A piece of cake

Alex is now 6. There aren't enough Legos in the world to please him, birthday cards that play the "Star Wars" theme delight him endlessly, and he wanted to celebrate with a plain chocolate cake.

Six years old and adept at torturing his mother.

Basic chocolate cake is my Achilles heel; I seem to be incapable of making it. I have many recipes for more sophisticated versions: flourless, triple-fudge, chocolate-raspberry, peppermint, Black Russian. But a good, plain chocolate cake eludes me. Past efforts tended to come out dry and flavorless. I was not going to serve a dry flavorless cake for my son's birthday. I begged for help.

An old friend promptly came through with a "super dupa easy" recipe she recommended to Will several years ago and that has been lurking in a saved e-mail folder since. Like most cake recipes, it involves dumping a bunch of ingredients into a bowl, mixing them well, pouring the batter into pans and baking. It couldn't be easier and came highly recommended so  I decided to go with it. (Exact recipe to follow at the end.)

This super dupa easy cake begins with combining sugar, flour, baking soda, salt and a lot of cocoa powder in a bowl. Technically, the dry and liquid ingredients are not mixed separately, but out of habit I stirred the dry gently before moving on.

I started to measure out the liquid ingredients and did a double take. I had written down 2 tablespoons of vanilla, which seemed a ridiculously large amount. Quick run to the computer to check the e-mail... ah yes, the 2 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 tablespoon vanilla were next to each other in the ingredient list and in my haste I had scribbled them down wrong. Still, 1 tablespoon of vanilla seemed a lot and I cut it back to 2 teaspoons.

I poured the liquid into the flour mixture and mixed until it was smooth. Then into a pair of cake pans and baked for 45 minutes. The cakes seemed a little underdone on the toothpick test, so I gave them another five minutes. The cake tops looked beautiful and the layers shook out of the pans nicely without any breakage.

I wasn't in the mood to make buttercream, so I wimped out and used store-bought frosting. Alex picked out the kind with colored candy dots to sprinkle on top.

THE VERDICT: Alex was happy. Will thought the cake was very good. Keith didn't like it so much, but I'm not sure he's a cake person. I can say it was easily the best basic chocolate cake I've ever made -- it was moist and had some good flavor. However, I thought it was a little more dense than I like. It was good, but I think I'm still looking for the perfect recipe.

Super Dupa Easy Chocolate Cake
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Thoroughly mix:
2 c. sugar
3 c. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
4 heaping Tbsp. cocoa powder
1 c. vegetable oil
2 Tbsp. vinegar
2 tsp. vanilla
2 c. water

Bake 45 minutes.

Timing is everything

Will pulled a package of chicken breasts out of the freezer and asked, "Do you want to find something to do with these, or should I?" Now, he was heading out the door to work and I had planned a very busy day of being a lazy ragamuffin, so thinking about dinner wasn't real high on either of our lists. But I took it as a recipe challenge, and agreed to find something.

Being lazy, I didn't want to flip through clippings and printouts, so I took the challenge as an excuse for messing around on the Internet and went to epicurious.com and my online recipe box. Most of the recipes in here are somewhere in my hard copy test files, so it's a good way to do a fast search for say, chicken dishes.

After a few minutes of perusing, I came across chicken with sun-dried tomato cream sauce. It was an instant winner: it called for sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, shallots and cream, all of which I had on hand and no other use for. I also read through the reviews by other home cooks, who highly recommended cutting up the chicken, doubling the sauce and serving it all over pasta. When it came down to it, that was exactly the sort of thing I was in the mood for. Hurrah for chicken with sun-dried tomato cream sauce!

Or maybe not, I thought several hours later as I cut up the chicken. Because at that point, when I was already committed to the recipe, I started remembering a few things. For one, I hate handling defrosted chicken -- I don't do cold well and while defrosted chicken is only slightly colder than if it had been in the coolest part of the fridge for 24 hours, to me it feels like ice. Why did I decide to make something that involves cutting this up?


And why did I pick something with a cup of heavy cream in it right after the holidays? As I managed my way through slicing the meat, I considered my options with the cream. I didn't have enough half-and-half to substitute, but was going to deglaze the pan with chicken broth anyway so maybe that was the solution. I decided to cut back the cream a bit and add a lot of broth.

