Hello everybody. I hope you all had a delightful Easter, Passover, celebration of Rome’s birthday, or just a wonderful spring day, whatever your preference. I celebrate Easter, and beyond my crazy love of jelly beans, Easter always means a big family dinner. We started with a cream of fennel and celery soup, and then had chicken, potatoes, carrots, asparagus, and mushrooms. I recently gave my slow cooker to my parents, having thoroughly failed at figuring out how to cook anything I enjoyed in it, and my mother used it to braise the whole chicken. I made the potatoes with a recipe I got from The Essential New York Times cookbook that may be my new favorite way to make potatoes. And we finished everything off with my mother’s pear walnut olive oil cake.
I’ve always really enjoyed cooking. I came back from a summer abroad in Torino, Italy with a recipe for homemade orecchiette pasta, which I made for my friends with walnut sauce and sautéed mushrooms. Note: if you’re going to hand-roll enough pasta for six people, make all six of them help do it, or have a six hour audiobook or several episodes of Doctor Who on hand to entertain you while you work. But aside from the odd homemade meal in college, I actually haven’t had much of a chance to do a lot of cooking myself. When I was living in Assisi, my host parents did all the cooking, occasionally letting me help and teaching me things, but it was mostly them (not that I’m complaining about the chance to eat homemade Italian food every night). I helped my parents some when I was living at home and working at the Disability Rights Center, and the kitchen in the dorms during my first year of law school left something to be desired (mostly space to cook before 10:00 PM). A huge driver for me to get my own apartment after 1L year was that I wanted to be able to cook and eat more healthy (as in less pasta and microwave meals). So I got an apartment, but 2L was so crazy that I was still mostly living on pasta and frozen meals, with a lot of goldfish and diet Pepsi thrown in. In whatever free time I did have, I would look through the internet and collect recipes and even read cookbooks for fun.
At the start of last summer, I said enough was enough. If I was going to keep collecting random recipes, I needed to start actually cooking them. I set myself a goal to cook one new recipe a week. Some weeks, I make two or even three new recipes. Some weeks I fall back on some old favorites, especially when the semester gets crazy. But more or less I’ve been averaging a new recipe every week this school year. Since I’ve started this goal, I’ve been compiling my favorites in a hardcopy Braille cookbook, because I don’t like to have my computer near me when I’m cooking in case I spray coconut milk all over the kitchen. I’ve had some great successes like the braided pesto bread I made last fall, and some disasters like that week I tried to do things with coconut. Since I started on this journey, many of you have been clamoring to know more about what I’ve been cooking.
So this is Jameyanne’s adventures in the kitchen: the delicious, the disgusting, and the disasters. My college friends used to joke that I should have my own cooking show because when I cook I do so with sound effects. This is probably the closest I’ll ever come to that. You’ll just have to imagine the sound effects.
Before I get into the food, I wanted to give a quick note on how I eat. I don’t eat red meat, and I don’t eat cheese. I also don’t use a lot of butter, milk, eggs, or cream in my cooking. I’m also kind of picky, like I don’t like turkey or salmon or pork. I basically eat vegan with some occasional chicken or fish. But while I do a lot of vegan cooking, I do not understand vegans’ obsession with cashews, and I don’t go in for buying ingredients I don’t recognize like spelt flour or nutritional yeast. Not that I don’t like trying new things. That’s what this is all about, after all. But if a recipe calls for an ingredient that’s unfamiliar to me and I don’t know what else I would do with that ingredient, I’m less likely to try the recipe.
Also, I’m linking to my favorite recipes where I can, but if I can’t, I will do my best to describe them. Keep in mind that I am Italian, and my Italian family’s way of cooking is a pinch of this, a little of that. For example, my mom, my younger brother, and I have been trying to recreate my grandpa’s bread recipe for the past few months, but it’s been really hard because all he wrote down was “flour etc” and then the approximate kneading and rising times. We recently discovered this recipe from King Arthur Flour which is basically what we were trying to accomplish. So if my descriptions aren’t precise enough for you, definitely google the recipe (when I do this sort of thing I always look at multiple versions).
Now that we’ve gotten all that over with, let’s get started.
The delicious
Chicken: Chicken was always really daunting for me, because I was never sure if it was done and it made me nervous. A couple things made this better. First, I got a talking meat thermometer. After a lot of searching and asking and getting nowhere, I just bought a cheap one on Amazon and it has been great. Next, I realized that it’s important to invest in good chicken, otherwise I won’t eat it. My typical approach to chicken is to plop a breast in a small Pyrex dish, sprinkle it with spices (usually montreal or everglade seasoning), and roast it until it’s done, but I have tried some other things. My favorites have included a curry powder and lime juice seasoning, a lemon pepper marinade, and a recipe I got from a friend called African spicy chicken, which involves marinating the chicken in tomato paste, lemon juice, and a ton of spices (I couldn’t find the actual recipe online, but it’s from Cooking for Applause if you want to try to hunt it down. My friend tells me it’s also an excellent way to prepare mushrooms, but I haven’t tried that yet). I also enjoy smothering the chicken in olives and lemon wedges. My chicken cooking skills are still a bit of a work in progress. I am still not very good at cooking chicken on the stove, but since I’ve been having such good success with the oven, I’m not too worried.
Fish: My parents make the best fish. Scallops in Chardonnay butter sauce with caramelized shallots. Halibut over couscous in a fennel, olive, and citrus broth. My mouth’s watering. Is your mouth watering? So learning to cook fish has been a challenge, if only because I have such high standards. I’ve learned to make the chardonnay butter sauce and cooked flounder with that. I’ve also made cod topped with tomatoes, onions, and olives which is really good. I haven’t done too much experimenting with fish, because I typically order my groceries, but I like to pick out my fish myself, and it’s a bit of a trek to the nearest Whole Foods. But one of my requirements for where I’m moving after law school is that I’m close to a market with good fish, so hopefully I’ll get more practice at this.
Almond lemon rosemary tofu: I found this recipe here, gave it a try while I was working at NIST, and have made it a couple more times since. It is really tasty. I’ve tried a few other tofu recipes since then, but I haven’t liked them as much, and I only occasionally eat tofu anyway.
Crispy chick peas: I actually first made this recipe during 2L year and fell in love with it. The chick peas come out so light and crispy, and they’re an excellent snack. But the recipe I was using never yielded chick peas that stayed crispy, and I wanted to be able to store these and not eat them all in one sitting, despite how tasty they are. Then I discovered this version from Sam over at It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken. You dry roast the chick peas first, then toss them with olive oil, salt, and other spices of your choice (I like to do a dash of cayenne). Then you pop them back in the oven and keep an eye on them. They can burn fast so definitely take them out to stir a couple times. When they’re done, turn off the oven, crack the door, and leave the chick peas in there for another five minutes. This really helps them stay crispy, and you can store them in the fridge in an airtight container.
Crisp galore: My dad and I make apple crisp together at Thanksgiving almost every year now. We do sliced apples with a topping of oats, brown sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I think the original recipe comes from Betty Crocker, and it’s great. For the apple filling, we never cnclude the flour, sugar, and cinnamon, and just do the straight apples with lemon juice to prevent oxidation with the topping on top. Sometimes we add walnuts or pecans or other nuts to the top of the crisp. I substituted apples for peaches once, and last summer, I tried a mixture of raspberries and pineapple instead of the apples. Last thanksgiving, we did apples, pears, and some extra cranberry sauce. All were delicious.
Braided pesto bread: At first I thought that there was no way I would actually be able to make this, but it wasn’t all that hard. I would recommend making the pesto ahead of time, if you’re making your own pesto, instead of doing it all the same evening like I did. There’s definitely time to make the pesto while the bread is rising, but it means one more bowl to wash. I make my own vegan pesto (basil, toasted pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, salt, a splash of red wine vinegar, and a blender), but you can certainly use your own recipe or use a jar of store bought pesto. This bread was really delicious, and like I said, not too hard to make. The recipe is here.
