Failures Happen

So, contrary to popular belief (or at least the few posts that I've made thus far) I am NOT a great cook.  I like to experiment and I'm pretty good at following a recipe, but sometimes the experiments do not turn out right.  And sometimes they are downright nasty.

Exhibit A:  Eggplant "Fries"

I bought an eggplant last week and decided that it would be a great way to make some foods that I haven't tried in a while, and I made some yummy eggplant stuff this summer, so I figured we'd give it another go.  So this is the recipe that I mostly followed:  http://www.closetcooking.com/2012/09/crispy-baked-eggplant-fries-with.html.



Ain't that pretty?

Well, turns out that eggplant does not want to become crispy.  Ever.  Eggplant is mushy and has never even begun to resemble "crispy" in my kitchen.  The final result was mushy eggplant sticks that stuck to my pan and tasted like bland couch cushions.  Maybe I followed the recipe wrong, maybe the interwebs have been lying to me, but either way, eggplant fries are a failure.


Exhibit B:  Muddy Mushrooms

I love mushrooms.  I don't think I ever gave them a try when I was a kid, but at some point I tried them and I haven't looked back.  Most times when I go to a decent grocery store, I'll get a carton of mushrooms.  Then one or two days that week, I'll oven roast them and eat them straight.  Its delicious.

So why is this a failure?  Well one time I was in the middle of roasting some mushrooms (it usually takes 20-25 minutes at 400F) and my friend showed up so we could take her dog for a walk.  Well, I figured that slow roasting things usually tastes amazing, and so I turned my oven down to 200 and happily sauntered off. Yeah, that didn't work.  My precious mushrooms were turned to black charcoal looking mushballs that were unfit for human consumption.

Ok, I thought, since I can't eat these straight I can at least save them and put them in a sauce or something.  I hate to waste a whole carton of mushrooms.  So then I decided to make a creamy mushroom sauce for some pasta the next day.  I chopped up my poor little black babies and put them in the sauce....and everything turned a nasty shade of gray.  Like old mop water gray.  Like the color Aunt Petunia dyed Harry's school uniform in HP1 gray.  Ew.  I'm not one to judge a recipe by how photogenic it is, so I proceeded to taste it and INSTANTLY regretted it.

Moral of the story:  burned mushrooms taste like crap.  And they cannot be revived.


I'm sure I'll have more kitchen failures, and next time I'll take pictures so you can see my prowess for burning and mutilating food.

My Go-To Dinner: Pan Fried Fish with Lemon Garlic Spinach

So there are some days I am starving and only have about 15 minutes before I collapse with hunger.  This is the recipe for those days.

Pan Fried Tilapia

Aldi sells frozen tilapia fillets that are pretty darn good.  They defrost really well in the microwave and then cook really quickly.



Dinner for 1:

1 fillet of fish (I usually use tilapia, but flounder also is pretty good)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon minced onion
tiny dash of cayenne pepper
salt and pepper

To make yummy fish mix up the spices and oil and lemon juice and rub it on both sides of the fish.  Heat up your frying pan on the stove and when it is hot, put in the fish.  I usually let it cook for 3 or 4 minutes on each side, but just keep an eye on it.  The fish is done when it is opaque the whole way through.

My fish occasionally flakes into a few pieces, which never bothers me since it all still tastes amazing, but if you want to make your fillets pretty, you can always make a pretty little package out of foil and put all of the seasonings in the package- you don't need quite as much oil if you cook it this way.  Then put the foil packet in the oven at 400 F for about 15 minutes.  The smell when you open it up is amazing!!


Garlic-Lemon Spinach

Whenever I buy a bag of spinach, I never seem to use all of it before it goes bad.  This recipe is delicious and it uses a LOT of spinach.  This is inspired by the spinach dish that came from the fish market next to my summer job last year.  I never knew I liked cooked spinach, but this dish is light and delicious.



~2 tbs olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
spinach- lots (plan about 2 cups raw for everyone you're serving)
a few squeezes of lemon juice

First, heat up the oil in the pan and start to cook the garlic.  Once it starts to smell amazing, put in your spinach.  I usually use about half of a big salad bag when I'm making this and I can eat all of it.  Spinach decreases in volume incredibly when you cook it, so about a whole pan full is just enough for me for a side to dinner.  Cook down the spinach until it decreases until about 1/4 its original volume.  About a minute before it is done cooking, pour in the lemon juice and let it sizzle.

Eat warm.  Make more if you need it!

Baked Cake-Mix Doughnuts

So for Christmas my amazing roommate gave me a doughnut pan- a simultaneously amazing and terrible gift.  And today is her 21st birthday.  So, naturally I am making doughnuts :)  Normally, I am of the opinion that if you have basic ingredients you shouldn't need a cake mix, BUT my mom had a ton of them (I mean and entire case) and so I took a few back to school with me.

Today I made yellow cake donuts (doughnuts? what is the proper spelling?) I also attempted a caramel glaze, which worked fine, but doesn't go super well with the already incredibly sweet yellow cake.

Cake Mix Doughnuts:

Ingredients:
1 box cake mix (you can do any flavor)
1 stick butter melted (yes a whole stick, I'll get back to this later)
2 eggs
1 cup milk

Basic instructions:  mix everything together, spoon it into a gallon zip lock and snip off the end, fill well greased doughnut pan about 2/3 full, bake at 350 degrees for about 12-16 minutes.  Remove from oven and flip the pan onto a plate or cookie sheet.

so pretty!

