08.21.05
Posted in Cookies & Candies, Dessert, Fruits at 3:45 pm by julie
I’m not a huge fan of lemon desserts. I like things sweet, and the tartness of the lemon can be a little overpowering. Give me chocolate any day over lemon. However, I started getting a taste for lemon bars when I served on a university search committee, and ate them at every candidate presentation. I think the key is to prevent the lemon curd-ish filling from tasting and smelling sulfurous and eggy, while maintaining some gloppy goodness.
This recipe produces a thin sugary crust on top of the bars, so the powdered sugar decoration doesn’t get absorbed into the filling. When making both lemon and lime bars at once, I double the crust mixture, and then add the coconut to just half. While the crusts bake, I make the fillings one at a time so they are both ready to pour when the crust is done. I was tweaking this recipe all summer, so I want to try to get the right amount of filling for a 9×9 pan in my next batch.
I put a generous sprinkle of green decorating sugar into the lime filling the first time, to better ensure that we could tell them apart from the lemon ones. (I didn’t have food coloring, and this was a perfect substitute.)
Lemon (or Lime) Bars
1 C all-purpose flour
1/2 C confectioners’ sugar
1/2 C butter, softened
2 eggs
1 C white sugar
2 T all-purpose flour
3 T fresh lemon juice (or lime juice) - about one squeezed lemon or lime
1-2 tsp minced lemon zest (or lime zest)
3 T dessicated unsweetened coconut (for lime bars only)
confectioners’ sugar for decoration
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease an 8×8 inch baking pan.
Combine the flour, 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar, and butter. For lime bars, mix in dessicated coconut. Pat dough into prepared pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes in the preheated oven, until slightly golden.
While the crust is baking, beat together eggs and sugar; stir in lemon (or lime) juice and zest, then fold in flour. (If desired, add a drop or two of green food coloring to lime filling.) Pour this mixture over the hot crust. Return to the preheated oven for an additional 20 to 25 minutes, or until filling is set.
Cool on a wire rack. Dust the top with confectioners’ sugar. Cut into squares when chilled.
Source: My own, after severe adaptations of several different recipes.
Update 1/5/07: I made these at Jeremy’s request; we had been planning to make a batch of them in Colorado and didn’t get to it. But we were shopping at Whole Foods on our return to the Portland area, and when I saw the pile of Meyer lemons, I knew what I had to do. These came out well, with good flavor from the Meyers, but my 8×8 pan had been trashed for bleeding Teflon, so the amount of lemon filling was a bit lacking compared to the crust. Now if I could only remember that I really only need one lemon to get the right amount of juice and zest… Of course that means I have three extra Meyer lemons waiting for attention in the fridge now, which can’t be all bad. Time for a Meyer lemon tart!
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08.20.05
Posted in Bread, Dessert at 4:00 pm by julie
Last weekend we got together with a bunch of friends from work to watch movies and share a potluck dinner, partly as a farewell to Jeremy for the fall semester. It was my job to bring desserts, and I agonized long and hard over what to bring, changing my mind several times. I didn’t settle on my menu until we were at the grocery store.
First I made a coconut-topped chocolate cake from Cooking Light. It uses a modified cake mix, and covers it with a layer of coconut goo and then a layer of thick chocolate glaze, akin to a thinly-spread Mounds candy bar. It was delicious and very fluffy, despite the fact that the cake used only egg whites and almost no oil. Actually, it was so fluffy that it was hard to cut cleanly, so we didn’t get any decent photos. But it’s definitely on the list to make again, so I’m sure there will be other photo opportunities. 
Next, I made a batch each of lemon and lime bars, at Jeremy’s request. Well, he requested lemon bars and I decided to get fancy. Good thing too, because everyone seemed to prefer the lime bars. The recipe for these will be forthcoming, tomorrow maybe.
Finally, I made a batch of soft sourdough pretzels, from this recipe, to munch on during the movie. These were an out-and-out success, and seem to be perfect potluck fare to compliment a cheese/crackers/veggies snack course.
I made the dough the night before, after letting my fed starter bubble most of the day, and put it in the fridge to retard overnight. Early in the morning, I pulled it out to warm and rise, so the dough was ready to roll and shape by midmorning. This was best done in several stages of stretching, so that the dough had time to relax in between. When shaped, I brushed them with egg wash and sprinkled with kosher salt, then into the oven.
I should also mention that Jeremy’s contribution to the potluck was a 64oz. container of perfectly brewed loose-leaf Casablanca Twist (spring darjeeling and peppermint) iced tea. Yum!
