The Yummy

Scallops with Mystery Green Sauce

There are few things that I find more daunting than cooking seafood. For some reason I have seafood built up in my head as something super difficult that requires lots of time and effort to do properly. I don’t know where this idea comes from, but I’m always amazed when I actually get something seafood-y and realize how insanely easy it was to prepare.

Pan Seared Scallops with Spinach Goat Cheese Sauce

In the title I said “mystery green” but it actually isn’t very mysterious… in fact the sauce is only two ingredients:

• Spinach
• Goat Cheese

A little salt and pepper never hurt anyone, but the only other ingredients for this recipe are:

• scallops
• olive oil

Step 1: The first step is to cook the spinach down. Just throw it in a pan and sprinkle some water over it (a handful usually does the trick for me) and heat on low until the leaves start to wilt and turn dark green. 

Step 2: Once the spinach is nice and cooked throw it in a blender with the greenish water that’s collected at the bottom. Add about 2oz of goat cheese to the spinachy green water mess. I didn’t have access to a food scale, so I used a tape measure to figure out how much 2oz was (based on the total weight of the cheese I’d purchased).

Blend on the “liquefy” setting until everything is combined to make a sort of runny paste. To see if it needs more cheese I usually just stick my finger in and do a little taste test. The 2oz/6cm worth was perfect for my tastes.

Step 3: Once the “sauce” is ready it’s time to cook the scallops. “Pan seared” is a fancy way of saying “thrown in a frying pan with a little oil on the bottom”, so do that.

Scallops are kind of grossly slimy when you first pull them out. They almost feel like a really concentrated ball of mucus, which is a disgusting image I really wish I hadn’t just put in my mind.

After a few minutes on medium heat the scallops should be slightly browned on the bottom. Flip them over to cook on the other side.

Let the scallops cook until they are slightly brown on the other side as well. They will turn opaque, which is how you know they’re ready to eat.

Step 4: Pour a small amount of the spinach goat cheese sauce over the scallops (I used a turkey baster to make it look fancy).

Verdict: Excellent. I had it with a salad and it was the perfect lunch.

Time: Using the blender meant the whole thing (including chopping stuff up for the salad) took about fifteen minutes.

Difficulty: Super super super easy. Can not emphasize that enough.

Back in the USA Burgers

So! Over the past two weeks I moved from Germany back stateside. This obviously put a bit of a damper on posting, since I was basically just eating lots of reheated spaghetti in between packing.

Now that I’m back though, I have so much to share with you! There are a few backlogged posts from Germany that I will put up at some point, but in the meantime let’s celebrate my homecoming with some burgers.

Buffalo Wing Cheese BBQ Bacon Burgers

Ingredients:

• 90% Lean Ground Beef
• Yancy’s Fancy Buffalo Wing Cheese
• Oscar Meyer Thick Cut Bacon
• Hamburger Buns
• BBQ Sauce (I used Wegman’s Kansas City variety) 

Step 1: I always wonder why people put bacon on burgers. It just seems so silly when clearly it’s so much better IN the burger. This means first step is frying up the bacon and getting it nice and crispy so that you can crumble it into the meat.

Step 2: The cheese usually works better if it’s shredded but my mom’s kitchen doesn’t have a cheese grater, so I had to cut it into small cubes instead. I sliced off three 1/4” slices from the triangle and then mini-cubed them.

Step 3: Dump the package of ground beef into a bowl and smush it a little. Add the cubed cheese and crumbled bacon.

Step 4: Mash it all together with your hands until the cheese and bacon seem to be pretty evenly mixed. Turn on the grill and while it heats up form the burgers into patties about the size of your palm and around 3/4” thick.

Step 5: Throw the patties on the grill and listen to them start to sizzle. I am extremely lucky to be staying in a house that has a grill built in to the stove. I’m thinking having to go outside to grill in February would not be super fun.

Step 6: As the bottom of the patty grills drop about 1 Tablespoon of BBQ sauce over the top of the burger. I used a turkey baster just to be fancy.

Step 7: Flip the burgers (only twice if you can help it… over flipping makes them less juicy and delicious) and put BBQ sauce on the other side as well. Once the burgers were just about finished I put the buns on the grill to toast them. I also added a small slice of the Buffalo Wing Cheese over the top because why not.

