Om-nom sauce!

Lentil-stuffed red bell peppers

filed under: dairy-free, jitterbean original, legumes, repurposed leftovers, rice, veggie, whole grain No Responses »

May 122013

As I have learned more about cooking over the years and gotten more comfortable with the world of pulses, I find that I am more and more satisfied with jettisoning meat in a given meal. Not that I’m going to leave it behind entirely, because hello! Duck is meat! I’m just saying that I’m perfectly happy going without if there is some other source of protein in the meal. And in this house, with my stash of beans, we don’t have to worry about that. (Seriously, if you’re ever over at my house, ask to see the stash. It would be a stash of shame to rival my yarn stash, except this is edible and delicious.)

I love making these stuffed peppers because, like a frittata, they are exceptionally flexible. You can throw whatever you have on hand into this dish and it is likely to come out quite deliciously. So this is not really what one would call a hard-and-fast recipe because it comes out differently every single time I make it. That’s a good thing for me though, since I can get stuck in a tasty-rut and need things to challenge my creativity. I hope you have the same fun I do experimenting with this healthy, delicious, and satisfying stuffed veg dish!

Click for the recipe →

Pumpkin biscuits

filed under: baking, breakfast, dairy-free, fall & winter, quick, quick bread No Responses »

May 052013

Pumpkin biscuits!

Last month, my favorite Adventure Buddy Heather (of Cheeseburger in Glacial Ice) came to visit. As tends to happen when we get together, all sorts of ridiculously awesome food flows forth. I mean, you should see the food we eat when we’re backpacking together — ptarmigan breasts with quinoa, beef burgundy, pumpkin pie, all from scratch, natch, and either made entirely at home or foraged for in the field — so it’s no surprise when we go overboard with the fancy-pants cooking when we’re together in the midst of civilization. We always seem to re-discover that food doesn’t need to be fussy to be amazing (backpacking ‘sketti is one proof of this) and these biscuits are truly an example of that. I asked her to guest-post over here to write up those eminently awesome creations that she whipped up, so without further ado, I give you Heather!

Pumpkin biscuits drizzled with fireweed honey

A few months ago I was driving around with the radio tuned to NPR when they began interviewing Nathalie Dupree about her new book, Southern Biscuits. I was enthralled by this interview – so much so that when I got to where I was going, I sat in the car listening until it was over. Later, I informed The Husband that we live in the South now (temporarily, please), and therefore I needed to learn how to make biscuits and HINT HINT this book would be an awesome way to do that HINT HINT. Well, one of those hints made it through his usual masculine oblivousness (probably the one where I said “Honey, get this for me as a present”) and on my birthday I unwrapped this cookbook.

I was fairly busy at the time and didn’t get a chance to crack it open, but a few weeks down the road I was packing to visit Stacey and I figured I’d throw it in. As you can imagine, when Stacey and I are in the same place, somehow all sorts of delicious food magically appears. Well, as it happened, we ran into a little problem right off the bat. See, it’s easy enough to swap out the butter for lard, but the recipes kept calling for milk. Or yogurt. Or cream. Or soda, but Stacey wasn’t too keen on that even if it was dairy-free.

Then, on page 120, we found it: Pumpkin Biscuits.

Self-rising flour. Lard. Pumpkin puree. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Completely dairy-free. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

These biscuits were absolutely delicious. Soft and chewy, just a hint of spices. Drizzle a bit of fireweed honey atop, or perhaps a slice of sharp cheddar if you don’t need to go the dairy-free route, and you’re in heaven. They are equally good the next morning, toasted in bacon fat with a poached egg atop. What are you waiting for?

Left-over pumpkin biscuits toasted in bacon fat and topped with poached eggs

Click for the recipe →

Ginger-stout cake

filed under: baking, booze, dairy-free, herbs, quick bread, sweet No Responses »

Apr 212013

Yes, I have posted a gingerbread recipe on here before. But by the time you try this for yourself, I’m sure that you’ll forgive me for the quasi-repeat, especially once you realize that the similarities between this gingerbread and that gingerbread stop with the name.

