Moroccan Chickpea Stew with Tomato and Lemon

Got a vegetarian in the crowd? Are they expecting the same old cheese pizza from you? Why not surprise the heck out of them with Moroccan Chickpea Stew with Tomato and Lemon?

Like so many stew/bean/pan sautee recipes, this one is elevated by citrus, and not just any old citrus--preserved lemon. OK, I'll admit that preserved lemon isn't exactly a pantry staple for some, but it's so darn easy to make, it should be. Really, it's just cut up lemons in lemony brine. At work I have a bunch floating around in an old plastic nut jar.

Now, fair warning to people who don't like sweet in their savory--this does have currants in it so it's more in that curry-with-chutney flavor world than a southern European chickpea stew. And the recipe suggests serving it on cous-cous, but it isn't necessary at all, unless you just need a little extra starch in your life.

Blackberry Cobbler

What? Blackberry Cobbler in the middle of winter?

I know, I know--macrobiotic squeamishness aside, isn't it nice to be able to buy ripe berries in January? I don't know where they come from, and lord knows how much of a carbon footprint they have, but: I used a cloth bag to carry them home, so there.

Actually not home, work. Dr. and Mrs. S. have fruit salad every morning for breakfast, and they like their berries--so berries it is, year round, regardless of the price. So it's just a short hop from buying a half pint of blackberries to getting six half pints for cobbler. Right? Just don't look at my receipts.

This is one of those cobblers you bake right in the frying pan--you cook the cornstarch/sugar/water mix with the berries, sling the dough on top, and throw the whole shootin' match in a 400 oven. The dough is sweet-biscuity.



Now--although Dixie (the aide) and I thought this was delicious, Dr. and Mrs. S. pushed those beautiful biscuits aside and just ate the berries. In her case I think it's a hangover from those dieting days--in his case, he's got a weird thing about texture. No bread pudding for this fellow. I guess the biscuits didn't make the crispy cut, or maybe he was just full. Sometimes I over-analyze.

Gourmet doesn't have this specific recipe, but it couldn't be easier--in fact, if you're a baker you already have this one imprinted in your memory and could figure it out in a snap. Well actually, the biscuit part did use one technique I've never used before--it's the standard flour/baking powder/sugar/salt + cold butter--but then you add a little boiling water to make it come together. So why cold butter? I don't know, but it came out great so who am I to question?

Chocolate Cake with Orange Buttercream

"You're making your own birthday cake?" my mother-in-law, Maddi, asked incredulously.

"I think I'm the best qualified," said I.

That's hubris on my part, readers, but if you're talking about a three-layer cake with chocolate orange ganache and an egg-white meringue buttercream that takes six and a half sticks of butter...well, in this case it's true, at least as far as our household goes. Nobody else would be crazy enough to stand around chunking soft butter tablespoon by tablespoon into a standing mixer bowl for forty-five minutes.

It was a production. Not the cake layers, which were straightforward enough. Here they are on our fabulous stacking racks:



Making the ganache was easy enough, and so was assembling the cake.



The buttercream, as you may have discerned from my remarks above, was a pain in the ass. But ooh, how pretty!



OK, here's where I ran into problems, if you can really run into problems at this point. After all, nothing's left but the shouting...er, eating, right?

Well, you're supposed to refrigerate it for six hours, and then let it stand at room temp for 2-3. I kind of forgot about it in the midst of the merry-making and didn't take it out of the fridge soon enough, so it probably got only about, oh, forty-five minutes of warming time. Anybody who's eaten fine flavored chocolate knows that cold temps dull the flavor.

So to MY taste buds, it was pretty good, but not spectacular. Part of that was the temp, part was that the cake layers were kind of dry and unimpressive. I tried it again 24 hours later, after it had been sitting out (well covered) and felt the same way.

Now--Epicurious bills this as a wedding cake, and wedding cakes have to be sturdy. But THIS recipe, in the book, only says you could use it for that, or for any small, fancy party. If I were going to tinker with it, I'd brush the cake with a simple syrup flavored with the same Grand Marnier that went in the ganache. Moisture + flavor = much better.

