Vegetarian Enchiladas ala Gourmet

It’s August in Central Virginia which means that there’s fresh local produce in spades.  I try to take advantage.  Over the weekend I went to my two favorite farmers’ markets and picked up some zucchini, squash, corn, sweet onions, hot peppers, and tomatoes amongst other things.  There’s also eggplant, mixed baby tomatoes and local goat cheese for another day.

My giant Gourmet cookbook is one of my favorite resources for meal planning.  I’ve had a bookmark on this recipe for vegetarian enchiladas for a while now.  Tonight I decided to tackle it.  It’s  more than a full page in the big book, so I figured it would be a commitment.  You make your own sauce and filling from scratch.  We’ll get to that in a sec.  Here’s what it looks like.

Safe to say we’re out of the land of 20 minute meals for tonight.  I’m sure this was a lot faster for Ruth Reichl and staff, but it took me two hours.  I made the sauce and the filling and then took a beer break before I took on the tortillas and assembly.  The recipe does mention that you can make the sauce and filling and do the rest on another day.  Believe me, I thought about it.

Not only did it take me two hours to make this, it took me another 30 minutes to wash the dishes and mostly clean up the mess.  Anyone else play kitchen jenga with their dishes?

Well, now that I’ve completely discouraged you from ever doing this, let’s take a look at the recipe.  I’ll give you some shortcuts as we go.

You make the sauce first.  It’s a green chili white sauce and it’s super good.  The good news is that you don’t have to do much chopping.  All the stuff you’d have to chop – onions, garlic, poblanos – goes in a blender or food processor.  Then you cook it down, add the cream and set it aside.  It take about 15 minutes to do.  I did roast and peel my own poblanos.  You don’t have to do that.  Get some in a jar if you want. Just make sure they aren’t pickled.  Or, if you want to take out the heat just use a can of diced green chiles instead.

I did substitute for the Mexican crema.  You have a few options.  You can use sour cream with a little extra water.  I didn’t have any.  I did have heavy cream.  If I’d had buttermilk I would have added that to the cream.  Well, when you don’t have buttermilk you squeeze lemon juice into milk and let it sour for a bit.  So, I squeezed some lime juice into the heavy cream and it worked just fine.

Here’s what you need (for my version):

• 2 T vegetable oil
• 2 poblano chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded and chopped
• 1/3 C chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 1/4 C water
• 1 C heavy cream with juice of 1/2 lime squeezed in

Here’s what you do:

• Put the chiles, onion, garlic and water in a food processor and process until smooth
• Heat oil in heavy skillet (cast iron if you have it) until it shimmers
• Carefully pour in the chile mixture
  • Seriously, be careful.  You’re pouring water into hot oil.  SPLATTER!
• Cook about 8 minutes, until much of the water cooks out
• Add the cream
• Remove from the heat and set aside

Sauce done.  Whew!  Congrats!

Ok, on to the filling.  I think you could use any number of vegetables in this.  I mostly used the ones in the recipe, but I added a can of black beans for protein.  I also added a package of Goya seasoning because I always use it when I cook black beans.  And, because it’s August and the tomatoes are amazing, I used fresh instead of canned.

There’s nothing difficult about making this filling, but there’s some real chopping involved.  That took me a while.  You could save yourself a lot of time buying frozen chopped vegetables.  I don’t think you’d sacrifice a ton in flavor.  And you’re cooking the vegetables until they’re tender so the texture should work out okay as well.

You can see that I missed the part in the instructions where you cook the onions and garlic first.  I had everything in one bowl and had to try to separate out the squash and corn.  Oh well.  I probably didn’t even need to bother.

For the filling, here’s what you need:

• 2 T vegetable oil
• 1/2 sweet onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 package Goya seasoning
• 2 small zucchini, diced
• 1 small yellow squash, diced
• kernels from 2 ears of corn
• 1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
• 2 medium tomatoes, diced

Here’s what you do:

• Heat the oil in a large pan
• Cook onion, garlic and seasoning until tender, about 5 minutes
• Add zucchini, squash, and corn – cook another 7-8 minutes
• Add black beans and tomatoes, with the juice
• Cook over medium/high heat, stirring frequently, until most of the liquid is absorbed – about 10 minutes
  • TIP:  if you’re adding salt, do that at the beginning of this step.  The salt will pull moisture out of the vegetables and you need to cook that out.
• Pour the mixture in a bowl and set aside

Filling done.  Getting closer!

BEER BREAK!

Now you’re ready to put it all together.  Do all the tortillas first.  Your hands get super messy once you start filling and rolling enchiladas so you don’t want to be back and forth to the pan on the stove.

Set up a little station with your sauce in a shallow dish; your baking dish; and your filling.  When you roll them make sure you put the seam on the bottom so they stay rolled.  You could absolutely do this in layers instead.  It would be quicker for sure.  And I found that the cheese covered up the enchiladas so I couldn’t see where to cut them anyway.  It was a mess on the plate.

Here we go.  Here’s what you need:

• 10-15 corn tortillas
• 2-3 T vegetable oil
• a baking sheet
• paper towels for blotting

Here’s what you do:

• Heat the oil in a heavy skillet until it shimmers
  • If you warm your sauce and then transfer it to a shallow dish, you can clean up that pan and use it for this
• Place one tortilla in the pan, turn it once, remove it to the baking sheet
  • This should take 4-6 seconds
• Repeat until all the tortillas are soft

Tortillas done.  One more step!

You’re in the home stretch now!  You’re going to sauce the tortillas; fill them; roll them; and cover them in cheese.

