Simple easy pizza dough

Got this from my sister.  I'm not sure whence she acquired it.

Preheat your oven to 200F and turn off when it reaches temp.

1.5 c of water at a temperature appropriate for proofing yeast
One packet of yeast

1 T sugar
2 T olive oil
1.5 t salt
flour (see below)

Proof that yeast in the warm water and add flour slowly, kneading/mixing as you go until it's the right consistency.  It'll probably be 3.5c or so before it starts pulling cleanly away from the side of the mixing bowl.

Put the dough in a  well oiled glass bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap, then place in that warm-but-off oven for at least 45 minutes.  Then remove it, punch it down, and roll out on a well floured surface.

Bake at 425F for 15 minutes for a softer crust, 450F for 15 minutes for a little crispier.

Brownie chocolate chip cookies

After I brought some chocolate chip cookie Oreos to work, one of the foodies I work with inspired me to try baking chocolate chip cookies and brownies together.  It was so awesome idea I couldn't resist.

Even if it would have been disappointing.  The planning was harder than stir-fry, trying to find a brownie recipe with baking conditions close enough to those required for the cookie that I would have some grounds for hoping for success.

But, I was lazy and used the break-apart square cookie dough things just to keep things simple.  I guess we'll see if I ended up saving time in the long run or if I just created more work for myself.

Anyway, we'll get back to the cookie dough, but here's what I put into the brownie batter:

• 1/2 c AP flour
• 1 1/4 c sugar
• 65g Dutch cocoa powder (sorry about switching units here; I wanted to use my scale)
• 1 t salt (I had kosher on hand, so that's a slightly heaping spoon full there)
• 1 large eggs
• 1/2 T vanilla
• 10 T butter
• 1/4 c chopped walnuts

I started by mixing the cocoa, sugar, butter, and salt over a double boiler on medium heat, stirring

occasionally.  I actually had a little more butter than I needed according to the recipe I was cribbing from, 1 stick and then 3 tablespoons left from another stick, so I took a pat and greased an 8"x8" pan and then tossed the rest back into the mix.  It never quite got smooth, but once it was at least uniformly grainy, I took the top pot off the heat to let it cool until it was just warm.

At this point I added the eggs and vanilla.  The original recipe said to add the vanilla, then one cold egg, then the second cold egg, but since I didn't anticipate any mixing problems I scrambled both eggs with the vanilla in advance, stuck it back in the fridge, and then stirred half of the mix at a time into the chocolate.

At this point, if you want something more like fudge, you can forget to add the flour.  I did that once.  It still tasted good.

I had half a cup of finely chopped walnuts but that just seemed like too much, so I added maybe a third of that to the batter along with the flour.  When it was all pretty even, I poured it over--wait, interlude for a cookie:

Okay, so buttered 8"x8" pan and prefab cookie squares.  Left them on the counter just long enough to get soft so I could press them more easily into the pan.  You don't want to let it warm up too much or it will start sticking to whatever you use to press it.  I ended up using the glass I had already employed to hold my premeasured flour and walnuts.  It worked pretty well because I could twist the glass when I lifted it from the dough and there was no pullout.  I put the mass of cookie squares in the middle of the pan and pressed it toward the corners, but in retrospect it might have been easier to put it at one edge of the pan and then work my way across.  Well, it wasn't exactly a Herculean task either way.

Back to the brownies!  I poured the batter over the cookie substrate until there was little enough batter left in the pot that I wouldn't feel ashamed licking it clean.  I sprinkled half the remaining walnuts over the top--really, it seemed like there was plenty to go around--and put it in a 330° oven.  Seemed like a reasonable compromise between the chocolate chip cookie and brownie recipes.

This was really the toughest part.  Everything's going to cook more slowly with the extra mass.  My instinct is to go with longer times at lower temperatures, so the thermal gradient in the food is flatter, but you can't just lower the temperature arbitrarily or nothing gets cooked.

I originally had it in for 25 minutes, but a toothpick in the middle wasn't coming out clean.  I put it in for another ten minutes, and then ten more minutes again.  Toothpick still came out wet.  Okay, ten more minutes, but at 320° this time.  Still a little wet at the bottom, but starting to look done in the middle:  fifteen minutes at 300°, and the toothpick finally comes out clean.

The hard part here is all these door openings coupled with the fact that I can't turn off the oven timer without turning the oven itself off, so trying to coordinate the time is a hassle; I was probably only getting 7-9 minutes at temperature, but maybe that's close enough.  Now that I've extended the time thrice, it occurs to me I could use the timer on my microwave instead.  Oh well; good reason not to drink Coke and vanilla vodka while I'm doing science.  Maybe next time.

Oreo stuffed chocolate chip cookie

This recipe was another case of "I must experience this for myself now that I've heard about it."  Since I was a little impatient, I tried using cookie dough from the store instead of making it from scratch.

I actually made two attempts.  The very first was with storebought dough and I tried completely encasing the Oreo with it.  Unfortunately, the normal cookie dough is so fluid at baking temperatures, before it starts to set, that I ended up with chocolate chip saucers with an Oreo island in the middle.  Fortunately, short of burning the cookies entirely, it's still delicious.

