James Starmer – Food

My Comments

This is another one of those things I remember from my childhood that I haven’t had since then. It’s basically a snow cone with cream instead of syrup. My sister had the idea that you could probably use a real vanilla bean instead of the vanilla extract but that would require simmering the half and half with the bean to extract the flavor and I was to impatient for that. Also note that I’m doing this because we just had a blizzard and there’s about 30 inches of snow in my front yard. Normally I wouldn’t classify the snow around Baltimore as edible, but in this case I think it’s OK.

My Comments

These are one of those things I grew up eating and promptly forgot about. I hadn’t had one in years and honestly they are better than I remember. And they are super simple and since there isn’t any leavening agent they are impossible to over mix and screw up. One key thing to remember is to use unsalted butter. I used salted butter and it was a little too salty. I also tried it a bunch of different ways, with jam, nutella, just powdered sugar. I think fried bananas would be good too though or end a meal with a 1/4 pancake and a scoop of ice cream.

These are also known as Dutch Baby Pancakes. Wikipedia says that the Dutch in “Dutch Baby Pancakes” refers to the Pennsylvania Dutch (who are German descendants), hence German Pancake.

My Comments

The only difference between this recipe and the one on epicurious is that I removed the peanuts, bumped up the amount of popcorn and I pop my corn in a bag.

I was really hoping this would taste like Fisher’s popcorn. It didn’t. It’s still good but it just isn’t the same. Back to the drawing board I guess.

My Comments

I looked at a few recipes before settling on this one. This is pretty much a straight rip off of Ina Garten’s recipe. I also tried Alton Browns recipe and from the stark similarity between the two I gleaned that granola bar recipes are pretty flexible, so I experimented a bit. As long as you have the right ratio of dry to wet ingredients, you can throw in anything you like. Some ideas that I tried were, flax seed (they have omega-3, a nice smokey nuttiness, and they add a nice crunch), sunflower seeds, dried apples, dried apricots, dried cherries, dried cranberries, raisins. Some things that I still want to try, macadamia nuts, chocolate, candied orange peel. One last note on why I like this version over Alton Browns, coconut. The shredded coconut adds another level of binding and a unique chewyness that Alton’s were lacking, so unless you hate coconut I’d leave it in there at the recommended ratio.

About a year ago I went biscotti crazy. I tried tons of different recipes looking for the perfect one. Believe me, there are a lot of biscotti recipes lurking on the internet. The biggest difference I have found is how soft the end product is. I’ve made ones that are so tender that they barely make it through the cutting stage and back onto the baking sheet and I’ve made ones that were tooth breaking hard. I think the harder they are the better they are for dipping, too soft and you end up with half a biscotti at the bottom of your coffee.

I really like this recipe because it’s right in the middle, soft like a cookie, but hard enough to hold up to the rigors of dunking in my tea. You could probably make them a little harder or softer by varying the time and heat of the second baking stage.

The base for this recipe is just Giada’s recipe and instead of pistachios and cranberries I added candied orange peel and and chocolate chips, along with a few minor tweaks.

Giada seems to think that these only last for 3 to 4 days. Personally I take a bunch with me to work and they hang out in my desk drawer for over a week sometimes two. I’m still here. My logic is that these are just cookies and cookies last forever right?

I linked to a candied orange peel recipe above. Candied orange peels are dead simple and taste great. I’ll try to write another post about them in the future. I didn’t really follow that recipe exactly because I only had two oranges. But I wholeheartedly agree that multiple boil and drain sessions are key.

The down side: I have to admit that after a few days the orange peels got really hard. If your aren’t going to eat them right away it might be worth experimenting with other candied orange peel recipes that leave you with a softer peel that might be less prone to drying out.

Since I hate whiskey this drink is definitely on the top of the hot alcoholic winter drinks list. It’s really easy to make and since the batter is just mainly butter it lasts a pretty long time in the fridge and even longer in the freezer.

For those coming in directly, here is a link to the recipe for the orange and chocolate biscotti in the background.

I was talking with my brother about this recipe and I think he said it best, it’s pretty hard to screw up bread pudding. I have to agree. As long as you hit the key bread, milk, eggs and sugar it’s probably going to taste good. So this recipe is more of a guideline than hard and fast rules. Feel free to change up the spices, skip the water bath, switch up the pine nuts, whatever, bread pudding is really hard to screw up. I liked using the muffin tins because I just popped them out and they were already divided and held up pretty well in the transfer over to a bowl. I actually threw most of them onto waxed paper and into the freezer once they cooled down. They come back to life in the microwave really well. So on a cold winter morning you can have a hot breakfast in a few minutes that isn’t oatmeal.

Here is a stop motion video of me shaping the buns from the previous post.

There has been a lot written about no knead bread at this point so I’m not really going to get into the history and details. I got the basic recipe here and it’s just the base recipe from this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

I have a lot of trouble baking bread. I don’t know if it’s some kind of bread A.D.D., but going through all of the steps to create a perfect traditional loaf of bread kind of has me stumped. After trying this recipe (I only did a half for my first two attempts) I’m a firm believer in this style of baking bread.

Just a few last thoughts, For the buns I removed slightly large than golf ball sized chunks and shaped them into little boules. The steam part might seem a little weird but it’s really what is going to produce the perfect crust. And let me reiterate, the steam part is dangerous, be careful. In the bread bible aka Bread Bakers Apprentice goes into a lot more detail about the whole steam process and they suggest opening the oven and spraying the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to really get a lot of steam going.

Now what should you do with these fine buns? I did end up smearing some honey butter on one of them but my favorite was this little bacon sandwich.

Here is a video showing how to shape the bread

I didn’t followSandra Lee’s recipe that uses “beef sandwich slices” aka steak-umms aka beef spam. I decided that this one on epicurious was a little more legit.

I loosely followed the epicurious version. I didn’t blanch the scallions. I didn’t use flank steak, I used a crappy cheap cut that was already sliced and fairly mangled. I mangled it more with a wooden hammer too try to get an even 1/16″. I didn’t tie it up with a string, I just hoped that the searing would hold it in place and it did.

Overall the feeling that I get from this recipe is that it’s pretty open to interpretation. It’s really just marinaded meat wrapped around a vegetable. I saw a lot of recipes for where the meat is wrapped around asparagus and a few where mini-negimaki were made appetizer style. So I think this is a good basic recipe that will hopefully inspire some more clever uses of meat wrapped around vegetables, but please refrain from using steak-umms, it’s just wrong.