A challenge, if ye will...

So, I was talking to Joanna and we've decided to let people suggest what they want to see on here. Is there a recipe you've always wanted to know how to make? Something you vaguely remember from a restaurant visit long ago that you'd love to see recreated? Well, let me know. Put it in the comments or email me at vragis357 (at) gmail (dot) com and tell me what you want to see. I'll happily rise to the challenge and, if you're nice, possibly let you try the finished result or at least give you a recipe and step by step instructions. On the list so far is a chocolate cake/cheesecake combo for Joanna's roommate Amber. I await your orders kiddies...

Cake class, week two

This is a crappy picture from my Blackberry but making this cake amused me. The writing is fairly self explanatory. I had weird colors of icing going (never choose colors when you're tired) and used this cake as essentially a practice board for some techniques (and to get rid of excess icing). Thus, the writing is a disclaimer, if you will.

Anthony, grill master

While I generally eschew pictures of myself, I'm all about promoting friends. With that in mind, this is Anthony, the cook of that awesome Italian dish a couple weeks ago. I will admit, based on this picture, I'm not sure who's having more fun, him or the corn.

















Here's the dinner he made. It's all from scratch.

Bacon wrapped steak, grilled corn, cheddar mashed potatoes, homemade beer bread, and wedge salad.















Next time I want to go to Ruth Chris, I'm just going to pay him to make me steak.

A pirate's life for me...

As I mentioned, Joanna and I are taking a cake decorating class. I've often said that my baked goods are delicious but I can't pipe for crap. Last night I made this cake. The lettering kinda sucks but I like the border I did and it amused me so I thought I'd share. This is NOT an admission of guilt so the RIAA, MPAA, and SBA can go suck a lemon.















L'chaim!

Beef with Broccoli and Chicken Fried Rice

Anyone who knows me knows I love Asian food, be it Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or good ol' Americanized Chinese. As such, I've lately been making things like Yakitori Chicken and Beef with Broccoli for lunches.

This is actually lunch from two weeks ago but I've been busy with things like cake class and my real job so I'm posting this a little late.

Fried rice is a great dish to make from leftovers. The first and not pictured step in making fried rice is cooking the rice. I do it ahead of time in my rice maker and toss it in the fridge. When cooking the rice, I prefer to not rinse it as I like making fried rice that is stickier and more like the Japanese variety than the Chinese. It's all a matter of taste.

The next day, break out the wok (or a big skillet) and brown some onion. Everything is better with onion...at least that's what the chewing gum and breath mint companies would have you believe. Set this aside.















Next, brown up some chicken or whatever protein you prefer and then set it aside. Or, skip this step and don't put any in. If you skip proteins, stare at the empty wok a second and ponder what might have been.














This looks like scrambled eggs, and it basically is. The main difference is 3 drops of soy sauce and 3 drops of sesame oil per egg. I use two because I love eggs. Set this aside.














Toss the onions in with the chicken and get it heated up again.














Then toss in your rice and some light soy sauce. This is also where you'd toss in carrot, bean sprouts, green onions, chuzwuzzles, or whatever else floats your boat. Just make it taste like you want it to.














There you have it. Fried rice. No real measuring required. So simple that anyone can do it...unless you're a zombie. I don't want zombies cooking for me. I'd be suspicious of the ingredients.















With the fried rice done, let's make some beef with broccoli to sit beautifully on top, shall we? This is another Cooks Illustrated recipe so I'm being intentionally vague to avoid litigation. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

Once again, I'm slow with remembering the camera. Take your beef, about a pound or so, and marinate it in soy sauce for an hour or more. Then drain it and toss it in a really hot wok or skillet with a little oil (in my parlance, little means a tablespoon or so) and cook it till just done. Set it aside. Good stir fry is about cooking things quickly and in batches and then bringing it all together when the time is right.














These are frozen broccoli florets as I didn't feel like trimming a head of broccoli myself. If you go this route, make sure the bag says florets on it. It will be a little more expensive than broccoli pieces but you won't get chunks of the tough fibrous stem in the bag. I tossed them in a little more oil then threw in some water and covered the pan so it cooked quickly. Remember, high heat is important. Remove this to a paper towel lined tray.














Now briefly cook up a little red bell pepper. You could use green but the color contrast is nicer with red and they are a little sweeter.















Now we add the aromatics. Minced garlic and ginger.














Finally we bring it all together. Everything back in the pan. It's like a high school reunion for ingredients except no one is divorced or still stuck on the four touchdowns they scored in that homecoming game...

This is also when you'd add sauce. You can go the jar sauce route or make it yourself. Mine had sherry, chicken broth, oyster sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, and tapioca starch (same deal as cornstarch but more common in asian cuisine. Use interchangeably).














