Still Life, With Cats

This content shows Simple View

Kitchen Adventures

Not always about the sweet

It’s not all about the sweet stuff around here, even though I do love to bake things. Tonight I decided to go for something savory, so I made Lemon Chicken with Orzo.

This went together fairly quickly – you cut up the chicken, then dredge it in a mix of flour, salt, and pepper, then cook that in a skillet. Then you remove the cooked chicken, and in the same pan, add broth and orzo (note – I had to add in roughly an additional half cup of water, so you’ll want to monitor that) and let that simmer until it’s cooked.

The recipe called for the addition of spinach and grape tomatoes, but grape tomatoes and cooked spinach are Not Food, so instead I tossed in a whole pile of broccoli near the end of the cooking time.

The lemon juice gets stirred into the orzo just before it’s time to serve, which might sound a little odd, but actually adds a nice bite to what could otherwise be a fairly bland dish.

Plate of orzo with broccoli and chicken

It doesn’t look very exciting, I know, but trust me, it’s tasty.

We both gave this recipe two thumbs up (and luckily I made enough that there’ll be leftovers for dinner tomorrow).

Citrus used today: 2 lemons

Total citrus used so far: 4 tangelos, 4 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



A little sweet, a little tart

Today is February 2nd, also known as Candlemas across the pond, which means it was time for crepes. Do not ask me to explain why one eats crepes for this day, as I actually have no idea why, but crepes are easy to make so who am I to question.

I made these Crepes with Lemon & Sugar, as the recipe fulfills both the citrus challenge as well as the need for crepes, but any crepe recipe would work here. I do have a crepe pan, but crepes will work just fine in a regular frying pan, as long as you make sure it’s well greased so the crepes don’t stick. Letting the batter rest for a bit before actually cooking them is also key – this lets the flour fully hydrate.

Two folded crepes on a plate, topped with whipped cream and yellow sprinkles

For this recipe, you make the crepes, then top with equal parts sugar and lemon juice. I was a bit nervous that they’d still be too tart, but in fact they were almost a little too sweet (probably because Meyer lemons are not quite a tart as regular lemons like the recipe calls for). If I was to do this again, I’d reduce the amount of sugar added with the juice at the end. Regardless, these were pretty tasty.

Total citrus used so far: 4 tangelos, 2 lemons

Making a thing a day for Thingadailes.



Nutty

Oh look, it’s February, which means it must be time for Thingadailies, or in this house, time for my annual month of ‘holy crap, how do we use up three full trees of citrus before they all go bad?’

So to kick off the month, I made Citrus Pecan Bread, which is a basic oil-based quick bread recipe, but with orange juice and nuts. For tonight, I used tangelos for the juice and chopped walnuts (because that’s what was in the freezer), but the general concept is the same.

This is not a new-to-me recipe – in face, I think we got this a couple years ago when we were doing a recipe subscription service, but we both liked it so much that it gets put into rotation at least a couple times each year when the citrus is ripe.

A loaf of quick bread

Can you tell where I accidentally jabbed my oven mitt-covered thumb into the loaf when pulling it out to check on it? Sigh.

Anyway, it’s super tasty and it used the juice and zest of 4 tangelos, which was the whole point.

Citrus Pecan Quick Bread

  • Ingredients
  • 1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 1/2 cup orange juice (plus the zest from the fruit)
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 Farenheit. Grease a 9-inch loaf pan.

Combine all dry ingredients except pecans. Stir in orange juice, water, and oil until mixed (but do not overmix), then stir in the pecans.

Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake 35-40 minutes, or until knife inserted in center comes out clean.  Let rest in pan about 10 minutes before removing; cool completely before cutting.

 

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Worth every penny spent

This morning we got up bright and early in order to make the house presentable for company, and this meant finally breaking out the nifty new gadget we bought ourselves during the after-Thanksgiving sales – a new vacuum cleaner.

You know you are a proper adult when you get super excited about a vacuum cleaner. But to be fair it is a combination vacuum cleaner that ALSO MOPS, and if you live in a house with all hard floors and an ever changing number of very busy cats and kittens, this is a massive game changer.

