Tag: cream

Last night, I decided to do away with a bunch of leeks by whipping up some sort of soup with them, mostly because I'd wanted to try vichysoisse for months. I can now say that, whatever it is I made last night, I ate it and it was fantastic.

• 3 leeks, chopped fine
• 6 red potatoes, cut thinly
• 2 cans of chicken broth
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 4 pieces bacon
• 1 pint cream
• garlic salt
• pepper to taste
• 1/4 tsp celery seed
• 1/4 cup mild cheddar, shredded
• 1/2 cup romano, grated
• 1/4 cup portobello mushrooms, chopped
• 1/4 cup butter

Hawaiian night has come and gone.  And so now I must post about the adventure.  Here is how finding a recipe for Hawaiian night went.  Hrm, well this recipe says it is Hawaiian, but that doesn't mean it really is Hawaiian.  Maybe they just put some coconut and pineapple in it and now they "believe" it is Hawaiian. Really, there are a lot of recipes like that.  So, I spent much time researching via the internet.  I found several plan a luau sites that were full of all sorts of recipes.  They proved to be very useful for finding ideas.

For my dish I chose Butter Mochi.  I love mochi ice cream balls. (Oooh! I just found a recipe for making your own at home.  I so have to try this. Sorry, back to this post now.)  So I thought that baked Mochi would probably be just as yummy.  The first hurdle to hop over was what recipe to use for Butter Mochi.  There are about 100 different ways to make Baked Mochi including recipes that add  flaked coconut or chocolate, not to mention the varying versions of just a Butter Mochi recipe.  Some recipes were calling for blocks of butter while others were only calling for 1 stick (or 1/2 cup butter).  I have only this evening come to conclude that when these people wrote their recipes they really weren't speaking of 1lb blocks of butter but simply 1/4lb sticks.  This is where being specific in writing a recipe comes in handy :)

And now for the recipe I choose after many, many hours of reading recipe after recipe.   Sumocat's Butter Mochi.  I did not stray from his recipe except in the pan I baked it in which means the temperature had to be adjusted accordingly. I used a glass baking dish and not a metal pan so I reduced the oven temperature to 325 degrees.  I chose to use a high quality butter (vs choosing a store brand) since butter is playing a star role in this recipe.    

I loved the end result this produced.  It has a wonderful butter flavor to it.  I was worried about over cooking.  I could have left it in the oven for about 5 minutes longer allowing the center to cook more without any threat of burning.  

The interesting part of this dish is that everyone bites into it expecting something completely different than what it is.  Mochi is a chewy product. People think it is going to be cakey or brownie like and it is not that at all.  So many will be confused by the texture and then be turned off of the dish all together, which really is a shame because I find it to be super delicious.  Ah well, more for me!

The Queen of Tarts is always acting all high and mighty, baking bread and cookies and I think probably even people every night. She'll casually pull out some flour and other stuff, get a bowl or something, and in twenty minutes she'll be yanking a tray of golden brown tastiness out of the oven. Her demeanor seems to say, what, bread? Oh look, here it is. Easiest thing in the world.

So, for Russian night, I decided to make a mushroom pastry. I'd show her. I'd whip up a huge plate of tasty mushroom foods and then I'd be the one who shrugs modestly. Oh yeah, those pastries? Totally easy.

I started the night before with:

• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 sticks of butter

The recipe I was following told me to cut the whole thing together with a wide knife. Not knowing what the heck it was talking about, I got a butter knife and cut the mixture together while watching Bob the Builder. By the end of it, my shoulders were totally and completely sore.

The next day, I sauteed:

• 1 lb minced mushrooms
• 1 minced large onion

I added some pepper and tarragon during the cooking process, then set it aside to cool down while I pulled out the dough.

Of course, the dough didn't look right. It kept falling apart. It was impossible to roll. So I got out the pastry knife (yeah, I didn't know we had one the night before) and cut in an additional half stick of softened butter. The dough formed a nifty ball immediately. Victory for me.

I started rolling the dough out, but it was pretty sticky, and it kept tearing in places. In fact, it took me an hour to roll out, but I learned one vital fact you'll need if you ever work with dough: flour is your friend. If your dough even begins to give you lip, cover it (and your rolling surface) with flour. You cannot have enough flour on hand. It's mathematically impossible.

Once I had the dough rolled out to about a quarter inch, I cut it into squares. I mixed a cup of grated parmesan into the mushroom mixture, put teaspoonfuls of it into the squares, and folded them diagonally. After all the little triangley things were made, they were brushed with egg yolk, sprinkled with caraway seeds, and put into a 350-degree oven for twenty minutes.

Were they good? Yeah. They were good. They were pretty darn good. But I couldn't shrug and be all modest, because my shoulders might have fallen off.

For this EU Night Russian Stuffed Eggs caught my eye as they are a twist from the common Deviled Egg, which is one of my favorite appetizers.

The recipe is easy to follow and the ingredients are all quite common. My only suggestion would be to chop the onion super fine, maybe even in a food processor or Magic Bullet. I hand chopped mine and they were a bit chunky.

Thanks to chef2mom and her professional chef skills I learned the proper way to Quenelle the egg mixture and place it in the egg. You could also use a small melon baller to fill the eggs.

This recipe was interesting as it has a mayo and sour cream sauce to go with it. I ate the eggs with and without the sauce and the sauce definitely adds to the whole flavor.

Another amazing EU Night down. Hawaiian Night will be coming next month. So, stay tuned!

I don't know why nobody ever told me that Alfredo sauce was easy to make, but I've wasted far too much of my life buying the glass jars of commercially made pasta sauce when a great alfredo is almost as easy.

