Simple Rice Pilaf

If you've struggled to cook a nice rice dish to pair with your grilled meat, then this is the recipe for you. You'll be shocked at how simple this rice is, because it tastes so good and is versatile enough to pair with seafood, chicken, and other grilled meats.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup white rice
1/2 cup orzo pasta (or vermicelli)
1/2 cup diced onion
2 cups chicken stock (or water)
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp garlic powder

Steps:

-In a medium sized pot, melt the butter over medium heat.

-Toast the pasta in the butter, stirring frequently, until it goes from light brown to golden brown.

-Toss in the diced onion and garlic powder and stir around until coated with melted butter, then cook the mixture until the onion becomes translucent. Remember to stir occasionally during this cooking process.

-Add the uncooked rice and chicken broth and raise the heat until the broth comes to a boil.

-At that point, the rice should be covered with liquid. If not, you need to make sure your measuring utensils are working properly. If you did it right, you can lower the heat to medium-low, cover the pot, and let the rice cook until the liquid is absorbed. This process will take anywhere from 20-40 minutes, depending on the type of rice you use.

-Once you are certain that the liquid has been absorbed, proceed to turn off the heat and leave the rice alone for a few minutes. After that, fluff the rice up with a fork or other fluffing utensils that you might have (All I had was a fork). Once you've done that, you can eat the rice served alongside some salmon, grilled chicken, shrimp, etc. Enjoy!

Deluxe French Toast

Here's a quick yet special spin on the typical french toast recipe. Most people just whisk together an egg and add a splash of milk and soak some sandwich bread in there, then they pan fry it in some oil and douse it with syrup. And it's really not bad, but this recipe is just something else. We're going to be using french bread, some spices, a thinner egg mixture, and an extra cooking step that will give us a great crust on the outside and a beautiful, soft, spongy interior.

Ingredients:
3 slices of french bread (day old bread works best)
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup milk
1/2 tbsp sugar
Small pinch of salt
Butter

Steps:

-Preheat oven to 400° F (to finish the french toast cooking)

-In a small bowl, whisk together the egg, vanilla, cinnamon, milk, sugar, and salt until well combined.

-Toss the bread in the mixture and let the bread soak it up.

-In a cast-iron skillet, melt enough butter to coat the surface evenly.

-Once the butter is melted, add the bread into the pan and cook until surface is light brown (the french toast will darken in the oven)

-Flip the pieces over and brown the other side as well. The bread should not be in the pan for longer than a few minutes.

-Once your bread is browned on both sides, stick the pan in the top rack of the preheated oven for about 5-7 minutes or until the bread puffs up and the surface of the bread has achieved a darker crust.

-Top with anything you want, syrup, powdered sugar, fresh fruit, maple butter, or any combination thereof. Enjoy!

Microwave Potato Chips

You may not have thought it was possible, but you can make crispy potato chips in the microwave. Despite sounding like a health disaster, this recipe uses very little oil. In fact, if you have some parchment lying around, you can get away with using no oil at all. That's right, absolutely no oil for the extremely health conscious folk out there (you know who you are). Here's how it goes.

Ingredients:
1 small potato sliced into 1/8 inch thick pieces
Table salt (coarse salt is too coarse for this)
Cooking spray or vegetable oil (optional but recommended)

Steps:

-Start by slicing your potato (rinsed well) into 1/8 inch thick pieces using something like an adjustable mandolin slicer or a knife if you're real pro and stuff.

-Find the largest dish you can that will fit comfortably in your microwave and line it with parchment paper (if you don't have parchment, this can still work, but you will have to oil your dish well).

-(This step is optional, but highly recommended as it will yield better results):
Spray the parchment with cooking spray or brush lightly with vegetable oil. Then, lightly sprinkle some salt directly onto the parchment

-Lay as many potato slices as you can onto the oiled parchment with some space in between (about a centimeter or two).

-Lightly sprinkle salt onto the potato slices

-Cook the potato slices in the microwave on HIGH for 3 minutes.

-Flip the potato slices over and set the microwave on HIGH for 1 minute this time, but don't leave just yet. In this stage, give your slices love and attention, otherwise they will go from light brown to toast in a matter of seconds.

-In this last minute of cooking, monitor the chips closely. Once a few of the potatoes become slightly browned, immediately turn the microwave off.

-Repeat the cooking process until you have no more potato slices left.

-Taste one potato chip to see if you need more seasoning. Most likely, this won't be necessary. Then enjoy!

No Electric Mixer Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hey guys! Welcome to my first post on this blog. Have a pie (( ・◡・)っ♨). Now that that's done with, I wanted to show you guys this recipe for chocolate chip cookies that anyone can make even without an electric stand mixer. If you have one, then use it because that will be much faster. Now, onto the recipe.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup softened butter salted or unsalted (4 oz. stick)
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1 egg (preferably large)
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/8 cup flour (1 cup and 2 tbsp)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt (not necessary if using salted butter)
1 to 1 1/2 cups of your choice of topping (nuts and chocolate)

NOTES:
One way to screw up this recipe is to over/under-soften the butter. If it's too hard, the cookies will be extremely hard to mix and they won't spread out when they bake. If it melts too much, your cookies will be very flat and not very chewy. DO NOT microwave your butter. The outside will melt before the inside gets a chance to warm up. Just let your stick of butter sit out from anywhere between an hour or two until it reaches room temperature, or it becomes easy to squish with gentle pressure.

Another way to ruin the recipe is to not measure the flour or sugar precisely. To measure flour, fill up your measuring spoon and level it off with the back of a knife or other flat object without packing the flour. With brown sugar, you do the opposite: pack the sugar into the measuring spoon until you can't fill it anymore, then level it off.

Steps:

-Preheat oven to 375°(F)

-Start by adding your super soft butter, brown sugar, and white sugar into a large mixing bowl. Using a baking spatula, mix the sugars into the butter until they are well combined. If you have a stand mixer, use your paddle attachment for this recipe.

-Once your butter and sugars are "creamed" together, add the egg and vanilla. Switch to a wire whisk and beast it up (just stir it basically). Again, if you have a stand mixer, use your paddle attachment. At this point, you should have a very wet batter.

-In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt (if needed) until the dry ingredients are combined.

-Add the dry ingredients into the wet batter. Switch back to the baking spatula and mix the flour and soda into the batter until just barely combined. Once again, stand mixer folks, you know the drill, use your paddle attachment. Be very careful not to over-mix. Even if you see small patches of flour, don't worry. As long as most of the dry ingredients combine, your batter will be fine (rhyme not intended). Just avoid over-mixing as it will result in stiff cookies. Once the flour is added in, the wet batter you had before should now be a cookie dough consistency, which just means that it can hold its shape.

-Here comes the fun part, which is mixing in the toppings. You could go for macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips. Perhaps, you might want to add dark chocolate chunks. It's totally up to you. For my recipe, I choose the traditional semi-sweet chocolate morsels. Anyways, just stir in whatever toppings you are using until they are covered in dough.

-At this point, you can scoop the cookie dough  using an ice cream scoop onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. You will likely need to do this in two batches.

-Put the tray of cookies in the oven for 11-12 minutes or until they have spread out and browned nicely. Do not put multiple trays in the oven at once.

-Once you have determined that your cookies are done, proceed to remove the tray from the oven, but do not disturb the cookies yet! Let them cool in the tray for about 5-7 minutes before removing so that the cookies have time to harden a bit and so that the cookies don't break when you try to hold them.

-Feel free to enjoy with a glass of cold milk or whatever your heart sees fit.