The coming weekend

Good morning!  This upcoming weekend we have allspice muffins and cream scones for offer.  And for the next weekend I've just now finished updating the menu to include oatmeal spice chocolate chip cookies and a dark chocolate pudding.  Both of these have quite intense flavors.  Give them a try!

This coming week, I'm hoping to make the time to add a few items to the menu, things which have been in my "to-do" pile for a couple weeks now.  And I have a stack of recipes I've been wanting to try for the first time or tweak for the final time.  Those that make the cut after tweaks, will be considered for inclusion on the menu.

Fortunately, I have some time free time coming up from my normal teaching routine, an entire week during which I hope to cook quite a few things.

That's all for today.  A short post, yes.  I'm off to the kitchen to work on a few things now.  Bon appetit!

Ice cream is on my mind

 

Happy Friday to all!

Here tonight we have a slight freezing drizzle.  As I sit here at the computer doing this post tonight, my wife is making ground beef with onions and peas.  She calls it beef keema matar.  Look it up and you'll see exactly what it is.  Tomorrow my brother and I will be eating it while playing baseball simulations.  We'll have some naan with it and follow it up with chocolate ice cream.

Ice cream has been on my mind.  As any of my readers know, ice cream holds a particularly strong spot in the heart of my appetite.  I've been thinking about making chocolate chocolate chip ice cream.  That's right -- chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips in it, slivers of chips really.  I've been wanting to add a very rich chocolate ice cream for a while and I was thinking that I should double down on the chocolate with the extra chips (slivers) as well.

There are other flavors I have wanted to add for a while, too, and I am going to make a concerted effort to do that as we approach summer.

One of my favorite things to eat as a quick sweet snack is ice cream sandwiches and so I have been tinkering with a good chocolate cake/cookie layer for this purpose.  I could fill it either with my French vanilla or this chocolate ice cream.

Whenever I eat ice cream sandwiches that I get from the store, I always let them sit out for a bit and soften up.  Does anyone else do that?  I always prefer that to hard sandwiches straight from the freezer.  Sometimes I will set one (or two or three) out on the counter and then I leave them longer than I planned to (alright, I forget about them and then suddenly remember 20 minutes later - LOL).  Then they are REALLY soft.  They ooze out everywhere when I bite into them.  They're still good.  But the best is when they are in between that freezer-hard quality and the oozing-melted quality.

I could probably opine on this topic for quite a while.  But I won't.  Instead I will close this post and spend some time updating my recipe database and thinking about making ice creams soon.

Enjoy your evening and stay warm.

Spring is coming

 

Spring is coming.  This week starts out with mild late winter weather which will make us feel like spring is already here.  Nothing is better on a warm early spring day than yummy breakfast foods so those will probably occupy spots in the weekend menu offerings in the upcoming weeks.

This coming weekend, gingerbread min-cakes and vanilla macarons are on the menu.  And for the following weekend, you can order allspice muffins and cream scones.

I spent this past week cooking many things, and among them was a wonderful chocolate mousse pie.  I have a little tweaking to do on it still, but you can rest assured it will be on the menu soon.

And this past weekend I revised the technique for a couple recipes that I use that had turned out not-as-expected that last time I made them.  This is always a good learning experience.  To paraphrase Thomas Edison, each such episode simply teaches me what NOT to do.  

In one case, it was a simple matter of whisking a muffin batter vigorously which should not have been whisked.  Something as seemingly innocuous as that can have a dramatic effect on a baked good, and that was certainly evident in this particular muffin which came out with a texture that was completely unwanted.  But ensuring that the batter is only mixed gently was the certain solution.

In another case, it was simply a matter of letting the batter sit longer before baking.  This was the case with my vanilla macarons.  The batter needs to sit for a while after piping it onto the baking sheet.   This ensures that the batter deflates as is needed so that cracks do not form on the shells as they bake.  And the prior time I had made these, I had rushed that waiting period.  It wasn't a good idea, and the results were clearly not-as-expected.  Since I expect to expand my macaron offerings, this learning episode was good to have.  

So I have revised my recipes for these two items to ensure that anyone that uses them now or in the future will have clear instructions on what to do and what not to do.  Each such tweak makes it easier for the next time I use that recipe.  And that kind of consistency is nice to rely on.

Enjoy the warm day, everyone!  And always, eat well.

Gingerbread cake, eating pasta with a fork and coming new menu items

 

Good morning.  We're halfway through February and winter's end is coming into view.  Soon we'll see everything beginning to green up again.  But first, I'm still hoping for one good snow storm in Kansas City.  I keep looking up at the sky, hoping for the telltale signs.

This coming weekend I'm taking the week off.  I will enjoy family time, good food, and baseball simulations as well as a movie or two.

The following weekend, we have these items available for ordering:  vanilla macarons and another round of gingerbread mini cakes with lemon zest.

