Tonight some of our friends came over and we had a pumpkin pie baking class from Chef Taka.  We had a lot of fun with our friends (maybe too much fun) and made 4 pies. While the pies were baking, we carved faces into acorn squashes. Then we rinsed the squash seeds really well and sautéed them in a hot pan with a lot of olive oil.  The cooked seeds tasted a lot better than the roasted pumpkin seeds we made last week.  They were a lot more cooked (and we used more oil which gave them more flavor).  Thanks Taka — both for showing us how to make pie and for improving our method of cooking squash (or pumpkin) seeds!

A couple of tips we learned while making pumpkin pie.  The recipe is really easy and is almost always on the can of pumpkin filling you buy.  But these three tips will help make the pies better.

1. Put the pie pan on a rimmed cookie sheet.  Then put the filling in the pie and then put the cookie sheet (with the pie) in the oven.  The filling is very runny until it cooks and its easy to spill. If it spills on the cookie sheet, no big deal, but if spills on the floor or in the oven, mom gets mad. Plus its easier to pull out the cookie sheet with the pie on it than just pull out the pie.

2. You have to let the pie sit for at least 2 hours before you eat it.  Otherwise its not set. ‘

3. (Most important), serve pie with fresh whipped cream.

Chef Taka setting up the ingredients for our class.

Discussing the various steps of pie making

Alex and Alexis hard at work.

The finished products!

Sauteeing the squash seeds…better than roasting them.

For this meal, we decided to get into Fall Spirit with pumpkin pie for dessert. The main course was ravioli, with two possible sauces, butter or a simple tomato/garlic sauce. Ali had the great idea to incorporate a cheese plate with roasted pumpkin seeds from our carved pumpkins into the meal (as an appetizer). We snacked on it throughout the meal prep.  We also made a corn, tomato and avocado salad, inspired by a healthy kids recipe that can be found on a website lower down on the page (in post No .28), although we change the recipe a little…adding bacon for example. Not quite so healthy but delish.  We also love the bright colors of the salad. One of our favorite fall side dishes, is, as shown in many previous posts… Apple Sauce!

Full Dinner!

Corn, tomato, avocado salad (with a little bacon:)

Cheese plate appetizer with cranberries and homemade roasted pumpkin seeds

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Peeling Apples (Koko supervising)

Applesauce with cinnamon

Mincing garlic with our new garlic press

Cooking simple tomato sauce for cheese ravioli (just tomato, garlic and olive oil)

Mixing the filling for pumpkin pie

Pumpkin pie, before baking

Pumpkin pie, just out of the oven

We decided that to be better chefs we needed our own set of “good” knives and so we decided to spend some of our prize money to go knife shopping.  We went to Sur la Table in Soho and a great knife expert, Vicki, showed us several options. We ended up each buying a 6 inch chef knife, a small pairing knife, a small serrated knife (for cutting tomatoes and other soft fruit or vegetables), a pair of kitchen shears (that can even cut through chicken bones) and a case to keep them in.  We also bought a garlic press because mincing garlic takes a long time. We didn’t get a big bread knife because we have two at home, so we really didn’t need those.  But the case has room to add more knives eventually. Vicki explained what to use the knives for, the best way to cut things, how to “hone” the knives and was super friendly.  Thanks Vicki and Sur la Table!

Checking out the knives at Sur la Table

Our Tough Chef stance, with knife expert, Vicki

Our new knives!

Tonight we were inspired by a website called feedfeed.info/Healthy-Kids-Recipes that our friend (and amazing cook/photographer) Christine Wong mentioned to us.  We made turkey sloppy joes, lemon-dill-quinoa-chickpea salad and sweet potato and regular potato oven-roasted fries. We also made apple pie that we decorated with pastry pumpkins, bats and stars. The apple pie was NOT from the website but it was still delicious. What we are liking now is playing around with recipes…changing things a little . For example, we weren’t sure that we would like the taste of Worcestershire sauce (an ingredient in the sloppy joes) so we only added half the amount. Then we added a little more. We also suspected that the amount of tomatoes in the sloppy joes might overpower the turkey, sp we only added 2/3 of the suggested amount of tomatoes (STILL TOO MUCH).

It was also fun to cook the quinoa. It starts off as a tiny seed and then when it cooks, it opens up and a tiny sprout comes out and curls around. We liked it but it definitely needs to have other stuff with it.  It was good in the salad but by itself it was a little bland.  Next time we are going to try it with chunks of avocado and maybe corn.

Full dinner

Cutting onion for sloppy joes and potatoes for oven roasted fries

Fries ready to go in oven

Ingredients for sloppy joes, grated carrots, onions, garlic, turkey & tomatoes

Cooking sloppy joes

Final product…sloppy joes

Cooked quinoa

Lemon-dill-quinoa-chickpea salad

Cutting apples for pie

Cutting slit in pie crust so steam can escape

Pie about to go in oven

Baked Apple Pie!

Tonight we made roast boneless leg of lamb, roasted asparagus with gruyere cheese, boiled fingerling potatoes with melted raclette cheese on the side and a tomato/avocado/bacon salad on butter lettuce.  Mom also made sweet potato and parsnip fries as a side because we had some left-over sweet potatoes and parsnips.  Our friend Wyeth helped out, especially with the marinade for the lamb, and he and his mom brought us delicious pastries for dessert from Eric Kayser (our favorites were the apple tarts and the chocolate eclairs).   The dinner was really good but Max thought the lamb was almost too sweet (it was very tender compared to, for example, lamb chops–melting in your mouth).  We also had to put it back in the oven because even though the meat thermometer said it was cooked, it seemed really rare when we cut into it.

Full Dinner

Butter lettuce (also known as Boston lettuce)

Tomato/avocado/bacon salad

Snapping asparagus stems.. cleaning fingerling potatoes

Asparagus–pre roasting

Roasted Asparagus

Lam Roast resting (with Halloween decorations:)

Tonight we made pasta all’Amatriciana and an arugula salad with roasted root vegetables with a dijon mustard-maple syrup-sherry vinaigrette. We made the pasta because we wanted to make a simple pasta that was a little different from our usual tomato sauce.  This one is different because you start by sauteeing pancetta (thick bacon), and then add onions, before adding tomatoes.  It has a deeper (almost sweeter) taste than just tomato sauce.  (Special thanks to Mark Bittman’s Quick and Easy Recipes for the recipe.) We chose the root vegetable salad because we wanted to take advantage of the fall vegetables, plus we could make extra oven-roasted french fries for us at the same time.  The salad was good but we all decided it would have been better with a little goat cheese (wouldn’t everything?).

For dessert we decided to try to make apple roses based on a video we saw on TV. Ours weren’t we quite as pretty as the ones  on the video, but they still tasted terrific, especially when we added fresh whipped cream.  We also got to experiment with puff pastry (we didn’t make it; we bought it frozen and then let it thaw).  Puff pastry is fun to work with if you don’t have to make it from scratch.

The full dinner (except for the apple roses:)

Arugula salad with root vegetable fries and pepitas.

Side of home- made roasted fries

Apple roses…baked!

Roasted sweet potato, yukon gold potato and parsnip fries

Pasta all’Amatriciana

The steps of making apple roses:

1. Slice apples for apple roses

2.Squeeze lemon juice for apple slices to soak in (with a  bowl of water)

3. Roll puff pastry out before cutting into six strips

Layer apple slices on puff pastry, fold bottom layer of pastry over bottom of apples, sprinkle with cinnamon, roll up

Bake rolled up apple roses at 375 for 35 minutes.

For tonight’s meal, I (Max) chose to make a chicken/chorizo/seafood paella, an avocado, tomato salad with lemons, and cooked apples with cinnamon sugar and vanilla ice cream (the ice cream was store-bought). I chose to make paella after watching Bobby Flay make it on America’s  Worst Cooks, as a demonstration for all the contestants to follow. I am also studying Spanish in school and I thought it would be cool to explore that culture at a Sunday Night Dinner.  Apples were not only a major component in today’s dinner, but also a major component for today’s breakfast. We devoured cooked cinnamon apples for breakfast (in crepes–thanks Mom), making two great meals a little better.

Although Bobby Flay made the paella look simple, it was actually a lot of work.  It wasn’t hard…just lots of steps: marinating the chicken, cleaning the seafood (especially scrubbing the clams), cooking the ingredients in steps: first chorizo sausage, then the chicken, then the onions and garlic, then the tomatoes and rice and saffron and chicken broth..before adding in the chicken and chorizo, and then shrimp and clams, and finally peas. Whew. But it was worth it.

