Wayne & Chewy's Totally Tubular Baking Adventures

Updates of my latest cooking creations

2008-07-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

Pasta shells with homemade tomato sauce garnished with parmesan cheese

Pasta shells, brussell sprouts sauteed in butter, and ham

This next dish is also a ham dish, which I received much assistance with from sous chef Justin. The ham was from Whole Foods and is accompanied by boiled cabbage, creamed onions, and mashed potatoes.

Flounder with a balsalmic glaze covered in tomatoes and parsnip

Chinese stir-fry (it actually came out decently!). The sauce was composed of a mixture of vegetable oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and hoisin sauce. Don't ask me how to recreate it - I just added the ingredients as I saw fit!

Creamed squash

Quite a long time :P

2007-12-02T04:07:00.000-08:00

Here's some random dishes I've made, but like Chewy, not much description here since it's been quite a while since I made them.

These ginger cookies are very yummy! I didn't have any margarine, so I substituted butter instead. The recipe I used makes about 3-4 sheets of cookies, but they'll go really quickly.

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Big-Soft-Ginger-Cookies/Detail.aspx

It's been a long time!

2007-11-11T17:53:00.000-08:00

As you can see, over the past few months we haven't been posting our culinary creations. Well hopefully that will change! I've amassed many pictures, which are shown below. Unfortunately, the descriptions are limited due to creating these dishes so long ago!

Linguini with chicken, tomatoes, and asparagus:

Ground beef, rice, and tomatoes:

Baked tofu, rice, and long green beans:

Chicken nuggets:

Other various meals:

Saving the best for last - chocolate chip cookies with and without walnuts!

Adding a little extra bang...

2007-08-07T23:50:00.000-07:00

Salsa Chicken Rice Casserole

2007-08-07T23:46:00.000-07:00

Recipe Link

Here's a pretty easy dish to make! Setup is super easy, although it does take a bit of time while you wait for the baking to complete. For this recipe, I switched to 4 servings, which was enough to last me a couple of meals.

Here's some rice being cooked right next to the boiling chicken.

Mashing it all up here :)
Layering everything on! Unfortunately, I didn't have enough stuff to fill the entire pan, but it still turned out quite alright.

Here it is! Turned out quite yummy. It turns out that leaving a bit on the edges lets it turn out crispier when you bake it. A pretty good meal to make, although you'll end up making this twice, given the usage of half cans of condensed chicken & cream of mushroom.

All about presentation...

2007-08-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

I don't have much time to write a long blog, but here are some meals I've made recently:

Chicken, green beans (from co-worker's farm!), and stuffing

Spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce

Tuna salad on a bed of spinach and sauteed green beans garnished with dried cranberries, almonds, and tomatoes

(On a separate note - Wayne where are all of your culinary creations???)

Yellow Squash Soup and Asian Lettuce Wraps

2007-07-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

I recently had some odd cravings. Well squash soup made sense since my co-worker kindly gave me more organic squash and since I had stir-fried it last time, it needed a new medium in which to appear. I followed a simple recipe of 30 oz. of chicken broth plus 20 oz. of water that was salted and peppered in which I cooked one de-seeded and peeled yellow squash plus half an onion. A dash of rosemary was also used to flavor the concoction.

The recipe said to simmer for 45 minutes, but 15 minutes more than sufficed to produce translucent squash and onions indicative of their tenderness. The whole mix was cooled in the fridge for 10 minutes and then pureed in a blender. The puree was then warmed and cream added to give a thicker texture. As you can see, the soup is still quite thin and in order to thicken it, I haphazardly added some cornstarch.

What I realized later is that the recipe called for 3 apples. I had decided to take these out and stick to straight squash, not recognizing that the thick consistency of the soup would not be maintained without increasing the number of squash in the absence of apples. What you will see below is the next day when I cooked two additional de-seeded and peeled yellow squash in the soup and pureed them in a blender. The yellow color shows the increased thickness of the soup to the expected consistency.

