Lifestyle

Best Side Dishes To Make For Holiday Dinners

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With libraries crowded due to upcoming prelims, earlier sunsets, and colder weather, it can be hard to remember that the holiday season is coming up! But with Thanksgiving Break in a week and Winter Break soon after, it’s good to keep those in mind – and even start thinking of how we want to play a part in holiday dinners. From dinner rolls to pies, easy store-bought sides to time-consuming homemade spectacles, there’s a variety of ways to help contribute this winter. 

Dining

AUSTIN | Eat With Your Eyes

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Normally when people write articles about their cooking experiences, there’s always a picture attached of the dish they made. Have you ever wondered why there are never food pictures in my articles? It’s because nothing ever looks good. I don’t know if it’s my inability to plate food or my lack of understanding regarding “angles” and “lighting,” but no matter what color the dish is, it always looks brown and sad on camera. I’m not a very aesthetically pleasing cook.

Dining

AUSTIN | A Loaf of Chocolate Swirled Cake

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After the epic fail that was my carrot “soup,” all I needed was some good old fashioned comfort food. Surprisingly, between the three Moosewood cookbooks I own, there isn’t a single classic chocolate chip cookie recipe. Even though I wanted gooey, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate chips to chase away the taste of dirty carrot water, I had to settle for the next best thing ー Chocolate Swirled Bread. I’ve always been told that it’s important to define my terms, so I would like to do that before I begin. This is not bread.

baking

Measurement Experiment: By Weight or Volume — Which is Better?

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Part 1 — Amelia Clute and French Macarons
French macarons are only scary if you actually care about doing it well. Let me elaborate — you would have to try extremely hard to produce a legitimately inedible macaron. Almost any combination of almond flour, sugar and meringue will give you an extremely tasty pastry. So why are macarons touted as one of the most difficult, fussy and intimidating challenges in the culinary world? Simply put, it is because we place too much emphasis on aesthetics without asking ourselves if we actually enjoy what we’ve created.

Dining

I Made Bread Too

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The only thing better than the aroma of freshly baked bread is the sweet smell of hot chocolate chip cookies; quarantine has provided ample time for my family to make (and consume) both. Over the past few months, we have experimented with many different varieties of bread in an attempt to make our lives more exciting. My family has always been a bread-loving bunch. For years, my mom has used a bread maker that mixes and kneads the dough. With this time-saving machine, we can add ingredients to the machine, leave it for two hours on “dough” cycle and return to shape and bake it in the oven (which we prefer over baking in the bread machine).

Uncategorized

Quarantine Cooking Across the Country

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When the Food System Fails — Minneapolis, Minn. My mother is a stubborn and hard working Lutheran, born and raised in Minnesota. Growing up, her mother, grandmother and aunts would always be making buns, biscuits, cookies, cakes, pies, loaves and hot dishes of all kinds. These were staples, found fresh or frozen at all times, because they make you feel at home. These are foods you make to endure stressful times, and no time in my life has been as tough as right now.

baking

Goodbye Gingerbread, Hello Hamantaschen

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Hamantaschen (noun): Jelly or chocolate filled, triangular shaped cookies that crop up around this time of year, and are obviously the superior holiday cookie. As a certified cookie expert (a.k.a. a product of the elusive freshman fifteen), I can assure you that cookies come in all shapes and sizes, and many are very similar. However,chocolate chip cookies, gingerbread and snickerdoodles all pale in comparison to hamantaschen. In early spring, there’s the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrating the Jews triumph over a mass genocide. In addition to having a celebratory feast, we’ve also narrowed in on the triangular shaped cookie market.

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Food Ethics | Worries to Wonder

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When I was 14 years old, I went hunting with my dad on youth hunting weekend. It’s the weekend before the official hunting season begins, giving novice hunters a better chance. Going into this, I asked two questions: ‘do I deserve to eat meat if I can’t kill an animal? ,’ and, more importantly, ‘how will I feel after this?’ The best way to find out seemed to be to shoot first and ask questions later. I was even planning on butchering the animal myself, which I felt was a crucial step in answering these questions.

baking

Food Ethics | Confessions of An Ignorant Bread-Lover

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Maybe you’re familiar with the fact that Oprah Winfrey has a partnership with Weight Watchers. This would not have been something I’d have known about had it not been for a particularly strange, and thus memorable, commercial I saw at some point during the past couple of years. Oprah advertised what seemed to be a new conception of Weight Watchers,hinging on one important factor for her. “I LOVE bread,” Oprah professed earnestly and seemingly out of the blue. To some, this could seem hilarious.