On Saturday we knew we would not have a lot of time on Sunday to make dinner (because of soccer games and because we were going to see STAR WARS) , so we started cooking on Saturday. We made two types of turkey chili, one with beans and one without beans because some people don’t like beans. We cooked the chili in a slow cooker on high for 4 hours. Then we put it in the fridge over night. For dessert we made lemon sorbet using fresh lemons with a simple syrup of sugar and water and lemons that we juiced. Then we cooked rice in a rice slow cooker. For sides for the chili we had guacamole, grated gruyere cheese, grated cheddar cheese, and sour cream. We forgot about the salad till the end and by that time we saw pancetta in the fridge, so we cut it up and cooked it in olive oil. Knowing that pine nuts go really well with pancetta, we than sauteed them in the same pan as the pancetta. We got all the mixed greens we had (spinach and arugula) and used it as the base of the salad. We put the pancetta and pine nuts in and then added goat cheese. Using the leftover olive oil from sauteeing the pancetta, we made a warm salad dressing with some sherry vinegar. It was a perfect balance of heavy food (chili) and light food (salad and lemon sorbet), and just the meal to get us into holiday spirit.
All of the ingredients for the chili
Chopping onions for the chili.
Adding the beans into the slow cooker.
Adding sugar to the simple syrup.
Lemons.
Juicing the lemons.
The sorbet’s final product!!
Final Dinner!
Help us X out hunger!
We believe in cooking for a cause: we love to cook and have plenty to eat but millions of kids don’t have enough food so we want to raise money and awareness about the issue of worldwide hunger. We were lucky enough to win $35,000 last summer and donated $11,666 to Action Against Hunger, an international charity dedicated to saving the lives of malnourished children, while helping vulnerable communities become self sufficient. Just $45 can save a live by providing a malnourished child with treatment. Please consider donating to this great charity–we did a lot of research and they are a 4 Star charity according to Charity Navigator! We are each donating $45 to Action Against Hunger from our allowance charity jar and will probably convince our parents to donate more…
THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO DONATED! EVEN THOUGH ITS THE NEW YEAR, ITS NOT TOO LATE TO DONATE…FOLLOW THIS LINK TO DO SO Donate: https://goo.gl/cVNjUH
Time to empty your charity jar!
This is the dessert we were going to make on Monday, December 14, before the Gingerbread Adventure occurred. Wow! it is so good and so simple!! I think that this rivals our chocolate fudge brownies. And the amazing thing is that there are only four ingredients (chocolate, butter, eggs and raspberries…oh and a pinch of salt but that doesn’t count). Here is the finished product:
Chocolate Mousse Cake with raspberries
The first oozy slice!
And here are the illustrated instructions (this recipe is based on a recipe in Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes For Teen Chefs, by Rozanne Gold, but her recipe called for butter and olive oil and that seemed strange to us, so we did some research and decided we could probably increase the butter and eliminate the olive oil. Her recipe also called for orange zest, but we didn’t have any oranges so we decided to skip it–tasted amazing without it.
The ingredients…
Here’s what you need: 4 extra large eggs, 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, 12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, and raspberries to garnish (and pinch of salt)
Here’s what you do:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butter and chocolate on low heat till smooth. Set aside to let cool.
Butter and chocolate melting
Beat the 4 eggs on high for approximately 8 minutes (they should triple in volume); you can add a pinch of salt: Note you beat the whole egg…don’t have to separate them.
Beaten eggs.
Butter an 8 inch pan and line it with a circle of parchment paper or foil. Combine the cooled chocolate mix with the eggs, beat on low till smooth.
Cake: prebake
Put the cake into a 375 degree oven. Cook for 18 minutes (middle should still be soft). Don’t over cook.
Into the Oven!
Let cake cool 10-15 minutes: put plate on top and flip to get out of pan, then use another pan to flip again (foil lining stays on the bottom.)
Fresh out of the oven
Place fresh raspberries on top. It’s probably pretty good without the raspberries but the contrast in taste between the chocolate and the berries is delicious.
Finishing touches: Adding fresh raspberries to the cake
And we are back to where we started! Time to eat
Today our weekly dinner was Monday night, instead of Sunday (busy holiday weekend) and we made a side of wild mushroom fettucine with our version of chicken parmesan (oven-roasted chicken served along side oven-roasted tomatoes) but the real story was our Gingerbread Adventure. We were inspired by our trip to Gingerbread Lane at the New York Hall of Science to make a Gingerbread house from scratch. But we probably should have taken one of the classes they were offering…because ours didn’t turn out quite like theirs.
We made gingerbread dough and cut out the walls and roofs and roof supports (we traced out patterns on paper and laid the paper as a guide on the rolled out gingerbread dough). Once the gingerbread was baked and cooled, we made a very stiff royal icing (but maybe not quite stiff enough) and proceeded to construct the house…it took a long time because we had to hold the sides together until the icing hardened. Here are some photos of the process; but keep reading down below for the full story:
Baked Gingerbread house pieces
Making the royal icing
Royal Icing!! (aka edible cement)
The four walls…
The roof: we had a small crack so fixed it with our royal icing. The coffee cans are holding roof together till icing dries
Success! or so we thought…
So we were pretty happy with the house. and took a break to let it dry so we could make dinner. While we we working on dinner, however, catastrophe struck!. The roof caved in and the walls buckled out. Clearly we had not built our house to the exacting NYC housing code. We managed to salvage the house, and rebuild, but now it is a Gingerbread Bungalow. Mom says we can make more royal icing, cover the house like stucco, decorate, and it will be the new thing in Gingerbread building. Stay tuned to see how that works out.
Gingerbread Bungalow!
Flat-roofed gingerbread house—best for earthquake zones.
Oh and dinner was good too. We expanded on our mushroom challenge, and cooked chopped shitake, chanterelle, cremini and button mushrooms in butter and truffle salt and served over fresh fettucine. We also practiced our plating skills with the chicken parmesan. Mom practiced her video skills. She needs more practice than we do
Wild mushroom fettucine
PS: here’s what the final gingerbread bungalow looked like:
Regardless of how it looked, it tasted yummy.
Last night we decided to have a mushroom challenge to determine which type of mushroom, chanterelles or shitakes, tasted better. We cleaned and sliced the mushrooms, sauteed them in butter, sprinkled them with a little truffle salt and served them on toasted bread that we had lightly rubbed with cut garlic. Then we tasted …. the conclusion? we liked the TASTE of shitakes best but we liked the TEXTURE and feel of the chanterelles better than the shitakes. Our solution: combine both types of mushrooms (see photo below) to make the perfect wild mushroom bruschetta. Also, the bruschetta tasted better when we didn’t rub the toasted bread with garlic…the garlic tended to overwhelm the mushrooms. We added a little basil for color.
Chanterelle-Shitake Bruschetta
Golden chanterelles vs. Brown shitakes
Tonight Grandpa Bob and Ann were coming to dinner so mom asked us to make braised lamb shanks for them. We made it the day before (Saturday) so it could sit overnight. It seems to tasted better that way because the flavors mix better. It is also easier to skim the extra fat off the top if its been in the fridge for a few hours. We served the lamb shanks over couscous and also made an arugula salad with goat cheese, toasted pine nuts and thin slices of ham. We wanted to use proscuitto but mom forgot to buy some. The ham was pretty good on the salad (proscuitto would have been better). For dessert we made blueberry crisp–we used up the last of the berries we had picked last summer and frozen. Max followed the recipe exactly and it was really good because he added a little lemon (per the recipe) to the blueberries (along with a little sugar). The lemon made the blueberries taste brighter–more blueberry like.
Lamb shank on couscous
Arugula, goat cheese, toasted pine nut & ham salad
Blueberry crisp
Chopping onions for lamb braise (goggles required)
Cooking down the onions, carrots, celery, etc. for the braising liquid
Finishing touches on the salad
Best part of making dinner: eating it!
Today I gave the kids a mystery box. It had shrimp, rice noodles, onions (garlic, red onion or green onions), vegetables (spinach, tomato or peas) and a few random additions (coconut milk, basil, a half bottle of champagne). I told them they had to make a main course using the 1) shrimp, 2) rice noodles, 3) one of the onion ingredients, 4)one of the vegetable ingredients and 5) one of the random ingredients (and any basic ingredients from the pantry…like olive oil, salt, pepper that they wanted). This is what they came up with:
Max: I made a shrimp tomato sauce for my rice noodles. First I started the water for the rice noodles (we weren’t sure how to cook them but putting them in hot water seemed a good start). Then I sauteed chopped garlic in olive oil. ( In between all of this, Alex and I checked on the water, added the rice noodles and let them soften.) For my sauce, I added vine tomatoes that I had quartered to the garlic and let soften. The sauce seemed a little dry, so I added some champagne. Finally I added the shrimp. I flipped the shrimp after three minutes and then put the shrimp/tomato sauce on the rice noodles and added basil for seasoning.
Alex: I was inspired to do an Asian-style meal by reading the suggested uses on the coconut milk. I decided to make a shrimp coconut curry. First I sauteed chopped garlic in olive oil. Then I added some sliced cherry tomatoes to the pan. And then I added the coconut milk and let it simmer for 5 minutes. It tasted a little tart, so I added some brown sugar. (We didn’t have any curry powder, but I still liked the taste) I added the peas and then the shrimp. At the end I added a few green onions. To serve it, I put it over the rice noodles and added a few basil leaves and more green onions.
