Cookbook recipe challenge thread

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Man, I called for this and still haven't gotten around. Most of the times I am cooking for myself, so that is not that exciting. When I started the thread I knew I had people coming in and would be cooking - but it turns out that my friends ate more at MDs and weren't very interested in trying local food. I hope to get to something soon,

Stefan
 
I have obviously been rather delinquent as well. It doesn't help that I actually bought two more cookbooks - albeit from the local used book joint - but yeah, I need to actually be in the kitchen a bit more :p

Soon! Soon! :)
 
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I have been wanting to try a roasting style mentioned in this book for a while. I have done simaler cooking before but not as mentioned here. The 30 minute sizzle sounded really good so I picked up a roast we had on sale at work, love getting grass fed beef for regular prices :) .

As the pic shows I think I would have been happier if the roast time was longer or at higher temp. While the meat did come out a nice even med rare the "crust" never really formed to my liking. But a do over is deffinatly in the future.

For this I let the roast come to room temp and rubbed it down with olive oil salt and pepper. Roasted at 450 for 30 mins dropping the temp to 325 for 25 mins for a rare/med rare roast. Has been great for sandwiches :)
 
Mmmm... looks tasty :) You're right, more crust would be even better. It's great when each learning step is enjoyable unto itself :)
 
My daughter has already polished off half of it, each week I do a roast to slice up for lunches. She's actually taking lunch to school now lol :p
 
I'm baking cookies at 2am from a recipe card, and it's not fun. There's no cutting involved, it feels like drudge work, and my product looks like crap. Ah well... the joys of doing a "cookie exchange" with others the next day.
 
I haven't cracked open a book all week... mostly doing recipes I have in my head... Last night was a tomato basil soup I used to make at Nordstrom, love that soup made it everyday for 5 years lol...
 
DwarvenChef said:
I haven't cracked open a book all week... mostly doing recipes I have in my head... Last night was a tomato basil soup I used to make at Nordstrom, love that soup made it everyday for 5 years lol...
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Nordstrom cafe is surprisingly good. (Born in Seattle)
 
Last night I cooked a recipe from the cookbook, 1080 Recipes, that Spanish cookbook. It was lamb stew with turnips and carrots, and it was tasty but I found the seasoning in the recipe to be a bit light. I hate it when recipes say things like 1 whole clove, 1 garlic glove, 1 thyme sprig, and 5 tbs of white wine for a stew that has a pound of turnips, pound of potatoes, 9 oz of carrots, and 4.5 pounds of lamb. Seriously? What is one clove going to do in that dish?

Anyhow, I added some bay leaf, an extra clove, some more garlic cloves, more wine, three thyme sprigs instead of one, more salt and it turned out nicely. I also mixed some whole grain mustard in Greek yogurt and added a dollop of that, which I liked.

I'm away from home, but here is a link to the recipe.

http://www.denverpost.com/recipes/ci_11380691

k.
 
DwarvenChef said:
I'm game :) I lost cound after the mid 300's and that was a couple years ago.
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My cookbook shelf when I lived in the bay area, I have 3 of these now :p and boxes of older books that people have started giving me lol
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Not sure what's more impressive the book collection or what's going on on top of the Mask DVD case. :thumbsup:
 
CalleNAK said:
Not sure what's more impressive the book collection or what's going on on top of the Mask DVD case. :thumbsup:
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Yet another ex-obssesion, tactical table top miniature games, 40k, warhammer, clan war, to name a few... got out of games years ago, still selling off the stuff I keep finding squirrled away.
 
Had a great family Christmas dinner last night, and I tried out a lentil soup recipe from Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Cooking. No pics, cuz it's not exactly thrilling stuff, but I had to tweak the recipe a bit. The one she has is for a Lebanese version that seemed a little bland to me. Adding in 3 teaspoons of ground cumin, however, made the soup come alive.

I had found an Egyptian recipe in another book that I'll have to try in the near future to compare a bit.
 
