|
|
- 04.06.06
- Update: So far I have cooked sixteen recipes this year, three over where I should be on the ninety-sixth day. I seriously think this might be my only involved goal at which I'm succeeding.
- 03.19.06
- Guinness Irish cheddar fondue: This was also intended for St. Patrick's Day, but also got shoved aside in all the drinking. It was just as it sounds--Guinness, Irish cheddar cheese (for the cheap, half Irish cheddar, half regular cheddar), apple juice concentrate and flour. Brian and I hunkered down with that and a platter of stale bread, apples and various steamed veggies on a Sunday afternoon--good and relaxing.
- 03.19.06
- Irish cream cake: This cake was intended for St. Patrick's Day, but as you can see it was a couple days late. It was also entirely a venue for practicing cake decorating but turned out to be really awesome. You make a basic cake, half of it chocolate and half of it plain white, made into incredibly thin layers. Then you stack the layers six or seven high, pouring a ganache made of chocolate, Bailey's and whipping cream between each layer. Then, for the decorating I tried my hand at fondant, sugar paste leaves and royal icing designs. All in all, it turned out pretty great for my first effort.
- 03.10.06
- Udon noodle soup, pork wontons with plum sauce, and soybeans: This might be our first technical entertaining. Mom and dad, Matt and Sarah all came in this weekend and, since we didn't know when the former two would arrive Friday night, we planned an evening in for dinner. Originally the affair was going to be this and sushi rolling, but by the time we were done with the soup, wontons and soybeans it was late and we were all amazingly full. The pork wontons were ghetto rigged with some chorizo, which was still really good but a great deal more greasy than intended--they were fried, but I steamed a couple near the end, which I thought tasted much better.
- 03.06.06
- Update: Today is the sixty-fifth day of the year and I have cooked twelve recipes. I only had to have cooked 9 by now, which leads me to believe that this is my most well-achieved on-going goal yet (this doesn't factor in the one-time goals such as getting a phone and adopting a pet. This one gives me hope for not entirely failing this self-improvement endeavor by the end of the year, and it's something I've thoroughly enjoyed doing, so double bonus.
- 03.05.06
- Onigari: Read: soft rice cakes with a surprise inside! These are basically sushi made bigger and less raw. you take sushi rice and fill it with cooked salmon, cucumber and/or anything else you feel like (ginger, cayenne pepper, garlic and other spices featured in mine). Then you press them up so the rice covers everything and decorate them as desired. I had some with seaweed ribbons, sesame seed coats and salmon hats, seaweed wrappers and seaweed triangles. I actually never tried any of them because I was more in it for the amusement of cooking (I really wasn't anywhere near hungry, amazingly), but Brian, on whom I can always count to annihilate anything remotely Japanese in cuisine, said they were awesome. I'll take his word on it now, since, after sitting out, they'll need a good steam before they're decent to eat again.
- 03.04.06
- Marinated feta: Almost too simple to be called a recipe, but I tossed this one together when I was bored Saturday. Cubed feta, pepper, coriander, garlic, capers, and thyme go into a container. Olive oil covers. That's it. I haven't tried it yet, though, because it has to sit in the fridge for two weeks to properly marinate. I'll update that one when it comes.
- 02.26.06
- Cinnamon cream torte: Although, as is usual for me, I couldn't just stick to the recipe and make the torte. I rather turned them into mini-tortes, like layer cookies. Basically you make an uber-flat pancake cookie, very cinnamony, but otherwise sugar-cookie-ish without so much of the egg. Then you whip up some heavy cream (although here I added more cinnamon, because I love cinnamon like... well, cinnamon). Then it's cookie, cream, cookie, cream, cookie, cream and dust the top with cocoa powder. After that you let them sit for an hour or so and the insides of the cookie become soft and cake-like while the outsides still hold a little crunch. Incredibly tasty (but it seems everything I've made so far has been).
