Cranberry haupia

At Costco recently they had fresh cranberries on sale for some ridiculously low price, somehow about as low as when we'd buy them back when we lived in a cranberry-producing region.  So of course I had to get some.  I planned to just do my regular cranberry sauce (courtesy of Joy of cooking), but when I saw this recipe for cranberry haupia in the newspaper, I knew we had to try it.

Ingredients for the haupia layer were:

1 13.5-oz. can coconut milk

½ c. sugar

2 envelopes unflavored gelatin

½ c. water

1 c. milk

We had coconut cream, but not coconut milk, so we used what we had.  It probably made for a richer haupia anyway!  And like usual, we used less sugar--probably about 1/3 c. or so.

Ingredients for the cranberry layer included:

2 c. fresh or frozen cranberries

¼ c. sugar, or more to taste

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ c. red wine

½ c. canned crushed pineapple

We omitted the pineapple because I wanted the cranberry flavor to come through, not cranberry-pineapple, and for a change, we used about the same amount of sugar as called for in the recipe.

Obviously, neither of us went to Stanford, but it was nice to get their wine gratis.

We used a Malbec that we'd gotten for free.  Upon tasting a bit of the wine after opening the bottle, we realized that neither of us actually likes Malbec (too dry and tannic), but we figured we'd use it anyway, because what else were we going to do with it?  In the end, it turned out that we couldn't really taste the wine in the finished sauce, so we probably could have used just about any red and the cranberries would have turned out fine.

The haupia layer was already solid at this point, so we took especial care to let the cranberry part cool to room temperature so as not to undermine our hard work!

Like being at a Thanksgiving or a Christmas luau, right?

The recipe was included as part of the newspaper's Thanksgiving stories, but I think this could just as easily be made for Christmas; the combination of cranberries, cinnamon, and red wine sounds a lot more Christmas-y to me than the spice combinations traditionally used for Thanksgiving dishes.  In any event, this was very tasty, with the tart cranberry layer nicely complementing the richness of the haupia.

The only thing was that the consistency of the cranberry layer was a lot firmer than the haupia, so that you'd go to cut off a bite and the force to poke the fork through the cranberry layer would squash the haupia (sort of like trying to eat one of those mille-feuille pastries).  I'd probably add more wine while cooking the cranberries, because there didn't seem to be a whole lot of liquid for the gelatin to work with in the pot with the cooked berries.  Thankfully, we have almost an entire bottle of Malbec that we can use for that!

Ragù with rigatoni v2.0

In our last post I had talked about the ragù with rigatoni I'd made with beef instead of lamb.  I recently tried making it again with some of our modifications.  The results were a mixed bag of success: not quite as tasty, but some of the new techniques can be incorporated into the next iteration.

• We stuck with beef, mostly because in this area, it's easier to buy beef than lamb.
• I wanted to try making this with an Italian wine rather than a French wine.  Thanks to Wines and More Rhode Island (right next to Whole Foods!), we got a wine from the Campania region.  I actually ended up liking the French wine better, both on its own and in the dish (but see the caveat in the next point), though I do believe that we need a bigger sample size on this one.  The Italian red we used was a little more dry than the Rhône wine we'd gotten the first time.
• Instead of using the 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1 cup of the juices, I used a 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes.  This was definitely not a solution.  The whole tomatoes are not canned in additional tomato juice; it's just whatever juices come from the tomatoes themselves.  Diced tomatoes, I have learned, are canned with additional juice added, so the ragù was much more acidic than version 1.0.  This made the dish overly tomato-y and combined with the wine we used, it didn't seem quite as complex of a flavour as the first ragù we made.  Most of the spices were drowned out.
• The recipe called for a cup and a half of chicken stock, which I had felt was too much, so for this iteration I reduced it to 1 cup.  Unfortunately, my ill-fated decision to use the diced tomatoes meant that there was still way too much liquid in the pot; I still had to boil the sauce uncovered for about 45 minutes to get it to reduce a bit.
• I greatly reduced the cumin and threw in a pinch of nutmeg along with a bay leaf, but as noted previously, the final dish was mostly a tomato sauce with some beef in it and practically no spices.  Next time I'll keep the proportions I used for this attempt.

So, I suppose this is what learning to cook is all about, right?  Trial and error, modifying the recipe a bit, then refining it some more?  That's what I keep telling myself, at least.

The fantastic thing about cooking with wine?  You can drink while cooking.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

Writeup background noise: Mike and Mike simulcast on ESPN2.

Lamb ragù with rigatoni (var. beef)

In an effort to diversify our recipe repertoire, I purchased The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (after having tested some recipes from the library's copy, of course).  We've had success with a few of its recipes, but then I started to notice that we were only making those few dishes.  So we decided to make something different: lamb ragù with rigatoni.

We quickly discovered that the Foxborough Trader Joe's (right next to Gillette Stadium!!) doesn't carry ground lamb, so we bought beef instead, and rather hilariously, we didn't even buy ground beef (personal preference).  I realize this may have changed the final product rather a lot.*  But they had everything else we needed, including a bottle of inexpensive but quality red wine.  Massachusetts grocery stores >> Rhode Island grocery stores.

This turned out to be a very tasty red; it was a lot smoother than many other reds (which I prefer).  Trader Joe's FTW!

