My roommate's girlfriend is pescatarian, so we try to find interesting dishes that accommodate her diet. There is a great recipe for fried cauliflower "wings". It is good enough to rival real chicken wings. The batter is extra crispy and the cauliflower perfectly tender. There are recipes for a Buffalo sauce and a Korean sweet and spicy sauce. I prefer the Korean sauce, but both are really good.

I also made some ranch dressing which itself is based on a homemade mayo. That mayo is a staple in my house. The ranch dressing is really amazing. It's much better with fresh herbs.

We also made toaster oven salmon to round out the meal.

While making fried cauliflower "wings", we made toaster oven salmon. For the marinade I just threw together some miso, soy sauce, brown sugar, and rice vinegar.

I think my toaster oven is a bit underpowered, as it took much longer than the recipe suggested. In principle though, I really enjoy the salmon covered in a marinade or flavored mayo and broiled. The oil coating in both cases insulates the fish from the heat so as not to dry out. Plus, the coating can get a nice browning. I also make broiled salmon with harissa spice mayo quite often.

I had 6 egg whites left over from the coconut custard I made recently. My roommate and his girlfriend have also been eating Klondike bars a lot, so I decided to make a homemade version.

The "ice cream" is actually a combination of Swiss meringue (cooked, whipped egg whites with sugar) and whipped cream. The texture is pretty much the same as the commercial bars. The best part is that you can use quality chocolate which the original is severely lacking. This recipe has a lot of leftover chocolate mixture, so I put some almonds in an icetray, covered them and froze it.

This recipe is pretty easy if you have a stand mixer. It may be bearable with a hand mixer too. The main drawback is that you must freeze things repeatedly to avoid melting while you are coating with chocolate. It's a nice way to use up some leftover egg whites. Ironically, we scrambled the egg whites on accident while cooking the meringue, so now I have yolks leftover.

I saw a video for simple sheet pan pasta dishes.

I had made something similar to the tomato based one years ago (the viral baked feta pasta thing). So, I decided to try the more unusual fennel, radicchio, and white bean recipe. However, I couldn't find radicchio and the fennel I did find was pretty anemic. He described radicchio (I've never had it) as a bitter cross between lettuce and cabbage. Bok choy sounded like a close enough alternative since it has a hard cabbage side and a leafy lettuce side.

I broiled everything like in the video. I especially liked the light charring on the bok choy leaves. I did find that it needed both cheese and lemon (he said one or the other).

I thought this dish was alright, but nothing to write home about. That's a weird phrase since I am literally writing about it... Anyway, I like the method and will try again with other combinations.

I bought a pound of loose leaf Thai tea a while back because I really love Thai iced tea in restaurants. For a while, I was making it all the time at home with various milks. The drink is really good, but I wanted to find something else to try. I found a Thai tea cake with custard recipe. The cake is pretty straightforward, even though I had to buy a new pan. You just steep the tea in some warm milk before incorporating into the cake.

For the custard, I couldn't find sweetened condensed milk, only sweetened condensed coconut milk. I felt that was perhaps a more fitting alternative anyway. The custard was pretty standard as well. However, it uses 6 egg yolks, so I didn't actually reduce my unused pantry ingredients with all the extra egg whites sitting around.

This is a really great desert. The cake becomes a nice orange color and the coconut custard awesome. I only wish that the tea flavor were stronger. You have to eat the cake without any custard to get any hint of tea.

In my last post, I made a pumpkin coffee cake that left me with a decent amount of opened pumpkin puree. So, in an attempt to use it before it goes bad, I made pumpkin sweet swirl buns (similar to cinnamon buns). I didn't have graham crackers, so I ground up a crunchy granola bar that aready had pimpkin seeds in it. I also had to grind hazelnuts into a meal which is a bit tricky not to turn into nut butter.

This used almost all of the remaining puree which is great. It also let me use my stand mixer to knead the dough. I'm glad for any chance to use it.

