kitchenmage

food porn: Grilled Cheese Cakewich

Best grilled cheese sandwich ever!

Two thin slices of pound cake, a generous slice of apricot-studded Stilton cheese, a few minutes in a skillet with a dab of butter. Moan in delight.

Nutella mousse recipe

This barely qualifies as a recipe, but I suppose it has more than one ingredient and some instructions, so it'll pass.

I found myself in the kitchen earlier, staring at yet another possible chocolate cake for the book. It wasn't quite what I was after, but it did leave me with a couple of very handy things leftover:

• A couple of tablespoons of Nutella
• ~1/3 cup of whipped cream

aka: deconstructed Nutella mousse

So I constructed it.

To make the mousse, stir the Nutella frantically for a minute to loosen it up a bit. Don't heat it, it just doesn't seem to help. Fold in about a quarter of the whipped cream to lighten the Nutella a bit. Fold in the rest of the whipped cream. Drool for 10 minutes while trying to get the glam shot of the not-so-photogenic brown glop. Eat.

English muffins and crumpets: an (almost) shared recipe

Many questions have plagued humankind for eons:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Does god exist?
• What is the meaning of life?
• What is the difference between English muffins and crumpets?

Well folks, after a day of research and experimentation, I have the answer to one of those. No, not the first three - I took the tough one: English muffins v. crumpets.

One might wonder how dull my day was to spend it hunting down the answer to such a  question, and one might be right. In my defense, however, that's not what I started out to do...

kitchenMage's Leftover Oatmeal Bread recipe

 

When you bake bread as often as I do, it is easy to find yourself looking around covetously at ingredients in your kitchen that might have been headed for another use. Cooked cereal is one of those things that lends itself to ad hoc bread making, adding a whole grain depth to otherwise white bread. This also appeals to the frugal side that many home cooks have, turning leftovers that might otherwise be thrown away, into tasty bread.

This is less of a recipe and more of a formula to use up leftover cooked cereal, which it seems all too easy to end up with. I have a soft spot for oatmeal bread, but you can make this with any cooked cereal. Or leftover brown rice, for that matter.

Sometimes simple is best

Having been MIA for far too long, I've been looking for a way to sneak back onstage without making a big deal out of an entrance. Something subtle, yet striking. Quiet, yet audible above the din. Notable, yet seeming like I've been here all along. You know, like whistling in a purple hat. I had pictures. I had recipe ideas. I had all sorts of funny-as-hell ideas...at 4.30 am.

Several false starts later, I've discarded anything  cute and/or complicated — apparently my off the cuff wit has abandoned me, perhaps headed to a tryst with someone less absorbed and more amusing — and have come to a not-so-stunning conclusion: Simple is good.

If you were baking cookies right now...

...what kind of cookies would you be baking?

Realizing this morning that I had neither bread nor cookies in the house — and with the last round of project editing coming up, we need both — I set about remedying the situation. I just pulled five loaves (2 regular and 3 pint-sized*) of Honey WheatBerry bread** from the oven, which has left the house smelling like breakfast.

Next up is cookies, which is why I am here. (because it is easier to bake cookies while typing on a computer in your office, right?) I'm feeling uninspired, I've got specific requirements for this batch of cookies, and none of my tried-and-true recipes beckon. Most of the time, this would send me to the cookbook shelves or on a multi-hour blog crawl,*** but this time around the first item on the requirement list is a reliable recipe from a trusted source. While I generally love new, even untested, recipes, I've know I've got time tonight but tomorrow may be another story entirely. Hence the need for a recipe I know will turn out well.

Here's where you come in...well, if I'm lucky. What's your go-to recipe for cookie-jar cookies? I've ruled out the brainless ideas (is that an oxymoron?) like oatmeal, chocolate chip, and peanut butter but that's the sort of thing I'm after. Not biscotti, not kiwi-pistachi macarons, nothing with more steps than ingredients.

The pantry is well-stocked: several kinds of nuts, 3-4 kinds of chocolate, an assortment of dried fruit, oatmeal, as well as the usual ingredients like eggs and butter...and half a dozen kinds of flour, if that matters. I've even got a decent selection of less usual things: dulce la leche, coconut milk, some Nutellaesque stuff from TJ's and almond paste. I don't have coconut or peanut butter.

Requirements:

• an actual recipe you've actually baked (ideas wthout recipes are fine, but please don't point me at a specific recipe unless you've had them)
• no assembly required (i.e., drop or bar cookies)
• not too messy to eat while working on a computer
• bonus points if I can make a double batch and freeze a bunch
• more bonus points if it uses jam (mostly because I just unearthed an open jar of berry preserves in the fridge and it looks really good)

So, whatcha got? Inspire me. Dazzle me. Make me gain weight. laughs

* one of the rare times this is true, they actually are about the size of a one-pint canning jar... grin

** a recipe I think is almost ready to go public...as Farmgirl would say, soon...

*** (hi, my name is kitchenMage and I am a blogoholic...)

Foolish Berries: the Dessert that Might Have Been

Although you'd never know it by reading this site, I've been managing to do a lot of cooking even during the crazy writing project. Last night's midnight treat was going to be this wonderful looking Strawberry Ouzo Mock Napoleons that I saw on She Craves the other day. Looks terribly elegant and truly simple: a few sheets of phyllo, strawberries, cream and a shot of booze. What could go wrong?