And why didn't I check that we had lots of garlic first? Yes, we had four cloves, but they were the skinny inner ones and it was more like I had two cloves. And why did I ignore the shallots on the counter for so long? One was fine, but the other was kinda funky inside so I didn't have quite enough for the sauce. Oh, well...

I started out sauteeing the chicken in batches, in the olive oil drained from the tomatoes. Things smelled good, and I wasn't burning anything, including myself, so I started the pasta. And that's when I got a must-take work-related phone call.

It was about a minute and a half into the call before it occurred to me to turn off the heat under the chicken, so the last batch was well-seared on one side. Not necessarily a bad thing if consistency in presentation isn't so important. But... A mildly bad thing: I forgot to set the timer on the pasta and had no idea how long it had been cooking. A more bad thing: At this point, getting out something green to go on the side flew right out of my head. A very bad thing: Now I was flustered about dinner and that's where I make mistakes.

To wit: The skillet was a little hotter than it should be. So the deglazing broth evaporated in three seconds and the shallot and garlic and tomatoes cooked much more quickly than anticipated. Not a big deal, really, because I poured in the cream and it thickened nicely and I was very proud ... and sort of forgot the part about doubling the sauce until I went to serve it and the sauce coated the chicken nicely, but left the (overcooked) pasta very bland. I also sort of forgot to use the camera, so there are no pictures ...

THE VERDICT: Meh. Will and I were unimpressed, Keith had no comment, and Alex repeatedly told me, "This is DEEE-LISH!!!"
    Now, in defense of this recipe, I think that it could be very good with some changes. Maybe if I had doubled the sauce like I planned, or even tripled it. Maybe if I finely chopped the tomatoes. Maybe if I had more garlic and shallots. Maybe if I used less chicken and cut it into smaller pieces. So while I'm not in a rush to make this again, I'm not jettisoning this recipe quite yet.
 

Christmas carne

First confession: Christmas was not the first time I made sugo di carne. That came about two months ago, when I had my hands full with work stuff and no time to blog and the camera has been on the fritz anyway so there weren't any photos anyhow.


Second confession: It is foolish of me to think that a holiday week allows me more time to write. Or that I can update a blog at someone else's house, especially when the photos are at home.



Third confession: The camera still stinks.

I'm much more stubborn about sticking to traditional recipes around the winter holidays than at Thanksgiving. I have some tried-and-true favorites, mostly involving eggnog, and look forward to making them every year. In the last few years, I've settled into a Christmas dinner of prime rib and Yorkshire puddings -- originally a compromise between goose (too fatty) and ham (too boring).

But this year, emboldened by the success of Thanksgiving tacos, I suggested the ultrafantastic sugo di carne over homemade pappardelle.  Sugo di carne is amazing. It caught my eye because it has only six ingredients, two of which are a cup of espresso and a bottle of chianti. You cannot go wrong with anything requiring espresso and chianti.

The recipe I use came out of Bon Appetit, I think in 2007. It was in the restaurant recipe section and the magazine got it from Caffe Mingo in Portland, Ore. They called it "penne al sugo di carne" and served it over two pounds of penne. I like it over pappardelle. At any rate, I cannot find the recipe online to link to it, and will do my best to reproduce it here.

The first, most important thing, is to have a large, ovenproof pot. Conveniently, Will gave me a beautiful 7 1/2-quart hard-anodized Dutch oven for Christmas, and while the boys were busy playing with their new toys, I got to play with mine. The first time I made sugo, I made it in a stockpot, which was OK, but too deep to stir properly. The Dutch oven was much, much better.

For this recipe, which serves 12, you will need: 5 lbs. of chuck roast cut into something approximating 2-inch cubes; 6 Tbsp. of butter; 3 red onions, halved and thinly sliced; a cup of wicked strong coffee (espresso preferred, but double-strength coffee works, too); an entire 750-ml bottle of chianti; and a 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, with liquid. You also need 2 pounds of pasta to serve it over, but that comes later.


A couple things of note here: The first time I made this, my heart stopped at the thoughts of "12 servings?" and "an entire bottle of chianti????" so I halved it and it worked out fine. This time around, I went for the whole shebang. Twelve servings is a lot, but I personally think that the leftovers reheated the next day are even better. So it's worth the full batch. Also, well, once you taste it, it's worth the entire bottle of chianti. The full recipe is a little cost-prohibitive, but well, hey, it's the holidays.

