Let's try this again

After a hiatus of a year, I'm going to try to revive the blog in a new location, time and life permitting.

Come visit me at http://ladydisdain.wordpress.com/ to see how it's going.

Cooler Weather Fare: Lima Bean and Corn Chowder

As the weather turns inexorably cooler and wetter, I begin to crave soup. Later in the year, this will mean heavier soups made primarily from pantry staples, but fortunately, in the transition between summer and true autumn there's a merciful period during which there is still a good variety of end-of-summer produce, like the wonderful fresh limas I got from the farmer's market yesterday. I was originally planning on using them for a salad, but as it was a horrible rainy day, I threw together this pretty chowder on a whim instead.

It's a satisfying blend of fresh and rich, with the sweetness of the corn and the bite of the chile flakes and black pepper cutting through the creaminess of the broth, and the potatoes and limas providing a smooth and substantial mouthfeel. It's also a snap to put together, but tastes like you went to a considerable amount of trouble.

Lima Bean and Corn Chowder
Serves 4-6

2 tablespoons each butter and olive oil
1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes
1 large onion, diced
2 ribs celery, diced
1 orange (or red) pepper, diced
6 cups vegetable stock
4 small potatoes, peeled and diced
1 dry quart fresh lima beans
16 oz frozen corn kernels
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Salt and pepper
1/2 to 1 cup heavy cream

Heat butter and oil in a heavy pot. Add chile flakes, onions, celery and pepper and sweat until softened. Add stock, potatoes, lima beans, corn and seasonings.

Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer until potatoes and lima beans are tender, approximately 20 minutes.

Take off heat and stir in as much cream as desired. Taste and correct salt and pepper, if necessary.

Notes: You could use frozen limas if fresh aren't available, which would make it a great dinner option in the middle of winter, when your vegetable drawer is pathetically bare.

Sunday Night Sweets Blogging: Honey Gingerbread with Apple-Quince Compote

I am woefully behind on the blogging, and I'm afraid I still don't have the time or energy right now to do this anywhere near as well as I'd like to, but something is better than nothing, right? Anyway, in a (probably futile) attempt to catch up, here is the Sunday project from two weeks ago: Honey Gingerbread, served with a compote of apples and quinces and topped with a generous dollop of sweetened mascarpone. While I love ordinary gingerbread, using honey instead of molasses gentles the cake, letting the spices warm and soothe you instead of being overwhelming, and serving it with the sweet fruit and the creamy cheese turns a humble snack cake into an unpretentious but still elegant dessert that could unapologetically round out a fancy meal.

Since the accompaniments are so simple (just add quinces to your favorite applesauce recipe, and stir a spoonful or two of sugar into a container of mascarpone), I will only give the recipe for the gingerbread. I will, however, encourage you to consider serving it with the garnishes, since the combination of textures and flavors is fabulous. If you don't have access to quinces, you could use a combination of tart and sweet apples instead, but quinces add such a wonderful, exotic floral note to any fruit dessert that they are absolutely worth paying the extortionate prices whenever you can find them.

Honey Gingerbread
Serves 8-12

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 cups honey
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 2 tablespoons warm water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon powdered ginger
Pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 325 F. Grease a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan and line with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, spices and salt.

In a saucepan over medium-low heat, melt together the butter, sugar, and honey. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly, then mix in the milk, eggs and dissolved baking soda.

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix well. Pour into the pan and bake until firm but springy when touched, 45-60 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in the pan before cutting into squares.

Notes: This gingerbread, like any gingery, cinnamony cake or cookie, will only improve if you give it a bit of time to sit. While it's wonderful fresh from the oven, it will be even spicier and more flavorful for breakfast the next day.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Memory Quest Edition

When we were students, His Lordship and I used to frequent a bakery that specialized in cookies, not high-impact cookies like tuiles or madeleines, but homey, chock-full-of-bits variations on the basic chocolate chip cookie. They were all unassumingly wonderful, but there was one for which His Lordship, who can otherwise take or leave desserts, would take regular detours. It was a honey-apricot-pecan cookie, moist and chewy because of the honey and full of nuts and fruit, and despite the fact that we'd buy a pound of them at a time, they never seemed to last until the next day.

