Well, what do you know... this little blog turns 1 today! I can't believe it's been a year. AoaAF has underwent a lot of changes since the old days. Many thanks to all of you who stop by my little corner of the interweb!
Switching to a sad note, my friend Tirrone is leaving for Illinois very soon and we wanted to send him off with a good meal and good friends. To keep things simple for a busy cooking weekend, we decided on a BBQ, with homemade hamburgers and chicken-apple sausages. One of our appetizers was prosciutto palmiers, a recipe from Chow. It's a quick recipe that produces large quantities, which makes it perfect for larger groups. I've changed the recipe slightly and, next time, I'd like to use an egg wash to give the puff pastry a little shine and some extra moisture.
Prosciutto Palmiers
(by Sharron Wood for Chow, recipe doubled from original)
Makes approximately 40 pieces
1 package store-bought puff pastry, thawed (1 pkg. typically has two "slabs" of puff pastry)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons water
6 ounces of thinly-sliced prosciutto (3 oz. per "roll", which is half of the original recipe)
1/2 to 1 cup grated Gruyeres cheese (Emmentaler and Comte can also be used)
Egg wash (1 egg, beaten, mixed with a little milk or water to dilute)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
On a floured surface, roll out each puff pastry to a rectangle of approximately 9 x 13 inches. Try to keep the edges even and trim if necessary. In a bowl, stir together tomato paste and water until smooth. The paste must be easily spreadable. Using the back of a spoon, spread half of the tomato paste mixture on to each pastry rectangle. Arrange slices of prosciutto on the paste, overlapping slightly. Sprinkle cheese evenly over prosciutto.
Roll long edges of rectangle towards the center, so the folds look like window shutters. Fold the halves together, so the roll forms "elephant ears". Wrap with plastic wrap and place in the freezer for 5 minutes. Remove from the freezer, make sure the roll is firm, then slice off the ends (discard the ends). Cut the roll into 1/2 inch slices and arrange on a baking sheet, keeping them about 2 inches apart. Brush lightly with egg wash, then bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Cool until safe to handle. Best served warm.
Tirrone also requested a tiramisu, for which I dug out an old and very faithful recipe. I grew up during the tiramisu boom of the 90's, when every restaurant had their own version. I love the stuff and wanted to make my own, so I found this recipe during my third year of college. I even won a dessert contest at work with it.
Classic Tiramisu
(by Carol via Allrecipes, original can be found here)
6 egg yolks
1 1/4 cups white sugar
1 cup mascarpone cheese
1 3/4 cups heavy cream
approximately 2 x 12 oz. packages ladyfingers (I recommend overestimating how much you need... leftovers are great for snacking)
approximately 1/2 cup coffee liqueur for dipping
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
In a double boiler, combine egg yolks and sugar. Over low heat, whisk constantly for about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and continue whisking until yolks are thick and a very light yellow. Add mascarpone and beat until combined. In a separate bowl, whip cream to stiff peaks. Gently fold into yolk mixture and set aside. Trim ladyfingers to size for lining a 9-inch springform pan. Dip each ladyfinger lightly and quickly in the coffee liqueur and neatly line the pan. Add 1/3 of the filling over the bottom layer, then line another layer of ladyfingers on top. Repeat once more, then add the remaining 1/3 filling to top off the pan. Dust top with cocoa powder and chill overnight.
Bon voyage to Tirrone and here's to another year of great eating!
D. and I are lousy members of our supper club. After our first meeting, we proceeded to miss the next two monthly meetings. To ensure we wouldn't miss another one, we wanted to host the fourth meeting. There was German night and Mexican night, so we decided to stick with the cultural theme and have French night. One of the reasons we picked it was that we enjoyed the dishes from D.'s birthday party and wanted to make them again.
