salad fingers pizza
March 21, 2010
I woke up from a nap this afternoon craving crunchy romaine lettuce ribs and finely chopped kale. To turn this into dinner, I put my third (and final) frozen pizza in the oven, chopped my romaine and kale, both from my awesome CSA, and set out to make a dressing. I wanted to make something that would taste pizza-ish, so I used olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, and oregano. I added salted mountain capers, chopped olives, and pepper. For protein, I thinly sliced some Parmigiano Reggiano for the top of the pizza, and added tiny cubes of cheddar to the salad.
My best friend Swati always takes me to a restaurant in California when I visit her that serves salad pizza. It is yummy! This is my version…frozen home made pizza and kale salad.
My mom brought a little hen over for dinner to peck at the edge of the pizza. I actually lit it on fire (it is a candle..) later on, and am still not sure if I am okay with burning chickens…
On a side note: if anyone has any tips on making non-chewy frozen pizza dough, please, please let me know. The frozen pizzas are great, but the dough turns out a little chewy. I put the pizza right in the oven, frozen. Maybe I need to let them thaw and rise a little first?
cake-from-a-mix
March 20, 2010
Maybe you could say that I am on a cake kick. Opportunities just keep popping up. It was my friend’s birthday last night. She had a roller skating birthday with a cake contest. I finished work around 5, and really wanted to bake a cake. I didn’t have a recipe with me in town, and my mom suggested that I just grab a mix…so I did.
I started with a Barefoot Contessa mix for coconut cupcakes, and added to it.
Instead of making cupcakes, I made two 8″ cakes, and then sliced them both in half to make 4 layers.
For some reason my kitchen becomes a disaster when I bake a cake. I was talking with my mom about it last night, and she was saying that it had to do with all the sugar all over the place. Maybe cakes are a collection of too much sugar.
I made a filling of Greek style yogurt, coconut passion fruit jam from France, and whipped cream (also my mom’s idea). I softly whipped the cream (1/2 cup) and gently folded in the yogurt (about 2/3 of a container), which is strained and quite firm. The mixture was quite tart, and so I added a lot of the jam to sweeten and flavor it. The cake itself was sweet, so I didn’t make the filling overly sweet.
Meanwhile, the cakes were on the porch cooling. The weather went from beautiful and sunny in the early afternoon, to cold, raining, and then snowing.
I put the coconut passion fruit filling in between the layers of the cake. I had a good amount of filling, which made the cake kind of tall. I was worried that it would drip over the sides, but it behaved itself. As the cake sat, a lot of the filling was absorbed by the layers.
I frosted the outside of the cake with cream cheese butter frosting (cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar from the baking mix “packet number 3”). I dusted the sides with coconut flakes (from “packet number 2”). For the top I put a layer of passion fruit coconut jam for brightness and color (also my mom’s idea).
This is my conclusion about cakes and mixes. My kitchen is still a mess, and I spent a lot of time. BUT, I didn’t have to think too much about things. It was fun. I had a cake where I probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
have your beer (and eat it too)
March 17, 2010
Sometimes I need to remind myself that I can indeed bake a cake. I bake cakes so rarely, that when I see something that looks interesting, and I have the inclination, I just need to do it! This afternoon, while browsing npr.org, I found a recipe for Chocolate Guinness Cake. Being the lovely beer drinking holiday that it is tomorrow, I decided to make this one…
Then I went through all the formalities. Made a list (left it at home by accident), called my brother to look up the recipe online and advise as to the type of beer recommended (while wandering aimlessly through the wine and spirits section of Drugtown), bought the rest of the ingredients from memory, went home, and baked the cake.
I love the satisfaction of following a thought from start to finish so quickly. (It wasn’t a particularly daunting task, but completed all the same.)
I don’t think that I have ever tried beer in baking. Sometimes my mom cooks with beer (most famously, welsh rarebit), but I can’t remember her baking anything either.
