Cranberry English Muffins

Lately, I've just been sticking cranberries into everything I cook.  I really miss fruit this winter, and I got tired of apples pretty early on.

You could make this without the cranberries, but then I'd have nothing to contribute to the literature, because there already is a perfect recipe for English muffins.  I've been trying to do this for a while.  I hinted at it 14 months ago (!)  It turns out that everyone uses the same recipe anyway, and it's Alton Brown's.   "My" recipe is *so* Alton Brown's that I'm not going to post it at the end, really, this is someone else's work.  

The only changes I made were:

1. Cranberries!
2. Earth Balance instead of shortening
3. Mix of whole wheat and AP flour

When I say everyone uses Alton Brown's recipe, I mean that most of the first page of Google hits on "English Muffin Recipe" is either that version or something based on that version.  I mean that when I searched for video guidance on making English muffins, the most useful video is based on Alton Brown's recipe.  Also, I've made English muffins not using Alton Brown's recipe and they were less than awesome.  These, however, are awesome, so let's do it this way.

Spiced Applesauce Breakfast Cake

I'm just starting out honestly, with "breakfast cake."  I know there's a fine line between bread and cake - (banana bread and carrot cake?) and this is a non-dessert cake.  It's not a bread.  It's also not super sweet.  It's breakfast cake, but you can have it for dessert if you want.

I was looking to make applesauce cake for two reasons:
1. I had too many apples, and am not interested in things like crisps, crumbles, pies, tarts; and
2. When I was a teenager, there was this orchard/farm market by the mall and they made amazing applesauce cake.

So working off the idea that cake can be made of applesauce - and not just in the swap-the-oil-for-applesauce-in-the-Duncan-Hines-mix-way - and that I needed to use some apples, I went to work.

Except, it's hard for me with desserts.  I don't like really sweet things.  Also, I have no idea how that applesauce cake I grew up with was made.

But it worked.  A very lightly sweet cake (dust it with powdered sugar and you get a bit more sweet in every bite) that's not really CAKE in the plan-your-other-meals-to-account-for-it way.

Garlic Knots and Bread Drama

What I need to start doing is just bringing the camera with me to the kitchen no matter what I'm doing in there, in case something *really important* happens that I need to tell you about.  But I didn't do that, so we have no process horror pictures.

I think that means this isn't a fail, but is instead a hot tip, since I won in the end, but whoa was it a fail early on. 

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

I've been lax about making bread.  November - January is so busy anyway, I haven't been making the time.  I very intentionally don't order bread through my buying club, because I'm planning on making it myself, and then I don't and everything is on a tortilla.   Just the other day I went to the supermarket for fruit and a couple of staples and I was drawn in by the bread and bought some sandwich rolls, since I knew I wasn't going to make them this week.  

Well, it's a new year. Let's make some bread.  Not just bread, either, let's make some sweet and warm and cinnamony bread. 

This recipe makes three loaves, which I think is perfect because you get one to freeze, one to give away and one for right now.   If you don't have three loaf pans, do cut down the recipe. 

English Muffins - not quite there yet

Light Brioche-style Sandwich Rolls

I'm a sucker for rich breads.  Somehow, croissants, challah and brioche are excluded from my general disdain for pastry and such.  The line has to fall somewhere.  So, I got it in my head that I was going to make brioche.  I had a sandwich in mind.  Brioche is tender and barely sweet, and full of butter, eggs and milk.   So, I got to Googling.


Julia Child's recipe has 12 tablespoons of butter and four eggs...
King Arthur Flour is great for bread recipes.  But wow... ten tablespoons of butter and three eggs... 
Epicurious uses just eight tablespoons of butter...


All of a sudden it was time to re-think.  I'd make something brioche-ish (say that three times fast!).


So I Googled a bit harder.  There was a less-rich recipe that had gotten around a bit.  NYT had published a light brioche sandwich roll.  Smitten Kitchen recreated it.   This was it.  Not only did I have a *much* lighter recipe, but of course it was going to work, because it got passed around and there were pictures.  Any fool (read: me) can post a recipe up on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's going to work.  I felt good about this one.


