Thanksgiving in the Lab

Since we kids "got all growed up", as my grandmother used to say, Thanksgiving has become a potluck affair for our family. Sign-up begins three weeks in advance, and if you want to be the one who brings rolls, plastic silverware, and paper plates you have to act fast.

Most of the time that's reserved for the person who's currently single, unemployed, or traveling more than 10 hours.

It always works out pretty well, and there is never any shortage of food. It also gives everyone a chance to expand their culinary skills and take new items for a taste test using human guinea pigs. Fortunately, no guinea pigs, human or otherwise, were harmed in the making of this year's dinner.

My sister cooked her first turkey. Joel made a green bean, kidney, and bacon dish. My brother tried his hand at baking a ham. One of the cousins brought corn spoon-bread. An aunt brought parsnips...

What the hell is a parsnip?

These are parsnips, or as I like to call them, naked carrots.







I signed up two items I'd never made before, creamed spinach and a pumpkin pie. The creamed spinach wasn't too difficult, except I made it from fresh spinach so it took eight pounds to get a decent amount once it wilted.

The pie... I know you're thinking pumpkin pie is easy. Crust, can of pumpkin glop, 30 minutes in the oven, and you're done. But NO, there would be no canned pie glop consumed by MY family this Thanksgiving. I was determined to make a pumpkin pie from scratch. From an actual pumpkin. You know, that thing you carve jack o'lanterns out of.

Lab Notes: The first thing you should know is that you have to get a special kind of pumpkin. You can't use just any big, orange squash. You definitely CANNOT use the same kind of pumpkin that you use for fall porch decor or Halloween carving. You have to use a PIE pumpkin to make pie.

Huh.

After you get the expensive ($3.99/ lbs) little sucker home, you cut it up in chunks, gut it (remove all seeds and gross, orange, slimy string stuff), and bake it in the oven until it gets soft and practically slides right out of the skin into the bowl. Add about $50 worth of spices that you have to go out and buy (because who keeps ground cloves lying around?), evaporated milk, sugar, and eggs. Hit it with a immersion blender until you have...

soup.

Lab Notes: "Huh. I wonder if it's supposed to look like that? Maybe I left something out. Like flour. Hmmmm... (consults recipe) Nope. It's all here. Maybe it will thicken up if I blend it some more."

*10 minutes of splattering copious amount of liquefied pumpkin all over the kitchen*

"Nope. Still soup. Oh well. *Shrug* Might as well go ahead and see what we get."

Funnel the pumpkin soup into the prepared pie crust, bake, and miracle of Great Pumpkin miracles you get...

PIE!

Pretty darn good pie, too, if I may say so myself. It was much lighter and fluffier than you get when you use pumpkin out of a can. Even the people in my family who don't like pumpkin enjoyed it. So much so, that there wasn't any leftover to take home.

The downside is that it probably costs about $10 a slice.

This Week in the Lab - Pork and Pears

Yeah, sounds disgusting.

Pork and pears.

Blech.

Anyone who grew up watching episodes of the Brady Bunch has heard of "pork chops and appleschawsh", but I don't typically go for meat and fruit combos.

I'm not a fan of cooked fruit.

Unless it's in a pie.

Which is a totally different situation.

I'd never heard of combining pork and pears before I picked up a copy of The Best Simple Recipes from America's Test Kitchen, but they are AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN, right? If anyone knows what they're doing in the kitchen (which in my house, is referred to as "The Laboratory"), it would be these people.

And it wasn't going to require a special trip to the grocery to pick anything up, because I already had all the ingredients.

SOLD!

For an ATK recipe, it was surprisingly simplistic.

The title of the book isn't false advertising.

Thick-cut pork chops...

a pear...

salt

pepper

little bit o' sugar

little bit o' oil

chicken broth

balsamic vinegar

buttah

sprinkle of bleu cheese

It was...

delicious.

I would rate this recipe TEN toques!

