Month: August 2019

Kale craze is the new avocado palooza. Medical News Today has an article HERE where they list a few bullet points about fiber, potassium and a few paragraphs in relation to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. As far as we’re concerned, we’re just happy we can make it taste less like eating palm tree leaves. We bought our kale from a couple of ladies at the weekly Saratoga Farmer’s Market. She suggested baking it, blending it into healthy shakes and perhaps ripping it up into anything with spinach.

My weak point when it comes to eating healthy is a bunch of rolled over potato chips, tortilla chips and a handful of crackers. First things first, let’s go to a video of a potato chip factory to see how professionals do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L09bMsShfY4 

This is our first attempt at making kale chips. My father tried to make these a few times but couldn’t quite figure out the secret to keeping them crispy. There’s something in the humidity that re-hydrates kale all over. That crispy texture only stays for about a half-hour. We baked our kale at 375 degrees,  Fahrenheit for 7 minutes. Any longer than that in a regular bake oven and they’ll burn to black and brown flakes.

Salty, spicy, cheesy and cinnamon churro seemed like 4 good test flavors.

Salty is your basic brand-name original flavor. Not much to it, but it provides a control one needs in all scientific endeavors. It was worth it to see how much seasoning we needed for each flavor. This proved it was possible. They were a little browner than we had liked and we needed a test to see how long they needed to bake. All and all, it was worth it.

Spicy is the hot chip that everybody eats a bunch on a dare or stains their fingers and has to suck it off holding back tears. That one’s fun!! These took second place for us. My only wish is that I held back on the cumin and smoked paprika. A little flavor, a little heat, a little too much on each chip, but we did a good job on this batch.

Every kind of snack food on the market has some kind of cheese flavor unless it’s fruity. This is essential in other words because if there’s no garlic ranch or sour cream flavor combo, my favorite tends to be the cheese coated one. Usually cheddar or Parmesan. Unfortunately, the cheese we grated on top oozed a bit and the inner moisture got into the leaves and we didn’t even take a picture these were so bad. We ate them just to get rid of them. No, we’re never grating cheese on top of kale again. We needed to find some dried out cheese if this one was going anywhere. Oh well. Better luck next time.

My mother is an autumn person. So is Jeremy. This is the sweet toothed sugary snack chip that people either love or hate. Cinnamon can be considered a spice after all. It’s easily blended in with brown sugar. You know my favorite chef Anne line: “BROWN FOOD TASTES GOOD!” But this just reminded me of a churro from Mexico. This was the all around favorite. It was crispy, VERY sweet and didn’t get a grainy texture at all. It was the most like store-bought potato chips out of all 4 batches.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

 

 

So, I was coming home from work late one night and boy, was I hungry. So Jeremy came to see me on my way out and we kind of morphed my mother’s 5-can casserole into a midnight macaroni. Her recipe is a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, a can of tuna, a can of cheddar soup and another can of crispy onion bits for the top. But when it’s late at night, you don’t have the time or will to bake up a whole casserole. You want fast food sans guilt. If it was a hard day, you need a soft landing. This is why we have comfort food.

First of all, in our opinion, the ULTIMATE comfort food is macaroni and cheese. It’s an easy one pot dinner almost if you synchronize everything just right. We’re not there yet, so Lauren boiled the macaroni. Shells are a nice vessel for the cheese. The bigger the better, but small ones work well too, as do elbows, rigatoni, or whatever shape suits your fancy. I mean, just LOOK at this gallery of shapes…Voila!

We wanted to be healthy and since I can’t go 2 days without fish, (Sorry Bruce, but fish are friends ’til they’re dead. Then they’re food!) we used a can of tuna fish, not the pre-seasoned packages because you can just as easily play with the seasonings on any plain fish. Combinations can range from sweet to spicy, seasonal, herbal, citrus…Anything you want. The spice pantry is a great place to use your imagination, make mistakes and experiment like a true culinary scientist. Really, try it out! It’s fun! If you aren’t a tuna person, you can find a bag of tiny shrimp in the frozen section, or calamari, mussels out of the shells or even scrap the fish and add chicken. It’s your meal, so you decide what protein goes into it, even leftover bean mix if you want.

Remember that bechamel from a few weeks ago? We added some velveeta cheese to it and gave it a cheesy twist. The tricky part for me is the issue of lumping. When I add the flour first at an estimated lump, (1 cup turns the milk into glue and patties.) I find more lumps than a case of Hidradenitis. My best secret is to pour in your milk first, add the flour gradually and then melt in the cheese. You REALLY want to have as much control as you can over this part in the process. Some say it’s 1:1 ratio, but that’s not always right as far as we’ve seen. Besides, some people prefer imperfect too thin or too thick sauces compared to what the books say.

I am a huge connoisseur of spice. I’ve tried everything I can get my hands on from mild salsa to this one little bottle in the Pepper Palace called “The End”. (We’ll discuss that when we go to Quincy Market. It’s a tad embarrassing.) But anyway, I saw some jalapenos in the vegetable stands and thought, “why not?”. It would wake us up a little. We weren’t scared of the capsaicin because dairy products like cheese sauces have fat which takes the heat down a notch more effectively than water.

Vegetables and accents are yours to decide. We chopped up and threw in some vitamin B rich broccoli crowns nice and tiny. When they cook through, they aren’t as hard but it’s so stocky they never become soggy, a notorious disappointment with zucchini. We piled on some minced mushrooms for the top. My mother likes to use crunchy onion bits. Sometime soon, we’ll show you Lauren’s new rice cooker and try out the cute little steamer basket that comes with it. Nobody said you can’t steam your vegetables on the side and fold in gently. We decorated ours with minced mushrooms all over the top.

Overall, this dish is a total artist’s canvas for any and all kinds of flavors and textures. I can clearly see this working on “Worst Cooks in America” as a base-line challenge as a 1st time creative assignment. We love this dish and will gladly keep it in our repertoire.

There is however one thing that we didn’t do that REALLY would have tied it all together for movie-buffs like us, <sigh> but we’re not alcohol drinkers.

Do you mean…

Yup, Midnight Margaritas! https://youtu.be/FarMiGXytwo?t=12

Anyone who has lived in Louisiana, been to a southern style restaurant or seen one of my favorite Disney princess movies, “The Princess and the Frog” , has heard about gumbo. It’s a spicy southern rice soup full of andouille sausage, vegetables, rice, and sometimes shrimp. African gumbo adds okra as a thickening agent. Beef and pork are not to be found. It’s usually on the side or a kick-in-the-pants topper for rice.

Some say that it can take up to a full day, (kind of like my grandma’s Christmas Eve sauce recipe) but SpicesInc has figured out how to cut that time to only an hour or so.  Their recipe is HERE as well as a comparison to the closely related same-pan main event, jambalaya.

This is the recipe we used from Delish. One thing we found was that out of all we saw about gumbo, we kept seeing the holy trinity. Now let us make it clear: THIS IS NOT RELIGIOUS! The holy trinity of cooking is just onions, peppers and celery. These are a few basic components used in Cajun cooking. They add a pinch of heat and that hearty vegetable crunch. If you want to crank up the spice meter, try a New Mexican green pepper, or jalapeno. Be sure to check out this list before experimenting. Above all, DON’T RUB THE OIL ON YOURSELF, ANY CUTS OR IN YOUR EYES! If it happens by mistake, wash it out with soap and water.    ~You’re welcome!

