butter makes everything better

I made a half batch of The Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls yesterday.
Warning: Extremely butterific and sugar stuffed.

Fridged the dough overnight and it was pretty easy to both roll out and roll up.

That's sugar and the start of the cinnamon on top of a layer of butter- softened instead of melted, so I didn't end up with melted butter all over the floor, just flour all over the floor. Totally worth it.

Loosey goosey ends

Type A rolls

Almost a pound of powdered sugar:

The maple/coffee frosting is obviously SUPER DUPER FREAKING sweet,  next time I'd consider serving with milk instead of cider. Or maybe vanilla ice cream.

I believe that I am successfully doing my part to help my pregnant friend's goal of gaining 35 lb- I hope the rest of you are doing some cardio so you don't die from my treats.

porkalicious v5

Superlazy pork belly
-oven to 425F
- kosher salt and pepper on belly
- score skin with a razor blade
- dribble a little olive oil in roasting pan to coat bottom
- cut a few onions into quarters (smaller if large onions) and put in roasting pan
- (optional- throw on some herbs like rosemary, thyme, sage on there)
- put pork belly in roasting pan on top of the onions
- roast 20 min, 275 deg for another while

brown butter cookies

I am too lazy and perfectionistic to make beauuuutiful symmetric oval cookies from a spoon, but even lumpy rounds are delicious when they are brown butter cookies. The blurb talks about the texture changing over time-- they go from sandy shortbread to a borderline creamy melt in your mouth kind of thing over a period of two days. Also- my new plan is to not use my oven when it is >80F b/c it heats up my apartment too much.

mac *cheese

Actually it's rotelle spiral pasta guys and cheese. I like the recipe out of Bittman's How to Cook Everything- the dry mustard adds the right flavour note for me.

And it turns out that the secret to panko? What makes panko those Japanese shardlike crumbs so fantastically crisp and light and amazing and why the crunchy top is like the best part of mac and cheese? PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED FATS, that's what.

Which is why I bought the Shirakiku brand Honey Panko, JAPANESE BREAD CRUMBS; soft finished flakes with honey. It's also "A GOOD BARGAIN." Says so on the package. The plan is to make some crispy crumbed chicken with these someday soon.

welcome back post hibernation

Non happy meat short ribs have gone up to ~$5/lb from $4 last year. There were a bunch of pork shoulder braises. And things like this mushroom risotto. It turns out that risotto is freaking easy to make delicious, especially with large amounts of parmesan reggiano at the end. Also you can be totally lazy and not make your own broth etc.

more braising

This time with happy meat from Rineer family farms from the Rittenhouse Square weekly Saturday farmer's market.

chuck roast, $6/lb (normally $7/lb)

with some yellow and red tomatoes

ok so the citrus didn't really add anything 

banana cake

From Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible.
I managed to remember both the sour cream and the lemon zest this time.

potato pancakes

Peel raw potatoes, shred on the big side of a box grater, add salt + pepper. Squish out liquid, shallow fry in vegetable oil (add butter/bacon/onions for fun).

rosemary lemon shortbread

There are a zillion recipes for this on the web. I would recommend chopping fresh rosemary as small as possible. Also my recipe involved powdered sugar creamed into the butter-- I suspect that I didn't cream the sugar in as much as I should have because there was a little bit of chewiness that I think resulted from high concentrations of the powdered sugar glomming onto itself.

peach crumble

I made the Smitten Kitchen peach shortbread and I am not all about the light delicateness of lovely flat squares. I think next time I'd pack it all into an 8" by 8" and get more hefty squares of peachy goodness. Maybe apples next time, seeing as how peaches are finished and it is now 100kinds of apples season now.

summer salad

strawberries
goat cheese
avocado
arugula

Happy Canada Day!!

In honour of Canada Day, I made butter tarts for the first time. I used the double pie crust recipe out of Bittman's How to Cook Everything, fit rounds into muffin tins, and filled with:
1/2c softened butter
1/2c packed brown sugar
1/2 c light corn syrup
pinch of salt
2 eggs
sploosh of vanilla
400 degrees for 18 min, resulted in a soft center but not too runny. Also, no raisins because I don't believe in raisins. Overfilling the shells results in filling leakage which caramelizes (technically a booboo, but +/- depending on how you feel about the addition of chewy caramel to your tart).

