A Tasteful Countdown: The Great Mouse Detective

Cooking with oil I'm so brave!

We have hopefully finished our jaunt through the English recipes. The final Brit movie has been watched in the form of the Great Mouse Detective. For this I decided on Fish and Chips for Mom and Dad and Clucks and Fries for me. I didn't bake them, either, they were battered and fried. That's right I did the oil. Not mom, not dad, me! But I waited to cook with oil until after they were home. I still need my "spotter" incase something goes wrong.

Because of mom's gluten intolerance, I found a batter that could be used that would hopefully taste good and not involve a gluten flour. A quick internet search came up with a batter that is really quite tasty! We did both the chicken and fish (halibut) in the batter. Next time I will tweak it slightly for the chicken as dillweed was a little odd to have with ketchup and chicken. That could just be me, though.

Fish & Chips for dinner. Gluten free and yummy.

The fries were a recipe I've been wanting to try for several years now. When Olympic Champion Brian Boitano had his show on the Food Network, he did an episode with twice fried french fries. I've been wanting to try them ever since. I wasn't sure if they would go with the fish, so I tweeted Boitano and he answered with a "yes!" so I took that as a sign to make Brian's "Pimp My Fries".

Everything came together easily, but the oil kept cooling way down so it took longer to make dinner than I anticipated. We didn't sit down to dinner until 8pm! Yikes! But it was well worth it because the food was delish! I had made dad a spicy tartar sauce for his fish - and he practically licked the bowl clean.

There were no leftovers!

For desert, I made mini lemon pound cakes. Dad's request. No glaze or compote. Just cake for dad. He took the rest to his men's group at church on Saturday. They made short work of it all.

All in all another successful meal. I'm getting good at this! With the Iditarod this weekend, I'm busy but we're still doing a movie meal. But it's going to be gourmet hotdogs for Oliver & Company.

Next time, no dillweed for the chicken.

recipes:
GF Batter for fish - http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1617,128187-252192,00.html
Spicy Tartar sauce - http://www.justapinch.com/recipes/sauce-spread/other-sauce-spread/spicy-tarter-sauce.html
Pimp My Fries - http://www.brianboitano.com/recipes-pimp-my-fries.shtml
Lemon Pound Cake - http://www.simply-gourmet.com/2012/08/187-lemon-pound-cake-with-cherries.html

A Tasteful Countdown: Toy Story

Pizza, Cake, and a movie, what could be better?

January 31st marked Duane's 18th birthday. It also landed on a Thursday, so we mixed the two together. Duane's big party would happen that weekend, so we did a small deal with just us and his best friend. It worked out great because Toy Story was one of his favorites when he was small - and it has that "army man" element so we could still do the "Go Army" so it wasn't totally cheesey.

Well, there was cheese - I made homemade pizzas. Thanks to my awesome new KitchenAid pizza dough was so easy! I loved how simple it was, and for the first time of me making the dough I have to say it was excellent. I used a recipe a friend gave me, but didn't put in the total amount of yeast that it called for. It still rose well, and it didn't taste yeasty. A win-win for me as I hate the taste of yeast!

I forgot to save some white frosting for stars on the blue.

I also baked a cake from scratch - the first one I did the night before and it didn't go very well. I tried another recipe the day of and it came out better than the first, but I think I'm over mixing with the KitchenAid. I will have to keep working on it. However, I loved how the camo effect came out. That's right, I made a camo cake! The cake was green, brown, and black inside. It was frosted red white and blue and had toy army men in honor of both the movie and Duane's love of the Army.

The cake was two layers and had a chocolate mousse filling. It was pretty good and I'm not a cake fan.

You might be asking what my mom ate with all of this gluten loaded food - for the cake she had the mousse only (we had a lot more mousse than we did cake. It was not what we planned. Not sure what happened there. For the pizza we tried the pinterest craze of the cauliflower crust. It really works and it tastes great -and I hate cauliflower! Mom was happy enough with it - she still misses the regular crust, but at least she's found something that she not only can stomach but likes! Just a tip - use a ricer not a grater. The ricer looks to give you more cauli-meal for the crust.

With two 18 year old boys plus the three adults, we ate all but a couple of slices of pizza (we made four plus moms!) and ate half a cake. All in all a success even with the cake issues.

Very proud of how the camo came out! AWESOME!

Pizza Crust recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/basic-pizza-dough-recipe/index.html
Cauliflower crust recipe: http://whatsfordinner-momwhatsfordinner.blogspot.com/2012/06/cheesy-garlic-cauliflower-bread-sticks.html

Oh! The week of Toy Story also brought our first bit of DISNEY MAIL! We all know how much I LOVE Disney Mail. And it was Toy Story themed mail at that! How awesome!

Disney Mail is almost as good as being there!