Here’s what you do:

• Preheat your oven to 450F degrees
• Place a tortilla in the dish with the sauce and flip once
• Move the tortilla to the baking dish
• Put 1/4-1/3 C of filling in the middle of the tortilla
• Fold one side of the tortilla over the filling
• Roll the tortilla and filling over onto the remaining section of tortilla so the seam is on the bottom of the dish
• Repeat until you run out of space in the dish
• Pack them in tightly!

• Cover with shredded cheese – I used pepper jack
• Place the dish in the over and bake 15 minutes until the cheese is brown and bubbly

And that’s it!  Two hours later and you’re done.  Or take those shortcuts and cut that time in half!

I couldn’t see where to cut the enchiladas so it’s a wreck on the plate, but it’s awfully good.  As hard as I worked on this I’m really glad to have leftovers.  Honestly I probably wouldn’t do this for myself again, but I might do it if company was coming!

So Special Seafood, Corn and Chorizo Risotto

We’re still getting settled in to the puppy routine here so relaxation isn’t really on the agenda.  Still, I needed to do something to reward myself for enduring the nights of wandering into the yard at all hours in my pjs whispering, “Go potty!  Go potty!”  And to remind myself that my life is still my own, not the property of the tiny terror.

(She really is amazingly cute and sweet and will charm the socks right off ya’).

Risotto with this many ingredients, and very little preparation on my part, was perhaps a bit too ambitious, but here we go.  In a risotto the quality of the ingredients really matters.  I mean, we’re really talking about starchy rice, broth and whatever proteins and vegetables you decided to add.  Make those proteins and vegetables count.  You really taste them.

I planned to have a lobster, shrimp and chorizo risotto.  I opted to boil the seafood to help the broth along. Sadly I chopped it before I put it in the pot and I left it a touch too long.  Those pieces will be lobster and shrimp salad in a day or two.  So, a quick pivot to scallops and a few shrimp I left out of the pot.

My best advice to you in making risotto is to do ALL, every single bit, of your prep before you start the risotto pot.  If you do, making risotto can be a lovely, meditative, enjoyable experience.  If you don’t, you’ll destroy your kitchen trying to throw things together and the panic will destroy all the zen of drinking some wine and stirring the risotto.  I fell somewhere in the middle tonight.

Here’s a view of my stove as I tried to do too many things at once.  Clean up is going to be a ginormous pain.

How do you make risotto anyway?  Oil, diced onions or shallots, dry wine, arborio rice, hot broth.  And patience.  That’s it.  So, make your broth (or pour it out of a can or box) and keep it warm.  3-4 cups should be enough for 1 cup of arborio rice.

• Heat the oil in a pot
  • I cooked my chorizo in the pot and used the rendering as the oil
• Add the onions and cook them 3-5 minutes
• Add the rice and stir 1 minute to coat the grains with the oil
• Add 1/2 C wine and stir until almost absorbed
• Add the broth 1/2 C at a time, stirring constantly
• Stir until the liquid is almost fully absorbed before adding more liquid
• Cook until the  rice is very al dente and then stir in the protein, vegetables and/or cheese

How do you make this risotto?

• Cook the chorizo in the risotto pot.  Remove and set aside.

• Pat the scallops and shrimp dry.
• Heat a heavy pan with a pat of butter until the butter browns
• Add the scallops and sear 1-2 minutes on each side

• Remove from the pan and set aside
• Add the shrimp and sear until opaque
• Remove from the pan and set aside
• Put an ear of corn, still in the shuck, in the microwave.
• Microwave on high 1-2 minutes.
• Shuck the corn and cut the kernels from the cob
• Chop a tomato

Now what?

• When the risotto is slightly harder than al dente add the tomatoes, corn and chorizo
• When the risotto is done add the seafood and stir until it’s heated through

Lessons learned?

If something goes a little sideways at the beginning you can still recover and make something truly delightful.

Not all amazing food is pretty food.

Any day you get to stand by the stove and drink rosé as you stir your dinner is a good day.

Tariwala Murgh (Chicken Curry)

I think I’ve mentioned how much I love Indian food. Love it.  But I rarely make it at home.  It’s often full of ingredients that aren’t familiar to me and that I don’t usually have in the house.  This year I bought a beautiful cookbook from Rasika, my favorite Indian restaurant in DC.  I decided I would be brave.  I would collect some of the ingredients I didn’t know and I would jump in and make some of this wonderful food.

This cookbook does a wonderful job of explaining all of the spices you’ll encounter.  Even better, it tells you in how many recipes you’ll encounter those spices.  This was a big help to me in deciding which ones I should buy to get the most bang for my buck.  For this one, I ordered deggi murch.  It’s a special chili powder.  While I don’t have everything I need to cook my way through this book, I do have an extensive spice cabinet.  I do keep turmeric, cardamon, cumin seed and garam masala in the pantry, so that made this that much easier.

I’ll admit this is not an easy recipe.  It has a lot of ingredients and it takes a long time.  The recipe commentary recommends that you make this a day or two ahead of serving it, so I haven’t even eaten any yet to know if it’s worth it!  That comes tomorrow.

I feel confident that you could use this masala on vegetables just as well, but I used chicken because that’s what the recipe says.  It also says you could make it with lamb. So, very versatile.  And it freezes well.  If it’s good enough to make it again I’ll probably make double.  It won’t be much more trouble to double the amounts and having some in the freezer would be worth it.

