Shameless Christmas Carol

This has nothing to do with cooking....

The last time I made bread....

my intention was to have a good sandwich loaf. Turns out it was just too crumbly to hold together for a regular sandwich, but I discovered it is excellent for grilled cheese!!

So....Nobody cooks all the time

But we gotta eat..
This one has puff pastry stuffed with Sopressata Salami, grated Gruyere and Dijon Mustard.


A little egg wash...


...and baked nice and brown.




All gone!

Thanksgiving

Natti had to work on Thanksgiving, one of the downsides of working in a hospital, so I had to do the cooking. That's OK, cause I smoke a pretty mean turkey.


Seamus was on hand to help out with the sampling detail.


When Natti got home from work, we packed up all the food and headed to her sister, Eva's house to lay out the spread and grub out.


Getting ready to carve the bird.

Hot Pan de Sal

This isn't exactly "authentic", but it's pretty darned close. I ran out of bread flour, so I used about a half cup of whole wheat flour. I also used Italian bread crumbs.





With a small slab of butter on it, authentic becomes a moot point.

I love coming home from a long days work......

and finding dinner ready to eat. Tonight I was greeted with pan seared salmon served over couscous cooked in chicken broth with capers and dried cranberries.


very satisfying! I never cared much for cranberries when growing up, but dried cranberries are a different story. Capers, I didn't have a clue. Salmon I thought I didn't like. Now I know I just didn't like the way it was cooked.

Oatmeal-Molasses Nut Bread

(perfect for a bread nut)

Recipe by Hardly Dangerous
Ya gonna need:
1 1/3 Cups Filtered Water
¼ Cup Steel Cut Oatmeal
2 Tablespoons of Butter
3 Tablespoons Molasses
1 Package Active Dry Yeast
1 Egg
2 Teaspoons Sea Salt
¼ Cup Chopped Toasted Sunflower Seeds
¼ Cup Almond Meal
2 Tablespoons Sesame Seeds
2 ½ Cups Unbleached All Purpose Flour
Good Olive Oil


Put the water into a small pan and bring it to a boil over high heat (that way you don’t have to wait so long). Add the oatmeal and reduce the heat to medium low. It’s gonna take a while, so you might as well crack a brew. Go back and stir the oatmeal every now an then and take a sip every now an then for about 30 minutes (steel cut oatmeal takes a spell to soften up).

While this is going on, you can surf the internet…er sumthin. After the timer dings, take the oatmeal off the stove (don’t forget to turn the stove off), add the butter and molasses. When it’s got the butter melted good, dump it into your mixing bowl (I’m talking about the one on your stand mixer). This should help it cool a bit faster, cause the temperature needs to come down to about 105F before you put the yeast in. Too hot kills the yeast. When it’s cooled enough, dump the yeast in and mix it up with a whip.

Might as well crack another brew, cause you got another wait comin. Let that yeast wake up for about 10 minutes so it can bloom. After the blooming has commenced, put on the dough hook and put in the egg. Turn the mixer on slow speed, then add the sunflower seeds, almond meal and sesame seeds. Kind of slowly add in 2 cups of the flour. Let the mixer do it’s stuff. You can add flour as needed to get the mixture dry enough that it pulls away from the sides of the bowl cleanly and forms into a floppy ball, then let her go for 7 to 10 minutes. This takes the place of what a purist would call kneading. I call it waitin’, watchin’ and restin’ time. Stop the mixer and take out the dough , and slap it into a nice ball. Take out your favorite hand turned pottery bowl, yes the one your brother Bryan made, and oil the sides a bit and put the ball of dough in it. Roll the dough around a little to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set it in a warm place, crack another brew (maybe two) we need to wait for about an hour this time. You may opt to set the timer and take a nap at this juncture (bread making don’t have to be tense, ya know).

