I’m attempting to broaden my taste for sweets and desire to make sweet treats. To do that, I’ll need a few good recipes. Lately I’ve gone through a few bad cookie recipes and began to feel rather unenthusiastic about making them at all. Luckily I stumbled upon this Meyer Lemon and Pistachio Shortbread from Cannelle et Vanille while searching for inspiration to use our Germack Pistachios. I have to say it was a pleasure to find this beautiful blog, the photography is absolutely gorgeous, she makes every entry feel like a dream – check it out! On top of it being so beautiful, it offered the perfect pistachio and cookie inspiration I was looking for, I had to make them at once!

This would be the first shortbread cookie I have ever baked. Certainly won’t be the last – they were delicious. Not too sweet with the perfect amount of lemon… and of course they’re loaded with butter too ;) The texture is nice and crumbly as you would expect from a shortbread cookie and they kept fresh all week. I doubled the recipe for extra enjoyment.

This recipe is adapted from:
Cannelle et Vanille

Ingredients
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
zest of 2 large lemons
about 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup pistachios, finely chopped
2 cups all-purpose flour

Prepare the ingredients. Be sure to soften the butter ahead of time. I used Germack Pistachios with the shell, so obviously I had to remove them before chopping. This probably took more time than the rest of the process. Once shelled, I ground them up with my Magic Bullet, it was a coarse mix with varying bits of pistachio. You could use a food processor or a knife to chop them as well. Zest and juice your lemons – the original recipe calls for Meyer’s lemons – I just used the only option of lemon from my local grocer and it worked; I admit I don’t know much about lemons! I’ll have to keep my eye out for Meyer’s lemons and see If I can notice a difference next time.

I used a stand mixer for this but you could easily do it by hand as well. First cream together the butter and powdered sugar. Pour in lemon juice & zest and mix until incorporated. Add flour and salt, mix, and finally include the chopped pistachios. Mix until all ingredients are well combined.

Roll the dough into 2 logs about 2 inches in diameter or so. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours. I wrapped mine in plastic wrap – I planned on chilling them all day before baking and I didn’t want them to dry out. Clearly my logs were not perfectly round, and once they sat on a plate for a while they became even less round. This didn’t seem to affect the taste what so ever.

Preheat oven to 350°. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Cut logs into ¼-½ inch thick disks and bake for 10-12 minutes until lightly golden.

As I took them out of the oven I was eager to taste, I grabbed one with in the first minute and it crumbled to pieces. My heart broke for a minute as I felt I might have failed with these cookies.  I allowed the rest to cool for a bit longer and they ended up setting perfectly. No failures here, they held together nicely and crumbled just as a shortbread cookie should.

A quick entry with a recipe for fancy butter…

1 stick of salted butter at room temperature
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary chopped
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 teaspoon honey
2 cloves of roasted garlic
1/8 heaping teaspoon hot pepper powder

Combine ingredients into a small storage container and enjoy all week while you use it to make all your breads and crackers taste more exciting ;)

I love crackers but have not made them myself until recently. I noticed that we haven’t purchased many, if any, crackers in the past year and when I came across JoyTheBaker’s post called Sea Salt and Poppy Seed Crackers, I knew what I had to do. So, I made crackers and they were delicious. In fact they were so nice that I have made four batches in the past 2 weeks and I’m already thinking about making another! This marks the start of my cracker hunt — must find more recipes.
Cracker recipes, where are you?

This recipe is surprisingly simple to make, it requires very few ingredients and about 10 minutes of your active time with 30 minutes or so to bake. It also lends itself to be modified with other spices and flavors. I’ve only just begun to experiment with these.

The recipe below was found on JoyTheBaker.Com
Joy found it in The Complete Book of Cookies

Sea Salt and Poppy Seed Crackers

makes 20 crackers
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4  teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 Tablespoon butter, cold and cut into 6 small chunks
1 Tablespoon poppy seeds
6 Tablespoons half and half
sea salt & additional half and half for the topping (I used kosher salt instead)

Preheat the oven to 300° F. Sift together the flour, salt and sugar.  Add the butter and, using your fingers, rub the butter into the flour until it is in tiny bits and dispersed throughout the flour mixture.

Stir in the poppy seeds.

Add the half and half and mix to make a stiff dough.  Place on a lightly floured surface and roll out to about 8×10-inches.  Cut into 20 squares.

Place the dough squares on an ungreased baking sheet lined with parchment or foil.  Brush sparingly with half and half and sprinkle with sea salt.

