Chocolate White Sauce

Yet another one of my experiments that didn't quite work. I tried to make white sauce, but using cocoa powder instead. That didn't work, so I tried to compensate by adding flour and maybe chocolate. It still didn't work. So I took it off the stove, ate some, and put it in the fridge. It's possible that it's still lurking in there.

Rice With Chicken, Cashews, and Yogurt Sauce

A while ago, I read an article in a cooking magazine after food cravings, and what is actually going on in your brain. Part of it is that certain chemical levels being too low will affect your cravings, and then it listed certain foods that can help manage those chemicals, so that you're less likely to experience cravings. For one of the chemicals (it may have been tryptophan, but I'm not entirely sure - I read that article a while ago), they listed yogurt, chicken, rice and cashews as all foods that can help manage it. I thought, hey, that all sounds pretty good together.

This is one of those dishes I may when I need something fairly easy and have all the ingredients on hand. A lot of times I have leftover brown rice in the fridge, maybe some chicken, and cashews and yogurt are staples. They're like cans of tomato sauce or pasta. The foods that always end up in your pantry. So when I'm hungry and want something quick, I'm likely to toss the rice in a pan with some oil, cook the chicken up in another one, then put it all together with cashews and, at the last minute, yogurt. Sometimes I'll add curry powder, or cook it in coconut oil, just do little things to switch it up. It's really quite delicious.

What you see above is my attempt at making it for a larger crowd. Yes, I love cooking it in just a pan, but that only is enough for one or two people. This was an attempt to make it for four or five. So here, I did everything the same way I usually do, except in a large pot. And it was pretty good, except that the yogurt combines better with the rest of the dish when done in a skillet. Here, the yogurt ended up being not warm and a little too thick. So while this version was still delicious, I think I'll sick with my frying pan.

More Ramekin Cakes!

So after that disastrous attempt to make pancakes, I still had some of that batter (vanilla cupcake batter with coconut and chocolate chips mixed in). I made ramekin cakes again. The wonderful thing about ramekin cakes is that you can make them with as much batter as you want. Maybe that sounds vague - you can adapt any recipe to be a ramekin cake recipes, because you can use as many ramekins as you need. It's just a useful baking style. I made them the same way as the last time. Very simple, very delicious.

Late Summer Treats with Homemade Ice Cream

 Peach Pie with homemade Cinnamon Ice Cream

Blackberry and Peach Cobbler

This is from a while ago - late August - when I was spending the day with my family. We stopped by a farmers' market and picked up this bag of peaches and they were just glorious. So later that night my mother and I were home together and she decided we should bake with them. We spent the evening cooking. 

She made the ice cream almost independently of me, just having me put the ice cream maker together. For the pie she made the crust, because she is a goddess when it comes to making pie crusts, and I chopped the peaches. After we had finished the pie, there were still peaches. While I was perusing a cook book, I stumbled over a cobbler recipe. Why not make a cobbler? So we sliced the remaining peaches and when we didn't have peaches for the recipe, we found blackberries and threw them in. For the recipe, you take the berry mixture and put it in the pan, then sprinkle this combination of sugar and flour on top of those, and finally top it all a crust. Then you pop it into the oven until it's all bubbly and the crust is that lovely golden color.

This was all amazing. For one, even though I normally cook alone, I really liked cooking with my mom. It was . . . nice. The ice cream was very good. I didn't expect to like it so much, mostly because I'm not crazy about cinnamon. I definitely preferred the cobbler to the pie. There was some spicing in the pie that I was just not crazy about. It was still good, but not my favorite. I liked the combination of berries and peach in the cobbler, as well as how sweet it was. Both of them were especially good when eaten with a little bit of the ice cream on top. 

Deconstructed Guacamole

This is my attempt at something sort of modernist. I guess it's obvious that I don't have a great understanding of modernist cuisine. I just know that there are some restaurants that deconstruct food and it ends up tasting good, so I decided to try it on my own.

Above you see the combination of sliced guacamole, chopped jalapenos, chopped tomatoes and chips. There's some lime juice, too. Here is my advice to you: just mash it all together. Don't try and be sophisticated and take it all apart. It's not very good.

My issue with this is that when taken apart, the ingredients were just bland. The flavors didn't meld nearly as well together as they do when mashed together as normal guacamole. Now, this may be partially my fault. I think perhaps it I had done something to them - spiced them in some way, or prepared unexpectedly - they may have been good. Also, it's possible that if I had very high quality ingredients, like really perfectly ripe tomatoes and amazing avocados, it also would have been better, but as it was, this dish was a flop.

I Think I Need More Practice With Breakfast Foods

Okay, so when I was reading the book Cooking For Geeks, one of the author's ideas was to take food that was prepared in one way and try cooking it differently, an idea that I immediately fell in love with. One of his suggestions was to try cookie batter in a waffle iron, but instead, I decided to play around with cupcake batter. I know cupcake batter. I actually did try cupcake batter in waffle form and it was very good (I didn't get to take pictures before it was eaten, which is why I haven't written about it here on the blog). So, with the remaining batter, I decided to make pancakes.

I haven't exactly talked about what the batter is, have I? Well, it's an adaptation of the basic vanilla cupcake batter that I also used in Ramekin Cakes, but I also added chocolate chips and shredded coconut. I sorta love what shredded coconut does to the texture of the batter when cooked.

So I decided to make pancakes. Except . . . I don't have much experience making pancakes. Usually, when I eat pancakes, someone else has made them - either I'm at a restaurant, at a friend's house or I'm at home, and my dad is cooking (my dad makes some of the best food I've ever eaten). What this means is I had only a vague idea of what to do. I ended up heating the pan up to high and then putting the batter in too thick, which caused the outside to burn before the inside was anywhere near done. An absolute failure. (To be honest, I wasn't going to post this, but this is a misadventure and I can't edit out my mistakes just so I don't look silly.) I still ended up eating some of it because I was hungry and it was vegan, so I didn't have to worry about raw eggs and salmonella. Not surprisingly, it wasn't very good. My advice is if you don't know how to make pancakes and are hungry, make something else and learn how to make pancakes when you're not hungry, with someone guiding you through the steps.

This was not actually cooked for breakfast. This was one of those in the middle of the afternoon snacks, when you're bored and feeling weirdly tired and have nothing to do. The two o' clock to four o' clock period. It's like you're brain dead. I was feeling lazy and maybe a little bit tired, so I decided, hey! Let's make some eggs! There wasn't a clean pan, so I ended up making them in a little pot instead. When I finished cooking them, I then ate them with a little bit of slightly toasted bread.

This was also not all that good. The eggs had little flavor and the bread was somewhat stale. Also, it didn't help that I'm not a big fan of scrambled eggs. I like mine over easy. I have wonder why I wanted to make them this way in the first place. Overall, it wasn't a very good idea.

No, it's not that I can't make any breakfast foods. I have made very good scones and muffins before and I can make a killer coconut oatmeal (yum, yum, yum). But I think with both of these dishes, I really just need to work on them some more before I make them for myself and anyone else.