She: Truffles galore

I went to the Oak Cafe and was served some scrumptious truffles. I bought a few to take home, and on the way FROM the cafe TO the car, it melted into a pool! So I decided to make my own. I used one of Mark's books, "Chocolate" by N. Malgieri...I usually stay away from it because its so...well, cheffy. A thousand silly ingredients and specific temps...if I can find a work-around, I will use it. But, not with chocolate. Too tricky. I decided to go crazy and make lemon flavored, dark chocolate truffles with milk chocolate coating. Ha! So here it goes:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tbs unsalted butter
1 tbs light corn syrup
8 oz bittersweet chocolate (72%)
grated peel of 2 lemons

Coating: 12 oz milk chocolate (50%) and a plate coated in dutch process cocoa powder.
First, cut your bittersweet chocolate into slivers and put it in a glass bowl with the lemon peel. Then mix cream, butter and corn syrup in a pan and bring to a low simmer. Remove from heat, and add to your glass pan of chocolate. Whisk smooth, and cool the mix for 2-3 hours in the fridge. Roll into balls and put on a cookie sheet, which you put back in the fridge for another hour.
Melt the milk chocolate to about 95, and let cool to the low 80's (F) and dip your truffles--I put the chocolate in my icecream scoop and then rolled the truffle around to coat. Let cool for a few minutes, then roll in the cocoa powder. Keep them chilled til you wanna eat them, then let them reach room temp. Yummy!

He: For the love of god...if you make nothing else...MAKE THIS CAKE!

How's that for a tagline? All due to the amazing cake that almost wasn't made.
Brandy and I were running through our area whole foods looking for ingredients. We were trying to find something that would inspire us to make a dessert with some of the apples that I had picked up earlier in the day (it's apple season right now...enjoy them while they rock). We talked about maybe some sort of turnover....nah. We talked about maybe making a pie...just too plain to really be us. I talked about some sort of thing that is in phyllo dough...that was shot down on the principle of being too cheffy (happens all the time in our house). By the time that we were out of the store we were really no closer to figuring out what we wanted to make with the damn apples...then it hit me....Scott's apple cake.

When I was working everyday at Watershed this cake went virtually unnoticed in my mind. I'm not sure if it's the leaden death-bomb quality of all of the peanut oil in it, or the almost gritty sugar glaze over the top. I never quite saw it for the beautiful thing that it is...just this wonderfully rich cake that beautifully shows off in-season apples. Sure...it does have a lot of sugar, and the glaze almost hurts it's so full of sugar...but if you don't attempt any other recipes on this site you must try this one!

Okay I just thought of one more thing that is kinda cool that you should know about this post...apples. The apples that the original recipe calls for are winesaps. Well, here in this part of California that isn't something that seems to be available right now. I ended up using pippins (which are a japanese creation crossing a yellow delicious with a granny smith). Also used were gravensteins, which I don't know the history of..but if anyone out there does please enlighten me. The last variety was some sort of crisp apple, as in there was 'crisp' in the name but I can't think of the variety now. When working on anything with apples it's always better to have more than one variety so that there will be greater depth of apple flavor (just one and it will be very monotonous as far as the apple flavor goes).

Here's the recipe:
1 C. packed light brown sugar
1 C. granulated sugar
1 1/2 C. vegetable oil (we used peanut oil at the restaurant..just make sure that the oil doesn't have any strong flavors...I bet grapeseed would be very nice in this)
3 eggs (at room temperature)
1 t. baking soda
2 t. ground ceylon cinnamon (very important...most cinnamon is vietnamese, and it's way too spicy for this preparation)
1/2 t. freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 t. salt (fine grain sea salt preferrably)
5 ea. fresh apples peeled, cored and diced into 1/2" pieces (baking varieties)
1 1/4 C. coarsely chopped pecans
2 1/4 t. vanilla extract

The Glaze
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1/4 C. granulated sugar
1/4 C. packed light brown sugar
pinch of salt
1/2 C. heavy cream

