Ok, here it goes: The Udon thing was a complete and utter failure.

PHEW! That feels good to get off my chest.

Making Udon noodles is an extensive process that is a lot of work. Hours and hours of tedious kneading, resting, kneading, resting, and the end result is not likely to be much if any better than store bought udon noodles. As a matter of fact, it is very likely that you will end up with noodles that are thick and chewy and not good at all. Such a waste!

In general, my interest in cooking is moving away from the complete Do-It-Yourself attitude. Partly because, ya know, it’s a huge time commitment to make even blitz puff pastry, or udon noodles, but also because some of this store bought stuff is probably better than you are going to make yourself in your meager kitchen. There’s a definite satisfaction in starting from complete scratch, though, so I’m glad that I’ve learned what I have so far, and there’s probably a good chance that I will at least TRY to make some stuff myself before moving on to the prepared things. Anyway I’m rambling here, I’ll put it simply: If Alton Brown has no shame in buying puff pastry, neither shall I!

So, Udon fail, but that’s not to say I have not been busy in the past month. Au contraire! I have made many a dish, both successes and failures. The failures: Bagels (I blame a bad recipe and instructions, as well as *cough* my crappy flour measuring techniques, whoops) and Filo dough (I blame the fact that it’s effin’ Filo dough, even the Greeks hardly make this stuff by hand anymore).

The successes? Look and see!

Vegan Asparagus Tart courtesy of Vegan Yum Yum

If the whole “Vegan” part of this concerns you for any reason, don’t let it. My problem with some vegan preparations is that the substitutes used have either a bad or confusing flavor or texture. You know I give them A for effort most of the time,  but sometimes it just comes out tasting weird (side note: both my vegan friends Candice and Lisa are effing amazing cooks and I love everything they cook beyond words, kisses). No worries here, though, because there are no substitutes in this recipe, just good ingredients. This post is already getting lengthy, so I’ll leave the specifics of the recipe to the links, but this is very easy to make and beyond delicious! I heartily encourage you to make it for yourself.

Goat Cheese Cream Berry Tart

This was delicious and rich, really rich! I can’t for the life of me remember where I got the recipe, and I think that’s ok because I don’t think I followed it closely. The gist of it though is to combine plain chevré cheese with cream, sugar and  a bit of lemon juice and whip into a creamy consistency. Spread atop a sheet of puff pastry (Pepperidge Farms makes an excellent puff pastry) and top with berries (blue and straw in this case) and bake until the pastry is golden brown. Delightful!

Here’s a few random photos from the past month too.

Dashi stock for soups, Udon or Miso. Pungent!

Green Onions, Carrots, and Cremini Mushrooms, good veggies for Udon.

Udon noodles are often kneaded with your feet. Yeah...

This batch actually turned out pretty good, excellent stirfry.

Those spicy cheddar palmier's I mentioned last time. I recommend cutting back on the brown sugar a bit.

Coconut Cookies. Pretty basic, chocolate chip like recipe.

So vacation was pretty awesome, but I’m happy to be back home (not so much back to work) and excited to continue the cooking projects!

Soon, sometimes this coming weekend  I hope, I will have an extensive post on making Udon noodles for you, but for the moment I wanted to share a kick ass recipe I made the other night: Spicy Cheddar Palmier!

• 1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
• 1 1/2 tablespoons Firmly packed light brown sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon cayenne
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup packed fresh parsley leaves, washed, spun dry, and chopped
• 1 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar (about 6 ounces)
• And last but far from least, a preparation of our Rough Puff Pastry

I made another modification to my pastry dough, I use 1 cup All Purpose Flour and 1/4 cup Corn Starch. Corn Starch (like all non-wheat flours) lacks the necessary protein compounds to formulate gluten during the kneading process, and as such you can be slightly less worried about over working the dough and still end up with that delightfully flaky texture.

Anyways, it’s simple, make your dough, roll it out into a sheet. Combine the seasonings and spread over the top, shred the cheddar and spread atop the spices. Use the parsley as you see fit, I pressed the sheet of dough into the parsley but you could also add it anywhere else into the mixture. As with any pastry you’re cooking with the rough puff pastry, bake at high temp (425 degrees F) for the first 5-10 minutes than reduce (375 degrees F) for the remainder until golden. To help with the browning you can do an egg wash or alternative.

