Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Best Pancakes Ever......(and they're whole wheat)


Pancakes and I have a long relationship, they are my favorite food AND the first thing that I ever learned to cook. My love with cooking from scratch actually started with pancakes (I was a strange 10 year old). I've gone through several recipe variations over the years but I finally created the perfect recipe.

When I make these for people I don't tell them that they're whole wheat. If I did, most people I know wouldn't eat them. They assume that whole wheat pancakes are going to be heavy, gritty and gross. (I've had a few bad batches) These whole wheat pancakes, however, are light, fluffy AND super delicious. So make a batch and don't tell anybody they're whole wheat until after they've finished eating them.

Note: I honestly forgot to take pictures, but I think I'm going to make pancakes for dinner tomorrow, in which case I try to remember to snap a few shots and upload them. (Don't judge me)

BEST PANCAKE RECIPE EVER

13.5 oz soft wheat (if you don't mill your own flour then you need whole wheat pastry flour)
4 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1.5 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
3 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup milk
3 eggs
1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted
vanilla extract
cinnamon

Q: Kellan, do I really need to use soft wheat or whole wheat pastry flour for this recipe?
A: Yes. If you make this with hard wheat or regular whole wheat flour your pancakes won't turn out right. I accidentally used hard wheat recently, my pancakes were horrible. 

The great thing about this recipe is that there aren't any special instructions for mixing this up recipe. Pancakes should be simple. Put everything in a bowl (except the vanilla and cinnamon) and mix it together. It doesn't need to be thoroughly mixed either, lumps are ok. Just make sure everything is combined and then let it sit for 10 or 15 minutes. After 15 minutes everything will be properly hydrated and the lumps will be gone (I promise).

The secret to this recipe is that I don't measure the vanilla and cinnamon. I put in what I feel to be enough. If I were to guess I would assume that it's about 1.5 to 2 tbsp of vanilla and 2 tsp of cinnamon but I honestly don't know. Put as much feels right to you. 

I use a regular ladle to measure out my pancakes, this recipe usually yields about 12 plate-sized pancakes. I come from a family with pretty large men, my dad is 6'5", and I haven't met anyone yet that can eat more than 3 of these pancakes; not even my 19 year old brother. As you can see the pancake the size of the entire bottom of the pan.
This is the nutritional information per, my extra large, pancake:

  Calories210.1
  Total Fat7.6 g
     Saturated Fat4.1 g
     Polyunsaturated Fat0.5 g
     Monounsaturated Fat2.2 g
  Cholesterol63.2 mg
  Sodium435.9 mg
  Potassium111.9 mg
  Total Carbohydrate29.9 g
     Dietary Fiber3.7 g
     Sugars7.6 g
  Protein8.0 g
  Vitamin A6.0 %
  Vitamin B-124.4 %
  Vitamin B-62.1 %
  Vitamin C1.1 %
  Vitamin D3.5 %
  Vitamin E0.7 %
  Calcium15.7 %
  Copper0.4 %
  Folate2.3 %
  Iron1.9 %
  Magnesium1.8 %
  Manganese0.1 %
  Niacin0.2 %
  Pantothenic Acid    1.8 %
  Phosphorus    10.6 %
  Riboflavin8.2 %
  Selenium1.9 %
  Thiamin1.4 %
  Zinc2.7 %


This recipe also keeps really well so you can mix it up, make some pancakes and but the rest of the batter in the refrigerator to use later. Happy pancake eating. 

Until next time, 
Kellan

Monday, December 6, 2010

Using Leftover Turkey: Day ? - Corned Beef

It's been a while, but we got a new addition Friday night so I've been a little busy. My aunt had a baby........YAY! My family is very close so I had A LOT of stuff going on. We had the baby and a 2nd birthday this weekend. I had a super busy day at church yesterday and I'm on newborn and babysitting duty for the rest of the week. Needless to say, I been busy but I wanted to share something with you.

I ended up making turkey salad out the rest of the leftover because we've been so busy. I'll post the pics later when I get back home. Most people think that turkey salad tastes just like chicken salad, that's not true. In my family we smoke all our turkeys and one had a jerk rubbed on the outside, so it had a very different taste.

