Creme Brulee: This is a real ‘going out to dinner’ treat, which our son recently discovered (he’s finally old enough to have an appreciation for more subtle desserts and no longer requires two inches of chocolate cement held together with gobs of whatever). I have to admit that I’ve never made it at home, held back, strangely enough, by the final step, because I don’t own one of those nifty little butane blow torches. I have now been informed that you can get them at Bed, Bath and Bewildered. However, the rest, as they say, is simplicity itself. And remember, this is a custard that happens to be made with heavy creme. You could make the same dessert by substituting half and half and saving yourself a bunch of calories. Of course, if you do that, you can no longer call it ‘creme brulee’ but it would be probably just as good and little bit lighter.
This is creme brulee for a whole lot of people – serves 12 with little servings(so you will need a whole lot of ramekins or little glass bowls) or six people who really like creme brulee.
Ingredients:
8 egg yolks
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
2 cups of heavy cream (that’s a pint carton)
1 tsp of vanilla extract
a little granulated sugar for the tops when you want to caramelize them

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees F.
Beat up the egg yolks in a big bowl until light.
Gradually beat in the 1/3 cup of sugar until all mixed in
Add, in little dribs, the heavy cream and the vanilla and thoroughly mix in

Take a large baking dish and put in enough hot water so that you have a depth of about an inch to an inch and a half.
Divide up the egg and cream mixture into 6 ramekins. If you have a big enough baking pan (and enough ramekins), I think you can divide it up into 8 ramekins, which will make a slightly smaller serving but probably still very nice if you serve it with some fresh washed berries on the side.
Put the ramekins into the baking pan with the water and put on the center rack of the oven.
Bake for 50-60 minutes. You will know to take it out when you lift up one of the ramekins and shake it a little bit; the custard should still be a little bit loose in the center. It will firm up when you chill it.
Once the custard is done, take out the baking pan and leave out until the water is room temperature. Then take out the ramekins and put into the fridge. Chill for at least two hours.
Just before you want to serve them, dust the tops with a little bit of sugar. This should take maybe a teaspoon, no more than that. Since I did not have a torch, I preheated my broiler and put the rack on the highest setting. I put in the ramekins for two minutes (I ended up taking them out after about a minute and a half though; this is something you need to keep an eagle eye on because what you want to happen is for the sugar to melt, not burn). Take them out wait for the ramekins to cool and put back in the fridge for a little while to re-chill and serve.

The second dessert is something that recently has become quite chic in the French version in the United States, macarons. I grew up with the Passover commercial versions of these, which used to come packed in tins. These are not ‘kosher le-Pasach” (kosher for Passover) because they use a little wheat flour in them; to make them for Passover, you can substitute potato starch for the flour.

Coconut Macaroons (this can be divided by half and it still works): Makes – A Lot
Ingredients:
8 large egg whites
2 cups of sugar
2 tablespoons of honey (try not using something like clover, which really has no flavor)
5 cups of unsweetened, dried shredded coconut (you can usually find this in natural foods stores)
1/4 cup of flour (cake if you have it, all-purpose will work) – for Passover, use potato starch
1 tsp flavoring (I used orange, but you can use anything from vanilla, almond, etc. – for Passover, don’t use any flavoring if you can’t get ‘Passover flavoring’ at your grocery store)

In a large pan (I needed my dutch oven), mix together the sugar, flour, and coconut together and add the honey.
Then add the egg whites and mix together thoroughly. It will have the consistency of cooked oatmeal.
heat over a low-medium heat (on my stove, the burner was just slightly under half way), stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan, turning the mixture under over and over.
When you start seeing the mixture turning brown on the bottom, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flavoring. Transfer to a bowl to cool to room temperature. This is going to take a while – mine took about 30 minutes.
Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. Don’t substitute waxed paper for this, ok? Put tablespoons of the mixture on the paper. Use the spoon to make mounds – DO NOT PRESS THESE DOWN. The goal is to end up with a product that is crispy and crunchy on the outside and moist and chewy on the inside. So you want a little mound there.
Bake for about 15 minutes and check. If they are brown on the outside, take them out and let them sit. If not, let them bake for another couple of minutes, but you will need to check on them because they go from ‘lovely’ to ‘blow torch’ rather quickly. The macaroons can be frozen. The dough can also be frozen for up to two months before you have to use it.

Enjoy!

We love black beans at Chez Siberia because…they taste great all by themselves but you can dress them up with all sorts of spices and then they taste..greater. Your dear Aunty was introduced to them by the DH because part of his family hales from Central America, where the black bean has a focal point in the cuisine. All dried beans can, with the addition of a whole grain, become ‘complete protein’ and with a little bit of clever nutritional legerdemain, black beans can be everything from soup to nuts. We always have at least a half dozen cans of black beans on the shelf because they can be turned into good, cheap stick to your ribs hearty meals – fast, fast, fast.

Basic Black Bean Stuff – can be used all by themselves as a side dish, fillings for tortillas, dips, etc.
One can of canned black beans, rinsed
Olive oil
2 big cloves of garlic, chopped fine.
1 onion small fist size, diced fine.
Chile powder – start with a teaspoon and work up from there if you like things spicy

In a big frying pan, put in a couple of table spoons of oil and put on a low light with the chopped onions and garlic. Cover and stir, cooking until soft.

Add rinsed black beans, stir around and put back on the lid.
If what you want is a side dish, stop here.

If you want a dip, at this point:
Take a potato masher, large fork and some muscle and start to mash them in the pan.
Add water (1/3 to ½ cup should do the trick for one can) and keep mashing until you get the consistency you want. If you want to up the protein (and yes, it also ups the fat too, but), add up to a ½ cup of grated sharp cheese and stir until it’s melted.

If you want filling for tortillas:
Mash up half the beans, add a little water and stir in the rest of the beans.
You might want to add more chili powder and perhaps some chilantro
Fill tortillas with the bean filling, grated cheese (we like cheddar), sautéed onions and peppers.

