Summing up: 2014 comes to an end

And thus must end the 2014 recipe project!

It was an interesting year. I think that the project was in part motivated by my friend who has celiac's disease -- a desire to be able to modify recipes for her morphed into a desire to modify and chronicle many of my cooking and baking adventures.

For Christmas I was in the kitchen, but not baking -- I made a traditional meal on Christmas eve for my parents (turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce), and a French meal on Christmas day (bourride [a fish stew with aioli], tartiflette [a bacon, potato and cheese casserole -- with a vegetarian version for some of us], asparagus and salad). My daughter did all the baking -- cream puffs on the eve and lemon bars on the day. I did make a version of my mom's coffeecake for the next day, but I felt a serious lack of baking over the holiday season. Travel was part of the reason, and a general busy-ness another.

New Year's Eve Baking Mania

So for new year's -- a baking mania came upon me. I made my favorite Christmas morning thumbprint cookies (funny that the recipe title from the NYTimes somehow gives me license to eat them for breakfast!), plus my grandmother's Rice Krispie Treats, and then a new cappuccino cheesecake and Mme. Sandberg's Mousse au Chocolat (from 8th grade French class!).

A fitting end to a year of baking and cooking. My conclusions:

Gluten-Free: the best way to treat gluten-free friends and relatives is with actual gluten-free recipes, including Rice Krispie Treats and chocolate mousse. Both of these recipes are from my childhood, and they really take me back. (See below.) It is also possible to serve cheesecake, and though over the year I have made many lemon and chocolate cheesecakes (and have thought about pumpkin cheesecake, the original recipe I made up and used to lure my future husband into my kitchen), it's fun to do something new. ("Really, mom, you're making a brand new recipe to take over to your friends' house for New Year's Eve? Is that wise?") Usually with cheesecake I try to substitute something for the flour that is in the cake itself, and assume my celiac-suffering friend will avoid the crust. Yesterday I bought gluten-free graham crackers -- I hope it wasn't a mistake!

My daughter bought the cutest little ramekins:
perfect for the portion control project!

Portion control: While I am committed to my general rule of halving the sugar, I have gotten complaints from various relatives that my cookies and pies aren't sweet enough. (My children assure me that they are wrong.) So another tactic is to come closer to the actual recipe, but just serve everything in tiny portions. This worked with our "test" of the chocolate mousse this afternoon.

With cookies of various kinds, this is harder, especially if you work at home. I've managed to hide cookies from the adults by putting half of every batch into the freezer ... but my teenaged son is perfectly willing to raid the freezer and eat all the cookies before we notice. So I guess half recipes, giving some away, and careful hiding will have to suffice if I want to bake cookies.

[Sometimes] be true to the recipe: Until I found my grandmother's recipe card for the Rice Krispie Cookies, I had completely banned this from my kitchen. But the gluten-free friend, and the memories of my gramma always having cookies available, reminded me that this is a recipe that really keeps. Thanks, of course, to that very modern invented food that has turned Americans fat -- corn syrup. In the beginning of this year, I made these with less sugar and less corn syrup. But then they don't hold together! And as I worked with the recipe, I realized why the chocolate layer (the thing that made my gramma's Rice Krispie Treats better than all others) got thinner and thinner over the years. My grandmother, bless her heart, was economizing -- modifying the recipe to make it more reasonable. An entire bag of chocolate chips plus an entire bag of butterscotch chips means that this recipe is both expensive and very caloric. Even so ... I think that with the portion control rule in place (I cut them in thinner rectangles instead of in squares), I can remain true to the recipe itself, while remembering how my gramma economized and being amused by her balancing the need to provide for the grandkids against the realities of increasing costs at the grocery store.

Experiment. While the fun of dipping into my great-aunt Del's 1960s recipe box, and of reliving recipes from my childhood, cannot be beat, it is also excellent to surf the web and troll the newspapers and/or cooking magazines. Some of my best recipes are from cookbooks -- I have one I keep only for the Carrot Cake recipe. So much of the 2014 recipe project was about expanding my horizons, while also regularly returning to memory lane. It has, I think, been a success.

Rice Krispie Cookie

[butter the bowl -- this is key, and it is written in pencil on the back of my recipe card, which is not at all helpful!]

1 cup sugar
1 cup light Karo syrup

Bring to boil, remove from fire, add 1 cup peanut butter. Stir until dissolved.

Pour this hot mixture over 6 cups of Rice Krispies. Mix well. Spread and put down in a large pan.

("I use my dripping pan roaster," says my gramma; really any cookie sheet will work.)

[Don't worry about reaching the edges of the pan.]



In the meantime, have melting on stove over hot water (or on low flame without a double boiler):

butterscotch and chocolate chips!

1 pkg. butterscotch chips
1 pkg. chocolate chips
1 T. salad oil [just the words "salad oil" evoke the 1970s!!]

When thoroughly melted, blend well and spread over top of Rice Krispie mixture.

