Seared Flank Steak with 'stop me before I drink this' Shallot-Mustard Sauce

I love flank steak. It is so easy to cook and can be prepared in so many different ways that it never feels like the same meal twice. Last Sunday we had Seared Flank Steak with Shallot-Mustard Sauce served with Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Apples and Maple-Sage Butter. Both recipes are from Fine Cooking and both are dishes I would definitely enjoy again. We were particularly enamoured with the Shallot-Mustard sauce. It came together as the last part of the meal and while I was reducing and whisking, simmering but not boiling I thought to myself 'Do we really need sauce? I bet the steak will be just fine without it.'. Man, was I wrong. Not totally wrong. The steak would have been fine with no sauce. But the sauce (which, if I'm being honest is mostly butter) made the meal. As the title of this post suggests.

Whole Wheat Pumpkin (Quick) Bread

This weekend was such a relief. A welcome respite from the reality of the last couple of weeks. (It's been very real around here of late) September has been a strange month so it was wonderful to spend a Sunday in the kitchen again. It felt familiar and I've been craving something familiar. So after David and I ran in the Terry Fox Run (10K) this morning I went crazy in the kitchen - pumpkin bread, banana maple oatmeal cookies and pork roasted slowly with apples. It was very Fall-ish here today.

Battery Exhausted

The nose/ear/throat issue that I've been ignoring for about a month now finally walloped me hard yesterday. I gave up mid-afternoon and headed home, then decided to follow the advice of the nice doctor I saw last night in the after-hours clinic and rest today. Or at least attempt to rest.

Being sick when you have kids is nothing like being sick when you don't. You can call in sick to the office but you can't call in sick to your kids, who generally require breakfast, a packed lunch and transportation to and from school. At the point that I have to get up to accomplish the aforementioned tasks I figure I may as well suck it up and just go to work. Otherwise I come home from the school drop-off, look around my untidy house and think, 'I'll just clean up 'x' then I'll go back to bed'. But 'x' leads to 'y' leads to 'z' and before I know it, I've spent my sick day re-arranging the linen cupboard. Today I made an effort to actually be sick. I still got up and got the kids moving but when I came home I crashed right back into bed. I finally got up mid-afternoon and decided I wanted some soup.

I've had a recipe for Parsnip Carrot Soup hanging on my fridge door for literally two months. I like parnips (remember parsnip crumble?) and happened to have some on hand in the fridge along with carrots, so decided to do one productive thing with my sick day - make good soup. And it was good soup. I had it with some camembert cheese and crackers. Even in my hazy state I thought to take a picture of my soup in progress:


I know. This is a horrible food shot. It's obviously a pile of discarded parsnip/carrot peel, slightly out of focus. It looks how I feel. But I love this picture, because after I took it my camera beeped at me, then showed the message: 'battery exhausted' before conking out. Yeah, I totally get that, Mr. Nikon Coolpix P90. Sometimes the battery is just too exhausted.

Apple Crisp

See this? Doesn't it look good?

I made apple crisp for our Sunday dinner dessert. I have an 'old reliable' recipe for apple crisp but the last few times I've made it, it's been a bit lackluster. So I decided to thumb through my cookbook collection for some apple crisp inspiration. I ended up finding a simple sounding recipe in The Bon Appetit Cookbook for Apple and Raisin Crisp.

I adapted this recipe slightly, leaving out the raisins (look too much like dead flies for my liking), omitting the lemon juice (because I didn't have any) and substituting macintosh apples for granny smith/pippin. And may I say, despite not following this recipe to the letter, it was delish. The whole time it was baking the house smelled heavenly, if heaven smells like apples, brown sugar and cinnamon. It was so good, I couldn't resist sneaking a taste while it was still warm. Hence the small dent you'll have noticed in the upper right hand corner of the dish pictured. It could easily have been a very large hole. P. claims not to like apple crisp, so he was the only one to sit out dessert tonight. Well, not entirely - he didn't pass up the vanilla ice cream that was on offer.

