A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Happy (Early) St. Pat's: Corned Beef, Colcannon, & Green Bread

Happy St. Pat's Day  a little early! I'm working most of the weekend including Monday but I wanted to share this meal with you.  Yum! St. Pat's food is one of my favorite go to for celebratory meals. Don't know why I don't prepare it more often.  Actually, the Reuben is my all time favorite sandwich and corned beef hash and eggs is my favorite breakfast. Can't go wrong with corned beef and cabbage in any form!

By the way, the green bread is a joke. It's simply my standard white bread everyday recipe that I added green food paste coloring to for some St. Pat's silliness.

As for the holiday itself, St. Patrick is credited with both driving the snakes and the pagans out of Ireland. As Ireland's patron saint, Patrick is attributed with using the abundant shamrock as a teaching tool to explain the three-in-one nature of the Trinity.

This is my entry for this weeks'  Weekend Herb Blogging, originally created by the lovely Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen.  This week, WHB is hosted by Kel of the fabulously photographed Green Olive Tree.  Check out all the other entries after Sunday evening.

Cardamom is a spice, not technically an herb, but Kalyn's focus is on all herbs, spices, or plants.  Cardamom, my favorite spice, is used quite a bit in northern European and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Bread Baking Babes: Royal Crown's Tortano

The second I opened the email invite to join Bread Baking Babes from Tanna, I knew I wanted in.  The second she sent the first month's recipe and it had "Crown" and "Royal" in it, I knew I was in love.

Okay, enough with the bad jokes. This bread was really fun, though long and complicated to make. I'm not saying it was hard, it was just different.  The dough was different, wetter and sloppier, which hurled me out of my comfort zone but in the end I enjoyed those sweating moments of wonder and Gene and I both are enjoying the big round loaf of chewy, hearty bread with a wide spectrum size of bubbles in the crumb, and that chewy/crisp crust that made every hour and every turn worth it.

This bread so inspired me that after baking it on an airebake metal pan, Gene and I went to Lowe's where I bought a couple of unglazed slate tiles to use for a baking stone and a couple more small ones to heat up for the bottom of bread baskets or to throw into a roaster to create steam for my next attempt.  Cost?  $1.88 per large tile and .99 cents per small tile.  That works for me.

You know what I had the most trouble with?  The baking part. Actually, my crust color is much lighter than what this recipe called for but at the time it FELT so dark.  I've told the story many times that I grew up in the kitchen of a cake decorator. I was my mom's apprentice, basically. In the cake frame of mind, overbaking is kin to a sin.  I can still hear my mom's voice saying "White cake is supposed to be WHITE!  Not BROWN!"  So there's something embedded in me that has a hard time letting any crust get dark brown. Someday I'll get over it and allow myself to bake a bread to a deep dark golden browned crust.  But I bet you I'll feel guilty the first time I do.

By the way, the flour I used made for marvelous-tasting bread. It's King Arthur European-style Artisan Flour, available (in this area--Springfield, MO) at The Cheddar Block on West Republic road between Kansas Expressway and the bridge that crosses over James River Expressway.

To view the rest of the Bread Baking Babes web sites, click on the links below:

A Fridge Full of Food (Glenna), Bake My Day (Karen), Cookie Baker Lynn (Lynn), I Like to Cook (Sara), Living on Bread and Water (Monique), Lucullian Delights (Ilva), My Kitchen in Half Cups (Tanna), Nami-Nami (Pille), Notitie van Lien (Lien), The Sour Dough (Mary aka Breadchick), Thyme of Cooking (Katie), and What Did You Eat (Sher)

No Knead Bread: Take Two

After my first foray into the Mark Bittman No Knead Bread, I decided a couple of days ago to try it again now that the holidays are over and I had more time to concentrate on it.  The results were the same. I still like it. It turns out a decent little loaf of bread, although this won't be my go-to every day recipe.

