The Modern Apron: Menus, Methods and Musings

Starters: Roasted Beets with Blue Cheese, Hazelnuts, and Sour Cream Dressing

2012-02-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

Poor beets. They are much maligned, that despised vegetable of childhood. So much abuse leveled at them: they’re old people food, they taste like dirt, they’re spongy, they’re just boring.

I won’t defend canned beets. In my opinion canned beets deserve the criticism they receive. But fresh beets are quite different. It’s like in high school when you meet your archenemy’s older sibling and discover that, while your archenemy is a jerk, his or her sibling is actually a nice person and you get along really well with them. It makes you wonder if they have the same parents, or if one of them was adopted.

I spent years avoiding beets. I breezed past them on salad bars without a second look. They were those jerky canned beets. No way. Then one evening, at a very nice restaurant, I met cubed roasted golden beets. They were actually a garnish on something or other, and I decided to try them.

I have a theory about food. If there’s something I think I don’t like, or haven’t had an opportunity to taste (let’s be honest: often people say, “I don’t like X,” when what they mean is, “I’ve never had X,” or, “I had X that someone made at a party once and it tasted bad,” or, “I’m not sure how to prepare X, so I never have”), I make a point of trying it at a really good restaurant. My thinking is that if a good restaurant can’t make a disliked or feared ingredient taste good, we’re probably just not meant to be. This method has served me well. I ate cream of mushroom soup and developed an appreciation for mushrooms, and tried oysters on the half shell and came to see how good they can be, among other things.

So here I was, in a quite nice restaurant, with roasted cubed yellow beets before me. They were a world away from those nasty canned beets of my childhood (which were served, I recall, with instant mashed potatoes, and a hamburger patty with American cheese on it—no bun, just a patty with cheese. All of which could possibly—although not completely—account for my aversion to beets). So I tasted these and was immediately smitten.

I started experimenting with fresh beets, and found a new friend. I like them roasted with just a little olive oil, and then cubed, and possibly sautéed in a touch more oil, seasoned with salt and pepper.

But one day, I started musing. This is something else I do. I muse. An ingredient will pop into my head—beets, polenta, halibut—and I’ll start turning over things to do with it. I’ll start running through other ingredients that might go with the one. It’s almost like a slot machine—the potential pairing ingredients will roll past (not quite as quickly as a slot machine, of course) and then all of a sudden, it’ll be a *chunk*chunk*chunk* and a combination will present itself. Sometimes I’ll keep one and discard the other two and start the process over. Sometimes all three or four will strike me as a winner. Then I start experimenting.

This is how this beet concoction came to be. I suppose it’s technically a salad. Something in my head said, “Roasted beets. Blue cheese. Hazelnuts. Sour cream. Dijon mustard. White wine vinegar.” So I tried it. I roasted and cubed the beets, combined sour cream, Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar, scattered the cubed beets with the cheese and the nuts, drizzled over the dressing, and was completely won over.

I took this to work for lunch and heated up the beets in the microwave (not ideal, but cooking facilities at my office are somewhat limited, obviously). I made it at home and reheated the beets in a pan on the stove with the merest splash of olive oil to keep them from sticking to the pan, and they were a delight.

I think one of the reasons people think beets taste like dirt is that they sometimes do. My grocery store sells only organically grown beets. More often than not, they’re caked in mud (and can someone please explain to me why America equates, “organic” with, “filthy”? It seems to me that all organic produce I encounter in grocery stores is encrusted with vast quantities of dirt. I don’t get this.) As a result, if you don’t scrub beets really well—and I mean really well—they will taste like dirt, because they’ll be lightly dusted with soil. To use a term coined by one of my six year olds, roasted soil is undelicious. Ew.

So scrub your beets really well. You can use any color beet you like—plain old magenta ones, golden ones, or the striped ones called Chioggia. The blue cheese I use is a moderately priced “Amish” blue cheese. This is strange, since I live thousands of miles from the nearest Amish person, but even if they’re imposters, they make decent blue cheese. You want a firm blue cheese that crumbles—Maytag blue is the texture you’re looking for, and it’s available most places. The hazelnuts are just hazelnuts. Buy them in the bulk section already skinned and chopped, and save yourself the chore of roasting, skinning, and chopping them.

As for the dressing, thin the sour cream to a drizzling consistency with white wine vinegar. You don’t want it too bitey, just enough to mellow the sour cream so it’s not too rich. The Dijon adds an extra dimension of flavor. If you’re serving this to guests, you can make everything up ahead of time—beets, dressing, cheese and nuts—but keep them separate until you serve. If you use regular beets (as opposed to golden beets), the dressing will turn pink, which is fine if you’re scraping up the last of it with your fork, but not so nice if the plate is just being set down in front of you.

I’m providing quantities, but you can also use your appetite, guests, menu, and palate as a guide. If you’re having this as a starter before a heavy winter meal, you might want to go lighter on the cheese and nuts, so everyone doesn’t fill up. If you’re using this in a transitional menu (a winter/spring one in which you’re serving something a little more delicate than a big stew or a braise, for instance) you could be a little more generous with the toppings to make sure no one goes home hungry. The same goes for the dressing—taste and see what you think. Too tart? More sour cream. Not assertive enough? A little more vinegar and perhaps another teaspoon of Dijon.

If your only experience with beets has been with canned ones, be assured that when you taste fresh beets, there will be hardly any resemblance. You’ll wonder if they even have the same parents as those jerky canned ones.

Roasted Beets with Blue Cheese, Hazelnuts and Sour Cream Dressing
Serves 4-6 as a starter

Salad

4 medium beets (about 1 pound, greens removed)
Olive oil
2 ounces crumbly blue cheese, crumbled
¼ cup chopped hazelnuts
Baby arugula or baby spinach for serving (optional)

Dressing
4 tablespoons sour cream
2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2-3 teaspoons white wine vinegar

Directions
1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Scrub beets very well with a brush, and dry with a towel.

2) In a small pan (you can even use an ovenproof skillet) pour a little olive oil. Add the beets, and roll them around to coat with the oil. Pour over a little more oil, if necessary to coat completely.

3) Cover the pan with aluminum foil and roast for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of your beets. (A note about beet size and roasting times, the variation of the former of which will greatly influence the latter: My beets, generally, are about the size of an average woman’s fist. Four beets of this size is about a pound. However, you may sometimes find ones that are smaller. In this case, you’ll want to roast them a shorter time. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to stick a fork into them, but it should resist a little. If it just slides in the way it would into a baked potato, they’re overdone. Start checking big ones at 30 minutes, smaller ones at 15).

4) Allow the beets to cool until they can just be handled, then rub the skin off with a piece of paper towel. If you let them cool too far, and the skins resist rubbing off, just get out your vegetable peeler and peel them. Beets have skin like carrots—very thin and easily scraped
off.

5) Cut off the root and top ends of the beets and cut into ¼-1/2” cubes. Set aside

6) For the dressing, in a small bowl, combine the sour cream and Dijon mustard. Stir to combine. Add in the white wine vinegar, a little salt and a little pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning. Set aside.

7) If you decide to do the beets well ahead, you’ll need to reheat them. To do this, heat a teaspoon or so of olive oil in a medium skillet, and add the beets. Allow the beets to just heat through, tossing from time to time to keep them from sticking.

8) To serve, you can put down a small bed of baby arugula or baby spinach, if desired. On each plate, mound up some beets, and season lightly with a little salt and pepper (just a pinch of each per plate). Scatter with blue cheese and hazelnuts, and drizzle with a tablespoon or so of dressing.

9) Serve immediately.

Luncheon Dishes: Mushroom & Tallegio Tart

2012-01-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

I have to say this. I've been holding it back for years. Only a few of those closest to me know this, but I feel now that I have to make this more widely known.

I hate quiche.

"Oh no," some will say, "'Hate' is such a strong word." OK, Mom, you're right, it is. How about, "I loathe quiche"? I do. I loathe quiche.

Quiche lovers (or, as we quiche loathers refer to them, "the unwashed masses") will claim I've not had a good one. I have eaten quiches in people's homes, in restaurants, and made them myself, and I have yet to come across one that I would friend on Facebook, much less have as a meal. (As an aside, is "quiche" like "sheep"? Are the singular and the plural the same word? Or is "quiches" a word? I am too indifferent to look it up, so I will just use whichever suits me at the time. If you see me use "quiche" as the plural, you'll know I was too lazy to execute the additional keystroke.)

I've had quiche that were no thicker than the average IHOP pancake, and ones that were 4+ inches deep (true story). Every single one was completely, and in all ways, feh. I think this whole response to milk and eggs cooked together actually dates back to my early childhood. When I first was able to eat solids, my mother lovingly made me a custard of the finest ingredients, carefully coddled, and served with the deepest maternal pride. (This is my mother's version of the story, as you may gather.) She popped a spoonful into my precious little mouth, whereupon I turned my head to one side, and ever so delicately pushed it right back out with my tongue and refused to take so much as one more bite. When you consider knowledge of this event--an event that took place long before my conscious memory could have recorded it--you will deduce that my mother told the story many, many times over the years. (MANY times.)

So it is, perhaps, not suprising that quiche is not on my list of Dishes to Serve at My Last Meal on Earth. Nor even on my List of Things I Like to Eat Very Much. Every quiche I've ever had has been an unfortunate combination of bland and soggy. It's just not possible to put milk and eggs into a pie crust and not have the crust get sodden. And no matter how much bacon and cheese you put in, milk and eggs are just never going to be that flavorful. I am a firm believer that there is almost nothing on this earth that can't be improved with the addition of some combination of bacon, cheese, heavy cream and/or Dijon mustard. But quiche, in my opinion, is beyond redemption, even by those most holy of ingredients.

Poor quiche. What did it ever do to me to excite such venom in my being? And so, because I feel in my deepest heart a bit guilty over my unqualified aversion to a foodstuff that never really caused me any harm, I offer an alternative to it.

If you've never had mushrooms with Taleggio cheese, I'm quite envious of you, because you're in for an amazing discovery. It is, in my opinion, one of the classic pairings, like mozzarella and tomatoes. Because the crust of this tart includes some cornmeal, it's sturdier than a regular pie crust. And since the filling is held together by just a suggestion of creme fraiche and an egg yolk, it doesn't turn the crust to mush.

The filling can be varried according to your taste and the tastes of your guests. If you're serving vegetarians, you can leave out the proscuitto and increase the red onion and mushrooms. If you don't have (or don't like) red onion, you can substitute something else--scallion, perhaps, or shallot.

And, in the cliched words of every cookbook author that ever wrote, this tart, along with a green salad, makes a nice lunch or light dinner.

Mushroom & Taleggio Tart

serves 6-8

Ingredients

Crust
1 ½ cups all purpose flour
½ cup cornmeal
11 tablespoons butter, chilled
3-6 tablespoons ice water
1 egg yolk
¼ teaspoon salt

Filling
¼ cup crème fraiche
2 egg yolks
1 ½ ounces prosciutto, chopped fine
½ pound mushrooms, washed and sliced
2 tablespoons butter
½ red onion, diced
2 tablespoons olive oil
¾ pound of Taleggio cheese, rind removed, sliced thin

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly coat a 9” tart pan with a removable bottom with cooking spray and set aside.

2. In a food processor, combine the flours and salt and pulse a couple of times to combine. Add the butter, cut into small pieces, and pulse 10-12 times until butter the butter is in pieces the size of a pea.

3. With the motor running, add the egg yolk and ice water until the dough pulls together. Start with 3 tablespoons and add more tablespoon by tablespoon as needed. Do not overprocess.

4. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll out to a 12” circle. Roll the dough up on the rolling pin and unroll it over the tart pan. Press the dough down into the pan and up the sides. Roll the rolling pin over the top of the pan to cut off the edges. Using a fork, prick the dough all over. Line the pan with foil or parchment paper and fill with pie weights or dried beans.

5. Bake the crust for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven, take out the pie weights. Return crust to the oven for another 10 minutes. The crust is done when it’s lightly brown. Remove and allow to cool for 10-15 minutes.

6. Make the filling. Combine the crème fraiche and egg yolks in a small bowl. Set aside.

7. Over medium heat, melt the butter until foaming, then add the mushrooms. Sautee until the mushrooms release their liquid and it evaporates, and the mushrooms are starting to get golden brown, about 10 minutes. Turn the mushrooms into a bowl, and return the pan to the heat.

8. Add the olive oil and sauté the red onion until soft, about 5 minutes. Turn the onion into the bowl with the mushrooms. Return the pan to the heat and add the prosciutto. Sautee until crisped, about 4 minutes. Stir into the mushroom and onion mixture.

9. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

10. Once the crust has cooled slightly, spoon the filling into the crust, making sure to distribute it evenly around the crust. Pour the egg yolk mixture over the top, distributing it evenly (use a spoon to push it around—you may need to push the filling along with it, but you can smooth the filling back into place; there should be a thin coating of the egg yolk mixture all over the tart).

11. Top the tart with the cheese, placing slices close to, but not touching, each other. They’ll spread out as they cook.

12. Bake for 22-27 minutes until the filling is set. The cheese will puff slightly and may turn golden in spots. Allow to cool for 5-10 minutes for the filling to set up. Slice tart into 6 or 8 wedges and serve warm.

Basics: Two Ingredient Bread

2012-01-07T14:59:00.000-08:00

A little over 15 years ago, my mother in law died very suddenly. This was, as you can imagine, hard on everyone, but it was particularly hard on my father in law, and for reasons beyond the obvious lonely/sad that comes with the loss of someone who’s been part of your life for most of your adulthood. My mother in law, as is the case for so many men of his generation, was his conduit to the world. She arranged his social life, sent out the Christmas cards, and was the primary point of contact for their kids.

She was the one who called us, extended invitations for holidays, organized family gatherings when we were visiting. She knew what was going on in our lives and what we were planning—buying and selling houses, changing jobs, etc. With her gone, my father in law really didn’t know how to connect with us.

As he struggled to forge a different kind of relationship with Alex and me, he sought a common interest among the three of us, and settled on food. The problem is, my father in law is a really bad cook. Alex describes his “signature dish” from their childhood, which evidently consisted of a can of corned beef hash mixed with ketchup and a few other components (after the canned hash and the ketchup, I’m always too nauseous to absorb the rest of the ingredient list, so I can’t tell you what’s in it beyond that, but really, does it matter? Ick). This food (I use the term loosely) was known as “Special Dish” and was evidently the pinnacle of my father in law’s culinary abilities.

So our conversations about food were primarily limited to his descriptions of what was currently in his refrigerator, along with what kind of soup he’d recently made or was planning to make. With my mother in law gone, he became an almost fanatical consumer of soup, it seemed. Any and every ingredient was fair game. I remember his coming for Fourth of July one year and Alex made, as he did every year, a big pot of dirty rice to take to an annual party. At the end of the party, there was still quite a lot left, and my father in law lamented that he couldn’t take it home and make soup out of it.

On a related note, he was also notoriously bad about throwing things out that were past their prime. During one visit, my sister in law and I decided that we couldn’t bear the fug of the refrigerator any longer, and launched a campaign to clean it out. He agreed, but insisted on overseeing the operation. Things went fairly well until we came to a little Styrofoam bowl of mashed potatoes. As we pulled them out, he kept insisting that those were “perfectly good” and that they were “just from when Shirley was here!” (Shirley being my husband’s aunt, and her visit had happened a good six weeks earlier. "That's just from when Shirley was here!" has become a catchphrase in our family, used when disposing of leftovers or containers of ingredients that are past their prime.) My sister in law made the mistake of opening them and actually taking a whiff, causing her to lunge for the sink, unsure if she was going to be sick, and to immediately dump the offending potatoes down the drain. She said later she had no idea why she’d bothered to smell them, as the green fuzz growing all over them left not a shadow of a doubt as to their fate. Doubtless they would have found their way into a pot of soup if we hadn’t intervened.

All of this is a very roundabout way of getting to the recipe I have for you. Not unlike my earlier ramblings on Christmas cookies, these stories and this recipe have only the most tenuous of connections. The recipe is for the world’s simplest bread. It’s two ingredients, and both of them are cheap and easy to come by. If you can turn on the oven and stir, you can make this bread. It’s great hot from the oven, but also makes good toast if you have it left the next day. I urge you to use the cheapest beer you have for this. Anything with any real distinctive flavor is going to make the beer taste in the bread too strong. When I was in college, we went to the grocery store and happened on generic beer. It came in white cans and had the word “BEER” written in black letters on it. If you can find this, it would be perfect. Budweiser or PBR is fine too. The flour must be self-rising. Regular all-purpose won’t do the trick. You should be able to find self-rising flour along with all the other flours in the grocery store. And don’t bother adding salt either. Self-rising flour has salt already in it, along with the leavening it contains.

I love this bread because it means we can have hot bread with dinner on a cold night with very little effort. You can leave it plain, or you can jazz it up with a couple of handfuls of shredded cheddar cheese, or some chopped herbs, depending on what you’re having with it (of course, then it’s no longer two ingredient bread). It’s nice with chili, stew, or even soup, if that’s what you happen to be having. Too bad I never thought to give my father in law this recipe when he was in his soup phase all those years ago.

Two Ingredient Bread
Makes 1 loaf

2 ½ cups self-rising flour
1 can (12 oz) cheap beer

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Grease a loaf pan (mine is about 8 ½” x 4 ½”—you can use any size you like, even two smaller ones, but if you use one substantially larger, your loaf will be wider and shorter as the batter spreads to fill the pan).
2. In a large bowl, combine the flour with the beer. Turn the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
3. Bake about 40-50 minutes. The loaf will sound hollow when you knock on the bottom, but really, if your oven is reasonably accurate, after about 45 minutes, this bread will be done. It’s such a cinchy thing to make that I don’t want to stress you out by even worrying about knocking the bottom of loaves, or checking it with skewers or thermometers.
4. Allow to sit for about ten minutes, then slice and serve.

Dessert: Cinnamon Roll Cookies

2011-12-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

This is a meandering musing about Christmas cookies. It’s kind of two unrelated stories that I’ve joined together, but it’s what popped into my head when I started thinking about what to say about the cookies I made.

I was having a conversation with a friend about Christmas cookies a week or so before Christmas, and we got to talking about the deterioration of quality of baked goods as people age. I won’t lie—it was a pretty mean conversation, in some ways. She was complaining about her mother’s poor execution of the sausage balls over Thanksgiving (Bisquick, bulk sausage, and cheddar cheese, the recipe is here, if you want it; in the manner of so many things that are made with what I call “low rent” ingredients, they are embarrassingly tasty), and I was telling her about Alex’s grandmother’s Christmas cookies.

I was assured that at one time, Grammy’s cookies were second to none. I’m not sure if that was an opinion clouded by the passage of time, or biased by affection, or possibly both, or if Grammy’s cookies had really once been great and had just gotten awful. But trust me, they were horrible. The only ones I can actually remember her making are Mexican wedding cakes. I think the truth was that she made several things—chocolate chip, fruitcake cookies and some fudge as well as other things, but they all seemed to be little stones covered with powdered sugar (they were all little stones, but I think the fact that they were all covered in powdered sugar had to do with them all being in the tin together and the sugar sifting off of the wedding cakes and on to every other thing around them). We always thanked her profusely and assured her we’d eat them on the way home.

Of course we never told her how they really were, nor what we really did with them (I can be mean, but I’m not that mean), which was to sow them along the roadside between Adams, MA and Falls Church, VA at regular intervals. Every so often we’d declare it to be time for a cookie, choose one, and announce the type. Only what we’d say was something like, “Mexican wedding anvil!” or “Chocolate chip brick!” or similar, and hurl it out the window. Then we’d say something witty like, “Oops! Sorry about that, Mr. Squirrel! I’m sure the swelling will go down in a couple of days!” or “Uh oh—that Jersey wall will never be the same again!” And you’re wondering why CBS still has Letterman in its late night line up instead of us.

And then when I started making my own Christmas cookies this year, I realized I’m bored with the same old Christmas cookies we’ve made every year. Chocolate chip. Oatmeal raisin. Peanut butter. “Magic” cookies (which aren’t “magic” cookies in the Eagle Sweetened Condensed Milk recipe definition, and in fact are actually a recipe called Favorite Chocolate Caramel Nut Bars and came out of a package of Kraft Caramels in the 1980s, but for some reason my grandmother always called them magic cookies, so that’s what I call them, but it always confuses people, who think they’re the kind made with a can of sweetened condensed milk, shredded coconut, and chocolate chips, and my high school English teacher just had an aneurism because this whole parenthetical aside is textbook case of comma abuse). Toffee Nut Bars. Brownies. I guess I’m just jaded, but all of those things just sound boring, boring, boring.

So I decided to come up with something a little different, and all my own. I got to thinking about things I’d like to translate into cookie form, and for some reason I thought of cinnamon rolls. At first I thought about doing them as an actual roll, but that experiment wasn’t much of a success. The dough I chose is pretty easy to work with, but doesn’t lend itself to being rolled out, filled, and rolled back up. It would make an admirable refrigerator log cookie (in fact, that’s its true application), but as a rolled up filled deal, not so much. So I decided to make them a thumbprint cookie, something I’ve had trouble with in the past, but figured I’d give another try.

I won’t keep you in suspense--they did work. My husband even liked them (he’s my harshest critic when I’m developing my own recipes, and he usually curls his lip at about 1/3 of everything and sends me back to the drawing board. With, I should hasten to add, constructive feedback for improvement). I got feedback from some other tasters, primarily about the distribution of filling within the cookie, which I’ve included within the recipe instructions.

The cookie part of these isn’t particularly sweet, which is good because the filling would make your teeth ache if you ate it on its own, and they both have a sort of crumbly tenderness to them. So they balance and complement each other pretty nicely. The topping could be piped on or spread on with a spoon, or if you prefer to drizzle for aesthetic purposes, you could—just add a bit more heavy cream until the icing is thin enough.

It’s possible that in another 40 years, my children or grandchildren will toss these out a car window yelling, “Cinnamon Roll rock!” but as long as they thank me profusely when I give them the cookies, I’ll be none the wiser.

Cinnamon Roll Cookies

makes 24-30 cookies

Ingredients

Cookie dough
2 sticks butter, softened
½ cup + 1 Tablespoon granulated sugar
2 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt

Pecan Sugar Filling
½ cup pecans
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup light or dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon water

Icing
2 ½ ounces cream cheese at room temperature
3 Tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2-3 teaspoons heavy cream (enough to make a
spreadable or pipable paste)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. In a large bowl cream together butter and sugar.
3. When butter is light and fluffy, and sugar is fully incorporated, add the vanilla, salt, and cinnamon. Beat to combine.
4. Add flour slowly, mixing until just combined.
5. Form dough into 1” balls and place on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.
6. In a food processor, combine pecans, sugar and cinnamon, and process until pecans are finely ground. With the motor running, add the teaspoon of water and pulse 8-10 more times until the mixture forms a thick paste.
7. Using your thumb, make a depression in each cookie. You can spread them out a bit
and make a fairly wide, shallow indentation, or make a deeper, more narrow indentation (the feedback I got was that the taster would have preferred the wide shallow configuration, because then they would have gotten a bit of filling in each bite; it’s a personal preference). These cookies don’t spread much as they cook.
8. Using a spoon or your fingers, fill each indentation with about a teaspoon of the pecan/sugar paste.
9. Bake 17-22 minutes, or until cookies are light golden and filling is set. Allow to set up for 5 minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer to racks to cool completely.
10. While the cookies bake and cool, make the frosting. Combine cream cheese, lemon juice and sugar in a small bowl and mix to combine. Pour cream in ½ to 1 teaspoon at a time, beating after each addition, until the mixture reaches a consistency you can either pipe or spread on the cookies (it should be a bit thinner than toothpaste).
11. Once the cookies have cooled completely, top each cookie with a dollop of icing (the icing can be piped using a pastry bag, a plastic bag with the corner snipped off, or you can just use a spoon to spread it gently over the filling).

Desserts: Butterscotch Sauce

2011-12-19T19:58:00.000-08:00

The Salted Caramel Cheesecake I posted here back in September has taken on a life of its own. This is entirely thanks to Pinterest. It got pinned once or twice, and has been repinned and repinned. I'm delighted that so many people are interested in it, but I have to tell you, it's somewhat harrowing as well.

This particular recipe is my own creation, not something I "adapted" from another source. It's rather like looking at your child and hoping that people find him or her as appealing as you do.

At the same time, "salt" is a very personal taste. What you find salty, I may find bland. What I find unpalatably saline, you may taste as perfection. Also, I am very sensitive to both the disappointment that comes from making something for a special occasion that turns out to be less than expected, and additionally to the wastefulness that comes from having to toss 3/4 of a finished dish. So when a few people said it was just too salty for them, I felt personally responsible.

And so I am back today with another dessert concoction, but not a "salted" one. This time I am resurrecting my love affair with butterscotch. From a child I have felt that a butterscotch sundae beat the pants off of hot fudge. True butterscotch (as opposed to caramel sauce, which is what many sundaes are made with) has the same warm, sugary notes that caramel has, but with an added complexity from the molasses in the brown sugar that generally goes in butterscotch. Also, caramel is such a small amount of butter in a greater amount of cream and sugar syrup. My butterscotch is almost as much butter as sugar and cream.

I read dozens of butterscotch and sticky toffee recipes before making this. I thought about including some kind of liquor--rum or similar--but decided to keep it pure. But I did want to emphasize the molasses, so I added just a smidge. I have Lyle's Golden Syrup in my pantry, but I realize not everyone has access to this, so I used dark Karo syrup instead. The difference in flavor is minimal in the finished product.

It took a lot of self control not to eat the whole recipe with a spoon right out of the container. I'm planning on serving this on Christmas Day for dessert with a Brown Sugar and Brandy Pear Turnover served with homemade vanilla ice cream. This isn't the best picture of it--I just shot it with my phone because I was worried that if I didn't, I'd eat it all and then I wouldn't have anything to show you.

Butterscotch Sauce

Makes a little more than 1 cup of sauce

Ingredients

2T butter

1/4 cup + 1T dark brown sugar (you can probably use light, but I had dark on hand)

1/2 teaspoon molasses

1T dark Karo syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch of salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

Detailed Instructions

1. In a small saucepan over low heat, melt butter with brown sugar, molasses and Karo syrup. When butter has completely melted, add vanilla and salt and stir to combine.

2. Increase heat to medium, and add heavy cream. Over medium heat, cook stirring frequently until mixture has the consistetency of cream of tomato soup, about 5-7 minutes. It's fine if it's at a strong simmer (lots of medium sized bubbles around the edges) but you don't want the whole thing to boil or you'll end up with pralines.

3. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Resist the urge to eat it all as though it were soup. Transfer to a container and refrigerate. The sauce will thicken up as it cools.

Appetizers: Puff Pastry Bacon Spirals

2011-11-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

N.B. I wrote this over the weekend. I am no longer quite this cranky. But boy was I ever when I wrote this.

I want to apologize because I’m kind of cranky today. I really don’t know why. I don’t have anything to be cranky about, when you come right down to it. And it almost feels wrong to be cranky over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I mean, I know people are—their families drive them crazy and they get grouchy. I’m lucky because I genuinely like my family. They’re people I’d want to be friends with, even if I wasn’t related to them. And I live close enough to all my family that we don’t have to go and stay with them to celebrate with them. We can eat and go home to our own space and our own beds and so on.

And today is my birthday. You might think that’s what’s making me crabby—another year older and all that—but honestly that’s not it. I kind of like birthdays and I don’t get grumpy about getting old or anything like that.

We’re decorating for Christmas, which I always really like too. Getting all the lights up, taking out all the fun things we bought on clearance last year (I mean, really—I bought one of those Charlie Brown trees, the sad little stick with the five needles and a single red ball to put on it—last year for a buck, and now I’m seeing them in stores again for twelve and fifteen dollars; it’s just crazy).

I think one thing that’s contributing to my cranky is that I cut my finger a week or so ago, and now I have this massive bandage on it. I was slicing leeks, and while I had my fingers in the correct curled under position when I was cutting most of the way along, I got to that last quarter inch and changed my grip, and nearly cut off the tip of my left middle finger. I’ll spare you the graphic description, but suffice to say there were sutures involved and it wasn’t pretty. So with this massive bandage, it takes me three times longer to do much of anything, and I’m supposed to be making another Thanksgiving dinner again tomorrow night so we have leftovers for next week. On Thanksgiving day, we had 18 people, so had very little left over (well, not the stuff I wanted left over—stuffing and gravy, and besides, I want to make my stuffing, which I love but which consists primarily of a bag of Pepperidge Farm and some cooked bulk sausage).

So I’m kind of just accepting my cranky. But I think that’s putting me in a worse mood. Being in a bad mood is putting me in a worse mood. How’s that for logic?

So I decided to share a recipe for something that, if I had it, would make me feel better. Puff pastry bacon spirals.These are great party food. You can make them up ahead and cook them off just before you need to serve them, although they also are pretty decent at room temperature. They’re not supposed to be particularly pretty, so kids can help with the assembly. And they’re bacon. How can you go wrong?

I’m not usually much of a one for “during” shots, but I’m including two for this recipe because I wanted to make sure you got a feel for how done “halfway” is for the bacon, and to illustrate the “twist.” If you cook the bacon too done in the first step, you’ll have a hard time twisting it in the second step. If it’s not done enough, it won’t get nicely crisp.

Bacon Spirals

Ingredients

1 sheet puff pastry, thawed and cut into ¼” strips (about 36 strips, about 3” long—if your pastry comes folded in thirds, you can cut each third into 12 or so strips; I use Pepperidge Farm brand)

1 pound bacon, each strip cut in half the short way (don’t use the really thick cut artisan bacon for this—you really want the thinner cut because it’s easier to twist; you probably won’t use the whole pound but how many pieces are in a package will depend on the brand and the thickness of the slices; I use Smithfield brand)

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. On a rimmed baking sheet lined with foil or parchment, lay out the bacon slices. Bake for about 7-10 minutes, or until partially cooked (see picture).

Cooked about halfway--a bit of browning around the edge, and the fat starting to render, but still flabby and pliable.