So we start like we start, with yeast foaming up.  

Thoughts on Strata and Doing it Right

*


I wasn't planning to tell you about Sunday dinner this week.  We just had some friends over for a casual meal, and the plan was to cook pretty simple foods and just have a nice time.  The half-vegan was originally planning on coming, and so the menu was set to include some foods she could eat.  We made up the buffalo seitan, and a kale salad, and I made some of David Lebovitz's blue cheese dressing,** and wanted to make another entree.  And I had all those farmshare eggs.  And I wanted to prep in advance as much as possible. 


Oh yeah, strata.   Sure, it's not for the half-vegan, but she didn't come anyway so we were able to use cheese.  So, like I said, I wanted to prep in advance.  Classic strata is made the night before, but last time I made strata I made it  a few hours in advance and it came out fine.  Classic strata is made with a ton of eggs, but last time I used just three eggs and two whites and it came out fine.  


So, I wasn't going to tell you about Sunday dinner this week, which totally confused MSNDG.  Midway through prep, she asked where the camera was.   She knows what cooking in my house usually looks like.  But I was all, "Oh, I've written about all this before, nothing special here."  

Challah French Toast

Last week we went to Trader Joe's and we were debating buying some bread.  I haven't made bread for a while* - first it was hot out, and then I just didn't do it.  I thought I was done with storebought bread, but it's frustrating not having bread, so we went and looked at the breads and all of a sudden I was like, "OMG, Challah!"  


I've never owned challah** and never made it.  The last time I had it was at a naming ceremony for my friend's second kid, and he's on his third now.  Challah has historically been something I've encountered at celebrations, at other people's houses.   We grew up in a place of challah and good bagels.  We don't have good bagels here.  


So I don't know why, in that moment, it seemed to make sense to buy this rich, eggy bread that's closer to the texture of a croissant than the whole wheat bread I make, but it sounded awesome.  And it was. 


But that's a big loaf, and we really don't eat that much bread.  So it served all of our carb needs for the week.   Having Indian food?  Don't make naan, bust out the challah.  PBJ?  Challah.  Breakfast at work?  Pack a thick slice of challah.  BLT?  Feels sacrilegious on challah, but sure is delicious.  Need a snack?  Holla Challah. 


And still, after a week there was a good amount left, and this bread wasn't going to go to waste.  But we all know what challah is best at, right?  French toast.   It's legendary.  

Whole Wheat Honey Yogurt Biscuits

Well, that's a lot of words, isn't it?  But it's not complicated and totally worth it.  I'm a fan of biscuits.  When I'm driving, it's a serious effort to avoid pulling into some awful fast food place and just buying one.  Barring that sort of weakness (and I can clearly remember a time when I was on the road for work last year and I got one at a Roy Rogers), I don't experience biscuits that I don't make.  I don't know when I'd encounter a biscuit.  Restaurants I go to don't have them, and I'm not frequenting the sort of picnics and backyard parties that have fried chicken and homemade baked beans and biscuits (please invite me to your backyard picnic).  So when there's biscuits, it's because I made them.  Several months ago I made some cheddar biscuits, which were awesome, but this time I was looking for something half-healthy, and a bit less luxurious than the Red Lobster style.  

Scallion and Scape Chicken Salad

 

I love chicken salad, and Sous Chef Brian does not.   Every few years I make a new one and he patiently tries it and tells me it's "a texture thing."  He eats tuna salad, and potato salad and coleslaw and everything else you can douse in mayo and call food, but for some reason chicken salad doesn't resonate with him. 

So I make it rarely.  Sometimes, I'll order it out, but I need to be feeling pretty adventurous.  Why's that?  Because I went to graduate school for Public Health.  Public Health people know better than to eat the mayonnaise.  In every epidemiology class, there is an outbreak investigation... 19 people showed up at the ER after a banquet.   At the banquet there was steak, fish, and egg salad.  Here's a table of what everyone ate.  And it's always the mayonnaise people who end up in the hospital.  

