mmmmmm

I've been holding out on you. Aaron and I have made some pretty delicious things lately which I have yet to share on my neglected blog. This changes TODAY.

I got over my peanut-butter-is-too-expensive-to-use-in-cookies thing and made these peanut butter cookies from Smitten Kitchen. They have 5 ingredients, and you can be eating them in less than an hour (most of which is hands-off oven or chilling time). They've nearly replaced these brownies as my go-to "I need a dessert now, and I already ate all the chocolate chips I've been hoarding in the freezer". 

Did you need a black bean burger recipe? Because I have one for you! This comes from America's Test Kitchen, which you'll need to have a login to see and the recipes will disappear unless you get a paid subscription after the current season has passed. So I've brought it here to you!

2 cans (15-ounce) cans black beans, rinsed
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 scallions, minced
3 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon hot sauce (optional, but I'd recommend it)
½ teaspoon ground coriander
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 ounce tortilla chips, crushed coarse (1/2 cup)
8 teaspoons vegetable oil
6 hamburger buns

Instructions

1. Dry your black beans for ~15 min by putting them on a baking sheet lined with a triple layer of paper towels.

2. Whisk together the eggs and flour to form a paste. Add in the scallions, cilantro, garlic, cumin, hot sauce (if using), coriander, salt, pepper. Mix well.

3. Crush up tortilla chips into a fine powder using a food processor, about 30 seconds (you could also probably just smash them up in a plastic bag if you don't have a food processor, just make sure they're pretty finely crushed). Add in the black beans and pulse 5 times to combine. Combine the black bean mixture with the egg/spice mixture and refrigerate for at least an hour. (This helps make it easier to handle the burgers because the mixture will be pretty loose at this point. That being said, Aaron and I were too hungry to wait every time we've made these, so we skipped straight to the cooking part and it worked out just fine.)

4. Divide the mixture into 6 equal portions, forming patties 3.5" in diameter. You can wrap the patties in plastic wrap and freeze them for later if you want, as long as you thaw them out before cooking.

5. Heat a couple teaspoons of oil in a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Once the oil's hot, cook three patties at a time. Cook 5 minutes on one side, until the bottom's brown and crisp, and then flip them and cook for another 3-5 minutes (whenever the other side is also brown and crisp). 

6. EAT. Love them so much you don't even care they're not beef. My favorite way to top these is with cheese (put a slice on when you're cooking the second side), barbecue sauce, and guacamole. Mmmm happiness.

And your final food recommendation also comes from America's Test Kitchen, but this recipe link should work: bolognese sauce. You're going to need meatloaf mix (pork + beef + veal) for it, and I wouldn't recommend subbing just ground beef or ground turkey (we almost always sub any ground meat for turkey in other recipes, but it doesn't turn out nearly as good here). It's worth it. You can, however, sub out the white wine for chicken stock and it will still taste fantastic.

Besides these few standouts we've sort of been in a rut lately. We decided we should actually cook more out of the cookbooks we own, so there will probably be some more Smitten Kitchen recipes showing up here in the future. Got any recipes you're loving these days?

[fairly empty] thoughts about dessert

I've been accidentally collecting unfrosted cake recipes lately, like this double vanilla butter cake, ooey gooey double baked chocolate cake ("ooey gooey"? ugh, come on, Food52), and this grapefruit curd in grapefruit cake.

I actually made the double vanilla butter cake tonight and in case you were wondering, can I forget to mix the sugar with the eggs at the beginning and not realize it until I've already added all of the other ingredients and still get a decent cake? Yes, you can! I tested out that scenario just for you! Your cake will be about half the height of the cake in the picture and therefore twice as dense, but it will still taste okay!

This will sound like a stupid idea coming off of that failure, but I also decided I want to tackle a Milk Bar cake sometime soon. Probably the birthday cake. I'm debating whether it's worth forking over a bunch of money on Amazon for 1) glucose 2) acetate strips 3) quarter sheet pan 4) 6" cake rings 5) more sprinkles. I was already going to buy myself sprinkles for my birthday, but glucose? When am I ever going to use glucose again unless I bake more Milk Bar cakes?

Not cake, but these salted peanut butter cookies look amazing. However, any recipe with significant amounts of peanut butter, maple syrup, honey, or Nutella makes me hesitate because that stuff is not cheap. And if we're buying peanut butter it's because Aaron eats a peanut butter sandwich almost every day for lunch (he's a champion of food monotony), not for a batch of cookies we'll devour in a couple days. This is when I'll know we've made it: when I can nonchalantly pick up an extra thing of peanut butter at the grocery store for cookies I'm making on a whim with no purpose or event in mind.

