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!