Remove bacon from the oven and allow to cool slightly, until it can be handled, about 10 minutes.

Twist together one slice of bacon with one strip of the puff pastry. Pinch the ends together to keep them from untwisting. You’re sort of wrapping the pastry around the bacon. As you twist, you can pull the pastry out slightly to make it longer, if necessary, to get it around the whole piece of bacon. (See picture.) Place each spiral on a rimmed baking sheet lined with foil or parchment (you might want to use a new liner, and not just return them to the pan the bacon cooked on the first time, because the residual bacon fat from baking off the bacon half way may make them too greasy).

See? Not very pretty or tidy.

Return the pan to the oven, and cook 18-22 minutes, or until the pastry is puffed and golden, and the bacon is cooked through. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Follow Up

2011-11-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

There were a lot of questions about the dulce de leche--what kind, how much, can I make it myself? Here's the comment I posted in the comments:

OK so to address everyone who is asking about dulce de leche--I buy it in the "latin foods" section of the grocery store. And that's in my local Super Wal Mart. If you're buying it by the can, I think it's a 14 oz can. Also, you can buy it on Amazon in a 6 or 8 pack.

Now, if you simply can't find it and don't want to order it, you can make it yourself. Take 1 can of sweetened condendensed milk (the 14 oz size), pop a couple of holes in it with a churchkey (the pointy single-hole style can opener) and put it in a water bath with the water almost to the top of the can. Bring the water to a simmer and keep it there for about four hours. You'll have to watch it and top up the water as it boils away. The longer you let it cook (and you can't really overcook it) the more caramely and rich it will be.

The salt in all three parts is kosher salt. DON'T USE TABLE SALT.

I don't use a water bath when cooking the cheesecake--just goes right in the oven. :)

Here's a link to Amazon--this is the brand of dulce de leche that my grocery store carries.

http://www.amazon.com/Lechera-Dulce-Leche-13-4-Ounce-Container/dp/B001EPPBMW/ref=sr_1_1?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1321991192&sr=1-1
I hope everyone enjoys this!!

If you have any other questions, leave them in the comments either on the original post, or on this one, and I'll be better about checking, I promise!

Side Dishes: Potato Stacks

2011-10-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

I’m always looking for something new to do with potatoes. I oven roast the small ones—the ones that are about the size of a ping pong ball--whole with some olive oil, I mash russets, I slice Yukon Golds thin and cook them with a little cream and some Gruyere cheese for a gratin. I’ve also cooked the small potatoes in boiling water, smashed them, and roasted the smashed potatoes. Sooner or later, though, I just can’t face another potato, roasted, mashed or gratineed. Enter this recipe. But there’s something distinctive about this recipe, or rather, about its name.

Sometimes a family has a name for something that other people would find unpleasant or even downright gross. My grandmother used to call every fairly sticky, globy food “goop.” At the dinner table she’d hold up a serving spoon full of something like macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes and ask, “Would anyone care for more goop?”

What always made this unfortunate was that's what she called what came out of your nose too. My mother always had a particular dislike for this reference, as she said the association always took her appetite away.

My grandmother’s reference was a sort of all-purpose one. Ours is more specific. We have this recipe--we call it potato piles. It doesn’t sound very appetizing, but really potato piles (or potato stacks, to use the term we use around company) are quite wonderful. The reason we don’t call them potato stacks in our day to day vernacular is…well, because we just don’t, but really these aren’t stacks. They really are just little piles of potato slices with some herbs and olive oil. As a result, they’re less of a recipe than a technique.

The herbs can be to your taste. Swap out sage or finely chopped rosemary, if that’s what you happen to have. Or use a combination of herbs. They can be as large or as small as you like, but for my purposes I like about piles that are an inch or so high, and spread out about 5” .They settle a bit as they cook. The higher they are, the longer they’ll take to cook, and you could end up with overdone edges and an underdone middle. The beauty of these is that you get the contrast of soft and crisp in the same dish.

One average size russet potato makes about four stacks, which can be either two servings or four, depending on what you’re serving with them. They’re easy enough that they could accompany a simple weeknight dinner, but fun and tasty enough to serve to company. And you can call them stacks or piles, depending on how proper your company is.

Potato Stacks (Potato Piles)

Ingredients
1 medium baking potato, peeled

1 -2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme

1 Tablespoon olive oil

Salt and pepper, to taste

Summary

· Peel potato into strips

· Toss with herbs and olive oil

· Season

· Pile on baking sheet covered with parchment

· Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes

Detailed Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Using a vegetable peeler, remove potato in strips. Some strips will be very narrow (1/4” wide) and some will be much thicker (up to 1”). When it becomes difficult to get the strips off, either because of the position of the peeler, or because the strips are getting too wide, rotate the potato slightly, and begin on another section. As you go around, you’ll end up with something that looks like an elongated apple core. When you’re in danger of adding sliced finger to the mix, stop and discard the remaining potato. You’ll have about 3 cups of loosely packed potato strips.

3. In a large bowl, toss the potato strips with olive oil. Add the thyme and toss to combine. Season with salt and pepper and toss again.

4. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or foil. Using tongs or your hands, make piles of potato strips about 5” across and an inch or so high. Scrape any remaining oil and herbs out of the bottom of the bowl, and distribute over piles. Scatter with a little additional salt and pepper.

5. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until piles are golden brown. The edges will be crisped and the center will be cooked through.

Desserts: Salted Caramel Cheesecake (Updated with A Note on Salt)

2011-09-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

N.B. It was brought to my attention that if this recipe is made with regular salt, it is WAY too salty. I always use kosher salt. Don't use table salt or this will be truly inedible. My apologies to anyone who may have tried it already without that caveat!

Here it is at last. I’ve been trying to get a picture of a single slice of this for months. And you know what happens? That’s right—every time I’m ready to photograph it, I look for the slice I saved as my “model” and it’s gone. Someone has eaten my model. So you’re just going to have to content yourself with the picture of the whole cheesecake that I happen to have snapped once with my camera phone. It doesn’t really do it justice, but you get the idea (and yes, it’s also my profile picture).

I made this for Thanksgiving in 2010. It was proclaimed, “The best dessert you’ve ever made.” Praise, indeed. Well, actually, considering all the desserts I’ve made in 15 years of marriage, plus probably 3 years of dating, that could be saying quite a bit. In the event, I was asked to make it again for Christmas. And again for Alex’s birthday. And again for our anniversary. And every time I made it, I would post about it on Facebook, and my friends would say how much they wanted a piece. Finally, in August of this year, I made a cheesecake, and invited all my friends over for a Friday night Happy Hour and Cheesecake Devouring Event.

I could have taken numerous pictures of my friends eating it, but when the dust settled, once again, I was left with no model. In fact, I didn’t even get a piece. So the next day, I made another Salted Caramel Cheesecake. I took it to a birthday party for a friend, where once again it was completely consumed, and while I didn’t have anything left to take a picture of, at least I got a slice of it this time.

So, rather than make you wait until November for this recipe, when I might actually be able to get a decent picture of it, I’m giving it to you now and you can make it for Thanksgiving and Christmas and your husband’s birthday and your anniversary. I hope it’s the best dessert you’ll ever make.

Salted Caramel Cheesecake

Serves 2

Ha ha! Just kidding—I’ve served up to 20 people with one cheesecake. Ideally it probably serves about 10-12 people.

For the crust

About 15 graham crackers

3 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 stick unsalted butter, melted

1 1/4 teaspoons salt (note: I reduced this from 2 teaspoons. A number of folks in the comments said they found it was too salty. I made this recipe 4 times before posting this, and checked the measurements pretty carefully, I thought. However, I made it for Thanksgiving 2011 and realized that they WAY the crust is distributed in the pan can make it seem quite salty--if there's a significant slope between the bottom and the sides, that fairly dense piece of crust can be overpowering to the rest of the recipe. So I'm recommending the reduction to the salt to account for the possible variations in the way people make the crust.)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. In a food processor, grind graham crackers to crumbs. (If you’re using premade crumbs, you want about 8 oz or 2 cups, and you’ll want to do all these steps in a bowl.) Add sugar and salt and pulse to combine. With motor running, add butter through feed tube. Process for another few seconds until combined.

2. Transfer the mixture to a 9” or 10” (I have a 10” myself) springform pan sprayed with cooking spray. Pat crumb mixture into the bottom of the pan, and up the sides about 2”. Don’t worry if it’s not perfectly even around the top; you just want to be sure it’s deep enough to hold all the cheesecake mixture.

3. Bake crust until slightly brown. You’ll just be able to smell it. This will take anywhere from 10-12 minutes. Remove crust from the oven and allow to cool on a rack. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees F.

For the cheesecake

3 8oz packages cream cheese, at room temperature

1 can dulce de leche

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

3 teaspoons salt

1 ¼ cup granulated sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1. In a stand mixture fitted with the paddle attachment beat cream cheese until smooth, add dulce de leche and beat to combine.

2. Add flour and salt, beat to combine, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. Beat until smooth and fluffy, about 5 minutes. There should be no lumps.

3. Add the sugar and beat to combine.

4. Add the vanilla, and then beat in the eggs one at a time until just combined, about 30 seconds each. Don’t overbeat once the eggs are added; the cheesecake will puff up too much while baking, and the top will crack.

5. Pour the cream cheese mixture into the cooled crust and smooth the top.

6. Bake at 300 degrees F for 55 – 65 minutes. The center will seem to be only slightly set, and will be wobbly if you nudge it. The sides will puff slightly.

7. Cool completely on a rack, then cover and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight (I have gotten away with a 5 hour cooling, but I was on edge that it wouldn’t turn out; overnight is really best). When I put it in the refrigerator to set up, I remove the ring from my springform, and put the cheesecake on a cake stand. You can leave it in the springform if you don't have a cake stand.

For the caramel

½ cup granulated sugar

3 tablespoons water

½ cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. In a large saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar and water. Swirl to combine. All those warnings about stirring caramel and brushing down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush to avoid crystal formation? I avoid all that by just never stirring it at all. If I need to move it around the pan, I just swirl it.

2. Continue cooking until the sugar turns golden brown, swirling occasionally. You’re looking for something that’s about the color of dark honey. The problem with caramel is that it goes from perfect to burnt in the blink of an eye, so just when you find yourself thinking, “Any second now…” pull it off the heat. It should take 3-5 minutes.

3. Off the heat, carefully add the butter, then the cream. Don’t wait until the butter is melted; toss in the butter, give it a whisk, then pour in the cream. It will foam up, seize, and otherwise look like a total failure. Persevere! Add the vanilla extract and salt and continue whisking.

4. Return to medium low heat and whisk until smooth. (Added note: if your caramel is too thin, let it cook for awhile over a low heat. I've actually let it boil a bit--unintentionally--and just when I thought I'd ruined it, it turned out to be perfect.) Allow to cool slightly, about 15 minutes.

5. Remove cheesecake from the refrigerator and pour caramel over the top. I try to encourage mine to pool in the middle, but if you’re more of a drip-down-the-sides type, you can go with that. I just think the drippy makes sort of a mess on my cake stand, but maybe that doesn’t bother you.

6. Return the cheesecake to the refrigerator to let the caramel set, about 30 minutes. To serve, cut in slices (it’s pretty rich) with a sharp knife, wiping the blade clean after every slice.

Appetizers: Rosemary Honey Hazelnut Crackers

2011-08-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

My local grocery stores used to carry crackers that were specifically flavored to go with certain types of cheeses. At this point the only one I can recall is that the celery-flavored crackers went with blue cheese. The amazing thing was, they really did complement the cheeses they were supposed to accompany. Often in the food world, you hear about things that are supposed to go together, and really, it's just a vile combination. The one that springs most readily to mind is chocolate and red wine. I'm not sure if this is the chocolate lobby, or the red wine growers association, or an evil alliance between the two, but it needs to stop because red wine with chocolate is just gross.

So like many good things in life these crackers seem to have vanished (and it's always the good things, with Exhibit A being Stouffer's vegetarian lasagna, and Exhibit B being Stouffer's broccoli in cheese sauce you could boil in the bag--clearly Stouffer's has let me down over the years, although in this case the crackers were not, to the best of my knowledge, made by Stouffer's). But something got me started thinking about those crackers, and I know crackers are a cinch to make, so why not make my own? And then I started thinking even more (your suspicions are confirmed--I admit I spend about 45 minutes out of any given hour thinking about food and food-related topics), and realized what fun I could have with cracker flavors. So I started with one that was inspired by another cracker I saw at the grocery store: rosemary raisin pecan. I swapped out the raisins and used honey for sweetness instead, and went with hazelnuts instead of pecans, because I like hazelnuts better than pecans.

I let my husband have one, and was accused of being "subtle." This rather surprised me, because I'm almost never accused of subtlety. He didn't think the flavors were super assertive, but that's the point. They're not supposed to clobber you over the head. And I think if you taste them carefully, you can in fact taste every flavor. However, if you want them stronger, add more rosemary, honey, and hazelnuts (keeping in mind that they're not intended to be a particularly sweet cracker in my execution, and if you add much more honey, you may need to add more flour--I haven't tested this).

On a technical note, it's best to try to cut all these crackers the same size, so they cook evenly. They may be a bit on the soft side when they come out of the oven, but they'll crisp up as they sit. And don't worry about appearances--they're intended to look rustic. Rustic, of course, is what we say when we mean "homemade and unprofessional." Rustic just sounds more deliberate.

Next I'm thinking of trying something like a Thai flavored cracker, with red curry paste, peanuts (or maybe peanut butter?) coconut milk and possibly curry or ginger or maybe even lemongrass. I also think if the basic dough were made with basil that they'd be an excellent thing to serve with tomato soup. I have a long list of things to try. I might even try to recreate the ones that went so well with blue cheese.

Rosemary Honey Hazelnut Crackers

Ingredients

1 cup + 2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup water

1 tablespoon chopped rosemary

2 tablespoons chopped hazelnuts

2 tablespoons honey

Summary

In a food processor, combine flour, salt and rosemary, and pulse to combine
Add nuts and butter cut in 8 pieces and pulse 5-6 times
Add honey and pulse, then add water and pulse again
If dough is sticky, add 1-2 tablespoons of the additional 2 tablespoons of flour
Roll out 1/4" thick on a lightly floured board
Cut and bake at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until lightly browned

Detailed Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

In the workbowl of a food processor, combine 1 cup of flour, salt and the chopped rosemary. Pulse a couple of times to combine.

Cut the butter into 8 pieces and add it, along with the nuts, to the flour mixture. Pulse a few times to combine.

Add the honey, and then the water, and pulse a few more times to make a dough. Feel the dough, and if it feels quite sticky, add an additional tablespoon of flour, pulse, and check again. You may need the second tablespoon of flour as well. If so, add it and pulse a few times to combine.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured board or counter. Roll out with a rolling pin to 1/4" thickness. Using a knife or a cutter, cut to desired shape. I make little rectangles, but you could certainly stamp out circles or something decorative. You can't overwork this dough, so don't worry about that. You can reroll the scraps as often as you want.

Transfer the cut out dough to a cookie sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove to a rack and allow to cool slightly. You can serve them warm, or let them cool completely and put them in a tin to keep at room temperature. They keep well for several days, and if they're a bit soft when they're warm, they'll crisp up quite a bit over time.

Makes about 2 dozen crackers, depending on what shape you cut them.

Desserts: Chocolate Caramel Tart

2011-08-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

Caramel Chocolate Tart
Ingredients

For the crust:

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened

½ cup + 1 tablespoon powdered sugar

¼ cup cocoa powder (I use Hershey’s Special Dark)

1 egg yolk

¾ teaspoon vanilla extract

1 ¼ cups flour

For the caramel:

2 cups granulated sugar

¼ cup corn syrup

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

½ cup cream

2 tablespoons crème fraiche

For the Chocolate Glaze:

3 ½ ounces bittersweet chocolate

½ cup cream

Summary
Crust
· Cream together butter, sugar, and cocoa in a bowl
· Mix in egg yolk and vanilla
· Sift over flour and mix in
· Wrap dough in plastic and chill 30 minutes to an hour
· Preheat oven to 350 degrees
· Roll out dough and transfer to tart pan
· Blind bake crust for 15 minutes, remove weights and liner and continue cooking for 10-15 minutes
· Remove crust from oven and allow to cool

Filling
· Combine sugar and corn syrup in a large saucepan
· Cook over medium heat until golden brown
· Off the heat, add in butter, cream, and crème fraiche
· Once butter is melted, pour into cooled crust
· Allow to set up for 30 minutes (refrigerate if possible)

Glaze
· Heat cream over medium heat
· Pour over chocolate and whisk until smooth
· Pour over tart and tilt pan to distribute evenly over caramel
· Let set 1 hour (refrigerate if possible)

Detailed Instructions

Crust
In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or on a large bowl with a hand mixer, cream together butter, sugar, and cocoa powder. Add the egg yolk and vanilla, and beat in. Sift in flour and mix to combine. Turn dough out onto a sheet of plastic wrap, pat into a circle, and wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes to an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9” or 10” tart pan with a removable bottom. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to a 10-11” circle (depending on the size of your pan). Transfer the dough to the tart pan (the easiest way to do this is to set your rolling pin at one end of your dough, then roll the dough up on the pin, just as though you were rerolling an unrolled length of paper towel. Position the “loaded” rolling pin over the tart pan at the edge, then unroll the dough and drape it over the pan. Press the dough gently into the pan, letting the excess hang over the side. When the dough is fitted in, roll the pin over the top of the pan and let the edge of the pan “cut” the dough. If there are places that are in any way uneven—the dough tears before you can pat it into the pan, etc—just use some of the scraps to “patch” those places). Gently line the dough with parchment paper or aluminum foil, and fill with either ceramic pie weights or dried rice or beans, and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the filling, return to the oven, and bake for 10-15 minutes more. It’s hard to tell with a chocolate crust when it’s truly brown, but when you start to smell that chocolaty smell, it’s time to take it out.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool, about 20-30 minutes. This is about how long it will take to make the filling.

Filling
In a large saucepan, combine the sugar and corn syrup. Bring sugar mixture to a boil over medium heat, swirling the pan occasionally. This will look strange at first, until the sugar starts to melt, but it will eventually all be liquid. Keep cooking until the sugar mixture is the color of dark honey. Watch it carefully—sugar goes from perfect to burnt in a twinkling. Just when you think, “Maybe ten more seconds…” pull it off. Off the heat, carefully add the butter and cream (mixture will foam up), then the crème fraiche (don’t wait for the butter to melt, just add it and stir to combine and melt the butter). Once the butter is melted, pour into the tart shell and let set, at least 30 minutes. If you can refrigerate it, this will help.

Glaze
Place the chocolate in a medium bowl. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring the cream to a boil. Pour the cream over the chocolate and whisk until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth. Pour glaze over set caramel, tip pan to distribute chocolate evenly, and let glaze set, 1 hour. Again, refrigeration is helpful here.

Serve in slivers, each scattered with a few grains of fleur de sel. Makes 10-12 servings.

Thoughts

Have you ever had the feeling that certain aspects of your life were jinxed? I've often heard people say they have "bad luck" with this or that. They go through three DVD players in two years, or they keep buying travel mugs that keep breaking, or every time they have the battery changed in a watch, it dies within two months. You know what I mean.

When I decided to make this tart, I had one of those moments when I was convinced I was just cursed. Rather than use my stand mixer to make this, I decided to use a hand mixer. I was feeling lazy, and the clean up would be easier, I reasoned. Years ago we bought (or were given, I sort of forget now) a hand mixer. It was just your basic hand mixer, nothing remarkable. Then one day, about three years ago, the beaters vanished. I mean they disappeared into thin air. One day I used them for something, and ran them through the dishwasher, and the next time I went to look for them, they were gone. My kids were too little to have put them in a weird place, we hadn't had any houseguests (often after we have guests, I discover things in odd places--well, odd to us, obviously not odd to them), and my husband didn't know where they were either.

We looked everywhere those things could be, and in three years they have yet to materialize. Every so often (usually when I had the bright idea to use the hand mixer) we'd say, "Really, we should just buy a replacement set--this is silly!" but it was never a priority except in the 10 or so minutes around the time during which I wanted to use the mixer. Then it was gone from my mind until the next time I wanted to use it.

Flash forward to maybe a month ago, when my grandmother was moving out of her condo and getting rid of things she no longer used on a regular basis. I asked if I could have her hand mixer, and she gave it to me. I wanted it for two reasons: first, it was a 1950-something Westinghouse (my grandparents always bought either Westinghouse or GE appliances--my grandfather worked on the Westinghouse and GE accounts when he was in advertising in the 1950s and 60s, and he was a firm believer that if you were going to tell other people to buy the products, you should use them yourself) and after 50+ years it was still going strong, and second, it had beaters.

So, to make a long story short (too late), I now have a mixer with two beaters, and this great tart recipe to make. I get out the ingredients. I get out a bowl. I get out the mixer. I get out the...wait, where are the beaters? Where are the beaters? You're never going to believe this. I couldn't believe this. I could not find those beaters for love or money. I looked everywhere. I could only stand there in bewilderment, and assume that when it came to mixers (or, more accurately, beaters for mixers), I was simply doomed. Going forward I would be one of those people who says, "I have terrible luck with..." and would finish that sentence with, "hand mixer attachments." I was completely floored. I checked every drawer, every cabinet. Could. Not. Find. Argh!

Finally, after doing what anyone in this day and age does when something utterly maddening happens (which is to say, I posted about it on Facebook), I looked one more time. And I did find them. Not in any bizarre or unreasonable place. Just toward the back of a drawer. Now I've put them in the drawer with the whisks (which I think makes sense, since that's essentially their function). We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, this tart is amazing. I've made it twice now, and the first time it was a bit overly gooey (but really, overly gooey caramel--so what?) and the second time the consistency was perfect, but I decided that the chocolate glaze constitutes lily gilding, and I'd skip it next time. In fact, I think it would be better without the glaze, but with some chocolate whipped cream (cream with a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder and some powdered sugar beaten into it, then whipped).

Lately my recipes have been my own. I shamelessly admit that I got this directly out of Amanda Hesser's new New York Times Cookbook (and she got it from the pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern who developed it in the first place). I wrote up the detailed instructions from my own execution. It's very rich, so a little goes a long way, but this is truly an amazing dessert. Assuming you can find the attachments to your mixer.

Side Dish: Fennel Cabbage Slaw

2011-08-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Fennel Cabbage Slaw

Ingredients

½ head of green cabbage, shredded (4-6 cups)
1 medium fennel bulb, shredded (about 2 cups)
1 large carrot, grated
Dressing
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
¼ cup apple juice
2 teaspons fennel seed, toasted and ground
Salt and pepper to taste

Summary
• Combine vegetables
• Combine dressing ingredients
• Toss dressing with cabbage mixture

Detailed Instructions
In a large bowl, combine the cabbage, fennel and carrot. In a smaller bowl, combine the dressing ingredients. Toss the dressing with the cabbage mixture. You can refrigerate this for a couple of hours before serving. If so, give it a good stir when you take it out of the refrigerator to redistribute the dressing.

Thoughts
Fennel is one of those vegetables that can be intimidating. Which part do you eat? Do you cook it or eat it raw? It’s not unlike a carrot, in that you’re supposed to lop off the fronds and eat the bottom, but unlike a carrot, it’s not a vegetable that we’ve been watching cartoon rabbits gnaw on since we were little tykes.

I happen to love fennel, both raw and cooked. It’s a great winter vegetable when you get tired of the usual suspects (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower). In the summer, it’s great raw, with the sort of cool refreshing flavor you get with cucumbers. In fact, I add it to my cole slaw every chance I get because I think it’s a nice flavor twist with the usual cabbage. Unlike cucumber, it’s not watery, so it doesn’t weep uncontrollably into the dressing and make it nasty. (Caveat: since all vegetables have a high water content, the dressing will eventually get nasty, but not in 30 minutes or an hour, the way it would if cucumbers were involved.)

So this recipe has a double shot of fennel, with the toasted ground fennel seed and the raw fennel. The toasted fennel seed gives the dressing another dimension—it’s not just mayonnaise cut with vinegar, as so many slaw dressings are. Also, sugar in slaw dressing makes it gritty to my taste. A little is needed to balance the vinegar, but the grit is off-putting. Since I was using apple cider vinegar in this, I decided to use the juice to sweeten it. I have four kids, so there’s always a gallon of apple juice lurking around in my refrigerator.

Fennel is one of those vegetables that will eventually oxidize and turn colors that we normally associate with a bad bruise. It takes a little longer, so you can safely make this the day before you serve it, but in my experience within two days it’s looking a bit suspect, and within three it has a distinctly sad appearance. It’s still fine to eat, and tastes OK, but after the second day I do take the time to cut the little darkened bits off the fennel when I eat the slaw. It seems to mostly change at the corners and tips, so they’re easily removed and pushed aside. However, you might want to take that under advisement in your planning.

Side Dishes: French Fries

2011-07-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

French Fries

Ingredients

2-3 medium baking potatoes, peeled and cut to desired “fry” size
Canola or vegetable oil to cover

Summary

Arrange potatoes in a large skillet, cover with cold oil
Turn heat to medium, turning fries after 15 minutes
Drain on paper towel, add salt to taste

Detailed Instructions
Using a pan large enough to hold the potatoes in no more than two layers, scatter the fries, making sure to separate them as much as possible. Any two fries that are right next to each other may stick together. It’s not possible to get every single one separate, but arranging them so that most of the fries are perpendicular to one another, versus side by side, is preferred.

Add enough canola or vegetable oil to just cover the fries. Turn the heat on to medium, and bring to a rapid simmer. You probably won’t have to adjust the heat much, but keep an eye on it. You don’t want it to boil over.

In the first 15 minutes, don’t stir the fries. After 15 minutes you can move them around gently. After about 20 minutes, use tongs to move them around and flip them over so you can see the undersides. When they start to turn golden, they’re close to done. You’ll end up with a few that get a little more brown than golden. Once they’re done, remove from the hot oil with tongs and drain on paper towel. Salt to taste.

This makes enough fries for 4 people.

Thoughts
Dinner at my house on Thursday night is the same thing every week in every season. We have hamburgers and French fries (the exception being the fourth Thursday in November, of course). By the end of a long week I’m ready for a meal that I can prep in 12 minutes, let cook largely unattended, and serve without having to listen to any whining. Everyone likes it, I get no groans of protest when I announce what’s for dinner, no one saying, “Why can’t we have x instead?”

I read about these fries in several places and they really are as easy as they sound. There are a couple of small caveats, but nothing too daunting. I use a 12” nonstick skillet. I’ve used a 12” chefs pan (with straight sides, as opposed to the sloping sides of a skillet) that was not nonstick. I recommend the nonstick because it does make it easier to get the fries out. If you use a regular pan, you’ll have to pry a few off the bottom of the pan, which is a bit tricky when what you’re doing is attempting to dislodge something that’s under an inch or two of boiling hot oil. I’m not saying it can’t be done—it can—but be very, very careful and be prepared to still do some scrubbing once you’ve removed the oil.

A word on the oil—I use canola. I buy a big jug of it at Costco. You can reuse the oil 2-3 times before it starts to break down. We just pour it back into an old oil jug and keep it on hand. When it’s time to dispose of it, we usually line a trash bag with lots of newsprint and pour the oil on that. The newsprint absorbs the oil, and goes out with the garbage. The plastic jug gets recycled.

The primary trick to these fries is not to stir them until they’re mostly done. I made them once with great success, then made them subsequent times and couldn’t understand why I was ending up with piles of fried potato bits. Then I realized I was trying too hard to keep them from sticking, and kept stirring them every few minutes. Don’t do it. Wait 15 minutes, then you can move them around. I use tongs to flip them over because the ones on the bottom get a bit more brown than those on the top. Turning them over and rearranging them gives them a more uniform appearance.

We’ve been making these for so long that I actually have a commercial French fry cutter. It can be mounted on the wall (I’m not quite to that stage yet) and the potato rests in a sort of trough that has a grid cutter at one end. There’s a plunger or pushing mechanism with a handle on it. As you lower the handle, the potato gets pushed up to and through the grid cutter, making perfect ¼” square fries. Before I owned it, I had one of those round apple slicers that switched out the apple sectioning insert for one that had a ¼” fry cutter. The fry insert never stayed in very well, and I often had to trim my potatoes so that the cutter would fit over them. After months and months of Thursday night hamburgers and fries, we bought the more efficient commercial one from Amazon. The price was surprisingly reasonable.

I’m not suggesting you rush out and buy a commercial French fry cutter (they are rather heavy and bulky to store, and they really do only do one job), but these fries are worth a try—they don’t make as big a mess as a “traditional” deep fry (admittedly they make some mess, but it’s not to the degree of the deep fry method), nor do they make your house smell like burning fat for two days. And I’ve never met anyone who whined about being served French fries.

Appetizers: "Mascarpone" Torta

2011-07-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

"Mascarpone" Torta

½ lb butter at room temperature
½ lb cream cheese at room temperature
2-3 tablespoons prepared pesto
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
French bread slices, to serve

Summary

Process cream cheese and butter in a food processor until smooth
Spread half of cream cheese mixture into a mold lined with damp cheesecloth
Spread pesto over cream cheese mixture, scatter with walnuts
Spread remaining cream cheese mixture over pesto and walnuts
Chill to set, unmold, serve with bread, toasts or crackers

Detailed Instructions
In the work bowl of a food processor or stand mixer (or in a regular bowl with a handheld mixer), combine the butter and cream cheese. Whir it around until they’re completely combined and quite soft. In the food processor the mixture will appear almost liquid as it flows around. That’s fine—you’re going to chill it back up in a few minutes.

