Newport Weekend

I had been meaning to visit my friend Amanda in Connecticut for quite a while, as I had only been up once while she was getting her PhD. Unfortunately, I chose the week after the most horrendous early snowstorm in CT (you probably read about it in the news) and my poor friend was still without power a week after the storm. Since she and her boyfriend Brandon were already camped at a hotel, we decided to road trip. Amanda picked the town of Newport, RI for its historic mansions and generally lovely seaside vibe. And then brandon got the flu. He decided to be a trooper and make the trek anyway, so they picked me up in Hartford and we drove to Newport. Having picked out a local cafe for breakfast and planned to hit historic mansions the next day, we called it a night. ...and then Amanda got the flu too. Bummer. I therefore conducted my Newport photo safari solo until we met up later for some pizza and football in the hotel.

Since it was still gorgeous, I'll share a few photos and a little history from Newport. Here is what constituted a "summer cottage" for Cornelius Vanderbilt, a railroad baron from New York whose fortune was estimated at around $75 million IN THE 1890s! Think about that for a minute. Using an online currency calculator, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.8 Billion in 2010 money (the latest year it would figure). So spending $12 million (~$318 million now) on a Renaissance style palazzo on the water was no biggie.

lamp post and part of the front facade of the house

Facade from another angle with an ornamental urn

Just a wee summer cottage of 65,000 sq ft and 70 rooms, ho hum. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, and started a fashion for period houses in America. He practically became the Vanderbilt family architect and also built the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina that you might know. The real disappointment was that no photography was allowed inside the house, so I just listened to my interactive audio tour and kept my lens to myself...but it was hard. The walls had beaucoup gold leaf on walls and ceilings with carved putti (cherubs), murals, mosaics and in interior fountain in a "grotto" under the grand staircase.  One room with grey-green paint had platinum painted panels featuring the Muses- not silver, platinum, the world's most expensive metal. The grand entry hall was meant to impress and entertain everyone from business titans to politicians and visiting foreign diplomats. Its ceiling soars 50 feet high, has an upstairs balcony, and the Vanderbilt crest featuring 3 acorns (gilded, of course) is prominently featured. It makes quite the impression. 

Here's an image I found online: 

Apparently it became a family tradition to slide down the stairs on large serving trays at parties. The shape of the stairs is based on the grand staircase at the Opera House in Paris, which I can actually vouch for. Here are some mediocre pics I took of the opera house stairs (it's not the most well-lit space). You can tell that it's one main staircase created from 2 branching off to each side at a graceful angle. And, yes those are large bronze reclining ladies holding up the lights. 

The left side of the stairway

The left side and upper levels in Paris

The middle of the main part of the staircase

See the resemblance? The level of ornament and detail in the house's grand hall is only slightly less. The Vanderbilt ladies had the stairs built 2 inches shorter than normal to accomodate gliding down the stairs in long gowns. The rooms weren't as crazy as this part of the opera house...

A room at the Paris Opera House

The Vanderbilt's dining room

...but they were close, as you can see by comparing the photos. The Dining room shot is by John Corbett, of The Preservation Society of Newport County. I have no other interior shots to share, so you should really go see it in person- here's their website. Here are some shots from the rear of the house, which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean from a cliff with, you guessed it, breaking waves. 

A view from the porch, if you can call it that

An upper story window, complete with putti and Corinthian capitals

The Breakers from the back. Yowza. 

Here are a few detail shots before we push on to the Cliff Walk. 

Some lichen on a trademark acorn ornament 

The side view of the house with a bush and one errant bit of ivy

Out behind al the mansions there runs a lovely paved path that goes pretty much all the way into downtown Newport. I only took maybe 1/4 of it, but it was very scenic and well worth a walk. Here are some shots of the views, waves, and the last optimistic blooms of some wild roses. 

The Breakers' neighbors

Waves coming in

Some of the neighbors' "cottages" down the coast

Mr. Bee, working it for the camera

Looking along a small bay

A late rose bud 

In Newport you can get a 1, 2, or 5 mansion pass, so I headed up the road a bit to Marble House, built by Alva Vanderbilt, wife of William K. Vanderbilt, who was Cornelious's younger brother. She was quite a firecracker, it seems, and designed the whole house very collaboratively with Richard Morris Hunt, who was made famous by The Breakers. The house cost around $11 million and includes 500,000 cubic feet of marble, mostly in a sort of warm beige tone, except for the formal dining room, which is red marble from Algeria. Alva incorporated lots of relatively feminist symbols in her home from Athena to female chemists. Alva was very involved in securing the right to vote for women, holding many suffrage fundraisers at the house. She even had special china made that said "votes for women" on it. I tried to sneak a picture of the china, but the glass case was faking out my lens. Of course, the Interwebs have an example here. She was never thrilled with her marriage to William, and soon blazed another trail for upper class women: divorce. Alva married a Frenchman for love, but had 3 children with Mr. Vanderbilt. She groomed her only daughter from birth to marry into European aristocracy, and the stuffy red bedroom complete with darkly carved 4-poster bed certainly gives you that message. Poor Consuelo (yep, that was her name- eesh) was a famous beauty and became a Duchess of Marlborough to a rather impoverished Duke. Consuelo produced her "heir and a spare" before following in her mother's footsteps to divorce and remarriage. (don't feel too sorry for him, he got $2 million a year for life from her family) I'm reading her memoir now, which is interesting. Anyway, here is the outside of Marble House. 

