All the Ingredients

Chocolate Bacon Doughnut Cake

Earlier this month, Bacon Boy celebrated his 21st birthday, and I wanted to invent a cake worthy of such an occasion. A while back, I had purchased a doughnut cake pan at Williams-Sonoma at an incredible markdown. Add chocolate, bacon, and the Chocolate Bacon Doughnut Cake was born!

I started by candying half a pound of bacon. I did this by cooking it in my cast-iron skillet with a seasoning made of brown sugar and a little chili powder for zing. I had to be very careful and watch the bacon closely so that I didn't burn it. As soon as I took each strip out of the pan, I laid it in a rack to dry and firm up. Usually I blot bacon with a paper towel, but this bacon was so sticky with the brown sugar, that wasn't an option.

Then I made the chocolate cake. I started by creaming together:

• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup bacon fat

I had the bacon fat from cooking the bacon--why not infuse the flavor from the very beginning? I whipped these together until fluffy--about five minutes.

Then I added:

• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Then in another bowl I mixed together the dry ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 6 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• a dash of J&D's Bacon Salt

A side note here:  If you haven't discovered Bacon Salt, it's one of my favorite ingredients! It is an artificially-flavored, low-sodium salt, that is vegetarian AND kosher. It is the perfect seasoning to sprinkle on top of home-made macaroni and cheese, and it adds bacony goodness to everything from grilled cheese sandwiches to chicken salad. I buy can but the Original and Hickory in the spice aisle at my Target, but there are other flavors: http://www.jdfoods.net/products/baconsalt. As it says on the label, "Everything should taste like bacon!" I use Bacon Salt almost every day. Back to the cake.

Alternate adding the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar with:

• 1 1/3 cups milk

Beginning and ending with the flour mixture, beat well after each addition until the ingredients are just incorporated. Stop as necessary to scrape down the sides of the pan. I chopped the bacon up, and folded half of it into the batter. Then I poured the batter into my two doughnut pans and baked them for about 40 minutes at 350 degrees. This amount of batter would easily fill two 9-inch cake pans.

After the cakes were baked, I let them cool in their pans for five minutes, and then turned them out onto racks to cool. Then I trimmed each half of the doughnut so that the two sides that went together were flat. The assembly directions didn't call for frosting between the two doughnut halves, but I glued them together with a quick frosting made of powdered sugar, cocoa powder, and just enough milk to make a spreadable frosting.

Then I made the chocolate glaze for the doughnut. I melted together:

• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips

Then I put that mixture in a bowl and whisked in:

• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 1/4 cups confectioner's sugar
• approximately 1/2 cup hot water

until the glaze was a consistency that would pour over the cake. I had assembled the doughnut on my cake stand, and put strips of waxed paper around it to catch the glaze overflow. As soon as the glaze was on the cake, I sprinkled on the rest of the bacon pieces.

Bacon Boy thought this cake was delicious. His girlfriend, not sure she would like the chocolate-bacon combination, ended up having two pieces. My husband thought the bacon flavor in the cake was subtle until I added the glaze with the extra bacon bits. He said those were the best bites. What we didn't finish, Bacon Boy took back to school him. The cake was very dark and dense--perfect with coffee.

Happy 21st Birthday, Bacon Boy!

 

New in the Kitchen: Cuisinart Blend and Cook Soupmaker

I haven't had a blender I've liked since 1982. That's the year I moved into my first apartment. I was trying to furnish a tiny hallway kitchen (you walked through it to get to the bedroom from the living room) with finds from second-hand stores. The kitchen had a tiny white, Easy Bake Oven and stove--the electric burners on top were so close, if I used more than one pot at a time, their sides touched. The oven was large enough to slide in a frozen pizza. The counter tops were a deep, bright orange. Keep-you-awake-in-the-dark orange. 

I went to Goodwill, and found a chrome toaster. It popped the toast straight up into the air, making every breakfast a rousing game of catch. When I got married three years later, I convinced my husband that this toaster was more fun than his Sunbeam that simply toasted the bread and popped it up. We spent years catching the toast until one day my chrome beauty fell from the counter to its death. We advanced to buying Cadillac toasters after that. the one we have now takes up one end of the kitchen counter with its long wide double-slots that can toast bagels or baguette slices. We eat a lot of toast in our house because my husband considers it to be a food group. Like ice cream and pizza.

At Goodwill I also found a great blend blender for my apartment. It was a study Waring with a glass jar that had originally been a very expensive kitchen tool. I got it for $7, and was told by the nice lady behind the counter that they guaranteed it to work for seven days. There was just one problem with the blender. It was pink. The base was pink. The lid was pink. It looked lovely on my orange counter top. I took to sleeping with my bedroom door closed because otherwise I could hear the pink warring with the orange in the dark. 

