Caramel

It's been a while since anyone has sucked at cooking, but as we find ourselves in the middle of the holiday season, opportunities abound for kitchen disaster. I am no exception.

I made a ton of food for Thanksgiving (four types of gravy!) and most of it turned out just fine. Except for the Cranberry Pecan Tart.

Usually I am a pie man, but I figured I'd try to broaden my horizons this year beyond the standard Karo syrup pecan pie recipe (classic though it may be). I found a recipe for a Cranberry Pecan Tart in an old issue of Cooks Illustrated, so I decided to give it a shot. The recipe requires you to caramelize some sugar. I remember making caramel corn all by myself back in middle school, so I figured how hard could it be?

Hard. Solid, crysalized-sugar stalagmites hard, to be specific. Caramel fail.

In fact, it took me three tries to make this recipe. On the first shot, I wasn't really paying attention and the next thing I know my pan of slow bubbling caramel sugar had turned into concrete-hard crystalized sugar rock candy. That was on Thanksgiving day and seeing as how I was running late and already had enough food to feed a small army, I vowed to try another day.

On the second shot, I did a little better, but I still had crystalized sugar problems:




On the third shot, I was extra careful and got the desired result:



It remains to be seen if the finished product actually tastes good, as it's still in the oven. However, I can offer the following advice:

• It's a good idea to stir your water and sugar together pretty well before you start, but also be sure wipe any stray sugar crystals down from the sides of the pot.


• Apply lots of heat to your best pan to make sure the sugar cooks hot and evenly.


• Do not stir at all until your sugar reaches 300º / light golden color. Even then, only gently swishing of the pot is advised, no actual stiring.


• When you are boiling the sugar, if you can see lots of sugar crystals forming on the top of the bubbles of the boiling water, you have already failed.

Three Pie Crusts, One Sad Afternoon

On Saturday, I decided that I wanted to make a pie for a cookout Martin and I were going to on Sunday. What inspired me was a video of Martha Stewart making pate brisee. "Easy!" she said in the video. "Use that food processor, make that pie crust!"

"I have a food processor,"I thought. "And I like pie!" Surely these two would combine together. However, to echo the sentiments of my mother after she attempted a Martha recipe and spectacularly failed, "Well. Shit."

(I apologize to all G-rated viewers for my mother's eloquence).

I faithfully followed the "cold rules!" rule of pie crust making and stuck everything in the freezer, to get it nice and chilled. My water was iced. Heck, my salt was iced.

I halved the recipe, because I wanted a pre-baked shell for a cream pie. I stuck it all in my 3-cup food processor, pressed pulse and woah! Why am I covered with flour? Oh, right, I forgot to cover the feed tube.

I forge on. I should have taken that for the sign it was and run. I added a bit of water, pulsed and coarse-meal sized pieces stuck together when pinched. I took it out and tried to form it into a disk. It would not. :( So I put it all back in the food processor and added yet more water. And now ... it's sticky. That's bad. But I was mad. I didn't care. I formed my disc and stuck it in the fridge overnight.

Rolling it out wasn't so hard. Baking it, easy peasy. Eating it? Not so great. It tasted wonderful and had some awesome flavor going for it - a stick of butter will do that. But it was crispy and definitely not flaky the way I wanted.

So I decided to try again but this time, using a whole new recipe. I don't know why I decided I had to shake things up, but I did. My favorite blog used this recipe. Surely it would work for me!

Because I'm getting depressed all over again, thinking of the three pie crusts I made yesterday, I will summarize:

Made an all-shortening crust instead of all butter. Destroyed the second crust when it baked wrong in the oven (shriveled up and collapsed). Rolled out a third crust, which collapsed when I attempted to move it to the pie plate. Burst into tears. Martin made me re-roll out the third crust again, even though I just knew (KNEW!) it would not work. It worked. Damn him for being right all the time. Made a chocolate cream filling, which did not taste so good. So, in the end, I had two ruined pie crusts and one decent pie crust filled with an overly-sweet chocolate filling. It was not a good Sunday morning.

