Adventures in Cooking and Baking

Anna and I love to cook and bake.  We often choose food that we've never made before.  I personally like trying to make things from scratch, without the help of any prepackaged mixes.  

On Friday night we grilled stuffed pork chops.  We have made chops before and also have stuffed them before.  However, recently we saw a Good Eats episode on how to make them better.  We became easily enthused and decided to copy the recipe.  This time we brined them for a couple hours.  Also we used thick pork chops, about 1.5 inches.  Unfortunately we cooked them a little too long, and they were still dry.  They had great flavor, but definitely could be more juicy.  Next time we'll pull them off the grill earlier.

Saturday we made Angel Food cake.  I takes eggs... a lot of eggs, 12 to be exact.  Actually 12 egg whites, the yellows are useless.  The Betty Crocker cookbook recommended using the yellows in another recipe, such as Creme Brule.  Riiight, nothing completes a meal like Angel Food cake AND Creme Brule.  I have nothing against Creme Brule, but I'm thinking we don't need both at once.  I actually used 14 eggs, I broke two yolks.  You have to be extremely careful, the eggs won't foam if there is any yolk.  I was using an "isolation method" so the two egg whites that I did contaminate with yolk could just be thrown away without affecting the other whites.  We are very happy to have a kitchen-aid mixer.  It took several minutes on high speed to force the egg whites to foam.  I can't imagine doing this by hand with a wisk, and even using a hand mixer would have been tiring on the arm from holding it for an extended period of time.  I did make one mistake.  I completely forgot the 1/4 tsp of salt.  By the time I realized the cake was already in the oven.  I was really worried, in cooking salt is used to bring out flavor, but in baking salt is often required in some chemical process.  However even without salt the cake turned out extremely well.  Since it was extremely tasty and was relatively easy it has gone on the list of things we want to make again soon.  We may have messed up the whipped cream.  Whipped cream takes heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract, the ratios are whats important.  We had just finised watching another Good Eats show, this one on milk, specifically we watched him make Tres Leche Cake.  In it he made whipped cream to use as a frosting.  We were paying to much attention, but he used 2:1 cream-to-sugar ratio.  Our whipped cream turned out much more sweet than usual.  We are thinking he was making a whipped cream specifically to be used as a frosting, not necessarily one used for pies and angel food cake.  Oh well, it still was incredible.

Brian