Jan Hagel cookies

I probably spelled that wrong, but its from Anna's Betty Crocker cookie cookbook. They are delicious, although Ed was being grouchy and didn't like them because they're not "cookie shaped". Fine, more for me. We changed the recipe a bit in that we only had pecans, not walnuts, to put on top, but that didn't change the deliciousness. Anna also had some Fiori Di Sicilia flavoring, basically a citrus/vanilla flavor, that made them very good. If you don't have any of that, I'd suggest adding some vanilla and some lemon zest or something, because they were delicious.

1C butter
1C sugar
1 egg, divided
1 tbs water
2C flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp Fiori Di Sicilia
~1/2C walnuts or pecans (we needed more than 1/2C), finely chopped

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Cream the butter with the sugar, add the egg yolk and Fiori Di Sicilia or vanilla and lemon. Add the flour and salt on top, mix the salt into the flour, and combine flour with butter stuff. Grease a 9x15" pan (I think? Can't remember...), and press the cookie dough into the pan. Sprinkle with the cinnamon, and then brush with the egg white-water mixture. Sprinkle the nuts on top. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the edges are lightly browned. Cut into bar shapes immediately, and cool on a cooling rack.

Cabbage and sausage pasta

I don't know why we had cabbage, but we did, and cabbage comes in large pieces, so we had leftover cabbage. Not really sure what to do with it, we turned to what we know best - glop over pasta! We also had some kielbasa, which made for a really nice beer-braised sausage and cabbage dish, over some whole wheat pasta, which supported those flavors really well.

Slice up an onion, chop up the cabbage, and heat some oil in a frying pan. Add the onion, stir until it softens. Add the cabbage, stir around for a while, then add ~12oz beer. Add the sausage, sliced up, and let that simmer away until the cabbage is soft and most of the beer is gone. Serve over pasta.

NYT No-knead bread

This no-knead bread was all the rage a while ago, and I'd made it once and it was good. So, I made it again. Its pretty easy, because you don't have to do anything except mix things together and let it sit, but you need the dutch oven to cook it in - I suppose a casserole dish with a heavy lid would work too, but the dutch oven was pretty great.

The original recipe is from the NYT, and its worth trying if you like bread that is chewy on the inside, crunchy and crusty on the outside, and has big holes in it. I'm all about the big holes. But that's hard to do with regular bread, for whatever reason, getting those big holes seems to take lots of experimenting and different attempts and tiny things make big differences - well, this one was easy.

Mix together 1/4tsp active yeast (I didn't have instant) with 1-5/8C warm water and 1 tsp sugar. Let the yeast get started, it won't do much since its a tiny amount of it, and then add 3C of flour with 1-1/4tsp salt. Mix that all together and then just leave it in its mixing bowl for 12-18 hours, covered with plastic wrap.


After about 12 hours, it'll look like this - big holes on the top. Supposedly that means that its ready.


Flour your hands, and then in the bowl, knead the dough a couple times until its all deflated. No need to overdo it. Replace the plastic wrap and let it sit for another 1.5 hours.
(after knocking it down, before the second rise).

In the last half hour that its rising, preheat the oven to 450F, and put the dutch oven into the oven to warm up with the oven. The dough should have about doubled in bulk by this point, and once your oven is preheated, transfer the dough carefully to the hot dutch oven. I put down some cornmeal first, so it wouldn't stick. Put the dutch oven back into the oven, with the lid, for 30 minutes. After 30min, take off the lid, and cook for another 15min, to get that golden crust. Take it out, turn it onto a cooling rack, and cool enough so that it doesn't burn you when you dig into it.

The holes!

Bean Gratin

Anna has a cookbook, and I've already forgotten its name, that I was browsing through the other day as we were waiting for cookies to bake. Anna has many cookbooks, but this one happened to be out and was interesting, and I was in the legume section, and saw something for "Bean Gratin". Intrigued, I read the recipe, and it sounded like an interesting way to prepare beans. Basically, you take cooked beans and bake them in a sauce until the sauce reduces more, and then add cheese on top and bake some more until it melts. Although I have some issues with the measurements (when do I not have issues with measurements?), it came out quite nicely, and passed the Ed-test.

The original recipe called for 6 cups of cooked beans, and I wasn't sure how many dry beans would make 6C of cooked beans, so I looked in my pantry and chose the fullest jar of beans that I had, which happened to be about 1-1/4C of white beans. The recipe then called for 1-1/3C rich broth, i.e. a broth that had been reduced a bit on the stovetop. We had some extremely rich beef stock from the oxtails, that was already pretty reduced, so I went with that. Since I ended up with about 2C of cooked beans, I thought I should use 2/3C of broth, but that didn't quite cover them (I also didn't have the 2-quart casserole dish called for - I don't know how big a 2-quart casserole dish is, but since I don't have any casserole dishes, I just went with a pyrex pan. Which was too big, apparently). So, I added about 1/3C water, which at least moistened them.

The rest of the recipe worked great, except that the beans on top dried out (duh. they're being baked, and aren't covered in liquid), but that was ok, because the dried out beans tasted delicious and a bit crunchy. So, although I'm sure the original recipe was delicious, this version is worth making again, too.