Not So Fast!

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the kitchen...

After watching the cupcake episode of Good Eats, I decided to try my hand at Alton's chiffon cupcakes. Sure, the recipe called for separating five eggs, but what's so hard about that? I've made angel food the required separating a full dozen. I jumped right in.

About nine eggs later, I had finally managed to separate five egg whites from their yolks without any contamination. I guess it could have been worse, but man I sucked at separating eggs today. This used up all the eggs I had, btw.

A little annoyed, I proceeded with recipe and immediately proceeded to whip the eggs whites with the 5 oz of sugar... but OH CRAP that was the egg yolks I was supposed to combine with the sugar. Fail.

At this point, I'm out of eggs, but I don't give up so easily. I race down to the grocery, grab a fresh dozen eggs, and race back home. Where are my keys? I don't have my keys. Ok no biggie. We keep a spare hidden by the door. Where is the spare? OH CRAP it's not there. Ok I'll just call Amy but wait Amy left her cell phone at home today. In fact, I could probably hear it ringing through the locked door as I try to call her.

It's actually pretty warm in Seattle today (90º... ok not that warm by NC standards, but whatever). Both me and the eggs are sweating at this point so I make an executive decision to break into the house. This involves diving head first through the bedroom window and basically doing a belly-flop onto the bed. I execute this about as gracefully as you might imagine.

All this for cupcakes. They'd better be tasty.

winners?

i guess we don't suck at cooking anymore?

Creamed Spinach

I'd taken some veal out of the freezer, but it hadn't fully defrosted for dinner tonight, so I had to scramble to come up with something to make.

I decided to reheat some leftovers and make some new veggie sides. My crisper was pretty empty - I missed the Farmer's Market in favor of Emily's bachelorette party. Martin and I had gone to the grocery store but only bought bare bones supplies, barely enough to last until Sunday, when I could replenish at the next Farmer's Market day.

Based on that, I came up with creamed spinach and tomato gratin. Take a guess at which you think the disaster was. :)

I picked this recipe because it was the only decent looking one I found that did not call for heavy cream, which I didn't have on hand. Everything was going fine until I threw it all into the food processor.

The line that says pulse until creamy? Yeah, it'll never become that. Instead, you'll get a weird, lumpy, grainy, watery green mixture. It's not appetizing at all. :)

Thinking about it now, I think where I went wrong was adding chicken broth to the mixture. I spent a long time squeezing all the water out of the spinach, to make sure that it wouldn't make anything watery. But then I went and added the chicken broth, thereby undoing all my good.

Coconut Ice Cream?

Tommy and I had a bad culinary week last week. I wanted to make some more ice cream, so I chose coconut ice cream. I like coconut, both the flavor and the texture of the flakes. Tommy insisted on buying REAL coconuts and harvesting the coconut flakes and coconut cream from the REAL coconuts. Awesome. We proudly walked out of the grocery store with 3 REAL coconuts. When we got home, we drilled into one of the eyes to drain the liquid (is it called coconut milk at this point?). Then I baked them for about 10 minutes. Tommy took a hammer to them and we took off the bark and then the second layer of bark. The flesh went into the food processor. Finally, coconut flakes! I sweetened them up and proceeded to make the coconut ice cream using the coconut, heavy cream, half and half, and some sugar. The result? Flavorless white ice cream with tons of coconut flake (those were flavorless too). Oh, and the ice cream has this strange crystall-like texture that doesn't resemble ice cream at all.

Pasta, green and clumpy

Is it considered cooking if the only step involved is boiling salted water? Pasta's pretty easy but plain old pasta gets boring. I wanted something different. Maybe something wide, or squiggly. Whole Foods was not up to the challenge. They had gnocchi but I was not in a gnocchi mood. So I went with fresh pasta; I had seen it many times before and it always intrigued me. Store-bought fresh pasta? Then is it really fresh? It's more expensive, maybe it's better.

