The great ricotta experiment

At lunchtime the other day, I was looking through the fridge for something to eat. I didn't find any sort of complete meal, just bits. I decided to try something inventive. I had half a tub of leftover ricotta, some plain cooked noodles, part of an onion and part of a can of tomato sauce that we use as pizza sauce. I sauteed the onion and some garlic in oil, added a few spoonfuls of ricotta, mixed in the noodles and cooked it together for a couple of minutes. It kind of looked odd, so I decided to put in the tomato sauce too. The result wasn't the greatest thing I've ever made, but it was pretty good. And better than just wasting the rest of the ricotta. I don't know what else to use it for besides lasagna type of meals.

Birthday cake, test 1

In a little over a week from now, my baby will have his first birthday... yikes! So, as you would expect, I am baking the cake instead of buying one. Since I didn't really start baking until about a year and a half ago, and I haven't ever made an actual cake, I decided I need to do some testing before the big event. This is test one. I didn't have very high hopes for it, but decided to try it just in case. It is a vegan chocolate and orange cake. Recipe out of 'Bon Appetit', again. I got a subscription for Christmas and am putting it to good use!

I didn't quite know how a n eggless cake would be, or how it could even be done, but surprisingly, there weren't that many unusual ingredients in it. In fact, I pretty much had everything I needed, except for the vegan "butter".

The cake looked really good, all frosted and everything.
After conducting a scientific taste test, K and I decided it wasn't bad. He liked it better than I did, but really, my main complaint has because I am not a big fan of chocolate and orange. Why didn't I leave the orange out seeing as I knew this ahead of time? Don't ask me! Anyway, the cake was kinda crumbly, but moister than we expected. And the frosting was a nice consistency, and kind of hardened up, which we both liked. This cake isn't going to be the birthday winner, but it was a fun test.

Eggs in Purgatory

This might be the strangest recipe I have ever made. I found it in an issue of 'Bon Appetit' magazine. It was one of those things where we decided that even though the end product seemed weird, we liked all of the individual ingredients, so we went for it.

First, you saute some potatoes, onions and garlic in oil. Then you add a bunch of artichoke hearts and a can of tomatoes. You cook it for awhile till the potatoes are pretty much done. Then you put the whole mixture in a casserole dish, make some dents in the top with a spoon, and crack and egg into each one of the dents! Crazy, right? Next you sprinkle the top with parmesan and put it in the oven till the eggs are cooked.

It's not the prettiest dish, but it tasted better than it looks. And better than it sounds, for that matter. I don't think this is a dish that will make it into our regular rotation, but for every once in a while, it was good.

Chocolate Chip Cookies 2.0

Inspired again by "America's Test Kitchen" I decided to try out their claim of a better chocolate bhip cookie. Better, you say? That's what I thought too. Their changes included, less butter, but you turn most of it into brown butter, using an egg plus a yolk instead of 2 eggs, using more brown than white sugar, and to NOT USE Tollhouse chips. Can you imagine? Their taste tests showed Ghiradelli 60% cocoa chips were the best. So I did just what they said. I think my butter was a little less brown than they were going for because I chickened out, but other than that, the same. The cookies were good, but in the taste department, they didn't have much on the regular old recipe. The way these cookies shined is in the texture. They were perfect! A tiny bit crunchy on the outside edges, but really soft and chewy on the inside. Oh and they are thick. Whenever I make the regular recipe, the cookies tend to melt out and be extremely thin and then crunchy. I don't mind this, but it was better for them to not be that way.

The Actual Recipe

For months now, K and I have been using this sauce recipe for salmon. It is actually just part of a larger recipe, and we pulled the bits out of it that interested us. Finally though, I made it the intended way, which is to put the salmon, veg and lemon sauce on egg noodles. It was good! To be honest, it isn't really any better than not having the noodles, but it is something different, I guess

Raw Cheese

Whenever we are at Vitamin Cottage, I look at the selection of raw cheeses. For some reason, I have decided that these cheeses are probably amazing. Alas, they are also expensive, so we have left them to our imagination. A couple of weeks ago, it was my birthday. My husband, correctly so, decided that a good present would be a fun kit of different teas, cookies, crackers, chocolates, and... the cheese! He got me two different kinds to try, one a hard cheddar, and the other a soft cheddar spread. Cheddar is totally my favorite. So I made each of us some samples and we had a taste test. Raw cheese, it turns out, tastes way better than pasteurized cheese. I don't know why exactly, maybe you can taste more of the subtle things that might be otherwise killed. All I know is this cheese has spoiled me into wishing it was the only cheese I ever got to eat. We will be sure to get it for special occasions here and there, but unfortunately, it can't be our go-to thing.

Muffins

I think I may have mentioned before that while I can cook like crazy, I never really baked until relatively recently. I think when I was pregnant is when it really started, because all I wanted to eat were baked goodies. Now I have added muffins to my repertoire. I was inspired by an episode of "America's Test Kitchen". They have yet to fail me on perfect recipes. These muffins were no exception. Perfect!
They have a few tricks. One is to use buttermilk. Another is to make a sugar and lemon zest topping to put on the muffin tops before baking, which gives them a super good, crystalline wonderfulness. The main trick though, is to make a condensed fruit jelly to mix in to the batter, besides just having the whole blueberries. You cook down some blueberries and a little sugar and then swirl it into the batter once you have that poured into the muffin pan. This makes for the best muffins we have ever tasted!
On my second go-around (we don't want to waste the excess buttermilk!) I found that I didn't have enough blueberries left to make both the jelly part, and have the whole ones in the batter. So I made the jelly out of raspberries instead, and still used blueberries for the whole fruit. This set was even better than the first!
We have enough buttermilk left for one more set of muffins, and I am definitely making the mixed berry version again. Good job Test Kitchen!