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Ok, seriously - does anyone actually cook the day after Thanksgiving??? Who isn't sick of the inside of their kitchen by then? And aren't the contents of your refrigerator quick to take away any reason for one to turn on the stove (except to reheat leftovers, of course)?
Well, I'll admit it: I wasn't as kitchen-adverse this Friday as I have been in the past. Nevertheless, I wasn't about to actually cook anything for lunch. The last thing I wanted was a plain turkey sandwich - I was craving something healthy (no surprise there, given the gluttony that took place the day before) and even though my Thanksgiving table is laden with far more veg than most (without having to resort to green bean casserole! Boo-yah!), I didn't want to just nosh on leftovers. I'm all about re-inventing last night's food whenever I get a chance, and when I spied the unused greens in my fridge that didn't quite get turned into a salad with poached pears, candied nuts, gorgonzola, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette, I had my inspiration.
I scooped the spinach into a bowl, tore off chunks of turkey breast, added some leftover roasted butternut squash, topped it off with some juicy pomegranate seeds and toasted pecans, and finished it with a drizzle of shallot-cacao nib vinaigrette that had graced the roasted squash the night before.
Chances are you don't have those exact ingredients on hand the day after Thanksgiving unless you stole my menu, but no worry, there are plenty of ways to make your own. Try using homemade cranberry sauce instead of pomegranate seeds or perhaps some roasted brussels sprouts or cauliflower instead of the squash. The point is that you're only limited by your imagination. Unless you're like me and you've already transformed your turkey leftovers into a steaming pot of delicious soup, chances are you still have plenty of food on hand with which to make your own creation. So go nuts and go fix yourself a salad while you're waiting for me to get to the really good stuff: the Thanksgiving menu, plenty of food porn, and bread that flowed continually from the oven!
Today's post from the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge brings you Artos, a Greek celebration bread. The book includes three versions - the standard bread, a Christmas bread, and an Easter bread. They all use the same basic enriched dough recipe that is flavored with spices, zests, and extracts, but the holiday-specific breads include fruit and nut embellishments that are specific to the season. The Easter bread even features red-dyed eggs atop the loaves.
Even though the rough goal of this group is to do one bread a week, when I realized that I don't have to work today and that I probably have a lot of trips coming up that will preclude any bread baking at all, I decided to go ahead and press on to bread #2, even though I just baked anadama bread yesterday. The loaf offers you the choice to either use a sourdough starter or a poolish. I do indeed have a cute little seed culture named Zeke that will one day be a starter (stay tuned for that!) and if I had waited to bake until this weekend he could have been used, but since I was feeling antsy I had to go the poolish route. Poolishes are really simple - the hardest part was scaling the 23-ounce formula down to 7 ounces. This is one of the things that I really like about using starters - they offer such a huge flavor payout for what is essentially zero extra work. All they require is a bit of planning ahead and then you let the enzymes and the yeast do all the hard work making your bread delicious!
So an hour before mixing the dough, I pulled the poolish that I made last night out of the fridge and mis en placed (no, it's not a verb, but I like to wordsmith) everything and began. I've been baking so much these last couple of days that I actually ran out of bread flour, so I threw in a couple of teaspoons of wheat gluten and rounded out the flour's weight requirement with all-purpose. Disaster averted. But, alas, here's when things began to get... sticky.
I am normally a pretty tolerant and patient baker, but as I was kneading this dough (or, more accurately, smearing it across the countertop) I kept thinking that a more accurate name would be Greek Frustration Bread. One of the reasons I start out my knead in a machine is so that I don't end up adding too much flour to try to make up for the stickiness of a freshly-mixed dough, but as I watched the dough resolutely refuse to form into a ball and instead just creep up the hook every ten seconds, it became clear that I was going to need to add more. So I added a little, then a little more, and then before long I was adding amounts of flour that I've never had to add to a dough before. The stand mixer was doing such a miserable job of kneading that I honestly thought the dough would be ready faster if I threw the hook across the room, so I took it out and started kneading by hand with a lot of flour, my bench scraper, and a temper that was barely kept in check. I was pretty furious with myself for skipping the autolyse, but it's pretty clear to me now that even if I had waited 20 minutes after mixing to start kneading, I still would have had to battle sticky, sticky dough.