What I loved about the Waring was that it had a six-horsepower motor, and could make a smoothie out of concrete. I perfected a recipe for frozen strawberry margaritas--the perfect summertime drink in my unairconditioned apartment. I loved that blender.

Then I got married, and we got a lovely blender for a wedding present. It was white, and had a plastic carafe and could muster just enough power to blend milkshakes out of partially defrosted ice cream and milk. The plastic carafe quickly got scratched and cloudy. The strawberry margaritas always had chunks of frozen strawberry in them. I hated it. My father-in-law, a man who knows his kitchen appliances, promised to buy me another glass-carafed blender. Instead, I got plastic blender #2 which had more blending force than the first plastic blender but not by much. I stopped using it when the bottom blade assembly fused to the carafe, and I could no longer get it apart to clean it thoroughly.

Then last fall I started to see commercials on the cooking channels for the Cuisinart Blend and Stir Soupmaker. I loved the idea of being able to cook in a blender--I love soup, but it tends to be something I don't make from scratch. I don't eat it out of cans either because of the high salt content. Canned soup just doesn't taste good to me. I watched and waited. Sure enough right after Thanksgiving Williams Sonoma had the soupmaker on sale, AND had four days where there was no shipping charge on orders. I sent an email hint to Santa at the North Pole, and sure enough, on Christmas morning there was the Soupmaker under the Christmas tree.

I have to confess, with all the joys of working retail during the holiday season, it was the end of January before I even got my new soupmaker out of the box. I managed to get it assembled and on the counter without too much trouble. It is big, and takes up a good chunk of counter space. And it matches all my other black counter top appliances. The soupmaker comes with a small recipe book, and I decided to try the recipe for cauliflower cheese soup first. 

I based this soup on the Lightened Broccoli and Potato Soup in the recipe booklet, using cauliflower because I didn't have any broccoli. I put the following in the blender jar:

• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 garlic clove, chopped
• 1/2 small onion, chopped
• dash of salt
• dash of pepper
• 1 medium potato, peeled and cubed
• 3/4 pound cauliflower, cut into roughly 3/4 inch pieces

Then I put the lid on the jar and set it to 10 minutes on High. Once the broth started to heat up, I saw that the cauliflower wasn't covered all the way, and I added about a half a cup more.

In a few minutes the broth inside the blender jar started to boil. Then I hit the "Stir" button for about 15 seconds to start to move the ingredients around in the broth. At the end of the 10 minutes, the liquid was at a rolling boil, and the glass of the blender jar was hot to the touch.

The blender timer went off after 10 minutes, and I reset it to 30 minutes on medium. Periodically during this time, I stirred the soup  ingredients around. The blades at the bottom of the blender are extremely sharp, but on "stir" the speed is low enough so that the mixture moves, but isn't pureed. 

When the timer went off at the end of the 30 minutes, I tasted the mixture. The cauliflower wasn't cooked all the way through yet, so I set it for another 10 minutes on Medium. Then I added 2 ounces of grated sharp cheddar, and blended the soup on Speed 1 until it was smooth and creamy. I poured the soup into bowls, and sprinkled it with some green and red pepper flakes that I had made from my own dehydrated garden peppers from last summer. My husband and I love these pepper flakes, and sprinkle them on everything short of ice cream.

 This recipe made four very generous servings of soup. We would have had two meals out of it, but we ate it all. With some crackers. It was a lot of soup. And it was delicious.

What I liked about this soup was that once I had chopped everything and put it in the blender, I could do things in other rooms of the house, stirring the soup periodically until it was done. I was very careful the first time to chop all the vegetables uniformly, but as the blender stirs, it continues to chop the pieces so now I am not as careful to have all the pieces small and uniform. I whack up the veggies, onion, and garlic, throw it in the blender, add broth to cover, and let it go. Sometimes I add sour cream wit the cheese at the end. Sometimes I don't add the cheese at all. This is so easy we have been eating soup twice a week, less than an hour from start to bowl.

I wanted some soup to freeze, so I made the recipe in the booklet for Carrot and Ginger Soup--delicious! (My husband doesn't like carrot soup.) And wonderful to take to work with a sandwich.

For most of these creamy vegetable soups, I have found that we like the consistency better when I add the potato. The soup is lighter because the potato makes the soup creamy without being cream. The best soup so far has been a potato cheddar with crispy bacon bits added right before serving. No leftovers again. For clean up, I fill the blender jar halfway, add a little dish soap, and blend it clean. The blender does come with a brush for cleaning which is very helpful for the blades--they are very sharp!

$199 is expensive for a blender. Not so expensive for a soupmaker that I am using twice a week. It makes great smoothies too. Next I will have to try and find that strawberry margarita recipe again!

Double Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti: For Deborah & Darin

I have already written my lament at the passing of Gourmet magazine. I miss it most at Christmastime. Every year I would wait for the cookie-covered December issue to arrive to see what new delight I could bake to send to family members. And then, when publication of Gourmet stopped, it was with the November issue. You know that those holiday cookie recipes were already written, the December cover photo already chosen. It was a doubly cruel blow. But I have my back issues.

