Toddler-approved Chinese fried rice on a weeknight

Fried rice has become a staple dinner in our house.  It's my go-to dish once a week, and it's great because it makes lots of leftovers and can be scaled up or down.  Our favorite Indian take-out place always gives us extra rice, and this recipe uses it up beautifully.  The recipe is best with pre-cooked and cool rice, not hot rice.  If you already have the cooked rice, the rest takes at MOST 15 minutes from start to finish.

Little Bread Toddler LOVES this recipe, which is great because I use it to sneak in all manner of vegetables and eggs for protein.

He's a messy eater.

You will need:

One yellow onion

One bag frozen vegetables

Three cups of cooked, cold rice (Jasmine is best, but whatever you have on hand is fine)

Three eggs (lightly beaten)

Three tablespoons each of mirin, sesame seed oil, soy sauce, and peanut oil

1. Dice the onion.

2. Pour the peanut oil into the skillet on medium-high heat.  When the pan is ready (the oil is shimmering) add the onion and saute until translucent.

3. Add the vegetables to the skilled and coat with the oil.  Cook for a few minutes until they seem not frozen.

4. Add the rice to the skillet and toss around to combine.  

5. Remove the vegetables and rice to a large bowl.  Use your spatula to scrape most of the rice and vegetables out of the skillet then return to the fire.  Add more peanut oil, about a tablespoon.

6. While you're waiting for the peanut oil in the skillet to heat up, add the soy sauce, sesame seed oil and mirin to the bowl of rice and vegetables.  Stir to combine.

7.  Add the eggs to the skillet and scramble them.  Then using your spatula, break the scrambled egg into small pieces and add them to your rice and vegetables.

8. Tada! You're done!  Time to eat!

How awesome does this look?  

Little Bread Toddler saw it in the skillet and said, "I want something else," then proceeded to eat four bowls of the stuff.  Again, he's a messy eater.  

It's that good!

Homemade cronuts

I hesitated to publish this post because those who are looking for a recipe for cronuts from start to finish are going to be disappointed.  However, it may prove helpful for those looking for clarification on how to take puff pastry and use it to make a fried doughnut-shaped but croissant dough-based delicacy.

First things first: what is a cronut?

 The Cronut (TM) is a trademarked name for a croissant-doughnut hybrid created by Dominique Ansel in May of this year.  It immediately sparked an international craze and fans flocked to his bakery, sometimes standing in line for hours, for the chance to score one of the limited number of treats made each day.  Many other bakers and bloggers have attempted to recreate the cronut.

Here is a picture of a Cronut (TM) from the website:

Also, Cronuts (TM) are filled with cream and topped with glaze, as you can kind-of see from the picture.  However, I don't want to give myself a heart attack and I don't really like super sweet pastries, so I limited embellishment to a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

I myself have never eaten a true cronut so I can't say for certain that what I made tastes anything like one, but it is tasty.  I ended up making these because my sister made a huge amount of puff pastry for a Thanksgiving dish she was making, and ended up with a lot leftover.

Here is how we took the puff pastry and made it into our version of cronuts.

You will want to start with cold but not frozen puff pastry dough.  Our dough was unleavened and made with salt, water, butter, and flour.

1. First, pour some oil into your pot so that it rises about two inches.  You are going to be almost deep-frying the dough, but not quite.  Let it slowly warm up to about 330-350 degrees F.

2. Now, take your puff pastry and roll it out.  I think the reason my cronuts did not rise as high as Dominique Ansel's is that I rolled the dough out too flat.  Maybe next time I will leave it thick.  Using one large and one small round pastry cutter, cut out the dough into circles.

3. When the dough and the oil are ready, carefully place the dough into the pot.

4. The first cronut was a little wonky, but I got better about timing as it went on.  Once the first side is nicely browned, flip it over.  The cronuts will puff up as they cook because of the butter trapped between the layers of puff pastry.

5.  As they finish, use the handle of a wooden spoon to remove the cronuts from the pot and let them cool on a paper towel over a plate or a cooling rack.  Sprinkle the hot cronuts with powdered sugar.

