Marsha’s Comments (group member since Sep 26, 2012)

Marsha’s comments from the Baking and Books group.

I made buttermilk chocolate chip scones using dark chocolate chips. The thing I liked about it is that I got to use some of my sour milk stash in lieu of the buttermilk. I dislike throwing out milk that's gone sour because I couldn't drink it fast enough. Using recipes that utilize the sour milk as an ingredient is always a personal triumph. The chocolate chips are a definite plus as well. (The scones taste even better on the second day.)

I found a book titled Pie and I've already baked one of the culinary treats within its pages. It's an apple pie and I daringly tried a lattice crust. It wasn't a stellar effort but it was a first attempt at such a crust and I think it came out well enough. (Next time, I'll use a different recipe.)

Last night, I made a no-egg devil's food cake. I had a lot of sour milk on hand (sometimes I can't drink milk fast enough to keep it from spoiling; recipes like this are a great way to avoid waste) so I decided to bake this cake.

However, the recipe instructions were laughable. It had only three steps, the oven temperature was too low and one instruction was flagrantly wrong. It's the type of recipe that needs major re-editing. Otherwise, you get yourself a terrible mess.

I'm looking online to see where I might have gotten this recipe but am having no luck. Here are the ingredients:

4 1/2 cups flour
2 3/4 cups sugar
1 cup cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups shortening
3 cups sour milk or buttermilk
2 teaspoons vanilla

If anybody finds this recipe, please let me know so I can check against my copy.

The recipe book calls these "biscuits". But Americans will see (and taste) these as cookies.

Currant and Almond Cookies – Preheat oven to 180°C/355°F (makes abt. 3 doz. 2-in. cookies)


Ingredients:

260g/2 c. flour
9 tbsp. ground almonds (½ c. + 1 tbsp.)
1 c. currants
½ tsp. lemon rind (you can use fresh or dried)
½ tsp. ground cardamom
200g/7 oz. butter, softened
9 tbsp. brown sugar (½ c. + 1 tbsp.)
1 egg, room temp.

1. In a LARGE bowl, mix together flour, almonds, currants, lemon rind and cardamom.
2. Set aside.
3. In a very LARGE bowl, mix together brown sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
4. Mix thoroughly in egg into the sugar/butter mixture.
5. Add the dry ingredients into the wet.
6. Mix thoroughly into the dry ingredients.
7. Mound dough by tablespoons into balls. If the dough sticks to your fingers, place it in the refrigerator for a while.
8. Flatten dough balls with your palms.
9. Place cookies ½ inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheets.
10. Bake the cookies on the middle rack of the oven for 10-12 minutes or until they have taken some color.
11. Cool for 10 minutes on the sheet.
12. Remove into an airtight tin.

I need HELP! I saw this video online about these muffins but the creator was unclear about what the leavening should be. One part stated baking powder and the other baking soda. Can anybody help me with this?

Apricot Muffins - Preheat oven to 350° (makes 6 large muffins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGSku...


Ingredients:

2 eggs
100g/approx. 1 c. powdered sugar
100ml/6 tbsp. + 2 tsp. vegetable oil
100g/approx. 6 tbsp. + 2 tsp. 30% sour cream
200g/1⅝ c. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking soda (the video isn’t clear about this; wait for answer!)
Pinch of salt
3 ripe apricots, halved and cut into thin slices (6 slices per half)
Powdered sugar

1. Grease and flour a muffin tin with six muffin molds or place paper muffin cups in the holes.
2. Set aside.
3. In a LARGE bowl, place the two eggs.
4. Add the powdered sugar.
5. With a hand mixer on medium speed, beat the eggs and sugar together until thick and white.
6. With the mixer on medium speed, drizzle in the oil until thoroughly incorporated.
7. Scoop in the sour cream.
8. Mix on medium speed until thoroughly incorporated.
9. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt.
10. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet.
11. Thoroughly fold dry ingredients into the wet with a spatula.
12. Divide the batter into the prepared pan molds or paper.
13. Arrange three apricot slices upright, skin side up, into the batter of each mold.
14. Bake for 20 minutes until golden and an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
15. Allow muffins to cool slightly.
16. Remove the muffins from the molds.
17. Sift powdered sugar over the tops.

Can someone help me with this recipe? I know it’s not baking but I can’t seem to get it right. The boiled sugar-water doesn’t turn into syrup. It crystallizes into sugar bits and turns into hardened sugar shards when I pour it into the eggs. Can someone else try it and tell me what mistake I’m making? Measurements are in American English.

