Greg and I didn’t go to Atlanta this year for Thanksgiving like we normally do because we were there in October for the wedding, so we decided to have a newlyweds Thanksgiving with just the two of us this year.  We were excited to use our new china and tablecloth, and I got to try out a few new dishes. Here’s a list of what we had:

Brined turkey with white wine gravy (I forgot to take a picture of the whole roasted turkey, but it looked pretty typical): we used Williams Sonoma brine mix and mostly followed this Emeril recipe, with the following differences: 1) I put some rosemary and thyme in the butter I rubbed on the outside of the turkey before baking; 2) I put onion, herbs, and apple in the cavity; 3) I started off the cooking at 425 degrees for 30 minutes with the turkey breast-down, then turned it over and cooked it at 325 for the rest of the time (till the a thermometer in the breast hit 161F). It browned nicely and the meat was very flavorful and moist. Cooking at a high temperature breast-down for a while supposedly helps the juices get into the breast meat and gets the legs cooking so they’re done at the same time as the breast meat. 4) I cut the gravy recipe in half, which was still plenty.

Sweet potato casserole: a classic – not much to say!

Green bean casserole: another classic I insisted on

Sweet corn bread pudding: we both loved this, and I’ll probably make it again next year. It was similar to cornbread stuffing, but moister.

Cranberry sauce: a variation of the recipe on the bag of cranberries but with the addition of orange zest and juice. Nice and not too sweet.

Caramel pumpkin pie with almond streusel: I was excited to try this recipe from my current favorite cookbook, but I have to say I was a little disappointed — it was good, but the combination of caramel and pumpkin sort of dampened both flavors, such that it just tasted sweet without a distinct taste. I’ll probably go with regular pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie next year. (And yes, I used a frozen pie crust this time — I already had too much to do!)

Nevertheless, it was gone by Friday night

Finally, we enjoyed some hot apple cider with rum after dessert, which was great on a cold night.

Tonight was the season finale of True Blood. Since it’s one of my favorite TV shows on the air right now (I’ve also read all the Sookie Stackhouse books out so far),  I decided to have a viewing party. I invited my friend Lil from lab and her boyfriend Ben, who’s also a big True Blood fan (Lil hasn’t watched many episodes but was a good sport while we all sat in rapt silence).

Although you can actually buy True Blood, I thought it’d be fun to come up with our own vampire-themed snacks. So, to go along with the red wine (the drink of Dionysus) and red summer sausage that Lil & Ben brought, I made red velvet cupcakes (southern *and* blood-colored!).  Because I didn’t want to use a lot of red food-coloring, I tried a version that calls for pureed beets instead. But the batter wasn’t really red after I added the cocoa, so I ended up adding a few drops of red food-coloring anyway, which also didn’t help. So they were basically chocolate-colored, but I think the “vampire bite marks” (red-hots) on the cream-cheese frosting made up for it

Here’s the cupcake recipe I used, which makes a chocolatey, moist cupcake, and here’s the cream cheese frosting. I’m already anxious for the premiere of the third season!

Since it’s summer, there have been a lot of zucchini breads posted on Foodgawker recently. That, combined with the zucchini getting old in my fridge and a general craving for chocolate, inspired me to make this chocolate zucchini bread.

I mostly went from this recipe. However, in an attempt to make it even healthier–in addition to grated vegetables and scanty amount of oil–I substituted yogurt for sour cream and whole wheat flour for half the white flour (it could probably be substituted entirely with little difference). I also used bittersweet chocolate chips, which gave a nice richness without being making it overly sweet. This was great for breakfast, especially paired with a big cup of coffee!

Chocolate zucchini bread with bittersweet chocolate chips

{makes 1 loaf}
Recipe adapted from Ourbestbites.

1/2 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1 t baking soda
3 T unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 c canola oil
1/2 c sugar
1/8 c brown sugar
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
1/4 c plain nonfat yogurt
1 1/2 c grated zucchini (I used 2 zucchini)
1/2 c bittersweet chocolate chips
turbinado sugar for sprinkling
——
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Set aside.

With a stand or hand mixer beat oil, white sugar, brown sugar, and eggs until combined and slightly fluffy, 1-2 minutes.

Add vanilla and yogurt and mix until combined.

Gently stir in the grated zucchini.

Stir  flour mixture into batter and mix just until combined.  Add chocolate chips and stir to combine.

Pour batter into a greased loaf pan and sprinkle with turbinado sugar.

Bake in your preheated 350 degree oven for 45-50 minutes, or until a toothpick or skewer inserted in the center comes out without gloopy batter on it (but not clean or it’ll be overdone–it should still have a few crumbs stuck to it)

[Ed. note: I didn't get a chance to do the Daring Bakers challenge this month, so here's a substitute post. Enjoy!]

