Steven's Strawberries (StevenBerries)

This is a strawberry stuffed with a mini marshmallow. Insanity, right? I know. This is what happens when you have strawberries , mini marshmallows and chocolate that is taking waaaay too long to melt.


This is the kid who decided that this would be a good idea. He was so hungry he attempted to eat his car key. And his cell phone. At the same time. I don't know if he was the first one to come up with this, but he's the only one I've ever seen do it.

I'm pretty sure you don't actually need instructions on how to do this, but I will give them to you anyway. Ingredients: Strawberries (with the top cut off), Mini Marshmallows

Put a mini marshmallow in a strawberry. The end.

P.S. For added deliciousness, dip in chocolate!

Grilled Cheese a la "Benny and Joon"

For those of you who like your sandwiches pre-squished, this post is for you. Now I realize that making grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron is not an original idea, but after watching Benny and Joon (an awesome movie) we decided that it sounded super fun, and once we realized how awesome the sandwiches were, we decided to share them with you. So go forth and iron!

Ingredients: Cheese (sliced), Bread, Wax Paper (optional), there is butter in the picture but I wouldn't suggest using it unless you like soggy grilled cheese sandwiches.

First of all, you will probably want to put some wax paper on the ironing board, just in case there is any cheese leakage. Next put some bread on the wax paper. Next put some cheese on the bread. Whooph, that was difficult, but you made it. Move on to the next step with a sense of accomplishment.
Here's where you get a choice! You can put some wax paper on top of the bread if you are afraid of serious cheese leakage, but I wouldn't be, if I were you. Anyhow, if you put wax paper on top be careful to keep checking that it hasn't melted onto the bread.

If you are not lame and don't need wax paper, just go at it with an iron on high-ish power. Iron one side till it is crispy, then iron the other side till it is crispy and the cheese is melted.


See! The cheese is melted! Delicious grilled cheese sandwich! Om nom nom!

Recipe:

Cheese
Bread

Put cheese on bread. Iron.
Hoorah!

Chicken Kiev. It's a chicken and butter taco!

This is Chicken Kiev. Chicken wrapped around seasoned butter and dipped in breadcrumbs to create one of the most delicious things you will ever eat. But not all chicken kiev is created equal. Some is made with an inferior butter mixture that tastes like gross and oozes. Some is soggy. Some is overcooked. Not this chicken kiev. This is a recipe from Cooks Illustrated an extremely pretentious, and awesome, magazine for people who cook. Their extensively tested recipes are not only delicious but also scientific! Hooray science! So anyway, Cooks Illustrated is the reason that this chicken kiev is delicious and not rubbery or tasteless.

First things first, we have to make some butter filling stuff. Ingredients: Butter, Lemon, Tarragon, Parsley, Shallot, Salt, Pepper

There's really not much to the butter filling, it's mostly juicing lemons and chopping herbs. This is the part where we show you how to juice a lemon with a spoon. I suppose you could use bottled lemon juice, but Cook's Illustrated told me to use the juice of a lemon, so that is what I will do.

This is where we show you all about chopping tarragon. My advice is, do it with a knife. Chop the parsley too, while you're at it.

Also chop the shallot. Hoorah for mini-onions! (This picture is sideways because of laziness. But you get the idea.)

Now put all those things you just chopped/juiced plus some butter in a bowl and mix it all together. I suggest a kitchen-aid or some similar device, but you know, whatever, wooden spoons are cool too.


Once everything has been mixed together make it into a square on a piece or wax or parchment paper. Now stick it in the refrigerator and get to work on the chicken part of the chicken!
Ingredients: Bread, Chicken, Flour, Eggs, Dijon Mustard, Oil

So, this part is a lot easier if you have a food processor, but we don't. So if you have a food processor, process the bread until it is tiny little crumbs. If you don't, use a knife. It takes a while, but whatever. Now put the bread on a cookie sheet with some oil and stick it in the oven for a bit. After the breads stint in the oven, it will be all bread crumby and delicious.

