For the past several months Alli and I have been working our way through the Harry Potter movie series. I'm incredibly sad that I won't get to go to the premiers of Deathly Hollows Part 1 & 2 with her, particularly as the newly released trailer looks absolutely amazing. Tonight we watched Order of the Phoenix, which is my least favorite of the books, but not a bad movie. The battle scenes at the end, in particular, are incredible. To celebrate, I made Butterbeer, a recipe for which I had stumbled over earlier this afternoon.


Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find butterscotch topping (actually, when i described it, the guy at Marks and Spencer looked like I was nuts. Such things may not exist in England, I guess), so I used toffee dessert topping instead. I did manage to get some A&W Cream Soda though. All in all, it was tasty for the first three sips, then it was just WAY too sweet. I'm thinking if (and when) I try this again, I'll use the club soda instead, and nix the butter entirely. It doesn't add anything...granted, being sans butter and butterscotch may make this NOT Butterbeer, but i think it will be tasty anyway. I experimented on had Alli try some as well, and she agreed with me. We also both agree that adding Rum had a lot of potential as well.....*angelic whistle*

Just in case anyone wants the recipe....

Ingredients:

1 cup (8 oz) club soda or cream soda

½ cup (4 oz) butterscotch syrup (ice cream topping)

½ tablespoon butter

Directions:

Step 1: Measure butterscotch and butter into a 2 cup (16 oz) glass. Microwave on high for 1 to 1½ minutes, or until syrup is bubbly and butter is completely incorporated.

Step 2: Stir and cool for 30 seconds, then slowly mix in club soda. Mixture will fizz quite a bit.

Step 3: Serve in two coffee mugs or small glasses; a perfectly warm Hogwarts treat for two!

You Win Some, You Lose Some

This week's success: Potato Leek Soup
This week's not-so-much: Chocolate Mug Cake, Cheddar Cookies.

Potato Leek Soup
This turned out really well, but let us be fair, it's really hard to botch something like this. I'm also really biased in favor of leeks, i think they are delicious and they warm my heart. You'd think think I'd be a bit of a weirdo if I admitted that leeks are probably one of my favorite foods (or at least, things to put in food), and you'd probably be right. But I don't care...they are too damned tasty.

The recipe I used was from Cook UK and dead easy to follow. I'm fairly sure this soup is one of the easier things on the planet to prepare, even for one such as me. Ninety five percent of the effort was in chopping the leek and peeling and dicing the potatoes - M&S did not have big potatoes, only little ones....holy crap that took forever, and much love to Rifha for hanging out and peeling/chopping with me while we watched Top Gear (of course, my much loved guinea pigs friends were present for taste testing.

The key to this recipe, I have decided, is adding epic amounts of spice. In particular, i went nuts with the chopped garlic, fresh basil, dried spices (standard 'mixed herb' and 'garlic Italian spices') and particularly the pepper. I'll cop to it, while attempting to add 'a dash' of pepper, the top came loose, and a torrential downpour of pepper went in. I'll admit, when the guinea pigs friends sat down to try it, was a little worried that they were going to choke.

They didn't, it was actually amazing, and probably my best success in cooking so far. (Yes...I can boil vegetables...go me). The combination was great, and it tasted even better when it was cold! This is definitely going to be a mainstay for me during the gross London winter. Next time I think I will try it with cream rather than whole milk, to see if I can get a thicker consistency. This could go horribly awry however, as it might make the whole thing a bit too rich. The soup I got this time was definitely of the broth variety as opposed to a creamy soup, so I'd like to play with that a bit. We'll find out how it goes I guess!

Verdict: A+, the guinea pigs friends enjoyed it too!

Chocolate Mug Cake
I have to admit, I had a lot of hope for this recepie. Really now, what girl doesn't love the idea of just throwing an egg and some flour into a microwave and outside comes chocolate decadence? Unfortunately, you get what you pay for. So this wasn't super exciting. I found the recipe here.
While the recipe did, in fact produce a cake, it wasn't a terribly exciting one. The first mug actually turned out looking more like some sort of mutated coral reef. While the texture was there, the flavor simply wasn't. For the third attempt (second one was already in the microwave by the time we figured out the first wasn't very good) I poured all the sugar and cocoa I had left into the mug. The result was slightly more flavor, but still nothing to write home about. If I try this again I'm going to try adding some chocolate syrup in there, and probably tripling the cocoa and sugar amounts. Also - What the heck is wrong with Tesco, they stopped carrying chocolate chips!! The nutters...the very nice man (who the week before when I asked if they had a halal alternative to bacon suggested using deli ham) recommended breaking up the bricks of baking chocolate by hand...yeah, that didn't happen. The 'presentation' wasn't terribly appealing either!

















