Deck the Halls with Boughs of Chocolate. . . fa la la la
Shelly
If I've never mentioned it, the best recipes are never my own. Again, this one comes from my Mom-mom. It's one that she's cooked for years, and, for some reason, she thinks that Jared's the only one who likes them. . . So, she makes extra for him (spoiled brat) but not for the rest of us. So, this year, I decided to make a batch for myself. I'm sure that I'll bring most of them to the Cookie Swap at the library. It's going to be next Saturday at 10:30 if you want something to do that morning. We're also making beeswax candles. Just bring some cookies, your recipe, and a sense of fun! Anyhow, when we were eating Thanksgiving dinner, I asked Mom-mom for this recipe. She mailed it to me this week, and I noticed (I guess because it was on her ice cream recipe too) that she always writes "Good Luck" on the bottom of her recipes. I wonder if she thinks that the recipes are that hard - or that I'm that awful of a cook. Anyhow, these are awesome and are well worth the work. This does make a pretty big batch, so if you're eating them yourself, you may want to half it.


Peanut Butter Balls


1 24 oz. package of Chocolate Almond Bark
(for reasons which I will demonstrate later chocolate chips are not an acceptable substitute)


1 stick butter
2 1/2 c. creamy peanut butter
1 box powdered sugar (or just over 3 1/2 cups)
3 c. Wheaties or corn flakes or Special K or whatever kind of generic tasting cereal you have on hand, crushed

In a bowl mix all ingredients except the Chocolate Almond Bark.
If the mixture is soft, refrigerate it before you form the balls. . . if you used too much powdered sugar, feel free to roll away.

Melt the bark and dip the balls into the chocolate. Cool on waxed paper and then return them to the fridge (or freezer if you're working on them in advance).



This is what happens when you try to use chocolate chips. Obviously, chocolate chips would be an awful idea. However, tonight, I'm sleepy. I didn't have the recipe with me at the store, and I guessed chocolate chips. Lesson learned. I will be forced to bottle this and use it on ice cream. The important thing to remember as a chef is that sometimes, you have to make sacrifices.


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Stop and Smell the Cookies
Shelly

One beautiful fall day not too long ago, my ENT suggested that I have my tonsils out. Trusting his knowledge and theoretically sage advice, I decided to do so. I warn you now. . . do not EVER trust a medical professional who wants to rip your tonsils from your body. This hurts very very very much. After two weeks of not being able to eat and actually enduring stomach cramps due to impending starvation, I am finally (somewhat) normal. The funny thing is, the whole time that I was slowly starving, I kept thinking about food, and watching the food network, and flipping through cook books. Maybe it was a coping mechanism, or maybe it's the impending holidays. . . but I couldn't help it. So, I emerged from my ordeal with a little time on my hands and a strong desire to eat pizza, sushi and onion rings (don't ask).

I decided to skip the onion rings and make cookies instead. Lately, I've made my fair share of deserts. Someone in the house, who isn't me, has an insane sweet tooth. Typically, we do pies - chocolate pies. I could make a chocolate pie in my sleep. But this time, my desire to recreate something so simple and elemental won through. I was lazy and just used the Nestle Toll House recipe. I'm going to cheat. Instead of copying it down, you can go here. That's not too much to ask is it? http://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/specialty/nth-detail-occc.aspx Or am I supposed to actually type out the whole recipe? That would be a huge waste of time when there's cooking to do. Here's the verdict. They turned out okay. . . decent. . . edible? There definitely has to be a better chocolate chip cookie recipe out there. And I know that there are definitely better chocolate chips. Who would have thought that Nestle chips are so inferior? The cookies tasted entirely too sweet. The point is, though, to go out there and make cookies!
Okay, maybe I'm getting carried away. I mean, I haven't done a day's work in about two weeks, so it's really no surprise that by this point, I've decided to wash five loads of laundry, make cookies, make homemade ice cream (my grandma's recipe - definitely worth sharing later), make a slow cooker full of potatoes, carrots and turkey, and contemplate the possibility of sweet potato casserole. All the while wondering who is going to eat this since the fridge is already full of homemade arepas, spaghetti sauce, burgers, and enough dollar general cookies to choke a horse. Oh well, c'est la vie.
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Apartment-made pasta
Sarah Ferstel
Ciao, ragazzi!

As promised, I managed to wrangle someone (thanks, Ilya!) into taking pictures of me while I made homemade pasta.

I was going to write a little something about the history of pasta, but it turns out that everyone's version of this history depends on how you define "pasta" and whether you are Italia-centric or not.

There are a variety of ways to make homemade pasta, but I'm going to show you the simplest way I found. Aren't you glad?



Ingredients:

2 eggs
1 cup of flour (I used the same flour that I used to make cupcakes, but please let me know if there is some better, more magical pasta flour that you've used)

Equipment:

1 pasta maker (aka Pastalina, my darling hunk of metal)
kneading mat (optional, but oh so handy)

Step one:

Dump the one cup of flour onto your kneading surface (which should be clean and dry) and make it look like a little Mt. Vesuvius. In a small bowl, beat the two eggs together.



Now, pour the beaten eggs into the volcano. Using a fork, mix the eggs and flour together on your surface. You're going to make a mess - get over it!




At a certain point, put aside the fork (I know, it's hard, but you can do it) and finish mixing the egg and flour by hand.

*Do not put your fingers in your mouth after touching the raw egg. That is a no-no.

2) Once the ingredients seem evenly combined, start kneading the dough. You'll need to do this for about 5 minutes.





Kneading is hard work!









Check out my awesome technique!


If you are unfamiliar with how to knead pasta dough, or any dough, you can check out some techniques online. A quick Youtube search will bring you quite a few results. Make sure to look for "how to knead pasta dough" or something similar. Otherwise, you'll find techniques on how to knead dough for breads that rise. You don't want that.


My basic kneading technique involves pushing the dough with the heel of my hand across the surface of the counter, turning the dough, kneading, turning, kneading, etc.

The recipe calls for kneading the dough for 8 minutes, but I found that 5 minutes of kneading worked well. The whole point of all this kneading is to "strengthen the gluten" or to make a dough that won't tear in the pasta maker.

When your dough is completely kneaded, you should be able to stretch out the dough (like I'm doing in the picture below) without tearing the dough.


Next, cut the dough into 3 equal pieces and then thin them out by stretching them until they are about 1/4 inch thick.

When using a pasta maker, always set the rollers at the widest setting first.


Pastalina has "7 settings of wonder" and I put the dough through setting #7, the widest, first and then turned the crank to run the dough between the rollers.


Next, I set the rollers to #6 and put the dough through again, and so on until I got to setting #1.

Eventually, your dough will get very thin and very long.



You could leave this out to dry to make lasagna or cut it up and make ravioli, but I wanted some fettuccine so I ran it through Pastalina's 'sketty-side.'

(Yeah, I realize it says 'Al Dente' on Pastalina. Apparently, Al is Pastalina's ex-boyfriend and she doesn't really want to talk about him or how much she regrets this "tattoo.")

And then layed out each individual strand of pasta to dry on paper towels.


Fresh pasta can lay out anywhere from 10 minutes to 24 hours in fairly dry conditions (say, an A/C'd Louisiana apartment in October), but after it is dried you'll need to store it in an airtight container.

To cook, simply throw the pasta into a pot of boiling water (no oil) for about 2-4 minutes depending on how al dente you like your pasta.

Buon appetito!
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Happy Halloween
Brett Chiquet

So October in dental school can suck, a lot, so my practice leader decided that we needed a practice pot luck, and since it was going to be the day before Halloween, she thought that we should all bring some ghoulish dishes. I signed up for "deviled mice" and while searching for ways to improve it, I also found another cute idea for "eye of newt". Of course I had to make some changes, and I was very happy with how they came out. Here's how they're made:

Boil eggs, let cool, peel, slice in half (length-ways) and remove the yolk. Side story- as much as I love to cook, every time I have to boil eggs I lose confidence in myself. Do I boil them for a certain amount of time and then rinse under cold water? Do I bring them to a boil, cover and then remove from heat for 15 minutes??? I'm so confused. Shortly after I graduated from college I was enjoying cooking all these new meals and I remember having to call home to ask my mom how to boil eggs. Embarassing, and I still haven't gotten over this. To set the records right, this time I brought the eggs to a boil, covered, removed from heat and then let cook for 15 minutes before cooling in ice water.

Combine all of the yolks in a bowl. Add mayonaisse (I used ~ 1/2 cup for 18 eggs) and yellow mustard (I used ~ 1 TBSP). Just make sure its a consistency you like. Add salt and pepper. Because I was using this as the basis for both eye of newt and deviled mice, it's time to start assembling the deviled mice.

