The Smells in My Kitchen

[Petra]

Reheated garlic and mushroom pasta with lots of cheese.

At 8:42 in the morning.

My hangovers demand temporally inappropriate foods.

[Young Val]

Fred, how did the caramels turn out? Mine are in the fridge now! It doesn't look like it will make quite as many as I'd hoped, but as soon as I finished my mise en place and took a good look I knew it wouldn't. I haven't tasted them yet, but they smell DIVINE!

Also got more gingersnaps and nutmeg maple sugar cookies in the oven!

[Petra456]

They turned out surprisingly good! I was about ready to give up when I burned the cider and had to use apple juice, but i'm glad I kept going. They're very soft but still hold their shape, and at least to me they're really rich. My mini brownie pan worked out perfectly! The caramels popped right out and they were really easy to cut in half, making them the perfect two bite pieces.

I wrapped about 10 of them and sent them to Will's parents along with the cookies, so I hope they like them too!

[zeroguy]

I don't think I've had these since I was a kid; I don't even know if they have a name or anything. Tortillas + butter/margarine + cinnamon sugar, rolled up and put in the microwave for a short period of time, are delightful.

[Petra456]

Oh man, my older sister used to make those for us all the time growing up! She always called them ghetto elephant ears.

[Gravity Defier]

Sounds like un-fried buñuelos (also referred to as elephant ears, I hear), though those are more like Indian fry bread than tortillas. Then again, if you skipped the frying and just used a skillet, it'd amount to pretty much the same thing, so I'm going with "same difference."


But yeah, we did cinnamon sugar with buttered toast.


I think there's a Norwegian dessert that is a tortilla like thing, in appearance anyway, and sugar, maybe. I remember having something like that in MN a few years ago.

[Petra]

My college roommate used to pan-fry those in butter and add honey at the end.

Evil.

[zeroguy]

I think there's a Norwegian dessert that is a tortilla like thing, in appearance anyway, and sugar, maybe. I remember having something like that in MN a few years ago.

Krumkake? That's really good, too.

[steph]

Bread, Buns and Pandoro!

I got my 2nd pandoro pan yesterday, so now I can do a double batch! This is very exciting to me, since making one pandoro takes all day. Now I can use the same amount of time and effort and double my outcome!!

[Ela]

It's latke night tonight.

Happy Hanukkah!

[thoughtreader]

It's latke night tonight.

Happy Hanukkah!

Do you have a good latke recipe I can have? My step dad always made them at my house growing up and I wasn't able to get it from him before he passed. and Hanukkah wont be the same without them.

[Ela]

I sort of make latkes on the fly, so no particular recipe. I grate a lot of potatoes, a little bit of onion, and add some eggs, a little matzah meal, and some salt. But I couldn't say off the top of my head what the proportions are.

This recipe looks similar to mine: http://www.kosherblog.net/2006/12/13/po ... er-recipe/

I never use flour, only matzah meal, and only a little bit. You can vary the amount of onion according to your taste. Some people vary their latkes by adding a sweet potato or small amount of another vegetable (carrot, squash, or apple can be tried).

When you are frying, the first batch usually sticks to the pan a little. I've never been able to avoid that happening, even though I patiently wait for the potato to cook sufficiently.

After the first batch, you have to be patient and wait for the potato to cook sufficiently on one side before you try to flip them to the second side. I don't know if it takes 5 min., like that recipe says, I just test to see if I can slide my spatula under the latke easily without it sticking.

To avoid having overly greasy latkes, I remove the latkes to a plate lined with paper towels, to absorb the excess oil. I alternate sheets of paper towels and latkes as more and more are finished and I stack them up.

We eat them with natural applesauce (no sugar added) and sour cream. Some family members use yogurt cause it's healthier but sour cream is the traditional accompaniment.

Let me know if you try them and how they turn out.

Writing about them made me hungry, can't wait to make and eat them.

[thoughtreader]

THANKS!!!!!! I'll let you know how they turn out!

[Eaquae Legit]

Ginger snaps! It's Christmas time here! (Although latkes sound delicious....)

[LilBee91]

My mom and I spent all day yesterday baking breads. Coconut, poppyseed, zucchini... Then cookies for good measure. Today is wheat bread and chicken noodle soup. I'm finally going to do the kitchen challenge and make noodles!

[Ela]

The latkes were delicious.

And now I smell like frying oil.

[thoughtreader]

The latkes were delicious.

And now I smell like frying oil.

What kind of oil did you use? the web site said olive?

[Ela]

Yes, I did use olive oil. I use olive oil for most things, appropriately or not. Except when I use toasted sesame oil (which definitely wouldn't work for frying latkes. )

[buckshot]

All I can smell is pie! Pie glorious pie!

[Petra456]

Felt like posting what I got for Christmas in here because it kinda had a theme : )

KitchenAid hand blender (this thing is AMAZING!)
Pasta cutter for my KitchenAid
Marbel rolling pin and stand
Rolling pin spacer rings
Pastry Matt
Frosting Spatula

I got some more things but they're not kitchen related.

