Day 2: Risotto

So, now that finals are over, I'm so excited that I will finally have all of the free time in the world, and now that the bread is gone (most of it was eaten by the slice, and then I took some of the french bread and made a "croque monsieur" with it), I figured it was time to move on and try something new.

Now, my parents and sister both work full time, and being that I work part time (I go to school full time), this typically means that I have the house to myself during the day. When there is nobody home, I'm always much less motivated to cook something, since there is nobody besides me to enjoy it, and I end up getting something while I'm out, or I'll go get a frozen TV dinner or something.

This practice (that I've basically been doing all my life), obviously has it's consequences. For one, it's not healthy. Frozen meals barely have enough food to fill you up, and they are full of sodium and gross chemicals and stuff. And then, to make matters worse, they don't keep you full, so you're digging in the kitchen for something to snack on an hour later. Also, this habit gets kind of expensive. It's so easy for me to think, "Oh, this TV dinner is only $2.00; what a great deal!" but in reality, you pay more for the food you eat later, it's not good quality food, and you only get one wimpy sized serving. Sure, buying all of the ingredients to make something costs money, but often times you can get 7-8 servings out of the meal, making it around the same amount of money to eat much better tasting food.

So anyway, perusing through my cookbook, I found a recipe for risotto. I LOVE risotto, and the shit that I would get in the dining halls would not do this wonderful food any justice, so I figured it was definitely time I made some myself. It's creamy rice with olive oil, wine, butter, and chicken broth, so really, what is the reason to NOT make it?

So I did. And damn, was it good. And damn, was it painfully easy to make. Seriously, risotto must be Italian for "even an idiot could make it."Actually, I think it's probably Italian for "creamy rice" or something, but whatever.

I minced the onions, softened them in some olive oil on medium low heat, poured in some rice (I used long grain, even though it is a sin. It still turned out great), coated it in the olive oily onion goodness, added some dry, white wine, stirred it up, and added simmered chicken broth bit by bit until it looked like this.


(Creamy deliciousness)

When I was done stirring, and it reached the creamy texture I wanted, I folded in some butter and parmesan cheese and ate up!

The best part about this dish? It was so filling. Yeah, it's got a little bit of butter in it, but most of the fat in here came from olive oil and chicken broth. It was savoury, satisfying, and now I've got about 4-5 servings of it left, so I can share with my family when they get home.

As for cost, I bought all of my ingredients for less than $10.00. The $10 included the rice (I still have half the bag left), the chicken broth, an onion, and some andouille sausage that I decided to eat on the side, so really, it would have cost about $6 to make this. And I got about 6 servings out of it, so that's $1.00 per serving for something that tastes great, took about a half hour to make, and is actually going to keep me full for a couple of hours.

Suck it, Lean Cuisine.

Day One: Bread

So, being super excited about my new hobby, I have spent the past few nights curled up in bed, deciding feverishly what I wanted my first recipe to be. I found a couple that I liked, but none that I felt would really be great to start out with.

Then, I was snowed in. So I'm thinking to myself, what is a great thing to have when it's cold and snowy that's easy to make and that is basically fundamental to cooking but that I'll feel accomplished enough about making? Whenever I think, I think extensively.

Well, I decided on bread. I know it's technically baking and not so much cooking, but given the fact that I feel pretty comfortable about baking, I figured it was a great place to start. The recipe looked easy enough, and bread is something that just about everyone likes, and it could go with many, many, MANYMANYMANY dishes, so I went for it.

I had helped people make bread, before, so I kind of knew what to expect, but this was my first time flying solo, so it was definitely an experience.

I started off with something called "Milk Bread." This was something that I had helped someone make before, and even though we had done them as rolls, I decided to just make it as a 9x5 loaf this time. I did everything by hand in this recipe, and it got a little difficult once I added enough flour to make a sticky ball of dough (I had to switch from a spoon to using my hands). Milk bread is a denser bread that uses milk instead of water in the recipe. There's also an egg in there, and you dissolve the yeast before adding any ingredients.