In other culinary news, I am very excited that we found a Trader Joe's in MI during our cross-border trek Saturday, because it means I can try out their Gingerbread coffee. I'm hoping this blend creates a mean gingerbread latte. I will, of course, advise.

Trick or Treat!

Tonight, in honour of Halloween, we had an orange menu for Sunday dinner - pumpkin soup, cheese and bacon buns, carrot sticks and mandarin orange slices.

Cheese and bacon buns are a comfort food that I remember from when I was a kid. They aren't hard to make. First fry some bacon, say 6-8 slices, and set aside. Line a cookie sheet with foil, split some burger buns and place on aforementioned foil-lined cookie sheet. Top burger buns with either cheese whiz or a cheese slice; choose the petroleum-based cheese product of your choice. Now cut the bacon into bite-sized pieces. I use kitchen scissors to do this. Sprinkle the bacon generously on the buns (I make 6 at a time). Now set your oven to broil (high) and place the buns under the broiler for 3-5 minutes. I personally like when my cheese gets slightly charred under the broiler. As I learned the hard way tonight, my kids do not. Instead they accuse you of burning their food. I made these bacon-less and tried to sell them as open-faced grilled cheese for the kids and yet they still rejected them. And don't get me started on their reaction to pumpkin soup, which they at least tasted this time, unlike when I served it at Thanksgiving. 'Yuk' was one of the nicer things they had to say...


For dessert I made a chocolate brownie snack cake with spiderweb glaze which the kids liked just fine, of course, but I found somewhat disappointing:

The cake ate fine, and was super easy to make, but my glaze wasn't runny enough so the presentation suffered as a result. Which is kind of ironic, because normally when I'm working with icing sugar my problem is all about the runny, as in I can't make it stiff enough. I blame this on multi-tasking. Because as I was making the icing I glanced out my kitchen window and noticed this:


So of course I had to run out and take some pictures. This maple has granny smith apple green leaves Spring and Summer, then in the Fall, seemingly overnight it turns a brilliant red. We've been so busy I hadn't even noticed it had turned until today. Between this and the need to wear mittens to trick or treat comfortably tonight (we are closing in on about 160 treats doled out), I'd say it won't be long before we get some white stuff visiting the neighbourhood.

Howja like them apples?

I made a lot of different dishes with apples this weekend. A lot. And the whole time I was peeling and chopping, slicing and dicing, I kept hearing Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting in my head; the scene where he bangs on the window to get the attention of an obnoxious college student in a bar who was (also) hitting on Minnie Driver and he says "You like apples? Yeah? I got har numba. Howja like them apples?" Note that this is said with a plummy Boston accent, which I've cleverly related using 'har' for 'her', 'numba' for 'number' and 'howja' for 'how do you'. None of which is relevant to any of the cooking I did, although when I finally stepped out of the kitchen Sunday and sat down at the computer I discovered Matt Damon and his wife had a baby this past Wednesday. Coincidence? Yup, pretty much.

So. Apples. On Wednesday I had a library book due back at the public library, so I dropped it in on my way home from work. As is my practice I scanned the cookbook section to see if anything inspiring was on the shelves. I went away with Lucy Waverman's A Year in Lucy's Kitchen. I'm familiar with Waverman's work, having noticed her recipes in the LCBO Food & Drink magazine and The Globe and Mail. What made me pick up AYILK was the premise - it's a recipe book made up of menus. I love cookbooks that give you menus. I'm not sure I've ever made an entire menu from a cookbook but I love the possibility that I might. Or even that I could. If I wanted to.

Lucy sets up her book by season, so I flipped to Fall and found a Halloween menu that sounded promising. In particular I decided to make Braised Chicken with Apples and Sausage along with the suggested side of Spiced Sweet Potato Fries. Lucy's menu rounds out this dinner with a pumpkin soup; I recently made a delightful pumpkin soup but was more in the mood for squash soup. In particular, a squash apple soup caught my eye in another book I brought home from the library: get cooking, by Mollie Katzen.

