Throwdown Cookbook

Happy Friday everyone!

This week's 2 women and a cook book dinner was slightly off. Jordan was extremely exhausted from an interview, and I have been battling the flu all week. Nonetheless, we fought through and put together an Italian dinner for Imran and Austin.

As we stated in our earlier introductions, if Jordan is Ina Garten, I am most definitely Bobby Flay. I love how he incorporates some sort of chili into EVERY dish that he creates. There are several recipes we wanted to try from Bobby Flay's Throwdown Cook Book, so we will be using this cookbook this week and next week.

This week we made 3 dishes from Bobby Flay's Throwdown:
Meatballs
Marinara Sauce
Coconut Cake

We also found a tempting Italian side from one of our favorite food blogs Annie's Eats:
Eggplant Marinara Flat bread

Eggplant Marinara Flatbread:
This recipe was our favorite for this week. All the ingredients were readily available at Publix, and it was quite easy to make. Annie always does a great job in instructions on her blog. We used the marinara sauce that we made for our meatballs, and used a goat cheese that had herbs mixed in it. This is a simple dish to make and does not require a high skill level. For a side dish on a scale of 1-10, I would rate it at an 8. The boys, Jordan, and I all agree that we will be making this again!

Spaghetti and Meatballs:
When looking at the two recipes for meatballs in
the Throwdown cookbook, we decided that Bobby Flay's marinara sauce seemed to have a kick to it, and the meatball recipe for his competitor would compliment this sauce. Therefore, we combined the two recipes hoping to create the "ultimate" spaghetti and meatball recipe. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Marinara Sauce
All the ingredients for the marinara sauce were readily available. Bobby Flay tends to always use peppers that are difficult to find, but thanks to our friend google, we were able to substitute Cubano peppers for Cubanelle peppers. The instructions were pretty straightforward, and did not require a high skill level. Sadly, this marinara sauce did not satisfy the boys or us. We were disappointed with the texture of the overall sauce. Rather than being thick and flavorful, the sauce was bland and runny. Jordan and I were tasting the sauce as we were cooking, and were hoping that when we added in the meatballs something magical would happen, but the sauce remained the same. Jordan described it as "cafeteria food" and said it just tasted like warmed up tomatoes. On a scale one 1-10, I would rate this sauce a 5.

Meatballs

We had better luck with the meatballs. All the ingredients were easy to find, and it basically just required a little bit of chopping, mixing, and creating golf size balls. By baking the meatballs the flavors locked in perfectly. I would say you need to know to cook and dice at an intermediate level to make these meatballs perfect. I think there was an element of spice lacking in the meatballs, and next time, I would add in a little bit of red chili powder and red chili flakes. I really liked the cheesy flavor in the meatballs. If complimented with the right marinara sauce, these meatballs have potential. On a scale of 1-10, I would give these meatballs a 7 in taste.

Coconut Cake

I would like to start off by saying that this recipe is written horribly in the cook book. You have to go back and forth in the cookbook at least 20 times when making this cake. This cake has 4 elements: the basic cake, coconut custard, coconut syrup, and coconut butter cream. The way the recipe is written you don't realize that different items need various times to cool/mature. Give yourself a good 3-4 hours when making this cake. With that being said, the ingredients were all available. The recipe calls for cake flour. We did not have cake flour at home, but did some research and realized cake flour is just all purpose flour mixed with corn starch. We eliminated the coconut liquor and substituted it with whole milk. Also, it requires vanilla beans. It came as a shock to me that 2 vanilla beans cost $9!! I would say you need to be baking at an intermediate level before attempting this cake. All elements of this cake were divine, besides the frosting. The frosting basically tasted like blended sweet butter. We doubled the amount of confectioners sugar that was required, but were still not satisfied with the end result. Next time we make this cake, we want to create some sort of pineapple vanilla icing, or use a standard cream cheese icing. I would rate this cake on a scale of 1-10 as an 8, with the right frosting it has potential of getting a perfect rating.

Week two of 2 women and a cookbook was a success!! Bobby Flay's Throwdown recipes are going to continue being analyzed next week. We were a little disappointed this week, but hope that this cookbook redeems itself, as Bobby Flay is one of my favorite chefs.

Happy Cooking!

Barefoot Contessa At Home

For our first official week of cooking meals for this blog, we chose recipes from Barefoot Contessa At Home by Ina Garten.

Shari and I have decided we will judge each recipe on 5 categories: availability of ingredients, instructions, skill level required, taste, and miscellaneous factors. Based on these categories we will then either recommend or not recommend each recipe. Then at the end we will give our overall opinion of the cookbook.

This week we made:

1. Green Herb Dip

2. Roasted Shrimp and Orzo Salad

3. Crunchy Noodle Salad

4. Eli's Asian Salmon

5. Zucchini Pancakes

6. Lemon Yogurt Cake

Green Herb Dip:

This recipe called for all readily available ingredients, and is very short and simple. Skill level is pretty easy- it just requires a lot of chopping herbs and a food processor. If you don't have a food processor, I'm sure you could subsitute a hand mixer just make sure the cream cheese is room temp. I found this recipe to be a little lacking in something but I couldn't put my finger on it. Shari and the boys liked it though. Overall, we think its definitely a good healthy alternative to other dips but I still prefer ranch dressing :)

Roasted Shrimp and Orzo Salad:

This salad was the perfect complement to the herb dip because it used many of the same flavors! All the ingredients were easy to find and we had most of them left over from making the dip. The instructions were easy to follow and it was very easy to make (just make sure you don't over cook the shrimp!). The flavor of this salad is great, it would make a really good dish for a summer party or barbeque! Shari and I would DEFINITELY recommend this recipe.

