Thanksgiving!!! Candied sweet potatoes (p. 302), Bread and mushroom stuffing (p. 533), Mashed potatoes (p.295), etc

Thanksgiving!! Hooray! A holiday where the main focus is where it should be--on food!!

My mom, who usually does the cooking, is experiencing neuropathy with her chemo, which makes her really sensitive to hot and especially cold. Even though we have a little thanksgiving each year (this year it was me, my mom, Josh, and his brother), it still requires a lot of cooking. So I decided to do what I could to help (and knock out some Joy recipes along the way).

First things first. What oven-cooked item could I make early so it wouldn't crowd the turkey? Candied sweet potatoes (p. 302) seemed like a good choice--and a serving size of 4! Perfect. We wouldn't have ten years worth of leftovers (and I only had 5 sweet potatoes--exactly what the recipe calls for). These were good. Not overly sweet and without marshmallows, two things I like in sweet potatoes. They also heated up really well. They were only made with four potatoes though--the last one had some gross black thing in the middle--it had to be culled from the herd. I made the recipe without lemon zest because I DESPISE zesting--well, at least until I get a microplane...

So why is there only one picture of this? And it's AFTER cooking? I forgot! No good reason--well, and the camera wasn't charged. But they do look tasty.




The only other thing I needed the oven for was toasting the breadcrumbs for the stuffing. My mother was absolutely horrified that I didn't need her to buy me ready made breadcrumbs. TJOC is big on toasting your own breadcrumbs, so I just needed her to buy white bread. That sounds easy--but getting you 100% Italian mother to buy pre-sliced white sandwich bread is not a simple task. She eventually did it, but not without a lot of complaints.


I decided to make Basic bread stuffing (p. 532), modified to Bread and mushroom stuffing (p. 533). Toasting the breadcrumbs wasn't difficult at all and they were beautiful and golden brown...

The bread pre-toast:




The bread post-toast--look how pretty it is!:




Mom was convinced this recipe was going to amount to--how did she so eloquently put it??--oh yes, stuffing a loaf of white bread up the turkey's ass. (As you can see, she's a back-seat cooker). She didn't need to worry--the stuffing was heavily spiced. I would never have thought to put nutmeg or cloves in there--although they were really good. You could definitely taste both flavors, but they were good. I mixed cremini and button mushrooms for the mushroom mix--I would have mixed more but Iowa has a pretty sad mushroom selection. I baked the stuffing in a casserole dish rather than inside the bird, so I added more broth so it wouldn't dry out. I also added two eggs which made a more firm stuffing.

Mixing the breadcrumbs and spices:



Pre-cooking--with tasty bits of butter on the top:





The tasty stuffing, after being shoveled onto everyone's plate:


I LOVE Yukon Gold potatoes. They are soooo good. So obviously, Mashed potatoes (p.295) were among the first things on my list of items to make. I was suspicious that TJOC wouldn't be able to live up to the wonderful Cook's Illustrated recipe that I made last year. And they weren't. The potatoes were good, but not great. Josh always enjoys the mashing process, I think it allows him to get out his frustrations in a healthy way. These cooked WAY faster than I expected, so they were done too early, which made me angry.


They tasted better than they looked:



At this point I was done with everything I had planned on making. But there were a lot of button mushrooms left over. So I decided, on a whim, to make Broiled stuffed mushroom caps (p. 284) stuffed with Basic flavored butter (p. 558) flavored to Garlic butter (p. 559). Oh were these great!! They were the hit of the holiday and gone in about thirty seconds. I can't recommend these enough--they were really easy and good. And the garlic butter was easy to make once I decided to mince the garlic in the world's smallest food processor. They would have been great on toast--sort of like snail-free escargot.


The butter--it makes quite a bit, I recommend having more than one use for it or halving the recipe--





The mushrooms pre- and post- broil. Thy tumbled all around! But were still nice and buttery:










So why didn't I make the cranberries? I said on the last blog I was going to...well, I specifically told my mother not to mince them and she did anyway. Unfortunately, that knocked my recipe out. And what about the pie? I'm not sure why that one didn't happen--I'm guessing lack of time.



