Watch Good Eats – S1E12 – Power To The Pilaf in Educational & How-To | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

First and foremost, we would like to apologize for this post.  We were in a big hurry, for no reason, and forgot to start taking pictures until about half-way done.  Secondly, because of this, we messed up a few other steps and almost ruined the entire dinner. Whoops.

A posed picture taken way after the fact.  These are some of the ingredients used in the rice pilaf.

Not pictured include: Saffron, green onions, chicken broth, butter, and bay leaves.

Extra ingredients in the picture that were not in dish: Garlic and fennel.

This is what everything looked like in the pan right before it went into the oven.

Let me catch you up on what you missed…..

First, place the saffron in hot water to steep.

Melt the butter in a 3-quart skillet over medium heat and stir in the onion, bell pepper and 2 pinches of salt ( NOTE: we forgot the salt )

Add the rice. Cook, stirring frequently, until you smell nuts – another 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the saffron and its water, the chicken broth, orange zest, bay leaves and the remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. (Again, forgot the salt). Increase the heat and bring to a boil.

Thoroughly wet a clean towel, then place the towel across the top of the skillet. Top with the lid, then fold the towel corners up over the lid.

Transfer the skillet (towel and all) to the oven and bake 15 minutes.

NOTE 1: We did not turn the oven on and the rice sat cold for at least 5 minutes while we waited for the oven to heat up.  Crap.

NOTE 2: We did not wet the towel enough and it caught on fire.  Jill noticed the burning smell and declared “I think something is burning”.  Peter, knowing that the food was not even close to done, ignored her, at first.

We then attended to the oven to see what was wrong and noticed the towel.  See the slightly singed edges above.

You see, when AB said in the show, “a barely moist dish towel”, we perhaps took  him a bit too literally on the “barely” part.  The above pictures illustrates our attempt to rectify that misunderstanding.

We put it back in the oven for the remaining cook time.  We hoped.

Its out of the oven and looking edible….we’ll see.

Fish out the orange zest and bay leaves. Turn the pilaf out onto a platter, fluff with a large fork and garnish with the raisins.

We served this with a chicken and fennel recipe that we found on FoodNetwork.com.

The rice came out pretty tasty.  We discussed it and agreed that it lacked only for the mistakes that we knew we made during cooking. The actual star of the dinner was the chicken recipe. Here are a couple of cooking pictures from that dish.

Thanks and see ya next time.

Keep Cooking!

Watch Good Eats – S1E11 – Pantry Raid I – Use Your Noodle in Educational & How-To |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

We had decided to make our pasta with portobello caps, asparagus, tomatoes, and shallots. Here Jill practices her knife skills on preparing the veggies.

We opted for whole grain wheat pasta for the health benefits and the earthy flavor.

We did a quick sauté of the mushrooms, asparagus, and shallots in olive oil. Ingredients that were nearly cooked were moved the outside of the pan as to no over-do them while new ingredients were added.

The tomatoes were just barely heated through in a skillet before joining the medley.  Over cooking tomatoes turns them into mushy goo.

The naked pasta sits, waiting in the wings for us to plate it up.

After ladeling big spoonfuls of the toppings on our pasta, we finished it quickly with a little squeeze of lemon and…

Grated parmesan cheese!  This dish turned out very flavorful! When we went back for seconds, we put the lemon and parmesan directly onto the noodles as well as onto the toppings which made it even better.

See you next time and keep cooking!

This is part one, go here for part two.

Here’s everything for the “dry team”. The flour was measured by weight but everything else was added by measure

Same story here.  Weighed the buttermilk, butter, and shortening.  And yes, the buttermilk is lowfat – if this choice was detectable in the end-product we’d be surprised – they were fantastic.

When Peter first started cutting in the fat, he wasn’t sure if he was doing it right, but sure enough that cornmeal-like texture came together after a few minutes.  P.S. this stuff becomes super sticky once you add the buttermilk.

The dough rolled out ready for cutting.  Wait, what did you say Jill?  We don’t have a biscuit cutter? Oh for crying out loud, we knew we were doing the biscuit Good Eats, why didn’t we buy a biscuit cutter?  Well crap. Now what?

Ahhh, improvisation.  I think AB would approve of our use of this can-previously-known-as-green-giant-corn-niblets.

Zoë thumbs dimples into the center of each biscuit.  The recipe says it will make 12, but we ended up with eight. Errr, seven and three-fourths.  We attribute this difference to our non-standard-sized “biscuit cutter.”

Golden-brown and delicious! These were quite easy to make and most certainly tasted better than anything coming from a can w/that fat little dough boy on the label.

Stay-tuned for how we plated these in the next post!

See you next time and keep cooking!

The above is part two, since we chose our recipe from the 2nd half of the show. Catch part one if you want to start there.

If you’re wondering which one of us shrunk to peel some potatoes, don’t.  That’s Peter’s daughter, Zoë. Good to know kids are useful for some manual labor

We (surprisingly) didn’t actually own a mandoline or v-slicer before tackling this episode’s dish, so this brand new one was purchased just minutes earlier at Sur la Table.

We didn’t really want to make a bunch of servings, so our gratin went into a 9×9 casserole instead of the 9×13 in the show.

Doesn’t it look beautiful? Clearly Jill was in charge of layering while Peter toiled away slicing potatoes and onions.

Here it is all together just before the addition of the dairy. WARNING! If you forget to season each layer with salt and pepper, you will have to employ your latent gymnast skills to disassemble your gratin using every spatula you own plus a couple flexible cutting mats to fix that error.  Not that we know from personal experience or anything…

All done after the exact cooking times in the show.  We made our gratin from bacon, white onion, and spinach. The cheese we used was a three-cheese blend of asiago, parmesan, and fontina which was purchased at Whole Foods.

Ready to eat!  Not the prettiest dish (nor the prettiest photo) but it was damn tasty. We paired our gratin with a roasted pork tenderloin into which we stuffed whole garlic cloves and sage leaves.  Also, if you’re wondering why the plate is so empty looking, well, it’s the new year and we are watching our portion sizes!

See you next time, and keep cooking!