Recipe: Carrot Souffle

Mr. Bill Cook, founder of Cook Medical, and the reason I ended up in Bloomington, passed away on April 15th. I don't know if it was among his favorites, but I do know he immensely enjoyed this recipe. The way I've heard the story is this souffle was served at the Cook Employee Banquet one year and the attendees, including Mr. Cook, absolutely loved it. Next year it was gone and the attendees, including Mr. Cook, were not pleased. The following year it was back.

What Mr. Cook wanted, Mr. Cook got. But when you're an entirely unpretentious billionaire that doesn't care about money, I think people are generally alright with you getting your way.

Carrot Souffle

Adapted from the kitchens of the West Baden Resort

60 minutes, 45 minutes unattended

6 servings as a side

Difficulty: Easy

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. carrots
• ½ c. sugar
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3 Tbsp. melted butter
• 3 Tbsp. olive oil
• 3 Tbsp. flour
• 3 eggs
• ¼ tsp. nutmeg
• 1 tsp. salt

Process:

1. Preheat oven to 275 degrees.
2. Peel the carrots and boil them in a large pot of salted water until tender.
3. Drain the carrots and place them in a food processor with the sugar, vanilla, melted butter, olive oil, flour, eggs, nutmeg and salt. Process until smooth.
4. Pour into a greased 8x8 dish and bake for 45 minutes.

Leftover quality: Good

Tips and Tricks:

1. To speed up the boiling, cut the carrots down from their full length before adding them to the water. Test the doneness with a fork – if it goes through easily, they’re cooked enough.
2. You can bake the soufflés in individual ramekins if you’d like. Reduce the baking time to 30-35 minutes if you choose this method.
3. If you’re baking in the 8x8 dish, you can serve the soufflé sliced from the dish, or you use a fork to whip the soufflé and serve it like mashed potatoes.

Recipe: Romesco Potatoes

I am puzzled by how I have gone my entire life without having heard of Romesco sauce before a couple of weeks ago. Simply Recipes posted a recipe in their blog that I was immediately intrigued by. Roasted red peppers, garlic, almonds? Blended and roasted to perfection? Yes, please.

Once I dug around a bit more, I found that this sauce hails from the Catalan region of Spain. The most traditional components are the nuts and red peppers. Garlic and roasted tomatoes make typical appearances as well, but Romesco sauces are that kind of recipe that everyone has their own version of.  The sauce is not meant to be spicy and is meant to have a consistency more similar to a chutney than a smooth sauce.

After cooking this once and exploring some variations, I've settled on the version you see below. I have put the sauce over potatoes and pasta, but I'm nearly certain it would be delicious on almost anything you'd wish pair it with.  The potatoes are especially good because of their texture that holds its own and their flavor that begs for something to take it up a notch.

Romesco Potatoes

Adapted from Simply Recipes and Smitten Kitchen

50 minutes

3-4 servings

Medium

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. Yukon Gold potatoes
• ½ tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. ground black pepper
• 1 tsp. thyme
• 3 Tbsp. olive oil
• ½ cup almonds, chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 15-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
• 1 12-ounce jar of roasted bell peppers, drained
• 1 Tbsp. smoked paprika
• 2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar

Process:

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2. Scrub the potatoes and cut into large, bite-sized pieces. Spread potatoes out over a  well-oiled baking sheet, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper and thyme. Bake for 25 minutes.
3. Place the olive oil in a medium-sized skillet over medium heat.
4. Saute the almonds, stirring frequently until they begin to brown. Add the garlic and cook an additional 1-2 minutes.
5. Place the contents of the skillet into a food processor with the salt, tomatoes, bell peppers, paprika and balsamic vinegar. Process until mostly smooth (the sauce should remain a bit chunky) and scrape sauce into a bowl.
6. Remove baking sheet from the oven and spread the sauce over the potatoes. Use as much or as little sauce as you’d like.
7. Return the potatoes to the oven for an additional 15 minutes. Place any unused sauce in a sealed container and refrigerate.
8. Remove potatoes from the oven and allow to cool briefly before serving.

