Clementine Muffins, or Morning Sunshine Muffins

Saying Clementine Muffins gets the job done - you know what you're eating. Morning Sunshine Muffins (Jenean's idea) is much more evocative of the lovely experience you will have while eating them.

Have you ever bought a big box or bag of clementines, and at first it is a delight, you are eating three a day and loving every bite, but by the time you're about two thirds of the way through, you are clementined out, and some of them are starting to go bad, and they begin to create anxiety in your household? That's where we were on Thursday evening. So we googled around a bit for ideas for what to do with clementines in a cooked capacity.

We found this recipe, at the beautiful blog smitten, which I believe is originally (or possibly only most famously) Nigella Lawson's. It calls for boiling several clementines in their skins (go look at smitten's beautiful photos of that process, I failed to take any) for 2 or sometimes 3 hours. I saw another recipe on orangette that was very similar, but used an orange and a lemon, and only boiled them for 30 minutes... Anyway - Friday night rolled around, I was all alone in the house and feeling anxious about the clementines, so I set them to boil, and turned them off after 30 minutes. Then Jenean got home and reminded me of the 3 hours in the other recipe, so we added more water and turned the heat back on... and we went and ate dinner, and watched some tv... and we forgot about those clementines. Not till a mysterious, possibly corn-dog-type smell began to waft from the kitchen did we realize what was happening - all the water had boiled off, and the bottom of the pan of clementines was scorching. Quel horreur. We felt terrible. What a waste of what we had thought was a process to SAVE those clementines from going to waste! Dad would be so mad!

We poured in a bunch of water, and joked about burnt sugar clementine cake, and Jenean went to bed. After a little while, I thought it couldn't hurt to at least take the next step, which is to drain the boiled clementines and grind them up, skin and all, in the food processor. Weirdly, the burned bits remained large and separate, and the orange clementine-y bits ground up into a pretty, dark orange paste. I pushed it through a mesh strainer to catch out all the black burned pieces, and sheepishly put it in the fridge.

The next day I decided the Clementine cake recipe, though thrilling, was not what was called for, considering it calls for expensive things like 3 cups of blanched almonds. I wasn't wasting all those nice nuts on burned clementines. So I modified the basic muffin recipe from the Joy of Cooking (not the old one, and not the newest one... the in-between one), and by George, they came out really really good! I mean, I'm going to make these all the time type good! They have such a nice round citrus flavor, without having to grate zest, or squeeze juice, or any of that, and they're really moist. You want to make these. And so without further ado, the recipe for...

Clementine AKA Morning Sunshine Muffins!

Boil 5 clementines in their skins (after removing any stickers, stems, etc and washing), in plenty of water for 1 hour (I really think that's enough). Try not to forget about them and burn them, but no big deal if you do!

Drain, and allow them to cool.  Cut into them to check for seeds, then grind them up into a paste in the food processor. For me this yielded about 1 cup, and it had the consistency of sour cream (up to this point can happen at least a day in advance, if not a lot more).
Have a 12 cup muffin tin ready, lined with paper liners, or just grease it up. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Measure out 3/4 cup of the clementine puree into a medium sized bowl and add and whisk together with:

2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
2/3 cup sugar
6 tbsp melted butter (or 4 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp oil)
1 tsp vanilla

in a large bowl meanwhile, whisk or sift together:

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (if you don't have it, just do all A-P flour, I wouldn't sub regular whole wheat flour here)
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, pour in the wet ones, and as the Joy of Cooking says, "mix together with a few light strokes just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Do not overmix; the batter should not be smooth." That's just so well said, I had to quote. Anyway, parcel out the batter into the cups, it should come almost to the top of the cup, when they bake the make nice domed tops. These took my oven about 21 minutes to bake... the recipe says to start checking after 12-15 minutes. You'll be able to see they're done when they're fully dry on top, even in the little cracks. Toothpick test them to make sure, and cool on wire racks.

mama's b-day ravioli with prosciutto and mushrooms

I've decided my posts are too long-winded. So this one will be mainly photos. We made ravioli for Mom's birthday dinner. Everybody helped. Mom chopped up the prosciutto, and we fried it till it was crispy and removed it from the pan.
Dad chopped up the mushrooms, and we fried those up nice and brown, then Jenean chopped and added garlic and some fresh rosemary.
I set aside about 1/4 of fried up prosciutto for later, and chopped the rest up smaller, and put it in a big bowl with the mushrooms, garlic and rosemary.
Then I added about 2 cups of ricotta, and a cup of grated parmesean, an egg, and some salt and pepper, and some freshly grated nutmeg.
Then Dad and I took turns rolling out the pasta dough. It's so much fun with this awesome contraption.
We portioned out the filling in heaping teaspoonfuls.
Dad and I just folded the dough over, using an egg wash to stick it together, and cut it into raviolis with a knife. I think I kind of want one of those nice crimper cutter things, for next time. ALSO, next time I'm gonna roll out the dough a bit thinner - level 6 instead of 5.
I made a quick sauce in a big pan while the raviolis boiled in well-salted water by melting a lot of butter with extra virgin olive oil, some more chopped garlic, some capers, and the remaining prosciutto. Toward the end of the ravioli boiling I stole some of the pasta water to add to the sauce, maybe a cup. When the ravioli was done, I threw them into the pot with the sauce, and let them bubble together to let it thicken up a bit.
Poured it out on a platter, with some more grated parmesean. Happy Birthday Mama.

Roman-Style Braised Artichokes - Hooray for Spring!

Right now, Trader Joe's is selling 4 packs of modest sized artichokes for $3, which seemed like a pretty great deal to me. It's artichoke season - March through May! So it's the right time for them to be delicious.

Usually in our family we just steam or boil artichokes, doing a minimum of trimming, and eat them leaf by leaf, dipping them in either melted butter or mayonnaise (I know, mayonnaise sounds crazy. But it's good, trust me - as long as it's Hellmans/Best Foods), till we get to the utterly delicious heart. Mmm.

For our Mama's birthday dinner though, I thought I'd try something special with them. I used a recipe in a book on Italian country cooking by Anne Willan. It's such a great recipe, there are hardly any ingredients but the flavor is amazing, and it can be made ahead and served at room temperature. It's meant to be an appetizer, but it made a nice accompaniment to the prosciutto and mushroom ravioli we made for the main dish.

you need:
6-8 cloves of garlic
1 bunch flat leaf parsley
8-10 sprigs of mint
salt and pepper
2-3 lemons (I think she calls for 3 to supply garnish... i skipped that)
6-8 young globe artichokes
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Now it's time to trim the artichokes - the only tough part to this recipe (you can do it!). Have a big bowl of cold water ready, in which you have squeezed the juice of one lemon - leave the lemon pieces floating in the water. Now the artichoke: You first want to cut off all but 1 1/2 to 2 inches of stem, and if it looks really tough, peel the outside. Then you want to go around and peel back the leaves one by one, trying to leave the base of each leaf (the edible part) behind. Your first go round the artichoke you'll probably want to pull the whole leaf off - the outermost ones are totally tough. Keep going around and around, till you get past the dark green leaves and expose the inner, lighter green ones whose tips are all close together in a cone shape (I didn't go quite far enough in, afraid to waste them, but next time I'll be bolder, because we all ended up with a couple rows of leaves we had to discard for being too fibrous, and the goal here is to trim down till everything is edible).
Now once you're down to the inside cone of more tender leaves, you get a nice sharp knife, and cut that whole cone off, to expose the really short yellow-to-purple leaves with the sharp tips(depending on how old the artichoke is), and the hairy choke. Get a small spoon or a melon baller, and dig out all those sharp little leaves, and every little bit of the hairy choke, until there's a little cavity, all clean, surrounded by nice tender leaves. Rub it all over with one of the halves of lemon, to keep it from turning brown, and then throw it in the lemony water while you finish up the rest of the artichoke trimming.
Phew! I promise, the hard part is over. When that's all done, chop up your garlic, parsley and mint nice and small, and mix it all together in a little bowl.

Now get a nice wide saute pan that has a lid, one that can fit all your artichokes flat side down in one layer. One at a time, pull your artichokes out of the water bath, and fill the cavities with a couple spoonfuls of the garlic and herb mixture, and put them cut side down into the pan. If you have some of the herb mixture left over, sprinkle it on now, or better yet, save it for later. I had left my stems too long to fit under the lid, so Dad trimmed them off and threw them into the braising liquid, they were delicious little snack nuggets later.
Sprinkle plenty of salt and pepper over the artichokes, then pour over the 1/2 cup of olive oil (really! don't hesitate, it's not too much) and enough cold fresh water to come up the sides of the artichokes about halfway (I also threw in the squeezed out lemon halves from before). Put the lid on the pan, put the pan over medium high heat, and bring it to a boil. When it's boiling, lower the heat and let it simmer, 25 minutes if you have small artichokes like I had, or more, up to 45, if they're big, until they're tender and a knife point goes in easily.

Then (here's a step I forgot to do, and it was totally fine... but I think I would do it next time) move the artichokes out of the pan and onto a serving platter, and reduce the cooking liquid in the pan to about 1 cup. You can add in the remaining herb mixture now if you have any, and once the boiling down has been accomplished and you like lots of lemon, you could add some more fresh lemon juice, maybe 1/2 a lemon's worth. I might even throw in some freshly grated lemon zest next time, but only after the cooking is done.

Pour that beautiful sauce over the artichokes. This dish is ideal at room temperature, making it great for dinner parties, you can make it way ahead. And oh my heavens, the sauce is so good (even if you don't boil it down) - you'll definitely want some crusty bread around for sopping it up - a messy but worthwhile procedure. The leftover sauce (several days later) made a great afternoon snack with bread and a piece a cheese.

Roasted Shrimp with Romesco Dipping Sauce

Well, not the greatest picture ever (I was too busy scarfing these down) but a delicious recipe nonetheless.

The sauce consists of 1 cup roasted red peppers, 3 cloves garlic, cayenne and some olive oil. Blend in the food processor - EASY!

I roasted my shrimp as I discussed here.

For the topping on the shrimp process together one slice of bread, one clove of carlic and 2 tbs of slivered almonds. Put this mixture in a skillet with a little olive oil and allow it to crisp up, then top the shrimp with it and serve along side the sauce.

There was left over breadcrumbs and sauce so we will probably make a pasta dish with these two things in the very near future as part of efforts to clean out the fridge.

Who's de What?

Here's one thing in our fridge that we'll have no problem eating up:

Chocolate Blood Orange Pots de Creme (adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe) that I made for my beautiful Mommy's birthday this weekend. These seem so fancy (especially when you put them in cute mismatched tea cups like this) but they really are simple and very versatile. I used chocolate and blood orange for flavorings, but you could easily use vanilla and lavender or any number of other combinations.


Here what you need:
8 oz of bittersweet chocolate (I used 75% but Cook's Illustrated recommends 1o oz of 60% - ah well)
5 egg yolks
5 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cups half and half (didn't have this so used an additional 1/2 cup cream and 1/4 cup 1% milk)
1 vanilla bean
Zest from one orange, peeled into strips with a peeler not a zester
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso powder dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
More heavy cream for whipping


Here's what I did:
Finely chop chocolate and set aside in a large bowl.


Whisk together egg yolks and sugar until combined, then whisk in heavy cream and half and half. Pour into saucepan and add vanilla bean split and scraped of its seeds (I added the pod too) and zest from the orange. Cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat while mixture thickens, about 8-12 minutes or until it reaches 175 degrees. It shouldn't ever come to a boil or even a simmer.


Pour the mixture, through a strainer, over the chocolate and let sit for about five minutes until the chocolate melts. Add the espresso powder dissolved in water (great to bring out the chocolate flavor) and whisk until combined. If you don't have a vanilla bean, now would be a good time to add vanilla extract instead. Fill tea cups (or ramekins) with chocolate mixture. We got 8 tea cups full out of this. Let sit until the chocolate comes to room temperature and then refrigerate for at least 4 hours before serving.


When ready to serve, top with whipped cream and eat. Chocolate and orange is one of my favorite combinations and these were full of orange flavor without being overpowering. You will both enjoy and impress with these lovelies.

Challenge

We've challenged ourselves to eat everything in the fridge, and everything in the pantry before stocking up again, because this is getting ridiculous:

I always envy people who are able shop and eat one week at a time and use every single thing they buy and make, so maybe this is our chance to use it all up and start from scratch. Good luck to us.

quasi indian friday night dinner

Our lovely friend Emily came over for dinner on friday. We've had two small pumpkins sitting on the windowsill since Halloween, if you can believe it, so I decided earlier in the week to finally do something with them for friday dinner. I remembered a recipe our CSA farmers sent home in a newsletter late in the season last year - chunks of winter squash, roasted in the oven with butter and curry powder, with chunks of apple added later on in the cooking.

Sadly, though both little pumpkins LOOKED good still... their pretty outsides hid a dark secret - only about one quarter of one of them was still usable. Luckily the Hi-Lo sells chunks of some kind of giant squash, so I got a couple of those. We also had some collard greens in the house, so I thought I'd get some tofu and make a kind of fake saag paneer with them.

Some baked brown rice (I added toasted cumin and ground allspice to this batch), and some homemade naan seemed like good a way to round things out... plus Emily brought all the fixings for, and made, some cucumber raita.

The squash (wish I had a picture for right here):

I had probably 2 pounds of squash, cut into cubes, and
2 onions, cut into chunks
mixed up in a big bowl with oil, and a curry powder mix I had made a while back - the usual things like turmeric, coriander, cumin, allspice, cayenne, a little cardamom, and I think a little fennel and cinnamon (it was Sri Lankan style, sort of). I also added a lot of salt and pepper, and some garlic powder.
I poured it all on an oiled baking sheet, covered it with another baking sheet (didn't feel like wrangling a bunch of foil), and put it in the 375 degree oven where the brown rice was already baking. After about 25 minutes I took the top sheet off, and added 3 small apples I peeled and diced, and let it stay in there another 30 minutes or... more. It turned out really tender, and sweet but savory.

The greens (that is, the fake saag paneer):

I sort of made this up as I went along. I put a big chunk of ginger, rough chopped, and 6 or so cloves of garlic rough chopped, and some toasted cumin seeds in the food processor, till it was all ground up.
I added about half the collards (I had 2 pounds total) to the food processor, and let it go till it was ground way down - it looked like a rough pesto.
I fried the cubed tofu, seasoned with salt and pepper, in a good amount of oil in a big frying pan. After I took the tofu out of the pan I added in the ground-up ginger garlic and collards mixture and let it fry up, with some salt and pepper. Then I added a bunch of water, more than a cup, but just a little at a time - I just kept adding water until it looked like a sauce. Meanwhile I put the rest of the collards in a microwave safe bowl, poured in some water, covered with plastic wrap, and microwaved it for two minutes. Then I added it all into the chopped collards in the frying pan, put a lid on it, and let it all bubble together on low heat for a while.
When it was time to eat it, I added some salvadoran crema I got at the Hi-Lo (it's kind of like sour cream or creme fraiche, it turns out! Only, a little cheesier and very salty - Emily warned me it goes bad fast so I'll have to think up something to do with the rest soon), maybe a half a cup, or more, and stirred in the tofu. It turned out better than I expected - in fact I personally felt it was more delicious than the average saag paneer - the collards gave it a little dark-greeny-bitterness that I really liked, better than spinach. I think in the future I might grind all the greens down in the food processor instead of just half of them (then i could skip the separate microwave steaming step). Also next time, I might buy some of the queso para freir they sell at the Hi-Lo, seems like it would be a lot like paneer.

The Naan (this one turned out mitten shaped!):

I used this recipe for naan, sort of. The only thing is that I've been growing a sourdough starter, lately, and had some I had to discard (I'll explain when I post about the starter, some other time), so I had to fudge some of the details. We did use the cooking method (Emily and Jenean spearheaded the naan baking) - which is to roll balls of it out nice and thin and throw it on a very hot stove top grill pan (ours it cast iron, which gets really hot), and flip it when it gets bubbly to cook the other side. Once they were done we brushed them with melted butter which I had put some chopped garlic in. They turned out good - tender and chewy, and crispy on the edges.

The Raita:

Emily brought an english cucumber, toasted ground cumin, yogurt, fresh mint and a lemon. She grated about 2/3 of the cucumber and chopped the mint, and mixed it all up with the juice of half the lemon, some cumin, and salt and pepper. It was so fresh and perky.

what I did with some of the leftovers (indian calzone?):

Emily wisely shut down the naan baking operation when we had 8 of them made, since there were only 3 of us eating. That left me with a pretty big chunk of naan dough sitting in the fridge waiting to get baked. Over the last few days we've been eating all this stuff for meals, so there was just a little bit of the collards left. I rolled out a little piece of it into a thin circle, put last of the collards on (probably just a 1/2 cup), pinched the edges shut, put it on an oiled pie plate, drizzled with a little more olive oil, sprinkled with salt, poked a couple holes in the top, and baked it at 450 for about 15 minutes. It was seriously good.