N&J Take on Pancakes

J. said that if we got an iron griddle as a wedding gift, he will commit to making pancake breakfasts once per quarter.  When R. & J. got us that griddle, it was time to deliver.

Since we had some buttermilk in the fridge from making our favorite waffles, we went with this recipe:

http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/classic-buttermilk-pancakes.aspx

The resulting pancakes were super fluffy, from the presence of two leavening agents in the recipe.
J. found it hard to get the temperature balance right on the new griddle to have the pancakes cooked all the way through before they burn.  But, he seemed to have found a good handle on it towards the end.

The pancakes were delicious:

We hope to repeat this experiment sooner than three months from now.

Remade on:

2015-01-17

2015-01-31 with half goat milk

Potato Crisps with some of the works

Inspired by our Smitten Kitchen cookbook, we made these:

https://boxingoctopus.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/smitten-saturdays-baked-potato-crisps-with-the-works/

We held back on many of the 'works' due to lactose intolerance.  They still worked out fairly well.

Some lessons learned:

- almond milk cheese doesn't melt, at all

- it's better to add garlic to these after the flipping step

Cranberry Sauce

We made cranberry sauce from scratch this year with some unusual ingredients.  We got the recipe from B.

This dish is inherently not photogenic:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
6 cups fresh cranberries
the zest of one lemon or 1/2 orange
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1 full bottle Pinot Noir or other dry red wine (we used our wedding wine)
1.5 cups of sugar

1 tsp of Chinese five-spice powder

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add cranberries, zest and fresh ginger; stir until cranberries begin to burst, 3-5 minutes.

Add wine and sugar; boil until mixture is reduced, stirring occasionally, about 30 minutes.

Remove from heat Add five-spice powder.

It was so delicious J. was just eating it with a spoon, by itself.

Remade on:

2014-11-28 for Thanksgiving, Part 2
2014-12-20 for smoked turkey w/L. & Z.

N&J Shortbread Cookies

One of our awesome wedding gift was a 3D printed custom cookie cutter in the shape of our wedding logo.  The gifter, our bridesmaid B., is refusing to tell us where she got it made.  Nonetheless, we quickly put it to use on the only cutter-required cookie style in our repertoire -- shortbread!

This is the recipe we used: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/shortbread-cookies-recipe.html.

Here they are in the oven (on the silicone mats, also from B.):

And here they are decorated with chocolate with the help of our bridesman D.:

They were amazingly delicious and fun to eat!

Balsamic and Beer-Braised Short Ribs with Parsnip Purée

Continuing our theme of "cooking with the wedding gifts", we next come to the big red cast iron dutch oven. This was a gift from M. and C. (n.b., a different "M. and C." from that mentioned in the previous post). I wanted one of these because the Internet suggested it was the appropriate tool for making braised short ribs, and I have long wanted to be the sort of person who can make braised short ribs. The recipe followed was that of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, and has been transcribed in blogs already.

She suggests the use of a dark beer, such as a black lager. After staring at the Whole Foods beer selection for 20 minutes, I settled on Old Rasputin, a Russian Imperial Stout, as our braising beer.

After 3 hours in the above pot, the meat was starting to fall off the bone, as desired. In all likelihood a bit more cooking would not have hurt. We elected to perform the optional extra step in the recipe wherein the ribs are briefly oven roasted after the slow cooking while the sauce is reduced on the stove. I suspect both were worth it.

The ribs were served on top of a parsnip purée, which was worthwhile treat in its own right thanks to the addition of horseradish. We deviated from the recipe here in that we used Lactose-free kefir in lieu of heavy cream.

In all, a highly satisfactory dish. Next time, the one thing I'd do differently is try it with a lower IBU beer.

Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies à la The Science of Good Cooking

After the wedding, things didn't turn out like in this movie. Rather, we came home and fell back to the old standby of chocolate chip cookies. M. and C. had given us some quality chocolate to make use of, so it seemed like the right choice. I pulled out The Science of Good Cooking to see what it had to say on the subject. Never lacking in swagger, the book promised a recipe for the "ultimate" chocolate chip cookies. A perfunctory Google reveals that they also are known as "perfect" in other America's Test Kitchen publications.

The signature twist of this recipe is probably the use of browned butter. Just as the name suggests, such butter is created by heating non-brown butter on the stove until it changes to the target color. The recipe promised that this would produce a nutty, toffelike flavor in the ultimate cookie.

While the resulting cookies were consumed with pleasure, they probably fell short of expectations. I found them a little too flat, and not quite chewy enough. The internet suggests that flatness can be a consequence of butter that melts too soon. Yet, melting the butter right away was the whole point of this recipe!

I suppose that recipes that bill themselves as producing an "ultimate" or "perfect" product will never live up to my expectations -- that's some serious hype.

Says N., "They were still quite tasty".

Blueberry Crumb Cake

We're terrible newlyweds-to-be, since we've been opening up our wedding presents as we get them.  We're even starting to use some of the goodies before the wedding takes place.

For example, our friends AH^2 got us the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, and we couldn't wait to dig into it.  Since it's blueberry season, we decided to make this blueberry cake, instead of the usual brownie type object.

Full recipe is here: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2014/07/blueberry-crumb-cake/

It was yummy.

Kale Salad with Radishes and Lemon Dressing

We first experienced this salad when our friends H. & E. brought it to a potluck on a ski weekend.  We asked for the recipe and replicated it, working in H.'s modifications and adding some of our own.

This is the recipe that inspired us: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Kale-Salad-with-Dates-Parmesan-and-Almonds-51137020

Our Modifications:

• no dates
• add radishes
• 3x the dressing
• garlic instead of shallots
• add bacon bits
• add heirloom tomato 
• skip the parmesan

Basically, we changed everything, except for the idea of soaking kale in lemon-honey mixture.

