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! 

Fall Corn Chowder

I sort of kind of made this corn chowder recipe last night from the USA Weekend newspaper insert...Creamless Corn Chowder.  I say "sort-of-kind-of" because once I got home and started looking at it I realized I did not have time to grill the veggies.  So instead I followed the "short cut" version's suggestion of sauteing the onions, peppers, etc. with the bacon.  I didn't puree the corn either.  I cut the corn off the cob and then used a spoon to scrape the yummy milky goodness out of the cobs as well.  I added 4 medium-hot roasted green chilis as well.  SO, in a nutshell, here's what I did...

I chopped up 4 slices of bacon and started frying them in a pan.  I added 1/2 of a large Vidalia onion and 1/2 of a green bell pepper once the bacon was almost done.  I also added in 4 chopped green chilis.  In a separate pot I added 2 cups of chicken broth and 1 cup milk.  I chopped 3 small potatoes and 1 large potato fairly small and added that to the pot.  Then while that was coming to a boil, I cut the corn off of 4 ears and scraped out the corn milk too.  I added all that to the pot of boiling broth/milk/potatoes and let it cook (stirring frequently) until the potatoes were soft.  I added lots of salt and black pepper.  Once the potatoes were pretty soft I used the potato masher to smoosh the potatoes up a little bit and make the chowder a little smoother.  Then I dumped in all the peppers, onions, bacon and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.  To serve I added hot sauce and a side of cheese and chipolte salsa quesadillas.  I will definitely be making this soup again!

Gringo Chile Rellenos and more uses for roasted green chiles...

I didn't know roasted green chiles were a popular item until I moved to Western Colorado.  Here we all await late July because we know that the Hatch green chiles will soon be roasting at all the farm stands in the area.  There is nothing like pulling up to your favorite produce stand and seeing a giant roasting drum outside.  You just know it's green chile season!  Bags and bags of warm, freshly roasted peppers lined the table at my favorite stand just yesterday.  An old farmer stood there labeling, bagging and sealing quarts of deliciousness.  Before November I'll have the freezer stocked with several bags of these awesome delicacies.

     Roasted green chiles have a very distinct flavor, I think.  There's a hint of smokiness along with a peppery bite.  They are soft and silky.  Some are hotter than others, but there's nothing that can replace the taste of a fresh green chile in a burrito, in scrambled eggs, or even in an eggroll wrapper.  What's that you say?  An eggroll wrapper?  Oh yes.

This is a bag of green chiles before I peeled and de-seeded them.

A lovely roasted green chile - peeled but with seeds still inside.  These come out very easily.  We usually split our chiles down the middle and rinse the seeds out.

    

These are Voodoo Biker's "Gringo Chile Rellenos" before they are cooked.  They are eggroll wrappers filled with a green chile and a nice slice of pepperjack cheese.  You just roll them up and brown them in about 1 tbsp oil.

Nicely browned Gringo Rellenos!

How awesome does that look?  Gooey cheese, a beautiful green chile...mmmm!

     Even though I could eat these for days on end, we do find plenty of other uses for green chiles.


Green chile creamed corn:  This is best with Olathe sweet corn :)  I cut the corn off the cob, then use the back of a spoon to get all the "milk" out of each ear of corn.  Then I saute onions and garlic in 2 tbsp butter, add in the corn, and a splash of chicken broth.  I let all that cook for a few minutes, until the broth is absorbed.  Then I add in about 1/2 cup of chopped green chiles and a lot of salt and black pepper.

Corn cut from the cob is on the right.  "Milk" from the cob is on the left.

Mexican flatbread (aka pizza).  For this I use the Santa Fe blend of Philly Cooking Creme as the sauce.  Then I top the pizza with red onions, red bell pepper, green chiles and cojita cheese (and of course a little mozarella).

 
You can also add them to scrambled eggs with cheese, turkey sandwiches, burgers...the list goes on!  I think my favorite ways to eat them are the simplest - wrapped in an eggroll wrapper, sprinkled in a quesadilla... But however you enjoy them, make sure you do it before the season is over!

Bunk? Bun? BUNDTTTTTTTT

    Everytime I use a bundt pan, I do two things:  1. Tell myself to wait until the cake is completely cooled before I invert the cake pan.  2. Giggle over my favorite scene in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."  You can watch that scene here. 
     Impatient people should not use bundt pans.  Seriously, if you're like me and you cannot wait until the darn cake is completely 100% cooled before you try to flip it out of the bundt pan, do not use one.  The cake will still taste great if you use a 9x13 pan. 

     I made this Chocolate Pistachio cake again from a recipe I found on the Pioneer Woman's website.  Here's a link to it.  You can see from the picture that Ree (the Pioneer Woman) must be a patient person.  Then again, she's posting her pictures for millions to see and therefore wants her cake to look perfect.  I was bringing mine to work where I have lots of friends - they don't care how it looks as long as it's tasty :)