Every year, I go into my office, and poke through the plastic magazine holders to find the December 1994 Gourmet. It contains a family favorite, Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti, on page 236. Actually, that's not quite true. I have never made the recipe with walnuts. They are wonderful nuts, and I always have them on hand, but to me chocolate and hazelnuts are made for each other. So I mix up a batch of chocolate hazelnut biscotti every year to send to my brother's family in North Carolina. They are a holiday favorite of my niece, Deborah. And since Deborah and her husband Darin are among the few (yet special!) regular readers of my blog, I have decided that this year, my present to them will be the Christmas biscotti recipe. 

Double Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti

(as adapted from Gourmet, December 1994, page 236)

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) butter, softened
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs (I prefer brown)
• 1 cup hazelnuts, rough chopped
• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
• 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and butter and flour a large baking sheet. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the eggs and mix until well-combined. Stir in the flour mixture to form a soft dough. Stir in the hazelnuts and chocolate chips.

On the prepared cookie sheet, form the dough into two slightly flattened logs, each about twelve inches long and about two inches wide. (Flouring your hands makes this easier.) Dust the top of each log well with the confectioners' sugar. Bake the logs 35 minutes, or until slightly firm to the touch. As the logs bake and expand, the tops will crack slightly. Cool the logs on the baking sheet for about five minutes. 

On a cutting board, using a sharp knife to slice cleanly through the hazelnuts without tearing the dough, cut the log diagonally (or straight across--my preference) into 3/4-inch slices. Arrange the biscotti, cut sides down, on a clean baking sheet and bake until crisp--about ten minutes. Cool the biscotti on a rack. They don't keep well because as they bake, the biscotti make the entire house smell like chocolate, and they are eaten almost immediately! I was able to keep some once in a holiday tin, for three days because I had labelled zucchini bread. I am sure they would freeze beautifully.

So, Deborah and Darin, the biscotti are in the mail. The tradition is yours now. Merry Christmas!

What's New: Birds Eye Steamfresh Chef's Favorites Helps Make Spinach Artichoke Dip

If you have walked through the frozen foods section of your grocery store lately, you have noticed a change in what's on the shelves in the veggie section. Besides the growth of single-serving frozen vegetable packets that I have mentioned before, there has been a rapid growth in packages of quick and easy, meal-ready blends of items. Gone are the days of potatoes displayed only as pucks, fries, and tots. Now you can buy bags of roasted potatoes mixed with carrots and herbs, ready to microwave and serve as a side-dish to pork chops or beef tenderloins. Or if you are of a veggie mindset, you can eat the bagged blend as your main dish.

As part of the Foodbuzz Tastemakers Program, I was lucky enough to receive a sample of the new Birds Eye Steamfresh Chef's Favorites. The first one out of the box was the Lightly Sauced Creamed Spinach. As a child, I hated spinach--especially straight out of the can, Popeye-style. But as an adult, I have learned the joys of spinach. I love it fresh in salads or on sandwiches, and I love fresh spinach cooked. But what to do with an entire bag of Creamed Spinach? Then it hit me--I would reinvent my Thanksgiving Day artichoke dip to include spinach.

My Thanksgiving Day menu doesn't vary. It did for the first few years we were married as my husband and I decided what dishes we like best. But then the menu became set in stone: roast turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing (yes, I know I am not supposed to stuff the turkey with the dressing anymore, but in twenty-six years no one has died, or even gotten sick as a result of my cornbread stuffing and it just tastes better that way), cranberry orange relish, sweet potato rolls, mashed potatoes with sour cream, Brussels sprouts with walnuts and orange, pickled beets, balsamic carrot salad with currants, and pecan and pumpkin pies with real whipped cream. And the appetizers are almost always bacon-wrapped dates and breadsticks, and artichoke dip. What if I added the creamed spinach to the artichoke dip?

I dug around in the cupboard and found the 9-inch casserole that I always make the Thanksgiving artichoke dip in, and got started:

• 1 can artichokes, in brine, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, diced small
• 2 wedges Laughing Cow Light Creamy Swiss (or 2 tablespoons cream cheese)
• 1 package Birds Eye Steamfresh Chef's Favorite Creamed Spinach, partially defrosted
• 2/3 oz grated parmesan cheese

I chopped the artichokes, diced the garlic, and stirred in the Laughing Cow Cheese. I like Laughing Cow in recipes like this because it is creamy already, and mixes into other ingredients much easier than cream cheese. I added half the grated parmesan cheese, and layered it into my casserole.

Next I put the Creamed Spinach in its pouch in the microwave. The package was supposed to cook completely in 5 minutes, so I cooked it for 2 1/2 minutes. That partially defrosted the creamed spinach, but didn't cook it all the way. Then I opened the package and topped the artichoke mixture with the spinach and cream mixture. I stirred it together with the artichoke layer, and topped the dip with the rest of the grated parmesan cheese. I baked it for about 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven. It smelled wonderfully cheesy and garlicky.

For dinner that night, I had bought and cooked lovely pork chops, and had baked two large potatoes. I served the Spinach Artichoke Dip on top of the baked potatoes. It was wonderful! I also sampled some on crackers just to make sure it will be  perfect for Thanksgiving. It was so good, it was hard to stop eating the dip on the crackers. 

I also got a sample of the Birds Eye Steamfresh Chef's Favorites Roasted Red Potatoes & Green Beans which were delicious with my grilled pork back ribs, and a sample of the Mushroom and Green Bean Risotto which I steamed in the microwave, and then added to a skillet of chorizo suasages that I had  cooked and sliced. My husband, who is not a big fan of rice, thought this was delicious. All of these veggies and sauces are on the light side--the creamed spinach had the most fat with 5 grams a serving. These aren't available in your grocery until September, but from what I could guess, based on the other packages of like-minded items in the freezer section, they should be less than $3 a package.

So next month, when you are trolling through the frozen foods aisle dreaming up dinners, make sure you grab a couple of the happy blue Birds Eye Stemfresh Chef's Favorites to try!

New Year's Resolution: Cooking from the Books January

After I finished tidying up the spice rack and the kitchen cupboards, it was obvious that next I had to sort and reorganize my cookbooks. They inhabit two spaces in our house: my basement office where the majority are shelved, and my son's room. Ten minutes after he left for college a year and a half ago, I put in two new bookcases which are completely full. I like to say that I don't collect cookbooks, they collect me.

My husband had reason to be in my son's room over the holidays, and remarked to me that I have a lot of cookbooks that I have never cooked a single recipe from. He used the half shelf of Alice Waters/Chez Panisse cookbooks as an example. Actually, I have used recipes out of a number of those cookbooks, but since my husband--who eats almost everything I put in front of him--is not the first to dive into a dish of vegetables, he had not paid attention to the lovely beet salad or brussel sprouts and walnut dish that have adorned our Thanksgiving table for the last three years--both recipes courtesy of Alice. But he made a fair point. There are a number of cookbooks that I own that I have never cooked from.

I have several friends who made pronouncements the first of the year about how their new year's resolution was "to not make any resolutions!" Well, I am always trying to eat right and move more, so I took a different approach. I want my new year to include new things. So my 2011 New Year's Resolution was to pick one cookbook every week that I have not cooked from, and cook at least one recipe from it. I figure that with my work schedule, one recipe a week was possible. My son is at school, and my daughter prefers food in a paper sack from a drive-through window, so I am really cooking just for my husband and I. A main dish serves us twice with some lunches left over. (My 2010 New Year's Resolution was to give up frozen meals and make my own for work  lunches & dinners--that worked out really well.)

So here's what was cooking in January:

Week 1: Bobby Flay's Burgers, Fries, & Shakes by Bobby Flay with Stephanie Banyas & Sally Jackson

I gave this cookbook to my husband for Christmas, and somehow I ended up as the one cooking from it on New Year's Day (although my husband picked the recipe: Bolo Burger, a popular burger from Flay's Bolo Restaurant.)  This is a wonderful cheeseburger, topped with Serrano ham (I had to use prosciutto since it was the closest I could find), Manchego cheese, and a fabulous Piquillo Pepper-Smoked Paprika Aioli. I had never made aioli before since my husband tends not to like strong garlic flavor, but this sauce was a hit. Once the burger is assembled, it is grilled in the bun like a grilled cheese sandwich. The nice thing about this is that the bun is warm all the way through and the burger layers don't slide apart when you bite into them. I liked this cookbook. There is a full-page photo of each burger opposite the recipe, and they all look mouth-watering. The directions are clear, and easy to follow, even if I can't always find the exact ingredients in my corner of Iowa. My husband and I had the burgers twice, and we will have to try some of the fries and shake recipes.

Week 2: In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart by Alice Waters

Since Alice inspired my New Year's Resolution, it seemed only right that one of her cookbooks appear early on. This one focuses on basic techniques such as dressing a salad, cooking rice, and steaming vegetables. I chose a recipe out of the "Simmering Stock" section. I had the meaty bone left from the Christmas ham, and I wanted to make a soup with it. I made the lentil soup, adding my ham bone to the simmering ingredients. This was a straight-forward lentil soup with carrots, onions, celery, garlic, chicken stock and lentils. I though the one unusual ingredient was rosemary. I had never added it to a bean soup, but I liked the way it brightened the flavor of the soup. Even though the soup had bits of ham in it after I took the bone out, my husband didn't care to try it. I had almost a week's work of lunches from this batch. The cookbook is beautifully laid out as all of Alice's cookbooks are, but this one is very tightly bound, and hard to keep open on the table as you are trying to follow the recipes.

