Monday, 28 December 2009 15:48
2009
1. Out of town
2. Slow Cooker BBQ Shredded Beef Sandwiches w/ Crunchy Potato Wedges
3. Pepper-Crusted Pork Loin w/ Best Potluck Macaroni and Cheese
4. Sautéed Chicken with Pesto-Mushroom Cream Sauce w/ Roasted Potatoes
5. Crispy Garlic Chicken Cutlets w/ Crash Hot Potatoes
6. Sesame Chicken with Garlic Sauce and Broccoli w/ rice
7. Game Day – cheese balls w/ crackers, ham w/ Green Bean Casserole from Scratch w/ Pineapple Stuffing, Tunnel of Fudge Cake
Apparently this is the week of potatoes! I never intend for things to happen this way, but it often seems like I’ll plan the week’s meals and then notice we’re having pasta every day, or that five nights use chicken, or, in this case, lots of potatoes. Thankfully we all like these things, so it’s all good!
I have found myself in an interesting position with recipes. Since I started this blog in May I have gone through most all of my pre-blog recipes. I think I’ve got 10-20 recipes left in my collection that I’ve yet to write about. This means that I’m able to turn to my cookbooks and the internet more and more to find new recipes to try and post, something I find very exciting!
This week I turned to the Cook’s Country 2007 Annual for inspiration and recipes from that tome are featured in meals 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The 7th meal is Game Day and I’m planning a Ham Feast to celebrate the New Year!
In non-menu news, Art is working on a very exciting addition to the blog this week, so keep your eyes peeled :)
Ingredients
-- 1 1/2-Pound Loaf --
1 cup sourdough starter
1/3 cup fat-free milk
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons pesto
3 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons bread machine yeast
-- 2-Pound Loaf --
1 1/3 cups sourdough starter
1/2 cup fat-free milk
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup pesto
4 cups bread flour
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 3/4 teaspoons garlic powder
1 1/4 teaspoons dried marjoram
1 1/4 teaspoons dried basil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 1/4 bread machine yeast
Instructions
1. Place all ingredients in the pan according to the order in the manufacturer's instructions. Set crust on dark and program for the Basic or French Bread cycle; press Start. (This recipe is not suitable for use with the Delay Timer.)
2. When the baking cycle ends, immediately remove the bread from the pan and place it on a rack. Let cool to room temperature before slicing.
Comments
Now that I’ve got the hang of keeping this sourdough starter going, I need to make a loaf every week or every other week to make it worthwhile. While I love basic sourdough bread, I wanted to try something new so I turned to The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook and found this recipe. The bread is great, full of flavor with that wonderful sourdough taste. Yum!
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At the end of 2008 I had the brilliant idea to send out cookies to a few friends for the holidays. The cookies were well received and, since I don’t bake that often, I enjoyed having an excuse/reason to do a lot of baking without the problem of then wanting to do a lot of eating.
I wanted to do the same thing at the end of 2009 but the year got away from me and I just ran out of time. After Christmas I had the somewhat less than brilliant idea that I should bake and send cookies to significantly more people. In fact, I should send cookies to friends and family all over the US! With the help of Art and Lance, I compiled my list, noting how many people were in each household I wanted to gift. The list quickly grew to over 100. Ack.
Then, continuing in my not so brilliance, I decided that I should bake 10 different types of cookies. 10 is a nice, round number you see. I went through my recipes, asked a few people for advice, and came up with the following list as a good mix of spicy, chocolaty, and nutty.
Anzac Biscuits
Candy Cane Cookies
Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Mint Crinkles
Double-Chocolate Cookies
Pepparkakor (Gingerbread)
Lemon Sugar Cookies
Peanut Butter Blossoms
Pecan Powder Puffs
Snickerdoodles
And, since I’ve got to make sure that everyone gets at least one of each type, some quick math led to the realization that I would be cooking around 1000 cookies.
1000 cookies.
I’m not sure I have room for that many cookies in my house! I realized that minor detail about space after I shopped for all of the ingredients, though, so I’m now committed to this course of insanity.
Behold, the ingredients required to cook 1000 cookies.