If I'm being honest, none of these recipes really wowed me. The squash soup was good, but the granny smith apple it included added a sweetness that I didn't care for, and the addition of lemon juice didn't save the flavour. The chicken was super moist and the apples that cooked along with it were a lovely accompaniment to the meat, but I think I prefer roast chicken. The sweet potato fries were good (P. nearly ate a whole wedge!). But just good. Period. So the meal wasn't bad, it was just a little....unremarkable.

I'll definitely need to aim for remarkable next Sunday since it's Halloween. When I was a kid, we had cheese and bacon buns every Halloween. They were orange (cheese whiz orange...mmmm) and if you were creative with your bacon, you could make your dinner look like a jack o' lantern. We aren't huge on Halloween around here, but we make an effort. Some of us more than others. This is the first year I've gotten the 'mom please let me just buy a costume' speech from my son, after my years of attempting unique homemade creations. So next Sunday will be an homage to Halloween. Here's a preview of the preparations we've done around our house to be suitably festive.

Thankful - Birthday Edition

Our niece turned 1 on Saturday, so we headed down the highway for a birthday/Thanksgiving celebration. Just like Thanksgiving weekend, this was another great day for traveling. We spotted a handful of gliders soaring among the fluffy white clouds and enjoyed lots of lovely Fall colour during the back road portions of our trip, when we didn't have our eyes glued to our Nintendo DSi-xls. Ahem.

I was very much looking forward to this dinner since we had lamb with my family for Thanksgiving. Nothing says Fall like turkey! We had a great meal in A&J's brand-spanking new house, which hopefully will host many more such dinners long into the future. Given the meal it produced, the kitchen works just fine!


While I love 'traditional' dinners that feature familiar flavours and dishes, I also like to experiment and try new things to keep special meals interesting. I love that we had roasted potatoes with our turkey instead of the more typical mashed, since it made me think to try a Parsnip Crumble recipe I've had earmarked in my recipe book hungry for comfort, which I've mentioned in a previous post.

Parsnip Crumble has the consistency of mashed potatoes, so I thought this dish would make a perfect complement to the roast potatoes - no competing with mashed. To make parsnip crumble you basically peel and chop 4-5 medium parsnips, boil them for 20 minutes, then mash them with butter and sour cream. Top them with an oat/brown sugar/flour/butter/nutmeg crumble mixed with fresh chopped cranberries. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes and you're good to go.

I think this dish travelled well, and it tasted fine, but next time out I would add more butter/sour cream and do a better job mashing. My parsnips had lumps, which weren't necessarily bad...I just would have preferred a smoother base. Parsnips are actually quite sweet, so the addition of the butter and sour cream cuts that a bit.

I think the real star of the dinner table were the roasted potatoes. Sure, they made a complete mess of a couple of baking pans, but the men were up to the challenge of soaking, chipping and generally rehabilitating said pans. Or at least I think they were. I wandered off after doing some (light) after-dinner dish duty to the more delightful task of hanging out with my niece for some girl talk. Luckily I was able to get the recipe for the roasted potatoes from my SIL so I can attempt to replicate their wonderfulness. They are an Ina Garten recipe from Food Network:

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

• 1 1/2 pounds small red or white-skinned potatoes (or a mixture)
• 1/8 cup good olive oil
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoons minced garlic (3 cloves)
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary leaves

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut the potatoes in half or quarters and place in a bowl with the olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary; toss until the potatoes are well coated. Dump the potatoes on a baking sheet and spread out into 1 layer; roast in the oven for at least 1 hour, or until browned and crisp. Flip twice with a spatula during cooking to ensure even browning. Remove the potatoes from the oven, season to taste and serve.

