Crunch Drops

It's been forever since my last post! I've barely been cooking, thanks to my b-day, work craziness, and then a fully booked weekend.

  I am very involved with the Junior League here in Owensboro. For those of whom who don't know what this is, it's a woman's volunteer organization. The League's been on summer break now since June. In September meetings get going again, and I have been starting to get busier and busier because of it, as we get ready for fall.

Junior League's are known for a lot of things (if you've seen The Help, you'll know one of them, but I swear that's not the way we really are here in Owensboro!), and cookbooks full of great recipes is one of them. Owensboro's Junior League has two books, one called 'To Market, To Market' and the other 'Home Again, Home Again'. Both of these books are chock full of Southern recipes.

Kentucky has a unique cooking tradition all of its own, many of which incorporate one of Kentucky's greatest traditions, bourbon. Or they originate from the Kentucky Derby. (You know, for a so called 'Bible Belt State', Kentucky is the home of most of America's home grown vices - Burley Tobacco, Bourbon and Horse Racing. Funny.)

There are MANY Kentucky recipes I want to try, but there was one recipe in Home Again, Home Again that I've been itching to sample since I got the book, called Crunch Drops. These may or may not be a Kentucky recipe, but most Owensboroans know of this cookie. It was a favorite of Senator Wendell Ford, who is from Owensboro and was the US's longest serving Senator (record has been taken by another Kentucky Senator, interestingly). I've had the pleasure of meeting Senator Ford several times, and I have much respect for a man who loves so delicious a cookie!

Crunch Drops are flour cookies with oats, shaved coconut and Rice Krispies in them. I could also see adding a dried fruit, like raisins, or cinnamon. Or butterscotch chips. Or chocolate. (My list could go on.) They get their 'crunchiness' not only from the Rice Krispies and oats, but also from the fact that there is no butter in them, just shortening. Shortening is, by the way, the secret to crispy fried chicken, too.

The dough will come out very stiff and dry, and will crumble easily. I packed it before setting it on the sheet.Came out perfect. And tasty.

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Crunch Drops

by Pulled from Home Again, Home Again by Junior League of Owensboro August-27-2012

A favorite of Kentucky Senators

Ingredients

• 2 cups sifted flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup shortening
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups quick-cooking oats
• 2 cups crisp rice cereal
• 1 cup shredded packaged coconut

Instructions

Sift the flour, baking soda and salt together. Beat the shortening in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Add the sugar and brown sugar and beat until smooth and creamy. Add the eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla and flour mixture. Add the oats, cereal and coconut, mix well. The dough will be very stiff.Drop by teaspoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes or until light brown. Cool on the cookie sheet for 2 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Details

Prep time: 20 mins Cook time: 15 mins Total time: 35 mins Yield: 5 dozen cookies

Tikka Masala Sauce

It took a lot of time and effort to figure out the secret to making tikka masala. I had to read many recipes, and suffer many 'not quite rights' to get my masala gravy to its current, crazy delicious version. (If this sounds like bragging, it's because it is.)

There were two things I had to figure out: 1) getting the bright orange color, and 2) the texture. The orange color is achieved through the use of cream, or another similar dairy product, and turmeric. Not so terribly difficult to figure out. But the texture was a different story!

The solution to the texture problem turned out to be in the onion - you put it in the blender, and make onion frappe. (I kid. More like blender-pulverized onion.) Fry the onion, add all the other ingredients, and voile, perfection as seen in Indian restaurants. I didn't discover the pureed onion secret on my own, I read about it somewhere on a blog, (this was a long time ago) and it was not an American one. The UK, I think, and it was by a woman of Indian descent. Wish I could find it again!

So, once I figured out these things, the next problem was where to get all the varying spices needed for the sauce. My favorite online site is iShopIndian.com. This is where I discovered Kitchen King masala, and that Indian chile powder is distinct (and a lot hotter) than the Mexican variety seen in my local grocery store.

For my garam masala, which is the spice that makes anything 'masala' , I shop at nuts.com. Some awesome stuff on this website. I can waste much time (and money) on here.

Garam masala shouldn't be added until the very end of cooking! It will turn bitter, and lose that wonderful smell.

This particular tikka masala dish I made with boiled cauliflower and potatoes, no meat. (John and I were eating healthy!) I paired it with my whole wheat Garlic Naan and basmati rice.

 - A note on the rice - Basmati should not be made sticky style! It should be more dry, to absorb sauce better. If you're using the 'finger method' of adding water to your rice, after cleaning the rice, add just enough water so that it stops below the line of your first knuckle on your pinky. You then need to allow the rice to soak in the water for half an hour, to get the maximum length out of your grains.

