Category Archives: Desserts

Vignettes

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a vignette as

An ornamental or decorative design on a blank space in a book or among printed matter, esp. at the beginning or end of a chapter or other division, usually one of small size or occupying a small proportion of the space; spec. any embellishment, illustration, or picture uninclosed in a border, or having the edges shading off into the surrounding paper; a head-piece or tail-piece.

Very well, then.  If you’ll permit me, I present you a few vignettes, accompanied only by a smattering of explanatory text, of the food we’ve been playing with over the past few months, while my dissertation lengthened and my sad little blog slowly became emaciated.  Since this is a season of excess, I’d like to fatten it up a bit.  Here’s a start:

Serving suggestion for French Onion soup: hollow out a sourdough bread bowl, toast the inside, coat with a crust of Parmesan cheese, and flood with soup.  Top with Swiss cheese and broil until the bread crusts and the cheese blisters.  Try not to burn your tongue.

To celebrate, or perhaps provide an epitaph for, our pathetic tomato season this year, I made a roasted green salsa for Halloween.  Tomatillos, which flourished happily, green tomatoes, which did not, jalapeno, onion, garlic, and plenty of cumin.  Roasted, cooled, pulsed together with salt, lime juice, and cilantro.  Tickling and spicy and smoky, and perfect for a rainy Halloween.

Seeking fruit without the healthful feeling, I made crustless “apple pie” one evening with great triumph.  Apples sliced thinly, tossed with a tablespoon or two of flour, butter, and a hefty sprinkling each of sugar and cinnamon, bake in the oven for half an hour.  I left the skin on for color, chew, and nutrients, and we were both delighted with the syrupy excellence they eschewed.  It was not unlike the filling in an apple pie crepe from The Vintage which, if you haven’t visited, you should.  With haste.

Spurred toward the heady, heavy, comforting feel of winter food by this apple pieless dessert, we delved into the season of rich sauces, hearty vegetables, and warm fatty indulgences.  Perhaps yearning for protein in the darkness of November’s cold snap, we opted for a rich beer and beef stew replete with parsnips, carrots, and cup after cup of rich brown mushrooms spilling earthy thickness into the stew.  Whole grain mustard offered intrigue, a whole bottle of Jubelale provided dark yeasty flavor, and a glug of beef broth tied the flavors together.  Good stew meat from Long’s Meat Market (warning: the website has sound) was the clear star, and even the “low quality” stew meat I bought, intended to be cooked long and low to tenderize, was so juicy, so flavorful, and so ridiculously good, that I couldn’t stop myself from gulping down three or four pieces after only searing them crusty brown on all edges.  Lucky for us, I made a full recipe and froze half, so when the celebratory delectability of December ends and the long, cold middle of winter sweeps into Oregon, we will have reserves to bolster us until the sun appears again. 

Fortunately this same reserve will not have to serve this site.  Holidays approach, and with them a break from school, which means a break from dissertating, a break from grading, and a break from relentless reading.  Rather, I intend to poise myself in my kitchen and dart behind and before the camera, mincing, stirring, pouring, focusing, clicking.  And, inevitably, writing.  To you.  Happy December!

2010 Thanksgiving Menu

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I get excited about holidays that involve cooking waaaayyyyy earlier than I should (then again, since our Target already has a Christmas section erected, complete with at least six artificial trees, maybe I’m not totally unhealthy).  I even told my mom over the phone this past Sunday that I’d probably go grocery shopping for the holiday late this week or this weekend.  Right, with two weeks to go.  I was already a week ahead of myself and willing to completely skip seven days of reality so I could buy a turkey.

But I love the way food impacts a holiday, and not just because I love eating.  For my family, food has a binding quality.  I love to cook, my mom taught me how and she loves to cook, my sister is developing an enjoyment and adventuresome spirit in the kitchen, and my dad… likes eating the food we make.  But still, it gives us something to talk about, something to share with each other, and something to do together, when we are in the same kitchen.  I feel close to them through the food we create.

