Again with the turkey leftovers December 29, 2007

Ok…so we have lots of leftover turkey. Luckily I also have many ways of dealing with it.

We’ve already discussed dealing with a savoury pie to help us sort out roast beef leftovers, now we’ll do it with turkey. The method is very much the same, but the ingredients are switched up a bit.

What you need:

1 pkg. deep dish pie crusts

1/2 of a cooking onion (I actually used a red onion because I actually enjoy the flavour of red onion cooked…damn the naysayers, dammit)

1 tbsp butter or margarine

1.5 cups of cubed, cooked turkey meat

1 cup of turkey gravy

1/2 cup of dry white wine

1/4 cup of milk

2 cups of frozen mixed vegetables

Salt and pepper to taste

If frozen, take the crusts out of the freezer to come to room temperature as the rest of the preparation goes on.

Chop the onion into palatable bits – far be it for me to say what that means to most people but I tend to chop mine fairly thinly as I’ve a couple of folks around here who don’t enjoy chunks of onions in their goodies. I, on the other hand, quite like the chunks…so giv’er and do what ye will.

Add the butter or margarine to a medium sauce pan heated over medium heat. Once that has melted add the chopped onion. Sautee until translucent. While that’s going on the turkey meat can be cubed (if this hasn’t been done already) and added to one of the pie shells. Top that with the frozen vegetables and season with salt and pepper to taste. Let that sit while the base it cooking.

This is a good time to preheat the oven. The pie wants to start at 375 degrees.

Once the onions are translucent deglaze (ok, I have to admit that I did not know what the term was for that particular manoeuvre until just this year…I’ve been doing it since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but the fact that there was a word for it escaped me completely…meh) the pot with about half of the wine. Add the gravy and stir vigorously (I love that word) until combined. Once combined add the mild and the rest of the wine and stir vigorously again.

Pour the base mixture over the vegies and meat already in the pie shell. Top the lot of it with the second pie shell, pressing the edge into that of the bottom shell to make a relatively firm seal around the edges. Cut slits into the top to allow steam to escape. Pop it into the oven at 375 for about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes crank the heat to 425 for another 10-15 minutes for optimum browning and pastry flaking.

mmmMMMmmm…savoury pies rock my world.

Lebkuchen December 29, 2007

Lebkuchen are pretty much a staple this time of the year but seem to come in so many different forms and fashions, I even have two different favourite recipes for them – one very much like gingerbread and another which is more of a cake. What they have in common is an abundance of spices and chocolate. It’s the only other chocolatey treat I make this time of the year and I can handle eating about two then get overwhelmed with the richness.

What you need:

1 cup soft (room temperature) butter

1 ½ cups confectioner’s sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp each ground cinnamon, mace, nutmeg and cardamom

1 ½ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 tbsp butter or margarine

Cream the butter, sugar eggs and vanilla together. A handmixer is good for that part but becomes redundant on the next step, which is adding the flour. At this point the dough tends to get too sticky and thick for a hand blender, so if you’ve dough hooks and a stand mixer then this is a good time for that, if not you’re relegated to wooden spoon land and over-developed dominant arm triceps like the rest of us. After the flour has been thoroughly blended in add the rest of the ingredients and blend until it all becomes a mad blended thing. Chill for two hours.

On a very well-floured surface roll the dough out to ¼ inch and cut into whatever shapes your little hearts desire. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for about 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

After the cookies have cooled they can be ‘iced’. In our house this doesn’t look like icing as much as it looks like Jackson Pollock took over the kitchen. Cookies get dunked, drizzled over, tossed and even smeared. In order to do this the chips and the butter or margarine need to be melted together in a double boiler and kept warm over high heat through the process. Once the chocolate has reached a liquid state all of the above verbs may be acted out upon our spicy little bundles of joy.

more turkey leftovers December 27, 2007

Once again I’m presented with the unique and wonderful challenge of coming up with creative ways to dispense of leftover holiday fowl. And because we all need more rich food after indulging and imbibing to the point of busting, I felt a spicey, cheesey sandwich with sweet potato fries was in order.

What you need for two sandwiches:

1 cup turkey meat (dark or white…whichever your preference. I like to use a combination of both)

1 small red onion sliced in rings

1 tbsp. jerk sauce (I really like Walkerswood jerk seasoning because it doesn’t just taste like hot. It tastes like hot and lime and onions and all of the other good things which go into a great seasoning. Try it. You’ll like it too.)

