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The cooking update

Mellystu — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:28:44 +0000

I browsed and didn’t see where I have posted any of my recent meals. Here’s a few things I’ve made lately. I browsed and didn’t see these, but for some reason thought I posted it.

Roasted chicken with rutabaga, sweet potato, yukon gold, onion and garlic
Chicken and noodle soup with carrots, scallions and leeks. I cooked extra chicken with the roasted meal and used that. I made homemade egg noodles too.
Lemon ginger bagels
Challah
Shrimp with penne and tomato sauce. And cheese.

I bought 4lbs of quinoa. That will make it into a meal next week. I also replenished my polenta. My only solid meal plan though is for lunch tomorrow for the extended fam. I’m making sammiches, soup and salad. I have various meats, cheeses and condiments for subs–including Penzey’s Sandwich Sprinkle, which if you don’t have this for your sammiches, get some right now. My sammich is going to be an open face of roasted garlic, red bell pepper and eggplant topped with mixed greens and brie and put under the broiler. I’m making a salad of mixed greens, roasted portabella mushrooms, chickpeas and avocado with a spicy mustard vinaigrette. The soup part will be homemade tomato, and I’m going to sub for the butter in the roux and the chicken broth so it will be vegan homemade tomato. I picked up some Sun Chips and grapes and strawberries for the side. I don’t feel like making dessert, so I picked up a couple of Godiva nibbles to toss in a bowl if someone wants something sweet.

What’s Cooking: Surplus Edition

Mellystu — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:39:11 +0000

My brain is slowly forgetting what I made. Thinking…thinking…I’m thinking…

Okay, yes, I made chili mac. I had all the ingredients for cafeteria chili, plus my jar of random pasta was getting full. I combined both. So, it was really Chili With Various Leftover Shapes of Dried Pasta. Whatever. It used up food.

Then I made a crockpot full of my Ameri-Mexican Chicken Mix. This is cooking boneless, skinless chicken breasts on low in the slow cooker all day. About 1 hour before we want to eat, I shred it and put it back with some Penzey’s Chicken Taco seasoning. I use it in tacos, enchiladas, burritos, or quesadillas. We had burritos. I froze the leftovers for a later Ameri-Mexican dinner.

We had one night of leftovers, and one set-aside chicken breast that provided chicken salad for our lunch.

Tonight, I’m making sweet potato and black bean chipotle quesadillas. I’m waiting for my black beans to finish cooking. Since I need to use what I already have in my house–with the exception of fresh produce–I used my dried black beans. I’m out of canned.

Tomorrow will be Pad Thai. I have tofu that I need to use before Sunday. And I had everything except scallions, which I picked up today.

On Saturday we are having breakfast. I took some sausage out of the freezer. I’m going to make some whole wheat banana pancakes because I need to use the bananas. And I’ll probably make eggs in omelette form to use up spinach. I can use canned tomato and not have any other veges except onions, or I can go pick up some other veges. I haven’t decided. I have a heart cookie cutter, so I’m going to cut the kids in heart shape. If the bananas would make it another day, I’d do that Sunday morning. I will see how they look.

Sunday will probably be the exception since it is Valentine’s Day. I’ll make whatever Mac wants. ~~Who wants to place bets that it will be chicken strips, green beans and mashed potatoes. Romantic~~. Surprise, he didn’t pick that! He wants crab legs, so Sunday will are having Seafood of Choice. I’ll make him crab legs. I’m going to have my salmon with ginger and blood orange marinade served on spinach with warm hazelnut encrusted goat cheese. I’m going to pick up shrimp for Ada and Jay, a seafood that they both actually like. I know Ada will dig into the goat cheese with me. She’s my Partner in Cheese.

Let them eat cake!

Mellystu — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:37:23 +0000

What have I cooked? Um…homemade pizza. I did make the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Thai butternut squash soup. I have also decided that I need to base all my meals on things that I have to clear out some groceries. I have a lot of pasta and tomato sauce. I also used one meal to take out some leftovers from the freezer. I thought it was my chicken taco meat, but it turned out the be BBQ pork. I use bowls to freeze in, and I don’t want to keep writing on them. Perhaps I should get some dry erase labels for my freezer bowls. I’m busy learning Ruby, so easy meals are a plus, and unless I get twitchy to make something new, easy meals utilizing mostly things I have on hand are on the menu. You probably won’t see me post about any new food. Except for the blabbering I’m about to post…now!

