Season

Chipotle Pecan Brownies and “The Unofficial Girls Guide to New York”

December 5, 2013February 7, 2017

Welp, it’s officially time to start making holiday treats and going gift shopping. Last night Jonah and I went to the Holiday Ale Fest, and it really got me into the holiday spirit. In thinking of holiday gifts, I want to tell you about this little book that I think would make a great present: The Unofficial GIRLS Guide to New York.

Now, before we jump in here, let me clarify that this book is the GIRLS guide, as in the TV show. Which I love. The past 2 seasons, my friend Erica has come over every week to watch it with us. The characters are fantastic (I think Shoshana is my favorite), the storyline is ever-entertaining, and it certainly captures certain aspects of being a twenty-something in a big city and not having any idea of what you’re doing with your life. Which I may or may not be able to relate to.

So when my aunt and uncle (of Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook fame) told me they were writing a GIRLS book, I was incredibly excited. Jonah and I rattled off interviews they could do, recipes, etc. But they had already thought of everything. This book is half fan-girl material, half guidebook, with some great recipes sprinkled throughout. Since receiving it in the mail, I’ve loved flipping through it, reading the stories of all the locations – not only because they make up the backdrop for this great show, but also because it’s New York, and there are so many interesting tidbits about all of these places. I’m just sad the book wasn’t out in time for our trip to New York!

I wanted to give you a little sneak preview by letting you in on one of the recipes. I decided to whip up “Agave’s Chipotle Pecan Brownies” a couple weeks ago, and dang were they good. More cake-y and less fudgy, the chipotle brings a really nice smoky and spicy flavor to these sweets. These would be a great unique treat to whip up for a holiday party! The recipe comes from Oberlin’s Agave Burrito Bar & Tequileria (Oberlin is where Marnie, Hannah, Jessa, and Elijah went to college, and where Marnie meets Charlie at the Oberlin College Galactic Safe Sex Ball 2007, which you can read more about in the book). I made half the recipe, and still had a 9×13 pan full of these bad boys, so I’ll give you the halved version, plus the full amounts in parentheses.

Chipotle Pecan Brownies

Ingredients

6 oz semisweet chocolate (12 oz)
1 cup plus 2 Tbl unsalted butter, room temperature (2 1/4 cups)
1 3/4 cups sugar (3 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (1 Tbl)
4 eggs (8 eggs)
1 1/4 cups flour (2 1/2 cups)
3/4 tsp cinnamon (1 1/2 tsp)
3/4 tsp chipotle powder (1 1/2 tsp)
4 oz pecans, crumbled to your desired consistency (8 oz)

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 9×13 baking dish/pan (or 2 if you’re using the amounts in parentheses).

In a double boiler, melt the chocolate, stirring frequently. While the chocolate is melting, cream the butter and sugar together in an electric mixer on medium speed. Add the vanilla, mix again, and then add the eggs. Mix to combine – it should be “creamy and lemon colored.” With the mixer on low speed, slowly pour in a little bit of the chocolate. Let the mixer stir this small amount in, then slowly pour in the rest of the chocolate and mix until it’s just incorporated.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, and chipotle powder, then stir to combine. Remove the bowl of chocolate from your mixer base, and gently fold the dry ingredients into the chocolate batter until thoroughly combined.

Pour the batter into your prepared pan, and scatter the pecans over the top. Bake for 25 minutes, rotate the pan 180 degrees, and bake for another 10-15 minutes. The brownies should be just set in the center of the pan. Remove from oven, and allow to cool for an hour before cutting. Serve them up and enjoy!

Mexican Feast: Chile Relleno with Shrimp

November 19, 2013February 7, 2017

Chile Relleno with Shrimp // Serious Crust by Annie Fassler

At the end of October, we took a trip to Mexico. My mom rented a house in Sayulita for a couple of weeks (we were only there for 1 week), and we spent our days swimming in the ocean, reading, swimming in the pool, and eating a lot of incredibly delicious Mexican food. Perhaps my favorite thing about our trip was all of the seafood, particularly shrimp. I am a big fan of shrimp, especially when they’re cooked to perfection and slathered in butter and garlic. Another amazing preparation that we ate (at least 3 times in a week) was chile relleno stuffed with shrimp.

Knowing that I love to cook, my mom asked one of the housekeepers from the complex to come over one night to do a kind of cooking lesson with us. Maria was fantastic – funny, smart, and an incredible cook. I think she was surprised that we a) wanted to help so much with the cooking and b) that, amongst us, we knew a fair amount of Spanish! She said that many of people she cooks for say they want to practice their Spanish, but don’t actually end up talking with her that much. But Jonah is fluent in Spanish, and my mom and sister aren’t half bad either.

