Chocolate Brownie Cookies

I’m not a huge chocolate fan but I saw this recipe on Bon Appetit’s twitter awhile back for Chocolate Brownie Cookies and they looked so good and I actually do enjoy a piece of brownie that I wanted to give these a shot. Caleb and I disagree about brownies and I’m a fan of the cake-y chewy quality of brownies (though I still do love the corner pieces) and Caleb isn’t a huge fan because he likes things that are crunchy. I figured this could be a good middle ground because the cookie edges would provide a nice crunch to cake ratio.

I checked out the recipe on Bon Appetit and it was actually really surprising because there’s no flour in this cookie; it’s mostly powdered sugar and cocoa powder. No leaveners either so this is a really interesting recipe. The recipe does call for a gluten free powdered sugar which I’m not sure about because I just used the powdered sugar I had in the cupboard so that could have affected the way my cookies came out. The mixture was a little dry and took some good mixing to get to the right stage but the amount of eggs actually did hydrate everything enough with a little bit of time so I’m glad I didn’t panic and add any extra liquid to it. I baked it for 14mins rotating halfway through then I let them cool a little before removing them from the pan but to my dismay they were slightly burned on the bottom and hard to remove. I guess since they have such a high sugar content then burn pretty easily and I think they could’ve gone with a little less time in the oven. It was hard to gauge because they’re so dark to begin with and were kind of soft looking in the middle but trust me, pull them sooner rather than later. To me they seem a little too hard and overdone and I wish I baked them closer to 10-12mins but that could also be my oven. They’re very chocolatey and with the one I tried it tasted a lot like the cocoa powder but people at work seem satisfied with them and I think they go well with a cup of coffee or milk so Caleb may enjoy the crispness of them.

For me they were a little bit of a disappointment and I’d rather have a cake-y chewy brownie corner. I’m glad I tired this recipe but it’s not going to be part of my wheelhouse in the future.

Carbonara

I’ve had a rocky experience with carbonara and totally scrambled eggs onto the noodles but this time I swore I would do a better job! So when Molly Baz made a video making Bucatini Carbonara and it was a recipe with about 6 ingredients , I felt like I had pretty good odds at doing a better job.

Molly uses guanciale and bucatini but I couldn’t find them at the local grocery store and I haven’t had time to drive to Wegmans so I used a thick cut bacon and a fettuccini because I’m happy with these minor adjustments. I still cut my bacon into small pieces and fried them it while my pasta was cooking then mixed my eggs with parm. Once everything was cooked, I started getting a little nervous that the residual heat would scramble my eggs giving me flashbacks to my first attempt at carbonara but Molly said to just add the meat and pasta to the egg mixture so I listened to her and went for it. Everything turned out perfect. I added extra bacon fat and pasta water to the mixture to loosen it and get it to coat the pasta until it was shiny and glossy. I’m so happy with this attempt and it turned out great. I definitely over-salted with the bacon and just what I put in the pasta water and with the parm so I’m a little sad about that part. I’ll be a little more careful next time and maybe watch my water to salt pasta ratio but besides that, this is a super easy recipe and totally doable whenever I feel like frying up some bacon.

Spicy Roasted Cauliflower with Tahini

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather lately and decided to have some soup that I had in my cupboard for dinner but of course, soup is never enough. So since I had half a head of cauliflower left in my fridge I figured I might as well sift through my recipes and see what I could try to make. I landed on a recipe from Savuer for a roasted Cauliflower and figured I’d try it as a filling post dinner snack-ish whatever you want to call it.

This is a simple recipe and I had everything I needed (minus jalapeños because I’m not a huge fan, or cilantro which is the garnish). I’ve been wanting to try this recipe for awhile because the photo looked so good and I love cauliflower so I mixed it with everything needed: salt, turmeric, paprika, olive oil, and garlic. I tossed the cauli, roasted it in the oven, and 45ish mins later it was ready to eat. I topped it with a little lemon to brighten it up and had my tahini (store bought, sorry!) standing by. This came out so bright and beautifully roasted and I was so happy with the outcome. It tasted pretty good, though the florets soaked up much more seasoning than the stems so I had to calculate my bites to make sure everything was balanced. I guess since I didn’t have jalapeños it wasn’t really spicy and I would’ve liked the little heat kick that it mentioned but the lemon and tahini balanced the flavor really well and it was so easy to make this is for sure something I could do in the future to add some flavor and color to extra cauli laying around. Simple and tasty.

Latkas

I’m no where near being Jewish but I love potatoes and that’s enough reason for me to make some Latkas. When you watch a Bon Appetit video with Carla Lalli Music and Miz Cracker and potatoes are involved, you get inspired. Watching these two make Latkas is just too fun and they both make this look simple and doable. The video links to a recipe but if you watch you realize it’s not exactly what they’re making so I used the online recipe as a guide for measurements and tried to stick to the video as much as possible.

This wasn’t terribly difficult to make though I won’t lie, I did manage to cut myself on my new grater while grating potatoes. It’s not the best and while I was going through the potatoes I knew it was going to happen. Minor injuries of the kitchen. While drying out the onions they totally got me and had me tearing up too. Concentrated onion water is real guys. Aside from these small hiccups, the latkes came together very easily and mine were a little wetter than Carla’s and Miz Cracker’s. I think I had too much egg and then tried to make up for it with a little more flour and my latkes ended up a little pancake-ier than I was hoping for. I love that potato-y flavor and texture and I wish I was a little more careful and thought about my adjustments with the egg and flour. Still very good in the end and I was pretty proud of myself with how I fried them. Maybe next time I’ll just make a hash?

Roasted Aloo Gobi (Potatoes and Cauliflower)

The Bon Appetit test kitchen has been adding a couple of small appearances by new cooks and Priya Krishna has been one of them. She’s been a little slow to grow on me and has a cute personality but seems a little more home cook-y and less professionally trained. This isn’t a bad thing because you learn a lot from being in kitchens and not all good cooks need to go to culinary school, but when a cook doesn’t have great knife skills I’m a little hesitant to learn from them. Priya mostly cooks Indian dishes from her cookbook Indian-ish which I kind of love the title of. Clearly Priya is like me and has a mix of traditional and American culture so I like the idea of cooking in an ‘-ish’ sort of manner. I also do like Indian food though I don’t get to eat it much especially here in Cortland (there are no Indian restaurants here so I’d have to make the trip to a nearby town and hope for the best) so Priya’s recipes are definitely interesting to me because I’d love to give that type of cuisine a shot at home. I also love vegetables and since a lot of Indian dishes are vegetarian oriented I tend to enjoy the concept a lot. That’s why when I saw her video for Aloo Gobi and realized it was just a mix of cauliflower and potatoes I was 100% in.

I really appreciate Bon Appetit and Priya for making Indian dishes available and accessible to the masses. Priya’s casual manner make the recipes approachable - if she can make these things, I’m gonna give it a shot too. Her recipe is super easy and I even had time to cut up some chicken and cook that while the veggies were in the oven to mix in with them later. I could use a little more of a kick with spices but this was such an easy dish to make and it seriously has everything I need in it. I did skip out on fresh cilantro leaves and ginger because I didn’t have any but i was totally fine without it this time. This is a go-to recipe for sure now. I’m already excited to make it again and I still have leftovers in my fridge today for lunch.

2nd day update: So this was still pretty good the second day, reheated but the potatoes totally didn’t hold up well. They got a little dried out in the middle and the texture was off but everything mixed together wasn’t too bad. Moral of the story is eat it all while it’s fresh. Easy.