My biggest cooking feat was making an Irish Car Bomb cake. You may take offense at the name, but it is the name of the drink on which the cake is based. I made it as a birthday cake for a friend. I made two of these cakes, one for practice and one for the birthday. These are my discoveries so far:

The chocolate you use in the cake is important. Yes, that should always be the case. It isn’t always the case for some people, so I’m going to stress it. Don’t you even dare reach for the Hershey’s if you are making this cake. I used Ghirardelli for the first round. It was not good enough. The second time around, I used Lindt with a 72% cocoa content. I didn’t have any Valrhona on hand, and the local store stopped selling Valrhona, so it is now an item I have to order or find in Kansas City. If I had it, I would have used that. I plan on getting some for later experiments.
If you eat the cake the same day as you make it, you don’t really taste the Guinness. It does enhance the flavor of the cake in an good interesting way. You just wouldn’t know it was a stout that was doing it. However, if you eat the cake the next day, you taste the Guinness. It is also just as yummy, and if you are going for Car Bomb flavor, make the cake the day before.
The cream part of the buttercream frosting is provided by Baileys. It is wonderful. I’m not a big frosting person. I find that sweet overpowers flavor, however adding the Baileys made it hard to quit tasting my work. When I make something that involves butter as a primary and important ingredient, I use good butter. For this frosting, I pulled out the Plugrá. The big thing for the frosting is that you don’t taste the Baileys as much on the second day. Making the frosting should be held off until right before you plan to serve the cake.
The ganache that glued the two cakes together featured Jameson. I ran out of chocolate for this, and sent Mac to the store for more only to find they didn’t have enough for me either. I was going to use the same chocolate featured in the cake, but I had to mix. This featured both Lindt and Godiva. Next time, it will be the same. I will plan better. I didn’t taste the Jameson in the ganache, even after adding more than what was called for. Some recipes use Baileys here as well. It may be better taste-wise. It may not matter at all. This is still in experimental stage.
Back to the cake recipe: I’m convinced that the cake recipe that I had was for cupcakes. I made some cupcakes with the batter to keep the size of the 9-inch cakes down a little. The cupcakes cooked perfectly. The cake didn’t. The first time, it sunk in the middle a tad. When I doubled the recipe, it sunk in the middle a lot. This happened in the oven as it was cooking. My first thought is the cause is the vast amount of liquid in the cake provided by the stout. When you cook it in cupcake form, it cooks fast enough to not sink. If you transfer that to a 9-inch pan, it doesn’t, and the outside is done before the inside, thus the heavy inside sinks. I filled in those craters with frosting and ganache, so the final look of the cake wasn’t bad. My other thought is that there is too much baking soda. I did some searching online and while most recipes were pretty much the same as I had, there was one that had 1 tsp less baking soda. If you double that, I would have used 2 tsp less. In the baking world, that is a lot. This is something I’m determined to figure out.
One last cake note: This is a dense cake. It wasn’t one of those light and fluffy layer cakes. I don’t think this can be helped because of the liquid. Reading up on stout cakes, that seems to be the case. If people like layer cakes light and fluffy, this isn’t for you. However, if I have to cut down the liquid to stop the cake from sinking, then that will probably lighten the cake up a bit as well.

I’m going to perfect this cake, however, I do think that Car Bomb cupcakes would be, well, the bomb. Really freakin’ good. And you can keep the cake part of the recipe as is. I’d still make it the day before. Do a Google search for them. I think everyone and their dog has made it and posted the recipe–with good reason. Yummy!

What’s Cooking Tuesday

Mellystu — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:48:08 +0000

Fajitas: steak, green and orange bell peppers, onions with Pensey’s fajita seasoning. Topping included homemade salsa, Vermont aged white cheddar and sour cream because I don’t have a yo-cheese made at the moment. It was typical household fajita fair. I really like cooking veges and meat and eating them wrapped in a tortilla.

Dessert was picked out by Ada. I was going to experiment with a new cake, but my oven mitts were filthy and needed a spin in the wash. And yes, I have only one pair. They are the replacement pair I bought for the two pair that wore out enough to cause hot things to hurt me. I need a back-up pair for those. In red.

Back on track–I let Ada pick out a cake selection at the store. She picked carrot cake. After eating the frosting, we had this exchange, as already seen on Facebook:

Ada exclaims, “I love carrots!” I respond, “Of course you do, as long as they are made from frosting or are actually Cheetos.”

What’s Cooking Monday

Mellystu — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:15:54 +0000

Yes, it is Tuesday. I was posting my weekly menus, but more often than not, it changes. I decided to just post what I made after. That I cannot yet change.

Dinner yesterday was chicken roulades: Pound skinless chicken breasts and roll with a filling of spinach, pinenuts and nutmeg. Wrap it in bacon, tie, place in pan with white wine or chicken broth and bake. There is a browning step in there, but the way I rolled them, the filling would fall out the ends if turned, so I skipped that and used the broiler at the end of cooking to brown the top. I’ll practice that rolling. I served it with roasted potatoes: yellow, sweet and purple fingerlings with toasted onion, savory and fresh rosemary.

Will we ever not be sick?

Mellystu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:52:37 +0000

Jay brought home a virus last week. I will blame daycare. He passed it to me. I passed it to Ada. So far Mac is the only one to not get sick. I got over the virus and ended up with another migraine yesterday that sent me to bed by 6:30pm. I even left the table in the middle of dinner because I thought I was going to die anytime someone spoke. I woke up a little after 2:00am with more pain. I took some more powerful pain relief and finally feel back to sleep after 3:00am. I didn’t get back up again until 10:30am. The headache is still here, but the migraine is gone. I took more meds with hope that I’ll feel normal soon. My headaches/migraines are getting more frequent.

