Psych, Monkey Bread

Dana and I watched the most recent episode of Psych. We were really excited to see the episode after hearing that it would be a tribute to Twin Peaks, with several cameos from the show. In the episode, Shawn and Gus are lured to the small town of Dual Spires for a cinnamon festival. Gus says he'll go as long as there is monkey bread.

When they get there, Gus picks up a loaf of bread and brings it to Shawn, both referring to it as monkey bread. The only problem was that it wasn't monkey bread. When I mentioned this to Dana he asked, "what's monkey bread?" I explained the principle to him and he ordered it for breakfast the next morning.

The recipe I found came out of the the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and they call it "Ruth's Coffee Cake," so it has to be good. They use a recipe for Christmas Stolen minus the nuts and candied fruit. So here it goes...

1 pkg dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
3/4 cup warm milk
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp salt
4 Tbl butter, softened
2 eggs
3 cups white flour

melted butter (I used about 1/4 a cup)
1 cup sugar mixed with
2 Tbl cinnamon

Dissolve the yeast into the warm water. Mix milk, granulated sugar, salt, butter. Add yeast and water mixture and beat thoroughly. Add 1 and 1/2 cups flour and mix till well blended. Cover and let rise in a warm place for one hour (at this point it looks more like batter than dough, but let it "rise." It'll get all bubbly a mellow. The directions read "Add enough of the remaining flour so that the dough is easy to handle." I had to add the remaining 1 and 1/2 cups plus almost a whole other cup. So there you go. Anyway, after that, let it chill in the fridge for half an hour.

When you're ready to use (I refrigerated my dough over night and then took it out an hour or so before I was ready to use it.) Roll the dough into a long cylinder about an inch in diameter. Cut off 1 inch pieces and roll them into balls. Dip each ball into the melted butter and roll in the cinnamon sugar mixture. Place into a greased baking tube (I used an angel food cake pan). Bake in a preheated oven 350 degrees oven for 50-60 minutes.

When it's done cooking, remove from the oven and let cool for 5-10 minutes before flipping the bread out onto a plate. It looks terribly impressive.

At least Dana was appropriately impressed. The stolen dough worked well: it was airy and not too sweet. Yum. Photos.



I couldn't wait to eat a bite (or two) before I thought to take some pictures... but you get the idea.


After a little more destruction... They're a great finger food because they're not too sticky. And they make your house smell amazing.

Yam vs. Sweet Potato

Dana and I spent Thanksgiving in Salem, OR with his dad and his new step-mom and step-siblings. We all helped by preparing something for dinner. I was in charge of cranberry sauce. Yum. Amber was in charge of the yams. Her new husband is from back east somewheres where they have down-home-style cooking. And he got to talking about sweet potato pie. Then they had to discuss the difference between a yam and a sweet potato. I think the ultimate solution was that they are the same thing.

So Dana and I (but mostly Dana) did some research on wikipedia to find out the difference between yams and sweet potatoes.

So most Americans are familiar with (regardless of what you call it) the orange fleshed, large and bulbous tuberous object that ends up as part of our Thanksgiving dinner.

This is a sweet potato, although it is only distantly related to potatoes like russets and reds. (Sweet potatoes are in the family Convolulaceae while potatoes are in the Solanaceae or 'Nightshade' family). Sweet potatoes were domesticated in south America at least 5000 years ago and when Columbus showed up, they learned about the plant that the natives called "batata."

Yams, (family: Dioscoreaceae) on the other hand, are originally from Africa and are believed to have been domesticated several thousand years before the sweet potato. The name "yam" comes from Wolof (a sub-Saharan language in the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language family) nyam which means "to taste or sample." I can see early European explorers now, sitting down to eat with the Africans who ate yams as a staple, and the Africans offering them the starchy vegetable and saying "try it, you'll like it." But the explorers thought they were saying "This is a 'yam.' Good for eating!" Yams are large and their skins can be anywhere from dark brown to light pink. Yam skin is thick and difficult to peel before being cooked.

Chances are, unless you know you have eaten a real African yam, you have only had sweet potatoes.

So, Now You Know!

