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!

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.

(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)

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.

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.

Easter picnic

This being the first big holiday spent away from our families, we wanted to do something special for Easter.  There was no way I could prepare a ham for just the two of us, so we hit upon doing a picnic (or, as I like to call it after our Provence excursion last spring, "le pique-nique").  We figured that it would be a good way to explore the state a little more, but even if the weather turned out to be poor, we could just put our picnic blanket out in our living room!  Our menu consisted of sandwiches on homemade baguettes, avocado salad, orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad, and hot cross buns.

Sandwiches

For the sandwiches, we went with prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and a little drizzle of balsamic, all piled onto homemade baguettes.

• We made the baguettes from the Joy of Cooking recipe; the stand mixer again proved its worth for the mixing and kneading.

Nice crumb!

• We had previously made the mozzarella, though for whatever reason our result was more like a cream cheese spread than regular mozzarella (we have made mozzarella successfully in the past, so it wasn't a first-timers thing).  So we just figured that the cheese could be spread onto the bread before putting all the fillings in.
• The prosciutto came from Venda Ravioli in Providence.  This was our first time going there and it was, I'll admit, a little overwhelming.  It was like a whole emporium for Italian foods; there were even multiple options for prosciutto at the meat counter!  Apparently the "San Daniele" prosciutto was the one to get, but as the guy in front of us requested the San Daniele, we had to 'settle' for prosciutto di Parma so as not to hold up the line.  There were already a LOT of people in line behind us as it was the Saturday before Easter at an Italian market....but I was just really excited to buy prosciutto in the same manner than one might buy some deli turkey for the week's lunches.
• The balsamic also came from Venda Ravioli.  The ingredients list was just one ingredient: 100% cooked must.  So I figured it was the real thing, or at least as close as we can get to the real thing without going bankrupt.  It's sweeter and less overtly acidic than the regular balsamic vinegars.  Well worth it to try!

  

  This is but one reason why I like going to Italian markets.

I made my sandwich with prosciutto, balsamic (sprinkled onto the cut surfaces of the bread), mozzarella, and basil; Dom added sliced red peppers to his.  Both were quite tasty!

That's mine on the left.  Amazingly tasty.

Avocado salad

Just a simple mixed salad of avocados, corn, grape tomatoes, snap peas, and green onions tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette.  We used the regular balsamic vinegar, not the stuff we'd picked up at the Italian market yesterday.  A good mix of colours, textures, and flavours.

Spot all five ingredients.

Orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays as "orange vanilla fruit salad", though I scaled it down considerably since I didn't want 12 servings.  We used a half pint each of blackberries and blueberries, plus some strawberries and Muscat grapes (they were the same price as the green grapes).  The recipe is pretty flexible as to what fruits to use.

The "orange vanilla" part of the original recipe title comes from the syrup poured over the fruit.  The original recipe called for equal parts sugar and water plus the zest and juice of an orange.  I used less than a quarter cup of sugar, a bit of vanilla, a half cup of water, the juice and zest of one Cara cara navel orange, and the juice and zest of a lime.  I figured that since all the fruits I'd chosen were pretty sweet, the syrup could use some tartness from the lime juice.  There was something between a third and a half cup of syrup after reduction.

Syrup, after reduction.

The result was a very tasty fruit salad; if anything, I would have left the vanilla out.  In fact, I debated for several minutes whether I should even include the vanilla in the first place as the lime-orange syrup already smelled pretty good.  But in the end there were no complaints about the fruit salad!

I usually like fruit salad, but this was really tasty with the zesty syrup.

Hot cross buns

I'll admit it: my only knowledge of hot cross buns before this year came from the first named melody in the music books used by novice instrumentalists, and the incomplete explanation I got about what hot cross buns represent.  I didn't realize until this year that they are an Easter tradition!  And they didn't seem too difficult to make.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe with inspirations from the version in Nick Malgieri's Bread.  So to the Joy recipe's cinnamon and nutmeg I added lemon zest, cloves, cardamom, and a pinch of ginger, and then instead of currants I threw in dried cherries (being a Michigan native and all).  In place of 1 egg I used 2 egg yolks.  So it was not exactly a traditional hot cross bun, but these were tasty nonetheless.

The icing was confectioner's sugar, water, and a little vanilla.  I had just enough for all 18!

The picnic site

We scoured a very helpful website listing public parks in the state to figure out where to go.  We finally settled on going to the park surrounding Conanicut Battery in Jamestown, which promised to have a nice view of the West Passage of Narragansett Bay.  We ended up having our picnic amid the earthwork fortifications of a Revolutionary War-era gun battery.  Neat!

Upper 50s, sunny, a light breeze, and too early in the season for bugs: could there be any better conditions for a picnic?  I don't think so.

