So excited but so late now!

So I have been missing for a while with my DaringKitchen Challenge, but this month I did complete the Daring Cooks Challenge, and it was amazing!

It was a challenge to challenge for sure! I was super nervous about it in the beginning but quickly found it to be fun and exiting, as cooking challenges go.

Blog-checking lines: For the April Daring Cooks Challenge, Lisa from Parsley, Sage and Sweet has challenged us to debone a whole chicken, using this video by Jacques Pepin as our guide; then stuff it, tie it and roast it, to create a Chicken Ballotine.

We deboned a whole chicken. I was so fortunate while at the grocery getting the chicken my store had two nice sized chickens for just under 10 dollars which I felt was a steal and if I "butchered" the first one I always had the second one to fall back on. I watched the Jacque Pepin video probably 15 times before I felt confident to give it a go. I also have to add that while I have some nice knives I really thought I should get a new one, so I took my gift card that was a gift at Christmas from my friend Annie to Sur Le Table and started shopping for a new knife. I knew after watching Jacque all I really needed was a good sturdy quality blade that could be easily managed. It was so fun shopping for the knife and I got the professionals discount because the sales clerk was impressed by my intended plan for the knife and stated if you are tackling that you surely deserve the professional discount! Anyway enough about the knife; we are here to debone a chicken. I looked at the bird and was a bit anxious at first but as things go I was not about to "chicken" out.. Sorry I could not resist.

Anyway here is the work on the chicken.

 I will not be over come with fear. The new knife is on the left.

 This really seems like a big chicken.

 Off with the wings.

 



 

Jacque does this thing where he makes chicken lolly pops, I totally messed mine up.  

Cutting down the back of the bird.

Out comes the leg bone.

 

Fully boned out bird, see how nicely the body over laps itself. 



Now to season and stuff the bird.

I had grand plans for the stuffing, I had decided to just "wing" it. Okay I will do my best to layoff the puns.. Anyway so I thought I would do a cranberry, leek, stuffing with goat cheese and walnuts. I was so thrilled once I was done with the deboning that I completely left out the goat cheese and the walnuts.

Here are the ingredients to my stuffing though, and I am sorry to say I have no measurements other than my hand and eyeballing. 8 ounces of day old Italian bread cubed into about 1/2 inch cubes, a hand full of dried cranberries boiled in about 3/4 cup of water for 10 minutes to reconstitute, 1 leek halved and sliced into half coins, one onion diced, both are sauteed in a bit of olive oil and butter; add every thing together in a bowl then throw in your favorite seasonings; I used salt and pepper along with some lemon rosemary and dried orange zest that I had on hand. You stuffing will look like this.

Leek and onion cooking.

Yes those are ice cubes you see in the stuffing as I did not plan well enough and had to cool it down before putting it in the bird below.

Here is the stuffed bird before trussing. 

Finally the trussed bird in a roasting pan, seasoned with some salt, pepper, and butter. The trussing I think really was the most difficult part. I placed it on some onions to roast.

 

 

Into the oven that bird went for around an hour or so, I checked the internal temp of the stuffing to ensure a full 165 degrees and then took it out. It looked nice, I would have liked a bit more color though on the skin.

 

It smelled like heaven.

I loved how easy it was to slice this and it was still beautiful.

Some close ups of the stuffing. It was so moist and tasty.

 

 

So after cooking and remembering that I had left out the goat cheese as well as the walnuts I was a bit disappointed, however I have pretty flexible when it comes to cooking so I did some mashed goat cheese potatoes and placed a slice of goat cheese on top of the slices of chicken. I did not make a sauce and instead used a cranberry orange chutney from the local grocery store which was the perfect addition.

 

Some close ups of the final product on the plate.

