Wintersday Workshop 2011 Entry 2 - ALCOHOL

 So this is the second entry for the Wintersday Workshop 2011 Contest, the Frosty, Mischievous, and Yuletide Tonics!

We prepared these drinks for an awesome guild get-together, and they turned out DELICIOUS.  The Yuletide Tonic was a simple Bloody Mary, with Mr. and Mrs. T's Bloody Mary Mix and some vodka, hehe.

 The Mischievous Tonic was Midori.  We used some Melon liquor and added lemon juice to it in a 1:1 ratio.  Mix it with a little ginger ale and you have a sweet and sour glass of awesomeness.  

 Finally, our Frosty Tonic was a Creamy Limoncello.  We soaked some lemon and lime peels in vodka for 3 days in room temperature and mixed it with a little milk and sugar.  It's about a 4:1 milk to vodka ratio for this one.

We also made eggnog, but decided not to spike it :P.  All in all, the guild party was awesome and the drinks (and cookies from the previous post) were a big hit :).  Thanks!

Wintersday Workshop 2011 Entry 1 - COOKIES

This is my first entry for the Wintersday Workshop 2011 Contest, Edible Gingerbread Shields and Focuses!  It took a lot of time, effort, and sticky hands and fingers to cook everything, but in the end, I'm happy with the result. :D

Thanks everyone!

Back to school now (Baked Tilapia with Veggies)

So school is back in session, which means I will be very busy once again. But I wanted to put this entry in before things started getting too heavy.  I made my own recipe for cooking fish!  It's really not too complicated.  I read a recipe which involved baking tilapia with a slew of other things involved which I did not have, so I used what was available and made something pretty tasty:

2 tilapia fillets
5 mushrooms, cut into quarters
1 potato, sliced
ginger, 1 slice diced
paprika
basil
salt
pepper
olive oil
cilantro

Lay some foil on a baking sheet and cover the foil with some olive oil.  Then take your mushroom quarters and potato slices and lay them out over the foil.  Add some paprika and basil to the vegetables before preparing your fish.  In a separate bowl, massage the tilapia with salt, pepper, and ginger.  Afterwards, layer the fish on top of your veggies and sprinkle some more basil, paprika, and garlic on top.   Garnish with a little cilantro and give the whole thing a little shower of olive oil and bake for ~15 minutes in a 400° oven.  You are now ready to eat!


We made ours with pasta with mushroom/tomato sauce.  Here are the pics: 

I thought the dish turned out wonderfully.  The potatoes went really nicely with the fish and the pasta, and the fish was cooked pretty well.  Here are today's stats:

Time to cook: ~45 minutes (30 minutes to prepare (not counting thawing frozen tilapia) and 15 minutes to cook

Amount of help received: Slightly less than before.  My girlfriend helped me cut everything and helped me decide what to cook with the fish in lieu of other ingredients, but I took a good amount of leadership.

Presentation (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (it looks good, but it's not professional looking)

Tastiness (according to girlfriend): 4.2/5 (It was good.  Putting the potato and mushroom in really helped with the flavor. Maybe cooking it as it's own dish and including some sort of sauce would have been better.)

So another success!  I was really happy making and eating this dish.  I most certainly avoided the Foundry of Failed Creations with this dish :D. Maybe a different hairstyle is in order for celebration :P

Thanks fellow cooks and eaters!

-Stuart-

Microwave Cake (is surprisingly quick and tasty!)

I totally said I would post the recipe for this, and I have yet to follow my promise.  This was an experiment my girlfriend and I did one night, and it turned out pretty well.  We just used what little ingredients we had lying around...so it was ultra improvised.  SO, here we go:  MICROWAVE CHOCOLATE CAKE RECIPE: ACTIVATE!!!!!!!

So this recipe isn't too challenging really.
6 tbsp Pancake Mix
1 tbsp Hot Cocoa Mix
1 egg
1/2 tbsp butter (we used Smart Balance Lite)
1/2 tbsp plum wine
1/2 tbsp Malibu rum
some pancake syrup (we used two small ketchup-sized bags that we had left over from a campus restaurant)
some cinnamon

Mix well together in a microwave-safe bowl and "bake" in the microwave for 3:30.  Here's the mixed version:

And here's the final product after it's been cooked!

The cake was really tasty!  Maybe it was a little dry, but overall, it's really simple and awesome to make and watch.  It also tasted great with Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream!  

THANKS ALL YOU VIEWERS!
-Stuart-

Oh, right, It's 2011 now (also Poignantly Precarious Potatoes)

Happy 2011 everyone! It's a new year, which means I have a better chance of cooking more than two dishes before the next year rolls around :P. Anyways, my girlfriend wanted to make a fish soup for tonight's dinner and I was to make a salad (which I can happily say that I can make on my own now, thank you very much). But this dinner plan left us without any starch for the night. So instead of resorting to eating toast, we decided to cook something with our potatoes. After some snooping around on Tastespotting, we found some Hasselback Potato recipes. We took the main idea and ran with it, using our own ingredients that we had lying around. The distinguishing characteristic of Hasselback Potatoes is that they are sliced thinly down the length of the potato but without separating the slices, keeping the potato whole in a sense. We cut the potatoes in the basin of our cutting board so as not to slice all the way through the spuds.

The slices are important in that they allow our glaze/sauce-looking thing to be better absorbed into the potatoes. The final cut looks like this:

You should be able to see all of the thin slices we made in the potatoes. After this, we sliced some garlic cloves and fit each slice in between the slits. The next step was to prepare the sauce/glaze-looking thing. We used some butter (Smart Balance Light rather), canola oil, paprika, salt, pepper, and basil, melted it in the microwave, and spooned it onto the freshly cut spuds. If we had some sort of brush, that might have worked better, but you've got to work with what you have. Now all you need to do is bake them! 40-45 minutes at 450° (If you wish, you can choose to reglaze the potatoes in ten minute intervals during the baking process, especially if you have extra glaze left over. This should help keep the potatoes moist. We only reglazed once, at the 30 minute mark, mostly because I forgot about this step...). Here's our Hasselbacks after reglazing, but before the final bake:

After you're done, garnish your dish with some cilantro and voilà! We have Hasselback Potatoes!

I enjoyed eating these a lot. The slices create the bite sizes for you, so all you need is a fork and you are ready to go. I, for one, don't like eating baked potatoes all that much, so this was a much appreciated deviation from the normal path of starches to my stomach...no, not the pharynx then larynx then trachea, I mean.....oh nevermind.

And now the rating for today:

Time to cook: A little over an hour (~15 min to prepare and 45 min to bake)

Amount of help received: Barrels (again, I mostly observed, this time after my failed attempt to slice garlic)

Presentation (according to girlfriend): 4.5/5 (a little burnt, but it was pretty)

Tastiness (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (tastes like baked potato [potentially could have been avoided with more than 1 reglaze])

So I'm still very much a fledgling, not yet ready to take off, and I would surely break some bones if I tried at this point...but I'm learning valuable lessons each time. As long as I stay patient I'll be good. :D

Thanks peeps!

-Stuart-