09.30.07
Posted in Bread, Breakfast, Foodblog Events, Persnickety Bits at 11:47 am by julie
This month has been cinnamon roll heaven. I already had plans to make sweet potato cinnamon rolls with my leftover sweet potato puree when the Daring Bakers September Challenge was announced: the Cinnamon Rolls and/or Sticky Buns from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
by Peter Reinhart, one of our favorite bread books. I decided to go ahead with my sweet potato recipe and call it a warm-up round for the real thing, but it made an enormous panful of rolls that we were eating for nearly a week, and we needed a break before I dove back in for another batch or two.
The original plan was to do them last weekend, but I had no yeast left, and we ended up going to Ikea and Whole Foods instead. (And why on earth was there only tiny little packets of yeast at Whole Foods? Was I just looking in the wrong place or what?) I decided to bring a batch to my staff meeting on Friday the 28th instead, but we learned on Thursday afternoon that a VIP/force of nature was going to be visiting the library, and the staff meeting was postponed a week. This after I had already signed up to bring treats to the meeting and mentioned to several people that the plan was for cinnamon rolls…so I see another batch of these in my future later this week.
Since I was just making rolls for my husband and myself after all, I didn’t rush and got the dough started on Friday evening after a long walk at the park with our puppy. The dough came together nicely: I used active dry yeast (vs. instant), warmed buttermilk (vs. powdered milk), unbleached bread flour (vs. AP), butter (vs. shortening) and lemon extract (vs. zest). I did have to add quite a bit of extra flour to get the dough to form a ball as described; it had been so wet that the dough hook wouldn’t have had much effect, so I added in half a cup at a time until it looked right, perhaps as much as 1 1/2 C extra.
After switching to the dough hook, I set the timer and went in the other room to gather dishes for loading the dishwasher. Now I should explain that our stand mixer and Cuisinart sit on top of our portable dishwaser, because our kitchen is old, ill-arranged, and seriously lacking outlets and counter space. When I came back to check on the dough, the mixer was on the verge of attempting suicide by leaping onto the floor. It had walked forward at least a foot. I talked it down off the ledge, loaded some dishes (all of which were rattling wildly because of the mixer), and then rescued the suicidal mixer from another leap. By the time 10 minutes were up, I was exhausted, the mixer was thinking about overheating, and the dough was gorgeously pillowy and elastic, with a satin sheen. It was the first dough I’ve ever made that windowpaned perfectly, and if I’d had three arms or a husband who wasn’t playing a video baseball game, I would have captured that proud achievement on the camera.
I have to admit that I diverted from the recipe a bit here. After the dough was safely ensconced in a greased bowl and deposited on the running dishwasher (for some moist heat in my cold, cold house), I gave my husband instructions to pop the bowl in the fridge before he came to bed and retired for the night. I knew it was going to take longer than two hours to double, and I wasn’t about to stay up that late, so the dough was retarded after the first rise rather than the second. It worked out just fine, though, as you can see. When hubby took the dog out for her morning constitutional, I pulled the dough from the fridge again to warm up, and got back in bed.
From there it was a simple matter of rolling out the dough, sprinkling on the cinnamon sugar, and rolling it back up into a log. I used the old dental floss trick to cut it into 10 rolls, saved three in the fridge for sticky buns tomorrow, and arranged the rest on a baking sheet for their second rise.
Since my house was still cold and my tummy was hungry, I used the warm-oven trick to help facilitate the second rise, turning the oven on just for a minute or so to make it an insulated proofing box. I was satisfied with the rise after 45 minutes, in part because by then it was 10:45am. But they look nice and puffy, don’t they?
The sad thing was that the 7-hour lamb from earlier this week overflowed in the oven, so instead of perfuming the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls, the kitchen smelled like burning lamb jus. But twenty minutes later, we forgot about the acrid scent, because our cinnamon rolls looked like this:
Mmmm, cinnamon rolls! I told Jeremy that the book said they had to rest for at least 20 minutes before we could eat them. He made sad eyes at me and basically told me I was starving him to death, so we started eating about 3 minutes after they came out of the oven. What can I say? I tried!
