Duck Duck Gyoza

I got an incredible Japanese knife from my brother as an early birthday/Christmas present recently. By his request, I agreed to make some Japanese food (specifically Gyoza) to honor this. Gyoza is a dumpling that's steamed then fried. It can be filled with just about anything, but I decided to splurge and use some delicious duck. They're delicious plain or with an accompanying dipping sauce I also made. The shape of the gyoza I made is a bit irregular from what you may see elsewhere, but I think they look better and I enjoy the resulting texture irregularity. Enough talk, let's get cooking.

Chicken Marsala and Green Pasta

Today's been a great day. A lazy Sunday where just about all I did was cook for the whole day. Crafting a breakfast. Devising a lunch. All the while, cogitating dinner. The result of this thought process has been a spinach and herb pasta with chicken marsala. Pasta has been around for a longer time than may be realized, with the first known references to it dating all the way back to 1154. It's such an old recipe and a major staple in Italian cooking that I felt it necessary to try and make it properly. The result? I'll never buy boxed pasta again. The texture is wonderful. Tender, completely free of graininess, and slightly chewy. As for the chicken marsala? I just needed something to put on top of this beautiful noodle I'd created.

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Molten Glucose Droplets

I decided to make something that would live up to the name of the blog. The most interesting idea I came up with was to fiddle around with caramelizing sugar to put in cookies. But it wasn't enough to just make a caramel sauce and put it in a cookie recipe, I had to get a little fancier. The result? Making caramel droplets by rapid cooling. It was a learning process. It took 5 attempts to get what I was trying to get. The end result of everything? Beautiful cookies spotted with chocolate, macadamia nuts, and caramel.

Standing Out Yet Blending In

With the advent of pumpkins in the fall, it seems every which way you turn you find more pumpkin recipes. That being said, I had planned on making pumpkin gnocchi today, but I wanted to be different. So I used golden acorn squash instead.Really it makes just about no difference at all. They even look similar to pumpkins. I could probably fool just about anybody into believing that I made pumpkin gnocchi anyways, but the point is I didn't and my main ingredient now sounds different than those coming from pretty much every food blog out there right now (including my own a few weeks ago). I'm pretty excited about it.

The Really Thin Pancakes

Today I made crêpes for breakfast. I woke up and made crêpes from scratch before leaving to go to class. I've never been a morning person. Usually I do as little as I can in the morning before leaving so I can get more sleep. But this morning when my alarm went off, I thought about crêpes. I didn't hit the snooze button once. It was time for some really thin pancakes.

The French have a notorious reputation for claiming that crêpes are very difficult to make properly, but I do believe I got the hang of it. These were rather good, as attested by my roommate.

Stocked

I hate running out of chicken stock. To me it seems like one of the most important ingredients to have on hand at all times in order to make a quick meal delicious. Since it can be used so universally in savory dishes, why not make your own high-quality stock and improve all the dishes you cook with it? Why not indeed. I've made stock and it was really easy.

Enter Pumpkins

Rejoice. Pumpkins are in season! From September to March of every year you can get these awesome orange orbs. Why are these gourds so great? Because you can make pie out of them, and when you buy a whole pumpkin instead of that canned puree crap, you get better flavor and more satisfaction out of the ordeal. This is mostly due to the fact that most canned pumpkin isn't really even pumpkin, it's a variety squash. You can also get the seeds from a whole pumpkin, which are great toasted, and if you are so inclined will enable you to grow your own pumpkins.

Let's make some dessert.

Grand Entrance

Welcome!
By popular demand, I begin today with my first post of this blog. This will be a collection of all of my culinary explorations as a college student. Last week I had thought to begin this blog by showing how to make pizza. Alas though, being myself, I wanted to make a much more grand entrance. I thought for the whole week about how I could start with a bang. Today I will be showing you a meal fit for the finest appetite, one truly splendid enough to justify the creation of a blog around it.

Here it is.

Pardon the washed out colors, my phone isn't a great camera.