Basic American Stuffing

Paired with the mashed potatoes that I will show at the cooking event, I will also be showing a version of American stuffing. Please note: I said "version". That is right, folks, just like mashed potatoes, stuffing comes in more than one form. You can go absolutely bonkers with the items you "stuff" into your stuffing! Besides this wonderland of choices, you can add more or less of different ingredients to create a drier or more moist dish. Sure, stuffing is traditional, but it isn't static! Today, I'm hoping to show you a truly basic form of this hearty food, but feel free to spice things up a bit. Along the way, we'll take a glance at the myriad of options for you to harness. But for now, let's think about what type of stuffing we are interested in.

Dry v. Moist v. Stuffed!!!!

While most people think of American stuffing as great inside a turkey or smothered in gravy, I am going to be serving my stuffing as more of a stand-alone dish. I personally LOVE stuffing! Warm, filling, lots of 'stuff'! I even have a Stuff Theory which I will expand upon on a later date. But here is the deal:

1. If you plan on serving your stuffing with gravy, you should keep the stuffing a little dry so that it can better absorb some gravy.
2. If you plan on serving your stuffing without gravy (as I am), you should keep the stuffing a little moist so that it is easier to eat all by its lonesome.
3. If you plan on stuffing your stuffing inside a bird, don't ask me how!! I have no idea how to do that! There no room in my kitchen to cook something like that (in my fridge, my microwave, my toaster oven) so I've never attempted something like that. In the future if I ever do try that, I'll let you know.

With all that out of the way, let's get cooking! Here is 

What you'll need:

1/2 a round onion
4 slices of bread (any kind)
some celery
some butter
an egg?
spices like salt, pepper, garlic powder, parsley flakes, etc.
broth (or water and consume)

cutting board and knife
mixing bowl

cup and spoon

small frying pan

spatula

bread pan

Now, I must admit that I did not have a bread pan before starting this recipe. So, I moseyed on down to the dollar store and picked two up. The lovely stickers you see inside the pans show the customer what the pan is made of, who the company that made it was, and all the places you can and can't use it. Ovens? Okay. Microwaves and grills? Of course not, you silly person! Luckily for me (NOT), they said nothing about how well they would do in toaster ovens. I spoke to some older ladies around me at the store and they said,  "まあ、いいかもしれないね。だめだったら、百円しかないなあ." -"Well, I guess it is fine. If it doesn't work, it was just a dollar anyway, right?" From this encouraging remark, I decided to chalk this up to my first major experiment with the dish: to see if my pans burn or melt in the toaster oven. Oh, dear.

Next, the actually cooking part of this cooking blog!

Stuffing, at is very essence, is a way to get rid of all the random foods and stale breads that you have in the pantry. To this end, some people insist that the best stuffing is made by actually leaving your bread out to become stale over a few days. You can pick white bread, wheat, mixed, season or non-seasoned, but may I suggest a few things? 

1. Dry or toast the bread.

First, using stale bread is all well and good, but make sure that you keep the bread out in the open air to become stale. This may seem obvious to some, but this blog is for those who don't know better. Keeping bread out will make it stale. Keeping it in the fridge or in a cupboard or in a bag might lead to mold since it is in a confined space. Second, if you'd rather not risk the staling process or if that doesn't sound so appealing to you, toasting the bread lightly in the toaster oven before you use it is also a valid option. The point is to start with dry bread so that the rest of the ingredients mix well and seep into it. Third, a message to those who would rather not have all the hassle and need to make. Stuffing. NOW! Take the liberty to go to the store and pick up croutons from the salad aisle. Guess what? That is already seasoned (usually), dried, and cut up! It takes out about 3 of the steps I have in this already super-simple recipe. Boom. Speedy stuffing.

2. Prepare the other ingredients. Wash and cut the vegetables.

3. Melt the butter in a frypan. Then add the veggies and cook until they are soft. Stir occasionally to make sure they don't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan.

Now, I feel like I may have gotten a little carried away with my butter here. It looks like I'm trying to make a thick butter layer on the bottom of the frying pan, but that isn't what you were supposed to do! Just a little butter, enough to help the veggies get soggy and delicious should do it, but if you are a butter fan, add some more now! You can get crazy like I did, but just remember that all the moister you add now will either lead to more mushy stuffing or will have to be cooked out longer later on.

4. Cut up the bread into cubes and place it in a bowl.

 5. Pour the butter and vegetables over the bread. Warning! The mixture will be hot, so be careful when handling the bowl or items within.