If you want to do enchiladas:
Do filling for tortillas, line up in a baking dish. Cover with:
Enchilada sauce (commercial or make your own here Easy Enchilada Sauce) or
1 large can of crushed tomatoes either by itself or combined with any or all of the a couple of teaspoons of the following: chili powder, cumin, chilantro, oregano.

Sprinkle more grated cheese on the top and back for 30 min. at 375 degrees.

And here’s the surprise:
Believe it or not, black beans can be used in desserts too. When I was thinking about this, I remembered having Japanese sweets made with what they called ‘red bean paste’ and wondered if black beans had been used for desserts. I have not tried this but the reviewer said it was awesome. Not that I am of the ‘add dried protein to all the sweets to rationalize eating them’ group (actually Aunt Toby’s mom, The Grandma, used to do this and was the queen of adding things like dried milk and soy flour to baked goods. The whole ‘Cornell Bread Book’ movement is based on the position that there are certain people on this earth who are going to eat nothing but baked goods no matter what you do, so you might as well make sure that there is some protein in it. The only problem with this position is this: there is a certain point where the ‘beany-ness’ takes over, so a light hand is advised), but making something that carries the additional benefits of higher fiber, high protein, vitamins, minerals, and anti-inflammatory chemicals is, as Martha Whatshername says, ‘a good thing’.

Amazing Black Bean Brownies (courtesy of Black Bean Brownies)

(this is Aunt Toby here – Before you get started with this, take a look at this recipe – there is NO flour of any sort in this. They are depending on three things to hold this stuff together: cooked black beans, a granulated coffee substitute or dried instant coffee and chopped up walnuts, bound together with eggs. If you don’t have or don’t want to use coffee or coffee substitute, you will need another dried substance to take up the slack here – it’s only ¼ cup so you could use anything from various flours, bran, etc. The other thing is that if you don’t have/want to use nectar or honey, you have a liquid issue. You can use a dry substance such as sugar to sweeten with, but you will need to put liquid back in. I’ll experiment and report back)

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups soft-cooked black beans, drained well (reviewers note: canned is fine – I’d rinse them well)
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ cup (granulated) natural coffee substitute (or dried instant coffee, for gluten sensitive)
¼ teaspoon sea salt
4 large eggs
1½ cups light agave nectar – you can substitute honey 1 for 1 with this. If you choose honey, use something like clover which basically doesn’t have a strong flavor.
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line an 11- by 18-inch (rimmed) baking pan (hs note: or jellyroll pan) with parchment paper and lightly oil with canola oil spray.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a glass bowl in the microwave for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on high. Stir with a spoon to melt the chocolate completely. Place the beans, 1/2 cup of the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blend about 2 minutes, or until smooth. The batter should be thick and the beans smooth. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt. Mix well and set aside.

In a separate bowl, with an electric mixer beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar and beat well. Set aside.

Add the bean/chocolate mixture to the coffee/chocolate mixture. Stir until blended well.

Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Using an electric mixer, beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy. Drizzle over the brownie batter. Use a wooden toothpick to pull the egg mixture through the batter, creating a marbled effect. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the brownies are set. Let cool in the pan completely before cutting into squares. (They will be soft until refrigerated.)
Makes 45 (2-inch) brownies.

We’ve already seen ricotta take its place in deserts and baked goods.Ricotta Cookies and Crepes Three Ways
Today in honor of ‘Not Thanksgiving” ( in that there is absolutely nothing about this recipe that has turkey, stuffing, squash, sweet potatoes, etc. in it), here is a lovely white pizza with broccoli. Light, non-greasy, filling. Yum.

White Pizza with Broccoli – you will need three kinds of cheese: Romano or Parmesan, Mozarella (a small block about 2×2x1 each) and Ricotta (2 cups)

Pizza Dough:
1 package of dry yeast, dissolved in 1.5 cups of hot water with 1 teaspoon of sugar. Put into a warm oven (turn off the pilot) for 10-15 min. until the mixture is bubbly and smells like..yeast.

Put into a big bowl with a couple of cups of flour (if you are including whole wheat, put in 1.5 cups of regular flour first and mix well, and use the whole wheat at the end to absorb the extra moisture.

Put a handful of flour on the counter (clean the counter first) and empty the bowl onto of it. Turn to coat the dough with the flour and knead until the dough is smooth, elastic and starts to have little blisters on the surface.

Place in a greased bowl, turn over, cover with a towel and put into the oven to raise for 45 min. to one hour.

While you are waiting for the dough to raise, cut up and sauté any of the following, singly or in combination:
Green or red peppers
Onions
Garlic

Also, cut broccoli (you will need a small head for a whole pie) into small florets, boil up briefly and drain.
Shred up enough of the following to make 2-3 cups:
Parmesan or Romano cheese
Mozzarella

Once the dough has risen. Take it out, punch it down and knead it a bit again. Set the oven for 400 degrees. Grease either a cookie sheet or a pizza pan and press the dough out into it to cover. Cover the dough with the ricotta. Grind black pepper on it and sprinkle oregano and basil on it. Put on the broccoli and other veggies and sprinkle the Mozzarella and parmesan or Romano cover.

Put the pan into the oven and bake until the cheese is all melted and bubbly and the dough is crispy – this should take 15-20 minutes. Serve with a green salad.

Enjoy!

The first Thanksgiving was NOT like that. The socalled Pilgrims had arrived in November the year before and at least half of them died of starvation and disease by the next November, when a ship arrived with more Pilgrims and, Halleluiah!, provisions. They had food. They might make it through the winter! Now THERE was something to celebrate. The local natives supposedly provided five deer, which meant that the traditional food for the holiday should have been venison, except for the probable lobbying efforts of the folks from Land o’ Lakes or something like that.

So, seeing as how we’ve been eating non-traditional foods for what actually was a celebration for NOT starving to death, I’m going to suggest the following for this Thanksgiving: Think small. Think dainty, even.