It was delicious!

Remade on:

2014-06-14 for BBQ Sparks w/o bacon

Apricot Cobbler

We volunteered with Village Harvest again this weekend, yielding a shoe box full of slightly imperfect apricots:

We've decided that a cobbler is the most effective method to use them up.  Here's a step in the prep process:

This is the recipe we stuck to: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Apricot-Cobbler-105131

The results were delicious!

Spiced Brownies

When J. is feeling stressed, he likes to bake brownies.  Today, after figuring out the wording on our wedding invites, he tried out a new recipe:

http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/09/the-baked-brownie-spiced-up/

N. insisted he add some walnuts on top to make them 'healthier'.

They were delicious!

White Bread

Our friend B. posted a picture of her bread dough rising on fb.  This inspired J. to try to make bread...from scratch.  We were short on time, so opted so the shortest and simpliest recipe we could find.  It came from our Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook (so 50s housewife!):

Here's how the result looked:

It was edible, but not amazing.  Conclusion: let's leave bread making to the professionals.

Lentils w/Spinach and Artichokes

A long time ago N. got a copy of 'Help my Apartment Has a Dinning Room' cookbook, designed for those aspiring to host their first dinner parties.  Now, we finally got around to cooking something from it, as part of our cook-one-thing-from-each-cookbook-we-own initiative.

Ways we deviated from the recipe:
- skipped the onion, of course
- did 1.5x lentils and 2x spicies
- put in the juice of a whole lemon
- added chopped artichoke hearts from a TJ's can

Remade on:
06-16-2014 with sausage:

09-05-2014, also with sausage

Bittersweet Decadence Cookies

We somehow ended up with a copy of The Wall Street Journal.  In their lifestyle section, they had a piece on fancy chocolate.  J. was inspired to make these cookies:

We used two different varieties of Scharfenberger baking chocolate bars.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304431104579551731399758384

The result was pretty amazing.

Vegan Lentil Salad w/Cardamom

Tasty lentil salad:

http://bevcooks.com/2013/01/lentil-salad-with-roasted-red-peppers-parsley-and-almonds/

We used black lentils.  Served this with roast chicken.

Roast Chicken, again

After this effort, I feel like I'm finally starting to make some progress on Roast Chicken. The surfeit of cooking blog posts on the topic all talk about how perfectly crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside their chicken is. I've always fallen short of that ideal. This was in the right direction, though! And it was all rather straightforward, too.

Prep:

What I did:

- Salted the chicken pretty heavily (using Trader Joe's Sea Salt, in case that mattered), placed the bird in the roasting dish, and placed the dish in the refrigerator.
- Went to the store, did miscellaneous things, etc. I wasn't paying close attention but suspect it amounted to 2 hours worth of salting time for the chicken.
- Used paper towels to remove as much moisture from the skin as possible. I did this until the skin really started to feel dry.
- Cut slits in the skin over the breasts divided about 3 T. of butter into slices and distributed them on top of the meat.
- Peeled and crushed a head of garlic into a bowl and mixed it with 1-2 t. of black pepper.
- Applied the garlic and pepper mixture to the skin
- Poured a thin layer of olive oil over the whole thing -- probably 3 seconds worth of light pouring.

Cooking

I used the "Classic Roast Chicken" recipe in The Science of Good Cooking for time and temperature guidelines, and mostly followed them to the letter. As should be clear from the picture, the bird was cooked in a V-rack.

My steps:

- Preheat to 400
- Cook the chicken for 15 minutes
- Flip the bird, then cook for another 15 minutes
- Flip again, then cook for another 20 minutes

After this, I was having my usual self-doubt about whether I had cooked it for long enough. Knowing that I have more often undercooked than overcooked meat -- and the extent to which people are put off by undercooked poultry -- I put it back in for another 5-10 minutes.

After letting it rest for 15 minutes, I cut it up, and was pleasantly surprised to have attained a roast chicken with both crisp skin and juices bubbling out when I made my first cut. So, I'm beginning to suspect that the salting, then dry method so beloved by food bloggers may have something to it -- though I didn't let it hang out nearly as long as is often prescribed.

Now, I just need to learn how to carve such an animal in a manner more dignified than my usual caveman style.

Flourless Chocolate Cake

The year we were invited to a potluck Passover seder, which calls for flourless desserts.  Since J. loves to cook w/chocolate, we went for this:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/01/shf-27-chocolat-1/

The seder was lovely and had too much food, as potlucks often do.  The density of this cake led to very little of it actually being consumed.  We were sent home with the remainder.  Luckily, we were invited to another casual potluck Passover seder the following weekend.  Guess what we brought?

This cake is rich, intense, and can cover your social obligations at two potlucks!

Indian Kale

In keeping up our goal of cooking one dish from each issue of Sunset we receive, we made this:

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/winter-greens-curry-50400000133934/

We used pre-chopped kale from TJ.  The dish did not impress for several reasons:
- the kale stems were still in
- the seasoning was overwhelming and way too sweet

Chocolate Chip Macadamia Cookies

Recipe from The Science of Good Cooking Book.

The results were not as chewy as we were hoping for, but tasty nonetheless.

Seasoned Bok Choy

We had some bok choy laying around.  This is what we did with it:

http://www.food.com/recipe/the-best-sauteed-bok-choy-280807

Kale, Sausage, Beans

Tonight we made yet another incarnation of what's becoming our quick weeknight standard:

This stir fry includes:

- kale
- beans
- sausage
- garlic & other spices
- whatever's been kicking around the fridge too long (today it was kalamata olives)

Remade:
01-25-2014 for dinner at David's house - used purple kale
06-08-2014 enhanced with red peppers, lemon juice, and bacon fat: