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Hey - look what I found this morning:
Remember this post? This is the camera I was talking about. Or one very similar. Didn't even realize I still had it. And appropriately enough this morning, I took over 200 pictures (Hi Dad - I'm at it again!). Have to go through them, but I'll probably post a few later today.
From Mexico One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless. This book is a terrific introduction to Mexican cooking. As the title indicates, the book focuses on a number of classic recipes in great depth, so you, the reader, can understand why the dish is made the way it is, what some of the regional differences are, and so forth.
Chiles Rellenos - which simply means stuffed peppers - are a bit time-consuming, but well worth all the work involved, and rather impressive to serve. This recipe is actually Chiles Rellenos de Picadillo en Caldillo de Jitomate, which translates as Classic Pork Picadillo-Stuffed Chiles in Tomato Broth.
For us, the coolest thing was the fact that we had, in the freezer, PLENTY of poblano peppers from the garden last summer, and we've just been waiting for the right opportunity to make this dish. There's also a version in the book with just a cheese stuffing. I'd like to make those, too, but this pork filling was delicious. I had the last of the leftovers for breakfast yesterday, by the way.
Anyway, on to the cooking. Settle in - it's a long process. But - well worth it!
First up - the ingredients:
3 T rich-tasting pork lard or vegetable oil. (we used the lard - you can get it at most grocery stores, right near the butter.)
2 medium white onions, chopped into 1/4 inch pieces
2 28-oz cans good-quality whole tomatoes in juice, undrained OR 3 lbs ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into large pieces
1 tsp cinnamon, preferably freshly ground Mexican canela. (we used what we had - regular plain ol' cinnamon)
1 tsp black pepper, preferably freshly ground
2 cups chicken or beef broth (we used chicken)
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 1/2 lbs coarsely ground pork shoulder
1/2 cup raisins
1 T cider vinegar
salt
vegetable oil to a depth of 1 inch for frying.
8 medium fresh poblano chiles, not twisted or deeply indented, preferably with long stems (okay, beggars can't be choosers - we used what we had in the freezer. There were more than 8, but some were on the small side)
8 6-inch wooden skewers or 16 toothpicks
6 large eggs, cold
2 T all-purpose flour, plus about a cup for dredging the chiles
Sprigs of fresh cilantro, watercress or flat-leaf parsley for garnish (we didn't garnish; we were too hungry)
Okay, got all that? Let's cook.
1. The broth base and filling. In a medium-large saucepan, heat the lard or oil over medium. Add the onions and cook, stirring regularly, until they are very well browned, about 10 minutes.
(not there yet)
While the onions are cooking, puree the undrained canned tomatoes, or, if using fresh tomatoes, puree them with 2/3 cup water, using a blender of food processor and working in two batches if necessary.
When the onions are well-browned, raise the heat to medium-high and add the pureed tomatoes, cinnamon and pepper. Stir regularly as the mixture boils briskly, reducing until it becomes the consistency of thick tomato sauce, about 25 minutes.
2. The Tomato Broth. Remove 2 cups of the tomato mixture and set aside.
Stir the chicken (or beef) broth into the mixture that remains. Partially cover and simmer over low heat for 45 minutes or so, while you're preparing the filling and chiles.
3. The Pork Picadillo Filling. Set a large skillet (preferably nonstick) over medium-high heat. Add the almonds and stir around until they color to a deep golden, about 2 minutes. Remove.
(keep going - you want them more golden that those above.)
Crumble the pork into the skillet and fry, stirring often,
until thoroughly cooked (some of the edges should be browned and crispy), 10 to 15 minutes. If the pork has rendered a lot of fat, drain it off. Stir in the reserved 2 cups of tomato mixture, the raisins and vinegar. Cook over medium heat, stirring regularly, until the mixture is very thick and homogeneous, about 20 minutes. Stir in the almonds, then taste and season with salt, usually about 1 teaspoon. Cool.
4. Preparing the Chiles. (* This isn't how we did ours. Bill put our chiles under the broiler, which you can read about in the Green Sauce recipe that I posted yesterday. But I'm printing the method from the book, because that's the way Chef Bayless wrote it.)
While the picadillo is cooking, pour 1 inch of oil into a deep heavy skillet or pot - the pot should be 12 inches wide and 3 to 4 inches deep for easiest maneuvering of the chiles - and set over medium to medium-high to heat to 350 degrees F. In two batches, fry the chiles, turning them continually, for about 1 minute, until they are evenly blistered (they'll look uniformly light green, having lightened as they blister). Drain on paper towels. Remove the oil from the heat.
When the chiles are cool enough to handle, rub off the blistered skins, then cut an incision in the side of each one, starting 1/2 inch below the stem end and continuing to within 1/2 inch of the tip. One by one, work your index finger inside each chile and dislodge all the seeds clustered just below the stem. Quickly rinse the seeds from inside the chiles, being careful not to rip or tear the opening any wider; rinse off any stray bits of skin. Drain cut side down on paper towels.
(In this picture below, these are some of the chiles Bill had done under the broiler. The skins have been removed, and the slits cut, but obviously the seeds are still there.)
5. Stuffing the Chiles. Stuff each well-drained chile with about 1/2 cup of the cooled pork filling,
then slightly overlap the two sides of the incision and pin them back together with a skewer or two toothpicks. For the greatest ease in battering and frying, flatten the chiles slightly, place on a parchment-lined baking sheet and freeze for about 1 hour to firm.
(* I had a bit of a challenge working with our chiles. First of all, like I mentioned earlier, some were on the small side, so obviously I used less than a half cup of filling. Second, structurally I think the chiles had been weakened by being in the freezer since summer. They tore easily when Bill was cleaning them out, so some of my stuffed chiles actually had 3 toothpicks (actually I used broken skewers, since I couldn't find our toothpicks until yesterday) in order to hold all the filling in.)
6. Battering and Frying the Chiles. Reheat the oil to 350 degrees F. (Actually, since we hadn't used the frying method to blister the chiles, I just used the pot of oil we had on the stove from a recent deep-frying project.) Set up a try lined with several layers of paper towels. Separate the eggs: whites into the bowl of an electric mixer, yolks into a small bowl. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt to the whites and begin beating them on medium speed. When they are beginning to look dry and hold a stiff peak but are not at all rigid, beat in the yolks two at a time until well incorporated. Lastly, beat in the two tablespoons flour.
(this should be a very light and frothy batter - soft and fluffy.)
Spread the 1 cup of flour on a plate.
One at a time, batter the first four chiles: (we did 3 at a time - whatever fits in your pot of oil) Roll in the flour, shake off the excess, pick up by the stem, dip into the batter and quickly pull straight up out of the batter, then lay into the hot oil. (If your kitchen is very warm, it's best to hold the remaining batter for the second round in the refrigerator.) Once the first four chiles are in the oil, begin gently, gently basting them with spoonfuls of hot oil (this will help set the uncooked batter on top).
When they're richly golden on the bottom, about 4 minutes, use one small metal spatula underneath and another one (or a spoon) on top to gently turn the chiles over. Fry until the other side is richly golden, another 3 to 4 minutes. Using the metal spatula, remove the chiles to the paper towels to drain.
Repeat with the remaining chiles.
7. Serving the Chiles. Heat the oven to 400 degrees F. (Preheat while you're frying the chiles.) Once all the fried chiles have cooled for at least 5 minutes, pick them up by carefully rolling each one onto one hand, then transfer to a baking sheet (lined with parchment if you wish, for extra ease at serving time). Pull out the skewers by twisting them gently (like taking darts from a dart board). Bake for 15 minutes to heat thoroughly, to render some of the absorbed oil and to crisp slightly.
Meanwhile, bring the tomato broth to a boil and check the consistency: It should be similar to a brothy somato soup. If it's too thick, thin with a little water or broth; if too thin, boil rapidly until thickened slightly. Season it with salt, usually about 1/2 teaspoon.
Ladle about 1/2 cup of the broth into each of eight deep serving bowls (large soup bowls or pasta bowls are perfect here). Nestle in one of the chiles, garnish with herb sprigs and get ready for a taste of real Mexico.
(* We didn't serve them in bowls - we just put them out on a tray and let people serve themselves.)
We ladled the sauce onto the chiles instead. But regardless - what an amazing dish! Flavor-wise, it's the small amount of cinnamon that really makes this taste special. And texture-wise, the frothy egg batter gives you a soft, tender coating - it's not crunchy like fish & chips, for instance. You're not making that sort of batter - separating the yolks from the whites and beating the whites first gives you a souffle batter instead - the result is comfort food at its most sublime.
So go on, set aside a chunk of time and make these. You will not be sorry.
This one was for a couple of coworkers who share a Halloween birthday. I wanted to do something in keeping with the spooky them of the holiday, and this is what I came up with.
I could have done a better job of displaying the spiders, I think...but so many of these cakes were just experiments - I made everything up as I went along.
Okay - well, part of the deal in making cakes for people at work was that I needed to have enough cake for everyone. So to solve that issue, the base is a 13 x 9 inch chocolate cake that I covered with fondant. I tinted it green. Why green? Well, it's not JUST green, it's "Juniper Green." So I'm thinking I recently bought some new food coloring shades and I wanted to play with them. Actually, considering that the two loaf-pan shaped layers on top of this first layer were tinted with "Aster Mauve" and "Delphinium Blue" confirms it. Hahaha. No other reason for the colors at all except that they were new.
The other new toy I must have purchased right around this time was a piping tip that had lots of tiny holes in it and could be used to make grass or fur with your icing. So that's how I did the spider bodies. I made two chocolate cupcakes. I wrapped them in brown fondant. I made little fondant spider heads. And I piped brown frosting through that tip to give my spiders furry bodies. The legs were the only inedible parts - I used big brown pipe cleaners.
And the other decorating was Charlotte-inspired - I piped spider webs on the loaf-pan layers and the green layer, and in the webs I did the "Happy Birthday" thing for each of the two people.
I will tell you that when I was making this cake, I'd made my spiders, and had positioned them on the cake, which was on a work stand in my little apartment kitchen. And every so often I would catch one of them looking at me....it was a little creepy until I got used to them.
And here they are:
Kind of cute, aren't they?
I love this sauce. It may have been part of the first meal Bill cooked for me...or maybe the second.
Anyway - it comes from Betty Crocker's Mexican Made Easy - published in 1993, I think it may be out of print now. Bill bought his copy for $2.99 at a Building 19 store an eternity ago.
Anyway, from Chapter 2 in the book - "Sizzling Sauces and Sides" - the description for Green Sauce is as follows:
"This is a suave chile sauce, slightly chunky and rich with cream"
Suave? I don't know about that. There's definitely some heat to it, though. I love it. It's great as a dip, and we also used it in tacos made from a slow-grilled pork tenderloin, and it was fabulous that way.
What you'll need:
1 large onion, finely chopped (about a cup)
4 poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded and finely chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 jalapeno chile, seeded and finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 T vegetable oil
1/2 cup whipping (heavy) cream ( * we only use 1/4 cup)
1/4 tsp salt
Now. If you've never roasted peppers, here's probably the easiest way. Heat up the broiler in your oven, and put one of the oven racks on the highest level possible. Put your peppers on a row in the pan so that when you place the pan in the oven, the peppers will be directly under the broiler flames. Once the broiler is ready, put the pan with the peppers (it's sounding like a tongue twister in the making) on the top rack and broil for a few minutes, until the skin chars. Pull the pan out, flip the peppers over, and char on the other side. They should look like this -
or even more charred. Oh, and all that gunk on the pan? Just soak it for a while, and it'll come right off. Or you could be smarter than we are and cover the pan with foil first. Take your pick.
Anyway, when the peppers are nice and black on the outside, place them in a paper bag, close the top, and let them sweat a bit.
When they've sweated and cooled, you peel the skin off. It's helpful to do this at the sink, so you can rinse the bits of peel away as you work.
Another option, if you've got a gas stove, is just to set the peppers (if they're big enough) on the burner over a flame. Turn them periodically to get a nice even char all over. Then proceed with the sweating and so forth. Just - you know, don't go off and so something else while the peppers are on the fire. It could be bad.
Okay, now, once you've got everything peeled and chopped and ready to go, place the onion, chiles, and garlic in the oil over medium heat in a small pan, stirring occasionally, until the onion is tender - about 8 minutes.
Stir in the cream and salt.
Ta-da! How simple is that? Especially in my house, where Bill does all the work and I just taste the finished product and give my professional opinion.
And my professional opinion is always "You should have doubled the recipe!" (Yield is 1 1/3 cups)
So hey, if you're looking for a change from salsa for your Super Bowl party on Sunday (if you're having one, or going to one. Or if you might be hungry all by your self) - make this instead!
Saturday, when my sister's kids stayed over, this was the menu:
The first meal Bill ever cooked for me was a Mexican dinner. The recipes came from the two cookbooks he had - one was a Betty Crocker publication, and the other was a book of name brand "Mexican" cooking - you know, where all the recipes stipulate that you use Kraft cheese or Philadelphia Cream Cheese - real authentic stuff. Still - it was a start.
I'll be posting them over the next couple of days, for your reading and salivating enjoyment.
Alex was psyched up for his swim class tonight - has been since this morning. Not just because he is ready and willing to jump into the pool, but because AFTER class, as a reward for facing his fears and conquering them, and for doing well on his report card (hee hee hee - his very first report card!), the deal was that we'd go out for dinner at Smokey Bones. It's one of his favorite places to eat. And fortunately, he forgot all about wanting to go out for sushi. We'd need to sell one of the vehicles to support his tuna habit.
Anyway, swim class went great - and at the end, when they lined up along the edge of the pool, Alex was the first one in. His skinny arm shot up and he was wiggling with excitement. And in he went. Second time through, he was smiling huge and pointing to himself and nodding like "Yeah, I want to do that again!" And he did. Bill and I sat there on the bench, grinning and giving him thumbs up signs and nodding like annoying bobble-head dolls. After the class, he came running over to us, beaming with pride.
We got the kids dried off and back in their clothes, and headed up the road to eat.
For dinner? What does the triumphant water boy eat? Ribs. No question. He ate a half rack of ribs, and might have eaten more if he hadn't eaten half his fries, his slice of garlic toast, Bill's garlic toast, and some tortilla chips before the meals came.
