Better Homes & Gardens Soups & Stews magazine

The Fam gave me this magazine for Christmas or Valentines, and normally I'm not a fan of these special magazines that cost so much (12.99!) BUT this one is a real winner.  We've tried 7 recipes so far and are just getting started.

The first one I made was the Bolognese Soup.  This recipe alone was worth the price of the magazine.  So good.

We made the Creamy Thai Sweet Potato Soup in the crock pot, and served it with Pesto Foldover Sticks.

Red Wine Oven Stew with Cheesy Potatos was a Sunday Dinner winner.

Chicken Cordon Bleu Soup was my second top pick, after the Bolognese soup.  Omit the croutons and it is a super soup (heeeeee).

The White Chicken Chili was pretty good, of course the kids hated it, so there were a lot of leftovers.  Also hated by the kids but enjoyed by the adults was the Red Beans and Rice Soup with Cajun Chicken.  At least that one they picked the chicken and sausage out while telling me how much they didn't like it.

Sunday Dinner - Chocolate Mousse

The Grandfather and I were talking food one night after finishing eating food, and he mentioned that a dessert of chocolate mousse for an upcoming dinner sounded delish.

I had recently come across a recipe that I  had wanted to take another look at, but then I flipped through a recent issue of Alive magazine and found a recipe for "Raw" French Silk Chocolate Pie, and the mousse filling called to me, so I skipped the crust and made the filling as our mousse dessert.

It's a very cool vegan recipe which uses chilled coconut milk and coconut oil in place of the usual cream and eggs.  I never ever make mousse that contains raw egg, so I really liked the change.

Other than chilling the coconut milk in the can overnight, the mousse is easy to make and SO DELICIOUS.

I was running short of time to get them chilled before dinner so my cups were a bit messy but to be honest, they probably would have looked the same even if I'd had more time.  So I slapped on a filter and here we are.

Try this!  

Recipe:  Raw French Silk Chocolate Pie with Coconut Whipped Cream

Sunday DInner and Thursday Dinner

A while back my Dad and I went through some of my mom's recipes and I brought some home, including her lasagna, cheesecake and caramel corn. I made the lasagna for Sunday dinner, along with some salad and cheese buns. 

Her lasagna is ridiculously delicious and quite simple.  We love it.

For dessert I made a recipe I ripped out of a Bon Appetit magazine more than a decade ago - Eva Marie Saint's Apple Pie.  This is easy and super delicious.  My Mother In Law requested a copy of the recipe to take home and to my knowledge, she is not a regular baker.

The following Thursday I made Asian Style Chicken Bunwiches with Ginger Sauce from The Great Rotisserie Chicken Cookbook.  They were super good and the ginger sauce was amazing.

We had raw veggies and fries and saved some room for a delicious dessert - Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Spice Cake.  It was a big hit, especially with my Dad, who would have taken the whole cake home if I'd let him.

HRC's CC Cookies

I recently came into possession of a slightly damaged but mostly intact copy of the 2004 Better Homes Christmas Cookies magazine.  I note the slight damage because to my disappointment the page containing the first recipe I decided I needed to try had been ripped out by some diabolical person.
The second recipe I wanted to try was Hillary Rodham Clinton's Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I am a fan of hers in many ways and for many reasons.
She is a smart, strong, opinionated woman.

I can't wait to read  her book, and  I will make another batch of these cookies for the Nasty Women in my life, just like I did with the first set.

HRC's Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies

Pizza Ring

I found this recipe for Easy Sausage Pesto Ring in a magazine called Fall Baking.  

I switched it up with pasta sauce and pepperoni for The Boy.  He loved it.  

Here's what I did.

1 TB butter

2 pk pillsbury biscuits

pepperoni

cheese

pasta sauce or pizza sauce

Preheat oven to 350'.  Grease a bundt pan with the butter.

Open the biscuits and lay them out on a cutting board.  Gently flatten them slightly.  

Cut the pepperoni into roughly the same size as the biscuits.  

Top each biscuit with a spoon of sauce, some pepperoni, and some grated cheese.  

