Baking

Gingerbread? Don’t mind if I do.

~ wellfedemily ~ 2 Comments

Oh! Hello. It’s been ages and ages. Actual time, one week. With the arrival of the Shaw Cable guy this morning, we have now clawed our way back into the 21st century, and these feelings of connectedness and calm are very reassuring.

Today marks the beginning of the week before Christmas, that frantic time of shopping and trying to remember who you have to buy for, who you haven’t bought for, and which bills should be paid right now lest you find yourself without heat, hot water, or car insurance. I don’t know about you, but I don’t handle stress very well. Fortunately, the one thing you can control, the one thing that can bring you inner peace like nothing else, even if you have forty-thousand relatives to visit in not nearly as many hours, is your kitchen, and you can whip it into submission and fill your home with wondrous holiday smells and end up with a cake that goes very well with rye and ginger ale. Which you probably also need right about now. Yes?

This is a strong-tasting sucker, crammed full of molasses and maple syrup and raw ginger. It’s grown-up gingerbread, and you can serve it with ice cream if you want to but I like it straight out of the pan, plonked onto a plate with a little icing sugar and a cold beer. It’s also packed full of good stuff, so you can even take this with you as an on-the-go breakfast, since you’re going to need to leave early to avoid traffic hell.

Grown-up Gingerbread

  • 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
  • 1 tbsp. grated fresh ginger, packed
  • 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup fancy molasses
  • 1/2 cup maple syrup
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
  • 1 tsp. dried ginger
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Cream together the butter, ginger, and sugar. Once smooth and creamy, beat in the molasses, maple syrup, sour cream, and eggs.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, dried ginger, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Stir into liquid mixture. Inhale. Sigh.

Pour into a greased 8″x8″ pan. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out relatively clean. This is a moist cake, so you may notice moist crumbs. That’s okay. Desirable, even.

The cake’s pretty good hot out of the oven, but believe you me, you’ll like it much better after it’s sat for awhile. There’s a lot of stuff in here to keep it moist, so if you want to bake it the night before, let it sit, then grab it and go in the morning, it would likely be at it’s flavour-zenith then. I’m not sure that phrase worked. Oh well.

You can frost it if you want, but I wouldn’t.

Now, you relax. And maybe buy yourself something nice, wrap it up, and put it under the tree, “From: Santa.” I won’t tell.

Red velvet cupcakes: Handfuls of holiday spirit.

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

I am still having problems here with photos: Something about an IO Error, and now I can’t upload photos anywhere and my computer caught the herp and I don’t know where it got it but I am displeased. If I ever get it to work again, I’ll show you my pretty cupcakes. Soon, I hope!

You know that scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie snaps and finally beats the crap out of that ugly ginger kid, buckets of delicious obscenity spewing from his mouth as he pummels the bigger kid’s writhing face? That’s how I feel this week, except I don’t have anything to take it out on. Butter, I guess. I could take it out on butter and maybe make some shortbread this weekend. But it isn’t the same, and besides, if I punched anything in real life it wouldn’t even notice. I have abnormally small fists. Also, the effect of me spewing obscenity would be lost because I killed the novelty of that when I was somewhere around Ralphie’s age.

I’ve been mulling over a post for red velvet cupcakes all week, because I made them on Monday for Tuesday and they were festive, even if my mood hasn’t been. Unfortunately, I ran out of red food colouring, so they were less red-velvet and more “red-violet,” like that Crayola crayon you always thought would be red but always turned out to be a funny sort of pink instead. That’s okay though. People got the gist. I made them for a work thing, even though nobody’s all that excited about work or work things these days – the stress in the office is palpable, and my boss is distracted almost all the time. Someone cried the other day. I don’t know why.

Around here, we’re in need of a serious dose of Christmas spirit.

I thought red cupcakes with white frosting, the occasional one topped with green or red sprinkles, would help. When have cupcakes not helped? Never, that’s when. It’s impossible to feel Grinchy when you’re eating a cupcake, and that’s a fact I’m pretty sure even science can prove. So here. Cupcakes, adapted from Joy of Baking.

Red Velvet Cupcakes, adapted from Joy of Baking

(Makes 14 to 16 cupcakes.)

