Doesn't she have something better to do?

Okay, so today has been a day of posts. I have spent the past week on the east coast for my sister-in-law's high school graduation (congrats Katie!) and to visit my two best college friends for a bit. Therefore, posting has been postponed until now. You may ask, why not just spread it out Sydney and keep some in reserve? That would be a fantastic and very smart suggestion. Unfortunately, I don't work like that. I just like to get it all out and not have anything hanging over my head. So there you go. Blog bombarded. Hope you enjoy!

Spring Green Risotto

This is one of my absolute favorite dishes. I saw Ina Garten make this dish and knew that I most definitely had to try this dish. I wanted to post about it (and if you know me I'm impatient and want it now), but I had just recently made it for Mike and my brother Calvin. My trip out east to Eliz's made this a perfect opportunity, especially since she is trying to go vegetarian. Her fiance Mike - there are a lot of Mike's in my life - said, well if Syd's making this, it must be hearty. It is. Especially when you add more vegetables than called for. Doesn't it look delicious?

Ingredients
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tbsp butter
3 cups of chopped leeks, white and light green parts (about 2 leeks)
1 cup chopped fennel (also called anise, something I didn't know before)
1 1/2 cups Arborio rice (actually in all grocery stores, who knew!)
2/3 cup dry white wine (Ina says use good wine, I just use the cooking kind)
4-5 cups chicken stock (Ina says homemade, I don't have time)
1 pound thin asparagus
10 ounces frozen peas (I couldn't find a bag this size, so I just used the whole thing)
1 zucchini (something I added and makes it fantastic)
1 tbsp freshly grated lemon zest (I did it once with and once without, both are good)
Salt and Pepper to taste
2 tbsp lemon juice (I just use one lemon's juice)
1/3 cup marscapone cheese (also in most grocery stores)
1/2 cup grated parmesean (preferably freshly grated)
2 tbsp minced chives (optional - haven't used it yet, but I should try it)

Heat olive oil and butter in sauce pan on medium heat. I would actually use a stock pot size because I am messy and it gets all over the place otherwise. Add in the fennel and leeks and saute for 5-7 minutes. Add the rice and make sure to coat all of it with the oil. Add the white wine and simmer until all of it has been absorbed. At this point, add about 2 ladles (no I didn't actually use the ladle, I just guestimated) of chicken stock at a time until it gets absorbed by the rice. Continue adding the stock this way.

While you are adding the rice, defrost the peas and blanch the asparagus (which has been cut up into about 1 in lengths) and the zucchini (which is cut however you like - I like to dice it). This is how you blanch. Boil water with salt. Add the vegetables and boil for about 4-5 minutes. Drain and put in iced water bowl until you add it. Apparently, this is supposed to keep the intergrity (???) of the vegetable when added to a dish like this. I like it.

When the risotto has been cooking 15 minutes, add in the vegetables, salt, pepper and lemon zest. It always takes me more than 15 minutes to get to this point. Who knows what's happening.
Continue cooking and adding stock until the rice is tender but still firm.

When finished, turn off the heat. In a bowl whisk together the marscapone cheese and lemon juice. Then add the parmesean cheese. Add to the risotto. This makes it wonderfully creamy but not too rich. Fantastic.

Mike (my Mike) introduced me to risotto, for which I will be eternally grateful. This is probably one of my favorite comfort foods now. You have to try this. You won't regret it. And if you do, let me know and we'll figure out what went wrong or another type of risotto you will love.

Banana Bread

Recently I spent some time with two of my best friends from college. I do believe we three were the original stumblers - you never knew what was coming out of our college house. They are both quite health-conscious people, so we tried to make sure that the dishes were very healthy. My friend Kim found this recipe for banana bread from Technicolor Kitchen which only called for 3 tbsp of sugar and she was hooked. I saw that it called for yeast and was skeptical, but it actually turned out quite good.

Ingredients
2 tsp instant yeast
3 tbsp sugar
3/4 cup lukewarm water
3 cups unbleached flour (we used bleached and it was fine)
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp butter
1/4 cup nonfat dry milk
1 ripe banana, slightly mashed

Add the yeast, pinch of salt, and water together and beat until foamy. The original recipe calls for using a stand mixer which was not available at the time, so we just used a hand. As for the foamy part, most of it was foamy. It took too long to get it all so we just went with it.

