Roasted Vegetable Puff Pastry

I admit, it's very easy to impress the people I usually have over for Christmas.  They don't eat out much.  That doesn't stop me from making fine dining choices.

This one is a huge cheat that's sure to impress with very little effort.  The total active time is less than 10 minutes, though it does take a couple of hours to get everything put together and baked.

I actually didn't use spinach in mine.  I used fresh greens off my radishes.  You could use any leafy green you like, but I find spinach to be the most widely available.  Plus, defrosting a brick of it is a massive time-saving device.

1 lb rainbow carrots
1 lb fresh spinach leaves or 10 oz frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1 Tb olive oil
kosher salt
1/2 tsp rosemary
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/4 C crumbled bleu cheese
1 sheet puff pastry
flour for rolling the pastry

1.  Preheat oven to 375º.  Peel carrots, then cut into batons, about 1/4 of the diameter and 2" long.  Toss in olive oil, a pinch of salt, rosemary, and pepper.  Bake on a foil-lined sheet until cooked through, about 30 minutes.  If working from fresh spinach, cook until lightly wilted.

2.  While the carrots are cooling, defrost the puff pastry.  It takes 30-40 minutes.  You can keep the oven on, so it doesn't have to reheat.  There can be some overlapping of these steps.

3.  Roll the pastry on a lightly floured surface to get rid of the creases.  Place on a baking sheet.  Distribute drained spinach on pastry, keeping the rims clean.  Then spread carrots over the same area. Finally, sprinkle cheese sparsely over the veggies.  One crumble per bite is more than enough.

4.  Bake until golden, about 20 minutes.  Allow to cool slightly, then cut into pieces with a pizza cutter.  Serve immediately.  The pastry gets soggy if you try to serve it as leftovers, but it can be revived a bit in the toaster oven if it isn't too dark to start with.

Serves 6 as a side, 12 or more as an hors d'oeuvre

Difficulty rating π

Doughnuts

Appropriately enough, I asked for a deep fryer for Chanukah.  Then I didn't have time to use it until after the holiday.  Merry Christmas!

Techie Smurf went a little overboard and got me the deluxe model that's twice as big as the one he has.  I'm not opening a donut shop.  Still, this project would have taken three times as long to fry with the slimmer model.  After the holes, I switched from the double basket to the full one and got in all four of the twists at once instead of one at a time.  And now I can fry my own tortilla chips, crispy won tons, and anything else I've been half-assing in skillets and saucepans.

The big thing I learned while doing this project is there's nothing to be afraid of.  Doughnuts sound all kinds of intimidating, but it's just a dinner roll recipe that you fry instead of bake.  I'm not kidding.  If you've ever made kick-ass rolls, or any other roll, the only difference is the cooking method.  Yes, I gave them the third level of difficulty, but that's for working with hot oil and three hours start to finish.

You also don't actually need a deep fryer to make these.  I asked for one because of the apple fritter incident.  If you can control your oil temperature on the stove, any heavy pot will do.  They actually made them in a pot on The Chew the day I opened the fryer.

This is a half-recipe out of the Bible.  It's almost identical to Alton Brown's, but he uses shortening instead of butter and doesn't put in cinnamon.  You don't really taste the spices, especially after glazing, which is the point.  In this case, the use of spice is to avoid any bland bites and not to add a definitive taste.

2-1/2 C flour
2 Tb sugar
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 packet (2-1/2 tsp) yeast
1/2 C + 2 Tb milk
2 Tb butter
1 egg

1.  In a stand mixer with the paddle, combine salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1 cup of flour.  Separately, warm milk, butter, and sugar to 100º.  Butter does not need to melt.  Stir in yeast and allow to get foamy, about 5 minutes.

2.  Pour milk mixture into flour and beat into a thick, stringy batter for 2 minutes on medium.  Add egg and another cup of flour and beat again into a dough that comes off the paddle easily.  If you wish, you can switch to the dough hook for this second addition.  I didn't want to wash it.

3.  Turn out dough onto a surface floured with the remaining 1/2 cup.  Knead until smooth, about 5 minutes.  Because this is an egg dough, it will always be a little sticky.  It's also going to be more firm than most of my dough recipes.  Don't worry about the extra weight.  Turn over ball in a greased bowl and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 hour.

4.  Punch down dough and let rest for 10 minutes on a rolling surface.  I just didn't wash the pastry board after step 3 and there was enough flour to finish.  Or, you can add more as needed.