Leftover quality: Good

Tips and Tricks:

1. Top the potatoes with a dollop of Greek yogurt for an additional, cool flavor.
2. If you want to just make the sauce, follow steps 3-5, then spread the sauce in a thin layer on a baking sheet and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.
3. The sauce alone can be stored up to two weeks in the refrigerator and also freezes extremely well.
4. Use sauce on chicken, pasta, as a spread, or anything else you’d like to pair it with.

Cooking for Beginners

Last Monday I kicked off my Cooking for Beginners class through the Bloomington Free School. I made it very clear to my students from the beginning that I am no expert in this field and have had no formal training. I'm just a gal who likes food and talking about food a whole lot more than normal people. No fancy titles for me. Just Emily Meade, source of endless food gab.

This is the first time I've ever done any formal teaching on food and cooking. And again, I made this clear to my students and apologized for the guinea-pig nature of what was about to be brought upon them.

Then I informed the room that in an effort to keep from lecturing at them, I wanted to make our time together very interactive and discussion oriented. Which meant I'd be asking a lot of questions and making them taste all sorts of weird things. And again, these troopers were game.

The structure and content for this class was developed in a true "stab in the dark" fashion. I'm trying to keep track of everything as I go along so if when I teach another session, it'll keep getting better.

The class is set up in three 90-minute sessions. The first covered kitchen basics, mostly equipment, tools and ingredients. I sat out on my back porch a few weeks ago in the beautiful springtime sun and devoted hours of going through a list of basic pieces of kitchen equipment and tools and discussing how to use them, care for them, shop for them, etc. And then I realized something. Even frat boys making ramen noodles have some cooking tools. They may not know how to use them most effectively, but they have them. Anyone with a kitchen most likely has something in it.

Feeling like a dummy (curse you, distracting springtime sun!) I quickly wrapped up my information on tools and moved on to the second portion of the class: Ingredients. After my kitchen equipment epiphany, I realized this is where I'd really be putting the meat on the bone. But unlike kitchen equipment, talking about ingredients needed to be much more hands on. There's a lot you can say about an ingredient, but because its ultimate utilization is going to be perceived through taste it made sense to me to spend time actually tasting the stuff.

During the class, I opened with introductions around the room that included what was the last thing you cooked and what would be your dream dish to learn how to make. I was relieved to hear all of the dream dishes were things I am confident I can teach how to make (yay!). After intros we went through the basics of kitchen equipment (I did spend all that time working on it, after al) and then moved on to ingredients.

For the ingredient portion I brought along the contents of my cooking liquid and spice cabinets. The first thing I did was a demo on making homemade popcorn. This was for two reasons: One, I wanted them to taste spices and bread didn't seem like the best vehicle for that and two: I felt like it would be a total cop out to teach a cooking class and do no cooking. Once we had popcorn, we went to town on using bread and popcorn pieces to taste various cooking liquids, spices and herbs. I asked them to sample something and then tell me what it tasted like. Was it sweet or salty? What flavors can you pick up? Do you like the taste? What does it remind you of? I wanted to get them out of the act of putting food in their mouths and into the act of paying attention to what that food said to them.

I shared with the ladies in my class my thought process for teaching ingredients in this way. I explained my rationale of ingredients being the biggest thing about cooking that people who aren't currently cooking don't understand. It's easy enough to figure out how to cook store bought pasta, but what is in pasta? They agreed that the ingredients were in need of the most demystifying.

For the next time around I plan to introduce more ingredients on the first day, but also provide a list of what they're tasting with space to write in their reactions to it so the students leave class with a list of ingredients they are now familiar with.

Next week we'll focus on cooking techniques. I'll be pulling from actual recipes to teach basics like boiling, baking, braising, sautéing, stir-frying, etc. 