Wrong.



I was skeptical from the start. After all, it looked like one big green blob of spinach fettuccine, formed into a nice rectangular brick. It turns out that the impressive powers of boiling water had no hope of pulling those strands apart. I poked and prodded it for ten minutes and all I ended up with was clumps.

Cake!

Our oven is sadly, out of order, which only intensifies my need for dishes that require an oven, like... cake. I knew, with the ingenuity that exists in the world, that someone had to have a recipe for some cake-like-creation that could be made either stovetop or in the microwave. Correct I was! Chocolate cake! Before we even start, let's detail the pitfalls associated with this course of action:

• Microwaved cake? Gross. Crazy times make crazy minds.
  
• Allrecipes? Why did I go there? I've never had a good recipe come from Allrecipes.
  
• It's worth repeating - cake in a microwave? Only Betty Crocker and her many preservatives seems to have found a way.
  

As you might expect, this was mostly nasty. While it had a vague chocolatey flavor and sweetness, it was dry in the middle and had a mostly chalky taste that was somehow reminiscent of baking sugar free goods, despite the real sugar I added.

We fight on, looking for non-oveny desserts.

I just want to point out

that I haven't had a cooking disaster in almost a month! Go me!

Nor has anyone else! Go everyone!

Fool

Amy made a killer meal for St. Patrick's Day today, with a really tasty brisket and cabbage and the whole-nine-yard. She entrusted me with dessert. I made a Rhubarb Fool, which is apparently a traditional dessert from Ireland or something.

I'll let my sister Elizabeth sum it up: "It tasted like luke-warm yogurt that had been sitting out for a while with a weird after taste." It kind of looked like vomit (dead baby vomit according to Amy... how do dead babies vomit in the first place?). Anyways, FAIL. No pictures... only memories.

Speaking of burning things...

I tried to make chicken and dumplings tonight, but I think something on the bottom of the pot burned? I'm not sure what, but it made the entire pot of food taste sort of burny. It's a shame, because I think it had real potential otherwise.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture, so I don't have proof. But trust me! It was pret-ty sucky.

Melted Melts

Tuna melts with tomato and sharp cheddar on spinach torillas.... EXTRA crispy.

It was all going good until I forgot to take them out from under the broiler.

Hot damn.

oh dear, bojangles'

though it was not actually my cooking, there was a food fiasco with which i am sure you can all commiserate.

today, after a long day, i went to bojangles' in search of some scrumptious comfort food. i bought the only appropriate meal, the cajun filet biscuit combo. and i have to say, i have never wanted to break down and cry so much as when i received this piece of cardboard chicken.

not only did was my "chicken" cold and not cajun-y-delicious, but it was about 1/4th of an inch thick and hard. i do not mean lovely, crispy hard, i mean lose a tooth hard. seeing as how many of you are, in fact, huge bojangles' fans, i am sure you feel my pain.

... and in my time zone, it is actually 8:52pm, not 5ish (since that is really important to this post).

Fail

I have been wanting to start experimenting with some healthier recipes, to see if there are any totally awesome ones. I decided my first attempt would be Eggplant Cannelloni, which is still not super-healthy, but at least has vegetables in it. So I wrote down the ingredients and headed to Trader Joe's (I don't usually go there, but a fancy dinner calls for fancy shopping, right?) When I arrived at Trader Joe's, I realized three things.

1. Trader Joe's doesn't carry eggplant, or anything else I would ever need/want.
2. Are eggplants even in season? Do they have a season?
3. I have absolutely no idea what capers are (of course, I do now. I looked it up when I got home)

Anyway, since I realized I am not yet educated enough to attempt such a fancy meal, I ended up buying the ingredients I could find and some frozen dinners, which I plan on making tonight. I'm not sure why I still bought a few of the ingredients. Now I have this random assortment of food in my apartment and nothing to do with it.