When you pull it all off the grill top it with the mushrooms. You could add other condiments if you want, but I don’t think it really needs them.

Sorry there is not a better closing picture but they did not last long enough to get a good shot.

Verdict: Super delicious. Will probably cause heart attacks, so prepare at your own risk.

Time: All told this took about a half hour. Not bad at all.

Difficulty: Super easy. Getting the timing right on the burgers is a little tricky but this time I managed to get them a gorgeous medium with pure dumb luck.

Grandma Nuch’s Banana Bread

A few years ago my dad put together a Word document with a few family “Favorite Recipes”. Most of them are near unintelligible for the novice cook, assuming that the person already knows how to make the recipe and just needs a reminder of quantities. I had some going-bad bananas though, so I decided to give this a shot.

Banana Nut Bread

½ cup Crisco shortening  butter             2 eggs

½ cup sugar                                            1 tsp baking soda

¾ tsp salt                                                1 cup crushed ripe bananas

½ cup milk                                             2 cups sifted flour

1 cup finely chopped walnuts almonds

Cream butter & sugar together.  Add eggs-sift salt, baking soda & flour together.  Crush bananas and add to mixture then add nuts.  Bake at 350degrees – 45 to 55 min.

Step 1: Cream butter and sugar together.

Thank god Amazon.de finally delivered my hand mixer. Creaming butter and sugar together is not impossible by hand, but it is exhausting. For those who don’t know, creaming butter and sugar basically just involves slicing the butter into little squares, dumping the sugar over it, and smooshing it together with a mixer until it has a creamy texture.

Step 2: Add eggs. Easy.

Step 3: Sift salt, baking soda, and flour together. My dad always insists that flour sifting is absolutely necessary, and credits his amazing chocolate chip cookies almost solely to the flour sifting. Personally I think sifting is overrated, and do not possess a sifter even if I wanted to do this step. Instead I threw it all in a bowl and mixed it with a fork, then added it to the butter/egg mixture.

Step 4: I didn’t have any walnuts, but I did have some almonds. So, you know, why not.

Step 5: Mash bananas.

Step 6: After the bananas are mashed, add them to the mixture and mix it all up with a spoon. Don’t use the mixer at this point or the bananas will get kind of gross. The mixture will have the consistency of a kind of thick cake batter, and once it’s combined just dump it into a pan.

Step 7: This is completely optional and not part of the original recipe at all, but I still had some streusel topping left over from the cream cheese coffee cake, so I sprinkled it over the top with the leftover almonds:

About halfway through the 40 minutes I checked on the bread in the oven, and it was rising beautifully. More importantly, it made the whole house smell like magic and fairies and other beautiful things.

When I pulled it out of the oven the only word I could think of was “perfection”. It was fluffly and gorgeous, and just generally wonderful.

Verdict: I would write but I am too busy stuffing banana bread in my mouth.

Difficulty: Easy easy easy. Even with a barely intelligible recipe I was able to pull a work of art out of the oven.

Time: Not bad at all. I made this while having my morning coffee, and made some scrambled eggs while it was cooking. It was finished baking at the exact moment I finished my breakfast.

Pizza from Scratch

Pizza. Arguably the greatest and most versatile meal in the world. Infinite options with regards to crust, sauce, cheeses (or lack of cheeses) and toppings, pizza is perfect for any meal and any occasion.

While I was over at Budget Bytes for the biscuit recipe, I noticed a recipe for pizza dough. I already had all of the ingredients, so I figured what the hell.

First I had to combine the sugar, yeast, and warm water in a bowl and letting it sit till foamy. Once the yeast mixture was put together, the flour, salt, and olive oil get mixed together in a separate bowl. 

Despite a lot of waiting, my yeast just didn’t want to get foamy. I was worried it was too chilly in my apartment, so I turned on a burner and held the bowl with the yeast mixture over it. This didn’t get the yeast foaming, although I did burn my hand a little.

I left the burner on and set the yeast bowl next to it, in the hopes that the heat would get it activated. I think I waited for a solid ten minutes with no result, so finally I called bread-expert Matt Bova who reassured me that the yeast didn’t need to get foamy to work.