It's hard to tell from this angle, but she based the plans on the petit trianon palace at Versailles where Marie Antoinette lived. Alva was a huge fan of Louis XIV and XVand had a large portrait of XV in their dining room. 

The rear of the house

Alva built a Chinese tea house out back...I wasn't a fan.  

View of the sea from the back yard. I like how the shadows turned out. 

That concludes the photographic portion of my trip. My poor sickly friends weren't feeling too photogenic, so there aren't any of us, but we had a good visit despite the ongoing adversity. I would definitely return to Newport, and if you have a cool $4 million lying around, you can buy the house just down the street from Marble House and I'll come to visit. 

  

Feeding Friendship: Ginger

I picked this round of FF's featured ingredient: ginger. I mainly did this because I constantly have a small amount of ginger left over if I buy it fresh, even though I literally purchase about 25 cents worth of ginger at a time. I sort of intended to do a lot of research and make an Asian dish with ginger that's more complicated than the regular stir fry thing that I do, but my search on AllRecipes.com for "ginger" led me to cookies and I never looked back. Ginger is a flavor George likes a lot, but I like a big, soft cookie instead of a ginger snap. I was therefore very pleased to find this recipe for a soft ginger cookie that had great reviews. We had a combination birthday party today for all the November birthdays in my office (5!) so I figured that the cookies would go over well. George is always sad that I take most of my desserts to work, so I decided right off the bat to double the recipe because it said it makes "15 servings." Dear readers, if you are making this at home I'd say stick to one batch. I got over 50 cookies out of my doubled batch, which is a lot more than 15 cookies per batch.

With that in mind, let us begin. First lay your butter out to soften on the counter (you can also cheat with 15 seconds or less in the microwave). Then preheat the oven to 350. Once your butter is warm enough to be a little soft, cream it with 1 cup of white sugar until it's a consistent fluffy texture.

Fluffy!

Next, beat in 1 egg and 1/4 cup of molasses. I had never used molasses before this, and I think I will term it the new "culinary napalm." Pour with caution to avoid a sticky mess and rinse that measuring cup- STAT. 

Now in a different medium to large bowl, add and mix the dry ingredients: 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour, 2 teaspoons ground ginger, 1/2 tsp ground cloves, 1/4 tsp salt, 3/4 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp baking soda. I thought about grating some fresh ginger for this, but I wanted a consistant texture without surprise ginger chunks that can be a little overpowering. 

 spices!

spices stirred into the flour

Slowly add your dry mixture to the other ingredients, beating as you go. A stand mixer is a real asset here, but I think that a single batch would be fine with a hand beater. This process basically aerosolized the ginger, which was a little intense. Apparently all it takes to make me think I'm smelling pumpkin pie is the combination of ginger and cloves :) When all your ingredients are incorporated and the texture is even, your dough is done. 

giving it a whirl

As you can see, my doubled batch came out a bit thick: 

anti-gravity ginger dough

...but this frankly just made it easier to roll into the required 1-inch diameter balls. Other reviews said they chilled their dough before shaping it, but I didn't find that necessary. After you've rolled the dough, put maybe a 1/8 cup of sugar (sugar in the raw might be fab here, I realized too late) in a little bowl or on a plate. Dip the top half of your cookie dough ball into the sugar and then knock of the excess before putting it on your cookie sheet with the sugar side up. 

applying the sugar topping

happy cookies-to-be

Then pop your dough in the oven for 10-12 minutes. I used parchment paper for some batches to prevent sticking, but they came out fine without it too. It's a little difficult to tell when they're done, since they're already slightly brown in color, but when they've spread out enough to make the sugar topping crack and they don't look very wet anymore, they're probably done. 

cookies are done! 

ready to serve

All in all these are a nice, fairly mild cookie that's soft and chewy. I was thinking I might splatter a few drips of chocolate over the top in the future and it would be tasty. These got the George stamp of approval, and my coworkers said they were better than the ones made by the other girl because they didn't have crazy ginger chunks, so my hunch paid off. They're not difficult to make and would be a hit at holiday parties. 

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