Chocolate "syrup" from scratch

Chocolate "syrup" in the mason jar

I needed some chocolate syrup to experiment with Irish cream. So I found a recipe and made a go of it. What I ended up with was tasty but in no way a "syrup". At best you would call it a paste. Still seems to work as long as it gets fully incorporated. Wouldn't work very well for chocolate milk (without heating).

Bring to boil in saucepan:

• 3/4 cup dark unsweetened cocoa
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1 dash salt
• 3/4 cup water

Boil 2-5 minutes until thick, store in fridge. 

Well, I never really got a "boil" and so I gave up and took it off the heat after 5 minutes. I had to keep stirring to keep from scorching. I glopped it into a mason jar and stored it in the fridge. It worked fine in chocolate milk as long as I processed it with the milk in my Vitamix. 

Next time: I am going to try Alton Brown's recipe. It has you make a simple syrup first, then incorporate the cocoa. It also uses a small amount of corn syrup which may help keep it from seizing up. And it calls for Dutch Process cocoa, which is probably worth trying.

Site assembled brick oven

Wouldn't camping with a thousand of your closest friends be more fun with an on-site assembled oven? Of course it would, as I found out last weekend.

The design is based off directions for a backyard pizza oven found on You Tube, with added angle iron structure for more stability. Wonderboard is placed on saw horses for the base. Then one layer of 12 fire bricks make up the bed of the oven. Then courses of ordinary red clay bricks, not cement brick , are built up with angle irons to hold everything in place.

Courses across the top are supported by angle irons. Extra pieces of wonderboard serve as wind screens, a top, and a door.

Fruit juice gelatin from scratch

There's always room for jello, or in this case, fruit juice gelatin.

Bloom  2 packets of gelatin (I use Knox) in 1/2 cup cold water.
Heat 3-4 cups juice to near boiling.
Add bloomed gelatin and 1-2 Tbs lemon juice.
Cool to near room temperature (could put over ice or cool water to speed it along).
Add fruit.
Refrigerate until set.

I use 3 cups of juice for a firm gelatin. More juice would result in a softer set.

Caramel Popcorn

One more go at caramel popcorn. This time I stayed pretty close to the original recipe, except for adding slivered almonds to the caramel right before the pour. No chocolate. No bacon. Just wanted to get a simple baseline.

Proofing Yeast and Baking No Knead Bread

Progressing through Cooking for Geeks, I got to do an interesting experiment with yeast. To test if your yeast is good put 2 tsp of yeast and 1 tsp of sugar in a half-cup of warm (105 degree) water. Then wait for it to bubble up.

And bubble it did.

Pancakes with almond meal

I like incorporating a lot of almond meal in my cooking. I have tried waffles with almond meal in place of flour and they didn't hold together very well.

This time thought I'd try pancakes with half the flour replaced with almond meal. This worked well in terms of texture, browning, and flavor. The one problem was that they were quite tricky to flip without them tearing and breaking up.

They browned up nicely.

To top them, I mixed up some butter, maple syrup, and a little pomegranate syrup. This tasted nice, but I needed to warm the butter a little to get it to blend better.

Next time: I wonder if I made the batter a little thinner if that would make them easier or harder to flip. I think part of the problem was that the inside was staying too tender to hold together.  It also seemed to work a little better to make three smaller cakes rather than one large one at a time. 

Caramel Bacon Popcorn -- Second attempt

My second attempt at caramel bacon popcorn went better than the first. I again worked from the Grandma Paula caramel corn recipe. Except I cut the caramel sauce in half since I didn't think I was making enough popcorn. (In retrospect, I found this to be in error). 

Caramel Popcorn

I like caramel popcorn.
I like making caramel.

Hmm.

Time to make caramel popcorn.

My first attempt was not quite on target, but still tasty. I added bacon and spanish peanuts.

Butterflied chicken broiled and roasted

One more recipe from Cooking for Geeks (p. 206 if you are following along on the Home Edition). The tricky thing when roasting a bird is that there is an inside and an outside. And you'd really like to get a little browning, but not-too-much on the outside and also thoroughly cook the inside, but not-too-much.

