This Time of Year

Autumn has a certain heft to it - you can smell the change in the air when true fall weather sets in, you want to dress a little warmer and wear coats, and in my house, the food starts to change a little too. I love certain dishes that I just find too heavy for warmer weather, but now that it's cooling down at night, they are reappearing in my kitchen. There are also smells and flavors intimately tied to this season in my mind. One of those is maple. In the last weeks, I've been enjoying a couple of maple treats. One was just for my house, and one was for sharing with family and friends.

A few weeks ago, I got a hankering for having some compound butters around the house. I certainly didn't need them, and if I really needed them I am sure I could find somewhere to buy them, but there was an underlying current of wanting to do it myself - so I made some maple butter. It was ridiculously simple, and we've eaten it all. It is phenomenal on corn muffins for a weekend breakfast, served with coffee, and some bacon if you like. In fact, corn muffins were the primary vehicle for almost all of the maple butter I made.

I simply softened a cup (two sticks) of salted butter (I wanted the slight saltiness to counter the sweetness of the syrup - you could use unsalted). When it was completely softened, after about an hour or so, I put it in the food processor with a quarter cup of real maple syrup and let it whir. This is no time for artificial maple syrup - it won't have the same depth or consistency. After about 30 seconds, I stopped the processor and tasted it. If you'd like it sweeter, add more syrup and process more; if you like it, stop now. It will be very liquid, which is okay. Scrape/pour it into a container - I used a pyrex dish with a lid - and stick it in the fridge. That's it, but boy was it a wonderful way to enjoy buttered biscuits or muffins.

The other maple treat I've recently enjoyed reminded me so much of the maple butter, but it was not at all the same. I found a recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess, one of my Nigella Lawson cookbooks, for an "Autumnal Birthday Cake" that featured maple. It sounded so lovely, I wanted to try it. She had adapted it from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, which I also have thanks to my sister-in-law, so I was able to compare and see which recipe sounded better. I went with Nigella for the cake, because she did not use the ginger. As the cake baked, the house began to smell like waffles and pancakes.

This cake calls for a cooked frosting, which is supposed to be beaten as it cooks over a double boiler. While I know how to jerry-rig a double boiler easily, I don't have a hand-held mixer! I used my heartiest whisk and went to town as it cooked. It fluffed up, turned white, and came along as it should! It took longer, and did not thicken quite as much as it would or could have with a mixer, but it worked well. I put together the cake on its cake stand, and took it out for a drive.


Traveling with a whole layer cake can be an adventure. Here I was fortunate to have a driver (a.k.a. my husband) so I could hold the cake. 80 miles later, we arrived at our destination to share the cake with an office of people I'd never met, but who knew me. They had said they didn't mind being guinea pigs for my baking, and this was put to the test. However, at the end of the day, they said I could come back any time and only one meager piece of cake remained. It must have tasted okay, and it certainly tasted and smelled like this time of year.

The Daring Kitchen: Adventures in Sushi

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.

The challenge is in four parts:-
Part 1: Making proper sushi rice – you will wash, rinse, drain, soak, cook, dress, and cool short grain rice until each grain is sticky enough to hold toppings or bind ingredients. Then the cooked rice is used to form three types of sushi:
Part 2: Dragon sushi roll – an avocado covered inside-out rice roll with a tasty surprise filling
Part 3: Decorative sushi – a nori-coated rice roll which reveals a decorative pattern when cut
Part 4: Nigiri sushi – hand-shaped rice rolls with toppings

Caution to those reading at home: I made this on a Saturday. I made the rice around 4:00 in the afternoon, so it had a nice little spot of time to cool off. Handling hot rice can burn your hands! When making the actual sushi, I was a little lazy about it. Making the rice is a little bit time intensive, but easy if you follow the directions! I had no trouble getting it to turn out as it should - glossy and a little sticky. The recipe DID make a LOT of rice though, so you may want to make a little less. As someone (as my husband reminds me) who doesn't always eat all the rice in sushi, perhaps we did not need quite as much rice!

Making the rolls was fun. I started with the Dragon Roll, and used crab meat and cucumber as fillings. I cooked the jumbo lump crab meat (the kind you buy at the grocery's seafood counter) in some salted butter over a skillet. I also salted and drained the cucumber slices. I actually made cucumber shavings using a benriner (which is like a mandoline, only smaller), but batons would have worked just fine, and maybe even better! I did not add the avocado until I'd made everything else, though - because it browns quickly, I simply waited until the very end, then used the benriner to slice the avocado into thin shavings and placed them in a scaled pattern over the roll.

