know, weird combination of flavors but it works!).  Once the other ingredients have been added (ranging from brown sugar to diced tomatoes to Worcestershire sauce), you boil it for 50 minutes to cook it down.  Oh, and I should mention that the chicken should marinate in ginger, salt and pepper for two hours before that!!!  We sort of didn't wait that full amount of time, but the sauce made up for it.  It was absolutely amazing.  There is a lot going on in this sauce; there are all sorts of complex flavors that just work together wonderfully.  It's a big compliment when Nick not only grills the chicken with it, he schlepps it all over his entire plate!  I am not big on barbecue sauce, and even I loved it.  Big thanks to Allie for helping me out with it while I worked on my potato burgers. 

My delicious plate (minus Allie's potatoes... they hadn't been passed to me yet :) )

In addition, Mom sauteed some asparagus in the extra sauce, Allie made amazing pesto potatoes, and we had a salad.  It was a regular summertime celebration barbecue!  I hope that, if you are new to Bridget's Year of Cooking, you find an interesting recipe to try this week... and that you don't think I am too much of a dork :)

Recipes:
Sweet potato veggie burgers

Grilled ginger-beer chicken
from the May 2012 issue of Food Network Magazine

Ingredients:
6 chicken quarters (4  - 4 1/2 pounds) (.... or chicken breasts if quartering sounds like a 1700s torture)
2 tablespoons ground ginger
kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper
6  12-ounce bottles ginger beer
6 black tea bags
3/4 cup minced onion
1  28-ounce can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup dijon mustard
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup packed light or dark brown sugar
12 sprigs thyme
1 stick unsalted butter, melted (we used olive oil)

1. Rinse the chicken and pat dry.  Toss the ginger with 2 tablespoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper.  Sprinkle half of the mixture on the chicken; reserve the rest.  Refrigerate the chicken, uncovered, at least 2 hours (but it is not the end of the world if you can't wait that long!)

2. Meanwhile, make the sauce: pour the ginger beer into a wide skillet; cover and bring to a boil.  Uncover and cook over high heat until reduced by half, about 30 minutes.  Remove from the heat, add the tea bags, and steep 10 minutes; discard the tea bags.  Add the onion, tomatoes, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, and thyme.  Return to high heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until thick, about 50 minutes.  Use a potato masher to crush the tomatoes during the last 5 minutes.  Remove the thyme.  Set aside half of the sauce for serving.

3.  Bring the chicken to room temperature about 30 minutes before grilling (or not).  Preheat a grill to medium with indirect heat: on a charcoal grill, bank the coals to one side; on a gas grill, turn off half of the burners. 

4.  Brush the chicken with some of the butter (or olive oil to be slightly healthier) and sprinkle with some of the remaining ground ginger mixture.  Place skin-side up (gross) on the cooler side of the grill ; cover and cook until it starts browning, about 18 minutes, basting with more butter and sprinkling with more ground ginger mixture halfway through.  Brush the chicken with a thick layer of sauce.  Cover and cook until a thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 160 degrees, about 20 minutes, basting with more sauce halfway through.

5.  Brush the chicken with more butter, then turn skin-side down and place on the hotter side of the grill (over direct heat).  Cook, uncovered, until marked, about 2 minutes.  Rotate the chicken to make crisscross grill marks and cook 2 more minutes.  Transfer to a board and let rest about 10 minutes. Season with salt and serve with the reserved sauce.

Vacation!

Sorry for the lack of updates this week.  It has been an absolutely ridiculous week for me!  Monday I actually did make dinner for my golf tournament team - my good old stuffed shells - but we were working till after 10 so I never got the chance to write it up.  Tuesday night I was making games for the math carnival at work, Wednesday night I had book club, and last night I went to Mark's.  So I have just not had a spare moment for the kitchen.  God knows what I've eaten this week.

But tonight I have reason to celebrate: vacation!  Yes, April vacation starts tonight, and I am not even able to express how much I needed the week off.  I need some time to do these things: read, sleep, hang out with Mark, plan the tournament, and cook! I have some pretty amazing recipes to try out, and tonight I found my new Food Network magazine in the mail.  I went through it and found a recipe for pecan maple scones.  I have wanted to try making scones for a while, and the recipe was from one of my favorite bloggers.  I love the Pioneer Woman's blog and TV show (I think mostly because she has a really cute basset hound) and her recipes are usually great, so I tried them out.