Just last week, we were running a little short in the food department, so it came time to try and scrounge what we could out of what was sitting around in the house. To that end, I collected the following ingredients:

• 2 cans evaporated milk (heavy cream would be better...)
• 1/8 lb. Parmigiano-Reggiano, shredded
• Lots of black pepper
• 1 stick butter
• Garlic salt
• 1 bag egg noodles

I melted the butter while the pasta started boiling. Once completely melted, I added the milk and whisked it all together, then whisked in the pepper and garlic salt. After the egg noodles were done, I drained them thoroughly, put them in the milk mixture, and began to fold in the cheese.

That's it. The best recipes are disgustingly simple. Although, after I ate the noodles, I felt like my heart was going to explode. This is some heavy stuff, friends. Don't get addicted.

I was seriously in need of some sour cream yesterday, so I browsed the internet for a couple beef stroganoff recipes and generated something that turned out to be pretty darn fantastic.

After slicing a half-pound sirloin steak into small strips, I dredged them in flour, garlic salt, and pepper, then sauteed them in butter along with a quarter onion (diced). I added a couple dashes of Worcestershire and soy sauce (that combo is my secret weapon for meat dishes). After the onion was transparent, I added some sliced mushrooms, a shot of apple cognac (any brandy would be fine), and half a can of chicken broth. Once the whole mixture thickened, I added half a cup of sour cream, reduced the heat to medium, and let the sauce thicken.

Over buttered egg noodles, this one was pretty fantastic. There was just a hint of the apple flavor from the cognac. If I do this again, I will wait to add the steak until after the onions are done; it certainly wasn't overcooked, but I would have liked it to be a little less cooked anyways.

Please save your family from store bought refrigerated sugar cookie dough. These cookies turn hard as a rock within minutes of making them and they have no real flavor at all. Treat your family to some wonderful homemade sugar cookies and frosting. They will thank you for it.

The recipe I am going to share with you has been in my family for over 20 years. My aunt Kathy received the recipe from a co-worker. Kathy then gave the recipe to my mom. It has since become a tradition that each year at Easter and Christmas my mom makes 6 double batches of cookies. We spend many hours baking and frosting, but it is always a lot of fun and wouldn't be the same without them.

I had never made these cookies on my own, but this past week that all changed. LittleRoq had a Christmas party to go to and I volunteered to make the sugar cookies (so as to save the children from the horrible store bought ones!). LittleRoq joined in on the cutting out of the shapes. And then he frosted the cookies reserved for our house while I frosted the ones for the party. It was really neat to make a recipe with my son that I have been making at my mom's side for many years.

Over the years we have learned a few things about making sugar cookies.

• First: Make way more cookies than you think you will need because no one can get enough of these.
• Second: If you are going to ship them, use small shapes rather than large ones because the small ones are more likely to survive the trip intact.
• Third: Do not roll the dough into large balls and then refrigerate. This creates a lot of hard work for you later on. The best thing to do is separate the dough and flatten it into a few small slabs, wrap in plastic wrap and then refrigerate. This makes rolling the dough out much easier.
• Fourth: Use powdered sugar rather than flour to dust your rolling surface so as to not add too much flour taste to the cookies.

For many cookie pointers read the transcript of the Good Eats episode The Cookie Clause. Alton Brown has many great tips on cookie making in that episode. It is where I learned about the slabs of dough. Can you believe we never thought of that?

And FINALLY the recipe:

Kathleen's (Mary's) Sugar Cookies

1 1/2 c sifted powder sugar
1 c butter softened
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
2 1/2 c flour, sifted
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar

Cream the sugar and butter. Mix in the egg, vanilla, and almond extract. Blend dry ingredients, stir into butter mixture. Refrigerate at least 3 hours.

Heat oven to 375 degrees.

Roll out dough a little at a time (if it gets too warm it gets sticky) to about 1/4 inch thick. Use cookie cutters to cut out.
Bake on un-greased baking sheets for 8 minutes or until lightly golden. Cool on wire racks. Frost with butter cream frosting.

Butter Cream Frosting

1 lb Powder Sugar (4 cups)
1/4 c milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 c butter softened
Food coloring

In a bowl combine sugar, milk, vanilla and butter. If a little thick add milk a few drops at a time until thin enough to frost with. Divide into bowls and mix in the food coloring.

Frost the cookies. Allow frosting to harden on the cookies then store in air-tight containers. (Place a piece of bread in with the cookies to keep them soft. When the piece becomes hard and dried out replace it with a fresh piece.)

This Cranberry Salad recipe is another passed on from my aunt. I have been making it for several years now and always get excellent reviews. It is a great dish for the summer time as well.

Start this dish the evening before you are serving it. In the morning stir in the remaining ingredients and the dish will be ready when you need it. A great make-ahead dish.

Be sure to buy cranberries in November and store them in your freezer (they keep for 1 year that way). Cranberries are not available the rest of the year.

Cranberry Salad

• 1 bag (12 oz) cranberries
• 2 cups sugar

Grind the cranberries using a food processor. Put into a bowl and combine with the sugar. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

• 1 1/2 cups walnuts
• 1 bag (10.5 oz) marshmallows
• 1 pint whipping cream
• 1 can (20 oz) crushed pineapple, drained

In a large bowl, add the remaining ingredients to the cranberry mixture, stir. Refrigerate for at least one our before serving.

This is my Grandmother's recipe. I don't know where she got it from, but she is the only person I ever knew that made Pumpkin Cookies. This is one of only a few recipes that I have of hers so it is one I treasure. Maybe it will become your signature cookie as it was hers.

Pumpkin Cookies

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup vegetable shortening
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup walnuts

Cream sugar and egg, pumpkin, vanilla, and shortening. Add dry ingredients. Stir in raisins and walnuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls on greased baking sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes in a 350 degree oven.