Foodiestudent - the foodie in training

Cupcakes: Shaken, Not Stirred

2009-10-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks for my dearest sister for another great blog posting. Here it is....

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Anyone who has followed my guest posts knows that I don’t like putting a lot of time or effort into cooking. If the instructions are longer than Take it out of the box and put it in the oven, I’m probably not going to make it.

So I was really interested to try the new Shaker cupcakes from Dr. Oetker. (They also have Shaker muffins, but I’m not a big muffin fan. Cupcakes on the other hand…)

My first thought is that these things are environmentally irresponsible - the plastic container will be used once and then outlast our entire species. Let’s take a moment and hail the recycling programs that turn these things into sweaters and picnic tables! Yay recycling!

Moving on. Making these cupcakes was easy as pie. :) Pour in some milk (you don’t even measure it, just pour until you reach the fill line on the container), shake, and pour into a cupcake pan. I was impressed how perfectly the batter filled exactly 6 cups. But it brings up another drawback of this product – for $3 you get only 6 cupcakes. If you’re a cupcake connoisseur, you may go broke.

Pop them in the oven for 22 minutes, let them cool, frost them, and voila! Cupcakes: shaken but not stirred. :)

Of course, I didn’t make frosting because that requires work. And why make something when Betty Crocker is perfectly willing to make it for you? I also used drizzle icing left over from the mocha brownies experiment.

And the taste… Yum! Good chocolate flavour and light, fluffy texture. The frosting was especially good, lol.

I would recommend the Shaker cupcakes if you need a small batch of cupcakes quickly, don’t mind spending $3 for such a small batch, and are good about rinsing and recycling your plastic.

Easiest. Bread. Ever.

2009-10-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

Here is another guest blog by Foodiestudent's sister. Take it away FSS...... :)

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Back in university I took a creative writing course where I wrote a series of short stories about a fictional medieval village. In our first class, we had to read our first story. Mine began with the heroine Thayleen (shortened from phenolphthalein, an acid-base indicator; I was also in a chemistry class that term) walking through the town market. A baker called out, “Come try my bread! Best bread on the island!” But I got tongue-tied and read it as “Breast bed on the island.”

Yeah. I was cool back then. Let’s fast-forward about 15 years because I’ve found what may in fact be the best bread ever.

Recently I came across an article on the Macleans website, reviewing a new book called My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, by Jim Lahey. The author, a professional baker, came up with a way to make no-fail bread at home with almost no effort. Well let me tell you, I’m a big supporter of no-fail and no-effort! So I Googled to find a recipe from the book and I found one here (scroll to the bottom for the print-friendly link).

The big secret to this bread is to bake it in a large oven-proof pot like a dutch oven. Well, I didn’t have one so I went out and bought one, along with bread flour and yeast. That was the most effort I had to put into this recipe.

The ingredients are simple: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Mix them for 30 seconds, cover, and let it sit for 12-18 hours.

After the sitting time is over (I waited 15 hours), turn the sticky dough out onto a floured surface, shape it into a ball, put it onto a floured dishtowel, and fold the towel over it. (Tip: put a lot of flour on the dishtowel.)

Leave it for another 1-2 hours. Preheat the oven and the pot, then carefully drop the dough into the pot, cover it, and bake for 30 min. Remove the lid, and bake for another 15 mins or so. Take the pot out of the oven and turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack. It will come right out without sticking, and it will smell amazing!

Now wait for 1 hour for it to cool down. This step is painful, let me tell you. :) But Jim Lahey says it’s important and if Jim Lahey says it’s important, then you should do it. And this is your reward:

And here’s mine with butter, honey, and saskatoon jam:

And the taste is… Amazing! Yum! It’s quite different from store-bought bread but that’s a good thing. The outside is crispy and the inside is chewy and semi-dense with lots of air bubbles. It has a fairly mild flavour that should go well with most toppings.

I’m interested to try this technique again, maybe with whole-wheat flour or some herbs or other ingredients added. I figure my total time spent in the kitchen was maybe 15 minutes over the course of 2 days, and I got a gorgeous loaf of bread out of it. My Bread is definitely on my Christmas wish list!

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P.S. iPhone users, I found a new foodie app to recommend. It’s called Harvest and costs $2.99. It contains info about how to select and store 64 types of produce, what’s in season when, pesticide levels used to grow them, etc. It’s super easy to use and a great little gadget to have handy at the grocery store.

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Thanks FSS. Another great blog post. As a carb lover I am all over this recipe :)

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2009-10-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

This blog post is the creation of my BFF, Skottie. Skottie and I go way back but we've never spent any significant time in the kitchen together. So it was news to me that deep down, in the shadows of Skottie's heart, lies a master baker. Let's learn from Skottie the baker together, shall we? Take it away, Skottie.......

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The awesome Foodiestudent has asked me to be a guest on her blog a couple times but I haven't done it yet. I recently promised my co-workers I'd bake them something for our next team meeting so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to show my culinary fortitude on the blog.

I love baking cookies. They're quite easy to make and they taste very good. The cookie monster in me decided that it was time to make Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies. I've made this recipe once before but this time I decided to experiment a bit.

One of my favorite spices for sweet dishes is cinnamon. I ran this idea by Foodie and she thought that it might not go over very well with chocolate. She suggested that I swap the chocolate for raisins. For those of you that know me well, you'll know that raisins are just WRONG. They do not belong in any cooked dish. I stayed true to my desire to add cinnamon with the chocolate chips.

Here's a link to the base recipe I started with: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Oatmeal-Chip-Cookies/Detail.aspx

I rarely do this, but for all you followers out there, I carefully measured out all of the ingredients and put them in colourful bowls. I think this is the first time I've used some of these bowls. If you look very carefully you can see a bit of cinnamon on the plate. I didn't want to overpower the recipe so I started with a small amount. There are 2 ingredients missing. One ended up in the cookies, the other did not. Can you guess what's missing?

The first step of the recipe is to cream together all of the "wet ingredients". Yes foodie students, sugar can be considered a wet ingredient! This results in a brown gooey mixture that tastes like heaven.

After that, you're supposed to fold in the dry ingredients. Usually I don't use oats in my cookies. After mixing it all together, I noticed that this recipe is quite dry due to the oats.

Here's a shot of my well-used cookie sheet with an awesome invention on top of it: Silpat. Silpat is a silicone baking sheet that prevents things like cookies from sticking. It's works wonders and makes for easy cleanup too.

Some of my co-workers say that my cookies look very professional. They're all the same size and shape (usually but you'll see later on that's not so true this time). I do this by carefully by measuring the amount of cookie dough using a measuring spoon as shown in the photo.

Here you can see a picture of the baked cookies. Is your mouth watering yet?? Being a semi-professional pastry chef (I've taken one class), I know I must taste my creation. I tasted one of each batch. I prefer a cookie that's crispy on the outside but gooey in the middle. The first batch was just like that. Yummmmm. The subsequent batches were less gooey -- more on the dry side. And one batch was over cooked because I wasn't paying attention. That will teach me a lesson. I had a timer on and didn't hear it go off because I was busy browsing the interwebs.

I took the cookies to work in a fancy package: a ziploc bag. I challenged my co-workers to guess which ingredient was missing (vanilla) and which was added (cinnamon). One person said nothing was missing and that they were perfect as-is. No one could guess the missing ingredient without some hints. I also learned that I didn't add enough cinnamon. No one was able to guess that it was there. Other quotes: "Excellent!" "These would win at a bake off". Overall a success. Next time I'll add more cinnamon and ensure that they aren't too dry.

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Thanks for an awesome post Skottie. And yeah, my mouth is totally watering. I'm going to have to make some of these cookies. My stomach demands it. :)

After an accidental hiatus... I'm back :)

2009-10-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

I apologize to my loyal Foodiestudent blog readers for not updating this blog in a while. I changed the password and then forgot what I changed it to for a while. Embarrassing but true.

But then I remembered it and am now able to get in and update the blog again. I have 3 guest posts coming at ya over the next few days before I delight and amaze you with one of my own making.

Delight. Amaze. Yup, those sound like the words :)

Stay tuned......

With all my heart,
Foodiestudent :)

Tofu Mocha Brownies

2009-09-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

Hi again, Foodiestudent readers! This is another guest post by Foodiestudent’s sister. (You can catch up on my past posts here and here.)

Foodie asked me to make a tofu recipe for this post. I said yes but I didn’t want to make a stir-fry or other dinner recipe. Unlike Foodie, I have a microscopic kitchen that is not conducive to cooking complex recipes (and by “complex” I mean “anything requiring counter space for things like chopping vegetables”). But I’m a trooper so I Googled some tofu recipes and found tofu-recipes.com and a super-easy recipe for Tofu Fudge Mocha Bars. I’m game for any recipe with fudge in the title! :)

For the taste test, I made two other mocha brownie recipes. Brownie “A” was simply a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix, made with 1/3 cup of decaf instant coffee crystals added.

Brownie “B” was Baker’s One Bowl Mocha Brownies from the Kraft website, made without nuts or icing.

And brownie “C” was the tofu recipe.

I was worried about one thing with the tofu recipe: the recipe calls for 12 oz of “silken” tofu. I couldn’t find anything called “silken” tofu, so I used “soft” tofu instead, hoping it would be ok. The first step in the recipe calls for you to beat the tofu with an electric mixer, so it would get smooth anyway. The brownies should be fine.

At least, that was the theory. Here’s what the tofu brownies looked like after being prepared and baked:

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that looks like. I couldn’t serve that monstrosity to anyone else, but I tasted it for myself and… let’s see if I can spell this correctly… BLEAAAGHHH! It was BITTER. The recipe calls for lots of cocoa and coffee, but not a lot of sugar. And raw sugar isn’t nearly as sweet as white sugar, so double whammy of bitterness. Yuck, yuck, yuck! YUCK!

So much for the great tofu experiment. Sorry folks.

But… I still had two other mocha brownies for the taste test! I labeled them using a bottle of prepared white icing (unfortunately I bought “drizzle” icing instead of “decorating” icing, so the letters were a bit drippy – but yummy!). Witness:

I had 11 people rate the two non-repulsive mocha brownies: 9 of my coworkers plus my husband and me. The results:

Brownie A (Betty Crocker mix with coffee added):
• Average score: 4.1
• “Fairly sweet, good texture, stronger coffee taste”
• “Strong coffee flavour, nice texture, quite sweet”
• “OK, needs more chocolate”

Brownie B (Kraft recipe with no nuts or icing)
• Average score: 4.5
• “Texture was more cakelike and the coffee was more subtle”
• “Can’t taste the coffee, yeah! Not quite as sweet”
• “Moist, delicious, perfect combination of crunch and chew”

Overall, most people liked both brownies, and their preference was mainly dependent on whether they liked the coffee taste, which was definitely stronger in Brownie A. My personal preference was Brownie A for its taste and chewiness. It was also the easier recipe to make, although it made a smaller batch.

