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I made a thing

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Continuing through my beerfest box and tried this peanut butter French toast one. Unsurprisingly it was way to sweet for me but I immediately thought it would be good in a cake, something like a chocolate stout cake but uh, not.

I used this recipe as a base. I used this beer instead of a stout, added 1tbs of peanut butter instead of the cocoa powder, skipped the chocolate chips and didn't do any frosting. I also used greek yogurt instead of sour cream but I've been doing that for years so it's not unique to this recipe.

It's pretty good! Definitely too dense/moist, removing the cocoa powder without adding another dry ingredient in its place was dumb. I probably should have skipped the sour cream/yogurt too since I was adding peanut butter. But I'm pretty pleased with myself for riffing off another recipe on the fly and just for making something on a Friday evening after a full week of work. Satisfied!
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Made roasted fingerling potatoes over a campfire this weekend! They came out delicious! Also veggie burgers, scrambled eggs, toast, and of course s'mores. Managed not to burn anything horribly!
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Over Easter weekend we made cheesecake and it came out delicious despite having to do some substitutions (the recipe we were using called for malt powder which we couldn't find so we subbed a mix of Ovaltine and powdered milk). We also fine-diced chocolate into it. Yum.

We also made Easter-dyed deviled eggs, which came out gorgeous.

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Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
So if people are interested in trying it - this is probably obvious, but the dye doesn't go through shells or anything. The process for these is hard boil them, shell them, cut them in half and scoop out the yolks (like you would for any deviled egg recipe) then dye the whites. What we did is buy some ultra-concentrated icing color dye (the brand was Wilton) and then put just like a drop into a cup of water for each color, and soak the egg halves in the water for like 15 minutes each.
 

JBear

Internet's foremost Bertolli cosplayer
(He/Him)
The SO and I usually take pictures of the things that we make, and last night was one of the rare occasions where the picture actually makes it look as tasty as it was (we are not camera people), so I'm sharing it. It' s a kale salad with beyond meat and bell peppers, topped with a sriracha/mayo mix:

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Also, while I'm at it, here's a bunch of pics from our recipe photo directory from the past 6 months or so that also turned out nice-looking:

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Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Those are gorgeous JBear!

Over the weekend my partner and I went on a mini-vacation and we bought a fondue pot and made fondue! First we did a cheese fondue with a pound of Gruyere and a pound of cheddar and also Belgian beer and bourbon in, and it came out great and was freakin delicious. Then I attempted a chocolate one, and screwed it up - the chocolate seized up and separated completely into cocoa globs in a sea of cocoa butter, which is evidently a thing that's easy to do if you add anything after the chocolate is melted (or can just happen in general because melted chocolate is hella temperamental). We still ate some of it and it was pretty tasty but obviously the texture was all wrong. I'll give it another go some other time and try to be more careful, and not add anything else after the chocolate.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Ooh, the falafel/couscous one looks lovely. And the fondue sounds amazing although I could probably only handle like four items, two pounds of cheese is impressive!
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Heh, we really should've halved the recipe for the cheese fondue, yeah, it made a ton. We had some left over and poured it into a container and put it in the fridge where it solidified... it remains to be seen whether it will just re-melt properly in the fondue pot later.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
More fondue was accomplished! This weekend we did a broth one (which is basically hot pot or what have you) and did veggies and shrimp in it and it worked great and was delicious (the broth had wine, onions, and baked garlic in so it gave everything a great base flavor and then we got out dipping sauces too). Then I did chocolate again and made it work right this time! Woo. Accomplishment.

(There was some chocolate left over so I put it in a container and in the fridge. I have no idea whether I'll be able to successfully re-melt it. We'll see. Or maybe it'll just be a tasty chocolate snack who knows.)
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Made this NY Times Salmon, farro and radicchio dish. Might be one of my favourite things @Lumber Baron makes and we found some frozen salmon for cheap which made it more feasible than usual.

Then I made an aperol cosmo (make a cosmo but instead of cranberry juice do half of the amount of cranberry juice called for with Aperol). Paired beautifully, although from the picture it looks like I could have strained out a bit more lime pulp than I did. Oh well!

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I wanted to make a bean-based (not necessarily vegetarian, but with beans rather than meat as a central ingredient) chili, and I had a great outcome using this vegetarian chili recipe by J Kenji Lopez-Alt. Definitely recommend it!

