Done and done.

A few weeks back, Jeff’s brother Ryan was in town for a visit. We had a pizza night, as we like to do when friends from out of town are in, and so we planned one for the Friday he was here. Corelyn and I found ourselves alone in the kitchen, and realized that we didn’t have anything to do. Veggies were cut, dough was rising, sauce was to be made by our favorite Hayfords…and people weren’t coming over for two hours. The house was clean, it was cool out….what should we do? (Since we finished Everwood, we’ve really been grasping at straws…) Then, and idea struck us. “Isn’t there a recipe in the PW for pizza dough?” It mattered not that the dough had already been bought — Jeff was worried there wouldn’t be enough, I’ve been trying to use up my flour like nobody’s business, and here we were…with two hours.

And so, obviously, we went to the store, got some ingredients for pizza, and made the dough.

Recently, Melissa came to visit, and admitted the only reason she’s moving to LA in the fall (other than going to library school at UCLA, wanting a life change, and enjoying LA’s weather) is to get on our blog. So of course, her ploy was to teach us something we didn’t know about cooking: how to make sushi! So, straight from Melissa (who learned from a one Ms. Stef) we have a step by step graphic explanation of how to make delicious sushi.

Step 1: You need to have sushi rice. This is a must. If you don’t, it’ll be harder to roll. Melissa says you can do without it, but after using it, I see the ways. Sushi rice, for us, was found at Target (and not at Ralph’s or TJs, surprisingly)

Step 2: Obviously you need tons of veggies. We used peppers, carrots, onions, avocados, and green onions. You cut them in strips, Melissa explained, and because of this you want veggies that are long, but you also can have shorter veggies and then use to strips. So, that’s an option.

Now, you take your piece of Nori (which is seaweed) and you hold it up and put it with the very shiny side out.

So you make the rice, and then you start with your seaweed piece and some rice. Like so.

Then you add some veg.

“You can add whatever you want, but just remember the more you add, the thicker your roll, and it can get harder to roll, and maybe break.”

You want to add cream cheese? DO IT.

Smush it on there.

You can add Wasabi in a Tube if you want, too.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Now you’re going to roll it. Melissa is explaining the proper way to roll it, so you get it nice and tight.

Look what a pro she is — she doesn’t even have to LOOK at the roll.

We are so excited, and impressed!!

Ok, now you’re going to cut your sushi.

Also not looking, because she’s that good. Also, remember that the end pieces never are beautiful. Melissa says it’s best to just eat them right away, so no one knows…

You can cut from one end to the other, or from the middle. Different schools of thought…

Delicious.

Now it was our turn!

And, of course, sushi for lunches! Perfection!

Thank you Melissa, for educating us. I cannot wait until you live here and we can all blog and love all the time.

For Jeff’s birthday, nearly 2 months ago (so we’re a little behind, what do you want from us?) I asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday. He, of course, wanted Outrageous Brownies. Obviously. So Corelyn and I set out to make him what he wanted. Here is the photographic evidence that we love Jeff enough to make him brownies that call for a pound of butter.

This is Corelyn trying to tell me that something we’re about to do is horrifying, per usual.

First, you melt some baker’s chocolate in a double boiler, or in our case, two sauce pans.

Then you add an unreasonable amount of chocolate chips.

Then, you painstakingly put a pound of butter in with the chocolate.

Stir, to avoid, you know, burning said chocolate and butter.

Secret 1: Instant coffee.

Check the cook book that Jeff has made. It’s a cookbook for our kitchen of our usuals. And recipes Jeff wishes I’d make more, such as Outrageous brownies. We gave one to Ryan for a graduation gift, and Jeff made one for us, too.

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

This month’s challenge was a recipe incorporating some kind of homemade nut butter. Luckily, yours truly works for a company that sells almonds and pistachios and boasts a room entirely filled with samples just there for the taking. We call this the “nut room” and visit it with glee. Anyway, thanks to that nut room and our generally well-stocked combined kitchens, I’m proud to say we prepared this recipe without making any special trips to the grocery store. An impressive accomplishment all on its own.

So we went with almond butter, because the curried tomato almond sauce looked too scrumptious to pass up. Here we have some raw almonds in our cuisinart, waiting to be blended into butter.

We gave it a whirl. Look at it whirling… Oooh…

Added some oil, for consistency.

And we whirled it some more, until our blending skills produced some almond butter at this perfect consistency. We opted for something a little grainier. It could have been smoother, but we were very hungry and impatient. Story of our lives.

As mentioned above, we decided to make the Chicken with Curried Tomato Almond Sauce because we’re just nutty for anything that used Indian spices. But, somewhat paradoxically, we do not actually have any garam masala on hand. Epic fail. Instead we enlisted the help of the interweb and hunted down an easy make-it-yourself garam masala recipe. Here it is from allrecipes.com:

Easy Garam Masala

As you can see, we were missing a few ingredients, but like the easy going modern ladies that we are, we said oh well and moved on. We also made a mental note to purchase our very own garam masala for future needs.

This is our garam masala plus some pepper, some extra cinnamon, and some shredded candied ginger. We used the candied ginger because we didn’t have the ground ginger that this recipe called for, but we figured a little sugary ginger is always better than none at all.

There may be nothing more delicious that this mass of buttery, indian spiced onions.

So good. Honestly, we probably would have just eaten this delicious mess of onions on some rice…

After mixing the tomato sauce into our onion mixture, we added the almond butter.

Then some milk.

And whisked until it looked like this.

The chicken was prepared and awaiting its introduction to the mixture…

But first, some veg. The recipe called for frozen peas, which we had, but we also had these fresh cut veggies leftover from a sushi making adventure the night before. And since the frozen peas were upstairs and these fresh veggies were already right there front and center in the fridge…

We mixed in the chicken and voila!

We then enjoyed our delicious creation on our laps, aprons still on, kitchen towels still draped across our shoulders. It was divine.

Let’s take a closer look…