Smells Like Bacon

Right now, my entire apartment smells like bacon. I finished cleaning up dinner hours ago. And yet the smoky-sweet aroma is still lingering.

It makes me think of when I was a kid and we'd go visit my Nana and Pa on the farm. My mother and her mother would always be up with the crows (as they'd say) and make a feast of a breakfast that the rest of us would graze on whenever the spirit moved us to finally get out of bed on a lazy Saturday morning. I, however, took no pleasure in sleeping in. I was always awakened by the bacon alarm. The second that smell drifted over my nostrils I would leap from my bed, run down the stairs, turn a sharp corner it to the kitchen, bolt halfway into the room and stop. I would then take a dramatic inhale through my nose and excitedly announce "I smell bacon!" to my mother, aunt and grandmother sipping coffee at the table.

I think I must have eaten a little too much bacon on one of those mornings once upon a time because my love for bacon mysteriously evaporated sometime before I hit teenage years. What a fool I was then. I don't love it as much now...or maybe it's just that I now understand arterial blockage...so I don't eat it all that often, but when I do, it's kind of wonderful.

That is why I felt compelled to share with you the current state of the air in my home.

And now, to complete this cop-out blog post (because did I really just apostrophize about bacon that entire time?) I shall lead you to other people who will talk more about bacon:

The birthplace of the bacon martini:
http://www.doubledownsaloon.com/

A coworker of mine made these for a cookie exchange last Christmas...they were surprisingly delicious:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Chocolate-Chocolate-Chip-Bacon-Cookies/Detail.aspx

And some more bacon for y'all:
http://www.pauladeen.com/

Regularly scheduled recipe posting to resume on the next entry. Please pardon the interruption.

Recipe: Corn Chowder

I was entirely spoiled last week by four wonderful days spent soaking up as much Cancun sun as possible. After long (and rough, let me tell you) days of lying out by the pool, my sisters and I dined in the fantastic establishments on site at our hotel.

The only dish during vacation I wasn't crazy about was a corn chowder I had the last night of vacation. I enjoy a sweetness incorporated when I cook with corn and this particular dish was too savory for my taste. The problem for me when this sort of thing happens is that cravings of mine don't go away. If I'm dissatisfied with something I eat it lingers in the back of my mind until I can fix it. This is what lead me to cooking a corn chowder amidst the transition from winter to spring - not your typical time for soup or corn on the cob, but a craving is a craving.

This particular recipe requires corn that's still on the cob. Two great things about this are: 1. In the summer, corn on the cob is one of the cheapest and most delicious (at least for me in the midwest) things you can buy from the produce section and 2. For those of you that get hit with the urge to make this chowder before the stalks are knee high, you can buy corn in the freezer section that is still on the cob.

Corn Chowder

Adapted from Mark Bittman

Serves 4

1 hour to prepare (45 minutes inactive)

Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients:

• 6 ears of corn
• 3 cups water
• 2 tsp. plus ½ tsp. coarse salt
• ½ tsp. ground black pepper
• 4 Tbsp. butter
• ½ cup scallions, chopped
• ¼ cup flour
• 1 quart whole milk
• 1 Tbsp. sugar

Process:

1. Shuck the kernels from the ears of corn. Set the corn kernels aside and place the cleaned cobs into a large stock pot.
2. Add the water, ½ tsp. of coarse salt and the pepper to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Discard cobs and reserve cooking liquid.
3. Increase heat to medium and melt the butter in the stockpot. Once melted, add scallions and cook for one minute.
4. Whisk in the flour one tablespoon at a time to make a roux. Once all the flour is incorporated, allow mixture to cook until it turns a golden-brown color.
5. Pour in the milk and reserved cooking liquid and whisk to combine with the roux. Increase the heat to medium-high and allow soup to boil, stirring frequently.
6. Stir in shucked kernels, sugar, and remaining salt. Simmer on low heat for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Leftover quality: Excellent, use leftovers within one week

Tips and Tricks:

1. If time allows, let the corn cobs cool before removing them from the stock and squeeze them to ring out any excess liquid the cobs have absorbed.
2. The amount of sugar can be adjusted depending on your taste. If you’re unsure, add sugar one teaspoon at a time and taste between additions.
3. For a leaner, less creamy version, substitute skim milk for whole milk.

