I had a great cheesecake adventure this weekend. I tried out George Geary's peppermint cheesecake recipe from The Cheesecake Bible. It was a big success . . . and a big mess.
The mess: I accidentally didn't use a big enough pan for the recipe. My spring form pans (I got a set of three a few years ago) don't seem to say how big they are anywhere on them. So I just looked for a pan that was bigger than my 9 inch cake pans and assumed it was a 10 inch spring form. Not quite. Which meant burning cheesecake on the floor of my oven.
I also found out that my kitchen aid is not meant to mix the amount of cream cheese required for a 10 inch cheesecake, so I think in the future I'll just halve the recipe.
The success: This recipe made a huge amount of cheesecake! And I really enjoyed the bits of peppermint crushed in it. So we shared it with a bunch of friends and everyone loved it, as long as they liked cheesecake and peppermint. One friend called it "decadent," and that's what we found it too. I wouldn't want to have this cheesecake lying around my house!
The only thing I would have changed is that it wasn't chocolaty enough for my taste. My husband I love chocolate, intense chocolate, so when the cheesecake batter was only a light cinnamon-brown, I was nervous. I thought about melting more chocolate but decided to stick with the recipe. So if I make this recipe again, I'll halve everything except the chocolate and see if that gets me the deeper chocolate flavor we like.
But so far, I like The Cheesecake Bible and George Geary. Sometime I'll have to check out more of his recipes.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Meals for the Week
When I sit down to choose our meals for the week, I try to make sure we don't end up having the same thing everyday, like pasta for four days in a row. I like to try to mix in some rice or potatoes or sandwiches or something, so that we have some variety in our lives!
This week I ended up with a variety of recipes to try:
I don't always choose so many longer meals, but this week I ended up with a little extra time, so I thought, why not do something fun? This week, we'll have noodles twice, potatoes twice, rice once, and tortillas once. I don't usually plan a real dinner for the day we go grocery shopping, which is why I have only planned six dinners. We usually eat egg sandwiches or something else that takes about five minutes because we're too busy and hungry to wait for anything more.
I have a hard time planning sides. Since it's just my husband and me eating everyday, one dish seems to make enough food. Every once in a while we'll go on a salad streak, but I usually end up throwing away rotting vegetables that we didn't eat fast enough. So to balance our meals, I try to plan dinners that include vegetables or that I can throw some into without ruining the dish. This week, I'm going to try adding green beans to the potato salad which blends two recipes and takes advantage of the sale on green beans. We'll see how it goes.
As far as the desserts, I had a couple of bananas that needed to be experimented with and I've had cheesecake on the brain for a couple of months now. Thank you, Cheesecake Factory. Despite my lack of cheesecake pan, I'm going to move forward with a cheesecake recipe from George Geary's The Cheesecake Bible. I haven't tried any of his recipes before, so I'm in for an adventure!
This week I ended up with a variety of recipes to try:
- baked penne (average)
- twice baked potatoes (long)
- thai red curry (average)
- black bean quesadillas (short)
- french potato salad (short)
- macaroni and cheese (short)
- chocolate banana cake (average)
- peppermint chocolate cheesecake (long)
I don't always choose so many longer meals, but this week I ended up with a little extra time, so I thought, why not do something fun? This week, we'll have noodles twice, potatoes twice, rice once, and tortillas once. I don't usually plan a real dinner for the day we go grocery shopping, which is why I have only planned six dinners. We usually eat egg sandwiches or something else that takes about five minutes because we're too busy and hungry to wait for anything more.
I have a hard time planning sides. Since it's just my husband and me eating everyday, one dish seems to make enough food. Every once in a while we'll go on a salad streak, but I usually end up throwing away rotting vegetables that we didn't eat fast enough. So to balance our meals, I try to plan dinners that include vegetables or that I can throw some into without ruining the dish. This week, I'm going to try adding green beans to the potato salad which blends two recipes and takes advantage of the sale on green beans. We'll see how it goes.
As far as the desserts, I had a couple of bananas that needed to be experimented with and I've had cheesecake on the brain for a couple of months now. Thank you, Cheesecake Factory. Despite my lack of cheesecake pan, I'm going to move forward with a cheesecake recipe from George Geary's The Cheesecake Bible. I haven't tried any of his recipes before, so I'm in for an adventure!