More detailed instructions:  Step one- turn on your awesome Pandora station where Taylor Swift comes on right after Piano Man, not sure how that happens.
Step 2: follow basic instructions, except maybe change the ingredients around a bit.  For this recipe I actually  cut the butter by 3 tablespoons and used 1/2 cup milk and substituted the rest in applesauce.  I did this more because I ran out of (my roommates') milk and wanted to make sure I had enough butter for the sauce than because I'm watching calories.  I am watching calories. I watch them all the way from the plate to my mouth. But seriously, the applesauce makes just as good of a doughnut.

Not so pretty :(

Step 3:  GREASE YOUR PAN.  Please for the love of all things good grease that sucker.  Its very disappointing when your doughnuts come out so beautifully and then they break to bits.  Grease it between every batch.  Even if you think its greased enough, do it again.  I'm telling you, better too much than not enough.  I mean really, you're baking them.  The alternative is literally boiling them in grease, you can afford another spray of the Pam.


Caramel Glaze (this would probably work better on a less sweet doughnut)

Ingredients:
4 tbsp butter
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup cream
1 tbsp vanilla

Melt the butter in your saucepan.  Then whisk in the sugar and let it boil for about 4 minutes.  Then add your cream and vanilla and keep whisking.  Let it all boil for about 10 minutes stirring occasionally.

I actually used milk instead of cream (because really, who has cream around?)  But I think the cream would have been better.  It turned out pretty thin and not as creamy as I would have liked.

Warning!  This burns incredibly easily.  If you have a gas stove like I do, you have to be really really careful. Once it starts to boil furiously pull it off the heat for a few seconds.  Trust me when I say you do not want that burned and nasty smelling mess on your hands.

Egg Noodles :)

Egg noodles are shockingly simple.  I've looked up recipes but I also tend to just eye it.  So the ingredients are just flour, eggs, and salt.  I start with "a bunch" of flour, about 3 cups if you want a measurement.  Add about 1/2- 3/4 teaspoon of salt, more if you like it salty, and then 2-3 eggs.  I mix them up with my hands (Murphy's law of cooking says that this will be the time that no less than four people will be texting you) until the dough can make a pretty smooth ball.  I usually start with 2 eggs and see what the texture is like after mixing that thoroughly, and add another if it needs more liquid.  After three eggs, you can always start adding a teaspoon of water at a time if its still too dry until you get a good texture.

Then grab a handful of the dough (about 1/4 of the total but it really doesn't matter) and plunk it on a (very!) well floured countertop.  Roll it out with your handy dandy wine bottle using more flour to keep the dough from sticking.  When you have it as thin as you want, use a sharp knife or pizza cutter to cut the noodles into strips.  Thicker rolls of dough taste more and more like baby dumplings, thinner have more of a noodley texture.  3 cups of flour makes enough noodles for a good sized crock pot of chicken soup.  But of course, since this recipe is so simple you can cut it down to 1 cup of flour and 1 egg to make noodles for one or two people.  You can let your uncooked noodles rest for a day or so in a sealed container but I never have time or foresight for that.  To cook- drop your noodles into boiling water for about 10 minutes.  If you're adding them to a crock-pot soup, you can simply put them in the broth about half an hour before you want to eat :)

You can add flavoring to the dough as well.  (My guy friend said that the recipe above wasn't interesting enough.  This is for people like him.)  Thus far I've only done garlic and spinach but I've seen recipes for beet, pumpkin, and carrot flavored pasta.  For spinach pasta I sauteed some minced garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil for about a minute, then added a LOT of spinach.  Really, it seems like filling the entire 12 inch frying pan with an inch and a half of spinach would be too much, but it cooks down so much that I actually filled it a second time.  So all in all I used about 1/2 of a bag of spinach.  Then you put the hot mess right into the blender and pulverize it.  Add the spinach puree to the dough before you add your eggs, and adjust the number of eggs according to how sticky the dough is.  The puree substitutes about 1 egg.  Then roll out your pretty green dough just like before.  I sauteed a few tomatoes chunked up with garlic for a sauce.  And it was divine!

Feel free to play with this recipe!  If you think a little melted butter is in order, use that instead of water to make the dough the right texture, or use milk.  This is just the basic proportions that I use and it has worked well for me!

Introductions

Hello there blogosphere!  This being my first post on my brand spanking new blog, I'm a little unsure what to write.  I suppose just an overview of things to come would be helpful.

I am creating this page as a space where I can essentially brag about what crafty and culinary type things that I've been doing without annoying too many of my Facebook friends.  While I'm sure they'd all LOVE to know what I made for dinner, perhaps this will be more helpful to all involved since I can put links to recipes and whatnot.

A little about me- I am a 21 year old college junior.  I'm pretty sure that I have undiagnosed ADD because it is impossible for me to sit still and so in every spare moment I am doing something crafty or I'm trying new recipes.  I can't even sit and watch a show without doing something.  My particular interests include lampworking beads (aka glass on a blowtorch), and baking.  I've also been trying my hand at sewing, but I've had terrible luck with sewing machines dying on me in the last two months.

My current model- notice the flour still on it from tortillas last night.

I should probably explain the title- Wine Bottle Rolling Pin.  Well I guess maybe not since its pretty self-explanatory, but basically I'm too cheap to buy proper kitchen equipment when things I have already will suffice.  I found this out when I went to make homemade egg noodles for chicken soup, but didn't have anything to roll them out with.  Then I spotted my roommate's bottle of wine that had a little penguin on it, and I figured it had less than a glass left and she wouldn't care.  So my cheap-o rolling pin was born.  I have since bought my own bottle of wine (for less than $4 I might add) and it has served me well for spinach fettuccine and homemade tortillas :)