Pumpkin-cranberry scones

Actually, I lied - these are butternut squash scones, not pumpkin.  But, it basically tastes the same to me, and both are yellow and squashy, and I happened to have butternut squash, so I used it.  These scones were pretty fantastic.  I ate the entire batch for lunch.  *burp*

Butternut Squash Cranberry scones

Made eight

1-1/3C flour

2 tbs brown sugar

1 tbs baking powder (that was too much.  I'd recommend 2 tsp)

1/4tsp fine salt

1/2 stick butter, frozen

1/3C pumpkin

1 egg

1 tbs pumpkin-y spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice)

~1/2C cranberries, cut in half

Icing:

some powdered sugar, in a bowl

some more pumpkin-y spices

enough water to make it a paste

put flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a bowl.  Stir those together, make sure lumps are out.  

Use a cheese grater (with big holes) and grate frozen butter into the flour.  then use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour, just pinch, for exactly 37.2 seconds.  

in a different bowl, mix egg and pumpkin.

dump wet into dry.  fold to combine, don't overmix.  It can still be very crumbly.  you don't want the butter to heat up, since that's what creates flakes.

Dump onto a floured surface.  Push all the crumbles into one lump, flatten out a little, fold in half, flatten a little, fold in half.  form into a circle.  cut into wedges with a knife.

bake at 350 for 25min.

make the icing.  when the scones come out of the oven, flip them upside down into the icing, move them around a bit to spread the icing, then flip back over and put on a plate to cool.

Flaky!  And delicious.

Cinnamon french toast

Weekends should start with that photo.  Preferably in bed.  This was some tasty french toast, covered in c-grade maple syrup - delicious and dark and maple-y.  Yup, that got a good Ed-rating.

I'm not sure if this is the legit way to make french toast, but it worked for us.  Mix up an egg and some milk, maybe a quarter cup of milk?  Cut the bread into slices, and dunk both sides in the egg mixture.  Let it sit there as you melt some butter in the pan.  Once the butter is melted and pan is hot, sprinkle cinnamon on both sides of the bread, and cook for ~4-5min a side.  Once cooked, slather in maple syrup and devour.

Cauliflower mac n cheese

I'd really been wanting some mac and cheese lately, and I wanted it with cauliflower in it.  Becky had been talking about some omelet she had that was cauliflower and chard (granted, she wasn't talking about it in a good way), but it made me think that this would be a good combo when slathered in cheesy cream sauce and mixed with pasta and baked.  How could that not make you drool?  This was a bit of a free-form recipe, but it worked well, I thought.  I'll totally make it again.  The Ed-rating was so-so, unfortunately.  He didn't like the chard, said he would have preferred it on the side.  But he liked the cauliflower.  Can't win 'em all, at least I was super happy!

Cauliflower mac

Made ~6-8 servings

1 head of cauliflower

1 bunch of swiss chard

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 bunch of sage

1 box of pasta

~1/4lb cheese, of a melty variety (I used a mix of cheddar and jarlesburg)

1 tbs butter

1 tbs flour

~2C milk

Salt and pepper, to taste

Bread crumbs, for the top

My goal here was to minimize the number of dishes that I used, and minimize time.  I am a hungry woman!  Feed me cheesy pasta!

Get a big pot of water boiling.  Preheat your oven to 450F.

Dice the onion, and begin to sweat it.  Dice the garlic.

Meanwhile, remove the chard from its stems.  Dice the stems and chop the chard.  Once the onions are sweated,  add the garlic, and once that is toasted, throw the chard stems into the frying pan.  Add some kosher salt.  Once those are tender enough to be tasty, add the leaves.  You just want to wilt the leaves.

Cut the cauliflower into large florets.  Once the water boils, add them to the water.  After a few minutes (5?), test it with a fork.  If it's done, pull it out with a slotted spoon.  Put in a big bowl.  Put the pasta in the water.  You want to cook it to just a little less than al dente.

If the chard is done, add it to the big bowl.  Grate the cheeses.  More cheese is best.  If in doubt, add more cheese.

Puree half the cauliflower in a blender or food processor.  Once your frying pan is free, melt the butter, then whisk in the flour.  Once it's combined nicely, add the milk, still whisking.  Then add the cheese, and salt the sauce to taste.  I added ~1tsp kosher salt, I think.  Add the pureed cauliflower to the sauce.  Pour into the big bowl.  Once the pasta is done, reserve some of the cooking water in case the sauce is too thick, then drain the pasta and add it to the big bowl.  Mix everything together.

Transfer to baking dish.

Put some breadcrumbs and more cheese on top, and bake for ~20min, until the top is golden brown, and the insides are bubbling.  Devour!

Plum kale salad

I'd been seeing this salad on a bunch of food blogs, and figured, hey, I have some ricotta right now, I have to try this.  Everyone else was raving about it, but it wasn't amazing.  I mean, it looked pretty, and the flavor was nice, but I had issues trying to figure out how to eat it.  The plum slices were too big, and the crispy kale bits turned un-crispy in the dressing, and the best part was definitely the rendered sopressata I'd put on top, which doesn't turn up in the original recipe.

This didn't get an Ed-rating, since I'd made it for lunch, but I doubt he would have liked the layer of ricotta on the bottom.  I'm not sure how I would have improved on this salad - I mean, the combination of flavors really was tasty.  Maybe smaller cubes of plum, and smaller pieces of crispy kale, and the ricotta mixed into it all, would make it easier to eat.  Definitely keep the sopressata.  Or bacon.  Cured pork product improves on any sweet + salty combination!  

Not sure I'll make it again, but I will remember that the plums complimented the savory kale nicely.  And the balsamic vinaigrette was good, too, I liked it mixed with the ricotta.  