From Em, January 1966

Yes, I had a Great-Aunt Em. And my gramma had a box of this in her house always. They can't last that long here, but I've made them to celebrate the end of 2014, a year when I thought a lot about Aunt Em, Gramma, and many others as well.

[important to cut these within about 30 minutes -- otherwise they get too hard! my note, not Em's or Gramma's]

Mousse au Chocolat (à la Mme. Sandberg, 1978-79)

12 oz. bag chocolate chips, melted on low heat [allow to cool]
2 T. sugar -- dissolve in 4 T. boiling water
Beat 4 egg yolks.
Add sugar and water to yolks.
Beat chocolate and eggs together.
Beat 4 egg whites until stiff.
Fold egg whites into chocolate mixture.
Add 1 cup whipped cream.
Allow to cool.
Serve with whipped cream!!!

Cappuccino Cheesecake

[This recipe has been in my file forever, printed out from the internet, don't remember where. But I've modified it, of course!]

Box of gluten-free graham crackers
5 T. melted unsalted butter
1/4 c. sugar

Mix crackers, butter, and 1/4 cup sugar in Cuisinart and pulse until they form crumbs. Press onto bottom (and/or sides, depending on how much you have) of 9" diameter springform pan. Bake crust at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Cool. Maintain oven temperature.

1/2 cup whipping cream
4 t. instant espresso powder
1 1/2 t. vanilla extract

Combine in small bowl; stir until powder dissolves; set aside.

4 8 oz packages of cream cheese at room temperature
4 large eggs
2 T. flour (or cornstarch for the gluten free variant!)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips.

Cappuccino Cheesecake -- reviews not yet out!

Using an electric mixer or Kitchenaid, beat cream cheese until smooth. Gradually beat in about 1 cup of sugar, then eggs one at a time. Beat in flour or cornstarch. Beat espresso mixture into cream cheese mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour batter over crust.

Place into a water bath if you can (see my other cheesecake recipe for this). Bake until edges are puffed and center is just set, about 1 hour +. (I reduced the oven to 300 degrees about halfway through.) Cool on rack 30 minutes; chill cake uncovered until cold, about 6 hours. Cover, keep chilled at least 1 day and up to 2 days.

Cut around cake to loosen. Release pan sides.

Christmas Morning Thumbprint Cookies

[From the New York Times, at least 12 years ago -- I had been looking for a recipe like this for years. Way better than what you can buy at Trader Joe's!]

1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 egg yolks
1 t. vanilla (or lemon extract, if your daughter used all the vanilla without replacing it)
2 cups flour
1/2 cup fruit jam of choice -- I prefer raspberry and apricot, though this year made do with blackberry and strawberry, since that's what we had

Heat oven to 350 degrees.
With a wooden spoon, beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time, and then the vanilla. Beat in the flour a half cup at a time.
Roll dough with your hands to form a snake, then pinch off about 1" at a time. Roll each into a ball and place on cookie sheet. Press each ball with a thumb to form a deep crater.
Spoon a little jam into each crater.
Bake until edges start to brown -- 16-18 minutes, but be careful [mine took about 14 minutes this year].

The Un-Thanksgiving -- Hijacked by Cook's Illustrated

Several weeks ago, we noticed that we had failed to commit to a plan for Thanksgiving.

We almost never travel (can't face the traffic), but since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, we instead try to lure relatives out our way. My brother-in-law is from near here, so sometimes he and my sister stop by; Steve's brother recently married a woman who used to live in our little town, and we had our fingers crossed that they might come again this year. And sometimes my mom makes the trip up from Virginia. We then fill in with graduate students, colleagues (often European), and other friends who might not have somewhere to go. I aim to invite people of all ages, but especially children. We try to fill up the house -- my ideal is 16, 18, 22.

We've only ever hit 22 in Philadelphia, because we have even more relatives on the east coast -- several generations worth -- and we managed to score our upstairs neighbors as well as a Chinese graduate student to add to the mix. For that epic Thanksgiving we threw the children, and the exchange student, into the car and drove to Philadelphia on Tuesday, cooked and baked all day Wednesday (can you say "manic baking"?), ate and ate (and played ping pong) on Thursday, went sightseeing with our exchange student on Friday, and drove home on Saturday.

But generally, we like to stay put. And this year, it was just going to be the four of us. Which seemed kind of sad and pathetic. We thought of inviting ourselves over to one or another friend's house, but in the end I said: "let's go to Great Wolf Lodge." For us, this was kind of funny -- it's not the sort of thing we do. But it was terrific. Comfy beds, big room, charades and Malaysian take-away to offset the kitsch and the water park, which were also fairly awesome, each in their own way. Our son said "here we are staying at Great Wolf Lodge ironically, but these rides are so great I'm not sure I'm being ironic anymore." That was our Wednesday night -- and then we drove back home.

Recently subscribed -- I'm loving it!

For the day itself, we had planned to grill salmon and make mashed potatoes. And that was supposed to be it. But instead, someone asked whether I would make my sister-in-law's Korean spinach, and I started pulling out cookbooks, including some new issues of Cook's Illustrated.