For anyone who likes brownies and wants to try something a little bolder than typical brownie recipes, I would recommend either of these two recipes.

And leave the tofu for stir-fries and smoothies.

Turkey Stuffing Divan

2009-09-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you have extra turkey and a husband who likes broccoli above all other vegetables? Why, you use the ingredient search tool on allrecipes.com of course. The result of my search was Turkey Stuffing Divan.

The ingredients are simple.... diced cooked turkey, broccoli, cream of celery soup, butter, boxed stuffing, cheddar, and milk.

We start by putting 1/4 cup of butter in a bowl. Adding some boiling water helps to melt the better.

The packaged stuffing mix gets tossed with the butter/water combination....

... and spooned into a casserole dish. At this point I figured I needed a larger casserole dish but I decided to live dangerously and keep working with this smaller one.

Top the stuffing with steamed broccoli and diced turkey.

Top the turkey with a mixture of the canned soup, milk, and grated cheddar.

More cheddar on top and the whole shebang gets baked at 350 for 30 minutes.

Here are all the layers. It was quite good. My only real complaint about the dish was the carb to veggie ratio. 2 boxes of stuffing in future incarnations of this recipe will be cut down to one. And so many veggie options can be added here... I'm thinking a can of corn and/or some frozen veggie mix (peas, carrots, and green beans). Chicken could be substituted for turkey of course.

But the real joy of this dish is how fast it was to put together. It was assembled in just a few minutes and once it was put in the oven it left me free to do other things for 30 minutes. Then I just pulled it out and it was ready to serve :)

Caesar Salad - with your fingers

2009-09-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

So Pioneer Woman posted a new recipe for Caesar Salad that you eat with your fingers. I have to admit that I've never eaten Caesar Salad without a fork. And since I'm all about experimentation here at foodiestudent I thought I'd give it a try.

I used a french baguette to make the croutons. I got this loaf from Walmart and it was surprisingly good. It was more dense than the ones from Safeway but was less crusty which made it much less messy to slice. It was perfect for making croutons.

I tried something new with the parmesan. I opted to go with chunks instead of the usual medium grate. I like the texture but I am going through a $14 block of parmesan way too quickly.

Here's the final result. Now, I have to say that the dressing was very easy to make and the croutons were incredibly tasty.

However, I was not a fan of using the full lettuce leaf and eating with my fingers. The issue was with balancing the croutons on the romaine leaves as they were picked up. If the lettuce was cut or torn and eaten with a fork then a balance of lettuce, dressing, crouton, and cheese could be enjoyed with every bite. And I'm all about the balance :)

West African Peanut Sauce

2009-09-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by this recipe for West African Peanut Soup and decided to make it but with a twist. One of the comments on the recipe said this was typically served in Africa on a bed of rice with chicken instead of all mixed up in a hearty soup. This sounded intriguing so I thought I'd give it a whirl.....

Ahhhh, a common image on the foodiestudent blog. Hello onion. I peeled you, cut you into manageable pieces, and sliced you in the food processor. Now I'm sauteeing you.

After adding some red and green peppers we end up with something I like to call "Christmas in a pot".

I added diced tomatoes, chicken broth, and some spices. That simmered for a while before I added the key ingredient....

Peanut Butter! Say what? Peanut Butter! Oh yeah.

I was skeptical... peanut butter with veggies in a sauce? Let's see what happens....

I whisked in the peanut butter to get it blended in. The peanut butter gave the sauce a richness and texture.

Some wild rice, a salad, and some peanuts for garnish completes the meal.

Honestly, the first bite or two I didn't know what to think. I had never tasted those flavors in combination before. But then I got into it and dove in with gusto. It turned out to be a great meal.

There is one thing I would change... I'd cut back on the chicken stock just a little as it made the sauce too thin. This is to be expected as the recipe was originally a soup recipe. However, the end result was far too thick to be considered a typical soup.

As served above, this is a vegetarian recipe (if desired, vegetable stock could be substituted for chicken stock in the recipe). I served leftovers the following day with chicken which was also a big hit. This will definitely be made again in the foodiestudent kitchen.

Caramel Apple Sticky Buns

2009-09-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

I defy anyone to take a look at this recipe for Caramel Apple Sticky Buns and not start drooling. Even though I don't really like apples, a little voice told me I had to make them or I would forever regret it. Always listen to those little voices.

Diced apples with a sprinkling of lemon juice cus, you know... brown bits are yucky.

Remember this bread/cinnamon roll dough? Well, now is the time to use it. Don't worry, although the blog posts are like a week apart, the making of the sticky buns only happened the day after the cinnamon rolls. The dough will keep in the fridge for up to 2 days so I was within the safety zone.

The caramel sticky sauce starts by melting some butter in a saucepan.

Then I added some brown sugar, white corn syrup (instead of dark), and milk (instead of cream). Trust me, the substitutions made no difference in the final product.

When the caramel sauce starts to boil set it aside to cool.

I won't go over the step by step process of rolling out the dough and making the cinnamon rolls as they are the same for this recipe as for the other cinnamon rolls.

Divide the caramel sticky sauce into two well greased 9 or 10 inch round cake pans.

Top with the diced apples.

Place the cut cinnamon rolls in the pans on top of the apples. Let them rise for about half an hour and then bake.

Ahhhh, baked yumminess :)

Flip the bunch of them over onto a plate and watch the ooey gooey goodness overflow. I covered these with plastic wrap and took them into the office. I was worried that with so many sticky buns I'd be taking some home at the end of the day. However, I went to check on them at lunch time and they were all gone. They were, most definitely, a huge hit.

Lessons learned were exactly one..... that is to divide the rolls into three pans, not two. Two pans were just too full and caramel sauce overflowed during the baking process which resulted in the following.....

Burning and smokiness. Didn't affect the buns but made the kitchen smoky-stinky.

Would I make these again? TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY YES! I only had one but it was very yummy and, judging by the speed by which the others were claimed, the others were yummy too.

Shintangle Bed & Breakfast

2009-09-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

This post will be a departure for me as I'm not featuring food that I made myself. Instead, all food featured in this post was made and consumed here....

My dear husband and I recently spent a weekend at this bed and breakfast. Our wonderful hostess (with the mostest), Heather, made us delightful breakfasts on each of the 3 mornings we were there.

Each morning we were greeted with the following...

There's orange and apple juice. We had the choice of coffee (medium or strong) or tea (various flavours) with cream and sugar but there was also milk and sweetener if those were our preferences. That little dish in front contains a curl of butter.

Every breakfast starts with this wonderful fruit plate. The quality of fruit here is outstanding... nothing is under or overripe. I'm not a big fruit eater but I cleared by plate every day.

Day 1: Pancakes, ham, hash brown potatoes, and scrambled eggs. As you can see, there are no eggs on the plate in the picture above. That's because Heather, the aforementioned "hostess with the mostest", knows I don't like eggs so she gave my portion to Vince. Vince did not complain :)

My syrup of choice that day was saskatoon berry syrup. Heather puts out three choices of syrup (see pic below). On the left is Canadian Maple, center is saskatoon berry, and on the right is butter maple. Oh yeah, and they're WARM! Talk about spoiling us!

Day 2: Waffles, bacon, syrups and.... get this.... maple flavoured creme fraiche! Is there anything yummier? I tasted it and determined that no, there is nothing yummier than maple flavoured creme fraiche. On this day I opted for butter maple on one of my waffles and saskatoon berry on the others. And creme fraiche was on all of them ;)

Day 3: Texas french toast with bacon and mandarin oranges. Once again, everything was cooked to perfection.

I was drinking my juice on the final day and, much to the confusion of those dining around me, I started laughing. That's because I saw this....

Anyone who watches LOST will recognize the Dharma Initiative logo on the bottom of my glass :)

Thanks Heather! You're the best!

If you are interested in spending the night at Shintangle B&B you can get more information at shintanglespring.com

Baked Beans - messing with the canned stuff

2009-09-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

Beans have always been a heat and serve proposition in my life. I never realized there were possibilities beyond that. So something funny happened to my insides when I saw this baked bean recipe on PW's website. Beans, veggies, bacon... all good for the foodiestudent.

So what have I got to lose?

Green peppers and onions. These were done in the food processor. The food processor slices but it does not dice. So inspite of the recipe specifically calling for diced peppers and onions.... too bad! I've been in the kitchen cooking and baking all day and I'm taking the easy route.

Bacon is a rarity in my house. It's not that I don't love the taste... cus I do. It's not that I'm concerned about the sodium and nitrates... cus I'm not. It's because I don't like the bacon grease film that coats the stove top, counter, and me after I cook it.

But the recipe calls for bacon and I suffer for my art ;)

This bacon is WAY undercooked. But the recipe said to way undercook it. I'm obedient :)

I drained off a little of the bacon grease and added the sliced onion and green pepper.

Fast forward 5 minutes and they are nicely sauteed. Time to add the key ingredient.....

... BEANS!!!! These are Heinz, straight from the can. I added the remaining ingredients... barbeque sauce, dijon mustard, brown sugar, and cider vinegar. After a minute or two it started to simmer which was my cue to pour the mix into a greased casserole dish. Then it was topped with the undercooked bacon and baked at 325 for 2 hours.

Yup, 2 hours. This baked for a looooooooong time. When all was said and done, it was very yummy. A little sweeter than expected (with BBQ sauce and sugar, I should have guessed) and the sauce was very thick as much of the liquid had evaporated. The peppers and onion are a minor component to the dish and you can't even taste them. The bacon on top was absolutely perfect though. Definitely cooked but not burned.

Overall, I'm glad I tried it. But given the 2 hour cooking time I'm not sure I'd make it again. Who has that kind of time for a side dish except at Christmas? So unless someone requests beans with their turkey this year, this recipe will be passed by many many times.

Cream Cheese Frosting

2009-09-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Weeza has requested my recipe for cream cheese frosting. I got this recipe when I first made Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls but wanted a more Cinnabon-like frosting. So I did what every good foodiestudent would do... I googled Cinnabon frosting :)

Here are the ingredients. Icing sugar, margarine, cream cheese, vanilla, and lemon juice. I was only making 1/2 the recipe so I used just 1/2 a bag of icing sugar and a cup each of margarine and cream cheese.

