The Recipe I have wanted to make beef wellington for a long time. The mysterious dish has always piqued my interest, and I finally had an opportunity to make it. The recipe is inspired by Gordon Ramsay, but he used more expensive ingredients that I wouldn't be able to afford, such as an entire beef tenderloin. I've linked a cheaper recipe and the video where Gordon Ramsay cooks the dish so you can see what I followed. I hope you'll also try to make the poor man's beef wellington. The Process This recipe was extremely hands-on compared to some other recipes I've made. I understand why everything had to be done, but I haven't done most of what I needed to do today. When cooking steak of any kind, my family usually heads towards the grill, but I had to pan-sear and bake this cut of meat. Putting it in the pan for a sear added flavor to the meat, but also ensured that my beef wouldn't be an unappetizing grey color. I seared the beef and let it rest while I prepared to put the mushrooms in the food processor. Then my food processor didn't work. I knew that I shouldn't let the steak rest too long since I only cooked the outside, so I quickly got a knife and got to chopping. Luckily, my knife speed has increased despite not being able to do a proper cutting method due to an injury to my right ring finger, but I still got the pieces small enough to be similar to a duxelles. I then realized that I don't have any plastic wrap, so I had to improvise while laying out my ham. I spread the mushrooms on top of the ham, then placed the filet of beef tenderloin on top. I wrapped it as tight as I could and let it rest while I prepared the puff pastry. I set it out and unwrapped the beef, ham, and mushroom wrap. It was messy and the three didn't want to stick together, but it was mu fault for not preparing a proper duxelles and having ham that was a bit too thick. I wrapped in in the puff pastry, and failed at trimming it. I may have ripped the pastry more than I should have, but at least I got it to cover the beef. The Reviews
I Made Plenty of MistakesAs mentioned in the reviews, I had overcooked the beef and let it rest too long, which let the pastry get soggy. The juices from the steak combined with the moisture from the mushrooms (which I'm assuming I didn't cook long enough,) left the pastry soggy. I'll have to fiddle with our food processor more and work on my technique for rolling the ingredients together more tightly. I could have also seared it for less time because I had seared it for longer than I should have. The final mistake here leads for room to grow and improve, and maybe a hint that I should go back to less complicated dishes. Thank you for following my short culinary journey.
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The RecipeI was watching The Office when I decided to make chili, and I found this recipe a while back. Hopefully other people will make this recipe and enjoy a nice, warm chili on a chilly day. The Process This recipe ended up being a bit easier than I thought it would be. Chopping up the onion took a while, but my knife skills have definitely improved compared to the last time I cut up an onion. I started out by putting the beef and onions in a skillet just for convenience when cooking them, but the only thing I did was make something else dirty. I probably could have cooked them in the large pot I ended up transferring them to, but it did make adding spices and stirring them together much easier despite accidental overflow. I did a double-take when looking at the amounts listed for the spices. There was so much chili powder just to add to the beef and onions. The amounts make more sense when I thought about all of the liquid I would be adding, along with other more plain ingredients being put into the pot. I was frazzled when putting everything into the pot because I was rushing to get everything in before something burned. I enjoyed putting everything together despite putting myself under unnecessary stress. Then I saw the unopened can of tomato sauce. Oops. I had to open it up and stir it into the already simmering chili. I thought about some ingredients we have that would make a great addition to the chili, and a few things immediately caught my attention. I grabbed some jalapeños, more beans, and hot sauce, then dumped a bit of each in. I stirred it around, then left the pot to simmer. The chili had to sweat off quite a bit of moisture before reaching a perfect consistency. The Reviews
What Would I Change? I wouldn't really change a whole lot with the dish. Everyone thought it taste good, so I'd probably only dial back on the hot sauce and chili powder. I'd probably take out a few jalapeños as well to help dial down the heat.
