Welcome to KidsCookDinner.com.  To learn more about our website and how my brother Max and I started cooking, scroll down a few posts.  To find out what I (Alex) am cooking, please stay right here.

Today I felt like New York bagels but we are not in NYC so I decided to make my own.  Ingredients are pretty simple: flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar, and luckily we had some good toppings in the cupboard (sesame seeds and Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel mix).

The process isn’t difficult but there are quite a few steps.  The first one was to proof the yeast by combining it with warm water and sugar.  This usually takes about 5 minutes, so while that was going on, I combined the flour and salt and made a well for the yeast mixture.

Once the 5 minutes as up and the yeast was activated, I poured it into the dry mix.

Then I had to mix everything together and knead the dough for 10 minutes.  It was very stiff: I got a good arm workout!

After that, I let the dough rise till it doubled (about an hour) and then punched it down.  That was satisfying.

Then I split the dough into 8 pieces, rolled each one into a ball, and then made a hole in the center of each ball to make the bagel shape.

The next step was weird but apparently essential: I cooked each bagel in boiling water for 1 minute each side.

After that, it was time to top them (with sesame or everything bagel mix) and put in the oven to bake.

20 minutes later, I had fresh NYC bagels!

Tonight Alex and I wanted to try to recreate one of our favorite meals from Trader Joes: Lemon-Rosemary Marinated Chicken and finally cook the potatoes from our garden (we also harvested rosemary from the garden for the chicken).  Ingredients are simple: for the chicken, you need: melted butter, rosemary and lemon; for the potatoes, add butter and milk (or cream if you have it.)

First step was to wash the chicken and make sure there was nothing in there (sometimes giblets/livers are in there) so after I got the chicken out of its plastic covering…harder than it looks, I put on my gloves to clean and wash the chicken.  (And there were giblets in there…took those out). Not a fan.

Then it was time to chop the rosemary, melt the butter, squeeze lemon into the butter and add salt and pepper. Alex helped out with the lemon and finishing up the basting sauce.

Then it was time to baste the chicken all over with the lemon-rosemary-butter mix.  Alex handled that while I started peeling potatoes.

We both ended up peeling the potatoes, and then put them in a pot of water to wait to cook.  The chicken had to cook for at least an hour so we didn’t want to start them to early.

After the chicken had cooked 30 minutes, we started the potatoes and when they were fork tender, I started to mash them, with butter, salt, pepper and cream.

After about an hour, the chicken was done so we served it up with the mashed potatoes. Mom made a quick arugula tomato salad with tomatoes and avocado to round out the plate.

Everything was delicious, however, I think we should have marinated the chicken in olive oil, rosemary, and lemon before we cooked it.  Our version tasted good but didn’t have quite the same flavor as Trader Joes.

Today I (Alex) woke up with a yearning for tiramisu.  I convinced Max that we needed to make it and then convinced my mom to drive to the closest grocery store to get the ingredients.   Tiramisu is a coffee-flavored dessert made up of ladyfingers dipped in coffee with layers of a whipped mixture of cream, vanilla, sugar, and mascarpone cheese, with cocoa powder sprinkled on top.  (Ladyfingers and mascarpone cheese are not something we usually have in our pantry, so that’s why I needed mom’s help.)  Here are the ingredients:

So the first step was to whip the cream, sugar, and mascarpone cheese together.

The next step was to soak the ladyfingers in coffee (the recipe called for coffee and coffee liqueur, but my mom nixed the liqueur.)

Then it was time to layer: first the soaked ladyfingers, then the whipped mix, then ladyfingers, then whipped mix, and then, finally cocoa powder on top.

Then we had to let it sit for four hours. (Are you kidding me?) we definitely cut that timeline short to try it.

Delicious!