Goetta Chedda Double Deckas:

If you see me walking down the street, there's a pretty good chance that I'm thinking about something edible. I could be considering where we'll go or what I'll order out for dinner that night, or weighing different restaurant's tap lists and drink prices, or, more commonly, pondering the contents of our fridge and thinking of what to make for dinner.

A few weeks ago, I was walking by Fountain Square doing just that. We had refrigerated pastry dough, and for one reason or another, the jumbo muffin tin (that I've never used for actual muffins) came to mind. Inspiration struck--what if I layered pastry dough circles with other ingredients in the muffin tin? When I got back to the office, I sketched my plan on a post-it and headed to the store that night for the rest of the ingredients. Goetta, mushrooms, cheddar. And the goetta chedda double decka was born.

How to make the GCDD:

Preheat oven to 400.

1. Saute the mushrooms thoroughly and cook the goetta.
2. Cut a circle with a biscuit cutter or other round object in the pastry dough.

3.Place a layer on the bottom of a greased muffin tin.
4. Sprinkle some cheese in the cup.

5. Add a circle of goetta.
6. Add some mushrooms.
7. Add some more cheese.
8. Repeat until you've reached the top of the tin.

Cook for about 25 minutes, and if necessary, place on top rack and broil for a few minutes to get some nice color on the top.

We served ours with a basic country gravy. We made this for dinner, though it would also be great for brunch. It looks impressive and is actually incredibly easy to assemble.

naan disclosure:

I have a confession to make. I’ve never actually eaten at an Indian restaurant. It’s one of David’s final frontiers, and he’s wearing me down gradually.

David went on a field trip to Chicago for work a few weeks ago, and I decided I wanted to make something new and different.

I was going to make Indian.

The difficulties were clear—I didn’t have all day to cook, so I’d have to prep some in advance, get up super early in the morning and use the slow cooker. And then there’s the teeny tiny detail that I had no idea what I was cooking was supposed to taste like.

“Even if it’s not authentic, I’m sure it will at least be edible.” I reasoned. “If not, Papa Johns delivers until 9:45.”

After a few hours of searching, I created the menu for the evening. Literally.

Welcome to "Nomvana"

I broke out the calligraphy set and attempted to write in sanskrit. I'm pretty sure that all I managed to write was gibberish consonants run together and forgot the vowels, but it's the thought that counts.

I found a nice recipe for lamb slow cooker curry with Serrano peppers for the main, paired with raita--a cucumber yogurt sauce to scale down the heat from the Serrano. For rice, I cooked basmati with spinach and a generous amount of cumin. Dessert was the result of my recent pudding shot experiments. And because if you are going to do something, you might as well go all out, I made naan.

I shopped for all my ingredients the day before, which included staring at the fresh ginger for an embarrassingly long time, trying to figure out how much I'd need. I had debated the night before about making naan and decided to go for it. I had never tried to make naan. After I tweeted a picture, apparently I'm not alone.

this is all you need!

I don't understand why, now that I've made it. It's kind of like making pancakes. You don't need a brick oven, or a crazy rigged terra cotta flower pot (I'm looking at you, Alton Brown), or anything expensive or weird like that.

I knew nothing about Indian cooking, and I made very passable naan. You can too! I found this recipe on Chow and followed it closely, because naan recipes are all over the place if you just search the internet. This one seems pretty standard. I've made it twice now, and the results are consistent.

makes me want some hummus real bad

I would definitely classify this as a great success. David said the flavors were great, and the raita was the best he'd had. I liked the spinach+cumin+basmati dish I invented. The curry was delicious and had just the right amount of heat. And even though I've never eaten at an Indian restaurant, I can assure you, our apartment certainly smelled like one for the next couple days.

A-Team Chili:

Winter in Cincinnati means different things to many people. To David, it means that he’s in for another season of fighting with his rear wheel drive Mustang in the snow. To my Dad, it’s time to break out the jeep, attach the snowplow and help out some grateful neighbors.

Me, I have a thing against winter. I suppose it really isn’t Winter’s fault that I’m short and my jean hems drag the salty, mucky ground, or that I spend most of season glaring out the window at the frigid air, wearing my winter coat indoors to be comfortable. Winter is what it is and doesn’t care what nobody thinks. I still don’t like it. I want my flip flops back.

To recap: winter to me means that I wreck my jeans and my winter coat gets a workout. I also eat chili and soup. A lot. Probably while wearing my coat inside. Potentially glaring out the window at the frigid air.

David was making a nice tomato soup for me for awhile, but sometimes tomato soup doesn’t cut it for lunch. Resolving to eat out less and cook at home more and eager to continue using our Le Creuset French oven, we decided to make our own chili.