  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tbsp. cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
  • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 2 tbsp. liquid red food coloring
  • 2 tbsp. raspberry jam
  • 1 tsp. white vinegar

Frosting:

  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 1 vanilla bean, scraped
  • 3 cups confectioner’s sugar

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tins with cupcake wrappers.

Whisk together flour, salt, cocoa, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth, then beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine with flour mixture, adding buttermilk, food colouring, raspberry jam, and vinegar. Mix well.

Pour batter into lined muffin tins. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cake springs back when pressed gently with a pointer finger.

Cool on wire racks, and then frost, using recipe above (mix stuff together … when it resembles frosting, use it; adjust consistency with confectioner’s sugar or cold milk as needed).

Purists will be all, “jam in red velvet? Regular old icing? The hell?” But that’s okay. Real red velvet cake would be frosted with cream cheese icing. But I didn’t have cream cheese, and this ended up working well enough that I am not going to steer you in a different direction just for tradition’s sake, though you’re welcome to go there if you’d like. Also, pretty as it is, I am just too hippified to dye something red without it tasting like red also … so I added the jam. You don’t have to. But make these cupcakes. They are light and sweet and unusual, with cocoa used more as a spice than as something to turn something else into chocolate. They’re perfect treats that fit into eager little hands, and they’re pretty and will certainly stand out on a dessert table.

Well, there you have it. I am now going to make a large pot of tea and consider my holiday moves. Should I wander down Granville Street, looking into the sparkly windows? Wrap presents and listen to Christmas music until I puke? Or bake something? Maybe I will write my Santa letter, in the hopes that he brings something fantastic, like another year’s worth of vanilla beans, or a high-paying career in food writing. In France. The elves can do anything, you know. Happy holidays!

Cranberry scones, and good morning to you!

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

Can you believe we’re a month away from Christmas? I can’t believe how long it’s been since I thought about tomatoes. I’m thinking about cranberries these days, and maple syrup and shortbread cookies and root vegetables and squash and foggy-skinned red local apples. American Thanksgiving is this week. I keep seeing commercials for Black Friday, hearing Christmas music in every little store I duck into, and finding egg nog and candy cane ice cream on grocery shelves where neither was before.

You may wake up early this week with a to-do list to fit the season and a hankering for something warm, and when you do, could I recommend scones? Cranberry scones, with maple syrup and brown sugar. Not too sweet, and very nice with a hot cup of tea.

Cranberry scones

  • 4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 3/4 cup cold butter, cubed
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup chilled whole milk
  • 2 tbsp. maple syrup
  • 1 cup fresh cranberries, chopped

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Combine the flour,  sugar, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Squeeze the butter between your fingers, as if you were making pie crust. I seem to say this a lot. Maybe I talk too much about baked goods? You don’t want to crumble the butter into nothing – think of peas scattered among crumbs.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, and add the milk and the maple syrup and the cranberries. Stir the liquid into the butter-flour mix, and press gently to form a dough. When the dough is a single mass that holds together well, turn it out onto a floured surface, and cut into four equal pieces. Form rounds of each quarter, and cut each quarter further into four pieces, making sixteen scones in total.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 15 to 18 minutes, until puffed and golden. Cool on a wire rack, but eat warm, slathered in butter and drizzled with a bit of maple syrup. Good morning, and happy holidays!

Olive oil orange cookies.

~ wellfedemily ~ 6 Comments

Cookie porn.One of the annoying things about being broke is running out of butter, especially when you want cookies. The day before payday is always incredibly bad for that. I ran out of milk too.

Good thing we never run out of the really important stuff, like wine.

So not only did I need a cookie. I needed a cookie that would go with my wine, and my, oh my, I think we’ve got one.

This recipe is a hybrid of sorts, a little of this and a little of that from Mario and Mark, and a bit of me as well. You should definitely give these a try – not too sweet, with a pronounced POP! of orange, and a nutty olive oil undercurrent. Perfect with wine, or even just on their own. Crunchy outside, chewy inside, and certainly not your everyday cookie. These are immodest, show-off cookies. Don’t be put off by the oil. It may not replace butter in your life, but it will be a nice little change.

