Posts Tagged ‘salty’
crack bark
Pretzels and chocolate and brown sugar caramel and sea salt and are you drooling yet? Here’s an awesome treat you can whip up in minutes and is just as addictive as the name dictates. Perfect for a snow day treat or something wonderful to crumble on top of vanilla ice cream.
french onion soup
For Christmas eve we always try to take things a little easy in my family. Simple dinner, simple fun. Hopefully no tantrums (from the adults, not the kids) and just sitting around enjoying each others presence. Dinner is also a more simple affair, in preparation for the feast that will ensue the next day.
French onion soup is one of those deceptive dishes. It sounds so simple and light – just onions and broth, right? Ohhhh nooo it has to be smothered in bread and cheese and toasted to bubbly, ooey-gooey awesome richness. Served with a nice salad and crusty bread, this is the perfect meal to get you ready for a Christmas day feast.
tomatillo enchilada casserole
Tomatillos are one of those fascinating and underused ingredients in your everyday kitchen. I can understand why. They have an odd papery husk, they’re sticky as all get out, and are almost inedibly sour when served raw (confession: for many years I believed that raw tomatillos were poisonous – don’t ask me where or how I gleaned this “knowledge”.) They’re just, well, weird. But also incredibly delicious, tart, and a staple in Mexican cuisine.
I baked these up on a Sunday afternoon and have been eating them off and on all week. Like any good casserole it reheats beautifully (even with the sour cream on top) and the whole thing comes together pretty easily. The flavor is tangy and refreshing, but still hearty with the chicken and tortillas melting together in one awesome layer. It’s a light casserole, perfect for an 80 degree fall day.
cowboy cookies
Sometimes you just have to bake cookies at 11pm on a Saturday night. And sometimes they just have to be chocolate-oat-pretzel cookies.
I got the Baked Explorations book for Christmas and this is the first thing I made out of it. I love the writing style of the Baked duo and their absolutely meticulous borderline OCD/Rose Levy Beranbaum way of explaining how to bake something as simple as cookies. Use cool (but not cold) butter, use a scoop this exact size, press down on the cookies but don’t smush them, etc. As much as I love to cook on the fly, sometimes it’s more relaxing to just follow instructions to the T. And this T stands for Totally awesome cookies.
Everyone knows I’m a sucker for salty sweets and so the pretzels are of course a fabulous element I love in these. Still, I wish they were even more salty. So in the ingredients listed below I’ve added a bit more salt and say you should use bittersweet chocolate. I think the cookies would just really benefit from it. They would go from totally awesome to super totally awesome. If there is such a thing.
salted caramels
Few things excite me more than my friends getting enthusiastic about cooking, so when my friend Sara mentioned she tried (and succeded!) making caramel for the first time recently, I definitely got candy making on the brain.
Naturally that led me to something salty-sweet and although salted caramels are featured in the latest Saveur, I’ve had this recipe bookmarked in Christie Matheson’s Salty Sweets for ages. I’ve loved every single thing I’ve made from her book so far and this is just another treat on the list of winners. I added a bit of salt at the end (sprinkled on top for visuals more than anything) but it turned out to be the best decision ever since the caramel itself is just barely salty. Those few extra grains on top make all the difference.
Making caramel can be pretty intimidating since it’s a temperature-sensitive thing, but my best piece of advice to beginners is this: go to your local kitchen store and drop $10 on a candy thermometer. It’s such a small investment for perfect peace of mind when you approach projects like this. You don’t have to guess if the color is right – the temperature will tell you if it’s time to move on to the next step. Plus you can use it for deep fat frying which I’m always going to encourage.