My new year’s resolution this year was to lose weight. My wedding (October 3) was my self-imposed deadline, though I went about the weight loss as a lifestyle change rather than a temporary diet. I started off on Weight Watchers doing the “core plan,” which doesn’t make you count the points of everything you eat. Instead, you can eat as much as you want of certain “core foods” like vegetables, grains, fruit, lean protein, etc., and you have a weekly allowance of extra points for non-core foods.

That worked well and I stuck with it for a few months, but I didn’t want to have to count points (even extra points) forever. So I stopped counting, but continued to lose weight by eating less meat and bringing my lunch to work. I’ve also recently started running and really like it.  I’ve been trying to run 2 miles 3-4 times a week, and I’d like to work up to longer distances and maybe even do a marathon at some point.

I’m proud to say I’ve lost about 25 lbs so far (if I count from my weight right after the holidays). I’m only a few pounds away from my current goal weight, which would put my BMI in the normal range. I tried on my wedding dress, which I bought last fall, this past week when I was in Atlanta. They had had to let it out in January because it was a little too tight at the time. Now it’s way too big and needs to be taken in!

After that long digression, on to the recipe. This is the type of dish I’ve been eating since I started losing weight. I like one-pot meals that can be made ahead of time and eaten as leftovers several times. Lentils are great sources of protein, fiber, iron, and other vitamins and minerals. They definitely fill you up–no meat required. I’ve tried several different lentil recipes and this is my favorite so far. I really like the flavoring with smoked paprika, which gives a nice earthy, smoky flavor that works well with the lentils. I got my smoked paprika (called “Pimenton Ahumado“) at Andronico’s, and places like Whole Foods would probably have it as well. I also added some rainbow swiss chard this time because it was on sale at the store, but pretty much any green (kale, spinach, etc) would work.

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Smoky lentils with swiss chard

Materials

1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 onion, diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp kosher salt
ground pepper
2 cups lentils, rinsed
6 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth (or one package, which is ~4 cups, plus 2 cups water)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ancho chili powder
1 tsp dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1 bunch swiss chard or other green, chopped
Plain yogurt or sour cream to garnish (optional)

Method

Heat oil in a large dutch oven over medium heat. Add onions, carrots, and garlic, and cook for a minute or two until fragrant. Add salt and ground pepper (10 grinds or so) and stir, then add lentils, broth, and spices. Stir well and simmer uncovered for ~15 minutes (just to reduce the liquid a bit). Then cover and continue simmering another 30-40 minutes, or until lentils are soft. Taste and add salt if needed. Remove and discard bay leaves. Add greens to pot, stir in, and cover to allow greens to wilt for 5 more minutes. Garnish with plain yogurt or sour cream, if desired.

Makes 4-6 meal-size servings.

Variation: I made this once with pre-cooked italian turkey sausage and it worked well. The sausage (either removed from casing and crumbled or just sliced) can be added with the onions and carrots.

I made these cupcakes for our Superbowl party–a Guinness chocolate cupcake topped with Bailey’s frosting sounded like a perfect dessert for a group of (mostly) guys watching football.  But I thought I’d save the post for closer to St. Patrick’s day, so of course I’m now late

I’m sure no one minds, though, because people love cupcakes year-round.  The original recipe from Smitten Kitchen (now dubbed “chocolate whiskey and beer cupcakes” due to some controversy on that blog about the name) actually called for a filling of chocolate ganache mixed with whiskey–the cocktail, the “Irish car bomb”, consists of Guinness, Bailey’s irish cream, and whiskey. But I didn’t want to buy a whole bottle of whiskey to make this, and I thought the filling might make it too rich.  I actually wish I had done it, though, because the cake part wasn’t very sweet on its own, so I think the addition of the filling would have made it just right.  They were good anyway (the topping is a just shaved chocolate for decoration), but maybe I’ll try them again with the filling–especially since I have a whole bottle of Bailey’s left over!

Occasionally I like to embrace the Jewish part of my heritage (on my mom’s side), albeit usually in food form — bagels, lox, pastrami sandwiches, etc. So when I found out that last Friday/Saturday was Purim, I decided to make Hamantaschen. These triangular cookies supposedly resemble either the hat or ears (depending on who you ask) of Haman, the villain of the Purim story. They usually consist of a shortbread or sugar cookie-like dough filled with jam or poppyseed filling.  The dough I used leans more toward shortbread, but I really enjoyed it because it stayed moist and slightly tender.

I decided to do the traditional poppyseed filling (my fiancé Greg’s favorite)  along with a few cherry jam-filled ones. The poppyseed filling was tricky–most recipes call for grinding the poppyseeds using a coffee grinder, then cooking them in milk and sugar. But since I don’t have a coffee grinder,  I found a recipe that supposedly didn’t really require grinding. Instead, you boil the seeds once and let them sit in hot water for an hour, then drain that water and cook them in the aforementioned milk and sugar. Then, at the end, you puree them in the food processor to get more of a paste. Maybe I have a crappy food processor, but it didn’t seem to do much of anything to the seeds except spray them all over the lid. Still, even without that final puree, the filling turned out fine — the flavor was great, though it did stick a little in your teeth.   As for the cherry filling, the jam I used ended up boiling out of most of the cookies. I think the key is moisture content — the poppyseed filling is relatively dry and so stayed put. I’ve read that pie filling is better, so maybe I’ll try that next time.

p.s. I’ve been remiss in posting — it’s been over a month (since I didn’t do the Feb. Daring Bakers challenge)! To make up for it, check back soon for Irish car bomb cupcakes!

Gil Marks’ Cookie Dough Hamantaschen
[recipe from this blog]

1/2 cup + 3 Tbs butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
3 Tbs orange juice, or sweet red wine, or a water/lemon juice combo [I used 2 T lemon juice and 1 T water]
1 tsp vanilla extract or grated lemon zest
1/4 tsp salt
About 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
About 1 1/2 cups filling — poppyseed, jam, pie filling, etc.

Beat the butter until smooth. Gradually add sugar and beat until light and fluffy (5-10 min). Beat in egg. Blend in juice (or wine, or water), vanilla (or zest), and salt. Stir in flour.
Wrap dough in a plastic wrap and chill until firm, 1 hour minimum. At this point, it can be fridged for days or frozen for months. Let stand at room temperature for several minutes, until workable but not soft.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
For easy handling, divide the dough into 4 pieces. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each piece 1/8″ thick. Using a 3 inch glass (ish), cut out rounds. Reroll the scraps.
Place 1 tsp of filling in the center of each round. Pinch the bottom side of the dough round together over the filling. Fold down the top flap and pinch the two other sides together to form a triangle, leaving some filling exposed in the center. Hamantaschen can be prepared ahead to this point and frozen for several months. Defrost before baking.
Place the Hamantaschen 1 inch apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake until golden brown, about 13 minutes. Let cool completely.

Makes about 30-40 small cookies.

Poppyseed filling
Adapted from How To Bake by Nick Malgieri
Yield: 1 1/2 cups [I halved this and had enough to fill 3/4 of my cookies -- the rest I filled with jam]

1 cup poppy seeds
1 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. butter
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Place the poppy seeds in a saucepan and cover them with three cups of water. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, cover the pan, and allow the seeds to soak for an hour.

Drain all the water off the soaked seeds and add the pareve milk, sugar, and butter. Bring to a boil over low heat, stirring occasionally, and cook until the mixture becomes fairly thick and you can easily see the bottom of the pan while stirring (this took about 30 minutes for me). Allow mixture to cool.

Puree the filling in a blender or food processor, making sure that most of the seeds are reduced to a paste (as I said above, this didn’t really happen for me).  Right at the end, add the raisins and cinnamon and pulse until the raisins are finely chopped. Filling can be stored in refrigerator for several days or freezer for several months.

I’ve been putting off posting, and hence I decided to post about two of my recent baking experiments at once to make up for it

Part I : Cinnamon Roll Muffins

Recently I made these cinnamon roll muffins from Joy the Baker. They’re made with yeast, but only take about an hour total as opposed to regular cinnamon rolls, which usually require several hours for the dough to rise, rest, bake, etc.

The recipe, which was originally for a loaf version, isn’t clear about when to rest them as muffins instead of a loaf–I ended up resting them in the pan. That turned out fine and they rose ok, but I was concerned when I took them out of the oven because the cinnamon topping had melted off the top and spread out in between the muffins in the pan. However, it ended up being pretty easy to scoop it up and get it back on top of the muffins, so crisis avoided

As for the taste, the muffin part was pretty bland and had the muffin-like texture you’d expect (not like a cinnamon roll, despite the yeast in the batter–which is to be expected because the dough wasn’t kneaded to develop the gluten), but the topping was so sweet that I wouldn’t have wanted a sweeter muffin. Overall, they were good and perhaps could substitute for cinnamon rolls if you had a real craving, but I’d rather use my calories on real cinnamon rolls!

Part II: Tarte Tatin

When I was at home in Atlanta, I decided I wanted to make a fruit dessert, so I chose the apple tarte tatin from smitten kitchen. I love tarte tatin, and will usually order it in a restaurant that has it on the menu, but I’ve never tried to make it. I guess I was always intimidated by the amount of caramelization you have to do to the apples…plus the fact that you need a pan that can go from stovetop to oven But, emboldened by my recent completion of the Daring Bakers caramel challenge, I picked up my mom’s stainless steel pan and decided to go for it.

