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!