Sorry, no pictures this time, they all turned out dreadful! I need a real camera.

Keep the Faith!

The short of it is it turned out pretty spectacular, except for the palmier filling which caramelized and really stuck to the cookie sheet. Whoops! And after all that boasting about parchment paper I did, I went and forgot to use it. Oh well, live and learn, next time I think I’ll try to make almond paste. The important part to mention is that I used all of the butter that the recipe calls for this time. The extra 5 tbsp of butter I stuck between two sheets of saran wrap and rolled flat. I then laid the butter on top of the dough on the second time rolling it out and folded the dough over it and rolled it into the layers. The results are absolutely stellar.

When I do get back, look forward to a long and tedious post about Udon noodles and my desperate struggle for survival in a crazy world of Asian cuisine and chemistry.

Keep the Faith!

Cooking pastry is not easy; it takes a lot of time, dedication and craft. But, at the same time, it’s not that complicated either, the key concepts are pretty simple, it’s all a matter of execution. Maybe this metaphor will only make sense to me, but pastry is funk. I love that.

With that said, I jumped into the world of pastry at a fairly easy entry point: pie!

Savory Chicken & Artichoke Pie

The first, most important, and hardest part of this recipe is the dough. Puff pastry can be a pretty intimidating thing to make, some of the recipes I looked at for Puff Pastry dough call for something along the lines of 36 hours of prep time! Well, lucky for us there is an efficient and effective shortcut, something we like to call:

Rough Puff Pastry

Recipe Courtesy of Epicurious

• 1 ¼ cup all purpose flour
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 13 Tbsp unsalted butter, frozen
• 5-6 Tbsp ice cold water

Ok, the first thing to note here is where I screwed up. The original recipe as you will well see if you follow that link calls for, ahem, “1 stick (1/2 cup) plus 5 tablespoons unsalted butter”. Ok, well, turns out that’s a pretty easy thing to misread when in the thick of things. My dough received only ½ a cup of butter. I only discovered this fact earlier today, so I suppose it’s a testament of… well something that my pie crust still turned out quite (SPOILERS!!) delicious.

Now, stop, collaborate and listen: in the words of the great Alton Brown, “organization will set you free!” It’s very important to keep everything cold and to handle your dough as little as possible, make sure you have everything you need ready to go so you can work fast and efficiently.

To start with, I used a glass mixing bowl that I had chilled in the freezer. Combine the salt and flour and mix thoroughly. Take a cheese grater and plop that sucker down in the middle of your flour and grate your frozen butter into the flour.

Best nachos ever.

Doesn’t that look just lovely? Yes it does, hush.

Cut the butter into your flour, working quickly to incorporate the butter without it warming up much. Next step is to start adding that water. Add a few tablespoons at a time and mixing it in well. You’ll likely use all of that water, but you don’t want your dough getting too sticky. When it’s ready, it’ll clump up and crumble and not look at all like it’ll work, you will be sad and disheartened. Don’t be! It’s all a clever ruse, our rough puff pastry dough is just playing hard to get. Cover the dough with saran wrap and chill in the freezer for at least 30 minutes.

Worth noting: I ended up having to use a fair bit of plastic wrap throughout this process. Do yourself a favor and splurge for the nice box with a good cutter on it. Nothing sucks worse than crappy cling wrap.

Once your dough is chilled, dump it out on to a well floured surface. Ideally a cold surface, a lot of professional pastry chefs use a marble surface. I just picked up the tip of using a cookie sheet that you have chilled in the freezer. Start rolling out the dough into a rectangle. It’ll be pretty clumpy and not roll out so hot, resist the urge to put water into it, I promise it’ll start looking like proper dough soon!

Once you have it into a rectangle, you do a tri-fold on it. With the narrow end facing you, fold the top third down and the bottom third up. Turn the new rectangle so the narrow end again faces you and roll it out again. Repeat this process a couple times, and then without rolling out the tri-fold, wrap it in saran wrap and return to the freezer again.