10 =

Now I'm feeling ambitious. Does anyone out there have a recipe they love that I could experiment with next week in the lab?

The Glorious Morning Glory Muffin

Since having a close brush with a series of deadly tornados earlier this week, my general attitude towards life has been "every day above ground (alive/not cowering in a storm shelter) is glorious". When I came across the America's Test Kitchen recipe for Morning Glory Muffins, I knew they would be perfectly suited to my mood. What's more cheerful and soothing than a muffin fresh from the oven?

Ahhhhh... muffin therapy.



They were a little work intensive for a girl who's idea of the perfect breakfast muffin is a 70cent box of Jiffy fauxberry muffin mix. For the most part, I would say they were worth the extra effort. The recipe called for all sorts of healthy goodness - once you got past the flour, sugar and an entire stick of butter - coconut, walnuts, apple, carrot, pineapple, and golden raisins. It made a batch of 15 good sized muffins.  

Dressed up in a butter hat...



Or rolling totally casual.

I ate five in a span of about 20 minutes. I have no self-control when it comes to baked goods. For my own continued health and well-being, I split the remaining muffins between the work crew and my neighbor. Everyone who ate one claimed they were excellent and went on to live a normal life, so I think I can give this recipe a thumbs up. The taste was very good particularly if you like your muffins a bit more hearty and less like a cupcake. The work involved toasting the coconut and walnuts, grinding, grating, whisking, etc. (vs. cracking open a box of Jiffy and adding an egg) seemed intensive to produce a humble muffin though. For this Morning Glory Muffins recipe, I give it... 

7.5 Toques

This Weekend in the Laboratory...

...otherwise know as the Kitchen, I cooked up my very first Stromboli.

What is a stromboli you ask? No, it is not a strumpet playing a a trombone in Tripoli like I first thought. Turns out it's like the worlds largest pizza pocket. Or a miniature replica of a spice worm from the movie Dune.



Pizza Pocket or Spice Worm? You Decide.

For an America's Test Kitchen recipe, it was surprisingly easy to make. Starting out with a pop-tube of refrigerated pizza dough, you layer on provolone, salami, capocollo, roasted red peppers and shredded Parmesan. Then you roll it up in a tube, pinch the ends shut, brush the top with some beaten egg, and sprinkle with a little coarse salt and sesame seeds. Bake, slice, and eat hot out of oven with a side of marinara. Then open your mouth like a beached grouper, and wave your hands uselessly in front of your piehole while sucking air because the molten cheese has melded itself to the roof of your mouth and given you 3rd degree stromboli burns the length and breadth of your soft palate.



CAUTION! HOT!

 But it was a good pain and totally worth talking with a lisp for the next three days.

Next time, I'll use a lean ham instead of the capocollo to make it a bit less greasy. For ease of preparation and sheer nummy goodness I give it...

8.8 Toques

Internal Gordon Ramsay - Round 1

There is a lot of pressure when you cook for other people. I have this paralyzing fear of being judged entirely on my cooking skills, which are virtually non-existent. I wonder if it’s a remnant psychological glitch somewhere in my psyche that harbors the idea that all women should get married, whip up a gourmet meal at a moments notice, keep a neat and tidy household, raise a flock (herd? murder?) of babies, and grow up to be nurses or teachers, but only as an option to spinsterhood.

Hmmmm… nah. F*** that. More likely it’s the fear that people might find a hair in their food.

GAK!

Because the mere thought grosses me out so much I made that cat-horking noise (Gak!) out loud as I’m typing this, I’ve started to wear a shower cap when I cook. There was momentary consideration of the standard food service hair net. But it’s only a net. There’s still a chance that a hair might slip out of one of the little holes. I realize I look totally insane standing over the stove in hot pink and purple flowered shower cap, but better safe than hairy.

For the past week, I have been stressing about today’s potluck at work. I signed up to do a dessert then immediately started freaking out.

