Semi failure

We tried a shortcut today while making our second-ever batch of macarons. Instead of making our own almond flour, which was messy and took a lot of time with the food processor, we bought Trader Joe’s almond meal.

Mistake! The macarons are the wrong color, far too brown and speckled, instead of pale golden. 

But we did bake them longer this time, so they didn’t collapse and stick to the parchment.

Practice WILL make perfect.

Tomorrow, we’ll make the buttercream, add some red or green food color gel, and put the cookies together in time for a little party.

And the Holiday Baking Begins

We freely admit that we are suckers for flattery. When we asked our Thanksgiving host up in San Francisco what we could bring, we had visions of dry Alinea caramel, some amazing wine, some delicate sugar cookies shaped like autumn leaves and sprinkled with orange and yellow sugar.

“You make the best ginger snaps in the world,” she said. “Make that. Skip the pies and everything else, but make gingersnaps.”

Well, sure! Of course we will. And while we’re at it, we volunteered to make a batch for a fifth grade school party as well. 

So this morning, we pulled out the butter, a bunch of mixing bowls, a flour sifter and got moving. We whipped up some pie crusts, used up some icky bananas for banana bread and then made the gingersnap dough.

This is a recipe we’ve been using since we first found it in the early 1980s in, of all places, Seventeen magazine. They used to have a cookie contest every year, which we assume (based on a quick Google search) that they’ve long since abandoned. Perhaps young teen girls no longer bake, but rather spend all their free time LOL’ing online, or playing Guitar Hero.

In any case, we were intrigued back then by the description of the soft, chewy gingersnap cookies that looked amazingly like the hard nasty disks that you buy in the box. Imagine our surprise when the cookies turned out perfectly. They looked great, they tasted great, and they’ve been our go-to cookie from October through January ever since.

Here’s the recipe:

3/4 cup shortening

1 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup molasses

1 egg

2 1/4 cups sifted flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Cream first 4 ingredients together until fluffy. Sift dry ingredients together; stir into molasses mixture. Chill dough for an hour. Preheat oven to 375 F. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll balls in graunluated sugar, then place 2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet (we use parchment instead). Bake for 9 minutes. Cool slightly on cokie sheet, then remove to wire racks and let cool completely.

Yield: 4 dozen cookies.

We’ll post a photo soon; at the moment things are chilling in the fridge.

It’s feeling very holiday-ish, though, around here. It starts with gingersnaps, then we’ll move onto sugar cookies, almond cookies, cookie press cookies, cinnamon and peppermint, ooh la la…

So tell us. What are your favorite holiday cookies?

Coffee maker, RIP

Our wonderful, fully automatic Gaggia coffee maker finally died late yesterday afternoon. It was four years old.

We loved our coffee machine, which dispensed either espressos, double coffees or big American coffees, custom-sized for our family cups and mugs, with a perfect dollop of crema on top. This coffee maker got us through building a house, moving, a cancer diagnosis, many parties and many hungover mornings.

Only once did we need to send it in for repairs. Mostly, it was a good machine, always ready to make a cup of coffee. Any time, day or night.

Lately, we noticed some strange behavior. Mysterious messages, weak coffees, no coffees dispensed, etc. Then, it asked us to clean it, but then could not complete the process.

It died at 5:15 p.m. Monday November 10.

It had made 6,221 cups of coffee.

Rest in peace.

We Love International Cuisine, but This is Ridiculous

We went to Trader Joe’s today to buy some mushrooms and chicken for a simple stovetop braise for dinner, and we thought, Hey, let’s get some burgers for tomorrow. It’s all part of our effort to go grocery shopping less often, to plan meals ahead, to be efficient with our money and our time and to cut the impulse purchases.

At our TJ’s, however, the hamburger meat has undergone a tragic transformation this fall. Instead of being able to choose from ground sirloin, or ground chuck, or whatever, it is now all labeled “beef”. With the fat content, to be sure, but not with any more information.

Today, it was worse. The meat was labeled as coming from any of the following countries: Australia, New Zealand or Mexico.

Excuse me, but why would we in California want to buy meat that was raised a continent away? What is the purpose of that? How fresh could it be? How much additional cost is there in getting it shipped all the way over to the U.S.A.?

Have the buyers at Trader Joe’s lost their minds? Or do they think their customers are too stupid to care?

We try not to be snobby and ridiculous, but we like to buy locally whenever possible. And we like to know what exactly we’re feeding our family.

Has Trader Joe’s become too big, too corporate, too glib? The gimmicky Hawaiian shirts and down-home signage won’t mask the problem when the deals are fake, the meat is imported, and they won’t tell us exactly what it is that we’re buying.

Pounding Meat

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. We’re not talking about anything dirty here. We’re talking about our growing fascination with using a pounder to flatten and tenderize our proteins.

It started years ago, when our brother taught us to make a delicious chicken paillard. He would pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, coat them with bread crumbs and sometimes egg, fry them up quick and serve with a side of pesto pasta and some sauteed onions and yellow peppers. 

We often would make a variation of this meal when we were trying to stretch some chicken either for economy or calories. You get a lot of real estate when you pound it flat and thin.

Our trip to Austria two years ago showed us the delights of wiener schnitzel, which we ate with potatoes and pretzel breads and wonderful beers and wines. We saw on the menus versions with pork, so when we returned home, we were delighted to find a recipe from Jacques Pepin that called for pounding pork medallions, a pork scaloppine from his book Fast Food My Way.