This particular recipe, by Nigella Lawson, calls for called for Guinness, and so I went to Drugtown and purchased a 6 pack (taking care to get the “real” stuff imported from Ireland), for which I only needed one cup…
The beer is heated in a large saucepan with the butter, and it created in my kitchen a deliciously tasty aroma of beer and butter…sounds kind of gross, but it wasn’t . I have never mixed a cake in a saucepan, and was a little worried that I might cook the eggs and sour cream mix (being incorporated below). I didn’t though, and everything went smoothly, and I got the batter into the springform pan and into the oven.
I broke down and drank the left over bit of beer (breaking my no drinking while operating hot ovens rule..). There was only a little left, and it tasted particularly delicious paired with the left over batter!
The frosting is a cream cheese, cream, and sugar frosting. It is layered onto the top to mimic the frost on the top of a pint of Guinness. The cake isn’t too sweet, and the tartness of the cream cheese goes well with the rich chocolate flavor of the cake.
I took the cake into to work in my pie carrier basket, which is the perfect size to carry pies and cakes around. As the day went on, the cake gradually diminished in size, and when I took the basket home, there was one piece left for my mom…thanks to everyone that helped in eating!
frozen pizza
March 7, 2010
Part one.
I love frozen pizza. It is one of the few things that I actually like from the freezer. Something happens to the pizza when it is frozen to make it taste, well, like frozen pizza. And then there is the convenience. Go to the store, pick up a pizza, take it home and bake it. Or more simply, open freezer, grab pizza, unwrap, bake.
In theory anyway. I am not the type to have frozen pizzas on hand. If I have them, I eat them, so if I want one, it requires a trip to the store…usually Hy-Vee, usually late at night.
And part two…
A few nights ago I made some pizza from scratch. It was good, but I forgot (since the last time that I made it) that my recipe makes too much dough for my pizza pan. I ended up, again, with a slightly ruffled pizza that had way too much dough on the edges. I wanted to make some pizza, figure out the best size, so that I have it all figured out for the next time I make pizza. The problem is that I don’t really feel like eating more pizza.
So, perfect time for me to make frozen pizzas. Then, some cold lonely night, I can creep down to the basement, open up the freezer door, and pull out a home-made frozen pizza. No more trips to Hy-Vee! (Oh, the things that make my world go around…)
I made a batch of pizza dough, kneaded it until the dough was the consistency of an earlobe (as per directions..). Then let it rise, and shaped it into 3 pizzas. Large enough for one meal (plus leftovers for the next morning). I love to have cold pizza with lime pickle!
The pizzas are simple; tomato sauce, cheese, and a little bit of dried oregano sprinkled over the top. I can always add extra cheese, or toppings before baking.
I cut out some cardboard circles, wrapped them in plastic bags, and put the pizzas on them to freeze. I wanted to make sure that the pizzas froze flat, and then in the morning I will give each pizza its own ziplock bag for extra fresh, airtight storage.
fresh iowa greens in february
February 13, 2010
We are members of a wonderful CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in Fairfield, and enjoy fresh greens every week. It is one of the things that makes this whole winter thing a little more doable.
My mom and I get a box every week, and sometimes we have a little trouble eating anything…everything is just so beautiful and fresh, and we want to save it! (She often nibbles a little, but wants to save some for me, and we don’t always getting around to cooking or eating together.) Kind of silly, but oh well.
So this morning, as we were baking cookies, I dug through the fridge and found a few gems that we had not eaten. My mom came up with the idea to make a little casserole. She is such an inspired cook. You could probably give her a basket of vegetables, and she would turn whatever she was given into something fresh and delicious!
The base for the casserole is steamed greens: chard, kale, beet stems, and spinach. She placed the steamed greens into several baking dishes, drizzled with olive oil. On top of the greens she put mashed potatoes (cooked quickly in the pressure cooker), and finished the top with grated prairie breeze cheese (from Milton, IA).
