summary

Cooking without a safety net

Thursday, September 26, 2013

All or Naan

I still haven't gotten the hang of Indian food, but I will occasionally fake something similar (lately, using a jar I picked up at a food fair back in Oregon and only recently opened).  I use this as an excuse to do something I know I can do: make passable naan.

My recipe comes from the excellent and well-illustrated Bread.  I've only made it a couple times, but it works well with dinner (obviously), and I usually end up eating pieces for breakfast or lunch for the next couple days.

I'm having naan of it.
2 t dry yeast
1 C milk
4 C all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t salt
1 t sugar
3 T plain yogurt (I think I actually used vanilla flavored yogurt once--that's good, too)
2 T ghee or unsalted butter, melted (I can't find ghee and haven't yet learned how to make it, so I used butter)


  1. Sprinkle yeast in 1/2 C milk.  Let stand 5 minutes, stir to dissolve.  In a large bowl, combine flour ans salt, then make a well in the center.  Add the melted butter, dissolved yeast, sugar, and yogurt.
  2. Mix in the flour from the sides of the well.  Add remaining milk as needed to get a stiff, slightly sticky dough.  (the book says "stiff, sticky" dough.  I have trouble managing dough that is genuinely sticky, and I suspect you do, too.  You're not going for chewing gum stuck to your shoe consistency here; you just want it to feel a little tacky as you handle it.  You should be able to easily free your hand from the dough ball after picking it up)
  3. Knead ten minutes.
  4. Let rise until doubled.  It may take 3-4 hours.  Plan accordingly.
  5. Punch down, let rest for ten minutes.
  6. I diverge from the book again here.  It says to divide the dough into four pieces, then roll them to 1/4 thick and about 6 inches in diameter.  The math doesn't work.  I can get them to achieve one of those dimensions, not both.  So I divide it into 8 pieces, roll them to the specified thickness, and if they are still a little big in diameter, that's ok.  Make naan of manageable size.
  7. Preheat your broiler on the highest setting (mine only has one setting, so that was easy).  Another side note here: If you have an electric oven, the broiler is probably at the top.  If you have a gas oven, the broiler is definitely at the bottom.  This has caused me trouble in the past, but it works fine for the naan.  Just move your oven rack to the bottom.  If you're using an electric oven, move the rack to the top, but maybe not all the way to the top.  These will puff up A LOT, and you don't want to burn the tops of them.  Much.
  8. Preheat the baking sheet for 2-3 minutes.  Put a couple dough rounds on the sheet (I can usually fit three of my smaller rounds on my sheets.  It should be easy to gauge, because while they will expand upward--sometimes an awful lot--they don't expand outward) and bake 2-3 minutes on each side, until puffy and golden.
  9. Stack baked breads on top of each other on a wire rack.  Cover with a clean, dry cloth to prevent drying.  Eat that night if possible.  Otherwise, they toast well, but the smooth outer texture makes spreading stuff like cream cheese nearly impossible.  Jelly might work.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

just some pasta

I have a book of pasta recipes that I picked up a few years ago from the bargain table at Noble Barn.  The Chief Taster scoffed at it, proclaiming all you need for pasta is pasta, cheese, and sauce.  True, I suppose, but there's a pretty wide panorama of options in that range.  Back in Oregon, when I briefly had an intern (mwahahaha), we got to talking about pasta, and I told him you can never really know all the pasta recipes, because pasta is used as a staple item in so many different cultures.  Even if you master Italian cooking (motto: Just add tomatoes!  And garlic!), there's still Japanese noodles (Just add soy sauce!), Chinese food (just add fried meat nuggets!), Thai (Just add basil and three stars of spiciness!), and even German (Spaetzle is a food!).  The book I have is limited to Italian-esque food, but I can give it credit for teaching me how to fake a decent alfredo, make a tasty pasta dish without sauce (unless bacon and olive oil count as sauce), and muddle through making some sort of filling meal with the random stuff I find in the kitchen when I'm too lazy to walk to the grocery.  Worth the six bucks.

Most of the recipe titles read more like a list of the major ingredients, which is why in late July I made:

Farfalle with chicken, broccoli, & roasted red peppers
(except I used rotini, because that's what I had in the cabinet)
4 T olive oil
5 T butter
3 garlic cloves, very finely chopped
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken, diced (the book suggested breasts; I always use the cheaper, more nutritious, and healthier thighs)
1/4 t dried chile flakes (I probably used more.  I'm generous with the spices I like)
salt and pepper
1 lb small broccoli florets
1 lb pasta (the recipe said 10.5 oz.  I have never seen a box of pasta that size, and I don't have a kitchen scale.  A pound worked fine.  Use your favorite shape.)
6 oz jar roasted red peppers, drained and diced
9 oz/ generous 1 C chicken stock (bouillon broth worked for me)
Parmesan (of course)

Cook garlic in olive oil and butter in a large skillet until it begins to color.  add the chicken.
Do you at least have some water boiling?  You should check on that.
Add chile flakes, salt, and pepper to chicken.  When it's cooked, remove from heat.
Dump broccoli into boiling water.  Cook 2 minutes, or until tender-crisp.  Eat as much as you want for testing purposes.  There's plenty in there.
Remove broccoli to chicken pan. Cook the pasta in the broccoli water.
Add cooked pasta, bell peppers, and stock to the chicken pan.  Simmer, stirring frequently, until most liquid has been absorbed.

