Step-by-step: Sushi!

One thing I found out while preparing for this post is that it takes a lot longer to do things when you have to stop and take photos of the process!

Sushi is one of those things that really works best with two hands. Tripods, timers, and good helpers also make it a lot easier!

This weekend, we made sushi with salmon and crispy shrimp. Here's what you need for 3 hungry people:

Step-by-step: Pizza Pizza!

In the first of what I hope to be many of its kind, here is a step-by-step (mostly) process of how I make pizza.

snowy day pancakes!

We had a nice casual breakfast before going out to shovel all the snow - banana pancakes! mmmmm

Then promptly went back to staying inside and keeping warm.

What do you eat on cold snowy days?

Confessions

I sometimes put my knives in the dishwasher.

I don't like chocolate,but I make things with chocolate all the time.
(I like it when people enjoy the food I make)









I make a bigger mess when my kitchen is clean.

I also don't like marshmallows, whipped cream, or chewing gum. (I like roasting marshmallows, because well, it's fire)

... and I make ice cream when it snows. (not from snow though)

What do you want to confess?

Cookie experiment...

To hold up my end of the Cookie Exchange, I baked some of my standard coconut macaroons (that's a great standby because they travel really well).

I also tried something that I saw on the interwebs today, but it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I packaged it up for the cookie recipient anyway. :) I was told by Angie that they tasted great even though they didn't look right.

The idea was to have an oreo cookie stuffed inside of a regular chocolate chip cookie. (as seen here) But I definitely used waaaay too much cookie for each oreo, and they blobbed out like some wild amoeba.

I could have gotten away with half the amount of cookie...

Because they ended up like this:







All in all though, it could have turned out a lot worse. But Angie is definitely encouraging me to try again (so she can eat the failures!)

How badly have you screwed up your food experiments?

Sushi night

My best friend Rachael and her daughter Ellie came over to have sushi with us last night. Ellie was such a great helper, keeping the rice fluffed and getting it cooled nicely.

As usual, we had salmon and crispy shrimp sushi. Accompanied by cucumber and avocado.

I made a lop-sided sushi-rice snowman for Ellie, to go with her chicken-fried rice. She didn't want to eat the snowman this time, and took him home. I think the dog will happily chow down on that.

The spoils of war are delicious.

Cookies in the mail!

A bunch of my online friends do a cookie exchange every once in a while, "Secret Santa" style. I haven't sent mine out yet (I'm going to do it this weekend! that's the plan, at least), but I received a big box from my cookie santa the other day with all sorts of goodies inside!

That's my awesome Optimus Prime lunchbox. I just put it in the photo because lunchboxes are cool.

 They were all packed *really* well!

My buddy made two types of cookies: Oatmeal (left) and Peanut butter (right). My favorite is the oatmeal! They're super soft and chewy, with a good kick of sweet and salty. I think there's also coconut in it. Thanks Jeff!

What's your favorite cookie recipe?

Fresh bread for lunch!

made while I was eating breakfast.

Dinner from my lovely wife

Tuesday night is climbing night, so I get home too late to cook a good dinner. Lucky for me, my lovely wife cooks dinner on Tuesdays!

Today it was chicken and pasta with mushroom and asparagus alfredo. Yum!

Oh, and I got new glasses! $25 shipped, from zennioptical.com! awesome.

Winter is the time for baking.

I didn't really have anything to do on MLK day, so I made some goodies!

Delicious cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and then I was too lazy to make a real dinner, so I just threw some bread in there as well. :)

On a side note, how awesome am I? I managed the herculean task of fitting the icicle lights back into the same boxes they came in! Holy crap!

yes, it did take us until Jan 16 to finally take down our xmas lights. Don't judge.

More adventures in bread baking (or, "dinner and a potluck!")

Have I mentioned how much I love the "Artisan Bread in 5 minutes" technique? I may have, but I'll just say it again. It is awesome!

Anyway, I made some more bread for dinner the other night, and while it came out great, I forgot to slash it before putting it in the oven. Slashing the top gives the bread a weak point from which to expand. So I think it turned out a little denser than it could have. It still tasted great though.

It looks a little phallic.

We had this bread for dinner with some chicken and broccoli.

This is how I typically make chicken when I'm not inspired to do something fancy. I just coat it in panko breadcrumbs, and pan fry it in a little olive oil. The broccoli is just boiled in salted water for 5 minutes or so, till it's slightly too mushy (Angie likes it mushy, not "al dente").

Today we had a potluck at work, so I brought some bread. Well, I made some bread. I woke up early (well, I woke up at my normal time and actually got up instead of snuggling up), went downstairs and took some dough out of the fridge and formed some oddly shaped loaves.