I’ll admit to one more slight tweak to the recipe, out of necessity. I made a half recipe of glaze, and because we were out of milk, I used heavy cream (warmed in the microwave) instead. Also, after taking the pretty photo above, I thought to myself, who am I kidding, and loaded that sucker up with frosting.
Much better! We made short work of these cinnamon rolls. They were soft and fluffy, and the sticky glaze made up for what we perceived as a lack of cinnamon-sugar goo in the interior of the rolls. Jeremy didn’t care for the citrus element of the rolls, so if—correction, make that WHEN—I make these again, I’ll use vanilla instead of lemon in the glaze. Personally, I didn’t mind the hint of lemon after a bite or three to get used to it.
Since I’ve made cinnamon rolls several times before but never sticky buns, I knew I needed to give those a try in order to continue calling myself a Daring Baker. I put aside three rolls for that purpose because I still wasn’t convinced that I’d like sticky buns, and they fit nicely into my ceramic loaf pan. This morning, I pulled the plastic-wrapped buns out of the fridge in their pan and made the caramel glaze, which was an entirely different process than I had expected. A scattering of pecans (no dried fruit for me, please), and the rolls were nestled into the pan for their second rise. They baked for about 35 minutes, rested for 5, and we dug in.
I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I liked the sticky bun variation nearly as much as the cinnamon rolls. I’ve never had them before, but the caramel seemed to have just the right amount of flow and tackiness, and the flavor was more to Jeremy’s taste becaue I used vanilla instead of lemon extract this time. I would definitely consider making this variation again, and I’m very glad I tried it.
Please be sure to stop by the Daring Bakers blogroll and check out everyone’s fabulous creations. For this fantastic recipe, visit Pip in the City, the blog of September host Marce in Argentina.
You may be wondering why, since I only made two cinnamon roll variations for this challenge, I titled the post the way I did. Well, the third bun in the oven is the proverbial sort: I am now 16 weeks pregnant. Hopefully that will account for all my recent laziness in both cooking meals and writing up posts about them, not to mention the sudden tendency toward comfort foods and emphasis on calcium and protein and fiber and whatnot. At least I’ve been very lucky, as a foodblogger, in that I haven’t been subjected to any morning sickness or weird food cravings!
I am a member of the Theta Class of Daring Bakers, inducted in July 2007. Below is a list of previous challenges:
Strawberry Mirror Cake – July 2007
Milk Chocolate and Caramel Tart – August 2007
Permalink
09.29.07
Posted in Cuisines, Dinner, Fish, Italian, Lamb, Meats, Pastas, Pork and Ham, Seafood at 9:51 am by julie
I’ve been busy cooking this week, but I’m not really sure what to say about most of the meals that resulted. After the salt-baked snapper on Sunday, we had to quickly use our fresh sardines also, so I found a Mario Batali recipe that involved sardines stuffed with a bread crumb-almond-orange zest mixture and baked over lemon slices and a sweet and sour pepperonata.
It was really a gorgeous, photogenic meal, but I couldn’t eat it. I’ve never had sardines before, fresh or canned, and the flavor was just too strongly fishy to me, not to mention all the bony bits and the heads and tails thing. I didn’t like the pepperonata, which was pretty sour and kind of spicy, and I didn’t even like the bread crumb filling because it was both fishy and orangey. We served it with farfalle drizzled with olive oil, and I had the foresight to strategically place my sardines and pepperonata around the edges of the pasta instead of on top, so at least I had something to eat. Jeremy thought it was pretty tasty, but he told me he used to eat canned sardines on toast as a kid, so there’s no accounting for taste. 
