You Win Some, You Lose Some

It was a quiche-tastrophe. (Sharyl's comments in pink)

It looked like this: 

But it tasted like this: 

Mom and I diligently followed Ben’s quiche recipe.  Made the crust with all it’s beautiful herbs.   

Mixed up the eggs and other yummy goodness.  Poured it into the crust and popped it into the oven.  It emerged looking beautiful, perfectly set.  We were very excited to try it because it looked so beautiful.  It was like biting into a bunch of very salty grass.  No really.  It was bad.  You couldn’t taste the cheese or the eggs, not even the bacon.  All you could taste was salt and green. (It was a deep dish pie pan and it needed more filling, however, thank goodness we didn't use any more ingredients cause there would have been that much more to throw away)

: (

 We think it is a typo in the book.  The recipe called for 2 teaspoons of salt. (Oh Ben, you Salty dog you)  Together with the teaspoon of salt in the crust and we might as well just dumped the salt shaker on our plates.  I triple checked that recipe.  I did not read it wrong.  2 teaspoons of salt.

 The same day as the quiche incident, we also made a lemon cream pie.  Called for the rind and juice of 6 lemons.  That was way too much. (and Lord knows Deanna and I LOVE lemon) We used an electric juicer and it created  A LOT of juice. (can you say "PUCKER UP" )  Half the lemons probably would have been just right.  Or squeezing them by hand. (The book should have said squeeze by hand because those of us with an electric juicer went overboard)                                            

These are not the Lemon Cream Pie

 We also made yeast rolls like the kind that they serve at Road House Grill.  Our local Road House has sadly closed its doors.  I adore their rolls so I am trying to find a recipe for them now that I can’t get my fix at the restaurant.  Yes, we cheated on Ben.  Get used to it, it’ll probably happen again.  (Good thing we have no hopes of getting a book deal out of this adventure)  Lots of work, with all the rising time.  Definitely not a quick thing to cook, more of an all day commitment.  Anyway, they were very good but not as good as the restaurants.  I’m still on the hunt. (I would like to find a recipe for the yummy biscuits at Red Lobster)

So, in order to redeem ourselves, we had a guest Chick come down and bring her quiche recipe.

My cousin Vickie brought her tried and true recipe down the next weekend and we made 5 (!) quiches. 

They were yummy. (The was about an hour's worth of veggie prep work before we started making the crusts)  Lots of veggies, lots of cheese and lots of bacon! (Holy Quiche Batman!)

Not a lot of salt.  All 5 turned out perfectly. (We could have fed an army)   I ended up freezing the pieces I took home, cut into wedges and wrapped in foil.  For the most part, they held up well to freezing.  But the ones with zucchini and mushrooms got a little soggy. (I ate mine every morning for breakfast, cold, right from the fridge, YUMMY)

Mushrooms, Ham and Cheese

Asparagus, Mushrooms and Ham

Classic Spinach and Bacon

Sorry this took so long to post.  I suck. (Yes you do! HAHAHA)  Actually, you are a very busy Mommy and work and children come first. : ) Up next is Tomato Basil Soup and Angel Biscuits.  That post will be up later this week.

Pie-O-Rama

Posted by Deanna.  Comments from Tisha in orange, comments from Sharyl in pink.

3 chicks, baking.  We can all now call ourselves pie makers. Gotta love how the kitchen smells while we cook. : )

I’ve been a baker for most of my life. Deanna is a great baker. She makes yummy things all the time and lucky for us, she shares them! Cookies, cakes, brownies, bring it on.  But I’ve never made pie crust before because, frankly, it’s a rather intimidating prospect.  The cutting in the cold butter and using ice water all screams “you’ll screw this up!” so I’ve never tried.  Then Ben came along and offered up a foolproof pie crust recipe.  No ice water and no cold butter.  Just some flour, sugar, salt and oil.  Anyone can make this pie crust and it actually turns out to be a pie crust!  Mixing it up was super easy, Lil Chick Z actually made 2 of the crusts mostly by herself. I have made lots of pie crusts before because my Mom taught me how. However, I bowed to her because she made such good ones. She is a legend in her own mind, I mean family, for making an extremely good Lemon Meringue Pie. Both Mom and Dad worked in bakeries and had lots of experience.   

