Category Archives: Family

Cooking techniques, Family, Food

Crisp or crumble?

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Ben’s cousin, his wife and their new baby came for a visit a couple weekends ago, and since the baby isn’t quite up to restaurant meals we stayed in on Saturday night. We had a simple dinner and topped it off with a strawberry rhubarb crumble I found on Smitten Kitchen.

The good news: Strawberry and Rhubarb! It’s nearly summer!

The recipe is easy and I loved the flavor of the topping. The lemon zest gave a lovely citrus scent, and the texture (it contains raw sugar and the large amount of melted butter) is fantastic.

Two things about the filling, though. I cut my rhubarb too big, so it took forever to cook and it didn’t combine with the strawberries quite enough. Still good, though. The bigger problem was the gummi-factor. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of flour and I think that must have been too much for the fruit I was using; I will investigate other recipes to see if that could be it. I felt like there was a gummy biscuit batter surrounding the fruit, and sometimes there wasn’t much fruit to be found in it.

I should have known I was headed somewhere doughy when the filling looked like this before baking, but honestly I haven’t made any fruit pies and have only made a couple cobblers, always with peaches:

Bleurgh, let’s cover that up with buttery deliciousness:

All in all I’d give it a B, all on account of the filling. I will have to try again; what a sacrifice!

That ice cream, by the way, is Ginger-Molasses from Christina’s in Inman Square. Mmmmm.

The rest of dinner, for the record:
Salad with crispy goat cheese cakes (squash slices of goat cheese gently, dip in egg white then panko (with salt and pepper); saute in olive oil):

Then grilled sausages and asparagus, and a big bowl of Lydia’s pasta salad.

Family, Food, Recipes

Dolly’s (Almost) Crisp Toffee Bars

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I have always read cookbooks, starting when I was in middle school or so. In my parents’ house there is a small built-in bookcase in the dining room where my mom always kept her cookbooks, so the easiest thing to grab to read over a snack or solo breakfast or lunch was a favorite tome. My usual pick was Barbara Tropp’s China Moon Cookbook (packed with hilarious stories in the sidebars, as well as fun recipes intros), but I also turned to Italy in Small Bites for mouth-watering descriptions of regional snacks throughout Italy, and to the various works of Maida Heatter for the most precise (and fascinatingly old-fashioned) recipes I’d ever seen.

Heatter, a master of dessert recipes, introduced me to the science of baking–one I’ve never really explored. I need to collect my own copies of her books and give dessert a try. My childhood was studded with Heatter recipes: My favorite was September Seventh Cake, which had a whipped filling, but my mom made the ultra-simple and (to adults–it’s spiked with rum) delicious Craig Claiborne’s Rum Chocolate Dessert for tons of dinner parties before she discovered crostatas. The brownie recipe (these are all from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, I think) is also killer.

But my very favorite cookies of all time are Dolly’s Crisp Toffee Bars. When properly made, the cookies, which contain no egg and LOTS of butter, are very thin and crispy, and have a shelf life of about a month. They’re sturdy and great for care packages, and perfectly toe the line between candy and cookie. I, of course, didn’t make them quite right, but we’ll get to that.

I found this recipe online–Mom, do you mind taking a quick look at the cookbook to make sure it’s right?

Dolly’s Crisp Toffee Bars
From Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts
Makes 32 bar cookies

1/2 pound unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup brown sugar (light or dark; I used dark), firmly packed
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
4 ounces walnut, cut into medium sized pieces (1 generous cup)
6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips (1 cup)

Adjust rack to the center of the oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl, cream the butter with a mixer.
Add the salt, vanilla, and sugar and beat well.

On low speed, gradually add the flour, scraping the bowl with a rubber spatula and beating until the mixture holds together.
Add the nuts and chocolate chips and mix well.

Spread the dough (it will be stiff) into an unbuttered 10 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 1 inch jelly roll pan. (This is where I went wrong: I don’t have that size pan so I used a quarter sheet, which is probably 9X12? Too small. I should have spread them in a half sheet; I could probably have even ignored part of the sheet and just not filled it all the way, since the dough is so stiff.)
With floured fingertips, press the dough firmly to make an even layer- it will be thin.

Bake for 25 minutes, reversing the pan front to back once to insure even baking. The cake will be golden brown. (I then didn’t compensate for the thicker dough by baking longer. Nope.)
Let cool in the pan for only a minute or so.
With a small sharp knife, cut into bars; let stand in the pan until cool.

Transfer the cookies to paper towels to dry the bottoms.
Wrap individually in wax paper or store in an airtight container.

Ok, so mine were just plain bar cookies–they never crisped up and got that toffee flavor or texture. I should have left them in longer. But next time I will make them properly thin and thus super crispy. Maybe I will do that this weekend. Or maybe not, since my 10 year high school reunion is a week from tomorrow and I suppose eating a sheet of cookies isn’t a great preparation method?

Family, Food, Good stuff, Travel

TJ’s meal + a weekend trip

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Well. I inadvertently made a meal from all Trader Joe’s ingredients:

That’s a Harvest Grain mix (israeli couscous, some orzo, baby garbanzo beans, quinoa), mahi mahi marinated in garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes, and a bag of baby spinach.

Doesn’t that look promising? Just wait, in the finished photo it looks even better. Sadly, this product was a total bust–the couscous and orzo, as you’d imagine, cooked just fine in the 10 minutes instructed by the bag. Any longer and they’d have been mush. The dried baby garbanzo beans? Not so much. As a result the texture was upsetting.

The fish Ben grilled according to the package instructions–7 minutes/side–and it was perfect. Juicy and very flavorful, though the marinade was too salty. Still, Ben liked it, so that adds another fish to our list! And I love mahi mahi, so I was happy despite the high sodium content. As for the spinach, I just sautéed it quickly with garlic and olive oil. Yum.

That extremely healthy dinner (if only the pilaf-ish thing had been better!) came together in about 15 minutes. Long Live Trader Joe’s!

Over the weekend we were down in Rockland County for a family event, so we decided to make a weekend of it and visit my cousin at Bard College, see a concert, and spend the night. I was stunned by how cool the Bard Campus is–it’s got about 90 buildings, many of them darling quirky houses scattered around as dorms or faculty housing. I took tons of photos of the Blithewood Mansion and its gardens. We went to a good concert at the Gehry-designed performing arts center, then had dinner at the bistro at Terrapin, in Rhinecliff. Fun place in an old church.

We stayed up in Hudson, in a really cool house/B&B run by a very fun couple, The Inn at Hudson. (Read all about the house and the owners in this New York Times story; the guest room they show is the one we stayed in.) On Sunday morning one of the owners, Dini, showed us his video (as his Drag alter-ego, Musty Chiffon), “(I wanna be) Jackie Onassis.” It was a cover of the song, which his New Wave band first recorded in the early 80s. The whole thing was amazing and I still have the song stuck in my head. You can watch the video, too, if you want…

Photos from the weekend…
Family, Food, General, Life in the Big Woods, Travel

Bon Voyage, Tom!

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I spent this weekend back up in Hanover helping my brother Tom get ready to leave for a two-month trip through Europe to absorb great works of architecture. He’s a smart puppy who won a travel grant to fund this trip. Since graduating from Dartmouth last June he designed and built a new timber-framed sugarhouse for the Dartmouth Organic Farm, worked at various timber framing jobs, and worked as a cabinet maker. He’s also a great cook!

I got up to Hanover Friday evening (after my first solo highway drive longer than 15 or 20 minutes–whee!) Tom was getting ready to grill dinner for me and for the college’s current Artist in Residence. We enjoyed sirloin, grilled asparagus, pasta with pesto and a delicious cabbage slaw.

He says he made the slaw using vegetable oil and cider vinegar with quite a bit of sugar for the dressing. I will experiment, since he wasn’t very precise with quantities! We ate leftover steak and slaw in great sandwiches the next day.

Tom has been working on a gorgeous custom fly-tying desk for a couple months, using many of the techniques he learned in timber-framing. He finished it on Friday and on Saturday we went to the woodshop to attach the top to the base and do a couple other final tasks.

Hardware and two doors will be added after he gets back from Europe. Pretty impressive, huh?

