Feeding Friendship: Better Late Than Never

As my title implies, I am running late on posting this past week's feeding friendship recipe. Sometimes you go to the Renaissance festival, a drag race and work late all in the same week, and sometimes the first two stores you go to don't have any pumpkin yet and you give up. Oh yes, our secret ingredient is: pumpkin! Now there are many lovely things you can do with actual whole pumpkins you buy at the store. If I had time and was slightly more adventurous, I would have made this recipe for a whole baked pumpkin, which I found when it was tweeted by lovely songstress Ingrid Michaelson. In a pinch though, I stuck with what I know:

And in fact, my Pumpkin Pie recipe comes straight from Libby's, with a small twist. This recipe is very easy, particularly if you buy your crust instead of making it by hand.

Start by beating 2 eggs in a large bowl (or dump 1/2 a cup of egg beaters into your bowl). Now is also a good time to preheat the oven to 425. Add one 15oz can of pumpkin to the eggs and stir to combine. This isn't a recipe you'll need your electric beaters to mix- just use a spatula.

combining the egg and pumpkin with my festive spoontula 

In a separate medium bowl, combine your dry ingredients: 3/4 cup white sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground ginger, 1/4 tsp ground cloves, and (my addition) 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice. Also, make sure your spices are in date, especially ones you may only use a few times a year (I'm talking to you, cloves).

mmm spicy

kind of pretty, no? 

Now stir all your spices to combine with the sugar and stir it into your pumpkin/egg mixture. 

Your filling should take on a fairly brown tone at this point, or at least be noticeably darker than the pumpkin alone. Next, you add your 12 oz of evaporated milk and stir to combine. 

Now your filling is done! Get a baking sheet and put your crust on it. Pour the filling carefully into your pie crust.  I find it much easier to balance a full pie on a cookie sheet, plus if something bad happens during baking, you won't have to clean the bottom of your oven. In another case of "do as I say, not as I do," remember to buy the "deep dish" pie crust, and don't overfill your crust with filling. I didn't have a deep dish, so I went ahead and made the "overflow" pie.

pie on your cookie sheet- or, in my case, a half sheet

"overflow" pie in a casserole dish

Cook your pie at 425 for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350 and bake 40-50 more minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. I let mine cook for most of the time and then brought in one of my favorite kitchen doodads- the pie crust shield. Behold: 

Once your crust is sufficiently brown, just slide that baby on and it will prevent over-browning and burning of your crust- sure beats trying to make your own out of tin foil (believe me, I've done that too).  And voila: pumpkin pie:

For me, you have to have whipped cream/whipped topping of offset the spice of the pie, but I'm sure everyone has their own preferences and traditions here. Here's how I eat it.

Tastes like the holidays to me!

Cooking with Bea

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law, Bea, came to stay with George and me once Ben and Stephanie got things with the new baby under control a bit. When they lived in Buenos Aires around the time Ben was born, their housekeeper Ventura was famous throughout the city for her empanadas. Now, considering both the fact that a lot of people in BA make empanadas and that she was from a Bolivian background means she must have had game. Since her recipe is lost in the sands of time, we decided to have an empanada night to try to recreate some of those flavors. I have a good Venezuelan empanada recipe, but Bolivian is definitely different.

We only remembered to take pictures part way through, so you'll just have to trust me on the first few steps. The first thing you need to do is make the dough because it needs to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or as much as overnight. This is the recipe I used:

Ingredients for 15 medium size or 25 small empanada discs:

3 cups all purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

6 oz unsalted butter (1 ½ sticks), cold and cut into 12 pieces

1 egg

4-5 tbs water

Preparation:

1. Mix the flour and salt in a food processor.
2. Add the butter, egg and water until a clumpy dough forms.
3. Form a ball and chill in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.
4. Roll out the dough into a thin sheet and cut out round disc shapes for empanadas (use round molds or a small plate).
5. Use immediately or store in the refrigerator or freezer to use later.

In the spirit of disclosure, I'll admit that I cut the recipe in half because it sounded like too much dough...but I totally forgot and used all of the butter. Frankly, it made the dough really workable and still tasted yummy. Not that I'm advocating doubling the butter, but clearly it was not a huge faux pas. So I threw the ingredients in my kitchen porsche (stand mixer) and then wrapped it up and stuck it in the fridge while we made the filling.

