Author Archives: Tasha

[48] Mashed Potatoes

How to Cook Everything, Revised Edition by Mark Bittman

What is roast chicken without some sort of delicious _Solanaceae_ accompaniment? It is nothing. NOTHING, I say!

Furthermore, woe betide you if you pick the wrong member of the _Solanaceae_ family. I mean, aside from some members being highly toxic, some having psychoactive effects (some doing both…), many would just be weird. I mean, I suppose I could imagine some folks feeling an urge to smoke after a good roast chicken, but that’s really _Solanaceae_ after the roast chicken, not with.

So, we’ve narrowed down our _Solanaceae_ choices to, “consumables”. I’m going to go a bit further and narrow it to “edibles”. Hell, let’s go a step further and narrow it to “major food crops”. So, we’re lookin’ at eggplants, tomatoes, and potatoes. Any one of those things is delicious, I have to admit.… Continue reading →

[47] Simplest Roast Chicken 1.0

How to Cook Everything, Revised Edition by Mark Bittman

So, by now it’s beginning to look like this challenge was actually “cook our way through _’How to Cook Everything, Revised’_”, I know. But it isn’t, I promise. I’m actually getting a little irked, in all honesty, that this cookbook is the one I keep pulling out. They’re not all up on this site yet, but I have 42 other cookbooks to cook from! Still, it’s amazing the recipes that are lacking. My “Complete Italian”:http://metacookbook.com/permalink/complete-book-of-italian-cooking.html cookbook? I totally expected it to have a Pasta Carbonara recipe, and it didn’t. So, Bittman it was.

With all of that said, I didn’t even hesitate to pull out _How to Cook Everything_ when I wanted to roast a chicken. The yellow, original version is how I learned to make a “knock your socks off” roast chicken.… Continue reading →

The Complete Book of Cookies

The Complete Book of Cookies, edited by Deborah Grey

This is the other book in the set of two given to me by Kevin, Suzie and their children. I also love this book, mostly due to the family that gifted it to me, but partially also because it feeds what Angelique calls my “hereditary cookie madness.”

See, I know I’ve mentioned before that my sister recently got married. What I only touched on, though, was the cookie baking this entails. And I’m not going to go into much depth here, but suffice it to say that weddings in my family generally include a LOT of cookies. See, our Grandmother B. is Italian, and there’s a tradition of having a cookie cake at Italian weddings. Or at least at that set of Italian weddings. So we get cookies too.… Continue reading →

Redo!

We just made the “White Bean and Spinach soup”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/15-7-White-Bean-and-Spinach-Soup.html from early June again today.

I decided to make it again because I realized we had everything on hand (even though I swore we wouldn’t use canned beans again), and it’d be fast. It wasn’t as fast as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty fast and tasty.

It wasn’t as good as last time. I blame, partially, that I forgot to add the salt right away. It didn’t really have as much time to marry the flavors together.

Finally, we did have nutmeg and cheese on hand for garnishing this time. Totally not worth it. The nutmeg added an extremely odd note to the dish, especially on the occasions I got a strong mouthful of it.… Continue reading →