Maria showed up to our house at 5 o’clock, and immediately got to work boiling tomatoes and peppers, roasting poblanos, and chopping away. I’m going to focus on the recipe for Chile Relleno stuffed with shrimp, but she also made us Mahi Mahi with garlic, 3 different salsas (one mild, one hot, and one pico de gallo, or salsa Mexicana, as she called it), beans, rice, guacamole, tortillas, and flan.

And thankfully, after cooking for us in the very hot kitchen, she joined us at the table. Maria made 6 peppers, so I’ll give you roughly that recipe. She didn’t measure a single thing, so a lot of this is my own guess work.

Chile Relleno with Shrimp

Ingredients

1 poblano pepper per person you’re feeding. 6 people? 6 peppers.
1/4 lb shrimp per pepper
~3/4 cup all purpose flour (for coating the peppers)
4 eggs, separated
Vegetable oil
Salt

Instructions

First things first. Roast the peppers. If you’ve got a gas stove, you can do this right on top of the burner. If you don’t have a gas stove, turn on your broiler, and put the peppers on a pan in the oven. Keep a close eye on them. Either way, you’ll want to turn them (with tongs) every minute or so. You want the skin to char and blister. Once they’re charred, you can either put them in a bowl and cover it, or use Maria’s fantastic technique: tie them up in a plastic bag. You want the peppers to steam up, which will help soften them and loosen the charred skin. After allowing them to sit for about 10 minutes, peel and seed the peppers. Seed them by making a lengthwise cut along one side, and cutting out the seeds with a small knife. You want to leave the stem in tact.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the shrimp, and boil until pink, but still tender. Drain and sprinkle with salt. Gently stuff the peppers with the shrimp. Put the flour on a large plate, and coat each pepper in flour. Set aside.

In a bowl, whip egg whites until foamy, but not quite till peaks form. Add the yolks, whip some more. Heat 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a (preferably non-stick) pan over medium heat. You’re going to cook your peppers one at a time, so it may not be a bad idea to set your oven to 200 degrees and put a pan in there to put the finished peppers on, so they’ll still be warm. When the oil is hot, coat a pepper in egg mixture, and place it in the pan. Now you’re going to kind of baste the pepper with oil. Using a spoon or a spatula, gently splash the hot oil up onto the pepper, so that even the part not touching the oil cooks a bit. Continue to turn the pepper and “baste” until the egg is nice and browned. Place in the oven, and repeat with the rest of the peppers.

Serve with salsa, guacamole, and sour cream!

Earl Grey Madeleines

November 13, 2013February 5, 2017

Elsa has discovered my secret.

My dear friend Elsa and I were hanging out quite a bit when she finally got back from her worldly travels this summer, as she was job hunting, so had her days free, just like I do. She came over one afternoon, and we decided to bake something. I started looking for recipes, and suggested rosemary shortbread, thyme/sea salt/chocolate chunk cookies, or these earl grey madeleines from Baking a Moment. She looked at me and said “Are we only allowed to make things that involve weird flavor combinations?”

She’s right. I like trying new flavor combinations. Why have chocolate chip cookies when you can add thyme? Or plain shortbread when you can add rosemary? Why not spice it up a bit? Plus, combinations like this are becoming rather mainstream. I think I’ve got her on the weird flavor combo train at this point, but she still teases me all the time. Anyway, on that afternoon, I convinced her to make earl grey madeleines with me. And dang, were they good.

For the record, Elsa made me zucchini, jalapeno, lime cookies for my birthday.

Earl Grey Madeleines

Ingredients

6 Tbl unsalted butter
3 bags earl grey tea
2 tsp light brown sugar
2 tsp honey
2 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

In a small pot on the stove, melt the butter. While the butter is melting, cut open the tea bags, and then stir the loose tea into the melted butter. Allow to steep over low heat for about 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and allow it to steep for another 5 minutes. Strain the tea butter. I used a mesh sieve that I overlayed with the tea bags (which I had cut to make sheets). If you have cheesecloth, you can use that.

Stir the brown sugar and honey into the tea butter. They may stay kind of separated, and you can slightly reheat to try to combine them better. Ours wouldn’t really combine no matter how much we reheated them, and everything worked out just fine. So don’t stress about it.

Here’s another weird step. In a (preferably metal) mixing bowl, combine the eggs and granulated sugar. Fill another bowl with very hot water, and put the bowl of eggs/sugar into the bowl of hot water. Mix this with your fingers (I know, I know) until the eggs feel slightly warm and the sugar has dissolved and is no longer grainy. When you’ve reached that point, you can remove the bowl from the water and whip the eggs/sugar on high until it has tripled in volume.

In another bowl (I know, it’s a bowl heavy recipe), sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Gently fold the egg mixture in in two additions. Pour a little bit of this batter into the tea butter, stir it up, and then pour the tea butter into the batter. Again, gently fold until thoroughly combined.

