So I decided on a different review. My last year in food. And no, I’m not even going month by month, but I’ll give you the top-10 most visited blogposts on here, and then I’ll add my own top 5 in addition to that.

10: Chicken in puff pastry

This is an insanely easy recipe that renders a very nice simple dinner. I don’t make it all that often, but whenever I do it’s an instant hit!

9: Candy bar ice cream

I love love love making my own ice cream, I started doing that for the first time this year. First without an ice cream maker, but after 1 batch I gave in and bought myself a machine. And some candy bars. The result was this candy bar ice cream, that’s just wonderful on any warm day when you’re craving chocolate.

8: Gratin Dauphinoise

A classic. Everyone who’s not lactose intolerant and doesn’t absolutely hate potatoes, needs to make this. It’s deceivingly simple. The only thing it really requires is a little time to sit in the oven. It’s good with everything and anything and makes your dinner instantly fancy!

7: Pierogi

Making pierogi was a daring cooks’ challenge which I finished about 3 hours after the challenge was posted. I’d only made pierogi once before, with my friend Amber. I forgot how easy and scrumptious they were. I altered the recipe just a tiny bit, to make them seem more healthy, like a full meal in a little dough pocket. The result, whole wheat pierogi to die for.

6: Cantuccini

These cantuccini  resulted in a multi-post day. At first I thought I’d totally screwed them up and failed miserably. I went on baking them, as I wanted to find out what the end result was. Boy was I glad I did. Even though they weren’t the pretty, small cookies I wanted (I’d just made them too big) they were very very tasty.

5: Lard

Lard, oh lard… Lard seems to have made a total comeback this year, and I took part in the craze. Why fill your body with chemically enhanced fats, when you can go all natural and produce tastier results. The featured post was the first time I rendered lard, I recently rendered a second, larger, batch and don’t think I’ll ever be willing to go back to the nasty stuff in the blue package!

4: Pasta with ham and peas

I never would’ve thought that such a simple ‘let’s see what I still have laying around in the fridge’ recipe would become so popular. But it did. I guess people just love their easy peasy comfortable food, that tastes great and looks good!

3: Gelato alla nocciole or hazelnut ice cream

This was my favorite ice cream last summer, no doubt about it! It tasted amazing. It was a very light ice cream, in texture and taste, yet very sweet and nutty. The reason I tried this recipe, was because it used egg whites as well as yolks. With the amount of ice cream I’d been making, I was drowning in egg whites. I was happy to find a recipe that didn’t render me more whites, and even happier that it became my favorite tasting gelato.

2: Angel food cupcakes

The ton of egg whites that the ice cream left me, was sitting in the freezer taking up space. Something needed to be done, and the only surefire way to get rid of a ton of egg whites, is by either making meringues or angel food cake. I decided on the cake and made cupcakes out of it. The result, the egg whites had left my freezer, and now a dozen cupcakes inhabited it. But not for long!

1: Swiss roll ice cream cake

Does this surprise you? The number 1. With the ice cream recipes in this list and the angel food cake? Ofcourse not! The swiss roll ice cream cake was a daring baker challenge. It took forever and a day to make, but it was surely worth the time. 2 kinds of ice cream, caramel sauce and chocolate-angel-food-cake-whipped-cream-swiss-roll. What’s not to like?  Apparently you, dear readers, agreed, as this is the post that, by far, received the most visitors in 2010.

My personal top 5, in no particular order, as it’s hard enough to choose just 5 posts on here.

Ginger snaps
The last post I did before this roundup, so I knew it wouldn’t make it into the list. But it so deserves it’s spot. Laurens filmed me while making ginger snaps and spent hours editing the prepping, 10 minutes of baking and cooling them into a less-than-1-minute-film. It was my first ‘cooking video’, so it holds a special place in my heart. Especially because both the film and the cookies turned out awesome.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igXt8Z8CAD4&hd=1[/youtube]

Pasta
My very first blog post here. And an important one at that. I love making pasta and there are many Italian (pasta) dishes featured on this blog. The basic though, is learning to make good quality pasta. This is the accomplishment I like most in this year. Laurens gave me my pasta rollers for Christmas in 2009. I made my first batch of pasta in januari and failed miserably. Then I tried again and it turned out okay. And then I tried again and again and within a couple of weeks making fresh pasta hardly took more time than boiling up some store bought. The taste is a big difference though. Homemade pasta is awesome!

Almost Cinnabons
Cinnamon rolls, yummm, is all I have to say about this. And I love showing you my nifty little trick making the casserole smaller. A tight fitting casserole is the trick to the best tasting rolles, they ooze together and make them gooey and wonderful!