Happy Easter!

Recipes used:

Baguettes: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 601

Fruit salad: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays (2013), p. 108-109

Hot cross buns: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610; with inspiration from Nick Malgieri's Bread (2012), p. 208-209

Writeup background noise: first it was NBCSports's replay of the Chinese Grand Prix, because while the Red Wings were losing, I commandeered the TV; and now it's the soundtrack from Super Mario Galaxy. 

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!

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...

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)

Cranberry orange bread

To be fair, this was originally a cranberry walnut bread, but since I don't really like nuts in breads, we decided to omit those and just go with cranberry orange.  The cranberries just recently showed up at our local Kroger, unless they showed up while I was on vacation...in which case then no, that wasn't so recently that they showed up.

Anyway, our notes:

• Of course, we omitted the walnuts, partly because I don't like using nuts in bread, but also for a reason explained below.
• The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar.  If you know us at all, then you know that we don't like too much sugar in our recipes.  We used something less than 1 cup and the end result turned out fine; one could probably use about 3/4 cup of sugar and it would still turn out fine.
• I have no idea how much orange zest I actually used.  Since I wasn't about to zest the orange and then determine how close to 1 Tbsp. I was, I just figured that the zest of 1 orange was sufficient.  The end result didn't seem to suffer from any lack of orange zest.
• Perhaps because of the layout of the back of the bag of cranberries (where I got the recipe), I somehow missed that I was to have "coarsely chopped" the cranberries before tossing them into the batter.  This didn't seem to adversely affect things, though it probably would have turned out marginally better had the berries been chopped.
• Also speaking of the cranberries, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of them.  Somehow I assumed that this was the entire package, so not only were they not chopped, there were also way more of them than the recipe had said to use.  Oops.  Only after I'd dumped all of the cranberries into the batter did I notice that the serving size for the package was a 1/2 cup, and that there were 6 servings in the bag.  So apparently I was to have used only half the bag.  But then I realized that it wouldn't have been as easy to use the leftover half of the bag (all the other recipes on the bag used the entire thing), and since the final product was tasty, we figured that this wasn't a bad thing to have thrown all of the cranberries into the batter.  This was a contributing factor in the decision not to use walnuts; there was barely enough room in the bowl for all of those cranberries, so we figured that the batter wouldn't also be able to hold chopped walnuts.

This was definitely a recipe to keep, especially with our modifications.  I'd like to say that next time I'll probably make at least some effort at chopping those cranberries, but most likely I'll chop one or two handfuls, call it good, and then throw the rest in whole.

Whole cranberries.

Blueberry Cornbread

Hello all - this is a guest post is by Dom, so bear with the brevity - I'm but a simple engineer.

Background:

After we first made the delicious flour tortillas previously posted, I really wanted to try making corn tortillas.  However, this turned out to be much more difficult than the flour tortillas, and not as tasty (in our opinion).  Thus began a quest to find other recipes that use some of the 5 lbs. of masa corn flour we bought for the corn tortillas.

The recipe for the blueberry cornbread is from food.com.

Note:

We did not have buttermilk, so I used 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice with enough milk to make a cup.  I was supposed to let them sit together 5-10 minutes and then stir before using, but forgot - oops...  However, this did not seem to matter as I let the wet ingredients sit mixed while I got the dry ingredients ready.

Result:

Tasty cornbread that is gritty but not dry, with blueberry deliciousness in every bite!  We would definitely make this again.

Final Product - with a couple of pieces taken out.

22 July 2012: Addendum from Caroline!  After about three days this started to go bad, so we would recommend making this only if you intend to finish it quickly.

Strawberry icebox cake

I first saw this recipe for a no-bake strawberry icebox cake in summer 2010 and wanted to try it out immediately.  Peak strawberry season and the vicissitudes of life being what they are, I didn't get a chance to make one until this spring.  It's an easy recipe, the results are just scrumptious (it really is like a strawberry shortcake), and it makes for an excellent dessert choice for informal spring or early-summer dinners.

Our notes:

• You can't get away with throwing subpar, underripe, pale strawberries in this; we had a couple of these, and I'd thought that they might be hidden under the flavours of all the other strawberries.  This was not the case and there was a big taste difference between areas of each slice that contained visibly ripe strawberries versus areas that had the underripe ones.
• Going strictly by the recipe, I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to put the graham crackers directly on top of the strawberries (implied in the recipe but not as structurally stable), or to put whipped cream and then the crackers on the berries (more stable).  I ended up putting the crackers directly on the fruit, partly because I prefer to follow the recipe as much as possible the first time through, and partly because the whipped cream was the limiting factor in this endeavour.  It seemed to work well, though I'll try the other method next time to see how that goes.
• I have yet to make a good ganache in all the times I've tried.  Maybe I'm not patient enough to keep stirring something for the time needed for all the chocolate to melt.
• We found it best to go conservative on the powdered sugar to put in the whipped cream, even though the recipe calls for a relatively low amount as it is.  We didn't want to the berries to be overpowered by any more sugar than was absolutely necessary to get the cream to not taste like Vitamin D milk.
• I didn't want to over-whip the cream and end up with butter, so I erred in the opposite direction and came out with more of a "Cool Whip lite" consistency.  I don't know if this is ideal or not, but since thicker cream seems like it would lend a better aesthetic to the finished product (by looking slightly less messy), I'd probably whip the cream for a little longer next time.
• The recipe said to let this chill in the icebox...refrigerator for about 4 hours before consuming.  Because I'd made this late in the evening on a Wednesday we didn't get a chance to sample it until Thursday dinner; the graham crackers still had a little body to them.  By Friday and Saturday we thought the flavour and texture had gotten even better, but on Sunday I noticed a small decrease in quality, though nonetheless still good.  The following days showed a continuing (but shallow) downward trend in quality, with the graham crackers becoming more and more insubstantial in both texture and taste.

I took this before the ganache went on because I had a suspicion that the chocolate would make this less photogenic.  That may have been correct, but the finished icebox cake was only enhanced by the addition of the chocolate.

12 July 2012: Addendum!  We made this for an Independence Day celebration and it turned out very well to whip the cream a little longer.  Dom did up the decoration on top:

Festive, no?

Key lime sherbet

For the key lime pie, we had only used about half of the lime juice as what we had gotten from the bag of limes.  What to do with the other half, we asked ourselves?  Once again, it was Joy of Cooking to the rescue with a lime sherbet recipe.

Our notes:

• Unbeknownst to me before the fact, this sherbet recipe called for gelatin as an agent to keep the finished product smooth.  Due to our previous almond pudding mishap we had a few envelopes of gelatin in the cupboard.  Much better results this time!
• The recipe called for 1 cup of sugar and we used somewhat less than a full cup; even so, my first impression upon tasting the finished product was one of overwhelming sweetness.  Probably reduce the sugar to 3/4 cup or even 2/3 cup next time.
• The sherbet had a better consistency after putting it into the freezer for a day than it did right from the ice cream maker.  I suppose it'd be the difference between soft serve and what I call 'real' ice cream.
• Our past experiences with our ice cream maker from the 1980s led us to believe that after churning and then storing the finished ice cream, you'd end up with a solid block of frozen product rather than something resembling a scoopable ice cream since the freezer wouldn't freeze it quickly enough.  That was not the case with this sherbet recipe, for which I credit the gelatin.  Surprisingly enough for our homemade ice cream (and related products), this was actually better not directly from the ice cream maker.

Soft serve sherbet.  Delicious, but it melted very quickly.

After one day's storage in the freezer.  Delicious, and it still has a smooth consistency.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 838

Key lime pie

We saw a bag of key limes at Meijer for $1.99 which I was naturally unable to resist due to my affinity for key lime pie.  Once I found out how easy key lime pie was to make (3-4 ingredients plus the crust), there was no stopping it.  I used elements from multiple recipes which were more or less all the same: beat egg yolks, add condensed milk, add lime juice (and zest if wanted), pour into crust, and bake in order to kill bacteria.

Our notes:

• Juicing the limes was the hardest part of the whole endeavour.  We probably used about half of the bag to get the 1/2 cup of juice needed, but at the same time, that's really only about $1 worth of fruit.
• I used about 1 1/2 tsp. of lime zest.  This was probably too much for the resultant pie we had; at first glance it looked like I had made a quiche with green onions in it.  Ordinarily I would have just slathered on a bunch of whipped cream (none of that Cool Whip stuff, thanks) to cover any blemishes, but because of the circumstances I couldn't do this.  So the solution is to either use more lime zest and cover the pie with whipped cream or meringue, or not use much (if any) zest and just serve the pie straight.
• However, the amount of filling the recipe produced only filled the pie shell maybe 2/3 of the way up.  Given this, I would tend to just use the lime zest and then use whipped cream to fill the rest of the pie shell.
• One of the few variations among the recipes I looked at was baking time.  Technically, key lime pie does not need to be baked due to the chemical properties of the ingredients, but with bacteriological concerns today most recipes tell you to bake the pie.  I baked mine for 12 minutes; it's hard to say whether a longer baking time would have resulted in a firmer consistency as this pie was a bit softer than I had been expecting.
• This is definitely not a pie to eat before chilling it for several hours.

Multiple people gave their approval; I would consider that a success in any culinary adventure!

Not Pac-Man.  Also, not a quiche.