Individual Sticky Toffee Pudding Cakes (776)

This was a really fun, weird recipe, and I'd like to do it again.  You make the cakes in the food processor, mostly.  There is a surprising amount of dates in them--some ground for flavor and some sliced and rehydrated for texture.  You steam/bake the cakes in the oven under a tightly wrapped tinfoil cover.  Then you take them out, let them cool.  Meanwhile, you prepare the caramel, then poke 25 holes in the top of each cake with a toothpick.  Pour the caramel sauce.  Let it soak in.  Flip and dump the cakes into a plate and pour MORE caramel over the top.  Obviously, it's not a healthy choice, but it was lovely and moist and (as the name suggests) very sticky.

Blueberry Scones (pg 520)

Lessons learned from the blueberry scones recipe:
1. When in doubt, use the food processor.
2. When dealing with pastry, the freezer can be the most important tool in your kitchen.
3. Try rolling and folding, rather than molding pastry doughs.  It creates fluffy layers that make nice visible swirls (see above).  But, more importantly, the layers puff and separate in baking.
4. Scones freeze well.

Baked Manicotti (pg 152)

Valuable lesson learned from this recipe: pasta is pasta.  Shape is fun, but not necessarily important.  Rather than killing myself stuffing manicotti shells without tearing them, the recipe just had me do roll-ups with lasagna noodles.  It worked fine. 

I did everything pretty much right for this one, but I didn't end up liking it very much.  It was so heavy that I ended up with an instant guilt trip whenever I ate it.  Having it sit in my fridge for a week, making me feel depressed whenever I ate it made me reconsider the plan a bit.  Either I need to make dramatically reduced portions of the heavier foods or I need to skip them altogether.  It turned out okay, I guess, but the cheese+starch, barely adulterated with tomato sauce (which was good, by the way) made me think that this is not a dish for people who aren't spending the day tending goats and eating grapes, or whatever it is they do in Tuscany.

Why this isn't working

Realization:  I wouldn't read this.  It's just ruminations about recipes I can't share because they're copyrighted.  So instead of giving details and making it vaguely instructive, I'm just going to put up a picture of the finished product and my notes.  That will make it a lot easier, and make it more likely that I'll continue doing it.

Paella: Page 385

Last weekend, I cooked up a storm, with generally pretty good results.  On Friday night, I took it easy, but Saturday I made my first real paella.  Well, it was real by my standards, but according to the rules, it isn't real until you use a paella pan.  I didn't know how it was going to turn out, so I broke in my All-Clad 5-quart stainless sauté pan, instead. 


I think Ryan would have liked it, if only because it has four meats: chicken thighs, shrimp, mussels, and chorizo.  I like it because it cooks up well in just one pan, though it did take some labor. 

Paella is a little picky when it comes to ingredients.  It's important to have Arborio or similar rice, rather than white or brown, because it puffs up and softens--more like pasta.  I went with a Spanish-style chorizo as recommended.  It had great paprika flavor, but it didn't soften well, so I might go with another sausage next time.  I included mussels, but couldn't find raw for a reasonable price, so I picked up some cooked ones on the half shell from the freezer section at the commissary.  I meant to get raw shrimp, but accidentally picked up cooked, so I shortened the bake time at the end of the process.  Still, the seafood part of the dish was a little rubbery.  I am tempted to think that I hate mussels, but I can't be sure until I cook them the way I'm directed, instead of winging it the way I have in the past.  Still, I might leave them out of the next dish.  They cost too much for something I don't particularly enjoy.

I've noticed that most recipes in this book use at least one little twist of cooking technique.  For this one, it was moving the paella from the stove top to the oven to cook the rice.  It's more typical to complete the process completely on the stove.  Because I cooked it in the oven, the crispy bottom rice, called "socarrat" (some people's favorite part of paella) was missing.  To replace this missing element, I turned an eye of the stove on medium high, and gave it 1/4 turn every several minutes to brown the bottom.  It wasn't perfect, but it was okay.

The finished product (complete with iPhone blur)

Knitting to True Crime

So what have I been doing with all this free time, really?  Most of it has been spent sitting on the loveseat with Winston, knitting and watching endless episodes of true crime programming on Netflix.  It's starting to feel like a true addiction because I feel drawn to it, even though I know it's wrong.  Right now I'm into "Lt. Joe Kenda: HOMICIDE HUNTER."  I've sucked down 4 episodes already today.  Here's some stuff I've made while my brain has been rotting:

 

Selfish project alert:  I got halfway through this pattern called Sherlocked, but when it said to change from the honeycomb to the cable pattern, it looked bad, so I picked out all the cabling and just finished it in the same stitch, but with a color change midway through.  It took four skeins, which took forever, but I think it looks nice.

 

After that, I took on a new knitting challenge: colorwork.  The only colorwork I had done before this was stripes (which are stupid easy).  This time, I took on a technique called intarsia, which allowed me to make pictures in my knitting.  Even though it was more difficult than some other projects, I went with a dog sweater, because I figured that Winston wouldn't give a damn if it turned out terrible. 

 

You can't see the pattern of the dog sweater very well in this picture, but it has 2 rows of hearts and bones--one across the shoulder and one across the rump.  As I'm sure you can tell by Winston's face, he loves it.

Bits and Pieces

I may not have been on the blogging wagon, lately, but I have done some cooking.  This is a collection of things that don't necessarily deserve a whole post, but that I happened to photograph and thought I should throw in.

I keep trying to make soups in the Vitamix with limited success.  This was an especially gagworthy cabbage one.  I talked about it with Kathy, a coworker, and we both think that Vitamix soup recipes usually have far too much onion, and heating it in the blender container doesn't temper the raw oniony flavor.  Another failed recipe was a carroty ginger one that used milk as a fluid base.  Problem: milk foams when blended.  The milk turned to bubbles.  Eating bubbles isn't much fun.

 

But my Vitamix attempts aren't all bad.  I've been doing smoothies as simple, high-fiber dinners.  It takes about 10 minutes to put one together, and it always makes me feel full.

While Mom was visiting, I got some peaches from a friend, Kristen.  They were getting too ripe, so we cut them up, sprinkled them with Splenda, and made an impromptu crumble with oatmeal/brown sugar topping.  I got to make it in my vintage cast iron 8" Le Creuset gratin dish.

I had a 50% coupon on my first Taste Trunk subscription box.  I have a subscription box fetish, and love getting surprises each month, but it can get pricey for things you know you don't actually need.  The coupon brought the price down to around $20 for 5-8 gourmet food products, which I could justify.

It was pretty cool.  The box was beautifully wrapped, and each of the ingredients came with a recipe--almost like a challenge.  This is the result of one of the recipes.  It's a southwest pizza with chipotle dip as a sauce.  The crust made of refrigerated crescent rolls, patted out into a sheet.  It was super easy and pretty darn good.  This is only a half batch, so half #2 is coming, and I look forward to it.