Collective Yum

thepennilessfoodie:

Some Saturdays you make such an amazing batch of scones you can not even share the recipe with friends…

Why post this picture today?  Because I’m in Alaska and my brother is getting married tomorrow.  So I had to make this post as minimal as possible.

That is right I am a little terrible. I am posting something that you will not be able to make.  These are the best scones I have ever had and I can not even tell you why I won’t share the details.  But let it be noted if you want to try some, invite yourself over and I will make a batch for the two of us.

The above picture contains cranberry orange scones and chocolate chip scones.  Another favorite would be blackberry lemon; but blackberries this time of the year are a bit pricey.

—jk

Earl Grey Cupcakes with Orange-Scented Buttercream

I’d been wanting to try a recipe I came across months ago. Look how cute.

I ran into a few snags, as to be expected (comments interspersed below), but they’re worth doing and I will be doing them again - with some tweaks - soon.

Small Tea Cupcakes with Orange-Scented Buttercream 
Makes about 20 little cupcakes, using 2 oz. souffle/nut/tasting cups, or about 12 regular cupcakes

Cupcakes:   
-13 tbsp butter
-6 slightly over-filled tbsp of black tea (I used Earl Grey as recommended) 
-1/2 cup sugar
-2 medium eggs 
-1/4 cup milk
-1 cup flour
-1 tsp baking powder
-1/2 tsp salt

To infuse the butter: Combine tea leaves and butter in a small pot over medium head, stirring often. Once butter has melted, reduce heat to low and cook for 5 minutes. Stir occasionally and do not allow the butter to brown or boil. (Note: it is really hard to tell if the butter is browning or not. The tea is makes it this really unattractive brown-green color and it smells RANK. Seriously not cool. I thought it couldn’t possibly turn into anything edible. I considering sending it to the Tibetan yak people who like that kind of thing.) Remove from heat, allow the butter to cool for 10 minutes. Strain the melted, tea-scented butter, pressing down on the tea leaves to maximize the amount of butter and the intensity of the flavor. You should have just over 1/2 cup of butter remaining.

Bring the butter to room temperature (you can speed up the process by sticking the butter in the refrigerator for about 1/2 hour, but you will have to stir it every 5-10 minutes). 

To make the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 325 degree f. Beat together the infused butter and sugar. (It started smelling a lot better at this point. Amazing what sugar can do.) Add the eggs and milk. In a separate smaller bowl, combine salt, baking powder, and flour. Add this mixture to the butter-sugar-egg mixture. 

Fill small paper cups and place on a baking sheet. (Or in my case, just put the cups in the muffin tin before filling. Silly big cupcake papers. I couldn’t find the 2 oz. cups as pictured.) Fill each cup about 1/2 full (you can go just a little over instead of under) (So she says. I did the 12 normal cupcakes and filled them just under half full, and they all rose a little past the top of the papers. I wanted them lower to achieve that level frosted top. Oh well. Next time I’ll do more of them and only fill 1/4 to 1/3 full and see what happens.) Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until a cake test inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean. 

Allow the cupcakes to cool before frosting.

Frosting:
-3/4 (1.5 sticks) cup butter, softened
-3/4 cup confectioner’s (powdered) sugar
-3/4 cup milk
-3 tbsp sifted organic all-purpose flour
-1/4 tsp orange blossom water (or 1/2 tsp finely minced orange zest)
optional: 1/4 vanilla bean, scrapings only
Decoration (optional): a few large tea leaves 

Beat together butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the flavoring(s) [orange/orange blossom water/vanilla] (I used fresh orange zest…about twice as much as called for) and set aside. In the meantime, beat flour into the milk in a small saucepan (you can use the same one you used for infusing the butter, this would add a very faint tea taste to the buttercream also). Heat on medium heat, stirring constantly to prevent lumps. (Note: this really weirded me out. Wait, what? Thin white sauce in the frosting? Really?? How…why…huh…oh hey it’s doing that magic thing where it suddenly turns thicker…Flour in buttercream. Hmm.) Remove from heat as soon it begins to boil. Keep stirring for a minute or two, until slightly cool. Bring to room temperature. Beat the flour-milk mixture into the butter-sugar mixture, and whip thoroughly. Cool in refrigerator while the cupcakes finish cooling. 

