Purple Pumpkin Eater Potatoes (minus pumpkins)

The thunderdome challenge is PURPLE POTATOES
~massive cheering and adulation~

So! I thought heck I'll make potatoes gratin. And it will be purple! How cool will that be?!?

Answer: Not Cool.

Answer B: Don't attempt to make a gratin without a mandolin. The potatoes will just laugh at your foolishness.

So to begin with, Here is the link to the recipe.

I thought if it had Fabulous in the title it would be fabulous. Boy was I wrong.
This time I had almost all the ingredients, so I blame the recipe.
Well I didn't have the leeks but whatever, it's just a stupid vegetable!

First I attempted to slice the potatoes. I also added a shallot because I'm carefree like that.

Adorable little purplies!

 Then I started cooking my favorite part, the bacon. Baccoooooon!

I smell like all good things

Now I add the goat cheese into the potatoes and mix heartily.

Never put flour on potatoes before but sure, why not?

 Then I add everything into my massively undersized skillet.

Look! A mess!

So at this point I can tell this is going to end poorly. The cheese is clumpy, the flour is making things worse, and the bacon ...well the bacon is perfect. Because: bacon.

So into the pan it goes, in a messy pile of schloop.

To make it better the recipe author said add cheese. Because cheese hides problems.

And into the stove it goes! I should mention I was also making StoveLoaf@ and curried vegetables at the time, and it is pictured here:

Stove: Still not bloody

And voila, when it was done...it looks fantastic!

I am a trick.

It even looks fabulous! 

Until you ate it.

Then it tasted like undercooked potatoes with flour caked on, and every once in a while you got a squish of hot goat cheese.

Yeah.

Fabulous.

But not to fear! Stoveloaf@ saved dinner! 

The Boyfriend said Stoveloaf@ was fantastic, which I was not surprised. When I asked him to make meatloaf he used a cookie sheet and a style best known as 'making a hill-type football-shaped meat brownie'. I finally found something I can cook better than him.

The curried vegetables were...eh. They needed more curry and to be baked longer.

The Fabulous Purple potatoes were tossed after a few bites.

Swirly purple weirdness, right there on a plate

 

 

BUT! I way overbought the potatoes (they were so cute!!) that I ended up using them in every dish for a few days.

I even made purple potato soup. Ever had purple soup? It was fantastic!
And I felt like Dr. Seuss while eating it!

So, all in all not a total failure.
But don't trust recipes that have the word "Fabulous" in the title.
And I should really make a note to buy all the ingredients for a recipe before I start cooking it...

Bread? Maybe?

I have horrible experience with bread. Like...horrible. I've tried to make multiple, multiple loaves. Every time it's ending badly. Lots of weeping and flour everywhere.
I'm thinking, maybe it's that I live in Denver?
Maybe it's not that I am incapable of baking yeasty things?

So I thought, google to the rescue! I'll try and find a high altitude recipe! Perfect!
Challah bread
Challah bread is ridiculously hard compared to a simple loaf!
Let's go for broke and fail again! Who needs self esteem when I can have deflated under cooked bread?

Step one - begin to grow the beast.

Growing some yeast

 Okay, now on to step two. I'll let the yeast begin to do it's thing while I mix up my eggy mixture.

Eggs and sugar and salt and what not

And after this I check out my yeast and holy shitballs, it's frankenyeast!

I am coming for you. In your sleep. ~notblob

Add everything together and start to mix in the flour. Notice my handy dandy rice cooker slash bread mixer spoon.

Mixing it up! With some flourz.

And now it's time to knead! Which...I should really research how to do this. I mean I assume you just punch it down and keep fiddling with it?

Maybe?

The flour is EVERYWHERE at this point.

And now it has to rise for an hour. I'll keep you updated! Or...probably forget and post something later about how I killed another bread.

I am rising like it's Easter, bitches!

UPDATED:

Okay I'm back! With some finished bread, even!

It doesn't look like it but I'm fatter

So after an hour the dough was all fat and reminded me of actual bread dough. Go figure. So I decided to try and role it into three braids. This failed. The braids were too fat and I couldn't work with them. I was worried about undercooked bread so I decided to make two loaves instead of one giant loaf.

