Sometimes mamma knows best

Coming out of the cold of May - Shepherd's Pie with Horseradish Mash

2012-05-04T16:38:10Z

Solly and Grandma draw in hopes of better weather.

It’s May 3 in Seattle. My lilacs are finally blooming, the late tulips have a few days left and the lawn needs a mow. It is also the same May, the time that the weather rears its temperamental head in ugly way – all those apple blossoms you are coveting – whooshed away by the stiff breezes, driving around wearing a skort bare legged and flip flops with the heater blasting on my feet. Seattle, after all is the home of the four season cashmere sweater.

Many blogs and instagram feeds are full of lovely spring treats – baby peas, rhubarb, spring chickens with poached asparagus and tiny little salad greens. That is all lovely and so luscious and cold. Brr. This kind of weather calls for a hearty dish that sticks to our freezing ribs and maybe uses up the last of the root vegetables that are moldering in the back of the refrigerator crisper. The first thing that comes to mind when I look up at the dark, damp and grey of a Seattle afternoon is a Shepherd’s pie. My friend Paola, makes a proper British Shepherd’s Pie with lamb and all that, I tend to stray to the American version, fashioned after Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes delicious beef filled one. In making mine, I tried to use what I had on hand, which were a few wizened turnips, rutabagas and carrots that I was excited about in January, but not so much in April. Root vegetables make the winter to spring transition in Seattle interminable.

Wizened veggies from the crisper.

Shepherd’s pie is pretty basic, take some sort of minced meat product, slightly season it, add whatever root vegetable you have on hand, mix it together and top with a potato crust. Bake and serve. It freezes beautifully and tastes better the following day. It is a leftover I actually look forward to eating. It can be fancied up with cheese or more spice, but I like it left a little plain. I have substituted turkey meat for the beef, but it is not as flavorful. I suppose if you loved ground lamb, then a mix of beef and lamb would be even tastier. The potato crust is where you can get really crazy – add cheese, garlic, jalapenos (I hear Paola shuddering), herbs or just keep it simple. The key is to make sure the crust gets a little crispy and the mixture h piping hot all the way through.

The mince and the ridges.

As I finish writing this up, the rain is drumming against our windows. Ernest refuses to go out and I can’t blame him. It is better to dream about a sunnier tomorrow.

Shepherd’s Pie with Horse radish Mashed Potato Crust (adapted from Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes Shepherd’s Pie)

Makes one pie, feeds 6 with no leftovers

Meat filling

1 ½ lb. ground beef (I used 15% fat)
1 medium onion, chopped – yielding 1 cup
3 carrots (more if you don’t have other root vegetables), chopped
1 medium turnip, chopped
1 medium rutabaga, chopped
1 parsnip (if you have it), chopped
1 c frozen peas
½ cup water or stock
2 T butter or fat of choice for sautéing the vegetable mixture
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 t fines herbes or some sort of herb mix containing (savory, thyme, marjoram)
½ t salt or more to taste
Pepper to taste

Mashed potato crust:

1 ½ lbs of Yukon gold or new potatoes, washed and halved or cubed depending on size
1/3 cup Greek yoghurt, sour cream or what you wish as creamy liquid
1 T creamed horseradish, or less if it’s hot
1 T butter

Under medium heat, melt butter in generously sized sauté pan. Add onions and cook for five minutes, or until they soften. Add carrots and other root vegetables and sauté for another 10 minutes to soften. Mix in fines herbes or herb mix to the vegetables. In a separate pan, boil chopped potatoes until fork tender (15 minutes). Remove from heat, drain and set aside. Crumble beef into the vegetable mixture, cover pan and cook until meat is no longer pink (approximately another seven minutes), add water moisten the mixture if it is dry. Remove from heat, add peas and Worcestershire sauce and season to taste.
Note: Add peas late, because you want them to stay nice and green. I can’t cotton to grey peas in this dish. They will cook when the rest of the dish is assembled and baked. Ditto for the vegetables, you don’t want to over cook them because they will be mushy. 4 out of 5 Shepherds prefer their vegetables to be cooked just right.

Coarsely mash potatoes you have set aside with a potato masher (you may actually have one in the back of your utensil drawer) or a fork. Add yoghurt, butter and creamed horseradish and mash some more (you may still want some chunky bits in your potatoes). Season the mashed potatoes to taste with salt and pepper.

In a buttered or oiled 2.5 quart baking dish (I used a something like this), pour in the beef and vegetable mixture. Top with mashed potatoes mixture spreading as best as you can to the edges. Elise suggests making pretty wavy patterns that ensure more browned and crispy bits and I second that. Bake at 375 F for 30 minutes until hot and burbly and the top starts to get golden brown, but does not burn.

In our household, we would pair this with a green salad and a side of cottage cheese. Yup, cottage cheese and it is delicious, just ask TH.

Coconut Pancakes with Ginger and Lime - Sunny days are ahead

2012-04-26T20:05:23Z

A lovely combination.