After all, we needed something green. Instead of Korean spinach, I found a recipe for a portobello mushroom and leek crostada (to which I added piave on top instead of gruyere), and a great butter lettuce salad with radishes, toasted walnuts, and a delicious yogurt-dijon-shallot dressing. And as long as the wood stove was going, we threw on some apples and made fresh applesauce. 

All of a sudden our "un-Thanksgiving" turned into quite a feast. Steve had to grill the salmon in the dark and cold, but that was half of the fun. It was delicious.

This issue was too tempting!

And tomorrow we have Thanksgiving do-over -- a tradition with some of our Ohio friends who spend the holiday with family, but want more leftovers than that. I'll be making my mom's crescent rolls and her country apple-cranberry sauce, plus my own special tradition. Years ago I decided that it isn't really a holiday without chocolate, so I make something every year -- flourless chocolate cake, chocolate biscotti, or in this case, milk chocolate cheesecake.

I can still see my husband's cousin in our pantry many years ago, chowing down on the chocolate cookies I was using for the crust for my first ever Thanksgiving chocolate cheesecake. And the pies coming down the stairs and in the front door another time to make the dessert table groan -- pumpkin pies, sweet potato pies, apple pies, flourless chocolate cake, and the cranberry walnut cake my daughter made that year, tempted herself by the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. 

I sure do love this holiday.

Broccoli Corn / Savory Frank Noodle Bake?

So my husband maintains that "bake" is not a noun. And he may be right.

But I was going through my Aunt Del's recipe box and found two promising recipes, circa 1968 and 1967, the first from someone named Maude Buckley and the second from Better Homes and Gardens.

I mean "promising" in the late '60s housewife sense. Lots of short cuts, cornflake or cracker crumb toppings, "cut into wedges and serve."

Why not? I survived the late '60s. My kids will too. In fact I doubt my mom ever made these kinds of recipes, but I remember clearly going to Florida to see my Aunt Em and begging her, every year, to make her "cream corn casserole." The spécialité de la maison, so to speak.

I occasionally buy canned creamed corn (a habit from childhood), but I never use it. It sits on the shelf for a year or so and then I donate it to a food bank. When you think about it, it must be the sugar that made that casserole so appealing to ten-year-olds.

After all, according to a reviewer on amazon.com, cream style corn is the best:

I love that the ingredients are simple - Corn, water, sugar, corn starch and salt - and that the corn is grown and packed in the USA. The cans are large enough to make a cornbread/egg/cheese casserole for our big family. I also add it to regular cornbread because it makes it moist, delicious and less crumbly.

 Good ideas, I am sure. But instead of making the Brocolli Corn Bake (that's how Aunt Del spelled it -- broccoli was still a foreign vegetable in those days, I imagine) with its "1 1 lb. can creamed style corn," I decided to merge two recipes and see what happens.

Here's the new recipe:

Broccoli Corn Savory Frank Noodle Bake

16 oz. egg noodles, cooked

1 medium onion, chopped and sautéed in 1 T. butter

1 16 oz. container of cottage cheese

1 16 oz. container of sour cream

4 eggs, slightly beaten

1 t. salt

1/2 t. pepper

1 16 oz. package of frozen broccoli, thawed

1 10 oz. package of frozen corn, thawed

1/2 cup cracker crumbs mixed with 1 T. melted butter

I made two versions, one with beef franks (4-5) and one with tofu kielbasa. Mix the ingredients together, add cut up hotdogs, top with cracker crumbs (I also added some shredded cheddar cheese that was left over from the other night), pour into a small greased glass casserole, and bake ~20-25 minutes in a 325 oven. (You could use a hotter oven, but I was also baking a cheesecake.) Near the end you can add some reserved hot dog pieces to the top for garnish!

 Review to come. Dinner time.

Brunch -- it's not JUST for jerks...

So the New York Times had a headline a couple of weeks ago that will go through my head and those of many readers for years to come.

Brunch is for jerks.

Not true. I have always loved brunch, mainly because when I was a child we hosted two great brunch events every autumn: a family Thanksgiving brunch and the high school girls' swim team brunch. At both events we ate quiche lorraine and my mother's fabulous yeast coffee cake and fruit salad, and we played touch football and enjoyed autumnal weather. Excellent memories.

Later -- especially after the kids arrived and it became necessary to eat early in the morning, even on weekends [sometimes as early as 5:30 or 6 AM] -- brunch became an excuse to have breakfast food again, post-Cheerios, at lunchtime.

It's also my favorite meal for entertaining. So this past Sunday when my sister and her husband were headed out to visit us, I took the opportunity of inviting a couple more friends so as to have enough people to eat my adult brunch menu from the Frog Commissary Cookbook. Here goes.

Indian Scrambled Eggs with Fragrant Rice and Minted Tomato Sauce

Three recipes in one, really, but if you eat slowly this is SO delicious and filling. Not, though, low cholesterol or low fat.

