Happy 2011

Can you guess what one of my 2011 resolutions is? My reasons for not posting for 2 months are plentiful and varied, but I hope to rededicate myself to cooking and posting in the coming year. Typically I aim for one post per week but in November and December I found myself caught up in exam period craziness, lacking a photographer who was caught up in his own end-of-term chaos, and with a dearth of kitchen inspiration due to a series of bombed recipes. Plus, I was elbow deep in these:

(Christmas Cookies 2010: Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels, Pistachio and Cherry Mexican Wedding Cakes, Grasshopper Squares, Chocolate-Dipped Shortbread, Sugar Cookies)

20 dozen cookies later I was more than ready for something savory. I finally hit on this successful recipe for wild rice chowder right before we left for a 10 day trip to Florida. But now that we’re home I’m back in the cooking groove and am happy to report that I’ve already discovered a few more delicious recipes to share with you in the coming weeks.

This soup reminds me of a more healthful (though admittedly slightly less delicious) version of a wild rice and mushroom soup my mom has made for many years. I made a few modifications, most notably streamlining the cooking process to allow the rice to cook in the same pot as the vegetables. I also made some swaps and additions based on the vegetables I had on hand. This recipe is adaptable like that and you can easily switch out anything that doesn’t suit your particular tastes.

I’m looking forward to a wonderful 2011 and hope you are too. I will see you again soon… promise!

P.S. This cookbook is an absolute treat for vegetarians and quasi-tarians (my invented term for myself) alike. I highly recommend it!

Daring Bakers: Decorated Sugar Cookies

I swear some Daring Baker must have heard me talk about my lackluster decorating skills last month. Just a few days after the petit fours post, I logged into the Daring Bakers site to see if our new challenge had been posted. It turned out our September challenge was going to be all about honing our decorating skills. Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” challenged us to make a simple sugar cookie recipe… the trick was we had to jazz it up using royal icing and various piping techniques. She posted a fantastic photo guide that made even a piping-bag-adverse baker like me feel like I could tackle this challenge.

Mandy let us choose any theme for our cookies; she asked that we consider what September means to us. The month of September has a lot of significance to me – back to school, my wedding anniversary, and an astounding number of birthdays. When I realized that the posting date was the day of my sister-in-law’s birthday, I decided that I had to do a birthday theme so I could gift some of the cookies to her.

Piping with royal icing is definitely a time-intensive, labor-intensive task, but I actually loved it. I had fun experimenting with the different techniques and noticed a lot of improvement from my first cookie to my last. I can see myself working with this technique in the future, particularly around the holidays. If you are new to this type of decorating and want a good photo guide, check out Mandy’s site. And most importantly, happy birthday, Kristin!

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

Christmas Cookies

Baking huge trays of Christmas cookies for colleagues and friends is a family holiday tradition. After many years of serving as my mom’s sous chef and resident cookie decorator, I love being able to continue this tradition in my own home. Some cookies are nonnegotiable. Sugar cookie cutouts will always make an appearance on my trays, no matter how tired I get of decorating batch after batch on my own. However, I also like the opportunity to try new cookies, especially ones that are quite different from those I had as a child.

This year’s old favorites included: Sugar Cookies, Chocolate Dipped Shortbread, and Turtle Bars. I tried a new (and very successful) recipe for Gingerbread Cutouts. And I also tried two brand new cookies: Chocolate Brigadeiros and Apricot Foldovers. All the recipes and more photos follow…

Daring Bakers: Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Wow – what a deceptively difficult challenge! For a short & sweet recipe, with a mere 4 ingredients, it sure was a doozy. The discussion board was ablaze with chatter about the finer points of baking macarons. Should the egg whites be aged? Double up on baking trays? How best to dry the macarons? And most importantly – just HOW does one achieve the elusive feet?

I guess I should back up. I’ve never eaten a macaron, but I have certainly seen my fair share of them in pastry shops and on other folks’ food blogs. I always assumed I wouldn’t like them because I had the impression they tasted like meringue, which isn’t my cup of tea. But due to their growing popularity, I’d all but decided to give them a try when, bam, this challenge arrived. I knew these little buggers were reputed to be tricky, so I readied myself for a fight. Though I love the really complex Daring Bakers challenges, I also find some of the most valuable ones to be those that require us to hone in on and perfect a particular technique.