Very important step.... wait for the margarine and cream cheese get to room temperature. I have tried mixing them right out of the fridge and now I'm in therapy.

The recipe I found was absolutely adamant that margarine, not butter, be used in this recipe. I didn't fully understand why but there was no doubt that in this case butter was to be avoided and margarine embraced. However, I have seen similar recipes that call for butter instead of margarine. So who are we supposed to believe? That's a question for another day. Today we are using margarine.

See how nicely the cream cheese and margarine mix together? That's because they are room temperature. :)

It's time to add the icing sugar. Please learn this lesson from foodiestudent.... turn the mixer down to low. The lowest possible setting. Add the icing sugar to the bowl one spoonful at a time. It will mix together quickly but won't explode out of the bowl in an icing sugar snowstom which is what will happen if the mixer is on a higher speed. This I have learned. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides when needed.

When the icing sugar has all been added turn the mixer on medium or medium-high and let it do its thing for 12 minutes. This will make the frosting super smooth and......

...strangely, it's a lighter colour. The frosting is much whiter now. Weird!

Once again, learn a lesson from foodiestudent, when the 12 minutes of high speed mixing are done, turn the mixer down to low. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla and lemon juice and barely mix until they have incorporated into the frosting. If you overmix or mix at a higher speed the frosting becomes curdled. And curdled is bad.

Grab the two cinnamon buns closest to you and top with a dollop or two of the frosting. Enjoy :)

Cinnamon Rolls - Pioneer Woman's recipe

2009-09-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

My cinnamon roll recipe has been a hit since the first time I made them. I give all respect and acknowledgement to Pioneer Woman. Her recipe (with fabulous photo instructions, as she always provides) can be found here.

Pioneer Woman uses a maple frosting to cover her rolls. I'm not a fan of maple flavor so I use a different frosting which I will demonstrate in a future post.

But for now, let's go through the steps of making cinnamon rolls.....

The dough is the same recipe as for white bread dough. So if you want to make this recipe and use half for bread buns and half for cinnamon buns, well, that would be smart. I've done that a few times :)

Start by scalding milk, sugar, and oil.

When the mixture has been scalded and then cooled for an hour or so add some yeast and flour. I use white bread flour but all-purpose will work. Mix them all together and let the mixture sit for an hour. It will rise a bit so make sure it is in a large enough bowl to allow for expansion.

After the mixture has risen add in another cup of flour, some salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Kneading isn't really necessary but will help incorporate the ingredients together when the mixture gets stiff. This picture shows HALF of the final dough mixture.

And I wanted to accommodate Weeza's request of showing an additional item in the pictures to give an idea of scale. Philly cream cheese packages are a fairly recognizable size and shape so I hope this works for you :)

Roll the dough out into a rectangle. This looks less like a rectangle than a Weeble that wobbles but has fallen down on its side. But the intention is to make a rectangle. Good luck with yours :)

The recipe calls for about a cup of melted butter but I find that to be too messy and too rich... 2/3 of a cup is plenty. Drizzle the melted butter all over the dough except for the front inch or so. Then sprinkle a cup of sugar all over and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. I don't measure the cinnamon... just sprinkle until I think it's good enough :) Again, avoid the front inch of the dough.

Pioneer Woman doesn't add nuts or raisins here and neither do I. But if you had a nut or raisin deficiency that needed to be addressed in your diet then now would be the time to take care of that.

And.... we're rolling! Start at the end farthest from you and tightly roll the dough towards you. You'll thank me when you get to the end and you pinch to seal the front end of the dough to the roll. Keeping that final strip of dough free of butter and sugar makes it easier to seal dough to dough. Sealing dough to buttery dough is significantly harder.

I tried to get the whole roll in this shot but couldn't quite manage it. Anyways, the sealed roll is longer than the length of the rolled out dough from a few pictures above. That's because once it's all rolled up you will probably notice some thicker and thinner parts. It's best to even those out by lifting and gently stretching the thicker sections. The end result produces a longer roll than you started out with. Make sure you have the counter space to do this.

With a sharp knife, slice the rolls about 1 inch thick. For 1/2 the dough you'll have enough rolls to fill three 10" round cake or pie pans.

Let the pans sit for about 30 minutes to rise and then bake for 15-18 minutes in a 375 degree oven.

Here they are, all baked and yummy. The two pans on the right are 10", regular, Wilton brand cake pans. The rolls in those pans were fully cooked in about 15 minutes. The ones in the disposable pan on the left needed another 3 or 4 minutes to brown. Interesting! I learned a foodiestudent lesson when I didn't even do an official experiment :)

I took 2 cinnamon buns because they were the smallest of the bunch. Don't judge me! :)

A little yummy frosting on top and these were consumed with much haste.

Thank-you, Pioneer Woman, for this recipe. I love it and have had this recipe requested many times. Now that I have made a batch I will try not to make them again until Christmas. Or at least Thanksgiving. Okay, maybe Labor Day. Wait, that's in a few days. Yup, I can definitely wait until Labor Day :)

Oh, and what happened to the other half of the dough?

It continued to grow and prosper in its own way. Stay tuned for the adventures of the rest of the dough......

Candied Pecans

2009-08-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I ordered a salad in a restaurant. I don't remember which restaurant. I don't remember what kind of salad. But on that salad was something that I have never been able to forget... candied pecans. They were not only the highlight of the salad but they were the highlight of every salad I've ever had! They were THAT amazing :)

I've tried to duplicate that experience by making my own candied pecans. I've tried a couple of recipes and as soon as I found this one I stopped looking. They are so good I have often eaten them by the handful. Just warning you... :)

Let's begin......

The ingredients are simple. Salt, pepper, cayenne, sugar, corn syrup, and pecans.

First we place some plain old regular white sugar in a bowl. I made triple the recipe so normally you wouldn't need a bowl quite this big. Sorry Weeza, I forgot my ruler.

Then I added some white corn syrup. Hey, I was kind enough to leave the bottle in this picture so that'll give you some idea of the size of the bowl.

Then the kick... salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. If you don't like a kick then omit the cayenne. But I like kick so..... cayenne-orama :)

Mix it all together until it looks really greyish and disgusting. Give it a tiny taste just to make sure you haven't gone too far into pepper-land. Adjust the sugar-salt-pepper ratio accordingly.

Then mix in the nuts. Gently stir them for a minute or so to ensure they are evenly coated with the mixture.

And spread the nut mixture out on a foil lined cookie sheet. I normally use just pecans but this time I decided to use half pecans and half almonds. Do I live on the edge or what?

This was triple the recipe. I have made quadruple the recipe before but with that many nuts you will need to use two cookie sheets. The nuts should be a single layer only.

After baking for about 15 minutes the nuts came out of the oven and I spread them out on aluminum foil. The candy glaze on the nuts will harden very quickly so make sure you spread the nuts out using two forks.

When they have cooled to room temperature these nuts will keep in an airtight container for a week or so.

For the original recipe check it out on Smitten Kitchen's site... Sweet & Spicy Candied Pecans. There are some cool salad tips there too.

Fettuccine Alfredo.... to the extreme!

2009-08-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

I made a couple of Alfredo sauce recipes a few weeks ago and found one that I really enjoyed. You can read about it on the entry called Fettuccine Alfredo... part 2.

So now it's time to raise the stakes. Can the sauce handle being baked with cheese a la Boston Pizza?

We'll start with some individual casserole dishes. You can use a larger one for a family meal but Vince & I wanted different additions to our pasta so we decided to make individual meals. I don't know if it was necessary but I sprayed them with non-stick spray. If nothing else, it'll ensure that cleanup will be easier.

This is what I wanted to add to my baked fettuccine alfredo. It's a mixture of diced bell peppers (various colours), sliced onions, broccoli, celery, and green onions. The colours are so pretty in the bowl and I love how they are reflected in the shiny sides of the bowl :)

Cooking the noodles and alfredo sauce. Yum yum yum.

I made the alfredo sauce with 2 cups of half n half this time instead of 2 1/2 cups of heavy cream. Unless you are trying to induce a heart attack, I strongly recommend making this change. I preferred the lighter texture of the sauce but there was no compromise to the flavor.

I also doubled the required amount of cream cheese from 2 tablespoons to about 4 tablespoons... but that was just because that's what I had left in the package and didn't want to re-wrap a wee morsel of cream cheese to put back in the fridge.

I drained the pasta and added it to the veggie mix........

.....and poured the sauce on top.

I followed my own advice from my previous post on the sauce and let it simmer for a while to thicken it. It worked but I think it would be okay to add a little flour in the form of a roux if you wanted it even thicker. Just be careful not to overdo it as it could get pasty.

Toss it all around until the sauce evenly coats the pasta and vegetables. This was easier said than done as the veggies didn't want to mix with the long strands of pasta. It would be easier to toss with a smaller pasta shape such as shells or bowtie pasta or macaroni.

I divided the pasta-veggie mix into the casserole dishes. You can see here how some of the dishes got more veggies than others due to how they didn't mix together too easily. You can also see that one of my oval casserole dishes became a rectangle. How did that happen??????

I topped the dishes with some shredded mozzarella and shredded parmesan cheese then placed one in the toaster oven (perfect when cooking for one). It baked for about 30 minutes at 350 then I turned the dial to broil and cooked it for another 5 minutes or so. Watch it carefully as it'll brown very quickly in the toaster oven.

I pulled it out of the oven just when the cheese was getting toasty brown... so yummy. A little sprinkle of parsley and I'm ready to dig in. Was it as tasty as it looks?

Uh, yeah. It really was. The first few bites I wasn't too sure about because the sauce was very liquidy. It thinned as it cooked in the oven. However, after I'd eaten about 1/3 of it I noticed that the sauce was getting much thicker and sticking to the pasta and veggies better. Therefore, I think the recipe would be perfect if you let it sit for about 5 minutes to let the sauce come together and thicken after taking it out of the oven.

Enjoy making a pasta dish that rivals Boston Pizza. If the foodiestudent can do it then you know you can too! :)

Chicken Chimi

2009-08-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

In my quest to find new recipes for chicken I ran across this one for Chicken Chimi or Chicken Chimichangas.

It went like this....

The recipe calls for chicken that is already cooked. I find the fastest way to cook raw chicken is by poaching it (pot on the left). It doesn't result in great flavor and you have to be careful not to overboil it so it doesn't get hard, but it gets the job done. In the pot on the right are sauteeing onions. This will become the sauce.

The spices are simple... just chili powder, cinnamon, and cumin. Optionally just use a package of taco seasoning.