Instead of the ratatouille, D. picked the glazed vegetable dish from Bouchon. I enjoyed this dish, but I think the glaze is a bit too mild to alleviate the tubers' earthiness. Root vegetables are best for this recipe, so we went with carrots (both orange and golden), rutabagas, turnips, and beets. The result was a visually arresting dish.
Glazed Vegetables
(adapted from Bouchon by Thomas Keller)
Various root vegetables (carrots, turnips, rutabagas, beets, etc.)
Sugar (1 tbsp. per 2 cups vegetables)
Butter (1 tbsp. per 2 cups vegetables)
Thyme (1 sprig per 2 cups vegetables)
Rosemary (1 sprig per 2 cups vegetables)
Bay leaf (1 per 2 cups vegetables)
Chives, diced and trimmed to 2 inch "batons"
Place the vegetables in a single layer in a sauce pan or skillet. (Note: Keller advises cooking each vegetable separately for even cooking, but I was short on time and mixed them with no adverse effects.) Add enough cold water just to cover the vegetables. Heat on high until water boils. While heating, add sugar, butter, thyme, rosemary, and bay leaf. Once water boils, lower heat to medium-high and cook vegetables at a hard simmer/soft boil. Cook until all of the liquid is reduced to glaze and toss vegetables to glaze. Transfer to serving dish and sprinkle chives over.
If vegetables begin to turn mushy, remove from liquid and continue to reduce. Return vegetables to pan when liquid has been reduced to a sticky glaze.
Much to my chagrin, I'm now a fan of beets. However, I wouldn't do beets and rutabagas in the same dish, because they taste quite similarly and it's a little too much of a good thing. Pretty colors, though.
D. made fries again, which turned out beautifully. Fries at home are worth the trouble if one has patience for the heating times and the mess. The oil takes a long time to heat and cools rapidly when the fries are added. Mandolines make slicing infinitely easier and faster.
For dessert, D.D. and D.B. gave me lemons from their tree, so I made lemon cheesecake. This recipe was one that I made over and over again during '06-'07, then stopped because I tired of it. Still as good as I remember. It's a Paula Deen recipe, but she used Splenda and fat-free cream cheese, sour cream, and egg substitute. Although D. is diabetic, he's not a fan of Splenda-based desserts. For him, it's better to have a small portion made with sugar than a typical portion made with Splenda. (Disclaimer: This works for him and I realize all diabetics handle their regimens differently, so please understand that this is not to be applied to all diabetics.) When he saw this recipe, he shrugged and asked if I could substitute real sugar back into it. It worked really well. I also use real eggs, but I like to use light cream cheese and light sour cream.
Lemon Cheesecake
(adapted from Paula Deen's Joanne's Almost Fat-free Lemon Cheesecake)
Crust:
1 3/4 cup crumbs made from Trader Joe's Butter Almond Thins (just about any butter-based cookie or wafer works, but I like the Butter Almond Thins)
1/4 cup butter, melted
Filling:
3 x 8-oz. packages cream cheese, at room temperature
1 cup sour cream
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons lemon zest
6 tablespoons of lemon juice (I accidentally added 6 tablespoons once, which was meant for the lemon curd, and I found it works really well... for a lighter lemon flavor, use anywhere from 2 to 6 tablespoons)
Lemon curd:
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon zest
6 tablespoons lemon juice
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter, cut into bits
(Note: I find that store-bought curd tastes just as good as homemade, so it can be substituted in a pinch)
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
Crush Butter Almond Thins in a food processor. Measure out the crumbs, then mix with melted butter. Press into a greased springform pan, using the bottom of a drinking glass to even out the mixture. Bake for about 10 minutes or until edges have darkened and crust is set. After baking the crust, wrap aluminum foil around the bottom and sides of the springform pan, creating a barrier to prevent water from soaking the pan/crust.
While preparing the filling, heat water for a water bath. It just needs to be hot enough so the bath doesn't take too long to reach oven temperature. Do not allow the water to boil.
