Chocolatier

Before I jump into my next vocational venture, I must start with this side-note. I got into a cooking frenzy today (it's called avoiding schoolwork) and now I have chocolate chip pumpkin bread and chipotle lentil soup going at the same time. My house smells.. interesting. It's kind of disgusting, to be honest. I firmly believe that they will both turn out superbly. I also firmly believe that I will not serve them together.

My dream job of today is to be a chocolatier. The movie in my head has me tromping around the rainforests of south america, finding the perfect cocoa bean suppliers and improving peoples' lives dramatically by discovering their cocoa crops and helping these small farmers succeed. Then I see myself in my spotless, Spanish colonial chocolate kitchen crafting artistic masterpieces that critics will rave as 'sinfully divine'- wrap your head around that one! Aaahhh. What a great life.

I tried my hand at chocolatiering last summer (2009). It was an interesting, inspiring, and frustrating journey. And by journey, I mean that I made maybe 2 different batches chocolates. I made lemon ganache truffles and chocolate covered caramels. Yes I made the ganache and caramels by hand, thank you very much. Both chocolates TASTED good but chocolate is tremendously fussy and it never quite set up like I wanted it to. Oh, add expensive to the list of adjectives that describe my chocolatiering journey. Once you start buying things like candy thermometers, dipping forks, vanilla beans and Scharffen Berger chocolate, it really starts to add up. So if anyone has loads of money and would like to send me to culinary school to learn what the heck I'm doing, buy all of my equipment and ingredients, and fund my expeditions to South America, please respond in the comments section. :)

Party Planner

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with the rest of my life. At this stage in the school year, I don't want to ever teach again and I find myself interested in so many different careers. So maybe I'll blog about all the ideas I have. If you have any suggestions, just jump on in and give me some advice!

Today I want to be a wedding coordinator or party planner. I would love to just consume myself with flower arrangements and cake and photography. Keith and I were picking up a cake at a bakery this morning and I was imagining that I was a wedding planner. It was the morning of the wedding that I was planning and I was picking up a dozen donuts and taking them over as a little surprise for the bride and her friends as they were getting ready. Aren't I just so thoughtful?!

The only problems I can foresee are as follows: weddings and parties are stressful and people get crazy when they're stressed. I don't know that I would want to always deal with stressed-out people. Also, weddings and parties are always on the weekends, so I would always have to work when other people are off. Thus my only friends would be other party planners.

Home free

So Keith has been out of town for the last two days and comes home tonight. I can barely remember any other time when he has gone out of town without me. I am always up and leaving him to go here, there and everywhere. So when this little trip came up, I got so excited about what I would do with my free time. Hurray! I could do anything I wanted, eat anything I wanted, accomplish any sweaty, annoying task I wanted.. So I watched loads of HGTV and Gilmore girls, made flan from scratch (astonishingly simple recipe at the end of this post), purged my pantry of everything that had already expired- some expiration dates were 2007!! Now I know that my grandma could beat me hands down on that. I'm sure she has things that expired in the 80s, but for someone who just started keeping their own house in 2006, it's pretty horrifying. I organized said pantry and it looks so beautiful! The only problem is that everything is exactly in its place and there is no room for anything else. So each time I find something randomly in my living room or bedroom that should be in my pantry (hey, I'm still new at this..), I freak out. And I'm looking at my grocery shopping list and having a little panic attack about where I will put the staples that I have run out of.
The other huge task that I accomplished was sorting through all of my clothes and getting them in the right place. Because of several trips and LOTs of laziness, I had accumulated quite a little pile of clothing on top of my dresser. Now the dresser top is visible again, my old, stained or torn clothes have been thrown away or put in Kitty's little house so she can rip them even more, my closet is organized and my drawers are full. What a good feeling.
Now I am surveying the house and I see a million other projects calling my name- sort through old mail and papers, take out the recycling, do laundry, straighten the living room, clean out the car so we can sell it, sweep the porch and replant the pots whose plants died..
I have one thing to say. COME HOME KEITH!!! I can't handle any more projects.


Frighteningly Easy Flan:
Mix together
8 eggs
1 can (14 oz) sweetened, condensed milk
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

In a pan, melt down 1 1/2 C sugar until it becomes a thin caramel and turns golden brown. (don't stir until it is pretty well melted!) Pour this caramel in the bottom of a 9" cake pan.
Add the egg/milk/vanilla mixture.
Put the cake pan in a larger pan with some water in it and bake at 300 degrees for 70 minutes. Run a knife around the edges and flip onto a plate (with edges to hold in the caramel!) and let cool.
The end.

Kitty

This is my puppy, Kitty. She is a little curly mass and we are starting to just love her. In an ideal world, we would have loved her all along, but a few sleepless nights and little mishaps made it difficult. But now she sleeps until 7 am and she only potties outside and she is wonderful.

 I know all you dog people will look at this picture and have an instant little heart attack about a wire being so close to a puppy. Uhh... a puppy being so close to a wire. Whatever. Same thing. Another thing that makes Kitty wonderful is that she leaves wires alone. Yes, yes, dog lovers of America, I will make sure they are out of the way if she is ever home alone and out of her crate.

One great thing about Kitty is that she loves to play with just about anything. One of her favorite toys right now is toilet paper tubes. She can play with them for hours and she gets them stuck on her nose like this:

On Friday, I took my curly little puppy to the groomer because poodles have to get all kinds of grooming done that I was not quite up for doing- like pulling massive quantities of hair out of their ears. No thank you. We dropped her off at noon and picked this thing up at three:

It may be hard to tell from this picture, but she has little white bows in her hair above her ears. She looked miserable. Now, this little pink triangle that was around her neck is her new favorite toy. She wrestles around with it and tries to tear it apart. I think it's payback for all she had to go through.