6. I love seeing the layers of dough!

On the outside they mostly resemble doughnuts and doughnut holes.  But when you open them you can really see the difference:

So, obviously this is not a perfect recreation of the Cronut (TM).  But that didn't stop us from eating way, way too many warm cronuts the night we made them.  And Little Bread Toddler ate two this morning.   The nice thing about these is that they aren't jumbo sized, so you don't feel your arteries clogging as you eat them (sneaky cronuts).

I have to say, these are a fun, special occasion treat.  I'd probably still make regular doughnuts though.  Maybe I just need to try the real thing?

Chocolate red wine cake

 
If you've never heard of Smitten Kitchen, you need to.

I had heard her mentioned off and on for a few years, but it wasn't until I heard an interview with her on the Diane Rehm show that I realized how awesome she was.

Smitten Kitchen is the blog of Deb Perelman, who lives in New York and cooks awesome things.

During her interview with Diane Rehm, she rattled off a recipe for cucumber and cabbage slaw.  Since then I've made it a bunch of times and it's really simple and delicious.

Then, during Passover, a dear friend was coming to dinner who was keeping kosher.  I found a recipe for chocolate caramel matzo crack and it was seriously so good.  I was considering hiding it before she came over so I wouldn't have to share.

Deb (can I call you Deb?) has never steered me wrong.  Everything I make of hers looks exactly like her pictures promise it will.  I need to buy her book already.

So my third recipe of hers was one I've been wanting to make since I first came across it a few years ago.

I made this cake for my book club and they just loved it.  The combination of the chocolate and red wine was amazing, and the cinnamon gave it just the right amount of spice.

I won't give the measurements because I would rather she get the hits on her blog, but here is a list of the ingredients and how I made it:

You will need:

Butter, room temperature
brown sugar
granulated sugar
1 egg + 1 egg yolk, room temperature
vanilla extract
AP flour
dutch cocoa powder
baking powder
baking soda
ground cinnamon
table salt

Once you have all your ingredients, now you will want to mis en place them.

Mix together your brown and granulated sugars into a bowl.

 Mix together the flour, chocolate, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a measuring cup.  This will make it easier to add a little bit at a time to the final dough.

Now measure out your wine and add the vanilla to it.

I should mention, at this point you will want to preheat your oven and prepare your cake pan.  Butter it up, then cut a circle out of parchment to fit the bottom of the pan.  Now grease that too.  Take a few tablespoons of flour and, holding the pan in the sink, shake it around until the pan is covered with flour.  Dump any excess flour into the sink.

Take your butter and add it to the bowl of a stand mixer.  Beat it about a minute until it's nice and fluffy.  Then add the sugars and mix to combine.

At some point you will add the eggs.  I can't remember when.  Maybe now?

Yeah, that seems right.  Add the eggs and the wine-vanilla mixture.

Now take your flour-cinnamon-cocoa mixture and pour it into a sifter.  Gently sift it into the bowl of the stand mixer.

Stir every so often so the flour is incorporated.  Don't worry if it looks weird and clumpy.  That's what Deb said and I believed her. Follow her instructions and she won't lead you astray.  I promise.

Now take a spatula and scrape everything into your prepared cake pan and put in the oven.  It bakes for something like 55 minutes.

I forgot to take pictures of the final product as a whole cake, but here's another action shot:

It's a really, really delicious and very grown-up cake.  We ate it sprinkled with powdered sugar and it was perfect, but Deb has a recipe for a mascarpone whipped topping, which I can imagine just takes it over the top.

Another recipe from Smitten Kitchen that is a keeper!  And no, this is NOT a sponsored post!  I just think her recipes are awesome and am more than happy to shill for her for free :)

Bacheofe a la Saveur

I'm glad that title didn't scare too many of you off!

This weekend in DC was like a microcosm of the month of March itself: sometimes rainy and cold, sometimes sunny and warm.  It doesn't know what it wants to do.  But it was sunny enough on Saturday that we were out and about running errands, and then rainy and cold enough on Sunday that this delicious Alsatian stew was just the thing to warm us up.