Stack the biscuits in groups of 3 or 4.  Turn each stack on its side and place 

in the pan, forming a ring.   

Bake for 20 minutes, remove from oven, sprinkle with some additional 

cheese, and bake 5 more minutes.  

Remove from the oven and let stand 10 minutes before eating.

Fail, fail, fail

It wasn't the best week in my kitchen. 2 recipes that I had such confidence in both completely tanked.

 I've had icebox cakes on my mind for a while.

 I made a basic one years and years ago - chocolate wafers layered with whipped cream, and oh, how delicious. 

While doing a purge of the remaining recipes from my cooking notebooks, I found an article from and old Food Network magazine on fancier ice box cakes. Most of them didn't interest me or used cookies or biscuits that I couldn't find here but one sounded super easy and good - ritz crackers with a grape jelly cream. Mmmmm!

 I made it for my Mom's birthday and it was a total embarrassment. 

First - and I do blame the recipe a smidgen for the directions on plating - it looked hideous.  Like a blindfolded kid made it.  But worst was second and third - the cream was gritty, not soft and pillowy like the magazine photos, and third - it just didn't taste good.  I was very embarrassed about serving it to my family, especially for a birthday dessert.  Everyone said it was ok, but not much got eaten.  

 

Then I decided to make some flourless peanut butter cookies from a well known food blog. 

I read through some of the comments, which were people saying how good they looked or asking for substitution information, but no one who had made them.  But whatevs, well known food blog.  I'm sure it will be fine.  

Nope.  I wasted the last of the peanut butter on this mess.  

Flat, greasy, oily, YUCK.  At least no one but myself was witness to this disaster.  

Ugh.

Smackdown - Sneaky Mac n Cheese

Sneaky food is everywhere these days - avocado in chocolate mousse, prunes in cake, oats in smoothies, pureed veggies in EVERYTHING. 

And I have nothing against sneaky food, especially since my lovely child becomes more and more picky each day. 

Sneak away, my friends, sneak away. (Foodwise, that is. Behave yourselves!) 

Here's our 2 competitors 

Food Networks Mac n Cheese with secret ingredient cauliflower 

vs 

The Sweet Potato Chronicle's Sweet Potato Mac n Cheese

In the Food Network's corner is mac and cheese that was served as a side dish with bbq chicken in the Jan/Feb 2014 issue.  Cauliflower is cooked until soft in milk, then pureed, and cheese is stirred in.  Sauce done.  Add your cooked noodles, a splash of pasta cooking water, stir, and serve.

I enjoy Food Network magazine and have cooked some good dishes out of some issues.  Regardless of the outcome, I'll be adding this to my list of go to recipes.

Over in the SPC's corner is Sweet Potato Mac and Cheese.  This is a more traditional m&c - a traditional white sauce that has cheese and mashed sweet potato stirred in, and peas are added to the pasta cooking water for the final minutes of cooking.  

This book and I do not get along - I had a high number of iffy/failures from the book.  But this recipe produces a smooth and delicious mac and cheese, with bonus peas.

This was another toughie - these were both excellent recipes that I would make again and again.

The verdict?

Mac and cheese with cauliflower, from Food Network.

I love how simple but flavorful the sauce is - no roux, no flour - and the creaminess the cauliflower adds.  The sweet potato mac is also delicious, and also a must try.

Recipes

Food Network Mac and Cheese

Sweet Potato Chronicles Sweet Potato Mac and Cheese

Ham and Vegetable Gratin

This recipe was in the latest issue of Food Network magazine, and I wanted to make it because I had all the ingredients in the house.  I love it when that happens.

I stuck to the recipe except for 2 things - I didn't have a frozen pea and carrot mix, I used just peas, and I "bammed" the crisp panko bread crumb topping with a handful of crispy onions instead of the parsley (which I thought I had but didn't).

This was really good, really filling and made lots.  If made my way it tastes just like split pea and ham soup, and you know that can't be a bad thing.

Recipe: Ham and Vegetable Gratin

Mighty Life List - Make a Pavlova

Some people may have scratched their heads if they'd seen number 39 on my life list - make a pavlova. Because it turns out that a pavlova is easy. Ridiculously easy. It's just egg whites and sugar! Which I knew, but I didn't KNOW. If you know what I mean. No?