1) Preheat oven to 325 degrees
2) Mix the sugars and oil in a bowl until well blended
3) Add the eggs one at a time and mix until each is incorporated
4) Sift together the dry ingredients and mix into the wet..stirring only to incorporate (if you overmix at all this cake will be really dense and hard)
5) Fold in the apples and pecans and vanilla
6) pour into a buttered and floured 9X13 inch pan and bake until the cake tests clean with a skewer (ours took 2 hours.....don't expect this to be accurate for everyone else. At the restaurant the cook time on this cake varied a lot! Start checking it after 1 hour)
7) Allow to cool in the pan completely (about an hour
8) To make the glaze melt the butter in a saucepan, add the sugars and salt, stir until well blended and cook over med-low heat for 2 minutes. Add the heavy cream, stir and bring to a boil...cook 2 more minutes.
9) Quickly poke holes with a skewer or fork all over the top of the cake, and with the hot glaze pour it over the cake.
10) Allow to cool slightly, and then enjoy this fantastic old southern treat.

She: Peanut Butter n Jelly Cupcakes

I saw different parts to this recipe in different places, and just had to put it together. I had a baaaad week, and when I do I bake. I needed a good project. These cupcakes are worth it. They are delicious! The icing alone is sinful.
Ingredients:
1 1/4C flour, 1 1/2tsp baking powder, 1/4tsp salt, 1/2C peanut butter, 1/2 stick butter, 1/2C brown sugar, 1 egg, 1/2 tsp vanila, 2/3C milk.
Icing:
1/2 stick butter, 1/2C peanut butter, 1/2C cream cheese, 2C powder sugar, 1tb milk
Directions: for batter, mix pb, butter and sugar on high til fluffy. Add egg and vanilla. Reduce and alternate between the rest of the wet and dry. Fill cupcakes 2/3 full and bake for 18mts @ 350F. While its baking, mix the icing: all the ingredients should be at room temp, blended on high. For the filling, I used smuckers raspberry jam in a piping bag with a long tip and just stuck it into the cupcake and squeezed. I squeezed too much in the first few and had jam volcano erruptions, but I got it right after a few. I just covered the spot with the icing. Tasty!

She: Home-grown Sunflower Seeds

This is a different kinda post, but I thought it could be educational, so what they heck. First, we have a garden. Not a fabulous one--it is plagued by aphids and spider mites, but we have peaches, lemons, a horde of pepper plants, tomatos, strawberries and a host of herbs. And sunflowers. I bought a different kind of sunflower this year--it looks like a giant mum. The things were huge! 8 feet tall, they had half foot wide heads on them, and the bees loved them. I wanted to save my seeds. So I read up on it, and found that if we had enough we could even have enough for a snack! Well, we didn't quite, but this is the process:

1. Once the sunflower starts to die, the stem and base of the flower will go from green to yellow. At this stage clip it and leave it in a dry place.
2. Once its dried, first pluck all the petals off. There will still be a section of innerpetals that hold and divide the seeds.
3. Now put the flower in a plastic baggie and use your nails to scratch out the seeds from the center. You put it in a baggie so seeds and their inner petals don't get all over the place. After thats done, you can save them to plant for the next year, or roast and eat 'em!

He: Corn Quiche Crostada

Anyone that knows how to bake will look at the header and wonder what the heck I was thinking and how the freak is this going to work? Well the thought was to try and come up with a crust for a quiche that would be low fat, high fiber, and high in good fats. Enter the crostada crust....slightly modified of course. The other big thing that I was trying to do with this is come up with a quiche that I could use as a meal (getting enough protein in 1 slice for me, makes that slice dowright huge...not so appealing).

6 ea. lg eggs
1/2 pound of lowfat cottage cheese
1 pound of organic tofu
1/2 C. rolled oats (nothing flavored...just plain 'ole oats)
1/2 C. plain raw nuts (I recommend pistachios, hazelnuts, walnuts, or pecans)
2 Tbsp. plain lowfat yogurt
1 tsp. salt
2 ea. ears of corn (roasted and kernels removed from the cob)
a few dashes of hot sauce

1) Add the oats, nuts and yogurt to a cuisinart and pulse to combine (you want the nuts to be broken down, but you don't want the oats to be total flour.
2) Press this mixture into a pie pan until you've reached a consistent thickness
3) Bake at 325 degrees for 8 minutes
4) Blend together the eggs, cottage cheese, tofu, and hot sauce until smooth in a blender.
5) Transfer this mix to a bowl and stir in the corn
6) Transfer the egg mix into the cooled, baked pie shell and place in the oven at 325 degrees until lighly browned on top and the whole mass jiggles just a little when you shake the pan
7) Cool and serve

The beautiful thing about this quiche is that it comes together in just a couple of minutes (minus roasting the corn). Also it satisfies all of my rediculously healthy diet stuff too.

