Selfish Mom

Food And Friends

Apr 3, 2013 Cooking & Baking

Today I had the huge privilege of going to my favorite kind of work event. It wasn’t about a brand, although two great brands – KitchenAid and Glad – were both sponsors. No, today was more personal: a chance to get together with friends to celebrate one of our own, a blogger and all-around wonderful person who is seeing one of her dreams come true with the publication of her cookbook, Homemade With Love.

My friend Jennifer Perillo has had lows and highs in the past year and a half that I can only imagine. Her cookbook isn’t just about food, it’s also about love and family. Her husband Mikey was her cooking muse, and she lost him in August 2011. Her love for him – and of cooking for him and their daughters – infuses the pages of the book and seeps into the recipes.

The day my book arrived from Amazon I took it to bed with me, thinking I would just read the intro and flip through it. I stayed up for hours reading the entire thing. I lost count of how many times I teared up.

And today, I got to eat a lot of that food. It’s not the first time I’ve eaten Jennifer’s food, but this time was different because every time I tasted something and ooh-ed and aah-ed, I knew I had the recipe waiting for me at home.

Jennifer spent the first part of the event madly cranking out dishes from her tiny kitchen, and when she insisted that we all start eating I wasn’t shy. I started with some creamy homemade ricotta, chickpea salad, homemade cheese crackers, and of course a cupcake.

Then I moved on to the pastas: one with pesto, one with a delicious red sauce and lentil-ricotta meat(less)balls. Everything was wonderful and backed up the book’s premise: good food is not complicated. Start with simple, healthy ingredients, add Jennifer’s techniques and instructions, and the results will be amazing.

The kids and I just got home last night from Spring Break in Buffalo visiting my mom, and now I’m on a plane headed to California for a few days for a work event. By the time I get home I’ll have gone nine days without cooking or baking anything, and will probably be in withdrawal. I already know what I’m going to make first, and I copied the recipes from Jennie’s book last night so that I could put in a grocery order while I was away and have the ingredients ready to go when I get home. I can’t wait. I’ll make sure to report back.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Food, Homemade With Love

Granola For Non-Health Nuts

Jan 23, 2013 Cooking & Baking

I love granola. I could eat it all day. I have eaten it all day, every time I make it. I like it plain, I like it mixed into vanilla yogurt, I like it with milk, I like it sprinkled on peanut butter and banana.

But what I don’t like are most granola recipes. For one thing, I’m not crazy about honey, and they all seem to use honey. For another, I don’t like dried fruit, and a lot of recipes use that as well. Basically, I like a sweet, crunchy granola that’s mostly oats and coconut with some nuts. So over the years I’ve developed my own recipe. It’s not healthy. It’s a calorie bomb. But it’s so worth it.

A few key things: 1) You have to use rolled oats. These are the old-fashioned, not quick-cooking kind of oats. 2) You have to resist the urge to overcook the granola. It will not be totally crunchy when you take it out of the oven, but it will get completely crunchy as it cools. 3) If you substitute honey, reduce the oil, add dried fruit, or do anything else to make this recipe healthier, I don’t want to hear about it. :-)

Ingredients:

• 3 cups rolled oats
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped raw almonds
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar (packed)
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt
• 6 tablespoons maple syrup
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 300 degrees and line a couple of rimmed cookie sheets with parchment paper (I use these reusable sheets – they can be cut to the size of your pans!)
• Put all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix well, making sure to break up any lumps of sugar
• Heat the maple syrup, vegetable oil, and vanilla in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thin (only takes a couple of minutes)
• Add syrup mixture to oat mixture and mix well until all of the oat mixture is moist
• Spread mixture onto the cookie sheets and put in oven
• After fifteen minutes, carefully stir granola and switch the pans to the opposite oven racks, so that the one that was on the top is on the bottom and vice versa
• Bake for another fifteen minutes, for a total of thirty minutes. Granola should be starting to brown.
• Remove granola from oven and put cookie sheets on cooling racks, stirring every ten minutes or so while the granola cools
• Once the granola is completely cool, store in an airtight container; keeps for about a week

Tags: Food, Recipes

When baking videos go bad

May 18, 2012 Cooking & Baking

I was trying to make a video about how to cut my awesome brownies…

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: baking, fail

Christmas cookie Tree centerpiece

Dec 25, 2011 Cooking & Baking

A couple weeks ago I saw this video of Gail Dosik, of One Tough Cookie, making a Christmas tree out of cookies. I was totally inspired.

I immediately started searching Amazon for graduated cookie cutters and found a set of star-shaped ones from Wilton. I never make a holiday centerpiece. If we have one, it’s because Fiona took it upon herself to make one. So I decided that this year, our centerpiece would be a Christmas cookie tree!

I’m rather glad that I couldn’t find the kind of cutters that Gail used because her tree requires a kind of precision that I just don’t have. Maybe next time. If I take a Valium first.

Last night I made a massive amount of roll-out cookie dough, and this morning made the cookies. At first it seemed like the cookies would take forever, but once I got past the two biggest stars it went a lot faster.