Olive oil orange cookies

(Makes about three dozen cookies.)

  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 tbsp. orange zest
  • 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1/4 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice (1 navel orange should do you for the recipe, zest and juice)
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 1 tsp. brandy (optional)

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Whisk together your dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together your wet ingredients. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredient mix, and stir to form a sticky, very shiny dough. Again, don’t be put off – it looks greasy. But the cookies, for some reason, won’t be.

Shiny dough.Roll the dough into balls about an inch in diameter, and plonk onto a cookie sheet. Bake about an inch apart, on the middle rack, for 12 to 15 minutes, or until lightly browned, slightly golden. Inhale deeply as these bake, and behold the fragrant wonders. This stuff smells AMAZING.

Cool on racks, but feel free to eat piping hot. Once cool, store in an airtight container. If they last that long. I ate, like ten cookies. I’m not even embarrassed, because olive oil is apparently good for you.

Okay, I’m kind of embarrassed, because it’s nearly midnight and I have to work tomorrow but instead of going to bed even though I’m tired, I’m drinking wine and eating cookies. For the win? I guess we’ll see tomorrow?

Maximum noms.

Rustic pear tart: A thing you can make without a pie plate.

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

We’re doing our best to save money, and one of our great ideas was that we would make our own wine. Rather fortuitously, at the same time we had the idea, my parents’ friends, John and Loretta, were cleaning out their basement and purging all the stuff they call Crap. Awesome score for us, and now we have almost 30 bottles of “wine.” I put it in quotations because it’s not good.

But it’s not bad.

Nick and his little helper prep the bottles.
Nick and his little helper wash the bottles.
The dress code for bottling night was brown shirts and hats.
The dress code for bottling night was brown shirts and hats.

We went to Nick’s sister’s and brother-in-law’s place last night to bottle our wine – they live in a house with a basement, so we made our wine there – and I brought pie. You know what’s weird? I don’t own a pie plate. I can’t really explain the oversight, but in the interest of saving money, which we have to do, I’m not going to buy one. You can make pie without a pie plate, and it looks rustic and homey, like you’re better than pie plates, like you’re crazy and clever and do what you want. And I think that comes out in the end result, as the pie is tasty and badass.

Rustic pear tart

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/2 cup cold butter, cubed
  • 5 tbsp. ice water
  • 1 lb. firm-fleshed pears, whatever you’ve got (four or five large)
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup brandy
  • 1/2 vanilla bean, split

Make your dough. Combine flour and salt, and drop each cube of butter in, squishing them between your fingers. The end result before you add the water should be a crumby mixture with larger chunks, some as large as kidney beans or peas. Stir in water, a bit at a time, to form the dough – you may not need all of the water … you want the dough to be just moist enough to hold together. Press into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until pears are done.

In a large pot, dissolve sugar in water and brandy. Drop in vanilla bean, and bring to a light boil. This is inspired by David Lebowitz’s recipe for poached pears, and is, in fact, very similar.

Stir in the pears, and bring back to a boil, boiling gently for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool in the pot, 30 minutes.

Pears!Roll out dough on a floured surface until about 1/4-inch thick. Roll the flat dough around the rolling pin, and then unroll onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

Lay the pear slices in a circle in the middle of the dough stacking up to two inches high, leaving about an inch and a half border – you’ll want to be able to fold the dough over the pears all rustic-like.

SDC12123Fold the dough over the pears. Optionally, you can paint the edges of the crust with a little egg and water – that’ll make it golden and lovely. But I’m lazy and forgot. Bake in a 375°F oven for 40 minutes.

Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

Pie!

Pie, sliced.

Cake … again? Or, “How to get ‘curvy’ for winter.”

~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday morning Nick, whom I am now referring to as Fruit Fairy, left two lovely red anjou pears on the counter, evidently some sort of gift from people he works with. Earlier this week, he brought home the biggest carrot I’ve ever seen, one that, at its top, was as thick as one of the trees outside.

Heeheehee.

I was going to make a carrot risotto out of it, but we’re kind of too poor to afford cheese at the moment and are rationing what little we have left. And yesterday it looked like this outside:

Red.

Yellow.

