Food In Many Forms

I was fully intending on doing a practice run the week before making Valentine's Day dinner for my boyfriend, but I was prevented by the " Snowpocalypse " as they are now calling it. I had decided on a recipe for Rack of Lamb  weeks ago, and I had my heart set on doing it, so instead of backing out, I enlisted the help of my boyfriend for the scary parts (i.e. cutting the meat ). I would have done it myself, if I had been able to practice, but it was a $55 piece of meat and I wasn't about to mess it up. The directions for stuffing the lamb were surprisingly clear and easy to follow. Using a wooden spoon to widen the hole and push down the stuffing was quite clever. I just wish I had prepared it earlier so the lamb could have marinated for longer. (Tip: While we were waiting for the lamb to marinate, we toasted a some french bread, lathered on some olive tapenade and covered it with the remains of the feta cheese stuffing.) The only thing lacking in that particular ...

When my roommate invited a friend over for potluck dinner, I soon thought of vegetable fried rice as the perfect mish mosh of whatever vegetables people bring with them. We used jasmine rice fried in sesame oil and soy sauce, scrambled eggs, onions, celery, carrots, canned peas and bell peppers. Also red pepper flakes in the rice gave it the slightest kick. Yummy! Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Today, we turned pureed pumpkin into a Gourmet meal. Here's how: J & A's Pumpkin Sausage Ziti   Ingredients Ziti, or any other tubular pasta  Andouille Italian Sausage (1 link per person) 2 Tbsp olive oil Garlic, 1 clove White Wine, a splash 1/2 cup vegetable broth 10-15 oz pumpkin (1 small can) 3/4 cup 2% milk 1/2 tsp Nutmeg 1/8 tsp Cinnamon Coarse Salt and Pepper, to taste Parsley, a pinch Instructions 1. Heat olive oil in a deep saucepan until hot, add garlic 2. Add white wine and simmer 3. Add some vegetable broth and all of pureed pumpkin into pan 4. Allow sauce to reduce, stirring occasionally, and slowly add in more broth 5. When it starts to bubble, add in the milk 6. Add spices and seasonings 7. Allow sauce to simmer and reduce 8. Saute sausage links in a separate pan and heat water for pasta 9. Cut sausage into bite size pieces and cook pasta as directed 10. When the sausage is cooked, the sauce reduced, and the pasta is al dente, everyone serve themselves a gour...

After my last post, I decided to be very selective in picking my next recipe - a yellow cake. Food Network had nothing resembling a basic yellow cake, while All Recipes had dozens of versions that were all just slightly different! After looking through reviews, I could not find a yellow cake recipe that did not have at least five reviews claiming it tasted like cornbread and five more who found it dry and tasteless. I ended up searching for Butter Cake instead, and chose a  recipe that achieved a rating of 4.5 out of 5 with 100 reviews. Still on my guard for cornbread character and dry, tastelessness, I read through the reviews. Several people suggested adding an extra egg or egg yolk, so I added an egg yolk. At least one person suggested doubling the vanilla and I figured - why not? With the cupcakes ready to bake, my roommate and I had a last-minute urge to add food coloring and you can see the results....Personally, I think it looks like a griffin or a pegasus or some...

I'm not sure that I have mentioned that I started cutting out recipes from magazines and putting them in an empty, old photo album . Well, it has been interesting to say the least. I have been disappointed with how some of them have turned out, (See Squash Casserole ) while others were pretty tasty (See Holiday Fruit Pies ). But to be honest, the recipes that are consistently good are the ones that are online . When I go to a site like allrecipes.com and there are rave reviews about the Molasses Cookies, I know they are gonna be amazing. And even better, a lot of the comments are very constructive - reviewers discuss substitutions they made and try to clarify some of the directions. It's kind of like Peer Review in scientific journals - as people test this "chemical reaction" they are checking the validity of the experiment and making it better!  Yesterday, I made Macaroni and Cheese from scratch. I had a recipe from Rachel Ray in my recipe book/photo album t...

The urge to bake has not left and after dinner today I could not wait to make molasses cookies ! When I look on my shelves at all the spices and sauces I have accumulated recently, I am quite impressed with how much I have really become a Cook. When one of my roommates is missing an ingredient to make dinner, it is not unlikely I will be able to find it in one of the five or six places that I hide away food. Even more exciting to me is when I try to make a recipe and have no way of getting the ingredients, I am able to throw something together anyways with the ingredients I have. I made crab cakes last week and we had neither old bay nor hot sauce nor dijon mustard. Instead, I used yellow mustard packets from the convenience store, I added lots of fresh black pepper and some Worchestershire sauce, and baked them up! Today, I just got lucky because I had molasses and sugar and flour and spices. The recipe was your typical cookie recipe...beat wet ingredients, combine dry, mix t...

The University of Maryland probably got 3 feet of snow yesterday, and barely any stores are open. However, with my determination to bake, I found a recipe that only required a minimal number of ingredients. The recipe we used to make meringues is a very basic one - egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, lemon zest and salt. But we added in cocoa powder and instant coffee to some of them to create a little more variety. They turned out amazing! We made the cookies really big, so we left them in for ten extra minutes, but other than that the recipe was really easy and accurate. I thought it would be funny to keep them in an old empty meringue container - but I am probably the only one who finds it immensely cool!