Friday, March 31, 2006

 

Mixing Bowls


We have a new set off mixing bowls! Aren't they great?

I'm back in pottery class and making tons of stuff to use around the kitchen. I think these turned out really great, there are a few glaze drips but that just helps with the handmade look. Next up I'm making some large pasta bowls for my Mom and small desert cups for us. Hopefully they'll turn out as well as these nested bowls.

 

Pesto and Ricotta Souffle


We've have about 5 cups or so of pesto in the freezer. The remains of the pesto that we made last summer with our bounty of basil from the farm. Pasta and pesto is great but we've been needing other ways to use up the remaining pesto. We made up this pesto and ricotta souffle from Molly Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook. Turned out nice and fluffy, wasn't quite filling enough for dinner but we think it'd make an awesome side dish.

Next up for using up pesto we are going to try pesto and cheese calzones. I also have an idea for pesto/ricotta bake.

Cook-Mykal
Time-10 min active, 45 min baking

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

 

Half Time Bread Bowl

This recipe was originally posted online by the author of Breaking Bread with Father Dominic , but the webpage is no longer up. Tom and I managed to find the archived pages on the way back machine and grab a whole bunch of tasty recipes. This is a bread bowl and spinach dip. We usually don't bother with the bowl though and just make the bread and cube it and then dip in the dip, it's easier than trying to turn the round loafs into a bowl.



The bread is great a nice light whole wheat with some honey, dill and caraway. The spinach dip has parsley, bacon and scallions in it and the bread and dip go together so well. Also this is a house favorite, highly recommended!

Recipe:
Half-Time Bread Bowl
Yield: 1 bread bowl.

1 1/2 to 2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 envelope FLEISCHMANN’S RapidRise Yeast
1 teaspoon dried dill weed
1 teaspoon caraway seed
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons butter or margarine


Directions
In a large bowl, combine 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, undissolved yeast, dill weed, caraway seed, and salt. Heat milk, honey, and butter until very warm (120 to 130 degrees). Gradually add to flour mixture. Beat 2 minutes at medium speed of electric mixer, scraping bowl occasionally. Stir in enough remaining flour to make a soft dough. Knead on lightly floured surface until smooth and elastic, about 8 to 10 minutes. Cover; let rest 10 minutes.

Shape dough into 6-inch ball; place on greased baking sheet. Cover; let rise in warm, draft-free place until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.

With sharp knife, make 4 (1/4-inch deep) slashes in crisscross fashion on top of loaf. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes or until done. Remove from baking sheet; cool on wire rack.
Cut off top portion of loaf (approximately 1/3); reserve top. Hollow out loaf to form 1/4-inch thick bowl, reserving center of loaf. Cut reserved bread into cubes, about 1-inch in size, for dipping. Fill bowl with dip (recipe follows).

SPINACH DIP

1 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed, drained and squeezed dry
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup chopped green onions
1/2 cup (about 10 slices) crisply cooked and crumbled bacon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Directions:

Mix all ingredients. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours.



Cook-Mykal
Time-About 2 hours total, if you make sure to make the dip while the bread is baking

 

Balsamic Glazed Pork Chops

This recipe was great. Cooked it up for the first time last night, only took about 30 minutes total and the results, delicious! We went with some cheap brand balsamic seeing as we used nearly a cup. Definitely will be making this again. Along with being tasty the dark color of the balsamic vinegar with the shallots really made everything very pretty.



Cook-Mykal
Time-30 min.

Monday, March 27, 2006

 

Pain Seigle - Rye Bread, Another Bread from France



I made this Pain Seigle, or Rye Bread, last weekend. It was another two day adventure. The recipe has a double starter, first rise for at least 5 hours and then with more flour and water added rise again for at least 7 hours. So you start off with a nice sponge that gets you to an almost sour dough flavor. The bread is very dense but has a very good whole wheat flavor being mostly rye flour also a little bit of a sour dough flavor from the extended rise times.

We used it for bacon, cheddar sandwiches, delicious. Even though the loaves are small and we had smallish sandwiches with the bacon and cheese and super hearty bread it was a huge dinner that left both of us very full. I also used some of the bread for toast with marscapone and lox and also marscapone and strawberry jam, both were excellent. This is a great hearty bread, anytime I had any to eat it stuck with me for at least 3-4 hours before I was hungry again, which is rather amazing as most of the time I am always hungry.

Overall this bread was awesome! I can't wait to get the third loaf out of the freezer, Tom and I have plans to make ham and cheese sandwiches with it.

Cook-Mykal
Time-long (started Sat. 8pm, finished Sun. 4pm, so nearly 24 hours.)



That's a picture of our sandwich press, improvised. We used our cast iron skillet and then I put another skillet with the full of water teapot on top. Results, nice browned and smooshed sandwiches.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

 

Chocolate Pudding


This is the basic blancmange from Fannie Farmer. I usually make chocolate, sometimes butterscotch, but the chocolate is the best. I love eating warm pudding, so making it from scratch is really great for me. In my opinion this is the best smooth creamy ordinary pudding out there! My next favorite pudding is Fannie Farmers tapioca Cream pudding, which uses quick cooking tapioca so it doesn't take any longer to cook than the blancmange does.

