adventures in Cooking
The past couple weeks I have been cooking and baking more. This week I got the bug to get more creative with my cooking. I ended up buying a deep fryer under this guise, but I am sure in the end I will find it mostly used for very common food such as french fries and onion rings. But I am not ready to abandon the motivation for the fryer just yet. Last week I made a salad that I wanted to top with goat cheese somehow but in an unusual way. So I decided I'd grind some pine nuts and use it as a coating for pan frying the goat cheese. This worked moderately well - but much of the coating got stuck to the pan. So enter the idea for the deep fryer........what if instead of patties I made little goat cheese balls and rolled them in the pine nuts, put them in the freezer a few minutes, then deep fried them!?! I still haven't tried it, but I have tried something else with goat cheese and pine nuts this week:
I bought some fresh yellow beets, reserved the tops, then peeled and chopped the beets. I then coated with EVOO and vinegar plus salt and pepper - then roasted for about 50 minutes. Next I sliced the beet tops and quickly sauteed them in a bit of EVOO. Once this was done I took the beet greens and put them in the bottom of a gratin baking dish, and the roasted beets on top. I them sprinkled some toasted pine nuts and goat cheese over the entire dish and baked until the cheese melted. This was very tasty - and there were no leftovers :)
The other experiment was potatoes au gratin with a twist. I always make these from scratch so this time I decided to add some shaved fennel and use parmesan as the cheese. The fennel adds a real nice earthy tone to what can sometimes be a boring dish..
So this weekend on to the deep fried goat cheese balls :) And what ever else I can dream up - I did buy more fennel last night and some leeks. I know there has got to be something tasty I can come up with using those ingredients.
I bought some fresh yellow beets, reserved the tops, then peeled and chopped the beets. I then coated with EVOO and vinegar plus salt and pepper - then roasted for about 50 minutes. Next I sliced the beet tops and quickly sauteed them in a bit of EVOO. Once this was done I took the beet greens and put them in the bottom of a gratin baking dish, and the roasted beets on top. I them sprinkled some toasted pine nuts and goat cheese over the entire dish and baked until the cheese melted. This was very tasty - and there were no leftovers :)
The other experiment was potatoes au gratin with a twist. I always make these from scratch so this time I decided to add some shaved fennel and use parmesan as the cheese. The fennel adds a real nice earthy tone to what can sometimes be a boring dish..
So this weekend on to the deep fried goat cheese balls :) And what ever else I can dream up - I did buy more fennel last night and some leeks. I know there has got to be something tasty I can come up with using those ingredients.