Dampen and wring out a square of cheesecloth large enough to fit in your cake pan and fold over the top of the cheese. Drape the cloth over the pan and push it in a bit. Spoon about half of the cream cheese mixture into the pan and smooth it out. Carefully spread the pesto over the cheese. You want a nice layer of pesto, but it shouldn’t be thick. Just enough that each bite contains enough that the flavor comes through, and it’s obvious that it’s pesto. You want to leave as little border as possible—you don’t really want the pesto to show, but neither do you want the first few servings around the edge to be nothing but cream cheese mixture. Scatter the pesto with the chopped walnuts. Spoon the remaining cream cheese mixture over the pesto and walnut layer. This is where it gets a bit tricky, trying to smooth the cheese without disturbing the filling. Remember that what is the top right now will be the bottom, so any flubs won’t show when it’s turned out.

Fold the extra cheesecloth up over the top, press down gently, and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.

When ready to unmold, unfold cheesecloth and position a platter over the cheese. Flip the platter and pan over and lift off the pan. If it should resist at all, tug gently on the edges of the cheesecloth to loosen the cheese from the bottom of the pan. Remove the cheesecloth. You can serve it at once, or let it sit at room temperature for a half hour or so to soften up.

Slice French bread into rounds for spreading. Toast in a 350 degree oven until lightly crisped, if desired. I often just leave the bread plain. You can also serve this with water crackers.

Thoughts
Originally this was to be a, "What do you DO with all that basil?!" post, a suggestion to make pesto, and then this recipe. And that may still be your problem if you live in most of the United States, but if you live where I live, you're wondering not what to do with all that basil. No, you're wondering if you're ever going to have any basil at all ever pretty much as long as you live. Then you sigh. Then you go buy a tub of pesto to make this recipe. Which, to be fair, is pretty great, no matter what the weather.

This was something we used to make when I worked in catering. It serves a large number of people for a very low cost per person, and it can be made in a huge batch, so it’s not labor intensive. The hardest thing to do is slice (and toast, if desired) the bread. A food processor (or mixer) does all the work for the torta. It’s molded in a cake pan, so you can get fun with the shapes if you like. We used to make this in a heart shaped pan for weddings and decorate the platter with flowers. I have also used just a plain 9” round cake pan. I cut the usual recipe in half because it makes a simply enormous amount when you use the proportions we used in catering. It’s really enough for 30 or 40 people. This reduced version I made in 6” loaf pan and it was perfect for the 15-18 people I was entertaining. To serve the larger number, just double the butter and cream cheese, and increase the pesto and walnuts to get the same even coverage (you'll just about double them as well).

The name of this recipe is in quotes because there’s actually no mascarpone in it. Perhaps at one time it was all mascarpone (if you're not familiar with it, it's a soft cheese that’s sort of half way between ricotta and cream cheese, often found in tiramisu), but by the time this recipe made its way to me, it was completely devoid of it. Just as well—it’s a little pricey to use in this volume. If you have recently won the lottery, or inherited a substantial fortune, you might try using all mascarpone, but if you’re like the rest of us peasants, the (relatively) inexpensive ingredients here will work just fine.

Desserts: Strawberry Cream Cheese-Sour Cream Ice Cream

2011-07-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Strawberry Cream Cheese-Sour Cream Ice Cream

1 pound strawberries, hulled and sliced
1 cup granulated sugar
1- 8 ounce package cream cheese, room temperature
½ cup half and half
½ cup sour cream
½ cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
1 ounce plain vodka

Summary
• Cook strawberries down with sugar until syrupy and soft, and cool
• Combine cream cheese, ½ & ½, sour cream, heavy cream, vanilla & salt in food processor until smooth
• Combine cream cheese mixture with strawberry mixture in a bowl
• Chill in an ice cream maker, adding vodka at the very end
• Spoon into containers and freeze until firm

Detailed Instructions
Combine strawberries and sugar in a small saucepan (I used a 2qt). Cook over medium high heat, stirring occasionally, until sugar is dissolved. This will take about 5 minutes. The strawberries will end up swimming in a light syrup. At no point do you want the syrup to boil (you could end up with strawberries in caramel if you do, which probably wouldn’t be horrible, but I haven’t tested that); if you start to see lots of bubbles, turn the heat down slightly. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the strawberries are soft, but not falling apart, another 3-5 minutes. Set aside and let cool until almost room temperature, about 10-25 minutes, while you make the cream cheese mixture. You don’t want it to be too warm when you add it to the ice cream maker, or it won’t set up properly.

In a food processor, combine the cream cheese and ½ & ½ and pulse until smooth, scraping down the bowl as necessary. With the motor on, add the heavy cream, sour cream, vanilla, and salt and process until well combined and smooth. You’ll have a very thick liquid, kind of like melted ice cream.

In a large bowl, combine the cream cheese mixture and the strawberry mixture. Stir well to combine. In an ice cream maker (I have the kind with a cylinder and a motor base) add the ice cream mixture to the cylinder and chill according to manufacturer’s instructions (mine calls for letting it run for about 15 minutes). Don’t worry if it’s not really ice creamy—it will firm up nicely in the freezer. In the last minute before you turn off the ice cream maker, add the vodka and let it blend through the ice cream.

Spoon the chilled ice cream into containers (I just use disposable plastic ones) and chill in the freezer for 4-6 hours or until set to desired consistency. You can take it out and stir it from time to time (you have the opportunity to lick the spoon you use for this when you do it), and once it reaches the consistency that you like, you can serve it. Because of the vodka it won’t freeze solidly. The ice cream will keep for about two weeks in the refrigerator. Eventually it will start to form ice crystals and ice chunks. Eat it before that happens. I’m not worried about that, to be honest.

Thoughts
This is not an ice cream in the classic sense. That is, it doesn’t start with a cooked custard base. That’s a plus for me—I don’t have the patience to wait for a custard to cool overnight in the refrigerator, which is why I seldom make ice cream. This recipe is largely attributable to my friend Julie Tiramisu (as I think of her—she has a real last name, but she also has a degree in Pastry, so I think of her as Julie Tiramisu).

I first made this for Mother’s Day as a cream cheese-ice cream mixture. When I described it to Julie, she said, “I’d put some sour cream in it, but that’s what I do—I tweak recipes.” I said, “Me too,” and made a mental note. I jotted down some changes in my recipe book along the lines of switching out some of the ½ & ½ in the original recipe for sour cream and moved on.

Then my neighbor gave me some strawberries from her patch, because they were just rotting on the vine, she said. While the first use for them that came to mind was strawberry daiquiris, the strawberry ice cream recipe seemed more family friendly, so I went with that. The berries weren’t terribly big, but they had big flavor, so I used them, making the changes I’d noted to the recipe when Julie T and I had talked.

There are only a few words appropriate to describe the result, and all of them should be followed with exclamation points. Wow! Incredible! Amazing! You get the idea. The sour cream makes the ice cream silky, while the cream cheese adds that lovely tang. You’d think that was the sour cream that added the flavor twist, but having had it made with and without, I can assure you it’s not the sour cream that adds the zing—that’s the cream cheese—while the sour cream changes the consistency. The sour cream makes it taste like liquid pink silk. If it were possible I’d have a dress made out of this stuff, it’s so beautiful.

It’s nice to have it in the freezer for any time, but I did serve it as dessert on Mother’s Day with great success. Because homemade ice cream is somewhat out of the ordinary, it makes a nice “special occasion” dessert. When I took some over to the woman who gave me the strawberries in the first place, her whole family said, “You made it? You made ice cream?” People just don’t expect it, but it’s easy with an ice cream maker, and with a base like this, that doesn’t require overnight chilling, it’s right up my (impatient) alley.

Quick!

2010-03-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

When you have children--any children, not necessarily a particular number of children--it can be very challenging to execute a reicpe.

It goes something like this:

Me: "Let's see...a quarter of a cup of flour..."

Child 1: "Mama, can I have a cereal bar?"

Me: "Wait, a cup of flour...and two teaspoons of baking powder..."

Child 2: "Mommy, where's my DS?"

Me: "No, two of soda, only one of powder..."

Child 3: "Mama, can I have some juice?"

Me : "And three quarters of a cup of..."

Child 4: "Mama, is it my turn to choose [what gets watched on TV]?"

Me: "Three quarters..."

Child 1: "Mommy, no! It's my turn!"

Me: "Three..."

Child 3: "Mama, are we going to the pool?"

Me: "Where's the white wine??"

And that was at 10 a.m.

So you can see that a recipe that contains a minimum number of ingredients, and spends most of it's time in a "hands off" state is practically a necessity. If what it delivers is also fun and tasty, well, bonus.

The recipe for "flapjack" in the March Bon Appetit magazine is just such a recipe. Flapjack, it would seem, is a British specialty, a sort of chewy oat bar. I checked my British cookbooks (of which I have three) and found no mention of it. No matter, I made it anyway. Five ingredients, a few minutes on the stove, into a pan in the oven, and 20 minutes later, a lovely little snack. I made it the first time and it was so quick and easy I was able to make it again a couple of nights later to take as a treat for my friends on the ferry. We often have these little morning nibbles, usually when it's someone's birthday. I figured we'd celebrate Tuesday with flapjack.

I made a couple of small changes and presented them to overwhelming approval. And so, because I also have a job, and need to get back to said job, I offer without further ado, my adapted recipe for flapjack.

This was the last bit of it left--I had to snap a picture quickly before it disappeared. Which it did about 12 seconds later.

Flapjack
adapted from Bon Appetit magazine
makes 16 triangles

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces

1/2 cup (packed) golden brown sugar

1/4 cup Lyle's golden syrup (available at specialty stores and some grocery stores--it's with the maple syrup in mine)

2 cups quick-cooking oats (not instant or old-fashioned--they say "Cooks in 1 Minute!" on the label)

1/3 cup hazelnut meal (finely ground hazelnuts--I use Bob's Red Mill brand; you could also use almond meal)

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350 and spray an 8" square pan with cooking spray. Combine first three ingredients in a pan over medium heat. Heat stirring until butter is melted, sugar dissolves, and mixture is smooth. Remove from heat and add oats and hazelnut meal, cinnamon and salt. Stir until well combined. Pat oat mixture into the prepared pan.

Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes, until outside edges are golden and crisp. Remove from oven and use a knife to loosen the mixture from the sides of the pan, and carefully cut it into four squares, and cut each square into four triangles. Do NOT attempt to remove the flapjack from the pan. It needs to cool completely in the pan. Once cool, it goes perfectly with tea.

Here, There, and Everywhere

2010-03-21T09:41:00.001-07:00

Have you ever noticed that when you become aware of a thing, you suddenly see it everywhere? This happens to me a lot with magazine text. I’ll be minding my own business, and all of a sudden it will occur to me that I’ve seen a particular word or phrase recently, and here it is again, and suddenly here it is everywhere.

The two that spring immediately to mind because they are current are “go-to” and “spot on.” Suddenly every food magazine I get is offering me a “go-to” recipe for this or that, and they’re all “spot on” in terms of flavor and deliciousness.

This happens to me primarily with magazines because I am what could be not so nicely called a magazine whore. I have even been known to stoop to the Family Circle/Ladies Home Journal variety of magazine when all other sources fail me. And I have a good friend who is similarly whorish, and she and I take great pleasure in pointing out these repeated words and phrases to one another (via email, which is our primary…well, actually our only means of communication, since I now live 3,000 miles away from her). We even have a shorthand abbreviation for when one of us points out something to the other. The other person responds “TNIWBE,” which stands for “Thanks Now It Will Be Everywhere.” And sure enough, it’s inevitable.

I remember it started with “bling.” I’d never heard the term before, but she remarked that it was ALL OVER and boy was it getting tiresome. I shrugged, but before my shoulders could drop back to their original position, I’d seen it four times (OK, I exaggerate, but almost). Since then we’ve pointed out such gems to one another as “spuds” (food magazines often substitute this word for potato in articles), “tresses” (you know, hair) and “kicks” (sneakers—my friend reads more health and exercise magazines than I do; I pretty much confine myself to food magazines, so I see the non-food ones from time to time, but the food ones are under my nose all the time).

Now it’s starting to happen to me with recipes. I’ll see a recipe and think, “Oooo, that sounds good” and I’ll make it, and the next thing I know, every magazine I read has a recipe for that same thing. Or an article about food trends in the New York Times mentions it. Or I read some of my favorite bloggers, and they’re making the same thing. In fact, this happened with the recipe I have for you today. I saw it in one place, thought it looked interesting, and since I made it myself I’ve now seen it at least three other times, most recently in (surprise) an article in the New York Times.

These are called Cat Head Biscuits. And they’re from that persnickety source that the chicken pie came from, so I will Not Mention Their Name, but as usual, I had to mess with their recipe. I also saw them in a cookbook I was perusing, and in an article about a Southern cook in the New York Times Magazine. They call them Cat Head because they’re as big as a cat’s head (in theory—I have cats and they’re really more the size of a kitten’s head, but we can overlook this).

Anyhoo, the thing I like about them is that they’re a biscuit, but you don’t roll them out and cut them. You blop the dough into a cake tin or cast iron skillet and bake. I love biscuits, but I get tired of digging out my pastry board, flouring it, rolling them out, and cutting them. Plus you waste dough that way, because you can really only reroll the scraps once before you start to develop the gluten when you’re kneading it into a cohesive mass, and they start to get tough. These call for no rolling, hallelujah! Even if you think you’re one of those people who just can’t make biscuits, you can make these (I am one of those people who just can’t hard cook an egg, but that’s a story for another time).

There’s also no fretting about keeping the butter super cold. In fact, it’s supposed to be slightly soft. However, I’ve also made them with butter that was effectively right out of the fridge, and they were fine. That’s another nice thing about this recipe—it’s flexible and forgiving.

Alex and I disagreed on the amount of sugar needed in these. The recipe I saw called for none, but I really thought they needed some. The amount I added was too much for Alex, who declared them sweet enough to be a shortcake base. I said they’d need quite a bit more sugar to be suitable for that. So I’m offering you a range of sugar amount, in case you don’t like your biscuits on the sweet side and/or you want to use them for strawberry shortcake.

So here are easy, tasty biscuits that could double as dessert component. You can use them as your go-to recipe, and they are spot on.

Cat Head Biscuits
Makes 6 biscuits

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 ½ cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons salt (I use kosher salt; if you’re using table salt, err on the side of 1 teaspoon)
1-3 Tablespoons granulated sugar (I’d add up to a quarter cup if you want to use them for shortcake, but taste before you take that leap)
8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter cut into ½” cubes, slightly softened (or not)
4 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening, cut into ½” cubes
1 – 1 ¼ cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Spray a 9” cake pan or cast iron skillet with cooking spray (the cast iron skillet would make a nice presentation if you were serving them directly from the pan). In a large bowl, combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. Using your hands or a pastry blender, cut butter and shortening into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs. Add buttermilk and stir to combine. Begin with 1 cup, adding remaining quarter cup if the mixture is too dry. The consistency will be very pasty and thick, which is what you want. It will actually hold a mounded shape when you plunk it into the pan. If you use too much buttermilk, you’ll get more of a batter than a dough, and they won’t work the way they’re intended to.

Using a half cup measure, or an ice cream scoop, or just a large spoon, create five distinct mounds around the perimeter of the pan. Place one mound in the center.

Bake until golden, 20-25 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then transfer to a wire rack. While the biscuits are cooling in the pan, use a knife to score between them (this will make them easier to remove from the pan once they’re cool). Serve warm.

Bye Bye, Chicken Pie

2010-02-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes (my husband would say, often) I become obsessed with a recipe that doesn’t work, and I have to make it work, even if that means making the same thing four times and driving my family crazy discussing changes and additions. “NO,” he’ll say, calmly, “I REALLY DON’T THINK IT’S GOING TO MAKE THAT MUCH DIFFERENCE IF YOU USE SEEDLESS RASPBERRY JAM INSTEAD OF THE KIND WITH SEEDS. NOW CAN WE PLEASE CHANGE THE SUBJECT?!?”

So is it a coincidence that my kids started saying, “Bye bye, chicken pie,” just about the same time I started my relationship with this recipe? Maybe.

Let’s talk about the first time I made this pie. I saw the recipe in a magazine (and never mind which one, because it’s one that tends to be a bit persnickety about its reputation—which I have to suspect is largely self-assigned—for printing Perfected Recipes, and they seem to feel there’s no improving on them, which I have found to be Just Plain Wrong. But I digress.) and it just looked so wonderfully unhealthy I had to try it. This is not, you understand Chicken Pot Pie. There are no peas, no carrots, no onions, no potatoes. This is chicken in a creamy sauce in pie crust. That right there is three of my favorite things: pie crust, chicken, and cream sauce.

I made it with the ingredients listed according to the instructions given. They referred you to a pie crust recipe two pages ahead, which made so much crust that I probably could have made one two-crust pie, and one single crust. It was wasteful. (Although I’m willing to accept some blame as far as the crust is concerned; it’s possible I rolled it too thin the first time.) The proportions they gave for the filling were so generous that I had to use a 10” deep dish pie crust to hold it all, which meant that the cooking time was more like an hour and a half. The thing spent so much time in the oven that the sauce broke. Even if it hadn’t broken, the original recipe called for lemon zest, which gave it a weird puckery flavor that I found off-putting.

I wanted to love this pie, but it needed some adjustments.

I walked through the original recipe.

Chicken: Originally the instruction was to roast over two pounds of bone-in breasts. Not only do I not normally keep bone-in breasts on hand, that was way too much chicken. I cut it back to two breasts, and used boneless skinless, which I always have around.

Aromatics: The one rib of celery and two cloves of garlic in the original recipe didn’t add enough flavor to the sauce. I increased the garlic and tossed in one medium chopped onion. Much better.

Sauce: That lemon zest was the first thing to go. Then to up the creaminess, I added some heavy cream, and at the same time reduced the amount of chicken broth so that the sauce recipe made much less overall.

Cheese: I had intended to reduce the amount of cheese the second time I made it, but actually ended up forgetting it altogether. Frankly, I didn’t miss it. I decided it was totally optional, and in the future I won’t be using it at all.

The result was deemed good but “missing something.” I thought it was fine, but if my tasters wanted a little added layer of flavor, I was happy to oblige (since it meant I got to make the pie yet again and I’d developed a deep affection for this pie reheated for breakfast. I actually don’t recommend this, because pie crust doesn’t take kindly to being microwaved, but if you do have pie leftover and you’re willing to put up with slightly tough crust, it makes a lovely breakfast).

The third time I made it, I simmered ¾ cup of heavy cream with rosemary, sage, and thyme. Bingo.

The result is a crisp flaky crust with a heavenly creamy sauce full of shredded chicken. The cheese doesn’t add much; I barely notice it. In fact, when it cooks during baking, it makes the sauce a little watery. It thickens up as it cools, but the first piece was a little looser than I prefer.

I think this would make an outstanding brunch dish. I myself loathe quiche. It’s always watery and the crust is soggy. This is a fabulous substitute with the same sort of ingredients profile: crust, creamy filling, some protein to get everyone going. And it’s different; not the same old thing.

And so, we bring to a close my chicken pie obsession. I know my family will be grateful (or maybe not, since this means we move on to something else). Bye bye, chicken pie.

Chicken Pie
Makes 1 9” pie

Crust
12 ounces flour (about 2 ¼ cup; use weight if at all possible, it’s much more reliable)
8 ounces (one stick) butter
2-4 ounces of ice water
¼ teaspoon salt

In a food processor, combine butter, flour and salt and pulse 10-12 times until butter is in quite small pieces. With the motor running, add the ice water until the dough just comes together. Divide dough between two sheets of plastic wrap and wrap tightly. Refrigerate for 15 minutes or so, up to overnight.

Chicken Filling
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
8 ounces (1 stick) butter
1 rib celery, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/3 cup all purpose flour
1 12 ounce can evaporated milk
½ cup chicken broth
¾ cup heavy cream
1 spring rosemary
2-3 sage leaves
2 thyme sprigs
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 bunch scallions, chopped (green parts only)
½ cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)
1 egg + 2 teaspoons water, beaten

Preheat oven to 375. Season chicken breasts with salt and pepper, and roast for about 25 minutes, or until done. Allow to cool, then shred into 2” pieces (shredded chicken really does taste different from cubed chicken, for some reason; I hate shredding chicken—it gets under my nails and it takes forever—but it’s totally worth the improved taste).

In a small saucepan, combine heavy cream and herbs over medium-low heat. Allow to simmer while you make the rest of the sauce.

In a 3 qt saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add the garlic, onion and celery, and cook until softened but not coloring. Add the flour and cook about 3 minutes. It’s OK if the flour browns slightly, but don’t let it get too dark. Add the evaporated milk, cream (and all the herbs), and chicken broth. Taste for seasoning and correct as needed with salt and pepper. Reduce heat to low and simmer until sauce is quite thick.

Remove sauce from the heat and strain through a fine sieve into a large bowl. Discard solids. Stir in chicken and chopped scallions (I taste for seasoning again here). Allow to cool slightly (about 30 mins).

Roll out pie crust, and fit into a 9” (1” deep) pie pan (spray the pan with cooking spray, and be sure to spray the edge of the pan so the crust doesn’t stick when you crimp it). Pour the filling into the prepared crust, and roll out the top crust. If you’re using the cheese, scatter it over the top of the filling now. Cover with the top crust and crimp the edges with a fork. Brush the crust with the egg and water mixture.

Bake at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour (start checking at 45 minutes—the top crust should be golden, and if using a glass pie plate, you should see little bubbles around the sides of the bottom crust through the dish). Allow to cool for ten minutes. Serve.

Up Next: Chicken Pie

2010-02-22T10:31:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a chicken pie that I'll make one last time this weekend and then reveal it to the world. I found the recipe and it just sounded amazing, but like so many things, it fell short. So I set out to retool it and work out the kinks, and if the fact that my husband ate half of the "beta" version this weekend says anything, we're almost there!

This is not a chicken pot pie. This is a chicken pie. And oh my is it a good chicken pie. It's not an everyday dinner--for one thing it takes a little time--but for a special occasion, I think it would be stellar.

OK, that's enough preview--coming soon: Chicken Pie!

Moving On

2010-01-31T14:19:00.000-08:00

OK, I need to get past this. You see, I've been haunted for the last...wow, almost three months now, by these eclairs! They just never turned out the way I wanted them too, and I've just been too discouraged to talk about them.

It's not that they were bad, mind. They just weren't what I expected them to be. But I watched some Julia Child a couple of weeks ago and one of the things she said was (to paraphrase), "Never apologize; just because it disappoints you doesn't mean the people you're serving know that it's not the way you intended it to be." In effect, keep your mouth shut and everyone will probably think it's just fine. Well, that surely is what happened with these eclairs. My friends thought they were just dandy. Bless them.

But to bring myself to closure here, let me explain what disappointed me. I made the choux paste, and it was fine. For all the kerfluffle out there about how tricky cream puffs are, they're not. You make the batter (you can even do it in a food processor) and steam does all the work for you (which is why I picked this particular dessert for this supper club--the theme was "air" and I felt that a pastry in which the "air" technically did all the work was right in line).

So, crisp little fingers of puffy buttery dough, the creamy custardy filling. No problem, right? Wrong. The directions for these eclairs call for lightening the filling with whipping cream. Nice idea, but guess what? You can't pipe it. If you look inside a cream puff or gougere, you'll see that the steam has indeed fluffed everything up nicely, but it leaves this sort of spider webby network of dough that you have to force aside to while you're filling them. That light airy cream just didn't have enough muscle for the job.

As a result, I was forced to slit the eclairs down the side and plop the filling in. Worst thing in the world? Of course not. Actually the way the instructions described the filling process? Why, yes. Not in line with my personal expectations? Ah, no, and this is where we come to the crux of the problem, and the aforementioned haunting.

It's not that they turned out badly, or even that they turned out differently than the recipe described, it's that they did not meet my expectations, and because I let myself down, I labeled them a flop. Of course I didn't stop cooking after this, I just stopped talking about it here. I was too mortified by my own perceived failure to come back and discuss it.

So now I am back, and I have discussed it. I didn't mention that the chocolate glaze let me down too, in part because I waited too late to make it and it didn't harden up the way it was supposed to until the next day. Again, my fault. If I'd made the chocolate in the morning, it would probably have been fine by 5 p.m. or so, when I needed to use it.

Well, live and learn. I think I have some pictures of this mortifying experience somewhere.

Right, you see? Fine. They're fine. The picture is a little heavy on glare for my taste, but I didn't edit it at all, just dropped it in here.

Now that we're past that, I'll start working on some other things that won't disappoint. I'm not even going to bother giving you the recipe for the eclairs, I'm so annoyed at how I let them ruin my life for three months. They are dead to me. Let's move on!

Chocolate Eclairs in Real Time

2009-11-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

We have a quarterly supper club that meets tonight. Our theme for this meal is "air." All the components have to have some relation to air. That relationship can be as vague or as specific as desired (and if someone says, "I'm serving rack of lamb, because lambs breathe air," I won't be the least bit upset). The hostess provides the entree, and the other three couples provide an appetizer, sides, and dessert. We rotate who does what, and tonight I'm to provide dessert.

I cast aside the obvious "air" references in dessert--meringue because it looks like the clouds, souffles because they're airy. Instead I chose chocolate eclairs--the heated air is what causes the choux pastry to puff. Choux pasty is so easy to make, it's a shame people don't make it more often.

I decided to do this recipe in stages. That way, if any one step failed, I could chuck the whole thing in the garbage and go buy a pavlova or some Miss Meringe cookies at the grocery store. So I thought I'd share this as I made it.

Step one is the pastry cream, because it needs to cool for at least an hour, and it was the most intimidating piece to me. I've made choux pastry many times, but I can't recall ever having made pastry cream. Anything where I'm heating up raw eggs or yolks to the point where they could potentially scramble makes me a little uneasy.

And truth be told, I think I did scramble it a little, but at the end of the recipe the pastry cream gets folded into whipped cream, so I think the stirring I'll be giving it prior to the folding will take care of any little lumps.

But here's the result of my efforts:

Not bad. This spoonful went right in my mouth, of course, and I can report that it has a nice vanilla flavor. It looks like vanilla pudding, and I guess that's pretty much what it tastes like (indeed, pretty much what it is). But I'm pleased that it turned out and I don't, at this point, at least, have to make a grocery run.

Vanilla Pastry Cream
Enough for 12 – 13 éclairs
From Fine Cooking magazine

1 cup whole milk (I was out of whole—I used ½ and ½)
3 large egg yolks
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Warm the milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat until tiny bubbles appear around the edges. In a medium bowl, combine egg yolks, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine. Add the cornstarch and salt and whisk. Pour half of the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture and whisk well. Add remaining hot milk and whisk again. Return the milk mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly. Continue cooking until mixture thickens to the consistency of vanilla pudding. This will happen all of a sudden. One minute you’ll be whisking milk, the next minute you’ll look up to see how hard it’s raining and when you look down, you’ll have pudding. It may look lumpy as it starts to thicken, but it will smooth out.

Remove from the heat, and scrape into a clean bowl. Whisk in the vanilla, and cover with a sheet of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pastry cream. Refrigerate until chilled, at least an hour.

Next up: the dough and the ganache, but not until this afternoon.

Where Have I Gone?

2009-10-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Nowhere. I'm still here, and I still cook. Lately, however, I've been too exhausted to actually photograph what I've cooked.

Let me 'splain.

For reasons that I can no longer recall (probably because of the aforementioned exhaustion), I decided it would be a good idea--no, a great idea--to run a half marathon. Of course! Because since high school, the only running I've done has been out of patience, out of time, out of money, and out of energy. And of course picking up one foot and then the other didn't play much of a role in any of that. So why on earth would I not run a half marathon? I can see no way in which this carefully constructed plan could possibly fail.

I picked the Seattle half marathon, which is held the Sunday after Thanksgiving each year. The choice was based more on convenience than on any characteristic of the race, or out of consideration for how spectacular the weather will be (because if there is anything the weather in Seattle will be on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it is not spectacular). I started training. By about last Sunday (six weeks out from the race), I realized I was hopelessly undertrained. I had only been training for five weeks prior to that. So I reconsidered. I had seen an ad in a running magazine for a half marathon at Walt Disney World in the spring, A quick internet search revealed the Disney Princess Half Marathon on March 7th.

I posted a Facebook status asking if anyone wanted to do it with me. One friend, a dedicated half marathoner, said she would. And so, dear reader, I am comitted to training between now and March 7th for a half marathon. This means I get up at 4:30 a.m. many mornings (I sleep in until 5 on the weekends) and run on a treadmill in my basement. As a result, I am exhausted. I manage to get through work and evenings with my kids, but I spiral down quickly from the time I turn out their lights. I am a lot of fun to be around.

As a second circumstance in all of this--and another major contributor to my lack of posts--is that I am doing more of my own recipe development. I still read all the wonderful food magazines I get, but I'm spending a lot of time using those as inspiration, rather than as instructions. It takes a lot longer, I'm discovering, to perfect something you dreamed up, instead of making something from a recipe that someone else has spent hours conceiving and perfecting. And it goes without saying (although here I am saying it anyway) that it takes even longer still when you have a full time job in an industry unrelated to food, four kids, a husband, and a house (no dog--come on, I'm not crazy, you know). I have a couple of things in the works, but to tide you over until then, here's the Chicken Pot Pie I made for dinner last night (and was too dead tired to photograph). Because I make this for my kids an average of twice a month, I've got the recipe down.

Chicken Pot Pie
makes enough for two adults and four hyper-picky kids with leftovers for the adults' lunches. It would probably serve 4-6 normal people, depending on how ravenous they were.

Filling
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream, ½ and ½, or milk
About 1 c frozen peas (no need to thaw)
About 1 c frozen pearl onions (no need to thaw)
2 large carrots, peeled and cut into ¼” dice
Salt and pepper

Poach chicken breasts until cooked through and set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, shred meat and set aside.

Preheat oven to 350. In a large saucepan melt butter over medium heat, and add flour. Whisk over medium heat, about three minutes. Add chicken broth and whisk until slightly thickened. Add cream (heavy cream tastes best, of course, but if you can’t bear the thought of the fat, use half and half or milk; it will still be good, just not as rich). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add shredded chicken and vegetables. Continue cooking until thickened, about 10 minutes (the ice on the frozen vegetables will thin the sauce down, but it doesn’t take long to thicken back up). Taste and correct seasoning. Pour chicken mixture into a 2 quart casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with biscuits. Bake about 15 minutes, or until biscuits are golden.

Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cold butter, cut in small pieces
1 cup buttermilk

In a food processor, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Pulse two or three times to combine. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal (maybe 12 or 14 times). With the motor running, pour the buttermilk into the feed tube slowly, watching the consistency of the dough. Once it pulls together, stop pouring and turn off the machine. Check dough by giving it a pinch—if it sticks together, it has enough liquid in it. Odds are you will not need all of the buttermilk.

Turn dough out on a floured surface and pat out to about ¾” thick. Using a biscuit or cookie cutter, cut out as many biscuits as you can. (I have used cat shaped cutters, hearts, stars and plain circles—be warned, the more complex the shape, the less likely it is to “work” as a biscuit. Kids think the shapes are cute, though.) You’ll probably have about 16 biscuits. Place these on top of the pot pie filling and bake as directed above.

Quantity Note: you can make more of this casserole, and cook it in a 9”x13” pan. To do so, you’ll need an extra tablespoon each of butter and flour, an extra cup of broth, and about an additional half cup of cream or milk. You’ll also want to up your vegetables and poach another chicken breast. I don’t make it in that big a pan because my kids eat like anorexic sparrows doing a Ghandi imitation, and I used to wind up with three tons of leftovers. While I like this chicken pot pie, I prefer not to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole week. I'm just fickle that way.

No! Not Gourmet!

2009-10-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/conde-nast-to-close-gourmet-magazine/?hp

I am shocked! I get that ad revenue is down, I get that they need to cut costs, but to close down Gourmet! Get rid of Lucky, get rid of one of your golf titles, cut Architectural Digest down to six months a year, but please don't get rid of Gourmet!

I have to be completely honest--when Ruth Reichl took over, like so many others, I declared the magazine to be ruined, and let my subscription lapse. I felt a little like I did in high school. You know, you're friends with someone early on, then they join some club or team and you feel like their new friends change them. The new person they've become just isn't someone you want to be friends with at that point in your life. You both move on. Then, one day several months or years later, you find yourself interacting with this person--maybe you're both on the yearbook committee now, or you're both in the spring musical production--and you realize that you've both changed more, and now you can be friends again.

Well that's how it was with me and Gourmet. Gourmet's new friend Ruth changed it, and not for the better in my opinion at the time. Then, one day, maybe two years ago now, I picked up a copy on the newsstand. I don't know what prompted me--maybe it had a pretty cover. Maybe I had read something on a food blog about a recipe that sounded good (let's be honest--that was probably it). Whatever the motivating factor was, I picked it up and kept picking it up. And then I subscribed. And now I make probably two recipes a month out of it, and flag even more for future use. I love what Gourmet has become--it's much more in synch with how I cook today. Lots of weeknight recipes, with a nice mix of fancier stuff for weekends and holidays when I have more time for cooking.

In fact, so completely have I about-faced on Gourmet that when a friend told me she had old issues from 1999 - 2004 or so that she would let me I have, I jumped at the chance. That span represents the almost entire time that Gourmet and I were estranged. I got a second chance! The stash even included the September 1999 issue that was the first one on which Ruth Reichl worked, and which created such an outcry (both for and against), as well as the November 1999 issue in which said outcry was recorded. I also have the August 1999 issue, which was the one just prior to Reichl's taking over, and which followed the older format. It's fascinating to read the two together.

Of course, the magazine has come even further now, with bigger changes that are nice to see and note. In the period BR (Before Ruth), Gourmet's opinion was clearly that there were no restaurants worth troubling with anywhere but New York and LA. Ruth expanded the restaurant reviews to the whole country. Gourmet used to be full of huge beautiful pictures of Italy, Francy, Germany, Laos...big glossy shots of places far away, along with travel tips for when you got to go (ha!). They still cover some travel, but it's not the main focus any more. The main focus is clearly food. Food that you could cook on Thursday night, as well as things you could make for your guests on Saturday night, or for Thanksgiving dinner. I feel it's more well-adjusted in the past couple of years. The Quick Cook or Gourmet Every Day columns from so long ago often had things like oatmeal cookies and cranberry sorbet. Perfect! Just what I serve for dinner every night! No, now you get things like steak, pork chops, and shrimp, as well as vegetarian choices. Much more useful.

I'm just hoping Conde Nast gives Gourmet a second chance. I looked at the Conde Nast website, bu there was no "contact us" button, so I guess I'll send an email directly to Gourmet. They can't do this! I already subscribe to Bon Appetit, Food + Wine, Martha Stewart Everyday Food, Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, and Donna Hay Magazine. On the newsstand I often buy The Food Network Magazine, La Cucina Italiana, and Delicious. I refuse to buy Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, anything Taste of Home, and anything Cook's Illustrated publishes. There will be a sad hole left in my cooking life.

A Little Grown Up Food

2009-09-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

I type that title as I sit here eating a "bus cookie" (it's a cookie in the shape of a school bus--what else?), but I've been starting to feel the need in my life for a little adult food. Something a kid wouldn't eat in a billion years, and frankly, I wouldn't expect them to. For the last month I've been reciting the mantra, "You will eat what we eat" (OK, not that heavy-handed, but that's the been the gist of it, I assure you) and serving my kids dinners that are sort of a middle ground between the more elaborate meals we used to eat at 9:30 at night, and the microwaved chicken nuggets and canned corn that the kids used to get at 6:30.

So we're eating Chicken Enchilada Casserole (yes, I know that's not what it's called, but that's what we call it), and simple sauteed chicken breasts and the like. And it's going pretty well. I think the kids have finally realized this is one of Mommy's crazy ideas that's not going away any time soon (like that pesky tooth brushing thing, and that annoying thing where she makes us put our trash in the trash can...if you can imagine).

But yesterday I sort of had a craving for something I knew they wouldn't like. You see, as much as I'm ashamed to admit it, and as much as I try not to do it, I do find myself getting huffy and offended when they won't eat the food I cook for them. My rational brain knows full well that they're not rejecting me, but food is such an extension of me, and I feel so personal about it, that I have to fight my irrational brain over this one. So if I made something that started out with things they didn't like in the first place, and then combined them in a way that I knew they wouldn't like much in the second place, I wouldn't get all snitty when they gave me that lip-curl when I told them what it was.

Result: Cream of Mushroom Soup. What kid likes mushrooms? I'm sure there's one somewhere, but none of them are mine, so mushrooms were an easy starting point. When it comes to soup they eat it's Campbell's Tomato made with 2/3 of a can of milk only. Period. Nope, not even chicken noodle. Isn't that strange? Maybe we'll try chicken noodle again this winter, but last winter it was roundly rejected.

Anyway, yesterday was a perfect soup day because it really was the first day of fall here in Seattle. We've been having this incredible Indian summer thing where the temperatures were in the 70s and the sun was shining and no rain. Well that all ended this morning. As I trudged to the bus stop, I found myself thinking, I'm cold. And my feet are cold. These are stupid shoes to be wearing. And this jacket isn't heavy enough. And I need a scarf. And maybe some gloves. And to top it all off, it's raining. Well, sprinkling, but drops are hitting me on the head and on my inadequate-weight jacket and dampening the toes of my stupid shoes, so I classify that as rain.

And did I mention that sunrise is now around 7:05? Somehow a 7 p.m. sunset doesn't bother me, but when the sun comes up at 7 a.m. and I should really have a flashlight out at the bus stop (so the bus sees me, and stops, you see), well, that's winter to me, baby.

So really I didn't intend for this to be a long-winded whine about summer being over and gone. I love fall, really I do. I like Halloween and all the fall festivals and apple picking and making things with apples and using winter squash in stuff and Brussles sprouts (oh, how I love Brussels sprouts!) and I don't mind the weather being colder, but I also don't like being caught unprepared. Tomorrow I know not to wear stupid shoes, to dig out my warm pea coat and scarf, and to bring the big bulky sweater I bought in Ireland ten years ago in to the office so I can be warm all day.

And tomorrow, like today, I can have Cream of Mushroom soup for breakfast again (yes).

Cream of Mushroom Soup with Sage

1lb mushrooms cleaned and sliced (I used Cremini)
2 slices thick bacon, cut in 1/2" dice
2T chopped fresh sage
3T butter
3T flour
2c chicken broth
2 cans 2% evaporated milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt & pepper to taste

In a large saucepan over medium heat, saute bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and set aside, reserving drippings in the pan.

Over medium heat, saute mushrooms in reserved drippings until all water evaporates. Add chopped sage for the last minute of cooking time. Remove mushrooms from pan and set aside.

In the saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour and whisk to form a roux. Cook 1-2 minutes. Add chicken broth and cook until thick. Add evaporated milk and return 1/2 of mushrooms to pan. Thicken slightly, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Remove pan from heat and using an immersion blender (or blender or food processor), puree (be careful when blending hot liquids).

Return pan to heat and add remaining mushrooms to soup. Cook until thickened slightly 5-10 minutes. Add heavy cream and stir to combine. Taste and correct seasoning. Serve sprinkled with reserved bacon bits.

(Alternatively, all mushrooms can be returned to the pan at once prior to blending.)

A Glimpse

2009-09-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

I'm dipping in here to assure that I haven't been run over by a cement mixer, or fallen off a ferry or any such thing. I've been somewhat lacking in imagination and motivation lately. I notice this across the food blogging nets--oh sure, some people are devoted and regular publishers (Cate, for instance, and also Deb--and if a woman who gave birth and could post about it two days later can post, what kind of a worm am I??), but a great many of the blogs I read on an ongoing basis are showing a sort of end-of-season lagging.

Oh sure, I've cooked--we have to eat, after all. But nothing has been very inspired, and even the things I've made for fun, as opposed to those things I've made out of the utilitarian need to provide sustenance for my family, seem to let me down. I made a Nutella swirl pound cake just this weekend that disappointed me horribly. It was my own fault, I'll allow that--I didn't realize one of my ovens had such a ghastly hot spot in it--but the fact remains that I was let down.

Is this the change of season? I always think of Ma in "The Long Winter" saying, "Well, it's to be expected; it's the equinoctial storm," or words to that effect when the autumn rains started early before that long winter began. Maybe this is, for me, an equinoctial storm of sorts, in which I hit a lull or down period before the weather officially changes and the seasonal foods change over. I want very much to make Brussels sprouts, or beef stew, but it's not time yet.

I did spend several hours this weekend making tomato sauce out of my San Marzzano tomatoes. I still need to put it through the food mill, but the tomatoes are cooked down. And may I say right now how much I love my food mill? A blender or a food processor, while they do an admirable job of pureeing things, doesn't strain out the icky bits. The seeds, the skins, any woody or fibrous bits, get left behind with the food mill, where they remain with the blender or the food processor (oh sure, you can strain, but that's an extra step; the food mill does both at once).

On another up note, a friend gave me several years' worth of old Gourmets and Bon Appetits she found while she was cleaning out. I mean like two boxes full. And old--early 90s. But food never goes out of style (even if the plates it's served on do, and let me tell you, the prop styling completely dates these things, to the point of hilarity). We're even having two dinners this week that are from a 1996 Gourmet. That's the year I got married.

So I'll be back shortly!

A Minor Miracle

2009-09-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

While I have no pictures to accompany this, I had to post about it, because it’s just such a thrill to me. I had to share.

First I must start with a basic, albeit rather embarrassing fact: my children do not eat What Mom and Dad Are Eating. Or rather, they didn’t (but I’m getting to that).

When my oldest was a baby, I made a conscious decision. Alex and I both worked 45 minutes from our home (or more, depending on the traffic). Although we left work at 5 each day, we didn’t get home until around 6, which meant I had to choose: feed the baby “our” dinner, which might take as much as an hour to cook, or feed him something “fast” (read: frozen and microwaved) and get him into bed at a reasonable hour. It’s to be noted that we had (and still have) an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kinda kid. By 7 p.m. he was spent and ready for sleep. I felt that forcing him to eat then would be Just Plain Wrong.

Thus it was that my child (and his subsequent siblings) embarked on a diet of chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, and frozen pizza. What they lost on the nutrition front they made up for on the well-rested front. Parenting is about making choices.

Flash forward six years. Add to the image three more children, a commute that now involves a ferry ride (making for a very reliably-timed arrival home), and two parents who are tired of eating at 9 p.m. or later. Also, consider that over the past couple of weeks the two middle children have been coming downstairs for one reason or another after they’ve been tucked in and putting away the remains of what Mommy and Daddy ate very happily, including a chicken breast with anchovies and capers. Bells and alarms went off in my head quite loudly. This. Would. Change.

Yesterday was what I was calling the Dawn of a New Era in our household. My pediatrician told me awhile ago that by school age, children should be able to eat with the family and eat what the family eats (meaning, there’s no need to fret about undiscovered food allergies, or be excessively concerned about things like choking hazards). I have a good friend who is driven batty by my descriptions of what we had for dinner, and my comment that, Lord no the children did eat that; are you kidding me? The combination of the doctor, my friend, the willing consumption of seemingly non-kid food by half my children, and my own impatience with the situation all contrived to push me into this New Era.

As of last night, my children will eat what we eat. Sure, sure, I may modify it for them—the broccoli we’re having tonight will be steamed plain for them, while the plan is to snazz it up for us with things like soy sauce—but the general rule is: one meal for all. The oldest begins first grade tomorrow, so the time is right.

And last night was pretty successful. I sautéed chicken breasts in oil and a little butter, then made a pan sauce with some chicken broth, Dijon mustard, and a splash of heavy cream. I roasted potatoes in the oven, and glazed carrots for the grownups. The kids got raw carrots to dip in the dip of their choice, with the participants being evenly divided into the ketchup camp and the blue cheese dressing camp. Everyone tried what was new and weird, ate carrots and apples, and made pretty good inroads into the weird stuff.

Good times.

I am now planning meals with my kids in mind, which means nothing that requires two hours to cook on a weeknight, and looking for things that can be modified if necessary. Tonight we’re having roasted pork tenderloin with Asian flavors (said flavors have yet to be identified, but I predict hoisin sauce will play a significant role in the preparation), the aforementioned broccoli, and rice. Only the pork will be labeled as “weird” by my kids. Rice and broccoli are big favorites. We shall see how this goes.

And so, because I can’t leave you with no recipe at all, here’s the carrot recipe I used. Sorry there’s no picture.

Glazed Carrots
from Ten Dollar Dinners by Melissa d’Arabian

½ cup water
½ cup chicken broth
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon brown sugar
½ teaspoon ground cumin
¾ lb carrots, peeled and cut on the bias into rounds
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Chopped parsley to garnish

Combine first 5 ingredients in a medium skillet (water through cumin). Stir, and allow to come to a boil. Add in carrots, stir to coat, and cover pan. Allow carrots to steam, about 5 minutes or until tender. The original recipe says to reduce the sauce to a glaze with the carrots in it, but I thought they might get overdone, so I removed them to a bowl with a slotted spoon, cooked down the glaze, and returned them to the pan, stirring to coat. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Remove from the heat, add lemon juice and stir. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Tomato Dilemma

2009-08-04T10:57:00.001-07:00

Tomatoes. When I say the word, you immediately picture a big juicy beefsteak, or possibly a humorously misshapen San Marzano, so perfect for sauce. Probably what does not spring to mind is a sweet little cherry tomato. Cherry tomatoes are often mere accessories to a salad, tossed on at the last minute, exploited for the color they add to plain greens, but without getting much in the way of respect or appreciation.

This was driven home for me this summer when I decided to grow tomatoes. We have a 40+ foot long porch on the front of our house. Because we spent most of our budget on kitchen appliances, we had nothing left over for landscaping, so our “lawn” strategy was, “Let a bunch of weeds grow and keep them cut short and guess what? They look like grass.” So this year we invested some money in raised beds and topsoil. Rather than put in a bunch of ornamental plants, I went with the more practical (and certainly more delicious) vegetables: four kinds of tomatoes, zucchini, swiss chard, carrots, lettuce and peas (and note to self, next year MORE PEAS! The kids will eat them out of the pod off the vine; we want to encourage this behavior). The front of the house is a southern exposure, so we were pretty much guaranteed success.

This has been a particularly sunny and uncharacteristically hot summer in the Pacific Northwest (in fact, so much like where I grew up has it been this year that I’ve begun referring to it as the Pacific Northeast. Ha, I’m such a card). Day after day the sun blazed down on my garden, and the carrots came up and the chard flourished. The tomatoes got enormously tall and set fruit, and then they refused to ripen. There were these huge green tomatoes all over my plants, but they simply wouldn’t turn red. I came within an ace of turning them all into one of my favorite side dishes, fried green tomatoes, and calling the tomato season a bust. I was counseled to have patience. My time would come, I was assured.

But then! One tomato ripened. One…yellow cherry tomato. A yellow cherry tomato? Well, beggars can’t be choosers, and shortly I had lots of ripe cherry tomatoes, mostly yellow, but a few red. What was I going to do with these? Oh sure, I could put them in a salad, but as I said, I think that’s so dull. It’s that whole exploitation thing I was just on about. I had to be true to myself and actually do something with them. But what?

And just as I was about to cave to the defeatist voice in my head, the one that kept saying, “You have to do something with them, you can’t just let them rot in that bowl. Go on, just make a salad and put them in there. You really have no other choice,” (this, incidentally, is the same voice that almost had me rip all the green tomatoes off the plants and fry them up—a persistent but so often wrong voice that should really just shut up, but I think I’m stuck with it), along came the August issue of Gourmet magazine, with a solution for my dilemma. Take your cherry tomatoes, blanch and peel them, then sauté them. Their suggestion was vodka, my rebuttal was white wine and anchovies.

Normally blanching anything seems too fiddly and time consuming for me, but cherry tomatoes slip from their skins so easily it’s no trouble. The little hussies seem anxious to disrobe for you. It’s almost obscene. And then you’re left with these slightly mushy little characters that (in my case) get rolled around in some olive oil over medium heat until they’re warm through, then they’re jolted with a shot of white wine and get some anchovies mashed around with them, and the whole thing cooked down to a syrupy consistency. You should taste before salting, but a grind or two of pepper is nice. I scattered these with chopped flat leaf parsley because I have so much of it in front of my house that people walking past can be heard referring to it as, “that house with the parsley shrub in front of it.” You could use chives or sage or oregano, depending on which herb is taking over your herb garden this year.

This would be a different summery side dish, something you don’t see every day, and lovely with roast chicken. A friend to whom I described this said it sounded to her like it would make an excellent topping for a bruschetta, which I think it would. You’d want to smash the tomatoes and cook off some of the juice that’s released, but then they’d be perfect on a toasted or grilled slice of Italian bread, rubbed with a clove of garlic if you’re feeling particularly devilish. If you’re serving them as a side dish, take care not to heat them until they pop. If they do, well, when life hands you overcooked cherry tomatoes, make bruschetta.

White Wine-Anchovy Glazed Cherry Tomatoes

adapted from Gourmet magazine

24-36 medium cherry tomatoes (a mix of yellow and red, or all one color; the round ones are easier to work with than the grape tomatoes)
1 tablespoon olive oil
¾ cup dry white wine
6 anchovy filets, patted dry
Freshly ground black pepper
Kosher salt (optional)
Chopped fresh parsley (or herb of choice)

Using a sharp paring knife, cut a small X in the bottom of each tomato. Drop in a pot of boiling water for 10 – 15 seconds. Scoop out and plunge immediately into a bowl of ice water. Remove skins from tomatoes.

In a large skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add cherry tomatoes and cook for about 5 minutes, or until tomatoes are heated, but not bursting. Add anchovies and wine to pan, and mash anchovies with a fork to encourage their disintegration. Taste for seasoning, and add pepper (you probably won’t need salt, but you can add it if you think it needs it). Reduce over medium heat, another 3 to 5 minutes, or until sauce has a syrupy consistency, but tomatoes are still whole.

Remove from heat and scatter with fresh chopped herbs. Serve immediately.

Fear Itself

2009-07-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Often, when I am trying to muster the courage to try or learn something new, I remind myself that people have been doing such-and-such a thing for thousands of years, and that if they can, I can too. This is how I encouraged myself to learn to cook, knit and sew. Obviously this technique doesn’t always work—if I were trying to teach myself molecular gastronomy, the argument doesn’t hold up, but since I am not inclined to learn molecular gastronomy, I think I’m OK.

Where it did come in handy recently was in pasta making. I have wanted to make my own pasta for a very long time, but have always been a bit shy of it. It seemed so…daunting, somehow. But why? Recipes aren’t accompanied by the dire warnings that are sometimes delivered with yeast breads and things like hollandaise sauce. They’re generally fairly breezy and simple, just a couple of ingredients and some technique. Maybe it was that pasta machine piece. It looks to me rather like the receiving end of the guillotine with a crank in it to automate the process of removing anything left over after the business at hand is concluded.

After dithering for months, I finally made up my mind. It was time to conquer pasta. I borrowed a pasta maker from a friend and wasted no time.

And I found it to be ridiculously simple. People often imply that they reserve making pasta for special occasions, dinner parties and the like. If I were making ravioli, I can see doing that. Making the filling and stuffing them would take some time, I can understand. But for your basic strands, heck, you can make that up in 45 minutes (15 minutes of hands-on time).

I did a little research and found a sort of generally accepted recipe: 1 egg to 1 cup flour, plus a little salt and olive oil. Not too intimidating. And mixing it up was a snap.

I did hit a bit of a snag when it came to the machine. I had to actually throw the first batch out because I cranked it through so many times that it came out looking not unlike something the Founding Fathers would have used to write up a document listing their further grievances against King George III and declaring that all Americans have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of a decent meal that didn’t involve brown gravy, boiled potatoes, or sticky bland bread sauce (which I was served once by the British mother of a former boyfriend and found to be so nasty that I couldn’t eat more than a bite, in spite of the fact that it was considered a tremendous treat by the whole family much, I suppose, as our own stuffing is at Thanksgiving and everyone thinks their mom’s was the best and gets very snippy when anyone suggests that actually, dried fruit is really gross in stuffing, or whatever. But I digress).

But Deborah Madison came to my rescue. As a brief aside (yes, another one), I find it interesting that when I’m not looking for a recipe for a certain kind of thing, I stub my toe on dozens of versions. But when I am looking for a certain kind of recipe, I either can’t think where to look, or the sources I choose are all completely devoid of that which I seek. I must have checked four cookbooks for basic pasta making recipes, and they were all sources I was positive would have some kind of guidelines, but to no avail. Finally, drawing on the assumption that vegetarians would eat pasta and therefore a vegetarian cookbook could reasonably be expected to have a recipe for homemade pasta in it, I checked “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.” Bingo.

But what really made it outstanding was that the machine making instructions included the tip that the first four or five passes through the machine should be on the widest setting, and each time you should fold the resulting rectangle (or rectangleish shape, because of course it’s not a perfect rectangle) into thirds, squish a bit here and there to thin out any significantly thick bits, and put it back through the machine with the “rough” edge first. That is, fold it, rotate it 90 degrees, then pick it up and put it back through the machine. Eureka!

In no time at all I was cranking out pasta like Sophia Loren. Or someone. Anyway, it was a breeze and I loved it. I made skinny strands and wide strands, rolled it out paper thin and made strands of that, and stopped one or two positions short of the thinnest setting, and made slightly thicker strands. So far I’ve only dressed it with butter and fresh herbs from my garden, and it is truly phenomenal. My husband keeps teasing me because I almost never made the dried pasta we have by the carload in the pantry, but I made fresh pasta for three meals in a row over the weekend. Well, it tastes different, that’s all.

Tonight I’m making an actual recipe (Fettuccini with Crispy Capers) so we’ll see how that comes out, but I can’t believe it will be bad. And if you’ve been timid about making pasta up to now, I can assure you that if I can do it, you can do it.

Homemade Egg Pasta
Adapted from nowhere in particular, technique mostly from “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” by Deborah Madison

1 cup all purpose flour
1 large egg
1 teaspoon olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt

Pour out flour on a counter top or cutting board, making a well in the center. Break the egg into the well, and pour in the bit of olive oil and sprinkle in the salt. Work the flour into the egg until it forms a dough. You may find you need to scatter it with a little water here and there. I kept a measuring cup of water on the counter and dipped my fingers in and moistened the ball a couple of times. The dough should be smooth and not sticky. If it’s sticky, you’ll have a hard time working it through the machine, so don’t add too much water. It should just be malleable. Knead for about 10 minutes total.

Let rest for half an hour in a ziplock bag.

To roll out the dough, set up the machine and open it to the widest point. Press the dough out into a thick rectangle and pass through the machine once. Fold the resulting rectangle in thirds, press to thin out any excessively thick places, and put back through the machine again with the “rough” edge first. Do this a total of four or five times.

Begin moving the knob on the machine to make the pasta thinner. Pass it through on the next thinnest setting, and continue making the dough thinner until you reach the desired thickness. The thinnest setting makes a very delicate finished product. Depending on your sauce, you may want to stop at the second to last setting and make your shapes from there.

Pass dough through “shaping” attachment (alternatively you can cut it to ribbons by hand at this point, although most machines come with some sort of attachment to create even strands of one shape or another). Hang over a wooden spoon suspended between two large pots or cans or canisters to let dry a little (I used my flour and rice canister, which are about 12-14” tall, with a couple of wooden spoons balanced between them; if you have a dish rack, you could also use that).

The pasta will keep for a couple of days in the fridge, or can be frozen for a month or so. Fresh pasta, as you’ve no doubt heard, cooks in just a couple of minutes in boiling water.

Just WOW

2009-07-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

So for three days now I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you about these brownies. I’ve gone from detailed explanations about how much chocolate there is in them, how incredibly awesome they are, and exactly how I found the recipe, all the way to just typing “zOMG hurry and go make these!” over and over, like some kind of insane cut-and-paste baking mantra.

Homemade brownies always seem to let me down. I buy brownies in bakeries and they’re thick and chewy and dense. The ones I make at home always seem to be thin and sticky, like chocolate paste thickened with some flour. For a long time I thought this was just me, and then I decided it was my recipes—because clearly these brownies can be made—and I started searching for something better.

I started collecting brownie recipes like some kind of sugar-crazed magpie. I would read over them and compare them to what I had made in the past. It was pretty obvious to me that I wanted something with a slightly higher ratio of flour to sugar and butter. The high sugar/butter recipes yield a very candy-like product. Also, I have a weird, inexplicable prejudice against recipes that only make an 8 or 9” square pan. I want 117 glorious square inches of chocolaty loveableness. (Did I do that math right? Is a 9” x 13” pan 117 square inches? I confess I was never much good at area, unless we were talking about circles, and then I knew there was something about the diameter or the circumference and pi played a role but I was always much more interested in two-crust versions than in irrational, transcendental numbers. And I might not even be right about circles. Geometry was a long time ago. )

Where were we? Oh, right, brownie recipes. So I wanted a big pan, and I wanted a pretty thick brownie.

I thought I had found it when a friend of mine brought some brownies into the office. They were just what I’d been wanting: quite thick, still moist, somewhat cakey. Since she has a pastry degree (and just what a woman with a degree in pastry is doing working as a product manager is a question worth asking, but when I did she pointed out that pastry doesn’t pay much. Touché.) I figured she was an excellent source. When I begged her for the recipe, she confessed that they were a mix (she’d made them on a weeknight and was tight for time), and she had put peppermint patties between the layers, which accounted for their height.

When I stumbled on a recipe that was the foundation for a brownie sundae, I was pretty sure I’d hit pay dirt. After all, for it to hold up a couple of scoops of ice cream, a brownie has to have some serious muscle. You’re not going to get some wimpy, effete, milquetoast brownie there. This is not some Ashley Wilkes you’re going to be piling the toppings on to. You’ve got to have Rhett (in brownie form, of course, although let’s be honest, if you had the opportunity to scoop ice cream and whipped cream and whatnot onto Clark Gable, wouldn’t you do it? I mean, the way he was in Gone with the Wind when he was all young and hunky, not the way he is today—which of course is dead).

SO. These brownies. Melty chocolate, a ton of butter, five (yes, five) eggs. They are the brownies of my dreams. The recipe makes a 9” x 13” pan, and they’re a good three-quarters of an inch thick. They have a thick, fudgy texture, but they’re not grainy and sticky. This recipe is now my one and only. I can stop looking. This is brownie nirvana. Transcending any previous brownie experience. The Rhett Butler of brownies. The Crown Jewels of brownies. The Empire State Building of brownies. The Grand Canyon of brownies. These brownies put the “wow” in “brownie” (OK, OK, so there is no “wow” in “brownie”—there should be). These are brownies with a capital B. zOMG hurry and go make these.

Fudge Brownies

from the LA Times' Culinary SOS feature; this is the brownie from the Brownie Hot Fudge Sundae at a restaurant called BLD
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (13 ounces) chocolate chips
1/4 cup cocoa powder
5 eggs, room temperature
3 cups light brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons ground espresso
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups flour

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

2. In a large bowl set over a pot of simmering water, melt together the butter, chocolate and cocoa powder, stirring until completely combined.

3. In a medium bowl, combine the eggs and sugar. Whisk in the espresso, vanilla and salt. Whisk in the melted chocolate mixture, then the flour until thoroughly combined. Pour the brownie mix into a greased 13-inch-by-9-inch baking dish.

4. Bake the brownies on the center rack until set on top and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out mostly clean (it should have moist crumbs stuck to it, but the filling should not be doughy), 45 minutes to an hour and ten minutes (start checking around 35 minutes; the original recipe said they'd be done in 45 minutes, but at 45 minutes mine were still pretty liquid in the center. They were in there for a good hour). Remove the brownies and cool the pan on a rack to room temperature. Cut into squares to serve.

The Bad Mood

2009-06-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

I didn’t mean to write this post in quite this mood, but I’m cranky. I’m sorry, but I am. This was going to be a post about choosing dinner recipes, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I am just in a bad, bad mood. And everything in the last few hours has conspired to make me more crabby.

Of course kids can always get under your skin, and mine have been going through a potty word regression that’s really bugging me. I tried to stay even tempered over that (with only moderate success, which didn’t make things any better), so of course I overreacted to everything else.

Even my thoughts were ticking me off. I have an insane neighbor. Totally deranged. She appears normal and lucid, but inside she’s a seething volcano of crazy. It’s like living next door to Mount Whackatoa. You never know when she’s going to erupt. Summer is her active season, because her kids are home and she finds ways to compare mine to hers (and of course mine come off second best) and then she takes it on herself to instruct my nanny on how to control them (because she won’t expose her crazy to me directly). At least once every summer I have to point out to her the inappropriateness of this behavior. Today I was thinking about some of the things she’s been doing lately, and of course, that didn’t make me particularly chipper.

Then I ran out of white wine after only three quarters of a glass. Need I say more?

Michael Jackson died today, which doesn’t make me particularly sad (we weren’t close), but I have 27,000 Facebook posts saying “RIP MJ” and variations from people I know didn’t care a whip about him when he was alive. Yes, I’m sure his family is devastated, and he recorded some good songs (although I never wore a single glittery glove, obscenely tight black chinos. and tried to moonwalk with zombies). Under normal circumstances, the tributes to Michael Jackson via social networking probably wouldn’t bother me in the least, but today is another story.

Naturally the radio in the car wasn’t functioning. Alex replaced the motor that operates the driver's side window last weekend, and the car is new enough (although not that new) that it has one of those radios that when you disconnect the power supply (as in stealing it), you can’t use it again until you enter some secret code. Naturally we haven’t the first idea where said secret code is. It’s on some scrap of paper somewhere that’s been moved around four times each time we've moved, and each time whoever puts it away says to themselves, “I’m going to put it HERE and I’m going to REMEMBER that it’s here.” Then we promptly forget where “here” is. So no radio.

I went to the grocery store (three quarters of a glass of white wine just doesn’t cut it), and was put out to find that there were no new cooking magazines. A new cooking magazine might have turned everything around, but it was not to be. Could this get any worse?

Evidently, yes. I was on my way home (admittedly, I was probably going a little too fast) and listening to what I thought might be a good grump-reduction song on my iPod (clarification: iPhone--I was using the "speaker" function; not listening to music via earbuds jammed in my ears, thus blocking out all other road sounds, I promise) because the song itself was pretty grouchy and negative (my life would seem fine by contrast? I don’t know, I guess that was my strategy. Otherwise why else would I have been listening to The Kinks’ “Father Christmas”?) when the car in front of me started getting bigger and bigger (and its brake lights brighter and brighter) for no good reason I could discern. Praying that whatever mammoth vehicle behind me wasn’t also the bad combination of cranky-speeding-inattentive, I too hit my brakes, only to see a deer prancing across the road in front of the Volvo ahead of me. Seriously? Not that I wanted the Volvo to hit the deer. Actually, I just wanted the deer not to be there at all. Frankly, the Volvo too.

So what are you going to do about all of this?, you might reasonably ask. When are you going to stop inflicting your personal brand of snarly on us?

The answer is, I made dinner. Yes, I chopped garlic, and mixed up fish sauce and brown sugar (it’s better than it sounds, I promise) and did various other cookly things and now I feel quite a bit better. I also watched an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and that helped a lot.

Like so many things in my life, The Mary Tyler Moore show is tied to both my emotional and my culinary memory. My parents used to let me stay up late to watch it on Saturday nights on our grainy black and white portable TV set. This would have been after our dinner of Chick’n Bucket pizza. I can’t say if that was really the best pizza I ever had, but it seems like it. First I ate off the toppings (pepperoni and sausage; I never ate the pizza my mother ordered—pepperoni and onion. Ew.), then I ate off the cheese, then licked off the tomato sauce, and lastly I ate the crust. I remember that the crust had concentric circles stamped into it, just as though…well as though it had been stamped out by a giant crust-making machine (which, let’s face it, it probably had been).

Anyway, at some point later in the evening, I was permitted to stay up late to watch that old CBS classic line up—M*A*S*H*, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show. I loved Mary. I wanted to be Mary. So anyway, tonight I watched the episode where she invites the Congresswoman over and serves her Veal Price Orloff (what a 1970s dinner party—I love it!). And I made dinner.

Our dinner was a lovely spicy-sweet stir fry of chicken thighs with a brown sugar-based sauce on it. I added a chopped Napa cabbage to the mix, because there were really no vegetables in the meal otherwise. Doing so had a nice added side benefit—as my boys were getting ready for bed (the four year old twins), they begged to taste the cabbage and one declared he wanted it for breakfast tomorrow morning. We’ll see if that holds, but it certainly helped tremendously to relieve my crankiness.

Caramelized Black Pepper Chicken
adapted from Food + Wine Magazine

½ cup dark brown sugar (I only had light brown sugar; I used it, and it turned out fine, but yes, that didn’t help my snippy mood)
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon minced garlic (I used three cloves, actually; love garlic)
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
2 fresh Thai chilis, halved (I left these out; I don’t like things too spicy. If you like spice, by all means, add them)
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 pound boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1” pieces
1 medium head Napa cabbage, cut into 1” pieces

Combine the first 8 ingredients in a small bowl (brown sugar through chilis [if using; otherwise, through pepper]).

Heat oil in a large deep skillet over high heat. Reduce heat to medium, add shallot and cook until softened, about 4 minutes. Add brown sugar mixture and chicken, and simmer over high heat until chicken is almost cooked through, about 8 minutes. Add cabbage and stir to incorporate. Let cook until cabbage is softened, but not wilted, about 2 minutes. Sauce will be somewhat watery. I have good luck turning the heat up high and reducing the sauce for about 2 minutes. It doesn’t get as saucy and thick as it might, but the cabbage stays more crisp.

Allure

2009-06-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

What is it about a recipe title that screams, “MAKE ME”? In a list of choices like Rainbow Chard and Comte Quiche, Cheese Quesadilla with Squash Blossoms and Poblanos, and Butter Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Sovrano, what did I lunge for? Popeye’s Wannabe Biscuits. Did I go for the highbrow-sounding seasonal delicacies? No, I went for what I anticipated to be the fatty carbohydrate that would be just this side of “The White Trash Cookbook” (which, I am not ashamed to say, I own although as more of a novelty item than as a cookbook from which I cook on a regular—or really even an infrequent—basis, but if I am ever invited to a potluck the theme of which is “My Grandfather Was a Shifflett*, How About Yours?” I am all set).

As I waited for the page to render, I was filled with a degree of hesitation, and was preparing myself to be disappointed. Was I in the process of opening a recipe for spinach muffins? Just which Popeye was referenced here? The sailor with the weirdly misshapen arms (seriously, what was up with that guy’s elbows? Even as a kid, and even understanding that it was a cartoon, I thought those little gumdrop-shaped growths between his forearms and his biceps were freakish and unsettling as, for that matter, were his forearms and biceps) or the home of the world’s second most awesome biscuits—Chick-fil-A will always be #1—and the fried chicken that caused an ex-boyfriend of mine to lie puking in a gutter (to be fair, not the fault of the chicken, but the fault of the eight-24oz Hurricanes he drank prior to consuming the skin off of roughly a dozen pieces of said chicken at a Mardi Gras parade approximately twenty years ago) and from which gutter I (a foot shorter and eighty pounds lighter than he) was forced by the New Orleans Police Department to drag him prior to the start of the parade? Which Popeye was in question here??

To my joy, it was the latter (although of course it did bring to mind the ex-boyfriend reference, which I then inflicted on you and my apologies if you were snacking or anything when you read the preceding paragraph). And to my further joy, it appeared to be the simplest of recipes. Four ingredients, two of them shamelessly low rent, and what appeared to be a 30 minute process. Fast and cheap—what more could I ask?

Clearly, I could ask that they be awesome. And so, to verify their awesomeness, I was forced to make them immediately. The plan that formed was that I would make them that very night. Alex was leaving town for a golf trip (I should say, another golf trip), but he was on a red eye, so I knew I’d have a little time between my arrival home and our departure for the ferry and the airport. Since it appeared to be such a speedy recipe (even the source labeled it as “Features: Fast”), I decided to go for it. We don’t keep non-diet soda of any kind in the house, and neither of us drinks Sprite anyway, so a grocery stop would be in order.

I almost got derailed when I arrived home and started searching for my muffin tins. "Where are they?" I asked. My husband directed me to the dining room, where 18 individual muffin tins were filled with approximately 43 million microscopic Legos. My oldest son had been permitted to purchase a Star Wars Imperial Death Cruiser Battle Station Fighter Kill Maim Destroy Something Or Other this past weekend. In an effort to speed the construction process, my husband had divided all the parts into their individual "steps." I heaved a sigh and put all of the pieces into their own Ziplock bags, whereupon I was chastised for not numbering them. Whatever.

When I was finally able to get all the muffins in the oven, the smell that emanated was heavenly. They looked amazing too. When I broke one apart, it was tender and light. Much more muffin than biscuit, although with a lovely crunchy biscuity top. I'd be tempted to make these as a drop biscuit on a pan, just to see how that experiment worked. I was informed that they smelled more buttery than they tasted, although the flavor was outstanding. I confess I basted 15 muffins with only two tablespoons of butter (only!), so I think being a bit more lavish and unrestrained with the butter might improve them (go ahead, melt the rest of that stick and baste the bejesus out of them).

I could go all Rachel Ray on you and insist that these be called buffins, or misquits, or muffits or bisquins, but I shall not because I would not be able to live with myself if I did (but it’s out there, isn’t it? Yes it is). Call them what you will, but they are indeed well worth the grand total of 30 minutes that they take to make.

Popeye’s Wannabe Muffins
from the Washington Post Food Section, June 17, 2009

4 cups Bisquick baking mix
1 cup chilled Sprite
1 cup chilled sour cream
4 tablespoons butter, melted, plus additional for gilding the lily (brushing the tops)

Preheat oven to 375. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients except the extra butter for brushing. Mix until just combined. Batter will be sticky.

Grease 15 standard size muffin cups. Fill each cup to the top, and brush tops of batter with melted butter.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until tops rise and are starting to brown.

Transfer muffins to a wire rack and allow to cool slightly before serving. Muffins can be stored in a tin at room temperature for up to 2 days. To freeze, wrap each muffin in plastic wrap, then in aluminum foil, and freeze for up to 1 month.

Nutritional Information: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Actually they’re not that bad—200 calories and 13g of fat (although of course they have no fiber at all) per muffin. Or buffin. Or misquit. Or muffit. Or bisquin. See what I did? I did it again, didn’t I? Yes I did.

*Just as an aside, out of sheer curiosity and because this is how my somewhat twisted mind works, I Googled the name Shifflett and found a website that was offering to sell me a Shifflett coat of arms for the bargain price of $18.93. On closer inspection, the primary feature of the Shifflett coat of arms is the profile of what appears to be a crow with what appears to be a saltine cracker in its mouth. I think that’s astonishingly fitting.

Neglect

2009-06-08T08:39:00.001-07:00

I've neglected this blog sorely the last two months. What do you mean it's June?!? I just got back from a vacation, so I should be ready to cook with vigor now, right? Right? It wasn't a cooking kind of vacation--we stayed in a hotel, so no cooking facilities--but I'm back now and have a huge list of things to cook, so I'll get back on the ball! Also, we're starting a supper club with some friends, so surely that will offer some opportunities to share recipes. More to come!

Success or Failure

2009-04-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

I love it when something starts out appearing to be a colossal failure, and then ends up a shining, glowing, magnificent success. It redeems my faith in the chemical reactions that are cooking. The most recent example I have of this is Caramel Slice.

I’ve been reading about slices for over ten years now, ever since the beginning of my (possibly unhealthy, certainly expensive) obsession with Australian cookbooks and cooking magazines began. Donna Hay, Bill Grainger, and Delicious. magazine all have recipes for various “slices.” In America we’d just call these a bar cookie and leave it at that. But slices seem usually to be more than just a simple bar; they’re layered affairs with crisp crusts and gooey toppings, that seem to conjure memories of school days, packed lunches, and school festivals. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a school festival—we might have had something similar when I was in school, but nothing like what I picture a proper Australian school festival to be. I imagine something along the lines of what we might call a “fun fair” in this country. Little booths with simple games like “pick up the floating duck with a star on its underside and win a small trinket” or the “throw darts to pop the balloons stuck to the board” or perhaps a bean bag toss. And of course, along side these are the bake sale-type booths, at which one would purchase a slice.

The series of events that culminated in my finally attempting a slice began with my utter despair over What to Cook. As you can tell by my posting dates, I’ve either been quite busy, largely uninspired, or at the bottom of a well. Possibly all three. The truth is actually more of numbers one and two, with only the slightest suggestion of number three.

In an effort to combat this culinary ennui, I started going through cookbooks I’ve had for years, meant to cook from, and just never gotten around to. I wrote down lists of recipe titles so that I could one day flip through the condensed version, happen on a book + a recipe that looked appealing, and voila! Instant inspiration.

Then for some reason, on Easter Sunday (perhaps there’s some symbolism here—resurrection and all that), I was struck. Slice! I should make a slice! Initially my intention was to take it along to the Easter dinner we were attending at my aunt’s house—we’d been told we didn’t need to contribute anything, and showing up at someone’s house with empty hands makes me nervous—but somehow they weren’t quite ready in time.

Now we come to the failure cum success part of this rather lengthy Tale of Slice. Every step of the way I was convinced that these things were going to be a Dud of the Highest Order. The kind of event that one dates from, like a car accident or the loss of a loved one (“Well, let’s see, that would have been a week or so after I made that Caramel Slice that was such an abysmal failure…” that sort of thing).

It started with the crust. The crust is flour, butter and sugar. That’s it. I made mine in a food processor, and it came out as rather greasy sand. As I stood there peering into the work bowl, my first reaction was that this needed some liquid of some sort. But as with any situation in which one is thinking of adding something the recipe doesn’t call for (or adding more of something than the recipe calls for), I gave pause. If I put water in there, I wasn’t getting it back out, and more flour would likely ruin the whole thing. I thought about the butter melting into all that flour in the oven, and figured I’d stick with the recipe this time out.

The recipe then directed me to pat this into a pan and prick it all over with a fork. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to prick greasy sand with a fork (probably not, come to think of it) but it simply doesn’t work. If you’ve ever done any gardening, say, and idly poked into a fairly damp sandy loam with a gardening fork or trowel, and had it pull a bit of the earth back up on the implement, leaving a sort of divot or pock, then you know what happened to that crust I was trying to prick all over with a fork. Not auspicious.

And the crust never really browned. I was assured it would turn a charming goldeny color associated with the crust of pies made by patient and loving grandmas, Christmas sugar cookies turned out with the utmost holiday cheer, and other items of a similar and somewhat unrealistically nostalgic nature (granted, not quite in those words). No dice, baby. The stuff was as pale as it had been when I put it in the oven, 15 or so minutes earlier. Only now it was sort of solid.

The filling looked to be even more of a disaster. The caramel consists of sweetened condensed milk, Lyle’s golden syrup, and some butter. (I should point out that this recipe has only seven ingredients.) These three things are heated over moderate heat until…well, I wasn’t really sure what was supposed to happen. In point of fact, nothing really did, other than the obvious and expected butter melting. And the instructions warn, don’t let it boil. Somehow I got distracted and it did a bit. Would the Caramel Police soon be on my doorstep? It looked pretty much the same as it had when I started heating it up. Was this good? Bad? The butter had thinned down the milk and syrup mixture until it was really more the consistency of well shaken buttermilk. Was this right?

Figuring I had little to lose (beyond some flour, a stick of butter, and a can of sweetened condensed milk), I dumped this mixture over the crust and popped the whole thing back in the oven.

The problem was that now we were almost late for Easter brunch, so I had to hurry off and shower and dress. I forgot to mention that there was anything in the oven, so Alex didn’t think to check it. When I got back the caramel mixture was now quite caramel colored (maybe too much so; I had no way of knowing) and was quite frighteningly bubbly. I pulled the pan out, tossed it on the back of the stove, and hustled everyone in the car to Easter brunch. When Alex asked what it was, I replied, “Oh nothing—supposed to be a cookie thing; I’ll probably wind up tossing it.”

By the time the bottom part had cooled down enough to top with chocolate, it had settled down and looked much less threatening. In fact, it even looked like it might be vaguely promising. I decided to complete the final step. I loosened the crust and caramel layers from the sides of the pan with a thin spatula, melted the chocolate in the microwave, and spread it neatly over the top.

The result, which seemed to be on the point of failure every step of the way, was declared not only a success, but a new favorite cookie. In fact, I believe I got ONE of them, and the rest of the pan was consumed by the person whose new favorite cookie they are (hint: Alex).

But you know, wow. Here was this thing that, really, I almost chucked in the garbage can, but decided to go ahead and finish, and it’s so great. The chocolate should be one that you would eat “out of hand” (as they say) because it plays a big role, and it shouldn’t be one that’s too refined or high society. You don’t want it to overshadow the caramel. I think you could probably get away quite nicely with melted chocolate morsels (although both times I’ve used some from the higher shelves on the baking aisle, but next time I might just not bother and go with the yellow bag).

The caramel is gooey and sticky, and you could substitute something like Karo syrup if you can’t find Lyle’s. Most grocery stores in larger areas carry this now, I think, but if you live in the northern part of Idaho, off the grid, and your nearest Jiffy Mart is two hours away, to say nothing of your nearest genuine grocery store, and then mostly what the grocery stores carry is beef jerky and canned soup, well, go for Karo syrup.

I’ve had a request to serve these at the little birthday gathering we’re having in a couple of weeks, so that’s always an indicator of a success. Birthdays are usually celebrated with Lemon Squares. I think maybe we have a possible contender here. Might have to have a showdown between the two.

Caramel Slice
adapted from Kitchen by Michele Cranston
makes one 8” square pan; how many servings that is depends on you. Could be 1, could be 16, could be something in between.

This is not a particularly thick cookie, but the combination of the buttery crust, gooey caramel and firm chocolate are wonderful together. I haven’t tried doubling this recipe to make more. I’d probably just make two batches if you’re inclined to, you know, share.

1 cup all purpose flour
1 stick butter, divided
¼ cup sugar
1 14oz can sweetened condensed milk
2 tablespoons golden syrup
5 ½ oz semisweet chocolate

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8” square baking pan.

In a food processor, combine flour, 7 ½ tablespoons butter and sugar. Process until the mixture is quite well combined (you can whir the daylights out of it; you’re not going to make it tough). Pat this mixture in into the prepared pan, pressing it well into the corners and making a little lip all around the edge by pressing your fingers right up against the side of the pan. The caramel is still going to be over top of it when you pour it in, but you make a bit of a hollow for it. Bake for 15-18 minutes until Not Golden (see above). It will appear more solid and cookie-like than it did when you dumped it in there.

In a small pan on the stove, combine 1 ½ tablespoons butter, sweetened condensed milk, and golden syrup. Heat over medium heat until butter is melted. The recipe says let it go for ten minutes; it still won’t look that much different (it will not look like your idea of caramel, trust me) You might have a little of the milk caramelize, resulting in bits of caramely something or other sort of floating about in this rather thin mixture. That’s ok. Remove from the heat and let cool for about ten minutes.

Pour the inauspicious looking alleged caramel over the crust. Return to the oven for 10 minutes or until the caramel is really bubbly and quite golden. Now it will look like your idea of caramel. You can let it go really until it’s in danger of burning (that’s what I did the first time; see above). As long as you check it often, you can let it get quite a deep golden, lovely color. The edges will be starting to brown up.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely and set up. When cool, use a thin knife or spatula to loosen the caramel and crust from the sides of the pan. Melt the chocolate over low heat, or in the microwave, and spread over top of the caramel. Allow to cool. Cut in squares and eat (sharing optional).

Teeter Totter

2009-03-31T15:25:00.001-07:00

We’re having some weird weather here. One day it’s sunny and not too bad. The next morning I wake up and skip blithely out to my car only to find a thin layer of frost that needs to be scraped off. Normally I manage this task with a good jolt of windshield washer fluid and the wipers, but the washer fluid reservoir hasn’t been filled in weeks (Dear), so that’s not an option right now. (And never mind that if it’s cold enough this strategy backfires and I end up with more iciness on my windshield than had been there initially.) Instead I end up scrambling through the car looking for the ice scraper, tossing aside Happy Meal toys, old magazines, and bungee cords, all the time cursing under my breath as the minutes tick away the little bit of buffer I had left myself so that my drive to the ferry wasn’t a 10 minute exercise in muscle-clenching anxiety over missing the boat.

I’m kind of reminded of the winter weather in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter. They kept thinking that sooner or later winter would have to give up, that with March would come Spring. And then March came and there was still more snow, and their food was running low and they contemplated slaughtering their farm animals for food. OK, so maybe we’re not getting three day blizzards, nor are we thinking about eating our livestock (not that we have any livestock, you understand), but I just said I was kind of reminded of that, not that our situations were identical. March is not bringing with it the glorious rebirth that we’re all assured is the very essence of Springtime.

So what to do? I think an Action Item List is in order:

1) Stop whining about weather; it is clearly futile, as weather is not attending to said complaints
2) Resign self to wearing sweaters and/or winter coats for another couple of weeks
3) Allow three extra minutes each morning for possible ice scraper search and/or ice scraping
4) Commence campaign to get washer reservoir refilled (Dear)
5) Make Salted Caramel Cheesecakes with Graham Crackers

Ah, you weren’t expecting number 5? Well it seems as good a choice as any. Cheesecake is without season, no? On the one hand cheesecake can be light and fluffy and airy and cool and bathed with fresh strawberries with juice that are positively natational, just the thing for a warm summer day. On the other hand it can be dense and thick and rich and possibly studded with morsels of chocolate or candy bar or some other decadent add in, perfect for a cold winter night.

Well we’re not having hot summer weather, nor are we experiencing cold winter nights. So I need something in the middle. These are actually more of a cream cheese custard; they’re cooked in a water bath (as are many cheesecakes) but they have no crust. They’re just the filling poured into a ramekin and cooked, then they’re topped with sticky sweet caramel that’s enhanced with sea salt (everyone who’s sick of the combination of salt and caramel being featured in recipes as though it had never been thought of before, please stand up. Now, everyone who loves caramel with salt anyway, regardless of how many times recipes act like they’ve just invented the most perfect combination EVAR, please sit down. Right, that’s what I thought).

So having seen this recipe, and feeling it was perfect for this stupid weather, I also decided that it needed something with it, some cookie or cracker. I made chocolate graham crackers one time with Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa that I remember as being a smashing success (my husband remembers them as less of a success, since 4 small children + 1 large batch of dark chocolate cookies = lots of chocolate mess everywhere). Since there’s no crust in these, why not serve the crust on the side? I clapped my hands with glee over the cleverness of this idea (work with me here; remember what I’m up against weather-wise and take pity on me).

I found these graham crackers and figured I had me a winner.

Indeed, I did. The cheesecakes turned out the consistency of a dense foam, which doesn’t sound very delectable, but is the perfect consistency for cheesecake. The salted caramel was the perfect zingy foil to the creamy, slightly tangy cheesecake filling, and had a nice subtle crunch from the sea salt scattered over it. The graham crackers were every so faintly touched with honey.

One nice thing I discovered about this recipe. It says you can make the various components up to a day ahead and keep them in the refrigerator. Baloney. Make them up to four or five days ahead. Seriously, I made six ramekins of this stuff, plus the topping and the crackers, and only two of us eat desserts like these in our house (most of the inhabitants lean more to the chocolate chip cookie side of the fence). Thus, we had dessert for three nights, and they kept perfectly nicely for four or five days (since my conscience and my thighs really don’t permit consumption of this sort of thing for three days running).

So make yourself some cheesecake, keep it around, and let it cheer you through the last dreary days of Winter. Or use it to celebrate the first glorious days of Spring. Either way, you deserve a treat.

Salted Caramel Cheesecakes
from Food + Wine magazine
makes 6 ramekins + sauce

For the Cheesecake
1 8oz package cream cheese, at room temperature
½ cup sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
½ cup sour cream

For the Caramel
6 tablespoons light corn syrup
½ cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ cup heavy cream
Fleur de sel

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the cream cheese with the sugar on medium speed until smooth. Beat in the eggs, 1 at a time until well combined, then add sour cream, mixing to combine. Spoon the batter into six 5-ounce ramekins or custard cups.

Set the ramekins in a roasting pan in the center of the preheated oven. Pour around the ramekins enough hot water to come halfway up the sides of the cups. Bake for 10 minutes, until edges are set, but center is still very jiggly. Turn of oven and leave cheesecakes in for 1 hour. Transfer ramekins to a rack and allow to cool completely. Once cool, refrigerate until serving.

To make the caramel, combine the corn syrup and sugar in a heavy medium sauce pan. Cook over moderately high heat without stirring until a deep amber caramel forms (you can swirl the pan a bit to get the two to combine, but be careful not to get it too far up the sides of the pan). Watch closely—it goes from amber to charcoal in the blink of an eye. And there is nothing at all luscious about burnt caramel, I assure you. Off the heat, carefully stir in the butter with a long handled spoon. The mixture may spit, so watch your hands. Stir in the cream in a steady stream. Again, there may be some bubbling. Don’t be alarmed if the mixture doesn’t seem to cohere instantly; just keep stirring and it will all come together. It may seem thinner than caramel should—it will thicken on standing.. Transfer to a heatproof container and allow to cool. Stir in ¾ of a teaspoon of fleur de sel.

To serve: Pour about 1 ½ tablespoons of caramel over each cheesecake. The caramel should be pourable; if necessary, warm in a microwave at 10 second intervals. Sprinkle each with fleur de sel just before serving. Garnish each with a rectangle of graham cracker, if desired.

N.B. The original recipe called for topping the cheesecakes with the caramel, then refrigerating them for at least 3 hours, and serving them with the salt. Since I wasn’t serving them all at once, I chose to keep the caramel and the cheesecake separate until I was ready to serve them. If you’re having them for a dinner party, you could prep them completely up to the salt, then serve. If you’re going to eat them over several days, you might want to hold off on the caramel, as I did.

Taking Care of Business

2009-03-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I simply can't let the lack of a photograph deter me from posting. I have plenty of recipes for things that really don't require a picture (or wouldn't be terribly photogenic).

Take, for instance, the polenta I made last week. Inspired by a meal I had on the business trip I took the previous week, I set out to recreate the polenta, which was by far the star of the meal.

My trip was to New York City, and one of the nights I was there we had dinner at my favorite restaurant in all of New York. L'Ecole is the restaurant run by the French Culinary Institute. The students run it--cooking, serving, etc--and the price is just so reasonable. A five course meal is $42. You can't even get a five course meal for $42 where I live, much less anywhere else in New York. And the food is amazing. I had sausage with lentils, scallops, a pork chop with the aforementioned incredible polenta, a salad, and dessert. Needless to say they had to roll me out the door.

When I got home, I decided my poor husband, who had been watching four children for three days (so that's actually twelve man days), deserved something yummy as a reward. I had asked what was in the polenta, and it seemed like the main thing that made it so wonderful was heavy cream. As my grandmother used to say, anyone can cook well with heavy cream. Indeed.

So I made polenta using half heavy cream, half chicken broth (I usually use all chicken broth; water just doesn't cut it in my book). While I was stirring, I cooked off some bacon in the oven to the point just prior to "burnt," so that it would be super-crispy. (As an aside, why do people bother making bacon on the stove in a frying pan? Have they just not thought of putting it in a rimmed baking sheet in the oven? Or are they quite fond of scrubbing at splattered bacon fat? Even when the recipe calls for sauteeing something in the residual bacon fat, I cook it off in the oven and spoon some of the fat into the heated skillet after the bacon is cooked. I can't understand why anyone would do it any other way, unless they derive a deep and lasting pleasure from cleaning the stove, which I suppose is possible.) Once the polenta was done, I scattered it with bits of crisp bacon.

Let me say right now you have never had anything so wonderful, so sublime, so lip-smackingly good, and at the same time so incredibly simple to make, as this polenta. The heavy cream and the bacon do all the work for you, you get all the credit.

Is this something you're going to make for dinner tonight? Well, possibly, if you're throwing a big blow-out to celebrate Poultry Day (March 19th!) and this is your side dish. However, I suggest filing this away for Christmas, or your birthday or anniversary, or maybe just the next time you're feeling too thin and emaciated.

The Best Polenta in the World
based on that made by L'Ecole, New York City
Makes about 6 servings

2 cups heavy cream
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup polenta (not instant)
4 strips of bacon, cooked crisp

Bring the cream and broth to a vigorous simmer (I never have the patience to actually let it come all the way to a boil, so I may as well admit that here in the instructions). Slowly pour the polenta into the liquid, stirring it round to combine. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring fairly frequently, until the polenta soaks up the liquid and takes on the incredible sumptuous texture that befits something cooked with two cups of heavy cream. This will take 15 or 20 minutes.

Serve polenta scattered with savory bits of crumbled bacon. If you make it ahead, and the polenta thickens on standing, you can thin it down with a bit of chicken broth prior to serving.

Top Rated

2009-03-01T07:11:00.001-08:00

I have to head off on a business trip, but I wanted to leave you with a good recipe. This is, without a doubt, one of the best pan sauces for steak you will ever make. It's a 5.

I should explain what I mean by a "5" in case you weren't around all those years ago when I explained how and why we rate recipes. It's like this.

Once upon a time, when I was a lighthearted young newlywed, I made chicken stock from scratch using a whole chicken (come to think of it, I still make chicken stock from scratch using a whole chicken). I had a magazine spread that provided the recipe for the stock, along with uses for the leftover chicken (before I realized that a chicken that had been poached to Hell and back shouldn't probably be eaten at all, but that's youthful inexperience for you). One of these recipes was for Chicken a la King. I thought it turned out well, and when I asked how it was, I was told, "Fine."

Three weeks later I was out of chicken broth, so I made some more, and another batch of Chicken a la King. When we sat down to dinner that night, there was a distinctly disappointed look on Alex's face. When queried about what the problem was, he responded, "I don't really like Chicken a la King that much."