Cook-Mykal
Time-20 minutes, plus a couple hours if actually enjoy your pudding cold

Monday, March 13, 2006

 

Shrimp Fried in Leavened Batter

Also by request, sorry it took nearly two weeks, here is the fried shrimp recipe, from "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" by Marcella Hazan.

1 lb shelled shrimp as small as possible
2 eggs
salt
1/2 package active dry yeast, 1 1/4 tsp dissolved in 1 cup warm water
1 cup flour
vegetable oil for frying

1. Break eggs into a bowl, add large pinch of salt, and beat well with a fork. Add the dissolved yeast and then add the flour, while beating the mixture steadily with a fork.

4. Put enough oil into a pan to come 1/4 in up it's sides and turn up the heat to high(or whatever you need to get a good frying temp, we always use a thermometer, which has recommended temps on it).

5. Dip shrimp into the batter, let excess flow back into the bowl, then slip the shrimp into the frying pan. Do no crowd the pan. Once a golden crust has formed flip the shrimp and cook the other side, once golden brown and delicious remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and transfer to a cooling rack to drain.

6. Stir batter and repeat 5 until all the shrimp are cooked. Sprinkle with salt and eat promptly.

 

Chai Recipe

By request of my first do not know in real life commenter (yea!) the chai recipe!

This recipe is from the cookbook "Classic Indian Cooking" by Julie Sahni, highly recommended if you're in the market for an Indian cookbook, great korma and mataar paneer recipes.

Masala Chai

6 cups water
1 stick cinnamon, 3 inches long
6 whole green cardamon pods
4 whole cloves
12 black pepercorns(optional, I always use them)
6 heaping teaspoons of loose leaf tea or 9 tea bags

1. Bring water to a boil and add spices. Turn off heat and cover pan and let the spices soak for 10 minutes or longer(I usually do about 20.)

2. Add the tea leaves or bags and turn up the heat to boil again, reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes( I like less strongly brewed tea so I usually do about 2 minutes.) Strain tea leaves and spices out(this sometimes gets tricky if you don't have enough large pots around, I usually end up straining into two large bowls or whatever is around and clean.)

3. Add milk and sugar to taste, the recipe recommends 1/3 cup milk and 12 tsp of sugar. What I usually do is just add the milk on a per cup basis just a splash until the color is right, probably ~2tbsp, and I use about 2-3 tsbps of sugar per mug(8oz). Remember that if it doesn't taste cinamonny enough that adding more sugar will bring out the flavor, don't be shy.

4. Enjoy! And now your house will smell all delicious for at least a few hours.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

 

Look at all that Chai.



Recently I made a double batch of chai base. MMMmmm tasty. This should last us nearly a month. Actually the chai lasted about two weeks, I'm planning on finishing the last mug with breakfast tomorrow and I actually made it two weekends ago. Most likely I'll be making more this weekend, this stuff is just so great to have a mug to wake up with.

 

Brioche, the two day adventure.

The dough. This is with the starter mixed in with the batter, ready for the first rise and then overnight chill in the fridge. The starter had already risen for a couple of hours.










Next day, after the dough has risen and chilled it's ready for shaping. The recipe I'm using calls for rising in round cans, coffee cans work great. Then more rising!










Fresh from the oven. The dough rises to the top of the cans and then you bake, where the dough nearly doubles the size of the can. After a bit of cooling the loaves slide right out of the cans. Since the brioche dough is so rich with 3 sticks of butter and six eggs it's really great with jam, but no extra buttering of the toast is needed. Later in the week I made up some lemon curd(Fanny Farmer) and we piled that on the toast and ate it for snacks. Excellent all around. Definitely worth the two days time to make it and putting up with a super sticky hard to work with dough.



The recipe I used was the "Mousseline Brioche" from The Breads of France by Bernard Clayton Jr. Clayton along with Beard (from Beard on Bread) were the two most important cookbook writers to help bring back homemade breads to the states in the 60's and 70's. The Breads of France is a great cookbook because Clayton traveled all around France getting original recipes and stories from French Boulanger's. There are several brioche recipes in the book all from different regions of France, the Mousseline Brioche is from the Hornfleur region. I've made several of the recipes out of the book and they were all huge successes, although it's not for someone looking to make a quick loaf of bread as many of the recipes are quite involved, although always worth the effort!

 

Pizza Crepes

Crepes waiting to be filled.


















Finished and ready to eat.



Tom and I made up this recipe. We had some leftover marscapone and we've been meaning to make dinner crepes for some time. What we did was mix up the marscapone with some ricotta, salt and pepper and pepperoni. Then we rolled that up and topped with spaghetti sauce and mozzarella. We didn't really mean for them to be like pizza but with the pepperoni and sauce it's the main flavor of the dish. They were quite excellent. I'm definitely looking forward to trying to use marscapone more often it's very good with a nice light flavor(it's like cream cheese but lighter and less tangy.)

Cook-Double Team (Tom and Mykal)
Time-about an hour prep with half hour baking

 

Fried Shrimp


We've fried up shrimp before for coating with sauce in Chinese recipes but never just for eating. Tom found a great recipe for battered shrimp in The Classics of Italian Cooking. It was a bit weird in that it had some yeast in it, but we ended up with a nice crisp light coating on the shrimp and it was excellent. Tom and I finished off this whole platter for dinner one night.

Cook-Tom
Time-1 hour

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