Sometimes you just have to have fun in the kitchen and try new things.  This week we did a lot of that.  Our experiments included 1) using chickpea water to make an awesome dessert; 2) trying to make tofu tasty and 3) playing around with vegetable scraps.

First, and maybe the coolest: we transformed the water in a can of chickpeas into glossy meringues.

Chickpea water meringues

The steps are shown below, but essentially you drain the water from a can of chickpeas, reserving the chickpeas for later.  You put the chickpea water in a mixer and whip for 10 -15 minutes: it goes from foamy to stiff peaks.  Add in 2 tablespoons of sugar and some vanilla extract and bake in a 250 degree oven for at least an hour and until firm and dry.  And yes, they really do taste like egg white meringues!

Second I (Max) tried cooking with tofu.  First I tasted it: sort of like feta cheese without any taste.  So I decided to add some flavors.  I sauteed red onions in olive oil and then added shredded kale.  After that had cooked a bit, I added the tofu and sauteed for a bit.  I tasted and it definitely still needed flavor.  So I added soy sauce.  Much better.  But it still was a little soft.  Mom suggested pumpkin seeds so I added those and it was delicious.  Mom ate it all!

Tofu with kale, red onion and pumpkin seeds

Third I (Alex) wanted to do something with some leftover vegetable scraps that mom had frozen.  There were cauliflower stems, broccoli stems, red pepper bits, mushroom stocks, onions, cilantro, carrots, lemongrass and probably some other stuff.  Mom suggested I make stock with them and that we save it for a night when were making curry or another Asian inspired dish.  So here’s what we did:

Vegetable Stock

We simmered the vegetables in 4 cups of water for about an hour. Then we let the mix cool slightly.

Asian Vegetable Broth

Then we strained it and this is the final product.  Can’t wait to use it (it has a faintly cilantro/lemongrassy flavor with hints of red pepper) so I am thinking of using it a Thai curry sauce.

Today we were very busy.  We started out by giving Mom breakfast in bed (first we let her go for a run, but then we made her get back in bed).  We made her a yogurt and berry parfait, a banana berry smoothie and included walnut-raspberry rugelach that we had bought at the Farmer’s Market yesterday.  She loved it.  We also got her lilacs, tulips, herb plants and a blue hydrangea plant so she was pretty happy.

Then we came up with our menu for dinner: kale/brussel sprout salad (Mom’s favorite) with filet mignon and mashed potatoes (our favorite) with berries and  home-made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for dessert.  We made the cookies in the afternoon so we wouldn’t have to worry about dessert during dinner. And then, after Max’s soccer game and walking our dog, we started on dinner. The salad is pretty easy–just a lot of chopping.  And for the filet mignon, half we just put salt and pepper on and half we put a Texas Spice Rub (salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and paprika– you can also add ancho chile powder but we didn’t have any.  We grilled the steaks on the stove top and then finished them in the oven.

Here are the cookies:

We’ll add more stuff tomorrow but Mom says it’s time for bed now (and since it’s MOTHER’S DAY we are listening to her for a change:)

We are so excited because we are getting ready to plant our garden upstate.  We have two gardens upstate (protected by tall fences because there are a lot of deer up there).  One is our vegetable garden and the other is our flower/fruit tree garden (sometimes this is just the “weed” garden…we always manage to plant the vegetable garden but once in a while we just get too busy to plant the back garden…this year we are determined to plant both!)

The front garden is completely ready to plant (covered with weed cloth & bricks, and just waiting to make sure no more frost possible); the back garden still needs a little work but Mom said she’d help with that 🙂

We have ordered a lot of great vegetable seeds to plant here: kale, kalediscope carrots, peas, lettuce, pumpkins, zucchini and Yukon gold and fingerling potatoes.  We love growing potatoes because they are so much fun to dig up and we collect all the worms that we find when we dig the potatoes up and then go fishing in our pond with them.  We will also buy local tomato plants to plant when the weather gets warmer.  There is nothing like a fresh tomato from your garden!

Some of the vegetable seeds/plants we ordered today.

For the flower garden, traditionally we have just planted sunflowers.  One year we even made a sunflower maze (see below). But this year we are planting sunflowers (of course), zinnias, delphinium and holly hock. Mom chose most of these flowers this year because she said they reminded her of her family’s garden in Iowa. We also have two apple treas and a peach tree in this garden.

