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

July 13, 2026

TBL Salad

Tomatoes continue to be in season so I thought that TBL Panzanella would be a good side dish for some burgers.

Since doing stuff gluten free makes everything harder, I started the day before by baking a fresh gluten free sandwich loaf.

I then cut it up and left it overnight to dry out, which if you’re familiar with gluten free bread, is not a difficult ask.

The next day I cooked up some bacon, made the dressing, and sauteed up a pint of grape tomatoes.

After everything was prepped, I tossed the bread with the bacon grease, washed the lettuce, crushed up the bacon, and cut up some basil.

The recipe calls for basil and mint, but we love basil around here so I skipped the mint and just doubled up on basil.

Once everything was ready, I tossed it all together and plated the salads. I really love the bacon+tomato flavor of a BLT and this delivered. I also really liked how the bread soaked up the bacon grease and the dressing, making for a soft and flavorful crouton. The rest of the family did not like this as much, though. They’d have given this a 2 versus my 4, so I settled on a three. Probably won’t be making this again, though.

TBL Panzanella

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used a homemade gluten free sandwich loaf for the bread
• Left out the mint, used double the basil

July 06, 2026

Stuffed Tomatoes

Over the weekend, we picked up some really nice beefsteak tomatoes from a local farm stand, so I thought I’d use them to make some Stuffed Tomatoes.

I had already acquired a mix of dried mushrooms from Amazon that has: porcini, shiitake, oyster, portobello, and wood ear mushrooms. I started by combining them with some water and white wine (sauvignon blanc) that I heated for 2 minutes in the microwave.

I left them there, with a bowl on top to push them down, for about an hour so I could be really sure that they were cas rehydrated as they’d ever get. I then chopped them up and prepared the stuffing while the hollowed-out tomatoes were draining. After stuffing them, I popped them under the broiler for 3 minutes, then topped them with some fresh mozzarella and put them back for another 3 minutes.

I used mozzarella here instead of goat cheese because I wanted my family to actually eat them. The stuffed tomatoes were delicious, even though I think the texture of rehydrated mushrooms is a little strange. Were I to do this again, I’d probably use fresh mushrooms and maybe add a little crumbled sausage to the stuffing. I might even put a little olive oil in the tomatoes and broil them unstuffed for a few minutes, first, which would create some great flavor. All in all a great way to use some large tomatoes.

Stuffed Tomatoes

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Soaked the mushrooms for about an hour
• Used fresh mozzarella rather than goat cheese