Archive for the 'sweet stuff' Category
Or as Mike called it, “The New Best Thing Ever”, “Heaven in a Bowl”, and “OMGooooooood!!”
I know, it doesn’t look like much. It wasn’t planned, and then when it turned out so well I had to grab a bunch out of Mike’s fist in order to document it. I’m not sure how to convey how much better this tastes than it looks. The spur-of-the-moment red tissue may have been a mistake. I’ll take more photos next time – and there will be a next time. We ate the entire batch tonight while decorating the tree.
I was just playing, distracted by thoughts of the sugary top of that Skibo Castle Ginger Crunch I told you about. I wanted to make it maple: ditch the ginger, swap the golden syrup for pure maple. Which made me want to add toasted walnuts. I put a slab of butter into a small pot to melt, intending to add another layer to an existing batch, just to try. I left the empty pot on the stove a few minutes too long as I went for the butter – distracted by something – and when I dropped it in the heat turned it golden instantly.
Browned butter! Of course! what better way to improve on an already awesome butter-sugar-golden syrup combo? I swirled the pot until it melted and turned a nutty brown, then stirred in the icing sugar, maple syrup this time and a bit of vanilla and dropped it in globs over just toasted walnut halves. Not pretty, but not ugly either, and ridiculously delicious.
It sounds insanely sweet, this butter-icing sugar stuff, like hard icing. But it’s not. A cup of powdered sugar is equivalent to half a cup of regular sugar – which isn’t to say this is low in sugar, just less sweet than it sounds. It balances the toasted walnuts perfectly. Make sure you have nice fresh walnuts, which is easy at this time of year with the turnover most stores see. They should be crunchy and nutty and slightly sweet – not at all bitter.
I’m not saying these are authentic pralines – in fact I’m sure they’re not – but I can’t think of what else to call them, other than sweet brown buttery, walnutty goodness.
Browned Butter Maple Walnut Praline
1 1/2 cups California walnut halves or pieces
1/3 cup butter
1-2 Tbsp. pure maple syrup or Lyle’s or Roger’s Golden Syrup
1 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Toast the walnuts by spreading them on a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet and toasting in a 350F oven for 6-7 minutes, or until golden and fragrant. If you have a toaster oven, that works too.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and after it melts, continue cooking it, swirling the pan often, until it foams and turns a nutty brown. Whisk in the syrup, icing sugar and vanilla. Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 seconds.
Spread the toasted walnuts out on the lined baking sheet and pour the butter mixture overtop, trying to cover as much of the nuts as possible. Stir a bit on the sheet with a spoon so that it clumps up and coats (or at least touches) as many of the walnuts as possible. Let cool, then break into chunks. Try to share. Makes about 8 servings.
December 04 2011 | snacks and sweet stuff | 16 Comments »
Yes, I shared. Honestly, I have no idea why my pants are getting so tight.
But first: Plantain fritters! I wish I would have figured this out on Monday. Then again, best that I didn’t – the house smelled like mini donuts and the Stampede all day. They were fantastic. And easy to make. They brought out the banananess of the plantains – as fritters, they tasted more of bananas than I think bananas would have. And they held up to the heat – when you bit into one, it wasn’t mush.
I love that this week I was forced to make my acquaintance with something that has been available to me for most of my life, and yet I never bothered getting to know. I still have enough left to take a stab at a curry next week.
Which, ahem, brings me to a small confession. I assumed that since we started on Monday, Sunday night we’d be wrapping up the Week in Their Kitchen project. It makes sense, right? En route to CharCut, where I had booked a seat at their communal table for Meat Sundays, at which this particular Sunday they promised to make a 15 kg poutine, I got an email titled: three more meals and you’re home free!
Um. Whoops? We’re supposed to keep going from the hamper until Monday noon? Maybe I didn’t read the instructions thoroughly. (Try to hide your shock.)
At any rate. I didn’t bail out on going for poutine, since I had already signed up. It was stupendous.
John and Carrie brought it out steaming – all 35 pounds of it (they weighed the ingredients) including 3 kg of cheese curds and I imagine a bucket of gravy. The fries themselves were cooked in duck fat. It was poutine perfection, served at the communal table, family-style. Awesome.
And yes, I enjoyed it. A little too mightily. It was good food with good friends around a table of happy (verging on ecstatic) people. It was nice to see cheese again, but I had been eating my share of potatoes this week anyway.
Which brings us back to the Week in Their Kitchen project. Yes, it wraps up today. But I can’t say I’m excitedly looking forward to the end of the day (to sum, that was the gist of the aforementioned email: I imagine many of you are looking forward to dinner tomorrow when you can eat whatever you want! That’s right after your lunch tomorrow you are all free of the Hampers!) because really, all the participants in this were always free of the hampers. We’re not homeless, or struggling. We didn’t worry all week that we can only access the food bank once per month, and what we might do when this stash runs out. This has been a learning experience, but I still can’t say I know how a food bank client feels, or that I’ve truly walked a mile in their shoes. Some participants have said this week was fun – I doubt anyone actually utilizing the food bank would share that sentiment.
