Cranberry Orange Scones

You should feel the weight of a scone in your hand. It isn’t light. It isn’t coffee cake. It fills your empty, growling stomach, hopefully along with a cup of strong coffee. It shouldn’t be wet inside, it should be crumbly and the fresh cranberries moist. The orange zest should make your cheeks tingle and the thick demerara sugar should be anodyne yet stimulating to your tongue. This recipe does just that.

Ingredients:

2 cups of all purpose flour

1/3 cup of sugar

2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup of whole milk (save 2 tbs for brushing)

6 tbs unsalted butter (about 3/4 of a narrow stick) cut into thirds

1/4 cup of freshly squeezed orange juice

2 tbs grated orange peel

——————-

1 bag of whole fresh cranberries

Demerara sugar for coating

Heat oven to 425. Line a baking sheet with parchment or coat with butter. Combine ingredients until you reach the dotted line above in a large bowl, food processor or standing mixer. Mix until almost uniform. Add cranberries by hand. Flatten mixture onto floured work surface and press down until about 1/2 inch thick. If it is very sticky and wet add a little more flour. Cut into 6-8 sections depending on how large you like your scones. Place onto parchment lined sheet or buttered sheet. Brush with remaining milk and top with demerara sugar. Bake until very light golden color. Ovens vary widely so you will need to watch these. Check after 15 minutes and then again every 2 minutes or so until done.

Brie, Apple, Coconut Pecan Saturday Salutation

This is how you want to start your day. Beginning the New Year with food which you savor is to say “Yes!” to life.

Ingredients:

2 Granny Smith Apples

3 x 3 piece of Brie (the better the brie, the better the glee)

1/2 cup of pecan halves (whole is fine)

1/2 cup of unsweetened coconut

Preheat over to 375. Cut apples into 1/4 inch slices.  Line a baking sheet with parchment or butter and place apple slices in a bunch in center. Place brie in pieces onto apples, top with pecans and then coconut. Bake for 15-20 minutes (turn up to 425 for the last minute or so), or until you home smells edible, or until your child or other loved one does this:

Pear, Chicken, Scallion, Red Onion, and Sharp White Cheddar Pizza

This pizza recipe creates a rich entourage of flavors that will entice your palate.

Ingredients:

Pizza Dough

1/3 pound of chicken chopped into bite sized pieces

1/4 cup of olive oil

1 red onion chopped

7 scallions chopped

1 pear chopped

1/8 cup of flour

dash of cayenne

1 tsp salt

1-2 tbs chopped garlic

1/2 cup of sharp white cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 550. Dry chopped chicken with paper towels. Heat frying pan on medium-high and when hot add oil In a bowl combine flour, cayenne and salt and toss chicken in mixture. Fry chicken in oil until golden brown. Remove with slotted spoon onto paper towels. Add chopped red onion to pan and cook until softened, then add pear and scallion and finally garlic until ingredients are soft but not overdone, about 5 minutes total from when red onion is added. Add chicken and cook for another minute.

Roll or stretch pizza dough onto your pizza peel or pan. Spread mixture from pan onto pizza dough, making sure not to overload it, if in doubt, add less. You can serve the extra on the side but it will not cook properly if overly laden. Top with grated sharp cheddar.

Put pizza in oven and cook until crust is golden brown, 10-15 minutes.

A Taste of Adams Morgan/ Ethiopia

Did you know that Tennessee has become one of the most popular places for Ethiopians to move to when they come to America? Me neither, because it isn’t. But Washington, DC is, and that is where I went to school. If you’ve left DC to live in a suburb you probably don’t miss the traffic or cost of living, but you might very well miss the Ethiopian and other incredible international food.

This is a dish inspired by Ethiopian cuisine but adapted for my tastes and available ingredients.

Ingredients:

2 pounds or so of Stew Beef

1 large onion chopped

As many tomatoes as you can afford (actually not more than 7, but hopefully at least 3, but if you’re still recovering from living in DC canned will do…)

1 teaspoon of Cardamon (whole or ground)

1-2 tablespoons of salt depending on taste

3-4 tablespoons of Tumeric (it’s bright yellow, important for Indian cuisine as well. Better to buy at an Indian store where the price will be better if you’re so lucky as to be near one, or in the Southern U.S., the Badia brand which is in the “ethnic” section and is much less expensive)

2 tablespoons or so of Butter

4 tablespoons of Olive Oil, Palm oil, Peanut Oil, etc.

Hot peppers if you like, any kind, as many as you want. I used dried, very hot red chilis

Instructions:

Dry beef with paper or cloth towels. In a large pan, I like to use a cast iron pan but as you like, add olive or some other oil and brown beef well, a nice, deep brown.