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Planning Meals
I don't know about you, but I used to never plan my meals. I was in school, running from class to homework to some event with friends. If you had asked me what I wanted to eat when I came home from the day, I wouldn't have known. A lot of evenings I just grabbed whatever was easiest, whatever I could make and eat in five minutes.
Now that I have someone to cook for and with, the investment of actual meals seems a little more reasonable. And since I hate eating the same thing every night, I decided to start planning our meals. Well, our dinners.
I think everyone has their own way of going about meal planning. Some people like to plan for a month at a time, others go to the store and plan in their head while they're there. I've settled on planning dinners once a week. I wait until the ads for the week are out, and I try to plan my meals around whatever's on sale. Try. At least, I look at what's on sale when I plan something else, that's progress, right?
So I hunker down at my computer, usually on a Tuesday night, and flip through the ads. They fan out from my chair in a semi-circle on the floor. I've noticed that the same old produce goes on sale week after week. When is broccoli not on sale? Okay, it's not always, but even if it's not on sale, it's usually pretty cheap. And we definitely don't want to eat broccoli every night of every week forever. Every once in a while something exciting will catch my eye, like acorn squash or brussels sprouts. I'm interested. Then I think: Is this something I can convince my husband to eat? Then it's back to looking through the ads.
When I've looked enough, sometimes a glance, sometimes a perusal, I get out the cookbooks and settle down to work.
I like to cook from cookbooks. I know lots of people get their recipes online, but I love to know the chef behind the recipes. I feel confident in the recipes of certain chefs. And, if I find I can trust them, I like to explore their recipes that take me beyond where I would ever have thought to go myself. So I open up a trusty cookbook, or more usually, the newest one that's caught my eye, and off I go. I page through it, I search the index, I mutter, I sigh, and at the end of it all, I have a list of recipes written on my Google calendar for the next seven days.
What makes planning dinners difficult is that I don't have the time to make most of the recipes that look intriguing. Instead, I sift through to find meals that are simple enough to make after an hour and a half commute, but look good enough to tempt me to put in the effort. On the days when the meals don't, we end up eating quesadillas or egg sandwiches, whichever we've had less recently. And we don't want to eat those too many days in a row!
Planning dinners is a lot of work, but it makes eating a lot more fun. And once I find a good cookbook, I run with it. Until I'm done. And then I'm off to find the next one . . .
Now that I have someone to cook for and with, the investment of actual meals seems a little more reasonable. And since I hate eating the same thing every night, I decided to start planning our meals. Well, our dinners.
I think everyone has their own way of going about meal planning. Some people like to plan for a month at a time, others go to the store and plan in their head while they're there. I've settled on planning dinners once a week. I wait until the ads for the week are out, and I try to plan my meals around whatever's on sale. Try. At least, I look at what's on sale when I plan something else, that's progress, right?
So I hunker down at my computer, usually on a Tuesday night, and flip through the ads. They fan out from my chair in a semi-circle on the floor. I've noticed that the same old produce goes on sale week after week. When is broccoli not on sale? Okay, it's not always, but even if it's not on sale, it's usually pretty cheap. And we definitely don't want to eat broccoli every night of every week forever. Every once in a while something exciting will catch my eye, like acorn squash or brussels sprouts. I'm interested. Then I think: Is this something I can convince my husband to eat? Then it's back to looking through the ads.
When I've looked enough, sometimes a glance, sometimes a perusal, I get out the cookbooks and settle down to work.
I like to cook from cookbooks. I know lots of people get their recipes online, but I love to know the chef behind the recipes. I feel confident in the recipes of certain chefs. And, if I find I can trust them, I like to explore their recipes that take me beyond where I would ever have thought to go myself. So I open up a trusty cookbook, or more usually, the newest one that's caught my eye, and off I go. I page through it, I search the index, I mutter, I sigh, and at the end of it all, I have a list of recipes written on my Google calendar for the next seven days.
What makes planning dinners difficult is that I don't have the time to make most of the recipes that look intriguing. Instead, I sift through to find meals that are simple enough to make after an hour and a half commute, but look good enough to tempt me to put in the effort. On the days when the meals don't, we end up eating quesadillas or egg sandwiches, whichever we've had less recently. And we don't want to eat those too many days in a row!
