Anne Can Cook

I'm hoping to post about Sunday's pasta experience tonight. Until then, here is some brief news:
Anne Can Cook now has a twitter account! You can find it by clicking the twitter icon at the top of the page, or by going here: http://www.twitter.com/annecancook.

I also have an email address specific to the blog now: annecancookblog@gmail.com. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, recipe requests, or pontifications about the universe, feel free to send them there.

Sup, Broccolis? It has been some week. I've had essentially two blog posts ready to go, but since I've been running full throttle without time to blog, we'll do a twofer. Before we get going, let me spill some of my personal beans.
AmeriCorps VISTA positions are contracted for one full year. When I first applied, I thought I would just do a year and then go to grad school. Well, once I got started and life kept happening, I decided another year or two in AmeriCorps would be a good thing for me. I applied for Teach for America, an AmeriCorps program that places volunteers in low income schools as teachers for two year increments. I do not have enough good things to say about the program, and would encourage anyone with a love of teaching to check it out and apply.
Due to my VISTA contract and TFA's time line, I opted to apply in the very last application tier. Applications were due February 19th, and decisions regarding progression in the application process were made public on March 2nd.
Unfortunately for me, I did not progress in the application process and, in essence, went back to the drawing board. I'm still planning to do another year of service somewhere, and am currently working on another AmeriCorps application.
Now, I can't say that not making TFA didn't bum me out. Of course it did. Luckily for my coworkers, my celebration methods are not dissimilar to my mourning methods. I made a cake. A blackberry swirl almond sour cream cake with my grandma's secret frosting recipe and shaved chocolate on top. Yes ma'am. Here is the cake, unfrosted:

Pretty, right? I should mention here that my favorite kind of cake is yellow and chocolate marble cake, and I would be lying if I said the aesthetics didn't play a part in that.
The recipe is from Tasty Kitchen user melja56. The only thing I did differently was use three whole eggs instead of four egg whites, since I had three eggs and not four. The blackberries were my own addition as well. I ran about 1/4 cup of them through the Magic Bullet with about a Tbsp. of sugar. Then I plopped spoonfuls of the rough puree into the cake better and swirled it with a spoon.
I mentioned my grandma's secret frosting recipe. Maybe someday I'll tell you what that is, but for now I'm guarding it with my life. Suffice to say that it is something like an almond vanilla butter cream, but better.
My coworkers loved the cake, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out, too. It was definitely not the worst eat-your-feelings cake I'd ever had.

On Thursday, my Taste of Home order arrived on my doorstep! Taste of Home had a $5 cookbook sale a couple weeks ago (apologies that I didn't share this with you at the time), and I picked up four books since shipping was automatically free at $20. One of the books I picked up was Ultimate Chicken Recipes, and I am so glad I did. There is a ton of good-looking food in that book, and it was solo cooking AND crock pot sections. I have an ingrained love of Taste of Home cookbooks, due to my mom and my grandma's long term devotion to the brand. I mean, when I found out Taste of Home was having a sale, I immediately called my mom who, in turn, placed her own intense order. That's how much we like their cookbooks.
Anyway, I didn't even get five pages into the chicken cookbook before a found a recipe I had to try: Hot Chicken Swirls

Doesn't look very much like a swirl, does it? It's not, exactly. Hot Chicken Swirls call for crescent rolls, which I did not have on hand. I did, however, have Phyllo dough in the freezer. So, using the filling from the Hot Chicken Swirls recipe as inspiration, I made something that was more like a Hot Chicken Bundle. Here is what I did:
1/2 c. cooked chicken
1 oz cream cheese
2 Tbsp. prepared ranch dressing
1/8 c. shredded colby jack cheese
1/2 Tbsp. Penzeys Fox Point Seasoning
1 Tbsp. Frank's Hot Sauce
A few sheets of Phyllo dough.

Mix everything in a bowl except the Phyllo dough, then plop the filling on the dough and form a roll/bundle/whatever you can get the dough to form into. Bake at 375F for 10 minutes.

This recipe only mildly resembles the original, but it was still pretty good. It would have been better as crescent swirls, though.

Phyllo dough is a real hassle to work with, by the way. I'm going to have to play around with it until I figure it out.

I have grand cooking plans for tonight, so I hope I'll have a post for you all tonight/tomorrow.

