Tasting 5: Luigi's

Sorry it's been so long- I have a million pizza pictures saved that need their reviews written up. I don't usually ever get pizza at Luigi's, because my family has the idea that it is mediocre and too expensive. Luckily for my reviewing opportunities, my friend served Luigi's pizza at a party the other day do I got to taste it.

My friend actually reviewed this, so as promised, I'll publish her review first.


"This pizza was from Luigi's. For crust, it gets a three. Sauce is a three. Cheese is a three. Ratios is a stupid rating. I'm not doing that. Overall, it was mediocre. By mediocre, I mean it was a piece of rubbish. A piece. Of rubbish. It was straight wack. More mediocre than the back of the second violin section. Word. -Mittens"


So her review was... very nice. Thanks for the review Sar- ah, Mittens. She isn't normally this insane sounding in conversation, I swear. Although I'm pretty sure she didn't actually think that it was "rubbish" pizza, because just before writing this, she was telling me that Luigi's makes fantastic pizza, and how dare I not go there regularly. Here, you can see it for yourselves:

Here's my review, in the proper format :)

Crust: fluffy, a but floppy ***

Cheese: Good flavor, nothing out of the ordinary ***

Sauce: Good flavor ***

Ratios: Fine ***

Bottom line: "Mittens" was right, I guess, it was pretty mush mediocre. Not bad, just middle of the road. Average pizza. 12/20

Tasting 4: Colosseo

Hey Guys! How've ya been? Sorry that we haven't posted in a while we've been really busy with finals and regents exams etc. SO. The pizza review that I'm supposed to writing about. Recently we reviewed Colosseo. When you walk into this place it seems kinda sketchy. They have just a regular counter to order and everything but the only place to sit and eat is a restaurant type setting behind the main entrance. We sit down and our mother goes to order. She comes back without any food and a women comes and takes our order. Weird. We thought that maybe you couldn't order and sit down? I dunno but the whole situation was just kinda turn off and we hadn't even eaten yet!

So enough about the scenery and what goes on in the restaurant, and let's get to the ACTUAL review.

Crust: Eh, it was okay. Kinda chewy but it wasn't unbearable. ***
Sauce: It was pretty sweet taste-wise but I liked the consistency. ***
Cheese: It didn't have much flavor it was really nice and stretch though :D ****
Ratios: They had the ratio down good which everyone thought was really important. *****
Overall this pizza gets 15/20 stars and the place was a tad on the shady side.

COOKING INTERLUDE: Chana Masala (Chickpea Curry)

Happy Memorial Day! Today my sister and I took an unconventional approach to Memorial Day lunch. We made an Indian dish called Chana Masala, or Chickpea Curry. The recipe was from Smitten Kitchen (sorry I couldn't post a link but the internet was really slow today and it wouldn't work when I was testing it...).


 We served our masala with garlic naan that we bought frozen from Trader Joe's. We toasted them up and piled the Channa Masala on top. It was crispy and spicy and mmmmmmmmm... I only have one tip for you if you get thirsty don't drink Dr. Pepper (the best soda in the universe) with it. It leaves a horrid aftertaste that will make you have a conniption.

On a boring day when you don't have anything going on or really want Indian food don't stoop so low as to use the microwave stuff make it from scratch it's easy, quick and delicious.

Baking Interlude: Macarons!

Happy Memorial Day, everyone! My sister and I were home from school on Friday for Memorial Day weekend while our parents were at work, so of course that called for making something that would be likely to get us yelled at. We looked through my extensive list of recipes that I need to try and settled on the most difficult one: macarons. We've wanted to try macarons since we first saw them on a cute food blog about two years ago, but the closest we came to tasting them were frozen ones from Trader Joe's, which we were too impatient to defrost. We came this close to trying them when we saw them in a bakery while on vacation in London, but it was not to be.

Ok, they are supposed to be difficult to make, from what I've seen on the internet. Apparently you need to age the egg whites, and triple-sift everything, and you shouldn't even try to make them if it's raining or if the moon is in the last quarter or if you're prone to demonic possession or something. So, I wasn't sure if this was going to work out, but then I saw the post on Brave Tart busting these myths, and decided to just wing it. So we used egg whites straight from the fridge (have teenage girls ever been renowned for their patience?) and taunted the storm gods by making macarons in the dripping humidity while it was drizzling outside.

Here they are in the oven! Granted, I have no idea what they're supposed to look like while baking, but this looks good enough for me. Sorry, I keep forgetting to actually take pictures of the steps while I'm doing this, so I mostly have shots of them finished. I used Brave Tart's recipe, which I'm linking because I still don't know the proper etiquette for posting other people's recipes. I basically just whipped the egg whites and sugar, dumped in the dry ingredients, folded them together until it looked like a batter, and piped them onto parchment paper.

While they were baking, I put together a chocolate mousse to fill them. I just stirred 4 oz chocolate chips into 4 oz hot cream, then added 2 tablespoons of butter and chilled it. Next time, I'll probably leave out the butter, because it didn't set as firmly as I would have liked.

Here they are all baked! I notice that they didn't develop that cute little foamy looking strip that I gather is called the "foot", but they tasted good. They were a little bit tastier than a straight meringue, nutty from the almond and almost a bit chewy on the inside. I whipped up my chilled mousse and piped it into the shells.

If you look closely in the background of that last picture, you can see the head of one of my cats :)

As you may have noticed, I also made some heart shaped ones, which I though came out even cuter than the plain circles. Here's one finished:

This is actually filled with a chocolate-cinnimon buttercream that I had in my freezer from making cupcakes a few weeks ago, because I ran out of mousse two thirds of the way through. The cinnamon was good, but we all pretty much agreed that the chocolate was the best.

Tasting 3: "Villa Pizza Fresh Italian Kitchen"

We went to the Tanger Outlets today out in Riverhead, and of course we had to try some of the pizza in the food court. They had an italian place called "Villa Pizza... or something. Their sign had a lot of different things on it.

The pizza was...okay. It wound up tasting like someone heated up a frozen pizza- which we're thinking they probably did.

Crust: The crust was way too thin, and it got soggy in places. It was stretched unevenly, with really thin patches *

Sauce: The sauce was actually out favorite part: it was very finely textured and almost runny, but it was nicely tangy. I have to say, though, it wasn't very seasoned- probably could have used so basil or oregano. ***

Cheese: The cheese had no real flavor, and it was greasy. **

Ratios: Not enough crust, too much cheese. **

Bottom Line: As far as we're concerned, it was basically old frozen pizza. About what you'd expect from a mall food court. 7/20 stars

Tasting 2: Generic School Pizza

Hey All!

 Sorry that this is the first post I'm doing but well, the world isn't perfect. So Lunch on Friday at my school is always pizza. I personally really like pizza (and the snacks you can buy with your extra money) so I really like Fridays. Usually, the pizza is Dominos but, for some odd reason that I bet I will never discover, they had generic school pizza that the lunch ladies defrost. Ew.

 Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of said pizza but it actually wasn't that bad. I did however write my review with a sharpie on a napkin (but sadly it got washed with my pants and has shrunken and torn really weirdly). But enough with my yammering, LET'S REVIEW!

 Sauce: Medicore, smooth texture but too sweet *** 

 Cheese: Very good, melty, flavorful, not too greasy ****

 Crust: Thick but soft and pillowy ****

 Ratios: Too much cheese and crust not enough sauce ***

 Bottom line: Not a terrible Pizza, the outside crust I actually liked more than Manhattan Pizza's! Definitely not the ultimate pizza that were searching for but it wasn't the worst pizza I've had during my thirteen years. 14/20 stars

A Baking Interlude with Kitcheneer A

Ok, I'll be honest here, as much as I like pizza, I REALLY like baking things. Anything. So in between pizza taste tests, be prepared for some Baking Interludes.

My sister, AKA Kitcheneer V, is athletic, unlike me. The other day was her last track practice of the year, so of course I was commissioned to make 50 cupcakes for the track team. And everyone knows that ice cream cone cupcakes are by far the best kind, so that was a must as well. I had to work on Sunday when we were doing this, so the cupcake making actually went on at eight at night, which doesn't sound late, but it is when you need to get up for school at 5:30 the next morning. By the time we were done, it was after ten, but cupcakes are always worth it.

I, being preoccupied by all things floury and also a horribly unmotivated library worker after four hours of straightening books, spent my shift trying to think of a way to make plain vanilla cupcakes interesting. Interesting to me, anyway. You see, I have a weirdly long list of strange and sometimes kind of gross sounding kitchen experiments that I am always looking for an excuse to try, and I never want to waste a baking opportunity on something ordinary. Then I remembered the Cake Boss cookbook that I had shelved the other week, and my promise to a cupcake-obsessed friend to try out the Cake Boss vanilla cake recipe. Aha, perfect for non-boring vanilla cupcakes! But oh no! Upon checking the catalog, I found that someone had taken out the cookbook. I was very dissappointed for about 30 seconds before I remembered the internet. Lo and behold, the recipe was one Google search away.

The secret to these seems to be the two cups of delicious italian pastry cream in the batter. We doubled the recipe (a LOT of eggs) to be sure we'd have enough for 50 cupcakes, and with a full four cups of custard along with all of the batter, it barely fit into my biggest mixing bowl. Oops. But we managed to eventually get most of the batter into the ice cream cones, and most of the cones into the oven. Except for the one that shattered when I touched it, but let's not talk about that.

They took forever to bake! Or maybe it was just that my mom was falling asleep in the living room and telling me to go upstairs every five minutes. I was afraid they were going to burn on top before they were cooked in the middle; there seemed to be so much sugar in the batter that it started to caramelize on the crown of the cupcake.

Yum. I had to wait until after school and another shift at the library on Monday before I got the chance to frost the forest of cupcakes. I just piped on some vanilla buttercream- I don't remember what recipe I used, but something really basic. I think they came out kind of cute, though. :)

And after all of that, I still have a Ziplock bag full of this batter in my freezer. I have no idea if it will still bake up good when I eventually get around to baking that, but I don't really care- I'm happy enough with how this batch came out.

By the way, I have absolutely no photography experience, and take pictures with my phone for lack of an actual camera. I'd apologize for the sub-par photos, but I'm actually surprised they came out this good at all. Happy kitcheneering!