There are two big problems that stand out to me from that assignment.  

1) The people in the example who get sick report a sore throat (not a symptom of salmonella, last I checked)

2) Who the hell is catering this banquet and using homemade mayonnaise in the egg salad?

A jar of Hellmans is not going to give you salmonella, because the eggs are pasteurized.  I mean, it might give you salmonella, in the same way that spinach or alfalfa sprouts might, but it's not more likely than spinach to make you sick.  The risk is in homemade mayo with raw egg.  You know I'm not someone to bash homemade foods, right?  Know your farmer.  Know your eggs.  Make mayo and be happy. 

Me, I'm not going to, but there are several things I learned in school that have given me unreasonable fears, and I'm not going to pass all of them on to you.   At least not all at once.

I think chicken salad has a few key components - something crunchy, something onion, something sweet, and something creamy.   Also chicken.  So those are the basic rules I follow.   Here's what I did last night.

Garlic Naan

Yesterday, I posted the faux-tandoori chicken from last night's dinner, as well as the greens.  Today I'll put up the garlic naan and acknowledge that there was also rice. 


There are a ton of naan recipes floating around there, with wide-ranging ingredients and prep methods.  I read  a lot of them.  Some call for just flour and water, others are more complicated.  They're cooked in frying pans and on pizza stones, over open flames, etc.  The goal is fast high heat.

Banh Mi Chay - Vietnamese Tofu Hoagies

One of my first blog posts was about this sandwich.  It is, in my mind, the best possible sandwich.  I read about it before I had it and said to myself, "this will be my new favorite."  And so it was.  Sweet tofu, fresh cilantro, pickled veg and jalepeno - what more do you need?  But I have a serious problem.  I can't find one I like around here.   There's a decent place in West Philly, but my favorite local place closed many months ago and I've tried most of the other joints and I'm not happy.   So I'm going to tell you how and why you should pickle your own veg days in advance rather than buy a $3 hoagie.   It's better.

Basic Sandwich Rolls

I'm pretty much set for bread.   I have pita in the freezer, along with two and a half loaves of the quinoa-flax bread, and some bread ends for croutons or breadcrumbs.  I'd like to totally avoid buying storebought breads.   But sometimes, you want to make something, maybe something quick, and there's this perfect bread for it and you don't have the 4-5 hours to pull it together.  Sandwich rolls are like this.  I don't want to eat a hamburger, or a sloppy joe on quinoa bread or on pita.   And I had big plans for Banh Mi.   So I needed to get some sandwich rolls going. 

Here's the thing though - I have mild plague.  Is it just a throat tickle, or an actual thing?  I don't know, but I'm not about to go touching on all the foods.   I have to be pretty sick to want to forego chewing and switch to soup when I'm sick, so the Banh Mi stayed on the agenda, but who would make the bread?  

Cue Sous Chef Brian.   In what I'm sure was a truly stressful feat, with me standing over his shoulder trying to convey the specific finger movements I use when kneading and shaping bread, my husband stepped in and took care of sandwich rolls.  My husband - the one I worry about when I leave on business trips, because he might not think to defrost something - the one who, when I had classes all day Saturdays, would tell me at 4 that he "didn't know what to eat," and thus had not.  He made the bread. 

Quinoa and Flax Bread

This is inspired by (Never home)maker's recipe and a bet from my mother.  Not a bet so much as a dare.

Me: "I'm going to make bread tomorrow, what kind should I make?"

Mom: "Rye." 

Me: "I don't have any rye flour, and I don't like rye bread." 

Mom: "What do you have, wheat?  I guess you're going to make wheat bread."  

And I listed off a few of the range of breads that I had the ingredients for, including quinoa.  And she said, "Quinoa, really?"  And I was all, "Challenge accepted."

