ladysprite (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladysprite) wrote2011-02-24 09:01 pm
ladysprite) wrote2011-02-24 09:01 pm
Entry tags:
Adventures In Cooking
So the cookbook project may be done, but that doesn't mean that I'm through experimenting with food. If anything, the playing around and exploring has left me with a bit of a taste for trying new (and occasionally bizarre) recipes.
So last week, when I was invited to help make finger food for a friend's party, I happily accepted. Cooking for friends is always a delight, and while I am known mostly as a baker, I have a deep-seated love of appetizers (mostly, I'll admit, because they're tiny and adorable), and I almost never get to make them - they're not the most practical food choice when I'm cooking for my husband and myself.
The suggestion I got for what to bring was 'something fried, maybe, or something involving macaroni and cheese.' I love having a direction to go in, because in some ways it lets me be more creative, a bit like writing poetry in a particular form, so I spent at least one happy afternoon browsing the internet and my cookbooks for macaroni and cheese-style appetizers, having decided that fried foods, while tasty, would probably not travel or sit well.
And I found about eight hundred recipes for individual macaroni and cheeses baked in mini muffin tins. And not much else. And I could have made that, but it sounded kind of... well... yummy, sure, but not that interesting or creative. So I kept looking. And I found, finally, a recipe for mac&cheese imitation sushi. And I knew I had found my recipe.
Except, of course, being me, I couldn't leave well enough alone. The original recipe called for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and leftover taco meat. Nowhere near acceptable for a fancy party, in my humble opinion, so the base was rapidly replaced with my new favorite four-cheese mac&cheese, and the filling with roasted red peppers and either prosciutto or dill pickles. And then I decided to bread the rolls with panko bread crumbs, because hey, if you're going to set out lilies you might as well gild them.
And then I spent most of an afternoon trying to figure out how to press, roll, and wrap pasta into cylinders, and praying that they wouldn't fall apart when I tried to slice them.
The end results were, while not perfect, surprisingly cool....
Maki-roni!
The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but at the time we were a little more focused on getting things onto the table than creating art...
Taste-wise, they were.... okay, they won't win any awards, but they were pretty darn good. The only real downside is that, to maintain structural integrity, they need to be served warm-but-not-hot. Other than that, they were fun, they were good, and the tastes blended surprisingly well....
So last week, when I was invited to help make finger food for a friend's party, I happily accepted. Cooking for friends is always a delight, and while I am known mostly as a baker, I have a deep-seated love of appetizers (mostly, I'll admit, because they're tiny and adorable), and I almost never get to make them - they're not the most practical food choice when I'm cooking for my husband and myself.
The suggestion I got for what to bring was 'something fried, maybe, or something involving macaroni and cheese.' I love having a direction to go in, because in some ways it lets me be more creative, a bit like writing poetry in a particular form, so I spent at least one happy afternoon browsing the internet and my cookbooks for macaroni and cheese-style appetizers, having decided that fried foods, while tasty, would probably not travel or sit well.
And I found about eight hundred recipes for individual macaroni and cheeses baked in mini muffin tins. And not much else. And I could have made that, but it sounded kind of... well... yummy, sure, but not that interesting or creative. So I kept looking. And I found, finally, a recipe for mac&cheese imitation sushi. And I knew I had found my recipe.
Except, of course, being me, I couldn't leave well enough alone. The original recipe called for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and leftover taco meat. Nowhere near acceptable for a fancy party, in my humble opinion, so the base was rapidly replaced with my new favorite four-cheese mac&cheese, and the filling with roasted red peppers and either prosciutto or dill pickles. And then I decided to bread the rolls with panko bread crumbs, because hey, if you're going to set out lilies you might as well gild them.
And then I spent most of an afternoon trying to figure out how to press, roll, and wrap pasta into cylinders, and praying that they wouldn't fall apart when I tried to slice them.
The end results were, while not perfect, surprisingly cool....
Maki-roni!
The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but at the time we were a little more focused on getting things onto the table than creating art...
Taste-wise, they were.... okay, they won't win any awards, but they were pretty darn good. The only real downside is that, to maintain structural integrity, they need to be served warm-but-not-hot. Other than that, they were fun, they were good, and the tastes blended surprisingly well....
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You'll be able to judge for yourself, though - there were a couple of rolls that never got sliced and served, so they're in the freezer now. I was planning on offering them up at game next week....
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I am guessing that refrigerating the mac and cheese in thin sheets on plastic wrap, then rolling, then re-chilling, then slicing, then popping them under the broiler to heat might be the most effective way to get sushi pieces. If you decide not to opt for the panko (or you could sprinkle it on at the end), you could lay out blanched spinach leaves on the plastic wrap, to give them a green 'nori' outer layer.
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I tried to find smaller pasta, but I still wanted something elbow-ish, for the mac&cheese look. I thought about orzo, but for this I just wanted at least semi-traditional.
The plastic wrap/chill/slice/heat was exactly what I did. The recipe isn't perfect, mostly because pasta isn't quite as sticky as sushi rice, but it's fun enough that I'm glad I tried it.... :)
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(Do you ever watch "Chuck's Day Off"? He's soo cute, and he makes gourmet cuisine seen like a breeze to make.)
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