All Purpose

I’ve got some experiments to catch on…

First, I made my own chicken stock a few weeks ago and it turned out pretty great I think!

I also made carnitas! I got the idea here, and boy they turned out great. It took a lot longer to get the the liquid cooked off, but I did accidentally stir it during the first couple of hours. I will definitely be making this again soon.

I also wanted to make homemade tortillas, but that was a bust. I made them too wet and couldn’t get them to come out of the tortilla press, even with saran wrap everywhere. So good thing we had our winter mainstay in stock.

1 Comment | In: baking, cooking, experiments | tags: carnitas, chicken, pork, stock, tortillas. | #

I can’t believe I’m on my last week at work. It did go by pretty fast. I’m winding things down now, finishing up the last few things, packing my office, doing errands on campus and then I’ll be done. YAY!

In other news, I’ve been able to add a bunch of new things since gluten, namely eggs and citrus. So of course I needed to make something to celebrate having citrus in my life.

I went for another Smitten Kitchen recipe, one I’ve done many times, the wonderful Margarita Cookies. I always get raves when I make these, they are simple, sound fancy and taste delicious.

I think this is basically a shortbread type cookie and you add lime and orange zest along with tequila and then you roll the dough in a sugar and sea salt mixture before baking and it’s the perfect combo of salty, sweet and tart.

Probably the hardest part of this recipe is rolling the dough into a log, but my laziness has helped me find an easy way to do even that.

Of course mine is not uniformly shaped, but it’s still yummy. Now it’s ready to be rolled in the sugar and salt mixture.

Then you slice and bake. You could totally make these and wrap them up pretty (in log form) with baking instruction and give them as gifts.

So citrus? Passed the test.

No Comments | In: baking, life | | #

So I’ve been doing this cleanse thing since the beginning of May. It’s been very interesting and challenging. Basically, I spent a week eating veggies, fruit, and select grains while drinking green juice every day. Then the real work began and one by one I began adding foods back into my diet to test. It’s two months later and I’m still not finished with my reintegration stage. I’ve got several key things back into my diet (dairy, fish, chicken, turkey, tomatoes, nuts, garlic), but I’ve still got a lot of stuff left to test and I’ve got some things that didn’t work out so well.

Anyway, I realized (too late) that this would be have been good blog fodder but I had a lot going on and missed that opportunity. I will try to document the things I have left to test though since I still do have a ways to go and it feels as though the process has gotten murky lately

So I added gluten (second try) on Tuesday and my first meal was cooked greens (stir fried in olive oil with garlic and olives) with whole wheat orzo and finished with a dusting of parmesan. It was delicious, but I was looking for something else.

The day before I added gluten I happened to surf on over to Smitten Kitchen and see her recipe for Cherry Pie Crumble and I knew I wanted to make that during my gluten test. So I made the crust on Tuesday night and then after procuring a cherry/olive pitter from Target I made the pie last night.

Normally, since I’m still on the cleanse, I would have substituted the sugar with agave but since I haven’t done any baking in forever and I’ve never baked with agave I decided to just go with the recipe. In hindsight, I should have gotten some raw, organic sugar at least to use since it’s less processed and I know that refined sugar can sometimes be processed with corn syrup and corn is a big no-no for me (it failed its test big time).

I also could not find sour cherries, perhaps this is an East coast thing? I got regular cherries and cut the sugar I used in the filling to a little over 1/4 of a cup. I also used arrowroot instead of corn starch.

I also cut the sugar used in the crumble in half, since I was trying to mitigate the use of sugar and any side effects it might have.

Overall, it turned out really good, it had a nice cherry flavor without being too sweet and the crust was awesome (I did use the vodka trick). When I cut into it it was a bit messier than I wanted, but I may not have let it cool enough or maybe the arrowroot didn’t thicken as much as cornstarch would (more experiments needed).

I did miss at least one pit though, I think I’d probably be eliminated from Top Chef for this, but hey I wouldn’t complain about making a dessert.

No Comments | In: baking, experiments | tags: cherry, cleanse, gluten, pie. | #

So every year at Easter my husband’s family makes Easter pies. It’s an Italian tradition and the pies can be savory or sweet. M’s family makes savory pies and I’ve been trying to learn this skill, and though since we were hosting the pie making this year that it would be fun to document the process. So here it goes…

So first thing is the sausage which must be purchased about 2 weeks before Easter. We bought 4 pounds of Italian sausage (3 lbs of hot and 1 lb of sweet) from Central Market, it’s their house sausage. You have to poke holes in the sausage and then put them on a rack in the fridge to dry for roughly two weeks. We did slightly less than two week, about 12 days. Then the day you make pies you cut the sausage into small chunks.

You also need chopped Italian parsley (seen in the above photo) and mozzarella (cubed into small cubes), ricotta, grated Parmesan cheese, eggs and of course some dough.

The dough technique is very different and requires flour, salt, water and Crisco and heavy kneading until it’s “soft as a babies bottom”.

Then the dough gets rolled into two pieces (top and bottom crust) while someone mixes the filling.

Then you place the bottom in a pan and fill it, without out pressing or squooshing the filling. Then the top crust goes on and is trimmed.

Then you press the crust into place with a fork to make sure it’s sealed tight. You also dab the bottom crust with water before placing the top crust down so it seals better.

Then the slather the top with a mixture of egg yolk and water and then you do the thing that makes it Easter pie, you cut a cross into the top.

