Updated Blog Address

Hey all,

We've decided to transfer our blog over to wordpress.com. We did this mainly because the blogs looked more professional, but you can find the new link: http://www.zachandgina.com, yes we splurged for the .com site, add it to your favorites!


Zach and Gina

Shop Class 101

Obviously, Zach and I LOVE to cook. Though we don't have a fancy kitchen, we find it mostly usable. What isn't working for us, however, is our lack of counter space. Since our dish drying rack takes up 1 out of 3 countertop spaces, it leaves us only about 4 square feet to spread out our computer (to refer to a recipe), cooking supplies, ingredients, appliances, and our glasses of wine. Drinking while making dinner is the best part! It hasn't been too much of an issue, but it would be nice to have more space. 

I have been looking for a long table to put underneath this window, but haven't been able to find anything long enough, and deep enough, or at countertop height. So...

I decided to build something! I haven't even taken so much of a shop class (2 semesters of home economics - at least I can sew!), but thought Zach and I could handle it. There is a website called http://ana-white.com/, and this blogger posts plans for building things out of wood. I found a plan for a table on here, and knew it would be perfect for that big space under the window. The plans for the table needed tweaking since we wanted it longer, and deeper, so we played around with the measurements, until we made a whole table to fit that space (when you take out the shelf the microwave is on). We also added a bottom shelf. I forget the height (but it's at countertop), but it is 2 feet deep and 5 feet long. See? That's a whole lotta square footage we were missing out on! 

Next, I went to Home Depot, and bought the (cheapest) lumber, a drill, screws, a sander, and sandpaper. For the lumber, we got 2x2s. Fun story about 2x2s. They aren't 2 inches by 2 inches. It's 1.5  by 1.5. That seems silly to me to call it a 2x2. They should just make actual 2x2s. I am gonna make a call to Home Depot... get that changed... Anyway, when I got home, Zach cut the 2x2s according to the plan with a hand saw. I think in all, he cut 18 pieces of wood. 

Next, we made the frame. On the left are the 2 tops (top and bottom shelf), and on the right is the side of the table. 

Then we put it all together! Don't be deceived by the pictures. This took a lot of time to accomplish. There was a lot of drilling, leveling, arguing, un-drilling, re-drilling, arguing, leveling, and more. I couldn't decide who wasn't level - the table, the floor, or our heads! By the end, the frame wasn't level in all the places, but I decided it didn't matter because I was excited for the next part of the project. Also, since we cut the 2x2s by hand, there wasn't any way to guarantee a 90 degree cut every time.

Outside the table went for installation of the plywood and sanding. I got the plywood cut at Home Depot, so it was pretty easy to screw the 2 pieces into place. Then we put wood filler into the drill holes.

Unfortunately, we don't have pictures of the sanding, staining, and more staining, and polyurethane-ing, and sanding, and polyurethane-ing, and sanding, and polyurethane-ing, and sanding, and a little more polyurethane-ing and sanding. This whole process took several days since we had to wait for our coats to dry, but it was so worth it.

And here it is!

It fills up that space perfectly, and gives us so much more counter space to work on! The shelf below is also wonderful so we can put our cookbooks on it, and baskets full of junk. The table is mostly level. You certainly cannot tell it's not level while using it, so it's just fine. Check out the cool paper towel rack we made out of scrap wood!

I am pretty impressed with ourselves that we managed to make this table. It took a lot of internet researching, calls to my dad (who knew stain and polyurethane could be so confusing?!), and re-doing things, but it was totally worth it. It's pretty great. Even though we are in this rental for another year, we hope to get a lot of use out of it. We haven't made a big meal yet (it's been in the house for 2 days now), but I know it's gonna be wonderful! Cool, huh?!

Mozzarella Cheese Bread

Mozzarella Cheese Bread

From time to time, Gina and I get to take the 1 hour drive to Orange County to housesit for my Uncle Rich and Aunt Ginny. They were out of town in Chicago and we were able to enjoy some beach time!

This week's blog post will be about one of the yummy treats that we made while we were out there. 

First, we bought some pizza dough from a local pizzeria. One large pizza worth was $4.00.

We rolled out the dough and formed it into a greased baking dish.

Then, we topped with mozzarella (part skim, of course), parmesan cheese, minced garlic, olive oil, and italian seasoning.

Per the pizzeria owner's instructions, we set the oven to as hot as it could go (500 degrees, F) and baked for ~10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, we weren't able to get the nice browned crust that the guy at the pizzeria told us to look for. We put it in for ~5 more minutes. The cheese browned up a lot more, but at least the crust was done. It was pretty darn good. My Aunt Ginny introduced us to the simplest sangria recipe the other day.  Simply mix wine (whatever kind, however much you want) and Fresca soda for a refreshing, tasty drink (see below).