However--my guests were pleasantly ga-ga over this cake. Mark, to his wife Elizabeth: "This is a big piece of cake. And I'm going to eat the whole thing." Ruth, who linged over her cake long after everybody else had finished: "Melissa, I just can't stop eating this cake!"



One final comment--for the frosting you're supposed to use six and a half sticks of unsalted butter. In spite of my good planning, I somehow ended up with not enough unsalted and ended up using at least four sticks of salted butter. This made for interesting buttercream frosting--I actually enjoy being able to taste a little salt in sweet things (like salted caramels and pecan sables) and so I wasn't put off by the flavor, but still I wonder how the buttercream would have tasted with straight unsalted...(but not curious enough to make another whole cake.)

Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic

Oh reader, you think you're so smart, don't you? You think this is that recipe for roasted chicken that involves putting 40 cloves of garlic in the cavity, maybe along with some rosemary and lemon, that recipe where the skin gets nice and crispy and the garlic gets soft and mellow.

But you're wrong. This recipe for Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic is much more cumbersome, fattening, and idiotic.

It asks you to put a cup of oil in a pot (a cup!!! For those of you in denial about the caloric effects of oil, that's 1000 calories.), brown the whole chicken in this oil (that's the cumbersome part, flipping the dang thing), take the chicken out (more cumbersomeness)put in your 40 cloves, put the chicken on top of the garlic, cover, and throw it in the oven. The idiotic part is that the skin sticks to the bottom of the pot so you have a flayed chicken, and then you can't use what they call the "sauce" because, well, there's a cup of freakin' oil in it. Also they underestimate the time it takes to cook.

I only have one positive thing to say about this recipe and that is that by some miracle the breast meat was incredibly tender and juicy, but that's because in the time they allot the dark meat is undercooked.

Harrumph. If you really must explore this recipe, go to epicurious using the link above and check out the reader reviews--they almost always have variations on the recipe that make it work better if it needs tweaking.

Mocha Eclairs and Flank Steak with Chimichurri Sauce

How can you not like something named "chimichurri"? It's so fun to say!

chimichurri
chimichurri
chimichurri

If I didn't know it was an awesome sauce I would think it was the sound a train makes when it goes up a hill.



Chimichurri sauce is one of those easy herb/garlic/oil/vinegar sauces that should be a part of your kitchen repertoire, just like pesto. And Flank Steak with Chimichurri Sauce is a fine way to use it up. This recipe was so darn easy--all you need is a food processor and a broiler--it's done in under 20 minutes. And if you can't find flank steak (I couldn't, at our local IGA) any beef will do. I happened to find a slab of "steak tip", which was not cut into steak tips and that worked brilliantly.

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I made eclairs!!

There is something thrilling about that to me, I'm not sure why. Probably because it's one of those pastry case items that looks like it would be impossible to make at home.

Actually the separate components are pretty easy to make--the casing is profiterole dough, which is made, no lie, like this: boil water and butter, dump in flour, stir, then beat in a few eggs. It's the least fussy thing I've ever done. Then you pipe it onto a buttered baking sheet (I always use zip-lock bags with the corner snipped off) and bake for somewhere around 25 minutes. Voila! You've got a hollow casing for your eclair filling.

The fussiest thing is probably the filling, but cornstarch makes that pretty easy, and the only thing left is the chocolate glaze (ch. chips + heavy cream). All in all, it's a lot of bang for the buck.

And here is my inaugural photo from my new digital camera:!



Thank you Maddi and Don, for such a wonderful gift--next time you're up I'll make you eclairs. :-)

Roast Pork with Apricot and Shallot Stuffing

Serving a crowd of carnivores?

Roast Pork with Apricot and Shallot Stuffing will make you look good, because it's unusual (unless you live in the North End and buy them at your butcher's every Sunday), pretty, and best of all, tastes great.

Oh, and did I mention it's fairly easy? Bonus.