For the Spiral Roll, I wanted six different fillings. I used crab meat as in the Dragon Roll, but also used some poached shrimp, with each shrimp sliced in half length-wise, some smoked salmon cut into thin strips, and carrots, asparagus and mushrooms. With the vegetables, I chopped the mushrooms and sauteed in a little butter to soften and bring out the flavors. That took about 10 minutes. I cut the carrots into thin batons and sauteed them in some butter too, just to soften them. I also did the same with asparagus. I could have achieved the same effect by steaming them. I filled the roll, and...I was overzealous. It was huge. Beautiful, extremely tasty, and huge. I cut slices of the roll, and ate them like a cookie! Less really is more.

For the Nigiri sushi, I made the little pillows of rice first. Then, I added the "raw" ingredients to the top. I used smoked salmon, poached shrimp, some carrot batons wrapped with a cucumber shaving, and some asparagus. It was lovely. A word of caution, however - the recipe calls for using wasabi paste to "bind" the ingredients to the rice. My wasabi paste was VERY powerful! It all tasted good, but the wasabi was almost too strong. Be careful, and when in doubt, use less!

Overall, the adventure was a success. We had a filling dinner of sushi, and could have fed many more guests! While I certainly won't be making sushi on a regular basis, it is nice to see that it's entirely manageable, and as you can see below, it really does look lovely!

A New Frontier: The Daring Kitchen

In September, The Washington Post published an article about online kitchen and cooking clubs, including the Daring Kitchen. I enjoy trying new things, and thought the Daring Kitchen sounded like fun. How could I make it more fun? Enlist someone to join with me, of course! I told my sister-in-law about it, and she is so wonderful she agreed to join with me.

The Daring Kitchen has a monthly cooking challenge that is "hosted" by one of its members. Each month, the challenge is posted, and members then create the recipes in the challenge. At the end of the month-long cooking period, they publish results. I can absolutely admit that the mechanics of the Daring Kitchen were a little confusing at first. When I finally was able to access the site's forum on the challenges, I was still confused about what I had to do when! However, the first challenge was to make Pho, a lovely Vietnamese soup with noodles, vegetables and protein. I love Pho in the chillier months of the year, and was excited to try it!

ONe Friday evening, I went to the store to stock up on a few essentials I needed to make the Pho. I used the quick recipe for Vietnamese Chicken Pho, but being me it still took me a while, as I fussed with the condiments longer than necessary and spent a while chopping vegetables just so. The only alteration I made from the recipe online was to both toast the spices and char the onion and ginger. In order to do the latter, I simply put the onion, halved, and the ginger root, with the skin still on, about 3-4" under the broiler and let them go until I could see some char appearing on the onion.

When it was done we had steamy, fragrant bowls of lovely soup, and tons of leftovers. I ate Pho leftovers, and the flavors in the broth always deepened a little more. I even had lovely photos (my mother can vouch for this!) of my soup, but they've since disappeared. I SHOULD have posted about this wonderful success back in October but missed the date because I was travelling. Why post now? Well, today is the day for the next challenge results to be posted - this is context. Any time I post about the Daring Kitchen, you'll be seeing a new adventure in the kitchen!

Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr: The Main Event

In our home, lobster is an anytime-event, but we do try to make it an event. A lobster dinner for eight cannot be anything but an event in our apartment, but we had such fun. We generally steam our lobsters, so the cooking involves putting on to boil big pots half-full of water. When they (finally!) come to a boil, in go the lobsters. There is a science to this, and I rely upon the man of the house to monitor all whole-lobster cooking, as he truly is a master.

For this event, we separated lobsters; the biggest goes into the water first, claws and head down, and the lid immediately goes back on the pot. Because we were cooking eight lobsters, we used two pots and put in all the lobsters over the course of about four minutes. From the time the first one went in they were in for about 14 minutes. While they are on, make sure the lids stay securely on top of them (this is how they can steam!) and you also want to put on your butter to melt over low heat. We always use a combination of salted and unsalted; how much you'll need is a matter of how you serve it and personal preference. For eight people, I used six sticks so everyone could have an individual dish of butter; it didn't all get used, but this way everyone could reach his or her own! Also make sure you put a colander of some sort in the sink. We tend to dump the pots as we can, and use tongs to get the lobsters out quickly.