After kneading for about ten minutes (and adding even more flour), the dough still stuck to my hand when I picked it up and inverted my hand - no gripping involved! This was just the sticky mass of goo resisting the force of gravity - that's how sticky it was!. Oh, Internet, I tried to get pictures of that for you, but it didn't work out this time. Before you complain, next time you're up to your elbows I'd like to see you get this shot without assistance! But I digress.
After adding my entire supply of sprinkling flour (I keep one of those parmesan/crushed red pepper shakers you see in restaurants filled with bread flour for sprinkling the stuff on the counter - makes it so much easier!) the dough finally became merely tacky instead of sticky, meaning that when I pressed my hand on the dough and lifted it off, the dough would very briefly stick but my would hand came away clean. At this point it passed the windowpane test, so an hour and ten minutes after I initially mixed the dough, I declared victory and squirreled away the dough to ferment.
Keeping in mind yesterday's over-ferment, I checked the dough often, but it went the full 90 minutes suggested in the recipe before testing done. The dough was so tacky, however, that it was difficult to test for doneness - if you poked even a wet finger in there, it stuck to your finger when you pulled it out. Now for shaping. The loaf looked huge - and almost every blogger out there commented on its enormous size - so, keeping storage in mind, I decided to divide the dough into two equally-sized boules. The dough shaped beautifully, the top never tearing now matter how tightly I stretched the gluten, and, again, was fully proofed at the end of the recommended time. The dough, covered only in damp kitchen towels, already smelled intoxicating, so I couldn't wait to find out what it smelled like as it baked.
Sure enough, before long, a delicious aroma wafted through the house. It reminded me not so much of bread as it did of Danish pastries, which surprised me not at all because of the common flavors within: nutmeg, lemon (zest in the bread, extract in the pastries), and almond extract. Not that I minded: on the contrary, since Danish pastries are one of my all-time favorite foods, both for taste and for sentimentality's sake. Because of this delicious smell, I had a very hard time not cutting into them right away, and was able to wait less than two hours before I had to put some of it in my mouth!
The loaves browned beautifully. I opted not to put a glaze on them, wanting to taste the flavors of the dough alone, and looking back, I'm glad that I didn't make one of the fancier variations. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! The bread is unquestionably delicious, perfect as a dessert or, toasted, as a treat with coffee. It would also be devastating as French toast! I'll definitely be making this bread again. Just, y'know, with more flour next time.
See also: Heather's Artos.
There is something about baking a pastry - a real, from-scratch, layered bit of flaky dough - that makes you feel like a total badass.
Let's face it, pastries have a pretty formidable reputation. They're certainly not in the "if you can boil water you can handle this" category. I've always had a huge soft spot for croissants, but there is another indulgence - the humble Danish pastry - that has a special, sentimental significance to me.
If there was ever a recipe for me to cut my pastry chef teeth on, this one had to be it.
See, this is another recipe that is near and dear to my heart. Like beef burgundy, my family has been eating these delicacies around holidays since I can remember. Perhaps even more significant, my Mom has been eating them ever since she can remember. When she was a kid, her next-door neighbor (the eponymous Mrs. B) would bring them over each Christmas Eve so that their family could chow down on them the next day. Before my parents' wedding my Mom had a kitchen shower where the guests brought treasured recipes to give to her. Mrs. B brought this.
So when, as I mentioned earlier, Cory and I were in the midst of forging our own traditions, these little gems were so in. I made my very first batch sans supervision this last Christmas (my previous foray being the year before when my Mom was visiting for Thanksgiving) and on the morning of Cory and I ate like royalty, feasting on the light, fluffy, and delicate (both in flavor and texture) yumminess.
I will warn that this is not the easiest recipe I've ever posted. In fact, if you lack the proper patience it's probably actually the hardest I've shared thus far. So with that in mind, use a light hand when folding the dough - you don't want to tear it. If it happens, don't hesitate to pinch the dough closed and put the dough in the fridge since it will start oozing butter. So take your time, enjoy being a real-life badass pastry chef, and enjoy the end result even more!