Don’t look at it until the timer dings again. Now you’ll be all surprised and pleased when you wake up to see that it’s about twice as big as when you shut them eyes. Now comes the hard part. The recipe that inspired this recipe says to dump it out on a clean board, I say put just a dusting of flour on the board so the dough don’t want to stick quite as much. What you’re going to do now is work it into kind of a rectangle maybe about ¾ to an inch thick. Fold it into thirds and flatten it out into another rectangle about the same size as the first. Do this rectangle thing a couple more times then just squash the dough into kind of a log about as long as your baking pan. Butter the sides of the baking pan and put the log in and cover it with a kitchen towel. We’re going to need another beer about now, cuz we got another wait.

If you have timed it correctly, your favorite half hour TV show will just be starting. When that show is over, set your oven to 375F and git to waiting right away. After your second favorite half hour TV show is over, take the towel off and put your now twice as big again dough into your now well heated oven. Set your timer for about 35 minutes. When it dings this time, you’ll have a really delicious loaf of bread ready to extract from the oven. You really should put it on a rack and let it cool for a couple of hours, but I’ll understand if you just can’t wait. It might taste extra good with a nice cold beer!!

Natti says I'm obsessed ......

Maybe she's right. I baked my first ever loaf of bread a couple of weeks ago, a wild yeast whole wheat sourdough. For my first shot at bread baking, it came out pretty good. I baked three more loaves over the last couple of weeks, and none came out as good as the first. All three taste good and have that sourdough tanginess, but two of them came out flat like a focaccia. The other looked beautiful, but it was a tad under cooked and quite dense (kind of like my noggin).



So today I decided to try something that uses regular old commercial yeast. I don't have time to wait for the sourdough starter to do it's magic (or maybe I'm just impatient). I started off with a Honey-Whole Wheat loaf... A very simple recipe: 1 package of dry yeast dissolved in 1 cup of warm milk, let it bloom for about 5 to 10 minutes in the bowl of the trusty stand mixer. Add 3 cups of whole wheat flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 egg, a couple of tablespoons of honey and 3 tablespoons of butter. Put the dough hook on the mixer and knead for about 10 minutes on slow speed. You come out with a ball of dough that looks similar to the one below.


That little ball of dough needs to sit in a warm place in an oiled bowl covered with Saran wrap for about an hour. During that time, it will grow as the yeast does it's magic. Then I take it out of the bowl, flatten it, fold it, flatten and fold again...several times. Eventually, I roll it into a log and put it in a buttered bread pan for another hour of rising. (sorry I didn't get pics of all this) Then into a 375 F oven for 35 minutes....Out comes a perfectly lovely loaf of bread.



Next up, an Oatmeal-Molasses loaf. Dump a cup of boiling water over a half cup of old fashioned rolled oats. Add about three tablespoons of butter and a couple of tablespoons of molasses and let it sit until cooled to 105 to 115F (so it don't kill the yeast). Add one package of active dry yeast and wait about 10 minutes for it to bloom. Add 2 cups of unbleached flour and a teaspoon of salt, put on the dough hook and knead for about ten minutes on low speed. I had to add flour to get the right consistency, but I didn'y measure it. You know it's right when the dough is stiff and pulls away from the sides of the mixing bowl. Make a dough ball just as above and put in an oiled bowl covered with Saran Wrap for it's hour of rising. It should look like this after it has risen.



Now I flatten it out...



and start folding. (This is what you missed on the Honey-Wheat bread)



I flatten and fold about a half dozen times, then roll it into a log and dump it into the buttered bread pan for another hour of rising. Before rising, it looks like this.



An hour later, it looks like this.



40 minutes in the oven at 375 and it looks like this!!

Sopas.....

Yeah, I know....sopas means soup, but in the Philippines it's a certain kind of soup. Natti's is just a little bit different. No Vienna sausage or Darigold milk in this and it is oh so good!! This would be excellent with a slice of my sourdough bread...mmmmm!!

Dinner in the family room....

Pork Chops and onions with lemon and toyo

My turn to cook again. This time, a bit more ambitious....

I started the “Natti’s Cooking” blog a while ago to share my enthusiasm for good food and perhaps to brag just a little about Natti’s knack for the culinary arts. I share it fairly regularly with my friends on Facebook, and I get comments from time to time indicating that some of them actually check out the blog and appreciate it.

