Ali McAuliffe

This week I wanted to make fondue, which is typically a three course meal of melted cheese, broth, and melted chocolate. My family doesn't usually like the broth course, which you boil broth and let the meat cook in there. So instead of boiling chicken in broth, my family will pan fry or grill chicken. The first course, which is cheese, you can use many different recipes. The recipes usually contain some sort of cheese, alcohol, and garlic or something to give it more flavor. We decided to use, colby jack and pepper jack cheese, a dry white wine, and some cornstarch to make the cheese thicker when you melt it. To add some flavor, I added some garlic and lemon juice. We like to dip bread, tortilla chips, and green apples into our cheese. I used my cutting skills from one of the past weeks to cube the bread, and I also practiced grating with the cheese. With your final results, you want it to turn out stringy so you can dip it easiest. It took a second to get the cheese right, beca

This week I got to cook potatoes a couple different ways. The different kinds that I made are things that we make at home all the time, so none of them really have a specific recipe. So, there was a lot of guessing and eyeballing, it all depends on your taste and how you like it. I made cornflake potatoes, cheesy potatoes and fries two different ways. This week was pretty easy, except for the fact that I had a little difficulty with the fries. I made cornflake potatoes first, which is what my family calls them. We make these all the time at home, but I have never made them myself before. These are pretty easy to make, and I did not have time to cut and prepare potatoes, so I just got some frozen hash browns. You take the hash browns and mix them with some sour cream, then add a can of cream of chicken soup. If you want it more creamy, then add another can of soup. After that you add a couple handfuls of cheese. Then, you will put all of that into a greased pan. Now is when you add th

Different cutting techniques is what I worked on and learned this week. The techniques that I tried are called julienne, slicing, large dice, and batonnet. I knew all of these techniques, except for batonnet, that one was a new one I learned. All these techniques I knew of, but I had not tried all of them before. The first one I tried was julienne, it is when you make long thin strips while cutting. I decided to use this technique on a carrot. First, I cut the carrot into long, wide strips, then you cut those into thin strips. I struggled a little with this one, because my knife wasn't quite sharp enough to cut the carrot into as thin of strips as I wanted. This is what the julienne cuts came out looking as. The batonnet cut was the one I had tried next. I had never heard of this technique before, but I had cut things like this before. For this cut you are supposed to square off your item, which I used a carrot, and make rectangular sticks. Squaring off your item means m

This week I decided to try and learn different techniques to cook eggs. There are many different ways to prepare eggs such as, boiled, scrambled, an omelet, sunny side up, over easy, poached, basted, and deviled. The techniques that I decided to use were scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, poached, and an omelet. Also, when I was done cooking the eggs I had my dad taste them to tell me if they were correct. The first technique that I tried was scrambled, so I had to put a pad of butter into the pan with the eggs, then stir and when it is almost cooked add a dash of milk. When I did this technique I only cooked one egg, so when I put it in the pan it cooked really fast, which I then over mixed them because it was cooking faster than I thought it was going to. The pieces of egg ended up being a little smaller, so next time I would use lower heat or more eggs and mix less, so I would end up with bigger pieces. I made a sunny side up egg next. To make these kind of eggs, you crack