Combine cream cheese and sour cream and beat with an electric mixer on medium-high until fluffy. For stand mixers, the paddle attachment works best. Add sugar gradually and continue beating until mixture is smooth. Lower mixer speed and add eggs one at a time. Beat only to incorporate. Gently beat in juice and zest. Pour into crust.
Set the springform pan into another pan (roasting pans work well) with high walls. Place pan in oven. Very carefully, add enough hot, not boiling, water to reach the middle of the springform pan. Bake for 1 hour to 1 hr. 15 min. or until filling is set and slightly jiggly. The water bath is essential for prevention of cracked fillings.
When cheesecake is done, be very careful while lifting the springform pan out of the water bath. Turn off oven and leave water bath inside to cool. Cool cheesecake completely and transfer to refrigerator.
In a double boiler, combine every ingredient for the lemon curd, except for the butter. Whisk until hot and frothy. Add butter gradually and continue whisking until mixture thickens and coats the back of the spoon. Remove from heat and cool. Curd should be jelly-like after it cools. Spread curd over cheesecake, then refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
Our next supper club meeting: brunch!
The Hoff had a fantastic idea: gather up a group of friends and form a supper club. She hosted and cooked for our first meeting, but we'll rotate hosts for future meetings and it'll be more of a potluck. We started with chicken breasts marinaded with a spice rub.
A lovely barley risotto with peppers and olives. It was delicious. I wasn't expecting barley to turn out as creamy as arborio rice.
This salad was my favorite of the night. I love arugula and its peppery bite. It's paired with a cider vinaigrette, goat cheese, and dates. What a great mixture of flavors... the peppery and bitter arugula, sweet and chewy dates, tart goat cheese, and a mild vinaigrette to tie it all together.
I love the Hoff's vintage style. This dinner set is awesome and she has a fantastic vintage flair throughout her home.
The next one will be at D.B. and D.D.'s. Can't wait!
Super Bowl Sunday is usually more about friends and food for me. I'm not a football fan, so this is the time to put together a great meal and pig out.
M. made his famous chili in two incarnations: meat and vegetarian. The veggie version has tofu as the "meat" and J. taught him a cool trick. Buy super-firm tofu, freeze it, then crumble it into bits with your hands. It'll look a lot like ground meat. Heck, I couldn't tell and if I didn't already know it was tofu, I would have believed it was meat. Appearance and texture were right on with ground meat.
Between the tofu and the extra beans, the vegetarian version is almost heartier than the meat version. Both had a nice kick, thanks to one habañero and one jalapeño split between both pots.
M. made cornbread, but I didn't take a picture of it. It disappeared too quickly! I made sweet corn tomalito, which I sheepishly admit is a knock-off of the Chevy's side dish. What? I like the stuff. Here's a great recipe for it:
Sweet Corn Tomalito
I accidentally left it in the steamer for far longer than 60 minutes and it still turned out great. Once the water was boiling and steam was generated, I turned the heat down pretty low.
Corn, beans, tofu, and meat are pretty heavy stuff, so a chopped salad lightened it up. This is definitely day of chain restaurant knock-offs, because I modeled the salad after Claim Jumper's Barbeque Chicken Salad. I omitted the chicken, black beans, and tortilla strips (which people could add since we had them on the table with salsa and queso), but there was a finely chopped mix of cabbage, lettuce, jicama, tomato, corn, cilantro, and scallions. It was topped with BBQ ranch, which I like with 3 parts ranch with 1 part BBQ sauce.
D. had his own list of side dishes he wanted, which started with jalapeño poppers from Costco. They're breaded, hollowed-out jalapeños filled with cream cheese. I'm not a fan of copious amounts of cream cheese, so I didn't have more than a bite.
He made pigs-in-a-blanket with kielbasa and Italian sausage. A portion of either would be wrapped in puff pastry, then baked for 20 minutes. Yum!
Fried chicken with our usual chicken recipe.