Anyhoo, I found this recipe in a recent Food Network Magazine, a Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova from Nigella Lawson.





It was, as I said, insanely easy. And also quite delicious. If I were to make this again (and I might, but first I want to try her pavlova with passionfruit) I would bake it slightly less, maybe 5 to 10 minutes. I also cut back on the whipping cream by half; that just seemed like way too much.

Salt Potatos

These were the most delicious potatos I've had in a long time, and certainly the simplest. Little nugget potatos boiled until tender in very salty water. When drained, salt crystallizes on the potato skins, leaving them perfectly seasoned. These potatos don't need anything else added to them.


Salt potatos
altered very very slightly from Food Network Magazine

1 1/2 pounds small nugget potatos, washed well
4 cups water
1 cup salt

Place all ingredients in a pot, cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until potatos are tender, 20 minutes or so. Drain potatos and let stand for a few minutes so the skins can dry.

FNCCC - Rachael Ray

It's Rachael Ray's week at Sarah's Food Network Chefs Cooking Challenge.

Love her or hate her, you've got to admit that the woman has amassed an incredible amount of recipes. I have made a lot of her recipes the past few years. A good number of them have been pretty tasty too.

But I think that this one might be the best Rachael Ray recipe I've made -


It's a beautifully seasoned turkey patty with a olive, tomato and cucumber salad. There was supposed to be spinach in the salad as well, but I forgot to add it. The problem is, I made this a few weeks ago and I can't find the recipe. I can't remember where I found it, or its name. I do remember that it wasn't made with turkey in the original recipe; I subbed that in because I found some ground turkey in the freezer. Argh.

So I bit the bullet and found another recipe to make for FNCCC. And this time I made sure to mark the magazine page so I could share it with you!


Behold the deliciously wonderful Beef and Bean Burrito Burger. This was so good! Ground beef mixed with black beans, brown rice, cumin, coriander, and served with guacamole. I skipped the bun (cough DIET! cough ha, nice try Sara, who am I kidding) and served it with chopped tomato. and salsa.

I really enjoyed this and it does taste like a burrito. I made 6 patties, not 4 as the recipe calls for. 4 would have been insanely huge. We will have these again for sure.

Recipe: Beef 'n Bean Burrito Burgers


ps - if anyone knows the recipe for that first burger, let me know!

Some more meals we've had

I have been doing a lot of cooking - a lot of new recipes. I haven't been taking many photos though. Not that that is much of a loss on this blog, most aren't great anyway.

Paxton will be 3 months old on Sunday and this thought delights and shocks me. Shocked because 3 MONTHS! It's gone by at a crawl and in a flash. And just like so many people predicted, I barely remember life before him. He's turned into quite a little personality, a charmer and flirt with anyone who comes into his life, and a bossy little guy for me and Scott, telling us in no uncertain terms when he doesn't whatever injustice we may be subjecting him to, such as a clean outfit, or a new diaper. The nerve of us!

A big lesson I'm still trying to learn is time management. Time didn't really matter BP (before Paxton) - if a dinner recipe was going to take 2 hours to make and dirty most dishes in the kitchen, no big deal. Laundry can be put off for another day. The dishes can sit a while.

Not anymore, unless we want to eat at 9pm (which still sometimes happens) and stay up all night cleaning. I'm trying to choose simpler recipes and also ones that can be prepped or made in advance.

This is something I've been reading about for a long time over at The Cookbook Junkie. Paula is a whiz at choosing recipes that can be made partially or all the way in advance, and reheated when it's time to eat. I'm working on this, using her advice to have a head start on dinners at least a couple of times a week.

A couple of days ago I made Paulas Spicy Honey-Brushed Chicken Thighs. I'd bought a big pack of thighs and broken them up into groups of 4-5 and frozen them. The day before, I moved a pack from the freezer to fridge, and the morning of, I rubbed the thighs (ooooo!) with the spice mixture and broiled them. This took no time at all and I got it done during one of the baby's catnaps. Then that night all I had to do was mix up the glaze and then toss the thighs back under the broiler for a minute or 2 to reheat before adding the glaze. They were wonderful and super easy. Even if you didn't start these in advance, this is still a fast dinner.

