Home Made Pasta

I have these fancy pasta roller and cutter attachments for my mixer now. I have been holding off to make some fresh pasta, and I finally got a chance to do it.
Here I am mixing up the dough. I decided to try a half wheat dough. I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, as it's not the same consistancy as bread dough.
It took a bit of doing, but I finally figured out how to make it roll out into sheets. I don't know if you are suppose to roll it out a lot or just a little. I did it a lot, as I was playing with a new toy.
My First cut pasta. It all clumped together and stuck and looks like a mess. No worries, the best part of cooking is you can eat your mistakes. Into a pot it went.
Here is my second attempt at cutting pasta. This turned out much better.
All cooked up. It tasted quite well. Break time!
Here is my thinking-on-my-feet pasta drying rack. It looks to be working quite well!
Doesn't that all look so good? Fresh, home made pasta.
Well, a slight design flaw. The sharp edges of the spoons, the brittle nature of dried pasta, and my making the pasta WAY too long (bigger is always better, right?), means that the pasta breaks at the the bend and falls down. Well the cats LOVED this, and 1/4 of my pasta ended up on the floor!

A cool dry place. A root cellar in your kitchen.

I don't know about you, but it's hot and muggy here. I keep looking at items that want to be stored in 'a cool dry place'. I wish I could say that my apartment qualified, but, unfortunately, it doesn't some days. I turn the AC off while I am at work to save some money on the electric bill. The temp climbs up into the high 80s. Not exactly cool. It isn't exactly dry either.

I brought my small dorm room fridge down from WI and wasn't sure what to do with it. I figured it out. I think I am going to build a cool dry place.

I am going to build an insulated pantry. It will look like a normal pantry on the outside. But the inside will be insulated with foam insulation. I will also use one of those water rid buckets or large amounts of silica gel to keep everything dry. I am thinking that the small refrigerator and a good amount of insulation should enable me to bring the temp down to 50 degrees or so. You know, normal root cellar or basement temperatures.

On the bottom shelf I will put the dissecant as well as anything that isn't food stuff compatible, like batteries, etc. The shelf above that I will store my negatives in their fireproof box as well as anything else that won't bother food as a buffer between the stuff I don't want to eat and the stuff I do.

On the upper shelves I will keep things like my flours, spices, oils, potatoes and onions. You know food stuffs that don't really need to be in the fridge, but ought to be kept cool.

I suppose the veggies will need to be in their own little moisture cubby so they can stay a bit more damp then the rest of the unit. Just like the crisper in the fridge.

Hrmm.. I wonder if I can make an easy access panel for my spices. I am seeing something like the butter drawer in your fridge, only pointed out, into the room through the door. This could keep the spices cooler than sitting in a cupboard, and help decorate the cabinet. I wonder if I could get some UV filtering glass for the spice doors....

Just thinking out loud... I suppose I could make this a bit smaller, like a table top unit for keeping my veggies and such. A counter top root cellar. I bet that is a marketable product right there. A 50 degree refrigerator for storing your veggies.

A little market research. I am seeing these little wine coolers. These look about perfect for what I am looking for for a root cellar. I could probably tint the front glass with window tinting to block most of the light.

What do you think? Is something like this useful for you?

Packing up...

 I won't be working on my boat for a few weeks. I am going to haul the pieces up to my new place this weekend when I pick up my keys for my new apartment. I am hoping that I can move in 2 weekends, but I am prepared to take 3 weekends to do it. The fish tanks and computer are the last to go up. Home is where the Hard Drive is...


 I bound up all the loose pieces together that are too long to fit into the truck. I then wrapped the ends in plastic so a loose board or aluminum peice doesn't work itself loose. I will rope and bungie this bundle to the roof rack on the truck. It ought stay.


 When I walked to Target to get the string and bungies, I wandered through the frozen food section and saw Pizza. YUM! Where I am staying was having a party tonight, so I felt awkward using the microwave, so I broke out my little camp oven. I preheated it up to nearly 400 degrees, but it could only cook the pizza and bread at 300 degrees.