At Thanksgiving, my mom and I make most of the dinner, my sister pipes in with seasoning suggestions, my dad carves the turkey, N. tastes things and generally tries to stay out of the way, and Lucy’s nose never stops twitching.  Every hour or so, little click-clacking dog claws tiptoe into the kitchen to take a sniff and clean the floor.

So I’ve already thought through the entire menu.  I know exactly what we’re having.  I’m even contemplating spending my evening tonight making a detailed grocery list for the big shopping trip.  Excessive?  Premature?  Perhaps.  But so delicious.

Here’s the menu for our Thanksgiving this year:

Appetizers: whole heads of roasted garlic with soft goat cheese and toasted baguette, roasted nuts with brown sugar and rosemary, assorted dried fruit.

Dinner: herb roasted turkey with giblet gravy, stuffing, chipotle mashed sweet potatoes,  creamed spinach and artichoke bake, and whole berry cranberry sauce.

Desserts: Mom’s pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and pumpkin cheesecake squares.  My sister doesn’t love pumpkin pie, so this year there will be two desserts.  If the recipe I invent for her works out well, I’ll post it here.

What are you having for Thanksgiving dinner this year?

Frankenbrownies

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I love Halloween.  We always have a party, and I always go overboard with the variety and quantity of treats I make.  I get nervous about whether we will have enough food, and then I get anxious about whether I’ll be able to pull everything together in time.  It can be a little scary…

I also loved the pumpkin enchiladas I posted about here.  I never would have expected the flavors of rich, fruity pumpkin, mild creamy goat cheese, and the deep roasty chocolate of mole sauce to go together well.  But they did, and it got me thinking of other ways of combining this trio.  Spurred by a statement of dessert desire by a sick friend, the project became brownies.  Pumpkin cream cheese brownies: could such a thing be?

There are a million recipes for brownies, but I went with Dave Lebovitz’s Cheesecake Brownies, which turned out to be a really good idea. Though I was at first thrown off by and nervous about the complete lack of leavening products, I fought back my temptation to add some baking powder and mixed the ingredients exactly as written.  It was the right choice.

Rather than simply swirling the cream cheese dollops with the thick, shiny chocolate batter, I also added about a cup of pumpkin puree mixed with a teaspoon or two of pumpkin pie spice.  I swirled.  I swirled and swirled and swirled, and still no chocolate came to the surface.  I scooped and plopped and swirled some more, and finally a few rich brown slivers came to the surface.  It was kind of a monster.  But keeping in mind that at its Latin roots, a “monster” bears in its etymology the idea of showing us something, I decided that was good enough, and I’d have to wait and see what it had to show me.  I deposited my weighty, ugly baby into the oven for almost an hour.

Fifteen minutes or so into the cooking process, I started to smell that incredible, mouthwatering aroma of chocolate cooking.  Half an hour in, a delicate curl of cheesecake inserted itself into the scented air.  I couldn’t smell the pumpkin much, but suddenly there was chocolate-cheesecake-spiciness, and I wanted to pull the whole thing out and just eat the whole thing with a spoon.

I resisted, and when the collection of smells had solidified into a… well… a thing from which an inserted toothpick came out clean, I set it aside on the counter to cool.  It was truly a frankensteinian creation.  The brownie layer was dark and rich and barely disturbed, while the top was a delicate whipped pale orange that cut like a harvest-flavored mousse.

The taste was so good.  The brownie was dark and rich; it was definitely of the fudgy brownie ilk rather than the cakey, flakey brownie.  The pumpkin and the cream cheese read like a pumpkin cheesecake, with all the creamy smoothness of a cheesecake and all the spongy custard-y quality of pumpkin pie.  They were delicious together, just as the same flavors – with considerably less sweetness – melded in my pumpkin enchiladas.