The roux was for sure the hardest part. Everything else was a simple step one- step two -step three and so on until step. This one wanted the roux to be super dark. 3/5 of the Famous Five French mother sauces: Bechamel, Veloute, and Espagnole use this method all the time. Usually, it relies on a 1:1 ratio of fat to flour. For Bechamel: Butter, a splash of milk and a quick whisk just to get rid of the flour taste if you’re going French style, Oil and/or lard  for Cajun where you fry the flour and let it brown nice and dark in the milk to embrace the nuttiness of it. Veloute is more stock and oil. The Sun King’s court came up with the idea. As they said in the movie, “Perfect Sense” that’s the essence of it all, fat and flour. When Flour meets water, it clumps. The fat acts as a smooth buffer for the molecules to slide around nicely instead of bumping and clumping. You’ve all heard about oil and water, right?

As for the taste after we sauted and combined everything. As for the end result,  we felt this was aces. Bold flavors, salty sausage and a nice pepper blend. The onions had a great caramelization to them. I’d gladly cook this one up again.

 

Geia Sas! That’s Greek for Hello! We’re continuing our GREEK chapter with a bit of night-life. This is a great recipe for when you want to serve something…eclectic, shall we say?

Riddle Me This:  What has 8 limbs, and tastes like chewing gum without the sugar? 

YUM!! I mean Yup, you guessed it…  OCTOPUS! 

 

Don’t be alarmed. It’s already dead. We made octopus soup 3 weeks ago from our big blue Greek cookbook. Not exactly the best idea on a hot day, but better to do a test-run before we get into the colder seasons of capital-area New York. Besides, seafood is best caught in the summer months anyhow.

We wanted to cut down on the salt and sodium, so we opted for 6 bottles of store-bought clam juice instead of fish/seafood stock. It seemed risky, but was well worth it to cut down the tang of that dry red wine we found. 

For those of you who don’t know, wine is either  dry, semi-dry or sweet. This just refers to how much sugar was burned off or not in the fermentation process. Ours was a dry red, which means red grapes were used and all of the sugar was burned off. The wood and the grape skins give a bitter taste of tannin. This happens mostly in red wines, tea, cinnamon, and acai berries.

We also have a disclosure to make: We don’t drink anything alcoholic, so my mom’s rule of broomstick was a bit hard for us. The rule states; one must taste the wine and like it before adding it into any sort of cooking or baking because the taste will stick around in the finished product, even if it won’t get you buzzed. We didn’t like the wine we chose at all. Red was the smart choice for color and goes well with octopus in terms of flavor profile, but I felt if we had gone with something sweeter-but not too sweet, it would have made a difference in first tastings. This is why after we tried some of our finished soup, we added a small palm’s worth of sugar to the pot. (It’s a Sicilian thing. You see it in the movie “Moonstruck” with Cher. I’m an eighth Sicilian through my paternal grandfather’s side.)

We wanted to try something new and healthy. In the produce section, we spotted a couple containers of zoodles.

You remember that pasta maker contraption where you stuck vegetables in the middle of it and cranked it like spaghetti. They claim that people don’t know the difference, but that underestimates human intelligence. Noodles made from zucchini never taste like typical egg and flour noodles. The zucchini noodles we found were firm enough to hold in the broth, but I wouldn’t use them again. They added no flavor at all to it. Maybe the beet or carrot zoodles would have been a better option, that way we wouldn’t have to add the extra carrots in for sweetness. We still decided to add in some fettuccine alongside. This really added some fullness to the soup unlike the other vegetables while also acting as a vehicle to carry the flavor. 

All and all, we would say this one needs improvement, but that’s how we learn everything about cooking if it isn’t textbook. Maybe we could find something that tastes less Italian and more GREEK. Lemon, feta and other pungent flavors covered in olive oil. Nice oregano, but this tasted much more like Mediterranean in general. In my opinion, it needs to scream louder, give a bigger bite, like something was inexplicably missing. It matters some about origin, (That’s how you get fusion cooking) but flavor is what wins me over every time. For me at least, we’re learning about what we like, we’re getting better at making elements, but we need to work on our complex pieces.

This one wasn’t too hard per say, but for us this was a first. We have the formula down, BS: Boil & Simmer. As we get on, I’m sure we’ll get better. But for now, it’s a good start.