Tag: cooking

Cooking/Recipes, Uncategorized

Celebration of food

heather

Tim and I are having an all-around lovely weekend, and like all lovely weekends, it was capped from start to end with deeelicious food.

Ben and Leah visited us for the weekend.  It’s been months since we’ve seen them – I last saw them before I became an accountant and now I am already almost not an accountant – more on that later, maybe.

Anyway, they arrived Friday night, and we were all starving.  We’ve been hearing good things about La Rancherita in Rock Island, so we headed off.  It was a cool, brightly lit Mexican restaurant with tasty pico de gallo and delicious tacos.  The crowd was very eclectic – a mix of races and styles and party sizes.  We saw everything from hipsters to gangstas.  For dessert we introduced Ben and Leah to the joys of Checkers apple pies.  We got 4 for $2.12, and they were perfectly delicious.

For breakfast on Saturday, Tim made his ultra-tasty egg, cheese, Canadian bacon, and  English muffin sandwiches.  He fries the egg perfectly, so that the yolk is the perfect state of gelatinous.  After doing a little shopping at Greatest Grains and the mall, we returned back to the house for a snack lunch of $7.00 Tillamook cheddar cheese, braunschweiger, saltines and cans of Great River Pale Ale.  While the boys played video games and Leah busted through advanced Soduko puzzles, I made guaucamole using this excellent Allrecipes.com recipe.  The freeze-squeezed lime juice gives it a tasty, fresh snap.  After contaminating all of my dishrags and utensils with tiny bits of chopped cilantro, I made chocolate chip cookies, using the recipe from the Nestle Tollhouse bag.  The trick is to get the butter at the perfect level of softness.  About 2 bursts of 10 seconds in the microwave gets it to the stage where it creates tall, fluffy, chewy cookies.

For supper Tim made amazing tortilla soup from an America’s Test Kitchen recipe.  The soup, paired with the gaucamole, made for an excellent supper and uncomfortably fitting trousers.

While we digested our Mexican feast, Leah and I soundly beat Tim and Ben at euchre and then retired to watch Despicable Me.  About 30 minutes into the movie, Tim and Ben were both sound asleep.

Tim treated us with another delicious meal this morning by making buckwheat pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Ben and Leah are cast iron snobs.  Ben, unheeding my warnings, convinced Tim to cook the pancakes on our fairly unseasoned cast iron griddle (which weighs about 30 pounds).  Ben convinced Tim and that a little butter and oil would cause the pancakes to not stick.  He was wrong – stick they did.  But they were still delicious.  I am right now re-seasoning the griddle and our cast iron pan.  I have already set off the fire detector.  We have several windows wide open, but the whole house is still quite smoky.  It better be worth it.

Besides eating, we spent the rest of the weekend playing video games, drinking excellent beers (Hopalicious!), doing lots of dishes, and just all around enjoying each other company.  Hanging out with family is so awesome.  It really makes me wish that we lived closer to Ben and Leah, and/or my brothers.  Someday…

Cooking/Recipes

How to poach an egg (and not just the yolk)

heather

I loved poached eggs on toast.  I especially love poached eggs on English muffins with slices of avocado.  My problem is that many times, I lose at least 50% of the egg white when I poach an egg.  It turns into ghostly wisps that separate from the main egg section, and I end up just washing it into the drain or garbage.

I recently read that to make a good poached egg you should boil water in a deep skillet, add a little salt and vinegar into the water, and then use a little bowl to ease each egg in one at a time when the water reaches a rolling boil.  I tried this yesterday, and I don’t know what I did wrong, but one of the eggs was a complete disaster.  The other one was undercooked, and I didn’t drain the water off well enough, so when I broke the yolk, it mixed with the water and was disgusting.

Today, though, they turned out EXCELLENTLY.  The combo of the vinegar and water keeps the egg in a nice compact, fluffy-looking mound!  Here is how they look in the skillet:

If I was using my former method (using a tiny pot, bringing the water to a boil, and then adding two eggs at once to the water), the water would be full of stringy, wispy egg whites.

I boiled the eggs for 4 minutes, and the yolks were perfect – not too hard and not too soft.  This method is more work and more resource intensive, but the eggs turn out so much better.