My Internal Gordon Ramsay: WHAT?!! Dessert?! Are you mad? You’ve only made two desserts in your entire life and I shouldn’t allow the mud-pie when you made when you were three to count.

Me: I know I can do it. There has to be a three-ingredient, five-star dessert recipe for a beginner out on the internet somewhere. [Frantically Googling.] The internet has everything! Right??

My Internal Gordon Ramsay: Dear god, this is the worst predicament I’ve ever encountered! Why didn’t you stay in your specialty area and volunteer to bring drinks and paper plates like you usually do? You can’t afford to start experimenting now! Especially with this group!

Me: I’m tired of being mocked as the soda and silverware person. I want to do contribute an actual dish.

My Internal Gordon Ramsay: This will end in tears, mark my words! Probably tears followed by puking!

Me: [Punching myself in the head] Shut the f*** up, Gordon! Get out of my kitchen!! And my head!

I made custard pie, then as a Plan B I made a fresh fruit salad and bought a can of Redi-Whip. We’ll see how it goes. Now my fear is that my dishes will be the only ones no one eats.

Next time I’m calling in sick on potluck day.

Lasagna - Epic Fail

Oh, it looks tasty on the outside...

but it was pure barfy on the inside.

Remember how I mentioned that during one of my more distracted Read-A-Thon moments I baked a lasagna? Yeah, well... it turned out disgusting.

I am cutting myself some slack because I'd never made lasagna before. But I should know better than to just wing it when I am trying to cook. "Winging-it" successfully in the kitchen requires the kind of kitchen-witchery knowledge that takes years of experience to accumulate. To make matters worse, I tried to make a lower fat, lower calorie, lower sodium version.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Lasagna is supposed to be all meaty-cheesy-noodley goodness and require a crane to lift it from the oven because once all the nummy components are assembled it weighs about 150 pounds. If you want to eat a low cal and/or low fat diet, lasagna is simply not the dish for you. Just as a side note, substituting half a ton of low-fat ricotta for the original mozzarella, parmesan, romano mixture is not a good idea. Even full-fat ricotta tastes like ass. Unlike with other kinds of cheese that you may use in cooking, with ricotta, more is not better. It also doesn't melt. It's like asbestos cheese.

Turkey sausage instead of the regular fatty Italian sausage or hamburger? Also a bad, bad idea.

I managed to choke down a single serving (when is the last time I ever ate one serving of anything?) only because I ate it with a side of jalapenos and washed it down with a half a bottle of Shiraz. Imagine that rolling around in your digestive tract all night. Oooh, yeah. I'm lucky to be alive.

What am I going to do with this thing? It feels like a sin to waste so much food, but I wouldn't inflict this stuff on my worst frenemy. Now I am stuck with 150 pounds of crappy Italian food guilt.

This stuff doesn't even rate a toque at all. It gets a BLECH = 7.5

Hell's Meals on Wheels

I have trouble boiling water without it turning into a major international incident. Ask my last two roommates. I have twice fused a boiled dry kettle to the heating element on the stove top. Bread is often reduced to char even with the toaster set on low just because I am present in the room. My oven took out a restraining order against me for good reason. I hate cooking - mainly because I'm not any good at it. Well... not any good when compared to my mother, who is my plumb line for the edible. I don't know why I can't set my standard a little lower, because I know I am never going to live up to it as my mum is a unbelievably good cook and baker.

If I'm going to bother investing the time and the money in order to produce food that doesn't simply come out of a bag, box, or can, then I want to make certain it's going to be edible. I turn to America's Test Kitchen.

Were I to pick a single cooking show to watch on television it would have to be ATK. No, it's not as action packed as Iron Chef, it isn't as campy as Good Eats, and its hosts/chefs don't look like they stepped off a runway in Paris.

FYI, you should never trust a skinny chef.

There are some fairly witty and cutting remarks flying between the host, Cook's Illustrated editor Christopher Kimball, and the variety of chefs/scientists/quality control experts. All of the dialogue is ad-libbed because they are just that comfortable with each other. I like the sense of camaraderie between them. It feels like they're letting you into their exclusive cookery club where all the cool kids wear bow ties and aprons.