6 slices of double creme brie

1 roma tomato, thinly sliced

4 slices multi-grain bread

1 tbsp butter or margarine

mayonnaise for spreading

salt and pepper to taste

Start by lubing a warm, cast iron skillet over medium heat with a wee bit of butter or margarine. Add the jerk seasoning and use a wooden spoon or spatula to coat the pan in it. Toss in the turkey pieces and roll them around the pan to pick up the jerk sauce, breaking it up as you go for more jerkey coverage. Move the turkey to a plate, crank the burner to medium-high heat and add the onions. Stir fry the onions for about 1-2 minutes then move them to the turkey plate.

At this point you can choose to toast the breads in a toaster or grill them in the skillet with another wee bit of butter or margarine. I opted for the latter this time around.

Once the bread is nicely toasted using either method, spread some mayo on the bottom pieces of each sandwich. Divide the turkey equally between both, then the onions, then the brie, then the tomato. Season with salt and pepper before topping with the remaining toasts.

Thinly sliced peppers in any colour, kosher pickles and lettuce all make wonderful additions to this sandwich. One can get as creative with it as one likes.

Pie for breakfast December 22, 2007

Had an early morning out of town visitor roll in today and so needed something quick and tasty and with some semblance of nutritional value to serve for breakfast. Of course pie was the first thing to come to mind. That’s just the way I roll.

What you need:

2 deep dish pie shells

2 eggs

1 400g tub of ricotta cheese

1 600g bag of frozen mixed (or not…I like mixed) berries

1/4 cup of sugar

Angostura bitters

2 pinches of salt

2 pinches of nutmeg

2 tbsp margarine or butter

freshly ground black pepper

Get the pastries out of the freezer and set them on a baking dish or an actual pie plate so they come to room temperature. In a bowl whisk the eggs until frothy. To those add one pinch of salt, one pinch of nutmeg, 6 dashes of bitters and give the lot a good whisking again. Stir in the cheese until combined.

Toss the berries, the sugar, the other pinches, about 6 more dashes of bitters and a few good grinds of black pepper (I really like to taste the pepper in it so I gave mine 30 good grinds) in a bowl together. Move this mixture to the bottom pie shell. Dot the top of the berry mixture with butter or margarine then spread the egg/cheese blend over the top. Top with the second pie shell (don’t forget to pierce the top to let steam out) and bake in a 425 degree oven for 30 minutes.

I don’t want to share December 21, 2007

Mushrooms, cheese, seafood and anything which comes even vaguely hors d’oeuvre-shaped (not necessarily in that order) are my favourite foodstuffs ever, so when asked to bring the pre-meal nibblies for our family Christmas do I gladly accepted and (rather masochistically) began to devise recipes comprised of all my favourites for savoury stuffs to give me a break from all of the sweets baking I’ve been doing…because, you know, I don’t have nearly enough things going on to occupy my time.

Thanks to the miracles which are Tenderflake and Presidents Choice frozen pastries and a little help from the fella, I was able to get these crabesque quiches & multi-mushroom turnovers pretty quickly.

The quiches – what you need:

24 frozen tart shells (frozen ones usually come in twelves)

1 large minced red onion (you can use a regular cooking onion but I really enjoy the sweetness a red onion imparts to complement the crab)

1.5 cups of imitation crab meat or 2 cans of the real stuff

1 cup grated provolone cheese

7 eggs

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tsp salt

2 tsp ground pepper

a pinch of nutmeg

a bunch of cilantro

Before doing anything else, get the pastries out of the freezer and set them out on baking sheets so they’ll come to room temperature as you work. Preheat the oven to 425. To each shell add a teaspoon of onion then divide the crab then the cheese up evenly between them. Top each one with 2-3 cilantro leaves. In a large bowl whisk the remaining ingredients together and divide the mixture evenly between the 24 quiches. Toss the lot of them into the cooker.

If you’re planning to freeze these (as I was) then they only need to cook for about 10 minutes or until the egg has set. To reheat simply pull them out of the freezer about an hour before they need to be served and toss them back into the oven preheated to 425 for about 7 minutes. If you intend to eat them right away they’ll need about 17-20 minutes of cook time off the hop.