We decided to go with beef and I had purchased a chuck roast. We threw about a pound and a half into my trusty food processor. Suddenly, we had ground beef and I realized my food processor did even more things that I realized. We also halved 8 or 10 red potatoes and boiled them until they were tender (~15-20 minutes), but probably only used about half of them in the end. We diced up a medium white onion, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, and one green and one orange chili (not sure what kind, but they smelled way spicier than they tasted) using the food processor. After turning on the range hood to vent the spicy smell and choking half to death on pepper fumes, we were ready to move on.

We also needed hard boiled eggs and Bea shared the trick of dunking them in an ice bath once they had finished boiling to avoid a ring around around the yolk.

boiling the eggs

eggs in the ice bath

Once they were cooked, we diced up the eggs and potatoes, along with several pitted green olives. We also added some peas (the less sweet the better)- maybe a quarter of a cup. 

We took the newly shredded beef and browned it in a deep skillet, along with the onion, garlic, and peppers. To this this we added some salt, pepper, and cumin. You can add paprika if you're into it, but we didn't. Bea also did something with beef bullion and a little water or chicken stock, but I'm not sure what it entailed. I think I was slicing something ;) Anyway, once everything is browned and cooked through and any applicable liquid is cooked off, you can remove the pan from heat and transfer the beef mixture to a bowl. Once in the bowl, add your potatoes, egg, olives, and peas. Also add 1/4 cup or fewer raisins. Told you Bolivian is different. 

the nearly finished mixture

Now you're ready to make your dough into the crust. I rolled out the dough on a floured cutting board. Optimally, you would have a cutter or other round object with a diameter of 4 inches or more, but we used the top of a drinking glass since that was about the best I had.

cutting the dough

The small circles we had made for some mini-empanadas, which might be fab at parties as an appetizer. We put maybe a teaspoon of filling in each crust, then crimped the edges together and painted the top with an egg wash. 

Crimping the top

Finished bundles resembled pot stickers

We put our finished empanadas on cookie sheets covered in parchment paper and put them in the oven at 400 until they started to brown, which was around 20 minutes on convection. 

here's how they came out

A few of them popped open a bit, but they all tasted good. George added salsa to his and Bea and I ate ours plain. 

mmm, flaky

Bea's verdict was that though they were tasty, they still weren't as good as Ventura's. Since I cut the dough quantity in half, we had quite a bit of extra filling with no empanadas to live in. The next night we made burritos with the filling, which were also excellent with a little salsa and Mexican cheese. Good times! 

Leftovers weren't a burden

Feeding Friendship: Vanilla!

I chose the key ingredient this time around, but I didn't have something seasonal in mind this time so I chose something sort of all-purpose that skews towards dessert: vanilla. I have a personal battle with vanilla extract because I can never find any that pleases me as much as some cheap mexican vanilla Mom and I bought on a cruise to Mexico in some run-of-the-mill drug store. I wish I had a gallon of the stuff, because even the fancy imported Madagascar kind can't match it for depth of flavor. Alas.

A few weeks ago, my college BFF Amanda came to town with her boyfriend, Brandon, and it happened to be the weekend of both of their birthdays. I just couldn't let that slide without making something, and Amanda has a deep and abiding love of strawberry nutella crepes born out our late-night trips to Cappy's in San Antonio. I had seen a "Milles Crepes Cake" (that translates to 1,000 crepes, but you only need 20) for sale on the Gilt Taste website, and though I didn't want to pay $75 for one, I did want to eat one. So I tracked down a recipe on the Cream Puffs in Venice blog (love that name, btw) that she had adapted, tested, and liked better than a Martha Stewart version. This cake features crepes layered with a vanilla pastry cream, which I found to be both tasty and easy to make, so I made a mental note to use that part of the recipe in the future for other things. Anyway, I made the cake and it went over very well with Amanda and Brandon. I fully intended to at least post a photo of it here, but it slumped over a bit, becoming somewhat un-photogenic, and then frankly we ate it too fast. So, long story short, I re-used the vanilla pastry cream from that recipe as filling for...Vanilla Cream Puffs.

This recipe is stupid-easy, but it does involve a lot of eggs (not egg beaters, sorry) so stock up! Start off by bringing your 2 cups of whole or 2% milk to a boil in a small sauce pan. Then stir 1 Tbl (or a little more, live a little!) and let it cool in the pan for around 10 minutes.

