Cookbook Project

My friend at work, Christy, is doing a special cookbook project – cooking her family recipes and putting it in a book to welcome a new addition to her clan.

She asked me if I would cook a few of the recipes and take pictures of them, knowing how much I love doing that. How could I say no?

Lemon Bars

These are classified in the things-Ilana-never-ate-before drawer. Even though I have spent most of my life in America, I am not, for all intents and purposes American, especially not in what I ate as a kid. My parents never made lemon bars; they never heard of them. But Christy is a true Midwestern girl, and I was psyched to try this old family recipe.

1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 cup flour
1/4 cup powdered sugar
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp lemon rind
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup regular sugar
2 Tbsp flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
Glaze
1 cup powdered sugar
juice of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine slightly softened butter, 1 cup flour & 1/4 cup powdered sugar in a food processor or mixer. Bake the crust for 15 minutes in an 8x8 buttered baking pan.

Combine 2 tablespoons lemon juice, lemon rind, eggs, sugar, 2 tablespoons flour & baking powder. Pour over baked crust. Bake 25 minutes. Cool.

For the glaze, mix powdered sugar and lemon juice until slightly thick. Pour over the lemon bars and let cool.

These were fantastic! Very sweet, but fantastic. A coworker even said they were the best lemon bars he has ever eaten... Yippee!

Even his website's pink...

"I like pink, and I specially like this outfit very much. The whole combination I find it really nice. We wear a lot of pink in Spain and I think it is a nice colour. If you look at my website it is also pink for this tournament”.

The boy is pretty in pink -- he can't help it.

He also can't help being the king of clay. Vamos, Rafa. Let's go for a fifth!!!

Welcome Back, Cotter!

I know I have been gone for a while. But those that are my Facebook friends know that I'm still around in some sort of cyberspace. True, most of the time I am bitching much more than I'm cooking, but the roots, the desire, still exist inside me, though dormant at times. I'm cooking again. Not that often, and not always that good, but we need money, we need to stop eating out, so I need to cook more often now. I have to push aside my laziness in going to the grocery store after work, when all I want to do is collapse on the couch.

It's getting warmer now. Something is stirring inside me, a new fervor to cook and discover and rise and fall. To cook, perchance to scheme.

The last three days I've cooked a derivative out of a derivative. It all started with an idea. We had chicken in the freezer - a triumph - and we hadn't had 'spanish chicken' in a while. Chicken poached in white wine, garlic and pimenton... Cooked till the liquid is reduced down to a sauce and the chicken is unbelievably flavored. I did an OK job of it one night while Rafa was out. Since he wasn't around to eat with me, I had a couple of filets leftover. Of course, the flavor is enhanced the next day and the day after that. I took full advantage of that.

I made pizza dough, using my favorite recipe. I added Maria's fabulous 'pasta spice' from Norway in the dough itself. The sauce I used for the pizza wasn't homemade - but I've made homemade before, and it has rocked, so I didn't feel too guilty about cheating. I topped the pizza with mozzarella and the chicken sliced into bite size pieces. It was delicious!!!!

And the next day, having some cheese leftover and remembering the puff pastry in the freezer, I made miniature puff pastry pizza pockets, filled with more chicken, cheese and sauce. I glazed the top of the pastry with olive oil mixed with more of Maria's spice, for added color and flavor. Fabulous snack....

On this lazy Memorial Day, I had a glance at some of my favorite books.... Francesca sent me a smaller version of the 'blue book', which has some lovely couscous salads in there. I don't have a patio or a bbq party invitation in the near future, but that doesn't mean I'm not making these soon, I hope. So watch this space.

Forgot the eggs, sweetie?

Yes, I did. Sorry.

Mom's Blinchiki -- revised

8-10 heaped tablespoons all-purpose flour (or 200g)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup water
1 egg!
sugar, to taste (1-2 tablespoons is my preference)
pinch of salt
1/4 cup olive oil, for frying

In a bowl or container for a hand blender, mix one tablespoon of olive oil, buttermilk, water, egg, sugar and salt. Add flour, tablespoon by tablespoon, and whisk by hand or using a hand blender or food processor/blender until the consistency is of thin pancake batter but thicker than cream - it would need to be able to swirl around in a non-stick pan, but not be so thin as to leave a very thin pancake.