Speaking of cookies, I got a cookie scoop for Christmas, and it is a life changer. I want to make drop cookies all the time now because cookies obviously, but also because using that scoop is so fun. It magically makes my cookies turn out much better to boot. I've been biased against cookie scoops in the past because I've always thought of them as ice cream scoops, and they suck at scooping ice cream. But, it turns out when you use them for their actual purpose, they work great! Who would've thought?

You'd think that after such a long gap between posts I'd return with something meaningful or interesting to say buuuuut nope! CAKES AND COOKIES. The important things in life.

kitchen revelations

Surprise! I'm blogging twice in one month!

Last time Aaron and I took a trip to Penzey's we made a new discovery: smoked paprika. Normal paprika is beautiful but also kind of bland, but smoked paprika. SO WONDERFUL. I want to put it on everything. We did a jazzed up version of our chicken tikka masala (which has almost entirely diverged from what chicken tikka masala is supposed to taste like as we found out when we ordered it at India Palace on our anniversary) with smoked paprika and bell peppers and mmmmm it was fantastic. Chili + smoked paprika? Anything Mexican with smoked paprika? Macaroni and cheese with smoked paprika? Tried them all, they're all glorious.

I finally got around to making sweet potato burritos with red onion, peppers, black beans, cilantro, lime, and smoked paprika of course, and it was so good. I would eat that sweet potato burrito over a chicken or beef burrito any day. Not that that's saying much since I sort of hate cooking meat anyway, but...still, delicious burritos.

Another cooking-related thing I wanted to share: a magical way of storing cilantro. I'd seen this tip online forever ago, but like most online tips I see (mountain dew + peroxide = fluorescent? NO.), I ignored it. Anyway, you wrap your cilantro in a damp paper towel and store it in an open ziplock. I may have just had a freakishly healthy bunch of cilantro, but it stayed fresh for over a week. Normally my cilantro lasts maybe 4 days. A miracle! I'm going to have to repeat this experiment to make sure the results are reproducible, but I was pretty happy not having to throw away half a bunch of wilted nasty cilantro for once in my life.

LAST THING. I finally made crème brûlée using the broiler. It's a chocolate version and it was divine. Amen.

You have any kitchen discoveries you want to share? Or any recipes I should be making? I need something to get me through the last bit of this awful, awful winter, and there's only so much crème brûlée I should be eating.

procrastinating wednesday's presentation

Someday I will write about something meaningful, but today is not that day. Instead: dinnerware and glass jars!

I love this dinnerware line from IKEA. I think I'll buy myself four bowls and four plates for Christmas. Isn't being an adult fun?

Does anyone know where I can get a big jar like this, only with an airtight seal? We've been using some nice stainless steel canisters for flour/sugar/brown sugar since we got married, but they're a little small for actually scooping full cups of flour out without getting it all over the counter. And since Aaron's making two loaves of bread a week these days, we're going through a lot of flour...

sasha in philly 3.0

A few weekends ago my cousin Sasha came and visited me again. We had a lovely time getting brunch at Ants Pants cafe (raspberry dark chocolate French toast oh my), doing a bit of shopping, getting cheesesteaks at John's Roast Pork (new favorite cheesesteak!), making snickerdoodles and pesto chicken pizza, nail painting, and lots of watching old "New Girl" episodes. 

None of our immediate family live anywhere near the East Coast, so it's nice to have Sasha only a one hour plane ride away. Thanks for visiting Sash! 

i spent too long looking at this picture and now they look like fortune cookies:

We made tortellini last weekend in celebration of Aaron being done with his pediatrics rotation and shelf exam and me being done with summer term TAing. It was surprisingly easy to shape, like easier than ravioli even with our ravioli press. And none burst when we cooked them! We filled them with homemade ricotta and homegrown basil and topped them off with homemade spaghetti sauce. I'm just now realizing that Aaron literally did everything except shape the pasta, so good job Aaron! You spent your weekend off cooking for me! 

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I sort of feel like I've had writer's block for over a year now. I just don't have anything to say lately! So in lieu of a lovely closing paragraph here's a slothstronaut:

You're welcome.

in Just- spring

This is a post about all the spring-ish-food-related things I've been up to lately, because this is my life: I spend my time thinking about chemistry and mostly what I'm going to eat for my next meal. 

Aaron and I made ravioli a couple of weekends ago. We filled it with ricotta we made ourselves, which, ironically I now love (so easy, so cheap, so delicious), and served it with a lemon cream sauce and asparagus. I wanted to make something that screamed spring, and this seemed like a good option.

We also made lemon bars the other week, using the tart pan I got for Christmas. It took some serious math skills to make this happen, since we used Metropolitan Bakery's lemon bar recipe, which is written for a 17"x11" pan. Ta-da, math is very useful, kids!

