Calamansi marmalade

Recently, a coworker brought in a bounty of calamansi for the library staff.  These are small but incredibly juicy citrus fruits, and you can eat the peel and everything.  By the end of the second day that these were available on the break room tables, I had amassed 4 sandwich-sized Ziploc bags full of calamansi.  Everyone else who had wanted some had claimed theirs, and hey, I didn't want these to go to waste.

I took this photo AFTER I had taken out what I needed for the marmalade.  It's a 2.5-qt Pyrex bowl full of citrus!

Citrus comparison: that's a regular lime on the left and a calamansi fruit on the right.  Sort of Key lime-sized.

Of course, the next step for us was to figure out what, exactly, to do with all this citrus; we couldn't possibly make enough salad dressing before the end of their shelf life.  Dom did a little research and found that one could make calamansi marmalade.  Not being a fan of orange marmalade, I didn't think much of this, but after remembering that I really like another citrus marmalade (yuzu), and discovering that these marmalade recipes only needed citrus, sugar, and water, I figured we should try it.  I ended up using this recipe that yielded a manageable result: 1 jar, rather than something like 12 jars.

Our notes:

• I figured this recipe wouldn't take much active time, but I hadn't counted on having to seed, juice, and slice 15 citrus fruits that averaged about 1" diameter.  That took a while right there, but the rest of it was pretty hands-off: boil the fruits, juice, and water together; put it in the fridge overnight; and then boil it with sugar the following day.  The actual cooking part could not have been easier.
• I cut each fruit in half along its equator and then extracted the seeds.  Then I'd cut each half in half longitudinally, then slice those quarters.  Basically, this produced smaller segments of peel, which I thought would be nicer in the final product than long-ish ribbons of peel.  This also made the slicing part easier; the quarters were easier to slice than the halves, somehow.
• The recipe calls for ¾ cup of sugar, and even more if one has a sweet tooth.  You know us: we used a little less than ½ cup, and the marmalade came out delicious.
• For the second boiling (with the sugar), I thought the mixture was having issues jelling, as I simmered it for longer than the 15-20 minutes called for, and I wondered if this had to do with drastically reducing the sugar as I tend to do.  But after I'd put the finished marmalade in the fridge, it started to set.  Success!
• The original recipe was written with canning in mind; not having any equipment for this, we had just planned to use the marmalade within a few days of making it.  If we make a larger batch, my plan is to put the fresh marmalade into our silicone muffin pan, put that in the freezer, and then wrap each 'muffin' of marmalade to store in the freezer and defrost as needed.  That way I won't tie up all of our 1-cup Pyrex containers at one time!

The marmalade is delicious on yogurt.

This result has caused us to idly wonder where calamansi has been all our lives.

Writeup background music: The Beatles, Help! (1965); we just watched the movie and were pleasantly surprised at how entertaining it was.  The trick for me was to make absolutely no comparisons with A Hard Day's Night, which is one of my favorites.

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!

Growing a Pineapple Entry 4 + Lilikoi sprouts

Update on the pineapple:  our new pineapple plants is going strong, with the leaves in the center growing quite a bit, and new leaves being added.  see the picture below.

Additionally, about the same time that we planted the pineapple, we planted about 30 lilikoi (passion fruit) seeds in a rectangular tray.  Two weeks ago we had two sprouts:

This past week, I split them apart before their roots could intertwine, and so the smaller one was put in a new small pot.  since then, two more sprouts have popped up (one is still very small and barely visible in the back-middle of the tray).

Growing a Pineapple Entry 3

After two weeks in the glass of water, the pineapple crown had grown decently long roots as shown in this picture:

We had a medium sized pot (8" diameter) available as well as some potting soil, so I filled that and made a small depression for the new plant:

And here is the planted pineapple crown:

After a couple of months, this will need to be reported into a 12" pot.  By then I should be needing to repot the avocado trees, which are currently occupying that size pot.

Growing a Pineapple Entry 2

Update on the pineapple.  At this point it has been 6 days since I started the pineapple in the glass, and now it has started to grow a few roots from the root nubs.  I will probably be potting it sometime this week.

Growing a Pineapple Entry 1

Due to a request, I am documenting how we have been growing pineapple plants.  We have some that are over a year old, so we can keep them alive for at least that long.  They don't produce fruit for at least a year and a half, so the jury is still out on whether ours will do that.  I started a new plant yesterday for this series of posts.

Without further ado, let's start:

Step 1:  purchase a pineapple with a crown.
Step 2:  grip the fruit and crown in separte hands and twist apart.

Step 3:  remove several bottom layers of leaves until you have a couple of rows of root nubs visible.

Step 4:  place the crown in a glass of water such that the roots are covered.

I will add more posts as this new plant grows.  However, until then, here are some of our current plants that are a range of ages.  We also have a couple of avocado trees that have successfully sprouted.  Sadly, I failed on the mangos.  Next year!

Mango Sauce

Note: we've been quite busy lately and thus no posts in a while, but it has been a good thing. :-)

Question for you: have you ever gotten so many mangos (for free from coworkers, they seem to be the zucchini of out here, when you have some, you have a ton) that you can't eat them all before you go bad?  Well have I got the solution for you!

Mango sauce!  Like apple sauce, but with mangos.

Not much too this, I cut up about 5-10 mangos into about half inch cubes, and cooked them down with some cardamom in place of the cinnamon you might use in apple sauce.  When I only had unripe mangos, I added some sugar, but the best was to have a combination of ripeness.

Cut mango in the pot.

Ono mango sauce ready to serve.

Mango season was back in June/July, but I just realized that I had forgotten to make the post.

Sweet cheesecake

Part 2 of our adventure with fresh bay leaves was a sweet ricotta-based cheesecake.  After the partial success with Part 1, we were optimistic to try a recipe using a less-salty cheese.

The ingredients for the sweet cheesecake were more or less the same as the savory, with the addition of some honey after the baking process:

4 oz. flour
8 oz. ricotta
1 egg
Bay leaves
4 oz. honey

The main prep difference came while shaping the dough on the baking sheet; instead of one larger cake, the recipe called for four smaller cakes (though these turned out to be large enough to share).  For the same reasons as the savory cheesecake, we used more than the specified number of bay leaves for each cake.

Fresh bay leaves ready for the cheesecakes.

The baking method listed for these cakes was the same as that used for the savory cheesecake, placing a weight atop the cakes before baking.  We didn't do that this time, mostly because we didn't want to either wash the weight afterward, or have the weight take up a bunch of dishwasher real estate.  We did observe afterward that the cakes would have been flatter and smoother had we used the weights; as it was, the cakes puffed like soufflés in the oven and subsequently collapsed.  If anything, this affected the texture more than the taste: we thought this might have led to a lighter texture in the finished cakes, which we liked, so next time we try the savory cheesecake we will not use the weight.

Finished cakes after being dunked in honey.  We substantially reduced the baking time from the specified 35-40 minutes to about 20-25 minutes so that the cakes wouldn't brown too much.

Overall, we both preferred the sweet cheesecake to the savory, but that comes with two disclaimers:

1. We both prefer Italian food over almost all else, so I think we're predisposed to go with ricotta over feta in general.
2. We'd want to try the savory cheesecake again with a higher-quality feta.

Both of the recipes seem to be a good use of the fresh bay leaves, but the bay flavor generally disappears after about a day in the fridge, so these dishes would be best served on the same day as baking.

A half cheesecake (minus the bay leaves): perfect for a single serving.

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93

Writeup background noise: Free Practice 1 of the Russian Grand Prix (when I originally drafted this last night), and NBCSN didn't have their commentators for it, so it was basically just various levels of car noise for an hour and a half punctuated by occasional radio communications between the drivers and their engineers.

Savory cheesecake

Recently we were given a Ziploc bag stuffed full of fresh bay leaves; another volunteer at an event we were helping with apparently has a tree in his yard.  We use dried bay leaves in sauces and (when we used to make them) stews, but we'd never used fresh before.  I immediately set about finding recipes to use our bay leaves.

From the trove of recipes I've amassed, I found two cheesecake recipes that would use bay leaves: a savory and a sweet.  Both came from a book that translated Ancient Greek and Roman recipes and adapted them for modern kitchens; incidentally and appropriately enough for April 21, these recipes both came from one of the Ancient Rome chapters.  We tried the savory cheesecake first.

The ingredients for the recipe are:

1 lb. feta cheese
4 oz. all purpose flour
1 egg
2-3 bay leaves [I used way more since we have so many.]

I bought feta crumbles as that was cheaper than buying a larger brick than we would have needed.  However, I found that this led to a very dry dough; the dough would have vastly benefited from the extra moisture that the brine would have provided.  I blame Whole Foods for only having two feta choices!  Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the extensive dairy cases at Michigan grocery stores.

We had only 12 ounces of feta (again, I was too cheap to buy more), so we used 3 ounces of flour.  Obviously we still had to use a whole egg, but I hoped that this would partially make up for the complete lack of brine in the feta.

Other than the low moisture, the dough came together fairly easily; it was almost like making a cheese gnocchi dough.  As instructed by the recipe, I put the bay leaves under the cheesecake/cheesedisk before placing it on the baking sheet, then put a heavy-ish Pyrex dish on top to weight everything down.

The cheesecake/cheesedisk was probably 6"-7" in diameter.  The recipe said to score before baking (like making scones), which I guess was helpful when I went to cut slices.  More like a guideline to follow than any physical assistance with getting the pieces apart.

The recipe said to bake for 40-45 minutes, but I baked for something like 35 minutes and thought that too long.  As it was, the outside edge of the cheesedisk was already brown and, as we would discover, rather tough.  For the thin cheesedisk that we made, I'd probably bake for 25-30 minutes.

The bay leaves came out looking basically like the dried bay leaves you can get at the store.

The final product was interesting, to say the least, especially the flavour.  At first bite there was a subtle non-feta taste from the bay leaves; then the full salty feta taste would overwhelm one's taste buds.  The texture of the non-brown sections was nicely smooth when the cheesecake was warm from the oven, but after a couple days in the fridge, it's gotten progressively tougher, and the bay leaf flavour has sort of dissipated.

Complete delicious dinner.  We didn't put salt in the eggs this time, but the cheesecake wedge definitely made up for that.  The rice helped too.

Would I make this again?  Maybe.  It would make a good appetizer, though I'd want to get a higher quality feta that didn't have such a straight-up salty taste.  We have plenty of bay leaves left to use!

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93-94

Writeup background noise: well, when I drafted the post originally, it was the 2nd period of the Wings-Lightning game.  Thankfully for me, I decided that the 3rd period was a fine time for a nap.

(Not Key) Lime Pie

I remembered, on the 14th, that it was Pi Day, so of course I had nothing prepared, no fruits in the apartment, and only 2 eggs.  Flipping through Joy of Cooking suggested a Key lime pie, and we thought that instead of using sweetened condensed milk, we could use a can of sweetened condensed coconut milk that I'd picked up in an impulse buy, since coconut and lime tend to go together well.

Purchased at our local grocery store, Don Quijote, which is, in fact, Japanese-owned.

Our notes:

• Not wanting to put the effort into a regular pie crust, Key lime's graham cracker crust was appealing.  Instead of regular graham crackers, I used some "Star Wars" graham snacks, as those were the only graham crackers at the store that didn't use shortening or artificial flavor (and were also a reasonable price).  When I made the crust, I did not add any additional sugar, thinking that the cookies were sweet enough.  However, I think the crust could have benefited from the crunchiness and the extra bit of sweetness that the sugar would have contributed.
• Also, it would have been best if we could have let the pie crust cool before filling it.  Because I wanted to minimize the amount of time the oven was on, I baked the crust, then worked on the filling as it was baking and then a bit more after it came out of the oven.  The resulting crust was a bit soggy.  Perhaps next time I'll make a frozen (not Key) lime pie so that the oven only needs to be on for the crust.
• The recipe called for a 15-oz. can of condensed milk.  As the photo above indicates, the condensed coconut milk was only 11.25 oz., which I lowered even more by pouring off some of the oil that had separated out.  I thought I'd make up for it using some leftover regular coconut milk from a different recipe.  Unfortunately, this may have made the resulting custard a bit too soft.
• The recipe called for ½ cup of lime juice; for us, this was 4 limes.
• We should have only had to bake the pie for 15-17 minutes, but we probably ended up baking it for about 25 minutes as it didn't seem set.  I suspect the extra liquid from the coconut milk threw off the baking time.
• The unbaked filling tasted great: both lime and coconut flavors were obvious.  Unfortunately, the coconut flavor baked out of the finished pie, and the lime flavor was not so pronounced.  Yet another reason for making a frozen (not Key) lime pie, but substituting coconut milks for the regular evaporated and sweetened condensed milks.

Using the pi dish for Pi Day!

Overall, this was a tasty pie, though with a few additional changes it could have been even better.  Clearly, our next project should be a frozen coconut-lime pie!  I'll need to get more Star Wars grahams before then.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 667-668 (crust), and 688 (pie)

Leftover Poke Breakfast

Note:  for those who do not know, poke, pronounced poh-kay, is cubed seafood, usually raw yellowfin tuna (ahi), salmon, or cooked octopus (tako) that is mixed with seasonings, sauces, and/or toppings like chopped onion or seaweed.  Poke in Hawaiian simply means "to slice or cut".

Recently Caroline's cousins Vi and Val were visiting the Big Island with their families, so we popped over for a couple of days.  After Val and her husband Rob picked us up from the airport, Rob offered to make us some quick breakfast with some leftover poke.  He had picked up this easy recipe when buying some poke (which he does every day when he visits the islands) and asked what to do with any leftovers.  He was told to cook in a frying pan for breakfast his leftover poke, leftover rice, and some eggs.  The combination was brilliant.

Shortly afterwards, we were in need of a quick dinner because I had an early hockey game, and so Caroline picked up some poke.  She intentionally got more than we needed, so the next morning we made the dish.  It took all of 5 minutes to cook in the pan, and all I did was toss in the poke and rice, then crack the eggs over the mixture.  While it was cooking, I was mixing the eggs in to make them scrambled.  Even though this is so simple, it is tasty as you mix the eggs and rice with the fish, and the spices and flavorings of the poke mean that you don't need to add anything more.

Close-up of final product.  The ahi did not get over cooked, helping the fantastic taste.

New Year dumplings: A pictorial

I just discovered a neat new cookbook that focuses on dumplings (mostly Chinese and Japanese, but there are a few other flavor profiles in there as well).  We figured we might as well try some of the recipes now while we have easy access to practically any Chinese or Japanese cooking ingredient; plus, each recipe makes more than one meal's worth of dumplings, so we thought it'd be an economical choice as well.  Chinese New Year provided the perfect opportunity to test the book's pork and shrimp dumplings.

We made our dumplings the day before New Year, and got 39 versus the recipe's yield of 45.  Perhaps we put too much filling in each one?  So far we haven't had any problems with broken wrappers or anything.  These are ready to be frozen, then put into a plastic bag to be cooked as needed.  Easy!

These cook pretty quickly with an almost set-it-and-forget-it method.  We are still working out just how long to cook our dumplings though, since we tend to cook fewer at a time than the cookbook author does.  He's usually hosting dumpling parties.  We are lame and thus do not tend to host dumpling parties.

I made a dipping sauce out of hoisin sauce and soy sauce (about a 2:1 ratio), along with a dash of rice wine vinegar.  Kind of a Chinese barbecue sauce of sorts.

The fillings weren't dense, dry, or falling apart.  I might add some cilantro leaves next time for flavor and color contrast, but that's another recipe!

Hey there, dumpling!: 100 recipes for dumplings, buns, noodles, and other Asian treats (2015), p. 41
Writeup background music: Dido, No angel (1999)

Chocolate chip cookies featuring a secret ingredient

The secret ingredient?  Avocado!

No, I am not going vegan.  What happened was that about a week ago, we were given a bag of avocados from our landlady--from the tree in her yard.  There had to have been seven or eight avocados in the bag, and while we gleefully put avocado chunks on our salads each night, we had to do something fast when a few of them ripened at the same time.  And while avocados have a bunch of health benefits, it's probably not so healthy to eat multiple of them in a single day.  So thanks to the little something called the Information Superhighway, we found a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that both used avocado and was not vegan.

As you probably already know by now, I took some liberties with the recipe.

• Cut down on the sugar: instead of ½ c. white sugar and 1 c. brown, I used ¼ c. white and probably about ¾ c. brown.  Seemed to taste just fine.
• Just the all-purpose flour, please: the recipe called for a combination of all-purpose and white whole wheat flour.  There was even a special note for those who might want to omit all of that evil all-purpose flour and just go with white whole wheat; however, there was no corresponding note for those who might want to go all-out unhealthy and omit the white whole wheat flour.  I used 2¼ c. all-purpose flour.  The cookies were just fine.  Rebellious baking!
• Whole eggs: the recipe called for 2 egg yolks, omitting the whites.  No explanation is ever given in the recipe for this decision.  Is it to do with the texture?  Do egg whites not play well with avocados?  Will the combination of egg whites and avocados somehow cause a rift to open in spacetime?  I used 2 whole eggs with seemingly no adverse effects on either the final product or the local universe.  Rebellious baking!
• Baking time: the recipe called for 14-16 minutes; I took the cookies out at 13 minutes, but that's just my preference for how "golden brown" the cookies were at that point.
• Recipe methodology and writing style: these left a bit to be desired.
• First of all, prep time is listed as "n/a".  I suppose for some, gathering ingredients or mixing cookie dough might take the proverbial "no time at all", but for most of us non-professional bakers* those steps are gonna take some time.
• Both the "total time" and the "cook time" listed are 25 minutes.  Does not compute.
• Also, the recipe apparently makes 48 cookies (I got about 35 out of it), with a 14-to-16-minute baking time, and a cook time (for 2 sheets) of 25 minutes.  I'm skeptical that the home baker has access to a large enough oven to accommodate a sheet pan that can hold 24 cookies spaced 2" apart.
• The ingredients are not listed in the order that they are used in the recipe.  This is a pet peeve of mine with regards to recipes.
• The fact that there's that note suggesting that the home baker could omit the all purpose flour, without a corresponding note regarding white whole wheat flour: it's mildly amusing at this point more than anything.  Eyeroll, more than resigned sigh.
• There is a note regarding the amount of avocado used vs. the amount of avocado in, well, one avocado: "Baking is an exact science. [...] Be sure to measure."  The only thing that I can say right now is that this very recipe has inspired me to create a new label for this blog called "inexact kine baking" and apply it to this and past posts where I modify baking recipes without poor results.

It looks like normal cookie dough.  With perhaps a few flecks of green since I probably didn't mix the butter and avocado together for quite long enough.

Verdict: The cookies turned out pretty good (I heard they were popular when Dom took them to work today) and the recipe is probably fine, though if we ever find ourselves with a bumper crop of avocados again I'd want to try something different.  The avocado lent a bit of additional flavor to the cookies, but nothing overpowering: it's not like you're tasting guacamole in a chocolate chip cookie**, more like a faintly nutty richness.  All told, I'd rather have my salad with mounds of avocado cubes on top followed by a dessert of all-butter chocolate chip cookies. 

Finished cookies.  I say, parchment paper has been fantastic in my baking experience: no more using the butter-an-aluminium-foil-lined-cookie-sheet trick, which I always seemed to have problems with.

*Especially those of us who, like me, are recently, again non-professional bakers.

**ew.  Even I have my limits.

Writeup background noise: the soundtrack for The Lego Movie (2014).  Everything Is Awesome!!!...right?

Kitchen experiment: vanilla

At the same time that we purchased our jar of Ceylon cinnamon, we also picked up a bottle of Mexican vanilla extract.  I'd tried a Mexican vanilla ice cream at a shop in San Antonio which delivered a slightly different taste from most vanilla ice creams, so I figured, why not try the Mexican vanilla extract if offered the opportunity?

I used the same method as when we tried the two different types of cinnamon: two batches of 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding, though this time I was able to do my as-close-as-two-people-can-get-to-a-double-blind-experiment design.  I made the puddings, assigned a number to each extract (1 for Madagascar vanilla, and 2 for Mexican vanilla), then labeled the bowls by number.  After dinner, Dom set the de facto order in which we each tried the puddings.

If I'd read the recipe more carefully, I would have seen that I could have made a single pot of rice pudding, then split the cooked pudding in half before adding the extracts.  Well, what's one more pot to wash, I suppose?

Turns out I tasted Pudding 1 first, and Dom tasted Pudding 2.  After testing each one, we determined that though we liked the pudding we had each tried first, there was not much of a difference in the taste; the taste difference was markedly less than the difference for the two cinnamon varieties that we own.  The following day, we switched it up: Dom tasted Pudding 1 first, and I tasted Pudding 2, though this time we probably introduced bias in that we knew which ones we were tasting first.  Interestingly, we again liked whichever pudding we had tried first.  Our results were more or less inconclusive since the difference between the two vanillas was too subtle for us, but we both agreed that we liked actual the rice pudding better without having cooked the cinnamon in it!  Just a sprinkling of cinnamon on top is all that we might need.

We wondered if by the time a flavoring reaches the extract stage and is then used to flavor something else, most of the nuances of the original flavor are lost, such that Mexican vanilla extract in cooked or baked goods tastes more or less the same as Madagascar or Tahitian vanilla extract in the same situation.  I would think it would be a different matter if, for example, one used the actual vanilla bean to flavor an ice cream or rice pudding.  Perhaps that should be a future experiment!




Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: once again, we used the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

Anniversary apple pie

We wanted to have a special dessert for our anniversary.  I didn't want to get a cake from a bakery, and I have never had much success making a cake at home, so we decided to make a fruit pie.  After spending some minutes scouring all of our cookbooks and Google Drive recipes, we finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook we don't even own: the Betty Crocker French apple pie recipe, the one my dad always used and for which I have carried a scanned copy through numerous apartments in three states.

As you can imagine, apples aren't really in season right now, and we are at least 2000 miles from the nearest commercial orchard.  We had a mix of Fuji, Gala, and Braeburn varieties, and we had to really go through the bins at the grocery store to find the good ones.

I had found a new (for us, at least) pie crust recipe that substitutes sour cream for the ice water and some of the butter: for a 9" pie, it's 1 cup flour, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup sour cream, ½ tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. sugar.  It looked pretty foolproof, and while I wasn't the one who made the crust this time, I can attest that the dough ended up in the refrigerator in near-record time, and the end result was tasty...so, I'd say it was a success.

While the crust didn't take long to put together, I had a very short time window to roll out the dough and get it into the pan; it got soft fast, and it isn't even very hot in our kitchen anymore.*  So this may have to be a wintertime pie crust recipe unless I can get quicker about rolling it out.  However, I stuck the crust into the freezer while I got the filling ready, and it was just fine by the time I was ready to fill and bake.

Betty Crocker's recipe is pretty simple.  For a 9" pie:

6 cups of apples
¾ cup sugar (white sugar, but I used brown)
½ tsp. cinnamon (I used our Trader Joe's stuff; maybe I should try the Ceylon cinnamon next time!)
½ tsp. nutmeg
¾ cup flour
Dash of salt (I used 1/8 tsp. of kosher salt)

To this, I added the juice of one lemon, partly to keep the apples from browning while I peeled and sliced all of them, and partly to punch up the flavour.  This could have been reduced to a half lemon as the pie had a pretty strong lemon taste (obvs).

I made half of the crumb topping recipe, as I've noticed in the past that a full recipe makes WAY too much.

½ cup flour
¼ cup butter
¼ cup brown sugar

This seemed to work just fine for the pie.  I also added some cardamom (because why not?); while good, for me it was not entirely necessary.  Take it or leave it.

I used the pi dish, of course.

Obviously, for me, this will always be a recipe to keep.  We made just a couple of small modifications to tailor it to us specifically, but the crust, the filling, and the topping all turned out great.

Similar to my experiences with peach pie, I cut the apples into chunks rather than thin slices.

*This is a relative statement, as the chocolate on our chocolate-covered shortbread cookies (a Christmas gift) became soft enough to stick to the plastic wrapper and peel away from the actual cookie as we'd unwrap them.  We now store the box in the fridge.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (year unknown, c. 1960s-1970s), p. 321
Writeup background noise: an interesting assortment of music, including Kylie (1988-2007 selections), Tom Petty, Rihanna, Santana, the Jackson 5, KT Tunstall, Yael Naim, and Gavin DeGraw.  Not to mention the Australian Open on mute in the super-background (Serena's match is about to start).  Wow.

Kitchen experiment: cinnamon

On a recent trip to California, we took the opportunity to visit a Penzeys Spices store.  One of the items on my list was Ceylon cinnamon, supposedly 'true cinnamon' as opposed to the cassia that is usually packaged as cinnamon; they're both part of the genus Cinnamomum, so it's more a matter of labeling and semantics, I suppose.  We were curious, so we picked up a jar along with several other herbs and spices, some of which were on the original list...and multiple that had not been.

I wanted to test the Ceylon cinnamon against "regular" cinnamon, so I decided on rice pudding: a nice neutral background for a flavoring.*  I used the Joy of Cooking recipe, and made two batches of 1/3-recipe so that we wouldn't be inundated with rice pudding.  To each batch, I added 1 egg yolk (I had used some egg whites earlier in the afternoon and didn't have any other immediate use for the yolks) and 3/4 tsp. cinnamon, both mixed in with the milk and sugar.  When I opened up the Ceylon cinnamon, I decided to first compare the fragrance of the two: the ol' swipe-a-finger-across-the-inside-of-the-lid-to-pick-up-just-a-bit trick.  Of course, at that point, I couldn't stop making Dune references.

Puddings in process.  Yes, the regular cinnamon is from Trader Joe's, and we haven't lived in a state with a Trader Joe's in over 6 months.  Might the age of the cinnamon have affected our conclusions?  Our past experience with 'older' spices indicates that this is negligible for us, but perhaps not so negligible for a professional.

At the first tasting, we both decided that the pudding with Ceylon cinnamon was our preference: it seemed to have a stronger and punchier flavour, though both puddings were tasty.  Even after a day in the fridge, we still both liked the pudding made with the Ceylon cinnamon.  Neither cinnamon was 'better', as it were, and since neither of us is any kind of a connoisseur (wine, beer, coffee, cheese, etc.), we can't even really quantify the taste differences between the two.  Most likely we won't go too far out of our way to get the 'real' stuff (though we'd never turn it down if given the opportunity), but this was an interesting experiment that gave us a good excuse to try something new.  And a good reason to buy a bunch of stuff at Penzeys.

Our finished puddings: that's 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding in each 25-oz. bowl.  Two servings each!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

*With one actual scientist and one aspiring scientist in the household, I needed to create as close to a double-blind study as is possible when only two people are involved, so I devised this method: I would make the puddings and assign a random number to each bowl of pudding while Dom was at work.  Then, when it would be time for tasting, he would select the number of pudding that we'd test first, without telling me which number it was.  Unfortunately, time ran out on my day off and we ended up making the puddings together, but I'd say we have a solid design for our next experiment: Madagascar vanilla vs. Mexican vanilla.

Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109

Maple granola

My standard breakfast is Greek yogurt (FAGE Total 2%) with either honey or jam on top, and a carb on the side.  The yogurt is non-negotiable, but the carb can be almost anything that isn't too super sweet: biscuits, muffins, a slice of bread, leftover French toast, leftover tortilla, leftover slice of pizza (no joke).  I tend not to combine the carb with the yogurt, but I recently saw an intriguing granola recipe in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for which we already had most of the ingredients and which called for mixing everything with a beaten egg white before baking to get nice big granola clusters.  Plus, in the interest of being frugal, I thought I might be able to get several breakfasts' worth of carb out of a recipe that makes 7 cups of granola.

Recipe notes

• I used sweetened shredded coconut as we did not have any unsweetened.  Illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty?  No, it seemed to come out just fine; the final product wasn't ridiculously sweet or anything, though there wasn't a very pronounced coconut taste.  Maybe next time I should get those big shavings of unsweetened flaked coconut.
• Instead of 1 cup of walnuts, I used 1/2 cup walnuts + 1/2 cup of sliced almonds, partly because that combination was less expensive at Foodland than buying walnuts only.  I got "walnut halves" instead of "shelled walnuts" in the hope that the manufacturer had packaged by volume and that I'd get more actual walnuts.  They probably packaged by weight to cover for that.
• For me, sliced almonds are too insubstantial for a recipe called "big cluster maple granola"; they get sort of lost in the shuffle.  Next time, I'd go with whole almonds: raw, if possible, since they get 45-55 minutes of baking for the granola.
• The walnuts became sort of brittle and lost their crunch after being baked for 50 minutes.  I'm not sure what I would do next time: maybe bake the granola with the almonds, then add the walnuts after baking?  Bake for less time overall?
• I omitted the toasted wheat germ because I didn't feel up to walking all around Foodland and/or Whole Foods trying to find that.
• I added the dry ingredients to the bowl first, including the salt and cinnamon (1/2 tsp. each), then added the olive oil and maple syrup and mixed everything together.  By adding the salt and cinnamon (especially the salt) before the liquids though, the grains tended to get filtered down to the bottom of the bowl, which then ended up remaining in the bowl rather than getting dumped out onto the baking sheet.  I don't know if this made a huge difference in the end, but next time, I'll add the liquids, mix together, then add the salt and cinnamon.
• The single beaten egg white did not seem to be enough for the entire mixture; there was still a lot of very crumbly granola after baking.  Maybe next time I should use 2 egg whites?  More maple syrup?  Honey?
• In a happy coincidence, I had purchased a nicely large bag of dried Montmorency cherries at Costco earlier this week before finding this recipe.  While I love me some dried cherries, I would experiment with using other dried fruit next time as the star of this recipe seems to be the maple flavor of the oats.  For me, if I'm using dried cherries in a recipe, I want that to be the predominant flavor; here they seemed to be simply part of the mixture.

Because of the maple syrup and the cinnamon, this definitely had that autumnal aroma going on when it was baking.  But since it's still over 80°F here every day, there's some cognitive dissonance going on there.

The granola went pretty well with the yogurt.  Not what I might call "ridiculously awesome", perhaps, but I'll work on that, and as it was, it was good enough for a breakfast change.

This was a very easy recipe to make, but the fantastic thing is, next time I can modify the recipe to taste.  Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, or almonds?  Sunflower seeds?  Pignoli?  Dried cherries, dried apricots, raisins, or dried mango?  Cinnamon, plus cardamom?  The possibilities are endless!




The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.
Writeup background noise: coverage of the ND-Clemson game (21-3 Clemson right now!).

Peach pie

I recently checked out the cookbook The Perfect Peach, written by a family who run a peach farm in California.  Not only does it have fantastic photos and great recipes, but it's also got a number of fascinating vignettes of life and work in the orchards.

Thankfully, the peaches at the store this week were in better condition than when I had shopped for the peach ginger scones, so before Dom had even gotten a shopping cart, I had already selected quite a few peaches for us.  I decided to try a peach pie even though Dom would be gone for the week; I honestly had wanted to wait until later in the week, but with the peaches ripening by the minute even in the fridge, I had to make the pie today.

Since butter (and dairy products in general) are far more expensive than on the mainland, I didn't have enough to make a 9" double-crust pie, so I figured I'd do a lattice top.  The crust took very little time to make, but that was just as well; time was very limited since it was already getting warm in the kitchen, and the oven wasn't even on yet.  I ended up using 1.5 recipes' worth of an all-butter recipe I had found before, and my tiny Cuisinart did the job admirably.

I would have woven the lattice, but the dough was warming up already and I had to really hustle to get the strips of dough laid out and back into the fridge before the butter melted.  I also discovered I need a better way to transfer the lattice to the pie, as the lattice defied my expectations by sticking to the parchment paper in places.

Quick notes

• Most recipes call for sliced peaches, apples, etc. when making fruit pies.  I find that chunks work better, both in terms of prep time and in terms of the texture of the finished product.  For whatever reason I find it easier to slice a pie of fruit chunks rather than a pie of thin fruit slices.
• Like many other instances, I used less sugar than called for; the recipe says to use 3/4 c. granulated sugar, while I used a little under 2/3 c.  Probably more of a case of having to adjust to the fruit's inherent sweetness.
• Lemon juice seems to be the acid of choice when making peach pies.  I substituted lime juice out of necessity, which I thought would lead to a better taste in the finished product, but this is 100% subjective.  In the end, the baking process seemed to have toned down the overt lime flavor, though I'm convinced that lime juice is a better choice than lemon juice.  Again, totally subjective!

Frankly, the peaches were tasty enough at this point that I could have eaten them without the crust.  Or without baking.

• I should take care to ensure that the pieces of peach lie flatter in the crust.  As you can see in the photos, I sort of just dumped the bowl of peaches and juice into the pie crust without much regard to orientation.  This causes the lattice to become sort of distorted.  It still tasted great; it simply wasn't as aesthetically pleasing.

Pie before baking.  I had a moment of panic when I flipped over the parchment paper with the lattice and some of the dough stuck, but it seems to look all right after all that.

• Many peach pie recipes, this one included, indicate that one should dot the top of the filling with butter before putting the top crust on.  I didn't have enough butter for this and I also had seen firsthand how much butter had gone into making the crust.  However, while the pie was baking, I noticed that the peaches on top of the filling started looking a little dried-out.  Maybe the butter helps prevent the filling from drying in the oven?  Ultimately, the pie tasted just fine, even if the peaches were a little wrinkly on top.  Much as I would have loved to put butter on top of the filling, it's probably ok that I couldn't.

Pie after baking!  I had not sprinkled sugar on top of the pie, though if I'd been making this for a dinner party or something, I probably would have.

• I baked the pie for about 55 minutes at 400°F.  I had put the pie in the oven without the crust protector at first, but then took the pie out at 20 minutes to fit the crust protector around, then baked for about 30 more minutes plus my "I'll stand in front of the oven and monitor until it looks done and/or I start to get impatient and/or concerned" phase.
• The juices in the filling were still a little runny, which would have made slicing and plating a bit problematic had I been serving this for other folks instead of just me.  I used about 3 1/2 Tbsp. of flour, which is right in the 3-4 Tbsp. range called for in the recipe.  Perhaps next time I should try using one of the recipe's other suggested thickeners instead (tapioca flour or instant tapioca), neither of which should be too difficult to find around here.

Tasty!

My next kitchen experiment is to freeze slices of this pie for when Dom gets back next week.  Though I could try to hold myself to one slice per day, I still probably shouldn't consume the entire pie on my own.

Addendum, 19 September: Thanks to Betty Crocker (and unfortunately, no thanks to our usually-trusty Joy of Cooking which only provided instructions on freezing unbaked pies), I was able to freeze roughly 4 slices of the pie.  I simply put the entire pie plate, obviously more than half empty, into the freezer; after several hours, I wrapped the pie in plastic wrap as best as I could.  We'll see in a couple of days whether or not it worked!

Addendum, 2 October: Apparently I had forgotten to update.  The thawed pie was, to me, just as tasty as it had been before freezing, with perhaps a slight decrease in texture.  Not a bad solution to the problem of how to preserve a baked pie, but of course the ideal would probably be to eat the entire thing before it would have to be frozen. :)

The Perfect Peach (2013): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.

Writeup background music: the soundtrack for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since Dom is gone, I'm on a 6-day Star Wars marathon, which I started Monday.

Peach ginger scones

After having apparently had a Hawaii theme to our last post, we have now packed up wholesale and moved to the islands.  At a farmers' market we went to recently, a vendor was selling locally-grown ginger.  While I didn't get any at the market (I waffled on it, and settled for the fresh ginger at Don Quijote), it did inspire me to try making one of the pastries I'd often get at a farmers' market out east: peach ginger scones.

I adapted a recipe from King Arthur Flour.  As you can imagine, Gold Medal flour works just fine.  I omitted the nutmeg they called for and used a bit of vanilla extract in place of the almond extract.  To get my ginger, I initially wanted chunks like the scones I'd had back east.  Unfortunately, I somehow never learned that ginger can be nigh impossible to cut.  For me, it was like the single time I tried to peel a butternut squash.  I ended up using a Microplane zester to grate something like 1 tablespoon of the ginger into the mix, but I must not have grated enough for it to be a really noticeable flavour in the finished product.

This recipe called for yogurt or sour cream and not something like buttermilk, which was fantastic since I always have Greek yogurt for breakfast.  I ended up using the 1/3 cup called for (I used Fage 2%), plus a bit of milk since the dough was mixing up exceptionally dry.

We could have done a lot better with the peaches we bought; these had been sort of dry and not very flavorful, though they had smelled great at the store.  I think that's more on us knowing when the ripest peaches might show up at the store or farmers' market.

To shape the scones, I used the "create a large disk and divide it like a pie" method (using a bench scraper to make the cuts before baking).  I had to bake these for a full 28 minutes before they got any kind of tan, rather than the 15-to-20-minute range called for in the recipe.  Fortunately, one of the recipe reviews had noted this sort of thing as well, so I didn't get too concerned as I'm usually pretty apt to do.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't actually split the scones apart that I had to bake them for so much longer?  Regardless, they didn't end up as doorstops, for which we can all be thankful.

Despite my changes and adaptations to the recipe, the scones turned out remarkably well; I may have consumed....a few....before Dom even got home that day.  These were not dry, dense, or rock-hard; they almost had a biscuit or shortcake consistency.  Unfortunately, because they were so moist, and because our apartment doesn't have air conditioning, the last scone from the batch went bad.  The solution, it would appear, would be to eat these quicker.  Or simply to wrap individual scones and freeze them until wanted.

Only one of [multiple] that were consumed on baking day.

When Dom saw the remaining [x]/8 of the disk when he got home, he asked if it was pineapple.  I had to admit it was made with a less-than-perfect peach, but next time, I might have to try using fresh pineapple chunks along with way more ginger!




Writeup background music: New Super Mario Bros. soundtrack.  We just picked up a copy of the game from a shop inside one of our local department stores.