Heat an 8"/20cm non-stick pan or rounded smooth griddle on medium heat. Using a pastry brush, brush a small amount of olive to give a thin layer. Pour the batter on one side of the pan and swirl the pan so that the batter reaches all sides of the pan. As the top of the blinchik gets dry, check underneath once the edges get golden. Turn over with your fingers, and cook about 30 seconds - 1 minute longer, depending on the thickness of the batter. Repeat until you are out of batter.

Makes about 12 blinchiki

Recipe By Phone

It's funny when you wake up and you know exactly what you want to eat. It is something you've had before and the food is so memorable to you, you can taste in your mouth. That is how I felt this past Saturday morning.

I really wanted my mom's blinchiki. I guess you can figure out what those are, little blintzes/crepes. But hers are not like crepes or blintzes; there is something distinctively different - not better, not worse, just different. Even if I had searched my many cookbooks and recipes online, I could never find that something I was craving. So I called my mom...

In her usual adorable way she gave me a convoluted recipe. Going over several times how to make sure the batter was perfectly smooth but never actually stating how much flour to put in. She said the final mixture should resemble thin sour cream. So because I need structure I counted the amount of spoons of flour I added to the wet ingredients because I know next time I wouldn't be so lucky. I weighed this amount of tablespoons post-recipe, so I could make this recipe, which surprisingly turned out perfect, again and again. And now you can too.

Mom's Blinchiki

8-10 heaped tablespoons all-purpose flour (or 200g)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup water

sugar, to taste (1-2 tablespoons is my preference)

pinch of salt

1/4 cup olive oil, for frying

In a bowl or container for a hand blender, mix one tablespoon of olive oil, buttermilk, water, sugar and salt. Add flour, tablespoon by tablespoon, and whisk by hand or using a hand blender or food processor/blender until the consistency is of thin pancake batter but thicker than cream - it would need to be able to swirl around in a non-stick pan, but not be so thin as to leave a very thin pancake.

Heat an 8"/20cm non-stick pan or rounded smooth griddle on medium heat. Using a pastry brush, brush a small amount of olive to give a thin layer. Pour the batter on one side of the pan and swirl the pan so that the batter reaches all sides of the pan. As the top of the blinchik gets dry, check underneath once the edges get golden. Turn over with your fingers, and cook about 30 seconds - 1 minute longer, depending on the thickness of the batter. Repeat until you are out of batter.

Makes about 12 blinchiki

To serve: Eat straight away, with sour cream in the middle and rolled up like a burrito, or you could cool the blinchiki and fill with any topping you wish in the middle. Fold the short end and then the long end, fry for about a minute on each side in a pan with olive oil, and serve. A typical filling for this are either mashed potatoes with caramelized onions, either in the potatoes or as a garnish, or mushrooms served with sour cream on the side. Enjoy.

Return of the Eight Foot Rugelach

So my rugelach are not really eight feet tall, but I think this was a neat picture I took of one pristine looking gorgeous delight. I make these every year on Hanukah; it has become a bit of a tradition in my kitchen. Unlike last year, this year's baking was without incident. I've made the full 36 cookie batch to divide among friends and co-workers. Happy Hanukah, all!

RUGELACH - Feast by Nigella Lawson

FOR THE DOUGH

425g plain flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
50g caster sugar
1 packet (3 teaspoons) easy-blend yeast, optional
250g cold butter, diced
100g cream cheese, cut or spooned into pieces
1 egg
60ml sour cream

Briefly process the flour, salt and sugar, and yeast if you're using it, just to combine them, and then add the diced butter and cream cheese pieces, and process again until the mixture resembles damp sand.

Beat the egg and sour cream together, and with the engine running, pour down the funnel of the processor. Continue running the motor until it comes together in a silky dough; it will seem like it won't make a dough, but leave the motor running and be patient. (This can also be done with a beater.)

Turn the dough out on to a lightly floured surface, and divide into three, forming each one into a fat disc. Put the discs into freezer bags and leave in the fridge to rest for an hour - though you can leave them there for longer - just taking them out about 10-15 minutes before you want to get rolling.