We also picked up some great book deals at the Five Colleges Book Sale, hung out with lots of Tom’s friends, finished packing up his stuff and figured out what he needed for this trip, which starts in Istanbul and finishes in Helsinki in late June. He’s packing very light (annotated version here):

Finally, almost a month ago Tom stayed at our place while we were gone for the weekend. When we came back I found this lovely handmade cutting board waiting for me–I can’t bear to use it yet; it’s leaning up against the wall in the kitchen, looking pretty:

Good luck, Tom! Safe travels…

Cooking techniques, Family, Food, Recipes

Christy’s stuffed peppers

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I previously wrote up my Mother in Law Christy’s meatloaf recipe, the one that opened my eyes to the power of a meatloaf sandwich. When we were on Long Island for Easter she taught me to make another easy weeknight entree (and one of Ben’s favorite meals ever), stuffed peppers, and I tried them out myself a week or two later. I’d never had a stuffed pepper before, so I don’t know if this is a typical recipe, but it is incredibly easy and SO tasty. I don’t even like peppers that much, but cooking the filling in them actually adds nice flavor, and I even ate most of the pepper with the filling! Ben likes the green ones; I prefer red or orange or yellow.

Christy’s Stuffed Peppers
(the recipe is pretty rough–just adjust everything to taste!)

For each pound of ground beef:
3 big or 4 small bell peppers
1 onion, chopped
1.5-2 cups cooked rice (I bought it for a fortune from the hot bar at Whole Foods but next time I’ll suck it up and cook it myself first… It would be a nice time saver to cook extra next time you’re making rice and use leftovers the next night!)
1 16 oz. can of tomato sauce (I used Muir Glen, and made sure it was not the kind with basil in it)
Grated cheese (Cheddar is good; I used a grated “mexican” blend from Trader Joe’s that I need to use up!)

Preheat the oven to 350.

Clean and core the peppers (I cut mine lengthwise but you can also just cut the top off and fill them like cups. I will do it that way next time. I overfilled one small and two big peppers and ate the bit of extra filling while they baked, because I was starving.)

Blanch the peppers in boiling salted water until they are tender but not soft. (A few minutes) Drain and set aside.

Sauté the onion until soft, then brown the beef.

When the beef is cooked, add in the tomato sauce and the rice and cook for 15 minutes or so, or until it tastes well blended.

Arrange the peppers on a baking sheet or in a casserole pan. Fill with the meat mixture, top with cheese, and bake for 15 or 20 minutes, until the cheese is melted.

The melted cheese looks so sad in these photos, I’m sorry!

Despite the simplicity of the recipe, these were incredibly flavorful and tasty. We ate leftovers for dinner a couple nights later and they were even better, though reheating was a bit tricky. I think if I knew I’d have leftovers I would leave the cheese off those when I was baking them, and then microwave them to heat the filling before adding the cheese and broiling them for a couple minutes.

Family, Food, Recipes

Americana: Christy’s meatloaf

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I hated meatloaf as a kid. Too wet, too mushy. In fact, I can’t remember ever eating it until I started dating Ben and going home to visit his family with him. Christy, my mother-in-law, is the eldest of 8 kids, so obviously her mom had to cook in bulk. As a result, Mrs. Rio made meatloaf in sheet pans (or big pyrex pans, I guess), not loaf pans. I know it’s not rocket science, but to me it made meatloaf a totally different food, with a much better top-to-interior ratio and no mushy dampness. At age 24 or so I ate my first-ever meatloaf sandwich. Now I’m obsessed with meatloaf, though it has taken me several tries with Christy’s recipe before I got anywhere close to her results. This recipe is very, very approximate–I used about 2/3 of the can of tomato sauce this time, which improved the texture a lot (mine was always too wet), and I think Christy actually uses more like 1.25+ pounds of meat.

Christy’s meatloaf
“Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a large mixing bowl, combine:

1 pound ground beef
1 egg
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce (any brand)
1 cup Progresso Italian-style bread crumbs Note from Kate: I tried it with organic italian breadcrumbs from whole foods and it was a bust. Stick to Progresso.

Mix thoroughly. I use my hands to make sure everything is well mixed – there’s nothing worse than biting into a clump of breadcrumbs… When it’s all nice and smooth, put the whole thing into an 8 X 8 ungreased baking dish (or pan or pie plate). Bake for 35-40 minutes or until the middle is no longer pink.

When I double this recipe, I use a 9 X 13 pan, and it works just fine. I bake it a little longer, close to an hour.”

I baked potatoes and roasted broccoli and we went for full-on Americana:

Very productive weekend, though I still didn’t cook much. Ben made cookies… We spent most of the time cleaning up the apartment and organizing things, so it’s feeling very fresh and nice right now. Photos to come, perhaps…

Family, Food, Travel

To the mountains

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On Boxing Day we all headed over to Eastern Oregon to stay at Sunriver, near Bend, and ski at Mt. Bachelor. We needed two cars, since Ben and I would drive straight back to Portland and Mom, Dad and Tom would return to Eugene.

The changing views on the drive over:

We crawled over the pass at about 18 miles per hour, passing all the Semis putting their chains on and squinting through the driving snow. It was a relief to hit the Eastern side of the mountains and see the snow taper off! We got to Sunriver in time to relax a bit in the (very nice and very large) condo before dinner.

Mom had worked many hours to prepare food before heading out. She made a big batch of Osso Bucco a couple days before we left, and brought the makings for sauteed cavolo nero (Italian kale) and a risotto Milanese (with saffron).

Lovely kale! (Meticulously cleaned and chopped by Tom; we had the stems in omelets and scrambled eggs for lunch.)

Delicious, warming winter food:

The next day I fell down and hurt my back, so instead of driving into Bend for a fun dinner out, we ate pizza at home and watched Monster’s Inc. I really, really enjoyed it, but I was also on painkillers so maybe I should watch it again to be sure it’s really that funny?

On Friday the Davidsons got to town for *their* week of ski vacation. They came over for a big lasagna dinner–again, Mom had spent hours making huge sheets of lasagna before we got to town. Yum.

We played Taboo and visited until it started to get pretty late. Ben and I were leaving the next morning to drive (3-4 hours) back to Portland and fly home. The less said about the messy 18 hour travel day with a very sore lower back, the better. Instead I will focus on the stunning landscape we drove up Highway 97 and then through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on Route 26. (It’s a classic case of forcing Native American tribes onto harsh, arid land, but the terrain is very gorgeous to look at.)

Family, Food, Home, Travel

Holiday feasting

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The holidays may be the only time of year when my family’s food obsession seems normal–after all, who *isn’t* constantly cooking around Christmas? Ben and I headed out to Oregon on the Sunday before Christmas and stayed a week.

Christmas Eve we always cook at the home of wonderful family friends, the Davidsons. The menu always varies: One year it was Chinese food (I think that was my favorite) and this year there was an enormous beef tenderloin. We started with lovely salads with cheese, roasted pears, and walnuts. Along with the beef we had broccoli two ways: spicy roasted and pureed; squash, beans, roasted potatoes and sweet potato fries. (Sadly all my photos of the food were horrible!) We pulled crackers and wore the paper crowns while we ate and played out miniature plastic instruments, or read fortunes with those little cellophane fish.

After dinner all the “kids” went for a little walk in the misty, cold night:

Christmas morning we slept in a bit, and then started to open our stockings while Tom made popovers and 40-minute eggs. There was also bacon. Soooo good:

Not long after:

I played around with a very cool new present, a portable photo studio with light diffusing panels and little lights. Maybe I’ll be able to use it for finally-well-lit food shots? Here’s a test with the awesome Polish crêche I grew up with:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Side note
The little hippie grocery store near my house has great produce. Non-Pacific Northwesterners, writhe in envy at the mushroom bounty:

(Note the “Mushroom Mountain” sign)

Doesn’t Romanesco Broccoli look like an alien world or an enchanted forest if you get up close?

More to come…

Family, General, Travel

Happy New Year

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Happy 2008! I have tons of photos from the trip home to upload, and lots to write about. In the meantime, here I am with my Dad, midway up Mt. Bachelor on my lone ski day last week. Shortly after this was taken I cracked my tail bone on a tile floor in the lodge and was out of commission for the rest of the trip. Sigh. Dad looks pretty hip in his snowboarder-style bandana, right?


(Photo by Sunriver Photography)

Back soon with actual food, which I know has been more than a little sparse in these parts recently. I pledge to get back to cooking as soon as possible!