This is “Home-style Chicken Curry” so everyone does it a little differently.  I followed the recipe as closely as possible.  I did use home canned tomatoes instead of fresh.  They just taste better than Winter tomatoes in Virginia which taste like nothing.  And I used some bottled ginger to make the paste because that seemed like exactly the right use for ginger that was already kind of paste-like.  Oh, and I substituted ground cumin for ground coriander.  It seemed closer that substituting fresh cilantro, which is the plan that produces coriander seeds.

So settle in.  Here we go.  Just kidding. The description will be a LOT shorter than the actual process!

Here’s what you need, with my adjustments:

• 1 pint canned tomatoes
• 2 C water
• 6T vegetable oil
• 1/2 t cumin seeds
• 4 green cardamon pods
• 4 whole cloves
• 1 inch cinnamon stick
• 2 Indian bay leaves
• 1/2 an onion sliced thinly
• 1 T chopped garlic
• 2 T Ginger-Garlic paste (process 1 part ginger, 3 parts garlic and some water into a paste)
• 1 t turmeric
• 1 t deggi mirch
• 1 T ground cumin
• 1 1/2 lbs boneless chicken, chopped into 2 inch pieces
• 1 T salt
• 2 T finely chopped fresh ginger
• 1 C hot water
• 2 T fresh lemon juice
• 2 t garam masala

Whew!  That’s the list.  But there are fewer steps than ingredients!

Here;s what you do:

• Set out the chicken to come to room temperature and salt it.
• Puree the tomatoes and water in a blender
• Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed pot until the oil shimmers.  Cast iron or enameled cast iron are your best bets.  Add the cumin seeds, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon stick, bay leaves.  When the cumin starts to crackle, add the onion.

• Cook 7-10 minutes, until the onion is brown.  Add the garlic.  Cook another 3-5 minutes.  The garlic should be brown.  Watch it carefully or it will burn.
• Add the Ginger-Garlic Paste.  Have the lid nearby!  This stuff cracks and pops in that hot oil.  Cook it 30 seconds.
• Add the tomato puree.  Bring to a boil.  And the turmeric, deggi mirch, and cumin.  Cook 15 minutes.  You’ll end up with a loose paste.

•  Add the salted chicken and ginger.  Cover the pot.  Cook 5 minutes.  Stir occasionally.
• Add the water, lemon juice, and garam masala.  Reduce heat to medium.  Cover the pot, cook 10 minutes.  It will be soupy when you’re done.

Serve with rice and naan.  That comes tomorrow.  Fingers crossed that this was all worth it!

 

Noodle Friday!

8 mile run in the morning means noodles the night before!  I told you last week that you’d see a lot of carb-loading Fridays, but I’m determined that they won’t all have an Italian theme.  Tonight’s noodles are Asian, but by all accounts not from Singapore as the name would suggest.  They’re called Singapore Noodles.

I travel to London for work quite a bit.  There are a couple of Asian chains that we don’t have in my part of the world that have become my comfort spots when I’m too tired or jet lagged to adventure some place new.  It doesn’t hurt that both are within a few blocks of my regular hotel.  I order Singapore Noodles at one of them nearly every trip.  There’s also a place close to my house that has a Curried Chicken and Rice Noodles dish that’s kind of similar and I love it as well. So, I’ve been looking forward to making this dish for a long time.

Here’s the thing.  These suck.  They just don’t taste like anything except curry powder and heat.  I’ll admit that I didn’t use the pork.  Believe me when I tell you that isn’t the problem.  I also didn’t have the shaoxing wine and I didn’t have time to go to an Asian market today, but I looked carefully and used some mirin as a substitute.  Still not the problem unless someone can tell me that shaoxing wine is a flavor bomb.

And they’re a fair amount of work.  There are a lot of ingredients and a lot of chopping here, not to mention peeling and de-veining the shrimp.

Wok cooking, as this is intended to be, requires very high heat.  I don’t have a wok at the moment so I chose the biggest pan I have.  I needed something with a broad surface area so I could leave the gas up high without having flames on the outside of the pan.  The good thing about working with heat this high is that as long as you keep everything moving you don’t need a lot of oil or liquid.  Good thing.  The splatter at this heat would really hurt.  Because you have to keep everything moving it’s super important to do all your chopping and measuring before you start.

How does it work?

In this recipe you scramble the egg first and remove it from the pan.  Then you wipe out the pan so you don’t end up with burned bits in your food in the end.  Be careful about that too.  I have a new burn mark on my arm because I didn’t pay attention to the edge of the pan.  Have a mentioned that the heat is super high?  Ouch.

Then put in the shrimp.  10 seconds.  Add onions, carrots, peppers.  30 seconds.  Keep everything moving!  Add cabbage, red pepper, curry powder.  Add the mushrooms.

Stir in softened rice noodles.

Add 1 T shaoxing wine, 1/2 T soy sauce, 1/2 T sesame oil.  Add green onions.

I should tell you that never in my life have I met with success soaking rice noodles in cold water.  Maybe I don’t start them soaking early enough, but I do follow the instructions on the package.  It doesn’t matter if it’s flat noodles for pad thai or these vermicelli sticks, I always end up putting them in a pot on the stove and heating the water until the noodles are soft enough.

SOOOOO disappointed.  They look basically like the picture from the recipe.  I just can’t believe they’re supposed to taste (or not taste) like this.  You’ll note from the photos below that I made a LOT of this stuff.  I tried to doctor up the bowl I ate.  I met with enough success that I managed to avoid throwing them in the trash and ordering a pizza.  I’m not sure I can make it happen for the leftovers.

Here’s the recipe I used in case you want to give it a try.  And if you have success, please let me know!

