Archive for the 'beverages' Category
Peeps! You can make them yourself, then float them in your hot chocolate! Yes, I do lie awake at night thinking about this stuff. Some girls think of George Clooney – I’m counting Peeps.
It’s just marshmallow goo, spooned into a zip-lock bag and squeezed out through one corner. Easy. In fact, once you have the bagful of creamy marshmallow (made with plain gelatin simmered into hot syrup with sugar and water, whipped with corn syrup until it has the same consistency as meringue) you could squeeze it out into letters, numbers or any shape you like. You could, I imagine, toss them about in finely ground coloured sugar while they’re still tacky to complete the Peeps effect, but I love the way they resemble whipped cream as they melt on top of hot chocolate. You can flavour them with vanilla or peppermint or coconut or cinnamon or anything else you think would go well with chocolate. (And if you want to go dairy-free, use coconut milk in your mug.)
Homemade Marshmallows
Sure you can always pick up a bag, but marshmallows are fun to make yourself, can be flavoured any number of ways – try adding peppermint or coconut extract – and are far more delicious than the packaged kind by virtue of being homemade. Bonus: you can shape your mallows into letters or shapes by spooning the mixture into a zip-lock bag and piping it out.
3 pkg. (3 Tbsp.) plain gelatin
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
2 tsp. vanilla, mint or coconut extract
icing sugar, for dusting
In a small bowl sprinkle the gelatin over 1/2 cup water. In a medium pot, combine the sugar and another 1/2 cup water and bring to a simmer; add the softened gelatin mixture and stir until fully dissolved and hot to the touch.
Pour into a large bowl (if you have a stand mixer, use it with the whip attachment), add the corn syrup and vanilla and beat on high (if you like, drape a kitchen towel overtop at first to catch splatters) for about 10 minutes, until the mixture cools and increases in volume until it has the consistency of meringue – billowy and white, and forms soft peaks.
Pour into a 9”x13” pan lined with parchment or foil and dusted generously with icing sugar, or spoon into a large (or small) zip-lock bag, snip a large piece off one corner and pipe shapes, letters, swirls or Peeps onto a piece of parchment or silicone mat or an icing sugar dusted sheet. Let cool until completely set and if you need to, cut into squares using a sharp knife sprayed with nonstick spray. Makes lots.
I also, since they’re in the picture and all, need to share with you my favourite oatmeal cookie recipe. They’re made with half canola oil and not a ton of brown sugar, and yet they’re as sweet as I’d ever want them to be, with a great texture. I made them this spring in Tofino – this time I added a handful of coconut, too.
Dad’s Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
a good shake of cinnamon
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup raisins or other dried fruit
1/3 cup coconut (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl beat the butter, oil, brown sugar and cinnamon until creamy; beat in the egg ad vanilla.
Add the flour, oats, baking soda and salt and stir until almost combined; add the raisins or other dried fruit and stir just until blended. Drop large blobs on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 12-14 minutes, until set around the edges but still soft in the middle.
Makes 1 – 1/2-2 dozen cookies.
Of course now that I’ve given up on the whole Free Stuff Fridays actually being on Friday, I arranged for a kick-ass prize today. So just a heads up: you may want to click on the free stuff tab up there – this one has a $750 price tag!
November 27 2010 | beverages and cookies & squares | 16 Comments »
I KNOW!!
I’ve weaned myself off of that late afternoon cup of coffee. With this.
Oh wait, I also had some of this.
This one’s just plain old hot chocolate, straight-up. That white creaminess on the top, by the way? aren’t dollops of whipped cream – they’re (melting) homemade marshmallows. Which yes, I know, are oh-so-very Martha. And to be honest I don’t have the patience for the cutting and the dusting with icing sugar (I can never cut them cleanly, and wind up a total mess with marshmallow goo stuck to me and less-than-Martha looking mallows all over my kitchen. And myself. And the floor. And the dog. Black-haired dogs and sticky freshly sawed-apart marshmallows do not mix.)
So I discovered if you just drop spoonfuls of the marshmallow mixture onto parchment paper or pipe it out from a zip-lock baggie (in which case you can make Peeps!) it’s far easier and less labour-intensive, and you don’t need to dust everything with icing sugar nor cut them into neat cubes afterward. And in your mug, they look like whipped cream.
