Carrot Top Pesto

It turns out these things aren't toxic!

Ingredients

• 1 bunch carrot tops, chopped
  
• 1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
  
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1/3 cup olive oil (about; we just eye-balled it)
• 1 cup parsley, chopped
• 1/8 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded or powdered or what-have-you
  
• garlic powder, to taste
• salt and pepper, to taste (you'll need a lot of salt)
• water, if you need it
  

Put everything except the olive oil in a food processor. Slowly add the olive oil through the hole in the top. You may not need all 1/3 cup, or you may need more. Scrape down the sides of the food processor periodically. Add seasonings to taste.

Thoughts: Easy to do. Pretty tasty -- carrot tops taste a lot like parsley, as it turns out. I kept hearing they were bitter, but they aren't really. You could also try adding some toasted walnuts to this. I bet it would be good.

Disaster Index: 2/10 pretty good

Cherry Peach Clafouti

Ingredients

• 1.5 lbs stone fruit (in this case, about 1 lb cherries and .5lbs peaches)
• 3 tbsp flour
• pinch of salt
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 large egg yolks
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 tbsp citronage
• confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Pit all your fruit and put it in a 10-inch tart pan (with high sides, preferably).
Sift together flour, salt, and sugar. Gradually whisk in whole eggs, egg yolks, milk, vanilla, and liqueur.
Pour wet ingredients over the fruit.
Bake until puffy and brown, about 45 minutes. Let cool slightly (cake should sink), then dust with sugar. Eat.

Thoughts: Recipe was hella easy, let me tell you that. We made a few modifications. The original recipe called for 1 cup milk and 1 cup heavy cream, but we only had whole milk so we just used that. It also called for kirsch, which we didn't have, but we figured orange would complement the stone fruit just fine. We also forgot to butter the tart pan. We also had the issue where we had too much batter for our pan, which is why we recommend using one with high sides. But most importantly, this recipe was a literal disaster. LITERALLY. It was terrible. I will just say that a lot of our baking recipes that we get from Martha Stewart are not super great, which surprises me a little. The thing about this dish is that the fruit releases a whole mess of water, which in turns prevents the custard from settling completely and it just gets really runny and gross. If we were to try to make this again, I would probably cut up all the fruit, mix it with some sugar, and then let it drain for forever. I'm pissed with Martha for even making this recipe. What a mess. Dan says he'll eat it, but it's pretty much a waste of eggs, two cups of milk, and a bunch of really delicious fruit. We're going to try chilling it and then grilling individual slices to see if that makes it edible. Because it isn't really right now.

Disaster Index: 6/10 (4 for Dan, 8 for me)

Margaritas

Ingredients


Makes two drinks.

• 3 oz tequilla
• 2 oz citronage/triple sec
• juice of one lemon (2 tbsp)
  
• juice of one lime (2 tbsp)
• salt
  

Thoughts: Feel free to add other juices to this, as long as you keep the lime juice. The acidity needs to come from somewhere. We recently made grapefruit margaritas and originally left out all the lime juice, and we had to add some back in. So even grapefruits are not acid enough. Bear it in mind.

Disaster Index: 1/10

Earl Grey Ice Cream

Ingredients

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 3 bags of Earl Grey tea, cut open (or about 1 tbsp loose)

Scald the heavy cream on the stove, then add the loose tea. Turn heat to low and let tea steep for about 3 minutes. The cream should turn dark and smell pungently of Earl Grey.
Stir in all the sugar until it dissolves. This shouldn't take long.
Place in fridge for 30 minutes.
Put in the ice cream maker. Make ice cream as you normally would. Eat.

Thoughts: Delicious, though it has a weird, unidentifiable, slightly bitter aftertaste. Not enough to prevent me from eating it all the time, but it's noticeable. Dan doesn't agree that it's bitter. Well. The ice cream works really well as an addition to Earl Grey tea, BELIEVE IT OR NOT. And it doesn't dilute the flavor! Awesome. Also, homemade ice cream just has just a great, soft consistency. It doesn't develop a lot of ice crystals the way store-bought ice creams do. So that's a plus.

Disaster Index: 1.5/10

Green chili pozole

This is almost too spicy?

Ingredients

• 2 cans hominy, rinsed and drained
• 1.5 lbs pork ribs
• 8 springs of flat-leaf parsley, tied with kitchen twine
• 4 garlic cloves
• 3/4 tsp dried oregano (preferably Mexican, says Martha, but seriously?)
• .5 lbs tomatillos, husked and rinsed well (they get pretty sticky)
• 2 jalapeno peppers, quartered
• 1 cup cilantro
  
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped (it's going into a food processor)
• 2 tbsp neutral oil
• salt

Place pork in large pot -- cover by 2" with water. Add parsley and garlic and bring to a boil. If any foam or fat rises to the top, skim it off with a ladle.
Reduce heat to medium low, and add oregano. Simmer, partially covered, until the meat is falling off of the bone, about 2 hours.
In the meantime, fill a small pot with water and bring it to a boil. Add your tomatillos and cook them in the boiling water for about 10 minutes, until the tomatillos are tender. Transfer them to a small bowl. Reserve some of the cooking liquid.
In a food processor or blender, add the onion, jalapeno peppers, cilantro, tomatillos, and as much reserved cooking liquid as you need to make the whole thing blend. Blend it until smooth. It should look like green chili.
Heat oil in skillet over medium-high heat. When it's hot enough to make you nervous, add the tomatillo mixture and 1/2 tsp salt, stirring constantly. It will probably spatter a little. Use a spatter shield.
Reduce heat to medium and simmer gently, stirring almost constantly (if you have pots like we do), until the mixture is thick, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.
The pork might be done by now. If it is, remove it from the broth (reserve the broth) and trim any excess fat from it (we didn't have any to trim). Remove the meat from the bones (which should be pretty easy at this point). Shred meat. Remove the parsley from the broth and throw it away.
Stir tomatillo mixture into the reserved pork broth and bring to a boil. Add the shredded pork.
Reduce heat, and simmer gently until heated through. If you just took the pork from the broth, this really shouldn't take long.
Add the hominy. Simmer until heated through, about 5 minutes. Season with salt or pepper to your heart's content.
Eat.

Thoughts: This was a pretty involved recipe, actually. There must be a way to simplify it. We'll see. This was pretty good -- I was hoping it would be JUST SLIGHTLY more flavorful. I think the pork ribs we used were not super fatty, and they probably could have been. In the future I would choose a less lean cut. Although a healthier thing to do might be to cook everything in pork broth instead of water. Then you would get a more savory flavor without the extra fat. Just a lot of extra sodium. TOTALLY WORTH IT, KIDS. The hominy adds a really interesting flavor. I have never really eaten much hominy before, but I would like to be eating more of it. The heat is of a proper intensity. Dan says "delicious" about the whole affair. Good.

Disaster Index: 1.5/10

Chocolate banana icebox cake

Ingredients

• 15 oz chocolate chips -- we did a mixture of milk and semi-sweet
• 5 large egg yolks
• salt
• 3 cups heavy whipping cream
• graham crackers -- just buy a box of them. We used the cinnamon ones.
  
• 4-5 ripe bananas, sliced in half widthwise, then sliced lengthwise a few times
• whipped cream, for garnish

Place chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl.
Place egg yolks and pinch of salt in another heatproof bowl.
Bring the cream to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Temper the yolks, then slowly incorporate, whisking constantly. You will probably scramble the eggs a little. Don't worry about it.
Return mixture to saucepan over low heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon (about 8 minutes). Do not let mixture come to a boil.
Strain mixture through a fine sieve to remove the bits of egg that you scrambled.
Stir mixture into chocolate until the chocolate fully melts, incorporates, and is smooth.
Refrigerate, stirring occasionally to break up the skin, until the chocolate is thick (about 4 hours -- our fridge is much colder than normal fridges, so we did it for maybe 2. Just do it until it's pretty stiff).
Line a 5x10 loaf pan with plastic wrap. Use about twice as much as you need, since you'll be covering the top of the loaf pan with it when you're done.
Spread 1 cup chocolate evenly into bottom of loaf pan. Top with a layer of graham crackers. You may have to break some of them to fit.
Spread 1/2 cup chocolate over the crackers, and top that layer with bananas. Get as many banana slices as you can onto each layer.
Spread another 1/2 cup chocolate over bananas, and top with more graham crackers.
Repeat this step until you get toward the top. The final layer should be a layer of graham crackers. This will be the bottom crust, since you'll be inverting it to serve.
Cover the top with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight.
To serve, uncover and turn out onto serving platter. The crackers will have softened to cake-like consistency from the chocolate. It will be delicious.
Serve with whipped cream, if y'all want.

Thoughts: We were not at all sure that this would work out, but it totally did and it was totally awesome. The original recipe called for all milk chocolate, which didn't sit right with us (what is the point of milk chocolate anyway) so we mixed in some semi-sweet, but in the future I think we would just use 100% semi-sweet. The chocolate flavor was not as pronounced as we would have liked. We also would have added more banana. The recipe calls for 4-5 bananas, but we could only fit 3. We probably didn't space them efficiently enough. But we will next time. This was totally delicious. And hella easy. And seriously, who wants to actually bake when it's so hot out? Not us.

Disaster Index:1/10

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 carrot, chopped (or two small carrots)
• 4 garlic cloves (but really as much as you want)
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 jalapeno pepper, chopped and divided into two equal portions
  
• 8 oz dried black beans (or 30 oz canned, undrained)
• 1 15-oz can of diced tomatoes (with juice)
  
• 1.5 cups chicken broth (or vegetable, I guess)
  
• fresh cilantro, for garnish
• crumbled feta, for garnish

If you're using canned beans, you can skip this first step, which is:
wash the dried beans thoroughly. Rehydrate them based on the instructions likely to be found on the package. You don't have to spend hours soaking these things. Just add the water and boil for a few minutes, then remove from heat and let them sit for an hour. That should do it. Drain when done.
Heat oil in heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onion, carrot, and garlic. Saute until vegetables begin to soften, about 6 minutes.
Mix in cumin and one pile of jalapeno (should be able 1 tsp or so).
Add beans, tomatoes (do not drain tomato juice), and chicken stock.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium, cover, and cook until carrots are tender, about 15 minutes.
Blend about 1/2 of the soup in a blender. Or, if you want to make things a little easier, just use a stick blender through the whole soup and stop when it looks to be about the right consistency.
When desired consistency is reached, return the soup to the heat and simmer for another 15 minutes, until thickened.
Season with salt, pepper, and the rest of the jalapeno.
Garnish with cilantro and feta.

Thoughts: Pretty delicious, and pretty easy to make. Dan says the soup had good flavor, but he wouldn't use feta in the future -- we'd probably use something like queso fresco or a variation thereon. Also he thought the beans were a little toothsome, which means next time we would either use canned (we ordinarily would have, but we had these beans sitting around in our cabinet forever and I was like "good god, I will make something with these beans") or actually soak them overnight the way everyone recommends. I would also top this with some sort of sour cream too.

Disaster Index: 2/10