6. Add spices and an egg (or two). Mix well! Add as many or as little spices as you like. I prefer using pepper, oregano, and parsley, but you can put salt or other seasonings in too.

7. Heat water to mix the consume and add it to the mix. The more you add, the more moist the stuffing will be.

On the package of soup that you buy, the company should give a suggested consume/bullion:water ratio for you to follow. I only used a cup of water (see my cup there?), and added more consume than was suggested to get more flavor without more water since my butter and eggs already made the mixture so wet.

Once you you have the bread, the veggies, the spices, the egg, and the soup all evenly mixed, place the ingredients into a baking tin. You may want to brush or spray or spread oil or butter onto the tin to keep the stuffing from sticking to it, but I didn't because - once again - there was so much moister in my mix to begin with! Definitely going to calm down on the butter next time.

8. Place the bread tin and put in the toaster oven. Sometimes splitting the stuffing into two tins and baking separately is better to keep it from burning on top if it gets too close to the heating coils. <-- This is what I learned from my attempt because the top of the stuffing was closer to the heat than the bottom. You'll see what I mean in a little bit.

I have no idea how much my toaster oven heats up, nor do I know how long to cook the stuffing because I wasn't using exact measurements. Since the temperature of my oven is my only uncontrollable variable, I put it on the highest time setting. That way, I could check on it periodically to see how it was doing. Burnt food is rarely a good thing, so I decided that once the stuffing turned a golden brown, I would take it out and see how the inside was doing.

Unluckily for me, the toaster has two heating coils; one on the top and one on the bottom. When the door was opened, it seemed like the stuffing was perfectly spaced between the two. However, when the door was shut, the try on which the tin was placed shifted closer to the upper coil. This means that the top of my stuffing was getting a lot more heat than the bottom was, so it cooked much faster! I realized this as I kept checking on the stuffing and adding more and more time to figure out what to do.

Because I really, REALLY didn't want to get sick from my own soul food, I waited until the top of my stuffing when from golden brown to slightly charred. Then, I took it out of the pan and prepared to be suffering through my dinner.

An unforeseen joy was that even though I kept adding more and more time for the stuffing, the pan never lost its shape or melted! I know that may seem like a silly thing to be excited about, but considering I bought it from the dollar store and wasn't sure if it was even toaster oven friendly, I was pretty psyched!

9. Finally, enjoy!

But low and behold it was great! Sure the top was a bit crunchy, but a good deal of the moisture had cooked out, leaving a soft (but cooked!!) inner core to my stuffing. Phew! Definitely a relief there. Mixing well ensured that there was seasoning in every bite and the butter was still trapped inside the veggie pieces. Yuuuummmm! 

I may not be 100% on this stuffing recipe  but at least I know that even with all the mistakes and guesswork and experimentation, it somehow all worked out. I'll be sure to make another post about how the whole cooking day goes, too!

Classic American Mashed Potatoes

Life can bring out a lot of negative emotions; loneliness, homesickness, depression, anxiety, heartbreak, nervousness, etc. We all have different ways of coping with these feelings, and in my family, an excellent source of relief. Chocolate, ice cream, cookies, soup, and other soul foods helped me through some rough times. Something about having the sight, smell, or taste of these foods makes it seem like everything will work out and remind me that my problems are small issues that I can overcome. To that effect, I have been going through a lot of these emotions recently and needed a big batch of mashed potatoes to help me feel better. Also, as one of the only two Americans in my city, I was asked to host an American Cooking Class for the international volunteer group here in town. Since my recipe list is not large, I decided to choose mashed potatoes. These photos came from my last bowl of mashed potatoes and will hopefully not only benefit anyone who finds me online, but also the cooking class. Eat up!

What you'll need:

potatoes
milk
salt
pepper
butter/margarine (optional)
other seasonings (optional) 

cutting board
knife
peeler (optional)
masher or strong fork
electric mixer (optional)
pot and mixing bowl
microwave safe bowl or cup (optional)

DISCLAIMER: The beautiful thing about potatoes is the amount of options you have. I am doing a very simple mashed potato recipe which is why I have listed the bare and simplest ingredients and tools I could above. However, you can add almost anything into your potatoes, and altering this recipe is a snap. I'll try to mention any variations I can think of, but if I miss any or if you think of some, leave a comment below for other readers (and even me!) to try in the future.

Okay, pick an amount of potatoes. Any amount will do. Do you want a lot or a little? A few or a mountain? Red skin, Idaho, or another variety? It doesn't matter. Just make sure that you wash them well before starting.

-To those who are truly new to the kitchen - Do NOT wash ANY of your food with dish soap! I have seen this happen before. Just scrub the food under warm running water. Clean scrub brushes that you only use for food are okay, but NO SOAP! 

There are some people who would peel the potatoes at this point, but I prefer to leave the skins on. I feel that it adds a more homestyle feel to the end product and I've been told that there are more nutrients in the skins of most fruits and veggies (root and otherwise), so I skip the peeling step. If that potatoes that you have are rather large, try to cut them up smaller. This will speed up the cooking process since you will have more surface area and less total volume per potato cube. *Trick* Cut all the potatoes into similar sized cubes/shapes so that they all cook at the same rate and you don't have some that finish faster than others.

How do they cook exactly? Observant as ever, reader! We will be boiling our potato chunks in a pot of water. You can bring the water to a boil and then and the potatoes or bring the water to a build with the potatoes in it already. I prefer the second method as the potatoes will cook as the water is coming to a boil. 

Catch the difference between the photos?
My water was taking a long time to boil, so I
just turned up the heat. Changing the temp
during cooking is totally okay! Need more time
to prep? Turn down the heat on your main dish.
Need to get things done? Turn up the heat! Just
don't turn it up too much or your food may
burn or cook more on the outside than the
inside. A few degrees isn't going to hurt and
that is where the expression "I'll put that on the
back burner" comes from - people would put food
on low temperatures on the back burner so that they
would still cook, but at a slower rate, giving them
time to work on other things.

How much water do I need to boil? Well, since I didn't give you an exact amount for how many potatoes to make, I can't give you an exact amount for water. But I can say that you should have enough water in the pot to safely cover the potatoes. I put in the potatoes, and then cover them with water, and then boil it all. *Trick* keeping the lid on the pot helps trap heat and makes the boiling happen faster. I didn't like to do this in the past because I felt that just made one more thing to wash, but if you are hungry and in a hurry for food, this really makes a difference!

How long do I boil the potatoes? Now slow down, friend! Don't rush me here. Boil the potatoes until they are easy to pierce with a chopstick. If you can stab about inside the boiling water and poke through a few potatoes, they are done. Next you can drain the water and put the potatoes in a mixing bowl. BE CAREFUL!! The potatoes and the water will be very hot. People sometimes forget this, so let's keep our kitchen smarts about us. 

For our next steps, we will be adding our other optional ingredients. If you are going to be putting your potatoes in the fridge soon after making them, don't worry about heating up anything after this point. Adding in the other ingredients cold will require them to take away from the heat of the potatoes in order to melt and mix. But if you are eating them for dinner, consider warming up the milk/butter in the microwave (using a safe bowl or cup) before adding them into the mixing bowl with the potatoes. This will help everything stay warm.

While the milk or butter is warming, mash up the potatoes just a bit with the masher. Now, add a touch of butter/milk and mash a bit more. Add some more butter/milk and mash a bit more. Now, add a touch….you get it. Different people prefer their mashed potatoes to be different consistencies (another beautiful aspect about mashed potatoes!!). Most people I have met prefer them firm, so for those people don't add as much liquid. However, some people, like my mother prefer them to be more creamy, so more butter and/or milk is needed when cooking for these people. I started with that new bar of butter in the photo above and ended up using 1/4 of it as well as a splash of milk. My boyfriend doesn't like using butter for things, so I make his mashed potatoes with only milk. Different strokes for different folks. 

*Trick* Adding little bits at a time is the best idea here! You can always add, but you can't take away. Keep adding a little of each until the potatoes are looking like the way you want. I know that sounds vague, but you will get to a point where you will think "These seem perfect!" or "I don't want to mix these anymore!!", which is when you will stop or pull out that electric mixer that I mentioned at the top of the post.

To finish off your soulful food, you can mix in final ingredients like melted cheese, spices such as oregano and garlic powder (which I like to do), or salt, pepper, and Italian seasonings, chunks of grilled or baked garlic, bacon bits, or even more butter!!! However you mix it, these potatoes can be stand alone dishes to help you out of a slump or dress up another dish to round out your meal. For those wishing to add gravy, you can warm that up in a sauce pan before pouring it on the mashed potatoes. Maybe I'll do a gravy post sometime in the future. For now, nom nom nom!!!

Welcome and Be Prepared

May I first say thank you so very much for choosing to come and read my site. Perhaps a web search brought you to my digital door, or maybe your just stumbling about looking for a quick read. Regardless, I'm happy to have you here with me today. Welcome and be prepared.

