Chocolate Mousse

I've eaten my fair share of chocolate mousse, but I'd never actually made it on my own before. We were wandering the aisles of the Londonderry IGA, wondering what to make for dinner, and Ed suggested chocolate mousse for dessert. Sounds good! Neither of us knew what went into it, but we figured chocolate chips and cream would be a good start. Turns out all you really need is chocolate and eggs, but we whipped some cream to put on top, anyway. Luckily, there is a cookbook at the Upper Camp (from like 1950), which, while having useful recipes for things like chocolate mousse, also has recipes for things that include jello, and recipes for "exotic" salads, basically that means anything that isn't iceberg lettuce. At least it wasn't like the 1001 Muffins book, which has recipes for liver-and-onions-muffins, fudge-sauerkraut-muffins, and lettuce-muffins. Why oh why would you want to make a lettuce muffin? I think I need to try some of these recipes, just to see how they turn out...

I think it was a Good Housekeeping cookbook, either way, what I can remember of the recipe is below.

Chocolate Mousse
Made enough for three, although we divided it between the two of us

1/2C semisweet chocolate chips
3 eggs, divided
1 tsp vanilla
Heavy cream for whipping, for topping, if you want.




Divide the eggs, and whip the whites to stiff peaks. I used a hand beater thing. An electric one would have been easier.

Melt the chocolate chips. You can either do this over a double boiler, or in the microwave. I used the microwave, the trick is to take the chocolate chips out of the microwave when they're still shiny, but not yet melted. Then you stir them around, until they melt. Add the egg yolks to the chocolate all at once, and stir vigorously. Add the vanilla. I think espresso powder would be wonderful here, too, but we didn't have any.

Fold the egg whites into the chocolate. I generally do this in three installations - the first third of the egg whites, I just stir into the chocolate, to lighten it up. The next third, I fold in, and the last third, I fold in.

Using a rubber spatula, pour the mousse into serving dishes. I was able to fit it all in two wine glasses, but 3-4 of them would be ideal.

Supposedly, you have to chill the mousse for 4 hours in the fridge. I stuck it in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and then removed it to the fridge while we were eating dinner, so it wouldn't be frozen. Although frozen mousse wouldn't be so bad. Top with whipped cream, and serve. The freezer-method seemed to work just fine, because the mousse was delicious. I suppose you should be worried about where you get your eggs for stuff like this, but so far so good, no salmonella.

Butternut squash soup

This is a fairly straight-forward soup recipe, but what really makes it are all the delectable toppings. The soup is fine without them, but better with. This got a good Ed-rating, for anyone who was wondering.

First, roast the squash. I peeled it afterward, you could peel it before, it doesn't really matter. I chopped my squash into chunks, tossed with olive oil, sprinkled on some sliced onions and chopped sage leaves, and roasted about 15min at 400F.


Then I put it in a pot, with some good chicken broth. I happened to have made the broth recently - chicken bones, carrots, celery, onion, bay leaves, rosemary, and garlic, all boiled down for a few hours. Home made broth is nice and all, but you could have used boullion and water. Add enough liquid that you've almost covered the chunks of squash, but there are still some chunks sticking up.

I added a rind of parmesan cheese at this point - we happened to have one hanging out in the freezer. I also peeled and chopped 1/4 of a granny smith apple, and put that in there, along with a couple chunks of fresh ginger. I recommend a bay leaf, too.

Simmer the soup for a while, maybe 20-30 more minutes. Remove the parmesan rind (unless it dissolved completely and you can't find it), and then blend the soup. I used a stick blender. Less stuff to wash. Pour in a tablespoon or so of cream, and stir that in. Serve in bowls. You could grate some more parmesan cheese on top, if you wanted.

All the stuff on top made it even more delicious. The glob of which stuff in the middle is greek yogurt - I'm not sure I'd do that again, it was a bit too tangy. But the caramelized onions, and oyster mushrooms fried up in butter until they're crunchy, and cream, those are all very necessary additions.