It was a quick delicious casserole, fresh with the greens, but hearty with the potatoes (made with organic sour cream) and cheese.
To go with the casserole, she made a salad of lettuce, and ridiculously fresh arugula, topped with avocado, grapefruit sections, and carrot ribbons. YUM!
So if you ever find yourself with a produce drawer filled with yummy greens, this is a great meal to use them up and really ENJOY them. Thanks to my mom, of course!
valentine hearts
February 13, 2010
My mom and I made these this morning. She has been making these for Valentines Day for as long as I can remember. The cookies are sweet, but not too sweet, because of the chopped almonds. The pink frosting with almond extract is delicious. And the fresh taste of raspberry jam in the center completes them. This actually might be my favorite cookie. There is something about making a cookie once a year that makes it extra special. I like to make these and pass them out to friends on Valentines day.
When I made it over to my mom’s house this morning, she had all the ingredients measured out, cooking show style.
The cookie dough is a simple mixture of the usuals. Butter, flour, nuts, sugar, etc. I like to make assorted sizes (we got carried away and only made one size this year..), but nothing too big as the cookies are double layered. Too big and there is just too much cookie.
We first chopped the nuts, rather coarsely in the food processor. Then we creamed butter and sugar, added vanilla and sour cream (egg replacement), and finally the flour. The dough is rather dry and crumbly, but you don’t want it too moist, or it will turn a little cake like and the cookies won’t be as crisp.
My mom rolled all the cookies out.
She was really good at jiggling the dough with the spatula to separate the cookies from the surrounding dough.
Once the cookies were cooled, it was time to spread them with jam, and make little cookie sandwiches. I saved a jar of homemade raspberry jam that I made this fall for the center layer. I put on just enough to make the cookies stick, making sure that nothing dripped down the sides of the cookies.
It is important to jam the undersides of the cookies together. They stick better that way, and then the outside of the cookies look better too!
The icing is made with powdered sugar (we used the natural stuff, even though it is a little more “home-made” looking), almond extract and vanilla. To give it color, we chopped up some beet stems and boiled them for a few minutes in water. Then we added the colored water to the icing, adding a little extra powdered sugar to stiffen it up.
The icing is carefully applied to the top of the cookie with the back of a spoon (another trick I learned from my mom…).
The whole jam and frosting part took for ever!
And always, last step is to wrap the cookies up in parchment paper packages. This particular grouping is ready to go to the post office!
hojicha pudding
February 7, 2010
Miles and Nozomi took us to a beautiful Japanese restaurant when we were in New York City last week. One of the highlights of the meal (there were many!) was a cold pudding, flavored with roasted green tea (hojicha). As we were eating the pudding, we discussed about how we could make it, and decided that it must have been made with soy milk, and that it would be nice and healthy.
Not the case. My mom asked the waiter if he could tell her what was in the pudding, and after a few minutes someone came back and told us that in the kitchen it was made with milk, cream, eggs, a little sugar at the end, and of course roasted green tea, or hojicha.
Upon further discussion, we discovered that the tea is steeped in hot milk, which is then added to cream, eggs, and sugar. We jotted everything down on a scrap of paper, and stopped at a Japanese supermarket down the street on the way home and picked up some hojicha.
When I got home from my trip, I was very excited to get started figuring out the recipe. Both Nozomi and I came up with a few similar recipes online, and I tried one today (slightly adjusted) with medium/good results.
The recipe below is very closely based on one that I copied from a website containing lots of green tea recipes.
Hojicha Pudding
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons sugar
15 grams hojicha (toasted green tea)
Preheat oven to 320 degrees.
In a baking dish (I used a glass 9 x 13 casserole dish) place 6 little oven safe ramekins. Set aside.
