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Prices on pork tenderloin have been excellent, so I am again making Maple-Glazed Pork Roast (Cooks Illustrated) with mashed potatoes, along with steamed green beans from the farmers’ market, for Sunday dinner--and dinner for the next several days.
Joan--What do you put in your lima bean soup? Ham? I have a vague recipe of my mother making such a soup. She adored lima beans.
I will bake these corn and seed crackers again because I like them, as I discussed in the June 17, 2018 What are You Baking thread. To help people who might be searching for a vegan cracker, I'm posting the link here as well:
https://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/knackebrod-med-fron-seeded-crispbread
On Thursday afternoon, as it continued to rain and I contemplated the lack of desserts in the house, I pulled out the KAF recipe for Crazy Blonde Brownies, which is on their site, reprinted from The Baker’s Catalogue (Spring through Summer 2001). I’ve previously baked this recipe, using the included lower sugar, and all white whole wheat variation. I was not completely satisfied, so I set out to re-work the recipe.
This time, I again used the lower amount of brown sugar. I used white whole wheat flour, but I substituted in ½ Cup quick oats for ½ cup of that flour. I reduced the vanilla from 2 tsp. to 1 ½ tsp. Instead of the optional butterscotch or vanilla-butternut flavor, I used the same amount of butter rum flavor (as I did last time I made the recipe). I also added 2 Tbs. flax meal. Instead of pecans, I used 1/3 cup pecan meal. I used 5.5 oz. each of butterscotch and semi-sweet chocolate chips. I baked in a 13x9-inch pan, lined with parchment for 28 minutes.
I'll add a note to this post, after we have them for dessert this evening, about taste and texture.
Promised Note: Next time, I'll cut the butter rum flavoring to 1/4 or even 1/8 tsp. It's strong. I'm hoping it will "fade" a bit by tomorrow, as it overwhelms the other ingredients. Otherwise, these bars came out well.Darn! My last post disappeared when the site had a glitch. This time, I re-wrote it in my Baking and Cooking Log and will cut and paste it in.
On Thursday, I was back in the kitchen baking. In the morning, I baked Knackebrod med Fron (imagine umlauts over the “a” and the “o” in the first word and over the “o” in the second word). Today is June 21, the longest day of the year, or Midsommar, a national holiday in Sweden. In tribute to the Swedish grandmother I never knew, I tried this recipe from Saveur (May 2014), which I found through a Google search on the internet.
https://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/knackebrod-med-fron-seeded-crispbread
I did make two changes. As humans cannot break down flax seeds to access their nutritional value, I replaced ¼ Cup of flax seed with 2 Tbs. of flax meal. I also reduced the Kosher salt in the cracker dough to 1 tsp. and sprinkled only about ½ tsp. on top. Instead of measuring the oil in a cup measure, I used 4 Tbs. I’m aware that there could be a rounding error difference, but the recipe turned out fine. I mixed in the oil with a pastry fork (any regular serving fork with four or so prongs would do), and I used it to mix in the boiling water as well.
I used a heavy 14x18-inch baking sheet covered and a piece of parchment that covered the whole sheet. I used a silicone spatula (no need to grease) to spread it over most of the pan, leaving just a bit of space on all four sides. I was careful to press it into a rectangular shape. Before sprinkling with the ½ tsp. kosher salt, I used a pizza cutter to cut it into rectangles 8x4 cm., which made 48 crackers. (I use metric because it is so much easier, when trying to cut even sections.)
Baking was 40 minutes at 350F, switching the pan around halfway through the time, but I did not think that they had crisped enough, so I baked an additional 10 minutes. [Note: I have a heavy metal baking sheet. It takes longer to bake most items, but it does so without overbrowning the bottoms of what I’m baking.]
My husband finds them rather plain, which is good, as that lowers the temptation to scarf them down mindlessly, an all too common problem with my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers. I like the taste of the roasted sesame seed. These would be great with thinly sliced cheese or with cream cheese. Although I did not search for a vegan or gluten-free cracker, these crackers fit both categories. These are faster and easier than the three rolled crackers that I make, so it is good to have an additional recipe that widens my repertoire.