The Recipe My family loves Chinese food, whether traditional or more Americanized. I thought General Tso's chicken would be perfect to try as one of my dishes for this project. The Process This dish was surprisingly fun to make. The sauce was fun to make and mix together. I enjoyed finally being able to do more with the chicken and actually cut it up more. I let it sit to marinade while I prepared the breading. The breading wasn't too difficult to make, but I quickly figured out that a lot of people use the wet hand, dry hand method for a reason. The mixture gets sticky quickly. I used the method and the process was much more smooth. I don't have a good pot for deep-fat frying, so I had to improvise and pan fry instead. That's where a lot of my issues came up. I could never get the heat quite right for the chicken and the breading. I got lucky with a few pieces that survived and I was able to douse them in sauce. Then I realized error two. I messed up my sauce by getting the portions wrong. My sauce was thin and a bit bland. At this point it was too late to change my sauce, so I just had to let it go and serve the dish. The sauce thickened and soaked into the breading, which wasn't the most delicious thing to happen, but it saved my sauce from being thin. The Reviews
Oops is Insufficient I definitely made quite a few mistakes with this recipe. Now only did I screw up when cooking a lot of the chicken, but I also made way too much sauce. Not many pieces turned out well, and many were either overcooked or grossly undercooked. I made sure to check every piece because no one wants rare chicken and a night reserved on the toilet. I'm glad I checked it because raw chicken is extremely dangerous.
The Recipe I originally wasn't going to make hot cocoa, but I had to shift around recipes because Thanksgiving left my family with more than enough food. I decided to go with something lighter, but still delicious. I saw this hot chocolate recipe a week ago and knew that it would be perfect. I halved the recipe and added a pinch of espresso powder for flavor just to see what would happen. The Process The recipe started out weird. I had to boil a small amount of water and then add the sugar, salt, and cocoa powder. At first I thought I did something wrong because it looked like brownie batter. I had to put the mixture on a low boil and stir it slowly while I put the milk in a measuring cup. I spent too long without stirring it and I didn't take it off the heat so it burned a bit. I panicked and it immediately took it off the heat and stirred it a lot. It didn't burn too much so I added my milk and pretend it never happened. I added a pinch of espresso powder and poured in the vanilla extract. I took a taste before adding half-and-half and realized it only taste like vanilla. I had to think quick about how I would fix the mistake, so I added more cocoa powder and stirred it in quickly. I turned up the heat and started mistake number two. I thought I had enough time to put up the ingredients I already used, but the next time I checked my hot cocoa I felt a thin layer of burnt stuff on the bottom of the pot. I decided to ignore it and I taste my hot cocoa again, and it was surprisingly good. A little thicker than it should be, but I still needed to add the half-and-half. I poured some mugs of hot cocoa for my taste testers and one for myself. The Reviews
What Would I Change? The hot chocolate was delicious, but I was in a rush to make it and made a few mistakes. I added too much vanilla extract and had my heat too high. Some hot chocolate stuck to the bottom of the pan, so cleanup is not going to be fun. I had to add a lot more cocoa powder to balance out the vanilla extract. Luckily, it went well and I still had a good hot cocoa recipe.
The RecipePizza is more complex than it seems. It may just look like a combination of sauce, dough, cheese, and maybe something on top; but it can be a challenge. The Process Making the pizza sauce and dough wasn't the challenge. Those aspects went over fairly smoothly and the only problem was me spilling some flour. Then I had to roll out the dough. I already knew about putting flour on my work surface to make sure the dough wouldn't stick, but the dough still put up a fight. I didn't want to use too much flour and the dough made me question that decision for as long as I was rolling it out. After a long struggle I was able to place my dough on my baking sheets (yes I did two balls of dough). A smidgen of olive oil on the dough, and I was able to spread my delicious sauce on top of the dough. I remembered when I made the cheese dip and macaroni where I forgot to shred my cheese first so I made sure to be prepared with my cheese. I shredded it the night before and the cheese was a perfect choice for the pizza. The toppings were an easy choice. I knew that I would want Italian sausage and pepperoni on at least one of the pizzas and the other would be cheese. I'd finally get to return to my cooking roots. Grilling. I love grilling and, not to toot my own horn, but I'd say I'm pretty good at it. The Italian sausage cooked perfectly and made the pizza taste better. Reviews
What Would I Change?The only thing I would change would be rolling out the dough. I would make it thinner and use a bit more flour when rolling out the dough. Other than that, everything ended up perfect and without a hitch. I'm proud to say that this pizza is the most successful dish thus far.
The RecipeThis recipe is delicious. I love it and it only took a bit of tweaking for my taste. I had to look for a classic southern recipe so I wouldn't have to deal with anything crazy like raisins or dried cranberries. The Process Oh man, another non-vegetable salad. This time the base is potatoes. I had to skin and cube my potatoes to boil them. I'd like to take a second to thank the Irish in me, because without it I would have taken much longer to peel those potatoes. Cubing them didn't take too long, but I did need to grab a huge knife to make sure I didn't injure myself by trying to get a tiny knife through a large potato. Aside from making large potatoes I also had to boil a few eggs. I forgot to set a timer for them, but I got lucky and took them out at a perfect time. I was worried that the eggs would be either poached or tough from being undercooked or overcooked. The dressing was the easiest to make, but I ended up needing to make more so the potato salad wouldn't taste like plain potatoes with a hint of dressing. I learned that I like relish from this dish, so that's a plus for the next time I eat hotdogs. The dressing was delicious and I adore the seasoning in the dressing. The secret pickle juice helped thin it out a bit and the dill relish combined with the pickle juice added a nice tang that was needed to spice up the flavor. The Reviews
What would I change?Honestly I wouldn't change a lot. I'd probably add a bit more celery just to add a bit more texture to it, but the dish was delicious. I managed to make it amazing despite not being a pro. I'm shocked by how well my potato salad went.
The Recipe I had used this to make my gravy, but I didn't have any turkey fat or turkey juice. I had to substitute in chicken broth as well for the sake of convenience. I will admit that I was originally going to make oven baked fries as well, but I burnt my hand earlier today and it's hard to do anything like chopping and julienning with one hand. Here's the recipe I would've used. And of course to finish off any poutine you need cheese curds or some chopped up cheese. Hopefully you'll have better luck than I did. The Process The gravy was much easier than I anticipated. Yet another recipe where I make a roux. I've practiced this enough where it was smooth sailing and it turned out well for the most part. I didn't have enough fat in my mixture, so it got a bit lumpy. I passed it through a strainer and that seemed to help it out. I let it simmer while my fries finished "cooking" in the oven. While waiting for my fries to finish defrosting I chopped up my cheese into small blocks. It took a lot longer than it should've given the burn on my right palm, but I wanted to make sure I was involved with a decent amount of the poutine components. The Reviews
Mistakes Always Happen Making the poutine today ended up being a perfect storm. I somehow managed to burn my hand earlier today and I didn't have proper components for the gravy. Cheese curds were out of our price range and the french fries would've been better if I wasn't stuck with one burnt hand and missing gravy ingredients. The gravy could also be a better color, but that's to be expected given my lack of ingredients. My poutine may not have been very tasty, but at least it didn't kill anyone!
The Recipe It was never explicitly stated how much pasta was used in the macaroni salad portion of the recipe I used, but I calculated that he used about 16 ounces. I thought the recipe used too much parsley and more of everything in general than what was necessary, so I halved most of it and reduced the amounts of parsley and bell peppers (originally peppadew peppers, but I didn't want to repeat the incident that happened when I made nachos). My taste testers don't like celery, so I decided to take that out and continue as if it were never in the recipe to begin with. Some Assembly Required It was a lot of the same prep work that I used with the nachos. Chopping up the vegetables was almost exactly the same, and cooking the pasta worked out the same as when I cooked macaroni and cheese. Nothing special there. Assembly was easy because it was just mixing. Adding sauces wasn't too difficult. The taste test got me. I have discovered that I still added a pretty decent amount of parsley, and I also discovered that I don't like parsley. The Reviews
I May or May Not Have Messed Something Up. . .The reviews were decent and the recipe wasn't as delicious as I was hoping for. This leaves room for me to invent my own recipe based on my likes and dislikes rather than a recipe from someone living in New York. I started to add too much sauce while trying to fix the strong taste of the parsley and onions. While assembling everything I should have added everything slowly to taste rather than all at once from a large measuring cup to the bowl. I recommend doing it like that and choosing vegetables you like for the recipe. It was a good experience and let me see the improvement I made with my knife skills.