No one eating it is actually vegetarian so I made some non-vegetarian substitutions like water-->chicken stock and marmite/vegemite-->anchovies+fish sauce, the former because it's always going to improve this kind of a dish relative to just water and the latter because we have those on hand already and they accomplish the same function (umami bomb) in flavoring the dish. I also added a small spoonful of honey.

Of the various chiles listed, I arbitrarily went with New Mexico, cascabel, and pasilla, based on what was at the local Mexican market. This was my first time making a chili with real dried chiles rather than "chili powder," and it definitely made a huge differences. It's definitely more work, especially with this multi-step method of roasting them, simmering them with water/chicken stock, and blending that into a paste, but I am not going back.

Accompanied it with this corn bread recipe, which only takes half an hour so it's easy to do while the chili is about to finish.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
This was my first time making a chili with real dried chiles rather than "chili powder," and it definitely made a huge differences.
Oh man yeah this was high on my list of cooking revelations when I tried it for the first time. I'm going to have to try this recipe out, thanks!
 
If you've already made chili with real chiles before, it might not be that interesting! That was the big change for me, but it might just be another bean-based chili for someone that's old hat for.

What I liked about the recipe and what made it seem approachable as a first-timer was the way that it doesn't arbitrarily list the exactly chiles you need but explains the types of chiles that would work and how they're different:

  • 3 whole sweet dried chiles like costeño, New Mexico, or choricero, stems and seeds removed
  • 2 small hot dried chiles like arbol or cascabel, stems and seeds removed (optional)
  • 3 whole rich fruity dried chiles like ancho, mulato, negro, or pasilla, stems and seeds removed

Beyond that, I do think that it accomplishes the goal of having a good variety of textures though better than other vegetarian or primarily bean-based chilis I've tried though. I think the chickpeas pulsed a few times in the foodprocessor in particular gives it a surprisingly meaty and satisfying texture that feels like a simple upgrade over what most basic ground-beef chilis are trying to do. I think that is the other unique (to me) approach here beyond it being a gateway to using real chiles.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
If you've already made chili with real chiles before, it might not be that interesting! That was the big change for me, but it might just be another bean-based chili for someone that's old hat for.
Oh, it's definitely not old hat, and I haven't done a blend of three chilis like this. Also like you said the chickpeas are a neat addition. Good stuff.
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
It's not actually a thing that I made, but my wife baked me an orange cardamom cake with rosewater frosting for my birthday today, and it is just fantastic.

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Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
If you have a recipe to share I'd love to have it!

Sure! She says to use your favorite recipe for yellow cake, but add 2T orange peel rehydrated in orange juice and a heaping tablespoon of cardamom. The icing was double buttercream, but with rose water in the place of the milk and vanilla extract.

That sounds delicious! Love me some cardamom.

So do I, and it absolutely was!
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
I finally got around to making a recipe I marked as "to try" quite a while ago: Pasta in hummus sauce!

Essentially you use hummus as a sauce to coat the noodles instead of something heavy like an alfredo. I've been curious but skeptical about it for a while but am happy to report it works well!

When I make it again I'd do a lot less of the pasta and a lot more of the greens, but that's just a personal preference as I'm not the biggest fan of pasta in general. I bet a roasted garlic hummus would go really well. I'd never even thought of using hummus like this and am glad I tried it!
 
I kind of hoped that Charles Kelsey's Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe would be a flop because it has some extremely on brand for Cook's Illustrated finicky steps that I felt silly doing , but unfortunately it did indeed produce the first chocolate chip cookies I have ever ever been fully satisfied by, instead of wishing it was just a little bit more this or a little less that. As described in the companion essay, it's basically the classic Toll House package recipe with a few fussy variations, but the variations do in fact make a huge difference.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
We made these completely ridiculous valentines cupcakes. If you don’t want to click through, the idea is you bake a red velvet sheet cake, cut heart shapes out of it, stand them up in vanilla cupcake batter and bake it again, then top with cream cheese frosting, and you end up with multi-flavor cupcakes with hidden hearts inside. Yeah, it’s a lot of work for a cupcake, but it was a fun spontaneous project. Our outer cupcake mix didn’t rise quite as much around the hearts as their pics in the recipe, but you can fix it up with the frosting anyway. And we had leftover batter that we added a bunch of chocolate chips to and threw in a pan and ended up with a basically a big Blondie sheet that we frosted and was also delicious.
 
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