Tag: Bon Apetit

What’s for supper? Vol. 460: It was the shroopiest of times, it was the doopiest of times

Happy Friday! The other day I thought of a really clever pun for this week’s food post title, and decided not to write it down because I would definitely remember it later. Now it is later, and, well.

It’s just as well. These things are always disappointing. One of my kids once had a dream about a fiendishly clever new advance in technology that would revolutionize the way we fight wars, and she woke and and DID write it down so she’s remember it. In the morning, she looked at her notes, and it said “bag of bees.” 

Anyway, I’m sorry it’s the first Friday in Lent and this post is gonna be full of the yummy things we ate for Valentine’s Day and for Mardi Gras and also because I’m a cooker of yummy things. Some years I come up with a putatively clever gimmick to shield the viewer from graphic (=meat) content, but we are solidly in bag of bees territory here, mentally. All buzz, no honey. I don’t know. Well, here is what we ate:

SATURDAY
Leftovers and french bread pizza

Saturday was shopping day, and I had the pleasure of paying for it almost entirely in cash earned from selling cheesecakes. That felt pretty good. 

Saturday was, of course, Valentine’s Day, so along with frozen pizza, I also got corn dogs as a romantic gesture, because only Damien and I like them. We didn’t eat a single corn dog like in Lady and the Tramp or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. 

We all gave each other chocolate and candy, and for dessert, I decided to try my hand at one of those fancy decorated swiss rolls. I followed the directions from The Squeaky Mixer, which were nice and clear. (I see she also has a post for a master guide on decorated swiss rolls!) It was very pleasant using a small bowl and whisk for a change. I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but it was nice to move more slowly. 

This recipe requires a very tender cake, so you can’t over mix anything. I did use the standing mixer to make stiff egg whites, which get folded into the batter. 

After you do that, you set aside a little bit and color it, and put that into piping bags (well, sandwich bags). The trick of putting the bags in cups and folding back the tops over the rim before filling them is SO helpful, especially if you just have a small amount in each bag

Then you grease and line a cookie sheet and pipe your design onto it. It opted for the old classic Valentine message: Shroopy doo.

Origin story: 

I wish I had spent a little more time coming up with an actual design, but I did manage to get the letters all backward! Then you freeze the design for a bit, to help it stay intact. 

Then I used a large bag to pipe the rest of the batter over the design. I took a pic just before I covered up the decorated part with plain batter.  

Here is where I made my first mistake. The pan is a rectangle, and you only decorate one half of it, because the other half is going to get rolled up and no one will see it. But I decorated the long half, rather than the short half. So at this point, I was locked into rolling a long, thin roll, rather than a short, stout swiss roll. Not necessarily a mistake, I guess, but not what I intended.

So you bake it for a short time (it’s a very thin cake), take it out of the oven, turn it out of the pan, and carefully peel the parchment paper off the bottom, revealing the baked-in design. I took a video of this part, and you can hear me breathing heavily. 

 

Here is where I made my second mistake, and this one was a doozy. I sprinkled the cake lightly with sugar and covered it with a damp towel and carefully rolled it up. 

The wrong way.

I rolled it so the design was on the inside. And I didn’t notice until it had cooled for about twenty minutes. So I unrolled and re-rolled it the other way, but of course it cracked, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid with a swiss roll! 

I was annoyed at myself, but not devastated, because if something is going to go wrong, it’s best when the mistake is super obvious and super avoidable in the future. One has simply not to be a bonehead, and it will work out better next time!

So while it was cooling, I whipped the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla, carefully unrolled the cake, spread it with the cream, and rolled it back up again, and let it finish cooling. 

It was, indeed, the shroopy doo-est of cakes. 

You can see that I festooned it with leftover molded chocolate from another project, and that really shrooped things up, I think. 

I actually used double the amount of cream filling, because, I don’t know, I like cream filling. When I sliced the roll open, it had a decent spiral, considering it was a long, skinny cake. (I know from watching Great British Baking Show that the spiral is very important.)