Grey.

And Nick hates it when I put landscapey outdoor pictures on here because he says they’re boring, but he only likes photos of meat and Megan Fox anyway so I don’t have to listen to him, and I wanted to show you why I decided it’d be a good idea to bake another cake. I don’t think I need to defend making two cakes in as many days, but this way you understand my motive. Gigantic produce. Incessant rain. You’d want carrot cake too.

And I made a little carrot cake awhile ago, but this recipe is a little different. It’s based on that recipe, but this one is bigger because that carrot was gigantic and I had different stuff in the fridge and was too lazy and warm to go back outside. These recipes evolve and grow and change, so I don’t think it’s slacking off to post a recipe for something that’s already on here. Maybe it is. No gold-star sticker for me.

Carrot pear cake

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp. cloves
  • 1 tbsp. finely minced fresh ginger
  • 1 lemon, zest and juice
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup grated pear (you don’t have to peel the pear if you don’t feel like it)
  • 3 cups grated carrot
  • 1 cup of the chopped nut or dried fruit of your choice (optional)

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices, ginger, and lemon zest.

Once combined, stir in liquids to form a batter, and then stir in grated pear and carrot, and fruit or nuts, if you so desire.

Pour into a greased and floured 9×13 baking pan, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

Cake on rack.

Once cool, frost with:

Cream Cheese Frosting

  • 1 cup cream cheese (at room temperature)
  • 4 tbsp. butter
  • 2 cups confectioner’s sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Combine the cheese, butter, sugar, and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Beat well, until perfectly smooth and spreadable. Put on cake.

Cake!

Then, pour yourself a big glass of something potent, shove the cake into your mouth, and dance around your warm, nice smelling kitchen, possibly in your underpants (which is how I do it), preferably to something really terrible that totally tickles you and that you’re simultaneously kind of embarrassed about liking (*ahem* Taylor Swift *ahem*). This is how cake is best enjoyed. Don’t choke.

Handful of cake + mouth = happy!

Cake for breakfast.

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

Plums, hacked up.I had a lot of leftover plums. I’d bought some close to the end of the season – a few prune plums, a handful of red plums, some of those translucent-looking yellow ones, and a nectarine I bought on a whim that I thought would ripen but never fully did. All were hugely disappointing – I tasted a few of each and found them to be sour and unpleasant. Boo. But tomatoes, when they’re roasted, no matter how sucky they are when they start out, are always wonderful. The flavour intensifies, and the sweetness creeps out. So why can’t that sort of thing work for plums? Discovery: The same thing totally does work for plums.

Fourteen plums of various sizes, and a nectarine, cut haphazardly/however you feel like cutting them, at 200°F over two-and-a-half to three hours, will reduce and caramelize and sweeten up, giving you about two cups of roasty sticky goodness.

Roasty.Scrape out your pan, syrup and all, into a bowl or something so that you can think about what you want to do with these. They’d be great on their own with ice cream or yogurt, or you could top them with crumbly butter, flour, and sugar and turn them into a crisp. I stored mine in ramekins for a couple of days until I’d decided their fate.

Colours!Their fate turned out to be cake. Breakfast cake. Because I’m a grown-up and I do what I want.

You could make this cake with apples, or even a couple of cups of caramelized, sweetened green tomatoes, if you were so moved. Berries or pears would also be delicious, as would rhubarb. You can make this at any time of year, with whatever fruit you’ve got on hand. I like unfinicky stuff like that.

Here’s the cake. It’s adapted from a recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book.

Fruity Coffee Cake

  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 cups dark brown sugar
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2/3 cup chilled butter
  • 2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp. cardamom
  • 1/4 tsp. cloves
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 2 cups soft fruit (such as roasted plums, chunky applesauce, mashed berries, etc.)

Preheat your oven to 375°F. Grease and flour a 9″x13″ baking pan.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and mix well. Drop in the butter in cubes, working it in with your fingers to form a coarse crumb. Scoop out about 3/4 cup of these, and set aside.

Add the baking powder, baking soda, and spices to the remaining crumbs, and combine well. Stir in your milk and eggs until a cake batter is formed. This will be a lumpy batter, but don’t worry about it. That’s the butter chunks making it look lumpy, and that’s fine. Once the wet and dry ingredients are thoroughly combined, fold in your fruit.