I digress. Back to the PEANUT BUTTER HOT CHOCOLATE. (It doesn’t have to be salted, if you’ve had enough of the salted sweet stuff. But it does have to be peanut butter.) In New York we went to a place called the Shake Shack. (Aside: BEST BURGER OF MY LIFE, HANDS-DOWN.) It was an outdoor burger joint, in a little park across the street from the Flat Iron Building, and although they have those heaters on poles distributed among their tables, it was chilly. A sign beside the ordering window read:
Salted Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate
Baby It’s Cold Outside
$3.25
Sold.
As if the burgers and frozen custard (!) weren’t stupendous enough, this ranked among the top two – possibly one – hot chocolates of my life. It wasn’t terribly salty, nor sweet, not overwhelmingly peanut buttery. It was thick and foamy and intense and wonderful. And this morning I figured out how to make it.
Oh no.
Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate
If you want it salted, add a pinch of flaky sea salt at the end.
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1/4 cup water
3 cups 2% or whole milk
2-4 Tbsp. creamy peanut butter
3 oz. bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped (Lindt 70% cocoa or Bernard Callebaut – you can get nibs or flakes from Bernard Callebaut they work great)
In a saucepan, stir together the sugar and cocoa to get rid of lumps; stir in the water until smooth, then whisk in the milk over medium-high heat. Heat until steaming. Remove the pan from the heat and add the peanut butter and chocolate. Let it sit for a few seconds, then blend it with a hand-held immersion blender. Or for individual cups, divide the chocolate among the cups and pour the warm milk overtop. Whiz with one of those little frothers to make it very smooth and foamy.
P.S. You don’t really need a recipe for this – you can just lob in a spoonful of creamy peanut butter into your regular (real!) hot chocolate. But whizzing it with a hand-held immersion blender makes all the difference, emulsifying and frothing it up into something much better than the sum of its parts.
November 23 2010 | beverages | 40 Comments »
There seems to be an awful lot of interest surrounding the topic of hot cocoa. Specifically, how to make it. This is not surprising considering the recent enormous dump of snow that has blanketed Calgary, slowing it down considerably and sending it scrambling to find its mittens and snow shovels. (Confession: I love it. Even the driving part. I love walking the boys to school and shoveling the sidewalk and coming in with the bottom inches of my jeans cold and wet. I’m sure the novelty will wear off sometime around January 2nd.)
So to make real, for-true-life hot cocoa this is what you do (or what I do): stir together a tablespoonful each of cocoa and sugar (or honey) in a small pot, and add about a cup of milk (soy or almond milk is fine, although it’s sweeter so you may want to cut down the sugar). Heat. (You’ll have to heat the water anyway-you may as well heat milk, right?)
Or, if you’d like to make yourself a nice stash of mix for the kids to dip into, you can get yourself a charming old glass jar (Value Village: $1) and spoon into it equal amounts of cocoa powder and sugar. Shake it up. This will take approximately twelve seconds, and take you from:
Ingredients: SUGAR, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL (MAY CONTAIN COCONUT, PALM KERNEL AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL), MODIFIED MILK INGREDIENTS, COCOA, CELLULOSE GUM, SALT, DIPOTASSIUM PHOSPHATE, SILICON DIOXIDE, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOUR, MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES, GUAR GUM, SODIUM ALUMINUM SILICATE.
to:
Ingredients: COCOA, SUGAR.
The boys today declared their hot cocoa the best they’ve ever had, and this was it. Made with 1% milk. It was no different than usual, but made me think maybe we all might need a steaming cup.
November 17 2010 | beverages | 31 Comments »
It was a good weekend, if busy. It may sound like the picture of domesticity, in fact, when I recap: coffee to go and some good, artsy garage sale-ing Saturday morning, at which W (finally!) became the proud owner of a Slap-Chop – a real one, not the 1950s version my Grandma had that he took one look at and declared “not the real thing”. (He has been asking for one since Christmas. When he got the Graty that came with it, he turned to me and said, “hey Mom! You can put your cheese in it, you can keep it in the fridge and fuggedaboutit!” in full-on New York slang.)
Then, a discovery that I’ve decided after much inner searching to share with you: fruit-filled hand pies at Bliss & Co. bakery in Chinatown: THE BEST EVER. (Also: really nice people there. Which is always an added bonus.) It was all I could do to take a few snaps before devouring one of those cherry pies. OK, both of them. They are every bit as good as they look.
This morning the boys decided they wanted to have a lemonade stand. We pulled out the old mixer with juicer attachment my sister acquired at some antiques/curios shop ages ago, which is pulled out a few times per summer for this purpose and no other. I realize it sounds a bit Martha to set up a four and seven year old with an antique juicer and bowl of lemons for their stand (you’ll be relieved to hear we didn’t serve it in our vintage jadeite glassware), but it beats Kool-Aid or even frozen lemonade concentrate hands-down. The boys love the process of taking an order, then juicing a lemon half directly into a glass over ice, and adding sweetened water. It’s the Real Thing. They know how to turn a lemon, sugar and water into lemonade.
If you don’t have a vintage juicer, here’s how to make it from scratch from fresh lemons. (Tip: if you zap your lemons in the microwave for 20 seconds, they’ll release far more juice.)
Freshly Squeezed Lemonade: To make a lemon simple syrup, simply heat equal amounts of lemon juice and sugar in a small pan until the sugar dissolves. (6 large lemons will give you about a cup of juice.) Cool completely and keep in the fridge. To make lemonade by the glass, pour a couple tablespoons into a glass with ice, then add water (tap or sparkling) to taste. To make a pitcher, mix 1 part syrup to 5-6 parts water.
We mixed up a batch of my Grandma Woodall’s Marmalade Cookies to put out in a bowl, and as they baked the boys painted their signs. When I asked how much they planned to sell their lemonade for – curious what price tag they might put on their wares – they said they wanted it to be free. When I asked why, they said they already had enough money. So they painted “free lemonade” signs.
(They still got $3 in tips. Ben said he wanted to give it to someone who didn’t have any money, so we’ll pass it on to the food bank.)
Dinner was pizza from Roma’s in Bridgeland – a place I hadn’t tried before, but was recommended by someone via Twitter. (Thanks, social media.) We got the Funghi, topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, provolone, mushrooms and prosciutto crudo. Salty and yummy, with a Roman-style crust (thin, with no rim).
And of course we nibbled on cookies all afternoon. I hadn’t made this particular recipe in ages – but it seemed fitting to pull out one of my Grandma’s recipes on a day when it seemed all of the birds in the neighbourhood came out to sing. (She loved birds, and could identify them all.) I love the scraps of paper that have her hand-written recipes on them (often with phone numbers and other notes to herself), but you might find it hard to decipher – you can find the typed-out-for-you version of the recipe here.
May 16 2010 | beverages | 23 Comments »
What a novelty! Tonight I think I’ll actually post what I had for dinner.
I couldn’t possibly relay the food that I’ve consumed over the past several days at the JPL-suffice to say it has been superb and in excess. Dinner tonight started with Sweet Potato Carrot Bisque, poured over crispy fried red onions (which were already in the soup bowls), then chicken stuffed with Fairwinds farm goat cheese and roasted fingerling potatoes, and white chocolate mousse with berry sauce for dessert. I figured the soup recipe was easy to share; plus it’s delicious. (I apologize for the nasty photo – it was dark, and the wine rendered me not as steady as I’d have liked.)
And also – I had gone to Shoana’s most excellent (say like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure – am I dating myself?) mixology class in the afternoon, at which I tested no fewer than 7 cocktails – for research purposes, you understand. I think she may have convinced me to buy a martini shaker. Or dig out the one I bought at a garage sale a few years ago.
Yet another great thing about Christmas in November is that you get to take home a book full of recipes – everything you ate in the dining room, as well as all the recipes from the presenters.
Sweet Potato Carrot Bisque
This was served over crispy fried red onions which had already been placed in the soup bowls; to do this, thinly slice the onions and cook in oil until crispy.
2 cups chopped carrots
1 large sweet potato, peeled and chopped
1 L (32 oz.) chicken broth
1 Tbsp. butter
1/3 cup chopped onion
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. curry powder
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. lemon juice
1/2 cup plain yogurt
In a large pot simmer the carrots and sweet potato in the stock for 20 minutes, or until tender, adding more water if you need to to keep the vegetables covered. Meanwhile, saute the onion in the butter until translucent. Add them to the pot of veggies. Add the sugar, curry, nutmeg and salt and puree with a hand-held immersion blender (or transfer to a regular blender in batches) until smooth. Add the lemon juice and yogurt and heat through. If you like, serve over crispy fried onions. Serves 4.
Chocolate Martini
2 oz. vodka
1 oz. crème de cacao
2 oz. milk (optional)
ice
chocolate shavings or finely crushed candy canes (optional)
Rim your martini glass by running a wedge of lime around the rim and dipping it into a shallow bowl of chocolate shavings or crushed candy canes. Shake everything else up (lots of ice) in a martini shaker and strain into the glass. Drink.
November 11 2009 | beverages and soup | 7 Comments »
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