Feb 4th and Feb 11th weekend menu offerings

Good morning, good morning!

It's a quiet peaceful Sunday morning here.  I've been up for a while now and have done many things, including updating the weekly menu.

This week's menu offering is chocolate mousse, mole pork chorizo chili and challah.

Next week's menu offering is peanut butter cookies with chopped peanuts and nutmeg, eggnog and blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla.

When I select items for each weekly menu, sometimes I try to choose items that go well together; for instance, the mousse, chili and challah, which I think work very well together and make a complete meal and dessert.  But then when I group other things such as the peanut butter cookies, eggnog and blueberry cakes, it's obvious that I'm not thinking the same way.  In this case, I decided that I simply felt like making those particular items.   And in that case, I really don't worry about whether they go well together. 

It has been an enjoyable weekend so far.  Yesterday I added another tweak to my smoky sloppy joes and tested them out on a couple people (who have not yet reported back on them).  I'm going to do another tweak or two later this week.  I hope to have them on the menu soon.

And this morning, I'm going to be playing around with blueberry cream and waffle cones, and then I'm going to make the dough for a quiche Lorraine this afternoon which will be finished up tomorrow.  I should have made the dough last night.  It has to chill overnight, and I had hoped to be making the actual quiche this morning.  But it slipped my mind yesterday while I was enjoying the day. 

That's all for now.  It's time for me to turn on some music, probably Debussy and Mahler today, and spend some time in the kitchen.  

Eating until finished

Happy Thursday!  It's the 27th of January which means it's less than 11 months until Christmas.  Yeah, I know, it's ridiculous to be thinking about the next Christmas already.  But it's still fun to be marking each 25th of the month until we get to the next December 25th.

I'm doing some cooking today, and starting to prep for weekend orders.  I get to make gougères for everyone this week, and I love making these.  There's something fun about cooking up the flour with the heated water and milk, adding it to cheese and eggs, and watching them puff and brown in the oven.  Eating them, of course, is the best part.

Eating is fun.  Sure, we need to do it to survive, but that just gives us an excuse to have a lot of fun with it.  I love keeping little bits of things around to snack on, grapes, for instance. I keep grapes around a lot.  And I find it quite satisfying to eat a couple grapes at a time and watch throughout the day as the grapes disappear and empty stems are left.   Somehow when there's nothing left except stems, I feel like I've accomplished something by consuming all those yummy grapes.  Is that odd?  Does anyone else do that?

I take pleasure in making sure that any food is used up and doesn't go to waste.  So when I have leftovers of anything, it's quite satisfying to see them used up.  It's good that I enjoy sharing the food I make with people because otherwise, how could I eat it all?  I could try, but that probably wouldn't be healthy.  It's too much.  But by spreading out my surplus, I can still make as many foods as I want, and develop and practice as many new recipes as I want, sure in the knowledge that someone will eat it up. 

OK, I'm off to the kitchen now.  I have a light teaching day on the piano so that means cooking with movies and TV in the background.

Have a great weekend!

Upcoming weekly menu offerings

Happy Sunday, everyone!  It's a chilly but not-too-cold morning here in Kansas City.  I'm thinking about hot foods as you can see by the photo above of chili in progress.

The menu offerings for this coming weekend includes pulla (a wonderful bread with cardamom), gougères, and butterscotch pecan cookies.

For next weekend, we have chocolate mousse (with dark chocolate), mole pork chorizo chili, and challah.

I have several new things that are on my list to work on for addition to the full menu.  I never seem to have as much time as I want in order to do everything, but it's fun going through the list and checking things off one by one even if it takes a while.  Why does it take so long?  There are just so many great foods that I love to make and eat and that I want to share with everyone.

I've been talking for a while about getting cinnamon rolls on the menu.  I still need to do a single-elimination bake-off using several recipes I have tweaked over the years.  One of those recipes will be on the menu soon -- I promise.  I know, I know -- I keep saying that.  Please be patient.  I promise you it will be worth the wait.

Also in the works to be added to the menu are quiche Lorraine, jalapeño bacon quiche, spaghetti sauce, twice cooked spaghetti, eclairs, smoky sloppy joes, and berry cream cornucopias.  Special projects I'm working on at the request of specific people are macarons and a high protein vegan ice cream.

I love that cooking is never-ending, meaning that there's always something more to cook, a new food to try, a new cuisine to explore.

Of course, it's the "eating" part after all that which is the best.  Time for lunch!

Breads

This past weekend I made honey oatmeal bread as part of the weekly menu offering.  I love making this bread.  The oatmeal is cooked first and left to sit for 20 minutes.  Then one by one ingredients are combined until the final additions of the oatmeal and honey are made.  Two rises of the dough are completed and then they are popped into the oven in mini-loaf pans.

I like making bread in mini-loaves.  For one things, it's easier to share with many people that way, since everyone gets a small but significant portion in a single loaf.  For another, it's just cool to slice up a mini-loaf and eat it all up.  I don't know why.  But it is.

I even get the feeling that the bread tastes slightly different than in a larger loaf.  I've not collected any empirical data to support that.  But it's how it seems to me.

Breads in general are great, aren't they?  And they are so complex and simple at the same time.  Temperature and humidity in the kitchen have a effect on your breads that can be tricky to deduce ahead of time.  I've heard of people who specialize in making nothing but breads talk about how even they sometimes don't account properly for day-to-day changes in temperature and humidity which makes today's bread making process a little different than yesterday's.  It's a hard thing to quantify on a day-by-day basis.  And that makes bread making tricky and amazing, I think.  

The action of yeast in creating the texture and the flavor.  The affect of the ambient environment.  Whether you spray water into your oven or not (unless you have a professional bread oven with steam injectors).  The kind of flour used.   There are so many things which affect the final loaf of bread that is pulled from the oven.

It's easy to see why some people spend a lifetime just honing their bread-making skills and instincts.  I'd like to do that, too, but there are so many other things I always want to make that there is no way I could focus exclusively on bread.  I'm glad some do because the rest of us can learn from their experiences and techniques.

Aged cheddar

There are so many great things to eat and drink in this world.  Yesterday I had groceries delivered and my order included a container of chocolate milk, one of my favorite beverage indulgences.  I've had multiple mugs of it last night and this morning.  My order also included cheeses, one good and one bad.  The good -- muenster.  Yum.  The bad -- I thought I was getting a package of American cheese, but I got a package of "cheese product" which is not really cheese.  Kraft should do a better job of showing this information on their package labels, or perhaps I should take blame since I didn't zoom in to see the small print.  Anyway, I am enjoying the muenster, but I'm not sure what to do the the fake cheese.

I was ordering American cheese because I'm going to be tweaking a sloppy joe recipe this weekend, and I love having a slice of cheese on a sloppy joe.  I never used to do this, but then I saw my sister do it once when I had her try my sloppy joe recipe, and so I tried it and I do it all the time now.  (Thanks, Christi!)

Cheeses are great.  They can truly be called one of the "great" things we have the opportunity to indulge in.  This year at Christmas, I was given aged cheddar cheeses, two of them (from Elisa and Ben).  One, in the photo above on the right, was a 10-year aged white cheddar.  And the other, the one on the left in the photo above, is a 15-year aged cheddar.

15 years!  It's an amazing thing that we can let a food sit for that long and it's not only still edible, but it's got amazing flavor and texture that have developed during those years.  I'm not an expert in making cheeses, not even close.  But I am happy that we have people that know how to make these wonderful cheeses, people that take the time to learn how to do it, and to somehow figure out that you can let cheese sit that long.

My aged cheeses are gone now, this far past Christmas when they showed up in my kitchen.  But I will look ahead to the next time I have them. 

Still shaking my head.  15 years!  How did someone figure that out?!

Have a great weekend! 

Cookie dough scraps

This weekend I made Breton shortbread with chocolate pearls.  These are one of my favorite cookies to put out on the weekly menu offerings.  I enjoy making them.  There's something nice about rolling out the dough, chilling it, and then cutting nice cookie dough circles for baking.  Of course, whenever one cuts shaped cookies, there is the inevitable pile of cookie dough scraps, leftover from between shapes that were cut.  

