Pizza Night Prep

This year I was given a wonderful holiday gift of a pizza making kit, including an Emile Henry pizza stone in fire engine red and all the necessary equipment and goodies – a serving platter, a rolling cutter, rolling pin, et. What fun, I love pizza, who doesn’t?

I decided to bite the bullet and buy the book Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in 5 Minutes A Day because I saw Zoe Francois and Mark Luinenberg’s video on the Emile Henry pizza stone webpage (see link above, it is a cute video). I am glad I did because they go into great detail about types of flour and salt etc. and tips and techniques that I did not get from the brief recipe included on the Emile Henry handout.

Funnily enough my friend Stephanie reviewed their book on her site recently and posted about in on Facebook and I was able to chat with the authors. This is why I love social media and the synchronicity of life.  Talk about timing!

So I get out my ingredients last night and look in my flour jar and it’s almost empty! Ack! Fortunately I had enough, or so I thought, for a half recipe so I started with mixing the hot water and the yeast and salt using my largest bowl which happens to be my beloved celery green Wovo salad bowl.  I began the “scoop and sweep” method they recommend in the book for measuring all purpose flour. A half recipe calls for 3 3/4 cups of flour and after scooping out 2 cups of flour I was done. Out of flour.  There was maybe a half a cup in the canister if I shook it out of the corners really well. Erk.

This deficiency  is completely understandable because since I injured my shoulder, over a *year* ago, I really have not done any proper grocery shopping and many of my essential staples are depleted. I went shopping on New Year’s Eve and purchased a couple of hundred dollars worth of groceries but of course none of those kinds of staples were among them –  I need to hire a sherpa or find a friend with a car to help me shop for the heavy stuff – flour, sugar, polenta, sherry, wine…..  The pantry situation is getting desperate.

Happily my holiday gift included a 3 pound bag of King Arthur flour specifically formulated for making pizza but per the book its protein count was too high for their generic recipe and more suited for pizzas that were formed by tossing. My ability to toss things is really not back up to speed yet – can you imagine?!!.  I decided to just go ahead and use this flour to complete my pizza dough and hope for the best.

The recipe calls for mixing the water with the yeast and salt, and then dumping in the flour and stirring with a spoon or dough whisk, of which I lack, until everything is moistened. I used a perforated spatula (see Ruhlman, there is a use for these kind of spatulas!), covered the mixing bowl loosely and let it rise for 2 hours.

Sure enough at 2 hours the dough had risen sufficiently in the bowl and the top of the dough had begun to flatten out. I gently scooped the dough into a plastic tub that I found at Daiso, closed the lid but did not seal it and popped the mess into the fridge. And went to bed.

Tonight is the big night, hope it all works out! I mean what could go wrong? My oven takes forever to preheat and who knows what temperature it really is – I think it runs low, the dough is made with the wrong flour and might be too sticky, I bought the wrong kind of mozzarella and I do not have a pizza peel. Heh heh.   Wish me luck!

Stuffed Full of Squash

I was not going to share this article with you because of what happened but then thought that perhaps I should.  Most food blogs only show you the most perfect,  ”delicious and amazing” recipes coming out of xxx’s kitchen, complete with the perfect food porn photography and drool-inducing descriptions.

Life isn’t always that way though, I think a real person has successes and failures in the kitchen but we the audience never seem to ever hear about the flops or failures or the “meh” of it all.  So, in the spirit of keeping it real, here is my recent flop.  Well, sort of flop.

I have had a pumpkin from my CSA box from the Fall and it  became part of my Christmas decorations.

I have decided that I would roast it stuffed full of tasty things, inspired by my friend Laura’s recipe from Hey What’s For Dinner Mom?.

Laura’s recipe is meatless and uses quinoa but I had some fancy pants sausages and was out of quinoa, so I checked in with my friends at the recipe swap. The recipe they suggested is by Dorie Greenspan and uses bread which is perfect because I have some artisan sourdough slab about to go stale so I adapted both recipes into my dinner.

Stuffed Pumpkin

1 sugar pie pumpkin, seeded
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
1/2 loaf Della Trattoria Meyer lemon and rosemary bread, torn into smallish chunks
2 chicken and spinach sausages
2 Tbl pork fat
1 large leek
1/4 pound mushrooms
A bunch of dino kale
1/4 c white wine
1/3 c heavy cream (I used sour cream thinned with milk)
4 slices leftover bacon
1/2 grated Peccorino Romano
Sage leaves
1/3 bunch of parsley
6 cloves of Garlic, smashed
Salt and pepper

I cut out the stem end of the pumpkin using a sharp knife like you would to make a jack o’lantern, and then cut off the strings on the cap with the chef’s knife and set the lid aside.

Now for evisceration.  I scooped out seeds and pulp with an ice cream scoop but you can use a sturdy metal spoon.  Save those seeds if you like roasted pumpkin seeds. I was not in the mood so into the compost bin they went.  Usually this step is gooey and messy, but my pumpkin wasn’t all that gooey inside.  I should have paid more attention to this fact, but onwards I went.

I put the hollowed pumpkin on a baking sheet lined with foil and seasoned the cavity with salt and pepper and olive oil.  I poured in the oil and then threw in the salt and pepper and smeared it all around with my hands; they are Nature’s best spatula!

Then I started assembling the stuffing ingredients. I used my Wovo salad bowl but any large bowl will do; toss in the leftover bacon and the sausages chopped into small pieces.

It is hard to believe I had leftover bacon but it happens!

I chopped up the parsley rather roughly and added that to the bowl too along with the smashed garlic cloves and the grated cheese and a few dried porcini.

On the stove heat I heated up a large frying pan and melted the pork fat (or use olive oil or bacon fat or butter, it’s up to you).  The leek was halved lengthwise, then into cut into slices about an 1/8″ thick, put in a colander and washed them well.  I like washing the leeks after they are cut because it’s easier to get the mud out if they are dirty. Lately our leeks have been really dirty. Heh.

With just some of the water shaken off, I tipped the leeks into the hot frying pan and added a few pinches of salt. A swift stir with the spatula then I grabbed a clean cutting mat and sliced up the mushrooms and add them to the leeks.  Lastly, I grabbed the sheaf of kale leaves and chopped off the stems into smallish pieces and added them to the frying pan.

They all cooked together until everything was very tender.  Meanwhile, I had a glass of wine and then attacked the kale leaves. Whack-whack-whack I went with my largest chef knife to chop them roughly.  Once the other veggies were tender, I added the kale and put on the lid for a minute or two until the kale has wilted a bit.  Wine in hand I tossed and sauted the kale and vegetables until the kale was completely tender.  I let the mixture cool a little bit.  So far everything looked and tasted great, good levels of salt, the veggies were all fork-ready.  My stomach growled.

(L-R: kale stems, leeks, mushrooms sauteing; a rough chop; the kale will fill the pan up but it cooks down to nothing)

Meanwhile it was time for the heart of the stuffing, the bread. I purchased this loaf of bread on a Saturday it was now Tuesday so it was just this side of being stale, perfect for a stuffing.

You could just chop it but I like the rough texture of hand-torn bread so I sliced the bread, then took a seat and over the bowl I ripped up the bread into small pieces, about 1/2″.

The stuffing was almost done, I just needed the cream and wine and a few herbs, salt and pepper. A quick toss with my hands I was ready to stuff my pumpkin. Since this stuffing does not have egg or raw meat I was able to taste a few pieces to make sure the seasoning was right on. I wanted it to be a little heavy on the salt to offset the pumpkin which is essentially bland and would be mixed into the filling.

I really packed it in and it all just barely fit!

Don’t forget to put its hat on!

Isn’t that beautiful?!  Into the oven it went, at 350 for 90 minutes. I checked it then and the pumpkin was still not fork-tender so I let it go for another 30 minutes. At last a fork just slid easily through the side of the pumpkin and it smelled so aromatic with the herbs and garlic I could barely contain myself.

I pulled out the stuffing first, and sneaked a bite. Hmmm. It was delicious but not all moist and steamy like I expected.

I scooped out the pumpkin and despite it being fork tender the flesh was rigid and oddly firm. I scraped all of it out into a bowl and tasted it – it was fine but dry and more starchy and did not have the squashy pumpkin texture it should have.  Hmmm, when did I get that pumpkin again?  I realized I couldn’t remember.

Huhmmm. I sat a bit and thought and thought. And then I remembered. This pumpkin was not from November, it was from October or perhaps earlier and in my overheated apartment it probably had completely dried out and converted its sugars into starches. Whoops!

I tried steaming the flesh a bit in a steamer on the stove but realized that it really needed to be used in a soup or something. This explained why the stuffing seemed so dry. The pumpkin, which normally would have exuded lots of juices while cooking, was essentially dessicated and therefore the stuffing had the consistency of being baked in a dish and did not get hydrated from its squashy container. If I had intended to bake the stuffing in a casserole I would have added a lot more liquid and covered it while baking to emulate the interior of poultry or other moist cavity.

Craptastic.

My dinner was completely salvageable though. I added about a cup of leftover chicken broth I had and another good slosh of wine to the stuffing and put it in a small casserole dish and covered it foil to bake for 30 minutes. Taking it out of the oven, I peeked under the foil and stood back as a cloud of steam erupted. I realized this was the stuffing I had expected. The mushrooms and garlic were soft and tender, the bread had that pleasant squish of being amalgamated with wine and cream and broth and the generous flecks of greens and chunks of bacon and sausage were like firm nuggets within each bite. It was delicious despite the absence of the pumpkin!

I saved the pumpkin for my next batch of soup. Lesson learned. I hope you try stuffing a pumpkin or other squash but please do make sure it is not Paleolithic in age!!

Holiday Truffled Roast Duck

I succumbed to the lure of a stuffed truffled duck 4505 Meats had for sale when I visited their manufacturing kitchen last week. How could I pass this beauty up?

