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.

Whenever I make mashed potatoes I usually try to make a little more than I need just so that I can have enough left overs to make these pancakes the next morning. Adding flour or something to thicken up the batter can be a necessary evil because it’s impossible to say how dry or wet the mashed potatoes are. I made two batches of pancakes from two different sets of mashed potatoes. The first set were perfect, cup of mash and two eggs, no flour needed. The second set used some overly wet mashed potatoes. I decided to try thickening it up with corn meal. Lesson learned, they didn’t taste like corn bread they tasted like crap.

When I was growing up my family almost moved to New Mexico. We took a lot of trips there to look at houses and see the sights. Of all the food we had, the one thing that I remember was sopaipillas and what really sticks out is that they were usually served with honey butter. Most of the recipes that I’ve seen floating around for sopaipillas either dust them with sugar and serve them with honey, but they never mention honey butter! They’re missing the best part!

Sopaipillas are good, but honey butter is great! For one thing, it solves the age old problem of honey on toast. Make a piece of toast, butter it up, drizzle some honey on it, take a bite and all of the honey runs off the toast. Now with honey butter, problem solved. Thank you honey butter!

One last thought, the honey to butter ratio is really flexible, I haven’t made this stuff since I was a kid and I just guessed at a ratio and it tasted great. I think next time I’d probably try a 1-1 ratio.

If you don’t get the title then please go and watch this.

I have two huge basil plants in my back yard. As the first frost creeps closer, the time line for using it all up gets shorter, so I needed a recipe that uses basil by the fist full. This is another one of those recipes that you really just eyeball. If you want it more garlicy add more, if you want it more basily add more of that.

You could throw all of this into a food processor, but you’ll come out with a really gross looking paste so I really recommend chopping this by hand. I use a mezzaluna, it keeps all of the bits in the central bowl area, the blade is sharp enough that the weight of the knife can do most of the cutting and the end result has individual bits of the primary ingredients instead of a singular green goop. If you have a ton of basil you can make up a huge batch of this stuff. I’ve heard of people putting it into ice cube trays to keep it over the winter. Personally I don’t know about the ice cube tray thing, with this much garlic I can’t imagine that you’ll be able to get the taste out of the tray afterward. It should last for a few weeks or months in your fridge if it’s thoroughly mixed/covered with olive oil.

I had the best intentions to make butternut squash ravioli today, but as dinner crept closer I just wasn’t going to get it done. I had a pot of stock that I started earlier in the day so I figured I could turn the squash puree into soup. The soup was good even if it wasn’t as sweet as my wife likes it. Her favorite butternut squash soup recipe is really heavy on the apples. While this might not take the title of “favorite” soup recipe it was pretty easy and didn’t require a blender.

Last couple of thoughts: I split this recipe in two because I still think that the puree could make a really good filling for ravioli on it’s own. The measurements are kind of vague for these recipes because I really just eyeballed most of it. I bought a squash and cut it up. That yielded about a pound when peeled and chopped. When I got to the soup stage I would have liked double the amount of puree, that’s why I said 2 lbs. in the recipe. So, I think this is a good recipe for people who like a flexibility in what they’re cooking.