Some cookie doughs can be re-rolled a second time without affecting the texture of the second batch that is cut from that re-roll.  Sugar cookies come to mind, for example.  But there are some like this week's Breton shortbread which I never re-roll.  At one point back when I was first working with these, before they were even on the menu, I experiment with cutting squares so that I could align each cut cookie in such a way that there was minimal waste.  But the baked result wasn't quite as nice as when they are round.  It may seem a small thing, but when these cookies are baked there is difference between square and circle finished cookies that is easily noticed.  With a circular cookie, there's the same distance from the edge to center all the way around.  But not with a square cookie -- the corners to the center are slightly greater in distance than from the midpoint between the corners going to the center.  That doesn't make a difference in every cookie.  But with these cookies cooked as squares, they didn't have same texture from edge to center all the way through.  

So ... what to do, what to do?  Well, in the end I just decided to keep making them all as circles.  And the scraps that are left over?  I bake them separately and I end up with a whole bunch of asymmetrical cookies in odd shapes.  But they are perfect for snacking on, for putting on top of ice cream, for dipping in chocolate, etc.  I could even bag those cookie scraps and pass them out to friends and family.  Some of them are more browned than others because the sizes are all different, but it somehow works, probably because these scraps are all smaller than the regular cookies.

As I have mentioned before in previous blog posts, I don't like to see things wasted when it comes to food.  So I always look for ways to use up as much as possible when I'm cutting, chopping or slicing any food item.

As I write this, I've already prepared everyone's food for pickup this weekend.  And later today I will be making a dish of potatoes au gratin with mushrooms.  A nice warm food to have on a chilly winter day.

Gougères

Good morning, good morning.  It's a very chilly day out and it's not going get any better tomorrow.  However, as we are now several days past the winter solstice, it's easy to see that the days are getting longer, so that should be of some comfort to those who don't like the cold dark nights of winter.

This week, gougères have been added to the menu.  These small cheesy puff pastries are so delicious.  I debated on adding these for a while even though I've had several people asking and hoping.  The difficulty was that they are best eaten fresh or at least very soon after coming out of the oven.  However, in the end I decided that since I freeze the portioned dough anyway, all I needed to do was to give simple instructions on how bake these.  So here you go:

I will give them out in a freezer bag with the baking time and temperature written on the bag.  Preheat the oven to 375 F.  Put them on a parchment lined baking sheet.  (I will even give you a sheet of parchment paper.)  And bake them for 30 minutes.  They go straight from the freezer to the oven with no need to thaw before baking.  

They come out nicely browned on the outside, and soft and just a little moist on the inside.

These are made by heating water, milk and butter with a dash of salt.  Then flour is added and vigorously mixed.  Then I use the stand mixer to work the dough just a bit to help cool it slightly.  Then lots of eggs are added, one at a time, and finally two different kinds of shredded cheese. 

I really love keeping a bag of the portioned dough in the freezer to have whenever I want a quick warm snack.

You'll see them on a weekly offering this month.  I hope you'll give them a try.

That's all for today.  Stay warm.  And eat well.

January 1st

Good morning and welcome to 2022.  Today is the first day of the new year.  Today is the first winter storm of the new year as well.  Right now there's only a dusting as I write this post, but we're going to be getting more as the day progresses.  It is bitterly cold with a slight breeze and about 17 F.  When I put bird seed out in the feeders this morning, I was definitely feeling it and was very glad to be back inside afterwards.  The birds don't seem to mind the cold though.  They are chattering back and forth at each other and flying to and from the feeding stations.  I have one station in my front yard and several in my back yard.   

I have been up for a while and since it's going to be so cold all day long -- our temps are going lower for the rest of the day so we have already achieved the high for the day -- I will be inside cooking and playing chess and other similar things.  I have a fireplace video playing on my TV and I can hear the crackling of the flames.  And while my virtual fireplace is up on the screen, I've been shredding cheeses -- cheddar and gruyere.  This will be for gougeres.  I will make the dough and freeze it for baking at a later time.  As a matter of fact, I'm going to be adding gougeres to the menu, but that's a post for another day, maybe my next post in a few days.

For now, I will enjoy the first winter storm of the season.  I will make the gougere dough.  I will make some warm scrambled eggs.  I will drink a fresh batch of hot chocolate -- not hot cocoa -- there is a difference.  

So Happy New Year to everyone!  Stay warm.  Watch a good movie.  Eat some good food.