5.  Roll out dough to 1/4" thick.  Yes, that thin.  I guess I don't have Grandma Sophie's doughnut cutter anymore, so I experimented with the round cutters I do have, not knowing in which directions the dough would rise.  Turns out, it pretty much goes straight up, so I could have used the next size up for the outer ring.  (A quick side note: the point of cutting a hole is because a torus shape will fry evenly.  If you're doing solid, filled donuts, you just have to cook them longer so the center isn't doughy.). After cutting out round doughnuts and holes, transfer them to a lightly floured baking sheet to rise for 30 minutes.  You can re-roll the scraps because yeast dough doesn't get tough like cookie dough does.  I chose to form the scraps into ropes and make twists instead.

6.  Fill your pot or fryer with 1" of oil and heat to 370º.  Gently place the risen doughnuts into the oil and fry until lightly golden, about 2 minutes.  Turn and fry other side until it matches, slightly less time.  Remove to a paper towel-lined plate or a cooling rack so any excess oil can drip off.

7.  I went a little nuts with the decorating and made them all a little different.  If you're rolling in sugar, cinnamon sugar, chocolate sugar, powdered sugar, etc, do it while they're warm so the granules can stick to the oil.  To make a simple powdered sugar glaze, combine milk and powdered sugar to desired consistency.  Dip or roll cooled doughnuts in the glaze and allow to firm up for about 10 minutes.  You can add sprinkles, coconut, nuts, chopped bacon, etc while the glaze is soft.  To make a "maple" glaze, add brown sugar to the basic glaze.  I didn't have much luck with adding chocolate chips to the glaze and melting the whole thing together.  Better to use a regular ganache.  For simplicity's sake, it really is easier to make them all the same kind and just change up the sprinkles.

8.  Serve within 4 hours (uncooked milk in the glaze, plus they get stale) or freeze unglazed once cooled.  To revive, let defrost to room temperature, then freshen up in the toaster oven for a few minutes.  Glaze and serve.

Makes about 1 dozen, plus their holes

Difficulty rating :-0

French Twists

I'm working on something big, but in the meantime:  Christmas Cookies!

This recipe was one of the finalists in this year's LA Times Holiday Cookie Bake-Off.  It was the easiest of the recipes I hadn't done in some form.  I would really like to do the baklava rouladas, but the relative humidity is just too low to open a package of filo.  There isn't enough butter in the world.

The story behind these is that the submitter's Italian grandmother used to make them.  Therefore, I'm not sure if the "French" part is supposed to be derogatory.  Let's go with the pretend notion that Grandma was from Northern Italy and these originated in Southern France.  The cultures meld there because the boundary has shifted back and forth over the centuries.  Natives of Nice and Cannes even speak French with the slightest Italian accent.

Reading the recipe, these are a lot like rugelach, just shaped different.  I'm not a fan of rugelach, and need a big cup of café au lait to make them palatable.  Having these in stick shape instead of crescent makes the dunking easier, but they don't really need it.  They maintained quite a bit of moisture, despite being basically pie crust.  The original recipe suggests apple or raspberry jelly.  I don't like either and hauled out a jar of apricot orange jam.  While not as smooth as jelly - but close - it's what I would have used when I was considering doing the rugelach.  I also subbed sliced almonds for the walnuts because that's what I had in the pantry.  I say, come up with any jam/nut combination that works for you.  The coconut mellows out the flavors, so don't omit it, but I used unsweetened flakes since there seemed to be plenty of sugar between the jam and cinnamon sugar.

I'm decreasing the volume of the fillings slightly because a lot of it ended up on the cutting board.  I may not have rolled the dough thin enough, but it still would have been a lot if I had gone a couple more inches in both directions.

2-1/2 C flour
1 Tb baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 C (1 stick) cold, unsalted butter, cut into cubes
*1 egg
*1/2 C milk
*1 C jelly or smooth, unseeded jam
*1 C coconut
*3/4 C chopped nuts
1/4 C sugar mixed with 1 tsp ground cinnamon
Powdered sugar

1.  In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Cut in butter until it is pea-sized.

2.  Separately, beat together the egg and milk.  Make a well in the middle of the flour and add the milk mixture.  Gently stir the ingredients until they come together into a dough.  I ended up adding about a tablespoon more milk to make it work, but it was a dry day.  The dough will seem to get more hydrated as it rests, so it's ok if it seems sort of dry at this point, as long as you can get it all to stick together in a single ball.

3.  Shape dough ball into a rectangle approximately 4" x 8".  This will make it easier to roll out later.  Wrap in plastic or wax paper and refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours.   Or, wrap again in foil, seal in a plastic bag, and freeze for up to 3 months.

4.  Preheat the oven to 350º.  Line 2 to 3 baking sheets with parchment or a silpat.  I used a silpat, and the cookies came off easily.  More important, the burnt jam came off the silpat easily.  And trust me, any jam that leaks out of the cookie will end up burnt.  How badly depends on whether your jam was sweetened with real sugar or corn syrup.  Not sure how sugar-free jams react to high temperatures.