Heat and serve with parsley as a decorative addition:

Now the part where the odd craving comes in...the very same day I decided I wanted asian lettuce wraps. Of course they don't mix well with squash soup, but none-the-less I made them. Basically the filling consists of ground beef with garlic cooked in a sauce created from soy sauce, hoisin sauce, rice wine vinegar, sherry, and sesame oil. Unfortunately, I didn't have ginger, green onions, or water chesnuts, which I would recommend adding. To create the wrap, wash iceberg lettuce leaves and fill with the stir-fried meat. Wrap and enjoy!

(They tasted really good despite not looking as enticing as they could have been with the additional ingredients!)

Showcase on Side Dishes

2007-07-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some side dishes I have made at different times throughout the past month.

Sauteed organic squash with garlic and parsley

The squash is from my co-worker who owns a farm and grows most of her own vegetables! I made it for a fourth of July dinner at Hayley and Jason's.

Side dish also made for fourth of July dinner - cucumber, tomato, and onion salad marinated in an oil/vinegar based dressing also containing basil, garlic salt, and sugar:

What would I do without fruit?? Fruit is pretty cheap at the Strip District in Pittsburgh, which is where most of this fruit is from.

Berries with dark chocolate stick (called "Pocky for Men" because of its bitter nature :P)

Bruschetta, Shrimp and Green Beans

2007-07-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

The bruschetta actually started out as pico de gallo for tacos I had made the other night, but I had so much left over that I decided to make it into bruschetta. Basically cut bread into small slices, added a little bit of olive oil to the tops and baked for a few minutes until slightly browned.

The topping consists of tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and garlic salt.

Together they are quite tasty :)

Next I made green beans with toasted almonds. First add a little bit of oil and add slivers of almond. You only need to leave them in for about 1 minute until they are browned. In my case, I left them in too long until they became blackened shards! The green beans were stir-fried in oil and lightly salted then mixed with the almonds.

Last was the shrimp stir-fried in a lemon, parsley, white wine, honey sauce that I completely improvised. Still need to work out the balance of components, but I would leave out the honey and use fresh lemon next time.

All in all though, the meal tasted pretty good. This is the final dish:

Watercress with French Tarragon Chicken and white rice

2007-07-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

This meal is similar to the previous one and doesn't require much explanation. Here it is:

Chinese style flounder with rice and watercress

2007-06-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

This dish is pretty simple and quick. Just poach the fish for about 3 minutes. In this case I used a filet of flounder, but sea bass works really well also. Place the fish on a plate and sprinkle chopped scallions and ginger on top. Lightly flavor with soy sauce. Then heat up oil until close to boiling and pour over top of the decorated fish. You should hear a crackling sizzle. I believe the hot oil helps to bring out the flavor of the ginger and scallions.

As usual, I was lazy with the rice and just made minute rice, which actually takes longer than a minute to cook :P Last was the watercress that was thoroughly washed and stir-fried in oil and salt with a tad of chicken broth.

Unfortunately, the watercress was a bit old, so had a bitter taste. Normally it has a sweeter taste - the important thing is to cook it pretty soon after buying it and picking out bunches that are very green and not yellow! Here is the final product:

Baked Mushroom Chicken!

2007-06-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Recipe Link

Time for another quick recipe :)

Here is the chicken after baking! I actually ended up cooking additional veggies along with the mushrooms, then baking them in with the chicken.

In keeping with the "quick food" theme, I just poured the chicken and veggies over rice.

Even had a bit of Carrot Ginger Soup. These soups from Trader Joe's are pretty tasty, and they just require reheating before serving.

Look for an update sometime next week as we hopefully choose a dish to both cook!

Eggrolls from scratch!

2007-05-31T20:28:00.000-07:00

So I cheated a bit and bought organic eggroll dough squares, but I did make the insides from scratch! Basically I pre-cooked vermicelli rice noodles in water and then cut them up into small segments. I added these to cabbage, carrots, mushrooms (broken into small pieces), and extra firm tofu (sliced into small chunks) and cooked for about 5-10 minutes with oyster sauce, chicken broth, and a smidge of sesame oil. About 2-3 tablespoons full of filling was added to a dough square and the square was rolled into a wrap. I was lazy and just used water to attach the final corner so that the eggroll was firmly sealed, but a little bit of raw egg is even better. Instead of using a ton of oil, which takes forever to heat up, I just covered the bottom of the wok in about 1/2 inch of oil and added 3-4 egg rolls at a time. Each side was friend in oil for about 1-2min or until crispy and brown.