Then, I decided to make some French Bread, since we make that all of the time in the grocery store bakery that I work in, and the recipe was just about as basic as you could get. It was just flour, yeast, salt, and water, and I decided to put this one on the mixer; it took about 10 minutes mixing on low speed. This one was a lighter bread.

Proofing the bread (letting it rise) always seems to be the hardest part of making it, and I found that I had to be a little creative here. This was definitely the part that made this process of baking bread time consuming, as the bread had to sit and proof for an hour in a bowl, and then I had to shape it/put it in a pan and then proof it about an hour more. It also didn't help that the ideal proofing environment is a warm, humid one, and I was in a dry, 60 degree house. I ended up turning the oven on the lowest temperature I could find, and then sitting the bowls of bread on top of the stove, covered in plastic wrap and with a towel. It worked pretty well, and it ended up proofing nicely, so I can't complain.

I baked the loaf of Milk Bread first, for about 35 minutes, and the smell was PHENOMENAL. It was a sweeter smelling bread, and it honestly would have tasted amazing with some honey butter on top. The best part by far was definitely the crust, which wasn't too dry, and seemed to retain a lot of the sweet and salty flavour of the bread (there was a bit of sugar in this one, and it was brushed with milk before baking). This would have made great sandwich bread, but the five people in my kitchen pretty much destroyed the entire loaf within 15 minutes, so I guess I have an excuse to make it again :)

(Milk Bread)

I was a little bit worried about the French Bread, basically because the first loaf was so good that I couldn't imagine making something even better, and also because I haven't exactly mastered the art of shaping bread dough into beautiful little loaves. It looked a little rough, and I didn't put anything onto the dough before baking it (just an egg white and water mixture five minutes before it was done). I wished it would have browned a little more, but honestly, once I tasted it, all of these meticulous little things went out of the window for me. Taste is really the most important part, covered by texture. It tasted wonderful, with a bit of a saltiness in the crust that tasted great, and the texture was that perfect light and fluffy stuff that one expects from bread. I enjoyed a piece of this with some creamy tomato soup.



Ultimately, the bread making was a success, and I will definitely be venturing out into some more complicated breads.

Hi, world.

Hi, world.

Yes, I started a new blog. I kept wanting to post stuff in my old one, but I just couldn't think of anything witty to say ever, so I'm unleashing all of my creative energy in this new blog right here. In case you also didn't realise, I've decided to become really serious about learning to cook.

Now, if you've ever interacted with me, like, ever, in the real world, you will know that I'm really into cupcakes. And I may be a little biased here, but I'd like to say that I do make some pretty kickass cupcakes. I've also got a wide variety of interests, stemming from science related stuff (I'm a geography major) to music, to everything in between, but one thing I've always wanted to do was learn to cook. And I've always told myself that I'm finally going to learn, but it hasn't really come to fruition yet. Basically, I'm really good at following directions; I can follow recipes really well, and I'm to the point where I can bake cupcakes and cookies without even looking at a recipe, but I want to learn how to really cook. I want to be able to take a frozen dead animal out of the freezer, know exactly what herbs to throw on that bitch, and cook it so well that I could convert a vegetarian.

So anyway, my quest to learn to cook took me to a used bookstore, where I found a gigantic "Joy of Cooking" book. I don't judge books by their covers, but I do it rather based on their fonts, how it feels in my hands, and whether or not I like what I see when I skim through the pages. I had picked up a number of cookbooks by this point, and I liked a lot of them, but the second I picked up the "Joy of Cooking" one, I knew it was the one I was taking home. So that's what I'm using. For the sake of copyright shit too, since I googled "can I post a recipe on a blog," and it told me it wasn't a good idea, I'm not going to post any recipes on here until I'm good enough to tweak it so it's my own. This is kind of long, so I'll make this individual post my "introduction," and we'll start anew on another post.