Turkey: If you’ve just got to have ‘the bird’, get the guy behind the counter at your local store to put that baby through the bandsaw, right up the middle (leaving you with one leg, one wing, etc.) and wrap up each piece separately. Unless you are feeding the Mongolian hoards, half of one of those big birds is going to provide you with enough meat for 6-10 people, trust me. A couple of slices of turkey provides anyone (even a starving Pilgrim) with enough fats and protein to live another day or two. No one needs to go into tryptophan overload. What do you do with the other half? Ah…put that in the freezer. You will probably have left-overs for the weekend anyway. Now you have another half a turkey to cook for another time instead of 10 pounds of already cooked turkey that you will need to find things to do with..quickly.

Twist on the Turkey: Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F. While it is heating up, put the half a bird bone side up in the bottom of a large roasting pan. Put together your own favorite bbq sauce and paint the bone side and put in the oven. When the preheat “I’m done!” ding goes off, flip the bird skin side up, paint that with the bbq sauce and lower the heat to 350 degrees F and finish off the turkey until a meat thermometer stuck into the leg and breast reads 165 degrees. Baste with more bbq sauce as you go as well as the juices from the bird. Yum.

Veggies. What would we do for Thanksgiving without veggies? Actually, looking back on the First Thanksgiving, what they had probably was some version of squash, since that is what the natives grew in the area, plus soaked dried beans and soaked dried corn – succotash. Now, cooked up winter squashes and succotash would fill anyone up – I’d suggest choosing one or the other and serving whatever greens you can lay your hands on, whether it is a green salad, broccoli, chard, cabbage, kale, whatever. If you can still get locally grown greens, so much the better, but even in the Northeast, we can get cabbage family to eat at this point that is locally grown.
Twist on the Veggies: Please, please, please don’t put butter in the veggies. No one loves mashed potatoes more than I do but if you want to do something wild and crazy with mashed potatoes, sauté up a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil, smash them up with the oil and then put all of that into the potatoes. For green veggies, just lightly steam – no “boiled up until they are grey”, please. Make the cooked green veggies the last item just before you put things on the table. If you want to dress them up a little, squeeze a little lemon or lime juice on ‘em.

Cranberry Sauce: I don’t care if you are a whole-berry fan or a Jellied fan but cranberry sauce is, in my opinion, one of the truly great inventions. However, canned is full of things like high fructose corn syrup, so here is what we do at Chez Siberia:

Twist on the Cranberries: One bag of whole cranberries, the same size bag of frozen blueberries, 1 cup of water. Put all three in a pan and simmer until the cranberries pop. Smoosh everything down. Taste. Put in ¼ cup of sugar, simmer and taste again. This should be sweet enough but if not, add another ¼ cup of sugar. This should be all you need and you’ve now saved a lot of sugar. The blueberries will gel up the sauce nicely; it’s a different color and has a nice perky taste. Oh, and did I say you saved at least half the sugar?

Dessert. I love dessert. There is not one dessert of any sort that Aunt Toby has not found her name written on it with an engraved invitation attached to it. But I ask you…how many times have you really gotten a dessert that people really went ga-ga for at Thanksgiving? Trying to figure out what people are going to like is why we end up with three different types of pie and one gets mostly eaten…one gets half eaten…and the mince gets one piece taken out of it and you’re stuck with the rest for the weekend. Do a plate of cookies. BUY mixed Italian cookies if you’re stuck for time. People LIKE cookies. Pie is like potato salad. People SAY they like potato salad but even if you used one big potato to make the salad with..you’d end up with left over potato salad. People will eat cookies. Even weird cookies that they have never seen before. As long as you say it’s a cookie, they will eat it.

Here’s a weird cookie that people will eat and you can secretly feel good about because the ricotta adds some protein.

Ricotta Cookies
Basic recipe:
2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1 stick of unsalted butter
1 cup of sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups of whole milk ricotta

Liquid. If you want lemon cookies use this:
1/8 cup of lemon juice
2 tsps of dried lemon zest

If you want the cookies to taste like something else, you can use one of the following:
1/8 cup of strong coffee; or
1/8 cup of orange juice concentrate; or
1 tsp of almond extract plus 1/8 cup of milk

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper or waxed paper. Don’t grease the sheets and try to do the cookies that way. Does..not..work.

Combine flour and baking powder in a bowl.
In the mixer bowl, beat up the butter until softened; add the sugar and beat until fluffy.
Add the eggs, the ricotta, the lemon juice and the zest and beat up.
Add the flour/baking powder mixture. It should have the consistency of the sort of cookies that you spoon out onto the cookie sheet.

With a table spoon, spoon out onto the cookie sheet. These cookies are more like ‘cakies’ – they do not spread much at all. They sort of rise. If you want them flatter, use a moistened spoon and press them down a little bit.

Bake for 15 minutes and when they are brown at the edges, take off the sheets and cook on a rack until they are cold.

Mix up glaze.
Basic glaze:
1 ½ cups of powdered sugar
1/8-1/4 cup of liquid.

If you used lemon juice or orange juice in the cookies, then use the same thing as the liquid in the glaze. If you used coffee, then melt up ½ cup of chocolate chips in the microwave with a couple of tablespoons of water and add that the sugar to make chocolate glaze and put that on top of the cookies.

When the cookies are cold, spoon about ½ tsp onto each cookie and gently spread on the cookie; allow them to harden for about 2 hours before serving.

Buon Appetito!!

And a got a little done…and a lot ended up, shamefully, on the compost heap.

So, for today’s plums, because I’ve got a million things (like everyone else), I did this:
1) Washed all the plums.
2) Set aside some plums for German Plum Cake (see below)
3) Took out a cookie sheet, greased it a teeny bit to prevent sticking, cut the plums in halves, put them on the cookie sheet and stuck them in the freezer. When they are frozen, I’ll put them into a ziplock ™ bag. Do I have a specific plan for them? Actually, no, but I can make jam or preserves with them, bake with them, even just eat them defrosted, but at least they are taken care of. Plums are the easiest stone fruit to deal with: Just cut in half, take apart, and flick out the flat, eye-shaped pit. Nothing like dealing with cherries or peaches. Neat and very tidy.

