Recently in Cooking Experiment Category
John got it right after a few guesses, and my brother got it right on his first guess: homemade yogurt! We bought milk at the farmers market on Saturday specifically for this purpose. It was pretty simple really, you heat the milk without scalding it, throw in some store bought yogurt, then put the jar in the warm car outside (110 degrees or so) for a few hours. It really does end up tasting just as good as the store bought stuff. It only saves a couple bucks, but every little bit helps, and it's fun too.
Better yet was when we were at Whole Foods picking up a few things and found local cherries on sale for $2/pound. We picked up 3 pounds, and Lisa made the best cherry pie from scratch. It was freaky how much it looked like a store bought pie, the filling looked like it was from a can, but everything she used was fresh ingredients. Just way too good to be good for my waistline.
Luckily, I've still been riding my bike, and this is the first week I've been doing the one hundred pushup challenge. I did day 2 this morning, and I'm having trouble imagining myself 5 weeks from now doing two sets of 27 pushups separated by 30 seconds of rest. But I'll keep trying and post my progress.
Hint: it's not mayo. Send me an email with your guess.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post devoted nearly their entire Food section to pizza. Frozen pizza taste tests, carryout recommendations (Church Street NY-style for the win!), and so on (pizza flavored beer?). But I was most intrigued by the article on grilling pizza. It was the second article on grilling pizza I had read in a week, so I had to give it a try.
Last night, we invited our neighbor over for a sanity-saving dinner (her husband is out of town, so she's going bonkers with two kids all to herself). We had grilled pizza and leftover mojitos from our BBQ Monday. Lisa made the dough in advance, giving it plenty of time to rise and such. While she was off at the chiropractor, I got the toppings ready, grilling some asparagus, slicing some fresh mozzarella, and mincing garlic. Then it was time to test it out.
Despite my worries about the dough falling through the grill slats, it actually worked almost as advertised. I got better about holding the dough at "10 and 2" as I cooked more pizzas (five total), but the first couple of pizzas were more rectangular than round. Luckily the kids and parents didn't care about style points, more about taste. The crust was nicely crisp, and the pizza was delicious. We had one pepperoni, two margherita, and two asparagus, prosciutto and fresh mozz (one had garlic too).
If you're looking for a way to liven up your boring steak/burger/chicken grilling routine, definitely click some of the links above to find out more. It's a fun experience for the whole family. Just don't let the kids get too close to the grill!
Yesterday, we took a trip up to South Mountain Creamery to see where our milk for this summer will be coming from. Lisa and Ellie had been there before, but this was my first trip there. They were having a big open house event, and the overcast weather didn't dampen their spirits much. We had fun riding in the tractor around the farm (pretty much a view of grass, since they're grass-fed cows), seeing the baby cows, baby goats, baby chicks, baby ducks, and baby bunnies! Lots of babies. They had some good barbecue for lunch too, and plenty of dairy products. We left with 2 dozen eggs, a bunch of asparagus, and our first half-gallon of milk. We took the eggs and made a frittata with some leftover ham from Easter, some good gruyere cheese, and the asparagus. Lisa has made it before, but this one seemed to taste a lot better. Even the picky eater Ellie ate all of hers. I guess that's what happens when you use good ingredients. Thankfully, the farmers market starts this week, so we'll be getting better ingredients more frequently. Plus, our CSA starts two weeks from tomorrow, and we'll have way more fresh ingredients than we'll know what to do with.
Let's just call "Sweet Blueberry Breakfast Biscuits" what they really are: scones. Like I said before, there are definite trends in the cookbook, and one is scones/biscuits. Not that it's a bad thing, but it just feels repetitive sometimes. But I like blueberries, so I liked these too. A tad on the dry side, but otherwise tasty with some morning coffee.
Next up is butter. Mmm... Butter.
Maybe not everyone is into bananas, I dunno. For whatever reason though, the Banana Layer Cake just wasn't as popular as I expected. We brought it to the curling club, and had some leftovers, so I brought it to work the next day too. And even after that, I still had one piece left (that I enjoyed myself). I liked it anyway. The basic recipe was two layers of banana flavored cake, and chocolate icing. The twist was that there were slices of banana layered in with the icing between the two layers. Maybe it was just too hard to eat at work. Oh well, moving on, next up is blueberry, which my daughter has been gleefully throwing around the house this morning.
Lisa's on a roll, making "Brown Sugar-Apricot Bars" last night. They're a fruity, non-chocolate alternative to brownies. Nice and moist, with small amounts of walnuts and coconuts to balance the flavor. Troy at work now wants this recipe in addition to the vanilla bean cream cake. I just can't get the Rolling Stones song out of my head. "Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?"
Next up should be bananas, which got glossed over last time when Lisa made apricot scones immediately followed by banana-chocolate chip scones.