What I can say is that I hate making scones.  The recipe says that the dough is supposed to be very crumbly, and as a bread maker, I am a dough snob.  I like smooth, velvety, cohesive dough.  I loathe crumbly, buttery, dry scone dough.  It was nearly impossible to form a ball with it, and then to roll it out!?  Don't even get me started!  So when I cut the 8 slices, they were lumpy and strangely shaped... which led to lumpy and strangely-shaped scones, of course.  I also had to make a maple icing, which, while delicious, made far too much, and I hate wasting.  So as much as I love the Pioneer Woman's dog, I don't love this recipe. The scones are good, but not so great as to be worth the pain and suffering of crumbly dough and extra maple frosting! 

I will admit that the recipe is interesting reading; the Pioneer Woman (her name is Ree Drummond) always adds funny little jokes into her recipes, so I will copy it as is below.  I just might never make these again.  And if I did, I would cut the frosting recipe in half.

Recipe:
maple-pecan scones
recipe by Ree Drummond
featured in May 2012 Food Network Magazine

For the scones:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled
1/4 cup pecans, plus more for sprinkling
1 large egg
3/4 cup heavy cream

For the icing:
1 pound confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup whole milk
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
splash of strongly brewed coffee
dash of salt
2 teaspoons maple flavoring or maple extract

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  In a large bowl, stir together the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder and salt.

2.  Cut the cold butter into small pieces.  Cut the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles crumbs.

3.  Now finely chop the pecans and stir them into the flour mixture.  Mix the egg and cream together.  Add the mixture to the bowl and stir until just combined.

4.  Turn the mixture onto a cutting board.  The dough will be very crumbly, but do not let your heart be troubled.  With your hands, push the mixture together into a large ball.  Do not knead or press too much; you want to leave that gluten alone!

5.  With a rolling pin, veru gently roll out the dough into a 10-inch round, about 3/4 inch thick.  With a sharp knife, cut the round into 8 equal-size wedges.

6.  Transfer the wedges to a baking sheet lined with a Silpat baking mat.  (Or just spray the pan with cooking spray; either one will work!)  Bake the scones for 22 to 26 minutes, until they're just barely starting to brown.  Do not allow the edges to become dark or the Red Coats will come and get you. Allow the scones to cool completely before icing.

7.  In a medium mixing bowl, stir the icing ingredients until smooth.  Pour generously over the scones and sprinkle with pecans.  Allow the icing to set before serving.

Happy Easter!

The last two days have been a whirlwind of baking, cooking, and cleaning!  It's Easter today, and this year our family was just staying home.  Mom was kind of sad about that, so we decided to make the best of it and make our Easter dinner amazing.  Considering I can hardly move after all the eating tonight, I think we did a good job.

Yesterday, Mom had asked me to make an Easter bread.  She had sent me the recipe earlier in the week, and while I thought it sounded a little bland, I know that Mom likes bland.  I was supposed to dye 5 eggs and tuck them into the bread, but I was lazy (and only had brown eggs).  Since I no longer needed it in wreath shape, I braided it and then curled it around itself (like my king cake from back in February).  It came out quite beautiful, but like I suspected, it was a little bland.  It had only 1/3 cup of sugar for flavoring.  It would definitely have benefited from cardamom, vanilla, raisins, something; but then again Mom loved it.  Go figure!  If I do ever make it again, we definitely need to eat it all in one day.  It gets stale really quickly no matter how well you wrap it!

Then today I basically spent the entire day in the kitchen working on our Easter dinner.  We had a ham, asparagus, twice baked potato casserole, herbed dinner rolls, and raspberry swirl sweet rolls for dessert.  Besides the asparagus, I made all the rest!  It was a very busy day. 

The first thing I did was figure out what to do with the ham.  It was a ridiculously expensive ham (that is what happens when you wait till 11 PM the night before Easter to grocery shop!), and it wasn't a spiral - but we found out today that it was definitely worth it.  It was sooo good - and possibly part of why was because of my delicious glaze!  I partly panicked because it said "cover ham with glaze" and I did not have any glaze, so I googled quickly: 1/2 cup water, 3 tablespoons honey, 1/3 cup brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon of mustard: voila!  It was quite good.  And I am now a believer in buying non-spiral hams.

Then I started on the doughs for my 2 yeast breads.  I went through an insane amount of yeast today, between my rolls and my dessert.  They both had to rise for 2 hours, so I got the dinner rolls rising and then made the dough for the sweet rolls, and then it was time to work on the potato casserole.