A summary for Rachel:

I decided I wanted to make Eggplant Cannelloni tonight, but I realized I didn't have any eggplant, garlic, shallots, capers, goat cheese, roasted red peppers, olives, parsley or oranges so I went to the grocery store. While I was there, I realized I'm dumb, so then I just bought a frozen dinner, and it was good.

Because I occasionally don't suck

I made myself a REAL food blog. I'm all grown up.

http://salchichatu.blogspot.com/

Note to Self

The overwhelming taste of cloves in homemade chicken stock is not good. And now you've gone and wasted your chicken carcass on bad chicken stock.

Fail. :(

At least there's Emily's bbq to look forward to - yum!

What to do with my pork juice

So, I made some Carolina BBQ last night through today, and it turned out pretty good, but now I have all the liquid that I cooked it in (plus juice from the pork) leftover, and I don't really know what to do about it.

What do you guys do you with your leftover liquids?

I normally put mine in a can or jar, but I don't think this will fit in any can or jar I have.

So, you guys think you suck better than me?

You do? YOU DO. INTERESTING.

Melanie, Rachel, Brian. Maybe you've forgotten, or maybe you are unaware, of the one time I almost burnt down my apartment.

It all started one lazy afternoon, when I was still living with Rachel in Cary. I decided to boil some water for pasta. While the water was boiling, I decided I should probably do some light cleaning. Then, I got a phone call from Amy Pyles! She wanted to eat dinner with me! How exciting. I WAS feeling quite hungry. Would she want to go now? I feel like I am forgetting something...but, it must not be TOO important! Let's go!

Dinner with Amy was SO MUCH FUN. We went to Two Guys, I think, and I ordered lasagna, I think. I ate until I thought I might start oozing (poop), and still had leftovers for another meal. This was really turning into the perfect day. Can anyone think of anything more perfect than sleeping until 4 and then eating lasagna? I sure can't. Anyway......

OH MY GOD I LEFT THE STOVE ON.

I have been "boiling water" for over two hours. I rush to put my leftovers in a to-go box (what? Give up leftover lasagna for a potential fire? COME ON), pay, and drive quickly home, praying that my apartment is still there.

Lucky for me, it is. I rush inside and the pot is glowing BRIGHT RED. ALL OVER. I run over and turn the stove off, move the pot off the burner, and - I am no pot anatomy expert but the metal insides of the pot have melted and are oozing out all over the stove top. EW! But..neat!

It's true that I didn't ACTUALLY burn my apartment down, and everything turned out mostly okay, especially since the pot I ruined was Rachel's, not mine. But I'm pretty sure I win this round because general suckiness seems to be based on two things - the edibility of the result and the danger level of the situation. I almost burnt my apartment down AND I had nothing to show for it. Not even the water that I started with. NOTHING.

The end.

Depression

I'm depressed. It started with the mayonnaise. I had such high hopes of this wonderful mayonnaise that I could make that would make for a wonderful dipping sauce for the chicken paninis that Tommy was making (the chicken was leftover from the chicken we roasted last weekend).

Back to the mayonnaise. It was runny and garlicy and gross. Gross gross gross. What went wrong? Did I add the oil too fast? Did I add too much oil? Too little oil? Was I supposed to let the egg come to room temperature before using it? Was my lemon juice bad (I used a very old lemon with some dark moldy spots on it)? Did I add too much garlic? Do I just suck at making mayonnaise? Oh I just don't know!

The panini was bad too. Edible (I only ate half of mine before giving up), but bad. It was not the right way to use the leftover (mostly dark meat) chicken. The wine sucked too, although it improved slightly after eating and getting all food tastes out of my mouth and off of my taste buds. Everything sucked, except for the freshly baked loaf of whole wheat bread from Whole Foods and the raw cow's milk cheese.