Fish tacos

Still catching up on backlog - these fish tacos were from when I was in Sunderland last month.  Peter still thinks they're "weird", but eats them anyway, with noises of contentment, so no complaints there.  This was bluefish, and worked pretty well as a filler for the tacos.  

I seasoned the bluefish with some chili powder, salt, and pepper, and let it sit there while I cooked down some diced red onion.  Once the onion was pretty well caramelized, in went some garlic, and then the fish, with a healthy squeeze of lemon.  I also threw in some halved cherry tomatoes, which, while not adding a whole lot to the flavor, made it look nicer.  

Also featured in the tacos is some garlic-lemon spinach.  Definitely one of my favorite ways to eat spinach, though I'm not sure it added anything to the taco.  And of course, avocado, because avocados are awesome.

The tacos were just the recipe on the back of the masa bag.  I think it's 1C masa flour to 2/3C water.  I rolled them out on some plastic wrap, and that made them a lot easier to transport to the pan for a brief minute of cooking.  I suppose a tortilla press might make round tortillas, but whatevs, these still taste good.

Peter mentioned that I couldn't post a photo on the blog without making a silly face while eating - of course!  Silly face accomplished!

Angel food cake and a cardamom-lime fruit salad

Ed wanted angel food cake for his birthday cake.  This is slightly more troublesome than a chocolate cake or something, but I figured it was totally within my capabilities, aside from the whole I-don't-have-a-springform-pan deal.  I figured I would make little mini ramekins of cake, because those would be small enough that the cake couldn't collapse.  This worked.

I followed this recipe, except I cut it in half.  I also used less sugar... it was easier to just use 3/4C than to add in the extra 2 tbs.

If you follow all the steps in that recipe I linked to, you will have a successful angel food cake.  The one thing I did change is that I buttered and sugared the bottom of the ramekins (but not the sides!), so that it would be easier to remove the cakes once they were cooked.

I also put the extra batter into the heart-shaped pan.  This mostly worked, though the middle of the cake was a little deflated after it cooled.  Still tasted delicious, though.

The topping was a fruit salad in a cardamom lime sauce.  I put the juice of a lime, a tablespoon or so of sugar, and the seeds from a cardamom pod into a saucepan, and boiled that, while stirring, for ~5min.  This made it all thick and syrupy.  It was delicious.  Then I poured the syrup over a small fruit salad of a kiwi, ~4 strawberries, and half a starfruit.  That sat that marinating while we ate dinner, and the strawberries turned the syrup all pink.  Once we were ready for dessert, I dumped the fruit on top of some whipped cream on top of the angel food cake, and poured more syrup on top.  Delicious!  I could have eaten that all day long.  

Lobster risotto

It was Ed's birthday last week.  So, I made him a 5-course dinner, and paired as many of the courses as I could with tasty beer.  We started with gougères, and a sliced pear and some chimay.  Can't say no to appetizers like that!  

(I kinda forgot that these guys puff in the oven, so they ended up being pretty huge, rather than tiny little delicate bite-sized morsels.  Oh well, still tasted awesome).

They went poof!  and were cheesy.  These things are so awesome.  Click that link and make some.

Then we had the salad course, which was caramelized pears, toasted walnuts, avocado, arugula, and craisins, in a maple mustard dressing.  That was pretty delicious, too.

The main course, which I served with a Belgian white beer from Unibroue, was a lobster risotto.  Lobster has been wicked cheap around here lately, and it's always delicious, so I decided to try my hand at a lobster risotto.  This was a bit time-consuming, but well worth the effort.  

First, I cooked the lobster.  It was a little guy, just 1.16lb, and I boiled him for 8 minutes.  Once he was cool enough to handle, I pulled the meat out of the shell, and threw the shell back into a pot, with some onions and carrots and bay leaves and the rinds from the gruyère cheese that I'd used up in the gougères, to make a stock.

Once I had a stock, I just set that aside until it was time to make the risotto.

To make the risotto, I started with a diced onion.  In a big wok, I sweated the onion in some olive oil, then added a few cloves of garlic, diced up.  Once that was toasted, in went ~1C of arborio rice.  I turned the heat up to high and kept that moving around for ~1-2min, until it was also toasted, and starting to look translucent.  While all this was happening, I had a pot with half a bottle of cheap white wine (pinot grigio; not ideal, but it was what was on sale) and a pot of the lobster stock warming on the back burners.  Once the rice was toasted, I added the wine, ~1/2C at a time.  I'd add some wine, stir it around until the liquid was gone, add some more.  When the wine was gone, I started in on the lobster stock.

About 10 minutes into the whole process, I threw in the chopped chanterelle mushrooms, and a pinch or two of kosher salt.  Continue to stir over medium-high heat, adding liquid as necessary, until the rice is cooked, another 15 minutes or so.  Then I added in the chopped lobster meat, and some parsley for garnish.

We served the risotto with some roasted brussels sprouts, just tossed in olive oil and kosher salt and roasted at 400F for 15min, because green things are good for you, and, incidentally, delicious.

The risotto was utterly amazing, and delicious.  It always is delicious, but the lobster flavor made it even more delicious.  It may be worth making this again before the lobster season ends.

Dessert was angel food cake topped with fruit in a cardamom lime syrup, but I'll save that for another post.  We also had a cheese board.  And Allagash Interlude, for the final dessert beer.

The cheeses were gruyere, a soft robiola cow/sheep milk mix, some sort of goat cheese round that I've forgotten the name of, and a very mild blue, that I've also forgotten the name of... it was a very delicious blue, though, and similar to a saint agur.