Grandma's Coming Over

We needed to make dinner the other night, and we wanted something healthy and tasty since Grandma was coming over for dinner. We turned to the Weight Watcher's Power Foods cookbook and found a recipe that included ingredients we had on hand: Southwestern Chicken Salad. Grandma arrived while we were getting ingredients out and the three of us cooked together. We had a great time in the kitchen.

We did have one missing ingredient. We did not have a red bell pepper (which made me very sad inside) to add to the salad, so we added a little extra corn. Also, we used fresh cooked corn cut from the cob instead of frozen corn.

We served the salad on toasted ciabatta bread that Grandma had brought us, and had sliced apples with goat cheese and sliced and salted cucumbers on the side.

Taster comments:

Grandma really liked the salad. She thought it was tasty and light, perfect for summer. She suggested it would be nice served on a lettuce leaf with a nice piece of artisan bread.

Kirsten liked the salad too.

Kate thought it was very delicious and tasted best as a sandwich with a little goat cheese.

The guys in the house chose left over bar-b-qued pork instead.

Sheila thought it was super yummy and light. It had some light mayonnaise in it, but it wasn't "mayonnaise-y." It was also good the second day. I would definitely make this again.

Maybe we should use this book as our next book to review.

Cook Book Class

Cook books are great, but cooking classes taught by cook book authors are awesome!

Kate and I took a class at Kitchen Window in Calhoun Square called,
"Summer Desserts." It was taught by the authors of the book, "Two Chicks from the Sticks: Back Home Baking." It is a cute book full of great recipes. Jamie and Jill grew up on neighboring Iowa farms, sharing a love of baking. They are energetic and enthusiastic, not to mention patient and knowledgable teachers.

We had a wonderful time, met some delightful people, and wowed Matt with the results of our class. We made strawberry shortcake, angel food cake with a lemon glaze, cream puffs and eclairs, chocolate sauce, and chocolate soufflé. I am proud to announce that I am no longer afraid of baking soufflés.

No Kate this Week

The Poached Salmon was wonderful. My main error was using a white wine I had without checking to see if it was "dry." The sauce was great, but everyone agreed it was too sweet. We also used a high quality raw honey, which may have contributed to the overly sweet sauce as well. Poaching salmon is not nearly as difficult as I expected it to be. Kate may have taken a photo, but I did not. If she did I'll have her post it later.

I made brown rice, fried rice with bacon, and teriyaki chicken and vegetables last night, but no recipe needed as it's a stand by around here and I used bottled sauce. One thing I did differently this time was to make a smaller amount of the stir fry. We like it, but we always have leftovers, and it is so different the next day that no one really looks forward to eating it. Making less worked quite well. I also blanched the carrots, a technique we used last week as a part of another recipe, which made them cook in the same amount of time as the other vegetables in the stir fry. I also used the liquid from the carrots in the rice. Maybe saved some nutrients??

I miss cooking with Kate.

Kate is on a local Missions Trip with Messiah Episcopal's Youth Group this week, so we haven't been cooking together. I will probably cook a few more things from last week's book because I have been enjoying most of the recipes so far. We never did get to the chicken fajitas, and I found a recipe for biscotti that looks yummy.

Cinnamon Rolls and Potato Kale Soup

Today we made two of our chosen recipes.

The first was Everyday Cinnamon Rolls. We did not have the recipe chosen before we got groceries so we had to make more substitutions than we would have liked for testing a recipe. For instance: we did not have enough buttermilk so we made some clabbered milk*. We didn't have enough granulated sugar, so we used some Splenda for baking, also our baking soda and baking powder were not as fresh as we would have liked.
* there is a recipe for clabbered milk in the book

Also, we melted the butter, and then too impatient for it to cool we put the bowl of butter in another bowl of ice water, which resulted in butter the consistency of thin pudding.

Now, we don't really know what part of our "adjustments" actually made this happen but the dough was way too sticky. We had to add a ton of flour to get it to be kneadable, and needed a scraper to separate it from the butcher block at times. Then, when we cut the rolls they were very floppy and did not hold their shape well on the way to the pan.

Besides the textural challenges, it worked out fine. The rolls were tasty. They were more of a quick bread than a traditional cinnamon roll, but since they were lighter and could be made relatively quickly, I would still recommend them for a tasty quick bread. I would like to try them again without the substitutions we made today.

For dinner, we made potato kale soup. One substitution was bacon for the chorizo. Chorizo would have been excellent in this soup, but I forgot to pick it up at the coop. Bacon was a good substitute. We did add a little larger pinch of crushed red pepper. Also, we used onion soup mix, mixed with boiling water for two of the six cups of chicken broth, but strained out most of the onions. It turned out very yummy - a definite do again.



This day included a lot of substituting and thinking on our feet, which is one of my favorite parts of cooking, but isn't always fair to the recipe you are trying out.

WW points plus are for the recipes as listed. Everyday cinnamon roll (one roll) is 8 pts, soup is 7 its for 1 and 1/2 cups.

First Cookbook

The first cookbook we decided to do is called "The America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook."* Each of us will choose two recipes to do throughout the week. And then we will pick one at random. 

Here are the recipes we chose:

    - Pasta Salad with Summer Vegetables (p. 92)  (Sheila here: I chose this one because it sounded tasty,  meets my goal of increasing the amount of vegetables I eat, and because it looked like something that would be easy to adjust and reuse often.)

    - Potato and Kale Soup (p. 99) (I, Kate, chose this dish because it sounded and looked mighty tasty. Also because kale has lots of calcium, which I need more of.)

    - Poached Salmon with Herb and Caper Vinaigrette (p. 216) (Sheila here: I chose this one because I want to learn to cook seafood, and this one doesn't need the oven.)

    - 

    - The Random Selection for this book is. . .Drumroll please. . . . Grilled Chicken Fajitas (p. 368)

*Eds. The Editors at America's Test Kitchen. The America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook. Brookline: America's Test Kitchen, 2010.

Week One - First Recipe

The first recipe we tried from the ATKHFC book was Pasta Salad with Summer Vegetables. The recipe was easy to follow. There are no times suggested for prep/cook etc. I think it took us about 40 minutes to make, start to finish. We had one ingredient glitch. Our Coborn’s order had not come yet, so we did not have good parmesan cheese. We left it out of the recipe and sprinkled “the stuff in the green can” on our individual portions. When the good cheese shows up we’ll add it in.

Tasters' Comments:

Kate – “It was very summery and fresh – very vinegary, but that was balanced when we added cheese. It is still filling because of the pasta. I most would definitely eat it again.”
Kirsten - “It was fresh and delicious. I really liked the mustard in it - it added a lot for me. I also really like the carrots, but I don’t know why. I would definitely eat it again.”
Sheila – “I liked this salad. It had a nice zing from the pepper, mustard, garlic and vinegar. It took a while to make, but I think once we get more kitchen time in we’ll get more efficient. I would eat it again, in fact I’m going to refill my bowl now.”

The recipe serves six. That amount would be appropriate if it is the main dish, otherwise that’s a pretty hefty portion. The Weight Watchers Points Plus value for one serving (1 cup, or 1/6 of recipe) is 5. We talked a bit about how easy this recipe would be to adjust or change. As long as we blanched any vegetables that would need to be slightly softened, we could change it up a lot of different ways and use the recipe often.

One more note about the book: There are product reviews (titled "Tasting:. . .") that are fun to read and could come in handy. There are also "Test Kitchen Tip" sections and how to notes sprinkled throughout the book. Two on the same page that we found interesting and helpful were "macerate vegetables" and "mincing garlic to a paste." I had no idea I had "macerated" the vegetables until I read this. I would have balked if someone had accused me of this before I knew what it meant. It was also nice to have the review of how to mince garlic to a paste as well. I had seen this technique on Rachel Ray's show and was trying to do it from memory when Kate noticed the directions were right on the next page. So far I really like this book.

The salmon came to day so I'm recommending we do the salmon recipe next. . .

Introduction and Goals

My daughter Kate and I have decided to embark on a summer adventure. We don't plan to leave home, except for trips to Seward Coop, United Noodle and Cub. We share a love of food, cooking and books, which means we have amassed a few too many cookbooks. Most of them are not touched, and too often, we find ourselves needing to remove dust bunnies before we can put a cook book to use.

Getting rid of things is hard for me, especially books. I did not have a large number of books as a child, and I find myself over-compensating as an adult. However, several shelves of untouched cookbooks takes up valuable kitchen real estate. We also like the idea of a less cluttered home environment, as a key aspect of reducing the unnecessary distractions that surround us every day.

We have challenged ourselves to tackle this situation as a mother-daughter summer project. Why not take the time to use the cookbooks a bit before we decide which are worthy of our limited shelf space?

Our goals for this nine week project are as follows:
- Review one cookbook per week
- Test a minimum of five recipes per book
- Blog at least once a week