Edible Containers - Daring Cooks

For April's Daring Cooks; Challenge we had a creative challenge.    Renata of Testado, Provado & Aprovado! was our Daring Cooks’ April 2011 hostess. Renata challenged us to think “outside the plate” and create our own edible containers! Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 17th to May 16th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

I love chili rellenos, but try to stay away from batter fried food.  I decided to stuff roasted, peeled poblanos.  First, I asked my husband to bring home the straightest poblanos that he could find.

Then, I roasted them and peeled away the blackened skin.   I made a small slit in them to remove the seeds.

After they were peeled, they looked pretty dark.

I roasted some chicken and made a tomato sauce with garlic, tomatoes, onions, cinnamon and cilantro.

I mixed up some mexican cheese, the chicken, some black beans, a little jalepeno, corn, some of the tomato sauce and cilantro and stuffed the peppers.  They were delicious and I am looking forward to seeing what else I can stuff in them!

éclairs - FFwD

My husband walked into the kitchen and glanced at my opened copy of Dorie Greenspan's around my french table and then he said "you're not an éclair maker are you?"

Does the man know me or what.

 
When I saw this Friday's selection for French Fridays with Dorie, I almost skipped it.   I know the people in this house and they aren't eating éclairs.  But then I thought, I can take them to work.  They eat anything at work.  Someone is always hungry.


This week's recipe calls for vanilla éclairs, cream puff dough filled with vanilla pastry cream and topped with white glaze.  To get the people in this house to try them, I knew that I needed to add some chocolate, so I decided to top them with a ganache.

I made the pastry cream early in the morning and put it in the refrigerator to cool.

I like making puff dough.  We eat gougeres on Christmas Eve.  However, they don't involve a pastry bag.  They can easily be spooned onto a cookie sheet.


Eclairs need a pastry bag,  I have previously been identified as not an éclair maker and I am comfortable with that label.  I am not comfortable with pastry bags.  How do you get the sticky puff dough into the bag without making a mess?  Perhaps it is a skill thing, one that I may not develop at this stage in my life.  I think a third hand would come in handy.  I got the dough into the bag, made the four inch strips and baked them.

I went out to work on the yard and let the elairs cool.  We had such a long, hard freeze, we have lost some plants.  By my front door, I have two bicolored iris plants.  They are perhaps my favorite plant.  They bloom and bloom.  Unfortunately, a lot of the plant had to be cut back after the freeze.  But today, there is one flower.

When I had finished with mulch, I returned to the eclairs.  The cooled eclairs were cut and filled with pastry cream and then topped with chocolate ganache.  They were tasty, it was a fun experience.

Garlicky crumb-coated broccoli FFwD

This Friday's challenge for French Fridays with Dorie was a simple, delicious way to prepare some broccoli.  I steamed some stalks, sauteed some minced garlic in butter.  After the garlic was softened, I added breadcrumbs and then some chopped parsley.  The stalks had been drained and patted dry and were coated with the breadcrumbs.

Here is were I failed, by coating didn't coat.  Some of it got on, but most ended up sprinkled on the final dish.  I am a coating failure.

It was tasty.  A bit like broccoli scampi.   I like my broccoli cooked in olive oil, garlic and red peppers.  I'm not looking for a new method for one of my favorite veggies.  Maybe we are stuck in a rut, but I'm ok with that.

Dessert - The Ugliest cake

My mother thinks that I don't make dessert often enough.  I've been known to bake dessert for birthdays, Easter and Thanksgiving.  That leaves over 345 days undesserted.  I pull an occasional dessert out of the hat, but for the most part we are dessertless. 

I bought Rose Levy Beranbaum's Rose's heavenly cakes because I couldn't resist the pictures.   I should have started with The Cake Bible but some of the desserts in this cookbook called out to me.

I made a bundt cake a while back.  I do enjoy a good bundt cake.  I remember having some difficulties getting the cake out in one piece.

Rose has a beautiful yellow daisy cake in her cookbook.  She bakes it in a Nordic Ware daisy cake pan.  It is  a beautiful pan cake pan that leaves daisies on the top of the cake, for say $35 dollars.  I am at the point in my life where I am trying to downsize the number of things in my kitchen.  I can't see spending the money for a spring time cake pan when Rose says that a fluted tube pan can be used instead.

Perhaps I should mention that many of the things in the kitchen that I am trying to downsize are over 25 years old.  The fluted tube pan, which I will refer to as bundt pan, has seen better days.  But remembering my recent difficulties, I was certain to well prepare the pan.  To no avail.  The top of the cake remained in the pan.  The bottom almost did as well, but I stuck a knife in and saved the day. 

Good news, I was planning on dividing the cake and filling it with berries and cream.  It self divided.  But it was no easy feat releasing the top; it came out in chunks.  Which I then covered with more cream.

I threw the pan out.  I'm not a big fan of throwing things out.  But my darling husband asked me what chemicals are being released by 25 year old nonstick pans that are way past their prime.  I have ordered a new pan.

