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

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!