I am trying to change the way I eat. It is not easy with travel and a lot of social activities, but when I pay attention to what I am shoveling into my gullet, things seem to be easier on my body and mind. For the last three months I have avoided eating wheat or wheat products and refined carbs. I feel much better and other than a few wistful glances at the cannoli in Rome, it has been pretty easy. I have been tested for gluten intolerance and I’m fine, so don’t go on about that. This is my choice and since I see some marked results in my mood (partly sunny) and skorts (loose again), I am not going to complain.

Ah, Kauai. How I miss you.

In my quest for new foods that will keep me satisfied, I started hunting around the internets for breakfast recipes. I came across a lot of mentions of coconut flour. I have been using a lot of coconut milk for smoothies and other things and love it, so I figured I would give it a go.

Coconut flour is a strange thing. I think that coconuts are fatty delicious nuts, but when you extract out all that oil, you are left with a lot of fiber and some protein. Let’s embrace that shall we? The recipe comes from a Paleo way of cooking. I’m not going down that road either, but the concepts surrounding the way of eating intrigue me. The recipe is high in protein (eggs and coconut flour), low sugar (honey) and low carb (coconut flour). I like the results and honestly, so have others (excluding TH, who is not a fan). It leaves me with more pancakes than I need, but they freeze and keep well. I modified the original recipe to remind me of places where flip flops are required and coconuts fall from palm trees just like in the cartoons.

Serving suggestion.

Coconut pancakes with lime, ginger and vanilla (adapted from www.paleospirit.com)
Makes 18 3”pancakes

4 eggs at room temperature
½ cup coconut flour
1- 1 ¼ cup coconut milk, soy milk, almond milk, dairy milk, any liquid will do, but coconut milk has a rich flavor and the vanilla coconut milk I used is a little sweeter
2 t vanilla
1 t baking soda
1 T honey (you can use sugar or any sweetener)
½ t cinnamon
¼ salt
¼ t dried ginger powder
½ t lime zest (zest a quarter of a lime)

Oil for skillet I used coconut oil, but would work great with canola or butter.

Mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs with liquids until well blended. Combine dry ingredients with wet ingredients and whisk or mix until no lumps remain. If the batter looks too thick, slowly add more liquid until you are happy with the consistency.

Over low-medium heat, melt fat of choice in your skillet of choice. Turn down the heat to low and start making pancakes. Be patient, these pancakes do not like high heat. When the top of the pancake appears to be drying and there are the telltale bubbles forming, it is time to flip them over to the other side. Keep pancakes warm until you finish the batter.

I served them with lime curd I made, some lovely tropical fruits on the side and chicken sausage.

Bon Appetit!

Orange Almond Cake infused with cardamon - New Year's Keeps on

2012-04-18T23:21:55Z

Torte, styled.

When we get invited to out to a friends’ for dinner, I am usually asked to bring dessert. I don’t mind this as I love making desserts, but I am pretty much in pattern of creating seasonal fruit desserts with the occasional lapse into the chocolate box. I stick to crisps, tarts and sometimes just macerated fruit with ice cream. I am trying to change this around a bit and at the same time, trying to not go shopping for the one ingredient that is crucial to my dish and that can only be procured on alternate Wednesdays fifty miles from home. I am trying to simplify my life, not complicate things for the sake of cake.

For Persian New Year, I wanted to make something that was vaguely Persian, but was going to leave the cookies to my mother who I simply cannot compete with for taste and quality of her cookies. I thought about doing something with rice flour and rose water, but then decided that that combination was too sweet and floral. I wanted to use things that I had on hand – almonds, fruit, eggs and yogurt. In my googling/epicuriousing/searching I found several great recipes for a Persian Orange Almond Cake that are derived from Claudia Roden’s 1968 cookbook, The New Book of Middle East Food. In my years, I have never heard of such a cake. I was all for trying to change things up and the recipe required no searching a store for an ingredient I didn’t have on hand already. Note: not everyone has unicorn horns in their pantry, but I do.

Unicorns need not fear.

The recipe is pretty simple, whole oranges are boiled twice to remove the bitterness. This is the same technique that jam makers suggest for extracting the bitter oils from citrus for marmalade. The whole oranges are pureed in a food processor, and then added to an egg and sugar mixture. All are incorporated with nut flour and a few more things and a beautiful rich moist torte is created. The torte sits well on its own, but is even better with a side of crème fraiche ice cream or an orange blossom flavored strained Greek yoghurt. We loved it so much; we ate it for breakfast the next day. It does require a little preparation, as the oranges need to boiled twice, but I started the boiling the night before and that saved a little bit of time.

I am a big fan of the nut torte. I am trying to limit my exposure to wheat, and nuts are something that seems to be easy to process and work wonderfully for some cakes and cookies.

Folding in ingredients. Do not over mix.

Orange Almond Cake for a New Year feast – Adapted from Claudia Roden with great props given to Australia’s Taste.com

Serves 12

This recipe calls for oranges to be boiled and then pureed. I used my Cuisinart, the original calls for mushing up the cooked oranges and pressing them through a sieve. The pureeing using modern machinery is much easier and adds way more fiber. I did end up weighing the sugar and almond powder because they seem to vary if those ingredients settle. My oranges were medium sized and pretty juicy which means that my cake remained nice and moist.

Cake
2 medium sized oranges
300 g. almond meal
1 t baking powder
½ t cardamom
½ t cinnamon
3 eggs
¾ cup sugar (would use a little less 2/3 c. next time)

Cake Instructions:

Wash oranges and place in a sauce pan with enough water to cover the oranges. Turn on stove and bring oranges to a boil and then turn to a simmer and let simmer for 20 minutes. Remove pan from heat and drain water. Add cold water and repeat process again. Drain oranges and let cool. Note: This can be done the night before, just put the oranges in the fridge until you need them. They will be squishy and that is a good thing.

Preheat oven to 325 F. Grease a 9” springform pan with cooking spray or olive oil, cut parchment to fit the bottom, coat sides with almond flour.

Puree oranges in food processor until smooth. I didn’t bother to remove the pips as I had navel oranges, if you have seeds, you may want to go to the trouble of removing them first.

Place sugar and eggs in mixing bowl and beat with electric beater until pale yellow and thick. Turn off mixer. Add pureed oranges to the egg and sugar mixture. Combine almonds, baking powder, and spices together and fold into the orange/egg/sugar mixture. Mix to combine, but do not over mix. Pour into prepared springform pan and place in oven. Cook for 40 minutes, check for doneness by using a wooden skewer, if it comes out clean, it is done. If not, cook for longer. Once the cake is done, remove from oven and let cool on cake rack. Remove from springform pan after 20 minutes.

Orange Glaze
Juice of one medium juice
Slivers of peel from one orange, zest would probably be fine
¼ c Sugar
1 t orange blossom water

Combine sugar, orange juice and zest in a heavy bottomed saucepan and cook until thick and syrupy. Remove from heat and add orange blossom water and let cool. If it thickens further to the point of gloopiness, add a 1 T water to thin. Thinly brush glaze on cake and use remaining as a garnish on the side.

Orange Blossom Strained Yogurt (can be made ahead of time):

1.5 cup Greek yogurt
¼ cup confectioner’s sugar (icing sugar)
1 t orange blossom water

Combine ingredients until blended. Place mixture in a coffee filter and let sit in a sieve/strainer overnight in fridge until thickened. Remove from coffee filter, place in container, in fridge and cover until use.

Serving Instructions:

At this point, you can serve the cooled cake with a lightly sweetened ricotta, the Greek yoghurt described above or a crème fraiche ice cream. I think the cake is better after it has sat a day. If you are going to do that, wrap cake well in foil until you are ready to serve it.

What a week

2012-04-07T04:34:51Z

I am a little behind the eight ball this week. I have been busy learning all sorts of new things and meeting tons of new people at the where conference in San Francisco. I'm still trying to digest it all.

I have a new recipe to post tomorrow. But now, I leave you with this...

Life away.

Life back to normal.

Hello Spring.

Spring filled frittata - Kuku Sabzi for a new year

2012-03-29T05:49:16Z

A heart of barberries for you and yours.

Persian New Year continues for another few days, at least it does somewhere other than our house. I took down our Haft-sin yesterday. Other than a little garbanzo filled ajil and some gorgeous bouquets of flowers, it just looks like a typical March around here- sunny one moment and stormy the next. The dog is confused and I’m just trying to keep things together.

We hosted a few friends for Persian New Year dinner last Friday. The menu was simple – as Persian New Year is a traditional meal with green rice with herbs, salmon with two different rubs and the herbed frittata, kuku sabzi, served with more herbs and feta cheese and bread. I added a carrot cardamom salad for color and a little variation from the endless onslaught of herbs that marks No Ruz dinner.

I am not adverse to the herbiness of No Ruz, in fact, I like it. It is that idea that we will base a whole meal around an amazing array of greenery that is not easily procured in Seattle at this time of year. I long for the dill, fresh parsley, chives and cilantro you can find in the California farmer’s markets. It is a classic mismatch hypothesis – need for green stuff locally and lack of green stuff locally makes for frustrated shoppers. Luckily, my mother was able to find fresh dill and other things to make dinner happen.

I would like to share with you a recipe for Kuku Sabzi, or the herbed frittata that my friend’s swoon over and I believe I have finally conquered. The Kuku (frittata) can be made with a variety of vegetables, a little bit of meat, egg, spices and flour to bind it together. The egg is much less pronounced in the Persian kuku than in the Italian frittata, which is a boon if you have egg adverse folks in your midst. The kuku sabzi is really about bringing together a lot of the tastes of spring in one dish. It is grassy, fresh, herby and oniony without being overpowering. My mom’s recipe has changed a little bit from the time she first shared it with me and I honestly think it tastes better than ever. The recipe does call for a few unusual ingredients that you may or may not be able to procure locally. One thing is the advieh, which is spice mix that consists cardamom, cloves, ginger, rose petals, cinnamon and cumin along with other things. I think quatres epices would work fine or you can skip it entirely and it would still be tasty. Barberries (zereshk) are the other thing that makes this dish a knock out. The other component is barberries which are both beautifully red and zingy and tart where you expect them to be sweet. Others have suggested using dried cranberries as a substitute or if you have fresh cranberries languishing in your freezer, thaw and use those. If you do this make sure you chop them and soak them in water to take out some of the sugar. I just checked and both are available on Amazon or at the Sadaf site (purveyors of many Middle Eastern spices). The newest addition is the salad greens, my mom is convinced that they make a world of difference, lightening up the dish just a tad without affecting the flavor. I have to agree.