But, to the cake. This is a modification of the German Plum Cake from recipezaar.com. To call this a ‘cake’ in the way that we understand the concept here in the United States is a little confusing. To Americans, all forms of ‘cake’ are the same: spongy, light, with some sort of thick frosting or sweet sauce or fluffy sweetened something all over it. This German Plum Cake is technically referred to as Pflaumenkuchen (don’t you just love those German cooking names – you can practically taste the thing when you say it – Flou-men-koo-ch–like you’re clearing your throat—en). Cooks with any mileage in the kitchen will recognize that this is NOT your father’s birthday cake when you read the list of ingredients. German Plum Cake

• 1/4 lb butter
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon sour cream
• 1 pinch salt (only if you use unsalted butter)
• 1 teaspoon ground lemon rind
• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 cups plums, pitted and sliced into thin wedges
For the topping
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1. In a large bowl, cream the butter, add the sugar, vanilla, egg, lemon peel, sour cream and salt (if desired).
2. Mix the flour and baking powder and add that into the mixture.
3. Grease the base of a round baking pan and spread the dough over the pan.
4. Liberally spread plums over the dough.
5. To make the optional topping, cream the butter, add flour, sugar and cinnamon.
6. Sprinkle over the plums and bake for 30-45 minutes in the middle rack at 375 F.
7. Serve with lots of freshly-made whipped cream.
8. If you like, you may also sprinkle rum or cinnamon over the fruit before baking.

Now if you do this straight, according to the recipe, what you get is really almost like the dough you press into a pan to make bar cookies with. It ends up being held together with the butter/sugar/ juices from the plums. Like many Central European ‘treats’, it’s meant to be eaten in quite small slices. I’d rather have something more like a dense brownie on the bottom, so instead of 1 table spoon of sour cream (which I did not have), I added a half cup of vanilla yoghurt (I had Greek style in the fridge which has twice as much protein as the regular low fat stuff and has 0% fat, so I can do the ‘Oh what a good girl am I” thing). That made the dough much closer to brownies in density. I just emptied the bowl into the greased pan, put the sliced up plums on top and the topping and let ‘er bake.

This is, I’m afraid, a very grown up dessert and definitely in the European mold. And by that, I’m not referring to the rum that they are suggesting you sprinkle on the fruit (actually, I sprinkled a teaspoon of powdered ginger and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon on mine before I put the topping on . I LOVE ginger). Check out the amount of sugar as compared to a standard cake baked here: 1/3 cup of sugar to a stick of butter – which is a half cup of shortening and an egg. The standard ‘throw it together at the last minute’ cake recipe in the US would be 1.25 cups of sugar, ½ cup of shortening, and 2 eggs. You can see that the fat to sugar ratio is totally different and makes for a dessert that depends much more on the quality of the fruit and the crumb topping for sweetness than what we expect from a standard cake here in the United States, which generally depends as much on the sweetness in the cake itself as it does on the sugar in the filling between the layers (if it’s a layer cake) and/or the frosting or topping. And considering that half of the calories in the dessert come from the butter, this is a calorie dense treat indeed. A small slice with a cup of coffee or tea would definitely round out a meal — we are definitely not talking about the standard “fill the plate and share it with two of your friends” serving of a piece of cake that gets presented in the US. A bit of a ‘dainty’ as they might say.

So, take out the nice china, brew up some lovely coffee or tea and enjoy.

A lot depends on what sort of bread you’ve got – garlic bread, cheese bread, breads with herbs in them are prime candidates for stratas (the main dish version of bread puddings); raisin bread or plain white bread can be used in desserts. We’re all familiar with French Toast (the French do not call this dish “French Toast” just as they do not call the musical instrument we know and perhaps love as the “French Horn” – in France, this dish is referred to as ‘pain perdu’ which means ‘lost bread’–which is rather ironic, since it is really bread that has been found and turned into something rather nice), and something to think about is using left over raisin bread as a nice change.

But back to basics. If you want to recycle bread into bread pudding, strata, or French toast, the basic thing that you are doing is…soaking the bread (either in slices or cubes or just mushed up) in eggs beaten up with milk and either spices and cheese (for the strata) or sugar and spices for bread puddings and their dessert-y ilk. What you are doing, frankly, is whipping up a basic baked egg custard which you are changing with sugar and spices for dessert or cheese and other spices for the main dish meal.

Basic recipe for baked egg custardy stuff: ½ C. of milk for every egg you use. So, if you use 2 C. of milk, you use 4 eggs.

For bread pudding/desserty type of stuff: add to that 2 c. of milk and four eggs: ½ stick of butter, ½ c. of sugar, ½ tsp of vanilla, ¼ tsp nutmeg, 1 C. of raisins (or other dried fruit – if you don’t like this you can leave it out) and enough cubed, stale bread to fill a really big mixing bowl. Mix the butter and sugar in with the milk and heat until it boils, turn off, stir in the eggs, vanilla, etc. and pour over bread in a greased baking pan. Cook at 375 for 45 min.

For strata/main dish sort of bread pudding, add to the 2 C. milk and 4 eggs things such as: 1 tsp dried mustard, ¼ c. of minced onion, a little cayenne pepper, or ¼ tsp of curry powder, ¼ c. butter(half a stick), and at least 8 ounces of shredded cheddar or other hard cheese. Put the bread and cheese into a big greased baking pan, pour heated milk, spices and stirred in eggs over it and bake at 350 for an hour or 375 for 45 min. You can mix in things like sausage, or cooked broccoli or spinach before you bake.

And now for something (ahem) completely different: the soup course (courtesy of Carol Field, “The Italian Baker”, Harper and Row, 1985 – this book has two complete chapters on stuff to do with left over bread including Corn Bread):

Panada di Milano (Rich Easter Soup)
Makes servings for 6
½ C. plus 2 Tblspoons bread crumbs
6-7 C. beef broth
3 eggs
3 Tbs. Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Place ½ C. bread crumbs in a small bowl and pour ¼ C. of the broth over the bread. Heat the remaining broth in a large saucepan to a rolling boil.

About 10 min. before serving, heat the butter in a small skillet over low. Add the moistened bread crumbs and sauté until golden, about 5 min.

