Having our cake and eating it too!

We finally made a cake! Although we enjoy experimenting with all kinds of savory dishes, our explorations into the world of cakes and desserts have been a bit limited. Strawberry shortcake is a perennial favorite (at least when strawberries are in season), and panna cotta is another reliable go-to dish – but honest-to-goodness cakes are a rare sight indeed in the Monkeyshines household.
That changed recently when Mrs Monkeyshines’ sister came to visit and brought with her a big bag of kumquats from the family homestead down south – what better way to use them than in Hazelnut Crunch Cake with Honeyed Kumquats? Before going any further, we should acknowledge that this isn’t an original recipe but hails from the esteemed (web) pages of epicurious.com. You can find the recipe – which we followed fairly faithfully for once – here.
This was quite a performance – it took two of us most of the afternoon – but was worth the effort and we’d definitely make it again for a special occasion. Here’ then, is a brief outline of what we did:


(1) First, here are the beautiful kumquats and the hazelnuts. We took the husks off the latter using the metal sieve technique as shown. (The recipe calls for unhusked hazelnuts; we weren’t sure if this meant to take the husks off or not?)

(2) Candying the kumquats – we added less star anise than the recipe called for since it seemed a bit too much of a good thing

(3) Here is the crunch – Hazelnut brittle. I’ve never made a brittle before and thought it came out pretty well!

(4) The cake worked! A bit rough around the edges, but we trimmed that off and cut it into 3 equal pieces, ready to assemble.

(5) Layer 1, topped with cream, kumquats and chopped hazelnut brittle

(6) Et voila! Thanks Epicurious!

Saucy Monkey

This month, the Daring Cooks got a little saucy! Jenni from the Gingered Whisk taught us the basics of how to make the five mother-sauces and encouraged us to get creative with them, creating a wide variety of delicious, fresh sauces in our very own kitchens.

Selecting a challenge for the Daring Cooks is an almost impossible task, because you sort of have to be all things to all people. A fairly basic recipe may be appealing to the novice, but not of interest to the experienced cook; conversely, a complex and challenging dish that poses a true challenge to the experienced cook may be just frustrating and demoralizing for the novice. Moreover, the Daring Cooks hail from all over the globe – so what is commonplace for one may be truly exotic for another.

It was, then, a delight to find Jenni’s challenge awaiting us – in my opinion, something to teach, entertain and challenge anyone interested in the culinary arts. We were preseted with recipes for the classic French ‘mother’ sauces – Bechamel, Veloute, Espangole, Holandaise and Tomato. The mother sauce can be either incorporated into a dish as it is, or turned into any one of an array of derivatives.

Of the five sauces, I probably make bechamel and tomato most frequently, so decided to embark on Sauce Espagnole – the classic French brown sauce. Moreover, I made my own beef stock from scratch. This was pretty much an all-day affair, but the end result was a remarkable mushroom sauce. My only regret was not making more sauce! I also made a tomato sauce and incorporated it into a favorite pasta dish. Read on for all the gory details…

Sauce Espangole/Demi-Glace from scratch

Ingredients:

1lb beef bones
1 small onion
1 celery stick
2 small carrots
Tomato puree
Olive oil
Thyme, parsley, bayleaf
4 Black peppercorns
1 clove

(Since this is quite the performance, I recommend you scale this up by a factor of at least 2, preferably 4 or 5 if you have a big enough stock pot…)

Beautiful beef bones. Look at all that marrow!

The mirepoix…

Roast the bones in a little oil for 30 minutes in a 400 F oven. Roughly dice the onion, carrot and celery and add to the pan; continue roasting for 30 minutes more. Towards the end of cooking time, slather some tomato paste over the bones:

Add everything to a stockpot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and immediately turn down to a slow simmer. Add a sachet containing the herbs and spices (I confess I just added them to the pot, knowing I’d strain them out later. Cook for 4 hours, adding more water if necessary to cover the bones. I ended up with maybe 2½ – 3 cups…

Strain the stock – it should be brown but fairly clear (if it’s not, you probably let it boil too much…)

Now for the sauce espagnole…

Ingredients

1/4 cup diced onion
2 tablespoons diced carrot
2 tablespoons diced celery
½ oz butter
½ oz flour
1½ cups beef stock
1 tablespoon tomato puree
Salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter and saute the mirepoix (onion, celery and carrot) until it starts to color. Stir in the flour and cook 5 minutes until lightly brown.