My second time, I thought I'd leave the cookie dough as thick dollops above and below the Oreo, so as it settled during baking, it would, I hoped, just encase the Oreo.

Nope.  Close, but no cigar.

Obviously the storebought dough just isn't firm enough.  I'd have to do something like try making it by hand.  Adding extra flour might work, or substituting a fraction of AP flour for something with higher gluten like bread flour, but since I knew someone has already figured all these details out to have posted this idea online in the first place, I thought I'd see what they had to suggest.

The original recipe apparently comes from here.

After all that hassle, I came up with a workable, if inelegant, compromise:  muffin tins.

I overdid it, but it worked:  two cookie dough squares in the bottom of each depression of the muffin tin, then the Oreo, then two more squares.  It was almost too much cookie, but it held together and baked up just fine.

Big hit with my coworkers, even the diabetic one.  I just wish I'd made more to share.

I tried it again using a mini muffin tin and one square each on top and bottom (and mini Reese's peanut butter cups--I thought they'd melt and fall apart without the support of the tin--but let's not get distracted), but that didn't turn out as well.  The top squares spread out during baking and all touched, so I couldn't twist them out one at a time like I could with the regular size muffin tin.  They did bake up fine and were delicious, but I had a lot of cookie shrapnel piled up by the time I got all the cookies extracted.  But that's an adventure for a later time.

Avocado-quinoa dip

This dish was adapted from a salad recipe I got at Wegmans.com.  I like avocado more for its versatility, especially its capacity for becoming guacamole, so I thought this one might work better as a sort of dip.

The main cast:

• 10 oz red quinoa, cooked
• 12 oz frozen whole corn, thawed (or fresh, whatever)
• 1 c sliced green onions
• 2 plum tomatoes, diced
• 2 avocados, mashed
• 1 t minced garlic
• thyme, coriander, cilantro, and celery salt to taste
• 1/2 T lime juice
• 1 T sesame oil

The quinoa I cooked per the directions on the bag, except I added some chicken bullion after adding the water.  I should have added it to the water first, but I had been trying to redeem some vile s'mores vodka, and it didn't occur to me until it was too late.

Okay, so:  Cook the quinoa, chop up all the vegetables as you see fit, mash the avocados, and mix it all together.  The original recipe said to let the quinoa chill for 20 minutes first but I got impatient, and it didn't seem to hurt not to wait.  As for the herbs and spices, you can adjust those however you see fit; the original recipe called for a cup of chopped fresh cilantro but I only had dried, and it's not my favorite, so I thought I'd throw in the other things to bring it more to my wavelength.  Maybe subconsciously I was trying to make it more like guacamole but with corn and quinoa in it.  And tomato.  Well, whatever.

I thought it was phenomenal.  I got full on it and still wanted to keep eating the stuff.  Seemed to go better with tortilla chips than water crackers.  Probably could have used a third avocado and/or tomato, though.  Maybe a little sour cream would make it more dippy, but I might still have guacamole on the brain.

I really need to get a better way to present these dishes.  Sometimes the big red plastic bowl is just not amenable to presentation.  

Bailey's Mousse

Went to a shindig at a former coworker's farm last summer and he pulled this out at the end of dinner. It's pretty strong, for pie.

• 3 T water
• 1 package unflavored gelatin
• 2 c whipping cream
• 1/2 c sugar
• 1/2 Bailey's Irish cream

Dissolve gelatin in water, heating as necessary.
Chill whipping cream and bowl, then beat to firm peaks.
Add gelatin solution and whip back to firm peaks.
Mix in sugar, then fold in liquor.

You can substitute Kahlua or Buttershots for the Irish cream. Other substitutions can probably also be made, but I haven't tried them.

As-is, serves 4. Doubled, it should fill a pie crust. Make sure you bake the crust first, if you're supposed to. I forgot to do that on the last chocolate mousse pie I made so I had to run back to the store at midnight before Thanksgiving and pick up all the ingredients I'd just wasted.

Orange cranberry relish

My sister makes this at holidays sometimes.  It's delicious; tangy without being overly tart.

1 bag of cranberries
1 entire navel orange, in chunks but not peeled
Sugar

Wash the fruit and put it in a blender until the consistency is even (not smooth...unless that's what you like).  Add sugar to taste.  Easy, tasty, festive.

Bread 'n' butter jalepeños

Bread 'n' butter pickles were always my dad's favorite, and while I was partial to dill growing up, I've more recently developed an appreciation for things more amenable to his palate.

Last fall a coworker of mine had a get-together out at his farm and, also being a fan of chiles, had some of these goodies out to go with his stewed beans and cornbread and what-all that everyone else brought  (I made butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies).

Fortunately for me, my coworker had a load of fresh jalepeños that were going to go bad before he could eat them all, and knowing I was the biggest aficionado of fiery comestibles there after himself, he let me take them home.

Fresh peppers are great, but there were a lot, and I had to try my hand at bread 'n' butter peppers.

Fortunately I currently reside near Muncie, Indiana, so canning supplies are still relatively easy to find.  I didn't do a real canning job on the peppers, the directions I was given by my coworker started with "You don't actually have to can the peppers," but it was as close to my memories of my mom making pickles and grape juice and chile sauce as I could get without deliberately going all-out.