I used Gail’s method for rolling out the dough. Before discovering her secret, I rarely made cut-out cookies because they always looked fairly terrible and tasted even worse, due to all the extra flour I’d have to use to keep them from sticking. But trust me, her method is genius. You’re crazy if you don’t use it.

I’ve never used icing on cookies, so I decided to give it a try. I wanted to outline the cookies in frosting then pour the icing on very thin and let it spread, but I just couldn’t get it thin enough. The recipe I was using said to just keep adding light corn syrup until it was the right consistency but I started getting afraid that it would taste funny. So I spread the frosting to the edges as best I could.

Assembly was really easy, since it didn’t have to be exact. I just had to check every few cookies and make sure the tree wasn’t lopsided.

You can see that some of the frosting near the top gushed out and dripped down. I decided that those looked like icicles and weren’t a mistake. :-)

I sprinkled the whole thing with silver-colored sugar, although I think it would have looked better if I’d done that before stacking the cookies.

I’m quite proud of myself, but this design left a lot of room for error. I’d like to try another one that’s not so haphazard. I think it may be time for some private lessons with Gail. :-)

I made way too much dough, so I let Fiona make some cookies (I think The Ass ate about half of them).

When she got tired of it I made some to share with the choir at Christmas Eve service.

And I still have about a third of the dough left. I might try making some smaller trees with it tomorrow – just the top five or six layers. Maybe I’ll make a whole cookie forest! And populate it with little gingerbread men! And the men will need a house…

I think this is the most relaxing Christmas Eve I’ve ever had. The presents were all wrapped days ago, and I did nothing today but bake.

I hope you all have a nice Christmas, filled with cookies and gifts and family. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, well, at least your kids will let you sleep in tomorrow.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: baking, Christmas, cookies, Food

A butternut squash recipe too good not to post about immediately!

Dec 10, 2011 Cooking & Baking

I just finished dinner. I mean, just. And I had to post about this Butternut Squash Gratin recipe I made for the first time.

For the past few years I’ve been having a love affair with butternut squash. In soup (fourth recipe down), with chickpeas and cous cous, or just roasted with a little butter and brown sugar, I could eat butternut squash every day.

When I saw this recipe online a few days ago I honestly couldn’t imagine how butternut squash would taste with onions, garlic and sage – I’d never prepared anything even close to it before. Well, I can tell you, it tastes just great. Better than great. The next time I’m invited anywhere where I’m supposed to bring a dish, this is the one I’m bringing.

The recipe as written is huge, and I figured the kids wouldn’t touch this (they don’t know what they’re missing!) and my husband was going to a friend’s house for dinner (but I’m sure he’ll join me in leftovers tomorrow), so I cut the recipe in half, and that was plenty. I think I’d have to be feeding over a dozen people to even think about making the full recipe.

There are only a couple of things I would change next time. For one thing, this recipe took over 2 hours start to finish. A lot of that time was spent waiting for the onions to caramelize, and then it spends forty minutes in the oven. So it’s not like all of that is active time. But it did seem like I was making it forever, so next time I’ll probably cube the butternut squash and do the onions the night before – I can’t imaging that reheating the caramelized onions the next day would make a bit of difference. Also, I would cut the onions smaller so that they would caramelize better.

Other than that though, it’s perfect as is! Can’t wait to have more for lunch tomorrow. And, well, probably a bit as I’m putting it away later tonight. :-)

Tags: butternut squash, vegetarian

My Cake Pop adventure

Nov 22, 2011 Cooking & Baking

So I’m not sure when I first got it in my mind to make cake pops. It might have been after I brought a couple of really beautiful NY Cake Pops home for the kids from an event (the Hugh Jackman interview – that’s right, eye candy and dessert), and they raved about them. It might have been when I spent an hour searching for the perfect cake decorating book on Amazon and discovered that cake pops were taking over. Or it might have been the moment I decided to do Slim-Fast and my inner demon said “Cake pops. Cake pops!”

Regardless, I decided to do it, and in true “me” fashion I ordered a bunch of supplies before making even one batch. I ordered a big Styrofoam block to let them dry on, a plastic display stand for serving them (to whom, I had no idea) and little bags and gold twist ties to wrap them in.

But then over the weekend, before any of that stuff had arrived, Fiona and I decided to jump in and make some. I had a layer of yellow cake in the freezer that I hadn’t used because it was really lopsided, so I put Fiona to work breaking that into crumbs.

I wanted to have some kind of vanilla/chocolate flavor contrast, but didn’t have any vanilla frosting to mix with the crumbs (and just didn’t feel like making any), and only had dark chocolate melting chocolate, so I just used those. Fiona mixed everything up by hand – literally – and I took out my new Wilton chocolate melter (which is awesome, by the way).

Fiona made the pops many different sizes, and as much as I wanted to correct her I was also curious as to which size would work best (we discovered that if you make them too small, they fall apart when you put the stick in). We put those in the fridge for an hour.

Then we dipped our sucker sticks in the melted chocolate, stuck them halfway into the pops, and put it all back in the fridge for another half hour.