One day I will try to make mayonnaise again, but only after I watch Amy make it. Maybe she can give me a one-on-one lesson when we visit Seattle in April.

All of this makes me depressed. Hopefully when I make homemade Samoas tomorrow, I will be successful and not depressed anymore.

Salmon of Death

I know nothing of Google's search algorithms (and the only reason I moved to Mountain View was because I heard they tell all residents their secret formula!!), but I think it's pretty exciting then when i do a search for "but i suck at cooking," this blog is still the first one to pop up.

So to continue our competition of trying to one-up each other in increasingly horrible food stories .... you may have messed up the recipe, but did you almost give yourself and your boyfriend FOOD POISONING?

For background, when Martin and I were in Sweden, we ate a crap-ton of salmon. I thought it was smoked salmon. Martin never corrected me. It's actually salt-cured salmon and it's known as gravlax or gravadlax. Basically, you brine a bunch of salmon for 36+ hours and then eat it. I ate so much of this salmon while we were there, I could barely tolerate the smell of salmon for the next year.

As I was reading my food blogs, I came across a recipe on how to make it. Perfect, I thought! Martin and his Swede-y McSwedeness will love this!

I brined up my salmon and followed all the directions. Then I sat back to let it do its salt and water transfer thing that it so likes to do. Last night, we cut into it for dinner. The texture was buttery smooth, just as I remembered.

The stabbing pains in the pit of my stomach was not.

I don't know if I really gave us food poisoning (Martin never complained but then - Martin never does). And I don't know how much of it was me psychologically wigging out, worrying I'd somehow made the gravadlax wrong. But my stomach was definitely protesting.

And that is that.

BEAT THAT RACHEL.

Just kidding. :) Brownies almost exploding in your face is definitely ftw.

Brownies of awesomeness

I keep seeing posts on here that end with food that is (at the very least) edible, which does not imply sucking at cooking.  Allow me to demonstrate some REALLY sucky cooking.

In high school, my friend Emily (not Caldwell) and I were making dinner for some friends.  We made homemade brownies, and just before dinner started, I took them out of the oven and set them on top of the stove to cool until time for dessert.

Halfway through dinner, Emily thought she heard something in the kitchen, so she went to investigate.  She said she thought the brownies were crying (I know, this definitely sounds like Emily Caldwell, but I promise it's not.)  I came in to see what she was talking about.

She was right.  The brownies were making a high pitched noise that sounded like crying.  We were both leaning in to see what it was, and all of the sudden we both jumped back.  Just in time.  The brownies EXPLODED.

We had made them in a glass dish, and the burner I had set them on was set on high (how am I supposed to remember to check things like that??)  There are still black marks on their carpet and wall where molten glass landed.

Good times.

Cheesy spinach ravioli

I got a pasta maker for Christmas and have successfully made pasta with it, but I have really been wanting to make some ravioli!

ooooo isn't it shiny?

Derrick and I love those spinach raviolis from COSTCO so I dug up a recipe. I used the recipe that came with my pasta maker (sort of- it calls for 500 grams of flour so I just guessed that maybe this was the same as 3 cups) :
3 c. flour (it calls for special pasta flour but I use whole wheat to make it healthier)
4 eggs
* Pile flour in a bowl, make a dent in the middle and crack the eggs into it. Mix it up until its all stuck together, then take it out of the bowl and knead on floured surface. Add small amts of flour and knead until the ball doesn't stick to you or the surface. Then add a little more. The dough has to be really dry to work in the pasta maker.

and then the following for the stuffing:
1/4 c. cracker (I used bread) crumbs
1/2 c. Parmesan cheese (I only had more like 1/4)
1/4 c. cooked spinach (this seemed like not enough so I used closer to 3/4 c)
1 egg
So basically I didn't really follow the recipe at all ;)

I rolled out the pasta and lined up teaspoonfuls of stuffing along one edge, fold, and seal! Then trim and cook as usual.

Despite my inability to follow directions, it still came out really the well. The only problem with this cooking escapade was the thickness of the pasta sheet I rolled out. I only went to level 5 and it was too thick, almost tough. So next time I will roll it out thinner and they will be perfect!

A few crockpot dishes

I guess I should get my own food blog instead of continuing to post in here, even though my food wasn't TERRIBLE. Maybe next time.

I just got the crock pot that "we" registered for, and I was excited to test it out. I made two new dishes.

Spicy Chicken Wings in Barbecue Sauce

Ingredients:

• 3 pounds chicken wings (16 wings)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1-1/2 cups barbecue sauce
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 teaspoons prepared mustard or spicy mustard
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• Tabasco to taste, optional (I didn't use any Tobasco sauce)

Preparation:

Rinse chicken wings; pat dry. Cut off and discard wing tips then cut each wing at the joint to make two sections (I didn't have to do this part because I bought wings that were already prepared). Sprinkle wing pieces with salt and pepper; place wings on an lightly oiled broiler pan.

Broil about 4 inches from the heat for 10 minutes on each side, or until chicken wings are nicely browned (I also didn't bother to broil my chicken first, since I don't have a broiler pan, and also I'm lazy). Transfer chicken wings to crockpot (the first step that I actually followed).

In a bowl, combine barbecue sauce, honey, spicy mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco. Pour sauce over chicken wings. Cover and cook on LOW for 4 to 5 hours or on High 2 to 2 1/2 hours (I cooked on low for 6-ish hours). Serve directly from slow cooker, keeping temperature on LOW. Makes about 30 chicken wings (you should ignore this, as it is impossible for a recipe that calls for 16 raw wings to make 30 cooked wings...unless....MAGIC?!).

Conclusion:

This was an easy and tasty recipe. I would make it again, exactly the way I made it this time.

Beef Stew II

• 2 pounds cubed beef stew meat
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons margarine
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4 carrots, sliced
• 3 stalks celery, sliced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• 4 cups water
• 2 potatoes (added by me)
  

Serves 8 people.

Preparation:

1. Dredge beef cubes in flour until evenly coated.
2. Melt butter in saute pan and saute coated beef cubes until evenly brown.
3. Transfer beef to slow cooker and add onions, carrots, celery, garlic, bay leaves, salt, sugar, pepper, paprika, cloves, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Pour in water and stir.
4. Cover and cook on Low 10 to 12 hours or on High 5 to 6 hours (I did it on high).

Conclusion:

It ended up kind of bland, and the flavor it did have was weird. I am chalking it up to accidentally pouring way too many ground cloves in when I was trying to measure out 1/8 teaspoon OVER the pot. Not smart. I think if I tried again, I would use a different recipe.

I have pictures of these, which I will post later.

Lightning Round

It turns out butwesuckatcooking.com is available. Should I get it for the site? Does anyone care?

Ok, here comes a bunch of quick disasters from the last month, in increasing order of destruction:

1) Today, I tried to make Lime Butter Sauce to serve over salmon. It calls for making an emulsion. I've never made an emulsion before, but I've kind of sort of watched Amy do it a couple times. In my mind, making an emulsion always involved slowly dripping oil into a liquid while you were rapidly stirring it. I didn't really read the instructions very carefully on the lime butter sauce, but it involved using melted butter instead of oil. So I carefully dripped the melted butter into the lime juice as I stirred... disaster. Each bit of melted butter instantly solidified on contact with the cooler lime juice. Instead of a nice frothy emulsion, I got little blobs of butter covered in lime juice... it was kind of disgusting.

However, this isn't a true disaster, because I immediately tried the recipe again. This time I poured all the ingredients in at once and mixed like hell with an immersion blender. It turned out much better. Amy approved.

Not much of a disaster. How about...

2) I made an apple pie a few weeks ago. While some of you seem to hate peeling apples, I hate apple peels in my pie. But that wasn't the disaster... the disaster was not baking the pipe long enough so I was left with undercooked, crunchy apples in a soupy sauce.