It was so bland, though. Next time I make one of these, I will do a layer of something with a stronger flavor on the inside along with the cream, and will  probably dress up the outside, as well. But honestly, I considered this project a success, because everything turned out well except for two things that are easy to correct next time. We live to roll another day. 

In the afternoon, we watched Yojimbo, and in the evening, we watched Moonstruck. Each perfect Valentine’s Day movies, in their own way. 

SUNDAY
Hamburgers, chips, king cake

Sunday our old friend Elijah was over, and it was another weekend where I felt powerless to resist making a bunch of big hamburgers (I had bought a bunch of ground beef while it was still on super bowl prices). I also got a sudden urge to make a king cake before Lent descended. I found a King Arthur Baking recipe and thought, oh yeah, I’ve used this recipe a few times before. Started putting it together and I was like . . . mmmmmm I don’t think I have used this recipe before. It calls for dry milk, which I didn’t have any of. It also calls for lemon oil or zest, which I also didn’t have, so I used orange zest. Then I tried to figure out what I could possibly use as a substitute for dry milk. You’d think wet milk is the answer, but that only works if you decrease the other liquid, which it was too late to do. I don’t even remember how I resolved it, but the dough I ended up with was less “soft and silky” and more “disgusting” and “something I don’t want to touch.” 

It requires two rises, and, by adding plenty of flour, I managed to coerce it into a reasonable shape. I added the cream cheese filling and then discovered there was a jar of homemade strawberry topping left over from cheesecake, so I spread that on, too.

Things are looking up! Many of us have untidy back stories, but we turn out well anyway! So why. not this king cake! All I had to do was fold over the margins and pinch them together, and carefully place the whole thing into a bundt pan. 

Well , . ., ,,,

I got the fuckin thing in the pan. Possibly the ugliest transfer possible. If there were king cake police, I’d be in jail for life for what I did to that dough. 

ANYWAY, I baked it, and it actually came out of the pan more or less intact, and I shoved a baby-sized rubber alien up in there, and drizzled it with three colors of icing, and threw some edible gold flakes on top because why not. 

It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I did overbake it, so it was a little dry, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t filled so much as infiltrated with cream cheese and strawberry.

I was cutting it up and passing out pieces, and Damien’s piece was last, with the rubber baby clearly visible. He was in the other room, so the kids and I declared that whoever gets the baby has to buy everyone ice cream, and then we gave Damien his piece. In other words, we shrooped his doo. Shrooped it good. 

MONDAY
Pork vindaloo, basmati rice, naan, mango

Monday I salvaged my good name in the kitchen. This meal turned out absolutely delightful, and I was very pleased with myself. 

In the morning, I assembled my spices for this pork vindaloo recipe from Bon Apetit. 

Then you just pulverize them all together and marinate chunks of pork in the resulting paste. The recipe calls for pork shoulder and pork belly, but I just used a rather fatty loin, and it was fine. I only used half the number of guajillo chiles it called for, and it was still quite fiery. I would do it that way on purpose. Hot enough to really light up your head, but not enough to make it hard to taste anything else. 

So I set the meat to marinate

cut up the mangoes, set up the rice, and made the dough for naan. I used the King Arthur Baking naan recipe, and this time I really had made it before. I decided I would get fancy and weigh the flour, rather than measuring it by volume like I usually do. Well, I had to add so much extra flour to get the texture right, I don’t know what the point was! 

But they turned out so, so good. I made a double recipe, which should yield 16 flatbreads, but I divided the dough into only eight pieces, so they were a nice, generous size. I cooked them in a very hot iron frying pan, wiped it out with a damp cloth in between fries, and brushed the pieces of naan with melted butter on both sides when they came out of the pan. PERFECT. 

They were SO soft and nice, I was just delighted. Probably the best naan I’ve ever made. 

The whole meal was delightful. 

I got a little ramekin of yogurt to sooth my mouth when the meat got too hot. I want to make this again right away, but it doesn’t feel very Lenten!

