Keeping House : Cleaning, Cooking, Shopping

This is an archive of Journal posts.

If you have comments, questions, recipe submissions, tips, etc email me: lyz@princessleia.com

Journal

September 26, 2004 - Tomato Sauce I made the tomato sauce from my parent's recipe yesterday, and I didn't mess it up! To amuse myself I took pictures throughout the process.

First I got together the canned/bottled ingredients.

Then I chopped up a really large onion, which ended up being a TON of onion, and I was a bit concerned that it was too much, so I didn't add all of it, next time I'll make sure to get an onion that's a little smaller. I also chopped up two garlic cloves. After they were all chopped up I put them into the pot and cooked them up a bit with 3 Tablespoons of Vegetable oil.

Then I added 1 Bay Leaf, 1 teaspoon Oregano, 1/8 teaspoon Margoram, 1/4 teaspoon Thyme, 1/2 teaspoon Hot Red Pepper, 1/4 teaspoon Basil, and 1 pinch Sage. I mixed that all up nicely with the onions and garlic for a couple minutes. Then I added the two 28oz cans of peeled tomatoes.

I stirred and let that mix together and simmer for 5 minutes. Then I added the 2 28oz cans of tomato sauce (as seen on the ingredients picture, this is plain sauce of tomatoes sold for putting into more complex recipes such as this one). I let that simmer for an hour. Then I added the tomato paste and simmered for another hour. Then I added a tablespoon of grated parmesean cheese. I should have added 2 tablespoons of red wine at this point too, but it's such a hassle to get wine, and I didn't have the cash on me to walk down to the wine and spirits shop in town. Crazy PA, not allowing people to buy simple cooking wine in a grocery store, come on! Anyway, after adding the parmesean I let it simmer for another half hour.

Then the sauce was done!

It's a bit more spicy than I remember, I might not add the hot red pepper next time, but I'll have to see what Michael thinks. You mean he didn't get to try it yet? Nope! Unfortunately he was stuck at work until almost midnight last night.

So I made myself a salad and some garlic bread and pasta, and enjoyed a dinner all by myself around 7 pm last night.

After the sauce had cooled a bit I poured it into some glass jars. It ended up taking up 3 16oz jars, so it made about 48oz of sauce, not bad at all!

September 7, 2004 - Cinnamon Pancakes I learned recently that making pancakes from scratch is hardly any more work than making them from a mix, so when I was in a cooking mood today I decided to try my hand at some pancakes. But what kind? My house is currently fruitless.. but I have cinnamon! I looked online until I found a nice looking cinnamon pancake recipe, here.

The recipe calls for making 3 batches of dry powder (as if you were giving the mix as a gift), then you use one third of the mix to actually make your pancakes. I was a bit weary about this, since I had never tried the recipe before, but hey, none of the ingredients are particularly expensive.

Dry ingredients (remember, this is for 3 batches
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 1/4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons salt

Wet batter ingredients (remember this is for 1 batch, set the rest of your dry ingredients aside for another time, use within 6 months)
3/4 cup milk
1 egg
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

August 5, 2004 - Flour Tortilla Success! I'm very excited to say that last night I made tortillas that are MUCH better than my previous attempt. I've refied the recipe a bit, and made sure I rolled the torillas much thinner.

The recipe is as follows:

2 cups of all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 tablespoons Vegetable oil
3/4 cup water

Mix together flour and baking powder in mixing bowl. Mix vegetable oil and water together in a cup or small bowl. With hands slowly mix oil and water mixture into flour mixture to make doughy. After kneading in hands for about 5 minutes put back in bowl and cover bowl with napkin. The dough will not rise but needs to "rest" for about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes remove dough from bowl and divide up into 8 separate balls of dough. On floured surface use a rolling pin to flatten them into semi round tortillas (it's harder than it looks!) about 8 inches across. Cook by putting them in a frying pan with heat on medium and waiting until you start to see bubbles, flip and keep cooking until parts of them start to brown (like you see in my photo, above). Stack on plate and enjoy!

August 5, 2004 - Twice Baked Potatoes. A friend of mine suggested making a dinner of twice baked potatoes. I've made baked potatoes plenty of times, so this was a nice diversion from the norm. I used a modified version of this recipe to make mine.

6 medium sized red potatoes (recipe called for 4 large baking potatoes, so that'd be fine too)
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
8 chopped up green onions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Wash and poke the potatoes 3-4 times with a fork. Put potatoes on a cookie sheet and put in oven for 1 hour. Remove potatoes and let sit to cool for 10 minutes. While they are cooling put together sour cream, salt, about 3/4 cup cheddar, and about 6 of the green onions in large mixing bowl. After potatoes have cooled for 10 minutes you will want to cut them in half (lengthwise) and scoop out the potato into the mixing bowl with the rest of your ingredients, be careful not to hurt the skins too much or scrape too close to the edges, and you might want to hold the potato with a cooking mitten so you don't burn yourself. Put potato skins back on cookie sheet. Use hand held mixer to mix together potatoes and other ingredients, add milk as needed to soften the mixture up. Once thoroughly mixed spoon mixture into potato skins. Bake for another 15 minutes.

