I just bought this (I'm so proud, the only gadget I bought on this years CES trip... if you don't count the Kindle) No, not the iPad - the iGrill, but with two temperature probes. Today I tested it making Gigot a la Provencale - easy leg of lamb recipe and it turned out lovely.
Tried my first ever Key Lime pie yesterday using what I think is the laziest recipe ever (condensed milk, egg yolks and lime juice for the filling). Ended up very yellow, which I'm blaming on the eggs but I can't be sure. Very edible though, I'll have to try it again, this time with some lime zest over the top before it goes in the oven (I forgot, ok). Now with a picture of my afternoon tea! By the way - my Christmas cake was a huge success and was easily devoured over the holiday. Maybe we just do different Christmas cakes here (I've heard the jokes).
My wife got a Vegetarian Thai cookbook for Christmas from one of her friends and a little while ago we tried out our first recipe, a Panang curry made with homemade curry paste. It was delicious, we had it again last night as the paste recipe made enough for three or four dishes. We also decided to make a green curry paste last night and now I'm frightened. Smelling it would burn your nostrils and my hands were burning from all the chili peppers I cleaned. The recipe called for 5 Jalapenos and 10 Thai chilies, though we only used 4 or 5. My finger tips are still burning.
That reminds me, I need to pick up some food-prep gloves before I make chili again. Attempting to wash off mascara a few hours after dicing jalapenos is not a good time.
I'm stockpiling Thai bird chilies in the freezer against the day I finally get a blender for this kitchen. Sweet chili sauce is only some thrift store kitchen equipment away... :)
Curious, I tried making a Diet Coke Cake (beloved of Weight Watchers everywhere) yesterday. It was vile. Either I did it wrong or those people are fooling themselves.
Making oven fried chicken. This is my first time cooking with real meat (Korean/Japanese BBQ and bacon do not count). I'm worried that I didn't tenderize the meat enough. :< also hoping that i don't end up killing everyone in the household. i am afraid of working with meat i'm so afraid
END RESULT! Broccoli, steamed rice, and oven friend chicken isssss.... A SMASHING SUCCESS MY MOUTH IS FALLING APART IN THE BEST WAY
I wanted grilled cheese. But simple grilled cheese would not do. Time to make a grilled cheese sandwich LIKE A BOSS. AVENGERS INGREDIENTS ASSEMBLE! Turkey, preferably chunked because that cold cut stuff is lame. Grey Poupon because we are classy as fuck. Basil. FRESH basil, not that dried stuff because you do not want to grill dried basil in this sandwich. Brie. Camembert will also do, but brie+basil is one of the sublime pleasures in life. AND IT TASTES GOOD SO THERE. Rye bread. I went with Jewish Rye because it's Yom Golem or something. I don't know. Any given day, there's a significant non-zero chance it's a Jewish holiday. I'm not one of the chosen people, I just like their bread. Behold my ghetto-as-all-hell Foreman Grill. Excuse me, the "Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Machine" as it says on the top. TEST YOUR MIGHT! MUSTARD! Like a Colonel. I like the coarse ground stuff, but you don't want the overpowering flavored mustards, and you don't want sweet mustard in this mix. Get a good slathering on there. About 1.5 slathers (or one metric hectoslather). BRIE! Brie is an Advanced Level cheese (YOU NO CAN EAT UNTIL IT WEAKER!) that you do not want to take lightly. Tessellate your cheese appropriately for the best cheese-to-bread coverage. Slice it about 1/4" thin, that's sort of the optimal thickness here. Too thin and it gets goopy, too thick and it won't melt right. BASIL! Basil that shit down in a manner reminiscent of the old school! Proceed to argue over whether it's bay-zil or bah-sel, but regardless it is good stuff and full of vitamins. Load up that turkey. This should not just be a simple sandvich, this should be like something you'd see hovering outside a doorway and you know you'd better grab it because there's a boss fight right through the door. Get ready for QUAD DAMAGE MOTHERFRAGGERS. ASSEMBLE! Brush the top and bottom with butter or olive oil. By now your grill is nice and hot. Don't drop everything all over the place like a noob, get it set there with the cheese on top and the basil on the bottom - that way the basil acts as an insulator to keep the turkey juices and cheese from making your bottom piece of bread all soggy and shit. You want this sucker CRISP. Grill it for like 5-7 minutes or so. Call your momma. Or start drinking some beer. Lagunitas Little Sumpin' Wild Ale - 8.8%, and probably the best thing this west coast brewery puts out. Get yourself some. LOOK AT THAT SHIT WILL YOU. That is some awesome nosh right there. Grilled cheese LIKE AN ADULT. For you are a grown-up, and it is time to put away childish things like Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles. Your belly will thank you.