Two more quick pictures--the turkey, although I only washed it, deserves it's day in the sun. It was very pretty. And Josh tried his hand at the electric slicer :)








www.Kiva.org is a really cool "charity". It isn't really a charity--it's a micro-lender, so you make little loans (right now you can only donate $25 to each one) to needy people and they pay you back. Most of the lenders have a 0% default rate, so you will get your money back, but your helping someone who needs it. I just made four loans--all to people trying to get started in agriculture, three to pig farmers (I have a soft spot for pigs!). It's a good deed, especially around the holidays. And you're helping people get on their feet so they won't need charity any more--how great is that? If you decide to do it, use me (email me for my username!) as a referral--I don't get anything but I would like to know if I influence anyone to make a loan :) As fellow food-lovers, I implore you to get involved :)

Chicken Cacciatore (p.433) and Becker Chicken Soup (p. 134)

So Josh and I bought a package of chicken thighs at the grocery store. I love chicken thighs--they have a taste (unlike the breast, most of the time) and they are INCREDIBLY cheap. This being said, I was under the impression that I was going to feel like cooking a lot more the week I bought them and they had been "aging" (hmm...chicken doesn't tenderize through aging...) in my refrigerator. I didn't want to end up throwing them out--what a waste! But we already had some in the world's smallest freezer and didn't have room for more. So I decided to use them all (novel, I know! ).


I made chicken cacciatore (p.433). Now, my family has a chicken cacciatore recipe and it is NOTHING like this one, so I didn't know what to expect. Our recipe doesn't have olives and has a hellava lot more tomatoes, so I didn't know what to expect.

The first strange part of this recipe? The fact that they seem to think I can fit 3.5-4.5 lbs of chicken thighs into a skillet. What skillet could fit that many thighs? Certainly not one I own! So I used six, which is what my skillet fit, and I think it was the perfect ratio of chicken:sauce.

This recipe is really good. I used oil cured olives, like it asked for, and they were awesome. I would recommend using even more than the recipe calls for, if you like olives. The mushrooms were also good. The chicken was tender, although the skin got kind of gross, so I would recommend skinning the chicken before using it. And the final test? It heated up great! In our house, this is a big deal :)

The onions and spices...watch them, they desperately want to burn!

Adding the chicken and tomatoes--it isn't very tomato-y, I'm warning you!

The finished product. Doesn't the sauce look tasty! Man, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it....

So I still had about four chicken thighs left over. What to do with them...first I thought to make chicken tortilla soup, but I didn't have any avocados on hand and didn't want to go to the store. So I decided to make Becker Chicken Soup (p. 134) with the thighs. I even got to use the chicken stock I made previously! It wasn't enough but it gave the soup a great chickeny taste. Four thighs was definitely enough chicken, even if you like a lot of meat in your soup.

I also used more curry than it called for--and it was delicious! Josh happily ate this for days. I think it would be better if you added either noodles or rice though...

Just as the soup starts to simmer...my bouquet garni is not in a cheesecloth, but it's easy enough to remove anyway.

The (tasty) final product:

Black Bean Soup (p. 133) and Tomato Meat Sauce (p. 563)

So...hmm...well...I've been a terrible blogger! You've placed your faith in me and I haven't been blogging. Do I have any excuses? Of course--but they aren't good enough (I've been sick, in Mexico, and worried that my boyfriend's cancer that was previously in remission might be back). What's worse? That I have several recipes that I cooked, took pictures of, and didn't blog about!!



So I'm going to double blog today. But what do you have to look forward to? THANKSGIVING! The holiday that is ALL about EATING! My mom is in charge of the turkey, gravy, and pumpkin pie, but she's undergoing chemo for colorectal cancer and can't finish the meal. So I'm making mashed potatoes, candies sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, a vanilla cream meringue, and the stuffing. How exciting is that!!



So, you know, I had the beans that had been soaking, to be made into Black Bean Soup (p. 133). As a holder of a meat science degree, I couldn't make my soup vegetarian, although it easily could be. I used salt-pork, which is like a chunk of bacon. I also put ham into the soup, which made it more hardy. With some cheese on the top and some Ritz crackers--it makes one hellava meal! But be forewarned--it makes a TON of soup. Be ready to eat it with a lot of people or you will have a bunch left over. Since I'm the only person in the house who likes beans, I ate this for days, but it was really good.



One big warning. When you drain the beans, you're supposed to reserve the juices. Well...whoops! Still worked though! I added a little of my homemade chicken stock to flesh the flavor out a little.



The celery, onion, carrots, spices browning nicely:















Hmm...it doesn't LOOK like black bean soup yet...although the black pork is a little creepy looking...








What a difference 3 hours makes! It really helps if you have a normal sized food processor too...