Smooth frosting over each one. Decorate as you wish, I prefer using something that looks a bit ‘natural’, such as the tea leaves. (Now I’m really curious…what other ‘natural’ decorations could I have used? Those quotation marks worry me.)

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They actually turned out fragrant, pretty, and yummy. The crumb was a bit dry - like fine cornbread - but I think that was because I steeped the leaves in the butter longer than recommended and they soaked up more than they should have, so there wasn’t as much fat in the cake as there was supposed to be. The cake was only lightly sweet and the Earl Grey flavor was delicate - which I never would have expected from the rankness of the steeped butter. 

And the frosting! It was such a fluffy, creamy thing. You never would have guessed there was flour in it. It was the texture of slightly sturdier, silkier whipped cream, and did not harden even after being left out all night at room temperature. It didn’t get weepy, either, which I thought it was going to do with all the orange zest oil in it. Nice stuff.

Edit to add - here is another, very similar frosting recipe that starts with thickening flour in milk. I’d recommend taking a look at it first, so you don’t freak out like I did. The main difference in the two is that the recipe I used, above, uses powdered sugar, where this other one uses plain granulated.

-Tuggy out

thepennilessfoodie:

Some Saturdays the only thing to be made is Palak Paneer (my version)…  Perhaps there are those of you out there who won’t agree with my recipe because I’ve kind of changed some of the details around.  Instead of Paneer (an indian cheese), I use Tofu.  And instead of using cream, I just add more yogurt.  Basically I cook all my spices, add three tablespoons of yogurt, 600ml water, and ~600g of frozen spinach and then cook it for ten minutes.  Purée with an immersion blender.  Add another three tablespoons of yogurt and toss the cubed tofu, serve with rice.  Yum.

I also know I don’t use the right spices, because I just throw a bunch of stuff into the pot and then taste it.  Add some more and taste again.  Repeat until its delicious.  But here’s the basic idea.

A good bunch of cilantro, half an onion, a few garlic cloves, some grated ginger, some chili, a tomato chopped, a bunch of cumin, turmeric, cardamom, nutmeg, fennel, cinnamon, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, and a pinch saffron.  Yep that’s right, I throw open my cupboard and start blindly mixing things until its just right.

As you may notice in the photos, I also press my tofu to get it a little firmer.  I slice the tofu into layers and then place paper towels between to absorb the excess water.  A few plates on top of it will add a little pressure.

—jk

Last night, I made Nigella’s orange-scented Spanish chicken with chorizo and potatoes, and then—on her recommendation—turned the leftovers into a breakfast quesadilla. These were good decisions, all. 

Find the recipe here. I modified it slightly in terms of quantity to suit a household of 2: I used 8 chicken thighs, instead of 2 (counting on 2 thighs each, plus leftovers for lunch), I used little red potatoes that I quartered (just over 1 pound), and I used 400 g. of chicken chorizo, which was delicious but got a bit drier than I assume the pork would have. That was okay by me—our Whole Foods didn’t have any appetizing pork chorizo yesterday—but worth noting. Another note, I used the zest of a whole Valencia orange, which had a very thin, almost soft peel. Next time I would choose a sturdier specimen and get as much zest off it as possible; last night’s attempt would have benefited from a touch more citrussy brightness. 

Best of all, after a yucky day, I came home, in five minutes had the tray in the oven, left it to cook for an hour while I vacuumed and generally restored order to my life, and then it was time to eat. Success. 

_________________________

Ta, Catie

This is quite possibly the simplest “recipe” that ever has been/will be on this blog, but it’s outrageously delicious:

Take a slice of artisan bread (I used a piece from a homemade French boule loaf), drizzle liberally with fruity olive oil, sprinkle with cracked pepper and flaky sea salt, then griddle until hot and a bit crispy. 

Devour a stack of these with a cup of coffee in the morning, or a glass of wine as an evening stack. Yum. 

_____________________

Ta, Catie

thepennilessfoodie:

Sunday lunch with friends, always special: http://ohsheglows.com/2011/05/04/vegan-enchiladas-with-cilantro-avocado-cream-sauce-2/

thepennilessfoodie:

Some Saturdays you have to make the most delicious breakfast food ever, Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread…  Joy the Baker sure knows how to write instructions.  There’s no way I could out do her!  The only way I could make them better is to steal them straight from her website and call them my own.  But I won’t.  So instead I’ll post lots of pictures of her Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread and you can see the directions here yourself.

—jk

Cooking with chicken part 4: enchiladas verdes

(part 1, 2, 3)

I was trying to think of what to do for dinner, though definitely planning to incorporate some of the shredded chicken I had at home, when I ran across this video about making enchildas with salsa verdes, and that clinched it. I looked up a couple of recipes online, and they all seemed like more or less complicated versions of the same thing, so I decided to wing it. After a quick trip to the Mexican grocery, I was ready to go. 

I use bottled salsa here. Had I been feeling virtuous, (and given access to ripe tomatillos) I probably would have made my own, but I never, under any circumstances feel virtuous on a Thursday night, so bottled worked just fine, thanks. Also, I tend to be a bit evangelical about this, but I do recommend that you use dark meat here. It’s more flavorful and doesn’t dry out as easily. Dry chicken in enchiladas is sad. 

Ingredients

• 2 c. of cooked, shredded, dark meat chicken 
• 8 small corn tortillas
• 2 c. salsa verde
• 8 oz. of monterey jack or quesadilla cheese, grated
• 2 oz. of cotija or queso fresco, crumbled
• crema and chopped cilantro (optional)

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. 

Next, soften the tortillas. Dampen a kitchen towel and wrap the tortillas in it; microwave for thirty seconds. 

Drizzle about a third a cup of the salsa into the bottom of an small, rectangular baking dish (I used one with a 1 3/4 qt. capacity). Next roll a bit of chicken and the grated cheese up in each tortilla, and wedge the rolls, seam side down in the dish. Cover with the remaining salsa, then chicken, then cheese. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes, or until the cheese is golden and bubbly. Top the enchiladas with a light drizzle of crema, the crumbled cheese and cilantro.

Enjoy in front of an episode or two of The Cosby Show with an IPA. 

Serves 4.

________________________

Ta, Catie

Cooking with chicken part 3: lazy chicken
(see part 1 and part 2)

Please excuse the wonky picture. Tumblr won’t let me fix it.

Once a week I trek over to Whole Foods to shop for vitamins, eggs, yogurt and a whole chicken. I got into the habit of buying a whole chicken every week over the winter after teaching myself a couple of basic butchering skills. About half of the time, I cut up the chicken into eight pieces and use the meat throughout the week, and the other half of the time simply roast it. However, sometimes the week passes me by before I have a chance to cook it, so I pop it into the freezer.

It feels like such a bother to defrost it later, so I like to use a frozen bird to make chicken stock, and then shred the meat up to be used in other meals.

Ingredients

• 1 3lb. frozen, whole chicken
• an onion, quartered and unpeeled
• a couple of carrots and celery sticks, cut in about four pieces each
• a tablespoon of whole peppercorns
• a handful of whatever fresh herbs you have (optional)

Method

Put everything into a large crock pot, pour in eight cups of water, and cook on low overnight, or for 10-12 hours. Remove the chicken from the pot and cool until you can comfortably handle it. Strain the stock into a storage container, and use or freeze in a week to ten days. When your chicken is cool, remove the skin, pull the meat off the bones (discard bones), and shred the meat with your hands or between two forks.

Yields: 8 cups of stock and … several cups of shredded chicken.

_______________________

Ta, Catie

Joe posted a simple French Bread recipe. Enjoy!

Steph