That was all in the service of science, of course (which is why the ‘o cookies’ disappeared like snow off a dike by Tuesday…). Today’s discussion is much more up my alley because frankly, Aunt Toby doesn’t like having to fuss with all of that. Any baked good that requires that level of diddling around with doesn’t get made at Chez Siberia very often (read that: the only time. If anyone lusts after homemade ‘o cookies’, they will have to make them). But, I digress.

At this point in the year, people have been fiddling around with cookie cutters, jimmies and egg wash for the past several weeks, tinning things up to give as gifts and so on. People have been eating decorated cookies since Thanksgiving and will continue to do so until they run out, which will probably be after New Years. If you have missed out on this ‘cookie steamroller’, good for you. If you want to give a gift that someone will thank you for in March, read on.

Forget the damn Santa cookies; make a pound cake and give THAT as a gift. Real from scratch (Sorry Ms ‘only from boxes and cans’ TV cooking person with the cakes made out of commercial store cakes) pound cake is not only heaven on earth; it is so damned useful as a base for desserts and goodies that having at least one in the freezer at any given moment is almost a requirement at Chez Siberia.

So, what can you do with a frozen pound cake?
Totally Obvious Dessert Solution #1: Slice the frozen cake up, plop a scoop of the best ice cream you can find with an appropriate sauce (home made of course but if you lack the time and dinner guests are in the driveway, when you scream into the phone, “so and so’s strawberry ice cream” you can also mention “so and so’s thus and such topping’ and a pint of heavy whipping cream).

Totally Obvious Dessert solution #2 (but only during the months when you can get local fruit): Take local fruit or berries, wash and slice up if they need slicing up, wash if they don’t, put into a small sauce pan with a teensy bit of water, a couple of tablespoons of sugar and heat slowly. Do not stir. When the fruit starts to release its juices, turn off. Serve with the aforementioned whipped up pint of heavy whipping cream which you will have added a teensy bit of vanilla or almond extract to and a tablespoon of confectioner’s sugar.

Less Totally Obvious Dessert Solution #1 (not for when there are sudden guests in the driveway unless you keep things in the fridge): Trifle. This is genius if you are good at making your own egg custards. Make up a recipe of lovely custard (the pan sort not the bake in the oven sort). Layer chunked up pound cake in a glass bowl (the visual is a big deal with this; don’t ask me why – it all ends up in the same place), with custard, fruit, cake, custard, fruit, etc. If you are feeding adults and are feeling generous, you can soak the fruit in a little brandy before you layer it in. If you have kids in the crowd…don’t.

Completely Obvious Secret When-you-need-something-sweet and nothing else is available: Take a slice of pound cake and spread with any of the following if you have them in the fridge:
Good fruit-based (home made if possible) jam or preserves.
Dairy –based frostings or fillings (cream cheese, sour cream frosting, etc.)
Peanut or other nut butter if you are feeling virtuous; Nutella(tm) if you are not.

Cut in half, stick both halves together. Cake Sandwich.
At 10 p.m. at night with a cup of tea, this is heaven, I tell you…heaven.

Totally Fancy “How Did You Do That?” Dessert: Slice up the cake. Layer 2-3 slices with jam, frosting, filling or whatever sort you desire. Cut the slices into sticks. All together now? Good. Get some sort of candy melt stuff. Good dipping chocolate from a restaurant supply, wedding cake supply or bakery supply house or even those wafers that you can get from chain craft stores. Melt according to directions and with the sticks on something like a rack over waxed paper, carefully spoon over the coating over the sticks. Voila! Extremely fancy homemade Petits Fours. Two of those on a plate with a cup of something will impress everyone.

So, there you go. Why wouldn’t anyone have at least one frozen homemade pound cake in their freezer? It’s almost un-American not to have one, right? So, do your patriotic duty. Make the recipe. You can be generous and give both away or hold onto one for yourself.

Pound Cake – this makes TWO loaves, so make sure you have two loaf pans to do it with.
(from the extremely grease-stained and written on pages of my cookbook – the original recipe is Fanny’s; the changes are mind)

Ingredients:
2 sticks of unsalted butter
1 cup of vegetable shortening
2 cups of sugar
10-12 eggs (depending on size – the smaller number is for extra large)
4 cups of cake flour
1 tsp of baking powder
2 tsp of vanilla
1 cup of milk or other liquid (orange juice for example)

How to:
Preheat the oven to 325 and grease two bread loaf pans
Sift together 4 cups of cake flour and the baking powder
Beat up the butter until it is mushy and soft, then add the vegetable shorting to cream together.
Add the sugar a little bit at a time. Beat up. Then add the vanilla and beat that.
Add the eggs 2 at a time and beat after every addition. This is going to be ‘sloppy’ but not liquid-y.
Add the sifted flour/baking powder a half cup at a time, adding a little bit of liquid every single time. The last addition should be liquid.

This is where things get weird with pound cakes. This is NOT going to be coming off the beaters like a standard layer cake batter. This is heavy and thick. You should have a batter that almost doesn’t come off the beaters at all – it should come off in a fluffy clump. It is lighter than the density and texture of something like banana bread, but not by much. Fluffy but dense (we’re getting into the woods here in terms of this, but trust me on this one. You will definitely scrape the beaters to get this off).

Divide up the batter between the two pans. Don’t second guess yourself and think you have too much and need to throw the extra into a Pyrex™ bowl to bake it. Two loaf pans. That’s it.

Bake at 325 degrees F for at least an hour. It usually takes mine about an hour and 15-20 minutes. Depending on your altitude and so on, your mileage may vary. The top is going to crack (accept it). Make sure the centers are all done with the toothpick test. When firm and done, take the pans out and cool on a rack. When cool, THEN use a knife around the edge and take out. Let cool all the way, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and aluminum foil. Gift wrap if you are feeling virtuous and give away. Otherwise, stick in your own freezer (Mwa-ha-ha!)

Variations on a theme: chocolate pound cake

All else is the same except for the flour:
3 ½ cups of cake flour
½ cup of baking cocoa

That’s the only difference.

Happy holidays. Bon Appetit!

It all comes down to fat. Or, rather, fat that is solid at room temperature versus fat that is either semi-solid at room temperature or liquid at room temperature. This is actually, in its own way, the same exact discussion and issue that is the foundation of pie crusts, biscuits, filo and other forms of puff pastry and so on. Everyone have their notebooks at the ready? Good.

For a nice, neat overview of fats, go here: Fat
The ‘money quote’ though on fats is this: Fats (fatty acids) which have what are referred to as long chains (that is, they have more connections with carbon and hydrogen atoms) have a higher melting point and yield more energy because there are more connections being broken up. At the same time, because in saturated fats, the carbon and hydrogen atoms are paired (so that there are no dangling carbons or hydrogens lollygagging around), the fatty acids can arrange themselves in a very efficient and closely packed stack – this gives them a physical stability in terms of all temperatures up to their melting points. That’s why they are solid at room temperatures. One of the interesting chemical and physical characteristics of baking with solid fats (such as butter and lard) is that because of this stacking characteristic; even when you bake them, they maintain their physical structure for a very long time before the fat will melt into the baked goods. This is how flaky pastry, pie crust, biscuits, etc. are achieved: The fat in the dough maintains its structure just long enough to hold the various layers of the dough apart. They get ‘set’ by the baking and the fat then hits its melting point and becomes part of the baked good.

So, where does cookie meet chemistry here?

Depending on how you like your cookies, the choice of fat in the recipe can completely help or defeat you. Aunt Toby, for years, despaired of ever making a decent chocolate chip cookie until I was advised by a coworker, when I described my problem (constant shattering), to divide up the fat in the recipe and do one half as butter and the other half as….vegetable shortening. Hunh? Although my coworker only knew from HER baking experience that mixing vegetable shortening would make the cookies more ‘flexible’ (if you like your cookies chewy and soft, this is where you get the chemical structure to do it, plus the relationship between the fats and the amount of sugar you are using), and they would not shatter when lifted off the baking pan with a spatula. On the other hand, if you like to make Christmas/cookie cutter cookies, flexible is not what you want.

Here is an example of a cookie (and I admit that this is my first time through with these cookies). I was reading someone’s comments regarding ‘sinful pleasures’ at the holiday time and how she can only get a certain cookie product from Trader Joe’s at Christmas. This was described as TJ’s version of the famous and ubiquitous chocolate wafer cookie (not only national brands but also seemingly every large grocery store chain has their own versions of these, but we will all know them as “O” cookies, to protect the innocent). Now, this holiday version of the cookie has ground up peppermint candies in them and this lady just doted on them. I went wandering around looking for a recipe for said cookies – no luck. But I did find various versions of ‘the O cookie’ and decided to give the whole thing a shot.

Now, in your mind’s eye (or mouth as the case might be), recall ‘the O cookie” – shape, flavor, mouth feel, cookie texture. Right? Got that? The chocolate wafers are relatively hard and crunchy; the filling is vanilla flavored.

Filling is filling, but how is the wafer texture achieved? Go back to the top and read again. If we want to reproduce that same crunch, we’ve got to use a fat that is solid at room temperatures; otherwise, we’ve got a ‘cakey’ not a cookie.

My recipe, courtesy of goodness knows how many blogs and sites on the internet:
Oreo(tm) cookies from scratch
Cookie Ingredients:
• 1 1/4 C all-purpose flour
• 1/2 C unsweetened cocoa
• 1 t baking soda
• 1/4 t baking powder
• 1/4 t salt………………………….I did not use salt
• 1 C sugar
• 1/2 C plus 2 T butter, room temperature
• 1 large egg
1. In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, cocoa, baking soda and powder, salt, and sugar.
2. Beat in the butter and the egg. Continue mixing until dough comes together in a mass.
3. Take rounded teaspoons of batter and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet approximately 2 inches apart. With moistened hands, slightly flatten the dough. (I found that while the dough wasn’t sticky enough to roll, I could press it flat with my hands like the recipe said and then use cookie cutters to cut perfect circles. If you just care about the taste, then there is no need for the cookie cutters. Also, remember this is a chance to get creative and use all kinds of cookie cutters.)
4. Bake for 9 minutes at 375 F. Set on a rack to cool.

I played it strictly by the book here – but I doubled the recipe and only used two sticks of butter. I found that I needed to add some water at the end in order to get the dough to come together properly. I added several teaspoons of water, one teaspoon at a time. The issue might have been the temperature of the dough – our kitchen is pretty chilly.

In terms of a filling, I went out on a limb and did a standard cream cheese frosting:
1 big block of cream cheese or Neuchatel cheese
4 cups of sifted confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp. Vanilla flavoring
Beat hard until combined and fluffy. Since you want this to set up in the cookies, we don’t want a really fluffy icing, but then again, we don’t want something that is too stiff either. You mileage may vary in terms of needing to add more sugar to this. The amount of filling per cookie depends on the actual baked size of the wafers; I ended up using about a half of a cutlery-drawer teaspoon in each cookie. That’s enough to fill the cookie and not squeeze out when you put the other cookie on top.

So, how did this work? Well, it worked like a charm and frankly, one of the secrets to this whole ‘non-shattering’ cookie thing is using parchment paper on the baking sheets. Great stuff and definitely worth it; I would not try to substitute waxed paper for this. But it saves on having the wash up the baking sheets afterwards.

The 9 minutes is exactly right. No trying to figure out or fudge it. Take the baking sheets out at 9 minutes (I did one sheet at a time), put out to cool and take off the wafers and put on a rack. They set up and get hard and crispy right away.

This dough definitely is not something that I could roll out and use a cutter for. It was great as a ball cookie dough, though. I rolled about a teaspoon (the one in the cutlery drawer; not the one that you use to measure ingredients with) of dough between my hands and then pressed out each ball into a circle using a spatula and put them on the parchment and baked. Worked really well. If someone has a great chocolate-roll-out-and-cut cookie recipe, that would probably work much better if you want to use a round cutter. By the way, the standard size of ‘the O cookie” is about 1.5 inches across.

Now, let’s have some fun. One of the things I found when I searched around on the Internet for ‘the O cookie’ is that there is this whole industry surrounded home confectionary and baked goods that involves doing things with ‘the O cookie”. There are businesses out there that make molds and forms so that bakers can make ‘chocolate covered’ ‘o cookies’ etc. It’s amazing. But once I made these cookies, just for kicks, I got some of the meltable candy wafers (these come in various colors and flavors and I’m sure there are millions of people out there who know about this and who use them all the time; I missed the memo) and did a little bit of decorating the cookies. I dipped, splotched, and generally had fun; someone with far better eye and practice than I can produce some really great confections with these homemade (and better made, too, I might add, since there are no preservatives or high fructose corn syrup or whatevers in these) cookies.

And what about the Trader Joe’s cookies? Ah – well, since I’ve never had them, I had no guidelines, so I took some of the green and white mints, put them through the blender to make a fine powder and mixed that in with some of the filling. It made the filling a little bit stiffer – if I’d had peppermint flavoring or peppermint liqueur, I’d have put a teaspoon of that to loosen the filling up a little bit and give it even more ‘minty freshness’. As it is, the comments from my judges (the DH and The Boy) were that you could tell they were minty but it was not a flavor that was ‘in front’ of the product, if you know what I mean.

This is also NOT a quick item to do. So, if you are stuck indoors this winter with kids who are over 5 years of age and want an activity that will be fun, educational, and keep them occupied for several hours (with some incentive at the end of eating them), this is a great project.

Bon appétit!

But…you never know….that stuff is pretty yeasty smelling. So I tried an experiment. I frankly bought the cheapest beer I could find at the grocery store (no Oomegang Belgian Dark or anything like that), opened up a couple of bottles and left them open all night to try to make it flat. Next morning – no good. Still bubbly as ever, so I poured it into a big glass measuring cup and zapped it for 30 seconds and stirred it up. And I did that again. At that point, it was warm enough. I measured out two exactly the same amounts of the beer into bowls, added one teaspoon of sugar to each and a half a cup of flour to each and put them in a warm oven to raise. Then, I added one tablespoon of dry yeast to one of the bowls.

Well, NOW we know. Warm beer/sugar/flour? Zippo.

So, there I was with a bowl full of very bubbly starter so I decided to make bread out of it. I warmed up the rest of the beer (the total volume must have been close to 16-18 ounces of beer) and produced this:

Beer Bread With Multigrains

16-18 ounces of beer, opened and warmed up
1 Tbs. Yeast
1 tsp of sugar, honey, or molasses
½ cup of flour (I use bread flour but regular basic flour will work)

Stir up and put into a warm place to rise – this will take about 10-15 minutes. Should be very bubbly.

Put into a big bowl with 1 cup of whole wheat flour and stir. Add enough regular or bread flour until you have a sticky dough.

Add: 1/3-1/2 cup of multigrain hot cereal (if you don’t have that you can add other whole grains that you’ve got – amaranth, grits, quinoa, whatever)
Add ¼ cup of flax meal or flax seeds (flax meal is actually better for you; crushing it up allows for better absorption)

Mix all of this together and turn out onto a floured board or countertop. Put more flour on top and knead until it is no longer sticky at all. Put into a big greased bowl and let rise in a warm place for 45 minutes.
Punch down, turn out on your floured board or counter and knead a little bit. Grease up two cookie sheets and divide the dough in half, forming each into a ball. Taking a sharp knife, make one cut straight through the top. Put back into the oven and let rise for 30 min. Take out of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Bake for 30-45 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow when you rap on them with your knuckles or a knife handle. Take out, let cool, slice and enjoy.
(Yeast micrograph courtesy of Dr. Maxim Zakhartsev, Dr. Sergei Rarozin, Carmen Momeu, International University Bremen, Germany)

Unlike their plant cousins, the apple, pears have a very very short window of wonderfulness. Which makes them actually very special but it also makes them darned hard to keep and is the reason why, if you look at the ingredients on ‘juice drinks’ and ‘cocktails’ on the shelf in your “groceria”, the first ingredient is going to be…pear juice.

If you’ve got a whole lotta pears that are going to get past their best before you can get them to the fresh eating market, you have to do something with them and turning them into juice is actually a terrific idea because when pears are at this point, they are SWEET and make a great juice base.

But I digress. Pears are coming into the markets right now. Do not pick on color. Pick up those babies and give them a big long ‘I’m drinking in all your phernomes right here’ sniff. If they smell like pears, even if they are still green, get them now. The flesh will be firm; they won’t be slimy, and you’ll be able to not only eat them out of hand but also do nifty stuff like bake with them. Our Elder Daughter bought a bushel of pears this week and brought us over half. The DH and I cut up a bunch and put them into the dehydrator, and another 1/3 went got sliced, put onto cookie sheets, into the freezer and then into plastic bags. The other 1/3 has been sitting in the fridge for people to eat, and I noticed this morning that..well, people were not eating them as quickly as they needed to be eaten. They were definitely starting to look like they were going to go into the ‘yellow’ stage over the weekend, when our son suggested “Pear Crisp”.

Pear Crisp? Well, anything you can make with apples, you can make with pears. And we’ve been known to throw the odd lonely pear into an apple crisp before. Even with this many pears, it would not fill out big baking pan (anything with ‘crisp’ at the end of it is fair game for breakfast in our house so making the BIG baking pan of it insures that everyone gets their fill of this.

So, here is our Crisp, With Pears:

Greased baking pan

Peel and chunk, slice, etc. pears (even if they are a little bit hard, this will work) into the pan

Dust with ½ tsp of powdered ginger

If the pan is not at least half full of fruit, peel and cut up whatever apples you have to fill it out. Good choices are Northern Spys, Empires, other firm, crunchy, cooking apples (Macs are not really good with this; they get mushy)

If you put apples in, sprinkle about 1 tsp of cinnamon on it. If the fruit is not particularly sweet (like if you use Spys), then add ¼ – 1/3 cup of sugar (depending on how sweet you like this sort of thing)

Set your oven to 375 degrees F

Crisp topping: Mix up in a separate bowl–
1 c. of flour (if you want to give it some oomph, add ¼ c. of wheat germ if you’ve got it)
1 c. of brown sugar
1 T. cinnamon
Cut up one stick of butter or margarine and using a pastry blender, combine until you get small crumbs.
Add 1 C of oatmeal (we like thick cut, but whatever you’ve got)
Sprinkle over the fruit and shake the pan a little bit to settle
Bake for 45 min until bubbly.

If you want to add some protein to this (besides drinking a glass of milk with it), you can add to the topping when you mix it:
½ cup of dried milk
1/3 cup of hemp protein powder
¼ cup of soy flour

Enjoy.

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 2x2x1 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.