In a small saucepan, steam milk, remove from heat and add hojicha. Cover with a lid and let tea steep for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, mix eggs in separate bowl and set aside. After 5 minutes, add sugar and cream to milk and tea mixture, and stir until sugar is dissolved. Pour tea mixture slowly into eggs through a strainer, whisking the eggs as you do. At this point, pour mixture through a sieve to remove any little lumps (I forgot this step…). Pour mixture evenly into 6 ramekins, and add hot water to the pan, being careful not to splash water into the ramekins. Place baking dish into oven, and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until done. It is finished when it sets up nicely. I asked my friend Mary and she said pudding should be about like pumpkin pie…
Chill and serve.
I am not completely happy yet with this recipe. For some reason, it seems a bit heavier than the version served at the restaurant, and slightly different. I don’t have a lot of experience with making puddings, so I might have to do a little research to figure out what I need to change.
dolores’s buttermilk oat farls
January 28, 2010
Right before Christmas I stopped by my friend Dolores’s house to drop off some fabric, and she sent me out the door with a batch of freshly made buttermilk oat farls (similar to a scone or biscuit). They were delicious, and I have been wanting to make them ever since. They are dense, tangy, and the perfect thing to eat with butter and jam, warm out of the oven.
The rolled oats are soaked in buttermilk overnight, and the farls are very moist and buttermilky as a result. If you love buttermilk and oats, you will probably love these.
The dough is shaped into a circle, and then cut into 4 or 8 pie wedges (Dolores shapes her’s into a square, and then into 8 triangles). I made mine round because I used my round cast iron pizza pan, as all my cookie sheets have migrated to my mom’s house. I patted the dough right onto the pan, cut it carefully, and slid the pieces apart. It worked well. I didn’t preheat the pan, so I was a little worried that the biscuits wouldn’t cook as well on the bottom, but they turned out golden on the top as well as on the bottom.
Here is the recipe, pretty much exactly as Dolores told it to me.
2 cups rolled oats (not instant!)
1 1/4 – 2 1/4 cups buttermilk
2 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
Mix oats with 1 1/4 cups buttermilk. Make sure to cover, and let stand overnight.
In the morning. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter baking sheet. Stir flour, salt, and baking soda together in a small mixing bowl. Gradually beat flour mixture into oats to form a soft dough, adding more buttermilk if necessary (it probably will be). Shape dough into flat circle, about 1 inch thick. Cut dough into quarters or eighths, and place on cookie sheet. Bake for 25 minutes, or until golden.
They are best when served warm, and can be kept warm by placing in a dish lined with a teatowel, in a warm oven, or by the stove. They can also be reheated quite easily in a toaster oven or regular oven!
hot potato
January 25, 2010
I’ve been eating a lot of pretzels with slices of locally made cheddar cheese (prairie breeze, from Milton) and Patak’s Hot Lime Relish. Tonight I was still craving the taste, but wanted something a little more dinner like, so I switched the pretzel out for a potato.
And added some green onion, sliced jalapeño, and cilantro. And of course a dollop of butter. It was yummy, and definitely a welcome change from the pretzels.
Wash and prick potato (russets are good), stick it into a 400 degree oven, and let bake until tender. (Can’t remember how long..) While the potato is baking, chop some green onions (about 1 per potato), a little bunch of cilantro, and the tip of a jalapeño, and mix them up a little on the cutting board. Add a good amount of butter to the potato first, so that it melts, and then add the chopped green mixture and cheese. On top of all that add a big spoon of lime pickle (to taste!). This might taste good with yogurt as well (instead of the more traditional sour cream).
“not a creature was stirring…”
December 6, 2009
This was my mom’s idea. (And borrowed from an adorable product that we are carrying in the store.) A mouse in a match box. An “easy” way to do the whole ginger bread thing. We made a mistake a few years ago and spent hours and hours on our gingerbread house, and after that decided that we either wouldn’t do one, or plan something simple. For those who don’t know, the first Friday of every month in our town we have an art walk. Somewhere along the line the December art walk (they all have themes) got the theme of ginger bread houses. Now in December every store, restaurant, gallery, etc., has one or more ginger bread houses displayed prominently in the windows. Ours isn’t quite a house, but in my mind sleeping quarters count too.