Crunchy Noodle Salad:

This recipe actually did not come from the cookbook BUT it is an Ina Garten recipe and has a nice asian flavor that paired well with our salmon. For a side dish this recipe called for a LOT of ingredients! Although these ingredients can most likely be found in your grocery store (we found them in ours), they are not things you likely already have unless you cook a lot of asian inspired food. We estimated that this pretty simple side dish cost us $20 to make because of all the extra things we had to buy to make it. Although these noodles went very well with the Salmon, it is not our favorite noodle dish and we would not recommend it. The dressing that is supposed to coat the noodles falls to the bottom and doesn't absorb well leaving the noodles with a faint sesame flavor.

Eli's Asian Salmon:

Like the crunchy noodle dish, the salmon called for a lot of ingredients but we found them to be worth it. The instructions were easy to follow, although we did have to cook our salmon about 5 minutes longer than called for. We rated this recipe's difficulty as medium, not because it is hard to make but because the oven has to be 500 degrees and it is easy to burn the crust. We also made some changes to this recipe we want to mention. Mainly we doubled the chili paste and served the fish with lemon. Overall, we all thought the salmon was excellent (even Austin who does not like salmon!). I, personally, felt the ginger overpowered all the other flavors so I would use less but Shari disagrees. The salmon was cooked perfectly and very moist so we recommend this recipe.

Side note: Imran likes his food spicy so Shari made a little sauce for him to eat with his fish. (Warning: not for the faint of heart!)

2 tablespoons Red Pepper Flakes

1 teaspoon Red Chili powder (cayenne)

1 teaspoon Garlic paste

Dash of Salt

Enough lemon juice to form a watery paste

Zucchini Pancakes:

These were super easy to make and a great way to get your kids to eat veggies. The recipe calls for traditional pancake ingredients plus a little onion and a lot of zucchini. The instuctions were very simple and as long as you can flip pancakes you can successfully make these. We thought the flavor was decent but after the pancakes sat out for a while they got greasy so we probably would not recommend this recipe.

Lemon Yogurt Cake:

Shari and I have actually made this lemon cake before and it is excellent! Ina featured it on an episode of Barefoot Contessa recently and served it with a blueberry sauce, so we to give it a try again. The ingredients are common and the instructions are clear. The skill required it pretty low and the beauty of this recipe is that is DOESN'T require a mixer! The cake tastes great and the blueberry sauce is really nice. We definitely recommend this recipe! The only caveate is that the blueberry sauce calls for vanilla sugar which we didn't have and neither did our grocery store. We added a little vanilla extract to our sauce to compensate but if you are so inclined I know Penzeys Spices sells vanilla sugar or maybe it can be found in a specialty food store.

Overall all, this is one of my favorite cookbooks that I own. Most of the the recipes have pictures (very important!) and Ina uses very easy to find ingredients and mostly simple recipes to create very tastey food. I have made several other dishes from this cookbook and enjoyed them all. Especially, the Chicken with Goat Cheese and Basil. It has become my go-to chicken dish and I highly recommend it and we definitely recommend this book!

Last Week

So our brilliant idea for this blog came to us while making dinner for some friends this past week. We made empanadas (a la Bobby Flay) and an apple danish (featured on my favorite food blog, Annies-Eats, recipe from Bakers Illustrated).

They were both PHENOMENAL! Best things we have ever made. I'm craving the empanadas now as I type. It was actually a bad day in the kitchen for both of us though... Shari touched her eye after dicing extra spicy peppers and I burned my finger not once, but twice!! We had to soak Shari's eye in a bowl of milk to stop the pain! It was totally worth it though!!

The recipes can be found at the links below:

Spiced Apple Cream Cheese Danish

Beef and Goat Cheese Empanadas

For the empanadas we improvised on the peppers. We couldn't find most of the peppers Bobby Flay used so we chose Jalapenos and a Habanero (no seeds) for the filling and for the sauce we substituted roasted red peppers for the piquillo peppers. Also for the empanadas, the dough recipe didn't create enough dough to make 8 empanadas. We recommend doubling it.

The Danish recipe was perfect and overall, the dishes were a raving success!!

Our new blog!!

Welcome to Two Women and a Cookbook!!

Shari and I have been best friends for a couple years now and we love to cook (and bake); so much so that our significant others are less than thrilled with the size of our grocery store bills :) Since there are only two of us in each house (no kids here) we end up wasting and throwing away a lot of food! To resolve this issue, Shari and I have decided to cook together once a week and have dinner for the four of us. We will select a different cookbook each week to test and all the dishes for the meal will come from that cookbook.

After our meal, we will rate the cookbook: how easy the recipe was to interpret and recreate, were the ingredients readily available, does the food actually taste good, and were any failures due to user error or the recipe.

We both love Food Network but we have found that professional chefs make a lot of really complicated things look and sounds easy. We are here to show you whether or not that is true!

Now that we have explained our intent we want to introduce ourselves!

Shari and I met while in grad school for our MBA in Orlando and quickly realized we have a lot in common. Mainly that we are both from Houston and both enjoy cooking (and eating!).

Shari has a passion for cooking. Nothing makes her happier than cooking dinner for her husband or entertaining a group at home. With her Pakistani background and her Texas upbringing, Shari has many exciting recipes and loves her food SPICY.

I, on the other hand, love traditional basic recipes (think Lasagna and Chicken Pot Pie). If Shari is Bobby Flay, then I am Ina Garten. I grew up cooking with my Grandma and my Mom and I love to bake! Although I am not married, I have a boyfriend who loves to eat and He (Austin) and Shari's husband, Imran, will serve as our judges every week.

Neither of us claim to be excellent or professional chefs, we are just two normal women with a reasonable amount of cooking experience. And what we lack in skill, we will make up for in exuberance :)

y!