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".