A Pause on this Site

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Hi Everyone!

I’m now focusing my efforts on my main blog, Behind the Music. Head on over there to read about historical and literary backgrounds about choral music texts. If you think that subject sounds boring, I’d urge you to take a look anyway, as you may be pleasantly surprised. If you’d like to watch a short video in which I explain my purpose on the site, go here. I’ve by no means lost my interest in cooking and especially in the feeding of groups, though. In fact, I’ve written a whole cookbook on the subject, Feeding the Masses Without Losing Your Mind, which you can purchase on that site or through Amazon. I give exceedingly down-to-earth, practical information and some great recipes. If you’d like to read the first chapter of the cookbook, follow this link.

 

Make a Biscotti Tree Instead of a Gingerbread House for Christmas!

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Photo credit: https://www.gatheranddine.com/almond-biscotti-christmas-tree/. Image used by permission.

This lovely photograph and its accompanying blog post and recipe are from Gather & Dine. Follow the link to access many process photographs and directions.

But I didn’t discover this fabulous item via the G&D blog. Instead, perhaps 20 years ago I was in the big Safeway near our then-house in Northern Virginia. It was getting close to December, and they had that issue of their store magazine out for sale, with recipes showcasing their ingredients and many coupons. I was stopped dead by the illustration on the cover for something called a “biscotti tree.” Alas, I can’t find that image in my files, although I know I had it at one point. Suffice it to say that I was fired with enthusiasm for making it, and I try to do so every year. If it’s December, then I must be making Tiny Tim Cranberry Tarts and Almond-Orange Biscotti Trees!

Here’s the really interesting thing: I’ve only ever seen this recipe/assembly idea in that Safeway magazine and then on the food blog I’m referencing here. That blog’s author, Emily, gives credit for the idea to a website that no longer exists. So it’s just her and me! And it looks to me as though she stopped posting on her blog back in 2018, although her site has an up-to-date copyright notice. So soon it may just be me! I’d better step up my game.

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Chicken Piccata for a Crowd

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From the website https://www.cookingclassy.com/creamy-chicken-piccata/

I love chicken piccata but often have issues with versions available. The combination of lemon, butter, garlic and capers with sauteed boneless chicken breasts is classic for a reason. But if you take a look at even a few recipes out there you’ll find that there are significant variations, and they can’t all be the best! So I’ve gone on a CP deep dive and combined aspects into what I think make a perfect version. (The photo is from the website Cooking Classy for a recipe that’s somewhat similar to mine; I thought her photo was very representative of how the dish should look.) Let me explain how I tweaked the recipe. Issues I’ve addressed involve:

1. Not enough sauce—This problem is of course easily solved simply by increasing amounts.

2. Not using wine—It’s surprising that many recipes don’t include this fabulously flavorful ingredient. Chicken stock alone doesn’t give the sauce the complexity it needs. I’ve included wine measuring half the amount of chicken stock called for.

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A Great Recipe from Yesterday’s Breakfast

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Yesterday we have our last all-church breakfast before going to our fall schedule. We had perhaps 60-70 people, and it went very well. I used a recipe from my cookbook, “Simplified Southwestern Casserole.” I added some fresh chopped poblano peppers and some frozen corn kernels. It was a huge hit! The cheese and veggies can be prepped ahead of time and spread out in the pans, thus leaving only the mixing of the cornmeal mixture for the last minute. You can see in the picture that I used the disposable half-size pans to bake the casseroles. Each one of them holds 1 1/2 times the recipe, so I made six times the recipe for four panfuls. We have one pan left over, but that missing section represents the depredations we made this morning for our own breakfast. I will probably freeze the rest in individual serving-size baggies.

As we head into the fall and (we all fervently hope) a somewhat-normal season, you might be well advised to keep this casserole in mind, as well as all the other recipes and ideas I have for feeding large groups.

Note: My cookbook is also available on Amazon.

A Frosting Triumph

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Hi everybody! Hope you’re enjoying the summer as we head towards some kind of normalcy. I attended a nice dinner party this past weekend and just realized as I sat here writing this post that the thought of masks never even entered my mind. There was a wedding on Saturday for which we’d specifically been told that mask mandates had been lifted, so there was that freedom too. Maybe we’ll even try for a block party on Labor Day. We’ll see.

Anyway, for the dinner party people had been asked to sign up to bring various items, and I thought, ‘If I sign up for dessert I can make cupcakes and try out the raspberry variation for my Swiss buttercream recipe.’ While I had made the master recipe a number of times, of course, I’d never actually made the variation with freeze-dried fruit. I had no idea how well it would come out. Oh my goodness! I used a mini blender to reduce the raspberries to a powder and then added raspberry liqueur (Chambord) and raspberry extract, and it was just the essence of raspberry. People went completely nuts over them. (The cake part was pretty good, too. I used the recipe for the “lemon cream cupcakes” that’s listed in the related posts below this one. This recipe is also in my cookbook. The recipe as written in that post calls for a thin layer of raspberry jam and lemon frosting; just use the cake part with this frosting. Jam would be overkill.)