Week 3: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl by Ree Drummond

I confess I love buying cookbooks that spring from blogs. Maybe someday my blog will become wildly popular and grow up to be a book. Ree Drummond's book is an inspirational model. It has a warm and friendly tone, and the recipes are clearly laid out and tempting. I love the fact that she took all her own photos and includes pictures from her life on a working ranch, including pictures of her family and friends, cowboys, cattle, and wild mustangs. This book would be a fabulous gift for a new cook because the step-by-step photos make following these recipes a snap.

We had company one Sunday morning for brunch, and I made Ree's Breakfast Bowls--basically potatoes, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, onions, and seasonings in oven-proof bowls, topped off and baked with scrambled eggs and cheeses. I served them with French Puffs--a light and airy muffin that is dipped in melted butter and rolled in cinnamon sugar after they are baked--like fancy doughnut holes.  These recipes were such a hit, that later in the same week I made her meatloaf recipe. It was a pretty standard meat/bread/egg mixture made extra special by being wrapped in bacon and topped with a "tomato gravy," a blend of ketchup, dry mustard, and brown sugar. This put the meatloaf over the top, and my husband and I each ate two pieces. Every time we reheated the leftovers, the meatloaf got better as the "gravy" caramelized a little more. Yum!   

Week 4: Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson

I have quite a few of Nigella's cookbooks and cook from them regularly. (She provided the recipe for the Christmas ham mentioned above.) Nigella Kitchen is her newest, with a series on TV by the same name. I had a pound of ground beef that I needed to use up, so I checked to see what recipes Nigella had in this new book that would use it. I chose her Barbecued Ground Beef. This is Nigella's version of Sloppy Joes, that she recommends serving in a bowl as a dip for tortilla chips that have cheddar melted over them. I served them Sloppy Joe style in buns.

I must confess that I don't usually spend this much time and energy making Sloppy Joes. I brown the meat, squirt in some ketchup, sweet barbecue sauce, and some honey mustard, and am done with it. This recipe called for celery, carrots, onions, and garlic to be made into a paste in the food processor with 6 slices of bacon and some brown sugar. Then you saute that slowly in a pan until it's cooked through, and add the raw meat and seasonings and cook it again, finally adding tomato paste, water, and my friend, Worcestershire sauce. The final zinger that sets these Sloppy Joes apart from any others you may have eaten, are Nigella's spices: cloves and allspice. I have never used either of these spices in a meat dish, and they gave it a bit of heat. The recipe is definitely a keeper since my daughter ate two of them and called dibs on the leftovers!

Now I am off to think about what books to tackle in February....

 

Spice up the New Year: Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce

After two months of the horrible schedule that is my retail life during the holidays, I am finally spending some time getting back to the rest of my life: family and food. As a result of dragging the dead Christmas tree out of the house, I felt an urge to clean out the corners that have gone neglected for so long. I decided to start with my spice rack.

I have a lovely wooden spice rack that my husband bought me years ago when we had no children and time to spend wandering about used book stores, antique malls, and kitchen shops. I have a kitchen the size of a postage stamp that has little storage space, so I had no drawer or cabinet to spare for spices. Over the years this rack has become jammed with little glass bottles, small boxes, and tins of various spices--some so old that I have no idea what I bought them for. As I sorted through the tins and bottles and very dusty boxes, I though about how different my spice rack is from the conglomeration of spices and seasonings my mother kept in her kitchen.

My mother did not use a lot of seasoning unless a recipe specifically called for it. And a lot of the items her recipes called for, I no longer have or use when I replicate these recipes, such as Angostura Bitters in pimento cheese or bay leaf in stew. I also have an herb plot as an integral part of my vegetable garden every summer. I grow, harvest, and dry my own, sage, parsley, mint, dill, lavender, basil, rosemary, thyme, and coriander. My mother never grew herbs. At least not on purpose. We had a rogue mint plant that lived under the outdoor faucet that was only pressed into service  to make mint sauce for my mother's leg of lamb.

After I cleaned out my spice rack, I moved on to the cabinet of oil and vinegars and things in taller glass bottles like molasses. I have canola oil and olive oil; my mother always used vegetable oil and Crisco. This, of course, was in the days before hydrogenated fat was known to be pure evil. My mother used apple cider vinegar; I have an assortment of aged balsamics--regular, white, and raspberry. But there on the back of my shelf was an old friend, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce.

I have had the fun of buying a new bottle of Lea & Perrins recently. As a Foodbuzz Featured Publisher, I occasionally get sample food offers. Sometimes these are for items I don't use or can't get in my market. But I was excited when my coupons for Lea & Perrins arrived. I was looking forward to dusting off an old recipe and trying  something new.

