Cake Repair, Part 3 - the Presentation

Cake Repair, Part 2

On the day Mom had to take Becky back to college (or at least half way), Pop was left to finish the repair job solo.

Step One:  Gather ingredients . . .
Home made frosting with cream cheese (he didn't take a picture of the cream cheese, sorry) - vanilla and powder sugar

......

Then he frosted layer one - the bonus layer...

And Finished Product "notice the Hebrew" - in the freezer to wait for the

return of the Anniversary couple....

Cake Repair, Part 1

The Anniversary Cake - attacked by "Pop" for a midnight snack once upon a time.... and since the anniversary is near - repair is necessary...

The Damages up close:

So here we go - Cake Repair: Part One 

Step one: prepare necessary parts . . .

One piece for "filling" and another for the new "bonus" base layer.

Step Two, cut out "new" center for cake, and attempt to plug-hole...

Level the Surface as much as possible...

Install parts...

  And then level the field again . . .

melted original icing to use as glue (. . . I mean, "filling")

Final trim . . .

and new layer gets to rest in the freezer....until tomorrow (when we take up Part #2)

Crème caramel

An instructional video done by some cuisine-saavy Canadians was the inspiration for this dish. They explain the dish much better than I, and after watching it a couple of times, I made the dish without using a written recipe.















You need to plan ahead because the dessert needs to chill for at least a few hours.

You will need only five ingredients- milk, eggs (a lot of them), sugar, vanilla, and water. Notably, we used half measurements of the video's instructions, because my soufflé dish is smaller.


First, you start a half quart of milk on the heat - it should boil, but only slightly, with some small bubbles around the edges of the milk - not a rolling boil like you are making pasta. Put your milk on medium heat and watch it carefully.





Put about a half a cup of sugar (or 1 cup if you are following the video) into a pan and wet it - you don't want lots of water standing above the sugar.


Put the sugar and water (your future caramel) on medium-low heat. The caramel easily burns, so as soon as it turns a beautiful golden brown color, take it off the heat and swirl it in the air so that it does not burn.

Prepare a bain-marie (a water bath) in your oven. This is easy - find a dish that your soufflé dish will set into, set water to boil, and then pour boiling water into it - to a level that will surround your dish to the 1/3 point or so. The video makes this very easy to understand.

The oven should be at 400F. While your milk is heating and your caramel is bubbling, crack 6 eggs (or 12 if you follow the video) into a large bowl. Our eggs were from the farmer's market, so some of the yolks are a beautiful darker color and stand out from the others.




Temper your eggs with the milk (gradually add milk a few times and stir, so that you do not cook the eggs). Beat the eggs until white peaks form. Once the eggs are beaten, add a teaspoon or so of vanilla. I say "or so" because I love vanilla and usually add more.

Your caramel should be done (or maybe it was done already). Take it off the heat, and pour it into the bottom of your soufflé. Gently tip the dish around so that the caramel coats the bottom of the dish and about 1/4 of an inch on the sides.

Pour your egg mixture into the dish.

Place your soufflé dish into the bain-marie.



Close your oven:) Wait for an hour.
Put it in the refrigerator and be sure not to touch it for at least 4 hours. I waited 6.



Take out your beautiful crème caramel and sigh at its loveliness.















After this time, take out the dish and cut around the outside of it with a knife, place an upside-down plate on top of the dish, turn it over quickly onto the plate, being careful not to break the mold.
















You should have a beautiful crème caramel.




Posted by Sara

John's Fish Dinner

Inspired by reading Julia Child's tales of fish-eating in France, (usually full of butter & white wine references) we decided to cook an experimental fish in similar style guided by intuition...yes, instead of a recipe.

You need: fillets of white fish of your choice, fresh lemon, parsley, garlic, white wine, butter, salt and pepper.

Steps: Warm butter in your pan and sear the fish so it is slightly brown on both sides. Remove the fish to a warm oven. Deglaze the fish pan with white wine. Add a bit more butter, lemon, and garlic to your taste. Simmer and reduce until it is the consistency you like for a sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the fish and garnish with parsley. We served the fish over Israeli couscous, but you could use a bed of greens or grain of your choice.


Our fish in the pan (you should have a bit less butter in searing than this picture shows)















John putting the fish to warm in the oven.















Our reducing fish sauce. You could also add some flour to thicken this, but we went lighter.















John pouring the sauce over the fish















The beautiful result















Our dinner - fish with couscous, green beans, bread...



Posted by Sara

Sauce

I cooked a marvelous and colorful pasta sauce this evening. Worthy of photos and blogging, but nobody thought of it at the time. Any actually nobody has thought of it at all, until just now.


-- Posted from my iPhone

So I called Just Grammy...

This is going to be a short one, but I thought I'd post because I had a couple of decent photos. So, I've already blogged about our fondness for grassfed beef - albeit leaving out some of the moral and economic justifications for it.

For more on this, I would refer you to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

We buy ground beef the most, for economic reasons, but recently, we decided to try a roast. We bought a more expensive london broil, and also a bottom round roast. This entry will be about the latter.

I'm not very adept at cooking with beef (yet!) so I called Just Grammy, the acknowledged authority on matters relating
to red meat, roasts, and their cousins. Her recipe layed out a simple procedure: brown the beef very well in a dutch oven.
Pour about a cup of good water into the pot - coming up to about a third the level of your roast. Then, roast it in the oven at 350 degrees for your initial hour. The time will vary based on how many pounds you have - we had about 2 pounds, and cooked the roast for around 3 hours. After an hour, we reduced the temperature to 250.

While your roast is cooking, cut up an assortment of vegetables - we use carrots, onions, and potatoes, for a basic roast. I think we will broaden to incorporate a greater variety for our london broil. About 45 minutes before the roast is done, put the vegetables in around the roast and continue to cook. Around the time your roast is done, the vegetables should be tender.

One note on grassfed beef - it tends to be less marbled than what you buy at the store, the natural result of actually eating what cows are meant to eat. That said, it would be a good idea to tenderize your roast prior to cooking with whatever method suits you, to increase its tenderness when removed from the oven.

You can reduce your broth on the stove after the roast is taken out and add some red wine, salt and pepper, and whatever herbs you like. While reducing, deglaze by scraping the bits from the bottom. Pour this reduction over your roast.

All said, it was a tasty meal and perfect for early fall.



Posted by Sara

Home Pub

Once in a while, we take it into our heads to go out to a pub for a beer and a burger and hopefully really danceable live Irish music. If our wallets are empty, a battle between reason and frivolity commences. In most cases, frivolity beats reason to a pulp. But this time, they compromised, and instead of an evening out at the pub, we created our own...right here at home. It turned out that it was actually better food than anything you would get in a pub. This is thanks to Baucom's Best beef, delicious locally-raised grassfed beef that we buy on Saturday mornings at our local market.

Required ingredients: grassfed beef and all the trimmings, beer.














John snapped this of me frying away.



The little onion bits browned (maybe too much but they were tasty).


Beer competition.


Reconciliation


The final table!

Posted by Sara

Homemade Pizza using Lebanese Flatbread

First - the flatbread, which was probably not hard to make - but as the cook has not taken up "keyboard" to detail the process, a picture will have to do . . . . It was marvelous, in case you wonder. Then the cheese, was a homemade mozzarella (we didn't make it; it was made by the Finley's son, Will - he is a  real "chef").  But JGW did pick the tomatoes from our meager garden - AND the fresh basil, which has done pretty well in spite of the drought . . . 

So here is Pop, slicing the tomatoes and preparing for a short baking time, and then getting ready to show off the yummy creation of the evening..And here is the final product:  spectacular (and gone too soon). 

Posted by LAW

Breakfast/Lunch on Retreat

This is lame, but desperate to post SOMETHING about cooking since daughter totally dominating the What's Cooking Blog, here we detail that certain staff persons of Sojourn Community church successfully prepared LOTS of bacon and eggs for hungry throng this past weekend . . . There WERE additional breakfasts prepared, but alas - the photographer was herself the "short-order" egg chef and unable to take any pictures :(

We did sort of a self-serve lunch line - which I'm sure makes John really glad he didn't have to be there, appreciate it, and then do dishes (which were all paper anyway).

Next post, will try to involve REAL culinary adventure and spices . . . .

I hear a signature is required, so here goes: law

Posted by LAW

Lemon Fettuccine *ala Lynne Rossetto Kasper

I'm an avid fan of The Splendid Table. Listening to Lynne's eloquent culinary advice not only peaks my interest but makes my mouth water. On this week's show, a woman, recently returned from Italy, wanted to see if Lynne could create a recipe for a taste she'd discovered there on a riverboat....a light, lemony pasta.

I fudged Lynne's recipe just a tad (linguine instead of fettuccine) but otherwise, stuck to it.

So for this recipe and its delicious results, kudos to The Splendid Table.
















Listening to the show while cooking




Recipe = Simplicity:
Zest a whole lemon, thinly slice 3-4 cloves of garlic. While your pasta cooks (good quality fettuccine or linguine), warm olive oil in a skillet (medium at most), add lemon zest to the olive oil. After a minute or so add the garlic slices. This needs to get fragrant only, then scoop 1/4 cup of pasta water into the olive oil and watch it make a sauce. This only takes a couple minutes. Then pour in your pasta and fold into the sauce. Cut the zested lemon and squeeze all the lemon juice into your pasta, tossing as you go so the juice doesn't cook. And voila...



The picture doesn't say much but the flavors do.






Afterwards, John was so pleased he washed the dishes...



Posted by Sara

Vegetarian Burritos

So we were driving around, and passing through what we would describe as a small, quaint township, and came upon the local farmer's market, or what remained of it. Farmer's markets are our new weekend hobby, an affair which even I, a staunch morning hibernationist, rise before dawn to attend to. Literally...if you don't make it to one particular favorite market of ours before 7:30, your chances of going home with a fresh dozen of free range eggs are close to nil.

Opposition to Seinfeld-coined "sweatshop eggs" featured in your supermarket at $.10 cents an egg can cost you a couple of hours' sleep if you take it seriously enough. But egg moralism aside, we really enjoy the feeling of being in our local market - schmoozing with the local food growers, bringing home bags of locally-grown, as-good-as-organic produce, drinking fresh coffee from the stand and maybe standing around, eating one of those freshly-baked scones as you peel back the wrapper.

So we plundered the local growers and made off with two bags of peppers - ordinary green and sweet multicolored, and a bag of cherokee purple tomatoes. We had bought some poblano peppers from the superG a couple days before. SO...we roasted all of them under the broiler. I couldn't figure out what temperature to roast at - I started out timidly at around 250 and eventually hit 375.

We chopped those up and laid them in pretty rows beside our chopped up purple tomatoes, made some brown rice and cooked our black beans, to that added some trader joe's poblano salsa, and ground up some fresh cumin seed, sea salt, and chili pepper in a mortar and pestle. All that together in 4 spectacorific vegetarian tortillas made a great lunch.




Posted by Sara