Fudge and Fruit Bread: Another look at Christmas Desserts

I've already told you about the cream cheese cookie press cookies and the cranberry bread on the dessert table that was such a hit this year but one of the biggest surprise hits was the fudge.  Our family tradition is all about the peanut butter fudge. No one in my family even gives a flying flip about chocolate fudge, weird as that makes us, just peanut butter.  However, I was feeling a little lonely for MY favorite flavor and decided to make a go at it:  white chocolate maple.  Yum.

Thought I'd share a couple more pics from Christmas:

This is the kids all cracking up but I couldn't figure out why until Sydney signed to me that Suzanne (my sister) was making finger signs behind my head.  Duh.  I'm so slow on the uptake!

So I'm a Year Late But All the Richer

I know that Mark Bittman's No Knead Bread from Jim Lahey's bakery appeared in the NY Times a little over a year ago. I know that every blogger on the planet has already tried this wondrous little recipe.  I know I'm a little slow on the uptake when I'm skeptical about a recipe.  But then again, what do you expect? I am from the "Show Me" state.

Let's just say I got "shown".

This recipe is great.  It's not the bread I want to make every single time I make bread but for an extra bread at the holidays that I can fix and forget with the greatest of ease, or for work stretches, or for times when I want homemade bread but I'm feeling a little under the weather, this is the recipe.  But it is not for the patience-impaired since the bread takes just under 24 hours to make.  From the article in the Times the key seems to be either kneading or time to make the glutinous fibers build up to make great bread.  Most of us choose the work method but in the recipe it uses simply time. 

The recipe starts with a simple bowl of globby flour, water, and a very small amount of yeast that sits covered on the counter for 12-18 hours.  My kind of lazy.  Then the dough is formed, rolled in cornmeal or wheat bran (which I didn't do, by the way) then allowed to rise for a couple of more hours, and baked off.

What the hell, I thought to myself. The furor is over. I'll give it a whirl now and see what happens. What happens is that at Christmas dinner, this bread disappeared before the traditional rolls.  Everyone loved it.  My cousin Paul smeared it with the braunsweiger pate and when I tried that trick I agreed with him that it beat the hell out of the Triskets that I actually am very fond of.

So my point here is that if you're one of the three people besides me who hasn't tried this recipe, try it.  I'll be making it again very soon and quite often just for the fun and to have something a little different but still home-made around the house.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Happy Christmas Eve and I'm just barely started!  I was a big slug yesterday and laid around most of the day watching Stephen King's The Stand, okay well I've read the book so I watched and napped while Gene watched--all four parts in one afternoon!  Felt good to slug out especially since my knees have been killing me.  Whine whine.

But today I will bake in earnest and post all weeks about the things I've learned and succeeded and failed at.  Hee hee.

I did have great luck with a new cranberry bread recipe from "The New Best Recipe" cookbook from Cook's Illustrated.  We had a smaller party of just my brothers and sister and their kids on Saturday night and that was a huge hit with requests for more for the big family Christmas evening party. I think it's the combination of the orange zest with the cranberries that really swings that recipe into something special.

Since our Mom died many years ago, it's a big thing with us kids when i make the old-fashioned cookies and dishes we grew up with--it's the memories that help make our holidays special so in the depths of the closet I finally found the cookie press I bought years ago and reworked Mom's recipe for cream cheese almond star cookies like we grew up with.  Our mom would make dozens of a dozen kind of cookies every year but but I'm not quite that motivated! They'll take what they get and they'll like it. :-)

I'm also a day late and a dollar short so I will be making the Daring Bakers Yule Log but not until today and, unfortunately, not in accordance with the directions.  I told my family about it and they were all excited except they didn't like the flavors in the challenge and whined and cried until I promised to make the yule log as a pumpkin roll, something my sister used to do every year until she lost her favorite recipe, and they want the pumpkin to be topped with maple instead of cappuccino buttercream.  Nothing like the folks who are going to be eating it making their desires known, eh?  :-)  But in the meantime (I'll be baking today) check out all the lovely yule logs already having been constructed by Daring Bakers all over the world:  Daring Bakers Blogroll

And now for those recipes for today...

Weekend Breakfast Blogging: St. Lucia Buns (Lussekatter)

Well...hell...

