Thanksgiving

Sorry I've been so neglectful of my blogs! I have not been spending much time on the computer in the last few weeks, but I have been spending a lot of time in the kitchen.

My family spends every Thansgiving together at a cabin at Algonkian Park, which is within walking distance from my condo. I have a full house, and all the out of towners stay in the four bedrooms at the cabin. It's nice that it's no one's home base, and everyone pitches in with the food for four days, including the BIG meal. We've got it down to a science! We do send around a long email list of who's bringing what, but by the 8th or 9th year it's pretty much in stone. Here's a peek into our list:

ANYTIME SNACKS
Chex Mix - Jamie
Cookies - Jamie
Artichoke Dip - Carroll
Fruit - Henry & Lauren
Pimento Cheese - Hank

WEDNESDAY DINNER
Taco Soup - Patti
Corn Bread - Jamie

Jessi's Chocolate Cake - Jessi

THURSDAY BREAKFAST
Breakfast Before - Jessi
French Toast Casserole - Carroll

THANKSGIVING MEAL
Turkey + Turkey Breast - Patti
Gravy - Patti
Broccoli Bake - Patti
Stove Top - Patti
Rolls - Patti
Potatoes - Carroll
Sweet Potatoes - Jessi
Creamed Spinach - Jamie
Mac & Cheese - Jessi&Jamie
Henry's Cranberries - Legard
Canned Cranberry Sauce - Carroll
Legard salad - Legard

Pumpkin Pie - Jamie
Chess Pie - Hank
Pecan Pie - Jamie

FRIDAY BREAKFAST
Buttermilk Biscuits - Jamie
Apple Butter & Pumpkin Butter - Andy

FRIDAY DAY
Turkey & Dumplings - Patti
Leftover King - Erol

FRIDAY DINNER
If we need dinner Friday, we can all pitch in to make a spaghetti and meatball dinner?

SATURDAY BREAKFAST
Fried egg sandwiches - Patti

BEVERAGES
Coffee -
2% Milk -
Half & Half -
Apple cider and/or mulled cider - Hank
Beer - Erol & RT
Wine - Joel
Punch - Jessi&Jamie

NON-FOOD OTHER
Table cloths - Patti
Paper plates - Legard
Turkey time paper plates - Legard
Napkins - Legard
Paper towels - Jamie
Dish washing soap/sponge/gloves - Jamie
Hand soap for bathrooms - Jamie
General merriment - Andrew

Next year we probably won't even need a list. The only thing that changes is who's making Wednesday dinner and the breakfasts, for which we usually don't stick to the list anyway!

I just love Thanksgiving time. The food, the family, the games, the predictability, the everything. My recipes will be listed soon, and some pictures too, but I wanted to let you know that I'm still here in my messy kitchen!

Christmas Cookies....

Would anyone out there be interested in purchasing homemade cookies from me this holiday season? (Only in the Loudoun County area; I don't want to ship them.)

I'm just thinking about this idea and would like to see what kind of response I get before I decide if I want to really offer this. If you are interested, please leave a comment on this post for me. I assume that only friends and friends of friends read this blog, so that's who I'm thinking of. Even if I don't know you personally, I'd like to hear from you! Lots of my friends say they know people who check this, and I love hearing that and I'm very happy to share my Messy Kitchen with you.

Here's how it may work: I'd offer several varieties of cookies to purchase by the dozen (maybe Rosemary Butter Cookies, Cream Cheese Walnut, Chocolate Chunk, Shortbread, Chocolate-Dipped Walnut Biscotti). Some, like the first three mentioned, I could also sell as frozen dough logs or balls for you to bake at home. I could do deliveries on perhaps the three Fridays in December before Christmas. I won't do fancy packaging so if you want to give my cookies as gifts, that's up to you. You can take 100% credit for the baking!

Now, I'm not a natural sales person and I'd rather just give everything away for free, that's just my personality. But I will have to go against my instincts and charge for my services and my products. Small bakeries in Loudoun sell their cookies for $2 each or more. I'm thinking of charging $15-$20 per dozen, depending on the cookie, with discounts for buying more. Maybe $12 for the frozen dough. I use the best ingredients and can't buy them in large quantities like bakeries, and I will home/office deliver in the area. Plus you have my recipes!