This approach changes the topology of the bird so that the outside becomes the top, and the inside becomes the bottom. And you can use different heat and technique on each.

In this case broiling the "top" and then flipping and baking at 350 until done. Flipping turns out to be a little tricky since the skin is apt to come off.

Next Time: As it turned out, I needed some combination of more heat or more time (or to replace my d*&!% probe thermometer that broke). I had assumed that since I had a smallish bird (4 pounds) it would take less or close to the 25 minutes called for. But the meat didn't really get fully cooked. I also managed to broil it a little too long. Checking as it cooks is a good idea. I was just a little too distracted with other things at the time.

So, this is one I want a redo on once I get a new probe thermometer. 

Two tones of caramel sauce

Continuing to work my way through Cooking for Geeks. There are "dry" and "wet" approaches to making caramel. This is a dry approach and I am a fan. 

Assemble the team:

• 1 part sugar,
• 1 part cream.

In this case, 1 cup of each. (Later I add a pinch of salt and 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract).

Start with just the sugar in a cold pan. Put over medium-high heat. DO NOT STIR -- until the edges have started melting. Then stir to blend the melted and unmelted sugars.

Once it is melted through you have a choice:

• Add the cream now
• Let the sugar darken some more

Or, none of the above. Divide into two batches and do both! Whenever you decide, add the cream slowly and stir to incorporate as you go. BE CAREFUL -- THIS STUFF IS HOT and STICKY -- a DANGEROUS combination. Add a pinch of salt and vanilla if you are so inclined (which I am).

Since you get different flavors developed at different temperatures I was aiming for a blended sauce.

What is an experiment without evaluating the results? An accident. So we sampled the light sauce, the dark sauce, and the blended sauce. Sharon liked the light sauce. I liked the blend best. They were all good. There was much more depth to the dark sauce.

Next time: I really like the blended sauce. I think I would divide the sugar and cream into 3/4 cup for the light sauce and 1/3 cup for the darker sauce and cook them in separate pans. I might not go quite as dark on the dark sauce. And I would warm the cream before adding it.

I dividing the blended caramel sauces in two containers so I could heat a small batch to serve without having heat the whole batch.

And for clean up, I just couldn't stand the thought of losing any of that great flavor stuck to the pan. So I deglazed the pans with milk, then drank the warm caramel milk.

Update 2/12/13: I just made this again using two pans and a 2:1 relation of light caramel and medium caramel and it worked out great!

Spinach pecan bacon sautee

Spinach. Pecans. Bacon. Mmm.

Winter Squash German Pancake

In the continuing saga of "things to cook with winter squash" I experimented with a roasted butternut squash German pancake.

For the topping I took some chunks of roasted butternut squash from the freezer and sauteed them in butter, brown sugar and a little fine spices. Then otherwise followed the recipe for the Thick German Pancake from The Best Recipe cookbook.

I thought they were tasty and passed my "qualified breakfast food" filter fine. Not as sweet as a pumpkin pie. I think I will do this again, but I'm not sure it will become a regular.

The 30-minute scrambled egg

In my reading through Cooking for Geeks, I have been inspired to do a lot of experimenting with eggs.

One technique that sounded interesting was for a 30-minute scrambled egg that ends up with the consistency of cream cheese. It took a couple tries to get it since care needs to be taken to keep the pan from going over 160 degrees (when the yolks start to form curds) but if you are much below that temperature it takes forever. So I ended up trying a couple different double boiler systems. Using a regular double boiler was easiest, but trying to clean it after was quite a chore. I like the setup best (pictured) with a small pan in a pan of water with an upside-down plate between.

Next time: In the end, I'm not sure it is worth the work, but I'll keep thinking about where I would use this as an ingredient in something else. Anything I make with cream cheese will be a tempting target.

