Archive for January, 2011
You know you’re getting older when: you have a Prune Jar in the fridge.
Molly talked me into it. The power of suggestion is strong with me late at night, when I read books in bed with a flashlight tucked under my chin (like a 12 year old boy looking at National Geographic – I really need to go to IKEA and get me a bedside lamp). The funny part is, I read her ode to stewed prunes (in A Homemade Life) well over a year ago, and every time I see a prune (or – pardon me marketing people – dried plum) I picture her father shuffling into the kitchen in his robe to put on a pot of prunes to sit overnight and transform into something far more juicy and sophisticated by breakfast. Now she’s what you might call a great food writer.
I decided to do it Berg’s way (that’s her dad) – food safety police be damned – and just cover a half a small pot of prunes with water, add a few slices of lemon (Molly adds orange too, but I didn’t have any – and I think she tosses in a cinnamon stick) bring it to a boil, snap the lid on, take it off the heat and leave it for morning. Don’t forget to turn the stove off, please.
And she’s right. They don’t turn watery, or sad, or stewed in the way that a tinned tomato tends to be – it’s like they’re relieved to finally regain some of their moisture, now that they’ve gone and puckered and condensed, and not only do they suck it up, but release some of their sugars back, creating this wonderful syrup that the lemon has given a complex tang. If you store them with the lemon slices in the fridge, their lemoniness will become more lively over a few days or a week. When you eat a bowl of them with homemade yogurt and granola, you’ll feel right grown up. Circa 1967.
January 30 2011 | breakfast | 14 Comments »
Today I used the bacon drippings from yesterday’s kale carbonara in the bottom of my Whirley-Pop pot when I popped my popcorn. That is all.
January 27 2011 | snacks | 10 Comments »
E.B. has been reading this blog for a very long time. About a week ago, she tweeted me asking advice about cookie pops for an upcoming birthday party. I had never made them, but had always wanted to – for no particular reason except that they’re cookies. On a stick.
And so we made some! For research purposes, obviously. I poked around the internet to see what other people were doing, and not being quite up for a full-on icing art project, I decided to just make chocolate chip cookies, stick wooden Popsicle sticks into the dough before they baked, and see what happened. Guess what? Cookies on a stick! Easy. It appears you can bake any cookie on a stick. Drop or other soft-doughed cookies, anyway – I’m not sure how you’d jam a stick into a rolled and cut-out cookie, unless you made the dough thicker than you normally would. To make perfectly round cookies for decorating, I’d roll sugar dough into balls, poke in the stick, then flatten them with the bottom of a glass. But to be honest, I’m not sure I’d bother with anything but crispy-edged, chewy-middled chocolate chip cookies on my sticks.
Tonight, Ben called from across the street to ask if I might have twenty-seven leftover cookie pops for him to bring to his class for his birthday tomorrow. Er, no. Guess what we did tonight?
Rather than go with my lower fat version, I went with the recipe on the back of the Chipits bag, tweaking it just a bit. I may have eaten some of the dough.
Good luck with the birthday party, E.B.!
Chocolate Chip Cookies on a Stick
3/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup canola or mild olive oil
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2 1/4 cups flour (half all-purpose, half whole wheat)
1 tsp. baking soda
pinch salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
3 dozen wooden Popsicle or stir sticks
Preheat oven to 350F.
In a large bowl, beat the butter, oil and sugars until well blended and starting to get fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat again. Add the flour, baking soda and salt and beat until almost combined; add the chocolate chips and stir just until blended.
Shape the dough into walnut-sized balls and place them on an ungreased baking sheet, allowing 2 inches between them. Stick a Popsicle stick into each, ensuring that the stick won’t interfere with the spreading of any of the other cookies.
Bake for 12-14 minutes, until golden around the edges but still soft in the middle. Let cool on the sheet for at least 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Makes about 3 dozen cookies.
January 24 2011 | cookies & squares | 20 Comments »
I’ve fallen into a poached egg rut – the very best kind of rut to be in, I’d argue. I picked up a dozen eggs prettier than a box of chocolates, in shades of pale green hostas and blue hydrangeas among speckled brown, toast and ecru. (Sorry, got a little Martha there on y’all.) They’re at the Kingsland market, from Noble Meadows Farm, where it must be said they have THE most amazing goat feta, made right on their farm, from their herd of goats, in Nobleford, Alberta. (Just typing that, I had to go downstairs and nibble a few cubes straight from their brine in open fridge, Nigella-style.) If you go, do yourself a favour and pick up a pack of spreadable goat cheese with apricot jam, then plant yourself on your couch with your sister and a package of crackers.