At first, I was afraid I didn't roll the dough tight enough to get a good swirl. However, the overnight proof in the fridge filled in the gaps. I also made a cream cheese frosting by whipping cream cheese, lemon juice, vanilla extract, and powdered sugar together. You can add a little bit of water to thin it out to your desired consistency.

The buns were really good! They were perfectly fluffy, a nice shade of orange, and the hazelnut filling was a perfect match for the spices. My only (minor) complaint is that the pumpkin flavor was not strong enough. I think the best takeaway is to try other fillings for cinnamon rolls. The dough is just a fluffy, yeasty, buttery vehicle for the filling.

On occasion I will scour the internet for recipes to use up an indegredient I have too much of (see the pantry raid tag). This time I was looking for old-fashioned oatmeal recipes, but it led me to another unused ingredient, pureed pumpkin. I originally bought it when I was experimenting with a low-carb diet and didn't really like it in less sweet applications.

Serendipitously, a pumpkin skillet coffee cake with oatmeal streusel could use both of these ingredients. I really liked this cake, especially the texture that the white chocolate adds. I didn't have any pecans, so I replaced them with some walnuts and pepitas (green pumpkin seeds).

Unfortunately, this only used a fraction of each ingredient. It didn't even use the whole can of pureed pumpkin that I opened.

The Independence Day gathering that I brought the Baked Alaska to was a potluck. The host made a really good watermelon, spinach, parmesan, and Balsamic vinagrette salad. The watermelon they bought was huge, so they sent me home with half of it. I found a watermelon gazpacho recipe to try to use it all up.

I couldn't find Calabrian chilis, so I just used some serranos. I also found that it needed much more vinegar than the recipe called for. Actually, it was quite hard to season the fresh soup, probably because it was cold and the flavors needed to mingle. It turned out really well after resting in the fridge though. This made me really appreciate the spicy watermelon combo.

I still have way too much frozen watermelon leftover though...

Baked Alaska has been a running joke with my culinary friends for a few years. We would make the most annoying menus possible for hypothetical events. It would include Baked Alaska, Beef Wellington, truffle anything, etc.

So, when I saw a video for practical Baked Alaska I knew I had to try it. It also helped that my friends were having a small Independence Day gathering and that I'm looking for stand mixer projects to use my new toy.

The practical approach is to make each component separately and assemble in one pan. The chocolate cake is dense, almost a brownie, and has a large fat ration to keep it from freezing rock hard. The best approach for the ice cream is to just buy it and let it soften a little before spreading on the chilled cake. My favorite part of this recipe is that while the egg yolks and whites are separated, they are all used. I really hate having egg parts hanging around in the fridge that I can't find a use for. The Italian Meringue was straight forward, but it was my first time making any meringue. I'm just grateful that I didn't splatter the lava hot syrup on myself.

So, you just layer everything in the cake pan and freeze until serving. Before serving, you are supposed to scorch the meringue to add a toasted marshmallow flavor. I went to a hardware store to buy a cheap butane torch. It turned out to be a normal cigarette lighter with a fancy nozzle. It had issues staying lit, so I broiled the whole dish for literally seconds and refroze it for a bit.

It was a really good dessert, impressive looking too, but it ruined the party by making everyone tired. Because of the extra time it took to make each component, I'd probably only make this again for special occassions.

When I was researching the matzo ball soup, I came across something amusing: Masa ball soup. It's a Mexican take on the original dish. Both are essentially dumplings in chicken soup. The dumplings here are made of masa, a specially treated corn flour used in tortillas, tamales, etc. The last minor differences are using squash and cilantro instead of carrots and dill. It's those changes that give the dish a Mexican flavor.

The masa ball dough was pretty loose which made me fear that the balls would disintegrate while cooking. Fortunately, they stayed together despite being a bit deformed. Overall, this was the best tasting pun I've eaten, but I prefer the original a little more.

While I had the masa flour out, I decided to try making champurrado, a thickened hot chocolate drink. I felt like the recipe was a bit lacking, so I added some cayenne, cumin, and coriander. It was pretty good, but not the right time of year for hot chocolate. One plus is that it sets up as a pudding when cooled which fit the season better.