Bad Idea Friday: Pumpkin Tarte Tatin

I've been making Choire's excellent tarte tatin at least once a week: it's absurdly easy, and a half recipe is basically the perfect size dessert for four.  I've been trying to think of other things that would adapt well to being cooked in caramel and then baked.  Pomegranates and raspberries are too fragile, plums and peaches are not friends with caramel, quince and pears are not distinguishable from the traditional apple tarte tatin.  Then yesterday I paused, pipette in hand: pumpkin.  Pumpkin tarte tatin. Pumpkin tarte tatin, in time for the Thanksgiving blog resurrection. The idea glowed before me: it was even a Thursday.  Bad Idea Fridays are BACK, baby.

I told the spouse.  He said "let's not do that?" and ":(   I disapprove of this plan"  Miffed, I turned to another friend in gchat, a friend likely to encourage me in my experimentation.  He said "as someone who is not terribly fond of the taste of pumpkin, but who IS terribly fond of the taste of your tarte tatins, I view this as a commander might view rumors of a planned enemy invasion."

Philistines.  Why are my enablers never online when I need them.

SO.  Peel and slice a winter squash/ buy a bag of peeled and sliced winter squash.  You'll need about three cups.  (This recipe is already better than the apple version: THEY SELL SLICED SQUASH IN A BAG: no incessant peeling and coring and chopping for me!)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 pinch salt, and 1 tablespoon sugar.  Slice half a stick of butter into 9- 16 cubes: smash the cubes into the flour mixture.  (Here the goal is to turn the butter into a butter-flour paste, but leave some of the flour in a non-butter paste state, so that later it will form a water paste and make amazing cracker-like layers in your pastry, because flaky pastry is cracker layers.  What I mean is "Don't do a great job mixing in the butter: half-ass it.  Or three-quarters-ass it.)  Add water a teaspoon at a time until you have a fairly reliable dough - not too dry.  Drop it onto a piece of saran wrap, cover it with another piece, roll it into a disc about the size of your pan.  (See step below.)

Because I make a lot of tarte tatin, I do the following step at the same time I make the dough.  Put the other half of the stick of butter in a 7-9 inch oven-safe frying pan. (This is the pan your dough should be about the size of.) Add half a cup of sugar: cook over moderate heat, stirring, as the sugar browns and melts.  When it looks like you've put a handful of Werther's Originals in the pan, add the squash.  You could also add half a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice: it's better for being simmered in butter.  Cook, stirring frequently, until the squash produces some liquid: about five minutes.  Take the top piece of saran wrap off the dough disc, flip the dough disc into the pan, take the saran wrap off the other side of the dough, tuck the dough neatly into the pan.  Cover up holes with bits you steal from the parts that flop out of the pan, flip bits that hang out into the pan along the dough; do not fret if the crust is not remotely even.

Bake in the oven for about 30-40 minutes: until the crust is golden-brown.  Take it out: while it is warm, put a plate over the top of the pan: invert the entire thing.  Flick the bits of squash that are sticking to the pan onto the tart.  Be shocked at how easy the pan is to wash.

How is it?

That is a sad face, right?  A definite "no" vote is apparent in that expression.  But guys, this is his second piece.  I am REALLY good at that pastry.  (Crackers.  Remember the crackers rule of thumb.  Or pull out half of the flour mixture, and stir it back in after you've squooshed in the butter.  Now you are a pastry maven.)

The pumpkin is... look, this is when you make peace with your feelings about pumpkin.  It's nicely roasted (I was worried it wouldn't cook through, but it did), and tossed in caramel: this is pumpkin at its peak.  If you keep eating it because it is a beautiful tart with amazing pastry, but are saddened with each non-apple bite, you must acknowledge that you do not really like pumpkin very much.  Sometimes you just finished sharing thirty pumpkin facts with the world, and it's a difficult thing to face.  Sometimes, you've been opposed to pumpkin as a foodstuff from the beginning, and it is easy.

Make it with apples.  Impress your friends.

Maddeningly Simple Panna Cotta

This recipe goes out to my loyal readers who have just regained the ability to refrigerate things and spent today paddling boats further than I drove. Put one cup heavy cream and 1/4 cup white sugar in a saucepan. Heat gently while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Once sugar is dissolved, boil for five minutes. Do not let boil over. Remove from heat. Add 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract or 1 tsp grated ginger with 1/2 tsp vanilla extract or 3 tbs. lemon juice or nothing at all. Stir to combine. Pour into 3 ramekins. Chill for two hours. Serve with fruit. It's a perfect creamy dessert! C has allowed me several spoonfuls while eating them all.