Naturally, while I was laboriously cutting the beef into neat 2-inch cubes that Martha Stewart would be proud of, my family called with the unerring instinct families have of calling when you're in the middle of something. Will kindly took over the cubing, and he is sensibly much more relaxed about these things so the cutting was done much faster and now we had 3-inch prisms. Precision is not necessary in this recipe. Besides, I will not disparage the sous chef who also slices onions for me.

Then I melted a tablespoon of butter in the beautiful large ovenproof pot and browned the beef. This must be done in batches, because there is a lot of it.


Next, I melted the remaining 5 tablespoons of butter in the pot and sauteed the onions, stirring frequently, until they were soft. This is also when I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. I never understand why recipes say to preheat first thing, but there's a good half-hour of cooking before anything goes in the oven.


Once the onions were soft -- the recipe says this should be about 5 minutes, I say more like 6 minutes -- I returned the beef and its accumulated juice to the pot. Then I dumped in the tomatoes, chianti and espresso. (Truthfully, I am too lazy to haul out the espresso machine so I use extra-strong coffee. Whatever's handy.) Bring the whole thing to a boil, cover it, and stick it into the oven for two hours.

While the sugo was braising, I made some egg pasta. The recipe I use combines 2 cups of flour and 3 eggs, knead it, let it rest for a half-hour, then run it through the pasta machine. This makes one pound of pasta, so I usually double it. Since I was making it for sugo, I rolled the pasta out to the second-thinnest setting on the machine, and then cut it into long fat ribbons. I should have cut them shorter, but c'est la vie.

After the sugo had been braising for two hours, I took it out of the oven. The next step is to shred the beef with two forks. You could theoretically do it in the pot, but it helps to take it out of the pot with a slotted spoon to make sure you get all the meat. Whatever you do, DON'T FORGET THE POT TEMPERATURE IS 400 DEGREES. The first time I made this, Will burned the heck out of his thumb. It wasn't pretty. Once the beef was shredded, it went back in the pot with all the tasty, super-rich liquid it had been braising in.

Meanwhile, I cooked the pasta. Once that was drained, we served it with sugo. A truly fantastic recipe.

THE VERDICT: Well, since this is the second time I made it, it's a definite keeper. I think, though, that between the richness of the sauce and the price of beef (and a bottle of chianti!) it's not exactly an everyday sort of thing. The leftovers are awesome, too.

Thanksgiving taco bar

I'm no genius chef, but I'm also not all that bad at roasting turkeys. We usually buy our Thanksgiving bird from a nearby farm, then I shove a mixture of butter and herbs under the skin and roast the thing in accordance with a recipe that has proven fairly reliable over the last decade. We complement it with the typical Thanksgiving dishes that we began preparing three days earlier and the result is generally tasty. Of course, it's also accompanied by the less-tasty sides of kitchen stress, overflowing sinks and creative invectives that should not be uttered around elementary schoolers.

    Last year marked a turning point in the Thanksgiving song-and-dance routine. My old reliable recipe unaccountably failed and the turkey was horribly underdone. Then the boys made it clear that they do not like Thanksgiving foods: not stuffing, not potatoes, not cranberry sauce, not gravy. After all the time Will and I spent cooking, neither of us wanted to be told how bad the food was. Least of all the gravy -- I am somewhat proud of my gravy and I have friends who still talk about The Gravy of 1997 -- so for the boys to pan it was somewhat of a blow.

    That was when Will suggested tacos for our next Thanksgiving.

     Now, when Will said "tacos," and when I heard "tacos," I suspect we were thinking different things. He probably meant, "let's buy some tortillas and mix some seasoning into ground meat," something that would not have involved a lot of swearing, timing dishes or work. His idea was a stress-free meal. But no, I have to do things the hard way.

    See, I make a decent flour tortilla. And there was this mole recipe I've been wanting to try, but you don't just make mole for the fun of it. And after all, it's still a holiday meal...

    This may have remained under control and stress-free, except my parents, younger brother, sister and sister's boyfriend were coming to dinner. This is one of the drawbacks of being the only sibling with a house: I end up hosting a lot of holidays. I like cooking for a lot of people, but it is a lot of work. Since we were having guests for dinner, I couldn't in good conscience serve them salsa out of a jar, could I?

     The menu ended up looking like this: shredded chicken, mole sauce, salsa, crema, tortillas, sangria, tortilla soup, frijoles refritos and rice. Most were familiar recipes. All were from scratch.