 



 

 

So Ashley loved it, the leftovers were better than the first time around. I also took some to work to share with folks and several people were glad to get to taste the end result. Now I have that second bird still left to do something with. Ash had requested that I do something like his favorite dish that I make which has a small chicken picatta similarity. I am still playing with the ideas in my head, but when it is done I will follow up with an additional post. I hope that you enjoyed the photos and that you take some time to watch Jacque Pepin complete the task of deboning a chicken. Happy Cooking to you. 





I am late on my posts X's two.

I have two posts to catch up on, the first is the Daring cooks challenge of Pate Chinois a Canadian sort of Sheppard's pie.

Our Daring Cooks’ December 2012 Hostess is Andy of Today’s the Day and Today’s the Day I Cook! Andy is sharing with us a traditional French Canadian classic the Paté Chinois, also known as Shepherd’s pie for many of us, and if one dish says comfort food.. this one is it!

Between being sick, the holidays, and well just life in general it has been near impossible to get on here and get things posted. I was not terribly crazy about this because I dislike this type of meal, but I did it. I did a sort of Mexican inspired Pate Chinois with taco meat, beans, corn, tomatoes, and a mashed potato with Mexican blend cheese. It was okay. Here is a photo.

Meat mixture cooking.

Meat and veg in the casserole.

Ooey Gooey Cheesy.

A little too watery, but okay.

 

 

For my Daring Bakers Challenge we completed Panettone, an Italian fruit bread.

 

Blog-checking lines: The December 2012 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by the talented Marcellina of Marcellina in Cucina. Marcellina challenged us to create our own custom Panettone, a traditional Italian holiday bread!

 

I love this challenge, and in light of being sick, and super busy I made two batches! I did the traditional fruit filled one, then one that I filled with chocolate pieces both milk and white, as well as some dried cherries. The Chocolate Cherry was my favorite though less traditional is my guess.

 

I did the traditional version first and tried to do it all in one day! It was time consuming and it turned out, but for one day it was a lot of work! I started at about 8am on Wednesday, and finished at 2am on Thursday. I will never try and do something like this in one day. So initially I could only find a fruit blend, then I located the citron and candied orange peel; I learned that I dislike citron. I also realized after the fact that I neglected putting in the orange and lemon extract, not that this took away from it. I took the bread to work and shared with many friends and co-workers. One of my girlfriends who I cook with regularly felt the bread was a bit dry; she was right. I think I over cooked the first batch. The other thing that was frustrating, is that I tried hanging the bread upside down in some stock pots, I was so excited to check on my work when I woke that I was near devastated when I found that the breads had broken away from the skewers and the tops had crashed into the bottom of the stock pot causing a slight collapse.

 

The many ingredients.

Blooming yeast.

This is incredibly sticky dough.

Doubled in size.

The dough laid out with fruit filling.

 

Waiting for the final rise. 

 

This is after cooking, before falling into bottom of pan.

This is what the final looked like from the bottom, also a bit too done.

Here is the bread with a slice out of it.

 

I do have to say that I was thrilled with the end results as I had a friend who came by to drop of a cookbook and I had her try a piece. She is Italian as in her parents immigrated to the US shortly before her birth, anyway she has had a number of Panettones and i am pleased to say that she reports it tastes just as it should! I was pleased about that.

 

The last version I did was with, as I said, Chocolate and Cherry. This was my favorite version. I took the two days to complete this one, did not rush it, and used the alternate cooling technique where I rotated the bread every 30 minutes. I used the recipe above but substituted the cherries and chocolates for the dried fruit, and I used cherry and almond extract instead of the citrus extract and I left out the zest. Additionally made three smallish panettone instead of two largish. The Chocolate Cherry was perfect not dry at all!

 

The three rising.

Three baking.

Three after baking.

Such a rich slice!  

This is a whole loaf sliced in half!

YUMMM, with a warm cup of coffee or cold glass of milk this is how one should end the day!

 

 

So I have a large amount of both left over and I plan on trying the whole bread pudding or French Toast casserole. I will have to keep you all posted about the outcome.

 

So sorry to have two challenges in one post, hope you all don't mind. I can't wait for the next challenges in both areas cooking and baking. Hope that your winter and New Year are fantastic. Fun cooking to you and yours! 





Dining out around our town.

So while I was home after Thanksgiving enjoying time with my family my dad made a suggestion to help me with posting more frequently on my blog. Then after we returned our monthly version of Community Impact Newspaper (Impact) arrived; there was a supplement in it that reinforced the suggestion my dad had made. He suggested that I do a weekly blog about the local restaurants; I took it a step further and thought about just starting with the A's in the phone book and going down the list. Well when the Impact arrived that little publication made it so much easier with the supplement listing most of the restaurants in the Hutto, Pflugerville, and Round Rock part of central Texas. So I decided why not just go for it.

This week Ashley and I went to dinner at one of our quick and easy restaurants in Hutto, Rio Grande Tex-Mex, I feel like they are moderately priced and we generally can have dinner for the 2 of us between 25 and 30 dollars, depending on a couple of things, do we get an appetizer and do I order a cocktail.

There are a couple of things to know about this place, it reminds me a bit of the Mexican food I grew up eating in South Texas, now it is not a perfect reminder but it is close. I get their cheese enchiladas often and while it is not perfect I am not disappointed. I have tried the chicken enchiladas and those are actually very good. Ashley gets the fajitas or the nachos most often. The fajitas are just okay in my opinion, but he seems to like them. I will eat their queso however it is not my favorite appetizer at this restaurant. We have recently discovered their Mexican Egg Rolls, which are not bad at all, they are a gooey combination of taco meat, cheese and rice; rolled in a spring roll wrapper and deep fried; they serve them with a jalapeno ranch dressing. These things a pretty good. Their salsa seems to be made homemade as the quality changes regularly, some days it is great others it is not; so if you are a salsa fan and you are trying them out, just know that it is hit or miss.

This week while we were there Ashley ordered his regular chicken fajita for one, and I decided to try something new, the stuffed avocado. Ashley was appropriately satisfied with his fajitas and seemed to enjoy them as normal; a trick we have learned is you need to ask for a few extra tortillas when ordering other wise you will not have enough to go with the meat you get.. Since I was contemplating starting my new weekly topic with the restaurant blog I thought I would order something I have never had before and went with the stuffed avocado. I had very high expectations as I had seen this thing before on other diners plates causing intense plate envy. It with a giant avocado which I had stuffed with chicken and cheese, then deep fried with what appeared to be the same batter used in the chili relleno (stuffed pepper). The difference with the avocado is that it appears to have cheese around the exterior of the avocado and then the breading, initially I thought the batter had not been cooked all the way. The avocado was okay actually, not great and I do not have any great plans to order it again. The chicken that was used in the center of the avocado seemed to be chunks of fajita chicken that the spooned in with the queso, again this is not my favorite queso. The meat to avocado ratio was very off, as the avocado was a giant one. The whole meal came with rice, beans, queso, and a cheese enchilada.

The general thoughts on the restaurant are these, we always have great service, we feel like it is an affordable quick place to grab dinner that is very close to where we live, the food is just okay, and there are many dishes we would order again, but really nothing that makes me say I have to go to Rio to get "X" dish. Here are a few photos from our dinner.

Ashley's Chicken Fajitas

 

 This is the dinner, stuffed avocado on the left, cheese enchilada in the back right.

A cross section of the stuffed avocado.

This is the end result of my plate.

 

 

As always we will return to Rio Grande as it is a close restaurant, affordable, and we generally enjoy our dinner. The meal I had has an "I would not order this again" feeling with a caveat that I would try it one more time with the beef filling. I hope that you are willing to go out and try a few restaurants in your area and I hope you find something new to taste. Not sure where Ashley and I will go next, but I do have a lengthy list, hope you enjoy. 



It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....Cookies that is.

Blog-checking lines: Holiday season is the time for sharing and Peta of Peta Eats is sharing a dozen cookies, some classics and some of her own, from all over the world with us.

