I have descended into full blown cooking nerd mode. (Saffron-Scented Halibut)

I spent most of high school and college avoiding chemistry.  Then I got into cooking.  My husband bought me an immersion circulator for Christmas!  I didn't know that there was a model that could hook on to an ordinary large pot instead of a giant plastic tub.  It looks more like lab equipment than a cooking tool. I've always been curious about cooking with one because I watch way too much Iron Chef America.  The Anovo immersion circulator is very easy to use.  I'm using it here with a pasta pot and some tin foil. One of the first things I wanted to try out was fish.  This is saffron-scented halibut with tomato compute and zucchini.  It was fantastic!  The zucchini was cooked through, yet still crunchy instead of mushy and gross.  The tomatoes had the right amount of softness.  The fish was perfectly cooked.  It was moist, flaky, and evenly cooked.  The saffron sauce had the right amount of zing from the oranges but it didn't overpower the flavor of the fish.  This dish did involve a good bit of prep work but total cooking time for everything was 17 minutes.

To make the meal, I attached the immersion circulator to my pasta pot, set it for 140 degrees F through its very simple touch screen interface, and covered the pot with tin foil.  The instruction manual emphasized that covering the pot is necessary and suggested tin foil if a special lid wasn't available.

I feel a bit like a mad scientist.  

Big White Chocolate, Almond, and Cranberry Cookies

This recipe means it: these cookies are big!  1/4 cup of dough for each cookie.  Even though they contain enough butter and sugar to stop your heart, they are amazingly good.  So, break out your colored Kitchenaid mixer that you got for your wedding and use once a year because these cookies are worth it! This recipe was a bit out of my comfort zone because it contained more than five ingredients.  It also reminded me that baking soda is actually used in cooking instead of only for being left in the back of my fridge for several months as a deodorizer.  ("Replace after three months"? I think David Tennant was still The Doctor when I put mine in there).

Tablespoon added for scale.  

Chicken with Olives and Oranges

About a year before I got into cooking, my mom got me three books with the best recipes from Bon Appetit magazine.  One of the recipes I made a lot was chicken with olives and oranges from the January 2005 issue.  The first few times, it was actually pretty bland and my attempts to make it more flavorful didn't exactly work.  So I took it out of my regular rotation and hadn't made it in years.  Back in May when I was cleaning out my cookbook army, I found the Bon Appeitit book and decided to try it again.  This time, I added some new tweaks and the result was a pretty tasty meal.  That said, I should have served it with a salad or something.  By itself it's not a large amount of food.

The trick to improving the magazine's recipe was to add a bit of lemon juice and some extra olives.  I halved the recipe to make it for two people but didn't halve the amount of olives.  I also seasoned the chicken with more black pepper than usual.  The result was a tangy, salty (in a good way, it wasn't overkill) chicken dish that is relatively healthy.  The recipe below is heavily adapted from the original.

Spicy Sausage Ragu in the Slow Cooker

I'm back from falling off the face of the earth!  I was super pregnant at the time of my last post.  As a result of having a new baby around, most of my dishes over the last two months have been of the "what can we make really, really fast?" variety.  Most of them were tried and true quick favorites.  We also had a freezer full of pre-made food donated by friends and family, which is *awesome,* especially during the first few weeks when painkillers and coffee are food groups.

Since I'm on maternity leave, I decided to experiment with my slow cooker.  I bought a copy of The Italian Slow Cooker and used a recipe from it for the first time last week.  Generally, if the first recipe I try from a new book in my cookbook army isn't very good, it takes a long time for me to use the book again, I guess I'm judgy that way.  The Spicy Sausage Ragu was a huge success!! Not only did my husband and I love it, there was enough left to freeze!

It doesn't look pretty, but trust me it tastes fantastic!!

Cream of Broccoli Soup

When I was a kid, cream of whatever soup came in a can, contained my monthly sodium intake, and was usually used to flavor chicken and rice.  It was almost always beige, even if the "whatever" in the soup was a green vegetable like broccoli or asparagus.  In other words: yuck.  That said, home made cream of whatever soup is really good! And in the case of cream of broccoli soup, it's actually green! There's a lot of broccoli in it and not a lot of whatever would make the soup beige.

This recipe is from The New Moosewood Cookbook and is vegetarian.  It has relatively few ingredients and is easy to make, especially if you have an immersion blender.  I seasoned mine with a bit of black salt at the end, that's what the flecks are in the picture.  Even though there is no heavy cream in this soup (I used 1% milk), it was still nice and creamy (and healthier).

Lobster Mac and Cheese

I love mac and cheese! I know it's not good for me to eat 6 pounds of cheese, but I don't care.  Lobster is awesome too.  I've tried lobster mac and cheese at several restaurants and figured it was time to make my own!  My husband doesn't love lobster as much as I do and he still enjoyed this dish.  I don't think it took very long, there is very little chopping involved.  But there is a ton of grating.  A lot of it can be done while the pasta cooks.  I would definitely make this again, but I'd probably alter the recipe to use a different cheese instead of colby jack, which I thought was too mild.  I don't want to overpower the lobster, but I want my cheese to be a little more flavorful.  This is fantastic comfort food!  The recipe says it serves two.  It was too much for my husband and I, we both had seconds and then I had some left over for lunch the next day.  It reheats well.

The finished product!

Bowtie Pasta with Mascarpone, Asparagus, and Hazelnuts

Back when I was first learning how to cook, this was one of the first "fancy" pasta dishes I tried to make.  In the beginning, I'm pretty sure I added way too much water to the sauce and ended up with watery, bland pasta with some asparagus and cheese on it.  But, I got better at it and it was on regular rotation in our house for about a year.  Then I started accumulating cookbooks.  I wanted to try Indian! Thai! Stir Fry! Mexican!  And this recipe was forgotten for a few years.  

A few weeks ago, I cleaned out my cookbooks to donate some to charity (and make room for more!) and found a "Best of Bon Appetit" cookbook.  This recipe was in it.  I got nostalgic and decided to make it again.  I'd forgotten how much I like it!  It's quick, easy, and vegetarian.  The sauce is pretty mild so it does need some salt and pepper.  But, it's very creamy, slightly sweet, and goes well with the roasted asparagus.  I added some sauteed garlic for extra flavor.  If you can buy blanched hazelnuts in bulk at your grocery store, that will make this dish really quick because then you don't have to do it yourself.  Honestly, if you're strapped for time, leaving the husks on will make your dish less pretty but I don't think it's worth it to remove them unless you're serving guests or have the time to spare.  My main alteration to this recipe is that I barely added any of the reserved cooking water to the sauce.  I did it very slowly and stopped as soon as the sauce reached my desired consistency, which for me was still relatively thick. It was easy to stir and coat everything, but not watery at all.  I definitely recommend this dish for a quick work night dinner.  I served it with some cantaloupe.