Coming Soon!

I know it's been a long time since I updated, but I'm hosting a brunch in about three weeks and there will be many brunch related goodies to come. Bran muffins, scones, blue berry pancakes and maybe more! Stay tuned...

Goat Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms

So I have made this recipe a number of times, so I'm not sure it qualifies as an experiment per say but I did use larger mushrooms than I usually do, so I'm counting it. Besides the larger than usual mushrooms, the other thing I did differently this time was use pre-peeled fresh garlic rather than buying garlic and peeling it myself. It's a little bit of a cheat, but I can accept that. I also forgot to put the garlic in the bread crumbs that I roasted for the tops, but I don't think it altered the end taste. I use a recipe from the America's Test Kitchen Make Ahead Recipe book and I've altered it a little over the years. First, I make double the goat cheese and thyme filling because I feel like there is just not enough if you only make the prescribed amount - and really, is there such a thing as too much cheese? I didn't think so.

To start, you pulse the bread in a food processor and toss it with some oil, salt and pepper (and garlic when you aren't having a brain fart and forgetting things). Then you put them on a baking sheet in the oven for about 20 minutes stirring occasionally and then you set them aside to cool. Next comes roasting the mushroom caps. Toss the mushroom caps with oil and garlic with salt and pepper and put them gill side down on a rimmed baking sheet. They stay in the oven until they release their juices and then you use tongs to turn them over (trust me on this one - do not try your fingers or some strange use of two forks or anything else) and bake them for another 10 minutes and then take them out and let them drain and cool a bit. While they are cooling, you can mix up the goat cheese filling. Leave the goat cheese out while you are roasting the breadcrumbs and the mushrooms so it is soft enough to mix up. 8oz of goat cheese, 2 tbs of olive oil and 2tbs of fresh minced thyme.

You put the goat cheese mixture into a bag - the cook book recommends a plastic baggie, but I recently bought disposable icing bags and I love them and have been using them for everything - and then you snip off the edge of the bag and you can pipe the mixture into the mushrooms. If you are going to finish them right away, you can put them onto a baking sheets to do this. If you are going to finish them later, you can put them in a casserole dish with a cover (if there are too many to fit in one layer, you can separate the layers with wax paper or parchment). When you have finished piping in the filling, sprinkle bread crumbs all over the top.

Now the best part about this recipe, besides how good it tastes, is that it can keep up to three days in the fridge before being finished, so you can really make it ahead and it's awesome. I made these for a dinner party the day before the party, so I didn't have to worry about it the next day. To finish the mushrooms they go back into the oven at 450 degrees for 10 minutes. These always go first at dinner parties and at book club they were gone before everyone had even arrived. The larger mushrooms worked well, but my only complaint is that it made this two bites instead of one easy bite. I think if you are eating a sit down dinner that would be fine, but for finger foods, I think you might want to use the smaller mushrooms.

Valentine's Day - Dinner for One

And an awesome dinner it was! Lemon Garlic Pork Loin with wild long grain rice and steamed asparagus followed by a chocolate mousse with raspberries on top. The most amazing part of the whole thing was that for the first time in my life EVERYTHING WAS READY AT THE SAME TIME!!!! It has never happened before and there was no one here to appreciate it (or vouch for it - since Lord knows it might never happen again). I managed to cook all of this and clean up the nail polish explosion in the bathroom and it was pretty awesome!

The pork loin was a pre-marinated thing I bought on a whim at the grocery store. I was a little intimidated by it because I don't do a lot of actual cooking (more baking) and because there is a theory amongst some that women in my family are genetically incapable of cooking pork of any kind without making it dry enough to choke you. So I cooked it according to the instructions (40-45 minutes in the oven at 350). While that was going on I set up the wild long grain rice on the stove. That took 2 1/4 cups of chicken stock with a tbs of butter and the rice which needed to be brought to a boil and then simmer on a low heat until the rice absorbs the liquid, so that was left to it's own devices and I was off to clean up the nail polish genocide in the bathroom (long story short - one bottle shattered and it looked like I murdered a shiny green alien in my bathroom). When the pork was done I tested the internal temp (which I normally never do, but with pork it seems like a good idea), and it wasn't quite high enough so I popped it back into the oven while I stirred the rice and set the tea kettle up to make the asparagus.

My boss taught me how to make the asparagus and it's the only way I really like to eat it. You heat water in the tea kettle and when it boils, you pour the water over the asparagus and set the kettle on top of it. Wait five minutes and drain it. Then toss the whole lot with a little olive oil and salt and pepper and it's perfect. And in this case it was the perfect amount of extra time for the pork loin to be in the oven and it was perfectly moist. The rice was excellent and the chicken stock made it so you don't even have to add salt or anything.

For dessert I made my mother's chocolate mousse - okay, full disclosure, I actually made this on the same day I made the mushrooms, but at least we know it keeps. I had some trouble with getting it to set - and I'm not sure why. At the moment, I'm assuming it was because it was just too hot in the apartment, but I also added an extra half cup of cream, so who knows. On that Saturday, I couldn't get it to stick, so I just stuck it in the fridge and one of those things appears to have worked. Pull it out, whip a little air into it, dish it into a bowl and add some raspberries an Voila!

That was my perfect Valentine's Day dinner for one. If nothing else I got some really excellent practice in actually cooking for people since my big mouth keeps offering to do it even though I don't have a lot of experience...sweet!

Vanilla Bean Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Buttercream Icing

So the saga of the cupcakes begins a lovely Saturday morning when I thought to myself, I should make cupcakes for my friend's birthday dinner tonight...I think I have everything, I just need butter and maybe something to decorate them with. Great, I'll just head off to the store and pick that up...oh crap I just locked myself out of my apartment and I have no super and the only place I happen to have a spare set of keys is in my office, but my office keys are locked in my apartment...damn. So 6 hours later I was back in my apartment, still craving cupcakes with no time to make them happen. One week later, I was looking through my cookbooks for a white cake recipe that didn't require self rising or some other strange flour (harder than I thought it would be, I'll be honest) and my mom sent me one that looked pretty easy. It was a Silver White Cake recipe and it had measurement for regular flour and special cake flour. I think next time I will add slightly less flour because I thought when the cakes were baked they tasted a little flour-y for my personal taste. Just before I mixed in the egg whites, I added fresh vanilla bean. I did like the addition of the vanilla bean. I had one last vanilla bean that I cut in half and scraped the seeds off one side and added it to the cupcake batter. I took what was left of the pod and put it in a glass and poured milk over it for my icing. My friend Dallas came over and kept me company and she arrived just in time to help me with the icing. By help, I mean give me her opinion on the consistency and texture and eat a lot of it. I used my mom's butter cream recipe and I used the milk the vanilla bean had been soaking in and I scraped the other side of the vanilla bean and added it to the icing as well. Clearly icing and I are destined to have a few more go rounds, because I had trouble getting the icing to have enough body for it not to be just runny and not to have too much body to you could hardly move it around. Some people don't like the vanilla and the vanilla, but I prefer my cupcakes like that. Dallas and I finally agreed on a consistency and I piped the totally yummy (if not perfectly consistent) icing onto the cupcakes. I took 6 of them to Phil and Yu's for dinner, about 4 over to Alicia's for the impromptu girl's only super bowl party she had, and the rest (that I hadn't wolfed down on my own) went to work to spread the sweets around. Icing and I, we will meet again and I will perfect you. You have been put on notice.

Welcome/Ginger Bread House

I decided I needed some way to chronicle all the things I'm planning on experimenting with in my teeny tiny kitchen. I'm mainly focused on baking because that is what I really enjoy, but I'm also trying to expand my horizons.

As a kick off, I thought I'd share my first try with decorating a gingerbread house over the recent Christmas holiday. It shouldn't technically count because I did it at home in my dad's incredibly large kitchen, but it was a lot of fun and I'm very proud of how it turned out. I cheated because I didn't make the gingerbread. I bought one of those assemble yourself Wilton kits, which started out okay, but the icing and I had some disagreements. You get this whole bag of icing mix, but you have to let the basic structure (sides of the house and the roof) sit for a couple of hours to set before you start decorating and that is where the first argument took place between me and the icing. When icing sits, it hardens. When it hardens, you then can't use it later to continue decorating. You can try just adding more water, but it doesn't really work. So the first batch of icing was great (I only made part of the bag originally), but after it hardened, the second batch didn't work out so well. It was a little drippy and I have had no experience working with icing bags and tips, so I did the best I could. It has just enough body to stick, but not enough to do any sort of decorative elements. I decided to try and work as much with the candy they give you with the silly things as I could. My original plan was to make one of the houses in the picture which is how this one started...but once the icing started giving me lip, there was no turning back and I had to go rogue.

The snowflakes were something I'd bought to decorate the sugar cookies we'd made earlier in the week - they were some sort of berry flavored edible sugar concoction with the texture of foam. Very strange, but worked out very well for this project. I decided to change direction and rather than the so-called "Candy Cottage" on the box, I decided that I would try for "Snowflake Cottage" instead. You can't have any sort of cottage without windows, so my mom helped me roll out gumdrops into flat gummy pancakes - they stick to the rolling pin and tear apart easily. We took our flat gummy pancakes and cut out window panes for the sides of the cottage. We did diamond shaped panes for decorative windows at the front of the house and stuck them to the front with icing and then piped around them. For the sides and the back, we did more traditional four pane windows by cutting two rectangular pieces and sticking them to the sides of the house with icing and then piping around the sides and piping a line through the middle to separate the panes. I don't have a picture of it, but besides the square window on the back of the house we also repeated the diamond panes as well. I added a snowflake fence along the front of the house and then dusted the whole thing with confectioner's sugar to make is look like snow. The whole family got involved in that one: my dad found us a box to put the house in while dusting it so I wouldn't make a mess, Richard found me the decorative silver platter to set it on when we were finished for presentation and my mom set everything up so I could transfer the whole structure from the table to the box for dusting and back to the serving platter when we were done without dropping the house or killing myself. At the end, we had a very lovely "Snow Flake Cottage" dusted with snow and displayed for the holidays.

It lasted almost a full week before one of the dogs finally got to the gingerbread on the back of the house. At that point I started picking candy off and I did saw off the back corner of the roof to see what it tasted like. It tasted a little like gingerbread flavored cardboard, but I guess it has to in order to be strong enough to make a house. All in all it was an interesting experience, but if I'm going to do it again, I think I'm going to have to try making my own gingerbread and I'm going to have to do some more experimenting with icing so I have a better handle on what I'm doing texture wise.