25 July 2010

These are based on Chocolate Truffle Triangles from Big Soft Chewy Cookies by Jill Van Cleave, but I found a few of her instructions peculiar, I’m a lazy cow and I hate leftover egg whites, and besides, I wanted more chocolate in mine.

2 sticks/1 c slightly salted butter, soft room temperature

½ c granulated sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 ¼ c all purpose flour

6T unsweetened cocoa powder

10 oz semisweet/dark cooking chocolate:  this is one of those things that varies a lot brand to brand and country to country.  I now prefer so-called British dark cooking chocolate to the American semisweet stuff I used to import, which seems to me too sweet for some purposes.  Whatever you use, break it up in pieces

¼ c espresso or strong coffee or very strong hot chocolate

8 ounces white chocolate, broken up

1/3 c whipping cream

Oven at 350°F

Cream 10 T butter with the sugar until smooth.  Add egg and vanilla, then flour and cocoa.  Mix till dough forms.  Press evenly into an ungreased 8 inch square pan.  Bake till edges just begin to pull in, about 15 minutes.  Let cool.

Melt dark chocolate and ¼ c butter together.  Stir till blended and set aside.

If you’re using coffee or espresso you need 2 T more sugar:  dissolve in your chosen liquid when it’s hot.  If you’re using hot chocolate, make it VERY STRONG and not too sweet.  Cool to warm and stir into melted chocolate.  Cool just till it gets claggy, then spread over the baked crust.  Chill in refrigerator until set, 2-3 hours.

Heat cream till just not-quite-boiling.  Take it off the heat and start dropping broken-up bits of white chocolate in while whisking like mad—white chocolate isn’t chocolate, and has a malign chemistry all of its own.  Also whisk in remaining 2 T butter, which will stabilise it if it shows signs of misbehaving.  Let cool till spreadable and then lather it over the dark chocolate in the pan.  Another 2-3 hours in the refrigerator till it sets thoroughly.

Cut in teeny-tiny squares and brace yourself, or possibly your pancreas.

Dairy-free notes:  I can’t help you with the butter, because I do use butter.  But you can make hot chocolate successfully with soy milk which works fine here (in Playing with Your Food there is a recipe for using coconut milk, which I’ve never tried in the truffle brownies, but seems to me it ought to work).  And I’ve had two successes using soy milk with the frelling white chocolate at the end and one disaster. I like white chocolate, but it has its little ways.  My best suggestion there is the whisking like mad part.

POSTSCRIPT, THE NEXT DAY:  it belatedly occurs to me that some white chocolate has milk solids in it, so anyone super-sensitive needs to read the label. I can get away with it here, but I don’t eat it often either.  And there will be milk-free white chocolate at your local health food shop, or there should be.

Chocolate Lightning Thins

¼ c butter

½ rounded c sugar

2 eggs

¾ c flour

4 T cocoa powder

¼ c chopped or shaved (not too fine) dark chocolate

1 tsp ground cinnamon

2 T sugar

Set your oven 400° F.

Build your dough as usual:  cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, beat fluffy, then beat in flour and cocoa powder, blah blah.  Stir in chocolate.  Spread and pat on a greased cookie sheet—not more than ¼” thick.  Blend cinnamon and sugar together and sprinkle (evenly, duh) over the top.

Bake about 20 minutes, till the edges are turning brown and pulling in, leave to cool for a few minutes only, then cut in small squares.  It’s easier if you leave them in the pan a few minutes after this till they’re safe to move, and then slide them off onto a wire rack.  They’ll turn crunchy as they cool, and Rubinstein also says ‘should preferably be eaten on the day of making’.  By the time you get to the end of these and that gooey novel you’ve been promising yourself, the bars should be ready to come out of the refrigerator. . . .

Crunchy Cookie Bars

2T butter

8 oz dark chocolate

2T golden syrup or dark corn syrup

8 oz plain digestive biscuits, rich tea biscuits, vanilla wafers or graham crackers (If you Americans can get them, I vote for the digestives.  Twenty years ago you could get them in gourmet shops;  I don’t know if they’ve migrated or disappeared.  Failing digestives graham crackers are my second choice . . . which so far as I know you still can’t get over here.  I used to bring them back in my suitcase—although there are a few ‘American groceries’ in London where you can get wild, wacky things like bittersweet chocolate and Oreos.  And graham crackers.)