I spent Saturday morning scouring recipes on the internet to find a good chili recipe. I found some solid recipes. Nothing was wrong with them, except I wanted our first batch of homemade chili to be a little less conventional.

I began to think of unusual, tasty things to put in the Chili and drawing up a list. Dark beer! Chipotle peppers! Ground bison! Camel meat!

“You know…” David remarked from the futon, doing his own chili research. “Making a chili is not like assembling the A-Team.”

“Whatever. Garbonzo beans!”

“No.”

“Fine, well I still want the camel and bison meat in it. It will be delicious, you’ll see.”

Camel is a very interesting meat. It is very lean and red, and smells delicious when you are browning it. Don’t feel bad for the camel, camels are not very nice animals. They have cranky, sour dispositions. I would be too if I always had sand stuck between my toes.

it is important to sort dried beans. Seriously. David found two pebbles. Dental work is expensive.

Camel, one of the tastiest Jerks of the animal kingdom

The chili came out very nicely for our first try. We are now on our 4th batch. We’ve been messing around with the meats and the spices. I firmly believe that we will stumble across the perfect chili by the time winter is over.

we finish with a roux to thicken the chili

Thick cut rib steak:

David went into work after hours last Friday. While he stated it should only take an hour or so, I had my doubts. I’d heard that before.

I decided to make the best of it—I wanted to go to Whole Foods and buy dinner as a surprise. I wandered around the store and by the butcher counter, trying to decide what I wanted to bring home. I finally decided on a thick cut rib steak.

As a side note, the butcher counter at Whole foods is way too tall, so it took about 5 minutes and me jumping up and down like a frenetic terrier to get the attention of the man behind the counter. This is why I usually let David, who is a foot taller, order.

I also visited the salad bar and was scooping up curried cous cous and wheat berry salad into a little box when David texted me that he was on his way back.

This was good and bad. David was not going to be stuck at work all night, but my surprise would not be quite as surprise-y. David would notice when he got back that his wife was missing and know something was up. Deciding that I could salvage this and I was going to be cryptic, I texted him the following message.

“Preheat the oven. Meat. 2lbs.”

When I got back, the oven was almost ready and we were ready to roast our steak.

I also bought this flemish sour ale made with champagne yeasts

I had also picked up some red peppers, one white onion, and some mushrooms, which David sautéed in a yummy sauce. I had seconds of the onions and mushrooms, and I don’t even like mushrooms.

...and I didn't set anything on fire. Win.

David went into work while I was home this past week, though I tried my hardest to convince him to stay home with me.

“Are you sure you can’t stay home? What’s so important at work?” I pled, listing out all the fun things that we could do. The park, the aquarium, the zoo, the museum center to see the dinosaur exhibit. Despite my offers, David decided to be a responsible adult and go into work. This left me with an entire day to myself.

What would I do with it? I tossed around the idea of dying my hair, decided against it. I resolved to embark an equally risky endeavor.

I could cook dinner.

I was already headed to the store for supplies for a grill out anyway.

I spent about an hour on photograzing, looking for inspiration. I needed something easy, something that was difficult to mess up. I was determined not to fall prey to my usual MO, which is wandering around in the grocery store for a huge period of time, grabbing random ingredients and bringing them home to try and form some sort of haphazard semblance of a tasty dinner or snack.

I saw the chocolate dipped coconut macaroon picture first. The recipe claims that they could not be easier to make. They certainly seemed easy, and they looked fantastic. I wrote down the ingredients on my grocery list.

But for the main course? I tried to pin down what I wanted to cook. The only results after all my “research” was that my stomach was rumbling from all the yummy visuals and I had decided that I wanted something larger—that I could stick in the oven and leave for a few hours. Ribs are pretty hard to mess up, right?

I headed out to Hyde Park Kroger for provisions. Despite my good intentions, I did end up wandering around the store for an hour in an erratic, inefficient pattern that probably puzzled security. I ended up with the supplies to make my macaroons, two racks of beef ribs, some red, green and yellow peppers, chunks of beef for the skewers, and juice boxes of cheap white zinfandel, with obligatory cheese, Beecher’s Flagship reserve.

yay for fancy-pants aged cheese

I hauled it all home and struggled to carry it all up the stairs. I then sat down and thought about what I should do first. David would have made a scheduling chart.

I just started with the macaroons.

I decided to make a double batch, and after fudging the recipe to approximately double the amount while doing the least amount of math, fraction and conversion factors possible, dumped the whole can of sweetened condensed milk in the large mixing bowl. A little salt, vanilla extract, and egg whites went in, and I stirred them well. Then I measured out the coconut flakes.(I've put my laura-fied recipe at the bottom of this post.)