While the mixing is going on (if you have two people or a stand mixer), add together all of the other ingredients. Then add the foamy mixture and knead until dough is tacky. If you don't have a dough hook or stand mixer, I highly recommend that you flour your hands for this. I didn't and it was a mess. Don't add too much extra flour though because the bread will get dry. Place in a greased/oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap and let rise for one hour. It should double in size.

Knead the dough on floured surface for ten minutes. Break into 8 balls and put into a cake dish. Cover and let rise for 1 hour to double in size. We didn't have a cake dish (are you noticing a theme?) so we just used a bunt pan and it was fine.

Bake the bread at 350F for 35-40 minutes or until golden brown.

Despite the use of yeast and lack of sugar, this was a really nice bread. I might suggest using 2 ripe bananas just to give it a little more banana taste. These had only the slightest hint. I don't know if that will throw off the flour measurements, but it is something to investigate.

Quesadilla Pie

I am a huge fan of one dish meals. I love getting everything I need nutritionally and tastitionally in one bite. You can then imagine my huge disappointment when I screw up a one dish meal and it becomes a two dish meal. Oh well. Mike did remind me that he was quite capable of putting a bite of each onto one forkful and then it becomes one. He is so logical. It was still two dishes for me. I got this recipe from Simply Recipes, one of my favorite blogs. Another thing I love about this dish is that the instructions are easy and there are little to no measurements increasing the creativity. So here's the deal, anything you can imagine would be quesadilla-ish, goes into it. The original blog has more options, I'll just tell you what I did (and how I would change it).


Ingredients

4 lg tortillas (about the size of the pie dish you're using)
butter
grated cheese
(those are the basics - gotta have them)

shredded chicken - cooked
tomatoes
garlic
onions
shallots
red pepper
pablano pepper
cooked black beans
olive oil
cumin
sour cream


Preheat your oven to 350F. Butter the bottom of your pie dish.

Hint: I used a fairly shallow pie dish and didn't get as many layers as I wanted. If you have a deep one, I would use it.

Saute the garlic, onions, and shallots until soft. I got a little garlic happy and used 3 cloves. I wont do that again. Two at most. Add in both peppers so they are warm but still a little crispy. (Again, I don't know if this makes a difference, but it felt right).

Cook your chicken and then shred it. This is really only a texture thing. I went through many different thoughts about how to create the dish, so I diced the chicken, cooked it, thought I wanted a different texture than diced and consequently took a knife and chopped it to pieces so as to appear shredded. Still tasted like chicken.

You are essentially creating layers out of what you make. I did it in whatever order I wanted, so I assume you can do the same. You start with a tortilla and then load on what you want. I started with the chicken and sauted mixture, put on some cheese and top with a tortilla. I then did a layer of tomatoes and another of the chicken mixture. It is at this point that I fogot the black beans and there was no way to incorporate them as much as I tried. Hence, two dishes. I topped off the last tortilla with a little bit of cheese. Somewhere in the process add the cumin to taste.

Put aluminum foil over the top and bake in over for 30ish minutes. Then take off the foil and bake for another 15 at 400F. Garnish with a bit of sour cream (and black beans...).

If I were to make this dish again, I would use more seasoning, less garlic, and hotter ingredients like jalepenos. Otherwise it was delicious.

Lemon Mint Orzo Salad

Yet another recipe that I ended up doing my own thing. I got this recipe from another blog that I really enjoy. This is a great pasta salad that is very fresh and light - fantastic for summer. Here we go!

Ingredients

1/4 cup Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
1/3 cup Minced Shallots
2 Tbsp Fresh Lemon Juice
1 Garlic Clove, minced
1/2 tsp Finely Grated Lemon Zest (or more to taste)
Salt and Pepper (to taste)
1 cup Uncooked Orzo
1/2 cup Finely Diced Yellow Pepper
1/2 cup Finely Diced Seedless Cucumber
Grated Parmesan Cheese - whatever makes you feel good
3 Tbsp Minced fresh Mint Leaves
Splash-ish Balsamic Vinegar

Random Thought: Isn't funny how sometimes recipes specify "to taste"? Isn't everything really "to taste". I mean, if I don't like an ingredient, I'm not putting it in, because of my "to taste", or I might add something, as I did here, "to taste".

Moving on...