Spoon the batter into a buttered and floured madeleine pan. You only need to fill up the molds about 2/3 of the way. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until they’re golden-brown around the edges. Remove the madeleines from the pan immediately and allow them to cool on a wire rack. Enjoy with a glass of milk, a nice coffee, or tea!

Buttermilk Devil’s Food Cake

November 6, 2013February 5, 2017

My Mom’s birthday was a month ago today, so it seems appropriate that I’m sitting in a tea shop, writing this post, looking at pictures of her with the birthday cake I made for her.

My mother is a pretty damn incredible woman. I don’t know if I’ve told you about her before, but let me. When we were growing up, she was always encouraging us to play. I don’t just mean my sisters and I playing with each other, or playing with dolls, or playing with crafts, but in the larger sense too. She encouraged us to be adventurous, boisterous, and reach for the stars.

If we wanted to make cookies, she was there to help. If we wanted to go out for the basketball team (a mistake I made only once, trust me), she was there at every game. If we wanted to be in plays (which we did… a lot) she drove us to auditions, sat with us while we waited nervously, drove us to rehearsals, helped create costumes, and was always in the front row on opening night, grinning from ear to ear, and often mouthing the words to the songs along with us. She pushed my creativity, she pushed me to try really hard, to do anything I wanted to do. That’s an incredible woman.

When I went off to college and my parents split up, my mom and I had a rough time. It’s been a hard few years of rebuilding, getting to know each other again, and finding the foundation that we had built when I was younger. But it seems since her birthday, my mother’s true unbridled joy and adventure and creativity has reappeared. It has been slowly creeping back for the past couple of years, especially since she has found David, but in the past month, it seems like she’s here to stay.

This year was my mom’s 60th birthday (hopefully she doesn’t kill me for writing that…) and we went big. Rather, David went big with many many surprises, and we all helped scheme and plan. She was surprised four separate times: by the arrival of me, my older sister, and Jonah on Friday afternoon; the arrival of her mother, sister, brother-in-law, brother, and sister-in-law on Friday night; by my little sister’s arrival on Saturday morning; and by a surprise party with all of her friends and a live band on Saturday afternoon.

It was the most pure joy I’ve ever seen her exude. It was a beautifully sunny weekend, and on Sunday we all made dinner together, like families do. When I asked my mom what birthday cake she wanted, she said “That buttermilk devil’s food cake I used to make you guys for your birthdays.” Emily, my older sister, immediately remembered this cake, but it took me a while. My mom dug around in her recipe box and pulled out this magazine page from 1985. Under the title it says “Makes 10 servings at $0.88 each.”

I didn’t remember this cake until I smelled the frosting, and then it came rushing back, which seems appropriate. The cake, and that weekend, reinforced the woman that my mother is and always has been. It’s rich, deep chocolate with an unexpected but welcome twist from the buttermilk and sour cream, perfect for a birthday, but especially perfect for my mother.

Buttermilk Devil’s Food Cake

Ingredients

Devil’s Chocolate Cake

Unsweetened cocoa powder (for dusting the pans)
2 1/4 cups sifted cake flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
2 1/2 cups light brown sugar
3 eggs
3 1/2 squares (1 oz. each) unsweetened chocolate, melted
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup boiling water
2 1/4 tsp vanilla

Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting

15 squares (1 oz. each) semisweet chocolate
1 1/2 cups sour cream
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
a pinch of salt

Instructions

Devil’s Chocolate Cake

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Butter 3 9-inch round cake pans. Line the pans with parchment paper, and butter the paper. Dust the bottoms and sides of the pans with cocoa powder.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

Using an electric mixer (or whatever) beat the butter until it’s light and fluffy. Beat in the sugar until it’s light and fluffy too. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Blend in the melted chocolate. My aunt (the cookbook author) had a great tip for this. Anytime I mix warm ingredients (like melted chocolate) into eggs, I get nervous that the eggs are going to cook. Her tip was to start with a little bit, blend it, and then add the rest of it. It makes a big difference. To me anyway.

Alternate adding the flour and buttermilk to the butter mixture, beginning and ending with the flour, until it’s well combined. Stir in the boiling water and the vanilla and divide the batter equally into the 3 prepared cake pans. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a knife or toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool them in their pans for 5-10 minutes, then turn them out onto cooling racks and remove the parchment paper to cool the rest of the way.

Sour Cream Chocolate Frosting

To make the frosting, melt the chocolate in a double boiler over barely simmering water. Remove from the heat, and beat in the sour cream, vanilla, and salt. Beat until it’s creamy and holds it’s shape. Be warned though, once this frosting cools, it hardens because of the chocolate. So frost your cake while the frosting is still soft and warm.

You may want/have to trim your cakes. I didn’t and it work ok. Put a layer on whatever plate you’re using to serve, and spread evenly with some of the frosting. Repeat with the remaining layers, and then frost the sides.

Enjoy with a glass of cold milk, family, and lots of laughs.