__________________________________


This is a Rachael Ray recipe called Turkey Cordon Bleu Crisp. I made this with some leftover chicken instead of turkey, and some ham I had in the freezer.


It's a savory bread pudding, and there's nothing wrong with that. I liked the flavors of the chicken, ham and swiss cheese. The recipe calls for you to drizzle with maple syrup before you eat, which I meant to do, but forgot. The next morning we had some of the leftovers for breakfast. I didn't think this reheated particularly well; for me it was a one meal recipe. I did remember to add some maple syrup and really liked that.
Turkey Cordon Bleu Crisp.

____________________________________

Another Rachael Ray recipe - Browned Butter Sauce. A very fast pasta sauce. Get your pasta in the water to cook before you make this. All it is is butter, salt, sage, parmesan and cream.

I loved this - similar to the pasta with myzithra I love so much. I used sage I hung up and dried from the garden in the fall, because I didn't want to buy a pack of fresh sage when I only needed 1 teaspoon.
Browned Butter Sauce.

_____________________________________

I am a huge Bobby Flay fan, although I have not made many of his recipes. I found this one for vegetable meatloaf in the Food Network Magazine. I made 2 small ones instead of one big one so I could freeze one for later.

I loved this too, in fact I love meatloaf of almost any kind. Turkey meatloaf is not something I've made a lot of, but I will from now on.
Vegetable Meatloaf with Balsamic Glaze

____________________________________________

I was sure I'd taken a picture of the Sauerbraten and Spaetzle I'd made, but I can't find any. This was another Food Network Magazine recipe. Sauerbraten is a German dish, like a pot roast. This one is marinated with broth, vinegar, onions, cloves and juniper berries. I couldn't find any juniper berries, but I don't think the dish suffered for it. If you make this, DON'T skip adding the gingersnaps to the sauce at the end. That is what makes it delicious. I had some trouble with the spaetzle, the consistency wasn't right I think, and by the time I had enough for the two of us I was exhausted, the kitchen was a disaster, and I had a couple of nasty steam burns. They were delicious though.
Sauerbraten
Spaetzle

food and links

If I could go back and change one thing from my pregnancy, it would be to cook and freeze a bunch of stuff for easy lunches and dinners for after the baby was born. Every book and magazine I read suggested freezing some lasagnas, casseroles, etc, and stocking up on basic necessities. We stocked up on kleenex and toilet paper, canned soup and cans of beans and tomatos. We bought pork tenderloins and ground beef and chicken, but instead of preparing stuff with them, we froze them as is. I figured, foolishly, that one of us would be able to whip up dinner while the other took care of the baby.

HA!
The first couple of weeks
crawled flew by in a haze of sleeplessness, pain (c-section), and new parent nerves. Most days I couldn't comb my hair, much less whip up dinner. Thank goodness for my parents, who shopped and provided us with food that first little while.
Since we got a (slight) grasp on our new situation, I've tried hard to make tasty, healthy meals that mostly can provide leftovers for other meals. Here's some stuff we've eaten that we enjoyed, and you might too:

This is Cincinnati Chili which is a combo of chili and spaghetti and is really quite wonderful. The sauce is slightly sweet and spicy from ingredients like cinnamon and chocolate, and there are beans! and cheese!


The recipe calls for 1 1/2 lbs of ground beef, but I used 1 lb of leftover Turducken from Christmas. I also mixed the beans right into the sauce, so I could freeze the leftovers, and used green onions to sprinkle on top instead of raw white onions. SO GOOD. I got enough sauce for 3 meals. We will make this on a regular basis.

__________

This one was so easy and also very good - chicken and waffles.
I have long wanted to try chicken and waffles, but believe me there are no restaurants around here that serve food like that. I don't really love frying at home, but this recipe shallow fries chicken tenders (I just sliced up a chicken breast). It also uses frozen waffles, which I always have in the house. We used the last of the excellent Turducken gravy for this, and that made it that much easier.