Okay, for breakfast blogging I made the theme to be "Ethnic Dishes with a Twist", the twist being that everyone should make a breakfast recipe from another culture, country, or ethnicity than their own.  Everybody else has been doing a great job with this event and I finally had time tonight to complete mine. I couldn't decide what to do at first.  One of my ideas was to make congee just because I see it on the menu of every big city hotel we stay in where there's a high percentage of Asian tourists.  Then I read a recipe and found that it's basically a rice porridge. That's fine. Actually, I love rice for breakfast with just a little butter and milk on it. I know that's not the same thing but somewhere along the line I lost my enthusiasm.

My other idea was to look up into my own family tree.  I'm Swedish/Norwegian on both sides but we have no Scandinavian hand-me down food traditions and that makes me a little sad.  I decided to make my own. Ever since elementary school when I first heard of St. Lucia Day, I've been been wanting to wear lit candles in my hair.  After all, I am the oldest girl of family.  But amazingly, Mom and Dad weren't real hip on that whole fire on my head in the wee hours of the morning while I'm baking bread thing.  I don't know why.

But I'm an adult now so I can wear lit candles in my hair if I want to. The problem is that now that I'm adult the idea has lost its appeal.  But not the thought of the St. Lucia buns.  I don't have a lot of practice with saffron but I do use and love cardamom, my favorite Scandinavian spice.  Put the two together and I call that Good Eats or Yumm-o or some other phrase that isn't already in the lexicon by people who might possibly sue me for using their trademark phrase.

St. Lucia (Sankta Lucia) Day marks the beginning of the Christmas season on December 13th. Sure, I'm a little early but let's call this a practice run. The tradition is for the eldest daughter in the family to serve saffron buns to her family while wearing a white dress with red sash and a crown of candles. It's a romantic tradition if not particularly approved of by Smokey the Bear.

My saffron buns didn't come out exactly as I would have liked them. They're a little overdone but they still tasted good.  Thankfully, Gene smelled them and pulled them out of the oven for me. You know that children's book "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day"?  Well that was my day yesterday.  I made the lussekatter tonight to try to distract myself from the fact that I'm having big trouble with my knees (now both) again in the form of some very wicked fluid retention on both and pain going with it. But, I was able to get into my primary care doc today so hopefully he'll be able to figure it out and fix it.

This is what the buns are supposed to look like:

Quite a bit lighter than mine and without the weird plumped up black raisins. I have NO idea what that was all about but the buns still tasted good once we knocked the demonic looking raisins off so what the hell.  We'll eat these up and next time, like December 13th, when I make them again, I'll be less distracted and pull them quicker from the oven.

The recipe follows.

Happy Birthday, Sis

Today is my baby sister's 37th birthday. I'm not sure if the 37 depresses her more or me more by way of the fact she's my little sister.

But aside from realizing we're sliding into middle age, her birthday is a wonderful thing. The girls had asked me a few months back if I'd help them make a cake for their mom. We decided to make it a full out lunch party.  So Jordan has been quietly arranging behind the scenes for Suzanne's boyfriend, Andrew, to make sure Suzanne was at my house at 11:30am yesterday for lunch/party.

I picked up the girls Wednesday night after I got off work at 11pm so we'd be together first thing in the morning. Well, we meant to get up early but that didn't exactly happen. Sydney passed out fairly early considering it was almost midnight before we got home, Jordan got caught up in a movie, and my nose was deep in the new Harry Potter book (fabulous!). So it was more like 10am before we were up and cooking.  Did I mention they were coming for lunch at 11:30am?

Thankfully, the cake layers were already baked. So while the Paula Deen's French Toast casserole was in the oven, the girls and I made buttercream and the they did it all.

I think they did a fantastic job. The cake is a layer of coconut sandwiched in between two layers of lemon with lemon buttercream and deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep purple fondant flowers and green leaves.

So we weren't awake yet and didn't get pics of the casserole but I do have the recipe after the jump. It was pretty popular. I'd never made anything quite like that before but it's a nice brunch dish.  We put the casserole together the night before so it was easy to slip it into the oven the next morning while we were still in our jammies.  The girls also served fresh cantalope and sausage links that they baked in the oven.

