November 02, 2026

Filled Pasta

Making fresh pasta for Season Six was a really exciting prospect for me, especially since I’d be able to build some skill making it gluten free. Even though it’s November when I’m posting this, I’d actually started exploring this back in April.

Gluten Free Fresh Pasta

I began by reading every recipe and watching every YouTube video about gluten free pasta making that I could find. If you’ve ever looked into this, you might know that there’s a TON of variation in what people use for the gluten free flour mix they buy or create for it. What I set out to find was a recipe that has a combination of both flavor and dough workability – that is, delicious yet easy to roll to a relatively thin setting. I found 9 different blends for pasta flour, and I wanted to try them all.

Over the next few months I would try a new dough recipe every so often, keeping some notes on what we thought about each. Along the way I think I got pretty good at making the dough and using the Atlas 150 that I bought for this project. Here are the various ones I tried:

• My baseline was a straight up substitution in the Good Eats recipe using King Arthur Measure for Measure Gluten Free Flour, which is universally not recommended. I confirmed this was no good – it came out very doughy and chewy.
• The Loopy Whisk blend, which was flavorful but hard to work
• Babish’s method, which was good but a little difficult to work
• Let Them Eat Gluten Free Cake’s blend and method was really easy to work, but a little bland flavor-wise
• Gluten Free on a Shoestring uses Better Batter. I needed to add more water and oil but then it was very workable. The flavor was OK.
• Impulsive Culinarian’s blend using corn flour and sweet rice flour was probably the best flavor-wise but hard to work.
• Wendy Wark’s Blend is a popular GF all-purpose. It contains corn starch and super fine rice flour, two of the ingredients in some of the better performing recipes. The dough turned out very workable, with good flavor.

A couple others I found but didn’t get around to trying:

• Using Fioreglut with just eggs and salt
• Baking Subs recommended bland
• GF Alchemist blend is crazy, but would be really interesting to try

There’s not a perfect answer here – so far I have not found the one “this is the way” flour blend that gives the best workability and flavor. But that’s not to say they aren’t good! They’re mostly all very passable and at the end of the day we have GF fresh pasta, so what’s not to love?

I ultimately decided to use the Wendy Wark blend, for two reasons. First, it’s a high-quality, pre-made blend so you don’t have to fuss with making it yourself from individual ingredients. That saves times and money. The other pre-made blend I tried was Better Batter, and Wendy’s blend beat it.

A close runner up is the Let Them Eat Gluten Free Cake blend. It contains whey protein isolate, which is probably what put it over the top from the others. However, it was a bit bland tasting, though that could probably be fixed by adding a little more salt (though the recipe has a lot to begin with). Since it’s a custom blend, this didn’t win over the Wendy Wark version.

Ravioli

Once I had my choice settled, I picked Ravioli as my starting point. The first step was to make the dough and get it resting. I collected the very simple ingredients list.

Notice that for this I’m using 3 eggs, where Alton uses 2. Gluten free dough needs a bit more moisture, so the extra eggs fills the gap. I measured out 200g of the flour blend into a bowl, then made a well for the three eggs.

I opted for this over the food processor because it’s just less mess to clean up later. Also, I do it in a bowl rather than the counter because GF flour is so fine I found it’s easier to control when it’s contained in a bowl. I then used a fork to beat the eggs and incorporate the flour a little at a time. It eventually turns into something that looks like it’ll never come together, because there seems to be no moisture left.

That’s the point where I turn it out on the counter and just keep working it. Sometimes at this point it’s really sticky, so I wet my hands just a little to help me work it. If you just keep on working the flour in, turning it, folding it on itself, and repeating, I promise you end up with a ball of dough that has magically come together.

For gluten free specifically, at this point you want to wrap the ball in some plastic wrap and let it sit for at least 30 minutes. This will give the flour the time it needs to hydrate, which will make it workable. This is also the perfect time to prepare the filling. in the show, Alton uses some of his meatloaf recipe as the filling, but only a quarter of it. Rather than reduce the recipe by three quarters, I just decided to make an entire meatloaf, reserve a quarter for filling, and cook the rest for dinner. We’ve already made meatloaf back in Season Two, so I won’t go over that again here. Once I had the mix, I split off a quarter of it and prepared the additions to turn it into ravioli filling.

