MADCookie

Experimenting tonight: I made Australian pancakes from my Joy cookbook and granola bars from my May Food Network magazine.

Australian Pancakes

  These were fun to make. They are basically individual meringue globs fried in butter then baked. They were airy and delicious, but I was the only one who thought the latter.

Granola Bars

Recipe:

GranolaBars.txt (1.68 kb)

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Incredible! I just made this tonight and it is incredible!

http://www.amishmart.com/recipe-p10002.html

I have a few differences.

1) I made a bunch more of the cinnamon mixture

2) Spread some in the bottom of the bowl that was going to receive the popped corn

3) I made the corn just like I normally do kettle. I put in white sugar and when it started to pop again, then I added the remain cinnamon mixture. This means the corn was popping in a cinnamon sugar pot.

4) I pour the popped corn in the bowl that had the cinnamon and then I tossed it all together.

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In Good Eats, Alton Brown used a sponge to make his white bread. He said it would help develop flavor. So I did the same. I follow Alton's techniques, but Joy of Cooking's recipes.

Sponge
yields 1 cup
1/2 C water
1/2 t yeast
3/4 C flour

Alton's technique is to use mix this together and store in the refrigerator overnight. So I did.

Bread
1 C sponge
2 C water. Tip: if using sponge from refrigerator, then use water at about 105°
4 1/2 C flour
1 T Salt

Joy of Cooking called for bread flour. I didn't have any. I used standard all purpose.

Here is the sponge starter

All the players




Joy of Cooking says "the dough should feel sticky to the touch, but not actually stick to your hands." I don't think I followed that recommendation, which is why I didn't get a high final rise.


Starting the first rise


3 hours laters in my oven. This was a good rise. I was very happy with it. Notice the rubber band is an Alton Brown technique to aid in measuring volume growth



After a little hand kneading and "punching down", I shaped and panned the bread.



They rise again. This was a decent rise. I am thinking it should be more. Perhaps I need to be more patient or not have so sticky of dough. That very sticky dough might not have been able to hold its weight as it expanded.


Final Product



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My turn to make dinner. I made my International Hot Wings, but I don't have the recipe memorized, so I had to follow the link to this blog to remember how to make it. This time it came out yummy, but it was too sweet. Mark liked it.

The power team. New team member is the hot chile flavored oil. Offical notice: I don't like normal Tabasco sauce. Tonight I used chipotle smoked Tabasco and this was extremely yummy.

A bunch of eye-balling of these ingredients went into a pot with 2 sticks of butter.

I was fortunate to be the first one to use their Fry Daddy for the wings


Plating - before we ate


Plate after eating -- 13 wings later


Now for dessert, I made carmel corn 

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My brother-in-law Mark made us fresh pad thai while our wives and kids are staying in Boston. They might be off visiting a great historical location, but we're going to cook and endulge.

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Look I really like coffee. I really do. I like it so much that when we departed for our 2-month working vacation, I ground coffee and took it with me. I thought I would use it in hotels, because their coffee tastes like .... hmmm, how to describe that disgusting stuff? Well, it is difficult describing the garabage that is served as thin flavorless coffee. I'm sorry I can't put words to hotel's ridiculous offering of their vile coffee.

Well, one host family was a tea family. They did not even have a coffee pot! Can you believe this?!

I made my own coffee maker. I used a large pot to catch the brew. Over it I placed a colander. In that was a wall of alluminum foil to hold the shape of the coffee filter as I pour nearly boiling water on the coffee. I think the only problem with this setup was the coffee got cold. I guess it took so long to pour the water and let it brew through the coffee that by the time it finished in the pot, it was cold.

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This is Project 8 "Get Comfortable with Visual Aids" for the Competent Communication. At our club, we do speeches in any order after you complete your Ice Breaker. I have 4 more speeches to do before completing this book!

The speech is supposed to be 5-7 minutes long. I completly blew the timing and finished over 8 mins. The video on my camera can record 1 gig at a time, so the video stops just before the ending, sorry. If the video gets choppy and stops frequently, then just pause it and wait for it to download in the background. 

If you are using a RSS reader, you'll need to open in another window to see the video.

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My coworker Slavisa was telling me about this cookie his wife makes. He described it as a chocolate chip cookie with coconut. I like to think of myself as a creative person, but I had failed to think of using coconut in a standard chocolate chip cookie. I make wonderful oatmeal butterscotch cookies, so I should have thought of this new combination. Well, I had a little free time tonight, so a cookie making I go. This recipe is definitely going to be a Christmas cookie that I give out!!

Recipe: Just use the Tollhouse Chocolate Chip recipe. The magic here is in the few twists that Slavisa's wife spurred in me. 1) I made the dough chocolate by melting about 1oz of bitter-sweet chocolate and adding that to the batter just before adding the flour mixture. Next time, I would double that or even triple it. 2) I toasted 2 cups of coconut and added that with the flour mixture.

The take away from this recipe is that we never stop learning. I love cooking / baking as it is a way for me to be creative. I knew I couldn't really screw up this recipe, I could only make it better!

 

 

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I followed this simple recipe for a delicious pound cake. Here are my pictures.

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