Fall Flashback - Pumpkin Cheeseball

I was poking through pictures from October 2009 last week when I came upon this one:


If memory serves I was cutting up veggies for a veggie tray when I was suddenly inspired to stick a broccoli stalk into the top of a cheeseball I had made to make it look like a pumpkin. And since I always take things one step further than I likely should, I then decided to try and turn my pumpkin cheeseball into a jack-o-lantern cheeseball. Which I accomplished with cucumber pieces. The final product was served on the one piece of genuine Fiesta-ware that I own, courtesy of my maternal grandmother.

I realize I am not unique in my cheeseball-as-pumpkin concept. Sweetspot.ca has a recipe for Mini Cheese Ball Pumpkins that I could totally get behind if I wasn't, well, lazy. And I am very intrigued by this Savory Pumpkin Cheese Ball recipe from ifood, which actually contains pumpkin.

We ate our pumpkin cheeseball with plenty o' crackers and a yummy homemade roasted squash soup on a cold Fall Saturday afternoon.

Cheeseball

8 oz pkg cream cheese
1/2 cup cheese whiz
1/2 cup grated cheddar
1 tbsp grated onion
few drops wooster sauce
few drops tabasco sauce
1 cup chopped walnuts

Using an electric mixer beat cream cheese, cheese whiz and grated cheddar until combined. Add onion, wooster and tabasco sauce. Scrape mixture out of bowl onto waxed paper. Roll in walnuts (optional).

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup

4 cups peeled butternut squash
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp finely chopped shallots
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 1/2 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups milk

Place squash in 2 qt baking dish coated with cooking spray. Lightly coat squash with cooking spray; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 30 minutes in a 375 degree oven. Melt butter in dutch oven over medium heat. Add shallots and garlic to pan; cook 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add squash and broth to pan; bring to a boil, cook 2 minutes. Stir in milk. Reduce heat and cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Place 1/3 of squash mixture in blender. Remove centre piece of blender lid to allow steam to escape. Place clean towel over opening in blender lid to avoid splatters. Or burning your hand. Blend until smooth, pour into large bowl.

Thankful - cupcake edition

On Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend we got to visit with D.'s side of the family (or most of them!) which was a treat, because we aren't often all together much any more. The weather was beautiful Sunday - a rare Canadian Thanksgiving treat of warm sun and soft breeze. I was asked to bring dessert to the potluck table and wanted to bring something suitably festive. I immediately thought of cupcakes for a couple of reasons.



A few years ago I got this book for my birthday. Cupcakes are a pretty big trend right now, so let me just point out that the publishing imprint of this title is 2006. Cupcake love has existed around our house for many years, likely a consequence of having young children and a mummy who has a thing for serving foods in small, contained, individual portion sizes. You should see my ramekin collection. But that's a story for another day. For Thanksgiving I decided to make Carrot & Cranberry Cupcakes with Cinnamon and Spice Frosting.






Thanksgiving Carrot and Cranberry Cupcakes

1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup dried cranberries


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix flour, baking powder, salt and spices together and set aside.

Using electric mixer, beat oil and both sugars until blended. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat until smooth. Add flour mixture and blend thoroughly. Fold in carrots, walnuts (if using) and cranberries.

Fill cupcake papers about 2/3 full. Bake for 25-30 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

Cinnamon and Spice Frosting

1/4 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup cream cheese
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves

Cream butter and cream cheese together until light and fluffy. Gradually add powdered sugar, beating until smooth. Add vanilla and spices and continue beating until frosting is good for spreading.

As yummy as these cupcakes sounded, I knew I also had to bring something chocolaty to the table, since my family thrives on a little bit of chocolate apres dinner. So I whipped up a batch of homemade ONE bite brownies. I started making these two years ago when friends gifted us a great little cookbook called Grazing by Julie Van Rosendaal. The only special equipment you need to pull these off is a mini-muffin pan. I have a silicone one by KitchenAid.