 

And we're rolling and we're rolling

The rolling out took a little trial and error. Roll, Roll, Roll your dough.  We were supposed to roll it out between 2 sheets of wax paper but it actually took about 4 sheets because wax paper is only so wide and the rolled out crust ended up wider than a single sheet. Note to self: invent a wider wax paper!   Then came the flipping and getting it into the pie plate.  Lo and behold, it worked.  I just bought myself a new pie plate (show off)  at Target because I couldn’t find my old one.  It’s a monster size pie plate so the crust didn’t go up and over the rim like it was supposed to but that’s ok, I wasn’t planning on entering the pie into any beauty contests.(Just entering her mouth)

 

Mom, who has made many a pie crust, had no problems with covering her pie plate and getting all fancy with the “fluting” of the edges.  Show off.  Of course, her pie plate was a baby compared to mine, so she had it easy.  We had Papa Bear(D), Mama Bear(T) and Baby Bear(me) plates.

Pricked the crusts with a fork and into the oven they go.  Beautiful golden flakiness emerged to cool on the counter.  Then came the filling.  

Tisha went first with chocolate creamy goodness.  The filling recipe is the same, no matter what flavor of pie you want to make, we just had to omit the cocoa powder if we wanted something other than chocolate.  The filling thickened up pretty quickly and into the cooled crust it goes.  And guess what?  It looked like an actual pie!  I have to admit that this looked and tasted pretty darn good! 

I went next with banana cream.  Left out the cocoa, as I mentioned and mixed in about 3 mashed bananas.  Another banana gave it’s life to line the bottom of the pie crust.  

Lil Chick Z really got into mashing up the bananas

 We decided that I should double the filling recipe because of my massive pie plate.  Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bad idea.  The pie ended up never setting, I think because there was just too much filling.  Or my heaping tablespoons of flour were not heaping enough.  So, I really ended up with banana pudding with pieces of pie crust in it.  Which is not a bad thing, but it’s not banana cream pie.  Next time, no doubling the filling, it’ll just have to have a smaller ratio of filling to crust. More room for whipped cream!! I love this picture of your pie Deanna with the cut bananas at the bottom.  Looks professional! 

Mom made a chocolate cream pie as well. This one set up no problem at all and it was really good
.Of course!  Nice chocolate taste and super smooth and creamy.  Lil Dude G really liked the “chocolate pudding” in the pie crust. Famous G quote " I LIKE chocolate". 

Lil Chick Z used one of the pie crusts that she made to make cinnamon sugar cookies.  She rolled out the dough, sprinkled on sugar and cinnamon and dotted the whole thing with butter.  Then it was rolled up into a log shape and sliced into rounds (Granny helped her with this part).  The cookies end up looking like little miniature cinnamon rolls.  This is not a recipe from Ben’s book, just something from the family recipe vault. Papa LOVED Z's cookies. Guess I will have to make some more : )

Lil Chick Z says:  "Hi, I made these cookies out of pie crust.  They were easy to make.  They taste good."  She really got into helping us this time, much more than ever before.  

The end result.  Yummy! 

Next time, we'll be down a Chick.  But never fear, we will carry on.  We'll be attempting quiche.  Oh my.Lions and Tigers and Quiche, OH MY !!  Tisha has decided that she needs a vacation (from us) so is going away for a week. Lucky girl!! We will try to persevere without her but she shall be missed. 


We are finding that cooking can be fairly expensive when just doing it by yourself. We are splitting all the ingredients 3 ways, so we can try new things that might other wise be too expensive to prepare on our own. Having said that, none of this has been overly expensive, just different ingredients than I usually have at home in my cupboards. I have made a Ben's Shelf  to put all the things that we use when preparing Ben's recipes. Did I mention he is OUR MASTER CHEF??  HA HA HA  Great fun ladies!  Enjoy your quiche next time!

ohmygod. Oh My God. OH-MY-GOD

Posted by Tisha:  Sharyl's comments in pink.  Deanna's comments in blue.
Round Two of tasting our way through Ben Starr's cookbook gave us this:

SOUR. CREAM. CHICKEN. ENCHILADAS.