Bake for 30 minutes or until crisp but still pale.  Transfer to a wire rack to cool and store in an airtight container.

So far the original recipe stands to be the best (of course) but I have started experimenting with adding other flavors which promise to make a nice cracker as well. I will post about them in the future. The additional ingredients in question are crushed red pepper, cumin, and sesame seeds… stay tuned for more cracker fun and dip ideas!

Over the holidays we were gifted some pretty amazing things. There are two new special tools I am specifically referring to right now, a KitchenAid! and a Calphalon Dutch Oven!!! Oh my! Could it get any better?! The year has already started off much much better than last, I couldn’t be happier. Both Joe and I are employed with jobs we like and we’re in good health (crowd cheers) plus, we’re set up to bake anything and everything we want. I’m ready to make 2010 a great year full of fresh bread & happiness. Cheers to all and thanks for taking a moment to look at my little site, a project that I desire to keep growing into something beautiful.  And thank You (M&D and B&R) for gifting tools that will help us grow (up & out;) as well.

Of course we had to break into our new toys immediately to take them for a spin. First stop — rosemary bread. We combed the internet for the recipe we would bake first. We landed on a recipe from ThePioneerWoman.com.

This recipe was adapted from
ThePioneerWoman.com

Rosemary Bread

20 oz. of bread flour (all purpose is okay, too) – about 4 cups.
8 oz. of water (or 1 cup).
4 oz. melted butter with chopped herbs of choice (we used rosemary).
2 teaspoons salt.
1 teaspoon active or instant yeast (if active, it would be best to sprinkle yeast over the water to let it start to work before mixing it in).

In your KitchenAid stand mixer (with dough hook) sprinkle yeast over the water before mixing in the rest of the ingredients.  Mix together on low speed for about 10 minutes or so until you can achieve a windowpane with the dough- this is something I never knew about until I followed their instructions. Achieving a windowpane is when you can pull off a small chunk of the dough you’re kneading and stretch it gently to see if it is somewhat translucent. If you can do this without it tearing, it’s ready.

Once this elasticity has been achieved, allow the dough sit out with plastic wrap over it for 1-4 hours to double in size. After it’s gotten bigger, it should be kneaded for a minute or two so that the yeast can redistribute – Once we kneaded the bread, the dough seemed to return to its original size and become more dense.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Cut a large ‘X’ into the surface of the bread dough so it can bloom!

Bake inside a covered cast iron pan after coating the rounded dough with olive oil and sprinkling with kosher salt. Bake for 30 minutes with the lid on, then remove lid to finish it off for another 15 to 30 minutes.

The bread can get brown on the bottom if it’s too close to the heating element; if that happens, just slice it off with a sharp knife.

We baked ours for the 30 minutes covered and an additional 20 without the lid- next time we’ll do the additional 30 minutes because our dough was a little too moist although it was still very delicious.  Our outer crust was beautifully perfect, this was an excellent first experience with both our KitchenAid and cooking with the dutch oven. We can’t stop thinking about mixing up our next batch of bread!

It’s exciting to think about how much easier the bread making process will be, the possibilities just opened up. Looking forward to finding more recipes to try.

A bread that takes less than 3 hours to make from scratch! Yay! It’s not always easy to find a bread recipe that you can rise within 2 hours and cook in about a half an hour.  I found this peasant bread recipe about a month ago on RealMomKitchen.com and have already baked it 5 times! It requires very few ingredients and very little effort. It’s a perfect bread to eat with soups or simply dip into oil, awesome right out of the oven and will last a few days as well.

Ingredients : flour, sugar, salt, water, yeast, butter, cornmeal

The peasant bread recipe below was found on
RealMomKitchen.com

1 package dry yeast
2 cups warm water
1 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
4 cups flour
cornmeal
melted butter

Place yeast, water, sugar, and salt in bowl and stir until dissolved. Add flour and stir until well blended. Do not knead. Cover and let rise until double in size (about 1 hour). Remove dough from bowl and place in 2 rounds on a greased cookie sheet sprinkled with cornmeal. Let rise an additional hour. Brush top on dough with melted butter and bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 375 degrees and cook for an additional 15 minutes. Serve warm.

– I found this dough to be extremely wet (which means easy to stir by hand!). The first time I used this recipe I followed the exact instructions and got a moist yet delicious bread with a crispy crust.  However, because it was so wet, It was very tricky and sticky to get the dough from the bowl to the pan.  The next few times I made it I used 4 generously heaping cups of flour instead and got nice results as well; it was still very wet and not too much easier to handle the dough. Although I think it helped the texture a bit and I will continue with the heaping measurement.