Lighter, Quicker Strata with Asparagus and Bacon

When Sous Chef Brian came home and asked what we were having, I said, "asparagus strata."  He said, "Erik Estrada?" I should note that I'm far too young to have watched CHiPs, but Sous Chef Brian is not.  Also, I know Erik Estrada from Sea Lab 2021, which was, for a very intense two-week span nearly 10 years ago, my favorite show.    I enunciated more clearly.  "Asparagus Strata."  He looked at me like a confused animal, which makes sense.  He doesn't get out to a lot of brunches or baby showers, and I had no clue what strata was before I started making it.


I had a vegetable strata at DiBruno Brothers about six months ago.  I didn't know what it was, but it looked pretty and it was vegetables.  It was tall, and had many layers, and it was delicious.  So this week I started looking for recipes.   I was surprised it was a brunch food, I would have called it "casserole" when I had it and been done with that. 


When I started researching recipes, I was shocked at how much egg it contained.   Over and again I saw easy-to-measure recipes that called for 12 ounces of cheese, 12 slices of bread and 12 eggs. 


I can't do that.  I can't put 12 eggs into dinner.  I can't halve it and put 6 eggs into dinner.  It just doesn't feel right.   I can, however, put less egg in, especially in order to justify bacon.  Also, these recipes called for sitting overnight, and that's not my thing.  And so lighter, quicker strata happened.

Falafel Dinner - part two - whole wheat pita bread

I spend a lot of time talking about how I don't bake.   Part of it is my disinterest in most sweets (can we have french fries for dessert instead?) and the other part is the precision and the measuring.  I like to cook by smell.   And yet, I made pita bread.

This was part of this weekend's big time falafel dinner - yesterday I posted the falafel, and tomorrow I'll post the hummus, and the rest will come as it comes. 

I read through maybe 20 pita bread recipes to get here, and many said that you can't really make pita at home and that the traditional way required an oven hotter than home ovens were capable of getting.  I figured if it didn't work, I'd have some sort of flatbread that would be just fine, and if it REALLY didn't work, I had tortillas in the fridge.   Spoiler alert - it totally worked.

Sundried Tomato, Pesto and Mozzarella Panini

Yeah sometimes dinner is a sandwich, but if it's an awesome one, I'll still post it.  Besides, this totally qualifies as home cooking because that's the bread I made on Sunday for the Spaghetti and Meatballs.  I suggested grilled cheese (I will always, always, suggest grilled cheese) and Sous Chef Brian was like "what if we add sundried tomatoes, and basil, and use mozzarella," so this is totally his recipe.

Spaghetti and Bison Meatballs and Italian Bread

Spaghetti and meatballs.   Something about it sounds so just thrown together.  Like a weeknight meal you wouldn't make for company.   But it was Sunday, and we had a dinner guest.   Oh, I should tell you - I asked her, "Hey, since I reference you in all my Sunday posts, is it cool if I use your name on the Interwebs?"  And she's all, "Yeah, I mean, that's fine and all, but it'd be more fun if you kept me a mystery."  So we had our mysterious dinner guest on Sunday, and made spaghetti and meatballs.   It was time intensive, making sauce, meatballs, bread, and totally worth it, even if in the end, it was just spaghetti and meatballs. 

Pulled Chicken on Cheddar Biscuits

I'm new to the blogging thing, and along with it, the twittering thing.  Seriously, I feel like somebody's Grandma, new to the internets.   But through the twittering thing, because we both use office supplies in the kitchen, I found On Blank.  I actually just looked at it for real for the first time yesterday, and it's awesome.   It's about food made of food, and about freezing things.  It looks like we have a lot in common, but she's more hardcore than I am - like, she goes on about how it's not a big deal to make your own bread.  (um, it IS a big deal.  Sure we should do it, but it's a thing.  It takes time.  You do it wrong, and you've lost all that time and have no bread.)   But anyhow, her blog looks awesome, and so when looking for dinner ideas today, I came across her herb and cheese biscuits.

Grilled Cheese

two pickles. that's right. also, the diagonal cut is key.

My kitchen's a mess.  What?  But hey, that's homemade bread.

no, i didn't make the roasted red pepper and tomato soup.

This was perfect with a nice Malbec.