See what happened there?  Pasta, without any real sauce.  Neat, huh?  The Chief Taster was pretty happy with this.  I thought it needed more of something, but I never figured out what.  Still a good meal, and very easy to make.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

pound it down

Sometimes my epicurean choices are dictated by what we have handy.  For instance, I have never found a can of evaporated milk with exactly the amount I needed, so I had a little leftover from a recent batch of soup.  My go-to recipe for excess evaporated milk?  Pound cake.

As luck would have it, I also had the last bit of a large jar of poppy seeds, and half a lemon that was left from... something.  Who knows?  Point is, I figured I could fake my way through a lemon poppy seed pound cake.  Then I checked my pound cake recipe, and found a lemon poppyseed variation on the same page that made my exciting experiment for the afternoon a pointless exercise in Following Directions.  Almost.

Betty Crocker's pound cake
3 C flour
1 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
2.5 C granulated sugar
1 C butter, softened
1 t vanilla
5 large eggs
1 C milk or evaporated milk (I used a mixture, because I didn't have quite enough evaporated milk)

for lemon-poppy seed variation:
substitute lemon extract for vanilla.  Fold 1 T grated lemon peel and 1/4 C poppy seeds into batter

Grease bottom and sides of two 9x5 loaf pans (there are size variations, but they don't mean anything to me because I don't have those pans, so I'm skipping them) and lightly flour the pans.  Heat oven to 350F.

Cream butter and sugar.  Beat in vanilla and eggs.  (Or lemon extract and eggs.  I didn't have lemon extract, so I squeezed the bejesus out of the lemon half I had, and poured the bejesus into the batter.  Boom.  I extracted it!)  Add dry ingredients gradually (and poppy seeds, if you're into that), and alternately with milk.  Beat just until smooth. Pour into pans.  Bake 55-60 minutes and test with a toothpick in the middle of the loaf (if you don't know this one, stick a toothpick into the center of the cake.  If it comes out clean, you're done.  If it comes out goopy and covered in batter, it needs to bake longer.).


Cool 20 minutes and remove from pans.  Cool completely before storing (the book says about 2 hours.  I have never in my life let a fresh pound cake sit that long without trying a slice or two).  You could top it with a bit of powdered sugar, but if you have some leftover raspberry jam, that's good, too.


Thursday, September 5, 2013

Chowdah

There are two ways to make clam chowder.  I don't mean White and Red (or New England and Boston, if you like), but canned and fresh.

This is the easy way.  I still haven't tried fresh, but I will.  And you will hear about it here.

The recipe comes from my Oregon Cookbook, which I bought at Crater Lake, and for sentimental reasons is one of the first places I look when I want to make something and haven't decided yet what it will be.  The recipe itself is theirs; the pictures and commentary are mine.

Oregon coast clam chowder
4 slices bacon, diced
1 T pan drippings (I've never measured this; I just cook the bacon, then throw the veggies in on top and assume I have the right amount)
1.5 C chopped onion
1/4 C flour
1/4 C grated carrot (I'm lazy, and I like my fingertips, so I just thinly slice the carrot.  It works.)
1/4 C chopped celery
3 C peeled, diced potatoes (still lazy--I use yellow potatoes and don't bother peeling them.  But I do wash them well)
1 t salt
1/8 t pepper
2 cans (8 oz) chopped clams, drained, reserve liquid.  (the cookbook is not specific about whether those cans are 8 oz each, or total.  I assume each, and err on the side of more clams.)
1 C evaporated milk

I feel like these colors are indicative of a specific flag, but I can't figure out which one.
This is where my version diverges slightly from the book's.  We both cook the bacon until lightly browned, but then they drain the pan (except for the 1 T drippings mentioned above), and I've never had so much bacon grease in the pan that I thought that was necessary, even though I hardly ever stop at 4 strips of bacon.  Do what you want.  It's cooking, not a nuclear reactor.


Add the onion and saute until translucent.  Stir in the flour; it will combine with the remaining drippings and form a roux, which will help thicken things later.  Dump in the rest of the veggies and seasonings.  Stir well.


Add enough water to the reserved clam juice to get 3 C.  Stir it into the veggie-bacon medley, bring to a boil, then lower the heat and let it boil gently, uncovered, for twenty minutes.  Stir occasionally.  Check potatoes for done-ness.


Add clams and cook another five minutes.  Stir in milk and heat through.

Soup's on!
If you want my opinion, this should always be served with some hot bread or rolls.  Popovers are a popular choice in our apartment, and by happy coincidence their baking time coincides nicely with how long it usually takes to make this soup (after everything has been cut up).