Vacation Barbecue

Tonight we are celebrating a number of things.  First, vacation! It's only the first day, and having a whole week off stretching ahead of us is a great feeling. 

Second, today is the date that I set randomly in my head back in December as the day that I make my blog public.  By public, I mean that I will post it on Facebook.  I have literally not even told my best friends about it, and basically my only readers are my mom, my aunts, Laura, and Anne!  I did not set out to make a blog that was interesting reading for others; the point of it was to create a list of the foods that I tried to make this year, along  with what went well (focaccia, stuffed shells, caramels) and what went not so well (ricotta gnocchi, beer bread).  It's more for me than anyone, but I understand that people who have a love for cooking like I do might be interested in checking it out. And by the way, if you told me back in December that I would have a love for cooking in 4 months, I would have laughed at you!  So hey, maybe reading about my enormous transformation will get some of my friends pumped about kneading bread dough, and then it will be worth it if I make myself look like a bit of a dork :)

So back to the celebratory dinner.  I was planning on making sweet potato veggie burgers.  I loathe burgers, and yet my family makes them often, so I am trying to find a good alternative.  I love sweet potatoes and cannellini beans, which get mashed together to make these burgers, so I figured it was a pretty good idea.  They were fairly easy to make: bake the potatoes, mash them with the beans, add the flavorings, roll in panko crumbs, and saute in safflower oil.  They taste absolutely fabulous, if I do say so myself.  I love the mix of the potato, beans, and the maple syrup and tahini!  It's such an interesting combination of flavor.  Allie, Kenzie, Mom, and I all ate one (and Nick even took a bite, which is impressive since he refuses anything healthy/made of vegetables).  I stuck fairly closely to the recipe, except I used 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes instead of 1 large, and I had no lemon pepper seasoning, so I just added 1 lemon's zest, pepper, and salt.  Mmmmmmmm!  Mom even asked if I will make them again - which she doesn't always do, so we have success.

Of course, my family can never be content with vegetarian meals, so they bought chicken to grill.  I decided to help out a little and make a barbecue sauce from my good old Food Network magazine.  The recipe calls for chicken  quarters, which for the record makes me sick to think about a chicken being quartered (wasn't that a Revolutionary War-era type of torture?!) , but Kenzie had bought chicken breast and I figured it would be close enough.  After a run to the liquor store for ginger beer, I was ready to try out grilled ginger-beer chicken.  We cut the recipe in half, since we only had about 3 pounds of chicken. What I can say about this recipe is that you'd better plan ahead; the sauce takes a very long time to make, but is very worth it.  The ginger beer gets boiled for 30 minutes, then you steep tea bags in it for 10 (I know, weird combination of flavors but it works!).  Once the other ingredients have been added (ranging from brown sugar to diced tomatoes to Worcestershire sauce), you boil it for 50 minutes to cook it down.  Oh, and I should mention that the chicken should marinate in ginger, salt and pepper for two hours before that!!!  We sort of didn't wait that full amount of time, but the sauce made up for it.  It was absolutely amazing.  There is a lot going on in this sauce; there are all sorts of complex flavors that just work together wonderfully.  It's a big compliment when Nick not only grills the chicken with it, he schlepps it all over his entire plate!  I am not big on barbecue sauce, and even I loved it.  Big thanks to Allie for helping me out with it while I worked on my potato burgers. 

My delicious plate (minus Allie's potatoes... they hadn't been passed to me yet :) )

In addition, Mom sauteed some asparagus in the extra sauce, Allie made amazing pesto potatoes, and we had a salad.  It was a regular summertime celebration barbecue!  I hope that, if you are new to Bridget's Year of Cooking, you find an interesting recipe to try this week... and that you don't think I am too much of a dork :)

Recipes:
Sweet potato veggie burgers

Grilled ginger-beer chicken
from the May 2012 issue of Food Network Magazine

Ingredients:
6 chicken quarters (4  - 4 1/2 pounds) (.... or chicken breasts if quartering sounds like a 1700s torture)
2 tablespoons ground ginger
kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper
6  12-ounce bottles ginger beer
6 black tea bags
3/4 cup minced onion
1  28-ounce can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup dijon mustard
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup packed light or dark brown sugar
12 sprigs thyme
1 stick unsalted butter, melted (we used olive oil)

1. Rinse the chicken and pat dry.  Toss the ginger with 2 tablespoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper.  Sprinkle half of the mixture on the chicken; reserve the rest.  Refrigerate the chicken, uncovered, at least 2 hours (but it is not the end of the world if you can't wait that long!)