I ended up with some very yummy smelling coconut goo. Following the recipe’s instructions, I placed them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven, setting the timer for 20 minutes. I them went about my next task.

In a separate area of the kitchen, I put down freezer paper and prepped the ribs. I liberally sprinkled them with pepper, soy sauce and a ½ cup secret ingredient, then lightly brushed them with Montgomery inn BBQ sauce and stuck them in the fridge.

I'm not very good at keeping secrets

My first set of macaroons finished baking, so I pulled them out and set them aside to cool. I loaded up the cookie sheet with another set and put them back in the oven.

The skewer prep was next. I put more freezer paper down and opened up the packages of meat. I stuck them in a baggie and poured in some soy sauce, Marsala wine and a little onion powder, then stuck them back in the fridge. I then cut up the peppers for the skewers.

After a few more rounds of macaroons in the oven, I had used all of my coconut goo and they looked oh-so-tasty. I let them cool, then transferred them onto more freezer paper for the next phase—milk chocolate dipping and covering the bottoms of them in crushed heath bar pieces.

Now that the oven was free, I transferred the ribs into it, and set the rib timer for 2 hours and 20 minutes. At this rate, the ribs would be ready about an hour an a half after David got home. I made him a cheese plate to keep him happy until they would be ready. I decided I had earned a juice box, and some cheese.

raw cow's milk cheddar, Beecher's flagship reserve, Widmer 4 year old cheddar, Black Diamond 2 year old cheddar, Beemster gouda and extra aged gouda and lastly, Cabot chipotle cheddar cheese

yes, that's a crazy straw

I then began the dipping process. I used a whole bag of Ghirardelli milk chocolate chips, but ran out halfway through. This was terribly upsetting. But I am a resourceful baker, so I looked in the cabinet for the supplies I had bought the day after Easter from Graeter’s. And began melting down chocolate bunnies.

Sorry little buddy, it's for a good cause

The heath bar crumbles helped a lot, because they acted as a binder against the gluey chocolate and secured my crumbly macaroons. I set my chocolate covered macaroons in the fridge to further set them.

Making the skewers was the last thing on the list, which I did while singing a little nonsense song about bell peppers to the cat, that I believe makes cooking more enjoyable.

The ribs came out and were very good, though I may have used a little too much pepper. The Scotch gave them a nice earthy flavor that went well with the tangy BBQ sauce.

So-easy-even-I-could-make-them Chocolate-Dipped Coconut Macaroons with Heath Bar

Macaroon batter:
1 can sweetened condensed milk (I used the large can of eagle brand)
about ½ cup egg beaters egg whites
3 teaspoons vanilla
¼ teaspoon of salt
6 ½ to 7 cups sweetened coconut flakes

For the chocolate dipping:
1 entire bag of milk chocolate Ghirardelli chips
2 small chocolate bunnies, or more chocolate chips
1 bag crushed Heath bar from baking aisle, or you can crush them yourself for good anger management

To Start:

1. Heat oven to 325°F. Line cookie sheets with aluminum foil. Seriously. Line the sheets, and spray the liner with PAM, these cookies are very sticky once they’ve cooled and you will have to pry them off your cookie sheet. I used a metal grilling spatula to do that part.

2. Dump the entire can of condensed milk into the bowl, mix in the salt, the vanilla and the eggs. Stir well. Then add the coconut flakes. Stir some more.

3. Grab little pieces of the batter and arrange them into little sticky coconut piles on a cookie sheet. They don’t expand much when cooked, so about an inch and a half apart is good.

4. Bake them in the oven for about 20 minutes. I tried 17, but in the end stuck with 20.

5. Take your cookies out of the oven and set them aside. Do not touch. I let mine set for about 20-30 minutes.

6. Once the cookies have cooled, transfer them from the foil to some non stick paper, such as wax or freezer paper (shiny side up). They will be stuck to the foil. Your best bet to get them off of it is to use a metal spatula. There will be a few macaroon casualties. It is OK to eat them.

7. Melt the chocolate chips in a microwave safe container with curved sides (this is important), checking every 40 seconds and stirring to melt evenly. Place the crushed heath bar on a small plate.

8. Grab a macaroon where you think it will not fall apart and put it in the chocolate, gently. Then use the side of the container to keep the macaroon from falling apart from the pull of the chocolate on the bottom of the cookie. Run the macaroon up the side of the container to coat the bottom in chocolate, then immediately place on the plate of Heath bar. Stick the macaroon back on the nonstick paper.

9. Stick the macaroons in the fridge to further set them and make sure they don’t fall apart for about ½ an hour.

(Adapted from a combination of Joy of Cooking and Baking Illustrated, and the Brown Eyed Baker)