Maybe I should have realized that with all these noodles and vegetables and 1 1/2 tablespoons of Madras curry powder, 2 tablespoons total of wine, sesame oil and soy sauce wasn’t going to cut it for flavoring.  I didn’t have much mirin, so in the doctoring process I moved on to dry sherry.  And then to rice wine vinegar.  And more soy sauce.  And then more of everything.  I really tried.

It’s a good lesson.  It doesn’t work every time.  Part of being an adventurous cook is failing.  This was a failure. This may be one of those things that just falls for me on the “Buy” side of the “Make or Buy” consideration.

So, here’s the finished product that I actually ate for dinner.  It looks pretty good, right?  Sigh.

 

Homemade Pasta

Next weekend is the Third Annual No Football Sunday Dinner.  I’ll explain that next weekend, but in short, it means that there are 10 people coming to my house for dinner so I need to start early on the planning and cooking.  The theme is Italian food this year so I spent today making pasta.  It’s kind of like playing in play-doh and way easier than making bread or pie crust.  I used to have a hand crank to flatten and cut the dough.  This was the debut of the pasta attachments for the KitchenAid.  Good stuff.

There’s not much in the way of ingredients for pasta.  Essentially you’ve got a 2:1 ratio of eggs to cups of flour.  That’s it.  No salt, no oil, nothing.  You beat the eggs and put them in the middle of a pile a flour.  Use your hands to mix it up.  That part’s a mess.  Very sticky.  You mix in the flour a little at a time until it stops being sticky.  According to Marcella Hazan, from whom I will take any and all advice regarding Italian food, it’s the kneading and stretching that count.  She recommends that you knead the ball of pasta dough a full 8 minutes.  Gotta tell you that’s a really long time, but it’s kind of a Zen thing once you get into it.  At the end you have a beautiful, gold, perfectly smooth and silky ball of pasta dough.

When you’re ready to roll it out I really recommend a pasta crank, manual or on your mixer.  You can do it with a rolling pin, but you have to have mad skills.  You need the dough to be completely uniform.  You have flatten the dough a little at a time.  Again, according to Ms. Hazan, the rolling by degrees step (several passes on each thickness setting) is key to producing good pasta and it’s the step that is often skipped in commercially produced pasta.  I’m counting on that step being the difference between just passable pasta and really good pasta.  It certainly is the difference between pasta that takes 30 minutes to make and pasta you spend a whole afternoon on.

The good news about this is that once you’ve spent a whole afternoon on pasta making you don’t have to feel compelled to eat it all at once.  It dries perfectly well and can be stored for a few weeks.  Use an airtight container and store it in the cabinet.  I’m counting on this being a winning strategy also since the big dinner is still 6 days away.  I could have made my life easier if I’d remembered to twirl the freshly cut pasta into little nests, but I didn’t.  I’m going to have to store this in a long container or I’m going to have to break it up.  The pasta has to dry 24 hours so I can figure that out tomorrow. 

Good?  We’ll see.
Easy? Not at all.
Good for company? I can’t see why else you’d go to so much trouble.
Special shopping? Definitely not.

Ingredients

4 eggs
2 C all-purpose flour, plus some as needed

Directions

Beat the eggs with a fork until well blended.
Make a well in the middle of the flour.
Pour the eggs into the well. Add flour into the eggs a little at a time.
Mix with a fork until the eggs aren’t runny.
Mix flour in a little at a time with your fingers, forming a dough.
Add flour as needed until the dough is no longer sticky.
Form a ball.
Knead for 8 minutes, or as long as it takes to make a silky smooth dough.
Cut the finished dough into 6-8 pieces.
Flatten the dough with a pasta press, beginning on the widest setting and rolling progressively thinner until you reach the desired thickness.
Roll at each level 2-3 times, folding the dough into thirds each time.
Cut the dough into ribbons and lay flat to dry.
Dry 24 hours if you plan to store it.

Cranberry Curd

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving and many of you are probably very tired of being in the kitchen.  I spent the holiday week in the Caribbean so spending a little kitchen time was welcome on such a cold day.  Turns out that canning is much less problematic when it’s 35 degrees outside than when it’s 95 degrees outside.  It’s kind of nice to have a warm steamy kitchen in November.  Lucky for me that a recent Cooking Light magazine included a recipe for Cranberry Curd, a nice twist on the traditional Lemon Curd.

The cranberry curd is in the small jars in the front.  The other jars are the mixed berry jam I also made today.  And in the way back are the peppers I’m drying to grind and use all year.  It’s a little bit “Little House” around here today.

Making curd falls pretty squarely in the ‘intermediate’ category of difficulty, maybe even toward the high end.  It has a number of steps and a fair lot of dishes too.  My kitchen was a pretty big disaster when I was done.  I have no experience with this kind of thing so I limited the recipe adjustments to one.  I left out the Grand Marnier because I didn’t have any.  I added just a touch extra lemon juice for the added liquid. 

So here’s the basic idea.  You cook down some cranberries in lemon juice; puree them in a food processor; and mash them through a sieve.  On the side you make this custard kind of stuff with butter, sugar, eggs and corn starch.  Cook it all in a double boiler.  Then begins the canning process.  Hot curd into hot jars into a hot water bath.  Twenty minutes later – voila! – you have shelf ready cranberry curd. 

