Monthly Archives: September 2010

Easy Chicken Cacciatore

Posted on by
1

Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

My picture doesn’t do this dish justice. We very happily ate this for several meals in a row, and it is a dish I will be coming back to again and again.

Cacciatore is a classic Italian hunter-style stew made with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and, usually, wine, cooked long and slow. True to this book’s style this is a 30-minute recipe that delivers a hearty meal. It may not be traditional cacciatore, but I, for one, don’t care. If it tastes good and is easy to make, I’m happy.

The dish starts out by browning boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Once the meat is browned, it is transfered to a plate, and onions, red bell pepper and mushrooms are added to the pan and cooked until slightly browned. Garlic, tomatoes and wine are stirred in, then the chicken breasts are added back to the pan, and the whole thing simmers until the chicken is cooked through.

The chicken breasts were very moist and flavorful. The sauce was slightly sweet and had a lot of texture from the red peppers and chunks of mushrooms. My only quibble is that the sauce was quite dry. Next time I’d add more wine or chicken stock. I served this over rice one day and quinoa another. It seemed to pair particularly well with the quinoa, the robust flavors of the stew melding nicely with the grassiness of the quinoa.

Peach Melba Cake with Raspberry Cream

Posted on by
5

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

I’m so done with this book. I’m done with three-layer cakes and fillings and frostings. These last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to pick a recipe to make. At this point, the cakes all seem alike, and they all seem like sooooo much trouble to make.

Right now I want simple. I want savory, not sweet. And I don’t want three different components to have to make. I’m whining a bit, I know.

So, vanilla cake with a peach mousse filling and a raspberry-whipped cream frosting. I have to admit that I was surprised by the cake part of this recipe. I was expecting dry and bland. Instead I got moist. The crumb of this cake is coarser than the other cakes I’ve made out of this book, but it stood up to the filling and frosting quite well. The cake is a cream cake which simply means that whipped cream is the fat of choice instead of butter.

To make the cake, cream is whipped until soft peaks form. To the whipped cream, vanilla, sugar and eggs are added. Cake flour, baking powder and salt are folded into the whipped cream mixture, followed by a bit of buttermilk. As usual, I decreased the amount of leavening from 3 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder to 2 teaspoons. My cakes were perfectly flat, no domes, no craters.

The filling is a peach mousse, and here’s where most of my problems were. The author never tells you how much peach puree you should end up with after thawing frozen peaches and blending them to a liquid. To this peach liquid you add more whipped cream and gelatin. My peach mousse wouldn’t set up, so I ended up having to add more gelatin to it. I suspect I had too much peach liquid to begin with. I had to assemble the cake in a springform pan because the peach mousse was so runny. Eventually it set up, but it took several hours in the refrigerator.

The raspberry cream is pretty simple to make. You thaw frozen raspberries, cook them until they begin to fall apart, then puree them and strain out the seeds. Some of this raspberry puree is stirred into whipped cream, which is then used to frost the cake. Once again, I didn’t have nearly enough frosting to cover the cake. The recipe calls for 1 cup of cream to be whipped. I ended up making almost double that just to cover the cake.

In the end, I had a decent cake. It didn’t have the strong, zippy flavors I was hoping for. Both the peach mousse and the raspberry cream flavors were muted, but it was still tasty. The recipe has you hold a bit of both the peach and raspberry puree and use them to decorate the plate. Forget decorating. I used the leftover purees to spoon over the cake and get the flavor I was looking for. This cake doesn’t hold well. By the next morning, the raspberry whipped cream had started weeping and the cake was sitting in its own raspberry-flavored lake.

I may come back to this book at a later date, after I’ve had time to recover from multiple-component cakes. I didn’t have too many success with this book. The ones that stand out are the ice-cream cake, the maple-walnut cake, the coconut cake and the sour cream-chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting.

Janhagels

Posted on by
1

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Jan… what?

Yeah, that’s what I said. Apparently Janhagel is Dutch for really good cookies made with butter, almonds and cinnamon.

These are deceptively simple. Just a few ingredients produce a cookie that is both crisp and chewy, sort of like a cross between shortbread and sugar cookies. The base of the cookie is a shortbread-like mixture of flour, butter, sugar, vanilla extract and almond extract. One single, lonely egg yolk is the liquid that binds these cookies together.

The dough is pressed into the bottom of a cookie sheet and brushed with an egg white. Sliced almonds are sprinkled over the dough, followed by a cinnamon-sugar mixture. The cookies are then baked until the top is golden brown. The cookies are sliced into bars, rectangles, diamonds, etc., while still warm, then left to cool completely.

With so few, plain ingredients, I wasn’t sure what to expect with these. Boy was I surprised. They are very buttery with a pronounced almond flavor. The edges got quite crispy, but towards the middle of the pan, the cookies became more chewy. And the cinnamon! I hadn’t realized how well almond and cinnamon flavors went together. Before I knew it, I had eaten three or four squares, for testing purposes, of course.

Hearty Potato Leek Soup with Kielbasa

Posted on by
2

Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Fall has hit North Idaho, bringing with it falling pine needles, an end to my sad little tomato plants and a craving for warm soups and home-made bread. Who am I to resist?