I shared the blog with Mike Hershfelt, a new intern at work, who said that his girlfriend also had a food blog, See it HERE. I checked out her blog and was instantly intrigued by her sourdough bread, partially because Natti had just discovered “San Luis Cracked Wheat Sourdough” bread and partially because the picture in Katie’s blog looked wonderful. I mentioned this to Mike and he offered up a cup of Katie’s sourdough starter to get me going. As of right now, my first ever batch of sourdough bread is in its 14th hour of rising/fermenting and I am getting excited.



I followed Katie’s recipe fairly closely, and initially ended up with a small dough ball which I set aside for the night. In the morning when I rushed into the kitchen to check it out, it had grown. It was now four or five times as big as the previous night and looked more like a really thick batch of my white milk gravy than a dough ball. I started to worry a bit.


After the requisite 16 hours of fermentation, I turned it out onto my floured cutting board and my worries started to ebb. It is dough after all, and it is full of bubbles and it smells good. I spread it out and folded it as recommended and then formed it into a ball to start its final resting period before I introduce it to the oven.



As I wait, I’m thinking “This has been pretty easy, so far.” And as I look over the directions, it appears that the hard part is already done. When one hour had passed, I set the oven to 400◦ F and put Natti’s cherished Le Creuset Dutch oven inside to heat up. After another half hour I dumped the dough ball into the dutch oven, put on the cover and slid it into the oven. Another half hour and the lid was removed from the dutch oven and I got my first peek at the bread.



Now all I have to do is wait 15 more minutes for the final browning and for the crust to firm up.



It's beautiful!!! Let it cool on the rack for a bit then cut into it, spread a little butter and….. It’s not half bad!! In fact, it's pretty darned good!!



I already have another loaf fermenting, and a couple of ideas which I'm pretty sure will improve an already pretty darned good bread.... we'll see tomorrow afternoon.

Calamansi

About a month ago Natti's sister Eva gave us a small calamansi (Philippine Lime) tree, which is just starting to bear fruit. The largest are about the size of a quarter.


This is my first "harvest"... just a hand full, but enough to make a nice glass of "lemonade".


It's a little bit different and quite tasty. Thanks a lot, Eva.

Samples

Natti made a dozen sample size cheesecakes, arranged them on a serving platter and adorned them with berries and mint leaf. She then took them into the dining room for a photo session.

Well, I had been doing a bit of photo framing and had the table pretty much covered up. She reached down to move something and all but four or five of the beautiful little cheese cakes tumbled to the floor.

The dogs didn't mind one little bit.

Cheesecake

better than the "Cheesecake Factory" by a comfortable margin!

Angel Food Cake

with honey lemon yogurt sauce.

I know, I know

.... but it really is something special

Grilled shrimp and asparagus........

Everybody likes shrimp...and when it's grilled just right with some fresh asparagus....


and served over lemon risotto, it makes for a pretty good dinner...


Honey orange panna cotta with fresh berries for dessert. Another home run!!


Left overs for tomorrow's lunch...

I'm not sure what to call this........

but it's got charcoal grilled corn, shrimp, tomatoes and sausage....


and it's served over orzo cooked in chicken broth and safron....


and it is very good!!

Adobo

Very simple staple food of the Philippines. Pork, soy sauce, vinegar, onions and tomatoes. Served over plain white rice. I think I could live on it.....





Adobo can be made with chicken or beef, but in my humble opinion, pork country style ribs are far and away the best.

Spinach salad with shrimp and warm vinaigrette

Saute' some minced shallots in brown butter, add a shot of red wine vinegar, another of honey, salt and pepper to taste. Pour it over a bed of baby spinach and pan fried shrimp....purty darned good!!

[click on pic for lifesize]

Once again....Chicken Parm

The sauce players (in order of appearance) Garlic, Onions, Stewed Tomatoes, Kalamata Olives, Fresh Basil....
The chicken breast gets hammered, egg washed, bread crumbs and a spell in a hot skillet. Then on to the baking dish, topped with sauce, mozzarella, basil and parmesan. About 30 minutes later.....

The real secret here is....the Kalamata Olives.

Click on the image for life size