5.  Place dough on a large, lightly floured surface and roll to 1/8" thick, trying to keep that rectangular shape.  I ended up taking pieces off one side and patching others.  Dough can do that.

6.  Spread a thin layer of jam over the entire rectangle, all the way to the edges.  On the lower half, sprinkle the cinnamon sugar, coconut, and nuts.  Fold the top half of the dough over the bottom half to completely cover the filling.  Lightly press the halves together.

7.  Using a sharp knife, cut the rectangle crosswise into 1/2"-thick strips.  The fold will be at the top of each strip.  Carefully twist each strip to form a spiral.  Place the spirals on the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about an inch apart.

8.  Bake the cookies until they are set and golden, 12-15 minutes.  Remove the cookies from the sheet to fresh parchment paper when cool enough to handle, or the jam will glue them down.  For Silpat, you can wait until they're halfway cooled.  Either way, dust with powdered sugar when cool.

Makes about 2-1/2 dozen

Difficulty rating. :)

Pasta with Squash Sauce

Ok, maybe not the best title.  I mixed leftover canned pumpkin and half a roasted butternut squash for this one.  I'm making the recipe slightly larger for four servings and an entire squash.

I did discover that butternut squash is a whole lot easier to cut if you buy the smallest one in the pile. The larger ones are dense and generally have it out for me, but I had no trouble getting through this one.  Peeling it raw is still pretty much impossible, so it was just as well I wanted the roasted flavor in the sauce.

As for the pasta, the photo shows some leftover soba noodles.  A white pasta would be considerably more appetizing.  That little patch of green at the top is the greens from the first radishes I picked.  I'm good at growing radishes.  The greens taste like spinach when blanched.  Need to come up with more uses for the radishes themselves.

*1 small butternut squash
*1  C canned pumpkin
*1/2 C diced onion
1 Tb olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp white pepper
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 C mascarpone cheese
milk as needed
2 Tb pine nuts for garnish
4 servings cooked pasta of choice

1.  Preheat oven to 375º.  Line a baking sheet with foil.  Cut squash in half and scoop out seeds.  Place cut-side down and roast until skin is easily pierced by a fork, about 45 minutes.  Allow to cool until you can handle it and peel off the skin.  Dice flesh into bite-sized pieces.

2.  Start boiling water for your pasta.  Drizzle oil in a 10" skillet and heat over medium.  Cook onion until softened, 3-5 minutes.  Add pumpkin and squash.  Once everything warms together, the butternut will start to give off more moisture.  If you want the sauce thinner, stir in half a cup of water or vegetable broth.  That's what I did.  Stir in salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

3.  When your pasta is finished and draining, add mascarpone cheese to the sauce and stir until creamy.  If you need to thin out the sauce again, use milk.  Either add pasta to skillet and toss to coat, or plate pasta first and spoon sauce on top.  Sprinkle with toasted pine nuts if desired and serve hot.

Difficulty rating. :)

Basic Plating

"Plating" is the fancy word for putting food on a plate.  It's considered as much a part of a restaurant's menu as the food itself.  You want the food to look at least as good as it tastes.  There is often an employee called the "expeditor" whose function is to check the appearance of an item before it leaves the kitchen.  They wipe off stray bits of sauce, add a final garnish, and make sure the temperature is appropriate.

Some restaurants lately have taken the concepts of plating and presentation to extremes.  The presentation should not overshadow the food itself.  Bubbles of ganache that house mint-infused CO2?  Truffle foam?  That's not food, it's performance art.  That said, there are some practices from finer restaurants that can be applied at home.

The simplest is putting food on the plate in a clean and organized manner.  Not only does it reduce sibling quarrels over who got the biggest piece, it looks nice.  I use this technique a lot when I do cold dinners, arranging the different pieces of the tapas into their own areas of the plate.

Generally, the central focus of the dish should be either in the middle of the plate or the spot closest to the diner.  I'm left-handed, so I tend to put it in the 8 o'clock position, nearest to the hand holding the fork.  You'll notice the edge of the table in the above photo.  Tilt your head a little to the right, and the meatballs are at 8 o'clock.  If you use formal-style table manners, you're holding the fork in your left hand when you cut, so that's still a thing.  I learned how to use the knife with my right hand and don't have to switch.

Garnishes don't have to be parsley.  I made some lemon meringue tarts on a whim to use up pie crust, and garnished the plate with a few grapes.  An already above-average tea treat went gourmet in five seconds.

Negative space is a technique I don't use all that often because it requires a plate larger than the food needs.  I generally do portion control when I plate something, and using a large plate runs counter to that.  I went hunting through my photos and found a decent picture of the concept in yam toasts.  If I'd garnished the board with raisins or some kind of sauce, you'd get a better idea.