When you are transferring the dough on to the pan you will basically just be plopping two dough blobs down. Because the dough is so wet it may end up merging back to one — no big deal.  Don’t skimp on the butter brushed on top; I think this is one of the best parts, it will add to your crispy golden crust and overall deliciousness. Cooking time will vary slightly depending on your oven. After a few times I found that cooking it (in my oven) a few extra minutes until golden brown is how we like it.

Aside from this bread being easy to make and virtually impossible to screw up, it is also very inexpensive. Nothing beats freshly baked bread!

Average Cost :
flour- $0.56
butter- $0.10
sugar- $0.01
salt- $0.01
yeast- $0.80
Cornmeal- $0.02
water- priceless

Total Cost is about $1.50!

Hoping to find more and more easy bread recipes!
Let me know if you have one for me to try…

Radishes are not something I often buy, not because I dislike them rather I’m not always sure what to do with them. Sure you could always dip them in something or just eat them, what else do people use them for? On a quick search I found a popular use was as simple as sliced radishes on bread with butter and a dash of salt. Hmmmm, ok I can do that! So, I tried it out and this is how it went…

Ingredients : sliced radishes, bread, butter, salt, and radish sprouts.

The day before we had this snack we made the bread, it was a french bread recipe found on The Thrifty Gourmet.  I’m not going to elaborate on our experience making this bread yet, I think we need another try for ultimate success — it didn’t rise properly for us this time.  But, for a first attempt at french bread, it turned out pretty good and was great for this snack. Check out their site for instructions and a great how to video demonstration if you want to give it a try.  I think most fresh breads would be great for this treat.

To make this snack, simply start off by preparing your ingredients. Slice your radishes and bread, pick your radish sprouts.  If you haven’t tried radish sprouts before keep an eye out for them; they’re quite tasty.  They would be great on sandwiches or in salads for an extra kick.

Toast and butter your bread.
Lay radish slices and sprinkle salt.
Top with radish sprouts and snack!

I also made radish chips! Still on a search for other ways to use them… any ideas?

Fall is slowly moving in on us and with it comes the urge to bake more bread! Joe and I love making bread. We don’t have much experience or a stand mixer, but we love to try out new bread recipes. While searching for ideas on how to use our fresh sage from the garden I stumbled across this Cheddar Sage Bread recipe.  Cheese, bread, & herbs… Yep- sounds good to me!

We have been growing sage all summer and haven’t done anything special with it (until now). I love the flavor of sage but just don’t know much about using it. I was excited to find this recipe because I have never tasted a sage bread before but it sounded delicious to me. We changed a few small things in the recipe and it turned out great! It wasn’t too much work and the rising time was only a couple of hours.  Sometimes when we make bread it feels like the rising time takes twice as long as it says it should. With this recipe I felt like everything went according to plan.

Cheddar Sage Bread
This recipe was found on thathomesite.com
(we slightly modified it in order to use ingredients on hand)

½ teaspoon dry mustard or 1½ teaspoons yellow mustard
3 tablespoons fresh sage, minced
3-3½ cups flour (we used bread flour, but all purpose will work just fine)
1½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon coarse black pepper
1 cup milk
3 oz shredded sharp cheddar or 3oz of other cheese
1 package active dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon oil
1 egg
2 tablespoons butter

Dissolve mustard in 1 teaspoon warm water – we didn’t have any dry mustard so we substituted it with 3 times as much yellow mustard (this recipe calls for ½ teaspoon dry mustard, we used 1½ teaspoons of yellow mustard instead).

Combine 3 cups flour with salt, pepper, and sage. Warm the milk.

In a large mixing bowl combine the milk, yeast, sugar, and oil. Stir or process to combine. Add the egg and mix well. Add mustard and flour mixtures, adding more flour as necessary so mixture forms a stiff dough and comes together in a ball.

Incorporate cheese into the dough — This recipe called for 3oz shredded sharp cheddar cheese; we used what we had on hand instead- which turned out to be about 4oz of a Gruyere & Colby cheese mix.

Turn dough out onto floured work surface and knead until smooth and elastic, add more flour as necessary, about 10 minutes.

Put dough in a lightly buttered bowl and turn to coat top. Cover and let rise until doubled, about an hour. Punch down, shape in a loaf, put in buttered loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, another hour.

