Baked Potato

No, I'm not going to tell you how to make "the world's best baked potato" or "the perfect baked potato, every time" because people have different opinions on what makes the best baked potato. I will, however, tell you what I do to make my baked potatoes, for selfish reasons... If anything ever happens to the site I Pinned, I won't have a handy reminder of the temperature I bake them at. That would be fairly devastating for me, because baked potatoes are one of my favorite foods, and this is my favorite way to make them. (Seriously, I might just carve the oven temperature into the wall of my kitchen when I own a home one day.)

Baked Potato

Ingredients
potato
vegetable oil
kosher salt

Equipment
foil, baking sheet, oven

Instructions
Preheat oven to 425F. (I REPEAT: 425F! THIS IS THE INFORMATION YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, ALEX OF THE FUTURE! IT'S 425!) Rinse off your potato and pat it dry with a paper towel. Stab it a few times with a fork. (Don't stab your hand.) Holding it over the sink, drizzle vegetable oil on it and rub it with another paper towel to evenly distribute a thin layer of oil all over the potato. Still over the sink, sprinkle it with kosher salt. Set the potato on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake for an hour.

Yields
A potato. Scalable: use more potatoes.

Total time
An hour.

Cleanup rating 1/5
Don't forget to rinse out the sink, it's all oily and salty now.

Difficulty rating 2/10
I mentioned not stabbing yourself in the hand, right?

Flavor rating 10/10
My favorite food, basically. Obviously you need to dress the potato when it's done, but that's on you. When you make it my way, you get really crispy potato skin. If you don't like crispy, wrap it in foil before you put it in the oven (and then you can skip the pan if you want).

Adjustability: high
Were you just reading that flavor rating bit? You can put ANYTHING on it. I like butter, garlic, cheddar cheese, fresh green onions, and sour cream. I also like pulled pork barbecue. I was just thinking, I'd like to try sauteeing some peppers and onions like you would for a Philly cheesesteak and chopping them up really small and putting them on a potato. And there's always other classics: bacon, broccoli, etc.

Make it with...
Nothing or anything. Great side dish; great main dish. I make mine as main dishes. It's a perfect "Birk's working tonight, what can I make for just one person" dinner. It's a great "I'm not so hungry and/or I ate a late lunch and/or I worked until 9 pm so I need to go to bed soon but I still should eat something" dinner. It's also a steak's best friend. Gets along well with chicken, too. And it's vegetarian (as long as you don't cover it in bacon bits or smother it in bbq) so it's an excellent choice for when you don't really know all your dinner guests very well. Guess what? It makes a good - if unorthodox - breakfast, too!

Cheesy Sausage Bake

I actually made this a while ago... I just forgot to post it. So here it is!

Cheesy Sausage Bake

Ingredients
smoked sausage, 1 package
1 large onion
1 potato
1/2 bag of baby carrots
olive oil
salt, pepper
paprika
sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

Equipment
oven, foil, roasting pan

Instructions
Preheat oven to 400F. Slice the sausage (about the thickness you see in the photo) and dice your onion and potato. Line a roasting pan with foil and drizzle with a little bit of olive oil, spreading it evenly. Put the sausage, onions, and potatoes into the pan and drizzle with olive oil; mix thoroughly with your hands. Sprinkle with sea salt, pepper, and paprika, and toss again to evenly coat. Spread it evenly in the pan. Bake for 45 minutes (stir every 15 minutes) until potatoes are forkable and golden-brown. Turn off the oven. Sprinkle the cheese evenly across the top and return pan to the oven for a few minutes to melt it.

Yields
about 4 servings

Total time
About an hour (about 15 minutes prep time with chopping and tossing, 45 minutes bake time)

Cleanup rating 2/5
The foil lining makes it easy to clean your pan. If you shred your own cheese, you have to clean the grater, which I see as a bit of a pain, but otherwise there isn't much to it.

Difficulty rating 4/10
You have to be present and paying attention the whole hour, because you need to check in and stir it every 15 minutes.

