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"All New Bread Machine Recipes," Favorite Brand Name Recipes
This is yet another glossy checkout lane booklet, one that I admit I bought myself. It's so shiny and pretty, and I love baking, and it has both bread machine and quick bread recipes that looked so incredibly tasty that I couldn't turn it down. Well, that and it cost $3.50, and I was probably hungry while I was waiting in line at the grocery.
And sadly, like most of my impulse purchases, I never actually used it, and it languished on my shelf stuck in between a dozen other similar booklets, until this project. I've gotten out of the habit of using my bread machine, so I wound up spending more time looking through the quick bread recipes - they're just more fun, and easier, and honestly they tend to taste better, too.
There honestly are a bunch of good-looking recipes in here, and I wound up making a loaf of Chocolate Raspberry Bread to share with a friend. It came out pretty darn well, too. I was afraid it would be overly dry or not chocolatey enough, but it was impressively well balanced. I'd make it again, and it's enough of a kick in the butt that I'll try to remember this book and use it in the future.
"The Cook's Tales: Origins of Famous Foods and Recipes," Lee Edwards Benning
This is a big old oversized paperback that I got many years ago at Buck A Book, for... well, a buck. It's part cookbook, part collection of anecdotes - there's a story about a dish or foodstuff for each letter of the alphabet, ending up with a recipe for whatever they're talking about. I've read through it, and it's interesting enough, but I never actually wound up using any of the recipes, mostly because they didn't actually look that good or interesting. The writing was better than the food.
But I had to choose something, so after a couple of read-throughs in which I couldn't find any one dish that caught my eye, I wound up deciding to make Quiche Lorraine. Their recipe bears no resemblance to any other quiche lorraine I've made, being full of large amounts of ham as well as bacon, and having few enough eggs that it wound up more resembling a Bisquick Impossible Pie than anything else, and I honestly assumed it would be a heinous failure that I'd be able to mock here in an amusing fashion.
It was delicious. Not standard quiche, admittedly, but so incredibly rich and tasty and savory and just... amazing. I am still croggled at the memory. This recipe is a keeper, and it's almost enough to make me want to try the other things in this book that look like they shouldn't work either.
"Cheesecakes," Favorite Brand Name Recipes - Philadelphia Cream Cheese
And yet another glossy checkout lane booklet, this one another hand-me-down from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
umbran's mother. I've had it for years, flipped through it more than a few times, and idly wished for occasions that would be fancy enough to require a cheesecake, but informal enough that I could make a fake one like this, but I've never used it.
I've been saving it through the project in case such an opportunity showed up, but we're nearing the end and no such chance has presented itself, so I wound up just biting the bullet and making dessert for my husband and myself. Honestly, the hardest part was choosing what to make. For all that these are not quite actual cheesecake, there were a bunch of tasty-sounding options, and honestly, dessert is dessert. It's all good.
We finally wound up deciding to make Cookies And Cream Cheesecake, which was actually a no-bake, vaguely cream-cheesey dessert, which I hadn't realized when I tagged it as a possible option (a brief diversion here; the recipe selection process usually involves me reading through a book and tagging a handful of recipes as 'potentially edible,' then passing the book off toumbran, who has the unenviable responsibility of narrowing it down to one or two choices from there).
It wasn't cheesecake. It wasn't really baking. What it was, though, was yummy. It's hard to go wrong with Oreo cookies and cheesecake-like flavors, admittedly. And making it for us just meant that we had dessert for several days. There are worse fates....
This is yet another glossy checkout lane booklet, one that I admit I bought myself. It's so shiny and pretty, and I love baking, and it has both bread machine and quick bread recipes that looked so incredibly tasty that I couldn't turn it down. Well, that and it cost $3.50, and I was probably hungry while I was waiting in line at the grocery.
And sadly, like most of my impulse purchases, I never actually used it, and it languished on my shelf stuck in between a dozen other similar booklets, until this project. I've gotten out of the habit of using my bread machine, so I wound up spending more time looking through the quick bread recipes - they're just more fun, and easier, and honestly they tend to taste better, too.
There honestly are a bunch of good-looking recipes in here, and I wound up making a loaf of Chocolate Raspberry Bread to share with a friend. It came out pretty darn well, too. I was afraid it would be overly dry or not chocolatey enough, but it was impressively well balanced. I'd make it again, and it's enough of a kick in the butt that I'll try to remember this book and use it in the future.
"The Cook's Tales: Origins of Famous Foods and Recipes," Lee Edwards Benning
This is a big old oversized paperback that I got many years ago at Buck A Book, for... well, a buck. It's part cookbook, part collection of anecdotes - there's a story about a dish or foodstuff for each letter of the alphabet, ending up with a recipe for whatever they're talking about. I've read through it, and it's interesting enough, but I never actually wound up using any of the recipes, mostly because they didn't actually look that good or interesting. The writing was better than the food.
But I had to choose something, so after a couple of read-throughs in which I couldn't find any one dish that caught my eye, I wound up deciding to make Quiche Lorraine. Their recipe bears no resemblance to any other quiche lorraine I've made, being full of large amounts of ham as well as bacon, and having few enough eggs that it wound up more resembling a Bisquick Impossible Pie than anything else, and I honestly assumed it would be a heinous failure that I'd be able to mock here in an amusing fashion.
It was delicious. Not standard quiche, admittedly, but so incredibly rich and tasty and savory and just... amazing. I am still croggled at the memory. This recipe is a keeper, and it's almost enough to make me want to try the other things in this book that look like they shouldn't work either.
"Cheesecakes," Favorite Brand Name Recipes - Philadelphia Cream Cheese
And yet another glossy checkout lane booklet, this one another hand-me-down from
umbran's mother. I've had it for years, flipped through it more than a few times, and idly wished for occasions that would be fancy enough to require a cheesecake, but informal enough that I could make a fake one like this, but I've never used it.I've been saving it through the project in case such an opportunity showed up, but we're nearing the end and no such chance has presented itself, so I wound up just biting the bullet and making dessert for my husband and myself. Honestly, the hardest part was choosing what to make. For all that these are not quite actual cheesecake, there were a bunch of tasty-sounding options, and honestly, dessert is dessert. It's all good.
We finally wound up deciding to make Cookies And Cream Cheesecake, which was actually a no-bake, vaguely cream-cheesey dessert, which I hadn't realized when I tagged it as a possible option (a brief diversion here; the recipe selection process usually involves me reading through a book and tagging a handful of recipes as 'potentially edible,' then passing the book off to
umbran, who has the unenviable responsibility of narrowing it down to one or two choices from there).It wasn't cheesecake. It wasn't really baking. What it was, though, was yummy. It's hard to go wrong with Oreo cookies and cheesecake-like flavors, admittedly. And making it for us just meant that we had dessert for several days. There are worse fates....