     The mole was the big one, and one of the few I could -- or must -- prepare ahead of time (the other being the crema, a simple matter of adding buttermilk to heavy cream and leaving it sit on top of the fridge for 24 hours). The recipe I used was adapted from "Cocina de la familia", a Mexican-American cookbook given me about 10 years ago.

     The recipe calls for partially cooking chicken breast in water to make a broth, then using the broth in the mole sauce, and finishing cooking the chicken in the sauce. This would be fine, except the recipe also highly recommended letting the sauce sit for a few days to let the flavors blend before finishing the chicken.
     Yeah, like I was going to do that. Aside from it being more work than I wanted to put into it (stress-free, right?), or the qualms I felt about having undercooked chicken sitting around for three days, I wanted people to have the option of not using the mole if they didn't want it. So I subbed in a very large container of chicken broth.

     I also had to adapt on the key ingredient of chocolate. My sister, just returned from Mexico, was bringing me Mexican chocolate, but wouldn't arrive until Thanksgiving morning. So I used some unsweetened cocoa, Ceylon and a handful of semisweet chips for good chocolaty measure.

    Making the mole was easy, but did have a lot of steps. Toasting dried chiles (above), then soaking them. Toasting peanuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, plaintain, garlic and crackers. Pureeing them (right). Pureeing the chiles and their soaking liquid -- and misreading the directions and pureeing them all at once instead of liquefying them in small batches, thereby leaving chunks of ancho in the sauce. Cooking the whole mess together in a large stockpot with some chicken broth and chocolate and wondering why it made so darn much... and fearing that it might be just a little too spicy.

     When Thanksgiving rolled around, I did not get up obsessing about turkey. Instead, I tossed some ingredients in a pot for tortilla soup, then employed my favorite cooking method for the salsa, chicken and refritos:  hand them off to Will. They were pretty easy, actually, and I would have done them myself except I was busy with tortillas. For those, I mixed flour, baking powder, shortening and water, then let the dough rest for 30 minutes. Then I rolled out 24 little taco-sized tortillas and quickly cooked them in a skillet.

     It was in the midst of this, including the rewarming of the mole, that we realized we were in the middle of the get-everything-on-the-table mad rush we had been trying to avoid. Still, it wasn't nearly as bad as the usual Thanksgiving frenzy. And we got everything on the table in good time ... except the tortilla soup, which we somehow forgot and ended up having for lunch the next day.

    THE VERDICT: The mole was spicy, but much better after mellowing for a couple of days in the fridge. It was also better with chicken than on its own. It was a little much for Alex, but everyone else seemed to like it. Would I make it again? Maybe -- or maybe a different version.

     Will I skip the turkey next Thanksgiving and make tacos again? Definitely... unless we come up with another festive, but even lower-key idea.

How I spent my weekend

Have I mentioned that we have too much stuff in this house? And that one chunk of that too much stuff is a rambling recipe collection?

This weekend, I took a stab at winnowing that down. I lugged into the family room a stack of roughly 40 dog-eared cooking magazines, all published in fall or winter months, and proceeded to go through and rip out every recipe that either Will or I had ever flagged.

Some of them I had cooked before -- they had tell-tale sauce splatters or coffee rings on the pages -- but never bothered to copy down. Some of them it's doubtful whether I'll ever cook them, like a braciole or salt-baked fish, but I have dreams.

Then there are those that I know it's redundant to clip: How many recipes for molten chocolate cakes do I really need? Still, I rip them out, because this one uses instant coffee powder (oh, is that what that new Starbucks stuff is for?) and that one has cherry topping and still another has an amaretto filling. And some things I can't say no to, like anything with peppermint.

Now I have a 5-inch stack of fall and winter recipes to sort through. When I consider that once I had a 5-foot stack of cooking magazines, well, I'm making progress.

Fall favorites

Mmm. Molasses cookies.

One of my favorite things about fall is cooking with warmer spices, like cloves and cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. One of my favorite things to make with them is molasses cookies.

To some extent, I am on a quest for the perfect molasses cookie. My freshman year of college, I had a roommate who worked with a woman who made wonderful molasses cookies, soft and chewy with just enough spice to enhance the cookie without overwhelming it. Rumor has it said roommate has the recipe, hidden somewhere in her own overflowing recipe file. If it turns up, well, I'm hoping to get my hands on it, but in the meantime I've got plenty of recipes to test.

This recipe for Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies comes from Bon Appetit, Nov. 2006.

