Breaking the Rules

Apparently I am a bit of a cooking disaster waiting to happen. At least I am according to the experts interviewed by Real Simple.

The January issue has a story called How to Fix Dinner: 17 all-too-common cooking mistakes (plus easy tips to avoid them). I do (or have done) about half of these tips regularly — mostly without any ill effect.

Take number two: using the wrong knife. Been there, done that, do that all the time. I don't even know which knife in my fairly nice Cutco knife set (Rachel spent a brief foray one summer in this selling cult so we of course now have many Cutco knives purchased before she quit) is supposed to do what. It's a complete mystery so I just grab the one closest at hand and hack away. Mostly that method works just fine. The Real Simple story, however, suggests that this approach will "damage your food." If I used the correct knife, I would be more efficient and my dicing would be neater.

The problem is that I don't really care about how neat my diced pieces are. In fact, I mostly don't care if my food is precisely diced at all, favoring larger pieces overall and losing interest fairly early in the process. I'm more interested in the flavors themselves and getting to the finished product.

Which is why I always — until the past year, when I finally realized maybe all these cookbooks and cookbook authors I interviewed were on to something since they were all saying the same thing — just grabbed my eggs and dairy products such as milk out of the fridge minutes before I would mix them into some kind of batter and dough. This is a baking no-no (number 15) because it results in dense cakes and breads. Apparently at room temperature, the article says, eggs, butter and liquids such as milk "bond and form an emulsion that traps air." Cold ingredients don't always bond.

As part of my quest to get my cookie baking Mojo back, I decided to pay more attention to some of these baking details. Letting the eggs and butter get to room temperature has been one of my changes and I'm happy to report, I will go up against Rachel's cooking baking any day. Bring it!

But a "mistake" I don't see myself changing, despite admonitions to the contrary from a variety of well-known and/or cooks I admire, is measuring dry ingredients in a liquid measuring cup. (And this is before going into the whole weighing debate which certain people absolutely swear by.) I don't even own dry measuring cups (or teaspoon/tablespoon measuring utensils for that matter; I use my eye and pour it directly into the bowl or into the palm of my hand. Oh, and I don't sift — ever.) Apparently baking this way means that my flour is in danger of being compacted if I bang on the cup to try to make it create a level line.

The article did get me thinking, though. I am a good cook. But could I be a better cook if I was more precise, more of a stickler for detail? Is that worth exploring?

My gut reaction is no. Leave it be. I'll try new things when I want (as in with the room temperature switcheroo) and because I'm motivated, not because someone, somewhere, is declaring my method a "mistake."

What about you? Do you break certain cooking "rules"? How's that working for you? Do you have certain procedures you absolutely swear by? Let's do some sharing and see what we come up with.

Shortsand...or What Not to Do When You Make Shortbread

So Rachel and I are actually in the same house with the Divine Miss M and thought wouldn't it be lovely to make something together rather than virtually? I asked for shortbread because I've never made and LOVE it. I've never made it because it smacks of pie crust to me and we all know how well I do in that category. (Read about my phobia here and my feeble attempt to get past it at Thanksgiving here)

Anyway because I am such a shortbread fan and because S is as well, I figured we'd just double Uncle Bub's recipe. I mean more is always better right?

Sadly, as this photo will show, some recipes are not meant to be doubled apparently. What we ended up with is shortsand, not shortbread. It's edible but you need to stand over a plate or you will simply have disintegrated crumbs on your chest or the floor.



When my mom suggested we make shortbread together I was totally game. The recipe I usually make around the holidays is super easy and incredibly delicious so it seemed like the perfect thing to whip up together during M's nap. Though my mom revealed to me that she does indeed possess a standing mixer, we went at it together by hand this time for convenience (her mixer has collected roughly 23 years of dust in a cupboard in--of all places--the bathroom...she seems to have only used it one time and, in that one time, broken one of the attachments). I'm pretty sure this wasn't the problem, though. One of the things I learned in my years working in a restaurant kitchen is that not all recipes lend themselves to size alterations through simple doubling or halving of ingredients. For whatever reason, it just doesn't always work. Thinking we needed a double batch due to the number of interested eaters, we casually doubled the ingredients. Eeh....nope. My only real complaint is that the recipe didn't fail in terms of not being edible. This means that when we make it again tomorrow I'll find myself having consumed an obscene amount of butter and sugar. Somebody's gotta eat it all, right?

Food for Thought Thursdays: Fear of Failure

Janet here: I had a moment of cooking panic this week. I had decided to make biscotti, something I'd never attempted before, but no biggie, right? I make new things all the time. And then it all began to go horribly wrong.

I followed the recipe the way I follow all recipes: I take the overall idea of mixing a bunch of stuff together but completely ignore all those little niggly details — aren't they really for people who are afraid to cook? — about sifting, mixing certain dry ingredients together first, using certain equipment etc. I mean, they all end up in the bowl and then in a baking pan anyway so what's the point?

With biscotti, the point, apparently, is that you end up with biscotti that actually looks something like biscotti instead of little biscotti pieces that look as if they aren't full grown yet.

I began to get concerned after I happily dumped all the wet ingredients into the bowl in one fell swoop rather than in batches as suggested. What I had after mixing was just a bunch of dough pieces. Nothing was holding together. The recipe said to take the dough out of the bowl and place it on the counter for kneading. Maybe, I reasoned, kneading would pull my dough together. Nope. After kneading and kneading and kneading and getting nothing to hold together in a way that was supposed to yield a 10" log about 3 inches in diameter, I gave up and just made balls of dough at whatever size I could force to hold together. It looked like this.


Now the story has a (mostly) happy ending, which I will share with you tomorrow when I reveal the full recipe and the final product. But in the meantime, I learned something about myself and about cooking. First, I am not used to having anything turn out other than fabulous, and I was not happy when things began to spin out of control. How would I explain this to the family — okay, Rachel, because of course there is a competitive streak to this little collaboration of ours. And, finally, it turns out instructions are there for a reason and that, yes, they do apply to me. Seems like this little baking adventure stirred up more than just flour and eggs.