Dave would like it on the record that I ate and enjoyed the fish (see below) and also ate my brussel sprouts and turnips. It was quite tasty.
Except I am still finding fish scales in the sink. They are literally appearing out of nowhere. I coulda sworn we got them all cleaned up that night. The price we pay for deliciousness…
Dave is making a whole fish for us. He is currently de-scaling the thing. This could be interesting. I don’t ever recall, in my whole food-eating life, being able to stare my dinner in the eyeball.
I have pasta at the ready just in case.
I have been told that I’m a breakfast elitist.
This means that I refuse to eat breakfast unless I can have an elaborate spread or fancy treats for breakfast. Oatmeal before work? Not for me. Cereal? Too plain. Bacon, eggs, pancakes, pastries? You betcha.
I just don’t enjoy standard work week breakfast fare. It’s okay from time to time, but in the mornings, especially in the winter, I could sleep in a bit more rather than make breakfast and if you know me and how much I enjoy food, giving up a meal for sleep must mean that I REALLY like sleep.. The quick breakfast stuff bores me but I could do it in a pinch. Other people I know ahem eat breakfast every day and refuse to accept that a cup of coffee serves as the “most important meal of the day.”
Sigh.
On the weekends, however, I love doing up breakfast. This weekend, Sunday breakfast (which was actually more like brunch by the time it was started and completed) included cinnamon sugar popovers. So easy and so yummy.
When getting coffee with Dave one morning, he had ordered a morning bun…you know, those cinnamon sugar pastry treats? Well, it was delicious and I’m sure that he probably regrets introducing me to those. Not only because he made the mistake of sharing the one that he bought for himself, but also because I found a fabulously easy recipe that yields damn near perfect results (very rarely can I say that a recipe I try comes out as good as what I have in mind) and I can now make them at will.
The foundation for this recipe comes from the blog A Sweet Spoonful with some minor tweaks of my own to make up for ingredients/items I didn’t have:
Cinnamon Sugar Popovers
Yield: 8 popovers
I made my popovers in a muffin tin although you can purchase a special popover pan if you’re so inclined; I’m just a fan of using what I have in my own cupboards. If you do use a popover pan, this recipe should yield 6 popovers whereas if you use a muffin tin, you’ll end up with 8. High heat is important to the success of these popovers so when you’re ready to fill your pan, remove it from the oven quickly and make sure not to open and close the oven door while they’re baking. These are really best the day they’re made. Preferably warm.
Adapted from: Cook’s Illustrated
Ingredients:
For the cinnamon sugar top:
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450 F. Blend the eggs and milk together in a blender until combined. Add flour, melted butter, salt, cinnamon and vanilla until smooth and bubbly, about one minute. Let the batter rest for 30 minutes.
While the batter is resting, it’s time to heat up the muffin pan. Pour 1/2 teaspoon of oil into each muffin cup, using only the outer 8 tins (leave the center ones empty — they won’t heat as evenly). Adjust oven rack to lowest position and make sure there’s not a rack directly above — remember your popovers are going to rise and you don’t want another oven rack to squish them. After the batter has rested 20 minutes, place pan in oven to heat the oil. You want the pan to have a good 10 minutes in the oven to heat.
After batter has rested, remove pan from the oven and, working quickly, divide batter amongst the 8 muffin cups. Return to oven and bake for 20 minutes (don’t open the oven door). Then lower heat to 350 F and continue to bake until popovers are golden brown, about 15 minutes more. After removing from the oven, gently flip them out onto a wire rack. I used a butter knife here–sometimes they take a little shimmying.
For the cinnamon sugar topping: mix the sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Thoroughly brush each popover all over with the 1/4 cup of melted butter, then dredge each puff generously in the sugar mixture. Enjoy warm.
Oh and let me tell you. We did enjoy them. Seriously delicious. If I could have these every morning, then I would eat breakfast every morning. My weight would also triple, but whatever.
I have been trying to figure out what to blog lately and honestly, I don’t know what I’ve been doing with my time. As in, how it is possible to have more time and not do anything of substance (read: I’ve done nothing the internet would be excited to read about). Except for adventures in the kitchen, which can be comical. Like the time I tried to make tomato soup and my food processor broke, sending tomato soup all over the kitchen and me. That was solid. Dave asked if I was turning my blog into a cooking blog the other day. I told him not intentionally, but since I like food, I could see why he’d ask that.
The busy season behind us, he and I have time to cook now (or rather, he likes to cook and I like to eat. Grin) so most evenings we can be found making dinner together (I’m an excellent sous chef). Usually at least one night a week, I’ll take the lead in the kitchen but he does such a good job, I’d rather just sit on the counter and watch with a glass of wine in my hand help him.