Round 2 of the Cooking Experiment began this weekend with a new almond recipe: "Sweet Almond and Chocolate Chip Drop Biscuits." I've already noticed that there's a bit of a repeating theme to the recipes, as there have been a couple of very similar drop biscuit/scone type recipes. They're very similar in texture and taste, just using the different core ingredient. That doesn't make them bad, in fact, these little things were actually very good. I definitely liked them more than the first almond recipe (Lisa liked making these ones more than that first one too!), and they were popular with the curling bonspiel crowd as well. They weren't as dry as previous scones, and the little bits of almonds gave it an interesting texture too.
Next up is apricot again.
The final ingredient of Baking by Flavor was Vanilla. Lisa picked "Vanilla Bean Cream Cake." Vanilla gets a bad rap for being plain, the anti-chocolate. It also loses some panache when the only vanilla you've tasted is vanilla extract. But take actual vanilla beans as an ingredient, and it's actually very flavorful. My co-workers are burning through the cake now, and each one is commenting on how surprised they are, and each one is enjoying it (many have come back for seconds, and it's only noon). The cake reminded me of something when I first took a bite, but it's escaping me right now. Looks like I'll have to have some more to jog my memory!
So now Lisa's run through each ingredient of the book at least once. But have no fear, she's starting over at the beginning all over again!
Update: I've now gotten two (TWO!) confirmations, from Tony and Troy, that this was their favorite recipe so far. Wow!
Lisa made "Chocolate and Cream Cheese Chocolate Chip Muffins" so long ago that I didn't even remember to include them on the web site. I do remember eating them though. Lisa was a little disappointed, because despite her best efforts, baking items that combine two different types of mediums into a swirl always seem to come out a little funky looking when she makes them. In this case, the cheesecake like filling seemed to make little valleys inside the chocolate cake muffins. As I said before, it doesn't much matter to me as long as they taste good, and these certainly were good.
The last ingredient in the book is Vanilla, after which Lisa will start all over again with new recipes!
Peanut butter cookies are another old standard that is difficult to improve upon. But the twist in the recipe for "Rich and Chewy Peanut Butter Squares" was to leave whole peanuts in the batter, giving an extra crunchiness that wasn't expected. My co-workers gladly wolfed these down, despite my "DOES contain peanuts!" warning.
Lots of catching up to do here. I didn't expect a lot from the Lemon-Poppyseed cake. After all, we make lemon poppyseed muffins from the Betty Crocker mix all the time, so it couldn't be all that different. And the cake itself isn't a huge leap. What made this recipe was the lemon sugar wash applied to the top of the cake after it was done. The lemon peel had to sit in the sugar for almost a week, as I recall, and the lemony flavor permeated the outside crust of the cake. It was an interesting and yummy twist on an old favorite.
This weekend's recipe was Spiced Apple Waffles. I have to say, I really did enjoy these. It seemed like some of the previous recipes, maybe just by the nature of what they were, were either a little dry, or maybe didn't have all the flavor I expected them to have. The waffles were nice and moist, and full of apple and spice flavor. Very yummy.
I've got some recipe catchup to do, so if yesterday was the day of 12 books, today is cooking experiment day!
Lisa's back with more recipes, after a long holiday layoff. This time, it was Iced Rum-Raisin Tea Biscuits. Now seriously, what do you expect when you hear "tea biscuits"? Are you like me, and you expect teeny little cookies for snacking on while holding your pinky in the air and sipping your tea? You'd be dead wrong. These things are huge. They're essentially the same shape and size as scones, and not too dissimilar in taste and texture. Personally, I could have had even more rum in there (you can never have too much). The icing and raisins gave just a little bit of sweetness to balance the rum flavor. A very fine creation.
The next ingredient is spice, I think.
Lisa actually made Pumpkin Ginger cake a couple of weeks ago for her choir group and I forgot to report back on it. I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin products, as I've mentioned before. Pumpkin spices, fine, pumpkin itself, not so much (although I do like squash/pumpkin soup for some reason). So I didn't really care for this cake all that much. But Lisa reported that it was a hot seller at "Cafe Soprano", the fundraiser for the soprano section of her choir. So I'm guessing it was a success.
Next up is peanut butter cookies, I think, since the lemon recipe requires the lemon peel to sit in sugar for 5 days. And now I'm all caught up on the recipes. Lisa promises that there will be Lemon-Poppyseed cake for me to bring in to work next week to placate the co-workers, and I'm think there might just be cookies too. She's trying to get through these recipes quickly because after that is Rum, followed by Spice, both of which seem very appropriate for the holidays.
It would be hard not to love Mocha bars. Unfortunately for the guys at work, we loved them too much to share and kept them all to ourselves at home. They're essentially brownies, with a little bit of coffee flavor. Very yummy, as expected, hard to screw up brownies frankly.
Sorry for the short review, I'm trying to catch up on the reviews. Plus, as I say, it's hard to screw this one up.
Next up is ginger.