Paella! with chicken, shrimp, chorizo sausage, clams and vegetables

Spice rub for chicken (for paella)

Chicken with paprika/oregano spice rub

Cuttingonions. (Even though they were sweet onions, we had to wear goggles to cut them)

Scrubbing the little neck clams for paella

Browning chicken (after browning the chorizo)

Rice, onions, garlic, saffron and tomato simmering

Avocado/Tomato Salad with olive oil & lemon

Cooking cinnamon apples

Apples cooked with cinnamon and butter

Cinnamon apples with ice cream (not homemade this time but still delish)

Tonight we were inspired by a cook book called Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs (by Rozanne Gold and her team).   We decided to make the cook book’s versions of some of our favorites, including Chicken Parm with roasted tomatoes, Eggless Caesar salad with walnuts and green apple croutons, and Roasted Pears with maple syrup (for dessert).  We of course changed the recipes a little bit and we also cooked fresh fettucine and green peas we had picked and frozen from our garden.  Mom said it was the best Chicken Parm she had ever had, and we especially liked making it because it wasn’t that complicated (and didn’t take hours and hours).  Here are some photos.  (By the way the roasted pears are SO easy…anyone could make them.)

Parmesan crusted chicken and grape tomatoes about to go in the oven.

Roasted grape tomatoes (about to be served)

Chicken parm (fresh mozarella added at the last minute…yum!)

Caesar salad with walnuts, fresh parmesan and granny smith croutons

The full meal.

The steps of making roasted pears: peel and half just-ripe pears; remove core and seeds, place in baking dish and squeeze lime over them. Break cinnamon sticks in half and place between each pear half and then pour 1/3-1/2 cup real maple syrup over them. Bake for 30-40 minutes at 400 degrees (or until tender when poked with a fork), turning once or twice and basting with maple syrup.   Remove pears from baking pan, discard cinnamon sticks and pour maple syrup juices from the pan over the pears. Serve with yogurt, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream…or just eat plain. Note: even if your pears aren’t ripe this works.  You just may have to cook them a little longer. Full list of ingredients is 3 pears, 1 lime, 6 cinnamon sticks, 1/2 cup maple syrup.

We had the day off from school on Wednesday, Sept. 23 so we visited our local Farmer’s Market (on Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan) with our mom.  We went there to give them our compost but the amazing fruit and vegetables inspired us to make a Farmer’s Market Lunch, primarily using ingredients from the Market.   It was simple but delicious and was based on the pears, tomatoes, mushrooms and corn on the cob we bought.  We added a few things we had at home and made a walnut, goat cheese, pear salad with the pears (and also had the pears for dessert), sauteed the mushrooms in butter and had them on sliced french bread, boiled the corn (it was super tender) and just sliced the tomatoes and drizzled them with extra virgin olive oil and a little salt and pepper.

Farmer’s Market Bounty

Slicing mushrooms

Slicing Tomatoes

Tomatoes with EVO, salt & pepper…all you need

Pear, walnut and goat cheese salad

Ready to eat!

For tonight’s dinner, we celebrated Max’s birthday (a little late, and for a second time).  We made braised lamb shanks but we started the day before because it needs to cook for a long time (we make it in a slow cooker) and it tastes better if it sits for a while. We used lamb shanks AND extra lamb stew meat because when we made it before we didn’t think there was quite enough meat.  Also if you let it sit for a while in the fridge after its cooked, then the fat comes to the top, solidifies and is easy to scoop out (then you reheat it).  Max helped out with the braised lamb shanks but then Alex took over because she wanted the rest of the meal to be a surprise for his birthday.  Alex made couscous, pear-walnut-goat cheese-cranberry salad, peas (from the garden), baked brie and his favorite brownies for dessert.  We also tried the Vin Santo (sweet wine) we had brought back from Santorini, Greece.

Alex thought it was amazing how much the couscous changed when it was cooked with water; “it starts out as these tiny, hard grains and then changes into large fluffy ones.”  It’s also very easy to make. Just boil water, add the couscous and let sit for 5 minutes.

Max thought it was amazing how the wine gave the braised lamb so much flavor although the amount of wine added was tiny compared to the other ingredients (in the braised lamb shanks).

Here are some photos:

Sitting down for dinner! Yum!

Chopping carrots, celery and onions for lamb shank braise

Chopping garlic for lamb shank braise

Sauteing vegetables for lamb shank braise

Red wine for braise

Browned lamb

All the ingredients in the slow cooker…cooks for 8 hours

Lamb after 8 hours

Making pear, mache, goat cheese, walnut, cranberry salad

Baked Brie

Beating eggs and sugar for brownies

Fudge Brownies (our favorite)

VinSanto from Santorini, Greece (great with brownies)