He: Old Southern style preserved figs

Okay, Brandy has been giving me a lot of crap lately for not putting together any new posts, and she has every right to....I've been neglectful of our little blog. Well no more...at least until I run out of pics and recipes for stuff that needs to be posted.

Let's get to the point of this already....you guys really don't care about the random blatherings of a cooking madman...do you?

In a cookbook that I LOVE The Gift of Southern Cooking by Scott Peacock and Edna Lewis I found a recipe for whole preserved figs. I've seen this recipe executed under the tutelage of Scott Peacock a couple of years ago. It really seemed simple at the time...really just a lot of waiting for things to 'do their thing'. How often do you see something like that in a recipe? Anyhow, since Brandy is in love with figs, and since we're in the fig growing capital of the US, and since we hit that great local farm for more figs than anyone can realistically eat before they go bad (believe me I tried...my limit seems to be about 10 of them before I just want to yack), I thought that this recipe would be a good idea.

I'm not going to give you tried and true amounts for anything in here...because it's really not essential to getting this to come out. The only pieces that are important are: the amount of time between cookings, the type of figs that you use (black missions will not work), and making sure that once they are canned that they sit for at least 6 weeks. So here's the basic rundown.....email if you need more specific instructions...but really, there aren't any more

1. Sprinkle figs with a couple tablespoons of baking soda and then pour boiling water over all. Let soak for 5 minutes (this step toughens up the skins a little bit so that the figs stay whole).
2. Drain off the water and rinse the figs in a bath of cold water 3 times, so that you can get off all of the baking soda that hasn't combined with the figs.
3. Pour a bunch of sugar over the figs (for 2 pounds of figs, at least 2 cups of sugar). Back the freak off you diabetics...this is important to cure the little suckers! If you're really that concerned with the sugar content....tough....just don't eat so many.
4. Allow to sit in the sugar for at least 2 days.
5. Follow this cycle for the next several days: after 2 days put in a nonreactive pot and bring to a simmer over medium low heat. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring to make sure that all of the figs get some time in the sugary mess at the bottom of the pot. transfer back to your holding container and wait 2 more days. do this cycle 3 times.
6. After the 3rd cooking transfer the figs to canning jars (with out transferring much of the liquid). Bring the liquid to a boil and cook until a candy thermometer reads 220 degrees. Pour the resulting syrup over the figs. Can according to manaufacturer's instructions.
7. Store in a cool, dark place for 6 weeks (do not store them in the fridge....it's not dark in there all the time...and too cold).
8. Eat the delicious figgy goodness when there are no figs available.

She: Figs and Such

I suck. I'm sorry. But school just began and I've been wrapped up with my classes! Now I'm back, and I'll get to nagging Mark about his fig post. But I'll start here with a preview...We went to this beautiful farm a few weeks ago--Mark wanted to check out where he was buying produce for his business from, and the owner offered...so we drove up to Davis and had a peak at the place. First, it was gorgeous. The grew a variety of everything: peaches, nectarines, lavender, wine grapes, tomatos, almonds...we walked around the place and looked at what they had. First, I have to say I was astounded by the almonds. I've never had them fresh before, and it was amazing. Once you get them out of the shells they have a good water content, like coconut. It was and eye opener to have this moist nut instead of the dry stuff you get at the supermarket. They also had fig trees--a few kadotas and some black missions, and we picked and ate the fruit off the tree. They let us take some home, and thats what mark is making preserves out of. They started talking about varieties of fruit and I started to go cross-eyed, so I went out side and took some pictures. They had bunches of flowers around to attract bees, and the whole place was beautiful. My grandparents had a little garden with some veggies and a couple of apple trees, but I've never had the experience of just walking thru acres of fruit you could pick right off the trees. It makes you appreciate food in a new way, and I felt so much more connected to the process. We put the figs to good use, and now that they are canned, mark will be adding up instructions and some of the pitfalls he ran into with the whole process, so stay tuned!