The recipe that I’ve posted before (from my grandmother) is a wonderful treat that is pleasant all-around, with a delicious, mild, warm spice flavor and a soft, crumbly texture. But this cake? This cake will sucker-punch you if you’re not paying attention. And that’s a good thing. It’s chewy, it’s boldly flavored, and there is a completely nil chance of this cake lasting the night when you serve it to friends.

The big difference is that this cake includes two over-the-top (in the flavor department) ingredients: ginger (obviously) — and lots of it, both fresh and ground — and stout beer (not so obvious). You combine these power-houses with a uncommonly vigorous mixing method (for cakes, anyway) and you have a fool-proof crowd-pleaser.

I first came across this recipe just before St. Patrick’s Day this year and was simultaneously excited by 1) the beer content and 2) the non-dairy-ness of it all. (Do you know how insanely difficult it is to find a dessert recipe that is dairy-free without modifications?) This immediately shot to the top of the recipe-queue and found its way to the table on March 17th. It also disappeared from the table that same night, and that had absolutely nothing to do with impaired judgment: it was just that good.

I made it yet again when Mrs. Cheeseburger in Glacial Ice came to visit this month. There being only two of us (and fearing that an entire cake would disappear between us if we didn’t force the cake into some easily-put-away-able/-freezeable portions), we made it in standard-size muffin-tins. And let me tell you, if you’re the type of person who always hoards the corner pieces in a tray of brownies, this method is for you. (But if you eschew chewiness, fear not: the cake-pan method has plenty of love for you.)

I suppose you could sweeten it a bit with a glaze or icing, but in my opinion, that would really reign in the ginger, and what would be the point of that? If that’s your goal, then you should really just make a different recipe entirely, because this stuff? It’s delicious, it’s ginger-tastic, and it is not the eensiest bit apologetic about it.

Click for the recipe →

Smashie ‘tatoes

filed under: dairy-free, favorites, sides, veggie No Responses »

Apr 142013

Golden delicious smashie-tatoes!

So I’m an Irish(-American) girl. And we Irish girls, we have a bit of culinary baggage:

When it comes to potatoes, we cannot. get. enough.

Mashed, baked, roasted, cooked in duck fat (what a surprise, said no one ever), really, it doesn’t matter. I’m probably gonna love it (excepting most French fries, actually: most of them are such poor quality that they are borrrrr-ing!). On nights that we make potatoes, The Hubs often has to remind me that my Irish is showing. “Whatevs,” I think to myself. “My gramdma would be proud!”

Smash!

When I had to put the kibosh on dairy, I was a little sad because was imagining a Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes. That is perhaps my most favorite of all potato preparations and is by far the one I make the least often (see previous statement of cannot.get.enough. This leads to an inevitable tummy-ache). But then, I discovered this little gem: it’s less of a recipe and more of a cause for you to smack yourself in the forehead and wonder why the hell you didn’t think of doing this yourself.

True story.

Smashed and seasoned, ready for baking

What’s so great about these little taters? Only everything ever. They’re mashed, giving that great texture experience, and they are crispy, which is in compliance with My Number One Rule In The Kitchen (if you can toast it, do it!). They are portable (I defy you to resist eating one or more directly off the roasting pan). They are the easiest potato recipe ever. They are dairy-free! And oh yes, lest we forget, they are flippin’ delicious. EVERYONE WINS HERE! Except the potato, which is, in fact, eaten.

So what are you waiting for??? Go forth and cook potatoes! Serve them with anything and everything and watch how happy they make everyone who comes in contact with them. Or, y’know, if you’re an Irish girl like me, they may not make it beyond your own sticky potato-fingers. Hey, don’t look at me like that: in this war of ‘tatoes, everyone’s got to fend for themselves!

