Mixed Fruit Crisp

Boy, I've never blogged from my office computer so don't blame me if this sucks. I need a dual-core processor to properly do this, see?

Keith, this one is for you. Recipe is taken from The New Best Recipe.

I made a double recipe which fits nicely into a 9x13 baking dish.

INGREDIENTS

Topping

3/4 cup AP flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

pinch of salt

1 stick of butter cut into 1/2 inch cubes

1.5 cups of chopped nuts...I used walnuts...feel free to use whatever you have on hand.

Filling

3 lbs (or so) of cut up fruit--i used approximately 3 lbs of nectarines/apricots (post-chopping weight) and 1/2 lb of boysenberries

zest of 2 lemons

3-5 tablespoons of lemon juice (use your taste buds)

1/3 to 2/3 cup of sugar (again, use your tastebuds...if your fruit isn't very sweet, add a bit more sugar...if you over did it on the lemon juice, add sugar to compensate)

(Advanced move...I made a corn starch slurry with the lemon juice to help thicken the filling...feel free to do the same if you so wish)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whisk together flour, sugar, spices and salt. Add cubed butter and, using a pair of knives, "cut" the butter until it is pea-sized. If you're lazy, just squeeze the butter and flour/sugar mixture until it's totally homogeneous. Nobody will know the difference. Mix in the nuts until evenly distributed. Refrigerate the topping for at least 15 minutes.

Process the fruit. If you're using stone fruit, please make sure you're not an idiot like I am and don't buy clingfruit. Freestone, please. At any rate, you just want chunks of fruit. See picture:

Toss the fruit with the lemon zest, sugar and lemon juice.

Distribute the chilled topping over the fruit:

Place crisp into oven. Bake for about an hour.

Serve! It's great warm or room temperature. Great with whipped cream or ice cream. It's a winner.

Time-15 minutes of active work, an hour of baking time.

Cost-Depends on where you buy your fruit. If you buy organic nectarines from the farmer's market, it'll cost an arm and a leg. Say, anywhere from 3-15 bucks total depending on food cost.

Alaskan Food Stuff

So being a food focused blog, I decided to make a specific post for food related things which I experienced in Alaska. The first photoset is just some random food which I ate:


This next photoset is restaurant-y stuff from Alaska:




This final set is an actual recipe! It uses a...wait for it, wait for it...Rachael Ray recipe! I find her TV personality extremely irritating but don't mind her all that much because I think she does encourage and draw people into the kitchen who wouldn't otherwise attempt to cook. Anyhow, my mom is a cherry freak and she wanted cherry cake.



INGREDIENTS:

4.5 cups flour (Weight measurements would be nice.)
1.5 cups firmly packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 sticks (12 ounces) unsalted butter, melted
1 large egg
.5 cup buttermilk
.5 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
two 10-ounce bags frozen cherries, thawed and drained (I see no reason why you can't use other types of frozen fruit.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Grease a 9x13 inch baking dish. In a bowl, combine 3 cups flour, the brown sugar and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Mix in all but 2 tablespoons of butter until large crumbs form; set aside. In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, the egg and the buttermilk.

In another bowl, stir together the remaining 1.5 cups of flour, the granulated sugar, baking powder and the remaining .5 teaspoon salt. Add the egg mixture and stir to form a thick, smooth batter. (This is where I ran into trouble. The egg mixture was totally insufficient to produce a smooth batter. I ended with a sticky mess so I kept adding buttermilk until a batter texture formed...I think I ended up quadrupling the initial quantity of buttermilk.)
Fold about a third of the reserved crumb mixture into the batter; spread evenly into the prepared baking dish.

Scatter the cherries over the batter; sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture on top. Bake the cake until golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes (Mine took closer to 1.25 hours..the home oven runs cold, I guess. And I used the toothpick to see of the cake was done...stick a toothpick into the cake...if the toothpick comes out clean, it's done.). Transfer to a rack to cool for about 20 minutes before serving.

A very, very solid cake. It was actually really tasty. Maybe a tad bit overly sweet and buttery but it was very well received by my mom and dad.

Time- about 1.5 hours...most of it baking time.
Cost-I dunno...my dad paid for the ingredients

Pizza Party!

This is my weekly baking project post. For all of you BCC noobs, one of my New Years resolutions is to become more comfortable with baking so I am trying to bake something on a weekly basis. So far, it's been pretty fun. I have had a few complete, unmitigated disasters but you live and you learn. Pizza dough is an important step for me because it is the first time in probably 4 years that I've used yeast. The first time was when I had just moved to California and was living at my ex-gf's mom's house. I tried to make bread using a James Beard cookbook but ended up with a stunted brick of flour and water. Happily, my second experience with yeast was far more successful.

I used the recipe from Chef On A Shoestring. The book is a few years old (originally printed in 2001) but the recipes still read really well. And the idea behind the book is right up my alley...some NYC television station went to a bunch of chefs and gave them a 20 dollar budget. With that 20 dollars, they were to design a three course meal for 4 people and the book is a compendium of what the chefs came up with. If you clicked the link, you'll notice the bargain basement price so don't buy the book expecting a bunch of glitzy pictures printed on glossy paper. As far as food porn goes, this book is a study in austerity. However, I've now made two recipes from the book and they've both turned out really, really well. It's a keeper.

Dough...salt, oil, yeast, flour and water:
1.75 cups of lukewarm water...lukewarm means between 105-115 degrees Fahrenheit. Sprinkle two 1/4 ounce packages of yeast over the warm water. The recipe mentions that you should let the yeast and water stand until dissolved and foamy. I never got any foam but the dough still turned out great. So, if you don't get foamy water, don't freak out. I waited 15 minutes for foamy yeast water before I grew impatient and continued on. While the yeast/water is doing its thing, measure out your flour. 6 cups worth, or if you're using a scale, 134 grams per cup. Add the flour to the yeast/water a handful at a time...use your other hand to stir the flour into the water and create a dough. After a few handfuls of flour, it'll be pretty sticky but just keep working through it. Once you've incorporated all of the flour, pour the dough onto a prepared, lightly floured surface. I used a clean kitchen counter. Knead the dough for 10 minutes. This is a good chance to alleviate some latent aggression and you'll probably work up a good sweat after the first 5 minutes. Kneading dough is hard but rewarding work. I really enjoyed it! The cookbook says that you're looking for the dough to become "smooth and elastic." Mold the dough into a ball and place in a lightly olive oiled bowl. Tightly wrap the bowl with plastic wrap and place in a warm area. Since I had been preheating the oven, I placed the bowl next to the warm oven. Let it rest/rise for approximately one hour.

Here's the dough progression. Baby bear:
Mama bear:Papa bear!:
I was amazed. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this result. I punched (*Ka-POW!!*) the dough down and poured it onto a floured surface. We'll continue with the dough after I show you the topping.

While the dough is rising, make the topping. This recipe called for caramelized onions, rosemary and gorgonzola. I purchased crumbled gorgonzola from Trader Joe's because it was affordable and I figured buying the good stuff would be a waste for pizza. For the onions, you'll need 4 onions, butter, oil and rosemary.
4 onions, thinly sliced. Pick two tablespoons of rosemary leaves off of the stems. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a large pan and 1/2 cup of olive oil. Toss in the onions and rosemary and cook very slowly. 30-40 minutes...you want to see the onions go limp and translucent. Add salt. Allow to cool. You might notice that the recipe says caramelized onions and these onions are still pale...I figured that the onions will caramelize when placed in the 450 degree oven. We'll see that while this made sense in theory, it didn't quite work in practice. I also took the time to roast some garlic cloves. 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.
At this point, you have prepared onion topping, maybe some roasted garlic, cheese and a ball of dough.

Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Get it good and hot. If you have a pizza stone, now is the time to use it!

George and I quartered the dough. The recipe calls for two pizzas but we decided to make four because a large pizza wouldn't fit on our pizza stone. Additionally, four pizzas allows you to vary the toppings and have a little more fun.

To roll out the dough, you can do it freeform by stretching and pulling or you can be a pansy (like me!) and use a rolling pin. I used my SilPin. It's a non-stick rolling pin. It's AMAZING. Here's what I ended up with:Underneath is a large cutting board. Because the dough has a tendency to stick, we used a bit of flour and cornmeal underneath. As George put it, "The cornmeal acts like tiny little ball bearings which allows the dough to slide off." Thank you, nerd.

Decorate your pizza with toppings of your choice. Here's pizza number one before it goes in:
After:
A few observations. First, because we were using smaller pizzas, we baked them for only 10 minutes rather than the recipe's 20 minutes. I think the reduction in baking time inhibited any onion caramelization. Second, the dough underwent a second rising in the oven and, because of the larger volume of dough, it changed the ratio of dough to topping. Basically, more topping was needed. We fixed this with the next few pizzas. However, we were pretty happy with the dough and the fact that the pizza tasted pretty good.

Number two with heavy toppings and the addition of roast garlic:
One of George's pies:He used anchovies, some canned spaghetti sauce and some shredded cheese that we had sitting around the fridge. We decided to chuck an egg onto the pizza to see what happened:
Egg was a bit overcooked at 10 minutes in the oven. I like how George got a nice rim around his pizza. George spent a year in culinary school and has some experience with this sort of thing. He told me that the secret was hand tossing the dough and not putting topping all the way out to the pizza's edge. Because there's nothing to weigh the dough down, it can rise more.

Anyhow, I had an absolute BLAST making pizza. It was alot of fun...making the dough was a little bit stressful but sooooo worth it when I saw it in all its glory. Pizza night is definitely something we will do in the future. In fact, we're planning pizza night for guests where we make the dough and toppings and let people make their own pizzas. Sounds like a good time, right?

Time- Probably about 30 minutes of active work for the onions and kneading the dough. Remember that the dough needs to rise for an hour. This isn't something to just whip up for an impromptu dinner.

Food cost-
Dough...uhhhh, cheap? Flour is next to nothing, yeast is $1.60. Onions are 80 cents, a few sprigs of rosemary, $3.00 bucks in gorgonzola. You get the point...turning out 4 pizzas didn't cost very much. Chef On a Shoestring, indeed.

Text only link click here.

Lolcat:

Pear Clafouti with Star Anise

So my roommate hired a maid to come over and clean our apartment. Friggin' amazing. Our apartment is sooooo clean. I've never been more appreciative of Latin America's hard working people than I am right now. And yes, I wondered if they were illegal immigrants. Does that make me racist? Living in California, I've heard so much about illegal immigration that I couldn't help but wonder. Anyhow, I'll enjoy the fruits of their labor. A drop of coffee spilled on the counter earlier this morning and I immediately wiped it up. When the cleaners come back next week, they will say, "Aye amigo, ess so cleeen in here!" Wait...I'm pretty sure THAT was racist. Sorry.

This is my baking post for the week. As I understand it, clafouti is something along the lines of a French farmhouse dessert. Something very simple that grandmas make due to the availability of the principal ingredients. Sugar, cream, eggs, flour, who doesn't have this stuff? I am using the recipe out of Jean-Georges:Cooking at home with a Four-Star Chef and I believe that, in the past, I've espoused the purchase of this book. My opinion of it has not changed. Go buy it.


The stuff you'll need. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. That's right, I specify Fahrenheit because I have readers from all over the globe...wouldn't want people thinking it was 350 Celsius (662 Fahrenheit) and burning their kitchens down.

Grind up 3 star anise. This is what star anise looks like. It smells like licorice. Add 3 eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla extract to a mixing bowl and beat. I now have an electric mixer. It is wonderful. Add 1/2 cup of sugar and beat until "foamy and fairly thick." Add 6 tablespoons of flour and beat until "thick and smooth." Add 3/4 cup of cream, the powdered star anise and a few pinches of salt. Mix in and let the batter rest. This is what mine looked like: Prepare the pans. The recipe calls for a 10 inch round pie pan. I used a 7.75 inch pie pan and (stupidly) wondered why I had leftover batter. In addition to the 7.75 inch pie pan, I used a 8x8 square baking dish. To prepare the pans, butter them up, throw in a bit of flour and rotate the pans so the flour has a chance to adhere to the buttered surface. Shake out any excess flour. Prepare the fruit. Peel the pears and slice the into eighths. Cut out the cores. Arrange the pears in your baking dishes. I think I used a total of three pears.Cover the baking dishes with the batter. The book recommends "leaving just a little of the tops of the pears peeking through."Chuck the clafouti into the oven. Recipe says 20 minutes or until "the clafouti is nicely browned on top and a knife inserted into it comes out clean." I have an issue here. It took me 40 minutes to achieve the desired results. And I'm not the only one...every online recipe for clafouti that I looked at called for cooking times WELL over 20 minutes. Most were somewhere between 30-45 minutes. My point is, whoever wrote "20 minutes" in the cookbook was on crack. It is absolutely incorrect.

Here is your reward:
Allow to cool, sift some powdered sugar over the tops and you've got a tasty breakfast!
Time- About an hour, total. Most of this is inactive while the clafouti bakes.

Food Cost- Ummm, pretty damn cheap...about $2.50 total. It's really quite cheap.

Text only link click this.

Lolcat:

Adios!

Bran Muffins

Here is the weekly installment of the The Clueless College Baker but, unlike some of my previous efforts, this one has a happy ending! The muffins turned out really, REALLY well...except for one step which we'll get to a little bit later. Wholesome and moist, these muffins make me look forward to getting up in the morning...perfect with a cup of coffee.

The recipe I'm using can be found in I'm Just Here For More Food...I've had issues in the past where the volume and weight measurements didn't quite match up (1 tsp of vanilla extract weighs 57 grams?) but had no problems with the bran muffin recipe. It's also a fun book to read through. Brown's enthusiasm for food is infectious and his science-based perspective is refreshing in an industry dominated by flowery adjectives and hollow rhetoric. There's substance behind his words that helps you understand WHY things happen as they do. When you understand the science behind the cooking process, you'll become more confident and will, eventually, be able to anticipate problems before they happen. Good stuff.

Oh. Some of you might notice that I use weight measurements when I bake. I do this because it's more precise. Given that flour can be compressed, it's easier to give weight measurements because then everyone's on the same page.

Anyhow, here we go.
The ingredients. Raisins in the center, bran flakes directly above. Baking soda to the right. Nutmeg in the small grinder.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Set half of a stick of butter aside to come to room temperature.
Use butter to grease up a 10 of the 12 openings on a 12-muffin muffin tin.

Measure out the dry ingredients. First, 138 grams of whole wheat flour:
8 grams of baking soda
Sift. Add a few pinches of salt. Recipe calls for 2.5 grams (.5 teaspoon) of ground allspice. I didn't have allspice and used nutmeg instead...I just ground it until it smelled quite fragrant. Set aside:
Measure out more dry ingredients. 20 grams of wheat germ:
Toast the wheat germ...just enough so it smells toasty. Set aside:
106 grams of bran flakes:
1/2 of a cup of raisins on top of the bran flakes:
Combine bran flakes, wheat germ and raisins. Set aside.

More measuring. 86 grams of brown sugar:
62 grams of molasses:
Set aside sugar/molasses mixture.

Buttermilk, 228 grams:

Measuring is done.

Take the softened butter and smoosh it around until it's sorta smooth. This was harder than I had imagined it would be:Watch this video and try not to think of me as a total psycho:

Here's what happened a moment later:

Ughh. Ideally, I would've whisked the butter and then added the sugar/molasses and whisked that for a while. After that, one egg. Things don't always go as planned. Aim for a nice homogeneous mixture.
Add half the flour/baking soda/salt mixture. Combine:Add half the buttermilk:Add the half of the flour mixture and combine. Add the remaining buttermilk and combine.
Add the bran flakes, wheat germ and raisins. Fold to combine...you will need Popeye-like forearms...it gets pretty thick:I used an ice cream scoop to get the muffin batter into the tins.

Done. Notice how some of these tins aren't quite full. The next time I make this recipe. I will only make 10 mufffins. Place muffins into your preheated oven for 20 minutes or so. Check to see that they're cooked through by stabbing them with a toothpick. If the toothpick comes out clean, they're done.

20 minutes later...GREAT SUCCESS! They look purdy, don't they? I couldn't resist and had to eat a piping hot muffin:
Cool on a rack:
Man, was I thrilled to see the lovely brown muffins come out of the oven. I guess I'm not totally hopeless when it comes to baking. Next time, I might try something a little more difficult. Homemade puff pastry? Maybe...just maybe...


Time- About an hour including baking time

Food cost- Lost the grocery receipt. Oops. However, it can't be more than 4 bucks for the whole batch...these things are pretty cheap.

edit: It should be known that I was somewhat unsatisfied with the shape of the muffins. They just don't have that steroid-fueled GIANT Starbucks muffin shape. This is one reason why I decided that, the next time, to make 10 muffins and not 12...that should help facilitate the classic muffin shape.