Review: Tomato paste in a tube

I recently purchased a tube of double-concentrated tomato paste and it has earned its place in my pantry.  Why, do you ask?

How many times have you opened a 5.5oz tin of tomato paste only to use a tablespoon or two, then ended up finding the rest in the back of the fridge a few months later?  I think we all have had this experience.  Tube tomato paste changes that.

I needed 2 teaspoons of tomato paste in a recipe last night, and I could just get the tube, squeeze out what I needed, put the tube back in the fridge, and go on with cooking. No muss, no fuss, no waste!

Anytime I need more than half of the tin of tomato paste, I'll still open a tin, but for a teaspoon or tablespoon, the tube rules.

This did come from a specialty shop, but I'm sure I've seen it at my supermarket as well. Try it out if you can find it, and let me know if you agree!

Let them eat Brioche!

This weeks bread in BBA is Brioche, very rich, and lots of butter (yes, I know I already said that, but it bears repeating). Peter Reinhart provides three different formulations, Rich man's, Middle Class, and Poor man's brioche. From a quick perusal of the recipes (which I don't have nearby right now) the only difference is the amount of butter involved. 1/2 cup for the poor man's, 1 cup for the middle, and two cups for the Rich Man's brioche.

I started off deciding to try something different. Another cookbook I have (100 great breads by Paul Hollywood) has a recipe for Apricot Brioche, so I asked Kenora to pick up some dried apricots on the way home and we set out to make Brioche.

After following the BBA recipes for a couple of weeks, with nice exact measurements (so many grams) it felt awkward to go back to using a rough measurement ("2½ scant cups").
Despite some issues with the recipe (I don't think it's possible to get the yield the book talks about), and overbaking it slightly (that isn't a light golden brown in the picture) this turned out so nicely! I had to try the BBA brioche.

We decided to do the Poor Man's brioche; it mixed up a lot easier than the dough yesterday did, and seemed to rise more evenly.

The problem I had was:  what style of bread do I want to make?
The classic brioche (to the left)? A normal loaf (below left)? Or mini-brioches (below right)?

Well, as those who know me can attest, my answer when faced with a decision like this is... "embrace the power of And" ... so, soon I had 10 loaves of Brioche baking (all from one batch of dough)

The things these pictures can't get across are

• the smell of the brioche baking; I swear I gained a few pounds just breathing the air while these little beauties were in the oven
• How greasy the dough actually was; in total, it weighed less than two pounds, but it was about 25% butter
• How light and flaky the finished bread was; I had a couple of slices of apricot brioche for breakfast this morning, toasted, with butter (yes, MORE BUTTER) and oh, it was heavenly!

Here's the collection of breads from this afternoon's baking session... anyone know how to slice the classic Brioche? [Apart from using a knife you wiseguys and wisegals:) ]

Next week is Casatiello, then Challah (which I might skip) then a Ciabatta.

Bread Bakers Apprentice - Bagels

(or how I almost killed a KitchenAid stand mixer)

Have you ever had one of those moments where you're in the middle of something, and you suddenly think you've made a critical and expensive mistake? That was about how I felt when I heard grinding coming from our big KitchenAid mixer as I started mixing the dough for the bagels. Then the paddle stopped moving temporarily, and I started seeing little bits of smoke coming up.

After a brief moment of panic, I started hand-kneading the dough, and boy that was challenging.

Baked potato bread

It's like a baked potato sandwich!

Well, the other day, I was looking for something like potato bread, but wanted a bit more than the normal bread (I love potato bread). Google helped me out marvellously! A quick search turned up a question someone asked ("Is potato bread vegan?"), so I went and looked, and saw that one of my favorite bread recipe sites had a recipe that called for bacon... hmmm... bacon, potato bread, all combined into one delicious loaf? I must try this Baked Potato Bread!

The Anticraft's Java Jacks

For today's brunch, I made a batch of Java Jacks from The Anticraft's recipe.  These are delicious coffee-flavoured pancakes made with sweetened condensed milk and strong coffee.  They make up easily and quickly, and watch them during cooking as they burn easily, I suspect due to the sugar content.

Served with homemade coffee syrup, whipped cream, bacon, and coffee - brunch is on!

Bread Bakers Apprentice - Anadama

Well, since one of the things I am enjoying making is bread, we bought ourselves a really nice little book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I've noticed during some of my googling, and blog-reading, that there's an unofficial challenge out there for people to cook each recipe in the book, in order, at the rate of one bread per week.

Well, I don't plan to do every bread in the system (some of the decorated ones I might pass on) I do plan to go through most of the book.

Bread one is "Anadama Bread" so that's what I started tonight.

All I've had to do so far is mix cornmeal and water... I think even I can manage that much. Now it soaks on the counter overnight and tomorrow morning I start the next few steps... this recipe has me waiting around a lot. Updates will follow, as will pictures.

Lemon thumbprint cookies

One person I've been inspired by is my friend Suzie the Foodie, and she made some amazing looking thumbprint cookies a while ago. Nigel and I decided to try them out, and we can now report that they taste as good as they look!

I made the lemon curd for the filling, and it is delicious. It looks, and tastes, like sunshine in a jar, which is so lovely in the dismal depths of February in Canada.

The recipe is from Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens. This was quite easy to make, though it does require some knowledge that a beginning cook may not yet have.

First, you're going to need a double boiler, or a quick substitute like a glass or metal bowl that you can place on top of a pot with gently boiling water in it. You do not want the water to touch the bottom of the bowl.