Next step was my favorite part: kneading the dough. There is something about beating a ball of dough into submission that makes me feel pretty badass. I had to google how to knead, but it’s pretty easy. Just pressing the dough down with the heel of your hands and then flipping it in half and repeat. I strongly recommend having a good soundtrack, because ten minutes of dough kneading can get kind of monotonous otherwise.

I let it rise in a silver bowl for a little over an hour. I completely forgot to cover the ball of dough in oil first, but it seemed to come out okay regardless. I love looking at the before and after rising pictures:

At this point the dough was pretty much set, so I got to work on the sauce. At some point I will cover Nuchereno Family Recipe Sauce, but that recipe is a bit involved for pizza. Instead I just did a basic marinara with some whole peeled tomatoes, tomato sauce, and a small thing of tomato paste. Added three cloves of garlic (pressed down with a knife to release all the garlicky wonderfulness), and three turns around the pan of basil, oregano, salt, pepper, and garlic powder (yes in addition to the cloves). A small handful of sugar and then it was just a matter of letting it sit and soak up the flavor.

While the sauce was getting flavor-y it was time to stretch out the dough. Like magic, I just tossed it in the air and made a perfectly even circle of crust.

I wish.

In reality, I stretched it out using my knuckles (sort of like giving a back massage) and kept getting big holes in the middle. It took three false starts where I wound up having to give up and squish the whole thing back together and start over before I finally got it sort of right. Despite best efforts I could not get the crust even all the way around. The edges were super doughy and the inside was incredibly thin. Before anyone could see that there were still a few small holes in the middle, I quickly put it on a parchment paper lined baking sheet and ladled sauce over it. I used a bag and a half of shredded mozzarella cheese, and about five mushrooms chopped up. Pepperoni went next, and then I sprinkled some black olives and put it in the oven.

I let it bake at top heat (around 225°C or 450°F) until the cheese was melted and the crust browned. While the crust wasn’t perfect (next time I will make more of an effort to get it even), the result was pretty damn good. It was enough to feed four people comfortably with an accompanying vegetable dish.

Verdict: I could not keep my guests from it long enough to take a non-blurry picture, so I’m going to say pretty confidently that this turned out fantastically.

Difficulty: Medium-hard. I think anyone could do it, but to get the crust stretched out properly takes a skill that is currently beyond me.

Time: Dough rising and so on are always a killer time-wise. This wasn’t too-too bad though. I think all told it took me close to three hours, so definitely a weekend only dish.

“Buttermilk” Biscuits

Do you know what buttermilk is? It turns out that it is basically just moderately curdled milk. Which, first of all, gross. Second, how is it that curdled milk can become so delicious when mixed in with a bunch of other stuff?

I was browsing Budget Bytes and I found a basic biscuit recipe so I figured I would give it a shot. I had all the ingredients on hand, especially once I found out buttermilk’s dirty little secret.

The first step was to curdle the milk. I squeezed out a tablespoon worth of lemon juice and mixed it in a mug with cold milk.

Once I let the milk start curdling, I started mixing up flour, baking powder, and salt. Finding baking soda in Germany is the next thing to impossible, so I just tripled the amount of baking powder. Then I just sort of stirred it together with a fork until it got all combined.

I used my food scale to measure out the butter and cut it into little pats. The recipe said that you can mix the butter into the flour mixture with a food processor, but I used the good old fashioned smooshing with my hands method instead.

Once the butter was incorporated (it really gave the flour mixture a kind of sandy texture) I added the “buttermilk” and mixed it in. This was definitely the stickiest wettest dough I’ve made to date.

I was a little nervous that it seemed almost more like a batter than a dough, but the consistency reminded me of the way Bisquick gets when you mix it up so I carried on. 

Next it was time to “liberally flour the counter top and [my] hands”. I did my best:

I can really not emphasize enough how important it is to use an ass-load of flour at this point. I wound up adding more to what you see above, and sprinkled even more on top of the dough because when I first tried to pat it down it just stuck fast to my hands.