This soup is easy, easy easy. You start off by browning some kielbasa sausage. That gets set aside while a couple of pounds of cleaned, chopped leeks are added to the pan, along with butter and red potatoes. Once the vegetables have started to soften, a little bit of flour is stirred in, followed by chicken stock. As the soup cooks, the flour starts to thicken it. Once everything is tender, part of the soup is pureed to give it more thickness and body. To finish it off, the browned sausage is stirred back in and heated through.

When I told Bryan we would be having potato leek soup for dinner, he said he didn’t like leeks — this coming from a guy who eats raw onions with gusto. After a couple of spoonfuls, though, he decided that leeks weren’t too bad, and in fact, he did like them.

This soup is comforting and filling. I wasn’t a big fan of the sausage and would either cut down the amount or replace it with something else, maybe some bacon or cubed pork loin.

Grilled Honey-Mustard Chicken

Posted on by
1

Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I’ve never been a honey-mustard sort of person, preferring ranch to all else. While this recipe isn’t going to persuade me to change camps, it is pretty darn good.

But what else would you expect from this book?

This is nothing more than grilled chicken topped with a sauce made with Dijon mustard, honey and cayenne pepper. The remaining sauce is mixed with sour cream and used as a dip. The recipe also calls for fresh tarragon, but I didn’t have it and didn’t miss it.

Did I mention that the recipe is dead simple, too?

We used this all week on other meats, such as pork chops, and it was just as good. Another winner.

Chocolate Macaroon Bars

Posted on by
1

Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Do you like coconut? Do you like chocolate? Do you like your brownies dense and moist with just a bit of chew? If you answered yes to all of the above, you must make these, the sooner the better. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll have friends with you when you make them. Otherwise, you might end up eating them all, gaining five pounds and hating me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I think these are about the easiest recipe I’ve made out of this book. The only hard part is finding the unsweetened flaked coconut. Fortunately, my local health food store had it in bulk. Don’t even try to make these bar cookies with sweetened flaked coconut. They’ll be waaaaaay to sweet.

The recipe starts out by melting butter, bittersweet and unsweetened chocolates together. Flavorings such as rum, vanilla and coconut extract are stirred in, along with sugar and eggs. Finally, a bit of flour and the afore mentioned coconut are added. With no leavening, the batter didn’t rise at all, but produced moist, slightly chewy, dense bar cookies. The coconut flavor is pretty strong, but not overwhelming, and the flaked coconut gives the bars a nice texture.

The recipe instructs you to make a chocolate glaze and pour it over the bar cookies. This is kind of like adding whipped cream to ice cream. It isn’t a bad thing, but it is totally unnecessary. Unless you really like chocolate, then it is completely necessary.

Quick Indian Turkey Curry with Potatoes

Posted on by
1

Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I’m getting tired of coming up with adjectives to describe how good the recipes from this book are. For this one, a tasty curry of chicken (because I couldn’t find turkey cutlets) and potatoes, fill in your own description.

This recipe was ____________ .

Just about anything good you come up with will fit.

You start out by browning chunks of poultry in a large skillet. Once browned, the chicken is set aside while the curry sauce is brought together in the same skillet. An onion is softened first, then a jalapeno, garlic, ginger and curry powder are added. Cubed potatoes and water are stirred into the onion mixture and the whole thing simmers until the potatoes are tender. Finally, the cooked poultry is added back to the pot to warm. To tone down the curry flavor and thicken the sauce a bit, yogurt is stirred in at the end. I followed the recipe recommendation and served the curry over rice.

Besides substituting chicken for the turkey, I made some other slight adjustments. Neither Bryan nor I like fresh ginger very much, so instead of using a tablespoon of the stuff, I only used about a teaspoon. This gave the curry a very, very mild ginger flavor, more of a background note then a punch to the face. I also used half of a jalapeno instead of the whole called for. I’m a wimp when it comes to spicy heat.

While this wasn’t Bryan’s favorite dish out of the book, I really loved it. It was so easy (one skillet!) but really delivered on flavor. You could easily make this vegetarian by leaving out the meat. The dish, served over rice, would still be quite filling. Maybe it was a good thing that Bryan was so-so about the curry; I’ve been happily eating leftovers for lunch all week.

Ice Cream Birthday Cake

Posted on by
3

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynn

There were no birthdays in my family this week, which is fortunate as I wouldn’t have shared this cake with them anyway. This is one of those cakes where I wanted to protectively curl my arm around it, while snarling and jabbing a sharp fork at anybody who dared come too close.

“Mine, all mine. My precioussssssss.”

You can go in all sorts of directions with this cake. The basic structure is a simple, one-bowl chocolate cake sandwiching any flavor of ice cream you want, capped off with a thick coating of chocolate ganache. For my ice cream layer, I made a vanilla gelato mixed with crushed Oreo cookies. Sometimes I’ve found that the cake part of ice cream cakes gets dry in the freezer, and the whole thing turns into a rock. But even after spending the night in the freezer, the cake was easy to cut through (running a knife under hot water for a few minutes makes cutting easy), and the cake part stayed softish. No dry cake here.

This ice cream cake hit all the right marks for a warm summer day. It was creamy and cool, with a nice chocolate punch. So the next time Bryan starts singing the song from the commercial of a well-known ice cream shop that sells ice cream cakes, I know how to shut him up fast.

And that’s usually not easy to do.