Bean Gratin
1-1/4C dry beans (or 2.5C cooked or canned - if canned, rinse them first)
1 bay leaf
1 tbs bacon fat or other fat
~2tbs salt

1C tasty broth or stock
1/2C grated parmesan cheese

If you have dry beans, you'll have to start this early - soak the beans for 6-8 hours, until they've about doubled in size. Then simmer them with a bay leaf and the bacon fat for about 20 min, until they're soft enough to eat. Add the salt, and simmer some more, another 10min or so. Beans other than small white beans will take different amounts of time to cook, just FYI.

Preheat your oven to 375F.

Once your beans are cooked, pour them into a pyrex baking dish - mine is big. I don't know the dimensions. If I weren't lazy, I'd go look it up. But the size doesn't really matter - the wider it is, the more dry and crispy your beans will get, the smaller the surface area, the more creamy your beans will be. I think the goal is for creaminess.

Pour the broth over the beans. Bake for 35 minutes. Take them out at 35min and add the cheese on top. Put them back in the oven for 10 minutes, until all the cheese is melted. If you want it a little browned, you could broil them for a minute or two.

Serve!

This was how much liquid there was - definitely not covering the beans. I might try it in a less shallow dish next time, if I could find such a thing... maybe a pyrex mixing bowl. Does that even work?

They exploded. But that tasted good, so it was just fine.

Added the cheese, and it comes out all glued together and delicious and cheesy and creamy with occasional chewiness/crunchiness. Pretty good.

Mushroom-ramp risotto

Ed went and bought $8 worth of ramps. Ramps are a spring veggie, also known as wild leeks, and I guess they can only be gotten in the spring, hence the price tag. But, Ed likes them, and I guess $8 isn't much to him. It also buys a LOT of ramps, so we ended up making a huge batch of risotto, which we couldn't really finish all at once. I think you're not supposed to make risotto in such large quantities, something about the texture, but that's never bothered us. We also had about 6 cups of chopped maitake and shitake mushrooms for the risotto. Straight-up deliciousness!

Mushroom-Ramp Risotto
Makes ~5 servings

1C short-grained white rice
1C white wine
4C chicken or beef broth (beef broth will turn your rice brown-ish)
1/2lb (~6C chopped) ramps
4C chopped mushrooms, you choose the kind
1/4C grated parmesan cheese
Olive oil

Heat the wine and the chicken broth. Put some olive oil (~1tbs?) into a wok or other large frying pan. Once the oil shimmers, add the rice, and stir that around in there for about two minutes. Then add the warm wine. Once the rice has absorbed all the liquid, add ~1/2C of the broth, and keep stirring and adding more liquid until the rice has about quadrupled in size. At some point in there, add the mushrooms and some salt, as the mushrooms will give up their water too. Taste the rice occasionally, and when it tastes done, stir in the ramps, cook for about a minute, and pull from the heat. Stir in the cheese, and serve.

Our rice is all brown colored because we used beef broth instead of chicken - we'd been cooking oxtails with this, and used some of the rich sauce they were braising in for the risotto - it was delicious, but turned things brown. I'll take that sacrifice for that taste.

Roasted garlic

I've had roasted garlic, spread on toasted bread, done on the grill before. But this time Ed did it in the oven (due to our overwhelming lack of grill in these parts), and it was awesome. Apparently its a little tricky figuring out where to cut the garlic, because you want to get the top off of each clove so you can get it out, but you don't want to cut away too much of the garlic - this stuff is good!

Roasted garlic
1 large head of garlic
olive oil
coarse-grained salt
bread (preferably french bread or some other rustic-style loaf)

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Keeping the head of garlic whole, chop the top off of it, trying to get a clean cut through the top of each clove while not removing too much of any clove. Put this on a sheetpan, cut side up, and drizzle generously with olive oil. More oil means more even cooking, or something like that. Put the garlic in the oven, and cook until its done. We weren't timing this, so really, you just keep cooking it until the cloves are soft and the whole thing has a slightly brown mostly golden toasted look. It should also smell delicious. I want to say it took 20-30 minutes, but just keep checking it every 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, cut the bread into slices, and toast that until its crispy on the outside and still chewy on the inside. If you drizzle or spray it with olive oil first, it'll toast up faster. This took ~5 minutes in the oven.


Pop out a clove of garlic using a butterknife - they should come out very easily, and should be quite mushy at this point.

You should be able to spread the garlic quite easily on the bread. Spread it around - if you want to split each clove over two pieces of bread, I won't be insulted, we like our garlic around here, so were laying it on thick. Hey, as long as the person you're kissing is also eating garlic, its all good...

For true deliciousness, sprinkle on some coarse-grained salt once you've spread the garlic - kosher salt or sea salt.

Maybe we shouldn't have eaten the entire head ourselves, but it was delicious - we couldn't help ourselves.

Tomato-avocado salad

I was having trouble getting inspired by anything at the store when I went to get stuff for dinner the other day, so I came home with some heirloom tomatoes and avocados. I didn't have a plan for them, but they turned into a salad. It was delicious.

2 avocados
2 heirloom tomatoes
~1/4C chopped cilantro
juice of a lime
bulb of 1 spring onion
salt to taste
Croutons (just chop up some stale bread and toast it)

Mix everything together and eat...