¼ c, approximately, chopped nuts.  I used to favour caramelised almonds, but I haven’t seen them lately

Icing sugar and cocoa powder

Melt (gently) the butter, chocolate and syrup together and stir till entirely blended.  Roughly smash the biscuits/crackers with a rolling pin—don’t do a good job.  You want big fat crumbs and some small pieces.  Mix them and your chopped nuts into the rest.  Pour into a well greased 8” tin and put in the refrigerator for several hours.  When they’re rigid, tip them out of the tin, cut into small bars, and roll briefly in icing sugar and cocoa powder.  (Well, ‘roll’.  I use two shallow dishes, one of each, and sweep each bar through one and then the other.  This makes a nice show on a plate because each one looks a little different, and if you’re serving them to an assembled, it makes them look a lot ritzier than they are.  It’s all in presentation. And the chocolate, of course.)

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 tuna steaks

1 fresh mango – peeled, pitted, and chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped red bell pepper
1/2 Spanish onion, finely chopped
1 green onion, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 1/2 teaspoons olive oil

2 tablespoons paprika
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon garlic powder
4 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

1. Whisk together the olive oil, lime juice, and garlic in a bowl. Rub the tuna steaks with the mixture. Place the steaks in a sealable container and chill in refrigerator 3 hours.
2. Combine the mango, bell pepper, Spanish onion, green onion, cilantro, and jalapeno pepper in a bowl; stir. Add the lime juice and 1 1/2 teaspoons olive oil and toss to combine. Chill in refrigerator 1 hour.
3. Stir together the paprika, cayenne pepper, onion powder, salt, pepper, thyme, basil, oregano, and garlic powder in a bowl. Remove the tuna steaks from the refrigerator and gently rinse with water and then dip each side of each steak in the spice mixture to coat.
4. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Gently lay the tuna steaks into the hot oil. Cook the tuna on one side for 3 minutes; remove to a plate. Pour the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil into the skillet and let it get hot. Lay the tuna with the uncooked side down into the skillet and cook another 3 minutes; remove from heat immediately.
5. Spoon about 1/2 cup of the mango salsa onto each of 4 plates. Lay the tuna steaks atop the salsa and serve immediately.

Our local butcher, who is awesome, found us a beautiful 3-4 lb Boston Butt on sale for $5. We took that home. I mixed up 1 cup of cider vinegar, 1 tsp each liquid smoke and garlic powder and ½ tsp Smokehouse pepper and chopped up 2 sweet onions. We put all that in the fridge overnight.

At 6 AM we set up the crock pot. We put 1 onion on the bottom, then the pork, then the other onion, shook the liquid, and poured it on top. We covered the crock pot, set it on High and went back to bed.

By 10 AM the house smelled like meaty, oniony goodness. We tried to make a sauce, but it burned. Oh well. At noon we took out the pork. It split into 2 pieces, and the shoulder blade came out clean.
You know how you should be able to pull apart the pork with 2 forks? I only needed 1. This stuff was so tender I think I could’ve pulled it with a spoon. I was eating it straight out of the pot.

4 slices worth of breadcrumbs, preferably from pumpernickel bread.
1/2 c milk
3 eggs
1.5 lb lean ground beef
1 tsp salt
1/2 c grated Parmesean cheese
1 TBL dried parsley, rubbed
1.5 tsp dried basil, rubbed

Mix the breadcrumbs and milk together in a good-size bowl. Let the mixture sit for a minute, and if it seems soggy, add more breadcrumbs. If it seems dry, add a splash more milk. The crumbs should just be kind of moist and fluffy.

Add in the eggs and mix thoroughly.

Add the salt, cheese, and herbs (and a bit of black pepper if you like it, which I don’t) and mix well. Then add in the ground beef. I find this mixes best by hand, like kneading dough. If it seems too wet at this point, add in more breadcrumbs.

Now, you can do what I do, which is make it into meatballs, cover them in tomato sauce and bake it, then serve over pasta or in sandwiches the next day; or you can put it in a loaf pan and bake it like a traditional meat loaf, 350°F for an hour. I’d still put a bit of tomato sauce or ketchup over the top before baking, because it keeps it from drying out, but if you’re not a fan of tomato then you might try covering it loosely with foil.