So. I won’t be going out for a celebratory dinner tonight. I’ll use up the rest of my hamper, along with the (comparably vast quantities of) ingredients already in my kitchen. I’ve already gone and bought a couple bags of food to give back to the food bank (remember-Husky covered the cost of the extra food for all our hampers). I’m going to continue on in some way, cutting my food spending drastically – for the next month at least only buying fresh produce and milk. (And toilet paper. Hard to make that from scratch.) I’m going to shop from my cupboards instead of from the store, and make do with what I have, which is clearly not that difficult.
I’ll try to pursue new sources of fresh produce for the food bank wherever I can (a portion of the new Ramsay community garden?), and contribute easy recipes (hopefully even compile a cookbook) because that’s what I can do to help. And I’ll focus more energy on being happy for what I have, and less thinking about what I’m in the mood for.
And I’ll eat more plantain fritters.
Plantain Fritters
Thanks to Gourmet for walking me through this.
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp. sugar (white or brown)
1 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
1/2-3/4 cup water
1 large egg, lightly beaten
3 ripe plantains
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
canola oil, for cooking
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the water and egg and whisk until the batter is smooth.
Peel plantains and cut on a slight diagonal into 1/2-inch pieces. Heat a half inch of oil in a heavy skillet or pot until hot, but not smoking. Dip the plantains in the batter to coat them and fry in batches (don’t crowd them) until bottoms are golden, about 45 seconds, then turn over and fry until other side of each is golden, 30 to 45 seconds more. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Stir together the sugar and cinnamon in a shallow bowl.
While still warm, toss each batch in sugar mixture until coated. Serve warm.
June 07 2010 | sweet stuff | 26 Comments »
I subscribe to the Nike school of thought when it comes to entertaining:Just Do It. Or Just Send Out An Email, and by hitting send you’ve instantaneously committed yourself to having people show up at your door, and you’ll figure it out, and everyone will have a great time even though you haven’t managed to tidy up the dust and dog hair rhinos that have collected in every corner and on the sides of each hardwood stair. Because really, no one cares about that stuff. And I’m convinced that everyone else will feel a little bit better about themselves if they see what a disaster my house is.
The point is, if you wait until you have time, or worry about schedules and menu planning and all the things that might stress you out about having people over, it might never happen. So although I should have been working on my manuscript today, I knew much of the neighbourhood would be out chipping in for the community clean-up, and would be hungry afterward. And isn’t life all about the people in it? Isn’t this the important stuff? Says the girl who is neglecting all her friends equally.
And so a few days ago I sent an email telling everyone to come over this afternoon for a bit of a barbecue. As it turned out, the temperature hovered around ZERO all day. We woke up to wet snow, and it came down until around dinnertime. By mid-afternoon we were all wet, cold and tired, having spent hours pitching in to give the community its spring cleaning. My sister suggested that instead of the barbecue, I throw a big pot of chili on the stove, and fill the oven with baked potatoes. I did. To bake a potato: wash it, poke it with a fork and bake right on the oven rack -you don’t need to wrap it in foil- at 350F for about an hour, depending on its size. It’s easy to tuck a few potatoes in the oven along with whatever else is baking, regardless of whether or not you’ll be eating them right away. Leftover baked potatoes make great, fast skillet fries or hash. Today they would have come in handy tucked into our pockets, to keep our hands warm. Sheesh.
Mike made me promise not to spend much time cooking, and I didn’t. I knew we’d need something sweet, and although a big batch of cookies or brownies would have been easy enough, I wanted to streamline it even further. I had a bag of letter-shaped pretzels I had bought for the occasion, and so smashed some up and stirred them into melted chocolate chips and peanut butter, then chilled the lot and cut it into blocks. A little too addictive, but dead easy. Especially when you need something to fill that chocolate void.
Crunchy Salted Chocolate Peanut Butter Blocks
They’re a little like homemade chocolate bars – you could add chopped toasted nuts and/or dried fruit in place of the pretzels if you like, but I love their crunchiness and salt.
3 cups chocolate chips (or chopped chocolate)
1 cup peanut butter
1-2 cups small pretzels, coarsely crushed in a ziploc bag
In a medium bowl, melt the chocolate chips and peanut butter in the microwave or over a pot of simmering water, stirring until melted and smooth. Stir in the pretzels and pour into an 8″ or 9″ square pan. Chill in the fridge until set. Let sit at room temperature for a bit to make them easier to cut into bars or blocks. Makes lots.
I picked up an orange pound cake from Rustic Sourdough Bakery on 17th Ave. Love the domed oval shape. W loves the little candy orange wedge on top.
Cathy made tiny potato, bacon and cheese frittatas that we ate like popcorn, and Jenn baked bread. And taught me how to take the top off a cupcake, then flip it upside down to sandwich the icing inside.
Altogether too much carb loading, and only one of us is running a marathon tomorrow. (Not me.) But we had lots of laughs around the kitchen table, and no one even mentioned the dust and dog hair rhinos.
May 29 2010 | snacks and sweet stuff | 18 Comments »
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 »
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