2. Meanwhile, make the sauce: pour the ginger beer into a wide skillet; cover and bring to a boil.  Uncover and cook over high heat until reduced by half, about 30 minutes.  Remove from the heat, add the tea bags, and steep 10 minutes; discard the tea bags.  Add the onion, tomatoes, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, and thyme.  Return to high heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until thick, about 50 minutes.  Use a potato masher to crush the tomatoes during the last 5 minutes.  Remove the thyme.  Set aside half of the sauce for serving.

3.  Bring the chicken to room temperature about 30 minutes before grilling (or not).  Preheat a grill to medium with indirect heat: on a charcoal grill, bank the coals to one side; on a gas grill, turn off half of the burners. 

4.  Brush the chicken with some of the butter (or olive oil to be slightly healthier) and sprinkle with some of the remaining ground ginger mixture.  Place skin-side up (gross) on the cooler side of the grill ; cover and cook until it starts browning, about 18 minutes, basting with more butter and sprinkling with more ground ginger mixture halfway through.  Brush the chicken with a thick layer of sauce.  Cover and cook until a thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 160 degrees, about 20 minutes, basting with more sauce halfway through.

5.  Brush the chicken with more butter, then turn skin-side down and place on the hotter side of the grill (over direct heat).  Cook, uncovered, until marked, about 2 minutes.  Rotate the chicken to make crisscross grill marks and cook 2 more minutes.  Transfer to a board and let rest about 10 minutes. Season with salt and serve with the reserved sauce.

Vacation!

Sorry for the lack of updates this week.  It has been an absolutely ridiculous week for me!  Monday I actually did make dinner for my golf tournament team - my good old stuffed shells - but we were working till after 10 so I never got the chance to write it up.  Tuesday night I was making games for the math carnival at work, Wednesday night I had book club, and last night I went to Mark's.  So I have just not had a spare moment for the kitchen.  God knows what I've eaten this week.

But tonight I have reason to celebrate: vacation!  Yes, April vacation starts tonight, and I am not even able to express how much I needed the week off.  I need some time to do these things: read, sleep, hang out with Mark, plan the tournament, and cook! I have some pretty amazing recipes to try out, and tonight I found my new Food Network magazine in the mail.  I went through it and found a recipe for pecan maple scones.  I have wanted to try making scones for a while, and the recipe was from one of my favorite bloggers.  I love the Pioneer Woman's blog and TV show (I think mostly because she has a really cute basset hound) and her recipes are usually great, so I tried them out.

What I can say is that I hate making scones.  The recipe says that the dough is supposed to be very crumbly, and as a bread maker, I am a dough snob.  I like smooth, velvety, cohesive dough.  I loathe crumbly, buttery, dry scone dough.  It was nearly impossible to form a ball with it, and then to roll it out!?  Don't even get me started!  So when I cut the 8 slices, they were lumpy and strangely shaped... which led to lumpy and strangely-shaped scones, of course.  I also had to make a maple icing, which, while delicious, made far too much, and I hate wasting.  So as much as I love the Pioneer Woman's dog, I don't love this recipe. The scones are good, but not so great as to be worth the pain and suffering of crumbly dough and extra maple frosting! 

I will admit that the recipe is interesting reading; the Pioneer Woman (her name is Ree Drummond) always adds funny little jokes into her recipes, so I will copy it as is below.  I just might never make these again.  And if I did, I would cut the frosting recipe in half.

Recipe:
maple-pecan scones
recipe by Ree Drummond
featured in May 2012 Food Network Magazine

For the scones:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled
1/4 cup pecans, plus more for sprinkling
1 large egg
3/4 cup heavy cream

For the icing:
1 pound confectioner's sugar
1/4 cup whole milk
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
splash of strongly brewed coffee
dash of salt
2 teaspoons maple flavoring or maple extract

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  In a large bowl, stir together the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder and salt.

2.  Cut the cold butter into small pieces.  Cut the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles crumbs.

3.  Now finely chop the pecans and stir them into the flour mixture.  Mix the egg and cream together.  Add the mixture to the bowl and stir until just combined.

4.  Turn the mixture onto a cutting board.  The dough will be very crumbly, but do not let your heart be troubled.  With your hands, push the mixture together into a large ball.  Do not knead or press too much; you want to leave that gluten alone!

5.  With a rolling pin, veru gently roll out the dough into a 10-inch round, about 3/4 inch thick.  With a sharp knife, cut the round into 8 equal-size wedges.

6.  Transfer the wedges to a baking sheet lined with a Silpat baking mat.  (Or just spray the pan with cooking spray; either one will work!)  Bake the scones for 22 to 26 minutes, until they're just barely starting to brown.  Do not allow the edges to become dark or the Red Coats will come and get you. Allow the scones to cool completely before icing.

7.  In a medium mixing bowl, stir the icing ingredients until smooth.  Pour generously over the scones and sprinkle with pecans.  Allow the icing to set before serving.

Happy Easter!

The last two days have been a whirlwind of baking, cooking, and cleaning!  It's Easter today, and this year our family was just staying home.  Mom was kind of sad about that, so we decided to make the best of it and make our Easter dinner amazing.  Considering I can hardly move after all the eating tonight, I think we did a good job.

Yesterday, Mom had asked me to make an Easter bread.  She had sent me the recipe earlier in the week, and while I thought it sounded a little bland, I know that Mom likes bland.  I was supposed to dye 5 eggs and tuck them into the bread, but I was lazy (and only had brown eggs).  Since I no longer needed it in wreath shape, I braided it and then curled it around itself (like my king cake from back in February).  It came out quite beautiful, but like I suspected, it was a little bland.  It had only 1/3 cup of sugar for flavoring.  It would definitely have benefited from cardamom, vanilla, raisins, something; but then again Mom loved it.  Go figure!  If I do ever make it again, we definitely need to eat it all in one day.  It gets stale really quickly no matter how well you wrap it!

Then today I basically spent the entire day in the kitchen working on our Easter dinner.  We had a ham, asparagus, twice baked potato casserole, herbed dinner rolls, and raspberry swirl sweet rolls for dessert.  Besides the asparagus, I made all the rest!  It was a very busy day. 

The first thing I did was figure out what to do with the ham.  It was a ridiculously expensive ham (that is what happens when you wait till 11 PM the night before Easter to grocery shop!), and it wasn't a spiral - but we found out today that it was definitely worth it.  It was sooo good - and possibly part of why was because of my delicious glaze!  I partly panicked because it said "cover ham with glaze" and I did not have any glaze, so I googled quickly: 1/2 cup water, 3 tablespoons honey, 1/3 cup brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon of mustard: voila!  It was quite good.  And I am now a believer in buying non-spiral hams.

Then I started on the doughs for my 2 yeast breads.  I went through an insane amount of yeast today, between my rolls and my dessert.  They both had to rise for 2 hours, so I got the dinner rolls rising and then made the dough for the sweet rolls, and then it was time to work on the potato casserole.

Can you imagine anything more amazing than twice baked potato casserole!?  Mashed potatoes, with cream cheese.  And not just cream cheese, but butter.  And not just cream cheese and butter, but sour cream as well.  Add chives, cheddar, pepper, and salt, and you have one amazing casserole.  It was supposed to have bacon, but I was running short on time (and prefer vegetarian food anyway) so I left it out.  Even my carniverous family said they didn't miss the meat.  This is definitely far from being healthy, but if you want a knock-your-socks-off potato side dish, this is the one for you.  As a potato lover, I could probably live on this casserole happily for the rest of my life.






