remakes

'tis the Christmas season, and as such I'm in baking mode. I wont bother posting the same recipes from last year, so only will post new stuff!

Today I made my favourites: almond squares: http://cheflolls.blogspot.com/2009/12/almond-squares-my-favourite.html

YUM!!!

stir fry

So I've been trying to make stir fry. Or rather, asian stir fry. Chow Mein. something like that.

It's not working.  The flavours aren't right, even when I cheat and buy a flavour pack from the store. The noodles are all wrong, and I'm buying the 'chow mein' noodles!!!

I'm going to blame my tools right now: my pot, pan, brain, arms, etc.

I shall persevere.

 Yes, you do see brussel sprouts. 

Secret Family Cheesecake

This is known at home as either 'Charlene's Cheesecake' (after my cousin Charlene. My Aunt Marlene made this for Charlene's christening and mum grabbed the recipe...)... although in reality it's just called 'Cheesecake, Cheesecake, Cheesecake' by a chanting family...

Now this is a secret family recipe, so I cannot divulge the ingredients or process.  I can say that in making it, I learned how to properly separate egg yolks, make meringue, use a double boiler, and make a mess out of pretty much every pot and pan in the kitchen! Took about 90 minutes to make too, so a very intense recipe...


So, if I make you Cheesecake, you'd better enjoy it! ha!

Bobutti

 Made this with my Dad last weekend.

Still waiting on the recipe from him. Basically it's a southern african curry with lots of dried fruits in it - super yummy.

For now I'll just post photos.

Rombauer Port

Excellent!!

Very sweet, blackberry and cherry flavours, but not so strong that you can't enjoy a full glass or two!

Thanks to Reesa for the tasting - she purchased the bottle on our 2007 trip to San Fransisco and saved it for a special occasion.... congratz on buying a place Rees!!

Tinhorn Creek 2005 Merlot

Had that last night with some sausage rolls while watching Planet Earth with the parental units.

Straight out the bottle, for the taste test, I was worried it had gone a bit 'over the top' - slight vinegar aftertaste.

However after letting it breathe a bit, it was just fine.  Now I'm terrible at describing red wines, but it had no tannons, which I was happy about, as I don't like it when my red wine 'dries out' my mouth.  It wasn't very 'heavy' or anything - it was pretty much exactly how I like my red wines - good flavour, smooth, but not overly heavy, or overly watery.

Fingers crossed as I type up about wine, I'll be come a bit more knowledgeable about it all, and at the very least develop some kind of consistent language so you know what I'm talking about!!!

Frightfully bad

I am frightfully bad at keeping up with my cooking it seems.

I shall try cook something tomorrow.

In other news, my Uncle suggested I start adding the wine's I drink and enjoy (or not) to my blog, for added... fun? 

So expect to see the odd wine review on here as well. If I remember to photograph bottles, I shall do that too.

Sorry to be so cooking-boring! :)

The Return of Chef Lolls!

I'm baaaack....

And I'm trying to perfect some of my favourites. Today's attempt was some Hummus, using a recipe from a book I purchased in England - see photo. However, as usual, when I followed their instructions, I wasn't happy with the outcome, so I then improvised.

Simple Hummus
Ingredients:
19oz can Chick Peas
5 Tbsp Tahini paste
1.5 Tbsp lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 Tbsp water

3 Tbsp olive oil
3 shakes of cayenne pepper
2 shakes black pepper


Method:
Drain chick peas. Blend in blender until nice and smooth. Add tahinni, then garlic and lemon juice. Blend. Add water, then olive oil. More blending. Add cayenne and black pepper. Still more blending.

The original recipe was for a 14oz can, and I had a large one, so I just up converted. However the results were a bit off - I should only use 3 cloves of garlic, and definitely need at least 3 Tbsp of olive oil.