Now here is where you butterfly the chicken. This is a really horrible picture of butterflying chicken, but you will just have to make do. You are basically cutting the chicken in half to make it skinnier. So cut through the skinny part.

It should look something like this when you're finished.

Now pound that sucker! Pound it good! (Suggestion: Don't pound right on the counter. The counter will dent and you will be sad.)
Now take that butter out of the refrigerator and cut it into four pieces (because we are making four chicken breasts)

Salt and pepper each chicken.

Put butter in the middle of each chicken and fold it over, to make sort of a raw chicken and butter taco.

Whisk the eggs and mustard together to make an egg wash. This will be the second thing you dip the chicken in.
This is what our bread crumbs looked like after their stint in the oven. Pretty gorgeous, no?

Dip your raw chicken taco first into some seasoned flour (seasoned with salt and pepper)

Then into the egg wash
Then into the bread crumbs.

Now put them on a wire rack over a baking sheet and stick them in the oven until it is no longer a raw chicken and butter taco, but chicken kiev! Hoorah!

When you cut them open, don't expect an oozy gush of butter, there is not that much. There is just enough butter to make this chicken taste like heaven. The chicken is juicy, the butter is lemony and delicious. This chicken is worth ten times the effort it took to make. So treat yourself to a chicken-y bliss and make chicken kiev today.

Chicken Kiev (from Cooks Illustrated)

Herb Butter

8 tbsp unsalted butter, softened

1 tbsp minced shallot

1 tbsp minced fresh parsley leaves

1/2 tsp minced fresh tarragon leaves

1 tbsp juice from 1 lemon

3/8 tsp table salt

1/8 tsp ground black pepper

Chicken

4-5 slices white sandwich bread, cut into 3/4 in cubes

2 tbsp vegetable oil

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1 c flour

3 large eggs, beaten

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1. For the herb butter: Mix all butter ingredients in medium bowl with rubber spatula until thoroughly combined. Form into a 3-inch square on plastic wrap; wrap tightly and refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.

2. For the chicken: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 300 degrees. Add half of bread cubes to food processor and pulse until cubes are coarsely ground, about sixteen 1-second pulses. Transfer crumbs to large bowl and repeat with remaining bread. Add 1/8 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper to bread crumbs. Add oil and toss until crumbs are evenly coated. Spread crumbs on rimmed baking sheet and bake until golden brown and dry, about 25 minutes, stirring twice during baking time. Let cool to room temperature.

3. Butterfly chicken breasts and pound until 1/4 inch thin. Unwrap butter and cut into 4 rectangular pieces. Place chicken breast cut side up on work surface. Season both sides with salt and pepper. Place 1 piece of butter in center of bottom half of chicken. Roll bottom edge of chicken over butter, then fold in sides and continue rolling to form neat, tight package, pressing on seam to seal. Repeat with remaining butter and chicken. Refrigerate chicken, uncovered, to allow edges to seal, about 1 hour.

4. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Place flour, eggs, and bread crumbs in separate pie plates or shallow dishes. Season flour with 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper; season bread crumbs with 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Add mustard to eggs and whisk to combine. Dredge 1 chicken breast in flour, shaking off excess, then coat with egg mixture, allowing excess to drip off. Coat all sides of chicken breast with bread crumbs, pressing gently so that crumbs adhere. Place on wire rack set over rimmed baking sheet. Repeat flouring and breading of remaining chicken breasts.

5. Bake until 160 degrees, 40 to 45 minutes. Let rest 5 minutes on wire rack before serving.

"Bagels"

The picture above is a bagel. However, it is not a bagel in the traditional sense of the word. There is no hole in the middle (that just makes these too hard to make), and they hardly taste like bagels, but they do taste like delicious. The above is a cinnamon sugar bagel that was the result of some complicated cinnamon sugar experiment. You certainly don't have to be as crazy as we are, and in fact I would suggest you don't. We kind of went a little bit overboard. But that's okay, because the bagels were delicious. So don't even worry about it, you will be warned about which parts to skip if you don't want to be insane.

