Sticky Toffee Pudding

For the past couple of months, I've had sticky toffee pudding on my mind. I've only had this dessert once before. I found a pre-made pan of sticky toffee pudding in Whole Foods and I bought it on a whim. Even though I knew it was probably a poor substitute for the real thing, I thought it was delicious.

This sweet treat is a modern English recipe, thus the use of the word "pudding", which our neighbors over the big pond use to describe a number of different styles of dessert.  It involves a moist and fluffy cake, traditionally steamed, bathed in a buttery toffee sauce and served with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. The secret ingredient, the thing that gives the cake its sticky texture and fruity richness, is chopped dates. 

I was watching Kevin Dundon's show on PBS and he prepared this dessert. I became somewhat obsessed. My mind would wander and I would find myself thinking sticky toffee pudding.  Just the words "sticky toffee pudding" evoke images in my mind of this unique dessert.  I'd been reading recipes and reviews and finally had a free weekend to experiment. 

I poked through a number of different recipes and settled on one that yielded the smallest quantity, just in case my first attempt was a failure. All the recipes I'd seen called for the large and meaty medjool variety of dates, which I found at my favorite gourmet store. Since this recipe uses a lot of butter, I chose high quality Plugra Europpean style butter. 

THE CAKE:

1 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 cup pitted, chopped dates

1 cup boiling water

1/4 cup unsalted butter at room temp, very soft

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp cinnamon 

THE TOFFEE SAUCE:

1 stick butter

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 cup light brown sugar, packed

The recipe starts with the cake. I set the oven to 350 and greased a 10 inch square baking pan. I chopped up the dates, placed them in a bowl and poured the boiling water over them. Following the recipe, I added the baking soda to the dates and set them aside to soften. This step helps to activate the baking soda, which makes the cake rise in the oven. Next I sifted together the flour, cinnamon and baking powder and set it aside. In the bowl of the mixer, I creamed the butter and sugar together until they were fluffy and well mixed. Then I added the egg and vanilla and mixed it until well blended. Then it was time for the dates. 

Some recipes suggested adding the dates in pieces, which would result in sticky little chunks in the finished cake. Kevin Dundon pureed the dates and blended the puree into the batter, resulting in a dark and dense cake. My approach was to blend the dates but to leave them still just a bit chunky. I added the blended dates to the batter and mixed well.  Finally, I added the dry ingredients and mixed them in by hand to avoid over-mixing.The batter was speckled with date pieces and it had a golden color. I poured the batter into the greased pan and put it in the oven. The recipe called for a 35 minute bake time, but my cake was done in about 25 minutes. The cake is done when the top is slightly springy, it starts to pull away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. 

While the cake was baking, I turned my attention to the toffee sauce. I had a moment of panic when I started to assemble the ingredients and realized that I'd forgotten to buy heavy cream. I substituted half and half, but I think my sauce would have turned out better if I'd had proper cream. I used the same proportions and put the ingredients into a small saucepan over medium low heat. The recipe instructed to let the sauce simmer until it began to thicken and turn a rich caramel color. Mine cooked for about 10 minutes and it looked good to me when I took it off the heat. By the time my sauce was done, the cake had come out of the oven and I poured a thin layer of the sauce over the top of the cake while it was hot from the oven. I let it cool for about 15 minutes, but by the time the cake had cooled, the sauce had started to seize up in the pot, so I put it back over low heat to remelt it. 

To serve, I poured a little sauce on the plate, placed a square of cake over the sauce and poured more sauce on top. I added a scoop of vanilla gelato to the side. The cake itself was fluffy and ethereal with little sticky pieces of dates studded throughout. The sauce was not exactly as I'd hoped - the consistency was just a little too thick for my taste, but it tasted wonderful, especially with the vanilla ice cream. I definitely have room for improvement, but this was a good first attempt. I have family coming for Thanksgiving this year. Guess what I'll be serving for dessert? 