Italian Lentil Salad

Ok, time to catch up on my Giada recipe adventures. Last Tuesday, I decided to make the Italian Lentil Salad. Obviously, it has lots of lentils in it.. So I cooked those up in a sauce pan. Then, you chop up and add all of these things:

 Back to front, left to right, grapes, hazelnuts, cucumber, scallions, bell pepper, and then the lemon you use for zest and juice. You mix all of this with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and then you serve your cold salad. Easy enough, right? I hadn't counted on this..

 Hazelnuts. Apparently, they are the biggest pain in the behind EVER. I never knew this. I saw hazelnuts in the recipe and I thought back to my fond memories of cracking hazelnuts, almonds, and whatnot and eating them from the shells. We only pulled out the nutcracker at Christmas, so I had this warm Christmasy wave of nostalgia wash over me.
I went to Trader Joe's and bought a large bag of hazelnuts, thinking of all the fun things I would do with the rest of the nuts. I only needed half a cup for this recipe. Visions of hazelnut risotto and hazelnut cookies danced in my head.
As I looked over the recipe, I noticed that these hazelnuts should be skinned, roasted and chopped coarsely. Still naive, I googled 'skinned hazelnuts' and that is where the madness started. Apparently, there are 2 ways you can skin hazelnuts. And also apparently, hazelnuts are terribly bitter if you leave the skin on. Believe me, my lazy self considered this option.
One way to skin hazelnuts involves boiling them in hot water and a few tablespoons of baking soda for a few minutes, then rinsing them individually under cold water and 'popping' the skins off. Then, since the hazelnuts have absorbed so much moisture, you put them on a pan and roast them in the oven.
The second method is to throw the skinful hazelnots on a baking sheet, roast them, and then put the hot hazelnuts between 2 towels (that you don't care about) and rub them together until the skins come off. According to my sources, this method is time consuming and less effective than the first.
I chose the second method. Laziness aside, I just couldn't quite face boiling nuts in baking soda. The picture above is the aftermath. As you can see in the first picture and the picture below, though, I think I did a fairly decent job.

So this is the finished product. I would give it a thumbs-middle. It was ok and the grapes and hazelnuts made it really interesting texturally. Bu, I kept getting bites that tasted like a mouthful of vinegar. And there was no vinegar in it! I'm thinking it might have been the scallions. Maybe if I try it again, I would use red onions instead.
Oh, and hazelnut risotto? Suddenly sounds atrocious.

Chicken Tacos

I am taking a quick break from Giada to share one of my favorite recipes. It came about through a lot of trial and error and picking bits and pieces from lot of food network shows. This is another recipe that I think Keith would have me make every day if he had his 'druthers'.

I start out boiling the chicken. I like to use bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts, because they are pretty cheap, but still only white meat. I've never been much of a dark meat fan.

 In the pan with the chicken, I add a quartered onion, a few garlic cloves, peeled and halved, a bay leaf, dried chipotle peppers (1 or 2), salt, cumin, and whatever else I happen to feel like adding. I add enough water to cover most of the chicken, bring it to a boil and then let it simmer for an hour or so.

This is what it looks like after it has simmered for awhile. At this stage, I take the pan off the heat and let it cool enough to put in the refrigerator. You can either go ahead with the chicken tacos right away, or save this little concoction in the refrigerator to make the next day, if you're planning ahead.

 When I decide I'm ready for tacos, I fish the chicken out of the broth, strain the broth and save it for soup, and shred up the chicken. In a frying pan, I sautee about half an onion in olive oil and then add the shredded chicken. To the chicken, I add some of Lawry's chicken taco seasoning. I usually use about half a packet since I am only cooking for 2. To this I add some water and let it cook for a few minutes, then I chop up about a cup of cherry or grape tomatoes and add them to the chicken mix, just cooking until they are heated through.

I couldn't figure out how to flip this picture, so you'll have to turn your head sideways for a minute. The picture below shows the real secret ingredients that help make these chicken tacos amazing. The green package is ducal refried black beans. They are from Guatemala and they are amazing. You can actually find them in the US now, at some Mexican grocery stores. Along with these beans is an avocado and some fresh cilantro from my garden. Ok, true confession- this is actually parsley, because it was what I had handy on my counter when I was snapping the picture. I would never put parsley on tacos, though. Cilantro is much better.

 We use whole wheat tortillas from Trader Joe's. Some day I might dedicate a whole section of this blog to the products I love from Trader Joe's. Keith likes crunchy shell tacos, so he usually has those. Here is the finished product:

The Christmas plate is a whole other story for another day. Looking at this picture is making me so hungry, so I had better sign off and go find something to eat. More Giada coming soon. I have already made 2 more recipes, but I need to find where I stored the photos on my computer..

Blueberry Mascarpone Turnovers

On Saturday morning, I decided to try this recipe from Giada: Blueberry and mascarpone turnovers. My life will never, ever be the same. The comment next to the date on this recipe says simply "ridiculous".

First, you mix together mascarpone cheese, sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest and lemon juice and add some blueberries. Then, you cut circles out of a piecrust. I cheated and used ready made piecrust, complements of Pillsbury.

To each circle, you add the filling, brush beaten egg around the edges and seal with a fork.

Then, you heat some oil to about 375 (this was as close as I could manage). and deep fry each turnover for 1-2 minutes.

Then, you let the turnovers drain on paper towels and sprinkle sugar on top. Arranage them nicely on a stolen IU plate that appeared among your wedding gifts (?!) and enjoy. The filling is beautifully balanced and the crust turns out flaky and delicious. Keith wants me to make them every day.

This is the one thing that I have noticed so far about the Giada recipes. The flavors are all so well balanced. I thought I cooked well before, but I can tell that I still have a lot to learn.