Robin says:

This is originally from the second Rosie’s bakery book—the Chocolate-Packed, Jam-Filled, Butter-Rich, No Holds Barred Cookie Book—except I’ve messed it around in small and medium-sized crucial ways because I’m like that.

Chocolate Orange Shortbread

1 large egg

½ tsp orange essence (remember I’m talking about ESSENCE not FLAVOURING.  Essence is pure distilled oranges and strong)

2 c ordinary unbleached white flour

¼ c fine rice flour (you can use all ordinary flour, but a little rice flour assists that shortbread to-die-for melting texture)

Probably half a cup of sugar.  This is one of those places where you need to experiment (I know, I know, I’m already expecting you to experiment with the flour).  The original recipe calls for 6T confectioners’/icing sugar and 2T regular granulated.  This is about texture again.  A lot of granulated sugar will give it a gritty texture—which is lovely, by the way—pure icing sugar will make it wickedly smooth.  I like 6/2 but that’s not always what I use.

1 T grated orange zest (REMEMBER TO BE CAREFUL TO AVOID THE WHITE PITH.  Which will make it bitter.  And for pity’s, and your liver’s, sake, if you’re going to be eating the rind, buy an organic orange.  Your average commercial orange is sprayed forty-six ways to Sunday, and not all of it will wash off)

1 c slightly salted butter, soft enough to work but not runny

6 oz very good very dark chocolate, chopped, grated or shaved.  Chopped is easiest.  I like the texture of grated, if your chosen chocolate will put up with this.

Cut the butter up fairly small and mix it loosely into the flour, and then start rubbing it together seriously either with your hands or the back of a spoon.  When it all gets to the coarse crumbs stage, make a well in the middle of it, break your egg into the well, add the orange essence, and beat gently with a fork so the egg and essence get blended before you mix it into the flour and butter.  Then mush it into the flour and butter.  At the end of this stage you should have a fairly homogenous blob in your bowl.  Then knead in the chocolate till it’s evenly distributed.  Unless you’re planning on feeding the chocolate-free end to someone you’re mad at.

At this point you’re supposed to pat it into a cylinder, wrap it up and put it into the refrigerator for a few hours, and then slice it into discs.  If you actually want to put off making them, this is fine.  If you’re a lazy, last-minute slut like me . . . slap the dough into the middle of a cookie sheet with edges and pat it out to the rim.  There’s enough butter to make it come out again easily, but if you want to make one extra step (and even I will acknowledge this is a good one), cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your cookie sheet, put the dough in the middle of that and then you can roll it out to size, which you’re not going to be able to do easily on a sheet with edges—but you want those edges to contain the creature.  You then transfer the parchment paper—cut it long enough to provide you with handles—to the cookie sheet.  You can also not pat/roll quite to the edge of rimless sheets to allow room for squidge, but then it doesn’t bake quite evenly and the finished product doesn’t look quite so satisfactory (I think).

It’s a good idea to mark out the lines you’re going to want to cut on later, but if you forget you can just break it.  Crazy-paving shortbread is fetchingly artless.

Baking is also a slightly find-out-what-suits-you-and-your-oven situation.  I like 325°F for about half an hour.  It may take as much as 45 minutes, depending on the size of your cookie sheet and the thickness of your dough.  Your shortbread should be visibly golden (despite chocolate mottling) and you do want it crunchy.  (Probably.  Doughy shortbread is supposed to be anathema but I think it’s rather good.)  If you’ve patted it out evenly then you can stick a knife point delicately in the middle and if it goes crunch you’re set.  In fact take it out immediately or it will overcook.  It will get crunchier as it cools and you don’t want it brittle.  Let cool before you finish cutting/breaking.

2 c assorted dried fruit (black and golden raisins, cranberries, blueberries, apricots, cherries, dates, whatever).  The big stuff you want to chop to be about raisin/berry sized.

1 c chopped nuts:  almonds, pecans and/or hazelnuts

1 c rum or brandy

1 c white all-purpose flour

½ c wholemeal/wholewheat/spelt flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp allspice

¼ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp mace

12 T (1 ½ c) lightly salted soft butter

1 c dark brown sugar

1 tsp (GOOD QUALITY) vanilla extract or ½ tsp orange essence (NOT ‘flavouring’)

1 T grated lemon or orange zest (if you’re using orange essence, I usually use more zest too)

2 large eggs at room temperature

Put the dried fruit in a shallow bowl and pour the rum or brandy over them. Put a plate over the bowl and leave for at least 48 hours and up to about a week.  If your bowl isn’t shallow enough that all the fruit is in contact with the booze, stir occasionally.