Braiding baguettes is not fun

This makes me want Crazy Bread

I began my braiding but quickly stopped because...I forgot how to braid. Is that even possible?
Yes. Yes it is. I googled how to braid challah bread because I didn't want to be the only dumbass to google how to braid.
Here they are braided! Aren't they beautiful?
Don't look at the ugly ends.

It's getting all Heidi in here

After another 30 minutes of rising, I was ready to toss them in the oven for 20 minutes.

And VOILA peoples! I HAVE MADE DELICIOUS BREAD. DELICIOUS, HOMEMADE BREAD.
My house smells better than crack right now. I bet if someone came over (hint: no one will) they'd rob me at gunpoint for my bread.

Yes, I am using my roast pan insert as a cooling rack

I CAN MAKE BREAD
~fireworks~

THAT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE UNCOOKED BISCUIT DOUGH
~cheers~

HUZZAH!!!

Non Thunderdome Recipe time!

I decided to post this recipe outside of the normal Thunderdome situation. Mostly because it's Wednesday night, all the good tv shows are on hiatus and I'm bored.

SO!

Most people, me included, think of Shepards pie with this thought in their head: Icky.

When I was a kid,  oftentimes we would have shepards pie. Which to my mother, God bless her soul, was hamburger meat, canned green beans, canned corn, and instant mashed potatoes.

It was foul. Just disgusting. Thinking about it now makes me a little queasy, because we had that often. I won't say my mother made it intentionally gross, she was just limited by resources. One of those resources being the ability to imagine food that tasted good. She just wasn't a cook. And it wasn't until I was 19 that I discovered potato soup isn't just water and potatoes and maybe some milk.
Back to Shepard's pie...

So I was wondering around a farmers market (This one to be exact) and found a root vegetable medley option. Usually that would make me leave immediately, as I have a fear of beets due to an over-beeting in a monthly produce delivery my roommate and I did in Portland.
Anything beets I avoid. Unless they're on fire.

But this was different. It had small tiny baby carrots, parsnips, whole garlic, giant turnips and yes...beets.

I picked it up and started thinking about what I could make with all these things. In the end I kept coming back to root veggie combo with some potatoes. Which is basically shepards pie.

So I thought...what the hell! I'll make shepards pie the way it's supposed to be made! And probably still hate it! This last thought was probably due to the beets.

Here is the original recipe. Which I shouldn't bother to post as I never follow it.

To start off with, I decided to add the parsnips to the potatoes and make a mashed parsnip potato thing. This was stupid, but we'll get to that later.

First we shave the parsnips naked.

Bow chicka bow wow

See the carrot bag? Aren't those the most adorable carrots ever?
These are the parsnips shaved, with some baby carrots just because they're adorable.

They look like little sperm! Wow am I not hungry now.

I diced the parsnips, diced some potatoes and threw them all in a pot.

Note to self: Parsnips float. Never know when vegetable floatability knowledge will come in handy.

Once those are boiling away, I started on the carrots. For all those carrots I probably got half a cup of diced carrot. You know how hard it is to peel and dice 45 individual carrots smaller than a pinky? I do. I spent 30 minutes bitching out the carrots.  But they didn't care. Stupid adorable baby sperm carrots.

Then I approached the turnip. I ...have never eaten a turnip before. At least willingly. I've never chopped one, and outside of the little small red ones for salads I really didn't know what a turnip looked like. But here it is. In all it's turnip glory.

Most underwhelming root vegetable ever.

I threw an onion (I cried), the turnips and the carrots into a fry pan with some butter. After five minutes sauteeing it smelled like heaven in my kitchen. Oh glorious butter.

I then noticed all of my vegetables were rather...white. And beigey. So I thought I'd add some green beans. But not canned green beans. I will never eat those again (see: above).
So I chopped some frozen green beans and threw them in the pot.

Chopping frozen things is much harder than it appears. These were especially wiley.

Once everything started to simmer, I threw in the meat and the worchestershire sauce, and the broth like the recipe called for.

At this point the potatoes and parsnips seemed done, so I drained them and added some butter and fat free half and half to make whipped potatoes.
Lessons learned:
You are the Parsnips bitch. Don't forget that.
Even though parsnips are fork pokey soft in the water, they will not mash. At all.
Hard clumps of goo does not help the mixing process when using a hand blender.
Mashed potato/parsnip goo can fly disproportionate distances when prompted.