Once those hot lobsters hit the sink, start running cold water over them. This serves multiple purposes. It stops the cooking process, so they taste sweet, soft and succulent (and are NOT chewy, gummy or some other weird texture!). It also helps the meat loosen from the shell. Finally, the cold water makes the lobsters cool enough to handle. Don't worry about cooling them down too much - you won't. But if they're not cooled at all, no one will be able to handle them to take them apart to enjoy!

This time, we also snipped off the tips of the claw shells, and let the water drain from them. I learned this trick at Mabel's Lobster Claw this summer in Maine. It made a world of difference in the amount of water in the lobster (as that steam condenses back into liquid form!) at the table. We served a platter of lobsters, eight little bowls of butter and a heaping plate of corn "grilled" in the oven as a last-minute emergency solution when we couldn't get to our building's grills. The feast was fabulous, and every morsel was deliciously devoured. You would think we couldn't eat any more.

Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr: Spicing It Up

One of my favorite kitchen pastimes is to try new recipes...and then fiddle with them. It drives my mother crazy, as she doesn't see how I can recreate anything with my constant fiddling, and it makes it hard for me to tell her exactly how to replicate a dish of mine. I worry about this less, and simply try to enjoy it. Recently, I found a new recipe for a "Spicy Adobo Shrimp Cocktail" in the August issue of Gourmet. I made it the first time just as directed in the recipe. I enjoyed it a lot - it was a huge hit in my house!

The next time I made it, I changed it a bit...in some areas more than others. They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Just in case this is true, I serve lobster fairly often! I swapped in some lobster meat for the shrimp in the recipe, making it a "lobster cocktail" instead. As you've gathered that lobster is popular in my house, this was a strategic alteration. The shrimp are great, but the sweetness of the lobster meat was an even better play against the adobo's heat. Still, I wasn't satisfied. The recipe, as you see, calls for celery. There's just something about celery that doesn't quite work for me. I'd cut back, but not enough to suit my tastes. And I added more other vegetables, but still could have gone with a higher veggie volume.

When the time came to plan the Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr, I suggested this instead of a salad. You still get the goodness of a healthy spoonful of vegetables, and it is spiked with some heat and a yummy helping of lobster. This was met with immediate approval, but I knew I still wanted to make some adjustments.

What I did differently:
Protein: instead of all shrimp, I used about a half pound of shrimp and the chopped lobster meat from three tails, about 3-4 oz. each
Celery: omitted completely
Avocado: increased to two
Tomatoes: increased to three or four - I like tomatoes
Sauce: all components (ketchup, lime juice, adobo sauce, water) increased to 1.5 times the recipe amount (e.g., instead of 2 Tbsp. of water, I used 3 Tbsp.)

This does present a dish a little more like a fresh seafood salsa, but the flavors are very balanced, with the sweet meat, spicy sauce and fresh vegetables. If you like spicy, add in a little extra adobo sauce too (I confess - I added a little more!). The heat, sweet and sour mingle to create a clean flavor that is deeper than you'd expect.

A few tips that worked for me: I make the sauce first, in a big bowl. Then I chop the rest of the vegetables, piling them into the big bowl on top of the sauce. Gently stir together, cover and refrigerate. This lets the flavors meld and deepen. Then prepare your protein. My preference is to stir in the protein about a half hour or so before serving, so the sauce can permeate the meat a bit. Do as you wish!

This makes a lovely light dinner for two, perhaps with a salad and some bread. When I served it as such, it made me a very popular lady. It's also a lovely first or second course, as it was for the Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr. In this instance, I served it in simple glass bowls or cocktail glasses. This made it a little fun, and sharing good food with good friends should be, above all, about fun, about enjoyment, about the pleasure of all of it - the food, the company, the evening.

Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr: First Bite

Deciding upon a menu for the End-of-Summer Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr seemed simple enough at first. We had an entree plan to anchor the meal. I had a lovely "first course" idea, covering a second lobster dish. The pressure was on to come up with a third element to round out the lobster trifecta. Someone (who shall remain nameless) pointed out that I did not HAVE to do lobster three ways, but really...everything is better in threes. Branches of government, major points of emphasis in a speech, and lobster dishes at my house - all work best in threes!