I ended up chilling and rolling out the dough three times total, with maybe three turns each time. Doing some quick math, that’s oh, 9^3 or 729 layers. Proper puff pastry requires adding butter or shortening in during the layering process. We’ll be skipping that for the rough puff pastry.

Once you have all that folding and rolling out done with, fold up the dough gently, wrap in saran wrap and chill overnight. The next morning, gently unfold the dough, roll out and cut your pie rounds from the dough.

The rest is easy peasy, just fill up your pie with delicious ingredients! I decided to go with a layered approach, bottom layer of feta, than spinach, than mushroom, then chicken and artichoke (I seared the chicken before hand and then chopped it up, if I were to do it again I’d probably bake the chicken first instead) and top it all off with mozzarella. Lay your second pie round on top, lightly wet the edges of the the two pie round and pinch together. Use your thumb and forefinger to make those pretty little fluted edges.

Ain’t I’m Clean?

I brushed some melted butter on top of the pie to make it brown nicely. It wasn’t the most effective, more experimentation is necessary. We’re going to bake this pie at 425 degrees F for about 10-15 minutes, and then reduce heat to 375 until the crust is a nice golden brown. This WILL smell amazing, by the way. Once it’s nice and browned, take the pie out and let sit for awhile to set up.

Mm, yes, it was delicious.

Me at work, displeased.

See? I am not happy

So, after coming home and reorganizing the pantry, I found myself with a strong desire to make something. But I had no plans, and no supplies. Time to get “creative”. I laid out the basic baking stuff I had and thought for a bit about what I could do.

And there I saw it, my old nemesis: Self rising flour

Ok it’ s not really that dramatic, it’s just that I bought it to make cobbler and spare myself the hassle of adding the baking powder and salt and such manually, but then I had nothing to do with it after. What could I make with said flour? Well, cobbler, but I have no fruit. Biscuits, but I have no buttermilk (well we do, but it’s two months past it’s expiration date, better talk to Jason about that…)

And then a thought hit me: doughnut!

Time to improvise!

Doughnut dough:

• 4 1/2 Cups self rising flour
• 2 tbs butter
• 1 cup light brown sugar (I’m still out of granulated, and I have a bunch of light brown left over from the granola)
• 2 cups milk
• A dash of vanilla extract, because why not?
• Salt?

Caramel topping

• 1 cup light brown sugar
• some amount of honey
• some amount of butter
• dash of vanilla extract, because again why not?

Recipe courtesy of my own deranged mind.

Pretty much the most incredibly straightforward thing you could do. Mix the wet stuff with the wet stuff, the dry with the dry, combine and make into a dough. Roll out said dough and cut out small circles of it and fry it in oil/lard/crisco whatever floats your merry little sailor boat. Oh you’re so cute in that sailor outfit.

I said small, I tried big at first and that was like half the dough in the trash when it failed spectacularly to cook right. Lesson learned.

The end result was…. not unpleasant, but nothing amazing. Except that it’s sweet dough fried and covered in a caramel sauce, so, you know, pretty hard to fuck up.

Oh yeah, I threw shredded coconut on top, because I had it and it needed to be killed. I mean used.

I have come to the conclusion that my day to day eating routines are incredibly boring. I am much, much too lazy to change this on a daily basis, but I have decided that each weekend I should have some sort of cooking project, hopefully with the result being me becoming a better, more adventurous and knowledgeable cook!

And with that: A LA CUISINE!

Homemade Granola Bars

Note: Today’s recipes are brought to you by the placidly psychotic Ina Garten!

Ina Garten DaVita baby!

Ingredients:

• 2 cups old-fashioned oatmeal
• 1 cup sliced almonds
• 1 cup shredded coconut, loosely packed
• 1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2/3 cup honey
• 1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 cup chopped pitted dates
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries

I suppose a well stocked pantry would have most, if not all, of these ingredients on hand. Turns out I do not have a well stocked pantry. Well sue me silly, I suppose that is something I will have to work on. I had to buy more than half of these ingredients, which lead to this being a fairly pricey first venture, but fingers crossed that will become less of the case over time. Turns out I did have wheat germ though, go figure.

