Recipes to try again later

I promised to share recipes that were successes and failures when I set up this blog. Spectacular failures often come with a good story, which is probably why I've been hanging onto this group of recipes without posting them. They were not highly impressive dishes (or haven't been tested yet) and they don't come with good stories. Despite that, I'm posting them here today because the blog entry is easier to find (and read) later than a little slip of paper with pencil marks on it. Hopefully in the future there will be revisions with photos and more exciting tales. Perhaps someone out there will try them out with the suggested "note to self" revisions and let me know how it goes.

Choco-cherry Smoothie

1 cup cherries from cherry bounce
1 1/2 cup seltzer water
2 cups homemade kefir
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tbsp cocoa powder

Blend until smooth. 
NOTE TO SELF: try with 1/2 cup seltzer next time, possibly less kefir. Great chocolate and cherry flavor, but beverage ended up too thin to be a good smoothie. The tanginess was nice, but perhaps less kefir and/or a teaspoon more sugar would bring taste into better balance. Booziness of the alcohol-preserved cherries sneaks up on you, so warn people if you serve this to others. 

Lemon-Chicken Pasta

3/4 pound thin spaghetti, cooked in boiling salted water
2 cups shredded leftover roasted chicken with lemon-pepper-garlic seasoning
75 g bunch parsley, chopped
juice and zest of 2 Meyer lemons
5 Tbsp olive oil
grated Parmesan cheese to taste

Whisk together the lemon juice, zest and olive oil. Toss with chicken and pasta and parsley. Sprinkle each serving with grated Parmesan. 

NOTE TO SELF: I'm sure that this dish could be done with plain salt-and-pepper roasted chicken with just the addition of a minced clove of garlic and some pepper to the sauce. Next time, consider using at least 1 Tbsp less oil. This version was a little too oily. 

The Large-Crowd Meatball Experiment

5 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 large onion, minced
2 Tbsp minced garlic
4 oz fresh bread, processed into fine crumbs
3/4 cup vegetable stock or milk
3 eggs, beaten
2 oz (by weight) sour cream
1 1/2 Tbsp kosher salt
2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
2 Tbsp dried Greek oregano
2 Tbsp dried basil

Place ground beef in large mixing bowl. Saute minced onion and minced garlic in olive oil. Moisten breadcrumbs with vegetable stock/milk in a small bowl. Add sauteed onion/garlic and moist breadcrumbs to meat along with all other ingredients and mix thoroughly. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake.
NOTE TO SELF: These would taste great with ground lamb or beef-lamb mix. Salt was not quite overpowering, but could easily be cut to 1 Tbsp plus 1/2 tsp. Dried basil and oregano amounts (especially oregano) should probably be cut in half. Devote another blog entry to this experiment and its theoretical variations with Korean, sweet-sour, American meatloaf and Middle Eastern flavor profiles. 

Bloody Mary Meatballs

3 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup minced onion
1/4 cup Bloody Mary Mix
1 Tbsp prepared horseradish

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil and mix thoroughly with meat and other ingredients. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake. Serve in a Bloody Mary sauce I haven't written a recipe for yet or make Bloody Marys and eat meatballs as snack with cocktail.
NOTE TO SELF: Mixed parts of three different recipes together to create this one, can't try it out until there is a sharing occasion to make this with a Bloody-Mary-inspired tomato sauce to serve them in.

Read more...

Henne en Bokenade

For the Thanksgiving feast this year, I used my friends as guinea pigs took the opportunity to get some immediate feedback on a stew recipe I was dying to try, but needed some help in eating the large quantity of food produced. I experimented with a recipe from the compilation by John L. Anderson called A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of recipes from several manuscripts written in England in the 1400s, and carted the results along in a big pot to reheat at the home of the hosts.

This chicken dish (in addition to two other meats) was substituting for turkey, since our hosts, who grew up in Sri Lanka, have never acquired a taste for that bird. My dinner offering was definitely standing on the far side of tradition among the foods at our Thanksgiving table. It was more like a tagine or a curry rather than the typical glorious platter of roasted poultry.