I picked up a 6-pack of duck eggs, too – from Greens, Eggs & Ham – they’re like chicken eggs, only bigger and mellower, if you can imagine an egg tasting slightly different from the eggs you’ve likely become accustomed to over your lifetime. W was disappointed when we first cracked one and a duck didn’t pop out. After all, we don’t call our regular ones chicken eggs.
With my cold dragging its feet, I didn’t have much will to cook a proper dinner every night. I managed some – one night was lasagna, but I didn’t post it because I winged it, forgot what I did, and didn’t want to come tell everyone to do the same. We ate beef bourguignon with mushrooms and lentils left over from a photo shoot for an upcoming issue of Apple magazine. But mostly this week we’ve been eating mixed greens out of a tub, birthday party food, and poached eggs on toast. No-knead bread toast, even. I could never tire of the combo. I may have to cut myself off of it.
If you are among the millions daunted by the thought of poaching an egg, I posted a wee tutorial over at Family Kitchen.
January 23 2011 | eggs and Family Kitchen | 23 Comments »
When we managed to light all the drippy birthday candles on almost two dozen of these, we sang: happy birthday dear MomandAnneandBenandRoryandHugo! Happy birthday to yooouuuuuu! Between our immediate family, marrieds and offspring, January has become almost as celebratory a month as December.
My mom and sister share the same birthday, and sometime longer ago than I can remember it was decided that spice cake with penuche icing would be their birthday cake. None of the rest of us have a particular cake we must have from year to year, and to be honest I don’t even know if a spice cake could be called their favourite kind of cake anymore, but it gets rolled out annually without question. Usually it comes in layers, with money in between, but I thought we’d streamline things this year, as they’d be served at the second birthday party of the day, with 5 boys 8 and under in the house.
At Party 1, Ben’s 8th, we had a grilled cheese bar (just marble cheddar, white and grainy bread and ketchup, but can you imagine a grilled cheese free-for-all with caramelized onion, crispy bacon, sundried tomatoes, pesto, different cheeses and interesting breads? I can suddenly not wait for my next birthday) and a lemon sheet cake decorated like a hockey rink, complete with strategically placed gummi bears. (Which, my sister calculated, was her 40th homemade birthday cake, when you count the birthdays of all three of her kids. How does one celebrate that? With a cake?) At dinner we ordered Indian/Pakistani food from Mirchi, which was spicy but delicious, and a good price – 8 grown ups and 5 kids ate for under $100.
And the cupcakes. I’m not sure what the technical difference is, but when I think of frosting it’s more of a billowy, Martha-esque cake topping, whereas icing is the more dense, sweet stuff we had on our childhood birthday cakes and cookies and licked off beaters. Penuche is a brown sugar icing that’s traditionally cooked, a method that opens the door to the possibility of overcooking it into a sort of a fudge that while delicious, can easily rip the top off a delicate cupcake as you try to spread it. This time, I dissolved the brown sugar into water, making a sort of syrup which I added to the butter-icing sugar mixture as I beat it, and it worked just fine. I’d venture to call it a foolproof penuche.
Or you could just call it brown sugar icing.
Spice Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Icing
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. nutmeg and/or allspice
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup canola or mild vegetable oil
1 1/4 cups packed brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/4 cups milk
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, spices, and salt. In a larger bowl, beat the butter, oil and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Add about 1/3 of the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir it in by hand or with the electric mixer on low speed, just until it’s combined. Add about half the milk in the same manner, then another third of the flour, the rest of the milk, and the rest of the flour, mixing just until the batter is blended.
Divide the batter between paper-lined muffin tins and bake for 25 minutes, or until the tops are springy to the touch. Let them cool tipped in their cups to allow steam to escape. Let cool completely before frosting. Makes about 20 cupcakes.
Brown Sugar Icing
I confess: I didn’t measure the icing sugar, but dumped in the bottom half of the bag. I’d guess it was about 3 cups, but use your judgment – you may need more or less to make it spreadable.
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1 tsp. vanilla (optional)
1/3 cup butter, softened
3 cups (ish) icing sugar
In a small bowl or pot, stir together the brown sugar, water and vanilla. If you like, heat to a simmer to dissolve the sugar, or let it sit for a bit, stirring occasionally until the sugar is more or less dissolved. (It doesn’t much matter if there’s still some graininess in the bottom.)
In a medium bowl, beat the butter until creamy; add the icing sugar and about 3/4 of the brown sugar syrup and beat until smooth. Add more sugar or syrup as needed until you have a soft, spreadable icing.
January 22 2011 | cake | 15 Comments »
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