Place the 2 table spoons dry bread crumbs in a soup tureen and break the eggs into the bottom of the tureen. Add the cheese and beat with a fork or whisk until well blended. Pour the boiling broth into the tureen and add the sautéed bread crumbs. Beat vigorously for one to two min. and serve immediately.

Here is something totally different in terms of use of stale bread: Salad course: Bread and Tomato Salad

Ingredients:
1/4 Loaf Italian Bread — Cubed
1/2 cup vegetable broth
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 Cucumber, Seeded, Sliced — Peeled
5 Green Onion Tops — Thinly Sliced
1/2 cup finely diced red onion
1 pound Tomatoes — Seeded, Chunked
6 basil leaves — chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground pepper

In large bowl, moisten bread with broth; squeeze out excess liquid and discard. Sprinkle bread with 1 tablespoon vinegar; toss to distribute vinegar flavor. Mix lightly with cucumber, green and red onions, tomatoes and basil. Add olive oil and remaining 1 tablespoon vinegar. Season to taste with salt ad pepper. Toss gently; refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Can be made a day ahead. Season to taste. http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/17/Bread_And_Tomato_Salad2141.shtml

Finally, we’re going to go off into the next dimension – think of something sort of like bread..only better…think of (cue scary music) CAKE. Regular, not terribly exciting, not frosted..cake. Cake like: pound cake, yellow cake, angel food cake….heck, let’s go off the deep end and think about: sugar cookies, Vienna fingers, chocolate cookies — any cookie that is not filled. During WWII, in the UK, my mom and her nurse friends used to treat themselves to a dish whenever they could pull together leftover cookies, a tin of evaporated milk and some other things. We have better things to work with however. With this sort of stuff, milk eggs and sugar, we can make: Trifle. Trifle is NOT bread pudding – it’s pastry cream….and bread pudding.

• Pastry cream:
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 5 tablespoons cornstarch
• 2 1/2 cups 2% reduced-fat milk
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Plus enough broken up plain cookies or cake that will fill a big veggie bowl – one whole pound cake’s worth.

Plus some sort of fruit, fresh or frozen, ½ c. of sugar, ¾ c. of fresh orange or other juice, (and if this is being eaten by adults, ¼ c. of some sort of fruit based liqueur – Grand Marnier, Chambourd, etc.)

Preparation
To prepare fruit, combine 3/4 cup sugar, orange juice, and liqueur in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat; cook 3 minutes until sugar dissolves, stirring occasionally. Add fruit to pan; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 8 minutes. Spoon mixture into a bowl; cover and chill.

To prepare pastry cream, combine 1/2 cup sugar and cornstarch in a medium, heavy saucepan over medium heat. Gradually add milk to pan, stirring with a whisk until blended; bring to a boil. Cook 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Gradually add half of hot milk mixture to eggs, stirring constantly with a whisk. Return milk mixture to pan; cook over medium heat 1 minute or until thick, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in vanilla and salt. Place pan in a large ice-filled bowl until custard cools to room temperature (about 25 minutes), stirring occasionally.

Arrange half of cake cubes (or broken up cookies) in the bottom of a 2-quart dish (if you have a fancy glass trifle dish, use that – any clear glass bowl will do – it’s just so you see the layers of stuff in it). Spoon 1 1/2 cups fruit mixture over cake/cookies; top with 1 1/2 cups pastry cream. Repeat layers. Garnish with grated orange rind, slivered almonds or whatever neat sweet thing you’ve got (hey, jimmies!! Chocolate chips!). Cover loosely with plastic wrap, and chill at least 4 hours.

So, don’t throw away the last two pieces of bread or those half a dozen tired cookies. Put them in a plastic bag, put that in the freezer and collect them so that you can recycle them into something nummy later!!

This post can also be found at Oxdown Gazette.

Best comfort food comes with stuff in it and gravy or “sauce” (whatever that means at your house) and comes on top of something else. In some people’s homes, it’s noodles or spaghetti…in other people’s homes, it’s on top of biscuits.

Today, it’s all about the biscuit and what you can do with it.

Now, you can go out to your local groceria and buy the “pop tube” of biscuits, but frankly, if you’ve got stuff on the shelf, I would never ever take freezer space for that, because, believe me: biscuits are not hard to make. There are two tricks:

1) Is your baking powder fresh? If you can’t remember when you bought your baking powder, it is not fresh and it will probably not work. Baking powder “off gases” and looses its oomph. One way to keep it fresher, longer is to put it into a sealable container once you’ve opened the can, but even then, it will NOT keep forever. One way to test is to put a teaspoon of baking powder into a little bit of vinegar (you do have a bottle of that, right?). If it foams up, you are good to go. If it does NOT, then ditch the package and write “baking powder” on your shopping list.

2) Do you have hard, cold fat? (No, this is not a discussion of you standing there, cooking in your underwear…). Repeat after me: If I want flakey, I need fat that is hard at room temperatures. This is the same piece of wisdom that works for pie crusts as well.

If you’ve got both of these, some milk and some flour, then you are definitely good to go. Here’s the basic recipe:

2 C. general purpose flour
Pinch of salt
4 teaspoons of baking powder
1 table spoon of sugar
½ C. of butter, lard, margarine or other hard-at-room-temp shortening
2/3 C. cold milk

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. and grease a cookie sheet.
Mix up the flour, salt , sugar and baking powder in a bowl
Cut up the shortening into little tiny chunks and use a pastry blender or two knives to cut the fat into the flour mixture. A pastry blender looks like this:

Pastry Blender

Once the flour mixture looks a bit like corn meal, then add your milk and mix it in. If you need a little more milk to get all the flour to go into the dough, then do that.

Throw a little flour on the counter and knead the dough a little – like three or four times. No more. You don’t want the heat from your hands to start to melt the shortening. Keep that dough cold.

Using a rolling pin or other rolling device (like…the wine bottle from the fridge…), roll out the dough about ½ inch thick and using a glass or other cutter (you can even just cut them with a knife into squares if you want), cut the dough into shapes and put on the greased sheet.