Flavor rating 6/10
It was good. I wasn't blown away by it, but it was very good.

Adjustability: high
You can add or replace ingredients pretty easily (make sure you don't use something that will devolve to mush unless you add it later in the baking process) and you can add whatever spices you want. I think I actually added garlic... I put garlic in everything.

Make it with
...nothing, unless you want to. You've got your veggies, starch, meat, even some cheese in there. I might make a green veggie on the side (peas, broccoli, a green salad) but I didn't this time.

Look, I Made Lunch! Eggs, Potatoes, & Bacon

I've pulled out the Sistema again, finally. Sistema is this great collection of plastic lunchware that I absolutely love and has had the most success getting me to take lunch to work. I have a whole set of green: three containers and three little squeeze bottles for sauces (two of the bottles are blue and pink/purple).

Anyway, this isn't a commercial... I'm just excited about using my Sistema containers again.

Today, I brought lunch that incorporated a little bit of leftovers from last night's dinner! I didn't eat all of my piece of pork, so I cut it into tiny pieces and made an egg scramble with some diced onion and cheddar cheese, which I paired with leftover potatoes from dinner, plus a couple pieces of bacon that were in the fridge!

The little dressing container in the middle of the potatoes on the right has a little bit of honey in it... don't judge, I like syrup or honey with my bacon. It's not as uncommon as you might think (at least not in the South).

I actually used another Sistema container to bring the Accidental Cookies to work, and one of the tiny squeeze bottles to bring the lime icing (it's a little liquidy, so I didn't want to put it on the cookies and have it all drip to the bottom).

Sauteed Apples and Pork Medallions with Pan Sauce

If that doesn't sound like the fanciest dinner I've made so far, I don't know what does.

The only thing I think I would change is that I was dice the apples to get a more thorough cooking. The first 1/4" or so got cooked fine, but if I had waited for the whole halves to get cooked through, the bottom would have become mush. I already made some changes to the original while I was cooking.

As you can see in the photo, I made potatoes (with cumin and garlic powder this time) and peas to go with this.

Sauteed Apples & Pork Medallions with Pan Sauce

Ingredients

2 Granny Smith apples, halved

2 pork medallions (or you can slice your own pork tenderloin, about 1/4" thick)

2 Tbsp flour

1/2 tsp cumin

salt & pepper

1 Tbsp minced garlic

1 Tbsp oil (I used vegetable oil)

1 Tbsp butter

1/2 cup chicken broth

1 Tbsp white wine vinegar

Equipment

stove, pan with high-ish sides, have your plates ready

Instructions

Put oil and butter in pan on medium heat. Sprinkle your apples with salt & pepper on the cut sides. In the meantime, mix flour, cumin, and some salt & pepper. Lightly coat the pork medallions and set aside. Once butter is melted, stir it up and add apples, cut-side down. Cook until they look approximately like the picture (about 5 minutes). Remove them and put on plates. Add pork medallions to the pan and cook about 4-5 minutes on each side (until done). Set aside on plates. Add chicken broth and white wine vinegar to the pan and scrape up any bits from the bottom. After about a minute, add minced garlic and cook for another 2-3 minutes until it reduces a bit. Pour pan sauce over pork and serve.

Yields

2 servings

Total time

about 30 minutes (although I started the potatoes earlier, because they took about 45 minutes)

Cleanup rating 2/5

One of the amazing things about making a pan sauce (other than the incredible flavor it yields) is that deglazing the pan does the "hard" work of cleaning the pan for you! Instead of scrubbing off all the little bits afterward, you just put delicious liquid into the pan and it turns those bits into food! Although, with all the oil and apple juice and broth and meat juices and butter going on, there was quite a bit of splatter (I may have used a bit too much oil) so that made a little bit of a mess.

Difficulty rating 4/10

Actually quite easy. The hardest thing was trying to determine when things were done. I'm pretty sure I've never cooked pork (which is weird, but chicken is just so easy) and I've certainly never sauteed apple halves, so I was a little lost the whole time. Cubing the apples would have made the whole thing a lot easier.

