food

When I saw the Grab-Its for the first time, I dreamed up all sorts of foods I could use them for. I love nachos, even just plain ones, so here are my Grab-Its with simple nachos and homemade guacamole.

I went to a pot luck Christmas party last month and someone brought something called a California Roll Bake. It was basically a CA roll topped with furikake and baked in a casserole, and then you spoon it into squares of seaweed instead of rolling it into sushi. It sounded amazing, but I didn't have money to buy CA roll ingredients, so I just made a spam musubi version. Delicious!

A grilled cheese and chicken sandwich plus very NOT delicious Santa Fe Style soup by Progresso. I actually prefer TJ's soups, but I think I picked this one up when I was sick and making a quick stop at Safeway.

My mom bought me this Blueberry Hill Casseroles & One Dish Meals cookbook for Christmas. I actually stopped buying cookbooks because I usually only use one or two recipes out of them, but this cookbook has a ton of recipes that I want to try. Today I made the Firehouse Chili Con Carne recipe (p114), which is excellent. I added a little salt, jalapeños, and omitted the chipotle because I didn't have any.

As an added bonus, I got to use my sort of vintage 3 quart Corningware Spice of Life casserole, which fit the recipe perfectly. I got lucky finding this piece at a local thrift store. This was my first time cooking with any Corningware, and it is amazing. I would have normally used my non-stick Calphalon casserole, but I'm trying to get away from the non-stick stuff and wanted to try out my Corningware; I'm glad I did. I've ordered a couple other cooking pieces and also found the Corningware Grab-Its, which I decided to hunt down.

I made my usual carrot cake recipe with white whole wheat flour. The texture changed a bit and the cake is not as moist as usual, but otherwise the flavor is excellent. Next time I will try adding more yogurt to the batter...

After several trips to Mrs. Fields cookies in several different malls, I finally asked why no one had butter toffee cookies anymore. Turns out they discontinued my favorite Mrs. Fields cookie. So I went on a search to find a good copycat. This recipe on Food.com is the one I thought looked best of the few that I found.

I chilled the dough for about an hour as the recipe suggested. The recipe calls for salted but I only have unsalted, so I followed this advice and added 1/4 teaspoon of salt to my dry ingredients. I also conducted a little experiment with my cookie sheets and greasing options. I tried a half sheet pan with parchment paper, a half sheet pan with butter, and one of those Wilton air cookie sheets. I didn't notice a difference in flavor or texture between the different pans, but toffee is sticky stuff, so for these cookies, I'll use the parchment paper.

They turned out amazing! Even better than Mrs. Fields.

Easily my best sinigang ever, this batch has bok choy, tiny potatoes and simmered for 5+ hours. I also figured out that I didn't need more types of vegetables, just more of of the same. So I used 4 carrots and 2 daikons. Still only one package of mushrooms because they aren't DH's favorite. Unfortunately, we got excited and ate most of the meat on the first night, so we'll have veggie sinigang for a while.

This is the first weekend since school officially let out for the summer. It's a little weird not having school, but I guess I better not get too comfortable since I have summer school in a few weeks.

I admit it: this picture is more of my new saucepan than it is of the soup.

The nonstick coating on almost all my pots and pans has worn off. I've had them for about 4 years, so it hasn't been a bad run for them. I'm only keeping one piece (dutch oven) of the 6 piece (stock pot with lid, dutch oven with lid, 2 fry pans, a saucepan and a saucier) set.

When I first bought that set, I didn't know what I *really* needed to cook with, so I figured going with a set was a safe bet. Now that I've been cooking on my own for 4 years, I know that I only really need 3 stovetop pieces: a stockpot, a saucepan, and a fry pan. Technically the stockpot I bought is more like a soup pot, which kind of annoys me, but it's fine since that's what I use it for anyway.

While I was originally planning to go for high-end stainless steel to upgrade (All-Clad or Viking), I just couldn't bring myself to click that checkout button on a $200+ stockpot alone. Instead, I went with three highly rated Cuisinart pieces that, when combined, cost less than the one stockpot I was going to buy initially.

My original set was hard-anondized aluminum with a non-stick coating. Their handles were nice and solid, so they were fairly heavy pieces. My new set is really light so that unfortunately makes me feel like they are cheap. But I know that being lighter is a great advantage, especially with my weak wrists.