As per normal with these 15th-Century recipes, very little guidance is given in quantities or cooking times. The method is laid out with regard to what order things should be done and what mode of cooking should be used, but nothing more detailed than "take these and put them together," "cut it in pieces," "temper with this/allay with this" or "sethe (simmer/boil) it." Sometimes the recipes are written a little out of sequence when the writer goes back to add something that should have been earlier in the list. In this case, I had my choice of two different ways to make the same dish called "Vele, Kede or Henne en Bokenade" or "Autre (another) Vele en Bokenade." They are wildly different from each other, one being made with fresh herbs like parsley and sage and thickened with egg yolk, the other being flavored with warm spices and onions and including some dried currants and other thickeners. But, they are both "en bokenade," meaning a sort of one-pot main dish or potage.

The original recipe is for "Autre Vele en Bokenade," using veal. Since the recipe beforehand offered "henne" or chicken as an option, I decided chicken would be an acceptable option for the second recipe as well.

The original text:
Autre Vele en Bokenade
Take Vele, and Make it clene, and hakke it to gobettys, an sethe it; and take fat brothe, an temper up thine Almaundys that thou hast y-grounde, and lye it with Flowre of Rys, and do there-to gode powder of Gyngere, & Galingale, Canel, Maces, Quybybis, and Oynonys y-mynsyd, &Roysonys of coraunce, & coloure yt wyth Safroun, and put there-to thin Vele, & serve forth. 

My quick-and-dirty version for modern cooks:
Take veal and clean it and cut it into small pieces and simmer it. Take that broth and thicken it with ground almonds and rice flour. Add powdered ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubebs. Add minced onions and dried currants. Color it with saffron, put the veal in the sauce and serve.

The recipe I devised:
Henne en Bokenade 
Cut up a whole chicken so you have wings, breasts, thighs, drumsticks and a back piece. Place the chicken pieces in a large pot with the wings and legs and back on the bottom and the breasts sitting on top. If you have a young chicken, use stock for simmering. If you have a stewing hen, simmer in water. Simmer the deboned chicken in 3 cups chicken stock (or 4 cups water and a much longer cooking time for stewing hen) with 1 tsp salt, 8 white peppercorns and a dash of powdered ginger. Remove the meat when it is cooked through and make a sauce with the broth. Skim fat from the broth if desired.

Mix 2 heaping Tbsp of rice flour with at least 1/4 cup water until it becomes a thick slurry that looks like cream. Use more water if needed. Whisk the rice flour slurry into the hot broth. Add 1 minced onion, 1 tsp ginger powder, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 3/4 tsp ground mace. Grind 10 cubebs and add them to the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer and cook until thickened, whisking occasionally. While the sauce is simmering, remove the meat from the bones and discard the skin. Pull the meat into smaller pieces that would fit on a spoon. When the sauce is close to the desired thickness, add 1 cup dried currants and a generous pinch of saffron. Add the cooked meat to the sauce and add a little salt if desired. The finished dish looks like chicken pieces and currants swimming in a fragrant yellowish-brown gravy.

Notes:
1. I did not have ground almonds or the time and desire to grind almonds on my own in a mortar and pestle on Thursday, so my sauce is thickened only with the rice flour this time.
2. I skipped the galingale because I had just run out, but I used more ginger than I otherwise might have.
3. This sauce thickens considerably as the dish cools. Serve immediately (just like the original recipe says) for the best presentation.
4. For those who are asking, "What's a cubeb?" A cubeb is a a dried berry from a plant related to black pepper. It is somewhat similar to pepper in flavor but also has a tangy, clove-like flavor. I got mine as a gift from a friend, but I know of a source in my area: Spicewell's Essentials. http://spicewells.us/Home.html
5. When I try this one again, I'd go for the ground almond and change up the spice mix to blend more successfully with the saffron; possibly, I would use less saffron than the approximately 1/4 tsp I had when I just dumped the rest of my saffron in the stew. Mine had a bit of an overpowering saffron flavor that blended well with the ginger, but left the other spices far less present.