I'm getting ahead of myself here.  They were just so darn delish that I had to see the final product again.
I will admit that although this recipe sounded fabulous, I wasn't sure it would be that good.  Let me tell you folks it was OMG x 3 good.   Deanna, Sharyl, and I sat around the table outside with our enchiladas topped with sour cream and cheese, refried beans and rice and there was deferential silence.  Deanna had the first bite: "ohmygod" which lead to, "Oh My God" from me and then Sharyl, "OH MY GOD!".  Yes. They ARE that delicious.   Sooo what's so special about them?   Cumin and shred it yourself chicken off of  a real chicken.  Not canned chicken or the rotisserie-cheater-kind of chicken, but whole chickens you boil and shred.  Speaking of boiling and shredding...
PREP:  If we could give an extra spatula to a special person who did all the work it would go to Sharyl.  God love her.  To save us time on Saturday, Sharyl boiled two 5-6 pound whole chickens and picked every last bit o' chicken off the bone. Since the recipe did not say what size of chicken, I went for the gusto and bought 2 very large ones.   She also added the other ingredients to make our enchilada filling a day ahead.   Cumin.  It's the secret ingredient that *Juanita only told her children after they were sworn to secrecy.  Go and walk to your spice cabinet and sniff the Cumin and tell me that doesn't conjure up images of your favorite Mexican fare.  Go on.  We'll wait. I thought, in my more is better mind, that I might as well double the recipe so we could have a large amount left over to wrap and freeze for another meal. Since the prep for the chicken filling took quite a bit of time, I figured I might as well make it worth the while. The house smelled delicious with the chickens cooking away and that magical cumin simmering into it. Something I have never done before when making stock and cooking chickens....Ben says to cut the onion into quarters and do not peel, same with garlic, separate and smash, then throw into the pot. When the stock is done, you take out and throw away all the ingredients except the chicken and stock. So peeling is a waste of time.

Saturday:  I arrive to find Sharyl and Deanna hands deep in dunking corn tortillas, rolling them up and gently placing them into the baking dish seam-side down.  Deanna is dunking each tortilla in the prep sauce that contained broth, sour cream. Hearing our MasterChef's voice "Go forth and season" I added condensed cream of chicken soup, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper. I tasted sauce for saltiness as Ben suggests but didn't think we needed any more.   The warmth of the sauce yielded a more pliable tortilla. We tried 2 different temps when heating the sauce, hotter is better for softening up the tortilla.   Sharyl added about 1/3 cup of chicken mixture to each tortilla.  The recipe states it can make 24 enchiladas and it most certainly did. I must add that having 3 hands in the kitchen (make that 6 hands) makes the work go faster and is much more fun!  This is definitely a labor intensive recipe.  Not something that you would be able to make on a whim after work one night.

  

Mmmmm...

Once all of the enchiladas have been made the recipe called for the extra dunking sauce to be poured over each enchilada.

Deanna then sprinkled Monterey Jack cheese on top, covered the dishes in aluminum foil and baked them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove the aluminum foil and put back into the oven for another 10 minutes. You let them sit for about 10 minutes when removed from the oven and then you are ready to serve.

Cost of enchiladas was about $20.  You  make 24 BIG ones and they are very filling. Sampling our effort in the kitchen was most definitely the best part.  We added refried beans and rice purchased from Sombrero down the street. (their beans are addictive, must be the lard) {lard makes everything better, it's a known fact} The only thing missing was a margarita.  Behold our plated feast...

 ~Before~

~After~  ...sigh...



What's on the menu for next time?  Let me preface our decision by imitating Confucius:  3 chicks no decide next recipe when belly still full.

3 Chicks and a Spatula are servin' up Meemaw's Chocolate Pie.  And Banana Cream Pie.  Cause 3 Chocolate Pies is overkill and besides, bananas and chocolate go together like....well, like peanut butter and chocolate. 

COMING SOON!   2 Little Chicks with an Opinion.
For all the moms out there with kids that are picky eaters we will ask our 2 baby chicks, Z and G, to sample and comment.  We cannot, however, guarantee the baby chicks will sample the food.  They haven't yet, but I suspect the chocolate pie might win G over. 

I'm "Z" to you.

