Experimental Cooking - Grilled Pizza

Much like the Jersey Shore my friends and I have started to have a weekly family dinner on Sunday night. Granted this has only happened twice and the next few weeks are iffy and then football will start. So maybe it will be very short lived but it has been a lot of fun.

Getting to the food point. It's summer which mean pulling out the grill, but hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled chicken was getting old, so we decided to try out grilled pizza. It didn't seem that hard roll out dough, brush with olive oil, grill add toppings, grill some more. All the article about grilling pizza said the key was being organized, which we were - but that didn't help out our first pizza from being half a disaster. I say half because only half of it burned into an blackened mess.

Key point missing from all of those "How to grill pizza" articles: Cook smaller pizzas!!! Don't use all the dough at once!!! Being lazy, we bought pre-made dough and mistakenly rolled the whole thing out and try to put it all on the grill at once. It folded on itself and wasn't really spread out because it was super hard to get on the grill. The 2nd rolled out pizza we cut into 3 smaller pieces and it worked out soooo much better.

Check out the results - the messed up pizza isn't there, though we did eat it still:

Closest pizza = arugula, prosciutto and cheese
Middle = cheese
Farthest = grilled peppers & onions and cheese (it was also kinda shaped like the USA, but it's hard to tell from this angle)

~emy

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Mother's day was brunch and father's day was carrot cake cupcakes. I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen and you can get it here. I can't actually tell you if they were any good, because I'm not the biggest fan of carrot cake, but my parents ate them all up and said they were really good. Though my parents would probably tell me anything I make tastes good.

Here are all the ingredients before the mixing. I actually only made half a batch and was grating my carrots super fine, but then got tired of it and used the next grater size up after that.


The batter! I didn't use the kitchen aid to mix it because of all the "chunks" aka the carrots, walnuts and raisins


Cupcake with frosting. I didn't use Smitten Kitchen's frosting recipe totally. It is a maple cream cheese frosting, but I didn't use butter and not as much sugar. I also used the fake kind of maple syrup and it tasted fine.


~emy

Brunch Cookin'

My poor neglected blog. It's been such a busy few months with a new job, school and life in general.

This is from awhile back, when I put together a nice spread for a Mother's Day Brunch:


Bagels from a local shop with cream cheese, lox, tomatoes, red onion and cucumbers for the fixings. Cinnamon rolls from a recipe that I don't remember where I got from, but I didn't pack the brown sugar that much because the time they were made before they were way too sweet.

And then there were the avocado and bacon deviled eggs (on the square plate in the above picture)

Pretty simple recipe I don't actually measure either:

• Hard boil 6 eggs
• Cut in half and scoop out the yolks.
• Add in half an avocado (diced), about 2 tablespoons of mayo, paprika and garlic powder to taste.
• Mix/Mash - then scoop filling back into the white of the eggs.
• In this case I added in cooked bacon on top as a garnish, but the next time I made them I actually crumbled in about 5 strips of bacon into the filling. It ended up being easier to eat it that way

hmm now I really want to make some of those eggs...

~emy

Sweet Tart

Another creation from this weekend...I was super ambitious for some reason


I didn't fold the pie crust over the edge so it sank down and was a really shallow shell. It's also store bought so not as impressive as home made


It prob worked out for the best though, because it didn't seem like there was enough filling - even though I followed the recipe

TaDa!



I guess I didn't have my macro setting on when I took this one

~emy

Char Sui Bao-tastic

Had some char sui in the fridge, so it only made sense to make some bao.
Check it out


The char sui with the extra sauce added in - YUM


Uh so my "closed satchel" isn't really closed - but I just pinched it together and it worked out - I think I have the pleats down, not it's just getting it more shut


In the oven!


Had a lot of dough and not as much char sui as I thought - so I did curried peas and potatoes too. The filling came out pretty good considering I didn't measure any of the spices out, or tasted it before hand


I kinda gave up on the closed satchel at this point and just wrapped them up so they were flat and more lumpy looking


Done char sui bao!


Yummmmm


Round and golden goodness


All the char sui bao


with the curry ones (the bigger ones) TA DA!

~emy

Dumpling Dairy - Attempt #1

Yay Google! Blogger is fixed! Now I can blog!!

So the boyfriend was nice enough to order this cook book with his other stuff so I wouldn't have to pay for shipping and I finally made my first attempt at making dumplings from scratch. Now don't get me wrong, I've made dumplings before - just always bought the wrappers from stores, never made them myself.

I started with the first recipe in the book, because it seemed simple enough...three hours later I had dumplings. The wrappers were a lot trickier than I thought they would be - they stuck to everything and I had to keep using more flour - I don't think the humid weather was helping either.

Check out the photos I took along the way of my pork and nappa cabbage water dumplings!

The filling: mainly pork, nappa cabbage & scallion


The dough, tortilla press and the start of the wrappers!

Rolled out with my dowel rolling pin - the middle (aka the belly) is thicker for better wrapper to filling ratio, mine aren't that circular - guess i need more practice

Cooking them up!

Finished pea pod and pleated crescent shapes

That one is a flower bud shape - kinda...

The in the middle is a poor attempt at closed satchel - guess I need a lot more practice before trying to make soup dumplings

~emy