TUESDAY
Mardi Gras

I have such mixed feelings about Chili’s having somehow become our traditional final place of debauchery before Lent. The restaurant was practically empty, but they seated us next to the bathroom anyway. It was fine. I ordered some kind of chipotle chicken bowl and it was perfectly fine. Then we followed up with our other, equally dubious tradition and headed over to Price Chopper to pick out individual tubs of ice cream.. I got a Ben and Jerry’s thing with a caramel core and pieces of blonde brownie. Damien was sick and Elijah was working, so we brought them to-go boxes. And that was our festal meal! Shroopy doo.

WEDNESDAY
Spaghetti and salad

On Wednesday I was the one who was sick, so Damien brought the kids to Mass. I spent the afternoon ruthlessly decluttering the dining room (four bags of trash, yay!), and for supper we had spaghetti and salad, and, just to round out the church basement dinner vibes, white bread with butter.

THURSDAY
Roast drumsticks, mashed potatoes, roast butternut squash

Thursday I was busy all day, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what with. So I threw together supper at the last minute. I just sprayed the chicken drumsticks with cooking spray and seasoned them heavily with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. I roasted them and then put them in a covered baking dish in a low rack in the oven to stay warm, so I could use the broiler to make the butternut squash. I peeled and sliced up two squashes and laid the disks in a pan on parchment paper. I may or may not have sprayed them with cooking spray, but I definitely put a little heap of brown sugar on each one, and then sprinkled them pretty heavy with a lovely biryani masala by Spicewalla. 

I had a five-pound bag of potatoes, and the original plan was to bake them, but you really cannot make baked potatoes for seven people when two of them look like this:

Five potatoes total in the bag! I used to buy potatoes like this on purpose, and slice them into these ludicrously long french fries; but it was definitely not a deep frying kind of night. I just boiled them and mashed them, and I did a pretty poor job, too. Very lumpy. The squash was great, though!

I just adore Indian spices on squash. Really tasty and interesting. 

It turned out to be a pretty good meal despite the potatoes. 

And that’s-a my story. 

FRIDAY
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

I’m actually really looking forward to this meal. I may even throw some leftover rice into the tomato soup. The kids got an early release from school because there is a big storm coming. I saw the highway department pre-salting the roads before the snow even started, so I guess it’s gonna be a doozy. 

I guess we are gonna try our Fisher Family Mandatory Lent Film Party again this year. Damien and I are both exhausted and couldn’t come up with anything creative, so we’re going to watch Spartacus, which I haven’t seen in many years. I remember it being very sweaty. The kids have been lots of fun to talk about movies with lately, though, so I have medium-high hopes. 

In conclusion, you will have a lizard in your pocket. Be you. Shroopy doo. 

What’s for Supper? Vol. 108: In which we have two vegetables for Thanksgiving, not counting potatoes!

Just the Thanksgiving food this time! I know it makes more sense to share Thanksgiving recipes before Thanksgiving, but none of this stuff would be out of place for a Christmas meal, either, except maybe pumpkin pie and stuffing.

All of my kids genuinely helped. Except for Corrie. Corrie mainly supervised.

They chopped, sliced, trimmed, buttered, grated, juiced, stirred, basted, and baked, and I would have been a complete wreck without their help. We started baking and cooking on Wednesday evening, and by Thursday afternoon, I felt calm, confident, cheerful, and ready. I highly recommend having kids who are old enough to help!

Here’s what we had:

Turkey with gravy and stuffing. I have no desire to argue with anyone about how to make a turkey. Not Alton Brown, nor his acolytes, nor anyone. I’ve roasted dozens of turkeys. I butter it and sprinkle it with salt and pepper, turn it breast down on a rack for half the roasting, then flip it for the rest of the time, and I (well, my sons) baste it every half hour. It turns out good.

The skin is crisp and varnished-looking, the meat is moist and flavorful. I don’t want to argue about it! Your way is good, too! Hooray for your way! I like my way! Hooray!

I made stuffing (Pepperidge Farm herbed cubes, I think) with sauteed onions, mushrooms, and celery. Not original, but always good.

I wanted to get the gravy over with, so I started with a ton of melted butter, then added a ton of flour until it was a thick paste, then thinned it gradually with turkey stock I had made with giblets and neck, celery, scallions. Then, when the turkey was done, I added salt and pepper, a fried and diced turkey liver, and plenty of pan drippings, scrapings, and fat.