More spring-related (okay, actually just garden-related) activities: I made pistachio pesto using the basil plant in my windowsill. It was really great. The basil plant is still alive, which is a significant triumph for me. Fourth time's the charm! However, some very suspicious brown marks are creeping up all of the stems, probably because my pot is small and has no drainage whatsoever? I have no idea what I'm doing. I also bought three sun gold tomato plants (like yellow cherry tomatoes) and four jalapeno pepper plants. The lower leaves of the sun golds are all turning yellow and falling off (????), but the jalapenos seem to be doing just fine. I'm thinking about planting some zucchini and maybe some strawberries. Anyone have any tips for any of these?

Or anyone have any suggestions for our next kitchen adventure? We have a sort of three day weekend coming up, and we need a project in case the cicadas come out of the ground and I have to lock myself indoors for six weeks because I am terrified of large, flying bugs.

a short thought (as if any of my posts have been substantial lately)

I think if I were only cooking for myself, I'd practically become a vegetarian-not because I think it's wrong to eat animals or anything. I just really hate cooking chicken.

you've had a birthday shout hurray

I turned 24 on Sunday, and it was lovely:

dan dan noodles from Han Dynasty

puff paint note and glow stick bracelet from Sister Andrus

presents from Mom (the fabric of those Everlane shirts is unbelievably soft)

homemade funfetti cupcakes

chocolate cake with salted caramel frosting (complete with candle holes)

Aaron and I went out for crepes at Beau Monde on Saturday night, and then on Sunday we had friends over for games and cake and cupcakes. I had a wonderful time! Thank you for all of the well-wishing! Lucky for me, there is still chocolate in my cupboard, so the joy and gladness continues. 

(Also, I learned that doing a crumb coat when frosting a cake actually works. For some reason, I am dumbfounded by this revelation.)

make these

I feel like it's been a little while since I've pretended this was a cooking blog, so I present to you a few recipes I've been making over and over again lately:

granola bars
I can throw these together in less than 10 minutes, and then I have a snack for the rest of the week. WIN. I always throw in almonds, and swapping normal chocolate chips for white was really delicious.

rolls
This is my favorite roll recipe so far. Today is my 4th time making them, and they've been really, really good and soft and delicious every time (knock on wood, they're currently rising). A couple of things I do differently because I am lazy: I don't roll the dough out into a circle and slice into triangles, I just do a rectangle with fat strips and roll them up. I'm incapable of making circles of dough...you should see my rectangular pizza and lopsided pie crust. I also don't put any butter on them before rolling them up, since that requires getting a bowl dirty to melt butter. Instead, I just take a stick of butter and rub it over the tops when they come out of the oven. Yummmm.

Do you have any favorite recipes you're currently obsessing over?

resolutions (mostly of the culinary variety)

Well, now that it's February I might as well post my resolutions for this year! Spoiler alert: none of these have to do with dieting or exercise.

1. Bake a ridiculous chocolate + caramel dessert. Some tempting options include: salted caramel budino a la Barbuzzo, chocolate caramel tart, or salted caramel chocolate fudge cake.

2. Make things to go along with main dishes for dinner. I don't know if it's because we don't really love salad or because Aaron detests most vegetables, but this is so hard for me to do. Tips?

3. Vanquish Les Miserables, unabridged (dun dun dun).

4. Go to Boston.

5. Get better at yeast breads. I kind of really want this gorgeous bread knife for my birthday, but...there is never any beautiful artisan bread to be cut in my kitchen, just Shoprite $1/loaf sandwich bread. So 2013, how about we fix this?

6. More consistent/better personal scripture study. I would like to learn more about women in the scriptures and in Church history. I'd also like to go back to reading the Book of Mormon in French (I swear I have lost almost all French skills I ever had).

Cooking, reading, traveling. A good plan for a year if you ask me!

a waste of trader joe's white chocolate chips!

It turns out if you add an extra egg* to your oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, not only will they be super crispy and not good, but they will multiply and you will be left with > 30 flat crackly cookies. Mmmmmm. I would also now not recommend white chocolate chips in oatmeal cookies...

You can come and take some off our hands if you want.

*I don't really know how this happened except I got really enthusiastic about cracking eggs?

merry christmas to us!

skillet. pasta maker. quiche dish.

You know you're getting old when you're really excited about getting kitchen things for Christmas. Christmas came early this year for me and Aaron, as we've gotten the three picture items already (didn't want to have to carry home with us on the plane from Utah, so our moms just had them shipped straight here). Thanks Mom and Wendy! We love, love, love them. Aaron is now a pro at making fresh pasta, and I love using the skillet (though I still haven't made a skillet cookie yet). I have yet to use my pretty quiche tart dish, but I just saw this Saveur recipe and am sorely tempted: chocolate caramel tart.

I should probably wait until we get our Thermapen thermometer on December 25th, though. (!!!!! so excited)

Anyone else getting kitchen-related Christmas presents?

happy [late] thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, we made these:

The turkey looks weird because we spatchcocked it: removed the backbone and flattened it for more even and faster cooking. Result: a perfectly cooked turkey in 80 minutes. BOOM.

(+ rolls, stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes)

We were thankful it tasted delicious.

gobble gobble

Aaron and I are doing Thanksgiving by ourselves in Philly this year. We've had a few offers to come have Thanksgiving with friends and family scattered along the East Coast, and while we would love the spend the holiday with everyone, we're a little burned out and just want to hang out at home.

So, we bought a 12 lb turkey. We'll probably be eating it for the next 6 months. I have read more articles about roasting turkeys in the past three days than I've read scientific papers in the past two weeks (oops). I'm super intimidated! We've never even roasted a chicken before, so this should be interesting. I've also read a lot about apple pie and making gravy, neither of which we've made before either. Oh the drama that is sure to unfold in our house come Thursday! We're pretty good at making mashed potatoes, honey glazed carrots, rolls, and pie crust, though, so if all else fails we'll just have a vegetarian Thanksgiving. NOT, we'll order take-out from Han Dynasty.

What are your Thanksgiving plans? You have any turkey/gravy/apple pie tips you want to share? Or what to do with the 10+ pounds of turkey we'll have left over?

(this is an open invitation to come eat our food)

aaron made ricotta against my wishes

Last week I came home to Aaron standing over the stove. I thought he was making something delicious for dinner until I noticed the paper towel-lined strainer next to him.

Ricotta!

I don't know why homemade dairy products gross me out so much, but they do. Homemade yogurt-ick. Homemade mozarella-also ick. Homemade ice cream-exception. The idea of heating up milk and cream and then curdling it and collecting the curdled milk/cream is pretty disgusting. I should probably mention that I don't drink milk because I also find it disgusting, so you know, this opinion might be a little tainted by that small fact. Anyway, when Aaron had told me he wanted to make homemade ricotta a few days prior, I said no way. But once Aaron has an idea fixed in his head it's pretty hard to dissuade him, so there he was in the kitchen, bringing milk and cream to a rolling boil three days later.

It took a substantial amount of persuading to get me to eat said curdled milk masquerading in the form of ricotta cheese, but it was actually delicious. And way cheaper than what we paid for ricotta at the grocery store, never mind what we paid for it at DiBruno Bros. For all that, I'm still grossed out by the process, so I shall leave all future ricotta making to Aaron.
We're even though, because I make all the chocolate chip cookies.

delicious food pictures

I present proof of our newfound hobby.

Clockwise from top left: lemon ricotta ravioli (pre-boiling), lemon ricotta ravioli with prosciutto and a sage browned butter sauce, peach pie, chicken tikka masala.

But we had pastaroni for lunch today, so...we're still working on it.

basmati.

We are really getting into this cooking thing lately. As in, Aaron was this close to buying a pasta maker this afternoon before I sort of talked him out of it ($70! Too much!), and I asked my mom for a Thermapen thermometer for Christmas (I will make perfect caramel if it kills me).

Here's what we've been making:

risotto
chicken tikka masala
no-knead pizza dough
banana cream pie from scratch (with this pie crust)
pavlova
pumpkin carrot cake with candied hazelnuts
lasagna
ravioli from scratch
whole wheat bread

Aaron found an Indian market not too far from campus and that's where we got our magical garam masala, whole ginger, and basmati rice. I now want to eat basmati rice instead of normal rice for any rice-containing dish. Burritos? Basmati. Chicken stir fry? Basmati. Risotto? Basmati. Just kidding.

Also, while we're talking about cooking, Sara showed me this amazing website called Ziplist that you can use to save recipes on any website (no pictures required, unlike Pinterest), and I am loving it. No one sees what I'm "pinning" so I don't feel stupid about pinning (ziplisting? clipping! I think it's called clipping) 8 chocolate cake recipes in the course of a half hour. It also has a nifty meal planning functionality so you can keep track of what you're cooking when.

This weekend we're going fruit picking again so we can make a peach pie. We also have some super ripe bananas, so banana bread? I guess it's a fruit dessert weekend. What are you making?

one more for june

This morning Aaron and I went and picked our own blueberries and peaches. It was a blast. Got any good recipes for either fruit? I can freeze blueberries, but there are 30 peaches sitting on my counter that need to be eaten...

But I bet Aaron's family can help us finish them off since their flight gets in tonight!
PARTY!!

mmmmm nutella

This is what is wrong with America:

3 million dollar lawsuit because of an idiot who didn't know Nutella wasn't healthy. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!