HollyKing's Journal

I was reading Michael Ruhlman’s latest blog post and I think it’s time to work on building up my basic cooking skills. So this week I am going to try and roast a chicken.

The Pâte à Choux I made turned out really well. Roast chicken with some cheese puffs and some vegetable on the side sounds like a good simple meal to start. How about this week, hollyqueen?

I've had some great responses from you all when I've asked for a bit of cooking help. Thank you everyone for them all. Be assured that I will get around to trying them all and will let you know how it all turns out.

Since the apple sauce was a great success I want to knock off another item from my list of Things to Cook. Namely candy apples and by that I mean the apples with a cinnamon hard candy shell. I love these things and want to make my own. I would also like to make my own hard candy.

Does anyone have some favorite books or resources about making candy apples or hard candy? Thanks!

Wow! I think my last post has generated the most comments. I guess people want me to be fat and happy. At least happy, so let’s keep going. I also want to make some soups. I love soup. Does anyone have any recommendations of recipes, books or other information on soups? In particular I love Tomato soup (recipe).

I also want to find a recipe for Sour Cherry soup. I loved it when I tried it in Vancouver and I think it would be a wonderful thing to make. So I’m also looking for a source of sour cherries. Any advice on how to pit fresh cherries for cooking would be a spiffy bonus.

Last night I tried a couple of new recipes for dinner. It turned out pretty well but I think a few adjustments would be an improvement. On the menu last night was:

First was a couple of chicken breasts coated with a mix of brown sugar and garlic. Sprinkled with sesame seeds then baked at 425 degrees F for about 20 minutes. The sweetness next to the garlic was pretty tasty. The problem was the flavor didn’t really penetrate the chicken. One possible fix would be to get a mallet to pound the chicken flat to increase the ratio of topping to chicken per bite.

Next I took a red bell pepper and stuffed it with a mix of mozzarella chese, bread crumbs, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, basil, basalmic vinegar, garlic and a bit of olive oil. I baked this in the oven at 375 for about 30 minutes. I liked this better but I think using a bit more cheese and vinegar would have made it better. As it was the basil pretty much overpowered all the other ingredients.

Both of these ideas came from a cook book called Quick and Easy Diabetic Meals for One or Two. I think I’ll have to try and cook more things from this cookbook. No more being a one trick pony in the kitchen for me. ;)