In a large pot melt butter, add olive oil and when bubbling add chopped onion. When golden, add tomatoes whole (I’m not so fussy after all!). There is no need to chop them. They will magically soften into a puree because next you will add hot peppers and then the lid. You will reduce heat to low-medium and recheck in about 10 minutes. Remember meanwhile to stir beef. When beef is browned and tomatoes are soft, add theCover and cook on low as long as you can stand, but at least 3 hours, hopefully up to 6, checking and stirring. You could put it in a slow cooker for 8-12 hours/overnight for something incredible if you have the time.

Mom and Dad’s Note: My 1 year old loved this, he ate 5 pieces! Just don’t make it too spicy and don’t accidentally feed him or her a whole cardamon pod or piece of one or you will get a yucky face and tongue out rejection. If that happens, offer juice and continue with beef.

Scones Everyday- Blueberry Pecan

Do you routinely pay $4+ for a scone from Starbucks or elsewhere? That is okay, but have you ever wondered whether you can make a better one yourself? How about those berries? Where are they? Did one of the employees pick them out and eat them while you were busy deciding among the endless beverage list?

These are an amazing breakfast, snack and dessert. You can omit the nuts, or change the berry, it’s your life and it’s up to you, you are the “decider”.

Did you know you can freeze these ahead of time so you can wake up to an easy yet impressive and satisfying breakfast? Yeah, I know, you want to nominate me for sainthood after this post.

So here is what you are going to do to make the batter:

Ingredients: (Help from Joy of Baking for general proportions of ingredients)

2 cups of all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 1/2 tsp of baking powder

6 tablespoons of cold butter (unsalted please)

2/3 cup of milk

1/3 cup of white sugar

Demerara sugar (or regular sugar)

A lot of berries, maybe two small containers, you can use dried or mix the two, and some nuts if you’d like some bite

Preheat oven to 400. Mix all dry ingredients together in some kind of bowl, the larger the better, or the mixing bowl of your standing mixer or of your large capacity food processor. Cut butter into three sections and toss in. Now you will use your machine or hands to mix this stuff up, or better, use a knife to break up butter so its crumbly. Now add milk and sugar and combine with hands or machine until uniform. Now, if you’ve been using machine muscle, you must turn to your own hands. Using them bare, or a spoon, add berries and nuts if you like carefully, combining with a gentle touch, you don’t want to smoosh them to jam. If you are using dried, however, you can massage them in as much as you like. Flour your counter, grab the dough and smooth out into something that approximates a circle. Hands or a rolling pin are both excellent. It will be lumpy and bumpy, that’s called texture and we like it. Cut into 8 pieces, more or less if you like your scones dainty or hefty respectively. Transfer onto a buttered baking sheet or one lined with parchment paper which will make clean up easier.

If you want to make a double batch and freeze some, now you would place scones on tray and put in freezer until hardened. Then you separate scones with parchment paper and put in a freezer bag. When you want to eat them, heat up as usual after brushing with milk or egg and adorning with sugar. You will bake a little longer of course, about 8 minutes more.

Otherwise, if you aren’t freezing and just making these the usual way, and when you are ready to bake frozen ones, get out some more milk, about 1/3 cup, or a beaten egg, and brush the top of scones with the liquid and then sprinkle sugar on top. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until light golden brown.

Poached Egg Atop Leeks Float in Cream

Once you’ve make Leeks Float in Cream , go to my poached egg recipe where I show you how to make a French style poached egg.

Place eggs on top of leeks, garnish with freshly ground black pepper and lemon.

Poached Eggs (Thanks Julia Child)

In the Art of French Cooking, which every serious chef/cultural historian should own, Julia Child explains her recipe for making a perfect poached egg. In the French Chef series aired on PBS, she adds a step which I think is essential, placing the eggs whole, in the boiling water, for 10 seconds, before removing them and then proceeding. Here is a link to the book set, if you don’t already own it:

Here is how to make poached eggs the proper (read: French) way:

Ingredients:

Eggs

Water

Vinegar

Ice (not necessary but helpful)

Equipment:

Slotted spoon

Boil some water, about 2-3 inches in a normal size sauce pan or saute pan. Add about 5 tablespoons of vinegar. DO NOT ADD SALT. While waiting for boil, make an icy cold bowl of water. When water boils, place eggs in water WHOLE for 10 seconds, then remove promptly with slotted spoon. Place on counter. Wait until cool enough to handle and then crack eggs, one at a time, and lower gently into water, holding egg as close to water as possible. Thanks to the vinegar and pre-cooking you will probably not need to lift white over egg but you can if you have time and are only cooking 1 or 2 eggs. Do not try to do too many eggs, I wouldn’t do more than 4 but if you are very daring you could try 6. After about 3 minutes (my adaptation from 4 as in book), remove egg with slotted spoon when white is firm but yolk is soft to touch. Immerse in icy cold water, add ice if you’d like. This stops the cooking and removes the vinegar.

Now, make my Leeks Float in Cream and place one or two of these on top for a divine brunch.