I’ve been slacking on posting weekly menus. That’s because I’ve been slacking on planning weekly menus. This week will involve the following based on what I took out of my freezer: Hobo Burgers; Chicken, Lettuce, Bacon and Tomato wraps^*; Italian sausage pizza and one more thing with chicken breasts. I also desire to try this salad.

Also, my mixer has been repaired and is ready for pick-up. We are doing that today. Yippee!

*Darn, my migraine made me miss going to the market. That means I’ll have to settle for super market tomatoes. Blech.

Weekly Menu: April 18th

Mellystu — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:15:22 +0000

I’ve been working a nice chunk over 40 hours the last few weeks. Meals have been sort of unplanned, what do we have in the house, sort of things. Yesterday and today, I thought out a meal list. Might as well post it:

Saturday: Beef ravioli with homemade arrabiata sauce.

Sunday: Baked chicken fingers, leftover fat potatoes that I made for a cookout we attended on Friday, green beans and almonds

Monday: Rice and pine nut stuffed eggplant — one of our vegetarian meals for the week.

Tuesday: Cowboy grillers with garlic broccoli — Cowboy grillers are chicken breasts stuffed with pepper jack cheese and bell peppers, wrapped with bacon and cooked on the grill.

Wednesday: Asparagus tofu stir fry — our other vegetarian meal for the week

Thursday: Grilled lime shrimp and blood orange vinegar and ginger glazed salmon. I’ll eat the salmon in a salad of spinach and hazelnut-crusted goat cheese. I was going to do a balsamic roasted pork tenderloin, but if the weather holds, it will be in the mid-80s that day. In order to not turn on the air-conditioning, I need to not turn on my oven. It could very likely get up to 90 in my kitchen that day without the oven on.

Friday: Maybe pizza, but again, this day could be in the upper-80s. It also depends on whether my new pizza stone has arrived yet.

Jay update with a Weekly Menu finish

Mellystu — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:30:49 +0000

The medicine we got for Jay has helped him keep down his Pedialyte. It also has the benefit of making him drowsy. He’s sleeping in his bed! The drawback is that the stuff is disgusting. Mac smelled it and said, “I don’t think they flavored this for kids. Ew, it’s green.” Jay gagged it down. Mac took a tiny taste as well. His face was as bad a Jay’s. I took the famous “spoon full of sugar” lyric literally, and I immediately gave Jay a spoonful of Agave nectar to swallow.

It has been a very busy week, and with Jay being sick, routines feel off. I think we ended up eating takeout three times. Eek! Tonight, I just made French toast since I had some homemade bread I need to use. I had coffee with it because I didn’t think I would make it through dinner if I didn’t. That used up all my eggs and all my half-n-half. I decided to make a night grocery run, taking Ada with me. I still have yet to check out the remodeled Dillons on 23rd, so we made an out of the way trip. It is quite an improvement, and I was surprised to find all the cheese they now sell. They are remodeling the one on 6th & Wakarusa, and it looks like it is going to be just about as big as the one on 23rd. I may actually shop there more often. For cheese anyhow. I didn’t take the time to plan out meals for the week, but I did at least decide on two. The only meat that Ada will eat willingly is Fillet Mignon and KC Strip. As much as I would love to have that every night, it isn’t going to happen. One of our takeout meals this week was Pad Thai, and she did eat the tofu. So, I’m using it for one meal:

Saturday: Seared Tofu with Gingered Veges
Sunday: Pasta with Sun-dried Tomato Pesto and Goat Cheese

Ada has enjoyed the goat cheese I picked up last week. I take a small amount and pat it into a disk, then I press it in chopped hazelnuts and toast it in a pan until the cheese just starts to melt. It is really good that way.

Weekly Menu: March 14th

Mellystu — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:25:20 +0000

Saturday: Black bean quesadillas

Sunday: Bacon provolone burgers with tomato and avocado and grilled asparagus

Monday: Beer can chicken –the best way to cook an entire chicken on the grill– with grilled portabella mushrooms, red and orange bell peppers

Tuesday: Bacon chicken tomato wraps — this is leftovers in disguise. It will probably just be me and the kids eating tonight.

Wednesday: Mushroom, prosciutto and fontina pizza

Thursday: Leftovers (and maybe some grilled red and sweet potatoes w/ onions)

Friday: Roast–because I’m sure we have a cut in the freezer

Weekly Menu: Editing as I go

Mellystu — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:25:32 +0000

Here is the weekly menu for March 8th. I’m editing as I go, so you will probably see it pop back into your feed.

Sunday: Grilled fajita shrimp/bacon wrapped BBQ shrimp

Monday: Shrimp scampi — I have leftover, uncooked shrimp. Bacon and garlic scrambled eggs were made for breakfast since I had the bacon from yesterday.

Tuesday: Steak bacon rolls on the grill, corn–also with bacon.

Wednesday: Gnocchi, with a brown butter mushroom sauce

Thursday: Sushi!!! Mac picked up sushi on the way home from getting Jay!

Friday: Pizza–Mac bought me 25lbs of high gluten flour form Costco. I made the dough Thursday night. We had pepperoni.