I'm not looking to do this as a business, I just love baking and think it would be fun to offer this service to my friends (and friends of friends!) this holiday season.

Easy Sticky Buns

This recipe is from Ina Garten's newest cookbook Back to Basics, and is also on her website (lucky for me, I didn't have to re-type the recipe :o)

This picture speaks for it's self: YUM! And it was extremely easy.
I am not afraid of butter at ALL but I felt that these had an exhorbanent amount of butter. Next time I make this recipe I will use about half of the butter called for in the first step (in the muffin tins). I was impatient and in trying to soften my butter in the microwave, I accidentally (surprise, surprise) melted it completely. Maybe this contributed to the over butteryness bordering on greasyness?? Probably yes, but still it was a heck of a lot of butter.
I halved the recipe, and don't have a 6-cup muffin tin. I only have an (eeeeehhhhhhhh) nonstick 12 cup one. You should never bake a muffin tin with empty cups, so pour water into them by pulling out the oven rack, placing the pan on it, and then pouring in the water with a liquid measuring cup. You'll be very unhappy if you accidentally slosh water into the wrong cups so use care!
(By the way, are you thinking that I halved the recipe but maybe didn't half the amount of butter I used? I checked and re-checked. I did half the butter.)

If you also half this recipe, remember that the tin needs to be flipped 5 minutes after it comes out of the oven, so DON'T forget to remove the water! Roll up a kitchen washcloth and dip it in to soak up the water. The pan will be hot so the residual drops of water dry up immediately.

Sticky goodness!

Easy Sticky Buns
12 tablespoons (1 & 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/3 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

1/2 cup pecans, chopped in very large pieces

1 package (17.3 ounces/ 2 sheets) frozen puff pastry, defrosted

FOR THE FILLING:

2 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2/3 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 cup raisins (I didn't add the raisins today)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Place a 12-cup standard muffin tin on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the 12 tablespoons butter and 1/3 cup brown sugar. Place 1 rounded tablespoon of the mixture in each of the 12 muffin cups. Distribute the pecans evenly among the 12 muffin cups on top of the butter and sugar mixture.

Lightly flour a wooden board or stone surface. Unfold one sheet of puff pastry with the folds going left to right. Brush the whole sheet with half of the melted butter. Leaving a 1-inch border on the puff pastry, sprinkle each sheet with 1/3 cup of the brown sugar, 1½ teaspoons of the cinnamon, and ½ cup of the raisins.

Starting with the end nearest you, roll the pastry up snugly like a jelly roll around the filling, finishing the roll with the seam side down. Trim the ends of the roll about ½ inch and discard. Slice the roll in 6 equal pieces, each about 1½ inches wide. Place each piece, spiral side up, in 6 of the muffin cups.

Repeat with the second sheet of puff pastry to make 12 sticky buns.

Bake for 30 minutes, until the sticky buns are golden to dark brown on top and firm to the touch.

Allow to cool for 5 minutes only, invert the buns onto the parchment paper (ease the filling and pecans out onto the buns with a spoon) and cool completely.

Roasted Chicken and Roasted Garlic

Winner winner chicken dinner!!!!!!!! This was dinner the day I made the Challah. (I know that this was a long time ago, but I'm trying to catch up on my posting here...)
Roasted chicken with gravy, roasted garlic, and broccoli (yes, roasted). Me like roasting.

This was the wine of choice for this dinner, and I'm mentioning it because it was absolutely splendid! I pair food and wine so generally (meat = red wine, chicken = white), but a lot of the time I just go for any wine I'm in the mood for, regardless of the food. On this occasion the pairing was spot on and all flavors were enhanced to the point where it was really noticeable. In the future I plan on paying more attention to the food-wine pairing because I see what a difference it makes, even to unrefined palates such as ours.
Hahn Piesporter Michelsberg Riesling, $10 at The Wine Shop in Leesburg.Perfect Roast Chicken
recipe from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten

1 (5 to 6 pound) roasting chicken
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 large bunch fresh thyme, plus 20 sprigs (I used rosemary instead this time)
1 lemon, halved
1 head garlic, cut in half crosswise
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter, melted
1 large yellow onion, thickly sliced
4 carrots cut into 2-inch chunks
1 bulb of fennel, tops removed, and cut into wedges (I didn't use fennel...)
Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Remove the chicken giblets. Rinse the chicken inside and out. Remove any excess fat and leftover pin feathers and pat the outside dry. Liberally salt and pepper the inside of the chicken. Stuff the cavity with the bunch of thyme, both halves of lemon, and all the garlic. Brush the outside of the chicken with the butter and sprinkle again with salt and pepper. Tie the legs together with kitchen string and tuck the wing tips under the body of the chicken. Place the onions, carrots, and fennel in a roasting pan. Toss with salt, pepper, 20 sprigs of thyme, and olive oil. Spread around the bottom of the roasting pan and place the chicken on top. Roast the chicken for 1 1/2 hours, or until the juices run clear when you cut between a leg and thigh. Remove the chicken and vegetables to a platter and cover with aluminum foil for about 20 minutes. Slice the chicken onto a platter and serve it with the vegetables.

Brine!
I brined my chicken, which I HIGHLY recommend. It makes the inside of the chicken meat taste very flavorful, which is especially important if, like me, you don't eat much of the skin. Wash your chicken completely inside and out with cold running water, removing and discarding the junk from the cavity. Place the chicken in a bucket or other large container that will fit the chicken and will fit in your fridge; I use the lid of my cake tupperware. Fill it with water and a cup of sugar and a cup of salt. You may also add lemons, peppercorns, herbs, all sorts of stuff, but the sugar and salt is the base and that's all I use on a normal day.

Brine the chicken overnight. When you're ready to roast, get organized because this can be a very messy process. Read the recipe again and lay out all your ingredients so that you won't have to wash your hands a million times before you get the bird in the oven. Don't for get to set aside your salt and pepper too! Dry the chicken very well with paper towels, place it in the roasting pan, then go ahead with the recipe. When you brush on the butter, it may look kinda weird and the first time I did this I was like "eww what is happening?!" As the melted butter is smeared on the cold chicken, it solidifies a bit making it look and feel funny. I may be the only one who's noticed this, I don't know, but I wanted to mention it :o)

Roasted Garlic
OK now, if you have your oven on such a high temperature for that long of a time, you simply MUST roast some garlic for that meal or for the next day. All you have to do is cut the top 1/4 of a head of garlic off, place it on a piece of foil, spash on some olive oil, salt and pepper. Bunch up the foil into a tight bundle and throw it in the oven.
Cooking time or temp isn't very important; with the roasted chicken at 425 for 1.5 hours it comes out perfectly, so you can adjust from there according to whatever else you are cooking.

You get this rich garlic smear for your chicken, bread, broccoli - everything on your plate no matter what it is pretty much. Count on one head of garlic for every 2-3 people (or if you're Erol, one per person). The flavor isn't pungent at all like raw garlic, it's roasty and toasty and mellow and delish.
Unwrap the top of the foil package, and squeeze from the bottom up and scrape the soft cloves of garlic that squirt out into a little dish. Or, unwrap the top, and then place it in the dish and let people squirt out what they want at the table.

Tomato Soup, and the gift of food

Lunch today is: Tomato Soup! Now, I hate canned tomato soup like Campbell's. It's one of those things that I want to like, because it seems so cozy and perfect to have tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch on a cold day, and I've tried it, but it's just gross! I don't like ketchup, and to me it was like drinking warm ketchup. But homemade tomato soup that's easy to make and doesn't use fresh tomatoes (which are NASTY unless you get them in season locally), sounded like it might turn out to be what I have always been hoping for in Campbell's.

By the way, you see why I created this food blog?? I have some very strong opinions...

I used leftover chopped onion and red bell pepper for the vegetables in this soup; I didn't have celery and I simply forgot the carrot. I didn't have basil, but it's great without and would be good with it too, but I wouldn't buy it just for this recipe. For the optional heavy cream, I added a splash (maybe 1/4 cup) of half and half. It says to use an immersion blender but I used the regular ol' blender - if you do this remember to take off the removable piece from the blender top!! Cover the hole with a towel loosely and let the steam out. Just ask my sister what happens if you forget to to this.... Let's just say you'll be cleaning soup off the ceiling and ordering a new lid that afternoon...