I'd initially thought about a salad, which I've served several times before. It's very simple, but delicious...but also not as unlike my "first course" as I'd prefer. Sitting around on Thursday night I suggested crostini. From there, the idea flowed and I went shopping for my ingredients, relying upon flavors that I like together. I felt happy about the idea, pleased by the possibility of putting together something fun, and excited about the tastes I hoped to create.

In my kitchen on Saturday afternoon my confidence had waned a little bit. I more or less mangled the first grapefruit, and wasn't sure about the flavor profiles. I put together a sample, and fed it to my official taste-tester. He took a moment to respond, which made me a bit more nervous - what if my third dish didn't work? Could we survive with lobster only TWO WAYS? Then he smiled, and said he loved the flavors. He said they were distinct, and perhaps not everyone would like it, but that it was good. I grinned; that was the point. I love playing in the kitchen, putting together flavors that I love in new ways to see how they react. In the kitchen, sometimes the taste of the resulting dish is greater than that of the individual ingredients. This time it was.

End-of-Summer Lobster Crostini

Makes ~18 appetizers

- 3 lobster tails, about 4 oz. each
- 1-2 grapefruits (this depends entirely upon your knife skills with citrus - I needed two!)
- Approx. 3 inches of fresh ginger, as thick as two fingers (or two thumbs, if you have small fingers)
- 1/3 cup mayonnaise (can be plain, jarred mayonnaise or homemade - for this small an amount the effort of homemade did not appeal to me)
- 1 Tbsp ground ginger (make sure it still smells potent when you open the jar; if not, get a new jar of it, as ground herbs and spices lose potency over time!)
- 1 small French bread loaf, sliced into 3/4 inch thickness; should yield 18-22 slices

1. Find a medium saucepan. Ensure saucepan is big enough to comfortably fit all three lobster tails on the bottom. Set lobster aside, fill pan with water and bring to boil over high heat. Place a colander in your sink. When water in saucepan is boiling, add lobster tails to boiling water. Carefully stir to turn tails. They are done when the shells turn red and curl. Depending upon the size of the tails, this can be in as little as 6 minutes or as many as 10. [You will not be cooking the lobster any more in this recipe, so if you're not sure, you can go for the higher end of the time range. I recommend 7-8 minutes for four-ounce tails.]

2. When lobster is cooked, dump the water and lobster tails into the colander in the sink and run cold water over them. This stops the cooking, and also helps the meat release from the shells. When the tails are cool enough to handle, remove the tails from the shells. Try to do this in a single piece for each tail, in order to have the prettiest results!

3. Slice the tail meat into half-inch thick, coin-shaped slices, give-or-take. You should end up with about 18 slices of lobster meat. If the tails need cleaning, for this preparation I prefer to clean each individual slice of meat with a paring knife and pick, to maintain the lovely shape of the tail slices. Place clean lobster "coins" in a small dish, place a damp paper towel over them, and place in the fridge until ready to assemble.

4. Peel the grapefruit and separate into small segments with no pith or seeds. This is always the hardest part for me - It took me almost two entire grapefruits to get the 18-20 segments, or a similar amount of fruit, for this recipe. As you separate each segment, put it into a shallow bowl. Let the juices from the segments collect in the bowl, too - this is fine and how you want it to look!

5. Peel and mince the ginger. Mix half to two-thirds of the minced fresh ginger into the grapefruit bowl, stirring within the fruit and its juice. Let sit for at least 20 minutes on the counter.

6. In a small bowl, mix the mayonnaise, remaining minced fresh ginger and ground ginger. Taste; if you like, add up to a half-teaspoon more ground ginger. Set aside.

7. Turn oven on to broil. Spread bread slices in single layer on baking sheet. Spritz lightly with olive oil. Broil for a few minutes, until bread begins to feel crusty to touch but is not browning much. Pull pan from oven. Turn over each slice, spritz with more olive oil and broil again until same doneness. Remove crostini from oven and from pan, letting cool slightly.

8. When crostini are cool, spread each with a little of the ginger mayonnaise. Top each with one lobster coin and a segment of the ginger-marinated grapefruit. I encourage you to try to get some of the minced ginger on the crostini with the grapefruit!