Minted Tomato Sauce
2 T. butter
2-4 cups of coarsely chopped onions (to taste)
4 t. curry powder
2 t. minced garlic
2 t. minced fresh ginger
2 t. ground coriander
2 t. ground cumin
2 t. turmeric
1 1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1 (20 oz.) can crushed tomatoes (if you use a regular large can you will have about double the sauce and be able to put some in the freezer for a second round later in the month!)
1/4-1/2 c. chopped fresh mint.

Heat the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onions and curry powder and sauté until the onions are tender. Add the garlic, ginger, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and salt and cook two minutes. Add the pepper, crushed tomatoes, and mint. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until very thick. Set aside.

Fragrant Rice
1/2 c. red lentils
1/4 c. butter
1 1/2 c. chopped onions
1 1/2 t. curry powder
2 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
1 1/2 c. white rice
2 T. lemon juice
2 1/2 c. water

Pour boiling water over the lentils to cover by an inch and let soak 15-30 minutes or until tender. Drain and set aside. Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onions and sauté until tender. Stir in the curry powder, salt and pepper. Add the rice and sauté 2-3 minutes. Add the lemon juice and water, cover, and cook about 15 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed. Add the reserved lentils, stir, and cover tightly. Keep warm in a 250 degree oven until ready to serve.

Scrambled Eggs
16 eggs, lightly beaten
1 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
1/8 t. cayenne
1/8 t. nutmeg
1 1/2 t. sugar (or leave this out)
8 oz. cream cheese
1/2 c. butter
2 1/2 t. minced fresh ginger
1/2 c. sliced scallions

Have the tomato sauce hot. Combine the eggs with the seasonings. Cut the cream cheese in bits into the eggs. Melt the butter in a large non-stick skillet. Add the ginger and sauté 1 minute. Add the eggs and cook until barely set. At the last minute, stir in the scallions. Serve at once accompanied by the sauce and rice.

My platter is brown, but it's every bit as beautiful as this one!

The seasonings can all be approximate -- 2 t. of everything in the rice makes life easier. I have a large platter from Michael Jones and I spoon the rice onto one side and the eggs onto the other, with a stripe of tomato sauce down the middle. Beautiful.

Now, although that is plenty to eat, the meal can be capped off with coffee, tea, and

Espresso Walnut Chocolate Chip Muffins
1/2 c. unsalted butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar (or reduce both sugars slightly)
2 T. instant espresso powder
2 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
2/3 c. mile
1 3/4 c. flour
1/2 t. salt
1 T. baking powder
3/4 c. semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 c. coarsely chopped walnuts.

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease and flour 12 muffin pan cups. Cream the butter with the sugars, espresso powder and vanilla. Beat together the eggs and milk. Combine the flour, salt, and baking powder. Alternately add the wet and dry ingredients to the butter mixture. Stir just to combine. Add the chips and walnuts. Fill tins full. Bake for 18-20 minutes. Cool five minutes, then remove from the tins and cool on racks (or not -- eat while still warm!).

Gluten Free Chocolate-Espresso Cookies

Baking gluten free is tricky. But when your best friend discovers she has celiac disease, and somehow you don't want to ice her out of social situations because of it, you have to adapt. And adapt your recipes.

The Epicurious "Chocolate-Espresso Cookies" recipe (originally from Bon Appetit in July 1997) adapts well if you remember the most important gluten free rule: your baking time needs to be significantly shortened. (I learned this the hard way trying to make gluten free cheesecake crusts using Pamela's GF baking mix. Threw several cheesecakes away before I adjusted. But it's also a lesson that needs repeating -- it's too easy to blindly follow the recipe.)

So here's a new version of the recipe with the lack of gluten in mind:

Gluten Free Chocolate-Espresso Cookies

Ingredients:

• 6 T. almond meal (that's what I used -- I bet you could experiment)
• 1/4 t. salt
• 6-8 oz. baking chocolate -- a mixture of unsweetened and semi-sweet, broken up
• 1/2 c. unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 to 3/4 c. sugar (I err on the less sweet side generally)
• 2 1/2 t. instant espresso powder
• 2 1/2 t. vanilla
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350. Mix almond meal and salt together in a small bowl. Stir baking chocolates and butter in a heavy large saucepan over low heat until melted. Remove from heat. Use a hand mixer or Kitchenaid to beat eggs, sugar, espresso powder and vanilla until well blended. Stir egg mixture into warm chocolate mixture. Stir in dry ingredients. Stir in chocolate chips and chopped walnuts.

Immediately drop dough by heaping tablespoonfuls onto non-stick baking sheets (or use parchment paper), spacing 1 1/2 inches apart. Bake until tops crack but cookies are still soft inside (about 7 to 9 minutes -- make sure to check so that they don't burn!). Transfer baking sheets to racks; cool 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to racks (carefully so they don't break!); cool completely.

