Tell us what you have cooked lately (that's interesting)

[Athryn]

I’ve got a baking question I’m hoping some of you can help out with. If I’ve got a recipe for muffins, can I use it to bake a loaf of bread or vice versa? For example, can I take the ingredients for banana bread and pour it into cupcakes and create muffins instead or take the ingredients for a cranberry muffins and pour it into a loaf pan and create cranberry bread? I assume the answer is yes, but I don’t want to have a disaster for Thanksgiving, if I’m missing something.

Quickbreads and muffins are pretty similar, the cooking times will be a little different though.

[TimElhajj]

Quickbreads and muffins are pretty similar, the cooking times will be a little different though.

Toothpick trick. Dip a toothpick in it–when it comes out clean, it’s good.

[Dejin]

Thanks Athryn and Tim.

[barstein]

GINGERBREAD! Gingerbread and pears. Make it for your sweetheart and he or she’ll never leave you whether you like it or not! (Kidding, kidding, darling!)

Let’s see. Here’s what I do. I take the Cook’s Illustrated recipe and mod it:

2 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose unbleached flour (11 1/4 ounces), plus more for dusting pan - I always use a cup of whole wheat flour. It makes it a tad denser, which I enjoy.
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon table salt
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon Dutch-processed cocoa powder
8 tablespoons unsalted butter , melted, then cooled to room temperature
3/4 cup mild molasses - I use blackstrap because I am a molasses NUT. They say not to. Up to you.
3/4 cup granulated sugar (5 1/4 ounces)
1 large egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup milk

Then I take a few not-overly-ripe pears (2 should do the trick) and peel and dice them, and add them to the dry ingredients before you mix them with the wet ingredients.

It’s a quickbread, so I abandon the recipe at this point. All I do is mix the wet ingredients, mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and quickly pour the wet into the dry and stir together until just barely mixed. Goes into a greased 11x7" pan. 40 minutes at 350.

Anyone have the Cook’s recipe handy? I googled a couple of possibilities on their site and wasn’t sure which to take into consideration when attempting Marged’s recipe mod above. (Also, the site requires a login.)

[AlanC]

Dunno how interesting this is, but I just baked an Italian Cream cake. It fell a little in the middle, but hopefully it’ll be tasty when we tear into it at the office tomorrow.

A friend made the fam an italian cream cake a few months back. I had never had one before.

Good fucking god was it amazing.

It temporarily caused me to reconsider the whole cake vs pie thing.

[baruk]

I made a tasty mushroom risotto the other day without using stock, just water, herbs, lemon juice, a glug of white wine and some of this stuff:

[XPav]

So how do you folks cook your turkey?

I’m brining mine again this year, with no stuffing in the bird (Alton Brown style).

Batali vs Symon argue about this: http://eater.com/archives/2010/11/23/mario-batali-and-michael-symon-in-a-thanksgivingbased-twitter-war.php

The main thing that I think, for home cooking, is that brining results in a more forgiving experience. Most turkeys are cooked too dry, brining fixes that major problem.

[Jeremy_Johnsen]

I haven’t had a bad turkey since I started brining. I made my first one in a convection oven this year. A little under three hours for a twenty pounder, it was great.

[Athryn]

I didn’t cook it, but I had deep fried turkey for the first time. I totally see why people do it, it was fantastic.

[ChristienMurawski]

Pies pies pies. So many pies.

We went to a friend’s house for dinner this time, and my wife signed us up to bring pies. So that was my Wednesday. I made Pecan, Deep-Dish Apple, Blueberry, French Silk, and Jefferson Davis. Good thing I love pies.

Pecan and Apple got the best feedback.

-xtien

[Meghan_Bowyer]

Apple cheddar bacon bread. And it’s a gift, so I have no idea how it tastes.

[BaconTastesGood]

I made french toast the other morning and it was, according to my fiancee, “the best french toast ever, why haven’t you made this before?!” The obvious answer is because I’m lazy. The second, more subtle answer, is because I knew if she liked it then I’d be on the hook to continue making it, which goes counter to #1 again. =)

It’s a real simple recipe.

• Thick sliced challah bread (I don’t even bother toasting/staling it)
• 1 whole egg for every 1.5 slices of challah bread
• some cream, I’m not sure how much, probably around 1/4 cup for 4 eggs
• about the same amount of orange juice
• a splash of vanilla
• cinammon

Whisk.

The key for me is a combination of soak time and cooking time. If you soak too long, it ends up soggy in the middle unless you cook at a low temp for a long time. If you don’t soak long enough, you get a crust then just bread on the inside. So you have to experiment.

I use a cast iron pan, medium-low heat, let it warm up, put in a LOT of butter, then cook until browned on both sides. Use that first piece as a test piece to see if you’ve A.) soaked it enough and B.) if so, let it cook long enough.

You eventually adjust the soak vs. cook time variable until you get pure eggy French toast awesomeness.

I serve it with butter between every slice on a stack (although I use 1-1.5" thick slices, so I usually only have 2-3 pieces) and real maple syrup. Some people prefer powdered sugar or fruit, but I’m a traditionalist.

[Kaigen]

Try using thicker slices of day old bread, letting it soak up as much as it can and then simply searing it on the oven and then finishing it in the oven to let all that sogginess get baked out. It’s the best way to make french toast.

My grill bitch and I have been baking together a lot. We’ve made cinnamon roles with raisins and hazelnuts and eggnog cream cheese frosting, ginger snaps, maple macadamia cookies (which we debated on adding dried cherries to and opted not to but should have). We also made pumpkin pies for a food drive at school together: Mine had maple/molasses/hazelnut cookie crust and whole chunks of acorn squash mixed in with the pumpkin puree. Hers was a lot more traditional, but very gingery and awesome.

[tiohn]

I made pain à l’ancienne baguettes today from Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice. A friend is visiting from Italy and she brought truffle oil and truffle tapenade. The baguettes were spectacular on their own, but the truffle oil really accentuated the nutty creaminess of the bread and just made everything sublime.

[Meghan_Bowyer]

The Holiday Baking Blitz continues! Currently in my freezer are apple-cheddar-bacon bread, chocolate-gingerbread cookies, and oatmeal-maple scones. Up next: pistachio pinwheels!

[interman]

Cooked for a staff party yesterday. Made vichyssoise with bacon bits and a Norwegian rice cream dessert. First time I’ve cooked for 25 people, and it went pretty well. Thank god for huge pots, but prepping the potatoes, onions and leeks got pretty boring.

[XPav]

Alright, I need advice.

My mother in law is going home in a week, leaving me and my wife alone with our new baby. Our baby is currently in a eat-every-hour-and-a-half mode, and so I’m looking for prepare-on-the-weekend meals that we can easily heat up/finish during the week.

I don’t want to eat ramen, basically, but I’ve got to have easy weekday prep meals.

Advice?

[Omniscia]

The Crockpot is your friend. Just make a big batch o’ chili or stew or something, and feast on the leftovers.

[XPav]

I guess I need to replace the crockpot I executed after it burned my last chili then.

[Damien_Neil]

Lasagna. If you make a really big batch, you can freeze some and have fast home-made meals any time you want.