Strawberry & Balsamic Galette

You  know when you were a kid, and every day at dinner your mom would be trying to feed you meatloaf or tuna casserole* or some other real horror, and you’d say “when I’m an adult I’m going to eat candy for dinner and stay up all night playing Sonic the Hedgehog, and instead of going to school I’m going to found a pirate colony in the backyard”?  It’s a shame that now, as an adult, I have evenings where I eat a sensible dinner made up of vegetables and lean protein followed by a piece of dark chocolate (Antioxidants! Moderation! PHOOEY!), then fold laundry and go to bed early.  My child-self would be appalled, not to mention seriously bored.

*I would like to issue an apology to my mother because she was right about meatloaf being good, but also demand one from her because she was NOT RIGHT about tuna casserole being good.  When is hot mayonnaise a good idea?  Oh!  Maybe when you put peas in it.  Blech.

*Note from Sue-I love tuna noodle casserole AND hot mayo, I think it’s fair to say we all just hate the cream of whatever soup. Mmmm hot mayo dips.

So, I made a strawberry galette for dinner.  BECAUSE I CAN.

For the crust:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 tbsp powdered sugar

pinch of salt

1/2 cup cold butter, diced

1-3 tbsp ice cold water

Method: Pulse the dry ingredients in a food processor until combined.  Add the butter and pulse until the dough forms a thick crumbly mess.

any recipe where the butter can be cold is a recipe i can get behind.

this was much sandier and finer than the recipe led me to believe.

Add the water a tablespoon at a time, pulsing very briefly between, until the dough JUST holds together.  Smush the dough into a big disc, wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge for an hour.

don’t smush it too much, though, because it’ll get chewy instead of flaky.

For the filling:

2 cups  fresh strawberries, quartered

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp honey

1 tsp brown sugar

1 tsp corn starch

Method: Mix strawberries with vinegar and honey and let sit for an hour or so.

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick circle.

someday maybe i’ll get a rolling pin. until then, there’s metal waterbottles!

Lay the dough on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet.  Sprinkle the brown sugar/cornstarch mixture around the whole circle, about 1/2 inch from the edges.  Strain the strawberries, reserving the liquid. Arrange the strawberries, artfully, this isn’t a hoedown, and fold over the edges of the galette.

ARTFULLY.

Bake the galette until golden brown and bubbly, about 40-45 minutes.  Let it REALLY cool until you cut it, or the strawberries won’t have had a chance to solidify and you’ll have a runny, sad mess.   In the meantime, pop the reserved strawberry liquid into a small saucepan and reduce it by half or so, until it’s thick.  To serve the galette, cut it into pretty slices and drizzle it with the sauce. I didn’t photograph the sauce, because I took this picture at 7am.  But I did eat it for dinner and it was fantastic.  The strawberries cook down into concentrated strawberry perfection.  You know when you eat a strawberry, and it’s sublime and transcends the way that normal strawberries taste to become a sort of strawberry archetype, informing your opinion forever on what a strawberry SHOULD taste like?  This is like that.  Also, the crust baked perfectly- crispy on the bottom and flaky and buttery. Plus, look how attractive it is.  This is the kind of thing that people who live in Italian villas whip up when they have visitors and then eat while drinking chilled wine from the estate on a stone patio at sunset.

And let me say: DO NOT SKIP the sauce.  You want the sauce.  Really.  Trust me.

- Cat

pretty, huh.

Gluten Free Blueberry Pie Bars

Last weekend, I went berry picking with some friends.  I have never done so in Oregon, which is idiotic, because everyone knows Oregon has the best berries anywhere.  It is strawberry season in Oregon, and is starting to be blueberry and raspberry season.  Blueberries are easy to pick, because they are on trees at a normal, human height.  Strawberries, however, are low to the ground and apparently enjoy hiding in thickets of thorny nonsense.  You kind of squat down and scuttle along the rows looking for berries.  Collecting a big bucket of berries made me feel satisfied to have come from a long line of peasants on both sides of my family, which is contrary to my childhood feelings about the same subject, during which time I was sure I was descended from royalty.  Not so, I’m told.

In any case, I picked a shitload of berries.  Far more than one person can consume.  So, I froze a bunch of them, in that Martha Stewart-y method where you lay out the berries on a cookie sheet and freeze them, then gather them up into ziploc bags individually when they’re frozen, so you have pretty, individually frozen berries instead of a frozen gloppy mess.  It worked perfectly.

