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12/31/2007 Party Leftovers After my big holiday party there are always leftovers of some sort:recipes that made more than I needed; things that didn't get eaten; or "raw materials" that weren't used. This year I barely had a little in the first group - there's an extra bowl of pate; in the second group there was only cheese and some sliced bread. Even the third group wasn't that big but I took a little inventory and made myself a scrumptious breakfast from what there was.
I toasted a sliced of dill-rye bread, topped it with smoked trout, made up some super fluffy scrambled eggs and piled those on the trout, and then topped the whole thing with creme fraiche mixed with dill and a nice amount of Ikura. Add a few warmed up potatoes that weren't used for the party and you have a breakfast that is beautiful and tasty!
12/30/2007 Holiday Party 2007 Friday night I held my annual holiday party. It was a ton of fun, as it always is! And I say this not because of anything that I do but because my friends are all so good at mixing and mingling that everyone who comes, whether they know anyone else or not, is included in assorted conversations and often ends up making new friends that night.
Over the last few years it seems my party has become a bit predictable and so this year I eliminated several of the tried and true dishes that I normally make and filled in with several new items. All of the new items were very good and the group loved them so they will appear on future menus, I'm sure! Here's the menu with links or information about the recipes.
The "Old Items" on the menu included:
The "New Items" on the menu included:
And, I rounded it all out with:
And, of course, there was plenty of sparkling wine, wine and sparkling water to round it all out.
More photos are here. Grammy's Carmelcorn I'm not exactly sure where this recipe came from. I believe someone my Mom knew gave her the recipe and then she gave it to me. I've been making it for years and it's pretty easy to do. And there's nothing like your own fresh carmelcorn!
Grammy’s Carmel Corn
Melt margarine or butter, brown sugar, corn syrup and salt over medium heat. When combined bring to a boil over medium high heat. Boil moderately for 5 minutes.
Remove pan from heat, add soda and vanilla. (Mixture will foam up to about double its volume.) Mix thoroughly.
Pour over popped corn and stir well.
Spread in pans and bake at 200°F for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes.
Remove from oven and immediately turn onto waxed or parchment paper to cool.
Notes: I use air-popped corn but any popped corn will work. I divide the popped corn between two roaster pans – the sides come in handy when you are stirring during the baking time. Don’t worry if, when you first try to mix the corn and caramel syrup, some of the popcorn seems a bit dry. As you stir throughout the baking process the caramel will become evenly distributed. If you forget to remove the carmelcorn from the pans immediately it will stick, but you can return the pan to the oven for a few minutes and it should loosen up again. 12/22/2007 Sugar Cookies What would Christmas be without cutout Sugar Cookies? Aren't these the cookies you always looked forward to as a kid? I remember lots of Christmases sitting around the table with my siblings, surrounded by bowls of colored frosting and jars of sprinkles making our treasured pieces of edibale art! Since that time I have gone from doing fancy and creative dedorating back to simple as can be. Which is where I still am today. Part of that is due to the amount of baking I do at this time of year, where time is of the essence, but part of it is also just an appreciation for a nice clean look.
 I make these cookies at other times of the year, too. Valentine's day finds an assortment of hearts; Halloween and Thanskgiving the shapes are pumpkins, leaves, acorns; sometimes there are eggs at Easter - in fact one year I used sugar cookie eggs as placecards! For those occasions I tend to do much more creative decoration but for Christmas white frosting with colored sprinkles is the basic formula.
The recipe I use is from Entertaining, Martha Stewart's grand book. I took a look on her website to see if I could find the recipe online. She has about four million sugar cookie recipes out there and I gave up looking for the one from this book. But it's a great recipe. The dough is silken and it makes a huge batch of cookies. The only change I make to it is to add a bit of either orange or lemon peel. I really like the little hit of freshness that brings to these cookies.
  12/21/2007 Almond Clusters The holiday baking frenzy continues although it is winding down. My family comes to town tomorrow and much of the baking will be packaged up in gift baskets for them. But I did squeeze a few more things in today.
These chocolate covered almonds are always a favorite. The original recipe called for milk chocolate and salted peanuts, which was a great combination. But over time I've moved to using dark chocolate and almonds instead. This batch is actually semi-sweet chocolate.
The recipe is super easy - 2 bags of chocolate chips and 2 cups (or a little more) of nuts. Melt the chocolate, add the nuts, drop by the spoonful onto waxed paper covered sheets. Let cool and harden and then eat!
The only thing I don't like about the recipe is that the chocolate tends to bloom - some times more than others. If you don't know what bloom is it's the light, grayish streaks chocolate sometimes gets. It's just an aesthetic thing - it won't hurt you - but I don't really like it. I'm going to make another batch of these next week when I will have a little more time and I'm going to try tempering the chocolate - something I haven't done before. That should take care of the bloom.
