My kitchen helpers

My little helpers, Bean and Baby D.

Bean is just now dragging pots and pans from their cupboards and Baby D is trying to cut up a watermelon with her toddler knife. Such big helpers! I'm glad they are enthused about spending time in the kitchen learning as much as they can about cooking.

Their personalities couldn't be more different. Baby D is goofy and wants to do everything herself. Bean is more laid back and likes to observe and absorb what is going on. As far as eating goes, Baby D eats like a bird and Bean devours everything in sight and wants more.

As much as I love them, they can occassionally derail a planned meal. That's fine, that's what pizza delivery is for.

I'm sure there will be plenty more stories of their antics in the future.

Chicken Consomme

I think Consomme is a french word meaning, "crazy amount of work for a clear broth." It's a wasteful process but the end result is a flavorful broth with rejuvenating powers when you're sick, as I am.
I've come down with a nasty bug and am currently on antibiotics. Usually I prefer to tough it out and get over a cold without using medication but with a toddler in the terrible twos and a teething ten month old, I decided it would be best to get this illness over with as soon as possible.

The neatest thing about this consomme is the raft. You finely chop up ground chicken, a carrot, a leek or onion and some parsley and mix that with one egg white. This makes up the raft. You throw all that into a pot with some chicken broth and let it bubble nicely for about 45 minutes. The broth will bubble up through the raft and purify the stock while adding flavor. It come out very clear and tasty.

Skim off the raft and you are left with a wonderful broth that needs only a little bit of salt to bring out the best of it's flavors.
To give credit where credit is due I also learned this recipe from watching, "French food at home" with Laura Calder. She's awesome.

Wings and Beer!

So simple and so so good. Once in a while my husband and I allow this indulgence which reminds us of all those nights after work when you needed to unwind with friends. More recently we had a weekly tradition we called SciFi Friday. My husband, his brother and I would eat wings while watching the SciFi channel on Friday night. (Buncha nerds, I know) The lineup was usually Stargate and Stargate Atlantis.
Since then, the SciFi channel has turned into the SyFy channel (lame), both Stargates have been cancelled and we started building the house and having kids. This last Friday was the first time in a long time that we've had wings.
The best wings for quality that we've found come from Sam's Club. They are packaged as a three-joint wing which you can cut into the two separate meat sections and discard the tip, or simply bake whole.
We deviate from the bar menu by baking our wings rather than frying them. I find the skin is crisper and it's less work than frying.
If I were back home in the Twin Tiers, the beer in the picture would be Yuengling. Since I now live in the upper Midwest, it's a Leinenkugel's. Fresh local beer -yum.

Baked Chicken Wings and Hot Sauce:
Preheat oven to 400F.
12 Chicken wings, whole or cut apart.
Place on a baking sheet.
Lightly coat with olive oil.
Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper.
Bake for 1 hour. Turn once during baking.

Melt preferred amount of butter in a saucepan. Add Frank's Hot sauce or other suitable hot sauce to desired heat level. Toss wings in sauce while still warm from the oven. Serve hot.

Serve with celery sticks and blue cheese sauce.

And don't forget the beer!!

The new kitchen

I never posted an official photo of what our new kitchen looks like! Boy, you'd think I've been totally distracted by other things, wouldn't you?
Here's the rundown:
The cabinets are solid maple face frames and door frames with baltic birch plywood panels. The stove is a five burner gas stove and electric convection oven by Fratelli-Onoffri. There's a pot filler faucet on the stainless steel backsplash. The wall oven is an electric convection oven by KitchenAid (with a pretty blue interior). The fridge is by Samsung. The kitchen sink is a 2 basin farmhouse style white ceramic sink. The countertops are solid soapstone.
Pretty, no?

Minnesota State Fair recap

I haven't leant an update since I submitted my pie for last year's State Fair contest. Well, I didn't place but my score was an 89 out of 100. I learned a few things and plan to keep competing. One fun story is that my MIL entered her Kro Kaner cookies for the first time (after making them for countless years with much adulation from the family) and she took third place!

Here are her Kro Kaners (aka bracelet cookies) above the white ribbon.

Some of the many cake entries. I both envy and pity the judges. That's got to be a lot of calories.

My competition.

The fondant decorated cakes were amazing. The theme this year was sewing.

All the syrups and vinegars looked so pretty.

The miscellaneous cookie category.

The traditional Scandanavian wedding cakes.

Fleischmann's has a category for baked good with a pink theme for breast cancer awareness.

I wish I could smell the baked breads. Everything was behind glass.

