I thought I’d share with you some of the cooking I’ve done so far this month.  It has been a busy month so nothing terribly elaborate and no videos of my cooking, but some interesting meals have come together in addition to the third (and successful) attempt at macarons!

Cornmeal Crepes with Ricotta and Ham

The first dish was a Cornmeal Crepes recipe from Gourmet magazine.  Cornmeal crepes (in fact, just about any type of crepe) are pretty easy to make and since you can make the crepes themselves in advance and then assemble them later, they are a pretty convenient dish for a weeknight dinner.

While I do have a crepe pan, I actually can’t use it because it isn’t compatible with my induction heating stove.  No worries, though, as a good nonstick skillet actually works every bit as nicely as a crepe pan.  This means that if you don’t have a crepe pan, you don’t have an excuse not to make crepes! 

The filling of the crepes is a mixture of ricotta cheese and ham.  The locally produced ricotta we have here in Thailand is oddly dry and chalky, more like smooth feta than the creamier ricotta I’ve had elsewhere.  Because of this, the filling was a bit dry when baked, even with the addition of egg and cheese.

The individual crepes are filled and instead of placing them in a large ovenproof dish, I used these little individual-size serving dishes.  Very “airplane kitchen” of me…  I covered and baked the dishes until the filling was bubbling hot and then topped the crepes with a stir-fry mixture of corn, spring onions and asparagus, with a few shreds of Parmesan cheese.  The asparagus wasn’t in the original recipe, but I couldn’t resist.  Ham and asparagus is a great flavor combination.

Polenta with Mushrooms and Fontina Cheese (Kind of)

One of my favorite food blogs is Joanne Choi’s “Week of Menus”.  She’s a friend of a high school friend, a working mother whose children have a variety of food allergies.  She’s also an avid foodie and good cook.  As you can imagine, she’s juggling multiple priorities and her recipes do a great job of balancing cooking from scratch with good flavor with healthy ingredients that avoid many common allergens. 

Polenta (coarse corn meal – a.k.a. grits) is a favorite of mine that I had not prepared in a while.  Joanne’s original menu is basically sauteed onion and mushrooms baked on top of polenta with a healthy smothering of fontina cheese.

Unable to control myself, I started improvising, adding the rest of the asparagus from the crepe recipe along with a bell pepper.

These were nicely fried up until just starting to get tender.  I then poured the polenta into a pot of boiling milk and water, stirring at to thicken.  A few minutes later I noticed a lot of little brown specks floating in the liquid.  “That’s strange,” I thought, trying to figure out what spice I had added that could be floating there.  Nutmeg?  Cinnamon?  No, I hadn’t added anything, I realized.  They were little bugs.

One of the frustrations with buying imported food products here in Thailand is that sometimes the grains and dried goods come with extra protein.  This happens from time to time, I know, and in most countries and in most parts of the population, people probably just deal with it. 

While I did consider for a moment whether there would be any ramifications for eating the polenta with the extra protein, I decided against it.  So I grabbed some pasta from the cupboard and boiled it up, doing a last-minute substitution of starches.

The end result was a perfectly nice dish.  You’ll see I added some chopped prosciutto.  The problem with the pasta is that when you mix it with the fried vegetables (with no sauce), the vegetables kind of fall through to the bottom of the dish!  It tasted fine but didn’t work the same as it would have with polenta.  Well, I’ve bought a new bag of polenta and we’ll try again one of these days soon!

With the polenta… er, pasta… dinner we had a few sliced of whole wheat bread I had baked.  I’m ever-happier with my breads and think they are not only really tasty but they look great, too.

Garlic Scallion Noodles

Another of Joanne’s recipes I wanted to try was Garlic Scallion Noodles.  Being of Korean heritage, she makes many dishes that employ traditional Korean flavors: garlic, ginger, scallions, soy sauce… all of which are very yummy.  The noodles were very easy – boil pasta and toss in a sauce of butter, soy sauce, sake (or mirin), scallions, garlic and a little brown sugar.  I would have added some slivers of ginger and some more garlic, but that’s just me.

The noodles lent themselves nicely to some Ginger Soy Chicken, which has an excellent an easy marinade.  You can either pan-fry the chicken, grill it on the barbecue, or use the broiled in your oven to lend an indoor barbecue flavor.  The meat stays so moist that even if you give the outside a good char, you can scarcely dry out the meat!

Blueberry Oat Scones

Tawn had been wanting to make some scones for a long time now.  While I regularly bake buttermilk biscuits which a former London-born roommate of mine said were just the same as her grandmother’s scones, I don’t usually make proper scones.  The difference is mostly in the fat used.  My biscuits use Crisco vegetable shortening, which lends a very flaky texture to the bread.  Scones, on the other hand, are made with butter, which results in a more crumbly texture. 