Cooking Without Tasting

After being away on business for nearly a week I was really looking forward to coming home and cooking my own dinner again. I planned out my meals for the week including one recipe I'm in the process of tweaking and two that were brand new to me.

Cut to me three days into the week and quickly spiraling downward into a vortex of sinus congestion woe. (For the record, I don't believe that's overstating the situation)
Being sick is no fun in general, but this week has been especially aggravating because I have temporarily lost the ability to taste and smell.

I've still cooked on the days I've felt up to it. Tuesday was seared pork with dijon brandy sauce and roasted fennel (still felt reasonably ok at this point), Wednesday was roasted sweet potatoes with goat cheese and relish (slipping into comfort food mode), and yesterday was linguine with creamy tomato sauce (full on sweatpants-glued-to-rear-end-glued-to-couch mode).

The only problem is I have no idea how any of this food actually tasted. The temperatures and textures I'm well aware of but without a functional nose, the taste is entirely lost on me.

This made me realize two things. First, how dependent I am on my ability to taste when I'm cooking. As I should be. Even when a dish is so familiar you can make it without a recipe, one of your ingredients could be spoiled, you may absent-mindedly forget to add salt or you just may be feeling like a little more heat on that particular day. The point is, whether the recipe is old or new, easy or hard, it's essential to taste as you go along. If you notice something that needs adjustment it's much easier to fix it then than when the dish is being served.

The second thing I realized is when I first started cooking, I rarely tasted anything as I was going along. I read and followed recipes line by line relying on a piece of paper, not my own taste buds to tell me if I was doing it right. If it came out poorly in the end I had no way of telling if it was a mistake in the process or a poorly crafted recipe. But I never felt like tasting before completion was necessary, as if it wouldn't taste right anyway because it wasn't finished.

So when should one stop to do a taste test when cooking? Here are a few places I always make sure to taste:

• Before and after adding any seasoning 
• Before placing something in the oven to be baked
• Before and after adding any thickening or thinning agents

Tasting can and should be done at whatever point in the recipe you feel like you need a better read on what's going on in that saucepan down there. If I'm cooking for myself, I don't worry too much about "double dipping" when I'm tasting, but if I'm cooking for others I always have a couple of spoons handy so I can sample without having to lick anything that's going back in the food. 

Happy tasting, dear readers. And when the full functionality of my nose returns, I shall rejoin the ranks of tasting spoon-wielding chefs everywhere.

Discussion: Culinary Identity

Whether you're new to cooking or have been at it for a long time, I think most people tend to follow a basic rule in their kitchen: cook what you like. There are surely exceptions here and there, but if you spend much time cooking food that you don't want to eat, how long will you keep cooking?

When it comes to what kinds of food we eat, there are a variety of factors that influence our choices: tradition,  price, religion, preferences, cravings and many more. When it comes to how and where we eat, even more variables enter the picture. We eat anywhere between the car and the kitchen table off of anything from paper plates to fine china. When you factor in how many kinds of ingredients exist in the world the possibilities of your culinary experiences are quite literally endless.

If there are so many drivers for the choices we make, how do we figure out what kind of eaters we are? On the most basic level, biology breaks it down to omnivores, herbivores and carnivores. As far as classifying eaters goes, this breakdown is where the simplicity both enters and exits the pictures. Herbivores, for example, encompass much more than just vegetarians. Vegans, fruitarians and raw foodists all fall under the herbivore umbrella, but the specific habits of each group have stark differences. Omnivores have fewer mainstream subsets, but based on consumption percentages alone of meats versus plants, the spectrum of eating is fantastically broad. The only group that remains straightforward are the carnivores only because an exclusively carnivorous diet is one that humans do not typically maintain over a lifetime.

