pumpkin crème brûlée

Having mastered the standard version to my own satisfaction, it's now time to start experimenting. First up is for the other half of the people who made it possible (Steph), who enjoys all things pumpkin, a pumpkin crème brûlée.

I basically used standard pumpkin pie spicing instead of the vanilla, steeped those in the heavy cream, used half brown and half regular sugar, and added about half a cup of pumpkin to the egg and sugar mixture. I'm not sure how it's going to come out, but it smells pretty amazing.

I will be tenting them with aluminum foil in the oven, I think it made for a much nicer custard, since the caramelization is applied after the fact.

crème brûlée

So about a year ago (maybe two?) my mom get me a set of ramekins and a crème brûlée cookbook. I also got a torch (from Steph?), but have yet to actually get it together enough to actually make it. Unknown to me, prior to a month ago, my mom had never had crème brûlée, because she's not generally a fan of custards. She had it at a very nice restaurant near Princeton, and it was apparently quite good. So there was pressure to make it this holiday season.

I used Alton Brown's recipe, mostly because there seemed to be very little variation among the different recipes I checked, even among the ratios of cream to egg to sugar. His had an extra step that basically involves steeping the vanilla pod in the cream for a while, and that appealed to me, so I gave it a shot. It took a few tries to get the right amount of sugar and heat for a nice top, but by the last one I had it down. One thing we did learn is that extra time to cool and set makes for a much better crème brûlée. Two hours was the suggested, I'd recommend at least overnight.

I've made another batch for christmas dessert, we'll see how it turned out, since I now have shiny new ramekins and they'll have had a full 24 hours to cool. I think we might be able to start experimenting with flavors beyond the standard vanilla after this batch.

[TND] 12.18 Balsamic Garlic Pork Loin

I adapted a Rachel Ray recipe for pork tenderloin. Hers had the tenderloins rubbed with balsamic vinegar and then crushed garlic in slits. I used roasted garlic instead, and because I didn't want to leave the house, didn't put fresh thyme and rosemary on it. I used a bit more balsamic vinegar, and then made a glaze from more vinegar, a bit of butter, and the drippings from the pan I roasted the pork in.

I paired it with some roasted potatoes and some salad (with a balsamic vinegarette). I'd like to do something a bit more herbal with the potatoes, I think it would tie together a bit better.

I made some dessert too, an experiment I've been meaning to try for a few weeks now. It's an upside down apple caramel tart. We had some issues making the caramel, as I had a drastically smaller cooking time then was actually required. Gotta let it sit for a long while, until it reduces and then finally caramelizes. We let it go a little too long, and so the final product tasted a bit burnt. I think the second cooking means you can err on the side of not as caramelized. You take peeled apples, slice it in half, then split one of the halves into thirds. A bit of caramel in the bottom of a ramekin, then the half apple, then arrange the thirds on top of it to make a flat area. Add more caramel, and top with puff pastry. I need a better way to cut the puff pastry, it ended up kind of ragged and uneven and not quite the right shape. I also need deeper ramekins. Or smaller apples. But really, I think deeper ramekins is the way to go. Also, it really, really needs vanilla ice cream.

[TND] 12.08 Seafood feast

I missed one or two in here, teaching a class from 5 to 6:30pm on Tuesdays has made it difficult to do the dinners every week. I did make turkey noodle soup from the turkey stock from thanksgiving, but I'm not sure that was on Tuesday.

Kuba came down for the weekend, and brought with him a bunch of scallops and some white fish (flounder, possibly some haddock) that he had taken out of the water on his last cruise on the NOAA fisheries research boat. The fish and scallops went directly into the deep freezer, so were about as fresh as it gets without cooking it on the boat. I also had stopped by a Polish bakery nearby, and gotten some fresh kielbasa. So instead of using bacon to wrap the scallops, I sliced the kielbasa thinly, and put the scallops on top of it. I also made a tarragon polenta crust for the top, which I also used on some of the white fish. I wasn't sure how many people I would have, so I got some shrimp on sale and made a quick scampi as well. The scallops were definitely the highlight, sweet, tender and delicious. The kielbasa worked beautifully, since it was subtler than bacon would have been, but still had a nice smoke and spice to it. A lot of it was the quality of both scallop and kielbasa, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it with lesser versions.

I also took the opportunity to overcome a hesitation I had in making risotto. Last time I made it, I used a wok, since it was the only appropriately sized pan I had. This is suboptimal, as you don't get even heating, and thus don't get even texture. This time I used my Caphalon 12" everything pan, which lives up to its name admirably, and it was a different experience. Much better integration, nice texture, much easier than last time. Parmesan and parsley to finish, and it was a nice backdrop to the seafood.