The chicken is brined in mixture of buttermilk, lots of kosher salt, and a bay leaf the night before. Before it's fried, it's dredged in flour mixed with cayenne pepper and dried herbs (thyme, oregano, rosemary... many herbs work). Each piece is fried for 5 minutes, then baked for half an hour. As always, D. does a fantastic job with the fried chicken.
We kept dessert simple with brownies from a mix, chocolate cut-out cookies, and coffee-walnut cookies from Alice Medrich's Pure Desserts. Alice Medrich's recipe was ridiculously and fabulously easy: pulse walnuts, coffee grounds, and flour together in a food processor. Then, butter is pulsed into the mixture. Add splashes of brandy and vanilla. That's it. The dough is pulsed until it balls up, then it's rolled into a log and refrigerated overnight. Before baking, the log is sliced and a whole coffee bean is pressed into the center.
The chocolate cut-out cookies were from Bon Appetit's December '07 issue. I made some for gift baskets before the holidays and froze half the dough for later use. The cookies turned out fabulous after a month in the freezer.
Royal icing and sprinkles made for a decorate-your-own cookie station. The food was fantastic, but the company really made the party. Thank you to our guests!
Saturday, October 6, was our Star Trek party! This entry comes so late because life has been absolutely insane lately. I barely have time to turn on the computer at home, let alone finish a whole blog entry. Plus, there were issues with uploading photos, so that added to the delay.
Good company, as always, for a showing of Voyager, Star Trek (the original series), and The Next Generation. D. was a big help, taking the lead with several dishes. I was overly ambition and planned a menu that wasn't easy in terms of getting the dishes out in a timely fashion. However, the dishes turned out beautifully, so I can say that my (or rather, our) A-game was definitely on.
Our cooking day began with the desserts. Molasses spice cookies (Bon Appetit Nov. 2006) started off the day's baking:
The cookies were a little flat, but the spicy and rich flavor was quite nice. They're a bit like gingersnaps without the spiciness that's usually associated with ginger. I liked them a lot.
There were the red velvet cupcakes (Bon Appetit June 2006):
They were topped with a cream cheese frosting. The red food coloring was a bit of a pain to work with, but the recipe was easy and the cupcakes super-moist.
D. made his trademark chocolate chip cookies. They're always fabulous and he definitely has a way with them. He says he uses the recipe on the Nestle chocolate chip bag and adds a little more vanilla, but I think there's a special touch to them that's associated only with him.
The whole wheat dinner rolls (Bon Appetit November 2007)... these are the rolls being proofed right before baking, while they're cooling, and after they've been pulled apart and put in a bowl:
They were a little too dense, though. The flavor was ok. I was expecting something lighter. Apparently, the secret weapon in these rolls is instant potato flakes. They were supposed to make the texture even fluffier, but I'm not sure that happened in this case.
Last on the baking list was a lemon angel food cake. It's yet another Barefoot Contessa recipe. I think it turned out beautifully.
I used an aluminum angel food cake pan. The pan is left ungreased so the cake can climb the walls. Once the cake is finished baking, it is placed on a wine bottle to hang, so gravity doesn't collapse the cake. When the cake is cool, it is carefully removed from the pan with a butter knife. A quick glaze of 2 cups of powdered sugar, the juice from one lemon, and some zest was mixed up and drizzled over the cake.
The cake was very light and the lemon flavor subtle. It would be fine on its own, but the glaze was a nice touch. After the party, I took a slice and paired it with macerated strawberries, which was fabulous.
As for the entrees, those turned out fabulously, too. D. used a family recipe for meatballs, which are braised in grape jelly and chili sauce (usually Heinz 57). The sauce is amazing and it's hard to believe that it's grape jelly, which I'm not fond of. This dish is wonderful with a bowl of rice.
We also made carmelized onion flatbreads (Bon Appetit February 2006), which came out really well. D. did a great job with the onions, which require quite a bit of patience. There was also a carrot orzo (Bon Appetit March 2007), potato pancakes (Bon Appetit January 2006), manchego/pear/fig jam crostini, and ham/Gruyeres/onion quesadillas.