My parents came over for dinner last weekend. Dave rustled up a roasted chicken and some rosemary potatoes (because I assured him it wasn’t a balanced meal without a carb-licious side starch) and a lovely green salad with pomegranate seeds, pine nuts and a vinaigrette. We had persimmon cookies for dessert.
I handle the baking.
The night before that, we tried our hands at recreating pizzas from Pizzeria Azzurro in Napa. I made the dough the night before (thankyouverymuch Sunset cookbook, for providing the recipe for Delfina’s Pizza Dough) and we got 4 different kinds of delicious cheeses (mozzarella and parm were the obvious choices but we also added in ricotta and chevre, in an effort to recreate Azzurro’s “Formaggio” pizza). We couldn’t remember if the pizza we’d ordered one night had sauce or not (it must have had something besides dough and cheese but we couldn’t remember), so we improvised and in our travels to Whole Foods found a white pasta sauce with porcini mushrooms, so we had a pizza bake-off. Yes. It IS as delicious as it sounds.
Rolling out the dough
Only half of the cheese we used
We made one pizza with the sauce and one without (since I had 3 pizza dough balls to mess with and that was after I had halved the Delfino’s recipe). The sauced pie was the clear winner. The other one, though also tasty, was merely a way to consume massive amounts of cheese. The sauced pizza was a meal. And a delicious one at that. We opted to use the third pizza dough ball to make appetizers for my parents the next night and they were fans too so we knew we had a winning recipe.
And it was pretty easy, as long as you didn’t get the idea to make pizza five minutes before wanting to eat said pizza. The dough can be made the day/night before, which is what we did. Here’s the dough recipe here. I also have the Sunset cookbook, which is what I was thumbing through when the pizza brainstorm came to us but for the purpose of sharing, this works too.
Pizza (pre-baking)
For the pizza, we just pre-baked the pan in a 550-degree oven, because that’s as high as it would go, for 20-30 minutes or so, then got to pizza creating. We sauced them, cheese-ed them and baked them for about 5 minutes before enjoying all that cheesey-dough goodness.
Like an idiot, I didn’t take a photo of them out of the oven, because clearly they looked delicious and I was too distracted by them to remember. But trust me. Yum.
We always do two Thanksgivings in my family. One on the actual Thursday with my dad’s side and the other on what is dubbed Thanksgiving Saturday, which finds us celebrating with my mom’s side. I was off the hook for cooking on Thursday, as my uncle had it all buttoned up in the kitchen. Dave and I donated wine to the cause, because that is always useful.
Saturday, however, I volunteered some desserts. So Friday was spent baking tasty recipes I had seen online or in my travels. I made Pumpkin-Chocolate Bars (saw that one one the TODAY Show one morning before work) and they were festive for the season but I really wanted a chocolate pie.
So I did what I always do when I need a recipe: I opened a google search window.
That’s when I stumbled upon a gem of a recipe for “Gundy’s Chocolate Pie” only, I wanted an oreo crust. Luckily for me, Katie, of Chaos in the Kitchen had a recipe for that too:
Oreo Cookie Pie Crust
Yield: one 9-inch pie crust
prep 10 min, cook 10 min
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Place Oreos in a large plastic zip top bag and smash the heck out of them. A flat mallet or rolling pin works great. You could probably also use a food processor (yep, that’s what I did–worked well, too). Try to get Oreos to a consistent crumby mush. The filling should resemble moist crumbs (if you do this by hand there will be a few larger pieces in the mix, this is fine). Empty crumbs into a mixing bowl and stir in melted butter until well combined. Pat wet crumbs all over and up sides of pie dish, making an even surface. Bake crust for 8-10 minutes or until hardened. Cool before filling.
So, I had my pie crust (chilling in the freezer after baking, actually) and I began working on the chocolate pie.
(adapted from Chaos in the Kitchen)
prep 5 min, cook 15 min
Directions:
Combine milk, egg yolks, sugar, salt, flour, and cocoa in a cold saucepan (literally put it in the freezer for a bit). Stir thoroughly to combine. Turn heat to medium, stir constantly until thick but do not boil. Once thick, remove from heat, stir in butter and vanilla. Let mixture cool slightly and pour into baked pie shell. Chill.
So. simply enough, right? Yea. Not so much if you’re impatient like me. See that part above where it says “once thick”? Yea. Get it thick. If you don’t and you’re too impatient, your pie will look like this:
Chocolate Pie Soup
Which is problematic when you have to be somewhere that afternoon with said pie. On the plus side, the crust was tasty (which is why the right side is hacked off…I didn’t screw that part up, thankfully!)
So I went around again for round 2, with Dave running to the store for more eggs for me. The second time around (after many calls to Dave to come look at it and tell me what he thinks of the consistency) we had a winning pie:
Edible Thanksgiving Chocolate Pie
I whipped up some whipped cream (literally) and put it in a tupperware to take with us and thus, the Thanksgiving pie was saved.