I served it with some cut up baguette, baby tomatoes (from my Dad's garden - yum!), cucumber and carrots. I think this was a good mix of flavours and textures, and did help disguise the strong garlic bite. If you like garlic, definitely keep the 4 cloves, but if you want to interact with humans within the next 24 hours, I'd say only do a max of 3.....

incinerator plate

So I am not having much time to do inventive cooking because I'm working around 10 or 11 hours a day, plus another 2 hours of commuting.. when I get home it's 9pm and I just want a quick meal, so in goes a microwave dinner...

However this past weekend I did try cook... and I learned some valuable lessons. 1) my 'hot plate' is an incinerator plate (technically I already knew this, but now it is confirmed). 2) you can't boil rice in soup. Or at least not 'cream of chicken' soup. I was going for a psuedo rissoto thing... in my mind it was going to be fantastic... but it just didn't work and I created an epic burned up mess.

No photos, sorry.

Perhaps this weekend I'll do something successful, like a stirfry or something. Otherwise me and the microwave will continue to be best friends.

Micro-Cooking

Well exams are finally over and I'm exhausted. I don't think I'll be picking up cooking for a few days.

Then it will be an adventure in Microwave cooking. I'll be in London (UK) for June, July and August, living with a mini-fridge and a microwave. I'm determined to be inventive.. not just eating the micro dinner every night, like I did last summer...

So if anything interesting is created, I'll post it up here! Stay tunned!

pressing pause

Well obviously I've had to press 'pause' on the cooking stuff... school has just taken over, along with a small thing called the 2010 Olympic Games, and having had a nasty cold back at the start of February...

I still intend to continue this epic journey of learning to cook, but it's on hold until my exams are over.

So check back in... June???

Cake.. well not really...

So my Aunt turned an important age this week (see how nice I am, not saying the age??). For the momentous occasion my Uncle stealthily planned to steal her away to Las Vegas (and area) for a week. This involved a night at our place in Vancouver, so I saw it as an opportunity for my blog...

That being said, I've got a sniffle and am behind with school, so wasn't able to actually find a 'scratch' cake recipe, so madam crocker assisted with the cake itself.  However instead of the 'water' I usually add to the mix, I added milk, and it was an interesting, and tasty, outcome. The cake was more dense and creamy, not as 'sticky' as water based cake is. Anyway.

I did make the frosting from scratch. I used a different recipe than last time at Mum's request. I followed all the instructions to the T, but something was wrong - it was too watery. I added more icing sugar, and then it was suddenly far too 'sugary'. So I added more butter.  In the end It tasted fine, but I know it wasn't quite right. Who knows.


Butter Frosting
Ingredients:
(From Five Roses)
1/4 cup butter
pinch of salt
3 tablespoons milk
2 1/2 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Method:
Cream butter with pinch of salt. Gradually add milk and icing sugar, alternating. Then add vanilla.

As I say, I added more icing sugar, and then more butter, to try get the right consistency. Mum thinks that she usually adds all the icing sugar, and then later puts in the right amount of milk, watching the consistency as it goes. Who knows, I'll just have to experiment later.

mmm Frosting

So I found a frozen cake in the freezer (half a cake, leftover shrapnel from Mum's trifle over Christmas). Since the weekend prior to this I'd eaten some lovely wedding cake, I was inpsired to eat it (that's my story and I'm sticking to it... nothing to do with stress and developments with school, nothing at all...).  All the cake needed with icing.

So I looked in my Five Roses cook book and found an easy butter icing recipe.

Rich Butter Frosting
Ingredients:
1/3 cup butter
1 egg
2 cups icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla


Method:
Cream the butter then add the egg. Slowly add in the icing sugar, and finally the vanilla.  This icing is delicious!

success!!

I have finally successfully made a mac and cheese sauce!!! wooo!!!!

So I followed the same recipe as below, but halfed it, and went super super slow. I made the roux properly and added the milk and cheese super slowly and it worked like a charm!   This time I used regular cheddar and spicy jalapeno cheddar and I'd definitely reccomend it.

So the only problem? I forgot to take a photo as I ate it too quickly!

WOOO! Finally, success!

Revisiting Mac & Cheese...

No helpers this time (and no cans of soup).