Definitely not very tasty. But is that the best we can do? No!

3) I was making sweet potato fries. I had successfully made regular fries, sweet potato fries, and even donuts in the last month, so my kitchen ego was even more golden-deep-fried than usual. I had been frying in a big 8 quart pot, but I was making a smaller batch, so for some reason I dropped down to a 3 quart pot. Big mistake. I had my oil up to 375º, dropped in my fries, and immediately the oil started to boil over up and out of the pot.

At this point, I'm faced with a dilemma. The correct response would probably have been to immediately cover the pot and then turn off the gas burner. The correct response did not occur to me at the time. All I could think about was how all that hot oil boiling over the side of the pot was about to ignite from the big fat gas burner underneath. However, the knob for the gas was pretty much right next to the burner, so turning off the gas would involve me sticking my hand into the fiery, greasy maelstrom.

Screw it. I decided to cut the gas. Miraculously, I only got a few grease splatter burns on my hand and managed to avoid setting the kitchen on fire.

Moral of the story: if you are deep frying, use the biggest pot you have. Or maybe just go to Bojangles.

Melanie's beer bread gone bad

I just tried Melanie's beer bread again, and failed, again. Both times the dough didn't rise! I used the self-rising flour substitute instead of the real thing, so maybe that's the problem? Or maybe this recipe doesn't like me? Any suggestions? Those were my only two attempts at making bread, so don't assume that I know something obvious. I pretty much don't know anything except exactly what I read from the recipe.

Pie!

I know this blog is supposed to be all about cooking disasters, but I don't care, 'cause I just baked my first pie! And it was edible! And it was apple!


It's not very pretty, but it sure tasted good. This leads me to conclude that it is impossible to go wrong when following a recipe that calls for one cup of sugar, and pie crust. I got the recipe from my sister Kelly, who got it from the back of a Trader Joe's pie crust box. I didn't make my own crust - maybe next time? Anyway, Kelly told me that I can get away with not peeling the apples before putting them in the pie, and I witnessed it firsthand when I tried her delicious non-peeled apple pie. So in an effort to save time and energy, I opted not to peel my apples, and I couldn't tell a difference.

It was particularly tasty with vanilla frozen yogurt on top.



Mark ate his plain because he's lame.


Here's the recipe:

Trader Joe's Gourmet Apple Pie

Objective
To make an apple pie that is not gross, burnt, hard, or otherwise inedible.

Ingredients

- 9 to 9-1/2 inch pie pan
- 1 package pie crust
- 3 pounds Granny Smith Apples, peeled cored and sliced (in my case, just cored and sliced)
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons milk or cream

Serves six to eight.

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Prepare crust according to package directions. Set aside two tablespoons sugar. Mix remaining sugar, flour, cinnamon, cloves, and salt together and sprinkle over apples. Toss well to coat.

2. Mound apples on top of crust. Cut butter into small pieces and dot pieces over the apples. Carefully place top crust over apples. Press and crimp edges of the top and bottom crust together at the rim of the pan. Brush the top crust all over with milk or cream and sprinkle with sugar.

3. Using a small knife make five or six slits in the top crust. Bake on the lowest rack in the oven for 15 minutes. Remove pie. Cover edges of crust with foil. Return pie to oven and reduce heat to 350 degrees. Continue to bake for about one hour or until crust is evenly golden brown and apples are tender.

Results
Yum!

Conclusion
Apple pie is good.

Rock-Hard Abs? Sadly, no such luck.

After watching a record two (yes, TWO!) cooking shows gushing about the awesome tenderness that is braised beef, I decided I had to conquer this beast. I went down to my Farmer's Market, where they sell Texas Long Horn Steak. I asked him for the best recommendation for a braised beef and he gave me a nice cut of flank steak.