Christmas cookies!

 



I was so excited when I saw this month's baking challenge, as I love to make Christmas cookies for people. It is a fond memory for me to have where my mom and I and my sister would all spend hours making various Christmas cookies for friends and family. The ones that we always make every year would be sugar cookies with a butter cream frosting, and Spritz cookies. I have a very distinct memory of the flavor of the Spritz cookies and well as bad as it is, butter is nice, but margarine is the only way to go. Now my mom's sugar cookies make a ton, and the dough is so tasty. For this challenge I was excited to look at all the different types of cookies. I had big plans, I planned to complete three different types of cookies, Mexican Chocolate with Caramel filling, Layer Christmas Cookies, and then finally some Rosemary Lemon Thumbprint cookies; I completed the first two and am still planing on the Thumbprints just not this week.

The first the Layer Christmas cookies are cookies that I have looked at for years and thought I really should try to make those one day so I was thrilled when I saw that one of the suggested cookie recipes included Layer cookies, I however used a recipe from Epicurious.com. I read and re-read the recipe to make sure I understood it, and to my surprise I did not. I prepared the cookies wrong, but they came out correctly. The Epicurious recipe that I used said to add the sugar to the egg whites a 1/4 cup at a time; later in the recipe when you are using the almond paste it says to add the remained of the 3/4 cups of sugar. There is a possibility the cookies would have had a bit more loft had I mixed the sugar correctly but they are still amazing! The flavor is phenomenal. I have shared them with family, friends and co-workers. I love it when I get to take cookies in to work as they all enjoy the treats.

 Egg whites, pre-whip. 

 

 Egg whites, post whip.

Cookie batter for the layer cookies.

Red layer after baking, it is hard to tell, but these are pretty thin layers.

The layers once they have the apricot jam has been added.

 



Yes it took 13 cans to ensure a level pressure on the cookie layers.

Layers after the chocolate had been done. Really beautiful cookies!

The Mexican Chocolate cookies came out the the 100 Best Cookies from Better Homes and Gardens. They have cinnamon in them as well as cayenne pepper; spice like Mexican hot chocolate. These cookies are incredible as the recipe suggests that you use high quality dutch processed hot chocolate; which I did. The cookies had an amazing chocolate smell and were incredibly rich. These cookies are icebox cookies that you chill and cut; they were not difficult at all to make. Once baked and cool it was time to fill with the caramel filling, I used the dulce de leche which is VERY sticky, but very worth it. The cookies tasted fantastic and were the perfect amount of sweet, chocolate, and spice.

 

Cocoa, butter, and sugar.

 



 

Cookie dough once the flour has been added.

 



The dough was split into two piles to be rolled into a log and chilled.

Cookies cooked.

This is a local brand of Cajeta, dulce de leche, or caramel; it is very very sticky!

Cookies after cooling, don't they look great!

Only one casualty of the entire batch, fortunately it was the perfect size to just sandwich it's self.

Spooning the cajeta.

Spreading the cajeta.

You will notice the caramel is all over the place on the cookies, and the layers started to slide quickly.

I generally don't care for chocolate when it comes to cookies, cakes, or desserts however these were all great. I have had the chance to share them like I said with my family. Additionally my mom and I had gone to the military post here where they live, and when we were in the commissary we saw some of the layer cookies, my mom and I both thought mine looked so nice in comparison to the ones at the commissary. The joys of being able to make a quality product! The final photos.

Nothing better then holiday cookies with the ones you love.

Layer cookies with some hot chocolate.

Layer, Mexican Chocolate and hot cocoa.

Thanks mom for letting me take your photo while giving the cookie a taste.

 

 

I cannot wait to make these all again, I would not make them in bulk though as both sets require a bit of time for setting up and chilling. I will have to post a note about the rosemary lemon ones once all done. Hope everyone else enjoyed the cookie baking as much as I did.