Is so good. I usually cube it and roast it with olive oil and a little brown sugar. How do you do it?
Raviolis? Souffle? Pancakes? Soup?
Any recipe suggestions heartily appreciated!
Update: These are AWESOME. Thank you guys. I will let you know what I make!
The poor pizza ball (that was an awesome descriptor, Laurie) and the pizza-peel weilding chef! I don't know what was funnier, the actual event or the comments about the event. So funny. For the record, Andy does make very excellent pizza regularly, but this one just went all kinds of wrong, poor darling. Props for the effort, and I do feel a little bit bad about the pointing and the laughing, but he's tough, and where is the fun in stabbing yourself in the hand and destroying about seven dollars worth of mozzarella cheese if there's no one there to point and laugh! And take pictures! Otherwise it's just plain tragic!
Pancakes, as promised, are hard to mess up too much (after the first one). This is the blue egg of Franny, the hen belonging to our friend Nicole, who gifts us with the most beautiful perfect little eggs, all labeled in their little carton to show us who laid what. Such a nice present. The yolks are such a nice deep yellow and the shells are hard to crack (good). I made these eggy pancakes with all of the eggs.
Swedish Pancakes
4 eggs
1 c. flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 c. milk
a little bloop of vegetable oil
Whisk eggs, flour, sugar, and salt together into a smooth paste. Slowly whisk in milk until just combined, then add a bit of oil (just to keep them from sticking) and stir again. Ladle or pour the batter onto the non-stick griddle over medium heat, and tip pan to swirl batter into a thin circle. Flip when edges look dry.
I like mine plain with a sprinkle of granulated sugar and a blueberry or two rolled up inside. Lemon is nice. Andy likes his with a sweet pink paste made of butter, raspberry jam, and powdered sugar, the way he used to eat them as a kid (though they probably used lingonberry jam at home?). Butter and hot syrup works for me, too.
It's all good. I LOVE PANCAKES!!!!!!!!!!
and it doesn't work out.
He didn't think it was funny until a little later. At the moment when I took this picture, I believe he was still "in crisis" [his words]. At least I didn't say "Wha' happened?"
Until a little later. 'Cause then you know I did.
Update: Note from Andy:
Thanks everyone for the encouragement!! Just when I was bragging that I should be an honorary Italian for my awesome risotto...
So my pretty good looking pizza was on the pizza peel thing. I tried to slide it off onto the 500 degree pizza stone and it rolled on me. Cheese all over the stone! Cripes! So I pulled the stone out and scraped it clean and built another pizza directly on it (which we ate). While it was cookin', I rebuilt the rolled pizza and stabbed myself while trying to run a knife under it so it would slide off. This is when the "crisis" began. The crust was thin. It wouldn't slide. So I tried the calzone approach. It wasn't working, so I went for pizza omelette. It became more of a fritter. Why I put that thing on the pizza stone, I don't know. Smoke. Blood. Suddenly camera and laughing wife. Hot pizza stone. Small kitchen. We didn't eat it. I ate some of it.
My favorite Thanksgiving food is actually one that I make the day after Thanksgiving: my mom's turkey tetrazzini. I've never had turkey tetrazzini anywhere else so I don't know how this compares, but if, after Thanksgiving dinner, you are still in need of comfort food, this one's for you!
My Mom's Turkey Tetrazzini
1 lb. button or crimini mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
4 c. milk
10 tablespoons butter, divided
1/2 c. flour
1 c. turkey gravy (or however much you have left over, if less than that)
1 to 2 c. leftover turkey meat, shredded into bite-sized chunks
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 lb. spaghetti
1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in large saute pan and saute mushrooms until soft and slightly browned. Set aside. Make bechamel sauce: Over medium heat, melt remaining butter in large saucepan, add flour, and whisk over medium heat for several minutes. Whisk milk into butter/flour mixture gradually until all milk is incorporated. Simmer sauce until it is thickened slightly and very velvety. Add turkey gravy and mushrooms and mix well. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Meanwhile, cook spaghetti in boiling water until a minute or two before al dente. Drain and return to pot. Mix in half of sauce and stir to coat. Pour spaghetti into 9" x 13" pan and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake for 30 minutes until top is bubbling and delicious-looking. Add turkey pieces to sauce and serve over slices of spaghetti casserole. Enjoy thoroughly.
