Pumpkin pie

If you know me at all, you know that I greatly enjoy baking: cookies, cakes, rolls, you name it.  Pie is a relative exception, as I am not usually impressed with store-bought pie crusts (what's in those?) and I don't particularly care for super-flaky pie crust anyway.  Also, I've noticed that almost every pie crust recipe is awash with dire warnings like "MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS COLD!!!1!" or "DO NOT OVERHANDLE DOUGH AT RISK OF TURNING IT INTO SOMETHING TERRIBLE", or "Don't use a food processor, the pastry blender is the ONLY way to do it", etc. etc.  So for a while, I would make fruit cobblers, crisps, and other treats that only required a top crust.  But then I received a small food processor for my birthday along with a later suggestion that it could be used to make pie crusts.

Our handy copy of Joy of cooking has a number of pie crust recipes, but they all feature shortening, which we never buy.  So I found a few recipes and techniques for all-butter pie crusts and set about making some dough.

I needed some way to keep the water cold.  Festive, no?

The new food processor is ready for some pie crust action.

Either my food processor was too small for the amount of stuff, or a flour grenade went off in my kitchen.  Nonetheless, this was the dough before it got dumped onto the counter, shaped, and tossed into the fridge.

Recipes say that the dough should be able to form a disk at this point.  I got something more like a crumbly mound o' dough.  Perhaps I hadn't added enough water?

Crumbliness notwithstanding, this stuff rolled out great after a couple days in the fridge and a much-longer-than-recommended time between taking the dough out of the fridge and rolling it out.  Look at that edge!

A pumpkin pie in all its glory.  This is made with a pie pumpkin that I had already baked; I never liked pumpkin pie (no joke) until I started making it with a fresh pumpkin.  This crust turned out tender and not very flaky: perfect for Dom and me, but your conclusion may vary.

Was this as much trouble as I thought it was going to be?  Not really.  Sure, making crust takes a lot longer than going to the store and getting some out of the freezer case, and I'm sure it can be very finicky, but I think the results are worth it.  Based on some of the comments I got for this one, it seems that others thought so too!

TASTY.

Hawaiian shrimp curry

Shortly before we left Ann Arbor, we discovered Indian food (it just took us a little while), thanks to the wonderful Cardamom Restaurant that opened in April near our old apartment.  Emboldened by this 'new' discovery, Dom immediately declared that we had to try making a curry.  It took us a couple of months and a change of residence to make that happen, but we finally tried a shrimp curry recipe.  It's from a cookbook written by a mother and daughter originally from Hawaii, but who had started a Hawaiian cafe in Ann Arbor a number of years ago.  As far as I can tell the cafe is no longer in business, since I would have found it by now if it were.

This was a great first effort, though of course there is room for improvement.  Our notes:

• We did not take the time to make shrimp shell broth as the recipe called for.  Not only did we not have any shrimp shells, having opted for the convenience of the peeled and deveined shrimp, but we used the suggested substitute of chicken broth.  No doubt the dish would have been even better with the shrimp broth, or even chicken stock we'd made ourselves.
• Our curry did not thicken much.  At first I thought it may have been a mistake with the amount of fat originally in the pan; we had started with probably a tablespoon of olive oil, when the recipe called for 2 tablespoons of butter.  (I hastily added about a tablespoon of butter upon realizing that I was making a sauce.)  Thanks to a chat with my mom I now realize that there may not have been enough flour in the recipe for the amount of liquid.  2 tablespoons of flour for 2 cups of chicken broth + half a can of coconut milk....or, maybe I'm just not good at making a white sauce.
• Slightly put off by negative press regarding the health of coconut-derived foods that aren't coconut water, I had opted for the 'lite' coconut milk, but I probably more than made up for that with the addition of some half and half into the curry.
• The addition of a bit of salt at the end (not called for in the recipe) did measures for the flavour.
• The Simply Organic curry powder was fine for beginners like us: pretty mild and very slightly spicy.  Next time we buy a jar of curry powder, we should try to get something a little more adventurous.
• Sort of a cookbook pet peeve of mine: when ingredients are not listed in the order they are used in the recipe.  This wreaks havoc with my organisation of ingredients prior to cooking.

The final result was extremely tasty, and we will definitely see what other kinds of curries we can make.

