Vstrecha-blog

Adventures in Cooking: Cabbage Soup

I seem to have almost completely neglected to take pictures of this endeavor. In my love to cook all things Russian, I once again turned to Smitten Kitchen, where Deb had posted a recipe for Veselka’s cabbage soup. In Russian, it’s called щи (shchi, though the first letter is pronounced so quickly that the ‘ch’ sound is almost nonexistant).

This went together almost strangely easily (for me at least, who is always waiting for something to go wrong whilst cooking). That is, if you don’t count the fact that sauerkraut apparently does not come in small containers, only large ones. So now I have a large container minus one cup of sauerkraut in my fridge that I am never ever going to use. 

Perfect for a hearty winter meal. I had mine with a side of black bread and a dollop of sour cream on top. And I had plenty of leftovers…

I have since eaten one of those frozen containers. I did think it a bit salty the first time around (the sour cream helps with this), so when I reheated, I added a cup of water, then tasted, & ended up adding another cup of water to even out the taste some.

Adventures in Cooking: Gluten free cupcakes!

First foray into gluten-free cooking! This will date how far behind I am with these posts, but these were for a friend whose house I was staying at for a weekend visit just before Christmas. Whenever I stay with people I always try to bring them a little something to say, “Hey, thanks for letting me crash on your couch.” I feel a teensy bit bad bringing baked goods for these particular friends, since the one guy wouldn’t be able to eat them, so this time around one friend got Muddy Buddy mix & the other got these cupcakes!

I found this recipe for GF vegan chocolate cupackes, which I then proceeded to tweak, since I didn’t really care about it being vegan, AND since I only wanted to make a half dozen (plus one more for tasting/quality control ;).

I surprisingly had most of the ingredients already. I could not find specifically sorghum flour, but I did find that GF all-purpose flour at Harris Teeter, which contains sorghum, plus some other flours AND starch. Also with some googling, I discovered that 1/2 T of egg replacement + 2 T of water equals one egg. (As a side note, this was — to my recollection — my first time ever making coffee. Good thing I have a coffee maker for when I have guests, ha!) So my list of ingredients for the cupcakes came out to be:

3/4 c GF AP flour
1/4 c unsweet cocoa powder
1/2 c cane sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 egg
1/2 c warm coffee
2-ish Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp rice vinegar 

The cupcakes came out perfect! They smelled absolutely amazing, and looked good too, with such pretty domes. The frosting on the other hand…

I didn’t make too many changes here, just used regular butter instead of vegan margarine, & regular vanilla instead of bourbon vanilla. And halved it:

4 Tbsp butter
1-2 oz cold coffee (1 oz = 1/8 cup)
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp instant espresso
2 cups powdered sugar

And I mixed. And I mixed. And I mixed. My frosting was still way to liquidy. So I kept adding more powdered sugar a bit at a time & mixing some more until I felt like I’d added so much extra I’d get diabetes from just looking at the frosting. And then I refrigerated it overnight. 

I’d even gotten a pastry bag & tips for fancy decorating. But when I attempted, the frosting just went pthhhhhht.

A mess to eat & ugly to look at. But they passed my taste test at least! Anyone know what I did wrong with the frosting?

Adventures in Cooking: Apple sharlotka

The title should really read Failures in Cooking, because that’s what this was. An absolute failure. I didn’t even take any pictures. 

(My dinner was tasty, though. Here’s what that looked like:

Basically, everything with fresh dill.)

So. Back to dessert. I was using this recipe for Apple sharlotka from the lovely Deb of Smitten Kitchen. I always leave some margin of error with my cooking, since everything’s usually an experiment, and i’ve never had problems with Deb’s recipes before. I know I did something wrong, i’m just not quite sure what.

Everything was going well up until the baking part. In the oven for the requisite 60 minutes, then I pull it out and… there’s still liquidy parts at the bottom. Um, ok. I start putting it back into the oven to bake for additional 10 minute intervals. After FOUR of those (yup, that’s another 40 minutes), it still isn’t done and now the top is completely burnt. This is when I give up. Another time, perhaps after I invest in an oven thermometer…

Adventures in Cooking: Carrot & Cilantro soup

Snagged this recipe from one of my mom’s Country Living magazines. I don’t really read the rest of the them, but man do they have some tasty-sounding recipes!

This one turned out as tasty as it sounded, though I have a couple of tips.

1. You see there in that list of ingredients where it says “1 teaspoon coriander seeds, crushed”? You can buy them at the grocery store 2 ways: still in seed form, or already crushed for you. On my groc list, all I wrote was ‘coriander seeds,’ so I got the whole ones. For the love of all that is good and holy, get the pre-crushed ones! They are impossible to crush. I slaved over crushing mine, with every tool I could come up with (back of a spoon, base of my knife, flat blade of the knife) and what you see in the picture above is the result. Not really that crushed. So every now and then in my otherwise pureed soup, i’d get something crunchy. And sometimes little pieces would get stuck in my teeth, like popcorn kernels. Not Optimal.

2. Maybe my food processor just sucks, but… a blender definitely works better to get your carrot/onion mix all nice and pureed.

