Archive for October, 2009
Can’t stay long-just wanted to pop in and thank you all for your birthday wishes, and let you know I made it through the day. I’m now firmly fused to the couch, box of frozen profiteroles in hand (breakfast and dinner – if what I’m eating now counts as dinner? – perfectly acceptable on your birthday, don’t you think?) and watching The Office. Bliss. My only regret is not having some warm chocolate sauce to dunk these babies into.
I didn’t make it through the day unscathed; I have a few minor burns up one arm and a partially severed left thumb (really it’s not that bad-one of those slices that’s mostly fingernail and only part finger) and a maimed right thumb-the result of ramming the metal tab on the seal of a balsamic vinegar bottle under my thumbnail. I have in fact damaged both opposable thumbs at the same time. I did it while frantically trying to feed 300+ at a Napa Valley wine event this evening- I didn’t actually sever a finger this morning on BT when I got to channel my inner Julia; that was all corn syrup and food colouring. (Sorry, I didn’t get it on tape. Maybe it’ll make the best of BT tomorrow morning?) At least the gore is in keeping with the spirit of the season.
I was hardly home for half an hour today – only long enough to change and reload between events. I didn’t cook anything in my own kitchen, but before I go to bed I’ll pull out a cranberry-orange loaf I made earlier in the week for our Halloween festivities tomorrow. Does that count? I think everyone should know how to make a cranberry-orange loaf. This one is from Eric Akis’ new book, Everyone Can Cook- for Celebrations. He got it from his friend Elizabeth. I like that it’s packed with cranberries and makes use of only 1/4 cup of butter. It doubles well – so you can eat one and freeze the other for the same amount of work.
Elizabeth’s Cranberry-Orange Loaf
from Everyone Can Cook- for Celebrations by Eric Akis. The addition of golden raisins makes this loaf reminiscent of a fruitcake-you can always leave them out. (I also reduced the salt from 1 tsp. to 1/4 tsp.)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter, softened
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 tsp. grated orange zest (I just zest the whole orange)
3/4 cup orange juice
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
1 1/2 cups golden raisins (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350F and spray a 9″x5″ loaf pan with nonstick spray. In a large bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter until the mixture is evenly crumbly. (Idea: you could do this in the food processor, and make dry mixes in advance to keep in the freezer; add the egg, juice and berries when you want to bake it!)
Add the egg, zest and juice and stir until almost combined; add the cranberries and raisins and stir just until the batter comes together. Spread into the pan and bake for about an hour, until the top is springy to the touch.
And for Free Stuff Friday – a copy of the book! Any edible plans for Halloween tomorrow?
(I just noticed the image is in reverse. I have no idea why-it’s right on my computer. Lets just call it special effects for Halloween.)
One Year Ago: Spider Truffles and Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
October 31 2009 | bread and breakfast | 37 Comments »
Have been reduced to a bobblehead with a wonky neck spring. Brain function reduced to a trickle. Discovered don’t have a waist upon trying on Julia Child outfits (Oxford-style shirt, tied apron, which makes me look more like Paul Prudhomme) in front of full-length mirror.
Ghoulash for dinner. Wanted to tell you about it. V. good on brown rice. Leftovers. Better after a day or two in the fridge. Freezes well.
Pulled Pork Ghoulash
adapted from Jamie at Home, by Jamie Oliver (a stunning book-I highly recommend it!)
canola or olive oil, for cooking with
4-5 lb. pork shoulder, preferably bone-in
1 large purple onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 red pepper, seeded and chopped
1 yellow or orange pepper, seeded and chopped
2-3 hot chile peppers, seeded and finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp. hot or 1 Tbsp. mild smoked paprika
1 19 oz. (598 mL) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
salt & pepper to taste
½ cup sour cream or crème fraiche (optional- Jamie spikes his with lemon zest and a handful of chopped fresh parsley)
Brown rice or warm cornbread, for serving
Heat a drizzle of oil in a heavy skillet set over medium-high heat and brown the pork shoulder on all sides. Transfer it to a Dutch oven or slow cooker. (If you want to cook this in the oven instead of the slow cooker, preheat it to 325°F.) Add the onions to the pan and cook until they start to turn brown; add them to the Dutch oven or slow cooker; ditto the peppers, chile peppers and garlic. Add them to the pork and onions, and add the paprika, tomatoes, vinegar and sugar as well.