And no. We’re unsure the difference between paillard and scaloppine, although one is French and the other, well, Italian. Or maybe the paillard doesn’t have the coating of wheat, not officially anyway?

In any case, we suggest getting out a few pieces of wax paper or plastic wrap and letting go with all your inner frustrations. Pound that pork, pound that chicken, pound that veal! Make it thin and then cook it up!

Your family will feel so satisfied on so much less, and you’ll have been able to work out some of your latent aggression.

Austin Eats

We had to take a little bit of time to recover from our Missouri team’s awful loss to Texas. But now we’re over it, sort of, and we’re pleased to report that we ate well and often in Austin.

Our favorite meal was probably at Trudy’s near campus, where we had a wonderful brunch after screaming our heads off at the ESPN Gameday show.

Trudy’s chips and salsa were fantastic, (sneaky hot salsa, crispy salty chips) but we loved loved loved the queso.

We tried a mimosa, which looked more like a margarita and tasted great with the chips.

Then came the Tex Mex eggs Benedict….our favorite foods, queso and poached eggs, combined….Heaven!

We had a barbecue meal pre-game at Stubb’s, which our friends chose because they know it as a music venue. We were still pretty full from all the chips and eggs earlier in the day, but we shared some fried green tomatoes and split a sandwich, shared some ribs.

Our last meal was at a place called Hula Hut, where you serve yourself chips from a huge warming vat, and dish up as much salsa as you can carry back to the bar. We had several margaritas in the sunshine, watching NFL games and enjoying the lakeside view. The food there was good, but we’d stuffed ourselves on the chips to the point where we barely enjoyed it.

We feel as if we were rushed food-wise, because the weekend was about football and being with Missouri friends. But we loved Austin. We’ll be back. And then we’ll find some better bbq, maybe some chili, more chips and queso. Definitely more queso…

Tex Mex or BBQ

In 24 hours, we will be on a flight from SoCal to Austin, Texas. We’re planning a weekend of college football fun, hoping our Mizzou Tigers kick some Longhorn Texas booty. 

But in between attending Gameday and pep rallies and tailgates and the game itself, we’re looking forward to some really great Texas food.

Yet where to begin? With the Tex Mex? Or with the barbecue? Are there not-to-be-missed Austin establishments?

Any suggestions?

The Elusive…Pumpkin

A few years ago, in November, we found ourselves in Vienna. It was a weeklong birthday treat, with lots of plans to visit galleries and operas and see old buildings and statues of Mozart.

We hadn’t thought of it as a foodie vacation, but between the street sausages and the pretzel breads and the beers and the great wines, the wonderful restaurant with the tea carts, the pastries and coffees, the wiener schnitzel, well, we were very very happy. And very very well fed.

One of the best things we did was stumble upon an open-air market, which we stupidly did not photograph. There, we saw the whole pumpkins that had been featured in meal after meal. It was fall, after all, so we’d been getting salads with pumpkin seeds and pastas with pumpkin seed oils…Pumpkin here, pumpkin there, pumpkin pumpkin everywhere.

And not the big white seeds, no! These pumpkin seeds were small and black. The pumpkins we saw at the market were also different. These were not oversized jack-o-lantern orange monstrosities. These were small, dense, orange with a gray cast…

We’ve never seen them before, and have never seen them since. 

Our supplies of pumpkin seeds and oils from that trip are long gone. So we’ve been trying to find out more about these elusive pumpkins. This weekend, at the Irvine Farmers Market, we asked the squash farmer about it. “Ugh, no idea,” he said.

And checking out websites for heirloom seeds also didn’t help.

Today, we had lunch with a friend who has friends in Germany and Austria. Help us, we begged.

She inquired, and apparently we are trying to find Gleisdorf pumpkins, which grow in Austria’s Steiermark. However, all we can find online at gourmet stores are the oils and dried seeds. We’d like to find seeds to plant, but when we investigate further, we find German-language agricultural articles.

We are not giving up! But if anyone has any ideas how to grow such a pumpkin here in the U.S.A, let us know!

Home Made Ricotta — Fun with Dairy Science

After flipping through the current Food & Wine, we decided it would be fun to make our own ricotta.  We were surprised at how simple the process was, were craving a good baked ziti for dinner and pancakes for breakfast so we decided to give it a go.

Making the cheese was a simple process.  Step one, heat the milk and cream to 185 degrees.

Step two, stir in the vinegar, stir in the salt.

Step three, cover and wait for cheese.

Step remove curds with slotted spoon and strain in cheesecloth.

Step five, enjoy.

The homemade difference comes through in creaminess, silkiness and flavor.  Our baked ziti with dabs of this ultralush ricotta was extra rich and satisfying.  Not only was the end result far superior to the store bought alternative but also cheaper.

Turning Wine into Vinegar — Intentionally

We really enjoyed Russ Parsons’ story that ran this week in the LA Times on Kitchen Essentials.  The paragraph that particularly caught our attention was the comment on expensive red wine vinegar and just how ordinary it is.  Given we had just laid out $15 for a mediocre bottle we had to agree.  We shot Russ an email asking him to post his vinegar making technique and he graciously replied and complied.

So we jumped online and found a home brew store with “mother” for sale and we grabbed a red and a white.  Not only are we excited by the prospect of building red wine vinegar that actually has great flavor but also are pleased with the “green” quality and the economics.  Green in that we have a use for leftover wine at the end of a good dinner.  Economic in that our sunk cost on this endeavor (mother, crock, cheesecloth) will be about the cost of one 8 oz bottle of vinegar.  We’ll keep you posted once the mother arrives and we get going.