Bake for 12 min., until they start to brown on top (they should also be brown on the bottom already).

Eat or use for dishes like:
Creamed chicken or turkey
Chicken or turkey pot pie
Turkey on biscuits (with mushroom soup)

What else can you do with biscuits?

Well, if you want to make what we call at our house “winter short cake”, you take out some frozen fruit from the freezer and zap it for 1 or 2 min. in the microwave. If it is not sweetened with something, throw a tablespoon of sugar into it when you zap it. Or, you can use canned fruit as well.

You will need to change the dough just a teensy bit to make it into short cakes: instead of 1 table spoon of sugar, add one-third to one-half cup of sugar to the flour mixture. Now, it’s a sweet biscuit dough. Continue with the directions and bake as usual.

For the shortcakes:

Take a bowl, break a baked sweet biscuit in half and put one half in the bottom and add some of the fruit and juicy stuff on top. Add the top half of the biscuit to the bowl and top with some nice real whipped cream (Hey, you are going to go to Dietary Hell for just the butter in the biscuit part, so you may as well go dancin’). Voila.

You can use sweetened biscuit dough to make sweet pizza also: pat the biscuit dough thinly on a greased cookie sheet. Whip together one cup of ricotta cheese that has had one egg and some sugar added to it. Spread that on top of the biscuit. Put sliced fruits on top and bake at 400 degrees F. until the cheese is set.

Once biscuits are cold, they really are not as appetizing as they were, so if you have left overs, put them, covered, in the microwave and nuke for one min. and serve immediately, or refresh in the oven for 10 min. at 350 degrees.

Biscuits take so little time to make from scratch and taste soooo good that it is really worthwhile to make them yourself.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

Once this season is over (and, one would hope, Ms. Palin and her hunting rifle will be put away to be played with some other time), fruitcake will again take its place in American humor along with jokes on wives, mothers-in-law, and George W. Bush’s prowess with a bicycle.

Frankly, I’ve never understood America’s seeming equation of fruitcake with the legs of couches, WMD and so forth – why use fruitcake when Lutefisk is at hand? (A Swedish-American co-worker from Minnesota described this traditional Swedish dish to me as “fish flavored soap.”)

Then again, I never had American commercial fruitcake until I was well grown.

I was brought up with my mother’s holiday dainties from the UK: Christmas “hard” pudding (“hard” as in soaked in brandy, lit on fire and served with an alcoholic sauce over the steamed cake-y pudding) and HER fruitcake, which is called Dundee Cake.

The problem with American commercial fruitcakes is that they seem to be prepared under the philosophy that they are cakes made out of glazed dried fruits, held together with a little bit of batter or syrup, instead of being a cake which just so happens to have some fruit in it. What people WANT is CAKE.

This is a cake that has fruit in it. It is a light batter and is a fruitcake that you will never, ever regift – as a matter of fact, I’ve seen people fight over the last piece of this stuff. My parents friends were so fond of it that the year that my mother had a heart attack and was in the hospital, I actually received a call from a concerned friend, an annual gift-ee, with the message, “Tell your mother that we miss her, that she must get better…and I guess this means we don’t get the Dundee Cake this year, eh?”

Here’s the recipe, straight from Glasgow:

Dundee Cake

As you can see, they are weighing everything out (which is what I did since I have a kitchen scale), but I’ve put approximate cup measures next for those who do not, plus a couple of suggestions.

Recipe Ingredients:

8oz Flour …………..regular all-purpose…..2 cups
6 oz Butter …………1 stick plus a couple of Tbs. Or a little more than ½ C. veg. shortening
5oz Caster/granulated sugar ………1 C. white cane sugar
4 Eggs
1oz Blanched almonds …………..1/4 cup of slivered almonds
1.5oz mixed peel ….they are talking about what we call ‘fruit cake mix’ here..1 C.
6oz each of currants, raisins, sultanas (seedless white raisins) …..I did not use this much – I used 1 C. of golden raisins and 1 C. of dried currents
Grated rind and juice of lemon …..I used ½ tsp. of dried grated lemon rind and 1/8 C. lemon juice
1 level teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons whisky ……….your choice, I didn’t use that; I used 1 tsp. of almond extract
2 tablespoons boiled milk and 1 tablespoon sugar….boiled milk? this is for the top, and I’d use a little fruit jelly cooked with 1 T. of sugar and 2 T of water

Method

Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl. When it is white and creamy, slowly add the four eggs (one at a time), plus a spoonful of flour with each, beating well all the time. Stir in the nuts and fruits. Add the rest of the flour, (sifted with the baking powder) and the whisky. Make sure the mixture is stirred well – right to the foot of the bowl. If it is too stiff, add a little milk.
(Note from Aunt Toby: the batter should have the same consistency as pound cake batter – definitely thicker than a regular cake batter, should come off the beaters really slowly with a big “glop.”)

Place mixture in an 8-inch greased and lined (with waxed paper) cake tin. Flatten the top with hands which are slightly wet. Cover with foil or greaseproof paper and bake at 325F (170C) or gas mark 3 for two hours. Halfway through, take off the foil and arrange the split almonds in concentric circles on the top of the cake. Check the cake with a skewer towards the end of cooking – if it is still wet in the middle, put it back for more cooking! 5/10 minutes before cooking is finished, brush the top with the sweetened milk to create a dry glaze. Keep in the tin for 15 minutes before turning out on a wired tray. Store in an airtight container.

These are the instructions straight off the site. I have to tell you that my dear old Mum never, ever “flattened the top with wet hands” or baked it covered in foil. Something she did do was to make them at Thanksgiving then used the period between that holiday and Christmas to ‘fortify’ the cakes several times by unwrapping them, pouring several tablespoons of whiskey or brandy on the top of the cake and then re-wrapping. This makes for a very strong-tasting cake – very adult. I just poured mine into the lined pan, scattered the nuts on top and baked it. Also, I baked mine in my oven for one hour, in a bread loaf pan and it worked really well.

Take the pan out of the oven …and resist…resist…resist…the temptation to start cutting into it. This stuff needs to rest and get cold. Then it slices really nicely and you can set it out on trays for tea time. Serve with coffee and a big pot of English tea – nothing else is necessary.

Lovely grub, as my mom used to say.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

If you are someone who feels you just can’t make bread – perhaps you’ve tried and it didn’t rise, or didn’t know when it was risen enough or baked it not long enough or too long, then go read through yesterday’s lesson:

Beginner’s Bread

Today’s bread is slightly different than yesterday’s example. This bread is slightly more nutritious. My ingredients list looks like this:
Wheat Flour….1/2 c. of whole wheat flour. The rest is regular flour (I’m using bread flour)
Yeast……………1T of dried yeast
Yeast ‘food’……..1 teaspoon of honey, because that is what I’ve got a whole lot of
Water……………Hottest out of the tap (if your water has been tested and is safe – otherwise, one part boiling water, two parts cold) – 1 C
Milk……………..1C – zapped for 1min. in the microwave so that it isn’t stone cold
Salt………………1 pinch
Fat………………..2 tablespoons of: olive oil or melted butter or other vegetable oil

Aunt Toby understands “Bread Fear.” We are all about the simple, controllable bread today – not the bread that you come back into the kitchen and find has taken over your stove, refrigerator and is crawling toward the dining room, looking hungrily at the dinette set. No, this is a friendly little bread that you can control and turn into things you and your family will love to eat.

Step 1: Preheat your oven a little bit so that your hand feels warm but not hot. Turn off the oven and close the door.

Step 2: Proof your yeast: Put a cup of the hottest water out of your tap (or one parts boiling water, two parts cold) into some sort of (heatproof!) vessel with 1teaspoon of whatever sweetener is your choice and 1tablespoon of yeast and stir that around. Put that into the stove for 10 min.

Step 3: Put 1 cup of milk (any type will do – full fat, 1%, you name it) into a microwave safe container and zap it for 1 min.

Step 4: After that 10 min. in the oven, take out the yeast/water/sugar. Sniff it and look at it. It should smell like beer and have a head like beer.

Step 5: Pour the milk and the water/yeast/sweetener into the big bowl.
Put in the flour. If you are using that ½ cup of whole wheat, put that in first; other wise, dump a good cup of bread flour in and slowly stir it around.. Put in your pinch of salt and your oil or melted fat.

Step 6: Keep adding flour and stirring it around until the dough (hey, you’re making dough!!) basically starts cleaning off the sides of the bowl. It will be sticky but it is now ready to knead.

Step 7: Clean off the kitchen counter. Dump a couple of cups of flour onto the counter and scrape out the dough from the bowl. Knead the dough and flour together. Your bread is ready to rise when it’s not sticky any more and you start seeing little blisters rising on the surface. Make your dough into a ball and put it in the bowl and cover. The ball of dough should be about half the size of the bowl.

Step 8: If your oven has cooled off, again heat it a little bit. Turn off the oven, put in the bowl and shut the door. Turn on the oven timer for 1 hour.

Go take a shower, clean up in the kitchen, read a book, play with your kids, watch a movie. Don’t mess with the oven or the dough. Leave it alone. After an hour, the dough should basically take up most of the bowl.

Take it out, punch it down, put out a little bit of flour on the counter top and scrape the dough out on top of it. Knead it a little bit with the flour to give it a bit of a rest.

You now have something you can turn into some really tasty things. Here is how I made the three things in the top picture. I divided the dough into thirds.

Loaf of bread: This is a small loaf. The bread pan is 7.5”x3.75”x2.25”. The bread dough rose 2” over the top of the pan, so the slices are going to be about 4”x4”. Grease the inside of the loaf pan and take one third of the dough. Roll it around on the counter a little bit until it is approx. the side of the inside of the pan and put it inside. Put that inside the oven. You’ll want to raise that for about 30 min.

Cinnamon rolls: Take the next third of the dough. Put a little flour on the counter, put the dough out on top of that and sprinkle that with a little flour also. Roll it out with a rolling pin until the dough is about ¼ in. thick. Oh, you don’t have a rolling pin? OK…do you have a wine bottle (full or empty)? Make sure it’s good and clean on the outside and use that instead. If the bottle is full, so much the better – when the goodies are done, you can also open the bottle of wine! Sprinkle all over the dough: cinnamon, a handful of sugar (brown is preferable, but white will do), chopped up nuts (if you like them; it’s not required), raisins (or currents or other dried fruit – even the stuff used for fruit cakes will do). Then, roll it up like your diploma and slice it to make rolls, about 1” thick. Place cut side down on a greased cookie sheet or in a cake pan. Now, put THAT into the oven to raise.

Italian finger rolls for the toaster oven: Take the next third of the dough, and roll that out like the cinnamon rolls (make sure the counter is clean – we don’t want bits of nuts and raisins in THESE rolls). Sprinkle this with dried oregano, basil and some parmesan or romano cheese. Roll up, cut into pieces and roll out a bit so that it’s about the size of a hot dog. Put on the greased baking sheet that came with your toaster oven and put THAT in the oven to raise. When the oven timer rings, all three of these should be raised enough. The bread will be way over the top of the pan; the cinnamon rolls will be little bit poofy and so will the finger rolls. Take all three pans out of the oven.

Set the oven temperature for 375 degrees and preheat. Set the temperature in the toaster oven for 350. There is usually no pre-heat on a toaster oven, so just leave that for a couple of min.

Toaster oven rolls: You’re going to have to watch this a bit. Toaster oven temperature controls are not as good as the ones in ovens. What you are looking for is browning on the outside and firming up, so, after 10 min., take out the pan and poke one of the rolls with your finger. If it gives, put the pan back and wait another 10 min. and check again. Twenty min. should be enough; 25 for sure.

Bread: If you are making a big loaf of bread (like, half the dough put into a pan bigger than the one I used), you can count on baking it for 30-45 min. at 375 degrees. The way you know it’s done is to take your fingers and flick it on the top. It should make a hollow sound. Take it out and put it on a cooling rack. If you don’t have a cooling rack, lay the pan on it’s side on a heatproof cutting board. Resist the urge to cut the loaf out of the pan and start eating it immediately – you will burn yourself. Show some restraint…and take out some butter or cheese.