The secret ingredients are not so secret anymore.

The best thing about kuku is that it is delicious served hot or cold. I like it the next day for breakfast.

The final product.

Kuku Sabzi –serves 8

The substitutions I called for should work just fine. It is a dish that is very forgiving, and begs for variations. If you have garlic scapes around, they should be fun to add. I literally added all the leftover herbs from Friday's dinner - tarragon, basil, mint to the mix and it tasted great.

2 ½ cups leeks, the green part (washed, chopped and cleaned)
1 cup cilantro (cleaned and stems removed)
1 ½ cups parsley (cleaned and stems removed)
½ cup chives or garlic chives (cleaned)
½ cup mixed herbs (really what you have lying about – I used fresh mint, dill, basil)
1 cup mixed salad greens (mesclun or lettuce, washed and torn into small pieces)
5-6 eggs (large)
¼ cup zereshk (if not available, use ¼ cup chopped dried cranberries or ½ cup fresh chopped cranberries)
½ cup walnuts (chopped) – optional
2 T butter (softened)
1 T flour (I used rice flour)
½ t baking soda
1 t salt
Pepper to taste
½ t advieh or some sort of quatres epices

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 8x8” dish or a small casserole (1.5 quart) baker. Place zereshk in boiling water and let sit for 5 minutes, drain off water and set zereshk aside. Put leeks in food processor and process until chopped, add parsley, cilantro, chives and mixed herbs until chopped fine. Remove from processor bowl and place in 3 quart bowl. Add 1 cup mixed greens, plumped up zereshk and walnuts and mix with hands to combine. Put flour, baking soda, salt, pepper and advieh into bowl and mix well.

In a separate bowl, beat five eggs until blended. Add egg mixture to herbs and mix to combine. The mixture should not be too wet nor dry , if it seems too dry, beat another egg and add it to the herb mixture. Turn mixture into greased casserole or dish and dot with remaining butter. Place in preheated oven and check after 20 minutes. The kuku should spring back when done, you want it to be cooked thoroughly, but not over cooked. Remove from heat, let cool and then cut into squares to serve.

Enjoy a few squares of Spring on me.

Awaken and make Nooneh Berenji -Rice cookies for No Ruz

2012-03-20T18:35:42Z

Some of the mother's famous cookies. I will get to them all soon. Patience people.

The Equinox happens tonight; officially it is the start of the Persian New Year, but a tad too late in Seattle for anything but a few phone calls and kisses around the family. Tomorrow night, I will be going to my parents for a dinner replete with all the traditional foods – the kuku sabzi, the sabzi polo and the smoked white fish with herbs (mahi bah sabzi). Yes, it’s all about herbs and green, a meal that Kermit the frog would love. However, this is just the start, the holiday continues with open houses galore – “Aid Deedany”, where you go visit your relatives, the older ones first out of respect, and then you move on to see your friends far and wide. In Iran, it is a two week process, here we try and do it in a few weekends. Most of the visits are after dinner – usually tea, fruit, ajil and an array of cookies. My parents are hard to pin down during these few weeks; they are out and about doing the rounds. Good for them. Spring is a great time to start emerging from the Seattle Slumber. The Slumber is the time between November 5^th and March 20^th, when most of Seattle goes into seclusion to only come out for special occasions – winter beer releases, Husky basketball games or to piss me off in line at the airport. Now is the time for all good people of Seattlandia to get out of your house and attempt to become one with your friends and neighbors, use this as a great excuse. I miss you all, really.

My mom makes a nice array of cookies for the holiday (pictured above). Persians are not big on chocolate, nor cheesecake or any strange concoction that we are likely to call dessert at the big table. They are big into orange blossom, rose water, honey, cardamom, almonds and walnuts along with delicate fruit flavorings. Some of their inspiration comes from the French with pate au choux and mille feuilles, but mostly are just plain Persian.

Cookies getting ready to hit the oven.

One of my favorites is “nooneh berenji” or rice flour cookies. These are amazingly delicate and powerful little cookies that melt in your mouth. You would have no idea that they are rice flour, they have a nice subtle rose water flavor with a little cardamom added for punch. They do not travel well, but they are worth picking up at a Persian grocery store when you can find them. If you don’t have one around, try making them. A plus is that they are gluten free. Since I am not a fan of making things with ingredients that are not easily found within a reasonable roaming radius of home, these are pretty swell. It does require learning how to clarify butter, which is something I had never done before, but a New Year means learning new things, doesn’t it?

Fancy cookie press made my Mr. S.

Nooneh Berenji – Rice Cookies topped with poppy seeds
Makes 5 dozen

This recipe requires two things – one is learning how to clarify butter and the other is to have a wooden cookie stamp. If you don’t have one on hand, I would just roll cookies into a ball, make a tiny indentation and then press the poppy seeds into the indentation. My mom has a little collection of the cookie stamps, they are made from wood, a husband of a friend of hers likes to make them. You can find glass and pottery ones at Amazon, Williams-Sonoma and some specialty cookware shops around your neck of the woods The trick is not to press down too hard, you want the cookies about ¼” thick after stamping.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups (3 sticks, ¾ lb.) unsalted butter
3 egg yolks
1 – 1 ¼ cup white rice flour (portion them as one cup with a ¼ cup measure in reserve)
1 cup confectioner’s (powdered sugar)
1/3 cup rosewater
½ t cardamom
1/4 cup blue poppy seeds

Melt butter over medium heat, let cool. Skim the foam from the top of the melted butter and then either carefully pour to avoid transferring the solids at the bottom to a clean container or sieve the rest of the melted butter through cheesecloth lined strainer. If you are still unsure, please refer to David Lebovitz’s awesome tutorial on the subject.

Prep a baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat. Preheat oven to 325 F.

By hand or in a mixer, combine butter with egg yolks added one at a time. Really you are not creaming because the butter is not really in a solid form, but you do want them well combined. Next add rose water to butter and egg mixture. Mix until combined. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients together, starting with one cup of rice flour and the confectioner’s sugar and cardamom. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix at a low speed until combined. If the dough seems sticky or wet, add additional rice flour by the tablespoonful until a little more manageable and easily handled without overworking the dough. Remove dough from bowl and start making 3/4” ball from dough and test cookie press to make an imprint. If the imprint works without cracking the dough, then the dough is the perfect consistency. If there is too much flour, add a tablespoon of water, and if it is too sticky, add a little bit of rice flour.

Once you are happy with the consistency you can start making cookies. If you are at a good stopping point, wrap the dough up in saran wrap or a zip lock bag and place in fridge for up to two days. Let come to room temperature before starting to make the cookies.

To make cookies - start rolling the dough into balls, place onto prepared baking sheet with 2” between each cookie and start stamping. Press or sprinkle 10-15 poppy seeds (is that a smidgen) in the center of each cookie. Check around 8 to 10 minutes, depending on your oven, once they begin to get a little golden on the edges, take out and cool on a cookie sheet. Once cooled, store in a sealed container for up to two weeks.

Persian New Year -Ajil or trail mix for hearty fire jumpers

2012-03-14T23:13:57Z

It is all about the flowers, spring, purity, life affirming and the cookies that my mom makes.

Persian New Year is next week. I haven’t blogged about it because I haven’t been very good about keeping up with the biggest challenge to starting the New Year, which is cleaning up your messes from the previous year.

That sounds really vague doesn’t it?

Really, the few weeks leading up to New Year are pretty much the same – clean house, settle debts, make lots of yummy food, prepare altar and get your life in order. This year, this has evaded me, partially due to travel, partially due to inertia, and mostly due to ennui.

All together it makes for a muddled end to one year and no real clarity to the next.

I think there is no way I can catch up and make it all spic and span by the Spring Equinox. I’m just going to settle for a 70% solution and call it good.

Makeshift haft-sin or altar from New year 2006. We were in Rome, so we winged it. Looks pretty darn good, IMHO.

The last Tuesday night before the New Year is a big deal in Iran – Chahar Shambeh Souri. I call it the Super bowl pre-game, the Rudolph the Red nose Reindeer special before Christmas of Persian New Year. You build a bonfire in the street, on the beach, in your backyard and you jump over the flames cleansing your health from a pallid and jaundiced to a vigorous and life affirming pink or red. In my recounting, I call it get rid of the bad juju and move on. While we can’t always to go to those great lengths of bonfire makings, we try and jump over a candle at home.

The best part of the celebration is the Persian Snack mix that goes along with the event, because gathering wood, making a fire and jumping over it takes a lot of effort.

This year's ajil, the mixture varies year to year, but its all so good.

Ajil, or snack mix is sold all over Iran and is a staple of any Iranian’s diet. Much like the GORP mixes that are life sustaining foods of coach airline flyers and hikers around the US, Ajil is nutritious and easy to make. It keeps for a long time and it is hard not to take great handfuls of it at a time. It calls for a nice mix of salty and sweet components that balance well off each other. Everyone has a little different riff on the mix, but it pretty much consists of equal proportions of various nuts and dried fruits. My mom’s mix this year consists of hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, dried chickpeas, sultanas, raisins and dried tiny figs. In the past she has added dried cranberries and apricots, but we’re more likely to stick to the standard mix these days.

Ajil for the last Wednesday before the New Year – Ajil Chahar Shambeh Souri

This is a pretty casual recipe, a little of this, a little of that, no need to be precise with measurements, but proportions are important. Nuts are all shelled; no one needs to work hard at eating this stuff.