Jumbo Shrimp

Fresh, local ingredients are the backbone of great cooking. When you buy local, you can be assured your food will be the very freshest it can be, right from its source to your kitchen. For almost thirty years, I lived near the Texas gulf coast and for another six years, I lived in New England just an hour from the Atlantic ocean. The seafood I bought pretty much came right out of the ocean and into my cooler. Close proximity to fresh seafood also has a huge impact on prices. In New England, even the largest lobsters were about $8 a pound, compared to $15 a pound inland,. We may have eaten our own body weight in steamers, which we could find for about $4 a pound. In Texas, its all about the shrimp. The warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico yield the largest, most succulent shrimp you can imagine. When I lived in Dallas, I'd visit my father who lives very close to the gulf coast. I'd fill a small cooler with the biggest shrimp I could find, 8-10 count for about $6 per pound. I always had fresh gulf shrimp in my freezer.

On a recent trip to the gulf coast, I had shrimp in the brain. Our vacation included a two-day visit with my sister and 93 year old dad followed by three days in a lovely beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula with my oldest and dearest friends. Before we set out on the hour-long drive from my dad's to the beach, we took a detour to a bait shop where I've been buying shrimp for 25 years. There is no name on the storefront, you just have to know where it is. The family that runs the shop also has a shrimp boat and for $7 a pound head-on, they sell the biggest, freshest and most mind-blowing gulf shrimp that have ever tap-danced across my taste buds. We bought 4 pounds of jumbos, a bag of ice and a pair of cheap sunglasses and hit the road. We stopped for a few grocery items, like lemons, cocktail sauce and margarita ingredients, before meeting up with my friends at our retreat on the beach. Once we got settled in and had a few adult beverages, I put a large pot on the stove to boil. 

There are many different ways to prepare jumbo shrimp. It is absolutely yummy sauteed in garlic butter with a squeeze of lemon and served with crusty bread or over pasta. It is fabulous in a tomato broth or a gumbo served over rice. But what I craved was plain boiled shrimp, the best way to enjoy its pure essential flavor. However you choose to serve your shrimp, the worst thing you can do is overcook it. Overcooked shrimp has a hard and mealy texture that is very off-putting. You know your shrimp is ready as soon as it floats and it needs to be plunged into ice water the minute its done to stop the cooking.  We cleaned the shrimp by removing the heads and rinsing them under cold water.

Normally, I would use those heads to make shrimp stock and put it in the freezer for a future soup or sauce, but that wasn't an option this time. I cut up two lemons and two limes and dropped them in the water, along with a bag of Louisiana seafood boil. When the water just began to simmer, I dropped the shrimp in and got my bowl of ice ready.  It took less than 10 minutes for those big boys to come to the surface of the water. I scooped them out with a slotted spoon and dropped them into the bowl of ice. Just a few hours after the shrimp entered my life, they were being dipped in spicy cocktail sauce and enjoyed by me and my grateful friends. 

We ate about half of them on the first night and put the rest in the fridge. For the next three days, we nibbled on shrimp for lunch and in the afternoon with our adult beverages. We also went to dinner one night at a local seafood restaurant where I ate more shrimp. By the time our vacation was over, I was staring to grow antennae, a tail and tiny flippers on my belly. Now I'm back at home and taking advantage of the local ingredients that are in season here in western Pennsylvania. My next trip to Texas is in just a few months and you can bet that wherever I am dining, there will be shrimp on the table. 

Peach Mango Crumble

I have what you might call a cognitive disconnect between the concepts of grocery shopping and going on vacation. I have this annoying habit of buying perishable fruits and veggies right before we leave on a trip. I lose my mind in the grocery store or hit a local farmers market on my way home and we end up having to frantically cook and eat all this produce in a matter of days. My husband has made me aware of this issue a number of times, but when I see those Chambersburg peaches for $1 a pound, I can't control myself, which brings me to the subject at hand.