Thank you for all of your sweet comments over the holiday, and to everyone who left me nice comments about making my apple pie for Thanksgiving: Thank you! I am completely psyched that you and your families liked it!!!
I have always really liked to cook. I cooked a little bit when I lived at home with my parents, and a little bit when I was in college and lived with my girlfriends off-campus. But I really started cooking with joy when Andy and I moved to Missoula and I got my own apartment (he had his own apartment but he was rarely there). Mine was a studio apartment, and the kitchen was really small. We painted the whole room wedding-cake white — bright, bright white, from walls to trim to shelves. It was pretty cute. The Orange Street Food Farm (our grocery store) was just a block down the alley. We had absolutely no money then. We worked ALL the time. But we started cooking together during those two years we lived in our little studio, and it was a blast. Dinner parties and special events were my favorites.
But cooking regularly was and still is challenging for me. I don't like going to the grocery store that much. I have a hard time figuring out what to make. I seem to have no memory of anything I've ever made when it comes time to figure out what to make today. Before I started blogging four years ago, I would say that cooking had become something I didn't even notice anymore, and just tried to get through when necessary, somehow. But the blog renewed my enthusiasm. Taking pictures of roasting spices is just FUN. Talking about what happened in the kitchen is fun. Finding something to make for the blog is fun. Real food blogs just totally blow my mind they are so cool. Watching cooking TV to get ideas is super fun and majorly relaxing. I love cooking shows. Perfect Day is my favorite one (though their web site is crashing my computer, so I'm not going to link it), and I love America's Test Kitchen, and you know I love the Barefoot Contessa, and I still TiVo Tyler's Ultimate and watch about once a week or so, depending on what he's got going on.
I don't blog everything I cook, by any means. But the blog has given me a renewed interest in the process of cooking. It forces me to slow down in all aspects — from shopping to preparing — and do things with more consideration and appreciation. Sharing what we've made virtually still feels like a kind of sharing, and thanks-giving. Today I'll pack my bags to donate. And plan the menu for Thursday. And do a little shopping. We'll have seven adults and two kids for dinner.
On Saturday, I was back in the kitchen after a bit of a take-out-Thai-soup hiatus. I spent most of the afternoon making Tyler's Turkey Mole Poblano (except I used boneless/skinless chicken breasts). I really love Tyler's recipes (though I do wish he would give exact measurements for salt and pepper the way that Ina does; it wasn't until I started cooking with her that I realized I was way under-salting and under-peppering everything that I made, and correcting that has made a huge difference in my cooking, I must say). But Tyler's recipes are perfectly, Saturday-afternoonly complex, at least in my opinion. You usually have to get pretty busy in the kitchen, creating sauces that have several processes, and sophisticated layers of flavor, but they work. I've made many of his recipes over the years and they work out really well for me (though now that I think about it I was that one time disappointed).
The Mole Poblano was terrific. Our friend Trevor was here for dinner and he graciously agreed. We served it with fresh avocado and a blob of sour cream and, yeah. It's deffo going into the recipe binder. Really good for a cold-and-rainy November Saturday night dinner.
Seeeeeeeriously messy kitchen when you're done, though. This doesn't even begin.
I am feeling much better, but don't seem to very motivated this morning. I took seven pictures of my cereal and that felt like a good day's work, frankly. Thank you for all the good wishes! You guys are so darn nice. I love you.
I was also on the internet this morning thinking about pies. I ran into these totally adorable little pies in jars, with the cutest tags by Lollychops. And a really cute turkey tag for Thanksgiving. And I was also thinking about getting these little leaf pie-dough cutters. But then I went back to these apple cider doughnuts. Which led me to these apple cider doughnuts. Which brought me to the creamed spinach (yum). All of which made me pretty excited about chowing down next week. Thanksgiving dinner's at our house.