Spread the batter into your prepared baking pan, making sure the fruit hunks are distributed evenly across the pan. Sprinkle the reserved crumb mixture over the whole cake.

Bake for 30 or so minutes, or until the cake is golden and a toothpick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Serve warm from the pan.

Good-smelling.We ate a bunch of this ourselves, but I also piled some up for Nick and sent it with him to work to make up for his perpetual lateness and hopefully score him awesome points. Since I don’t get awesome points at my work because I’m pretty sure most people don’t like me there, I just brought one piece for one person. He told me the cake was perfect, delicately spiced and actually rather light in spite of all the butter. Good for breakfast, or even dessert after a casual, homey dinner. So there you have it. Cake you can eat anytime.

Stacked cake.

Champion breakfast.

Horses’ Arses.

~ wellfedemily ~ 3 Comments

Breakfast.

I have two days off this week which is awesome and I’m finally catching up on my sleep after being sick this weekend and even though someone is very mad at me somewhere about a bill I thought I paid, I’m still being optimistic. With two days off and no money in the bank to distract me into doing things, I’m hoping that this will be the week that I finish my novel. I have to. I have managed to convince myself that if I just finish the damn story, Random House will pick it up immediately, and then it will be optioned as a movie, and then Anne Hathaway or that Evan Rachel Wood girl or someone will star as my protagonist and it will be the best chick flick ever and I’ll get really rich and then it won’t matter that I might lose my job because I’ll be in France anyway, with a villa near the water and you can all come and visit and we’ll have a grand time. This is what will happen if I just focus. It seems so easy, doesn’t it?

Which is why I went back to bed for two hours, and why I am here, now, blogging. And why I just made cinnamon buns, bonus points for them being the lazy kind. And why I did the dishes, which I never do unless I have to or unless Nick mutters something under his breath about leaving me for a harem of maids who never make fun of his eyebrows or move to the other side of the room when he eats. I remember now why I stopped writing the thing in the first place. It’s frigging hard. And also I am having a hard time making my protagonist relatable to anyone but me, because she’s manic and neurotic and painfully self-conscious but also incredibly narcissistic, and also mildly sociopathic, which is why I get her but I’m wondering if she shouldn’t just be the quirky friend of someone much more believable. Random House? Are you out there? You tell me what I should do.

Anyway, the cinnamon buns. They’re called Horses’ Arses because that’s what my Grandpa named them, because apparently if you look closely at the back end of any horse, it will be curly and twisty, and will resemble these fluffy little cinnamon buns, which are made with a baking powder biscuit base and are much quicker than the yeasty ones, which is perfect for breakfast on a weekday or for snacking all day long when you’re supposed to be doing something important and life-changing but you just can’t make yourself type another word of fiction because suddenly everything else in the whole world is super interesting and distracting.

I’m pretty sure the recipe is a Fannie Farmer recipe, but I’ve been making these for so many years now that the recipe is permanently etched onto my frontal lobe. It’s one of those family recipes that everybody’s always made, and I don’t think the recipe has ever changed, except that for my Grandpa, probably more brown sugar was added. You should make these. Go, preheat your oven right now.

Horses’ Arses

  • 2 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 4 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar (if you don’t have this, don’t worry – I’ve omitted it before and it always turns out fine)
  • 2 tbsp. granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
  • 2/3 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 2 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 425°F.

In a large bowl, whisk together your flour, salt, baking powder, cream of tartar, and sugar. Drop your butter into the mix in hunks, and gently work it into the dry ingredients. Like many doughs, it’s best if the butter isn’t thoroughly combined – you want the majority of the mixture to resemble a coarse crumb, but there should also be larger hunks here and there. This is what makes everything fluffy, and fluffy is better than not fluffy.

Stir in the milk to form a dough, and turn the whole thing out onto a floured surface and gently knead the dough, for about thirty seconds, until it’s soft and no longer falls apart or is sticky. Roll the dough out to a thickness of about 1/4 inch.

