Ups and Downs

I didn't do much today, but what I did do was cooking, so you're about to see the fruits of pretty much all of my constructive motion today.  Despite my original plans of cooking and cleaning today, my house is not much cleaner than it was when I started, but I am now full for the second time today.

First, breakfast:
I've been waiting to try out the recipe in "400 Appetizers & Party Recipes" for chocolate and orange scotch pancakes since I picked it out more than a week ago.  I mean, the picture in the book just looks so good.  The recipe is pretty easy, it's basically a modified chocolate pancake soaked in a creme fraiche sauce and flavored with chocolate and orange, with a bit of Gran Marnier thrown in for good measure. 

The pancakes were pretty great by themselves, so I'll throw in the recipe here:

In a large bowl, sift together 1 cup self-rising flour (I used a substitution from "The Joy of Cooking" of 1 cup plain flour, 1.5 tsp baking soda, and 0.5 tsp salt) and 2 tbsp cocoa powder.  Make a well in the dry ingredients and crack in two eggs.  Slowly incorporate the eggs into the dry ingredients with a whisk (This is actually pretty hard.  I think I did it wrong because I just got a bunch of lumps of dough-like substance, while the book seems to indicate that it should be smooth).  In a small pan, heat together 7/8 cup milk and 2 oz semisweet chocolate (I used 72% cocoa dark chocolate) until the chocolate is dissolved.  Mix the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture and add the finely grated rind of one orange and 2 tbsp orange juice.  Drop large spoonfulls of the batter onto a pan and cook them like any other pancake. 

I had a couple of these little pancakes while I was making them, and believe me, they are delicious.  The thing is, they're not really sweet like pancakes, more like a kind of savory chocolate.  I don't know if this is because of the salt in my self-rising flour substitution or what, but I loved these guys on their own, and I hope to make them again.  Unfortunately, the rest of the recipe just goes down hill.

Actually, if you just make the start of the cream recipe--dissolving some brown sugar in warm butter, and mixing with creme fraiche--you'd have a pretty good sauce, but I found that the added Gran Marnier, orange slices, chocolate, and orange peel just brought it down.  I think it was too much.  I also think that I don't like Gran Marnier.  When it was done, the whole thing looked like this:

Not too impressive.  If I do this again, I'm going to just make the simple sauce and drizzle it over the pancakes, but in this recipe, I was instructed to basically stir the pancakes into the sauce.  This resulted in the horrible mess you see above.  It didn't help that my orange peel is short and has too much pith, and I could only make chocolate shavings instead of chocolate curls for decoration.  I'm sure a more professional cook could do a better job, but I think even a more professional cook would agree with me when I say this dish would taste better if we just kept it simple.

I was so full from the pancakes that I had no need for lunch, so we'll just fast-forward through my squandered afternoon (although I did call Jingnan, that was nice), and get to the flour tortillas.

Dinner:

I linked to this in a previous post, but I'll do it again here because it's such a good recipe.  Since it's just a simple flatbread, both the ingredients and the instructions are basic: mix together flour, salt, baking powder, milk, and lard; roll into circles and cook. 

I just followed the recipe, and I didn't have any problems to speak of.  Well, except I learned the hard way that you shouldn't stack the tortillas once you've rolled them, if they sit too long, they'll start to stick together and it's a pain to separate them.

I really liked working with this dough though.  The milk and lard lead to this being a really soft and light dough that just rolls out like magic.  Some people might be scared to try the recipe just because they've had bad experiences rolling out pie crusts or something, but this is nothing like pie crusts.  Well, it might be like rolling out pie crusts in heaven, because this dough is light and fluffy. 

They're pretty quick and easy to cook, so I'll just skip to what they look like when they're finished:

Well, now I've got a stack of fresh flour tortillas, what do I do with them?  I make tacos (fajitas?)! Well, I'm sure it's closer to tex-mex than anything else, but it is delicious.

