Sunday Dinner: Italian Wedding Soup

My, my, what a busy month it's been. I have been cooking and baking a wee bit here and there but much of my time has been spent at the brewery, bartending, and as of January, tackling my new role as Taproom Manager & Assistant to the Ambassador. Plus this, that and the other fun thing I'm usually up to.

Today just felt like a day to cook (albeit after I lounged around, visited a potential rental place, watched football and ran errands). I caught some of the Martha Stewart Show the other morning--thankfully, it was an episode focused on healthy recipes. Italian wedding soup is a more recent favorite of mine, so I decided today to take on that recipe from said episode. The one big, slightly unhealthy change I had to make was to add pasta. It's essential, right? I also switched out the escarole for spinach for two reasons: it's cheaper and it's brighter (we with the eyes first!).

So here we have my riff on light Italian wedding soup. And I'm going to be honest with you--as much as I love baking and consider it my "home" in the kitchen... this was supremely easy and yielded great results. I really look forward to integrating more home cooking into my routine.

Pumpkin Cheesecake with Brown Sugar Bourbon Cream

Ahh, the perils of hosting Thanksgiving dinner. This year, my family hosted 10 people at my parents’ house and my mom magically figured out how to fit all of us around the dining room table. We had the usual slight conflict in the kitchen (sorry for yelling at you, Ariel; you’re a great tater-tot shaper) and last-minute menu changes (the aforementioned tots, sweet potato style!).

But pretty much no matter the circumstances--who hosts, how many guests, so on and so forth--the dessert table is top notch at our family & friends Thanksgiving celebrations. The lower photo on the right? That's the Thanksgiving dessert table, 2009 edition.

This year, my mom graciously asked me early on what I’d like to make for dessert so I’d have “dibs” on whatever it was. The brown sugar cheesecake with bourbon caramel sauce from two years ago still sticks in my mind as extraordinarily tasty, but I wasn’t going to settle for a repeat dessert. Luckily, America’s Test Kitchen came to the rescue, as they often do, with a timely e-mail containing a video for spiced pumpkin cheesecake with brown sugar bourbon cream. (I had to lift my chin off the floor, too.)

As you know if you’ve read any of my previous posts, I trust America’s Test Kitchen & Cook’s Illustrated to provide perfect recipes that don’t need any adaptation. This holds true here with one exception--I swapped the graham cracker crust for a gingersnap crust. Let it be known that Trader Joe’s triple ginger cookies are INSANE. They have little bits of crystallized ginger in them which magically stayed nearly whole even after I decimated the cookies in the food processor. It also doesn’t hurt to save a few of the cookies and crumble them on top of the decadent whipped topping. DO NOT skip the step where you remove excess liquid from the pumpkin puree; it’s essential to maintaining a fluffly, not dense, cheesecake filling.

Now, what to do with the leftover brown sugar bourbon cream...

Adventures in Wood-Fired-Pizza-Making

A couple weeks ago we had some stellar weather here in Southwest Michigan. To celebrate that and to thank the many people at Big C Lumber who provided the materials for building my parents' new house, my dad and I collaborated on an afternoon of making pizzas in the wood-fired oven out on the new screen porch. All in all, we made 8 pizzas using combinations of the following laundry list of toppings: Roma tomatoes, pineapple chunks, Canadian bacon, Italian sausage, shredded chicken, purple and yellow fingerling potatoes, basil, sauteed yellow peppers and onions, asparagus, eggs, fresh mozzarella, shredded mozzarella, blue cheese and a 4-cheese blend.

No recipe and little talk here--the photos speak for themselves.

Pizza Master Karl creating a Pizza Margherita

Fine ingredients

Hot, hot, hot!

Fingerling potatoes, asparagus, Canadian bacon

Italian sausage, shredded chicken, sauteed yellow peppers and onions

My creation: fingerling potatoes, blue cheese, fresh greens

The spot!

Jacques Torres's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Please note, straight from the beginning, you’ll need to let this dough rest for AT LEAST 24 hours before baking. Your patience will pay off!