Read more...

Taking it slow in the new year

During the first few days of the new year, my husband is still on winter break from his job at the university and I have extra days off from the cafe for New Year's Day and other days when business is really slow. It's cold outside and we're craving something warming and uncomplicated to eat after all the party food and cookies in December. And since at least one of us will be around in the late morning, it's a great time to drag out the slow cooker to make those dishes that finish themselves while you're having an afternoon at home relaxing or catching up on chores.

Before I go into the recipes, I just wanted to have a bit of a rant about slow cookers: you can't really just "set it and forget it," despite the conventional wisdom about them. They are slow enough to give you an afternoon off from cooking dinner, but not slow enough for the working woman or man who is away from home for 9 or 10 hours. Also, many recipes involve adding an ingredient an hour before the end of cooking time or changing the temperature partway through cooking. Unless you're talking very large slow cooker with very large amount of food in it (impractical for a two-person household like mine, where the five-quart cooker feeds us for two or three days) or you've got a fancier slow cooker than mine that can be set to only cook for a preset amount of time and then change itself to warmer mode, you just can't fill the slow cooker at breakfast and not look at it till dinner and expect the food to be anything but overcooked. My basic, no-frills Crock-Pot is a tool that can only be used for days off or staggered schedules where one of us has the morning off and the other comes home at the right time in the evening to turn off the cooking.

This planning problem is, of course, no trouble at all when one person is at home all day during winter break. On just one such day this week, Andrew further modified a Taste of Home recipe I'd already changed to accommodate our tastes. Here's our result:

Slow-Cooked White Chicken Chili
serves 4 to 5

2 chicken legs (bone-in, skin-on)
1 medium onion, chopped
1-2 Tbsp canola oil
1 garlic clove, minced
1 1/2 cup water
1 tsp Minor's chicken base concentrate
1 15-oz can Great Northern beans
1 1/4 cup frozen corn kernels
1 can chopped green chiles
2 tsp ground cumin

Brown chicken legs in oil. Remove and place in 5-quart slow cooker. Saute onions in oil until tender, add garlic and cook one more minute. Transfer to slow cooker, on top of chicken. Add all other ingredients. Cover and cook on low for 6 hours until chicken is no longer pink and leg bones pull apart easily.

Here's another recipe full of warmth, good smells, and beany heartiness that I made yesterday, once again making heavy modifications to a Taste of Home recipe. I was inspired to make cornbread (a Cook's Illustrated recipe) to accompany this one. Cut a piece of cornbread in half in a bowl and pour the stew right on top to let the juices soak into the bread.

Four-Bean Stew
serves 4 to 6

8 oz leftover roasted ham (OK to leave on the fatty bits)
2 medium onions, chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp canola oil
1 clove garlic, minced
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground dry mustard
1 28-oz can Boston-style baked beans (no tomato, flavored with molasses)
1 16-oz can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 16-oz can butter beans, rinsed and drained
1 15-oz can whole green beans, drained

Chop ham and set aside. Saute onions in oil, add garlic and cook another minute or two. Stir in sugar, cider vinegar, mustard and salt. Simmer about 10 minutes. Stir all ingredients together in 5-quart slow cooker and cook on low 6 hours. Stir occasionally to avoid sticking. Serve over split pieces of cornbread.

Special note to my mother: Hey, Mom, I finally got over my long-standing hatred of cornbread! I found a couple of recipes that I actually like. They both include actual corn kernels, along with lots of fat or cream, and not very much sugar. For small portions only.

Read more...

Playing with 15th-Century pork pie again

Not only are pork pie recipes available in the Harleian manuscripts from 15th century England, there is also a pork pie recipe in the 14th-century collection called Forme of Cury. The last time I tried to recreate a pork-and-fruit pie and described it in this blog, I was going with a 15th-Century source, but the recipe I used most recently from the prior century isn't much different. It's still ground/minced pork inside a crust with fruit and spices, although this one also includes some fowl, as did the first Tarte de Chare recipe I found.