9. Put on a beautiful plate, share with friends and enjoy!

End of Summer Blowout Lobster Spec-Tac-U-Laaarrrrr: Introduction

Dinner with friends is always a fun way to mark an occasion, the passage of time, or simply to unwind a bit. With this in mind, and the time flying by, we decided to host an end-of-summer dinner with a few friends. I'm not entirely sure the idea wasn't (not-so-)secretly about eating more lobster. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic region; I learned to eat crabs when I was pretty young. My husband, on the other hand, is a true New Englander, and loves lobster (this is the understatement of the year...honestly). We have lobster on a not-infrequent basis - because it's a holiday, because it's the beginning of summer, because it's Saturday, because the store had lots of lobsters. Any excuse for lobster! The latest excuse: a relaxing shared evening with friends to mark the end of summer...what else could we serve but lobster!?!?!

So, up to this point, one would assume a simple steamed lobster feast, right? Maybe a side of corn or something. We run in a slightly more...lobsterific...crowd, though! A few weeks ago, we had dinner with some friends, all of whom were planning to join us for the end of summer feast. That night we had pork in three different dishes, and the gauntlet was thrown. "Are we going to have lobster three ways?" With such a statement on the table, what else could I do, but plan such an event?

In true celebratory fashion, we served (and ate!) lobster, three ways. I'll cover the details in coming posts!

Celebrate Good Times...

I have a reputation at work for asking, any time there is an event, if there will be cake. Growing up, I had amazing birthday cakes for many years - a beautiful butterfly, my favorite My Little Pony, Cheer Bear from the Care Bears...the list continues. At a certain point, though, I stopped having cakes. In recent years I've returned to the idea of celebration being marked with cake.

This weekend we celebrated a birthday in our house, and I made a birthday cake. After inviting a few friends to enjoy the cake with us, I discussed the plan - a lovely chocolate cake and a rich vanilla buttercream frosting. After poring over a number of cookbooks, I settled upon Lisa Yockelson's Velvety Chocolate Cake, from Chocolate Chocolate. Using so much butter, I knew it would be rich.

After the layers cooled, I decided to go for broke, and split each of the two layers in half. I made a bittersweet chocolate ganache and filled the layers with the chocolate. Then I made a simple vanilla buttercream and constructed the entire cake. Sometime during this time, the household "taste tester" came in and sampled the frosting. Deeming it worthy, I finished the cake.

While we only got through half the cake last night with our friends, the rich, sumptuous dessert seemed a fitting end to a celebratory weekend - a little more indulgent than necessary, but fun! There is something so lovely about a homemade cake on a cake stand that I just love. It looks ready to celebrate. The time it takes to make it is a labor of love, and to me means that the celebration is special - deserving of both the labor and that level of indulgence, of excess. Something beautiful and fun to share with those you love. Cake makes every occasion a little more fun, a little more special, a little sweeter.

A Girl's Gotta Eat!

I've always enjoyed food. As a baby, I enjoyed carrots so much that I turned orange - literally. (Scientific factoid for you: beta-carotene is fat-soluble, and if you eat enough, it builds up in your fat tissues.) There are pictures of me standing on the countertops getting into the cabinets to find ingredients. I made my first cheesecake at 10, having seen a picture of it in Bon Appetit. I cooked with my parents, with my grandmother, with friends. I enjoyed making things, especially things that people enjoyed.

As an adult I continue to enjoy it. There's something amazing about trying something new for the first time, or recreating at home a dish you enjoyed in a restaurant, or simply putting together a beautiful plate of food. My mother sends me pix messages asking what ingredients are. My brother and sister-in-law and I discuss different ways to cook vegetables. I send pictures of food to friends and family. My father suggested the title for the blog, as perhaps these pictures are worth not a thousand words, but a thousand bites.

It's not all easy, or simple. Much of my adventures in the kitchen are messy. I've still not mastered making custard-based ice cream (I stick to Philly-style, with no eggs). I manage to splatter the kitchen with whatever I have on the stove top more often than not. In part, this led us to have a backsplash installed this summer - easier cleanup! Despite the challenges and failures, it's a labor of love. At the end of a workday, I like coming home and going to the kitchen. It occupies my hands and my mind, which allows me to relax.

Life is an adventure, and spending time in the kitchen is one of the important ways to enjoy it for me, and to share it with others. We can all enjoy other people over a shared table. Here I'll share it with you, too. Welcome to my table...I hope you enjoy and find it worth the bites.