Add the stock and tomato puree, cover and simmer 1 hour. Strain out the vegetables and voila, Sauce Espagnole! I took this a step further and made demi-glace, by adding back another cup of beef stock then reducing until thick.

For the mushroom sauce, I pan-fried some mushrooms with a tablespoon of finely chopped onion, and added the demi-glace along with a splash each of sherry and lemon juice. (I am not sure how many mushrooms, but I am sure I followed the Monkeyshines Rule of Mushrooms: There are never enough mushrooms…)

This may be the best sauce ever! I served it over a nice fillet steak…

Spaghetti Milanese with fresh tomato sauce

For my second attempt at the challenge I turned to a familiar recipe – the decidedly un-French Spaghetti Milanese. This was one of two spaghetti dishes that were part of my Mum’s regular repertoire growing up – the other, of course, being Spaghetti Bolognese. First the tomato sauce, for which I used some beautiful San Marzano tomatoes from the farmers market:

Ingredients

½ small onion
1 small carrot
1 rasher bacon (homemade!)
¾ – 1lb tomatoes, roughly chopped
½ tablespoon flour
½ cup chicken stock
lemon juice
sugar, salt and pepper

Finely dice the onion and carrot, and saute together with the bacon for 5 minutes (adding a little oil if the bacon isn’t particularly fatty). Add the flour, stir to coat the vegetables, then add the chopped tomatoes. Cook over low heat for 5 minutes, add chicken stock and simmer 30 minutes. Add a dash of lemon, pinch of sugar and some pepper. If you use commercial chicken stock, you probably don’t need to add more salt.

Puree the sauce using an immersion blender and continue cooking for 30 minutes.

Beautiful orange color!

To complete the dish, slice some cooked ham, saute some sliced mushrooms (see Rule of Mushrooms above) and serve with the sauce over pasta, with some parmesan cheese.

The Monkeyshines Clan Makes Haggis

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
- Robert Burns

To the best of my knowledge I don’t have any Scottish heritage. I did grow up in Wales (so arguably have that Celtic thing in common with the Scots), but that’s as far as it goes. So when the June Daring Cooks’ challenge was revealed to be Haggis, it was something I’d never made before – though I have sampled its delights once or twice during New Year festivities while living in Britain.

The first challenge in making haggis was that my better half does not eat any sort of offal/organ meats – however, I was able to take on the challenge when she was out of town for one weekend. The second challenge was procuring the starting materials, including lamb liver, lamb heart and beef suet. I managed to track down the first two at a Halal butcher in San Francisco:

Lamb heart, lamb liver, onions and some sage from my front yard

No such luck with the beef suet, so I substituted some home-cured smoked fennel and pepper bacon. Since we keep this in the freezer, it was hard enough that I could shred it on a food grater:

So, on with the show… here is my recipe, scaled down from that provided by Ruth, our Daring Hostess:

2 lamb hearts
12oz lamb liver
2 medium onions
2 1/2 oz steel-cut oats
2 oz bacon fat, shredded
1 tablespoon chopped sage
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
pinch each of allspice and clove

Peel the onions but leave them whole. Put the hearts, liver and onions in a pan, cover with cold water and bring to a boil.

Remove the froth from the top, drain the pan and add more cold water. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 40 minutes.

Reserve ~1 cup of the pan water. Put the liver, hearts and onions in a food processor and pulse until finely chopped and mixed. Add the oats, bacon fat, sage and spices and mix well. Add a little of the pan water so that the mixture is still solid but soft.

Stuff the mixture into 2 sections of beef middle, each ~8” long. (Warning – if you plan to follow this recipe, read on to see how it turned out first!) Simmer the haggises in water for up to 2 hrs.

So what happened? I knew that the haggis would expand on cooking, but the beef middles were not as expandable and resilient as I had hoped. I checked in after about an hour and this is what I found…

Boom goes the haggis! The filling from one of them escaped into my pot of boiling water; I was able to salvage the other one, and continued to steam it until it too started to rip apart some more.

Served with ‘neeps’ (aka turnips in Scotland, swede in the rest of Britain and rutabagas in America), as shown at the top of the page. These were not the best rutabagas in the world – they are a rarity in San Francisco at the best of times, and early summer is not the best of times. Although they were a bit woody, the taste wasn’t bad. As for the haggis – I would say not bad for a first attempt, despite the exploding casing debacle. Although the liver flavor was pronounced, there was a subtle smokiness, which may have come from the bacon. If I make it again I will probably use the steamed pudding technique (fill it into a mould and cook in a water bath/bain-marie) and I think I’d increase the amount of oatmeal – there wasn’t quite enough chewiness for my taste. But then again I didn’t include the suet, which I’m sure would have made a difference in the final product.