By that point the dough was well rested so I got out my pasta machine and got set up for ravioli making.

The process is pretty straightforward. First I split the dough into quarters, and rolled it out as thin as I could. Since GF dough breaks easily, around setting 2 I cut the sheet in half. I then rolled each out two more levels, stopping at level 4. In the past I’ve tried going thinner but the GF dough will just tear at that point. I laid out the two strips next to each other and plopped half a teaspoon of filling across each.

Then I put on the egg wash, folded them over, cut each individually, and crimp the edges to the best of my ability. It’s a lot of work, and the first few I did were ugly as sin and barely workable. But by the time I was done with the last quarter of the dough I had a good rhythm and process down, and even though they look a bit rustic I think they turned out alright.

This was a sample of some of the better looking ones. The next step was to cook them. Since I made so many I did it in batches.

It took about 4 minutes for them to cook through and float to the top. Once both batches were done, I heated up my cast iron pan with some butter and tossed in the cooked raviolis. A little into cooking I threw in some cut up sage.

I did this in batches, too. Finally when everything was done it was time to plate, and shave some parmesan on top.

The raviolis were delicious, except they needed a sprinkle of kosher salt on top, which was wild to me because of how much salt is already in the recipe. But this tracks with other tries – it seems fresh pasta just needs it. Anyway, we really enjoyed them and the extra step of frying them in butter makes them extra special. As much as we liked them, though, I can’t see myself doing this much more in the future – it’s just so labor intensive that it would take a lot to get me to do this again. Oh, and the raviolis paired really well with the meatloaf!

Tortellini

Since I was already in pasta making mode, I figured why not keep going and make Tortellini for Sunday’s dinner. It began exactly like the ravioli did, by making a ball of pasta dough. I won’t go back over it here, but it was the same idea. While the dough rested, I got all the filling ingredients together.

After mixing them together I was left with a bowl of filling, which I put in the fridge to firm up until the dough was ready.

When the dough was ready I once again set up my pasta making station.

From there, it was a slow, five step process. First, I’d roll out as many sheets as I could to about a 4 setting on the Atlas.

Then I used a 2” biscuit cutter to make rounds.

After that I put a 1/4 tsp dollop of filling in the middles of each round.

Then I went back and put egg wash on one side and folded them into little dumplings.

Finally, I folded each dumpling and crimped th ends together to make tortellinis.

As you can see, the first few were pretty rough (upper left) but as I got into a flow they got better and better. The trouble was this – as I made each I put them on a parchment lined sheet pan. However, when I went to cook them, half of them stuck to the parchment and tore when I tried to pick them up to put them into the boiling water. Thw was really discouraging, because the process to make these was slow and pain-staking. I made a first batch out of the ones that didn’t tear by boiling them for about 4 minutes. I then put them in a bowl with some butter, shaved parmesan, and a little parsley.

I didn’t make enough of them for a full meal, so we ate them as a little before-dinner snack. They were quite delicious! We loved the flavor of the filling, and the texture of the GF fresh pasta. Trouble is that it’s such a pain to make that I don’t really see doing this very often. Especially with the trouble of working with GF dough – at least this recipe, which like I said is one of the better ones. I may try another dough recipe some day, or just make noodles which is way less complicated. But for now I’m really glad I did these two experiments!

Ravioli [GF]

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used Wendy Wark flour blend
• Used 3 eggs instead of two

Tortellini [GF]

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used Wendy Wark flour blend
• Used 3 eggs instead of two

October 25, 2026

Asian-inspired Cuisine

I can’t believe I haven’t made any Good Eats recipes in October so far. It’s been busy, but since I had a free Saturday I thought I’d do some Good Eats dinner. I’ve been saving the Asian Slaw to pair with the Chimney Tuna Loin, so Saturday was when that could all come together.