In the interest of using up some of my berries AND of making a gluten free dessert for a buddy, I landed on Gluten Free Blueberry Pie Bars.  (I wanted to make a blueberry tart, but I don’t have a tart pan and seeing as I DO have a bundt pan AND a springform pan, that seems like enough pans I use once per decade.)  If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know anything about celiac disease, wheat allergies or the general gluten free food thing, I’d like to introduce you to the internet.

I’ve never made anything gluten free on purpose.  You know, like roasted asparagus.  That is gluten free.  But something normally made with wheat not made with wheat?  No.  Turns out, though, that there is a plethora of gluten free choices.  Almond flour, amaranth flour (?  This seems like what lembas bread is probably made from, and if you get that reference, you’re a dork and we would get along famously), rice flour, oat flour, arrowroot flour, fava bean flour, chickpea flour, etc.  I opted for rice flour, because a dessert made out of fava beans is weird, and oat flour, because that is something I could make myself.

These bars were so easy.  So so easy and so very delicious.  I think with nuts in them, these bars would be easily good enough for you to have for breakfast, or you could have them for dessert with ice cream and they’d still be wonderful.

Gluten Free Blueberry Pie Bars

Crust:

1 cup rice flour

1 1/4 cups oat flour (you can make your own by pulsing oats in a food processor until more or less fine, but they make a nice base when they’re a little rough)

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 cup (1/2 a stick)  butter, softened

1 egg

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Blueberry compote:

2 cups fresh blueberries

1/4 cup sugar

3 tbsp corn starch

juice of half a lemon

Method:  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.  In a small saucepan, cook the blueberries, sugar, lemon juice and cornstarch on medium heat for 15-20 minutes, then let it cool until you can touch it.  It should be relatively thick, like jam.

For the crust, mix together all the dry ingredients, then smush in the butter, egg and oil with your fingers until the crust is sandy but mostly holds together.  Into a greased square baking pan, press 3/4 of the dough into the bottom, pretty firmly and be sure to cover the pan completely, not leaving any holes.

tamara doing the actual work.

Pour the blueberry compote onto the dough, then drop the remaining 1/4 of dough onto the top of the berries.

notice in this picture that i have some extra Thai chiles from when i made stir fry last week.  they’ll just sit there.  forever, probably.

Bake for 25-30 minutes until the top dough is lightly browned.  Let cool completely before cutting.

These turned out perfectly. Taking the extra step of cooking the blueberries was my way of ensuring that they didn’t get too runny and create a cobbler instead of bars.  They turned out beautifully.  I even took them to the beach.  And!  No gluten!

- Cat

Rice Pudding

that's my coffee table. it's attractive, but has dangerous splinter potential.

When I was a kid, I had two even younger and more obnoxious siblings, which meant that Wendy’s was the only place my mom ever took us for lunch. (Mom and Dad, before you protest that I only remember the things you’d rather I didn’t share on the internet, I very much recall the time you took me to some fancy place for dinner when I was 6 and I wore the flower girl dress I wore in Aunt Carol’s wedding and some old man gave me a silver dollar.  I had a lovely childhood, even though once I broke my toe and my mom didn’t believe me, and another time my dad gave me a fat lip while playing catch because he chucked a fastball at my face.  Lovely!)

As the cultured among you will undoubtedly recall, Wendy’s used to have a salad bar.  Included among iceberg lettuce and probably 23 gallons of ranch dressing, the salad bar also had TWO kinds of pudding, vanilla and chocolate.  That meant that, to me, my mom saying “we’re meeting your Aunt Carol for lunch because I’m going insane listening to your plan to put on a production of Cinderella in the backyard for all the neighborhood kids with yourself as the star WHILE trying to make sure your sister doesn’t eat any cigarette butts off the sidewalk”, meant that I was about to get to eat a shitload of pudding.  I really love pudding.  I will admit that making pudding, from scratch, properly, is sort of a pain in the ass.  I won’t judge any of you if, instead of making this recipe, you go get a box of Cook & Serve chocolate pudding from the store, make it, and then eat it while it’s still hot.  In fact, if you do that, let me know, I will totally come over.

But, if you don’t mind the time it takes to make it, this pudding is GREAT.  If you have homemade vanilla extract, or a vanilla bean, it would be even better.  But as it is, it’s creamy and gently sweet and just so very nice.  It’s like fleece socks.  They might not be sexy, but they sure are nice.

Rice Pudding (Note that this recipe will double very easily, I just didn’t think it wise to have that much pudding lying around.)

1/2 cup rice (I used brown Jasmine rice, because I accidentally have like 3 bags of it.  It turned out just fine, and I figure, hey.  Fiber!)

