Pizza, Popsicles, & Peaceful Mornings

I like Friday mornings in the summer.  The library is only open Monday through Thursday, so we work four 10-hour days and have every Friday off.  I've been waking up somewhat early (for me, for a day off anyway) on Fridays and enjoying the peace of a quiet morning before it gets too hot.  Lately it's been pretty hot by 9, though this weekend was a bit overcast and a little cooler than it was during the week when we had some 100 + days.

     Iced coffee on a hot day is a pleasure.  I brew up a bunch of coffee over the weekend and keep it in an iced tea bottle in the fridge; it usually lasts most of the week.  Anyway, Friday morning I was pouring my glass of coffee and remembered this very cool picture my sister posted on facebook of her coffee with the cream just added.  It was black with these swirls of white and very cool looking.  I was inspired to try getting a similar shot.  Let me tell you, it isn't easy to photograph cream diffusing through coffee. You really only get a few shots before it's too late.  That's my cool Eeyore glass mug my Big Sis brought me from Disneyland.  It's even got my name engraved on it.  I love it.

     After the photos were taken, I sat down and enjoyed my coffee and read a few chapters of my book.  I'm reading The Sherlockian by Graham Moore.  It's a mystery involving the death of a member of The Baker Street Irregulars during the society's annual festivities in New York, a missing diary of Arthur Conan-Doyle, and the killing off of Sherlock Holmes and his subsequent return.  It's good so far, but I was jarred at one point by the use of the word "fractal" in a description of 1900 London from the p.o.v. of Conan-Doyle.  The term was coined around 1975.  I suppressed my irritation and continued reading because the book is interesting and the writing good otherwise.

     Friday evening I tried a new pizza dough recipe, and I think it's probably the best pizza dough I've ever made.  I used the recipe from King Arthur Flour.  The recipe calls for 7/8 to 1 1/8 cup water.  I used 1 cup, but the dough was really sticky.  Next time I'll probably use 7/8 of a cup instead.  I turned out fine though.  I just kneaded in a little more flour once I removed the dough from the bread machine before dividing the dough and then letting it rest before making the pizza. The dough was the perfect combination of chewy and crispy.

      I had some leftover pesto sauce, so I used that instead of a standard red sauce.  For toppings I used chopped leftover chicken breast and zucchini along with mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses.  The pizza turned out very yummy.  The pesto was very tasty and went well with the other toppings.  This picture is from Saturday lunch.  The leftover pizza was still very good the next day.

     Aren't popsicles so refreshing on a hot day?  Sunday, I made orange and raspberry cream-sicles based on a recipe I found on Pinterest.  I didn't have orange extract, so I left that out, and I used simple syrup in place of the honey as my honey is completely crystallized and was never going to blend into the other ingredients.  The flavor was good but too subtle.  I think using orange juice concentrate instead of orange juice would have produced a more "orangy" flavor. However, the reason I decided to try this recipe was because I had some fresh squeezed orange juice in the freezer.  It came from the last bag of Willcox oranges I bought before the season ended.  They were the best oranges, sweet and full of flavor, but they were starting to mold, so I cut off the moldy bits and juiced the rest of the oranges so they wouldn't go to waste.


     The recipe is supposed to make 6-8 popsicles, but my popsicle molds must be larger than the ones used by the person who created the recipe because I ran out after filling only 4 of my molds.  I had some very ripe raspberries, so I took some of those, added some simple syrup, mashed them up, and then mixed in a little half & half and filled the last 2 popsicles molds.  The raspberry ones weren't quite sweet enough, and they were very seedy.  I think it might be better to put some or all of the mashed raspberries through a strainer to remove some of the seeds.  The other aspect that wasn't ideal was the texture.  It was pretty icy instead of creamy.  I really should have expected that, since the mixture was simply frozen instead of processed in an ice cream machine first then poured into the molds.  Freezing the mixture in an ice cream machine, even partially, would reduce the iciness in the final product.  I'll have to try that next time and let you know how they turn out.  Darn, now I'll have to buy an ice cream maker.  The things I do for this blog.

Dinner With A Side Of Nostalgia

Pot Roast

Does anybody out there make pot roast regularly? I haven't made one in years, but I found this great grass-fed chuck roast recently at Noah's Ark in Placerville. There's just something homey and comforting about pot roast. It reminds me of my grandma (my dad's mom) who passed away a little over a year ago. There were three dishes that I think of as her specialties: "Spanish" meatballs, mustard/brown sugar pork chops, and pot roast. She made excellent corned beef and cabbage too, and her cole slaw (she always called it cabbage & carrot salad) couldn't be beat. She also made the best butter cookies. I've got the recipe somewhere. They were just light and crispy with a nice buttery flavor without being too rich. I can remember helping her mix up batches when I visited her.