Golden delicious smashie-tatoes!

Click for the recipe →

Duck confit

filed under: dairy-free, favorites, french, poultry No Responses »

Apr 072013

Duck legs, pre-curing

Yes, it’s true: I am all about the Quack Attack. For my money, there are few animals tastier than the duck. There is something decadently succulent about the dark, flavorful meat that is found throughout this bird, and oh, the fat… the fat can just take everything about your cooking to the next level.

So it’s not surprising that some enterprising cook came up with the idea of cooking a duck in its own fat. I mean, as a society we have acknowledged that combining two products from the same animal can elevate them both to new heights (see: cheeseburger), so to the people who scoff at the idea of confit, well, I just scoff back. Or something. Or I would if I weren’t so totally absorbed in the wonder of the method. (Sorry, I’m too busy appreciating all that is awesome and wonderful in this world to be appropriately snarky back at you. That’s it: that’s my new motto. But I digress.)

Cured duck legs

Confit is a French word, which seems to imply that confit is difficult, snooty, impossible to eat without my nose held at a dizzying angle in the air, and altogether too refined for a knuckle-dragger like me to fully appreciate. Or perhaps it’s too baffling and you find yourself asking what one does with it. Fortunately for all of us, confit is exceedingly simple: make a curing paste in a food processor from a couple of pantry staples, throw it in the fridge overnight, rinse it, submerge in fat, and cook for a couple of hours.

Duck leg confit

As for what to do with the finished product? It’s a doozy of an answer: anything and everything. So far, I’ve used it in cassoulet (yet another scary-sounding French dish that is actually peasant food), risotto, and just plain eating. But one of the best parts is that it keeps in the fridge for a month (confit literally means “preserved”), so though I confit-ed up a whole duck and only needed the breasts in my risotto, the legs will wait around for me to be inspired once again. What shall I use it for? An exceedingly amazing pot-pie? A savory and decadent (cheese-less) pizza? Tossed with roasted Brussels sprouts? (Woah.) Who knows? A whole lotta inspiration can happen in a month. All I know is that those two beautifully golden legs will be challenging me to up my creativity-ante, and there’s no doubt that they’ll do that if I can resist the temptation to pull them out in the middle of the night and schmear them all over my face as I savor them by the fridge.

Duck leg confit: tender, flavorful, NOM!

Click for the recipe →

In which success eludes me

filed under: kitchen stories, no recipe here No Responses »

Mar 312013

Eggs: successful poaching eludes me.

This has been one of those weeks where Sunday has rolled around, and lo, I have no material to post. It wasn’t for lack of trying: for one, my camera’s two battery-chargers have apparently eloped and my batteries are dead, and two, I’ve been attempting to beat two different recipes/techniques into submission, but the wily bastards have gotten the better of me. I won’t go into huge detail here since they will hopefully get full write-ups of their own, but here are three very important lessons I’ve learned over the last several days:

Lots of people on the internet — people I even trust and respect — will tell you that you can make brown sugar at home with white sugar, molasses, and a food processor. THEY ARE LYING. Shakes fist at Ms. Smitten Kitchen and Mr. Good Eats.
Make sure the water is for-real boiling when you add eggs for poaching. This “almost boiling” crap is not going to cut it, unless you like under-cooked whites and over-cooked yolks. Seriously, how does that even happen???
Also, trying to poach an egg in a little mixing bowl to cheat is totally unsatisfying and produces eggs that are distinctly not poached.

I hope your week in the kitchen was better than mine, and here’s to next week being better!

Cheater poached eggs are distinctly not poached eggs.