We ate dinner once the potatoes were done.  Unfortunately, the dinner rolls were not ready for dinner.  But it's okay, because I am in love with them and plan on eating them all myself!  They are soooo pretty.  I had to paint them with an egg and milk wash, and then add a leaf of something to the top for decoration.  I used parsley, rosemary, and cilantro.  They taste great, but they look great too.   These take forever, but they are worth it.


















Dessert was my last step.  I had found this recipe for raspberry swirl sweet rolls, and, knowing that my family loves raspberries, I knew today was the day for them.  Like the rolls, they take a very long time - lots of time to proof the dough, let things rise, etc..  But they were worth the wait.  Once they were out of the oven and glazed, I ran over to the Cormiers' with about 3/4 of them, and they went quickly!  They may not be great for you, but it was Easter!  Time to celebrate friends and family and good food :)

Recipes:
herbed dinner rolls
twice baked potato casserole
raspberry swirl sweet rolls

Sweet Potato Skins

Tonight my family was all going out, and Marky and I were stuck home.  While I was disappointed not to get to go out to eat and to see Linny, I was excited to be able to choose a dinner menu with Mark that does not have the constraints that my meals usually have.  For example: Kenzie will not eat ham.  Rachael won't even come in the house if she smells fish.  My mother hates "bread with flavor."  Nick refuses to eat vegetables.  Do you see what I am dealing with here!?  Add to the mix the fact that I am practically a vegetarian again, and you have  quite the tough crowd.

But for tonight, it was just me and Mark.  We have pretty similar tastes and he is a great sport about eating whatever bizarre things I come up with.  I decided to go healthy again (two nights in a row!  Am I skinny yet?) with a recipe from the same blog as yesterday's pumpkin pasta.  This recipe I had pinned months ago, but I knew it was not for a night when there were carnivorous family members to feed.  But tonight was the night: stuffed sweet potatoes! Stuffed with spinach and chick peas!!!  Meatless!  And low fat!  Bring it on!

Being unable to leave the house, I sent Mark to Vincent's for what we needed.  They didn't have shallots, so I used garlic to saute the spinach with.  Other than that, we kept the recipe pretty similar.  Our sweet potatoes were huge and took forever to bake, and it was a bit difficult to scrape the insides out while leaving enough behind to hold the skins together.  In fact, out of our 4 halves, one half ended up getting scraped out completey (I love my sous chef but his ADD sometimes affects his direction-following skills!)  It worked out; we just had extra filling. 

I am a little bit in love with these (I know I said that last night about the healthy pasta, and now I love the healthy potato skins... perhaps this is the start of something beautiful).  The filling is soooo delicious and does not at all taste low fat.  The low fat cream cheese and sour cream get mashed with the potato, and then mixed with the spinach, chick peas, and garlic.  Absolutely amazing.  Then they get sprinkled with a little bit of mozzarella and baked for 10 minutes.  They are really filling; I couldn't even finish mine (though to be honest I had already eaten an embarrassing amount of the mashed potatoes while stuffing the potato skins).  There is one half left for lunch tomorrow.  Mmmmmmm!   Healthy sweet potato skins... they totally make up for a night stuck at home :)

Recipe:
healthy sweet potato skins

HEALTHY Bacon and Pasta?!

I think I have stumbled upon an amazing secret.  It is possible to eat macaroni and cheese - with bacon - and have it be low fat!  I know, I know: I didn't believe it either, but I found a recipe that made this claim and so I had to try it out.  Their secret ingredient?  Pumpkin.

Basically, the sauce is made from pumpkin puree, low fat evaporated milk, and low fat cream cheese.  This seemed strange, because how can you have mac and cheese without cheese!?  Then there is salt, pepper, garlic and scallions - and of course bacon.  Mom said she remembers hearing that dieters should not be afraid of bacon; when used sparingly, it adds tons of flavor to your food.  The recipe calls for 1/4 cup (but I tripled the recipe, and thus tripled the bacon... which felt unhealthy but it was worth it!)  I was very intrigued, and cautiously optimistic.