Crispy Phyllo Spinach Tartlets

First attempt at crispy phyllo spinach tartlets turned out to be "a learning experience" that turned out well enough in the end. I have not worked with phyllo much in the past and didn't realize that it required thawing which takes many hours to do right. I tried to accelerate the process in a 200 degree oven, but I think this resulted in drying out the dough and creating a lot of tearing.

The filling was tasty. I am tempted to try some dried cranberries in place of the sun dried tomatoes next time. I didn't have a good tartlet pan so I used some Corelle bowls. This made four large tartlets, which seemed like two servings worth. Next time I would use the small bowls.

The leftovers were ok, but these were much better fresh.

Stuffed chicken thighs

Had a first go at chicken thighs stuffed with a spinach parmesan stuffing.

Overall, I liked how the chicken turned out. It produced a lot of sauce, so it would have been good to serve over something that could use the sauce (rice, pasta, steamed veggies, ...).  I also think it would have presented better sliced in 3 or 4 slices to show off the stuffing.

Stir Fry in Seattle

Pork dish in the wok

I spent the weekend with a friend in Seattle and we had a number of culinary adventures. I brought some lovely tomatoes and peppers from home that we were drowning in. So our goal was to come up with some simple dinners that would make good use of them. On the final night, we picked up some lovely pork at the farmers market and made a stir fry in a wok.

This worked well on all counts. Easy to prepare, quick to cook, looked and tasted great.

We made a dredged the pork in seasoned flour. And added a sauce of corn starch, soy sauce, and sesame oil.

Black Sauce Experiments

We made some Black Sauce in a medieval food class I took this weekend. I used it up last night.

So I made some more this evening to have with some meat and cheese. This batch I made with almond meal, red wine vinegar, my pepper spice blend, ginger, and galangal.

I want to do some experiments to determine My Favorite Black Sauce mix

• bread crumbs | almond meal | hazlenut meal
• Toasted | untoasted
• round pepper | long pepper | tail pepper | grains of paradise | a blend
• red wine vinegar | white wine vinegar | cider vinegar | balsamic | verjus
• ginger | galangal | both
• whole thing cooked | fresh 

I don't think I will try all 900 combinations. 

I suppose I'll do two passes of varying individual variables and just keep my best choices to date. 

I still need to decide which order to test the variables. 

...

Update (7/21/2013):

I tried making black sauce at a recent camping event using gluten free bread crumbs and did not like the result. Eulalia speculated that in the process of toasting the GF bread crumbs the xanthan gum  became bitter. 

Strawberry-Blueberry Crepes

Experimented with some crepes tonight.

For the filling I warmed some fresh strawberries in a little sugar with a Tbs each of sour cream, plain yogurt and port. I didn't quite have enough fruit, so I added some fresh blueberries.

For the batter I used

• 1/4 Cup each: whole wheat pastry flour, white whole wheat flour, 10-grain flour
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 Tbs port
• 1 Tbs melted butter
• 2 eggs

Mix dry then wet ingredients with a whisk (or a food processor). 

Cole Slaw: First attempt in recent memory

We had some cabbage, a knife and the Joy of Cooking. What to do?
Make Cole Slaw!

We used the technique of soaking the sliced cabbage (or rather 1/4 cabbage in our case) in ice water for an hour while we shopped for interesting things to add.

We made a dressing of greek yogurt, juice of 1/2 lemon and 1/2 lime.

After drying the soaked cabbage we added some cranberries, some not-too-sweet raspberries, chopped toasted pecans, and an apple cored and chopped.

Turns out the raspberries were rather sour so the sour dressing was too much sour. At the table, we sprinkled a little Splenda over the top which helped a lot. The apples, cabbage, nuts, and cranberries were all playing very well together.

Black Beans and Brown Rice

Found an interesting recipe for black beans and brown rice and my Mom and I thought we'd give it a try. Rather than a jalapeño chili we used two small but spicy chilies we found at her local produce market.
We took some of the advice for garnishes: fresh tomato, avocado slices and a topping of a little parmesan cheese.
Next Time: The rice could have been a little more moist. We probably needed to add a little water as it got absorbed until the texture was better.