When one has made a large batch of lemon curd, one immediately ponders ways to use it up. Which is why this morning I made Meyer Lemon Morning Buns (I would link the recipe, but the URL appears to no longer be functional, so…hmm).
You start with a fairly basic enriched yeast dough, and after that’s risen for about an hour, then you carefully flatten it out into a rectangle. You slather the rectangle with some lemon curd, then fold over one side and sprinkle the whole thing with a mix of lemon zest and sugar to add a little more lemon flavor. Then you fold over the other side, pinch the edges closed, turn, and carefully flatten back into a rectangle so you can cut it into thin strips, about 1 inch wide. Those then get twisted and spiraled, and then carefully placed onto baking sheets. Another (shorter) rise, and you brush them with melted butter and then pop them into the oven to bake. And when they’re done, ta da, you have a bunch of lovely swirly buns!
The lemon flavor in these is fairly light (Adding some lemon zest to the dough itself would probably help a lot here), but otherwise we really liked them. One bun makes a delicious breakfast, so these will last us for a couple days, and the shrub in the backyard has a bazillion more lemons, so I’ll definitely be making these again.
Today we veered wildly off the soup and baked goods track and instead made a big pile of bean and cheese wraps.
This is a recipe we’ve made many times in the past, and it’s always one where I put it off and put it off and then finally make a batch and ask myself why I don’t make these more often, because they really are just that easy.
These things are super easy to customize. You start with 6 cans of whatever beans you like (we use black, white, or pinto) rinsed well and then drained. Add in a can of corn (or some frozen corn if you prefer), and a cup of whatever type of salsa you prefer. A chopped onion is a good addition, although since neither of us is a fan of raw onion, I always cook it first. You could also toss in some diced peppers, or whatever other veggies you prefer. A couple teaspoons of a mix of your favorite relevant spices (cumin, oregano, salt, pepper, chili powder, etc.; you decide what level of spice you want), and finally 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese (you can forgo the cheese but I’d recommend something in a similar vein as a replacement to add both binder and a little moisture to the interior) and you have a ginormous bowl of filling. Then you lay out burrito sized flour tortillas over every open surface in your kitchen, and dole out heaping cups of filling onto each until you’ve used it all up. Fold them so the filling is trapped inside, then wrap them in waxed paper and stash them in the freezer.
To serve, I recommend heating it in the microwave so the filling inside is warm, then giving both sides a quick toast on a pan on the stovetop, so they get some color and crunch. Then top with a dollop of sour cream, salsa, guacamole, or whatever else your little heart desires.
We make ours deliberately a little bland because 1) we have different levels of preferred spice, and 2) we’d both rather spice it up afterwards with extra salsa, but you do you. The point is that with a very small amount of effort, you end up with a dozen or so perfectly filling, fairly inexpensive lunch (or dinner) items in your freezer for when you’re just not in the mood for another sandwich.
It is that time of year, where the Meyer lemon shrub in the backyard tries to take over the world, and I do my best to call its bluff. And what better way to clear out half a dozen lemons than a double batch of lemon curd?
Curd is one of those things that is easy to make, as long as you are paying attention, because you’re dealing with eggs and if you wander off and leave it alone, you get lemon-flavored egg scramble. It needs to be cooked low and slow, and you need to stir it constantly the entire time (it’s a lot like gravy in that regard). But if you are patient and follow the steps, you end up with a lovely thing at the end.
This is the same recipe I have used ever since I first made curd, back when we moved into this house in 2007. It’s half a cup of lemon juice, 2 eggs, zest from a couple lemons (it usually takes about 3 lemons), 3/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup butter, cut into chunks. You whisk everything but the butter together in a metal bowl until it’s blended, then put the bowl on top of a pot of simmering water, add in the butter, and start whisking non-stop. Eventually, if you did it right, the mixture should start to thicken, and start to turn a lovely bright yellow. That’s when you pull it off the heat, and then run it through a fine sieve, because no matter what you did, there’s probably some tiny bits of cooked egg lurking in there, plus that will also filter out some of the zest, which is no longer needed.
I’ve tried actually canning lemon curd in the past (following approved recipes) but it doesn’t turn out as nice after the hot water processing, so instead I just freeze mine in batches, so that throughout the year, I can pull out out whenever I need it.
We ate the last of the Granola Bread the other day, so I thought it might be nice to branch out and try something new. Inspired by the fact that I had some carrots in the fridge that were starting to look a little sad, I decided to make this Carrot Bread, because not only does it include a whole pile of carrots, it sounded like it would be tasty.
It’s basically a sweet quick bread that includes 9 ounces of carrots, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. How could this go wrong?