Turnovers – what you need:

2 pkgs puff pastry

1 large minced red onion (or possibly the rest of the one from the quiches)

2 cups chopped mushrooms (I get these handy packages of mixed mushrooms which include portabello, shiitake and oyster at the grocer’s)

1 cup grated stinky cheese (I used emmenthaler I had leftover from a fondue at the weekend but other good choices would be old cheddar, edam, guyere & romano)

Preheat oven to 425. Puff pastry generally comes in packages of 2 pastries each – we’ll want to roll each of those out into 10″ x 10″ish squares then cut each square into 9 smaller squares. To each smaller square add 1 tsp onion then divide the cheese and mushrooms up among the 36 squares, fold them into triangles and press down the egdes. Toss’em on a baking sheet or stone and then into the oven for about 10 minutes or until they start to brown (if freezing) or 15-20 minutes if cooking through and eating immediately. Again, these will require about 1 hour of standing time out of the freezer and another 7 minutes in the oven at 425 to reheat.

Favourite cookies December 17, 2007

I know them as zitronenkuchen, though it seems there are many things which go by that name and I’m not really sure why there’s an emphasis on the lemons in the nomenclature when the star of this little attraction is surely the abundance of hazelnuts. But I digress.

It’s certainly a fiddlier recipe than one who doesn’t bake should engage with, however the results are well worth the fiddling and I really only make them once a year so I daresay my I can afford to have my non-baking mind blown at that cost. This is another bastardized version of a classic recipe; I’ve added cardamom (because I have a small crush on the lemon/hazelnut/cardamom flavour combination), more lemon and a little twist in preparation which make them exactly the cookie I look forward to all year long.

What you need:

3.5 cups ground hazelnuts.

3 cups confectioner’s sugar

3 cups all-purpose flour

3 sticks of butter

3 eggs

8 cardamom pods

1 tsp. ground mace

1 tsp. ground ginger

Juice and grated rind of 2 lemons

Method:

Grind your cardamom pods. I use a mortar and pestle for this and discard the actual poddy bits, adding only the powedery interiors to the recipe. This can also be done (albeit, a wee bit less elegantly as with a mortar and pestle, but it works) by placing the pods between bits of wax paper or in a paper bag and running a rolling pin over them. One way or the other, please, please, please use cardamom pods. Using previously ground cardamom will result in cruel and unusual punishment up to and including having to listen to Englebert Humperdink tunes on repeat for the rest of your life. True story.

Combine the flour and sugar and spices, cutting in the butter once combined. You don’t have to be too meticulous about cutting the butter in as one might be with a pastry, but it needs to be in there. After doing a half-assed job of cutting the butter in add 2.5 cup of the ground nuts. Toss the rest of the nuts into (or back into, if you’re grinding your own) the food processor and grind some more. Grind until you’ve basically got a nut butter. That little step is going to take these cookies from something of sugar cookie consistency to the sublime decadence of shortbread and all of its melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Add the nut butter, eggs and lemon rind and juice. Blend with an electric hand blender until everything is happily amalgamated. With a spatula move the lot of it into a ball in the center of the bowl and chill until hard. That’s going to take a couple of hours so you might as well pour yourself a drink and setup with some good eye candy (I recommend Slant’s 100 Greatest Videos), then a book, then some sleep. Ok. Leaving them overnight is best.

This is how we chill in Canadia:

The rolling and the cutting are where things get fiddly. Because the cookie dough is very much like that of shortbread it will melt quickly with much handling and stick to anything it comes into contact with. As such the surface upon which they’ll be rolled and cut should be well-floured. Please bear in mind that this is not bread dough we’re working with and adding some flour is not going to compromise the integrity of the end result. So be generous; flour the table/counter, the rolling pins, the cookie cutters and yourself. It’s sticky. Sticky, sticky sticky and melty. Because it’s melty you’ll want to work in small batches, returning what you’re not rolling and cutting to the fridge.

The dough should be rolled out into 1/4 inch slabs, then cut with whichever cookie cutter shapes your little hearst desire. We used various stars and moons and butterflies and maple leaves. Having a chopstick on hand to remove bits of dough from the more detailed parts of cookie cutters is very handy.

After dough is cut it should be moved directly to a greased cookie sheet. This recipe makes a whole lot of cookies. Like, in the 72 piece range depending on how big the shapes one chooses are. As such, they’ve pretty much got to be baked in batches so an oven preheated to 350 degrees is required. Cookies will need to be baked at that temp for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

It’s a blizzard! December 16, 2007

And that is a bowlful of what will be whiskey balls in the not-too distant future.