It's simple to classify yourself as ominvore or herbivore. It's a far more complicated process to define just what kind of ominvore or herbivore you are. So what is the benefit of understanding your unique brand of omnivore or herbivoreism?

I eat meat, so I am by classification an omnivore. However, I usually eat it for three or fewer meals per week. I'd venture to guess that I also have at least three vegan meals per week. I could break it down into percentages, chart it, analyze it and try to really understand the statistics behind it, but the point is that the percentages don't matter. They don't matter because I eat what I like. Sure, certain things influence my preferences. I like vegetables, so I tend to eat more of them. When bell peppers are ringing up $1.50 each at the grocery store, I avoid them like the plague.

When you cook for yourself or others, your end results are always judged. That's why its so important to have a clue of what kind of cook you are. How can you have confidence if you can't begin to define what you're doing or why you're doing it?

I believe finding your culinary identity is a permanently incomplete process. And it should be! Knowing even one food you like is the starting line. Exploring that food, perhaps introducing a few new ingredients moves you along the path. After a while the exploration will lead to both discovery and a slight comfort with the unfamiliar. Understanding your culinary identity, nebulous though it may be, makes you more confident with anything you're cooking or eating. 

Recipe: Perfect French Toast

Over the weekend, my dear older sister was visiting from Chicago. If we're giving credit where credit is due, then major kudos go out to this lady who has made the drive to Indiana to visit me more times than anyone else (parents, of course, excluded from this count) since I moved. We always make a point to go out to one of several fantastic restaurants while she's in town. Our other tradition is staying in on Sunday morning and making breakfast. This always includes some sort of breakfast carb (pancakes, waffles, french toast, etc.) and deviled eggs.

"Why deviled eggs?" you ask? "Why not?" we respond. We don't typically see them except for Easter and Thanksgiving if we're lucky, so we've made it our own personal tradition to whip up a batch every time she's in town. Because they're tasty, that's why.

Now to do a complete 180: let's talk about french toast! I love deviled eggs, but I'm not totally sold on the recipe I was raised on. Don't get me wrong, they're delicious and addictive and even better when they're oddly colored because they came from dyed Easter eggs, but they're also the only reason I have miracle whip and yellow mustard in my fridge. I'm convinced there's a different (not saying better) way, so the deviled eggs are still on the drawing board for now.

On to the toast! (For real this time)

I call it Perfect French Toast not because I am so conceited that I think I make perfect recipes (though, I must say that my french toast beats the pants off Mark Bittman's version) but because my trusty taste tester, The Vegetarian, told me that I was not allowed to change anything about it because he liked it so much in its original form. It's the only time he's ever forbidden me from elaborating on what could be improved upon next time, so I'm leaving it. For now...

Perfect French Toast:

3 eggs
1/2 cup half and half
1 tsp. vanilla
6-8 slices of day old french bread
cinnamon

1. Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla together in a shallow casserole dish until well combined.
2. Place a griddle on the stove over medium heat.
3. Soak slices of french bread in the egg batter, allowing them to absorb the batter. Turn them over in the batter to ensure both sides are well-coated.
4. Place 3-4 slices of bread on the griddle at a time and allow to cook for around 2 minutes on each side. Before flipping them over, sprinkle with cinnamon.
5. Flip the toast slices over and continue to cook for an additional 2 minutes or so.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the remaining slices of bread and serve immediately.

