Talk about a quickfire challenge!

Vimeo user Animi recently posted this short stop-motion movie on making an apple pie. The video certainly is fun, set to the music of Dave Brubeck. But what we found curious was the method for making pie crust.

Do you make a cylinder of dough to create the sides of your pie dough? Let us know in the comments below.

[Via Serious Eats]

Gena's chicken kebabs. Photo: Erica George Dines Photography.

It is hard to believe that kids are nearly back in school, and it's time to resume the hectic weekly schedule of balancing school, work and afternoon activities while still getting a hot meal on the table.

As much I enjoy eating out, I also love cooking and knowing exactly what is going into my food. Summer is nearing the end, but that does not mean you have to put away your grill -- use it to your advantage.

Grilling can save you time in the kitchen and help you get meals on the table in a quick fashion without heating up the kitchen. Get my go-to quick grilling recipes after the jump.

Photo: Food Network

Brian Boitano is renowned for his 1988 Olympic gold medal in figure skating and infamous for a song from 1999's "South Park" movie. But now the professional skater is working a different arena -- the cooking show.

On Sunday, Boitano makes his Food Network debut with "What Would Brian Boitano Make?" Quite possibly one of the campiest cooking shows to hit TV, it follows the Olympian as he makes meals for the likes of a bachelor friend, a handyman, a new mom and roller derby girls, all from the comforts of his real-life kitchen.

Boitano spoke with Slashfood about his cooking-show debut, being a "clean eater," his "South Park" song and the one kitchen gadget he can't live without (Slap Chop anyone?).

Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow has road-tripped through Spain with Mario Batali and Mark Bittman on "Spain On the Road Again," and the chefs' culinary know-how seems to be rubbing off.

The star of "Shakespeare in Love" has made a move towards her own cooking show with a roasted chicken how-to video she posted to her Web site Goop. During the nearly 8-minute video, the actress debones a chicken while talking about learning to cook while a 19-year-old student at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"I was trying to be an actress as well so I kept driving down to LA to audition for movies, and my dad was there working. We sort of started getting into cooking together; we got sick of the frozen meatballs that were left in the freezer for us," Paltrow says. "It just became our thing. So we started watching a lot of cooking channels, and over the years its become a major passion."

Paltrow's Quick Roast Chicken and Potatoes after the jump.

Today for lunch, my sister and I did something we don't do very often. We went to an Italian restaurant. Italian just isn't one of my favorite cuisines. After a minute of looking at the menu, she asked me what cannelloni was, at which point I realized I had no idea. Imagine my surprise when I got home and found this post from Baker's Banter. It's a how-to on Sara Moulton's (Sara's Secrets) version of cannelloni, which uses crepes rather than pasta sheets. It looks incredibly delicious, and would probably make a great, easy, special dinner.

According to this article in Wikipedia, cannelloni can be made with either pasta sheets or crepes and still be considered correct. It was really interesting to learn about this dish, especially since it found me rather than the other way around. It occurred to me that cannelloni is similar to baked enchiladas. Now I'm curious if there are similar recipes from other cuisines. What do you think?

Come on, you just knew that this was going to happen sooner or later: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has reached a deal with Costco to offer frozen and fresh refrigerated foods for customers. The items will start showing up in Costco locations in 2008.

This article makes a good point about how this will affect Martha Stewart's image. It's one thing for Martha to tell us how to make neat crafts and how to clean our homes and where to vacation and how to decorate, and give us recipes and kitchen tips, but what if we try these foods -- foods that the company has made, supposedly -- and we don't like them, or they're just "typical grocery food?" As the piece says, drapes and paints cannot spoil in the refrigerator."

But they'll probably be fine. But I wonder what foods she'll offer? Probably something a little fancier than corn dogs and Salisbury steak.

Angel food cake is a dessert that has relatively few ingredients, but takes a fair amount of planning. The light, downy-soft texture of the cake and fantastic flavor make it worth it, though, because you will never buy an angel food cake that tastes this good at the supermarket. This cake is sweet, moist and nearly melts into your mouth. Eat it straight out of hand or top it with strawberries, whipped cream or lemon curd.

To make the cake, your eggs whites will have to be separated and brought to room temperature. It is easier to separate eggs when they are cold because the yolk is much less likely to break and contaminate the whites. The best way to separate eggs is to use multiple bowls, breaking and separating the eggs before transferring the white to the rest of the whites. This way, a broken yolk will not ruin a dozen egg whites. When the egg whites are at room temperature before you begin to beat them, they will achieve a much greater volume, giving you a higher, lighter cake.

Congratulations! You have successfully made delicious, homemade dinner rolls. After gathering all your ingredients, you proofed the yeast, kneaded the dough, shaped the rolls, baked the rolls and now that the rolls have had sufficient time to cool you get to taste the rolls. They have a hint of crispness to the crust and a soft interior. You can see the color difference in the rolls that are brushed with egg (top left, in the photo) and those that were not (all the others). The rolls brushed with egg bake up darker in color, though the egg does not add anything to the flavor of the roll.

Eat these with butter and jam, or use them to mop up gravy. Enjoy!

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Lightly beat an egg with 2 tablespoons of water and brush onto your risen dinner rolls. This will give them a lovely brown sheen as they bake. You could brush them with butter instead, for a deeper color, but an egg will always give them the best shine. If you like, you may also sprinkle sesame or poppy seeds on top of the rolls at this point.

