Holiday Cooking and Baking

Today is the day to start some holiday baking! On the agenda: gingerbread men to decorate with the girls, a batch of regular truffles, and maybe a couple of other things. I don't quite have my traditions nailed down yet. What are yours?

I also need to prepare for Christmas Eve dinner, but I can't quite think about that yet. Uh oh!

Truffles

Well, it took 4 batches, but I got somewhere with the vegan truffles. Great taste -- dark chocolate dusted with cocoa powder, bathed in orange blossom water, rolled in cocoa again and topped with luster dust and a couple of grains of fleur de sel. Weird texture, though -- I couldn't quite get them to set up enough -- even with arrowroot. Maybe not enough? I'll make the real deal next week for my mom, so it will be interesting to check out the differences in texture. Then maybe back to the drawing (cooking) board.

Truffles

Well, I started a little project today. As I've mentioned before, I love to renovate recipes. I am making homemade truffles this year (simple ones, I should say), and I want to make some animal product-free ones for my friend Lori. Lori is a terrific baker -- I secretly think she doesn't sleep because she is also mom of two, and an avid runner and yogi. I have seen her easily draw herself into some pretty awesome poses. Anyway, I digress. Lori has a dairy allergy and a vegan lifestyle to accommodate it, so I don't want her to be left out of the holiday truffle fun. The first task was to make a vegan substitute for heavy cream, which I did tonight, using silken tofu, soy milk and arrowroot. It actually was pretty rich and silky after I brought it up to a simmer! I combined it with some vegan chocolate, coarse sea salt and vanilla -- I'm just not sure of the quantities I used. It is setting up overnight, so tomorrow we'll see if we can take it to the next step or if we're starting over...

Slippery Little Fellas

For dinner tonight, I made a quick pasta with some broccoli rabe, sundried tomatoes, shallots and garlic. I topped it off with some toasted pine nuts and the king of cheeses (as Mario would say). Yummy! But alas, no pictures. It was all eaten! Even Josephine and Lucy preferred it to their frozen Elmo Whole Wheat Pizza that I heated up for them. But here's the thing -- the sundried tomatoes needed to be chopped fine, and those buggers are slippery, even under relatively sharp knives! Is there a secret to chopping them? Discuss.

chef academy, episode 1

or, emmanuel delcour is awesome.

as previously mentioned, i am unable to resist a food/cooking-based reality show. add in this guy, and i'm positively licking glued to the tv.

bravo's chef academy is a kind of jumble of cooking show, talent contest, and docudrama featuring famed chef jean cristophe novelli. the chef and his about-to-give birth girlfriend arrive in the US from the UK to set up a branch of his esteemed school of cookery.

up first? visiting the location, picking the contestants, the requisite melodrama, and a glimpse of the students' er, chops. i won't go into too much detail, for those of you who haven't watched. it's quite enjoyable. the fact that it's on monday nights at 11:00P is a bit odd; why no tie-in with top chef? anyway, watch it and report back. there may be a quiz.

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ok, i lied. spoilers after this point (if only so i may get on my soapbox for a bit. this has nothing to do with food, so feel free to move along if pseudo-serious social commentary is not for you)...

as it has already been alluded to in the teasers from next week's show, video previews on the website, and various and sundry blogs, mr. delcour had a previous incarnation, under a pseudonym, as an actor in adult movies. read: he was a porn star. (and, might i add, the only porn star that has ever made me actually want to watch. but i digress.)

i was hoping they weren't going to include this fact in this new show. not because i have any problem with the profession personally, but because of the inevitable puritanical backlash that seems to come with any such admission. already i've seen bloggers posting about 'outing' him and comments that bravo should have done a better background check.

while i understand that pornography is obviously a loaded issue, and not exactly considered to be a mainstream subject of discussion, i personally find it frustratingly hypocritical that a society that spends literally billions of dollars on porn annually can simultaneously turn their collective noses at anyone involved in said industry.

anyway, my point, and i could go on at length but i will restrain myself, is this: i hope that this show doesn't turn into a disdainful attack on a former porn star while it obviously capitalizes on any resulting publicity. of course, i'm not sure why i would expect adherence to such a standard from a reality tv show, but it would be refreshing, would it not?

okay, class dismissed :).

It looks pretty good, but

yuck.

One of my food hobbies is renovating recipes, that is, attempting to make them healthier without sacrificing (too much) of the flavor and texture. This one didn't quite work. It's a baked shells dish with tomatoes, Italian sausage and broccoli rabe. The original is a recipe from Everyday Food, which for the life of me I can't find on the website. Maybe they don't post recipes until the next print issue is out? I don't know. Anyway, I digress. Of course. For this recipe, I decided to use brown rice pasta instead of regular medium shells. I used Tinkyada, a brand of brown rice pasta I've used often, but this time with disastrous results. Despite seriously undercooking the pasta in the boil phase of the recipe, it was already seeming overdone. Once it was baked -- completely fallen apart. Gnarly.

I did however, have great success with the other renovation to the recipe: using non-meat sausage (oh, I know some of you are rolling from that phrase)! I used Field Roast Italian Sausage, and I thought it was yummy. It added the oregano and fennel flavor of sausage, along with some of the texture and chew of meat, but left out the fat, calories and then ummm... animal part.

So I guess I was 1-1 on this reno. I just can't get the squishy rice pasta texture out of my mouth. Eeww.

twice baked

another meal based on what we had left in the fridge...this time good ol' twice baked potatoes.

i've discovered that if i have cheese around, it's possible to make something at least passably good to eat.  (or, of course, we can just eat the cheese straight up.  truth be told, cheese is one of my main food groups.)

the gorge made some delicious meatballs (more on those later!) and baked potatoes for dinner last night. so today i scooped out the leftover potatoes, threw them in a pan with butter, smoked cheddar cheese, some parmesan, sour cream, a bit of milk, chopped scallions and some salt and pepper.  when it was kinda melty and mixed through, i filled the potato 'shells' and added more parmesan (cheese, glorious cheese) and baked them.

i was wishing i had bacon to put in them, but the smoked cheddar added a surprisingly bacon-y quality. not a revolutionary recipe, but quite yum-o, to borrow a phrase!