 

From bottom left:  Ann, Aunt Miranda, me, Sydney, Jordan, Andrew, and the birthday girl: Suzanne.

We all went in together and got Suzanne a family-sized crockpot that she's been needing for a while. She has a crockpot but it's too small. We knew the bigger one was a hit when Jordan said "Yay! Now when we have beans we can have ham TOO! And when we have roast we can put vegetables in with it!"

So what did I do after they left?  I was a big wuss and collapsed into the chair with an ice pack on my knee for most of the afternoon and read Harry Potter.

Yesterday was a hard-knock life but today it's back to the grind.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: The Mediterranean or Omega Diet

Fresh Cherry/Strawberry bread with low fat Cardomom/Honey Cream Cheese

At work, Ashley has gotten about a dozen of us together to play The Biggest Loser-The Work Version where everyone is measured by percent body weight lost, minimum 10%, and the reward is not only looser jeans but everyone's throwing in $1/week. The contest runs from yesterday through Halloween, 18 weeks.  Nice time frame to really accomplish some health changes and a nice little pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for someone.  We're focusing on the 10% since, being in the medical field, we're all aware of the studies that have shown that for folks who have weight to lose, even a 10% change can reap medical benefits in lowered blood pressure, lowered cholesterol, etc. 

I'm not going on any weird diet, just going to refine what I'm doing now, cut out the junk, and get back into a solid exercise plan.  For years, since Gene's heart attack, I've focused on excising transfats from our diet and focused on more veggies and complex carbs, but we've gotten lax.  The truth is the biggest bulk of eating right is about what you allow yourself to buy at the grocery and how many times you take the time to cook even when it's easier to run through a drive through.  I've gotten bad about being lazy with cooking.  I tend to forget that simple can be better for you, and as much or less trouble than getting in the car to pick-up take-out.

The basic rules of the Mediterranean, or Omega Diet**, are mostly what we already know:

• Eat foods rich in Omega-3 Fatty acids such as fatty fish (salmon, tuna, trout, mackerel), walnuts, canola oil, flaxseeds, and green leafy vegetables.
• Use monounsaturated oils such as olive and canola oil, expeller pressed (not heat processed).
• Eat seven or more fruit and vegetable servings every day.
• Eat more vegetable proteins: beans, peas, and nuts.
• Choose lean meats and low-fat dairy items over high fat meat and full fat dairy products.
• Avoid transfats:  basically anything in a box at the grocery, from the bakery, or is ordered at a drive-thru window.

**From The Omega Diet by Dr. Artemis Simopoulos and Jo Robinson.

Getting back into the Mediterranean routine, I purchased expeller-pressed canola and walnut oils at The Cheddar BLOCK on Saturday to make salad dressings (no way to get that many veggie servings in without making more salad meals), and I've stocked our crisper with veggies and berries, and have refilled the "fruit bowl" with apples, peaches, plums for the moment.

Last night we had steamed cod (not fatty fish but still, fish) and salads for dinner.  As a side at lunch the other day I made fresh cherry/strawberry bread with low-fat cardamom/honey cream cheese, a nice way to combine a whole grain with a fruit serving.  I think the couple of years I was in school, I just got out of the habit of thinking fresh and common sense wholesome to the point where it became more of a treat than a way of eating generally most of the time.  After school, I just didn't get myself back into the habit of making better choices but this is an excellent chance to recommit to both cooking more with our health foremost in mind and getting back into a better exercise frame of mind too. 

At work, we all get exercise, I have learned that by being off with my knee the last couple of months and how easy it was to put on ten pounds from the lack of exercise. When I first left school, I wore a pedometer for about a month at the hospital and we average about five miles a day on our feet.  But it's not the same as that 30 minute walk around the track and getting some resistance work in.  For me, because of my knee I'll have to go a little more slowly with the cardio but I'm even more motivated to getting back to strengthening the muscles around my knees, and my back, all for the sake of staying healthy on the job and not being out with another injury.

Losing a chunk of weight and winning that almost $200 bucks would be the cherry (pun intended) on top.