Bake the rolls at 400F for about 20 minutes. They will be golden when they are done. Slide them off the baking sheet and onto a wire rack to cool. Yeasted breads can turn a bit gummy inside if they are cut when they are hot, so it is best to let them cool to room temperature before eating them.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Take your risen dough and turn it out onto your lightly floured surface. Use a knife or a bench scraper to divide the dough in half, then divide each half into six even pieces, for a total of 12. You can shape these pieces into any shape you like. Rounded balls are probably the simplest, but it is even easier to drop them into lightly greased muffin tins. To make knots, roll each piece of dough into a rope and tie it. (Yes, that is my hand. No, it is not easy to shape a dinner roll and take a photo at the same time. ) Shaping the dinner rolls is a great time to get your kids involved in baking, even if they can only manage snake-like breadsticks or less-than-circular rolls.

Place all your formed rolls onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or one that has been lightly greased. Cover the baking sheet with a large, clean dish towel and let the rolls rise for about 20 minutes.

Now is a good time to preheat the oven to 400F, then you can finish preparing the rolls.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

 

To your yeast mixture, add buttermilk, honey, salt and 2 cups of flour. Stir vigorously. This is made easier if you have a stand mixer, where you can proof the yeast in the attached bowl and use the dough hook to knead it for you. It isn't too difficult to do by hand, though. All you need is a big wooden spoon. Add the remaining flour a few tablespoons at a time, until the dough stops sticking to the sides of the bowl and clings instead to your spoon or dough hook.

Kneading is the best part, so place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead it with the heel of your hand. As best as I can describe without a video clip, here is how you knead dough. Press the dough down with the heel of your hand, fold over the top half of the dough. Rotate the folded dough 90 degrees (1/4 turn) and repeat. Continue kneading, adding a bit more flour to prevent the dough from sticking, for about 5 minutes, until the dough is smooth. Place it in an oiled bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise for 1 - 2 hours, until doubled in size. If you kitchen is cold, this rise will take 2 hours, but it will probably take less time if your kitchen is warm. The dough is now ready to be shaped.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

 

The first step, once you have your ingredients, is to proof the yeast. Combine your active dry yeast with 1/4 cup warm water in a large bowl. You can test the temperature of your water by putting a few drops on the back of your hand, as you would do to test the temperature of a baby's bottle. If the water is too hot for your hand, it's too hot for the yeast. You cannot kill yeast with water that is too cold, only slow its activity slightly, so it is best to err on the side of caution and not overheat your water.

Mix the water and yeast with a fork to blend. After 5-10 minutes, the yeast should look slightly foamy. Time to add the rest of the ingredients in the next step.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

 

Nothing accompanies a hearty dinner or stew than a freshly baked dinner roll. It seems that many people turn to refrigerated dough in tubes these days instead of making their own. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But freshly made ones are just a little bit better. These buttermilk dinner rolls have a delicious, buttery taste without having any butter in the dough, and are very light and fluffy. Cook along with this edition of Cooking Live with Slashfood, as I show you the steps to make these at home.

Here are the ingredients. The instructions start in the next post.

Buttermilk Dinner Rolls
¼ cup warm water (110F)
1 packet active dry yeast
1 ¼ cups buttermilk, room temperature
2 tbsp honey
1 ½ tsp salt
2 ½ - 3 ½ cups flour
1 egg (optional, for egg wash)

 [Photo by Nicole Weston]

 

Tomorrow I will be chronicling the steps required to make a Streusel Coffee Cake recipe from Martha Stewart Living. This is a great way to follow along with a recipe because you’ll be able to see all the steps and hear about all the tools and techniques you’ll need – just like on a cooking show, but without commercials! And like televised cooking shows, there is no pressure to make the food to be able to enjoy the process. I'll document everything with photos.

Of course, you can’t “cook along” with something you don’t know the ingredients for. Here is a list of everything you’ll need to make the cake, with a few notes of my own. I am using less cardamom than the original recipe because I am a huge cinnamon fan and a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to streusel coffee cake. I did use a bit, but feel free to substitute cinnamon for all of the cardamom. If you don't have yogurt, you can substitute buttermilk.

While I enjoy many, many varieties of homemade muffins, from light and moist to heavy and healthy, I have always found the bakery-like muffin difficult to recreate at home. Who doesn't love the fluffy interior, crispy ledge and high, domed top of muffins from a coffee shop or bakery? With the help of The Best Recipe, I compiled a few tips to picking a recipe and recreating these at home:

• Choose a muffin recipe that uses yogurt or buttermilk as a liquid, which will make a thicker batter and support the muffin in a high rise.
• A thick batter will allow you to heap the batter into muffin tins without it spreading all over the pan. This will ensure a high rise and create a small shelf around the base of the muffin.
• Even when using an acidic ingredient like yogurt or buttermilk, a muffin leavened mostly with baking powder will achieve a higher rise than one with baking soda alone.
• Using butter instead of oil and creaming it with the sugar will create a fluffier texture, not to mention that butter will give the muffins a more delicate (and delicious) flavor than oil.

Here is a fuller account of making bakery-style muffins, as well as a recipe for the Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Muffins pictured above. Or, you can check out Elise's Blueberry Muffin variation of the same recipe.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]