I started with 1-2 quarts of whole, fresh peppers; most still green, some obviously ripe.  I chopped off the stems and ran them through my food processor with the coarsest slicing blade.  From what I recall of Alton Brown's lesson on the subject, the capsaicin glands tend to be up at the stem end of the inside of the pepper, and I wanted to preserve those while eliminating the stemmy woodiness endemic to most fruits.

As you know now, I'll generally err on the side of convenience when trying something new, and then compare it afterwards to a more old fashioned or purist or honest method of preparation.  The same holds here:  I got some Ball bread & butter pickle mix and followed the instructions.  Much easier than finding a recipe for the brine, making sure I had all the ingredients, and then doing research on canning or hoping to find a close-enough procedure already published somewhere.  Since I knew I didn't have to go through all that trouble anyway, I just followed a rough outline of the instructions on the mix jar.  I won't give you a blow by blow, but here's the rundown:

1. Place a half gallon jar in a stock pot and fill with water until the jar is full and the stock pot is as close to full as you dare. Put on high heat until it boils. Mainly I wanted to reduce thermal shock at step 4.
2. Combine white vinegar, the mix, but no sugar (the mix has dextrose and there's enough sugar in today's foods anyway--but if you like 'em sweet, don't let me stop you) in a saucepan and bring to a boil.
3. When everything's boiling, find a way to safely drain the jar, and then fill it with the sliced peppers.
4. Pour the boiling acid-brine over the peppers, close the lid, and let it steep. At first some of the peppers will not want to submerge, so after the jar cooled a bit (let it cool on the kitchen counter for a while--don't put hot food in your refrigerator), I inverted the jar for a few hours a couple times. I probably didn't need to, the peppers "cooked" and settled well enough on their own in a day or so, but it didn't seem like it would have hurt.

If I were making pickled eggs I'd leave them alone for a few more weeks, but since the peppers already have a lot of flavor and a much higher surface area to volume ratio, they looked ready to eat inside of a week.  Oh yes, they were, gloriously so.

Tangy, sweet, still hot but not rudely so.  Yum!  Great as a condiment on hamburgers, or as a side with beans or in soup.

But I had an epiphany or two while I was waiting for the water to boil.  I'll get back to you when I've had a chance to do some research, but let me give you a preview.

First, why are we only using white vinegar?  Acetic acid has a tangy sourness and a pungency that aren't objectionable, at least at culinary concentrations, but that's like saying sugar is sweet--it's nothing else, and most people with sweet teeth would prefer some kind of candy with particular flavors to spoonfuls of table sugar or prescription strength fructose.

I sometimes use a malt or red wine vinegar as part of a marinade, or a sauce or fond, and it's an important part of vinaigrette dressings.  I'm finding more canned tuna packed in olive oil and even infused with garlic, so I could empty a can of that stuff over a bed of lettuce and be halfway to salad dressing; so why not put some veggies I might have in the pickled condition into a salad, that have been macerated with a nice pinot noir vinegar instead of some corporate brine?  I'll let you know.

I've gotta tell you, though, that pinot noir vinegar?  I could drink that like scotch.  Brilliant.

Second, why use only bread 'n' butter mix, or sugar for sweet pickles, or dill and garlic for dill pickles? I'm using "pickles" as shorthand for any pickled vegetables at this point, natch.  I'm looking at the ingredients on this jar and it's basically salt, spices, and sugar.  Oh, lookee at this other jar also containing salt, "spices," and sugar...maybe, with a respectable dry barbecue rub like this one and perhaps a hit of Liquid Smoke, we could have some barbecue pickles.... I'll let you know.

Pecan pie muffins

Someone at work brings these in for a birthday/holiday treat once or twice a year.  When I asked for the recipe, she said she'd have to get me a copy later; she always brings in the recipe to share because people are always asking, but she'd already run out.  Fortunately she made more copies and got one to me by the end of the day.

Here it is:

• 1 C packed brown sugar
• 1/2 C flour
• 1 C chopped pecans
• 2/3 C melted butter
• 2 eggs, beaten

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Combine sugar, flour, and pecans.

Combine butter and eggs, and mix well; then add to the dry mixture.

Fill either paper lined or greased mini muffin tins to the top.  

Bake 20-25" or until they test done.

Pumpkin brownies

This comes by way of a human interest-type internal newsletter from what we call a "defense and aerospace prime" I was supercontracted to one summer.  Don't worry, this recipe isn't ITAR-controlled, so foreign nationals are welcome to try it.

Ingredients:

• Nonstick cooking spray
• 1/2 C canned pumpkin
• 1/3 C brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• Whites of 2 additional large eggs
• 2 T vegetable oil
• 1 C all-purpose flour
• 1 t baking powder
• 1 t cocoa powder
• 1/2 t ground cinnamon
• 1/2 ground allspice
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/4 t ground nutmeg
• 1/3 C mini chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Spray 8" or 9" square baking pan with nonstick spray.

Mix wet ingredients--pumpkin, brown sugar, egg and whites, and oil-in a large mixing bowl.  Beat on medium speed until blended.  

