How much oil do I need a day???

Sorry ya'll about the lack of updates. With school back in session comes a new schedule, which this year is exceptionally full. It's great to be busy, but not if you have a blog people are expecting you to update:)

So you read the title of our post, how much oil do I need a day? We have gotten some information that might surprise you. To help your brain and body function properly you need 4 Tablespoons of "good" oil a day. Some recommended kinds are, olive oil, coconut oil, flax oil, hemp seed oil, almond, walnut and pecan oils.

We have started putting coconut oil in our morning smoothies and also melting it with cocoa powder and a pinch of xylatoil and freezing for a afternoon pick me up. Other ways to get oil in to your diet is by eating lots of salad, and also using it on grilled cheese for lunch instead of butter.

Now you tell us by voting on the poll, what's your favorite type of oil?

Check back next week for some more ways to make your life a little more healthy!

Hannah and Esther DeL

P.S. One last thing, you can not have more than 2 tablespoons of oil at once as it defeats the purpose of helping your body:) So try and spread it out over your whole day!

The requested pie crust recipe.......

Here is the recipe I normally use, sometimes I do use half butter and half shortening, I have found out that when I do it makes the crust flaky and you still get that rich butter flavor.

Makes: 1 -9 inch pie crust ( it doubles great!)

1 c. all purpose flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 c. plus 1 T. shortening

2-3 T. ice cold water

Mix your dry ingredients together. Cut in your shortening with a pastry blender, or use two knifes in a criss-cross motion. My sisters also just used there hands:) I prefer the pastry blender. I normally don't measure my water, I fill a cup about 1/2 full and then put ice cubes in it to make sure that it is truly ice cold. This is the most important part of the process. Next I pour in the water about 1 T. at a time, and use a fork to toss it around. When I get to the right consistency I use my hands to finish mixing it together. Then next very important part is not to over work or touch the dough. You want to touch it as least as possible, having the dough cold is essential for a flaky crust. I then pat it into a circle and roll it into the desired size. For the sides I usually pinch the dough between my fingers or use a fork to crimp the edges.

I also have tried this recipe using half whole wheat, you do have to be a little more gentle with the dough but it turns out good. Another thing I have tried is using all whole wheat and really cold coconut oil, the dough was very fragile but it sure was a lot healthier then using that shortening..... Hope these tips help. Also one more thing I have also refrigerated the dough before rolling it out to make sure that is stayed really cold so that it was really flaky.

If you have anymore questions just leave a comment and I will try to answer them:)

The Pie Crust Queen of the DeL Sisters Kitchen:)

Chef Esther

Over fill, and level with a knife

Braided Look

Divide dough into 3 strands. Braid, and tuck ends under and place in loaf pan.

How to make cinnamon bread in 3 easy steps!

Spread dough with hands into a rectangle

Dump filling onto dough

Spread out your filling................

Fold long sides into the middle, and roll it up!

A few scone tips

Scone Tips
Don't Cut Corners - Use a pastry blender or two knives to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. This will help create uniform pieces and will melt the butter less than using your fingers.

Chill the Butter - Butter for scones should be cold and firm, so that when you cut it into the dry ingredients it forms pea-sized pieces. This will make the scones light and tender as the pieces form air pockets when the butter melts.

Don't Overdo It - Scone batter should be mixed just until the ingredients hold together and the dry ingredients are incorporated. Over-mixing will result in tougher, heavier scones.

Get the Scoop - Use a 2-ounce ice cream scoop to portion perfectly round, uniform scones.

Creative veggie cutting tips

Choose the vegetables. Good choices for creative cutting include carrots, cucumber, radishes etc.
Scrub and wash the veggies until they are clean.


Using a cutting board, slice the veggies. Some suggestions include:

Cut star shapes for carrots


Cut celery into small lengths and then cut slices in the top of each piece so that it splits apart and looks like cartoon hair


Cut a radish rose;


Cut cucumber slices and cut a little triangle at each quarter of the circle, to form a flower shape overall


You can also use cookie cutters, but you will have to press quite hard, or at least steam the veggies first. This can be quite good for larger veggies, such as a potato


Try combining veggies to make a veggie sculpture.


Cook the veggies as desired. The choice is yours - steamed, broiled etc. Or, you may prefer to use them raw in a salad or added to a hot Asian-style broth.


Serve at your dinner party and watch friends and family bombard you with compliments on your creativity.