Flavor rating 7/10

YUM. The apples were a little weird (again, they only got half-cooked I think, so cubing would help... or at least slicing). But the pork was very good, and the pan sauce was delicious. (I added the garlic on a whim, and I'm ever so glad that I did. I would probably have added a  little finely diced onion if I had remembered that there was half an onion in the fridge. And maybe used a splash of wine too.)

NEW CATEGORY!!!

Adjustability: high

Obviously, I've already mentioned that the apples were too big. And that I messed with the pan sauce quite a bit (and would do so even more in the future). So this new category will help consolidate all of these ideas. Low adjustability means I don't think I would change anything, or I don't know how. Medium adjustability means I could change one or two things, or I wouldn't change it very much. High adjustability means the possibilities are endless, and/or I have lots of ideas of what to change in future attempts.

NEW CATEGORY!!!

Make it with

This category will tell you what I did make to go with the recipe, or what I might consider making with it. I already mentioned that this one was made with potatoes (with cumin and garlic) and peas. I might also make rice, and any green vegetable you like... broccoli might be good.

Accidental Cookies

So, remember how I was making a ton of Mothers' Day cookies? Well, I screwed up the dough for the raspberry cookies (I forgot to add the sugar... thank goodness I tasted the dough before folding in the raspberries!). I tried to go back and add the sugar and re-mix it, but it turned into a firm dough ball that would not take raspberries well. So I saved it until later, and made these "accidental" cookies! Then I decided that they needed a little something... so I made a lime icing.

Accidental Cookies with Lime Icing

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

8 Tbsp (1 stick) butter, not softened, cubed

2/3 cup heavy whipping cream

lime juice (about 2 Tbsp? I didn't measure)

powdered sugar (about 1/2 cup? I didn't measure)

Equipment

baking sheet, parchment paper, mixer, oven

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix flour and baking powder together. Add butter and knead together by hand. You should get a crumbly mixture. Add the heavy cream and mix thoroughly (with a spoon should be fine). Add the sugar (if you want to be exactly like me, swear loudly about forgetting to add the sugar in the first place). Knead really thoroughly until all the sugar is incorporated. Pinch off small balls of dough and place on parchment-paper-lined baking sheet. Bake about 15 minutes. Let them cool thoroughly on a cooling rack. Mix lime juice and powdered sugar, adjusting amounts until you have the consistency of icing you want. Drizzle over cookies.

Yields

I got about 2 dozen cookies

Total time

Hard to tell, since I made these around making the raspberry cookies, but probably about 30 minutes including 15 minutes baking time.

Cleanup rating 2/5

Any time I'm working with powdered sugar will be no lower than a 2/5. But the dough is really clean, because it's a firm ball of dough instead of a crumbly mess.

Difficulty rating 5/10

Kneading by hand is a pain in the butt. Especially since I did it twice in a row (this batch, then doing it correctly for the raspberry cookies). And getting the icing consistency right is tricky.

Flavor rating 6/10

Birk says the cookies have a biscuit-y feel/flavor, and I don't disagree. But I like them, and it means they aren't too sweet. The lime icing is pretty tart, and I like that too. I feel like this recipe has some tweaking in its future.

Happy Mothers' Day!

I made cookies for my various moms for Mothers' Day (and two of their birthdays, too)!

For my mom, I made walnut butter balls.

For my stepmom, I made gluten-free chocolate cookies.

And for my mother-in-law, I reprised the raspberry-lime cookies, but I used lemon juice like the original recipe said to, instead of lime.

Top left: gluten-free chocolate cookies.
Top right: raspberry-lemon cookies.
Bottom left: walnut butter balls.
Bottom right: For Birk's birthday, peanut butter Kiss cookies.

Happy Mothers' Day!