Jake came over to help dip (yeah, he’s the kind of “helper” who shows up for the fun part and then disappears) and they decorated the pops with chocolate chips, colored sugar, and sprinkles.

We let them sit until they were dry to the touch, then we tried them and oh my GOD they were good. I mean, how could they not be? It’s frosting and cake dipped in chocolate. The next step was to make them look good. And I’m sorry to say, I had to do this without Fiona. Don’t get me wrong, the kids’ turned out really cute, but I get annoying with this stuff. If I can’t make it look professional I’ll just buy it from someone who can.

The only additional supply that had arrived was the Styrofoam block. I covered it in packing tape, got out a ruler, and poked sixteen holes on one side and twenty-five holes on the other (for different sized pops). I put some foil over the top to catch drips. Eventually I think I’m going to get a wood block and drill holes, but who knows when I’ll get around to that. If someone could just sell me one that would be fabulous.

I made a 13x9x2” devil’s food cake from a mix and let it cool completely, then I put it in my stand mixer and mixed it up until it was in pieces. Since the cake was nice and moist it didn’t really get to a crumbly stage like the other one had, but it did get to the point where there were no big pieces.

I added canned chocolate frosting a spoonful at a time until the cake was the consistency of soft Play-Doh (I ended up using 3/4 of a cup).

Now, here’s the part where you’ll start to suspect that I’m a little crazy, but I got out my trusty Oxo kitchen scale and weighed out cake balls 30 grams each. Trust me: if you want to make things a uniform size nothing is as easy as weighing them. The key is to have a scale that can weigh in negative numbers, so that you just keep taking the dough out of the bowl until you’ve reached 30 grams. So much better than eyeballing it.

Once balled up, I put the pan in the fridge for half an hour to chill. About half way through that I pre-heated the Wilton chocolate melter and melted some chocolate, stirring frequently. Then I switched it to the “warm” setting and got the pan from the fridge.

I dipped each sucker stick into the chocolate and pushed them about halfway into the cake balls. I’ve checked out a few sites over the past few days for cake ball advice and even though most of them advised putting the balls back in the fridge before dipping, I didn’t. I let them sit for about fifteen minutes to let the sticks set, then got to dipping. (It’s worth noting though that by the time I got to the last ten, I had to put them back in the fridge – they were totally warm and mushy. So depending on how fast you work, you may or may not have to cool them down again.)

It took me a while to get my technique down so that they came out smooth, but here’s what I ended up with after making about a dozen uglier ones: I dip the ball in and immediately (but gently) tap the stick against my finger to get off excess chocolate. This leaves the chocolate a little lopsided, so I twirl the ball slowly while letting the rest of the excess drip towards the stick. Once the chocolate stops moving and starts to set I put the stick into the Styrofoam.

After about half an hour the cake balls were dry, and I drizzled them with white chocolate. Another fifteen minutes and they were stable enough to be laid down again without wrecking the chocolate. Ideally I would have put them into my new plastic stand, but it isn’t here yet!

Some sites have said to refrigerate them at this point, and some said they would “weep” – that the moisture would escape from the insides and things would get ugly. These are going to my son’s classroom tomorrow for their Thanksgiving feast, and since I routinely leave frosted cake or cupcakes out for forty-eight hours, I think these will be fine too.

I can’t wait until the white dipping chocolate I ordered gets here, because that’s when the fun will begin. Even though I’m not a huge fan of white chocolate, coloring it does make the cutest cake pops.

Now that I’ve got my dipping technique down I want to try something more complicated, from a booklet I was sent to review, Cake Pops & Mini Treats. I need a few more supplies though. Yay, more shopping!

While making these look good is certainly harder than making them taste good, this was a great project for Fiona and me to do together, and I can’t wait to make them with her again. And I promise not to critique her technique. :-)

I visited the following sites to learn the basic techniques for making cake pops:

• Bakerella
• Love From the Oven
• The Kitchn
• Instructables

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1 (NY Cake Pops, Cake Pops & Mini Treats booklet). Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.

Tags: Cake Pops, Food, Kids

Finally, a great biscuit recipe that’s also lightening quick!

Oct 14, 2011 Cooking & Baking

I’ve tried about a half dozen biscuit recipes over the years, trying to find a good one. In order to be a good one in my mind the biscuits don’t just have to taste good, they also have to be easy, relatively quick, and use only ingredients I commonly have on hand. Because I’m not making a turkey and stuffing here, these are biscuits. Like, Oh my God we’re out of frozen bagels what will I put the scrambled eggs and American cheese on. I have to be able to whip them up quick.

So I put out a call to twitter and of course my friend Jennifer Perillo came to my rescue. She recommended this recipe by Dorie Greenspan. I just made them and wow. First of all, from the moment I started to the moment I was spreading butter on one and popping it into my mouth, slightly less than 30 minutes had passed. Second, they used very few dishes and measuring spoons and only a little counter space. Third – which I haven’t tried yet – Dorie says you can cut the dough then freeze it before baking, and pop a few into the oven whenever you need them.

Delicious.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.