Sublime browned-butter chocolate-chip cookies

filed under: baking, chocolate, cookies, dairy, favorites, sweet No Responses »

Mar 242013

The quest for the ultimate chocolate-chip cookie is a bit of a thing for people like myself. Sure, you could go with the back-of-the-chocolate-chip-bag one, but while there’s nothing wrong with it per se, there’s nothing special about it. And even though the chocolate-chip cookie is the standard, that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. It appears that others agree, so a zillion recipes and versions abound, which leaves you with a conundrum: how do you find the best? And what are your criteria for the best? Some people like chewy cookies, some like crispy, some like super-sweet, others like excessively-chocolatey. And some weirdos even like nuts in them. And I certainly have more than one recipe that I adore. The point is: if you can think of a cookie characteristic, you can find someone who thinks that it’s absolutely necessary and a recipe that corresponds to that criterion.

Luckily, this recipe can please just about everyone.

Chewy in the center, a bit crisp on the edges, warm and gooey flavors of toffee throughout (and yes, you weirdos can add nuts if you please), this cookie is simply made of magic. The secret is in the browned butter and extra egg yolk, and the seemingly-fussy mixing-method gives results unlike any I’ve ever seen before. And in theory, these cookies are perhaps even better the next day, but really, do you think they’re likely to survive that long?

Click for the recipe →

100% whole-grain buttermilk loaves and rolls

filed under: baking, dairy, favorites, freezes well, staples, yeast bread No Responses »

Mar 172013

Whole-wheat bread gets a bad rap. And that’s too bad, really, because it doesn’t (necessarily) deserve it. Especially when you consider that there are scads of bad white bread out there, but for some reason, those loaves haven’t painted all of white-bread-dom with the mark of evilness.

Is it just because bad whole-wheat bread tends to be heavy and dense? Don’t get me wrong: I’ve made several of those bricks, erm, loaves myself, but the flavor of the bread was still quite good.

I started to understand better when I took a bread class that had us making six or so different kinds of bread. One was the requisite whole-wheat loaf, and when I bit into it, I suddenly understood why some people hated whole-wheat bread: the loaf that had been made from that recipe was awful: the bread was not only dense, but was also bitter and completely unpalatable. I wish I could tell you what had gone wrong so that you could avoid those things, but I threw that recipe away, ne’er to look upon it again.

So I’m here to tell you that if that has been your experience in whole-wheat bread-making, then I am here to rescue you. This recipe makes a loaf that is tender and almost feather-light. Its flavor is sweet yet pleasantly tangy and goes well in almost any application, be it shaped into sandwich loaves, toasted, or made into burger-buns or kaiser rolls. It’s really become my go-to recipe because though there are a handful of whole-grain bread recipes that I like as much or more (like this one or that one), this one is the most reliable and the easiest to make.

So give this recipe a chance, won’t you? I think you’ll find — like everyone I’ve introduced this bread to — that it’s a game-changer.

Click for the recipe →

Damn-good corned beef and cabbage

filed under: better the next day, booze, dairy-free, family tradition, holiday, irish, meat, menu, sides, veggie 4 Responses »

Mar 102013

For years after striking out on my own, I had a dilemma on my hands: being the great-grand-daughter of Irish immigrants, I absolutely love a good corned beef and cabbage on St Patrick’s Day, but I’d be lying if I said I could make a decent one back then. I tried a new cooking method every year, and every year it was the same story: just barely-avoided unmitigated disaster. But really, let’s face it: how could I possibly hope to achieve success when I was starting with a highly-questionable hunk of preternaturally pink meat and (more often than not) throwing it in a pot of water to boil. Of course I was doomed (doomed!) to fail!

But a couple of years ago, someone cut from, well, exactly the same cloth as me posted a recipe on NPR’s Kitchen Window. It was all about how to cure your own beef brisket and included not a small amount of nose-super-high-in-the-air food-snobbery (which I usually try to suppress, but let’s face it, it’s always there) and a hefty amount of embracing the art of cooking with booze. This, I thought to myself, could be the end of my woes!