I wish I'd brought my camera with me tonight. Not just to take a picture of his jump into the pool, but to capture his rapturous face, dotted with sauce, as he devoured rib after rib. He'd hold the meatless bone up to Bill and laugh as Bill gave him a look of shock and amazement.
Lots of the time, I just go on with things, you know? Don't we all? Get up, go about our days, do our things, eat, work, shop, relax, go to bed, etc. Get the kids dressed and ready for school and daycare, shuttle them back and forth, do laundry, plan meals, help with homework, mediate squabbles, direct traffic, wash faces, tuck blankets under chins, hugs and kisses and off go the lights.
But I try to be aware now and then. I try to pay close attention to the smaller picture. A week ago, Alex was afraid to jump into the pool. Yesterday Bill worked with him in the pool, helped him work through the fear and get past it and discover that it's actually fun when the water goes over your head. And tonight - he did it himself. Twice.
So the four of us, our little family, went out to celebrate. We relaxed, we had good food, and we had fun. No tears, no tension. Just...comfortableness.
A peek into the window of my own life...tonight glowed warmly, gentle laughter and random giggles dancing from room to room.
They're downstairs right now, watching a Dora and Diego DVD ("The Great Dinosaur Rescue" or something like that. Featuring Dora and her football head, and her normal-looking cousins, Diego and Alicia.) Julia got to pick this morning, and Alex was just trying to convince Julia that she's not really interested in this movie.
"Hey," he hisses with fake excitement, "I've got a better idea! Let's watch...(dramatic pause) cartoons!"
Cartoons, as in something on TV, rather than a DVD.
Sometimes he can sway her, but not this morning.
"No! I'm watching THIS!"
They are quiet now.
Alex, resigned.
Julia, triumphant.
~~~~~
Yesterday Bill took Alex over to the Y during "Family Swim" time at the pool so he could coach Alex in jumping into the water. At swim class, for some reason, Alex has developed a fear about jumping off the edge of the pool. He used to be fine, but something changed at the end of his last swim class, and in order for him to move up, he needs to get over this.
So for half an hour, Bill worked with Alex, having him jump in holding Bill's hands, and then one hand, and finally no hands...jumping in and giving Bill a high five in passing...and it worked. Yay!
Swim class is tonight, and hopefully Alex's confidence won't suddenly disappear.
~~~~~
My sister's kids spent the weekend. It's always nice when they visit - my kids love their big cousins, and I think the big cousins get a kick out of the little cousins. Best of all, they all keep each other occupied, which gives Bill and me a bit of a break.
Of course, there was cooking. We cooked Mexican for the weekend, and I also gave everyone samples of some of the desserts I've been working on for some of next month's posts.
So it was a weekend of eating. Especially Saturday. I'll post recipes and pictures later.
In a few minutes, I've got to get the kids moving, brush teeth, get dressed, bring Alex to kindergarten and run a few errands with Julia in tow.
It's cold out this morning, and we had a little snow yesterday, so everything looks clean and wintery.
That's it for now. I'll be back later.
This recipe comes from a Time Life-Books series - "Foods of the World" - published in 1968. I think my mother had (or maybe still has) all of them. They came two books per part of the world - one large hardbound book that had a lot of historical and cultural information and recipes, and then the smaller wire ring-bound volume that just had the recipes. Bill's mother had the two volumes for Chinese Cooking, and now we have them on our shelf.
Bill had picked up a can of fresh crabmeat when he was shopping for the Soft Shell Crab Roll and other things we made a couple weekends ago. The grocery store he was in didn't have soft shell crabs, so he figured any crabmeat would do. Then I mentioned where we could get frozen soft shell crabs (at Dave's Marketplace - their East Greenwich location is the one I use most) and so we didn't end up using the crabmeat for the rolls.
So. Bill thought we could make these dumplings with the crabmeat at some point. It took a while to get done - there's a bit of a time committment, and for one reason and another, it didn't get done.
At last, I made them Friday night. Actually, I started things on Thursday - I was going to include them as part of our dinner - but I didn't have time to put them together, so into the fridge went the filling and the dough.
Oh - and another thing - I changed the recipe. Or, rather, I used a different dough than the one called for, mainly because I didn't have tapioca flour. So I found another dough recipe - a yeasted bread dough, actually, that was used in other recipes (same book) for other steamed dumplings. So you're getting my rendition of the recipe, actually, and not the exact on in the book.
Is that enough of a back story?
Here's the recipe. You'll have approximately 4 dozen dumplings, and because I used a different dough recipe, you will have some left over. Freeze it, or get creative.
Steamed Bread Dough:
1 pkg dry active yeast - I had a jar on hand - a package is about a tablespoon.
1 T sugar
1/4 cup lukewarm water
1 cup milk, heated to lukewarm
4 cups all purpose flour.
Very simple - sprinkle the yeast and the sugar in the 1/4 cup of water and blend. Set aside to allow the yeast to become active. Then combine with the milk, and add the flour. If you're doing it by hand, add the flour a cup or so at a time, stirring well to incorporate. Once the dough is too stiff and sticky to stir, pour it out onto a board and knead in the rest of the flour. Continue to knead until you've got a nice, firm ball of dough.
Place the dough in a very lightly greased bowl and cover with a damp towel. Set in a warm place and allow to double in bulk - about 1-2 hours, depending on the environment. Punch the dough down, and allow to rise again for 20-30 minutes.
While the dough is rising, you can put the filling together. Here's what you need:
2 dried chinese mushrooms, an inch to an inch and a half in diameter.
1/2 lb fresh crabmeat or a 7 1/2 ounce can of crabmeat
3 tablespoons peanut oil or other flavorless oil
1 tablespoon finely chopped, peeled fresh ginger root
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper (I used black.)
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1. In a small bowl, cover the mushrooms with some warm water and let them soak for 30 minutes to rehydrate. (It helps to place another bowl or something on top of the mushrooms, to help keep them submerged at first.) Then, remove the mushrooms, discard the water, and remove the stems. Chop up the caps as fine as possible. Set aside.
2. Pick through the crabmeat to remove any bits of shell or cartilage. Shred it and set aside.
3. Place the oil, ginger, salt, pepper and sugar within easy reach.
4. Set a wok or skillet over high heat for about 30 seconds. Pour in the oil, swirl it about and heat for another 30 seconds, reducing the heat to moderate if the oil begins to smoke. Add the ginger, then the mushrooms and crabmeat and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes. Then stir in the salt, pepper and sugar, stirring for 30 seconds longer, and transfer the entire contents of the pan to a bowl. Cool to room temperature.
To Assemble:
Cut the dough into quarters. Cover three sections while you work with the first one. Lightly oil your work surface and roll the first piece of dough into a log about an inch in diameter.
Next, take a knife or bench scraper and cut the log into pieces half an inch or so wide.
Next, the directions say to "lightly oil one side of the cleaver blade and, with the palm of your hand, firmly press the blade down on each slice of dough, flattening it into a 2 1/2 inch round." So I did that.
(My hand looks freakishly wide and the freckles on my arm somehow seem to my paranoid eyes like liver spots. Just so you know.)
Anyway, that worked, but it was just as easy to flatten the dough with my fingers, and faster.
Whatever method you choose, after you get them all flattened, take one in the palm of your hand and place a teaspoon of the filling in the center.
Fold the circle of dough in half and press the edges together...
And as you're sealing the edges, you want to sort of pleat the seam edge by making little folds as you go along.
This particular dough seemed rather soft and floppy while I was doing it, so the pleats weren't very sharp. And I'm also not a professional. The main thing is, seal them up so nothing pops out while they're cooking.
After you've pleated the edge, set the dumpling down on a lightly oiled platter or plate while you make the rest of them. Press the dumpling down a bit so it's "sitting" with the pleated edge up.
To cook:
If you've got a bamboo steamer, you want to get a shallow pan wider than the steamer and pour in enough boiling water to come up about an inch on the side of the steamer. (Sorry - I didn't take pictures at this point.) Place the dumplings in the racks of the steamer - not too close together, as they expand somewhat while they cook. Set the entire bamboo steamer and lid on the water in the pan and let steam (water still boiling) for 5 minutes. Keep a kettle of boiling water handy, in case you need more during the cooking process. We have two steamers, with two racks each, and that worked perfectly for the 46 dumplings I made. You can keep the first batch warm by just keeping the lid on the steamer while you cook the other batch.
Bill made a little dipping sauce for them, too. He used soy sauce, sesame oil, fresh ginger and garlic, and rice vinegar, and maybe some sugar.
I love soft shell crabs. Fried, so the legs are crunchy and the body is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. They're seasonal items - you can only get them fresh some time in the spring, but one of our local grocery stores has them flash frozen year 'round, so every once in a while I get some and make sandwiches. Usually with some arugula and a spicy mayo on a soft roll. Aahhhh. Good stuff.
Another favorite of mine is any sort of maki roll made with soft shell crab. You can get them at just about any sushi bar, I think. I can get them at a couple of local grocery stores that have mini sushi stations near the seafood counter.
Or, we can make them at home. Which, if you saw this post a few days ago, you already know. I just figured I'd discuss the preparations in a bit more detail today.
My husband is usually the sushi maker in our house. We both can do it, but for whatever reason, he has taken it on as his job. I'm the fry cook. So anyway, we wanted to do an all-Japanese meal over the weekend, and Bill was looking through the gorgeous Nobu: The Cookbook, by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa.
What a beautiful book. And it's well written, and well illustrated, with plenty of step-by-step photos to show how to, for example, assemble a maki roll. The autobiographical section of the book is quite detailed as well. He's had quite a life thus far.
But anyway - on to the crab roll.
The most interesting thing about this one to us was the use of a very thin sheet of daikon radish as the outer layer of the roll. Typically it's nori, or rice, in the case of an inside-out roll. But we haven't seen daikon used before. (Which means nothing - we're certainly not sushi experts over here.)
Here are the directions for Nobu's Soft Shell Crab Roll:
Ingredients:
1 cup vinegared rice
1 sheet dried nori, toasted
grated wasabi to taste (we use a paste, since we don't have fresh here)
1 T asatsuki chives, chopped into fine rounds. (we used the chives from our garden)
1 T flying fish roe (we didn't have that available; we used whitefish roe)
1/12 avocado
vegetable oil (for deep frying)
1 soft shell crab, cleaned (we made two rolls, so we have two crabs.)
potato flour (I used regular flour - it's what I had in the house)
1 straight and uniform daikon radish, with ends trimmed, peeled.
Method:
1. Spreading the rice. Spread the vinegared rice on the sheet of nori. Using your left hand to make sure the rice doesn't spill over the left side of the nori sheet, spread the rice out evenly toward the left by pressing - but not squashing - the rice with the fingertips of your right hand. Repeat, using opposite hands, for the other side. You should make the rice a little thicker at each end of the nori in order to form a "bank." Leave about 3/8 inch of the nori sheet free of rice at the side furthest from you.
2. Adding the wasabi and filling. When the rice is thoroughly and evenly spread over the nori, apply an unbroken streak of wasabi across the middle with one finger. Then, using a spoon, spread the chives and the fish roe evenly over the wasabi and across the rice. Add the avocado on top.
3. Bring about 3 inches of oil in a small saucepan to 355 degrees F. Dust the soft shell crab with flour
and deep fry for 3 to 4 minutes.
Drain.
Cut the crab in half and add it to the roll while the crab is still hot. Because the crab is the bulky part of the filling it should be firmly compressed before rolling. This will make rolling easier.
4. Rolling with nori. Lift the end of the nori nearest you and carefully roll it over the filling, pressing down as you go.
(Bill is using a makisu, a bamboo mat, to roll it. He covers it in plastic wrap to prevent food from sticking when he's making multiple rolls.)
5. Making the daikon peel. Holding an 8-inch knife firmly, move the daikon against the knife, turning the daikon gradually to cut the flesh into a paper-thin ribbon.
This is called katsura-muki. You should end up with a strip 4 inches by 12 inches.
* Much easier said than done. But Bill did really well considering he's never done it before. And when he'd cut the two sheets, he just trimmed the thicker sections with a vegetable peeler, to give it a uniform thinness. It wasn't paper thin, but it was still pretty damn thin:
6. Rolling with the daikon peel. Place the nori on top of the strip of daikon and roll away from you.
7. Cutting. Press down on the roll again at both ends to settle the filling, and trim the ends with a knife to tidy the shape. Starting from the middle, cut the roll into 6 pieces of equal size.
(And you'll probably notice that the ends of the roll weren't trimmed - we kind of like the extra bits of crab and so forth sticking out of the ends.)
Like I said, Bill made two crab rolls, and truthfully, I could have eaten both of them by myself (hidden in a corner of the kitchen so no one would see me until it was too late). The daikon gave them an extra level of crunch, along with the crispy portions of crab. In contrast, you have the creamy texture of the avocado, the pop of the fish roe, and tangy thin bite of the chives. All of this wrapped in perfectly cooked morsels of rice and the sea-salty sheet of nori.
Actually, I could probably eat three of these rolls, if I was really hungry.
If you're going to make sushi or maki rolls, you need to first learn to make sushi rice.
Bill is the sushi rice maker in our house. I don't even do it any more - it's his job. The basic ratio of rice to water is 1:1, and his cooking time is 10 minutes of cooking followed by 10 minutes of steaming. But I'm jumping ahead of things.
First of all, it seems obvious, but if you're going to make sushi, buy sushi rice. You can get it in many grocery stores or health food stores. Sushi rice is a short grain rice, so if you must substitute, you want something short-grain.
You will also need rice wine vinegar, sugar, mirin, and salt.
First thing you'll need to do is rinse the rice in cold water. Bill does this in a strainer, under running water.
What you're doing here is washing the starch off of the grains of rice. Starch is great if you're making risotto, and you want that creamy texture, but when you're making sushi, you want each grain to be distinct and separate from the other grains. So keep rinsing.
Get your fingers in there and work the grains of rice under the water. You want the water to run clear.
Once that's all set, place the rice in a pot with an equal amount of water (by volume - i.e. 1 cup to 1 cup). Bring to a boil and cook for ten minutes, then shut the heat off and leave the lid on and let it sit for another ten minutes. DON'T OPEN THE LID. You'll let the steam out too soon and the rice won't cook properly.
When the rice is cooked, fluff it up a bit with a fork to separate the grains. Taste it - you want it firm, but not al dente. It should be cooked all the way through.
While the rice is cooking and steaming, you need to make the vinegar mixture.