Buttery Garlic Naan

Indian food is great. Ironically, I didn't actually have much experience with it until moving to Owensboro. Who knows where life will lead you?

There are no Indian restaurants in the actual city of Owensboro itself, but nearby Evansville does have one. Called the Taj Mahal, John and I make the occasional journey there, to satisfy cravings. It's debatable as to what, exactly, it is we're craving when we go: is it the chicken tikka masala? Korma? Or maybe, possibly, the naan bread?

Naan is a triangular sharped flat-bread, and a complete must when eating Indian. When I saw a recipe for Garlic Naan on Girl Versus Dough, I felt the craving, but not the desire to head out of town to fulfill it. Bake time!

Apparently there are two varieties of naan, yeast and yeastless, yeast being the more difficult to make. I opted for the yeast variety. (What's the point, if it isn't a time consuming challenge? Plus, my parent's are coming down from Nebraska in about a day or so for my birthday. This means I have to dirty my kitchen up with a project recipe, just to get ready for them.)

There are also a bunch of different ways to cook naan, apparently. Most Indian restaurants probably have a tandoori, the traditional way of making it. John frowns upon the idea of getting a tandoori for the house, so that left me with the choice of stove, grill, or fry pan. I opted for the last, feeling that it would probably get me closest to that real tandoori feel. (That and there was no way I was heating up the grill.)

I kneaded my dough by hand. I don't have a stand mixer strong enough to handle dough, and no food processor either. Left me with my hands and fingers! I kneaded for about 10 minutes, until the dough was elastic and smooth. Because I used whole wheat flour, it wound up being a bit dryer than I needed, so I added an extra splash of milk. You don't want the dough to be sticky, either, simply add more flour if you're experiencing that problem.

I used whole wheat flour for my naan, which made it less flexible than white flour naan. Tasted just as good as white though, in my opinion.

After splitting the dough into 8 pieces for the second rise, I used a cheese cloth to cover them up. Thought it looked a bit like mummy wrappings. Which made me think of Halloween. Which is coming up so soon! This summer has flown by.

Serve your naan with your favorite Indian dish, using it to scoop sauce up, like John and I did with my from-scratch Tikka Masala. I'll put a post up about how I make Tikka Masala sauce shortly.

Healthy Disguise Chocolate Chip Cookies

 John and I purchased a boat recently, and have been spending almost every waking, non-working moment since cruising around the Ohio River. (It is, in fact, safe to boat on the Ohio. Even to get into the water!)

One of the things I love about boating (there are many things I love about boating), is eating. Not that long ago we ate homemade chocolate chip cookies on a friend's pontoon. These cookies looked, quite literally, like the perfect specimen of the classic chocolate chip cookie. Right color. Right size and shape. Right smell. But as I was chewing, I noticed something strange about the texture. No one else seemed to notice, but there was a chewy, somewhat stiff nature to them that a traditional, flour-only chocolate chip cookie wouldn't have. Whatever this was, it had to have been finely ground in order to disguise it. I knew it had to be some sort of healthy addition. After failing to puzzle it out on my own, I asked the hostess. The answer? Oatmeal!

I found the idea of grinding oatmeal to a powder in order to hide its addition genius, and immediately had to try it myself. I started with the original Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe. The Nestle recipe is the essence of perfection. No substitutions should be made to it. None! This should be made into a law. (Full disclosure: I substituted.) You cannot pull a cup of flour out for a cup of finally ground oatmeal, period, end of discussion. The cookies wouldn't hold their form when laid on the sheet, the dough was gooey even after I chilled it, then they wouldn't harden after baked, and remained much stickier. (I'm not good at admitting failures. John had to unceremoniously dump these in the trash for me. They'd have sat on the counter, forever waiting for someone to try to pry them apart, if he hadn't.)

How much oatmeal to add, that was the question. I figured one cup was too much, especially as an addition. It would create a great deal more dough, reducing the chocolate chip per bite ration, which I certainly didn't want to do. After my successful batch however, in which I did half a cup, I think one cup wouldn't have hurt, so long as the chip count is upped.

This batch turned out beautiful! You couldn't even tell the oatmeal was in there, which was different from the cookies we had on the river. I'm guessing either A) she added a full cup, B) I refined my oatmeal more, or C) both of these. Either way, they tasted great, and had a good deal more whole grain fiber than your normal cookie. Next time I'd like to try using whole wheat flour, instead of refined.