I tried the recipe from Martha Stewart’s Baking cookbook for oat and dried apricot scones, omitting the apricots and instead using frozen blueberries.

Mix together oats, all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.  Then cut in chilled butter until it forms coarse crumbs.

“Coarse crumbs” is a relative term, but I look for pieces of flour-coated butter about the size of a green pea.  Then mix in the liquid: buttermilk blended with an egg.  The resulting dough is very wet, perhaps a bit more wet than I would have expected.  Folk in your blueberries, currants, raisins, dried apricots, or whatever else at this point.

Working on a well floured board, form a circle about 1.25 inches (3 cm) thick and cut into wedges.  I could have made these a little narrower pieces.  Then you arrange the pieces on a parchment lined sheet and freeze them, covered, for at least an hour.  Not having the space in my freezer, I refrigerated them, which resulted in dough that spread more during baking than anticipated.

Before baking in a 375 F / 185 C oven, brush with a cream and egg yolk mixture (I substituted buttermilk for the cream) and sprinkle with coarse sugar.  It took about 30-35 minutes to make the scones.  They turned out really tasty although I’m going to fiddle with the recipe.  I think a butter-shortening mix would be better as I like scones that are flaky and not just crumbly.

So that’s the cooking thus far this month.  I’ll probably return to both the polenta and crepe recipes and try them again this week to see if with bug-free polenta and creamier ricotta the results will be more in line with what I expected.

Here’s to your good eating!

Perhaps I have my timeline wrong because now that I think about it, these may have been New Year’s Eve breakfast cinnamon rolls.  Nonetheless, we started our morning with a pan of cinnamon rolls that were mighty tasty, especially with a tangy orange zest and buttermilk icing. 

My great-grandmother, a woman of stout German heritage, made cinnamon rolls regularly.  These were yeast rolls which required more time and advance planning.  I’m quite keen on a recipe from Cooks Illustrated that uses as its base a baking powder biscuit dough.  You mix the dough, roll it out, add the topping then roll it up, cut it and bake it.  Easy.

The ingredient for this recipe are pretty simple.  The cinnamon-sugar filling is 5.25 oz of brown sugar, 1.75 oz of granulated sugar, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1/8 teaspoon each ground cloves and salt, and 1 tablespoon of melted butter.  You can modify the sugar and spices a bit if you would like to achieve a different flavor profile or level of sweetness.  For example, you could add some nutmeg or cut back on the sugar a little.

The biscuit dough is 12.5 oz all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, 1.25 teaspoons baking powder, 0.5 teaspoons baking soda, 0.5 teaspoon salt, 1.25 cups buttermilk and 6 tablespoons melted unsalted butter.

Mix the sugar and spices together and then add the one tablespoon butter, stirring until it forms the consistency of wet sand.

Mix the dry ingredients for the dough together.  Pour 2 tablespoons of the melted butter into the buttermilk, whisking to distribute the butter into little drops throughout the buttermilk.  Pour this liquid mixture into the dry ingredients.

Stir together until just combined.  The dough will be wet and tacky.

Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead just a few times until it becomes smooth and is no longer shaggy.

Using your hands, pat the dough into a 12 by 9 inch rectangle.  Brush the remaining butter onto the dough leaving a small gap at the edges.

Evenly sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar mixture across the dough, leaving a border around the edge.   You can use less than the entire amount of the mixture if you don’t want the rolls to be as sweet.  You can also add chopped nuts and raisins or other dried fruit at this point.  I used pecans and black and golden raisins.

Working with a bench scraper or spatula, start rolling the dough along the long side, pressing down to make the roll pretty tight.  This helps hold the filling in place.  As you get to the final edge, brush a little more melted butter along the edge to help it hold firmly.  Pinch the edges shut and gently smooth the log so it is uniform in size.

Cut the log into nine equally sized slices.

Carefully place each slice in a buttered nonstick cake pan.  Place the first slice in the center and distribute the remaining slices around the first one like flower petals.  You can brush the tops of the rolls with any remaining butter and sprinkle on any leftover filling or filling that fell out on the cutting board.

Bake in a preheated 425 F oven for about 25 minutes or until edge are golden brown. After loosening the edges with a spatula and allowing to rest for two or three minutes, slide onto a greased cooling rack without separating.  I found it easier, though, to invert them onto a plate and then invert them again onto a second plate or serving platter.  Otherwise the buns wanted to fall apart.  Wait five more minutes before icing.

While the rolls are baking, prepare a cream cheese icing.  The icing is 2 tablespoons of softened cream cheese, 2 tablespoons buttermilk, some orange zest and 4 oz confectioner’s sugar, whisked together.

Drizzle the icing onto the rolls, as much or as little as you desire.  These are best eaten while warm but they tasted pretty good upon reheating later in the day, too.