Things to keep in mind:

• Let your chocolate mixture cool if you want the chips to retain their integrity -- if you put them in too soon they will melt!
• Since GF cookies tend to spread, it may be worth just letting the chips melt and grinding the nuts rather than leaving them "coarsely chopped." You get the taste without the idea of nuts -- and frankly, when my cookies are tending toward the lace-thin, individual pieces of chips and nuts may make them break more easily.
• Baking time: The original recipe (with 6 T. flour instead of the almond meal and 1/4 t. baking powder) calls for a 12 minute baking time. Know your oven, and experiment with your GF timing.
• Also, if your cookies turn to crumbles, it's no terrible loss -- they are fabulous sprinkled over vanilla ice cream.

Pretty delicious.

Angela's Best Cookies

The first recipe I ever felt confident about modifying is this one, and these became my very best cookies. I've baked them for school treats, for lecture series (when my budget didn't reach to snacks), for cross country pasta parties. I've had people ask for them by name. When are you going to make more Angela's Best Cookies?

But of course, I stole them -- or rather tweaked a recipe I found in one of my go to cookbooks, the Frog Commissary Cookbook.

I wasn't in Philadelphia when this place was still retail, but I appreciate their description of these cookies: "We sell this cookie the way McDonald's sells burgers: they fly out the door." What they don't say is that they also made money on these cookies by stretching the dough -- basically we are talking Toll House cookies plus a LOT of oats, so that the recipe makes a LOT of cookies fairly inexpensively. I added dried cranberries to make them even yummier.

It's great to make a whole recipe and then stash half in the freezer for later, but after my teenaged son figured that trick out, it's safer to just make half a recipe at a time: 2 1/2 dozen.

Enjoy!

Angela's Best Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup brown sugar (or reduce)

1 cup white sugar (ditto)

2 t. vanilla extract

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 t. salt

1 t. baking soda

1 t. baking powder

2 1/2 c. old-fashioned oats

12 oz semisweet chocolate chips

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

3/4 cup dried cranberries

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes. Let sit one minute, then remove to cooling racks.

Before

After

Mac & Cheese -- it's what's for dinner

Whenever anyone asks why I married my husband, I have a few stock answers: 1) he was the first good boyfriend I ever had; 2) I was looking to date an American; 3) he knew how to cook.

That last one is not insignificant. In the pre-tenure days when I was working from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. in my office and dining on Snickers bars, his "I make dinner every night, just come over" was a real turn-on. In fact, it was true: I will never cease to be amazed that he can come home from work and have a yummy, healthy meal on the table within twenty minutes. Without going to the store for more ingredients. (Indeed, without following a recipe.)

Tonight, I almost achieved parity. I made a pretty decent baked macaroni and cheese without running to the store. In fairness, I've had this in mind for a few days and I've been accumulating ingredients -- but I resisted leaving the house at 5:05 to get more cottage cheese (a good portion of which said husband had eaten) and instead began to put the meal together. What's more, though I didn't do without a recipe, I did make up my own version, based on two different recipes. Here goes:

Baked Macaroni and Cheese

12 oz. elbow pasta
1 cup large curd cottage cheese
2 cups milk
1/2 t. salt
1 t. dried mustard
1/4 t. each nutmeg and black pepper
about 14 oz. cheddar cheese, grated
dried Italian bread crumbs (or panko -- whatever you have on the shelf)
1 T. dried flat leaf parsley (courtesy of a neighbor)
1/4 c. grated parmesan

Butter an 11 x 7" glass pan and begin preheating the oven to 375. Cook the pasta about 7 minutes and drain. Whiz the cottage cheese, salt, pepper, mustard, nutmeg and milk in the blender. Grate cheese.

Pour the pasta into a bowl and add the cottage cheese/milk mixture. Sprinkle on 3/4 of the cheddar and mix. Pour into prepared pan. Now mix the rest of the cheddar with the bread crumbs, parsley and parmesan. Sprinkle on top.

Cover tightly with foil and bake about 20 minutes.

I also threw together a black bean/corn/tomato/scallion salad with some corn we'd cooked and taken off the cob on the weekend, with a garlic and onion powder seasoning (don't know how that landed on my spice shelf, but it's okay in a pinch).

The reviews from kids and husband were good. If I ever find my camera cord, I'll begin recording these things in living color again -- for now, just use your imagination.

A nice way to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary tonight.

ADDENDUM 10/29:

I wanted to make mac and cheese again this week, and couldn't recall which two recipes I had melded together. And then I remembered that I had chronicled the project here! I was so glad, I eked out a photograph from my still-cordless camera... This time I used rotini and maybe a bit too much dried mustard (emptied the jar), but it was still very yummy, and there were enough leftovers for three lunches!

Black Gold: Summer Salad for a Fish Taco Feast

Recently a friend added me to a facebook group: Friends who Cook. Last night I tried my first recipe from the group -- I liked the tagline, "Black Gold: Addictive AND Healthy."

Black Gold

Ingredients:
1/3 cup fresh lime juice (about 2 limes, squeezed)
1/2 cup olive oil
1-2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 t. salt
1/4 t. ground cayenne pepper
1 (15 oz.) cans black beans, rinsed
10 oz. bag of frozen corn or corn cut off 3 cobs (cooked)
1 1/2 red bell peppers, chopped
2 tomatoes, chopped
6 green onions, chopped
1/2 -1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Directions:
1. Place lime juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and cayenne pepper in a small jar. Cover with lid and shake until ingredients are well mixed.
2. In a salad bowl, combine beans, corn, avocado, bell pepper, tomatoes, green onions, and cilantro. Shake lime dressing and pour it over the salad. Stir salad to coat vegetables and beans with dressing and serve (or refrigerate for an hour or two before serving to allow the flavors to blend).

I went ahead and made the salad about 1 1/2 hours in advance. Pretty yummy, but especially because we took it as our contribution to a fish taco feast at our friends' house. I need to get that recipe -- they grilled rubbed swordfish and the corn tortillas, and spread a spiced mayonnaise on the tortilla, added a cabbage slaw and the fish -- fantastic. 

Tuna Chickpea Pasta Salad

My friends invited us to stop by at a cookout they were having to celebrate their new (and newly renovated) home in West Mount Airy. I was excited to go, but the "potluck" aspect stopped me -- in the middle of painting jobs and reading and cleaning and so on, did I have time to throw something together? I really didn't want to spend too much time going to the store. On the other hand, I always want to show up with something yummy to share.

I looked in the cupboard and found two cans of tuna in olive oil, two cans of chick peas, and a box of orecchiete. Voilà.

Pasta Salad On-The-Fly

1 box any pasta, 16 oz.
2 cans of tuna in olive oil
2 15 oz. cans of chick peas
1/2 - 1 cup sweet or red onion, diced
1 pint of cherry or grape tomatoes, sliced in half
4 T. olive oil
4 T. (or more) lemon juice
2-4 T. flat leaf parsley, chopped finely (or as much as you have -- I have a pot of herbs outside and harvested as much as was ready)
salt and black pepper to taste

This makes a LOT: good for a potluck, to leave some with the hosts who will not want to make lunch the next day after cleaning up, and to take some home. Unless no one else brings anything to the potluck, in which case it should feed a crowd. (You can also make just half a recipe, which works just fine if you have the right bowl to present it in!)

The Perfect *Ricotta* Cheesecake

Okay, so I've perfected my summer cheesecake: light and fluffy, AND I get to use Uncle Roland's zester, AND it helps to have access to my 9" springform pan (and to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods for the ginger snap cookies -- though I imagine any cookies would do).

In short:

Lemon Ricotta Cheesecake with Ginger Snap Crust

Take about 2 cups of crushed ginger snaps and pulse them in a Cuisinart with about 6 T. melted butter. Press into a greased 9" springform pan and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

5 eggs, separated
2 8 oz. pkgs of cream cheese
1 15 oz. container of ricotta
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2/3 cup sugar
1 T. flour.

Beat the egg yolks until light with a mixer or in the Kitchenaid mixer; add cheeses, lemon zest juice, and 2/3 c. sugar and beat until smooth. Pour out into another bowl and stir the flour in with a spoon. Wash the bowl and whisk up the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold them into the cheese mixture (with a rubber spatula). Turn the batter into the pan and place pan in a baking dish large enough to hold it comfortably. Add as much warm water as you can to the larger pan; you're baking the cheesecake in a water bath. Transfer carefully to the preheated oven and bak until the cake is just set and very lightly browned, about an hour.

NOTE: This summer I have used my cast iron frying pan for the water bath, which has worked brilliantly.

Turn the oven off, take the cheesecake out of the water bath, and return to the oven to cool for 30 minutes to an hour. Then cool on a rack and refrigerate until well-chilled before slicing and serving. (Unless your family is too impatient. Then explain to them as they are eating how much better it will taste on the next day.)

No huge innovations here -- I am happy with the ricotta substitution and increasing the eggs to 5, which makes the cake light and high, and I've adjusted the crust to get the right proportions. This might be yummy with ginger instead of lemon in the cheesecake -- I'll try that this autumn.

For Tucker and Kayty -- enjoy!

Everyone's into Quinoa: Corn, Feta & Quinoa Salad

Corn, Feta and Quinoa Salad

Adapted from an adaptation from Everyday with Rachel Ray 

Rachel Ray has become a part of our household – though we did not invite her in. I think I must have accidentally not unclicked some checkbox on some internet site I was exploring—and the next thing you know, we are getting Everyday with Rachel Ray in the mail every month. If I get to it first, I try to recycle immediately, but my daughter insists—and I’m sure she is right!—that there are good recipes to be explored if we just take the time. She stacks the magazines up in a corner of my study, or in her own room, and she’ll probably get to them. Eventually.

In the meantime, I was searching for a recipe for a salad using quinoa, and came upon a blog with a recipe (Corn, Feta, and Quinoa Salad) that had been adapted from that very magazine—an issue which I’m sure is sitting around our house somewhere. We had some friends over for dinner and I adapted it some more myself—in part because whenever we have people over in July it is always beastly hot and better to have done the cooking in the early part of the day. In fact, the evening turned out to be lovely—but this was a delicious complement to the bluefish Steve grilled (and the peach salsa I made as a garnish).