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cookies

These are the cookies I made for my stepmom! She's gluten-free, and she loves chocolate, so I jumped on this recipe when I found it.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter (softened)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup cocoa powder

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup butterscotch chips

Equipment

oven, baking sheets, parchment paper, cooling racks, mixer

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix together butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Add egg and vanilla; mix thoroughly. Combine baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder, and mix into wet batter (be careful not to make chocolate clouds that choke you). Stir in the chocolate and butterscotch chips. They will expand while baking, so give them some room on the parchment-lined baking sheet (about 1-1.5" should do). Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Yields

I got about 15 cookies out of it, but they were pretty big cookies.

Total time

A little under 30 minutes.

Cleanup rating 3/5

Chocolate everywhere. Delicious batter that I know I shouldn't lick off the spoon and beaters and bowl because it has raw egg, but yummy anyway. Definitely an instance of "clean immediately or regret it."

Difficulty rating 5/10

Not hard, but there is skill and patience required when baking cookies. Mixing, measuring carefully, fully incorporating ingredients... it might help to know that I use a hand mixer, so it's a tiny bit trickier than using a stand mixer.

Flavor rating 3/10

Disappointment. I hope my stepmom liked them more than I did. They are INCREDIBLY sweet. And I have an insane sweet tooth... but this is ridiculous. I washed down a bite with some Coke and it made the Coke taste bland like water. Still, though... chocolate. So it's not like a 1 or 2.

Additional note: The original recipe called for white chocolate chips instead of butterscotch ones, and mentioned that you can also add 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts (which I had, leftover from Mom's walnut butter balls, but I was fairly certain that my stepmom and I agree that nuts are great but they don't belong in our baked goods).

Walnut Butter Balls

Happy Mothers' Day! I made cookies for my mothers this year... a different kind for each mother, according to their tastes.

For my mom, I made Walnut Butter Balls. The criteria for Mom were (1) I had to be able to mail it across the country without too much damage; (2) she likes nuts in her cookies/brownies/whatnot; (3) preferably no chocolate (only because it would melt in the mail, not because she doesn't like it).

While I was making them, I thought they smelled kind of like Christmas... and they look kind of like snowballs! Maybe they just remind me of rum balls (without rum) but I think these will get a repeat around Christmas.

The original recipe is from here.

Walnut Butter Balls

Ingredients
1 stick of butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
another 1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup flour
1 cup chopped walnuts
pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

Equipment
oven, parchment paper, baking sheet, cooling rack, mixer

Instructions
Soften your butter in a large bowl (I let it sit out for about 30 minutes). Preheat oven to 350. Add 1/2 cup powdered sugar to butter and beat with mixer until creamy. (Beware of sugar clouds.) Add flour, walnuts, salt, and vanilla and beat until incorporated. It will be pretty crumbly. Take tiny handfuls of batter and squeeze it together to get the air out. Squeeze into balls and set on parchment-paper-lined baking sheet. You don't need to give them a lot of room; they won't expand much. Bake 15-20 minutes. They'll be pale but firm (not squishy). Let them cool on the pan for a few minutes. Put about 1 cup powdered sugar in a bowl. While the cookies are still warm, roll them around in the sugar to coat them and set them on the cooling rack. Once you've done all the cookies, start again from the beginning and roll each one a second time.

Yields
I probably got about 20 cookies.

Total time
Prep + baking + sugar coating = about 30 minutes. Plus 30 minutes for butter softening, so about an hour.

Cleanup rating 2/5
Powdered sugar everywhere. Other than that, you just have a mixing bowl to clean (put parchment paper under your cooling rack to catch all that powdered sugar).

Difficulty rating 5/10
Not the easiest cookies to make, but certainly not difficult, either. It takes some patience and attention to mix the butter and sugar properly (and without making it sugar-snow all over the kitchen). And making the balls takes a little talent and a little patience. Otherwise, not too difficult.

Flavor rating 7/10
Birk loved them. I'm typing this up before Mom gets them so I don't know yet what she thinks of them. I thought they were pretty good, but I'm not a nutty cookie person, so they aren't my favorite. But they're good.

Bonus photo: cookies pre-sugaring.

