ScottandMichelle's Daily, Semi-Annual, Bi-Monthly Foodfest!

So What's The Occasion?

2008-07-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

So Scott surprised me this morning with a delicious breakfast. Normally we just have cereal or I'll make one of my not-so-famous McMuffin clones, but today he announced that I was to stay out of the kitchen and that he'll handle it. What did I do to deserve this? Was it my cooking? Has it been that bad all these years? No, there was no reason. He just wanted to make me breakfast. That's it.

It's not that it's unusual for him to want to do something nice for me, we do things for each other all the time. And I don't ask for much, but if I get an out of the blue craving for.. say, some grapes, he's halfway out the door before I can say "Stop! i'm fine." But I'll admit, it is pretty sweet to have a great breakfast made for you by someone who does it for no reason other then they just love you. There's no better tasting meal then that.

McMuffinness.

2008-06-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

I love McDonald's Egg McMuffins. I do. I can't help it, they're delicious. But since we aren't usually up and ready early enough in the morning to get 'em, it's become a rare breakfast around here. So, with my ability to be satisfied with a reasonable facsimile of something, I decided to try recreating them at home. After all, it's just an english muffin and an egg right? And while i've made many McMuffins at home, I still can't quite figure out what that special taste is that McDonalds has. Still, even though it's not quite the same, I do make a pretty good McMuffin If I say so myself.

First, you gotta start with a sourdough muffin. Put it in the oven on broil 'til it's lightly toasted. You don't want to toast both sides, just the insides or it'll be too crispy. Meanwhile, crack an egg into a round cookie cutter on a frying pan and wait for it to solidify enough to take the cutter off and flip. Once you flip the egg, turn the burner off (don't want the egg to cook too much), add a slice of cheese and let it melt. You should also fry a slice of ham or bacon while you cook the egg. Then once the muffin is toasted, add butter, some mayo and a little ketchup. Then it's ready for the egg, the ham and the cheese. Viola!

Kumla!

2008-06-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

You may or may not know what Kumla is, but I grew up with it. My grandparents were from North Dakota, and it seems that there is, or at least was a high concentration of Norwegians living there. Kumla is a Norwegian word I think, and although you may have had a similar dish, it probably wasn't as good as my grandma's Kumla. It seems like everytime I visited them, they happened to be making it for dinner.

Kumla is essentially just potato dumplings, though it's so much better! You boil a big pot of water, flavor it with vegetable broth, cook some meat (lamb, roast beef, etc..) in the broth for a while for flavor, then grate some baker potatoes and form them into tennis size balls and boil them til done. People have different ways of making and eating them, but we always just cut a piece off and swiped it through some butter. It takes a few hours to make, but isn't it worth it for one of the greatest meals of all time?

Boiling the kumla balls.

The finished meal!

Mini Burgers

2008-01-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

So we've been on a small (no pun intended, oh.. who am I kidding, yes it was..) kick lately of making mini versions of different foods. And now that I think about it, I guess it's not just limited to food either since we recently ordered ourselves a new Mini Cooper too!

Anyway, inspired by Wolfgang Puck's miniburgers, I found a recipe for the buns and gave it a sampling tonight. Not too shabby. Mine were a little bigger then Wolfgang's miniburgers, which are supposed to be bite size, but they were still smaller then normal, and tasted fairly delish! Need to work on making the buns a bit less dense though.

Gobble Gobble!

2007-11-24T12:13:00.000-08:00

We spent this Thanksgiving with Scott's family, and had a nice dinner. We cooked the turkey again using Alton Brown's famous brine recipe, and that always goes over very well. Not too much else to mention this year, we ate dinner, hung around and visited for a while and that was about it. Good times..

More Pizza Experimentation

2007-11-14T18:12:00.000-08:00

So we did pizza yet again, we're doing it about once a week lately, just having fun, working on our techniques, and playing with different toppings you can't get from your local Dominos. This week Scott went for what he called a beer pizza. It had bratwurst and cashews on it. I went for a Michelle "white pizza" custom, which had garlic parmessan sauce, pepperoni, onions, mushrooms, and steak & crab. Both came out good, and even though mine was a little bland and could've used more "kick", it was good, and I would make it again. Here's some pics.

Scott shaping his dough..

Then he added the sauce, bratwurst, and jalapenos..

.. and tops it off with cashews and mozerella.

The finished pie!

And now for mine:
I start with a white garlic parmessan sauce, and some pepperoni..

..add some green onions, crab, mushrooms, steak & red onion..

Deliciousness!

Pizza Again.

2007-11-03T04:23:00.000-07:00

We made pizza again last night, and had some brand spankin' new pizza pans this time too, which worked out pretty well. The last time we made pizza our pizza cutter broke apart, so we didn't have one this time because the new one we bought hasn't arrived yet.

