baking with laser-like focus and mad skill in a kick-ass black outfit
Let’s get down to it!
Steph from Stephfood was our Daring Cooks’ July hostess. Steph challenged us to make homemade noodles without the help of a motorized pasta machine. She provided us with recipes for Spätzle and Fresh Egg Pasta as well as a few delicious sauces to pair our noodles with!
So…we’ve made a lot of pasta. In the fall, it’s an almost once-a-week kind of thing around here. We love it. This past winter and spring, we created a sweet potato ravioli to die for. It’s super yummy.
Happy Friday!
As promised, we’re moving from philosophical to hands-on practical around here. Today’s tip is a fantastically easy way to save a broken mayonnaise.
Don’t know what that is? Well then, skip to the bottom of the post and let’s get you making some mayonnaise!
If you do have experience in making mayo at home (or aioli, which is marvelous and the main reason I make mayonnaise instead of buying it), you have likely found that many recipes “break.” I don’t know why exactly breaking happens, but it’s maddening and until last night, I’d never been able to save a mayo that had done this.
This is one of my favorite video clips. To me, this is the pinnacle of success. And not because it put a few guys into space.
Today’s tip is a bit philosophical, but I promise to make it up to any and all reading with four straight weeks of practical tips that don’t make your brain hurt.
I want to talk about benchmarks. I’ve always sort of known what the word means, but never thought about it much until I went back to school. Even then, I thought about it more in the context of “will knowing what the word ‘benchmark’ means get me a good grade on this exam/paper?” than I really thought about it.
Friday, it’s Friday!
I’m afraid that today’s post title (is it a headline?) may lead some here looking for a way to use cornmeal in pizza crust. Or maybe as a topping. These ideas are interesting, but they aren’t our topic. Today, I’m going to talk about how to get your raw pizza dough into the oven.
This can be hard, unless you have a screen that you’re building your pizza on (and unless you’ve done hours in a pizza restaurant, I’m not even sure why you would know what one is, but if you do, and you have one, and you use it, no tip this week!). But there is an easy little trick that has worked for us like a charm ever since we started making pizza.
Friday tip is a little late!
Blame the origins of this particular installment; our friends S and J came by last night and at least one ninja may have had a bit too much cheer in her happiness to see them. Too much to write a tip last night, at any rate.
We’ll try to make up for it with brevity and simplicity this week – today’s tip is all about doing something sophisticated for cheap (don’t you love that?). Whenever we go visit my Dad, he always serves us red wine out of one of these:
Friday!
Today I want to talk a little about cooking philosophy. I’m an extremely literal person (so much so that it’s possible that I have a disorder). Not that nuance or entendre is lost on me, but I have made some serious social faux pas because my mind stays on the literal track instead of going there.
I think this is the reason I like recipes. I like to follow them. I like to learn “the way” to do things and then I get more comfortable experimenting. While this character trait doesn’t lend itself to extemporaneous cooking out of the gate, what it is good for is noticing patterns. And notice I have.
Friday Tip time! I’m certainly not the first person to ever expound upon umami, but I’m hoping we have some newbie cooks reading, and I think using it is such a neat trick, I thought talking about it was tip-worthy.
Just what the heck is umami? If you were me and you watched this video
You might think it was soy sauce. Kikoman soy sauce in particular.* But umami is a little more complicated and a lot more fun than that.
Friday! And this Friday leads the masses out of Los Angeles and leaves us with the quiet city all to ourselves…
But I digress. Today’s tip is a piece of sheer genius that I found somewhere – quite possibly Cook’s Illustrated. Lots of recipes call for a small amount of tomato paste, usually a tablespoon or two. Cans of tomato paste are never that small (I think they would be impossible to open if they were), which inevitably means leftover paste. You can circumvent this problem by purchasing a tube of tomato paste, which is quite convenient, but much more expensive than a can.* Ninjas are thrifty creatures and just can’t stand to pass up an opportunity to save a little money. So we buy the cans, but that leaves the pesky problem of what to do with the other six tablespoons of tomato paste…
It’s Friday again??
So we seem to be having a bit of a dry spell here in the Friday Tip corner, but I wanted to put something out there for you to chew on. This is what I came up with.
One of the things I wanted this blog to be about was saving money or being economical about cooking. I love food. I love cooking and I really love eating. But few things warm my heart as much as the smell of $0.89/lb chicken bought on sale roasting in the oven. It’s fantastic to make your own beautiful food at home, feeding yourself and your family, being social, talking and eating, hearing about each others’ day, or maybe listening to the radio. But it’s really fantastic to realize that your food bill has been cut by 30%.
This is one of those posts where I man up and admit to being wrong. Maybe not “W” wrong (my ego is too fragile for that), but mistaken in an assertion at the very least…
Above is a photo of all the ingredients for a pizza my husband is about to make*. He likes to take everything out and have it ready to go (even measured out if possible) before he starts cooking. Me, not so much…