Sweet Palmiers

Palmiers have lots of names in French: palm trees (palmiers), French hearts (coeurs de France), elephant ears, shoe-soles... but they're usually just palmiers. And if you use frozen puff pastry, they're stupidly easy to make. We had a last-minute "oh no, one of our best employees is moving and his last day is tomorrow" situation at work, so we wrangled up some people to bring cookies and ice cream and chips and dip and drinks so we could give him a proper send-off. I made these.

Palmiers (cinnamon-sugar)

Ingredients

frozen puff pastry

sugar

cinnamon

1 egg white per 2 sheets of puff pastry

Equipment

oven, parchment paper, baking sheet, basting brush

Instructions

Thaw your puff pastry according to package directions. (Mine said 40 minutes.) Preheat oven to 400 F. Unfold the puff pastry and brush with egg white. Sprinkle liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Roll the right and left sides toward the center (to make the curly shape you see in the photo). Turn the log over, brush with egg white, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Turn it back over, brush with egg white, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Use a sharp knife and slice the log into ~1/4-inch slices, trying your best to keep the curly shape. Lay the slices on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet (give them enough space to expand a little bit). Sprinkle each liberally with more sugar. (I never said these were good for you.) Bake for 12-15 minutes. Cool on a cooling rack.

Yields

I used three sheets of puff pastry and got about 36 palmiers out of them, so I'll go with about a dozen palmiers per sheet of puff pastry.

Total time

I baked mine in rounds, so I did three separate bakings... took me about 90 minutes (40 minutes to thaw the pastry, a little prep time, plus 45 minutes baking time, with three rounds of 15 minutes each). If you did just one sheet, it would be about an hour (40 minutes thaw time, 5 minutes prep time, 15 minutes bake time).

Cleanup rating 1/5

So easy. If you can manage not to get sugar and cinnamon everywhere (which is easy-ish, because it's not powdered sugar, and I used Vietnamese cinnamon which is more expensive and therefore I'm more careful with it) you just have to clean the sticky sugary egg white mess off a cutting board (or, if you're smart, throw away a piece of parchment paper).

Difficulty rating 3/10

It's not very hard, but you do have to be careful with timing (I made too many without adjusting timing, so by the time I got to my third sheet of pastry, it was getting sticky because it had been thawing for too long) and without a great knife, it's hard to slice the log nicely. I managed to keep the shape okay, but good tools are necessary to be a good cook (or baker in this case).

Flavor rating 5/10

I was a little underwhelmed. I think Birk was too. But a lot of people at work praised them (and sought me out to do so) so that's probably a good sign.

After thawing the pastry, brushing with egg white,
and sprinkling with cinnamon & sugar.

After rolling it into a curly log.

After slicing. (This was the third batch. Notice the little tails on some
of the slices? That's because it had been thawing a little too long,
and it kept sticking to the knife. It's not a big deal, you can just
stick the tails to the side when you lay them on the baking sheet,
but still... that's not the goal.)

A palmier in my palm. Ha.

Raspberry Lime Cookies

I promised cookies for a party. I made brown sugar cookies last week, intending the same thing, but I missed the gathering, so I ate a lot of the cookies myself. And I'm making the brown sugar cookies again for a work thing next week. So I thought I should probably make something different for tonight! (And I made them early enough that if they turned out badly, I still had time to make... brown sugar cookies.)

Raspberry-Lime Cookies

Ingredients

2 cups fresh raspberries

juice of 1/2 a lime (or 1.5 Tbsp ReaLime)

1.5 Tbsp sugar

another 1/2 cup sugar

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

8 Tbsp (1 stick) butter, cubed (not softened)

2/3 cup heavy whipping cream

3/4 powdered sugar

1.5 Tbsp milk

Equipment

oven, cookie sheet, parchment paper, cooling racks, two bowls (one small, one large)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. In a small bowl, combine raspberries, lime juice, and 1.5 Tbsp sugar. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, 1/2 cup sugar, and baking powder. Add the butter and mix together with your hands (it should be a crumbly mixture when you're done). Add cream and mix together. Fold in raspberries (try your best not to smush them, but a little smushing is inevitable). Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and put spoonfuls of batter about 1" apart. Bake for 15 minutes (I left them for another 2 or 3 minutes, but I'd check on them at 15, anyway.) Let them cool on cooling racks. Mix powdered sugar and milk together and drizzle on cooled cookies.

Yields

I got nearly 2 dozen cookies, and a few of my spoonfuls were a little big.

Total time

I had to make two batches (only one rack in the oven right now) so it took an extra 15 minutes, but it takes about 30 minutes overall.

Cleanup rating 4/5

I made a mess... you might make less of a mess. But I got raspberry juice, lime juice, flour, and powdered sugar everywhere. It helped that I put parchment paper under the cooling racks before adding the icing, but there was still quite a mess to clean up.

Difficulty rating 4/10

You need to be able to mix the flour mixture with the butter properly (not too lumpy), not destroy the raspberries, not over- or under-bake them... etc. Plus, you should make sure each spoonful has an appropriate mixture of dough and berries and is cohesive enough to stay a cookie.

Flavor rating 6/10

They're a little tart (possibly because I changed the original recipe I found from lemon juice to lime juice, and I used ReaLime instead of a... real lime) but they're still pretty good. Maybe a little less lime juice, or a little more sugar in the first step?

Breakfast Apples

I made breakfast again! And it was delicious. The plan was scrambled eggs, but I turned my back long enough for it to accidentally be an omelet. Which was pretty cool, because I've never managed to make an omelet before. I also made bacon, but I thought we needed something plant-based... so I grabbed an apple and made the following!

Breakfast Apples

Ingredients

1 apple (mine was Granny Smith)

1 Tbsp brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1 Tbsp butter

Equipment

microwave

Instructions

Dice your apple and put it in a bowl. Add the butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and mix. Microwave for 1 minute. Stir well. Microwave another 30 seconds. Stir well again, and enjoy!

Yields

2 servings as a side

Total time

5 minutes

Cleanup rating 2/5

I have a thing about never being able to use brown sugar without getting it all over my hands (and the counter). And the bowl is pretty sticky but you can run it through the dishwasher, so it's not a big deal.

Difficulty rating 2/10

Dicing an apple is the hardest thing involved.

Flavor rating 8/10

Yum! Not too sweet. Went perfectly with the rest of our breakfast.

Avocado Chicken

As is often the case, this is from a recipe online that I adapted to suit my own abilities/tastes/preferences/available ingredients.

Avocado Chicken

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
1 Tbsp olive oil
seasoning (I used sate from Penzey's)
2 avocados
about 1 Tbsp minced garlic
about 1 Tbsp lime juice
about 1 tsp cilantro
rice, to serve with

Equipment
stove (2 burners)

Instructions
Make your rice (I used the 2 cups of water, 1 cup of rice, 1 Tbsp of butter in a saucepan method). While that's going on, make your chicken (like this) with your seasoning of choice. While you're waiting on both of those, cut and scoop your avocados and put them into a bowl. Run a knife through them a few times to approximately dice them. Add the garlic, cilantro, and lime juice (and some salt) and mix it up. (Don't mix too much or it will turn to a paste instead of a relish-like consistency.) Once everything is done cooking, serve the avocado on top of the chicken on top of the rice.

Yields
2 servings (easily scalable)

Total time
about 30 minutes (rice took 20 minutes, everything else happened while that was cooking)

Cleanup rating 2/5
You just have the chicken pan, avocado bowl, and rice pan to clean.

Difficulty rating 3/10
The chicken is easy, the rice is stupidly easy, and the avocado is easy. And you don't have to get the timing exactly perfect either!

Flavor rating 8.5/10
YUMMMMMMMMM. I loved this. The only change Birk suggested was to add beans (which I'm not a big fan of unless they're baked beans served with hot dogs). I thought maybe adding some cumin to the chicken or making Mexican saffron rice instead of the plain white rice would be good too.

So, happy pre-Cinco-de-Mayo, everyone! I had mine with a Cuba Libre; I highly recommend that.