Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for February, 2009
February 28, 2009 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m disciplining myself not to call it a crock-pot. That is, after all, a brand name, and it’s not the brand ours is. Ours comes from the drugstore (not kidding) and is teensy, which is why this recipe is halved from its original form. And so far, the Crock-Pot company hasn’t offered me any money to name-check their product on my blog – you know, for all 19 people who have read it today to see, talk about a lucrative market going untapped – so I’m going to use the generic “slow cooker.”
This beef was eaten in the Cuban buns I made in the last post. I hear that this is not unlike pulled pork, except it’s beef, but what do I know about pulled pork? I’m from Canada and I live in New England. I’ve never even been to the South. So I’ll let people with more experience judge that. I liked it, but that is a meaningless statement unless you’re me. Matt liked it too, which adds a little bit more credence to the theory that it was tasty. I bet a lot has to do with what kind of barbeque sauce you use. Upon Matt’s recommendation, we went with the Jack Daniels’ brand sauce, because he loves their mustard, and putting booze in things is nearly always a good idea. I mean, give me an example where it isn’t. YOU CAN’T. And guess what? This dish has the addition of booze in the form of beer in the sauce as well!
So, changes: halving it, obviously, and replacing the Dijon mustard with regular brown – Matt detests Dijon, and I don’t eat mustard if it’s not cooked into something (exception: Schwartz’s sandwiches in Montreal. You don’t mess with genius.), so there’s no point having it around the house. And I realized I didn’t have red wine vinegar, so I used balsamic, and that was fine.
Slow-Cooker Shredded Beef
Ingredients
1 1/2 tsp mustard
1/4 cup barbeque sauce
1 1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
3 oz, or a light 1/2 cup, beer (I used a pale ale)
a heavy 1/2 lb beef, cut so that it fits in the bottom of the slow-cooker
Method
Mix together the mustard, barbeque sauce, and vinegar in the slow-cooker.
Dump the beef in on top of that.
Pour the beer over the beef.
Put it on low and leave it for 6 – 8 hours.
Take it out and shred it with 2 forks.
Serve it on buns with as much sauce as you like mixed in.
So as it turns out, I might not have needed to halve the thing in order to get it to fit, but we did get 3 and a half sandwiches out of this much, so take that for what it’s worth. Also, I didn’t manage to get a photo of the sandwiches made. Use your imagination.
February 25, 2009 at 5:29 pm · Filed under breads, food
Just to be clear, the emphasis is on buns – as in they are buns made of Cuban bread – not on bread, as if there were some other type of buns other than bread. Well, I mean, there are, but this is a food blog. God. You people.
So let’s just get this clear right off the bat. I don’t know anything about Cuban bread. I don’t know what it’s like or what it’s supposed to be like, other than in Cuban sandwich form, at which time it is a long bun, pressed flat around its delicious contents. Maybe that’s a different kind of bread than this recipe, I don’t know. So I have no idea how accurate this is, as a representation of Cuban bread. But it’s tasty and quick and the recipe I got from Real Mom Kitchen SAYS it’s Cuban bread and why would she lie? At least, she almost definitely knows more than I do about the subject. What I can tell you is this: it’s white, it’s soft on the inside and crusty on the outside, it tastes good, and the leftover one is going to house my dinner tonight.
The original recipe was for loaves, but since I was making shredded beef (more on this in the next post; it takes long enough for me to crank out a post about ONE recipe that I figured it would be asking for trouble if I doubled up – and if you read that and thought “uh, double up, uh, uh,” you are my favourite), I halved the 2-loaf recipe and made it into 4 large buns instead of one loaf. I may have picked the wrong bread for the job, though – I feel like shredded-meat sandwiches should be on buns that are soft through and through, including the crust, but then again, I’m not from the part of the country where these things originated, so maybe I know nothing. This bread is still great. And you can’t beat it for speed. But next time, I think it’ll be a loaf, and I’ll leave something else to be buns. Or maybe I’ll just skip the cake pan full of water trick, because that’s supposed to be for crust enhancement, right? So if I don’t want to enhance the crust… right? That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Cuban Bread
Ingredients
2 1/2 to 3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp yeast
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup hot water
sesame seeds for sprinkling over the top (you could also use poppy seeds)
Method
In the bowl of a stand mixer, mix together the yeast, sugar, salt, and 2 cups of the flour. Well, fair’s fair, you don’t have to use a stand mixer, but it will make the next step a lot easier.
