Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

We are broccoli eaters around here, so I was intrigued by this recipe when I saw it. You cut up a couple heads of broccoli into bite-sized pieces, then toss them with salt and red wine vinegar. While the broccoli marinates, you heat olive oil with garlic and cumin seed, stir in sesame oil and a pinch of red pepper flakes and pour the whole thing over the broccoli and vinegar and let it sit for an hour to so at room temperature. The hot oil softens the florets just enough that they aren’t raw crunchy, and the vinegar adds a welcome acidity, cutting the richness of the oil. Although the broccoli will continue to soften as it sits, it will remain perfectly toothsome for several days in the refrigerator.

This is a nice change from my usual roasting or steaming method. I did have to add about twice as much vinegar as the recipe called for as there wasn’t enough to coat my broccoli, but I found that I liked having a stronger vinegar flavor. I’ve made this twice, and found that the smaller I cut the broccoli, the softer it gets. The second time I made this, I cut down a bit on the amount of cumin called for and still thought there was too much. Don’t leave out the red pepper flakes. They add just a touch of heat that contrasts nicely with the cold broccoli.

Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with mac and cheese. I love it because it is cheesy pasta. I hate it because I usually eat too much of it. Unfortunately, this recipe isn’t going to help me resolve my dilemma. This was so very, very good and so very, very easy to make. It is “drier” than most mac and cheeses I’ve made, and the only cheese in it is about a half of a cup of Parmesan. Yet, the combination of bacon, parmesan, peas and lemon juice is delightful.

This dish comes together fast. In fact, I had to take the sauce off the heat because the pasta wasn’t quite done. You start out by sauteing a couple of chopped up slices of bacon until they are crispy. Next you stir in frozen peas and cook for a minute to defrost them. Then you add a bit of creme fraiche or heavy cream (I went with the heavy cream), lemon juice and the cooked pasta. After stirring everything together until the pasta is coated, you add the Parmesan and salt and pepper. More stirring until the cheese is melted, and then lots of eating.

Seems almost too easy to be good, but it was. I did have to add more heavy cream because my pasta seemed too dry, and when I reheated it the next day, I added a bit more. We liked the dish so much, that I made it again, a few days later, and added some leftover flank steak instead of the bacon (and left out the peas because Bryan decided that peas didn’t belong in mac and cheese).

This will definitely become my go-to macaroni and cheese recipe. Forget the blue box.

Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

You should have seen Bryan’s face light up when I told him we were having chicken fingers for supper. I’m pretty sure this guy has eaten more chicken strips/fingers than anybody alive. Then his eyes narrowed and he started asking questions.

Bryan: Are they deep-fried?

Me: No, baked.

Bryan: Are they breaded?

Me: No, but there are bread crumbs involved.

Bryan: Are they even chicken?

Me: Well, no. They are ground turkey, but it is all poultry.

Then he walked away, shaking his head and muttering some not-so-very-nice things under his breath.

In the headnotes to this recipe, Clark talks about wanting to make chicken fingers for her daughter that were spicy, nutritious and something that adults would like. So she modeled them after lamb kibbe, a turkish dish that mixes ground lamb with aromatic spices such as cinnamon, cumin and allspice. You take a pound or so of ground chicken (or turkey, if your supermarket doesn’t carry ground chicken), mix in the afore mentioned spices plus green onions, garlic, cilantro, bread crumbs, pepper and a pinch of cayenne and then form the mixture into “fingers.” Those fingers get brushed with olive oil and baked in the oven until cooked through.

The turkey fingers were … interesting. Neither Bryan nor I really liked the spices with the meat, and the texture of the fingers was quite dense and a bit tough. I’m pretty sure I overmixed the turkey mixture and that’s what made the fingers dense and tough. As to the flavor? Well, I prefer my cinnamon be kept with the sweet things. I liked the idea of the recipe, though, and could see making these with different spices and herbs.

Currently cooking from Cook This Now by Melissa Clark

This was one of the first dishes I marked out of this book. Sometimes you want rice to take a more starring role in your meal, and I thought this recipe might do that. I’ve had coconut rice before, and I’ve always really liked it, especially the versions I’ve had in the Caribbean (although their “peas” usually mean our beans).

Unfortunately, I had problems with this recipe, and those problems were probably just as much my fault as the recipe’s fault, although I do wish Clark had been a little more explicit in some places. I ended up with gummy, clumpy rice that didn’t taste coconutty at all.

This is a pretty straightforward recipe. You cook brown rice in coconut milk and water until tender. During the last few minutes of cooking, you stir in frozen peas. Easy, no? Well, here’s where I ran into problems.

1. Clark calls for brown rice. She doesn’t specify long grain, short grain or medium grain. I went with my favorite short grain brown rice. She also tells you to rinse the rice first, which I forgot to do. That one is my fault and probably contributed to the gumminess.

2. Clark calls for coconut milk, but doesn’t specify regular or lite. I went with lite. I don’t know if that made a difference or not. Clark says to pour the coconut milk into a measuring glass and then add enough water to make two cups. I ended up adding less than 1/4 of a cup of water to equal two cups, and my liquid was quite thick and “saucy.” I ended up adding another 1/4 cup of water because my rice was starting to stick in the pan, but it was still somewhat chewy. I think this was the major culprit in my gumminess; perhaps the type of rice I used needed more than the two cups of liquid. Maybe I should have used less coconut milk and more water.

3. As for the lack of coconut flavor, well, I don’t know. Maybe I should try adding some dried coconut to the rice. Maybe using a blander white rice will let the coconut flavor come through better.

Currently cooking from In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

When I started reading through this book, looking for recipes to make, I skipped this dish three or four times. It looked like too much work. I couldn’t imagine the flavors. It just didn’t sound that good. Then Bryan happened to see the recipe; he thought it sounded good.

Maybe I should listen to him more often, because this dish rocked. Seriously, this is one of the best chicken dishes I’ve ever made. And it wasn’t that much work.

You begin by using a food processor to make a paste of salted, roasted cashews, cilantro, olive oil, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, lime juice and a jalapeno. Half of the paste gets rubbed over chicken thighs/drumsticks which are then broiled or grilled, and the rest of the paste is served at the table as extra sauce.

I used chicken breasts that I cut into pieces and threaded on metal skewers. I opted for the broiler over the grill, and I let the chicken marinate in the paste for about two hours before I broiled them. At first, I was worried that the paste was too sweet and too spicy (even though I only used half of a seeded jalapeno). But under the broiler, some sort of alchemy took place. Married with the chicken, the sweetness turned into a faint caramel bitterness, the toastiness of the cashews took center stage, and the spiciness of the jalapeno almost disappeared. Unfortunately, the paste that I saved to serve as a sauce (I thinned it down with a little water) was still too sweet. Next time I’ll add extra lime juice or cut the sugar a bit.

I can’t wait until summer when I can try this out on the grill. I suspect the smokiness of the grill will take this dish over the top.

I’ve had a devil of a time trying to pick my next cookbook. You’d think, with more than 200 cookbooks, that that would be easy. Nope. I’ve been trying to cut down on my processed sugar intake, so I wanted to steer clear of baking cookbooks (at least for a little while). And none of my savory cookbooks looked very appealing. Lately, all I’ve wanted to eat are salads full of cabbage, lettuce and other assorted veggies. Also, I wanted to cook out of one of my newer cookbooks. I kept coming back to this book, but I just couldn’t find more than a handful of recipes that sounded good. I decided to go for it anyway. I’ll probably tagteam this book with another of Melissa Clark’s new cookbooks, Cook This Now.

One of the first things that struck me about In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite was how readable it was. Every recipe comes with a story. Not just headnotes, but a story that tells you how the recipe came about. That’s not surprising, considering Clark writes a regular column for the New York Times dining section, in addition to appearing in just about every food magazine ever published. She’s got an easy way of writing that makes you feel like she’s your best friend. She makes writing look effortless.

Anyway, onto the first dish. This book has exactly one recipe for chicken breasts, and Clark even admits that she originally envisioned using a whole chicken, preferring the dark meat to the white meat, but her editor requested chicken breasts. I don’t know how this would work with a whole chicken, but I can tell you that it works just fine with chicken breasts. Better than fine, actually. This was so good that Bryan even admitted to kind of liking the sweet potatoes.

The dish is pretty simple and perfect for a weeknight. You take a couple of sweet potatoes (okay, yams), cut them into chunks and start roasting them in the oven. Meanwhile, you make a paste of honey, chipotle chilies in adobe sauce, cumin, cinnamon, salt, garlic and vinegar. The paste gets rubbed all over chicken breasts, then the meat gets place on top of the sweet potato chunks and roasted until the chicken is done, about 20 more minutes.

My only gripe is that the paste was very spicy. The recipe calls for 4 chipotle chilies, minced. I hate the seeds (they never soften, and I find their hard texture annoying), so I took all the seeds out, and it was still too spicy. I would cut the chilies in half if you don’t like spice. Other than that, I really liked this dish. The sweet potatoes get soft but not mushy and soak up a lot of the chicken juice. The chicken stays moist, and the paste gives it a lot of flavor. I was a little unsure about the combination of cinnamon and cumin, but here it really works. I love the idea of roasting the chicken breasts over veggies, and I’d like to try it with cauliflower.

As for a picture? Well, I came down with a cold the day I made this, and I was too tired and sneezy to get out the camera. Sorry.

The last few weeks testing this book’s recipes kind of got away on me. I got wrapped up in sourdough and then the holiday season hit. I’m overdue for my wrap-up post, but here it is.

If ice cream making is your thing, you really need to check this book out. I love this book, and I will probably never make ice creams any other way. Although many of the recipes didn’t appeal to me, the fact that Bauer includes a master recipe (for both ice cream and frozen yogurt) means that I have a formula that I can follow to create my own flavors. Cream cheese in ice cream. Who knew?

My favorite ice creams were:

Salty Caramel Ice Cream — This was the first recipe I tried, and the first spoonful was a revelation. After that first bite, I knew Bauer was onto something.

The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World — Deep, dark chocolate. Not too sweet, smooth and rich. This is the chocolate ice cream of all chocolate ice creams.

Lemon & Blueberry Frozen Yogurt — Tart and refreshing. There’s no dullness to the lemon flavor here, and if you don’t like blueberries, just about any fruit will work.

Ice creams that weren’t my favorite:

Nectarine Ice Cream — This was my attempt at adapting Bauer’s master recipe to my own flavor. I was hoping for the essence of nectarines in frozen form. I got watery, washed out ice cream that had little resemblance to the fruit. Probably more my fault than Bauer’s.

Brown Butter Almond Brittle Ice Cream — Except for the almond brittle, this ice cream was blah. Life is too short to waste it eating blah ice cream, dontcha think?

Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

When I crave citrus to eat, it is usually grapefruit that I’m wanting. Oranges are too sweet (usually) and lemons and limes too sour. The lowly grapefruit gets it just right.

I’ve been thinking about a grapefruit frozen yogurt for some time, wondering if you could capture the sweet/tart flavor without having to cook it down to a syrup so the juice wouldn’t make the frozen yogurt icy. Well, this frozen yogurt comes close to what I had in mind, but it’s not quite there. In the book, this is a grapefruit hibiscus frozen yogurt, but I didn’t want to track down dried hibiscus flowers, so I simply left them out (you could probably use hibiscus tea, if you didn’t mind the tea flavor). The frozen yogurt uses both the grapefruit juice and the grapefruit peel.

You start out by bringing grapefruit juice and sugar (and the dried hibiscus if you are using it) to a boil to dissolve the sugar. That gets set aside while the frozen yogurt base is made. The base is simply milk, cream corn syrup and the grapefruit peel boiled together and thickened with a cornstarch slurry. The base is then whisked into cream cheese, drained low-fat yogurt and the grapefruit/sugar solution. The liquid is cooled, strained to remove the peel and churned.

