Tales of a Quarantinista

SO I haven't eaten at a lot of restaurants lately! I'm guessing that you already know why. But some parts of quarantine have actually been fun. I like home school. And I have gotten to play with my brother and sister way more than usual and do lots of art projects. But I've also gotten to do LOTS of cooking and baking. And even though this is supposed to be a restaurant blog, I thought that you might like to hear about some of what I've been making.

We actually started spring break out in Montana skiing. We didn't last there very long, but because we were trying to avoid being around other people, we did a lot of cooking. My mom and dad's ski instructor Randy, taught us a new way to heat up left over pizza last Christmas. It sounds weird, but you warm it in a frying pan with some olive oil. We tried it and definitely agreed that it's the best way to make reheated pizza taste freshly cooked.

So on this trip, we decided to give Randy's other pizza trick a try. He told us that for breakfast, you can scrape the cheese and toppings off of left over pizza and mix it in with eggs to make really good scrambled eggs or an omelet. We tried it with pizza that had spinach and artichokes on it. And then my mom used the crust to make toast, using the pan and olive oil technique. The eggs were really good. The crust toast tasted really good too, but it was a little odd for breakfast. I think that next time I'd serve the eggs with regular toast and make the pizza toast into some sort of appetizer or serve with dinner.

I bet you've never seen a breakfast like this before! I know it looks kind of gross, but I promise that it was super good!!

But very soon after our pizza breakfast day, we had to head home, and we've pretty much been in our house ever since. The good news about always being home is that we've had lots of time for big cooking projects. Our first project was making bagels. We used this recipe, but we had some trouble with it.

The dough was too dry and never got stretchy. We added probably 1/2 - 3/4c of extra water in small amounts and kneaded for at least 12-15 more minutes. The dough looked better then, but still wasn’t stretchy. So we preheated the oven to 250, turned it off once it came to temperature and then did the rise in there to try to better activate the dough. We did the rest of the recipe as written and used the honey.

I guess our changes worked because they were great. We did poppy, sesame, onion and everything versions.

The broken one in the back fell apart while we were boiling it, but it still tasted spectacular!

Our next big project was soft pretzels. These were really fun to make, and the dough worked much better just by following the recipe than with our bagels. Making bagels and soft pretzels is similar though, because you boil both in water before you bake them. Twisting the pretzels was a little bit tricky, but it was fun.

These were my dad's favorite. He and I tried them with all different kinds of fancy mustard!

We also made English muffins. If I'd known that I was going to blog about our projects, I would have taken more pictures. But I'll take more when we cook from now on. The interesting thing about cooking English muffins, is that you use cornmeal on the dough and then brown the muffins on a griddle before baking them in the oven. Because you cover the dough in cornmeal, once it is rolled out, you can't re-roll your scraps. But my mom just griddled and baked the scraps too, and they turned out to be delicious! English muffins maybe don't sound that exciting or worth making yourself, but they were INCREDIBLE!!!!!!

You can see the cornmeal on the English muffins. Can you guess whose H shirt that is?!

One of my favorite projects that we've made so far is goldfish crackers! I liked making these because my brother and sister and I were determined to use every tiny bit of dough to make as many crackers as possible. The recipe says to roll out the dough, but it fell apart when we tried to roll it. So we patted it out with our hands instead and that worked fine. The crackers taste more like cheese straws than traditional goldfish crackers, but they were yummy and fun to make.

A different kind of home SCHOOL! Ha ha!

One Saturday, my brother and I did a really special project with my dad. There's a very famous chef named Thomas Keller. He has fancy restaurants in California and New York. We've watched some of his cooking classes and used them to make new dishes. He's doing a special project now called Big Hearts Little Farms, to help farms that are struggling because restaurants are closed and not buying produce. Chef Keller wants to support these farms and so he started a project selling boxes of ingredients for meals with food from farms. Then he makes videos about how to take everything in the box and cook it. We ordered the first box he offered and made leg of lamb with roasted vegetables and two different kinds of beet salads. The vegetables looked beautiful and tasted very fresh. The entire meal was magnificent. My favorite part of cooking was peeling the beets and my least favorite part was taking the dirt off the potatoes. We roasted the beets and some were mixed with horseradish and chives, and then some were also mixed with creme fraiche. None of us had ever had beets and horseradish together before, but now it's a family favorite!