Poached egg
One of my favorite posts because it makes me want to scream ‘I did it’. Poached eggs had always given me trouble. Granted, I’d only tried twice. And then, suddenly, I tried again and it worked. Such a proud moment in the kitchen!

Tiramisu
Just look at that picture for a minute will you? This was one of the first posts where Laurens and I really worked together to make the photo’s work. In our overstuffed-thus-tiny old kitchen, we’d walk around each other, re-positioning ourselves, so the pictures would work. Before that it was basically cook, serve, picture, eat. The pictures turned out beautifully and the Tiramisu was delish. What more do you want?

So there you have it. There are tons more posts I could write about, recipes I loved, photo’s that turned out beautifully, food I want to eat every single day for the next 2 years while I gain 3 million pounds. I’ll leave finding them up to you though. And if you find your favorite recipe on here, just visit it, let me know. The review next year might just turn out completely different because of that!

For now, I sign off, wishing you a wonderful, delicious, creative, inspired, food-filled new year!

I found an italian recipe online (instead of using my italian gelato book) which actually used whole eggs (separated). I immediately liked that, as I already have a heaping load of saved egg whites (frozen) and I really don’t know what to do with them. We don’t like egg-white-omelets, I don’t want to keep making Angel Food Cakes, no matter how tasty they are. I just don’t want more whites, period!

A recipe using the whites, therefor, was perfect for me.

And perfect it was. This ice cream is soooo dang tasty! It’s so extremely nutty. It truly does taste like you bought it at a gelateria in Italy somewhere.

Unfortunately I was too busy making it to take pictures, and neither did L. So here’s a picture of some hazelnuts instead…Did I mention I really really like hazelnuts. Especially when incorporated in ice cream?!?!?!

There are some minor issues with making this gelato tough. I’m wondering if you have any tips, or that I just need to deal or buy a more expensive ice cream maker.
Usually when you pour ice cream into your ice cream maker for churning, you already have it moving, to prevent immediate frost on the sides and bottom. Now this base is so thick, with the beaten egg whites, the nuts and the custard, that there’s no way you can pour it. You just have to scoop it in, which in my case, can’t be done uless you take the lid off (or just add it a teaspoon at a time). The opening in my lid is just too small to spoon stuff in. And, as you understand, the churning stops as soon as you take the lid off.

Now I scooped my mix in as fast as I could and started churning as quickly as possible, but I still had some stuff frozen to the side. Also, this gets real thick and solid fairly quickly. Now I have no idea if this is normal, but my machine swiches sides once in a while. It’ll start clockwise/counter clockwise and when it feels an obstruction (or without obstruction after an x amount of minutes) it will change directions. Now with the gelato getting firm and thick and solid so quickly, once it goes counter-clockwise it will actually push the lid out of the locked position and then push the lid off. This actually happened in about 10 to 15 minutes after I started churning. In other words, it freezes really really really quickly.
Not that I mind, hey, I have no problem recieving my ice cream a little quicker!!

The ice cream that immediately got stuck on the sides and bottom was still perfectly okay once I schooped it out. The only difference was that it was frozen a little more, like what will happen when you put it in the freezer.

All in all it was a giant success! Hazelnut (nocciola) has been my favorite flavor since I was a little kid, so I’m really really happy about this. Now tomorrow or so I will proceed with L’s favorite – caffe!  (coffee)

[print_this]

Gelato alla nocciola (recipe makes about 1 quart)

• 2 cups (whipping) cream
• 1 cup hazelnuts
• 120 grams (caster) sugar
• 4 eggs
• vanilla sugar

Start out by separating your eggs. You know the rules. Not a drop of yolk with the whites, so make sure you move your perfect whites to a clean container to avoid contaminating your whole batch if you screw up your last one)

Toast the hazelnuts if they haven’t been peeled, do so after toasting, it’ll be easier. In a food processor add the toasted nuts and a heaping teaspoon of vanilla sugar and grind the hazelnuts until they’ve become a fine meal (and still have a couple of chunkier bits in there).
Pour your cream into a small pan, add the hazelnuts and bring this to a boil. Once it’s boiled take it off the heat and let it sit while you beat the egg yolks and sugar together to form a creamy, slightly foamy substance. Slowly pour the hazelnut-milk-mix into the yolks, while whisking feverishly. Pour the combined eggs and milk back into you pan and on very low heat, while constantly stirring, make a fairly thick custard.
Move your custard to a bowl and let it cool off completely. In the mean time beat your eggwhites very stiff.
Once the custard has fully cooled, fold it into the whites, add the mix to your ice cream maker and churn until it’s all thick and firm and has become gelato.
Eat some right then and there and move the rest into a container and place in your freezer for future feasts!