2 cups quinoa, cooked (I used multi-colored)

1 large can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

4 T olive oil

4 T rice wine vinegar

4 T lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

1/2 - 1 cup basil leaves, julienned

1 cup corn kernels (2 ears of corn)

12 oz. feta cheese, cubed (I quadrupled this from the original recipe -- and my son thought the only thing lacking in the salad was "more feta")

salad greens

Toss quinoa, chickpeas, basil, corn and feta together. In a separate bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Drizzle over the quinoa mixture and refrigerate. Serve chilled or room temperature over salad greens. Yum!

Cheesecake in July

It is almost impossible to bake in the summertime. We don't have whole house air conditioning, and besides, I refuse to heat the house from the inside while it's heating from the outside!

But this summer (so far) has been fairly lovely, and so on Saturday I ventured to bake a cheesecake. Anyone following this blog knows that I have declared the "perfect cheesecake" not once, but twice in recent months. And yet...

Lemon Cheesecake with Ricotta
(on the right is my personal recipe file project, still ongoing!)

Apparently, I need to fiddle with perfection. This weekend I made Mark Bittman's Lemon Cheesecake, but with twists. For the crust, I used Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Cookies (yum!). This was brilliant, a nice change from a straight graham cracker crust. The other innovation was to substitute ricotta for some of the cream cheese -- I used 15 oz. of whole milk ricotta with two 8 oz. packages of cream cheese. I didn't adjust the eggs, and perhaps I might have, but the happy noises coming out of my family's mouths last night confirmed that the ricotta added a certain lightness to the cheesecake. Again, yum.

The best part about cooking and baking, though, beyond the taste sensations exploding in the mouth, is the effort that goes into it. The same day I made a Quinoa Corn Feta salad (adapted from Rachel Ray) and a peach salsa for the bluefish we were grilling, and all that chopping and stirring was positively therapeutic.

Most importantly, for the cheesecake I needed lemon juice AND lemon rind. I walked down to the corner to buy the lemons at our bodega (a nice feature of city life), and then I rifled the drawers looking for my lemon zester.

I don't have a lemon zester in my other kitchen, so only in summer can I replay in my head that scene in the Brooklyn apartment of one of our favorite relatives. "A zester!" I exclaim. "I've always wanted a zester!" "Here, take it," says Uncle Roland. "No, really, I couldn't!" I retort, embarrassed. "Seriously, I've only used it once or twice myself. Take it, and you'll think of me when you use it."

How great is that for a dessert in mid-July? This recipe brought together creativity, fresh ingredients, the convenience of life in the city, the fun and precision of separating eggs, measuring and mixing, plus a chance to use my lemon zester and think about its provenance. Not bad for an experience -- and at the end there was cheesecake.

Thanks, Roland.

The Perfect Brownie

For years I have collected brownie recipes -- copied out of cookbooks, cut from newspapers, and so on, in search of the perfect brownie. Every brownie I make is too dry, or too cakey. In despair, I have purchased brownie mixes. My friend Jennifer expressed her disdain -- how could I, the queen of home baking, use a brownie mix? So sometimes I make Texas Brownies (Sue Kearney's recipe, with sour cream), very yummy, but that's a different treat entirely. (I'll post the recipe next time I make it -- great for a crowd. Requires corn syrup for the icing, though!)

Then last year I was at my sister's house and she had baked brownies for her husband's birthday. O my god. They were delicious!! And she said: "Why haven't you been making Foster's Brownies?"

I would have, really, if I had known they existed!

The recipe makes A LOT of brownies, so it's good to cut it in half. The key, though, is to manage the baking time. If you bake them too long, they are delicious, but too dry. If you manage just right, then someone in your family might say, like my son did yesterday: "There have been far too many cookies in this house over the years, and not nearly enough brownies."

Even a little piece deserves its own plate.

Here's the "modified" version (i.e. approximately a half recipe, but with my own tweaks).

Foster's Brownies

1 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder*
1/2 t. salt
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar (reduced)
2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
1 T. vanilla
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)
2 cups (12 oz.) semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 325.
Lightly grease and flour a 9 x 13" pan (glass is fine). Set aside.
Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt in a bowl and stir to mix. Set aside.
Cream together the eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla in a separate bowl with an electric mixer until well blended.
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix just until all the dry ingredients are moist and blended. Do not overmix.
Fold in the walnuts (if using) and chocolate chips and stir to blend. Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan.
Bake 25-30 minutes. They should be slightly soft in the center when tested with a toothpick. Remove from oven and cool 30 minutes before cutting.
Cut into 2 1/2 by 3 inch bars (for a smaller brownie, cut the bar in half down the center or on the diagonal.)

* I usually use Ghirardelli's chocolate or Ah!laska brand, but I was lured at the Freshgrocer (which had neither of my preferred brands) to purchase Hershey's "Special Dark Blend of Natural and Dutched Cocoas." Yum. It really is darker than most cocoas, and the contrast with the Ghirardelli chips was awesome. (I admit, I used twice as many chips as the original recipe called for. But at least I left out the walnuts!)

Of course, AH!LASKA is organic, fat free, and kosher, the first such cocoa on the market. See all about it here.

Blueberry Buckle: The Recipe

So I thought somehow that the photo of my recipe book would be legible to anyone interested, and it seems that it was not.

Here's the recipe I used:

Blueberry Buckle

1/2 c. shortening (I used unsalted butter, softened)
1/2 c. sugar (not reduced as per my usual)
1 well-beaten egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1/2 c. milk
2 cups fresh blueberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (325 if using glass pan). Grease a 11 1/2 x 7 inch pan. (9x13 is okay, but the buckle will not "buckle"...)

Thoroughly cream shortening and sugar. Add egg and mix well. Sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to creamed mixture alternately with milk. Pour into well-greased pan (pour?!? the consistency of my batter had me "patting" the dough into the pan). Top with blueberries. Sprinkle "Cinnamon Crumbs" (a.k.a. streusel) over blueberries. Bake 45-50 minutes or until done (possibly less if you're using a larger pan).

Cinnamon Crumbs: Mix 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (okay, I used 1 t.). Cut in 1/4 c. unsalted butter until crumbly.

Here's what it looked like before baking, in a 9x13" glass pan.

The after picture is here.

This was delicious, especially when warm and topped with fresh whipped cream. Next time I will try to make the "crumbs" more crumby (maybe the kitchen was too warm and so the streusel effect was lost?) and try a smaller pan (perhaps a 9 or 10" square metal pan?) to get the effect of "buckling" from the cinnamon layer, now that I know why it is called a Buckle. My friend who lives in Georgia recommends mixing up the fruit -- she uses blueberries and nectarines. Could one do blueberries and pomegranate seeds, or would that be too crazy?

Summertime Blueberry Buckle

I am in the midst of creating a personal cookbook -- trying to organize my recipes in some fashion that is both useful and attractive.

For a number of years I have been carting around a 3 ring binder with file folders stuffed into it: Breads and Muffins, Soups and Salads, Ethnic Recipes -- you get the drift. But now I am hoping to rewrite all the recipes I've been saving into my New Improved Book.

The problem? I'm actually fairly attached to the recipes as they are. I remember, for example, writing out one of my Russian recipes on the back of an orange flyer advertising George Kalbouss's Russian 522 course ... in about 1996. My friend Sara and I were planning a Russian feast. So looking at that recipe reminds me of the apartment where we held the feast, the guest list, the menu... How can I give that up?

I have recipes cut out of newspapers (including my Chocolate Roll Cake from St. Louis circa 1997 or so, when I was there for the AAASS conference in November); recipes handwritten on notebook paper or other random scrap paper; recipes cut out from magazines; recipes typewritten or handwritten on recipe cards, by myself, my aunt, my grandmother; recipes printed from epicurious.com or other recipe websites...

There is even a certain serendipity. Which brings us to the Blueberry Buckle recipe. My mom sent me her cornbread recipe, copied out from her new Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, but she also sent me the page from her old cookbook, and on the reverse of that page is the Blueberry Buckle recipe. And it's summer. So I copied it into my new book, and then prepared it -- for the first time. (I will adapt and change it in future -- stay tuned!)

Leaving room on the left for my Aunt Em's
Oatmeal Muffin recipe, the tastiest ever because made with sour cream!

I learned several things, about the Recipe Book project and about the recipe itself. First of all, by writing in ink I am guaranteeing that my book has "character" -- already I smeared the ink when preparing the first recipe! Secondly, this BH&G recipe makes word choices that don't necessarily reflect reality. For example, there is no way I could have "poured" the batter, since it was quite stiff. Instead I "patted" the dough into the pan. Third, though I only had a 9X11 glass casserole, that worked fine. No need to be hung up on exactitude! I admit, too, that I am doubtful about the "Cinnamon Crumbs" -- just a way to get more butter and sugar into the dish, since the texture did not live up to the name: there were no "crumbs" involved. Perhaps because it was too warm in the kitchen? I'll experiment some more in future to see if I can justify the BG&H vocab.

I got to thinking that adding basil to this recipe might be really nice. My daughter says no -- she thought adding chopped pistachios on top would be better. My son says that if I never make this recipe again, he will have no reason to live. So I guess I'll do it again next weekend when we have guests, as long as the blueberries are still in season.

Delicious -- especially with fresh whipped cream!

The designation "Buckle" seems so old-fashioned somehow, so I thought I'd better investigate. To quote this recipe site, "A buckle is an old-fashioned single layered cake interspersed with berries and with a streusel-type topping that “buckles” as it cools. Not sure mine did that -- maybe this is why I needed the smaller pan?

Finally, as I copied out this recipe and made the dish I was thinking of my stepdad. Over the holidays I accidentally overheard him talking to my mom about something I had baked (not even sure what!) and commenting that Angela should learn that sometimes sugar can be a good thing. (Generally I cut the sugar in all recipes in half, with the result that nothing I bake is particularly sweet!) So this time I did not reduce the sugar, and I agree -- it was tastier. Thanks, Allan.