Vegetarian White Wine Sauce

I didn't take any pictures, so this wont be a visually pleasing post. But it was so delicious that I'll just try and draw a picture with my words...just kidding, who do you think i am? seriously, I'm an engineer the best I can do is give you a picture in numbers.

I tried to find a recipe online but there were none that fit the idea i had in my head so I made up my own and it came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

this recipe made 2 generous portions
*1/2 cup of dry white wine...I went with barefoot chardonnay b/c i happened to have little bottles sitting around
*1/2 cup of vegetable stock. I used the Trader Joe's vegetable reduced sodium savory broths.
* 1/4 onion chopped
* 1 large shallot chopped
* 1 clove of garlic chopped and crushed
* 1/4 lemon
* 1/4 tbsp salted butter (b/c i like it healthy like that)
* 1 fresh ear of corn, kernels cut off
* 1/2 cup frozen peas
* 1 handful of fresh chopped spinach
* cream to taste

1. Melt in your prettiest le cruesette the butter, and throw in the onions, garlic, and shallots to sautee.
2. squeeze in the lemon juice
3. Once sauteed add the wine and broth and put the top on to simmer.
4. after a few min add the corn and peas.
5. Reduce heat and Simmer longer
6. add a dash of cream
7. Boil up some water and cook the pasta
8. Just before the pasta is done throw in the spinach.
9. Mix and serve
10. On each plate mix in goat cheese, and then top with parmesean cheese
11. if desired add salt to taste.

Note: I used zucchini in mine but i don't recommend it so I wont add it here.

All that practice with play dough paid off!

This past sat was the 1 year anniversary of the day peter and I got engaged. To celebrate we tried out our brand new kitchen aid attachment pasta maker to make ourselves a nice dinner. We also tried out our new beater blade attachment. Kitchen aid is a great kitchen tool, but its major flaw is that the mixing attachments designed for it do not fully reach the bottom of the bowl, which generally results in extra dry materials unmixed at the bottom of the bowl.

This new beater blade (pictured above) reaches all the way to the bottom helping to mix almost all of the ingredients. Since it touches the entire bowl its a bit noisier when mixing, but thats ok with me.

After all the ingredients were mixed through we attached the pasta attachment and began to make pasta! its exactly like playing with play dough! We were slightly concerned because the spinach wasnt chopped up well enough for the dough, but evidently the pasta attachment does some good blending while its pressing out the pasta to give it a nice even green color.



We tried 4 different pasta settings. Fusili:
This one lost most of its shape and looked kinda strange, but the consistency of the pasta cooked well.

Next we tried bucanini which i have never had before. its like spagetti but hollow little tubes. These probably came out the best!


Lastly we tried large macaroni and rigatoni which practically came out the same (rigatoni a bit better).

We threw all the different types in the pot of boiling water and made a confetti of pasta! I made a tomato/cream/pesto sauce that was so delicious if i do say so myself. We served it on our new plates


mmmm what a delicious celebration!

Garlic Scapes Pesto

Last Thursday I headed to the farmers market at work in hopes for fresh peaches. No peaches were to be found, but they had a bucket of beautiful garlic scapes. I've never seen them for sale before so how could I pass up this opportunity! The farm even provided me with a recipe! I bought 1/2 lb of garlic scapes and was excited to try making garlic scapes pesto. I was imagining it to be garlicy, but not overwhelmingly so. I was very very wrong. I tasted the pesto as I was making it and it tasted like pure garlic!! I quickly emptied out my fridge's basil collection and added that to the pesto to try and diffuse the flavor. It helped, but only mildly. We ate it over pasta, but I would not recommend it. Tonight i'm going to try it again since we have so much leftovers ----i'll add more basil this time i guess.

Below is the recipe I dont recommend

1/2 lb garlic scapes (buds cut off)
1 c oil
2 c Parmesan cheese
blend in food processor

Star Wars Themed birthday food!

For peter's birthday gathering I decided to make star wars themed food.
We ended up making 4 star wars themed foods.

1. Light Sabers! We melted white chocolate and dyed it green, blue, and red (no purple b/c peter would have gotten angry if i acknowledged samuel l jackson's purple saber)
2. Princess Leia cupcakes. M&M buns and frosted faces. Not that well done since i'm not that artistic, but you get the idea

3 and 4. Using the william sonoma cookie cuters I made yoda and storm trooper cookies.




Ideas I didnt follow through with:
* Han Solo action figure in Jello (carbonite clearly). Someone suggested I turn this into Jello shots, but I was afraid people would accidentally eat the han solo figurines.
* Death Star Truffles, pretty easy to make a chocolate truffle look vaguely like the death star
* Luke's severed Hand. At halloween Diana took a latex glove and filled it with water and froze it to have ice hands floating in the punch, I figured this might be able to be adapted for the star wars purpose as well.
* Home made marshmallows for cloud city

Cooks Illustrated

I've recently been introduced into the world of Cooks Illustrated, and even signed up for 1 year. I found some great recipes and all turned out delicious. One however could have turned out better. It turns out Cooks Illustrated has a handy iphone app, which of course I downloaded. You can look up a recipe, add the ingredients list to an easy shopping list, and then follow the recipe by phone as you cook. This would have been all fine and dandy if there hadnt been a major typo in the iphone version. I made the Poached Pear and Almond Tart. There are 3 different portions to this recipe, the poached pears, the crust, and the Frangipane filling. TWO of the 3 portions (the pears and the filling) had the same typo. On the iphone version it called for 5/6 tsp of salt. First off who has measuring spoons that can even do that? I thought it sounded like a lot, and didnt have the right spoons, so i put in 3/4 instead (so slightly less for those of you who dont feel like doing the math). I decided to taste the frangipane b/c I love almond flavored anything and it was super salty!!! I ran to my computer and sure enough it was supposed to call for 1/8 tsp instead! I dumped in a ton of sugar to both parts to try and compensate for my super salty tart. The tart ended up ok (esp since I love salty things), but I think next time will be better.

Scalion Pancakes!

Earlier this week I came across a recipe for scallion pancakes, which is just about the only part to Chinese food I'll eat. For some reason no restaurant around here offers them. I started discussing it with Emily who recommended a slightly different recipe. Who knew scallion pancakes are so easy to make!!! The other nice part about making them at home is that you can use less oil, and put them directly on paper towels to soak out more oil when you are done. mmmm so delicious.



Emily was also inspired by our conversation and made them as well this week!

LDCM Cookies

Today we had a govt shutdown party. I made cookies stamped with the image of the satellite our instrument is mounted on. They came out alright