The main challenge here was getting the consistency of the macarons just right. They should have crisp outer shells but remain chewy on the inside. Most importantly, they should develop feet – a distinctive puff around the bottom of the shell. I baked 3 trays of macarons and only got about 1/10 of them to turn out as they should. For some reason there were two rows (on two different trays) that developed feet and a shiny, crack-free shell. The rest of them… not so much. Since they were all from the same batch of batter, my theory is as follows: the ones closest to the heat source did the best. Perhaps my oven temperature needs adjusting. Or maybe I shouldn’t have chosen chocolate macarons for my first go-round. If they’d been a lighter color I probably could have gauged doneness better. Also, they seemed to benefit from sitting out on the counter a bit after they’d been piped. I couldn’t fit all three trays in the oven at once, so I baked one, then the other two. The second two trays were the ones that had the” good” macarons. Interesting…

Luckily, the failures are just as delicious as the successes. We shared some with friends last night and have been munching away on them since then. I couldn’t resist making them a little Halloween-themed. I sifted 2 tbsp. cocoa powder in with the almond flour and confectioner’s sugar. A little orange food coloring in the vanilla icing and tada! Halloween macarons.

Daring Bakers: Mallow Cookies

The July Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

This post is dedicated to my Grandpa Z, who loves anything marshmallow, especially Peeps & Mallowmars. I thought our fabulous hostess Nicole had a great idea here – trying a homemade version of one’s favorite storebought things. Though not as big a fan of marshmallow as my grandpa, I decided to make the mallowmars first. The idea of piping marshmallow piqued my interest. I intended to follow up with milanos with a twist- chocolate cookies with a chocolate mint filling. However, I seriously underestimated the number of cookies I would end up with after trying the first recipe. Even after taking at least a dozen to my friend Emily, whose sweet baby Rachel decided to make an appearance 6 weeks early (!), I still had at least 50 cookies left. My next step is to give some to my brother. College students have a way of putting lots of homemade sweets away. In any case, the milanos will have to wait for another time.

I thought these cookies were good but not incredible. The cookie part is rather biscuit-like. I found it a bit too crumbly. The marshmallow was good and even though I thought I’d piped generously, I wished there was more of it on each cookie. I made my glaze with bittersweet chocolate and it came together nicely, though it needed to be refrigerated in order to harden, which the recipe does not mention.

Happy Birthday to You

I just started six, yes count them, six posts that I’ll be sharing in the next few days. I got a bit behind in my posting because we are still figuring out Jeff’s new camera. It’s been a bit challenging figuring out the easiest way to get the photos from his computer to mine. However, I’ve still been cooking and now I’ve recruited him as my partner in crime to help me snap some better photos. 

When I first met Jeff it was our senior year in college. We lived in the same apartment complex and ran into each other a few times. One of the first things we talked about was my love of all things culinary, so naturally Jeff asked what my signature recipe was. I stumbled around, trying to find an answer, and eventually had to just sheepishly mumble, “Pasta?” 

Two Non-Recipe Recipes

It’s so good to be back in the kitchen! I overdid my planning a bit this week and pulled out more recipes than I’ve had time (or appetite) for. Hopefully we’ll get hungry before the ingredients go to waste. 

When I saw green tomatoes at the market on Saturday I realized that I hadn’t made them yet this summer. So we had fried green tomatoes and some other veggies one night. They are just sliced, salted and peppered, coated in cornmeal, and fried in some olive oil. I love mine with goat cheese and honey on top. I convinced J to try the honey and he wasn’t so sure about it, so I guess it might be a personal taste. But hey, I thought I’d throw it out there. This was our first use of my new cast iron skillet. The whole not using soap thing is still a little hard for me, but I’m looking forward to using this skillet for cornbread, fried chicken, and my favorite blackberry cobbler, among other things I’m sure. 

Buttermilk Cookies

I have to admit… I wasn’t so sure about this recipe when I clipped it. The January issue of Gourmet focused on Southern cooking. In the letters to the editor section of a later issue, someone wrote in to complain about this fact, arguing that they don’t like anything that belongs in the category of Southern cooking. Seriously?! I can understand the grits thing… some people just don’t get it. But you don’t like fried chicken? Pecan pie? Pimento cheese? BISCUITS? Really. I’d rather not read the same magazine as you then.

Back to the cookies. This recipe was mentioned in one of the articles about Edna Lewis and the way they described them,  ”What you see here is the cookie of your dreams, with a tender interior and the slightest bit of crispness around the edge,” is what got me. Plus, the mouthwatering picture of a pile of cookies next to a bottle of lemonade didn’t hurt either.