Chocolate covered strawberries

Every year on my birthday, I buy strawberries. Having a birthday in February means I feel a little silly buying my favorite fruit in the middle of winter, but I figure, its my birthday, I can buy strawberries if I want. I don't know if I have a healthy relationship with buying food... I like to eat it, but not to spend money on it. Anyway, I have strawberries, and I have been enjoying them. Since it's my birthday, and I'm in Amherst but Ed's in Boston, he suggested that I bake myself a cake. That seemed like far too much work, but chocolate-covered strawberries was just the right amount of work. And far more delicious than a cake, anyway. It's true, there is a way to improve strawberries - dip them in good chocolate!


This took about five minutes, start to finish, thanks to a microwave. I used some of the KAF burgundy chocolate chunks, about a third of a cup, and put them into a pyrex measuring cup. I think in the future, a wider bowl would be better. Anyway, I microwaved the chocolate for one minute, but it wasn't starting to melt yet, so I did another 15 seconds. After that, I could stir it around, and it was beginning to melt, but it took another 15 seconds to really get gooey.

The strawberries were washed and dried and sitting on a towel ready for use. Since I didn't have any wax paper, I buttered a plate, and used that. I had meant to only dip 7 strawberries (I'm just one person, after all), but I had enough chocolate to do 12. And you can't let good chocolate go to waste!


Once the chocolate was all gooey, I stirred it up with a spoon some more, then removed the spoon, and commenced dipping.


The dipping was a fairly messy process, and involved a lot of finger-licking. I found if I rolled the strawberry through the chocolate, that worked best, although near the end, I was just using my index finger to paint the chocolate onto the berry.

After dipping, I put them on the plate, and the chocolate had hardened up pretty well before I was even done dipping the last berries. I've heard you can put them in the fridge, but clearly the house was cold enough they didn't need it.


End result: perfection. The perfect mix of sweet and bitter and sour, chewy and crunchy and soft and toothy. So good. So worth it. Happy birthday, me.

Lemon Garlic Green Beans

Let's pretend you had some leftover, frozen, butternut squash gnocchi in your freezer from the fall. If you happened to also have butter, fresh sage, an oyster mushroom, and some salt, I'd highly recommend chopping that mushroom, frying it in a healthy glob of butter with a pinch or two of kosher salt until its just brown, adding some sage leaves, frying those up until they're starting to get crunchy, adding more butter, dumping in the cooked gnocchi, stirring it all around, and serving it with a dash of freshly grated parmesan cheese. If you did all those things, you'd probably have a darn tasty meal sitting in front of you. Just sayin'.

Clearly, a dish like that needs a side, preferably a green one. I had some green beans, and I wasn't entirely sure how I wanted to cook them, but I had recently had some of the lemon-garlic olives from Whole Foods, and those are tasty, so I decided to make lemon-garlic green beans. Not quite the same as olives, but hey, they were still pretty good. No photo, and no Ed-rating, but I'm guessing he'd like these.

Lemon Garlic Green Beans
Makes however much you'd like
Green beans, of some amount - they don't really cook down, so just pick out as many as you'd like to eat.
1 lemon
3 cloves garlic
olive oil
salt

Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium-ish heat. Chop the garlic finely. When the oil is hot, add the garlic, stir it around, and then add the green beans. Sprinkle with some kosher salt. Slice the lemon into 4-6 round slices, and place those on top of the beans, mashing them a bit with a wooden spoon so they start to give out juice. Let the beans sit without moving them for a few minutes, then stir everything around, and let it sit for another couple of minutes. Taste a bean every once and a while. Once they taste as cooked as you want them, pull them off the heat. Discard the lemons and garlic pieces, just eat the green beans. They were delicious like that.

Creamed spinach

I've never actually had creamed spinach before, but Ed wanted to make some, after seeing an Iron Chef episode where they made creamed spinach with gruyere. I think it was battle gruyere, because he was talking about cheese a lot. This was another Monday-night bribe, as I came home from coaching to various projects all over the kitchen. The plan was for the creamed spinach to be the base of the dish, with a poached egg on top, and then a little gruyere cracker thing on top (that's where you can tell it was from Iron Chef - what normal person makes cheesy tuile things?).