So while I tidied and unearthed the kitchen from a mountain of dishes, and baked the cookies for this evening’s exchange, and steamed and scrubbed the bathroom (after first relocating the *extremely* messy quintet of kittens who had been residing there to a new enclosure), Richard cleaned all the rest of the floors in the house with our fancy new device, and we both marveled over how fast it was, and how well it worked, and yes, I know this means we are officially old, but I’m okay with that.

Anyway. Once the house (or at least the upstairs – we shall not speak of the condition of the downstairs) was reasonably tidy, a bunch of friends came over and we all learned a new-to-us game (Mosaic), and gnoshed on all manner of snacks, and played with kittens. And then once that was done I packed up the cookies and headed off to another’s friend’s house, where several of us gnoshed on (yet more!) cookies and had a lovely time.

And now I am going to go keel over because as much fun as it’s been, it’s been a very, very long weekend, and as previously determined, I am officially old.

Tis the season for Holidailies.



Baking Sisters: Alaska

When my sister and I discussed what to do for Alaska, we tossed around a couple ideas. Technically the official recipe is a salmon pie made with a puff pastry crust, but my sister is not a fan of fish. So instead we decided to make sourdough the over-arching theme, since that’s a common thing up there.

Obviously we had to make sourdough bread, but if you’re doing true sourdough, you do not use commercial yeast, but instead use a starter that you’ve either nurtured for years by carefully feeding it (cough cough, kept in the fridge and fed once every month or three when I remember it’s there), or something you throw together quickly because your old starter died (my sister).

I got my sourdough sponge started Saturday afternoon. Before I went to bed, I mixed up the dough, then put that into the fridge. After that, it seemed like a good idea before the fact to plan to get up at 5am and pull it out of the fridge…except that I forgot that it was Daylight Saving Time day, and that meant it was actually 4am (no matter what the clock said) and since I’m going through another round of super fun insomnia, that meant I was riding on roughly 3 hours of sleep. Fun times!

But anyway. Dough comes out of the fridge, then gets shaped, then gets set aside for another couple hours, so that by the time we were ready to meet via video call, all we had left to do was pop it into the oven.

This is where things got interesting for me. For years my oven has taken just a couple extra minutes to bake things. But during an attempt at making cookies last week, things were taking more than twice the normal time to bake, and after we bought a hanging thermometer, we discovered why. The oven is now heating roughly 100 degrees lower than the dial says.

So I turned the oven up as high as it would go (500), put my boules on the bottom rack, and crossed my fingers.

Thankfully, they baked, although they aren’t as browned as I might have liked.

But one cannot live on bread alone (ha!), so we also made cake and cookies, both of which used sourdough starter, and also soup, which did not use sourdough starter, but was instead to join the bread for lunch.

First up was the soup. I decided to make this Cheesy Broccoli Soup based solely on the fact that we had a lot of broccoli in the fridge that needed using up. So while I was waiting for the oven to come to temperature, I threw all the soup ingredients together and got that simmering. I also stirred in some leftover chicken sausage, because soup is an excellent way to clean out the fridge.

Next up was a Sourdough Chocolate Cake. This cake involves a sponge that’s stirred together a couple hours before you’re ready to bake it, with sourdough starter, flour, and water. Once it’s baked, then it’s topped with an espresso buttermilk glaze. It’s also supposed to be drizzled with some melted chocolate, but I decided that that was a bit overkill, so left that out.

And finally, the cookies – Sourdough Soft Ginger Cookies from Ruth Allman’s book Alaska Sourdough. These are spiced with molasses, ginger, cloves, cardamom, and lemon zest. They were supposed to be cut-out cookies, but by the time we got to them I was starting to wear out, so I just pulled out a cookie scoop and made ginger lumps instead.

So how did everything turn out?

The soup was super tasty – the addition of the sausage worked really well, plus since I doubled all the veggies it was quite filling and substantial.

The cookies will not win any prizes at a beauty contest, but they’re actually really tasty. I would definitely make these again – super quick to stir together and they hold their shape really well so would work for either scoops or cut-outs.

Aside from being slightly burnt on the sides (see above for my oven temperature woes), the cake was delicious. The addition of the buttermilk and the espresso powder kept the icing from being too sweet (which is usually a problem with glazes).