I looked up a 'roux' recipe after some comments on the last time I tried to make it from scratch. I turned to my new Julia Child cookbook. It sounded easy. Just add 3 tablespoons of flour to 2 tablespoons of butter, mix until nicely blended and 'frothy'. Then add 2 cups of milk and later 1.5 cups of a cheddar/parmesan mix of cheese. Add cayenne pepper if desired.

Sigh.

Well, no, not sigh, lesson learned. You can't just plunk all the flour in with the butter (unless you want your flour mixture to look like breadcrumbs), and the pan can't be too warm, and the milk must be warm and added SLOWLY.  Otherwise you get a hissing lumpy mess.

With a lot of patience (more than I have), I squished out most of the lumps and added the cheese and ate it on top of some fusilli pasta.  It tasted quite flour-y, but cheesie enough, so I'm going to have to play with it all at a later stage.

I'm not giving up!!

Opa! A Greek Feast

The Cooking with Friends continues! This time it was with Colleen and Wilf, with Wilfy giving me more training. As you can see by the photo, I now have some appropraite cooking wear... (thanks to Reesa and C&W!)

This was quite the feast - it took 3 hours to cook! And while I can't promise no one was hurt during the making of this feast (how's that burn doing Wilfy?) I can say that we made a delicious meal, and would recommend greek-lovers to try some of these recipes.

Now, I think I have to caution my readers that these recipes aren't necessarily what we made or consumed, as, honestly, I was cooking with Wilfy, and Wilfy and recipes don't seem to get along......... =P  But I think they are pretty darn close! I'll point it out where I have no idea if it matches up.


Pita Bread
(taken from Joy of Cooking)
Ingredients:
3 cups bread flour
1.5 tablespoons sugar
1.5 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons active dry yeast (this is really cool to watch happening)
2 tablespoons melted butter
1.25 cups water

Method:
Mix everything together and knead for 10 min or so until dough is smooth, soft and elastic (gooey).  Transfer to oiled bowl and turn over once, then let rise (covered by plastic) for about an hour, or until doubled in volume.  Then divide into roughly 8 pieces and roll out with some flour into flat rounds. Let rise again if you want.  Place rounds onto pizza stone (or other baking surface) and wait until puffy areas form. Flip and then remove. The cooking is about 1 min per side. Beware, oven is hot (see above re Wilfy's burn).

Hummus
(also from Joy of Cooking)
Ingredients:
3/4 cup of chickpeas
3 tablespoons of tahini
2 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
Some olive oil.
1/2 teaspoon cumin

Method:
Pure in blender, adding oil to smoothen.

Tatsiki (no idea how to spell it).
Ingredients:
Balkan plain yoghurt
cucumber
others???

Method:
Wilfy did this one, so I don't know. I believe it was to add the shredded cucumber to the yoghurt and stir. I'll check and change the post once I find out more details.

Greek Chicken
Ingredients
Chicken
Lemon Juice
Garlic
Oregano

Method:
This was all by Wilfy guess, so I can't say how much other than 3 lemons and probably 3 cloves of garlic. The Oregano was just shaken in.  Add the chopped up chicken and let marinade for a few hours, preferably overnight. It's cool, the acid cooks the chicken in the fridge.
Then put the chicken onto skewers and broil (or cook on BBQ) until the chicken is done.

Greek Potatoes
Ingredients
Chicken Stock
Lemon juice
Oregano
oil
other?

Method:
Admittedly I can't remember all this. I believe we mixed all the liquid ingredients together, then poured over the potatoes and baked in a 400F oven for about an hour.  It was good, and surprisingly had no garlic.

Greek Salad
Ingredients
Tomato
Cucumber
Feta Cheese
Red Onion
Green Peppers
optional: olives

Method: Chop into chunks, mix and serve. Could sprinkle some olive oil to moisten, but not needed.


Results: Well, it was a very tasty meal. I would probably take the garlic up a notch in the humus, and the lemon down a notch in both the chicken and potatoes, but this was an excellent start!!