So this is what I'm left with:

The parsnips are laughing at you. Or me. Whoever. They're just laughing.

Once the meat cooked down I loaded it into the pie pan.

Underwhelming yet again.

Then I added the non-whipped mixture in what I vainly tried to make into something resembling mashed potatoes.

This looks gross.

I baked it for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, and just pulled it out as I'm writing this post.
It looks exactly like the picture before being baked.

I have a feeling this is going to taste like Dinty Stew with Gloop. Yay.

So to celebrate I made myself a drink.

Highly recommend coconut tequila. The Girly Tequila!

I figure after 3 of these, I won't really care if I'm eating Dinty Stew with Gloop.

Maybe.

I'll let you know.

OMG Y'ALL

I completely forgot to link VeganGourmand's website!

I suck at this.
You should fire me.
Except you can't because I'm the boss of this here blog! NEENER NEENER NINCOMPOOP.

Here is his delightful blog with a delightful winter squash recipe.
To keep things organized I will be adding blog links out to the side so you can check out VG's fabulous blog whenever you feel up to it.

VEGAN G'S STUFF IS HERE

Also I sort of feel like I'm talking to myself. Anyone else? ~echo...echo~

Where there's smoke...

I really enjoyed our first cooking challenge. The challenge ingredient was picked by me this time and was "winter squash." I chose butternut squash and this recipe. I usually buy my butternut squash pre-cut and I was amazed how ORANGE it was when I cut it open. Here I am scooping out the innards

Martha suggests you bake them in the oven with some water in the bottom of the cookie sheet and covered in foil. Who am I to argue with Martha? My oven isn't actually all sideways like this

Here are my ingredients all lined up with the scooped out cooked goodness

Please note that smoked paprika is NOT the same as paprika

Please note that 1tsp is NOT the same as 1tbs and especially 2tbs is NOT the same as 2tsp

Yes. I used 2tbs of smoked paprika vs 2tsp of paprika. I just re-read the recipe right now and realized my measuring mistake

Here it is all cooked with non-browned bread crumbs on top

My review? I'm sure the original recipe was very good. My version was a disaster and you will have to imagine the next picture of it in the garbage. I was hesitant to add the paprika (it just seemed that there should be sweeter spices in it) but smoked paprika was a horrible, horrible HORRIBLE mistake. Thank god I didn't have the chives it also called for. Hopefully, everything will work out for the next challenge. PS I forgot to mention that there was NO WAY I was going to buy 9lbs of butternut squash so I bought one large one and cooked the mixture in a....container vs in the squash.

Becak's Winter Squashtacular

SO! Winter Squash was the challenge!

Let's start out with the original recipe link.

Moroccan Style Stuffed Acorn Squash

But it is more like a Ninja Moroccan Style Stuffed Acorn Squash (whew that is a lot to type) mostly because I did these things:

1) confused quinoa and couscous. THESE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS.
2) bought regular winter squash because acorn sqaush is sort of ugly. In comparison.
3) had half a bottle of wine before I started cooking.
4) Made other random substitutes before/during cooking.

SO! Here is my obligatory ingredients list picture. Except to make it more confusing, some of these items are not in the recipe and some won't be used at all, and I don't understand why I picked them up and put them on the brightly colored cutting board.
I'm looking at you, bag of wild rice.

Most of these things are not in the original recipe.

Sidenote!
 I started out here:

I ended here:

AND WE BEGIN!
By cutting the (not) Acorn Squash. Actually wait---
We begin at the farmer's market where I held an Acorn Squash and the Squash you see here, and decided I liked the colorful, pretty one better. I am shallow when it comes to fruit. I assumed the taste is the same but I'll never know.

So I split the squash in half, and took out all the little nasty seeds and inner cobwebs.
Notice I'm not all the way into the wine yet.

Seedy!

I then plopped those guys down face first onto a cookie sheet and threw them in the oven.
Luckily Pumpkin Chunkin was on in the other room and I realized it had been the required 30 minutes when the show came to a climatic end.
Also I should get bonus points because I was watching a Winter-Squash-Themed show during my recipe challenge.

Here they are baking away in forgetfulness.