Oh, and because all of that wasn’t nearly enough, I also made Sourdough Cinnamon Crumb Cake for breakfast before the official baking extravaganza started, primarily because I’d doubled my starter in preparation and had a lot to use up to get it back to a manageable amount before it goes back to lurk quietly in the fridge for another couple weeks.

This was…a lot of crumb topping (and I didn’t even make the full amount the recipe called for), but it’s delicious and so I can forgive the mess involved in eating it.

Overall, this was an extremely successful baking day, even if I did have to do a bazillion adjustments with oven temperature in order to get things to cook.



Baking Sisters: Alabama

This year for Baking Sisters, my sister and I decided that we would try making the official (or unofficial) foods of each state. Initially we toyed with the idea of picking and choosing and skipping around, but after January’s bake, we decided to focus on one state a month. And since we’re going in alphabetical order, that meant Alabama was first.

All the ingredients used for today’s session

Not all states have an official food, but in Alabama’s case, it’s the Lane Cake. This is a four-layer vanilla sponge, filled with a mix of dried fruits and pecans soaked in bourbon and cooked into a sort of caramel, and frosted with a cream cheese and whipped cream frosting. The recipe also calls for coconut but we don’t like coconut, so both my sister and I decided to leave it out.

We didn’t want to make a ginormous cake where we were unsure about the flavor, so we decided to quarter the recipe, which made for some fun with calculator apps when trying to work out measurements. I still did four layers, but used my little 4-inch springform pans, while my sister did larger pans, but only two layers.

My four cute little cake layers

While the cakes were baking, I made the filling. I soaked chopped dried apples and dates in some bourbon, then cooked egg yolks, sugar, and butter until thickened, and mixed it all together with some toasted chopped pecans. That was put into the fridge to chill.

The final step was to make the frosting, which consists of cream cheese, powered sugar, and whipping cream, all blended together until light and fluffy. Then I assembled the cakes and frosted the whole thing. Ta da! Look, it’s a very small Lane cake!

Coffee cup included for scale.

Here it is, sliced, so you can see the layers of cake and filling.

So how did it turn out? Well, the cake itself is tasty, and the frosting is absolutely delicious. The filling is…different. It’s not a bad thing – there’s a caramel sort of feel to it, and it’s tasty enough, but the bourbon was a little overpowering, so I’m not sure it was all that necessary. Still, it was fun to make, so I’m counting that as a win.

Next up, cookies. Alabama Cookies, to be exact. And yes, this is another recipe that calls for coconut except we left it out because coconut is Not Food.

There’s a bazillion variations of this cookie recipe on the internet and I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to Alabama, although maybe it’s the pecans that makes them claim it, who knows. It’s basically a Jumble Cookie, in that it’s a standard cookie base into which a bunch of random extra things get mixed – in this case oats, chocolate chips, toasted pecans, and weirdly, Rice Krispies.

These are not the prettiest cookies in the world, clearly, but they’re certainly tasty, and super quick to throw together. Definitely worth making again.

And finally, we decided to tackle something savory – the Alabama White Chicken Sandwich, which is basically shredded chicken on a bun, with White BBQ Sauce, and topped with coleslaw and pickles. We both started with precooked chicken (Richard picked up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store), and store bought coleslaw (since none of us are big coleslaw eaters), then stirred up the sauce (which is a new-to-both-of-us thing – we’d never actually heard of white BBQ sauce before this). It is white, by the way, because of the horseradish and the mayonnaise.

Here’s my sandwich, all assembled.

I admit I was a bit hesitant about this recipe because I am not normally a fan of horseradish, but this turned out actually super tasty (and in fact I added in a bunch more horseradish because I felt like the sauce needed a bit of an extra kick).

So overall, this month’s bake was a delicious success.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



A head of the pizza game

Today was National Pizza Day, so I suppose we could have just made pizza, which we have done oodles of times in the past. But a random Twitter thread a week or so ago had me pondering, because someone mentioned that they had made calzones in their mini skull cake pan. And I thought, hey, *I* have a mini skull cake pan. I should make calzones! Or perhaps I should call them skullzones instead.

