​Boeuf bourguignon. Coq au vin. Molten chocolate cake. Fancy-sounding dishes for fancy-sounding meals, right? Whether you’re impressing a date or an entire dinner party, there are certain items you can serve that will have the room applauding your culinary skills — and have you taking it easy in the kitchen.

While the items below might sound difficult to make, every single one of them is deceptively simple to assemble, cook or bake. Get ready to wow your next church potluck supper attendees or just cook a fantastic meal for friends. And you don’t even have to tell them that you spent more time on your outfit than on dinner.

1. Homemade Salad Dressing:

Whether you’re whipping up a quick vinaigrette or some savory blue cheese dressing, homemade salad dressings are really a no-brainer. Why spend extra money on bottled creations that contain preservatives and icky ingredients like high fructose corn syrup when you likely have everything you need on hand to make your own? What’s more, they’re nearly foolproof to make. Added too much olive oil? Just pour a little bit more red wine vinegar in to compensate. Even better, you can make just as much as you need for a few servings and personalize the salad dressing to the meal. Serving duck a l’orange? Squeeze some of that orange juice into your balsamic vinaigrette, too, for a memorable meal.

2. Bread:

You, too, can have homemade bread in a very short amount time, with no kneading required. Mike Morris first discussed his recipe for beer bread here a few months ago, which only takes a few minutes to prepare and 70 minutes to bake, leaving plenty of time for other activities while your house fills up with the magical aroma of freshly baked bread. This recipe works with virtually any good beer and is even better when shredded cheese is added to the batter.

Photo by Quintana Roo

​

3. Crepes:

The French like to make you think their cuisine is much more difficult to prepare than it really is. It’s not. French recipes have lasted through the ages because they’re both delicious and simple. Crepes are no different. The batter takes only five minutes to throw together and — like your salad dressing — is composed of items you likely have on hand already. There is a slight trick to turning the crepes in the pan — and a thick, hot cast iron skillet is definitely recommended here — but if you can play a Wii or drive while changing radio stations, you likely have the required dexterity to figure it out in no time. Crepes can be either savory or sweet, but always look stunning.

4. Risotto:

If there is a trick to risotto, it’s this and only this: Keep stirring. Seriously. A monkey could do this. Risotto gets its classic creamy texture from the amount of starch that’s packed into the tiny, short-grain arborio rice. Stirring the rice constantly while cooking it down in chicken stock (no water, please!) releases the starches and imparts a rich, silky texture to the entire dish.

Photo by esimpraim

​

5. Puff Pastry:

People who think puff pastry dough is difficult to work with have probably never even tried. Simply roll it out, let it reach room temperature and begin working your magic. To start with something simple, try replacing the top of a chicken pot pie with a cut round of puff pastry. It will look magical after it’s finished baking and will taste at least ten times better than regular dough. If that’s easy for you (and it should be), try your hand at crafting vol au vents for your next party — a tad time-consuming, but still as simple as third grade arts and crafts time with construction paper.

6. Roasted Chicken:

The only moderately difficult thing about roasting a chicken is trussing the poor bird. But if you can tie your shoes (you don’t still wear velcro shoes, right?), then you can handle it. Once you have a basic roasted chicken recipe down pat — which shouldn’t take more than once or twice — you can switch it up as you see fit, such as incorporating herbs into a fat chunk of butter and putting that between the skin and the flesh, or stuffing the chicken with fennel bulbs and fresh rosemary.

Photo by sassyradish

​

7. Coq au Vin:

Simple doesn’t always mean quick. That’s especially true in the case of the classic French dish coq au vin. But although it can be somewhat time-consuming (this isn’t a quick weeknight dinner, for sure), the end result is well worth the effort. Remember to blanch your bacon first and it’s a nice, steady downhill slope from that point on. This recipe is a great starting point, and the poetically beautiful and simply delicious dish will make your dinner guests feel extra special, especially if you serve some of the same wine that you used for braising the chicken with your meal.

8. Boeuf Bourguignon:

If you can make coq au vin, you can make boeuf bourguignon. The same principle apply here — braising meat in wine — and the results are no less spectacular. Although Julia Child’s recipe is the standard-bearer in this area, there exists a far easier and faster (yet still tasty) recipe that the New York Times dug up not long ago. Try it out this weekend and you’ll fancy yourself a graduate of the Cordon Bleu in no time.

