Apple Crisp

Since I am not a huge fan of pumpkin, I thought I'd spice things up a bit and throw in a little apple dessert for you.  This was amazingly easy (other than the cutting and peeling of the apples).  I am used to making apple pie, where you add sugar, spices, etc. to the apples, but for this recipe, sliced apples go into the bottom of a baking dish alone, and then are topped with a crumble topping.  I thought that this was odd, and that the apples wouldn't taste as good, but surprisingly, this dessert was great.  The topping is very sweet and has cinnamon in it, so it balanced out the apples.  If you own an apple slicer/peeler/corer, this is a quick and easy dessert to throw together for the fall!

Pumpkin Bread

So here's another fun pumpkin recipe!  I actually made this twice, and if you take a look at the picture, the bread sank down in the middle.  It did this both times I made it, and I can't figure out why!  Both times it rose like a regular loaf of bread in the oven, but as soon as I took it out and it started to cool, it completely collapsed in the middle.  My husband said that it tasted fine, but it doesn't look good.  I sliced it into smaller pieces just so that it wouldn't be noticeable that there was "sinkage" in the middle.  I will be making this again sometime soon so that I can see if we can make it look like a real loaf of bread...  If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to let me know!

Pumpkin Cheesecake

So it's fall in Indiana, which means pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin everything.  I, unfortunately, do not care for pumpkin - pumpkin anything.  My husband loves it, as does the rest of the midwest (so it seems) so I will be cooking everything I find in the cookbook that deals with pumpkin - yay fall!!  My first pumpkin attempt was a yummy (so I'm told) cheesecake.  I have only made one other cheesecake ever and was hoping that this would be a success.  For some reason, making an actual REAL cheesecake (and a pumpkin one at that) frightened me, and I thought it would be so difficult.  Surprisingly, the cheesecake is not difficult, but it is a bit time consuming, as there are a lot of steps. 

     The first thing you have to do is make the graham cracker crust (recipe below).  I do not have a large food processor, so to crush the graham crackers, I put them into a big ziplock bag, and crushed them with a rolling pin.  Once you mix the graham crackers, sugar, and  butter together, you press it down into the bottom of a springform pan.  I think that if you don't have a springform pan, you can use a regular round cake pan, but I'm not sure how easy it is to then get it out of the pan after it bakes.  The crust then either has to bake for a few minutes, or freeze for something like 20 minutes.  I chose to bake it. 

   Once the crust is taken care of, the actual cheesecake part is made.  The recipe calls for adding the eggs and egg yolks one at a time, which I normally would ignore and add them all at once, but let's remember that I'm trying to really learn how to cook/bake well, so I followed the instructions.  I have heard some cooks advocate breaking the eggs into a separate small bowl before adding them to the mixture, but I always crack them right over the bowl as I add them - I mean, seriously, who takes the time to do that?  I now am a more informed cook, and know why the "pre-cracking" is recommended.  While adding the last egg, I accidently dropped the shell into the bowl as the mixer was mixing - AAAAGGGHH!!!  I turned off the mixer as fast as I could, while simultaneously having a small heart attack.  I then had to scrape out all of the broken bits of egg shell, hoping that they actually all got out.  I didn't hear any complaints later, so I think all was okay. 

     The recipe says to put a cake pan with some water in it into the oven to moisten the air before you bake the cheesecake, but do you think I remembered to do that?  I did not.  If I remember right, I think the reasoning behind actually doing this is that the moisture helps to keep the cheesecake from cracking on the top.  Take a good look at my cheesecake and you'll find that there are several cracks on the top.  I'll have to try to remember the water next time so that the end result is prettier! 

     Finally, the last step is to put a sour cream topping on the top and finish the last few minutes of baking.  Do you see a sour cream top on my pumpkin cheesecake?  No, you do not.  Why?  Only because my sweet, darling, little daughter decided to rummage through the cabinets while I was cleaning up (something she always does, and I approve of, since it keeps her busy) and she pulled out a piece of dry spaghetti and jabbed it into her ear.  Second and much more real heart attack of the day... Yes, boys and girls, we had to make an unexpected immediate trip to the doctor.  The cheesecake was ready to come out, but we didn't have time for the topping, so we'll just have to make another one sometime to try again.  AND... no, little cute girl did not puncture her ear drum as I feared, but she did scratch it - we were lucky.