In real life, it looks much less like mud :)











Since I was in a cooking mood, I also made Tomato Meat Sauce (p. 563). Of course, I knew from the start that white-bread TJOC probably isn't the end all of Italian cooking. That being said, this sauce was pretty good. I used salt-pork for it, instead of bacon or pancetta, because I had it left over from the black bean soup. It was very tasty--like cracklings in your sauce! The sauce is very tomato-y because of the whole tomatoes. I recommend it--I think it will freeze well. Of course, that would be a lot more helpful if we weren't cursed with the world's smallest freezer...





My one problem with that the recipe required 1 T of tomato paste...what the heck am I supposed to do with the rest of the can???





Browning the beef and salt-pork in olive oil...YUM!













Mmmm...smells great! And super easy...

















The finished product--ready to go in the freezer (the picture looks like you are going to dive right in!):

Household Poultry Stock (p. 118), Bouquet Garni (p. 960), Baked Polenta (p. 349), Curry Mayonnaise (p. 580)

First of all, I have decided to abstain from cooking Mexican food this week :) I'm nervous about my research and don't really want to think about the trip!

Second, I'm pretty sure people are reading this blog who I don't know in real life--that is super exciting! Also, if you decide to make any of these recipes, go back and comment on how yours turned out. If you want to take a picture of yours and email it to me, I'll post it on the blog!


Yesterday I got highly motivated to cook. First item I wanted to make? Black bean soup. So I got out my black beans, started reading the recipe....uh oh...beans need to soak overnight! So I guess that will have to be made Monday!

So what else to make...

I had the leftover carcass from a rotisserie chicken that we bought at King Soopers. I had no idea what to do with it but it still had some meat on the bone and it seems wasteful to throw it away. So I decided to make Household Poultry Stock (p. 118). Super easy! Throw the chicken carcass and some water in a pot, boil it, throw some vegetables and Bouquet Garni (p. 960) into the pot, boil some more. Strain it and VOILA! Chicken stock. And it makes your house smell great--like chicken soup. Actually, the stuff I strained out of the stock looked pretty damn good too--it would probably be good if you wanted to eat it.

So am I still going to buy chicken stock at CostCo? Yes, because we use a TON of it. But I will make all of our chicken carcasses into stock too...


All of the ingredients boiling away:



The strained stock--look how tasty!



What to make next? We got a nice big hunk of salmon at Costco and Josh was highly motivated to grill it so I didn't need to help with the main course. But what could I make as a side dish? Baked Polenta (p. 349) was something I had all the ingredients for...

Now, I don't know how many of my readers are of Italian heritage. I am and my mom and noni made polenta for me all the time. We would have it with sauce on it and the next day, we would slice it, fry it, and eat it with maple syrup. This recipe is not like my families polenta.

TJOC has 4 polenta recipes, but this one is strange.

Reasons why this recipe is strange:
1. It has swiss cheese in it. Any cheese is strange in polenta, except maybe Parmesan. But swiss? How Italian is that? Very odd.

2. It tells you to slice three kinds of cheese (well, slice swiss and mozzarella, measure out some Parmesan). Then it tells you to put half in the middle and half on top. Half of what? Half of all the cheeses? Or half of the cheese in general? I put the swiss in the middle and the mozz and parm on the top...

I hate vague instructions!

So how did it taste? Pretty good. Odd, but good. I think it would be better with some sauce on it.

Browning the onions in olive oil...


The constructed polenta pre-oven




Nicely browned and tasty-looking!





So what else could I make? It seemed like a good idea to put some sort of sauce on the salmon. I decided to make Curry Mayonnaise (p. 580). OMG! This was delicious. TJOC recommends using it in chicken salad...I'm totally going to next time I make it. If you like curry you have GOT to make this! My favorite way to eat it is to mix the leftover salmon in the curry mayo the next day and eat it on Ritz crackers (I'm obviously a gourmand!).





Until next time!

Cauliflower and Potato Curry (p. 267)

Where have my comments gone? I think people are still reading because they mention items from my blog but they aren't commenting--I want more!

Sorry that I haven't been blogging so much recently--but I haven't been cooking! I was sick at the end of last week (didn't feel like working!!) and my blowout trip to Kansas City is coming on Thursday--awesome awesome awesome! When I get back I'm going to do some serious cooking.

So what did I cook yesterday? Aloo Gobi--or as white bread TJOC says, Cauliflower and Potato Curry (p. 267). Pretty easy to make. Chop some stuff up, brown it. Chop more stuff up, brown it. Add broth and coconut milk. Cook it down. Pretty easy! This recipe could easily be vegan (although mine wasn't).

Again, it's white bread, so it doesn't have NEAR enough curry in it. Even so, it was awesome and Josh said it was great the next day--plus it was easy!

I'm always so nervous cooking Indian food but DAMN--both dishes I've made so far have really turned out well...



Yum...




And it was made with frozen spinach instead of fresh...worked fine!




Josh felt strongly that the chili he made tonight deserved to be pictured in the blog :) It was very tasty, but not from TJOC


I'm going to Mexico in a couple weeks, so I think I may dedicate the next few week to Mexican foods!

Chicken fingers (p. 430) with Barbeque sauce (p. 586) and Honey mustard dipping sauce (p. 566)

I was totally unmotivated to cook Monday night and we barely have any food in the house. That being said, we did have some boneless, skinless, (tasteless?), chicken breast segments that we accidental paid a fortune for and I had managed to thaw. So what to do with them....

Chicken fingers (p. 430)! I love chicken fingers! And I imagined I would like homemade chicken fingers better homemade then the chicken selects at McDonald's that I have been over-eating (I WILL win Monopoly!). There are two recipes in TJOC for chicken fingers in different sections of the book. One of them requires a deep fryer. I have a deep fryer...but I'm not ready for that mess yet. So, p. 430 has a recipe that just requires stovetop frying! Perfect!

Hmm...there one egg yolk was twice the size of the other! One of my eggs was obviously from a mutant chicken.



Breading was kind of fun. You dip the chicken in an eggy mixture,than in a breadcrumb mixture. After about two of them your fingers get coated in a chicken-y, egg-y, breadcrumb-y, nast-y mix. Even so, it's fun, like playing in a sandbox. I think I paid more to have the chicken precut, which is incredibly stupid--I'm not THAT lazy! I'll pay more attention next time.


Breaded chicken fingers, pre-frying...




After cooking...it is possible that these fingers had a titch too much frying, although they didn't taste burned at all!




I decided to make homemade Barbeque sauce (p. 586). Awesome! So easy that I was talking on the phone with my mother for most of it...Now I warn you, this is Carolina-style BBQ sauce so it's pretty vinegar-y and tangy. If that isn't your style, then you won't like it. Josh and I use a lot of BBQ sauce and this made a lot of it, so I think we will be making this again. We also had to simmer it for way longer than 5 minutes to thicken it BUT that may because of the evil that is elevation.



As I started to boil the sauce, it was pretty red and chunky...





After being boiled, it was lighter....mmmm....and tasty....





Josh wanted to help, so I told him to stir the sauce for a while!

And then Honey Mustard Dipping Sauce (p. 566). This was awesome! It's pretty much mixing dijon mustard (pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?) and honey (local Colorado honey, of course), but it's amazing how tasty that combo is! And here is a secret, non-TJOC hint that Josh gave me--if you mix a little mayo in, it's like the honey-mustard in fast food joints!

Honey mustard sauce--it's even good if you dip Brussels Spouts in it!

I'm not afraid to say it, I gorged myself on chicken fingers and sauce. I managed to pack away well over half of them. Oh my god they were great! I'm salivating just thinking about them....


My helpful cleaning crew....

Sweet Crepes (p. 679), Crepe Cake (p. 651), and Pancakes (p. 644)

You would think that I would want to cook a lot this weekend because it was rainy and gross. But I didn't. Why not?

1. It's rainy and gross and I find it hard to be motivated when the weather is dreary (I suppose I should never live in the Pacific Northwest!).

2. I had a hella lot of work to get done this weekend, both for school and housework.

3. Josh and I are, umm....way over budget in groceries this month so I wanted to hold off a bit.

4. Our refrigerator is jammed with uneaten leftovers.

That being said, there has been minimal cooking in the last few days. Although I did post, but you probably didn't see it--it was actually earlier than my last post, so I backdated it. So go check it out!

Sweet Crepes (p. 679) and Crepe Cake (p. 651). The sweet crepes were awesome, although I think deep down the savory crepes were better. Really, the get easier each bunch you do. Have any of you tried to make them yet? I really think everyone should try. The crepe cake is really interesting. To make it, you make a crepe, spread jam on it, put another crepe on, spread more jam, keep layering. Then you put it in the oven--and if you are far more exciting then me--you flambe it! How exciting!

Make crepes, spread jam...

The finished product:

A crepe cake is really something that would be incredibly impressive for a dinner party. Esp. if you light it on fire. It was simple and can sit for up to 8 hours, so you wouldn't have to be in the kitchen while everyone else was eating. Since you can vary the jam or jelly you use (I used black raspberry from Trader Joe's), it could feel like you were making dozens of different cakes.

A slice of crepe cake.

This will be the last you see of crepes or blintzes for a while. Josh is incredibly sick of them! I don't understand why, I think they are awesome!

Now, on a completely different note, Pancakes (p. 644). Josh was shocked that I have never made pancakes from scratch before, but I hadn't. I think you'd be better off making these from scratch then from a box--they were super easy and there can't be that many more ingredients just starting from scratch.

Josh made fun of my pancakes because they had pockets of flour, but the recipe says very clearly not to mix it very much. They were very tasty!

The mix--the recipe says that lumps don't matter:

The pancakes love each other--maybe they will make little pancakes!

A huge pile of pancakes--

EDIT! I am happy to say, the blame for the ugly pancakes can be laid at the door of the TJOC editors. The edit page shows that although the recipe calls for 1.75 TABLEspoons baking powder, it should ACTUALLY say 1.75 TEAspoons baking powder. Make sure to make the change to your version of TJOC!

Mulligatawny (p. 136), High altitude classic 1-2-3-4 cake (p. 747), and Quick white icing (p. 793)

I am a few days behind and I have to blog about yesterday soon...

I love soup and I'm happy it's fall so that I can make fall-y things!

I made Mulligatawny (MGT) (p. 136) today. I don't know how many of you eat MGT, but it's one of my favorite Indian dishes, along with Kheer. But I've never made any Indian food, even though Jennifer (one of my great friends from high school who is married to an Indian man) tells me it's easy.

This was super easy. It only took about an hour from start to finish and made a hearty two servings as a main course. It was just creamy enough and the curry was awesome (I made it with yellow curry). The oddest part? There are apples in MGT. I had no idea about that, although they did give it a crisp taste.

A vague and blurry picture of the yellow, tasty soup:


****FULL DISCLOSURE***
I know that I have stated (numerous times) that I am doing this because I can't cook. That's true. But I am an excellent baker. In high school, friends used to ask for my cookies (specifically, my big cookie) for gifts. I send dozens and dozens of cookies out every Christmas. I bake and I bake well. That being said, I haven't mastered the high altitude yet and I'm sick of not baking...
**************************

I started this cake several days ago before noticing that I was out of eggs. It turns out that TJOC uses a TON of eggs so I ran out for the first time ever (I usually have plenty on hand). So I already had the flour mixture taken care of and the sugar measured, so I figured, this will be a breeze, I'll make cupcakes.

Where the hell are my cupcake tins? Oh! I have no idea. So I guess it will be a cake I'm making.

Let me remind you, I live at approximately 5,000 ft above sea level. Why does that matter? Because it screws up almost all cooking and I have had ZERO luck with baking so far. But, hey, TJOC has high altitude recipes, so how could I screw it up?

I have no idea, but I managed to screw up 1 of the 2 cakes. I would love to know how that happened considering they were both poured out of the same bowl and in the oven next to each other on the same shelf!

The good cake:


The bad cake (see the indentation in the middle?):


AAGGGHHH! Why does this happen? I'm just going to have to keep trying until I get it right.






I decide to ice my cake with quick white icing because I don't feel like digging out my candy thermometer.





This is where it starts to go downhill...Frankly, I think this is the funniest thing to happen to me so far in my journey of TJOC. I sifted and sifted--but for some reason, after about twenty minutes, I had 1/2 cup--and I needed 4 cups...so I just fluffed the powdered sugar and moved on. This wasn't a problem. What was the problem?


It looks good, doesn't it?

Well, TJOC calls for 4-6 TBSP of milk, sherry, rum, or coffee. I don't drink coffee, so that was a no go. I figured that milk would require me to refrigerate the cake, and I don't feel like doing that. So what do I use? I invited the Captain to the party. Yes, I put 6 TBSP of Captain Morgan rum in the frosting.

"So, do you want to taste the frosting" I asked Josh. Of course he did. "Um...it has a strange taste" was all he said..."does it taste like rum?" I asked. It did. I tasted it. I'm not confident I can take this to work...I'll smell like I have a flask in the desk. It tastes like someone poured rum into the cake, and of course, it isn't cooked off so there is plenty of alcohol still in it...

I'm not sure how much I want to eat my rum cake. I mean, I like rum cake normally, but this is a little much...

So I iced the cake and they are pretty...I guess we'll see...

I was going to give some of it to a co-worker because he gave me a whole bunch of garden tomatoes from his garden, but he doesn't drink, so I think this cake might be a no-no...