We also had a gigantic bone-in leg of lamb, which Jeremy wanted for braising. I went with the 7-hour lamb recipe that I’ve made once before, which allowed me to get the meal started at lunchtime (not the best idea in retrospect, since braises are pretty front-loaded operations, and I ran out of time). But since my cut of meat was the sort actually called for in the recipe, I used the method called for in the book: browining by broiling in the oven and braising in a large roasting pan. Unfortunately for me, our oven is really pitiful when it comes to broiling, so this part took at least twice as long as it should have, and I still didn’t get the color I was looking for. Then I realized that we had somehow run out of tomatoes, which is almost unthinkable; I substituted some tomato paste and my last 4 oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, chopped up. We foil-wrapped the roasting pan as securely as we could and left, hoping that the braising liquid wouldn’t all steam off. But we needn’t have worried about that, because in fact the lamb and vegetables produced so much extra liquid that it overflowed our rather shallow roasting pan and all over the bottom of the oven. Lovely. But the lamb tasted just as good as last time, even if it wasn’t quite as spoonable.
On Thursday I made pork chops. The original plan was to have them with some porcini risotto, but I decided I wanted something a bit faster, so I made spaetzle instead, with a side of buttered peas. The pork chops were a Bruce Aidells recipe, and it made for juicy, flavorful chops even though I let their internal temps get a bit high while working on the spaetzle. Since it also calls for ingredients I typically have on hand, I think this is a method we’ll be using again, such as it is. And it meant I didn’t need to use my lamb jus-anointed oven.
Pork Chops with Garlic-Cream Pan Sauce
4 thick center-cut pork loin chops (1 ¼ to 1 ½-inches thick; 2 to 3 lb total)
1 tsp each chopped fresh thyme and sage
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 T olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled
½ C chicken stock
½ C dry white wine
1 tsp coarse-grain mustard
2 T heavy cream
Trim the excess fat from the edge of the chops. In a bowl, combine the thyme, sage, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle the herb mixture on both sides of the chops. Let them sit at room temperature for 30 minutes; alternatively, cover and refrigerate for 24 hours.
In a heavy skillet large enough to hold all the chops in one layer, over medium-high heat, heat the oil. When it is hot, brown the chops for 1 to 2 minutes on a side. Adjust the heat if the pan seems too hot. Lower the heat so the chops still sizzle. Cover the pan and cook for 3 to 4 minutes more or until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 140 to 145 degrees.
Transfer the chops to a warm platter (set the skillet aside), cover chops loosely with foil, and let them rest for 5 minutes. The internal temperature will rise to 145 to 150 degrees.
Meanwhile, make the sauce: In a microwaveable container, combine the garlic and stock. Heat on the highest setting for 2 minutes or until the garlic is soft enough to mash. Pour off and reserve the stock. Mash the garlic with a fork.
Discard all but 1 tablespoon of fat from the skillet, leaving the sediment behind. Return the skillet to medium-high heat. Add the wine and scrape the bottom of the pan. Reduce the wine by half. Stir in the stock, garlic, mustard, cream, and any juices on the bottom of the pork platter. Stir until smooth and thickened slightly. Taste for seasoning. Add more salt and pepper, if you like.
Return the chops to the pan. Turn them several times in the sauce to reheat. Serve at once.
Source: Bruce Aidells, Boston Globe
Permalink
09.24.07
Posted in Cuisines, Dinner, Fish, Italian, Seafood at 2:17 pm by julie
We had quite a busy weekend! Saturday was a big shopping day because we decided to drive up to the new Ikea by PDX to try and find a new bookshelf for our literary overflow. We’d never been in an Ikea before, and it was quite an experience, almost like a ride, a little overwhelming. In the end, we did find some bookshelves (though—of course—we ended up bringing home the wrong size, so we’ll have to go back again) and a shoe shelf to put next to the front door, and I only refrained from buying elderflower soda and cloudberry preserves and Daim candies because of how much we had just spent on furniture. We did get some glass mason jars for grain and legume storage, though.
After that adventure, we had just enough space in the car to stop by Whole Foods for some groceries. We loaded up on yogurt and produce, and made some very profitable stops by the meat counter and the fish counter, so you should be seeing some more interesting meals appearing on the blog to make up for the recent blandness. With no further ado, I present to you… Whole Snapper Roasted in a Salt Crust.
This is a crimson snapper. We’ve gotten whole silk snapper from Whole Foods before, and I cooked it very successfully in a parchment packet. That was initially the plan when we picked out this guy, but once we got back home and I started flipping through my copy of Molto Italiano, I changed gears and broke out the rock salt instead.
I’ve cooked whole fish a few times before, as I said, so I’m feeling a little more confident about it now, but I’m not much less squeamish. The very helpful woman at the fish counter offered to scale the snapper for us, and I gratefully took her up on it. But I still had to deal with the fins and tail on my own, and after watching The Evil Dead and the first part of Dead Alive on the Monsters HD channel, I was very nearly feeling too grossed out to cook something that was staring back at me.
Somehow I got through it, though I’m quite sure I made some gruesome faces during the preparation. Once the fish was buried in salt and roasting, Jeremy made some jasmine rice while I worked on a skilletful of broccoli a la Lidia to go with the fish.
The salt crust hardened up nicely. What it didn’t do so nicely was break into two whole pieces so we could remove the fish. There must be some special technique to cracking it open. We ended up having to crumble the salt crust up and sift the fish out of it, but Jeremy used a light touch and it emerged, still whole, without much damage.
Jeremy did a beautiful job of filleting the fish, and we got it all plated up. It tasted delicious, very flavorful but not fishy, and absolutely tender and succulent. Between avoiding the stray bones and chunks of rock salt, though, actually extracting bites of fish to eat was a picky eater’s nightmare, though. It was certainly fun to try, and I might attempt a salt crust again with a different type of meat, but my belief in the parchment packet as the ideal vehicle for cooking whole fish is totally reaffirmed.
Whole Fish Baked in a Salt Crust (Pesce al Sale)
1 4-5 lb whole snapper or salmon, cleaned (gutted, scaled, fins and tail removed)
4 lb coarse or kosher salt
2 egg whites
Lemon wedges and olive oil, for garnish
Preheat the oven to 475F. In a large bowl, mix the egg whites into the salt until it is uniformly moistened. Spread about a third of the salt on the bottom of a large rectangular or oval baking dish, place the fish on top, and cover it completely with the rest of the salt mixture, covering it completely.
Place the dish in the oven, turn the heat down to 400F, and roast for 20-30 minutes (or about 10 minutes for every inch of thickness at the fish’s widest part). Remove from the oven, use a hammer or the handle of a knfe to crack open the salt crust, and remove the fish to fillet it. Serve garnished with lemon and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil.
Source: Adapted slightly from Molto Italiano, by Mario Batali.
Permalink
09.18.07
Posted in Dessert, Foodblog Events, Fruits, Pies & Tarts at 11:28 am by julie
Oregon is a great place to live if you love food. For a good part of the year, we’re almost rolling in fresh fruits, berries and other produce, wild salmon, fresh hazelnuts, you name it. Besides which there are tons of fairly local dairies, cheesemakers (and more and more), meat producers, grain mills, wineries, and so on and so forth.
It can be a bit overwhelming for a girl who grew up in land-locked, semi-arid Colorado, but I can safely tell you that Oregon doesn’t quite have it all. For one thing, Oregon is sadly lacking in that quintessential fair food, funnel cakes—everyone here is enamored of flabby, greasy, sugar-caked elephant ears, a phenomenon I am at a loss to understand. (That may, in fact, have to be the subject of its very own post, because we missed Oktoberfest at Mt. Angel this year, and the funnel cake booth there is one fo the few I’ve found in the state.) For another thing, Oregon doesn’t have Rocky Mountain oysters… but wait, that’s a very good thing.
The other thing I’ve really been missing ever since I came out to live in Oregon for college is Concord grapes. Oh, we have wine grapes galore. I’ve got some variety of champagne grape growing in my backyard as we speak. But I’ve never been able to find Concords in the farmer’s markets, or even at the grocery store, and believe me, I’ve looked. You see, one of our traditional family recipes in the fall is grape pie, a dessert that not many people (around here, at least) seem to be familiar with. I got so desperate to have grape pie one year that my mom brought a frozen container of homemade pie filling in her carry-on bag from Denver (this was before the days of tabooed liquids and gels on airlines).
Now, I have no idea why we managed to come by Concord grapes in Colorado every fall, but I can’t find them here. It just doesn’t compute. But when I saw the plastic packages of blue-black Niabell grapes stacked up at Whole Foods with the label “Concord-like” large as life on the front, I snapped some up before I could blink, and happily set to making my precious grape pie.
The Niabells were indeed Concord-like, with that characteristic grapey smell as you pinch each grape and pop the pale green innards out of their purply skin. A quick simmer, a rather more onerous sieving to remove all those pesky seeds, and a quick blitz of the handblender, and I had a violently purple pie filling ready to go.
I decided to use white whole wheat flour in my pie crust this time in a nod to good eating habits, and the dough behaved really nicely. Since my last few crusts have been very short doughs for tarts that required serious patching, I was starting to feel inept at moving a rolled crust from the board to the pan. This one made me feel much more secure in my basic crust-handling skills.
Because the pie filling was rather liquidy, I parbaked my crust at 400F for 15 minutes, after its rest in the refrigerator. When it came out of the oven, I removed the pie weights and brushed the bottom and sides with a bit of egg white to seal them. I’ve never done this before, but heard it was a good way to avoid a soggy bottom, and the white dried very quickly to a shiny clear coating on the crust that looked trustworthy. In went the crayon-purple pie filling…
…and less than an hour later, out came a perfect (if slightly overflowing) grape pie! Mmm, pie! And since, for unfathomable reasons Jeremy isn’t a fan of grape pie, that means there’s more for me! You better believe I’ll be haunting Whole Foods next August looking for Niabell grapes… or maybe I should just send my Berry Birds to spy for me.*
I have no idea where my mom got this recipe from (maybe you can enlighten us, Mom?), but I know at least one of my aunts makes it too. My only adjustment to the recipe, other than the crust, was to puree the grape skins a bit after adding them back to the pulp, as I don’t much like the texture of the whole ones. Since this was my first grape pie-making experience personally, I didn’t want to stray from the recipe too much, but I would go ahead and puree them entirely next time, as even the smaller bits of skin just don’t do it for me. They definitely need to be in the pie, though, for color, flavor, nutrients, and pectin.
Update 9/23/07: I just found out that the Fruit a Month event for September is focusing on grapes, so this post will fit right in!
Mom’s Grape Pie
Slip skins from 1 1/2 lb (4 C) of Concord grapes; set skins aside. Bring pulp to boil; reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes. Sieve to remove seeds. Add
skins. (This is where you could puree them.)
Mix 1 C sugar, 1/3 C flour, and 1/4 t salt; add 1 T lemon juice, 2 T melted butter, and grape mixture. Pour into 9 inch unbaked pastry shell. Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, sift 1/2 C flour with 1/2 C granulated sugar. Cut in 1/4 C butter until crumbly. Sprinkle atop pie. Bake 15 minutes more. Best when eaten with vanilla ice cream.
*Any other children of the 80’s remember these guys? I totally had Purple Pieman and Sour Grapes dolls to go along with all my other Strawberry Shortcakes, and I thought they were great. Probably still in my parents’ basement somewhere too…
Permalink
09.17.07
Posted in Dinner, Meats, Pastas, Pork and Ham, Veal at 7:58 pm by julie
If you’re feeling like you’ve read this post before, you’re not having déjà vu: the photo I used for this post in June looks nearly identical to the one above, and with good reason. It’s basically the same meal. But more complicated, as so often seems to be the case with my life.
We were at the grocery store on Saturday morning and I saw, unusually for Fred Meyer, a few little packages of ground veal in the meat department, so I snapped them up and decided to make pork and veal meatballs. But of course there was no ground pork to be had, so I got some shoulder steaks and determined to grind my own. We have a nice electric meat grinder (most useful for grinding up whole chickens—bones and all—to make gravy for ferrets, by the way), so this wasn’t a big deal. We also got some lovely Angus NY strip steaks, and some spinach-feta-chicken sausages.