Brownie Help

FUDGY OR CAKEY? You make the call on which type of brownies to make. These are swirled with caramel. FUDGY OR CAKEY? You make the call on which type of brownies to make. These are swirled with caramel.
If you think you can't bake, brownies are for you.
"They're one of the easiest things to make," says Jessica Gaya, owner of Corina Bakery in Tacoma, Wash. "The best way to mess them up is overbaking. Other than that, brownies are really easy."
Indeed. Take a few pantry ingredients, a couple of bowls, a whisk, a spatula, a pan and an oven set to 325 F. Within an hour, you're staring at delicious baked chocolate.

Do you crave fudgy or cakey?

Do you like bittersweet or semisweet chocolate?

Dutch alkalized or natural unsweetened cocoa powder?

With or without nuts?

What about icing?
Brownie bakers willing to consider the important questions, read on.
Get cakey
If you want light, airy brownies with cakey, buttery richness, here's the skinny:
Cakey brownies have more flour. Flour gives them structure. They don't fall after baking. They stand up to icing.
They have less solid chocolate, sometimes even no solid chocolate. They include cocoa powder and more sugar. Cakey brownies that have high sugar content get a crustier surface as granulated sugar replaces solid chocolate's ultrafine sugar particles, which melt smoothly and soften the batter. Larger grains on the batter surface crystallize and caramelize.
They have more butter. Extra butter compensates for the small amount of fat in cocoa powder. Since butter melts faster than cocoa butter, brownies whose butter content outweighs the amount of cocoa fat will bake soft.
They're mixed by first creaming butter, eggs and sugar. They're often mixed with an electric mixer but can be mixed by hand.
Recipes sometimes include milk.


Get fudgy
If you crave dense and decadent brownies, there's no way to fudge fudgy.
Melt a lot of chocolate. Even a small batch can call for a pound or more.
Choose a recipe that has less flour. It's no coincidence that fudgy brownies have a lot in common with flourless chocolate decadence cake.
Mix by hand. Whisking a minimal amount of air into the eggs reduces their leavening power. Gently stirring in the flour prevents tough batter. If your brownie crust separates when the cooled brownie collapses, you've overmixed.
Keep your cool, and underbake. A lower oven temperature (325 F) helps fudgy batters bake smoothly. Remove brownies from the oven just before the center sets.


Chocolate choices
You can use almost any chocolate – bittersweet, semisweet or milk chocolate. There are many excellent chocolates: Scharffen Berger, Guittard, Ghirardelli. Callebaut, Lindt and Valrhona are available if not affordable.
Humble brownies don't necessarily need fancy chocolate. Supermarket baking squares produce good results.
While you can use bittersweet in place of semisweet or vice versa, not all chocolates are interchangeable. Some of today's premium bittersweet and semisweet chocolates contain 35 to 70 percent chocolate liquor, the remainder is sugar. Different percentage chocolates behave differently. Substitute with anything that has more than 62 percent chocolate, and you'll need to do recipe math to adjust the sugar-to-chocolate ratio.
Mainstream brands contain about 55 percent chocolate liquor and produce the most reliable results. The higher the cacao percentage, the denser the brownies.


Powder your cocoa
Cocoa powder is dry, concentrated cocoa bean, the pod from which chocolate springs. Cocoa powder retains all of chocolate's flavor but almost none of its fat. Made with lower-quality beans, natural cocoa powder tends to be acidic and strong. Dutch-processed cocoa powder is alkalized to take the edge off. Dutch-process cocoa powder has a luscious dark red color but is less flavorful. While you can substitute Dutch-process cocoa powder for natural cocoa powder in most recipes, don't do it when the recipe has a lot of baking powder or soda, both of which react to acid.
Natural cocoa produces brownies with more flavor complexity and lots of tart, fruity notes. Because cocoa powder has less fat and sweetness than chocolate, the butter and sugar content in these brownies is pretty high. This produces a candylike crust and soft interior.


Panning for thick and thin
Brownies are commonly baked in a 9x14x2-inch pan that's known as a brownie pan. Eight-inch square pans also are popular. If you want thin brownies, use a larger, shallow pan. For small batches, I like to use a quarter-sheet pan measuring 91/2x13x1. For big batches, I like the half-sheet pan size, 18x13x1.
If you're using a dark nonstick pan, lower the oven temperature by 25 degrees. Brownies tend to bake with crusty edges, and dark nonstick pans turn up the heat.


