June 28, 2010
Thanks to everyone who entered last week’s giveaway! You guys really love your mac n’ cheese, which makes me think I should post my favorite recipe for it. Anyway, if you haven’t commented on that post yet, you still can and you’ll be entered to win Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast
. Computer issues prevented me from posting on Friday like I had planned, so I’m posting the second giveaway today and will announce the winners of both cookbooks on Friday instead of Wednesday (barring other computer issues, which I’m still working through). If you comment on today’s post as well then you’ll get another chance to win!
The second cookbook in the giveaway is one of my favorite resources: How to Cook Everything
by Mark Bittman. The title doesn’t lie, it really is everything. This cookbook is giant with over 2,000 recipes, but it’s more like 5,000 because he offers alternate versions or additions to almost every recipe. The beauty of it is that he tells you how to make all the basics and then you can combine them or add them to other recipes. Good examples of that are this strawberry tart (crust, filling and glaze, all separate recipes) or this brownie tart which I added his butterscotch sauce to or my individual chicken pot pies where I used his biscuit recipe for the topping. Besides all the recipes there’s tons of tips, tutorials, and suggestions. If I have any kind of cooking question, I always check this book first. For instance, for today’s recipe I didn’t know what the right temperature should be for medium-well meat, so I checked and of course he had a list of all the correct temps as well as tips for the best way to cook it. I didn’t know that meat cooks best if it’s at room temperature when it first hits the heat, so let it sit out for 30 minutes or so before you put it in the oven.
Let’s talk about that recipe now, shall we? When I was organizing my recipe and ingredient indexes for the redesign, I realized that in two years I’ve only posted two recipes with beef. There is tons and tons of chicken and even a good amount of pork so adding more beef is something I definitely need to work on. I’ve not always been a big fan of red meat, but I’m coming around to it. I’ve mentioned before that I get tired of eating chicken all the time and while I still do eat chicken more than other meats, lately I’ve been making an effort to have at least one beef, one pork and one seafood dish each week.
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June 23, 2010
Next Monday, this blog will be 2 years old and since I didn’t really do anything to celebrate the anniversary last year I decided to go all out this year. So welcome to the completely redesigned Back to the Cutting Board! If you’re reading in the comfort of your feed reader, I’d love it if you’d click on through and take a look. Plus there is a reason you will want to visit, which I’ll get to soon…
Since I’ve posted quite a few recipes over the last two years, I wanted to make the site easier to browse. I cleaned up the Recipe Index and I added a new Ingredients Index if you want to search for recipes with specific ingredients. I also made an effort to simplify things. I loved my previous design, but I wanted something cleaner and simpler this time. I think the home page and sidebar were too busy before so I made an effort to pare everything down to the essentials (well, mostly anyway, minimalism is kind of against my nature, so this is as pared down as it gets for me). Plus, the site is loading much faster now after removing some plugins and sidebar items that were slowing it down pretty substantially.
But anyway, enough about that…on to the giveaway! I’ve never done one before, so I thought this was perfect time to finally do one. And while it may not be original, I thought it only appropriate to do a giveaway with some of my favorite cookbooks. I’m not formally trained and two years ago I knew very little about how to cook and all the different kinds of ingredients and foods that are out there. I certainly wouldn’t have this blog if it weren’t for my cookbooks and I wouldn’t have learned half a much as I have about cooking and baking without them. Two years ago I was too scared to make even the slightest changes to recipes, but lately I’ve noticed that I feel much more confident in my cooking and in my knowledge and techniques that I have no problem adapting recipes to my liking. One day I hope to be writing my own recipes, but for now I’m very thankful to have my cookbooks for guidance.
I’ll be doing two giveaways this week. The first is my current favorite cookbook which is Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast. This is sort of a sequel to an older Martha Stewart Everyday Food cookbook, which I also love and highly recommend: Everyday Food: Great Food Fast.
The recipes in both cookbooks are simple but delicious and also relatively healthy (“only as much fat as necessary” which is a way I’ve heard some recipes described before). And I think the photography and food styling in them is also simple yet stunning. It’s a big inspiration to me when I take photos for this blog.
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June 10, 2010
Since I already found a healthy waffle recipe that I liked a lot, I decided it was time to find a better recipe for pancakes, too. I’d seen some recipes for oatmeal pancakes and was intrigued by the idea. Before last winter I hated oatmeal, but moving to a place that actually gets cold and my desire to eat something warm in the mornings finally converted me into an oatmeal lover (also finding out about steel-cut oats helped a lot). But I was still unconvinced about oatmeal in pancakes. Mainly, I was worried about the texture. Would they wind up being lumpy or mushy? Would they be really heavy or dense? Also, all the recipes I’d seen required that the oatmeal sit in liquid overnight to soften and I just don’t have that much forethought about whether I’m going to want pancakes when I get up in the morning. So when I found this recipe that only required the oatmeal to soak for 20 minutes (though you can soak it overnight if you think that far ahead), I decided this was definitely worth a try.
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May 20, 2010
Do you ever go to the grocery store and randomly pick up something that looks so inviting or is such a good deal that you can’t pass it up, even though you don’t know what you will actually do with it? Well, that’s how I ended up with 2 cartons of giant blackberries this week. They were beautiful and they were buy one, get one free. How could you not buy those?
But then, if course, I had to find something to make with them so they wouldn’t all go to waste (although they were pretty perfect in a bowl with a little sugar sprinkled on top, too). I already posted a blackberry cobbler a while ago, so that was out. After searching around for a while, this recipe jumped out me, and for good reason! It’s extremely simple and produces a very moist and delicious cake. And since I really like the combination of lemon and blackberry, I added a lemon glaze on top (the same one from these lemon cakes). I think the glaze perfectly balances out the tartness of the blackberries as well as the cinnamon and other spices in the cake. Besides, it’s a cake and cakes are supposed to be topped with some kind of sugary concoction, right?
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