I didn't know what thread to put this in, but then I realized: it's cheese! Cooking thread! Cheese fire in Norway tunnel burns for 5 days I love you, Norway. May I come eat your delicious, if flammable, cheese?
My best friend and I have been planning a cooking show for years now. Since we currently live on opposite coasts, we'd probably have to do it My Drunk Kitchen-style, maybe edited together using the video whiz skills neither of us have. The working title is Cooking With Stuff. Proposed episode titles have included When In Doubt, Add More Butter; If You Liked It, Then You Should Have Put Some Cheese On It; and Boys Suck, Pasta Salad Is Better. Tonight's was "Four Cans And A Healthy Dose Of Magic," renamed by said friend to "The Audacity of Soup." Nute, if we ever bring this out of the realm of cross-country Facebook conversations, will you guest-star? :D
Nute might I suggest trying that sandwich with some honey mustard? Not like a super sweet honey mustard, just something with a little bit of sweetness will do. It interacts with the brie in some really wonderful ways.
Made quick-fried noodles with green onion, (leftover~) chicken, egg, sesame oil, soy sauce and some sriracha. I am learning to enjoy just throwing shit in a pan and hoping it turns out well. it turned out well. But I'm wishing I had oyster sauce; I feel that would have added the sweet touch I was craving.
YOU MAY NOT. The sweetness in honey mustard does go well with brie, since the creamy+sweet combination is excellent (I often make a brie+marmalade tart for winter dessert) but what it doesn't go well with is the basil. Basil + honey can be a great snack (especially with greek yogurt to provide some tartness) but when you add sweet into the sandwich it can often make the flavors too complex.
Yeah I'd probably lose the basil if you went that route. Maybe try to get a bitter green in there even.
My favorite "fancy" grilled cheese is Gouda and apple slices. Wonder what else I could toss in that...
Harvey's Express in Union Station makes a grilled sandwich with brie, country ham, and apple slices. That's what gave me the idea to make my own at home, except subbing in the turkey and basil like they used to at the greatest sandwich shop in Virginia.
Last night I went back to A Feast of Ice and Fire and made buttered beets. So here's the awesome recipe: Beets Butter Salt Pepper Olive oil Take your beets, rub olive oil on the outside, wrap in tin foil, roast in an oven at 375 for about an hour. They call for 4-6 beets, I only used three. None of them were particularly large for beets. I took them out after an hour and let them cool for 10 minutes. Let me tell you, 10 minutes of cooling a beet means that beet is still pretty fucking hot. At this point I'm supposed to peel the beets. No other instructions. Fuck you, cookbook. I cut away the skin, and the only real way to tell where is skin and where is not-skin is that not-skin is shiny. Also, my fingers got all red, and I made sure to work on a plate because I didn't want my cutting boards stained. And the beet was pretty fucking hot and I burned my fingers. Slice beets up into 1/4-inch slices, melt butter in pan, saute. Throw some salt and pepper on those bad boys and eat. I converted my wife to beets. She liked these. This morning I pooped red. It was scary, then I'm like, "Oh yeah, beets. I wonder how Russians know if they're bleeding from the anus if they eat a lot of beets?" I took no pictures. You're welcome.
I like to do that with radishes, minus the part where you put them in the oven and peel them. Just chop, saute in a pan, season. Yum! I've never had beets before, but I like root veggies so maybe I'll grab one to experiment on some time.