Whoever thought up this food combination is A GENIUS. This one doesn't really count as healthy though.
__________

I love sweet and sour meatballs, so I had to try these Mini Skillet Meatloaves for their sweet and sour glaze. They were very easy - I mixed up and formed the loaves in the morning and made the sauce, so we only had to cook them and heat up our side dishes at dinnertime. Paxton decided to have a screaming fit when dinner was ready, so there are no photos. But please, enjoy this one:

__________

Scott's favorite dish out of this group is this one, the Smokin' Chicken Burger. Ground chicken and mushroom patties topped with carmelized onions and a red wine sauce. We also added cheese because we could. Pow!


___________

I am still so enjoying reading Cookin' with Coolio and the next recipe I tried was for Karate Meat. Sliced steak cooked with onions, garlic, chile powder and 5 spice powder. I added a bell pepper cause I had one.


This book seriously is fantastic, and I was so happy to hear from 2 people who bought it after reading about it here. I hope they are enjoying it as much as I am. You should get it too!

Two hits and a miss from Rachel Ray

Have I mentioned that I am struggling with food? Well not with food, exactly, but the cooking of food. I have little interest in spending time in the kitchen cooking, and even less interest in looking through cookbooks, magazines or online for interesting things to make. Looking at food and/or reading about food? Blah. That word describes many things in my life. If I'm not in my pajamas, eating fruit and watching What Not To Wear and/or re-reading a Harry Potter book, then it's Blah. Oh my, that looks sort of sad, what I just wrote.

Anyway! From time to time I have short spurts of food related energy, when I say to myself, stop making boring sandwiches and pasta and the same zucchini-onion-pepper stirfry! Grab a cookbook and find something new and exciting! One day I even got myself so worked up that I'd decided to do one of those cook thru the book things (like I failed at last year!), but once I discarded the recipes containing booze, uncooked eggs, peanuts, certain cheeses and everything else I shouldn't eat, plus the ones I wouldn't eat (salmon, veal), there were like 4 recipe left, and what's the point.

So I've been reading a lot of Rachel Ray magazines. My Dad and I have an arrangement - he buys the magazine, reads it and cooks whatever out of it, then he passes them to me. I do the same thing and then store them so should either of us want to revisit an old issue, there it is. I like the magazine quite a lot and almost everything we've tried in the past has been a success. I'm trying to strike a balance between finding recipes that appeal to me and recipes that I have some or all ingredients on had for, like today's first recipe,

Pretzel Crusted Chicken and Zucchini Strips.

We had company at the end of last month and in preparation I bought a jumbo container of pretzels for snacking. No one touched them but me and although pretzels have been my friend and constant companion the past few months I was more than willing to sacrifice some of them for the recipe. I also had some chicken in the freezer, so all I needed to buy was zucchini. I am a huge, huge zucchini fan, and I love me some zucchini sticks. This dinner was easy to put together and tasted very nice. The zuke sticks were my favorite part and I will make them (and most likely the chicken) again.


Up next is a BLT Salad, also something I love. The one in the magazine is made with arugula and nuts, but I had spinach and no nuts so I went with that. I also had bacon in the freezer and tomatos on the counter so I had to buy nothing to make this dinner. I love when that happens. In the magazine this was served in endive leaves, but we just used bowls and a sprinkle of parmesan. I loved the mustard in the dressing - this salad is a real winner - easy and good. I was about to type that you don't have to turn on any appliances to make it but that's not true. Unless you buy pre-cooked bacon. But you could always microwave the bacon, avoiding the stove on hot hot days.



The last one is a miss that was pretty spectacular - Plantain Hush Puppies. I've been wanting to try a plantain for a long time but never knew what to do with them. I figured this recipe would be an easy introduction, paired with corn, and the dipping sauces sounded pretty yummy. Well the mixture came together fast, we dolloped it into the oil and...yikes. They just disintegrated into mush. There was no saving the first batch. Checked the oil temperature....it was good....second batch, same as the first. I was getting ready to switch gears and pan fry the rest of them, but when Scott tasted a little of the batter and immediately spat it into the sink....we turned to sandwiches and salad for dinner. And tried our best to ignore the pan full of oily yellow goo on the stove.