       When my siblings and I were kids, we would each go spend a week with grandma individually during the summer. During that week, the kid who was visiting was "The Big Cheese." My grandma and I would bake cookies, go shopping, and play tourist in Sacramento. She taught me how to crochet (I made endless hats, scarves, and socks for all the stuffed animals), to play cribbage, and to swim. Her neighbor had Corgis that were so cute. It's funny how much you remember when you start thinking about your childhood.

       Well, this is supposed to be a food blog, so I'm writing today about the pot roast (pretty darn good) and the madeira cake (not quite a fail) I made yesterday. Once again, I didn't have a go-to recipe, so I cobbled together a recipe I found online with my mom's advice on how to proceed in the endeavor of pot roast making, and the result was quite yummy.

       First I patted the chuck roast dry with a paper towel then sprinkled it with a little flour, salt, and pepper before browning it on all sides in a skillet with a little oil. Once all the sides were nice and brown, I transferred the roast to my Crockpot. I love this Crockpot; it was a gift from my sister one year for Christmas or my birthday, and it is just perfect. It's a perfect size, not too small and not too big, and it's not all gadgety with digital readouts and programmable controls. It has 4 settings: high, low, warm, and off. That's the beauty of a Crockpot, you don't have to do much. Once you start it, it's good on its own for several hours (or more) before you have to do anything. When the dish is done, you really only have to turn it down to warm or off and serve dinner.

       The chuck roast went into the Crockpot along with a sliced yellow onion, a few potatoes, and some carrots. I threw in some garlic powder, parsley, and thyme for good measure. Then I poured in one 12 oz can of V-8 and about a cup and a half of water. My mom suggested the V-8 because that's how she used to make it. She said she used it because it added the flavor of the vegetables, but not chunks of veggies we kids didn't like when we were little. I turned the Crockpot to high and left it for about an hour. Then I turned it to low and left it for another 5 hours or so.

       When the roast was done, I turned the Crockpot to warm and then ladled out about 2 cups of the broth, straining it into a smaller bowl. I chilled this for a bit so I could skim as much fat off as I could before using it to make the gravy. When I made the gravy, I browned some flour in a dry pan. You don't really need to used oil or butter to brown the flour when making gravy (cream sauce is another story). Just keep the flour moving (I use a wire whisk) and the temperature of the burner at medium to medium-low, and it browns just fine. Once the flour is ready, pour in the hot liquid and stir like crazy. This works for me, minimizing the problem of lumps. I added a little salt and pepper and let it bubble for a bit before serving it up with the roast and vegetables. All-in-all a success, and and enough leftovers so I can take some for lunch at work tomorrow.

Madeira Cake
       While the roast was cooking, I was thumbing through my new baking book I got just after Christmas. It is full of interesting recipes I'm not very familiar with. One of these is madeira cake. The description goes like this, "This rich butter cake was popular in Victorian England. It was often served with a glass of Madeira, hence the name. It is a moist tender cake due to the high butter content." Sadly, the same could not have been said about my cake. The photo and description in the cookbook made it sound similar to pound cake only with some orange zest mixed in. Something didn't seem quite right when I mixed up the batter; it was more like soft cookie dough than cake batter. It seems to me now that the amount of flour called for might have been too much and/or the liquid ingredients should have been increased. Still, I persevered. I spooned the batter into the loaf pan and patted it smooth. I baked it exactly according to directions: 315 degrees (weird) for 50 minutes.

       The cake was not a success. It was dense and on the dry side. The crispy texture of the outer crust was good, as was the flavor of the cake (I mixed in about a teaspoon each of orange and lemon zest.) The texture really needed help. My mom sprinkled some Amaretto Di Saronno on her piece after the first bite, which helped with the dryness. The one thing that did go perfectly was turning the cake out of the pan. The recipe called for greasing the pan then lining it with parchment paper. Once the cake was baked and allowed to cool for about 10 minutes, it just slid right out of the pan, and the crust was smooth with no stuck spots.

       After about an hour's mild disappointment, I had a brilliant thought: Trifle! The cake would be perfect to use in a trifle. Slices of cake or ladyfingers are layered on the bottom and part way up the sides of a trifle dish (if you have one. otherwise, a glass bowl). The cake is then brushed with liqueur or sherry then layered with fruit, custard, sometimes jelly (either Jello or jam), and topped with whipped cream. There are any number of variations. I will be making the trifle tomorrow night or possibly Tuesday, and we'll see how the cake tastes in that. I think it will hold up well; the wet ingredients (liqueur, custard) will soften and moisten it without causing it to dissolve into a soggy mess. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Dessert Report

Today's post is about the dessert I made because the dinners I made yesterday and tonight were both things I've made and reported on--pizza and stir fry. However, tonight's dessert was a thing born from necessity. The necessity to do something with the milk before it went bad.

