Chocolate soufflé

The dessert from my birthday dinner was a chocolate soufflé. And my birthday present was four soufflé ramekins! Yum. I promise not to try and eat the porcelain. I've never made a soufflé before, but Ed made it look easy. I should mention that all he let me do was watch him make me things and drink beer. I live a rough life.

Chocolate soufflé

1-3/4oz chocolate, melted

1.5tbs butter

add seeds from one vanilla bean

beat 1 egg yolk with 1tbs water and 1tbs sugar until strings form

fold egg yolk into chocolate mixture

ramekins coated with soft butter, then granulated sugar, then stuck in the freezer

Take ramekins out of freezer once egg yolks go into chocolate.

3 egg whites + 1/6C sugar + squeeze of lemon juice, beat to stiff peaks.

fold 1/3 of that into chocolate mixture, then fold in the rest, until relatively consistent.

Ladle into ramikins

400F

15-18min, once grown 1.5", golden brown and delicious.

I recommend sprinkling the sugar on top, it just makes it look prettier.

yummm. We had enough for three ramekins, you can probably guess who the glutton was who ate two...

Birthday dinner!

We didn't quite get around to celebrating my birthday on my birthday, since, well, schedules and stuff. But the day after was good enough for me, and I got home from coaching to some pretty delicious smells. Ed had made me a three course meal, complete with a different type of beer for each course!

The appetizer was from the ocean - seared scallops, and broiled oysters. The scallops were perfect, and I had never known that I liked oysters until I tried these ones. They were cooked, and were quite delicious.

Ed gave me "recipes" for both. I'd recommend a slightly hotter pan for the scallops, but our stove can only put out so many watts. It's on its last legs.

Seared scallops:

Dry large sea scallops, 1-3/4 x 1-3/4" tall

Butter

Chopped green onions for garnish

Large-grain salt

Cut in half lengthwise, just to make them thinner, and leave out to dry out some more (they had been in a bag with liquid, and wet things don't sear well). Heat a pan with some butter, and put in the scallops. Don't crowd them. Leave them on one side until brown and seared, then flip. It's important to flip them and take them out before they have cooked to a hard texture rather than to wait for them to brown, hence the need for high heat. You don't want overcooked scallops. No siree.

Serve with pan juiced, sliced scallion, and sea salt

Oysters:

Ed shucked them well in advance, and cleaned well

Remove them from both sides of the shells and replace in shell, leave in fridge to produce enough liquid in shell

oven 400F

switch to broil, use tinfoil to keep them upright on baking sheet

broil 3min just to convert texture

back onto bed of ice to serve

lemon squeeze, scallion, salt (wellfleet oysters)

The next course was steak, Andrea Ogden's grass-fed steak, no less, with a sage butter. And champagne-braised carrots and onions and a purple cauliflower, probably because Ed knew I'd flip out if we didn't have some vegetables with the meal. Although on all days to only eat meat and chocolate, I feel like my birthday is a fine day to do just that.

Sage butter:

1/2 stick butter (already soft)

1/2 bunch of fresh sage

Put half the butter into pan with diced sage, and cook sage until slightly browned and crispy. Stir with softened other half, and then put in a bowl in freezer until solidified enough to work with it, but not hard (2 minutes, more or less). Then form a log on wax paper, and leave in freezer to make solid. When the steak is done, slice off a round, and let it melt onto the meat. Actually, you could do this while it's cooking, too.

I think the chocolate soufflé deserves its own post... keep your eyes peeled for that one!

Spicy cheese crackers

No ski trip is complete without cheez-its. Unfortunately, I didn't have any cheez-its, and I was going on a ski trip. Thankfully, I did have cheddar cheese, butter, and flour. Done deal. These crackers were DELICIOUS, and definitely passed the Ed-rating with flying colors. I will be making them again, they far surpassed the bright-orange cheez-its I'm used to.

Spicy cheese crackers

Didn't make nearly enough, double the recipe

1.5C grated cheddar cheese

4tbs butter

3/4C flour

1/2 tsp kosher salt

3/4 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tbs milk

Preheat oven to 350F.

Dump everything into a food processor and process until it makes a ball of dough. Roll this out with a floured rolling pin until it is ~1/8" thick. Cut into squares, or whatever shape you feel like, really. Dock the top with a fork, to keep them from getting puffy. Bake for 12-15 minutes, checking occasionally.

I recommend keeping smaller, single-person servings in different containers, because otherwise you'll eat the entire batch all at once, and then you won't have any more. That would be sad.

Thanksgiving rolls

And this one is even older; we made these rolls for Thanksgiving. But it's such a pretty picture that I felt the need to post the recipe. I wanted some dinner rolls, but I don't really like the bland, uniform, squishy rolls that most people consider dinner rolls. I remember loving four-leaf clover rolls back in the day, so searched for a recipe, and then realized that I didn't have enough muffin tins to make four-leaf clover rolls, so just made balls and let them rise in a cake pan. It worked, and the rolls were quite delicious - crusty on the top, delicate and almost sweet on the inside, and perfect for mopping up bits of gravy and whatnot.

I used this recipe, although I'll repost below. I mostly stayed true to the recipe... as true as I ever stay.

Thanksgiving dinner rolls

Made 24 rolls

1/2C warm water

1tsp sugar

2 tbs yeast

3/4C warm milk

2 tbs melted butter

1/4C sugar

1.5tsp salt

2 whole eggs

4C flour

1 egg yolk, for brushing.

Put the water, the teaspoon of sugar, and the yeast together in a big bowl. Let that sit for 5min or so, and then add the other liquid things and sugar. Add the flour one cup at a time; after the first cup add the salt. When the dough gets too stiff to stir, dump it out on a floured table and knead until smooth, about 5-10min. Then put it back in a bowl (preferably a clean, greased one), and let it rise about an hour, until doubled in bulk.

After an hour, dump the dough back onto a floured surface, and divide into 24 equal-sized chunks. Grease two round cake tins, and roll each chunk of dough into a ball. Place the balls in the cake pans at equal intervals. They probably won't be touching each other - that's fine, because they'll expand as they rise. Let them rise again for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 400F. Mix the egg yolk with 2tsp of water, and brush the wash gently over the now-risen rolls. Cook for 10-15min, checking occasionally and removing them when they're golden-brown.

These tasted best on the same day they were made, but I just re-warmed them in the oven (400F for 10min) the following day (Thanksgiving), and they were pretty tasty.

Cauliflower mac and cheese

I guess I have a bit of a backlog here of photos I took of tasty food - this one is from after I got back from Rumford with the team. I had volunteered to Peter that I take some of the leftover food (we had lots), and he was thrilled, so packed me up four shopping bags worth of leftovers. Luckily, skiers eat relatively healthily, and it's all food that I like, but I now have like five bags of apples in the bottom of my fridge, and none of them are crispy enough for my tastes when it comes to eating raw apples. I'm whittling them down by putting an apple in my oatmeal every day.

We also now are in possession of the largest hunk of cheddar cheese I've ever seen, as well as four packs of english muffins, a 3lb box of macaroni, and three big tubs of yogurt. The yogurt I can use up on the oatmeal with the apples, but for the cheese and macaroni, well, there's only one solution there - mac 'n' cheese! I decided that I wanted to make this semi-healthy, so put a cauliflower in it, like this recipe.

The end result was pretty good, but given that it made a whole pan, we're still slowly working on the leftovers. The topping was ground up english muffins and more cheese, and I doubled the amount of cheese in the actual recipe - 1/2C is not enough for a full pan of this stuff! But the cauliflower was a good idea, and it got a passable Ed-rating. I think we also added some garlic, and some chopped up ancho chile, just for more flavor.

I'd recommend this - tasty, filling, and even has vegetables in it.

Chicken Tangine

For Christmas, Ed got me a whole bunch of spices. Some of them were just normal spices, since we'd been running out anyway, but some were new and exciting! We now have things like Za'atar, preserved lemons, ancho chiles, two kinds of curry powders, whole vanilla beans, mustard seeds, tarragon... the list goes on. Anyway, having all sorts of exciting spices makes me want to try out all sorts of new and exciting dishes, and the preserved lemons put chicken tangine into my head as something to try. It ended up being absolutely delicious, although I shouldn't have doubled every spice in the recipe... it didn't look flavorful enough, but yeah, I overdid it a bit. The recipe below has the original amount of spices.

Chicken Tangine

Made enough for five

1 pack of chicken legs (8 legs?)

1 bunch of collard greens

Olive oil, as needed

1 red onion

2 tbs minced fresh ginger

5 cloves minced fresh garlic

1 preserved lemon

2" piece of cinnamon

2 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground cumin

2C stock

4 whole green cardamom pods

2 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste

1/2 tsp grains of paradise (or black pepper)

1/4tsp ground turmeric

1/4tsp ground nutmet

1/4tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 325F.

In a heavy dutch oven type dish, heat the olive oil and start browning the chicken legs. I took off all the skin, first. In a separate frying pan, begin to sweat the onions in some olive oil and a little salt, with the stick of cinnamon. You could use the dutch oven for everything, to cut down on dishes, but that would have taken too long.

Onions in.

10-15min later, they were getting nicely caramelized.

Toast the ground spices, and ginger and garlic, in either the dutch oven or frying pan, whichever has finished its task of browning things first. Toast the spices for 5 minutes or so, and then add the chicken back in and toss everything around to coat.

Add the collards (rinsed and chopped), and the preserved lemon, and then cover with stock. If that isn't enough liquid, add more water, until the chicken is mostly covered. Bring everything to a simmer in the dutch oven, and cook for 3-4 minutes, and then transfer to the oven for 1-1.5hrs. The liquid will reduce, and the meat will fall off the bones. It is utter deliciousness. Let it rest for 10 minutes, try to find the piece of cinnamon and the cardamom pods, and serve over rice.

Belgian Waffles

We wanted waffles this morning, or at least, Ed thought that maybe if I made waffles, he would get his butt out of bed faster, but it didn't really work too well. Maybe part of that is my fault, because I wanted Belgian waffles, and that is a slightly more complicated recipe than the usual King Arthur Flour pancake recipe I use. This one uses yeast, and beaten egg whites, and I thought it was pretty tasty - nice and crispy on the outside, but moist and delicious on the inside.

But, but... why is all the coffee gone?

First you mix up all the dough bits, then you whip the egg whites, and fold them in. Then let it sit for 20min or so, and then you cook them!

Belgian Waffles

Made 7 waffles

1/2C warm water

3/4tsp yeast

1/2tsp sugar

1/2C milk

1 egg, separated

1 tsp vanilla

2 tbs melted butter

1/4tsp salt

1.5C sifted flour

1 tbs sugar

Put the warm water, yeast, and 1/2tsp sugar into a bowl. Dump in the milk, egg yolk, vanilla, butter, salt, and flour. Beat the egg white to a soft peak, and fold into the batter. Let it sit for 20 minutes, and then cook on a waffle iron.

Before egg whites.

After egg whites.

mmmmm.