Next, prepare an ice bath with one large-ish bowl full of water and ice and a smaller empty bowl for the finished cream that fits in the larger bowl of ice water. Also get out a candy or meat thermometer to use later and cut 3.5 Tablespoons of butter to have ready for later. Set your bowls aside. While your milk is cooling off, crack 6 eggs and put the yolks in a medium sauce pan with 1/3 cup of sifted corn starch and 1/2 cup white sugar.

Whisk these all together until they're evenly mixed. When your milk has set for 10 minutes, gradually whisk it into the egg mixture over medium heat. You'll continue whisking this mixture for around 2 minutes, and it wil become extremely obvious when you are done. I was kind of amazed by the rapidity of the transformation in the ingredients that takes place at this stage of making the cream, so I decided to video it for you! Hopefully you'll find it a fraction as interesting as I did. 

So I'd been whisking a very soupy mixture for probably a minute and a half at this point (which I have spared you) and then bam! it just thickens up in seconds and it's ready to go.  It looks really yellow in my extreme closeup in the video, but it's more or less cream-colored even though it does get a little more yellow as it thickens. The next bit is the one ticklish part. Take your big glob of cream and push it through a fine-meshed sieve (I used a fine mesh metal colander the first time and it worked) with a spatula or spootula (best word ever) into the smaller bowl you set out earlier. Your whisk will not push anything anywhere. Once it's all through, stick the smaller bowl in the ice water bath and measure the temperature of the cream. If it's still hotter than 140 degrees, then stir the cream with your spatula until it cools to below 140. 

When you hit about 140, add 3.5 Tablespoons of butter and stir until it is incorporated. You're done with the filling! Take it out of the water bath and let it sit on your counter until it comes to room temperature. Depending upon whether you intend to fill your puffs right away, you can cover and refrigerate the cream, even overnight. 

Next comes the bready, puff portion of the project. Take a deep breath, this is easier than it looks. I looked at the various cream puff recipes on AllRecipes, and though the filling varied widely (vanilla pudding, really?), the puffs were mostly the same. I ended up using this recipe. So, add 1 stick of butter to 1 cup of water and bring it to a boil. Slowly add 1 cup of all-purpose flour and 1/4 tsp salt. Stir until the mixture forms a ball. 

Next I used my fabulous new stand mixer (an anniversary gift from my parents) with the paddle attachment to beat in 4 eggs one at a time. George and I call it the "kitchen Porsche." You can also use a wooden spoon or a hand mixer. 

You'll take this recipe and drop tablespoon-sized dollops onto cookie sheets. The recipe says ungreased sheets, but one of mine stuck and the other didn't, so it your sheets are kind of dry & sticky, you may want to Pam them. I generally tried to make mine round, but they don't need to be too perfectly shaped. Then you pop them in the oven for 20-25 minutes (slightly less on convection setting) until they puff and are ever so slightly browned on top. They also need to be dry in the middle- not still sticky or doughy. 

This goes in ...

and these come out! 

Isn't chemistry wonderful? I just find it amazing that this sticky dough turns into these light, buttery puffs when you add heat and time. Anyway. Wait for them to cool. Next comes what I thought was the only tricky part. Take a sharp knife and cut the top 1/2 or 1/3 of the puff off. I started leaving a small connector "hinge" of puff so that the tops wouldn't fall off when I transported them. The puffs are delicate and a little hard to cut without mushing, so be careful. I took to sticking the knife all the way through it and cutting from the middle out to achieve a better cut and more leverage. Once the puffs were cut open, I spooned the filling in according to how much I felt each puff could handle and then I put on the "lid." 

adding the filling

a finished puff!

I was taking these into work, so I didn't worry about the presentation too much. I think next time I will drizzle a little melted chocolate on top and dust a little powdered suger to finish off the presentation. They turned out both pretty and tasty, earning good reviews from all my coworkers. I think you get a big wow factor on these without too much complicated cooking, and they were a great showcase for the vanilla filling. 

happy cream puffs in a brownie pan, ready to head to the office

Feeding Friendship: Balsamic Vinegar

This week's ingredient was chosen by Veronica to help her mom, Nancy, with a balsamic vinegar quandary.  Nancy had been given a gift basket with several flavors of balsamic vinegar and had no idea what to cook with them. Ellie called dibs on the strawberry flavor, so the next most intriguing possibility to me was the dark sweet cherry. Full disclosure here: I have never cooked with balsamic before, but I have seen it used constantly by Top Chef contestants on TV, usually accompanied by the word "reduction." But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night....ok, no I didn't.