As you can see, I've got my tortillas, some refried beans (hard to get around here, but I stopped at Lupe Pinto's last weekend), cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and two meaty fillings.  I've got some regular ground beef with loads of cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper, and some beef bouillon to fill it out, and I've got some pork steak cubed and fried up with onions and yellow bell pepper.  It's a hefty spread, and now that I've eaten a couple portions, I can tell you that it is a filling as it is tasty. 

Upcoming recipes to look forward to:  Elvis's favorite banana pudding recipe, baked corned beef encrusted in dijion mustard and brown sugar, and from the recipe book, recipe #149, Black Pasta with Ricotta (if I can find any black pasta around here).

Adventure!

I've been feeling like I haven't made anything for a while, and while that's not entirely true (I made some soup this week), I certainly haven't posted about anything in a while.  So today, I made a recipe I got from my good friend Mary.  It's called Cauliflower Soup, and I present the recipe below:

1 small head of cauliflower, diced
1 box of chicken stock
1/2 jar of fire roasted red pepper, diced
1 can of regular evaporated milk
1 small box of mushrooms
1 can of cheddar cheese soup
1 T. onion soup mix
2 T butter
1 cup cooked wild rice

Cook cauliflower in the chicken stock.  Sauté the mushrooms in the butter.  Add the mushrooms and everything else to the cauliflower and serve.

To serve, top with some shredded cheddar cheese, about 1/2 to 2 T of rice vinegar and top with ginger garlic wonton salad topper. 

Okay, so that was the recipe, but I couldn't make it according to the recipe.  I didn't have a box of chicken stock, but I have bouillon, and I guessed that a 'box' is about a pint.  I didn't have any fire roasted red pepper, but I did have a whole red bell pepper which I didn't roast, but I did chop it up and cook it with the cauliflower.  I didn't have a small box of mushrooms, but I did have a box of small mushrooms.  There's no cheddar cheese soup in this country, so I made a packet of cheddar cheese sauce and added a little more milk than was called for on the packet instructions.  I didn't have onion soup mix, but I found some onion sauce mix.  I had wild rice, but that stuff is a pain to cook.  Did you know that it takes like 50 minutes to cook wild rice?  It's all right though, it tastes pretty good.

Oh, also, I didn't have any cheddar cheese or ginger garlic wonton salad topper (whatever that is), so I skipped the cheese and used some tortilla chips in place of the salad topper.

So, in spite of all my substitutions, everything worked out.  Here's what it looks like in the bowl:

It's not exactly a color explosion, but a lot of that has to do with the wild rice and red pepper sitting at the bottom of the bowl.  What it lacks in visual appeal, it more than makes up with flavor.  And don't skip the vinegar at the end; it really adds something special. 

Actually, before I made the soup (because cooking wild rice takes soooooo looooonnnggg), I made what must be my favorite salad.

 
I guess it's sort of a Caprese salad.  It's just chopped bell peppers, tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese topped with some olive oil and a little salt and pepper.  The secret is to mix everything together and then wait at least ten minutes for the juices to come out.  Then it tastes amazing.  Plus, it's super easy and probably good for you.  Thanks Jingnan for exposing me to this tasty salad.  

Amaretto Soufflé

First, I need to warn you: I've never made a soufflé before.  I've never even been in the same room as a soufflé before, so I don't know what one's supposed to taste like, or how it should feel.  That being said, I made one today.

This particular soufflé is from the "400 Appetizers & Party Recipes" book, and it's on page 490.  It sounds pretty good because I love amaretto and all things almonds.  It calls for some amaretti, which I'd never heard of before, but it turns out they're these delicious Italian cookies.  If I get nothing else out of this recipe, the discovery of the amaretti makes it all worth it.