First, I made my mother's London Broil. My mom loved flank steak and cooked it often. Although my father seemed to prefer T-bones, my mother said she liked flank steak because it was all meat, and she didn't pay for bones. I also think she liked it because one end of a flank steak is usually thicker than the other end. That way, my father could have the well-done end, and she and I could split the rare end.

Mary Louise's Flank Steak Marinade

• 1/2 cup Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 smashed, peeled clove of garlic

My mother used to have a special plastic pitcher for marinating the flank steak. She rolled the  meat up, slipped it inside, and then added the marinade. Every time she went by the refrigerator, she shook the pitcher, dispersing the sauce. Then, early in the afternoon, she flipped the steak, and continued the shaking process. At dinner time, she heated up the broiling pan in the oven, and unfurled the steak across the top, dotting it with butter before she broiled it. Instead of dotting my flank steak with butter, I add 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil to the marinade. I also add 1/4 cup red wine to the marinade if I have some hanging about, marinating my steak in the refrigerator in a Ziploc bag. Then I heat up the broiler in the oven and put the steak on. I flip the meat once during the broiling process which takes 10-15 minutes total, depending on the thickness of the steak. 
  

Anyone who has read my blog in the summertime, knows that I have problems with pumpkins. I think a few vines would be nice. And every summer I end up overrun with mini and giant squash that I feel obliged to give away to everyone I know. Then I feel compelled to bake and use the rest. (I currently have at least 18 quarts of cooked pumpkin in my basement freezer.) I seed the pumpkins before I bake them, and have been experimenting with roasting the seeds over the numerous batches. Then I take them to work to share because no one else in my house likes roasted pumpkin seeds. I roasted the last batch in December after I bought my new bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and everyone who tried them said that these were the best!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

First, scrape the pumpkin seeds out of a fresh pumpkin. You want to make sure they are rinsed free of any of the fibrous strings that hold them together. Spread them out on waxed paper to dry. Then, put them in a bowl an add:

• 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil (you want them covered with the oil, but not swimming in it)
• 1 tablespoon of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce

Spread the seeds out on a cookie sheet, and sprinkle them with some sea salt. Bake at 250 degrees, stirring them around every few minutes. Take the seeds out when they have roasted to a darker color. Watch out though--they can burn! They are nutty and salty and just right with a glass of beer (although not at work!).

So if you haven't tried Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, it's time to get a bottle and try it!

 

 

Oatmeal Honey Bread

I have baked a lot of  bread in my life. I spent an entire year when I had my own apartment eating only bread I had baked. This was quite a feat considering that the kitchen I had then was basically the hallway from the living room to the bathroom. It had almost no storage, presenting a small slice of orange counter with a tiny sink and a stove with an oven that was only slightly bigger than an Easy Bake. I started my bread experiments with the recipes in the only cookbook I had at the time, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. There have been many editions of this cookbook, but my favorite is still the 1979 edition. And one of my family's favorite breads is based on the Oatmeal Bread from this book.

We eat a lot of cereal in our house. One of our favorites is frosted shredded wheat. The problem is that with a bag of this cereal, there is always a lot of the wheat shreds left when the cereal is finished. I hate to throw them out, so I have added them to the base of my version of this bread. So if you are a shredded wheat fan, take note! If you don't have leftover wheat shreds, double the wheat germ and the bread will still be delicious.

Oatmeal Honey Bread (adapted from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook)

In a cup measure, put all the leftover shreds from your package of frosted (or unfrosted) shredded wheat. Then add regular oatmeal to the top of the cup, and place in a large mixing bowl. Add 1 more cup of oatmeal, and 1/3 of a cup of wheat germ. Pour 3 cups of boiling water over the mixture and let it sit until you can comfortably touch the bottom of the bowl (at least 30 minutes). After about 15 minutes add 2 tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup of honey to the top of the oatmeal mixture. This will allow your butter to soften and mix easily into the dough.

Then start to work in your flour. How much you use depends on how much water your shredded wheat bits and oatmeal and wheat germ soaked up. I usually stir in several cups of flour, until the mixture becomes  to stiff and sticky to work with a wooden spoon. Then, with the dough on some flour on the wooden  kitchen table, I work in more flour with a dough scraper to help me flip and turn the dough. It takes at least fifteen minutes of flipping and kneading and working several more cups of flour into this sticky dough to get it smooth enough to handle without without it sticking to my hands. The I plop it into my large yellow mixing bowl, already rubbed with butter, and let it rise under an old pillowcase.

Once the dough has doubled in size, I take it back out onto the floured table  and cut it in half with a serrated knife, and work it into two loaves. Then I put the loaves in buttered pans back under the pillowcase to rise. Once they have doubled in bulk again, cresting over the top of the pans, I put them in a preheated 375 degree oven to bake until the tops are golden: 35-45 minutes. Then I turn them out onto a rack to cool, rubbing butter over the top of the loaves.