The Canadian expats and the American butter tart virgins at work have expressed approval. Hug your local Canadians today.

In other news, I am getting a new stove! My old one won't hold temperature so hopefully a new one will be installed by tomorrow. Hurrahs.

Porkalicious v2

Splurged on a Berkshire pork butt from Meadow Run Farm via Reading Terminal Market's Fair Food Farmstand that took 2+ days to defrost in my fridge.

Salt & pepper on the pork for a few hours, then browned on all sides. Sauteed some onions, 2 carrots, then added 1 c. chicken broth, 2 green serrano peppers, some peppercorns, crushed allspice, lightly toasted cumin, cloves in a teaball, juice+zest from 1 giant orange, dropped the orange in for fun, braised for 300 degrees for 3hrs uncovered and another 2 hrs uncovered, chopped up the roast into some giant cubes to break it up. Once a lot of the braising liquid evaporates, the pork starts to fry in its own fat. SIZZLE.

Served with an excess of guacamole (five avocados is apparently too much for 4 ppl), salsas from Prin, sour cream, tortillas and unfortunately no air conditioning (now installed!). Also a pineapple that I made Katherine cut up. Starter of cheese crisps (browned cheese).

banana cake

Cordon Rose Banana Cake from Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible. In the iterations that I've done, I have occasionally left out the sour cream and the lemon zest if I didn't happen to have it around. Also if you don't need the cake to be flat for layering or frosting, I wouldn't bother with the cake strip to keep it flat because I think the texture is better when it's a little domy.

candied bacon

Brown sugar, pinch of cayenne, oven at 400. I did the brown sugar mixture on both sides of the bacon, and a lot of the melted sugar dripped off the bottom (damn gravity), it would have been less messy if I had just put it on the topside of the bacon.

chocolate cake w/ whipped cream ganache

Cake recipe = master chocolate cake from the four in Cook's Illustrated's Best Recipe. Ganache from the same book. I think I have to stop with the ganaches bc they get a little too pasty to really frost with plus I am killing my coworkers slowly w/ the cholesterol content.

lemon cherry scones

Everyone was hoping the cherries were chocolate.

short rib braise (after)

I used to do the Molly Stevens overnight red wine marinated short rib recipe out of Braising with Molly. But then I tried it without the overnight marinating and it wasn't noticeably different so I don't even bother without the marinating these days.
(5lb of flanken cut short ribs on their sides mostly fits in a layer in my 6 qt Ikea enamel glazed pot). Kosher/giant flake salt & pepper the short ribs. Lazily chop up some vegetables (eg garlic, onion, carrot, celery, parsnip, mushrooms, whatever) in ~2" pieces. Brown the short ribs & remove from pot. Preheat the oven to 300F. Brown the veggies and open the wine. Try the wine. Add the rest of the wine + 1 can (doesn't really matter what size) of crushed tomatoes. (Also optional: rosemary, thyme, more garlic, some cheesecloth tied around allspice, cloves, peppercorns) Bring to a boil, put the short ribs back in the pot & try to get them all partly submerged but don't stress about it. Put the lid on for a secure seal, transfer to oven. Check in 20min to see if things are simmering gently or boiling hard. You want the first so adjust oven temp appropriately.
In theory you might want to turn stuff over after an hour or two. I've actually been lazy and not turned anything, and it didn't make much difference.

vanilla for baking

1. Buy vanilla beans off ebay.
2. Buy cheap vodka.
3. Split a pile of beans lengthwise, scrape the insides.
4. Get rid of some of the vodka to make room for the vanilla beans.
5. Put the beans in the vodka.
6. Shake.
7. Wait for weeks to months for the extract to mature- when it doesn't smell like vodka anymore.

Happy Groundhog's Day

It is Groundhog's Day in North America, a day of weather prognostication and cranky sleepy rodents.

Apparently everyone saw their shadow.

It is also the day of the anniversary of the birth of my brother, 4 of my other friends (seriously), and my über boss.

So I made some celebratory cupcakes. (Cupcakes = 1 batch of Cook's Illustrated Best Recipe chocolate cake (first version in the book), 1 batch of Smitten Kitchen's Double Chocolate Layer Cake adapted from Gourmet March 1999 frosted w/ chocolate ganache.)