Add the dry ingredients (you're not sure about the chocolate chips at this point, right?  Good--hold off on them) and beat on low speed until the batter is smooth.

Now you can stir in the chocolate chips, and then spread evenly in to the pan.

Bake 25-30" or until a toothpick comes out of the center clean.  When cool, cut into squares.

Because it's pumpkin, the expected time of year to have this would be fall, but it's good all the time.  Despite the cocoa, they almost come out more like blondies, but really, I'm not going to argue about it.

Breakfast in a glass

Not a weekday breakfast, though.  Treat this one like a mimosa.

Pour into a tumbler:

6-8 ounces of orange juice

Add a shot of:

chilled bacon vodka

Mix well and serve.

I had some Bakon from Kahn's Fine Wines in Naptown, but you can also make your own--thanks to the Pinterest board from Lindsay Allen at the Editor's Taste Buds.

You can drink it on the rocks, but I always keep my fruit juice chilled and my booze in the freezer, so it didn't need it.

My experience was like first drinking a swig of orange juice to wash down some bacon, followed by the taste of having eaten some bacon after drinking orange juice, accompanied by a shot of vodka.

Eventually I will try a bloody Mary with the Bakon (also from Lindsay's Pinterest board).  Not a huge fan of tomato juice, but I like BLTs and I actually had a pretty good bloody Mary at a barbecue joint in Champaign once that was saved through the liberal use of black and hot peppers.

Adulterated piri piri turkey

I'm not sure where I first read about piri piri chicken, but I'm cribbing from Epicurious.com for the overall experience, and for the sauce, About.com for piri piri fish.  It was described as having Portuguese and African roots, and I haven't had much experience with southern/western Mediterranean cuisine, so I thought the time was ripe.

I happened to have dried herbs on hand and a bottle of lemon juice, but except for the fresh lemon juice, the sauce recipe didn't specify.

My approximation of piri piri sauce:
1 T Sriracha chile sauce
5 dried de arbol chile peppers
1/2 c lemon juice
5 garlic cloves
2 T cilantro
1 T parsley
1/2 T salt
1/2 c olive oil

I should have added far less salt, like half a teaspoon, especially considering my choice of chile sauce (original recipe actually called for paste), but live and learn.

I put everything but the oil in my food processor, and when it started to look smooth, I drizzled in the oil while it was still running and let it go until it looked like it wasn't going to get any smoother.

I scooped out a couple tablespoons and put them in a zip-top bag with a turkey breast, not having a whole chicken, squeezed out the air and massaged it a bit, then put it back in the fridge.  The original recipe called for four hours, some of the reviews suggested overnight.  There seem to be different schools of thought on marinating; some say that that there's no point in trying to go past half an hour or a couple hours because the diffusion of the marinade drops off exponentially (more or less--don't ask), others say that you can achieve arbitrarily thorough marinating depending on food preparation and the spoilage horizon.  Whether it's more effective than a couple hours or not, overnight in the fridge is going to be pretty safe unless the meat's already microbially compromised.  So, I left the turkey breast whole and cut it up after marinading overnight.

You know what?  The original recipe called to have a whole chicken marinated, then barbecued, and then glazed with the following:

3 T butter
3 T chopped fresh cilantro
2 minced garlic cloves
2 T piri piri sauce
2 T fresh lemon juice

I don't have a grill available currently, and I don't feel like baking this turkey breast in the oven like it's a whole chicken, so I'm not bothering with that.  Here's what I'm doing instead:

After marinading adequately (or before, if you don't want to wait so long), cut the turkey into pieces convenient for stir frying.  Cook in an oiled wok on high heat.  I fried one serving spoonful of meat at a time to reduce the thermal load on the stove.  When it got about medium well I took it off and put on more meat, until everything was equally cooked.

Then I put all the meat back in with the following and let it stew, rapidly stirring and scraping the bottom of the wok, until I was darn well satisfied:

1/2 c piri piri sauce
3 chopped garlic cloves
1 sliced shallot
1 t white pepper
1 2-inch chunk of ginger root, scraped with a spoon and grated

I let it go for a while, continuing to stir over high heat until everything was just about where I wanted it, and added a sliced red bell pepper.

When it's had enough in your estimation, take it off the heat and serve with as much of the remaining piri piri sauce on top or on the side as you wish.  If you want to be faithful to the idea of barbecuing the meat, you can leave it in until the sauce and solids start to carbonize.  If that's not your thing, the shallot and bell pepper should reach the cooked-yet-firm stage between 2 and 5 minutes, depending on how hot your stove gets.  I like barbecue, so I tried to push it to the far end of the Maillard regime before adding the bell pepper, but not into "bark is just burnt rub, isn't it?"  After I started cooking, it occurred to me to worry about the low smoke point of the olive oil in the sauce, but it was obviously far too late, and didn't end up being a problem.

Yes, I know, stir fry is just about the antithesis to barbecue, but barbecue technically isn't just cooking in your back yard, either, and like I said, I don't have a grill.

Result?  Tangy, and...distinctively bright.  The salt was a bit excessive, as I feared, but it didn't so much taste too salty as it made the ginger and pepper come across as perhaps too citrusy.  Maybe one teaspoon of salt would have been a good balance.  I might have tried serving it over rice with the remainder of the sauce, instead of just drizzling a bit over the top of the meat.  The rice would have taken up the sauce well and might have taken the edge off the salt's effects.