Over the this past weekend, I made quite a lot of food.  And I had two of my grown kids and their spouses over for a while when they stopped by to pick up some of that food.  During that visit a discussion emerged regarding the practicality of eating bowtie pasta with a fork.  I sat on the sidelines and just watched and it was hilarious.

We have a few new items ready to add to the menu.   These include a new orange drink, pancakes, a chocolate tart and shortly we'll see a new chocolate snack cake as it is also in it's final stages of testing.  I also made a tweak to my snickerdoodle recipe that appears to have been approved by all testers, so I will put that on a weekly offering soon for everyone to enjoy.

Have a great week, everyone!

  

Snowy weather

 

What's not to love about a snowy morning in Kansas City.  Today started out with a beautiful snowfall, but it is quickly melting as the temperatures hover in the mid-30s.

This snow has remade my schedule for the day.  This means my morning has been spent proofreading recipes in my recipe master database and in my ingredient cost spreadsheet.  And I've watched some good movies.  And I mixed up a bit of mock-tartar sauce to have with fish sticks that my wife has popped into the oven.

And I made pancakes this morning, tweaking cooking times and the cooking protocol itself as I get ready to put them on the menu to offer to all of you, frozen and ready for re-heating in the microwave.  As I whisked together the dry ingredients for the batter, I was a little too vigorous and some of the dry ingredients swooshed out of the bowl.  This is a common occurrence for me as sometimes I am too impatient or too much in a hurry or simply too excited to take my time when whisking dry ingredients.  Today it was "simply too excited", perhaps by the snow.  But I was also eager to try cooking with a couple new pancake rings I had purchased earlier this week and tweak the amount of batter I wanted to have for close-to-perfectly-circular 6-inch pancakes. 

Well, the pancakes came out perfectly after a few attempts to get just the right amount of batter for these new rings.  

As for whisking dry ingredients, at least I wasn't working with cornstarch.  If I get sloppy with whisking with cornstarch, that stuff flies everywhere.  It's amazing how fine the particles are.  And even simply opening the cornstarch container loosens and scatters the dust around.  It's terribly messy to work with.  But also a fantastic ingredient to have in the right foods.  

Is that enough of my random thoughts for the day?  Yes, I think so.  I'm putting together a list of grocery items to get for several things I'm making in during the upcoming weekend.  Ok, that's another random thought, isn't it?  Enough.

Have a great day, everyone!

Lemon snickerdoodles

Good morning! 

This coming weekend we have smoky sloppy joe filling and gingerbread mini-cakes available for ordering.  The following weekend I will be taking the weekend off to enjoy some activities with family including a fun day of Stratomatic baseball with my brother.

I cooked many things this past weekend.  In addition to the scones and cookie dip which were available for order, I also made a savory pie, and two different kinds of snickerdoodles.  

First of all, I made the usual snickerdoodles.  But then I did the final tweaks I felt were needed on a variation of these:  lemon snickerdoodles (photo above).  I'm all set to officially add these to the menu this week.  Just need to finalize all the details of the recipe and set up the item on the website.

I love putting lemon in so many things.  And I always use lemon zest and/or lemon juice rather than lemon flavoring.  Lemon extract simply does not add the same kind of flavor lift that lemon zest does.  At least that's my experience.  Perhaps there's a really good lemon extract out there that I'm not aware of?

Besides, I love taking lemons and zesting them.  It's a satisfying thing to see the lemon zest pile up under the zester.  Many people say to only zest once on each spot of the lemon so as to NOT get any significant amount of the white under the peel, but I always zest with two quick strokes.  I find the flavor to be more intense and full when done that way.  I tend to go through a lot of lemons and so I will squeeze the juice out and save it and toss the lemons out into my landscaping beds to decompose and add to the soil composition. 

This week I went through many lemons since both the snickerdoodles and the scones required them.  I have a few left, though, so I'm going to keep them in the fridge and see when they might come in handy over the next couple weeks.  

Coming soon:  pancakes, dal (lentils) and rice, pakora patties, and a chocolate snack cake.

Brownies

 

Does anyone not like brownies?  I have multiple brownies on the menu, including the bouchons shown in the photo above.  These are made in a special mold that results in the cork shaped brownies you see in the picture.

I have Twinkie-shaped molds for these brownies.

And I have 4-inch fluted round molds for these.

And some are carefully frosted with mousse or ganache and then precisely cut to a specific size.

Each brownie is unique and the size and pan or mold that I use to cook them is very carefully selected after a lot of trial and error.  (Everyone says "trial and error", but it really should be "trials and errors", plural on both, since it's never just one attempt.)