I kept thinking that I would start the gingerbread experimenting long before the December 5th deadline, but of course I ended up Tuesday afternoon with a batch of chilled dough that behaved like a rock.
I could barely cut it with a knife, and had to toss it out. (For the record, I didn’t do the best job of following the recipe, and heated the butter, sugar, and molasses up too hot. I think!)
Tuesday night I made what was the first of many trips to Hy-Vee for a new jar of molasses. Batch two, on Wednesday worked out much better. I was still afraid of chilling the dough so I just rolled it out warmish, and cooled the pices on a cookie sheet on the porch before baking since it has turned bitterly cold here. I made the design for all the pieces on stiff paper, and then placed the paper directly on the cookie dough, on a cutting board, or directly on the cookie sheet, and cut out the shapes. It is harder to keep the shapes exact when the dough is warm, but I managed ok.
I made a lot of bricks, some logs, a few stockings for the mantle, and the box and fireplace this way. I had a few pieces break as I was removing them from the cookie sheet, but other than that, no major disasters. I kept on changing things around, and needing to bake extra parts. I had a ziplock bag full of left over dough saved for such emergencies, I would turn on the oven, roll out the part, bake it, and go on to the next part.
Cleaning the flour off of the baked sheets of gingerbread. My vegetable brush worked out to be the best tool for this.
Thursday morning, after another trip to Hy-Vee, this time for junky powdered sugar and egg white powder, I assembled the pieces and stuck them together with royal icing. Royal icing is the best icing for this kind of thing. It is made of sugar, egg whites, and water. It tastes kind of gross, but when it is dry it holds like a ROCK. (When I was in 2nd grade we had a gingerbread house party for my birthday and the person who was in charge of the icing used some other recipe, and we had a night of houses falling all over the place!)
One more trip to Hy-Vee (you would think that I could have made a list and picked up all the ingredients at once…) for marshmallows, and the pillows and quilt were under way. I wanted to make the bedding out of something soft, and marshmallows came to mind. Even though you can’t really see them in the finished product, they create the right shape and feel of cozy bedding. The red candies are really yummy peppermint pillows from the store. They made the perfect topping for a downy satiny quilt.
My mom came over to sculpt the little mouse. I made an attempt, and called her directly to finish it off. She molded the head out of marzipan, and the body is just a padding of marshmallows under the quilt (the old pillow technique). The mouse was finished in stages. First he was placed in bed to check his positioning.
Then he needed a little color. His nose and ears were a little too much marzipan colored. In came my mom with the pink frosting.
We decided at the end of mouse production that we needed to have him wearing a red sleeping cap and red pajamas. We molded the parts with marzipan, and carefully painted them with red icing. We inserted the red shoulders into the box using my size 0 knitting needles. Tricky tricky work. If we got even one drop of red dye on the white pillow we were sunk.
(I can’t decide if I like the peppercorn eyes or the shredded wheat whiskers better here!)
On to the fireplace. I wanted to give it a more “authentic” feel, so I made it three dimensional, and ended up having to brick the inside arch. That was tricky! The hearth ended up working out well.
I made a piece of gingerbread for underneath the bricks, and then glued them all on with the royal icing. The fire was lit up from underneath with a christmas light. I ended up painting some of the logs red later on down the line.
We were a little worried about transportation to the store. My mom brought over a large wooden tray, and we placed each part in a bed of tea towels. The pieces were snugly set in, and the trip was successful. My mom drove, and I held the setup on my lap.
Kathy did an amazing job decorating the tree, and it looked so beautiful in the window! Little mousie got a corner under the tree, and enjoyed the festive atmosphere!
living in the woods and making stuff 