- 02.20.06
- Salmon cakes and spicy linguini: B and I wanted to cook after work, but neither of us felt like grocery shopping. I scanned our appetizer cookbook for recipes light on the random ingredients and came across this one to use up the salmon we had left over. First we grilled and flaked the salmon as well as made some chunky mashed potatoes with lemon zest, parsley, green onion and cayenne pepper. Then we tossed everything together, fashioned the 'dough' into discs and threw them in the freezer
After they were good and frozen we broiled them. Then we made the lemon butter dipping sauce with butter, lemon zest, lemon juice, water, salt, pepper and garlic. Realizing that amount of food would never satisfy Brian, we also made a pot of spicy linguini which went amazingly well topped with a little of the butter sauce. Entire thing (even with the twenty minutes in the freezer) only took us forty minutes to make and it was amazing.
- 02.16.06
- Gyros with tzatziki sauce: The same day I made the olive and anchovy bites in Hillsboro, I also intended to make gyros. However, I soon realized that ground lamb was nowhere to be found in Montgomery County, and turned instead to my usual ghetto rigging--sage pork sausage processed with ground turkey to reduce the spice strength, then spiced with more Greek-ish spices. However, by the time I was done with my ghetto rigging, it was movie time, and by the time that was done, it was two in the morning and I was drunk. So I froze the ghetto lamb and brought it up, tossed together the tzatziki Thursday night before Gameworks and B and I had gyros. The rigged meat was actually a fairly close approximation of the spiced lamb I've had in gyros before so yay me.
- 02.15.06
- Sushi: On the day after Thanksgiving Brian and I got together with our friends Chrissy and Keith and made sushi. Not much more to it--rice and seaweed rolled with cucumber, squid, salmon, shrimp, crab and/or roe. Brian and I turned out to be really adept sushi rollers, though, so we may have to look more into this.
- 02.11.06
- Olive and anchovy bites: Awesome, awesome stuff. These are basically crackers (though I can never get my crackers to look like crackers--I get bored and just start smashing them into abstract cracker shapes) with olives, anchovies and cayenne pepper added to the basic flour and butter mixture. They are so ridiculously awesome, despite (or maybe because of) their simplicity and the fact that I love anchovies. As luck would have it, I made them in Hillsboro and most there can't stomach the idea of anchovies, so I was able to take a good chunk of them in the car for the trip back to Chicago. Much deliciousness.
- 02.11.06
- Update: As of today, I have cooked five recipes, which is exactly on target for thirty-seven days into the year (I should be at 5.05 recipes, technically speaking, so it's all going along as planned).
- 01.25.06
- Pork balls with minted peanut sauce: This was ghetto rigged out the ass, and still ended up tasty as all hell. The pork is pureed with spices, wine and soy sauce, then rolled into balls. Ideally it is then rolled in cooked rice and diced ham to coat, but we had no ham. So ours was rolled in Spam. The minted peanut sauce, after an attempted rigging with peanut butter chips and peanuts, turned out to be a soy ginger peanut sauce, and although I dyed it an unnatural color, it was satisfyingly delicious.
- 01.21.06
- Scrambled eggs with spring asparagus: I made this for Brian's birthday. It's a fairly self-explanatory combination of eggs, asparagus and some snow peas and paprika. According to Brian, it tasted pretty good (I'm not a big egg fan), but it didn't really end up looking all that good.
- Scrambled eggs with prawns: Another fairly self-explanatory dish. I combined this with the asparagus eggs for Brian's birthday. It was served with parsley and spring onions.
- Grilled tomatoes on soda bread: This was rather ghetto rigged, as I didn't have any soda bread--the soda bread mix I was planning on using turned out to have raisins in it, which would not mesh well in this dish. It still turned out pretty good, though; grilled tomatoes on crusty bread, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and olive oil with shaved parmesan topping. Nummy!
- 01.18.06
- Sizzling shrimp: Brian and I nabbed some 4-6 count shrimp on sale at Dominick's, and since they were so huge, we wanted to do a simple recipe that focused on the taste of the shrimp. This had us simply sizzle the prawns in oil with red chilis and garlic. As our added bit, we made some couscous and drizzled the garlic chili oil over it. This dish was amazingly tasty.
- 01.14.06
- Sugared pretzels: I whipped these up at the last minute before a housewarming party at the Thoma's. It's a fairly basic sugar cookie recipe, made a little more doughy to aid rolling into pretzels instead of cutting out. On a whim, I dusted the tops with dark chocolate cocoa as well, which proved to be a great idea. I definitely need to make these again (mostly because rolling pretzels is just damn fun).
|