It's a little prettier in person, but more importantly it's delicious.  Change your room lighting if it bothers you.

Labeling this as "proof of concept" since I took so many liberties from the original recipe.  Apologies to any purists still reading.

Tomato-tapenade hors d'oeuvre

I reverse engineered, or closely enough, this snack I first experienced at the wedding reception of a buddy of mine from grad school.

Start with sourdough bread medallions or cut a baguette into approximately 1/4" thick slices.  You can also try cocktail bread; rye or multigrain might be best, but as usual, whatever your druthers.

If you like it crispy, put the bread slices on a cookie sheet and bake in a 300°F oven for five or ten minutes.  The idea is to get them crispy around the edges but still have them chewy enough that it doesn't just shatter when you take a bite.  I've skipped this step and it turns out okay.

Take some tapenade/olive salad mix, either prefab or made yourself, and mix in shredded sun dried tomatoes.  I had whole tomatoes and they were just a little too dry for my taste so I put them in my food processor, first, with a little sesame oil until the chunks were more or less even and fine.  Add the tapenade until your olive:tomato ratio is between 2:1 and 1:1, then blend a little more until the mixing and texture are even.  It should be a little pasty but you should still be able to distinguish some individual tomato and olive bits.

Mix in a finely graded hard cheese like Parmesan or Asiago (preferably without anti-caking agents, but it's tolerable with that cheese in a canister, although then it won't melt), about the same volume you used for the tomatoes.

Smear onto the bread and put back into the oven for five minutes, or eat cold.  Since this time I didn't pretoast the bread, I did seven minutes.  You may want to do the same if your ingredients aren't at room temperature.

I found some sun dried tomato tapenade at the store recently so I tried it to see if it would be a grave miscarriage of justice not to do the tomatoes myself.  Turned out fine, although I think next time I would try holding the baking time down to five minutes and boosting the temperature to 400°F.

A 3.5 oz bottle of the tomato tapenade got me this far.  Turns out it already had a little goat cheese in it, but oh well.

Next time I might try adding finely diced chicken, or prosciutto or bacon chunks, since everything goes better with cured pork.

Crispy Prosciutto Cups

Got the basis of this recipe from Kelsey Nixon's show on the Cooking Channel.  It looked fascinating and easier than some of the other things I've been planning on trying, so...next on the list it got to be.

You can look up the original recipe (and you should) at the link above.  I'll just present the modified version I tried.

1 lb Italian sausage
12 oz package of diced celery and white onion
1 cup of pomegranate arils
4 large eggs, beaten
6 pieces prosciutto
10 oz package of dry stuffing/bread cubes
1 t fennel
1 t dried thyme
2 c juice from a turducken (cooked, of course--how else would you get any water out?  Don't tell me.)

I didn't particularly plan it out.  I saw that fennel sausage was the first thing listed in Kelsey Nixon's recipe and couldn't find any so I thought I was being clever when I opted for Italian sausage and added fennel instead of fennel sausage and various other spices, and was feeling smugly clever until I just now noticed that Italian sausage was also called out in the original recipe.  Well, there was plenty of meat as is; it may have been more like a meatball than stuffing, in my book, if I'd doubled the amount of sausage.

I can't believe I just said "there was plenty of meat as is."

Since I was low on prosciutto I ended up just doing one slice per muffin tin cup and filling a small breadpan with the rest of the stuffing, but it was fine since I still needed something to go with that turducken.


It turned out pretty well, too, although I made the mistake of trying to eat it while watching "Eraserhead" and I just had to stop.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves; I was barely able to get the prosciutto out of the package without tearing it apart, so I ended up breaking each slice in half and trying to work with two rough square of ham tissue, which was a bit easier.  I had foreseen the possibility of this working better, but I sadly failed to honor this prophecy in my own mind.

The arils were just serendipity.  I hadn't read much past the ingredient list when I was shopping so I was half inclined to get fresh cranberries if I could find any, thinking about how the balance against Granny Smith apples would change if I did, when I just saw the package of fresh arils.  Also, they were on sale, and I didn't remember the apples until I was leaving the parking lot  Meh; world didn't end without them.

I admit, I've been going the slightly processed/prepackaged route here and there, but when I'm trying to discern something new, I try to weigh convenience allowing me to focus on the novel aspects of a dish against the superior quality of ingredients prepared freshly and properly by me in the kitchen.  In this case the sacrifice seemed negligible; in other cases, it's usually because I can't even find the best stuff fresh.


On with the cooking!  As I would presume, you turned your oven on to 325°F back when I was talking about David Lynch's ouvre killing my appetite.  If not, there's plenty of time while the sausage is browning over medium to medium-high heat in a skillet.

When the meat was browned, I added the celery/onion mixture and a little under half the arils.  When they started to cook down, I started adding the spices and half the juice (I had just pulled the turducken out of my slow cooker and the bag it was in still had all its juices).  I think I over did the juice a bit, and feared it might not have had as rich a flavor of legitimate chicken stock, so I let it reduce by approximately half before transferring it to a large bowl with the dry stuffing.  Meanwhile, I used the rest of the poultry juice--ugh, it sounds awful phrased this way, doesn't it?--to deglaze the skillet and allow the sausage-bread mixture to cool before adding the eggs and the remainder of the arils.