Add the hot water and beat for 3 minutes. If you’re doing this by hand, have fun counting 100 strokes, because that’s how many you have to stir!
Stir in the remaining flour until dough is no longer sticky.
Knead for 8 minutes.
Place in a greased bowl and cover with a damp towel (I used a damp paper towel to no ill effect) and let rise for 15 minutes.
Punch it down. I never know how much to punch dough down, so I just gave it a few good wallops and called it a day.
Put the dough on a baking sheet in whatever shape you want it to be, and cut slashes in the top.
Brush the top with water and sprinkle the seeds over it.
Arrange your oven so that you have one rack in the middle and one in the bottom.
Put the baking sheet on the middle rack, and a cake pan full of water on the bottom.
Turn the oven on to 400 and bake for 40 – 50 minutes (from the time you turn it on, not from the time it reaches 400).
February 22, 2009 at 9:09 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
I thought this was going to be a stew. It was not. It’s not bad or anything, but if I had categorized it properly, it wouldn’t have been the next thing I’d made. Not that I think I have full-blown OCD – that’s a real and crippling disease, not something to be bandied about when you’re picky or particular about stuff – but I do have rules for myself involving, for instance, doing things in a specific order. This was the only recipe in my “stew” list at the moment, so when it was time to make something from that list, this is what I did. Otherwise, I’d have gone into the world of cookbooks, which are getting sorely neglected.
So let’s talk about this soup. The recipe comes from Cooking Books, and upon reflection, the photo should have tipped me off that this is not stew-like. Again, not that this is a problem or anything. If I were to make it again, I’d make some changes, though. The liquid is 100% water, no stock, which isn’t a big deal except that the sauteeing of vegetables does not go on in the same pot, so it doesn’t get flavoured as much by those ingredients. Primarily, I think, the flavour comes from the chorizo, which floats around expressing its paprika oils, and the bay leaf. The pistou (or, actually, persillade, since there’s no oil involved) didn’t really form a paste, again, perhaps, because there’s no oil involved (or perhaps just because I have lousy technique), but bruising and bashing the parsley leaves and garlic no doubt released tons of flavour. It just made for a different texture of finished product – once stirred into the soup, the individual leaves floated off discretely, so you might get a few pieces in your bowl, instead of a pervading flavour throughout the pot of soup.
So if I made it again, I’d saute stuff in the pot that I was going to use for the actual soup, or add a stock-ice-cube or two for added flavour. I’d make it in the summer, too, so I could use a fresh tomato instead of a can of diced tomatoes; I think I wound up over-tomatoing the thing by doing it this way.
It does get quite a few pots and pans dirty; in this it is unique among soups. You soak the chickpeas overnight, then put them in the big soup pot, boil the chorizo first in another pot (I just used the chickpea-soaking pot from the night before), bake the meatballs in the oven on a baking sheet, and saute the vegetables in a frying pan. I’m not sure what the purpose is of boiling the chorizo first separately, so I’d probably leave it in the main pot for that, and saute the veggies first before even adding the chickpeas. If it’s a question of them getting too mushy or something, I’d take them out until an appropriate time to add them back in, but first of all I don’t think that’s a major risk, and second of all there would be some flavour imparted to the oil and whatever else was in the pot at the time. And anytime I can make fewer dishes for myself to wash, I’m in favour. Hey, we’re looking at a new apartment – it has a dishwasher. Ooooh.
Chorizo and Chickpea Soup With Meatballs
Ingredients
1/2 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight (put them in a pot and cover with 2″ cold water and just leave them)
1/2 a bay leaf
~1/2 lb chorizo (maybe the lighter side of half a pound)
1 slice bread
~1/2 lb ground pork (maybe the heavier side of the half pound this time)
2 tbsp grated onion (this is maybe 1/3 of a small onion)
1/2 an egg, lightly beaten (I mean, you beat the whole egg…)
1/4 tsp pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
the rest of the onion, diced
1 small carrot (or half a large one), sliced
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 14-oz can diced tomatoes (I’d just use one fresh tomato, though)
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
salt
Method
First of all, don’t flip out over the ingredients list. Part of that is for the meatballs, part is for the rest of the stew.
Take your soaked chickpeas and put them in the big soup pot and cover with 2″ of cold water.
Turn the heat on to high and bring to a boil.
Add the bay leaf and turn it down to a simmer.
Cover partially and leave it at a simmer for 1 hour.
Once the hour is up, boil the chorizo for 2 minutes (in another pot).
After 2 minutes, pluck it out with tongs and drop it in the chickpeas.
Continue to simmer for another 30 minutes.
Ok, now we’re going to talk meatballs. You can do this part during the hour of chickpea simmering.
Preheat the oven to 425.
Soak your piece of bread in cold water for 5 minutes, then wring the water out of it (this part is, honestly, a little gross) and shred it, as best you can anyway considering it’s soggy bread.
Mix the pork, egg, grated onion, salt, and pepper with the shredded bread until it’s all well combined.
Oil up your hands and a baking sheet.
Form the mixture into balls the size of cherry tomatoes and arrange them – NICELY – on the baking sheet. If you didn’t get that reference, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.
Stick them in the oven for 12 minutes, shaking the tray or dislodging the balls with a spatula halfway through so they don’t stick.
Set them aside for later. I put mine in the fridge with no discernible ill effects. Well, and we put a couple in our mouths. They’re pretty good.
So your meatballs are made and your chickpeas and chorizo are nearing the end stages of their simmering. Time to deal with the rest of the veggies for the soup.
Heat the olive oil on medium-low in a small pan.
Saute the carrots, onion, and one of the cloves of garlic therein for about 5 minutes.
Add the tomatoes and cover the pan.
Leave it for 5 minutes.
Stir in the paprika.
Now stir the entire contents of the pan into the big pot with the chickpeas and continue to cook for 15 minutes.
At this point, fish out the chorizo, using tongs, and take it to a cutting board.
Slice it up and dump it back into the soup.
Stir in the meatballs as well, and let it cook another 5 minutes.
While it’s cooking, bash your parsley, the other clove of garlic, and some salt around – in a mortar and pestle if you have one, in a bowl with the back side of an ice cream scoop if you’re me – until it forms a paste or you get sick of smashing away for no result. Either or.
Stir this into the soup and cook for another 5 minutes, and now, finally, you can eat.
February 15, 2009 at 9:36 pm · Filed under dessert, food
I made these to take to work. One was for someone who had been fielding the brunt of some upset callers; the rest were for whoever was fast enough to get one. I don’t announce baked goods anymore unless I have TONS.
I found the recipe here, but I had to invent an amount for the baking soda – it’s not in the original ingredients, but the instructions make reference to it. I was nervous, because I knew this is one of the particularly scientific parts of baking, but it seems to have worked out. I also thought I had most of the instant coffee tubes left from having bought them for the mocha brownies, because Matt had said he doesn’t really need them anymore, but I guess he did need them on a couple of occasions, and there was only one left. So they weren’t as mocha-y as they were supposed to be. I was fine with that, but maybe other people would have liked it more with more mocha flavour, I don’t know.
Mocha Chocolate-Chip Muffins
Ingredients
3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp cocoa powder
~1 tbsp instant coffee, although the original recipe called for 3, and mine could have definitely used more coffee flavour to be truly called “mocha”
1 1/2 cups plain yogurt (that’s 2 single-serving cups)
2 eggs
8 tbsp – one stick! – butter, melted then cooled
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
Method
Preheat the oven to 375.
Grease or line a muffin pan. This recipe was supposed to make 12, but I got 4 more out of it, so be prepared.
Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder in a large bowl.
In another bowl, whisk together yogurt, instant coffee, and eggs until smooth.
Fold the wet ingredients into the dry, using a spatula, until just blended.
Stir in the chocolate chips.
Divide equally among the cups of your muffin pan.