Shirley Tong Parola and Lisa Parola Gaynier, Remembering Diamond Head, Remembering Hawaii (1999), p. 209
Writeup background music: Jack Johnson, From Here to Now to You (2013)

Unrelated to food, but related to the writeup background music.  We saw Jack Johnson (not that Jack Johnson) at the Life Is Good Festival on the 22nd.  He played "Sweet Caroline" probably because the festival was held outside Boston, but it was like an early birthday present for me!

Mini madeleines

I'm on a bit of a French kick right now.  A coworker's delicious-looking snack of a madeleine one afternoon got me to thinking about making these, and thanks to my mom, a mini madeleine pan was procured almost immediately!

I used a recipe from Joy of Baking, mostly because they gave a baking time specifically for mini madeleines.  I think it turned out great, except that all told, it was a little over two hours from gathering ingredients to taking the last madeleines out of the pan.  Not generally a problem, unless you start after 9 PM on a Monday evening and you have to go to work the next day.

My notes:

• Because of time constraints, I took the eggs out of the fridge about 15 minutes before using them; the end product came out fine, but next time I'll try to plan to have everything at room temperature.  The results could be even better!
• Once again, I used less sugar than called for in the recipe; I scooped out 2/3 c. sugar, but I filled each 1/3 spoon about 7/8 full.  I don't feel like calculating what fraction of a cup of sugar actually got used.
• Our sole remaining, and much-maligned hand mixer (great for whipped cream, not so much for cookie dough) has found another use: beating the eggs for this recipe.  The whisk attachments worked great.

Light 'n frothy eggs.

The batter after coming out of the fridge.

• The madeleine molds should only be filled to maybe 50%, maybe a 1/2-3/4 teaspoon's worth of dough for each one.  My first batch came out way too huge!  I think by the end I got the size right.
• The silicone baking sheet was great; I sprayed nonstick spray twice, once before the first batch and once after the second, and it probably didn't need the second spray.  And none of the madeleines stuck!

Madeleines made easy.  Also, from the looks of these molds, gigantic.

• The recipe says to bake 7-9 minutes at 375°F; I found 8 minutes to be ideal for our oven.
• The recipe made 75 mini madeleines, but the first tray used significantly more dough than subsequent trays, so I could probably have gotten 85 or so out of this batch.  May it be said, though, that not all 75 made it into the storage containers...

Verdict: this will not be the last time I make madeleines!  Now that I know roughly how long to bake the mini ones, I'd like to adapt different recipes.  Nothing wrong with this one, but I want to try the one in our French cookbook!

The madeleines on the left probably came out of that batch you see in the molds above; the ones on the right came after I'd figured out that each mold didn't need so much dough.

Pita Pita

This had been something I had wanted to try for a while.  The recipe is from Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 344-345.  We baked these on the pizza stone, similar to the naan.  This experiment met with mixed success - some pitas came out amazing (see below) but others came out really thin and thus crispy.  The formula for success seemed to be having to roll the pita several times (adding flour each time) and keeping them smaller.  The larger pitas that didn't get as much flour added stretched too much in my hands and that is how they got so thin.  Therefor, next time I will just add more flour to the dough as I'm making it and be sure to roll them out with lots of flour on the counter.

Unbaked pitas as I was rolling them out.

This first pita came out decently well.

We took a piece "so that you could see inside"...

Perfect pita!!!  It eventually deflated but left an awesome pocket.

Verdict:  will definitely make again with the above noted lessons learned.

Creamy Chicken and Dumplings

On day recently as I was cleaning out the mixing bowl from making pizza dough, I mixed some water with the excess flour and decided to try the raw dough that formed.  I enjoyed it so much that I decided to make a dumpling dish without looking at a recipe.  Chicken was the easiest thing to add, and it quickly became a creamy chicken and dumpling thing.  I started by cooking the chicken with some chicken broth.  Then, I added some dumplings made from the following dough  (inspired by pizza dough):

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• olive oil (I didn't measure)
• ~ 1/3 cup of water - I just added water until I had the dough consistency I wanted

Once the dumplings started cooking, Caroline added some cream and sour cream we had in the fridge to complete the dish.

Result:  a pretty tasty dish, though the dumplings were quite dense.  Next time, I might think about making them with milk, or possibly smaller.  I don't know - I still have to think about how to make them less dense.  This is something I'll probably try again, but I won't subject Caroline to my experiments without trying them first myself.

Dumplings just added.

Cooking along with cream added.

Bowl o' food!

