Red Lentil Soup

Red Lentil Soup from the Vegetarian Times complete cookbook. I couldn't find red lentils at my local store and didn't feel like making another trip to go to Whole Foods so I just used regular lentils. It tastes great, but maybe next time the red lentils will make it even better. This is a pureed soup packed with healthy stuff.

3 Tbs vegetable oil

2 medium onions, chopped

1 cup red lentils

3 medium carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

About 2 cups canned coconut milk

1 tsp salt, or to taste

1 bay leaf

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 one-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced

1 Tbs curry powder

1/2 cup chopped cilantro (I used dried)

1. Heat 2 Tbs oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add onions and cook, stirring often, until they start to brown, about 10 minutes. Add 4 cups of water, lentils, carrots, coconut milk, salt and the bay leaf. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cook partially covered until the lentils are tender, about 20 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat the remaining 1 Tbs oil in small skillet over medium heat., Add garlic, ginger, curry powder and cilantro. Cook, stirring often, until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add to the soup.

3. Remove the bay leaf and puree the soup in batches in the blender or food processor.

Sorry, no pic of this one.

Spaghetti Carbonara

Spaghetti Carbonara from allrecipes.com

I made this as a way to use up leftover cooked bacon. Rich doesn't like onions so I substituted onion powder, and since I didn't have to cook the bacon or chop and sautee the onion this came together extremely fast. It was quick, easy and tasty. You could definitely make it healthier by using less oil, turkey or canadian bacon and whole wheat pasta and adding in some peas or broccoli. It's a good base recipe to play around with.

Brown Butter Vanilla Cake with Chocolate Ganache and Caramel Buttercream

Now that's a mouthful, both the name and the cake itself.

This thing took me literally about 6 hours from start to finish, and I think every utensil in the kitchen is dirty. But it was a fun way to spend a rainy Saturday and Rich and I both give it two thumbs way up.

Here's the blog with the recipe. I made a few slight modifications. I don't have a whisk or paddle attachment for my stand mixer so I used my hand mixer for everything, just on low when it called for the paddle attachment. I wasn't sure how to heat the egg + sugar mixture over a pan of simmering water, so I heated it over medium in a saucepan and used a candy thermometer to cook to 160 degrees. The ganache was a bit of a disaster. First, I accidentally used unsweetened chocolate. Rich tasted it and made a face and I realized what I'd done, so I remelted the chocolate and added sugar. Then after chilling and mixing, it was a dry crumbly mess so I reheated again and just tried to get it to some sort of spreadable texture.

I'm not sure I'd make this very often because it is a lot of work, but the brown butter vanilla base is great and would make a great sheetcake with the caramel icing for a lot less time and effort.

Here are some of the steps in pictures:


Start by making the browned butter, which is basically just cooking the butter until it reaches the appropriate color and smell. I just googled and read about this a little to help me judge it.



This is the browned butter, poured into a bowl to go in the fridge. It has to chill and harden to be used in the cake.


To make the ganache, finely chop the chocolate (SEMIsweet, not UNsweet), then pour the hot cream over, let sit a minute, then stir. In theory...but mine didn't all melt so I had to add more cream and microwave a few seconds.


Once I realized it was unsweetened, I scooped some out and remelted with sugar then rechilled.


Bake the brown butter vanilla cake layers, put in pans on wire rack for about 20 minutes to cool, then run knife around edges of cakes and turn out onto racks to finish cooling.


This is the buttercream frosting before the addition of the caramel.


The caramel, made by cooking sugar and water then cooling slightly. You mix this with the buttercream.


The two layers with the chocolate ganache in the middle.


The finished product...looks great to me!


Ready to eat.

Granny's Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350 and bring 3 eggs to room temperature. Grease and flour three 9 inch round cake pans.
Sift 2.5 cups flour, 1/2 cup Hershey's cocoa powder, 2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp salt together.
In separate bowl, cream 1 cup crisco or butter, 2 cups sugar for 3-4 minutes with a mixer.
Add 2 tsp vanilla extract and 3 eggs, one at a time and mix after each one.
Add a total of 1 cup of buttermilk and all the flour mixture, but in thirds alternating flour/buttermilk starting and ending with flour. Do not overbeat.
Add 1 cup boiling water and mix until smooth.
Bake at 350 about 25-27 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool pans for 10 minutes then turn cakes out onto wire racks to cool completely. Once cakes are cool, make frosting.

Frosting:

Melt 1 stick butter in saucepan. Add 3.5 Tbs cocoa and stir until smooth. Add 5-7 Tbs
milk and bring to boil. Add 1 lb sifted confectioners sugar, 1 tsp vanilla and a dash of salt.

Let cool just a little but frost cakes while frosting is still warm enough to spread easily.

This is my favorite cake in the world. Granny, my mom's mom, makes this every year for my birthday and it is the best! She gave me the recipe a couple years ago and I finally got around to trying it. The writing in purple are things that she didn't include in the recipe that should be included for those of us who don't know what we're doing.

I had found some aprons online that I just thought were adorable so my parents printed out the pics, bought fabric and the pattern and Granny made me two for Christmas. How special is that?? Here's one of them, it's got cupcakes all over it. The other is pink and brown polka dots. I'm greasing and flouring the cake pans.


Somehow even with the awesome apron I still managed to get flour on my black shirt on the hip area. Anytime I use flour or powdered sugar I wind up covered in it.


The finished product from the top looks pretty good. Check out that cake stand...another new but vintage addition to the kitchen from Ebay. Love love love it!


Side view...not so good. I let the icing cool which was wrong because it was too thick and resulted in using way too much between the layers and not leaving any for the outside of the cake. I also need some work on evening up the layers so I don't have a leaning cake. This cake stand is huge, much wider than the standard sized cake pans so for presentation I think next time I'll decorate around the edges with chocolate covered strawberries or something similar so there's not so much blank space between the cake and the fluted edge of the stand. I also need to get a glass dome to cover the stand so the cake doesn't dry out.

Gran's are always much prettier and a little tastier, but it wasn't too terrible for a first attempt.

Cooking with the family: Lost Bread, Baked Brie, Shrimp & Grits, and She-Crab Soup

Warning: You may gain 10lbs and increase your cholesterol just by reading this post.

Rich is from south Arkansas, about 15 minutes from Louisiana and his stepdad is from LA so he grew up with a lot of Cajun foods. One of our favorites is the Cajun take on French toast, called Lost Bread or Pain Perdu in French. It originated as a way to use up leftover French bread. His mom always makes this for us for breakfast, but using regular bread instead of French bread. While my family were here visiting over the holidays, Rich took over the breakfast tradition and made Lost Bread for us all.

Cece's Lost Bread

3 eggs
4 Tbs sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
small can Pet milk
butter

Beat eggs well then stir in sugar, vanilla and cinnamon. Add enough Pet milk
"to achieve correct consistency" (don't you just love family recipes like this:)) Melt butter in electric skillet (or on the stove if you prefer) at 350 degrees, melt enough to completely cover bottom of skillet. Dip 4 pieces of white or wheat bread, one at a time, in the egg mixture until bread feels heavy but does not tear. Place in skillet. Brown completely on one side. Pick up each slice of bread before turning and melt more butter underneath it, then turn over and place on melted butter to brown the other side. Serve warm with powdered sugar and syrup.

The menfolk cooking breakfast for the ladies. Rich was making the Lost Bread while Dad made bacon and eggs.


A couple nights we just did an hors d'ourvres style dinner with chips & salsa, a cheese/meat/cracker tray, olives, fruit and baked brie. I had never baked brie before so I made the mistake of buying a wedge instead of a wheel. Bake wedge=melted cheese runs out the side. It still tasted delicious though. I added some chopped butter, brown sugar and pecans underneath and on top of the cheese and baked in small baking dish in the oven. We served with crackers and apples..YUM!



Shrimp & Grits is the quintessential Charleston meal. There are several different varieties, some using a brown gravy sauce and some using more of a barbecue or tomato based sauce. This recipe uses brown gravy. It's not gravy like you would put on mashed potatoes, so if you're not a gravy fan I wouldn't let that deter you if the rest of the recipe sounds good to you. I'm not sure what kind of grits you're used to but the ones here are different from what I was used to in Arkansas. They are thicker, creamier and heartier..and more delicious! We made some modifications to the recipe, adding more cheese and some cream to the grits to really fatten it up and make it richer. It turned out really great but it could use a little kick if you like your food a little spicier so I think next time I will add a bit of red pepper or more hot sauce at the end.

Dad and I peeling and deveining the shrimp that we bought from a local seafood market.


Dad chopping veggies.

She-Crab Soup is also a very Lowcountry dish. It's a rich, creamy bisque-like soup. We cheated a bit and used a mix for the soup base but it was wonderful and was easily as good as what we've gotten in some of Charleston's finest restaurants. Mom cooked the soup and added quite a bit of extra butter and cream, so I think next time I'll cut that back to keep it from being quite so rich. You can order the mix online at amazon, and can used canned crab so you can bring a bit of the Lowcountry to your kitchen wherever that may be!

Mom making the soup in my very awesome new but vintage Le Creuset dutch oven from the '50s.


Everything cooking on the stove.


Time to eat! I even put my juice in a wine glass to be festive.


Of course we had to have dessert. This is my Aunt Beth making a cake. It was a boxed yellow cake with homemade chocolate peanut butter frosting.


Feel like you need to run 26.2 miles to work that off??

Pumpkin Bread and Orange Cranberry Loaf

I pulled out some fun baking pans and made a batch of pumpkin bread batter. I made heart-shaped muffins, a Razorback loaf and regular loaf + white chocolate chips. Then I made one loaf of orange-cranberry bread to use up some fresh cranberries I had. Both these recipes came from allrecipes.com so you can read other cooks' reviews for ideas on modifications. For the pumpkin, I supstituted applesauce for half the oil. I didn't modify anything on the orange-cranberry. These make great breakfasts, snacks and dessert, yum!

Downeast Maine Pumpkin Bread

Orange Cranberry Loaf

White Bean Chili, Pumpkin Roll and Vanilla-Maple Steamer

White Bean Chili


Here's what you'll need.



Rich is not a fan of anything soup-like so he ate his with a fork to avoid the broth and onion.


I cooked the chili in my enameled cast iron dutch oven (aka french oven) and some cornbread in my newly resurfaced and reseasoned cast iron skillet.

Pumpkin Roll

Here's what you'll need.


You turn the cooked portion out onto a powdered sugar coated dish towel (clean and dry of course).


Then you roll it all up together.

After it cools, you unroll and frost, then later re-roll, chill and slice. Next time I'll use a larger jelly roll pan and a thinner dish towel to get a tighter roll, although this did turn out pretty well.

Vanilla-Almond Steamer

I didn't have almond extract so I used maple, and it was delicious. A nice nonalcoholic, decaffeinated alternative to something like a Bailey's and coffee.