So, I made burgers this way. They were the best ever. They were also medium, and if I wasn't just burning off some of the extra crap I got from Omaha along with the things I actually wanted, I might have felt compelled to put them back on, but I figure that they're a big enough company that I can trust the fear of lawsuits to keep their grinding relatively clean. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a pan over medium heat Put some garlic salt and ground black pepper on the surface of the meat you're about to put down in there Add just a little bit of soy sauce to the pan (between a teaspoon and a tablespoon at the very most). This will set off your smoke alarm, bubble a lot, and not seem to do much, but that shit is in there adding a little savory note. Burgers go in, seasoned side down. You want to just let them sit there and cook for a couple of minutes (this is the part where you know how done you want your stuff - I went down for maybe three minutes), and take this opportunity to season the other side Flip. Once you think you're in the neighborhood of the doneness you want, cut the heat to low and put a thin slice of butter (I got about 1/2 tablespoon) on top of each patty. Once that's started melting, throw your cheese on top to melt on. Seriously, the best hamburger I have ever eaten. If it doesn't kill me to death, I may have to do that again. I also made some individual berry crisps, but you can find that recipe under Alton Brown Crisp (only change I did was using Lorna Doones instead of any of the stuff he suggested, and I liked it just fine, and because I was making a double batch I supplemented 16 oz. of frozen berries with 8 oz. of frozen cherries). Yo - those things are pretty good, particularly after thirty seconds in the microwave over a scoop or two of good vanilla ice cream.
Using this recipe or something like it? I don't understand how that would have even remotely the right texture, much less taste good.
To elaborate: One box of chocolate devil's food cake mix. One can of Coke Zero. I cooked it in two round cake pans. It stuck to the cake pans like I had greased them with Elmers. Even the non-stick one pan. The non-nonstick one was amusingly crumbly and lost an entire chunk, which then got pried out of the pan and set on the plate next to the main cake like an iceberg that had just calved. I glued it back on with frosting and sort of shoveled the crumbly bits in and squished them down, and used them to make a sort of frosting-crumb spackle.* Then I popped the less-crumbly one on top, thinking that would make it possible to frost it smoothly and still have a decent-looking cake. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. The entire cake sagged on one side. The side with the missing chunk just didn't perform as a base layer very well, despite my efforts at shoring it up. The entire cake lacked structural integrity. But hey, it's all going the same place, right? I attempted to cut myself a slice. Is it a bad sign when your chocolate-diet-coke cake crumbles like overcooked cornbread? Yes. I can confirm that it is. Not only was the texture horribly un-cakelike, the flavor was.... very odd. It was only vaguely chocolatey. It had a very distinct cola flavor. I suppose this is one of the attractions, since people recommend various flavor combinations, and perhaps a combo like cream-soda in fruit cake might appeal, but I was trying for chocolate. What's worse, it was tooth-achingly sweet, with a very distinct artificial-sweetener aftertaste -- which I usually don't notice in items sweetened with Splenda, like Coke Zero. The cooking or the combo of flavors enhanced it for me. I threw the rest of the cake away. A baked sweet has to be pretty vile before I will even consider doing that. My only consolation was that I had some frosting left in the can, which I ate with a spoon the next night, after the cloying sweetness had faded into a less-painful memory. *Apparently "spackle" is not in the dictionary. WTF the BBBoard people never had to fill in the holes left by nailing up Frankie Goes to Hollywood posters in their dorm rooms?
My first guess would be the difference came from using Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke. Zero has an additional sweetener besides aspartame that supplements the flavor profile differently than aspartame alone, potentially causing it to be "too sweet" for you, and reacts differently under heat, potentially changing the expected final texture. What I'm saying is: who has two thumbs and wants to take a trip to the grocery store to do some science? This guy!
Geoff made chili con carne for a work chili competition. He cheated and used Cook's Illustrated recipe. Whatever. This thing is freaking gorgeous. He toasted chili peppers and ground them in our spice grinder. The aroma was heady: smoky and fruity. Then you add toasted and ground cumin seed and oregano and wind up with homemade chili powder. If you're going to do something, might as well do it right. Four pounds of beef chuck roast and almost nothing else? Why not: Then you make a slurry of chili powder and water and add it to aromatics already sauteing. The directions say "cook until fragrant" which means "cook until you're lifted off the ground like in a cartoon because it smells so good."