Daring Bakers Newbie--My First Bagels Ever!

One little thing to talk about before I start the bagel post--for those of you who missed the ending about the cake I mailed to Sher of What Did You Eat, the cake did arrive by 10am the next morning and it traveled really well, better than I thought it would. The only visible sign of having been shipped is that the plastic wrap left a faint pattern in the top of the fondant. That's it.  Sher said she and Bob really enjoyed it and so did her friend Nancy, who dropped by after work.

To see the cake, how it arrived, and what it looked like cut into, click HERE to go to Sher's weblog.

What a great experiment! I was really pleased with the results. So now we know: you really can mail cake and get it there in one piece (bad pun) and edible.

To the Daring Bakers founders, Ivonne of Creampuffs in Venice and Lisa of La Mia Cucina, thank you for including me into the group.  I love the whole concept of challenging ourselves to new baking heights, especially the whole idea of mixing it up between sweet and savory, cakes to pies to breads to whomever's-turn-it-is-to-name-it.  Because my--cough cough--expertise--cough cough is in cakes and decorating cakes, I was thrilled to try my hand at bagels, something completely different from my norm. 

I do make loaves of bread and dinner rolls all the time for our meals, by hand at times and by having burned through three (yes, THREE) bread machines over the last 15 years of my marriage (the first was a wedding gift), but I've never tired bagels or pretzels. I've thought about it but the DB group and this challenge gave me the proper motivation I needed to take the plunge, pun intended.  For those of you who don't get the joke in "take the plunge" you will as soon as you read the recipe and see the pics.

This month's challenge was created by Jenny of All Things Edible and Freya of Writing at the Kitchen Table and the recipe's title is:  Real Honest Jewish Purist's Bagels.

I'll tell you what my very first thought was when I printed off the recipe and it printed off to 3 1/2 page--"(Screw) me! I wanted to be in this group why?!"  I then mentally added and "Oy!" just to stay in theme. 

Well, you know what? A couple of the techniques were different from anything else I'd done before but it wasn't really "hard".  Putting them together, following the recipe, and coming out with a usable product at the other end was not difficult, BUT, what was really difficult was getting them any resemblance this side of heaven to each other.  I know, and the recipe reaffirmed, that a real bagel is formed by hand and that they're not completely uniform, but let me show you something that explains my personality and why that lack of uniformity bugged me--

This was my hors d'oeuvres table from the Pampered Chef party I hosted the other night. See my cheese tray in the front?  Let me make it a little easier for you--

There are three layers of cheese slices in each row, lined up to perfectly fill edge to edge.  My husband walked up behind me while I was carefully slicing each piece as evenly as possible and using a ruler I keep in the kitchen to line up the front edge exactly.  He stood there for a while. Of course he was admiring my precision, I thought.  Nah.  He looked at me with the same look of disgust he'd have if he found a booger in his coffee and said "You are the biggest control freak I know and THAT'S the proof, right there."  And then he walked away LAUGHING at me. Not WITH me. AT me.

I was a little put out by that comment, especially since he disrupted my concentration on making my cheese exactly even on every side.  How could he say such a thing just because I like inanimate objects to do what I want them to and to do it in as uniform a manner as possible?  Is that so much to ask from a world that revolves supposedly on the chaos theory? 

I didn't think so either.

So my point of that story is if you are like me and you're a big control freak one of those people who likes everything to be prettily perfect in every way... this recipe is even more of a challenge than Jenny and Freya had any idea it would be because those little buggers do not like to be the same size, shape, consistency to each other no matter how much you poke, roll, shape, slap, dunk, or swear at them.  And believe me, I tried all of those things, especially the swearing, and they still came out an attractive bunch of bagels on the whole but not even close to consistent and perfect. Sigh. So look at the recipe as an exercise in humility and plow through anyway because the end result will forever ruin you for a grocery store-bought bagel.  I think Gene and I each ate four a piece the first day.  Hmmmm...maybe making them often isn't such a good idea.

To see how the other members of the group fared, click on any of the blog names in the list on the left, titled "Daring Bakers".