From a cursory read-through of the recipe, I knew that this one would take rather a while: definitely a weekend meal despite the cookbook author claiming that it could be done on a weeknight ("It cooks in 45 minutes!" for me means "You will be chopping things for 30 minutes, THEN cooking for 45 minutes!").  But even so, we started chopping things around 5:30 and didn't eat until just past 7.  Didn't budget the time well on that one.

Once we got the stove going, the sauce looked great.  Beef, onions, celery, carrots: deglazed with some red wine, this was starting to look more like a French beef stew than an Italian pasta sauce (though I have since learned that this is the traditional method for preparing a ragù alla bolognese).

I'd added the wine a few minutes prior to taking the photo; it was already tasty at this point.

Then the recipe told us to add 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1/2 cup of the juices, then a cup and a half of chicken stock, followed by a covered simmer for 45 minutes.  This made the sauce look more like a soup, so I left the pot uncovered for the 45 minutes.  This thickened the sauce, but I would still reduce the amount of chicken stock to 1 cup at most and simmer with the lid on.

The ragù just after adding the tomatoes, juice, and broth.  Soup, or sauce for pasta?

The ragù after trying to get it to reduce.

The finished product was incredibly tasty even though we hadn't followed the original recipe to the letter.  It was not overly tomato-y; there were enough other flavors like rosemary, bay leaf, thyme, and cumin that no single flavour dominated the dish, and the carrots added just a bit of sweetness.  If anything, I would swap out the cumin (the cookbook author loves that cumin) for a pinch of nutmeg instead, but that is just my personal preference.

This is definitely something we would make again, but only on weekends unless I can improve my knife skills** enough to make this on a weeknight.  I'd like to see what it would taste like with the original main ingredient, but this beef variation was excellent.

A recipe to keep!  We made this with rigatoni bought from Trader Joe's.  It's somehow thicker than the Barilla or Mueller's rigatoni and stood up well to the chunky sauce.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

*This is, in fact, reminiscent of a recent experience at a local Szechwan restaurant.  Our party wanted to order "Chinese broccoli with chicken".  Our waiter kindly let us know, though, that the restaurant didn't have any Chinese broccoli that evening; moreover, because of a printing error, it wasn't broccoli in the dish, it was cauliflower; and then it wasn't chicken, but pork.  Cauliflower with pork?  Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Chinese broccoli with chicken!

**I have almost, almost resisted the urge to use the word "sharpen" in relation to improving my knife skills.

Moscato cupcakes

Among the (admittedly few) wines that I drink is moscato.  Among the (admittedly many) desserts that I think are very tasty are macarons.  So when Kroger has a wine sale and Macaron Moscato is among the discounted varieties, I go for it.  Sadly, the wine was not as good as one might have expected.  There was a very strange and sort of artificial taste that I'd never tasted in a moscato before which led to something hitherto never seen before--us not finishing a bottle of wine we'd bought.  So, what to do with the rest of the bottle?  Make something delicious out of it, right?

Cute label, but the wine was not so good.

The magic of the Interwebs led me to this recipe for moscato wine cake.  Not owning a Bundt pan, I decided to do cupcakes instead, which led me to some ad-filled blog that probably tried to install malware on the University's network (ha! denied!).  But it did have a recipe for moscato cupcakes that I hastily copied and pasted into a comparatively safe Word document.

Reception to these was mixed.  I thought they would have been better with better wine and not using a boxed cake mix.  But when Dom took them to his office, apparently they were a big hit.  Like many of our other culinary experiments, this one could benefit from a bigger sample size!

Our notes:

• I didn't search for too long, but all of the recipes I found used a boxed cake mix.  Now, prior to this, I had not used a boxed cake mix in years.  I discovered that boxed cake mixes have quite a few ingredients that don't sound all that appetizing, and also that there is no inherent difference in the mixes for "yellow" and "butter recipe yellow" cakes; it's the end user that has to add the butter to the mix in the latter case.  Still, to be faithful to the recipe the first time trying it, I bought a boxed cake mix (just regular yellow cake--not yellowcake, mind you).  Next time, I'd just make my own cake batter, and adjust the recipe as needed, which in my case means "until the batter looks about right".
• A better wine would have led to tastier cupcakes, but then I suppose that's the classic case of "you get out of it what you put into it".  I could still taste that weird slightly metallic taste in the cupcakes which means that, amazingly, we still have unconsumed cupcakes in the apartment five days after baking.
• There was no frosting for these things.  We didn't have enough powdered sugar to make frosting; neither did we have enough wine left to flavour it according to the recipe.  By all accounts these didn't really need frosting, and frosting probably would have just decreased the shelf life anyway.
• The photo below shows some cornbread-looking cupcakes.  The recipe produced 17 cupcakes; this came out to one full 12-cup muffin tin and one 6-muffin tin that only had 5 cupcakes.  To save time, I just put both tins in the oven at the same time, with the 12-muffin tin on the top rack and the 6-muffin tin on the bottom rack.  The 12-muffin tin produced the cornbread-looking cupcakes, but the 6-muffin tin produced cupcakes with very smooth tops that were more a beige-y colour rather than the cornbread color.  It didn't really matter too much in this case, but just some interesting tidbit of information that may come in useful sometime in the future.

Verdict: Probably something I'd try again, but with my own cake recipes.  Also, it would mean not drinking all of a bottle of moscato in order to save some for the cupcakes, which would be sort of difficult for me.

Cupcakes with wine in them, not cornbread muffins without wine.