Oh, I threw in a little red-black pepper mix just before taking the sausage off heat, too, because I couldn't find a jar of black pepper.  Worked fine.

All that being done, I scooped as much of the mixture into the prosciutto-lined muffin tin as I dared and packed the rest into a 7"x3" breadpan.  Into the oven for 20 minutes, then check for doneness.

It looks pretty much like this when it comes out, only the meat is visibly crispy and everything else is slightly darker on top.  I remembered to take a "before" picture but not an "after" one, sorry.

It's not a stuffing recipe like what I normally use, but it was quite good.  The pomegranate's sweet tartness worked with the savory meat just as well as I could have hoped.  It was just a bit crumbly around the edges, but nothing that shouldn't be resolvable by a plate.  Maybe that second pack of sausage would have turned it into a less frangible fluffy meatball like you get in some restaurants, but whatever.

Some variations to consider for the future:  bacon instead of prosciutto, and mini-muffin tins, which would have been more accommodating to my half slices of prosciutto.

UPDATE--The photos should be visible in the published posting of this recipe now, not just in the draft preview that only I can see.  What would have been the good of that?  I was in the room with them at the time; it's not like I need to prove that to anybody.

Pumpkin fluff dip (revised)

I forgot something in the original posting of this recipe. The corrected version is as follows.

1 12 ounce can of pumpkin puree or whatever that stuff is
1 8   ounce tub of whipped cream type stuff
1 box of instant vanilla pudding (typically 1 or 2 packets)

Mix these together with pumpkin pie spices, either the premixed variety to taste or:

1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1/4 t cloves
1/2 t nutmeg

Once evenly mixed, serve with vanilla wafers or ginger snaps.  Windmill cookies might be pretty good, too, come to think of it.

All quantities are approximate.  Some cans of pumpkin are 15 ounces, which shouldn't make much of a difference; and some pumpkin pie recipes call for no nutmeg or no ginger, so increase or omit any of the spices if you don't want to scandalize the palate.

Pretentious mac 'n' cheese

Some cookbooks will warn you to stick with eutectic cheeses when making macaroni and cheese if you want it all to come out all smooth and creamy.  I can't blame them.

However, it's not strictly necessary.

I got my first hint from, ironically, the first cookbook I found that actually warned me not to use hard cheeses like sharp cheddar (presumably cheddar-flavored cheese melt product would only have shown up on their classiness radar) or asiago, which would tend to be gritty, or really delicate and non-uniform cheeses like bleu, which would tend to be runny and awful.

Well, turns out the key to the solution is in the problem itself.

The recipe I had been looking at did, actually, call for a little bit of cheddar, but only in quantities small enough to provide flavor without compromising the texture, and mixed with something well-behaved on the stove like mozzarella or provolone.  Not bad advice.

There are probably some béchamel based recipes you could get away with adapting, too, but one thing at a time.

All I really had to do was take their advice without heeding their warnings.  First, in the spirit of good pretentious dishes, I brought together a couple relatively highbrow cheeses:  shredded hard cheese (I think my first attempt was with a medley of Parmesan, asiago, and romano) with no anti-caking ingredients and Roquefort, in approximately equal proportions.  I used one pack of Roquefort, which is 3-4 ounces, so figure maybe half of one of those smaller jars of whichever hard cheese you prefer, or grate yourself a pile about the same size.

I put those in the food processor so the mixture could homogenize a bit while I worked on the other stuff.  My thinking was that the mixing would be much more thorough than I could achieve by hand, and would be facilitated by the extremely high initial surface area of the hard cheese.  Although the mixture did warm up some, it wasn't enough to cause the fats to melt and separate.  I've had that happen with poorly planned homemade cheese dips before, and I hoped to tame the tendency by first blending two cheeses with complimentary defects.

I wanted a dish that would stay creamy, though, so into a saucepan over medium heat I put about 3-4 ounces of mozzarella (so we have about a 1:1:1 ratio of hard, delicate, and eutectic cheeses), a tablespoon or so of butter, and the better part of half a cup of milk.  Maybe a bit more; if I recall correctly, I'd poured out a whole cup and ended up drinking some when I was satisfied with the consistency.  Well, whatever you want to do; the creamy macaroni and cheeses I see on TV always look great but mine usually come out looking like a casserole so I probably underdo it.  Anyway, I was afraid that if I didn't include something that was intended to melt smoothly, the pretentious part of the dish would disintegrate upon cooking or, worse yet, separate on the plate once it started to cool.  A fondue or queso-style cheese should also perform this function well.

Okay, so:  Got the creamy part of the sauce melted, got the pasta cooked (half a box of shells); put those two together, and as soon as it all starts looking consistent, add the hard-bleu cheese blend.  If I were only using well-melting cheeses I probably would have turned off the burner and relied on residual heat from the pasta to finish the melting and avoid burning the bottom of the pan, but I wasn't sure it would be quite enough so I left the heat on low a little while longer and stirred vigorously.