We finished school and moved away, and then the bakery closed, depriving His Lordship of the opportunity to buy them ever again. Since he never stopped pining for them, I decided to try reproducing them at home, and began a long and occasionally frustrating quest for the right recipe. I began by trying to modify a standard chocolate chip cookie with nuts, exchanging some of the sugar for honey and replacing the chocolate with the apricots, assuming that that's what the bakery had done. The taste was fine, but the texture was wrong. His Lordship wanted it to be chewier, and to have a more pronounced honey flavor. Since nothing I could do to a basic creamed-butter dough would produce the level of chewiness he wanted, I decided to switch the paradigm to a modified ginger cookie instead, which had the double virtue of built-in chewiness and one-for-one substitutability of honey for molasses. Using the same basic recipe underlying the five-spice and bourbon-infused cookies I previously posted, I added a cup each of chopped pecans and dried apricots. His Lordship proclaimed the results closer than any of my previous attempts, and they've been a big hit with family, friends and coworkers as well.

I appear to be on the right track, but I'm still not perfectly satisfied. Although the combination of flavors and the level of chewiness are right, they still spread quite a lot, producing a much flatter cookie than the one I remember, and, if not watched carefully, they over-brown and become almost praline-like. I've tried increasing the proportion of nuts and apricots to add more structure, thoroughly chilling (even pre-freezing) the dough, lowering the baking temperature, and making sure to remove the cookies from the oven while just barely golden. All of this has helped, but not enough. I'm starting to suspect that I may need to play around with adding extra flour for additional support. Next time, I will try increasing it by a quarter of a cup, to see if that makes any difference. In the meantime, it's still a damn good cookie, even if it can still use a bit more refining, so I'm putting up the in-progress recipe. Keep watching this space for ongoing installments of the Great Cookie Quest.

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies
Makes approx. five dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup strong-flavored honey
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups pecans, coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cup dried apricots, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt.

Melt the butter and place in a large mixing bowl, allowing it to cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the granulated sugar, honey, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the sifted dry ingredients and stir until barely blended, then stir in the pecans and apricots. Cover the bowl and chill thoroughly.

Scoop out the cookie with a tablespoon-sized scoop and place two inches apart on the cookie sheets. Bake 9-10 minutes, until just beginning to turn golden. Immediately slide the cookies, parchment and all, onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely and set up.

Notes: Next time, I will try increasing the flour by 1/4 cup to see what that does, and I will probably also increase the amount of nuts and apricots again.

The Food of the Gods: Zabaglione

It is, quite frankly, a little nuts to make zabaglione on a Monday, but I had three leftover egg yolks after making chocolate amaretti (recipe to follow) for the Sunday cookie baking, and they weren't going to get better after another 24 or more hours in the fridge. And really, there is no higher fate an egg can aspire to than zabaglione, the frothy, foamy, heady alchemy resulting from the combination of nothing more than yolks, sugar and wine. Custard is comforting, creme anglaise is elegant, but zabalgione is transcendental, like tasting the rose-tinged golden clouds that accompany the sun as it sets over the wine-dark sea.

I used to be a purist and would insist on beating it by hand just to show off, but even in my pre-soft-and-lazy days, I still wouldn't have been crazy enough to do it the hard way on a Monday. By all means, use a handheld mixer, Monday or not, unless you really want an upper-body workout.

Marsala is my usual choice for zabaglione, but I didn't have any, thanks to the stupid archaic blue laws that infest this part of the country and make even a functional teetotaler like me want to stockpile booze just to avoid making another trip to the state-run store. I used port, but you could use almost any sweet wine or liqueur that you desire, although the advantage to the Marsala, besides the wonderful honey-caramel flavor, is that it won't stain the zabaglione quite as dark as port. Next time, I might even try Kahlua.

Monday Evening Zabaglione
Serves 2

3 egg yolks, at room temperature
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons port

Set a medium-sized pot containing an inch or so of water on low heat. In a bowl just bigger than the pot, combine the yolks, sugar and port, and beat at high speed with a hand-held mixer or a whisk until combined and foamy, then place over the water and beat over the heat until the mixture thickens and triples in volume. Continue beating at high speed for an additional three minutes, until very viscous and warmed through.

Divide between two stemmed wine glasses, and serve with fruit or plain cookies, such as ladyfingers or amaretti.

Notes: Be careful not to let the water boil, since it might scramble the yolks. If it looks like that might be happening, pull the bowl off the double boiler and continue beating while lowering the heat under the double boiler, then replace the bowl once things have cooled off.

Sunday Sweets Blogging: Sour Cherry Crumb Tart

Cranberries, rhubarb, and now sour cherries. Do we sense a theme here? I appear to have a thing for incandescently red, tart fruit, don't I? I suppose I might as well confess that I love pomegranates and blood oranges, too. I'm sure someone with a psychology background could come up with some sordid reason for my attraction to crimson fruits, but I prefer not to examine the implications too closely and just enjoy the mood-lifting color and the tastebud-stimulating tingle.

Even if you don't share my potentially problematic compulsion to snatch up anything red and tangy, you really ought to take advantage of the blink-of-an-eye season for sour cherries if you're lucky enough to live in their growing area. They're obscenely expensive for the two weeks or so that they appear, and pitting them is a pain in the ass, but their manic color and flavor are so wonderful that it's well worth the pricetag and the trouble. If you do bite the bullet, the best way to showcase them is in a pie, or, if you're not feeling up to working with dough, a crisp or cobbler. You want to let the fruit get top billing, with some plain and sweet dough or crumbly mixture to play the supporting role.

I went a little nuts (literally!) with today's recipe, which combines both an almond-enhanced bottom crust and a crumbly topping, but since they're a once-a-year treat, I thought they deserved the extra effort. As has become another habit, this recipe is an amalgam of components from several recipes: the basic almond tart dough and the almond crumble from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake, and the filling from a Gourmet recipe for sour cherry crostata on Epicurious. The end product is humble in appearance but a shooting star in taste and texture, with a tender cookie-like crust and a crumbly and nutty top layer, sandwiching between them a zingy layer of unadorned fruit.

Sour Cherry Crumb Tart
Makes 1 9-inch tart

Almond Tart Dough
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg yolk, at room temperature
1/2 cup finely ground almond meal
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Sour Cherry Filling
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 quart fresh sour cherries, pitted (approx. 4-5 cups)
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cold water
3 tablespoons cornstarch

Almond Crumble Topping
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup slivered almonds
6 tablespoons butter, melted

Equipment: 9-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom

Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat on medium for 5 minutes, or until fluffy and pale in color. Beat in the vanilla and egg yolk and beat for another 2 minutes, then beat in the almond meal. Sift the flour over the the mixture and fold in gently with a spatula, until no traces of flour remain. Place in a gallon-sized zip-top bag or sandwich between two layers of plastic wrap and press out into a disk approx. 1/4 inch thick. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Melt the butter in a large nonstick skillet over moderate heat, then add the cherries and sugar, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Lower the heat and continue to simmer until the cherries are tender but not mushy, about 6 minutes. Mix the water and cornstarch into a paste, pull the pan off the heat, and stir the paste into the filling. Return the pan to the heat and simmer two more minutes, stirring frequently. Pour the filling onto a shallow baking dish and allow to cool to room temperature.

Place the oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350F. While the oven is heating, prepare the topping by mixing the dry ingredients in a medium bowl, then stirring in the butter until thoroughly combined. Let sit for five minutes, then break the mixture into medium-sized crumbs with your fingers.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and press into the tart pan, making sure the bottom and sides are even and patching any cracks or holes through which the filling might ooze. If the dough heats and softens too much from working it, return to the refrigerator for several minutes, then fill with the cherries. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the top.

Set the tart on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake until the dough and topping are golden and the filling is bubbling, 30-40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely on a rack, a full hour if you can wait that long, and at least half an hour if you can't.

Naked Pizza

After half a lifetime spent piling as much onto a pizza as the laws of physics will permit, I have finally come to the conclusion that the Italians have it right after all, and that the ridiculous excess of American pizza is really an insult to the basic form. Pizza, in order to be any good at all, needs to be as minimalist as possible, so that you can taste the mellow yeastiness of the crust, the peppery fruitiness of the oil, the mineral tang of the salt, and the individual characteristics of the very few and elemental toppings you do choose to add. Tons of cheese only dull your palate, sweet and pasty tomato sauces only make the whole experience insipid, and too many toppings not only clash and drown each other out, but also weigh down and wet the dough so much that you will never get a properly crisp crust.