After this picture was taken I ended up adding a little sour cream to the top of each potato on my plate. They were delicious! And I had some left over to send with my boyfriend to work the next day. With this meal I also made some steamed broccoli and cauliflower.

August 2, 2004 - Biscuits and Tortillas. Last week I was looking for a recipe that'd be similar to the recipe for "KFC Biscuits" because they are so yummie (the only thing from KFC I'll eat actually). Instead I found this article released by KFC with a recipe for "Kentucky Biscuits." Although it turns out these are not actually *their* biscuit recipe, it was simple and made really tastey biscuits:

1 1/2 cups flour (before sifting)
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
2/3 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable shortening

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. In a mixing bowl, sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder. Make a "nest" in the flour mixture and add milk. Add shortening and begin kneading with hands until completely mixed, this will get your hands all sticky and doughy, but that's ok, if you think it needs more moisture add a little bit of milk (I didn't see the need). Once it's pretty well mixed, put the dough onto a floured surface (I used my cutting board) and knead the dough a bit more into the flour (directions said knead 6-8 times), not too much though, you don't want a lot of extra flour in your biscuits. Pat dough until it's about 1/2 inch thickness. Cut into biscuits (I used a cookie cutter, but using the lip of a glass would be fine). Place on baking sheet and bake in oven for 10-13 minutes. This recipe makes about 9 biscuits.

Later in the week I attempted to make tortillas. My friend Ed gave me his wife Kelly's simple and healthy recipe (for 2-3 torillas, probably want to make double batch.):

1 cup of flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Enough water to make it doughlike
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

Mix flour, baking powder, and water until doughy, add vegetable oil. Make sure the dough is not too dry and craking, but also make sure it's not too sticky wet. Divide into 2-3 balls of dough (depending on how thick you want the tortillas) and use a rolling pin to flatten into roundish tortillas. One at a time put into frying pan set at medium-low and cook until you think they are completely cooked (takes a couple minutes).

I believe my only trouble with this recipe was that I didn't add enough water, I made a triple batch and added only about a cup of water, only enough so the dough would stick together, I ended up with tortillas that had a tendancy to break rather than fold! I also didn't flatten them out enough, I probably should have made a double batch for making 6 tortillas instead, and flattened them out more, Apparently the dough rises :)

All in all I am very pleased with my cooking acomplishments this week, the tortillas were good even if they broke often and made our taco dinner a little messy. Flour is a neat thing to have! And these "breads" were amazingly inexpensive.

July 26, 2004 - Lasagna. This weekend I attempted to make lasagna from San Giorgio oven ready lasagne pasta. Basically you take these pre-cooked noodles, put them in the pan to make lasagna like you normally would (there is a recipe on the box, which I used, sans meat). I was very excited with how well it turned out! Of course since I don't eat beef, it was pretty much noodles, tomato sauce and cheese, mmm! I might try it with Morningstar Farms Ground Meatless Crumbles next time.

I also made some brownies last night. Just stuff from a Betty Crocker mix, yum! I've made brownies from scratch in the past, but I'm pretty sure it turns out to be more expensive, especially since I bought this mix on sale for $1.69.

July 22, 2004 - Potato Stuffing. Last night, at the suggestion of a friend, I attempted to make "potato stuffing." Basically it's mashed potatoes, mixed with bread stuffing, and baked. Pretty simple right? Well it sure smelled good after the first 40 minutes in the oven. I guess my only complaint is that it was a bit dry. Next time I might make a gravy to go along with it, or maybe bake some chicken broth in with it so it's moist all by itself? Here are the details to how I made it:

4 medium sized potatos mashed
5 toasted bread slices, cut into cubes
a few slices of onion (add to your taste)
a bit of celery (add to your taste)

Preheat oven to 400. Cut up potatos and boil for about 20 minutes. Once they are done boiling put in some butter and milk and use a hand held mixer to mix, add more milk and butter as needed for smooth potatos. Pour bread cubes, onion, and celery. Mix well with a spoon. Press mixture into 8x8 baking pan. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 40 minutes. Remove aluminum foil and bake for another 20 minutes.

July 21, 2004 - Site Launched. I decided to put together this site after I forgot how to boil potatoes and ended up not cooking them enough, turning my last batch of potato salad into a bit of a failure. So I made up a text file of notes for cooking. But why stop there? Why not share with the world!

Use the navigation above to check out different sections of this always in progress website

For more entires, see the Journal.