What's left of my fridge dough.

30 minutes later, and I had some awesome bread to take to work!

Bread is awesome.

I made some Artisan Bread again. I love this stuff! It sits in the fridge, ready to go, and requires no more time than it takes to heat up the oven. (and most of that time is just waiting for it to heat up.)

I'm still working on getting the shape to look good though. It seems to rise unevenly. Fortunately, it still tastes damn good. 

Puzzle Answer!

Those of you that made guesses were pretty close. The guess of vanilla bean specks was spot on. 

excuse my messy kitchen.

Churn, baby, Churn

That's right, fresh vanilla ice cream! My good friend Kara got us this ice cream maker attachment as a wedding gift, and we've made quite good use of it so far. Soon I will branch out from the simple cream+sugar+vanilla-bean formula and get into custards. Stay tuned!

Best breakfast

I asked myself, "Self, what could make some homemade banana pancakes even better?"

I answered myself, "Self, I do believe that bacon would make those better, as bacon makes everything better."

I've seen bacon pancakes in the past, where they put a whole (or half) strip of bacon in a pancake, but that seems like it would make it tough to cut. We like our pancakes nice and soft, and able to cut with a fork.

This is the wrong way.

This is the correct way to make bacon pancakes:

Take some bacon, cut it into small pieces, then cook it up so it has some crispy bits, and some chewy bits. Set it aside. Oh, and save the drippings, because that's some good stuff.

The batter is pretty basic, with the addition of a smooshed up banana. Serve with some warm maple syrup, and a runny egg!

Coming up next: The answer to the culinary puzzle from the last post!

Pizza, and a puzzle!

I recently purchased the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I tried out the first basic recipe, and it really couldn't be simpler. I bought a large plastic container (around 5 qt., or 1.25 gallons), and took about 3 minutes to add the four ingredients and mix them all up. I let it rest on the counter, then threw it in the fridge.

I've been using this batch all week for dinner bread, and even made some rolls for lunch, baked the same morning! But that's for a different post. Today we're going to talk about pizza!

I started out making pizza several months ago, and like everything else, there was a learning curve.

a tough, dense crust.

It took a while to figure out how to get the crust (or "cornicione") to puff up the way I wanted. Turns out, you want to keep the air bubbles produced by the yeast inside the dough, instead of obliterating them with a rolling pin. Who knew? Once I figured that out, they started turning out a little better. I pressed out my dough from the center, leaving the edges alone.

Now, with the dough from the book above, my pizza dough is coming out great. I made some last night, from the same batch that I used for the roll for today's lunch. First, I stretched the dough thinly (maybe a little too thinly this time, because there are a few holes that I had to patch up).

I put it on my awesome new Superpeel, and topped it with tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, scoops of Ricotta cheese, ground sausage, and some pepperoni slices.

I put a baking stone at the lowest point in my oven,  and heated it to 500 degrees (that's about as high as it will go). Slide the pizza onto the stone, cook for about 10 minutes, and voila!

The crust was crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, but not so tough that it was difficult to chew. I was quite happy with the outcome.

Angie came home later, and said that she wanted one too, so I quickly whipped up another one, this time with fake-eroni. 

And now, a culinary puzzle: I made this after dinner. This is step one of the process. Can you guess what it is?

First post, how far we've come...

So a bunch of people have convinced me to start a food blog.

I've been taking photos of my food since 2004, before I had a decent camera, or any photographic sense whatsoever. You can see the evolution of both my food as well as my food photos over the years by going back through my gallery. Here's a sample of an early dish (steak with rice and wine)

I didn't even have nice plates. I was using these metal serving trays that my dad purchased at a restaurant supply store. These were used daily for over a year, until I was forced by my friend Rachael to get some nice plates to go with the nice food.

You can't tell here, but I still don't have a proper dining table. The first photo was taken on the kitchen counter, and the second was on the cheap Ikea coffee table. At that time, all my meals were eaten while sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, while watching tv on a hand-me-down 23" CRT tv. (At least it was on a proper table, as compared with previous residences where the tv was on milk crates, and the dining table was a cardboard box draped with some bath towels)


The change in food quality is most apparent when you look at the sushi we've made. It always tasted quite good, but the techniques have vastly improved.

late September, back in 2004

Notice the same stainless steel serving plates. The rolls always had way too much rice, and the nigiri was cut poorly and placed sloppily on a too-large hunk of rice.

I did eventually start getting better.

April, 2006

That basically brings us up to the present. I'm still cooking a lot, and taking photos. This blog will showcase new dishes, techniques, experiments (failed as well as successful ones), and anything else that happens to interest me. What would you like to see?