So, being a Top Chef fan I decided to go an unexpected route and suggest pairing this type of balsamic with something savory instead of sweet: beef! Scouring my available recipe resources, I settled on one from AllRecipes.com (my go-to online recipe site where you can save recipes in an online "recipe box") called Cherry Balsamic Short Ribs. Now, due to grocery store constraints and other life factors (apparently one should not shop at the end of Labor Day weekend since the store is kind of tapped out), my recipe turned into what I will call Cherry Balsamic Braised Beef. Here I substituted what my store calls "stew beef" for short ribs, because they were completely out and I figured that cooking the meat for over 3 hours would offset any toughness that comes from using a cheaper cut of beef.

I started out by slicing and dicing everything I would need to get my mise en place, well, in place. Look, Mom, colored vegetables!

I sliced up most of a large Vidalia onion, two carrots and two celery ribs. I would also have added a fennel bulb here, but they came in packs of 3 at the store and I didn't want to deal with trying to use up 2 more alien-looking bulbs. Next, I turned the oven to 350 while I took my next steps. I took the beef and seasoned it with sea salt and fresh cracked pepper, then browned it in my Dutch oven in two batches, draining the grease in between. Now I had a plate of mostly browned bite-sized pieces of beef, which I set aside for the moment. 

In lieu of adding more olive oil, I left the beef drippings in the pot for flavor and cooked the onion, celery, and carrot in that instead for several minutes until the onion got translucent. Next, I added some shamefully cheap Burgundy wine (I looked for better and could find no other Burgundys) and let it reduce by half. I'm certain that any full-bodied red wine would do fine, but the recipe said Burgundy, so I obliged. Per the directions I added some fresh rosemary from my garden (yay!), dried thyme (I was out of fresh), and the demi-glaze.

Oh, the demi-glaze. This is a gelatinous sauce base that took me about 4 grocery stores to find, and even then Balducci's (local fancy-pants gourmet market) didn't carry beef for some reason, so I chose lamb over chicken or seafood. I thought about making my own, but that entails hours of reducing stock and making an entire French sauce, so that went out the window.

After a good stir, chicken stock and cherry cola (!) went into the pot with the 1/3 cup of balsamic.

Now, I used regular aged balsamic, but I think that the cherry flavored kind would be a nice addition to the recipe. Next, I added the beef back in and tossed in 10 oz package of thawed frozen cherries and a few fresh cherries too.

In retrospect, I realize that I added too much cherry Coke to the sauce- a can instead of just a cup. I was rushing because I wanted to get this all in the oven before leaving for an appointment so it would cook while I was gone, and we all know that haste makes waste. So, oblivious to the dangers ahead, I placed the pot in the oven, set the timer for 3.5 hours, and went on my merry way.

When I re-entered the house, I knew immediately that something wasn't right. I checked the pot, but could see nothing obviously burning to explain the smell. When the time was up, this is what I pulled from the oven:

Boooo. My theory is that the extra soda made the overall liquid level too high, as well as adding too much fizz to the pot. Therefore, the top part burned while the bottom portions under the liquid were spared. Still hoping to save the dish, I strained out the liquid from the sauce through my (spanking new) mesh sieve. At this point I tried some beef to make sure it wasn't all a lost cause, and it tasted alright. I put the solids in one container and the liquid in another and called it a night. [I'll also put in a plug for Le Creuset pots here, because this nightmare cleaned up super easily due to the coating they put on their cast-iron pots. Amazing, and worth the cost and the heft for cooking.]

The next day, I followed the directions from the recipe to make the sauce, but it was really salty and basically tasted burnt. Alas. I made some brown minute rice and ate the beef and vegetable mixture alone over it. 

Though the beef survived and was relatively tasty, I'll need to make some gravy or something to put on the leftovers to make up for the sauce. The burning incident stripped the dish of its nice sweet cherry flavor that other cooks raved about online, which is disappointing, but I still think it would pair well with the cherry balsamic. So, if you try this dish, make sure your pot is big enough, check your liquid measurements twice, and check in on the braising process a little more often than I did, and you should be fine. 

In other beef and cherry news, I think that the balsamic marinade from this month's Real Simple magazine could be used with the cherry balsamic vinegar to a similar, tasty effect on grilled steak. Here is the link if you want to try out a recipe I haven't screwed up. 