But when I sat down to decide on a meatball recipe, the more I looked, the more I realized I just wanted to make more of those pork-ricotta meatballs from Food and Wine, using a blend of pork and veal. The problem? No ricotta for the ricotta meatballs. I tried in vain to find another recipe that sounded good to me, and then gave up and walked over to the little market for whole milk. To make my own ricotta cheese.
I’ve made ricotta once before, using the buttermilk method. This time I had no buttermilk, as the little market doesn’t carry it, so I used distilled vinegar instead. I didn’t get as much yield with the vinegar method, so I would definitely say buttermilk is preferable.
Ricotta is insanely easy to make. The real reason to make it is because it’s obviously fresher and much better tasting than what you can get in a tub, at least if you use better milk than what they sell at the little market. Unfortunately for us, every time I make ricotta, it is because I need it for a recipe, but we’re all out and can’t (or else are too lazy to) get to the real grocery store.
The other nice thing about making your own ricotta cheese is that you can drain it to achieve the exact level of creaminess or crumbliness that you need. The first time I made it, I let it drain for close to an hour, and it was pretty solid; this time I was in a bit of a hurry to get the meatballs going since they take 2.5 hours in the oven, so my ricotta drained for nearly half an hour and was the perfect soft texture for mixing into ground meat.
If you’re interested in trying this very cool trick for yourself, here are a few resources:
Cooking Light
101 Cookbooks
Lex Culinaria
Permalink
09.14.07
Posted in Breakfast, Cuisines, Dinner, Foodblog Events, Fruits, Italian, Lunch, Meats, Pastas, Poultry at 10:42 am by julie
I’ve been doing lots of cooking and taking photos, but most of it, lately, is hardly worth mentioning, sad to say. But if you just close your eyes and scroll down past the mediocrity, there’s a really awesome pasta dish at the end for your troubles!
This eggbaby, which I made for breakfast last Saturday, looks pretty enough in the picture, but it came out thick and dense and bland. The sauteed apples were the only bit that made it edible for me, although Jeremy was sweet enough to eat three slices.
I made some fried chicken fingers, brined in buttermilk, earlier in the week, and they tasted fine dipped in milk gravy, but they weren’t anything special.
I’ve made this orecchiette with broccoli and anchovies once before, and we both really liked it (it comes from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, of course), but this time it just wasn’t very good. Right or wrong, I blame the broccoli. Actually, it was so pitiful that we bought a German chocolate pie from Marie Callender’s to console ourselves.
Ah, but here’s the bright spot in this otherwise mediocre menu. It may not look like much, but what you see above is a version of my ultimate comfort food. It’s a recipe I got from my aunt in Oregon City, who said it was adapted from a noodle dish made by a Thai friend of hers. In its current incarnation, it could hardly be farther from a Thai dish, but that doesn’t bother me one whit, because it’s noodles with eggs and bacon, salty-sweet. I believe the original involved shrimp rather than bacon, and quite possibly rice noodles, served with a vinegar-marinated cucumber salad, and every so often I wonder if I could reverse engineer it based on the description. But I like it so much this way, I never have.
The recipe below isn’t so much a recipe as a guide, as I never measure any of it. Just wing it until it tastes good to you. Still, such as it is, it’s my entry for Ruth’s Presto Pasta Night #29, if I’m not already too late.
Noil’s Noodles
I have no idea if that name is spelled correctly, so if I’ve botched it terribly, I apologize. I have always made this with wide egg noodles, but we ran out of them, and Jeremy has recently developed a serious egg-noodle prejudice for which I have no explanation. So I’ve used Barilla Plus rotini the last few times and it is just as good a meal, if farther than ever from its Thai roots. If you use these noodles, you may need to go heavy on the seasonings, so taste and adjust a bit more.
1/2 lb egg noodles or rotini
3 slices of bacon
1 tsp minced garlic
Soy sauce
Sugar
Salt and pepper
2 eggs, beaten
Get the pasta boiling in water right away and cook it until it is al dente, according to the package. Meanwhile, heat up a nonstick wok or large skillet. Slice the bacon into half-inch pieces and cook until it begins to get brown and crisp up; add the garlic and stirfry for 30 seconds or until it becomes fragrant, then remove the bacon and garlic to papertowels to drain, reserving the bacon fat in the pan. (If there’s a lot, you may want to remove all but 2 tablespoons or so, depending on how much pasta you cooked.)
