Irish Soda Bread

We tried this tonight to go with our Irish boiled dinner. The bread is definitely yummy - not overly sweet but definitely belonging to the sweet bread category - but we had some problems with the recipe as it is written, so I'll give you the recipe as I found it (on www.elise.com) and also tell you where it didn't work.

• 4 to 4 1/2 cups flour
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 cups buttermilk

Add 4 cups of flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda to a large mixing bowl and mix well. Using a pastry cutter work butter into flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal, then stir in raisins. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture. Add beaten egg and buttermilk and mix until dough is too stiff to stir. Dust hands with a little flour, then gently knead dough in the bowl just long enough to form a rough ball. If the dough is too sticky to work with, add in some more flour. Do not overknead! Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface and shape into a round loaf.

Even with the alloted amount of flour I could not get this to be anything but a gelatinous mess. I think I finally added an additional cup of flour (total 5 cups, so only 1/2 cup more than the max called for).

Transfer dough to a lightly greased baking sheet and score top of dough about 1/2'' deep in an "X" shape. Transfer to oven and bake until bread is golden and bottom sounds hollow when tapped with a knife, about 35-45 minutes. Check for doneness also via toothpick method.

At 50 minutes my bread was still raw at the center - completely raw - but it was browning on the outside, so I covered it in tinfoil and cooked it an additional 20 minutes (totalling 1hr 10min) before it was ready to come out.

Remove from oven and cool on wire rack. Serve bread warm, at room temperature, or toasted with butter. This we had no problem with. Yummy!

Christmas cookies - two varieties

Such a cold day, only four days from Christmas, found us seeking indoor diversions today, so we baked.  Isn't that a rather traditional thing to do this time of year?  I'd found two recipes in our Penzey's Spices magazine that we had wanted to try.  The first is for cocoa cookies and, while they taste pretty yummy, they were a pain to make; even after over an hour in the fridge the dough was too sticky to successfully transfer from counter to cookie sheet with its shape still intact.  The second recipe is for no-chill cookies and that one worked like a charm!

Cocoa Cutout Cookies (thanks to Penzey's Spices)

Combine 3/4C sugar, 1/4C corn syrup, 1 egg, 1t vanilla and beat on medium until creamy.  Add 1/4C cocoa powder, 1/2t baking soad, 2/3C butter (softened), 2C flour, and 1/2t baking powder and beat on low until well mixed.  Divide dough in half, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for at least one hour before rolling on a lightly floured surface to cut.  Bake cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet at 375 for 8 minutes per sheet.  Cool before frosting.

No-Chill Cutout Cookies (thanks to Penzey's Spices)

Mix 1C butter (softened) and 1C sugar until creamy.  Add 1 egg and 1t vanilla, mix until creamy.  Add 3C flour and 2t baking powder, blend well.  Form dough into a smooth ball and roll out on a lightly floured surface to cut.  Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 400 for 6 minutes.  Cool before frosting.

Vanilla Frosting (thanks to Penzey's Spices)

Combine 2C powdered sugar, 2t butter (melted), 3TB milk, 1/4t vanilla and mix until smooth.  Apply to cookies right away.  I made a make-shift applicator by rolling wax paper into a cone shape and filling it with frosting - a trick I learned umpteen years ago in Girl Scouts!

Sinterklaas Vooravond: 3 dishes for a Dutch holiday dinner

We held our annual De Vooravond Van Sinterklaas party yesterday (a day late, yes) and spiced our holiday fun with three decidedly Dutch dishes - runderlappen, hutspot, and brussels lof.  Although we can't recommend the last one, the first two were quite fun, so here you are!

Runderlappen

Runderlappen is basically meat and onions slow cooked in traditional spices, so start with 3lbs of round steak, pound it, saltand pepper it, then cut it into serving size pieces. Browned these pieces on both sides in about 1/2C of bacon drippings (I reserved these from preparing the bacon for the hutspot), then remove them to a slow cooker (with so much meat this took me several batches, and a little additional butter fat). After the final batch of meat is removed add 3 onions, sliced, and fry them slightly before adding 1C water, 3T vinegar, 1T mustard, 2 bay leaves, 1t whole cloves, and 10 peppercorns. Bring this to a boil, stirring to mix in the drippings from bottom of the pan, then pour over meat in the slow cooker. Add enough water (or broth) to just barely cover the meat and cook for 2-4 hours or until very tender. Turn meat every 1/2 hour or so. Serve hot with onions and some of the juice.

Hutspot

Hutspot is boiled potoatoes, onions, and carrots mashed together and served with meat. It's as easy as that. The recipes that we have seen call for about 6 onions, 6 carrots, and 8 potatoes to be washed, pealed, cut into pieces, and boiled in salted water alongside smoked sausages (Gelderse rookworst, to be exact). The vegetables are then removed and mashed together with 1/2C milk and 4T butter, then served with the sausages and cubed pieces of well done bacon. That's the traditional dish, but I left out the sausage and served it as the side starch to the runderlappen. I did serve it with the bacon, however, since I conveniently needed bacon fat for that dish!

Brussels lof

My computer translates this literally as "brussels praise" but I found a few web pages that make me think this is simply what the dutch call endive.  In any case, endive is popular as a cooked vegetable in the Netherlands and several other European countries.  In fact, the endive we were finally able to locate stateside had been shipped from Holland, and we don't mean Michigan.  I washed our endive, then sauted them in butter over high heat for about 2 minutes per side, after which I reduced the heat and added 3T lemon juice, 1t salt, and 1T sugar to the butter, covered the pan, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.  I can't say we enjoyed this dish.  It was relatively flavorless, and next year I might try a different endive recipe, or I might search for a completely different vegetable all together.  Who knows.

Happy (Dutch) holiday cooking!

Yes, pumpkins were hurt in the making of...

Have you ever made "from scratch" pumpkin pie before? I looked online for recipes and found all kinds of great ones, each and every one of them calling for at least two cans of pumpkin. I'm not sure when canned pumpkin became a "from scratch" item, but with all the BPA warnings, and with a little time and a lot of curiosity on hand, I not only volunteered to make our Thanksgiving pumpkin pie this year, I opted to make it truly from scratch, meaning, that is, from a pumpkin. So I tried another online search, this time for "how to make pumpkin pie from a pumpkin," and I took the very first recipe that came up. It wasn't a fancy looking site, but the method seemed good, so Calvin and I shopped for our ingredients on Monday, and settled into the kitchen for an afternoon of baking on Wednesday (well, actually Calvin was settled into his bed for a nap and only I was scurrying around the kitchen). Turns out the recipe was relatively easy, and way better than relatively good, so now I'll share it with you.

I'll give you the rundown below, but The site link is here: http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/pumpkinpie.php

The only thing I did differently was to soften my pumpkin by cooking it on high in the microwave for 3 minutes before attempting to cut it in half (the site mentions using a hand saw, but I thought this was a better idea).

I got my 8inch organic pie pumpkin from Arbor Farms, softened it in the microwave (3min on high) before cutting it in half and scooping out the pulp.  I then cut it into small enough pieces to fit into my microwaveable dish (which, to me, means NOT PLASTIC, unlike the pictures on the recipe site), added an inch of water, covered it, and microwaved (again on high) for about 20 minutes (I had to do mine in two batches because it wouldn't all fit in the dish).

When done I was able to remove the skin by just lifting it off.  I then pureed the pumpkin using a hand held submersion mixer (great tool for this project!), and set it in the refrigerator for an hour while I made the crust (I used her recipe with whole wheat flour, but think my no roll recipe would work fine) and cleaned up the pumpkin mess. 

After pouring off any excess water I measured out 3 cups of pumpkin (I froze the remaining 2 or 3 - that was a lot of pumpkin!) and added to it the following:  1cup raw sugar, 1.5t ground cinnamon, 1t ground cloves, 1t ground allspice, 1/2t ground ginger, 1/2t salt, 4 eggs, and 18oz organic evaporated milk (which I found also at Arbor Farms - got to love them!).  I then mixed well with my hand mixer, poured into my waiting pie shell and slid it into the oven.  Just as she says on her site, man was it liquidy!  And boy did it cook up nicely.

Baking: I started it at 425 for just 15 minutes, then dropped the temperature to 325 for another hour.  She says to keep it at 350 for 45-60 minutes, though, and I might do that next time.  The usual clean knife rule applies here.  I also coated walnut halves with brown sugar and butter and added these to the top for the final 5 minutes of baking.  Also, I had plenty of leftover crust and dough, so I painstakingly made minipies in a cupcake tin (getting the crust in takes forever!) and added them to the oven for the final 45 minutes.  Not bad.

Sadly, I have no pictures of the finished pie itself, mostly its murderous beginnings, but hopefully you'll get the chance to make one and see it for yourself - yum!

Irish Boiled Dinner

Tonight was pumpkin carving night and that meant Irish dinner.  Why?  Because according to many sources the Irish brought us the Jack-o-lantern (and can really be thanked for much of Halloween, for that matter), and so to celebrate the roots of this season enjoyment we started our evening with Irish Boiled Dinner.  The way my mom makes this feast is by boiling corned beef, but I tried a new recipe tonight and boiled fresh organic brisket in beer.  I have to say, I'd rather have the corned beef and the beer on the side, and I disagree with the cooking times the original recipe listed, so I'll tell you what they said, and what I did.  The recipe came from Cooks.com:

Put 2lb beef brisket in dutch oven; add two 12oz bottles of Lager beer, 2c water (or enough to cover meat), 2 bay leaves, 10 black peppercorns, 1/2c parsley, and 2t salt; start water.

In saucepan add 2T olive oil, 3 cloves garlic (sliced), 2c leeks (chopped), 1 md onion (sliced); saute for a few minutes, then add to dutch oven.

Bring water mixture to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for 2-3 hours or until meat is tender.  Meanwhile chopped your veggies to add later:  3/4lb carrots (cut in large pieces), 3/4lb red potatoes (peeled), 2lbs green cabbage (cut in sixths, leave part of the core in to keep leaves together).  Add carrots and potatoes in last 25 minutes and cabbage in last 15 minutes.  Remove from water and serve hot.

Notes:  I already mentioned that next time I'll use corned beef and drink the beer.  Also, I used more carrots and potatoes than they called for, and I think they're wrong on their cooking times, so next time I plan to cook my cabbage for 25 minutes and my other veggies for only 15.

March 17, 2009 -  I made this again tonight using the following alteratiosn - I used corned beef (yes, you can buy it organic), boiled it in water, and drank the beer.  The cabbages and potatoes I added 35 minutes before the meat would be done, and the carrots only 15.  The carrots could have used a little less time, perhaps, but otherwise this was delightful.  Try it with Irish Soda bread - yum!