Ha.
First of all, this thing weighed a ton, and because I was in a hurry I used only one hand to pull it out and so I consequently dropped it on the floor. Thankfully it maintained enough structure I was able to get it back into the pan and once it cooled it was (mostly) fine.
But that’s not the bread’s fault. No, the issue I had with the bread was that it was alternately both unpleasantly heavy and also too sweet. That 1 teaspoon of cinnamon was not remotely enough to give it any flavor, and the tiny chunk I had left an unpleasant greasiness on my tongue.
Richard actually liked it, so he gets the remaining loaf to snack on for however long it lasts. But the recipe itself is being relegated to the recycling bin, and next time I have too many carrots, I’ll find something else to do with them (like maybe soup!).
After a brief reprieve, it’s time for more soup! I know, but this finally gets us caught up to our ‘one per week’ challenge, so yay.
Anyway. Last night I looked in the fridge and freezer to see what needed using up, and then I pulled out a recipe from my stack of Soups To Try that would take care of most of the leftovers: Creamy Ham and Potato Soup.
This soup goes together pretty quickly. First you chop up onion, carrots, and celery, then cook those in butter until soft. Add in the garlic, then make a roux with some butter, and deglaze the pan with some wine (we used some kind of cheap stuff Richard bought specifically for cooking because neither of us drinks wine). Next you add in some broth, then dump in chopped ham, diced potatoes, and a bay leaf. That all simmers until the potatoes are soft, then you stir in some half and half (we used the leftover coconut milk from the Curried Cauliflower soup we made earlier).
We ate it with a small slice of leftover Chocolate Focaccia on the side.
Verdict: Delicious! Quick to throw together and has that ‘comfort food’ appeal you want when it’s cold outside. Not entirely sure what the wine added – you could easily use broth to deglaze instead, and next time we probably will.
Note: The recipe says it makes 4 servings, but we divided it into six bowls and stashed the other four in the fridge for lunches for the next couple days.
Today was kind of exciting. California was hit by a rather nasty storm, with winds gusting upwards of 60 mph in our area, and even higher down in Southern California. We had friends over for an impromptu game day, and halfway through, the power went out. Thankfully it was still light out, so we moved toward the window-side of the table and were able to continue our gaming, but it did mean my plan for (yes, another) soup for dinner was thwarted.
Luckily, however, I had made cake. Or rather, Sandtorte.
A little backstory on what that is and why I picked it. For Christmas this past December, my little sister, my niece, and I all got a copy of B. Dylan Hollis’s cookbook: Baking Yesteryear. If you haven’t stumbled across his baking videos, by the way, I highly recommend you check them out. He’s got a quirky sense of humor and some of the recipes he’s made are absolutely delicious (and of course, some, not so much).
Anyway. Since we all got a copy we decided we’d jointly make one recipe from the book every month, then report back to each other on how it turned out (Why yes, I do do a lot of food-related personal challenges, why do you ask?) In January, we picked the Grasshopper Pie, which I thought was pretty tasty, probably because I used nonalcoholic syrups for the flavoring instead of the Creme de Menthe and Creme de Cacao that the recipe called for, while my sister and niece used the real thing and apparently were not fans (hooray for my accidental better choice!).
This month we picked the Sandtorte, which is from the 1900’s. It’s kind of a pound cake sort of cake, except that you use half flour, half cornstarch, and you whip the egg whites (of the SIX eggs) separately before folding them into the batter, so that at the end you end up with a surprisingly light cake.
The recipe said to place a doily on the top and then sprinkle it with powdered sugar to create a pretty pattern.
Gosh, if only I knew someone who had several dozen random knitted doilies downstairs in a cupboard? Oh that’s right, it’s me!
Anyway. Here is my cake.
The sandtorte
Not the best backdrop, but by this point we had no power anywhere in the neighborhood so I had to make do with wherever the most light was available.
The interior is a cross between a pound cake and an angel food cake, which sounds like a complete oxymoron but I don’t know how else to describe it.
It’s a tasty enough cake, although there’s not a huge amount of flavor. I suspect this would be much improved with the addition of a cream or a sauce. Perhaps some lemon curd. Hmm. If only I knew of a small Meyer lemon shrub that routinely tries to overload me with fruit around this time of year…..
Be of good cheer, my faithful readers, because today I did not make soup! Instead I made focaccia. Chocolate focaccia, that is.
