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recipe Friday
Yesterday was payday, and to celebrate not being flat broke, I bought a kitchen scale. I've been wanting one for ages. Now I can cook/bake from recipes that specify weights (as most non-US recipes do) rather than volume, without having to do ridiculous things like try and convert grams to cups. (I have done that once, successfully, to make a fruitcake, but it's full of potential problems and makes for nervous baking.) Having a scale also means I can bake bread properly by weighing my ingredients. Yay!
Something I cooked recently: Last night I finally baked the Lemon Polenta Cake I've been talking about for weeks. It was extremely easy--I put the whole thing together in the food processor, on the grounds that a cake with no wheat flour in it can't be over-mixed--and produced a delicious cake. The almond meal and polenta give the cake enough presence to stand up to the intense lemon syrup, unlike the lemon loaf cake I tried a couple of weeks back where the cake itself was sort of insipid. The finished lemon polenta cake is extremely moist (almost falling apart), extremely flavorful, and extremely extremely rich. Possibly a little too rich for my taste; I think I'll cut down the butter next time. Something about the moist richness and the dense crumbly texture reminds me of baklava, which is a good thing as I love baklava but I hate using phyllo pastry, because no matter what I do it immediately becomes dry and shatters. Anyway, another thing I'm loving about the cake is that it promises a lot of variability, since both the syrup and the batter could be spiced or flavored in many ways: lime or orange zest and syrup, grated ginger and a ginger-infused simple syrup, a lemon-basil or lemon-rosemary syrup, cardamom and saffron syrup, etc.
Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: Pizza! Using this recipe, except that I'm going to using uncased sausage, browned and drained, rather than sliced sausage links. The dough is rising now; I'm going to use half the dough, freezing the other half for later, and bake it in a 10 inch springform pan. This because not only don't I own a 14 inch pizza pan, but one probably wouldn't fit in my oven. And yes, I've done the math; a 10 inch pan is almost exactly half the area of a 14 inch pan. I'm excited about this project because I've never made my own pizza dough before, and also because this recipe allows me to have lots of toppings and cheesy goodness, whereas most homemade pizza recipes strive for an authentically Italian-style pizza with a thin crust and a distinctly ascetic touch with the toppings. These pizzas are no doubt excellent, but I grew up with American pizza and I want my cheese.
I'm not baking yeast bread this week, because bread and pizza dough was more than I wanted to tackle. Later on today I'll throw together a loaf of soda bread, which is easy and fast, so that I'll have something for breakfast and lunches.
Something I'm idly thinking about cooking someday: While grocery shopping yesterday I bought some split peas, so I'll be making split pea soup with those and the remaining ham hock in my fridge. That's probably the last of the really wintery things I'll be cooking for a while, because the weather here is definitely turning springlike. Speaking of which, asparagus continues to be on sale for 98 cents a pound, so I've got more of that to use in a pasta dish or a stir-fry or something. I need to try to reset my mind to spring and summer cooking.
ETA: I may possibly have made myself a Bloody Mary using the juice drained off of the tomatoes for the pizza. Vodka before noon: why not?
Something I cooked recently: Last night I finally baked the Lemon Polenta Cake I've been talking about for weeks. It was extremely easy--I put the whole thing together in the food processor, on the grounds that a cake with no wheat flour in it can't be over-mixed--and produced a delicious cake. The almond meal and polenta give the cake enough presence to stand up to the intense lemon syrup, unlike the lemon loaf cake I tried a couple of weeks back where the cake itself was sort of insipid. The finished lemon polenta cake is extremely moist (almost falling apart), extremely flavorful, and extremely extremely rich. Possibly a little too rich for my taste; I think I'll cut down the butter next time. Something about the moist richness and the dense crumbly texture reminds me of baklava, which is a good thing as I love baklava but I hate using phyllo pastry, because no matter what I do it immediately becomes dry and shatters. Anyway, another thing I'm loving about the cake is that it promises a lot of variability, since both the syrup and the batter could be spiced or flavored in many ways: lime or orange zest and syrup, grated ginger and a ginger-infused simple syrup, a lemon-basil or lemon-rosemary syrup, cardamom and saffron syrup, etc.
Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: Pizza! Using this recipe, except that I'm going to using uncased sausage, browned and drained, rather than sliced sausage links. The dough is rising now; I'm going to use half the dough, freezing the other half for later, and bake it in a 10 inch springform pan. This because not only don't I own a 14 inch pizza pan, but one probably wouldn't fit in my oven. And yes, I've done the math; a 10 inch pan is almost exactly half the area of a 14 inch pan. I'm excited about this project because I've never made my own pizza dough before, and also because this recipe allows me to have lots of toppings and cheesy goodness, whereas most homemade pizza recipes strive for an authentically Italian-style pizza with a thin crust and a distinctly ascetic touch with the toppings. These pizzas are no doubt excellent, but I grew up with American pizza and I want my cheese.
I'm not baking yeast bread this week, because bread and pizza dough was more than I wanted to tackle. Later on today I'll throw together a loaf of soda bread, which is easy and fast, so that I'll have something for breakfast and lunches.
Something I'm idly thinking about cooking someday: While grocery shopping yesterday I bought some split peas, so I'll be making split pea soup with those and the remaining ham hock in my fridge. That's probably the last of the really wintery things I'll be cooking for a while, because the weather here is definitely turning springlike. Speaking of which, asparagus continues to be on sale for 98 cents a pound, so I've got more of that to use in a pasta dish or a stir-fry or something. I need to try to reset my mind to spring and summer cooking.
ETA: I may possibly have made myself a Bloody Mary using the juice drained off of the tomatoes for the pizza. Vodka before noon: why not?
no subject
I checked the lemon polenta cake recipe again and I definitely didn't use 200 g of butter - I maybe used half the amount. And it was still very moist but I also used a bit of milk because the dough was very hard.
I enjoy your recipe post very much and I learn a lot (for instance I checked out what split peas are).