I'm disappointed it didn't turn out. Did I do something wrong - was it my corn? My plantain? I don't know. Anyone out there tried this one? I hate kitchen failures.

Coming soon - juice!

A Tale of Two Burgers

We've been grilling fools over here lately, and I wanted to share 2 fabulous burger recipes with you. They are so good. You should make them.

First up is a burger from the latest Food Network Magazine. The lead story on the cover is Best Burgers From Bobby Flay, promoting his new book Burgers, Fries and Shakes. I saw enough reviews on blogs to know that this is a book worth owning. I was drawn to the recipe for his Dallas Burger, a burger with homemade bbq sauce, dry rub, and coleslaw. It's a recipe he created for his wife, who loves bbq'd brisket. We love brisket too, so this was the one to try first.

The burger is a little time consuming - if you go whole hog you make not only the burger patties from scratch, but also the dry rub, coleslaw and bbq sauce. But not an awful amount of time. Be patient, it's worth it.


This burger is SO GOOD, and it's the bbq sauce and coleslaw that really make it fabulous.


Look at that! We had them 2 nights in a row. I think I'm drooling a little right now.....

Dallas Burger

_______________________________________

The other burger is also from Food Network, from their Ultimate Recipe Showdown show. I've only seen the show once, but luckily for me, it was the Burger episode, the episode that brought this burger into my life.

Sorry if I sound a little dramatic, but damn, this Vietnamese Bistro Burger rocks.


You may recall my recent post about how much we love and miss Vietnamese food. This is another easy flavorful Vietnamese recipe that we will be making a lot of. The patty is made of ground pork seasoned with lime, ginger, soy and fish sauce. Make sure you make the pickled carrot and daikon salad, it's fabulous on the burger.


I could go on for days about how wonderful this burger is. I won't though. I'll just say one more time it's easy and delicious and hopefully you are going to try these, cause you'll love them.


Vietnamese Bistro Burger

Weekend Cookbook Challenge - Love

So here's my double love for this months WCC- I made the food that I love (pulled pork sandwiches) with the dude that I love. Did you see how I made it rhyme there?

North Carolina Style Pulled Pork
Rachel Ray magazine, October 2008


Here's my 5 lb boneless pork roast. The recipe calls for you to rub the spice rub on the pork right before you brown it. We rubbed in the rub the night before, wrapped it in a bag, and fridged it overnight.


Then the next afternoon we browned the roast on all sides.


After the roast was browned it was wrapped in a double layer of foil, placed in a baking dish and put in the oven at 300' for 4 1/2 hours. Then you unwrap the top of the foil, exposing the top of the roast, increase the oven temperature to 450' and cook another 20 minutes.


Here's the pork sitting on the counter as we tried to figure out how to get the pork AND all the juices out of the foil and baking dish. I was trying to pull back the foil so I could get at the pork, figuring I could lift the meat out in 2 or 3 pieces, then spoon out the juices. Instead, I tore the foil, and the juices started leaking out into the pan. "Did you hear that?" said Scott.......


as a piece of glass broke off the dish and cracks appeared all over the sides and bottom of the dish. Frack. We put a bath towel around the dish, in case it shattered, and got the pork out of there. Most of the juice ended up in the dish, rendering it all useless. There was about 1/2 cup in the foil that hadn't been in contact with the dish, so we kept that. Dammit! Now I have to buy a new damn 9X13 pan.


After we calmed down, Scott shredded the pork, added the reserved juice, and the rest of the dressing ingredients.


We made her coleslaw recipe too. It was too spicy.


Coleslaw and pork on a toasted onion bun.


OMG! YUM!

Served with a side o'beans.