If you are using the oven put a lid on the pot and put it in for about 3 hours. If you are using a slow cooker, set it on low for 6-8 hours. Take the lid off and test the meat – it should pull apart easily with a fork. Remove any bones and continue cooking with the lid off if you’d like to thicken the sauce. Skim any fat from the surface, or cool the pork completely, then refrigerate it overnight; this makes it easier to pull the solidified fat from the surface, and it always tastes better reheated the next day, after the flavors have had a chance to improve.
Using two forks, shred the meat and distribute it through the sauce. Season with salt and pepper. Serve over rice or split cornbread, topped with a dollop of sour cream or crème fraiche. Leftovers are grand, and freeze well.
Serves 8-10.
One Year Ago: Beef Stu, Garlicky Cheese Biscuits and Blood & Gutscakes
October 29 2009 | pork and slow cooker | 21 Comments »
Bit of a week. My head hurts. It’s after midnight. I can’t seem to spell without the aid of spell-check. Still on Thursday and Friday’s to-do list: find a Julia Child wig (and build a costume around it, then practice my higher-octave voice) for Breakfast TV Friday morning (I’m hoping they’ll let me bloodily cut my finger on the air à la Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live), shop and prep for two different cooking segments (cupcakes, shaggy monster cookies, spun-sugar cobweb croquembouche, stuff with pumpkin in it), make green food for a photo shoot for ParentsCanada magazine tomorrow afternoon (at which I’ll also be taking the pictures), finish two articles and take photos for one of them, and cook for a Napa Valley wine event at Willow Park on Friday night, which 250 hungry people will be attending. That’s not including the little stuff, and the outline and sample chapter of a book manuscript I was supposed to have done this week, which obviously won’t. And oh yeah-
I have a 4 year old.
Luckily (for so many reasons) I have a next door neighbour who happens to be a chef. He comes in handy because 1) we’re tag teaming on this Napa Valley event, which is a very good thing because he’s far more cheffy than I, making things like seared scallops over radicchio slaw in soup spoons, and there’s no way I could pull it off myself. Also, he sometimes brings us food. Some days he leans over the fence to give me a taste of a duck confit or some little cornucopia filled with something interesting. Earlier this week he brought over cold rigatoni stuffed with goat cheese and tossed in pesto, which we’ve been dipping into for the past few days.
Tonight at around dinnertime they came in handy-we set the last of them out in a bowl at the table and nervously scarfed them down with our fingers, dunked in chipotle aioli, as my sister filled out paperwork to make an offer on a house. Her very first house. Directly across the street.
Rigatoni Stuffed with Goat Cheese
from Chef Wade Paterson-thanks Wade!
1 package (500 grams) good quality dried rigatoni
1 lb soft goat cheese
¼ cup sun dried tomatoes packed in oil (well drained)
1 14 oz can artichoke hearts (well drained)
¼ cup chopped fresh basil
¼ cup ground Parmesan
½ cup pesto
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
salt & pepper
Cook rigatoni in a large pot of well salted boiling water until just al dente. Drain well and immerse in cold water to stop cooking. In a food processor add cheeses, tomatoes and artichokes. Process until smooth. Add in basil and pulse until just mixed. Season with salt and pepper.
Fit a piping bag with a small straight tip small enough to fit in the rigatoni. Fill bag with cheese mixture. (Alternatively, fill a large ziploc bag, seal and snip a corner off to pipe from.) Drain rigatoni well and pipe cheese mixture into rigatoni. Be careful not to overfill or the rigatoni might break.
In a large bowl combine pesto and olive oil and mix well. Add stuffed pasta and toss to coat. Serve at room temperature. Store in the fridge up to 3 days. Does not freeze well.