When the pasta is done, drain it thoroughly, and dump it in the skillet with the hot bacon fat. Stirfry it for a few minutes over medium high heat, until it’s lightly coated in the bacon fat and just a bit browned and crisp in spots (if that’s how you like it; I do!).
Add a few glugs of soy sauce and stir it around; the sauce should lightly color the pasta. You can always add more later, so don’t be too heavy-handed at first. Next add about 2 tsp of sugar and stir that through, with a few grinds of pepper. Taste a noodle and adjust the soy and sugar balance if you need to; it should taste lightly and proportionately salty and sweet (the sugar mostly keeps the soy flavor in check).
When it tastes good to you, add the bacon and garlic back with the noodles, and stir fry for another minute or so while you beat the eggs. Spread the noodles out a bit so they aren’t all mounded up, and pour the eggs right over them. Give it a minute or two more to set, then stir it vigorously and keep stirring until all the egg is cooked.
The amounts in this recipe are all adjustable. I used to make it for myself when Jeremy was in school and I just used a single egg, 2 slices of bacon and less pasta. The amounts I’ve suggested above makes a big plateful each for two people, or maybe three if they can all show some restraint.
Permalink
09.11.07
Posted in Nuts, Grains & Legumes, Reviews, Veggies at 10:06 am by julie
I wasn’t expecting anything in the mail until this evening, but there it was on the porch last night when I came home from work: a copy of Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson (plus a few non-food related books I’d ordered). I’ve been a reader of Heidi’s blog, 101 Cookbooks, for several years, so I was in no way surprised to see a gorgeously designed book with mouthwatering photographs. I also knew that, like the blog, it would emphasize organic, minimally processed vegetarian cuisine in a very thoughtful way, and it doesn’t disappoint. I haven’t had time yet to read my way through the entire book, but I can already see how empowering it will be in terms of getting to know some of those less familiar (but incredibly nutritious) ingredients and how they can be worked into your everyday menu without too much fanfare.
Last year I bought The Splendid Grain, an award-winning cookbook by Rebecca Wood that focuses on the use of grains: familiar and esoteric, whole, cracked, rolled or milled. The grains are grouped by continent of origin, and each grain is discussed historically and practically with an offering of recipes. Every time I get that book out, I can’t wait to try the recipes. I even bought a bunch of fun flours and whole grains from the Bob’s Red Mill store in Milwaukie: millet, teff, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa. I’ve tried them out here and there, and some have become fast favorites, like quinoa pilaf, which I vastly prefer to rice; or buckwheat, for fabulous cookies and banana waffles and pizzoccheri, or just a bit of seasoning in a cinnamon flop. But somehow I rarely seem to get beyond sighing over the recipes in The Splendid Grain to actually making them.
I don’t think Super Natural Cooking will have the same fate. It focuses on a narrower range of grains, and also spends time on minimally-processed fats, oils, and natural sweeteners, and also has a fantastic section on cooking by color, which is great for fussy people like me who gravitate toward brown and beige foods. Heidi also gives practical, and rather empowering, advice about making substitutions, which is really what I needed to feel comfortable buying unusual ingredients for one specific recipe and then being able to use up the remainder in other ways. Actually, I think that once this book gets me rolling, I’ll feel much more at ease going back to The Splendid Grain as well.
In the meantime, I wanted to note that if you haven’t already been playing with white whole wheat flour, by all means go out and get some! It’s in all the ordinary grocery stores around here these days, from Bob’s Red Mill or King Arthur, and I’ve been substituting it for all or at least half of the AP flour in most of my baking recipes lately, not to mention fresh pasta. We can’t taste the difference at all, and it gives me a warm, peaceful feeling to know I’m eating something slightly less bad for me.