Brush the melted butter over the rolled dough. Sprinkle the sugar over top, pressing down so that it’s not loose. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m estimating that it’s a cup of sugar. It’s really about two and a half handfuls, and I have small hands – paws, you might even say. I never measure this, because I’ve never seen a parent or grandparent of mine measure it out ever. It’s probably more the case that if you like more sugar, go nuts and add it, and if you like less then don’t add as much I guess. Sprinkle the cinnamon over top.

Roll out!

At this point, you could get as creative as you wanted – add nuts, dried fruit, crumbled bacon, even – anything you like. I never add anything different, because I like it just how it is.

Roll the thing out lengthwise, like a jelly roll. Cut the roll into slices about one-inch thick – you should have about twelve buns. I ended up with eleven. Place close together in a greased baking dish, or in those round cake pans if you wanted to. My dish is about 8×10, and the buns filled it up, some touching. It’s okay if they touch.

Little assholes.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until lightly browned and melty and fluffy. You can smell when these are done – the smell of cinnamon and sugar baking is marvelous, especially when it’s just for you. Serve warm, with a big glass of milk. And then maybe take another nap, because those big goals of yours can be daunting, and sometimes it feels good to procrastinate.

I still mean to tell you about my plums, and something about green tomatoes. Later today I am going to make venison burgers, using Alana from Eating from the Ground Up’s excellent brioche hamburger bun recipe. Last week I kind of fell off the face of the earth and didn’t do anything I said I would and then I felt bad, but I’ve promised myself I’d be productive and finish my story this week, so you know I will be all kinds of distracted and blog, probably more than anyone even wants to read. I say this now. I am completely unreliable, but that’s not something to worry about now – very little matters when you have a tray of warm cinnamon buns all to yourself.

Mine!

Eating chicken pot pie is like stuffing a blanket in the crack of a draughty door.

~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

I don’t normally like pot pies, because they remind me a bit of those Swanson’s things that are filled with goop and stringy bits and, oh, let’s say “vegetables,” only you can’t tell which ones because vegetables aren’t shaped like that in real life, and what the hell, Swanson’s? I don’t like them, normally, but Nick does, and so I’ve had to devise a clever plan that will allow us all to enjoy the meal. That clever plan? Curry powder and biscuit dough, and large, hearty chunks to bite into. Nothing like those crappy little things you sometimes get talked into buying when your version of Nick comes shopping.

VegetablesAlso, I’m lazy and hate doing dishes and our sink is still kind of broken, so this whole thing takes place in a single pot, save for the mixing bowl you’ll use to mix the biscuit topping. One pot, hearty dish, kind of like a hug you eat. And when you’re chopping your vegetables, make sure you cut them so that they look like what they are.

Chicken Pot Pie

  • 2 tbsp. butter
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • 2 medium Russet potatoes, chopped into half-inch cubes
  • 1 1/2 cup chopped uncooked chicken (I prefer thighs, but chicken breast is okay too)
  • 2 carrots, sliced into rounds
  • 1 leek, chopped
  • 4 stalks of celery, including leaves
  • 1 cup frozen peas (or lima beans!)
  • 1 1/2 tsp. curry powder (the regular yellow stuff)
  • 1 1/2 tsp. salt, or to taste
  • 1 tsp. black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp. celery seed
  • 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
  • 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 1 cup milk

Crust:

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 4 tsp. baking powder
  • 1 tbsp. sugar
  • 1/2 cup cold butter
  • 2/3 cup milk, also cold

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

In a pot that can be used on the stove and in the oven, melt the butter and brown the chicken with the onion and garlic over medium-high heat. Add the potatoes, and sauté for a minute or two before adding the carrot and leek. Sauté for another minute or two, until the veggies are brightly coloured and have begun to sweat. Add the celery, and then sprinkle the spices and flour over top. Mix well, scraping up any browned bits at the bottom of the pan.

Aromatic!Add the chicken stock and milk to deglaze, reduce to medium, and allow to simmer while you make the biscuit dough. You want the veggies to simmer and the liquid to reduce slightly and thicken, about five minutes, or until the potatoes can be just pierced with a fork. Stir in the peas. This is the thing I forgot, and I was annoyed, because the peas add a lovely punch of colour to the end result, and also I super love peas.