There are different recipes for the vinegar mixture, but the preparation is the same.
The ratio Bill has been using for some time now comes from a book he bought me way back when, called Sushi Making at Home, by Yasuko Kamimura.
It's a fun book with lots of step-by-step photos on how to make sushi rice, how to make various kinds of maki rolls and all sorts of other related dishes.
(On a side note, some of the translation is amusing. There's a dish called Ichimatsu Oshi-Zushi, which is basically layers of rice and vegetables in a square mold, topped with diced scrambled egg alternating with mashed shrimp in a checkerboard pattern. There's a picture of a serving of the finished dish at the top of the page, and just below the picture, above the name of the dish, it reads: "Girls will be delighted. Use a pan." Huh? Girls will love it - because it's pink and yellow, apparently. And oh, by the way, use a pan. I don't know, it just cracked us up.)
Anyway.
Combine the following in a sauce pan:
6 T rice vinegar
2 T sugar
2 tsp mirin (sweet sake)
2 tsp salt.
Heat these together to dissolve the sugar and the salt. (The above proportions are for a 3 cup batch of rice - 3 cups before cooking).
Okay.
Put the cooked rice in a large bowl and pour the vinegar mixture over the rice. With a paddle or wooden spoon, you want to mix the rice with the vinegar using a cutting motion. At the same time, you're also slowly cooling the rice.
The book also says to fan the rice with one hand while you're mixing the vinegar in with the other hand. Sort of a culinary version of patting your head and rubbing your stomach.
Anyway, once it's mixed well and cooled, cover with plastic or a damp cloth so the rice doesn't dry out.
Bill also mentioned just now that he makes more of the vinegar mixture than called for, to rehydrate the rice if needed.
* And another useful tip - keep a bowl of water mixed with a little rice vinegar handy - the sticky rice will adhere to your hands after you work with it for a bit, and rinsing your hands often in the vinegar water will help counteract that.
All set? Okay, now you can go make a Soft Shell Crab Roll.
Sorry, but I just don't have much to say today. I started another post about the dinner we (well, mostly my husband) made on Sunday, but I just don't have the enthusiasm for it at the moment.
I actually suddenly thought - "Another recipe? People must be getting so bored with that. Don't you have anything else going on in your life?"
And well yeah, of course I do. In fact, I'll have to go pick up two of them from school/daycare in an hour or so. Then we're going to the grocery store to get a few things because - get this - my son wants to learn how to make ratatouille. Really. I know. He's five. Well, and a HALF. But still. He's not even all that nuts about the vegetables that go into ratatouille, but he's willing to forget that in this case. Thank you Disney/Pixar for this healthy influence on my son. Because, you know, the only reason he wants us to make this dish is because it's featured in the movie of the same name. Pretty funny, huh?
So we'll pick up some eggplant and zucchini and tomatoes and all that, and later on we'll make that for dinner, along with the steamed crabmeat dumplings I'd already planned to make. Interesting blend of cuisines tonight.
And there I go...back to food.
I've also got other cooking "projects" under way...I'm actually gearing up for a pre-Valentine's day recipe series. To begin on Feb 1st, or at least that's the plan. So I'm doing the food prep ahead of time, so I can have all the images ready to go. At times I think I'm a looney. But it's fun.
And I'm not even really all THAT into Valentine's Day, either. The enforced giving of valentines to all your classmates...the ugly, loser feeling if you don't get as many as other kids...ugh. Horrible pressure. And it just escalates from there. I like romance well enough, but I don't like to have it scheduled for me by Hallmark and FTD. And roses on Valentine's day? Please. It's inSANE what they cost. Just crazy. I'd rather have a new toaster if you're going to buy me something. Actually, Bill knows that (plus the cat tries to eat the baby's breath if there is any in a bouquet of roses, and usually also ends up knocking over the vase in the process, and then later hacking up a mess of tiny half-digested white flowers. Now there's some mood music for you.) - and the best Valentine's Day gift he gave me one year were some Godiva chocolates - inside a 14 inch All-Clad sauce pan - with lid! Nothing says "I love you" like - "here's a big pan, go make me something." But see, actually, that IS what it says to me. That's why we are married.
Another thing about Valentine's Day that bugs me is the people out there who say Valentime's Day. No, it's not "Time for Valen's Day." It's not Valen TIME. It's ValenTINE. TINE. Like as in the tines of a fork. Which, unsurprisingly, brings us back to food again.
We don't go out to eat on ValentiNe's Day. There's no fun in it. You have a long wait - even with reservations - in an overcrowded restaurant with stressed waitstaff and you are just SUPPOSED to have the best meal of your life...and you don't.
I'd rather we cook it ourselves, after the kids have gone to bed, and dine quietly and peacefully and without any waiting patrons eyeing our table to see if we've paid the check yet.
To me, there is romance in preparing a meal for someone. Food isn't love - it's the preparing of it that's love. You make a meal - any kind of a meal - for someone else...something you know they will enjoy and appreciate - that's romantic. That's love. And so that's kind of what I want to convey in the February posts leading up to Valentine's Day. There will definitely be some fancy-schmancy things - particularly desserts - but they're really not that hard - they just take some planning and preparation.
But there are the simple things, too. Nothing, for example, says "I love you" to my husband like a grilled cheese sandwich. And not some fancy gruyere on a baguette grilled cheese, either. I'm talking sliced American cheese on white bread, with yellow mustard, fried crisp golden brown on the outside/warm and melty and goopy on the inside - in plenty of butter. That's it.
I guess what I'm really trying to say, in my babbling, rambling, run-on sentence sort of way.......
.......is that it is apparently impossible for me to write about anything anymore without turning it into a piece about food.
So I think I'll end this post now and go peruse my cookbooks for a ratatouille recipe.
"Julia, what kind of bird is it that stands on one leg...and is pink..."
"A...FALINGO!"
And while I'm looking at the book Taste of Japan by Masaki Ko, I HAVE to share this recipe with you. I landed on it while I was flipping through the pages to find the Daikon recipe in my previous post, and this is one of our all time favorites from the book. SO easy and SO yummy. If you like shrimp and avocado and wasabi.
We need to make this one again soon, I think...
Here's what you need:
2 avocados, halved, pitted, and scooped out of their skins.
8 ounces cooked shrimp, shelled
For the dressing:
4 teaspoons usukuchi soy sauce (it's lighter in color and saltier than dark soy sauce)
2 T rice vinegar
2 teaspoons wasabi paste (available at grocery stores. If you buy the wasabi powder, you mix it with water in a 1:1 ratio to make the paste)
Okay.
To make the dressing - whisk the three ingredients together well.
Cut each avocado half into 3/4 inch cubes.
Cut the cooked shrimp into pieces about an inch long.
Put the shrimp and avocados in a bowl, toss well with the dressing, and serve promptly.
See???? How easy is that? And it's so yummy you won't want to share with anyone else. This recipe serves 4, according to the book, but I think Bill and I can polish the whole thing off between the two of us.
We also added scallops one time, I believe...and you could use lobster instead of shrimp if you want.
Go ahead. Try it! You know you want to....
A couple of days ago I posted a bunch of pictures of Bill making a soft shell crab maki roll. He made a number of things that day, including a dish we'd made years ago and haven't made again in ages. Since this particular soft shell crab roll included thinly sliced daikon as part of the assembly, Bill decided to make Daikon with Sesame Miso Sauce as well.
First of all, what the heck (you may be thinking) is a Daikon anyway?
It's a big radish. Raw, it tastes, well, like a radish. Cooked, it has a rather distinctive taste, kind of more like a turnip. It's used fairly often in Japanese cooking and garnishing. The one Bill bought was huge - about 3 inches in diameter and I don't even know how long the whole thing was because I didn't see it before he cut it up.
In the picture above, the radishes are obviously cleaned. Fresh from the ground, they'll look brown.
Anyway, it's an interesting dish - the kids had NO interest in it at all - they didn't even know what it was, but somehow they just knew it wouldn't compare to raw tuna and salmon. And they were right, because not too many things CAN compare to sashimi. But I digress.
We got the recipe from one of the several Asian cookbooks we collected at the very beginning of our relationship - from the Creative Cooking Library - Taste of Japan by Masaki Ko.
We used this book a LOT. Looking through it recently made us a bit nostalgic, and so look for more recipes from this volume in the weeks and months ahead. Pages are stained with food splatter (we must seem like the messiest of cooks, but honestly, only Bill is. hahahahaha) and the book willingly opens to certain pages just because we made those recipes so often way back when. I think it was a bargain book when we picked it up, and it may be out of print now.
So, let's make this.
Bill made the sesame miso sauce early in the day, just to get it out of the way.
For that you'll need:
a generous 1/3 cup red miso paste
a generous 1/3 cup white miso paste
1/4 cup mirin
2 T sugar
4 tsp ground white sesame seeds
(some notes...miso paste is made from fermented soybeans. The darker the paste - there are also yellow and brown pastes to be had - the more intense the flavor. We like the brown for miso soup. Anyway, you can find them in some grocery stores, and very often in health food stores. They come in little plastic tubs and seem to keep for an eternity in the fridge. And mirin is a sweet sake used for cooking. You can find that in grocery stores and health food stores as well.)
So what you do is mix the red and white miso pastes in a saucepan. Add the mirin and sugar and then simmer for 6 minutes, stirring continuously.
Remove from the heat and add the sesame seeds.
Pretty simple, right?
Okay. You can do that ahead of time or you can do it while the daikon radish is cooking.
To prepare the radish you'll need...
1 medium daikon (about 2 lbs)
1 T rice, washed (not cooked)
1 sheet kombu seaweed (about 8 x 4 inches)
salt
(kombu is a form of kelp, most often used in flavoring stocks. It's purchased dried and packaged, and you just break it apart and use what you need. You don't rinse it off to clean it - that will remove a lot of the flavor and nutrients. Just wipe it off if necessary. You can find this in Asian markets and some grocery stores and health food stores.)
Clean and peel the daikon (if not already done) like you would a carrot or turnip. Slice into 1-inch thick pieces. Wrap the rice in a piece of muslin or cheesecloth and tie it with a string, leaving room for the rice to expand.
Place the daikon in a saucepan and fill with water. Add the rice bag and a little salt, bring to a boil, and then simmer for 15 minutes. (The rice added to keep the daikon white while cooking and to draw off any bitterness.)
(Bill actually put the rice in tea infuser, which worked nicely.)
After that's done, place the kombu in a large, shallow pan and lay the cooked daikon on top. Fill with water, bring to a boil, and simmer for 20 minutes. The seaweed is used to flavor the daikon.
After the daikon was cooked, we placed the kombu on a plate, arranged the daikon on top and then top with the miso sauce. (Or, you can wait to top with the sauce until you're serving it, which is what the book suggests. We only plated up a small amount of the daikon and put the sauce on before bringing it to the table to save time.)
We also surrounded the daikon with a bit of seaweed salad that Bill threw together. I'll check with him to see what exactly he seasoned it with, but it's a good bet he used rice wine vinegar and sesame oil with the two seaweeds. Anyway, here's the final image. The miso sauce is pretty thick - I actually thinned it with water just so I could try to drizzle it artistically (hahaha) over the daikon.
And there you go. A pretty simple vegetable dish with a lot of flavor and nutrients.
This is one of my favorite cake creations of all time. Well, all of MY time, anyway.
First, a little background....
I used to go down to my sister's house on the weekends a lot back around this time. Early in the morning, or sometimes overnight. We'd have coffee in the mornings. Natalie was a baby, Calvin was a round-cheeked toddler...and a terrific new bagel place had opened up in town, and they also had flavored coffees. Sometimes I'd bring Calvin with me to pick out the bagles and coffee for the morning.
Anyway - as I said, Natalie was a baby, and she didn't go to bed cooperatively or sleep through the night...so coffee was verrrrrrrrry important as early in the morning as possible.
That's one thing. The other is, and I think I've already mentioned this in one (or both) of the other posts about cakes I've done for my sister, the cake needs to be CHOCOLATE.
Okay. Now ALSO, around this time period, or maybe the year before, I'd bought a book that included all sorts of cool Christmas-themed ideas - not just decorating, but baking, cooking, gift-giving, whatever. And in there - the sole reason I bought the book - was a recipe about making bowls out of very firm gingerbread. And I thought those were really cool. I know I made bowls one year, as part of the cookie-giving thing...not sure which year.
So that's the background.
And so when I was thinking about some sort of theme for my sister's cake, I thought about coffee. And came up with the idea of making a giant coffee cup out of gingerbread, and filling it with cake.
So here's the very short version of a several-day process:
First I made the gingerbread coffee mug. I made the gingerbread dough (the same dough used for these gingerbread houses) according to the directions and formed the mug shape over a stainless steel mixing bowl, baked it, and also made a handle and a saucer.
I used royal icing to glue the handle to the cup, and then I used thinned royal icing, tinted light blue, to paint the cup and saucer. I used a darker blue icing for the splatter design on them, which was fun - just tipped the brush in it and shook or drizzled the darker blue onto the lighter blue.
For the cake, I baked probably four 8" layers of chocolate cake. Then I lined the same stainless steel mixing bowl with plastic wrap. I cut the layers of cake to fit in the bowl, and in between them I layered a mixture of raspberry jam and chocolate frosting. Once I had all the layers set up, I just (carefully) pulled the whole thing out of the bowl - the cake layers cradled in the plastic wrap - and set it down into the coffee cup. I used the plastic wrap (rather than just assembling the cake inside the cup) to keep the moisture of the cake from seeping into the gingerbread and turning the whole thing into a blue soggy mess.
Next, I melted some chocolate and made a circle on a piece of parchment and let it set. Then I drizzled melted white chocolate in a swirl on top, to represent the half & half she takes in her coffee. When that was all dry and firm, I set that on top of the cake. And that was that.
I especially like how my nephew has his fork all ready. "Come on, Mommy, stop staring at it and cut me a piece!"
Actually, I think to serve it we removed the disc of chocolate on top and then pulled out the whole chocolate cake thing in the plastic wrap, and just cut that up. She kept the cup for quite a while, until the icing "paint" started to flake off.
(And, of course, I'm noticing that I committed one of the cardinal sins of photography - there is a lamp growing out of my nephew's head. Hahahahahahaha. Ah, well.)
Today is my Dad's birthday - Happy Birthday, Dad!
