architheque

One of the highlights of my kitchen experiences was the moment I mastered a basic pad Thai sauce. Life changing. Or at least palate changing!

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I’ve had my ice cream maker for a while now, but I’ve only ever made apple cider sorbet and a Coke slushie in it. Let me say I have now seen the light.

I was craving sweets last night so badly I’d paced the kitchen six times before realizing it. I resolved to make ice cream, since for the first time in ages I actually had cream in the house. But a quick survey of googled recipes showed me all the things I didn’t have. Like vanilla beans, half and half, and, it turns out, fresh milk. Oops.

I started eliminating recipes based on ingredients, starting with eggs first, as I didn’t feel like adding twenty minutes of stirring on the stovetop to the length of my payoff. Then I eliminated the vanilla bean recipes (keeping vanilla extract recipes). Then any that required large amounts of milk.  Somewhere in the middle, I started sourcing recipes that called for powdered sugar, ’cause I happen to have a ton that needs to be used up. I ended up with a recipe that looked really good…except for the quart of half and half it called for.

In the end, I made up my own recipe. And you know what? Hit it out of the park. Either I’m amazing, or ice cream is hard to screw up. Probably the latter.

It’s a vanilla ice cream base with chopped peppermint bark stirred in. I’d been saving a box of the stuff in the freezer, a gift from Christmas, for precisely an occasion such as this. It was worth the lost space. You can use crushed starlight candies or peppermint extract along with chocolate chips, if you like.

Harry and David peppermint bark!

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Twice this year I’ve gotten up early on a Sunday and done some scrambled baking before having to go somewhere.  Lucky me, part of this past weekend’s recipe required a homemade ‘baking mix’ for which there were lots of leftovers.  Now I have a stash of already-started oatmeal blondies for future usage.

I was googling recipes late Saturday night looking for something I could make the next day that wouldn’t require a trip to the store between then and 8 am the following morning (basically everything that called for chocolate!).  Naturally Martha Stewart swooped in to the rescue.

I found the recipe via Vicarious Foodie.  The orginial MS version (and a link to other baking mix recipes) here.

They came out perfectly.  Would you expect less of Martha?

I’ve seen a few references lately to being a good cook = not being afraid in the kitchen. Specifically, going with the flow and making the best of your mistakes. That’s what this soup is. It started as a pilaf style couscous…and somewhere the water to couscous ratio took a really bad turn. Now it’s soup! And good soup at that.

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Now here’s a novel idea: using an ingredient for what it’s intended for! I had bacon ends in the freezer, bok choy in the fridge, and leftover potsticker wrappers. Building on the success of the previous bacon and bok choy recipe gave me these potstickers, which were so perfectly salted that no soy sauce was required. (Yay bacon?)

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So here was the experiment (and a scientific experiment at that!): Take potsticker wrappers from the refrigerated case at the Vietnamese grocery store. Add three types of cheese from the Hispanic grocery store. Fry half, boil half. Taste. Judge.

(From right to left)

Cheese One: Don Francisco Queso Fresco, Whole Milk (large wheel)

Cheese Two: Los Altos La Cubeta Queso Fresco, Whole Milk (molded)

Cheese Three: Rancho Grande Sierra Fresco, Skim (large wheel)

I thought cheese one would win, as it was the closest in moistness and texture to ricotta cheese. I was rooting for cheese two, as it was the only one that didn’t come shrink-wrapped in plastic. I threw in cheese three because it looked firm and different and I needed an underdog.

Each potsticker wrapper peels off the stack ready to go. Put a dab of cheese on one side, wet the edges with a damp finger, fold over, and crimp with a fork. Flip it and crimp the other side for good measure. If boiling, drop in rapidly boiling salted water for three(ish) minutes. If frying, lay in a pan of very hot oil for thirty(ish) seconds until crisp on one side, flip and fry second side equally.

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Double thumbs up. Ten out of ten. Five stars. I don’t know how to recommend this recipe any harder. First wonderful thing about it: it takes hardly any time at all. Second wonderful thing about it: the sauce is so dang good. (And it can be used with just about anything, including satay.) Third wonderful thing about it: any green stir-fry-y vegetable will do, fresh or frozen.

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A fabulous breakfast: rose flavored lassi. I’ve never made it - this glass was courtesy of leftovers from a chaat picnic. But I think this summer I’m going to learn. Maybe if Indu sees this post, she’ll advise me whether any plain unsweetened yogurt will do or if I need to hunt down some Indian style curd at a market. Indu, what say ye?

Part of the leftovers from that last dinner party was an excess of homemade whipped cream. Not something I eat generally, and I was at a loss for what to do with it. I decided to make hot chocolate, from scratch. I used the recipe off the Hershey’s cocoa powder box, with whole milk, which I’d also had for the party.

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Got up at the crack of dawn to bake Easter morning biscuits. ‘Cause what’s Easter with out a ham biscuit?

