Spaghetti From Scratch

Pasta dough setting up

I've been meaning to make spaghetti from scratch ever since I got the pasta attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer last summer. Then Kevin and I got a hankering to make meatballs. And then I received a cook book with an easy recipe for tomato sauce from scratch. So this past weekend we decided to put it all together and make a delicious home made meal.

Kneading into fat rectangles

The pasta was pretty straight forward. It's basically eggs and flour (with some water and salt for flavor and texture). I found a video online that detailed how to use the attachment, and I'm glad I watched it. Rolling out the dough and sending it through the cutter is a process. Though thankfully it didn't take quite as long as I was anticipating. And by the last batch, Kevin and I had a pretty good system worked out.

Rolling out the dough

The meatballs were a pretty basic recipe that Kevin added some spice to. We made some similar ones for my mom's birthday party in December, so we had the basic idea down. And they aren't too different from burgers when all is said and done. The extra spice made these really flavorful and delicious.

meatballs!

Finally there was the sauce, which took about ten minutes according to the recipe. We should have cooked it for longer, though, to let it thicken up more. It was ultimately pretty thin and oily. It didn't help that we just spooned it over the pasta instead of mixing everything together. It separated and which led to a meal of pasta followed by tomato sauce. But next time we'll know. And I found a different sauce recipe that should be thicker.

The finished product

All in all it took a little less than two hours to make dinner. Things staggered pretty well (we mixed meatballs while the dough was setting and cooked the sauce while the pasta water was boiling). I think it may just have been worth the effort. Even if we did end up with comically long noodles. I'm excited to try again, now that we have a better idea of what we're doing. Though this definitely won't become a typical thing. It's way easier and cheaper to buy pasta pre-made.

Risotto

Several months ago, The Toast posted a Risotto Template. It's not a recipe so much as a guide for making risotto. One that you can personalize to your heart's content, but that gets a lot of the basics right. It's the kind of thing that might not work for the chemists in my life, but it's exactly the kind of recipe I've come to love.

I wanted desperately to try it out. But I was so busy planning the wedding that I couldn't seem to find the time. Then there's the fact that risotto is high in both fat and carbs, which didn't really mesh with my weight-watching goals leading up to the wedding. So I decided to wait until after the honeymoon. And last weekend (after a supremely busy month) I finally found the 2+ hours I needed to attempt this.

It didn't come out perfectly - the rice was still occasionally crunchy. Which, I don't even know how that happened. I was thinking that I maybe didn't cook it enough, but Kevin thinks I may have burned some of the rice grains in the toasting step. Whatever it was, it's something I'll hopefully be better about next time.

As I said, this recipe was pretty open to interpretation. I used tumeric instead of saffron because have you seen the price of saffron? And I threw in a little extra wine and a lot of extra cheese. I did the full 8 cups of chicken stock (minus what ever boiled off), which meant that I was adding stock and stirring for about an hour and a half. And drinking wine during that time.

To my finished product, I added mushrooms, shrimp, and peas. I should have added more of all three, but I was worried about overpowering the rice. I did about a handful of each, and will probably double that next time.

The risotto tasted really good, if occasionally crunchy. The wine helps with that part, though. It was fun to make. I watched two episodes of Orange is the New Black while I was chopping and simmering and stirring and eating. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Saturday evening. Hopefully I'll find time to make it again in the future. This is one of those dishes I'd really like to perfect, as it works really well both fresh and as leftovers.

Casserole!

After the last soup, I am officially over soup. I made too much of it for too long, and now it's time to start cooking things that are more solid. And to use recipes that make fewer servings. How convenient that we just got a nice new casserole dish! And casseroles are super easy.

Chicken:

Mushrooms:

Spaghetti:

White sauce:

Throw it all together to bake:

Mmmmm.

Ok, it's maybe a bit more complicated than that. Especially the sauce. But whatever. It was delicious.

Soup 6: Flu Chaser

As soon as I saw is recipe, which calls for twenty cloves of garlic, I knew I would have to make it sooner rather than later. Then when Kevin got sick last week, and I woke up feeling less than great, I decided it was definitely time. This soup has all sort of goodness that's supposed to chase away colds and flus. Plus it looks delicious.

The recipe makes a ton, but after we went through the turkey soup in less than a week, I was pretty sure we could handle eating this. We'll probably get tired of soup before too much longer, though. But that just means I'll have to branch out with new recipes.

The first order of business is to peel all of the garlic. Then cover it with olive oil and bake for 45 minutes

When the garlic is getting close, start getting the rest of the soup ready. Chop up the onion, carrots, and celery and row them in your pot with the chicken. The recipe called for a whole chicken, but I couldn't find a pre-butchered one at the store. I ended up buying some breasts, thighs, and drumsticks separately.