The recipe calls for 2 cups of salsa but my dear husband is allergic to raw onions so I substituted canned diced tomatoes and some cilantro. It never occurred to me at the time that I should add some hot sauce too. I would come to regret that LOL.

Here the sauce has reduced down and diced chicken added. If I had bothered to taste it I would have realized it needed a kick and added the hot sauce here. But I was distracted by my husband walking in the kitchen and asking what I was making. I'm easily distracted I guess LOL.

Uh, I missed a few steps between the last picture and this one. Remember... husband, distraction, etc.

So all I did was take a whole grain tortilla, place some refried beans down the center, topped the beans with the chicken mixture, rolled it up (repeat with 6 tortillas) and baked them all in the oven.

Lessons learned:

Mexican food needs spice! If you are going to substitute diced tomatoes for salsa make sure you add hot sauce, pepper, green chillies, jalapenos, almost anything to give it more of a kick. I put some salsa on the side and that helped up the interest factor.
The recipe says to serve with sour cream, guacamole, and cheese. I would suggest if you are using cheese to put the cheese inside the wrapped tortilla before baking. It would melt and get all gooey. So unless you don't like melted and gooey I'd give that a try.
Baking or bbq'ing chicken would result in better chicken taste and texture. Although poaching works on short notice.

This recipe was pretty good and I'd probably make it again. If you have children who don't like vegetables it would be easy to add vegetables to the chicken mixture and sneak them in that way. Carrots, zucchini, corn, celery, bell peppers.... all would work well in there.

Anyone have any chicken recipes they really like? I'm always looking for new ones :)

iPhone Recipe Apps

2009-08-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is by our favorite (and thus far, only) guest blogger, Louisa. Thanks for doing another blog entry for us Weeza :)

Greetings, gentle readers. This is another guest post by Foodie Student’s Sister (FSS). This time around, I’m reviewing four recipe apps for iPhones. (Sharp-eyed readers will notice that once again I managed to avoid doing any actual cooking…)

The four apps I reviewed are All Recipes, Betty Crocker, Big Oven, and Epicurious. All four apps are free to download from the iTunes store, and all four have corresponding websites that use (presumably) the same recipe databases as their iPhone counterparts.

I tested each app searching for mocha brownie recipes (or just brownies if no mocha variations available) and then trying a few things like marking a recipe as a favourite, and using any special features.

All Recipes

The good: Search results display in a nice-looking list with ratings and photos. Nutritional information and reviewer comments are available at the bottom of each recipe. The spinner feature is cool (see picture below). The app lets you build a list of your favourite recipes, sorted alphabetically.

The bad: All Recipes claims to have “thousands” of recipes but it’s the only app that didn’t have any recipes for mocha brownies.

The ugly: Before you can view a recipe you have to look at an ad for a few seconds. There is also a smaller ad on the recipe itself. Within a few minutes I was sick. to. death. of those ads.

Verdict: 3/5 stars (would be much higher without the ads; note, there’s no option to pay a few dollars to remove the ads, as some other apps have)

Betty Crocker

The good: All the recipes have photos and there are no ads. Yeah! The “Search by Ingredient” and “Surprise me!” (random recipe finder) features are great. Recipes include nutrition information.

The bad: The Betty Crocker app claims to have over 4,000 recipes, the lowest of the four apps. The interface feels big… big buttons, big spoon at the top of the screen, etc. It crowds out the recipes themselves a bit, which is fine for browsing, but not good if you want to read a recipe carefully.

The ugly: iPhones have a feature where if you’re scrolling down through a long screen (e.g. reading a recipe or looking through a list of search results), you can quickly jump to the top of the screen by tapping the top of the screen. The Betty Crocker app has disabled this feature, which is a real nuisance.

Verdict: 4/5 stars (would be higher if there were more recipes)

Big Oven

The good: Big Oven claims to have over 160,000 recipes, by far the most of the apps I reviewed. A few recipes include Weight Watchers points and diabetic exchanges. The app includes a food/cooking dictionary.

The bad: Many recipes don’t have photos. The search results display kind of like newspaper pages, which is a bit weird. The interface overall is just a little awkward (e.g. the home button is an “H” instead of a little house). You can’t build a favourites list unless you have an account.

The ugly: Could somebody please tell me wtf is with this ad that appeared on every page?

Verdict: 2.5/5 stars (would be higher if the app didn’t constantly push you to sign up for an account)

Epicurious

The good: The Epicurious app has a nice interface, easy to use, which is a big plus. It claims to have over 25,000 recipes, and has a reputation for good recipes.

The bad: The search feature is a bit slow, and while you wait you have to look at a full-screen ad. (Cynically, I wondered if the search is deliberately slowed down for more ad time.) The search results display one hit at a time, and you have to scroll to the side to see more search results. This makes it very hard to scan the list quickly. Many recipes don’t have photos.

The ugly: It’s great that the app has a shopping list, but: (1) You can’t export the list or add anything else to it, meaning you would have to use this in addition to any other grocery list you might have. And, (2) if you make a shopping list from multiple recipes, the common items aren’t combined. So, you’ll see “2 cups sugar” near the top of the list, then “1.5 cups sugar” again halfway down. It should either say “3.5 cups sugar” or at least put the two sugar entries together on the list.

Verdict: 3.5/5 stars (would be higher with fewer ads and better search results)

Photos:

So, out of these four apps, my favourite was the Betty Crocker one, but All Recipes would have been the champ if not for the overbearing ads. And it seems to me you would never want to follow a recipe on a tiny iPhone screen (or risk spilling food on it), so use these apps to find a good recipe, then email it to yourself to print off (all the apps had this feature).

There are lots of other recipe apps for iPhone. If you have one you really like, post it in the comments and let us know what you like about it. Thanks!

Signing off,

FSS

FS note: Uh, I have a blackberry, not an iPhone. Can you review some BB apps in a post that might actually be helpful to me?????

My Foray into Vegetarian Cooking

2009-08-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big meat eater. I'm not vegetarian, per se, but I prefer to keep my meat servings quite small. My husband is the opposite as he enjoys larger servings of steak, chicken, anything with protein. However, as I was cooking only for myself one evening I thought I'd give a vegetarian recipe a try.

I started with some chopped peppers. Look at the beautiful colors in this dish. I love how pretty the yellow, orange, red, and green peppers look all chopped up and intermingling.

To the peppers I added some chopped onion and garlic. I also chopped up a jalapeno pepper. The majority of heat from jalapeno peppers resides in the seeds and membrane so I scraped most of those out before dicing it up and adding it to the mixture in the pie pan.

I then drizzled on a little EVOO (extra virgin olive oil), added some kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, and tossed them all together. Then the pan went in the oven for about 10 minutes to lightly roast the vegetables.

Ta-dah! These were lightly roasted... barely a hint of brown on the edges of some of those onion pieces.

I topped these with a semi-drained 14 oz can of diced tomatoes. The recipe called for them to be drained but I just did the "open the can, hold the lid on, and tip the can over" system to drain the tomatoes. Next time I'll use a strainer or colander to drain them properly as excess water is a bad thing here.

I then topped the tomatoes with some chopped feta cheese.

Then some rolled out puff pastry went on top and it all went back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes it looked like this. The puff pastry was done to perfection.

Then the whole she-bang got flipped over onto a plate and in many ways resembled a pizza.

And the result?.... meh. With some changes it could be quite good but as it was, not so great.

Lessons learned or changes I would make include:

The aforementioned draining of tomatoes. I didn't drain them as fully as I should have so after a few bites I noticed a pool of tomato-water on the bottom of the plate so I tilted it over the sink and let quite a bit of water drain away. It would have been best to get rid of this before it soaked the puff pastry.
Garlic. I chopped the garlic as the recipe called for but next time I will mince it. Some pieces were too large to eat and I ended up picking them out.
Feta cheese seemed like such a good idea when I was reading the recipe but as it turns out it was the weakest part of the dish. The feta did not melt. Instead it heated up and became the consistency of scrambled eggs. I do not care for scrambled eggs but even if I did I don't think they would go very well in this dish. I would definitely substitute another type of cheese for feta... preferably one that melts well or is a little smoother.
Flavor-wise this was a little bland, even with the jalapeno pepper. The only spices called for are salt and pepper. I'd kick it up with any number of spices or herbs. Any spices used in Italian cooking would go well. Or how about some chili powder? Vegetarian cooking shouldn't equal boring.
A note about the puff pastry. The box includes 3 methods for thawing... 2 hours at room temp, 4 hours in the fridge, or 2 minutes in the microwave. I used the microwave method for this recipe and I was not impressed with the results. It thawed unevenly (warm/cooked on the outside while still cold/frozen in the middle). This made for difficulty in rolling out and working with the pastry although the taste in the end was fine. Given the option, thawing in the fridge or at room temperature yields the best results.

So, would I make this again? Probably not. I could do so with the above changes but there is a whole world out there of vegetarian dishes I'd like to try. I would make any number of those before coming back to this one.

Puff Pastry Appetizer

2009-08-21T06:28:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I blogged about making a puff pastry appetizer for a party. It was a totally made up recipe and I was quite proud of it so I made it again just for you to see, and maybe drool over ;)

Hello little puff pastry square. Welcome back into my life. I have missed you so. But the honeymoon is over and now I have to destroy you... mwa ha ha ha!

You are now a flatter version of your former self.

The box says to roll the square out to 12" X 12" but I got a little carried away and this was more like 15" X 15".

Then I took some pecans and gave them a rough chop. No need to make them smaller than this... we're looking for some crunch here, not pecan dust.

I placed 1/2 a block of cream cheese in the middle of the rolled out puff pastry. Then I topped it with the chopped pecans. Some overflowed... it's all good :)

Then I topped the whole pile with some brown sugar.... about 4 or 5 tablespoons. This looks like a lot of brown sugar but it really wasn't. It added some sweetness to the appetizer but definitely wasn't too much.

Then I brought the corners together at the top and pressed them together. I sealed any other openings by pressing the pastry together. A little water helps if the pastry is reluctant to cooperate. This made a nice sealed package so nothing could ooze out prematurely.

I sprayed the baking sheet with Pam but I doubt it was really necessary. And I love that this is small enough to bake in the toaster oven.

And here it is all toasty brown on top. Yum yum yum.

I cut open the pastry appetizer so you could see the innards but it's a little hard to see. You can see the cream cheese in the middle and there's a glimpse of the caramel (cooked brown sugar) and pecans on the left.