The ending result?  Amazing.  You can't really taste the pumpkin, and it feels like a super rich, creamy macaroni and cheese.  The crumbled bacon give you the perfect smoky flavor to contrast the cheesy sauce and noodles, and the scallions give it a little kick.  I am in love with this meal.  Here is the best part: even though Mom claims to hate all mac and cheese, and Rach refused to eat because she didn't feel good, Kenzie loved it.  But more importantly: Nick ate two helpings!!!!  Yes, the same Nick that refuses to eat things like vegetables, fennel, cloves, and goat cheese!  We secretly hid the empty can of pumpkin and claimed that it was made with "low fat cheese."  He was scarfing it down, making comments about the "strange orange color."  Finally I had to tell.  He took it surprisingly well, but then worked on picking out the bacon from his last helping.  It was pretty entertaining when he announced that this was his last meal before his diet, and I could tell him that this is diet! Genius!

Yes, I even made a salad.

This has me thinking: adding a little bacon, and using pumpkin as a sauce, can make a bad-for-you meal good for you.  It makes me want to learn more little diet tricks like these.  I might have to go through Dad's old Weight Watcher's cookbooks!

One last note: you know me and leftover ingredients.  I had some pumpkin left after the dinner, and I wanted to use it up, so I made a pumpkin spiced baked oatmeal.  I like baked oatmeal and love to have something to grab for breakfast.  It's in the oven now, so I will keep you posted how that goes!

Recipes:
healthy bacon and pumpkin pasta
pumpkin spiced baked oatmeal

Cinnamon and Clove Day

Today I may or may not have taken the day off from work... we were out late last night at the concert, and so I planned on having a relaxing mental health day.  It ended up being a good thing that I stayed home; I had to help get Dad up, and then Mark came over and we grocery shopped, and made lunch, dinner, and dessert together!  It was relaxing in that I was not at work, but still quite busy - and I must not be cut out for mental health days, because I spent much of the day feeling guilty.

Marky was in charge of lunch; he made grilled chicken sandwiches with bleu cheese, onions and peppers.  This is his specialty and they were great.  While he worked, I set up the slow cooker for dinner.  I made cinnamon chicken.  It does sound weird, I know, but I like weird food.  The recipe calls for boneless skinless chicken breast, sliced carrots, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coconut milk, and tomato sauce.  Quite the strange mix.  I couldn't find coconut milk, so I Googled it and mixed cream of coconut with hot water.  Then I let it set for 6 hours. 

Mmm... potatoes!

I also made my personal favorite, mashed potatoes. to go with the chicken.  I added goat cheese, butter and milk.... extremely healthy.  But the chicken wasn't bad, so I figured it would even out.  They were by far the best part of the meal, but I am a mashed potato kind of girl.  And add goat cheese to anything, and I will be happy.  So this was perfect.

As for the chicken?  Well, I don't like meat, so as I always say, I am not the person to ask. I thought the texture of the chicken was a little too stringy, but the flavor was very good.  I liked the carrots.  Kenzie,  Nick and Mark were the only ones home.  Mark and Kenzie both ate a lot and said they liked it.  Nick did his bizarre "I-may-usually-eat-like-an-elephant-but-happen-to-be-full-tonight" thing and gave 75% of his serving to the dogs.  Apparently he "doesn't like cloves."  Kenz and I are fairly certain that he would not have even known there were ground cloves in it except for the fact that I was telling her the ingredients.  I'm getting very used to Nick whining about my meals, though, so this time I chose not to be upset and just be entertained by his story that he wasn't hungry since he ate a hamburger 7 hours earlier.

Frosting with a weird tip?

While Kenzie was at class tonight, I worked on a surprise dessert for her.  She is having a crappy day, and I know that she loves chai tea, so when I saw a recipe for chai cupcakes, I knew I had to try it. You have the option to make chocolate or vanilla chai cupcakes (or both!) with either Swiss meringue honey buttercream or whipped chocolate cinnamon ganache for frosting.  I decided to make the vanilla cupcakes with the chocolate frosting.  In a funny coincidence, both my dinner and my dessert have cinnamon and cloves in them (so ha, Nick)!  The cupcakes came out delicious: spiced and soft and great.  Then the frosting might be my best yet.  It only called for semisweet chocolate, heavy cream, and cinnamon, which I was intrigued by because of so few ingredients.  I had to simmer the cream and cinnamon, then pour it over the chocolate, mix it up, chill it for an hour, and then whip it.  Then of course I ruin everything when I try to frost the cupcakes and they end up looking ridiculous, but it tastes amazing.  As someone who is not big on sweets, I will probably bring one to work tomorrow for lunch :)  And hopefully they did their job and made Kenzie's crappy day a little bit better.