 YUM. It is good as I am writing this. The Pizza got a little bit toasty on the bottom, being so close to the heat.

Supermarket 2.0

I thought this was a pretty good parody/satire of the whole web 2.0 buzz.

 Although, it may not be all that far off if you look at this photo sent to my by a friend of a local grocery store up by Chicago.

Beer Cheese Potato Broccoli Soup

Beer Cheese Potato Broccoli Soup

Quick, Superbowl Sunday, you need to bring a dish to a party where there will be a dozen HUNGRY people. What do you do?

Bear Creek Soup to the rescue!

2 packages of Bear Creek Cheddar Potato Soup.
1 head fresh broccoli
1 pound of shredded cheese
1 bottle beer.

In large crock-pot, add 15 (of the requested 16) cups hot water, bottle of beer, and 2 packages of soup. Cut up broccoli into small pieces and add to soup.

Cook on high for a while. Probably a couple of hours. So you can start this and forget it a while ahead of time.

Random Pork Roast.

I needed to clean out some veggies I had laying around before they finished going bad. Grape tomatoes, a bell pepper, shredded carrots.

Into the crockpot goes a bottle of beer that Katie hasn't drank yet, a can of low sodium beef broth, half a container of grape tomatoes, and a bag of shredded carrots. I was expecting the carrots to cook down to nothing, they almost did.

Off to the store I went. Pork Rump Roast, cheap. Large yellow onion, a red potato and a white potato. I wanted to see if I could tell the difference in the end.

Once home again, the roast gets cut in half, cleaned up a little bit and browned all the way around. While the meat is browning, I remembered I had the red bell pepper, that gets cut up along with the onion and into the crockpot they go. Meat goes in on high.

I do some chores, clean fish tank, talk to Matt, do whatever for a couple of hours. I then cut up the potatoes and add a dollop of Hoison sauce for a bit of flavor and saltyness.

I go take a walk along the beach for a couple of hours.

Upon getting back, I add some tapioca to thicken the liquid into a gravy.

It looks good. I am not sure what all to season it with. I forgot I had bay leaves, so those didn't go in. Bummer.

Pork Rump Roast
Shredded Carrots
Grape Tomatoes
Potatoes
Onion
Bell Pepper
Bottle of Beer
Beef Broth
Hoison Sauce (Vietnamese sauce that I can best describe as a thick soy sauce)



For being something just thrown together, it actually is pretty good. It needs a little something-something, I don't know what, but it is good nonetheless.

Chicken Fried Rice

It sucks cooking for yourself!
I had cooking club this weekend, but ended up not going. That is AFTER I bought $50 worth of groceries for it. I couldn't find any rice paper at any of the local markets. Katie was down, and I would have had to send her home really early in order to go to a market that had some.

Now, to eat up these groceries...

What do you do with bean sprouts?
Chicken Fried Rice!

Chicken Friend Rice
Publix brand Frozen Seasoning Mix (onions, peppers, and some other stuff too)
Rice
Chicken Broth
Chicken
Soy Sauce
Eggs
Bean Sprouts
 
I put the frozen veggies on to warm up a bit. Cooked 1 cup of rice with 1 can of reduced sodium chicken broth (covered) until most of the moisture was gone. I then added the chicken and cooked the 4 eggs before I stirred them in. Soy sauce and bean sprouts very last so I didn't cook them to death.
 
It actually tasted pretty good! I am quite proud of myself. Not that it was really hard. Just a matter of doing it. I even washed my pan the same night! Well, I wanted to hard boil the rest of the eggs so they wouldn't go bad.
 I had gotten something new, it's called Hoisin Sauce. It is pretty good.

Supper of Kings

I originally wanted to call this post Breakfast of Champions, but I am having it for dinner.

Doesn't this look good?