[/print_this]

So I went home, poured myself a big cold diet coke and decided I’d much prefer frozen coke. Then I figured, hey, I have an ice cream maker, I bet it can make frozen coke too. So I turned the machine on, poured half my bottle of diet coke in there and figured the churning-freezing thing would give me the delicious summer drink I love to have on hot Colorado days.

I don’t know if it was the fact that the coke was diet, and that there’s sugar needed to make it work. Or that an ice cream maker just churns too slowly, but it was an epic, epic FAIL. The diet coke froze to the botten and sides instead of moving around and somewhat freezing throughout. my ice cream maker started making a funny sound, so I went and looked and it was moving, but in shocks splashing diet coke everywhere. It just kept getting cought on the pieces of solid frozen diet coke on the bottom and sides.
I wonder if it just needs to move around faster to prevent it from sticking, if it needs to be more sugary, or that frozen coke is just chemically altered so that I actually don’t want to drink it anymore. Anyways, I’ll just go back to my old method of placing the coke in a shallow bowl in the freezer and scraping a fork through it every 20 minutes, much like you’d make a granita.

What does work in an ice cream maker, is ice cream. All kinds of ice cream, or sherbet or whatever is not coke that splashes around. Anything that can deal with a slow churn and doesn’t freeze to the sides in an instant, works wonderfully.

2 weekends ago I mentioned that I was going to make ice cream in my then brand-spanking-new ice cream maker. And I did. And I will give you the recipe and you will ooooohhh and aaaaahhh over the deliciousness and simplicity of the whole deal. Really, making ice cream is sooo much easier and more fun than I ever imagined. And this time L actually took a whole lot of photos of the process. Which is good. You can see all the stages toward deliciousness.

I truly truly love making ice cream and wonder why I hadn’t done it before. The only thing is egg whites. What to do with all the leftover egg whites. I still have a dozen angel food cupcakes in my freezer, so I don’t really want to make more of that. I don’t really like egg white omelets, I just miss the yolk too much. What do you do with your leftover egg-whites. Just tossing them seems like too much of a waste.

Today I think I’ll make gelato alla nocciola, or hazelnut ice cream. Hazelnut is without doubt my very favorite ice cream flavor. Sure I love, love, love me some Baskin Robbins pralines and cream, and Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough, or plain old cookies and cream, or Haagen Dasz vanilla swiss almond, but if I could pick anything in the world, I’d go for italian gelato, nocciola flavor.

I found a recipe, in Italian, from an Italian website, that actually uses whole eggs (separated, but still yolk and white) for gelato alla nocciola. I will try that. If it’s not wonderful, I’ll try one of the other millions of recipes you can find, and I’ll go back to saving tons of egg whites. But for now I’ll try this. And I’ll let you know how it works out!

[print_this]Candy bar ice cream (recipe for about 1 quart or so)

• 1 1/2 candy bars (Mars, snickers, or some generic chocolate-caramel thing)
• 2/3 cup milk
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• a pinch of pink himalayan salt

Combine the milk, sugar, salt and about half a candy far in a pan. Stir until all the candy bar has malted and it comes to a slow boil. Turn off the heat and let it cool off a slight bit while separating the eggs and putting the egg yolks in a bowl (I actually used a big measuring cup from which I could easily pour.)
Once the egg yolks have been beaten in their bowl very slowly pour the milk/candy bar mixture into your yolks while whisking feverishly. You want to go very very slow to prevent the yolks from cooking and you ending up with egg-piece-chocolate-ice-cream!

Once all the milk has been incorporated into the egg yolks, pour the mixture back into your pan, turn on the heat very very low and stir constantly to make the custard. Make sure you scrape the bottom and sides so you don’t get lumps. Once the custard has thickened take it off the heat. Pour the heavy cream into the same bowl or measuring cup you’ve used before and slowly whisk in your custard. Make sure you scrape the pan and make sure you whisk so all is incorporated. Place the bowl in the fridge to cool off completely before churning it.
While it’s cooling, cut your leftover candy bar into little pieces.

Assemble your ice cream maker, start it and pour your ice cream base in. Once it’s been churning for 5 to 10 minutes, slowly dump in your candy bar pieces. Keep churning for a total of 30 to 40 minutes until the ice cream has reached soft serve state. Serve yourself a bowl of the deliciousness, then put the rest into a freezer container and let it firm up completely in the freezer. Enjoy!!!

[/print_this]