We experimented a little more this time, though still didn't go too crazy. Scott tried a few different cheeses and some pancetta on his, but ended up not caring for it much. I added a few more things on mine including some of Scott's cheeses, plus canadian bacon, pineapple, mushrooms, olives, and onions. A little bit Hawaiian, and a little bit Supreme. It wasn't too bad. I'll try and be more creative next time. Maybe try something i've never had on pizza before.

But yet again, I forgot to take a picture of the completed pizzas before we ate. One of these days i'm gonna remember to do that.

Mini-Caramel Apples (Iron Chef America Style)

2007-09-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

We were watching Iron Chef America the other day, and the secret ingredient was apples, so the challenging chef made mini-caramel apples (as well as candied and chocolate) and they looked like a really fun idea, so we thought we'd try it ourselves. Today we tried the mini caramel apples, we'll do the others later, but you know what? They came out good! They're really simple, just find a recipe for caramel dip, get yourself some apples and a melon baller, and use the melon baller to scoop out some chunks of apple..

Then stick a toothpick in them and dip it in the caramel!

Viola! You have yourself some mini-caramel apples!

Now *that's* what Willis was talkin' about!

(edit: So, turns out this doesn't work out as well as we initially thought. When we first made them, they looked right and everything, but eventually the caramel dripped off the apple and never hardened. I guess the lack of skin on the apple keeps it from sticking, and it just turned out to be an anti-delicious mess. We're not giving up though, we'll try to figure out a way to make it work!)

Deep Fried Pickles

2007-09-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

So we were watching a show this weekend where this guy goes around the world eating bizarre things. With one meal, he was served a side dish of deep fried pickle chips. Well, Scott thought that sounded pretty tasty, so we decided to try and make some. We got some tempura batter, broke out the deep fryer and some pickles. Verdict? they turned out fine, I guess, though they were really nothing special. It never sounded all that great to me to begin with, but I was game. We concluded that while they weren't necessarily bad, they weren't really worth bothering with again.

So we gave up on the pickles, but still had batter left over, so I got an idea. I love the Bloomin' Onion at Outback, so I thought i'd try frying up some onion slices. Turned out pretty good too! Better then the pickles anyway.

Pizza Pizza, Scott and Michelle Style.

2007-08-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

So we made our second attempt at homemade pizza last night. We tried making pizza for the first time a few weeks ago, and it came out fine, but the crust came out way too thick, so we wanted to try and get a thinner crust this time. And we were successful. If anything, the crust might have been too thin this time. Scott actually likes thin crust, where I prefer thicker (chicago style please!), but the thin crust worked out well this time.

The top picture is Scott's pizza. Needless to say he likes his pizza less, uhm, "decorated" then I do, but he finds a way to enjoy it anyway. ;-) On his he had, sauce, (churizzo on half), and cheese. He said the churizzo was a really good idea, and regreted not putting it on the whole pie.

As for me, I went with my usual supreme once again. I'll experiment with some different toppings next time, but this time I went with sauce, pepperoni, onions, sausage, light coating of cheese, mushrooms, olives, and jalapenos with a little more cheese on top. Deliciouso!

Both our pizzas were the same size, rectangular to fit on our pizza stone. And mine only appears smaller because I ate some of it before I thought to take a picture.

All in all, the pizzas turned out great! But what to put on it next time? Hmm.. experimentation looms...

S'more Night

2007-04-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

So we decided to have some fun and make S'mores in the fireplace tonight. While it's not quite the same as sitting around the campfire trying to keep your marshmallow in the flame while trying desperately to avoid the smoke that keeps following you no matter where you go, it was still fun. Though we only ate about 3 each. I'm pretty sure that when I was little I could have easily doubled that.

More Fun With Green Food Coloring.

2007-03-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the food coloring wasn't really intended for the eggs I admit. The real reason we bought it was so we could try making Shamrock Shakes at home. Remember those? It's been a few years since i've had one so we thought it would be fun to make our own, and you know what? turned out to be a good idea, because it came out with just a wee bit of the tasty!

(Hay, I tried.. ;-)

Green Eggs and (no) Ham.

2007-03-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Well, we didn't have any ham around, but we did have some eggs and green dye, and since I apparantly can't pass up the opportunity to re-create a disgusting looking food from a popular children's book, and because it's also St. Patrick's Day, we had green eggs for breakfast this morning. Or more accurately, we had some green eggs this morning. I'll be honest, I know it's just regular eggs and a few drops of flavorless dye, but it's still surprisingly difficult to eat. The majority of your brain knows it'll taste the same, but there's that other part of you that goes "WTF are you doing?! I don't want to eat that!"

I made it through about half of mine.