We also made a quick salad of the spinach, tomatoes, green onions and some avocado we had in the fridge. We liked our dishes (and mom and dad did too) but we decided we needed to work a little bit on how to cook rice noodles (ours tasted a little like clear rubber bands).
For desert, we made one of our favorites: fudge brownies, but we topped it with M&Ms that we saved from Halloween (mom put them in the freezer to stay fresh.)
Mystery box of ingredients
Alex cooking her coconut milk shrimp
Max softening his tomatoes for his shrimp dish
Max’s dish: shrimp with tomato, garlic, basil on rice noodles.
Alex’s dish: shrimp with coconut milk, peas, tomatoes and garnished with basil and green onions.
Spinach salad
Brownies with M&Ms. Be sure to put the M&Ms on when brownies just out of the oven so they melt a little.
Tonight we had an ambitious main course: duck ragu. We served it with fresh pasta and an arugula, proscuitto, goat cheese and pine nut salad. For extra flavor, we sauteed the pine nuts in the duck fat. Making the duck ragu was A LOT of work. First we had to get the skin and fat off the duck legs and thighs. That took almost an hour. Then we had to brown the duck, take the duck out of the pan, cook the other ingredients, add the duck back, cook for an hour, take the duck out AGAIN and remove the duck from the bones, add the duck back to the pan and cook some more (see below for photos of all the steps). The end result was worth it. Dad said it was one of the best meals we’d made. For dessert we had chocolate chip cookie bars. They are like chocolate chip cookies but they hold up better, especially if you pack them in lunches. Just don’t leave them on your kitchen counter too long because they might disappear (like some of ours did)…
The full meal: duck ragu with fresh pasta; arugula, proscuitto, goat cheese and pine nut salad
The arugula, goat cheese, proscuitto, pine nut salad
Ingredients for duck ragu (including dried porcini mushrooms)
Cutting the fat off the dug legs and thighs (with our new kitchen shears)
Finally most of the fat is gone from the duck
Browning the duck
After removing the duck, sauteeing onions, carrots and garlic
Adding more ingredients: tomatoes, red wine, chicken broth and dried porcini mushrooms
Now we add the duck back in.
After you add the duck back in to mix and let simmer, you have to take it out again, let cool and pull the duck off the bone…once you add that back in, and let cook some more, you finally have Duck Ragu!
Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars…putting them on the counter before dinner was a mistake (somebody snacked on them).
For this meal,we prepared for the cold winter in front of us by preparing a classic Winter Meal. We made an endive Salad with fancy greens, walnuts and cranberries, goat cheese, maple vinaigrette, and “Turkey Pasta” (turkey cut into long, thin strips). The maple syrup vinaigrette was so good! You could almost eat it without the salad. Our main course was a Shepherd’s Pie (with ground lamb, carrots peas and mashed potatoes). For dessert we made an Apple Tart. We used puff pastry and then layered apples that had been tossed with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter. We also were lucky to host Laura, an OPERA singer, for dinner. She liked the maple vinaigrette too.
Mom’s note: the kids used their new knives tonight for the first time. Please beware! Most of us don’t have that sharp knives (I certainly don’t) so new knives (or just sharpened knives) are much quicker to cut through everything (including little fingers) so be careful.
Endive salad and shepherd’s pie.
Peeling potatoes for shepherd’s pie crust
Peeling More Potatoes (into our compost bag)
Group chopping of carrots
Sauteeing onion and carrots for shepherd’s pie
Adding lamb to onion and carrots
Alex’s turn to sautee
Adding peas…ready for mashed potato topping
Shepherd’s pie fresh out of the oven
Puff pastry apple tarts…before the puff!
Finished apple tart with whipped cream. Yum!
With our guest, OPERA Singer, Laura Krumm!!!
Today we made dinner for our mom’s book club. Because some of the members are vegetarian, we decided to do a completely vegetarian meal. For starters we made tomato bruschetta. For the meal, we made: butternut squash soup (served with crème fraiche and pumpkin seeds on the side); a hearty chickpea, tomato, mozzarella, pesto salad; and a traditional Greek salad. We also made garlic croutons for the soup or just to munch on. For dessert we served one of the pies we had made the night before with Taka, along with chocolate chip cookies. We did most of the work beforehand so as not to disturb the book club, but we did make the bruschetta right when the book club arrived….it’s better served fresh.
(Mom said the green skull candles were a good touch since the book club was reading Strangers on A Train, where 2 people are murdered.)
The full meal…
Soup and croutons
Tomato bruschetta
Chickpea salad
The hardest part of making butternut squash soup? Peeling the squash!!
Whew! It’s peeled. Now we just have to chop it!
Chopped butternut squash and onions…
Immersion Blender. Great invention.
Read to serve
