Today I finally had time to play around in the kitchen, which I hadn't gotten to do in quite a while. At least, it felt like quite a while. Maybe it wasn't really that long. Anyway, on this wonderful Friday I finally had the time to experiment with some new recipes I had been meaning to try out.
First on the list was Ginger Chocolate Scones from Post Punk Kitchen, one of my favorite vegan food blogs. I had seen this recipe a while ago and bought Turbinado sugar specifically for it, and then I promptly forgot which recipe used the sugar. Needless to say, I was very excited when I re-stumbled upon the recipe and figured out what the Turbinado chillin' in my pantry was actually meant for. I had to make a few changes to the recipe only out of necessity (like I only had chocolate soymilk instead of regular) but I basically followed the recipe exactly so I won't bother re-posting it here. These weren't scones in the sense of crumbly, buttery deliciousness ( I guess that's what I get for trying vegan baking) but they had more of a cake-y, banana-bread-ish quality. The flavor was really interesting, combining ginger and chocolate without being too sweet, which I actually liked more than I expected to. My only problem with this recipe is that even though I baked the scones for 15 minutes, just like the recipe says, the bottoms burned a bit. Luckily it wasn't enough to ruin anything, but it was still slightly upsetting. If I make these again I'll definitely take the cooking time with a grain of salt, like I normally do, and check up on the scones more frequently to make sure they don't burn.
After this (slight) baking failure, I decided to try and redeem myself by trying another experiment. A while ago I had seen a blog posting about microwave potato chips which intrigued me. I couldn't find the exact posting so I just took the general idea and made it up. It's really simple, and came out surprisingly well.
Ingredients:
Potato
Olive Oil
Salt
Directions:
Wash (and peel if you want) a potato. Cut it into very thin slices.
Put the slices on a *microwave safe* plate, drizzle some olive oil over the potato, and toss 'em around so that all the slices are coated in oil. Sprinkle some salt on top.
Put the plate of slices in the microwave. Now, the times will vary a lot, depending on exactly how thick the slices of potato are and how temperamental the microwave is. My microwave is definitely very temperamental, so I put the slices in at 2-3 minute intervals. In-between each nuking session I flipped them over so that they would cook evenly.
Keep microwaving until the chips are crispy and just beginning to brown (and this will, surprisingly, happen in a microwave). My chips took about 5 or 6 minutes total, but it will change every time.
I was quite impressed that a microwave was capable of making crispy potato chips. Because they were thicker than store-bought chips they had a slightly chewy aspect, and tasted more potato-y. But I really liked them. I didn't like that I ended up eating an entire potato's worth of chips (which is a lot when they're pretty thinly sliced) but besides the fact that I need to learn to share food and not eat it all myself, I would call this a success.
No comments:
Post a Comment