It was the size of a baby! It was at least 18″ long and weighted at least 8 pounds. Once I put it on my kitchen table I realized I had a problem; no roasting pan in the Roost was large enough.

I had to cut off all of this to even get the duck close to fitting in my roasting pan. I saved these goodies for stock and future rendering for duck fat.

After trimming off 9″ of the neck and the “collar” of fat from the neck and shoulders the duck now fit into my largest roasting pan. Barely! The directions called for a little sprinkling of salt and pepper, and I added a sprinkling of thyme for good measure.

The directions were simple, I had nothing to do but have a glass of Bonny Doon Ca’ del Solo Muscat and wait, and then…. this…

I let the duck rest covered lightly in foil for 30 minutes, and then got ready to carve.

First, I poured off the fat from the roasting pan, strained and cooled it for future wonderful uses.

I used a bit of the duck fat and flour to make a roux, then added a good glass of wine and the truffled duck stock to make a pan gravy for my dinner. I now think that truffled duck stock is the best stuff on the planet, outside of roasted duck that is.

The stuffing was so aromatic with truffles and 4505 Meats’ sausages and Tartine’s olive bread.

It took some wrangling but I removed the legs and thighs in once piece and both breasts, one went onto the carving board for my dinner. I immediately ate both “oysters” and hacked the carcass into smaller pieces to be frozen for soup stock – duck soup! There was a lot of meat on this bird.

I carved up some of the breast meat, it was juicy and perfectly rare, and rendolent with truffle.

I served up my plate and ladled some truffled gravy over the dressing and the duck. The seasoning of the meat and the stuffing was divine. I have been kicking myself for not thinking of using olive bread in poultry stuffing.  Where was my brain?  Why didn’t I think of this myself?  Ryan Farr is a genius!

Outside of carving the bird, I had very little to do. This was the most spectacular and yet the simplest thing I have ever prepared.

A note on wine, most people serve red wine with duck but I found that the fruit of the Ca’ del Solo Muscat by Bonny Doon was wonderful with the duck,  Its citrus notes and almost floral fruit cut through the richness of the duck meat and did not overpower the truffles.

I shared the leftover stuffing and the rest  of the duck breast with my colleague at the office and we had the nicest Christmas Eve eve luncheon, despite the lack of wine. The duck legs and full breast were carefully frozen as I promised to share some with friends for a little dinner soon – seared duck leg and a petite salade and wine, what could be better?

If you have the chance to pick up a duck from 4505 Meats I could not recommend it highly enough.

4505 Meats
Ryan Farr, head genius
http://4505meats.com/

My 2011 “Did It’” List

My friend Luna Raven recently posted her 2011 “Did It” List, inspired by one of her friends and I love all the things she got done this year.  Thus inspired I thought I should join the club and write about my accomplishments too.

I went to Mushroom Camp and  learned to mordant yarn and fabric and then dye it using foraged mushrooms.

I found my first candy cap mushroom in the redwood forests up in Sonoma.

I attended the Fancy Food Show and scored twelve pounds of amazing blue cheese. (no picture, we ate it all!)

I discovered some amazing ramen places, including my current favorite, pork and corn butter ramen at Ramen Club.

I treated myself to some incredible yarn at Stitches West and have actually knitted up a few garments.

I gathered up all my courage and borrowed lots of courage from friends and had surgery to repair my shoulder from a tragic high fiving injury when we won the World Series in 2011.Two months later I did not listen to my doctors orders and returned to work a month early, which is why one should not make important decisions while taking pain medication!  Major life lesson learned!  (Is that technically an accomplishment?)

(note to the surgeon)

I am still in physical therapy due to yet another accident while riding MUNI.  My  accomplishment there is patience and learning to follow directions and care for myself, and, even though it’s embarrassing, sit in the disabled seats on the bus.

I got to visit with my dearest childhood friend three times! ((Lovi!!))

My friends and I made ten different kinds of macaroni and cheese on my birthday at a huge blowout party, and we almost ate them all!

I celebrated one year at my new job and I am still loving every day. It was great to have health insurance, medical leave and understanding coworkers while I heal. I am so lucky!

I went to San Diego on the most hilarious girls road trip to BlogHer – the Road Trip of Happiness!

I relearned how to embroider after taking a great class from Princess Animal and finished my first sampler.

I knitted my 26th pair of socks and learned how to darn them.

I created a new diet of bacon, chocolate, beef, wine and cocktails, bread and cheese because of weird food allergy/sensitivities – I’m doing just fine on it, it’s not privation that’s for sure!

I launched a new blog – The Inadvertent Redhead – as an outlet for my non-food related talents, and I love it! And yes, I’m still a redhead!

Because of my blog and social media I was invited to a multitude of wonderful parties and events and I feel so privileged to have these opportunities and to know so many wonderful writers, cooks, chefs, photographers, stylists and artistan food producers from many genres.

Despite all the challenges and sadnesses of this year it has been a really good one and I am looking forward to many fun things in 2012.

I am most especially looking forward to another year with my wonderful family.

Here’s to health and happiness ahead!