I've mentioned this before, but my father is a photographer (retired) and he is responsible (or at fault) for putting a loaded camera in my hands at a young age and letting me loose on the neighborhood.
It was one of those boxy little cameras that used a flash cube...I shot the roll of black and white film in a matter of oh, seconds, probably, and went back to the basement door in our kitchen and called down to him "Now what?"
He stuck his head out of the darkroom and answered "You're done already?"
And I haven't changed a whole lot since then. Too bad the digital age hadn't hit yet - my parents probably could have bought a summer home in the mountains with the money they'd have saved on film and flash cubes.
But then, if it had been the digital age, I would never have learned how to process a roll of film - including how to load that roll of film in complete darkness, just by touch. I would never have learned to print contact sheets, with all my little images in nearly-neat rows on a single 8 x 10 sheet. I would never have encountered the pure magic of printing a picture and watching the paper as it rested in the developer tray, waiting, rocking the tray gently, practically coaxing the hidden image to slowly appear. My picture. That I took. And processed. And printed. Myself.
So in honor of my father, and to give him a good laugh as well, probably, here are a few old pictures I dug out, pictures I took (as evidenced by every single flaw you can see).
This is our back deck, and in the back you can see the grill...and in front of that - some buckets, and some little tiny blurry things. Those are some of my little plastic farm animals and my little tiny Fisher Price people. Note the...well, the blurriness, and the crookedness...it was ART.
Next up, my younger sister. Even then she was interested in karate...that must be some sort of kata she's doing. And of course, THAT would explain the blur of the picture. Nothing to do with me.
That's the vegetable garden behind her.
Since I'd mastered black and white so handily, I was quickly promoted to color....
I specialized in group photos of both people and animals. Here's a shot I took in our kitchen (see the wallpaper in the back? I love that wallpaper. I wish I had some. Just to look at. All different kinds of flowers all over it. Sigh.). Note how EVEN THEN, I was rather, um, overly organized, and if you look closely, not only are all the animals grouped by species, but also by color. Especially over there on the right. I don't even know what all the little black and blue and red things are, but at least they are grouped by color. Very important on a farm. And see the happy Fisher Price family in front. Not dead center - no, it's a much more visually interesting image BECAUSE they are off center. I was quite the prodigy.
The one good thing (well, one of so many) about this shot, is that it's not as blurry as the previous two. Clearly, I was improving. I remember my father's mantra - "keep your elbows in" - keep them tucked against your body, to steady the camera. If you can keep yourself still, even in the middle of a strong wind, the picture will be the better for it.
I could go on and enlarge that to mean something more universal, but I've got to get the kids ready for school, so I'll leave that up to anyone else reading this.
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Dad. I'm keeping my elbows in!
Love,
Jayne
The kids had swim class tonight. We got there earlier than usual, so we tied the styrofoam "bubbles" around the kids' middles and sat in the little stand of benches to watch the other classes. There were some more advanced classes going on at the far end of the pool - the diving end. We watched those kids do cannonballs and practice dives, and we watched other kids and their parents arriving.
It's hot in the pool room. Hot and humid. Bill and I dress for summer on swim nights just so we don't pass out.
We were sitting in the front row of the benches, close to the shallow end of the pool. There was a beginner class in front of us, about 5 kids with varying levels of comfort in the water, and their teacher, a slightly heavyset girl in a one-piece swimsuit. I hadn't seen here there before. She was encouraging the kids to follow her back and forth across the shallow end..."Come on, fishy-fishies!" And they'd paddle along behind her, then suddenly she'd turn around and holler "Shark attack!" and pretend to chase them back the way they'd come. Lots of squealing and laughter. It looked like a fun way to learn to swim.
At last the lifeguard on duty blew her whistle and that half hour session was over. Kids climbed out of every side of the pool, parents met them with towels, and the kids waiting for the next session hung around until their teachers called them by name.
The girl teaching the class in front of us stayed in the water and leaned forward onto the edge of the pool and called out "Rays and Starfish! Any Rays or Starfish?" She waited there, looking around expectantly, and finally one little boy and his mom came over to her. She explained that the other teacher for that group was out sick and she was the sub. The mother nodded and the little boy headed off to the end of the pool to wait for the sub and the rest of his class. The sub stayed where she was to keep an eye out for other Rays. Or Starfish.
And while the girl was standing there in the water, leaning forward slightly, in our direction, Julia, who was sitting on my lap, pointed to the sub and said cheerfully - and loudly, of course -
"Mommy! She has a big chest!"
Unfortunately, there was no earthquake right then, so all I could do was look at the sub with an apologetic, embarrassed look on my face and clap my hand over Julia's mouth. Fortunately for me, this girl wasn't upset - she shrugged and smiled and said "I do." I smiled gratefully at her and then was glad to have a reason to look away when Alex and Julia's teacher started calling their names.
Bill, meanwhile, looked everywhere but at the girl in the pool or at me until she had headed over to the class she was covering. I looked at Bill. His smile was fixed and if I hadn't known better I'd have thought he had just lost control of a bodily function or two. He sort of murmered "what did she say?" at me and I told him and he nodded - just as he'd thought. And ignored. "I just kept talking to Alex," he told me. "I was so glad Julia was sitting on your lap."
I told him I was just glad she got the terminology right. She used to say "nest."
I was also glad the sub was teaching her class at the deep end of the pool. Way too far away for any accidentaly eye contact. When class ended, we fled.
So yesterday Bill (mainly Bill - I was soft shell crab fry cook, dishwasher, and photographer) prepared this absolute FEAST of Japanese food. Primarily sushi - related things, but not just that. I'll post the recipes separately, because there are too many to cram into this one post.
But after the meal, and after the clean-up, I uploaded the pictures I'd taken while the meal was being prepared, and what struck me funny were not the pictures of the food, but the unexpected pictures that showed up here and there in between the chronology of the food prep. Basically what happened was while Bill was making the soft shell crab maki rolls, and I was taking pictures of them, Alex yelled from the other room "Mommy! Come quick! The sky is pink!" And so I just peeked out the kitchen window, saw that yes, the sun was setting and pink clouds dotted the sky, and took a quick step outside to take a few pictures before the pinkness was gone. Alex knows I will to this, so he is vigilant.
So here's an example of my viewing experience...
Continue reading "We Interrupt This Photo Essay on Last Night's Dinner Preparation..." »
Some people, like myself, do all they can to avoid being photographed.
Others...
Recently we started putting out peanuts in the shell for the local squirrels. Because it keeps them busy and allows the other birds to eat the bird SEED we also put out, and because my kids love squirrels and they're kind of entertaining. The squirrels. Well, so are my kids. At times.
But anyway, a few days ago I had put out some stale bread on a little shelf on top of the rail to our deck, which is visible through the windows above the kitchen sink (in case you were interested) and then I put the zoom lens on my camera and waited for the squirrel. Or squirrels. In this case, there was one. I don't know his name, but I'm sure my son could tell you.
Anyway, these are a few of the shots. Keep in mind I'm shooting through a window and a screen, so that's why some of the pictures have a sort of soft focus effect going on.
Continue reading "Pictures of Squirly. Or Was it Squirlio?" »
As I mentioned in my recent post about Renee Pottle's cookbook I Want My Dinner Now!, I recently made the Vegetarian Burgers and these were a twofold hit - first time being as sandwiches for dinner, and the second time - for my husband the next morning as a substitute for corned beef hash with his eggs. Now, they don't taste like corned beef, it was more the texture, but regardless - I got extra mileage and an idea for tweaking the recipe specifically for breakfast some time.
Anyway, here's the recipe for the Vegetarian Burgers - I'm giving you the 6-serving version, by the way.
Ingredients are:
3/4 cup quick cooking rice (brown or white) ( I used brown)
3/4 cup quick cooking oatmeal
3/4 cup breadcrumbs
1/3 cup peanut butter
3/4 cup cottage cheese
1 T instant minced onion
1 T instant minced garlic
1 1/2 tsp dried basil leaves
Got all that? Okay.
1. Mix rice and oatmeal in a large bowl. Pour boiling water over mixture. Cover bowl and let sit for 5 minutes.
2. Preheat grill to highest setting.
3. Drain rice/oatmeal mixture. Add bread crumbs, peanut butter, cottage cheese, onion, garlic, and basil. Mix well. Shape into burgers, approximately 3/4 inch thick.
4. Grill for 6-8 minutes, or until browned. Gently remove from grill.
Serve With: Pepper Jack cheese, sliced tomato and onion, and sesame seed hamburger buns.
~~~~~
And now, if I may, just a few of my own mental notes from the process.
First of all, get everything measured out and ready before you pour the boiling water on the oats and rice. If the oats sit in the water for too long, they get almost too mushy, and it's harder to drain the excess water. (I learned that the hard way. Don't make my mistake!)
Second, keep in mind that everything is already cooked or ready to eat when you put these on the grill - you're just browning them and warming them through. It's not like you're dealing with raw meat or eggs - so if they're not steaming hot in the center, that's fine.
Third - some changes I made because of what I had on hand: I didn't have the instant minced garlic, but I did have garlic powder. BUT - don't use a whole tablespoon of garlic powder in place of the minced garlic, unless you've got a vampire problem. I'd say a teaspoon or so of the powder in place of the minced, if you need to substitute. Also, oddly enough, I was out of dried basil, so I used oregano.
Fourth - I used a griddle instead of a grill because my mixture was SO mushy (because I let the oatmeal/rice sit longer than 5 minutes) I was afraid it would sink down in between the ridges and I'd end up with scrambled crispy veggie burger stuff. Which probably would be pretty tasty.
~~~~~
Now, I'm thinking, if you have peanut allergies, obviously you're not going to use peanutbutter. If it's possible for you, personally, to substitute another nut butter, then that's probably your best bet.
~~~~~
Other thoughts...these are full of protein and whole grain nutrients and calcium, for starters. And if you're so inclined, you can probably vary or add to these ingredients and create other "flavors." I was thinking of dicing some mushrooms and sauteeing them until all the liquid was gone and adding those into the mix some time. Or you could vary the seasonings, too.
Anyway, go ahead and give these a try!
Remember the clamcake recipe I mentioned recently? Well with a few alterations, I changed it into an apple fritter recipe.
Why? Of course there's a story behind it. Bill had a sore throat last week, and as a teacher, that presents quite a problem - especially when he's teaching huge chorus classes. So he took two days off and returned to work on Thursday, and I, being the happy homemaker/nurturer/loving wife/really annoying individual that I am, decided to make him a nice soothing, comforting dinner.
I figured I'd roast a chicken and serve it with cous cous and spinach - the spinach would be sauteed in olive oil and then mixed - still over heat with a couple of beaten eggs and some grated parmesan.
Well, the only whole chickens at the grocery store that day were little 3-4 pound ones - not the size I wanted. But there were sales going on, and so I bought a 10-pack of chicken thighs. And I sort of cooked them the same way I'd do a whole chicken - I cut up onion and mushrooms and scattered them around the pan, and placed the thighs, skin side up, on top, and sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper, which gives you a nice crispy skin. In addition to that, I also chopped up fresh tarragon and parsley (that I'd packed away in olive oil in the freezer at the end of October), garlic, and lemon zest and mixed them all together and tucked them between the skin and the flesh of the chicken thighs.
I baked them at 375 degrees F, for probably about an hour. Then I set the chicken aside and made a gravy with the drippings and mushrooms and onions, a buerre manie (which is just a blend of flour and butter, mashed together, that acts as a thickener. The good thing about mashing the flour and butter together is that the fat of the butter coats the flour particles and you don't get lumps. You just want to make sure you continue to cook whatever you put it in so there's no raw flour taste. It's different from a roux, as a roux is a cooked mixture of butter and flour - cooked first to get the desired flavor and then you add the liquids, etc.) where was I? Oh yes, and some white wine and salt and pepper and dried tarragon.
Alex liked the cous cous and the chicken. Julia liked the cous cous and the mushrooms in the gravy and a bit of the chicken. Bill liked all of it. So did I. I was really pleased that the chicken skin was crispy.
But what's this got to do with apple fritters? Not much, I admit. But I had also wanted to make a dessert that would be soothing. And to me, warm = soothing. But then, so does cold. And Bill likes apples. And cinnamon is yummy with apples. And we still had frying oil on the stove from the clamcakes. And hmmm...what if I substituted.... And from all that disjointed thinking came my experimental apple fritter recipe. I have no pictures - sorry 'bout that. But I have testimonials from Bill and Alex.
Bill: (Eyes wide, mouth full, head nodding) "Mnhrrmmm!"
Alex: (Politely chewing and swallowing first) "These are so, so good! Can I have another one? Can I have it for my snack tomorrow? (and the following day) "I wish I could have that for my snack every day!"
Anyway - here's what I concocted:
First, you'll need...
1 cup flour, 1 T baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 T sugar, and 1 tsp cinnamon - whisk these together to combine.
In a separate bowl, you want an egg and 3/4 cup of apple juice.
You also should start heating up your oil. You want it to come to 375 degrees F.
And finally, peel a Granny Smith apple, and remove the core. Dice it up into small pieces - 1/4 inch dice if you're really motivated, otherwise a bit bigger is okay.
Combine the flour mixture with the egg/juice mixture and blend into a nice batter. Stir in the diced apple and let it stand for about 15 minutes.
While the mixture stands and the oil heats up, get a plate with several layers of paper towels, a large slotted spoon, and a second plate with several layers of paper towels ready. And in a medium bowl, mix together some confectioners sugar and cinnamon. (I didn't use measurements - I used what was left of a bag of the sugar - maybe a pound, maybe less - and several good shakes of the cinnamon.)
Okay, when the oil is at the proper temperature, scoop about 1/4 cup of the batter at a time into your hot oil, until you have 4-6 fritters-in-the-making. Turn them over while they fry, so they brown evenly. When they're a nice dark golden brown, remove from the oil and place on one of the plates of paper towels to drain briefly. It's a good idea to cut one of them in half just to make sure they are cooked through. And then, of course, you should sample it to make sure these are palatable. Toss the whole fritters in the mixture of sugar and cinnamon and then place them on the other plate with paper towels. Keep them warm in either a low temp oven or a warming drawer (if your oven has one). Fry off the rest of the batter in batches, tossing in the sugar/cinnamon and holding them in a warm place until you're ready to serve.