Roast Peaches with Rosemary

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Halve apeach and place in a baking dish. Drizzle with honey, sprinkle with salt, and put a sprig of rosemary where the pit used to be. Bake until as tender as desired- 10 to 30 minutes. (C prefers that his peaches be either barely warm or baked into submission. He accepts nothing intermediate.)

Serves two. I'd suggest adding some Rice Dream, or ice cream, or even my unhealthy obsession of the summer: pouring custard.

Bad Idea Fridays: Mochi

Today is my birthday. This proffered Bad Idea Friday post from the incomparable A (or ---, as her friends call her) is a perfect birthday gift- I don't have to destroy the kitchen or post today, suckers. Hurrah for guest posts.

1) Purchase a small box of glutinous rice flour on a whim.
2) Decide that you have too many clean dishes in your house
3) Read rice flour box for a recipe because you are Irish and only recently mastered cooking brown rice in a rice maker.
4) Note that the only recipes on box are for chocolate mochi (all out of cocoa) and white sauce (I can make roux with cheap flour).
5) Google.
6) Opt for a stove top recipe due to a distressing lack of microwave safe containers
7) Combine 1 part rice flour, 1 part sugar, and 2 parts water, heat without boiling until quite thick. (I may have erred here.)
8) Place mochi in a very well oiled pan to cool. (13x9 would be better than 8x8.)
9) Wait several hours for mochi to set. When it does not, place in 250F oven for two hours. (When in doubt, bake, there is no recipe anywhere which advises this because...)
10) Remove mochi from oven. Notice a distressing texture on surface, somewhat like the patchwork of dessicated moss and pond scum from the bottom of a dry reservoir.
11) Leave mochi out all night, partly in disgust, partly to cool
12) Cut gummy blocks the next morning. Dust one with flour. Find it inedible and decide to dust the rest with confectioner's sugar. (bad idea because...)
13) Hydroscopic properties of the sugar cause mochi to become [more] digusting, sticky, sweaty globs of novel-textured bland starch.
14) Relegate to the back of the fridge for a week, then compost. Perhaps soil bacteria and saprophytic fungi will relish this pure energy source.

I'm fairly certain rabbits are better confectioners than I am.

-A

Bad Idea Fridays: Red Velvet Cake

What a wreck.

I made Red Velvet Cake for my brother's birthday. It tasted like propylene glycol. (Wikipedia says Propylene glycol has no flavor. I accidentally got a face full when we were draining a cooling system, and I beg to differ.) I used the Cook's recipe, I followed it to the letter, I had my mother taste the result and confirm that it was the same cake her grandmother used to make and still I was horribly horribly disappointed. Still, I'm sure there are people out there- people who haven't had a traumatic encounter with food dye solvents- and they might enjoy the traditional cake.

Every single recipe I have ever read for Red Velvet Cakes briefly discusses the history of the cake. There's a lot of diddle-daddle about chemistry, a brief mention of Steel Magnolias, and a sneering reference to the wartime use of beets. Happily, I like beets. I am seriously considering making this week 'beet week'. Even more happily, my indestructible chocolate cake uses one cup of water as the fluid component. Beet cooking liquid is like water, except it stains everything it touches. Since the recipe has proven resilient when I muck around with the ingredients, halving the cocoa and doubling the vinegar shouldn't be fatal...

But what of the frosting? There must be a cream cheese based frosting- otherwise, there's no startling color contrast. I tripped off to the natural foods market to buy some vegan cream cheese. There a lovely woman told me that as a vegan, cream cheese was forever barred to me and that eating the vegan version would only make me crave the real stuff more. Plus, she said, it was gross. Better that I should make an icing of Crisco and powdered sugar.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Stir together 1 and 1/2 cups white flour, 3 tbs. cocoa powder, 1 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1 cup sugar in a 9 inch round baking pan. (I added 1/4 cup cocoa, because my hand usually shakes when measuring out 1/3 cup) If you are using a fluted Bundt pan, do the mixing in another bowl and grease the pan. Otherwise, the cake will be removed in chunks and will look like crap.