Why?? Why would anyone devote so much time to knitting a 20 foot long fish???

Alton Brown's Banana pudding

Each night my husband likes to watch 30 minutes of TV before bed to unwind. His preference is for sitcoms or something equally lighthearted to help shake off a stressful day. The other day he mentioned that he was getting sick of watching, "Everybody Loves Raymond" over and over so I started to DVR a few episodes of, "Good Eats" with Alton Brown. We used to watch this show all the time together until he started designing the house and I got pregnant a little over three and a half years ago. I was so nauseous that even watching food being cooked made me ill.
We watched the episode called, "Yes we have no banana pudding". There we learned why boxed Nilla Wafers suck so much now compared to the ones they made when I was a kid, and we found out what imitation vanilla extract is made from. (You don't want to know)
My husband was immediately inspired to make this stuff. I made the vanilla wafer cookies (num!) and he made the vanilla custard. It didn't turn out very well and we think it's because the pan he used had straight sides and the whisk couldn't reach the stuff in the corner of the bottom of the pan. Alton uses a fancy saucier pan and we didn't have one.
Notice I said didn't.
I was a nice wife and bought my husband a saucier pan last week. I should have saved it for Christmas but I knew that it was bugging him that he couldn't make a perfect custard and he wanted this figured out right away. So this is what we made the other day. Nice and yummy banana pudding with a meringue top. I'll have to show him how to do the traditional merigue top with many waves and peaks just for appearance sake, but as far as taste goes, this was crazy good.
Time to get back to the gym, we're both cooking with gusto again!

Easiest Canned tomatoes

So easy I may have to make more.
I found the recipe on French Food at Home. She uses fresh bay leaves but I substituted oregano because it was what I had available.
I used one jar last night. There's a definite difference between home preserved tomatoes and plain tomatoes in a can from the store. I'm not a fan of canning tomatoes because of all the labor involved, but this was nearly effortless. I used a glass loaf pan half filled with water in place of the brick used to weigh down the jars while in the boiling water.
Here's her recipe:

INGREDIENTS

• Tomatoes
• Few sprigs fresh thyme
• Bay leaves

• 1 or 2 onion slices
• Water, as needed

DIRECTIONS

Pack whole tomatoes into quart/litre jars with a few thyme sprigs, a couple of bay leaves, and an onion slice or two. Close the lids and set the jars on a rack in a deep pan. Add enough water to cover generously. Weight down with a brick so they don't float. Simmer for an hour and a half, until they lose their shape and collapse. Let the jars cool in the water so that they form a tight seal. When done, each jar will look only half full of tomatoes.

Home made granola

I had been looking for a recipe for granola for a long long time. After scouring the internet for months one popped up on my Google reader list here. I modified it slightly and we are in love. "I need to make more granola" is a common utterance around here now.
We love this stuff as a quick snack. I pour plain yogurt and honey over mine. My husband scarfs it down plain. I don't know what the shelf life is because it's always gone within 4 days.


The recipe:

Dry Ingredients

6 cups rolled oats (I used old fashioned)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup coconut
1/3 cup sesame seeds (I substituted flax seeds)
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1 cup chopped nuts (I use a mix of almonds, walnuts and unsalted peanuts)
Dried fruit (I use fresh chopped apricots, craisins and dates)

Mix all ingredients. Coat thoroughly with:

Wet Ingredients
1/2 cup oil
1/3 cup honey
2 tsp vanilla

Spread out on a baking sheet and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Stir at 15, 20 and 25 minutes.

Turkey Burgers with Indian spices

Simple recipe. A light and mildly spicy twist on hamburgers. 

1 pkg ground turkey. 

1 small red onion finely diced

1" fresh ginger minced fine

1 Tbsp garam masala

1 tsp ground cumin

Mix and form into patties. Grill. 

Top with plain yogurt and mango chutney.

Serve with grilled mango.

Love wholeheartedly.

Crazy going.

2 kids. 2 dogs. 1 cat. 1 husband away on work. Yeepa!

Ever have that inner conflict between the white trash and pompous snob tendencies within? I feel that all the time. When hubby is away I make those really bad meals that only kids can eat and not suffer angina from. Tonight was Kraft shells and cheese. I couldn't help feeling that it was so wrong to cook this crap in a kitchen with soapstone counter tops and a fancy Italian stove.  Maybe it was a backlash against my husband's extremist tendancies towards dieting which has helped him drop over 40lbs while I'm still nursing and trying to keep my caloric intake UP.

F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-O-N.