Chicken Curry

In theory, when I said that I wanted to try new recipes and cook I suppose you imagined that I'd be cooking from scratch and things like that. I think that's what I'd imagined too. I do like cooking from scratch, but I also enjoy prepared things. Like curry sauces. I was at the grocery store yesterday getting ingredients for the dessert I made last night and I happened upon a display of Patak's curry sauces. After reading all the labels I settled on the Butter Chicken sauce. I've used the Tikka Masala before and I really like it. So I thought I'd try something new. And it was easy. Cook up some chicken. Add some sauce. Simmer. Eat. Delicious. I definitely don't find any problem with making cooking easy with prepared foods.

After eating my curry, I tried the S'mores Cookie Bars that I made. I found the recipe on one of my favorite food blogs. Mel's Kitchen Cafe has lots of delicious looking recipes. I am excited to try more of them. I haven't quite decided how I liked them. For sure I didn't put enough chocolate chips in, and I think I should have used more marshmallow too, but really they were just very, very sweet and I'm not sure how I felt about that. I brought some of them to work and my coworkers seemed to like them. I think I will have to make them again one day so that I can form a better opinion of them.

Autumn Goal

A few summers ago I made a goal for myself to try a new recipe (ideally for a dinner entree) every week that summer. I remember doing alright, though I definitely made more desserts than entrees. (but really, isn't dessert better anyways?) Then life happened and I haven't cooked nearly as regularly. Now though, I've found that my work schedule allows me to be in the states for most of the rest of the year and I think it's time that I start cooking again. So, my new goal for Autumn is two fold:

1. To try and cook one new recipe every week that I'm in town for the remainder of the year.
2. To actually cook dinner once (at least) every week (that I'm in town) for the remainder of the year.

I guess if I wanted to make my goal three fold my third goal would be to blog about it, but I don't want to get overly ambitious...

Stoves

About a month ago I moved to a new apartment. The lease on the house I was living in was up and it was time for something new. So I moved. And then went out of town for two weeks. Last week I was home and one day lunchtime came around and I decided that it was time to cook something. This was big. I think it was the first time I'd prepared my own food in about 6 weeks. So I made pasta. Yeah, nice spiral pasta with a little broccoli for the sake of eating a vegetable. I think it is a little sad that I've lived in this apartment for a whole month and that was the first time I've ever used the stove. What's worse is that I haven't used it since then either. I look forward to being home again one day and cooking meals for myself.

Food with a Face

Much has changed in my life since I last posted--many, many moons ago. I have relocated across the country, travel 2 weeks a month for my job and don't cook nearly often enough. But I did take a picture of some bird that I consumed in Singapore a few weeks ago. It was delicious. Enjoy.

Zupfa

I has been months since I have posted anything, and it has been a while since I have cooked anything particularly exciting too, but I have cooked a few good things in the last while. Last year sometime I made a Lemon Posset, I think I posted about it. This time I used cream that had been frozen and then thawed. That doesn't work. It changes consistency and just doesn't set up in custards. So the lemon posset never really set and it had a weird consistency. So I now know that cream doesn't freeze. But at the same time I made Scottish Shortbread cookies. Those did turn out pretty well. They didn't taste exactly like Walkers, but pretty close.

I also made Zupfa, which is a sort of Swiss bread. It is delicious. I have a friend who has a good recipe and I used hers and it was delicious. I've decided that it is much cheaper to make your own bread than to buy it at the store and so that is what I've been doing. I made this recipe for between $5 and 6 dollars. And it made approximately 9 loaves. So it was 60 or 70 cents a loaf. So much cheaper than store bought bread, and it has no preservatives! The recipe was huge--I think the hardest part was finding a bowl bigg enough to mix it in, and then enough pans to bake it in. I had regular loaves, and more french bread shaped loaves, and round loaves, the works. I also tried to make cinnamon rolls out of some of it, but that didn't work too well. It's definitely not good for sweet breads.

Sometime after my Zupfa adventure I tried my hand at a chocolate rice pudding. I had all sorts of leftover rice one and I thought that that would be a good way to use it up. Yeah, no. I've never really had good rice pudding, but this definitely wasn't it. It tasted a lot like warm, mushy, cocoa krispies. Definitely not exciting. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Maybe other kinds of rice pudding are good, but this one wasn't.

Let's see, after my not so delicious rice pudding I made a dessert that I was a little more comfortable with. I needed a pie for something so I whipped up a cherry pie using cherries I bottled myself last summer. It turned out pretty well. I'm always glad when my pies turn out.

And the last dessert that I've made was a mango shortbread bar. It was pretty good. It had a shortbread base, and then mango slices on top of that and then more shortbread crumbled on top. it was a bit like a cobbler. Everyone seemed to like it well.

Banoffee Pie and more

I find that once again I am behind on my posting. A few weeks ago I was flipping through a dessert cookbook that I picked up at a sale for 50% (because the dust jack has a tear in it) and I found a recipe for banoffee pie. Now, this recipe looked quite a bit more sophisticated than the banoffee that I'm used to, but for lack of any other recipe I decided to give it a shot. And, it even used my new tart pan--what could be better? When I made it, it certainly was more formal looking, and it didn't have quite the same flavour, but it was still delicious, and it tasted like banoffee. I will most definitely make this one again.

I also tried my hand at making calzones. They're not too hard. Pizza crust, pizza toppings, folded in half... They took forever to make. I guess all that dough rolling just took a long time. And it made about a billion calzones. I'll be eating them for a few more weeks. But, at least I don't have to cook as much now. I filled my calzones with ham, bell pepper, mozarella, and ricotta cheese. They were pretty tasty.

Then today, I was eating my grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and trying to decide what to make for dinner. I thought to myself--Mac and Cheese sounds good. I wonder if I have a recipe for that. or the ingredients. Turns out that I did find a recipe. It seemed simple enough, and I even had the ingredients; how rare is that? So, I made mac and cheese for dinner and also traditional Irish soda bread. I've made the soda bread before, and it turned out alright this time too. I haven't had mac and cheese in a long time, and this was way better than any box one I could have made.

Souffles and Custards

I would be remiss if I didn't update soon. It appears that it has been quite a while since I have written.

Some number of weeks ago I tried my hand at a Chocolate-Banana Fool. The OED explains a fool as "A dish composed of fruit stewed, crushed, and mixed with milk, cream, or custard." The word was first used in this sense in the late 1500s and was spelled with an e (foole). So essentially, a chocolate-banana fool is a sort of chocolate-banana custard. It was quite delicious, though the I think that next time I'll use a little less chocolate because it didn't mix into my custard as smoothly as I would have liked and so was a little grainy. but the semi-sweet chocolate definitely was a good sweetness.

After the fool, I tried a Cheese Souffle. Now, I have always heard the souffles are quite difficult to make, and that anything much of a loud sound will make them fall. I don't know about the loud noise (though I suspect that's merely and old wives' tale) but I do know that souffles aren't really that hard to make. You mix the ingredients, whip the egg whites, fold them together, and bake. They are delicious. I've tried to describe what exactly a souffle is to a number of people, and I have yet to come up with a very good explanation. It's sort of like a cake, only spongy-er, and a cheese souffle is kind of like cheesy scrambled eggs, but not. They are extremely light, and moist, and delish.

The week after I made this cheese souffle, I decided that one good souffle deserved another so I made "Hot Berry Souffles with a Mixed-berry Coulis," you know I like coulis. Instead of making these souffles in a big souffle dish like the cheese souffle, these I made in individual ramekins, so they were delightfully easy and individually portioned. The berry souffles were a nice light shade of purple, and were light, and fruity, and a great dessert. The best desserts are the ones where you can eat just a little and feel satisifed, and this was just that way. The coulis on top looked nice, and gave the souffle just the right sauce to eat it with. I included a picture of them right after they came out of the oven. They are amazingly tall, and fell quickly. but they were good--if I'm allowed to say that.

Earlier this week, I had the responsibility of providing treats for our weekly staff meeting, and so I made a Lemon Cream Tart. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture, so I have nothing to show for my work. Tarts are surprisingly easy to make, and quite tasty. The dough for the crust reminded me of the smell of cookie dough, (though the dough didn't taste like it. In fact it wasn't yummy at all). The lemon cream part was reminiscent of the filling that lemon meringue pies. I'll have to make it again sometime so that there can be a picture.