Unfortunately, he put me in charge of the gruyere tuiles, after telling me to turn the oven to broil, and I forgot about them. Then I smelled burning, opened the oven door, and was greeted by flames. Oops. So, no gruyere tuiles.

The creamed spinach, however, was delicious, with or without its fancy bits. Being an Ed-recipe, quantities are approximate, but, this was delicious.

Creamed spinach
Made enough for two large bowls, big sides

1 bunch of fresh spinach, rinsed and dried
4 pieces bacon (Ed used black forest)
1 clump oyster mushroom
~2-4tbs heavy cream
~1/4-1/2C grated gruyere cheese

Chop up the bacon and mushroom into very small pieces, and cook it until the bacon has rendered out all its fat and the mushrooms are cooked.

Blanch the spinach for about a minute, then pull it out and chop it up as finely as you can. Add it back to the mushrooms and bacon in the pan. Mix it around. Add some cream. Stir things around. Our spinach was still pretty green, not that creamy. Add in the cheese. Stir around some more, until the cheese melts. Add more cream if you feel you need that. Put the whole mess in a blender, and blend for a bit, until it looks more like gloop.

Serve. You can sprinkle cheese on top for more deliciousness. Ed served this with a poached egg on top, and while that was tasty, the spinach on its own was delicious. This is crazy, because I never thought I liked creamed spinach, but I don't think I've ever had it before, either. Just goes to show, you can't know you won't like something until you try it...

Bribes

The other week, I had said something about wanting to leave Monday night (instead of Tuesday morning) for Amherst, to avoid the snowstorm on Tuesday. I went off to coach, and when I came home, Ed was in the process of cooking a steak tenderloin, mushroom risotto, and opening a bottle of wine from when we were last in France. Needless to say, I stayed home that night! What a bribe =)

This makes me start drooling. The risotto was a regular sort of risotto, with oyster mushrooms and shitakes in it, and then some oysters and black trumpets fried in butter until they're crunchy, and sprinkled on top of the risotto. Oh man, I just started drooling again.

We also had a very tasty salad, with a cilantro-ginger-lime vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is the only real recipe from that night...


Cilantro-ginger-lime vinaigrette
About a handful of fresh cilantro, rinsed
~1" cube of fresh ginger, peeled
1 lime, its zest and juice
olive oil
lemon juice, to taste
salt, to taste

In a food processor, combine everything. Process that up, until it makes a smooth dressing. Taste it. Add more salt, lemon juice, or olive oil, as needed.

Potato-kale pancakes

This was a bit spur-of-the-moment, but, I wanted something hot for lunch, and I had kale and a potato to work with. Any time you fry something in a quarter inch of oil, it'll get my approval, anyway. And the Ed-stamp of approval. These were quite tasty.

1 potato, shredded
2 leaves of kale, rinsed, dried, and chopped into teeny little pieces
~1/2C shredded parmesan cheese
1 egg
cooking oil
salt and pepper

Grate your potato, and squeeze out the water. Then put it in a bowl. Add the kale, cheese, egg, and maybe 1/4tsp of salt and a couple grinds of pepper. Mix that around until its homogenous.

Heat a generous layer of cooking oil in a frying pan - the cast iron pan worked well for this. Once the oil is shimmering, use your hands to roll out hand-sized balls of the glop, and put it down in the oil. You'll have to work the potato stuff a bit with your hands, first, so that it all stays together, but it should stay. Once the balls of potato mixture are in the pan, flatten them a bit with a spatula.



Let the patties sit still for about three minutes, and they should be sitting there sizzling away. Once the bottoms are browned, flip, and shake some table salt on top of the side that just got flipped. Squish the patties with a spatula once you've flipped the patties.



After another 2-3 minutes, when that side is also browned, pull the patties out of the pan, and drain on a paper towel for a second before serving. Repeat the frying as necessary, I ended up with five patties. These are quite good, but if you fry up anything as little pancakes, and make it crunchy, and put cheese in it, well, I'll like it. The kale was a tasty addition though.