Tag: cooking

Unintentional Mochi

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Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to think through this prompt. I, personally, alone, have not had any baking or cooking fails that I would count as “epic”.

I do, however, have one with my siblings for a family holiday meal.

Some brief background: while my brother has not been diagnosed (to my knowledge) with any sort of gluten sensitivity, he has noted that he feels better when he doesn’t have any gluten products and made the choice to go gluten free.

So, every family meal we have typically has some gluten free component, which in general is easier than you think. This has been going on for several years at this point and is part of my family’s new normal.

One Thanksgiving my sister and I were trying to follow an instant pot mac n cheese recipe using gluten free rice-based macaroni. She said she had made it before, and I had no reason to doubt her, so I followed her lead.

We measured everything out, and placed the pasta and liquids (I think it was a combination of water and milk, but I could be misremembering the milk part) into the instant pot. She hit some buttons, started the timer, and went to work on some other dishes while we waited.

It can’t have been more than 10 minutes, MAYBE 15 at the most, and the noodles should have been done and ready for us to add the sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, we  made a mistake somewhere, and when my sister went to vent the instant pot it started spitting a milky liquid (maybe that’s why I thought milk was involved) which caused us to panic a little and carefully throw a towel over it to prevent the hot liquid from getting everywhere.

As soon as the spitting stopped, we opened the lid. The pasta was still swimming in water. My sister said it should be fine and that we just needed to drain them, so she got a large spoon to try and get some out to check that the noodles were cooked appropriately before moving to the sink. To our horrible surprise we found that the noodles basically collapsed and rapidly turned into a mush. My sister quickly dug in to see if she could find any noodles that survived, but she only made it worse. She mixed the rice pasta macaroni too much, which in its current state didn’t take much at all, and the whole thing turned into a hot, sticky, homogeneous mass.

We looked at each other in mild shock and disbelief before we started laughing at the absolute disaster. We immediately wrote it off as a failure and played with it for a couple seconds. I tried poking it with my finger and it was almost like Oobleck the way it stuck to me.

As it cooled down and solidified more, I noticed the change in firmness and bounciness was almost like what I had seen in those videos of people making mochi. Then it dawned on me why. Mochi is made with rice flour, and as I had mentioned earlier the box of gluten free pasta was rice based.

We more or less made instant pot mochi.

A favorite recipe of mine

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What’s your favorite recipe?

I feel like I’ve answered this prompt before, or something similar, but I don’t know that I’ve ever considered any particular recipe to be my absolute favorite, as if only one were allowed to be described that way. I’m sure if I truly cared to “put one on a pedestal” then it would come to mind easily and I wouldn’t be writing this part.

So, while I wouldn’t classify the one I’m about to share as my one favorite, it is still  ONE OF my favorites. Although, technically it’s less a recipe and more a simple modification to one.

This is a simple modification for cookie recipes. Take a box of instant pudding mix and an egg, and add them to whatever cookie recipe you’re planning to make.

The trick I’ve found for this is to add the dry pudding mix into the butter and sugar after you’ve creamed those together. Then, when it comes to adding eggs, if your recipe already calls for one, just add a second. You can proceed from there and follow your baking instructions as normal. Usually. You may need to adjust the bake time.

That’s all there is to it!

Lacking in traditions

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

Honestly, this is an interesting question. I’m glad I was able to read it before crawling into bed around 1:00AM so I could try to sleep on it. Unfortunately, that didn’t help.

I don’t know that my family has any traditions that we picked up from my parents and kept doing. We might have a traditional family recipe (a version of töltött káposzta that we learned from one of my grandparents) but that’s not something we limit ourselves to having just once per year at holidays. We eat it whenever we feel like making it.

Aside from that, I really don’t think my parents specifically had traditions that they tried to pass down to my siblings and I.

Making delicious food

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What foods would you like to make?

So many things.

Cookies, cakes, brownies, ice cream.