Crickets.

Which is how it came to pass that I now demand a rating for 1-5 for every meal I cook. Anything less than a three is banished, never to be made again. A three might be spruced up to improve it, but if we can't think of anything, it might get made again, but odds are it won't. A four could be put in the regular rotation (although considering my recipe collection--14 binders of recipes torn from magazines, every back issue of Everyday Food, Cooking Light back three years, 43 issues of Donna Hay magazine and counting, countless other saved cooking magazines, and 300+ cookbooks--I could make a recipe every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of my natural life and never cook everything, so the odds that there will ever even be a regular rotation are sort of slim). A five is incredible, stupendous, don't change a thing. There have been two recipes rated a five in ten years.

One of these is the recipe I'm about to share with you. We often make this for special occasions when we're eating in. It's fast and easy, and the flavor is so incredible you can't believe it's three ingredients and takes three minutes to make. The original recipe serves the steak with Parmesan Mash, which is wonderful, but it's also wonderful without. The next time you make steak, you must make this.

Pan-Fried Steak with Parmesan Mash and Pan Gravy
from Donna Hay magazine #16
serves 4

4 russet or Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 1/2" cubes
2 ounces butter
8 ounces heavy cream
salt and freshly ground pepper
1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
4 - 5 ounce Filets Mignon
oil for brushing
for pan gravy
1/2 cup beef stock
2 teaspoons grain mustard
1 teaspoon brown sugar

Place potatoes in a large pot of cold salted water. Bring to a boil and cook for 15-20 minutes or until just cooked through. Drain, return to pan, add butter, cream, salt and pepper and mash with a potato masher until smooth. Stir in Parmesan cheese and set aside to keep warm while the steaks cook.

Brush the steaks with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat a medium non-stick frying pan over high heat, and cook steaks 4-5 minutes per side (for medium-rare, or longer to desired doneness). Remove steaks, set aside, and keep warm. Make the pan gravy by stirring the stock mustard, and sugar into the pan. Bring to a boil and cook 5 minutes or until thickened. Serve steaks with mash and pan sauce.

On An Impulse

2009-02-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

"You think the Time to Make the Donuts guy is sexy."

I woke up with that line in my head (from having watched "The Wedding Singer" the other night). Maybe that was the reason I woke up with an unquenchable urge. I'm not sure why, but from the moment I opened my eyes I had an inexplicable desire to fill my house with the smell of hot oil. And what better way, I thought, than to make donuts? Of course!

My kids are donut fiends. We distinguish weekdays from weekends by identifying those days as "Gillian days" (days on which the nanny comes) and "donut days." On any given evening they'll ask, "Is tomorrow a Gillian day, or a donut day?" Normally their donuts come from Safeway, and are really bad.

This morning I decided that we needed homemade donuts. I've never made them before, so a bonus day off, plus a day when the kids wouldn't normally get a donut, seemed like a perfect excuse to give it a try.

I confess I'm not much of a deep fryer. When I get to that line in the list of ingredients that says, "Oil for deep frying" I usually skip to the next recipe. What a nuisance, I think. I'm not messing around with that.

Well, deep frying is a bit of a monkey business, but besides snapping at my children to stay at least 50 feet back from the stove while the oil was heating and while I was frying (I was a little nervous about that 5 cups of boiling oil; call me overprotective), it really wasn't that bad. I didn't splatter myself or the stove with oil, and there were no grease fires. A smashing success, by all accounts.

But what about the donuts? How did they turn out? They were well received. My husband declared them "pretty damned good." My oldest son (usually the pickiest when it comes to Mom's versions of beloved junk foods) said he really liked them. He wanted to open a stand where we could sell donuts. I declined on the grounds that a) we live in a cul-de-sac that gets almost zero traffic, and b) it's 34 degrees outside.

But they were, if I say so myself, pretty damned good. I made a buttermilk donut, which is the "cake" donut you buy at the store. They take less time than the yeast donuts, requiring you only to mix them up, let the dough rest, then roll, cut, and fry them. I almost had a disaster when I realized after mixing everything together that I had forgotten the baking powder, but dumped it in, mixed some more, and crossed my fingers. I don't have a donut cutter, but the recipe I used suggested using a round cutter + an apple corer. That I have.

Once they were done, we tossed them in a bowl of cinnamon and sugar, and devoured them. It's important to check the temperature of your oil from time to time. I think mine was too hot in one batch, and the result was donuts that were getting pretty done on the outside, but weren't quite cooked through in the middle. Overall, however, they were cakey and moist, and the tiny bit of mace and allspice really does enhance the flavor.

I'm not sure if I'll ever make donuts again. It's a lot of work, although the results were worth it. Maybe on birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas. I would like to play with the flavors a little--add some cinnamon, try them with ground cloves, maybe even find a cider donut recipe, that sort of thing. But on the whole I'm satisfied to have been able to say I made them once, and didn't have any disasters. As cooking experiences go, that's pretty damned good.

Buttermilk Donuts
makes 24 donuts
adapated from Sheila Lukins "U.S.A. Cookbook"

2 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground mace
Vegetable oil, for frying
Cinnamon and sugar, for dusting

Beat eggs in a large bowl until pale yellow. Slowly add sugar, beating until the mixture is thick and ribbony. Stir in the buttermilk, vanilla, and the melted butter.

In another bowl sift together flour, baking powder, salt, allspice and mace. Add to the egg mixture and stir to combine. Do not overwork the dough. Let dough rest in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.

Pour 2-3" of oil into a large heavy pot and place over medium-high heat. Heat to 370 degrees F.

While the oil is heating, roll dough on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of 1/4". Using a floured 2 1/2" donut cutter (or a 2 1/2" biscuit cutter and an apple corer to cut out the centers) cut out rounds. Save the dough from the holes.

When oil has heated to 370 degrees, fry the donuts in small batches until golden brown, turning once, about 1 1/2 minutes per side. Remove the donuts to a rack or plate covered with paper towel to drain. You may need to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches. The recipe recommended using a slotted spoon to transfer the donuts in and out of the oil, but I found a pair of tongs to be just as useful.

The Turning

2009-02-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

OK, show of hands of those who are ready for Winter to be over, and Spring to be here. As I suspected. Thank you, you can put your hands down now.

We keep having these spells of nice weather--bright sun, almost warm--and we look around and think, ahhhh, it's over. And then it snows. I mean, come on, really? Really?

So last week, in a conflicted state of mind that was attributable completely and entirely to the weather, I bought a dozen and a half pink tulips, and a cabbage. The Spring vegetables haven't really hit yet, so we're left with what stores well: cabbage, leeks, potatoes, beets.

I put the tulips in progressively smaller vases until finally their petals just wouldn't stay on and they scattered like so many enormous blushing snowflakes across my counter and floor, and then out they went. The cabbage sat patiently waiting in the refrigerator. As a cabbage does.

Its moment came with a dinner of Cabbage Gratin with Potatoes. The recipe is in the "vegetables" section of the Food + Wine 2007 Recipes cookbook, but it's got enough heft to be a whole meal in itself. Because it has bacon in it, it's not suitable for your non-carnivorous friends. But for those of you who eat meat, and just can't think of another damned thing to do with another damned cabbage, here's a wonderful idea.

The potatoes are quartered, and roasted separately. I use the little Yukon Golds that you can buy in a mesh bag, but any smallish new potato will do. The the bacon is sauteed, shredded cabbage added and wilted, and the potatoes stirred in. The whole deal is topped with cheese and then popped back in the oven. The original recipe calls for it to be broiled until the cheese starts to brown, but I prefer to actually bake it for a little while until the sauce thickens up and the cheese melts.

F+W calls for farmer cheese, and I have used this (it's what's in the picture), but I've also used Gruyere and Comte. If you're using one of these hard cheeses, I would recommend putting the cheese on in the last five minutes of the baking time, rather than at the beginning. If you do use farmer cheese (or something like it), it can go in the oven for the whole time.

What you end up with is a sort of Cabbage Mess, but a delightful one. The cabbage gets all lovely and caramelized as it cooks with the bacon, and the potatoes are soft and roasty tasting, and the cheese is melted over the top. It's an excellent meal for a night when the weather is playing one of those tricks on you, and the only thing you have to remind you that Spring really is coming are the tulips and the potted primrose you bought at the grocery store, along with that cabbage.

Cabbage Gratin with Potatoes
adapted from The Food + Wine Annual Cookbook, 2007
serves 4 (but they're pretty big servings; might even get 6 out of it)

2 pounds small potatoes (red or Yukon gold), quartered (or in 6ths if they're largeish)
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon olive oil
Salt + freshly ground pepper
1/2 lb bacon, 1/4" thick slices, cut into 1" pieces
2 lbs green cabbage, cored and thinly slices (as you can see, "thin" is a relative term; I just slice it up and don't worry much about how thick or thin the slices are)
2 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup heavy cream
1 - 7 1/2 ounce package farmer cheese OR 1 cup shredded hard cheese (Gruyere is nice)

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Spread the potatoes on 2 large rimmed baking sheets. Pour 1 tablespoon of olive oil over each pan and toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Roast for about 25 minutes, or until potatoes are browning on the bottom and tender. Remove from the oven and set aside. Leave the oven on.

In a deep ovenproof skillet with a lid (I use a 12" skillet for this), heat the remaining 1 teaspoon of olive oil. Add the bacon pieces and cook over medium heat until browning slightly, about 4-6 minutes. Add the cabbage and toss gently (I use tongs) to combine cabbage and bacon. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the cabbage is tender and starting to brown a little, about 12-15 minutes.

Stir in the garlic and cook about 2 minutes, then stir in the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then add the cream. Simmer 1 minute. Remove from the heat and dollop the farmer cheese over the top of the cabbage. Put the skillet in the oven and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until sauce is thickening, and cheese is melted (if using hard cheese, put the skillet in the oven and bake without the cheese, then scatter it on in the last 5 minutes of cooking to melt it). Serve right away.

Dutch Pizza

2009-02-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

Everyone has a truly humbling cooking experience. Some people can’t make pancakes. Others are hopeless at making bread or cake. Many are completely flummoxed by gravy, turning out lumpy pastes, or thin flavorless gruel studded with little flour bombs. Scrambled eggs are often a source of frustration and tears.

For myself, I am brought to my knees every time I try to make pizza.

The dough is a cinch—yeast is my bitch. I have no fear of yeast. I can make tomato sauce from scratch, and I laugh at toppings. But when confronted with a fully topped crust, ready to be baked, I crumble.

For the life of me, I can’t get the uncooked topped dough off of the cutting board and onto the stone in my oven.

Short of flattening the dough and topping it right on the peel, I cannot see how this is done. I can flip an egg or a pancake in a pan on the stove with the flick of a wrist, but pizza? I’m totally baffled.

And don’t talk to me about corn meal.

This is why I consider the pizza I make to be Dutch rather than Italian. I always think of the Italian as so passionate, so devoted, especially to their food, which is so effortless. It's lavish and fabulous, without being particularly complex or involved. Whereas the Dutch in my mind are no-nonsense, close with their money, and either products of the 1960s counter-culture, or of the hardships faced in World War II. And really, when was the last time anyone ever said to you, "Wow, you wouldn't believe this fantastic new Dutch restaurant we found!"

My pizza is about as far away from Italian pizza as you can possibly get, which is why I think of it as Dutch.

This past week I thought I would try again to confront what has up to this time been my Waterloo. “This time,” I thought, “it will be different.”

Inspired by a description of a pizza a friend made that was topped with thinly sliced leftover rib eye steak, mushrooms, Gorgonzola cheese, and a hint of mozzarella, I set forth. All I can say is that if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I guess I’ll be posting my next entry from a padded room (I just hope they have wireless!).

The dough I used was fine, great even. It made four individual pizzas that I topped with some sliced New York strip that I bought specifically as a topping. In one pan I seared the steak, then sautéed some thinly sliced shallot, and some sliced mushrooms until both were soft and caramelized. I rolled out the dough, laid the steak slices on it, scattered it with the shallot mixture, dotted with a little Gorgonzola, and grated a couple of tablespoons of fresh mozzarella over each.

Then I destroyed them as I pushed and prodded and jabbed and poked them onto the pizza peel, and reversed the process to get them onto the pizza stone. *sigh*

As you can see, they look…well, like pizzas made by someone who really sucks at pizza making. And I guess that’s what they are, so it’s fair that that’s what they look like.

I have no happy ending to this story. They taste fine, good even. But they look terrible. Perhaps someday I will confront this problem head on, read up on technique, buy books to guide me (hey! An excuse to buy books? Maybe this day will come sooner than I think!), and practice, practice, practice. But for now I’ll just stick with making things that don’t bring me to tears or make me say words that need to be spelled with asterisks.

Until that day, here's a really good pizza dough recipe. I just hope you're better at getting it into the oven than I am.

Pizza Dough
makes 4 – 6” pizzas
from Bon Appetit magazine

3/4 cup warm water (105°F to 115°F)
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 cups (or more) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil

Pour 3/4 cup warm water into small bowl; stir in yeast. Let stand until yeast dissolves, about 5 minutes.

Brush large bowl lightly with olive oil. Mix 2 cups flour, sugar, and salt in processor. Add yeast mixture and 3 tablespoons oil; process until dough forms a sticky ball. Transfer to lightly floured surface. Knead dough until smooth, adding more flour by tablespoonfuls if dough is very sticky, about 1 minute. Transfer to prepared bowl; turn dough in bowl to coat with oil. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let dough rise in warm draft-free area until doubled in volume, about 1 hour. Punch down dough. Roll out dough into six inch diameter circles. Top as desired.

Dippy

2009-01-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

I'm completely torn about this "recipe." I put it in quotes because it's almost more assembly than cooking. On the one hand, it's the kind of uncooking that American society has been criticized for embracing. On the other hand, it's so darned good.

The story behind it is evidently as plebeian as the recipe itself. Long ago a small pamphlet of sorts was compiled of the favorite recipes from the coaches of the Seattle Seahawks, and was sold as a promotional item at a local drugstore chain. The aunt of a friend of mine included the little book in my friend's stocking one year. The coach who supplied the recipe wasn't even the head coach; he was the line coach or something like that. The recipe caught my friend's eye, and she made it. To her surprise, it was good and everyone (especially her then-young children) loved it. So she made it again. And again. And people asked for the recipe, and she gave it to them. So by now just about every person in the Pacific Northwest either has the recipe, or has tasted the result.

I made it myself for Southwest/Mexican-themed gathering, which I was actually unable to attend. A friend of mine delivered it for me. I had tasted it as I was making it, and practically took a spoon to it, and that was before it was even cooked (don't worry--this recipe could very easily be eaten at room temperature). My friend assured me that everyone there reacted similarly.

And so, despite a list of rather low-rent ingredients, and no picture, I provide you herewith a dip recipe that is universally loved. I'm a little sheepish about this, but trust me, it's delicious. Make it for the Super Bowl, if you're a fan of that sort of thing (I confess I am not).

Bean Dip
Another nice thing about this dip is that you can buy an 8" square foil pan at the grocery store, make it in that, and not have to worry about it.
from the random Seattle Seahawks coaches pamphlet from long ago
Make 1 8" square pan

1 can bean dip (such as Frito Lay; sold near the corn chips in the grocery store)
1 8 oz package cream cheese
1 cup sour cream
1 packet taco seasoning
1 cup (or more) shredded cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine bean dip, cream cheese, sour cream, and taco seasoning in a large bowl. Transfer to an 8" square pan and top with cheese. Bake until cheese is melted and bubbly, but not browning, about 30-40 minutes. Serve with some form of corn chip (Tostitos, Fritos, baked tortillas--your choice).

You see? But it's ridiculously good.

Dinner: A Dialog

2009-01-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Person 1: There, that's the squash for tonight's dinner, and I'm making the crepes now
Person 2: Um...when do the Spring vegetables arrive?
Person 1: Well, considering it's the middle of January, I'd say a couple more months
Person 2: So that means I'm stuck eating squash and fennel for the next couple of months?
Person 1: I can make you beets...
Person 2: Uh...
Person 1: Or you can eat [expletive that rhymes with "quit"]...

I'll leave you to determine who is who in this dialog...

Preppy

2009-01-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of an impatient cook. I love the process of combining, adding heat, seasoning and the like, but I really don't like prep work. I just find it tedious. I want to get down to business and cook. I don't mind chopping the occasional onion or clove of garlic, or peeling a few potatoes, but some foods are just so needy in the prep department.

Take butternut squash. Not only do you have to peel it, but the peel scores off the charts in a Knoop hardness test. Because of its shape, you have to separate the neck from the bulbous bottom and cut them up separately. The seeds have to be scraped out of the cavity, which always leaves a weird slimy-yet-dry film on my hands, and then the whole thing has to be cut into chunks. What a drag.

But last week I had bought a butternut squash (because despite the hassle of getting it ready, I love it), and it was just lying there on the kitchen counter, staring at me. It was almost as though it was challenging me to take it on. "C'mon, ya wimp," I could almost hear it say, "let's go." I haven't been getting enough sleep lately.

I tackled that squash, chunked it up, and stuck it in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator. Vanquished! But it was a hollow victory. I mean, you know, now what?

Interestingly, a memory of a failed vegetable lasagna wafted through my mind. It had seemed like such a good idea, but it had been a complete flop; not enough sauce and the pan the recipe called for had been far too big for the noodles and vegetables. It wound up being a sort of mound of barely moistened mush in a vast sea of enameled cast iron. I was kind of surprised too, because it came from a magazine that usually has pretty decent recipes (I won't point fingers, but the magazine's name rhymes with Hooking Plight). Could I do better?

Well I won't keep you in suspense: turns out I could. Using an idea from another set of recipes from that same magazine (successful ones, of course), I made a bang-up Roasted Butternut Squash and Pancetta Lasagna. It had started out to be just a roasted squash lasagna, but Carl Carnivore (aka the guy I married) asked for some kind of protein in it.

I roasted the squash with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and baked off the pancetta. In the first iteration of this recipe, I just cooked the pancetta to a fare-thee-well and crumbled it up. That worked OK, but it made the end result pretty salty, I thought (and for me to say something is salty means that it probably had a salinity level somewhere around that of the Dead Sea). The second time I made sure that the amount of pancetta was controlled--I limited it to 1/4 pound, whereas the first time I just chucked in everything I had on hand, which was probably closer to a third of a pound.

This recipe makes four servings (albeit fairly large ones; I've found that a half serving is ample for lunch). The creamy sauce that binds it is actually surprisingly low in fat because of the evaporated milk used, although with the pancetta, mozzarella and parmesan it doesn't necessarily qualify as a low fat recipe. Still, if you were restrained with the amount of cheese you used, you could get away with calling this reasonably healthy.

So the next time you have a butternut squash staring you in the face, challenging you to a smack-down, grab some pancetta and sage, and start prepping. I can't give you any quick and easy tips on peeling butternut squash--I just gnash my teeth and snarl through it--but I can say that this is a great thing to do with it when you've conquered it.

Butternut Squash and Pancetta Lasagna
makes 4 dinner servings, or two dinner servings and four lunch servings

1 butternut squash (about 3 cups peeled and cubed)
1/4 pound pancetta
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 - 12 oz cans evaporated skim milk
1/4 cup chopped fresh sage
1/3 cup shredded parmesan cheese
2/3 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
6 no boil lasagna noodles
olive oil
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Toss squash with 2-3 tablespoons olive oil, salt and pepper in a 9" x 13" roasting pan. Roast until squash is browning on the edges and corners, about 40 minutes. Cook pancetta in a 9" x 13" roasting pan until quite crisp, 15-20 minutes.

Melt butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and whisk for about 3 minutes to take the raw flour edge off, but not enough to brown the flour. All at once add both cans evaporated skim milk and whisk to combine. Cook about 5 minutes, then add chopped sage, parmesan, salt and pepper (go easy on the salt--remember, you've got that salty pancetta going in; the sauce should have just enough salt not to taste bland, but not so much that it tastes actually salty). Cook until the sauce is thickened, about the consistency of half and half (if it reaches the consistency of heavy cream, it's slightly too thick--add some milk to thin). This will take about ten or 15 minutes.

In an 8" square pan coated with cooking spray, cover the bottom with about 1/2 cup of the sauce. Place 2 no boil lasagna noodles on top of the sauce. Spoon half of the squash over the noodles, and scatter with four slices of the pancetta that have been crumbled into small pieces. Spoon another half cup (or so--a little more if necessary) of sauce over the filling. Top with two more noodles, squash and pancetta, and sauce. Place the last two noodles on top of the squash filling, and pour the remaining sauce over them. Top with the shredded mozzarella.

Bake at 450 for 25 minutes or until bubbling and cheese is browned. Allow to rest for 5-10 minutes. Cut into four pieces and serve.

You Know What?

2008-12-15T13:07:00.001-08:00

I haven't blogged in...wow, a really long time. There are multiple reasons for this: in my family we have three birthdays between 10/29 and Thanksgiving. And then we have Thanksgiving. And then we have Christmas. It's pretty crazy at my house from the week before Halloween until New Year's.

So I must offer my sincere apologies and promise that I'll try to put something up between now and Christmas (I have a little dessert turnover that I took to Thanksgiving that's another of the "blank slate" type of offerings).

And maybe I'll muse on the various Christmas menus that we have coming up.

I'll be back!

Won Over

2008-11-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

I'm not quite sure what drew me to Brussels sprouts. My mother used to claim she loved them but she never served them. Perhaps my father didn't like them. Perhaps she just liked the idea of them. They are quite cute: like little baby cabbages. It's probably a blessing she never did make them; in our house when I was a kid, vegetables were supposed to be mush. Correction, they were supposed to be canned.

In talking to people I find that childhood memories of Brussels sprouts are what primarily deter them from eating them today. Moms who boiled the daylights out of the poor little things (the Brussels sprouts, not the kids) and then served up acrid-tasting balls of soggy leaves have ruined many of my friends for the joy that is Brussels sprouts.

Something I've recently discovered: almost any vegetable is improved by roasting. Cut into uniform pieces, tossed with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted at 450 degrees until the edges are browning just about all vegetables are transformed. I've roasted the obvious choices, the usual roast accompaniments, such as potatoes, carrots, and onions, but I've also roasted things like butternut squash, fennel, endive, and Brussels sprouts with great success. I even roasted some asparagus one time that almost turned my opinion of it.

Once I'd discovered Brussels sprouts and was tiring of roasting them with olive oil, recipes popped out at me. Sauteed, roasted, steamed (although I confess I've never steamed them for fear of turning them to the aforementioned mush), with bacon, cream, or cheese. I've cut them in half, shredded them, and pulled them apart into individual leaves. I can't recall having made a bad Brussels sprout recipe.

We recently had some friends to dinner, one of whom was a vegetarian. Since Fall was just upon us, I wanted to serve something that reflected the season. When I mentioned Brussels sprouts to my friend, she curled her lip. She had childhood-boiled-acrid-mush syndrome. I felt it was my duty to cure her. The problem I faced was that every recipe I could recall had bacon in it.

And then I remembered Donna Hay. In a feature on roasts in her magazine, she offered half a dozen sides, one of which was a Brussels sprout recipe that puts all others to shame. The sprouts are cooked under a soft blanket of cream mixed with cheese and mustard. The mustard was originally english mustard, but I swapped it out for my beloved Dijon, and upped the amount. It also recommends that you blanche them first, but I confess I always skip this step. Trim the spouts and cut them in half, mix up the cream with the cheese and mustard, spread the cream mixture over the sprouts and bake for 20 minutes. The result is heavenly and could convert even the most determined Brussels sprout hater on the spot. As evidence of this I can report that my friend who curled her lip was convinced.

So because I want everyone to love them as much as I do, I urge you to go get some Brussels sprouts and try this recipe. You too will fall completely in love with them.

Cheesy Mustard Brussels Sprouts
adapted from Donna Hay magazine #26
allegedly serves 6, but in fairly small portions; to my mind this is enough for four

1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup grated mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
Salt & freshly ground pepper to taste
12 Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Combine cream, cheeses, and mustard. Taste and add salt and pepper as needed (because of the parmesan, it may not need any salt, but a couple of grinds of pepper are recommended). Place sprouts in a 4-cup capacity baking dish in a single layer. Spoon cream mixture over the sprouts, covering them evenly. The mixture is pretty thick, so you'll wind up sort of blopping it on and spreading it with the back of the spoon. Bake 20 minutes or until golden and bubbling. Devour.

Prolonged Absence!

2008-11-03T10:22:00.001-08:00

Lawsy, I've been so remiss! I have a very good reason, however: I just started a brand new job, and you know how that is. First few weeks you have to actually be productive, prove yourself, learn everyone's name, figure out where the ladies room is. Stuff like that. Also, the computer I used to use for blogging belonged to my old company, which means I've been effectively without a decent computer to compose on and use for picture storage.

Now that I'm settling in, I promise to get back to posting more regularly. I've come to realize that I adore Fall and Winter vegetables even more than I like the Spring/Summer lot. Fresh tomatoes are great, but somehow I find myself much more excited about cabbage, cauliflower, endive, fennel, leeks, and butternut squash. I don't understand it, but I'm going with it. So far this month I've made:

Oven roasted fennel
Cauliflower gratin
Butternut squash gratin
Swiss chard gratin (yes, E, again)
Sauteed cabbage with oven roasted potatoes, cream, and Gruyere cheese

Every one of them was outstanding, and now that I'm resolving not to be such a blog slacker, I'll get start taking pictures of them and posting the recipes.

Sans Picture

2008-10-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

If you’re a food blogger yourself, you know that there are some recipes that are hard to share because they just won’t photograph well. I was thinking about this at breakfast this morning, when I was eating a scrambled egg with duxelles, and a leftover concoction of cabbage, roasted red potatoes, onions, bacon, and cream. Both had amazing flavor, and were just heavenly (even the unlikely sounding potatoes and cabbage for breakfast), but boy were they ugly.

I like my scrambled eggs pretty dry (for which read: not fluffy and pretty, but more flat-pancake-like), and that potato and cabbage thing wasn’t particularly attractive when it was fresh, much less as a leftover two days later. If I showed you pictures of it, you’d wonder why I was eating it at all. And it wouldn’t tempt you to make any of it. But I realized as I was reading "Beard on Food," the amazing compilation of Beard’s articles from his various syndicated columns, that I was finding it necessary to keep a packet of sticky flags next to me as I read, so I could mark those recipes I wanted to try. And there are no pictures, just Beard’s discussion of the subject, and the recipes themselves.

The recipe I bring you today is one for something that isn’t really a thing by itself, but is a component of other things. An ingredient, if you will. I refer to the duxelles that was in my scrambled eggs.

I made duxelles once before, but I don’t recall it being much of a standout. In the first place, I think it was microwaved, and in the second place, I believe it was a recipe from Cooking Light, so it wasn't the lavish affair with lots of butter that Beard presents. And as we all know, butter makes the world go ‘round.

For some reason, after reading the recipe for this, I was overwhelmed by an urge to make it. Really, I have no idea what drove this. Certainly it wasn’t a sweeping desire to finely chop two pounds of mushrooms (do you know how many mushrooms are in two pounds? A lot, that’s how many). Maybe it was the comment Beard makes at the end of the recipe: that the lot, cooked down and spooned into a screw top jar, could be kept in the refrigerator for at least two weeks. Maybe it was his ideas for what to do with the duxelles once it was made.

Whatever the reason, Sunday morning found me with my two pounds of mushrooms, a knife, and a cutting board. I chopped and chopped and chopped some more. I got interrupted to go to the grocery store (Sunday is Donut Day, you understand), and to make some peanut butter sandwiches and various other kid food. I used plain old white mushrooms, rinsed off, and chopped both the stems and the caps into a pretty fine mince. This is actually easier than it sounds because the shape of mushrooms lends them to quick chopping.

Once I had my bowls and bowls of chopped mushrooms, I undertook the cooking part of the recipe. All this really requires is a pretty substantial block of time when you’re going to be in and out of the kitchen with some regularity so you can stir the mixture. Beard says it will take 1 ½ to 2 hours, but I found that to really cook them slowly and evenly it was closer to three. The result, however, was just as he’d promised: a thick dense mass of mushrooms, very dark, almost black in color.

Maybe what drew me to this recipe was his suggestions of what to do with them. Because now that you have this stuff, the question isn’t what do I do with it, but what do I not do with it? Beard’s offerings include stacking crepes eight or nine high layered with the mushrooms, dotting them with butter and baking them. This is served sliced in wedges. The way I’ve been eating them is in scrambled eggs, also recommended. Additionally, I made some pork lo mein the other night that called for shiitake mushrooms. I had none, so I stirred in a generous spoonful or two of duxelles; the mushroom flavor they added was amazing.

They can be stirred into mashed potatoes or celery root, spooned over hamburgers, or combined with 4 or 5 tablespoons of shredded cheese (Gruyere and Cheddar are mentioned, I think blue would also be admirable), spread over baguette rounds and toasted under the broiler as an hors d’oeuvres. Add it to sauces, Beard urges: cream sauce, brown gravy.

I can think of a few dozen more things to do with it, starting with adding it to roasted Brussels sprouts after cooking, or warming it up and scattering it over oven roasted roma tomatoes with herbs. It would make a great addition to a steak pan sauce, with a little Dijon or whole grain mustard and a little beef broth, all stirred in after the steaks pan fry. Combine it with hot pasta, fresh baby spinach leaves, and some grated Parmesan cheese.

About the only places I wouldn’t use duxelles is in lemon meringue pie, or chocolate cake or something like that. Otherwise, it's a fantastic “secret” ingredient that requires some chopping and watching time, but it stores well and has so many uses that it's well worth the time to make it. Just don’t expect to be able to take pictures.

Duxelles
adapted from Beard on Food, by James Beard
makes about 1 1/2 cups of mixture

1 1/2 to 2 lbs white mushrooms (Beard suggests that this is a good way to use mushrooms that may be somewhat past their prime, since looks really don't count)
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallot or onion
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
2 teaspoons salt

Chop mushrooms fine, caps and stems. Beard calls for wringing them out in a kitchen towel before cooking, but I confess I barely squeezed out enough liquid to get the towel damp. If your mushrooms seem fairly dry, I think you could safely skip this step.