This latest experiment with pork-and-fruit pie was a big hit at the local Society for Creative Anachronism shire's holiday party potluck, where a few of us took the challenge I'd posed to bring pre-1600 food to the party.

Here's the recipe I worked from this time (with special characters replaced with "th" where they appear):
Tartee
Take pork ysode. hewe it and bray it. do thereto ayrenn. Raisouns sugur and powdour of gyngur. powdour douce and smale briddes theramong and white grece, take prunes, safroun & salt, and make a crust in a trape & do ther Fars therin. &bake it wel & serue it forth. 

That is, take cooked/boiled pork and grind it, mix in eggs, raisins, sugar and powdered ginger, powder douce (sweet powder, a spice mixture). Add small birds and white grease (fresh fat, not drippings). Take prunes, saffron and salt. Make a crust in a trap (a pie dish) and put the farce (meat mixture) in it. Bake it well and serve it forth.

I departed from the original recipe's instruction to grind previously cooked pork and used fresh ground pork, easily available these days from the butcher shop. I also decided to do a double-crust pie that would stand on its own instead of putting a single-crust pie in a pie plate, because I wanted people at the potluck to be able to easily eat pieces of pie with their hands. As it turns out, the fresh pork may have been an unwise choice because the pie's juices steadily bubbled over through my vent holes in the crust and created quite a mess on my baking sheet. Cooked pork may have been more well-behaved and stayed in its crust.

I can only hope that entire small birds would have baked up to a safe temperature when mixed in with the rest of the meat. I didn't have the time the day I was baking to go looking for quail or doves, so I used 1.5 to 2 pounds chicken thighs, which for the convenience of my potluckers I deboned before cooking. And to be sure I'd get fully cooked fowl, I fried the chicken pieces in oil until browned before adding them on top of the pork mixture in my pie.

My recipe for the rest of the pork-and-fruit mixture:
1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz currants
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 to 3/4 tsp salt
2 whole cloves, crushed to powder
dash cinnamon and nutmeg
pinch saffron, crushed
2 tsp sugar

Once again, I used the "good white crust" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks that was their version of Gervase Markham's crust described in The English Housewife, a manual from 1615. It is sturdy, but just fatty enough to be a little flaky. The flavor is appealing, especially when the pie is still warm, and it bakes to a nice golden color at 375 degrees Fahrenheit without threatening to burn before the pie filling is done and bubbly in the center.

I should mention that I was instantly won over by the Project Gutenberg e-book version of Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge, which I acquired for my iPod through iBooks, for the simple reason that it has every recipe listed individually in the table of contents, so I can just look for the title I want and go directly to that recipe without having to page through the entire book. A big win over the HTML version on the Project Gutenberg website because the recipes in the book are not organized alphabetically or even necessarily by course in the meal.

Read more...

Quiet Thanksgiving dinner for two

Thanksgiving Day was not a large celebration this year, just me and my husband. Since we both had the day off work, I slept in and spent the rest of the morning cooking up a special small feast with lots of local items.

Here's our feast table just before we dig in:

The menu

Main dish:
a locally-raised organic chicken, roasted with rosemary sprigs (from my own backyard) stuffed in the cavity

Side dishes:
golden beets from the special Thanksgiving farmer's market, roasted in the pan with the chicken
spaghetti squash from a friend's backyard, roasted and seasoned with salt and pepper, butter and brown sugar
rose heart radishes from the CSA, boiled and then sauced with a roux-based white sauce with chicken bouillon base and lactose-free milk

Dessert:
pumpkin custard in pie form, with prosciutto bits rolled into the crust

To drink:
a California Chardonnay

Read more...

Easy chicken stock

Flavorful, frugal and lowfat, homemade chicken stock adds special taste without salt and artificial additives. My freezer always has containers of stock and of ingredients waiting to become stock.