Casseroles of so many kinds.

Pot roast and veggies, steak and potatoes.

Burgers with interesting toppings. Home made buns, too!

I really could go on and on about the many different foods I would like to make. The most important one right now is Red Beans and Rice, because I picked up most of the ingredients already. I think I’ll make that tomorrow.

I also really want to make pretzels and beer cheese dip because we’ve had a can of Guinness in the fridge for a while leftover from the time my roommate made something for St. Patrick’s Day back in March.

Honestly, I just need to get back in the kitchen a lot more often.

Favorite fruits

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List your top 5 favorite fruits.

Well, this should be quick and easy. My top 5 favorite fruits, in no particular order:

  • Strawberry
  • Banana
  • Lime
  • Pineapple
  • Mango

Orange and kiwi are honorable mentions.

Now, for a little nitpicking, lime bubly is the best flavor (followed by pineapple) but if I’m enjoying something other than bubly then pineapple is typically preferred. If I’m making something with kiwi, lime, and/or orange they are typically flavors that I build on top of because they are supporting rather than starring in the dish or drink.

Small things add up

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Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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There are so many different things I could change in my life that would be improvements. If I were to look at them the way I normally do, I wouldn’t be able to stick to them because I have a problem with that.

For instance, take the idea of “eating better/healthier” and trying to treat that in its entirety as a small improvement. The idea is simple enough to follow and seems like it could be a small thing to do but we often take for granted what our relationship with food is even like. How much thought do you put into what you’re eating?

I’ve gone through different phases of eating healthier and trying do things differently for weight management. I’ve seen success with some, while others I failed miserably with. Although the thought of eating better is simple, it means a change in lifestyle. You have to identify many more changes than you expect when trying to make a “small improvement” related to food. Source and acquisition. Quantities and preparation methods. Storage. So, rather than trying to treat something that is actually much larger as a “small improvement” one thing I’ve been slowly trying to integrate into my life in an attempt to modify my lifestyle towards eating better is simply just “eat some veggies” or “have some fruit” in addition to the other things I eat.

It doesn’t matter that I might be adding more calories to my meals, I just need to add better sources of nutrition to those meals. Then when I’ve made that a consistent thing I can move on to the next small improvement.

Getting my cook on

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What’s your favorite thing to cook?

First off, I’m not a recipe blogger, so I apologize in advance for not giving you all my life story centered around a favorite dish before actually getting to the point.

Recently I’ve taken to cooking something akin to Beef and Broccoli (or is it Beef with Broccoli?)

I found a simple enough recipe for the sauce not too long ago and started making my own version without measuring ingredients, or even having all of them to begin with, and got it down so it’s easy to throw together.

  • 1 or 2 cups Beef stock (I had chicken, which seemed to work just fine)
  • 1 Tbsp Soy sauce
  • 1 or 2 tsp Oyster sauce
  • Cornstarch slurry for thickening

I’m sure I’m missing one or two things but that’s the base of the sauce. Toss all of it except the slurry in a sauce pan, bring to boil, add slurry, simmer until thickened. Easy! Typically I only use a couple spoonfuls of the sauce each time I cook, otherwise everything would end up swimming.

The beef part I’ve been lazy with and just used ground beef. However, in an effort to be ever so slightly healthier, I’m not using any cooking oils for the broccoli and other veggies I decide to throw in the pan. Instead, I happened to have some less lean/kinda fatty ground beef so I just fried up the beef and used the fat that renders out. I was just cooking it as a patty and setting it aside so that I didn’t have to go through the hassle of draining.

For the veggies I was using some combination of onion, potato, and zucchini. The potato, being a starch, was thrown in there so I didn’t need to cook rice. The onion and zucchini were for flavor and to drive a healthier balance to the fatty meat. I just chopped up all three and fried them, adding a pinch of salt.

See? Rather simple recipe, and it’s been something I’ve been able to quickly throw together at home either for lunch or dinner.