It was just enough, or the mixture was more forgiving than I hoped.  It was somehow sharp and smooth at the same time, pleasant but intense enough to demand a palate-cleansing drink to go along with it, with a possibly disturbing blue-flecked appearance.  But hey, all that mold's cooked, so who cares?

Irish ice cream

This receipe was my second foray into "no minors without their parent or guardian" ice cream.  My first was Alton Brown's egg nog ice cream, actually a frozen custard (incidentally, his avocado ice cream is good too, reminding me for some reason of the green tea ice cream at some Japanese restaurants).

After my foray into Irish toast, I knew there was untapped potential in liquor as a cooking ingredient, and when I got in the mood for ice cream one day with not quite enough milk to go around (not a situation I like to be in, except that this kind of thing keeps happening when I am), this recipe all but manifested itself whole and complete in a single glance.

But first, the ingredients:

4 egg yolks
1/3 c sugar
1 pint Irish cream liqueur
1 c heavy cream
optional:  1-2 T small chocolate chips or chopped dark chocolate

Mix the yolks and sugar until smooth and the yolks become a slightly brighter yellow.

Over high heat in a small saucepan, mix the cream and half the liqueur.  When it just starts to boil, remove from heat and temper it into the eggs.  I had done my egg yolks in a food processor so I just left them in there during this step and turned it back on while I added the hot cream, slowly enough not to cook the yolks or the plastic components of my processor.

Return everything to the saucepan and cook, stirring frequently, just until it reaches 160˚F.  Remove from heat and add the rest of the liqueur.  My saucepan tends to retain heat, so to facilitate cooling and prevent overheating, I sometimes have a second, prechilled pot or metal bowl on hand, or a shallow ice water bath to partway submerge the pot in.

When you're satisfied you're not going to cook everything in your fridge from the residual heat, move the mixture to the fridge and let it cool to 40˚F.  Lower would actually be better; maybe you should put it in the freezer a little while, instead.  Because of the relatively high amount of alcohol, the freezing point is going to be pretty low.

I use one of those ice cream makers that has the freezable liquid core instead of one that uses ice, so I just leave my cores in the freezer all the time and keep the temperature turned all the way down.  It's enough to almost completely freeze the flavored vodka I keep on hand for another recipe I'll post later, so for most ice creams it sets pretty quickly (especially the avocado one).

When the mixture is cold, add it to your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions.  If you decided to add the chocolate, wait until the mixture has started to firm up; if it's too runny, it'll all get pushed to the sides and the bottom, and if it's too close to solid, it will just stay near the top and not mix.

Serve in modest quantities.  Keep in mind that it's over half liqueur (way over half if you replace the heavy cream with more Irish cream--why not?) so you'll basically be consuming a bowl full of 20-30 proof liquor one heaping spoonful at a time.  It adds up.

French soup onion

A former colleague of mine passed a recipe like this one on to me some time ago.  It's been so long since I made it, though, I've forgotten a few details.  I'm filling in the blanks with a recipe from here, which came up in a Google search for something else (it looks like there are some other interesting ideas there, too)


Start with one single large onion, white or yellow, peeled.  Cut the bottom just so it sits flat, but don't remove too much; it should still hold itself together when it's done.


Cut a divot from the top and place a beef bullion cube in the hole.  I crushed mine so it would dissolve more readily from the juices that will sweat out of the onion.  Maybe it wasn't necessary, but it didn't hurt anything.


Sprinkle Parmesan or another hard cheese over the top of the onion.  Don't use the powder in a can or anything else that has an anti-caking agent in it; it will burn rather than melt, leaving you with nothing but the bitter taste of regret, and most of an onion.  I recommend a shaved cheese; it will be more stable on the onion's convex surface until you can get it in the oven.


Speaking of which, you should have preheated yours to 400ºF between the time you made an ingredient list and the time you peeled that onion.


The Fat Free Vegan whence I spliced in instructions to cover the steps I'd forgotten says "Bake them until tender and slightly caramelized around the edges, about 45 minutes."  I seem to remember not having the onion in the oven for quite that long, but if you like slight caramelization, then go for 45 minutes; if not, pull it out after 30.


When it's done, you should have a well-done onion with a nice, gooey cap of melted cheese over maybe a tablespoon of French onion soup broth.  Mmm, smells delicious.

So after removing it from the oven, you...I don't know.  Apparently I thought that a way to serve the onion would be self evident, because I didn't think to ask my friend what he did with it.  I ended up putting it in a bowl, slicing it into bite size pieces with the edge of my fork, and just snacking on cheesy, beefy onion wedges.  Although the cheese didn't adhere very well, what with all the juice that came out, it was pretty tasty until I ended up with lukewarm, translucent onion bits at the bottom of the bowl.

Work in progress, I guess.  I'm open to suggestions.

Irish toast

My first experience with this recipe was when I had some sourdough bread and was in the mood for French toast.  I don't recall now how much of my inspiration came from an insufficiency of milk and how much came from me looking at the long-neglected bottle of Irish cream in my freezer and asking myself "Well, why not?"

Incidentally, there are sometimes good reasons why not.  I will share them with you from time to time.