Lyonnaise Potatoes. My father brought this dish. Will add the recipe when I get it! Very tasty, and it reminded me of my grandmother’s cooking, which is high praise.

Sweet potatoes with blue cheese and walnuts. A simplified version of this recipe, which also calls for dates, parsley, and gorgonzola, rather than blue cheese. I baked the potatoes, sliced them open, mashed in the toppings, and then reheated them in the microwave before dinner.

Parkerhouse rolls. I’ve made this recipe before, with good success, but this year we just bought frozen dough. My daughter rolled the dough into golf ball-sized balls and put them in buttered cupcake tins — one ball in the mini tins, and three balls in the regular size.

 

Hobbit Bread (braided bread stuffed with onions, mushrooms, and cheese). This is (according to my 17-year-old) the best recipe in An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery.  I’ll paste the whole recipe into the bottom of this post. She used frozen bread dough for this, too, and added poppy seeds to the top.

Oven roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon. Easy peasy. Boys trimmed and halved the Brussels sprouts, daughter snipped a pound of bacon into pieces, and I mixed it up with oil, salt, and pepper, and spread it in a shallow pan, then roasted at 400 for about twenty minutes. The bacon wasn’t as crisp as I would have liked (I should have laid it on top, rather than mixing it in), but the Brussels sprouts still magically gathered in a ton of bacon flavoring. It was great.

Hasselback butternut squash with bay leaves. This dish puts the hassle in butternut squash, let me tell you. But it was worth it. So pretty and exciting. I made it the night before, then warmed it up for the meal. We ended up using jalapeno peppers instead of Fresno chilis, fresh bay leaves instead of dried, fake maple syrup instead of real, canola oil instead of olive, and salted butter instead of unsalted! Still great! We’ve never had a spicy dish for Thanksgiving before. It found myself cooling my tongue with cranberry sauce in between bites of squash. Here’s the recipe from Bon Appetit.

Cranberry orange nut bread. Worth the trouble to zest the oranges and squeeze fresh juice, especially if you have kid slaves to do it for you. They also chopped the nuts and cranberries with my lovely mezzaluna knife. Recipe from Epicurious. This is very festive-looking, with the bright cranberries and flecks of orange zest, and it makes the house smell wonderful.

Banana nut bread. I always start baking for Thanksgiving with banana bread, because it’s so dang easy. Fannie Farmer has the classic recipe.

Apple pie. I don’t really follow a recipe for the filling – just sliced apples, sugar, a little flour, cinnamon and a little numeg, and dots of butter on the top – but here is the crust recipe I use — except I use butter, which I freeze (or even just chill) and grate it into the flour, so it only takes a few jabs with a butter knife to fully incorporate it. The butter does warm up in your hand as you grip it, so be careful of your knuckles if it slips!

My 17-year-old used cookie cutters to make stars and flowers, and made an overlapping pieced crust, which was lovely. We brushed it with an egg wash (beaten up egg with a little warm water) and then sprinkled sugar on top before baking.

I baked the pies until they were almost done the day before, then put them back in the oven at 250 while we were eating the meal. By dessert time, they were hot again and perfectly browned.

Pumpkin pie. I used readymade graham cracker crust and followed the recipe on the side of the pumpkin can. And yes, I had to run to the convenience store and buy evaporated milk, because all I had was condensed milk. I always know what the difference is, except for two times: when I’m shopping, and when I’m baking.

We had whipped cream and ice cream for the pies. I intended the kids to have a choice, but they intended to have both ice cream and whipped cream on everything. Corrie skipped the pie and just had ice cream and whipped cream.

Crock pots were very useful. I made the gravy on the stovetop, then transferred it to a slow cooker, to free up space and keep it warm, and filled the gravy boat from that. I also microwaved the gravy boat, so it stayed warm while it was on the table. I used my other slow cooker for mulled apple cider.

It was my husband’s turn to worry that there wouldn’t be enough food, so he bought an extra turkey breast, so we roasted that, too. I helpfully added garlic eyes so it could glare at us.