Permalink
09.10.07
Posted in Foodblog Events at 3:18 pm by julie
Just a quick post because I’m excited—I won a cookbook contest over at Cooking with Amy, and I’m going to be getting a copy of Masaharu Morimoto’s new book, Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking. We’re fans of Morimoto’s work on both the original Iron Chef and Iron Chef America; his food is always so beautiful and creative, and I can’t wait to get a look at some of the recipes he includes in the book!
Update 9/15/07: My book arrived today, and we had a blast looking through it. The photos are gorgeous—makes us wish we had a coffee table to keep it on. The recipes, as expected, are for the most part beyond my skill set, made with hard-to-find ingredients and equipment, or are just too, um, challenging for my persnickety palate. Strawberry squid ice candy, no thanks. But that didn’t make the recipes any less fun to read, especially since we recognized more than a few from both the Japanese and American versions of Iron Chef. And I was pleased to find a number of recipes that actually did seem accessible for someone like me, so you may well see a Morimoto recipe or two make its way to the blog in days to come. Thanks so much, Amy, for hosting this fun contest!
Permalink
09.09.07
Posted in Beef, Meats, Soups at 9:04 am by julie
When Jeremy brought home a huge package of tri-tip steak from Costco earlier this week, I knew right away that I wanted to use part of it for beef stew. It may not quite be fall yet, but it’s close enough for me!
The recipe I chose last night is one I’ve used many times before. It’s a recipe my mom has been making since my childhood, and although it is nothing fancy or complicated, it always makes a delicious meal (not to mention excellent leftovers) and it’s one of my favorite comfort foods.
Mom’s Beef Stew
2 lb beef stew meat, cut into 1 1/2″ chunks
2 T olive oil or shortening
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic, whole
1-2 bay leaves
1 T salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper
1/2 tsp paprika
A pinch each of allspice and cloves
2 C hot water
6 carrots, peeled and sliced into chunks
4 potatoes, peeled and sliced into chunks
1 lb small onions, quartered (or 1 package frozen pearl onions)
2 T flour
In a heavy-bottomed large Dutch oven, heat oil or shortening and brown beef well. Add next 10 ingredients (through water), stir well, cover and simmer for 90 minutes. Remove garlic and bay leaves; add carrots, potatoes and onions, cover and continue simmering for an additional 35-45 minutes, until vegetables are tender. (If necessary, add enough extra water or beef broth just to cover vegetables.) Remove about a cup of liquid to a small container and add flour; shake or whisk to combine, and stir back through the stew. Continue to simmer for 3 minutes, or until stew is thickened, and serve.
Permalink
09.08.07
Posted in Dairy, Snacks at 10:53 am by julie
When we were first exploring Whole Foods in the spring, we decided to try a bunch of different types of yogurt. Jeremy tried out Greek Gods and Fage Greek-style yogurts, and I picked out a variety including goats-milk and water-buffalo yogurts. The Greek-style yogurts were winners: we can find Greek Gods locally, and now use that frequently as a snack drizzled with honey, or in various sorts of recipes. Fage makes a better Greek yogurt, though, and we always get some when we visit Whole Foods.
I thought the goats-milk yogurt was alright, but it was too thin for my tastes, and on the gamey side. After that I didn’t have high hopes for the water buffalo yogurt, but I had purchased several containers of it and Jeremy wouldn’t touch it, so I gave it a shot. It was a revelation: naturally thick and creamy as cheesecake, and brilliantly white because any carotene is processed into vitamin A by the buffalo. It’s also naturally much higher in protein and calcium, and lower in cholesterol than cows-milk yogurt. It’s made in Vermont by Woodstock Water Buffalo, and the line of flavors is locally inspired. Our Whole Foods doesn’t carry the full range of flavors (I’d love to try chai, honey, strawberry, and black currant), so I’ve been sticking with vanilla and maple, and they’re both delicious, just sweet enough to balance that yogurt tang without tasting like pudding.
So be sure to try some of this yogurt if you see it in the store! I picked mine up as a novelty, but I’d always keep some in the fridge now if we didn’t have drive so far to get it.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »