Archive for the 'sweet stuff' Category
No, not for dinner – but you don’t really want to hear about how I ate chateaubriand all over again, do you? (That’s beef tenderloin with béarnaise sauce – like hollandaise, made with egg yolk and clarified butter. Oh yes. I’m a bit ashamed of myself for how much of it I ate. On everything. Turns out it’s pretty damn yummy on bread, too. And vegetables. And fingers. I gave my dessert to Mike, but downed a few chocolate truffles and fancy martinis.
It snowed all day today – thick, slow, quiet snow so ideal for the holidays that I fully expected to see a bunch of JPL elves on the roof outside my session dumping bagsful of fluff over the edge. (You know The Snowman by Raymond Briggs? Like that.) We snuck out for an hour in the afternoon and made snowmen and threw rocks through the thin ice at the edge of the lake. I don’t want to go home tomorrow. How could it have been seven days already?
But the food. My sessions this year have been on the subject of sweet gifts from the kitchen: my Grandma’s Peanut Brittle, sugar plums, chocolate bark, candied pecans and chocolate mint cookies made with After Eights. Setting up after lunch W came into my room and helped himself to bowls and ingredients and started doing his own impromptu chocolate dinosaur cake demo. It was pretty damn cute if I do say so myself. I mean, look at him! What makes it even more funny is that he’s never actually seen me do this.
The inspiration for the bacon brittle came at breakfast, when faced with chafing dishes overflowing with the stuff. I piled some on my plate and brought it to my session, chopped it and stirred it into peanut brittle along with the nuts. (Mixed salted nuts – delicious, but I think if I planned it I’d stick to pecans.) It was almost as big a hit as W.
Bacon Pecan Brittle
The recipe for my grandma’s peanut brittle is written by hand on an old recipe card I still have; it turns out to make a great basic recipe whether you want to make a nut brittle with peanuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, pumpkin seeds or mixed nuts. Or bacon.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup corn syrup or honey
pinch salt
3/4 cup water
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 cups toasted pecans or other nuts
a few slices of bacon, cooked until crisp and crumbled or chopped
Combine the sugar, corn syrup, salt and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir constantly until the sugar dissolves. Once the sugar has dissolved do not stir, but swirl the pan occasionally until the mixture reaches 325°F on a candy thermometer.
Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla and baking soda – the mixture will foam up in the pan. Stir in the bacon and nuts. Immediately pour onto a rimmed baking sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray and spread out fairly thin with a spatula or the back of a spoon that has been sprayed as well.
Cool completely and break into chunks. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks. Serves about 10.
November 12 2009 | sweet stuff | 14 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 »
For as long as I’ve had the faculty of memory, and for as long as he was alive, my Grandad ate butterscotch or caramel sundaes for dessert. Sometimes it was a variation on the theme; bananas sautéed with butter and brown sugar (add some rum, stick a match to them and you could call it bananas Foster) were the biggest request when my Grandma was gone and my mom went to stay with him. It’s difficult to imagine anything simpler or more of a comfort than bananas sautéed in butter and sugar and spooned over ice cream or warm pancakes or wrapped in a crepe.
On regular weeknights he had vanilla ice cream with butterscotch marble, or a dish of plain vanilla with butterscotch or caramel syrup drizzled over top. During one visit my Dad attempted to impose his own healthy eating habits on him; since Grandad never dished out his own ice cream – my Grandma would go serve it up while he stayed in his usual seat at the end of the table, so that behind him you could see the Detroit river and behind that, a sparkling, towering downtown – I was sent out of the kitchen to the dining room with a dish of a sugarless vanilla frozen soy product doused with extra caramel to disguise its inauthenticity. I’m not sure why he thought we’d get away with it. We didn’t.
I heart caramel. I really do, and yet I’m never inclined to order a caramel sundae. I just don’t think of it in the face of chocolate or hot fudge. But when I do get a taste, I adore it. Remembering this, and my Grandad (who lived to be 94), I made a batch of caramel sauce – tweaking a recipe for chewy fleur de sel caramels – and bought a tub of vanilla ice cream. (I couldn’t make the ice cream from scratch too – I just couldn’t. I knew in my gut that it would cause me to eat the entire batch of both if I did.)
I drizzled the caramel sauce over the ice cream and sprinkled it with salt – flaky pink salt from the Himalayas that N brought me a jar of, and then I tried a bite with a pinch of crackly Maldon salt, and then grey salt. You know, for research purposes. Hey, I can’t help it – it’s my job.
That pants falling down business? I nipped it right in the bud.
Caramel Sauce with Grey (or other nice) Salt
This keeps very well in the fridge, but it’s a large batch – enough for an extra jar to share with someone you really, really like.
1 cup golden syrup (Roger’s or Lyle’s – I used Roger’s)
2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
a few drops lemon juice
2 cups cream – whipping cream (35%), coffee cream (18%) or half & half (10%), or a combination
2 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. pure vanilla
good, flaky salt – fleur de sel, Maldon, pink – for serving with
In a heavy saucepan, combine the syrup, sugar, salt and lemon juice and cook over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves completely and the mixture begins to simmer around the edges. Wash any sugar and syrup from the sides of the pan with a pastry brush dipped in water. Cover and cook for about 3 minutes.
Uncover the pan, attach a candy thermometer to the edge and and cook uncovered, without stirring, swirling the pan once in awhile until the mixture reaches 305°F. Meanwhile, bring the cream to a simmer in a small saucepan; turn off the heat and set aside.
When the sugar mixture reaches 305°F, turn off the heat and stir in the butter, then whisk in the hot cream; it will bubble up and steam. Turn the burner back on and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool completely.
Store in the fridge; when ready to serve, reheat (if you like) and drizzle over ice cream, cake or your finger; sprinkle lightly with flaky salt immediately before serving.
Makes about 3 cups.
One Year Ago: Peach Pie and Roasted Peach & Brown Sugar Ice Cream
August 16 2009 | dessert and sweet stuff | 27 Comments »
I know better than to separate a whack of eggs at once without using a little dish as a buffer, in case I should nick one of the yolks and taint a half dozen whites. But I always get a little smug when I need to separate a lot of eggs into whites – it’s like my own private version of bungee jumping – and as if it’s a big deal to add one teeny more dish to the overflowing sinkful, I always just go ahead and live on the edge. And so the other day as I was making a hundred teeny pavlovas for my little cooking show at Stampede, I broke a yolk five eggs in. I tried to scoop out the offending yellow with a piece of cracked shell and thought I got it all, but those whites refused to reach their full potential and I was left with a bowl of flaccid meringue and nothing to do with it.
So I stirred in a capful of coconut extract, a cup or two of toasted shredded coconut, and spread it on two foil-lined baking sheets, then baked them in a 250 degree oven for an hour, as I would have had they turned out the way I intended. Once cool the slabs of meringue were easily broken into shards, which we have been nibbling on all week. I think I might be hooked. I’m dying to dunk some into melted chocolate.
Coconut Macaroon Bark
3 large egg whites
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. coconut extract
1-2 cups sweetened shredded coconut, toasted
Preheat oven to 250° F and line two large baking sheets with foil or parchment. Stir the cornstarch into the sugar. In a large bowl, beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar, beating until the mixture holds stiff, glossy peaks, like shaving cream. (If it doesn’t get completely stiff, that’s OK too.) Beat in the coconut extract, and fold in the coconut. Spread the mixture onto the sheets, about 1/2″ thick.
Bake for an hour, then remove from the oven and cool completely. Peel off the foil and break the bark into shards. Makes lots.
(Dinner this week has more often than not been chili, scooped out of a big pot in the fridge and reheated as necessary in between events and trips down to the grounds. I made some for the Stampede party last weekend, and my chef neighbour brought over another vat as he cleaned out his fridge to leave town, and I mixed the two together. Unfortunately this means we can’t figure out what makes it so damn yummy. It has tons of beans, chick peas, chipotle peppers and beef – ground and in chunks. Of course it gets better by the day – deeper and more concentrated. Speaking of mac & cheese – have you ever had chili served over a bed of it? If not, please do.)
One Year Ago: Bison Back Ribs and Blueberry Bison Burgers
July 09 2009 | snacks and sweet stuff | 12 Comments »
Oh yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.
Yes.
Seriously, yes.
Sweet Potato Aloo Gobi
Aloo (potatoes) gobi (cauliflower) is a potato-cauliflower curry; this version, inspired by Bal Arneson’s beautiful new cookbook, Everyday Indian, uses sweet potatoes for a flavour and nutritional boost. (Use the larger, darker-fleshed sweet potatoes rather than those that are longer, thinner and paler-fleshed.) The tomatoes melt around the sweet potatoes and cauliflower, mingling with the spices and creating a sticky-sweet, smoky almost-sauce.
generous drizzle of canola or olive oil
1 medium head cauliflower, separated into florets
1 onion, finely chopped
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
1 Tbsp. garam masala
2 tsp. ground cumin or 1 Tbsp. cumin seeds
2 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2-3 medium-large tomatoes, chopped
1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Drizzle a rimmed baking sheet with oil and spread the cauliflower out in a single layer; drizzle with a little more oil and toss the cauliflower around with your hands to coat the pieces. Roast for 10-15 minutes, until tender and golden on the bottoms and edges.
Meanwhile, heat a generous drizzle of oil in a large, heavy skillet. Add the onion and cook for a few minutes, until starting to soften. Add the ginger, garam masala, cumin, chili powder and salt and cook for a minute, then add the tomatoes and potato. Stir to combine everything well, pour 1/2 cup water over top and cover with a lid; reduce the heat to medium-low and cook until the sweet potatoes are tender – about 7 minutes.
Add the roasted cauliflower to the pan and stir to combine everything well. Serve immediately, as is, with rice or naan.
Serves 4.
One Year Ago: Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread
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May 19 2009 | eating out and one dish and sweet stuff and veg and vegetarian | 35 Comments »
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