This morning we tried making Alton Brown’s recipe for English muffins. We don’t usually stock dried milk, so we bought some. All they had at the store was a giant box. Now I’m wondering if we could have used regular milk in place of some of the water instead. Brian looked up the definition of #20 scoop and it means 20 scoops per quart. Using my handy math skills, I determined that this is 5 scoops per cup, so I tried out our scoops. The larger one was the right size. After resting, I scooped the dough into aluminum bands that I made instead of rings. Two scoops per ring barely got me 6 muffins and the recipe specified 8 to 10. Hmmm…. I put a cookie sheet on top. After 6 minutes I flipped them and the bottoms were dark brown, so I turned the heat down on the griddle. After another 6 minutes I took them off and opened one. They were very dense and spongy, but tasted excellent. I think if I try it again I’d look for a recipe that would give me less dense of a texture, I’d get real muffin rings, and I’d put less dough in each ring.

If I had to say pass or fail I’d say pass. But on the ABCDF +/- scale I’d probably say B-.

And now we have a whole box of dried milk… what do I do with that?

I decided that I’d like to add some extra beans and some beer to our chili this week. This made Brian nervous. There’s no recipe! Ok, so I screwed up once and made baked potato soup with the consistency of library paste! Once. At first the chili did taste overwhelmingly like beer, but some beef broth and extra seasoning fixed it. It was good! I like stuff added to my chili anyway, so under the Fritos, cheddar cheese, and sour cream, it was great! Brian eats his plain (Fritos on the side).

We also made corn bread (Northern) from the New Best Recipes cookbook. I would highly recommend it (with real butter and honey). Very nice.

Yesterday I made a full recipe of Ina Garten’s Corn Chowder. I wanted leftovers. We’ve made a half recipe before. I doubled the bacon and only used 1 Tb. of butter, and added a couple of cans of creamed corn to try to thicken it. It was still too thin. Next time I will keep the doubled bacon and reduced butter. I’ll keep the bacon out of the soup until we serve it (as it says in the instructions). Before serving I’ll use my stick blender to “cream” some of the corn. And I think I will not add all 12 cups of chicken stock. 6 would probably be perfect. I think it needs more cheese and pepper. I will NOT add creamed corn – it just made it taste weird and tinny.

Overall, I thought it was good, but not 5 stars. We have made it before “by the book” and even then I don’t think it deserved 5 stars.

Since the two of us hardly made a dent in it we will have lunches all week. I ran out of soup containers and had to throw away about 2 servings. I’ll plan better next time.

Tonight we made Alton Brown’s recipe for gyros. In short, I think the rosemary is a little weird and I think you need a rotisserie to do it well (we did the meatloaf method). I made the meat into paste, basically, in the food processor. I think the meat texture was fine, but we were missing the crispy edges from the rotisserie versions. To find ground lamb we had to go to Whole Foods.

The result wasn’t so great for the effort and money involved. Next time we’ll head to one of our gyros spots instead.

Back in Ohio there was this place we went that sometimes had beer cheese bread, usually in the fall. I’m not talking about cheese and beer baked into the loaf. I’m talking about French or Italian bread covered in melted cheese and beer. It’s hard to describe.

So the other day I was reading this article on Welsh Rarebit and a lightbulb went on. What we had in Ohio was a beer and cheese fondue over bread, then broiled. Easy!

Last night I made a mess of our house trying it out. I heated butter, added flour, added most of a bottle of brown ale, after that thickened I added mozzarella and pepper. I had to stir that for a long time before it melted evenly. Then I added a dollop of Dijon mustard (and apparently didn’t stir it in well enough). I poured this whole mess over a split half loaf of French bread and broiled it. I had to move the oven rack closer to the broiler. All in all, it was good and I will do it again. I was worried that the bread was too soggy, but it was actually very similar to what we’ve had before. It might be less soggy if I cut back on the beer next time. It is very much like fondue without the dipping.

I made the mistake of microwaving cold beer to warm it up without keeping an eye on it and got beer all over the microwave. Oops. Cooking with me can be messy. But tasty.

I’ve had kisir at a local restaurant and loved it, so I wanted to try it at home. It’s like tabbouleh that’s light on parsley and heavy on bulgar. It involves some ingredients that I don’t have on hand. The first is bulgar (Brian loves saying that word). I found some at our local grocery store, but it looks different. I decided to try it anway. The recipes I found online also called for red pepper paste (which I think is mostly sweet and some hot peppers) and pomegranate molasses. I found recipes for both of these things and tried to make them. I’m too lazy to boil and bake the red peppers, and I couldn’t find any hot red peppers on the day I went to the store.

This is starting to read like one of those allrecipes.com reviews where the reviewer slams the recipe after making so many changes the recipes is hardly the same.

Anyway, I substituted red pepper flakes and made some approximation of paste by mincing red peppers and basically frying them to get rid of some water. I simmered pomegranate juice while I did this to reduce it. The recipe for pomegranate molasses that I found had some sugar, but I wouldn’t add that next time. It makes the final result too sweet. As far as I can tell, the red pepper “paste” is fine. I also used tomato paste, so any paste-like qualities that were missing from the red peppers might be covered by that.

The bulgar I found at our store did not have a rating for the grind size. Eyeballing it, it looked pretty much like small rice. I followed the directions on the bulgar package, equal parts bulgar and water and rest for an hour. In the end, it tastes a lot like chewy, nutty, brown rice. This is not the same as what I’ve had at restaurants or seen in pictures, which more closely resembled cous cous. I think I’ve got the wrong kind of bulgar. It definitely improved upon sitting overnight in the fridge. The flavors need to blend.

All in all, I’m glad I did this. Next time I’ll try a different store for a different kind of bulgar. I’ll leave out the sugar. if I can find hot red peppers I’ll use one, and I might make more of an effort to get a paste-like consistency with the peppers. Neither recipe had salt, and I found this salad needed it.

It’s not quite what I was going for, but I still like it… I’m taking it to work to eat for lunch. I might branch out into other bulgar salads.