Another fear bites the dust: puff pastry

Not only have I never made puff pastry before, but I've never even cooked with it. Whenever I see it in a recipe, I get annoyed that they want me to use store-bought when I could just make my own...but then I've never made my own. It's a vicious cycle.

And I knew that it was a little intimidating...something about rolling butter and flour 500 times, keeping everything cold, if you breathe wrong, it all melts together and is ruined.

But I also knew that it was coming up in our Modern Baker Challenge. Andrea, Phyl, and Sara have already made the puff pastry and elephant ears, and seeing their results really made me want to try it.

And then Marthe picked empanadas for our next Bake! twitterbake, and they're made with puff pastry. Looks like today was the day!

I used the recipe from Bake!, although it looked pretty similar to the Modern Baker one. I mixed up flour, salt, and half a stick of sliced cold unsalted butter in my food processor. Then I switched to a bowl, where I added tiny pieces (1/4 inch) of more butter. Cutting the butter into those tiny pieces was actually the most time-consuming part! I started folding in cold water until I could push the dough together and then I began the press and fold sequence. It seemed like the instructions in Bake! are much easier than the traditional puff pastry, but a little more involved than the instructions in Modern Baker. I was a little worried about whether I was doing it correctly, but by the third turn, I felt like I had the hang of it. My dough looked like this before I put it into the fridge, and I couldn't see any of the layers I was supposed to have:

But after an hour of refrigeration, I cut off a piece to use for the elephant ears, and I saw this:

Layers! Sigh of relief!

Also, while I was waiting for my dough to cool, I found a link on Nick Malgieri's website to a video of him demonstrating the puff pastry recipe from Bake! on Martha Stewart. It was so helpful!! I will definitely have it by my side the next time I make puff pastry, and I hope other beginners watch it, too.

The rest of the elephant ear preparation was easy. I rolled out the dough in sugar, folded it over on itself per the instructions, and put it back in the fridge. Then I sliced the dough into 1/2 inch segments, dipped them in sugar, and placed them on my silpat-covered jelly roll pan. The only issue was that they took way longer to bake than they were supposed to and I needed my oven for dinner...they ended up taking about 20 minutes or a little longer.

These were easy and awesome...I'm really glad I only made part of a batch because they were all gone within a couple of hours. Yum!

Summer on a plate

I'm most of the way through my SPRING break today, and guess what my family spent the afternoon doing? Yes, shoveling. AGAIN. This longest, coldest, snowiest winter is taking its toll...kids have cabin fever, adults are crabby, roads are cracking, vehicles are groaning.

So I declared war on winter with our dinner tonight...in fact, I skipped spring and went right to summer!

Strawberries! Chips and guac! These awesome taquitos that Tracey posted, interestingly, the day after my hubby bought a bag of frozen ones because he'd been craving them for weeks. Seasoned black beans.

The taquitos were a huge hit. Hubby was in seventh heaven, declaring them way better than the frozen variety he's been craving. And both kids loved them, which shocked me. I made both corn and flour varieties, figuring that hubby would like the corn (more traditional) and the kids and I would prefer the flour (what we usually eat). Interestingly, the little guy and I both preferred the corn tortilla ones. Hubby and the little girl liked both equally. I made a huge batch of filling, which made about a dozen taquitos for dinner (we had a couple left over) and another dozen and a half to freeze.

My favorite guacamole
adapted from America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook

3 avocados
1/3 cup chopped cilantro
1/3 cup diced red onion
1 jalepeno, seeded and minced
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
1 lime

Coarsely mash the avocados in a medium bowl (you still want to see some chunks). Add the next five ingredients (through salt). Squeeze the juice of the lime onto the guac. Stir to combine. (It's best the day it's made, but will keep for an afternoon or a day; just press a layer of plastic wrap onto the top, refrigerate, and give it a stir before you serve it.)

Baked chicken taquitos
adapted from Our Best Bites, via Tracey's Culinary Adventures

8 ounces cream cheese
3/4 cup salsa verde
1 tbsp lime juice
2 1/2 tsp chili powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp minced garlic
2/3 cup chopped green onions (tops and bottoms)
5 cups roast chicken, shredded
3 cups grated cheese (I used a combination of sharp cheddar and pepperjack)
3/4 tsp kosher salt
corn and flour 6-inch tortillas

1. Preheat oven to 425 F. Spray a jelly roll pan with cooking spray.

2. In a large bowl, stir together all ingredients except tortillas. (I actually used my hands and mixed it like a meatloaf.)

3. (If using corn tortillas, warm them a couple at a time in the microwave, under a damp paper towel; mine took 22 seconds.) Spoon 3 tablespoons of filling onto tortilla and roll as tightly as you can. Place seam-side down on the pan.

4. Spray the taquitos with cooking spray and sprinkle with kosher salt. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until crisp and golden (ours took about 25 minutes to get there).

(I baked one pan immediately. For the rest, I made the tortillas through step three, placed them on a jelly roll pan, and stuck them in the freezer for about an hour. Once frozen, I put them in a freezer bag. When we want to eat them, we pull out however many we want, place them on an oiled pan, spritz them with oil, sprinkle with salt, and bake for about 16 minutes at 425º or until the filling is just barely starting to pop out of the end.)

Sunflower seed bread with rye sourdough (Mellow Bakers: March)

Our final Mellow Bakers bread for March is sunflower seed bread with rye sourdough. I was not a big fan of the sunflower seed rye from the BBAC, so I just made half of the recipe.

Last night, I made a sourdough starter and a rye soaker. I couldn't find rye chops, so I used some coarse rye meal, covered with boiling water. Today, I toasted some sunflower seeds and then mixed everything together (bread flour, salt, instant yeast, water, starter, soaker, seeds, and malt syrup). The dough was really, really sticky. I knew Andrea had given the dough a couple of stretch-and-folds to help strengthen it. I did one stretch-and-fold in the middle and it definitely helped, although I still struggled to shape the dough at the end.

I baked it with steam for about 30 minutes, and then ran out to the grocery store while hubby made our dinner (plain ol' grilled cheese for the kids, cheese-mustard-ham for me, and cheese-ham-mustard-sauerkraut-banana-peppers for himself)...unfortunately, he didn't think to take a picture of the loaf before he sliced it for the sandwiches.

The bread and the sandwiches were okay. The little guy didn't like his at all and the little girl picked out all of the sunflower seeds and put them on my plate (no surprises there). Hubby loved his sandwiches; mine was okay.

Definite winner for March: whole wheat levain with multigrain soaker; I think everything else will go onto the "will not make again" list.

Bake! Chocolate chip cookies

This week's Bake! recipe was chosen by Andrea, and she selected chocolate chip cookies. According to Nick Malgieri, these are the ORIGINAL chocolate chip cookie, based on the original Toll House recipe.

In this house, we love cookies, we love chocolate, we love chocolate chip cookies...this was a no-brainer. I will admit that I haven't experimented much with chocolate chip cookie recipes since I discovered our perfect recipe, which is based on the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook's recipe.

Like Phyl and Andrea before me, I left out the walnuts, agreeing that they don't belong in chocolate chip cookies. NM says to make sure your butter is softened, but not too much or you'll end up with flat cookies; my butter was barely soft at all and my cookies were still really flat. I experimented with cooking times: 10, 11, or 12 minutes. They were varying degrees of golden to deep golden. Usually, I like softer, thicker cookies, but the ones that cooked a little longer had an awesome, chewy, almost toffee-y quality that was pretty addictive.

These were totally unlike our usual chocolate chip cookie, but were so good in their own right. I'm not sure I'd make them for gifts or a gathering, as their looks were very unpredictable. But I'm positive we'll make them again for us!

Tikka masala and naan

I've found another use for my ghee! I've always loved naan, although I haven't had it in a few years. When I saw Tracey's post about homemade naan a couple of weeks ago, of course I bookmarked it.

And now that it's spring break, and I have time, I was happy to make Cook's Illustrated's tikka masala, white rice (with ghee in place of butter...soooo good!), and naan! I followed the recipe and instructions for naan on Prerna's site, and it was pretty easy.

I whisked flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar together. And then I combined some warm milk with some of my homemade yogurt, and mixed it in with the dry ingredients. The dough rested for two hours.

I dumped the dough out onto a lightly floured board and attempted to knead it; the dough was really wet and sticky and I had to flour my hands and the board quite a bit...but after a few minutes, it became nice and satiny. I split it into eight small balls, which I flattened with my hands and then sprinkled with garam masala. My hubby and I are new to garam masala, and I think it's fair to say that we're somewhat addicted. I'd actually pulled out some other spices to experiment with as well, but we just couldn't break away from the garam masala, although I did end up sprinkling on some kosher salt, too. I brushed a little water on the other side and then cooked it, covered, in a skillet for about a minute. Perna suggests cooking the other side above the open flame on a gas stove, but for some reason, one of my burners wouldn't light and I was using the rest to cook dinner, so I just cooked both sides in the skillet.

It was awesome and easy. I brushed some ghee over the naan after taking them off the stove. I can honestly say that I could eat this stuff every day; it was that good. I was really surprised that neither of my kids liked it, but my hubby and I were more than happy to finish theirs. This recipe will be a frequent attendee at our dinner table!

Conquering my fear of frying

Before we got together, my hubby's standard "breakfast" was a couple of doughnuts and a can of Pepsi. Happily, it didn't take me long to exert my influence...within a couple of months of spending mornings with me, he'd gotten accustomed to a healthy breakfast first thing and his students would complain that he was crabby if he skipped it.

It's not just doughnuts; many of my hubby's favorite foods are deep-fried.

This is one area where we are just not compatible. I do not like eating fried foods, but more than that, I hate hate hate the smell of deep fried cooking. The smell of oil frying just pervades every surface, every scrap of cloth, every inch of a house. {shudder}

As I started cooking more over the past couple of years, I tried a lot of things I never thought I would. I'm someone who spent most of her life unable to look at a piece of meat with bones in it, unable to deal with the smell of peppers or anything spicy, unable to stomach the look or taste of red meat. I can now easily rip the insides out of a Thanksgiving turkey, can cook and cut bone-in chicken, can whip up a Sunday potroast with my eyes closed, can slice and dice a dozen jalapenos. But I told my hubby: even with my expanded food horizons, don't ever expect me to fry anything in my house!

Even so, when Di posted a recipe for doughnuts nearly a year ago, I bookmarked it. My hubby loves doughnuts, and I love being able to make his favorite things. I looked at the recipe periodically, but just could not bring myself to try it. I hate the smell of frying foods!

And then, a couple of months ago, Cooks Country had a recipe for homemade apple fritters. My hubby and my dad love apple fritters. And I just had to try it. So I bought a bottle of peanut oil, bought a candy/deep fry thermometer, dragged out my cast iron dutch oven, and gave it a try.

My hubby was thrilled that I deep fried, and he loved these apple fritters. I have to admit that even I ate a few bites the day I made them. My kiddos didn't really like them, and my dad said they were way too greasy. Success? So-so.

I went back to Di's recipe. I knew that Andrea was also nervous about deep frying, but had had success following Di.

So I bought a gigantic tin of crisco (I'd remembered reading a post from America's Test Kitchen that solid vegetable shortening was the best vehicle for frying doughnuts, although when I went back to confirm, I couldn't find where I'd read it) and whipped up a batch of all-purpose sweet dough from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. You're supposed to let the dough rise overnight, but I made it first thing in the morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon, the dough had already more than doubled, so I pulled it out.

I grabbed about 440 g of dough and rolled it out to about 1/2 inch. I used my 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter to cut out circles. Unfortunately I don't have a tiny cutter for the centers, so I actually used the wide end of my turkey baster. I ended up with 10 doughnuts and about 15 doughnut holes. I let them rise on a parchment-lined sheet pan for a little over an hour until they were getting puffy.

Then I dumped 6 cups of crisco (gross!) into a pot and heated it over medium to 375F. I cooked them for 45 seconds per side, and only did a few at a time so I could carefully monitor the temperature and keep it right at 375. I removed the cooked doughnuts to a paper towel-lined cooling rack, and then coated half in a cinnamon sugar mixture (3 tbps white sugar with 3/4 tsp Vietnamese cinnamon) and dunked the other half into a chocolate glaze (1 ounce of semi-sweet chocolate chips mixed melted with 2 tbsp of half-and-half, a drop of light corn syrup, and a little over 1 cup of powdered sugar, sifted).

The 15 doughnut holes were completely gone by the time I'd finished dipping and glazing the whole doughnuts (and by the time I got the camera working).

Hubby said he considered it a sign of personal growth that there were four doughnuts left when we went to bed last night.

These were so good, not greasy at all. The little guy loved the cinnamon sugar ones and single-handedly ate an entire one for breakfast this morning. (Breakfast was with Daddy; I never would've let him eat an entire doughnut!) The little girl loved the chocolate-covered ones, especially the little holes that I remembered to dip in sprinkles just for her. Here's a chocolate-loving face:

Homemade pasta success!

My mom came over for her birthday dinner last night. I'd called her earlier in the week and said, "I'll make you anything you want for dinner...what would you like to order at Abby's restaurant?" She said (in typical mom form), "Oh, anything you want to make is fine! I don't want to have to pick. I just want it to be easy for you! Whatever's no work! We can even order in pizza!"

And after a few more minutes of me throwing out suggestions and her vetoing them, she said, "Ohhhh, how about some of your new homemade pasta? And that cheesecake you posted?? And garlic bread?" Sure, Mom! =)

For my birthday (in addition to a fabulous new apron and an heirloom cookbook of my husband's family's recipes), my in-laws gave me Food & Wine's book on Pasta. It is awesome...it has a section on making homemade pasta, Italian pasta dishes, Asian pasta, American pasta, super fast pasta. I decided to try their basic egg pasta recipe.

They list egg and flour quantities for 3/4 pound and 1/2 pound of pasta, but I wanted to make a full pound. They call for extra-large eggs; I only had large. Plus they indicate that you should add 2 extra tablespoons of flour if you're using the food processor method (which I was). They give a really nice description of how to tell if your pasta dough is ready, so I ended up going entirely by feel this time. I ended up using 4 large eggs and about 3 cups of all-purpose flour.

I let the dough relax, wrapped in plastic, for an hour while I worked on my mom's cheesecake, although they say the resting stage isn't necessary if you're going to roll the dough by machine (which I was). The dough rolled out easily; I learned my lesson with flour last time. My pasta machine handbook says to roll out to 4 or 5 for fettucine; the cookbook says 6. I decided to try it, and I ended up with eight sheets of very thinly rolled pasta.

They claim that, even if you roll by machine, you should never cut by machine. After my major difficulties with using my spaghetti and fettucine cutters the last couple of times, I was actually happy to read this. I used my pizza wheel to cut the folded sheets into 1/4 inch strips. It was when it was 10:00 at night and I was hanging each strand up to dry that I said to my hubby, "I don't think that pasta making is going to become an obsession like bread making has....it's too time-consuming and tedius, and the results aren't that much better than store-bought."

After an hour, I put the pasta into a glass jar and then into the fridge.

The next night, dinner was pretty easy. I boiled the pasta in a pot of salted water for about 2 or 3 minutes. I heated some of our favorite spaghetti sauce, which I'd had in the freezer downstairs. I used the pain a l'ancienne recipe from ABED to make garlic bread. (I actually made 6 loaves; we used 2 last night, but I turned them all into garlic bread and froze the other 4.) And we had cheesecake with strawberries for dessert.

This pasta was awesome, by far the best I've ever made. With pasta this good, I can see why I would want to make homemade pasta frequently. I used the leftovers in my favorite chicken noodle soup recipe tonight...I don't think we'll be able to go back to the stuff from a box!