Corned Beef
What does corned beef have to do with leftover turkey? Great question. Well I used my delicious turkey stock as the cooking liquid for my corned beef. I made my corned beef in 45 mins in the greatest cooking device ever.............the electric pressure cooker.
I love this thing. LOVE IT!!!!!!!! I have always been afraid of pressure cookers because they can explode but I don't have to worry about that this puppy. It has a built in safety precaution that doesn't allow the unit to be opened if there's any pressure built up inside so I don't have to worry about opening it too soon and having corned beef on my ceiling. If you don't have a pressure cooker you should definitely get one of these and they're relatively cheap. On Overstock they start at $45.

If I get a chance to make something cool this week I'll do another post but right now I'm not entirely sure that's going to happen. I want to make some liquid laundry soap this week but we'll see.

Until next time,
Kellan

Monday, November 29, 2010

Using Leftover Turkey: Prep Day

I know that I was supposed to be doing a week of bread next..........but after making 20 dozen rolls for Thanksgiving, I'm really not feeling making ANY bread for at least a week. When we were cleaning up from Thanksgiving dinner my grandmother gave me the turkey carcass, she figured I could do something with it. I hate to disappoint so I'm going to make as many turkey dishes as I can with the carcass.

As with any carcass, the first use is to make stock.

Isn't that beautiful? Making this stock was crazy easy, I put the carcass in the slow cooker, filled with water and let it cook on low overnight. I turned the slow cooker off around 10:30 this morning but I didn't pick the turkey until 7 pm. Why the long wait? 1) I've been doing laundry and forgot. 2) I don't like burning myself (don't ask).

WARNING: picking turkey is not pretty or fun. There's no gadget that you can use for this, so mentally prepare yourself and stick your hand in. All you have to do is separate the bones from the meat. Sounds easy right? It is..............just do it and don't think about it.
Once you've finished separating the meat from the bones strain your stock and your done! Super easy right?

I'll be back tomorrow with use #1 for leftover Thanksgiving turkey. 

Until next time, 
Kellan

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Chicken Experiment - Final Thoughts

The rest of my week wasn't quite as successful, mostly because I wasn't feeling all that great.

Tomato Soup
I used some of the stock I made to make tomato soup from a recipe I saw on Keeper of the Home. When I was originally reading the recipe I was trying to figure out what the baking soda was for. I didn't realize until I was actually making the soup that the baking soda was to neutralize the acid in the tomatoes. Since I used tomatoes that I canned myself, they had a little extra acid from the lemon juice I put in bottom of all my jars. Overall, the soup was really good but thin. I ended up reducing mine by a lot. I will definitely make this soup again but I'm only going to use about 2 cups of stock instead of 4.

Chicken & Broccoli Fettuccine Alfredo
I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Heavenly Homemakers, and found a great recipe for easy alfredo sauce. When I saw it, I had to make it. As I've said before, I LOVE TO EAT and one of my favorite things is alfredo sauce. That's not to say that you can slop alfredo sauce on anything (I once ordered the blackened cajun chicken alfredo from Red Lobster, it was horrible).

Ingredients:
half a chicken worth of picked chicken
1 batch of Heavenly Homemakers easy alfredo sauce
1/2 bag of frozen broccoli
fettuccine noodles

Make the alfredo sauce first, then throw in the chicken and frozen broccoli.
Turn the pot on medium/low, put a lid on and let everything hang out for about 15 minutes.
Cook the amount of fettuccine you feel is adequate. (I personally like more sauce and toppings than pasta so I don't make a lot but that's up to you)
You really don't have to drain the pasta, I fished mine out with tongs and threw it directly into my sauce.
Mix everything together and serve.

It's tasty, delicious and super easy.

At this point we had been eating chicken for a little over a week. I couldn't think of anything else to make and honestly I was a little tired of chicken. So I fed the rest of the chicken to the cats. I recently discovered that feeding them cat food was making them sick so I've been feed them tuna, chicken and turkey (cats are carnivores). They were quite pleased. They had been eyeing the chicken since I brought it home.

Final Thoughts
I definitely think I proved my original theory that we could eat off two chickens for a week. I actually think we could have went two weeks but I'll leave that for another experiment. It definitely takes creativity and research to try to use the same main ingredient over and over again.

I'm currently working on a bread experiment and I just ordered potassium hydroxide so I will be making liquid soap soon (SUPER EXCITED ABOUT THAT).