Melt butter in a large heavy skillet (mine is a 12" one) over medium heat. Add mushrooms and shallot or onion, and stir to combine with butter.

Cook over low heat, stirring every 10 to 15 minutes (or every now and then when you think of it) to move the mushrooms from the bottom of the pan to the top. Beard calls for adding more butter "as needed" but I found a whole stick to be ample, thanks. The duxelles are done when all the moisture has been drawn from the mushrooms and they are completely dehydrated, and are a thick blackish mass. They will appear almost burnt; they are not.

Add the salt and stir through. Spoon into a large jar or storage container and refrigerate. The mixture should be good for, as Beard says, at least two weeks. Use willy-nilly.

Picture Perfect: Concord Grape Jam Tart

2008-10-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you want to run out of your house shouting, “I did it! Look at this, world! It looks as nice as it did in the magazine!” You want to take out an ad in the paper, call the networks, and invite everyone in to view your creation.

Today was one of those days for me. As is often the case in my life, an ingredient and an idea came together to nudge me into the kitchen. The display of Concord grapes at my grocery store was too overwhelming to resist. They just smell so…grape. Most of the grapes these days don’t smell like much of anything, but Concord grapes, with their dusky purple skins, smell like grapes should smell. So I bought a pound or so of them, with no clear idea what I was going to do with them. A pricey whim, I’ll concede, but one that paid off.

To the rescue came the October issue of Martha Stewart Living, which contained—ta da!—a recipe for Concord Grape Jam Tart. A beautiful bit of pastry with a cut out of grapes on the top to both indicate the flavor and give you a peek at the dark mysterious filling within. And it’s nice that it’s something unusual; jam tart recipes abound, of course, but the idea of making one with a jam you’ve made yourself seemed unusual.

Since I’ve been brushing up on my pie crust in anticipation of an apple pie to be made with apples picked 100 yards away from my house, and a pear tart to made from pears picked 100 feet away from my own house, I felt this was a good practice session. Would it be beautiful? Maybe. Would it taste good? Undoubtedly, with the Concord grapes cooked down to a thick pasty filling.

So I am happy to report that it was both.

I’ll admit that my first pass at the jam was disappointing. It was too thin and never did thicken up, even when it was cool. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I returned the jam mixture to the heat and really cooked the daylights out of it. It almost boiled over, in fact. It still didn’t show any inclination to thicken up as it cooled, but since I hadn’t planned to make the tart until the next day anyway, I put it in the refrigerator and hoped for the best.

My efforts were rewarded with a thick purple product that was just what I was expecting it to be. This was, I knew, what it should be like: not as thick as a true jam, it ran off the spoon and left visible ribbon trails behind it. And it was so purple. You’d have to say purple a hundred times to truly express its purpleness. I’ve read that purple is “in” this season; if so, this is the tart the fashionistas should be eating (not that fashionistas eat tart I wouldn’t think, but if they did, this would be it). It has the sweetness and clear flavor of the grapes, with a wonderful almost creamy texture to it.

The dough pulled together without a hitch, and I rolled it out and prepared to line my tart pan. When it came to cutting out the grape design on the top, I hit a snag. The instructions call for using the non-decorative (if you will) end of two sizes of pastry tip to make the circles. I guess I got the low budget pastry tip kit, because all my tips were the same diameter. I used the plastic coupling ring instead, which was just fine. Also since I didn’t have the sanding sugar the recipe recommended, I used Turbinado.

Brace yourself—the top of this tart is going to sink as it cooks. It’s a bit of a shock to peer in at your beautiful creation and find that the top that floated so gracefully over the filling when you popped it in the oven has sunk down into the pan. But it turned out beautifully in spite of that. Just like the picture, in fact.

Concord Grape Jam Tart

from Martha Stewart Living, October 2008

makes 8-10 amazingly beautiful servings

For the dough

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 teaspoon salt

8 ounces (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2" pieces

1/4 cup ice water

For the jam

1 1/2 pounds Concord grapes, stems removed

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 cup granulated sugar

salt

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Coarse sanding sugar, for sprinkling

Sweetened fresh whipped cream, for serving

For the dough: Pulse flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor to combine. Add butter, evenly distributed around the workbowl, and pulse until combined and mixture resembles coarse meal, about 10 seconds. Add ice water, one tablespoon at a time, pulsing 2-3 times after each addition. When all water is added, dough will be just starting to hold together. Turn out onto a lightly floured board, shape dough into 2 disks, wrap each in plastic and refrigerate 1 hour (or up to 2 days).

For the jam: Combine grapes and lemon juice in a medium non-reactive saucepan over high heat. Cook, stirring frequently, until grapes release their juice, about 7 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing the grapes to release all the juice. There should be about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice (discard solids). Return juice to a saucepan over high heat, stir in sugar and a pinch of salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until the temperature registers 220 degrees F on a candy thermometer, about 8 minutes (despite my checking this repeatedly, this is the step where my jam flopped, and I put it back in the pan and boiled the daylights out of it, then let it cool down and refrigerated it overnight, and was successful). Let mixture cool, stirring occasionally.

Assemble the tart: On a lightly floured work surface, roll out each disk of dough to 1/8" thickness. Move one round to a baking sheet lined with parchment, and fit the other into a 9 1/2" tart pan with a removable bottom. Trim the dough in the tart pan, and freeze both the tart pan and the baking sheet for 15 minutes.

Using the wide base of two pastry tips (or two other approximately 1" round cutters--one slightly smaller than the other) cut clusters of holes in the dough on the baking sheet to resemble a bunch of grapes. Use a paring knife to cut out a stem-shaped piece of dough. Freeze until firm.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Spread 1 cup jam over the dough in the tart pan (I just spread it all in there--the remaining jam was approximately 1/4"; not really enough for "another use"). Brush top edge of dough with egg white. Slide the remaining dough over the top of the tart, centering the design. Press the edges to seal, and trim excess dough. Brush the top with egg, then sprinkle with sanding sugar. Refrigerate 30 minutes.

Bake tart for 15 minutes, remove tart from the oven and gently tap the pan on the counter to release any air bubbles. Return tart to the oven and bake an additional 15 to 20 minutes, or until crust is golden brown and filling is bubbling. Transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool. Remove tart from pan and transfer to a platter. Serve with lightly sweetened whipped cream, and call the media to witness your astonishingly beautiful feat.

Loveable: S'mores Cookies

2008-09-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

I believe I have found the world’s ugliest cookie. I made some cookies from a recipe in Gourmet magazine, and when I made a second batch, one of my nannies asked me what that log in the refrigerator was. I explained that they were the chocolate cookies that had been around the previous week. The other nanny was joyous that I was making another batch.

“I kept eating them,” she said, “And Kerina kept asking why I was eating those ugly cookies. I told her, they’re ugly, but they’re awesome!”

Indeed, I would say “ugly but awesome” sums these cookies up perfectly. In fact, so ugly are they that it took me half the batch just to find one that was attractive enough to photograph.

These are from a local company called Dish D’lish, run by a woman named Kathy Casey. The recipe was in the March issue of Gourmet magazine, in the You Asked for It section. A woman in the Seattle area said she goes out of her way to buy one of these whenever she flies out of Sea-Tac. Since I don’t fly (except in extreme situations), I realized would probably never get one of these cookies unless I made the recipe. And since there was no picture of the cookies with the recipe, I had to assume I was doing things correctly and that ugly was part of their charm.

The first time I made them I forgot to stir the candy bits into the cookie dough. The second time I made them I did, but I realized that I actually liked them better without them. Both times the recipe made more like 11 cookies than 10 (I'm not very good at rolling out the log to exactly 8" long).

Also the first time, I rolled the dough out into a log on a floured board, but didn’t like the look of the white flour on the chocolate dough. Remembering my Martha Stewart wisdom, I recalled the tip to “flour” cake pans for chocolate cake with cocoa to avoid that white-flour-on-the-outside-of-a-chocolate-cake look. I dusted the exterior of the dough log with cocoa powder. When baked off, the cookies had an extra hint of chocolate that was subtle, but interesting.

The topping is the real gotcha on these cookies. You have to mound the marshmallow goopiness perfectly in the center of the raw dough or it melts and slithers off onto the baking sheet, making it look like the topping was caught in the act of trying to escape when you opened the oven door and pulled the cookies out. If you manage to calculate the exact area of the cookie circle using the formula you remember from geometry, of course (isn’t it π x r squared?) and blop the stuff in the exact middle point, you wind up with a pool of melted marshmallow goodness that turns lightly golden. Using one large marshmallow half per cookie (cut around the equator), instead of the minis, also helps the appearance a bit. It’s still not very pretty, but it’s tasty.

I think the dough for these cookies could be used for more than just s’mores cookies. I see melting other things on top of them, such as caramels, or starlight mints. This bears consideration.

My one beef with these cookies is that after you make them, you’re left with most of a can of sweetened condensed milk to use up. It only calls for a quarter cup of it, and then you’re left with at least another 9 or so ounces of the stuff. I guess the solution is to make more ugly cookies.

I even put it on a really pretty plate in the hopes that it would make the cookie more visually appealing. Fail.

Chocolate-Toffee S'more Cookies
from Gourmet magazine, March 2008
makes 10-11 jumbo cookies

For Dough
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (8 oz.) package toffee baking bits

For Topping
1 1/2 (5" x 2 1/2") graham crackers
1 cup mini marshmallows (or 5 large marshmallows halved through their equator)
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk

Make the dough: combine flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Cream together butter, shortening, and sugars in the bowl of an electric mixer until fluffy, then beat in the egg and vanilla. With the mixer on low, add in the flour mixture and mix until the dough just comes together. Stir in toffee bits.

Shape dough into a log 8" long, 3" in diameter on a board dusted with flour (or a combination of flour and cocoa powder) with floured hands. Flatten the ends and chill, wrapped in plastic, for 6 hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment. In a food processor, grind graham crackers into fine crumbs (about 1/4 cup). Combine crumbs with marshmallows and sweetened condensed milk (mixture will be very sticky).

Cut dough crosswise into 10-3/4" thick rounds. Place 2-3 slices on each baking sheet (these cookies spread about 5" during baking), and top with 1 heaping tablespoon of marshmallow topping, placing it in the center of each slice (this is where a single large marshmallow is easier than a clump of the smaller ones).

Bake cookies 18-22 minutes until topping is golden and cookies are baked through. Slide onto a rack to cool completely. Finish remaining cookies in the same manner.

Mystified: Fried Green Tomatoes

2008-09-16T11:11:00.000-07:00

I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually come around to love fried green tomatoes. You don’t come from a Southern family and not have some genetic predisposition towards fried chicken, grits, and fried green tomatoes, and my family is about as Southern as you get (my dad grew up in the north part of Louisiana and Mississippi, my mom in the southern part of Virginia). My dad used to tell me about the kinds of things his aunts made for dinner when he was young: whipped potatoes as light as down made without a single electric appliance, only a wooden spoon; greens cooked to the point of disintegration in pot likker; lemon meringue pies with piles of meringue that were so high they had to crane their necks to see one another across the table. And of course every time my grandmother came to visit she’d make pralines. Real pralines with fresh pecans she’d brought with her that were, as I recall, merely pools of brown sugar and butter studded with whole pecans. I know there was more to them than that, but I still remember the grainy almost gritty texture of the praline, and the meaty heft of the nut as I bit into one. That doesn’t sound very nice, but I assure you, they were sublime.

I fought fried green tomatoes for years, even refusing my sister-in-law’s urging to try the very best ones in the whole world at Kudzu Café in Atlanta (a restaurant that has sadly closed its doors). I wasn’t wild about raw red tomatoes, and I was pretty darned sure that raw green ones—even if they were technically cooked—weren’t going to go over well. This just goes to show, I think, how wrong one person can be. Last week when we got several green tomatoes in our CSA share, I couldn’t really think of anything to do with them but coat them in cornmeal and fry them. I can’t even put my finger on what changed my mind. Generally I can trace my whims to a specific incident or occurrence that drove a small wedge in the sheer rock face of my refusal to accept the food I was so vehemently rejecting, and later caused my stubborn resistance to cleave in half. But not in this case.

I have now come to the conclusion that the reason to grow tomatoes is so you can have an endless supply of fried green tomatoes. They require some fiddling--what with dredging them in flour, dipping them in buttermilk, and then dredging them in corn meal--and of course you do shallow fry them, so they’re not the healthiest of fare, but oh my. Tangy and firm in the middle, light crisp crust on the outside, I never dreamed they could be so good.

Although I ate a fair number at dinner, the next morning the memory lingered on, and with the enthusiasm that only a new convert shows, I took a chance and heated the leftovers up for breakfast. I was pleasantly surprised; usually fried things aren’t as good when reheated. Their crust tends to get mushy, and the overall quality suffers. I wouldn’t say the tomatoes were as phenomenally good as they were the night before, but I didn’t push them off my plate either. I used the toaster oven and I think that may have had something to do with it; if I’d microwaved them they’d have gotten soggy for sure.

The recipe I used was from the Food + Wine annual cookbook for 2007 (which means it was published in an issue in 2006). Originally it was a fried green tomato salad, with the tomatoes served over frisee with bacon with a warm vinaigrette. In retrospect, this would be very good too, although my worry is that the vinaigrette would sog the crust of the tomatoes and make them just a shade less spectacular. In this case we used the recipe for the tomatoes only and let the rest fall by the wayside. Interestingly, since then I have gone through my cookbooks to find possible variations on fried green tomatoes to see if there’s another version out there I want to try, and they seem to all be almost identical. Flour, eggs (or buttermilk or milk), and cornmeal. It doesn’t appear that many people have deviated from that formula. I still have some more research to do, but preliminary findings suggest I’ve already got the perfect combination of ingredients.

Now I’m delighted that we planted all our tomato plants so late; originally I was in a fret that I wouldn’t get many red tomatoes. With the very chilly start we had to summer out here, we didn’t get the plants in the ground until almost July 4th. This means that by the time frost is threatening I’ll have at least several dozen green tomatoes, and a watertight reason to eat fried green tomatoes at nearly every meal for as long as they last.

Fried Green Tomatoes
adapted from Food + Wine Magazine, August 2006
makes about 12 slices, or two dinner servings + two breakfast servings

4 large green (unripe) tomatoes, sliced crosswise 1/2 inch thick
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
Cayenne pepper
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon water
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon dried thyme
Canola oil, for frying

In a large bowl, combine the tomatoes with the garlic and olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and let stand for 10 minutes.

In a pie plate or shallow bowl, combine 3/4 cup of the flour with salt, pepper and cayenne. In another pie plate, whisk the eggs with the water. In a third pie plate, combine the cornmeal with the remaining 1/2 cup of flour and the thyme and season with salt, pepper and cayenne. Line a baking sheet with wax paper. Drain the tomatoes. Working with 1 slice at a time, dip the tomatoes in the flour, tapping off any excess, then dip in the beaten egg and then in the cornmeal; press to help it adhere. Transfer the breaded slices to the prepared baking sheet.

In a large skillet, heat 1/4 inch of canola oil until shimmering. Fry the tomato slices in batches over moderately high heat, turning once, until golden and crisp, 5 to 6 minutes per batch. Transfer to a rack lined with paper towels to drain. Sprinkle tomatoes with salt.

Passionate: Bright Lights Chard Gratin

2008-09-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

As obsessive as I clearly am when I find something I like (please see Exhibit A: Blackberries), I can’t believe I haven’t shared with you my current obsession. I know this may sound a little strange at first, but hear me out. My current love, the food with which I am so taken that I actually planted it in my own garden to ensure an immediate and almost unending supply thereof, is Rainbow Chard.

Right, I know.

Tracy, chard? It looks like some weird weed and it has a name that sounds like the discarded by-product of the cheese making process. What you say is true, but I can’t help it. I’ve fallen and I’ve fallen hard. And work with me here: for once my insatiable love is for something healthy. Oh yes, at this point I’m still in the smother-it-with-white-sauce-and-buttered-crumbs stage of the relationship, but at least I’m not deep frying it. I maintain that the American public can be gently guided to love any food provided that it’s either breaded and deep fried, or smothered in a cheesy white sauce. I mean, really: calamari. I rest my case.

But back to my newfound passion. It started turning up in my CSA share each week, and I thought, what do I do with this? Enter Deborah Madison’s “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets.” She has a recipe for Bright Lights Chard Gratin. In her introduction she says this recipe is just as good if you use some spinach or other green, plus the chard. Well there you go: I have no fear of spinach. Spinach and I are great pals. If I could get spinach, along with my old friends goat cheese, cream sauce, and bread crumbs, to introduce me to chard, why, I’d be at a party with a whole lot of folks I knew, and only one stranger in the mix. I could ease out of my comfort zone only slightly, and maybe make a new friend.

Since then I’ve eased further and further, and chard and I are now joined at the hip. I bought a packet of seeds and planted it in my garden, and the other night I made an all chard gratin with a combination of my CSA bunch and a fistful plucked from my own crop. It was still slathered in béchamel sauce, but it was all chard, no spinach invited (no offense, spinach; I still love you). I figure one of these days I’ll be brave enough to try a simple sauté, with the stems cooked first, and the leaves added after, all in just a touch of butter with some garlic, salt and pepper. But baby steps for baby feet, and I think my next experiment will be crisp chard cakes on a bed of creamy spinach (recipe in one of my new acquisitions, the Food + Wine 2008 cookbook). Still a chard/spinach combo, and still with the cream sauce and crumbs, but the cream sauce isn't in with the chard, and the spinach is a separate entity altogether. I can hardly wait.

Bright Lights Chard Gratin

from Deborah Madison’s “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets.”
serves 4 as a main dish; 6 as a side dish; or, if you're me, two days in a row for lunch

2 pounds chard, including half the stems (or an equal amount of greens, such as spinach, nettles or sorrel)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 onion, finely chopped
sea salt, and freshly ground pepper
1 cup fresh bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced
3 tablespoons chopped dill or parsley
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup milk, cream, or a mixture of cream and stock
1 cup crumbled fresh goat cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F and lightly oil a 2-quart gratin dish.

Separate the leaves and chard stems. Wash the leaves well, then coarsely chop them. Trim the ragged edges off the stems, wash them well, and dice them into small pieces.

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a wide skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and chard stems and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion has begun to brown, about 20 minutes. (Note: I found this took about 5-7 minutes, not 20; maybe my heat was higher. In any event, it shouldn’t be left unattended, because you may find this goes faster than the original recipe says it will.) Add the chard leaves (and any other greens you may be using), sprinkle with 1 teaspoon salt, and cook until they’re wilted and tender, about 10 minutes (interestingly, this was about the correct amount of time).

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a small skillet and add the bread crumbs, garlic and dill or parsley. Cook, stirring for about a minute, then scrape the crumbs into a bowl and return the pan to the heat.

Melt the last tablespoon of butter, stir in the flour, then whisk in the milk (I used plain old 2%). Simmer for 5 minutes, season with 1/2 teaspoons salt, and add to the chard mixture. Add the cheese, then taste the mixture, correct for salt, and season with pepper. (Note: I actually added the goat cheese to the white sauce in the pan and whisked it until the cheese was melted, then poured it over the chard mixture. This was successful also.)

Pour the mixture into the prepared dish and cover with the bread crumbs. Bake until heated through and golden on the surface, about 25 minutes. (The sauce will also be bubbling a bit.) Let settle a few minutes before serving.

Eat, and vow to make again as soon as humanly possible!

A Collection: Things I Never Thought I Would Say (or would never have to say)

2008-09-06T17:03:00.001-07:00

1) We don't clean the furniture with fruit

2) Don't throw the chicken (N.B. we were talking about a live chicken in this instance)

3) Yes, I'll get you some ketchup for your pizza

4) Peanut butter is not evil

5) Cheese and crackers really aren't a proper breakfast

6) So what if she got pizza sauce in her hair? She's still going to bed in 5 minutes!

I'm quite sure there's more. These are the ones that came to mind right after I said #3.

Rustic: Blackberry Pie

2008-09-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry to keep going on about blackberries, but if you live in the Pacific Northwest (or anyplace else where blackberries abound) you’ll be sympathetic. Of course if you live in a place where you have to buy blackberries at four bucks a pint, as I used to, perhaps you’ll be somewhat sympathetic (and maybe a little envious) as well. They’re just everywhere and they’re free. I spent the weekend making blackberry pie, blackberry compote, and the lovely delicately flavored pound cake in Suzanne Goin’s “Sunday Suppers at Lucques” that goes by the name Pastel Vasco, which is both laced with the blackberry compote, as well as served with it. And I have more grand plans in the works for my little pretties.

Picking blackberries is very soothing activity, in spite of the danger of the thorns. Your only focus is the next berry. Sunday morning I took five children blackberry picking (four of them mine, one the neighbors’—not as insane as it sounds, since the blackberry bushes are a hundred yards from the house next door to us). The children picked and ate and squabbled over who had found the biggest berry. I noticed the almost opalescent quality of the berries after a brief but heavy rain that morning.

Blackberries are very friendly bushes, almost too friendly; if you move in too close, they begin to embrace you, their little stickers gently but firmly hooking into your clothing. I also noticed the surprising lack of spider webs in the thicket (with relief, I might add; spiders weird me out). I saw only one web the whole time I was in there, and even though there was a cluster of big perfect berries right behind it, I left the web intact in deference to a spider who had been brave enough to make his home there.

When I got them home I made the blackberry pie. The recipe is from Mario Batali’s mom (published in the August Food + Wine), and is pretty basic. The crust for this is a straightforward combination of vegetable shortening, flour, sugar, and ice water. I’m out of practice with handling pie crust, but this one turned out well, despite a few tears. In fact, I think the best way to describe the visual outcome of this pie is “rustic.” I always find rustic to be a useful term that’s employed to describe things that are really just kind of ugly and ragged. But since this pie turned out just like that, we’ll go with rustic.

The filling is nothing more than blackberries, lemon juice, and sugar. I discovered that I had used all of my white sugar and forgotten to pick up any more at the grocery store on Saturday morning, so I substituted brown sugar for half the white and crossed my fingers.

The result, while ugly (for which read: rustic), was exactly what was promised to me. The crust was melty and tender and the berry filling bubbled up around the edges of the crust and made little pools of purple sticky on the top. Because I can’t stand the suspense in situations like this, I had done a test to make sure the crust would be good. I took the trimmings and baked them separately on another sheet until they were turning goldeny brown, then pulled them out and tasted them. They offered me a number of possibilities if I chose to skip the sugar, up the salt, and think savory.

The baking time was about an hour in my oven, and I found a crust shield to be a necessity in the last half hour of cooking. I do think the instruction I had to let the pie sit for four hours was a key to the success, because while it was still somewhat juicy and runny, the berries had set up to a certain degree, giving it some structure. It wasn’t just blackberry soup with crust croutons. I ate my piece straight, without ice cream so I could really get a feel for the flavor and sweetness of the filling, instead of being overwhelmed by the supplemental sugar. It had a nice balance, and while I’m informed that ice cream made it even better, it was pretty darned good without.

Marilyn Batali's Blackberry Pie
from Food + Wine Magazine, August 2008
1 9" pie (1-8 servings)

Crust
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup solid vegetable shortening, chilled
5 tablespoons ice water

Filling
2 pints (1 1/2 pounds, or about 20-30 minutes worth of picking) blackberries
1/2 cup sugar (I used 1/4 cup white, and about 1/4 cup of light brown; it came out fine)
3 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, and salt. Add the shortening and use a pastry blender or two knives to cut it into the flour, until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the ice water and stir with a fork until the dough is moistened. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gather into a ball. Knead 2 or 3 times until the dough just comes together. Divide in half, flatten each into a disk, and refrigerate until well chilled, at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Let the dough stand at room temperature 10 minutes. Working on a lightly floured surface, roll out one disk of the dough to a 12" round. Transfer to a 9" pie plate Roll out remaining dough to an 11" round.

In a bowl, stir the blackberries with the sugar, flour, and lemon juice, lightly mashing the berries. Pour the berries into the prepared crust and sprinkle the butter cubes on top. Brush the overhanging pastry with water and carefully set the top crust over the berry filling. Press the edges of the dough together and trim the overhang to 1". Fold the edge under itself and crimp decoratively (or, in my case, messily). Cut 4 slits in the top crust.

Bake in the center of the oven (with a cookie sheet or piece of foil underneath it) for about an hour and 15 minutes, until the bottom crust is golden and the fruit is bubbling. If necessary, cover the edge with the foil for the last few minutes of baking. Let the pie cool at least four hours before serving.

Resolved: Two Easy Luches

2008-08-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, when I was a young bride…well, scratch that because I got married at almost 30, so I guess I was technically never a “young” bride. Anyway, back when I first got married, before I lost my mind and had four children (and the jury is still out on which of those things happened first), weekday lunches used to be leftovers from things I’d made for dinner the night before. My coworkers used to heat up their Marie Callendar frozen dinners while I was zapping my Star Anise Simmered Chicken with baby bok choy.

On weekends lunch was a fairly elaborate event. If we didn’t go out, I made something at home. I remember one time making mushroom crepes from an old Cooking Light. The recipe for these started out along the lines of, “Make the crepes…” and I did. I made crepes from scratch, sautéed mushrooms, made a light Béchamel sauce for them, and then baked them. It was through this recipe that we discovered that portabella mushrooms don’t sit well with Alex (although the recipe calls for generic mushrooms plus shiitakes, I recall that I used Baby Bellas, which resulted in…well, anyway, we don’t eat portabella mushrooms anymore, let’s just leave it at that).

But then I began accumulating children, and now lunch is a far simpler affair, even those I take on weekdays. Recently I found two recipes in Cooking Light’s Dinner Tonight column that turned out to be godsends. I didn’t make them for dinner; I made them on Sunday afternoon and immediately transferred them to containers for weekday lunches. Because each recipe made only two servings, it was perfect: one for me, one for Alex, and two days’ worth of lunches were taken care of.

One of my problems with making something like soup or risotto or a casserole is that I find I get really tired of it long before the week ends, especially if it was a dinner one of the weekend nights. I used to have a friend who couldn’t eat the same type of food two days in a row: if she’d had Mexican the night before, we couldn’t have Mexican for lunch the next day, even if the “Mexican” she’d had the night before was the Rice and Beans Weight Watchers Smart Ones frozen dinner. I’m not quite to that point, but I have discovered I can’t eat the same thing for lunch more than two days in a week without getting bored.

But another thing that happens every year around the end of summer is that I start to make resolutions. When I was in school, I always resolved at the end of August that I would do my homework on Friday nights this year, not leave it until Sunday afternoon; that I would study harder; that I would be really organized and keep my paper and books tidy. September seems a good time for resolutions, with the new school year starting, so even though I don't think I've ever kept a "school year" resolution (or a New Year's resolution either, for that matter), I keep making them. This year one of my resolutions is to take lunch to work more often, and find ways to keep myself from getting bored. These two recipes got me off on the right foot.

The shrimp curry recipe comes together in literally minutes (I think it took longer for me to thaw the shrimp than to chop the onion), and the pasta takes only a little longer than that. They give a time of around 40 minutes, but if you cook the pasta while you’re making the sauce, it’s really only about 20 or so minutes. I upped the curry paste in the shrimp recipe, and it was a little fiery (tempered by the basmati rice I had with it). If you like things spicy (like Alex does), you’ll want more than a ¼ teaspoon of curry paste; if you’re a wimp like me keep it to a ¼ or a ½ teaspoon. Also my shrimp were about an ounce each, which means if you want to taste it before you dish it up, you should add a “tasting shrimp.” Normally I leave out the crushed red pepper when recipes call for it, but I was feeling daring when I made the ziti, so I left it in, and it does add a nice kick.

And so here, to encourage you to take your lunch to work, or to give you two fast dinner choices, are the recipes from the current Cooking Light (September 2008):

Thai Coconut Shrimp Curry
from Cooking Light, September 2008
makes two servings, perfect for lunch

1 teaspoon canola oil

1/2 cup chopped onion

1/4 teaspoon red curry paste (such as Thai Kitchen)

1 teaspoon sugar

12 ounces large shrimp, peeled and deveined

1/3 cup light coconut milk

2 teaspoons fish sauce

1/4 cup chopped green onions

1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil

1. Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and curry paste to pan, and sauté 1 minute, stirring occasionally. Stir in sugar; sauté 15 seconds. Add shrimp; sauté 3 minutes or until shrimp are done, stirring frequently. Stir in coconut milk and fish sauce; cook 30 seconds or until thoroughly heated. Remove from heat; stir in green onions and basil.

Nutritional Info
CALORIES 255(26% from fat); FAT 7.4g (sat 2.6g,mono 1.8g,poly 1.9g); IRON 4.6mg; CHOLESTEROL 259mg; CALCIUM 111mg; CARBOHYDRATE 10.2g; SODIUM 740mg; PROTEIN 36.1g; FIBER 1.1g

Ziti with Spinach, Cherry Tomatoes, and Gorgonzola
from Cooking Light, September 2008
makes lunch for two!

4 ounces uncooked ziti (you're right--that's penne in the picture; we didn't have ziti--penne works too)

1/2 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper

1 garlic clove, minced

6 tablespoons half-and-half

3 tablespoons Gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

1 cup fresh spinach

1. Cook pasta according to package directions, omitting salt and fat; drain.
2. Heat extra-virgin olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add cherry tomatoes, salt, crushed red pepper, and minced garlic to pan; cook 1 minute, stirring occasionally. Stir in half-and-half and Gorgonzola cheese; cook 2 minutes or until slightly thick, stirring constantly. Stir in spinach and pasta; cook 1 minute or until spinach wilts, tossing occasionally.

