I wanted to do a simple pork braise so I went to the store on Thursday.
They didn’t have pork to braise, so I thought I’d braise beef instead. I liked the looks of an eye of round cut so I bought that.
I liked the idea of roasting beets while the braise was in the oven, so I bought a bunch of beets. Brussels sprouts were on sale, so I bought some of those as well.
Then, I got home and learned that eye of round is not good for a braise. So I found an alternative roasting recipe that required marinading for 48 hours and put it into a marinade.
Although I planned to use my trusty dutch oven for the braise, that won’t work for the roast. So my husband found a spare cast iron skillet we’ve never used and seasoned that for me.
I didn’t want to waste the beet greens so I just spent half an hour preparing them to roast with onion and garlic and I’m now roasting the beets in advance.
The roast will go in with potatoes and carrots around 4pm.
My family loves roasted Brussels sprouts. Trim the stem off, cut them in half, toss with EVOO and roast them, cut side down, on a baking sheet at 350º for about 20-25 minutes until they are browned on top. Some leaves come loose when you cut off the stem; these are especially delicious roasted.
I’ll have to think on this one. The only thing that comes to mind is making homemade bagels which I’ve done during quarantine. Not hard, taste great, but there are several steps. Highly recommend!
I wouldn’t say anything I have cooked, is overly ambitious. I recently make a big holiday feast (four courses, plus appetizers) for four separate families, shopped, prepared, cooked, boxed, delivered and hosted the Zoom celebration. Does that count as ‘ambitious’?!
I guess this would be an “ambitious” fail but I decided I was going to learn how to make croissants from scratch when my daughter started kindergarten. She started college this fall and I still haven’t made my first attempt. I am impressed and inspired by @abasket and the bagels!
Here’s a project that turned out to be more involved than I originally anticipated.
I decided I wanted to make butter pecan ice cream one day. But plain pecans aren’t good enough for Anomander’s ice cream - it had to be crunchy roasted candied pecans.
Then I realized that my favorite parts of pralines are the tiny little nuggets of either the the praline mix or a small chunk of pecan completely coated in crunchy yummy candied goodness. Basically the yummy stuff at the bottom of the bag.
Of course you can’t buy tiny little chunks of pecan praline so I had to make my own pralines. So I bought pecans, broke them up by hand to get the exact size I wanted, researched pecan praline recipes for hours (where I found out that technically I wanted candied pecans and not pralines), mixed up a candy coating, and roasted them. Yay tiny chunks of candied pecans!
Then I decided plain milk and cream weren’t good enough for the great butter pecan ice cream boondoggle. Oh no, it had to have infused pecan flavor. So more chopping, then hours of infusing pecans in milk. Followed by a lot of draining and squeezing to get all the pecans out because Anomander’s butter pecan ice cream has no soggy pecans, only crunchy yummy small candied pecan chunks.
So my simple little ice cream project turned into an all-day affair with a sink full of used pots and utensils. But it was totally awesome and worth the effort!
@anomander – pralines are great but candied pecans are better.
I made strawberry ice cream once and it was a grayish color which my husband wouldn’t touch. I still dream about that–it was SO good! I ate it all by myself!
Needed refried beans last night for a mexican dip and usually just use a can. Couldn’t believe I didn’t have one on hand. That turned into 3 hour project of looking at recipes, cooking dried beans (plus learning curve on instapot–not a wasted experience!) and then preparing them for the dip. I could’ve gone to the grocery store in 15 min. but for some odd reason this sounded easier…
I’m not a very good cook but like everyone else I started making sourdough bread when the pandemic hit. It was always fine, nothing terrific but I’ve moved to regular yeast bread and these have been coming out amazing!
I’ve been experimenting with some really fancy- looking recipes on the King Arthur Flour website because I I find their recipes easy to follow and sometimes they have Instagram stories with step by step videos. This weekend I made the Harvest Apple Challah Bread and it was so yummy and looked beautiful!
I also finally purchased a stand mixer which has been a game changer for my bread making ?
I’ve made croissants five times now, I think. Have been waiting to make them again because they’re easier to make when it’s cold out. It’s a three day process, but I think they’re worth it!
I’ve also made bagels 4-5 times now thanks to @abasket 's recipe. My neighbors love them! My husband has requested cinnamon raisin next time.
My mother always said “if you can read, you can cook!”.
I was such a failure at challah that I never tried it again. Some of you may know that when something fails to hit the exact mark, I just rename it, to temper expectations. (That giant quiche that leaked out of a springform pan came out pretty flat. We called it Southern Cheese Pie or somesuch. The guests were delighted.)
Have made wedding cakes, multi tiers, including one with extra pillars to hold up the top layer, and fondant topping. Every time, I agree, going over the details and planning what goes in when takes up most of the time. Then there’s reading the cake baker comments online, looking at cake deco pictures, then wandering through Amazon to look at pans, the little deco flowers, and other things I don’t need. Lol, that’s easily 80% of the task.
My dc’s school did drive thru BBQs to raise funds - after the first year, we committed to making 175 brownies to replace the cookies they had been handing out. From that, a friend and I upped the ante to producing 400 brownies for our town’s spaghetti dinner youth sports fundraiser. It really helped that my friend had access to a commercial oven; in later years, we used the community center’s convection oven. Sadly, I had to bow out a year or so ago, and the fundraiser didn’t happen this year.
We purchased a deep fat fryer a couple of years ago. In short, they are a super messy and greasy smelling hassle.
My D and I decided to make falafel from scratch. It took hours. We boiled the chickpeas, ground it all up, etc…We thought would would use the deep fat fryer. I don’t know exactly what we did wrong, but we threw in three or four round falafels which immediately disintegrated into thousand of tiny pieces. It was an inedible mess and we had to throw away all the oil too.
On another occasion, after returning from Japan, we decided to make tempura, in an attempt to replicate the delicious delicacy. I missed (or ignored) the part that said to fry one or two pieces at a time. I put in seven or eight pieces to save time. They immediately coagulated into a giant impenetrable lump with raw batter on the inside. The vegetables remained uncooked. Major fail.
Deep fat fryers seem simple. They are not. Proceed with caution and expect your home to smell like a greasy spoon for days after. We only ever use it outdoors now.
My very first overly ambitious cooking project was actually deciding to recreate our wedding cake from Cocolat. The owner/author had published a cookbook which had the complete recipe. My 20-something year old self with zero baking experience but an excess of self-confidence thought, “how hard could it be”?
The answer was: very, very hard! It’s something like 7 layers of vanilla sponge cake, chocolate ganache, chocolate soufflé, and Italian buttercream. At the time I owned one hand mixer and had never made a cake, ganache, soufflé, or buttercream. I also didn’t have a single cake pan. It turned into a 4 day endurance exercise in trial and failure, but I ultimately triumphed and produced a delicious, if somewhat lopsided, wedding cake!
I continued making the cake every year at Christmas for probably the next 20 years - it became one of our Christmas traditions. I still have the cake pans I bought for it back then too!