While the flavor was great, it did read more like a layered dessert than a brownie.  I think this is because I used the full amount of cream cheese mix Dave Lebovitz calls for PLUS a cup of pumpkin puree.  There was just too much goodness to swirl evenly.  My proposed solution to this is to layer half the chocolate, then dollop on the cream cheese and pumpkin, then top it with the other half of the chocolate batter before mixing.  It seems it will be easier to swirl together the much denser, thicker chocolate with the delicate creaminess of the additional flavors if the chocolate is divided up.

This was truly a Frankenstein creation, but it was certainly not a monster, except perhaps in the sense that it demonstrated deliciousness.  It will make its debut at our Halloween party this year, swirled and sliced and dressed to impress, in orange and “black.”  Its trio of components all vying to be the star means I won’t have to make as many kinds of treats, because here’s the trick: this is a three-in-one.

See, trick-or-treat’s not so scary…

Dancing in the Kitchen with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef

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Shauna and Danny Ahern are my friends.  I don’t know them, we’ve never met, and though I read Shauna’s blog Gluten-Free Girl with a dedication that trips along the border between religious devotion and obsessive-compulsive disorder, I doubt she has ever glanced at mine.  I have drooled over the food (and made some of it!), I have laughed at her triumphs, I have felt my biological clock chime when she speaks of her daughter.  In late July, I sat on my sofa with tears streaming down my face, choking for breath as I read the beautiful story of her wedding.  As a writer myself, I admire her style, her skill with words, and her ability to talk lovingly, richly, thoughtfully about food, about family, about opportunity and love.  I feel like I know these people.  I wish I really did.

A few weeks ago, Shauna announced that along with the forthcoming publication of the cookbook/love story she and Danny “the Chef” wrote together (Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes, listed on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Free-Girl-Shauna-James-Ahern/dp/0470419717), they were willing to share three preview recipes with interested parties.  I was, of course, one of these, and in a flurried email exchange, I suddenly had three brilliant recipes, replete with stories, to dance to in my little kitchen.

I ended up only making two of the three, mostly because N. doesn’t like shrimp, so a plate of seared prawns in almond garlic sauce did not sound appealing to him.  But if everything in the cookbook is as stellar in flavor and straightforward in instructions as the two recipes I did conquer over as many days, everyone should own a copy of this book, whether you eat gluten-free or not.

Friday night N. and I went to a last-hurrah-of-summer-bbq at the home of J., my birthday twin, and his partner HP.  Troubled by the notion of bringing the chocolate cake again (I’ve made it several times this summer already), I cast about mentally for another idea, and there was the pdf recipe for GFG’s chocolate peanut butter brownies.  My mouth started to moisten.  Chocolate, butter, sugar, peanut butter, and my first experimentation with xantham gum?  Yes, thank you, I think I will!

As brownies go, it was a fairly standard procedure of careful melting, mixing, swirling, baking, but oh the delight of tasting!  In the short section about the recipe preceding the ingredient list, the words “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” appear.  They aren’t kidding.  With the peanut butter swirled gently into the deep chocolate batter (and there is no other word for the color than that: chocolate) and my fingers cautiously tasting stray blobs of batter, I wanted to stop and eat the batter.  Half of it would bake up just as nicely as the whole pan, right?

I resisted, and slipped the dish into the oven, relinquishing it from sight for half an hour.  Still tasting the batter, I could detect a slight grainy texture that I attributed to the alternative flours used (my previous experimentations with gluten-free flours have not always been great, but they have always been grainy), so I was a little worried about that.  But after the pan cooked, cooled, and came to the party with me, my concern lifted.  I wouldn’t have had to tell anyone these brownies were gluten-free.  I wanted to, because I must admit I wanted to brag a bit about participating in this project (and get the word out there!), but there was no explaining to do.