I had three big, lovely Pennsylvania peaches ripening on the counter. I also had a mango that was about twenty minutes away from going bad. We were leaving for vacation in less than a week so I needed to dispose of this fruit post haste. Since I've been doing so much baking lately, my pantry is stocked and luckily, we are both big fans of fruit desserts. There are so many wonderful recipes from pies to tarts to ice creams, but I opted for one of the easiest and most scrumptious - the crumble. Now, there always seems to be a bit of confusion about the difference between crumbles, crisps and cobblers. They are all baked fruit desserts, but each has a different topping. The cobbler has a biscuit topping which is usually dropped in small dollops on top of the fruit. When it bakes, the juice from the fruit permeates the bottom of the biscuit and the browned top resembles a cobbled road, thus the name. The crumble has a streussel topping made with flour, butter and sugar that gets very crunchy when it bakes. The topping for the crisp has the same ingredients as the crumble with the addition of oats, which I just happened to not have in my otherwise well stocked pantry. I did, however, have a big bag of walnuts in the freezer, so I decided to add a little extra crunch to my topping.

PEACH MANGO CRUMBLE:

3-5 ripe peaches
1 ripe mango
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
6 tbsp very soft butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts

The amount of fruit you have will determine the size of your baking dish and that is actually an important part of the preparation. The layer of fruit needs to be deep so it doesn't cook away to nothing before the topping browns. The deeper the dish, the saucier the fruit will become while baking, which is exactly what you want. Choose a baking dish that has high sides, like a gratin dish or small casserole, and one that is small enough to keep your fruit from spreading out into a thin layer. Of course, if you have a lot of fruit, you will need to make more topping to compensate. For 6 to 8 large peaches, try doubling the topping recipe.

Preheat your oven to 350. Split, peel and slice the peaches and mango and toss them with the vanilla and a tablespoon each of four and sugar. Set them aside while you work on your topping. In a medium sized bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon and chopped walnuts. Mix them together briefly with a fork, then add the butter in small pieces. Start working the butter into the dry ingredients to form a loose dough. The texture of your dough is critical to the success of this dessert. If you can squeeze the dough together and it stays together, you've got it right. If your dough is too dry and crumbly, add a tablespoon of water and work it in until you can squeeze the dough and it keeps its shape. Your dough should be in clumps when you put it on top of the fruit, Those clumps will absorb the fruit juice underneath and get all golden brown and crunchy on top. Yum.

Dump your fruit into your baking dish and make sure you have a nice thick and even layer. Then start piling the clumps of dough on top, making sure all the fruit gets covered completely. I like a thick topping, but that is all a matter of personal taste. Some people like just a small bit of crumb topping, some people like as much topping as fruit. Its all up to you.  Once you have all the fruit covered, put the baking dish on a baking sheet covered with foil. This dessert tends to bubble up while baking and the juices will destroy the bottom of your oven if you don't take this step. Bake it for 30-40 minutes until you can see the juices bubbling at the sides of the dish and the top is beautifully browned.

The crumble will be as hot as the surface of the sun when it comes out of the oven and while it will be almost impossible to resist sticking a spoon (or your finger) into this magnificent dessert, it is best served warm, but not scalding hot. You will save yourself from a nasty burn if you let it cool off for half an hour before you eat it. For pure heaven in a bowl, serve this with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and make sure you spoon some of that warm fruit juice all over the top. I didn't have ice cream in my freezer, so I served it with a spoonful of plain Greek yogurt, which was also outrageously good.  This might be my favorite summer dessert. Its a great way to use fresh berries, stone fruits or even apples and pears. Try this once and I think you'll want to make again and again.

End of Summer Dinner

Well, this is it. Its the final week of August and while it still feels like summer, it won't for long. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler and I'm starting to see pumpkin spice flavored everything on the grocery store shelves. In just a few short weeks I'll be putting my sandals and shorts away to make room for boots and jeans.

The end of summer also means the end of summer produce. No more garden tomatoes, no more fresh corn and no more inexpensive peaches and berries. I've been harvesting what I can and getting it processed for the winter. My basil and parsley plants have been tremendously productive this summer and they needed to get trimmed back. I also had a hell of a time last weekend trying to fit everything in my freezer and I decided to cook some of my stored stuff to make room for more.