This was heavenly! The pork was so tender and nicely seasoned. The vinegar dressing kept it nice and moist, and if I'd been able to use all the juices (I estimate I lost about a cup) it would have been that much better. I wasn't crazy about the coleslaw though - not very interesting and a little too spicy. The hot sauce we're using right now is nuclear-hot, so I cut back on the amount of hot sauce and pepper flakes in the slaw, but it's too spicy on its own. Good on the sandwich though. Also, boring - no carrot or anything else that could add flavor or character. The coleslaw recipe is here, if you're interested.
They seem to have edited the pork recipe online, so here's the magazine version.

3 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons pepper
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
One 5-pound boneless pork shoulder roast
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup white vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
8 hamburger buns, split
4 cups coleslaw

Preheat the oven to 300'. Mix together the salt, pepper and paprika; sprinkle all over the pork and rub in. **I used 1 TB pepper**
In a large skillet or Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the pork and cook, turning occasionally, until browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer to a 24-inch-long sheet of heavy-duty foil and double-wrap the pork.
Place the pork, skin side up, in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish; roast until tender, about 4 1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and carefully unwrap the top of the pork. Increase the heat to 450' and roast for 20 minutes more.
Transfer the roast to a large bowl, along with any juices. Using two forks, shred the pork. Add the vinegars, sugar and hot sauce; toss. Serve on the hamburger buns, topped with coleslaw.

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Want to take part in WCC? Find a recipe that fits the monthly theme. You can use a recipe from a cookbook, magazine, website, your Mom, whatever. Make it, blog about it with a picture and the recipe (if you like) and email me a link to your post by February 28. I'll have the roundup posted a couple of days after that. My email is iliketocook AT shaw DOT ca.

Notebook Three - redemption.

What surprised me about Notebook 3 when I went to flip thru it to write this post was 2 things. First, how many of the recipes in its 46 pages I've already tried, and second, how many damn good recipes are in here. Right now I'd wager that this one has better recipes over all than 1 or 2.


My mom's bean salad recipe is in here, and we know that's a winner. So is her Mediterranean Chicken and Pasta which is so good. Zucchini Fritters, Asian Smoked Chicken and Mu Shu Chicken are some other good 'uns. Also? Cheese Jalapeno Muffins.


Still on my to make list - Turkish Delight (sort of scared to try to make it), Chicken Lettuce Wraps, and Dill Pickles. Mmmmmmmm.


Although my plan for this cookbook reminisce was to make untried recipes from all my notebooks, from Book Three I chose a recipe I'd previously attempted. Back in 1997, when this book was being worked on, I bought a copy of Gourmet magazine which had a recipe for a baguette.


For some reason, I made it as a gift for a co-worker "friend". I don't remember why. What I do remember is the morning after I gave it to her, she came to work and ..... well, she trashed my bread. I no longer remember why she didn't like it, valid or not (I suspect not) but it shattered me. I'd been so proud of the bread, dammit! I didn't try to make bread again for years.


So when I saw this was the book that the supposedly horrid baguette came from, I had to try it again. And guess what? It was pretty ok bread. I've made better, but this was not too shabby.


Damn um, her. Whatever her name is. (I have an awesome memory for faces, but a real crappy one for names.)

One-a-Day Baguette Bruesch
Gourmet

Makes 1 baguette
The relatively large amount of salt in this bread is the secret to a full-flavored baguette.

1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 cups warm water (105°‐115° F)
4 to 4 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons salt

In a large bowl sprinkle yeast and sugar over warm water and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.
With a wooden spoon stir in 2 cups flour until combined. Stir in salt and 2 cups of remaining flour until mixture forms a stiff dough.
On a lightly floured surface knead dough with lightly floured hands 8 minutes, or until smooth and elastic, kneading in enough of remaining 1/2 cup flour to keep dough from sticking.
Transfer dough to a lightly oiled deep bowl, turning to coat with oil, and let rise, bowl covered with plastic wrap, until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.
Preheat oven to 400° F.
Punch down dough and form into a long slender loaf about 21 inches long and 3 inches wide.
Put loaf diagonally on a lightly greased large or 17- by 14-inch baking sheet and let rise, uncovered, about 30 minutes.
Make 3 or 4 diagonal slashes on loaf with a sharp knife and lightly brush top with cool water.
Bake loaf in middle of oven 30 minutes, or until golden, and transfer to a rack to cool.