Batter up
Some bakers swear you must cool melted chocolate before adding it to eggs lest you ruin the batch. Others swear that hot chocolate ensures crusty tops and chewy centers. When I worked as a morning baker, I made several trays of brownies each week. Sometimes, the chocolate cooled while I did other tasks. Sometimes, I tempered the chocolate into the eggs hot off the stove. It didn't seem to matter.


An easy way to add extra gooeyness and visual texture is to add a tortoiseshell-like appearance by swirling caramel onto the top of the unbaked batter in the pan. To ensure that the caramel doesn't melt away, use caramel that is fairly thick and completely cooled. The caramel can be mixed with thick jam or fruit compote for extra zing. Plop the cool caramel onto the batter. Drag the edge of a knife through the caramel and batter to create abstract lines.
If brownie batter is poured too thick, brownies won't bake properly in the centers. Combined with the slight underbaking needed for gooey brownies, you couldn't pass batter-heavy brownies to even the most zonked-out brownie eater. Don't spread the batter too thin; moisture and flavor will bake out quickly.


Another way to add texture and taste contrast is to stud the batter with chunks of chocolate. Fold in chocolate chunks in the final stages of mixing. Use bittersweet chunks with a semisweet batter. Sprinkle chocolate chunks on top, too.


CAKEY BROWNIES
10 tablespoons (11/4 sticks) unsalted butter
1 ¼ cups sugar
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (natural or Dutch-process)
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup walnut or pecan pieces (optional)
Position a rack in the lower third of the oven, and preheat the oven to 325 F.
Line the bottom and sides of the baking pan with parchment paper or foil, leaving an overhang on 2 opposite sides.
Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa and salt in a medium heatproof bowl, and set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water. Stir from time to time until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and hot enough that you want to remove your finger fairly quickly after dipping it in to test.
Remove the bowl from the skillet, and set aside briefly until the mixture is warm, not hot.
Stir in the vanilla with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each. When the batter looks thick, shiny and well-blended, add the flour and stir until you cannot see it any longer, then beat vigorously for 40 strokes with the wooden spoon or a rubber spatula. Stir in the nuts, if using. Spread evenly in the lined pan.
Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack.
Lift the ends of the parchment or foil liner and transfer the brownies to a cutting board.
Makes 16 to 24 brownies.
PER SERVING: Calories 153 (57% fat) Fat 12 g (4 g sat) Cholesterol 33 mg Sodium 37 mg Fiber 1 g Carbohydrates 17 g Protein 2 g
SOURCE: Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate by Alice Medrich



FUDGY BROWNIES WITH CARAMEL
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter
1/4 cup cream
1 ½ pounds semisweet chocolate
3 eggs
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 ounces good-quality bittersweet chocolate bar, broken into ½ -inch chunks (divided use)
3 to 4 ounces store-bought caramel sauce

Preheat oven to 325 F. Lightly grease baking pan and set aside.
Melt butter, cream and chocolate in double boiler. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar and vanilla.
Add a portion of the chocolate mixture to the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Add remaining chocolate and continue whisking.
Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Whisk in the sifted dry ingredients in 2 increments. Whisk only until the flour is incorporated. Add half of the bittersweet chocolate chunks to the batter and mix.
Pour batter into the greased pan. Smooth the batter with a spatula. Sprinkle the remaining chocolate chunks on top.
Spoon globs of cold caramel sauce onto the brownie batter surface. Use the back of a knife to drag abstract patterns of caramel through the brownie batter.
Bake approximately 30-35 minutes, or until center is molten and not quite set.
Cool completely before cutting. Makes approximately 12 brownies.
Note: The recipe bakes best in a quarter-sheet pan measuring 9 ½ x13x1 inches. You also can use a 9x14x2-inch brownie pan or an 8x8 baking pan.
PER SERVING: Calories 590 (47% fat) Fat 33 g (19 g sat) Cholesterol 73 mg Sodium 164 mg Fiber 5 g Carbohydrates 78 g Protein 6 g


Enjoy the great review I found!
Chef Hannah

So why should I use unsalted butter?!??

Tip #1. ALWAYS use unsalted butter. Salted butter might taste better on toast, but it can very easily ruin a batch of cookies or a cake. Almost every recipe calls for salt, since it is a flavor enhancer. However, if you are using salted butter there is no way to control how much salt is actually going into your recipe. Get the unsalted butter and then add the appropriate amount of salt on your own. Trust me, it will make a big difference.