Took my twenty biscuits and nine pounds of glazed ham to a hike/potluck and thoroughly enjoyed the day. I hope you had a lovely Sunday too.

A super quick dinner to use up the leftover ricotta in my fridge.  Added bonus: it’s really really good.

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I had a dinner party at my house Friday night. It was awesome. As I was desultorily cleaning up Saturday morning, I realized I’d learned a few things.

First is not why you should have a party at your house, but why you should have said party on a Friday rather than a Saturday. The reason? If you have it on Saturday, you will spend all day cleaning and prepping. By having it on Friday, I had to split my cleaning and prepping among the weeknights prior, and I had to be smart about it because I had limited time and energy after a full day at work. I spent maybe three hours getting ready - compared to the eight or nine I would have spent on a Saturday. Nobody at your party can tell the difference, so why not take the less effort/time route? Plus, when I woke up Saturday, my house had been dusted, vacuumed, and all decks swabbed, so I had no Saturday chores! I had the whole day to myself!

Second, here are good reasons to have the party at your house instead of your friends’:

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How could I resist a lasagna recipe that takes four hours to make? Really. I could not. The fact that it had next to no cheese in it just intrigued me more. So I set aside Sunday afternoon and got to work (this post will forever after be known as, “the time I spent four hours making lasagna so you didn’t have to.”). Recipe is here; I made very few changes to it, so I’m going to do show-and-tell rather than repost it.

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I went into a boutique grocery store downtown yesterday for a steak and some spinach. I got both of those, but there was no way I was walking out of there without chard too once this bunch of red beauty caught my eye. I don’t cook with chard nearly as much as I’d like to, especially after the swiss chard in my summer garden was immolated by aphids. When I do get it, it’s a treat.

To honor the chard, I decided to combine it with two more ingredients in the kitchen that qualified as “treats” to me: blood orange infused olive oil and a package of mango chicken sausage.

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This was an experiment for me, to try out combining several favorite components into something new. It resulted in a richly flavored casserole based on corn tomalito, a sweet Tex-Mex steamed pudding. The recipe takes some advanced planning if you make it the way I did, but there are two substitutions to make it quicker: use canned beans instead of dry, and sauté and chop the chicken instead of stewing it.

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I totally absolutely burned the lima beans this weekend.  Oh well.  Opportunity for a new recipe!

If you go to Trader Joe’s and buy their little bag of black lentils, you will find the original of this recipe under the paper flap.  I, if you haven’t guessed by now, naturally omit several ingredients and am prone to adding or substituting a lot more.   I cut the celery because I don’t like it and the corn because the other person I feed doesn’t like it.  I frequently add potatoes.  This weekend, I substituted spicy sausage for the sweet.  Let me tell you,  simmering a spicy sausage for two hours results in some intense flavor.   Made with sweet sausage, I would eat these lentils straight.  But with spicy sausage, I cut it with rice to give my heat sensitive palate a break!

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Confession: When I want cornbread, I break out a box of Jiffy and just dress it up with creamed corn and chilies to fake everyone else out. If my grandma does it, I’ve always reckoned I can too. Plus corn meal (like, say, rutabagas) simply isn’t something I’ve ever kept in the pantry.

But I did go out and buy cornmeal to dust the counter for no-knead bread. Now I’ve got five pounds of it. And when I want cornbread muffins to go with my lentil stew and don’t have any mixes, why not break out the ancient Better Homes and Garden’s cookbook and try my hand at making it from scratch?

Two immediate observations: Why does the recipe call for 14 muffins? Have you ever seen a muffin pan with anything other than twelve cups? And second: Good grief. I don’t have any milk.

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Here’s a post to encourage Liza to buy some baby bok choy this weekend!

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This would probably be The Best Tea Ever even if my mom hadn’t kept a bag of it in the “tea cabinet” over the microwave when I was twelve and totally ingrained the taste of it into my nostalgic memory taste buds.

What is this Best Tea Ever? It’s hibiscus! Hibiscus tea is ridiculously good for you - full of antioxidants and good plant matter, and it doesn’t have any caffeine to give you the jitters or addict you. If you’re into traditional medicine, it’s also believed to be good for your blood pressure and has mild diet advantages. But beyond that, it tastes really really good. Hibiscus tea is tart and fruity and it’s delicious hot or cold. In the winter I like it hot and strong. In the summer I like to brew it extra extra strong, cool it off, then cut it with sparking water for a healthy homemade take on soda.

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Just a little omelet goodness to make you hungry this morning.

This open face omelet was made with spinach, tomatoes, and paneer from a local Indian grocer. The paneer was cubed like tofu, pan-fried until golden, then sprinkled on top of the omelet. The bottom was cooked through on the burner, then the pan was transfered to the broiler to firm up the top. It was not at all planned, but was absolutely delicious. Thats the good thing about sandwiches, soups, and omelets, though, isn’t it? Almost anything you have in the pantry can suffice as an ingredient in a pinch.

