Cooking Misc.: January 2004 Archives

This is a variation on a recipe from Elizabeth Alston's little pancake cookbook. I started by slicing a Granny Smith apple thinly, as though I was making a pie, then sauteed it in some butter with brown sugar until the slices softened. While that was cooking, I whisked 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt, a few gratings of nutmeg and a big dash of cinnamon in a 4 cup measure. Spread out the apples in their pan evenly, then poured in the batter (which was the batter for Easy Oven Pancake in the cookbook) and popped it in a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes. It's an eggy pancake, full of sweet-tart apples. We poured maple syrup over the top.

This is a variation on a recipe from Elizabeth Alston's little pancake cookbook. I started by slicing a Granny Smith apple thinly, as though I was making a pie, then sauteed it in some butter with brown sugar until the slices softened. While that was cooking, I whisked 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup flour, 2 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt, a few gratings of nutmeg and a big dash of cinnamon in a 4 cup measure. Spread out the apples in their pan evenly, then poured in the batter (which was the batter for Easy Oven Pancake in the cookbook) and popped it in a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes. It's an eggy pancake, full of sweet-tart apples. We poured maple syrup over the top.

This is one of those places you walk into and everything is so breathtakingly beautiful that you just have to look for a while, even before you can start contemplating the flavors. (It also makes you mad at yourself for not having a camera along; this picture is from their web site, www.buttercupbakeshop.com.)

We confined ourselves to the cupcakes (just $1.50 each): lemon, Devil Dog (with marshmallow-looking frosting), German chocolate, red velvet, spice, Lady Baltimore (white with a cherry nestled in the frosting on top) and then the regular yellow and chocolate. We both settled on spice, which had a sour cream frosting. The cupcake part was good, with a spicy (nutmeg?) bite and the texture of a quick bread, with golden raisins and walnuts. The frosting was piled high and fluffier than Cupcake Cafe's, sweeter too (almost too sweet, without a detectable sour cream tang). Not the dense, rich Cafe cupcake, but a chewier, sweeter one. It seems more like an everyday cupcake to me. Not that it's mediocre. It's just a sit-down-after-school-with-a-big-glass-of-milk-and-a-treat cupcake. The one thing that keeps it from firmly planting itself in that camp is the huge quantity of frosting. (Which I can't decide whether I'm for or against; it's nice to have frosting for every bite, but it makes it less portable and more decadent.)

I'm in the process of getting Kim's new design up and running, so please bear with us as I get all the kinks worked out. It's not her fault, it's her lazy husband.

I don't know how to choose what to write about today. Should it be the sad tale of my belly flop with chocolate pot de creme (I used frozen egg yolks that hadn't completely thawed, so you can imagine the rest), the yummy tortilla soup topped with toasted corn tortilla stips and cheese that wasn't really that difficult or exciting to make (diced onion and jalapeno sauteed; added cumin, chile, garlic, then chicken soup base, water, a can of diced tomatoes and a sliced pork chop left over from lunch the day before) or the rosti that was pretty but soggy and, mysteriously, tasted to Todd like wet socks (tasted to me like onion, potatoes, salt, pepper)?

Todd took a pretty picture of the soup, though:

I got my Penzeys order yesterday and found a surprise. They had packaged, along with my order, a sample of their chili powder. Unlike lots of national brands, their chili powder doesn't have salt, just ancho chile powder, cumin, garlic and Mexican oregano. I had ordered cumin, ancho chile powder and Turkish oregano, so it's almost like they were showing me that I could get it all together in one.

I also ordered their awesome single-strength bourbon vanilla, which comes with a vanilla bean in the bottle (one of their bestsellers is the double-strength vanilla), and paprika, turmeric and chicken soup base. I haven't tried it yet, but it's kind of a paste and the first ingredient is chicken meat, so we'll see how it is. In the past I've ordered chipotle chile powder (smokey and hot), cardamom pods, paprika (they have hot and sweet), sage, curry powder, peppercorns. They have a great selection of whole spices, vanilla beans.