1/2 cup white sugar

4 cups of milk (1/2 cup set aside, I used 1%)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

dash of salt

Method:  In a saucepan on medium-high heat, mix together the rice, sugar, 3 1/2 cups of milk, salt and vanilla.

kindly disregard the french onion soup i was cooking at the same time. also, apparently i need a spoon rest.

Bring it to a boil, cover it and reduce to low heat.  Here’s the annoying part.  Cook it for 45-50 minutes.   It’s not so bad- you should keep it covered the whole time, and stir it every once in awhile, but other than that you can just let it cook.

yep, still cooking.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the remaining 1/2 cup of milk and the egg, and set aside.  After the 45-50 minutes, when the rice is cooked and the mixture is a lot thicker and reduced, mix the milk/egg mixture into the rice, and stir it REAL fast, so it doesn’t cook the egg.  If you don’t fancy taking a risk in your cooking, you can let the rice cool awhile before mixing the egg/milk mixture back in.  Either way, once it’s in and the egg isn’t cooked, turn the heat back up to medium-high and bring the whole lot to a boil, stirring frequently.

ok. this picture is gross. but i had a little of my egg whites cook when i poured in the egg/milk mixture, and i wanted to prove to the internet that not only is it ok to mess up a little, but that a lot of the time, mess ups are fixable. for example, i just fished these out. problem solved. it does look like alien boogers though.

Then, let it cool a bit, pop it into a pan or bowl ( I housed mine in an 8×8 baking dish), and let it set in the fridge for a few hours.  Sprinkle with a little cinnamon and have at it!

- Cat

Pecan Blondies

do they look like they have butter in them? because they do. lots.

You know that thing where you start doing a task a really stupid way, for instance deciding to break up whole toasted pecans with your fingers because you don’t feel like washing the cutting board and knife it would take to chop them properly, and you realize like 4 pecans in that you’ve made a serious error, but you think to yourself “there aren’t THAT many, this isn’t THAT stupid” so you go ahead and break up the rest of them with your fingers and then realize that it took you 15 minutes of your life because you were too stubborn to admit defeat EVEN TO YOURSELF?

Also,

You know that thing where you cook something really lovely at home, such as caramel made out of butter and brown sugar and it makes your hair smell like sugar for once instead of the steak you cooked in a pan that made your hair smell like charred meat,  or channa masala because you were standing over the pan while you made it and now your hair smells like leftovers, especially when you first step into the shower, but this time you like it because it’s nice and sugary instead of totally gross?

Furthermore,

You know that thing where you take a bite of something and know immediately that you have absolutely no control over how much of that thing you are about to eat and will also be totally consumed by thoughts of said thing during any of the times you manage NOT to eat it in the time it is still in your house, and then lament immediately when you do eat all of the thing and realize it’s out of your life forever?

All of those things happened to me while making these blondies.  These are dense, chewy, caramely, nutty morsels of buttery, fatty perfection.  They are what you want chocolate chip cookies to taste like.  They are what you hope shortbread will be.  They are absolutely what they serve during snack time before recess in Heaven.  Also, they take place in one pot and are really, really easy.  Hallelujah.

Pecan Blondies, from Fine Cooking

2 sticks (1 cup) of butter

3 cups packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

2 egg yolks

3 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/4 cup all purpose flour

healthy pinch of salt, plus more for sprinkling on top

1 1/2 cups of chopped, toasted pecans

Method:  Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees, and butter or Pam a 9×13 baking dish.  In a pot on medium heat, melt the butter and brown sugar until the sugar has dissolved.

the sugar has mostly dissolved, and i let mine boil for probably 5 minutes.

Then, let it boil gently for a couple minutes.  Take the caramel mixture off the heat and let it cool until you can touch the pot.  In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, egg yolks and vanilla, and mix it into the cooled caramel, taking care not to cook your eggs*, because that is gross.  Then, mix in the flour, salt and pecans until JUST combined, pouring it into the pan.  Sprinkle some kosher salt on top.  Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the top is golden brown.  Enjoy complete adulation from everyone you feed these to.

* A note on tempering eggs:  the official recipe wants you to make sure your eggs are room temperature before mixing them into the warm caramel mixture.  The reason is that if the caramel is too hot, it will cook the eggs instead of incorporate them into the batter, and that means your blondies will have scrambled eggs in them.  Foul.  To avoid this, try to make your eggs as close to the temperature of the caramel as possible.  If you, like me, never ever have room temperature eggs because you never plan anything food-related that far in advance, you can break your eggs and yolks into a bowl, and whisk them together over another bowl of hot water to warm them up a bit, though the process of whisking the eggs together in a warmer bowl will do that as well.  Then,  whisk the egg mixture into the caramel a little at a time, whisking the whole thing constantly until the eggs are fully incorporated and the mixture is smooth.