This picture has nothing to do with Thanksgiving dinner: I promise I did not eat macaroni on Thanksgiving. But a recent box we cooked had this noodle that just wasn't going to take it any more.



Take that, cheese sauce mix.

Ukrainian Piroshky

Most ethnicities have some sort of meat or potato inside a bready coating whether it be samosas, tortillas, wontons, or the pierogie. This piroshky is pretty similar. But it’s baked, which I think is easier to manage than fried pastries. Dana and I eat these with Tarxoon, aka tarragon soda from Ukraine. It sounds gross, but it’s pretty good.

 

Anyway, the recipe: I usually half the dough and it’ll make 6-8 good sized piroshkies.

The dough: 2 cups milk

1 TBL yeast (or one of those packets)

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

5-6 cups of flour

Warm the milk, add the yeast and let it mellow for a few minutes. Add the other ingredients. Let rise for 1 hour.

Potato filling:

1.5 kg of potatoes, boiled and puréed

100 grams of onion

100 grams vegetable oil

2 tsp salt

Saute onions in oil and add to puréed potatoes. Season accordingly. I like to use garlic powder, but it’s delicious with just salt and pepper. Once, I misread the recipe (the original we have is written in Russian) and sautéed ground beef instead with the onions and then added it to the potatoes. That was good too. All I’d say about adding meat is that you should cook it before filling the dough.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Once the dough has risen, half the dough repeatedly until you get a lump about the size of a lime. Roll it out and spoon in your filling. I’m going to estimate 1/4 of a cup to 1/2 a cup of filling for each lump of dough. Pinch the dough closed around the filling and place on a lined baking sheet.  I’m a bad person and haven’t timed how long these cook, but I’m going to say start with 10 minutes and move up from there. When they’re golden brown, the piroshkies are done. If you like the shiny crust, you can glaze the piroshky before putting them in the oven with an egg or with some milk.

Super yummy. And they’re super convenient to take and eat on the go, like a hot pocket, but better.

Raspberry salsa

I love allrecipes.com. If you've never visited the site before, I recommend it. Besides having a ton of recipes, it has a lot of reviews. Reviews are all well and good as reviews, but I find them much more useful when people critique and offer other ways to cook the dish as well. You find out then if several people thought the cookie dough too runny or too dry and adjust accordingly. You find out if someone else cooked it with brown rice instead of white rice and how that affected the outcome. I know there are magazines you can buy that do the same thing except by a panel of professional cooks. but I am poor. And this website does a fair job.

This recipe comes from that website. Submitted by "Karen." I found it because my mother-in-law's raspberry bushes have been going crazy and we have had a plethora of fresh raspberries. I also made a yummy raspberry-banana bread. I forgot to take pictures of that, so I'll have to make it again... rats.

Anyway, recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 cups fresh raspberries
• 1/4 cup chopped sweet onion
• 3 teaspoons finely chopped jalapeno chile peppers
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/2 teaspoon white sugar
• 3 TBL Fresh lime juice

Directions:

1. In a medium bowl, mix together raspberries, sweet onion, jalapeno chile peppers, garlic, cilantro, white sugar and lime juice. Cover and chill in the refrigerator at least 1 hour before serving.

I bought a lime to juice and put in the salsa, but I forgot. The salsa turned out good anyway. It's sweeter that normal salsa, which is to be expected, but still has a nice zing to it. And it was still very tasty on chips. The recipe also recommends putting it on chicken or steak, which would be yummy but I didn't try. I also decided there weren't enough peppers in it so I added some orange bell pepper too. I probably doubled the garlic as well. But I forget now. I really ought to keep better notes.

What I was most worried about was the pepper and the onion being too crunchy. I don't know if it was the berries or the sugar (or both) but the onions and peppers softened just right. I'm sad the raspberry bushes are done producing because it will be harder to make this yummy salsa. The results should be similar if you make it with frozen, thawed berries, although I've not yet tried.

Here is Dana's pretty picture of it.

