Cooking in Cornerstone's Little Kitchen

We are behind on posting this, but we made dinner and breakfast at Cornerstone on Vashon a couple weeks ago.  First up, dinner...

There was a recipe we knew we wanted to make for Spinach and Ricotta Dumplings from the May 2011 Food Network Magazine, and then we figured out the rest of dinner around that.  The dumpling mixture was made into balls and rolled into flour

Then we made a marinara sauce to put the dumplings in, using fresh herbs from the farm



After boiling the dumplings, we tossed them in the sauce, and then topped them with parmesan cheese

Natalie cooked mutton from the farm, using leftover sauce from meat that Brandon had cooked, and it was so delicious, with a slightly sweet flavor!



There were also white beans that Natalie had cooked, and Brandon and Julia finished by adding butter, bacon, herbs, and cheese - they were also really good, but unfortunately we don't have a picture of just them. 

We made Asparagus with Garlic Dip from the May 2011 Food Network Magazine

We roasted the asparagus instead of boiling it like the recipe suggested



The dip was made with LOTS of garlic cooked in oil, then pureed with the rest of the ingredients, and finished with chives from the garden.

The salad we made was a Green Salad with Buttermilk Dressing from the June 2011 Food Network Magazine. 



We used cilantro from the garden, and raw yogurt and buttermilk from Vashon.  We also added some arugula from the garden. 

For dessert we made Maple Pecan Bars from Tasty Kitchen

To go with them we made vanilla/maple ice cream.  This isn't a very good picture, but we didn't get any better ones :(



Ian, Jeanette, and Wesley spent the night and in the morning we made Puffed French Toast, also from Tasty Kitchen. 



We got bread from Great Harvest, which is dipped in a batter made with orange zest

Then they are fried, and while they are frying they puff up a lot! 

We fried them in coconut oil that had already been used for frying ice cream, so the oil looks really dark

After being fried they are rolled in cinnamon sugar

They were really thick after being fried, and it was hard to tell where the batter stopped and the bread started--we thought you could just leave the bread out and fry the batter, and it would still be really good!

We have another post to do already since this one should have been done so long ago--hopefully we'll get it up soon!

May 11th Rainy Day Dinner and Breakfast the Next Sunny Morning!

Since there seems to be no end to Winter in sight, we decided to make a warm, comforting casserole for dinner that Jeanette has been talking about wanting to make since we got the magazine that the recipe is in over a year ago. We still included some Spring items in the meal, like asparagus with dinner and rhubarb in the dessert.



The main part of dinner was Tuna Noodle Casserole with Leeks and Fresh Dill from the March 2010 Bon Appetit Magazine. We substituted dried dill and fresh parsley for the fresh dill that the recipe called for.



The potato chip topping really made the dish, adding crunch and saltiness on top. Ian remembers having tuna casserole this way when he was young, but Bethany's mom didn't add the topping on hers. All of us thought it tasted "just like tuna noodle casserole!" - basically it took us back to childhood!

We also made Escarole Salad with Anchovy Dressing from the May 2011 Food Network Magazine. Not only were there anchovies in the dressing, but also lemon and orange juice. The flavors of the dressing, hard-boiled eggs, and croutons were similar to caesar salad.


And because it should be Spring-time, we made Lemon-Parsley Asparagus from the May 2011 Food Network Magazine.

This was very simple to make, but added a lot of flavor to the asparagus, and went really well with the casserole.

For dessert we made the Rhubarb and Raspberry Crostata from the May 2011 Bon Appetit Magazine.

Rhubarb is something to look forward to in the Spring!



The filling was cooked on the stove to thicken, and then cooled before putting it on the crust and baking.

We used freshly ground flour for the crust, which was very buttery...during baking a ring of melted butter formed around the outside of the crostata! Jeanette also made brown sugar vanilla ice cream to go with it, using local raw milk as well as eggs from Cornerstone Farm. We really enjoyed the dessert, especially since we hadn't made something with so much fruit in a while, and this had a lot of fruit filling for a crostata! Surprisingly, Ian even ate a piece and a half!

For breakfast the next morning, we made Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cake with Broiled Topping from Tasty Kitchen.

Wesley liked the batter pretty well!

The recipe called for quick-cooking oats, but we just used rolled oats, and they worked great--we thought you probably would barely notice the oats if you used quick-cooking. This cake has a lot of sugar in it!! It would probably still be sweet and taste good with the amount of sugar cut in half!



The topping was put on at the very end of baking and broiled very shortly, making a delicous crispy caramelized top.

We made whipped cream to have with it too!

The cake was delicious warm, and as it set the topping became more and more crunchy!

Though he did try a few bites of the cake, Ian made himself a savory breakfast. He topped it with creme fraiche that Jeanette had made using raw milk.

Since Wesley had so much fun licking all the beaters and spoons, he didn't have more of the cake for breakfast, but a pb&j instead.

Because it was so nice outside in the morning, we ate breakfast outside by the fire that Ian made.

It was beautiful out, and even though we were right outside the door to the house, it felt like we were camping with the fire and the lake and trees all around us.

After breakfast we went to let out three ducks that the Wilsons got a week ago, and were acclamating to their new home by keeping them in a house before letting them loose on the property.

It was a really fun couple days, filled with lots of good food, laughs, and at least some sunshine!

April 13th Breakfast & Dinner

For breakfast we made Sticky Date Pancakes with Butterscotch Sauce from the Tasty Kitchen website.

There was a whole stick of butter in the batter, which was very thick!

The sauce was very easy to make and just leave to simmer while we cooked the pancakes. It was also Jeanette's favorite part...she kept saying she couldn't believe how much she loved it!

Because the batter was so thick (maybe it would have been more pour-able if the butter had been softer like the recipe suggests?), a little bit went a long way once it spread out.

We also found that we didn't need to melt very much butter in the pan since there was so much in the batter!

We made whipped cream out of the cream from the top of raw milk, and also had apples and strawberries to go along with the pancakes.

The pancakes with the sauce and whipped cream were sooo good - you don't feel like you want or need any maple syrup to go along with them!

Moving onto Dinner......

When we were talking about what we wanted to make, we both thought we hadn't made fish in a while, and there were a lot of sides we wanted to make that would go well with fish, so we decided to find a fish recipe to try! There was also a salad we had been wanting to try, so we started the meal with it. The "recipe" was from the April 2011 Food Network Magazine for Watercress, Avacado and Orange Salad. All the flavors went really well together, and we loved the different textures of the avocados, red onions, and nuts. The onions are soaked in water for a while after being sliced, and then sat in the dressing for some time too, which softened them just a little bit, and took a little of the harshness of raw onions away. We used romaine lettuce instead of watercress, and we liked how it held up and kept its crunch once we tossed it in the dressing and everything.

The fish we decided to make was Tilapia Milanese from the March 2011 Food Network Magazine, but we used red snapper because we couldn't find wild caught tilapia, and we didn't make the arugula to go with it as the recipe suggests. The fish came out really well - nice and crispy on the outside, and with great flavor from the lemon zest and parsley in the coating.

To go along with the fish, we made Roasted Cauliflower Risotto, also from the March 2011 Food Network Magazine, and Roasted Radishes with Brown Butter, Lemon, and Radish Tops from the April 2011 Bon Appetit. The risotto was not made in the traditional way that risotto is usually prepared--rather than add a little bit of warm broth at a time, stirring until it is nearly all absorbed, and then adding more, all the broth was added at once and brought to a boil, then covered and put in the oven to finish cooking before adding the final ingredients. However, the pan we used was SO full when all the liquid was added, that we simmered it on the stove instead of putting it in the oven. This technique actually worked quite well; the rice absorbed more liquid as it sat while we finished cooking everything, but adding a little more broth would probably have brought it back to the right consistency if we had taken time to do that. We were so ready and excited to eat that we just ate it as it was, a little more like rice than risotto!

The roasted cauliflower and almonds were kept separate, and added on top of the risotto when it was served.

Roasting radishes was something neither of us had thought of doing before seeing this recipe - we had both only eaten them raw, and they seem to have such a strong flavor when they are raw that you can't eat a lot of them at once.

After they were roasted, they had a much more mellow, almost sweet, flavor to them. They also had a browned butter sauce poured on top after they were roasted, which made them taste so good! The recipe said to chop up the greens and put some on top after the radishes were cooked. There were a lot of greens, which we were thinking might be good cooked with the radishes a little bit next time.

And now dessert!!

We made Sticky Toffee Banana Pudding from the March 2011 Bon Appetit magazine, a banana semi-freddo, and caramelized bananas to go with it. The original plan was to make banana brown sugar ice cream with the caramelized bananas, but when we were on our way back from grocery shopping Jeanette realized that the bowl for the ice cream maker was not in the freezer, so we couldn't make ice cream! So we decided to puree some of the caramelized bananas, add them to whipped cream we had left over from breakfast, and freeze it. Then we left the rest of the caramelized bananas to have with the dessert.

The "pudding" (cake) was so good! Some of the toffee sauce is poured over the cake when it is cooked through, and then it's baked for a few more minutes, so the sauce is absorbed into the cake. We used honey in the sauce instead of the dark corn syrup it called for, since we thought the flavor of the honey would pair well with banana. The semi-freddo we made with the whipped cream was actually pretty good with the cake! It was very banana-y, especially combined with the cake and the caramelized bananas. Jeanette said the dessert was like glorified banana bread, which describes it really well because it was a sweeter, richer, banana bread type cake with the added banana flavor from the semi-freddo and caramelized bananas!

We really enjoyed every part of this meal, including the semi-freddo that we made last minute! Wesley really liked the pancakes...he ate at least 2 for breakfast, and then had another one in the afternoon when we started cooking that had been left in the oven, and accidentally got re-heated for quite a while when we turned the oven on! He also had fun helping us lick all the beaters!