 

All right, so a soufflé is basically a lot of air and egg with a little bit of flavoring.  You put it in a special soufflé dish (which I had a hell of a time finding in Glasgow), and when it bakes, it expands.  You're supposed to serve it right away because it deflates quickly.  From all that I've read, a soufflé is only really pretty when it first comes out of the oven.  Even the act of serving it makes it deflate, and it's still gooey inside, so it all falls apart when you serve it up.  I really don't understand this dish at all.

Well, I baked it.  I might have baked it too long, because when it came out it looked like this:

As you can see, it's a little too brown on top, and it's already started to deflate.  In this picture, I'd already sprinkled a little powdered sugar on top.  Barring that, this is how it looked when it came out of the oven. 

Once you cut it open to serve it, it deflates a lot more.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but the hight in the center is about half the height of the dish.  The inside is a bit runny and very much like you'd expect from half-baked egg whites. 

How does it taste?  Honestly, it tastes like eggs.  Eggs with a little too much sugar and not enough amaretto.  Expecting, according to the book's description, "A mouthwatering and luxurious soufflé with rather more than a hint of Amaretto liqueur," I was not impressed.  But let me point you back to my initial statement: I have never made or even seen a soufflé before tonight.  Maybe I just did it wrong.  I followed the recipe to the letter, but it's possible I just have no intuition for soufflés, and I messed up some important detail.  Oh well, this book has loads of soufflés in it, so I'm sure I'll be making more in the future.  I just hope they aren't all this disappointing. 

Next recipe form the book:  #332, Chocolate and Orange Scotch Pancakes.  Now this is more my style.  I'll get working on them ASAP.

Biscuits!

Today, I made things with biscuits.

First, I made my favorite breakfast ever, biscuits and gravy.  It's pretty easy to make, just start with your favorite recipe for biscuits, then add gravy.  I use the recipe in "The Joy of Cooking" for basic rolled biscuits.  The only difference is that I used half butter and half butter-flavored shortening whereas the recipe in the book just calls for butter.  I think the shortening makes the dough a lot lighter.  If you ever have time, make one batch of dough with all butter and one batch with some shortening and compare the two, the difference in texture is astounding.  Anyway, I made a double batch.  The first half was made into biscuits:

They look petty good, and they taste wonderful.  Just salty enough, light and fluffy, I really outdid myself this time.  I made some gravy to go on top of the biscuits.  I don't have any pictures of the gravy by itself; it's pretty bland-looking, but it tastes amazing.  It's just a bechamel sauce with added pork sausage and lots (and I mean lots) of pepper.  The secret to a good gravy for biscuits it to add pepper until you think you've added too much, and then add a bit more.  Trust me, it's amazing.

 
The second half of my biscuit dough went into making monkey bread.  If you're not familiar with monkey bread, look it up, it's some great stuff.  Most recipes you find these days call for canned biscuits, but they don't really sell those here in the UK, so this is my first attempt using home-made biscuit dough.  I just rolled it out and cut it into strips.  Then you shake it in a bag with sugar and cinnamon, and pour some brown sugar and butter over it.  When I was done, it didn't look so good:

Next time, I'm going to make a few changes.  First, I don't have a bundt pan, which is kind of how it's made.  Instead, I have a springform pan that has a bundt insert.  It just isn't the same, so next time I'm going to use an honest bundt pan.  Second, I cut the dough into strips, and I think I should have gone with balls.  The strips just didn't bond well together.  Third, I need more dough, look at that picture up there, that's some paltry looking monkey bread.  Finally, I need to use different sugar.  I used demerara sugar because that's what I have, but traditionally, you're supposed to use white sugar.  The demerara just didn't stick to the dough, so instead of a sweet coating that gets covered in gooey caramel, you get a cinnamon coating that gets covered in gooey caramel.  Not terrible, but not quite right.  Next time, I may use some caster sugar.  That's sure to stick.  Still it all tastes good.  Butter and sugar: how could it not taste good?  And look at the texture in the bread:

That is light, fluffy, and delicious.  This really is my best batch of biscuit dough ever.

To wrap things up, here's a picture of me enjoying the fruits of my labor: