Posts Tagged ‘salty’

Everyone’s feeling the pressure right now. Your to-do list is a mile long before you have to fly home or plan your holiday party or go to a handful of cookie exchanges. Presents need to be wrapped (or bought – eek), dinners need to be planned, and oh my God is Christmas really less than 2 weeks away? In short, you have no time, but the necessity or urge to have baked goods is still staring you in the face.

Well, fear not! These “turtles” are your savior in their speed, ease, and deliciousness.

I almost balk at calling this a “recipe” because it’s really not – you almost don’t cook anything (it could easily be done in the microwave even) yet it still impresses everyone come dessert time.  My mom gets these every year at her cookie exchange, and although I often giggle at their laziness in comparison to the other froufrou cookies they inevitably are the first thing gone from the tin. Because they’re amazing. Salty and sweet and chocolatey and just perfect. It’s like a chocolate-covered pretzel on crack and every bit as addictive as the analogy says.

Festive wrapping.

All laid out.

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And now to go on the complete flipside of the previous no-fuss dessert post, we have these.  Ditching frozen puff pastry and sliced apples for tempered chocolate and homemade salted caramel, let’s just call the previous post a warm up for more ambitious dessert pursuits!

My coworker and friend Dave is a home beer-brewer with his friend Jon and together they make Layger Brewhaus and annually reveal their beers at an October beer-tasting party. Beer-to-food pairing being one of my favorite gastronomic delights, I asked if I could make something to bring and pair with one of the beers. Dave said yes and naturally I drifted towards the beer that sounded the best to me, the hazelnut amber. And since I love pairing chocolate with beer, I thought the idea of a salty-sweet truffle (kind of like playing off pretzels with beer) paired with a warm, rich beer would be awesome.

And it was.

Making these was a trial. The original recipe I tried to use was just terrible so I ended up using Ina Garten’s method for caramel and then combining the Bite-Sized Dessert recipe with another off of Epicurious. I won’t even detail how many times I had to make the caramel before I got it right (6! I wish I was kidding!) but once I got that out of the way, it really was a breeze and just time consuming more than anything.  Thankfully they were totally worth it because the inner texture is rich and thick like any good truffle, and the outer shell has that perfect semi-hard snap before biting in. Combined with the lightly salty caramel and the few topping grains which melt in your mouth as you devour the truffle, they really are a special treat to be savored. And shared!

Salty, briny, tart, sour, pungent… all these adjectives describe my absolute favorite type of cooking: pickling.  Dill pickles being my favorite food of all time, I also appreciate almost any other vegetable pickled for that matter, and yes, that includes red cabbage, green cabbage, carrots, asparagus, green beans… the list goes on and on.  I’m one of those freaks who eats sauerkraut by the can (and happily enjoys the juice as well) and will never have enough kimchi in my life.  Simply put, I love anything that’s cooked in vinegar, and preferably stays there for quite some time.

This recipe isn’t exactly on the same level as say, making your own sauerkraut at home (someday!), but it’s got the same flavor profiles and ideas behind it.  You take a relatively bland vegetable like cabbage, cook it in tons of vinegar and some spices, then devour.  I made this specifically because I was craving kielbasa with cabbage and mashed potatoes and wanted to try and make a ‘healthy’ version.  I used turkey kielbasa (surprisingly delicious, I was so dubious), mashed cauliflower, and this lovely pickled red cabbage. The whole plate came out at under 450 calories (no joke!) and the flavor profiles are all there – sans the guilt!

Be careful what you wish for or you just might get it.

Right before I made this dish I was musing on how out of all the recipes I’ve tried specifically for this site, only one has been labeled a complete and total failure (oh feta dill pie, you were terrible and let’s not speak of you again).  This recipe doesn’t quite make it to ‘failure’ status, but it certainly won’t be receiving the ‘favorite’ tag either.  Since my sister and I have The Shining, we made this within 3 days of each other and both did our spins on it, with mediocre results.  She used capers instead of olives, I used pecorino romano instead of feta and a different pasta shape, yet both results were lackluster.

The idea behind this dish is great.  Like pasta puttanesca, you make a room temperature tomato  sauce (using the best heirloom tomatoes in this case) with some olives, toss hot pasta with it, add some cheese, and dig in.  Since I’ve been battling a horrible head cold and didn’t feel like spending my energy standing in the kitchen for hours, the idea really appealed to me.

The flavor isn’t bad per se, it’s just very subtle and nothing extraordinary.  Something I did notice however while snacking on the cold leftovers late last night was that the flavor intensified and the entire dish was more enjoyable cold, after sitting for a day.  Honestly, if I were to make this again, I would make it, chill it, and serve it the next day as a cold pasta salad.  But hot for an entree?  Probably not again anytime soon.

People often ask me what inspired me to cook — when it happened, why it happened, etc.  I have a myriad of memories that led to me becoming the cook I am today, from being inspired by my sister when she was a pastry chef to becoming obsessed with Food Network when I was 17. The earliest memory of the bunch being an odd obsession with this gorgeous illustrated copy of “The Junior Fannie Farmer Cookbook” in my elementary school’s library when I was 8 or so.  It was only recently I remembered it and brought it up to my mother, who remarked nostalgically “I thought it was so bizarre at the time.”  Thanks, Mom!

But currently it’s my maternal grandmother Esther’s recipes that inspire me the most right now.  I never got to meet her, sadly, but in a way, I feel like I got the ‘cooking gene’ from her.  Although she mostly cooked at home, the rare exception would be Fish Fry Fridays at the bar my grandparents owned many moons ago called “Stick’s Tap” in downtown Milwaukee.  The only recipe we have from Stick’s is her coleslaw (also a winner), but my mother keeps all her other recipes in this ancient little wooden box under our microwave at home, and they’re always incredibly simple, cheap, and tasty.  Few are very summer-friendly (mostly awesome heavy meat action, thick sauces, etc.) but this (like the coleslaw) is one of the exceptions.

I like to think of this dish as ‘pickles unpickled.’  It’s like eating the pickling jar contents before you boil, seal and let sit for a few weeks.  Don’t approach this dish if you’re afraid of vinegar, that’s all I can say.  It’s got a handful of ingredients often seen in dill pickles, comes together in about 15 minutes, and can be eaten straight away, or chilled for a bit if you prefer it a little more refreshing. This is a popular side dish in any Slavic cuisine (for my family this means Polish but I saw something similar to this dish everywhere when I lived in Russia).  It’s sweet, sour, cold, and a fantastic side dish for any grilling or BBQ.