I scooped some vanilla ice cream into a 4" ramekin and put the ramekin on a plate with two of the apple fritters and serve.
Try them - they're pretty yummy and pretty simple as well.
Quite some time ago I received an email from author Renee Pottle, asking if I'd like to review her cookbook, I Want My Dinner Now! on this site, in return for a complimentary copy of the book. I think at the time I was just so surprised that anyone would want my opinion on anything - out of the blue like that - that I went into shock and couldn't process the request.
Eventually (over a year later, to my great embarrassment) I emailed Renee back and she was very kind and forgiving about my lack of a quicker response. She sent out a copy of her book right away. And finally - my apologies again, Renee! - I am getting around to posting about it.
First of all, I want to mention her website - Wine Barrel Gourmet - you can not only order this cookbook, but several others, as well as healthy gourmet foods, recipes, and you can also find all sorts of useful and healthful information.
And now for the book. I Want My Dinner Now! begins with a wealth of useful information for the novice or nervous cook. Sections on Safety, Measurements, Cooking Terms, Ingredients, and so forth are straightforward and easy to follow. The section "Ingredients: Other" is my favorite of these - here you will find foods that aren't necessarily well-known and popular - but they should be. Bok choy, cellophane noodles (also called bean thread noodles - used in the Thai Spring Rolls I made recently, for instance), coconut milk, hoisin sauce - lots of ingredients that are flavorful and healthy and definitely worth trying if you haven't yet.
Her brief chapter "The Well Stocked Pantry" gives you a handy launching pad of a list so you can stock your own pantry with oft-used herbs and spices, baking ingredients, pastas and rices, canned goods, etc. I think this is the key to being able to get food on the table fast - it's like having every single crayon color in the Crayola box sharpened and at the ready. The possibilities become endless.
We've tried several recipes - and I have a bunch more marked with post-it notes that I will be trying in the upcoming weeks. But so far we've sampled the Taco Salad - anything taco-related is a hit with my kids (and my husband. and me.) - so I figured this was a good place to start. Actually, Bill put it all together and had it on the table by the time the kids and I got home from work. Very simple to prepare, and healthy as well - kidney beans are used in addition to the ground beef, and I would venture to say you could substitute ground turkey for the beef if you prefer.
Another one I made not all that long ago was the Beef Goulash. This is made in a slow cooker - another great tool for working parents. Again - pretty simple to make - you put it all together in the morning and come home to a stomach-rumble-inspiring smell permeating your home. I'm reading my little scribbled notes along the edge of the page - "in at 8:00, out at 4:30, and we ate at 5:30" (because I didn't get home til then. Bill shut off the slow cooker.) I also wrote down "w/pasta & peas" - I'm thinking I may have had Bill add those in when he got home that day - which would have been around 3:00 - but since I didn't elaborate in the notes, that's just a guess. Renee's "serve with" tip suggested hot noodles and brussels sprouts. So I think the pasta and peas was just my version, based on what we had. We also added some salt to taste.
Thirdly - last weekend, actually, I made the Vegetarian Burgers. Once again - simple, simple preparation - she uses quick cooking brown rice and quick cooking oats as the base - and pretty yummy. We've been wanting to make veggie burgers lately, and thank you, Renee, for giving me something to work with! The kids liked them, and so did my husband - he actually ate too much at dinner and was moaning a bit later that evening.
We had two and a half veggie burgers left over the next morning, and Bill ate them reheated and topped with some over-easy eggs. The texture was close to the corned beef hash I make - and far healthier - and he said with a little change in the seasoning, these burgers would be a great substitute for hash with his eggs. And he's rather partial to good corned beef hash, just so you know. I realize it wasn't the intended use, but you know, it's always nice to be able to take recipes and play around with them.
Oh - and another couple of things that are pretty cool about this cookbook. The ingredients for each and every recipe are listed in amounts for either 2 or 6 servings, so there's limited math-induced stress. The prep time is listed at the top of each page, and at the bottom are "serve with" suggestions and a handy reference section that lists which items in the recipe are (or should be) in the pantry and which you'll need to purchase.
Next up for me will be the Tamale Pie. Or maybe Szechwan Beef. Or the Sunday Brunch Eggs and Ham. I get the feeling any choice I make will be a good one.
Thank you, Renee, for sharing your cookbook with me, and for providing a ton of family-friendly, time-friendly, budget-friendly, health-friendly recipes with which to respond to the plaintive, demanding cry of I Want My Dinner Now!
On Friday I spent the day pretty much doing stuff with my kids and around the house. Just wasn't in the mood to type.
And then yesterday - well, remember several days ago when Alex was sick? Well, yesterday I spent most of my day in bed curled up in a shaking ball, praying I wouldn't throw up. And you know what? I didn't. I just felt like I might. I ate nothing all day - except a lemon yogurt and a cappuccino that Bill made in the morning. The cappuccino was probably not a great idea, but it just smelled really good....Anyway, that was it. I had sips of water and felt hot and cold and achy and miserable. Fun. A few times I thought, well, maybe I could get my laptop and sit in bed...but then I really didn't feel like going all the way downstairs to get it. So I just stayed put.
Bill pretty much kept the kids occupied and distracted, though they both came up to visit me periodically through the day. Julia because she wanted me to read to her, and Alex, because he is a sweet boy who just wanted to see how I was feeling. (Sigh.) Bill took them to the grocery store at one point, and when they got back, both kids raced upstairs, coats and boots still on, to bring me "Mommy! We got you something!" a bouquet of roses. It's on the dining room table, in a vase, and they smell good. I have pretty nice kids.
The toughest part of the day was when Bill made dinner for the kids. He did breakfast for dinner, which is fun, and he saw the turkey breakfast sausages I'd bought at the store on Friday...and so he cooked THEM and some eggs. The smell. It nearly got the best of me. Ordinarily it would have pulled me out of bed and I'd be elbowing kids out the way to get my fair share, but last night? I just wanted to leave the building. Through a window. My only solution - and a temporary one at that - was to go into the bathroom and run the shower and open all the tubes and jars of lotions and shampoo and so on, just to make that one room smell friendly. Of course, Julia came a-knocking on the door "Mommy, I have to go potty!" and so with a groan (this never EVER happens to Bill) I let her in and asked "who's in the other bathroom?" and she said "No one." She just wanted to be in the bathroom I was in. I let her take care of business and then I sent her on her way. And I hung out in the little steamy room until the good smells faded and the scent of sausage crept back in.
There wasn't going to be any escape from it. So I just inhaled deeply and resigned myself to further misery. And got back in bed and pulled the covers over my head to escape a bit. But then it was too hot and I couldn't breathe. So, yeah, the sausages won. Kind of.
Anyway, I'm sort of better today. I am afraid to eat anything, but I might try a banana in a little while. And some tea. That sounds safe.
Forgot to mention (traumatized as I was by last night's adventures) that Alex has two adult teeth coming in. Front bottom two - which were also the first two baby teeth that showed up. I like his consistency.
The funny thing is, he hasn't lost the corresponding baby teeth yet, so the new teeth are right behind the baby teeth.
Like a shark, right? They have rows of teeth always in the works, so when they lose some while feasting on oh, panic-stricken beachgoers, replacement teeth move right in to fill up the gaps, thus ensuring that all vicious tearing-of-flesh will continue uninterrupted and with the same degree of shreddiness as before. (And yes, I know sharks are beautiful and amazing and much-maligned creatures of the sea. I like sharks. Which is why I can poke fun at them. Just like I love my family....)
Anyway, that's the status with him. No Tooth Fairy visits in the immediate future. Maybe if he's lucky, all the adult ones will come in and then all the baby teeth will fall out in one shot, and he can afford to buy his first car with the loot.
For now, we are calling him Shark Boy.
Forgot to mention this before, but I got a call from Julia's doctor exactly a week after her horrible experience with sharp things and BLOOD to let me know the results were back and yes, she indeed had Lyme Disease. I forget how he explained this, but from the test they could tell she was in early stages, so we caught it at a good time. Yay.
She's going to be on her amoxicillin for the rest of this month, and after that, fingers crossed, she will be fine.
We went to bed around ten. Bill's had a sore throat and a cough, so he's been home for the past couple of days, resting his voice and drinking tea and moaning and whining and sighing and telling me he really hates being sick bravely refusing to admit anything is wrong. He went to work today.
Both kids have had the sniffles, too, and dry coughs, particularly Alex. It's the weather, it's the dry air and the closed up houses and probably exposure to lots of other runny-nosed little kids at school (Alex) and at daycare (Julia). By some miracle, I am fine. Probably because someone has to be.
So last night...somewhere around 11:30 or so, Alex came into our room and said his arm hurt. I think he'd probably been sleeping on it or something like that. I said he could come in our bed for a few minutes, and then he'd have to go back in his own bed. That worked for him. He snuggled in between us and dozed a bit, and then I woke him up and told him time was up. He said that was fine - his arm was all better now.
I followed him down the hall - he in his green, fuzzy, dinosaur feetie-pajamas. He asked if he could have something to drink and I said sure, go ahead and get in bed and I'll go get you something. He climbed onto his bed and I held up the sheet and comforter so he could scoot inside. He's got my old double bed. Kind of big for a five-year-old (okay, five and a half) but hey, at least there was plenty of room for the 879 stuffed animals he had arranged along 2/3 of the bed.
I used to do that when I was little. Try to sleep with all my dolls and stuffed animals in my bed. But the main thing I remember - and it looks like this is one of his concerns, too - is that all the animals and people had to be lying face up, so they could breathe. No matter that they were crammed way down near my feet - they had to be face up. Don't want any plush corpses the next morning.
Alex has solved some of this by heaping all the animals on top of the bed. They have plenty of room to breathe. And since it's a full-sized bed, he has some room to sleep. Probably less space in his bed for him than Julia has in her toddler bed. But it's snuggly and fun. And it keeps the animals off the floor and tidy.
Anyway, I held the sheet and comforter up and he crawled toward his pillow. He coughed - like he's been doing lately with this cold - and said "I feel sick." Now - he's been saying that every time he coughs. And I say yes, but you'll get better.
So he coughed and said "I feel sick," and I said "Just go ahead and get into your bed, you're fine."
And then he threw up.
On the pillow, the sheets, and some of his unlucky little plush friends.
I think I stood there in disbelief for a split second - he actually was sick! - and he started crying loudly, and like the bad mom that I am, my first thought at that point was "be quiet! Don't wake up Julia!"
So he threw up again. Fortunately at this point he was facing away from the mattress. Unfortunately he was standing up on the bed and the distance from mouth to floor was much greater and thus the horrible splashing radius was greatly increased.
I grabbed him from the bed and herded him into the bathroom, slammed open the lid and seat and told him if he thought he was going to throw up again, do it in there. He immediately obeyed, and then started wailing. He hasn't done this in a long, long time. I think he's forgotten how horrible it is. All kinds of goopy gunk was running from his nose and mouth, and I wiped it away with a damp washcloth and told him it was going to be okay, he was going to be okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.
I helped him take his pajamas off and had him sit on a little footstool near the toilet while I went back to his room to clean up the mess.
Now, one would think that during all these horrible noises, and the loud crying, and the light by his bed being turned on so I could see the ABSOLUTE HORROR that awaited me, that Julia, the lightest sleeper in the universe, would wake up. But if one thought that, one would be surprisingly mistaken. She snoozed on, despite the noise, despite the light, and despite the horrible smell.
At first I didn't even know where to begin. Ugh. Just UGH. So I started throwing all the clean and dry animals off the bed to the other side of the room. Then I just rolled everything - all the sheets, the pillow, the comforter, and the unlucky animals near the pillow - into a giant smelly ball of navy blue, and stuffed the whole thing into a giant trash bag. Much easier to carry that way, and nothing would - ugh - leak.
Alex said he was done throwing up and was cold. I ushered him into our bed, where my husband lay motionless and quiet. I must confess, I wanted to shake him. But instead, I had Alex snuggle under the sheet and blankets, and I went back to my smelly hell.
I got a couple rolls of paper towels, another trash bag, and a cannister of Clorox disinfecting wipes, and proceeded to clean it all up. I am not going to go into any more detail at this point - suffice to say, it was ICKY and SMELLY and I had to stop a couple times just to leave the room and breathe some air that wasn't perfumed with vomit and Clorox.
Julia continued to sleep.
When I'd finally cleaned everything up, I got the spare crib mattress from the floor in the kids' room and made that up with some of Julia's sheets, and carried it into our bedroom. I got a fresh pillow and some blankets, and one of Alex's teddy bears, and moved him from my bed into this cozy little nest for the night. I got him some water and told him if he was thirsty, just to take tiny, tiny sips. And then I got into bed.
And then Julia woke up. She was thirsty. She came with me down to the kitchen where I got her a sippy cup and - amazingly - was completely agreeable about going back to bed. She NEVER goes willingly. But last night she did. I tucked her in and kissed her goodnight and wondered how she could stand the smell. It was fading, but it was still there. She didn't seem to care. I left the room, door open so it could continue to air out, and went back to bed. I climbed in, and Julia immediately started crying. I got out of bed and went to find out what was wrong. (Pleasedon'tbesickPleasedon'tbesickPleasedon'tbesick...) - She couldn't find her cup of water. Easily solved, another few kisses and out I went. This time she stopped me before I got to my bedroom.
"Mommy, you're a-posed to close the door!" She has this thing about wanting the door shut. I told her the room needed to get fresh air in it, but she was genuinely distressed and so fine, I drew the door almost closed - figuring I would get up in a few minutes and push it back open, once she nodded off again.
I got back into bed and tried not to relive the awfulness of the night but my mind kept replaying it. Alex was still awake. I could hear him breathing and moving around a bit on his little mattress on the floor. I really wanted to sleep.
"Mommy? I'm really, really hungry."
"Okay, honey, let's find you something you can eat." We headed downstairs. I figured Saltines would be best - pretty bland and safe. I put a few in a little bowl and we went downstairs and watched 45 minutes of stuff on the Food Network. I told him to eat slowly and take tiny bites. He nibbled like a mouse, and ultimately ate 3 and a half crackers before suddenly announcing "I'm ready to go back to bed now." So back we went, up the stairs, to my room, to his makeshift bed.
He coughed once and threw up. Right on my floor. I think I whimpered and then shouted "Quick! Run to the bathroom!" and gave him an encouraging shove from behind. He tried, but lost the rest of his stomach contents on the hall floor right at the top of the stairs. He made it into the bathroom and opened the lid and seat of the toilet and stood there, ready for more.
