Life in the Cheese Drawer

i found the resolution to my homemade pizza woes.
i always have problems moving it from the peel to the stone, and toppings end up everywhere and all over the stone. then it burns and it stinks. 

look at that! it has a conveyor belt! you slide it under the dough and zip it on, then slip it off on to the stone. aaah! the only unfortunate thing about this is it’s $60. 

i got my ice cream maker for christmas, and it’s been getting a semi-decent workout. 
of course the first thing i wanted to try to make was healthy, so i went online and found a vegan chocolate ice cream recipe. NEVER AGAIN. that crap had no sugar, an overload of cocoa, and was altogether gross. plus, it froze solid, so nate needed an ice chipper just to get it out of the pan.
next i fell back to the old ATK standby – vanilla (with slightly less sugar). DELISH. charlie said it was the best vanilla ice cream he’d ever had. when my dad goes off his diet in two weeks, i’m going to make him a batch.
last night, i tried out chocolate. 
(i swear, i don’t know why everyone doesn’t make their own ice cream.)
this was an egg-less recipe, which had me slightly worried. but it was nice because i didn’t have to worry about tempering the eggs and cooking them. once again, delicious. it was a wee bit cocoa-y for my tastes, and when i make it again, i might try to use half cocoa and half bar chocolate. 
come springtime, i’ve got to make a berry ice cream, and i want to try a peanut-butter cup ice cream. 

oh, ATK, you really had me worried for a minute with your “light” carrot cake recipe. in fact, i almost tossed it and started over with a different recipe. but, i persevered, thinking that you haven’t really failed me yet. 
thank god i didn’t follow my instincts!
the carrot cake i’ve made in the past has called to add the carrots to the wet ingredients, then mixing in the dry. this one said to mix the carrots in at the end. but before that point, i was looking at the dough wondering how on earth it would pour into a cake pan, because it certainly looked more like cookies. 
reluctant, i stirred in the carrots. it was a long process – i probably spent 5 minutes trying to incorporate those carrots – but in the end, the water from the carrots transformed the cookie-ish dough into a cake dough.
WHEW.
needless to say, this worked out ok. it’s a little bit chewy, which i’m not sure is the fault of the recipe or the inherent quality of carrot cake or my overzealous mixing of the carrots.
either way, point ATK.

 

nate has been ranting about cooking duck for a long, long time. i’ve only had duck once before in my life, and i don’t think it was prepared very well because it didn’t necessarily strike a chord in my when nate kept bringing up duck.
well, i finally caved and made duck. and it was yummy.
the first thing i did was watch the good eats episode on how to make duck, so i had that under my belt. next, i saved up so i could actually buy the duck. (duck is expensive! the one we bought was $19.) the second was to choose a date to make it – and today was chosen.
now, you could cook the duck whole, but alton brown’s recipe calls for cutting it into quarters; this was the first time i’d actually cut apart a fowl pre-cooking. after wrestling with bones and skin and my not-so-sharp knives, i finally was able to put the meat in the brine. oh, did i mention there was a brine? if i were to do this again, i’d include half the salt since the duck came pre-injected with crap. BUT. the brine had pineapple juice in it, which i thought was cheeky on the part of alton.
after the brine, i steamed the duck for 45 minutes per instructions. the only pot big enough to do the job was my canning pot, so out that came again. meanwhile, my cast iron pan heated up in the 475º(!) oven. 
after the steam, i placed the duck skin-down in the pan so it crisped up nicely. the skin was scored so the fat that sits under the duck skin, which helps them float, has a way to get out from under the skin. so when you pull the duck pieces from the pan, you’re left with some nice duck fat, which according to nate should be good on everything.
it was a little salty due to the double brining effort, but it was yummy. would make again.

today was a good produce day. i was going to go to the rochester farmers’ market, but on the way was planning on stopping at ron’s berry farm, which is just outside of eyota. his sign boasted tomatoes, pumpkins, and squash. 
it was the only stop i needed to make! i got three big butternut squashes, three pumpkins for my porch, two pie pumpkins, a white pumpkin, and a bag of potatoes for about $20. plus i didn’t need to deal with the hordes at the market and was able to buy directly from the farmer. 
then off to lacrosse with charlie (yay!), where we went to an apple orchard. $12.50 for a bag of honeycrisp?! no thanks. then doug and charlie found the “seconds” apples, which weren’t perfectly round or had a little spot on them, of which honeycrisp were $6. i’ll take that!
and sometime this week i have to head over to mom and dad’s neighbors and get some apples off their tree. i’ll be making more applesauce and pies in my future.
(also squash potato soup, which is delicious.)

summer is not the greatest time to be making cookies. the oven heats up, it’s making a lot of unnecessary heat in the house, etc. etc.
so now that it’s cooled down outside, i thought i’d take another crack at pursuing getting my way through america’s test kitchen cookie section. i opened up the book to see what i could try to tackle and took a little browse through the cookies, then decided to just make some chocolate chip cookies. 
sorry for you! ATK will resume another day. that’s the way the cookie crumbles…

i have caved to twitter peer pressure.
i kept seeing alton brown retweet people making his pretzels, so, naturally, i had to make his pretzels.
pretzels are pretty easy, but you have to do one weird thing: boil them in baking soda water. otherwise, it’s 6 ingredients.
ok, off to tweet my pic in hopes of getting a RT!