Ice Strawberry Mousse (makes 4-5 servings)
– Taken from Ice Cream by Hilary Walden

⅓ cup sugar
4 tablespoons water
4 egg yolks
⅔ cup cream, whipped
1¼ cups puréed and strained strawberries (1 lb. strawberries)
2 tablespoons orange liqueur or orange juice

1. In a small heavy-based saucepan, dissolve the sugar in water.
2. Bring to the boil.
3. Boil until the temperature reaches 234°F.
4. Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks in a bowl until very thick and light.
5. Gradually beat in the boiling syrup.
6. Continue beating until well increased in volume.
7. Fold in the cream.
8. Blend the strawberry purée and liqueur or orange juice together.
9. Fold into the egg yolk and cream mixture.
10. Pour into a container.
11. Cover.
12. Freeze until firm.
13. About 20 minutes before serving, transfer the mousse to the refrigerator.

I've been making a lot of cakes for my local meetup group. They really appreciate my efforts. Lately, I've been using a lot of recipes that include hazelnuts because I found a large bag of them near my home. (One of the members is baffled by how I constantly make these kind of finds. I can't explain it myself. Just lucky, I guess!)

So my latest baking efforts is a hazelnut cake made in a springform pan. It makes a low, nutty cake with a chocolate glaze on it. Since I don't have a working blender, I have to grind and chop the nuts by hand. It's time consuming and tedious but it's worth the extra effort.

I made jam cake. While the cake came out well enough but the frosting is so heavy in sugar that it went on like spackle and kept peeling. I think it could have benefited from milk along with the six tablespoons of butter.

Jute wrote: "Wow..that sounds awesome! You always make such interesting things."

Meh. I’m a trash picker with a cast iron stomach and an adventurous spirit. I just see what’s in the fridge and then try to find a recipe that fits.

Last night, I made one of my old standbys: Chinese Rice with Vegetables. It’s my favorite dish because I can whip it together in half an hour and it takes two cups of assorted vegetables. Depending on what I have on hand, it’s never the same dish twice. It’s handy for clearing out of the fridge those bits and pieces of veggies that are starting to lose their freshness. You can even used canned vegetables if you feeling reeeeeeeally lazy. It’s a great dish to make late at night when you’re really not in the mood for anything elaborate.

If you don’t want soy sauce, you can omit it. If you like to experiment, you can try other sauces for different flavors. Don’t care for the vegetarian version? Try adding beef or chicken chunks, pieces of fish or shimp. When I made it last night, I eschewed the vegetables and opted for pumpkin seeds, salted peanut halves and raisins for a Mediterranean flair.

Here’s the basic recipe.


Chinese Rice with Vegetables (makes 6 servings)


Ingredients:

1 c. uncooked rice
2 c. water
2 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tsp. vegetable oil
2 c. any combination of: fresh or frozen peas, frozen mixed vegetables, julienned carrots, sliced mushrooms, chopped green pepper, shredded Chinese cabbage, broccoli flowerets, sliced green beans
Ground black pepper
Salt (opt.)

1. Combine rice, water, soy sauce and oil in 2- to 3-quart saucepan.
2. Bring to a boil.
3. Stir once or twice.
4. Reduce heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes.
5. Add vegetables.
6. Cover and simmer 5 minutes or until rice and vegetables are tender and liquid is absorbed.
7. Season to taste.

I made Italian Green Beans last night. I'd found green beans, garlic cloves, Pecorino Romano cheese, bacon and a couple of tomatoes. So I browsed through foodferret.com to find a recipe using these items.

The recipe actually called for frozen green beans and mine were fresh. Thus I had to wing it, making some substitutions and varying cooking times to accomodate the tender vegetables.

It tastes great and looks interesting, what with the browned chunks of cheese adhering to the beans and the meaty bacon slices dotting it. Nothing like a cheap meal to round out the day.

I made chicken with white wine and tomato sauce yesterday. The recipe is for chicken legs and thighs. But I had chicken breast meat so I used that instead and it worked very well. The recipe recommended eating this with rice so I whipped up some of that as well.

I made Swedish meatballs, the very first time I ever made meatballs with milk. They're also in a sour cream gravy. It's an interesting taste combination.

I found scads of lettuce in a local bin and took them home. So I made lettuce soup. It's very good and has a light flavor to it so that only a little salt and pepper is needed. Maybe next time I'll add bacon bits.