When King Arthur posted this recipe as their bake-of-the-week, I knew I had to give it a try. The yeasted dough is similar to a traditional focaccia recipe, with the addition of black cocoa to the batter (plus a tiny bit of sugar to counteract the bitterness of the cocoa), but then you knead it for 15 (!) minutes before stirring in some chocolate chips. After the first rise, it then goes into a pan prepped first with a puddle of olive oil – focaccia dough actually rises in an olive oil bath, which helps give it that characteristic slighty chewy outer texture. At the end of the rising time, another healthy glug of olive oil is drizzled over the top, then you use your fingers to poke it full of holes (I have no idea why focaccia has holes; I just know they’re required), and sprinkle some pearl sugar over the top.
I wasn’t entirely sure how this would work, since chocolate plus yeast dough isn’t always a winning combination, but oh my goodness, this turned out delicious!
It’s got the focaccia texture and open crumb interior, but with little pockets of chocolatey goodness, plus the occasional pop of sweetness from the pear sugar on the top.
Day 2 of Thingadailies, and it’s time for more soup, mainly because we fell behind and needed to catch up if we were going to stay on track with the one new recipe a week plan.
Tonight’s soup was Chicken Bacon Chowder. While yesterday’s soup was light and chock full of veggies, this soup swings in complete the opposite direction, combining chicken, onion, leeks, mushrooms, and of course bacon, in a crockpot and cooking it all day so that the entire house smells amazing by dinner time.
A crockpot full of delicious chowder
Unlike yesterday’s soup, we were definitely not hungry after eating a bowl of this chowder. I think next time we make it I’ll cut back on the salt, and maybe do a couple healthier tweaks (subbing in coconut milk instead of the cream, for example, or using only half the bacon), but it was exactly the thing for a cold night when it’s been a long day at work and all you want is food that doesn’t require any effort (because all the effort happened 8 hours before).
We did, by the way, eat more of the cauliflower soup for lunch, although this time we paired it with grilled cheese sandwiches made on the Sourdough Sandwich Bread I baked this morning. Yum.
Oh look, it’s February again, which means another year of Thingadailies. In prior years I’ve had some kind of plan for a theme of what I’ll be making but this year I just haven’t come up with anything so…we’re going to play it by ear. And thus, today, I made Curried Cauliflower Soup.
Last year, I started thinking about the fact that we like soup, but we don’t actually have that many recipes that we make, and wouldn’t it be fun to expand our soup repertoire. So I went back through all the bookmarks in my Recipes to Try folder, and polled my family and friends, and made a list of a bunch of recipes, and then we set ourselves a goal of making one new-to-us soup recipe every week for the entire year (or a total of 52 different types of soup). Obviously not all of them will end up in our favorites list, but at least we’d have tried lots of new stuff and hopefully added a few more to the recipe box.
This recipe is pretty simple. You cook up some onion and some garlic in a little bit of oil, then add vegetable broth and a massive pile of cauliflower, plus a bunch of spices (although weirdly curry was not actually one of them) and simmer that until everything is soft. Break out the stick blender and blend it until smooth, then stir in some coconut milk to add a bit more depth and richness to the flavor.
The recipe suggested serving it with some roasted cashews sprinkled on top, but we skipped that, and instead had it with slices of Granola Bread on the side.
Verdict – it’s definitely tasty and we’d be perfectly happy to make it again, but we were both absolutely starving about an hour later, so this soup would be better as a side dish instead of as the main course.
This month, instead of doing our baking date through virtual means, we decided we would actually do it in person. It was my year to host, so my entire family was here (you would not think we could cram eleven full grown adults into our tiny living room but somehow it always works out), and my sister and I figured we could sneak in some baking time then.
We’ve really enjoyed this season of Great British Bake Off – the new host is much better; the format was back to what it used to be; nearly every week my sister and I wanted to bake at least one of the recipes (unlike in years past when we’ve been uninspired), and sometimes we have even struggled with *which* recipe to make because we wanted to make them all.
So for Christmas we decided we wanted to make a plaited bread. Christmas morning I mixed up the dough for another lardy cake (since my sister hadn’t yet made that one), while she mixed up the dough for a basic white bread. Then once that was ready, we rolled it out super thin and brushed it with garlic herb butter. Once that was rolled up, we then had a discussion of how many strands to do in our plait. The contestants had to do a minimum of 5, but we decided to do six. My sister started cutting the long roll, and then as she finished we realized she’d actually cut it into eight pieces instead. Oops.
Ah well. We roped my niece into helping while my mom took pictures, and we rolled each piece out into a long, thing rope. Then we got to plaiting. My sister wanted to find a video, but I was pretty sure I had an idea of what to do.
Things got a little silly.
Okay, we probably should have watched a video, but once we got started, we got the hang of it.
Ta da!
It was a lot of fun to make, and it was nice to be able to bake together in the same place for a change. And bonus, it was absolutely delicious!