Once the dough was covered in flour I patted it down to about 3/4” thickness and started cutting out biscuit rounds using a small drinking glass. The oven was already preheated to about 250°C from dinner, so I just dropped the dough rounds onto a parchment paper-covered baking sheet and popped them in.

I have to be honest, I was not feeling super optimistic about these turning out well on the first try. They seemed incredibly flat when I first put them in the oven, but I was heartened when I checked on them and they had started poofing:

They came out beautifully. Just really gorgeous and fluffy, and when I split them open the insides proved to be flaky and wonderful.

Verdict: These turned out really amazingly, and they were one of the easier baking things I’ve tried. I let my roommates at them and they disappeared pretty quickly at dinner time (spread with pesto and an eggplant/tomato mixture I made) but I also saved a couple to have under my poached eggs with breakfast. I will definitely make these again, and next time I will use the extra flour the first time around so that I don’t get a sticky mess.

Difficulty: Really easy, especially compared to the coffee cake or pizza dough. No kneading, no rising, really no work at all besides a little mixing.

Time: I think all told these took probably about an hour. I made a huge mess on the counter with the flour and dough sticking, so if you do these make sure to allow for extra cleanup time.

Thanks Mom :)

“I can’t keep looking, everything looks soooo good!! I seriously think you should send this in to some reality show, it would be great!”

• Question: Your kitchen looks very clean. Is that really your kitchen or just a photo set? - Anonymous
• Answer:

  Believe it or not, unless otherwise marked all of the photos have been taken in my very own clean kitchen. I’ve found that life is much more pleasant when the counters are wiped, the floors swept, and the dishes done during or immediately after cooking. It’s by no means spotless, but a pretty giant improvement on any other kitchen I’ve ever had. It also makes it a lot easier to cook when there are clean dishes and counter space available for chopping things and so on.

Chicken Salad

I have never really understood why people eat chicken salad. I like chicken sandwiches with mayo, but it just seems unnecessary to go the extra step and mix it all together first. If that didn’t sound so impossibly boring, I probably never would have tried this.

googled: chicken salad recipe

It seems like there are as many varieties of chicken salad as there are people making it. I perused a few, but not wanting anything too complicated I settled on All Recipe’s Basic Chicken Salad Recipe for my inspiration. I didn’t have any celery or pepper, but I added bacon to make up for whatever loss of flavor that might cause.

Step 1: The first order of business was cooking up some chicken. I had one breast loose in the fridge, so I rubbed it with a little salt, pepper, and chili powder, then dropped it in a pan with a little olive oil at the bottom.

Most instructions for cooking chicken in a pan recommend that you pound it out first so that it cooks evenly. I didn’t feel like dealing with gooey disgusting pieces of cling film, so I came up with another method:

I just push the chicken over to the side of the pan and squish the thin end up around the edge. It still cooks, but much more slowly since there’s less heat than directly over the burner. I was incredibly pleased with how well this worked. Once the fatter end was cooked most of the way through I moved the chicken back into the center of the pan just to make sure the end got cooked enough, and it really worked out extremely well.

Step 2: I wasn’t really in a washing dishes mood, so I decided to just drop the bacon in with the chicken. I did a quick careful wipe of the bottom of the pan with a paper towel (while it was still on the burner, which I don’t recommend) to get rid of some of the excess oil, and then threw in the bacon.

Step 3: While the bacon was getting crispy in the pan, I was chopping up some almonds. I had some sliced but the recipe called for slivered. I wound up with more like “ground” because apparently sliced almonds don’t take really well to slivering.

When I pulled the chicken and bacon out of the pan I chopped those up too, and burned my fingers in the process. Probably better to wait until things cool off a bit to pick up a knife.

The chicken turned out really really good and I was almost sorry to be defiling it for chicken salad. A handful of pieces fell victim to the Quality Control Monster and it was only with great effort that the rest were left to cool.

Step 4: Once the chicken had cooled off (probably not as much as it should have but I was hungry) I dumped everything in a bowl and added a giant gob of mayo. Probably about 1/4 cup, which was a little too much for just one piece of chicken. I threw in a smidge of mustard too because why not.

There are times when you should be grateful I only share compressed photos, and this is one of those times. This mixture looked completely and totally disgusting:

I am gagging a little even looking at it now. This was midway through the mixing, so everything hadn’t really gotten caught yet but it was starting to look gobby. Also, yellow. Gag gag gag.

Step 5: I couldn’t really think of anything I could possibly add to it that would make it look more appealing, so I made some toast to spread it on. At this point I almost scrapped the whole project and made eggs, but I had already put in so much effort that I had to see it through.

I have never been so relieved in my life to cover something with a slice of bread. I knew that if I kept looking at it I wasn’t going to be able to put it in my mouth.

Miraculously once I cut it and looked from the side, it actually looked sort of appetizing.

Appetizing enough to eat anyway. It wasn’t until I found myself licking the crumbs off my fingers that I realized this disgusting goopy mess was actually kind of delicious.

Verdict: Decidedly not bad! I still don’t really see the appeal of chicken salad, and I would much rather just have the chicken and stuff all separate instead of smooshed together, but it was pretty tasty.

Difficulty: Super super super easy.

Time: If you do not have chicken already prepared this will take awhile because it has to cool before you can mix it up. If you do already have some leftover chicken it’d only take about five minutes to mix it all together.

Fried Macaroni and Cheese

I am starting to despair of ever finishing the Macaroni and Cheese I made four days ago. I’ve eaten it with pretty much every meal since then, and I’ve also let both of my roommates at it. Despite that, there is still more than half a dish left. I’m getting sick of it as a side, but it’s so good that I don’t want to waste it.

googled: mac and cheese leftovers

One of the first results was Alton Brown’s Next Day Macaroni and Cheese “Toast”.

Ingredients:

• Leftover baked macaroni and cheese, refrigerated for at least overnight ✔
• 1 cup all-purpose flour ✔
• 1 teaspoon salt ✔
• 1 teaspoon pepper ✔
• 1 teaspoon cayenne - just used the straight up chili powder
• 1 egg beaten with 2 ounces water ✔
• 1 cup panko bread crumbs - alas, no panko. had to use german breadcrumbs.
• Oil for deep frying, preheated to 375 degrees ✔ -ish

Step 1 was cutting the leftover macaroni and cheese into bite size pieces. I have to be honest, this was kind of gross. Mostly I’ve just been kind of scooping it quickly into a bowl and immediately putting it in the microwave, but actually handling the firmed almost jello-y mold was pretty nasty.

Step 2: I mixed up the flour with the spices in one bowl, beat the egg with water in another, and dumped some breadcrumbs in a third. Then I coated the macaroni and cheese pieces in each, finishing with the breadcrumbs. My hands got disgusting, but it was kind of nice to have my fingers coated because it was freezing in the kitchen and the breading provided a nice barrier from the cold egg.

After the pieces were all breaded they had to sit for five minutes to let the breading set in or something. At this point I took a look at how much macaroni and cheese was still left and felt that same despair welling up.

I mean, I moved it to a smaller plate and it is still big enough to cast its own rather-significant shadow.

Step 3: heating the oil went pretty quickly. I used some yellow-y oil that I couldn’t identify by the label since we were out of olive oil. I think maybe sunflower based on the package but I’m not sure. This heated up a lot nicer than the olive oil did, and gave a better sizzle when I dropped the pieces in.

Step 4: I flipped them over so that they would all get evenly golden-brown in the crust area. I couldn’t quite bring myself to fill the pan with enough oil to just coat them all in one go. This part took a little bit, especially since I wanted to make sure that the insides were melty in addition to the crust being brown.

Step 5 (Optional Dip): I think a little sour cream would have been beautiful with these, but unfortunately I was out of it. Instead I first tried a little cream cheese, and when that proved to be disgusting I mixed some mayo with a little thai sweet chili and sriracha sauce. It complemented the blander mac and cheese flavor nicely.

Verdict: These weren’t bad taste-wise but way too greasy to eat on anything resembling a regular basis. I felt kind of sick after and I only ate three of the pieces. I washed it down with a banana and some nutella though, so to be fair it could have been that making me nauseous.

Difficulty: Not hard at all. I think anyone could do this without too much trouble.

Time: The most time consuming part was cleaning up the three dishes from the breading, but overall this only took about fifteen minutes total.