9. Truffles:

These truffles are so good that they will be consumed — every last one of them — within five minutes of putting them out for your company. You’ve been warned. And if you want to give them the recipe, you can, but isn’t it more fun to keep this little secret to yourself? All that’s in these delectable little bites are crushed Oreo cookies, cream cheese and melted chocolate (Almond Bark is recommended here). Even your kids can make these, they’re so easy. But your impressed dinner guests will never have to know…

Photo by arsheffield

​

10. Molten Chocolate Cake:

It’s quickly becoming a staple on restaurant dessert menus, as the sight of chocolate oozing richly out of the tiny cake is impressive to kids and adults alike. But the amusing thing about molten chocolate cake is that it’s basically a half-baked cake, which anyone can throw together. This excellent step-by-step recipe from Pioneer Woman Cooks (with photos) shows you how. Serve with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream, and this dessert will be an extraordinary endcap to even the simplest of meals.

What are your favorite easy-yet-impressive recipes? Share them with us in the comments section below.

–>

These all look like great recipes. I have wanted to start making my own bread to reduce the amount of sugar added as the amount of sugar in bread has increased tremendously in the last decade.

Spy Shots: Next-gen Dodge Charger interior gets outed

by John Neff (RSS feed) on Mar 10th 2010 at 2:27PM

Next-gen Dodge Charger spy shots – Click above for high-res image gallery

There’ve been no shortage of spy shots to be had showing the upcoming next-gen Dodge Charger, but to date we’ve yet to see the interior fully revealed. Our spy photogs have remedied this by finally capturing the big rear-wheel-drive sedan’s inner domicile. What’s plainly obvious is that Dodge designers have added some swoop to the Charger’s angular interior. Note the silvery dashboard piece that acts as a backdrop for the cluster gauge, driver and center air vents and the rather large navigation screen. This particular interior is two-tone with what appears to be light-colored leather seats and door inserts, with black plastic (soft touch, we’re hoping) everywhere else and some nickel-colored trim thrown in. There’s also a new three-spoke multifunction steering wheel and information display between the tach and speedo.

All in all, we see a big improvement over the current car’s aged interior, but a final verdict will have to wait until we can get our grubby paws all over it. We’ve also got some new spy shots of the exterior that don’t reveal much more than what we’ve seen before except a naked C-pillar. Have a look in the high-res gallery below.

Gallery: Next-gen Dodge Charger: Spy Shots

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Filed under: Spy Photos, Sedan, Dodge

Tags: 2011 dodge charger, 2011DodgeCharger, charger, charger spy shots, ChargerSpyShots, dodge, dodge charger, DodgeCharger, spy pics, spy shots, SpyPics, SpyShots

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What a great improvement for the interior. Makes it worth waiting to get that second generation Challenger. New engines, new interiors are making Dodge far more compelling.

Corey Haim, Star of “License to Drive,” Dead At 38

Corey Haim, the star of “License to Drive,” the coming-of-age-by-getting-your-license movie that both introduced me to classic Caddys and confused me by insinuating a VW Golf cabriolet was a Mercedes, died this morning of an apparent drug overdose. [TMZ]

Send an email to Ray Wert, the author of this post, at ray@jalopnik.com.

First Shots and Specs of Microsoft’s Secret Project Pink Phone

These are the first photos of Microsoft’s Project Pink phones, snatched from deep within the bowels of the Microsoft/Verizon industrio-complex —not the Turtle, but the larger, Sidekick-like Pure. This doesn’t look like Windows Phone 7, so what is it?

The shots come just hours after a leaked advertising campaign for the Turtle outed Verizon as a carrier for the Pink Turtle, without so much as a mention of the Pure.

Our tipster confirms the Pure is also headed to Verizon, but doesn’t have a release date. (Though it’s hard to imagine the release date would fall too far out of line with the Turtle, which is expected to hit stores at the end of April.) Anyway, this thing: It’s strange! The paneled interface, with fixed squares for everything from music (with Zune typography) and email to RSS feeds and what looks like a unified social networking hub. As hinted earlier, the aesthetic is similar Windows Phone 7, but the software is distinctly not Windows Phone 7. This looks like Windows Phone 7: Feature Phone edition.

Our source got a few seconds to use the Pure, and said it was intuitive, “better than Android,” and decorated with Windows Phone 7-style animations throughout. That said, the app situation still doesn’t add up. There’s apparently an download screen for new apps, but it’s not populated with anything yet. This could mean two things: Either the Pink phones will tap into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace somehow, which would be great (but also doesn’t make sense), or they’ll have apps like the Zune has apps—which is to say, only sort of, and only from selected partners.

The more we see, the more the Pure and Turtle look like they’re stacking up to be Zune-ified followups to the Sidekick. It’s an interesting move, but who does Microsoft think they’re going to sell this thing to? Tweens?

Update: Firmware Leak

We’ve got our hands on leaked Pink firmware, and we’ve dumped all the icons and photos we could extract. Sadly, there’s not way to run this right now, but we can see a lot of what’s shown above, like the homescreen application icons, in full resolution. There are also traces of Zune, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. There are some shots (discovered by someone else who’s got the firmware) that show a lockscreen dialer, but these are likely placeholders of some sort. Finally, we’ve got a shot from the Turtle’s camera, which appears to have flash. (Filenames included in the gallery, because they’re pretty descriptive)

Here’s what we can glean from the dump so far:

• The carrier is definitely Verizon, though there are references in the firmware to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US (which are probably placeholders, since the rest of the evidence points to CDMA as the standard for these phones.

• The OS is based on Windows CE, like the Zune and Windows Phone 7. This doesn’t mean a ton to users, but the guy who passed us the firmware sums up what that means under the hood:

Everything is programed in .NET a lot like 7 is. It does not say it inside the files where I have seen, but It is coded in XAMl and is in the structure that CE 7 is supposed to be structured, it is my belief that it will be based off CE 7, and it will have a lot of tie in to Windows Live as well.

• Turtle and Pure codenames are used in the firmware, but that doesn’t mean that those’ll be the shipping names for the product. There are also codenames for the “Pride” and “Lion” handsets, which appear to just be the international versions of the Turtle and Pure, respectively.

• The Turtle’s screen is 320×240, while the Pure’s is 480×320—the same as the iPhone.

• There are reference to something called “The Loop,” which sounds like some kind of central social networking hub.

We’re powering through the firmware dump now, so we’ll post more as we get it. [Special thanks to our tipsters, and Conflipper]

The Consumerist is running a story about a store caught restocking returned underwear. Pretty nasty. Click on the link to see what they had to say.

Leaked Documents: Microsoft’s Secret Phones Coming to Verizon (Update: In April?)

After the Windows Phone 7 launch passed without so much as a mention of Project Pink, Microsoft’s other new phone project started to fade into memory. Today, we can confirm: Pink is coming, and Verizon’s the carrier. UPDATED

A tipster passed us a load of 3rd-party marketing materials, in which a promotional plan for Pink is laid out in detail. (Campaign specifics and most graphics have to be witheld to protect the innocent, but rest assured, they’re legit.) The documents don’t talk about specs or software details, or more importantly why the hell Microsoft thinks this weird little pebble is a good idea, but there’s plenty we can learn:

• The early Pink renders leaked to us back in September? Those are exactly the same ones included in the proposal.

• Of the two phones in prior leaks, only one shows up here: The Turtle vertical slider. It’s a messaging phone, basically—one part Pre, and two parts Sidekick. (Or maybe three.)

• Verizon is a launch partner for the device, and probably an exclusive carrier. The branding and marketing in the documents suggests a joint Microsoft/Verizon launch, but another carrier isn’t completely out of the question.

• The phones aren’t running Windows Phone 7, unless it’s hidden behind a different interface. Virtually all rumors around the Pink platform implied as much, and again, this appears to be something fundamentally different.

• Social Networking! It’s all over the proposal, and presumably, the phone.

• It’s suggested that the platform has apps of some sort. For a phone like this to share apps with Windows Phone 7 is pretty much impossible—the minimum hardware requirement for a Windows Phone look out of reach for this little black lump—so this one’s a big question mark. Is it another SDK? Or closed app development like we’ve seen on the Zune HD? Web apps?

Since the documents come from a party working with Microsoft, and not Microsoft itself, a few things are missing: there’s no mention of a release name for the product (Pink is the codename we’ve been using, but the launch title could be different.); stil no sense at all as to how the interface works; and no announcement or launch date. The documents are just days old, and hint at a near-term launch, which would be inline with what we’ve been hearing about a second Microsoft phone launch at or around CTIA at the end of this month. And remember, this are marketing materials, designed to promote a launch, not just an announcement. In other words, Pink, or whatever the hell it is, will likely beat Windows Phone 7 to market. So that explains all those Tweets, I guess.

All these missing pieces add up to a massive gap, not just in the phone’s feature sheet, but in our understanding of what it’s supposed to be. If it’s a replacement for the Sidekick, the obvious question is, is anyone asking for a replacement for the Sidekick? If it’s just a Microsoft-branded feature phone, er, why? Doesn’t the future of youth/budget phones all about scaled-back smartphones (see: Pixi, Backflip), and not glorified feature phones?

UPDATE: More insiders have come forward, and now we have a possible timeframe: Late April. Oh, and there are two phones, as implied by the original leak. The second, according to our tipster, is the Pure horizontal slider, pictured below:

So these two phones – the Sharp PB10ZU and the PB20ZU – there are names for them but I can’t tell you what they are, cause Verizon may just put out different code names in order to find out where any leaks occur. And frankly the names are really really awful sounding so I hope what I’ve been told aren’t the final names anyway…

Apparently the interface shares some aesthetic elements with Windows Phone 7, albeit with “some sort of UI skin/more of a social-networking edge to [it].” As for release, apparently Verizon is “looking at a late April launch date,” though this isn’t set in stone. [Thanks, Tipsters!]

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

http://www.t-mobile.com/Templates/Generic.aspx?PAsset=Pro_Pro_UnlimitedFamily…” target=”_blank” />

Gizmodo is reporting that the two project pink phones seen previously are real. Not sure how I feel about that form factor.

Disney Confirms Tron and Avengers Animated Television Series

Posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 by Peter Sciretta

We’ve been hearing rumblings of a Tron television series for the last month or so (first, second), and now Disney has confirmed the reports during their upfront presentation Tuesday evening. The mouse house has also revealed a new animated series for Marvel’s The Avengers.

The Tron animated series would be broadcast on the Disney Channel and geared towards kids aged 6-14. The bad news is that the pilot has yet to be greenlit, and the earliest we can expect it is late 2011/early 2012. Before they broadcast full episodes, Disney plans to release a a 10-part “Tron” micro-series premiering in fall 2011 on Disney XD. According to reports, Disney showed some stills from the early development of the series, but nothing has been released online publicly.

The other piece of news coming out of the upfront is that Disney is already begining to take advantage of their acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, and will be releasing an animated series on Disney XD in fall 2010: “The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes“. Disney Channels Worldwide entertainment president and chief creative officer Gary Marsh is also quoted as saying that Disney has “been pouring through the library of 7,000 Marvel characters looking for the next Spider-Man,” adding that “fans of the Marvel Universe should expect to see more cooperative ventures in the near future.”

source: THR

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2011 Ford Mustang V6 First 300 HP+ Car To Achieve 31 MPG

2011 Ford Mustang V6 EPA certification has just finished and, though Ford predicted 30MPG from their 305HP 3.7-liter V6, they actually got 31 MPG. According to Ford, it’s the first 300HP+ car ever to return over 30MPG. Having cake, eating it too.

Send an email to Ben, the author of this post, at ben@jalopnik.com.

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Ford Tempo Fanatic 12:34 AM

Smugness has a new name, and its not Toyota Prius… Reply

two wheels are enough 12:28 AM

The cake is a lie. No one will ever achieve 31 MPG in real-world conditions because it’s a Mustang, and people who buy Mustangs generally don’t drive like grannies. But I tip my hat to Ford’s engineers for their not inconsiderable accomplishment. Reply

Ben Wojdyla promoted this comment

Bad Juju 12:19 AM

Wait, you mean all those guys with Corvettes that swore they could get 30.1 mpg in 6th (if they felt like it) were…wrong? Noooo… Reply

Ben Wojdyla promoted this comment

Optixtruf 12:15 AM

Ok, cool.

In the end though, its still a V6 mustang. Does this thing have a live axle? Reply

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‘Jersey Shore’ Parodies ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and ‘Avatar’

by Christopher Campbell Mar 3rd 2010 // 12:45PM

Filed under: Comedy, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Oscar Watch

So that Jersey Shore spoof of The Hurt Locker I posted the other day was — to my delight — only the first of a week-long series of Oscar parodies made for the talk show Lopez Tonight. It was also only a preview, so I’ve updated that post with the full sketch. And now I present to you the next three parodies, two of Inglorious Basterds and one of Avatar, all featuring the reality show stars you love to hate. Unfortunately, they aren’t tackling all ten Best Picture nominees, but the rest of this week will bring more spoofs of Precious, The Blind Side and Up in the Air. As far as guilty pleasures go, I’m fairly satisfied with the effort, though now I am left only to dream of what they could have done with District 9, Up, A Serious Man and An Education.

There is so far the impression that these parodies will decrease in quality as the week continues. Monday night’s clips for The Hurt Locker and Inglorious Basterds were pretty well done, particularly in their self-parody. The latter features Jersey Shore’s Vinny inserted into the opening scene, chatting with Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa (now meant to be an MTV exec) while the show’s “guidette” members hide under the floorboards. Even Jersey Shore haters can appreciate how this one ends. But then last night’s second Inglorious Basterds sketch was as bad as the first was good. Featuring Snooki in Brad Pitt’s role, it’s less self-mockery than merely an acknowledgment of depravity. Subbing the assignment of “banging” Floridians and killing braincells for the film’s Nazi scalping only reminds me why I don’t actually watch the show regularly. As for the Avatar spoof, it seems it was just a short one-gag excuse for George Lopez to make a crack about the film’s running time.

You can watch Lopez Tonight for those Precious and Blind Side parodies, and tomorrow night brings us two bits based on Up in the Air. Check out the two Inglorious Basterds videos and one Avatar after the jump (some language and content may be NSFW). And keep up the expressions of hatred for the show in the comments.

via cinematical.com