And of course, the two made a perfect pair out by the pool.

Here is a closeup of the yummy cheese sticks.

Nutritional Analysis

We'd like to do a cost analysis and nutritional analysis.We will look at the calories first. We used part-skim mozzarrella (~350 calories for the whole meal). The dough we estimated as ~1000 calories (from various websites). This worked out to about 700 calories for half the cheese bread (we were hungry!), which really isn't too bad: all things considered. It's fewer than ordering out, and still very tasty! 

Cost Analysis

So we bought the pizza dough for $4.00. The mozzarella was ~$5.00 for the package (we used half), so about $2.50. We used Italian seasoning (~$0.08 worth), jarred minced garlic (~$0.10 worth), and parmesan cheese (~$0.50 worth). Total, $8.18: which we estimated about 4 servings: or about $2.04 per serving.

See Gina enjoying the company (even though she's allergic!). Sebastian was so cute.

Here's a picture of Gina and I enjoying the beach in Laguna Niguel later that weekend.

Swirlicious Cheesecake Cupcakes

I get a lot of ideas of foods to try from pinterest.com, mostly because I am surfing it often. This makes me bound to run across tons of delicious food items. Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake Cupcakes is one of these amazing finds. It originated from a blog named Annie's Eats. I nearly died after looking at the pictures, so I went straight to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients. 

I should have taken more pictures, but it was just so darn hot in the kitchen that I wanted to make them as soon as I could (sorry to our family and friends in Texas, I know it's hotter there!).

I grinded up graham crackers, and mixed that up with some butter to create the graham cracker crust, and layered that in the cupcake pans. They had to bake for about 5 minutes in the oven at 325 degrees, but you can definitely smell when they are done. 

The filling was pretty darn easy, too. Zach mixed up some cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, salt, and eggs. After the cheese filling goodness was done, we made the raspberry swirliciousness. In the food processor went raspberries, and sugar, then we strained it to get the seeds out. I imagine it doesn't matter if you leave the seeds in, but I thought it looked prettier without them. 

On top of the cupcakes goes a few dots of the raspberry stuff, and we swirled it around to get that tie-dyed effect. This part was pretty fun!

Zach accidentally made hearts! So cute.

So, I have never made cheesecake before, and I am guessing timing is everything when it goes into the oven? Because I had some issues. Zach put the first 2 trays of the cupcakes in the oven, and we cooked them for 22 minutes, as the recipe suggested. I don't know what we were thinking, because our oven runs hot so we always take things out early. But we didn't, and the cheesecake cupcakes got a little charred on the edges. Which was fine. But then as they cooled, they sunk in the middle! We taste-tested them, and they tasted a tiny, tiny bit charred, but still delicious. With the third pan, we set the time to 18 minutes, and they came out perfectly!

You can see the difference in the two batches in the picture below. The cupcake on the left in the white paper is perfectly done, and the two on the right, not so much. I don't know that this was a cooking failure, but there was definitely a lesson learned here! 

Luckily, Zach was having a meeting the next day with his Thermoelectrics group, so he brought them with him. I guess people liked them (even the funny looking ones) because Zach only came home with a few leftover! Maybe they just ate them to be nice? Haha, no, but seriously, they are sooo good and rich and amazing. Cheesecake is such a dense dessert, and the cupcake size is just the right amount. 

Here's the breakdown of the cost and calories. 

Cost

I am not as fancy as Zach with my cost analysis, so here it is dumbed down. My bill at the store was $20 (already had vanilla on hand, though, and only used a third of the graham crackers I bought). We got 36 cupcakes out of the ingredients, and that comes to about... hold on let me get a calculator... 56 cents per cupcake. Not too shabby, I guess? I don't know, but dude, it was totally worth it!

Calories

I plugged all of the calories into a calorie counter, and it came out to 187 calories per cupcake. This is a pretty great number considering all the cream cheese packed into each cupcake! 

Yes, now it's your turn, go make these! They're so good!

Shredded Beef Chipotle Tacos

You may have thought that we were tired of tacos, but since we've been diagnosed with TNS we decided we might as well go all out. This time we decided to pull out the slow cooker and do a recipe from our Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. We loaded up the slow cooker with some thin cut round steak. Then tossed in some diced onion, fire roasted tomatoes, minced garlic, cumin, and mexican oregano. Couldn't have been easier: 10 minutes of prep in the morning, then let it cook all day. Here's what we put into the slow cooker.

We also made some great pico de gallo. We finely diced some roma tomatoes and onion. We added a dash of sugar and salt and the juice from 1/2 of a lime, and more of Wendy and Jerry's serrano peppers (thanks guys!). It was a nice, fresh topping for the tacos. Gina decided to cut a few extra calories and ate the meal on lettuce.

I, on the other hand, ate mine on corn tortillas. We both topped our tacos with some shredded Mexican cheese and some plain nonfat yogurt (sour cream substitute).

Overall the tacos were pretty tasty. We've done a similar recipe out of Rick Bayless' cookbook, Pork Tinga Tacos. While these shredded beef tacos were very good (especially with the pico de gallo), I would have to say that the Bayless recipe is much better. I really love the flavor of chipotle peppers en adobo. It adds a smoky taste with just the right amount of spice. If you've ever had the chipotle tobasco sauce at Chipotle Mexican Grill, that's right where it is. I kind of wish Chipotle actually used some chipotle peppers in their meats, but we can't have everything :(.

We're interested in adding two new aspects to our blog: pricing and calories. We figure it's something that we're concerned with, and it's not too difficult to determine.

Meal pricing
So, to do the pricing we simply added up all of the cash we spent on the ingredients. In certain cases, such as spices, we didn't use all of the ingredients. In these cases, I just calculated the cost of the spice per teaspoon and multiplied by how many we used.

Who knew, the density of dried oregano is available online in 209 different measurement units! Anyways, it works out to be 0.0357 oz / tsp.

Also, the density of ground cumin can also be estimated using online sources. 600 grams per liter, or 0.104 tsp per ounce. Anyways, forget all the mathy details, the final results works out to be as follows:

This worked out to a total of $14.13 for the whole meal, or $2.36 per serving (assuming this yields 6 servings, which may be a slight underestimate). That's pretty good when you're on a tight budget!

Anyways, any feedback on the pricing would be good. If there's something you'd like to see that I didn't show, or if you think it's totally lame: don't be afraid to comment!

Calories
We also did a quick calculation of the calories. There are plenty of websites nowadays where you can enter in what and how much you ate for the day to get a rough estimate of whether you'll lose weight (myfitnesspal.com). We were able to enter what we used in the meal into one of these engines to get an idea of how many calories each serving was. Gina came up with 267 calories (for all  when we included the yogurt, cheese, beef dish, and pico de gallo). Since she ate it on lettuce, that's all she gets. I ate it on tortillas, so add 65*3 to that and I get 472 calories for my serving. This seems pretty low, but in reality the recipe doesn't have much. Besides the beef (which is lean cut) there are only vegetables and spices. So we get loads of flavor for very few calories! This is of course good on the waistline.

Well, we hope that you enjoyed our post on tacos. I bet you guys are thinking: "How can they keep eating tacos? Aren't they sick of them?" The answer is no, we'll never be sick of tacos. We could live at Chipotle and be the happiest people in the world. And based on the number of calories that we came up with, this isn't necessarily a bad thing!

Happy cooking, everyone!

"Atleast it's edible..."

Welp, 8 of you voted on the poll (2 of the votes were Zach and I, haha), and the results were that we should post our cooking mishaps! So here's one!

"Atleast it's edible." That's what Zach had to say about the dinner I made for him last week. I literally slaved in a hot kitchen (96 degrees in Pasadena) with the oven on for 2 hours. But I agree...

I decided to make Spaghetti Squash with Spicy Tomato Sauce. I had made this last year, and it turned out wonderfully, so I was hoping to have the same results. Yeah, not so much.

Check out the size of that squash. Zach had to karate chop it to get it into big chunks.

I laid the squash face down in water (a trick I learned from my friend Katie Walker), and put it in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour.

Let me skip the boring parts, and let's just say after 2 hours in the oven, it was still not cooked all the way through. So, I scraped out the squash, and decided to boil it on the stove. I boiled it for about 20 more minutes, and it was still crunchy!

We ate it anyway alongside the spicy tomato sauce. I sauteed onions and garlic until softened, then added tomato paste, diced tomatoes, sugar, italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, and water to make the sauce.

It was fine, but not delish. Bummer. I think the issue was that the squash was too humongous. The spaghetti squash I used last year was much smaller, and cooked so much faster, and the "noodles" were soft. Eh, you win some, you lose some. Oh, and the recipe was from my College Vegetarian Cookbook. I suggest, if you decide to make this, use a smaller squash!

It's gettin' hot in herrre

So that's why I made sorbet! Now Zach and I have a refreshing treat for these over 90 degree days. My friend, Lindsey, e-mailed a sorbet recipe to me from a blog called backtoherroots. One of her main reasons for sending it to me was that it had white wine in it- which I LOVE! Ah, I miss drinking wine with her!

Anyway, I made...

Peach and White Wine Sorbet

The ingredients, since it was not ice cream, were pretty limited. And I like less ingredients because it means less cost at the grocery store. I needed about 6 peaches, 1/2 cup of  sugar, 1 lemon, 1 cup of white wine, and a 1/2 cup of water. Easy!

I just diced up the peaches...

Cooked them on medium heat for 15 minutes with the sugar and water and some lemon zest...

Added the wine and lemon juice after the peaches had cooled...

And blended it until smooth, and refrigerated overnight.

The next evening, I put the mixture in the ice cream maker for about 25 minutes.

Very stoked about the sorbet!

The texture was really great of this sorbet, unlike some of the ice creams we have made that stay hard. I am not much of a sorbet fan, and for me to like this says a lot. So good! And healthy! You know Zach loves it, he pretty much likes everything.

Chili Rellenos de Rachael Ray

Sure, when you're thinking of Mexican food, Rachael Ray isn't the first chef to come to mind. However, Gina and I have been trying to decide how to use our anaheim peppers from our garden, and we wanted chili rellenos. The recipes out there, though, aren't very healthy and are usually battered and fried.  Rachael's looked fresh, delicious, and it is not loaded with a ton of fat and calories. Find the recipe here.

First, the recipe called for fresh sweet corn: one of my favorites. I grew up eating corn straight from my grandparents' fields, and I love its nice fresh taste. We cut the corn off of the cobs, then sauteed it up with some onions and serrano peppers.

The serrano peppers we got from our friends Wendy and Jerry who grew it at their apartment (Thanks guys!). 

Here is a picture of the sauteeing step, we later added some fire roasted tomatoes and garlic to finish it off.

We also followed Rachael Ray's recipe for some cilantro lime rice. We took this opportunity to use the microplane tools that my grandparents bought me for my birthday this year. Lime zesting made easy.

We put cilantro, lime zest, vegetable broth, spinach, and some lime juice into our food processor and ground into a paste. We put it into a bowl and stirred in with some cooked rice (cooked in vegetable broth).

Of course, we can't have chili rellenos without some roasted green chilis. We used the broiler to roast some of our homegrown Anaheim chili peppers (also two store bought, because we didn't have enough ready).

We covered the chilis with the corn/tomato/onion mixture and used the broiler to melt some cheese on top. The rice turned out very well, and brought in some nice color and flavors to the rellenos. We'd recommend this healthy alternative to fried chili rellenos to anyone, again you can find the recipe on Rachael Ray's Food Network website.

YUM - O!

TNS

Hi! We've been up to some more comida Mexicana lately. We've had tacos four times in the last three weeks. As a result, we are currently suffering from TNS, better known as Taco Neck Syndrome. One well known person affected by this syndrome is Shaquille O'Neal (see below). 

Now, without further ado: Creamy Chicken and Greens with Roasted Poblano Tacos (recipe here).

Last week we were blessed with the chance to spend some time in beautiful Laguna Beach, CA. My mom brought my two sisters (Cati and Jessica), my niece Grace (20 months!), and Mason (my younger sister Jessica's boyfriend) out to spend some time on the beach. Of course, we took this opportunity to share our love for comida Mexicana, tacos in particular, with these fellow taco lovers. What's Mexican food without some yummy guacamole? See the fresh avocados?!

And the finished product with some tomato, garlic, and lime juice.

For the tacos: First, we cooked up some onions in the skillet with a bit of garlic. Once that was done, we added our greens and chicken broth and cooked until they were good and tender. We used Swiss chard and spinach for the greens.

Here are the greens once they'd been cooked down.

While all of that was cooking, we roasted the Poblano peppers in the oven (top rack, on broiler setting for ~10 mins, flipping once) until the skin was blackened. This was a good alternative to the way that we usually do, which is flame roast on our gas range. This condo that we were staying at only had an electric range, but the broiler actually worked very well.

Once the peppers had cooled, we skinned and seeded them and cut into strips to prepare for the taco filling.

Since this recipe makes a creamy chicken taco filling, we had to use some cream! Rather than use heavy whipping cream (or creme fraiche) we took Rick Bayless' advice and used some Mexican Crema, which turned out to work very well.

So we added the cream to the skillet with the greens and cooked for a while longer. We also added the peppers and some chicken. We bought a rotisserie chicken from the store, it was cheap and very convenient for this recipe. See the final step below:

And here are the TNS culprits all plated up with some chips and guac, yummy!

Of course, we did what we usually do, heated the corn tortillas in the microwave in a wet paper towel and plastic bag so that they came out nice, warm, and pliable. This recipe was pretty fast, very creamy, and super delicious. The greens gave the tacos a little more filling, and a nice texture. The roasted poblanos added depth to the dish and just the right amount of spice. Overall, highly recommended - just ask Mason! You can find the recipe here.

Here are a couple of pictures from the week:

Here's to family, we had a great vacation, and were happy to share some Rick Bayless with them!