Corned beef and Potatos. I rememberd I had some Garlic, so I added that a bit late, it didn't get a chance to brown up before I decided I was hungry.

All that work keeping them seperate in the Skillet just to pour them into the same bowl and mix them together while I am eating them.

Slow Cooker Apple Cobbler Recipe

This month's Cooking Club theme was "When I think of Fall I think of _____".

Apples silly!

Have you ever tried to make an apple pie in a crock pot? Neither have I. The task seems a little daunting. I settled on a cobbler.

Hmm... Apple Cobbler.

Simple enough, right?


Ingredients:
non-stick cooking spray
4 medium tart apples
1/2 cup sugar
1 lemon, grated rind and juice of
1 dash cinnamon
5 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup natural cereal with nuts and fruits
Directions:
Grease side of 3 1/2 quart Crock-Pot lightly with non-stick cooking spray.
Core, peel and slice apples; place in crockpot. Add sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice and cinnamon. Combine butter and cereal. Add to crockpot; mix thoroughly. Cover. Cook on Low for 6 to 8 hours or High for 2 to 3 hours. Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped topping, if desired.
This recipe for Apple Cobbler serves/makes 4
Heh. Yeah, right. Serves 4? I need to serve 12. But I don't really because there are going to be 2 other desserts there as well. So I need enough to give everyone a good taste.

Off to the store I went....

Apples, hrmm, no apples like what I have in the yard back home. Next best thing? Hey, Granny Smith's are on sale in a package. 6 to a package. 2 packages would be too many. 1.5x the recipe it is!

Get the rest of the stuff and start peeling apples. After peeling some apples, I peel more apples. And after seemingly more apple peeling, I remember why I wash potatoes, and cube them up without peeling them!

Everything in, I make the cobbler stuff, and put a little extra on the top.

Hours later it is really really good. Maybe just a tad too much lemon, but I was really annoyed with all that apple peeling, and squeezed the daylights out of that lemon!

My Recipe ended up being.

6 Granny Smith Apples
1 cup Splenda
1 lemon, grated rind and squeezed to death
1 dash of cinnamon, with a sprinkle on top to add color
1 stick butter
maybe 2 cups of cereal after I was said and done. I sprinkled some on top for color

I cooked it on High for an hour or so, then on low for a good long time. When I got there, I took the cover off and did it on low while we where eating, hoping to dry the top off a little. 

Turkey Sausage & Tortellini Soup

Katie was over this weekend and she helped me make a crock of soup for going over to some friends on Sunday at 4pm.

She found a Turkey Sausage & Tortellini soup recipe that sounded really good.

Here is how the recipe from the book goes.
6 oz, cooked smoked turkey sausage, halved lengthwise and cut into 1/2 inch slices
2 cups packaged shredded cabbage with carrot (coleslaw mix)
1 cup loose-pack frozen cut green beans or Italian-style green beans
2 14.5 oz cans Italian-style stewed tomatoes
1 10.5 oz can condensed French Onion Soup
3 cups water
1 9oz package refrigerated cheese filled tortellini
Grated Parmesan Cheese

Put everything except tortellini and cheese into crockpot and cook on low for 8-10 hours or high for 4-5 hours.
Add Tortellini, cover and cook for 15 minutes on high.

Well, this is all good and such, but I had to feed a dozen people. Granted, this was a side dish, but they are big eaters.
Also, what am I going to do with the leftover ingredients?

Anyway, this is how I made it.

2 packages of cooked smoked turkey sausage, halved lengthwise and cut up into whatever sized pieces fell off the knife. Meat GOOD!
1 bag shredded cabbage with carrot (coleslaw mix)
1 little box frozen cut green beans
3 cans Italian-style stewed tomatoes
2 packages dried onion soup
1 large container of low-sodium Chicken Broth
water
1 14.something oz package refrigerated 4 cheese tortellini

2 packages dried tortellini

Instructions, rush to store that closes at 11pm at 10:40, grab things off shelf, find dried tortellini, then fresh, don't put dried back because store is closing.
Decide to keep dried tortellini for a later date and put away in cardboard box that serves as pantry (Hey, I bet you wish YOUR pantry said AMD Athlon 64 & 1GB of RAM on the side!).

Put everything sans packaging into crockpot, and cover with water at around 2am. (Yeah, that includes the nice, fresh tortellini - promptly get told by girlfriend that the tortellini was NOT to go in with everything else)
Cook on low until 3:30 pm.
Verify that tortellini has turned to mush, and is basically a thickener at this point.
Arrive at friends 15 minutes late bearing 1 crockpot of soup, 1 small package of Parmesan cheese, and 2 packages of dried tortellini recovered from pantry.
Add tortellini. Wait 20 minutes, half an hour. Quietly get bowl, and server very large helping to myself. Get out of doorway as stampede runs to crockpot, then to kitchen for bowls, then back to crockpot. Do not take pictures as empty crockpot isn't very photogenic.

Several people said it was really good. I currently have no reason to believe they lie to me with any great regularity.

I liked it, I guess that is all that matters, right?

Another Cool Gadget

All right, you should know me by now. I love cool stuff. I stumbled across an item at Walmart (I should really quit going there, it's getting expensive) that I just had to have. In fact, I left it there, told my mom about it on the phone after I got home, and decided that I needed to go get it, and drove back to Walmart to get it that same night.

What is this miraculous new invention? It is a Brinkmann Portable Oven. Yes, a small, propane oven. It is soooo cute!
 


Here are some of the reasons I got the oven:

1. I wanted it - the best reason of all
2. It was only about $55
3. It will be a lot of fun camping
4. It will be a lot of fun during hurricane season
   1. While everyone else is complaining about eating saltines again, I can tell them about the fresh bread and muffins that I was enjoying fresh out of the oven just that morning!
5. It is just darn cool!

The box says that it can bake at 400 degrees for 4 hours on a single small propane cylinder. It even came with a free cookie sheet, which is a good thing, because this oven is really small. The pan that came with it basically fills the oven with it's imposing 9 inch square bulk.

I had asked my mom what kind of pans did she think would work better, glass or metal. I was thinking glass because you can't scratch the Teflon off of it. My mom said metal so I didn't have to worry about breaking it while I was camping. I did one better. I got those new silicone pans. Here are the reasons I got the silicone pans:

1. They won't break when I drop them
2. They won't scratch
3. They fold and flex and make it easier to pack
   
4. They will fit in the oven even if they don't fit - just push hard, they will fit!
5. They are just cool in their own right

The set came with the following pieces:

• Round Cake Pan
• Muffin Pan
• Bread Pan
• Spoon/Spatula - it works well enough to pop cookies off of a cookie sheet
• A pot holder/gripper - pretty handy, and it has a little magnet in it so it will stick to metal stuff
  

I bought the oven Sunday night, and it was too late to be able to play with it more then to unpack it and put the pieces together. Last night I was out getting my haircut, so I couldn't play with it last night. Tonight... Tonight was the night. I went to Publix and got a bunch of assorted bread, muffin, and biscuit mixes that say 'just add water' on the box. I stopped at target, and got the silicone pan set I had scoped out on my way to Publix. I also bought the biggest tube of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookie dough Target had.

Lessons Learned

I got the oven going right around dusk. It took a few minutes to get up to temperature on the high setting. Maybe 20 minutes or so? I had enough time to wash the pans and get stuff unpacked and so forth.

I put 4 cookies into the metal pan that came with the oven and stuck them in for the 10 minutes that the directions called for on the low setting, the thermometer reading a perfect 350 degrees. 15 minutes later, they came off and when I tried them they still weren't quite done.



I put the muffin tin I had prepped with cookies onto the top rack. I made smaller cookies for the 2nd pan of cookies. The oven was reading about 400 degrees at this point. The 2nd pan of cookies turned out much better. The muffin tin on the top rack wasn't even close to done. So I turned it back on high, and set the 3rd pan of cookies into the oven. 10 minutes later I started to smell something funny. The photo below says it all.




The oven had worked itself up to around 450 degrees. I am thinking that given time and a calm day, this little oven might hit 500 if you let it.

Future Plans

Some of the thoughts I had for this oven include:

• Fresh bread when your camping
• Fresh cookies at a tailgate party
• Maybe fill a tuna can with wood chips and make a small smoker out of it if baking a chicken or something in it
• If kids are with, those personal sized pizzas would fit perfect in the oven, and the fussiest of eaters would be happy
• Fresh muffins to go with your morning coffee in the morning. You could probably put the coffee pot on top to keep warm while baking the muffins.
• If camping with a larger group, if you warm it up, and then shut it off, you could use it to keep some food warm while the rest of the food is cooking.

*This blog post is a little different for a couple of reasons. All the photos where taken with my new cellphone camera. I wrote and published this post from the new Google Docs (formally writely.com). Docs couldn't post to blogger for some reason, so I copied and pasted it into Picassa. This document is publicly viewable at: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d3cxzdx_6dwx4tk.
 

MyCookingClub

Last night we had another meeting of the cooking club I am in.

Half our host for the evening, Keld, is grilling up some wonderul chicken wings. I even had two of them myself, and people who know me well know I don't eat chicken wings!

Here you can see some of the wonderful food that we all brought. Grilled Chicken wings, grilled chicken breasts, mushroom swiss burgers, beer brats, 2 kinds of potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans, macaroni and cheese, fruit salad, a greens salad, and I am sure I am missing some!

Everyone was so quiet! The food must have been great. Here you can see about half of the bakers-dozen that was attending last night.

 

Beer Brats!

Tonight is the cooking club night. Tonights theme, backyard barbeque. Several of my friends have NOT HAD A BRAT! You get back in your chair yet? No... I will give you a moment. Ok, settled now? Good. No brats, I couldn't believe it either. So, I am going to fix this. Seeing that I have this brand new crockpot, I am going to try to cook the bratwurst in it.

The cooking club is loosely (er, very loosely) based on the Cooking Light magazine. We are supposed to be trying to cook healthy and all. Ok, I got a package of turkey brats. Never had them before, but they are on the left there. In the middle are Johnsonville Stadium brats. They are precooked, so I am worried they might be overcooked by the time they are put on the grill. On the right, are the local Grocery Store Deli brats. Only 1 package of them. I checked ALL the sausages in the deli department.

My friends know that I am not a beer drinker. The only way I could walk out of the store without spending $10 or more on beer that I won't drink is to by a 4 pack of pint sized cans (16 oz.). Two of them are in this photo along with the largest sweet onion in the produce department. Your right, need more beer.

Another pint of Miller later, I think the brats and onions look happy now. Get these all cooked up. Grill them tonight untill they are nice and tasty. Hopefully there will be leftovers so I have some for lunch tomarrow...

 

My New Crock Pot

I went out and got myself a new crock pot. I rather like this one. It has 3 settings, High, Low, and Warm. It is designed to be hauled around even! There are latches on each side of the lid to clip the lid in place. It even came with it's own spoon that clips into the lid!

A really neat feature is that the lid has little tabs so you can set the lid on one of the handles and it won't go all sliding all over the place. I think this is a winner, I plan on using it a lot for the cooking club I am in. 

Thermo-Electric Coolers

OK, so I am living in a "Mother in law" sweet, which consists of a bedroom, a bathroom, a closet, and an outside door. A very nice place, right on the water, massive hedges grown into arches over the driveway. Very nice people, so natually I don't want to bother them too much.

So I decide that I am going to get one of these fancy Thermo-Electric Coolers, basically an iceless cooler that you can plug into your car/the wall. They seem a bit handier then a small fridge (especially considering that I have one or two of those laying around in WI). It would seem to be useful after I get a different place to live - camping, hurricanes, etc.