I started with our usual pizza dough recipe, then we eyed the contents of the fridge and decided to fill them with some broccoli and some mushrooms. We debated type of sauce – whether to go with a red or a white sauce, so I instead just tossed a little butter and flour into the veggies and made a roux, then stirred in some cheese, and used that as the filling. I divided the dough into six pieces, then rolled each one out and carefully lined the skull pan molds. I filed them, did my best to crimp the tops, then tossed the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

Ta da! Skullzones!

They aren’t perfect – I think next time (because oh yes, there *will* be a next time) I need to use less dough per skull, and perhaps parbake the cough in the molds before adding in the filling, but they were super tasty, and highly amusing, and that’s what counts.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



A loaf of comfort

Today was World Nutella Day (yes really, it’s a thing), so in order to have a vehicle on which to consume our Nutella, I made some soda bread.

There are a bazillion recipes out there for soda bread, many of which include things that are Wrong and Disgusting, like raisins and caraway seeds, but the recipe I used is pretty simple: oats, flour, baking soda, buttermilk, and salt. Yes, there’s the added step to grind up the oats first, but I find I actually prefer them that way, when used in a quick bread setting, but otherwise you just stir everything together into a shaggy dough, then dump it into a greased bread pan, and plop it into the oven to bake. And when you’re done, you have a lovely, hearty loaf of bread that is perfect for slathering with Nutella, or just some really good butter.

This recipe is just a little heavy on the salt (next time I’ll halve the amount) but otherwise is extremely delicious.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Return of the lemon

Just to show that it is not all yarn all the time around here, today I decided to mix things up and bake something.

Okay, so the truth is I was feeling uninspired to knit, and was very much aware of the plethora of fruit that still remains on the Meyer lemon shrub in the backyard, but hey, baking a thing counts, so let’s go with it.

Anyway. I made Lemon Brownies, because it was a quick recipe that would use up a lemon.

They’re…okay. The majority of the lemon flavor comes from the glaze, while the bar itself is fairly bland. It’s possible the flavor will develop once they’ve had a chance to sit, but overall, we were both underwhelmed. Ah well.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Chocolate – the new fruit

Today was cold outside, and I had originally planned to be driving kittens places, except that that changed so instead I stayed home and did laundry and pet kittens and knit, and also I baked, because hello, have you met me.

I made another batch of the Alfajores because I’m apparently not rolling out my dough thin enough or else the number the recipe claims is a giant lie (there is no way it makes 42 filled cookies (two cookies per sandwich) – that would be 84 cookies from one batch and I definitely did *not* get that many cookies!). I’m not going to bore you with pictures of that though, because they’re not very exciting to look at yet – just pale brown discs that are now resting in the freezer until it’s time to assemble.

However, I also made panettone, because my sister and I decided to extend our little Great British Baking Show bake-along to include the two holiday episodes they released to Netflix (which technically were from 2020, but eh, who cares, it’s more baking!).

I’ve never been a huge fan of panettone because 1) it tends to be kind of dry, and 2) it usually includes a lot of dried fruit, which I don’t like (raisins and all their wrinkly little counterparts are Not Food). But it looked intriguing, and when compared to the other two possibilities (a mincemeat pudding – which is chock *full* of the Not Food things) or an illusion cake (neither of us was in the mood to deal with an entire full-sized cake), panettone was the natural choice. Plus, by making it myself I could replace the fruit with something far more tasty, like, say, chocolate.

Technically we were supposed to make 12 individual panettone, but I pondered trying to turn a muffin tin into a set of panettone molds, and gave up and made one big one instead.

Panettone is basically just an enriched bread dough, but you mix stuff in (dried fruit or nuts or chocolate) after the first rise. Otherwise it’s really not that much different than any other bread dough out there.

I used a large metal bowl because I wasn’t entirely sure what else would work, and it was clearly too big, so when it was finished baking, it….does not look like a panettone.

A loaf of panettone

But it tastes fine. I might have added a little more chocolate than it called for because I wanted to use up the remains of the bag of semisweet chips in the cupboard, so you definitely get chocolate in every bite, which helps because oh hey, what do you know, apparently a main characteristic of panettone, even if you bake it yourself, is that it is dry.

But now I have made panettone (and will be gifting large chunks of it to other people) so I can check that one off the list and never bother again.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.




top