this was a weeek for much experimenting in the kitchen.
for valentine's day i wanted to make a cheesecake for me and the significant other. in an attempt to make the cheesecake more healthy (rather, less bad for you) i used fat-free cream cheese and splenda. hours later i open the oven to find a small ugly excuse for a cheesecake. the taste was close, but the cheesecake was cracked on the top and looked like hell (having been baked extra long because the first time i checked it was still liquidy).
thinking splenda may have been the culprit, i get online to find another recipe with splenda in it. i had enough (fat free) cream cheese to try again, so away i go with cheesecake number 2. hours later i open the oven to the same thing. at least it was cooked throughout, but the surface more resembled a baked, cracked bit of mud than a cheesecake.
so that's two cheesecakes thrown away in one afternoon. but the takeaway is that fat-free cream cheese is NOT to be used for making cheesecakes. at least, not exclusively. there may be some combination of regular and fat-free cream cheese that would work and one day i may have the energy or ambition to try.
but wait, that's not all.
the second cheesecake left me with some egg-white. i'd been wanting to try homemade mayonnaise for a while now, and i used this as the excuse to try. so i whipped it up, adding lots and lots of oil to the mixture, waiting for it to emulsify. finally my arms get tired, so i i get out the mixer with the whisk attached. having used LOTS of olive oil, i switch over to something lighter. i run out of that. so determined, i shift back to the olive oil. _finally_ it looks (consistency) properly like mayonnaise. but how does it taste? well, with that much olive oil it tastes almost exactly like olive oil. also, it's green. also, there's a TON of it. hmmm. so we tried to eat it, but since it tasted pretty much like olive oil it didn't make for a very good condiment. and now it sits in my fridge, still looking alright, but not tasting any better. i'll throw it away this weekend. the takeaway here is that homemade mayonnaise may be really good, but an egg and a half shouldn't make that much mayonnaise. and maybe oil with less of a taste would work better.
and for mess number three.
cooking the chicken in the skillet left some oil and such behind, so i decided to add some sour cream and try to make a sauce. oily mess. maybe if we add flour we'll get gravy. nope. oily mess with flour. one day i'll learn to make a proper sauce. or gravy. but this was not the way to accomplish it. the mess went straight into the trash can.
but all is not lost. the purchase of a sam's size jar of artichokes (from sam's club) was a success and has produced some _excellent_ chicken with artichokes. of course, that's the significant other's cooking, not mine.
and last night was my first attempt at making mashed potatoes. and that was quite successful too. not perfect, but still a very satisfactory result.
so this is the kitchen. a fun place to create a mess that's sometimes, but not always, edible. it's good fun. like chemistry lab.