Helpful hints:

• The older the bread, the better. The "perfect" version was made from a boule that was about four days old. I used day old sourdough for yesterday's version. If you have to use fresh bread, toast it in the oven to dry it out a bit before using it.
• The longer you soak the bread in the batter, the further into the bread it will absorb (and the older the bread, the better it will absorb). I'd recommend soaking for a few minutes on each side.
• If you aren't serving these immediately, toss them in the oven to keep warm. Unlike pancakes, french toast responds to this treatment quite favorably.
• Instead of syrup, try topping with agave nectar. It's a natural sweetener that has none of the red number 40s and high fructose corn syrups that are found in so many commercially available pancake syrups.
• If you need more batter than is made here, but not so much to double the recipe, add 3 Tbsp. of half and half for each additional egg you toss in.

Butternut Gnocchi

Lesson learned this evening: 14 oz. of squash is less than the weight of a typical butternut squash. Trying to make gnocchi with almost three times the squash than I meant to? Well, it makes things difficult. Next time instead of just reading the recipe, I'll try reading AND comprehending. 14 oz. does not equal one squash. Lesson learned. Moving on...

Despite overly wet dough and, well, we'll say "free form" gnocchi as a result, the finished product was actually quite delicious. It was based of of the Buttercup Squash recipe out of Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love. The color of the gnocchi, a bright orange-yellow, was bright and beautiful. The sauce she recommends along with it, really just a combination of ricotta, parsley, and reserved cooking liquid from the pasta, balanced the color and flavor very nicely. The only change I would make to the sauce is the amount of parsley she recommends - she says half a bunch. Which, if her supermarket bunches are anything like mine, that's a heck of a lot of parsley. I went for something closer to a quarter cup and would do a little less (around 2 Tbsp.) next time.

This one is still an "in-the-works" recipe for me if for no other reason than I want to get the gnocchi looking a little nicer. For the next time around, I'm planning on adding a little bit of potato to the squash for two reasons: 1. I think it will tone down the squash flavor just a touch. 2. I think it'll be a slightly fluffier texture inside and make it a bit easier to work with. I hope it doesn't affect the color too much, as that is an impressive looking feature of the recipe. I'll probably do 3/4 squash and 1/4 potato. I also plan to make the dough drier and roll out the gnocchi into logs. This may require some guesswork with portions and may be aided by a brief refrigeration, but Mark Bittman has some lovely illustrations in How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian that show gnocchi-making.

A couple of things I messed up and wish to not repeat next time. First, squash is ridiculously hot when you take it out of the microwave. Don't touch it until it cools a little bit! I'm still working on really learning that one...next time around I'll probably cut the squash and potato down, boil it, let it cool, and then process it to start the dough.

Once those tweaks are in there, I think it'll be good to go. And in the meantime, my sister will get to enjoy the not-so-beautiful version when I cook up the leftover dough for her this weekend.

Why I'm a crappy blogger.

I am a terrible blogger. There. I said it.

But it's true! I am awful about updates often enough to keep any audience coming back. I'm no good at keeping it brief and spend way more time than any human should agonizing over every word in my posts. I always think about things that would make a great blog post but when it's time for the fingers to hit the keys, I instead become interested in that massive pile of (previously ignored) laundry.

I am Emily and I suck at blogging.

I would like to say for the record, there are things I am good at. Cooking, for one. Singing is another. I like to think I'm pretty good at my job. I also excel at eating peanut butter, being a complete type A, ignoring speed limit signs, talking very fast, and picking the fastest line at the grocery store. 

I want to be a better blogger. I have a lot to say when it comes to food. And let's be honest, I have a lot to say about things period. Talking about food and teaching people how the heck you cook it are passions of mine. I get excited about perfect french toast, irritated at people who think twinkies are a fine dessert, and feel compelled to tell anyone who will listen how simple it is to make you own pasta sauce.

I am Emily and I love to talk. About food.

The main purpose of this blog is to give me a place to talk all about food and cooking, but I hope it will also function as a place for lively discussion, a home for my favorite recipes, and, most importantly, a place where people can learn something that inspires them.

Is the fourteenth time a charm? I'm pretty sure that's how many times I've tried to start a blog. Whatever. I'm trying! That's the first step, right?