Our garden was a bit of a disaster this year. Most of our tomato plants came down with late blight and one of them was a variety that was developed specifically for the Heinz company. It is a super Roma that is quite fleshy and has very few seeds, so it is perfect for thick sauces. Before the plant succumbed to blight, it has started to bear fruit and there were about 30 green tomatoes on it. I left the plant alone and let most of the tomatoes ripen. Once they were ripe, I blanched them in hot water, shocked them in ice water, peeled them and put them in containers in the freezer. I had two quarts of those special Roma tomatoes taking up space in the freezer and I also had a huge amount of fresh basil and parsley still growing in my garden. Based on those ingredients, my game plan was to make tomato sauce and fresh pesto for some kind of Italian dinner. After a brief discussion with my husband, we settled on chicken Parmesan and angel hair pasta.

I started with the tomatoes. I'd never grown this variety before, so I wasn't sure how they would taste. I left them to defrost on the kitchen counter for a few hours and as they defrosted I noticed that water was collecting in the bottom of each container. Normally tomatoes put off some juice, but it is typically red just like the tomatoes. This liquid was completely clear, but it had the flavor of sweet tomato juice. I chopped half a yellow onion and sauteed it in olive oil with a little salt, pepper and oregano until it was just starting to brown, then added two cloves of thinly sliced garlic. As soon as the garlic started to brown ever so slightly, I dumped in that clear tomato water and let it reduce for a few minutes to concentrate the flavor. Then I added the still partially frozen tomatoes and let that all simmer together until the tomatoes were completely defrosted. I mashed them a bit with a potato masher and left it to simmer over low heat for about an hour to let some of that liquid reduce. Finally, I used my immersion blender to make a chunky sauce. I was surprised at how sweet these tomatoes were and how much body the sauce had given the amount of juice there was. I set this yummy sauce aside and moved on to the pesto.

I made the pesto following the directions from Tami Dixon who'd made pesto in my kitchen just a few weeks earlier. I wanted to recreate that rough and chunky pesto that Tami made, so I filled my food processor with basil and parsley leaves, added some pine nuts, walnuts, three big cloves of garlic and just pulsed the processor a few times to break everything up. Then I added the olive oil, cheese, salt and pepper and pulsed it just until it was blended. It was chunky and bright green and fragrant just like Tami's. There was quite a bit of pesto and some went directly in the freezer for a future preparation. Once the sauces were made, I moved on to the chicken. I sliced a couple of chicken breasts into cutlets and pounded them out to about half an inch thick.  Each chicken breast yielded four cutlets and I floured them lightly, dipped them in beaten egg and then pressed them into a dish of seasoned Panko breadcrumbs. I pan fried them until they were golden brown and set them on a sheet tray. Once they were all cooked, I covered each one with a healthy dollop of tomato sauce and some shredded provolone cheese and popped them into a 350 oven. After about 10 minutes, I turned the oven off while I boiled the angel hair pasta. When the pasta was cooked, I tossed it with a couple of big spoonfuls of pesto and the rest of the tomato sauce.  I served this delicious dinner with a salad on the side.

The tomato sauce had a very bright, sweet flavor and the tomatoes maintained a nice texture during cooking. If I'd had more of them, I may have cooked a giant pot of tomato sauce and let it boil down to a deep red, rich consistency. Perhaps I will grow them again and next time I will have a bigger yield. The pesto had just the right texture and still had little bits of crunchy walnuts and pine nuts floating around in it.  The earthy and herbaceous flavor of the pesto blended beautifully with the bright tomato sauce and the contrast in texture between the crispy chicken and the soft pasta was a marriage made in heaven. It was simple fare, but made with love from things I grew in my own backyard. You just can't get that kind of fulfillment from a jar or can. When you grow it yourself or buy from a local farmer, you can always trust the quality of your ingredients and your meal will taste that much better when you know where your food came from.

World Peace Cookies

It's all Dorie Greenspan's fault.  You see, not only is Dorie Greenspan a food columnist for the Washington Post, has published 12 cookbooks and won numerous James Beard awards, but she authored what has become my go-to source for baking bread - Baking with Julia.  My copy of Baking with Julia is a mess, its pages smeared with dried egg wash and smudges of butter, and it now automatically opens to the challah recipe. I'm officially a Dorie Greenspan fan. She's getting ready to release her newest book "Dorie's Cookies" and she's been posting recipes on her blog. That's how I found the recipe for World Peace Cookies.