Distracted by Shiny Objects

There are a few projects kicking around that I have long been meaning to take care of, and this is one of them. About a year ago (!) I was traveling and bought 3 strands of red coral beads that I intended to turn into a multi-strand necklace. I've been wanting a coral red necklace for a while to wear with my more neutral office clothes. Mom bought me a chunky single-strand one for Christmas a couple of years ago and I do wear it, but I wanted something multi-strand, which is rather expensive in that red coral look that I want. Therefore, I thought that DIY was a good option. Recently, I also purchased some strands of stick pearls at The Big Flea (a giant twice yearly flea market at the Dulles Expo center) and I wanted to do something multi-strand with them as well.

While I was shopping at JoAnn's recently for sewing supplies I realized there was a ton of beading stuff there too, so I armed myself with clasps, crimp beads, and stringing wire. I started out with the red beds. There were two different sizes and I had enough of the smaller beads to do a whole strand, but not enough of the larger, so I settled on a shorter strand of the small size and a longer strand alternating the larger and smaller beads.

Mom and I used to make necklaces and other beading projects together when I was younger, but that was probably in the mid nineties (yikes). So I turned to YouTube for some tutorials for multi-strand necklaces. While none of them really addressed exactly what I wanted, I got enough ideas to get started. I began by putting one crimp bead and one necklace bead on a strand of wire. I didn't cut the wire to length yet, I just worked with it on the spool. Next, I took my lobster claw clasp and put the end of the wire through it, leaving about an inch tail. I then worked the tail down through the bead and through the crimp bead. Here it is with the pearls I used later.

Next you pull the tail as taut as you can and then crimp the crimp bead with either pinch-nosed pliers or a bead crimper until the wires don't move anymore. With the end secure, you're almost ready to start beading (aka the fun part). At this point, I measured from the end of the first bead making a necklace of 16 inches and left an additional 2 inches of wire for the fastening process at the end, since you can always snip it shorter when the time comes. So I cut the wire off at a total of 18 inches. For the red necklace I did the strand with the small beads first , but I don't really think it matters which strand goes first. I also recommend you do this at night, in the worst light you can find, with no hard surface to work on...oh, wait, no, that's just what I did. Once you're done stringing, you just carry out the first fastening steps again by looping the wire through the fastener loop and then putting it back through one bead and the crimp bead. Here it is with the pearls again:

It's a little more difficult the second time with the other end of the wire occupied by all the beads, but it's still not too bad. After crimping the crimp bead down, you can either snip off the remaining wire or tuck it into the neighboring beads. Your first strand is now done! You can just repeat these steps to attach the second strand to the fasteners. Just be sure to attach the second strand both on the outside or both on the inside of the other strands. I made my second strand 2 inches longer than the first one and it seems to have worked out well. Here is the finished red necklace.

Next I repeated the process with the stick pearls. They are long and skinny and were much more difficult to work with because of the size of the holes drilled in them. The openings were so small that I had to try multiple beads for the end beads because it was so difficult to get the wire to go through the hole twice. There was definitely a lot more blood, sweat, and tears involved in the second necklace, so if you're considering a project like this, it would behoove you to check out how big the holes are drilled in any given beads you want to use, just to avoid problems down the line. 

I had a few beads left over when I was done, so I went out and grabbed some earring hooks and bead holders. I got two different accent beads to go more with black and more with browns. I had a hard time deciding on beads to go with the pearls, but I ended up with a faceted crystal kind in a color they are calling "smoke" and a bronze freshwater pearl. For this type of earring, you just put the beads on the post and then loop the top of the post around the earring hook with pliers and bend the end around the post. 

Bending the end around itself is not the most fun and easy task, but so long as both sides basically look the same, I don't think it's too worthwhile to stress out about making it look too perfect. Or maybe I've just stopped sweating the small stuff after and earthquake and 2 hurricanes. So here is the set with the crystal beads together with the necklace. Forgive me for omitting my face, but my current case of pink eye does not make it easy to apply makeup or easy to look normal at all really.

And here's a look at the other pair with the brown pearls. I got a lot of, um, help from Watson during these projects, who contributed by chasing the string the beads came on, batting the beads around, attacking the stringing wire, and generally sticking his paws in where they didn't belong. Exhibits A & B as I was trying to photograph these earrings:

Here are what the look like without any feline interference:

Overall this was a fun and not very time-consuming project that netted me 2 necklaces and 2 sets of earrings so far. I may go back and make red earrings if the mood strikes. Next time you can't find jewelry you like in your price range, think about making your own!