First, though, Sunday night’s dinner was the Garlic Shrimp Casserole, so that’s where we’ll start. I have been putting this one off, since the episode depends on leftover Chinese takeout, which is a challenge for us because finding gluten free takeout is near impossible around us. But, by chance I checked altonbrown.com and it turns out that his revised recipe doesn’t rely on takeout at all – it makes the garlic shrimp, too. So I first set out to make some home-made leftovers.

Making Garlic Shrimp Leftovers

I began by marinated some shrimp in olive oil and garlic.

Then I cooked it in a cast iron skillet on medium heat.

Once the shrimp was done, it was time for the vegetables. For this I used a frozen pack of stir-fry veggies.

I decided that one the shrimp was done I’d just re-use the already hot pan that had some garlic and oil in it. I just dumped the frozen veggies right in.

Meanwhile I cooked up some jasmine rice. When the rice and the veggies were done, I tossed them all together in a bowl, and voila, I had garlic shrimp, veggies, and rice leftovers. I popped the bowl in the fridge to wait for Sunday’s casserole.

Asian Slaw

Once the leftovers were ready, I turned my attention to the Asian slaw. I started with the dressing.

All I did was toss them all together in a large bowl and whish until it was all mixed. After that I gathered the rest of the slaw ingredients.

One substitution I made: rather than serrano chiles, which I couldn’t find, I used a large pablano pepper. I think it didn’t make much of a difference in the end. Once all of the ingredients were chopped, I mixed them all together into a large bowl.

The bowl went into the fridge for a few hours while I made the tuna. For this I started with an absolutely beautiful 2-pound piece of yellowfin.

Like in the episode, I trimmed it so it was somewhat rectangular and then cut it into two one-pound pieces.

I mixed up the simple marinade and put it in a container with the tuna for about two hours. The episode and the online recipe say to use wasabi power, but I didn’t think the family would enjoy that, so instead I used a few teaspoons of ginger powder.

While the tuna was marinating I got my chimney starter prepped. I decided to put the starter on my little smoker, and use a grate from my propane grill to cook on.

When I was ready to start cooking, I got the chimney start lit.

It was then a matter of time to wait for the coals to burn out and get super hot. While that was happening, I got some sushi rice on the stove. It took maybe 30-40 minutes for the chimney starter to get ready to cook on – before that, the flames were going way above the top of the chimney. But once it was ready, I then coated the cuts in sesame seeds.

It wasn’t as pretty as the episode, but it worked. I then brought them out to the coals and one at a time I cooked them, 30 seconds per side, for a total of two minutes per cut.

After each piece came off the “grill” I put them on a plate with tented foil. I then brought it all inside, and let them sit for a couple of minutes before cutting into them. When I did, they were just perfect.

OK, maybe I could have done more than 30s per side to get a sear line around the edge, but that didn’t matter at all. We served the tuna in bowls over rice with some of the slaw on the side, and some of the honey-soy marinade as a topping/dipping sauce, and I have to say it all worked together perfectly. The tuna was as good as a perfect filet, and the rest of the meal complimented it incredibly well. What a treat!

Shrimp Casserole

On Sunday night, it was time to put together the shrimp casserole. With the manufactured leftovers, it all went together pretty quickly. I simmered some chicken broth, added a corn starch slurry and then some heavy cream, and put it all together with the leftovers mix in a 9x13 baking dish.

After covering the top with some breadcrumbs I popped it in the over for about ~25m, then gave it a few minutes under the broiler to toast up the top.

We let it sit for a bit to cool, and the dug in. It was alright. I liked it enough to have seconds, and Vivian devoured it. Gemma thought it was a bit bland and mushy. I can completely see why using actual Chinese takeout leftovers would do the trick here – they use so much flavor, sauces, salt, etc. that the shrimp and veggies would be way better. Here I was going for at least a little reasonable healthiness. Another thing I might do differently if I ever do this again would be to double up on the veggies, and use less of the liquid binder. I think those two things together would reduce the mushiness.

Chimney Tuna Loin

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Left out the wasabi and added a couple of teaspoons of ginger instead
• Could probably have gone more than 30s per side, but it still came out spectacularly

Asian Slaw

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Substituted a pablano pepper for the 2 serrano chiles

Garlic Shrimp Casserole

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Followed Alton’s revised recipe
• Used a 14.4oz package of frozen stir-fry veggies. Next time would use two.
• Next time would use a little less of the broth/cream binder.