Brioche Bustling with Chocolate Ganache–Brioche Part II

Now that you have your Brioche dough ready, you are ready to make things exciting by filling it with chocolate. We will make chocolate filled Brioche which is an exquisite combination of two of the building blocks of life—bread and chocolate. If you have a relative of European ancestry you may have been given a slice of bread with a piece of chocolate which you found marvelous and surprising as a combination. Chocolate filled Brioche is similar in some ways but unique enough to make it worth whipping up in your own kitchen. It is warm and slightly gooey inside, and has a sugar coating on top. It is somewhere between a bread and a pastry and though it smells lot like pain au chocolate (what we call a chocolate croissant) it has a distinguished taste setting it apart from it’s rather distant cousin.

Adapted from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

Ganache Ingredients:

High quality bittersweet chocolate (I used Scharffen Berger) ¼ pound

Unsalted butter 2 tablespoons

Rum (I used a little vanilla, I don’t have a liquor cabinet in the kitchen) 1 tablespoon

Corn Syrup (Really? Are we making frosted flakes or Brioche? Not in my house. I substituted 5 tablespoons of sugar and a 2 tablespoons of water) 5 tablespoons

Microwave (you can use a double boiler if you have one but why?) chocolate until it melts, about 2 minutes. Stir in butter, it helps if you break it up a bit, until it too melts. Add rum or vanilla, sugar and water, stir until even consistency.

Grease a loaf pan (the kind that looks like it is for a loaf of bread).

Remove about a grapefruit size handful of the Brioche dough (the book says to have it chilled which certainly makes it easier to handle, but I didn’t have room in my refrigerator so mine was room temperature and it went fine). Pat with flour in a ball and roll out on counter with a rolling pin. Don’t worry about being too detail oriented here, just get it into a relatively even thickness (about ¼ inch or so) and something that might be similar to a rectangle. Now spread the ganache over the dough but leave room on the edges, about an inch. Then roll up the dough, tucking in the edges. You will get something like an oval. Put it in a butter greased pan. I had some leaks which I patched up once in the pan with extra dough which you will have plenty of. Next you will brush the brioche with egg whites, no more than one, and sprinkle with sugar, preferably large grained demerara. 

When you are done it will look something like zis:

Bravo! You are almost done. Now comes the hard part, sitting on you hands for 1 hour and 40 minutes while it does it’s thing. Get outside, play with your children, take a bath, but don’t touch it and don’t put it in the over yet. 30 minutes before heat your oven to about 350. Bake for 40 minutes. Let cool (yeah right). Slice, enjoy!

Brioche–An Old World French Classic

Brioche has stood the test of time to remain one of France’s central pastries. It has many variations and adaptations in other cultures. Real brioche contains, in addition to the ingredients of a basic French bread, honey, eggs and ample butter.

Marie Antoinette, if she said it, said “let them eat brioche,” by the way, not “cake”.

If you can afford it, use raw, organic honey. Here we used honey from a wonderful apiary in Tennessee called Poor Hollow Bee Farm.

I used the cookbook Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for the brioche dough.

Ingredients for Brioche Dough

Flour 7 ½ cups

Salt 1 ½ tablespoons

Yeast 2 packages

Eggs 8

Honey ½ cup

Butter 3 sticks (24 tablespoons)

Water 1 ½ cups

Recipe:

Combine yeast and lukewarm water, about 100 degrees, in a large bowl and stir. Add all other ingredients and mix well, using either your hands, a spoon, a food processor with dough blade, or a standing mixer with dough hook as I’ve used here. Transfer mixture into a plastic container, large enough for mixture to double, about 7 quarts. After several hours, when dough has risen, you can transfer container into refrigerator.

The pastry dough being churned in a standing mixer with dough hook.

Leeks Float in Creme

This is what leeks dream about being. Once you’ve trimmed the ends and washed the leeks, you next must dry them. Then begins the sauteeing, the adornament with cream, and then, of course, the enjoying of the leeks.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of leeks (3 stalks)

1 tablespoon of kosher salt

1/2 cup of heavy cream

3+ tablespoons of crushed or chopped garlic

2 tablespoons of preferably Kelly Gold Irish butter (from grassfed cows)

Some olive oil (I love Aria which is a full bodied Greek olive oil from Crete. It doesn’t get better than this for olive oil, it is its quintessence as far as I can tell).

Lemon slices

Trim leeks by snipping off the roughest part of dark green tops, chop off the bushy ends, then thinly slice about 1/16 of an inch pieces and toss into bowl.

 

Rinse with cold water, pour into colander, drain. Make sure to not skip this step: DRY the leeks with a towel. Heat butter and olive oil in large pan or pot over medium-high heat. Add garlic and stir vigorously so as not to let garlic burn, but not so vigorously as to burn yourself! Maybe I should say, quickly instead. Now add leaks and stir until mixture slightly reduces. Add cream and continue stirring. Bring to boil and cook until leeks are softened but still bright green. Turn off stove and serve with a garnish of lemon that you must squeeze over the piping hot leeks. Additionally you can top with a poached egg and some fresh black pepper!