Fill a large measuring cup with 1 cup beet water, 1/3 cup oil, and one teaspoons almond extract. (To make beet water, get some beets. Wash them, cut them in half, put them into a pan, cover them with water, and simmer them for about half an hour. Reserve the beets. Use the water. On another note; I added the almond extract on a whim. It turned out to be the best part of this cake.)

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk vigorously until combined. Add four tablespoons cider vinegar and stir until combined.

Pop the cake into the oven and bake for 25 minutes. Remove, let cool, gently coax out of the pan, fail, end up removing cake in three large pieces. Try to talk yourself into making buttercream frosting with Crisco. Fail. I made a glaze with the juice of one lemon, 1/2 cup powered sugar, and one cup dessert wine, simmered together until I could claim the alcohol evaporated. I also added 1 tsp. grated ginger, so everyone who tasted the cake could say "Ginger. Interesting." (This is exactly what they said.)

The cake was red going into the oven, but it was only a little red coming out. It smelled exactly like beets going in, but when it was removed it smelled and tasted like cake. Since it was reddish, sourish, and tasted of almonds, everyone thought it was a cherry cake. I dub this quasi-failure "Cherry Blossom Cake" and promise to oil he pan next time. Also, fie to the people who disparage baking with beets.

I realized this morning that I could have used haupia as frosting. The color contrast would have been perfect.

Salad Chocolate Cake- Hurrah for the End of November!

I should note that this cake is good. It isn't great- and I have had great vegan cakes- but it's good. Also, its real name is Six Minute Chocolate Cake, it really takes only six minutes to make, and it uses one whisk, one measuring cup, one spoon, and one pan. I wanted it to be the perfect last minute pantry cake, but it does require an eternity of cooling time. (Here "an eternity" is probably like 30 minutes.) Don't be desperate when making it. Leave the cake in the pan until it is cool. Don't start making a cake at 8 when you want to be asleep by 9. My advice to you.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Go do something else for five minutes so that the oven finishes preheating before the cake goes in. Stir together 1 and 1/2 cups white flour, 1/3 cup cocoa powder, 1 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1 cup sugar in a 9 inch round baking pan. (You may reduce the sugar as a matter of course in other recipes, but don't do it here. The cake will suffer. Standard Bundt pans seem to work fine with this recipe and if you have a 8 inch square baking pan, you are a kitchen hoarder and you can also use that.)

Fill a large measuring cup with 1 cup water (or cold coffee), 1/3 cup oil (the cake above used olive oil, and while I love olive oil more than kittens, I think another oil would be a better choice. Olive oil cakes are delightful, but what makes them delightful is the combination of egg and olives. Certain combinations are intrinsically good- that's why we eat mayonnaise.), and two teaspoons vanilla extract. (A advises adding a teaspoon of grated ginger here, or half a teaspoon of powdered ginger. She says "Adding ginger to baked goods makes them taste interesting. It disguises the fact that they aren't very good.")

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk vigorously until combined. Add two tablespoons cider vinegar (There's the salad reference. Olive oil and vinegar. Gosh, how clever.) The vinegar reacting with the baking soda will leave fizzing tracks during the final lazy mixing.

Pop the cake into the oven and bake for 25 minutes, or until stabbing it with toothpicks results in clean toothpicks. The end result is a plain and practical cake that is also pretty good.

The ganache in the photo is 4 oz. very dark chocolate melted- in the microwave! in 30 second spurts! stir frequently to prevent burning! mixed with 1/4 cup coconut milk. It makes a dense fudgey topping that I imagine would combine very nicely with a ginger chocolate cake.

I have also discovered that pretty much any cake, no matter how utilitarian or Sandra Lee inspired, can be dramatically improved by a.) stabbing it all over with a long skewer (while it is still in the pan) and b.) sprinkling cooking sherry onto it. Sadly, my kitchen is clean out of cheap cooking sherry. One could use rum, or that suspect bottle of liqueur that lurks in the back of every pantry. (Not ours, because former roommates drank it. But it's totally worth living without these kitchen essentials if you can watch a grown man drink a pint of peppermint schnapps and chase it with half a bottle of Kahlua.) I'd be tempted to make a quick glaze with the chosen liqueur, a dash of powdered sugar, and some lemon juice for when the cake is ultimately removed from the pan. Heck, you could make such a glaze without the EtOH if you didn't want people to become slightly tipsy over cake.