The have a few stores, and apparently people are always clamoring for a Penzeys to be built in their town, so the company is running a competition. Whatever city sends the most postcards to Penzeys will win a store in their town. (I think the city has to have a population of 300,000.) The company doesn't do a lot of marketing, so this is a way for them to find out where they're known and where a store my do well. It could be genius, or it could fail terribly. It'll be interesting to see. I'm sending my postcard in. (Write "I want a Penzeys in my town" and send to Bill Penzeys, c/o Penzeys Spices, 19300 west Janacek Court, Brookfield, WI 53045; make sure to include your address because it's limited to one entry per address.) They have all the rules on their web site. The contest ends July 31, 2004.

Here's a tale of the pointlessness of going to Key Foods on a Sunday afternoon: I had intended to make chimichurri, shrimp and asparagus (I know, but I had some great asparagus in early December from the grocery - sweet, asparagusy), a pistou for vegetable soup. I guess it's winter, and I was thinking spring. No basil, only the saddest-looking curly-leaf parsley, no shrimp, moldy asparagus. It was almost comical.

Using a recipe from Molly Katzen's Sunlight Cafe as inspiration, I made Chai-spiced oatmeal for breakfast this morning. I had bought cardamom pods to make Chai tea this winter and forgot all about them, so that's next, but here's an interesting spin on the plain old bowl of oatmeal (I loved it):

Combine 1 cup milk, 1/2 cinnamon stick, 2 crushed cardamom pods, 4 cloves, a pinch of salt and a grating of fresh nutmeg in a small saucepan and heat almost to a boil, until steam is coming off it, the edges are getting bubbly and the center kind of starts to undulate. Turn off the heat and steep for 15 minutes, then use a slotted spoon to strain out the big spices. Then add about a tablespoon of honey (I used strong buckwheat honey, which I love, although Katzen's recipe called for light honey) and turn the heat back on medium-low. Sprinkle in 3/4 cup oats and stir. Cook for 8 minutes or until the oatmeal is a consistency you like. I added more honey at this point because it wasn't quite sweet enough for me. It makes 2 kind of small servings. The taste is almost the way perfume or flowers smell, warm and spicy, and there's a nice rough and creamy texture, since I used a higher ratio of oats to liquid than is usually recommended (thanks, Lael, for the tip).

The line at our local gourmet-ish grocery store, Natural, forms right in front of the deli counter and sometimes snakes back through the refrigerated dairy aisle. Yesterday when Todd and I stopped by for a few things, the line was all the way to the back wall of the store, blocking access not only to the deli but also to the milk, eggs, cheese and refrigerated tubes of pizza crust (if they even carry it), which is what I was after. So instead I picked up some yeast, deciding to make my own pizza crust. Which is what I did. I'm still astonished that I can casually decide to make pizza crust and just do it. And it only took about 1 1/4 hour, including the first rise.

I think I'm ready to graduate to more advanced yeast-based recipes, like bread (I know, bread's not really advanced, but I'm kind of scared of yeast, so I'm taking baby steps). Deb's bread always turns out so beautiful, so maybe I'll try a recipe from Deb's blog.

This is a cookbook Todd's mom gave me for Christmas. His great-aunt Trudy won it when she was 13, in 1925, for a recipe for split-pea soup that she has written in the back.

The recipes are interesting, odd and kind of vague (recipes don't specify an oven temperature, just saying "a hot oven" or "moderate oven"). There are lots of ingredients I've never heard of or never used: Porto [sic] Rico molasses, sweetbreads (two recipes for sweetbread and cucumber salad), aspic, tongue, chaud-froid, croquettes, coupes, baskets, creamed vegetables, mutton, mincemeat and puddings. In fact, lots of everything. The recipes are really short, and the book is more than 700 pages. They're written in sort of a backward manner that I find myself using when I'm in a hurry, with lots of steps and important information relegated to a sentence clause. Here's a recipe for curried vegetables:

Cook one cup each potatoes and carrot, and one-half cup turnip, cut in fancy shapes, in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, add one-half cup canned peas, and pour over a sauce made by cooking two tablespoons butter with two slices onion five minutes, removing onion, adding two tablespoons flour, three-fourths teaspoon salt, one-half teaspoon curry powder, one-fourth teaspoon pepper, few grains celery salt, and pouring on gradually one cup scalded milk. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.

Other recipes have ingredients lists, and the best part about the book is where someone has made notes: how to halve a recipe for Cottage Pudding, "Nancy List made for Donna's dinner 8/29/86" next to Snow Pudding I.

Don't know if I'll cook from it, but it's fun to read. I like the recipe style; I imagine it's written for women who knew their way around a kitchen.