Planning dinners is a lot of work, but it makes eating a lot more fun. And once I find a good cookbook, I run with it. Until I'm done. And then I'm off to find the next one . . .
Monday, December 6, 2010
My Cooking Influences
Before I get started talking about some of my adventures with recipes, I thought I should let you know about the cooking in my life. My mom went through phases in my childhood. She baked homemade bread when I was young. I can still remember eating hot bread fresh from the oven. It had twisting pattern, like a snail shell, that I could uncurl and then enjoy. Later, when my mom was back in school, we seemed to live on frozen pizza and pasta prima vera and whatever other frozen foods could be cooked in 20 minutes or less, preferably in the microwave. But when she had the chance, my mom would experiment with new recipes. Sometimes we loved them, like a great homemade taco soup, sometimes we hated them, like a cold lentil salad. But we were expected to try all of them, and now, my favorite thing is to try something new.
My mom had lived in France for a semester, and my Dad lived in Germany for about two years, and both spent time in Turkey, after I was born. So we developed, as a family, a taste for the European. Fabulous cheeses, wonderful breads, amazing pastries, I learned to love them all. I went to France myself, only for two months, and came back loving French food. My mom bought me a French cookbook (an American edition of one I'd seen in France), and that was the start of my eclectic cookbook collection.
My husband comes from an All American family. His mother made good food, but she didn't love cooking. She made great Thanksgiving rolls, but she bought her pies. She'd make dinner, but never wanted kitchen stuff for a Christmas present. My husband was a good sport in the kitchen before we were married. He made brownies (from a mix) and had made a big dinner for friends on occasion, but he hadn't really embraced his talent for cooking . . . yet.
After we got married, we had to find some sort of middle ground. I like to try all sorts of outlandish things like quinoa and babaganoush and squash. I, also, don't like touching raw meat. Gross. My husband hates squash, it's a texture thing, isn't that fond of mushrooms, and only tolerates seafood, usually, for my sake. So when we got married, we embarked on a journey, one we didn't know we were going to take, to find food that we both like to eat. Sometimes we're successful, sometimes we're in tears, but it's been mostly fun, so far. We're looking forward to continuous food adventures, which will hopefully match a fire on in the oven while rolls are baking so that they taste so much like smoke they're inedible, even though they look perfect; polenta so bland that we both take a couple bites, look at each other, and throw the rest away; and all the other outrageously funny as well as miserably disappointing meals we've had. Though a lot of times things work out. They just aren't as memorable. That's why I have this blog, so we can remember our successes and share them. Enjoy!
My mom had lived in France for a semester, and my Dad lived in Germany for about two years, and both spent time in Turkey, after I was born. So we developed, as a family, a taste for the European. Fabulous cheeses, wonderful breads, amazing pastries, I learned to love them all. I went to France myself, only for two months, and came back loving French food. My mom bought me a French cookbook (an American edition of one I'd seen in France), and that was the start of my eclectic cookbook collection.
My husband comes from an All American family. His mother made good food, but she didn't love cooking. She made great Thanksgiving rolls, but she bought her pies. She'd make dinner, but never wanted kitchen stuff for a Christmas present. My husband was a good sport in the kitchen before we were married. He made brownies (from a mix) and had made a big dinner for friends on occasion, but he hadn't really embraced his talent for cooking . . . yet.
After we got married, we had to find some sort of middle ground. I like to try all sorts of outlandish things like quinoa and babaganoush and squash. I, also, don't like touching raw meat. Gross. My husband hates squash, it's a texture thing, isn't that fond of mushrooms, and only tolerates seafood, usually, for my sake. So when we got married, we embarked on a journey, one we didn't know we were going to take, to find food that we both like to eat. Sometimes we're successful, sometimes we're in tears, but it's been mostly fun, so far. We're looking forward to continuous food adventures, which will hopefully match a fire on in the oven while rolls are baking so that they taste so much like smoke they're inedible, even though they look perfect; polenta so bland that we both take a couple bites, look at each other, and throw the rest away; and all the other outrageously funny as well as miserably disappointing meals we've had. Though a lot of times things work out. They just aren't as memorable. That's why I have this blog, so we can remember our successes and share them. Enjoy!
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