Oh Shauna.  Oh Danny.  The taste!  The crumb was rich and moist, the pockets of peanut butter were sticky bombs of candy-like delight.  I couldn’t even get a photo in before the hordes descended on the pan.  Seven people decimated ¾ of the pan in ten minutes.  Almost everyone went back for seconds.  Ever thoughtful of my not-so-narrow waistline (and hips, and thighs, and butt), I generally try to leave leftovers at other people’s houses when I choose dessert as my contribution to a meal.  Not this time.  The remaining brownies came with me, clasped tightly on my lap as we drove home in the rain.

Saturday, I ventured out into the weather again to pick up a few last ingredients for my second dance with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef; it’s hard to make a pasta dish containing lemons, olives, anchovies and pine nuts when you don’t have lemons or pine nuts in your kitchen.  I grumped to myself as I walked to the store and back.  Why did I need this stuff?  I knew I shouldn’t, but it would just be easier to substitute ingredients.  The brownies had been good (liar, understatement of the century!), but this was just pasta.  I could post about the brownies and leave it at that…

I was so wrong.  With water for brown rice pasta considering coming to a boil, I prepped ingredients and tried to imagine what this was going to taste like.  N. had already been frightened by the idea of anchovies, and I knew he was envisioning a cheap pizza draped with little fishy bodies.  I told him that Shauna and Danny said not to be afraid.  He said “hmph,” which meant he was unconvinced.  He doesn’t know Shauna and Danny like I do.

With the toasty, nutty perfume of not-quite-burned pine nuts still lingering in the kitchen, I sautéed a collection of vegetables in my biggest skillet, hurriedly chopping and slicing in between stirring sessions.  I’m always too anxious to cook to bother readying all my mise en place before scraping a boardful of ingredients into the pan.  At the point that the roughly chopped mix of olives I’d kept stowed in the back of my fridge and the finely chopped little fillets of anchovy hit the pan, I felt my knees buckle.  The smell was incredible.  When I added capers and lemon juice, I had a Proustian epiphany of Corsica, of Greece, of Spain.  Except I’ve never been to Spain.  Or Corsica.  Or anywhere in Greece.  It was just a strong enough, rich enough, delicious enough smell that it lifted me from the stained hardwood floor of my kitchen and transported me onto some magical different plane of Mediterranean glory.

Carefully twirling the pasta through sauce, I had to be careful not to drool on it.  These flavors: is this umami?  It was almost more than I could manage to mix in pine nuts, lemon zest, a clumsy chiffonade of basil – I just wanted to eat it straight out of the skillet.

We sat down to eat.  I tried to do one of those perfect forkfuls where you get a tiny sample of everything.  I tried to think objectively about what I was about to experience, about what vocabulary I would use to describe it, about how I could speak like a food critic about it.  I don’t know how.  Here are my words, all I can manage: earthy.  Warm.  Salty-bright-tangy-acidic-perfect.  Briny.  Tart.  Meltingly rich.  Flavor bomb.  Somewhat reminiscent of chicken piccata, but deeper, richer, earthier, nuttier.

And N.?  He scraped his plate.  I asked him what he thought so I could make a report.  “It was excellent.”  As I’ve written before, N. is generally restrained in his verbal praise of food.  And this was “excellent.”

I’ve never bought anchovies before.  I might never allow them out of my pantry again.  This recipe, whether we use gluten-free pasta or not, will fast become one of my staples.  For me, it’s too distinctive to have all the time.  It’s too special.  But for those nights when I need something powerful to wake my taste buds, when I need something that makes my mouth feel alive, this is it.  This was like eating a tango.

Go to a bookstore.  Order Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes.  Rejoice in the story and in the recipes and in the wonderful opportunity to eat really, really good food.  Dance in your kitchen.  And then tell me about it.  And tell Shauna.  I know she’d want to know.

