Great Pumpkin (Bread)

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but kept waiting 'til I made it, so I could post a picture with it. Well, life is what happens when you're making other plans, and I haven't yet made pumpkin bread this fall, so you'll have to content yourself with Linus waiting in the pumpkin patch. Please imagine that "Bread" is written on his sign, under "Welcome Great Pumpkin," because this is, indeed, great pumpkin bread.

My best friend and partner-in-crime, Andrea, gave me this recipe a few years ago. It's delicious and moist. The recipe makes two loaves, which is a very good thing, because it's positively addictive.

Pumpkin Bread

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1 can (15-16 oz.) pumpkin purée
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour two 9”x5”x3” loaf pans.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg.

In a separate bowl, stir together pumpkin and oil. (It will look curdled – it’s okay!)

Add in eggs one at a time, beating well after each.

Make a well in the flour. Add pumpkin, and stir until moistened.

Bake at 350F for one hour. Cool in pans 10 minutes, then remove from pans and cool completely.

Cornbread: the new millennium

Before you skip ahead to the recipe I'm posting today, please look, if you will, at the list of links in the right-hand column of this humble blog, and take note of the second one down: My "cooking Bible": The New Best Recipe. I am not affiliated in any way with their site, other than the fact that I worship at the altar of America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated. I've always liked their show on PBS, which is what led me to purchase this cookbook. (I've since subscribed to both of their magazines.)

This cookbook is to me what Joy of Cooking was to many women of my mother's generation. I'm actually starting to be tempted to "cook the book," á la Julie Powell of Julie and Julia, who cooked her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Every recipe I've tried in New Best Recipes has been phenomenal (go ahead, Muppet fans, sing it - I know you want to), and the cornbread I made tonight was no exception.

You may recall that I made some less-than-fantastic cornbread last week. My mistake? Relying on an old standby recipe rather than giving in and trying something new. I now have a new gold standard for cornbread. It's moist and tender, almost spongy, not too sweet, and has lots of corn flavor.

Do me a favor: if you like this recipe, please go buy the book. I'm a bit torn about posting it here (pesky copyright laws and all), but if it convinces a couple of people to purchase the book, I'll consider it a good deed done.

Golden Northern Cornbread

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus more for greasing the pan

1 cup yellow cornmeal, preferably stone-ground

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

4 teaspoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs

2/3 cup buttermilk

2/3 cup milk

Adjust an oven rack to the center position and heat the oven to 425F. Grease a 9-inch square baking pan with butter.

Whisk the dry ingredients (cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt) together in a large bowl. Push the dry ingredients up the sides of the bowl to make a well.

Crack the eggs into the well and stir lightly with a wooden spoon, then add the buttermilk and milk. Stir the wet and dry ingredients quickly until almost combined. Add the melted butter and stir until the ingredients are just combined.

Pour the batter into the greased pan. Bake until the top of the cornbread is golden brown and lightly cracked and the edges have pulled away from the sides of the pan, about 25 minutes.

Transfer the pan to a wire rack to cool slightly, 5 to 10 minutes. Cut the cornbread into squares and serve warm. (The pan can be wrapped in foil and stored at room temperature for up to a day. Rehear the cornbread in a 350F oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Notes:

I doubled the recipe and made it in a 9x13" pan, with enough left over for 4 small muffins.

If you like your cornbread sweet, you're going to have to increase the sugar a bit.

The book has some tantalizing savory variations. You're going to have to buy it to see them.

New York, New York

I may not love the Yankees (go Red Sox!), but I do love visiting New York.  The next time you go, do yourself a favor, and don't eat in one of the overpriced chains in Times Square/the Theater District.  There are lots of great places to eat in New York that aren't full of tourists.

Sadly, the last time I was in the Big Apple, I expectantly ordered a pastrami sandwich, and was sorely disappointed.  I've had better at our local place in Massachusetts.  Perhaps this article from Serious Eats will be of use, the next time I'm heading to NY: Best Jewish Delis in New York. Yum.

If you're ever craving a burger in New York, go to one of the five locations of Burger Heaven - if you ask for a medium rare burger, you'll get it - and their sweet potato fries are delicious.  Prices are (for New York) very reasonable.

I welcome your suggestions for other places to try on my next foray into NYC (which will be in a few weeks to see Mary Poppins on Broadway).

Comfort in a bowl

I had eight of my best girlfriends over for a party on Friday night. *waves at the friends* As I mentioned in my last post, I made veggie chili and beef barley soup. I also made corn muffins to go with the chili, bought a really good loaf of bread to go with the beef barley soup, and made apple crisp for dessert. If anyone out there has a good cornbread/muffin recipe, I'd love to have it; the ones I made just weren't fabulous. The beef barley soup, on the other hand, rocked my socks off, if I do say so myself.

I made it as written, with the beef bouillon granules, but I'm sure it would be even better if you made it with my friend Charles' liquid gold in place of the water and bouillon. If you do, use 5 cups of the stock for the soup. Use one cup of water to cook the carrots, and add only the carrots, not the water in which you cook them.

Beef Barley Soup

2 pounds cubed beef chuck roast

1 - 2 tablespoons oil

2 - 3 large carrots, peeled and sliced

5 1/2 cups water (or 5 cups stock, 1 cup water)

4 teaspoons beef bouillon granules (or 4 cubes, crumbled) - only if using water, not stock

1/2 onion, chopped

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder, or 4 cloves, pressed

1 8-ounce can tomato sauce

3/4 cup uncooked pearl barley, rinsed

Salt and pepper to taste

Brown cubed beef in oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Do this in a couple of batches, so beef will brown properly. If the pan is overcrowded, beef will stew in its juices and turn gray instead of browning. Add browned beef to slow cooker.

Add carrots and 1 cup water to skillet; cook carrots just until tender. Add carrots (and water, if using water instead of stock) to slow cooker.

Add remaining water and bouillon (or stock), onion, garlic, tomato sauce, barley, salt and pepper to slow cooker. Stir to combine.

Cover, and cook on low for 5 hours.

Great with some crusty bread and a salad. A topping of little Parmesan, freshly grated, is yummy too.

I'm still here...

Several factors have contributed to my lack of posting the past week or so:

- I started a review of last Sunday's brunch at Meritage the Restaurant at the Boston Harbor Hotel. Suffice it to say, it was fantastic, as always. I'll get to it at some point.

- When I wasn't at brunch, I was nursing a bad back all weekend.

- The Red Sox are in the American League Championship Series. 'Nuff said.

- I've been preparing my woefully cluttered house for a party tomorrow. However, at my house, food takes precedence over clutter, which means I spent all evening making chili and beef barley soup (I'll post the recipe this weekend).

Time for bed. Well, time for bed after this out...

Paradise By The Dashboard Light

I know I already posted today, but as the aroma of meatloaf is wafting in to me from the kitchen, I feel compelled to post.

I will tell you right now, this is not a fancy, lots-of-strange-ingredients meatloaf. My mum never made meatloaf when I was growing up, but my grandmother (her mother) did. Mum's parents, Gramma Bonnie and Grampa Clyde, were both true New England Yankees, born and bred, of Scottish and English descent; Gramma's cooking definitely reflected this fact. Meat and potatoes were the order of the day. Vegetables were a distant second, and often out of a can (though Grampa grew a mean tomato).

This is as close to Gramma's meatloaf recipe as I've been able to get, although I did go out on a limb and add some garlic (a bulb of which never crossed her threshold). I keep thinking that I'm going to branch out and try something different with it, but I haven't yet...I love it as-is.

Meatloaf

1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 clove garlic, finely chopped, or 1/8 - 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 large egg
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
1 small onion, finely chopped (if you don't chop the onion very finely, I'd recommend sauteing it for about 3-5 minutes before mixing; otherwise the beef won't cook evenly around the pieces of onion)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix all ingredients; as horrible as you might find it, your hands really work best for this job. Spread mixture in ungreased loaf pan, or shape into 9x5” loaf in ungreased 13x9” pan. (I've read that you can bake it in muffin tins; after baking, cool and freeze any unused portions. Great if you are cooking for one or two people.)

Bake uncovered for 1 hour to 1 hour, 15 minutes, or until beef is no longer pink in center and juice is clear; meat thermometer, if you have one, should read at least 160F. Drain meat loaf.

Let stand 5 minutes.

Serve with some mashed potatoes or some mac and cheese, and maybe sautéed mushrooms, baked carrots or steamed green beans. (Tonight is mashed potatoes and mushrooms. Mmmmm.)



Oh, and about Bonnie and Clyde, in case you were wondering. Gramma's given name was Margaret, and known to most of the world as Margie (with a hard g - around here, it sounded like "Maahgee"). When Mum's twin, my Uncle Bob, got engaged, his fiancée didn't know what to call my grandmother. Hollywood stepped in to help out my Aunt Diane, and released the movie "Bonnie and Clyde" just then. A family nickname was born.

EDITED TO ADD: I just read on Serious Eats that they're declaring October 18 National Meatloaf Appreciation Day.

Let's Dish: Pros and cons

I wish I had a recipe to post tonight. We had roasted pork tenderloin with cornbread stuffing, and roasted mashed butternut squash and fresh green beans on the side. It was delicious.

Unfortunately, the pork was put together about a month ago at a place called "Let's Dish." You choose the meals you want to make when you sign up online, give them your money, go there, put together meals with fresh ingredients, and walk out with freezable meals. I went there in September with some other gals, and I made crabcakes, steak tips in Merlot, spinach lasagna rollups, and the pork tenderloin with cornbread stuffing. Everything we've tried has been decent - we've not yet tried the tips - but the tenderloin is my favorite by far of those we've tried.


Making crabcakes

The Let's Dish concept is an interesting one. I like the fact that it's a timesaver - there's no shopping for ingredients, and everything is prepped and ready to mix. If you buy the smallest package, 4 meals, it's $4 per serving, which seems pretty reasonable. However, each meal supposedly serves six. I know that Chuck and I have had no trouble disposing of three servings between the two of us (and we're not stuffing ourselves), so that's $6 per serving instead, not counting sides. Still not horrendous, especially when you consider what we'd pay to go out.

I'm just thinking that if I bought some freezable containers, I could pretty much do the same thing in my own kitchen for less, and my ingredients would probably be fresher and better quality. It wouldn't be quite as convenient, what with the shopping and chopping, and there wouldn't be the social factor of giggling with eleven other ladies while we were doing it, but I could fill the freezer with meals for less. I know that, when going through the list of meals to make, I didn't want to waste my money on making them at Let's Dish, because they were mostly meals I could prepare fairly easily at home.

So there it is, pros and cons. I might go again sometime, as it was fun to do with a group (though I can't make the next gathering with the same group), but I think I'm more likely to go invest in some freezer-to-oven containers, and spend a Saturday in my own kitchen.

A weekend of sinful eating

I returned home yesterday evening from a long weekend in Maine. We went to one of my favorite places, Mount Desert Island, which includes beautiful Acadia National Park and the charming town of Bar Harbor, where we stayed. If you should ever make it up that way, I recommend a visit to 14 1/2 Mt. Desert Street, where you'll find Café This Way.


Our first trip to Bar Harbor was last summer. We ate at another establishment our first night there, and were underwhelmed. Our B&B host suggested the next afternoon that if we were looking for something a little different, we might want to try Café This Way. We set off a little later, and got the very last table. Before we'd even made it to dessert, we'd made reservations for the following evening!

When we started making plans for this year's trip, we quickly decided on a couple of things:
1. Dinner reservations were made for both nights at Café This Way.
2. We decided to stay at a less expensive B&B, which offered only a continental breakfast, so that we could eat breakfast at Café This Way. (Do you get a sense of how much we like the place?)

I didn't take pictures, but here's a rundown of what we ate there.