"What happened, Mama?" Julia was awake this time, sitting up in her bed. I told her Alex was sick.
"And he frowed up?" Yes, he frowed up. You stay in bed, Julia, it's icky out here. "Okay Mama!" There really must be something wrong with her...she's being way too cooperative.
I turned on the hall light and muttered "I'm in hell" in the hopes that my motionless and silent husband would leap out of bed with a valiant cry of "I'll handle this! You go take a nice bubble bath!" It didn't happen. He's no dummy.
So I cleaned up the newest mess while Alex hung out in the bathroom. By some miracle, he hadn't splashed anything on his clean pajamas, which was good. I wiped his face off again and herded him back to bed. Fortunately there was no smell with this batch, so my room was tolerable.
It was after 2:00. I got back in bed and just lay there, listening to Alex, waiting for his breathing to even out, so I'd know he was sleeping. At last, he was asleep, snoring softly. I fell asleep at some point, too.
Today I'm keeping him home. So far he's only had some half apple juice/half water to drink. And he's got a bucket to bring with him wherever he goes. Just in case.
We don't just feed people here....
As I mentioned in this post yesterday, my kids love Sesame Noodles. And my husband has his own recipe for them, which is not written down and does not use actual measurements or anything. He just wings it.
But way back when, the first recipe we used for Sesame Noodles came from a bargain book called Classic Oriental Dishes, edited by Lisa Dyer, that we bought around 10 years ago or so. And since my husband has a bad sore throat and shouldn't be talking anyway, I'll post the recipe from this book instead of his version, simply because any recipe that has EXCELLENT!!! scrawled a the top of the page - and the date we first made it - 1/23/1998 (okay, 9 years ago - it'll be exactly nine years next Wednesday, in fact! Happy Anniversary, Sesame Noodles recipe page!) has to be worth sharing.
The recipe is actually Sesame Hot Noodles - but you can leave out the heat if you'd rather. Bill makes non-spicy noodles for the kids, and then we add our own heat to it separately.
Here's what you need:
OH - wait, before I give you the recipe, I have to share this little moment with you. Way back when we were still living in our tiny converted summer cottage and cooking all kinds of great things in our tiny kitchen (which I should tell you about because it's like no other kitchen I've ever experienced), including Sesame Noodles, we also used to go out to eat a lot because it was fun, no dishes to clean up (it was a VERY tiny kitchen), and we didn't have kids, so we had lots of options as to WHERE to go. Plus, having no kids, we had money, and yeah, we should have been saving it, but we were younger and foolisher and so we at out. Plus, we'd eat out, and then try to duplicate recipes at home, so it was actually RESEARCH. Can we agree on that? Okay, good.
So anyway, there was one good Chinese restaurant near our house, and one that was, um, how do I say this nicely?.....a dump. It was mainly a cheap place for locals to go and have Tiki cocktails in the dark bar and then stagger home. Which is all well and good...but still. I think either they changed ownership or the current owners decided they wanted some new clients...but anyway, suddenly some work was done on the place and word spread that it was now a Chinese Restaurant Worth Going To. And naturally, we went.
I don't remember what meals we ordered. Or how they were. I just remember that we ordered Sesame Noodles as an appetizer. Cool! They have Sesame Noodles! We love Sesame Noodles! Let's see how theirs are! So we ordered them, and probably some other appetizer to split, and waited. The dining room had been spruced up - the booths were nicer, there were pictures on the wall...the lighting was a bit bright, but maybe that was to prove that they weren't JUST a dark bar with Tiki drinks. (That part seemed unchanged.)
So anyway...we are sitting there, eagerly awaiting our Sesame Noodles. And then - here she comes! Here comes the waitress with the platter! And with a smile, she set the oval platter down between us and went on her way. Bill and I stared.
The platter held a decent mound of noodles...and I believe they had been tossed with some kind of thin, dark brown watery sauce (like soy or something) - but the best part, oh the VERY best part, was the big smear of peanutbutter (Skippy or Jif - one of those kinds of peanutbutter) across the top of the noodles. And I believe they may have sprinkled a couple of sesame seeds on top.
A BIG SMEAR OF PEANUTBUTTER. That was it. That was our exotic taste of the Orient that night. Peanutbutter on spaghetti.
The follwing recipe is much better.
You will need:
2 8 oz packages of medium egg noodles. (We've also found that Barilla Spaghetti Rigati works really well, too.)
3 T sunflower oil (or any other vegetable oil. Not olive.)
2 T sesame oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 T smooth peanutbutter
1 small fresh green chili, deseeded and very finely chopped
3 T toasted sesame seeds
4 T light soy sauce
1-2 T lime juice
salt and pepper (to taste)
4 T chopped fresh cilantro
Okay, once you've got all that assembled, here's what you do -
1. Place the noodles in a large pan of boiling water, then immediately remove from the heat. Cover and let stand for 6 minutes, stirring once half way through. At the end of the 6 minutes, the noodles will be perfectly cooked. Otherwise, follow directions on the package.
2. Meanwhile, mix the sunflower and sesame oils with the garlic and peanutbutter until smooth.
3. Add the chilis, sesame seeds, soy sauce, and the lime juice according to taste, and mix well. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Drain the noodles well, them place in a large heated serving bowl. Add the peanut dressing and fresh cilantro, and toss well to mix. Serve immediately.
And that's all you do. Pretty simple, huh? And way better then just a smear of peanutbutter....
I sat near a girl at work who loved M&Ms. So, just for fun, I made her this birthday cake.
It's 2 8" rounds of chocolate cake and one 12" round. Layered - 8-12-8 with chocolate frosting between the layers. Then I carved it into the shape of an M&M candy, covered that with frosting, and then wrapped the whole thing in fondant that I'd tinted green. Then I iced the "m" on the top with royal icing and surrounded the whole thing with mini M&Ms.
From Keo's Thai Cuisine, by Keo Sananikone. I mentioned the Spring Rolls in this post earlier today. Here's my version - slightly different but basically the same. Mine are larger - like egg roll size - and the actual version has them smaller - little bite sized appetizers.
These are the ingredients:
1/2 lb fresh ground pork
1/2 lb shrimp, chopped
10 dried Chinese black mushrooms (available in Asian markets and some grocery stores)
1 ounce bean threads (avail. in Asian markets and some grocery stores)
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, shredded
1/4 lb bean sprouts
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1-2 teaspoons fish sauce (Asian market or sometimes Asian section of grocery s tores)
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup lukewarm water
14-16 rice papers - round ones, medium size (about 8" in diameter) (found in Asian markets in greater variety - sometimes in grocery stores. They're used for spring rolls and nime chow, among other things.)
6 cups oil for deep frying
Got all that?
Place the dried mushrooms in warm water for 20 minutes to rehydrate. Remove the stems and dice up the caps.
Soak the bean threads in warm water for 20 minutes as well. Drain, and then cut them into roughly 1-inch lengths.
Place the shrimp and pork in a large bowl. Add mushrooms and bean threads once rehydrated and chopped up. Add onion, carrot, bean sprouts, black pepper and fish sauce. Mix well and let stand for fifteen minutes or so.
Place the teaspoon of sugar in the cup of lukewarm water to dissolve, then pour into a shallow pan wide enough for the rice paper to lay flat in it. I used a small frying pan.
This is what the rice paper looks like when dry -
They're brittle and they crack easily.
Once you've got the sugar and water in a pan, place one of the pieces of rice paper in and submerge it.
Let it sit for a few seconds, then remove it and place on a plate or other dry work surface. Give it a minute or so to allow the rice paper to absorb the moisture.
Place some of the pork/shrimp mixture on the rice paper, like so:
Actually, this is a bad picture - the mixture should be closer to the edge of the rice paper, so mentally move this mixture closer to the bottom of the picture. Now, fold up the bottom edge over the mixture, then fold over the right side and the left side - it's like making burritos and things like that - and then roll tightly to seal.
Continue until you've used up the pork/shrimp mixture. When you're about halfway through the whole process, put the 6 cups of oil in a deep pot and set on a medium high flame. If you've got a candy thermometer, attach it to the pan and keep an eye on the temperature. You want to heat the oil to 375 degrees F.
Once you've got all the spring rolls made, assemble them and a few other things near the stove so you'll be all ready once the oil reaches temperature. You'll need a large slotted spoon, two plates with several layers of paper towels, and the spring rolls and tongs. Keep everything close by so you aren't dripping hot oil all over the place.
Once the oil is hot, carefully lower 4 of the spring rolls into the oil. Don't splash them - the best way is to place one end in and lay the rest of the roll in gently. Because of all the water in them, these will bubble up and make a lot of noise for a little while. It's kind of fun.
Roll them over so they brown evenly. This might be kind of difficult, as air pockets form inside the rolled rice paper and the rolls will stubbornly roll right back the way they were after you flip them so the pale side is down. Don't give up. Worse comes to worst, you can just hold them submerged in the oil until they cook evenly, but I don't like doing that because they seem to soak up too much oil that way. It may take some trial and error. But that's part of the adventure.
When they're golden brown, remove from the oil with a slotted spoon and drain excess oil into the pan before placing them on one of the plates with the paper towel layers.
Let them cool a bit and then slice one in half, just to make sure everything is cooked through. Let it cool a bit more, and have a taste. You've earned it.
Let the oil temperature come back up (if necessary) and then place 4-5 more rolls in and continue frying in batches until they're all done. If necessary, keep warm in a low oven or a warming drawer until it's time to serve them.
~~~~~
The book suggests a Spring roll sauce, but this is the one we made -
1 cup hot water
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 T lime juice
1 T white vinegar
1 T fish sauce
Dissolve the sugar and salt in the hot water.
Combine with remaining ingredients.
~~~~~
And that's that. The tighter you can roll them the better they fry - the loose ones tend to have bigger air bubbles.
And you don't have to use that sauce - you can use a hot sauce, soy sauce, whatever you want. I used some of the green curry sauce that we had with the chicken at that same meal.
Give it a try - frying's fun!
This is from the book Keo's Thai Cuisine, written by Keo Sananikone and published in 1986.
Green Curry Paste
15-20 fresh small Thai green chili peppers
4 stalks fresh lemon grass, coarseley chopped
3 shallots, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon coarseley chopped kha (kha is Thai ginger - we use the fresh common ginger you can get in the produce section of the grocery store)
1 tablespoon coarsely chopped kra-chai (kra-chai is "Lesser Ginger" - again, we use common ginger here)
5 kaffir lime leaves, choped (you can get these in Asian markets. The flavor is unique and very much a part of Thai cuising)
1/2 teaspoon chopped kaffir lime rind (if we don't have kaffir limes, we use regular limes)
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground caraway seeds
1/2 to 1 tablespoon fish sauce or 1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon shrimp paste (you can find this in asian markets)
2 tablespoons oil.
Combine all ingredients in a food processor and process until smooth. If a mortar and pestle are used, then add oil after all other ingredients are ground. Refrigerate in a glass container. Paste keeps well for several months.
(Bill put the mixture in ice cube trays to freeze it, instead of in the fridge, and then popped out the cubes when they were frozen and kept them in ziploc bags in the freezer.)
Thai curry sauces are made by adding coconut milk to the curry paste. The amount of paste determines how hot and spicy your sauce will be.
Before we had kids, Bill and I used to cook meals together a lot. When we had kids, that kind of fell by the wayside for a while because someone usually had to tend to a baby or a small toddler or a baby AND a small toddler or two small toddlers...until now. Now, we've got a kindergartener and a preschooler, and they are amazingly tolerant of their parents' desire to both work on something AT THE SAME TIME.
So we've started doing that, mainly on weekends. Sometimes one of us does more of the cooking, and the other one is kind of the assistant and will maybe take charge of one dish. But still - it's nice to be elbowing each other out of the way and fighting over burner space on the stove top again.
The weekend before last, we did up some Asian dishes. Now, sometimes we'll stick to a particular country, like Japan or Thailand, when we pick recipes. Other times, it's just whatever sounds good to us or whatever we have ingredients for. Bill actually planned ahead for this meal, and went to one of the local Asian markets on Saturday so we'd have everything we needed to cook on Sunday.
Here's some of the haul:
That brownish bud-shaped thing to the right of the limes is a bud from a banana tree. You peel away the petals and underneath are little skinny banana blossoms that (obviously) haven't bloomed. They're a couple inches long and the same color as the outer petals. They don't taste like much, but you can detect a little sweetness. You could use them like lily buds, though lily buds, to me, have a distinct apricot flavor.
Anyway. That's what Bill likes to do - he'll pick a couple of items he's never seen before (usually labled "Fresh Vegetable" in English and something in Thai that he can't read. And sometimes he'll ask what it is, and other times he won't. It's fun.
He did most of the cooking that Sunday. My job was the spring rolls. We got our ideas and actual recipes from two books: Keo's Thai Cuisine, by Keo Sananikone and published by Ten Speed Press, and Classic Oriental Dishes, edited by Lisa Dyer - a bargain book put out by Smithmark years ago. We've had these for about ten years - along with a couple of other Thai and Japanese cookbooks we bought one day. They all bear the splatter stains from frequent use.
One of the nice things about having a garden (and growing a variety of hot peppers) is that we can make up batches of green and red Thai curries and freeze them in ice cube trays, to use all through the winter. (I say "we," but this is really Bill's territory.) So one of the easiest things to do for this meal was the green curry Chicken. (Extremely easy for me because Bill cooked it.) All Bill had to do was take out a couple of cubes of the green curry...
thaw them, and cut up some chicken,
and throw the whole thing together. (Those skinny brown things in the upper right are the banana buds, which he used in his soup.)
It's a delicious, hot/spicy, fragrant dish, and the recipe actually calls for shrimp, but you can use chicken, pork would work, and we've also used tempeh, which is a fermented soybean and grain product that's got a nice non-meat but meaty texture. For this meal, Bill also added in sliced red chilis (hot), mushrooms, scallions, cilantro, and baby corn. Here's a little glimpse of the final product....
Bill also made sesame noodles, primarily because if the kids didn't like any of the other stuff, sesame noodles are a sure bet. He's made these so often he doesn't use a recipe.
And the soup...it was kind of a thrown-together noodle soup using rice noodles and shrimp, cilantro, scallions, banana blossoms and a chicken stock.
