Pumpkin pie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TASTY.

Hawaiian shrimp curry

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mini madeleines

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

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

My notes:

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

Light 'n frothy eggs.

The batter after coming out of the fridge.

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

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

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

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

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

Pita Pita

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

Unbaked pitas as I was rolling them out.

This first pita came out decently well.

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

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

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

Creamy Chicken and Dumplings

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

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

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

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

Dumplings just added.

Cooking along with cream added.

Bowl o' food!