- Cat

Pumpkin Bread Pudding

I have a love/hate relationship with fall. Fall colors are beautiful; I love the smell of a crisp fall day (which is really not the same in Colorado as it is in Michigan), I love fall foods like roasted vegetables and chicken. What I do not love is the end of the summer; which marks the end of camping, biking, and patio eating and drinking.  I love eating outside, and drinking outside, and everything that you can’t do in the winter. Fine- winter in Colorado is still pretty badass, but I’m going to miss the summer.

Here is one thing I love about fall, fall flavored treats, specifically pumpkin.  I love everything from pumpkin pie to pumpkin cheesecake and everything in between. I love the savory side of pumpkin too, but my true love comes from the spices you normally associate with pumpkin: cinnamon and nutmeg.

My love for cinnamon is almost as deep as my love for soup. I keep two different kinds of cinnamon in my kitchen. That’s right, I have two kinds- don’t act surprised.

My favorite place to shop for spices is Savory Spice here in Denver. Their spices are freshly ground in the shop on a weekly basis and they have a fantastic selection. My absolute favorite kind of cinnamon (the kind I used in this recipe) comes from this shop.  It is Vietnamese Saigon cassia cinnamon.  If you imagine walking into a room where someone has just baked cinnamon rolls- this is exactly what this cinnamon smells like. I still remember the first time I smelled it, it was so pungent and intoxicating; my mind was reeling with recipes I could make with this delicious spice.

“True” cinnamon comes from bark, which comes from the cinnamon tree. True cinnamon is called Ceylon cinnamon (because it’s native of Ceylon, Sri Lanka).  In the United States what we known as cinnamon is actually the bark of the Cassia tree, which is native to both China and Saigon and a few other select regions.  The cinnamon that is in Chinese five spice is Cassia cinnamon, whereas the cinnamon that is commonly used in Mexican hot cocoa (and many Mexican dishes) is Ceylon.  For me, the main distinction is the pungency and the sweetness. I find Ceylon to taste more muted and with a slightly spicy undertone; whereas cassia has an intense “cinnamon” flavor and is spicy and almost sweet.  They both have their place in my kitchen, but Vietnamese Saigon Cassia Cinnamon is my go to baking cinnamon (and also one of my go to housewarming gifts).

About the nutmeg- for the love of all that is delicious just use fresh ground. Whole nutmeg isn’t expensive and the flavor is far superior to pre-ground.

On to the recipe (finally), pumpkin bread pudding.  This bread pudding is FANTASTIC. It has a bit of crunch, a lot of fall flavor, and a little sweetness from the caramel topping.

Ingredients:

2 packages of Kings Hawiian rolls*, cut into cubes and toasted

2 cups ½ and ½

1 cup dark brown sugar

2 cups pumpkin puree (NOT pie filling)

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. nutmeg

2 eggs

1 yolk

Pinch of salt

Caramel topping:

½ cup butter

1 ½ cups dark brown sugar

½ cup heavy cream

Heavy pinch of salt (to taste)

Method:

Preheat oven to 350.

Cut the rolls into 1 inch cubes and toast for 10 minutes in the oven.  Put the cubes into a 9X13 baking dish and let cool slightly while you make the custard.

Whisk together ½ and ½, pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, eggs and salt. Pour the mixture carefully over the bread cubes, trying to cover all area evenly. Cover and let rest for at least 15-20 minutes but up to overnight.  Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes or until the top is brown and crusty.

For the Caramel sauce:

In a heavy bottomed sauce pan combine the butter and brown sugar. Whisk together over medium high heat until the butter is melted and the sugar begins to bubble. It will go from looking a little like wet sand to starting to look like a smooth sauce; this will take about 2-3 minutes.

At this point whisk in the cream and cook for another minute until the caramel is smooth. Add the pinch of salt and whisk, serve warm, or re-warm before serving.

A few notes:

* I adore Kings Hawaiian rolls, they are delicious, and they used to be a favorite of my grandmother’s. However, you can use any kind of bread you want in bread pudding. I like the sweetness of these rolls in this recipe, but it is not required. I would recommend an egg bread of some type (such as challah). However, you can use leftover French baguette or sourdough, or really anything. The important things are that the bread is cubed (which means you need to use thick bread) and that it is slightly crusty(which you can either do by toasting it, or using day old bread). For this recipe you will need about 10 loosely packed cups of bread cubes.

I always buy dark brown sugar. More often than not, when I’m using brown sugar I am using it for the flavor. Dark brown sugar has a more rich molasses flavor to it, so for sake of flavor (and cupboard space) I just buy one type- and it’s always dark.

-Sue