The cake was delicious, ugly but delicious.   Here is a link to Rose's blog with a yellow cake recipe.

short ribs in red wine and port - ffwd

Something very unusually happened here in San Antonio, we got snow.  Not much, certainly not enough to make a city ground to a stop back where I grew up.  We knew that something was going to happen.  The weathermen were all excited.  We received multiple emails on what the district would do in the event of snow.

Then, during the night, plans changed.  We got freezing rain and then, a dusting of snow.  Perhaps where you are from, the plows and salt trucks would be out in full force.  I don't think that we have any, maybe we have one or two.  So early in the morning, the city closed every highway.  Done deal, no school for anyone.  The excited weathermen talked all morning long about how ice is slippery.  All morning long, through the Today show, which is one of my favorite indulgences.  And since I normally leave at 710, I don't indulge often.  

There hasn't been real snow here for decades.  So we got up, and made a snowman on the basketball court, we tried for a snow angel.  Somewhere in the midst of all this excitement, the camera was handed from one mittened hand to another.  We have no real skill with mittens.  And we dropped the camera, and like tiny little electronic things everywhere, the camera stopped working.

So, my photos are from my phone.  And they do not do the short ribs in red wine and port justice.  I have become a big fan of cooking meat in vast quantities of alcohol.  Go Dorie.  One of the February Friday challenges was for this delicious, winter appropriate meal.

The recipe starts with a bouquet garni.  Parsley sprigs, thyme sprigs, bay leaves, rosemary, star anise and celery stalks are tied up in cheese clothe.

Short ribs are broiled on all sizes until browned and sizzling then seasoned with salt and pepper.

Onions, carrots, parsnips, ginger and garlic are sauted in oil and seasoned with salt and pepper until a little browned about 10 mins.  2 T of tomatoes is added to the pan and stirred about.

Then, an entire bottle of Syrah and 1.5 cups of port and the bouquet garni are added and boiled until the liquid reduces by a third.  The meat is added to the pot with enough beef broth to cover it.  The covered with foild and cooked for 2 hours.  The foil folded back to let some steam leave and then cooked for one more hours.  At this point, I added carrots.  We love carrots, lightly cooked.

The sauce is strained and reduced further.  The short ribs are put under the broiler and served.

This broth was delicious.  Short ribs annoy me.  I ended up taking all the meat off the bones and putting it back in the broth.  Next time, I want to try this with a lovely pot roast.

basque potato tortilla - ffwd

There is a suggestion at French Fridays with Dorie for a delicious Valentine's Day dinner.  The potato tortilla, served at warm temperature, is suggested as an appetizer.

Tortilla means something completely different in the Basque region of France than it does in Texas.  This is more like a room temperature omelet than anything that would be considered a tortilla in my neck of the woods.

You start by cooking some cubed Yukon Golds and diced onion in a cast iron pan.  Some rosemary,  garlic with the skin left on and salt and pepper are added to the potatoes and onions.  It is sauteed for about twenty minutes.  After the potatoes are tender, they are removed and the pan is wiped down.  The garlic and rosemary are removed, I had to hunt around for the garlic skins.

9 large eggs that have been beaten with salt and pepper and a pinch of cayenne are mixed with the potatoes and onions.  The mixture is returned to the oil coated skilled, cooked slowly and then put under the broiler for final browning.

We ate the tortilla warm.  My husband and daughter enjoyed it.

Pullman Bread or pain de mie - mellow bakers

My husband asked when we were going to have homemade bread again.

I haven't baked bread for a couple of weeks.  I think that I was a little tired from my baking, feeding fest over Christmas where I tried to fatten my children.  Unfortunately, my children currently lack the fattening metabolism and the only person that I succeeded in fattening was myself.

In an attempt to become a little healthier, I have decided to try to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into my diet and to get more regular exercise.  I'm not an anticarb person, I just need to use a little more discretion about which ones are invited into my house and with what frequency.

January's Mellow Baker's  assignment includes three breads; golden raisin, pain de mie and a three stage sourdough rye.  I believe that I have mentioned that no one in my house eats cooked raisins.  Perhaps, on occasion, I have mentioned some of my trials with rye flour, so I opted for the pain de mie.  Hamelman and I have the same sized pain de mie pan.  I got mine on sale at King Arthur flour when they were releasing the newer, perhaps smoothier lidded, version.  A pullman pan is a rectangular pan with a lid.

I pull it out whenever I have the desire for a rectangular prism.  Which really isn't that often. 

This was a very easy recipe.  The ingredients were assembled.

Bread flour, dry milk, salt, sugar, yeast, butter and water were combined.  The dough fermented for two hours, and then was shaped.  I had enough for one loaf in the pain de mie pan and then another smaller loaf.  My white bread loving husband was concerned that I was going to throw the dough out because it was too small.  Really...  The dough was shaped into the pullman pan and a smaller pan, and fermented again for an hour and then baked.

In the end you have made white bread, which isn't my favorite, but will make a fun breakfast.

I was tempted to make french toast, but always wanted to try eggs in the nest.