The most exciting part to me about making stock at home is that it re-uses ingredients from other dishes. Just keep freezer bags or plastic containers with bones from roasted chickens and trimmings of vegetables in your freezer and add to them (keep the vegetables separate from the bones). The best vegetable trimmings are the ends of carrots, the tops of celery, the washed tops of leeks, the stems of parsley and the ends of summer squashes (minus the hard stem). Cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon recommended adding apple peels to stock, and I've done that with good results too.
If you're in no mood to keep vegetable trimmings, just make simple stocks with the bones only.

I used to leave a stock pot on the stove all afternoon a few times a year, but I found a way to make stock that requires even less attention to the pot: use the slow cooker (aka Crock-Pot).

Fill a slow cooker with bones. Cover all the bones with water, put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on the low setting about eight or ten hours. After about four or five hours, add vegetable trimmings and a couple cloves of garlic if desired. If I'm cooking stock overnight, I have no desire to set an alarm clock for four hours later to add veggies, so I just make the bones-only stock if I'm not awake while it's cooking.

If you forget about the stock and cook longer than 10 hours, the more the bones and connective tissues dissolve, and the more jelly-like the stock will become when it is cooled. This gel is nutritious, containing protein and calcium, and it returns to its liquid state when reheated.

When the stock is finished cooking, put the bones in a mesh strainer over a pot so they will drain. Then toss them out and ladle the stock through the strainer into the pot. Use the ladle so that sediment in the stock stays at the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the pot into the refrigerator overnight to cool. Remove the fat layer the next day and store the stock in plastic containers in the freezer. My favorites are 32-oz yogurt containers because it's a way to re-use what would otherwise be trash, and 4 cups of stock is a convenient quantity to use.

Although I don't make other stocks like beef or veal or fish, I'm sure the only part of this process that would change is a slightly longer cooking time for beef bones and shorter time for fish bones. The same stock process I describe works for turkey carcasses after the holidays, too, or for starting a soup from a ham bone.

Save your food containers and food "waste" for stock, and you get a large quantity of nutritious liquid for the cost of leaving a light bulb on for the day.

Read more...

My first fried chicken

I did not grow up with home-cooked Southern-style fried chicken, as frying things with a lot of oil happened very rarely in my parents' home. I've been attracted to the idea of making a batch of fried chicken as a picnic food, which I've read about in older cookbooks and novels set in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Enter the motivation of needing a dish for a Memorial Day weekend potluck, the availability of fryer chickens at the Bloomington Farmer's Market, and Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything, and I'm in business.

Of course, I departed from the original recipe in order to use the ingredients I have at hand. I did soak the chicken in buttermilk overnight as recommended by the recipe for added tenderness and flavor, and I think it helped.
Mixed in with the flour was 1/2 cup matzo meal for a little coarser texture to the breading. The next time I make this dish, I'm definitely using more spices. I didn't have nearly enough pepper and salt at 1 tsp each, and I should have had much more of the Penzey's spice mix (I don't recall whether I used the Jerk Seasoning or the Adobo Seasoning) because its taste didn't come through at all.

Using my cast-iron covered Dutch oven and a mix of Crisco and canola oil (Nigella Lawson highly praises the results from solid vegetable shortening, and I had a cup of Crisco on hand), I fried at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for seven minutes with the cover on and seven minutes with the cover off, one batch for the dark meat and one batch for the light meat. The dark meat stayed in a couple more minutes with the cover off.

The final taste test at the potluck was successful. The chicken was, alas, fried earlier in the day and had been refrigerated, so it was not at the peak of its crispness, but the texture was better than acceptable, even when I ate leftovers another day later. Can't wait to try this again and improve upon the spice mix.

Read more...

Lower-fat, no-coconut korma

I found a recipe I wanted to try from a slow-cooker cookbook in my collection, one that promised delicious curry slow-cooker style. It was a chicken korma with a coconut milk base, thickened with ground toasted almonds. "Lite" coconut milk still isn't light enough to make the cut in my diet, and there are already ground almonds in the recipe, so I thought, "why not kill two birds with one stone? I'll make almond milk instead of using coconut milk and then I'll have ground almonds to use for the thickener."