September 28, 2026

Braciole Dinner

Dinner tonight was a Braciole for the main course, along with a salad plus Thousand Island Dressing.

It started in the afternoon with preparing with meat. I began with a 1.75 pound flank steak.

I laid it out on top of two sheets of cling wrap, then started the job of pounding it flat with a meat mallet. This was grueling work. At first it seemed like the meat wasn’t moving at all, and I was getting nowhere. I took a few breaks and came back to it a bunch of times over the course of an hour or so, in between meetings and stuff. Eventually I got it to where I thought it was workable.

At some point during the process I googled for tips on flattening a flank steak. Most people on the internet agreed that the best way is to butterfly it, which of course I was too late for. I think in the end what helped me was:

• Cutting away some of the silverskin on each side of the meat. I used the tip of a knife to get under it and and then pulled it up. Some came right off, but what was left was broken enough to (I think) help the meat move
• Letting it come to room temperature. I should have realized this earlier, but the flattening process got easier and easier the warmer the steak got

So with a flattened steak, it was time to food-process the filling and spread it over the meat. For this I used some gluten free seasoned croutons, which are indistinguishable from gluten-full ones.

Then it was time to roll and tie it. That was cool because this is a process I’ve never done before. It took a couple tries to get the “looping” right, but after I got the motion down, it was pretty easy.

After that I browned all sides of the braciole in a cast iron pan. I needed to bend it a little because the roll was a bit longer than the 12 inch pan could handle.

Once it was browned, I put it into the pan with some store-bought marinara (not tomato sauce) that had been heating in the oven. I tented the pan with foil and popped it into the oven at 350 degrees. I then turned my attention to making the salad dressing.

This couldn’t have been easier, it was just one step: “mix everything together in a bowl”. I halved this recipe because I couldn’t see us needing 2 cups of salad dressing any time soon. Once it was all mixed I put it into a jar for serving.

An hour after I put the braciole in the oven, I dropped the temp down to 325 and gave it one more half hour. When I took the meat out of the oven, I moved it onto a cutting board and let it cool for about 10 minutes before cutting it.

I have to say this one was a hit. Everyone in the family loved it, and everyone had seconds. The meat was so tender, and the filling was absolutely delicious. But an unexpected star was the sauce – having cooked the sauce for so long resulted in it being thick and caramelized, and just full of concentrated flavor. It paired with the braciole so well. The salad dressing was alright – it’s a decent low-calorie alternative to normal thousand island – bit the beef was a winner.

Braciole

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Would try butterflying the meat next time to speed up the thinning process
• Cooked at 350 for one hour, then 325 for 30m
• Used a 24oz jar of store bought marinara sauce
• Next time would love to try cooking at 300 for 3 hours

Thousand Island Dressing

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used half as much mustard powder

September 27, 2026

Misc. Weekend Eats

Had a little time at home this weekend, and some guests staying over so I decided I’d try out a few recipes while we were here. Since Clotted Cream takes about 24 hours, I started there. I was able to find some non-ultra-pasteurized heavy cream at Whole Foods, so I started there by pouring a pint of it into a coffee filter fitted over a strainer, which was over a bowl.

From there, I scraped/stirred it every 2 hours for the next 10 hours. Meanwhile, while we were waiting for guests to arrive I started on the Cheese Souffle by gathering up my ingredients.

Of course souffles are notoriously scary to make, so I took my time as went slowly and carefully. The first step was to make the cheese sauce.

The sauce came together well. I used a GF measure-for-measure flour for the roux, which worked fine, though I think the roux was a bit darker than it should have been. Though, cooking the water out of the butter is a bit tricky to time right – by the time I thought it had all been cooked out (the bubbles stopped being large and frequent) I think the butter started to brown. So that’s why in some of the following photos you’ll see the cheese sauce looking dark (though no less delicious). When the cheese sauce was done and it was cooling to room temperature, I started on the eggs whites. In the show, he added a tablespoon of water, which was not in the online recipe. I used the extra water, though not sure if it made a difference. I then beat the egg whites to medium peaks.

