A couple of announcements about two Cookthinktankers:
1. VeganYumYum has been nominated for Best Veg Blog in the 2008 VegNews Magazine Veggie Awards. Congratulations, Lauren! Go vote for her now. (By voting, you could win a trip to New York.)
2. For her upcoming cookbook based on Steamy Kitchen, Jaden needs more recipe testers. Help Jaden out and get involved with a really cool project. More details here.
Another month, another challenge. After the danish braid, I was excited for another puff pastry challenge — Chocolate Éclairs. It involved a few techniques I hadn’t done before — creating a pâte à choux dough, using a pastry bag (which I didn’t have, so I substituted Ziplocs) and making pastry cream. Eeek.
I had some trouble with the dough: the recipe called for waiting until the liquid was at a “rolling boil,” and I waited too long for it to get past what I would call a quick simmer, so a lot of the liquid evaporated. I ended up having to add liquid back in at the end to make the dough soft enough to work, which probably explained the lack of puff in the pastry fingers. It was the prettiest end product, but the test would be in the tasting.
Since I can’t handle too much chocolate, I left the final judgment to my boyfriend. He declared them to be “Oh, Claire” rather than éclairs, because that’s what he kept saying as he ate them. I declare that a success.
Many thanks to this month’s hosts Tony Tahhan and MeetaK! You can see the complete recipe here.
I can eat clams cooked any way. Summers on the coast wouldn’t be the same without clam baskets and clam bakes. And in the colder months, they are essential to seafood chowders (red and white).
Send us your best clam recipes for the Root Source Challenge. Our favorite will be featured in the Root Source and published on Cookthink.com. The author will receive a copy of Big Night In, by Domenica Marchetti.
Submissions are due by 12pm EST, Tuesday, September 16, 2008. Send us an email to rootsourcechallenge [AT] cookthink [DOT] com with your name, email address, blog URL and a permalink to the recipe. Please put “Root Source Challenge #31: Clams” in the subject line of your email. Click here for the complete rules and to see past winners. Good luck!
Please welcome Corinne Fay to Cookthink. Corinne started working up here in Cookthink’s “Montague branch” last month. You may know her already from reading the Root Source, which she now writes every other week, and from her Friday afternoon “Five Things To Do This Weekend” posts.
Corinne recently graduated from Smith College where she studied art history while crafting croquembouches in her tiny kitchenette. Before Cookthink, Corinne worked the usual string of student jobs — waitress, gallery intern, camp counselor — and also wrote food and restaurant reviews for her hometown paper.
A native Mainer, Corinne craves fresh seafood coated in butter and the tiny, low-growing blueberries of her home (not to be confused with the bloated, high-bush variety). Her most recent exploits in the kitchen: a batch of currant jam and homemade bagels.
1 Make pumpkin whoopie pies. And then pumpkin risotto.
2 Get ready for applesauce season.
3 Fatten up for the colder weather that’s coming.
4 Start canning. Pickles, salsa, lemons, and blueberries, oh my.
5 But don’t forget to enjoy the last days of summer with peaches and BLTs. Only 25 days left!
(Image courtesy of Andrea’s Recipes)
It’s a mystery to me how just ground meat plus fat plus seasonings can amount to so much rustic flavor. The secret behind Italian sausage seems to be “not too much of this and just enough of that,” as the Joy of Cooking prescribes.
If you missed this week’s Root Source, be sure to subscribe so you can get in on the next one.
For this week’s Root Source Challenge, we narrowed the field down to two excellent-looking recipes. Olga sent us an enticing recipe for sausage calzones, but our favorite was the Sopranos-inspired roasted sausages recipe from Nik’s Snacks. Congratulations, Nikki.
Don’t forget to get us your submissions for this week’s Root Source Challenge #29: Sweet Corn. Entries are due by noon on Tuesday, September 2.
I always made poached eggs the way I was taught: in shallow, barely boiling water, with a dash of white vinegar, spooning water over the yolk to cover it and hoping the egg would turn out all right. I never understood how restaurants made those pretty oval poached eggs, chalking it up to some gadget I did not have or need. Then I learned a few tricks from a trusted source.
1. Break the egg into a ramekin, not directly into the boiling water. I am no fan of unnecessarily dirtying a dish, but this is worth it for two reasons: it’s a cleaner operation, allowing you to skim out any stray eggshell fragments. And it allows you to lower the egg into the water and let it slide right out, instead of spilling from its broken shell and splattering into the boiling water.
2. Poach eggs in deep, not shallow, water. Heat water until just boiling in a small, deep saucepan. Then create a little whirlpool by running a spoon in a circular motion in one direction. Lower the ramekin into the water and let the egg slip gently out of the ramekin and into the current, renewing the circular motion in the water while the egg tumbles around in the water, the white coating the yolk.
3. Trim any stray whites with kitchen shears. After you’ve removed the egg carefully with a slotted spoon, let it drain in the spoon or on a clean dish towel. Trim and serve.
Did you know that you can make poached eggs in advance? Leave the drained eggs on the dish towel until you’re ready to use them, then slip them into gently boiling water to reheat them just before using.
Any other egg-poaching tips I should know about?
Cookshrink is a weekly column that looks at the psychological aspects of how and what we cook.
Last week’s column about cooking for an audience led to some discussion about the importance of preparation as as tool to keep your wits about you when cooking for others. It made me start thinking about the issue of timing when cooking for guests.
I am both wildly impatient and have a nearly pathological fear of keeping people waiting, which means that even when I plan to finish up cooking once the guests arrive, my nerves dictate that I have finished all my prep work down to the last detail before they get there. I wasn’t always like this, but seemed to become more emphatic about being prepared after one too many evenings of being served dinner at midnight, me and my fellow guests long drunk on empty stomachs while waiting for the designated cook to get his or her act together.
We all run into small delays and have accidents that set us back in the kitchen, but there’s a type of person who invites you for dinner at 8pm and then, when you arrive on time, seems surprised to see you, brushing his or her still-wet hair and scrambling to find the wine glasses and put some olives out, mumbling something after a half hour about how he or she needs to get dinner started.
This kind of cook is not necessarily inexperienced, just disorganized, his or her time management issues manifesting themselves in the kitchen. The kind of cook who tends to get caught up in the moment, to take on too many tasks at once, to lose track of the big picture while mired in the details. Generally overambitious, this kind of person plans elaborate meals that fall apart once the realities of making them set in.
Am I describing you or someone you know? If not, what are your secrets for getting dinner on the table?
Yesterday, with the rainy remnants of tropical storm Fay pulling into town, I was craving something nourishing and hearty. It wasn’t exactly chilly, but it was cool enough here (especially for August) to give me an excuse to eat soup. I decided on a sausage, white bean and escarole soup.
Here’s how I made it:
Though I always intend to cook a new and complete meal every night, more often than not when the dinner hour rolls around I’m tired and hungry and just want something to eat. That’s why my go-to batch of fast recipes is so handy to have around. (They keep my hands from straying into the bag of Doritos calling me from the pantry.)
Here are my top five fast, easy recipes from the past few months, dishes that keep me eating well with minimum fuss (and usually in less than 30 minutes):
