Mon, Oct 8, 2012
Anna and Kristina are both excited and nervous about their next cookbook, "My Pizza": excited because pizza is their favorite food; nervous because pizza is their favorite food. The cookbook's author, Jim Lahey, claims his recipes replicate what can be achieved in a commercial wood burning oven - where temperatures can exceed 1,000ºF, required for a good pizza crust - in a standard home oven, with the help of a pizza stone. As such, they, with the help of local pizza maker Salvatore Miele, test different types of pizza stones and compare the finished crusts to one cooked in a wood burning oven. In three hours, they plan to prepare four different types of pizzas - margherita pizza with basic tomato sauce, pepperoni pizza (made with merguez) with red pepper sauce, three mushroom pizza with béchamel, and bird's nest pizza - plus two additional recipes from the book, namely roasted squash and pumpkin seed salad, and corn gelato. They have two extra reasons to be nervous: their guest taster is Tony Gemignani, a world champion pizza maker; and they plan on baking the four pizzas in front of Chef Tony. They hope that being more organized than usual will end up working in their favor and producing an end product worthy to stay at home for instead of needing to go to out a pizzeria. Because good ingredients are the order of the day especially for the margherita pizza, they also learn how to make buffalo mozzarella from cheese maker, Paul Sutter.
Mon, Oct 15, 2012
To test their latest cookbook "Mourad, New Moroccan" which focuses on modern takes of traditional Moroccan dishes, Anna and Kristina feel they can only properly do so by traveling to Marrakech, Morocco. They are in awe of the vividness of Moroccan cuisine as evidenced by the food markets, most specifically the spice markets, which comprise an integral part of food preparation. In three and half hours, they will prepare six dishes: figs, crème fraiche, arugula & mint salad, grilled kefta, harrisa rolls, vegetable tagine, basteeya, and almond cookies. Beyond the unfamiliarity with some of the ingredients, they are also unfamiliar with their kitchen and what is available in it, on which they will blame if their meal is a disaster. They are nervous about meeting their guest chef, as she is Chafaï Choumicha, a Moroccan celebrity chef with a rock star status in Morocco. They just hope that if non-English speaking Chef Chafaï doesn't like the food, it won't come through in the translation. As they will be using one in the preparation of their meal, they also test different types of tagines available commercially in Canada against the standard terra cotta tagine used in most Moroccan kitchens.
Mon, Oct 22, 2012
Anna & Kristina are really hoping that they will like the latest cookbook they are testing, "Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood", if only because they like homey food, country music and Yearwood as a musician. It is a cookbook filled with her family's southern favorites, and she vouches for every single recipe in the book. It is family styled down home comfort food, which means ease which in turn means sometimes shortcuts in terms of the addition of processed foods. She also makes no apologies that the recipes are by no means low fat. Anna & Kristina are preparing six dishes in two and a half hours: mama's waffles with maple syrup, Georgia pate, sweetened iced tea, baked spaghetti, chicken piccata, and red velvet cake. Their guest taster knows a thing or two about down home southern cooking as he is Park Heffelfinger, the owner and executive chef of the Memphis Blues chain of southern barbecue restaurants in Vancouver. As a seasoned chef, will he agree with Yearwood's use of all that processed food? In addition, Anna & Kristina test different models of waffle irons.