Farmers' Market and Fancy Butter

Happy June, everyone!  Today I took a drive over to Bisbee to check out their Farmers' Market.  I've only been to the one here in S.V.  It's on Thursdays, which makes it sometimes hard to get to when I'm busy at work.  The Bisbee market is pretty nice.  I got a good haul today.  I picked up some meat from Sky Island/47 Brand and San Ysidro Farms--the people are great!  They raise animals humanely and healthfully.  Happy cows (and pigs and lambs) make for healthier meat, in my opinion.

     From the Elfrida Community Garden stand, I got a variety of radishes and a giant rainbow beet.  I also picked up some French shallots and purple garlic.  I'll have to think of something yummy to make with these.


     When I got home, I was pretty hungry, so I made myself some lunch.  I had a lovely grass-fed beef steak that I thawed a couple of days ago and some fresh green beans I bought last weekend, both of which needed to be eaten.  I boiled the green beans until they were just cooked then drained them and sauteed them in a pan with a little garlic olive oil.  I put them in the oven to keep warm while I made the steak.  Just salt & pepper and a little garlic.  When the steak was medium-well, I put it on the plate with the green beans and topped it with a little gremolata butter.  I only managed to eat about half of it before I was full.

     What is gremolata butter, you ask?  Well, it's a compound butter made with  a mixture of minced garlic, chopped flat-leaf parsley, and lemon zest.  It is delicious sprinkled on meat, especially lamb.  I first heard of a gremolata when I made an amazing recipe for red-wine braised lamb shanks I found on Epicurious.

     This gremolata butter recipe came from Rachel Ray via my Pinterest Cooking board. I've pinned over 100 things to my cooking board and have made fewer than 5 of the recipes, so I'm trying to remedy that.  Tomorrow or perhaps later in the week I will be making a recipe for pesto chicken I pinned about a month ago.  The recipe calls for lemon juice in addition to the zest.  I was doubtful for 2 reasons: 1) mixing liquid into butter can be difficult and 2) I thought the juice would make the butter too tart.  Alas, I was right to be concerned.  This wasn't a total fail, but it wasn't a success either.  I didn't find it too hard to get the juice mixed in, but it did overwhelm the other flavors and make the butter too lemony.  I may try softening the butter again and adding more butter, garlic, and parsley to see if it tastes better.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend.  More dinner reports later this week.

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.

New Cookbook

I got a Borders gift card from my wonderful brother and sister-in-law (among other fabulous presents), so I went down to Borders for their big after Christmas sale, and found some great bargains. One of those is The Essential Baking Cookbook (ISBN 978-0681025936) published by Bay Books.

This book has everything from bread to cakes and pies to cookies and muffins. I didn't realize at first, but it's an Australian publication which means it has lots of cool things you don't normally find in U.S. cookbooks (though it also lacks some things you'd expect to find in a U.S. cookbook). Ingredient measurements are offered in cups, grams, and ounces unless they are smaller than a 1/4 cup--then they are in teaspoons and tablespoons.

I made rolls from the bread section on Sunday, and they turned out well. I don't have a lot of experience making yeast bread, so I was a little nervous. I made sure I set the timer so I'd knead the dough for long enough, and I bugged my mom with lots of questions about whether it seemed to be rising properly. The rolls turned out tasty and the texture was right. They tasted good, but there seemed to be something lacking, but I had a hard time putting my finger on it. My mom and I finally decided it might be that a little more salt or sugar was needed. The recipe called for 1 tsp. of salt and 4 tsp. of sugar (divided) for 4 cups of flour. I'll probably up the salt by 1/2 tsp. and the sugar by 1 tsp. next time and see if that makes a difference.

I had a problem with how the rolls browned. The book gave examples of different glazes to use either before or after baking. I did an egg wash that was supposed to give the rolls a "deep colour in the crust." I didn't find it to work well. The bottoms browned faster than the tops, and the tops stayed kind of pale. I will consult the "What Went Wrong" section of the cookbook to see what I can do next time to get they outcome I want.

I have lots of great recipes to experiment with in the coming year. I also will be attempting to plan ahead meals more. It's much easier to get dinner going when you know you have the ingredients on hand to make one of a selection of recipes. What I've done occasionally in the past is to pick out 5 meals to make for dinners for a week (the other 2 days are for leftovers), and then shop for those meals specifically. Then I leave the list of meals on the fridge and when I ask myself "What am I making for dinner tonight?" I can go consult the list and pick out what looks good (or is easiest to make, depending on how I'm feeling about cooking that day). This is probably not revolutionary meal planning to anyone except me, but I like how well it works, especially in avoiding the curse of indecision which leads to ordering pizza or going out to eat.

I've been doing pretty well incorporating more vegetables into my meal plans, listing not just the main dish but also possible veggies to serve as well. Having those veggies listed right on my weekly meal list is a good reminder so I don't end up finishing the main dish without having made any vegetable accompaniment. That's not really a problem if the meal already incorporates veggies in the recipe--like the roasted vegetable and chicken bake, but when I'm making something like oven baked bbq ribs, I hate finding myself with a ready-to-serve main dish but nothing to serve with it.

I'm going to continue to plan meals with plenty of vegetables; I always feel particularly virtuous after eating a dinner with lots of veggies. The baked chicken with roasted vegetables is now on the regular dinner rotation. There's a lot of prep, but it's not hard to make. And really, if I chose just 2 or 3 types of veggies instead of 5 or 6, it would probably take less time to prep.

What I really want to do is improve at making stir fry. Mine seems to always turn out with either overdone or underdone veggies. Perhaps I need a wok instead of using the large skillet. Hmm, maybe I can convince my mom she needs a wok. I will be researching stir fry techniques, but if anyone has a good method they use, please post a comment. Thanks.