I made the Thai spring rolls, as I mentioned, which I've put up in a separate post so it's easier to find later. But for now...some snapshots of the evening...
Bill at his "station" - the wok and the pot on the back burner are his. He'd already made the sauce for the sesame noodles, and the noodles themselves were in the warming drawer of our stove. Those bowls over on the right, near the glass of beer, are all his too. I have to juggle all my stuff in order to deep fry the spring rolls. He hogs the whole place....
This is the green curry chicken coming together in the wok.
And these (above) are some spring rolls just after I put them in the oil.
Time to eat...
We serve the soup in this...with some sterno in the center to keep it hot and to scare the heck out of Alex when the flame flares up. Heh heh. Dinner should be exciting, we say.
And speaking of exciting, we always put out chopsticks for the kids to use when we have any kind of Asian meals. Their techniques vary a bit....
They do love their sesame noodles...
They both tried a spring roll and some of the soup. Julia liked the mushrooms in the soup. Alex didn't like the soup or the spring rolls - he's a sesame noodles guy, and that's that. Julia also tried one of the baby corn from the green curry chicken dish, but didn't like the heat from the chilis. We don't force them to eat everything, especially the spicier dishes, but they can try anything they want. Sometimes if we don't put something on their plate, they'll want to try it, which is nicer for us than if they just see something odd we've put on their plates and they reject it without even knowing what it is. Alex will sometimes take a look at a new dish and just tell us he doesn't like it. But as long as it's not spicy, he has to try it. Just have a taste. If he doesn't like it, fine. But the point is to always try new foods. To be adventurous.
Remember that snowman my kids and my husband made yesterday? It looks like this:
Well, this morning as I was bundling up the kids for school/daycare, Bill (he's home, sick) was looking out the window at the back yard and announced "There's a squirrel on the snowman!" So as he picked up the kids so they could see, I grabbed my camera and stealthily slid out the door to try to catch the squirrel in action.
He was stealing the peanuts (in shells) we'd used for eyes and mouth. At this point, he was working on the snowman's shrinking grin which, understandably, now looks more like a frown....
A few minutes ago, while I was uploading the icy pictures from this morning, Bill announced that the squirrel had eaten all the peanuts, and just the nose (and hat and scarf) remained.
Our snowmen do not live peaceful lives here.
A few pictures I shot this morning...
Of course, after prowling around the front yard and then skipping any shots in the back yard because the sun wasn't up enough, I stepped on the pavement just before the back stairs and felt my left foot slip forward and then my right (because I wasn't looking down, I was looking all around for more glimmering ice on the trees) and I nearly went over backwards. I mention this mostly for my sister, who will appreciate the humor in the near fall and awkward recovery. And would appreciate the humor even if I did fall over and crack my skull on the driveway.
I've been trying to dig out forgotten food items from the depths of the freezer so we can utilize them before they get freezer burn and become inedible.
I found a large square plastic container with something brown in it, so I figured I should thaw that just to see what it was about. Turned out to be leftover beef stew.
And Bill had mentioned that we had one remaining frozen bag of soft-shell clams in their broth, plus another bag of clam broth.
So I thawed the bag with the clams in it and decided to make clam cakes to accompany the beef stew. Weird combination, I know, but, well, sometimes that happens.
The clamcake recipe was Bill's mom's - it's written on a little torn-out page from a notebook; the fringes along one edge where it ripped through the spiral binding are discolored and raggedy looking. The first part of the word "Clamcakes" is torn off - it's more like "lamcakes."
Clamcakes or lamcakes - they were pretty good. And pretty simple.
First, in one bowl, whisk together 2 1/4 cups of flour and 4 teaspoons of baking powder.
In another bowl, combine 1 1/3 cups clam broth with 2 eggs.
Chop up the clams. (Ours were already cooked. Normally you'd use quahogs anyway, but hey, any port in a storm. Or something like that. Steamers worked just fine.)
Fill a large pot about a third to half way with vegetable oil and heat to 360 degrees F - 375 degrees F.
As the oil is heating up, combine the clam broth and egg with the flour and baking powder. Whisk together to get rid of any lumps. Then stir in the chopped clams. Set aside until the oil has reached temperature.
Also, have a couple of plates ready with several layers of paper towels on them and some salt, and a large slotted metal spoon.
Here's how the batter will look after it has been sitting a few minutes:
When the oil is at the right temperature, get a large spoon (tablespoon or bigger), or, if you have it, a 2 tablespoon size measuring spoon. Scoop up some of the batter with your big spoon and lower it to just above the surface of the hot oil. Scrape the batter into the oil with another spoon. Scoop 4-6 clamcakes-to-be into the oil. You want them to have room to move around a bit, and you'll need move to turn them over so they brown evenly.
Here are some partway through the frying...
They're still too pale, but they're getting closer. All those little straggly bits of batter can be scooped out and discarded.
As they reach a dark golden color, take one out and cut it in half to make sure the batter has cooked all the way through. If it has, pull the other clamcakes out and set them on one of the plates with the paper towels to drain. Sprinkle right away with a little salt - it will stick better while they are still hot and a bit oily. You can keep them warm in a low oven or under a dish towel. You don't want to wrap them in foil - that will steam them and they'll lose their crispness.
Here's a tantalizing close-up of some of the finished ones from last night:
They go nicely with leftover beef stew.
My sister finished Alex's hat and we picked it up yesterday. Here are the kids this morning, getting ready to go outside and play in the snow. Wearing the hats that Auntie crocheted for them...
Aren't they nice? The hats, I mean. Thanks, Auntie!
Snow snow snow!!!
I'm so goofy, I know.
The snow began around here somewhere between one and three-thirty in the morning. Bill got the call last night (he's a teacher) that there would be no school today, and when I checked the no school listings on the local news, just about every school in the state is closed. So no school for Alex, either. And since I'm currently not employed, I don't have to dig out the driveway and creep in to work. YAY FOR ME, TOO!
It's the wet kind of snow that sticks to everything - and consequently, it's a winter wonderland outside. It's also perfect snowman-making weather, igloo-making weather, snowball fight weather....
Yay!
I've rearranged some things a bit on the sidebars...and I've added a new typelist called "Books of Food and Cooking" down there a bit on the right. I figured I'd list the cookbooks I own that I've referenced in this blog.
I have a ton of cookbooks, and books related to food that aren't cookbooks, and since I've got a bit more time on my hands lately, I thought maybe I could introduce them on a semi-regular basis.
So that's my next project, here on this li'l ol' blog o' mine. I think it'll be kind of fun - and a good incentive to revisit the books I haven't used much lately. Many of them are old friends - bindings broken with use, pages dotted with grease spots and food splatter. Sounds yucky, but it's proof that they've been well used, and what better recommendation could there be?
The kids just watched an episode of Dora the Explorer in which, apparently, Dora had a baby. At least that's what Alex told me was going on. I double checked on that disturbing bit of preschool role-model news and he said her parents AND Dora were having a baby. And actually it's two babies - a boy and a girl.
And Alex called up from the stairs to me to tell me the good news, and followed it up with "When are WE going to have a baby? I just can't wait to have a new little baby!"
And I said...um...I don't believe we ARE going to have another baby.
This disappointed him somewhat. And he mulled it over. And he asked "Doesn't other mommies have new babies when they already have children?"
Have to give him credit for planning his argument.
I told him we'd wanted TWO babies, and we had them - him and his sister.
And then he came up to the kitchen and continued on as if it was still a possibility. "If we have another baby, I hope it's a cute little boy baby."
I told him "I already HAVE a cute little boy baby. His name is Alex."
And Alex said "No, aNOTHER little boy baby.........Mommy, what do you think you'd name a new little boy baby?"
"Um....I don't really know." Since it's not in the plans, I really haven't given much thought to baby boy names in oh, several years now. "What would you name a baby boy?"
"Hmmmm....I'd name him....Jacob."
"Well maybe when you grow up you can be a Daddy and name your baby boy Jacob."
And then he was distracted by the new box of Fruity Pebbles Cereal that Julia picked out at the store this morning, and soon went back downstairs, a bowl of artificiallyl flavored goodness in his little hands.
Thank goodness for distractions.
UPDATE - 1/11/08 at 11:05 am, eastern standard time...
That said, I'm going to try, in my two hours of childless, husbandless time this morning, to put up the remaining 4 posts about cookies (and candy) I made before Christmas. Because I have to. I took pictures and everything.
I know. I really need to work on my organizational skills.
Anyway, here goes nuthin....
UPDATE: It's not gonna happen. I've got one post done (see below), and maybe I'll get another one done before I have to get the kids...uploading the pictures slows me down, but I can't just post a recipe without illustrations. Where's the fun in that? Where's the sudden hunger pangs?
FURTHER UPDATE: Okay, well 2 out of 4 done before I went to get the kids. That's not too bad. Hopefully I can get the other two done some time later today.
THIRD UPDATE: It's ten past ten - and I finished another post (see below). One to go. And I'll do it tomorrow because I'm DONE for today.
I'M DONE!!!
Let the rejoicing begin. And please see below for the final installment of the Christmas Cookie Marathon.
Before you say "hey - wait a minute - torrone is a candy! Not a cookie!" - I realize that. And I sat here just now thinking about that and wondering if I should make a whole new category for candy...or should I just lump it into the "On My Menu" list? Or? Or? It froze me in my tracks.
Fortunately, my sister interceded and made this insightful comment:
"Well, you can still put it in a cookie jar."
And you know what? I can! And you can, too!
So let's cook up some sugar, shall we?
The recipe I used can be found here - it's on the Food Network, courtesy of Emeril Lagasse.
One of the things you'll need is edible wafer paper.
I initially ordered mine from Sugarcraft, but that very same day I got a call from someone in their customer service dept to let me know they were out of stock. While this threw a monkey-wrench into my plans, I really, really appreciated how quickly they called me. I was able to order it from somewhere else the same day. But still - go check out their website - if you are into any kind of baking or sugar work or candy making or just bored at work, they've got a LOT of cool tools and gadgets and products to look at.
I ended up ordering the wafer paper through GourmetSleuth.com. That's another cool site as well, and it's more about all kinds of cooking, not just baking. I need to go back and browse around - they seem to have a heavy focus on Mexican cooking supplies, which is appealing to me....
Anyway - you will need some of this wafer paper. The torrone is very sticky and unless it has something like the wafer paper to adhere to, it will just reach out and wrap itself around anything or anyone in the way. Really. Remember how I used to have a cat?
Okay, so you've got your wafer paper trimmed and placed in a 13 x 9 inch baking pan, per the recipe, and you've got all the ingredients assembled - those would include granulated sugar, honey, egg whites, confectioners sugar, toasted almond slivers, and lemon zest.
You will also need a candy thermometer - the temperature of the sugar is rather important.
So first thing you'll want to do is get your sugar and honey heated in a sausepan.
While that starts to melt together and heat up, you should have everything else ready to go. This means you'll want to pre-toast the almond slivers and have your lemon zest all grated and standing by. And you'll also want to have your egg whites already in the SUPER CLEAN bowl of your mixer, and the sugar ready to pour. Once the sugar reaches the proper temperature, a lot of things will need to happen rapidly (I typed "rabidly," which could also apply) so you need to be ready.
The sugar mixture will take a while to come up to the proper temperature. Which is fine, because it's kind of cool to watch the progress...
Little hot spots of honey lava, bubbling up to the surface. Stir it a bit so it doesn't scorch....
So what temperature are we at right now? We need to bring it up to 315 F....
Not there yet... If you can't stand waiting, you could always start whipping the egg whites.
You want to bring them to soft peaks, and then add in the sugar and bring it all up to stiff peaks. Don't over-beat them - they'll dry out. In fact, if you want to just get the egg/sugar mixture to a soft peak stage and leave them there until just before you need them, you can do that, too.
Okay, let's take a peek at the sugar again.
We're making progress...
Temperature is climbing...
I am pretty sure I mentioned this before in my post about Pecan Squares that you need to be VERY CAREFUL when working with boiling sugar. Anything boiling will hurt if it pours or splatters on you, but boiling sugar is sticky, and if it sticks to you, trust me, IT. WILL. HURT.
Okay, back to staring at the boiling sugar....it's kind of mesmerizing...hypnotic...very cool...
Okay, keep an eye on that thermometer - we're getting close now.
Okay, put your camera down and be ready to get this pot off the heat. When you hit 315, pull it off the burner and stir the mixture to cool it slightly - to 300.
If you haven't done so yet, now is a good time to bring the egg whites from soft peaks to stiff peaks. Once the sugar is down to 300 F, it's time for the tricky part. With the mixer still running (at a slow to moderate speed) pour the hot sugar SLOWWWWWWLY but STEADILY into the egg whites (meringue). You want to try to run it in a thin stream right down the inside of the bowl - not actually touching the edge of the bowl, but just barely in. Main thing is, you want to try to avoid having the hot sugar drizzle onto the whisk attachment and splatter hot sugar all around the room.
The hot sugar mixture will double the volume of your meringue, but that will go back down as the mixture cools a bit. Keep the mixer running to help cool the sugar/meringue. It will thicken as well. At this point, fold in the almonds and the lemon zest.
Now another fun part - but without the burn factor. Get your 13 x 9 inch baking pan, already lined with the wafer paper...You'll need to pour the mixture into that pan and very gently spread it to fill the pan evenly. The stuff sticks, like I said before. You can dip your fingers in water and press the torrone gently into the corners of the pan - the water will help prevent sticking. Once you've got the mixture pretty well spread out, then top it with the other trimmed pieces of wafer paper. Let it cool on a wire rack for a bit.
Then, with a "no guts, no glory" attitude, flip the pan over onto a sheet of parchment, and your giant piece of torrone should come out. If it doesn't...give it a minute - the weight of the candy should release whatever hold it has on the inside of the pan.
(I let mine cool on the rack, and as it cooled, it drooped into the spaces between the wire...which is why I'm suggesting the parchment paper.)
Let it finish cooling, and then cut it into pieces.
I'll tell you this - it's very smushy and will be...um...challenging to work with. But it's fun, and it'll impress your friends, who didn't realize you could actually make candy.
Someone told me it tastes like those "Bit O Honey" candies...not my personal favorite - the honey, I mean, but it's authentic - Torrone is traditionally made with honey.
I would like to try another recipe, with different flavors. When I do, I'll let you know how it comes out.