And now for the Hobbit bread recipe!

Next time she makes it, I’ll take pictures at different stages, so you can see how the dough gets that braided effect.

Braided Bread Stuffed with Mushrooms, Onions, and Cheese

This hearty bread is practically a meal unto itself. In celebration of Hobbits well known love of mushrooms, this is stuffed with mushrooms, onions, cheese, and English country herbs. It’s best fresh from the oven while the cheese is still runny, but the leftovers are almost as good served alongside supper to help soak up a hearty plate of mutton or venison gravy.

Dough:
1 ½ c / 300 g water
1 tbsp active dry yeast
4 tbsp / 85 g honey
4 eggs
½ c oil
6 ½ -7 c / 825 – 850 g bread flour
1 tbsp coarse salt
8 cloves minced garlic
1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves
1 tsp fresh basil leaves, minced

Filling:
2 tbsp butter
2 c / 200 g sliced mushrooms
2 onions, diced
2 c / 250 g shredded mozzarella
2 cloves garlic in filling
1 tbsp rosemary in each
1 tsp basil
1 tbsp coarse saltTo make a loaf , start by dissolving your yeast in the warm water. Feel free to add an extra tsp of honey at this stage to help kick start your yeast. Walk away for ten minutes. When you come back, the yeast should have bloomed so it looks like a mushroom cap rising up out of your bowl. It knows its fate.

Mix in the eggs, oil, salt, and the rest of the honey. When you achieve a soupy mass, add the minced garlic , fresh rosemary leaves, and fresh basil. It should smell delicious.

Now mix in the bread flour. Modern cooks with a stand mixer can attach the dough hook and let it knead away for 6-8 minutes. If you want to get a real feel for the period, knead it by hand for 8-10 minutes. The dough should be soft, pliant, and not too tacky.

Form it into a ball, cover it with a clean dishtowel, and let it rise for an hour, or until double in size.

Meanwhile, make your filling. Melt your butter in a large skillet over a medium-high heat. Add your onions and cook until they start to brown . You want them to lose a lot of moisture while gaining some flavor.

Once the onions start to brown, add your garlic, rosemary, and basil. Keep cooking for another 3-4 minutes, or until the garlic barely starts to brown . Finally add the mushrooms. You don’t want to overcook them. Mix them in and cook for another 4-5 minutes, stirring frequently.

Take the pan off the heat and finish it with the coarse salt. Set it aside to cool while the dough continues rising.

Once the dough has doubled in size, punch it down. Flour a clean surface and roll the dough into a rectangle . Put that rectangle on a sheet of parchment paper so you can easily move the finished loaf to a pan. Trim away any rough edges.

Now that you have a trimmed rectangle of dough, mentally divide the rectangle into thirds. The center third is where you place your filling. The outer two thirds will be cut into braid strips. To give it an attractive , braided top, make neat, even, 1 inch 2.5 cm wide cuts along each side. Make a bed of cheese in the middle ⅓ of your bread. Pile the mushroom filling on top of that. Cover the filling with any remaining cheese. Fold both end pieces inwards so they cover some of the filling.

To create the braided top, pull the cut edges of dough over the center, alternating sides and tugging tight, so the dough completely covers the filling. This makes a single, massive rectangular loaf . Slide it onto your largest cooking pan. If you don’t have any oversized baking sheets, just slide it into a heavily buttered 9×13 glass baking pan. Either way, let it rise for another hour. You put this much work into it, so you might as well make the bread pretty. Whisk together an egg and 1 tbsp of water to make an egg wash.

Use a pastry brush to paint the surface of the bread. If you’d like, sprinkle another 1 tsp of coarse salt on top. Bake the bread at 350F / 180C for 35-40 minutes. If the top starts to get too brown, cover it with foil.

Due to the moist interior, the bottom of this bread has a tendency to get soggy if you leave it out overnight. That means it’s your duty to consume the entire loaf before bedtime. If you don’t have a party of dwarves or a couple teenagers on hand to help you finish it, you can always use the leftovers to make savory mushroom bread pudding for tomorrow’s dinner.

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