Here is a fun new tidbit I found today.  The Joy of Cooking can actually be found online, so I'll be adding the recipes right here via the web - yay!  Click on the link below for the graham cracker crust and pumpkin cheesecake recipes!

http://books.google.com/books?id=tbyW2LeXIOkC&pg=PA983&lpg=PA983&dq=the+joy+of+cooking+pumpkin+cheesecake&source=bl&ots=fOSJg91CAU&sig=lgPJx-6a5K1qlp4Y0csitIYI5iU&hl=en&ei=fSfbTJXhHMGqlAec5ZSaCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CEAQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Chicken Fried Rice

Tonight we had chicken fried rice for dinner.  We planted a rather large garden this summer, and it is still producing tomatoes, sweet peppers, and onions.  Currently, there are yellow peppers, red peppers, green peppers, and orange peppers ready to be picked, and I want to use them up before it finally frosts here in Indiana!  The recipe in TJOC is for "fried rice," but the directions tell you that you can add meat or other vegetables - whatever you have on hand.   This is another recipe that is extremely easy to make.  This recipe calls for 3-4 cups of cooked, cold rice - great for leftover rice; I actually intend to make extra rice in the future just for this purpose.  For tonight's meal, I cooked the rice earlier in the day and let it cool.  I also only had about one cup of cooked rice, so I divided the ingredients by 1/3, and with the added chicken and peppers, it was perfect.  That said, I'll get on with the recipe.... for the 3-4 cups of rice, the recipe calls for 4 eggs.  Those are just scrambled with a bit of salt and put aside.  The rice is then cooked for a few minutes in 2T vegetable oil* with 1t minced ginger.  You then stir the eggs and 1/2 cup scallions in with the rice, and voila!  You've got yourself some fried rice!!  I sauteed diced chicken, onions, and peppers in a bit of seseme oil, and added that to the fried rice, and then topped it all off with soy sauce, and it was perfect!  I'm sure you can add to the rice whatever you might have in your cabinet, which is another reason this is an easy go-to meal.

*if you are used to using olive oil for cooking rather than vegetable oil, don't try to substitute if a recipe calls for cooking with vegetable oil.  Vegetable oil has a higher smoke point than olive oil, so the best bet is to follow the recipe.

The Joy of Cooking, 75th Anniversary Edition

FRIED RICE p.357

Baked Butternut Squash

                                  

Butternut Squash

After taking the summer off, I am now back to baking and cooking like crazy.  One side dish that I made the other day was Butternut squash, and it is now my new favorite!  I honestly can say that I haven't had squash since I was very little, and was skeptical, thinking that I would hate it.  I was so wrong.  If you haven't eaten this squash (I don't know if other types taste similar or not), you must try it.  The flesh is similar in texture and taste to a sweet potato.  This is super easy to make, so if you wander down the produce isle and sometimes wonder if you should pick up a winter squash for a try - you should.  All you do for this recipe is to cut the squash in half, put it on a rimmed baking sheet (I actually used a Pyrex dish) that has about 1/4 inch of water in it, and bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes.  At 30 minutes in, I brushed the top with melted butter, sprinked on some brown sugar, and baked for the remaining time.  This particular squash had to be in 10 minutes or so longer than the recipe called for, because when I first took it out, the flesh wasn't tender enough.  Part of the squash didn't get the brown sugar on it, and the taste was still great - good enough that next time I'll try it with just a little butter and salt.

Chicken with a mushroom cream sauce

This chicken dish is one of the best we've had yet - not low fat, by any means, but so tasty!  It was also pretty simple to make.  The chicken breasts are sauteed in olive oil and taken out of the pan.  In the same pan, you cook shallots for a minute or two, and then add mushrooms cook for another couple of minutes.  After that, the pan is deglazed with sherry, heavy cream is added, a pinch of nutmeg, some parsley.  That is cooked down until it is thick enough to "coat the back of a spoon!"  The end result is a delicious mushroom sauce that goes over the chicken. We had mashed potatoes (it's what I had in the cabinet), but I think if I have this again, I will probably try it with egg noodles.  One thing that this cookbook does not do is give suggestions about what to serve things with, so without knowing what some of these dishes will be like in the end, I just have to guess what each dish will be good with.  That said, this dish was great - a must-try!

Cobb salad

As it got warmer, we started grilling more, and I started blogging less and using my cookbook less.  As I looked through it recently, I realized that there are a lot of dishes in there that are great for warm weather, so here's the first one (not that it's super hard, or takes a culinary wizard to accomplish) cobb salad.  I often order this when we are out, but I have never made it at home, so when I saw the "recipe" in the cookbook, I thought we'd have it for dinner. Of course there are greens on the bottom, which we conveniently picked fresh from our garden - yay!  I cooked a couple of chicken breasts in the crockpot for the afternoon, and chopped those on top.  Crumbled bacon, boiled eggs, avacado, and tomatoes finished it off.  Per cobb salad instructions, we were supposed to have blue cheese on there as well, but as I don't like blue cheese, my husband had to settle with blue cheese dressing on his instead.  This is a great salad, but unless everything is cooked beforehand, it is a bit time-consuming to cook the chicken, bacon, and eggs.  Maybe next time I will pre-cook that stuff and have it on hand to be able to just throw the salad together.

 boiled eggs were added