An Accidental Discovery: Tangerine Dream Rolls

I had never imagined, when first I set out to write about food, that I would ever say the words "it all started with a box of prepackaged Pillsbury mix," but here we are.



Who knew?

To be honest, I don't even know where the stuff came from.  I was cleaning out the cramped cupboard that houses my "baking only" ingredients and found this guy crammed in the back with some boxed cake mixes, from some long ago time when I must have not really given a damn.  The first impulse was to chuck it.  I've been enjoying baking more and more, and cooking alongside Poppin' Fresh seemed like a setback. However, I'm cheap and it's wasteful.  I knew from the start that I didn't want to make the hot rolls that were the main focus of the product.  The "great pizza crust" touted in the lower left corner was tempting, but once again I'd already locked in my menu for the week, and I wanted the dough boy gone.  (I needed room for cake flour, so that I could eventually make these.)  As anyone who even periodically reads this blogs knows, one area where I do have room to tamper is with dessert.  The two years I spent working at a cinnamon roll factory  had ruined me off of the sticky treats for most of my adult life, but with one caveat.  Orange rolls.  Perhaps it was because they only made them sporadically, perhaps they were just better, but while the cinnamon rolls I bagged each day grew to disgust me, orange rolls were a highlight of my day whenever the test pan ended up in the break room. 

Quick and Easy Chicken Salad

Let's get something straight right up front.  When I say chicken salad, I'm not talking about tuna's equally gloppy cousin.  I'm talking about a healthy, vibrant green salad topped with juicy slices of chicken breast.  If you were expecting the other chicken salad, you'll have to look elsewhere. 

Now that we have that out of the way, let's turn our attention to the salad.  While the actual assembly of the salad is easy,  the quick part is relative.  To give our chicken the proper flavor (one that will allow us to eat the salad completely dressing free,) we have to prepare it at least several hours in advance.  You'll want a couple of boneless, skinless chicken breasts-one for every two people you plan to serve.  Poke them a couple of times on each side with a fork, and place them in a large Ziploc bag with a tablespoon of olive oil, the juice of one lemon, and a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, plus a few dashes of salt, then stick them in your refrigerator to marinate.

Chocolate Cranberry Chunk Cookies

I started this week off with a dilemma.  Although I got behind a bit during the holidays, I feel like I need to post at least once a week to remain a viable blog.  After all, I'm making money now-my first payment from the mucky-mucks who provide the advertising that frames this page will be here by the end of this month.  But there can be no clicks without content.  Problem is, I don't just write about food.  I read about it as well.  I've already gushed about Macheesmo on these pages but there is also Kayln's Kitchen, which has food so delectable I looked at it off and on for a month before I realized it was dedicated to the South Beach Diet, and The Food in My Beard, whose author must really take the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing to heart-his step by step photos make any recipe seem easy.  I could easily list a dozen more, but I'm worried if I gave you that many great blogs to read you wouldn't come back.  The point of all this is that I ended up with a cooking conundrum.  I need content, but on all the days I allot to creative cooking (three days a week are for leftovers or such challenging meals as potatoes topped with chilli,) I filled the menu with other blogger's dishes.  Had they been written any length of time in the past I could have filed them under "Other People's Recipes" and hoped any slight modifications I made might make it worth reading about the process, but the things I am cooking are from recent enough posts that even fairly heavy modifications would still feel like theft.  Obviously, I could have scrapped one of the meals and replaced it with something of my own, but that isn't what I wanted to do.  African peanut stew sounds great.  Chicken tortilla soup simmering all day in the crock pot sounds wonderful.  I decided I would have to bite the bullet and find the cash to finish my half written review of the Salt Tears Coffeehouse and Noshery some lunch hour, and headed to the store.

Boise's Best Breakfast: The Egg Factory (Review)

Before I begin to discuss the food served at The Egg Factory (6882 W State St Boise, ID 83714 (208) 853-2037, with two other locations in the Treasure Valley) let me take a minute to address hyperbole.  I'm not a fan.  Perhaps it's because I have young kids at home, but I don't really care for it when people casually say that things are "the best," "the greatest," and the like.  I don't get a sense for how good something is if you run around like Gordon Ramsey, saying that everything that passes your lips that you don't actively hate is "the most amazing" whatever-it-is.  I just want this to be clear when I pronounce The Egg Factory Boise's best breakfast.  To be fair, I haven't eaten at every single restaurant in Boise, but I have eaten at perennial "Best of Boise" winner Goldy's, hangover staples like Merritt's and The Capri, chic coffeehouse/eateries and truck stops.  The Egg Factory tops them all.

Fowler's Pie (Recipe)

I know we're well into December now (a by-product of time spent Christmas shopping and preparing for class in the Spring), but today's recipe involves Thanksgiving leftovers-kind of.  For the first time ever, I made stock with the turkey carcass.  It was a relatively simple process.  I placed the entire carcass in a large pot along with some chopped carrot and onion, a whole head of garlic that I peeled and crushed, a tablespoon or so of sage, half that amount of black pepper, and a carton of vegetable broth.  I added enough water to make sure the liquid covered the bird, brought the whole thing to a simmer, and covered.  I let the stuff cook for about five hours, then took it off of the stove and strained it.  The liquid had changed from murky and brown-the color of vegetable broth-to a bright straw yellow, and it definitely still smelled like Thanksgiving.  I disposed of the solids and put the fruit of my labors into the fridge to chill.