Everyone seems to have a set of characteristics that embody their perfect chocolate chip cookie – whether they like them chewy or crispy or with or without nuts. Well, I say throw all your preconceived notions of what a chocolate chip cookie should be and go ahead and make this recipe. The secrets? I think it boils down to: lots of butter, brown and granulated sugar, salt and resting time. Salt is now the “secret” of most baked goods that come out of my kitchen.

The recipe calls for both cake (or pastry) flour and bread flour, but all-purpose flour splits the difference on protein content between the two of them, so I’m certain these would still turn out terrific with what you are most likely to have on hand. I was unaware of the bread flour in the pantry, so the recipe I made was a mix of cake flour and all-purpose flour and they turned out excellent. And if you have it or can get your hands on it, these cookies do well with high-quality bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate. I won’t lie – used 16 ounces of grocery store semi-sweet chocolate chips and 4 ounces of chopped unsweetened chocolate to the complaint of no one. All in all, the recipe is written as I made it, but check out the source for Jacque’s “perfect” way to make ‘em.

I made these with a small cookie scoop – #50, about the size of a good, rounded tablespoon – and it made about 70 cookies (!). If you decide to make them a little bigger, keep the oven at the same temperature, but increase the time by a couple minutes. As always, just keep an eye on them and when in doubt, trust your nose. Once the smell overwhelms your kitchen, they’re done.

Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie

Yes, you may be noticing a trend. Banana bread (which I spread with peanut butter) and now this. Full disclosure, my go-to quick breakfast happens to be a slice of whole-wheat toast, smothered with cruncy peanut butter then topped with banana slices and acacia flower honey (THAT stuff is amazing, thanks sister). I’d almost go so far as to say that peanut butter and banana ranks up there with the combination of peanut butter and chocolate. I said almost.

Banana cream pie was never on my radar prior to a couple years ago. I signed up to be a recipe tester for Cook’s Country magazine (part of the Cook’s Illustrated portfolio) and their ultimate banana pudding was the first “assignment” I received. I’d never even made pudding before. The result was one of the most decadent, comforting desserts I’ve ever tasted. Fat free, to boot! (Where’s the sarcasm formatting button, again?)

Soon after making that, I figured it’d be an excellent starting point for banana cream pie. So, instead of layers of banana pudding and vanilla wafers topped with whipped cream, I made a pie with a vanilla wafer crust, thickened banana pudding filling and whipped cream on top. The problem in the couple times I made it was figuring out the best way to get the pudding to a consistency that it could actually come out of the pie plate as a slice, not a blob. This time, I nailed it--just the right amount of cornstarch.

Cook’s Country gets all the credit for the incredible deliciousness of the banana pudding filling, but I’m gonna go ahead and claim the bonus points for execution on the pie as a whole. Helloooooo, peanut butter whipped cream on top? Jackpot! For what it’s worth, one change I made to the original pudding recipe was switching up the milk product, adjusting from all half-and-half (10-18% butterfat) to part half-and-half, part whole milk (3.25% butterfat). Now wasn’t that kind of me?

Do yourself a favor and set aside a couple hours to make this pie. I promise you won’t regret it (and neither will the friends and family you share it with... you will share, right?).

Ultimate Banana Bread

I had the pleasure of joining a bunch of lovely ladies for my close friend Ashley's bachelorette party this weekend. We trekked up to Traverse City, Michigan to enjoy a day of wine tasting and fun. The weather was perfect, the wine was excellent and the company was impossible to beat. I did not make the banana bread for this occasion... no, instead, I created something juuuust a bit more risque--something I'm afraid will not make the blog at this time ;-)

Equal parts distraction from my other dessert endeavor and the need to use up a whole lot of overripe bananas,  I set to the kitchen to whip up America's Test Kitchen's Ultimate Banana Bread before leaving town for the weekend. Little to my surprise, I returned and it's almost gone. Because it's from the current season of America's Test Kitchen, this recipe is available for free on the ATK website for a limited time. The only change I made was to substitute some whole-wheat flour for a small amount of the all-purpose flour for a little added nutritional value. The banana liquid didn't reduce quite as dramatically as described for me, but the results were still great. This banana bread is moist, delightfully banana-y and damn good looking, if I do say so myself. Enjoy!