Bake 20 – 25 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick comes out with just a couple of crumbs.
Cool in the pan for the first 5 minutes, then take them out and cool the rest of the way on a rack.
February 14, 2009 at 10:42 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
I found this recipe at Dishing Up Delights, but apparently it’s originally from Matt’s girlfriend, Giada De Laurentiis. So I figured I had a guarantee of success on my hands. Well, that and because it’s fried.
And you know what? It actually was kind of successful. Matt liked it, the texture wasn’t too bad (more on this later), and the frying didn’t result in a horrible mess and lots of little burns on my hands and arms. I don’t know if it was my favourite; the only kind of ravioli that Matt accepts as valid is the kind filled with ricotta cheese. Ricotta cheese generally makes me gag, but the breading and frying made it less obvious in this case – particularly with regard to the texture, which is a major factor in my dislike – so I could eat them without having some kind of involuntary throat reaction. And it is involuntary, by the way – I discovered that I didn’t like ricotta completely by accident, by eating some manicotti or something and gagging instantly. I asked my mom what was in them, and the only thing in there that I hadn’t eaten before was ricotta. Can you be allergic to one kind of cheese? It was that strong and sudden of a reaction.
So this recipe, the amounts are kind of vague, because the only ingredients are ravioli (fresh or frozen, as long as it’s thawed first), buttermilk and seasoned breadcrumbs for dredging them, oil for frying, and sauce for dipping. So you only need as much as it takes for your chosen amount of ravioli. The amounts I used of the dredging materials were too much, but the oil was just right, and we just both spooned a bit of jarred spaghetti sauce onto our plates for dipping.
Fried Ravioli
Ingredients
enough oil to be 2 inches deep in whatever you’re frying in
buttermilk (1/2 cup was more than enough for me)
italian breadcrumbs (1 cup was, again, more than enough)
frozen ravioli, thawed, or fresh if you can get it (we used half a package)
pasta sauce for dipping
parmesan for topping
Method
If your ravioli are frozen, lay them out to thaw on a baking sheet, which you will get to reuse later.
Pour a couple of inches worth of oil into your frying receptacle – I used a wok, which meant that 2 inches isn’t as much oil as it would have been in, say, a pan, but do what you need to do – and heat it to 375. How do you do that on the stove, I wonder? I hope you have a thermometer!
Dredge each ravioli in buttermilk, then in breadcrumbs, and lay them out on the baking sheet that you may or may not have used earlier.
Pop a few into the oil – not so many as to crowd them, though, you’ll be doing this in batches anyway.
Turning them occasionally, fry for a couple of minutes or until golden brown.
Remove to paper towels to drain.
Repeat until all your ravioli are cooked. Did I honestly need to include this step?
Serve with tomato sauce for dipping and parmesan sprinkled on top.
February 5, 2009 at 5:24 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Yes, more pasta with bacon and mushrooms. What? First of all, both of those things are good separately (they are!). Second, they’re fantastic together. Third, this changes it up a little by using gnocchi instead of ordinary pasta, adding corn, and having a bit of mustard in the sauce. Fourth, I used up leftover mushrooms and bacon (if you can believe there was bacon left over). And fifth, I didn’t make a fool out of myself this time by trying to get Matt to eat it. I made it on Monday, when he had a union meeting.
But, of course, if you’ve been reading for more than a few days, you’ll know that every time Matt has a union meeting and I think I can make myself something he doesn’t like, something happens and he walks in the door before I’ve even started cooking. And this time was no exception! I was just getting the bacon out when he strolls in through the door. Are you joking me, I thought, or possibly said out loud. He informed me that, no, the meeting wasn’t cancelled or postponed, they had just had it somewhere close to the warehouse instead of at the union hall, which is two towns and two subway lines away (and the warehouse isn’t even ON a subway line in the first place), and then he’d gotten a ride home. But he told me to go ahead and cook anyway and he’d go get a slice of pizza. He also got a couple slices of bacon, but that’s neither here nor there.
