Category Archives: Food

We have a few pecans, courtesy of my parents and their tree. I was trying to decide what to do with them, and as often happens I thought of dessert. Specifically ice cream. Then I thought about what would go well with pecans in ice cream…and came up with something amazing.

Cherry Pecan Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

Mix a little less than 2 cups of milk [1], a little more than 1/3 cup of the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries, and 2/3 cup of sugar [2] in a big bowl. Use an immersion blender until the sugar dissolves or you get bored.

Add 2 cups of cream [3]. Dump into the ice cream maker.

After about 20 minutes, add 1 cup chopped pecans, 2/3 cup chopped dried cherries, and 1/2 cup chocolate chips. After about five minutes it should be mixed up and you can freeze it.

[1] Most recipes call for whole milk, but 2% is what we have in the house, so that’s what I use.

[2] This is half the sugar the recipes in my booklet call for. The cherry juice adds plenty of sweetness.

[3] The recipes call for 3 cups, but cream is sold in 2 cup containers, so I use an extra cup of milk instead. The good thing is this makes the ice cream lower fat, but the texture isn’t as creamy (shocking). So feel free to use an extra cup of cream and one less cup of milk. I won’t tell.

You’ll never guess what we had for dinner on Thursday.

Since then, the turkey has turned into turkey divan, turkey potpie, and turkey sweet potato hash. (And there’s still straight turkey left.)

The first two turned out a little runny, but still tasty. And we own bowls and spoons, so that worked out fine. I’ve never made turkey divan before, and didn’t find a recipe that quite matched what I remembered, so I merged a bunch of recipes together: white sauce with sour cream mixed in, broccoli and frozen peas, topped with a little shredded cheese and served over rice.

The hash, my breakfast experiment, was good. Diced turkey, diced leftover baked sweet potato, onion, chopped orange pepper just because I had some, chopped fennel and chives ditto. Made a nice side for a fried egg and meant that yesterday I had turkey for all three meals.

In non-turkey tastiness, last weekend I made pumpkin lentil soup. It was very good–though I probably should have grated the ginger as called for since the immersion blender left some chunks–but works better with an extra protein at the meal. Like cheese and crackers. (Everything works better with cheese and crackers, though.)

J made awesome cranberry sauce from the newspaper (thank you, Associated Press). It included dried apricots and cherries, orange zest and juice, port, and balsamic vinegar. Amazingly good.

And finally, I made a cheesecake for the first time ever: pumpkin hazelnut cheesecake. The hazelnut is all in the crust and for once I didn’t mind the existence of the crust. The crust would probably be really good on its own cut into cookies. Someone seems to have given the recipe a one-star rating because she couldn’t find hazelnut flour: I just ground up hazelnuts in the food processor. Man is a tool using animal.

This week: More leftovers, and then turkey soup!

There’s a kitchen gadget meme floating around, one of those long lists of items where you bold if you use the gadget, italicize it if you don’t, strikethrough gadgets you got rid of, color blue if it broke, color red if it started a fire, change font to Wingdings if you don’t know what the gadget is…

It got me thinking about gadgets I have loved and lost.

My bread machine comes to find first. When I lived in Boston I started baking my own bread–it was tasty, cheap, and therapeutic. Then I moved to a horrible spider-infested basement apartment in Maryland with no kitchen. It came with a sink, an electric burner, and an electric griddle. Maybe a microwave unless I bought that. J, being an awesome then-boyfriend, got me a bread machine.

That bread machine got a lot of use for years. If you’ve ever heard J or me joke about fish bread, that’s from the instruction manual for the timer section–it warned not to use the timer if you were making bread with perishable ingredients like milk, eggs, or fish. I never did find a fish bread recipe.

The bread machine evenually entered an old age where the kneading part worked and the baking part didn’t, which made the whole come home to hot fresh bread thing not work any more. So it’s no longer with us.