I started with a pretty basic French toast recipe, but made one important substitute:

2/3 c Irish cream

4 large eggs

1 t vanilla

1/4 t salt

Some recipes I see call for two tablespoons of maple syrup at this point.  Growing up, the French toast I always had instead some nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, and we saved the syrup for a condiment.  Here, there's really no need, since the Irish cream brings enough sweetness and flavor to the party all by itself.

You'll notice I didn't specify any bread at this point; use whatever you want.  The baseline recipe I used said to saturate six slices of white bread with the egg mixture, but I know some people who only like getting both sides of the bread wet, which has the advantage of the bread being less likely to fall apart.  Personally, I like the insides of my French toast more like pudding than bread, except for the time when I hope to succeed in making French toast sticks as a finger food, and I usually end up trying to make French toast when I realize my bread is nigh-stale and unsuitable for most other purposes, so I put all my bread and mixture in a container and leave it in the refrigerator for a few days.  Sure it's more than willing to fall apart when it's ready, but I usually have ended up with large fragments of bread from trying to divvy up the stale loaf in the first place.  I guess there's always baked French toast or French toast casserole or bread pudding.

Unless you're soaking the bread, you can put a skillet on medium heat before you start dipping, grease it, and let the temperature stabilize while you finish your preparations.  Otherwise, put a skillet on medium heat, grease it, and let it get up to temperature while you try to figure out the best way to move the bread to the pan without turning it into croutons.

Cook until the egg in the bread has turned golden brown, just a couple moments, and then flip; repeat, then remove to a plate to serve.  You're not likely to cook all the alcohol out, and you shouldn't want to try; this is a stay-in-for-the-morning breakfast.  May as well pour yourself a mimosa.

As for "Why not?"  No good reason that I can see.  Chalk one up in the "Success!" column for this experiment.

Stuffed breakfast fattie

As people who know me are aware, I'm a big fan of bacon, so when I first encountered the bacon explosion, I had to try one.  I immediately ordered one or more and then tried assembling them myself.

I was going to call this the segmented bacon explosion, but apparently the bacon explosion is really a fattie filled with bacon, and what I wanted to try was filling it with other breakfast foods commonly served along side sausage or bacon.

I've already tried making relatively low fat bacon explosions, with turkey bacon for example, and had reasonable luck, so I started with that.  Actually, here's my ingredient list:

1 package turkey bacon
1 lb sausage (in this attempt, Bob Evans maple; it's lower in fat than the other brands I've tried)
1 jar Billy Bones BBQ dry rub (you won't need the whole thing)
6 eggs
2 breakfast sausage patties
3-6 French toast fragments

I started by laying out a sheet of wax paper and sprinkling some of the dry rub.  Then I constructed a lattice of the turkey bacon (you can see how the real Bacon Explosion is constructed here) and rolled out the sausage until it made a pretty uniform blanket over the bacon.

The sausage patties and French toast fragments were left over from a previous meal, but if you don't have any or if you've only got waffles or something, no worries.  I rolled tracks in the raw sausage with the patties so when I rolled the whole thing up I wouldn't have to worry about punching a whole through the meat wall, but you can just set some of the raw sausage aside and do a spackle job later.

Since I only wanted two compartments in my stuffed fattie, I could have used only one sausage pattie to make the partition, but I had hoped putting one at what was going to be the bottom would lend some structural support, since raw processed meat is more like a viscous fluid than any sort of load bearing rigid object.

Right.  So, with one patty near one end to mark the bottom and one near the middle, I packed in all the French toast fragments I dared.


I found a bottle with the same diameter I wanted the fattie to be, a bit smaller than the sausage patties, and wrapped it in wax paper and laid it on the sausage blanket in the second partition.  I then rolled it up as you would any other bacon explosion.

I tried pinching the sausage shut where I could, sealing the French toast end, and then stood it up on that end and removed the bottle.  It slid out of the wax paper easily, but the paper stuck to the greasy blanket a little.  I had to try twisting it down into a smaller-diameter roll before I could extract it, but eventually it came out.

Next came the hard part:  filling the top compartment with scrambled eggs.  You know how to make those up, so I'll skip to the bit where I poured them in and prayed and hoped that the compartment was watertight.  A little of the eggs leaked out before I got everything plugged up or pinched off that I could find, but it didn't seem like very much, so into the oven it went for the T and t recommended by the BBQ Addicts.  Seriously, if you don't know how hot or long to cook the thing, you should have followed my links to their site a long time ago; only your arteries will regret it.

The result was less than awesome.  It was fine, actually, except that during baking, I lost the rest of the eggs.  Just a puddle of scrambled egg on the bottom of my cookie sheet.

I've thought about what happened but I haven't made another attempt.  I reckon I just couldn't get everything sealed up properly; as plastic as uncooked pork sausage is, it's just prone to delaminating from the bacon lattice while in the green state.  Maybe if I'd set aside more sausage at the beginning I could have used it to path obvious or probable holes.

But, even failed experiments are successes of a different kind.  I could have filled it up entirely with French toast and had no problem other than making sure I had maple syrup in the house.  I could have laid down a layer of cheese and just coiled the thing up like a Yule log.

I'll get back to you on that.