Until next time,
Kellan

Friday, November 12, 2010

The Chicken Experiment - Midweek Update

This past Sunday I decided to try an experiment this week, that is supposed to be the purpose of this blog. I bought two whole chickens (I did cheat a little because they were cut up but it was cheaper than buying them uncut) and wanted to see 1) how many things I could make and 2) how many days we could eat off those two chicken. It's currently Friday and we still have the meat from one chicken that hasn't been touched yet, these are the preparations I've come up with so far:

Chicken Stock
When I got home from the store the first thing I did was make stock and I did this for two reasons. The first of which being that Kitchen Basics stock, although delicious, is expensive and since the purpose of this experiment is to maximize use of the chicken I had to make the stock. The second reason is that I wanted the chicken to already be cooked because I hate having raw chicken around and I thought it would make cooking easier for the rest of this experiment. 

Making stock is actually quite easy. You need chicken, an onion, some celery and carrots. As stated before, I did cheat a little, the chicken was already cut up so I didn't have to bother with that AND I bought baby carrots in a bag from the store. I usually don't by bagged produce but it was on sale for $1 and I couldn't pass that up. I don't have one of those super big stock pots, so I put one chicken in a 5 qt. enameled cast iron dutch oven and the other in my 6 qt crockpot. Throw everything in the cooking vessel of your choosing, cover with water, put the lids on and walk away. 

The chicken that I cooked on the stove was done in about 3 or 4 hours over medium-low heat. The chicken I cooked in  the crockpot on low was done in about 12 hrs. In all honesty the crockpot stock was probably done WAY before 12 hrs but after I finished with the stove batch I went to sleep, the extra time doesn't hurt anything. Strain the liquid away from the solids and pick all the chicken off the bones and VIOLA you have stock. I've read that some people like to leave the veggies and blend it together.............I'm not that kind of girl. I think stock should be clear. *shrugg*

Chicken Salad
I LOVE CHICKEN SALAD, my grandmother makes it all the time and it's always delicious. I don't know why chicken salad is so tasty but it is. Chicken salad is stupidly easy to make, it's chicken, mayo, relish and mustard. People add other things, my grandmother usually adds onions and celery but Dj doesn't like the texture difference so I leave them out. I've heard of people adding craisins and/or grapes......too adventurous for me. 

Chicken Pot Pie
Another super easy chicken dish. Pot pie requires: 
half a large onion
2 potatoes
carrots
2 stalks of celery
4 cups of the stock
4 tbsp cornstarch
1 sheet of puff pastry 
half a chicken worth of picked chicken. 

Cut up the veggies, saute them for a little while and add the stock, reserve about 1/2 cup of stock. 
Add the chicken and simmer for about 10 minutes
Thoroughly mix the reserved stock with the cornstarch and pour into pot with other ingredients
Pour everything in an casserole dish and top with puff pastry. (I usually make designs with the puff pastry but you can just lay the sheet on top if you want)
Bake at 400 degrees for about 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.  

We ate this pot pie for 3 days and I didn't make one that was very big. I still have to figure out tonight and the next few days. I'm open to suggestions. 

Until next time, 
Kellan

Friday, March 19, 2010

Homemade Strawberry Applesauce


I know it's been a while. I moved and have been QUITE busy. I'm going to start posting a lot more.....I have to remember to take pictures while I'm working on stuff (and I had to find a way to get the pics off the camera).

Now I know some of you are thinking, "Why would I want to make applesauce?" Well not only is it tasty and delicious but it MUCH better than anything that you can buy in the store. I personally like applesauce that contains other fruit like raspberries, strawberries, blackberries....etc (you get the idea).

For the purposes of this post I am making strawberry applesauce but you can put in whatever fruit you want.

Ingredients
3 lbs apples (whatever you want/have, combinations work too)
1 lb  strawberries (replace with any fruit you like)
1 juice of lemon
1 T vanilla extract
2 T ground cinnamon
3 T agave nectar (any sweetner will work)
1/4 c water

Directions

Wash, peel, core and chop apples

        

Chop strawberries


Pour in juice of lemon, vanilla extract, cinnamon, agave nectar and water.



Cook over medium low heat until soft


If you like chuky applesauce you're done. If not, you can blend it smooth (I used an immersion blender).

You can eat the applesauce warm but I personally like mine ICY cold. To me it's extra delicious after being in the frig overnight.

Until next time............

KAC