Then there’s baking, and there might be drinking and more pies made.

And finally there’s this:

We made 8 pies, I think, in about 4 hours and we used both the oven and M’s Big Green Egg. I drank a lot of bubbles and it was fun. We capped the day off with dinner at Perla, but that’s another story.

No Comments | In: baking, mahwage | | #

I’ve been MIA lately, I know. I’ve been sick since like August it seems. Nothing serious, just allergies but it’s getting old, really old. So I’ve done a few baking things and some knitting stuff and even some yard work.

I made croissants. Real croissants. From scratch. They were really good and our neighbor, who’s mother is French, said they were very close to real French croissants (I need to get a full report about what was missing).

So I got this book, Baking, a few weeks ago and it has great step by step instructions for all kinds of baking stuff. I think it could be a baking course on it’s own. Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do something challenging so I decided to try croissants. It’s a lot of work, and a lot of butter, but they turned out great and the instructions were good and easy and had photographs to go with, which I love. Anyway, croissants!

I also made bread a lot lately, including my Rosemary Olive bread and Chocolate Cherry bread, which I got from this book . I’ve been making these breads for a while so nothing new, but nice to have fresh bread. I hope to make bread a lot more as it cools down for fall/winter here.

I’ve been knitting a lot and just finished a sweater (post to come soon) and started a new one. I’ve also started the long process of cleaning up and preparing the yard for fall/spring gardening. I cleaned out my dead tomatoes and can you believe that the basil I planted with them is still alive and is at least 4 feet, yes feet, tall. We’re planning on harvesting it all over the next week or two and making some pesto.

I’m going to try to do the Sweet Potato biscuits tomorrow (for Tuesday’s with Dorie) because they sound yummy and I need to master biscuits. I’ve had bad biscuit mojo the last few years.

No Comments | In: baking, garden, knitting, life | tags: basil, bread, croissnats, tuesdayswithdorie. | #

So remember that whole baking thing? Right. So it’s Tuesday and I realized when I got home that I still have not done a TWD this month and the souffle (which I missed last week) and these turnovers were the two things I wanted to do for September. So I flew by the seat of my pants and made these turnovers today, well tonight.

First, I made soup for dinner, Winter Minestrone. It was good.

Then quickly while the soup simmered I made the dough (I did a half recipe of this) and threw it in the fridge. The dough did not come together for me that easily, it actually seemed a little dry when the recipe said it would be wet. I squashed it into two balls and chilled it for about 20-30 minutes. Did the recipe say an hour? Sure.

Then I pulled it out and rolled it out using the plastic wrap method, which works like a charm I must say. I gotta remember that one. Then I folded it and chilled for about 20 more minutes, while I mixed together the dry ingredients and cut up the apples. I added a dash of curry to the dry stuff for fun.

Did the recipe say chill for 2 hours? Yes it did. I don’t have time like that though. I decided to just go for it and unfolded and rerolled the dough in plastic a couple of times to smooth the creases and then used ramekin as a dough cutter. It did work but the stickiness of the dough made me decide to do one pass through with the ramekin and save the rest of the dough and filling for tomorrow and a proper chilling.

So then I went to put the apples down and fold it all over and…

more like burritos than turnovers.

But I have to say they turned out delicious and that crust is awesome. The Italian said he could eat a whole plate of them.

So lessons for this week are to plan ahead, and get better lighting in my kitchen.

3 Comments | In: baking, tuesdayswithdorie | | #

So I have this book called Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. I’ve had it for a couple of years and I’ve made a few things from it, but really not much, which is a shame because it seems like a great book. I guess I sometimes forget about it though.

Then I found this whole group of people from all over the world that have this book too and they bake a recipe from the book every week, and then they all blog about it. Isn’t that so cool? So here I am, writing my first Tuesday with Dorie post. Yes, I know it’s Wednesday all ready, but I’m still figuring out the timing for all this.

So first let me admit that I don’t have a money shot of the brownies. It just got too late and I was tired and sunburned. I’ll post some more pics to Flickr and this post later today, including a money shot of the cooked brownies in all their glory (if there are any left when I get home).

So the recipe was pretty easy. I had a couple of bumps, mostly of my own doing. First, I though there was instant coffee around, but I was wrong. Ok, no biggie. Then I found out the nuts I had were really old. Like scary old. So no nuts. Alrighty, no problem full steam ahead.

Then as I as melting the butter I realized I needed to sift the cocoa. Fuck. I’m sure if you direct your attention to the following picture you’ll understand. That metal thing? Yeah, that’s my “sifter”.

Is it resting in a measuring cup? Yes, yes it is. Let’s just say my wrist is still smarting from that and leave it at that for now.

Despite all that it came together pretty well. I was a little concerned about the texture of the batter, not that it looks scary here or anything.

And I was a bit worried about my “oven”, but no way was I turning on the real one.

It baked for exactly 30 minutes, and it turned out swell in the end. The Italian (aka my husband) asked that if I make them again I make them just the same: no coffee, no nuts. The cinnamon was not prominent last night but after resting it definitely comes out more. The texture is great with a crispy top layer and super gooey inside. Very decadent, very yummy.

You don’t need the book to try these! You can find the recipe on the NPR site (scroll down a bit).

I will work on my note taking and photo documenting abilities for future installments. Promise.

2 Comments | In: baking, tuesdayswithdorie | | #