The flatbreads had a creme fraiche drizzle that was really runny during preparation, but baked up really nicely. I like the carrot orzo's subtle flavors of carrot and parmesan cheese. The bland pasta muted it out just enough. D. fried the potatoes crisply and they were topped with creme fraiche and diced red onion.
The crostini was good return for flavor vs. effort. Manchego is a pretty mild cheese with a smooth flavor. It pairs well with the sweet pears and the really sweet fig jam. The quesadillas are inspired from a Trader Joe's frozen pizza. It's the greatest combination ever... smoky ham with the semi-sharp Gruyeres cheese and strong onion.
Our Southern-themed dinner! I was really excited to see everyone last Sunday night for dinner and gab. Let's start with K.'s part of the meal. Her sweet potato casserole was awesome. I must have the recipe so I can sit on the couch and eat the entire dish alone. The casserole had sweet potatoes, evaporated milk, sugar, egg, and marshmallows (K.? Am I missing anything?). I'd have to say that it's the most fabulous combination ever.
Here's her yummy cornbread. I liked how it was more moist than the typical crumbly cornbread.
D.M. took charge of the frying. He wanted to stay for Girls' Night, so he did the fried stuff. The chicken was a repeat of Ina Garten's recipe, only we did buttermilk overnight instead of a brined buttermilk for a few hours.
D.H. brought frozen okra, so K. sliced it and D.M. fried it up. Quite yummy. I've never had okra before. It's dredged in cornmeal, salt, and pepper. The okra itself is pretty sticky, so no extra wet ingredients are needed to make the dredging stick.
J. brought corn, which was winding down a fabulous summer. She said the farmer's market didn't have much this past weekend and it looks like they're transitioning between the summer produce and fall stuff.
As for me, I had an off day. Nothing turned out quite right. I tried that honey wheat bread that was an Outback copycat. I don't have a bread machine, but that was the only difference I did from the recipe. The bread turned out fine, texture-wise, but it tasted like burnt coffee. Yuck. I was not a fan. I found another recipe with the same ingredients, but different proportions... guess what? Less coffee. Bah.
Collard greens were from Paula Deen. I used my crockpot instead of boiling them in a pot. They were fine, but a tad bland.
I seriously could kick myself for this peach crisp. It's Ina's recipe and the only alteration I made was pretty "fatal". I used canned peaches instead of fresh ones. Canned peaches are already soaked in their own syrup, but I went ahead and macerated them with the sugar. What resulted was a soupy, buttery mess. I also don't think the topping should be made in the mixer. I should have used the food processor instead. The mixer didn't break down the butter enough, so there were big chunks.
I also tried to make lemon martinis, only to create a mixture that should probably be used to clean deep-tissue wounds. Sigh. I really should leave that to G.
Anyway, it was great to see everyone. I hope we can do this again soon. Maybe we should make it a sweet potato casserole party? YUM. Casserole and a handful of forks. Maybe a chocolatey dessert? Kick D.M. out of the house and make it an indulgent girls' night in. Ooooh... perhaps make the next evening marshmallow-themed. S'mores, anyone?
The first dinner party post! Tonight's was rather impromptu with a small group. We were watching Barefoot Contessa and Ina Garten was making fried chicken, deep-dish apple pie, mashed potatoes, and homemade bleu cheese dressing. Totally had a craving for fried chicken. On the FN website, one of the recipe reviewers offered an awesome alternative to her buttermilk marinade. Ina's recipe says to soak the chicken pieces in buttermilk overnight. Since we didn't have overnight, this alternative worked out beautifully. The reviewer suggested adding salt to the buttermilk. The acidic buttermilk will tenderize the chicken, but the salt speeds up the process a lot more. Plus, the chicken is given a big oomph in flavor. Here's the buttermilk brine:
