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Beautiful Balsamic Brussels Sprouts

This is the lowly underappreciated Brussels sprout.  Each one looks like a tiny head of cabbage and tastes similar as well!  As an adult I have rediscovered these little gems.  These guys have lots of vitamins including a boatload of Vitamin C.   Usually I roast them.  I trim off the ends, chop them in half, add about 2 tbsp of olive oil and some salt, and stick them in the oven at 425 for about 30 minutes.

Tonight I didn't have time for that.  I had fish in the oven that was going to be done in 35 minutes and I wanted everything else done by then too.  So first I quartered the sprouts and put them all in a square microwave safe pyrex dish.  I added about 1/2 cup water (I could have used a little less) and some salt.  I covered the whole thing with plastic wrap and microwaved for 6 minutes.  I wish I had a picture of that.

In the meantime pour between 1/2 and 1 cup of balsamic vinegar into a small saucepan.  Add 2 tsp sugar and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to medium and let the vinegar reduce by half.  It will start to get thicker and sweeter.  Remove it from heat when it has reduced by half.

Melt 1 tbsp butter with 1 tbsp olive oil in a pan.  I like to use the cast iron skillet because things brown so beautifully in it.  Chop up about 4 mushrooms and 1 clove garlic and start that heating and browning in the pan.  When the Brussels sprouts are out of the microwave...add them to the pan. 

The finished product

Isn't that pretty?  Look how green!  If there is any water in with the veggies now, turn the heat up and let the water evaporate.  Don't go too far away.  Once the water has evaporated, turn the heat back to medium and add 1 tbsp oil.  Stir and then stop.  Now go away.  Wash a few dishes, send a quick email...what I mean is, let the veggies start to brown a bit on the bottom.  When most everyone has had a chance to get a little color to them, add the balsamic vinegar reduction and remove from the heat.



I was in a mood for fast, simple and tasty food tonight so while the Brussels sprouts were doing their thing, I chopped a few potatoes.

I wanted them to hold their shape, so I kept the pieces of potato fairly large - about 2 bites each.  I added these guys to a large pot and covered with water.  I added some salt as well and turned the heat to high.  That's right.  I'm boiling potatoes.

Check out that levitating lid!

I cooked the potatoes about 8 minutes.  Then I drained them, threw them back in the pot and added 2 tbsp real butter, salt and pepper, about 2 tbsp parmesan cheese and a sprinkle of chives.

Mmmmm...steamy potatoes...

Tonight's dinner was nothing fancy.  The fish was great but I still like the tortilla crusted tilapia the best.  The thing about dinner is, it was done in 35 minutes, it was good and it was good for me.  Hey, a little butter never hurt anyone!  One last recipe...

I've got a scratchy throat and a slight sniffle which I hope is the result of winter dust mite allergies and not a cold.  I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a cold.  It's been years.  So I pulled out all the stops tonight:

Bigelow now has an apple cider tea.  It's awesome.  Get  a packet of it.  In your tea mug, squeeze 1/2 tbsp honey and add 1 packet sweetener or some sugar.

(Excuse the sideways-ness of this photo).  Add 1 shot of Canadian Whiskey and fill with hot water.  Enjoy!

A New Year and New foods!

It's a new year and with that in mind I'm on a kick to try new foods.  First up:  Spaghetti Squash.  Maybe it doesn't look so great in the photo, but let me tell you it is really tasty and super easy to prepare.  All I did here was cut the squash in half and scoop out the seeds and other gross squash intestines.  Then I rubbed on a little olive oil.  I placed 1/2 of the squash cut side down in a pyrex dish with 1/4 cup water and covered it tightly with plastic wrap.  I microwaved it for 13 minutes.  In the meantime I threw my favorite quick and healthy fish (SeaCuisine Brand) in the oven and chopped up some broccoli.  While the broccoli steamed and the fish cooked I made a little marinara sauce with some oregano, garlic, olive oil and crushed tomatoes.  I let this simmer while everything else cooked.  Once the first squash half was done I took it out and then took the fork and ran it lengthwise down the squash.  The most amazing thing happened!  It really did make spaghetti strands!  It was the coolest thing. So while the second one cooked I fluffed up the strands of spaghetti squash and topped them with marinara.  I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up that squash at the store. 

Friends have said they also eat the spaghetti squash like they would butternut squash:  with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon.

I'm definitely on a vegetables kick lately.  Not a vegetarian kick, but a vegetables kick.  Salads, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, squash, potatoes, peas...and I'm attempting to nurture a renewed interest in fruit.  I got hooked on raspberries a few weeks ago and before that it was clementines.  Next I might start adding half a grapefruit to breakfast.

On tonight's menu?  Another SeaCuisine fish - cod with lemon, herbs and something else... These are often on sale at one of the local grocery stores, they're low in calories and they are so easy to prepare.  You don't even have to thaw them!  My favorites are the mediterranean crusted salmon and the tortilla crusted tilapia.  You just preheat the oven, pop them on a sheet pan and cook them for 30 minutes.  Quick, healthy and tasty!

Sour Cream Pound Cake

For dessert on Christmas (and every day since) we had Sour Cream Pound Cake with raspberries and whipped cream.  This cake was amazingly simple to make!  The recipe I followed is June Dorminy's from a 4-H cookbook in my hometown published in 1996.

Preheat oven to 300.

1/2 pound butter
3 cups sugar
6 eggs
3/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup milk
1/4 tsp baking powder
3 cups plain flour
1 tsp vanilla

Cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs in one at a time.  Combine sour cream and milk and mix.  Then add flour a little bit at a time.  Add the vanilla and mix a tad more.  Spray your bundt pan with a cooking spray that has flour in it.  I like Baker's Joy.  It makes a difference! 

Cook the cake for 1 1/2 hours or slightly longer until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  Let the cake cool before you try to flip it out of the pan.  Top with whatever fruit you like and whipped cream.

I really have been cooking...

Despite my lack of posting recently, I have been cooking.  Cooking and cooking and cooking.  It's the holiday season after all!  Here's a list of things recently made and my critique of each of them:

• I made pumpkin bread (the recipe was for pumpkin muffins but c'mon...like I'm going to follow that?).  It turned out so well that I shared some with people at work and then sent some to my dad for Christmas.  I think what makes it so tasty is the addition of golden raisins.
• For Thanksgiving I made my first ever real bake-it-in-the-oven cheesecake.  It was a pumpkin cheesecake for which I got the recipe off of a Philadelphia Cream Cheese advertisement.  It turned out great!
• It's been a month of pumpkin ok?  The pumpkin risotto I made didn't taste like I expected it to.  It could have been an overabundance of parmesan, but something made it taste almost Italian-ish.  I wanted it to taste like pumpkin.  It wasn't bad, just not what I thought it would be.
• Thursday night I thinly sliced some boneless country style pork ribs, sauteed them in a pan, then simmered in bbq sauce with a little white balsamic vinegar added (to make it more like Carolina bbq sauce).  I then toasted some awesome buns with a little cheese on them, put a big spoonful of the pork on top, and then added coleslaw.  Right. on. top.  Delish!
• Of course, with the work potluck and all, I had to make the Rosalyn Carter Cheese Ring.  While no one believes cheese and strawberry jam will be good together, they do after they taste this.  
• So there you have it.  Some recent cooking sessions.  Christmas Eve will be filled with skiing and a large pot of spaghetti with marinara sauce and Italian sausage.  Christmas will of course be ham-centric ;)

Undaunted Courage

     Lewis and Clark have made it to the Pacific!  While they aren't hanging out on a beach anywhere, they are facing the wintery storms and blustery winds of modern-day Astoria, Oregon at this point in the book.  I'm almost 2/3 of the way through and so far we've packed for the journey, traveled up the Missouri river, met with bands of Sioux, Hidatsa, Mandan, Shoshone and Nez Perce Indians, suffered through a gross winter in North Dakota and discovered the culinary delights of roots, horse and dog.  Hey, you've gotta eat what you've gotta eat.
     I think Ambrose does a great job of mostly telling it like it is - he allows you to envision it for yourself and to come to your own conclusions about some things.  Sometimes he does include his opinion about what most likely happened, the causes of certain events, etc.  His most vexing mystery, for himself at least, is where are the rest of Lewis's journals?  Surely the guy who was ordered by Thomas Jefferson to keep a daily log didn't just forget...or just disobey a direct order... Ambrose's theory?  Lewis's manic-depressive nature caused him to sometimes turn melacholic and not write.  It's not as if no one was writing - Clark wrote almost daily.  There are notes everywhere for everything and Lewis went so far as to sometimes send live specimens back to Jefferson - he shipped back a prairie dog!
     I haven't been disappointed with this book.  It's insightful and I'm really able to see Lewis and Clark as characters and as makers of history - not just as two guys who decided to take a trip to the Pacific Ocean.

Caramel Cake - It only survived because of my mom

This weekend I made a caramel cake.  A from scratch, covered with cooked caramel icing, straight-from-the-south caramel cake.  I followed this recipe from Deep South Dish.  Why didn't I follow the recipe of someone from the Food Network or from a 4-H cookbook?  I don't know, but the recipes were the least of my problems so I guess that chick knows what she's talking about.

I started yesterday by making the cake part of the caramel cake.  Good thing I hadn't planned to make the icing yesterday since it was rainy and cloudy all day and ANYONE from the South knows you can't cook candy or icing on a rainy, cloudy day.  I'm making the assumption that it's because there's too much moisture in the air.  So anyway, I made the cake.  Keep in mind that the only "from scratch" cake I've made before was a pound cake.  It turned out well but that didn't keep me from worrying about these. 

I whisked my dry ingredients (that's my version of sifting), creamed my butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla, added in the flour and milk (alternating, ending with the flour because that's how the recipe did it).  I divided the batter into 2 springform pans coated with Baker's Joy (Thanks Kisha!) and waxed paper.  Everything was going great.  I got them in the oven with no trouble.  The recipe said to make sure not to overcook them, and to start with 20 minutes, then check them.  And there's where the trouble began.

At 20 minutes I could see they probably weren't ready, but I thought I would check anyway.  Wrong move.  Why?  Because as soon as I opened the oven door both layers sank in the middle.  Not a little bit - a LOT.  I thought maybe they would rise back up a little, but no.  Two sunken-in-the-middle layers.  This was not going to do, not at all.  One sunken layer?  That I could probably deal with...but TWO?  No.  So I set about making a third layer.  I halved the recipe, got it in the oven, turned on the oven light and set the timer for 30 minutes.  I watched it but I did NOT open the oven at all.  That one turned out much better - not perfect, but close enough.  Still, I only needed 2 layers soooooo what to do with that third sunken layer?  Why treat the Voodoo Biker and his employees that's what! 

Here's what I did:  I peeled and chopped two pretty big peaches (almost softball sized).  I melted 2 tbsp butter, about 1/4 cup brown sugar and a little vanilla and lemon juice in a pan.  I threw in the peaches and sauteed for a few minutes.  In the mean time, I poked some holes in the layer with a toothpick.  Then I dumped the peaches and glaze over the layer and took it down to the store.  I heard it was great ;)

Anyway, I put the other two layers in the freezer overnight.  Today after an awesome bike ride with my friend A, I set about making the icing.  I read the recipe twice before I even began.  It involved melting sugar (the "burnt" sugar portion of the recipe) in a cast iron skillet while at the same time bringing to a boil a milk, sugar, butter and vanilla mixture in a separate pan.  Eventually all this gets combined.  Tip #1:  Always use a bigger saucepan (like a 4 qt) than you think you'll need.  This was mistake #2 for me as I did not do that. 

When I poured the caramel mix into the milk mix it rose up to the top of the pan and over the sides as I was screaming to no one in particular, "This isn't going to work!  It's not going to work!"  I set the saucepan down on top of the cast iron skillet (although it had already poured melted sugar onto the stove eye) and grabbed a bigger pan.  As I was pouring from one to another my candy thermometer fell onto the floor.  Smoke was coming off the one burner, I was throwing the pan and sugar mix onto another burner and the candy thermometer was lying on the floor.  I turned on the fan, picked up the candy thermometer, and went back to whisking the mix to get it to the soft-ball stage.  The candy thermometer was sitting on "Soft-ball" after only a minute or two.  Wow, that was fast, I thought.  I took the mix off the heat and continued to whisk.  It was supposed to get thick and creamy.  It wasn't.  That's when I realized the candy thermometer was broken. 

At this point I suppose less stubborn people might give up, or at least start over.  I was determined to make this work.  I threw the candy thermometer away, got the pot back on the heat, and started whisking again.  They call it the "soft-ball" stage for a reason.  I grabbed a glass of cold water and a spoon and set them beside the stove.  I thought back to all the times I made fudge with my mom and sister.  Soft-ball stage literally means the mix will form a soft ball when you drop it in water.  So I whisked and every minute I would drop a little drop of mix into the water.  The caramel began to change, to get hotter - you could see it from the way it bubbled.  I checked again - still no soft ball.  After probably a full 5 or 6 minutes of whisking and checking, it finally changed - it didn't exactly form a ball shape, but it formed a shape instead of just streaming to the bottom of the glass.  

I took it off the heat and kept whisking.  I looked at the clock and figured I'd give it 5 minutes.  If nothing had changed by then I could assume it was ruined.  But it did start to change!  I thought again to the candy making from my childhood and knew to whisk until some of the sheen was gone from the caramel.  It started to thicken and get dull and I stopped whisking and picked up the phone.  "Mom?  The fact that this caramel icing worked is all because of you."

The bottom layer was the sunken one and you can tell that even here.  I tried to get the icing to flow prettily over the edges...

Is the cake beautiful?  No.  That's because I waited a bit too long to start icing it and the caramel started to set...BUT it tastes amazing!