One Year Ago: Green Hair with Bloody Eyeballs and Toenail Clippings, and Crème Caramel
October 29 2009 | appetizers and pasta | 17 Comments »
Look Ma – no feet!
So it appears I am woefully lacking the ability to turn out a good and proper French macaron. Perhaps these could be classified as second-generation Belgian macaroons? Despite their lack of gloss and feet, they taste good enough to eat half a sheet pan of them, spread on their soft and chewy undersides with lemon curd.
Why am I making macarons on a regular Tuesday afternoon? It’s Daring Bakers’ Day, and I was determined not to miss another one. The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.
Ami says has tried many, many recipes, and this is her favourite. I myself am a macaron virgin (making, not eating, silly) and so don’t know one recipe from another. I have made meringue a time or two, and macaroons -there is a difference- the French macaron variety, while delicious, always came across as too precious. I’d still choose the big, robust, dense and chewy and gooily sweet variety, preferably doused in chocolate. But I was pleasantly surprised at how low-maintenance they were, even though they didn’t turn out right. I blame the almonds – I ground my own – and yes, to a fine powder with the icing sugar. I mean it couldn’t have been me, right?
Some recipes call for drying the unbaked macaroons on the counter for half to a full hour. This recipe has you bake the macaroons at a low temp. for 5 minutes, then take them out of the oven, raise the temperature, and baking them for an additional 7 to 8 minutes. Drying is necessary to get the trademark “feet”. I got no feet.
Claudia Fleming’s Macarons (adapted by Ami)
2 1/4 cups icing sugar
2 cups almond flour or finely ground almonds
2 Tbsp. granulated sugar
5 large egg whites
Preheat the oven to 200°F. Combine the icing sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl. If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of icing sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery.
Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.
Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.
Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip (Ateco #806). You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.
Pipe 1″ mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper). Bake for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F. Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored. Cool on a rack before filling.
If you’re looking for macaron references, David Lebovitz, Serious Eats and the always stunning Tartelette do know their way around them.
One Year Ago: Tomato Apple Cake
October 27 2009 | cookies & squares | 15 Comments »
Trick or TrEAT!
Today nine of my favourite food, craft and lifestyle bloggers await behind nine haunted houses (undoubtedly catching up on their sleep) with an array of scary holiday treats created just for you. At the end of this post you’ll find links to the next houses on the block, which will in turn direct you to the next, and so on. It’s like real trick-or-treating, isn’t it? Except that you won’t accidentally eat a dozen mini chocolate bars or need to bundle a snowsuit under your costume, and in fact we won’t even know if you don’t put on a costume at all. (Or hey-if you’ve eaten way too many mini chocolate bars you can always blame it on the “bulky snowsuit” under your clothes.) Just curl up with your laptop and a mug of something warm (and/or boozy) and come visit the people in our neighbourhood.
I have to admit I like the idea of candy apples much more than the apples themselves; the caramel variety is almost impossible to get a grip on, the caramel slipping across the smooth apple skin as you plow it with your teeth. And I’m never quite sure how to approach the hard red candy kind; there is no way to be delicate when sweet shards are shattering all over your face, sticking to your cheeks. That said, I can’t let Halloween go by without making them.
While we’re being honest, I may as well admit that I don’t generally make the caramel kind because those little square caramels and I have a history; namely I was completely and all-encompassingly addicted to them a few years back. It was right after W was born, when people kept saying to me “you’re breastfeeding – you can eat whatever you want and you’ll totally lose weight!” Bollocks. I of course wanted to believe this and so put it to the test, downing my own weight in caramels daily. Their little wrappers were everywhere, even though I grabbed them and stuck them in my pockets anytime I went from room to room. I got panicky whenever my stash ran low. When I got a batch that were on the hard side, I carried them in my pockets until they softened up. Two months and 25 pounds later (I’m not even exaggerating) I had to quit cold turkey.
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October 25 2009 | sweet stuff | 31 Comments »
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