Kitchen clean-up

Today I have been experimenting with some different foods and recipes in the kitchen.  At the same time, I've been nibbling on spoonfuls of one delicious food or another, grabbing a quick bit of a muffin, eating a few grapes -- basically grazing like a deer in a meadow.  These kinds of days are fun.  They are unscheduled.  They are free-form.  They are creative.  They also make a mess as I tend to dirty a lot of utensils and pans and serving plates.

When I was younger, I would be all gung-ho about cooking up multiple things on a single day and it was always fun.  Fun, that is, until it was all done and I had to do all the clean-up.  Oh, I hated that.  Seeing a mound of dishes and pans and spoons and spatulas all waiting for me after a lot of cooking, well, it was sometimes maddeningly disheartening.  I hated all that clean-up.  Who wouldn't?  As I finished the final recipe I was making on one of these long cooking days, that pile always mocked me, always laughed at me, always dared me to stay enthused about my day in the kitchen.

Then one day, I just decided to do "clean as you go".  At first, I hated disturbing my cooking momentum with constant stops to clean a pan or a mixing bowl.  But it didn't take long for me to feel differently.  These days, as soon as a single pan or plate or spoon is done being used, it's cleaned right away.  Often those things are done while cookie doughs or cake batters are in the mixer so that I get the satisfaction of multi-tasking, or perhaps while a tray of cookies is in the oven.  So now when I finish of day cooking multiple foods and tons of cookware and dishes are being used, the clean-up is already done.  There is never a pile of unwashed dishes ready to break my good mood.  

One might ask, why don't I just use a dishwasher?  I prefer to wash the dishes by hand for many reasons.  I won't go into all the reasons at this time, but let me mention one that may seem unexpectedly unusual.  I love the feeling of the hot water on my hands as I wash the dishes on chilly autumn mornings and cold winter days.  Admittedly, this reason doesn't hold up in summer, but for every other season where the temps are frigid, cold, or even mild, there something about soaking my hands in hot soapy water that I find to be a nice perk of choosing to do all my dishes by hand.  

Have a great week, everyone!  And remember to take the time to enjoy some good food.  

Hot chocolate

 

It's late August, and the weather is hot.  The sun is bold, and the humidity is high.  Yet we aren't that far away from the change of the season to autumn.  I'm already thinking ahead to copious rainfall, cloudy afternoons, leaves falling, and holidays that seem to be in such a hurry that they trip over each other in their push to get us to the end of the year.

So what am I thinking about during what may be the last bit of real hot weather for the summer?  Why, hot chocolate, of course.

I love hot chocolate any time of the year.  Some people tell me that's crazy.  But people love hot coffee all year, so why not hot chocolate!

Some people mistakenly call any chocolate drink "hot chocolate", including all those mixes that come in single serving packets to which is added hot water or hot milk.  But in reality, most of those are made with cocoa powder and no chocolate, and that means hot cocoa.  You want real hot chocolate, you have to use actual chocolate.  And when you do, it is definitely worth it!

Here's an easy hot chocolate recipe:

180 g  bittersweet chocolate, 60% cacao

100 g  milk chocolate

32   g  cocoa powder

40   g  sugar

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp allspice

a pinch of cardamom

a pinch of salt

The higher the quality of chocolate you use, the better the flavor and smoothness you will get.  (And by chocolate, I do not mean chocolate chips.)  Break up the chocolate into relatively small pieces.  Then toss the pieces into a food processor.  Add all the remaining ingredients and then pulse the processor many times in medium-length spurts.  I don't like to run it continuously because the blade generates heat, and I don't want to melt the chocolate.  Instead, I want to chop it relatively fine.  If you have some chunks of chocolate left over, don't worry, it's OK.

Now heat up milk and add it to a measured quantity of the mix.  The hotter the milk, the better.  You want this hot milk to melt all that chocolate in the mix.  You can use the microwave, or a saucepan, either is OK.  Generally, 1/4 cup of this mix per 1 cup of milk is a good ratio.  When they are combined, stir it until the chocolate is all melted.  Voila!  There it is!

You can vary the spices to whatever you want, but this combination is one I particularly like.

I've had several cups this week already even as the summer is trying to enforce it's will one last time (I hope!) before autumn arrives.  I love it any time of day.  I especially like to add a bit of almond-flavored whipped cream.

Anyway, give it a try and let your mind wander to the cooler months and holidays ahead.

Cauliflower mash

Good morning and Happy Saturday to everyone!

This week cauliflower mash makes it's entrance on the full menu of Bruce Bakery and Bistro.

Personally, I've never been one to eat cauliflower much.  Some people really love it, but it seems more people can just as easily do without it.  But I love being able to take a food that is not a favorite of mine and turn it into something that is irresistible.  And that's what we have here.

If you like mashed potatoes, you'll like this.  The texture, the flavor, the appearance all are very similar to mashed potatoes.

Cauliflower is cooked in boiling water until very tender.  Then it's puréed with butter , cream cheese and various seasonings, and finally shredded parmesan cheese is processed into the mixture.  When it's done, it tastes amazing.  I am not exaggerating when I say that when it's sitting in my fridge, I can't help going back to it multiple times throughout the day.  

An here's an amazing thing.... it's even good when it's cold!  Hot or cold, I enjoy it immensely.

That's all for today.  Just a short post that I'm squeezing in between cooking brownies, hazelnut shortbread and Swedish visiting cakes for this weekend's orders.  

Have a great week!  Enjoy the waning summer.  Autumn will soon be here.

Sweet spiced roasted pecans

A new item has been added to the full menu:  sweet spiced roasted pecans.

While I am more than happy to indulge in sugary sweet treats that are the complete opposite of healthy, I am also very happy to have healthy snacks that are also delicious.

These roasted pecans are coated in a mixture of  several spices and extracts, as well as the sweet coating that helps bring it all together.  They roast in the oven for about a half hour and when they come out I am eager to dive into them as soon as they are cool.  I've roasted these for as long as 45 minutes and they are still great.  By that time however, much more of the natural pecan flavor has been baked out, so I prefer to keep the cooking time down to 30.  But it's nice to know the cooking time is extremely flexible.

I put these in a sealed container on my kitchen counter, and I can't help but repeatedly return to it to nab a few more throughout the day as the hours pass.  They are healthy so your body feels good as you eat them, and they have a great balance of sweet and spicy, and I love the lightly crunchy texture

They will be offered on a weekly menu soon.  I hope you will try them out.

Stay cool if you can.  It's a hot day here in Kansas City, and many other places around the world.  

Textures

 

Isn't food great?!  I mean .... can you imagine life with nothing but nutritional supplements that have no taste, no flavor, no color, no texture?  I like to think especially about texture a lot.      

Food textures, the words themselves, refer specifically to properties of foods which can be sensed by touch, either by mouth or by hand. 

For instance, take the crispy rice treat shown above.  The combination of the crispy (from the puffed rice) and the chewy (from the marshmallows and butter which are melted to create this treat) is amazing.  Or take a simple chocolate chip cookie -- the slight bit of crispiness on the outside, the slight bit of chew on the inside, the pools of liquid chocolate interspersed with the actual cookie.  The texture contrast is wonderful.

The tricky thing with some foods is that textures are very likely to be easily changed (most often in a bad way) completely by accident if one is not being careful.  This week I made sweet spiced roasted pecans.  They were great.  I always love to have them around to snack on.  They were crispy and crunchy both from the roasting which dried them out a bit as well as from the sweet and spicy coating in which they were roasted.

I stored them in a sealed container and every time I wanted some, I popped the lid, scooped some out and resealed.  But then something terrible happened.  I got distracted.  I went to grab a few.  And I left the lid open.  For some time they sat open on the counter and slowly bit by bit they seemed to absorb some of the humidity in the air.  When I went back to get more and I saw that I had left the lid open, I knew they wouldn't be the same.  And they weren't.  The taste was the same but also different because texture affects our evaluation of taste. 

The same thing happens to potato chips if you leave them out on warm humid day.  That's why some people have made a fortune on little clips which make sure you chips bags are closed.

Well, I'm going to make another batch of pecans.  And this time I'll try to be more careful.  I tossed the remains of the texture-disadvantaged batch out for the squirrels.  I don't know if the squirrels could taste the sweet or the spicy on these pecans, but I hope they appreciated my efforts.  I happened to catch a glimpse of a young brown squirrel nibbling on one of the pecan halves.  He seemed to be enjoying it.  

Have a great week, everyone.