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Week 6 – Veggie Chips

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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.

Week 5 – Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup

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My favorite comfort food!! I love grilled cheese sandwiches. They are super tasty and easy and I always like to make them with vegetable soup or a really good tomato soup, which I usually get from a can.

027. Deluxe Grilled Cheese Sandwiches:

Typically, I go with the extra easy – bread & cheese only. However, these are supposed to be DELUXE grilled cheese, so I figured I had to step it up a little bit.

I still used plain wheat bread, but we did have 2 types of cheese (pepper jack and cheddar) and I added mayo, spinach, and tomato to the sandwiches too.

I would like to add my own tip to their recipe that my mom always used – cover the pan to keep the heat in and melt the cheese faster so you don’t over-toast the bread.

It still tasted like a grilled cheese, so I enjoyed it. I liked the idea of having different fillings and mixing things up, although it is still fancier than I will probably try to do in the future.

076. Fresh Tomato Soup:

I am so disappointed in myself for this one. I messed up all over the place. Tomato soup is a food that I have just recently acquired an appreciation for, so I was really looking forward to learning how to make it. And the pictures in the book made it look so good!!

I would have to say the overall theme of my mistakes was not paying attention. My littlest helper was distracting me and I missed a lot of things. (Additionally, this is why my post is especially short on pictures)

My first mistake was not thinking about how many tomatoes I had. I was told that we are not in peak tomato season, so when I was at the store I looked for the ripest tomatoes I could find and then planned to supplement those with a can of tomatoes.

I ended up with about 3 good looking ones and one large can of tomatoes. Instead of thinking about how close to 2 lbs. of tomatoes I was getting, I charged right on through to my next mistake: putting the whole can of tomatoes and juice into the food processor. Additionally, I didn’t realize this was incorrect until I had already begun blending and was getting confused about why it was SO watery. There was also A LOT of it. I decided that I’d ended up with too many tomatoes somehow.

My plan became to boil off some of the excess liquid to try and salvage the consistency which had turned into salsa. It was around this time that I realized I somehow didn’t have any honey in my house(? How could that even happen? At one time I had 4 different types of honey from 4 different areas of Texas!). So instead I tried to substitute some sugar, but I have no idea what the correct ratio of sugar to honey is. Also, I couldn’t tell if I had doubled the recipe or just had a little bit too much, or if maybe this was how much soup the recipe was supposed to make!

Even with all of my attempts to boil it down, add sugar and cream, and I think at one point I added flour to thicken it for some reason, it still came out with the taste and texture of a really nice meatless marinara sauce.

I thought about putting it back in the blender or straining out some of the juices, but at this point the sandwiches were done and Martin was back. So I just chalked it up as a loss and served it. Martin was very sweet and finished his bowl and my bowl.

I’d like to try the soup again sometime because I think I could learn from my mistakes and make it a little better.

Next Week: March 16, 2019

Next week I will be knocking out 2 recipes that I have not been excited about since the beginning!

001. Baked Root Vegetable Chips & 002. Peppered Kale Chips

Week 4 – Salmon & Salad

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This was another good set of recipes! I didn’t get to make them until Monday night, but everything came together quickly for a weekday.

Also, as Martin pointed out, this meal is deliciously Keto. If you somehow haven’t heard of the Keto diet, my brilliant cousin has a write-up about it on her blog HERE. Whether you are on Keto or not, this meal is undeniably healthy & delicious.

050. Salmon in Parchment:

I thought the taste of this was great! I liked how the oranges made it a little sweet and went well with the salmon and veggies without being overpowering.

I added green & yellow squash to my salmon because I’m pretty unoriginal and I couldn’t think of anything better. Next time I think I’d like to try how a variety of vegetables cook if they’ve usually got different cooking times.

I used foil because I didn’t have enough parchment paper. I don’t have a lot of notes about this because it really was so easy to make.

071. Fresh Herb Vinaigrette:

Another easy recipe! I used a combination of fresh thyme and dried basil and oregano. Shallots were in the recipe again; this book seems to like them.

I liked the ease of everything going into one mason jar that I can store the leftovers in. I feel like I could potentially have several different versions in the fridge which would be fun.

My favorite part of this book/experience is the opportunity for variety. They give you some alternatives, which opens up my creativity and makes me want to experiment and try new things.

Any new pics I get will go here.

Next Week: March 9, 2019

027. Deluxe Grilled Cheese Sandwiches & 076. Fresh Tomato Soup

I LOVE grilled cheese sandwiches. And tomato soup. And especially the 2 together. The weather is supposed to be terrible, so I’m looking forward to staying warm with homemade soup. Like always, thank y’all so much for your participation! I hope you’re having at least a little bit of fun with this.

Week 2 – Lasagna & Caesar Salad

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February 16, 2019

Welcome to week 2! Last week was fun and I want to thank everyone for being supportive!

I would like to start this week’s post with a disclaimer that I don’t think I’ve brought up yet: I am not a cook. I feel like I should be since I bake a lot, but I don’t have the same instincts I do when baking. That’s part of the reason I’ve started this venture – to get better cooking instincts. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by how well this week’s dinner turned out even though I made some simple mistakes.

Martin was working on Saturday, so I made the lasagna Saturday night for dinner on Sunday. Since I wasn’t hurrying to put anything in the oven, I was able to go slower and do more prep work than last week.

I started with the Bechamel Sauce which had a fancy name that scared me, but it was a pretty simple cheesy gravy sauce. I think the consistency was right and it didn’t take very long for me to prepare – less than 10 minutes.

The meat sauce is where I made my mistakes. Firstly, I didn’t notice that my fennel seeds were whole and I didn’t have a great system for grinding them like a mortar/pestle or a spare grinder or something (Christmas present Martin?). Upon re-reading the recipe tips while writing this, I saw that they recommended using a rolling pin to crush them.. That would have been a great idea. However, I was able to chop them up pretty well with my chef’s knife, although there were some chunks in there and I’m not sure if that affected the taste at all.

Secondly, even though the recipe clearly said to lower the temperature and simmer for 15 minutes, I just let that stuff keep on boiling for the whole 15 min. By the end of it, the sauce was really just red meat with some tomatoes. Because of that, the sauce didn’t go nearly as far as I think it was supposed to. (I’m also apparently brushing up on my reading skills)

I couldn’t find my grated Parmesan cheese until the lasagna was basically done, so I had to use the shaved Parmesan I had bought for the Caesar salad in the filling. There were chunky flakes in it that made the filling more annoying to spread, but I don’t think I messed up that layer as much.

Here’s my layering prep! You can kind of see how much my meat sauce boiled off in this picture. About 3/4 of the way through the layering, I added another can of tomato sauce and made it go far enough to at least cover the noodles. It seemed to work.

Pre-baked lasagna!! I covered it in with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. When I baked it on Sunday I had to keep it in for 55 minutes before it became brown and bubbly, but it was a hit!

I would say this was a classic lasagna. I would also say that it is fool-proof! Even with my missteps it still turned out pretty tasty. I’m interested in trying the vegetable version of this recipe and maybe some other variations now that I’ve tried the original.

070. Caesar Salad (Bonus 010. Cooking eggs):

The dressing came together really quickly. I was able to do all of it on Sunday while the lasagna was in the oven. This even included hard-boiling eggs (I used their tips from recipe 010. Cooking Eggs so I’m counting it!!) which I forgot to do ahead of time.

I couldn’t find anchovies at my HEB, so I decided to try it with anchovy paste. That’s what the picture below is. It looked pretty gross and did not smell much better, but I think the flavor was the same from the vague memory I had of making this dressing several years back.

I started the dressing in my regular blender but ended up having to move it into my mini blender because the big blender wasn’t making the dressing smooth.

(Little Westley foot in the bottom left corner)

My smaller blender worked and I was again pretty happy with the result. I was worried that the little amount of dressing it made wouldn’t be enough for all of the lettuce I had, but it was just enough!

I didn’t make croutons even though the recipe called for them because I don’t like croutons and I didn’t feel like doing more work for something I’d just pick out anyway.

The final product! I thought it was very pretty and delicious. Overall, I liked these recipes way more than last week’s. They did really remind me that I am a much better baker than a chef. I’m excited to keep going and hone all of my skills to be all-around better.

Other Pictures:

Craig & JJ

Next Week (this week) : February 21, 2019

021. Double-Blueberry Muffins & 084. Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m going to have some family in town this week so I decided to go with recipes that I could make ahead and people can eat them as needed instead of as a meal.

Just like last week, post your own experience below and if you have a picture, send it to me and I’ll post it on the website until I figure out how to let you post pictures yourself.