Bread porn: improvisational division

There are two schools of thought about schools of thought: one says you can divide the world into two kinds of people...the other doesn't. I belong to the latter group and have never understood the reductionistic thinking that goes into black-and-white, us-or-them, 'with us or with the tourists' kind of thinking.

It only gets worse, however, when the talk turns to all things kitchen. Seems the common wisdom is that cooks can work freeform, pitching all caution and planning to the wind Iron Chef-like and creating dishes ad hoc, while bakers must follow a recipe, doing exactly what they are instructed lest their creation — perhaps sensing fear — fails to rise, gel, puff, cream, melt-at-body-temperature or otherwise perform as desired.

Balderdash!

I stand (okay, sit) here as a proud believer in the other kind of people: bakers without recipes. I do this absolutely all the time and one of the places I do it most often is in baking bread. (oh, stop cringing, it only hurts the first time!)

The ultimate carrot recipe for kids: copper pennies (my way)

Someone I know was looking for carrot recipes that "even the most finicky kid would eat" today, which brought to mind one of my "not quite a recipe" dishes: Copper Pennies

My first memory of Copper Pennies comes from The Dunes restaurant in Grayland, WA. The Dunes, marked on highway 101 by only an eight-foot tall statue of an...ahem, erect...Geoduck, was unpretentious, serving whatever had been caught that day, and only that, prepared in one of several ways (fried, baked, sauteed in butter), with the same couple of not terribly inspired sides for every meal. (have you looked at the Geoduck yet? if not, go...now. I'll wait. tick tick tick Did you look? Worth the click, huh? Now imagine it eight feet tall. And going there at sixteen on a date.)

I am sure that by today's sometimes haughty standards, it would be considered quaint...or worse, but it was fresh, honest food that traveled only a few miles to my plate. I like my fish that way: live this morning, and dinner tonight.

And the pies. Oh. My. Goodness. The pies! It was like having Sunday dinner with company coming at Grandma's house, if your Grandma happened to have fishing boats delivering daily and a staff of prep cooks. (and if yours did, I am totally jealous!)

Although the place is now, sadly, gone in a fire, I can still recall, however, sitting at one of those window tables nibbling on the chilled, sweet and sour carrots while waiting for the freshest seafood and the good-enough-to-be-mandatory blackberry pie, made with the tiny wild blackberries that I'd seldom bother to pick myself but coveted when others did the work for me.

I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a thousand recipes for Copper Pennies. They are sweet and just the right size for little people's hands, yet they don't really have a lot of added sweetener. It's more like the vermouth in a good dry martini, where (according to one of my favorite descriptions) "the word 'vermouth' should merely be mentioned loudly enough to make the gin cringe." I think that holding the brown sugar open near the pan of cooking carrots is almost enough.

Okay, I take it back, I just looked and apparently the "classic Copper Pennies" are made with canned tomato soup and marinated for days in the refrigerator. Now I am sorry I looked, I am sorry I even wondered. No, I am not going to link to any of them, it's all too disillusioning.

I've found that these are readily adaptable to whatever seasonings are on hand and sounding tempting. They are also great for encouraging kids to experiment with flavors. Carrots are pretty forgiving and cheap enough that if you create something really disgusting you can toss it without feeling wasteful.

(recipe after the jump)

a pound and a half of chocolate pastry filling

Those cherry blossoms were out in Seattle about two weeks ago. In January. In one of the rainiest Januaries in a really, really long time. I barely got the picture between squalls. It has little reason for being here, no attachment to the rest of the post, it's simply a lovely cntrast to the rest of what I've been looking at lately. Like the kitchen.

The kitchen is littered with brown golf balls. Puffy, irregular, cracked, chocolate golf balls. Looks like a chocolate Easter bunny played 9 holes before getting distracted and wandering off. A dozen or more — actually a lot more — discarded chocolate-espresso puffs, mostly torn to reveal gummy insides (gasp) cover much of the counter. What's left is either smeared with chocolate filling or dusted with chopped praline. Except for the pile of drying orange zest. I'd take a picture, but I'd just get the camera dirty.

When I made the big batch of the Mud Puffs yesterday, I guessed at the actual quantity of filling that would be needed. Apparently I guessed high. Quite a bit high. Leaving me with a pound or two of disgustingly rich chocolate orange pastry filling pressing need to make it go away to a place that doesn't make my jeans tighter.

What to do. What to do.