Monday, 08 February 2010 22:19
Soup
Ingredients
Soup
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 3 pieces
6 large yellow onions (about 4 pounds), halved and cut into 1/4-inch thick moons
Salt
2 cups water plus extra for deglazing
1/2 cup dry sherry
4 cups chicken broth
2 cups beef broth
6 sprigs fresh thyme, tied with kitchen twine
1 bay leaf
Ground black pepper
Cheese Croutons
1 baguette, cut on bias into 1/2-inch slices
8 ounces gruyere cheese, shredded
Instructions
1. For the soup: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 400*F. Generously spray inside of heavy-bottomed large Dutch oven with nonstick cooking spray. Place butter in pot and add onions and 1 teaspoon salt. Onions will just about fill the Dutch oven.
2. Cook, covered, 1 hour (onions will be moist and slightly reduced in volume). Remove pot from oven and stir onions, scraping bottom and sides of pot. Return pot to oven with lid slightly ajar and continue to cook until onions are very soft and golden brown, 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours longer, stirring onions and scraping bottom and sides of pot after 1 hour.
3. Carefully remove pot from oven and place over medium-high heat. Using oven mitts to handle pot, cook onions, stirring frequently and scraping bottom and sides of pot, until liquid evaporates and onions brown, 15 to 20 minutes, reducing heat to medium if onions are browning too quickly. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until pot bottom is coated with dark crust, 6 to 8 minutes, adjust heat as necessary. (Scrape any fond that collects on spoon back into onions.) Stir in 1/4 cup water, scraping pot bottom to loosen crust, and cook until water evaporates and pot bottom has formed another dark crust, 6 to 8 minutes. Repeat process of deglazing 2 or 3 more times, until onions are very dark brown. Stir in sherry and cook, stirring frequently, until sherry evaporates, about 5 minutes. (I deglazed four times for a total of 1 cup of water.)
4. Stir in broths, 2 cups water, thyme, bay leaf, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, scraping up any final bits of browned crust on bottom and sides of pot. Increase heat to high and bring to simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 30 minutes. Remove and discard herbs, then season with salt and pepper.
5. For the croutons: While soup simmers, arrange baguette slices in single layer on baking sheet and bake in 400*F oven until bread is dry, crisp, and golden at edges, about 10 minutes. Set aside.
6. To serve: Place oven rack 6 inches from broiler element and heat broiler. Set individual broiler-safe crocks on baking sheet and fill each with about 1 3/4 cups soup. Top each bowl with 1 or 2 baguette slices (do not overlap slices) and sprinkle evenly with gruyere. Broil until cheese is melted and bubbly around edges, 3 to 5 minutes. Let cool 5 minutes before serving.
Comments
I really love French Onion Soup. If I see it on a menu and it’s not super hot outside, I’m likely to order it. However, I’ve never made it myself because no one else in the house likes it the way I do. With all of the snow we’ve been getting, I decided that there was no better time to make my own French Onion Soup than this week – especially since I’d just seen a recipe for it in the 2008 Cook's Illustrated Annual. There were a couple parts of the recipe that I was unsure about, but I followed it to the letter since it’s something I’ve never made before.
This soup was pretty fantastic. The multiple deglazings of the onions really yielded a deep, rich flavor to the soup. That part of the recipe is definitely a keeper for next time.
Even if the Test Kitchen prefers the taste of sherry to other alcohols for this soup, I’m not sure that I do. Next time, I’d try using red wine instead, which has been my preference in the French Onion-style casseroles I’ve made in the past.
I was unsure about the blend of beef and chicken broths, but it worked quite well and the flavor of the broth part was lovely. However, I think I’d try all beef broth next time, just to see how that works.
I’d also like the soup to be more… velvety. Next time I’ll either try adding some flour after all the deglazing or I’ll simmer the soup for longer and remove the lid in step 4.
Since I was only serving myself soup, I used the toaster oven for the croutons and the final broiling. This worked very well for a single serving. The first bowl of soup I made, shown here in a gorgeous crock that our best friend Brian gave us one year, had cheese only on top of the crouton. For the second bowl I split the cheese and put a bit under the crouton and a bit on top of it. I think I like the way the second bowl turned out better because the crouton wasn’t completely covered with cheese which let it crisp up a little more during the final broiling.
I will definitely be making, and tweaking, this again. It’s a great starting point for my experimentation in French Onion Soup.
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