Cook your orzo. I probably did more than a cup because I never believe that uncooked pasta yields more cooked pasta. It gets me every time. Seriously. Maybe I'll learn eventually.

Stir together olive oil, garlic, shallots, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper. Make sure it tastes all right. For whatever reason, I couldn't stand the thought of putting this cold sauce on a dish I wanted to serve hot, so I sauteed it for awhile. Did it make a difference. I have absolutely no idea. But it felt better...? (When you figure out what that means, can you let me know...good grief).

Stir everything together once the pasta is is cooked. When I was finished with this, I tasted it and thought it needed something, so I added Balsamic Vinegar. I really like this taste, so you should not go by what I put in it, but do the whole "to taste" thing if you feel so inclined. Voila! Great Side salad to go with your meals. It was suggested to put it with roasted chicken. Seeing as we had no roasted chicken, or anything else but leftovers, Mike ate that and whatever he could find and still enjoyed it. There you go.

Baklava Muffins

There are many things that I just cannot get enough of, but one of my absolute favorites is honey! Oh my goodness, I can't start my day until I put an unholy amount of honey in my tea. Mike is always astonished by how much goes in there. Since I love honey so much, it is safe to say that I love baklava as well. This dessert is fabulous. I first had it at The Parthenon in Chicago, and I have loved it ever since. Lately I have been finding/seeing baklava recipes all over the place. You'll probably see some more here. I found this recipe on another blog that I follow. As always, I've made a few adjustments here and there where I felt like it. I'm not really a muffin baker, but what the heck. First time for everything, right?

Filling
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (I chopped them even more than the bag had them)
1/3 cup sugar
3-4 tablespoons of melted butter
1 1/2 -ish teaspoons cinnamon
-ish ground cloves (this wasn't in the original, but I see it in lots of other recipes - not too much through!)

Muffins
1 cup plus 7ish tablespoons flour (what's up with the tablespoons???)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup & 2 tablespoons buttermilk
3 tablespoons of melted butter (I just used the rest of the stick)
honey

Filling
1/2 cup honey


Preheat oven to 400

Mix all filling ingredients and set aside. I really just taste tested this until I got the right combination of sugar, cinnamon and clove. Best way to get it right!

Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda. In another bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, butter, egg and honey. They original didn't call for honey, but I thought that would be wonderful. That's also why I used -ish amount of flour. I didn't know if the extra honey would make it too wet. Make a well of the dry and stir in the wet. Use a fork so that it's lumpy (apparently that's they way it is suppose to look).

The recipe says to use baking cups. I didn't have any so I just sprayed the heck out of it with baking PAM. It was fine. Here's where I came into trouble. You are supposed to fill the cups only 1/3 full with the muffin batter, put a bit of filling in and then fill the cup until about 2/3 full. I don't know what that's supposed to look like. I didn't eyeball it very well and started to run out of batter at the end and other muffins just baked quite large. Oh well. I work on presentation another time.



Let the muffins cook for about 15 minutes (mine only needed 13). Take them out and drizzle with honey. I was pretty happy with these. I think if I ever make these again, instead of drizzling with honey, I will make a honey butter to spread over.

A Real Stumble...

Before I started this blog, I read lots (about 15) of different food blogs to see what it was all about. I found this recipe for steamed dumplings that I was extremely excited about. I even went out to buy a steamer just to make this. I figured that I love Chinese food and that it would be even better if I could make it, and I was being healthy with steaming instead of frying! Right? So today I set out to make this dish for my new blog. (To be truthful, I have been planning on posting about this way before I even set up the blog.) I even followed the recipe exactly and thought that the pictures matched up pretty well with what the other blogger posted (except that I used beef instead of turkey). See.




I even worked on presentation. Something that typically never is on the priority list for me at all. There was even homemade sweet and sour sauce involved. Can you tell how excited I was?


You know what? It was awful. I can't remember the last time I made something so awful. As in, I cannot continue eating this monstrosity that took me a ridiculously long time to create. Mike says that he thought it was okay and that he was not eating it out of pity. I am not sure that I believe him. Yes, there is a little bit of bitterness. Mostly because I was so excited to make this and it be wonderful. Maybe I just don't like steamed dumplings. I don't know. If anyone out there tries this recipe, let me know what you think. I don't think it was user error, but maybe it was. Maybe I am adverse to most things healthy and would prefer for this to have been fried. There are too many maybes in this equation right now. Definitely, I am majorly disheartened. But what stumbling chef doesn't have their share of misses? Well, this sure was a miss. What this dish didn't miss, was the trash can. That it hit soundly.