So, ingredients in tow, time to start into making this sucker! The first step is to combine the oatmeal, coconut, and almonds together, lightly toss and put on the ritualistic baking vessel of your choosing. Choose wisely. I went with a cake pan. An eldritch cake pan, covered in ancient runes and possessing bizarre non-Euclidean geometry. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (not Celsius) and then pop that sucker into the oven for 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned. Think India and not Nigeria. Stir that stuff occasionally, you know, let it know you love it from time to time.

While you wait for the healthy part of the concoction to get nice and golden brown, it’s time to make the incredibly unhealthy part. In a sauce pan, combine the butter, brown sugar, honey, vanilla and salt and bring to a boil over low to medium heat. Stir it, you know, nobody likes burnt tasting syrup. Also, vanilla extract, fuck you! It was like five bucks for this tiny little bottle of this stuff. I hear it goes a long way though, so maybe this is part of that “stocking the pantry” thing.

So now that your syrup mixture is boiling, and your kitchen smells just divine, take your oat mix, now golden brown and delicious, out of the oven and dump into a big mixing bowl. I lack a big mixing bowl, so I made a mess by dumping it into a medium sized mixing bowl, your mileage may vary. This would be an ideal moment to reduce the temperature of your oven to 300 degrees. Now add the toasted wheat germ to the oats.

Tangent: I am not in the least bit convinced this wheat germ is essential to this recipe, not at all. I don’t think it adds any flavor to the final product, as far as I can tell it’s just there to up the calorie content by a lot. Speaking of which, people call Granola healthy, but what does that actually mean? Turns out it just means that Granola is chock full of calories, but light on fats. Ok, that’s swell, and actually really good if you’re, say, hiking or something. But if you’re just sitting on your ass at home (like me) eating handfuls of high calorie granola will still make you a lard ass with or without the fat content. Garsh.

Add the fruits to your oat mix and pour the syrup over top, mix well! Oh, did I mention that you should probably have chopped up all of that fruit pretty fine before you even started doing anything else? No? Well the recipe I got didn’t EITHER, so suck them fowl eggs and learn your lesson for next time chump!

Pour your now thoroughly mixed and delightful smelling granola mix into cake pan that you have buttered and lined with parchment paper. Did I mention you need parchment paper? You do, so have some. You should have some anyways, because it turns out this stuff is incredible, I’ll show you shortly. The recipe I followed said to “lightly press the mixture into the pan”; I am not sure about this. My granola bars turned out pretty crumble and not so, uhm, bar like. I’m not sure if this had more to do with the fruit bits not being chopped finely enough or if I didn’t pack it into the cake pan well enough, or even if I didn’t let it sit long enough after. Maybe we’ll never know, but pack your granola mix in whatever way makes you happy. Stick it in the oven for 25-30 minutes until a light golden brown. Take it out and let it cool for a few hours.

Ok, so here’s the fun part, getting the granola out of the pan! Here is where you find out that parchment paper is the coolest thing ever. Just flip the cake pan upside down on top of a surface of your choosing (I chose a cookie sheet. I chose wisely) and just bang on the bottom a bit and the parchment paper will allow the whole blessed thing to come out smoothly.

See? Awesome! Parchment paper is coated in silicone, stands up to heat without smoking or imparting any flavor to the food (unlike wax paper, don’t use that) and is completely non-stick. I’m a lil’ bit in love.

So once you get the block of granola out, cut it into the form that most makes you happy. I tried just simple bars, but it was much too crumbly and didn’t come out smoothly. I don’t know for sure why, maybe I’ll make it again someday and find out.

They were still very delicious though, we polished off the last of them this morning, that’s quite a lot of granola eaten in not even two days. Next time I think I might cut down on the fruit a bit, chop it finer, and maybe add some chocolate chips. The great thing is just the possibilities for adding new things to mixture!

Final score: 9 Squirrels out of Monkey.

INTERMISSION

ACT II

Shortbread Cookies

Ingredients:

• 3/4 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 6 to 7 ounces very good semisweet chocolate, finely chopped

Do you see that? DO YOU SEE THAT? Three quarters of a pound of butter! Holy shit, no wonder shortbread is so goddamn delicious!