I thought I did a pretty good job with that, not knowing what to expect and how long to do beat them for. Then it was time to fold the foam into the cheese sauce.

You can see above how the cheese sauce was a bit dark. Maybe next time using white cheddar rather than yellow would lighten it a bit? Not sure, but I don’t think the color affected the final flavor. Folding in the foam was another place that was scary because I didn’t want to break the foam down and lose all the air I had put into the eggs from beating them. But, it actually turned out fine – again, just going slowly and carefully was the name of the game. After folding all the foam in, it was into the pan and into the oven.

Next came the cook, and here’s where I messed it up a bit. I put the souffle on the middle rack of the oven, not taking into account the enormous rise that I’d get while it cooked. So, what ended up happening was that it rose right into and through the top rack of the oven.

I had to kind of scrape it out of there, which was too bad because I feel like the top would have been absolutely perfect. As it was, though, even with an ugly and half-missing top, the souffle was superb. All of our guests had a good laugh at the oven mistake while we chowed down on it.

The next morning, it was time to take the clotted cream out of the fridge.

It seemed like all the liquid was drained, so I scraped what remained off the coffee filter and into another bowl.

From there I mixed small amounts of the liquid into the bowl until it was the consistency of cold cream cheese. Meanwhile, Gemma baked some blueberry scones, and when those were done we tried the cream on them. It was delightful – kind of like a cross between whipped cream and butter. Our guests enjoyed it too.

Side note. I spent a bunch of time reading around and discovered that this clotted cream recipe is not actually clotted cream. It’s closer to butter, but not really that, even, because it’s not churned. This recipe is really just isolated cream fat, which is really good by itself, but not clotted cream as it traditionally exists. I did notice that Alton has an updated recipe on his web site, and I did try that one first, though it didn’t work for me – I think my little 2 quart crock pot’s “warm” setting is not warm enough, because I got only the thinnest little layer of solids at the top after 10 hours.

Cheese Souffle

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used a yellow, mild cheddar. Maybe next time would try a white cheddar.
• Might use half the dry mustard next time.
• Added a tablespoon of water to the egg whites, like on the show (not mentioned in the online recipe)

Clotted Cream

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 4/5
• Tried Alton’s updated clotted cream recipe at first, which didn’t work so well
• This is not traditional clotted cream – it’s more like butter, which is still good though

September 22, 2026

Frozen Strawberries

I had meant to make Frozen Strawberries about a month ago, at the peak of the season, but life happens and I never got around to it – the big lift being the procurement of dry ice. Well, I finally decided to venture over to Dry Ice Corp a couple towns over, and it was a breeze to get 10lbs of dry ice (their minimum sale amount).

It’s the tail end, or maybe just past, the strawberry season, so the second challenge was getting some berries that were good enough to freeze. I finally did find some local berries. I washed them and layered them in colander, then popped them in the fridge for about four hours to dry out.

Once the time was up I got out a stock pot and added ice, then mixed in the berries. I did this in a few layers: ice, berries, ice, berries, ice. I then left it in the cooler outside (the cooler lid propped open a little bit with a folded paper towel). After about 30 minutes I went out to bag them.

When then was done I ended up with a freezer bag full of flash frozen strawberries.

Now I just need to think of what to do with them. I really wish I had taken off the husks before freezing, because then we could just grab them from the freezer and put them in smoothies and stuff. As it is now, we need to thaw them before using.

The process was so easy, but I’m going to give it a 4 because getting dry ice requires a special errand just for that. As for crowd rating, this will get an N/A because it’s more a technique than a recipe. But it’s very cool now that I know where to get dry ice and how to flash freeze stuff – seems like something that might come in useful some day!

Frozen Strawberries

• Crowd: N/A
• Ease: 4/5
• Should have taken off the husks before freezing so we could just use them right away, like in smoothies.

September 13, 2026

Weekend Confections

Some people get really excited about making sweets and sugary stuff. I must have been born without a sweet tooth, because I am definitely not one of those people. So, I thought since I had a free Saturday that I’d try and knock out the remaining season six sweets. My plan was to use the Gold Cake to make a batch a cupcakes, and then frost them using Cocoa Whipped Cream for half, and Buttercream for the other half.

Now, the first stop as always was the comment section of the recipes. From what I gathered, the gold cake recipe was not that great, and the buttercream even worse – most commentors said it completely didn’t work. A little more research, though, turned up something interesting. Turns out that Alton himself recognized this and redid both of these recipes in his Reloaded follow-up series. So, I decided I’d used the reloaded gold cake recipe (called “A Far, Far Better Cake”) and the reloaded buttercream recipe as well.

Of course the cake would need to be gluten free, so I turned to Claude to try and work out how to modify the recipe. From this, I learned that the recipe should be good by just substituting Better Batter gluten free all purpose flour and making no other modifications. So, I gathered up my ingredients.

I halved the recipe because I only wanted to make a dozen cupcakes. That calculated out to 1 stick of butter, 170g sugar, 120g flour, 7g baking powder, 1/8 tsp salt, 4 egg yolks, 150g milk, and 1/2 tsp of vanilla. The batter came together easy, just like the recipe.

The one change for GF is to rest the batter – I let it just sit there for 25min or so after mixing. I then used a #20 scoop (3 tablespoons) to portion it out into 12 cupcakes.

Turns out there was just exactly enough for 12 cupcakes. I then popped them in the oven at 350 and set a timer to check them after 16 minutes. After 16 minutes I checked and they were very close – temp was about 200 degrees (the recipe advises you to check) – so I gave them another 2 minutes and they were perfect after that. First I let them cool in the pan for 5min and then I took them out and put them on a rack to cool. Meanwhile, I cleaned my mixing bowl and popped it in the freezer while I did went out and did some errands.

When I was back I turned my focus to the cocoa whipped cream. I first made a (half) batch of cocoa mix.

This one went together pretty darn easily. I followed the recipe exactly, and ended up with really nice whipped cream with medium peaks.

After this was done I switched my attention to the buttercream. Just like the cake, the buttercream has a reloaded recipe that changes things quite a bit. And like the cake recipe, I halved this one, too. I used a whole egg and then added enough whites (left over from the cake) to get to about 110g. Everything else scaled down by half quite nicely. I began by mixing the eggs, sugar and corn syrup.

And then I popped that over a dutch oven with water and a tea towel. Then, I whisked it non-stop for the next ten minutes. The mixture became whitish in color and the sugars were definitely very well dissolved.

I measured it about 150, short of the target, but I was getting tired of whisking so I took it off the stove and moved the bowl to the mixer. There, I let the mixer run for a long time – I think it took about 15 minutes to get the temperature down below 80, when I started adding pats of butter. The butter at first didn’t incorporate so well, but as I added more, it all started coming together and eventually – almost suddenly – I had something approaching frosting.

As a slight deviation from the recipe, I added a half teaspoon of vanilla right towards the end. Once the buttercream was done, I filled a piping bag with it and frosted half of the cupcakes. I then grabbed the cocoa whipped cream and put that into a piping bag, using it to frost the other half of the cupcakes.

It was finally time to try them. I got the girls and we all grabbed one for a taste. The cake itself was really good. Light and fluffy, moist, and super flavorful. A great cake, even for gluten free. The cocoa whipped cream didn’t do a great job as frosting, but the buttercream – as painful as it was to make – was seriously delicious. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s basically just butter and sugar.

On Sunday night, I made a little dessert using strawberries and Writing Chocolate along with the rest of the cocoa whipped cream. Preparing the chocolate couldn’t have been easier: it’s just microwaving chocolate chips combined with a little canola oil. Once again I halved the recipe, and used a half cup of semi-sweet chips and a teaspoon of oil. I microwaved it for a minute, stirred, then another 30-45 seconds. It didn’t come out of the microwave looking melted but I stirred it until it was smooth and melty. I then prepped a piping bag to spoon it into.

From there I piped a bit onto a couple plates, put strawberries and the cocoa whipped on it, and then piped a bunch more over everything.

I thought it came out looking pretty good. The whole thing was delicious – how could you go wrong with melted chocolate? Also, the chocolate in the piping bag stayed workable for hours.