[TND] 11.06 Tomato Soup, Potato Pancakes and Pumpkin Pie

The tomato soup I made is one I make very frequently in the winter, since it's based on canned tomatoes and quite good despite that. Basically put a chopped potato, a quartered yellow onion, 3 cups of water, 2-4 tablespoons of butter, a couple bay leaves, the juice of an orange (save the zest), a tablespoon (or more) of cumin (I like to had ground ginger and a bit of coriander too), a bit of salt and pepper into a big pot. Boil, reduce to a simmer for 15-20 minutes. Add two big (28 oz) cans of peeled tomatoes, the zest from the orange, and bring back to a boil. Let it simmer for at least another 20 min, though it can easily sit and simmer for longer if you need it to. Fish out the bay leaves, blend it with an immersion blender (beware steam/splatter). It can simmer for a while without issue, serve it hot with fresh chives and sour cream. You can supplement the orange with more juice, or even use two oranges, but I don't think I'd use all the zest, in that case. It scales wonderfully, halves or doubles, and is quite lovely on winter nights. The original recipe puts it through a mesh strainer before server, but you lose so much fantastic texture from the tomatoes and potato that I don't recommend this.

Best thing about it is what you can dip into it. I've done grilled buffalo mozarella sandwiches before, but last night we did potato pancakes. There was a recipe in the most recent Fine Cooking, but it relied very heavily on a specific type of food processor with different grating attachments. We grated up a bunch of potatoes, a couple of onions, and mixed them together with salt, pepper, paprika, flour and eggs. Two eggs, two onions for 2.5 lbs of potatoes, maybe half a cup of flour, but it's really just looking for texture. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible, fry, keep warm in the oven. I only have one pan suitable for frying, so it took a long time, but I also made some applesauce to go with them. Surprising to me was that the combination of the potato pancake with applesauce was very nice with the citrusy-spicy tomato soup.

Finally, I made pumpkin pie. I cheated on the crust for lack of time, using the Whole Foods frozen premades, and used the recipe out of the Joy of Cooking with pointers from my Dad. I ended up with excess mixture, which I put into little custard cups and cooked as though they were custard, in a water bath. Water baths suck, I need to work on executing that before I try it with an actual custard. One important note, make sure you stir the pie mixture immediately before pouring into the crusts, or else the spices, particularly the ginger, seems to settle. I also would like to get the appropriate spices from Penzey's, instead of using the McCormick ones, as they really do make or break the pie.

[TND] 10.30 Acorn Squash Pasta

A couple weeks ago, Dave gave me a couple of acorn squash that his mother had found mysteriously growing in her garden. I supplemented them with a few organic, locally grown squash from the supermarket. I found a pretty simple recipe for making squash into a sauce of sorts, and modified it pretty heavily to get the end product.

I peeled (skinned?) the squash (I used five 2 lb squash), chopped them into 1" pieces or so, and roasted them much as one would potatoes, with olive oil, salt and pepper. Parchment paper on the bottom of the pans is amazing and I wish someone had told me about it sooner. I also roasted some garlic in the usual way (3 heads, we likes the garlic). Garlic goes into a pan with a bit of (optional) butter, and half a bottle of white wine, Barefoot Chardonnay in this case. Heated it to a simmer, let it do that for a while, then added about half of the squash, since there was no room in the pan for more. Stir that, let it integrate and come back to heat, started the pasta (3 lbs) cooking. Once the pasta was done, reserved about 2 cups of the cooking water, drained, and put the squash-garlic mixture into the pasta pot with the rest of the squash, put it back on the heat, then added pasta water until the texture was nice and smooth. Added about half a cup to a cup of shredded parmesan cheese, stirred and heated until I couldn't see the parmesan anymore, tweaked it with more pasta water. I added a dollop of sour cream, half and half or milk would work nicely too, though you could just as easily skip it and the parmesan if you wanted it vegan. Then add the pasta, I used rotini so the squash would get into the ridges, and mix thoroughly.

While this was going on, I fried some sage leaves, which in the future, I will do ahead of time, since they really need to be watched. I used a mixture of olive oil and butter, the latter being the traditional, the former making it easier not to end up with a lot of burnt stuff.

Serve the pasta with toasted walnuts, more shredded parmesan, and crumble some of the fried sage leaves on top. I served it with some mixed greens with a balsamic dressing, which was a really nice pairing, to the point of potentially using balsamic vinegar on the pasta next time.