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Some Cooking Myths Exploded

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Image by Michelle Statler from Pixabay

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve started following a foodie YouTuber named Adam Ragusea, and he’s quickly become a favorite of mine because (ahem) he agrees with me on so many issues and so I trust him in other areas. There’s w-a-a-y too much conventional wisdom out there just waiting to be debunked, and he’s the man to do it. Here are three that I’ve especially liked to go along with the iodized-salt-is-bitter myth from last time:

MYTH #1: Let me start out with the misconception that I cited in my previous post: the ridiculous idea that home bakers should be measuring flour BY THE GRAM for yeasted breads. One of my favorite TV-show-based video channels, America’s Test Kitchen, really stresses this idea. They said in an episode about pita bread, for instance, that you should measure x number of grams for the water and flour, giving amounts for King Arthur brand bread flour. But if you were using another type of bread flour, they said, you should decrease the water by one ounce, as KAF has more protein than most other flours.

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Make Your Own Bagels–and Live to Tell the Tale

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Imperfect but delicious! These got a little mangled because they stuck to the pan and each other after rising. Note my strictures and instructions in the recipe so that the same thing doesn’t happen to you.

I find that I cannot resist sharing with you the success I’ve had with my version of whole-wheat bagels. I had tried a New York Times recipe awhile back and the results were, shall we say, underwhelming. They tasted fine, but they certainly weren’t bagels. More like flat little pillows, with basically no crust. Bah! I said at the time that I thought the basic problem was that my dough was too soft to hold its shape, especially during the boiling phase, and it turned out that I was right. One of the distinguishing characteristics of bagel dough is that it’s quite stiff, almost to the point of being dry. So take note in the recipe of the guidelines for how sticky (or rather non-sticky) the dough should be.

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Make the Homemade Meatballs If You Can!

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The picture is of a Costco frozen Italian meatball and one of the homemade ones I made using my own version of Alison Roman’s “Good-bye Meatballs” from her new “Home Cooking” video series. The one on the right is the Costco one. (Be sure to subscribe; she’s doing a new one every Tuesday. They’re short and funny. I love her because she’s so completely opinionated. Not that I could be described that way or anything! Note that I don’t always agree with her opinions. She adds way too much salt and pepper, I think, and she’s way too fond of dill, just to name a couple of my quibbles. But such is life.)

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Further Encouragement for Master Recipes (Esp. for Salad Dressing)

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Image by jlarbig from Pixabay

You may remember that I said w-a-a-a-y back last September that I had shipped the final manuscript for my cookbook to the tech department (i.e., my husband) and that we were planning to get it out perhaps before Thanksgiving but certainly before Christmas. I then gave you some previews, one for my salad dressing chapter. Well! Didja notice that there was no cookbook by the end of last year? We decided to release it later, this spring, with the hope that people would be planning parties for the summer by then and there would be all this pent-up demand for a cookbook specifically aimed at such occasions. That’s still the plan. Here it is the beginning of the fourth week in February; we should release it early next month, I think. Then I plan to do a few little demos highlighting the ideas from various chapters.

In the meantime, though, I’ve re-read the manuscript about 12 times, or so it seems. I got rather tickled at this from the great, great Smitten Kitchen blog, with the author talking about her first cookbook:

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A Guh-reat but Really Easy Recipe For Kung Pao Chicken

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Image by Fernando Sadao Shiraishi from Pixabay

I’ve had a standard stir-fry recipe for many years that can fit either chicken or beef depending on the stock/broth used and other variations. I don’t think lemon juice goes with beef, for instance, so I substitute sherry. It’s served me well, but recently I’ve become interested in developing a good homemade version of kung pao chicken. When we lived in Falls Church, VA, we ate a number of times at the Peking Gourmet Inn, a restaurant less than a mile from us that was a favorite of many celebrities, including the George W. Bushes. The walls are lined with many framed and signed photos. Gideon especially loved their kung pao chicken, saying that it wasn’t like any other version he’d ever tried. I loved their egg rolls, and sometimes for lunch I’d call in a takeout order (with extra garlic sauce), swing by and pick it up, and consume the two scrumptious, golden, packed-with-filling rolls in about five nanoseconds. Heaven! (Well, nearly.) In homage to that memory I made some egg rolls not too long ago that weren’t bad, although I didn’t deep fry them. Too messy! Then I decided to make a run at the kung pao. While the end result wasn’t really much like the PGI version, I have to say that the results were pretty gratifying. You know you have a hit on your hands when people keep taking seconds . . . and thirds. There was a tiny portion left. (Which I ate for lunch today, and it was just as good as freshly made!)

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