Lorna Sass offers a delicious almond milk recipe from the 1400s in To the King's Taste: Richard II's book of feasts and recipes adapted for modern cooking. That almond milk is sweetened, which I didn't want, so I changed things up a little in my most recent almond milk.

The most fun part about making the almond milk comes after Step 1: blanch whole almonds, drain, rinse with cold water, drain. Then I get to squeeze them until the almonds pop right out of the skins. The flying almonds have a surprising velocity when they hit the bowl. Sometimes they leap right out of it. For this recipe, since it was going to cook down for a long time, I made a rather thin almond milk by putting 1/2 cup almonds and 2 cups water into my blender to whirl until the almonds were ground and the water was white. I strained out the almonds to add to the curry later in the cooking.

I also decided there was no reason why I couldn't, when I didn't want to wait four hours for dinner, make the dish on the stove in about an hour. 

The rest of the recipe:

No-coconut chicken korma 
serves four to six

Almond milk made with 1/2 cup almonds and 2 cups water, ground almonds strained out
2 Tbsp butter or ghee
3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into bite-size pieces
1 onion, chopped
4 green cardamom pods, cracked
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 dash ground turmeric
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp ground chilies
1/2 cup chicken stock, if more liquid desired
1 Tbsp lime juice
1 tsp garam masala
salt and ground black pepper to taste

Heat ghee/butter in a pan and cook chicken pieces until they start to brown. Fry onion for a few minutes, then add cardamom pods and garlic and fry 2 minutes. Add ground almonds, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon stick, ground chilies and cook about one minute until fragrant. Add liquids and simmer until chicken is cooked through. Stir in the citrus juice and garam masala and cook until liquid has thickened and reduced to your liking. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Serving suggestion: spoon curry over saffron rice -- rice sauteed in butter/ghee and then steamed in water with a pinch or two of saffron for color and flavor
Garnish suggestion: toasted sliced almonds

Read more...

Andrew's going-away dinner

This dinner is from a few weeks ago. The night before the dear husband took off for a week-long conference trip, I cooked up something special for our last dinner together.

The menu:

Roasted chicken with peach chutney that I canned in the summer

Chili potatoes

Roasted squash with butter and brown sugar

The finished plate:

For the potatoes, I was improving on the recipe I used for Christmas dinner, which included zucchini in the sauté. I didn't like the way the zucchini was skillet-blackened by the time the potatoes were golden brown, so I took them out. Also, I needed to use up some purple Peruvian potatoes from the last farmer's market, so into the sauté they went.

The recipe:

Chili Potatoes

2 pounds potatoes, peeled

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp chili pepper flakes

salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes whole in salted water, drain and cool. When cool enough to touch, cut potatoes into small chunks. Heat vegetable oil in a large pan, toss in chili pepper flakes, then sauté potatoes until they are golden on all sides. Season to taste.

With the chicken, I dried it off before roasting in the hopes that it would not spit so much as it baked in a hot oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. I salted it only a little on the skin and inside the cavity for seasoning and roasted it on a rack inside the pot I usually use for chickens. Most of the flavor in this dish comes from the peach chutney. I roasted it approximately one hour, until the meat thermometer read 170 degrees Fahrenheit.

The peach chutney recipe is in the Bernardin company’s Guide to Home Preserving. The peaches are from this summer’s local farmer’s markets. This was a fantastic year for peaches, so I bought 6 to 8 pounds of them every week and made lots of preserves to hang onto the peaches for a few more months. For this dinner, I heated the chutney on the stove before pouring over the plated chicken pieces.

The squash baked at the same temperature for the same amount of time as the chicken, on a pan underneath it in the oven. I brushed a little oil on it to keep the exposed squash parts moister.

Sweet Roasted Squash

One large winter squash

2 Tbsp brown sugar per pound of roasted squash

1 Tbsp butter per pound of roasted squash

salt and pepper to taste

Cut squash open and scoop out seeds. Brush cut sides with oil. Roast at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until tender, about one hour. Scoop squash out of its skin and mash it. Mix with butter and brown sugar. Season with salt and pepper.

Read more...