Giftmas Crostata

We hosted a small Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year. One of my friend brought her very own home made cranberry sauce. And quite a lot of it too.

It’s a delicious, spicy, citrus-y cran relish really and my mind immediately went to what else I could do with a surfeit of the stuff.

Well, make a cranberry and pear crostata for Giftmas, of course.

Kate’s Crostata, now in permanent rotation on the baking menu.

Since this is the season of giving, all y’all might have some Giftmas money burning a hole in your pockets, might I ask you to consider making a donation to Scarleteen? They’re halfway to their goal in fundraising, and it really is a damned shame that the best sexuality education site on the whole of the interwebthingynet has to struggle to make ends meet, and is run nearly single-handedly (thank goodness for well-trained volunteers) by a woman who is the most passionately dedicated person I have ever met.

So please, hit that donate button and give a little to an invaluable resource.

Consider yourselves nagged.

Leftover Stuffing

Yesterday I got an email from Saveur magazine about things to do with Thanksgiving leftovers. I had a bunch of leftover stuffing, since The Baker doesn’t eat it, so the recipe for Leftover Stuffing Frittata caught my eye. What a great idea! Something bready topped with eggs and cheese, baked until puffy and melty! I decided to try it.

I am not a strict follower of recipes, especially when I don’t have all the ingredients in the house, so mine wasn’t exactly like the one in the recipe. I put sausage in my stuffing and didn’t feel like dealing with picking and chopping the leftover turkey I have (which I prefer in sandwiches anyway), so I left that out. I used a casserole dish instead of a nonstick skillet, and I only used one kind of cheese (cheddar).

I put the stuffing in the casserole dish and pressed it down, grated cheddar cheese over the top until it was covered, and poured over it four eggs I’d beaten with salt, pepper, and dry mustard.  And then I popped it in the oven at 350 F for about half an hour. When the cheese was all melted and the egg was puffing up over the stuffing, I took it out.

I was hoping the egg would cover the stuffing and cheese, but instead it went right through everything. Apparently this is supposed to happen, and it turned out that it moistened the stuffing more and held it all together, so it worked. It would have been better with a bit more egg though. The recipe calls for eight eggs, but I used a fairly small casserole dish and four eggs. You’re supposed to wait until it cools, but I was hungry and it looked good so I dug in. And it was tasty! It held together better once it was cool, and I have leftovers to eat for breakfast today.

The leftover stuffing usually gets tossed, once the turkey and potatoes run out and there’s nothing to eat it with. So I’m happy to find a way to use it up that’s so easy.

Saveur’s website has 25 ways to use up Thanksgiving leftovers, in case you’re looking for ways to use up something besides stuffing.

More Stale Bread

The day after Thanksgiving in the US is possibly a bit late to be reminding people that stale bread makes great stuffing, but I’m here to do it anyway. My responsibilities for Thanksgiving dinner here were gravy and stuffing. I didn’t buy boxes of stuffing mix this year, I just took all the old ends of loaves in the house over the last couple of weeks and cut them up. I was planning to bake them on low heat to dry them out, but then I remembered that I’d be adding liquid to soften the bread up again and decided to just freeze the cut-up bread instead.

I don’t use an actual recipe for stuffing, I just kind of throw it together. Many years ago I got served apricot sausage stuffing made with chopped-up dried apricots, and it was pretty good but I thought apples would be better than the apricots were. Ever since, I’ve been making apple sausage stuffing.

Serious Chocolate

Bittersweet chocolate, chopped for espresso shortbread.

The melting point with this chocolate is so low… even my cold death-like touch melts it.

When trapped in the house…

… make pie.

Someday, maybe my bathroom will be done. Until then, I’ll be enjoying apple season.

Apples, Again

It’s that time of year, of course, for making wonderful things with apples. One of my favorite baking blogs to read is Confessions of a Tart. Great pictures and inspiring recipes. A few days ago, she posted this apple tartlet recipe which I knew instantly I had to try. I mean, how could I not?

Obviously, I need more practice at this one to get the ratio of apples to ricotta correct. But it was a fun and quick recipe to whip up on a cold, cloudy autumn morning, while contractors were tearing out my bathroom (finally!). I had to slice the apples very thin, as I was using a big old Mutsu. Next time, definitely more apple, even if I have to slice them paper thin like this.

Irene wasn’t kidding when she said her house filled with the scent of baking apples and vanilla. Right now, ours is redolent with the same.

Thanks, Irene, for hosting such a great site! Also, your chocolate cupcakes were a big hit here at the house a few weeks ago.

Apple and Pear Cakes

At the farmers’ market this week, my favorite orchard had some lovely golden russet apples. I’d never seen them before, so I quickly nab a bunch of them for an apple cake. I also have a few pears remaining from Cynthia’s mother’s pear tree which are so ready to go.

The russets have a tough and slightly fuzzy skin, which translates to a powdery taste when eaten with the skin on. They’re a bit tart, a little like a granny smith, but with a sweeter aftertaste.

Sadly, I’ve no one here today to perform the sacred duty of licking the bowl and spatula clean.

And 40 minutes later, they’re out of the oven and resting before they get flipped out of their pans. These are double flip cakes: out of the pan to a plate, then to another plate so they’re right side up again.

Carefully…

You can just put those pear pieces back in, like a puzzle, as it’s going to be the bottom of the cake anyway.

However, sometimes no matter how much you’ve buttered the pan, your cake will stubbornly insist on clinging tightly to it. And then you have to perform some careful reconstructive surgery. Which is what happened with the apple version of today’s cake.

Slightly damaged cake still tastes delicious.

Stale Bread

A while back, The Baker asked her friends how much they’d pay for a fresh loaf of home baked bakery bread to be delivered to them. One of the answers was “I wouldn’t, it goes stale too quickly.” The current standard loaf in our household takes a lot longer than a day or two to go stale, but we still end up with a lot of ends of loaves going stale and this got me thinking about what you can do with stale bread.

The obvious answer is toast. I love toast, and it’s perfect for using up old bread. Once you toast it, it gets all crispy on the outside and the insides get soft again from the heat of the toaster. And then you melt some butter on it, with maybe some cheese or jam or a fried egg, and it’s great. But what else?

I had a saying…

when I was an English teacher. One of my monitors said after a class, “You’re really quite strict with the children, aren’t you?”

“Yep. As far as these kids are concerned, I’m Kaiser effin’ Wilhelm, and they love me for it.” As if to prove my words, at that moment, the next wave of kids came tumbling in the door, and even the kids who weren’t my students ran to me, squealing, “Teacher! Teacher Sam! Hello Teacher!”

Every time I make Kaiser rolls, I think of that.

Now if only I could get the rolls to OBEY and LOVE me as well as my former students did.

P.S. Confidential to the person searching for “pie crust recipes using butter”: you don’t want to go with just butter. You can for a quiche, but really shouldn’t for a tart or pie, since it’ll be too soft and soggy, you do need the extra bit of shortening to make a strong, flaky crust. However, if you insist, this one should do.

Crust III: Crostata

Blueberry peach crostata, infused with vanilla, using the other half of the tart crust we made the other day.