The finished product!  Beautiful, isn’t it?  With some fresh fruit it makes for a pretty healthy (well, almost) start to the day.

There we are with our New Year’s Eve day breakfast.  A sweet end to the old year!

After four days up in Chiang Mai and having sent our houseguest Stephanie on her way back to Melbourne, let me return to New Year’s Eve and catch you up on events.

New Year’s Eve is a big event here in Thailand.  In fact, unlike for many companies in the United States, New Year’s Eve is a statutory holiday here, as is New Year’s Day.  Tawn’s extended family, much of which lives in properties adjacent to his parents’, hold a big annual party to ring in the new year.  Tawn was there for most of the afternoon, returning home about 11 pm to celebrate the stroke of midnight with Stephanie and me.

This left Stephanie and me to our own devices for most of the evening.  Instead of venturing out – crowds and the threat of bombs! – we stayed at home and had a low-key dinner of homemade pizza, salad and chocolate souffles.

The pizza was pepperoni, mushrooms and red peppers, something simple and satisfying to munch on.

A mixed greens salad with plenty of toppings increased the healthfulness of the meal.  Then we took a turn for the cardiac unit (no, wait – chocolate has antioxidants, right?) with the souffles.

This was not my first time using this recipe from Cook’s Illustrated Best Make-Ahead Recipes.  The secret is that you can make souffles in advance, wrap them well (uncooked) then freeze them.  Then, when you want a hot souffle all you have to do is take it out of the freezer and slip it into a hot oven.  Twenty five minutes later you’ll have dessert on the table.

The ingredients: chocolate, confectioner’s sugar and granulated sugar, egg yolks, egg whites, cream of tartar, salt, vanilla and a bit of orange liqueur.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl set over simmering water.  Beat the egg yolks into the granulated sugar.

Continue whipping the yolks and sugar until the mixture triples in volume.  Gentle fold the chocolate and egg mixture together until just incorporated.

Whip the egg whites, adding a bit of cream of tartar and then a bit of confectioner’s sugar, until they form stiff peaks.

Gently fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture until mixed, being careful not to deflate.  Spoon into ramekins that have been buttered and sprinkled with granulated sugar.  Fill to the top and then cover with plastic wrap and then foil.  Refrigerate for up to three hours or freeze.  When ready, remove the wrappings and bake on a tray in the oven for about 25 minutes or until the interior is still slightly soft.

Remove and dust with confectioner’s sugar.  Some berries or a berry sauce are nice, too!

Above, Stephanie and I toast our New Year’s Eve dinner.  Would have been nice to have Tawn home with us, but he was back in time for the fireworks.

While it is a bit more than a week late, let me wish you all the very best for 2010.  May each of you enjoy good health, great happiness and boundless peace.

About a month ago, Gary wrote an entry which documented another of W’s culinary exploits.  The recipe in question was Crispy Parmesan Biscuits served with lemon butter, smoked salmon and rocket (arugula).  The photos turned out wonderfully (no surprise there) and since I’m a biscuit man, I decided to try the recipe.

When it comes to biscuits, there are many schools of thought.  I was raised on a rolled, buttermilk baking powder biscuit.  But I enjoy exploring other types.  This Food Network recipe is also has buttermilk and baking soda, but uses butter and olive oil instead of shortening, also has some corn meal in it, and is formed as a drop biscuit.  Different textures, to be sure.  It also has a hefty 5.5 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese!

The precooked biscuits, with flecks of green onion, looked appetizing.  I wasn’t sure how large to make them.  I also didn’t know how much they would spread out so I baked them in two batches instead of one.  As it turns out, they don’t spread so much as they puff up, so fitting them more tightly on the tray would have been fine.

Fresh out of the oven, they had a lovely, cheesy smell.  I let them cool on a rack, as instructed, before slicing and making the little sandwiches.  While they cooled, I prepared the lemon butter, combining a healthy dose of lemon jest with softened butter.

The finished product, probably a little skimpy on the rocket and the salmon.  They look great, but I have to tell you, they were a mess.  The biscuits are very crumbly because of the use of liquid fat and butter instead of a solid shortening.  Shortening = flakiness, butter = flavor + light crumble, oil = fine crumb.  Also, the biscuits themselves were oily to the point of being greasy.  I followed the recipe precisely, but wanted to stop and wash my hands after every few bites, they were so oily.

The flavor combination was excellent, though.  Parmesan and buttermilk, the zest of the lemon, fatty smokiness the salmon, bitter crunch of the rocket.  Wanting to perfect this, or at least get a heck of a lot better, I’m going to revisit this recipe in the next few weeks.  I’ll start instead with my biscuit recipe, and substitute in some of the ideas from the Food Network’s recipe and see if we can get something that has the same flavor profile but with more structure.

Stay tuned for the results of that…