I'm not a huge fan of using height as a presentation tool.  If something falls between plating and setting down the dish, it just ends up looking sloppy.  The easiest example of this is leaning ribs or chops up against each other so the bone sticks up.  Here's a photo of doing it with scones.

You could get height by sticking a spring of garnish that stands up, by using a stemmed goblet instead of a soup bowl, and by making a stacked dish like a sandwich.  Again, I don't really care how tall my food is.  It's just another presentation option.

The timing of this post is a good reminder of presentation during holiday parties, but these techniques can be applied to any meal.  Cut a PB&J in a new way and you've made your kid a special treat.  Set up plates instead of serving family-style and a weekday meal feels unique.  A meal can be as interesting as you feel like making it, even something as boring as mac-and-cheese out of a box.

The Office Potluck

It's that time of year again, when everyone has to bring something to work for the holiday party.  An office potluck inevitably turns into 3/4 desserts and 1/4 veggie and fruit trays from the people who forgot until that morning.

I signed up to bring a brisket and didn't find out until after it was bought that one person didn't eat red meat, another was vegetarian, and a third is trying to be vegan.  Feeling guilty, I also signed up for a vegan main dish.  I'm turning the polenta with broiled vegetables vegan, with soy milk and nutritional yeast taking the place of the goat cheese.  I've never used nutritional yeast before, so I'm glad they carry it in the bins at Sprouts.  I don't want to be stuck with a full package of something I might never use again.  The rest of the soy milk I can use in coffee or tea.  Not my first choice, but I don't dislike the taste.  Mostly, I still have dairy at least once a day because you lose the enzymes to digest it if you go off dairy completely.  I haven't been able to drink a cold glass of milk in over a decade, but I can have some in coffee or any heat-treated dairy product.

I also dug out the hot plate I never use.  It's probably from the '70s, but hasn't started a fire yet.  The oven at work is the size of a closet, so reheating wasn't an issue.  This was just for anyone who wanted to keep things warm afterwards.

What I've learned from this year's endeavor is that there are too many specialized diets out there and you can't please everyone.  I only did the broiled veggies because I seriously doubted anyone else would bring something with nutritional value.  And because it goes with the brisket.  My advice is to bring something you like and don't mind bringing home the leftovers.  If everyone does that, they'll at least be able to eat their own dish.

Leftovers in Action

By now, everyone has fruit and vegetables in the crisper that are threatening to turn.  My main culprit was celery.  I actually had to throw away half the bag.  It took some serious trimming to come up with enough for a Waldorf salad, but the only thing I had to buy for it was the grapes.  I usually catch things like that and transfer them to the broth bag, but I had just finished another 45 hour work week.

The other thing was coming up with a use for the sauerkraut other than grilled cheese.  I went with the obvious and grilled up some bratwurst.

So after putting on a bit of weight from that little adventure, I went through the pantry for some plant-based protein.  That ended up being some black bean veggie burgers, but with butternut squash instead of the one sorry plantain at Sprouts.

The fridge is mostly empty now, and I don't have a lot of leftovers in the freezer.  This works because my garden is getting useful again.  Produce doesn't go bad as quickly when it's still in the ground.

Radish Farm

Ok, I admit I'm doing a gardening post because I haven't had time to cook anything interesting.  There was going to be one on fixing a broken hollandaise, but I didn't manage to resurrect it.  I've also been looking for a gap to show off my latest gardening coup.

For the most part, my winter seeding has not been going well because the weather is not cooperating. My large tray of indoor seeding has produced two struggling celery sprouts.  Period.  The lettuce patch has a solid row of little arugula and sprouts of what I assume is Romaine.  I kind of forgot what I put where.  The herb pots haven't sprouted squat.

The Pond is doing slightly better.  I have two solid rows of carrots after two seedings, but they take months to grow.  The beet seeds must be quite old, because I only have four plants out of two rows, and they're struggling.  I'll try again.  I have a slightly newer packet of beet seeds that are a different variety.

Where I'm succeeding beyond all expectations is the radishes.  I hope I like them, because there are two solid rows of a radish every 2-3 inches.  While weeding, I found out the leaves have little spikes on the underside, like nettle leaves.  I appear to be slightly allergic to whatever natural defenses those leaves contain.  Generally, blanching makes them edible.  I have to remember not to eat them raw.

The citrus tree is doing quite well this year.  The fruit is smaller than usual, but there's a lot of it.  Normal sized lemons for a change.  There are even two grapefruit way up there.  Maybe this year they'll ripen.  I haven't had very good luck with the grapefruit.  There are even more navel oranges than I'm used to.  Really hoping I can do something with them for Christmas.