Cinnamon rolls: These are as close to “fast food” as you can get: 15 min. baking at 375 degrees. Take them out and put the pan on a cooling rack. Again, resist the urge to dig in – that sugar gets very very hot and you will burn yourself.

Your biggest challenge will be waiting until they are cool enough to eat – use the time to clean up, pour the wine, and smell that heavenly smell.

Some “Aunt Toby Hints”: if you are going to make your own bread, you may as well “make every calorie count.” Make sure you work as much nutritional advantage into that dough that you can. And as readers know, I am a big proponent of getting the most protein “bang for the buck” as possible. American “general purpose flours” are actually not very good – unlike Canadian general purpose flours, which test out at 14% protein. Ours are really quite bereft. So, how do you put protein into your breads? Put one or more of these in right at the beginning.
Substitute this for some of the flour:
Dried Milk or Dried Dairy Whey……………up to 1 cup of flour
Soy flour………………………………………….no more than 1/3 c. (it gets very “beany”)
And add-ins like: chopped or slivered nuts, sunflower and other seeds, oat meal

Another thing to remember is “keeping qualities.” There are ways to make your bread stay fresh longer. Commercial bakers use all sorts of additives; we can use honey or molasses as a sweetener – they are both hygroscopic.
Always put in a couple of tablespoons of fat

For richer dough than this one for sweet rolls, heat your milk with a half a stick of butter (make sure when you put it with the yeast that it is not too hot), put in 1-2 eggs and, depending on whether or not you will be filling it (like with the cinnamon rolls), ¼-1/2 c. of sugar or honey.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

To make yeast dough (which is what everything from bread, rolls, and pizza is made of), you need only the following things:
Bread or general purpose flour, dried yeast, sweetener of some kind to feed the yeast, hot water, salt, and a little fat.
You will also need 2 bowls:
One to mix in(something the size of a mixer bowl) and
One that is larger(grease the inside with oil or shortening).
You will also need a couple of wooden spoons and a rubber scraper.

If you have these ingredients, you can make: Basic white sandwich bread, French bread, Cuban bread and pizza. It’s not a terribly exciting sort of bread, but it is a very good basic bread and will give you the skills necessary so that you can bake other more interesting things. Here is how it works:

Mix up the sweetener (honey, sugar, molasses), 1T of dried yeast and a cup of hot water and put in a warm place like the inside of your stove if you’ve heated it a little bit. Go away for 15 min. When you come back, it should look like the picture (frothy!) and smell like beer. If it does not, put it back for another 10 min. If it still isn’t like that – throw it away and go back to the store and get a fresher packet of yeast (the expiration date will be on there).

If you’ve got that nice beer smell and foam, then you have now “proofed” the yeast – you’ve proven that the yeast is good and is going to work.

Pour this and another cup of hot water into your mixing bowl along with a pinch of salt and 2 tablespoons of melted butter or olive oil or some other vegetable oil.

Pour in a cup of flour and mix this all up. See how it looks and smells. Keep putting in flour, a cup at a time and mix it up. The more you mix it, the more the gluten in the flour will get developed. When the dough starts to clean off the sides of the bowl when you mix it around (by now, your arm may start to hurt), it’s time to knead it.

Kneading does two things: The warmth from your hands develops the gluten AND as you add more flour, the dough gets less sticky. Pour a cup of flour on your clean kitchen counter and dump the dough on top. Pour some more flour on top of the dough so your hands don’t stick. What you will do is basically fold, punch down, roll up, and work the dough and work the flour into the dough. Keep doing that until you start seeing little blisters form on the outside of the dough – it’s ready to raise the dough.

Preheat your oven at the lowest temp you can – leave that on until when you stick your hand in, it feels good and hot, but not so hot that you can’t keep your hand in for the count of 5 or so. If it is, leave the door open for a min. Turn off the heat in the oven and shut the door.

Take your dough and put it into the other, greased bowl – turn it over so that both sides now have a little bit of grease on them and cover the bowl with a dish towel, plastic wrap, and put into the oven. Close the door and set the timer for 45 min.

Go away and do something else. When the timer dings, open the door – your dough should now look like this – it almost fills the bowl!!

If it doesn’t, put it back for another 15-20 min. Take out your dough, punch it down and put it back on the kitchen counter with a little flour and knead it a little bit. Now is time to bake it.

Put your hand back into the oven – still nice and warm? If not, heat it a little bit like before. Grease whatever baking container you are going to use for the bread: bread pan, cookie sheet, whatever.

Take your dough and squeeze it into the form you want. If you want to put it into a loaf pan, spread it out on the counter (your hands will do) in about the length of the pan. Roll it up and put it into the pan.

Let’s say you don’t have a loaf pan. You can still bake this, free form style. Grease a cookie sheet or even a doubled up heavy aluminum foil piece in about the size of a cookie sheet. Take your dough and make it into any shape you want: a big flattened ball, French Bread sticks, animals…whatever you want. Put it on the sheet.

Put it into the oven and set the timer for 30 min. It should rise nicely. Take it out.
Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees F. Put in your pan of bread and bake for 30 min.

Check the bread – you can tell if it is done by rapping the top of it with your fingers. If it makes a hollow sound, it is done. If it does not, leave it in for another 10-15 min.

Take the pan out. If you have a cooling rack, put the pan on that. If you do not and are using a loaf pan, lay the loaf pan with the bread in it on its side on a (non-plastic!) cutting board. If you are doing this on a cookie sheet or aluminum foil, then leave it on the top of the stove to cool.

Control yourself – this stuff is going to be hot for a while. Give it a good 30 minutes to cool off before you try to dive in. Take out the bread from the loaf pan by running a knife around the inside edge of the pan and giving the pan a good rap on the counter. The bread should pop right out. With free form, run a spatula underneath it and pick it up. There you have it – bread for you!! Let it get completely cold before you put it into a plastic bag to store it in your fridge.

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)