We're living in turbulent times and I have found myself feeling worried and apprehensive about the future. The world could use a little peace, so why not put some good karma out there with a batch of cookies?  As I lined up my ingredients, I started to feel a sense of peace come over me.

Dorie Greenspan's World Peace Cookies

1 1/4 cups AP flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 stick + 3 tbsp unsalted butter at room temp
2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup white granulated sugar
1/2 tsp sea salt (Dorie suggests fluer de sel)
1 tsp vanilla extract (use the good stuff, please)
5 ounces good quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped into pieces (I used Giardelli 60% chips)

Now, Dorie has a lot of little tips that helped tremendously when I put this dough together. This is a rolled cookie dough that gets refrigerated and sliced for baking. Its quite crumbly, but can easily be squeezed back together to form the cookies. If your dough falls apart at any time, don't worry about it. Just press the crumbled bits back together and your cookies will come out just fine.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder and baking soda together and set it aside. Working with the paddle attachment on your mixer or with your hand mixer, cream the butter and two sugars together on medium speed until they are fluffy, soft and well blended. You will probably need to scrape down the bowl once during mixing, just to make sure everything gets well incorporated. Beat in the salt and vanilla. Then stop the mixer, add all the dry ingredients at once and turn the mixer back on low speed so the flour doesn't fly all over the kitchen. It won't take long for this dough to come together. When you can't see any more flour and the dough has formed moist chunks, its done. The dough may or may not form a ball, but don't wait for that to happen. Once it has formed the chunks or curds, its mixed enough. Put in your chocolate pieces and mix for about 15 seconds just to incorporate them.

Now, turn the dough out on your work surface and using your hands, bring it together into a mass. It will feel a little crumbly, but it should not feel dry. You should be able to bring it together easily without it falling apart. I enjoyed working with this dough because its texture resembles playdough and it kind of took me back to my childhood. I shaped mine into a loaf to start, then cut the loaf in half. I took one of the loaves of dough and started shaping it into a log, using my bench scraper to released it as it does stick to the work surface. Dorie is very specific on the size of the log - 11/2 inches in diameter. I have no idea how big mine were, but I would say they were about the size of a medium cucumber. I made two even logs with flat ends, wrapped them in waxed paper and put them in the fridge for at least 3 hours. They can also go in the freezer for a couple of hours. Either way, they need to be very chilled before they get baked. If you have frozen your dough, take it out of the freezer and let it sit out for about half an hour before you slice.

I took my dough out of the fridge, placed an oven rack in the very center of my oven and preheated it to 325 degrees. With a sharp knife, I cut half-inch slices out of the dough. The chocolate chunks make this task a little tricky. Use a sawing motion with your knife to cut through the chocolate chunks. And if the rounds of dough fall apart, just press them back together. I placed the dough rounds on a cookie sheet covered with a silicon baking sheet. I highly recommend you purchase one or more of these tools. It will make your life as a cookie baker so much easier! I only cut enough slices to fill one cookie sheet, then re-wrapped the dough and put it back in the fridge.

The cookies bake for 12 minutes - no more and no less. They will not look set when you take them out of the oven, but that's how they are supposed to look.  DO NOT remove the cookies right away. Let them cool off on the cookie sheet until they are just barely warm, at which point you will not be able to resist popping one in your mouth. They are amazing warm, but the texture changes as they cool and they are just as delightful cold. The texture is mostly crunchy with the slightest bit of chew in the center. The chocolate pieces are soft and melty when the cookies are warm, but they firm up as the cookies sit.

The dough can be stored for several months in the freezer, which means you can make a double batch and always have cookie dough ready to bake at a moment's notice. This is one of the most chocolaty cookies I've ever eaten. I ate four of them without a pause and suddenly felt a wave of peaceful vibes wash over me. Next time, I think I'll add a touch of Vietnamese cinnamon or maybe a little ancho chili powder for that mysterious Mexican chocolate flavor....and for a touch of international flare. Can we actually achieve world peace with a batch of cookies?  If Dorie Greenspan thinks so, I'm inclined to agree.