So step one, take all of that butter and stick it in a mixing bowl. If you have the benefit of an electric mixer, well bully for you, I didn’t so I stuck it in a bowl and chopped it a lot and put it in the microwave for ten seconds. If you do this, remember, YOU DO NOT WANT IT TO MELT, just to soften up a bit. Add the cup of sugar to the butter. Turns out I failed at the buying ingredients bit, I had about a quarter cup of granulated sugar here, rats. I did, however, have a long unused box of confectioners’ sugar (a previous purchasing mistake) and you can substitute for granulated sugar at a ratio of 1.75:1. Apparently you can also add corn starch to the confectioners’ sugar to give it more of a flowing consistency like granulated, I did not do this because it seemed unnecessary in this recipe and also I didn’t have corn starch. Or at least I thought I didn’t, I found some stuck at the back of a shelf later, weird.

Anyways, mix your butter and sugar. The recipe said “until they are just combined”. That seemed vague to me, so I went with “until they look delicious and you want to put your face in the bowl and eat nearly a pound of sugary butter”. Then you add the vanilla. So now you have a bowl of sugary butter that also smells and tastes like vanilla. Try your best to not lock yourself in the bathroom and eat the whole bowl. You may have to repeat this part of the recipe.

Meanwhile! Sift together the flour and salt. Wait, wait, wait, that’s a holdover from the original recipe. That’s fucking stupid, there is about ten times the amount of flour to salt here, don’t sift shit you hear me? Place that flour and quarter teaspoon of salt DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BUTTER MIXTURE and thumb your nose at the Man while you do it. Take that Man, take that.

Now, get a lil’ bit o’ flour on your hands, just so they aren’t too clingy, like your ex was, and start kneading that mix until it forms into a semblance of dough. This may take awhile, turns out shortbread dough is incredibly crumbly, like, serious man, it hardly constitutes dough in my mind. Whatever! Once you have this pseudo-dough together, plop it down on a surface lightly dusted with flour and form into a small paddy. Wrap said paddy in saran wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

No, I don’t know why, stop asking all these tough questions and just do it ok? Find something else to do with your time for 30 minutes; I went for a bike ride.

Nice shoes right? Yes.

Retrieve your chilled dough paddy and unwrap. It will fall apart, like you just dropped the fine china or something. Work it back into a clump, which will warm it up, which again makes me wonder why I chilled it in the first place. Hmm.

So, if you’ve ever done anything with dough you get this part of the story. Roll it out, cut into the shapes that you want. I went with simple bars. Also, I don’t have a rolling pin, but I do have many, many empty wine bottles. I don’t have a problem ok?

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees EFF and bake your cookies for 20-25 minutes until the edges begin to brown. Well, that’s what the recipe said, I found it more like 25-30 minutes, but maybe my oven just sucks.

Elsewhere in the kitchen, start melting your semi-sweet chocolate. I suppose the right way to do this would be to use a double boiler of some sort. I just put the stuff in the microwave for 30 second shots and mixed thoroughly after each go. Worked PRETTY WELL if I do say so myself.

Once the cookies are browned and out and cooled a lil’, and the chocolate is melted and smooth and warm, and your good and drunk on all that wine, you’ll want to start coating half of the cookie with chocolate. I moved the cookies to a piece of that magic, wonderful parchment paper and poured the chocolate on them. Now that that’s done, let them sit for awhile for the chocolate to harden up. Try and not eat them until the chocolate firms up, trust me it just tastes better later.

There was A LOT of dough made from this recipe, if I had to do it again I’d cut it in half at least. Right now I have a big ball of shortbread dough tucked away in my freezer

See? I don’t know what I’ll do with that, something delicious no doubt!

This recipe was very easy to make, and very delicious, and another one that’s a great place to start from, I can see myself doing so many interesting things with this basic dough!

So that’s that for this week at Sans Cooking! Thanks for reading, and I hope to continue this project. A big thank you to all the placid cannibals at the Food Network for these great, easy recipes.

Keep the Faith!