Deviled mice: slice ~ 5 olives. Place a couple of slices into each of the spaces the yolk occupied. Then fill with yolk mixture. Do not over fill, as these will be placed yolk-side down on your serving dish. To make look like mice, cut 2 toothpicks in half for whiskers, arrange 1 olive slice with pimento as the eyes and ears. The original recipe suggested placing an olive slice as the tail and then use chocolate sprinkles as droppings. While cute, I didn't have enough room for the tails and most of my friends know that I truly dislike chocolate, and I thought the mice were cute enough as it.

Eye of Newt (sweet and spicy): Tony Packo's has the BEST pickles ever! The only problem is that they are based out of Ohio and I have to order them online, but it is totally worth it. Start out by dicing sweet and spicy pickles and placing a couple into each of the spaces the yolk occupied. Now, add 1 tsp Tobasco, 1 tsp of Sriracha and enough blue or green food coloring to give the filling a greenish tint. Spoon into eggs, you can overfill. Next place a black olive slice on top of the yolk mixture. Fill the center of the olive with white horseradish. Next, mix a little red food coloring with horseradish sauce and paint jagged lines on the eye whites.

Enjoy!
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Long time, no post!
Sarah Ferstel
Oh, dearest readers!

I'm so sorry for the long delay between posts. Hopefully, your lives have been filled with other frivolities and you have not been made desperate by the dearth of posts on this blog.

/apologies and beseeching for forgiveness

Here's what I've been up to while away from the blog.

1) For Kate and Dimitri's wedding, I baked about 120 cupcakes (see picture at left). All my practice sessions this summer really paid off and the lemon and devil's food cupcakes were a hit. I had a little help from some of the wedding guests, but, all in all, I spent about 8 hours baking and frosting these tiny, cakey, cup-sized, bits of joy.


Most importantly, the bride and groom loved them.

PS- check out their wedding buffet! It was beautiful and delicious.



2) I made an awesome mushroom, caramelized shallots, and fontina cheese quiche, but I won't go into details since Shelly already posted about quiche.


3) For Ilya's birthday, I made a fig jam crostata. It's super simple to make. Take a pie crust, either store bought or homemade, put in the pie pan. Mix 1 and half cups of fig jam with tsp of almond extract and two teaspoons of lemon zest. Pour into pie crust. Then top it off with another pie crust (or cut up the second pie crust into strips and criss-cross them). Bake for 45-50 minutes at 350. It's super easy.

Here's a link to a more complicated (and more authentic?) recipe for Italian fig crostata.

By the way, you can use whatever jam you like and some people may even like to mix different jams together. Experiment! Have fun! Mangia!

4) Also for Ilya's birthday, I made homemade pasta. Kate's mother sold me this beautiful pasta machine. I love it so much, and it's not as scary to use as it looks.

Here's my beautiful machine. Her name is Pastalina and she's the prettiest pasta maker in all of pasta-dom!


Sooooooo shiny! Don't get too mesmerized by her beauty. She's mine, all mine.

I'll tell y'all all about making pasta from scratch when I can cajole someone into taking pictures while I make it. My hands get way too messy to take pictures myself.

5) Coming up this weekend, I'm going to make Halloween cupcakes (Hi, my name is Sarah and I'm addicting to making cupcakes). Look out for pictures of those too.

Hopefully, my fellow bloggers will post soon too. Hint, hint, hint...

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The Quiche Epidemic
Shelly
When Sarah came to visit this past weekend, we were talking about food (of course), and it came up that we had both made quiche last week. I wonder if the beginning of Autumn triggers some subversive quiche cravings in the modern mind. Regardless, I promised to post something about the wonderful conjoining of pie crust, egg and cheese. A week later, after a diagnosis of possible mono, I'm finally getting around to it. Because it's so tedious to sit down and write about eggs, right?