Cuban Arroz Con Pollo

Mob week may be over, but I'm doing one more mob inspired recipe: Arroz con pollo, in honor of Scarface. Vamos a Miami, for a taste of Little Havana!

Miami is known for a lot of things. Great weather, the occasional hurricane, teeny-weeny bikinis, techno music, and lots of Cuban immigrants and refugees. This has left the city with a strongly Cuban influenced cuisine, of which Tony Montana would definitely have enjoyed.

Arroz con Pollo is probably one of the most famous of Cuban dishes, after the Cuban sandwich. I was looking for more of a challenge, so I opted to make arroz con pollo instead of the very tasty sandwich. This dish's unique yellow color comes from annatto seeds, or achiote in Spanish, rather than saffron threads, used in the Spanish version of this dish. (There's also a Mexican version, which is red in color).

I pulled this recipe from a website called Taste of Cuba, here is the link. All kinds of interesting looking recipes on this site! I halved everything on the original recipe, adjusting it down for two. Despite this, there was still plenty left over. Otherwise, I followed Taste of Cuba's recipe almost exactly

The original recipe called for an entire chicken, cut up. I used only two large chicken breasts, with bones. It's important to get bone-in breasts/legs/thighs for a recipe like this - the bones add more flavor. I stripped off the skin, leaving just a bit of fat. Helped cut back on the calories. I shredded the chicken before serving, removing the bones. (I told John to eat with caution anyway.)

To make arroz con pollo, I needed to create annatto oil from the seeds. Of course, I couldn't find the seeds anywhere, not even in my local Hispanic market (which is entirely Mexican in its bent). I did however get lucky and find Sazon Goya - annatto and cilantro flavored seasoning packets at Wal-mart in the Hispanic foods section. Not exactly right, but when I looked at the back it said 'will add flavor and color (my own emphasis here) to your food!' I figured I had a winner, and it turned out I did!

Before placing the chicken in to pan-fry, I added a bit of the Sazon Goya to the olive oil, and fryed it for a minute to get the yellow coloring. As you can see, it added a brilliant orange tinge to my chicken breasts.

Arroz con pollo had a unique, tangy sort of taste, from the wine and beer combination. The alcohol burns off as it cooks, leaving just the flavor of the beer and wine. I used a dry sauvignon blanc, but a chardonnay would work well, too. John and I decided that if I make this again, it could use some spice to it (we are both heat lovers). I'd add perhaps a dash or two of cayenne pepper, or a teaspoon of red pepper flakes.

 

Served with rolls. I could also see this paired with a nice crusty bread. And a mojito or two.

Sunday Gravy

It's mob week on AMC!! In honor of this event, I'm making a mob inspired dinner.

"I'm going to make John a dinner he can't refuse."

Sadly, throughout the course of my life, I've been deprived of the joy that is the classic mobster flick. True story. No wise-guy here. (Wise-girls don't exist, I believe. And I find the mobster view on women rather disturbing...) The first in the daily line up for mob week was, of course, The Godfather. I'd never seen this movie before, not even parts of it. John was mortified! We've been marathoning mob shows all week.

Anyway, while watching The Godfather there was a scene, during part of a 'war' between the rival mob families, where the character Peter Clemenza is showing the young Michael Corleone how to feed a large group of men. Goes like this: Clemenza - 'Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs; heh?... And a little bit o' wine. An' a little bit o' sugar, and that's my trick.' Um, yum. I want some!
 

Turns out, this recipe is also a favorite of the Soprano's. After doing a bit of research, I stumbled across a recipe very similar to Clemenza's dish on food.com, under 'Soprano's recipes', called Sunday Gravy. Nearly the same, but the recipe on food.com omitted the wine and sugar. Because I believe that more food should include wine, (mostly so I can drink it while cooking), I decided to make my Sunday Gravy closer to Clemenza's, plus a few extra additions, like onions, peppers and fresh herbs from my garden. (Must needs add some sort of vegetable. So I can feel less guilty.)

I paired my Gravy with Angel Hair pasta. Before serving the pasta, make sure to 'pink it up' - place the pasta in a bowl, then add a little of the gravy sauce to it, and stir it all up. Then serve the gravy on the side, along with grated Parmesan. Have some crusty bread and a salad with it.

 

By the end, my gravy turned out quite differently from what Clemenza made, and the Soprano's recommend. I halved it and added fresh tomatoes and plenty of fresh herbs, browned my sausage and meatballs at the same time, and generally did whatever I wanted to with it. I adjust everything to taste. Turned out absolutely delicious, we ate until stuffed!

Sunday Gravy freezes very well, so don't be afraid to make plenty of it by doubling the recipe.