Recently in Cooking Category

There's not much that tastes better than a cookie straight out of the oven. And unlike most of the things I've been cooking lately, cookies are something I've been making for years and years.

No secrets here. I just follow the recipe that's on the back of pretty much every Nestle Toll House bag. I use Crisco instead of butter. Why? Because that's how my mom always did it, which made me wonder what the difference between butter and shortening really is.

While I don't think shortening is actually any healthier, it does seem to make a difference in the texture of the cookies. I've used actual butter once or twice, and while the cookies taste more buttery (obviously), they come out kind of flattened. With shortening, they come out fluffier. Actually, fluffier is probably not the right word, but they are definitely less dense. I like 'em better that way, and I don't miss the butter flavor.

I found this blog entry this morning that explains why, if you're curious. (The difference is primarily that butter has some water in it and a lower melting point, while shortening does not. Cooking = science! Hooray for science!)

I've used that recipe a hundred times, but often substitute different kinds of chips, which can really change the cookies. I haven't done anything truly crazy, but I've made this same recipe using butterscotch chips, peanut butter chips, M&Ms, white chocolate chips, and Andes mint chips. Maybe some others that I can't remember, too. Anyway, this time I used half a bag of peanut butter chips and half a bag of chocolate chunks. You can also add nuts if you want, though I usually don't.

The recipe says to bake for 9-11 minutes. For years, I always had to bake for more like 8 minutes. I would inevitably forget this, and end up toasting the first pan a bit too much. Apparently this was due to my many crappy electric apartment ovens that ran hot. Ever since we moved into the house with our awesome gas oven (with digital temperature gauge!), these cookies come out perfect after exactly 10 minutes.

Yum!

I'm in the first day of a three-day class about Simulink and Stateflow. Those are two software/coding/simulation tools that have gotten a lot of use around NASA lately as we are (or were) designing flight software for a new vehicle. They're part of Matlab, which is a coding language I used extensively in my old job down the hall, but haven't touched in the four years since I moved to the Rendezvous office.

I'm encouraged to find that I haven't completely forgotten all of my Matlab skills, and that I'm pretty good at picking up Simulink. Simulink is all visual -- as in, you drag blocks around that represent equations and functions and inputs and outputs -- and I'm pretty good with all things visual.

I'm not really sure why I'm in this class except for the fact that they needed a civil servant to meet their headcount requirements. (As a cynical aside, the fact that I'm a civil servant seems to be all I'm good for these days.) I don't have any immediate use for these skills. But it's been more fun so far than I thought, and it's always good to have a new skill. Right???

Now for a complete topic shift, and to give the non-engineers reading this something that they actually care about, I will show you what I made for dinner last night: Pioneer Woman's meatloaf. I haven't had meatloaf in a very long time, and after we finished, Jose said "that was major comfort food." And it was. Meatloaf with a side of potatoes.

Meatloaf is totally easy to make. You just put everything in a bowl and mash it up.
We were generous with the parsley, yet I still wish we'd added more.

In addition to that stuff above (meat and cheese and spices), you also add eggs and bread soaked in milk. Then you get to mush everything together, which is easiest to do if you use your hands. I suppose this part would suck if you don't like touching meat. I'm not a huge fan of touching raw chicken, but for some reason ground beef really doesn't bother me.

The only hitch was that I couldn't find my loaf pan. I KNOW I used to have a blue pyrex bread pan. It matched the blue pyrex baking dishes I have in 2 different sizes. But last night it was nowhere to be found, and the only thing Jose could find was a small aluminum loaf pan that was not nearly big enough for all that meat. Let's just say we will be eating meatloaf for the next couple days as leftovers. See, something I have quickly realized is that Pioneer Woman's recipes make a TON of food. Enough to feed her family of 6 plus a few guests, I suppose. I really need to start cutting them in half.

So we used one of the baking dishes and had "meatloaf brownies." That picture shows the situation after I'd covered half the meatloaf brownies in sauce. Don't worry, I finished covering it with sauce before I baked them.

Meatloaf brownies. Try it.

I've enjoyed my past few blogs posts about cooking, so I figured I'd just continue with the occasional cooking post -- plus it's fun to take pictures along the way. One of the biggest advantages of cooking at home is that it's a lot easier to control what I eat, and by that I mean both portion size and what goes into the food. We're not that picky, and we don't make huge efforts to make our meals especially low fat or low calorie, but we do try to use more fresh ingredients than we have in the past. (There was nowhere to go but up, considering a lot of our meals used to come out of a box or from a restaurant.)

And then of course there is portion size. I've been moderately overweight for my entire adult life, despite the fact that I lead a fairly active lifestyle. To put it simply: I eat too much. I snack too much, I usually clean my plate, etc etc. So when it comes to losing weight, the biggest thing I have to do is control how much food goes into my mouth. I don't try too hard to count calories (an activity that I hate), and I don't deny myself treats. I just have to EAT LESS. It is FAR easier for me to eat less when I can control how much I put on my plate, and the easiest place to do that is at home.

Hence: more cooking at home, and more lunches brought from home. I've lost 6 pounds over the past 4 months, and while I realize that rate of weight loss is quite slow, it's something.

Anyway, the other night we made seafood risotto, one of my favorite things we've made from this cookbook. "Quick and easy" definitely describes this dish, but it's also quite tasty. It's got a lot of flavor, which makes it satisfying.

To start, you chop up some onions and cook them with some olive oil. Here's Jose helpfully demonstrating his technique. ;)

It's funny how many of the recipes we make these days begin with sauteed onions. I don't care though, because onions on the stovetop smell really good. I usually throw in more onions than the recipe actually calls for too.

Then comes the "risotto" part. Because this is a recipe from a "quick and easy" cookbook, it doesn't actually use true risotto. It uses regular white long grain rice. That goes in with the onions, along with a can of chicken broth. That simmers, covered, until the rice starts to get fluffy.

By that time, most of the chicken broth has been absorbed, so you add a little water along with some julienned (look at me using cooking terminology!) carrots and black pepper. More simmering, again covered.

After the rice is fully cooked, the rest is super easy. Add chunks of crab meat (we get the imitation stuff, which is fine), parmesan cheese, and spinach, and leave it on the stove just long enough for the crab to heat up and the spinach to wilt.

Voila! It reheats pretty well as a leftover too.

On Monday morning, President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. Embedded in that budget were changes for NASA, including the termination of the Constellation program begun in 2004. With the space shuttle program coming to an end after the last shuttle flight this fall, the Constellation program was the next big thing: designing a new vehicle to carry astronauts to the space station, and eventually beyond. That program has now been cancelled. By the end of this calendar year, NASA will have gone from three major programs (space shuttle, space station, and Constellation) to one. NASA will not be designing or building anything to replace the space shuttle under the President's proposed plan. Instead, NASA will focus on developing new technologies, while we will rely on commercial companies to develop new ways to take humans into orbit.

This is bad for NASA. Very bad. Career-altering. Life-altering. Many people will lose their jobs, and many people who still have jobs will wonder what they're supposed to be working on. If you had asked me on Friday if I would still be working for NASA in 2 years, I would have said "yes, certainly." On Monday, my answer changed to "I highly doubt it."

I'm still formulating my thoughts and will post them soon. But on Monday night I needed to distract myself. I did that by cooking a lasagna.

I've never cooked a lasagna before, and let's face it -- it's far easier to buy a frozen one from the store. They taste good and involve a lot less work and a lot fewer dishes. But I've been enjoying cooking much more lately, and for some reason I just really wanted to be able to say that I made lasagna. It seems like something that would be hard to make, and I wanted to see if I could do it. (FYI, this was another recipe from The Pioneer Woman's cookbook, but the same recipe, slightly simplified, is also on her website.)

It turns out that it's not difficult to make; it's just time-consuming, i.e. we didn't sit down to eat until 9:00 pm, at which point I was pretty dang hungry. I knew it would need to bake for 45 minutes, but I didn't read closely enough to realize that making the meat sauce also required simmering for 45 minutes. I REALLY need to learn to read the full recipe first, but alas, I didn't.

It was delicious. I love eating something delicious for dinner and knowing that I made it. Totally cool. This recipe made a TON of lasagna, so be warned. Next time I might consider cutting it in half. Fortunately, lasagna stills tastes great as a leftover. We've already enjoyed some for lunch yesterday, and I may be having it again tomorrow!

Many of you have already heard of The Pioneer Woman, a woman who gave up city life and moved to a ranch in Oklahoma after falling in love with a cowboy. She has a completely fabulous website full of great photography, yummy recipes, funny stories of life on the ranch, and other awesomeness. I came across her blog last summer and have been reading ever since (along with thousands of others, I might add).

I put her recently released cookbook on my Christmas list, and my sister was excellent enough to get it for me. I finally cracked it open last night and started with her infamous linguine with clam sauce. (If you want to know why it's infamous, you can read her story.)

First I read through the whole recipe, which in itself is impressive since I have a rather bad habit of NOT reading the entire recipe before beginning to cook something. (That gets awkward when I realize I'm all out of some key ingredient.) That's how I knew to save the clam juice! And yes, I used canned clams. I used canned and dried ingredients mostly, which is probably not ideal, but hey -- next time I'll go for the fresh stuff.

I thought I could both cook the pasta and make the sauce at the same time, because cooking pasta is just not that hard. But it turns out I'm not so good with the multi-tasking and timing of multiple items in the kitchen quite yet. Fortunately Jose had just gotten home from class, so I gave him the pasta monitoring duties.

Shortly thereafter, it was done! And it was delicious! And look at me, I even got all inspired to take some photos, although mine certainly don't compare to the ones in the book.

I'll definitely make this recipe again, because as yummy as it was, I think it can be even better. First of all: more clams! I didn't specify what size cans I needed when Jose went grocery shopping, so I only had about 2/3 the amount of clams that the recipe called for. Also, as I already mentioned: fresher stuff! I used garlic from a spice jar instead of actually mincing up a fresh clove and I used dried basil because we didn't have the parsley the recipe called for. I don't think this really hurt anything, but it wouldn't hurt to use the fresh stuff -- especially the parsley.

Overall verdict: YUM.