Another great recipe from Kellie’s Belly! This fudge melts in your mouth. Fudge is not one of my favorite things but this fudge is wonderful.
Peanut Butter Fudge
2 c. sugar
1/2 c. whole milk
1/4 stick butter
pinch of salt
3/4 c. peanut butter
3/4 c. marshmallow fluff
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Our friend Kellie from Maine of www.kelliesbelly.com told us about this great recipe. She says “the cookies are soft, fluffy, and delicate. The icing really helps the eggnog flavor stand out, so don t omit the icing if you try this recipe!”
Easy Egg Nog Cookie
Ingredients
I don’t know what it is about the British Isles and their unfortunate names for certain things. Spotted Dick is by far one of the more unfortunate. Not only are they known for silly names, but also for their dearth of tasty local food. If ever there was a time to be proved wrong, it was during the week-long power outage we had about a month ago.
Noting our dampened spirits (pun intended), we picked up the running joke for the evening and then decided to actually eat it. A quick note about that week: we were running our refrigerator off of our car engines through an 800 watt inverter originally purchased for camping. While it rained, car running, dealing with the loss of the Internet, we read the instructions on the can of Dick by candlelight. All the while, we cracked terrible jokes, just the most awful lame jokes that you usually only laugh at when you’ve been enjoying some libations, but our lack of professionals like Jon Stewart to do it for us, we went on our merry way (at least two of us thought it was funny).
Beyond the dick jokes, we actually ate the stuff (the sponge cake, that is). The taste is if you were to take a sponge cake, bathe it further in trans-fats (don’t read the ingredients), soak it in a liquid form of molasses with raisins, force the raisins into the cake, and then add lead weights just to give it some more heft. I actually enjoyed it, though after reading about the amount of hydrogenation needed to create this product, I probably won’t have it again.
Pumpkin-Orange-Cinnamon Spice Donuts!
This recipe was really easy. You can do it quickly and they are really tasty. You could even try doing a frosted orange icing with orange juice, powdered sugar, milk, and orange zest, similar to a simple icing for cookies.
1 c. brown sugar
4 tbsp. cooking oil
3 eggs, beaten
2-4 tbsp. grated orange rind
1/4 c. orange juice
1 c. pumpkin
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
3 1/2 c. flour
3 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. Soda
1/2-1 cup sugar
2 tsp. Cinnamon
1 tbsp. Orange zest (optional)
Put all ingredients together in your mixer. Mix with the mixing hook until dough comes off of the sides. You may need to add extra flour 1 tablespoon at a time to make dough firm enough. Form the dough into a ball and let it chill for 2 hours (I skipped this part). Pat down the dough on a floured surface and roll it to 1/2-2/3” inch thickness with a rolling pin. Use a donut cutter or we used a round glass and a shot glass to make the classic donut shape with delicious donuts hole leftovers.
Heat oil or fat (we used canola oil) in a 3” pan, we used our cast iron pan, on the stove to 375 degrees. We didn’t have a deep fry thermometer so we put the heat on low and let the oil warm up for around 15 minutes. Then we tested it with a donut hole to see if the dough would cook in about 3 minutes. If the oil isn’t hot enough, the donuts will absorb a lot of oil. Once the oil is hot, put 3 donuts at a time in the pan to fry about 1 1/2 minutes per side, 3 minutes of cook time total. Then use metal tongs to pull the donuts out of the oil and shake the donuts to drip some excess oil back into the pan. Immediately toss the donuts in the cinnamon-sugar glaze in a smaller bowl. You can then set the donuts on old paper bags to absorb some of the oil. Serve while warm!!!
[We love donuts, but you can call them doughnuts if you want]
Flank Steak Reuben Sandwich with Chipotle Reuben Sauce
Tips:
• You can grill the meat and assemble these sandwiches the night before. Then wrap them in foil and place them in the refrigerator. The next day you grill the sandwiches on your panini maker for a hot lunch.
• You may grill the sandwiches on your sandwich press or in a hot buttered/oiled frying pan with a cover. Grill the other side once the bottom is browned.
Grilled Flank Steak:
12-ounce flank steak ready to grill
3 teaspoons coarsely ground pickling spice (can buy in spice section)
Preheat grill on high. Coat steak with pickling spice. Grill steak to medium-rare to medium. Remove steak from grill and let stand for at least 5 minutes. Cut flank steak into 1/4 inch slices.
Sandwich Assembly:
• 12 slices Deli Rye Bread
• Grilled Flank Steak Sliced
• 1/4 cup Chipotle Thousand Island dressing (recipe below)
• 1 1/2 cups drained sauerkraut from jar
• 6 ounces thinly sliced Gruyère cheese
Nonstick olive oil spray
Heat up your panini maker or sandwich press until hot. Assemble the sandwich from bottom to top: 1 slice of bread, slices of meat, sauerkraut, sauce, cheese, and top with second slice of bread. Spray the panini maker with olive oil spray. Grill the sandwiches until the cheese is melted and the bread is browned.
4 parts mayonnaise
1 parts ketchup
1 chipotle in adobo sauce, finely chopped
1 tsp chipotle sauce from can (to desired spiciness)
1 part pickle relish
Pepper
Pinch of sugar
Skull & Crossbones: Day of the Dead Bread
On November 1st and 2nd of every year, Mexican and Latin Americans pray for loved ones who have passed away. On these days they make Pan de Muertos (Day of the Dead Bread).
Some use anise seeds and orange zest when they make their Bread of the Dead. We decided the cinnamon version sounded much more appealing. In the end, I did add an orange-sugar glaze to the top, which turned out very well.
Recipe after the jump. . . .
Came across a post at Serious Eats and I couldn’t resist giving it a try. Basically, you take a gallon of Apple Cider from Whole Foods ($7.00), put some cider yeast in it and wait. I’ll let you know how it turns out in a couple of weeks.
Bouchon Quiche Recipe: The Most Delicious Waste of a Day You’ll Ever Have
For a baby shower this weekend, a friend asked me to make a couple of quiches. As Northern California food bloggers near the home of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Restaurant, we just couldn’t do it the simple American way with store-bought pie crusts and the “it’ll be ready in an hour prep, cook, and bake time quiche recipe.” Instead, we pulled out Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Cookbook and spent eight hours over three days assembling a couple of masterpiece quiches from the most labor intensive recipe we’ve ever found. Even with two people working the entire time in the kitchen it was intense, sweating bullets and hoping for success. We learned a lot from massive mishaps but in the end we were surprised to get some rave reviews from guests at the shower.
We made the quiche crust dough a day before we needed it and refrigerated it overnight. The recipe was similar to the way that you make biscuits with flour and pieces of chilled butter. We rolled the dough out on Friday morning and I got out my three pans with removable sides. The fact that the pans had 3” high sides instead of a 2” high ring mold didn’t faze me at all considering I thought it was a minor detail. In the end it made a huge difference in the ultimate success of our standup quiche shells. We freaked when we opened the oven after fifteen minutes of bake time to find the sides of our crust fallen into the pan (see the oven photograph). I immediately got online and googled Thomas Keller’s Quiche problems and found a few posts. Others had the same issue and thought it was because there wasn’t enough dough to go over the sides taller pans. They made extra dough to try and solve the problem, only to find out that the dough just can’t hold itself at 3” high so YOU HAVE TO USE A 2” RING MOLD PAN FOR BOUCHON QUICHE! We just continued and tried to patch the sides hoping it would all work out, and miraculously, it did! We had a bit of a filling leak on one of the three quiches, but it still turned out to be pretty decent looking and utterly delicious.
If you ever attempt this, you have to let us know how it turned out!
Recipe information after the jump….