Category: boys

Categories
baking boys

No Tuesdays With Dorie, but Lovely Hamantaschen Instead!

hamantaschen1

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Lemon Cup Custard, chosen for us by Bridget of The Way the Cookie Crumbles. I didn’t make it. Today is Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated most significantly, at least for my family, with hamantaschen, and given that we made two batches on two different days, I decided to skip the custard. If you want to read about Lemon Cup Custard, visit the several hundred other TWD blogs, where you will no doubt see many lovely photos and read many vivid descriptions.

But if you want to read about hamantaschen, stay right here.

When I was young, I learned that hamantaschen were named for Haman’s hat, Haman being the awful nasty villain at the heart of the Purim story. Turns out that, as with so many other things we learn as children, that’s probably not true. And I always wondered why we were eating a bad guy’s hat anyway. But no matter why we eat hamantaschen, we do eat them. A lot of them.

Traditionally (meaning the ones I ate as a child, and the ones you see in bakeries today), hamantaschen are filled with cherry, prune, or poppyseed fillings. We are not traditional.

We’ve been refining our filling selections over the years since #1 Son was very young, and we’ve settled on some perennial favorites: Marshmallow Fluff and chocolate chips, almond pie filling and chocolate chips, cherry pie filling and chocolate chips …

Did you pick up on the common thread there?

We also use Nutella and pecans, plain cherry filling, almond butter and sweetened shredded coconut, and other things I’m forgetting right now.

On Friday #1 Son made a batch of dough, using a new recipe for us (because we couldn’t find the book with our regular recipe, but let’s not discuss that right now). He and his girlfriend and #2 Son and a friend of his made hamantaschen Friday afternoon. Fun was had. But the recipe didn’t make very many, and I didn’t get even one.

So Sunday night I made another batch, and this morning I baked them (with a little help from #2 Son, who made a turkey version).

hamantaschen-turkey

First I rolled out the dough and cut it into circles; our regular recipe involves rolling the dough into logs and slicing (like World Peace Cookies!), then rolling out each individual circle.

hamantaschen-cut

Next I put a dollop of filling in the middle of each cookie.

hamantaschen-cut-cherry

I used lots of different fillings.

hamantaschen-coconut

hamantaschen-cherry

And then I folded them into adorable little three-cornered hat simulacra.

hamantaschen7

The dough was much drier than our usual. #1 Son had neglected to mention that, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I made do. They’re not the prettiest hamantaschen ever; some were prettier than others.

hamantaschen2

But they are absolutely delicious, as always, and I am very happy with them. And I am even happier that I made them in daylight, and so got some decent photos for a change.

hamantaschen3

hamantaschen4

Categories
baking boys Dorie

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate Armagnac Cake

choc-armagnac-cake1

This week’s recipe, chosen for us by LyB of And Then I Do the Dishes, did not sound the slightest bit yummy to me. I don’t like fruit. I don’t like alcohol (except for Kahlua and the amazing mudslide mix my father-in-law buys at Christmas). And I’m sick to death of dark chocolate.

I wasn’t going to make it. I do TWD almost every week, so I figured I could skip a week.

Then #1 Son got hold of the recipe. He likes fruit. He loves alcohol. And he loves dark chocolate.

So I turn over the bulk of this post to my guest blogger:

“I made it with rum and prunes, and it was one of the easiest and tastiest chocolate cakes I have ever made. I would happily make it again.”

He’s a man of few words, at least when there’s no bacon involved.

So I guess that wasn’t the bulk of the post, and I apologize for its brevity. He cut the recipe by two-thirds and baked the result in an oval ramekin.

choc-armagnac-cake2

I had the smallest bite of this cake, and as expected, I didn’t like it. The rest of them did, though:

Husband: I actually thought that the alcohol-softened prunes added quite a bit to the dark fudginess. There was a light fruit note that was quite enticing. I found the glaze a little simple, but it didn’t detract. I didn’t think it was necessary, ultimately. Given my choice, I would have put a little dollop of unsweetened whipped cream on top.

#1 Son: I liked it a lot. It had a really great fudgy texture, but wasn’t too rich and had a real depth of flavor. It was my favorite thing out of the Dorie book so far. Didn’t get much prune or rum flavor, though. I would have liked it with a little orange marmalade on top. That would have enhanced both the dark chocolate and fruit flavors, and been a light counterpart to the fudginess.