The frozen yogurt is slightly bitter from the grapefruit peel, but has a pretty nice grapefruit flavor, although it isn’t as strong as I would have liked it. You can definitely taste the yogurt, and that yogurty tang almost overwhelms the grapefruit. This might be an instance where ice cream might showcase the grapefruit flavor better than yogurt (of course, a grapefruit granita would give you the cleanest, freshest grapefruit flavor, but darn it, I want dairy).

Or, I could simply do what I did after I took that picture up there. After the camera was put away, I added the rest of the grapefruit supremes and juice to the bowl with the frozen yogurt, stirred it all together and ate it. It was amazing. Tart but sweet, creamy from the melting frozen yogurt and intensely refreshing. I pretty much licked the bowl clean.

Currently cooking out of Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

‘Tis maybe the season for good cheer, but it’s also the season for stews, braises and the slow cooker! Since there are probably a hundred recipes in this book that I haven’t tried yet, expect to see more dishes from it in the coming months.

Conversely, these days I am having a hard time talking myself into making ice cream, even though there are still a few recipes in Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home that I still want to make.

An ice cream-making slave for Christmas? Yes, please.

After the overeating fest that is Thanksgiving time, I haven’t been baking/cooking much. This is about the most complicated thing that has come out of my kitchen for a couple of weeks. Even my sourdough starters are feeling neglected.

This stew starts out by pureeing a can of hominy and chicken broth until smooth. That goes in the slow cooker, along with a bunch of onions that have been softened in the microwave, tomato paste, chili powder, garlic, oregano, diced tomatoes, more hominy, soy sauce and cubes of boneless pork butt. Then, you take carrots, slice them up and wrap them in foil and put the foil packet on top of the stew (this keeps them from getting mushy). The whole thing cooks on high for 5 to 7 hours, or low for 9 to 11 hours. When the pork is tender, you add the carrots and any juices into the stew and stir in lime juice and fresh cilantro.

I skipped that last step, but I wouldn’t recommend it. While the stew is good, very thick and hearty, it needs that little bit of freshness that lime juice and cilantro would give it. I love the flavor of the hominy with the pork, and because you puree part of the hominy, every bite is full of corny flavor. And the carrots give the dish just enough sweetness to offset the heat of the chili powder. Like most stews, the flavor is improving with age. This is a nice alternative to beef stew or chili.

On another subject, I stumbled across this blog earlier this week and fell in love with it. A blog full of sprinkles, pink velvet roulades and 10-pound cakes? What’s not to love?

Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

I set the sourdough aside long enough to churn up another ice cream from this book. I wanted something other than chocolate, and brown butter and almonds sounded like a good choice.

You start off by browning a whole bunch of butter and separating the brown milk solids from the oil. To the milk solids you add whole milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup and salt (the clarified butter gets set aside to use elsewhere). This mixture is brought to a boil, and the corn starch slurry is added. Once the mixture thickens, cream cheese is whisked in, the ice cream is cooled, churned and layered with almond brittle and frozen.

Almond brittle you ask? Oh. My. God. Yes. This candy recipe blindsided me. I’m usually indifferent to brittle; I prefer toffee, but this stuff is magnificent. It’s crunchy, but crumbly enough that you don’t break a tooth biting it. It has a deep caramelized  flavor with just enough butter to soften the edges. And it is chock full of almonds. How good is that?

I say damn good.

Out of all the recipes I’ve tried so far out of this book, this is my least favorite. The ice cream is good, tasting exactly like you’d imagine a brown butter ice cream with almond brittle to taste. It’s just that the ice cream is sort of timid. It doesn’t blow you away with flavor like some of the other ice creams. I think this ice cream would be great served as an accompaniment to something else, maybe an apple pie or a peach crisp, but I wouldn’t make it again to eat by itself.

Except for that almond brittle.

One other note: In the book, the picture of the ice cream shows an ice cream that is a uniform pale tan; apparently they use butter extract. My ice cream looks like it is flecked with chocolate shavings from the browned milk solids. I’m betting that a trip through a blender or a strainer would take care of that.