Here's a photo by Rita Maas:



The other item that will make this a no-sweat affair for you as a cook is this:



Remote oven thermometers have got to be the greatest invention since fire. You can actually cart this thing around the house, up to 100 feet away, and it will tell you exactly what temperature the interior of your roast is while it's in the oven.

I used to have one of these, long ago, but the temp probe cr*pped out and I never got around to replacing it. But I bought one at work because Miranda, my counterpart, was experiencing undue stress over things like leg of lamb. Really, nothing is more awful than thinking you should give meat ten more minutes in the oven and finding out you've blown it and it's overcooked.

So this little gadget has been a wonderful addition and is the reason why the Christmas beef tenderloin was cooked to medium-rare perfection, and why this roast pork was whisked out of the oven at the precise moment that the center of the stuffing reached 150 degrees.

Too late to ask Santa for one--just hie thee to Bed, Bath & Beyond and get one for yourself.

Fig Pudding with Rum Butter

Suet.

If you bake, you've run across recipes that call for this clean, gravely, beef fat. The usual suspects are mincemeat pie and plum pudding. And people tend to fall into two camps when it comes to suet--the "no way" camp, and the "I'd try it if only I could find it" camp. I'm not sure why it seems so repulsive to use this animal by-product in sweet food--after all, we certainly use butter and eggs, and if you think about what those actually are...well, better perhaps not to think too hard.

To use suet you have to have access to a butcher, and not the one at your local Shaw's. I mean a real butcher, where they get whole sides of beef to break down because suet is found around the kidneys and loins.

Now, at this point you might be thinking to yourself, "what's the big deal about suet?" Well, according to my research, it has a higher melting point than butter. This is useful at least for Christmas puddings because the other ingredients have time to set before the suet theoretically melts away, leaving a light, airy cake product behind.

Notice I said "theoretically".

This is because for the the past two years I've followed the plum pudding recipe in the Joy of Cooking...

Wait a second, let me back up.

At my job, there are two major holidays where the family gathers. The first is fourth of July, the second is Christmas. They are grand affairs with long-standing traditions, and one of the traditions at Christmas goes like this: after the big Christmas feast, the lights go out in the dining room and the cook (that's me) appears with a platter of flaming Christmas pudding and everybody sings "We wish you a Merry Christmas" (you know... "now bring us some figgy pudding..."). Then I promenade this now sputtering spectacle across the room and take a bow while everybody claps.

So on this, my third Christmas, I went out on a limb and changed the recipe, from the above-mentioned Plum Pudding, to Fig Pudding with Rum Butter--which brings me back to the point I was making above. The point is that the two times I made the Plum Pudding, the suet never melted, and so the pudding was extremely dense and rich. I finally figured out that it would melt if I heated it up in the microwave and had determined to do that this year (steam the pudding in advance and microwave the heck out of it just before serving) when I came across the Fig Pudding recipe in The Gourmet Cookbook.

It still calls for suet, but it's treated differently--whipped with sugar instead of grated and left in small chunks. Not surprisingly, this allowed the suet to melt away beautifully, and the result was a light, moist, figgy cake (or pudding, if you insist) that got great reviews.

I did have some trepidation about changing the recipe, but realized that as long as it's in the same basic shape (I used the same pudding mold), is accompanied by hard sauce (which is what the Rum Butter is), and is on fire when it comes out, the specifics of the innards don't matter much.

NOW---my next problem to work out with this dish is how to get the darn thing to remain alight during its journey across the dining room. I've tried heating the metal platter, the pudding and the rum, I've tried putting little sugar cubes to "anchor" the alcohol (what Mrs. S. used to do)--the only other thing I can think of is to buy some seriously high octane booze next year and try that out.

Any pyros out there feel free to chime in on this cooking quandary.