Cookies for Persuasion

You should know something about me. There is nothing scientific about me at all (sorry Brakers). I like creativity, and I hate absolutes. Most of the people I talk to about baking say that it is a science. Oh my goodness, make me cringe with despair. How can my thing (we'll fudge that a little) be scientific? Well, when I do it, it's not. It's much more about texture and taste and feeling. I mean, I will follow a recipe, but why is 3 3/4 cups of flour better than 3 3/4 cups and 2 tablespoons of flour? I mean seriously. What's the difference. And how did it get to be 3 3/4? Someone had to arbitrarily figure it out eventually. There was a lot of tasting and seeing and feeling to figure it out - I'm guessing. So while I will also give you the original recipe, know that I fudge things here and there almost all of the time.

Moving on to Cookies for Persuasion. I thought I should start my blogging with a fool proof recipe. These are seriously the best cookies that I have ever made. And I make them a lot. I told you earlier that I am a teacher. Well, I use these as persuasion for behavior and test scores, and it's worked pretty well. In our high school, we have teams for sophomores and freshman to help support them more. I made these cookies for our entire team as motivation for doing well on finals. Now they are legendary around the school. So if you want to double, triple, or quadruple this recipe, it's possible. There are a few tricks, but it works great. I currently made these cookies for Mike to take to the law office to that he can make friends with the partners at the firm. Not even joking. Right now he's planning on putting up a sign that says "If you want cookies, come talk to the IP Interns". I'll have to let you know if it works out for him.

Without further ado, here it the recipe. I orginally got it from Paula Dean - I love how that woman is not afraid of butter. I made a few ajustments, but only because I am that lazy. You'll see.

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1/2 cup vegetable shortening (I use the sticks of butter crisco)
3/4 cup of sugar
1 3/4 cup of brown sugar
3 lg eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 3/4 flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 package of semisweet chocolate morsels
1 cup milk chocolate morsels (I use a whole package)
3 squares bittersweet chocolate, chopped (which I don't use because I don't want to chop)
1 cup almond brickle chipes (I use the heath toffee chips covered in chocolate)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease baking sheets

Mix together the butter and shortening until creamy. I ALWAYS use salted butter when baking. I know almost everyone does otherwise, but I like it that way and so far everyone else has who has tried these cookies (or anything else I've shared with people). Gradually add sugars until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla. I always add more vanilla. I guestimate it. There can never be enough vanilla. Make sure that you beat this until really creamy. I'm not sure, but I think that it really helps with how these cookies melt in your mouth when baked.

Here's another shorcut I take. I don't mix together the dry ingredients before I add them to the wet. I just sprinkle around the salt and baking soda, mix it, and then add the flour bit by bit so that it doesn't spray everywhere (sometimes that still happens). Stir in all the chips.

Here's a big secret (I at least thought this was revolutionary when I heard of it). Use an ice cream scoop to drop the dough onto the baking sheet. It makes all the cookies even and then they bake down beautifully. Doesn't that look nice?

You should bake these between 11-12 minutes, but we all know that depends on your oven. It changes for each oven I bake these in. Sometimes it is it is 9 1/2 minutes and sometimes it is 13. Just depends. Let them cool for a few minutes before taking them off the baking sheet. I don't like to use racks because it always makes everything I make fall apart. I use parchment or wax paper on the counter or table and let them cool there completely.

And that's it. Persuade away.

Stumble About...

Stumble About... is a blog which follows my stumbling around the kitchen with maybe a few other episodes outside of the kitchen. Who knows. I am a high school English teacher (I just finished my first year!), so that always gives quite a few stories of stumbling. I also love to wander around new areas and go exploring. Did I mention that I have absolutely no sense of direction? Again, stumbling. This summer I am spending my summer in Milwaukee with my husband (Mike) who is working at a law firm as an intern. This gives me quite a bit of time to explore various interests of mine, which usually can be fairly flighty. But this summer, I want to really explore the kitchen more. The school year does not leave a lot of time for that, but Mike and I LOVE to spend time in the kitchen. It doesn't always turn out good or attractive, but we enjoy it none the less. Hence, my blog. Let the stumbling begin.