In a bowl, whisk together 2 1/3 c. flour, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp allspice and a very small pinch of coarsely ground pepper.

Then in my trusty electric mixer, I beat 12 tablespoons room temperature butter until smooth, then creamed in 1/2 c. of molasses and 1 c. of light brown sugar. When it was blended, I beat in an egg and scraped down the sides:

Next, I gently added the flour mixture on low, low speed. Adding flour to doughs and batters always makes me yearn for my mother's mixer, or rather, the pouring shield on her mixer. It's just a big plastic ring, with a sort of funnel on one side, but it keeps all the flour from foofing out when you try to mix it in. I have a pouring shield, but sometime between the late '70s and the late  '90s, some idiot decided it would be better if the shield came in two pieces. I think the idea was to make it easier to add ingredients, but it actually means the shield doesn't fit correctly and if you're not careful, it will fall into the batter. So now I rarely use the darn thing and just add flour very, very slowly.

When the flour and spices are just mixed in, the dough will be very soft and smooth. The next step was to divide it into two pieces, wrap each with plastic wrap, and chill for at least an hour. Then I let the kids lick the dough off the beater.

After an hour (or more), I took out the smaller of the two hunks of dough. I preheat an oven to 350 degrees and lined a baking sheet with foil. Then I rolled small pieces of dough into balls and rolled those in a bowl of sugar.





Once I had a dozen balls of dough placed on the baking sheet, I flattened them with a juice glass. They didn't look very sugar-topped anymore, so I sprinkled some more sugar on them.

These were supposed to bake for 12 to 14 minutes; since I like my cookies on the chewy side I went for the minimum. They came out a little crunchy on outside and a little chewy on the inside.

THE VERDICT:  Not quite as chewy as I was hoping for, but not bad. That pinch of ground pepper adds a unexpected pfefferkuchen-like kick. Will and Keith enjoyed them, assuring me that I make a mean molasses spice cookie. These would go great with some vanilla ice cream. A keeper.

Ambition, 2.1

One of the reasons I got so het up about the idea of making homemade ricotta was I found a recipe for ricotta gnocchi. Said recipe was part of an article about using homemade ricotta and sure, I could have just bought a tub of cheese at the store and called it a day, but I got ambitious.

Ricotta recipe one failed miserably. Ricotta recipe two turned out splendidly, and now that I had the main ingredient, I could turn it into gnocchi. The actual recipe was for ricotta gnocchi with some kind of mushroom sauce (serves six), but I skipped the mushroom part and figured on substituting my own tomato sauce.

Per the instructions, I weighed out a pound of ricotta and dutifully drained it until it had the texture of wet clay. I mixed in a half cup of flour, an egg, a tablespoon each of olive oil and melted butter, a 1/4 c. of Parmesan
and some salt and pepper. It felt very sticky, so I added another tablespoon of flour. After the fourth (do not add more than four! the recipe said) it was still pretty sticky, not slighty sticky, but, do not add more than four tablespoons!

I did pause a moment to consider that this was the same guy who wrote ricotta recipe one, and maybe, just maybe, he was wrong. Then I decided to follow what was written and play around another time, if necessary.

I covered and chilled the dough. A half hour later, I took the dough out again and tried to divide it into four parts, but it was awfully sticky. I ended up with three. Using copious amounts of flour, I rolled the dough into 3/4-inch-wide logs. Here, the recipe said to cut them into 1-inch pieces, but I thought they would look more, well, gnocchi-like if I pinched off pieces instead. They were still remarkably sticky, so I rolled them in flour before placing them on a baking sheet to chill some more.

At this point, I had to turn the operation over to Will while I took Keith to soccer practice. Shortly before we were due home, he put the gnocchi on to cook. They boiled in water for a few minutes, floated to the top, and he cooked them about two minutes longer and drained them. Keith and I weren't home yet, so Will kept the gnocchi warm by tossing them with some melted butter in a saute pan over low heat. When we finally got home, he served the gnocchi with tomato sauce.

THE VERDICT: Reaction one -- Serves six? I don't think so. We didn't have enough for four servings, with two of them kid-sized. Granted, I didn't do the mushroom sauce business, which might have had something to do with it, but we still should have had enough for four bowls.
Reaction two -- WOW. Wow, wow, wow. These were really good. The gnocchi were extremely light, with a nice texture and flavor. They also went well with the homemade tomato sauce. So next time, I double the recipe.