The small orange root vegetables on the left are actually round carrots, which I had never seen before!

These are the beets with horseradish and herbs.

These were the beets with creme fraiche.

We also made another dinner using recipes from Thomas Keller that included salmon and Bearnaise sauce. There are five French mother sauces that are viewed as the basis for all other sauces and I think that every chef needs to know them. They are Bechamel, Veloute, Espagnole, Sauce Tomat and Hollandaise.

Bechamel is a sauce that starts with a roux, which is when you cook flour and fat together as a thickener, and then add milk or other dairy to make a white sauce.

Veloute is a roux mixed with a clear stock, to add flavor.

Espagnole is a brown sauce also made with a roux, and beef or veal stock, tomato puree, and a mirepoix. A mirepoix is small diced vegetables cooked in butter or oil for a long time until they're soft. It is used as a flavor base.

Sauce Tomat is made by cooking down tomatoes (I bet you could guess that!). But it's different from the Italian tomato sauce that we usually think about. Sauce Tomat is sometimes thickened with a roux and is flavored with pork and vegetables.

Hollandaise is the only mother sauce that is not thickened with a roux. It is thickened from a blend of egg yolks and melted butter.

We made a Bearnaise sauce, which is considered a child of the mother sauce Hollandaise. It is flavored with herbs and white vinegar. It is tricky to make, so my dad did most of it. He had to whisk for a really long time and joked that Chef Keller must be really strong!!!!

He also made salmon two different ways. He cooked the loin in a hot pan with oil so that it got really crispy skin. And he cooked the belly in a sous vide, which cooks it immersed in a bag in water at really low temperature. We put the Bearnaise sauce on the salmon and asparagus. We all thought that this meal was incredible!

Having my dad around more has been one of the really good parts of quarantine! I don't usually get to eat dinner and cook with him as much and that has been really special.

That wine was not for me!

My mom says that one of the reasons that she likes to bake and cook is so that the house smells good and makes us feel cozy when we get home from school. So I guess now that we're home all the time, she's baking all time! She joked that if she wants the house to smell good, it would probably be easier to buy some candles that smell like soup and cookies, but I'm glad that she cooks instead!

Two of the recipes that we made recently had lots of cinnamon in them and so they made the house smell especially good. The first one was a cinnamon swirl bread. Usually when we're not in quarantine, my mom mostly cooks healthy recipes. Since we've all been home, she has been doing a lot more treats (I think that's because my dad doesn't believe her that healthy baking can taste good!). But this recipe was actually a whole grain bread. And my dad did like it! A cool thing about this recipe is that you can add any mix of whole grains that you want. An easy way to do it is to use a 7-grain hot cereal mix. My mom wanted to save that for actual cereal though, so we used a mix of quinoa flakes, rye flour, oats and ground flaxseeds.

We especially liked this as toast with butter. I thought that this recipe was very good, although I thought that the next recipe was even better!

My mom sliced the bread and then froze it, so that we can warm up single pieces at a time. Isn't it pretty?

We also made cinnamon rolls, and they were a HUGE hit. The Kitchn (which is a very good cooking website) tried out the four most popular cinnamon roll recipes on the internet and said that this one is the best, so of course we had to try it! This recipe is a little bit complicated, but the hardest part was definitely letting them cool enough to eat them!

They would still be good plain, but the frosting makes them even better!

This next recipe we tried is Easter Matzo Bark and we made it because it is a good mix of the two sides of our family. You take matzo and cover it with a caramel sauce and bake it and then add a layer of chocolate and Easter candy, although any candy would work. This is a good recipe to make because kids can do most of it. Everybody who had it thought it was amazing. It tastes more special than it sounds. We used candy eggs filled with peanut butter, which I highly recommend!

I hope that you have liked reading about what we have been cooking and baking. There's actually a lot more, so if you like reading about this, let me know and I'll post more recipes!!!