The June Daring Cooks Challenge was hosted by Ruth from Makey-Cakey. She brought out the Daring-est of Daring Cooks and challenged us to make real Scottish Haggis.

Thanks to Ruth for an entertaining challenge – it was definitely daring!

The Crepes of Wrath

Crepes of wrath? What’s that all about? Truth be told, it’s the first crepe-based pun I could come up with (after Crepe Expectations, which I already used in a pancake-themed post from last year). It’s not like these crepes put me in a vengeful mood – far from it, they were a welcome harbinger of spring.

(Edited to add: I just learned that The Grapes of Wrath was published exactly 75 years ago, on April 14th 1939!) 

The April Daring Cooks Challenge was brought to us by Joanna from What’s On The List. She taught us all about Pathiri and challenged us to create our own version of this inspirational Indian dish!
First a confession – there is nothing Indian about what we made  - but in our defense, Joanna’s challenge instructions specified that ‘the crepe batter recipe can be a recipe of your choice, but the filling must be of a savory nature and I “challenge” you to be “as creative as you can be!”’ So we pulled out a wild rice pancake recipe that we’d previously made many moons ago and came up with our own filling depending on what looked good at the farmers’ market. I’m sure we’ll revisit Pathiri some time as we do like Indian food.

Here are our beautiful spring vegetables: baby carrots, asparagus and pioppini mushrooms:

The aforementioned pancake recipe was originally based on one at epicurious.com, though as is our custom we didn’t exactly follow the recipe.

Wild rice pancakes (serves 2)

1/2 cup wild rice
1 1/3 cups water
1/2 tsp salt
2 finely sliced scallions (green onions)
1 large egg
scant 1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup flour
salt and pepper
vegetable oil
Cook the rice, water and salt for about 45 minutes until tender (we did this the day before so that it would cool completely before we used it). Mix together the egg and milk and combine with the rice. Add the scallions, stir in the flour until smooth and leave to stand for at least 20-30 minutes,
To cook the pancakes: Heat a cast iron skillet over medium-hot heat  and add a small amount of oil, swirling so that it coats the pan. Add a ladleful of batter and gently tilt the pan so that you have about a 6-inch disc of batter:


Cook until the edges start to brown and the batter starts to get firm, then flip and cook the other side. Keep warm while you do the rest of the batch.


For the fillings, we sauteed the mushrooms in butter, pan fried the carrot (cut into thin ‘coins’) with some finely sliced onion and a little balsamic vinegar, and finally cut the asparagus on the bias and steamed it. No more detailed recipes, since we sort of made this up as we went along.



Our one nod to the pathiri recipe was to assemble this into a stack of pancakes with the savory layers in between. You can only really see the asparagus in the photo at the top of this post, but the others are inside the tower and the final result was a fitting start to spring here in San Francisco.
Thanks for the challenge, Joanne!

Arancine revisited

January’s Daring Cooks’ challenge was a ball! The lovely Manu from Manu’s Menu brought our taste buds to the streets of Sicily and taught us her family tradition of making arancine – filled and fried balls of risotto. Delizioso!

We’ve actually made arancine before, way back in November 2010: however, we were delighted to revisit these tasty treats as we rarely get the opportunity to make fried food. This time, our daring host Manu (www.manusmenu.com) provided recipes from her Italian family, and we were spoiled for choice: Arancine al Ragu, Arancine al Burro or Arancine agli Spinaci. We chose the spinach option, because putting those greens in the middle makes it a healthy dish, right?

We made a bit less than the published recipe, using only 2 cups of Arborio rice instead of 3: we still had ample arancine for a party of four and plenty of leftovers as well. First up was the saffron risotto. We used a relatively small dose of saffron but the risotto still turned out to have a delicate yellow color and flavor:

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon saffron threads
2 cups Arborio rice
1/2 cup white wine
2-3 cups beef stock
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese

Heat the stock. Saute the onion in the olive oil until soft and transparent, add the rice and continue to cook until the rice becomes translucent. Add the wine and reduce on medium high heat to burn off the alcohol, then add some stock (to just cover the rice) and turn the heat to low.