Heat oven to 375°. Melt butter. Brush loaf with melted butter and bake until loaf is golden brown, about 50 minutes  — 50 minutes was just right for us. The bread seemed to turn a golden brown rather quickly and looked like it could be done after about 25 minutes, but we waited until it baked for the suggested amount of time and it turned out perfect. Cool on a rack before cutting into it.

While it was baking the whole house smelled amazing! It tasted just as nice!  We used it all week to eat as a simple toast and for a few breakfast sandwiches as well.

Last week Joe and I went on a little vacation to Minnesota with some friends (Todd, Gage, Robert, & Joshua), Todd and Joshua are brothers who have a family house set on beautiful Lake Ossawinnamakee, where the water is clear! We spent most of our time on the pontoon boat floating around playing games and enjoying treats; when we were off the boat you would most likely find us cooking around the fire or up in the cabin kitchen.  All of us happen to really enjoy cooking, so there was no shortage of good ideas for tasty meals.

One of my favorite parts of the whole trip was cooking with the “camp cooker” over the fire.  The camp cooker is essentially and iron sandwich press that is suitable for cooking in a camp fire.  Before going up there, Todd mentioned that we would be using this device to cook little apple pies, one of his favorite ways to use it- and that we did! It was our first item cooked on the fire.  In the cabin we cooked up some spiced apples and pears and with bread & butter headed down to the fire to crisp up our pies. Sadly there are no photos of these delicious apple pockets. Luckily this cooking method was so much fun that we used it a few more times in varying ways.

A couple mornings later it was time for our next Camp Cooker treat- breakfast style.  To make our breakfast sandwich we used a dozen eggs, 2 Field Roast grain meat sausage links (Mexican chipotle flavor), mushrooms, red and green peppers in between a mix of wheat and white bread for each sandwich (because that’s what we had). I have to say it was definitely one of the most satisfying breakfast sandwiches I have ever had- and there’s a lot to compare to! Here is how we did it:

Here in Chicago there’s no problem finding fake meat products.  There’s a good chance the corner store carries tofu dogs or something related.  But in central Minnesota where the population of all near towns just barely top 200… even the large grocers don’t have many options in the way of imitation meat. They all seem to carry Morning Star but it was quite challenging to find tofu dogs or anything that we might be able to put on a stick to roast just like the carnivores do. The reason I mention any of this is because if we had not been on such a quest to find Smart Dogs, we would have never come across this fake sausage which we used in our Camp Cooker breakfast sandwiches.  Just as we were about to head back to the cabin, after a long drive and several stops in search of meatless dogs, we spotted a store called Crow Wing Food Co-Op.  It was a great little shop full of all things natural and organic, we found more than enough options here. Definitely somewhere I’d go more often if it wasn’t a ten hour drive away!

Preparing the filling was easy and straight forward.  We first chopped up our peppers and mushrooms, then unwrapped the soy sausage links from their plastic casing and crumbled them into a cast iron skillet. Fry until peppers are cooked they way you like it and the soy pieces are warm enough. Scramble the eggs. Keep covered and head towards the fire with the filling, butter, and bread.

Heat your camp cooker up, this will help clean it and will warm it up so the butter will melt and evenly coat the two sides. Once you remove it from the heat allow it just a moment to cool so your butter doesn’t immediately burn. It’ll still be very hot so use caution as you add the butter.  Place it on an appropriate surface (not plastic or dirt) and put one slice of bread on each side. Get ready to fill!

It doesn’t really matter the order of which you add your filling, but we decided to put the sausage pepper mixture on first and then we added our eggs. The second time we made these we combined all of the ingredients into one mixture.

To complete the filling we topped it with some sliced Swiss cheese and closed up the camp cooker.  It’s now ready to cook!

The cooking time will vary depending on how hot your fire is and how close you hold it to the heat.  We found the best results by holding it just above the coals turning it from side to side often in order to avoid burning the bread. The faster you cook it the better your chances are of having a burnt sandwich. Take an extra moment to hold it over the heat, with constant flipping you’ll end up with a nice golden crispy sandwich with a steamy filling. You can check the progress as it’s cooking by carefully peeking at it.

With a small amount of preparation we were able to make several breakfast sandwiches that were most excellent. It was amazing to be able to cook them in the sun on a fire within feet from such a clear lake. It’s not often that we allow ourselves time like this- something so simple and so necessary really reminds me how important it is to take a break from the usual!