So, about a week out from the venerable holiday, I set out to find myself a beef brisket — a plain ol’ one that hadn’t been subjected to salt-peter and god-knows-what other chemicals along with the traditional corned beef spice-packet. And it was nearly bloody impossible! It seems that in March, almost all of the beef briskets get processed into corned beef and it can be extremely difficult to find one au naturale (well, as au naturale as super-market beef gets — oh, and there’s that food-snob I was warning you about!). So don’t be afraid to ask the butcher if there are any squirreled away in the back, and don’t be surprised if the butcher tries to hand you a package of corned beef.

So two years ago, I tried this out for the first time. The beef didn’t get to cure for the full week (see: it’s hard to find a beef brisket a week before St Patrick’s Day), but it was still fully delicious. It was also easier to execute than I had ever imagined. I had a group of friends over for dinner and we polished that sucker off. I’m not gonna lie: it was impressive. I had intended to use the left-overs in Reuben sandwiches, but I wasn’t too upset about it since my lack meant that the party had been a success. Last year, we repeated the recipe (though I started looking for briskets much earlier that year) and since I was pregnant at the time, the booze that was in this recipe (which had of course been de-alcohol-ized by cooking) was the only beer I had (sadness!). That year, though, the left-overs were plentiful due to fewer guests and more meat and the Reubens flowed (more on that in a later post). This year’s brisket is already curing on March 3rd and I can’t wait to taste it again. So won’t you join me in forgoing creepy pink meat and finding out how easy it can be to make something utterly superior, even if you’ll be too toasty on Irish Car-Bombs to notice.

Sláinte!

Click for the recipe →

Irish-American soda bread

filed under: breakfast, dairy, dairy-free, family tradition, favorites, freezes well, holiday, irish, quick bread, sweet, whole grain 2 Responses »

Mar 082013

This time of year, Irish soda breads start popping up in bakeries everywhere. They are either dry and chalky or delicious and decadent, in which case they obviously contain relatively expensive ingredients, which is pretty improbable in a bread ostensibly born of frugality at the hands of Irish potato farmers. More irritating to me, however, is the fact that most of the loaves you find in bakeries are obviously yeasted, which, I mean, come on, really? It’s soda bread, as in baking soda. Harumph.

So while this recipe is clearly not authentic (why hello there, butter and sugar and eggs! Fancy meeting you here!), at least it makes no pretenses about what it is. It’s not a loaf of yeast bread that has been formed into a boule and slashed (slashed! Just try doing that to a soda bread batter!), and the recipe helpfully includes the descriptor “American,” cluing you into the fact that peasant food it’s not. Authentic it may not be, but honest it surely is.

Because of that, I like to think that this is a bread that my maternal grandmother would approve of. She was 100% Irish and took delight in her heritage. When I think of the time spent in her house when I was young, the Irish proverbs are one of the first-and-foremost elements in the settings of those memories. So when my Mom was visiting me over St Patrick’s Day in 2008, we decided to honor Muggsy and try several new recipes for the holiday. The results had highs and lows: we swore off ever again making pistachio cookies that had instant pudding in them (they had a really unpleasant mouth-feel) but this recipe became an instant favorite. I always make it along with my corned beef and cabbage and serve it for dessert. The left-overs make an excellent breakfast bread. So, from my Irish family to yours (whether you’re Irish or not), I hope you enjoy this bread and that it makes you feel a little greener this St Paddy’s Day!

(Note: I had been preparing to make this recipe in just a few days’ time when I learned that I’d have to cut out dairy for my daughter’s sake. I was a bit devastated because I’ve literally been looking forward to this bread for months, but not being one to slink away with my tail between my legs, I resolved to adapt it for my new dietary restrictions. I admit that I was skeptical going into the mixing and baking but was very pleasantly surprised when I finally tasted it. It’s a very close facsimile of the original and far exceeded my expectations. If you’re sensitive to dairy, please do give the dairy-free version at the end of the recipe a try and let me know how you like it.)

Click for the recipe →

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