Can you imagine anything more amazing than twice baked potato casserole!?  Mashed potatoes, with cream cheese.  And not just cream cheese, but butter.  And not just cream cheese and butter, but sour cream as well.  Add chives, cheddar, pepper, and salt, and you have one amazing casserole.  It was supposed to have bacon, but I was running short on time (and prefer vegetarian food anyway) so I left it out.  Even my carniverous family said they didn't miss the meat.  This is definitely far from being healthy, but if you want a knock-your-socks-off potato side dish, this is the one for you.  As a potato lover, I could probably live on this casserole happily for the rest of my life.






We ate dinner once the potatoes were done.  Unfortunately, the dinner rolls were not ready for dinner.  But it's okay, because I am in love with them and plan on eating them all myself!  They are soooo pretty.  I had to paint them with an egg and milk wash, and then add a leaf of something to the top for decoration.  I used parsley, rosemary, and cilantro.  They taste great, but they look great too.   These take forever, but they are worth it.


















Dessert was my last step.  I had found this recipe for raspberry swirl sweet rolls, and, knowing that my family loves raspberries, I knew today was the day for them.  Like the rolls, they take a very long time - lots of time to proof the dough, let things rise, etc..  But they were worth the wait.  Once they were out of the oven and glazed, I ran over to the Cormiers' with about 3/4 of them, and they went quickly!  They may not be great for you, but it was Easter!  Time to celebrate friends and family and good food :)

Recipes:
herbed dinner rolls
twice baked potato casserole
raspberry swirl sweet rolls

Sweet Potato Skins

Tonight my family was all going out, and Marky and I were stuck home.  While I was disappointed not to get to go out to eat and to see Linny, I was excited to be able to choose a dinner menu with Mark that does not have the constraints that my meals usually have.  For example: Kenzie will not eat ham.  Rachael won't even come in the house if she smells fish.  My mother hates "bread with flavor."  Nick refuses to eat vegetables.  Do you see what I am dealing with here!?  Add to the mix the fact that I am practically a vegetarian again, and you have  quite the tough crowd.

But for tonight, it was just me and Mark.  We have pretty similar tastes and he is a great sport about eating whatever bizarre things I come up with.  I decided to go healthy again (two nights in a row!  Am I skinny yet?) with a recipe from the same blog as yesterday's pumpkin pasta.  This recipe I had pinned months ago, but I knew it was not for a night when there were carnivorous family members to feed.  But tonight was the night: stuffed sweet potatoes! Stuffed with spinach and chick peas!!!  Meatless!  And low fat!  Bring it on!

Being unable to leave the house, I sent Mark to Vincent's for what we needed.  They didn't have shallots, so I used garlic to saute the spinach with.  Other than that, we kept the recipe pretty similar.  Our sweet potatoes were huge and took forever to bake, and it was a bit difficult to scrape the insides out while leaving enough behind to hold the skins together.  In fact, out of our 4 halves, one half ended up getting scraped out completey (I love my sous chef but his ADD sometimes affects his direction-following skills!)  It worked out; we just had extra filling. 

I am a little bit in love with these (I know I said that last night about the healthy pasta, and now I love the healthy potato skins... perhaps this is the start of something beautiful).  The filling is soooo delicious and does not at all taste low fat.  The low fat cream cheese and sour cream get mashed with the potato, and then mixed with the spinach, chick peas, and garlic.  Absolutely amazing.  Then they get sprinkled with a little bit of mozzarella and baked for 10 minutes.  They are really filling; I couldn't even finish mine (though to be honest I had already eaten an embarrassing amount of the mashed potatoes while stuffing the potato skins).  There is one half left for lunch tomorrow.  Mmmmmmm!   Healthy sweet potato skins... they totally make up for a night stuck at home :)

Recipe:
healthy sweet potato skins

HEALTHY Bacon and Pasta?!

I think I have stumbled upon an amazing secret.  It is possible to eat macaroni and cheese - with bacon - and have it be low fat!  I know, I know: I didn't believe it either, but I found a recipe that made this claim and so I had to try it out.  Their secret ingredient?  Pumpkin.

Basically, the sauce is made from pumpkin puree, low fat evaporated milk, and low fat cream cheese.  This seemed strange, because how can you have mac and cheese without cheese!?  Then there is salt, pepper, garlic and scallions - and of course bacon.  Mom said she remembers hearing that dieters should not be afraid of bacon; when used sparingly, it adds tons of flavor to your food.  The recipe calls for 1/4 cup (but I tripled the recipe, and thus tripled the bacon... which felt unhealthy but it was worth it!)  I was very intrigued, and cautiously optimistic.

The ending result?  Amazing.  You can't really taste the pumpkin, and it feels like a super rich, creamy macaroni and cheese.  The crumbled bacon give you the perfect smoky flavor to contrast the cheesy sauce and noodles, and the scallions give it a little kick.  I am in love with this meal.  Here is the best part: even though Mom claims to hate all mac and cheese, and Rach refused to eat because she didn't feel good, Kenzie loved it.  But more importantly: Nick ate two helpings!!!!  Yes, the same Nick that refuses to eat things like vegetables, fennel, cloves, and goat cheese!  We secretly hid the empty can of pumpkin and claimed that it was made with "low fat cheese."  He was scarfing it down, making comments about the "strange orange color."  Finally I had to tell.  He took it surprisingly well, but then worked on picking out the bacon from his last helping.  It was pretty entertaining when he announced that this was his last meal before his diet, and I could tell him that this is diet! Genius!

Yes, I even made a salad.

This has me thinking: adding a little bacon, and using pumpkin as a sauce, can make a bad-for-you meal good for you.  It makes me want to learn more little diet tricks like these.  I might have to go through Dad's old Weight Watcher's cookbooks!

One last note: you know me and leftover ingredients.  I had some pumpkin left after the dinner, and I wanted to use it up, so I made a pumpkin spiced baked oatmeal.  I like baked oatmeal and love to have something to grab for breakfast.  It's in the oven now, so I will keep you posted how that goes!

Recipes:
healthy bacon and pumpkin pasta
pumpkin spiced baked oatmeal

Cinnamon and Clove Day

Today I may or may not have taken the day off from work... we were out late last night at the concert, and so I planned on having a relaxing mental health day.  It ended up being a good thing that I stayed home; I had to help get Dad up, and then Mark came over and we grocery shopped, and made lunch, dinner, and dessert together!  It was relaxing in that I was not at work, but still quite busy - and I must not be cut out for mental health days, because I spent much of the day feeling guilty.

Marky was in charge of lunch; he made grilled chicken sandwiches with bleu cheese, onions and peppers.  This is his specialty and they were great.  While he worked, I set up the slow cooker for dinner.  I made cinnamon chicken.  It does sound weird, I know, but I like weird food.  The recipe calls for boneless skinless chicken breast, sliced carrots, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coconut milk, and tomato sauce.  Quite the strange mix.  I couldn't find coconut milk, so I Googled it and mixed cream of coconut with hot water.  Then I let it set for 6 hours. 

Mmm... potatoes!

I also made my personal favorite, mashed potatoes. to go with the chicken.  I added goat cheese, butter and milk.... extremely healthy.  But the chicken wasn't bad, so I figured it would even out.  They were by far the best part of the meal, but I am a mashed potato kind of girl.  And add goat cheese to anything, and I will be happy.  So this was perfect.

As for the chicken?  Well, I don't like meat, so as I always say, I am not the person to ask. I thought the texture of the chicken was a little too stringy, but the flavor was very good.  I liked the carrots.  Kenzie,  Nick and Mark were the only ones home.  Mark and Kenzie both ate a lot and said they liked it.  Nick did his bizarre "I-may-usually-eat-like-an-elephant-but-happen-to-be-full-tonight" thing and gave 75% of his serving to the dogs.  Apparently he "doesn't like cloves."  Kenz and I are fairly certain that he would not have even known there were ground cloves in it except for the fact that I was telling her the ingredients.  I'm getting very used to Nick whining about my meals, though, so this time I chose not to be upset and just be entertained by his story that he wasn't hungry since he ate a hamburger 7 hours earlier.

Frosting with a weird tip?

While Kenzie was at class tonight, I worked on a surprise dessert for her.  She is having a crappy day, and I know that she loves chai tea, so when I saw a recipe for chai cupcakes, I knew I had to try it. You have the option to make chocolate or vanilla chai cupcakes (or both!) with either Swiss meringue honey buttercream or whipped chocolate cinnamon ganache for frosting.  I decided to make the vanilla cupcakes with the chocolate frosting.  In a funny coincidence, both my dinner and my dessert have cinnamon and cloves in them (so ha, Nick)!  The cupcakes came out delicious: spiced and soft and great.  Then the frosting might be my best yet.  It only called for semisweet chocolate, heavy cream, and cinnamon, which I was intrigued by because of so few ingredients.  I had to simmer the cream and cinnamon, then pour it over the chocolate, mix it up, chill it for an hour, and then whip it.  Then of course I ruin everything when I try to frost the cupcakes and they end up looking ridiculous, but it tastes amazing.  As someone who is not big on sweets, I will probably bring one to work tomorrow for lunch :)  And hopefully they did their job and made Kenzie's crappy day a little bit better.

Recipes:
slow cooker cinnamon chicken
chai cupcakes

This is where I gave up and just smeared the frosting on...

Doughnuts, casseroles and breads: oh my!

Whew! What a day.  I basically spent 7 hours in the kitchen, and while I loved every minute of it, I am totally exhausted now!

After a trip to Stop and Shop with Marky in the early afternoon, I decided to christen my brand new, candy-apple red mixer by making doughnuts!  I found a recipe for baked chocolate-glazed doughnuts, and they looked so pretty in the pictures that I felt like I had to try.  The dough is a yeast dough, and so it needed to rise twice, which made it take a while.  It was a little sticky and definitely needed more flour than the recipe calls for, but once I got it right, it was easy to roll it out and cut it into doughnut shapes.  I used a cookie cutter, and then a cannoli filler to cut the holes in the middle.  They baked up perfect, and then I made the chocolate glaze, dunked them in, and Mom and Mark helped with toppings.  The recipe calls for sprinkles, but they got creative with coconut, nuts, and peanut butter chips.  I have to say, this is finally something that looks just as beautiful as the pictures!  They were gorgeous.  And, considering how quickly they were eaten by Kenzie, Mom, Mark, Allie, Rachael, Alex and Nick, I think they were a hit:) I actually didn't try them - not a big sweets person - but they got rave reviews and look beautiful, so I was happy. Be prepared for lots of pictures of my first pretty food!

Then I worked on two casseroles.  Tomorrow is the welcome back breakfast at work for our head janitor, after he had heart problems about a month or so ago.  I found a recipe online for a bacon, potato and egg casserole (I had to search long and hard for something without any gross sausage!) .  I decided to make two, one for tomorrow and one for my family for dinner as a test run.  My only change to the recipe was not adding sun dried tomatoes, because my family hates them.  I'm a pretty slow cutter, so it took me a while to dice up the garlic, onions, bacon, and yellow pepper, not to mention cracking and beating 16 eggs (luckily I bought frozen diced potatoes)!  However, the ending result is pretty damn great.  We all loved it.  Certainly it is not very healthy (and Kevin might want to stay away from it at the breakfast...)with all the bacon and cheese, and the vegetables cooked in the bacon grease... so I think that if I made it again, I would try to do it without bacon.  I'd fry the veggies in a little olive oil instead.  Cooking them in the grease made me a little sick... of course, until I ate it, in which case it was so delicious that I didn't care anymore!  Can't wait to have more again tomorrow at the breakfast... and then run a marathon or something.

Lastly, I had to make something for Kenzie to bring to the breakfast.  This was payback after all the years she made stuff  for me to bring to potlucks before I started up with my resolution.  I decided on a quickbread that I have been wanting to make: honey beer bread.  I almost made it last night, but it doesn't get made in a mixer and I was desperate to try out my new baby.  I figured it is probably not a normal breakfast food, with the beer and all, and it's not very sweet (only 2 tablespoons of honey), but I wanted something easy (and this is ridiculously easy).  I know from experience that at these breakfasts, the hot foods go first, and all breads, muffins, etc. barely get touched, so it won't really matter if people think beer bread isn't a good breakfast.  It made the house smell amazing, and while it still does have a faint beer taste (totally appropriate for a breakfast at an elementary school!), I think it will be a hit.  And if not? Well, they have the casserole to make up for it :) 

Now, I am giving myself tomorrow off from my resolution after a weekend in the kitchen!  I will be seeing my favorite local band, Gamble and Burke, open for Sean Kingston.  No cooking for me tomorrow!

Doughnut Party with Mom, Alex, Kenzie and Mark

Recipes:
baked doughnuts
cheesy potato breakfast casserole
honey beer bread