Seattle: Day Two

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This trip was extra special in the food indulgence area because we opted to stay at a bed and breakfast instead of the usual chain hotel.  At the Villa Heidelberg, our hostess serves what she calls a “hearty breakfast,” which consists of coffee or tea and fruit, followed by a hot dish that changes every day.  As we ate this hot dish the first morning – a croissant stuffed with Canadian bacon, cheddar cheese and sliced, cinnamon dusted apples, then coated in egg and baked until the pastry was even toastier and flakier than before and the apples were just softening – she explained that she has almost run out of room in her kitchen for her cookbook collection.  Other bed and breakfast establishments have five or six standby breakfasts they alternate between or cycle through, but she said that early in her career as innkeeper she got tired of making the same things week in and week out.  She keeps adding and adding to her repertoire, and with a side of maple syrup to absolutely drench this croissant in fantastic sticky decadence, we were well set to begin our adventures.

Despite this incredibly filling start to the day, when thoughts of lunch started to percolate as we strolled through Pike Place, I knew almost immediately what I wanted.  The smells in the marketplace were so good that you’d think it would be hard to decide.  But I knew.

The fish stalls here were impressive, and when I say that the place smelled like fish, I mean this in a positive way.  Even raw, the fish was so fresh and so reminiscent of the salty spray of the Pacific that even N. admitted it smelled good.  It didn’t hurt that the aromas of smoked salmon and fried seafood lingered around us as well, and this became my lunch quest: fried shrimp.

For $7.99, the sardonic but chatty expediter at one stall sold me this beautiful portion of beer battered and fried prawns with French fries.  It was like heaven.  Since N. doesn’t like shellfish, we never eat it at home.  Not only were these fresh, plump, perfectly toothsome prawns, but they were coated in delicious rich batter and fried until they had soaked in just the right amount of grease.  Enough to coat the fingers and shine suggestively in the corners of my mouth.  Not quite enough to weigh me down.  Perfect.  Well, perfect if I’d had a beer on the side.  Maybe a nice wheat beer with a generous lemon wedge.  And bringing the expediter home, where he would become our local bartender.  Then I could call it perfect.

Dinner this night was to be our belated anniversary dinner.  Since I’d just celebrated my birthday, I decided it could do double duty.  We chose Purple, a bistro and wine bar right downtown, and entered the enormous, dimly lit room slowly.  Solid heavy doors and ceiling to floor windows protected a huge spiral staircase winding around a column of shelves packed with bottles.  While I was still gaping at this collection of wine, we were seated and handed a binder full of beverage choices.  Our poor server had to come back three times to get our order, as I, still a bit of a wine novice, was completely intimidated by the gratuitous supply and tremendous number of options.  I selected a nice citrusy Gewürztraminer while N., always the beer man, had an Old Rasputin Stout.  He gave me a sip and I was surprised by its dark smokiness.

With so many wine choices, I was almost dizzy with the rush of having to choose accompanying food.  I get nervous at restaurants when I have a plethora of choices.  Do I opt for something comforting, familiar, guaranteed to be good, or do I branch out and order something that sounds adventurous – a startling mix of flavors that might be outrageously good… or a slight disappointment?  Here, though, I needn’t even have opened the menu; the first special on the front page was too good to pass up: risotto with roasted tomatoes, spinach, and Greek feta.

The poor quality here is due to the dim lighting, but I could just as easily claim it was thanks to my hands quivering from delight.  It sounds so simple, and as I looked down at my plate I feared I had been too cautious, but I was wrong.  The blend of flavors was stellar.  The rice was tender and flavorful, the tomatoes had sharp tanginess that matched well with the feta, and the whole thing had that unbelievable magical creaminess risotto gains from twenty minutes of tireless stirring while the rice grains – little sponges that they are – slowly suck in more and more broth.

While my fork danced around my plate, N. enjoyed a more hands-on experience, ordering a gorgonzola and fig pizza, replete with walnuts and rosemary, and a shy sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.  The thick purple slices of fresh fig looked so alien on pizza, as did the hefty chunks of walnut, but the finished product was tasty and intriguing.  In my plans for recreation, I may try making a rosemary foccaccia dough as a base, and then replacing the fresh figs for dried.

Because it was a special occasion, and because our server told us the desserts were “tapas sized,” we decided we had to splurge.  With options like these, there was simply no leaving before we had a sample or two.  We decided to share two desserts: the red velvet cake with lavender cream cheese frosting, and the blackberry cheesecake with blackberry coulis and candied lime zest.  Despite being barely bigger than golf balls, both were triumphant.  The cake was moist and rich, and the lavender sprinkled atop the frosting was an unexpectedly good touch.  It had a sophisticated flavor somehow and a light perfume, making this more than just good cake.

The cheesecake was rich and exceedingly smooth, and I found the perfect balance was a generous dip of blackberry coulis and a sliver of candied zest.  I like a bite of sour citrus with my cheesecake, and without that tart, slightly bitter chew, this perfect little cylinder might have been bland.  As it was, if I were slightly less polite I would have licked my plate.  Hell, I would have licked both plates.

Thanks, Seattle, you were that good. 

Experimentation

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N. and I rarely finish an entire loaf of bread.  Oh we try, but invariably those loaves of whole wheat, and sliced sourdough, and the occasional rye, end up shoved to the back of the freezer or refrigerator with only a slice or two left in them.  Then they just sit there.  For months, sometimes.  The same, as of late, is true of bagels.  In spurts of enthusiasm toward the noble meal that is breakfast, we buy half-dozens and dozens of bagels from various bakeries and munch our way through four or five before the lonely outcast remainder is slowly pushed behind Tupperware containers and plastic-wrapped leftovers.

Well no more.  I have been meaning to make bread pudding for some time now, in an effort to put to use the heels and scraps of bread that litter our freezer shelves, but I couldn’t find a recipe I liked and, in one of my odd and unfounded deductions, had somehow decided it was a difficult thing to make.  Yesterday, with no experience and only a handful of recipe ideas from the internet (google: “bagel bread pudding”; you’ll be surprised by the number of people who have tried it!), I liberated our stash of lonely, forgotten, individually bagged cinnamon raisin bagels and invited them to a custard party.

Here’s what you need:

3 cinnamon raisin bagels

3 eggs

3 cups milk

½ – 1 cup sugar, depending on how sweet you want it.  I wanted dessert AND breakfast, so I only added about ½ cup.

½ tsp. pumpkin pie spice

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1-2 TB spiced rum (optional)

Here’s what you do:

Tear or cut the bagels into bite-sized chunks (or a little bigger), and settle them in a single layer in a square glass baking dish (8×8 or 9×9).

In a medium bowl, mix all remaining ingredients together and whisk well to blend.  This is the custard.

Pour custard mixture over the bagel pieces, top with a plate or pan (something to push the bagel pieces down into the custard), and refrigerate for at least an hour.

After at least an hour of chilling under pressure, move the pan to a preheated 350F oven and bake for around 45 minutes, or until the tops of the bagel pieces are browned and slightly crisp.

Thanks to the cinnamon, the pumpkin pie spice, and the rum, after about twenty minutes our house filled with that holiday-season smell.  You know what I mean.  After 45 minutes, I peeked in the oven and saw that the top pieces, the edges that poked out over the custard, were dark brown and crispy, and when I touched them lightly the whole beautiful pudding jiggled slightly and then sprang back into shape after my touch.  The top had puffed up as the eggs cooked and expanded, and when I took it out of the oven I could hear it hissing and whining softly as air released.

I couldn’t wait very long before digging in… so I did.  Bagels exiled to the back recesses of our freezer will never go to waste again.  The custard was soft and sweet, but the real stars were the bagel chunks.  They had soaked up a lot of liquid and had the consistency of very firm, chewy French toast.  They were moist and soft but still had pleasing texture, and I could have eaten the whole casserole dishful right there in the kitchen, leaning over our petite table.  But I resisted.  Because I wanted some for breakfast this morning too…