[Platypi007]

I baked rolls to go with the soup my family had for our late Christmas get together with my dad's sisters (usually we see that side of the family on Christmas afternoon, but with Christmas falling on a Sunday both my dad and I had to work (he is a pastor and I'm a music director at a church) so we weren't able to make that. Historically we had gotten together with them at my grandmother's house on Christmas eve but she passed away two Christmases ago (funeral was the 27th, I believe? She died on the 22nd) so that has ended. I hadn't been able to make it to Christmas eve at her place in a number of years, though, since all the churches I've been at have done Christmas Eve services and I live an hour away.

How did I get on that tangent in a kitchen thread? Oh yes, rolls. I made rolls. I took my italian sandwich bread recipe and made it into rolls and it worked out pretty well! I could have made them half the size they were, but otherwise, very good!

[Eaquae Legit]

Experimental half-rye seed bread and madras curry. I kind of really want to make pea and ricotta ravioli, but no idea when that will come about.

[steph]

Dinner: Lettuce wraps and (the debut of my new, brilliant culinary creation) mac & cheese wontons.

Dessert: Lemon pound cake (made by my sister) with fresh, warm lemon curd drizzled on top. I have 6 more pints of lemon curd in the fridge!

[Platypi007]

Earlier this week: yummy lentil soup! I've got two containers of it in my freezer and another still in the fridge. Yummm!

[buckshot]

I love lentil soup ! It's even better with ham or at least ham hocks in it. Julie makes a kick ass lentil chili I love too. It's wierd people around here turn their nose up at lentils. I never cooked any before but until a couple years back we always grew about 400 ac. a year and the processors we sell to kept giving us small bags of the ready to sell product. So now we don't plant lentils anymore and we buy them at the store. Too bad they don't come up with a new variety of lentils with a little less power if ya know what I mean.

[thoughtreader]

Currently my kitchen smells like the peanut butter and banana cake I'm baking for Cleo's 5th birthday!
And I have to say for dog cake it smells pretty fantastic, I hope she likes it. I'll post pics of cleo eating it in the pets thread later

[thoughtreader]

Cleo's cake



More photos of her drooling over/consuming cake in the pets thread

[Young Val]

A hambone in a pot of water on the stove. The outrageously delicious-smelling beginning to hambone-soup.

[buckshot]

One of my all time great's ! I can almost smell it!

[Petra]

All my lunches and dinners for the next week:

-Garlic soy green beans
-Mushroom couscous
-Sherried tomato soup
-Homemade humuus

[Platypi007]

King cake! (Well, the isn't much smell yet, the dough is in the second ferment. In about 3 hours I'll be smelling it as it bakes!)

My king cake recipe for those interested. I don't think I mentioned just how sticky the dough is in the recipe, but it is pretty lose and sticky. It is a high hydration dough. When you are doing the kneeding you might think something is wrong and that you'll never be able to get it out of the bowl (I've never tried kneeding this by hand), but all is fine. There is enough oil (butter) in the mix to lube it up and keep it from being a huge mess. After the first ferment when you fold it it probably won't stick to your hands or the counter too badly.

I added orange zest to it this time, in addition to the lemon zest, and I am going to do a cinnamon filling.

[steph]

Holy cow, that sounds amazing. I've tackled pandoro enough times that I think that I could do this. I may just try one of these days.

[Platypi007]

Holy cow, that sounds amazing. I've tackled pandoro enough times that I think that I could do this. I may just try one of these days.

As for a pasta roller, we have the old, metal kind and it worked just fine. I would prefer a wider one, though, since I want to be able to roll my pasta in big enough sheets to have a single noodle on a layer of lasagna. I don't know if they make them that wide. I'll have to research that.

You should post that second bit in the Kitchen Challenge thread, someone was asking about pasta rollers there, unless they cross-posted to this.

I love baking breads, and it is insanely easy if you know how to do it. Especially if you weigh your ingredients rather than measuring by volume. :D Baking breads was my number 1 reason for wanting the Kitchen Aid mixer that I bought back in 2005. I drooled over it so much for like 5 years before that... The first Mardi Gras season after I got it (which was just a couple of months later) I baked my first king cake!

Then I began modifying the recipe, and started trying to get it to work with weight measured ingredients. After a couple of years it began to fail horribly. Last year I started over from scratch, based it on another sweet bread recipe that was similar, and it worked like a charm! It makes me so happy to be able to have good king cake again. Most bakeries around here will start making them the week before Mardi Gras and they just don't measure up to authentic New Orleans ones, and in New Orleans they start baking on Epiphany and go through Mardi Gras (the Mardi Gras season). In fact, now there are bakeries that make them year round with colors for other holidays and sporting events.

[steph]

You should post that second bit in the Kitchen Challenge thread, someone was asking about pasta rollers there, unless they cross-posted to this.

Haha! I realized my mistake right after I posted that and I fixed it!

I think I'm seriously going to try the cake, though. If you added a picture of one onto that recipe page, I'd pin it on Pinterest and I bet it'd get repinned a lot!

[Platypi007]

My only camera is my phone and it dislikes taking photos indoors... I have no idea what you are talking about pinning, though.