What is Bacheofe?  Also spelled baeckeoffe, backenoff, or baekaoffa, it's a wine-simmered Alsatian stew with meat and vegetables interwoven with potatoes.  The name means "baker's oven," because (according to Larousse Gastronomique), housewives would assemble the stews on Monday morning and drop them off at the bakery to cook in the residual heat of the ovens to be retrieved in the afternoon.  The neat thing about bacheofe is the thin rope of dough around the rim that seals the top to the dutch oven.

I came across bacheofe in Saveur magazine, hence the title "a la Saveur."  The author's version includes a bacon lattice on top, which I couldn't resist.  You can find the recipe here: http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Bacheofe-Alsatian-Stew.  It takes two days, so plan accordingly.

You will need:

Day 1:
1 lb boneless beep chuck, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 lb boneless pork shoulder, same treatment
1 lb boneless lamb shoulder, same treatment
kosher salt and black pepper
3 cups (one bottle) dry white wine.  I used a sauv blanc but a gewürztraminer or other sweet German wine is more typical
1/4 cup parsley, finely chopped
2 tsp juniper berries
5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 bay leaves
2 medium carrots,sliced
2 medium yellow onions, sliced
2 small leeks, sliced
2 sprigs thyme

Day 2:
1/4 cup duck or goose fat
3 lbs yukon gold potatoes
1 lb thick-cut bacon
1 cup flour
5 tbl water

1. Place beef, pork and lamb in a bowl (I used a large glass baking dish) and season with salt and pepper.  Add the wine, parsley, juniper berries, garlic, bay, carrots, onions, leeks and thyme.

 Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until day 2.

2. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Rub an enameled dutch oven with the duck fat so it has a nice thick coating.

3. Slice the potatoes into thin slices and layer them with the marinated meat and vegetables, remembering to season in between each layer.

4. Make sure the last layer is potatoes.

5. Mr. Bread Maiden getting fancy with his photography.

6. Place your bacon slices on top of the potatoes.  Doesn't that look pretty?

7. Pour the left-over marinade over the bacon.

8. Now comes the tricky part: making the dough.  In a small bowl, add the flour.  Pour the water over the flour and mix together until it just forms a dough.  If it can't absorb any more flour, don't force it.

9. When the dough forms a ball, flour a clean surface and knead the dough a little bit.  If it's not malleable, let it rest for about 10 minutes until the dough relaxes.  Roll or squeeze the dough into a snake.

10.  Wrap the dough around the rim of the dutch oven.  Place the lid on top.

11.  Bake in the oven for 3 1/2 hours.

12.  Remove the dutch oven from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes.  Break the seal using a knife or plastic spatula (if using an enameled dutch oven) if you need to.

 

Many recipes said the point of the dough rim was to create a tighter seal akin to a pressure cooker.    However, my lid came right off with no resistance.  I don't think it made a difference.  We pronounced it quite tasty.

Butternut squash, white bean and bacon soup

We interrupt this bread blog to bring you one of my favorite recipes ever: butternut squash soup. It is so delicious, so healthy and filling that I had to share it.

I found it on Grubarazzi but made several changes.

You will need:

1 pack of bacon
1 large yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 large butternut squash, peeled and chopped
box of cherry tomatoes or can of chopped tomatoes
2 cans cannellini beans
1 bunch sage
2 springs thyme
2 sprigs rosemary
pinch of red pepper flakes
4-6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
salt and pepper

1. fry up the pack of bacon in a large saucepan. Move the crispy bacon to a plate to cool.  Leave the drippings in the pan.

2. Fry the onion in the bacon drippings until they are golden and translucent, about 5-10 minutes.

3.  Add the garlic and butternut squash and fry for about 5 minutes.

4. Add the broth and bring to a simmer.

 5. Add the herbs, beans, tomatoes and spices.  Let the vegetables soften, about 45 minutes to an hour.

 6.  Chop up the bacon and add to the soup.

 7. Turn the heat off and let the soup sit.  When the soup has cooled enough to handle, blend in batches.  Taste and season as needed.

I hope you like this soup!  I served it at a party and got rave reviews.  The beans provide a great heft to the soup instead of milk, a roux or heavy cream, which makes it great for people who can't process gluten or lactose.