 

Meet Z:   Well, ok then.  Little Chick Z is 8 years old.  Her palate is really starting to expand which makes her food loving mother's heart happy.  She likes all the normal kid foods, chicken nuggets and pizza, but she also loves feta cheese, potstickers and pistachios.  She would eat beans and rice for every meal, if I would let her.





Meet G:  Picture and info coming soon...


*Juanita is not part of this blog and any reference to a Juanita or her offspring is purely fictional and coincidental.

** Note about saving and freezing the enchiladas. I found that the left over enchiladas weren't as good the next day as some other "leftover" type foods. The corn tortilla breaks down a bit and the ends get hard. We had a LOAD of them left over and I think perhaps the idea of making an extra meal was a good one, but perhaps not with this recipe. This is more of a dinner party impress the hell out of your friends and family type of a meal and just live on the memory of how absolutely delicious it was.  ***I agree with mom, these were a no go for me the next day.  I didn't want to think about them again so soon after our first meal.  They are some of the best enchiladas I've ever had but they are incredibly rich and the thought of eating more...well, let's just say I didn't like the idea.  I'm pretty much a leftover person, in that I don't mind leftovers and often look forward to them but not these, I'm afraid.

Our first day

Posted by Deanna:  Sharyl's comments in PINK.  Tisha's comments in ORANGE.
It's our first day of cooking and we've decided to start with recipes found on Ben's website.

Up first is Cheesy Potato soup.  This is a fairly straight forward recipe, calling for, well potatoes and cheese.  Velveeta to be exact.  It also calls for bacon.  How can you go wrong with a soup that has cheese, potatoes and bacon?  You can't. If only the screen allowed for a scratch-n-sniff.  Nothin' smells better than bacon.

The soup was quite good.  It's a thinner soup, not typical of potato cheese soups I've had in the past.  It has a rich flavor and the bits of bacon were a really nice addition.  We doubled the recipe so that we could each take some home.

Excuse the bread in that picture, the cornbread was still in the oven. (and we couldn't wait for the corn bread to be done to taste the wonderful smelling soup)

Speaking of cornbread, that was the second recipe of the day.  This is the Green Chili Cornbread that Ben made on MasterChef, to go with his Pork Butt Chili. (teehee, you said butt) Pork Butt must be said with a redneck accent, btw, as in "Gimme sum of that porkbutt JimBob". This recipe is a little more labor intensive with the roasting of the chilis and corn but still not an overly complicated recipe.  This was new for me.  Queen Spatula aka Deanna, put them in the oven roaster like she knew what she was doing. Wait. She does know what she's doing.  The flavor of both the corn and chilis was sooo good. 

The chilis roasting in the oven smelled so good!  We subbed Anaheim chilis as the grocery store near mom's house did not have Poblanos.   I've never roasted corn this way, it took a little longer than the chilis but it was definitely worth it.

Once everything was mixed together, it was a very thick batter.  The color was beautiful.  We used feta because mom couldn't find the queso fresco crumbles. 

We didn't have a cast iron skillet (I know, shame on us) so we had to use a 9 X 13 glass pan.  It took about 33 minutes to cook and came out perfectly.

Yum!  It's a very savory cornbread which is not what most people are used to when it comes to cornbread.  You could taste the roasted corn and chilis.  None of us could taste the feta at all, even though we could see it.  We all agree that chunks of pepper jack cheese would be a great addition. 

So, our first foray into the world of cooking like Ben.  Total spent was $37.37 for the ingredients.  Keep in mind though, this included things that we didn't have in the pantry and only used a little bit of in the recipes, like the dry mustard and peppercorns.  There is now a dedicated stash of items that will be used in this endeavor, so the cost of the recipes will most likely go down as that stash grows.

Leftover report:   The soup did not hold up well to being microwaved however, it was just fine when heated in a saucepan slowly on the stove.  I did not notice any change in the consistency and the flavor was the same.  The cornbread is actually better the next day.  The chili taste is stronger however, it does dry out fast.  
This was fun!  I know Sharyl noted it took one hour from start to finish with the soup.  All hands on deck made both recipes easier.  Something new for me, in addition to the roasting of corn and chilis, was sauteing (sp?) the onions in bacon grease.  Have mercy---did that smell good or what? 

Next up:  Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas that will make your mouth wattah.