Lentil Chili Soup

Got this recipe out of the newspaper a few months ago and just had time to try it.
Here is the recipe and instructions as it appeared:

1 cup lentils, any variety
8 cups stock
2-3 jalapeno or serano chiles, stemmed, seeded and rough chopped
1/2 a small onion, finely chopped
1 Tbls fresh ginger, grated
1 tsp ground tumeric
1 tsp toasted cumin, ground
salt and pepper to taste
kefir (Russian yogurt stuff) as garnish

Combine all ingredients except kefir and salt and pepper. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for 45 minutes to an hour or until lentils are soft. If liquid appears too thick, add as much a cup of water or stock. Remove soup from heat, let cool for 10-15 minutes. Puree small batches in blender . Return soup to pot and season with salt and pepper to taste. heat to serving temperature. Top servings with sour cream. Serve with tortillas.

I didn't have stock so I used 8 cups of water and 3 Tbl of bullion instead. I used jalapenos. I did not have fresh ginger either. So I used 1 tsp ground ginger instead. I also used regular old ground cumin instead of toasting the seeds then grinding them myself. Our stove is a hot stove so after I got it to boil I put it on its very lowest setting for the 45 minutes where it boiled quietly the whole time. I skipped the blender step. I'd rather see what's in my soup than guess in the midst of a puree. But feel free to blend if that's what you're into. I actually could have bought the kefir, but Dana says it's pretty gross, so we just used sour cream. I tried the finished soup with both tortillas and tortilla chips and I liked the chips better than the plain tortilla, but both were good.

My recommendation: yummy! Hot enough to make you sweat a little but not so hot your tongue hates you afterward. The finished soup is a cooked-spinach green shade, so it may take some convincing for children, but it smells delicious and tastes yummy too!

Lemon Raspberry Jam Cookies

These are sometimes called linzer cookies, but a little different. I think with linzer cookies, you bake the individual halves of the sandwich and then add the jam after. This recipe comes from the Betty Crocker Cooky Book (2002 version of the 1963 edition): Ethel's sugar cookies. I never made them before I got married because I never thought lemon belonged in sugar cookies. My husband loves lemon flavored anything and so requested I make these yummy jam cookies using the Ethel recipe.

Sadly, I am without my 2002/1963 edition, and so had to look up the recipe on the internet. What with Betty Crocker moving into the instant mix phase, I have had trouble in the past finding a recipe for any of her sugar cookies. Luckily, someone posted this recipe on Betty Crocker.com and I was able to move forward.

Here is the recipe I used for lemon, filled sugar cookies.
Ethel's Sugar Cookies

Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book

3/4 cup Butter; softened
1 cup Sugar
2 Eggs
1/2 teaspoon Vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups Flour; sifted
1 teaspoon Baking powder
1 teaspoon Salt
Sugar; for dusting (optional)

Thoroughly mix together the butter, sugar, eggs, and flavoring of choice. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir into the butter mixture. Chill for at least 1 hour. Roll out to 1/8-inch thickness. cut into desired shapes with cookie cutter dipped in flour. Re-roll the scraps and continue cutting until all of the dough is used. Place on an ungreased baking sheet. Sprinkle with sugar, if desired. Bake in a moderate/hot (400F) oven until delicately golden, about 6 to 8 minutes. Makes about 4 dozen 3-inch cookies.

VARIATIONS:
Lemon Sugar Cookies: Follow the basic recipe above, except use 2 teaspoons grated lemon rind and 1 teaspoon lemon juice in place of the flavoring.

Filled Sugar Cookies: Follow the basic recipe above except put together in pairs before baking with 1 tablespoon filling of your choice or a solid chocolate mint wafer between. Press the edges of the cookies together with the tines of a fork.

Nut Sugar Cookies: Follow the basic recipe above except mix 1 cup of finely chopped nuts into the dough.

I used raspberry jam as my filling. This raspberry jam is special though: it's made from scratch. In the spring, my sister-in-law likes to make freezer jam. The past two years I've been around to help out. Luckily, there was another container of raspberry jam left.  

For linzer cookies (and how I've always made these cookies before) the top half gets a shape cut out of it with a small cookie cutter: a square, star or circle. This time, I was working with limited resources and so instead, I just made an "x" in the top cookie before putting them together. It worked pretty well. It's not very pretty (as you will see) but they tasted VERY yummy. Happy cookies.