Recipes:
slow cooker cinnamon chicken
chai cupcakes

This is where I gave up and just smeared the frosting on...

Doughnuts, casseroles and breads: oh my!

Whew! What a day.  I basically spent 7 hours in the kitchen, and while I loved every minute of it, I am totally exhausted now!

After a trip to Stop and Shop with Marky in the early afternoon, I decided to christen my brand new, candy-apple red mixer by making doughnuts!  I found a recipe for baked chocolate-glazed doughnuts, and they looked so pretty in the pictures that I felt like I had to try.  The dough is a yeast dough, and so it needed to rise twice, which made it take a while.  It was a little sticky and definitely needed more flour than the recipe calls for, but once I got it right, it was easy to roll it out and cut it into doughnut shapes.  I used a cookie cutter, and then a cannoli filler to cut the holes in the middle.  They baked up perfect, and then I made the chocolate glaze, dunked them in, and Mom and Mark helped with toppings.  The recipe calls for sprinkles, but they got creative with coconut, nuts, and peanut butter chips.  I have to say, this is finally something that looks just as beautiful as the pictures!  They were gorgeous.  And, considering how quickly they were eaten by Kenzie, Mom, Mark, Allie, Rachael, Alex and Nick, I think they were a hit:) I actually didn't try them - not a big sweets person - but they got rave reviews and look beautiful, so I was happy. Be prepared for lots of pictures of my first pretty food!

Then I worked on two casseroles.  Tomorrow is the welcome back breakfast at work for our head janitor, after he had heart problems about a month or so ago.  I found a recipe online for a bacon, potato and egg casserole (I had to search long and hard for something without any gross sausage!) .  I decided to make two, one for tomorrow and one for my family for dinner as a test run.  My only change to the recipe was not adding sun dried tomatoes, because my family hates them.  I'm a pretty slow cutter, so it took me a while to dice up the garlic, onions, bacon, and yellow pepper, not to mention cracking and beating 16 eggs (luckily I bought frozen diced potatoes)!  However, the ending result is pretty damn great.  We all loved it.  Certainly it is not very healthy (and Kevin might want to stay away from it at the breakfast...)with all the bacon and cheese, and the vegetables cooked in the bacon grease... so I think that if I made it again, I would try to do it without bacon.  I'd fry the veggies in a little olive oil instead.  Cooking them in the grease made me a little sick... of course, until I ate it, in which case it was so delicious that I didn't care anymore!  Can't wait to have more again tomorrow at the breakfast... and then run a marathon or something.

Lastly, I had to make something for Kenzie to bring to the breakfast.  This was payback after all the years she made stuff  for me to bring to potlucks before I started up with my resolution.  I decided on a quickbread that I have been wanting to make: honey beer bread.  I almost made it last night, but it doesn't get made in a mixer and I was desperate to try out my new baby.  I figured it is probably not a normal breakfast food, with the beer and all, and it's not very sweet (only 2 tablespoons of honey), but I wanted something easy (and this is ridiculously easy).  I know from experience that at these breakfasts, the hot foods go first, and all breads, muffins, etc. barely get touched, so it won't really matter if people think beer bread isn't a good breakfast.  It made the house smell amazing, and while it still does have a faint beer taste (totally appropriate for a breakfast at an elementary school!), I think it will be a hit.  And if not? Well, they have the casserole to make up for it :) 

Now, I am giving myself tomorrow off from my resolution after a weekend in the kitchen!  I will be seeing my favorite local band, Gamble and Burke, open for Sean Kingston.  No cooking for me tomorrow!

Doughnut Party with Mom, Alex, Kenzie and Mark

Recipes:
baked doughnuts
cheesy potato breakfast casserole
honey beer bread