Student Cooking

Homemade Beef Stew

~ Hilary ~ 8 Comments

Hello everyone, remember me?  I know, its been awhile.  No, my blog is not dying, so for all you shaking your head’s out there, stop it right now!!  Rather, I’ve just been really busy with classes and such.  I had two huge assignments due today and yesterday, and we’ve now started newsroom days for radio, which complicate things a tad more

But enough with my complaints!  Lets get on to what you actually want to read about…

Okay, so at this point I’ve finally accepted that the cold fall weather is here to stay.  Ever since the Halloween blizzard, it’s like some signal went off in my brain making me crave only two things: chili and stew.  Not having made anything decently healthy for awhile, I thought making my mom’s homemade recipe for the latter would be a great way to get my protein and veggie intake.  A more important factor contributing to this decision was that I forgot my grocery list when I went to the store (never a good mistake), and stew is a very good improvisation “I don’t know what the hell I’m buying” dish.

My dear roommate Brittany also coincidentally decided to make stew last night.  Bubbling away on the stove, our stews brewed and sizzled – creating a symphony of smells in our cramped kitchen.  Though the cooking time on a recipe like this is rather long (see instructions below, don’t plan on making this in a rush!), it turned out to be worth it in the end.  My improvised recipe ended up making five servings of warmth and love.  It pains me a bit to type this post, since I’ve now had stew for two meals in a row and am kind of sick of the thing.  Perhaps I’ll move on to chili next and leave my leftovers in the freezer for a bit…

Cute little freezer leftovers

Homemade Beef Stew
– 2 tablespoons olive oil
– 500 g stewing beef (basically beef cut up in squares at the grocery store, it’s amazingly cheap)
– 1 onion, chopped
– 2 cups beef broth, water or a combination of the two
– 4 carrots, sliced
– 2 large potatoes, diced
– 1/4 cabbage, chopped
– 1 zucchini, sliced
– 1 teaspoon dried thyme

The instructions for this one are pretty simple: fry meat with oil until brown.  Once browned, add onion and pour 1 cup of the liquid over the meat.  Bring to boil and let sit simmering for 45 minutes, or until beef is tender.  Add carrots, potatoes, cabbage and remainder of liquid. Let cook for 20-30 minutes.  Within the last 5 minutes of cooking, add zucchini.  Sprinkle with thyme and serve.  Enjoy!

Chicken Chorizo Paella

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

I am embarrassed to admit that it took me two solid days to learn how to say “chorizo.”  I know what you’re thinking: “Hilary is so stupid, it’s pronounced exactly how it sounds!”  This is a valid point.  I compare my difficulties with chorizo to the full week it took me to pronounce and spell Milla Jovovich’s name.  She is the actress who plays Alice in Resident Evil, and also the female I have the biggest girl crush on.  Regardless of my zombie-killing admiration towards her, I insisted on spelling and saying her name like this: Jokovich.  This error caused my roommate Brittany, another huge Milla fan, to sigh in irritation.  However, just as in chorizo, I finally learned.  This is why radio scripts have pronunciations, my friends.

Alright, so that was a little off topic…

This Chicken Chorizo Paella recipe was from the November issue of Canadian Living.  To be honest, I was actually a little disappointed in this one.  The flavours were very similar to that of the squash risotto I made a few weeks ago (to be fair both recipes did use white wine, arborio rice and chicken broth).  Also, I’m not 100 per cent sure I like chorizo.  After all the trouble I spent learning how to pronounce the damn thing, you think it would be super tasty, right?  Unfortunately it left some sort of cross between pepperoni and kielbasa taste in my mouth, a flavour to which I would rather have been unexposed.  The consistency of the rice was good, and I controlled my irrational desire to add more than the required cup, a restraint which I wish I had when I made my soup a few weeks ago.  I am confident in saying that this dish would have been way better with just the chicken, but that’s just me.

Also, this recipe represents the first time I’ve actually bought wine to add in to a dish.  I stole some of my roommate’s before (sorry Alex if you’re reading this, it was only 1/4 cup I swear!) and decided it was finally time to invest in my own bottle.  The bottle is now sitting staring at me from atop my dresser, begging me to use it again.  We’ll see.

Hmmm, now what do I do with the other half of my chorizo…

S’mores Cake

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

As far as desserts go, I’m pretty sure this cake represents me completing a s’mores hat trick.  Earlier this week I was feeling a little glum; I had so much school work to do, I hadn’t been home except to sleep for a few days straight and I was just overly frustrated at the lack of blogging and delicious food eating I had been doing lately.  In true Hilary fashion I went upstairs, turned on some Taylor Swift and started singing at the top of my lungs.  The combination of baking and singing (poorly) were the only two things that could cure my slump.

I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to make when I first went upstairs, however I very quickly decided that s’more-ing it up was the absolute only thing to do.  I originally wanted to have chocolate cookie crumbs on the bottom of the dessert with a graham cracker cake on top of that, but I was faced with an obstacle of terrible proportions.  Did you know that chocolate crumbs go bad?  Me neither, but for some reason these smelled really sweet and tasted chalky.  I’ve had them since the summer, but I thought that stuff was sort of non-perishable.  Apparently not.  Thank god my roommate Alex came up and insisted on eating the crumbs, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about the mystery flavour until post-baking.  Not good.

So in the end, here was the anatomy of the cake:
– Graham cracker cake (recipe adapted from Annie’s Eats)
– Melted marshmallow*
– Chocolate glaze
– Graham cracker crumbs

*HOLY melted marshmallows have the sticking power of Krazy Glue.  I almost permanently pasted several kitchen utensils to the counter.  Once I melted the little buggers and tried to spread out the marshy layers with my fingers, I very quickly learned that I either had to find some way to (pardon my language) lubricate my fingers otherwise suffer a sudden tragic death from marshmallow stickyness.  For said lubrication, margarine was very handy.  Thank you greasy fats.

PS: Halloween wrap-up post to come tomorrow!


Pizza Awesome

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

NAME CREDIT: Ariel Hartman.

I couldn’t think of a title for this post, and I tried googling all the ingredients and the interweb gave me no ideas.  In a moment of panic, Ariel forced me to call it this.  Apologies.  (she is now saying the title like a valley girl)

Before we start, an admittance of guilt: I feel absolutely horrible that I haven’t blogged for nearly a week.  I’ve had so much school work to do, and I shouldn’t even be blogging right now…  Lets be honest, I really just needed to stop doing work for two seconds.  Last night I made a cake (which will be my next post) and tonight, a pizza.  Sometimes a girl just needs to eat.

Alright, on to the actual post…

Guess what everyone?  WE GOT A BREAD MAKER!!!  Ariel had been telling us for months that she was going to get her mom to send us the one they never used and we finally got it delivered all the way from B.C. earlier this week.  It just so happens that this is the same bread maker that we have at home, so whenever the little thing churns, I get super nostalgic for the times when my mom would make fresh bread when I was young (I would always pick away at the bread before we were supposed to eat it, that’s why there were always holes in the crust, sorry mom).

Anyways, since I have been dying to use this miracle machine for a while now, I decided making pizza dough in it was the best way to begin my bread maker adventures.  Britt found a great recipe online and we decided to go splitsies on the dough and make two different delicious kinds of pizza.

I was originally planning on making a margarita pizza, but considering I’m not a huge fan of basil (the main ingredient in this kind of pizza) I decided to sort of improvise on this recipe.  I splurged on a delicious $8 mozzarella ball which melted into the most smooth yet chewy perfect cheese I have ever eaten in my life.  When I arranging the ingredients on this pizza I was being slightly ridiculous, perfectly aligning the spinach and peppers in a circular flower pattern.  Ariel gave me a few weird looks, but in the end I think it worked out for the best!  If you can’t tell from the picture, there is mozza cheese, baby spinach, red peppers, grilled chicken and red onion on the pizza.  Also, I added the red onion just so this pizza didn’t have a Christmas colour theme, but in the end it actually multiplied the tastiness by 10!

Special thanks goes out to Mer-Face (Ariel) for helping hold my pizza while I took pictures of it!  Balancing this baby on the patio wall would not have been easy, so I was mucho grateful!  Also, she got a new profile picture, bonus!


Chunky Rice and Bean Soup

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

This day shall be known from here on in as “Soupy Saturday.”  The reason?  I made the most amazing soup in the universe!  Unlike my past soups which have focused on some sort of vegetable (pea soup, carrot soup) or on recreating a fiesta-in-a-bowl, I wanted to make a soup that just had EVERYTHING.  This Canadian Living soup recipe was perfect to achieve said goal  Also, since our house is absolutely freezing (we are students who are way too cheap to turn on the heat until snow hits the ground), I needed something other than my Snuggie to keep me warm.

This soup was soup-er (HA, get it?) easy to make, and took less than an hour in total to cook.  The only difficulty occurred when I decided to scoff at Canadian Living’s “tested till perfect” mantra, and add three times the amount of rice that the recipe called for.  This was a major mistake, and I had to add about a cup more water to compensate for my ingredient adding through over-excitement.  Due to this extra H2O, I now have enough soup to probably last me until the end of the winter season.  I’ll be keeping a large tupperware of it out (wish me luck trying to fit it in our fridge!) and packaging the leftover soup in cute little single-serving Ziploc bag packages to be eaten on overly lazy days.  Also, I need a thermos to bring things to school, anyone want to buy me one (preferably this or this). :)

Oh wait, one more thing.  I bought this new app for my iPhone (yes, I paid a whole 99 cents for it) that turns my phone into a pinhole camera.  Isn’t that the most wonderful thing you’ve ever heard?!  I took a few pictures of my lunch using that camera as well, and loved the result so much I thought it needed to be shared with you…