Next, you need to know how to work with eggs in this situation. If you beat your eggs in a bowl and dump them into a hot bowl over water at a hard rolling boil, you're going to end up with scrambled eggs. I put six eggs into my makeshift double boiler while it was still cold, whisking away, and then turned on the heat. I slowly added the lemon zest and juice of 3 lemons, and 2 cups of sugar, while continuing to whisk away at the contents. When the water under my bowl heated up and started to boil, I kept the heat at medium and added half a cup of butter, stirring constantly.

You want this to thicken to the consistency of thick honey, so you don't want this to be runny. This is similar to a custard, but it doesn't have the milk or cream that a custard has. I also found that the thickening was similar to making custard in that it feels like you're going to stir and stir and stir and stir forever, never having it thicken, when all of a sudden it just does so for you over about 30 seconds or so.

We poured the lemon curd carefully into clean glass jars and left it to cool on the counter for a bit before putting it into the fridge to chill.

Now, for the cookies! I don't have the recipe handy that we used (Nigel looked up this one), but we made the cookies tonight. We baked them without the lemon curd in them, and here's how they looked.

We then mixed some lemon zest and lemon juice with half a cup of icing sugar to make a thick runny glaze, then drizzled the glaze over the cookies. Lastly we added a generous spoonful of curd to each indentation.

Don't these look heavenly? The tartness of the lemon curd and the crunchiness of the cookie and the sweetness of the glaze are perfect.

Oh, we also have a pile of leftover lemon curd, so this weekend, I think it's time to make lemon tarts.... What do you think?

So that's what it's like to cook

Well, what a change a year makes. Last year, heck, 6 months ago,  I never would have thought I'd be cooking half the stuff I'm cooking. You see, I lived alone, in an apartment that would take any opportunity to heat up beyond a level I was comfortable in (I had windows open all year round, this is Ottawa, it gets cold). So for my own comfort, my definition of cooking was heating things up in the microwave, and maybe occasionally cooking something quick on the stove.

Then, last August, my girlfriend and I moved in together, we now have a house, that does a much better job of handling heat (in fact, the walls actually get cold at times). And between unexpected expenses (vet bills) and buying stuff we need for the house, it seemed a good idea if one of us started cooking. Well, it was summer when we moved in, and one of the first things we got was a barbecue... that plus a propane tank and we had fire to cook meat, even though our kitchen was nowhere near unpacked. So I started barbecuing, after all, "it's not real cooking, I'll leave that for my sweetie to do when we get the house usable."

My first ever pulled pork, about to be shredded

Well, a funny thing happened... I had fun cooking meat over an open fire,  so I kept doing it, and eventually, I decided I wanted to try a pulled pork. No idea what's involved, or what I'm doing, but I have Google to help me, or so I think.

Well, pure dumb luck, it worked... in fact, it worked so well that we've done it two more times now. Including once this past weekend, in the oven, because even I'm not crazy enough to try an 8 hour barbecue session in January.

And with that, I think my addiction became official. I started searching for recipes and trying them (still not having a clue what I was doing). I'm sure my sweetie got sick of me getting half way into a recipe and calling out "ummm... what does this mean?" or "ummm.... HELP?!?!?!" (and I'm still not sure what that one recipe meant by "halved rosemary".

However, before my reader (that would be you) thinks I am always successful, I have definitely had my share of failures in the kitchen...

• The turkey breast dinner that wouldn't cook (or fit into the biggest pan we had)
• The cheese sauce
• The other cheese sauce
• Then there was this cheese sauce (yes, I cannot make a cheese sauce)
• Or... the barbecue hose  (see to the right)

But I'm having fun in the kitchen, making bread, cookies, muffins, whatever strikes my fancy and makes my mouth water. 

Slowly but surely we're building a collection of recipes we can use, some of them are surprisingly good (stuff we didn't think we would like) and over time we will be sharing some of them as we get them set for our tastes.

Wow, I'd forgotten what real food tasted like

I used to cook a lot, and though it wasn't always fancy, it was tasty. Then one thing led to another, and I had more money than time (instead of, well, less money), and convenience so-called foods came into my life. That was far more years ago than I care to recall.

Then, well, my boyfriend and I moved in together in August 2010, into a house with a proper kitchen, and Nigel started to cook stuff on the barbecue we bought. I was recovering from a torn rotator cuff at the time, so a lot of normal things hurt, and that made it harder to cook.

Well, Nigel discovered he was really enjoying cooking, and we've been making more and more food from scratch in the past six months. We've bought a bunch of cookbooks we didn't already own, read blog articles, watched some nifty shows about food, and most of all, cooked more.

I'm finally starting to feel better, and as we get into a routine, I'm slowly finding my interest in cooking and food returning. I love to bake, always have, and we're making our own treats now and both of us are loving it. We're getting spoiled by how good everything tastes, and we've noticed a couple of interesting side effects of all this cooking real food at home. We hardly ever eat out or order in anymore, and when we do, we find the food often is overpriced, oversalted, and overly heavy. We're also a lot harder to impress.

Nigel's approach to food and cooking has been inspiring to me, as he's taken a totally different tack on it than I'm used to. I'm used to looking at recipes and cookbooks and deciding what I want to make based on ingredients at hand. Nigel? He's been going online a lot and looking for "how do I make this food I want to eat?" recipes. He's tackled stuff I never would have thought to make, and he's had a lot of successes. He also has more patience with his failures than I historically have had.

We're looking forward to sharing the nifty stuff we're cooking and eating now, and if we get someone else drooling and interested in making tasty food, that's great too!