Braised chicken with nuts and dates

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

Focaccia

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

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

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

Conclusion - definitely a recipe to make again!

Photos!

Loaf number 1 out of the oven.

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

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

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

Genoese Minestrone

Since it's been getting cooler, we figured it would be a great time to try making soup.  A quick survey of what ingredients we had versus ingredients called for in various recipes convinced us to try a minestrone recipe.  This turned out great and we had leftovers - enough to enjoy, but not so much that we didn't like the soup anymore.  Pernfect.

From World Kitchen - Italy

Notes:

• This does take some time to make - there is a lot of prep work involve in cutting up vegetables to go in the soup.  However, some effort was reduced by buying pre-cubed prosciutto (instead of pancetta) from Kroger.  Overall, this was an afternoon project.
• Instead of borlotti beans, we added some red kidney beans that were still around from making red beans and rice a little while back.  We also used some Italian cut green beans instead of runner beans (might actually be the same thing).
• Deletions: cabbage (we didn't want to buy one to just use 1/8-1/4), pesto, and Parmeasan cheese.  The pesto and cheese are meant to be added when served, and so were not viewed as necessary.
• The recipe said to just peel the potatoes and add them in whole, but we used cubed unpeeled redskin potatoes.  This seemed to work out just fine, and it goes along with our tendency to only peel potatoes when necessary (which is rare).
• We used some Barilla mini penne that we had instead of ditalini, but it seemed just fine.  The pasta will get softer and mushier for the leftovers, but it will still be very good!

Cooking the onions, prosciutto, sage, and parsley; already smelling great.

Then you cook the vegetables a bit before adding the chicken broth.

Delicious finished soup, ready to be consumed.

Verdict:  Would definitely make again.  The end result is definitely worth the prep work.

World Kitchen - Italy (2010), p. 24-25

Moscato cupcakes

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

Cute label, but the wine was not so good.

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

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

Our notes:

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

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

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

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.