Linguine with Shrimp Scampi

My sister loved the frozen/boxed shrimp scampi that we ate at our cousin's house over Xmas. The frozen stuff is good but drenched in scampi butter, so we decided to make our "own" with pasta from this recipe. It turned out okay: garlicky, lemony, buttery. Also, Barilla now makes whole gain linguine (exciting) so our dish was a bit healthier.

Christmas Sugar Cookies

Merry Xmas!

My (not-so) little anymore sister and I made some soft sugar cookies. Despite her best intentions, cooking with a 12 year old was nothing short of a small disaster. Nonetheless, if you add enough sugar and butter to anything, it will taste great. The centers were sugary and gooey-I like. Plus, the seahorse cookie cutters were pretty cool. 

Mark Bittman's Braised Turkey (chicken)

Well this is certainly not the most elegant/danty looking dishes, but good lord, it is freaking delicious!

Here is Mark Bittman's recipe. I made a stripped down version, I only had chicken breast and used bacon instead of pancetta. I recently caved/indulged and bought myself some absolutely amazing looking, thick sliced, hickory smoked bacon. Xmas gift to myself. 

I browned the turkey in bacon fat (and consumed bits of bacon while I cooked hehe), and then the vegetables (I used carrots, onion, mushroom and some sage leaves). I then deglazed the pan with some chicken stock and put it all on a baking pan. 

After some time in the oven (not sure how long, was watching TV), it turned out like this!

The chicken turned out...pretty good. I don't think I have enough of a  vegetable bed or liquid for the chicken to be as tender as Mark Bittman's. But the vegetables were AMAZING-sweet, tender and juicy. Very home-y, Thanksgiving-esque feel to the whole thing. In the future, I may just skip the chicken. Yay, very exciting!

Giada's Stracciatella Soup

Giada de Laurentiis is my idol, watching her just makes me want to get in the kitchen. This is her Stracciatella soup which she describes as an Italian egg drop soup. It was super easy and fast; the whole thing took less than 10 minutes to make. My egg turned out more lumpy than ribbon-y but it was delish nonetheless. The chicken broth is great with the egg, parm, basil mixture. 

Caramelized Sweet Potato

This is not one of my usual dishes because I don't usually like to play around with sugar (and hence rarely bake) but I was feeling nostalgic. When I lived with my grandmother, she had quite a sweet teeth and loved to make caramelized sweet potato. I knew it was going to be a pain, because 1) caramelized sugar is finnicky, 2) my grandma had a hit or miss experience with the recipe and 3) I could not find a suitable recipe online. Thus, this was a true experiment, based on my memories from when I was a toddler. Although I don't remember much of the cooking process (besides the fact that, like most Chinese dishes, it was cooked on a stove and not in the oven), I do remember the finished product. When done just right, the sugar would coat each sweet potato chunk, and when you tried to grab one, a long trail of caramelized sugar would follow. Mm..sweet childhood memories.
So first I baked the sweet potato at 400F until I could easily run a sharp knife through a piece, about 20 minutes. 

I then melted some sugar on the stove, and quickly tossed in some potato chunks. 

Well, the last batch looked the best. I did not recreate the stringy-sugar effect and there are clumps of sugar everywhere but it tasted like how I imagined it would. I don't know how to get the sugar to perfectly coat each chunk and for all the chunks to stick together in one perfect sugar-potato conglomeration. There seems like so many variables to this, such as how much oil to roast the potatoes with, the temperature of the sugar, and the perfect sugar to potato ratio. Well the dish needs a lot of work but I probably won't be reattempting this anytime soon-my teeth are hurting from all the sugar.

Potato and Leek Soup

This is the first recipe in the book Julie and Julia from Julia Child's "classic recipe". My mom stir fries leek with pork, but leek and potato is a wonderful combination! In the book, she uses some sort of potato emulsifier but I just mashed the potatoes with either a whisk or a fork. It's lumpy but I like it that way. Like Julie says, it really does only need about 3 ingredients: butter, leek, potato. 

Leek in butter

Potato

Mash..and serve!

This was not my best potato+leek soup since I only had 2 medium potatoes to one leek bundle so it turned out greener and leek-ier than I liked. Oh well!

Cod in Cartoccio

I think I first heard about this on Food Network's Good Eats. 
It's a super easy, fast and healthy way to make fish although I generally like to do this with non-fishy fish (i.e. white). 
My fave combo is cod + whole brussell sprouts. If you've never had cod, it is a tasty, relatively inexpensive white fish which is meatier than say tilapia. According to Alton Brown, the best material is parchment paper but since I am a poor student and don't use parchment paper for anything else, I just use aluminum foil. Just stick whatever you want in the foil with some EVOO, S+P, wrap it up and stick it in the oven. 500F, 12 minutes-FLAT (usually).

Before: 

After:

After with the fish all flaked up:

Cookies with cocoa powder

Today I have a guest recipe from the lovely Linda T. 
This is what she made
Here's how it turned out! I ate quite a few of them. Very delish!

Here is the cookie dough

Before and After. Please appreciate the artfully placed pumpkin and ribbon in the after picture.

Roasted Chicken Drumsticks in Homemade BBQ Sauce

I've been on a chicken drumstick kick recently. I've made them Asian style in soy sauce + garlic and breaded but neither of them quite hit the spot. 
This is the recipe I tried. The BBQ sauce was easy peasy, but it takes a bit of time after the chicken is cooked to get it's golden brown coat. I took it out several times to "bast" the drumsticks in its juices. Overall...delicious, probably could have waited longer for the juices to caramelize some more. Gotta work on that patience thing. 


Before:

After! (the 3 prettiest ones, again sorry for the poor image quality. One day I will get a new camera.)

Heirloom Tomato Salad

This was my first time eating heirloom tomatoes and they really are more interesting and taste better than regular tomatoes (even vine-ripened tomatoes). They all taste different but my favorite are the red ones with the greenish tinge. Although it looks like an unripened tomato, it is actually very sweet and just a little bit tangy. 

Heirloom Tomato

http://rockwalker.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/heirloom-tomatoes.jpg

Here is the recipe I tried: More professional heirloom tomato salad

And here is how it turned out. Oh and I tried another one with avocado. Both were good and tomato-y!

My First Post!

I've decided to start a blog about my experiments in the kitchen. 

I am no foodie, chef or aspiring homemaker. Nor do I currently have a functional non-phone camera. But...I do like trying new recipes and new ingredients, and I certainly like eating. 

I plan post the good, the bad and the very ugly dishes, so ... here we go!