The Recipe There's a bit of a problem here because I didn't specifically follow a recipe. I used a simple macaroni recipe to give me measurements for my cheese sauce and a YouTube video where three different chefs of three different levels make macaroni and cheese. I only used this to learn how to salt my water and the idea to put bread crumbs on top. I chose some cheeses that I thought would taste good (cheddar and smoked gouda). This Seems Familiar... I had to make a roux and béchamel sauce again. I can finally redeem myself from a grainy cheese sauce! Nothing new, just butter and flour, then slowly whisk in milk. The only thing that changed was how much cheese I used. I got an arm workout from shredding all 19 ounces of cheese. I barely had a big enough pot for all of that cheese sauce. My cheese sauce redemption was only a wish; I added my cheese too quickly and it was grainy again. My excitement for gooey cheese on top of perfectly cooked pasta got to me and I added huge handfuls to the pot. I may have small hands, but that didn't stop me from shoveling large amounts of cheese into the pot of béchamel sauce. There's not a lot to talk about with cooking pasta. I just followed the instructions on the box and used the YouTube video to figure out how to salt my water. I used an 8 ounce box of macaroni and cheese, which needed half a gallon of water. I ended up putting less than 1/8 cup of salt in there, and my pasta ended up being perfect. I cooked it for the minimum amount of time and strained it, which led to it being tender with a bit of bite. My bread crumbs weren't too difficult either. I toasted the bread crumbs in a pan with some butter, then sprinkled them on top of my macaroni and cheese before getting the bread crumbs extra toasty in the oven. It went well and despite my grainy cheese sauce, still taste delicious and was a hit. The recipe might even come back up at Thanksgiving! The Reviews
Help! What do I do?Turns out you can make nachos extremely complicated if you do everything by yourself. I walked in only knowing fancy cooking terms like julienne and sauté, and now I can do them. Here are all of the sources I used: How to julienne bell peppers How to cut an onion How to cut a jalapeño Nacho cheese dip recipe How to sauté onions A Long Process for Some Nachos Nachos don't seem like something that would take a long time to make. That's what I thought. I spent an hour on preparation for everything I was cooking. That includes chicken, cheese, and the vegetables. It may seem like a lot of time, but this is actually amateur hour and I like having ten fingers and zero hospital visits. If you know what you're doing then you could shave that hour down to about thirty minutes. The time could also decrease if you don't have a curious cat steal one of your tomatoes and play with it. After all of the preparation, I actually had to cook everything. I already know everything about grilling, so I'll admit that I had my dad help me out by cooking the chicken. He is the one that taught me everything I know about grilling and didn't want me to burn anything. I definitely would have burnt the chicken if I had to do that by myself because I had to watch my bell peppers and onions to prevent them from burning and watch my roux, add milk after the flour cooks, then watch my béchamel sauce. It was still quite a bit to balance just with those two. Making cheese dip is difficult, and having to closely watch two things was great practice for multitasking in the kitchen. The Reviews10/10 9/10 9/10 The reviewers all agreed that the cheese dip was delicious. A couple reviewers thought the texture was slightly off, but didn't affect the overall enjoyment of the nachos. All three reviewers were glad that there was leftover cheese dip for the next day. The vegetables were a good size for nachos and worked well for different textures in the nachos. They made everything taste more fresh as well. Mistakes Were Definitely Made The nachos were delicious, but I made a huge mistake that will affect me for what feels like an eternity. I didn't have any gloves to wear while cutting the jalapeños, and unfortunately I will have a burning sensation on my fingertips for 24 hours. I have tried soaking my fingers in milk, and despite being funny, the experience wasn't all that great. I'm sure you can imagine the pain I went through to put in my contact lenses the morning after making these nachos. Hopefully my fingers will recover in time to make the next recipe on the list! This here is the little rascal that stole one of my tomatoes. I love him to death, but tomatoes aren't toys, Scout! |
AuthorHi, I'm Laurin Hoke. I've always liked the idea of cooking, and now I have a chance to practice! I hope you'll follow my cooking (or burning) journey! |