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08.08.05
Posted in Bread, Dinner at 3:58 pm by julie
Despite the heat, I did quite a lot of baking this weekend. I took pictures of most of it as I went along, but Jeremy has those pictures on his laptop, so they’ll have to go in another post. I do have a few pictures from Sunday, though, so I’ll talk about that.
Sunday Baking
The picture above shows a loaf of sourdough on the left, and banana bread on the right. I actually started the sourdough on Saturday, feeding the starter and making a sponge for the bread that fermented overnight. On Sunday morning, I got up and kneaded dough in my pajamas, adding about 1/3 cup of flour and some wheat germ to the bread flour for good measure. The dough rose beautifully, and when it was threatening to spill over the sides of the bowl, I punched it down, shaped it, and left it for the second rise. It baked up beautifully, though we have yet to taste it: I’m going to slice some of it up for pesto garlic bread with dinner tonight.
The banana bread was a new recipe, and I think Jeremy was disappointed, as he loves my standard banana bread. (Last time we were at the store, he very carefully selected a bunch of exactly three bananas, and tried to convince me they were for just eating. But I knew better: three bananas equals banana bread, and sure enough, they sat untouched on the counter until they turned black.) The recipe was Banana-Oatmeal Bread from Cooking Light, and although it made a big, lovely-looking loaf, it wasn’t as moist or flavorful as my recipe. Frankly, I can’t taste the bananas or cinnamon at all, and I’m not sure why that would be. It is edible, but after several such unfortunate experiments with different recipes, I have to conclude that banana bread shouldn’t be messed around with, as I already seem to have the best recipe out there.
PS: Behind the breads you see a corked glass bottle that once held Mexican vanilla. We used the last of it this week, and Jeremy talked me into filling the bottle with liquid sugar to pour in our tea. I obliged, and made a simple sugar syrup at a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water, boiled until thoroughly dissolved. It works fine, but it still sinks to the bottom of the cup like granulated sugar does, and makes rather a sticky mess on the bottle when poured. Oh well.
Enchiladas de Pollo
This was Sunday dinner, my first ever attempt to make chicken enchiladas. I used a Cooking Light recipe from the same collection as the banana bread, and got much better results than with the former. The recipe calls for simmering bone-in chicken breasts in water with bay and peppercorns to make it tender enough to shred, and I made extra while I was at it, to freeze with the resulting broth for chicken soup this fall. The sauce was made very quickly with canned tomatillos and chiles, whirred up with milk and an egg using my stick blender. Then I assembled the enchiladas, dipping each corn tortilla briefly in a skillet of hot water before spooning a mix of chicken, cheese and onions in the center and rolling it all up. I poured the sauce over the lot, covered it in foil, and was surprised to see that after 20 minutes in the oven, virtually all the sauce had been absorbed into the tortillas. Although this initially made me quite nervous, they came out very moist and flavorful, and not too spicy for my sensitive tongue, so all was well. Bring on the leftovers!
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08.04.05
Posted in Dessert, Dinner, Meats, Poultry, Tools & Gadgets at 3:55 pm by julie
A continuation of my excessively long list of culinary discoveries this summer…
5. One of my goals this summer was to practice roasting whole chickens. I’ve only done it twice, which is less than I had hoped, but they came out great both times, so confidence is high. They were both Cooking Light recipes, a magazine which I have subscribed to off and on (currently on) over the years. First was a chicken roasted with herbs and homemade lemon curd (made the night before) which came out very moist and flavorful, and left me with a batch of lemon curd in the freezer to make lemon gem cookies later on. More recently was a flavorful rosemary-garlic recipe I have used before for turkey; with the carcass of this chicken I made two quarts of very flavorful stock, adding in the giblets from both chickens and the roasted onions from the pan.
6. I experimented with a wide variety of new recipes this summer, some of which have already become regulars in our repertoire: we’ve already made Lombo di Maiale Coi Porri (Pan-Roasted Pork Loin with Leeks) twice, and hope to make it again before Jeremy goes back to school. Likewise, I’ve made multiple batches of lemon bars, cream cheese pound cake for strawberry shortcake, and moist potato bread from leftover mashed potatoes. After a number of variations, I found a recipe for what might be my personal perfect chocolate chip cookie, crisp and chewy at once (the secret seems to be using a silpat on the top oven rack at a lower temp than usual). Other great successes included bittersweet truffles infused with fresh mint or jasmine pearls; an improvised crustless broccoli quiche with feta and Parmesan; a humble eggless cinnamon flop with deconstructed streusel that we’ve been enjoying for breakfast; and a number of pesto-based dishes: salmon baked with spinach pesto, fettuccine tossed with sun-dried tomato pesto, and last night, a semi-traditional trofie al pesto (fresh basil pesto tossed with green beans and homemade noodle twists, sans potatoes).