Lavish Cinnamon Brunch Cake invites high expectations just from its title. So naturally, I didn't think it really lived up to the expectations. I'm pretty picky when it comes to anything resembling crumb cake, you know the type, with streusel topping, etc. My favorites are the Drake coffee cakes and the Krusteaz box mix. This was decent certainly, but nothing to write home about.
Lisa skipped the Coconut recipe, since the chocolate recipe she just did had coconut. So next up is coffee and mocha.
As expected, the chocolate recipe was evil. Chocolate Coconut Cream Batter Pie. I'm not a big dessert guy, but I still ate at least half of the thing myself (over the course of several days). Lisa was a bit disappointed in the results though. Essentially, the batter was like a brownie, and Lisa just does not have good luck making brownie pies. The middle always ends up really gooey. Not a problem if you ask me, but it bugs the heck out of her that it doesn't come out even. Anyway, this pie ended up about the same, gooey in the middle. But it was very yummy! The coconut was swirled in, just enough to cut the rich chocolate flavor. Good stuff.
Next ingredient is Cinnamon. No word yet on what recipe Lisa will be baking though. And again, the book is Baking by Flavor by Lisa Yockelson.
This week, Lisa made Butterscotch Chip Pound Cake. I think it was supposed to be Caramel and Butterscotch Chip Pound Cake, but ended up being all butterscotch. Not a big deal though.
The cake was pretty yummy. Lisa had a little bit of trouble with the butterscotch chips sinking to the bottom of the pan and congealing in a big gooey mess. There was still plenty of butterscotch on the cake though, and it is being well-received here at work.
Next up is chocolate. Lisa has chosen a different kind of recipe, since she has done so much with chocolate in the past: Chocolate Coconut Cream Batter Pie.
So, it turns out that buttercrunch was essentially Heath bars. Still can't say that it's ever been a big ingredient in our cooking, but at least we knew what it was. Lisa made Buttercrunch melt-a-ways this time, and sadly, I biffed and missed out on tasting them. But the people at the curling club said they were very good. A couple of Heath bar fiends in particular kept going back for more.
The one thing Lisa has noticed about the recipes already is that they call for far too much powdered sugar coating. A Heath bar cookie tastes fine on its own, you don't need to mask the actual flavor by rolling it in powdered sugar. The butter cookies she previously made also called for sugar, and Lisa followed the recipe, and of course, they tasted more like sugar than anything else.
Next up, caramel and butterscotch (I think that's an either-or proposition, not both in the same recipe).
The latest ingredient in the great cooking experiment was butter. As expected, it was extremely dangerous to a family which considers butter to be one of the major food groups. The recipe was "Butter Crescents", and I wasn't sure what that would end up being. Could have been croissants, or something else. It turned out to be little crescent shaped cookies. Covered in powdered sugar. Oh, how evil you are, Baking By Flavor. Lisa made me bring most of them in to work with me this morning, because if they had stayed at home, they would have been too tempting for her. At just past 11am, half the cookies I brought in were gone already.
The next ingredient is supposed to be "Buttercrunch". This one should be interesting, because it's an ingredient we have never used before.
The latest attempt at the food experiment, blueberries, was kind of boring: oversized blueberry muffins. The official recipe name is "Tender, Cakelike Blueberry Muffins." I didn't particularly notice anything cakelike, they just tasted like blueberry muffins. But good muffins nonetheless.
The next ingredient in the book is butter. That could be dangerous, since our family loves our butter.
The book is "Baking by Flavor
Lisa made part 2 of the great "cook her way through her "Baking by Flavor
This version went much better, as she had all the ingredients ready and everything came out fine. I had one this morning, and it was pretty good (I'm not a huge scone guy, so I don't know how they would compare to really good scones). It used dried apricots and raisins, which I had my doubts about, but which tasted good.
She also made the banana/chocolate chip version over the weekend, because it needed less eggs, and we only had four left at the time. Those were pretty evil, honesty, just because of the chocolate chips. It tasted more or less like banana bread with chocolate chips, which is one of Lisa's specialities.
Next up would be bananas, but I think since Lisa already made the banana scones, she'll skip to blueberries.
Lisa decided last week to try something new. She's been bored with cooking lately, so she decided she was going to cook her way through her "Baking by Flavor
First off, she thought she had all the ingredients, but in addition to the 4 eggs, she needed 2 egg yolks. We only had the 4 eggs left. Next, the dough mixture was so watery that she had to put in 6 cups of flour instead of the 4 that were called for. Then, naturally, we forgot to put the dough in the refrigerator overnight, so it probably overrose, which made it really difficult to fill and roll up later on. Finally, she just threw the thing in the oven and waited to see what would happen.
It turned out pretty decent, in the end. But, as Lisa said yesterday, it was way too much effort for something that was just "OK." She is already frustrated with the experiment, but vowed to carry on. Next up is supposed to be Apricot, so we'll see how that goes.
