Hello, Comets! While we usually review food from restaurants, I don’t have a car, so we’re all stuck here in my friend’s kitchen together. Get comfy. The following recipes were adapted from Melissa Clark, Alison Roman, and Molly O’Neill, respectively, of the New York Times cooking section. For the original recipes, unlock the full potential of your UTD email and activate your complementary NYT account. For the modified recipes and commentary thereupon, scroll down to look at what I hath wrought upon my friends’ innocent, virginal kitchens.
Chicken Parmesan
For the original recipe, click here!
Recipe: (Made enough for 2 + some leftovers)
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Recipe:
Flatten the cutlets to ¼ in. Season both sides of the chicken slabs with salt, pepper, and paprika. Set up a breading station with the chicken, followed by flour, followed by the beaten egg mixture, followed by the panko crumbs, followed by a baking tray. Bread the cutlets and lay them on the tray. Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes. Take the tray out, put sauce under and over the cutlets, put the cheeses over the cutlets, and continue baking for another 15 minutes. Take out, let cool slightly, and serve. |
Unlike UV, my friend and I have a vested interest in keeping our kitchens working, so we forwent deep frying in favor of baking the chicken. This review is therefore not a fair reflection of Clark’s original recipe.
With that said, my friend called this “Michelle Obama school lunch ahh chicken,” and that’s a pretty apt description. It was dry. Flavor was sparse and existed solely in the (store-bought) tomato sauce sparingly partitioned among the chicken. Given my previous experience with chicken parms, I’m not convinced this problem was solely brought on by baking instead of deep frying. The accompanying pasta (again, cheap store-bought stuff) ended up being the star of the show, which, while good for the meal, felt like a slap in the face to all the work we had put in. I would be willing to try this again, but I’d have to marinate the chicken or otherwise do something to make this worthwhile.
Ingredient accessibility: 5/5
Difficulty: 2/5
Taste: 1/5
Worth doing again: 2/5
Tiramisu
For the original recipe, click here!
| Recipe: (Made enough for a 9 inch circular cake pan)
Cream:
Assembly:
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Recipe:
Cream the yolks and a ¼ cup of the sugar together. Whip the heavy cream and the remaining ¼ cup sugar together until stiff peaks form. Cream the mascarpone into the whipped cream, then fold the sugar-yolk mixture into the whipped cream mixture. Cut the pound cake into ¾ in. slices, then slice those slices in half horizontally. Mix the vanilla and the coffee. Use a sift to powder the bottom of the pan with half the cocoa. Dip the cake slices in coffee and lay them down until the pan is loosely covered with a layer of pound cake slices. Cover with half the cream. Repeat with the other half of the cake slices. Top with remaining cream, then sift cocoa powder on top. |
Sadly, I could not find ladyfingers, so I used some pound cake instead. This is the biggest diversion from the recipe, and if I were to do it again I would just make the cake myself (see online for my adventures in that) instead of paying $7 for one. Additionally, my friend insisted we substitute the 70-proof rum for 61-proof vanilla extract to avoid alcohol.
This wasn’t as difficult as I expected. That being said, if you make this, for the love of Ratford, procure an electric mixer first. I was out here hand-whipping the cream for the better part of Fall Out Boy’s “Save Rock and Roll.” (Bonus album review — my music taste solidified as a depressed middle schooler, so 8.5/10.)
This was a delectable dessert. It was soft and creamy, lasted amongst many people for many days, and it kept in the fridge just fine. Comets, friends: may you always find all your ingredients in the first 3 stores you stop at, and may your all-nighters be ever full of tiramisu.
Ingredient accessibility: 2/5
Difficulty: 3/5
Taste: 5/5
Worth doing again: 5/5
Lemon Pound Cake
For the original recipe, click here!
For those who aren’t aware, a couple weeks back, one Afroman (the rapper behind the 2000’s hit “Because I Got High”) won a defamation case against some of the finest crybabies in blue from the Adams County Sheriff’s Department. In 2022, they broke down his door, disconnected his indoor surveillance cameras, and took $400 that they later failed to return while searching for narcotics and kidnapping victims. While they didn’t find evidence of any crimes, the security footage revealed that they did find a beautiful lemon pound cake sitting atop Afroman’s kitchen counter, which the sheriff definitely noticed. When it was clear the cops weren’t going to do anything to compensate him for his broken door or the trauma inflicted upon his family (including his children, then 10 and 12, who were home during the raid), Afroman decided to take those lemons and make lemon pound cake. He used the surveillance footage in several music videos that mocked the department, including “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and, of course, “Lemon Pound Cake.” The cops then sued for $3.9 million for defamation (on the grounds that jokes in the vein of “you’re fat” and “I had sex with your wife lol” should be illegal) and invasion of privacy (on the grounds the cops had a legal expectation of privacy when raiding someone else’s home). Afroman defended his work as opinion and satire protected by the First Amendment. The jury agreed. After the case, Afroman wore his signature American flag suit and told the world, “I didn’t win, America won. America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people, by the people.” I couldn’t agree more.
This case is a genuine win for opinion, parody, and the fundamental American right to freedom of speech. On behalf of the satirists and opinion-havers of AMP: thank you, Afroman, for your fight. Feel free to swing by for a slice of lemon pound cake anytime.
| Recipe: (made enough a 9×5 loaf pan)
Cake:
Glaze:
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Recipe:
Zest the lemon, then microwave for approx. 8 seconds before juicing. Put the stick of room temperature butter in a mixing bowl and use the wrapping to grease the loaf pan. Cream butter and sugar. Combine remaining dry ingredients in one bowl, and measure sour cream in another bowl. Alternate adding a scoop of the dry mix and a spoonful of sour cream to the mixing bowl, stirring to combine after each addition. Bake at 350°F for one hour. In the last 5 minutes of baking, mix the juice and powdered sugar to form a glaze. After taking the cake out of the oven, put it on a plate and spoon part of the glaze over the top. After 10 minutes, coat the top and sides with the glaze. Wait another 10 minutes and repeat. Wait a final 10 minutes before serving. |
I need friends with real kitchen setups. In the meantime, it’s entirely possible to do all of this with just a 1-cup measure and no mixer, measuring spoons, or juicer. But I would definitely recommend getting them — the measuring spoons especially, because I was fully using a regular dining spoon to guess the proportions for the salt, baking soda, and baking powder. That’s generally not a game you want to play with baking soda or baking powder, but it was midnight and I didn’t feel like running back to my own apartment. Additionally, the sour cream was partitioned with a knife in the original container to measure. I’m not sure if that means I should be celebrated for my ingenuity or permanently banned from the kitchen. Probably both.
The cake itself was bright and citrusy, as though the sacrificed lemons were the sun and my mouth a new light source. It was dense, which I was assured was normal for a pound cake, but I’d like to reattempt this recipe with properly-measured leavening agents nonetheless. I tried the cake again the next day with some vanilla ice cream, and the flavors melded wonderfully. It was a thing of beauty. Overall, it was a gorgeous dessert whose sweetness was matched by the free speech win that inspired me to make it.
Ingredient accessibility: 4/5
Difficulty: 3/5
Taste: 4/5
Worth doing again: 4/5