Or Criso based buttercream. Gross.

Pie Dough

One of the biggest surprises college held for me was young ladies who did not care a fig about their pastry technique. I was as bamboozled as my brother is by my husband's complete lack of interest in shooting things and throwing himself down precipices. I mean, yes, feminism rah rah rah, but someone must make the pies.

Fortunately, the lovely people at Cook's illustrated have a foolproof pie dough, without any worries about cracking or toughness. It does shrink a bit, so make sure there's a generous half inch margin around the rim of the pie. Makes two crusts.

Process 1 and 1/2 cups flour with 20 tablespoons shortening or butter or a combination of the two- I haven't been able to taste a significant difference, but I loath shortening with great passion. It seems to cover everything with a fine oily scum- I feel like I'm in New Orleans. Not after the oil spill, just in general. Add also a pinch of salt and a dash of sugar. The ingredients will form a paste; forbidden in traditional pastry making because unmixed butter is thought to cause flakiness. It is in fact caused by flour mixed with water, surrounded by hot fat, causing tiny crispy crackers to form within the crust. Thus, when one adds an additional one cup flour, one wants to avoid processing it in completely. Add 1/4 cup cold water and 1/4 cup vodka (gluten can't form in a non polar liquid, so toughness is mitigated) and pulse until there's a delightfully manageable dough. Chill it in two discs for about an hour, and then roll it out between sheets of saran wrap before removing the top sheet and flopping it into the pie dish. (Then remove the other sheet, etc, etc.) Remember to leave generous margins around the edge- scalloping is a good choice here- and bake it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. (You may want to weigh the dough with beans in tin foil or pie weights for the first 15 minutes.) Fill with filling and bake at 300 degrees for eternity.

Why yes, filling will have to either be a custard (pumpkin) or already cooked before being added. I suppose you could skip the blind baking, fill it to overflowing with apples or apricots and a half cup of sugar, and then cover it with the other half. Bake that at 350 degrees until pretty. After fussing with the absurdly complicated pumpkin pie recipe all morning, I really wish I'd done that instead.

Moon Rice

If you feed your children this rice at every meal, they will be the healthiest and prettiest children. They will also weep all day when you run out of rice. Adults will also become healthy and pretty, and will probably manage to restrain their tears. Recipe serves 2, but you can dodecuple the dry ingredients and store them in a jar for weeks.

Take 1 cup dry short grained brown rice. Add one tablespoon forbidden rice. (Forbidden rice is purple, and smells like heaven.) If you know that the rice will be consumed soon after cooking, add a teaspoon of green lentils.

Put in a rice cooker, add the suggested amount of water, and press the magic button. Wait until the rice is done. Eat your rice.

No rice cooker? Buy a rice cooker. The rice is always perfect.

Fine, yes. You can boil the rice like pasta in 12 cups of water, strain it, and then steam it briefly in a smaller pan. The rice will be almost as good as rice cooker rice.

Fine, yes, basic brown rice stovetop instructions. Bring 1.08333 cups of rice mixture and 2 cups of water to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until rice is tender- about 25 minutes. Or perhaps your rice is old- in which case you will have to simmer it longer and possibly add additional water.

What if you already know how to make rice? Does this article serve no purpose? Well. Take a cup of cooked Moon rice, add a tablespoon of sugar, 4 oz. of coconut milk, and possibly a dash of vanilla. Simmer together for five minutes, and blammo! Awesome rice pudding.

Planthead's Chocolate Pudding

This is not exactly as tasty as non-vegan pudding. It is vastly better for you, and it is really easy to make. It helps if you don't try to paste pudding flavor onto it- think of it as a delightful dessert that superficially resembles pudding. And it's good, it's good, I swear.

Take 1/2 container silken tofu (7 oz.). Puree in a food processor with 1/4-1/3 cup cocoa and 2-4 tablespoons honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, or, you know, sugar. Add a dash of vanilla extract or rum or orange liqueur. (I'm just guessing about those measurements- add stuff until it tastes good. It's a very forgiving recipe.)

For added richness, melt some chocolate in the microwave (in 15-30 second bursts), temper by stirring in a little pureed tofu, and then add the whole thing back to the food processor and blitz.