Just let them cool and then enjoy!!

Here's the filling. YUM!

Dinner Party, Saturday, 5/12/07

2007-05-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

The dinner party was a lot of fun, but cooking was definitely chaotic since I decided to take a nap and wake up 1.5 hours before everyone was arriving! Due to the short amount of time, I don't have many pictures of the process and those that I do have don't show any close ups of my dish. The important thing here though is that the food was delicious!

So to start, I made the pan-fried noodles. These are egg noodles that I bought from the Chinese grocery store and they tell you on the package to add the noodles to boiling water for 20 seconds and then to pan fry them. I guess this helps to moisten them up and briefly cook them. To pan fry them, I used my big wok with a layer of oil that just covered the bottom. There were a lot of noodles, so I took a third of the noodles at a time and basically stirred them around with the oil. Once the oil was evenly distributed I let them sit on low to medium heat for about 5-10 minutes, flipping the batch now and again. Take them out when they start to turn a bit brown and crispy.

During the 5-10 minute incubations (uh oh, this is starting to sound like lab!) I chopped up various veggies from the Chinese store: snow peas, baby bok choy, chinese broccoli, long green beans, and watercress. I looked for lotus root at the store, but couldn't find it. Ironically the store was called "Lotus." To flavor the veggies you can make a variety of different sauces - brown sauces, garlic, ginger. Well I knew my sauces could be sketchy so I opted to stir fry the veggies in oil with garlic and salt and then make the sauce on the side. Veggies in a stir-fry are best when they are crispy, so I made sure to cook them with the lid on for no longer than 3 or 4 minutes.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I got a recipe from my aunt for a brown sauce. Unfortunately it called for chicken broth and oyster sauce, which I later realized wouldn't work because a large portion of the guests were vegetarians or vegans, so I filed the recipe away for a future date. I did find a recipe online for a ginger sauce, which did not come out well because (1) I didn't follow the directions and melt the brown sugar first and (2) I had the wrong type of soy sauce -the salty kind. Needless to say, the sauce tasted horribly salty and gross, so I threw it out. Luckily Maria came to the rescue and made an impromptu sauce composed of soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, and corn starch for thickening, as well as other components that I don't recall!

The last component of the meal was fried tofu that actually came out quite well. It was also from the Chinese store and made fresh that day (the best kind!). A woman at the store told Maria and myself that tofu hardens when soaked in cold water overnight. Hard tofu is the best for frying. Since I bought it that day, I only had about 5 hours of soaking, but it was decent. I've learned that it's important to remove as much water as possible when frying, so I removed the tofu from the water and placed it in between two cutting boards (one on top, one on the bottom). A book or heavy object can be placed on top of the upper cutting board to force the water out from the tofu. After allowing this process to go for about 45 minutes, I sliced the tofu and coated it with salted and peppered flour. Then I threw the chunks into a decent amount of oil (almost burning off Maria's arm in the process!) and let them cook on low to medium heat until somewhat brown (5-10 min).

Here are some pictures of all of the food, including my tofu, stir-fried vegetables, pan-fried noodles, Maria's curry

and sauce for my noodles, Shiang Yong's pasta with tomato sauce,

Amanda's salad with balsalmic vinaigrette, Jane's homemade banana bread,

and Elisa's seasoned baked eggplant. John, Ryan, and Henry kindly provided the drinks while Colleen baked an apple pie, Chien-Chiao brought a Boston creme pie, Maria and Henry brought chocolate fondue with fruit, and Frankie made poached pear in a port wine sauce. All in all, quite tasty!

Partying it up!