As for the food, I added hominy to my recipe at the suggestion of a friend. When I added kidney beans last time, they got a bit mushy, so I didn't want to do that again. The hominy turned out to be a good addition. The purpose was to add more substance to the soup, and it did, without adding any strange texture or taste. I'll be adding it again for sure.

I made these chocolate-dipped strawberries following this recipe on King Arthur Flour. The recipe is super easy, and they turned out looking great! I did get a little excited and tried to drizzle dark chocolate on the white chocolate, but it didn't turn out quite like I imagined. Oh well, I put those on the bottom layer of the gift basket. I also learned that white chocolate burns in the microwave, so I had to start a new batch because I couldn't get the burnt bits out of the first batch.

I hope the recipients like them! ...If they don't, I'll eat them.

I didn't have rice vinegar to make spam musubi, so we just had it as spam and rice with nori. I think I'll be making onigiri with it for lunch tomorrow. Not sure what I'll make for dinner on campus though.

November 6 is National Nacho Day! I love nachos, so naturally I had to celebrate today. Unfortunately, I could not find my slow cooker, so we didn't have shredded pork tacos as planned. My salsa also was past the expiration date, and I found the plastic seal puffed up somehow. So I made the nachos vegetarian without sour cream or guac, but they are still delicious, though.

We also had brownies for dessert. I found John's Favorite Brownies recipe by Scharffen Berger on Cooking for Engineers.

I celebrated National Deviled Egg Day with this traditional southern recipe from Paula Dean. I also used this method for making hardboiled eggs, and they turned out wonderful.

I didn't alter the recipe much, except that I used dill relish instead of sweet relish since that's what we had and I prefer it. But DH and I decided that deviled eggs were a little too rich for us as a main course. He ended up eating most of them since I just couldn't take much more, despite the good flavor. So instead of focusing on the deviled eggs, I'll also include a picture of our breakfast on Sunday. One of my favorite weekend activities is a leisurely breakfast, including but not limited to an egg fried in bacon fat. I know. I'm so healthy.

A good friend of mine whom I haven't seen since December is very briefly in town this weekend. His birthday was yesterday, so I told him I'd make him a cake; he chose cake of the carrot variety. I hope he likes it! It's as much work as I remember, but also just as delicious.

Also, I made some gnocchi and somehow messed it up. How do you mess up gnocchi? Anyway, I had the genius idea of deep frying them as I was trying to figure out how to save it. I didn't do it this time, but I might try it someday.

My lovely risen dough. I have been cooking and cleaning all morning. I'm making siopao, which will hopefully last us a few weeks. I decided to add hard boiled eggs to them since I had to buy eggs for the dough, so I used this method after a quick google search. The method worked fairly well, though I think the water was boiling longer than it should I have; I was multitasking and didn't catch it right away. The eggs turned out much better than eggs I have made in the past though, so I will continue with this method.

In the past I used only chicken, rather than following the recipe and using both chicken and pork. But since I don't really eat chicken anymore, I used all pork. I'm not sure how well it will turn out, unfortunately; after about 3 hours on high in the slow cooker, the pork butt I bought hadn't softened up at all. I would usually have let it cook overnight, but I didn't think of cooking siopao until this morning. I hope my filling doesn't turn out tough. That would make me very sad after laboring all day to cook. I'm letting it cook another hour on the stove before i start filling. My dough is getting a little unruly.

The craigslisters haven't come back since Tuesday, unfortunately, but I did cook dinner tonight. This time I had the lemon pepper, which is tasty. I'm not too happy with the potatoes; they are missing something, but I wasn't quite sure what. I never use a recipe when I make mashed potatoes, and maybe that's my problem. Oh well, I'll keep trying. I usually add garlic or garlic powder, but I skipped it this time to avoid the after taste. That could have been what was missing...

We are babysitting our nephew tonight. I got home, cooked dinner, and DH came home shortly after it was ready. My nephew (let's call him DN) was fussy during dinner, but we got him to eat with some patience and bribery. I feel like I just worked for 12 hours. Man, kids are tough. My boss has 4 kids, so I can't imagine what she must feel like. I'm sure it's different when they are your own kids, but still.