Jellied Cranberry Sauce

Jellied Cranberry Sauce is one of those recipes that asks you to push cooked solids through a fine mesh sieve--in this case, four bags of boiled cranberries. After about the fifth scoop of cranberry mashing, I was asking myself why the canned stuff was really so bad, and I'm still not sure I can give you the answer to that. I love chunky homemade cranberry sauce, especially with stuff like orange zest or dried cherries added in, but this recipe is meant to replicate that Jell-O look and mouth-feel. It's just straight, slightly sweetened, very thick cranberry juice that has added gelatin and is set in a mold.

Anyway, I pressed on (no pun intended), mixed in my gelatin, poured it in a ring mold (with some left over in a bowl) and let it sit overnight. Oh, by the way--this was the day before Christmas, to be served with the Christmas feast for twenty-two people at work.

Here's the exciting part.

Now, when you unmold cranberry sauce, you dip the mold in hot water for five seconds and then turn it over onto a plate. Easy, right? Epicurious certainly makes it look easy--here's a picture by Sang An of Jellied Cranberry Sauce that doesn't resemble mine in the slightest.



Mine didn't look like that because I dipped it in hot water (really hot water) and when I unmolded it, the melted jellied cranberry sauce puddled all over the plate around the now much diminished and undignified looking remnants of the ring mold.

Clearly this unmolding business is a learned skill.

Plan B: scoop it all up and put it in a pretty bowl. Tastes the same, takes up less space anyway.

Old Plymouth Indian Meal Pudding

Gentle Readers, this is the time of year when I can scarcely draw a breath for all of the cooking, shopping, and rushing around that I do. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention Old Plymouth Indian Meal Pudding, which I made for my book group earlier this month.

The above photo only resembles mine in color of pudding and addition of vanilla ice cream. Otherwise it was quite a different creature because this is a dessert that you bake (according to the recipe in the book) for two hours.

That's right. Two hours.

Why, you might be asking, does a pudding have to bake for that long?

I have a theory, and it goes something like this. Did you ever hear the story about the family who always served their Christmas roast with the ends cut off? It was an old family tradition--the grandmother had always made it that way, and so did the mother, and the daughters honored the tradition by likewise making it in the traditional family manner. But one day, a husband spoke up at dinner. "Why," he asked plaintively, "do the ends get cut off? That's the best part!"

So the daughters determined to get to the bottom of the tradition, and they called their grandmother who had retired to sunny Costa Rica. "Grandma," they asked, "how did that family tradition get started--cutting the ends off the Christmas Roast?"

"Oh that!" said the Grandma. "You silly girls--that was so the roast would fit in the pan!"

What does this have to do with baking a pudding for two hours? Well, my idea is that somebody left their pudding in the oven for and hour and a half, and when they realized their mistake, they poured milk on top in hopes of re-adding moisture and baked it for another half hour. The result was not bad, kind of half crusty and half chewy, and somehow it got passed down for generations and ended up in The Gourmet Cookbook.

So that sums up Old Plymouth Indian Meal Pudding. Not bad, kind of half crusty and half chewy. Not surprisingly (at least to me), this recipe is not to be found on Epicurious, so if you're just dying to make it let me know and I will post it here.

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Good news!! I've just received a digital camera for Christmas! If I had more time I would find a photo and show you what it looks like but it's a Sony and it's pink. So now I can be stylish AND clever. Well, the clever part will come after I figure out how to use it. Until then I'll just have to be stylish.

Good luck with your Christmas preparations!

Curried Lentil Soup recipe for Elizabeth

Long overdue--sorry I made you wait!

1/4 cup vegetable oil
2/3 cup finely chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons finely grated peeled fresh ginger
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 cup lentils, picked over and rinsed
2 1/2 cups (20 ounces) chicken stock or store-bought low-sodium broth
2 1/2 cups water
2/3 cup chopped drained canned tomatoes
2 cups coarsely chopped spinach
fresh lemon juice to taste
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat oil in a 4-quart heavy saucepan over moderate heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned, 6-8 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add curry powder and cumin and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add lentils, stock, and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until lentils are tender, 20 to 25 minutes.

Stir in tomatoes and spinach and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until spinach is wilted, about 2 minutes. Add lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.