Category: 4 Foodies

Posts having to do with recipes, food experiences.

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

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I can’t wait for another Cookie Swap.

It’s when bakers carefully nestle their sugar melts, gingersnaps, lemon iced, molasses, oatmeal, snicker-doodles, bars, balls and sandwich type cookies in scrubbed up tupperware containers lined with fresh waxed paper.

Everyone clusters together until a pre ordained starting time before circling the table and selecting an assortment of cookies to take home.

A swap is never described out loud as a competition. For starters that kind of thing would put off all but the boldest. The classic swap, like-minded people agree,  is an efficient way to wind up with an impressive array of cookies to easily pass off as their own to family and friends.

That said, seeing any of your cookies left-over at the end of one or two circles is much like seeing a dog at a pound waiting hopefully for its family.  

Use this recipe: Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies – Cooks Illustrated the next time but tuck away some because every one of them will be gone.  As far as the non competitive part, I say, leave ’em in your flour dust.

Soup’s On

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The eve of St. Patrick’s Day is a great time to troll for recipes fit for friends.  What else do you do after the parade but eat and drink like it’s the last supper? Well, not the Last Supper just a last supper.

Here’s a tasty and easy potato soup.

It starts with deliberately curdling milk. Curdled milk in most lexicons means rotten, “Do not drink.” ” Sure why not,” the Irish say as they add lemon to the milk. As the milk keeps itself busy on the counter, do the prep work: peel and chop potatoes, onions, and mince a couple of cloves of garlic.

Cook the potatoes in vegetable broth and saute the onions and garlic in butter. Puree the potatoes in the pan. Add the milk, and parmesan cheese and sour cream to ramp up the flavor factor.  Salt, pepper and green onions on top and it is ready to slurp Up.

Here’s a link to the recipe and credit to the Cook, who isn’t Irish at all: Party like you’re Irish, even if you’re not – KansasCity.com.

My tips: Set aside some of the cooked potatoes before you puree for a little less bisque and more chunk and salt to taste rather than putting in two tsp of salt in one swish.

I Invented The Rice Cake.

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Watching the food network has lulled me into thinking that great cooks can simply toss things into a mix and with a pinch of this and that turn out a company dish. So I figured I could make a chicken and black bean burrito without consulting a cookbook, for crying out loud.

I had already cooked the chicken and I was using black beans from a can. I decided to add brown rice to add another nuance. I only needed one serving; the box told me 1/2 cup both water and rice in a bowl, microwave for 7 minutes.

I added chopped tomatoes and green onions to the black beans and chicken and I threw in some cumin. By that time, the microwave had signaled that the rice was ready.

Oh, yeah — it was. I had invented the rice cake. Not an atom of water remained, the rice lifted from the bottom of the bowl in one piece. I thought to myself, what would Julia do? Cook rice on the stove, probably.

I crumbled the rice cake into the main mixture. I figured the taste would be the delicious crunchy/soft sensation you get when you wrap a hard shell taco with a soft shell tortilla.  (Visit Taco Bell, if you don’t know what I mean.) A little cheese and everything was wrapped up tight in a whole wheat tortilla for one last microwave jolt.

I won’t make those again. The rice tasted raw, hard and tasteless. The onions really needed to toned down with a little pre saute. And the cumin was frankly worthless. Sig said he was full after the first one.

Ramped Up Hamburgers

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I took a regular old pound of hamburger, tho used the 94% lean kind (and actually it was a little bit less than a pound), and added a 1/4 of a cup of each of: shredded carrots, chopped up scallions, tomato sauce and egg substitute.  Threw in a couple of TB of parsley. Yeah, it was kinda like making a meatloaf without any seasoning to speak of.  So, then you make 4 patties and saute in a pam sprayed pan for ten minutes turning once. 

The whole process was so easy cheesy I could easily watch the elimination of two boys and two girls from the American Idol countdown.

Would I do it again? Yes, the hamburgers were juicy, big and filling — all the adjectives you want and need on Thursday night must see tv. (But unless you are a real purist, you should add a little salt and pepper to the mix.)

Just Missed the Gold

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I ordered a medium pizza with extra cheese, onions and black olives. Done in 15 minutes from the pizzaria practically across the street that never has any down time. Sig went for the pizza while I made a no slouch salad with radishes, red peppers, green onions, cucumber and red leaf lettuce. Plates readied, salad poised, dressing standing by — pizza box flung on oven and it’s —- REGULAR THICK CRUST! What could have been a perfect golden olympic in-front-of-tv dinner comes in a distant second without the full flavor and satisfying chew of the thin crust.

Check out pictures of Rockport, Texas.

Cooking Lesson

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I read in MS Living mag that one of her editors loved to feed her family of 3 boys and 1 husband a chicken that was simply sautéed in olive oil and finished with a combination of red wine vinegar, garlic and rosemary.  A photo of both the dish and the attractive family of five clearly anticipating a great dinner sent me to the grocery store.

The butcher asked if I was making curry when I asked to have the chicken, skin and bones intact, chopped into about the same size pieces. I’ve never made curry but I said yes, anyway — as what was the point of carrying on that conversation thread?

Mixing the marinade was the only step unless you want to count mincing the garlic cloves and cutting up the rosemary. The recipe said, “Don’t crowd the chicken, cook in two batches if necessary.” I pretty much ignored that, thinking — the chicken were long passed the time of caring whether they were crowded.

That was a mistake. 

Instead of a clean crisp sear, the chicken steamed. Instead of a rich brown carmelized finish, the chicken turned a pock-marked pale grey. Instead of a uniform doneness, the parts were either half-cooked or overdone.  Adding broth to the pan to begin a glazing sauce caused the chicken to seriously simmer, no doubt still irritated about the crowding.

Then the vinegar, garlic, rosemary marinade joined the party — and really never left. The finished dish was a jumble of bones, skin, tough chicken meat with a chief note of an unbalanced vinaigrette.  I served it over brown rice with asparagus.