Leeks are new territory for me. I had never had one until one of my shopping trips to Trader Joe's in Minneapolis. TJ's sells pre-cut leeks in packages of two. I thought, why not? I brought a package home to Iowa, and then panicked. The logical thing to do when one panics is, of course, to turn to Twitter. I believe my tweet looked something like this:
"What do I use these leeks for? Should I saute them with my gnocchi? What do I do?!"
Luckily, one of my friends directed me in the direction of Nunkin and her potato leek soup. I asked her for her recipe and she kindly obliged.
I promptly made the soup and it was awesome, much like Nunkin herself. I really cannot say enough nice, glowing things about her, particularly since she is letting me post her recipe here.
Without further ado, here is Nunkin's Potato Leek Soup, as copied and pasted from the original message.
"2-ish T butter
3 leeks, white/light green parts chopped (fairly fine slice)
1 small white onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2-3 carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 shallot, chopped (not really necessary, but I have fun shoving onions in this soup)
4 or so red potatoes, peeled (if you feel like it) and diced
4-ish cups veggie broth
roughly 1/3 to 1/2 c heavy cream
some herbs if you feel like it (I like dill or chives or both if I have any on hand)
BACON, cooked and chopped
CHEEBS

In dutch oven or large sewp-making pot or whatever, drop the butter in and let it melt. When the butter has gotten all nice and melty, drop in the leeks and let them cook for a minute or two until they soften. Add the garlic, onion, carrot, celery and shallot, stir it around and let
it hang out for about 5 or so minutes so that all those veggies start to soften and start smelling yummy. Then dump in the potatoes and the veggie broth (and any extra water you might need to make the broth level just cover the potatoes) and any dry herbs you might want to use. Bring it to a boil, drop the heat and let it hang out on the stove for about 45 minutes - an hour or so until everything is nice and soft and falling apart.
When it's hit that stage, remove it from the heat, dump in any fresh herbs you might want to dump in (chives are awesome) and let it cool for a few minutes,
and then blend it either in batches through a blender or with an immersion blender or what have you (you could probably mush it to bits with a potato masher,
honestly). When it's all blended, stir in the cream and adjust the seasonings. I usually serve with a handful of bacon and a handful of cheebs thrown on top, but you could probably mix that in too and it would be good."

I've been tossing in cheese with the cream, and then serving more on top. The more cheese, the merrier.

I have to say that this is some of the tastiest soup I've ever had. It's also relatively filling, which is good because I would be liable to eat the entire pot's worth if it wasn't.

Last week was a lazy week for cooking. I honestly don't even remember what I had for dinner last week. I think it's because I was so geared up for my hoity toity dinner with my boyfriend in Minneapolis.
Andrew and I didn't see each other on Valentine's Day, and his birthday was on the 19th, so we decided to do this past weekend instead. He booked us a reservation at Porter and Frye's, which is a small fancy place in the Hotel Ivy.
I won't bore you with our dinner details, but I will say that everything was excellent and it was really fun to go somewhere like that when we normally wouldn't. I mean, the dessert was plated like something from Iron Chef. You just don't see that at the local burger joint.

Anyway, it was time to head back to the kitchen. Tuesday at work I was wracking my brain, trying to come up with something to eat that wasn't spaghetti. Then it dawned on me: Chicken Enchiladas. Chicken Enchiladas are high on my list of favorite foods. In fact, my mom makes me enchiladas pretty frequently when I visit because I love them so much. Mom's enchiladas are the best, of course. I hope she doesn't get too offended that this isn't her recipe. Someday I'll make Mom's enchiladas, but it's just never the same, you know?
Apologies that this picture isn't better. I'm experimenting with my food photography.
Here is what went down:

4 tortillas
4 oz cream cheese (or lite cream cheese)
1/4 c. salsa
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 c. cooked chicken, chopped
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp. chili powder
1/4 tsp. cumin
1/4 c. shredded colby jack cheese

Grease a baking dish and preheat the oven to 350F. In a small sauce pan, melt the cream cheese and salsa together. Once the mixture is more or less homogeneous, toss in the garlic, chicken, and spices. Stir together and heat through.
Spread about a fourth of the mixture on a tortilla. Roll up the tortilla and filling, then place in the baking dish, seam side down. Repeat with the rest of the tortillas.
Sprinkle the enchiladas with cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes.

Mom does get credit for this recipe, as it was her homemade salsa I put in my enchiladas. Mmmm.
These enchiladas, while not as good as Mom's, were still pretty good and very easy. I got a little over enthusiastic with the filling and ended up with only three enchiladas instead of four. One of these days I'll post Mom's recipe, but for now these will do.

Cinnamon Roll Sugar Cookies. Recipe here.

Only half of them are iced because I didn't properly follow the instructions and therefore failed to cream the cream cheese before mixing with the milk and sugar. As a result, I have lumpy icing that tastes great, even if it looks weird.

I feel the same way about pizza as I do about soup. Just as you can make soup out of anything, you can make anything into a pizza.