In the midst of my research on how to best braise this steak, I asked Amy and Alex for advice. They both seemed nonplussed that I intended to use flank steak for braising and told me to cook it as a normal piece of steak. I was a little confused but also a little panicked, so ... I took their advice.

I prepared it the way I would any nice piece of filet or porterhouse and the results were tough little nuggets I could barely chew around. I was so sad. Martin had mashed the potatoes to an amazing creamy puree and I had a great presentation.

I think next time I might not cook flank steak this way. :)

My Turn, My Turn!

To continue on with Brian's biscuit fiasco, I recently had one of my own. I followed the biscuit recipe from the cookbook Jordan gave me for Christmas, missing two very key words:

2 cups self-rising flour

Right. So you can imagine the hockey pucks that mine came out to be. Amazingly, Martin still ate them! Good man, Martin, good man!

On a positive note - are those allowed in this blog? - I made it again (with the right flour!) and dropped it on top of the pot pie I made last night. When you use the proper ingredients, it comes out great! Fancy that!

Biscuits of Shame

I've long claimed to be some sort of superior biscuits maker, which is why it was kind of humbling that my sister totally kicked my ass at a biscuit bake-off last weekend.

Her biscuits were pretty good and man mine were not so good. Elizabeth is very humble in her account of her victory in her write-up of the event. However, I was there, and I can tell you my biscuits were flat, dry little hockey pucks. Square hockey pucks. The ones on the left that don't look much like a tasty biscuit.

I'd like to blame my downfall on not using self-rising flour, but instead a combination of unbleached all-purpose and cake flour, but Elizabeth used the same flour I did, so no reason to complain there. Basically, it comes down to not using enough baking powder and then over-baking. End result: flat little hockey pucks. Granted, put enough jam on it and it's still edible. But Elizabeth definitely won that round.

Roasted Marshmallow Pudding

Recently, I decided to try my luck at some homemade pudding. Butterscotch. It was my first attempt at cooking such a thing, and the directions didn't give any times. While melting the butter and brown sugar, I was instructed that it would be ready when I smelled a nutty smell. Well, I smelled a nutty smell before all of the butter was even melted, so I thought that using my nose wasn't the best indication. I continued melting. I let the butter and sugar melt together a little too long, because once combined with the heavy cream, the house was filled with a slightly burnt smell. I continued anyway and let the pudding set in the fridge until we were ready for desert.

The pudding tasted nothing like butterscotch, but to my surprise, Tommy was very happy with the way it turned out because it tasted EXACTLY like roasted marshmallows. YUM. We didn't have any graham crackers or chocolate to pair with the pudding. Oh. Well.

Chef in Swedish is kock

I feel out of place posting to the same cooking blog that Brian Ferris has contributed to, but I suck at cooking.

I'm spoiled. I haven't done any real cooking in over a year. When I do prepare something, it involves at most a spoon & bowl or a plate & knife.

I'm so bad at cooking, I often show up late for dinners that are cooked for me. Sorry Melanie!

Stir fry

Tonight I made some stir fry. It was a pain in the ass to make and tasted funky. A lot of work for very little pay-off.

The Indian Food I ate tonight

This is a food blog, not a cooking blog, right? Good. So, today I made Mark drive 4-ish hours to bring me my glasses (this is a somewhat long, non-food-related story). Have I mentioned lately that Mark is awesome?

Anyway, needless to say, Mark was a little bitter about the whole ordeal, so I tried cheering him up by getting take-out Indian food from this Indian restaurant in downtown Sunnyvale. We ordered the Chicken Biryani, some samosas, and some other Murg thing that I don't know the name up. HOLY MOTHER. That was some seriously spicy Indian food. And now I feel like my stomach is going to explode.

No Seriously.

I decided I wanted to make (insert some extravagant dinner) tonight, but I realized I didn't have any (insert random ingredient here) so I went to the grocery store. While I was there, I forgot what I was there to buy, so then I just went out to eat, and it was good.