Makes 9.5 cups

1.5 cup walnut halves
1.5 cup almonds (unsalted)
1.5 cup hazelnuts (I like them toasted, unsalted)
1 cup pistachio nuts (salted)
1 cup dried chickpeas. lightly salted (available at Middle Eastern markets)
1 cup sultanas (golden raisins)
1 cup flame raisins (the bigger, the better)
1 cup currants

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl until well combined. The chickpeas tend to fall to the bottom of the bowl, so tell your guests to scoop all the way to the bottom to get the proportion of sweet and salty together. My TH leaves the chickpeas behind, go figure. If you have picky eaters, you can leave them out. Store leftovers in a sealed bag for up to a month, if they last that long.

Ibarra chocolate cake - how patience pays off

2012-03-08T00:01:14Z

The cake, so fancy and terribly easy.

There is something about the concept of try and try again. Sometimes you feel like you are hitting yourself over the head over and over again and sometimes all that trying pays off. You finally achieve that handstand in Yoga class (not me), a rock skips six times before sinking, or you conquer the flakey pie crust that tastes good.

No, this is not about pie. This post is about trying.

When it felt like my world was collapsing around me, I decided to start doing other things for self-preservation. I met some fabulous food bloggers and writers through Keren Brown, one was Jenise Silva (@licorous) from Twitter. She and I had a few of the same interests, community gardening, awesome restaurants and canning. I would see her on and off, she asked me to write a post for Canvolution and then she started talking about contests.

I hate contests, partially because I hate the attention and stress, partially because I hate to lose. However, the opportunity to challenge myself to make the perfect food item was intriguing; in this case it was a contest pairing pie versus cake. There are pie people in the world and there are cake people, you really can’t be on the fence with this one. Either you stand firm with the precise yet crusty pie camp or the crumby delectable cake camp. I love pie, but really, I like pie filling. The pie crust, while it has been bane of my existence, is usually what I leave to the side. I have a few friends who make awesome pies and pie crusts and for this I am truly grateful, but I stand firmly with cake.

Cake you say? Cake is something that brings me great joy. It is one of the first things you learn how to make, either as a quick cake with a few ingredients or a mix, which once you add all the things required – egg, oil, water, you might have just made a scratch cake.

I love the crumb of a cake – the mouth feel of a dense yet delicate cake. I am not into the fudgy moist cake with coyingly sweet frosting, I like my cakes a little on the dry side and with an appropriate 4 parts cake to frosting ratio. In fact, I like my cakes unfrosted, so I can enjoy the crumb and taste without the noise of confectioner’s sugar and butter.

And no, I am not a hoarder of the frosting rose.

What does this have to do with cake or when the hell are you getting to how this all fits into cake v. pie? Right, let me tell you.

In 2010, Jenise put on a great contest of Seattle bakers, who each selected a camp and went on to make their best example of a cake or pie to be judged by a group of food lovers and professional bakers. I was intimidated, but charged. I made my standby cake – chocolate cake with a mocha buttercream frosting, but I this time I paid rapt attention to detail. I made another kind of cake and had my colleagues try it, and then paired them next to each other. When the contest time came around, I felt I was on my game. I did not account for hot weather, uneven baking and inability to make a smooth frosting. Oh yeah, that by the time the judges got to my cake, they would be stuffed.

The very full of cake and pie judges - 2011.

It was good, but compared to the rest, it was not great.

When cake goes bad, from the Westinghouse cookbook.

But I learned a lot, I learned about my oven, rotating cake pans, and patience. It was a good experience for me which I repeated a few more times that year, by entering and losing pie contests galore.

Le cake, two layers, with ganache and marmalade between the layers.

When the Cake v. Pie rematch returned in 2011, I was on my game. I decided to try something different and used a recipe that I loved and was a little different. It was a gluten free nut torte (named a cake) that uses flavors found in Mexican chocolate – orange and cinnamon and combines it with bittersweet chocolate and beautifully toasted almonds. The recipe comes from the Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe Cookbook. The recipe works well as long as you are careful folding in egg whites and not overbeating the mixture. It is not an elegant creation. It has very little lift as it is has no leavening, but the taste is wonderful. The cake turned out great, I managed to get it to the site in one piece. I hung around a bit, but since we had dinner guests, I skeedadled out there before they started judging the cakes. Partially out of the necessity to feed four humans and three hounds, but because I hate to lose.

Some of the contestants representing team cake.

And you know something, I won 2nd Place in the cake category and became a better baker in the process. WIN. WIN.

Ibarra Chocolate Torte - Adapted from the Coyote Cafe Cookbook by Mark Miller, Ten Speed Press, 1999

Makes 12 servings.

Note: This recipe makes one layer of the cake. If you wish to get all fancy and make it as a two layer cake, then by all means do so. I myself am not comfortable doubling this recipe, so I make each layer separately. You may wish to throw caution to the wind and try it.

Almond Cake:

1 T cinnamon - yes one Tablespoon
zest of 2 oranges
4 T (2 oz) bittersweet chocolate grated
1 1/2 C unblanched almonds, toasted and ground ( I use the ground almonds at trader joes)
4 eggs separated
1/2 C sugar
2 T fresh orange juice
2 T Grand Marnier
2 T seville marmalade, thin cut
Rice flour for dusting

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease, rice flour and paper an 8-9" cake pan. Combine cinnamon, orange zest, grated chocolate and ground almonds in a mixing bowl and set aside. Beat egg yolks with 1/4 C sugar; stir in orange juice and set aside.