Naan

This flat-bread is one of the tastiest parts of Indian cuisine - at least in our opinion.  We got our recipe from Joy of Cooking (p. 608).  Overall the recipe isn't too difficult, if but a bit time consuming (though not nearly as much as the challah).  Note time!

Notes:

• Rising - the constant struggle with our winter baking.  Our apartment just doesn't seem to be warm enough to get dough to rise without warming the liquid first (the recipe called for the yogurt to be room temperature).  However, this did not seem to affect the result much.
• Baking is pretty easy, and quick.  The recipe called for us to preheat our pizza/baking stone for 45 minutes at 475 degrees F (!!!).  We did not do that - we just let the stone preheat with the oven to 475 and then put the rolled out dough on the stone.  The recipe called for 5-6 minutes of baking, and we cut that down to about 4 minutes for the second batch, as the first was quite brown.  Next time we'd consider lowering the temperature to get a less brown and softer bread.

Result:  delicious warm and relatively soft flat-bread.  Would make again!  (I love putting that comment - and it seems to be the theme lately.)

Pictures!

A couple of pieces on the pizza stone.

Completely out of the oven.

You can see a piece taken out - and thus the inside.  It was pretty good, just probably not bake it so much next time.

Mousse au chocolat

Among its many great photos, our fabulous French cookbook has a recipe for chocolate mousse or, as it says, "mousse au chocolat".  It didn't look too difficult, and I even got to try out a new cooking technique.  The results were tasty (chocolate and whipped cream: where could you go wrong?), but the texture was a little airier than I usually associate with chocolate mousse.

Our notes:

• Not owning a double boiler, I used the standard substitute of a small mixing bowl set on top of a saucepan of simmering water.  This was the first time I'd tried using any kind of double boiler technique, and it worked great; the chocolate melted nice and smooth.  In terms of the recipe, I'd melt the butter along with the chocolate next time; adding the butter after taking the melted chocolate off the heat (as the recipe instructed) seemed to lower the chocolate's temperature too quickly.  Next time I'd probably add the butter when the chocolate is almost completely melted but still on the heat.

Worked great.

• The recipe called for the egg whites to be beaten until "firm and glossy".  Unfortunately for me, this led to a much foamier mousse than I'd been expecting (I've never been a big fan of meringue anything), and the overall texture was not that smooth--too much air in the structure.  So next time, I'd probably experiment to see if beating the egg whites to soft peaks would offer a smoother texture to the finished product than stiff peaks.

Almost meringue.

• Despite using bittersweet chocolate (Ghirardelli), the mousse still tasted oversweet.  It seems like the added sugar in the recipe acts partly as a stabilizer, so next time I'll try using something more than 60% cocoa!

Chocolate mousse, before refrigeration.

• The recipe said to transfer the mousse into molds before refrigerating, but I don't think the mousse, prepared as the recipe directs, would be able to set in what I think of as a mold, even if the molds were bigger than the ice cube trays that we tried using.  Perhaps it meant to just divide it into individual serving cups, or perhaps I just didn't make it right!

Festive. Sadly, the mousse as produced by this recipe doesn't hold a shape at all, so we were not able to get Block M servings of chocolate mousse.

• Interestingly, this mousse had a richer taste and smoother texture after a few days in the refrigerator.  I don't know if this is good practice or not, to make something on one day to eat a few days later.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, but with a few modifications, and maybe after trying other chocolate mousse recipes.

Chocolate mousse, after refrigeration. The presentation would probably have been a little better had we owned a pastry bag and related kitchen gear.

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 176-177
Writeup background music: Muse, The 2nd Law (2012); we saw them in concert in Detroit this past Saturday and now I can't stop listening to their music.

illy: for moka pots

illy makes a coffee specially ground for use in moka pots.  In short, this is delicious: strong enough to not taste watered down, but not overstrong; very smooth; and finely ground enough for the moka pot.  An excellent standard!

Cake citron (lemon cake)

This came from our awesome new French cookbook.  Originally I'd wanted to make something to take in for work the next day, so I had to find a recipe that wouldn't make us go out and buy anything.  This recipe used standard kitchen supplies along with some lemons, which we seem to have a lot of right now; I think it's because I can never correctly estimate how much lemon juice is in one lemon, so I tend to buy too many at a time.

I didn't end up taking this to work, mostly because I didn't want to have to transport it across icy sidewalks.

Our notes:

• This is basically a pound cake.  That loaf pan was pretty hefty after I put all the batter in!
• The amount of flour should be adjusted for the ambient humidity; 300g of flour is a little too much for a Michigan winter.

The cake before it went into the oven.

• I used the lemon juice option for the glaze: much more flavourful than just water!
• The recipe called for the knife test of doneness; accordingly, I ended up baking this for somewhere between 35 and 40 minutes rather than the 30 listed in the recipe, but I still ended up with an underbaked center (a common problem when I bake cakes in loaf pans).  However, this would lead to some delicious consequences.
• The recipe said to put the glaze on the cake while the cake was still hot, contrary to my normal tendency of waiting until a cake is cool before glazing it.  I was a little skeptical, but I like to follow recipes to the letter the first time I make them, so I duly made the glaze when the cake came out of the oven and glazed it right then.  It seemed that most of the glaze was absorbed into the cake on account of the cake's temperature, rather than staying on the outside which is what happens when I use my usual method.
• Since the center didn't get completely baked, it collapsed a bit, leaving a small hollow between the top of the cake and the center.  I kept pouring glaze through the knife cuts from when I tested the cake; the crumb absorbed all of this glaze, so the center of the cake had an even more pronounced lemon flavour.  This, to be honest, was by far the tastiest part of the cake!

Glazed cake.  Photo credit goes to Dom for this one.

Verdict: a recipe to keep!  Though I might want to get better at baking cakes in loaf pans before I make this for anyone else; I suppose not everyone appreciates underbaked baked goods like we do...

A shot of the crumb just after I had sliced off the end.  By the time we got to the center areas where the glaze had absorbed into the crumb, we were too eager to enjoy the cake to take photos!

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 75-76
Writeup background music: Kylie Minogue, Enjoy yourself (1989 U.S. version); thank you, Penn State University, for lending me your copy of the album!

Holla' for Challah

We've been wanting to try making this for a while now - and we finally got to it!  We used the recipe from our copy of Joy of Cooking (pp 600-601).  Everything went pretty well, so just a few notes:

Notes:

• We ended up with extra flour in the mixing bowl, though we suspect that was due to the dryness of the air (it is Michigan in the winter-time).
• We only baked it for 20 minutes instead of the 30-35 called for - but it was already browned quite nicely (as you can see in the picture), and had a hollow sound when thumped.
• The three ropes in the braid stayed pretty much separate through baking, so we are considering next time reducing or omitting the flour on the ropes that was called for in the recipe.

This recipe does take a decent amount of time as you have let it rise several times, but it is worth it.  See for yourself:

Just before baking - the braid came out quite well - except for the pinching together at the final end.  My bad...

Out of the oven - with a nice crust and delicious inside!

A nice view of the crumb inside.

Verdict - definitely make again!

Glazed lemon cookies

A while back (as in, before the holiday season), I was on a big cookie kick.  When I realized I couldn't go to Dom's department's holiday party, I still wanted to make some treats to send with him, so I chose a glazed lemon cookie recipe from Real Simple.  These turned out pretty well, to say the least.

My notes:

• While gathering all the ingredients together, I realized that the only lemon flavour came from the glaze; there was neither lemon juice nor zest in the dough itself.  I ended up using the zest of one lemon and the juice of about 1/2 a lemon in the dough, added with the egg yolks, salt, and vanilla.  A bit of raw dough was nicely flavoured before baking, but if anything, I should have use more juice or zest to get a stronger flavour in the baked cookies.
• The extra lemon juice helped pull the dough together; perhaps because our apartment is frightfully dry, the dough was really crumbly after adding the flour.  Adding enough lemon juice helped smooth everything out and imparted some lemon flavour to the dough itself.
• The recipe claims to produce 48 cookies.  I don't know if I did something wrong or what, but I came out with 32 cookies (two sheets of 18).  It's not even like I made them gigantic--they came out to a perfect two-bite cookie.  So I'm not sure what that was about, but it didn't seem to be any kind of a problem.
• Each sheet of 18 got about 13 minutes in the oven--neither brown nor very underbaked, but perfect for us.
• I drizzled the glaze over the cookies rather than dipping the cookies in the glaze.  This had the double effect of using less sugar (probably about half of what the recipe called for, but I just added sugar to the lemon juice until I got glaze, so I have no idea how much I actually used) and making the cookies look all fancy.
• From a subsequent trial of the cookies in which I didn't add any lemon zest to the glaze for aesthetic reasons, I found that the lemon flavour in the glaze was not as strong.  So next time I make these, I'd sacrifice the aesthetics of a totally smooth glaze for the stronger flavour provided by the zest.