One Bite Brownies

1/4 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 large egg
2 large egg whites
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp instant coffee granules, dissolved in 1 tsp water
1 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, mix together butter and sugar until well combined. Add egg, egg whites, vanilla and coffee and stir until well blended and smooth.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Add to the egg mixture and stir by hand just until combined. Spoon the batter into mini muffin cups that have been sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until puffed but soft to the touch. Do not over bake! Cool in pan on wire rack.

Thankful

Last week was pretty awful around here. I have a miserable cold, and I am not a good sick person. So it made the week feel pretty long, likely for everyone at my house, although the prospect of a long weekend was some comfort. When I'm sick I tend to cook what I think of as 'comfort food' dishes. Often, particularly in the Fall/Winter, that means soup.

Last weekend I made pumpkin cookies for the boys and was left with a half can of pureed pumpkin. I thought about making another batch of cookies, or some pumpkin bread, but decided instead to see if I could make pumpkin soup. Not finding any pumpkin soup recipes in my print cookbook collection I turned to the web and found what seemed like a winner on Allrecipes.com.

I like community-based recipe sites like AllRecipes. They remind me of community cookbooks, which aren't entirely extinct but probably less popular than years past, when family favourites were typed up and spiral bound and sold as fundraisers for hockey teams and Girl Guide troops. The Internet take on community cooking is of course, not a passive experience, because people can comment on your recipe, recommending variations that can lighten, sweeten or flat out change (for better or worse, depending on your perspective) the original. Take the recipe I found for Cream of Pumpkin Soup. It had a high overall rating (4 and 1/2 stars) but when I went in to read some of the reader reviews of the recipe the comments showed that those who made the soup tweaked it to their own taste, then appeared to rank the soup based not on the original recipe but on their adapted version. Those who did not tweak the soup ranked it quite low - the 2-3 star range. So I had to puzzle together, based on the numerous suggested tweaks, what would be my recipe for Cream of Pumpkin Soup. Here is what I ended up making:

Cream of Pumpkin Soup

1 cup chopped onion
2 tbsp butter, melted
30 ounces chicken broth
15 ounces pumpkin puree
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ginger
2 pinches nutmeg
1 shake cayenne pepper
1 cup skim milk

Saute onion in butter in medium saucepan until softened. Add half of chicken broth, stir, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Transfer broth to blender, process until smooth. Return mixture to saucepan. Add remaining broth, pumpkin, brown sugar and spices. Stir well, bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add milk, stir and simmer 5 minutes. Serve.

A simple but effective soup. I served it at our Thanksgiving Saturday and those who tasted it (no one under the age of 9 was interested) liked it a lot. Some of the less adventurous in the crowd (you know who you are) thought the soup would taste too much like pumpkin pie, so refrained. I'll admit to being curious if that would be the case but it wasn't. The soup tasted very similar to squash soups that I have made/tasted in the past. No pie-ish taste at all. Being dulled by a cold didn't lessen the taste of this great soup which I will definitely make again. Being dulled by a cold did make me forget to photograph this particular creation so here is a shot of our Thanksgiving table instead.

Two For One

I've already admitted that I buy food I think is pretty, even if I have no intention of eating it. Now I'm going to expose my husband's bad grocery shopping habit.

D. can't seem to resist buying 2 for 1 items. Even if we don't need it, even if it isn't something he likes, he'll bring it home because it was on sale, 2 for 1! (He also tends to buy things in very, very large sizes. Like, beyond econo-size, even. But I digress.) A month or so ago he brought home 2 for 1 pork tenderloins. Which wasn't actually a bad score, because you can do a lot with pork tenderloin and everyone in our house likes pork. But when I opened up the first of two pork tenderloin packages I found...two pork tenderloins. In his 2 for 1 haste D. had actually bought 4 pork tenderloins. The first package I used when we were still grilling but the second package has been lingering in our freezer. Sunday I decided it was go time. And since we'd already exhausted my typical pork tenderloin dishes with the first two loins, I could try something new.

My kids like food you can eat on a stick. I noticed this when I fed them fruit as toddlers. They ate fruit more readily and more abundantly if I gave them toothpicks to spear with. Sadly this phenomenon did not translate to vegetables...which are harder to sell, even on a stick. But I wondered if I could do something stick-tastic with meat. I found my answer thanks to MyRecipes.com, which aggregates recipes from a number of magazines including my favourite, Cooking Light.

Pork Satay with Peanut Dipping Sauce comes courtesy of Oxmoor House, who appear to be a publisher of cookbooks. Only problem with this recipe - I didn't have chicken broth, a necessary ingredient in their Peanut Dipping Sauce. So I decided to use their pork recipe but sub-in another peanut dipping sauce that I found in my Canadian Basics cookbook that didn't require the broth.

This proved to be a good recipe for a Sunday dinner for a couple of reasons. One, you have to pound the tenderloin to make it thin for threading on skewers, so you can work out a lot of 'darn the weekend is over already and it's back to work' aggression. Two, once you've pounded the pork and marinaded the pork and threaded the pork you only have to broil it for a few minutes each side to finish it off. So it's fast and doesn't take up a lot of oven time. Three, everyone ate it with no complaints because it tasted great. The marinade also has peanut butter, so you may find the dipping sauce is overkill but I liked it. I find there are two kinds of people in the world, those who dip and those who do not. I dip, D. does not. So there was lots of sauce left over. Here is how I made the sauce:

Peanut Dipping Sauce

1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
3 tbsp each: sugar, soy sauce, lime juice
1 tbsp each: minced garlic, minced fresh ginger, dark seasame oil
1/2 tsp (or to taste) chile paste or hot pepper sauce
1/4 cup warm water or coconut milk

Blend all ingredients in food processer until smooth.

Overall this was a great dinner, enjoyed as part of our triumphant 'holy cow I can't believe we ran 10K today' euphoria.

Fig Jam

Every once in a while a new food follows me home from the grocery store. I don't mean for it to happen. One minute I'm sticking to the list and the next minute a food stuff I can't pronounce or have no idea how to eat is in my cart. Last weekend figs followed me home:

Sometimes I buy food I don't need or won't eat because I think it's pretty. I know. It's an odd habit to have let alone admit. For example, two weeks ago I brought home the cutest little baby eggplants I had no intention of eating because they were perfectly shaped and a deep, lustrous purple. I put them in my fruit/veggie bowl on the counter and admired them until they rotted. Then I threw them away.

Figs are okay as far as looks go, but they aren't eggplant. Which is to say I wanted to make something out of these figs. In the back of my mind I think I was recalling a recipe I read in Bon Appetit when I bought the figs - Country Ham and Cheese Biscuit Sandwiches with Fig Jam. The jam part of this recipe does indeed call for black mission figs but dried, not fresh. Foiled! So I poked around Google for a bit and came upon various recipes for fig jam, most of which called for the figs to be cut up and simmered in a sugar/water combo. So that's what I did:


I made a simple sugar syrup out of water and sugar and threw in my cut figs. Plus a splash of vanilla. They didn't thicken after an hour of simmering, so I turned up the heat a bit and sprinkled on more sugar. After another thirty minutes or so I had something that appeared to be the consistency of a jam. So I cooled it and I mason jar-ed it. Then I had to decide what I was going to do with it.

Sunday morning at breakfast I decided to put the jam into action. I made fried egg sandwiches with bacon and mozzarella on toasted english muffins with...a nice helping of fig jam spread on the bottom muffin. I like foods that serve up a salty / sweet combination and this hit the sweet (and salty!) spot. You can't see the fig jam in the picture below but trust me, it's there. I still have about 1/2 cup of jam left so let's see if I can get creative and use it up before it goes the way of the eggplant.