Lessons learned (as I am foodiestudent I have much to learn and take lessons away with every experiment):

The puff pastry box says unless you have a recipe, to bake the pastry at 425. However, as this recipe has a filling I think it would have worked better at about 400 for a slightly longer cooking time. The cream cheese would have had a better chance to melt and there were pockets of brown sugar that hadn't melted enough to be a caramel sauce so a little longer time in the oven would have rectified that.
The puff pastry rolled out was easily large enough for a whole 250g box of cream cheese to be used in the recipe.
This is a rich recipe so don't try to eat it all by yourself. The first few bites were very good but after that I felt obligated to eat it because it was so good but I felt very blah after a while because it was so heavy.

Here is the recipe if you'd like to try it yourself....

Cream Cheese Pastry Appetizer

1 sheet/block of frozen puff pastry, thawed
1 250g block of cream cheese (regular or light)
1/3 cup pecans, rough chopped
1/4 - 1/3 cup brown sugar
3 - 4 apples, sliced
lemon juice

Preheat oven or toaster oven to 400 degrees. Roll out the puff pastry to about 12" X 12". Place the cream cheese on the center of the pastry. Top with pecans and brown sugar.

Bring corners of pastry up to the top of the cheese mound. Seal together in a decorative fashion using a drop or two of water if needed.

Bake in preheated oven for about 40 minutes or until toasty brown on top. Serve with sliced apples drizzled with lemon juice (to keep them from discoloring).

Butter Chicken

2009-08-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

I have been making Better Butter Chicken out of the Eat, Shrink, and Be Merry (ESBM) cookbook for months. But at the request of my cousin Sarah, I started looking for another butter chicken recipe that didn't use any premade sauces or marinades. The recipe from ESBM uses bottled tandoori marinade on the chicken and the rest is from scratch. But this new recipe uses nothing premade which is preferable to me as who needs the extra sodium and preservatives found in the store bought stuff?

I found this recipe for Butter Chicken on the Tasty Kitchen website. It is an off shoot of Pioneer Woman's website which is my new "first stop" when looking for new recipes :)

It starts with cutting boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or your cut of choice) into 1 inch cubes and marinating them for 30 minutes - 24 hours. The marinade is simple.....

Just cumin, ginger, salt, and yogurt. The recipe calls for "Greek plain yogurt" but I couldn't find anything like that in Safeway so I went with Lucerne instead :)

The chicken cubes went for a little swim in the marinade. My intention was to cook them an hour later but life had other plans for me and I didn't get to them for 24 hours. this turned out to be a good thing as the meat became very tender with the extra time to marinate.

To save on clean up time, and let's be honest, we all want to save on clean up time.... I lined the baking sheet with foil before lining up the chicken cubes for baking. These went in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes.

Now is a good time to start the sauce. If you start the sauce within about 10 minutes of the chicken going in the oven you will find that when the chicken is done it will be the right time in the recipe to stir it into the sauce.

We start the sauce by sauteeing an onion in a tablespoon of oil. I sliced this onion using a food processor. Ah, I love my food processor. It never makes me cry when slicing an onion :)

The next step is mixing in some spices. But instead of taking a picture of the jars like I normally do (yawn) I measured them into this cute little bowl. There are six spices here, can you guess what they are?

(insert the theme music from Jeopardy! here)

Time's up. How many did you get right? :)

Here are the spices mixed with the sauteed onions. This step looks disgusting but smells wonderful. The butter chicken spices are starting make the whole kitchen smell like "Bombay Sweet House" (best Indian food in Calgary! If you are ever in north east Calgary make a point of stopping there for some butter chicken, naan, and any one of their many desserts).

Canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and chicken have been added now. All that's missing is a little heavy cream and butter for some added richness. Although this could possibly be skipped for a healthier version.

With ESBM's version I take about 1/2 of the mixture and mix it in the blender just before adding the chicken. This results in a smoother overall texture. However, this version was quite smooth and didn't require that extra step.

And here's the final product. A little salad and wild rice completes the meal.

Now, I've got to say, compared to ESBM's version, this was creamier and tastier and really was no more difficult than the version using the bottled marinade.

But beware, this version is deceptively spicy. If you are serving it to children or people who don't like spicy foods make sure you have some extra yogurt on hand to dilute it. You could also rinse the marinade off the chicken before baking it but if you take too much off you risk removing too much flavor from the whole dish. And some people like full flavor :)

When I make this again I will try adjusting the last step. Instead of adding heavy cream and butter I'll try substituting half n half for the heavy cream and skip the butter all together. But other than that I like the recipe just as it is. It gets two big thumbs up from the foodiestudent! :)

Curly Wurly

2009-08-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

This is a Curly Wurly as you might find it in the store:

This one and only time I will contort the Curly Wurly to show you the innards. Creamy caramel goodness enrobed in Cadbury's milk chocolate.

And this is the carcass, just moments after the carnivore, uh chocolat-a-vore, consumed the delightful little Curly Wurly...

And the chocolat-a-vore rejoiced for the hunt was a successful one.

Company is coming and I've got no veggie dip!

2009-08-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

We had an impromptu party a few days ago and I had no party food for my guests. I was able to rustle up a couple of dishes by rumaging through the fridge...

First was a dish I, regrettably, didn't take a picture of. I took some frozen puff pastry and thawed it in the microwave. Then I rolled it out to about 10 X 8 inches. I placed 1/2 a block of cream cheese in the center and topped with some chopped pecans and a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar. I then brought the corners of the puff pastry together on top to make a little flowery knot and baked it at 425 for about 35 minutes. And it received great reviews from those that tried it. Yum yum yum. I think this would go very well with apple slices... but we didn't have any so we just dug in and ate it by itself :)

The other dish I made was some veggie sticks from the vegetables I had in the fridge. Wash & slice... easy-peasy. But we had no dip. I found an old bottle of ranch dressing well past its best by date but didn't think food poisoning would be an enjoyable result of the party. So I raided my fridge and cupboards for anything I thought might make a good dip.....

My potential ingredients included buttermilk, dijon mustard, mayonnaise, cayenne pepper, plain yogurt, lemon juice, dill, salt & pepper, and brown sugar. What a strange group of ingredients. What delights can I make?

I started with an equal amount of mayo and yogurt and whisked them together. I then added a splash of buttermilk, just because I wanted to say that I used it for something other than cornbread :)

Those three ingredients made up the creamy base. Then it needed some flavor. I added dill, salt & pepper, cayenne, and brown sugar. It still needed a little something so I threw in about 1/2 teaspoon of dijon mustard. I skipped the lemon juice. After whisking it all together I have to say it was an excellent dip. The dijon and cayenne added some heat (almost too much... go easy on that cayenne) but the dill was the prevailing flavor.

Next time you are in need of an emergency dip or salad dressing, see what you can whip up with the ingredients you have in your fridge. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results. :)

Fettuccine Alfredo.... part 2

2009-08-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

I was disappointed in the results of my first Fettuccine Alfredo attempt so I went searching for a new recipe. I searched online (how did people search for recipes before the internet? Oh yeah, recipe books. How quaint). I found a recipe called "Fettuccine Alfredo - the real thing". Well, if it's the "real thing" then it's gotta be good stuff, right? Read on to find out ;)

These are the main ingredients. Fettuccine noodles (okay, they're actually linguine because Catelli doesn't make whole wheat fettuccine - weird!), garlic, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, heavy cream, and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

A word about Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. That little triangle you see in the picture above was $15 at Safeway. Real Parmesan cheese (not the stuff in a can but a triangle like the one above) is about $13 at Safeway. They are similar in taste and texture but I personally prefer the Parmesan. If you wanted to substitute Parmesan and save yourself $2 I think the taste & texture would be virtually identical.

Also, hard cheeses like these are insanely easy to grate using the grater attachment on a KitchenAid mixer. After hand-grating the last batch I realized how foolish that was and went back to my KitchenAid mixer for this round. Who wants to burn extra calories anyways? ;)

So the cooking process went like this.... lightly sautee the garlic in the butter, add the cream and bring to a simmer, add the cheeses and salt & pepper and stir until melted. Serve over cooked fettuccine. It was incredibly simple.

The end result looked like this....

I topped it with some chives and a little extra grated Parmesan.... and the pasta gods rejoiced! This really was very good alfredo sauce. It was a little runny (more about that in a second) but the taste was truly delightful. This one is highly recommended. We refrigerated the leftover sauce and microwaved it the next day for lunch and it was just as good the second time around.

What would I change?

The recipe doesn't specify so I cooked the noodles and sauce at the same time. However, the noodles cooked much faster than the sauce so I had to serve the sauce as soon as the cheese melted or risk the noodles getting cold. It would have been preferable to let it simmer for a while and reduce down to a thicker consistency. When (not if) I make this again, I will make the sauce fully and let it simmer while I cook the noodles.
The recipe calls for 2 1/2 cups of heavy cream. This is a little excessive. I would reduce it to 2 cups, maybe less, and top off with water as it's quite rich. Alternately I might try using half n half mixture instead of heavy cream. Of course this probably won't help the runniness situation addressed in #1 so I'd make sure the sauce is reduced to the desired thickness well before cooking the noodles.

That's it, no other changes to make. Here is a link to the original recipe if you'd like to try it yourself.... Fettuccine Alfredo - The real thing

Fettuccine Alfredo.... kind of

2009-08-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

I love fettuccine alfredo as much as the next guy. Maybe more! The hearty creaminess. The cheesy wonderment. The versatility of additions to the dish. The ability of the dish to serve as either side dish or main course. Besides the caloric count, what's not to love? :)

I found this posting on Pioneer Woman's site and decided it looked simple enough for anyone, even a foodiestudent, to attempt. Check it out then come back and keep reading :)
http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/07/fettuccine-alfredo/

I can do that, right? So here we go.....

I didn't have any fettuccine but I had it's cousin, spaghetti. And I didn't have any heavy cream but I had skim milk. That'll work, right? Keep reading and find out :)

Now, I normally don't mess with a recipe the first time I make it but a pasta dish without vegetables is like cheesecake without the cream cheese. It's just not the same without it :) Plus, I like vegetables and I wanted some in my meal. From left to right we have 4 colours of bell peppers, tomatoes, and red onion. And for extra flavor we have salt & pepper, chives, and parsley.

By the way, if you don't want to grow or buy fresh herbs, these refrigerated bottles of freeze dried herbs are the next best thing. They taste better than dried herbs but have all the convenience of dried herbs. The foodiestudent recommends :)

I normally grate a bunch of cheese at once using the grater attachment on my KitchenAid mixer but today I decided to kick it old school. Plus I bought this grater about 6 months ago and was starting to feel bad that I hadn't used it yet. And yeah, that black strip on the right is the rind from the parmesean. I just couldn't throw it away for the picture I guess LOL.