This bread is my daughter Emily's favorite. She has inherited her father's love of toast, and will eat two slices of this "Mommy Toast" at a time with butter. Since the bread is slightly sweet, it makes great peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I also like it toasted, topped with just marmalade.

A Gift of Peaches: Peach Pies for the Freezer

My husband and kids have returned from visiting his parents in Texas. Some husbands bring their wives jewelry or chocolate. Mine brought me two jars of jam, and a giant box of Texas peaches. He said that they fit my criteria for roadside vendors: he bought the peaches out of the back of a beat-up pickup truck, and they looked and smelled fabulous! I never buy fruit that doesn't smell like fresh, ripe, whatever-it-is. That eliminates  most grocery store fruit. This time of year, teenagers making spending money with their local produce have pickups parked in lots all over town.

My husband had an ulterior motive. He considers pie to be a food group (along with ice cream, hamburgers, and pizza).  He knew I would be happy to bake most of these peaches up, two at a time, for the freezer.  And he makes the best batch of pie of crust--"Foolproof Pie Crust"--from a recipe my mom cut out of a Woman's Day in the 1960s:

4 cups all-purpose flour, lightly spooned into cup
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 cup vegetable Crisco
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
1 large egg

In large bowl, stir together with fork (or pastry blender) flour, sugar and salt. Cut in shortening until crumbly. In small bowl, beat together water, vinegar and egg. Add to flour mixture and stir until all ingredients are moistened. Divide dough into 5 portions (4 if you use large pie plates). With hands shape each portion into a flat, round patty; wrap each patty in plastic wrap and chill at least 1/2 hour.

At this point, for fruit pies, I don't really use a recipe. In the case of the peaches, I used 12-16 peaches (they were on the smaller side) and rinsed and dried them, leaving the peels on. Then I sliced them into a bowl and added 3 tablespoons Instant ClearJel from King Arthur Flour, http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/instant-clearjel-8-oz . This magic powder thickens fruit pies without the cloudiness of flour or the visible pearls of tapioca. I also added 1/4 cup of sugar and a healthy dash of Vietnamese Cinnamon, also from King Arthur.  I poured the peaches into a pie pan with a bottom crust. After I put the top crust on and crimped the edges, I spritzed it with a little Pam and then sprinkled it with colored sugar.

I baked the pies for 15 minutes at 425 degrees. Then finished them off with an hour at 350 degrees--until the crust was golden and the fruit filling just starting to come through the slits on the top of the crust. I cooled the pies completely. Then I wrapped them in heavy duty foil, and  bagged them for the freezer. To thaw them, I bake them again at 350 degrees until a knife stuck into the pie comes out hot to the touch: at least an hour.

My husband says that nothing tastes as good as a slice of warm peach pie on a snowy January day. I would have to agree with that!

Bacon-Wrapped Breadsticks

I try not to buy cookbooks that focus on one specific ingredient. Yes, the pumpkin cookbook looked tempting on the shelf the summer before last when I had the bumper pumpkin crop. But when 90 percent of the crop turned out to be mini pumpkins, they weren't right for soup or stew or bread. So the pumpkin cookbook sits on the shelf, unused. (However, my daughter never carved the lovely Halloween pumpkin that I bought for her annual Halloween party. I threw it against the fence in the garden after it had served as the Thanksgiving centerpiece. I now have over 100 fledgling pumpkin plants enthusiastically climbing about. Although  a number of the hearty green beasts are doomed to become part of my nonchalant compost pile, I think I will use that pumpkin cookbook after all.)

But bacon cookbooks are a different thing altogether. Bacon never goes out of season, and I always have it on hand. I have cheapo brand supermarket bacon for the days when Bacon Boy comes home from college, and I make mass quantities for his consumption. Cheapo bacon tastes much better with my special dry rub sprinkled on it as it sizzles in my mother's cast iron skillet. The dry rub recipe had brown sugar in it, and the bacon caramelizes divinely in the fat and sugar in the skillet.

I have also stashed away pounds of bacon from last summer's trips to the farmer's market that I  rationed out on special occasions all winter. As I have written before, this bacon tastes almost nothing like it's supermarket cousin, and is used for special meals or to make things like the bacon jam. But if Bacon Boy is sitting down to inhale a pound of bacon at breakfast, I might as well by the stuff that's only $3.24 a pound.

So I was drawn to the cookbook, Seduced by Bacon: Recipes and Lore about America's Favorite Indulgence, by Joanna Pruess. This book divides its bacon recipes into categories such as "breakfast and baked goods," and "appetizers and snacks." An appetizer I tried was the Bacon-Wrapped Breadsticks. Pruess'  recipe coats strips of bacon with mustard and then parmesan cheese before they are wrapped around the breadsticks and baked. I liked this, but put my own twist on the recipe.

You want to start with a nice hard breadstick such as Stella D'Oro or Alessi (I use the Alessi because they are all I can find regularly in this part of Iowa.) The breadsticks come in different flavors. I use plain and sesame because I don't want a garlic or cheese flavor that will interfere with the flavor of the bacon.