There's a mouse in the kitchen! Isn't he cute? He's a potholder I bought at the Mt. Angel Oktoberfest this fall. I think he's so sweet. Cute idea, too. Last night I made a sour cream apple pie, except that when I went to get the sour cream out of the fridge, there was about a tablespoon of sour cream left (and I needed 1 1/3 cups). So I used whole-milk honey yogurt (which, oddly, we had a gigantic container of). And it worked just fine! Yes, it's true, something that I baked actually came out. Miracle!!!
Thank you so much for all of the ideas you offered in the comments yesterday on ways to support troops and military families, especially at the holidays. I am definitely going to take some time this week to get organized in my thinking about the upcoming holidays so that I can do all of the things I want to do, make the things I want to make, send all of the gifts I want to send, spend time with the people I love, and generally try to make a plan to help me stay balanced. In our two fairly small families, we also have six birthdays (including mine) between mid-November and mid-January. Mid-November seems to trigger this relentless forward march through those three months, and it always sneaks up on me a bit, and makes me start wiggin. This year — this year — I want to be better prepared, and also build in some empty time for myself, as well. Yep. It's gonna be different this year [she said with determination and resolve].
Thank you so much for all of the movie recommendations over the weekend!!!!! A fantastic list I will be working my way through this winter. I did watch one several people suggested, Run Fatboy Run, on Friday night and I loved it. There are so many hilarious one-liners in that movie. Great movie. I'm going to take the list to the video store today and get a few of the ones I've never heard of before, like Jam & Jerusalem (which I think is a series, not a movie, but that's cool — more to love).
Butternut squash with brown sugar and butter; chicken with mushrooms, sage, and prosciutto. I used Ina's recipe for the squash and Mario's for the chicken. (Note: Be careful when you fry the sage, because it will really snap and crackle, and also I only used about 1/3 c. of olive oil instead of the called-for 2 cups.) Good grief, this was a good autumn Sunday dinner. We've made it twice this fall and it is a definite keeper.
The apples were absolutely beautiful. I think I had a Fuji, a Gala, and a Braeburn. They were hard and crisp and so sweet. The kitchen smelled of apple sweetness. I had a recipe from the October issue of British Country Living for something called "apple parkin," which I'd never heard of before.
Don't you love that someone invented the apple peeler? One of the most fun kitchen gadgets ever.
The apple parkin has a sort of crumble crust with butter, brown sugar, eggs, flour, and oatmeal on the bottom, covered with a layer of chopped apple, topped with the crust mixture mixed into a thick batter with a bit of milk. The original recipe was written in metric, but I found a web site that converts metric measurements of specific ingredients into standard measurements. I didn't have self-rising flour so I looked up a substitute ratio for adding baking powder and salt to all-purpose flour and used that.
My margin of error was getting rather large. Let that be a warning to you.
It wasn't to me. I happily topped it with cinnamon sugar and baked it for as long as the recipe said (30 minutes). The center was still completely raw, though the edges were done. Ruh-roh. I put it back in for ten minutes: still raw. Another ten: still raw. Another five: still raw, and now the edges and the bottom layer were rock hard. I took it out, sliced a piece, and worriedly drizzled it with a bit of cream, hoping for the best.
It sort of tasted like a clod of dirt from an apple orchard. Apparently I did not read the line at the top of the metric conversion web site that literally and very obviously says, "These conversions only work with U.S. recipes. If you try to convert a British recipe using these instructions it may flop." And that's when I said, for the seventeenth or eighteenth time in my life, "Self, you should've made the pie!!!"
I picked the apples out and ate them. Three apples is three apples, no matter where.
Pumpkin, spice, and everything nice (i.e.: cinnamon whipped cream), all on a plate for an early-morning Halloween breakfast. These pancakes are from the always-inspiring Joy the Baker, and they were absolutely delicious. And very filling. I could not finish them. Possibly only the second thing in my life I haven't finished. If you're having an easygoing Saturday morning like we are (the fire's lit, I've got crochet on the hook, the dog has been walked, and Andy is . . . dyeing a t-shirt in a pot on the stove), I highly recommend these. They even have whole-wheat flour in them. Good.
Walk in the Woods Pattern
Ice Skating Afternoon Pattern
Be Present Retreat:
re(discover)
Manzanita, Oregon
March 10-14, 2010