I diced some peppers which isn't that exciting but I love the bright colours so I had to take a picture. Enjoy :)

This is just the parmesean cheese all grated up in a little bowl. Why did I take a picture of it? Just to show you that I take my own advice sometimes. A couple of posts ago I was kicking myself that I took a picture of diced strawberries in a red bowl. There was no contrast. Here there is contrast. I am happy with this picture :)

I sprinkled some parmesean on the plate, just like pioneer woman told me to. And before you mention my pale plate, pale cheese combination, please note that these are the only plates I have.

Then, because I'm an obedient girl, I poured the melted butter and cream (uh, milk in this case) combination on the plate.

Next came the fettuccine, uh spaghetti. Oooooo, steamy!

And topped with the rest of the parmesean.

I tossed it all together and then...

Topped with the diced peppers, onion, and tomatoes.

Tossed that around (I did lots of tossing) and then....

Topped everything with the parsley and chives.

And the result?.........

Sorry pioneer woman, but this was not as good as I hoped. In PW's defence, my version doesn't even look as good as hers. My theory on why mine wasn't as successful as hers is:

I used milk instead of cream. You can tell my sauce isn't nearly as thick as hers.
My pasta to sauce ratio is way off. I have way too much pasta for the sauce that I made.
The addition of vegetables added complexities not addressed in the original recipe.
- They were cold which brought the temperature of the entire dish too low to fully melt the parmesean cheese.
- They also required more salt than the recipe originally called for.
- And if I didn't have enough sauce for the pasta before the addition of veggies, it was even more lacking after the veggies were added.

At the end of the day, I'm not convinced this recipe is worth trying again. It's too risky a prospect to put the sauce together on the pasta. There is no room for error.

I'd rather make a complete sauce in a saucepan and pour it on the pasta afterwards. Making it that way allows me to perfect the recipe as a separate entity from the rest of the meal. It also allows me to adjust the pasta to sauce ratio based on my preferences of the day.

Non-stick Spray vs Butter & Flour

2009-08-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

The Experiment: Does using non-stick spray instead of buttering & flouring a cake pan make a difference in the ability to remove the cake from the pan?

Inspiration: I follow Pioneer Woman's blog and her instructions in baking often include buttering and flouring pans but I'm a habitual non-stick spray user and never flour the pans. I wondered if I was getting worse results because of taking a shortcut.

Expected Results: I expected the process of buttering & flouring to be more time consuming than using the non-stick spray but I expected the results to be about the same.

Actual Results:

Butter Flavoured Pam is my non-stick spray of choice. Lucerne regular salted butter and Robin Hood all-purpose flour are my butter and flour choices.

On the left is the Pam'd pan. And on the right is the buttered and floured pan. I melted the butter and used a brush to spread it around the pan. Then I put a tablespoon of flour in the pan and shook it around to cover the interior. I had to do that a few times to fully cover the buttered surface.

I poured the cake batter into the pans. This is my "Canada Day Cake" recipe. Just looking at these pictures is making me drool :)

Time to bake the cakes....

Here you can see that there is a small difference to be seen in the pans. The one on the left is noticeably browner around the edges. It's almost as if the Pam fried the edges of the cake a little.

Here's a side view. You can see the browner edges. But here's the really shocking part, the shape is different.

The floured pan on the right rose more in the middle but the edges didn't rise much, resulting in a domed cake.

The Pam'd cake on the left seemed to rise evenly all around. There is some rising in the center but the edges rose too giving an interesting wavy but fairly even surface.

Time to take the cakes out of their pans. They both slid out easily with no sticking to the pan. The one on the left has no residue but the one on the right has a floury residue on it.

So which method is best? For convenience and clean results I'll be sticking with my non-stick spray. The floury residue is unappealing and is the real deterrent to using the butter and flour method. The convenience of using non-stick spray is just a bonus :)

Dessert Pizza

2009-08-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

I am determined to find a great strawberry and cream cheese dessert. Strawberries are in season and cream cheese is on sale. And frankly... yum yum yum!

Meet store bought naan. This is not the light, airy, tandoori oven, tasty naan of Indian restaurants. It's is a very poor cousin. However, it makes a really great base to individual pizzas. And in this case, dessert pizza.

I mixed some diced strawberries with a little sugar. In retrospect I should have used a bowl in a contrasting colour for this picture. This is why I am foodiestudent instead of foodieexpert ;)

And this container contains a little melted butter and oats. There may have been some brown sugar too. It's been so long. I'm starting to understand the downside of writing up a blog post weeks after taking the pictures.

Here's the naan, topped with strawberries, topped with the oat mixture. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's brown sugar in there.

I baked the dessert pizza in a 350 degree oven, just as I would for regular individual pizzas. I put it on a cooling rack on top of a cookie sheet before baking as it makes the crust nice and crispy underneath instead of making it soggy underneath.

This was especially important in this recipe as the strawberries had lots of liquid in them and if they didn't have a way to drain away the crust would have become a mushy mess. If I hadn't used quite so many strawberries this wouldn't have been as much of an issue. But I did. Hindsight. Let's move on.

This is leftover cream cheese frosting from a batch of cinnamon rolls. By the way, I LOVE cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting. How did I ever have leftovers? Oh well, the important thing is that I had leftovers as without them I wouldn't have been able to do the next step.

I took some cream cheese frosting and mixed it with a little milk.

Frosting + Milk = Glaze

Glaze was preferable to frosting as I wanted just a thin layer to drizzle over and fancy up the dessert pizza.

Witness......

This was good but didn't keep very well. If you didn't eat it soon after it came out of the oven it was a lost cause. The liquid from the strawberries seeped into the crust more and more as time went on and made it too mushy to be enjoyable. Luckily, that wasn't a problem as we ate most of it at once :)

The naan was a nice non-sweet base (as there was sugar in every other layer, this was important). The strawberries were good if a little liquidy. The oats gave a nice heartiness and crunch. And the glaze added the final touch of sweetness to ensure one was aware they were eating dessert and not a main course :)

Felines like chocolate milk

2009-08-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

Felines like chocolate milk. This I know because Vince made a glass of chocolate milk and placed it within reach of our cat, Star.

She reached in with her paw and shook it as if the cold liquid was a shock. Then she had a little taste.....

She must have liked it because she reached in again and licked her paw right away.
Then she tried to stick her head in the glass at which point I put down the camera and prevented a potential chocolaty milky mess that yours truly would have had to clean up.

For the record, Vince dumped that glass and made himself a fresh glass of chocolate milk. And the germophobe within me rejoiced :)

I'm back with more dessert experiments

2009-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad bad girl.... Foodiestudent hasn't been updated in about 6 weeks. I have no excuse, at least no GOOD excuse, for my absence. But I've been prodded by some loyal blog readers and I'm back. I have a few experiments already documented with pictures, they just need write ups. This is the first of those.....

I peeked in the fridge and cupboard and brought these items out as the potential ingredients. Salt, flour, brown sugar, butter, oats, crescent rolls, cream cheese, and strawberries.

The only crescent rolls I had on hand were multigrain... not typically the stuff desserts are made of. But here at foodiestudent, we roll with the punches ;)

I took one crescent roll triangle, placed a small slice of cream cheese on the fat end and topped with some diced strawberries.

I then rolled them up and placed them in a non-stick sprayed casserole dish.

Then Vince decided to "help" by picking up the camera and taking a self portrait. This'll teach him to do that while I'm foodiestudenting :)

And here they are all lined up and pretty. Also topped with a few extra diced strawberries.

The rolls were then topped with oats for a bit of crunch. I likes me some crunch I do :)

I melted some butter and brown sugar and poured it over the rolls. Then they were baked until golden brown.....

These were pretty good. It's rare that an experiment works well on the first try but this one ranked quite high.

Lessons learned from this experiment:

1. Don't take pictures of ingredients you didn't use in the experiment (specifically salt and flour in the first pic) :)

2. Multigrain rolls are best left in the main course and only white crescent rolls should be used in dessert recipes.

3. If you are going to dissolve brown sugar in melted butter, make sure you wait long enough for the sugar to actually dissolve before moving on in the recipe. The sugar was chunky on top of the rolls and the butter pooled around the rolls instead of becoming a united syrupy sauce. The overall taste was good but the texture wasn't quite right.

4. If you don't want your picture on my blog, don't take a picture of yourself while I'm cooking!

Stay tuned for new posts coming soon.

Some experiments work, some not so much

2009-06-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

I seldom plan for a dessert but I frequently want to eat dessert after supper. So this means if I'm going to have dessert I have to improvise.

I have a recipe for "All Bran Brownies" which I had never tried so I decided to make it one evening. The recipe basically calls for soaking some All Bran in warm water to soften then mixing in a box of instant brownie mix and baking soda and then baking. Easy peasy :) So as the All Bran was soaking I went to get the brownie mix out of the cupboard and to my horror the cupboard was bare. Well, bare of brownie mix anyways. However, I had a box of chocolate cake mix. So I thought that was close enough and continued with the recipe using the cake mix.

The key ingredients... All Bran cereal and Chocolate Cake mix.

The mix in the pan all ready to go in the oven. It was significantly thicker and more dense than a typical cake mix or even a typical brownie mix. It was more like the consistency of mashed potatoes.

I baked and iced the cake but alas, the experiment was a failure. The cake was dense and had a definite All Bran taste. Not even icing could save this cake. I had one piece and threw the rest away. However, its one saving grace is that because of the high fiber content from the All Bran cereal, the cake was very filling. It was almost a meal in itself.

On another day I decided to improvise a cheesecake-type dessert. I started by making a graham cracker crust. I didn't measure anything which is so not like me but was very fun and freeing :)

This is about 1/2 box of graham cracker crumbs, a pinch of salt, about 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a little melted butter. After mixing them all together I pressed the mixture into a pie plate.

The filling was interesting. It consisted of 1 package of light cream cheese, 1 can of condensed milk, some salt, and a splash of lemon juice (all mixed together in the bowl). Then I folded in about 2/3 of a cool whip container and about 1/4 cup of sliced almonds.

The salsa in the picture was not part of the dessert recipe. We were having tacos that night :)

Then I poured the filling into the crust. It was about the consistency of pudding which is a little more liquidy than I would have liked. I put the pie in the refrigerator to set. It needed about 5 hours to set but 2 hours later a certain man in my life was asking "is the dessert ready yet?", "can we have dessert now?", "I'm sure the dessert will be set by now" so I caved and served the not-quite-set dessert.