Gauging from that, you can bet I'm not at all a traditionalist when it comes to pizza. I'm always mixing it up. I use different sauces and whatever toppings I have lying around, and the results are usually tasty because I have complete control over them (mwahaha).

Last week, though I didn't post about it, I made an Indian-Inspired Pizza from Booking and Cooking. The pizza was very, very tasty, and was an excellent example of taking foods you love (in this case, Indian curry) and making them into pizza.

My hot wing pizza recipe came about when I was a junior in college, and therefore is not the world's healthiest thing by any means. I was surfing the Internet one night and trying to decide what to have for dinner. One of the cooking sites was featuring a buffalo chicken pizza, but the ingredients or the process didn't look that great to me. I decided I could do it better, fasted, and tastier with just the ingredients in my fridge. And so I did.

1 personal sized pizza crust
1 Tbsp. ranch dressing (I make my own, but use whatever you like. You can also use blue cheese dressing, if that's your thing).
2 chicken strips, cooked and cut into pieces
2 tsp. Frank's Red Hot Sauce (you can use a different hot sauce if you really want to, but I recommend Frank's).
CHEESE

Cook the chicken strips and cut them into chunks. Toss with the hot sauce.
Spread the ranch all over the pizza crust. I usually do a thin layer of cheese, then the chicken, then more cheese, but feel free to top the pizza however you like.

Tonight, for cheese, I uses Gruyere, Fontina, and mild cheddar. Happy Pre-Valentine's to me!

You can easily expand this pizza to full sized. I would just adjust the ingredient amounts accordingly.

I thought I was doing really well this winter. I started taking vitamins that were chock full of vitamin C. I was giving those vitamins the credit for my wellness this year. I had a sore throat for about five minutes in January, but now I'm getting a full blown cold. Curses.
Desperate times call for chicken noodle soup. It's the end all be all of cure-alls. Therefore, I decided to go for it for tonight's dinner.
I clicked through a few recipes, but nothing quite grabbed me. I decided to wing it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can make soup out of anything. Armed with this adage, I took to my kitchen.

There were a couple factors in play. I decided I wanted to do curry-ginger as the flavor background, because curry has the heat to clear my sinuses and ginger is very good for you. I also had a rotisserie chicken that I had purchased as an experiment for the purposes of shredding the meat (remember my bone-in chicken phobia)? Lastly, I had vegetables in my fridge that were begging me to use them.

I started with a mirepoix. For those of you who don't spend your time watching way too much Food Network, a mirepoix is a mix of celery, carrot, and onion. My begging vegetables in question just happened to be baby carrots and half a white onion. I gave each ingredient a rough chop with some garlic.

After the mirepoix, I shredded some of the breast and leg meat from the chicken. I think I ended up with about a cup. I gave that a rough chop as well.

In my soup pot, I heated up a couple Tbsp. olive oil. Once that was sufficiently hot, I tossed in the mirepoix and garlic.

I let that hang out for about five minutes, then added the curry powder. The great thing about curry powder is that there is a million different varieties. Curry does not always mean hot. There are plenty of curries out there that are mild and somewhat sweet which are just as flavorful as hot curries. If heat is not your thing, I suggest a Garam Masala or a mild yellow curry powder. I like heat, so I go for a medium intensity red curry powder. My curry of choice is always Penzeys Rogan Josh.

After the curry powder was all incorporated, I tossed in the chicken. I gave everything a good stir, then added the chicken stock. At this point I seasoned the soup with ginger, ground pepper, salt, and some cayenne pepper. I brought it to a boil, them reduced the heat to low and let it simmer for about 40 minutes. At that point I tossed in some uncooked, broken spaghetti noodles. I broke them into about 2" pieces. I let the soup go for another ten minutes or so before I decided it was ready to serve.

Remembering that I just eyeballed everything, here are the estimations for the recipe:

1 cup mirepoix
5 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup cooked chicken, roughly chopped
3 Tbsp curry powder
4-5 cups chicken stock
1 Tbsp ginger
Salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper, to taste
1 cup of uncooked noodles

Once everything is chopped, heat up a few Tbsp. olive oil in a soup pot. Cook the mirepoix and garlic for a few minutes to soften, then add the curry powder. Stir well. Add the chicken and chicken stock. Season with salt, pepper, and spices. Bring to a boil, then reduce and simmer for about 40 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Add the noodles and simmer for an additional ten minutes or until the noodles are cooked. Eat. Feel less sick.

As always you can augment this anyway you want. Are you a more broth or less broth person? Do you prefer more vegetables or more chicken? However you want to make it is how you should make it. I think that's how people really learn to cook-by taking recipes and making them their own.