Overall, it went way better than I expected. In fact, it was almost perfect — apart from the fact that the apples got a little too caramelized (some might say burnt) in the middle. The problem was that the pan I used was about 15 inches across, and just didn’t heat evenly enough to caramelize everything at the same time. So rather than having perfectly caramelized apples in the middle and undercaramelized ones on the outside, I ended up cooking the ones in the middle a bit too much. Still, the flavor was amazing. The crust was super easy to make and really flaky and delicious, and the tarte even came out of the pan with minimal apple displacement (only a couple in the middle stuck)! In all, I was really proud of it, and I guess everyone else liked it because it was gone by the end of the meal

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was another savory one — homemade pizza, using the dough recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  This was slightly different from the recipe I normally use, since it calls for leaving the dough in the refrigerator overnight. While that did help split up the work and made for a stronger yeasty flavor (which honestly I wasn’t a huge fan of), I felt like the dough didn’t really rise as much as it should have — though that could also have been my old yeast I split the original recipe, which was supposed to produce 6 9-12” pizzas, in half. Though I was hoping to make two pizzas with it (another part of the challenge) I ended up only being able to make one ~13-14″ pizza with a normal crust.

As part of the challenge, we also had to attempt tossing the dough in the air. I had never tried it before but was excited to go for it.  Here’s my best toss (thanks to my fiancé Greg for the great photo!):

[Yes, that's Anthony Bourdain on my t-shirt]

I was able to toss it a few times, but I ended up doing the final shaping on a cookie sheet. The sauce was homemade too, using this great recipe from Smitten Kitchen:

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Moderately Easy Tomato Sauce

4 roma tomatoes
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
Pinch of red pepper flakes
Splash of white wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt

Bring medium pot of water to a boil. Poach the tomatoes for one minute only, and then drain them. As soon as they are cooled off enough that you can touch them, peel them. The peels should come right off. If they don’t, make a slit in the skins. This always does the trick.

Drain and dry the pot. Put it back on the burner over medium heat. Pour in olive oil and let it heat completely before adding the garlic and stirring it for a minute with a wooden spoon. Add the red pepper flakes and stir it for anther minute. You do not want the garlic to brown. Put the peeled tomatoes in the pot, along with the wine, sugar and salt. Break the tomatoes up with your spoon.

Let the sauce simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes break down. Carefully taste without burning your tongue and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

Makes enough for one small/medium pizza.

(Note: I substituted red wine for the white wine with no problems. SK also has a recipe for a sauce that calls for canned tomatoes, but I haven’t tried it yet).

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I topped the pizza with my old favorites: sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, onions, and fresh basil.

I think next time I would add the basil at the end of baking to keep it greener.

Although I have a pizza peel and a baking stone, I always get nervous about moving the pizza from one surface to another after topping the unbaked dough. Because I want to leave the stone in the oven, I just assemble and bake the pizza on a cookie sheet for about 5 minutes, then slide it directly onto the baking stone for the last few minutes of baking to help crisp the crust.

For the pizza dough recipe, check out the blog of this month’s host, Rosa.

And stay tuned — for dessert after the pizza, I made pumpkin crème brûlée

I’ll take a moment from playing with my new iPhone to post about a favorite recipe   As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to some tree nuts, including pine nuts. Since I can’t eat regular pesto, but love basil, I recently started making almond pesto. I can’t tell you how the taste compares to regular pesto, but I love it.

The base recipe is from Giada’s Family Dinners–I’ve just changed the pine nuts to almonds.

Almond Pesto

• 1 garlic clove, peeled
• 2 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1/4 cup almonds (I prefer roasted & lightly salted)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste (less if your almonds are salted already)
• 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan

Into the bowl of a food processor, add the garlic, basil leaves, almonds, salt, and pepper. Pulse until finely chopped. With the blender still running, slowly pour 1/2 cup of olive oil. Check for a thick, yet smooth consistency, adding more oil if necessary. Transfer to a bowl and stir in 1/2 cup Parmesan. (Alternative: add piece of Parmesan to food processor and let it shred it for you. It might leave a few chunks though, as you can see in some of my pictures).

Cook spaghetti according to package directions. Drain, then add pesto.

Stir to mix until pasta is evenly coated.

Enjoy!

Just wanted to do a quick post about another recipe from Smitten Kitchen — big crumb coffee cake.

That recipe uses rhubarb, but I had a bunch of peaches so I used those (2 very large peaches, peeled and sliced) instead, and it worked well. If you like coffee cake with a high struesel-to-cake ratio, try this recipe!

And, of course, it’s great with coffee