In another bowl, beat egg whites to soft peaks while gradually adding 1/4 C sugar. Stir egg yolks and orange juice into the chocolate almond mixture, then fold in half the beaten egg whites. Blend well, and gently fold in remaining egg whites.

Spread mixture evenly in prepared cake pan and bake for 25-35 minutes or until cake pulls away from sides of pan. Let cool for 10 minutes and invert cake onto cake rack.

Warm marmalade until runny.

When cool, paint with Grand Marnier and brush on marmalade, let set for 10 minutes and cover with glaze. If you plan on adding the second layer, do it now, cover the repeat the grand marnier wash on the top, but skip the marmalade.

Chocolate Glaze

10 T (5 oz) bittersweet chocolate
1 T (1/2 oz) unsweetened chocolate
3/4 C softened butter
1 T corn syrup
1/4 cup chopped candied orange peel.

Place both chocolates, 1/2 C butter, corn syrup and in a double boiler over simmering (not boiling) water. Stir gently until just melted. Remove from heat, and stir in remaining 1/4 C butter. The glaze is ready to pour when it reaches the consistency of maple syrup (between 86°-96°).

Place cake rack over pan or wax paper, pour glaze over cake, tilting to coat evenly. Decorate with candied orange peel if desired.

Gourmet Game Night - Walnut Sables with Maple Walnut Cream

2012-03-06T18:52:25Z

I love my Cookbook Club, unfortunately the Cookbook Club schedule and mine have not collided for the past few months, and I have missed some great discussions and feasts. As luck had it, I would be home in January. In order to bring some sophistication to 2012, the powers that be decided it was time to jazz things up and have a cocktail party with fancy dresses and shoes and adult beverages.The book we chose to highlight was Gourmet Game Night by Cynthia Nims. Cynthia, a northwest native is a is a well known chef and cookbook author, with quite a portfolio of cookbooks to date. Gourmet Game Night highlights finger food, easy to assemble, eat and manage when you are holding a royal flush at your monthly poker game.

The book also contains all sorts imaginative recipes come some yummy adult beverages will knock your Laboutins off, but can be adapted for the abstaining ones in your party.

So, the royal we donned our fancy dresses - sequins, sparkles, lace and stilletos for a night of gab, sitting by the pool, eating and dissecting all of our great discoveries. As usual, I stuck my head in the sand about the dressing up part. I never think I have a nice outfit to wear to these events, always happy to be clad in pencil jeans, black sweater and flats. This time I delved deep into my closet and found an awesome lace skirt I hadn't worn since my friend's 40th (He'll be 47 this year) and a cap sleved cashmere sweater. This was paired with a nice pair of Cythnia Rowely lace stilletos and a
girly clutch, contacts and make up suitable for Vegas. I thought I cleaned up pretty well.

As for the food, I couldn't decide on what to make. I had been so bogged down with my AMS meeting that had consumed the whole month of January and had about 12 hours to make a decision. Everything that I had origininally eyed had been taken, so I took another deeper look and found two things that intrigued. One was a stuffed mushroom recipe (to be posted later) and the other
was a cookie. The cookie was a sure thing because desserts are not always plentiful and I had all the ingredients on hand (WIN).

So, folks, I present to you a delicious, partially time intensive but oh so worth your while cookie that
you will end up adding to your repetorie when you want something elegant, not too sweet and not chocolately.

Walnut Sables with Maple Walnut Cream

In her notes, Cynthia says that cookies taste better a day later, and I agree. Let them fully cool before
filling them and after filled store in a sealed container in the fridge and take out a 30 minutes before serving, as if they will last more than a day. Her original recipe calls for using a 2" round cookie cutter. I used my 1 1/2" and made the same amount of cookies. As long as there are two cookies per sandwich you'll be okay.

Prep time - 30 min for dough and frosting

Active time - rolling baking filling - 60 minutes

Eating time - pretty quickly

Walnut Sables
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup chopped toasted walnuts
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 t salt (I used sea salt)
1/2 c unsalted butter, cut into cubes
3 egg yolks
1 t vanilla extract

Maple Walnut Cream
1/4 cup unsalted butter at room temp
3/4 cup powdered sugar
3 T finely chopped toasted walnuts
1 1/2 T maple syrup (I use grade B, or dark, it has a much better flavor)

Toast walnuts, Preheat oven to 300 F. Place walnuts on cookie sheet and bake until they are fragant, about 10 minutes. You don't want them to burn, but you need them to to toast enough to release some of their nutty goodness. Remove from oven and let cool. I do this by removing them from the cookie sheet and putting them on a plate, to cool faster. When they are finally cool, you can work with them.

Left over toasted walnuts are delicious on oatmeal, just saying.

Place walnuts and whole wheat flour into food processor fitted with metal blade and whizz until walnuts are finely chopped. Add remaining flour, confectioner's sugar, and salt and process until well blended. Add butter, egg yolks, and vanilla and pulse until well blended and if you were to stop the processor and take press the dough together it would hold together like a shortbread. Turn the dough out onto a piece of parchment or saran wrap, and press together into a flat disk. Wrap and place in fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes.

In the while, make the walnut cream. In a small bowl, place the softened butter and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Stir until combined, continue to add the sugar into the butter until well incorporated. Next stir in the finely chopped walnuts and maple syrup. The mixture should look like frosting. Refrigerate until use.

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Take dough out of fridge and let sit for 10 to 15 minutes to soften. Roll out dough onto a floured surface (I use parchment on a cutting board), to about 1/4". Using your cookie cutter, 1 to 1 1/2" circle, cut out circles and place onto a cookie sheet that has been lined with parchment paper. Fill up the cookie sheets with the cookie cut outs, leaving 1" between each cookie. Reform scraps of dough and refrigerate to firm up if the cookie dough has become to soft to work. Bake cookies in the middle racks of the oven for 10 minutes, or until lightly browned. I checked at 5 minutes and switched trays from the racks and turned the trays from front to back. Remove from cookie sheets onto a wire rack to cool. These cookies are very delicate - sandy like a sable, so be gentle until they cool.

Continue rolling out dough and repeating process until you have used up all the dough. I ended up with another cookie sheet and about 50 cookies total.

At this point, you can take your cooled cookies and place into a air tight container for a few days until you are ready to fill them.

When it is time to fill them, remove filling from refrigerator and let it come to room temperature. The filling is like frosting and should be easily spread between the sable cookies. Place a grape sized amount of filling onto one cookie and then place another cookie on top and press down gently, use your finger or a napkin to smooth off the filling that may have oozed out the sides.

Let sit an hour before storing.Leftovers, as if you'll have any, should be stored in an air tight container.

Makes 25 cookies.

Vietnamese Coffee Jello - or how to kick yourself in the butt

2012-03-04T05:51:15Z

Note: I am trying to get back into blogging. I have spent too much time wondering how people perceive me and not spending enough time not giving a whack and doing things I love. My dear Rebecca Nelson of the Ravenna Blog asked me to post a recipe for a Community Board Newsletter and while walking the dog and wracking my addled brain, this popped to mind.

Coffee and gelatin, builds strong brains and hooves.

This winter, I was joking with some of my Twitter friends about gelled desserts. I had posted a picture of a sublime trio of poached quince, quince jelly and shortbread from one of my favorite restaurants in London, St. John Bread and Wine. The quince was offset by a nice whipped cream and the combination of all the flavors and textures worked well together. A Twitter conversation started about Jell-O molds. It turns out that some people actually use them instead of displaying them on their kitchen walls. Imagine that. My intent was to experiment with all sorts of gelled recipes in the month of January, but like all things, life got in the way. I was able to convince TH that gelled desserts were very important and she suffered through many different experiments. My best effort was a cherry juice jelly; my worst was a green tea lemon jelly that looked like the slime we used to buy in the little green garbage cans at the toy store.

Coffee jelly is a classic New England dessert – leftover coffee is saved, when you have enough, you heat it up, add some gelatin, sugar and in a few hours, you have created a thrifty light dessert that uses up your leftovers and nothing goes to waste. Serve with some whipped cream on the side, and you can win over the most skeptical of critics. Better yet, you can use decaf and they would never know.

I decided to see where else I could take this. I found a great recipe for one of my favorite drinks turned into a gelled dessert from The Food Librarian. I have enjoyed Vietnamese coffee -a sweet, strong coffee served either hot or cold when dining out, but never tried making it at home. The coffee is traditionally made using a drip filter to which sweetened condensed milk is then stirred into the coffee. It is a great substitute for dessert when dining out. It also lends itself well to gelling. The recipe is quick to make, requires very few ingredients and is sophisticated enough to serve at an elegant dinner party.

Vietnamese Coffee Jelly - adapted from The Food Librarian– serves 6 – 8

Active time – 15 minutes

Chilling time – 4 hours

Ingredients

2.5 cups strong brewed coffee (French Roast is fine) – divided (1/2 cup and 2 cups) – Decaf or Regular coffee

1 14 oz. can or squeeze bottle of Sweetened Condensed milk (I use Trader Joe’s)

3 packets (3/4 oz or 21 grams) of unflavored gelatin

To serve – unsweetened whipped cream

Instructions

Place the ½ cup of cold coffee into a 2 quart bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin over the coffee and let it sit for 10 minutes to bloom (or enlarge) before getting incorporated into a hot liquid.

During this time, heat the remaining 2 cups of coffee (don’t boil, but does need to be hot)

After gelatin has bloomed, add heated coffee to gelatin and stir in the sweetened condensed milk, stir to make sure all is dissolved.

Pour into a 9x13” Pyrex (glass) baking dish, or a ceramic bowl (1 quart). Refrigerate for 4 hours or until firm.

Remove from refrigerator. If in baking dish, cut into squares and serve. In a Jell-O mold or ceramic pudding basin, run a little warm water around the outside of the mold or bowl to loosen and then turn out onto a plate. Cut into serving pieces.

Notes – can add a touch of cinnamon or nutmeg to coffee to give it a little bit of spice

Gluten free