Gold Cake [GF]

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used the reloaded recipe instead of the original episode’s recipe
• Substituted Better Batter GF flour for all the flour in the recipe
• Rested the batter for 25min after mixing
• Baked 12 cupcakes, which took 18min total baking time

Cocoa Whipped Cream

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Put the mixer bowl in the freezer for about 2 hours before mixing

Buttercream

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used the reloaded recipe instead of the original episode’s recipe
• Added half a teaspoon of vanilla. Would be interesting to try and make this wth chocolate.

Writing Chocolate

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 5/5
• Used standard semi-sweet chips
• It does not come out of the microwave looking like a sauce – you need to stir after heating it

September 06, 2026

Broccoli Casserole

I have to say this is one of the ones that I had very low expectations for going into it. We were doing some ribs for dinner so I thought that Broccoli Casserole might be a good side dish to serve along with them.

I started by cutting up and blanching the broccoli.

The recipe calls fpr “6 cups”, and since I really dislike volume measure for anything but liquid ingredients, I made sure to weigh it after measuring. Turns out that 6 cups of broccoli florets (I didn’t use the stems) is just about exactly one pound. After they were done steaming and were in the ice bath, I used the same sauce pan to saute 12oz of mushrooms.

When they were done I gathered up the rest of the ingredients.

One recurring theme I noticed in the Food Network recipe comments for this one was that people often substituted ranch dressing for the the blue cheese. This made sense to me, especially since my family really only likes blue cheese in the context of buffalo wings. Ranch seemed like the natural choice here. I mixed up the wet ingredients, including the ramen seasoning packet. I used a pack of gluten free ramen, and crushed the noodles then added them to the bowl with the vegetables.

After I mixed them together I moved everything into an 8x8 baking dish, making sure to pack everything tightly in there, like he did on the episode. I baked it covered in foil at 350 for 45 minutes, then took the foil off and gave it another 15.

I served this along with the ribs and like I mentioned, was NOT expecting much at all. Turns out though, that the casserole was actually pretty good! It was good enough for each of us to at least have seconds. However, now and then you’d get a “crunchy” in there, which was a gluten free noodle. I should have remembered, gluten free ramen cooks very differently. If I ever do make this again, I’ll pre-cook the noodles before adding them into the casserole.

Broccoli Casserole

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used one pound of broccoli florets
• Substituted ranch for blue cheese
• Used gluten free ramen – next time need to cook the noodles first

August 18, 2026

Strawberry Pudding

Making Strawberry Pudding started with husking a pint of strawberries and making the Macerated Strawberries the night before.

Reading through the online comments on this one, I heard that using a regular red wine like the recommended merlot would make it too “boozy”, so I went with one the commenter’s suggestions and used Ruby Port for the wine. Since I halved the recipe, I used a cup and a quarter of the port in the mix.

I then put them all in the fridge and waited until the next morning, when I gathered up the ingredients for the puddings. Now, it’s tough to find gluten free potato bread off the shelf, and I didn’t really have time to bake some for this recipe, so instead I used a brioche loaf from Promise Gluten Free.

The puddings came together pretty easily. The most difficult part was getting the bottom off of the cans – I had to resort to the can opening on a Swiss Army knife because a regular crank can opener didn’t have anything to grab onto. Once I got the puddings in the cans I pushed some seltzer cans down into them and popped the whole thing in the fridge.

About 8 hours later, it was after dinner and time to try the puddings. I get them out of the cans, I simply lifted the can while pushing on the seltzer.

The puddings were good! They’re a lot of food though. Perhaps one less layer next time? The brioche was good too, but we think perhaps a biscuit would be better. Definitely don’t regret making these, but would probably not go through the trouble again.

The strawberries, though – yep, they’re boozy. However, the left over “juice” makes for an incredible sipping beverage. We took the left over liquid (with the honey, zest, and sugar) and mixed it half and half with some of the remaining port and wow it’s so good, a perfect dessert drink.

Macerated Strawberries

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used Ruby Port instead of regular red wine

Strawberry Pudding

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used Promise Gluten Free brioche bread instead of potato bread. Did not leave it out for two hours to dry.