Homemade Tomato Soup
recipe from Michael Chiarello on foodtv.com

1 (14-ounce) can chopped tomatoes
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 stalk celery, diced
1 small carrot, diced
1 yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup chicken broth
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup heavy cream, optional

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Strain the chopped canned tomatoes, reserving the juices, and spread onto a baking sheet, season with salt and pepper, to taste, drizzle with 1/4 cup of the olive oil and roast until caramelized, about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a saucepan, heat remaining olive oil over medium-low heat. Add the celery, carrot, onion and garlic, cook until softened, about 10 minutes. Add the roasted chopped canned tomatoes, reserved tomato juices, chicken broth, bay leaf and butter. Simmer until vegetables are very tender, about 15 to 20 minutes. Add basil and cream, if using. Puree with a hand held immersion blender until smooth.

OK, now to my gift! THIS was dessert last night: A frozen peanut butter pie, courtesy of my friend Pepsi! It was sooooo good and I'm about to go get a piece right now since I'm thinking about it! I told Erol about it at dinner and he could hardly wait for it, then once we got home he was kinda dancing around me asking when I was going to cut him a slice. This was my text to Pepsi while we were eating it: "Wow we both want to dive into this pie!" It was light and fluffy in texture and tasted like pure peanut butter heaven.

I met Ina Garten!!

Andy and I went to Ina Garten's book signing at Sur La Table in Arlington today!! We waited patiently in line for 90 minutes, outside in the cold and inside the store which was very crowded with people and merchandise. Luckily I had enough toys and snacks for the boy so he was content in his stroller the whole time. This trip could easily have been disastrous if he failed to cooperate. Here's our first glimpse of Ina! We thought we were getting close, but inside the line wrapped around the entire store, so we weren't even half way yet at this point.In the ROOM!

So, it's not exactly a picture with Ina Garten, more like we're in the same frame, but at least she's smiling.
She talked to Andy over her table, asked his name and remarked how well behaved he was. The lady in front of us agreed he was very patient (Good Boy!!). There was a pause while she was signing my books, so I go "I'm a big fan." I'm such a dork! But she did chat with me for about 10 seconds, so that was nice of her.

Here are a few recipes I plan on trying out soon:
Parmesan & Thyme Crackers
Roasted Potato Leek Soup
Coq au Vin
Dinner Spanakopitas
Chive Risotto Cakes
Orange Pecan Wild Rice
Brownie Pudding
Easy Sticky Buns
Homemade Granola Bars
French Apple Tart

Potato Chip Cookies

I saw recipes for Potato Chip Cookies in two different places on the same day, so I took it as a sign that I must make them. I don't have a rule or anything, but hey, it sounded good to me!

Now, I had NO idea what to expect here. I've never heard of these before, and certainly never eaten them. You'd think they'd be salty, right?? But no, they're not! I don't know why and it's really strange. They don't taste like potato chips at all, and you'd never know they're in there, except for they feel kinda potato-chippy when you chew them. The flavor is very buttery and a little nutty from the pecans. They are crisp, and extremely light and crumbly, like a pecan sandy but lighter in texture. Erol said that they are similar to chips in that you could eat a dozen of these before you realize it.
Potato Chip Cookies

recipe from The Best Of Fine Cooking Cookies magazine

8 oz. (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened at room temperature; more for shaping

1/2 cup granulated sugar; more for shaping

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

8 oz. (scant 2 cups) all-purpose flour

2 oz. (1/2 cup) finely chopped pecans

1/2 cup finely crushed potato chips

Position oven racks in the middle and top of the oven and heat the oven to 350°F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment.

With a stand mixer (use the paddle attachment) or a hand mixer, beat the butter and sugar on medium speed in a large bowl until creamy and well blended, about 4 minutes, scraping the bowl as needed. Add the vanilla and beat again until blended. Add the flour, pecans, and potato chips and mix on low speed until just blended.

Shape heaping teaspoons of dough into 1-inch balls. Arrange the balls about 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Put some sugar in a shallow bowl. Lightly grease the bottom of a glass or measuring cup with soft butter. Dip the glass into the sugar and press the glass down on a dough ball until it’s about 1/4 inch thick. Repeat dipping and pressing with the remaining balls.

Bake until the cookies look dry on top and the edges are light golden, 10 to 12 minutes, rotating and swapping the positions of the sheets for even baking. Let the cookies cool on the sheets on racks for 5 minutes before transferring them to racks to cool completely.

Store at room temperature or freeze in an airtight container, separating the cookie layers with waxed paper.