Two weeks of soups: I got a really bad cold at the start of fall semester, and then again at the start of spring semester. I quickly ran out of canned soup and wound up making a bunch of soup to keep myself going. First, I made this onion and apple soup that I found on the Food Monster app. This was really easy and simple, and kind of the perfect thing for someone with a really sore throat. I added garlic to the recipe because I’m Italian and believe any recipe without garlic in it is sacrelige. Next, I made my mom’s cream of butternut squash soup, which has no cream in it. Basically you cook potatoes, onion, butternut squash, and herbs in broth, and then puree. My mom uses this same recipe for all kinds of soups, just substituting other vegetables (like asparagus or peas or fennel and celerye) for the butternut squash. It wasn’t hard at all, and it is my ultimate comfort food. When I started to feel better but still didn’t want to eat much besides soup, I made a curry red lentil soup with tomatoes, garlic, and ginger, recipe also courtesy of my mother.
I’ve tried a lot of other recipes that I’ve really liked, but before I turn this post into a novel, I’m going to move on to the disgusting recipes.
The Disgusting:
I did have a few recipes that did not turn out the way I wanted them to. They weren’t all completely disgusting, but they were not great by any means.
I tried to make fennel crackers, which I had in Italy and loved. The recipe I used called for butter, and I was doubtful but the comments said it was good and I’m not really a baker, so I thought “what do I know?” So I went with it. The crackers came out like puffy squares of bread. They tasted all right, but they went kerplunk in your stomach. Also this is the point where I tell you that I can’t cut anything in a straight line and so these were not very pretty either. I have since found other recipes which use olive oil instead of butter, and I think that would work better, but I haven’t tried to recreate the crackers yet.
The other recipe that fell into the disgusting camp was a butternut squash galette with roasted apple and caramelized onion. I think this was probably my fault, because I became frustrated with the directions for making the pie crust and did not follow the directions exactly. The crust that came out of the oven was lumpy and really gross. The filling was great, and I ended up scooping that out and eating that for dinner on its own and throwing out the crust.
I also tried a recipe for butternut squash gnocchi with a sage sauce. This wasn’t quite on the level of disgusting, but it was heavier than I wanted, and after all that work—it pretty much took a whole day—it was only okay. I may give it another try at some point with some tweaks, but I’m not sure.
The Disasters:
Worse than disgusting—yes there’s worse—are the recipes that didn’t even make it to completion. Luckily I don’t have too many of these. But the ones I have all have to do with coconut. And it started with a pancake.
Last spring, I bought a Braille cookbook from the National Association of Blind Students, because I read cookbooks for fun and I like Braille. I got a lot of good recipes from this book (including the curry lime chicken and the lemon pepper marinated chicken I talked about up above). But one of the recipes was for a banana coconut pancake. You mixed a ripe banana, some coconut flakes, and some cinnamon, formed it into a pancake, and left it out on the counter to dry. I followed the directions. I swear I followed the directions. As I was mixing and forming into a pancake, I said to myself, “This seems really goopy. I’m not sure it will work.” Unfortunately I was right. The best that could be said about this pancake is it made a delightfully weird suction cup noise as I scraped it off the plate and into the trash the next morning.
This left me with an awful lot of coconut flakes that I didn’t know what to do with, and since I started buying my own food, I am loathe to throw anything away. So I looked up what to do with coconut flakes. And I found a recipe to make homemade coconut milk. I use coconut milk in curries, so I thought “okay, why not? I’ll use coconut milk, and I probably won’t use these coconut flakes for anything else.” This recipe probably would have worked if I had an actual blender instead of an immersion blender. As it was, the coconut ended up splattering halfway up the walls, and the milk I got was still pulpy and watery and pretty gross. It was a fail of epic proportions. To whoever wrote that recipe, you are totally wrong: it is not easier to make coconut milk at home. If I need coconut milk, I will buy it.
I used the last couple cups of coconut flakes to make coconut bread. At first all seemed to be going well. It rose beautifully, it smelled great, and then I took it out of the oven and it had deflated to a weirdly sweet and weirdly salted very thick flatbread. It wasn’t terrible, but it was weird, and I wouldn’t make it again. It also wrecked my confidence in my ability to make bread until I came across the recipe for braided pesto bread above and had to try it so I did. Yes, I am perfectly capable of making bread. Just not that bread.
So these are my favorite and not-so-favorite things to cook from what I’ve tried so far. I hope I’ve made you hungry, and if not, I hope I’ve made you laugh. Let me know in the comments if you try any of these recipes and what you thought, or if you have any favorite recipes I have to try. I’m always on the look-out for new ideas.
Buon apetito!