Orange Rum Cake (Pg. 735) Ravioli (Pg. 313)

Easter happened so we had to make a cake. I didn't read many of the options before settling on Orange Rum, especially when I saw the recommended frosting was a chocolate glaze! The ingredients were really simple and the glaze was a breeze as well. It called for "dark rum" I don't really know what that is but I had a rum and I used it to saturate the cake after it cooled a bit.    

 

Here's my make shift double boiler. 

 

   Sean: 3 stars (he thought it tasted dry, maybe needed more rum?)

 Beth: 4 stars (really good!)

We made ravioli too, not very noteworthy. Needed a pasta machine.

Sean: 3 stars
Beth: 2 stars

             

Sean made Bee's Knees 5 stars all around

Cheese Crackers (pg. 70): Definitely not Cheez-Its

We've been eating a lot of chips, so I thought we better throw in some variety and add cheese crackers to the mix. They were pretty fun to make. You get to roll out the dough as flat as you can and cut little squares. I should have tried to do fun shapes, like cat heads or face masks, but I didn't have the energy.

Oh yeah, I tried to use the Vitamix instead of a food processor, which I thought would be better but I guess not. It was like 6am and I pretty much had to put the Vitamix on full blast and instead ended up burning out the motor and almost stripping the gear. Turns out none of that is necessary when you have two functioning hands.

I forgot that you're supposed to flour a surface and not cover it with vegetable oil to help make things not stick, so the first batch tasted a little more... fried? The second batch got a lot thinner and I think they crisped better in the oven. The end product is fine. They taste good, but they're pretty dry to eat. I think they work better as dog treats.

Em: ⭐⭐⭐
Jess: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rogi: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ for sit, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ for lay down, ⭐⭐⭐ for come, ⭐ for NO JUMPING
(By: Em)

Baked Pork Ribs (pg 490) with Sweet and Smoky Spice Rub (pg 587)

This was another case of cooking what we could find.  We don't eat ribs very often because a picky eater in the house doesn't like barbecue sauce.  But dry rub is a different matter.

This was equal parts of smoked paprika, brown sugar, and black pepper with a touch of cumin and salt.   It gets rubbed on the ribs, which are then wrapped in foil and slow baked.

We skipped the optional sauce mop.

These were very tender and couldn't get much easier.  The rub was sort of boring (black pepper doesn't have a real depth of flavor) but they were mild enough for my dad to be able to eat once we wiped the rub off his portion.  Would definitely make again with a different rub (and Joy has others).

Julie: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mike:  ⭐⭐⭐ (boring)

Mango Lassi (Pg. 13)

Had one wrinkly mango on the counter so made a half batch of the mango lassi. It was good, it's such a simple recipe hard to screw up, but I honestly thought it could be a lot better. You'll need a good blender to get the ice to be "partially crushed." I didn't have this.

Without any liquid it was super hard to blend, but the consistency was nice. Mostly tasted like whipped mango yogurt. Could have used some milk like just a little at least? And how about some cardamom or cinnamon or something? Real lazy job Joy.

Sean: 10 out of 10 stars
Beth: 2 stars for wasted opportunity

Guy Fawkes Cake (I'll post pg number later)

Remember remember the quarantine of forever...

This cake was the BOMB. Get it?
~Em 5 stars
~Jess 3 stars (-1 for bad jokes, -1 for weird oats)

Stracotto (Italian Pot Roast) (Page 464) with Creamy Polenta (pg 322)

Parental Warning, this article contains depictions of raw meat and graphic language describing the the use of meat products.

Stracotto in Italian means "overcooked," which is an ideal recipe in my book:  How can you go wrong?

For some reason all pot roast recipes that contain classic Italian ingredients, like garlic, tomato, and red wine are labeled Stracotto.  As Stracotto recipes go, this one is pretty basic-- no basil, no mushrooms, no fennel all of which I've seen in other versions.  You could add any or all of that if you want. I think olives would be good too, but mom would never concede to that.

Fortunately, we have half a cow in our freezer so we had the perfect roast available.  This one was small, probably less than 2 lbs with the bone and a goodly amount of fat.  The recipe calls for a boneless 4lbs cut of meat, but that's a lot of meat.  If you are having a crowd of meat eaters, this would be perfect.

Browning of the roast

The Trinity

There is nothing complicated about this recipe, if you've ever made a pot roast of any kind it's the same formula:  Brown the meat, add carrots, celery, onion and then put liquid in the pot and cook it forever. Then drink the bottle of wine while you wait for it to overcook.


But, this is Stracotto so it does not stop there and the wine is going in the pot instead of in your glass.  The next step is the really good part-- Chop garlic, parsley, rosemary, fresh sage together to make a nice paste. It helps to have an herb garden, but if you don't you can use dried.

The key ingredients: chopped parsley, sage, rosemary and garlic

The fabulous smelling garlic parsley and wine

After browning the meat, set it aside and brown the vegetables in the fat, (remove some of the fat or your sauce will be greasy) add the parsley/garlic mix to the browned vegetables in the pot and fry it up with the tomato paste and a little bit of the wine.  This smells so amazing you may want to stop and take a taste.  For vegetarians, I think you could add some olives and large portobello mushroom caps at this point and skip the meat. (Beth, you should try this and see how it works. Probably only need to put it in the oven for an hour.)


For those who are here for the meat, add the meat back in after the vegetables and wine, parsley, garlic combo has become almost dry.  Throw in the rest of the wine and the tomatoes and a couple of cups of broth.  If you don't have broth you could just add water, or just use the whole bottle of wine.

Put it in the oven or leave it to simmer on top of the stove for 3 hours. You could probably even go longer if you want, just make sure it doesn't boil dry.   When you take it out the roast should nearly fall apart and the liquid will be thicker, but probably not thick enough for gravy, so set it on a burner with the meat removed from the pan and boil it furiously until it thickens. This takes some time, maybe 15 minutes or more.  Be patient, it will thicken and when you think it can't get thicker let it go another five minutes and it will be even better.

Boil it furiously until it thickens

The final product 

We made the creamy polenta on page 322, to go with our roast.  Highly recommend this.  The gravy is a little acidic because of all the wine and tomatoes, so the cheesy polenta goes really well with it. My only quibble with the results were I thought it was too acidic and a little greasy.  Part of that could be the wine we used was not as heavy bodied as the Barolo, they recommend, and our roast had a lot of fat on it. This is why you want to pour off as much fat as you can after you brown the roast, or to complicate it further you could take the gravy out of the pot and separate some of the fat before reducing it. Not worth the trouble, unless you have unlimited time on your hands during a quarantine or something similar.

Ed, Julie and I all give this a 5/5. Ed had it two nights in a row and raved both times.

Tuna Casserole (I'll post the pg. number later)

Tuna casserole seems like a thing you should eat when you're quarantined. We forgot to buy condensed mushroom soup, which turned out to be a pretty happy mistake. We made our own sauce instead (included in the recipe), and I think it turned out much better than it would have with pre-made soup. Maybe because we didn't have quite enough milk, so we used heavy cream to make up the difference (2 cups 2%, 1/2 cup heavy cream).Also, since we didn't have mushrooms, we added chopped celery and carrot. And of course, we chose to add the bell pepper. Seemed like the healthy choice.

After the casserole was in the oven I realized that I forgot to mix the bread crumbs with butter. Oops. We pulled it out, drizzled some melted butter over top, and I think it was totally fine.

The end product was delicious. Reminds me of the tuna helper I used to eat at least once a week when I was young. #glowup

Em: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jess: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
(Posted by Em)