cooking from books

     My awesome friend Ashley recently sent me Julie and Julia, which I spent the few waking hours of commuting during fashion week reading.  I pretty much needed to cook something from it at the first available opportunity.  I wanted to make Beef Bourignon but it was too late on a Sunday to bother with going to the butcher (the same Astoria one referred to in the book, I am pretty sure) and I do not buy beef from Keyfood because they never. ever EVER have any cut I want. Ever.  It makes me wonder what kind of cow they are putting out there. They do have chicken.  They also don’t have THAT the way I want it cut but I decided it was high time I cut up my own damn chicken, thereby making me less angry every time I go to Keyfood expecting to find “whole chicken, cut up”.  They don’t have it Mia, stop looking.  It takes under 10 minutes to cut up a chicken with a dull knife and not-kitchen scissors.

anyhow.  Instead I made

• Coq au Vin. 

It was fun to make and featured igniting cognac which was also fun, but I don’t think it is any better Pan Roasted Chicken from Marcella Hazen’s first book (Classic Italian Cooking) which is also chicken-browned-then-cooked-in-wine except it doesn’t have: a hundred ingredients, a stick of butter (part of which you FRY BACON IN), or more than an hour in the making.  So I’m glad I finally tried this classic French dish, and I will probably still try the beef version, however I’m sticking with the Italian chicken recipe.  It takes 40 minutes.  It is delicious.

This is a first from this book!  My mommy bought it for me after reading an article about the author who is from Cleveland. The book is very pretty, full of nice photos and unusual recipes.

But I was craving brownies and had (almost) all the ingredients.  Go ahead and guess where this is going…

So, in my fridge there was a previously-melted clump of bittersweet chocolate chips left from the christmas bake-a-thon.  I needed 3oz of unsweetened chocolate plus a cup of chips.  So a brief semi-melting and prying out of the bowl, my previously melted clump of chocolate was just over 4oz.  Add a frozen block of unsweetened chocolate and that’s close enough, right? sure!  Never mind that that cup of chips wasn’t meant to be melted.  Never mind that at all. 

Problem #2:  I need 3 eggs.  I have 2 eggs.  and bananas!  In place of one egg: half a mushed up banana, hey banana and chocolate is great together!

The recipe calls for 20 minutes total baking time.  Mine baked for more like 45 minutes but came out with a crinkly top, a moist cakey inside, and are were perhaps the best brownies I’ve ever made.  I bet if I followed the recipe more like correctly, they’d be even better.  I’m keeping the banana part though, cuz yum.

I have made many things from this book.  Jambalaya, several kinds of gumbo, skillet corn bread, french bread, a spice cake, probably other stuff if I bothered to go get it while typing this…  So, something new!

~ Red Beans & Rice.

I found a lonely bag of red beans in the cupboard that seriously needed to be cooked and just happened to have some spicey smoked sausage waiting in the fridge from an episode of going to the store hungry, so this was a nice easy way to use things up.  All I needed to buy was the cajun cooking trinity (green peppers, onions, celery).   I recently bought a slow-cooker so in this went and I took myself on a cold sunny walk to the Jackson Heights greenmarket, now open all year! 

~Potato salad w/ asparagus.

~roasted chicken with tarragon and all the garlic in the world.

I made this during asparagus season and in draft it has been sitting since.  I must have wanted to elaborate but now I don’t remember why.  The salad was really good.  The chicken kinda meh. 

I love the book.  The recipes are often way to cheffy for me though.  

Yesterday (high of 90 degrees) I canned some jam:

• Strawberry with sugar (double batch)
• Strawberry with honey
• Strawberry lemon marmalade (really just strawberry jam with lemon peel in it)
• Sour cherry jam (which will only set in the fridge, that is its opinion on the weather)

So that checks off the Ball Big Blue Book which wasn’t really on the list.  The only thing from it was the marmalade.  Everything else I used an alterna-pectin which requires less sugar than fruit; unlike standard pectin in which case I would have gone through no crap 15 pounds of sugar, which I did not.  I did have to purchase honey though which was a bit funny seeing as this was under a week since the Great Overnight Beehive Relocation of 2010.  

That honey isn’t going into jam.  I’m drinking that honey neat.

(pictures of jam later)

• Sticky Apple Chocolate Cake.  Variation, Banana.

This book is cool because it gives a basic recipe and is followed by several variations.  Chocolate and bananas are yummy.  Since this cake has fruit in it, it qualifies as breakfast, too!

Technically speaking, this cookbook is not mine.  It came with Josh.  So if I made something from it does that mean I can check off another book as a sort of “get out of jail free” card? 

The book is sort of weird.  It is a compilation of recipes that were part of a contest in which the winners give their money to a charity of their choice.  It has a lot of pictures of people in a variety show.  Mostly Paul Newman.  It also features recipes using bottles of something made by Newman’s Own.  Using bottles of things to make other things always makes me think of all the terrible things one can do with a can of cream of mushroom soup and a bad, lazy idea.   Anyhow there is one thing in there that is a revelation.  It is macaroni and cheese with 4 kinds of cheese and ground lamb and spinach.  Man is that good.  I think you gain a pound reading the recipe though.  So something new!

Tasty Thai Shrimp and Sesame Noodles.

yum.  It used N.O. Light Italian Salad Dressing as a marinade and as part of the noodle dressing.  The dressing also had peanut butter and soy sauce in it.  It was easy and would have been really fast except that I refuse to pay for someone else to clean and de-vain shrimp when I can do it just fine.  I decision I always regret about half way through.  

Deciding which to use for this was challenging.  I figured I would go with a main dish sort of thing because I’ve used the book for endless baked goods and also for bechamel, a thing my brain refuses to remember how to make (don’t get too excited I only use it to make macaroni and cheese).  In the end I went with “what can I make I already have the ingredients for?”  A time honored tradition.

• chicken in a pouch with olives and sun dried tomatoes.

It was highly unexciting.  It is I guess a pretty healthy way to cook and the chicken was super juicy and cooked really fast though, so there is that.

It was much better chopped up over wide egg noodles a couple days later.  With the addition of feta cheese.  Because feta cheese makes everything better.