Pour in a whole bunch of chicken stock and bring it all to a boil.

This is about the point where you once again realize that the pot you chose was too small. So transfer to the big pot. Maybe I should have cut this recipe in half...

While that's coming to a boil, strain the garlic

And measure out the spices and squeeze the lemons. I ended up having to supplement the fresh lemon juice with some bottled stuff in our fridge. It turns out that two lemons have nowhere near 3/4 cup of juice between them.

I also substituted fresh mint for dry mint because I couldn't find dried mint at the store. And fresh is probably better anyway. When the soup is boiling, throw all of this in and let it simmer for 2 1/2 hours.

Well the recipe said 2 1/2 hours or until the chicken is very tender. After a little more than an hour, the chicken was literally falling off the bone. I figured it was done. At this point, start cooking some rice and pull all of the chicken out.

Use a couple of forks to pull the chicken off the bone and shred it.

Toss the shredded chicken and the cooked rice back into the pot and bring it all back to a boil. Salt to taste and serve!

I switched back to the other pot when I pulled the chicken out. This was mostly to make sure I had gotten all the bones and skin out. But it's also easier to store the soup in this pot, since it fits in the fridge.

Soup 5: Turkey Soup From Scratch

Since Kevin cooked an entire turkey last week I decided to take the opportunity to make turkey soup from scratch. First up, the stock.

Break up the carcass and stuff it in the pot.

Turkey carcasses are really big, and this one was hard to break up since it was cold from sitting in the fridge all week. Next time I'll have to time this better. Cover the carcass with cold water and add the drippings and giblets.

Our drippings sort of solidified from sitting in the fridge. I hope this turns out okay.

Then throw in some celery and carrots and realize that the pot you chose is way too small.

So throw everything in a bigger pot. We're lucky Kevin's mom decided to just leave this at our house.

Then add the onions

Now throw in a bunch of spices and bring the whole thing to a boil.

Then reduce the heat to a simmer and let it cook uncovered for four hours. After four hours a lot of the water has boiled off and everything is nice and concentrated.

Pull out the bones and veggies as much as you can. Then pour the rest through a strainer into another pot. And then you get a nice big pot of turkey stock. Now it's time to cut up some fresh veggies for the soup. Throw them all in the broth with some garlic, sage, and whatever else you want and let it cook for a while.

When the veggies have cooked for a while, add a bag of egg noodles. Then chop a bunch of turkey and throw that in as well. Cook until it's all warm, then serve. Mmmmmm.

I don't really know who's going to eat all this soup, though

Soup 4: Apple, Onion, and Cheddar

For Christmas, my mom got me a cookbook of soup recipes. I kind of stopped making soup when the insanity of the holidays kicked in, but I thought I'd get one more in before the end of the year. I chose this one to go with the turkey Kevin made for dinner last night, so we should have some good leftovers this week.

The recipe in the book said it made 12 servings, so I decided to halve it. Although for some ingredients it was closer to 2/3. It came out pretty good in the end, though. The nice thing about soups is that nothing has to be too exact.

The first step is to melt some butter on the stove while you slice the onions nice and thin.

Then sauté the onions with some garlic in the butter for about 25 minutes. While that's cooking, peel and slice your a apples and get the broth, cider, and spices ready.

The liquid base in this soup is three parts chicken broth, one part apple cider, to which I added a bit more apple cider.

The recipe called for 5 onions and 4 apples, which is hard to halve while getting the proportions right. Next time I'll either use less onion slices or another apple. Or maybe I'll just make the full recipe and find a way to eat it all.

Once the onions are nice and soft, add the apples and sauté for five more minutes.

Then add the liquids and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium, then cover and let it simmer for 40 minutes. This soup smells delicious, and unlike anything I've ever cooked before. Though that's probably because this was the first time I used carroway seeds in anything.

While that's simmering, you can grate the cheeses. One cup of cheddar and 1/8 cup of Parmesan. You also need some heavy cream.

 Okay, that's way more cheese than the recipe called for. What can I say? I like cheese.

When the soup is done simmering, remove it from the heat and add the dairy. Stir until it's all melted, then salt and pepper to taste. Bring the soup back to a simmer for a few minutes before serving. This tasted delicious, though I may need to chop the onions a little smaller next time. Or not. They ended up looking more like noodles than anything else.

Soup 3: Curried Carrot-Squash

The last couple of soups have been pretty easy, so this week I'm graduating to a purée. The ingredient list is pretty simple and somewhat healthier than the tomato soup I made.

Look at all those vegetables

First you need to chop up all the veggies.

Veggies: sliced and diced

Now heat up some olive oil and a bunch of garlic

The recipe called for five cloves, but recipes always underestimate the amount of garlic you actually need. I used six cloves.

Then toss in the onions and carrots. Cook for a few minutes until the carrots are tender and sprinkle in some salt.

Then add the squash and some more salt.

That's a big pot of veggies!

Let that cook for a few minutes while you measure out the curry and wine. These two ingredients are the whole reason I chose this recipe.

I think I may use a bit more curry than that next time. Just a bit.

Then pour yourself a glass of wine for good measure.

The best part of cooking, really.

Now stir in the curry

It smells so good!

Then add the wine and a box (48 oz) of chicken broth

And now it looks like soup!

Mmmm. Now cover the pot and let everything simmer for an hour. While your kitchen smells progressively better and better.

An hour later, it's time to puree the soup. Once again, I took a bunch of pictures of this process, but my blogger app seems to have eaten them. Next time I'll have to triple check that that things syncs once I've finished my draft.

Pureeing the soup was quite an experience. We ladled it into a blender, then poured it into a separate bowl. It took three batches to do everything, and we made quite a mess. I'm glad Kevin was there to help out. I'll definitely be sticking an immersion blender on the wedding registry.

We served the soup with a fish that I took a cool picture of, but that has since disappeared. Stupid iPad.

Next week we're hosting a fancy dinner party, and I'm considering making a batch of this for everyone. It's actually both vegetarian and paleo-friendly, which is a rarity among the things I cook. We'll see how ambitious I'm feeling.

Soup 2: Sherried Tomato Soup

I fell in love with tomato soup years ago. Not when I was a kid, but shortly after college, when I hurt my jaw. I was on a liquid diet for several months and tomato soup became one of the main components of that diet (along with Jamba Juice, scrambled eggs, and protein shakes). It's about time I learned how to make it.

I found a recipe online at The Pioneer Woman's blog. It looked simple, and I loved the tone and pictures in the post, so I decided to try it first. Plus it has the added bonus of having lots of sherry and cream. How can you go wrong with that?

On Saturday evening, I began cooking the soup, taking pictures and cobbling together a blog entry as I went. The whole thing was pretty great if I do say so myself; it even included a few Alice in Wonderland inspired witticisms. Unfortunately, just as we were sitting down to enjoy the soup, we lost power. The lack of wifi meant that my Blogger app couldn't sync up with my online account. And for some reason this meant that Blogger ate my wonderfully constructed blog post. So you'll just have to click through that link up there if you want pictures and the recipe.

Suffice to say that the soup was delicious and super easy. It took about 45 minutes to pull together, and that was when I was taking time to take pictures. With better timing, I could probably get it down to half an hour, which makes it possible to make this almost anytime I want it.

Soup 1: Chicken Stew

This is the recipe that came with my Dutch oven, so it seemed like the perfect place to start. They wouldn't use anything too complicated for an introductory recipe, right?

Here's everything that goes into this soup

Stew ingredients. The owl (Hedwig) holds salt

Actually, the recipe only calls for 1.5 pounds of chicken meat, which is supposed to be two bone-in breasts. But they don't make chickens that small anymore, so I ended up with nearly 2 pounds of chicken.

First you sauté the veggies for a bit.

Carrots and onions. And it didn't even take me forever to chop them

I was surprised by how little basil I ended up needing. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup, which is less than half of what I bought. I even added a little extra, because why not? I'll need to find a way to use the rest of the basil before it goes bad.

1/2 cup of basil...if you smush it down

When the veggies are tender, stir in the tomatoes, tomato paste, broth, basil, and bay leaf.

It's starting to look like stew

Then add the chicken and try to submerge it. Bring it to a boil. Then reduce the heat to a simmer for about 25 minutes (until the chicken is cooked through). Since the chicken breasts are too big to actually be submerged, you need to turn them occasionally. One of my breasts was big enough that it needed more than the recommended 25 minutes. So I covered the stew and cooked it for five more minutes.

I got the smallest breasts at the store and they were still too big

Once the chicken is cooked, take it out. Fish out the bay leaf and throw it away. Add the kidney beans and let the stew simmer and thicken while you cut up the chicken.

It's all coming together

Discard the skin and bones from the chicken and chop it up into bite-sized pieces

I didn't get quite all of the bones out, but it all worked out

Toss the chicken back in the pot. Salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until you're ready to serve.

Stew: Officially a success

This smells so good, and it was a perfect accompaniment to the football game.