#2 Son: It was pretty good overall. The cake was good; I liked the bits of prune.

choc-armagnac-cake3

Sorry, folks — that’s all I’ve got today. Go check out all the other TWD bloggers to see what they did with the cake, and if you want to try it yourself, buy Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan, or visit And Then I Do the Dishes, where the recipe will appear.

Categories
boys food recipes

Snow Day!

Here in the mid-Atlantic we got our first real snow of the season today. On March 1st. And what’s really sad is that #2 Son, who is almost 12, was overjoyed when he woke up this morning; he thought this was a huge amount of snow.

snow-fort

snow-dogs

#1 Son remembers — just barely — the Great Snow of 1996, when we got 30 inches and it lasted for days. He was not quite 4 then, and our exchange student from Austria built him a snow cave to play in. That was a huge amount of snow. But poor #2 Son hasn’t seen much snow in recent years, and he really, really, really likes snow.

Where is the food-related content in this post? you may be wondering. Never fear: It’s coming.

This afternoon #2 Son scooped up a bowl of snow and prepared to mix it with maple syrup, as we’ve done with our pitiful little snowfalls in the past. But I remembered seeing a technique for pouring hot syrup over snow to make candy, so we tried that. (I Googled and found a recipe here.)

It took a while to get the syrup to the right temperature; as with every other kind of sugar syrup I’ve ever dealt with, it’s a long process that progresses almost instantly at the end to disaster. But I managed to get it just about right this time, and we dribbled it over the snow.

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The syrup hardens almost instantly to candy: chewy or brittle depending on the exact temperature at the moment of pouring. Either way, it’s yummy.

maple-candy-1

And it’s very pretty, too!

maple-candy-2

More snow!!!

Categories
boys meat

Better Late Than Never: Bacon Explosion

#1 Son found this recipe on the Internet, and he was immediately consumed with the need to make it. Right then. Luckily for me (and the family’s cardiovascular systems), it was two days before Superbowl Sunday. I managed to delay him by telling him what a marvelous contribution the Bacon Explosion would be to the Superbowl party we were going to attend.

Whew.

I asked him to write this post, because he is a much better writer than I’ll ever be. It’s been three weeks, but here, at last, without further ado, I present to you: the Bacon Explosion, as written by #1 Son, with my comments in square brackets:

____________________________________________________________________

This. This is how cults are formed, when men create objects so perfect, so beautiful that they can only have come from the divine. Welcome your new god. Welcome the Bacon Explosion.

My recipe deviated from the initial incarnation of the One True Bacon Explosion, I’m afraid. As I had neither barbecue rub nor barbecue sauce, I substituted some City Tavern Herb Rub (excellent, highly recommended [salt, onion, garlic powder, white pepper, cayenne pepper, Hungarian sweet paprika, thyme, oregano, marjoram, sweet basil, sage]) and Peter Luger steak sauce, which I could happily drink from the bottle (really.)

The first step in ushering in the Age of Bacon is to weave the sacred meat together. Who would have thought religious devotion would be so much fun?

bacon-woven

The weave was spread with the herb rub and topped with two pounds of Italian sausage, helpfully decased by the Acolyte [otherwise known as #2 Son] here.

bacon-decasing

That was further topped by the absolute maximum amount of bacon I could fit on my stove, which I realize now is wholly inadequate [the stove, he means].

bacon-stove

After another layer of herb rub and a layer of steak sauce, the Assembly began. This unworthy one rolled the sausage mixture together first into a tight roll, then back the other way with the bacon weave.

bacon-construction

bacon-prerolled

bacon-rolled

Two and a half hours later, a tear came to this one’s eyes as he beheld his creation. He fell to his knees and prayed for salvation. The Bacon Explosion did not disappoint him. Two slices, a thousand calories and a Steelers win later, all was right with the world.

bacon-cooked

bacon-cooked-and-cut

Categories
boys food

Dinner, Made by Someone Else

#2 Son wanted to make dinner the other night. I wasn’t going to stop him. He puttered around our almost-empty kitchen for a while (it had been a while since I’d been shopping) and came up with Trader Joe’s ravioli with pesto (made in September with my bounty of basil). That would have been a tasty if staid dinner; I often do the same thing with TJ’s tortellini.

But #2 Son took it further. He sliced up an onion, caramelized it, and added some toasted pine nuts.

He’s more creative in the kitchen than I am, that’s for sure. The kid has a future (of cooking for us, at the very least).