 12/19/2007 Fantasy Fudge I remember when my Mom first made Fantasy Fudge. Although she cooked and baked a lot, she hated to worry about the whole temperature thing when making candy. And then along came Fantasy Fudge where instead of worrying about temperature you just boiled it for a certain amount of time (which got you to that temperature, guaranteed). And from that point on we had fudge every Christmas. I've often thought about making "real" fudge - something that is complex and requires thermometer watching and probably doesn't include marshmallow creme - and then I think why?
 This year I accidentally made two batches - accidentally because although I doubled the recipe I was thinking that made one 9"x13" pan but it was really two! I guess I'd better read the instructions more closely next time. Although, since I wanted two big pans, it all works out just fine. And I noticed (when reading the recipe) that they have reduced the boiling time from 5 minutes to 4. And, I happen to be stirring it with my really cool thermometer whisk (which I'm not sure is available any more...) and noticed that the temperature was actually reached after about 2 minutes of boiling, but I let it go a bit longer to make sure.
The recipe can be found on the back on the marshmallow creme jar or if you want to see it now, look here. You can use chocolate chips instead of baking squares - 12 oz is one "normal" size package.
 12/18/2007 Peanut Butter and Jelly Jewels but made with Chocolate Peanut butter and chocolate is a classic combination - and I'm not really talking about Reese's... but more in the classic sense of the two. This recipe offers chocolate as an alternative to cherry preserves when making these thumbprint cookies - for me it wasn't the alternative it was the way to make them. And it's the only way I ever have. This recipe is by Rose Levy Beranbaum and I found it in her cookbook, Rose's Christmas Cookies
 , which is a great cookbook! However you can also find the recipe online here. Now I cheated just a bit this year. Normally I follow her recipe and make the chocolate filling. This year a jar of Hershey's Dark Chocolate Kisses just happened to be sitting in front of me as I started forming the peanut butter cookies. And I decided to bake them using the kisses for the chocolate filling instead of making my own. They worked really well. When I pulled the cookies out of the oven I used an offset spatula to just smooth and spread the chocolate bit. And then they were perfect...
Book Review: Eating the Greek Way  I'd been wanting a good Greek cookbook, so when I was offered this book for review I jumped at the chance to take a look at it. I wish I could recommend this book and maybe it's appropriate for some folks but in my mind it's just another one of those fad things where everyone has some angle as to why eating some particular ethnic cuisine is healthier than anything else.
This book, Eating the Greek Way: More Than 100 Fresh and Delicious Recipes from Some of the Healthiest People in the World
, is basically this Greek doctor's version of a diet. The first 50 pages are all about eating healthy and provide background for his particular theories. Then the book is divided into the normal categories for chapters. So far, so good. But, since the doctor's theories revolve around the glycemic load you'll find that the recipes only contain fructose - no sucrose, glucose, honey or maltose (beer).
And it's not even natural fructose, but fructose powder is used in place of sugar in recipes - with no alternative given. And since fructose powder is sweeter than sugar you can't just do a 1 to 1 conversion, you'd need to experiment to turn these into non-fructose versions. But the thing that I found disturbing was that fructose was added to recipes I wouldn't add sugar in the first place - tomato soup, salad dressing, moussaka, baked eggplants - if we are so concerned about glycemic load, wouldn't an option be to reduce sugar all together?
So while the recipes are appetizing I don't buy into the concept and while they can be converted, I'm sure, I found the book to be disappointing.
12/17/2007 Book Review: Street Food  Looking for a last minute gift idea for a foodie friend? If they have a sense of adventure and think travel is all about eating, this might be the perfect gift for them. Now, there are many books by this name Street Food
, so make sure you get the one by Tom Kime. Tom eats the way I like to eat when I travel - he searches out the street food, the little places where the locals eat. And now he has documented those street meals in this lovely cookbook. The one thing that strikes me as I read the recipes is that some of the recipes seem to include an awful lot of ingredients and I generally think of street food as being more simply prepared. But still the recipes ring true and seem very authentic.
Tom covers a lot of ground in this cookbook. There are recipes from:
And he uses slightly different (but they will make sense) categories to group the recipes:
If you have a friend who loves to explore local culture through food, they'll love this cookbook - and there's nothing that says you can't buy it for yourself, either! I've marked lots of recipes to try! Here are just a few: Moily haldi - coconut and turmeric fish soup made with prawns, squid, lime juice, coconut milk; Picarones - sweet potato and pumpkin doughnuts; Kebab b'il karaz - lamb meatballs with sour cherry sauce. And there are lots more. Panera Bread Sunday morning I found myself out and about a little too early. A couple of stores I thought had early openings didn't. So I had about 20 minutes to burn while waiting for the doors to open. I decided to wander into the new Panera Bread at Northgate Mall. Panera is a chain but this was my first encounter with the bakery.
There was a pretty large array of breads and pastries. Two things caught my eye - one for then and one for later. The Pecan Rolls called my name - I love sticky buns and cinnamon rolls and this one was so nicely browned! The other thing I noticed was a loaf of Asiago Bread and they had a demi size which was perfect for a trial run. I also ordered a cup of tea to go with my Pecan roll.
My Pecan Roll was disappointing - not bad just nothing to write home about. The pecan topping was so crisp that it was hard to cut into bite-size pieces - or at least without sending part of it flying across the table. The inside was nice and tender but strangely tasteless. I only ate about half of it before deciding that it wasn't worth wasting the calories on. I did like that when I said that my order was "for here" that my tea was served in one of those great heavy old cafeteria style mugs - they stay hot and hold a lot!
The Asiago bread meets my approval though! Some cheese is mixed into the batter and then the top is sprinkled with more. So the cheese flavor runs through the bread but is not overwhelming. Good on it's own, toasted with a little butter or accompanying your meal, it's pretty versatile.
It also turns out that they have free WiFi - that's a nice benefit. I may stop in again to give them another try although, so far, it's not a place I'll be telling anyone, "you just have to go to Panera!". But it's certainly worth another try. 12/16/2007 Another batch of cookies down! Tonight's batch of cookies - Chocolate Crinkles! You've probably made them or at least eaten them at some point. Sweet, cocoa -y, a little chewy. Everything good in a cookie..... And here's a recipe if you'd like to make them yourself. Star Cookies This is another cookie that I make every year. It was one my paternal Grandmother always made. I love them and also make them especially for my Dad. These are much easier to make with a good electric mixer and a food processor but for years I made them by chopping the nuts by hand or with a little nut chopper and using a hand held mixer.
 So it can be done! You can find the recipe here. Striped Icebox Cookies The Holiday Baking continues. I love these striped cookies. They look more difficult to make than they are. And one recipe makes a big batch. It's the same recipe as these Bull's Eye Cookies but each flavor of dough is divided into 4 pieces, rolled out to a 3½" x 12" rectangle, wrapped in plastic chilled for 30 minutes, then stacked in 4 alternating colors (so you have two stacks). Wrapped and returned to the fridge overnight and then sliced and baked at 375°F for about 10 minutes.
 12/15/2007 Lots o' Fruitcake Yesterday I finally got all my fruitcakes baked. It's a tad bit late as fruitcake is best after a couple weeks - once the flavors have really melded - and I'll be handing them out to my family in a week. And, yes, they do like them!
As I've mentioned in past articles the trick to making good fruitcake is to use good ingredients - hold off on those fluorescent cherries and pineapple! Use real candied citrus or lots of dried fruits, like I do. Brings fruitcake to a whole new level.
In the photo the round ones are gifts and the "bread" shaped loaves are mine for an upcoming party and just to eat!
More info and the recipe here.
Tennessee Sugar Cookies Finally got the Tennessee Sugar Cookies made this year! Normally they are the cookie I start with but it didn't quite work this year. But now they are made and I'm feeling more like Christmas. :-) I've talked about these before so you can find the recipe here. 12/14/2007 Forelle Pear I came across the most adorable little pear a couple days ago. It's a Forelle Pear. And I really should have added something to the photo to give a bit of perspective to it, as it's pretty small. You may be familiar with Seckel Pears, and these are very similar in size. This one is just a little over 2½" tall. I had never seen a Forelle before so I bought one to try it out.
I ate it for a snack today and was a little disappointed as it was still a tad bit green. But it had promise! It reminded me of the more common and much larger Bartlett, which is one of my favorite pears. And with its size it's a perfect little midday snack. I think they would also make a great pear for a nice dessert - maybe poached and served with blue cheese, for instance. With their smaller size they would be a nice petite finish to a meal. A Little Treat - To Give or Keep Looking for an elegant and tasty way to remember someone during the holiday? You can't go wrong with any of Fran's products but I love the salt caramels! These are the Gray Salt Caramels (dipped in dark chocolate) but there are also Smoked Salt Caramels (milk chocolate) - or you can get a combo box. And I love the festive red box (7 pieces for $11.50). Check out the stores or website for other great gift ideas... even if the gift is for you - as this box was for me!
12/11/2007 Simple Spritz A quick and easy recipe yields a simple yet luscious cookie. There are tons of recipes out there but this one is pretty much the one I use. This year I flavored one batch with the traditional almond flavoring and another with orange flower water. But more than anything the taste and feel of butter is what comes through.
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