Night at the Improv, Part II

On the same afternoon I made the frankencookies, I decided to make stuffed peppers.  We had gone to an orchard that morning, and I bought three poblano peppers, and we had a little ground beef in the freezer.  The thing is, I had made stuffed peppers with Betty's recipe before, and I wasn't crazy about them.  So I made up everything on my own, thusly:

~ 1/2 # ground beef
1/4 # sweet Italian beef sausage
1 C uncooked rice
1 small tomato I found in the crisper
generous handful (about a cup, maybe a little more) grated cheddar
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 generously proportioned, full-bodied poblano peppers

Boil peppers 5 minutes to soften them a little.

Cook the rice.  I've found that despite the package directions, I get pretty good rice in about 25 minutes.  Halve the peppers lengthwise, keeping in mind they'll need to become bowls soon, so cut them to make deep pockets.  Discard stems and seeds, put the pepper halves in a pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, and cook five minutes to soften them a little.  While the rice simmers away at the back of the stove, cook the beef, sausage, and garlic.  By the way, is your stove in the corner, against a wall, like mine?  Does that force you to have pot and spatula handles in the middle of the range instead of off to the side, out of your way?  Did you fail to consider this, and leave a metal spatula handle sticking out of the meat pan where it could get heated by the pot boiling the peppers and burn the shit out of your hand when you grabbed it?  Put some ice on that.  When the meat's done, dice the tomato and toss that in there, too.  The rice should be done by now, if you planned well (and except for the spatula handle, I did), so you can add that and the cheese to the meat mixture and stir it all together over low heat.

Pretty much any meal can be improved with the inclusion of good sausage.

By this time, I had decided that I wanted to make popovers, too, but the popovers cook at two different temperatures (first high, then a little lower towards the end), and neither was where I planned to bake the peppers, so I compromised and set the oven at 375F.

Filled pepper halves, just before I baked them.  They didn't last long enough after baking to get their picture taken again.

Turn off all your burners and start spooning filling into pepper halves.  Set them in a glass baking dish.  I had a little filling left over, so if your amounts are all the same as mine, and your peppers are the same size, you might need four instead of three (eight halves instead of six).  I baked them about half an hour, maybe forty minutes, with the popovers.  Faked my way through the whole meal, and all of it was tasty.  I was really happy with how the peppers turned out, and felt even better about that because I really hadn't liked Betty's recipe the first time I made them.  However, I'd add some cumin and curry powder if I did it again (and I probably will).

Night at the Improv, Part I

As you may know by now (if you've been reading this blog for a while, and have paid any attention at all), I'm a big fan of faking it.  Sometimes that just means trying a new ingredient in a well-used recipe (adding cumin and curry powder to Betty's brown rice and lentils was brilliant.  Betty's diverse, but her recipes tend toward the bland and basic), but sometimes I make dinner winging it all the way.

Sometimes, I have no choice in the matter.

This story actually happened last year, but since I knew I'd be hiking by now, I figured it would be a good post to delay until I couldn't be relied upon to update regularly.  The next post is a continuation of the same afternoon in the kitchen.

First, the cookies.

I have this great book for chocolate chip cookies.  All the recipes were culled from a contest to find "the best" chocolate chip cookie recipe, possibly the most subjective idea since Miss Universe (click the link, or you can't really appreciate the joke).  I first liked it because I got it when I was still beginning to learn how to cook and bake, and there was a lot of good information in how the ingredients worked, and enough variety in the recipes to see those theories in action, assuming you eat an awful lot of cookies, which I arguably do.  Since I got the book, I haven't even hit the halfway point in trying all the recipes, but I have found a few very good ones, and this is one of them.  That should come as no surprise; it was a finalist.

Joyous Chocolate Chip Cookies (submitted by Robin Joy Minnick)
3 C flour
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
1/2 C butter, softened
1/4 C shortening
1 C brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 C granulated sugar
1 t vanilla
2 eggs
1 T milk
3 T dark corn syrup
2 C semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 C pecans, broken

1. preheat oven to 350F
2. Cream butter, shortening, and sugars.  Add vanilla, eggs, milk, and corn syrup.  Gradually add flour, baking soda, and salt.  Add chocolate and nuts.
3. Drop by teaspoon-sized balls onto parchment-paper lined baking sheets (the original recipe says greased sheets, but greasing a baking sheet recently removed from a 350F oven will either be exceedingly painful, or a fire hazard.  Maybe both!  One sheet of parchment paper will last through an entire batch of cookies, and nobody get third-degree burns.).  Bake 7-10 minutes, until cookies are golden brown, and slightly darker along the edges.

I'd made it two or three times before, and didn't think much of launching into it that afternoon, but after I had reached the Point Of No Return on making a batch, I realized that I had a little less then half as much brown sugar as I needed.  And about a third of the corn syrup.

The dark glob is molasses.  Don't tell anybody.

Fine.  I'll fake it!  Instead of a cup of brown sugar and half a cup of granulated, I had almost half a cup of brown sugar, and just used enough granulated to make up the difference.  (Still 1.5 C total sugar)  When I realized I didn't have enough corn syrup, I used molasses for the rest.  I've made lots of cookies with molasses.  It's dark and sweet.  That's sort of like corn syrup.  Plus, it smells nice baking.  Besides, the recipe actually calls for dark corn syrup, and I'd always used the light corn syrup we had, so strictly speaking, I'd never made those cookies right, anyway.

The results were pretty great.  The Chief Taster, who was already a big fan of the original recipe, raved about this batch.  I might even make a note in the cookbook to try this variation again.

Snickerdoodles

My usual uniform is shorts and a T-shirt.  You can tell when I'm being dressy because my shirt has buttons, and if I'm really serious, it's tucked in, too.  For me, the first real sign of winter's arrival is the day when I realize that I have to start wearing pants again (jeans) and store the shorts for a few months.  That day was about two weeks ago.  Truly, a sad day for me and anyone who enjoys gazing upon my hairy kneecaps.

This Monday, driving back to our place after the fourth wedding we've attended this fall, I got another inarguable sign of winter: snickerdoodle craving.  Out of nowhere, I could taste them in my mouth, and feel the perfect snickerdoodle texture smashing between my teeth.  I warned the Chief Taster that we'd have a batch in the next few days.  She sighed her resignation, hoping that she would be able to bear the threat of more baked goods.

The last time I made snickerdoodles was over two years ago, when I still lived in Bend, and winter arrived much earlier than here in Virginia (I still have trouble with the knowledge that, for the first time in my life, I live south of the Mason-Dixon line).  When I pulled them out of my pack as Summit Cookies, my Scotsman friend laughed at the name.  He'd never heard of them before, and I thought that was odd, because I had grown up with them.  On the other hand, he'd never heard of zucchini bread either, and raved about it the first time he had mine.

I realized while making this batch that snickerdoodles are a primordial cookie; the most basic cookie form, before it gets tarted up with chocolate chips, nuts, bits of fruit, icing, bacon, or all of the above.  If you want to try your own batch, I suggest this recipe from Ms. Crocker.  I think my doughballs were a bit smaller than she suggested, and I used a very small bowl for the sugar mix, because it gets used up and spread out easily, and it's easier to get the doughballs coated when the sugar mix is piled up.  I also used a spoon to scoop some over the top of the dougballs.  I just said "doughballs" an awful lot, and the software tells me I spelled it wrong every time.