Why such a disparity between warm tidings and a vague yet classic warming? 

What an excellent question, reader. Because you seem like a good person, and I would hate to have been untruthful to you this early in our online acquaintance. In terms of blogging, I have a slight inkling on how this all goes down, but in terms of cooking, I am a complete and total newbie. No, like really. I am. My cooking specialty at the time of this post is grilled cheese sandwiches. Boiling water is considered to be a skill in my book. And what is more, I only recently learned how to make a proper omelet. This all leads back to the title of this blog, "Alex Can't Cook."

So why would such a self-proclaimed kitchen failure start a cooking blog?

How astute you are. It is true that I pale in comparison to the greats in cooking blogs, TV, vlogging, and books, but that is just why I am creating this. I am not a world-class chef in a kitchen that houses all of the fancy machines and ingredients you would see on those renowned cooking programs. I'm a twenty-something living in an apartment with basic appliances. Don't believe me? Here are my current tools.

I have only one burner. It is electric (oooooohhhhh), but it is
singular, as the photo suggests. This means that I must control
what is cooking and the order I prepare my food or dinner will
never be served.

On top of a fridge that only reaches my waist sits a
microwave and toaster oven. 

The settings of my toaster oven leave much to be desired.
It gets hot, but I don't know how much. All I can control
are how many minutes something sits inside of it.

Likewise, the settings of the microwave are standard.
No specialty settings or extra features here, folks.

My other great handicap is that I have lived with great cooks. No, you may not know them, and they have never hosted a special on the Food Network, but their skill has (surprisingly) been a hinderance to my growth. My father, my mother, my grandmother, aunts, uncles, my boyfriend, my roommate, etc. have always been around to make delicious food and treats, so why should I bother? And should I even try to attempt to cook with them, I usually was pushed back to "assistant" rather than "chef-in-training". I would wash food, clean an area, stir something, or even cut the food, but to save time or show me how to do it properly, they would take care of the majority of the food preparation and more difficult tasks. 

My father in particular refused to write anything he did down so that I could try and duplicate it later. "Why should I do that? And you'll just remember it eventually. We can just try to make it together." But when we did, he would handle multiple dishes at one time, making it difficult for a beginner to keep straight what was being prepared to go with what. I would stare after his swift moving hands and ask "How long does that go in? What is the heat on the oven? Maybe I could try to do that too? No? Oh, okay. I'll just clean up over here while you do that." Stuck playing second fiddle, I tried to take in all the information without getting in the way or ruining the food. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that. My father and other cooking influences made wonderful dishes that I enjoy immensely, but I couldn't seem to take in what they were trying to teach me at the time.

But now, I am the one in charge of the kitchen. Sure, I have a roommate (again), but she cooks her food and I cook mine. We buy separate groceries and have all our meals separately. My family and boyfriend are (sadly) all living in America while I am here in Japan. This makes things lonely, but it is also an opportunity to try all the kitchen-related skills that I could never hone before. Sure I may take an hour longer than most people to make dinner, but I'm the only one waiting on me to finish. If I make a mistake, it is only in a serving for one person, not the family's food. 

To that end, as I mentioned, I'm in Japan. This means that I will be doing things the long way as I may not have access to pre-made American goodies that would make the recipes go by faster. I may also use some bizarre ingredients because it is all I've got over her. Still, I'll try to stay as simple as possible since my main go is to use the things I learn by experimenting with cooking to help others like me who are just starting out or who are using a basic, basic kitchen. 

But, as the saying goes, in order to make good food, you must taste good food. Having wonderful cooks around me did help me develop an idea about what food should eventually look and taste like, so most things I attempt will be what I saw my parents or relatives make once upon a time. With no small amount of effort, my food may even turn out like theirs, but I'm not holding my breath on everything.

So welcome to my small workspace and be prepared to see me make a bunch of mistakes and even turn out a few surprises. Luckily, you are protected on your side of the computer in case I catch something on fire. I hope that I can give some help to the cooking newbies out there and grow as a cook myself. And I hope that you will all help me! Leave comments to help others who stop by the site. See something I did that you do differently? Have links to other versions of my meals? Write about it and let us all know! I'll try to mention variations of the food I cook, but I would love to hear from you, the internets, as well.

I happen to be very hungry now, so I'll go try and whip something up. Happy New Year! Happy Start to This Blog! And as the Japanese say, "yoroshiku onegaishmasu - thank you in advance and please look over/take care of me from now on."