I don’t have a lot of tips to offer except to follow the instructions.  Mashing the berries through a sieve is messy and a giant pain.  I was too lazy to get out my food mill, but I don’t know that it would have saved me much time or effort.  Maybe.  In any case you have to do it.  You’ll be tempted to skip that step because the pureed berries look pretty smooth when they come out of the food processor.  They aren’t.  You’ll be surprised how much peel you end up throwing in the trash.  You may also be tempted to skip some of the mixing between egg additions.  Don’t.  In order for the curd to be creamy and to thicken properly you need to beat the curd after each addition.  And be sure to stir frequently as it cooks.  You don’t want it to burn or get grainy from being ignored.  One tip about the double boiler.  If you don’t have one, no big deal.  Use a pot with a little water and a heat resistant bowl.  Regardless be sure that the water doesn’t touch the bottom of the bowl.

I decided to can this in a hot water bath canner.  That way folks can store it on the shelf until they open it.  For you canners out there you need 1/2 inch of headspace in the jars and they process for 20 minutes.  If you don’t can, or just don’t feel like it, you can freeze it.  I recommend using Ball’s freezer safe jars for that.  Of course if you just want to use it up you can store it in the fridge for a week or so.  Cover the top in a little plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming.

I’m pretty impressed with my first batch of curd.  It’s thick and smooth and creamy just like it’s supposed to be.  It has a sweet/tart thing going on, so that’s good.  The cranberry adds a nice red color that’s very holiday festive.  Since most of this will be holiday gifts that works out well.  It’s not as red as the picture in the magazine, but maybe their cranberries were darker than mine.  If the color bothers you add just a touch of red food coloring.  That shouldn’t hurt anything.

What does one do with curd?  The magazine recommends adding it to yogurt or oatmeal.  I think traditionally it’s served with crumpets or scones at tea time.  You can also use it between cake layers or as a cupcake or cookie filling.  Make tarlets.  Serve it over ice cream.  This is really versatile stuff so if you decide to make it make a whole bunch.  I doubled the recipe you see below and still have the ingredients to make another double batch on another day.  I hope folks like it in their Christmas baskets!

Good? Good.
Easy? Not even.
Good for company? Absolutely. A lovely gift.
Special shopping? Nope. Just remember you can only get fresh cranberries in most places at certain times of the year.

Ingredients

1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 (12-ounce) package fresh cranberries
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
2 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch

Directions

1. Combine first 3 ingredients in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 5 minutes or until cranberries pop. Place cranberry mixture in a blender or food processor; process until smooth. Strain cranberry mixture through a fine sieve over a bowl; discard solids.

2. Combine sugars and butter in a bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well combined. Add egg yolks and egg, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in cranberry mixture, cornstarch, and salt. Place mixture in the top of a double boiler. Cook over simmering water until a thermometer registers 160° and mixture thickens (about 10 minutes), stirring frequently. Remove from heat; let stand 5 minutes. Stir in liqueur. Cover and refrigerate up to 1 week.

Smoked Turkey, Collard Green and Shrimp Gumbo

This post has been a while in coming.  That’s kind of fitting because this dish takes a while to make.  I ended up making it over two days.  That’s definitely a way to do it if you don’t have 4 hours to hang out fairly close to the stove. This is one of those times when reading the recipe carefully all the way through before I started would have saved me a little inconvenience.  Turns out it doesn’t work well to start this at 5:30 thinking that you’re going to have it for dinner that evening.

 This is a rich, dark, smoky, salty gumbo.  Good stuff.  It’s a traditional flour and fat roux cooked to a dark brown.  Add some Guinness and it gets darker still.  By the time you’ve let some smoked turkey cook for 3 hours you’ve got a dark and smoky gumbo that’s reduced by about half.  Because it reduces so much be careful about the salt.  Don’t add any until the very end.  It concentrates.  That’s all I got done the first night.  I had to have time to let it cool before I put it away.  The next night I heated the gumbo, added some water and made a little extra roux so it wouldn’t be runny.  Then I added some fresh chopped collards and some I’d already cooked in smoked turkey pot liquor.  It took about 40 minutes for the fresh collards to cook down.  Five more minutes for the shrimp and you’re done – a mere 1 day and 45 minutes after I started.

A few tips.  The next time you’re going to make collards make 3-4 cups more pot liquor than you need to cook the collards and save it for making this gumbo.  You can freeze it until you need it.  Then cook enough collards that you have some for this recipe.  Freeze them until you need them.  Then chop the smoked turkey legs or wings from your collard pot and freeze it until you need it. (Are you getting the idea here?  Use your freezer!)  This way you’ve got most of the components done.  You just need to make the roux, chop the vegetables and add the elements you made ahead of time plus the shrimp.  I’m guessing you could do the whole thing in about 45 minutes that way.   

The truth is that this is worth the trouble.  I love the dark and smoky flavor.  The rice keeps it from being almost too rich to eat.  But it is rich, so start with small portions.  I made a half recipe and got 6 servings out of it.  Next time I’ll make a whole recipe and, you guessed it, freeze it!

Good? So, so good.
Easy? Not at all.
Good for company? My company enjoyed dinner and the leftovers I sent home.
Special shopping? Nope.

Usually I give you the recipe the way I made it, but since I messed up the timing I had to make some adjustments you won’t need now that you know what the timing is. What you see below is the original recipe from foodnetwork.com.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups small diced onions
3/4 cup small diced celery
3/4 cup small diced green, red, and/or yellow bell pepper
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 (12-ounce) bottle stout beer (recommended: Abita Turbo Dog)
8 cups dark chicken stock, chicken stock, or water
1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
2 bay leaves
4 teaspoons Essence, recipe follows
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 pounds smoked turkey legs
1 pound collard greens, stemmed and rough chopped
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
Steamed white rice, for serving

Directions

Heat a large, 6-quart, wide-mouthed Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the flour and oil to the pan and stir to combine. Cook, stirring constantly, until the flour mixture is a deep chocolate brown color, about 20 minutes. Add the onions, celery and peppers to the roux and cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Add the garlic, stir, and cook the garlic for 1 minute. Add the beer to the roux, stir, and cook for 2 minutes. Add the stock, thyme, bay leaves, 2 teaspoons of Essence, salt, and cayenne to the pan. Stir to combine and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and add the turkey legs to the pan. Cook until the turkey legs are falling-from-the-bone-tender, about 3 hours.

Remove the turkey from the pot and transfer to a plate to cool. Add the collard greens to the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour. When the turkey is cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the bones and tear into bite-size pieces. Discard the skin and bones. Return the turkey meat to the gumbo. Season the shrimp with the remaining 2 teaspoons of Essence and add them to the gumbo during the last 10 minutes of cooking.

Taste the gumbo, re-season if necessary. Serve with steamed white rice.

Lemony Chicken Noodle Soup

This is the first real day of Fall as far as I’m concerned.  It’s the first day I’ve needed my fleece pants.  That makes it Fall.  And it’s my first chicken noodle soup of the season.  Homemade chicken noodle soup is one of the best foods on the planet.  Make no mistake about it, it also takes a lot of time to put together.  There are a lot of shortcuts you can take – some good, some not so much.  I went the long way around today.  It makes a difference and it’s a nice way to spend a cold and rainy morning.

The first step in making chicken noodle soup is making the broth. And the most important thing to remember is that it’s different than making stock in that you’re planning to use the chicken.  When you make stock you simmer it for hours to get the most concentrated flavor.  By then the chicken is completely devoid of taste and chalky dry in spite of being in water for hours.  When you make soup you’re mostly poaching the chicken just until it’s done so keep an eye on it.  Other than that it’s the same.  You add carrots, celery, onion, parsely, salt and pepper to a big pot of water with a whole chicken.  When it’s done you use a colander to separate the solids from the broth.  Set the chicken aside and throw the rest away.  Stock done.

The original recipe instructs you to simmer all the vegetables in the broth.  I like to saute the celery and onions in a heavy skillet first.  I helps them stay a little crunchy in the soup.  The carrots you’ll want to simmer.  The recipe also calls for orzo.  I like the slurpy part of eating chicken noodle soup so I used whole wheat egg noodles instead. They also add a little nuttiness to the soup.

You might be inclined to cook the pasta, whichever kind you use, in the broth.  Don’t.  Yes, it would add a nice flavor to the noodles, but it would also make the soup cloudy with starch.  Here’s what you do instead.  Once you’ve pulled the chicken off of the bones put the bones and skin in a pasta pot with some water and let it boil for 20 minutes or so.  Drain the water through a colander to get the skin and bones out and return the water to the pot.  Cook the pasta in that.  You’ll get some extra flavor in your noodles without messing up your soup.

At this point your kitchen is filled with dirty dishes:  2 pots, 2 bowls, a skillet and a colander – all large.  My only advice is to wash dishes as you go.  My kitchen is kind of small so that’s the only way I can make it work.  Of course your kitchen is also filled with the most wonderful smell of chicken soup.  So worth the extra dish duty.

Let’s talk for a second about the shortcuts.  I used a whole, free range, hormone-free chicken from Empress Farm.  Feel free to use the skin and bones of a rotisserie chicken instead to make the stock.  And of course set the chicken aside to use too.  If you do that taste it before you add any salt.  Rotisserie chickens tend to be a little salty.  You’ll find that the broth is a little dark because the chicken has been browned.  You can also get pre-chopped carrots, celery and onions.  I recommend a grocery store salad bar for that.  It will cost you extra, but save you time.  All I ask is that you don’t use canned stock for soup.  It’s fine for cooking if that’s what you have.  In soup, though, the broth is the whole deal.  Take the time to make your own.  Of course if you have a bunch in the freezer absolutely use that as a time saver.

The thing that makes this soup something special is the lemon.  Lemon zest and fresh lemon juice.  It adds something sunny to the warm comfort of chicken noodle soup.  Holding the parsley and lemon juice to the end makes the soup extra bright and cheerful.  The perfect remedy for the season’s first cold and rainy day.  Now bring on the football!

Good? Warm and yummy.
Easy? Not at all.
Good for company? Of course. Soup always feeds a crowd.
Special shopping? Nope.

Ingredients

1 (4-pound) whole chicken
2 carrots, peeled, cut in 1-inch pieces
2 celery stalks, cut in 1-inch pieces
1 large onion, peeled and diced
4 sprigs fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 teaspoons whole black peppercorns
10 cups water
2 t olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/3 cups chopped carrot
1 1/4 cups chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
2 teaspoons salt
6 ounces uncooked whole wheat egg noodles
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
zest and juice of 2 lemons
Coarsely cracked black pepper

Directions

Remove and discard giblets and neck from chicken. Place chicken in a large Dutch oven. Add 2 chopped carrots, 2 chopped celery stalks, and next 5 ingredients (through bay leaves) to pan. Add 6 cups water; bring to a simmer. Reduce heat, and simmer 45 minutes.

Remove chicken from pan; place chicken in a bowl. Chill 15 minutes. Remove chicken from bones.  Place chicken skin and bones in a pot with 4-5 cups of water.  Chop chicken into bite-sized pieces; cover and set aside. Strain broth mixture through a sieve into a large bowl; discard solids.

Heat 2 t olive oil in a heavy skillet.  Add diced celery, onions and garlic.  Saute until the onions begin to brown.

Add enough water to broth to equal 9 cups; place broth mixture in a large Dutch oven. Add 1 1/3 cups carrot and salt to pan; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 15 minutes or until carrots are tender. Add reserved chicken, celery, onions and garlic and simmer 3 minutes or until thoroughly heated. Keep warm.

Bring reserved chicken skin, bones and water to a boil.  Strain through a colander, reserving liquid.  Return the liquid to the pot and return to a boil.  Cook pasta to al dente.  Add pasta to pan with chicken and broth mixture; stir in parsley, rind, and juice. Garnish each serving with lemon wedges and cracked black pepper, if desired.

Potato, Turnip, and Black Kale Baeckeoffe

It’s Fall! (In spite of this week’s fairly Summer-like temps in central VA).  And it’s October so we’ll say that this recipe is in honor of Oktoberfest.  It’s also in honor of the fact that I’m home and actually had time to cook.  Good thing – this takes a long time.  Here’s the ‘baeckeoffe’ explanation from Cookinglight.com for those of you who are a little rusty on your Germanic Alsatian dialects.  “Translated from the Germanic Alsatian dialect, baeckeoffe means “baker’s oven,” as it was traditionally a dish that was brought to the local baker to cook in his oven. Classic versions are loaded with meat, but our vegetarian riff is equally hearty and rich.”  I’ve never had a version loaded with meat, but I’d be willing to give that a shot.

Let’s start with the substitutions.  I try not to make many subs on dishes that are new to me and generally unfamiliar as a combination of ingredients.  The original recipe called for spinach. That seemed a little wimpy with the potatoes and turnips.  I bought some lacinato kale at the farmers’ market last weekend that I still needed to use.  That seemed like a good fit.  I also didn’t have any heavy cream.  Seemed silly to buy an 8 ounce container when I only needed 2.  I substituted 2% milk with just a little low fat cream cheese melted in.  I think both substitutions were fine, but with the kale I probably could have used more of the milk mixture.  It was just a little tough even after an hour in the oven.

Flavor wise this dish is a tiny bit on the bitter side.  Kale, turnips and Gruyere are all on the sharp side.  Clearly the idea is that they will balance with the potato, mushrooms and carmelized onions.  Not quite.  I didn’t have nearly enough mushrooms and onions.  They represent the creamy and sweet parts of this dish, respectively.  I made about 1/2 a recipe of this dish, but only had 1/4 of the mushrooms I needed.  I won’t make that mistake again.  And given how much onions cook down when they carmelize I would have been happier had I used the amount called for in the full recipe.  Ditto the milk mixture.  Of course the other way to cut down on the bitterness would be to use 2 layers of potatoes instead of one potato layer and one turnip layer.

One note about managing the time it takes to do this.  First, note that it bakes for an hour after it’s all put together so account for that before you start.  I’d guess you could put the whole thing together a day before you bake it. Also, while the recipe calls for you to do the mushrooms, wipe the pan and then start the onions.  That’s silly.  Use two pans and do them simultaneously.    Definitely you could make the onions and the mushrooms ahead of time – a day or two.  That will reduce your prep time a lot.  You’ll just want to warm the mushrooms before you try to spread them in the dish.

Overall this dish is a lot of trouble to make.  I knew that going in which is why I waited until a Friday.  Still, I’m not convinced that the trouble you have to go to is made up for by the enjoyment of the dish.  I’m not quite ready to write it off, but I’ll admit to some disappointment.  The reviews just raved about it.  No rave from me.  Just an “ok with potential.”  Maybe I’ll try to find one of those recipes with some meat in it to add a new dimension to the flavor.  That said, I’d make the mushrooms over and over again.  They’d be amazing in little gratin dishes.  You could mix them into cooked pasta.  You could stuff chicken with them.  That’s worth taking away from this even if you never try the whole thing.

Good? Ok, but has potential
Easy? Not so much
Good for company? As a side, maybe
Special shopping? Nothing exotic here

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter, divided
8 oz sliced mushroom caps
1 clove minced garlic
1/2 cup white wine
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/2 tsp thyme 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided
2 tablespoons 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, divided
2 cups vertically sliced onion (about 2 medium onions)
1 small Yukon gold potato, peeled and cut into (1/4-inch-thick) slices
2 cups black kale, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt, divided
1 small turnip, peeled and cut into (1/8-inch-thick) slices
1/4 cup milk
1 t neufchatel cheese
1/4 cup shredded Gruyère cheese

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°.

Melt 1/2 T of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms to pan, and sauté 2 minutes or until lightly browned. Stir in garlic; sauté 30 seconds. Add wine; cook 2 minutes. Add parsley, thyme, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes. Uncover and cook 6 minutes or until liquid almost evaporates. Remove from heat. Add 1 T cream cheese, stirring until cheese melts. Set aside.

As you start the mushrooms, heat pan over medium-high heat. Add 1/2 T of butter, melt. Add onion; saute for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Reduce heat to medium; continue cooking for 25-30 minutes or until deep golden brown, stirring frequently. Set aside.

Heat milk and remaining tablespoon of cream cheese. Whisk until smooth. Keep warm.

Coat a lidded baking dish with cooking spray. Arrange potato slices in dish, and top with kale. Sprinkle 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper evenly over kale. Spoon the mushroom mixture over black pepper, and arrange turnip slices over mushroom mixture. Top with caramelized onions; sprinkle with remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, remaining 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Pour milk mixture over onions and sprinkle evenly with Gruyère cheese. Cover and bake at 350° for 40 minutes. Uncover and bake an additional 20 minutes or until vegetables are tender and cheese begins to brown.