What else should one do on a blizzardy day?

Over and under an orange-cranberry pound cake December 16, 2007

This is my second favourite thing to bake for the holidays. Where traditional pound cakes use a pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs, this one is a slightly (just slightly) lighter and easier on the stirring arm version. My recipe makes 8 mini loaves for sharing but is easily reduced by two thirds for a single, normal-sized loaf.

What you need:

1.5 cups butter

3 cups granulated sugar

6 eggs

4.5 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1.4 cups of milk

3 tsp. vanilla

1.5 cups dried cranberries

grated peels and squeezed juice of 4 oranges

Start by creaming the butter, sugar & eggs together until fluffy with a hand mixer. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder and add to the creamed mixture slowly, alternating between it and the milk. Once all of that is combined add the vanilla (for this batch I ran out of vanilla so I substituted 3 teaspoons of Angostura bitters and I think I’ll keep using them as a replacement because the results are sooooo good) and mix again. Now it’s time to get out ye olde wooden spoon and stir in the cranberries and orange peels.

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease whatever it is you’re choosing to bake them in – I used two 10×12″ casserole dishes then I divide the cakes into 8 after they’re cooked. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-30 minutes or until a test with a toothpick comes out clean.

Use the orange juice with 3/4 of a cup of granulated sugar to make the glaze by mixing them together then pouring over the cakes as they come out of the oven. Allow to cool then refrigerate immediately or the cakes will be eaten.

I don’t bake December 13, 2007

I really don’t. Betty Crocker I am not. I don’t do cookies. I’m a complete failure with pastries. I cooked one chocolate cake from scratch ever and since then everyone has had store-bought cakes (albeit, really good ones like the lovely caramel pecan ones from the lovely little bakery in East City) or …well…Betty Crocker boxed things for their birthdays. I do not bake. Yet yesterday I found myself pilfering all of the filberts, almonds, dried cranberries and cardamom pods I could from the closest bulk food store. Why? Because the holidays are coming up and nothing gets me in the holiday spirit (because the onslaught of Christmas tunes certainly doesn’t do it…no no, I go out safely armed with my iPod and some Aimee Mann) more than the scents imbued through cookies and cakes emanating from my oven…and then giving all of those goodies away to people who obviously need to pack on a few pounds.

I daresay my next few posts will be an inundation of baked goods. But it won’t happen again. Because I don’t bake.

Potutus December 13, 2007

…or jacket potatoes or stuffed potatoes or twice baked potatoes…regardless of what one might call them they’re really, really good. Today we made the meatatarian variety (though I’ve a few great vegetarian versions up my sleeve we can talk about another time) with twice smoked bacon.

We pick this stuff up at the local farmer’s market and it’s lovely and decadent (despite its appearance) and probably something the devil threw at Dante through his little adventure. But it’s good. Really good. And well worth having to slice it one’s self.

Onto the potatoes!

What you need:

4 large cream flesh potatoes (I prefer russet potatoes, but tonight I used a generic round white because it’s what we had on hand)

1/2 lb. twice smoked bacon

1.5 cups grated marble cheese

5 scallions (green/spring onions) thinly sliced

2 tsp. dried thyme

salt and pepper to taste

The washing and the baking of the potatoes should be the first step. Scrub, scrub. Bake, bake. Rub each one in a little olive oil and salt then toss ‘em in some tin foil, then into the oven for an hour at 375.

Once they’re done take them out of the foil and let them cool enough to be handled. You don’t want to let them cool too much or they won’t want to get intimate with the rest of the ingredients, but don’t burn your fingers, please.

Slice each potato in half lengthwise and scoop out their guts into a bowl. Don’t worry too much about getting everything or leaving too much or too little in the shell. All of the rest of the things added to the guts will more than compensate for technique whilst allowing the final product to look worth eating so just go ahead a scoop while those potatoes are still warm.

Set the remaining skins on a baking sheet. To the bowl of guts add everything else. Stir. Stir some more. If you think you’re done stir again for good measure. Toss the guts back into the potato skins and toss those in the oven at 375 for about 20 minutes or until they’ve got that lovely golden brown hue as in the picture above.