Berry Fun Night with Driscolls

Blackberries are to me the essential summer fruit.  My memories of blackberries are blazing hot days camping – limbs brown as a berry, hair bleached pale blonde,  a perpetually sunburned nose – I was a child of the creek, meadow, forest, lake and golden hills.  Strong and lithe from running and climbing trees and swimming my mom could barely entice me out of what ever body of water we were near; it was pure joy.

At the last camping trip before school if we were lucky the blackberries that lined the creeks and rivers would be ripe, and we would test the berries daily to see if they were ready to be plucked by greedy fingers, wincing from the brambles.    Old coffee cans would be deployed, some with strings tied through holes punched by an awl near the top rim and worn about the neck, and we were instructed to return when the can was full.

Wading through strong currents to reach blackberry bushes so laden they were almost touching the water my sister and I or my little friends  and I would strive to get every berry possible, fingers and mouths stained purple.  Perhaps half of our harvest was consumed on the spot for testing purposes.  Occasionally a howl of anguish would be heard when we barked a shin against an underwater snag or when a particularly enticing berry slipped from our pruned fingers into the flowing water.

Damp, bedraggled of hair and clothes and purple all over we would trudge back to the campsite where mom would sugar down the berries in a bowl covered with a mesh umbrella to keep out the yellow jackets.   The slim metal can that fit inside the old ice cream maker would be filled with her vanilla bean custard base and dropped inside the tub, then layered between crushed ice and rock salt.  We would turn and turn that handle and eventually we couldn’t make it move anymore, when my dad or his pal Fred would reach down and give it 20 easy cranks; we would marvel at their strength. The ice cream maker would be swathed in beach towels and hidden in the shade to harden the ice cream while we ate dinner in the slanting sunshine of the late summer evening.

After our dinner fat curls of creamy ice cream would be dished out and we were allowed to fill our bowls with as many blackberries and sweet purple syrup as we could fit.  The sweet juice at the bottom was always the best part and we would take elaborate pains to swirl the berries and ice cream together to create violet hued streaks with our spoons.   If no adult was looking we would lick the bowls clean with our hummingbird-Labrador tongues.

Blackberries bring that feeling for summer bliss back the instant I eat one, even on a foggy blustery San Francisco winter night.  It sounds funny to write about blackberries in the middle of winter but Driscolls Berries in  Watsonville grows organic berries year -round, thanks to our mild climate.  They invited me and a small group of food bloggers to attend a special dinner featuring their blackberries cooked by Rick Rodgers, a special chef and author from New York,  a seminar on food photography tips and tricks by  Caren Alpert, a local legendary food photographer and food styling and prop technique by  Carol Hacker, a San Francisco prop stylist.   It was quite a room full of talent and I learned a lot.

The event space was fun too, in the Dogpatch area of SF at the Hands On Gourmet space; their staff were top notch and it is a cool old converted warehouse complete with paned windows like they have at Fort Mason.

Down the rabbit hole! The delicious Blackberry Cobbler cocktail.

We sipped on wine and mingled, it was like a reunion with many of my favorite food blogger friends.   I really enjoyed getting to talk to Rick of Driscolls Berries and our long chat about organic farming and the fruit industry in California throughout the last few decades was enlightening.

The event started with cooking demonstrations by Chef Rick then Caren and Carol would style and shoot the food item using Caren’s gorgeous camera tethered to a laptop.  Although the photos shown here are my own it was fascinating to see the three of them work together and see the many conversations and adjustments that were made to the tableau to produce the desired shot.  Despite my lack of photography equipment (I use an iPhone 4), it was very gratifying to see that my instinctual attempts at photography are perfectly in line with their teachings, after all isn’t having the eye and instinct 90% of being a good photographer?

The first demo was for the slurpable Blackberry Cobbler cocktail.  It reminded me of a cocktail I had recently at Rye, my favorite watering hole.  The bartender there used crushed ice and raspberries but the rest was essentially the same.  I have included the recipe at the end of this article, go wild and try other berries!

The first course was a savory blackberry custard tart, shown above.  Oh how depressed I was that I couldn’t even try one but given the rapidity of their disappearance from everyone’s plates they seemed to be exquisitely tasty.

If you would like a sweet blackberry tart recipe, Amy Sherman of Cooking with Amy developed a gorgeous version for the party.

The entree was a pancetta-wrapped pork loin roast with a blackberry sauce which the chef called a compote, but I would make it again cooked down and strained. I love wrapping roasts in bacon and so that wasn’t anything new for me but the sauce was a big hit.  He served the roast with a cold salad of roasted fennel, more blackberries and gorgonzola cheese.  I believe this salad will become part of my regular repetoire this year.

Desserts were quite lovely; Chef Rick made a cobbler with a crunchy topping that was baked like a granola and served with Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous vanilla ice cream. He also made a blackberry bundt style cake that smelled delicious.

To thank us for coming the kind folks at Driscoll’s gifted us with basket after basket of blackberries, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, along with a perfect berry colander, an apron and one of Chef Rick’s cookbooks, mine was about Christmas – how timely!  Also the staff at Baddish Group gave us each a pastry tamper, what a wonderful gift!  I cannot wait to use mine, no more using my thumb or my pestle to make mini tart shells.