Verdict: B-

Cheddar Cheese Cookies:d
Earlier this week I discovered SuperCook an absolutely fantastic little website. Basically, you punch in what you have in your kitchen, and it will spit back out recipes that match the ingredients you have. The result I got was cheddar cheese cookies and cheese mushroom puffs. Seeing as I'd never heard of the former before, i figured I'd give it a try. The end result well....like the mug cake, it worked, but the outcome was utterly bland and boring. The guinea pigs agreed, and I'll admit that these just went in the bin after we'd tried them. I'm rather disappointed about these came out, because with that much butter (and it was A LOT of butter) you'd have thought it was guaranteed to be tasty, alas, although they were visually appealing, they just didn't cut it.















Verdict: D, Big dissapointment

Attempting to Cook: Chicken Stuffed with Philly and Basil etc etc...

Let's just get this out there...I'm a terrible cook. Or at least, it's not really something I am known for. Whenever the word "cook" comes out of my mouth, anyone that knows me within a 10 mile radius has a heart attack and then faints from the shock. To be clear, it's not that I can't cook, I just well...don't. I'm what you'd call 'an instruction based-cooker' I can do exactly what the little writing on the box tells me, so long as it isn't complicated, but more than that and I'm stumped. Creativity is not my forte when it comes to food, nor is cooking lingo, half the time i don't know what they mean (seriously...how exactly do you 'sweat' an item of food, at least hygienically).

So, filed under my "personal growth/I have too much free time on my hands" improvement regime, is my 'try some new recipes' cooking adventure.

This week's menu (most of it impromptu, and based off of what I had in my fridge):

Starter: Spinach salad with cucumber, red pepper, tomatoes, feta, salt and pepper and a dash of olive oil: This was a bit of an afterthought, and something for us to eat while waiting for the main to cook. It's salad, but one of my favorites.

Main: Chicken stuffed with Philly (spiced) and wrapped in parma ham:
Okay, I did some tweaking to the recipe i used for this, which I dug up here.
1) IQ and Rifha, my two guinea pigs friends are both Muslim, and follow a Hallal diet...meaning that the parma ham was a big no-no. I would now like to take the opportunity to point out that, while inquiring around the local grocery stores if they had turkey bacon no less than five different people laughed at me for even suggesting it, including bystanders. I wound up finding a lovely beef alternative, known as Chiavennasca. It's a dried beef, seasoned with all sorts of tasty spices, and I'd never heard of it before, but it worked just fine, although may have been a bit drier than parma ham or streaky bacon.

2) The recipe called for basil cream cheese, but i wasn't able to find that, or the garlic herb flavor so instead i just bought plain (light) cream cheese and stirred in my own spices - garlic, more garlic, fresh basil, dried basil, and some various 'mixed spices' that I inherited from a friend when she moved back into the states...the result was probably the tastiest part of the meal. Seriously...Rifha and I wound up fighting over who got to eat the leftovers...delicious.

The chicken turned out decently, and it's nice to know that even with my minimal cooking skills I didn't completely botch it. Overall it was pretty good, if not the most exciting thing I've ever eaten (but hey, it didn't taste like death so that's good). The Chiavennasca was a good substitute i feel, and is something i will remember for the future if a recipe i am trying calls for bacon/parma etc etc.

Verdict: Probably not something I'd actively go "wow i'm really craving this" but definitely something i can whip up easily if i need to. Tasty, if not memorable. But sometimes you need that.

Dessert: Baked Apples with Amaretti and Marsala Filling
Again, this was off the cuff, but one of the few recipes i'm pretty comfortable with. My oldest brother is a chef, and good at what he does. This is the recipe he first gave to me several years ago when I was finishing up a research internship in New York City. Basically, I hadn't had the best time (not horrible, just boring) so I wanted to go out with a bang. These were my secret weapon. I'm also a big fan of them because it's a recipe I feel comfortable enough (as i discovered that night) to just whip together without measuring and prepping etc etc. My only issue with them is that I still absolutely suck at getting them to look good. This is where watching too many cooking shows (and listening to my brother rant) is either a bonus, or a negative...I understand the virtue of plating, but it tends not to work out well for me. Also, while I personally am a huge fan of this dessert, I'm not so sure Rifha and IQ were as into it as I was, it's not to everyone's taste, but I love it.

Verdict for the evening: Tasty if not memorably so, and no one died! I consider that progress.