On Christmas Eve (and hopefully for the new year), I made Vegan Carrot Soup. I wanted to clear out the carrots, potatoes and vegetable in my fridge. Also, it's getting very cold so this is ideal weather to make and eat soup. This came out chunky, hearty and thick, mainly because I no longer have a working blender.

If the bread is really hard, too much so to eat or even slice, I grate it on the fine side of a four-sided grater and make bread crumbs.

I made Beef Rib Eye Roast with Red Wine Mushroom Sauce with Brussels sprouts in a creamy sauce. There was only about one pound of roast instead of the three called for in the recipe so I had to juggle the ingredients a bit. But it came out very well, moist with a rich gravy of fresh mushrooms and parsley.

I also used a lot of ingredients I found so it was one of my inexpensive dishes as well.

I want to try making the chuck/pot roast recipe again, only this time with beer as the flavorful liquid instead of wine.

However, I believe that beer would require different "chunkies", as Alton Brown would call them. So what spices, herbs and vegetables would be the best additions with Amstel Light beer? Any suggestions?

Best Pot Roast

Ingredients:

Cooking oil
A hunk of good beef, chuck roast or brisket (briskets are usually cooked longer and shredded in their juice; chuck roasts are sliced against the grain)
Root vegetables such as beets, carrots, celery, garlic, ginger, onions, potatoes, radishes, rutabagas, shallots or turnips (carrots, celery, garlic and onions are a popular combination with pot roast)
Liquid (beer, stock, wine, water)

1. Brown a hunk of good beef in hot oil. Brown it deeply for best flavor.
2. Remove the beef.
3. Cook some onions, carrots, celery, garlic, or other root vegetables in the oil until softened.
4. Add liquid (beer, stock, wine).
5. Bring to a light simmer.
6. Add the beef back.
7. Cover the pot.
8. Cook on very low heat for several hours. (I prefer to cook it in the oven; the all-over heat seems to do good things. The next best is the slow cooker, in my opinion.)

One final note of advice: Read up on braising, where you can get more details on this, but remember never to cook your pot roast at too high of a heat. It will interrupt that slow melting cooking process and make your roast tough and stringy. Never let it boil; just cook at a long, slow, low heat.

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/go...

Notes: I pulled this recipe from an online suggestion. The instructions are vague and it gives no amounts nor specific cooking time. So why put it here? I suppose I like the idea of a challenge!

When Alton Brown cooked a pot roast using chuck meat in his episode “A Chuck for Chuck”, season four, episode seven, he relied on a large cast-iron skillet for cooking the meat on the stove and wrapped the meat in foil for oven roasting. This was a basic recipe for a college student living out of a trailer so he made it very simple indeed. I could try that with this recipe if I don’t want to fuss with a large pot.

11/30/2012 – I made this last night, although I ended up finishing it in the wee hours of the morning. I had found a beef brisket, shallots, garlic cloves, carrots, celery, a sweet potato and red wine. So I used all of that to cook this pot roast. It took a while. Since this recipe didn’t come with time setting, heat levels, amounts or oven temperature settings, I had to wing a lot of the instructions. However, it all came out very well!

The brisket was about 1½ pounds. I heated ¼ cup of olive oil in a heavy 11-inch cast-iron skillet on medium-high heat until it was smoking. I cut up two small shallots, crushed three garlic cloves, pared and sliced one sweet potato and one celery stalk and set them aside in a bowl. When the brisket was browned, I tossed the cut-up root vegetables into the oil and cooked it for about 5-7 minutes (if I had to do it over, I would put in the harder veggies first, like the potatoes and carrots, and let them cook before adding the softer foods like the celery, garlic and shallots.) For step four, I used leftover beef broth and added some red wine to make one cup of liquid.

Then I added the brisket back, clapped an iron lid over the entire pan and stuck it in a preheated 200°F oven for about six hours. It came out juicy, tender and swimming in a thin broth that cries out to be sopped up with bread.

I finally made the soup. It was last Saturday but I kept getting distracted and really busy. This is another recipe from The Ultimate Soup Bible . It’s Chilled Tomato and Sweet Pepper Soup. It’s rather bland, actually, even with additional salt and pepper. The best thing that can be said about it is that I found most of the ingredients I used for it so it was very cheap to make.

I made poached pears in a raspberry coulis from a 4-ingredient cookbook. I didn't have white grape juice or Riesling or raspberries. Instead I used homemade dandelion wine and thawed mulberries. This is a recipe notable for its ease of preparation, few ingredients and shortness of prep time: about 30-35 minutes.