PF Changs, eat your heart out.















L'Chaim!

Food from friends...

Apparently good cooks congregate together because I got this picture today from Joanna's roommate Amber. Her boyfriend Anthony made an Italian feast last night.

















Her description:

"It is a picture of hot italian sausage stuffed into banana peppers and then rolled in cheese/pizza dough. On the side is bow tie pasta with spaghetti and sausage. It looks good and was delicious, and so I took a picture of it."

I heartily concur. It looks fabulous. Next time I'm inviting myself over for dinner and will nosily take pictures in his kitchen while it is prepared.

L'chaim!

Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Joanna got a membership to Cooks Illustrated Online, the online version of the magazine of the same name. She's been letting me browse through the site and I've found some great stuff on there. What I really like about it is that they provide you with tips and techniques which make one more apt to try something new. They also have great product comparisons and reviews. Since this recipe comes off their paid site, I'm going to approximate what I did so as not to infringe on copyrights. If you like what you see, spend the $15 bucks for the one year membership. As my friend Jimmy would say, it's a fine deal.

This required a lot of prep work so you gotta REALLY like cooking or have a bit of a masochistic streak. In other words, this will never end up on Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals. We have dijon mustard, oil, white wine, chicken broth, mushrooms, leeks, garlic, parsley, thyme, lemon juice, butter, and butterflied chicken breasts pounded to about a quarter inch.















The first step is sauteing the mushrooms. I love mushrooms. They are one of the many things I hated as a child but tried again as an adult and now adore. Spinach falls in the same category. Let that be a lesson to you. You should give pretty much all food experiences a shot...with the exception of eating bugs. That's just gross.
















Once the mushrooms are good and cooked, toss in those leeks. This made me want to make potato leek soup, so I shall. Leeks taste like a mild onion. If you didn't know, now you do, and knowing is half the battle, or so they tell me.
















Now let's make all this jibber jabber aromatic by tossing in garlic and parsley. Thyme came late to the party. Rosemary and sage stayed home that day.
















Once this all got cooked, I set it aside, deglazed the pan with white wine, and set that aside. This doesn't look like much but it's the beginning of a beautiful sauce.
















Our lovely mushroom, leek, garlic, parsley mixture gets together in the cozy mini food processor. As in real estate, cozy means ridiculously small.















Mix that up with some chicken I pureed left over from trimming the breasts, the rosemary, and some salt and pepper and voila! You have stuffing. Either I have Parkinson's or my camera stinks at focusing.
















Spread this out among 4 flattened breasts like so, and then roll and tie them up tight. I wasn't kidding when I said this was labor intensive.
















I made a little baby one because I could. So there.















After browning them on all 4 sides (yes I know a circle doesn't have sides), you cook them in the white wine and broth for about 18 minutes. As the recipe says, you need an instant read thermometer to make sure the stuffing is cooked too since it has raw chicken in it.
















Mmmmmm...look at that. They can chill out for a minute while I make some sauce.
















In goes the mustard and it gets reduced down. Once it has reduced, the butter and lemon juice are added along with salt to taste. If I had one critique of this recipe, it would be not enough sauce. Next time I'll double it because it was phenomenal.
















Cut it into medallions and drizzle with sauce. I served it with white rice and green beans I blanched and then tossed in a simple reduction of butter and balsamic vinegar. The white wine was already open so might as well drink it, right? You never want to cook with a wine you wouldn't drink...except maybe Marsala. I think that would burn off the lining of your stomach. Anything called "fortified wine" kinda scares me.
















And, of course, what is dinner without dessert? Joanna made Dulce de Leche cheesecake/custard. That was her gig so I didn't document it. I really just forgot to as I was busy licking the spoon after she made the caramel in the first step.
















Holy crap it was good.



L'Chaim!

Petit fours...kinda...

I got it in my head a couple weeks ago to make petit fours. For those of you who have no idea what they are, Wikipedia, purveyor of knowledge, offers this definition:

Modern petits fours usually consist of a geometrically cut piece of sponge cake, topped with fondant and are approximately 25 millimetres (1 inch) square and about 40 millimetres (1.6 inches) high. The fondant which tops the cake is often pastel in color, and commonly decorated with piped icing flowers or other embellishments.

That pretty much jives with everything else I've read. Some sort of sponge cake cut into squares and torted (layered), some sort of filling, and covered in something, typically poured fondant.

This is what they should look like:




















Lovely and delicious.

This is what mine looked like:















The phrase, "...a face only a mother would love" comes to mind. They were tasty though. Mmmm...lemony!

So, let's examine what I did and what I'll do differently the next time around (because I don't give up easily).

To begin, make an English sponge cake. Apparently, sponge cakes derive their lift largely from beating egg whites until you essentially have a meringue. Then you add in the yolks.















Then, you fold in sifted flour (I love playing with a sifter!) just until it is incorporated. I forgot to take a picture of the cake in the pan or the whole baked thing because I'm scatterbrained sometimes. It happens.

Here's the finished cake, cooled and severed in twain. If you are a Freemason, you'll chuckle at my verbiage. If you aren't, you'll just think I'm weird.
















Now, this sponge cake smelled VERY eggy, as you might imagine something largely made out of eggs might smell. I wasn't happy with that fact though so I made a simple syrup (water and sugar), added in some lemon juice and zest, and brushed this down heavily, both to kill the egginess and to seal the cakes. Next time I make petit fours, I'll make a different cake.

The next step was to make lemon buttercream. I have an ontological discussion with Joanna about once a week regarding how I can call my icing buttercream when it contains no butter. I instead use a shortening base (something many professional bakers do) as it holds up better and doesn't really ever spoil. It is a tricky prospect to get it right because if you don't, you get the weird tongue coating taste of shortening in the buttercream. I've been doing it for a while though and people never know until I tell them.

This discussion was most recently engaged in when she proceeded to make, with a cute scrunched face, the class recipe of Crisco based buttercream that we need to use for the cake decorating class we're taking. When you get right down to it, it is all a matter of taste. She prefers her white whipped icing or real buttercream, I prefer buttercream sans butter and hate stuff like whipped cream icing. I still love her, even though she's wrong. (I'm so going to get punched for that last sentence)

My philosophy is, if it looks like buttercream and tastes like buttercream, it must be a duck. Wait, that's not right...
















Skip forward a couple of steps and we have the cake iced and cut into squares. What I did was ice the whole thing, wrap it in foil to freeze it a bit, then cut it down when it was good and solid.















Clearly, I did not use a ruler. Measure once, cut twice. That's what I always say!

The next step was to cover these buggers in poured fondant. I've never worked with poured fondant and I took the cheap way of making it. Technically, you have to heat confectioners sugar to the soft ball stage and then cool it a bit then run it through the food processor. Having only a mini food processor, I just kinda half assed it on the stove.
















This stuff was like cement. And it got everywhere. And it dried hard as a rock. And I damn near burned off my fingers cause I had to keep heating it to keep it liquid. Next time, I'm using a simple glaze. By the way, the shirt says "Will fix computer for brains!" Zombie geek humor. Gotta love it!
















This is the finished product. I admit, it wasn't quite as I envisioned it.
















Though technically meeting the criteria for a petit four, I refuse to denigrate the term and therefore will call these iced lemon cakes. I'm a perfectionist, I know.

So, what will I do differently next time? Well, I'm going to ditch the sponge cake. I'm thinking I'll either do a pound cake or a denser version of my regular cakes. Also, I will torte it more and use less icing/filling in the middle. These were tough to work with. Finally, I'll eschew that stupid poured fondant for royal icing or a basic glaze. The next time I try this, I'm thinking chocolate raspberry.

L'Chaim!

Farfalle with chicken, sausage, and creamy sun dried tomato pesto aka. YUMMMMMMMMM!

Most people I know have a signature dish. For some, they are lucky if they can have their signature dish be oatmeal from a packet. Those are the people I like to call potential customers. Just like I don't fully understand people who are ignorant about computers but am thankful for them as they keep me employed, I am similarly thankful for those people who burn water, as they need someone to feed them lest they starve. For others who enjoy the art of cooking as much as I do, you get a little more creative. A few examples off the top of my head are Joanna's cupcakes, Sarah's risotto, Amber's soups (I want her chicken tortilla soup like right now), Anthony's orange chicken, and Terry's steaks. Shoot, now I'm wicked hungry. If you don't know these people, their stuff rocks. I should make them guest blog. I digress.

My specialty would probably be this dish. I've been making it for years and love how versatile it is. It is wonderfully flavorful, even the reheated leftovers rock, and you can tweak it for taste in any number of ways. I don't have a recipe to link so I'm gonna try to give you the low down off the top of my head.

First we must lay the foundation of our edible ediface by performing prep work. This was me chopping up about 6 or so green onions (in the bowl) and a couple deseeded jalapeno peppers or red peppers or whatever hot pepper you like (on the cutting board) . That little cutting board wasn't really well suited for the job. I've since had Joanna pick me up more cutting boards. I'm a germaphobe and don't like mixing meat and veggie cutting boards so I used this little bugger, better suited for cutting limes for a bar or whatnot.














As I recall, this was 3 sausages and about 1.5 pounds of sliced chicken breast. The original recipe calls for chorizo but, since I was making this for Joanna and she doesn't like most sausage, I subbed in Trader Joe's sun dried tomato and basil chicken sausage. If you like spice, I recommend you stick with chorizo, which is a spicier Portugese sausage. Good stuff.














I also cooked a 12oz package of farfalle (bow tie for the plebians in the group) pasta to al dente and set it aside. I'm gonna share with you an interesting factoid I learned from America's Test Kitchen. When cooking pasta, you really do want to use 4-6 quarts of water like they suggest. It dilutes the starch the pasta gives off which will otherwise stick to it. The more you know...














Brown up the sausage over high heat in a skillet for a few minutes. Trust me, you want a big skillet. We got a LOT more to toss in. The sausage looks lonely, but not for long.














"Hello Mr. Sausage, I'm Chicken, your new neighbor. Let's dance." Cook the chicken till it's brown on the outside and mostly cooked. Don't cook it too long or it will be dry by the end of our little adventure.














Go ahead and toss those green onions and jalapenos. Scratch the screen to smell what it was like at this point. Did you try it? If so, now try to lick your elbow. Then we need to talk about a bridge I have for sale...














I sometimes forget to take pictures when I'm in the middle of things. This was a case of that. Clearly something has changed between the above picture and this one. What was it, you ask? Well, I put in about 1.25 cups of heavy cream and 2/3 of a cup or so of sun dried tomato pesto. I've had a devil of a time finding sun dried tomato pesto since Delallo is the only company I know that makes it and Giant Eagle, the grocery store giant in this area, doesn't stock their stuff anymore cause of some lover's quarrel or something. The solution? A jar of pesto, sun dried tomatoes to taste, and a food processor. I'm the MacGyver of food. Cook this mess and simmer it for about 10 minutes to finish cooking the chicken.














Toss in that pasta. It's getting lonely all by itself in the collander.














Plate it out, toss on Parmesan, and go to town. If you hear groaning and moaning sounds, that's you while eating it. Do not be alarmed.














L'chaim!

Zucchini bread...and I use the term loosely.

At the request of my roommate Scott, who's told me about 80 billion times how much he loves zucchini bread, I decided to make some. I have no idea where I put the recipe I usually used as it wasn't in my cookbook (lovingly organized by Joanna) so I turned to the Food Network. I decided to use this Paula Deen recipe: Zucchini Bread. It turned out pretty good except the bread stuck to the pans. If you decide to try it, I highly suggest you ignore her idea of spraying the pans with non-stick spray and instead either line your pans with foil or parchment or grease and flour the hell out of them. Consider yourself warned. Also, I would much more consider this cake rather than bread. You're not gonna be slapping bologna between a couple slices of it. If you are, go to the doctor. You might be pregnant.

The first step was, of course, grating zucchini. I didn't actually make this bread until Sunday but I woke up Saturday morning and thought "Hey, let's grate some zucchini." So I did. I'm impulsive like that. A rebel.
















The next day I went to get out my zucchini. If that looks like a lot, it is. I made a double batch. I had a lot of people to bestow bread upon.














Here we have flour. Nicely measured out into the biggest mixing bowl I have.














The recipe calls for nutmeg but I decided to omit it as Joanna doesn't like it. Instead, I tossed in some ginger to still give it a little spiciness. Hey, I'm nothing if not accommodating.














Good ol' Giant Eagle baking soda. Arise bread, arise!















I love cinnamon. It is probably my favorite spice. If a recipe calls for cinnamon, then it's OK in my book.














Where'd all the flour go? Oh yeah, it's buried under a mound of sugar. That's how you know this is a Paula Deen recipe. There is almost a 1:1 ratio of flour to sugar. This is certainly not something to serve to a diabetic...unless you want to kill them.














Whisking up some eggs and vegetable oil. I almost made an omelette but then I remembered I had bread to bake so I put away the spinach and feta and got back to work. I love eggs too. Noticing a trend?














Mixing the whole mess together.














Still mixing. This was a lot of zucchini bread batter. Goopy too. Somewhere here I tossed in walnuts. I don't see them but I know they were there.














Here we are. Ready to pour into pans. Righto. Pip, pip, cheerio. Sometimes I break into British idioms. It's bloody awful. I'm daft. OK. I'll stop.















I decided to make most of the bread in my mini loaf pan for easy distribution. This was one of the nicer ones that didn't stick.














I do recommend trying this recipe. The bread kinda caramelizes a bit on the outside from all the sugar and it was really quite moist and flavorful.

L'Chaim!