Thursday, February 28, 2013

Roasted butternut squash with tahini sauce

So, browsing the internets, we came across Amateur Gourmet making this. It looked delicious, so, we made it, too. The tahini sauce was a little different than what he'd made, since we didn't have any fresh lemons - we mixed tahini with greek yogurt, ground cumin, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, grains of paradise, and red pepper flakes (we also didn't have any za'atar - we'd had some, but it's long since gone, and we haven't gotten more). The end result was a truly delicious way to eat squash. So good, in fact, that we did it again a few days later.

Here's the original recipe, from Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbook, Jerusalem. This is "the caterer's" that my grandfather goes to in London. I have his book called Ottolenghi, but haven't gotten around to acquiring the other books, yet.

Roasted butternut squash with tahini sauce
Made enough for 5-6 side servings, 4 main servings
1 butternut squash, cut into 3/4 by 2 1/2-inch wedges
1 red onion cut into 1 1/4-inch wedges
olive oil
~1/4C light tahini paste
~1-1/2 tbs lemon juice
~2 tbs water
1 clove garlic, crushed
~1/4C pine nuts
1 tbs za’atar (or mix of cardamom, cumin, pepper, and other middle-eastern-y flavors)
~1/4C coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley
Kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 450F.
Toss the squash and onions with some olive oil and kosher salt. Arrange on a baking sheet, and cook for 30-40min, maybe flipping at the halfway mark if the bottoms are getting too browned. Keep an eye on the onions as they might cook faster than the squash and need to be removed earlier.

Toast the pine nuts in a dry small frying pan, no oil needed. This'll take 5 minutes max, make sure you don't burn the nuts!

Mix all the sauce ingredients together, drizzle over the squash and onions on a nice platter. Sprinkle za'atar, nuts and parsley on top. Eat!

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

chocolate covered strawberries



So, Ed's not a huge fan of my chocolate covered strawberries, because apparently I need to temper the chocolate more. I, however, think they're delicious and amazing, and given that I make chocolate covered strawberries on MY birthday, I'll make them how I want them. This whole chocolate covered strawberries thing is quickly becoming a tradition for my birthday, I like it. Anyway, it's dead simple, and quite delicious.

Melt ~4oz of chocolate in a double boiler. Make sure it's tasty chocolate that you'd like to eat, because you're not sweetening it or anything, let's not get complicated. I think I used 70% dark ghiradelli, and it was delicious. Rinse and dry your strawberries. Stir the chocolate occasionally as it melts, you don't want to overcook it. Once the chocolate is melted, turn the heat down to a level that will just maintain the runny-ness of the chocolate, and start dipping your strawberries. Once they're chocolate covered, put them on a wax-paper-covered plate. If you run out of strawberries but have leftover chocolate, you can pour it onto the wax paper in a little puddle, and stud with any available nuts or dried fruit. Makes an instant chocolate bar.

Put the strawberries in the fridge for ~20min, and the chocolate will harden up nicely. Enjoy! Don't eat them all at once, because you'll get a stomach ache. Not like I'd know this from experience.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Beer bread

Beer bread is one of those amazing foods that doesn't take long to make, but tastes delicious. These photos are from January, I think, when Ross and Sam appeared in our kitchen and we ate food and laughed together. Ed had made some sort of delicious beef stew, which was good, but we needed something for mopping up the juices, and had no bread, so Sam and I threw together some beer bread while waiting for Ross to show up from the track workout. Because we wanted the bread to cook quickly, we put it into two 9" diameter cake pans, rather than your typical loaf pan, and holy cow, that is an improvement! Because the best part about beer bread is the crunchy crusty butter-soaked topping, and with two flatter loaves, you get even more crust! So delicious. Next time you make beer bread, definitely put it into two flatter pans, or even one wide flat pan (and don't forget the butter on top!). I've put a basic recipe for beer bread, below.







Beer Bread
3C flour
1tbs baking powder
1/4C sugar
1 tsp salt
12oz beer (I think we used a fairly basic brown beer)
1/2 stick butter, melted, for topping.

Mix everything except the butter in a big bowl. Grease two 9" round cake pans. Pour the batter evenly into the pans, maybe shake it around to spread it out. Pour the melted butter on top, maybe sprinkle with some kosher salt if you really want. Bake at 350 until done. (start with 15min and keep checking every 5-10 min). Cool ever so briefly, slice it up, and enjoy!

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Pickled onions

We pickled a lot of things before Christmas, this year, and one of the surprise successes was the pickled onions. These were red onions, in a mix of sugar, salt, vinegar, and water, and I believe we put some garlic gloves and peppercorns in there for flavor. We didn't cook the onions at all before pickling - just poured in the hot pickling liquid, and canned them (which does involve 10min of boiling your food). The end result was very tasty, and definitely got good Ed-ratings. The onions were a bit soft, a little softer than stir-fried onions, and had none of the bite of raw onion, only good flavors. And some pepperiness from the peppercorns. Definitely going to make these again!

Above is one option for using pickled onions - fish tacos! I believe we're looking at two separate tacos - both with salmon, but one has a bed of greek yogurt and black beans, while the other has guacamole, black beans and broccoli. Both were delicious.

Other things that we pickled that were delicious were turnips, kohlrabi, quartered radishes (no more spicy! just delicious!), garlic, beets, carrots, ginger, and preserved lemons (not really pickled, but we did them at the same time). A very tasty Christmas gift! We're pretty hooked on the quick pickling now, though canning has its time and place, for sure. For all of these, we had a sweet/salty mix going on with the vinegar, and all sorts of random additions for flavor. The dried red pepper in the kohlrabi was a bit too much, two months later...

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Snowpocalypse sticky buns

Winter storm Nemo hit Boston Friday night, and is still going strong into Saturday morning, so I figured what better time to bake something delicious? Thankfully we haven't lost power, despite three transformers going out (flash! bang!) in the thirty minutes we were out for a walk last night. These buns have an overnight rise, so you have to continue to trust that the power won't go out in the morning, when you want to bake them, but luckily we're all set now!

I couldn't find a recipe I really liked online, so I sort of made up my own. You want a rich, dense, dough, and I was going to make these ones from Bonappetit.com, because they look delicious, but I read through the recipe, and I got to the bottom where they list the nutrition information, and it's 830 calories *for one bun*. I may eat 3000 calories a day, but I think I can probably find a recipe without three sticks of butter in it. I want breakfast, not dessert...

Anyway, here's my recipe. It was delicious. Ed-rating was also delicious, but he would prefer a lighter, more pastry-like dough, and more gooey filling on the inside. Ok, so that three-stick-of-butter recipe... The only trouble is that I ended up with 14 sticky buns, so maybe I should have cut them smaller, to fill two pans. Instead, I crammed 11 of them into one pan, and the others didn't get a topping (they were still delicious - think cinnamon roll).

Sticky buns


Dough
1C milk, warmed up in microwave to lukewarm
2 tbs melted butter
1/4C sugar
1 tsp yeast
1 tsp kosher salt
1 egg
3.5-4C flour

Mix together the milk, butter, sugar, and egg. Beat well, to froth the egg. Dump in the yeast, and let that stand ~5min until it's a bit bubbly. Dump 2C flour and the salt on top, mix up the salt and flour before mixing the dry stuff down into the wet. Add another cup of flour, mix that in - at this point, it'll be rough and shaggy, you want to get it to a smooth and silky texture. Use the fourth cup of flour to knead the dough until it's smooth and silky, adding flour as necessary. Grease a bowl, and put the dough in the bowl for 1-2hrs, until it's about doubled in bulk.

Topping
This made twice as much as I needed - halve
4tbs butter
3/4C brown sugar, packed
1/2tbs corn syrup
1tbs cream

Put all the ingredients into a non-stick pan on the stovetop. Cook over medium, until you get some bubbles: Once you have bubbles, simmer, stirring the bubbles occasionally, for 3-4 minutes. Remove from heat, and pour the topping into two very well-greased 8" diameter pan (one pan if you make half the amount of filling. Duh). Meanwhile, toast the pecans in the oven, for ~10min (don't burn them!). Sprinkle the pecans onto the topping that's cooling in the pan. Filling
3 tbs butter, melted
~2-4tbs brown sugar
~2-4 tsp cinnamon

Once the dough has risen, roll the dough into a long rectangle on a lightly floured surface. Supposedly, 12x16" and 1/4" thick. I just sort of rolled it out until it looked big enough. Because it's so dense and rich and has already risen, the dough won't scootch back the way pizza dough sometimes does. It'll stay right where you roll it. Melt the butter in the microwave, and pour on top of your dough log. Use your fingers to spread out the butter evenly, across the whole surface. Then take the brown sugar, and sprinkle on top of the butter. Use your fingers again to spread it around and get even coverage, but leave a ~1" strip along the top (away from you) with no sugar. Liberally sprinkle cinnamon on top of the sugar. Now roll your dough log tightly, starting with the end that's towards you, and place it seam-side down. Cut in half with a sharp knife, then put the two halves next to each other and cut into ~1" rolls (I cut mine too high, hence only ending up with 14 rolls instead of 16). Place the rolls cut-side down into the prepared pan of toping. Don't let them touch each other - they'll rise overnight and in the oven. Let the rolls rise overnight in the fridge (cover with plastic wrap or a towel or tinfoil or whatever), and in the morning, take them out. They need to heat back up to room temperature, I put mine next to the radiator in the kitchen to speed the process. Once they're at room temperature, preheat your oven to 400F. Cover the rolls with tinfoil loosely, to prevent the tops from browning too much, stick them in the hot oven, and immediately reduce the heat to 350. Cook for 20min with the tin foil on, then remove the tin foil and cook another 15min. Once they're done, golden brown and delicious, immediately invert the pan onto a plate. Scrape any extra gooey bits onto the buns =). Let them cool just enough that you don't burn your fingers, and enjoy! Before inverting.