There's a LOT of science involved in the testing, retesting, and trial and error of the recipes in the America's Test Kitchen before they reach the stage of perfection necessary to air. It's more like a kitchen/ laboratory. You can rest assured when a recipe has made it into an ATK magazine or cookbook that it is going to be good... as long as you follow the recipe exactly. Because using a pound of chicken vs. a pound-point-five can make a huge difference in the outcome.

I found that out with my own brand of trial and error. And error. And error.

This week I prepared their Tex-Mex Chicken and Rice out of their Light and Healthy 2011 magazine. It was delicious. It was so delicious in fact that I wondered about its "light and healthy" claim. The only issue I had with the end result was the level of spiciness, but that's my personal preference and easily remedied with the judicious application of the world's greatest condiment - sriracha.

I cooked it in a cast iron dutch oven. Why does everything taste better when it's cooked in cast iron?

It's kinda purty, too.

Out of a possible ten toques (white puffy chef's hat) this recipe gets an eight both for ease of preparation and taste.

,

= 8

Baking Xmas Cookies - Ho, Ho, Holy #$%!

There are times when I forget that I cannot cook. Particularly challenging for me is the form of cookery known as "baking", which a pastry chef explained to me in rather pompous tones is completely different from mere "cooking". His airquotes, not mine.

Six weeks ago, the idea of doing a cookie exchange at work seemed like a fantastic idea. I mean, it's cookies, right? How fun is that, getting a bajillion different kinds of cookies to take home? Now, 48 hours before the exchange, I've had a change of heart. I FREAKING HATE BAKING COOKIES.

(The 2011 Fo'Sho' Goals, particularly #7, do not officially take effect until Jan. 1. I'm cleared for cursing as much as I want until then. Good thing, too, because last night I think I scorched the ozone layer in the atmosphere directly over my house with all the swearing I did.)

Yes, I know, it's very grinchy, not to mention downright un-American, to say you hate cookies. Who hates cookies? It's like saying you hate butterflies and sunshine and *$#&^@# unicorns.

And of course, I've been telling everyone for weeks that I'm going the Full Martha this year with my cookie recipe and baking Maple Pecan Shortbreads out of her new Cookies cookbook. I promised everyone in the office that there would be no cookies sliced from a pre-made roll or broken from a sheet of perforated squares, which is my usual M.O. Oh no! This year my cookies will be homemade with luuuurve. Accept no substitutes.


What Maple Pecan Shortbread cookies are supposed to look like.

Then last night, as I'm looking at the recipe I'm thinking "Holy *&%$! This is waaaay more involved than I thought it was. Sift the flour? Do I need a special piece of machinery for that? What the &*$* is Tubinado sugar? A cookie cutter. I need a cookie cutter for this? Can't I just roll them up in little balls and plop them on the sheet? Parchment paper. What the *&$$# is that? Can you buy that in the store, or do I have to find a really old book and start ripping pages out?"

It was also unfortunate that I didn't do the math on how many batches it was actually going to take to give everyone in our department at least four cookies. I didn't want to be chintzy and only give two or three. That's not in the spirit of Christmas.

I would need six dozen cookies. I had one cookie sheet big enough to hold a dozen cookies + time to bake + mixing up the batter + the time the dough needed to chill in the fridge... sweetbabyJebusinaninjasuit! I was going to be baking cookies until 3 AM!

But I couldn't go back on my promise of making, with my own two hands, Martha's Maple Pecan Shortbread. Not only would reneging at the last minute suck, but I would be the subject of office ridicule until next Christmas.

By the time I was finished, I was so sick of the smell of cookies the thought of eating one made me feel nauseous. I hope all the animosity I was feeling doesn't make that last 3AM batch taste bad. "I'd like a side of cookies, hold the luuuuurve."