Some people prefer a brownie that is made with nothing but cocoa powder, some with nothing but chocolate, and some with a blend.  I determined long ago that for me, brownies made with all chocolate and no cocoa powder did not result in the texture that I desired.  So all my brownies are either cocoa powder or a blend.  The important thing is to use a very high quality cocoa powder.  My choice is a dark cocoa powder made by Cacao Barry.  I have found it to be supremely chocolatey and perfect for my tastes when it comes to brownies and other chocolate confections.  

Going back to the idea of pans and molds, I have found that the right selection of cooking vessel makes a significant difference sometimes.  With all my brownies, I tested a variety of vessels before I settled on the final choice.  And I carefully notated for each recipe which pan or which mold should be used along with any other small but significant baking tips I learned regarding how much to fill each mold, exactly how different cooking times and temperatures affect the brownie, whether or not the addition of extra chocolate chips or shavings is advisable, etc.

And sometimes I will try new things with a batch I am making just for fun (as opposed to something prepared to go out to the door for someone else), just to see what happens.  These might include baking the pan under tented foil, or mixing the dough more or less vigorously (this makes a difference sometimes!), or mixing by hand versus machine whisk or paddle.

Little tweaks like this, done over time, constantly help recipes and finished foods evolve and hopefully become just a little better as they are made again and again.  And sometimes, a new way of doing something is arrived at which turns something ordinary into something much more special.

Pancakes

 

It's the last day of January and it's cold, although not snowy as the picture above shows since that was taken last week.  The cold puts me in the mood for hot pancakes today.

I made multiple batches of pancakes over the last few weeks.  I'm currently doing final tweaks on a pancake that will be made and then frozen and offered to everyone on the website so that that it can be taken home and stored until wanted, then warmed in the microwave.  

I don't usually do things like that, meaning making food that is to be warmed up in the microwave, but this pancake is especially good in that way.

Another thing I like about this pancake is that it has a nice even color across it's surface, a result achieved by NOT frying it in oil or butter in the skillet.  Instead, I simply cook it in a dry non-stick pan and it comes out with it's beautiful color.

I don't have any pictures yet to show, but they will come when I finish the final tweak.  And then they will be added to the menu.

Syrup?  For me, I prefer to use real maple syrup, or a berry-based syrup such as blueberry or boysenberry or raspberry.  Imitation maple?  I'd rather stick with the real stuff even though it is a bit more expensive.  To me, it's worth it.

That's all for today.  This is one final post for January.  See you all in February.

February is coming

Good morning!  January is just about gone, February is soon to be here, and then we can all start looking forward to spring, fresh plants, deer browsing the new greens in the yard, etc.  But today the weather is cold, and I feel like making hot chocolate and a chocolate tart.

This coming weekend, cookie dip and scones are ready for ordering.  Next weekend, we have a couple really great things for cold weather meals:  gingerbread mini-cakes with lemon zest, and smoky sloppy joe filling.  This filling goes great on buns, of course, but also in tortillas, and even just by itself by the spoon.  Give it a try!

This week I tried out my new food processor.  The old one was damaged when someone  (yeah, it was me...) dropped the plastic cannister at just the right angle to cause a very large crack in the side.  It had served me well for many years.  The new one runs very smoothly and is very quiet.  I think it's a great new addition to the kitchen as it is an upgrade from the old one which was decent but not great.  I learned to use it well enough for what I needed, but the new one is so much better.

Kitchens can easily get filled up with so many gadgets and utensils.  I try not to let that happen, but I have to admit that I have some things that rarely get used, some that I haven't used for years.  Soon I'm hoping to do a full reorganization of the kitchen and maybe then I'll toss a few things that seem to be doing nothing more than taking up space.    

Having a gadget or utensil that can serve multiple purposes is really a nice idea.  But I have some things that are specifically designed for one purpose, such as my strawberry huller.  These kinds of things sometimes do such a great job with their single purpose that it can be tough to consider eliminating them.  In fact, the strawberry huller is something I would never get rid of.  But it's certainly worth going through everything and trying to reduce the number of items sitting on shelves and in drawers that aren't being used.

Wish me luck.  And eat well, this coming week.  

The coming two weekends

 

Good morning.  My usual Sunday post is a morning late, but here it is.  

This coming weekend we have spritz cookies and French butter cookies ready to order.

The following weekend's menu has just now been updated with cookie dip and buttermilk scones.

We have snow forecast this week here in Kansas City, at least a few chances coming up.  And that means it's a good time for winter foods.  So this week, I will be making lots of hot chocolate, warm savory pies, and pancakes hot off the griddle, among other things.  My wife has been making excellent spicy dishes from lentils and also lots of kebabs and pakoras.

When the kitchen is busy with activity, I love the aromas that float through the house.  I step out to the get the mail and when I re-enter, I am bathed in these warm aromas.  I to go out to fill the birdfeeders and when I come back in from the cold, the aromas welcome me back into the house.

Food is one of the great luxuries of life.  

That's all for now.  Have a great day.  I will be back in a couple days with more to write about and perhaps a recipe to share.