7. Part of the reason I finally took myself over to the public library rather than getting all my books from Hatfield Library and its consortia is because I wanted to be able to browse knitting books and cookbooks. Over the course of the summer I have found a few that I really liked, including an Amish cookbook
that gave us the cinnamon flop and our Fourth of July oven-fried chicken; Nigella Lawson’s well-known How to Be a Domestic Goddess, where I found the recipe for that huge loaf of tender potato bread and one for peanut-butter Snickers muffins; and Bittersweet by Alice Medrich, from whence came scented truffles, chocolatey chocolate cookies, and a subtly spiced loaf of marbled Tiger Cake. I have a growing list of cookbooks to seek out in future visits, and look forward to trying out more new recipes.
Related to cookbooks in a way was my exploration of the world of food blogs. Food bloggers post recipes, discussions of cooking experimentation, favorite cookbooks, gadgets and ingredients, and such; they also host online events in which groups of bloggers all make dishes based on a chosen theme or ingredient. I read a number of these blogs regularly, and have successfully tried recipes from some of them. Here are a few of my favorite sites: 101 Cookbooks, Brownie Points, Chocolate and Zucchini, Simply Recipes, The Domestic Goddess, and Words to Eat By.
8. Moving on to the subject of new kitchenware, Jeremy got me a wonderful anniversary present in June: a 7-1/4 quart red Le Creuset enameled dutch oven (with a free cast-iron grill pan), a silpat, and a silicone muffin pan. We’ve already used Big Red (the dutch oven) several times, to braise beef and short ribs and that divine pork roast with leeks. It is extremely heavy, particularly when full of liquid, but does a magnificent job of even cooking and is big enough to fit just about anything I could possibly want to braise, stew, or roast–well, maybe not a turkey, but I can live with my roasting pan for that. Le Creuset is very expensive, but it’s the sort of thing that lasts a lifetime if you take care of it, and we found such a great deal on Amazon that Jeremy actually thinks it was a computer error (the price went up right after we placed our order).
The silpat fits my jelly-roll pan perfectly, and does an admirable job with cookies and leftover pizza. I still tend to use my stoneware for most baking needs, but when I have a larger batch of something to cook, the silpat will be very useful. Even more useful has been the silicone muffin pan. I love muffins, but I almost never had muffin liners on hand, and found the process of greasing and later washing out all the little edges of the pan to be almost too much trouble to be worthwhile. This muffin pan (can’t really call it a tin now, can I?) is almost miraculously non-stick and fits on my small heirloom cookie sheet just right (just for the sake of stability, as the silicone is too floppy to safely carry wet muffin batter to the oven in). The muffins end up hotter than the pan and I can use it multiple times without having to wash out gunk. Even the mess of melted Snickers bits came off instantly. My next outing with this pan will be cupcakes studded with bits of crystallized ginger and topped with ginger cream cheese frosting.
9. I’ve been using a few ingredients that didn’t really have a regular place in the kitchen before this summer, that I thought worth mentioning. Some are just things that came in handy for the recipes I wanted to try out, and others were born of the necessity of carrying groceries a mile on foot. For instance, we’ve started eating more couscous recently, as a lighter substitute for potatoes. Jeremy has high couscous standards, mostly regarding their olive oil content, but I am getting there. I also tried polenta as a potato substitute, but we didn’t care for that as well; perhaps it needs more tweaking. In addition to the fresh fruits and veggies I have been getting at the market a bit at a time, I’ve also found myself buying more lemons than I used to: we used them for the roasted chicken, lemon curd, and lemon bars, and I also roasted the zest of lemons and limes as I had it, grinding it to powder for later use in cooking. For baking, I discovered the joy of Heath bits mixed into chocolate chip cookies, and the convenience of cooking spray and no-trans fat shortening sticks. Cooking spray may seem like a no-brainer, but I have avoided it like the plague because of the strong alcohol smell of the Pam my mom used to buy; recently I realized that they now make some cooking sprays sans alcohol and trans fat. Bonus! Finally, although it isn’t exactly an ingredient, we were very pleased to discover Endangered Species chocolate bars, specifically the Bat Bar with its crunchy cocoa nibs and the Wolf Bar with almonds and dried cranberries. Safeway doesn’t carry this organic chocolate line, which makes us very sad, but we get them when we can snag a ride to Fred Meyer.