Preheat oven to 350°F, and grease well your two-loaves-of-bread equivalent pans:  so four half-sized loaf tins, eight quarter-sized loaf tins, or approximately 24 muffin cups.  (If you’re using muffin cups . . . use paper liners.  Life is short.)

Sift the dry stuff together.

Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add zest and vanilla or essence, and cream again.  Add eggs.  BEAT THOROUGHLY.  Drain the fruit and add any liquid (not the fruit yet!), if there is any, to the batter.  Mix.

Add the flour mixture.  Stir in well.  Now add the fruit and nuts.  Stir again.  This is the moment you may have to use your judgement.  Flour varies, as does how much liquid there is left after the fruit has been soaking in it.  You may need to add a little liquid–orange juice, apple juice or water–or a little flour.

Pour into your pans:  depending on the size of the pan your baking time is anywhere from about 20-25 minutes (muffin tins) to about an hour and a quarter (9 x 5 inch normal bread pans).   When the middles puff up and start looking solid, stick a toothpick in.  When the toothpick comes out dry, etc.

Let cool in the pans half an hour or so.  An hour won’t hurt.  But don’t try to get them out too soon, they’ll be too fragile.  (They would be less fragile if you used less butter.  But . . . why would you want to use less butter?)

These don’t need to ripen, although you can turn them into little leglessness bombs if you want to (in theory the baking will have removed all the alcohol) by wrapping them in cheesecloth and dripping a little further rum on them—in which case keep them wrapped up in plastic or tin foil in your refrigerator, like Jeanne Marie did with hers, till wanted.  I did this once and . . . wheeeeee.  Don’t use an entire fifth, okay? (They’ll probably fall apart if you do, and then you’ll have leglessness bomb pudding.)

And I feel that, when it’s time to eat it, the true perfect drunken fruitcake should also have frosting. Frosting that goes something like:  1 c confectioner’s/icing sugar, 2T butter, cream together till smooth, and then add enough rum/brandy (2-3 T) to make it spreadable.  Go for it.

PAD THAI USING SAUCE FROM A BOTTLE BECAUSE THERE IS NO WAY I AM MAKING IT FROM SCRATCH (serves 1)

You will need:
rice noodles
an egg
shrimp, chicken, or tofu, if you want some protein
bean sprouts
fresh cilantro
lime juice
chopped peanuts
a good pan for stir frying
Pad Thai sauce–I use “Thai Kitchen” brand, which doesn’t contain anything nasty. Well, fish paste sounds kind of nasty, true–but no MSG or weird chemicals.

1. Boil 4 c water
2. Take a handful of rice noodles–I like the flat wide ones that are kind of like linguine–and boil them for 6-8 minutes, or til soft all through. (If the package says you should just soak them in hot water, it’s lying, they don’t cook all the way and then you’ve got crunchy/chewy noodles in your stir fry pan when it’s too late to do anything about it.)
3. Heat up a pan with a little bit of oil. Scramble the egg in the oil, then remove your scrambled egg to a a bowl and keep the pan hot. At this point, if you’re adding meat or tofu, you should fry that in the pan til it’s cooked through.
4. Drain the noodles, then put them in the frying pan. Add a few tablespoons of pad thai sauce, and stir fry, along with your protein. The noodles will absorb the sauce as you cook them; you can always add in more sauce if you think you under-did it.
5. Add the egg back in. If you’re using bean sprouts or thawed pre-cooked shrimp (I sometimes do) then add them at this point. Stir it all together to get it heated through.
6. Dump it out to a bowl, garnish it with a quick squirt of lime juice, a bit of chopped cilantro, and the peanuts. There you have it, a fabulous meal!

Pad thai sauce from store
unexpected treat this eve
Tho alas, no limes.

75g dried chickpeas, soaked for c 24 hour (or mixture chickpeas & butter beans)

1/2 tbs gram (chickpea, besan) flour
1 small red onion
1 clove garlic
1 large handful flat-leafed parsley
Small squirt harissa paste
Salt & pepper

Put it all in the food processor and blitz until very fine; squoosh into burger shapes, as many as feel comfortable. Grease large baking-tray and plop the burgers on to it. Bake at mark 6 for 30 minutes or so.