I've never made a gingerbread house before. Well, actually, I made one from a kit back when I was maybe 13 or so. But I had never created my own templates - until now. Well, last month. (December.)
We were watching a Gingerbread House competition on the Food Network and Alex said he wished we could make one some day. So I thought - I'm already making a zillion cookies - what's one more project?
Honestly, I had been wanting to make one anyway; I just didn't think I'd have the time. But hey, if my kid wants to make a gingerbread house, then that becomes the most important project.
So, I have a good sturdy gingerbread recipe that I'd used in the past to make gingerbread bowls. I hoped to do gingerbread bowls this year (well, last year, since I'm writing in January), but I wasn't sure if I'd have time.
The recipe is from Marcia Adams' book Christmas in the Heartland, published by Crown in October 1992. It's a beautiful book - not just recipes, but crafts and traditions and information and a cozy warm feeling.
But I digress.
Here we go...
The wet ingredients...and their good friends, the fats and sugars:
2 cups of unsalted butter (4 sticks), room temp.
1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup molasses
1 1/2 cups dark corn syrup
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp orange extract
6 large eggs
And...
The dry ingredients:
17 cups all-purpose flour
2 T baking soda
2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
(This is a big recipe. You can cut it in half if it's easier to work in smaller batches of dough.)
Okay, in your mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars until fluffy. Add in the molasses, corn syrup, extracts and eggs while the mixer is still running
and beat until well combined.
While the mixer is running, combine all the dry ingredients in another bowl with a whisk.
Add the flour mixture gradually. The dough will become extremely stiff, and you will probably have to finish by hand, either in a bowl or on a board.
Divide this into quarters, wrap in plastic and put this in the fridge.
Now, about the template. I decided I would make two houses so that each of my kids could decorate one, rather than suffer the hell of them fighting over who gets to do what to this wall and that roof. And since it was the first one I was designing, I figured I should make it simple.
I have these square 12" x 12" sheets of graph paper that I'd bought for designing quilt squares and applique pieces. I drew a rectangle 6" x 8 " for the longer sides of the house, and a narrow rectangle 4" wide with a point at the top for the short side pieces - 8" at the highest point and 6" at the lowest point, and then the roof, which was 9" x 4". Fortunately all 3 template pieces fit on the one sheet of paper.
Then I taped the single sheet of paper to my countertop and covered that with a sheet of parchment and taped that down. then I traced the templates onto several sheets of parchment, so I'd have many sets, just in case any ripped or got damp and curled or anything like that.
Then I cut out all the pieces and set them aside.
Now - take out one of the pieces of chilled dough and roll out to about 1/4 inch thick. Try to roll it out so that you can fit several pieces of the template on it at once.
Then, holding the parchment in place with one hand, carefully cut around the template pieces with a knife or pizza wheel or bench scraper.
And remove the paper.
Fun, huh? You'll need 2 of each shape to make one house.
Place the dough sections on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and place in the fridge for an hour.
Preheat your oven to 350 F and bake for a good 30 minutes or so. Take the pans out and let the sections of dough cool on the pans. They should be hard.
As you can see in the image above, as they bake they will spread slightly, and the sections of your house may run together a tiny bit. Just wait until they're completely dry - they'll snap apart nicely.
Now, to decorate, I kept the pieces separate because it's easier to work on a flat section than the house once it's completed. Also - because my kids would be decorating them, I figured there was the chance that they'd somehow accidentally knock over the house if they had to decorate after assembly.
And I used plenty of royal icing to decorate and to glue the pieces of the house together, and we had Necco wafers, mini marshmallows, and colored sugars to use as well. We also had gumdrops, but I couldn't find them til a couple days later.
Time for the fun part...
Julia favored the mini marshmallows. Lots and lots of them.
Alex, on the other hand, really wanted to make his look like a house.
If you look over at the section he's pointing to, you can see that he's drawn a front door on there in red. And if you look at this other section on the lower right, you can see a little green wreath with a red bow.
You can see the door a bit better. I think the Necco wafer there below the marchmallow is supposed to be a window.
And this is just a glimpse of the chaos that existed in my home all of December. You can see sections of the kids' gingerbread houses toawrd the back, and other gingerbread cookies I made with the leftover dough, and a whole mess of Pecan Squares in their little paper cups on a tray...all the icing and sugars...and those pale cookies are dinosaurs made out of Short Dough that Julia was going to decorate and instead she broke a Pteranodon into pieces and went on her way.
Unfortunately I didn't take pictures as the houses were assembled. I was too busy doing the gluing and holding the sides in place. But here's the one shot I took of them while the icing glue was drying, after the roof sections had been attached:
Those containers of cookies and that snowman napkin holder (That Alex made in a Home Depot kids workshop when he was 3, hee hee hee!) are supporting the edges of the roofs. Oh - and do you like Alex's roof? With the Necco wafer shingles? He worked really hard on his house.
And where are they now? Did we wrap them carefully and pack them away for next year? Nope. They ended up as bird food. The kids got to whack them to bits with a meat tenderizer in the back yard. That part was Bill's idea - the brutal destruction part. The kids - well, particularly Alex - loved it. (I know, and you'd have thought Julia would have been the joyfully violent one. The birds enjoyed them. Particularly the seagulls. And also the squirrels.
And just for fun, here's a picture of the gingerbread house (actually a graham cracker house, if you want to be precise) Alex made in his kindergarten class:
And that's an ice cream cone tree and a graham cracker reindeer cookie there in the front.
Isn't that adorable?
The birds thought so.
And in German - Mandelsterne.
A funny thing about these this year. The food editor in our local paper had an invitation out to readers to send in stories about learning to cook by watching, say, their mothers or grandmothers. I sent in a little story about these cookies, explaining that they were my then-boyfriend's favorites and so one evening I learned to make them by helping her. I missed they deadline by two days, but they posted the story anyway, and the recipe.
And this year - when I made them - they didn't come out so well. Figures, huh?
Anyway, here's what you do. And normally I can make these just fine - so I'm really not at all sure what the trouble was this year. Perhaps I wasn't thinking postive thoughts while I made them....
You will need:
1 lb confectioners sugar
1/2 lb almonds - ground
1/2 lb hazelnuts - ground
6 egg whites (and set aside 4 T of them to glaze the cookies with)
1 tsp almond extract
the rind of one lemon
* Grinding the nuts - I used a food processor this year instead of the meat grinder that I used in past years (because Bill's mom used a meat grinder) - and I like the processor method MUCH better. It's fast and tidy and fast.
You go from this
to this (these are the hazelnuts, by the way)
in seconds.
Now for the batter:
Place your egg whites in THE EXCEPTIONALLY CLEAN AND DRY bowl to your mixer and whip to stiff peaks.
Add in the confectioners' sugar and beat until very stiff.
Then fold in the almond extract, lemon zest, and nuts. Chill the dough for at least an hour.
Now, on a clear work surface, sprinkle some confectioners sugar or granulated sugar. A good amount. You DO NOT want to use flour for these. They don't have flour in them, for one thing. So use sugar instead.
Scoop out a small amount of the dough and put the rest back in the fridge.
Very carefully - it's fragile stuff - roll out the dough to about a quarter of an inch thick.
Dip your star-shaped cutter in some sugar and cut out enough stars for one cookie sheet.
Now get those 4 T of egg whites you set aside earlier, and gently glaze the top of each star with a little of the white. It gives them a nice thin "crust" when they bake.
And you place them in a 300 F oven for about 15-20 min...
And because you obviously did something wrong, they come out looking not like stars, but like...
blobs.
But look - in this next picture (from 2006) - in the upper right corner - THOSE are almond stars in their proper star shape. I CAN make them correctly. I really can!
And actually those are all 6 of the German cookies. L-R, back row - Farmer Hats, Lebkuchen, Almond Stars, front row - Pfeffernusse, Springerle, and German Butter Cookies.
OH - and most important of all - bake them on PARCHMENT PAPER on your sheet pan. Otherwise they will stick and you will tear your hair out in frustration.
They're very tasty (no matter what they look like) - they're basically meringue cookies with ground nuts in them. Crispy outside, chewy inside. VERY sweet.
Enjoy!
In German (according to Bill's Mom's recipe) these are Baurenhutchen.
I prefer to call them The Bane of My Existence.
Actually, they're pretty interesting cookies - they're kind of two cookies in one - a butter cookie outer cookie and a crispy/chewy meringue inner cookie.
The problem is, I can't seem to get them to come out right. At least, according to what Bill's uncle (his late mom's brother) has said was the way their mother was able to make them. And I know that is a poorly and confusingly constructed sentence, but I blame it on these cookies. Anyway, according to what I've been told, the cookies - which resemble tri-cornered hats when you shape them - came out of the oven still looking like that - the three sides vertical and touching in the center.
Mine have never, ever, ever looked like that. They taste great - they're one of Alex's favorites, and mine - BUT. They look more like hats that someone put away in an under-the-bed storage thing under some sweaters and heavy pants and oops, maybe they shouldn't have done that because now the perky tri-cornered hat looks like a pancake.
Still, they are yummy and worth the mental anguish.
Here we go:
Oh - and I'm giving you the measurements for the way I make them - which is to double the butter cookie portion because (another of my failings) I always end up with way too much leftover filling. I could just cut the filling in half, but more cookies is always better.
So.
For the butter cookie part, you will need the following:
1 lb all-purpose flour
1/2 lb unsalted butter
1/2 lb granulated sugar
6 egg yolks (save 2 of the whites, you'll need them for the filling. Save the others. Make meringue cookies with chocolate chips in them. Hide them. Eat them when no one's around to want you to share them. You work hard. You deserve it.)
2 T thick sour cream
Combine the flour and sugar in your mixing bowl, and then cut in the butter. You can use a paddle if you're using a stand mixer.
You want to check your progress as you combine them so you don't over-beat the mixture. You're looking for a fine, sandy sort of result. Like this:
And now you add in the yolks and the sour cream...
And mix together until you've got a nice, smooth dough. Remove it from the bowl, wrap in plastic so it doesn't dry out, and set aside while you make the filling. Or, if you're not going to use it til the next day, put it in the freezer.
(Look at those bizarre wrinkles in my hand. You'd think the dough weighed several pounds....)
Okay, now for the filling.
First, you need 1/4 lb of almonds, ground. I used to grind them in a meat grinder, which is what Bill's mom did, but this year I put the nuts in the food processor and I like that MUCH better. For one thing, when I used the meat grinder, it took a long time. And every year it seems like I make larger batches of cookies, so that adds to the time, AND, sometimes the grinding produces more of a nut butter result than just a ground up nuts result. So that's my two cents. I'm using the food processor.
Because you can start out with this:
And moments later, you've got this:
Oh - and if this looks like way more than a quarter pound of nuts, it is. I was also doing the almonds for the Almond Stars. Figure I'd grind two batches with one process. heh heh.
Okay, now you will also need two egg whites that you hopefully set aside earlier when you were separating your eggs. And about 3/4 of a cup of sugar.
No put the yolks in a PERFECTLY CLEAN (AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NO RESIDUE FROM THE OTHER DOUGH LEFT IN THE BOWL OR YOUR WHITES WILL NOT WHIP PROPERLY) and dry bowl, and, using the whisk attachment, whip them to stiff peaks.
And then slowly add in the sugar and beat some more...
Now, the recipe doesn't say whether you want any sort of peaks or not. It just says to beat 1/4 of an hour - which is because this was originally done by hand. I beat them together until they are soft peaks.
Next you fold in the almonds, and your mixture will look like this:
Okay. Now you'll need a clear work surface with a light dusting of flour. And some parchment-lined baking sheets. Set your oven on stun. Just kidding. Set it to 325 F.
Take a portion of your dough and roll it out to a thickness that's comfortable for you to work with. And what thickness is that? Anywhere between 1/8 and 1/4 inch. The recipe says 1/8 - actually it says the thickness of the back of a knife, but that leaves room for way too much variance, so Bill's mom added "approx 1/8" and then she wrote in - "I like 1/4." So - it's up to you. Mine was somewhere in between.
Next, you want to cut out circles that are about 3" in diameter. Place the circles on a cookie sheet with at least an inch of space between them. Place a bit of the filling (the egg white and nut mixture) in the center.
Okay, now the amount is another thing you want to play around with until you are comfortable with it. Because the next step is to fold up the sides of the cookie to form the tri-cornered hat shape. This takes a little practice. Also, if you've had the dough in the fridge, you want to give it plenty of time to come to room temp before you try making the hats, otherwise the dough won't bend; it will just crack and tear.
Here's my left hand (I'm right-handed, but that's the hold-the-camera hand) trying to demonstrate how to fold up the edges successfully.
Pinch the edges together in the center so they'll stay in place, at least for now.
Kind of cool, huh? Now I've put them in the oven for anywhere from ten minutes to a month to firm the dough up so it'll keep its shape. And here's how they looked AGAIN this year, part way through the baking:
FLATTENED. AGAIN. Plus the edges didn't stay pinched together.
There has GOT to be a way to do this so they stay perky. Either that, or Bill's uncle is remembering them BEFORE they went into the oven, and I'm feeling insecure and inadequate for nothing.
I thought I'd taken a picture after they were out of the oven, but apparently not. They will basically look like they do above, only a bit more golden brown. You need to bake them for about 20-25 mintues.
And I've experimented with different oven temps too. I'll tell you this - they don't look good if they're burnt.
I will keep trying, anyway, and if I succeed, you'll be the first to know. Because my scream of triumph will be audible around the world, I think.
Oh - and what to do with any leftover filling, you may ask?
Well, you can mix in some mini chocolate chips if you want to,
And bake them until they are crispy and lightly golden on the outside...
And kind of chewy and melty
on the inside.
(I really need to hire a hand model for these shots. My hands are all wrong for this sort of thing.)
Anyway, that's how to make the Floppy Farmer Hats - and despite my griping about how they look, they really are pretty yummy.
And the taste, after all, is what will keep bringing stealthy hands back to the cookie jar.
The other day I was driving home with the kids after picking them up at kindergarten (Alex) and daycare (Julia). Somehow they got into a discussion of how different animals would break through ice to get to water if they were thirsty.
"What about...an eagle?" I asked them.
"His beak!" Julia shouted. "And his...claws!"
"Yeah," Alex confirmed, "But eagles don't have claws - they have talions!"
