Week 6!! I have at least been consistent with going through the recipe book, even if I have been less consistent with writing down my thoughts. Thank you to those of you who have been following along! I am loving getting pictures and texts about how ya’ll are liking each recipe.
I decided it was the perfect week to get the first 2 recipes out of the way in one go because we were having a healthy potluck at work. I hadn’t been looking forward to making these because I don’t really like most chips and especially not the baked kind. Also I don’t like the taste or texture of kale.
Needless to say, I was going into this week with incredibly low expectations and standards.
001. Baked Root Vegetable Chips:
From the get-go these were pretty. I do really like beets and I knew I could find the normal purple ones, but I had never seen any other color of beets before. I wasn’t sure my HEB would have them. They did!
Martin came through and found golden beets which tasted pretty much the same as the normal beets to me. I also decided to make 1 potato and 1 sweet potato because I was worried about how many chips I’d have since the beets were so small.
I was right to make some other chips because after they were baked they got even smaller! There would not have been enough for everyone.
I got to use my mandolin slicer for these which made me pretty nervous because I cut off a good bit of my thumb on one a couple of years ago. This may have caused the inconsistency in cutting that happened. I noticed that some of the chips were not the same thickness which was annoying.
They were very pretty while drying out. I cut them, put them on paper towels, and then left them out for about 2 hours to try and get the potatoes to dry better.
These things took FOREVER to bake. The recipe book said like 30 minutes or so, but I think the potatoes were in the oven for 1.5 hours. Luckily I had separated the large chips from the small ones to bake, so I was able to pull out the ones that were done and not get them too burnt. I ended up flipping all of them every 10-15 minutes to try to get them to even out.
I thought they turned out fine. Martin seemed to like them. My coworkers loved them. I got asked a lot about the recipe and how I got them to crisp as well as I did, so I was pretty happy that they were received well.
002. Peppered Kale Chips:
This had to have been one of the easiest recipes ever.
I just have a picture of the finished product on these because all I did was buy a bag of triple-washed kale and put the oil, salt, and pepper on them before putting them in the oven.
They also baked right around 20-25 minutes according to the recipe. I had no issues. I think I finished all of them in 30 minutes all in.
I still can’t decide if I liked them or not. They definitely did not have as weird of a taste as normal kale and the texture was obviously different. But the texture was still weird! I would have expected them to be more substantial but they almost dissolved in your mouth?? It was very weird.
Martin and I were being more critical and we thought that I must not have dispersed the oil well enough because some of the chips seemed dryer than others.
My coworkers on the other hand couldn’t get enough! I got asked by just about everyone how I made them. People were surprised by how easy it was. It sounds like several of them have tried to make some in the past with poor results so they were impressed.
I might make both recipes again for a party or something, but I probably won’t be adding either to my snack drawer anytime soon.
No other pics yet!
Next Week: March 23, 2019
094. Classic New York-Style Cheesecake
I’m just going to be making the 1 recipe from the book this week because I’m also going to make a raspberry compote and chocolate ganache for it which are not in the book.