Because the weather was cooler today (something we could not be sure of until this morning), my husband, dog, and I went hiking in the Indiana Dunes State Park today--a three hour hike, after a picnic lunch, that included sand trails. Hiking in sand is twice the work. (It is called the Dunes.) When we returned to the car, I suggested that we needed to pick up something for dinner because neither of us was going to feel like cooking after an hour-plus drive home. As we would be going by Michigan City, we stopped and picked up a rotisserie chicken and container of potato salad. (We had our trusty picnic cooler with us.) I steamed green beans from yesterday's farmers' market in the microwave. Dessert was ice cream and more wonderful strawberries from the same farmers' market. (I shall never be satisfied again with supermarket strawberries.)
Thanks, Len, for the detailed recipe review. I think that one of the comments on the recipe also mentioned it puffing up in the oven.
The first pizza crust I ever made, and that I made for years, was from Fleischmann's Yeast. It called for an initial parbake of each of the two crusts after the dough rose. I used this recipe a lot, back in my single days, because I could parbake each pizza crust, then wrap and freeze one for use later. In those days I did not have a pizza stone, nor had I used parchment, so I did the first bake in a greased pizza pan to keep it from sticking. As I recall, sometimes I had that puffing up in the oven as well and had to deflate it as it parbaked. A big difference is that the parbake was at a lower temperature--maybe 350F--then the topped pizza baked at a higher one. I eventually incorporated some whole grain into the recipe. I've been thinking of trying it again, especially since my husband seems to care less and less for pizza. (Sigh.) I often used it for a vegetarian pizza topped with a mixture of red, yellow, orange bell pepper, and chopped red onion mixed with oil and spices. Feta cheese was sprinkled on top.
Topic: Blueberries and Science
My mind has been on blueberries due to the rapidly developing crop in Indiana.
I've been reading various recipes for canned blueberry pie filling. Almost all of them say that the blueberries should first be blanched for 1 minute in boiling water, then drained (but not given an ice bath) and set aside in a bowl before being incorporated into the pie. According to one recipe, that stops "the enzymes that cause the flavor to degrade during storage" (storage as pie filling). I am glad to know that this step is necessary. It is included in both the recipe Univ. of Georgia that Randy D. recommended, and also in the one on this site from Teaching Cotton.
I've been wondering about jam. I've not made a completely blueberry jam, but I've used blueberries with other berries for a mixed fruit jam. I was reading Keven West's Saving the Season (Knopf, 2013, pp. 218-219), and he comments that the major flavor, as well as nutrients for blueberries, are in the skin. Blueberries work well in muffins, etc., he says, because "the skin does not break down with cooking." However, when it comes to longer cooking, as for jams, he observes that "its modest flavor can cook away entirely."
He does two things to compensate: 1) he heats the blueberries until they "sweat and burst their skins," cools them a bit, then puts them through the coarse blade of a food mill. He suggests that this will distribute the skin equally in the final product, although he notes it is thus "not a jam but . . . a fruit butter." 2) He also notes Harold McGee says, in On Food and Cooking, that blueberries get their flavor from a class of molecules called terpenes. West says that "terpenes are highly volatile and boil away with cooking," which might explain why there are so few recipes for blueberry jam.
West has two fixes for that. The first is to add some gin, 4 tsp. to 2 1/2 pounds of blueberries in the recipe, "once a gel set is achieved." Gin has terpenes, and he says that a shot of it will restore the fresh blueberry taste.
His second fix, tor those who do not want to use alcohol is to use ground coriander seeds when making the jam and to stir in a Tbs. of lime juice and the zest of the lime at the end.
When I told my husband that I need a bottle of gin, he just looked at me. He does not like the taste of alcohol and avoids it. Both of his grandmothers were officers in their local WCTU, so I think that is genetic 🙂 , although his cousins do not appear to have gotten that gene.
After reading about blueberry jam, I began to wonder about canned blueberry pie filling. Would it also benefit from gin or lime? It gets processed for 30 minutes when canned. It will also be baked again when it is used for a pie. Would gin or lime, either added to the filling before it is canned, or else added to the pie filling when it is finally baked up into a pie, give it more of the taste of fresh blueberries? Should I give up on canning blueberry pie filling and try to stash away a "pie supply" where my husband won't grab them to use on his oatmeal?
Would a regular blueberry pie, made with fresh blueberries, that initially gets baked at a higher temperature to brown the crust, also benefit from lime or gin?
How much experimentation do I want to undertake with our forthcoming precious supply of blueberries?
I do think that I might try this pie recipe:
It's too hot and muggy to cook today here. (Thank heavens for leftovers!) However, for those of you in cooler climes who are cooking today, here is this week's thread.