Wow. My oven is gross. Is that blood? MOVING ON.

This is not blood. Pinky swear.

LOOK! They're done! By no fault of my own!
I added the brown sugar and butter like the recipe calls for. In the future I'm not sure I'd use that much, it made little swimming pools of butter and sugar in the bottom of the squash. I appreciated the sweetness but not the extra fat. Also I didn't have the paint brush the recipe calls for, because I don't spend money on useless kitchen gadgets (yes I do, bought a paintbrush on amazon this morning).

Glistening Pools Of Butter and Sugar.

So at this point I started gathering all my recipe ingredients together again and noticed...hey, don't I have cous-cous?
Who has cous-cous? I don't have cous-cous! (say these in cheerleader song)

I figured I'd use white rice as a substitute because buzzed as I was getting, one starch is as good as another, right?

And the recipe says it has to soak up the stock anyway so voila! Problem solved. I began prepping my vegetables.  I used rainbow carrots that I purchased at the same farmer's market.

I have 17 pictures of dinner being fried in a skillet and
one picture of the actual prep work. Go me!

I followed the instructions for cooking the vegetables, except I added mushrooms. Because I could have sworn this recipe called for mushrooms so I bought a bunch. I said screw it, I'm adding the mushrooms.

Also I added dates instead of raisins. Raisins are dead shriveled souls of former grapes, and I haven't gotten over that one time I bought 40 lbs of raisins at Costco. NEVER COSTCO HUNGRY, PEOPLE.

Notice the wine consumption?

At this point in the recipe I realized I had no white rice. All I had was the 40-minute crunchy brown rice. The rice fairy stole my rice, to make a point about how I should pay more attention to ..rice. Or something.

Also at this point I realized I was getting very hungry, my squashes (squashies? I like squashies) were getting cold, and I was almost out of wine. I was very irritated to discover that I had to wait another 40 minutes for my starch to finish de-crunchifying.

I banged around my pots and pans in irritation as I prepared the rice, enough to irritate me even further because WHO IS MAKING THAT NOISE? oh wait. It's me.

As the water starting boiling and I closed the lid on the rice for 30 minutes, I remembered I just bought a new rice cooker. It was sitting there, staring at me. Laughing at me. Stupid rice!
As the evil rice was cooking I messed around in the kitchen, mostly doing nothing. I pulled down my heirloom tomatoes (same farmer's market) and giggled at how cute they were. I wanted to eat the little lime looking one but then he'll be gone. So I didn't.


Last glass of wine.
Pretty tomatoes.
Sad? Happy?
Conflicted. So very conflicted.

I decided rather randomly that this dish needed cheese. Who doesn't love cheese? What isn't made better by adding (more) cheese?
So I pulled out some herbs de province goat cheese. The stall guy at the market said the cheese wouldn't melt, even fried. I decided to test my cheese's strength, and chopped it up and threw it in with the vegetables.

Cheese makes everything okay.

Finally after more Pumpkin Chunkin the forever-long rice was done. THANK GOD. I added it to the skillet and let it mellow in the juices of the beans and cheese. VOILA!
I shoved the mixture into the now cold (non)Acorn Squash. I was in such a hurry that the picture is blurred.



I styled it so it looked like the small one threw up. Yes, I am a child.

 SO! After missing half the ingredients, adding another half of ingredients that weren't in the recipe....

I give this 3 out of 4 pies.

This may be two pies and a cobbler but ignore my failed random internet picture finder skills

I think if I had followed the recipe all the way through it would have been good, but bland. Without the cheese, there was no savory to offset the sweet of the dates and the squash. And because I had 40 minutes to cook my vegetables (Not my fault. Fault of evil rice.) everything was very mushy and cooked, so again without the cheese the texture would have been similar to pudding.

I would probably make this again, but make the following changes:

A) Buy pre-made squash cuts. The presentation is nice but not necessary and scraping out squash guts is no one's idea of a good time.

B) Add a protein, like chicken or tofu. Two hours after eating this I was hungry again.

C) Use less sugar/butter on the squash itself, like I mentioned earlier.

D) Buy all of the real ingredients in the recipe before judging it without actually *trying* it. Except the raisins. Raisins are disgusting.

Testing!

Testing some space, y'all.