Ingredients: Corn Meal, Vegetable Shortening, Bread Flour, Butter, Sugar, Yeast, Cinnamon, Brown Sugar


Mix some warm water with yeast and sugar. Let it sit for about five minutes so that the yeast can eat the sugar and grow up big and strong.

Now add some of the flour. Not all of it, because that would be insanity.

Now add the rest of it and put the bread hook on the mixer. Now this next part gets a little weird because we think bagel dough is hard to knead. If you have the skills to do this without being crazy, go right ahead. The point is, knead the dough for 10 minutes.

The dough is really not at all cohesive at all, so our suggestion is to knead it by hand for a minute or two...

...and then stick it back in the mixer for the rest of the time. If you want anything in the bagels (chocolate chips, blueberries, cinnamon/raisin, etc.) It will look not at all like dough when it is in the mixer, so when it comes out of the mixer...

...knead it a little bit to make it all cohesive again.
Cover and let rise. Only, you won't really be able to tell that it's risen. Because this dough is sneaky.
Now here's where we started experimenting. Our goal was to make an intensely cinnamon sugar "bagel" and we had no clue how to do that, so we experimented. Our first cinnamon sugar mixture consisted of cinnamon, brown sugar and butter.


Our second started out as cinnamon and sugar...

...but then had some melted butter added to it to make it into crumbles. Now after we made the bagels we figured out that the crumbles would be good to put on the bagels ofter they came out of the oven, because putting them on the bagels before was just silly as they melt (duh).

Bring a pot of water to boil (theres some sugar and salt in the water too) this might take a while as there is a lot of water to be boiled. A lot. As in 16 cups.

Form the dough into eight of whatever shape you like (that's the nice thing about homemade, you can make all sorts of crazy shapes) and let them rise again, covered, while the water comes to a boil.

Boil your bagels! Mmmm, doesn't that look tasty? (By the way, the answer is no)

This is where we make the bagels insanely tasty. If you don't want cinnamon sugar, you could put any number of things on them. Sesame seeds, onions, poppy seeds, cheese, etc. We coated the bagels in butter, then in cinnamon sugar,

Next, we covered them in brown sugar/butter/cinnamon, then crumbled some crumbles on top. Bake for about 25 minutes on a cookie sheet that has been coated in cornmeal. If you do follow the same procedure as us, be warned, the cinnamon sugar will melt all over the cookie sheet. This isn't a big deal however if you scrape the burned sugar off the sheet with a spatula right away. If you don't do so, the sugar will harden and never come off. Ever.

This is a picture of a bagel that has been cut in half and completely covered in creme cheese. This is the only way to eat a bagel. (Not really, but creme cheese is practically the best thing ever.) These bagels aren't sesame seed, but when you make yours, you should make sesame seed bagel in honor of Mitch Hedberg. Because he's cool.


"Bagels" (Joy of Cooking)

1 cup plus 2 Tbsp warm (105° to 115° F) water
1 package (2 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
2 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 Tbsp melted vegetable shortening (Crisco)
1 1/2 tsp sugar
1 3/4 tsp salt
1 cup bread flour
3 to 3 1/2 cups bread flour
4 quarts water
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
Cornmeal

Combine water yeast and sugar in a bowl and let sit for five minutes. Stir in shortening, sugar, salt, and 1 cup bread flour. Gradually stir in the rest of the flour. Knead for about 10 minutes by hand or with the dough hook. Let rest, covered, fro 10 to 15 minutes. Divide dough into 8 pieces and form into shapes. Let rise, covered, on a floured board, for about 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 425. Bring water, sugar and salt to boil in a large pot. Drop about 4 bagels in at a time, wait till they rise to the surface, then let them cook for about 45 more seconds. Skim out and place on a cookie sheet coated with cornmeal. Bake 20-25 minutes. Consume.