Saturday night, Chuck had a wonderful yellow beet soup to start. We shared an Asian salad of mixed greens, red cabbage, crispy wonton strips, and a sesame-soy vinaigrette. I had Thai-grilled salmon for my entrée, which was served with crispy rice-stick noodles, fried sweet potatoes, and a sweet chili-lime sauce. (I could happily eat this for dinner twice a week.) Chuck had grilled sesame-marinated tuna, which was lovely and rare, served with a wasabi-edamame purée and seaweed salad. After all of that, we didn't really need dessert, but we indulged: I had a blueberry-crumb pie, and Chuck had a SINFUL chocolate-peanut butter fudge pie that was much more fudge than pie.

On Sunday morning, we got there early, which was a good thing - the line was out the door not long after we were seated, and we got there before they opened! Blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup, and sausage patties that were absolutely addictive graced my plate, and their decaf coffee was top-notch. Chuck had "The Patti" - an omelet with pickled jalapeños, red onions, spicy jack cheese, and salsa - with a side of yummy corned beef hash. It also came with some tasty homefries. His toast was a disappointment, though - dry and hard enough to use as hockey pucks.

Sunday night after our sunset cruise aboard the Margaret Todd, we returned to the Café. We started with Maine crabcakes which, though they had lots of crab and little filler, seemed somewhat lacking in taste; I think I'm used to Old Bay in my crabcakes. We shared a Caesar salad; not the best I've ever had, though the Parmesan crisps that came with it in place of tired croutons were yummy. I wasn't hugely crazy about the thick sauce that came with my scallops, a caramelized fig-bacon sauce that they called a vinaigrette. The sauce really was superfluous, given the wonderful sweetness of the scallops; I would've preferred them "naked." Chuck enjoyed his grilled tenderloin with bleu cheese and caramelized shallots. He requested it to be medium-rare; it was closer to rare than medium, and the bite I stole was delicious. Both of us were too full for dessert, sadly.

Monday morning was pretty much a repeat of Sunday morning. Chuck asked for his toast to be lightly toasted, and it was much better, though he said the hash was a tad chewy. My pancakes and sausage were just as good as the day before.

Believe it or not, we didn't spend our entire weekend at Café This Way! We hit the Acadia Oktoberfest in Southwest Harbor on Saturday. Lots of Maine brewers were there with samples to try. The food wasn't typical German Oktoberfest food, a disappointment for Chuck. However, he enjoyed a smoked brisket sandwich, and my lobster roll was delicious. We also bought a huge bowl of what the stand called "curly fries," but were what I'd call kettle chips. Fresh out of the oil, still hot, they were absolutely delectable.

Sunday afternoon, we never really ate lunch; we had fruit and Luna/Clif bars around mid-afternoon, then stopped at Mount Desert Island Ice Cream before our harbor cruise. The pumpkin ice cream I had was GREAT, and Chuck liked his Fudge Stout.

Sadly, we never made it to Jordan Pond House for tea and popovers on this trip; that'll be a priority for me next time! Besides their wonderful popovers, Jordan Pond's lobster stew, while pricey, is fantastic. They also serve sweeten-your-own icy-cold lemonade; there's nothing like it after a hike.

Oatmeal, revisited

I had delicious cookies last night and this afternoon. I stopped for treats on my way to Girls' Night last night, and found at the local grocery store some in-house-bakery-made cranberry orange oatmeal cookies. I'll be experimenting soon to see if I can replicate them.

Until then, I bring you this recipe, for oatmeal cranberry white-chocolate cookies, which are quite yummy. I think this may have been on the back of the bag of Craisins.


Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies

2/3 cup margarine, softened
2/3 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cup old fashioned oats
1 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 ounces (about 1 cup) dried cranberries
1 cup white chocolate bits or chunks

Preheat oven to 375F.

Cream margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, mixing well.
Combine oats, flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl. Add to margarine/sugar/egg mixture in several additions, mixing well after each addition.
Stir in by hand cranberries and white chocolate.
Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake about 8 minutes at 375F or until golden brown. Cool on wire rack.

Makes approximately 2 1/2 dozen cookies.