Cook until the rice is a bit more than halfway cooked – 13 minutes according to Manu’s recipe – adding stock as needed. After 8 minutes, add the saffron. Then, when the rice is done (but still firm) add the butter and cheese, season and spread on a baking paper to cool (we used a silicone mat):

Make a cup of bechamel sauce (1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, 1 cup milk, nutmeg and salt). Saute a chopped clove of garlic with a little butter, then add 6 oz spinach leaves and cook over low heat until wilted. The spinach does down to nothing! Add enough bechamel and ~2 oz grated mozzarella cheese to make a thick sauce/paste.

Before…                                                        after!

Next, prepare the arancine balls by making a little pocket in a handful of the saffron risotto, adding the spinach and cheese mixture and closing it up:

Almost done! Roll the arancine in flour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs (one after the other, in that order)…

… then shallow fry in vegetable oil until the outsides are crisp and golden:

Delicious! Thanks, Manu, for a great challenge.

Stuffed cabbage rolls with mushroom sauce

December’s Daring Cooks’ Challenge had us on a roll! Olga from http://www.effortnesslessly.blogspot.com/ challenged us to make stuffed cabbage rolls using her Ukrainian heritage to inspire us. Filled with meat, fish or vegetables, flexibility and creativity were the name of the game to get us rolling!

This was a timely challenge for us. In the week before the challenge was published, we had remarked to each other that the cabbages in our local farmers’ market looked particularly good, so on our weekly grocery shopping expedition we picked one up. We were therefore delighted to find that the December challenge was to make stuffed cabbage rolls! We stuck with the recipe that we had planned to use (outlined below), but were grateful for one of the tips in Olga’s challenge instructions, namely boiling the cabbage whole and separating the leaves in situ. In the past, we used to separate – or rather, try to separate - the uncooked leaves, and often the assembly of stuffed cabbage rolls was more of an exercise in patching together torn pieces of cabbage rather than wrapping up the filling. By pre-cooking the whole cabbage, the leaves separate out nicely and we also appreciated how the core remained intact – we used this in a second recipe during the week.

Here, then, is our stuffed cabbage recipe:

For the cabbage and filling:

1 green cabbage
2/3 lb ground turkey
1/4 cup uncooked white rice
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
2 teaspoons caraway seeds        
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
Salt and pepper to taste           

Mix all the ingredients to form a meat/rice stuffing mixture. Bring a pot of water to the boil (the pot needs to be big enough to hold the cabbage!) Simmer the cabbage, core facing up on low heat for about 5 minutes, until the leaves can be easily separated from each other. It’s easiest to stick a large fork in the core while you’re doing this…

Wrap the stuffing up inside neat parcels of cabbage, and place in a baking dish:

For the sauce:

1/2 medium onion, chopped
1/2 lb mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream
1 oz butter
1 oz flour
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the onion in the olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add the mushrooms and continue cooking, stirring frequently, until they give off their liquid and get soft.

Make a roux with the butter and flour, then gradually mix in the milk to make a white sauce. Add the sour cream and season to taste.

To assemble, pour the sauce over the cabbage rolls, cover with foil and bake at 375 F for ~1 hour.

Turkey Ballotine

Encouraged by our success in the Daring Cooks ballotine challenge back in April this year, we decided to attempt a ballotine of Turkey for Thanksgiving. It was a bit of a gamble: we were expecting guests, and although they were all family or friends who would be forgiving of a culinary debacle, we obviously wanted the day to go well. Thankfully (hah!), with a little help from Jaques Pepin’s excellent Youtube video we were able to remove the turkey bones without tears (either pronunciation/definition works – neither ripping nor sobbing was involved…)
Here, then, is a summary of our Turkey Ballotine adventure. The stuffing is made of parsley and lemon, a classic combination. The following quantities prepared enough stuffing for our 15lb bird: it can be scaled down according to the size of your fowl, though larger birds will still only need this quantity as their cavities do not get much larger than those of a 15lb bird.