Nutritional Info
CALORIES 335(28% from fat); FAT 10.4g (sat 5.9g,mono 2.4g,poly 0.4g); IRON 2.6mg; CHOLESTEROL 26mg; CALCIUM 129mg; CARBOHYDRATE 49.9g; SODIUM 485mg; PROTEIN 12.3g; FIBER 3.6g

Gratitude: Corn Blackberry Muffins

2008-08-24T14:03:00.001-07:00

At last it’s blackberry season! It seems that perhaps they were later this year than in years past. Maybe as a result of the very cold spring and early summer we had here in the Pacific Northwest. But finally the brambles are showing the dark drops that are the blackberries we all love. I find it hard to complain too much about blackberry brambles; it seems a bit churlish and hypocritical to grumble and moan about them for ten months of the year, and for the other two revel in their gifts. So you’ll never hear me complaining about the blackberry bushes taking over the yard (besides, I don’t have to keep them under control; that’s Alex’s job).

I know I’m not the only one enjoying blackberries these days. Everywhere I go on the island I see people with plastic containers. Yesterday on my way home from dropping my son off at a friend’s house to play, I even saw a woman walking along the road, clearly headed somewhere, popping berries into her mouth that she’d picked from bushes along the way. Sure they’re an invasive weed, but how can you be mean about something that provides you with a free, portable snack?

This morning started out beautiful and sunny, just the perfect day for something blackberry. About 11 a.m. the clouds blew over, and the breeze kicked up, and as I type this I’m listening to the rain on the porch roof, and hearing it patter on the driveway. It may be October now, but this morning it was brilliantly August. My sons had some friends coming for a playdate, and their mom was going to be staying so she could get a house tour and chat over coffee. I am a firm believer that you can’t have coffee without something to nibble, and also that Sunday morning demands a little time spent in the kitchen making something special. Add to that the whole summer-blackberry thing, and I immediately went running for Sara Foster’s “Fresh Every Day” cookbook, which contains an admirable recipe for Corn Blackberry Muffins.

These are like sunshine in cake form, studded with blackberries. They’re August in a muffin. They can be made with frozen blackberries, but since my kids have been out picking blackberries with their nannies every day this week, we had a whole container of them in the refrigerator. They’re going to make cobbler next week, although my oldest son declared he didn’t like blackberries. “Then what,” I asked, “do you eat when you make the cobbler?”

“The cake part!” he declared. Of course. I don’t know why I ask these questions.

But I digress. These muffins turned out an outstanding product; the muffin has a slightly grainy quality, a result of the cornmeal, and the blackberries are folded in gently so that they remain whole and explode when you bite into them, releasing their juices and flooding your taste buds with summer. You could make them with any fruit, but since blackberries are free in my neighborhood, I can’t think of anything else I’d use. And, as Sara Foster says, cornmeal and blackberries just go together. The slightly corny flavor of these muffins does seem to marry beautifully with the sweet-tart richness of the blackberry.

I may be making soup for dinner if this rain keeps up, but earlier today we had summer for a few fleeting hours. So really, we have nothing to complain about.

Corn Blackberry Muffins
from Sara Foster’s “Fresh Every Day” cookbook
makes 12 large muffins--and I mean large; for a minute I was afraid they were going to do that overflow thing! They didn't.

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 ½ cups yellow corn meal
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
¾ cup well-shaken buttermilk
¾ cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I used way more than this; possibly as much as 3 tablespoons—I heart vanilla)
1 ½ cups fresh or frozen blackberries

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line 12 large muffin cups with liners, or spray with vegetable oil spray.

Stir the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt together in a large bowl.

In another large bowl, combine the eggs, buttermilk and vanilla together. Gradually add the flour mixture to the buttermilk mixture, stirring just until the dry ingredients are moist and no flour is visible. Do not overmix or muffins will be tough. Gently fold in the blackberries.

Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin cups with a 1/3 cup measure, or with an ice cream scoop. Fill tins to just below the top of the liner. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the tops spring back when pressed lightly and a toothpick or cake tester comes out clean. Allow muffins to cool for 5 minutes in the pan. Turn out on a rack to cool a little more. These are best fresh from the oven.

Annoyed: A Form of Retaliation

2008-08-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

Last night we had a little tiff. Well, not really. Someone made a comment that ticked me off, and then repeatedly asked me what was wrong. "Are you OK?" he kept saying, "Are you sure?" I kept nodding and shrugging, because the truth was, I was hacked off at him, but it was up to him to figure that out, frankly (he never did; I just got over it).

At one point he asked if there was anything he could do to help (this all transpired while I was making dinner), and I said no, but later it occurred to me that there were a number of excellent forms of revenge open to a person who was cooking against a person who had said something completely boorish and insensitive.

Here's what I came up with. You can make the person:

Pick thyme leaves
Make pesto by hand
Shell fresh peas for 8 or more people
Peel tomatoes or peaches
Toast and grind spices using only a mortar and pestle (double whammy here—not only do you make him pay, but you remind him in living color that you don’t have a spice grinder)
Pit cherries
Make elaborate cocktails for you, then take one sip of them and ignore them until they’re warm
Shell, toast and deskin hazelnuts
Unwrap caramels or other candies
Pick through dried beans or lentils looking for stones and other impurities

It was such a nothing comment that now I can't even recall what it was about (lie; I remember it with sparkling clarity) but this list lives on in my mind and will one day be called into service.

(Sorry there's no picture with this, but really, what would I take a picture of? Me standing at the kitchen counter looking peeved? The insensitive boor who made the comment?)

Lame: Why I Haven't Posted in Awhile

2008-08-16T09:00:00.001-07:00

So I received a politely worded complaint (Molly) that I hadn't posted anything and that perhaps the pea soup had lost the allure and glamour that it had a week or so ago.

Well, yes. Here's what happened.

I tried to make some Jam Thumbprint Cookies from a Shaker cookbook I have. I don't know if the Shakers were just more talented makers of Jam Thumbprint Cookies than I am, or if the recipe is a total sham or what, because these were a complete flop. They started out looking quite promising (as you can see), but after I baked them, the cookies refused to hold up their end of the bargain and contain the jam at all, and the jam melted everywhere and all I can say is thank God I used a Silpat, because everything came right off with no problem.

So I need to try these again (because they had awesome flavor and if I can just get the darned jam to stay in the darned cookie, we'll be good to go), and I need to write up some nice peanut butter cookies I made last week and I promise that I'll get a few things up here this week and next for your viewing pleasure.

I'm going on vacation for a couple of days this coming week so while I may not be able to post a lot, the hope is I'll be able to cook a lot and have something to post. Sometimes I think I'd have been better off starting a political blog; at least those write ups just depend on other people doing something and me forming my opinion of their behavior. Then again, that would involve my having to follow politics closely, which would probably cause me to start drooling and/or fall into a comatose state because I personally find politics to be stupefyingly boring. Food is way more interesting. And really, if all the politicians in the world were to disappear, would we continue to exist? What if all the food in the world were to disappear? See? So we can clearly deduce which is more important.

With that, I'm off the to the farmer's market!

In the Bag: Creamy Pea and Chicken Soup

2008-08-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

This is supposed to be an entry to this month’s “In the Bag” competition over at A Slice of Cherry Pie. If it’s too late to make the roundup, then it’s just a post of a yummy soup.

Here in the Pacific Northwest we have an interesting summer phenomenon. We call it “Fall.” You see, summer kind of comes and goes. One day will be beastly hot and send us all scurrying for the swimming pool and thinking about what kind of salad to have for dinner. The next day we’ll need windbreakers in the morning, and there will be enough breeze all day long to make you feel like a little soup for lunch might be a good thing. At first this sort of annoyed me; come on, I though, pick a season. But now I rather like it. When I lived back east, in an area known for five months in a row of weather forecasts that consisted of, “Hazy, hot and humid, with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms,” we’d get to early August and I’d start thinking, “An overcast drizzly cool day would be a pretty welcome break right about now…” but it seldom happened. Now it happens all the time.

And so, because of this phenomenon, I created this soup using some springy/summery vegetables, but with a little weight in the form of the chicken to warm you and stay with you a bit. I bought the peas, but I had a yellow squash that came in my Community Sponsored Agriculture box. It was perfectly fine, but had some appearance issues. It wasn’t really pretty enough to just eat steamed or sautéed, but there was nothing wrong with it, so I added it to this soup. You could just add another half cup or so of peas if you didn’t have the squash, or you could use zucchini or another summer squash in its place.

In keeping with the In the Bag ingredients for this month, I added some grated parmesan at the end for flavor and a little saltiness. Be sure you taste the soup after adding the parmesan, but before adding any additional salt. Depending on your palate, you may find the parmesan (and the pancetta used at the beginning) make it salty enough.

This soup is going to be my lunch for the next few days, along with a slice of toasted bread with radish butter (a stick of butter with a half dozen radishes that have been diced up fine mashed into it). If you have an unseasonably cool summer day, you might give this a try. It would also be fine with frozen peas as an early Spring luncheon or starter to an early Spring dinner. It’s a lovely shade of pale green flecked with the darker green tarragon, and has the flavor of the peas and the chicken, but with a hint of licorice from the tarragon.

Creamy Pea and Chicken Soup
makes 6 servings

1 teaspoon olive oil
4 slices pancetta
1 ½ pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts, cubed
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium yellow squash, cubed (optional, or you could use zucchini, or just another handful or two of shelled peas)
1 ½ - 2 cups shelled fresh peas
2 cups chicken broth
½ cup heavy cream
½ cup grated parmesan, plus extra for garnish
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon
Salt and pepper

In a Dutch oven or large sauce pan over medium high heat crisp the pancetta in a teaspoon of olive oil. Remove from pan and reserve. Add cubed chicken and brown, about 7 minutes. Remove chicken from pan with a slotted spoon and reserve.

Reduce heat to medium, add onion to pan and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add peas and squash and cook until soft, about 7 to 10 minutes. Add chicken broth and bring to a simmer. Remove pan from heat and puree peas, squash, onion with a handheld immersion blender, or in a stand blender (take care when pureeing hot liquids in a blender; remove the center venting piece from the blender, but hold a dishcloth over the opening to avoid having the hot liquid spray everywhere, making a huge mess and potentially burning you and anyone in the vicinity). The soup can be as chunky or as smooth as you like. I left some very small pieces of vegetable in mine to give it a little heft.

Return the pureed soup to the heat and add the reserved chicken. Bring the liquid to a bare simmer and let cook until the chicken is cooked through, about 5 more minutes.

Add ½ cup cream, ½ cup grated parmesan, and 1 tablespoon chopped tarragon. Stir to distribute through the liquid. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

To serve, ladle soup into bowls, and scatter with reserved pancetta, chopped, and a scattering of grated parmesan.

Frothing: I never really liked these people that much anyway...

2008-07-28T17:37:00.001-07:00

and now I really don't like them. The America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country folks are getting a leetle too big for their britches, in my estimation. You can read the whole story here on Melissa's site.

The gist of the situation is that the PR rep for this group emailed a blogger who posted a version of a Cook's Kitchen potato salad she'd made. She changed several ingredients (four, actually) but credited Cook's Kitchen as the original source or inspiration. The PR woman (again, my opinion, although I am far from alone) was pretty snippy about the whole thing. We don't allow our recipes to be modified. They are tested up to a hundred times and they work. I read, "Your modifications to our recipes can't possibly improve them; they are the pinnacle of recipe perfection." Well, sorry, but they're not.

Melissa herself makes this point: they don't allow it. I would assert that once you publish a recipe, you're putting it out there for all to take a whack at. Granted, they can't republish your instructions word for word, but they sure can make your recipe and say, "Not bad, but you know, it needed more cumin. And maybe some ground coriander. And I bet if I added a little Old Bay seasoning it would make it interesting..." and they're off.

Recipes are a creative process. Part of the joy in food blogging is seeing what other people have done with a recipe. I myself had my eyes opened by food blogs in which people read magazines--magazines that I myself receive--and saw things I never saw in them. People taking what had been side dishes, or accompaniments, or even garnishes, and turning them into something amazing. And they credit those sources by saying "adapted from" or "based on the recipe in" and I myself see nothing wrong with this. Good lord, if it weren't for this kind of tinkering, we'd all still be cooking from Apicius or Escoffier. Or burning up slabs of dead buffalo in campfires.

Food is subjective. What tastes good to me may not taste good to you. The same goes for music, books, art, you name it. Melissa also publishes an excerpt from a Washington Post article from 2003 quoting Christopher Kimball (surely one of the ten silliest asses in America today, at least as he's characterized in this article) saying that changing one of their (ATC's that is) recipes is like saying you're going to play a Bach sonata but change the key. Surprise, Mr. Kimball, people do things like that all the time. Wander through a museum and watch a painter reproducing a great work on his or her own canvas. Read a book that's a pastiche of another work. Hell, watch The Lion King and ask yourself: who did it better? Shakespeare or Disney? You'll notice that The Lion King bears a striking resemblance to Hamlet (dead father, innocent son, evil uncle; they did miss out on the relationship between Hamlet's mother and his uncle--hey, this is a family movie, people).

And so, like so many other bloggers I say, back off, America's Test Kitchens. You didn't invent food. You didn't invent cooking. And in many cases, you didn't even take it to the heights of perfection that you so clearly think you did. I've made several recipes from your cookbook (the one that I own and now wish I could return; too late, I wrote in it a few years back...making notes on how to IMPROVE THE RECIPE, I might add!!) and then made other versions that I thought were better.

America's Test Kitchens is not God's gift to the culinary world. They need to stop acting as though they are.

And as my own small contribution to the nose-thumbing in the direction of ATC that's taking place all over the food blogging community, here's a link to my Chocolate Chip Scone recipe in which I reproduce the directions for the process word for word. If they demand that I do so, I will reword the instructions, but otherwise it stands as it is. Take that, ATC!

ARF/5-a-Day Round Up on Sweetnicks

2008-07-22T21:04:00.001-07:00

The Modern Apron has the privilege of being part of the last ARF/5-a-Day Round Up that Sweeetnicks will be doing. Go over and say a fond farewell to a very noble effort--getting us all to eat more foods that are both yummy and good for us. Thanks for everything, Cate!

Phases: Roasted Fingerling and Tomato Salad with Green Beans and Arugula

2008-07-22T06:40:00.001-07:00

It’s probably no secret by now that I have lots of kids. Lots of young kids. My oldest is five and starts Kindergarten in the Fall, the youngest is twenty months. In between we have a set of three year old twins. Thus it is that I spend most of my time unwrapping cheese sticks, making peanut butter sandwiches, and putting the valves back into sippy cups (the day my youngest gives up sippy cups we are going to have a huge bonfire and I’m going to throw every sippy cup in the house on it and dance a merry jig while they melt to a molten oozing charred oblivion; they’re a great invention, but for about four years now I’ve felt like I spend my days doing nothing but putting valves back into sippy cups).

However, this is not a rant about the evils of sippy cups, but more a discussion of the challenges of cooking with so many children so young. It’s very hard to get a large block of uninterrupted time to do anything. I was eyeing a chocolate cream pie with caramel whipped cream last week, and after reading the recipe through about three times, I realized I was either stupid or crazy (possibly both, of course). Did I really think I was going to have time to make a boiled custard, to say nothing of a chocolate pate sucree? Madness.

So what I need are recipes that can be done in stages, in which the components can be prepped, then left to sit before anything is done with them. Or they can sit around for a little while after something is done with them, and they won’t deteriorate. I found just such a recipe this weekend, and it’s elegant and yummy too.

The June issue of Martha Stewart Living had an article on potato salads with oomph. These were more than just your basic potatoes + mayonnaise + aromatics. These were actual meals. I had noticed a bag of Russian banana fingerlings in my grocery store two weeks ago, and when this salad, which uses them, caught my eye, it seemed like fate. Fate brings me to a lot of recipes (such as this one, and this one). Usually they’ve been pretty good in the past, so I trust this Fate fellow these days.

I was not disappointed this time either. The potatoes and tomatoes are roasted with some olive oil, garlic and thyme, and then tossed with arugula and blanched green beans in a red wine-Dijon vinaigrette. I cut the potatoes and tossed them and the tomatoes with the garlic and olive oil puree, scattered them with thyme (I didn’t even have to pull it off the stem! Talk about easy!) and popped them in the oven. This is about the only piece of this recipe that really couldn’t be left to languish; once the potatoes are cut up, they need to head for the oven promptly lest they turn that sad grayish color that potatoes do turn. But since the prep for this step is mostly done with a sharp knife and the blender, it can be completed in the time it takes one three year old to eat a banana and a bowl of animal crackers.

Next I topped and tailed the green beans, which could sit out with no ill effects. I made the dressing. Again, a patient component that will wait until you’re ready. When the potatoes and tomatoes were done roasting, I pulled them out and let them cool their heels on the stove for a little while, during which time I read “Hungry Pig” and explained that, yes indeed, the sun was going down. I think I may have had a glass of wine in there too.

I blanched the green beans, shocked them, and let them drain while I rounded up the last kid from a water balloon fight and saw him headed for a bath. He was allowed to watch George of the Jungle and then off to bed.

Finally, dinner time! I tossed the arugula and green beans with the potatoes and tomatoes (and I confess, I used more like three to four cups of arugula for four people versus the two in the original recipe, and 6 ounces of green beans, rather than the 3 ounces called for), and served the dressing on the side.

I won’t lie and say we ate before 9 p.m. but I will say that this salad held up to a phased preparation incredibly well. Nothing suffered because of the wait, and it all came together into an elegant and delicious meal. I heated up some rosemary ciabatta to go with it, and it was an excellent dinner for a summer evening.

Roasted Fingerling and Tomato Salad with Green Beans and Arugula
from Martha Stewart Living, June 2008
serves 4-6

For the Salad
5 garlic cloves
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 ½ pounds Russian banana fingerling potatoes, halved lengthwise
1 pint cherry tomatoes
4 stems fresh thyme
Salt and freshly ground pepper
6 ounces green beans, trimmed
3-4 cups baby arugula

For the Dressing
2 tablespoons red-wine vinegar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon minced fresh thyme
½ shallot, minced
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Make the salad: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Puree garlic and olive oil in a blender until smooth. Toss with potatoes, tomatoes, and thyme on a rimmed baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper. Bake until potatoes are golden and tender, 30 to 40 minutes. Let cool slightly. Or quite a bit.

Prepare an ice-water bath. Cook green beans in a large pot of boiling water until bright green and just tender. Transfer to ice-water bath. When cool, drain beans in a colander and let them sit as long as necessary. They won’t mind.

Make the dressing: Combine vinegar, mustard, thyme, and shallot in a small bowl. Add oil in a slow, steady stream, whisking until emulsified. Set aside until needed.

When all children are in bed, and you’ve had ten minutes to relax, toss potato mixture, beans and arugula with dressing (or you can do as I did and toss the vegetables together and serve the dressing on the side). Season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately or at room temperature. If there’s going to be a gap of an hour or two between the preparation of all the components, and the actual serving, I recommend keeping everything separate and tossing it all at the last minute. Arugula gets so pathetic looking when it sits too long in dressing.

Relaxed: Best Buttermilk Pancakes

2008-07-21T06:32:00.001-07:00

What says lazy and leisurely more than a stack of pancakes? Pancakes are Sunday morning food, vacation food. I remember going on vacations as a kid and eating at the hotel restaurant and ordering pancakes. I never got pancakes at home, so I took every opportunity to order them when I could. Even fast food pancakes are a food for a slow day. You can’t eat them in the car, so you have to have the time to go in and sit down. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t like pancakes in some form or other.

My kids are being indoctrinated into this mindset as well. On Sunday mornings they always beg Daddy to make pancakes. Usually by the time they’re made all the kids have had something else: a peanut butter sandwich, a bagel with cream cheese, a bowl of dry cereal (or possibly all three). But the sentiment is there.

Pancakes work for any season. True, in the hottest depths of summer, if you have no air conditioning (very common in the Pacific Northwest: we have only about two or three weeks of “air conditioner” weather per year; and I always say that you don’t need air conditioning often, but when you need it you need it) standing over a hot stove or griddle flipping pancakes may not be your favorite thing to do. But for the most part, pancakes aren’t season-specific as other things can be.

And pancakes are pretty hard to screw up. Short of not getting them to flip properly (a situation easily remedied if you make them a little smaller so the pancake turner fits under them easily), a good recipe will result in good pancakes. We’ve used several recipes over the years, all of them producing a pretty good product. In our young, carefree, childless days we ate a whole grain pancake recipe from Cooking Light. The scrap of paper lived on our fridge for years and was called into service every Sunday morning.

Then we moved, and the recipe got packed somehow, and we were thrown back to random other recipes from various sources. For awhile we used one from Marie Claire that used self-rising flour and few other ingredients, making it a great kid recipe. Then one morning I stumbled on a recipe that I think is the one I’ll be using from now on. I found it in The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics. I’m not sure what led me to this recipe, but I’m certainly glad to have found it.

It’s got enough interesting ingredients (eggs, buttermilk, melted butter, vanilla) for my kids who now want to feel like they’re doing more when they “help” us cook, and it makes a light spongy pancake that soaks up the maple syrup but doesn’t fall apart. This is key. So often there’s not enough body to a pancake for it to withstand being drowned in syrup. They just collapse in a heap of soggy mush, impossible to pierce with a fork. You end up kind of shoving it onto the fork with the remains of a half of a slice of bacon, and sticky crumbs dribble back though the tines to the plate. Most disheartening.

If you’re still searching for that perfect pancake recipe, you should try this one. You can make the batter as thin or as thick as you like by adding a little more buttermilk or flour, and using only ¼ cup of batter per pancake means that if you have a reasonable sized pancake turner, you can flip it easily, without that horrible smeary mess that sometimes happens when they’re too big. The vanilla isn’t in the original recipe, but I love the little whiff of flavor that vanilla gives to pancakes, so I add a little.

Best Buttermilk Pancakes
from The Martha Stewart Cookbook: The Original Classics
The recipe claims this makes nine 6-inch pancakes, but we’ve always gotten way more than that out of it; it alll depends on how big you make the pancakes.

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups buttermilk
4 tablespoons butter, melted
Butter for pan or griddle (if desired)

Preheat an electric griddle to 375, or place a skillet over medium-high heat. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar in a medium bowl. Add the eggs, buttermilk, and melted butter, and whisk to combine. The batter should have small to medium lumps.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees. Check the pan or griddle by flicking a few drops of water on it. They should bounce and spatter right away. Brush on ½ teaspoon of butter, if desired, and wipe off excess with a paper towel.

I use a ¼ cup measuring cup to scoop some batter into the pan. If you have room for multiple pancakes in your pan (I don’t) you can pour out pools about 2” apart. When pancakes have bubbles around the sides and in the middle, and are slightly dry around the edges, flip over (this will take about 2 and a half minutes). Cook until golden on the bottom, about another minute.

Repeat with remaining batter. Keep cooked pancakes on a heat-proof plate in the oven. Serve warm.

The Modern Apron on Sweetnicks

2008-07-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

The berried muffins from a couple of week ago are featured in the ARF/5-a-Day Roundup on Sweetnicks. Hop on over and check out the other great offerings--always something good there!

Foods I Hate

2008-07-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

Tell me blue Go Gurt comes out of pajamas. And the answer to the obvious question is: I didn't give it to her. The little angel next to her gave it to her. Guess I can't fault him for sharing.

No more Go Gurt in my house, ever!

P.S. You'll notice it's Wednesday and I'm still alive. Guess the strawberry jam is OK to eat (well, that one jar, anyway).

Trepidation: Strawberry Jam

2008-07-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

Approximately four thousand years ago, I bought a home canning kit. It consisted of a proper round rack for holding the jars in a large stock pot, a set of scientifically engineered tongs for raising and lowering the jars safely into (or out of) the boiling water, a little plastic wand with a magnet in the end of it, for grabbing the metal lids and rings out of the water when sterilizing them, and I forget what else (probably at least a thermometer). With the exception of the rack, they were all a cheerful shade of aqua blue plastic that made me think of the color of a swimming pool under the summer skies. All of these items sat in pristine condition in my various kitchens, totally unused because I have a terror of explosions, botulism, and other shadowy horrors that I’m convinced surround the canning process.

Time passed, and I read over and over that canning wasn’t scary. Really, it wasn’t. Fannie Farmer reassured me. Magazine articles did their best to convince me. Cookbooks whispered comforting words of encouragement. Finally, when the strawberries in my local grocery store were being delivered on a daily basis by farms less than two hours away, I decided I was a big ol’ wimp and better give it a try. I brought home two flats of strawberries, and dove head first into strawberry jam. I read two magazine articles, two cookbooks, and recipe pamphlet circa 1959 from a box of commercial pectin. It’s also worth noting that the strawberries I had were approximately a quadruple batch of jam. Never let it be said that I do things by halves, even on the first go ‘round.

I am not going to pretend that canning isn’t a colossal pain in the ass. It is. People who write the instructions for jam making toss off a breezy, “sterilize x number of jars, lids, and rings.” All very well, but unless you have a really big stock pot, all of those jars are not going to fit in the pot at one time, and you will have to do the sterilizing, dishing up, and processing in batches. Also, they casually mention that you must put the jars on a rack in the boiling water; they can’t just sit on the bottom of the pot. Since that perfect rack I bought with my canning kit so many thousands of years ago has long since disappeared, I don’t have a rack that fits in any of my pots. All my racks are oval or rectangular roasting racks, or rectangular or square cooling racks. Hm.

So I turned to my assortment of kitchen tools and found some egg rings that make a reasonable platform for the jars. You could also use cookie cutters of various shapes jigsawed together (secured with paper clips) to form a circle-like shape. Or use the rings that go on the jars.

I’ve also read that when jam is ready it looks like jam. It forms a mass and just looks, well, jammy. I have also read that strawberry jam thickens as it cools. I certainly hope so, I thought, because otherwise I have the largest batch of strawberry syrup in the history of the world. I’d better break out the ice cream maker, just in case.

And jam making is apparently not for the clumsy. Remove the full jars from the processing bath without tipping them, I was cautioned. Without tipping them? Pardon my French, but shit, I was lucky to get them out without dropping them. And I didn’t always manage that. I dropped four of them and they wound up on their heads in the boiling water.

The easy part is the jam itself, it would seem (assuming it gels). Hull the strawberries, toss them in a big pot with some sugar and lemon juice, mash with a potato masher, bring to 224 degrees on a candy thermometer (or, if you’re me, on a candle making thermometer; don’t ask) and hey, presto. Jam. Well, in theory.

If the flavor of the syrupy starter is any indication, this is truly in the realm of the Best Jam Ever. Many years ago (and probably the event that propelled me into the Home Canning Kit Ownership age) I had some raspberry jam that a friend’s mother made from raspberries picked in their back field. It was incredible. It was bright and clear and true. You often read those words in descriptions of homemade jam, but there’s a reason. Homemade jam does taste more than store bought. It’s more immediate, more real. I can’t really describe it without sounding clichéd and verging on corny (and using an annoyingly excessive number of italicized words), but you really can’t fathom it until you have it (whether it’s yours or someone else’s).

But I’m actually writing this as the process moves along (four batches of jar sterilizing, plus processing, has taken the better part of three hours), and I have to say, I’m a little worried. Even the stuff in the pot isn’t thickening up, and it’s pretty close to cool. I may be left with 16 jars of strawberry syrup, a sticky stock pot, and a kitchen floor right out of a Smucker’s factory.

[14 hours later]

Well, some of it still looks a bit thin, and some of it looks fine. It’s not as thick as commercial jam, but I was warned that unless I used commercial pectin it wasn’t going to be that thick. As for how it tastes, I was right about it being amazingly good. As to whether or not I’m going to contract botulism and keel over, well, I can’t say for 24 to 36 hours, as I understand that’s the incubation period for botulism once ingested (don’t ask why I know this). So I have a ton of strawberry jam that I’m a little leery of eating. I’d call this experiment a success, although I won’t be able to declare it a complete success until I find out if I live to Wednesday. However, I didn’t blow anything up, or set my kitchen on fire during the canning process, so that’s on the plus side of the ledger.

Strawberry Jam
makes about 3 pints of slightly scary (to me) jam
adapted from a whole bunch of sources

6 cups hulled strawberries
3 -4 cups sugar (depending on sweetness of berries)
1 to 4 tablespoons lemon juice (again, depends on how sweet the berries are)

Combine sugar, berries, and lemon juice in a pot over medium-high heat. Crush berries with a fork or potato masher. Cook, stirring almost constantly, until sugar dissolves and strawberries liquefy somewhat.

Turn heat to low and cook 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the fruit has broken down and the mixture is thick. Test for gelling by putting a small spoonful of jam on a plate that has been in the freezer for a few minutes. Place plate in the refrigerator for two minutes. Check the jam; if it’s gelled, you can proceed to the canning. If not, cook for a few more minutes and test again.

Wash and sterilize canning jars (see, there I go, tossing that one off; you can use really big ones, or smaller ones, it’s up to you). Ladle jam into jars, screw lids onto jars, and place in a boiling water bath for 10-15 minutes. Remove and allow to cool.

Jam keeps for up to a year.

N.B. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was forced to leave the strawberries and sugar on a low simmer for three and a half hours, plus the “regular” recommended cooking time. My stove is gas and has a “simmer” setting that keeps whatever it is just barely, well, simmering, for as long as you leave it. Did this have any effect on my jam? I can't say.

UPDATE: I stand corrected on botulism in strawberry jam. Botulism is possible in low-acid foods--carrots, green beans--that are home canned. But higher acid foods like strawberries or tomatoes wouldn't be suceptible. In retrospect, I recall having read this some years ago, but in my gripping fear, I forgot it. Phew, that's a relief!

Replay: Savory Bread Pudding

2008-07-05T07:23:00.001-07:00

I posted about savory bread pudding here, and last night I had a stale loaf of bread that needed using, so I thought I would share what I did with it, since I'm not doing steady blogging here this week.

I chopped up an onion and satueed it with almost a pound of sliced mushrooms. I stirred the onion mixture into the torn bread, added the milk and eggs, and baked. Just before it was done, I pulled it out and scattered about 6 ounces of chopped blue cheese over the top, returned it to the oven and let the cheese melt. The result was outstanding. I have no picture of it, I'm sorry to say, but it was a yummy variation on a theme.