I’ve been sick lately, so I haven’t been cooking — or updating my blog. We had an enjoyable Christmas holiday, with plenty of food to eat. We also received a few cooking-related gifts, and I would like to show them off and tell a little about them.
First, the big daddy: a KitchenAid mixer! It’s a 5-quart, bowl-lift, heavy duty model. I’ve just used it a couple of times, but it’s been great so far. It mixes really well, and you barely have to scrape the bowl. AND you just flip it on, and you can go get the next batch of ingredients ready and it just sits there working. It seems powerful too. I was making some banana bread muffins with it, dumped in some mostly-frozen bananas, and it mashed them up pretty easily.
This is a neat little whisk that my wife found a few weeks before Christmas. Unlike your typical wire whisk, this one is pretty firm, and the straight edges are great for sauce pans. It has a 10-year warranty too!
This is a food chopper that my wife received as a gift. Its like a mini food-processor. The container holds just a few cups of ingredients, and the power button is just a pulse (or push and hold). Its just the right size to be handy and not get in the way in our small kitchen.
Next, is the Whirley Pop (Amazon link)! Its a pretty simple device to make popcorn on the stove-top. While it cooks, you twist the handle which turns the stirrers inside to keep the popcorn from burning. It makes popcorn really fast, and you can even make kettle corn as good as you get from the Fair (or baseball/basketball games).
Last, but not least, are cookbooks! One is a cookbook for recipes in which all the ingredients come from CostCo. The other is about barbecueing everything from burgers to ribs to fish to octopus (where do I buy octopus???). The third one is all about RIBS! Luckily, I like ribs enough to forgive this book for not having any pictures. (: Good pictures in a cookbook can really convince you to try to make something new and yummy.
Overall, Christmas was a nice holiday. We spent time with family, and had plenty of good food to eat. Oh yeah… I made Tres Leches cake for everyone to try. Only one person didn’t like it (out of like 10-12) due to the ’soggy cake’ texture. Everyone else seemed to like it.
Happy New Year!
3 Responses
January 5th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
hey, once again, it had great flavor, but if I can’t get past the texture, it doesn’t matter how good it tastes… it’s just not gonna get down!
January 8th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Chad,
I bought some spare ribs to make in the next few days, but I want to know if you have a really good recipe. All I ever do is just put them in the crockpot and dump a bottle of store bought BBQ sauce over them — they turn out ok, but sometimes if I have a pretty thick cut, they seem kind of dry or tough — even in the crock pot. So, any suggestions you have would be great.
Steph
January 8th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Hi Steph,
I’m actually making ribs today too (baby backs)! This link is what I
did the last time I cooked spare ribs:
http://www.cspencer.net/cooking/2008/07/for-dinner-ribs-potatoes-brussel-sprouts/#more-84
I just cooked them whole, but then I learned that you’re supposed to
trim them down like this:
http://www.bbq-book.com/news2006/html/october_2006.html
The basic steps to cooking ribs are:
1. Season with a dry rub
2. Bake low and slow and wet — 250F for 2-4 hours with some liquid in
the bottom
3. Finish them how you like them — I like to thin out a BBQ sauce,
and then broil it onto the ribs as a glaze
My home-made sauce recipe is here:
http://www.cspencer.net/cooking/2008/05/bbq-country-style-ribs/#more-13
Good luck!
-Chad
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