Then there’s the garlic press, which one day simply snapped as if I had suddenly been given super strength. We haven’t replaced it, even though we use a lot of garlic. Chopping isn’t difficult, and knives are easier to clean than the garlic press was. Maybe if we replaced it I could find out if I really do have a garlic-press-breaking superpower.

I also killed a vegetable peeler, but at least that one broke at a joint, and we have another one. Likewise the cheap popover pan that still works as long as you don’t turn it upside down and dislodge the no-longer-secured popover hole thingies.

I can’t really think of a kitchen gadget that I want and don’t have. Maybe that electric griddle from my old apartment. Mmm, pancakes.

I still get Cooking Light on paper, though a) there’s an iPad version and b) the recipes are generally available free on their website. Call me a Luddite, but it’s nicer to browse through a paper magazine. I’m building up a huge collection of back issues, though.

From recent issues, I’ve tried some chicken recipes and a quick bread.

Champagne-browned butter chicken (Oct 2012)

This was good. I even ate the mushrooms, because they were drowned in the sauce. The recipe is fussier than what I usually like to make: there are quite a few browning steps before the chicken and potatoes (and mushrooms) go in the oven, and then once it comes out you deglaze with wine as usual (I used white wine rather than champagne) and also brown the butter in a second pan and then combine them to make a sauce.

The chicken took forever to cook–this would work nicely in the crockpot up to the sauce-making step.

Maple-stout quick bread (Oct 2012)

J likes maple, I like stout, so trying this was a no-brainer. It was tasty, though surprisingly reminiscent of banana bread. However, the loaves didn’t bake through, so the middle was pudding-like. I swear I stuck a knife in them and it came out clean, so I’m not sure how that worked.

Chicken with honey-beer sauce (Sept 2012)

This got made because J came home from the grocery store with chicken breasts for me to cook, so I flipped through issues until I found something quick and appealing. I wouldn’t have expected that beer, soy sauce, mustard, and honey would be tasty together, but I was happily surprised.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to get boneless skinless chicken breasts to cook all the way through without cutting them into pieces. Presumably a lower temperature would work; maybe our cold oven is balanced by a hot burner. At least this isn’t an actual problem.

We’ve been picking ripe apples for a few weeks. J made applesauce while I was in Kansas; he made more last weekend and we froze some. Our apples are too tart for me to eat, but they make fabulous applesauce. He also chopped up a bunch and froze them. I see apple crisp in my future.

Continuing with the my husband is awesome theme, he gave me A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official A Song of Ice and Fire cookbook. It might sound gimmicky but it looks like a good cookbook; there are many many recipes I want to try. Recipes are divided by geography (the Wall, the North, King’s Landing, etc.) and each includes a quote from the books referencing the dish and a gorgeous photo. Some of the recipes come in two versions: a medieval version (with quote and source) and a modern version. Last night I made Roast Aurochs with Leeks; although I used the crockpot rather than the oven so it was more like pot roast. Also, the recipe calls for bison or beef, as it would be extremely difficult to obtain the flesh of an extinct mammal. I also skipped the pepper sauce because pot roast doesn’t need sauce. It was still quite good. Could have used more leeks (we didn’t have enough).

We’ve made a few new things recently.

J made cardamom popovers, filled (after baking) with marscapone and some spices. The popovers would have been great by themselves. The marscapone was almost too heavy for them.

Last weekend, I made tandoori chicken. Not a great accomplishment (it’s just marinated and grilled), but it’s the first time I’ve ever grilled anything, so that was kind of fun. And the grill still works.

I was tempted to eat the marinade with a spoon. It’d be a great dip: yogurt, fresh ginger and garlic, various spices. The raita (yogurt, cucumber, mint) alongside was also good. Need to make that again to use more mint.

This weekend we had steamed artichokes. My parents used to make them, but I never have. (This is what happens when J makes me do the grocery shopping. We get different kinds of produce.) Nothing fancy there; I’m not sure why I haven’t considered buying them before.