I started with this. It's like Nutella but instead of all hazelnut it's half hazelnut and half caramel. I spooned some of this lovely concoction into a bowl and melted it in the microwave.

I served one slice of pie onto a plate and drizzled the melted Nutella-like spread over the top. Yummy!

You can tell from the pic that the pie could have used more time to set in the fridge. However, even after being in the fridge overnight it was still a little sloppy. I think using less Cool Whip (about 1/3 of a tub instead of 2/3) would resolve the problem. I also would have cut the salt out of the filling or reduced it significantly. A little salt in the crust is great but having more than a pinch in the filling was too much. The almonds added a nice texture to the filling. Another option would be to sprinkle the almonds on the pie crust and then pour the filling on top to result in more of a layered effect.

Overall, I see this pie as a successful experiment. It was eaten quite happily (the next day it had set a little more) and with a few minor modifications I'd make it again.

Have you tried to whip together a dessert with no preparation? What was the result?

Pop Quiz

2009-06-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

Here is the much anticipated guest blog on Foodiestudent. Notes in italics and bold are my own. Hey, it's my blog and I can't have anyone TOTALLY take the spotlight from me :D. With that in mind, take it away, Louisa........

Hello there, gentle readers! This is a guest post by Vicky’s (ahem, Foodiestudent or FS) sister, Louisa. A couple weeks ago I suggested she try this “pop quiz” for her blog, but the more I talked about it, the more I realized that I wanted to do this experiment myself, not just read about it on her blog. So she agreed to let me do a guest post and here we are! (I am nothing if not generous!)

For this experiment, I made homemade pop by mixing various types of syrup with club soda. Then I recruited some coworkers and we taste-tested them all.

(Note: During the taste test, most of us simply drank the pop and rated it. But we had a couple of wine aficionados in the group who swirled, sniffed, and sipped the pop, then used words like “bouquet” and “low notes” to describe it. Awesome!)

The syrups:

Homemade raspberry syrup made from fresh, locally grown, organic raspberries (made by my boss’s husband!)
Maple syrup
Ice Java (sweet coffee syrup that you’re supposed to add to milk)
Ribena (blackcurrant syrup)

Here you can see how much syrup we put in each glass. This also shows the order in which we conducted the taste test (raspberry, Ribena, maple, Ice Java):

And here they are after adding the club soda (we used canned Canada Dry club soda):

We thought it was pretty funny how the Ice Java pop looks like Guinness. :) (the foam on the "Guinness" looks so thick it could be eaten with a spoon)

We had 11 taste-testers, including myself, and each pop was rated on a scale of 1-5 points, with 5 being the best. People could also add comments. The results:

Raspberry pop:

Scores ranged from 4 to 5, with an average score of 4.7
"Smells and tastes fantastic"
"Not too sweet but still really fruity; delicious!"
"Much tastier than real pop!"
"Fresh-tasting flavor"

Ribena:

Scores ranged from 3 to 5, with an average score of 4.1
"Good flavor but not as good as raspberry"
"Tangy, less sweet"
"Bland"
"Not quite as fresh tasting [as the raspberry]"

Maple:

Scores ranged from 1 to 5, with an average score of 3.2
"Much too sugary"
"Good and sugary"
"Delicious! A sweet treat"
"Yuck!! I didn’t even finish it. (Adding Ribena did NOT help)" (Maple and Ribena... just the thought makes me cringe)

Ice Java:

Scores ranged from -1 to 5, with an average score of 2.6
"Tastes like a hardware store. Disgusting" (I got my best belly laugh in months from this comment)
"Good bouquet. Great coffee undertones"
"Big head, short taste" (Due to my ladylike nature I shall refrain from snickering at this)
"Not good for non-coffee lovers"

Here are all the individual ratings. We were fairly consistent in liking the fruit-based pops, but varied widely with the more unusual maple and Ice Java pops:

Average scores:

Incidentally, I work at a university and all my taste-testers are researchers. They offered some comments about the research methods and results: (*cough*geeks*cough*)

For each round of testing, we had the same person pour the syrup, to make the quantities as consistent as possible (without actually bothering to measure). However, we each poured our own club soda, filling the glasses from 1/3 to 1/2 full. (Perhaps mixing each flavor in a pitcher and pouring into the cups would have been a better method, hindsight being 20/20 and all)

We noticed that the scores got lower for each subsequent test, possibly because we were subjectively comparing each drink to the first one we tried, and so the first one became the de facto gold standard. Also, some people didn’t rinse their cups between tests. (44 plastic cups from Wal-Mart: $1.98. Accurate results on the "pop quiz": priceless)

In the end, we recommend heading to your local farmer’s market to find someone selling organic fruit syrup, and using that for your own homemade pop experiments. And Ice Java belongs with milk (or chocolate milk – yum!), not club soda. (The FS will definitely be keeping an eye open for organic fruit syrup. The raspberry & club soda combo looks yummy and refreshing)

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for the great blog post, Louisa. Come back and do another guest post anytime.

Until next week, loyal blog readers.... adieu!

Special Guest Blogger

2009-06-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to announce that next week's blog will be delivered by a special guest blogger. This is the portrait of the guest blogger..... apparently:

Check back next week to read about the results of a fun food experiment.

Adventures in Puff Pastry

2009-05-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've tried making pastry once or twice but it wasn't very good. Pastry dishes (pies, turnovers, etc) aren't my favorite desserts so I never cared enough to learn how to make perfect pastry. Nor have I ever explored any pre-made options available in my local grocery store.

But last week I watched an episode of "Ultimate Recipe Showdown" on the Food Network. It was all about desserts and one contestant made "Raspberry Puffs with Goat Cheese and Thyme". Once I saw how good they looked on TV I just had to try them for myself.

So I went to my local Safeway (I get no money from Safeway for this advertising!) and looked for the first ingredient, one sheet of frozen puff pastry. They had only one kind of frozen puff pastry. I purchased it and brought it home.

It's a small box... about 7 inches wide X 3.5 inches high X 1.5 inches deep. That seemed too small for the first instructions in the recipe... Unfold pastry sheet; cut along fold line to make 3 strips... but I had high hopes that the box would yield a beautifully folded sheet of puff pastry just as I saw in my dreams.

Alas, this is what was actually in the box.....

One frozen block of puff pastry which has been perforated down the center. All of you are probably saying "Well of course, ya foodiestudent! That's how frozen puff pastry comes in Canada" but I had no idea and I wasn't sure how to follow the recipe instructions without the pretty sheet I was picturing in the aforementioned dreams.

So I had to do the unthinkable.... read the directions on the box! (gasp!) Basically the box just says break off one half of the pastry block, thaw in the fridge, and roll out into the pretty sheet you've been dreaming about. I'm paraphrasing but you get the idea.

So I did that (it rolled out VERY quickly and easily), cut the resulting sheet in half which looked like this...

I then baked it as per the recipe and cut the pastry in half. Thusly....

I was worried because they appeared a little undercooked inside but I guess that's what they are supposed to look like inside because they tasted fully cooked.

And here is the finished product....

And O... M... G...!!!!! They were SOOOOO good. They were also far too big for these little dessert plates so immediately after this picture was taken they were moved to luncheon plates. About 10 minutes after that Vince & I were patting our stomachs and groaning about how full we were.

The whipped cream was mixed with goat cheese and a touch of vanilla which gave it a wonderful richness and tang. The raspberries were fresh and mixed with a little jam to make the sweet sauce. A little thyme was sprinkled on top which added an interesting flavor to the whole dish. And of course the puff pastry was perfection :)

Chicken Marinades

2009-05-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

I have a favorite chicken marinade that I use almost exclusively but at the request of a reader (hi Sarah!) and in the interest of expanding my marinade horizons I did some research on various marinades and ran a taste test when I entertained some family and friends.

The marinades I made were:

Braised Chicken - garlic, olive oil, paprika, curry, cinnamon, cumin, salt

Honey Mustard Chicken - dijon mustard, honey, lemon juice, paprika, salt, red pepper flakes

Cornell Chicken - egg, vegetable oil, cider vinegar, salt, poultry seasoning, black pepper

"Unbelievable Chicken" - cider vinegar, dijon mustard, garlic, lemon, lime, brown sugar, salt, black pepper, olive oil

Indian milk and yogurt marinade - milk, yogurt, garam masala (coriander seeds, black peppercorns, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves)

Here are the ingredients for all five marinades. Gather your friends around and play "where's Waldo" with the ingredient list above :) There is one ingredient missing. Bragging rights if you can figure out which one isn't there (click on the picture to see it blown up).

Here is the Garum Masala all ground up and pretty. I use all these ingredients in my butter chicken recipe. All this time I had no idea I was making garum masala... I just thought I had an great butter chicken recipe with an awesome blend of spices.

The marinades all made up and placed into labelled bags. Organization was critical in this exercise so my taste testers would know which marinated chicken they were tasting.

Although I adjusted each recipe down to the amount required for one boneless, skinless chicken breast the final quantity of marinade was dramatically different for each one. Check out the few tablespoons in bag #1 vs more than 2 cups in bag #5.

The chicken was cut up and evenly distributed in each of the bags. Then I placed them in this container and put it in the refrigerator overnight. I loved how pretty the bags were all lined up in a row so I had to take this picture :)

The next day: the chicken in their pans all ready to go in the oven. I made little aluminum foil dividers so that the flavours wouldn't inter-mingle while they were cooking.

And here they are after baking in the oven.... all ready to be taste tested. I asked 5 people to give each piece either a thumbs up or thumbs down.

5 out of 5 said they liked the braised chicken. It was the hands down winner.
4 out of 5 liked the honey mustard chicken. The lone person who didn't like this said she doesn't like honey mustard anyways so that explains her thumbs down.
2 out of 5 liked the cornell chicken. The 3 who didn't care for it REALLY didn't like it. One went so far as to say she hated it and another said she would never touch that chicken again.
2 out of 5 found the "unbelievable chicken" to be okay. The other 3 didn't care for it. The overall consensus was that it was boring.
0 out of 5 liked the indian spiced chicken. Two people said it wasn't too bad but the real disappointment seemed to be that for a recipe with indian spices there was very little flavour.

So the clear favorites in the experiment were recipes 1 and 2. The recipes are below if you would like to try them yourself.

Braised Chicken (the quantities here are for 3 chicken legs plus some sliced vegetables so adjust quantities as you need)
Grate or finely mince 3 garlic cloves and place in a small mixing bowl. Pour in 3 tbsp olive oil and whisk. Add 1 tsp sweet paprika powder, 1 tsp curry powder, a heaping 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/8 tsp ground cumin and 1/4 tsp salt. Whisk together and use as marinade or baste chicken and veggies before baking or roasting.