Chiffon Cupcakes with Chocolate Whipped Buttercream

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day when our thoughts turn to…chocolate.  It just so happens that I have a meeting in the office tomorrow too so it’s the perfect time to try out a new cupcake recipe.  I love cupcakes for eating, but I gotta tell you I’ll be glad when real cakes are back in vogue.  They’re a lot less labor intensive and a little more forgiving.  Still, these are charming and most importantly no plates or forks required.

For a while I’ve been wanting to try this Chiffon Cupcake recipe from Alton Brown, but it’s a fair amount of trouble so I’ve held off until now.   I had leftovers for dinner so that left me enough time to take this on.  I mostly steer clear of Alton Brown.  I find him to be pretty condescending and annoying on TV.  This recipe is a little annoying too.  I know it’s supposed to be better to measure dry ingredients by weight than by volume, but let’s be real – that just makes things harder. 

The bother starts right at the beginning.  You have to separate 5 eggs and beat the yolks with the sugar.  Then in a separate bowl you make a meringue with the whites.  The recipe instructs you to mix up the batter in your mixer, then transfer the batter to another bowl so you can use your mixer to whip the egg whites.  That’s a whole nother level of trouble.  If you’ve got a stand mixer and a hand mixer I’d do the batter in your stand mixer and use the hand mixer on the whites.  Oddly enough I find myself without a hand mixer at the moment.  Fortunately I do have an immersion blender with a whisk attachment.  I put the whites in a large measuring cup and used the stick blender.  Just be sure that your egg whites bowl is large enough.  When you whip all that air into them they quadruple in size.  The next bit of trouble is that this batter is so airy that it doesn’t pour out of the spoon very well.  You have to shake it out.  I used a ladle to help measure out the batter so the cupcakes would be the same size.  Don’t do that.  It’ll go faster if you use a large spoon.  You can fill the cups about 3/4 full.  There’s so much air in the batter as it is that they don’t puff up very much.

They are a beautiful golden brown when they come out and the tops are very smooth.  If you’re into fancy decorations these cupcakes will make a good surface for your frosting decor.  Honestly I think this batter baked in a cake pan and cut would probably make lovely petit fours.  They are light as air but seemingly sturdy so I think you could use about any frosting.  The batter isn’t overly sweet so they can take a fairly sugary frosting I think.  Honestly they’d be beautiful with Seven Minute Frosting on them.  Anyway, I’m kind of into whipped buttercream right now so I decided on a chocolate version of that.

I’ll just refer you to the peanut butter version of this frosting for the details, but I do want to share a few things I learned this time around.  If you leave the milk and flour mixture in the fridge to cool it more quickly you should put plastic wrap right down on it.  If you don’t it will get a skin just like pudding.  No amount of whisking will get rid of that skin.  If that happens just peel the skin off and throw it away.  Now, for the chocolate.  Use baking chocolate and not chocolate chips.  Chips have just a touch of paraffin or wax in them to help them keep their shape.  This frosting is way too light to overcome that waxy texture.  Don’t bother with a double boiler.  A glass bowl in the microwave works just fine.  Just melt your chocolate in short intervals and stir it good between intervals.  If you try to melt it all the way down at one time you’ll burn it.  It will actually be done before it looks like it’s done.  You’ll be surprised how quickly the last of the lumps disappear with a few good turns of a spoon.

I haven’t eaten one of these yet.  It seems tacky to show up with 23 cupcakes.  But they’re lovely and really, how bad can they be?  I’ll let you know tomorrow.

Good? Let’s hope so. (Not so much.  Spongy and a little dense.  Frosting rocks).
Easy? Not at all. (And not good enough to make them worth the trouble).
Good for company? Of course. (Choose another cake recipe.  Keep the frosting).
Special shopping? Nope. Standard baking components.

Chiffon Cupcakes

Ingredients

5 1/4 ounces cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
5 large eggs, separated
6 ounces sugar, divided
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5/8 teaspoon cream of tartar

Directions

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Place paper liners into 2 (12-cup) muffin tins and set aside. If you prefer, set 12 ovenproof coffee mugs on a half sheet pan and set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

Place the egg yolks and 5 ounces of the sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk on high for 2 minutes or until the mixture becomes pale yellow and ‘ribbons’ when lifted. Add the water, vegetable oil and vanilla and whisk to combine. Add the dry ingredients and whisk just to combine. Transfer the batter to a mixing bowl while you whisk the egg whites.

Place the egg whites and cream of tartar into a clean bowl and whisk on high using the whisk attachment, until it becomes foamy. Decrease the speed to low and gradually add the remaining ounce of sugar. Increase speed to high and continue whisking until stiff peaks form, approximately 2 minutes.

Transfer 1/3 of the egg whites to the batter and whisk until well combined. Add the remaining egg whites and fold in gently. Transfer batter into prepared muffin tins or coffee mugs, evenly dividing the batter between the cups. Place both muffin tins on the middle rack of the oven or, if using mugs, place all of them on a half sheet pan and set on the bottom rack of the oven. Bake for 30 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean or the cupcakes reach an internal temperature of 205 to 210 degrees F. Remove from the oven to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before frosting.

Whipped Buttercream

Follow the original directions, but leave out the peanut butter.
Add 4 ounces of room temperature, melted baking chocolate to the butter and sugar mixture before whipping in the flour and milk mix.