Then I cut the strips of bacon in half for a proper bacon to breadstick ratio, sprinkle them with dry rub,a and wrap them around the bread stick. It takes about half a pound of bacon to wrap one package of hard breadsticks. I lay them out, Alton Brown style, on a cooling rack on top of a cookie sheet. I sprinkle a little more dry rub over them, and bake them at 250 degrees until most of the bacon fat has dripped into the cookie sheet and the bacon strips are brown--about an hour.

Take them out of the oven and let them cool to room temperature. Some of the bacon fat has been soaked up by the breadsticks, and cooling them allows them to firm back up. Otherwise they are too floppy to eat.

Now when Bacon Boy moved home for the summer last week, I got the breadsticks all ready and then turned the oven on to preheat. That was when I discovered that the oven was broken. So I put the bacon-wrapped breadsticks into the freezer until I could figure out an alternate method for cooking them. Several days later while grilling hamburgers, it came to me--I could grill them! I waited until the coals died down, about an hour after I had finished cooking anything else, and laid the breadsticks out directly over the coals. The bacon fat dripping into the coals heated the fire up some, and I had to make sure that I turned them every few minutes.

The next day, I brought them out as an appetizer to dinner. Bacon Boy loved them, and Bacon Husband proclaimed that they were even better than when I made them in the oven--"Smokier!" Perhaps one of these days I will move on from the appetizer section of this cookbook and get to the Old Fashioned Shepherd's Pie--with bacon!

Strawberry Shortcake on the Griddle

Last summer I planted 12 strawberry plants. They settled in, sent out runners, and produced a small crop of berries--enough for eating out of hand. This summer they spread more and are happily producing many more berries.

When I went out to pick the first few ripe berries, I discovered that they had already been nibbled on. I suspect the culprit was Volkswagen, our neighborhood raccoon. We have spotted him a number of times eating the rabbit corn and bird seed we had been putting out all winter for the birds. I call him Volkswagen because in silhouette, he resembles the VW Beetle, and because he is the largest raccoon I have ever seen. Although raccoons are supposed to be nocturnal, Volkswagen is not. He prefers to come out late in the afternoon to see what's about the house to eat. He is probably so large because this gives him a dining advantage over his nocturnal friends. So I laid tomato cages on their sides to form a protective framework over the berry patch, and covered it with netting. Volkswagen can no longer get to the berries, and yesterday I picked a bowlful.

It's wonderful to eat fresh strawberries, warm from the sun. It's also good to eat them as strawberry shortcake. There is just one problem with making shortcake in my kitchen right now. The oven is broken. It had been heating slowly, so we ran a cleaning cycle. That heated the oven up hot enough and long enough to incinerate any oven goo that might have been causing it not to heat well. It also burned out the something-or-other so that the oven will heat up no higher than 190 degrees.

This is a problem. There are no recipes for shortcake that will cook at that temperature. Beef jerky, yes, shortcake, no. So I decided that my best option, short of building a solar oven, was to make shortcakes as griddle cakes. I started with a plain shortcake recipe, adapting one of Paula Deen's. I wanted a full-fat recipe so that the cakes wouldn't stick to the griddle. I also wanted a shortcake dough that I had to roll out so that it would be thin enough to cook on a griddle.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 stick butter, cold and cubed
• 2/3 cup half-and-half

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and butter until you have a coarse meal. Put the mixture into a large bowl, and form well in the center. Add the half-and-half. Gently mix with a spatula until the dough just comes together. Turn it out onto a lightly flowered surface, and shape into a disk that is 3/4 of an inch thick. In the original recipe, you cut this into 8 3-inch round biscuits and bake in a 400 degree oven for 12-15 minutes until the biscuits are fluffy and golden.    

Instead I rolled them out to about 1/2 inch thick, getting 18 shortcakes. Even though my mother taught me not to, I always gently squish together the lacey bits leftover from cutting out the shortcakes (or biscuits). I can never bear to waste any of the wonderful buttery dough. That gives me two or three ugly lumpy shortcakes that I always think taste the best. 

I heated up the griddle on low, and put the shortcakes together on top so that they would fit, seven under a pot lid. I figured the heat under the lid would create a heated space and allow the shortcakes to rise a bit. It worked!

I flipped each shortcake over four times to evenly distribute their time on the griddle surface. It took each batch of biscuits about 12-15 minutes minutes to cook all the way through. I could tell when they were done when they were golden brown and firm along the edges. To serve, I put one shortcake on a plate and topped it with garden strawberries and real whipped cream, and then layered it with another shortcake, berries, and more whipped cream. They were heavenly!

So head out to your garden and pick your strawberries, or find your closest farmer's market. All sorts of berries are in season now, and will taste great as shortcake. The berries are waiting for you!