In keeping with my latest attempts to teach myself to like mayo-based salads, may I present purple potato salad!

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Have you tried this recipe? ‘Cause really, it doesn’t get better than this. This is a Real Simple recipe, which I got through the Urban Drivel blog. At the time I bookmarked it, I didn’t have an electric stand mixer or a dough hook. But for Christmas, guess what I got?

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A warm, soothing soup for chilly January weekends. My own recipe!

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I should preface by saying I’ve never been big on chicken salad. I love mayonnaise as much as the next backwater gal (on bacon and tomato sandwiches, especially), but tidbits of food suspended in the stuff never sent me in ecstasies. Despite them being standard fare on the dining room table all my life, I’ve steered clear of mayo-based pasta salads, coleslaw, potato salad, tuna salad, and chicken salad.

So why I felt inspired to make chicken salad out of three boiled leg quarters, I have no idea. But I’m glad I did! Having something your way is the ultimate road to liking that thing.

I recently had a potluck party for which one attendee decided to cook his dish (chicken curry) at my house. Being a clueless dude, he put his leftover chicken in my freezer without wrapping it in any fashion whatsoever. Two days later I realized I had some freeze dried poultry I needed to rescue. I trimmed the frosty bits, then simmered it a good long while until it easily fell into chunks. The broth went into a fava bean soup, the meat went into my salad.

To my now moist and soft chicken, I added some cut up Trader Joe’s green beans that had been steamed then roasted with lemon juice several days earlier. Yay for using up leftovers! I don’t like raw celery (another minus for chicken salad) so I was looking for a green, slightly crunchy alternative. The green beans did a great job. I tossed in some capers, lightly rinsed to reduce the salt, and some scallions and fresh garlic that were sauted in olive oil for two minutes. The dressing is two parts TJ’s organic mayo to one part Napa Valley honey truffle mustard. Finishing touches were lots and lots of parsley and fresh black pepper. I’ve been eating it with whole wheat crackers and am very pleased!

One of the benefits of being naive about a particular type of cuisine (and eating solo) is getting to blithely make up your dinner as you go. I came home starving one night and decided instead of inhaling cookies while I cooked dinner, I would whip up a batch of 3 Minute Baby Bok Choy as a pre-meal snack. Only, I didn’t have all the ingredients - even for something that simple. Not having grown up on “Asian” food, though, it really doesn’t matter to me if my dishes are authentic. So I made do with the ingredients I did have. Of course it turned out delicious. How else could bok choy turn out?

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I’ve been wanting to make this for months.  Now that I finally have, it took me the better part of fifteen minutes on Google (that’s a long time!) to figure out where it was I first saw the stuff.  It was Seriously Good’s post here.

Mine has garam masala, sea salt, turmeric, finely diced cilantro, ground coriander seed, and a few other miscellaneous Indian spices mixed in.  No cumin because I couldn’t find it.  It’s still really really good.  Perfect on a cold night.  Way to elevate a can o’ beans!

I must give a shout out to this recipe. I’ve never made anything so ambitious as marshmallows before, but once the concept was introduced, thanks to the Brownie Points blog, I could not get the idea of it out of my head. I had every good intention of making scores of marshmallow spoons to give out to family as gifts, but the stringent requirements I put on the task (say, finding spoons at vintage shops cool enough that people would actually resuse them) prevented me from reaching completion. As it was, I barely managed to squeak these more traditional marshmallows into the getting-ready-to-leave-for-holiday schedule.

Since it’s not my recipe, I’m just going to post a show-and-tell. Fun!

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Maybe not be the most appealing vision of snap green beans, but ohhhh they’re yummy.  Nothing brightens up frozen (or just mid-week boring) beans like a savory pesto.  My recipe for walnut pesto is taken, if memory serves me correctly, from a page out of Real Simple a few years back detailing ways to make bruschetta without tomatoes.   I ripped the page out and had a bruschetta party shortly after.  The walnut pesto went down like a house on fire.  It’s good tossed with veggies, in pasta, on toast, and, when no one else is looking, straight off the spoon…

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Twice WordPress has eaten this post! I don’t think these cookies want to be shared with the world! But they’re so dang good, I have to persevere.

I had oodles of leftover mint from making the bun, and wanted something to do with it other than mint juleps or mint tea (top two Google recipes). After some digging, I finally uncovered this Urban Drivel post that suggested putting my mint in a cookie dough recipe. Now we’re talkin’.

I didn’t use the Nestle Tollhouse recipe she refered to because I had a brand new recipe from a co-worker to try. It’s heavier on the flour than any recipe I previously owned, but results in fluffy, stay-soft cookies that taste just-baked even the next day. The UD post also comments on the mint being very strong, but mine turned out quite subtle. The menthol only revealed itself after you were finished. Bliss.

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Ah…now I feel like I’ve really accomplished something. Homemade Eastern NC BBQ sauce! From my uncle’s own recipe (or one of them, at least). I knew there was a reason I went home for Thanksgiving .

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