Every year since I can remember, my family has eaten beef burgundy on Christmas Eve. The warm wine and beef flavors, served atop noodles, the meat perfectly tender... this is the food that memories are made of. Which is good, because it means that the substantial effort required to put this meal on the table is worth it. I mean, come on, this is a dish three days in the making - you know it has to be good. This recipe is like the poster child of the slow food movement.
Even though this year was the first that I'd ever enjoyed this meal on Christmas itself (it was our tradition to eat this on the Eve), this is the single dish that I associate the most with warm and cozy family dinners around the holidays. We often spent Christmas with extended family, but Christmas Eve was a smaller affair, and beef burgundy, with its warm and sensuous flavor, was the perfect dish for a more intimate setting.
Now that I'm all grown up, having married and struck out on my own, I find that I'm in a fun situation: I get to make my own traditions with Cory now. Not surprisingly, beef burgundy made the cut. We enjoyed our first Christmas as husband and wife huddled over a bowl (or two), eating the food that will tie the years of our lives together.
Every family deserves a beef burgundy of their own.
With, oh, about four days to spare, I'm finally sitting down to plan my Thanksgiving dinner. This may seem odd because I put way more effort into planning dinner parties, but Thanksgiving? Eh! To me, Thanksgiving is more about delicious but traditional food that is simple by necessity (I don't know about you, but preparing a huge feast with only one oven is a daunting task), whereas when I'm having people over, well, to be honest, I'm generally cooking and plating to impress.
So this year, the first without Adult Supervision, I'll present a menu comprised partially of (eek!) untested recipes, without (gasp!) photos, before the event has actually occurred! Because, really, posting a Thanksgiving menu after the fact has questionable value.
I've decided to include breakfast on this menu because in my family we always overlook it. Me, I think it's important to start the day right and some savory breakfast scones would definitely qualify in that regard. Sometime in between-ish we'll enjoy a simple cheese course. When it comes time for dinner we'll have a turkey version of The Herbed Bird (be on the lookout for an awesome soup made with the leftovers), a bread (undecided between beer rolls, Parmesan whole wheat bread, or a roll version of the delectably light whole wheat buttermilk loaves I made last Sunday), roasted shallots with thyme and butternut squash, roasted pear salad with candied walnuts and blue cheese, mashed potatoes (garlic? Will I use russets, reds, or yukon golds?) and some sort of stuffing or cranberry sauce or relish that Cory will decide upon since I'm not much of a fan of those things. We will finish, of course, with pumpkin pie. The wine will be flowing all day, and it will be a glorious celebration of, well, gluttony.
Enticed? OF COURSE YOU ARE. Let's get cookin'!
Click here for the recipe for "The UNTESTED (gasp!) Thanksgiving menu!" »
This recipe is one that's been near and dear to me for nearly my whole life. My Mom originally clipped it out of a newspaper and it's grown up with me, going through different changes as I changed too.
Originally we made these cookies huge and round with little pumpkin stems and lavished icing and sprinkles upon them like festive, sweet, sticky jack-o-lanterns. Needless to say they never lasted long.
Years later as my brother and I grew out of the whole Halloween thing, these cookies stuck around (of course!) Now that having a good smooth icing canvas was no longer necessary, chocolate chips made their way into the cookies. They marred the formerly glasslike (well, for a cookie) surface but dude, it was chocolate. Yum! My parents would send these cookies to me in my care packages at college, and they brought back memories of childhood the way that only really good comfort foods can do.
Now that I'm all old, non-pumpkin-decorating, and out of college, it's up to me to keep this yummy tradition alive. I've made them every year over the last couple autumns, but this year I discovered my favorite addition: The Squash Quad of Power. As in the Turkey Trifecta, this blend of flavors complements the flavors it's enhancing so perfectly that I wouldn't ever consider excluding them. Unsurprisingly, when you add cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger, and cloves to the cookies, they're, well, uhm, wow.
They just might be the best cookie ever.