10. Finally, and this is something I won’t be able to confirm until at least Monday, but I think my final great cooking discovery of the summer is a 4-1/2 quart KitchenAid stand mixer, which I just ordered on sale from Amazon. I never really considered such a thing necessary, given that I have a perfectly functional hand mixer, but after reading reviews and talking with very happy owners of similar mixers, I decided that $99, free shipping, and a $20 gift certificate was too good a deal to pass up. I know I’ll use it, and eventually I can get some of the neat attachments, like the pasta roller and ice cream maker, to increase its functionality further. In the meantime, hopefully the weather will cooperate, and allow me to mix up a slew of wonderful baked goods before Jeremy has to leave for New York.
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08.03.05
Posted in Beverages, Fruits, Herbs at 3:54 pm by julie
While Jeremy was away at school, I tended to make the same few dishes over and over again: ones I knew I liked both fresh and as leftovers, and that made enough to last me several days. This largely translated to soups and stews, and a few casseroles and pasta dishes. I did the same thing with baked goods, making enough to send some to Jeremy, and keep me in carbs for a week or so. All in all, it worked out pretty well, but by the time he came home for the summer, I was ready to expand my culinary range with some new dishes. I’ve had a lot of fun cooking and baking this summer (when cooler weather allows) and since the blog has been sadly neglected while I was doing all of this, I thought I would summarize some of it here, in no particular order:
1. Farmer’s markets are my friend. Just before Jeremy came home, I started making it a Saturday habit to walk over to the public library to check out and return books, perhaps stroll through downtown Salem, and wind up at the Saturday Market to have lunch and check out the stalls, which have a variety of live plants, produce, and various crafty items. There is also more of a regular farmer’s market on Wednesdays at lunchtime, which we’ve gone to numerous times over the course of the summer. As spring progressed into summer, I have had a good time watching the flow of produce change, from strawberries and cherries in May and June, to green beans, peaches, root vegetables, and the inevitable Oregon influx of raspberries, blueberries and blackberries in July and August.
2. Of the fresh produce we’ve been buying all summer, our happiest introduction was to Hood strawberries. I have never liked strawberries, though I can sometimes be coerced into eating a few with a bowl of powdered sugar for dipping. That was the case, at least, until I learned about Hood strawberries, which are perhaps the sweetest, juiciest strawberries grown in Oregon. Compared to these little gems, the strawberries at the grocery store might as well be sour, crunchy rocks. We ate quite a few plain, but pints and pints of them made up for strawberry shortcake, macerated with a bit of sugar and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and spooned over a wonderful recipe I found for cream cheese pound cake.
Next to the Hood strawberries, our favorite new fruit is Rainier cherries. These yellow and light red cherries have tender, pale flesh that is sweeter than the dark red Bings, which I also like. We never cooked with these, just ate them by the pint as long as they were available.
3. One of my smarter brainstorms this spring, while wandering through Saturday market, was the sudden realization that the bare spot in my backyard that gets so much sun would be a perfect spot to put an herb garden. I came home with armfuls of 4” pots and planted a wide variety of herbs in May: rosemary, chives, spearmint, oregano, English thyme, tricolor sage, French lavender, and Roman chamomile. I tried to get basil going several times, and finally had better luck just a few weeks ago, as my new basil plant has started putting out tiny new purple leaves. I’ve used snippets of fresh herbs these past few weeks to great effect, and have been carefully harvesting and drying the blossoms of my chamomile plant as they appear, to have a few cups of homegrown chamomile tea later this fall.
4. Speaking of tea, this summer has been an ongoing exploration of the world of loose-leaf tea for us. We started with a free canister of citron green tea from Adagio (a thank-you gift for posting a link to their website on our blog back in March) and liked it so well that we have placed large orders about once a month ever since Jeremy came home. We really can’t say enough about Adagio: they have a well-designed, educational website; a good range of very high quality teas, tisanes, infusers and other tea paraphernalia; and superb customer service, including reasonable shipping, careful packaging, and lots of customer incentives (such as freebies and a discount system). They’ve made loose tea evangelists of us, so to speak. I plan to go into more detail about the “ritual” of brewing tea and some of our favorite varieties in a separate series of posts, if I ever remember to take pictures while we are making it.
This was originally supposed to be a short post, but it turns out I did quite a lot of cooking-related stuff this summer. From now on, I’ll try to keep up a little better, and maybe even post some recipes. In the meantime, I’ll split my rambling up over two posts. More tomorrow.
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08.01.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:14 am by julie
Welcome to The Persnickety Palate. This post is a back-dated welcome. For more information about the blog and its inception, please go here.
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