There are therefore two secrets to really spectacular and satisfying pizza: Keep It Simple, Stupid, and do not even bother if you're not going to use a baking stone. I know it seems like the height of yuppified self-indulgence to buy a baking stone, but you absolutely need the porous ceramic texture to wick away the extra moisture and sear the crust to a crackly, caramelized golden-brown. A mediocre batch of dough can be saved by baking on a ripping-hot stone, but even the most perfectly kneaded and risen dough will become a spongy, disappointing mess if you bake it on a regular cookie sheet. There's no point in going to all the trouble (and potential heartache) of working with yeast if you're going to handicap yourself from the start, so you really owe it to yourself to spring the $20 at Williams Sonoma or Bloodbath and Beyond, or even the $3 at Home Despot for unglazed quarry tiles instead (Thanks, Alton Brown!) .

As you can see above, dinner tonight featured my absolute favorite pizza: a white pizza with nothing but olive oil, salt, and thinly sliced onions and garlic. The oil keeps the dough moist and rich, and the onions and garlic turn sweet and wonderful in the high heat, needing only a sprinkle of salt to round everything out. While I do make the dough from scratch on occasion (and, in a particularly industrious phase, even kept a sourdough starter going for months at a time, from which I made weekly batches of baguettes or focaccia), lately I've had neither the time nor the energy to make my own, so I procure the dough from the neighborhood pizzerias or from the refrigerator case at Trader Joe's. If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend Alton's recipe, which, if not fast, is practically foolproof and incredibly flavorful.

Pizza Bianca with Red Onion and Garlic
Makes 2 oblong pizzas, approximately 12 inches by 6 inches

1/2 lb pizza dough, purchased from your friendly neighborhood pizzeria
1 large red onion, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, thinly slices
1/4 cup good olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Equipment:
A baking stone or unglazed quarry tiles
A pizza peel or cookie sheet (turned upside-down if it has a rim), for transferring the pizzas to and from the oven
Coarsely ground cornmeal for dusting the peel or cookie sheet

Move the oven rack to lower third of the oven and position the baking stone on the rack. Preheat the oven at 550 F for at least 20 minutes, to allow the stone to get really hot.

Meanwhile, mix the topping ingredients in a bowl and allow to marinate. Divide the dough into two equal portions and shape into balls, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rest until the oven is ready.

When the oven and the stone are blistering hot, sprinkle the peel or upside-down cookie sheet generously with the cornmeal, to prevent the dough from sticking when you transfer it to the oven. Stretch out the first ball of dough into a long, thin rectangle, approximately a foot long and six inches wide, by pressing, pinching, and even letting it hang down from your fingertips to let gravity do the work. (If the dough immediately shrinks back, cover with plastic again and let it relax for several minutes before trying again.) The thinner you get it at this point, the crispier the end product will be, but don't worry about the precise thickness. If the dough tears, just pinch it back together.

When the dough is thin enough for your liking, lay it onto the cornmeal-dusted peel or sheet, and spread with half the topping mixture, making sure to leave a lip of at least half an inch all around to prevent the toppings from sliding off during the transfer. Gently shake the peel or sheet to be sure the pizza isn't sticking, and then slide the pizzas off the peel/sheet onto the heated stone in the oven with a few quick jerks.

Bake for 10 minutes, or until the dough is a dark golden brown and the onions and garlic are beginning to caramelize, then remove to a cooling rack for a few minutes before eating.

Repeat with the remaining half of the dough and topping mixture.

Notes: If you must have cheese, I'd suggest doing what we did with this batch: Add paper-thin slivers or a fine grating of cheese at the absolute last minute, after the pizza is already out of the oven. (We used Manchego, which was lovely.) If you want the cheese to brown, don't put it on the pizzas before they go in the oven; add it in the last few minutes of baking, once the dough has already set and is starting to turn golden. This will ensure that the crust stays crisp and the cheese doesn't burn or turn oily.

Sunday Night Sweets Blogging: Opera Cupcakes

We're woefully overdue for another Sunday night sweets entry. It isn't that I haven't been baking; it's just that life has been interfering with blogging time again. The hazelnut chocolate chip cookies I made two weeks ago were a bit disappointing and not worth posting about yet, but I'll try to find time to write up last week's almond-caramel sandwich cookies sometime soon, since they came out rather well.

In the meantime, tonight's mood was in the cake direction. The foibles of my crappy oven aside, I've been really happy since I started using Shirley Corriher's recipe for Basic Moist Sweet Cake from Cookwise for cupcakes. The method is a bit quirky, since you blend the flour and the fat together first, then add the liquid ingredients, but the end product is wonderfully moist, tender, and velvety. I think it might actually work better as cupcakes, since the crumb is so delicate and melting that I can't imagine it holding up particularly well to frosting or slicing as a full-sized cake. As it is, you really need to double-line the muffin cups, or use the stiff mini-panettone molds I used this time, to give the cakes enough support to stand up once you unmold them; otherwise, they just spread and deform in the liners.

Besides the fantastic texture, the other advantage of this recipe is that you can use any oil you like, but nut oils, if you have them, give you an incredibly flavorful end product. Nearly every time I've made this recipe, I've used macadamia oil, which gives the basic yellow cake a wonderfully exotic, round, full flavor. This time, since I'm out of the macadamia, I used hazelnut, which inspired me to go with the coffee-chocolate combination of the classic Opera Cake when it came time to frost. Having both a coffee buttercream and a ganache glaze is probably overkill for cupcakes, but I couldn't decide on one or the other, and I really do love the combination of chocolate, coffee, and nuts.

I'm not entirely happy with the decoration here, because the coffee beans are too small and too dark to make any impact against the ganache. Next time I'd probably use the half-cup of leftover buttercream to pipe rosettes on top of the ganache and then top with the coffee bean, or perhaps a chocolate-covered espresso bean. I'm not going to knock myself out over aesthetics this late on a Sunday, though, and anyway, you really can't argue with the taste.

Opera Cupcakes
Makes 20-24 cupcakes

Hazelnut Cakes
2 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
6 tablespoons plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (1/2 cup total)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup hazelnut oil (or other nut oil, or mild vegetable oil)

Leave eggs, buttermilk and butter out at room temperature until butter has softened.

Place shelf in lower third of oven, and preheat to 350. Set 20 mini panettone molds on a baking sheet, or line two muffin trays with liners.

Sir the eggs, yolks, 6 tablespoons buttermilk and vanilla together in a liquid measuring cup.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, and mix on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, oil and remaining 2 tablespoons butermilk, and mix on low until the dry ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium and beat for 1 1/2 minutes, until light. Add the liquid ingredients, one third at a time, beating for 20 seconds between additions.

Fill the molds or muffin cups halfway and bake until golden and a tester comes out clean,
approximately 20-25 minutes. Remove from oven and let sit on baking sheet or in muffin trays for ten minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Coffee Buttercream
3 cups powdered sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder, dissolved in 1/4 cup hot water
1 to 2 tablespoons whipping cream

In a standing mixer, mix the sugar and butter on low speed until well blended, then increase speed to medium and beat for another 3 minutes, until light and fluffy.

Add vanilla, dissolved espresso and cream and continue to beat on medium speed for 1 minute more, adding more cream if needed for spreading consistency.

Once the cupcakes have completely cooled, spread 2-3 tablespoons of buttercream over the cakes, creating as smooth and level a surface as possible and leaving at least 1/4 inch of space between the buttercream and the top of the mold/liner for the ganache layer. Refrigerate the frosted cupcakes in an airtight container until the buttercream has firmed.

Ganache
150 grams heavy cream
150 grams dark chocolate, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Lyle's Golden Syrup (or corn syrup)

Heat the cream in a liquid measuring cup in a microwave until near boiling, approximately 1-2 minutes. Add the chocolate and whisk thoroughly, until chocolate has dissolved and the mixture is smooth. Whisk in the syrup.

Pour 1-2 tablespoons of the ganache over the frosted cupcakes, tilting the cupcakes to swirl the ganache over the surface and ensure even coverage of the buttercream layer. (Do not touch the ganache or try to spread it with a spatula or other utensil, as it will mar the shiny surface of the end product.) If desired, add a coffee bean or chocolate covered espresso bean as garnish.

Return to the refrigerator in a covered container until the ganache has set.