2007-05-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

This weekend I'm having a small dinner party at my place and I've decided to cook pan-fried noodles with stir-fried vegetables in a brown sauce. My aunt gave me her recipe for the sauce, which she says usually comes out well 1 out of 4 times (and she's a really good cook!). Let's hope that tomorrow is the 1 time it works out well :) I'll try to remember to take pictures, but will definitely write about my experience after tomorrow.

Slowwwww cooked chicken ;)

2007-05-11T02:19:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is! Ok, so this post is a week later than when I actually cooked, and I ended up cooking a lot later than I had hoped, but at least it turned out well :)

Like Chewy, I had a rather interesting time finding ingredients, as the evaporated milk was in a rather strange location. Thankfully, I had done my research on pimentos ahead of time, so I was prepared for that.

Sadly, I don't have as extensive a photolog as I had hoped, since I ended up making this dish in a hurry. However, I found it's a rather simple dish to make, and took me only about 20 minutes total to get everything done! Of course, actually having some prep time before cooking would have been a lot nicer, but I'll take what I can get.

I stayed fairly close to the recipe (halving everything), but deviated slightly by going for orange peppers instead of green ones, and probably overdoing it on the mushrooms.

Final result! (And it doesn't look like a cookie.....). I was a bit sloppy with my pepper cutting, which is why there's that huge orange chunk.

I served it over jasmine rice, which was fairly tasty when mixed together. In retrospect, I should probably have stuck with the green peppers, since it ended up tasting a bit like cream of mushroom + chicken.

Time to choose our next challenge! Hopefully it'll take us less time to do ;)

Chicken a la King, finally!

2007-05-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

Today I had a hard day at work, so what better way to relieve some stress than to cook? Before I could fire up the stove, I had to make a trip to the store to gather the ingredients for what I hoped would be a very good dinner. However, what I thought would be a quick trip turned into an odyssey! It was easy enough finding the commonly used ingredients like the veggies, butter, and half and half, but when it came to the pimentos...What are pimentos anyway? Luckily a knowledgeable Giant Eagle worker pointed me in the right direction. Oh but the saga continued as I asked everyone in sight where I could locate the pastry puffs. After facing quizzical and dumbfounded looks for about 15 minutes, I finally gave up and went on my way to check out.

I'm happy to report that the process of making the Chicken a la King dish went smoothly. First I cut up all of the ingredients before starting to cook:

Next I sauteed the mushrooms and green peppers in salted butter:

Then I added the dry ingredients and tried to stir in as much as possible, though I had to add some wet ingredients to get the smooth texture that the recipe mentioned. I slowly stirred in the liquid ingredients as directed and did add some corn starch to thicken up the gravy. Lastly, I added pimentos and raw chicken instead of cooked since chicken cooks quickly and tastes really bad if overcooked. This is how it turned out:

The finished product was bordered by crescent rolls, which was the closest thing I could think of to pastry puffs, though definitely not as light and fluffy!

I think rice will also taste good with the Chicken a la King as Wayne will be trying (ahem, one of these days :) ) The dish was very filling and somewhat heavy, so as a dessert I cut up some fresh strawberries and pineapple. Yum!

On a final note, I realized later that I completely forgot to use the dry sherry like Kathy suggested even though I bought it at the store today! Ah well, next time :P

In the meantime...

2007-05-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Looks like we really dropped the ball with the Chicken a la King. In the meantime, here's an easy dish I made not too long ago. It's basically asparagus sauteed in a light oil and butter sauce with lightly breaded chicken and white rice.

Asparagus
Just slice off the rough stem (about 1/2 to 2/3) and wash in a strainer. I used mostly oil, a pinch of salt, and a sliver of unsalted butter and sauteed the asparagus about 5-10min or until it was cooked, but still crunchy. The key to crunchy, but not raw, asparagus is to continue to stir the whole time and to taste a little piece every few minutes :P

Chicken
For the chicken, I cut it into cubes so that it would cook fast - I was really hungry! The breading consisted of about 1:1 plain breadcrumbs to flour and was seasoned with salt, pepper, and parsley. Each cube was tossed around in the breading for full coverage before laying on a baking rack and baking at 400 degrees for 5-10min. You'll have to estimate based on how big the chicken pieces are. I don't usually keep track of the time, so I had to cut into one of the pieces to make sure it was cooked. Yes, this causes the chicken juices to run out, so it's better if you can practice enough be confident in the baking time. To give the breaded chicken some added flavor, I generously squeezed fresh lemon juice on top.