So this is my single-serving version (that still netted me some leftovers) of this recipe from Off the (Meat) Hook, which is yet another ace name for a blog. World’s full of them. And since it is not summer and there isn’t fresh corn, and since in any case I am too lazy to cut the kernels off a cob of corn, I used a wee can of corn. Can we live with that? I can. Am I gratuitously using the word “can” here? Not on purpose, anyway.
Gnocchi with Bacon, Mushrooms, and Corn
Ingredients
a decent handful of mushrooms, sliced (I am not about to tell you how many you need, because my mushroom needs may be substantially higher than the average person’s)
2 slices bacon, in bite-sized pieces
let’s say 1/2 a small can of corn kernels (I ate the rest of the can for lunch the next day)
1/2 tbsp butter, which is technically 1 1/2 tsp, but since sticks of butter are so handily marked in tbsp gradations, it’s easy to just halve one. And anyway you can use less, if you like. I mean there IS a bacon grease situation to contend with.
1/4 cup white wine
1 tsp brown mustard
1 1/2 tbsp cream, which, follow me closely here, uses 3 of your measuring spoons: 1 tbsp, 1 1/2 tsp. LIFE IS SO COMPLICATED.
an appropriate amount of gnocchi, as if I measure.
Method
Fry up your bacon until it is crispy and delicious.
Drain on a paper-towel-covered plate.
Pour off most of the bacon grease but keep a bit in the pan for frying up the next ingredients.
Which are the mushrooms. Saute those puppies until brown and soft (the original recipe had them getting crispy; I don’t have that kind of patience).
Take them out and put them on the paper towels with the bacon.
Now throw the corn into the pan and saute that until it is crispy and just starting to sizzle and make popping noises. Can you make popcorn out of fresh corn? Let’s not find out.
Anyway, put that on the paper towel as well.
Now, boil the water for the gnocchi.
Add them when it reaches a boil.
As soon as you’ve added them, put the butter into the pan you’ve been using and melt it until it gets sizzly, then turn it off.
When the gnocchi start to float to the top, fish them out with a slotted spoon and toss them into the pan with the butter, and turn it back on.
Saute them until they get a little brown.
Now add the wine, cream, and mustard, stirring to combine and to coat the gnocchi.
Cook for a few minutes, stirring a bit, until the sauce is almost completely reduced. Play it by ear (or eye, I guess).
Throw in all the things on the paper towel and give it a good stir.
Season with pepper and salt, if it needs any, what with the bacon, and serve.
Question: when a recipe, as they so often do, calls for bacon in little pieces, do you cut it up before you cook it, or break it up after it’s cooked? I do it afterwards, but I’m beginning to suspect this is not normal.
February 3, 2009 at 5:58 pm · Filed under food, meals
Even the name is adorable! And actually, the recipe I based it on is even more adorable – hers are more like a micro-mini meat pie, being made in mini-muffin pans instead of regular muffin pans.
This was phase 2 of the “let’s make Matt better via the judicious application of beef to his stomach” plan. It may not have worked on Saturday, but maybe it did work on Sunday, because he managed to get through a day of work on Monday. And it made me happy too, because as Audrey points out in her original blog post, anything wrapped in puff pastry is great. Plus it’s like a pot pie, which Matt is against in general, and which I am against when it’s just a bowl of filling with a puff pastry hat on top. Having the crust go all the way around the filling, underneath and everything, is key. It soaks up some gravy and gets just indescribably delicious. Was this the first step towards converting Matt to the joys of pot pies? Perhaps, although the fact that this was beef with a brown gravy and no interloping vegetables probably had much to do with his enjoyment of it.
I halved the recipe, and this meant I could halve the simmering time for the gravy, which is fantastic because I must have missed the line in the original recipe that said to simmer it for an hour. By the time I got to that step during the actual cooking, I did not have an hour. I decided I’d do half an hour and see how it was looking, and it looked fine, so. Oh, but what did not look fine was the majority of my finished pies – they were, um, bursting with flavour. Or maybe just straight-up bursting. I used the rim of a pint glass to cut out the circles of pastry, and it was really not big enough. I should have used a big mug or something. Or maybe, innovative idea, had some kind of large round cookie cutter. I tried to glue the lids on with egg wash, but in most cases this wasn’t happening. Oh well. The inside comes out as soon as you cut into them anyway, so is this a big deal? Clearly it is not.
