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

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

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?

1. 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.
2. 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

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:

1. I used milk instead of cream. You can tell my sauce isn't nearly as thick as hers.
2. My pasta to sauce ratio is way off. I have way too much pasta for the sauce that I made.
3. 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

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

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

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

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.