Some of the flowers we ordered today

Sunflower Garden from last year

In the middle of the Sunflower Maze (two years ago)

For tonight’s dinner we tried to use up some ingredients in the fridge to make a side “hash” to accompany one of our favorite meats: lamb loin chops.  We also made couscous and a spinach salad with bacon, tomato and avocado.  The hash was really fun to make: we used a left over baked potato (chopped up), chopped red onion, an orphan chicken sausage and some frozen corn…very tasty.  For the couscous we decided to try cooking it with chicken broth instead of just water.  The broth added a lot of flavor. And for the lamb chops? Just a quick marinade of olive oil, chopped garlic and salt and pepper was all we needed.  We grilled them on top of the stove and then finished them in the oven. Yum.

The full meal

Leftovers for the hash

Chopping onions for the hash

Gently sauteeing the hash

The hash…

Grilling lamb chops — we finished them in the oven

View from the stove

A couple of days ago, Max compared two types of eggs: store-bought, conventional eggs vs. farm-fresh, locally-raised organic eggs.  Click on the link below to see the results…they may surprise you.

Eggx-periment

Hi sorry we haven’t updated for a while but we are on vacation in Colonial Williamsburg. Here we are in the kitchen of the Governor’s Palace, in front of the huge coal oven they had to cook with. And they had no refrigerators, just ice from an ice house! Boy are we lucky to have all the fancy appliances we have now.

Tonight we celebrated the arrival of spring–it’s finally warm out!  We prepared (spring) lamb chops, ramps, couscous and a spinach/arugula salad with avocado, chickpeas, tomatoes and parmesan cheese.  I (Alex) also prepared an appetizer with sauteed chicken liver because I wanted to try cooking them.  Liver is kind of weird looking.   For dessert we had a lot of starburst candy that mom said we couldn’t eat, so we made a starbust trifle.  (We melted the starbust candy with butter, orange juice and cointreau to make a sauce…more below).

Ingredients

For the lamb chops, we put a rub of garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper on them.

Cutting garlic for the rub

Then we grilled them for 3 – 4 minutes a side.

Flipping the lamb

After they had a nice grill mark, we transferred them to the oven at 375° Fahrenheit. Although we had eight of these lollipop lamb chops, everyone was hungry for more after dinner!

We also made a spinach/arugula salad with avocado, chickpeas, tomatoes, chopped almonds and parmesan cheese. We dressed it with a balsamic vinaigrette.

Salad

Ramps are baby leeks–they look sort of like scallions but ramps have bigger leaves and are completely edible. You just have to clean them really well. Mom helped clean them (because she said she didn’t want to eat mud) and then we chopped them into thirds and sauteed them with olive oil and salt and pepper.  We also made couscous.  Then when we plated the lamb chops, we used the ramps as a delicious garnish.

Cleaned ramps

Sauteeing the ramps

Plated entree.

For a special appetizer, I (Alex) wanted to try to cook chicken liver. Oooooh…it looked really weird (kind of like a brain).  I sauteed it in olive oil with a little garlic and salt and pepper.  Then I toasted some bread, drizzled it with olive oil and put the liver on top of the bread.  We all tried it but I think Koko (our dog) liked it best.

Cooking the liver.

Liver bruschetta anyone?

For dessert, I (Alex) improvised with frozen french toast sticks, oranges, almonds, raspberries and starburst candy (we had about 100 starburst candies and mom said we couldn’t eat them, so I decided to try to make them into dessert.)  I decided to make a “trifle” with the french toast being the cake. Trifle is a layered dessert usually made up of pieces of cake soaked in rum or sherry, then custard or whipped cream, fruit or jam, more whipped cream and then whatever you like on top…shaved chocolate, nuts…  I melted down the starbust candies with butter, orange juice and cointreau to make a liquid to soak the cut-up french toast in. I also added a little rum (carefully. I turned off the heat first!)  I put the french toast (and this liquid) at the bottom of the trifle, then I added fresh raspberries. Then I added whipped cream and I topped it with chopped almonds and the zest of an orange.  Pretty good use of starbursts if I do say so myself…

Melting the starburst candy in orange juice and Cointreau

I added a little more rum to make the sauce less sticky.

Layering in the raspberries

Starburst Trifle

Today for brunch we tried another recipe from the cook book United Tastes of Texas (thanks again Jay and Jean!).  We made Chilaquiles (pronounced chill-ay-kee-us).  Sort of like nachos with a fried egg on top? So so yummy! Especially with avocado on the side.

Here’s a photo…we will add the how-to later (we have to go to a soccer game now)

Chilaquiles Plated!

(Back from soccer.) Here are the ingredients. There were a lot of steps but they were easy (and worth it):

First you sautee onion and garlic; then you add canned tomatoes (we also added fresh grated tomatoes). If you have a halepeno pepper, and like the heat, chop that and add it in too. Then you layer corn tortilla chips in a dish and spoon the tomato/onion mix on top.  Add grated cheese (we added a combo of cheddar, jarlsberg, gruyere and cojitia but use whatever you like) and bake for 20 minutes.

Finally fry a few eggs and put them on top.  Garnish with avocado,cilantro…whatever you have in the fridge and want to eat:). Dad added hot sauce but he adds that to everything.

Chilaquiles Plated!

Tonight we wanted to try out some recipes from a great cook book called United Tastes of Texas by Jessica Dupuy.  (Our good friends Jay and Jean Hendrix (Texans, of course) gave this book to us last week.)  There are so many great recipes that it was hard to choose but we settled on Texas Strip Steaks (with a special Texas Meat Rub); Tomato, Avocado and Cotija Salad; Tomatillo Salsa and good ol’ mashed potatoes.  Because Alex had a late soccer practice, Mom helped me out (she’s a pretty good sous chef…almost as good as Alex;).  Everything was delicious.  Thanks Jay and Jean!

The full dinner

The ingredients

To make this dinner I (Max) started by making the dry Texas Meat Rub.  I combined garlic powder, onion powder, ancho chili powder, paprika, salt and pepper.  Then I rubbed it into the steaks, washed my hands, and let the steak rest at room temperature for 1 hour.

Making the spice rub

The Spice Rub

Spice-rubbed steaks

Meanwhile I started on the tomatillo salsa.  I peeled the tomatillos and then simmered them with 1 jalapeno pepper until they were tender. I let that cool and then blended it with garlic, lime juice and spinach (the recipe calls for cilantro but mom couldn’t find it in the grocery store).   Then I added the blended mix back to the saucepan and simmered until it thickened up…finally a little bit of salt and then plated it.

Peeling the tomatillos

Blending tomatillo salsa ingredients

Tomatillo Salsa!

Once the salsa was done, I prepped my salad ingredients and cooked my potatoes for mashed potatoes. Then it was time to grill the steaks.  I grilled them on top of the stove on my grill pan to get some good grill marks and then I finished them in the oven.  While the steaks were finishing, I put together the salad. I combined quartered plum tomatoes and cubed avocado with garlic, lime juice and olive oil.  I let that sit and then put it on a bed of spinach and crumbled Cotija cheese (sort of like a mild feta) on top.  The recipe didn’t call for it but I added roasted papita seeds to add crunch.  It was delicious.

Finally the steaks were ready to serve! And it was time to eat.  Thanks again, Jay and Jean.

Here is our updated post for Sunday Night.  We made pizza two ways (Max’s way and Alex’s way), we made a shrimp appetizer two ways (Alex’s way and Max’s way) and we made dessert: ONE WAY…if you are making chocolate chip cookies, you don’t need to do it two ways. One way is yummy enough!  The good thing about making two pizzas is that we had left over for Monday night.  Here are the pizzas:

Tonight I (Alex) made white pizza (as you can see below). Half of the pizza was just fresh mozzarella cheese, while the other half was mozarella cheese, mushrooms AND truffle salt. We pressed and kneaded the pizza dough as thin as possible and then cooked it for 10 minutes at 500 degrees before we put toppings on it because otherwise the toppings make the pizza soggy.

White pizza with truffled mushrooms

Alex adding mozarella to the pizza.

Tonight I (Max) made pizza (as you can see below).  I made a easy tomato sauce (minced garlic and tomatoes), spread that on the pizza then put shredded fresh mozarella on top. When it came out of the oven, I put fresh basil on it.

Max’s take on a margerita pizza (tomato sauce with fresh mozarella and basil)

Max putting tomato sauce on pizza

Shrimp & Asparagus appetizers (2 ways). Today for an appetizer mom gave us 4 mystery ingredients: shrimp, asparagus, roasted almonds & lemons. Alex made a salad with arugula, asparagus, shrimp, tomatoes chopped almonds & a lemon-olive oil dressing. Max, on the other hand, made a shrimp & asparagus bruschetta. First, he sauteed the shrimp and steamed the asparagus. Then he toasted 4 pieces of bread and squeezed some lemon juice into the shrimp. Then, he cut up the almonds and took the bread out of the toaster. He then placed the cooked shrimp on the bread and drizzled the olive oil from the saute pan on the bread, and placed the asparagus on top. Then, he sprinkled salt and pepper on top of the bread. (Boy, is it hard to refer to yourself in third person!)

Appetizer ingredients: lemons, asparagus, shrimp and almonds

Shrimp & Asparagus appetizers (2 ways): Bruschetta or Arugula salad

Finally for dessert we had a classic: chocolate chip cookies (we made them earlier).  We also made a few ice cream sandwiches to add variety.  All we had to do was let some vanilla ice cream soften and then put a scoop between two cookies.

Homemade Ice Cream Sandwich

Dessert: Classic Chocolate Chip cookies.