Honey-Mustard Chicken Marinade (this is for 3 chicken breasts. This makes an awesome chicken sandwich with some pepper bacon and lettuce on a kaiser roll - thank-you Pioneer Woman)
Whisk together 1/2 cup Dijon mustard with 1/2 cup honey. Add juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/2 teaspoon paprika, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Sprinkle in some crushed red pepper flakes or cayenne if you like things a little spicy.

Croutons

2009-05-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you have stale bread buns that no one wants to eat? Why, you make croutons of course.

I don't have a real recipe for croutons but the basic idea goes like this....

1. Dice up the stale bread.
2. Toss the cubes in a mixture of melted butter and various spices
3. Bake the lot on a baking sheet at 350-375 about 15 minutes or until toasted, tossing about 5 minutes in.

The fun comes in when you experiment with the spices. I have had success with the following: salt, pepper, parsley, onion powder, garlic powder, Maggi, Worchestershire Sauce, seasoning salt, curry powder, cilantro, and cayenne (not all at once mind you LOL).

However, I did NOT find success when I tried adding honey. I really enjoy a little saltiness in my desserts but apparently adding a little sweetness to a traditionally salty dish does not produce the same level of taste enjoyment. The honey seemed to counteract all of the other spices. It didn't overpower the taste of the croutons so much as just cancel the power of the other flavors.

Lesson learned... a little salt in sugar is good; a little sugar in salt is bad.

Homemade Bagels from scratch

2009-05-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

Instead of doing a "which is better" experiment this time I'm doing a "can I do it?" experiment.

The Experiment: Can an a foodiestudent who has only purchased bagels in the past make them from scratch?

Inspiration: I ran across a "real New York bagel" recipe on smittenkitchen's blog. The recipe was intimidating because it involves many steps and takes 2 days to make. But since the chances of me going to NY any time soon so I can experience a "real NY bagel" is pretty slim I thought I'd give it a try.

Expected Results: I expect the bagels will be edible but different from what I'm used to. They are supposed to be chewier and more dense than the bagels we are used to in local bakeries.

Actual Results: The first day involved making a "sponge" of flour, yeast, and water....
I was worried right from the start because after 2 hours the sponge was supposed to double in size as well as form bubbles. The bubbles were there but it didn't seem to grow in size at all. So I gave it another hour but it still looked the same. I contemplated chucking it out and starting over but after 3 hours of waiting time I didn't want to repeat the waiting time just to have the exact same thing happen again so I decided to soldier onward.

I added the other ingredients and kneaded and kneaded and kneaded as per the instructions. This was a very firm ball of dough that was a pain in the wrist to knead for so long. If you decide to make bagels from scratch I recommend going to the gym and doing some serious upper body training for a couple of months in advance LOL.

This recipe makes 12 giant bagels, 16 regular bagels, or 24 mini bagels. I opted for minis. The dough is resting here. Why is there a single electric beater sitting on the counter, you ask? What an excellent question, I respond. I needed to find a tool in my kitchen that I could use to start a hole in the bagel to give them their classic shape. It was surprisingly difficult to find a tool that would make a small but perfectly round hole. However, I came across the beater and found the plug-in end to be the perfect size, shape, and easy-clean material for the job.

Here is half the batch in their beautiful round form. Aren't those holes perfect? Thank-you electric beater :)

Before I could "retard" the bagels in the fridge overnight (let them rise slowly) I had to check to see if they were ready. This involved dropping one bagel in a bowl of cool water to make sure it would float within a few seconds. This one floated right away so I put it back with its brothers and they slept in the fridge overnight.

Good morning uncooked bagels! The sun is coming in the kitchen window and it's a beautiful day. The bagels rose a little overnight but they aren't explosive. However, for mini-bagels, they are bigger than I expected. If I made the 12 giant bagels they would have been scary-huge.

Yeah baby! This is the step that separates the real bagels from bagel-wannabe's. They were boiled 6 at a time in a baking soda-honey-water mixture.

I didn't take a picture of it but while the bagels were boiling I had a wee fire in my oven. It's a long story involving cake batter and a pan that was too small and a homeowner who forgot to clean up the mess before pre-heating her oven to 500. Luckily it burned itself out after a few minutes as we don't have a fire extinguisher and I was afraid to pour water on it just in case there was grease fueling the fire. I blew on it really hard and that seemed to help too :)

The finished bagels. The ones on the right were sprinkled with kosher salt. The ones on the left are plain.

The recipe instructions clearly state to let the bagels cool for 15 minutes before serving. I waited about 3 minutes and couldn't stand it anymore. This is one of the salted bagels with some light cream cheese. This bagel along with 2 of its brothers were consumed so quickly I think I broke some kind of bagel eating record.

The verdict is in and yes, Vicky can indeed make bagels. The ones with kosher salt are a little tastier than their plain counterparts although both are very enjoyable. They are definitely dense and chewy but no more so than some bagels I've had in the past. These are white (plain) bagels but they have the denseness of a typical whole wheat bagel available from local bakeries. They are chewy but only as much as you would expect from a bagel. I was worried the chewiness would be too much and be the downfall of the bagel but it wasn't even an issue. This experience was definitely a success.

I was asked the other day if I will take requests for food experiments. The answer is absolutely yes. If there is a food experiment you want me to try or a question you would like the answer to you can leave a comment or email me. I will do my best to respond to all requests.

Until then... happy kitchen experiments :)
foodiestudent

**edit: a loyal blog reader commented to me that bagels, given their shape, should not be referred to as brothers but instead as sisters. I see your point, loyal reader. I shall be sure to think more carefully about the sexual shapes the foods represent before assigning them a gender in future :) **

All Purpose vs Bread Flour

2009-05-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Experiment: Does using bread flour instead of all purpose flour make a difference in homemade bread buns?

Inspiration: I make bread buns about every other weekend. For the last batch I noticed that the buns were quite dense. I enjoyed that when they were fresh out of the oven but the next day they weren't as enjoyable. I wished they were a little lighter. Some research done by my good friend Scott suggested that using bread flour instead of all purpose could make the buns lighter.

Expected Results: From the website ochef.com... "Bread flour is called for in many bread and pizza crust recipes where you want the loftiness or chewiness that the extra gluten provides." So it seems that in theory the bread flour will yield lighter bread buns.

Actual Results:
The titans go into battle. In the yellow corner we have the challenger, bread flour! And in the blue corner, the reigning champion, all-purpose flour!!!! *crowd goes wild*

The bread recipe starts with scalding a mixture of milk, vegetable oil, and sugar. As no flour is involved in this step I am starting off with everything in one pot.

And that brownie in a pie plate in the background... that became a "peanut butter brownie pie" :)

The milk-oil-sugar mixture has been separated into two bowls and one envelope of yeast added to each bowl.

Here the flour and other ingredients have been added to the mixture and it has been allowed to rise for an hour or so. Already I noticed a significant difference. The dough with all purpose flour was drier and stiffer than the dough with bread flour which was stickier and more moist. I carefully measured the flour and other dry ingredients so the difference in texture was quite surprising.

This is after a second rising. Although the bowls are not identical in size & shape I think it's safe to say that the bread flour dough (on the left) rose more than the AP flour dough.

Time to make the buns. I usually use another method to make buns but it's difficult to get consistently sized buns that way so I rolled out each batch of dough and used a biscuit cutter to get more consistency, which I hoped would make for better comparisons.

The difference between the amount each set rose can clearly be seen here. Just look at the space between the buns in the AP ones (right) compared to the bread flour ones on the left. You can see how much more they expanded with the bread flour.

And here's the final result. The bread flour buns look burned but please trust me that they weren't. They got a little darker on top than the AP buns on the right but the lighting his this pic makes it looks worse than it really was.

The buns were put through a highly scientific taste test with my brother, husband, and myself. The results were as follows...

Husband: the bread flour ones are a little saltier and lighter and just better.

Brother: the bread flour ones are a little sweeter and heavier but in a good way. The all purpose ones tasted bland. NOTE: brother ate this bun while it was warm and he said it may have tasted heavier than it really was because it was fresh out of the oven.

Me: the bread flour ones were definitely lighter and had a slightly crisper crust. They held their shape well, even while warm, without being heavy or "stodgy" inside.

Interesting that there were different opinions on the taste but in the end everyone preferred the bread flour batch over the all purpose flour batch.

So, in general, I would say that the bread flour yielded lighter results. The taste was preferred by all and I would recommend using bread flour for all homemade bread products. There is also whole wheat bread flour for healthier options.

FoodieStudent - an introduction

2009-04-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

My name is Vicky Bennett and I am not a foodie. Phew! That was a tough confession to make. Actually not really. Most people who know me would not be surprised by that at all. Until about 6 months ago I lived on salads, frozen dinners, and fast food.

Then one day something miraculous happened.... I came across Pioneer Woman's website. PW single-handedly piqued my interest in making food from scratch. Her recipes are simple yet ambitious at the same time. The step by step pictures mean even microwave-only chefs (like me!) can attain her culinary heights. Once I started trying her recipes I was amazed at how my kitchen confidence grew and I was able to branch out to other recipe blogs and websites, although I will always stay true to PW and her initial inspiration. I still check her site on a daily basis.

The more I tried, the more I wanted to experiment. I wanted to see how close I had to follow recipes to the letter and which shortcuts I could take. For example, how important is sifting the flour when making a cake? Is buttering and flouring a pan any better than using non-stick spray? Does salt really enhance the flavour of chocolate and other sweets? For that matter, is kosher salt better than table salt?

This is the blog where I will research, experiment, and document the results of these wonderings.

To kick it off, here is a picture of a loaf of brioche I made during a food network monthly challenge in January 2009. I made it using the flour shown (Robin Hood's blend of white flour and wheat bran.... healthy like whole wheat but cooks and tastes like white flour). The results were less than satisfying. Brioche is supposed to be flaky like a croissant and it seems that for the right texture only white flour will do. This loaf was crusty and dense... still edible but not what I would call a success given the expected texture.

I couldn't end my first post with a culinary failure so here's a success. For a St. Patrick's Day buffet I made mini-cupcakes and some chocolate shapes with the leftover green and white chocolate. At the back are the two mini-cupcakes (that simply ooze with cuteness) and in the front from L to R are a shamrock, mug of green beer, and a green chocolate in the shape of a peanut butter cup. Not only did I eat all of the above by the handful but they were the first items to disappear from the buffet table. There is no greater compliment for a FoodieStudent like me :)

Thanks for reading my blog. Check back for a new post with my first official experiment soon!