Mini Meatpies
Ingredients
1 1/2 tsp vegetable oil
1/2 lb steak, cubed small
1 small onion, chopped finely
3/4 cup stout (more Murphy’s! Matt couldn’t finish the can for me since he’d just taken cold medicine, so I took one for the team and guzzled it while talking on the phone to my dad about Japan – how international! Drinking an Irish beer used to make Australian meatpies in Boston and talking to a Canadian about Japan)
1/2 cup beef stock
a couple sheets frozen puff pastry – I used 1 sheet and a little corner of a second, but I should probably have used more
1 egg, beaten lightly
Method
Heat the oil in a frying pan.
Add the beef and cook until it is browned on all sides.
Throw in the onion and saute until softened.
Add flour and mix until everything is coated and maybe a little brown.
Pour in the stock and stout, and stir until the gravy boils and thickens (you don’t have to be stirring constantly, that’s boring, but keep an eye on it).
Cover and reduce heat to a simmer, and leave it to simmer for 30 min, stirring occasionally.
At some point during this process, take the puff pastry sheets out to thaw. Also known as “don’t be me.”
If the gravy looks sufficiently thick and appetizing at this point, take it off the heat and let it cool for 10 minutes, then chuck it in the fridge to cool down all the way. Obviously leave it on the simmer if it doesn’t look ready yet.
While it’s cooling in the fridge, grease a muffin pan (this makes 6) or spray it with cooking spray or whatever you like to do to keep things from sticking.
Preheat the oven to 400.
Cut out big enough rounds of puff pastry to line each muffin cup.
Take out your gravy and spoon equal amounts into each lined cup.
Cut out a slightly smaller round of puff pastry to be the lid to each cup, and adhere them with a bit of the beaten egg.
Brush more egg over the tops and cut 2 slits in each lid.
Bung them into the oven for 15 minutes or until golden.
Let them sit for a few minutes before eating them – this will be obvious if any filling has leaked out, because it will be bubbling away like crazy, and you’ll know you’d burn your face off if you tried to eat any. But rest assured that this is true even if your pies are better constructed than mine and all the insides stayed in.
February 2, 2009 at 1:32 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Matt’s been sick. He’s had a wretched cold that caused his Thursday, which he had off, to be a total waste of a day off (but NOT a sick day, so, in fact, thrifty!) and then made him call in sick on Friday. He had to work on Saturday – this was why he had had the Thursday off, he was covering for someone else and had their day off in exchange – which he managed, but it was no fun. And then yesterday he was so exhausted and dizzy and weak from the whole endeavour that he could barely leave the house – or, indeed, the chair. So this weekend has been about making food that would fortify him, or at least make him a little happier.
On Saturday I had the whole day to make something, so I chose soup, even though this is not an all day sort of soup. It’s just a good, hearty soup with lots of things in it that are good for you. The recipe is from From Whence the Sweet Bird Sang and boy is she right about its ease and awesomeness. All that said, though, I don’t know if it actually did cure Matt. After all, Sunday was pretty much a write-off for him. Am I asking too much of this soup? I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t actually guarantee it has magical curative powers. Still pretty good though. I halved it because that’s what I do. We still have a big tupperware in the fridge and a small, lunch-sized one in the freezer.
Beef Barley Soup
Ingredients
roughly 1/2 lb steak (a cheap kind is fine, but not quite stew meat, because it doesn’t cook all that long), cubed
1 carrot, sliced
2 small ribs celery, sliced
1 small yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
1/3 cup pearl barley (or possibly “pearled” barley… depends who you ask, and I don’t want to further contribute to the dumbing down of language by dropping the end of the word – and you see this particular brand of bastardization EVERYWHERE)
4 cups beef stock
salt & pepper
Method
Throw everything in a pot over medium heat.
Cover and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
Take the lid off and let it simmer for another 15 minutes.
AND THAT’S IT.
It’s not a great picture – I mean, even by my standards; you can’t even see any of the barley. Maybe I’ll take another picture when I eat some leftovers.