I have extremely high standards when it comes to my own baking.  Usually I pronounce what I create as "all right", but I almost always have a "but..." to go along with it.  Not so with these.  As soon as I bit into one of these I knew this was a recipe to keep (with all the modifications, of course).  A bright, clean, intense lemon flavour, not too sweet, not too dry, not under- or over-baked, and just enough cookie to get a good taste without having too much cookie.  What else do you need?

Delicious.

I may have taken one already...

Irish Stew

This is a hearty stew for the coldest of winter days on the Emerald Isle (or in the Mitten).  This is another recipe from our favorite Joy of Cooking (pp. 496).  This is a lamb stew, and we were able to pick up some lamb chops at our local Kroger to throw in.  The result was very tasty.

Notes:

• Quantity - the recipe called for 3 pounds of stew lamb.  As Kroger did not have stew lamb, we picked up a couple of packages (~ 2 lbs total) of some bone-in lamb chops, which seemed to work quite well.  We didn't really scale back the amount of vegetables, but that can't hurt, right?
• Liquid - the recipe said to use either chicken stock, dark stout, or water.  We opted for about half-and-half chicken stock and stout (Murphy's Stout - 'twas a bit less expensive than Guinness but still tasty - just not if you ask Caroline ;-) ).  This seemed to work out well, and helped it taste close to the Irish Stew at Conor O'Neill's (on Main St. in AA).
• Thickening potatoes - we sliced up some potatoes that were supposed to disintegrate and thicken the stew, but this didn't work.  In discussing why it didn't work, we came up with the theory.  The time we've had potatoes thicken a stew we cooked it on the stove - this recipe had us cook the stew for an hour and a half in a Dutch oven in the oven.  Perhaps the stew needs to cook harder for this to work, or else you have to slice the potatoes really thin.

Pictures!

Before going in the oven.

Ready for consumption (the carrots are added after an hour in the oven).

Verdict - a very tasty dish that makes good left overs and should be made to warm body and soul!

Braised chicken with nuts and dates

Whenever Caroline reads a book about some type of food, she usually wants to make something with it. So recently, she read this book about dates, and thus wanted to buy some at the store. A couple of days later, we weren't sure of what to make, and then remembered that we had chicken and we had dates, so we had a recipe to try.

Notes:

• The recipe called for ground walnuts, but we didn't use any. Still seemed to taste just fine.
• The recipe also called for crushed coriander seeds. As we didn't have any of these, we just threw a bit of cilantro in. This tasted just fine to us, so no need to use a plant's seeds when you have it's leaves! (Not actually going to claim this as a general rule...)
• This was a pretty easy recipe - didn't take long to make and didn't require much prep work.

Verdict: Would definitely make again. This is a very tasty dish that is also easy. Bonus!

It may look a little monochromatic, but it was certainly tasty. -CPYP

Dates: A global history, p. 118 (Nawal Nasrallah; 2011; London: Reaktion Books)

Focaccia

We saw this recipe, surprisingly, in a French cookbook in the "Foreign Breads" section.  It sounded so good we made the easy decision to try it out.  We also had fun using the new kitchen scale we bought to measure out ingredients in metric units (and by weight instead of volume for solids).  The ingredients are pretty easy, as with most breads:  flour, water, yeast, salt, and olive oil.  There is a note below about the one less common ingredient (rosemary).

The bread turned out to very tasty, and as we were going over to my parents' house, we decided to bring one loaf over there for everyone to try.  It was well received - such that my dad was "OK" if we left what remained there.  For all the deliciousness, we do have a few notes:

• Dough consistency - I swear I followed the recipe to the 't', but the dough came out very wet.  I was supposed to "punch down" the dough and roll it out, but that wasn't happening.  Next time, I think I will add the water more slowly so that I can get the right consistency from the dough.
• Fresh rosemary to top - we did not have any, but our dried rosemary tasted just fine.  I'm sure the fresh herbs would be better, but it still is good with dried.
• There were a few steps to this, and so there was work to do over the several hours it takes to make.  You have some decently long breaks, but just be prepared to spend some time on it.

Conclusion - definitely a recipe to make again!

Photos!

Loaf number 1 out of the oven.

Loaf number 2 out of the oven.  We started with baking both at the same time with this one on the bottom rack, and then moved it up when the first loaf came out of the oven.

Loaf number 2 during slicing - this turned out to be a nice texture.

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 322-323