Rice
Lastly, I was lazy and just used minute rice, but any type of rice will do. Rice pilaf would have been a nice addition, though the store bought mixes have too strong of a flavor sometimes. In this case, I didn't want the rice to overpower the flavor of the meat and vegetable components.

Viola - here is my final dish:

(Don't worry - this is just a small portion of what I made. You should have enough for 2 people if you use a large chicken breast, 1-1.5 cups of rice, and a bunch of asparagus)

Coming soon...

2007-04-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

Ok so we got a bit lazy over the past couple of weekends, but we're hoping for an amazing Chicken a la King next weekend. Hopefully it doesn't come out looking like a cookie again, Wayne...

4/15 Chicken a la King

2007-04-13T02:55:00.000-07:00

This weekend we'll be making Chicken a la King.

http://www.dianaskitchen.com/page/recipes03/0827_chickenala.htm

Seems a bit light on the veggies, so I'm planning on adding some green beans to the side, and probably serve it on rice. Serving 6 to 8 seems like quite a lot though, so I'm kind of tempted to cut the recipe in half, hopefully without affecting it too much. :)

Scookies!

2007-04-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

Unlike Chewy, for our first project I wasn't about to make any compromises, so I went for the frozen blueberries (on sale too!). Overall, the recipe seemed easy enough with pretty standard ingredients and techniques. The hardest part of it was actually cleaning the oven before baking. This time I opted to go for the baking soda + water method, since the last time I used the clean cycle on my oven, it set off the fire alarm. ^_^;;;

Here we have the eggs & cream being whisked together with a fork.

Creamy mixture being added to the dry stuff :)

Mixing it up! At this point, I stopped taking pictures because things started to get pretty messy. Perhaps I should have gone with the dried fruits like Chewy, since my attempt at mixing quickly smooshed all the blueberry goodness. Secondly, the decision to use frozen blueberries without thoroughly thawing them probably wasn't a good idea either, as my hands quickly started freezing. It appears I didn't knead the dough as well as I ought to, which was probably an effect of the whole "frozen hands" thing.

Well, they're very light and fluffy, and taste quite good! :) Unfortunately, they didn't turn out quite as picture perfect as I had hoped. Instead they're kinda like.... cookies... except really light and fluffy like scones. I'll have to work on my kneading next time so I can cut out cleaner shapes given a denser dough, hopefully using something I can knead without my fingers falling off.

The outcome for Chewy...

2007-04-08T20:25:00.000-07:00

The scones looked nice in the end and everyone at the Easter dinner party seemed to like them. Success!

Blueberry scones with a twist

2007-04-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Our first project is to bake blueberry scones, but instead of blueberries I went with the more affordable dried cranberries. The recipe is from Martha Stewart and seems easy enough.

http://www.marthastewart.com/portal/site/mslo/menuitem.fc77a0dbc44dd1611e3bf410b5900aa0/?vgnextoid=49cf61876e70f010VgnVCM1000003d370a0aRCRD&autonomy_kw=blueberry%20scones&rsc=ns2006_m3

Preparation time took about 25-30 minutes, though with more practice, this could be knocked down substantially. So far they smell really tasty, but still 10 more minutes until the baking time is complete. My biggest concern is that they will be dried out because of my need for extensive kneading :P

Our challenge...

2007-03-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

In order to master the skills of cooking and baking, we will take on new recipes every week ranging from Chicken a la King to Tiramisu. Ok, so let's not get too ambitious yet. We'll start small at first and hopefully achieve the basics. The second stage of our self-training will consist of mastering more intricate recipes, followed by a third stage of recipes that only the best chefs can meet with success. However, our true test of skill and creativity will come in the final challenge, but we cannot yet reveal that feat...