In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Blend well, and then cut the butter into the mix. You want to work the butter in with a knife at first, and then with your hands, pinching the butter and the flour in your fingers and squishing flakes back into the bowl. You want this to look a bit like the early stages of pie dough, with chunks of butter, in varying sizes. Gradually stir in the milk, and knead to make a dough.

Flatten and roll out to the approximate diameter of your pot. Mine looks to be ten or so inches in diameter, and the dough ended up being about an inch thick. It doesn’t have to be perfect – go for rustic, it’s much nicer. Nothing like Swanson’s. Press the dough into the pot gently. It doesn’t matter if there are little gaps – holes are a good thing. Keeps the juice from bubbling out all over your oven.

A little leakage? That's okay.Stab a slit into the centre, and place in the middle of your oven. Bake for 15 minutes.

Toasty/wonderful.Serve with a green salad, and a cold beer. Everything about this dish is warming, from the actual heat of the thing fresh out of the oven to the hint of curry and thyme, to the steaming biscuit topping that tastes like something your grandma would have served with soup. It’s rich and aromatic, and perfect for a crisp fall evening when you don’t want to do anything but finish a very good book, all huddled up in a blanket.

Like a hug, but you eat it. Would've been better with peas.

I think a responsible choice deserves a baked good. And I had to clean out the fridge anyway.

~ wellfedemily ~ 9 Comments

I think I mentioned awhile back that we have to move, which makes me a sad panda because I really like it here. Well, I did, at least, until the hallway light died and proved irreplaceable (for the lazy) and the faucet stopped stopping water from dripping all day and night. But it’s nice and cozy and we have a patio that looks out at trees and I liked that. So we picked a place, and it was on the high side of barely-within-budget and had a dishwasher and in-suite laundry and a pool but they wanted us to pay the rent on the 30th of each month and I haven’t had that kind of money on the day before payday in a very long time. In fact, I haven’t had money the day before payday in a very long time.

And there were other hidden surprises, and we could have taken it and made it work but we didn’t. Why do I feel so much better all of a sudden? Sigh. Of. Relief. So, big girl making big choices that I am, I felt like I earned a baked good. Also, there were leftover yams.

This recipe is for Nick’s favourite baked good. I think I invented it, but who knows. I don’t Google stuff anymore because I feel entirely unoriginal and it always proves I’m not as smart as I think I am and there are enough opportunities for that in real life without having to search for it. It’s called “Yam Bread” because Nick named it. He’s a writer. Can you tell?

Yam Bread

(Makes one 9″x5″ loaf.)

  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 tbsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 2 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp. cloves
  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1 cup pureed yams (or sweet potatoes … or you could even use squash, if that’s what you had. Or, of course, pumpkin)
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup melted butter

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Thoroughly grease a loaf pan. Note, if your loaf pans are smaller, just use two.

Combine your dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix thoroughly.

I dunno ... ingredients?Whisk together your yams, eggs, milk, butter, and vanilla, and then pour over the flour mixture, stirring to combine. This mixture is going to be dense, and it may seem unyielding. Don’t give up. You may want to take the electronic route and throw this all into a stand mixer – that’s okay too. I was just lazy and didn’t want to set mine up.

Stand-up spatula.Scrape the almost dough-like batter into your prepared pan, and bake for one hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

As this bakes, it will smell exactly like pumpkin pie. The best part? When you eat it, it will TASTE exactly like pumpkin pie, only a million times better because there’s no soggy crust and you can put butter on it. Let cool on a wire rack once it comes out of the oven. It will be crisp and crunchy on the outside, and fluffy and pie-tasting in the middle.

Looks like loaf.And so, baking comes to the rescue again. And the blogosphere, actually, although I hate calling it that because it sounds scientific and science is not fun. I call it Blogdom, because it’s like there’s a kingdom and everything’s magical because you type your problems into it and people respond to you in ways you didn’t expect them to and then you don’t feel like the only one trudging bleakly into whatever sort of despair, and there are unicorns. So, thank you, bloggy friends. You guys are cool.

This little bit made the living room smell like autumn and craft fairs and nice old ladies.