[TND] 10.16 Mac'n'cheese

Pure and simple, mac and cheese. I use the white parts of some scallions in the roux, sweet paprika, and white pepper. There was a bunch of edam on sale at the grocery store, so I used that and some sharp cheddar, so it's going to have a lot of sharp flavor, as I usually cut the cheddar with monterey jack instead. Since I didn't add anything like ham or veggies, the sharpness doesn't have anything to compete with.

[TND] 10.2 Flank steak, roasted potatoes, green beans

A simple birthday dinner designed to make good use of the last of the grilling weather. I definitely need a bigger grill, the two little ones are nice for some purposes, but just lack the surface area that I need for my typical grilling ventures. I did the flank steak with lime juice, ancho chile powder, salt and pepper, something I did a couple times this summer. I got the steaks from a different place, and there was definitely a noticeable difference. The more I use the all natural, grain fed beef from Highland Park, the less I want to eat the stuff from the regular grocery store. I think I'd rather have steak of higher quality, less often, then the lower quality steak. Green beans were just steamed, probably some of the last of the summer. I did some of the potatoes with cumin, some without, both were quite delicious. I did have to roast them a lot longer than I would have thought, which is something to bear in mind for future roasting endeavors. I also recently saw a recommendation to try parchment paper on the bottom of the roasting dish to prevent sticking, I'll have to try that next time.

[TND] 9.25 Shepherd's Pie

A while ago, I had an idea for a less traditional shepherd's pie, using sweet potatoes instead of the traditional russet. It's a pretty intuitive idea, so you can probably find some recipes out there for it. I couldn't find one I liked, so I just made mashed sweet potatoes like I would have to serve separately, with a bit of brown sugar and a hint of ancho chile powder. At the suggestion of my mom, I used frozen corn, heated 3/4 of the cooking time (I got the organic stuff 'cause it was on sale). I wanted to mix ground beef and lamb, but the grocery store had one small package of lamb, so it was basically just ground beef. Typical seasonings, but I also added a good bit of chipotle chile powder. A while ago I made some twice baked sweet potatoes with chipotle, and the combination is quite good. It worked very well here, I'll definitely be doing this recipe again.

[TND] 9.18 Argentine-style burgers

Another recipe out of Fine Cooking (and on the web, apparently), this recipe went against my current thinking in terms of burger-crafting. It involves saute-ing garlic, onions and jalapenos, letting them cool, and combining that mixture, cilantro, oregano, salt and pepper with the ground beef. For most of the summer, I've been simply adding kosher salt as I make the patties, which both minimizes the amount of handling and gives it all the flavor it really needs. Especially if you use all natural, grain fed, additive free beef. Additional flavor and texture
can be added on top of the burger, so kosher salt is all you really need for burger qua burger. I used 90%, since it was what was on sale (and actually, the only ground beef I could find), but if I were to do this recipe again, I would definitely use at least 85%, and probably 80%. The charcoal grill requires a higher fat content, even if the additions serve to keep it a bit moister.

The burgers got put into pita pockets with sliced red onions and a chimichurri sauce, which is basically parsley, mint, oregano, lime juice, olive oil, cumin, salt and pepper. The sauce I would definitely use again, probably with less mint. I think it'd be delightful on fish.

I also made sweet potato fries. Sliced them into 1/4" sticks, coated in oil, sprinkled with salt, turbinado sugar and pepper, and roasted at 450 for about 20 min. They were pretty good, and I learned an important lesson about aluminum foil and non stick pans. I would like a way to mass produce the fries, maybe frying them would actually be faster, since there's only two oven racks and you need to single layer them.

Not sure about next week. It may be cold enough for mac'n'cheese, or it may be time to start experimenting with shepherd's pie.

[TND] 9.11 Curried Skewers

Last Tuesday was an experimental recipe that I borrowed and modified from a link off the Fine Cooking web spam I occasionally get. It involved a modified curry powder made by adding ground cumin, coriander, white pepper, paprika and a touch of cinnamon to a store curry powder. Cubed a pork loin, sprinkled with the curry mixture and let it marinate in minced garlic, olive oil and orange juice. I did the same thing with some nice tuna steaks, but they didn't get to marinate, as I didn't want to bury the tuna in the curry, but next time I would definitely let them go the distance. Salmon might work too. After letting them marinate for a couple hours or overnight, skewered them with the biggest, roundest red grapes I could find. Grill until the meat is done, the grapes should have char marks and shriveled a bit. The tuna you can let be a bit rare if it's good enough quality.