July 29, 2026

Marinara Sauce

Tomatoes are coming into peak season around here, so I went out and bought 20 fresh romas to try out some Tomato Sauce from scratch.

I started by splitting and seeding them all, then putting them in some glass baking pans. After that I drizzled them all with some olive oil (I didn’t bother measuring), then added the chopped garlic and then the onion, salt, and pepper. I was using dried herbs so I decided to save them for later – the thought being that dried herbs would just burn with 2.5hr in the oven.

Before I did this recipe I read through the comments on the Food Network site. This one is odd: there are plenty of 5 star ratings and plenty of one star ratings. The one star ratings almost all say that everything came out of the oven burned to a crisp. So, following some of the five star comments I cooked them at 300 degrees for the first hour, 325 for the next half hour, and then I did the last half hour at 400 like the recipe says.

I think I got it just right – cooked perfectly with just the right amount of caramelization. Though, the bottom of the pans was caked, which took a lot of elbow grease to clean. One commenter said he used parchment paper on the bottoms of the pans, so were I to do this again I’d try that. After the tomatoes were done it was time for the food mill.

This was the first time I used a food mill, so it was a bit of a learning experience. I think I did it right, and after 10 minutes or so of cranking I had a mill full of skins and about a cup and a quarter worth of sauce.

Lots of the comments pointed this out – for all the tomatoes and all the work put into the recipe, you really don’t end up with a lot of sauce. I just don’t know how in the world the recipe gets to the 4 cups as listed on the site.

Regardless, I put that resulting sauce in a pan and added some wine. The recipe says to add a full cup of wine, but I figured since I only got a little more than a cup that I’d only add a quarter cup of wine. Also, I added the herbs at this point, too. I let the sauce come to a boil and then simmered it for a while before I tasted it. On the first taste, it was really bitter. I had read in the comments that this could happen and the solution was to add sugar. I added a little bit at a time, and after about a teaspoon worth, it started tasting pretty good. I heated up some left over pasta and topped it with the sauce.

The sauce definitely has the consistency of a marinara – the kind of sauce you’d get with some mozzarella sticks from the local pizza house. I am not sure I’d really do this one again based on the amount of work you need to put in for the result, but my family really liked it, so it was all worth it.

Tomato Sauce

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Cooked for 1.5hr at 300, then 30m at 325, then 30m at 400
• Only made about a cup and a quarter of sauce
• Added the herbs while cooking with the wine
• Added only 1/4 cup of wine
• Added a teaspoon of sugar to combat bitterness

July 25, 2026

Funnel Cake

We had a free Saturday night, so what better way to celebrate than with some Funnel Cake!

Now, I’ve made gluten free pate a choux already, and that worked out OK with some modifications. This time around I decided I wanted to see what people do specifically for GF funnel cake, pate a choux or no. I eventually landed on this recipe from the Gluten Free Austrian which doesn’t make a pate a choux first. So, my rating and experience here will not be specifically with the Good Eats recipe, but we’re going to sometimes have to do that in order to be gluten free – that’s the tradeoff we’re making from here on. Often, the recipe modifications aren’t too drastic, but this time around they are. But, “making gluten free funnel cake” is higher up my list than “making the Good Eats funnel cake”, otherwise I wouldn’t be cooking for my family.

So with that said, on to the frying!

I started out by making the batter as the site suggested.

You can see from the photo that I have a piping bag in a pitcher. That makes it incredibly easy to fill the bag without much fuss.

Once the batter was made and in the bag, I got the fry oil ready. I used about 3/4 of a gallon of canola oil and heated it up to 350 degrees. Starting in the middle and going around in ever larger circles I fried up cakes one by one.

After I made a few of them – they got progressively better as I dialed in my technique – we dusted them with powdered sugar. We also heated up some chocolate sauce and drizzled that on top, too.

The cakes were delicious. Light, fluffy, and crispy with a hint of sweetness. They reminded us of being at a carnival. And making them was extremely fun, too! I’ll definitely be pulling out this recipe as a treat every so often.

Funnel Cake [GF]

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used a gluten free recipe from here