Parsley and Lemon Stuffing

12oz fresh breadcrumbs
Grated zest of 3 lemons
3/4 cup chopped parsley
6oz melted butter
2 eggs, lightly beaten
Salt and pepper to taste
Mix the breadcrumbs, lemon zest and parsley in a food processor, and season to taste. Mix in the melted butter with a fork, then mix in the eggs. (We prepared everything in advance except for the egg, which was added just before stuffing the bird)
1. Our beautiful Diestel turkey (from Guerra’s of San Francisco, of course). We rubbed the skin with salt the previous day and air dried it in the refrigerator overnight, then rinsed off the salt before making the ballotine:

2. Deboned and ready for stuffing! AS Jacques Pepin puts it, we have rearranged Mother Nature – the turkey tenderloins fit nicely in the gap between the breasts and the legs:

3. With stuffing in place:

4. Ready for the oven – we rubbed some herb oil over the skin before roasting at 350 °F for about 2 hours. We made a little platform from potatoes and carrots, so that the turkey wouldn’t sit in its fat/juices.

5. Et voila! The rendered fat was used to make the roux for our gravy, and the pan juices made a wonderful natural gravy browning.

The carved bird can be seen at the top of this post. Thanks to Jeff, Myint, Phil, Deepa, Luke and Jack for sharing Thanksgiving with us this year!

Crepe Expectations

We love going out for Vietnamese food – Ben Tre in South San Francisco being a particular favorite. Our go-to orders are usually either the bun (cold vermicelli noodles with various meat and vegetables) or the pho, which we have also made at home on several occasions, including a Daring Cooks challenge back in 2009.

I have always been intrigued by the menu description and picture of bánh xèo – a sort of cross between an omelette and a pancake. Yesterday I had most of the ingredients lying around in the kitchen, so decided to give it a try. The recipe is from the latest issue of Lucky Peach, and comes from New York Vietnamese chef Jimmy Tu. I won’t reprint the recipe here (buy the magazine!), but here is a general outline:

- Make a crepe batter using rice flour, colored with a little turmeric
- Cook some bacon and small shrimp in a skillet, then add the batter and cook until set
- Drizzle an egg over the batter and continue to cook until the egg is done and the pancake pulls away from the pan
- Pile some bean sprouts on one side of the crepe and fold the other half over. Serve with lettuce leaves, herbs (I used cilantro) and some nuoc cham, a sweet and spicy dipping sauce.

Delicious! Thanks, Lucky Peach! 

A different sort of challenge #tributetolis

Since most of our readers are (we assume) fellow Daring Cooks, you will already know the shock and sadness we felt when we visited the Daring Kitchen website last week. Expecting to read about the latest DC creations, we instead learned that Lis (Lisa Cifelli), co-founder of the Daring Kitchen, had passed away. Although we never met in person, we communicated by email – in particular when we hosted a challenge and later wrote a book review for the website. Her enthusiasm, humor and friendliness always leapt from the page (screen?), and she will be sorely missed by us all.

We wanted to make a dish and raise our glasses to the memory of Lis, so we bought a couple of nice steaks and paired them with Horseradish Souffle - a recipe from the challenge that we hosted almost exactly 3 years ago. I’m sure we would never have contemplated creating a dish such as this were it not for the Daring Kitchen and the opportunity to host a challenge for our fellow cooks.

They weren’t the puffiest souffles that we’ve ever made, and the photo above isn’t our most artistic creation. They were, however, made with fond memories of Lis. Thanks, Lis, for your boundless enthusiasm, infectious humor and tireless efforts to make the Daring Kitchen the wonderful community that it is.

Sopa de Ajo

Our November Daring Cooks’ hostess was Begoña, who writes the beautiful blog, Las recetas de Marichu y las mías. Begoña is from Spain and didn’t want to go with the more common challenges of paella or gazpacho, she wanted to share with us another very popular recipe from Spain that we don’t see as often called Sopa Castellana which is a delicious bread soup!

We make bread almost every week, so looked forward to incorporating it into our Daring Cooks challenge recipe. Since our bread is based on the recipe from the Tartine cookbook (Tartine being a much-lauded bakery here in San Francisco), we decided to use one of the recipes in that book for Sopa de Ajo – Garlic Soup. It’s similar to the challenge recipe for Sopa Castellana, but without the ham or red peppers.

The bread:

The rich chicken stock:

One whole head of garlic (!), chopped and fried:

And the assembled soup, cooking on the stovetop. We used smoked paprika instead of regular sweet paprika, because we like that smoky flavor.

Optionally served with an egg yolk (see top of page), the soup was rich and delicious, but boy was it garlicky! Probably not the thing to make when you have a client meeting the next day. (Oh wait… one of us did have a client meeting the next day…)

Thanks, Begoña, for a delicious and different challenge!