So, my quiche story is quite recent. It was never something that I had growing up. It's funny to discover these foods and wonder how on earth you've missed them for so long. . . . especially something like this. It seems like quiche (well some of them) would have been perfect on fridays during Lent. Goodness knows that I wouldn't have complained if we ditched the tuna salad sandwiches from time to time. Alas, it took going away to college for me to discover this, apparently German, culinary delight which has been popular in America since the 1950s (aka long before I was around). http://www.foodreference.com/html/artquiche.html

I can't say that I remember the first time that I ate quiche, but I do have fond memories of the first time that I cooked quiche. One of the grocery stores in town decided to stock feta - which doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. However, the population of Natchitoches, Louisiana, apparently didn't feel a need for feta at the grocer's. . . which left them in a real pickle. To clear the shelves, God bless them, they marked down all of the feta to 50 cents a package. Being an impoverished college student, I decided to purchase an unseemly amount of cheese. The lid of the feta container included a recipe for quiche - which seemed too easy to be true. Now, I had a ton of feta, a recipe for quiche, and eggs are super cheap. . . so we hauled out Crissy's copy of Where's Mom Now that I Need Her? http://www.amazon.com/Wheres-Mom-Now-That-Need/dp/0961539011/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253802089&sr=8-1 (a book that every graduating senior should get as a gift) and found an even easier recipe and got to cooking. The feta stayed that cheap for months, and we ate an excessive amount of quiche that semester.

I'm not going to tell you that I don't like quiche with all kinds of fun meat and veggies in it. I was even looking at a recipe recently for a Spanish version of some sort with potatoes and will probably try it soon. However, when I think of quiche, I think of this very simple method of combining those few main ingredients which create cheesey, eggy perfection. I never use a recipe anymore, so this recipe is going to sound like one of those annoying recipes that you get from old people who have been cooking their whole lives and are just guessing at measurements. Fortunately, eggs are cheap, so if you screw this up (and how could you really?) just pawn it off on some unsuspecting and hungry person and start another, tweaking things to your taste.

Quiche
1 frozen pie crust (I prefer the deep dish crusts)
6-8 eggs
1 pkg. feta cheese
1/2 c. cream (or whole milk)
salt and pepper to taste

Simple as pie. . . preheat the oven to 350. Scramble the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the cream, salt and pepper. Sprinkle the cheese on the bottom of the pie crust. Pour the egg mixture on top, and bake until done. I think that this usually takes 30-45 minutes in the oven, but you'll really just need to keep an eye on it. The top will start to turn a light golden. That's when you'll want to take it out. And voila!
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Might I have a bit of earth, sir?
Sarah Ferstel

Tabbouleh here I come!

About a year ago, I moved into a very cute apartment in a very cute part of town. I live on the second floor of a small apartment building (12 units in all) set around a pretty courtyard with a garden. My landlord tends to the garden in the courtyard and it's filled with beautiful flowers and plants, many of which I've never seen before. I guess all that flora got to me and for the first time in my life I decided to start my own little garden this past spring.

I didn't really have a game plan, per se. I started off with one of those garden herb kits you can get at any mega store (Super Target is my 'local business destroyer' of choice), and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to grow basil, chives, and parsley on my kitchen windowsill. For those of you who are discouraged by the cost of fresh herbs at the grocery store, I highly recommend growing your own. It's very simple (I bought a child's kit, to be honest), and cheap. By now, I've probably grown over $50 worth of herbs, and I paid less than $10 for the kit.

Feeling confident, I decided to branch out from herbs and venture into the world of veggies and flowers. I went to Clegg's, my local nursery, and bought a few pots of varying sizes, seeds, dirt, and some fertilizer. Using the windowsill in my living room, I started a mini green house growing cherry tomatoes, morning glories, snap peas, and sweet peas (the flower) from seed. After they reached a certain height, I moved them to bigger pots outside on my landing.

As you can see, the morning glories have done a great job of taking over the railing. The tomatoes have also grown much larger than I anticipated (one of the plants is taller than me!), but the snap peas couldn't take the harsh morning sun and the sweet pea died off, too. But I wasn't discouraged. I went to my local farmer's market and bought plants that like baking in the sun: rosemary, black-eyed Susans, and some other flowering plants with names I can't recall.

Unbeknownst to me, there is a whole container garden movement. I'm not surprised as it took very little effort or gardening knowledge to get my plants going. If yuppies and hipsters in NYC can grow plants, then there is no reason a gal from Louisiana can't! Sure, I wasn't always successful, but I managed a sweet little garden.

I'm pretty proud of these plants. I'm nice to them, and, in return, they make yummy things for me to eat and pretty flowers for me to look at.

PS- Bonus points to whoever can guess the origins of the quote in the post title.
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