FOR THE FILLING

250g dark chocolate
50g light brown sugar
50g butter

FOR THE EGG WASH

1 egg, beaten with a pinch of caster sugar

FOR THE SUGAR GLAZE

3 tablespoons caster sugar
3 tablespoons boiling water

Preheat the oven to 190C. Process the chocolate until it's battered into rubble, and then put these dark brown crumbs into a bowl with the sugar, using your fingers to mix them together. Melt the butter separately and let it cool slightly.

Roll out one of the discs of the dough on a lightly floured surface to a circle 25cm in diameter. With a knife, divide the circle into 12 triangles, like you would divide a pizza, only don't pull apart the triangles yet.

Brush the circle of triangles with the melted butter, and then spread or sprinkle a third of the chocolate filling to cover the circle. Then very carefully pull away one triangle at a time, rolling each one up from the thick end to the narrow end to form a bulging curly-whirly crescent; think of a croissant. Follow this procedure with all the dough disk and their filling.

Put the rugelach on to lined baking sheets (if you've used yeast, let stand on the tins as they are for 20 minutes) and brush each one with the egg wash, and bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes.When they come out of the oven, browned and puffy, mix the sugar and water together for the glaze, and brush the rugelach with this to make them shiny. Let them cool on a rack.

The Thanksgiving Scrooge (or freaking out in non-sequiters)

It's not that I hate Thanksgiving. It's just that I hate people. Ok, maybe I don't hate people, I just hate, well, cooking for people. Cooking when I need to, not when I feel like it. Because the moments when I feel like it or I have time to are few and far between, so I don't want to make food, I don't want to have people over, I don't want to clean my apartment. I want to crawl under my covers and re-emerge on January 2nd.

And now to the cooking. This is what I have made so far, and maybe this is why I am feeling the way I do.

Girdlebuster Pie - There is a lot of base for my pie dish. It wasn't clumpy enough to be able to push it far up on the sides, but the worst part is that my ice cream doesn't freeze and neither does my base. That 'gorgeous' florentine that the pie gets when the ice cream pops out is all over my pie, not to mention my freezer is full of graham cracker crumbs. The pie is NOT beautiful, but I'm thinking graham crackers plus chocolate plus ice cream plus butterscotch sauce ain't exactly a bad thing, so I'll just shut up now, serve it, eat it, enjoy it. Enough.

Christy's Sweet Potatoes - So excited by this recipe, and the filling turned out really well, but the skins were too thin and ripped. Why why why didn't I let them cool completely?! So now I have a lot of filling and not sure yet what to do with it. Bought some lovely gourds (have had a lot of fun lately using that word inappropriately at work with my coworkers) in order to gut and stuff with said filling, but they are just too beautiful and I couldn't cut them, no I just could not. So they will be the centerpiece, I think (channeling Martha Stewart). My mom thinks Liam will want to play with them, which I'm fine with. I hope he doesn't throw it at my TV. The filling, well, maybe I'll bake it in my Le Creuset (bless my ceramic baking dish obsession), sprinkle some pecans (rhymes with fans) and sage on top. Mashed sweet pots cum sweet potato casserole. Oh, who fucking cares?!

Cranberry, Orange and Almond Pudding - I panicked about the girdlebuster-pie-that-refuses-to-freeze so I made this pudding in 2.2 seconds. It's the fastest I ever put anything together. I had leftover cranberries so this recipe made sense. I tweaked it a tiny bit, but it looks like something I'd just love after the huge meal we'll have tomorrow. Even snapped a pic. (Hate my pictures lately -- I am a slave to natural light.)

Redder than Red Cranberry Sauce - Easy easy easy. Beautiful. Can't wait to have it with turkey.

Brined Turkey? Not so much. - I wanted it to happen. I PLANNED for it to happen. It's not happening. Picked up my turkey. My mom and I marinaded it this evening in olive oil and garlic. It'll be delicious. It won't be MY turkey, but it'll be delicious. Brining? Maybe next year. I couldn't face buying a huge bucket and finding room in my constantly disappearing fridge.