2.5. I’m not very good at chopping cilantro, so I went ahead & pureed that in the blender too. I feel like this was a Good Decision.

Bonus, this soup is super-healthy too! Good for a night light soup/sandwich meal. I still have a container of this waiting for me in my freezer too. I’ll have to let y’all know how it keeps.

Adventures in Cooking: Thanksgiving Pecan Pie

For Thanksgiving, my dad requested pecan pie. Mom was just going buy one until I swooped in & saved the day said I had made one before. Which I (of course) did not save the recipe for.

After doing a bit of internet searching, I settled on this recipe for Southern Pecan Pie. I didn’t want any fancy variations, and I definitely didn’t want to have to roast the pecans (I did this for my first pecan pie, and it was a big fat PAIN.)

I was pretty sure I should pre-bake the crust, so the bottom wouldn’t be this soggy sugary mess. So I followed the directions on the pre-made crust box & poked a bunch of holes in the base and sides. The first iteration (which i’m not showing here) I didn’t poke all the way through, and the crust puffed up with this giant air bubble during the baking. (I tried to break the bubble & ended up breaking the whole crust in the process. That one went in the trash. I’m convinced this is why the company puts two crusts in the box.) Try #2 I made sure that my poked holes went completely through the dough. This baked really nicely, but became a problem later on when I baked the pie — the liquid filling bubbled through these holes & adhered the crust to the pan. Clearly there’s not optimal method here. Anyone know any other ways to successfully pre-bake a crust & avoid these issues?

The rest of the pie came together pretty easily, apart from the fact that corn syrup is really really sticky and somehow manages to get over everything no matter how hard you are trying to be clean. Since I pre-baked the crust, I covered up the edges when baking the rest of the pie, so they wouldn’t get burnt.

It was a bit of a trial getting the slices out of the pan, but the finished product was way better than any store-bought pie. YUM-O!

Adventures in (Growing &) Cooking: Tomato Pasta

The tomato plants were an impulse buy at the grocery store, and a bit of an experiment. As in “let’s see if I can keep these alive long enough for them to even product anything.”

Then they went from this:

to this:

and finally became this:

This is me, who has a strong penchant for killing anything green. I have GROWN VEGETABLES, and then COOKED A MEAL WITH THEM. Understatement of the century, I was excited about this.

What I did:

1. Boil water & cook up some whole-wheat linguine.
2. Heat up oil for sauteeing. Minced garlic goes in first, stir around for a couple minutes, until just brown. Diced purple onion goes in next, sautee a few more minutes, until onions are translucent. Tomatoes go in last, along with all their juicyness. Don’t cook too long after this, or the tomatoes get too soft. 
3. Add the cooked pasta & get it all good & mixed together.
4. Season: crazy salt, pepper, oregano.

This is just what I had on hand, I think it would be tasty with any other veggies you’d care to sautee up.

Adventures in Cooking: Hide-and-seek Chicken Quesadilla Casserole

Last week I had this recipe stuck in my head that I thought I remembered eating at home, but then completely failed to find exactly what I remembered. So I sort of improvised, buying the main ingredients I could recall, and scrounging around my kitchen for other ingredients found in other recipes I thought were similar. It’s a part hide-and-seek, part Frankenstein meal, but it ended up being all tasty. (Is that too cheesy?)

As you can see in the picture above, I used this medium-size CorningWare dish I have, and it made 4 good sized dinner portions (1 for dinner & 3 leftover meals).

Ingredients:

• chicken
• taco seasoning
• cream of chicken & mushroom soup
• small can of diced green chiles
• shredded cheddar cheese
• water
• medium tortilla shells

What I did:

1. Cut up the chicken into bite-sized pieces & cook it, then added taco seasoning & water and cooked some more (like I was making taco meat).
2. Emptied out the can of soup into a bowl. I thought it didn’t look liquidy enough, so I added a half a can of water. Then I mixed in a couple handfuls of cheese, about half the can of chiles and the cooked chicken. Between the half can of chiles and the taco seasoning, it was just spicy enough for me, but i’m pretty wimpy. Add the whole can of chiles if you’re inclined.
3. I sprayed the dish with Pam so things wouldn’t stick, and then starting with a layer of tortilla, I alternated tortilla and chicken mixture until I ran out of mixture. I ended with a layer of tortilla. Because of the shape of the pan, I ended up ripping a tortilla in half and overlapping the two halves as one layer.
4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. You should probably cover the dish with aluminum foil too, so your top layer of tortilla doesn’t get too tough. I forgot to do this at first, and the top layer was kind of difficult to cut through. I cooked the whole kit about 40 minutes, until it was good and bubbling, then took off the foil, sprinkled cheese over the top, and cooked it for another 10 or so minutes, until the cheese melted.

I’m pretty impressed with how it turned out. I don’t usually trust myself to improvise while cooking. I think I do probably need to eat more vegetables, though.

Adventures in Cooking: Tortellini soup, take 2

This one’s about second tries. And about using what you’ve got in your fridge. I had a package of italian sausage tortellini and a bag of spring greens. So I made some chicken broth, and voila — instant dinner. (And it was way better than when I made it the first time.)