I do my homework, and decide to get one. A little bit of online research shows me that all have this nifty feature that most people would consider "useless", they are not only coolers, but they are warmers as well. Now, most people would go, why would I want my cooler to warm? Seems a contridiction. Well, I belong to a cooking club, and we get together once a month and see how cunningly we can poison each other. Actually, most everyone seems to be quite the accomplished cook, but I digress. Anywho, we seem to either overwhelm the fridge, or fight for the oven. I am thinking, "gosh, a place where we can keep things warm while people are getting settled, PERFECT, this little gadget is getting all the more usefull."

So, superbowl sunday, I make a trip to the local Super Walmart at 5 oclock. I figured the entire male population is going to be sitting in front of the TV, and most of the women will be babysitting their boys. WRONG. Lesson 1, superbowl sunday, there is a run on coolers. Don't expect to buy a cooler on superbowl sunday. They are all sold out. Lesson 2. I am apparently not the only freak who doesn't watch the superbowl because the $15 worth of stuff I picked up required a 15 minute wait at the checkout.

Ok, so a few days later, I decide to start calling around. 4 phone calls locates 2 coolers like what I am looking for, or at least that is what my poor spanish and the dude on the other side of the phone poor english skills determine. So into the car I go. I get to Walmart, and look, and look, and look. No cooler, no blue Walmart vests. I finally find a cooler, EUREKA, it's even the one I am looking for. The box is open, but a quick rummage reveals that everything is still there, so it must have been a superbowl "rentee". Off to the checkout counter, 30 minutes later, I lug the thing into my car and drive home.

I get home, and dump it out of the box, I fiddle around and go to plug it in, but something is wrong. The online information said that to swtich between warm and cool, you flip the plug around on the cord as it plugs into the cooler. On MY unit, the cord goes straight into the cooler. Just my luck.

So, I decide to "fix" it. An hour on the internet reveals no significant information as to whether I can run the pelteir junction backwards without any damage, but one can deduce, that every OTHER cooler you can, as they allow you to do it. This warrents further investigation, so I dismantle my brand new cooler.

The picture shows the business end of a Thermo-Electric cooler. The small end on the right is what is inside the cooler, and the large end on the left is outside. You can see a thermal disconnect strapped to the outside heatsink. There is no thermal monitoring on the inside. This means that I could really have some fun, melting my new cooler.

Short term plan, get a double pole, double throw switch, and install it so that I can switch the peltier unit to heat/cool. This I think is a great improvement on how the other cooler/warmers work in that the fans will always run in the more effecient direction. I just need to remember not to leave the unit on heat overnight or I may do some serious meltage damage to my brand new cooler.

Long term plan, install my own thermal regulater on the inside of the cooler. Now I COULD go out and get one like what is already installed for about $3.00. That just isn't any fun. Being a out-of-practice electronics hobbiest, I am going to install an embedded microcontroller to control my fancy cooler. The one I have at hand happens to be eithernet enabled. So I think I am going to have the only Internet Cooler in existance.

I am thinking that I am going to install a total of 4 temperture probes (simple thermisters) to monitor ambient outside temperature, outer heatsink temperature, inner temperature, and inner heatsink temperature. I will log these temps at 15 minute intervals, and create graphs. A batter backup for the controller means that I can continue to log temperature even when the cooler is unplugged/without power, whatever. I will then be able to log into my cooler, and get the current stats on whether my milk has gone bad or not because the temp is too high.

I think I am also going to install a digital temp readout on the outside of the cooler so that I know what temp it is without having to go online (handy during a hurricane when the internet is down).

The switch will be repurposed into telling the microcontroller whether it should heat or cool. I think this is a wise move, as some of my "friends" may try to hack my cooler and switch it from cool to heat and spoil my milk. The hardware switch saves me the expense of mailing said spoiled milk to my "friend" and having him deal with the stench he created.

What do you think?