I am not a cook and I don't play one on television. :D I don't know if this counts as following a recipe, but I saw a couple of Thomas Keller's videos on simple roasted chicken, so I "adapted" it for thighs. Dropped the temperature a bit (still higher than what I typically use), salt, pepper, little bit of thyme and rosemary. It was quite good. Crispier, more tasty skin than my regular stuff. Interesting how bumping up the temp by 25 degrees can make such a difference.
 
Whoot just got Stone Brewery's cookbook... see what I can pull out of it :)
 
ecchef said:
I'm a Nordy's alumnus too DC. Used to be a Garden Court chef back in the day.
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I was with the Marketplace as lead/sous lol, lead doing the job of sous :p it's what it is lol Enjoyed my time there :)
 
Ok, I have cooked a few recipes out of different books in the last three weeks.

* Linguine with Butter, Pecorino, Arugula, and Black Pepper by Giada out of Everyday Pasta. It is easy and tasty. One of my wife's go-to recipes.
* Strawberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream by David Lebovitz out of The Perfect Scoop. I used frozen berries that I picked a summer ago.
* Basic Semolina Pasta by Donna German out of The Pasta Machine Cookbook (pictures below). I hand cut a papperdelle and used my own pesto that I made in early fall. My 10-month-old baby loved it.

k.

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Btw, I have to put in a plug for the website eatyourbooks.com. I finally bumped up my subscription to a year-long one ($25) with unlimited cookbooks for my 'virtual bookshelf'. IMO it seems a bit expensive, and I wish they would do something like a lifetime subscription for $80 or some other subscription option.

Anyhow, this morning I added all of my cookbooks only 28 and 18 of them had already been indexed, meaning that I can search those cookbook recipes using the website search and filters. I typed in rabbit as I have a rabbit in the freezer, and I got 21 rabbit recipes from my own cookbooks.

Not only does it save time, I think I will end up using my cookbooks more. The rabbit recipe that I chose, is actually from a book that I have yet to use but have owned for three years. If you have a lot of cookbooks and want to increase their functionality, it seems like a good service. But it is up to you if the search function, saved time, and increased utility is worth the 25 bucks per year. You can also try it out for free with only 5 cookbooks.

I like the service.

k.
 
mr drinky said:
Btw, I have to put in a plug for the website eatyourbooks.com. I finally bumped up my subscription to a year-long one ($25) with unlimited cookbooks for my 'virtual bookshelf'. IMO it seems a bit expensive, and I wish they would do something like a lifetime subscription for $80 or some other subscription option.

Anyhow, this morning I added all of my cookbooks only 28 and 18 of them had already been indexed, meaning that I can search those cookbook recipes using the website search and filters. I typed in rabbit as I have a rabbit in the freezer, and I got 21 rabbit recipes from my own cookbooks.

Not only does it save time, I think I will end up using my cookbooks more. The rabbit recipe that I chose, is actually from a book that I have yet to use but have owned for three years. If you have a lot of cookbooks and want to increase their functionality, it seems like a good service. But it is up to you if the search function, saved time, and increased utility is worth the 25 bucks per year. You can also try it out for free with only 5 cookbooks.

I like the service.

k.
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I would love something like that, but would be more interested in a stand alone program. Something you don't need to be connected to use. I would pay for something like that, download all your books info... heck I'd be happy with just having the index of recipes listed for a search.

I have the old MasterCook program from ver 2 and updated a couple years ago. But it's hard to keep up with it, and hard to get rid of it as I have several gigs of stuff attached to that program...
 
I've actually bought a lot of cook books as of late.

The last two recipes I have done are:

* Thomas Keller's (Ad Hoc) Chicken and Dumpling Soup
* David Tanis' (A Platter of Figs) Harira Soup

I'm not sure what I will do next, but I will probably do something by the end of the week. Both were exceptionally good.

k.
 
Carefull you'll start getting the glares I get now :p I really should find a way to get all my books in one area... I have 4 bookshelves in 3 rooms full... Oh boy...
 
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Ok thanks to work having a great sale on roasts I got a 4lb sirloin roast to work out the system outlined in The River Cottage Meat book.

Blasted for a full 30 minutes than dropped to 325 for 40 minutes. Came out beautifuly :)
 
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