It worked much much better than I thought it would. The raisin-y but still grape-y flavor of the grapes with the hint of curry was a great transition between the curried pieces of pork. Grilling the grapes alone was pretty tasty, which was not something I'd expected either.

I also used the curry mixture on some cauliflower, after applying oil and salt, which I then roasted. It was delicious, though I need to figure out how to better distribute the curry mixture, as I had a couple bites that were almost gritty because there was too much of it in one place.

Next week is Argentinian burgers and sweet potato oven fries, I think.

[TND] 9.4 Beer Brats

I'm trying to get the most of the grill while the weather is still permissive, so tonight we'll be doing beer brats. The premise is simple. Boil brats in beer, onions and peppercorns. Grill. I am going to take suggestions from those more familiar with it as to what beer I should use, I'm thinking some sort of lager might be best. I've used ales in the past, mostly because they're what Dave had.

While we're appreciating summer, we'll do some lovely corn on the cob and some summer vegetable, probably zucchini. I may use something other than cumin to season it, as I've been doing that all summer, but it's so good it's hard to argue with. Cumin doesn't seem to complement brats all that well, however, so I'll think about it today and see where I end up.

I've got the next couple TNDs tentatively planned, I'll post that later this week.

pizza for dessert

This evening a bunch of us went over to Carissa and Julian's house for dinner tonight. Our local supermarket chain makes some surprisingly decent pizza dough, and they had a ton. One of the tentative ideas was to make chocolate pizzas.

I'm not a big chocolate qua chocolate fan, so my first thoughts were to add peanut butter, and since there was one right in front of me, bananas. We rolled out a small test pizza and just spread a bit of peanut butter and sprinkled it with chocolate shavings. It was too thick, but still tasty. I am doomed to never be a chocolatier or pastry chef, as my hands are far too warm. It melts. A lot. Which makes it very hard to work with.

We made a larger version, layered peanut butter, bananas, and milk chocolate shavings. It was pretty amazing. We're now trying a goat cheese, strawberry slices, topped with dark chocolate. It was good, but the chocolate was much darker than I anticipated, so we're trying a refinement. I'm thinking about pears now, mostly 'cause they're sitting on the counter, and they'd be delicious.

Bacon

When I went to find bacon to go with the lovely tomatoes to make BLTs, I ran into a problem. It was all too thin. I went to a butcher, several grocery stores, and even the bacon labeled as thick cut was still about half the thickness I was looking for. The thinner cut works for wrapping things like asparagus or pork loin, but for a sandwich or even with eggs, I prefer about 1/4" thickness. It seems my options are buying a whole slab and cutting it myself, which I'm not quite sure I want to do, as that seems a bit much just to get it cut to what I think is a normal thickness. I think this may just be one of the downsides of living in a rural area.

[TND] 8.28 Simple Red Sauce

This worked out really well again. I used a bit of slurry since I didn't have time to let it reduce, and I think it didn't have an effect on the taste. I used three different types of tomatoes, and it seemed to be a little more depth of flavor, but the "paste" varieties I think make for a more classic sauce. Nigel got to compare it directly to the previous sauce, and said that last week's sauce was a bit sweeter. May have been the different basil, too.

I also made the garlic bread I've been making for the last little while. Roast the garlic, mix with butter, fresh oregano and cracked pepper. Spread it on lengthwise halved bread and top with either shredded mozzarella or sliced fresh mozzarella. Bake it until the cheese is just browning. Let it cool so the cheese doesn't go everywhere when you slice it. It has been and was amazing this time.

I cannot recommend fresh heirloom tomatoes enough. Go buy some before summer is over and you have to wait until next year.

[TND] 8.28 Fettucine with Red Sauce

It is the end of summer and thus it is time for tomatoes. At the Tolland farmer's market, I have found a stand which sells several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, all grown organically. These are beautiful tomatoes. They are large, usually about 1/2-1 pound, and have beautiful red color. One of these days I'll actually remember to write down the varieties. The variety he has most consistently is a duller red, and has a very high ratio of flesh to seeds. I've used them for many things, including simply eating them with a bit of kosher salt.

The plan is to make them into a very simple red sauce. I tried this earlier in the week with the ones from last week, and it was amazing. We'll see if it scales up and works with multiple varieties of tomatoes. The recipe is simple, it's onions and garlic (also organic and from the farmer's market) sautéd in olive oil, chop and add tomatoes, salt and pepper to taste, and reduce as much as possible. Add chopped basil off the heat, just before serving. Parmesan is optional.

I think if I make the garlic butter tomorrow night, I should be able to make cheesy garlic bread too, I just need to get garlic sometime tomorrow, or have someone pick it up for me.