     My mom buys Strauss non-fat milk. It's organic milk from a Northern California dairy where all the cows are happy California cows. They are grass-fed and pasture raised, so the milk is a little different from everyday milk (read expensive). Here's the thing about Strauss milk though. As the days go by, it starts to get sweet. There's a point, based on how sweet it tastes, at which I know that in another day or so the milk will go bad. That day was today. I didn't want to waste almost 3 cups of milk, so I knew I had to do something with it.

     Pudding! I like pudding. I even like the boxed stuff. Unfortunately, we didn't have any of the boxed stuff, so I was out of luck. But wait...people made pudding before Jello ever started boxing the stuff. What to do? Ah, the internet, I love you (even though sometimes you infuriate me.) I found a recipe for Chocolate pudding made with cocoa and cornstarch (I had both of those things!). It also called for sugar (check), milk (duh), salt, butter, and vanilla (just a little of the last 3).

     The recipe did take some effort, but it wasn't complicated. It just took some time. I am not renowned for my patience; I always want to hurry things up. This sometimes leads to unpleasant results when cooking. I managed to be patient this time, and it was worth it. The pudding came out creamy and chocolate-y with the added bonus of being low-fat and without any preservatives or weird food additives.

Pumpkin Praline Torte

Since it's been mentioned recently on facebook, I thought I'd post about the Praline Pumpkin Torte that so wowed everyone I know who has tasted it.

About 5 years ago, my mom emailed me about a recipe from Sunset magazine she thought looked good. It would be something different for the holidays while still being seasonal. I looked the recipe over, and it looked really good. It was a big hit from the first.

Fast forward 2 years to Thanksgiving 2007; I was in Boston at grad school for my MLIS. Since I was going home to California for Christmas, I stayed in Boston for Thanksgiving. Some of my friends and co-dorm residents were also staying, so we decided to make our own Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out great! Everyone made something, and it was all so yummy. I was in charge of dessert, so I decided to make the Praline Pumpkin Torte.

It was a huge hit! There's just something about the combination of layers of rich, spicy pumpkin cake studded with praline pecans and sandwiched together with whipped cream.

The recipe was featured in a Sunset Magazine website feature called 17 Thanksgiving Desserts.

Praline Pumpkin Torte
from Sunset

Notes: You can bake the cakes (through step 3) up to 1 day ahead; cover and store at room temperature. [I recommend making them at the night before, letting them cool, and then wrapping them up. I think it makes the cake dense, moist, and melds all the flavors together.] Up to 6 hours ahead, assemble layers; cover with a large inverted bowl or pan and chill.

Prep and Cook Time: about 1 hour, plus 1 1/2 hours to cool cakes.


3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/3 cup butter
3 tablespoons plus 1 3/4 cups whipping cream
1 cup chopped pecans
4 large eggs
1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups canned cooked pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (or 3/4 teaspoon each ground cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup powdered sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Butter two 9-inch round cake pans. Line bottoms of pans with cooking parchment. In a heavy 1- to 2-quart pan over low heat, stir brown sugar, butter, and 3 tablespoons whipping cream until melted and blended, about 5 minutes. Pour half the brown sugar mixture into each of the cake pans. Sprinkle 3/4 cup chopped pecans evenly into pans.

2. In a bowl, with a spoon, beat eggs, granulated sugar, and oil until well blended. Stir in pumpkin and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, baking soda, and salt to blend. Whisk dry ingredients into pumpkin mixture until well blended. Pour half the batter into each of the pans; smooth top.

3. Bake until a toothpick inserted in center of cakes comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool in pans on racks about 5 minutes, then invert onto racks and remove pans and paper. Let cool completely, about 1 1/2 hours.

4. Up to 6 hours before serving, in a bowl, with an electric mixer on high speed, beat remaining 1 3/4 cups whipping cream until soft peaks form. On low speed, beat in powdered sugar and remaining 1/2 teaspoon vanilla just until blended. Set one cake layer, pecan praline side up, on a serving platter. Spread two-thirds of the whipped cream mixture over the top. Set second layer, praline side up, on top. Cover with remaining whipped cream mixture. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup chopped pecans.

Yield: Makes about 12 servings

If any of my friends who have made this cake have any variations they've tried, let me know.

--recipe and photo copyright Sunset Magazine, photo by Monica Buck--