It was a very enjoyable evening and I learned a great deal as well as enjoying the company and the great food.  The best take away for me for the whole evening was knowing the Driscoll’s berries are available all year long, and they taste just as sweet in the winter as they do in the heat of the summer.

Blackberry Cobbler Cocktail

1/2 cup ripe blackberries, plus extra for garnish
1 oz. fresh lemon juice
1 oz. simple syrup
11⁄2 oz.  gin
1⁄2 oz. Crème de Cassis
Splash of sparkling wine

In a mixing glass, muddle blackberries, lemon juice and simple syrup.

Add the gin and the Crème de Cassis. Top with ice and shake vigorously.

Pour into a tall glass and top with the sparkling wine. Stir from the bottom up and serve with more blackberries for garnish and a straw for sipping.

Serving Size: 1 cocktail

 If you would like to have some delicious Driscolls blackberries please leave a comment and I will pick a few names at random and send you a generous $5 coupon courtesy of Driscolls!

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Read more about the event from the San Francisco Examiner

Recipes:

Savory Cheese Tartlettes with Blackberries

Blackberry-Sage Compote for Roast Pork/Fowl

Roasted Fennel Salad with Blackberries and Gorgonzola

White Hot Russians

Ah, San Francisco “winters”.  We have cold grey mornings where the tops of the high-rises on the hills are heavily obscured in frigid mist and the light is pale and diffuse.  The wan sun struggles to show around mid-day for a brief glaring hour then gives up with a moist sigh of vapor to return us to basement  bone chilling damp before 5:00 pm.

It is good weather to be inside, wrapped well in woolens and squishy cashmere plopped next to a blazing fireplace hissing radiator.

A few years ago I concocted this soothing boozy cocoa for nights just like tonight.    

White Hot Russian

1 cup low fat milk
3 T Ghirardelli sweet chocolate powder
1 jigger Sky vodka (I had this on hand but any vodka will do)
1 jigger Baileys Irish Cream
1 jigger Kahlua Coffee Liqueur
coffee ice cream (option but awfully nice)

In the microwave (or stovetop), heat milk in a pyrex cup until very hot (3 minutes in my micro). Mix in the chocolate well.

In a small jug, mix the liquors together. Pour half of the liquors between two mugs and top off with the hot cocoa. Scoop a generous spoonful of coffee ice cream and float it on top of cocoa.

Serves two if you have white hot Russian masculine company, or for one person with seconds on a frigid night after watching sappy Christmas movies and using up all the Kleenex in the house….

Stay warm out there!

Eggless Baking: Luscious Chocolate Wacky Cake with Ganache

This Thanksgiving my family decided not to make our traditional pumpkin chiffon pie because of my current food intolerances. Sadly for me this year this amazing pie that was carefully crafted and perfected over 50 years by my maternal grandmother contains eggs, so it’s off my menu for a while.  How very thoughtful of my family to make this sacrifice on my behalf though, I was truly touched.

Before I could get too caught up in the guilt associated with voluntarily or involuntarily imposing my food limitations upon others my mom announced she would be making Wacky cake. This substitution for our holiday sweet was nothing short of stellar and we were all quite excited.

(one bite left!)

You may have heard of the iconic Wacky cake, it has been around before the World War II. It is an eggless and butterless cake because eggs and butter were rationed during wartime and often the average family never saw these common staples. The necessity for cake, however,  did not diminish for those on the homefront and a delicious and suitable substitute stepped in to fill the gap and sweet tooth of the Nation. In today’s parlance wacky cake is vegan. It is also tremendously delicious!

I have fond memories of scarfing down still warm slabs of dense, chocolately Wacky cake in the cafeteria of my elementary school. Our highly gifted school cook, Frances, made Wacky cake at least once a month and served it heavily dusted with powdered sugar.

My sister taught me how to make Wacky cake  and I recall that she did this so that I could make it when I got home from school so that she could have it but she hotly disputes this! Mom recalls that she first received the recipe from her high school and college friend, Susie Jones.

Whatever the source, Wacky cake is a wonderful recipe. The cake has a very rich chocolate flavor from cocoa powder, like a devil’s food cake, and has a fine crumb.

Instead of getting its leavening from eggs the recipe uses baking soda and vinegar which produces a quick but short rising period. The lack of eggs and butter in the recipe results in the cake being less flexible than a egg-based cake so care must be taken if you plan to unmold it from the baking pan. The cake uses oil instead of butter and therefore one could conceivably say that this is a “heart-healthy” cake if a light olive oil or grapeseed oil is used, due to the oil’s antioxidant properties.

Traditionally the cake is mixed right in the baking pan, dusted with powdered sugar when cooled and served straight from the pan. This spared the cook additional dishes to wash up, saving money on soap powder.   My mom’s piece de resistance was to instead top the cake with a thick, rich, bittersweet ganache.

It was heavenly.

Look how thick the ganache is on this slice of cake, how it glistens and shimmers. I do love chocolate.

Wacky Cake
1 1/2 c flour or cake flour
1 c sugar
3 T unsweetened cocoa (we used to use Hershey’s but mOm used Valhrona)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. good vanilla
1 T vinegar (white or cider)
5 T vegetable oil (grapeseed, light olive oil or canola)
1 C cold water

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

If you wish to unmold the cake, butter the bottom and sides of a cake tin and line the bottom with parchment or waxed paper, and then butter that paper too. In a mixing bowl sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt. Add on one side of the bowl the vinegar, on another the vanilla and on another the oil. Add all of the water and whisk together swiftly and quickly pour into the cake pan and bang it into the oven.

If you are going to serve it out of the pan, sift together the dry ingredients as above directly into your baking pan (an 8″ x 8″ square Pyrex), then make three holes in the dry ingredients. In one hold put the oil, the vinegar in the second and the vanilla in the third. Pour over the cold water and mix well with a fork and bake.

Bake for 20-30 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few crumbs. A bit of care must be taken when baking wacky cake to not over-bake it or it will be perilously dry.

Unmold after cool, if desired (using the wax paper lined pan) and cover with ganache, or sift over a blizzard of powdered sugar.

Great Ganache

Once you add ganache to this cake there is no going back. In fact, after making this ganache I feel like putting it on everything.

1/2 c + 2T heavy cream
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. butter
5 oz finely chopped bittersweet chocolate
1 T good bourbon (optional)

Place the chopped chocolate into a bowl. Heat up the cream until it is very hot but not boiling, and pour it over the chocolate and stir until the chocolate is smooth. Add the butter at this point and the vanilla and the bourbon, if using. If you are not using the bourbon in the ganache, shame on you and just drink that tablespoon.

Keep stirring the ganache with a spoon, not a whisk, until it begins to thicken. When it is thicker than gravy, pour/spread it over the cooled cake. If you want those attractive dribbles down the side of the cake pour it on when the ganache is a little bit thinner, slightly thicker than chocolate syrup or caramel sauce. I prefer it on the stiffer side so that I can spread it over just the top of the cake.

If you like, you can make a double batch of ganache, and spread half of it over the top, and then let the remaining ganache thicken a bit more so that you can spread the sides of the cake.

Be sure to do what we did and carefully clean the mixing bowl with our greedy fingers and tongues.

The finished Wacky cake with ganache was utterly delicious and was perfect with the last bit of red wine from our Thanksgiving dinner.

The best part of Wacky cake is that it is so simple to make, you can bake it up right before dinner or as an after school treat like I used to.

Soft Rolls for Thanksgiving

Last Thanksgiving I made several batches of these amazing, soft rolls for our dinner.  They were so delicious that as the first batch came out of the oven we “sampled” them so much that we did not have any left over for the next night and I just *had* to make more.

Poor us.

I love these rolls so much and tweeted their picture *a lot* last year, and this year, and my friends not-so-gently reminded me that I that did not share the recipe.

The genius thing about these rolls is how easy they are to make, especially if you have a stand mixer.  If you have never made dough in your life you can easily make these rolls.

My mom has her glorious “Red Baron”, a glossy, fire engine red Kitchen Aid that does all but the dishes for you.    You add all the ingredients into the bowl, turn it on and do other things for a few minutes (like the dishes).  The dough gets turned out to rest in a bowl for an hour or so, then formed into the rolls and popped into two cake pans.  After another rest (just long enough for a restorative glass of wine and feet up on the couch) into the oven they go.  When they’re done they’re basted liberally with melted butter, and then comes the hard part – not eating them all before dinner time.

Given my current bout of weird food allergies these are one of the few things on the holiday table I will be able to eat (with a minor modification), so you know I will be buddying up to the basket of rolls this Thursday.  And Friday.  Heh.

Soft Rolls for Thanksgiving

3 1/2 cups all purpose
2 tsp. instant yeast
2 T potato flour or 1/4 cup instant potato flakes (or in my case, I am just using more regular flour)
3 T nonfat dry milk
2 T sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
4 T unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus 2 more T melted for basting)
2/3 c  water, warm
1/2 c milk, lukewarm (out of the fridge for an hour or s0)

Place everything (except the melted butter) into the bowl of the stand mixer and mix to make a dough, using the dough hook.  Let the machine run for 7 minutes at medium speed.  The dough should be pretty smooth at this point.

If you do not have a stand mixer, mix together everything with a spatula or wooden spoon until a rough dough is formed.  Then knead with your hands on a lightly floured surface for about 7 minutes until the dough is soft and smooth and pretty much not sticky.

Remove the dough from the bowl, form into a ball and put in a bowl that has been well buttered.  Cover the top with a little plastic wrap and let the dough rise until doubled in a warm place ~ about an hour.

When the dough has doubled, deflate it by a gentle punch right to the midsection.  Oooph!   Divide it into 16 even pieces.  I do this by rolling the douhg into a long log, then cutting it in half, and keep cutting each half until I have 16 pieces.  Roll the balls in your hands until they are nice and round, or pull the sides down to the bottom of the ball and pinch, then roll gently.

Butter two 9″ round cake pans well and arrange eight balls of dough in each pan (see picture).   Cover the pans loosely again with plastic wrap and let them rise until doubled again and nice and puffy, about an hour or so.  If they don’t look like they are filling the pan let them rise another 20 minutes or so.

Bake at 350 F for 22 to 24 minutes, remove from the oven to a rack and brush the tops well with melted butter.

Try to contain yourself and not eat them all while hot, and I wish you the best of luck with this.

If you make the rolls earlier in the day during Thanksgiving, you can reheat them in the oven after you take out the turkey.  Turn off the oven after you extract the bird and leave the door ajar,  put in the pans of rolls in for about 10 minutes (set the timer!) and they will be beautifully warmed.  I would even go as far as brushing the tops with more butter, because there can never be enough butter on Thanksgiving.

I think this recipe might have originated from the King Arthur website but cannot find it, so please forgive the lack of attribution.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sweet Potato Biscuit Love

This time of year the markets are overflowing with different varieties of sweet potatoes: large, orange-sherbet colored, sea lion shaped sweet potatoes, palm-sized pale yellows and the deeply orange garnets.

(little yellow-fleshed sweet potatoes, about 4″ long – babies!!)

Instead of covering them with gooey marshmallows as a Thanksgiving side dish my family usually prepares an elaborate sweet potato souffle with an orange sauce, dotted with buttered roasted pecans.

This is a bit too rich for every day, so I get my fill of roasting them and eating them split and mashed with butter and sea salt, and as crunchy oven-baked fries or simmered into softness in a zippy Thai red coconut curry.

My absolute favorite way of using up the bounty of sweet potatoes is to make them into savory and sweet biscuits. They are like soft little pillows of love and comfort, crunchy on top and moist and fluffy inside.

This week I received about 8 tiny little sweet potatoes with the palest yellow flesh, and last night I got the craving for my sweet potato biscuits, so I popped into the kitchen and started my preparations.

I preheated my convection oven and started a pot with a steamer insert on the stove. About four of the baby sweet potatoes were scrubbed and peeled and cut into small chunks and steamed until very tender, about 15 minutes. I let them cool and then pureed them in my minichop.

Meanwhile in a mixing bowl I dumped in the flour, brown sugar, leavenings, salt and stirred them up, and then added cold butter that I had diced up. I also measured out some milk and added some lemon juice for a quickie faux-buttermilk.

The “buttermilk” and the sweet potato puree were mixed together and poured into the butter and flour and were quickly mixed into a soft dough.

I patted out the dough with my hands and used my ancient biscuit cutter to punch out about 12 pretty pale yellow biscuits. They went into a well oiled cake tin and were baked for about 25 minutes.

I actually got really caught up in watching the Monday International Mysteries on tv – Inspector Morse this week – and let them go just a minute longer than they should have so the tops were deeply browned this time. I keep forgetting that convection ovens cook faster than regular oven. These biscuits brown a lot more than regular biscuits due to the sugar content in the mixture plus the natural sugars in the sweet potatoes. It is also what makes them so delicious!

The timer dinged and I pulled a few hot biscuits out of the plan, split them open and buttered and slathered the halves with dollops of the last of my Potrero Hill honey, and I ate them, slightly singeing my fingers and tongue as I nibbled away watching the whodunnit.

The murderer was caught, the biscuits were delicious and a hot cup of tea finished off my impromptu snack before bedtime.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/2″ chunks – enough to make 3/4 cup puree
1 3/4 cups flour
2 T brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
6 T unsalted butter, diced
1/3 cup buttermilk*

In a small pot with 2″ of water in the bottom, add a steamer insert and then the sweet potato cubes. Bring the water to a boil and steam the sweet potatoes until they are very tender when stabbed with a fork. Mash until smooth or puree in a food processor. Let cool before using. (Sometimes I fudge this step a little by just spreading them out on a plate until they stop steaming and then puree and add them to the buttermilk while still a bit warm.)

In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and powder and mix well. Add the diced butter and combine and mix until the butter is mixed into the flour about the size of small peas.

In a measuring cup mix together the buttermilk and the sweet potato puree until smooth and pour into the flour/butter mixture, and mix until a soft dough is formed. Knead gently in the mixing bowl for a minute or two, then pat the dough out onto a floured cutting mat or cutting board, the dough should be about 1 1/2 inches thick. Cut into rounds using a biscuit cutter or use a knife and cut them into squares.

Arrange in a buttered or oiled round cake pan and bake for 20-25 minutes until the tops and bottoms are golden brown.

*If you don’t have any buttermilk in your fridge, you can make “faux buttermilk” by adding 1 T of lemon juice or plain vinegar to regular or skim milk. Stir the milk and let it sit for at least 5 minutes and it will thicken up pretty well to approximate buttermilk.

Bridging the Seasons: Eggplant and Squash Gratin

Summer in San Francisco decided to not show up this year (again) and fall is decidedly here.  I am pretending that the beautiful clear weather outside equates to Indian summer and that the balmy air I feel isn’t coming from the radiator.

Happily for us fog-bound people we still have an abundance of summer vegetables coming in from the farmer’s markets.  It was quite the treat to see a fat, tissue wrapped, perfect eggplant and the last of the  heirloom tomatoes  in my produce box and a few squash – pale green fat and stubby zucchini varieties – and pretty red bell peppers.

(no comment…)

My mind instantly flashed to a new porcelain baking dish my dear friend A___ gave me for my birthday.  I am quite partial to Royal Worcester and the beautiful harvest fruit design is one that makes my heart sing.  It is an inherited passion.   It is also the perfect size for the quantity of vegetables I had on hand and was time for it to be christened with a beautiful eggplant and squash gratin, so I invited A___ over for dinner.

While A___ and I sipped red wine and caught up on the past few months, I sliced the eggplant and squash.  The eggplant was briefly fried in a touch of olive oil in my non-stick skillet and the squash was liberally sprinkled with salt and set out to drain in a colander in the sink.  As the browned eggplant came out of the frying pan I stacked up the floppy slices on a clean cutting mat to rest briefly.  In between flipping the eggplant around in the frying pan and drinking wine I quickly minced up a fat shallot and grated a clove of garlic and tossed them together in a small bowl.  The bell pepper was thinly sliced and set aside in a pile next to the cooked eggplant, and several of the tomatoes were roughly chopped and set out on paper towels to dry out a bit.  The preheating oven warmed the room, as the wine and conversation warmed our hearts.

Finally the eggplant was done frying and the salted squash had exuded some liquid and had drained sufficiently.  I began an assembly process in my new pretty dish.

I laid down a layer of eggplant in slightly overlapping circles, then tomato, a sprinkle of the shallot/garlic mixture and bell pepper.  I topped this with salt and pepper and about half of a 4 ounce log of goat cheese flavored with lemon zest.  Honestly it was all that the grocery store had that day and I am very happy about that now.

I repeated the process until I ran out of vegetables and cheese.  The final coup de grace was fresh mozzarella, sliced thickly and the discs spread over the top of the gratin and finished with a dash of Maldon salt and a few grinds of pepper.

It slid into the oven while we sat around munching on those crazy bright green Spanish olives and some Rainforest crackers.   We talked over all the goings-on over the past few weeks since our last dinner, opened another bottle of wine and relaxed in the perfumed air of the Roost as the gratin bubbled, sizzled and melted under its soft blanket of gooey cheese.

Finally the timer went off and then began the torturous wait for the gratin to cool and firm enough to be scooped out of the pan.   We admired the beauty of the gratin and completely forgot to take pictures!

Sometimes it is just nice to enjoy the company and enjoy the food without having to wait to photograph every step and every spoonful, it is called living in the moment, and we did just that.

Despite our precautions of draining the tomatoes and salting the squash the gratin was still a bit watery, but the leftover gratin the next day had completely absorbed the liquid which makes me think I should have made this dish the day before my pal came over for dinner!

The flavors of the vegetables really shone and the touch of lemon zest in the cheese was wonderful.  The best part, of course, was the richly browned cheesy mozzarella blanket covering the dish and we fought like pumas over bits of the cheese.

(a version with potato)

Eggplant and Squash Gratin

1 eggplant, sliced thinly
1/2 pound zucchini, sliced thinly lengthwise
1/2 pound tomatoes, sliced thickly
1 red bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced
2 shallots, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced or grated
4 oz goat cheese (I used goat cheese with lemon zest, if you cannot find this add 1 tsp of grated lemon zest)
6 oz fresh mozzarella, thickly sliced
olive oil
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 F and oil a baking dish with olive oil.

In a skillet, heat a few tablespoons of olive oil and fry a few slices of eggplant at a time until they are browned.  Set aside.

In a colander, arrange a layer of sliced zucchini and salt them well, and repeat; let the squash exude liquid and drain for 30 minutes or so.  Pat the slices dry with a paper towel and set them aside.

Arrange the tomatoes on a paper towel to drain.  Mix together the bell pepper slices, the shallot and the garlic in a small bowl.

To assemble, lay down a layer of the eggplant, followed by the squash, then tomatoes then a sprinkling of the pepper/shallot/garlic.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with slices of goat cheese.  Repeat until you have used up all of the vegetables and cheese, and top the final layer with the mozzarella.  Add salt and pepper to the top of the mozzarella.

Bake for 40-45 minutes until all of the vegetables are very tender and the cheese is browned.   Let sit 15 minutes to allow the gratin to firm up.  Better if made the day before and brought to a bubbling temperature in a 300 F oven for 20 minutes.

Serves 4 as a main course or 6 as a vegetable side.

This is a very forgiving dish, if you don’t have bell peppers or want to substitute an Anaheim chile or add potatoes anything goes!

(Moray eel potato)

Feel free to play around!  I have also made this with smoked fontina as the top cheese and mozzarella as the “inside” cheese.