U.S. Senate bean soup (p. 133) and Tuscan beans (p. 255)

First things first, if you read my posts in a blog reader, you probably never look at the sidebars on the actual blog. So you don't know that I have a Facebook fan page! Please join, when I write ten posts in a day and backdate them, I will let you know! Plus, it's terrific for my self-esteem to get new fans.

For my last days at mom's house, I decided to make some bean recipes. Josh doesn't like beans, and although I do like them, sometimes TJOC recipes make an enormous amount of food. U.S. Senate bean soup (p. 133) has looked tasty to me for quite some time.

I soaked some white beans overnight and then added them to a soup pot with a ham hock and water:



I simmered it for about an hour, shredded the meat off the ham hock (mom was absolutely shocked there was so much meat on the ham hock), and added diced celery, onion, potato, and garlic.



It was then cooked again and it became creamy!



I didn't even have to mash it to get it that creamy! I thought it was really good. That being said, it didn't seem like a soup at all. A stew, maybe, but not soup. The ham lent a nice saltiness to the whole thing and it was really flavorful. TJOC says that this recipe is actually served in the U.S. Senate! The recipe is online.

I like Tuscan beans (p. 255). And the recipe was amazingly easy. I combined the beans, some sage, garlic, and olive oil in a pot and covered it with water:



When the beans were tender, it was done!



A little salt and pepper and it was perfect. I drizzled some olive oil on the top and it was absolutely delicious. This would be a perfect side dish if you were inviting over vegans for dinner--easy and filling. I used more garlic, which I really recommend, otherwise it's a little bland. And make sure you thoroughly salt the beans!

The recipe for Tuscan beans is online. Let me know what you think if you make it!

Egg salad (p. 164) and Drip coffee (p. 30)

This is a simple blog post, each recipe with only one picture.

I don't like Egg salad (p. 164), so this is another post in the list of foods my mom likes that I needed to make while I was home so mom could eat it.

The egg salad was easy--I chopped up hard-boiled eggs and mixed it with mayonnaise and a little onion:



Mom said it was the perfect egg salad. It's bizarre to me because it has almost no ingredients--it must be the ratios. I think people probably go over the top with mayonnaise although it's not necessary because of all the egg yolk. Mom said that lots of coworkers lustily eyed her egg salad sandwich the next day.

I don't drink coffee, although I do have a coffeepot. My mom has always sworn that everyone should have a coffeepot for guests and it actually does get used by other people relatively frequently. Even so, I've never made Drip coffee (p. 30), believe it or not. The only time I drink coffee is when I really need the caffeine and can't get to a nice can of Coke. And I then fill it full of cream and sugar.

TJOC's recipe is more about the quantity of water per coffee, which I followed, and then I followed the directions for the coffee maker:



I still didn't drink any, but my mom said the coffee was good. Not much to say about the topic, it's just coffee, right?

Cream of onion soup (p. 145) and Sauteed chicken livers (p. 440)

I have been getting amazingly behind on the randomly selected list so I looked it over to see if there was anything that I didn't want to eat but that mom would enjoy. Cream of onion soup (p. 145) was an obvious choice--I don't really like onions but my mom loves them.

Be very, very careful at the first step of the recipe--you cook two cups of diced onions in some butter over medium heat for TWENTY MINUTES! That's a really long time. The onions really, really wanted to burn. My mom was convinced that they wouldn't make it the full time--but they did.

I added flour and salt to the onions and then added turkey stock and heavy cream. After the mixture was cooked for a while, I added some of the hot soup to some beaten egg yolks:

That mixture was added back to the pot:

And done! It didn't even require any immersion blending! Mom really liked it and it was really easy. I think it would have been particularly good with onions out of the garden and it really showcases the onion flavor (there are almost no other ingredients). The recipe doesn't make very much soup, only four cups, so if you are anything like mom or I, you probably want to double it.

When I spotted Sauteed chicken livers (p. 440) on the randomly selected list, I knew mom would be eating that rather than me. Chicken livers are very cheap and I wish I liked them! But I don't. When I was working on my Master's degree I was trained for a beef flavor taste panel which highly sensitized me to livery flavor. I went from not liking the flavor of liver to absolutely despising it.

I rinsed them and separated them into their lobes.

I then cooked them for about a minute on each side in some butter. Watch them, they pop! In fact, some of them flipped themselves over at the minute mark (apparently, chicken livers are helpful).

I removed the chicken livers and then added onion to the pan, cooking it until it was brown and "crisp".

Apple juice was added and the crispy bits were scraped up. I added some turkey stock (the grocery store had turkey backs for $.30 each and I couldn't resist) and reduced it until it was syrupy.

And then popped the livers back in:

I actually think that picture is pretty attractive! Too bad it's of chicken livers. The whole house smelled like liver--it was disgusting. My mom was ecstatic. She said it was totally different than how she made them but they had a nice flavor. She even (gag) ate them cold the next day (gag). It hurts me to even type that. Be careful if you make these--there is a lot of chances to burn the whole thing and ruin all of your hard work.

French bread (p. 601)

First things first--my mom's new dog loves to watch me take pictures:

I think that's about the cutest picture of a dog that I've seen in a long time.

I've been failing at the breads and coffee cakes chapter big time. It's mostly because I'm absolutely terrified of bread making at high altitude. The first time my mom visited she attempted to make bread. It failed and she swears she stayed up all night angry about it, so she got up at 5 am to try again. It was much better but still not to her liking. So I've always thought that if my mom, an accomplished bread baker failed, what the heck could I do?

So mom brought up making bread when I was home in Iowa. I thought it was a great idea and started flipping through TJOC. Mom had neither bread flour or milk, one of which is required in almost every TJOC bread recipe. I finally found one that would work--French bread (p. 601).

The recipe has very few ingredients--all-purpose flour, salt, and dry yeast were mixed together. This recipe is slightly strange because the yeast is mixed directly into the flour instead of being mixed with water first. My mom mentioned that my great-aunt, whose baking skills are legendary in my family, always made bread this way.

I made a well in the center and poured in some water:

I then mixed it with my hands until it was "soft and elastic".

The bread went into an oiled dish and was covered (clean towel, ziploc bag, almost the same thing):

Until it doubled in size (a couple hours):

I punched it down and then let it rise again. Eventually, I rolled the loaves out and laid them on a greased pan:

I scored the top of the bread (I did diagonal stripes but TJOC mentions that you can also do one long horizontal stripe):

It looked perfect!

The bread was delicious! Nice and crusty, like a good baguette (or even a good Italian bread). Mom and I expected it to get hard very quickly (because of the total lack of preservatives) but it really didn't. The baguette made amazing little ham sandwiches! The bread was easy and quick--it was actually really fun to make.

Roast chicken I (p. 424)

I actually roast chickens relatively often. But I hadn't officially made Roast chicken I (p. 424). It's a really simple recipe, which was exactly what I needed after a huge day of cooking on New Year's Eve. I rinsed the chicken, rubbed it with olive oil, and then let mom season it (the picture is pre-seasoning):

It was cooked for about an hour and we attacked it like hyenas:

Delicious! Roasting a chicken is so amazingly easy that it blows my mind when people mention that they've never done it before. Honestly, if you are scared of roasting something, start with a chicken--they are so cheap that if you mess up (and you won't), it doesn't really matter. Then use the carcass to make stock!

I noticed that everyone else seems to posting a list of resolutions on their blog, so I'm going to follow the trend:

1. Graduate with my PhD. Preferably in May.

2. Cook 201 recipes in 2010.

3. Find a job.

4. Regularly exercise using my Wii--I hate excercising, so this is going to be a challenge.

5. Visit Dallas, New Orleans, Des Moines, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago to visit friends--I feel like I'm not seeing them nearly enough. And those are the easy ones--I'm really not seeing my friends in places like Fayetteville nearly enough.

6. Throw a massive garage sale and liquidate out some of the way too much stuff in this house

7. Read Stand Facing the Stove, the biography of Irma Rombauer

8. Take better pictures for the blog.

9. Get my dissertation research published.

10. Take more pictures! I have entire years with only one picture of myself.

NYE #5--Dolmas (p. 82) and Vegetarian chili (p. 254)

The final New Year's Eve post! Be sure to read them all.

Dolmas (p. 82). I will never be able to see the word "dolma" without immediately following it up in my head with "a giant pain in the ass". Rachel made the lion's share of these dolmas--I'll admit it--but I'm counting them off because I was standing next to her helping the whole time. I made about six other dishes in the time she was actively working on these stupid things. They took at least 4 hours, most of it active time.

The first step of dolma-making is soaking the grape leaves in water, separating each leaf. This took almost an hour--there were a LOT of leaves in those jars:

After soaking the leaves and changing the water twice (to remove the salt), the leaves had to be dried. Rachel's solution for this was to rip up paper towels. This took at least a half hour more--maybe more:

We made the mixture for the middle--lamb, onion (twice as much onion as lamb!), parsley, dill, and rice (we used brown rice instead of white). It didn't seem like much meat--this would be a good recipe to stretch meat.

The mixture was combined:

The mixture was then wrapped in the grape leaf like a little envelope:

And they were layered into a big pot, drizzled in olive oil, and covered in beef broth:

The whole mixture was then cooked. These pictures are depressing to even look at--apparently, neither Rachel nor I like dolmas very well. I don't think there was anything wrong with TJOC's recipe, per se, but neither one of us is a big fan of lamb and the grape leaves were really tough. Plus, there were a lot of onions in the mixture. A LOT of onions--and I don't really like onions. So they took forever and the dolmas were definitely our least favorite dish of the night. I think Rachel may have mentioned that they tasted a bit like feet smell, which I know is an appetizing thought. Oddly, my mother thought they were tasty, but then again, she eats cold chicken livers (to be seen in a future post).

Rachel, her fiance, and myself are all Iowa State University alumni--and our Cyclones finally managed to make it into a bowl game (and they won!). So, obviously, the game was on (although Rachel and I barely left the kitchen during the game--fine with me, I don't like watching sports). We thought it would be nice to have a meal during the game, since it started at 5 pm. We settled on Vegetarian chili (p. 254).

We cooked onion, red and green bell peppers, carrots, and garlic in a little olive oil.

So pretty! We added jalapenos, chili powder, cumin (freshly ground!), tomatoes (canned from Rachel's mom's garden!), and multiple kinds of beans (kidney, Great Northern, and black), as well as tomato juice to the veggie mixture:

The whole thing was cooked for almost an hour. It was really good! Hearty and flavorful with a really good mix of flavors! I like my chili to have a lot of tomatoes and a lot of beans, so it was right up my alley. That being said, most of the people at the party like their chili to include one additional ingredient--meat.

Yes, we added meat to the vegetarian chili:

Even more delicious! It was a big hit although it made a LOT of chili. We doubled the recipe but probably didn't need to--Rachel had a TON of chili left over.

All in all, it was a very fun party and I really enjoyed cooking for so many people! I hope to do it again.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope everyone has a truly excellent 2010. Any resolutions?

NYE #4--Pesto cheesecake (p. 76), Pigs in a blanket (p. 91), Curried nuts (p. 70), and Rosemary and brown sugar nuts (p. 70)

First things first, if you have the slightest doubt that this was a HUGE day of cooking--

This was our list of recipes that we would make. I needed the organization and it included how much cook time, fridge time, and prep time each item would take. I greatly underestimated the prep time of some of the foods (I'm talking to you, samosas and dolmas). Some of the items got knocked off the list as we cooked and ran out of time (Swedish meatballs, cupcakes) and I've blogged about other items before (Blue cheese dressing, honey mustard).

My mom had watched a tv segment on cream cheese covered in hot pepper jelly that she thought we should make. I happened to have a big jar of dad's homemade green pepper jelly that I had not idea what to do with. This was the result:

It was amazing! I thought green pepper jelly sounded horrible but it tastes almost nothing like hot pepper and is super sweet! It was so good on crackers! Dad gave me another big jar of it and I am going to make this at home in the future.

Rachel's cat was also being helpful:

There is something very strange to me about a savory cheesecake. I adore cheesecake. In fact, I would say that cheesecake is one of my favorite desserts. But Pesto cheesecake (p. 76)? It seemed so strange. TJOC gives no indication on how to eat it either--do you just take a slice? Or do you smear it on something? This was high on my list of "when am I ever going to make this" so when Rachel mentioned we should make something that I wouldn't normally make, it was the first thing to pop into my mind. The only experience I had with savory cheesecake was when Melissa of Melissa Cooks Gourmet made a green chili version.

The recipe wasn't difficult but was time-consuming. I combined pesto (store-bought) with ricotta cheese, sour cream, eggs, salt, lemon zest, nutmeg, and black pepper. I then poured the mixture into a springform pan that had been buttered and sprinkled with breadcrumbs:

It was then cooked in a waterbath:

And refrigerated for six hours (yes, six hours. Give yourself lots of lead time with this recipe). We popped the springform pan off, smeared more pesto on the top, and decorated it with sundried tomatoes:

We are such dorks! It seemed like the perfect decoration for the party. I would recommend this cheesecake to everybody who likes pesto. If you like pesto, this cheesecake will be a big hit. If you don't, it's going to be the most disgusting thing you've ever tasted. Rachel and I both liked it and I think it would have been even better if we had made it in an 8-inch pan instead of the 9-inch pan I had with me. I think you just eat it in slices, like sweet cheesecake. It was actually a very beautiful dish (but not a very popular one).

Pigs in a blanket (p. 91) are one of those foods that EVERYBODY seems to like but me. I don't know what it is about them but they just don't appeal to me. That being said, they seem to appeal to everyone else--we even had them as a hors d'oeuvres at the wedding (and got tons of compliments). I decided that they would be perfect for the party.

I took a can of refridgerated crescent roll dough, unrolled it, and cut it into pieces (ignoring the perferated lines). I then wrapped the dough around cocktail franks.

Each batch of the piggies made about a cookie sheets worth.

Popped into the oven, they puffed!

I made honey mustard sauce to go with them. They were a HUGE hit. They were so much of a hit that Rachel's boyfriend asked us to hide the rest of them so they weren't all gone before everyone got to the party. We did as he asked and people still hunted them down! The pigs in a blanket were absolutely the most popular thing at the party, which I think is a little ironic. We made all these difficult dishes that took hours and yet the pigs in a freakin' blanket are the first things eaten!

I thought Curried nuts (p. 70) seemed interesting and Rachel agreed. She pointed out that she didn't really like the curry mix she had (the real question is, why did we continue on at this point?).

Curry powder, cayenne, and butter were mixed together:

And the nuts were mixed in. The nuts (I used almonds from a friend's farm and store-bought peanuts and cashews) were roasted for about seven minutes.

We didn't have any parchment paper, so we just used aluminum foil--it's not quite as good but it worked okay. The nuts were strange because the curry powder wasn't very good--I think they would have been amazing if we would have used my own curry mixture. I've really never tried my hand at high-end nuts but it was much, much cooler than just putting out a bowl of salted mixed nuts. If I had a high-end lounge, these would totally be on the table, along with Rosemary and brown sugar nuts (p. 70). Rosemary and brown sugar nuts were made much the same way as curried nuts, except for a rosemary/brown sugar/corn syrup/butter mixture instead of the curry mixture:

I roasted them:

The corn syrup made them beautiful and glossy. Rosemary and brown sugar are unexpected flavors when it comes to nuts but they were absolutely delicious. I would make these again in a heartbeat. Again, they seemed very high-end. I think it would be even better with macadamia nuts, cashews, and pecans, but that's probably because those are my three favorite nuts.