With my cousin Gary visiting over the holidays, I was serving menus that contain no flour or wheat-derived items. There are different kinds of wheat intolerance. Some (maybe most) are celiac, which means gluten intolerant. My cuz is just wheat intolerant, which is less-encompassing in some respects since he can eat rye and barley.

I knew back some months ago I’d read a cornbread recipe over at Tummy Treasure that intrigued me. I assumed I could adapt it to GF (gluten-free) because it contained little flour. Sure ‘nuf, I did. Gary brought a package of Bob’s Red Mill all-purpose GF baking flour which I used in this recipe for the 3/4 cup of mixed flours Erika used.

These muffins are very easy. A tad different than some (with the addition of pumpkin, which I couldn’t distinguish in the muffin at all, really). And they certainly qualified as GF since I used flour substitute. My cuz was pleased because he could even HAVE some kind of bread stuff. Erika says these don’t keep well, so I froze the leftovers as soon as they cooled. They were a bit on the firm side – as cornbread is if it doesn’t contain a lot more flour. In other words, this is not a “tender” kind of muffin, but mostly a cornbread one.

If you’ve ever known some celiac-types, the “bread” they must eat is fairly dreadful in my estimation. But Gary is grateful that there are companies who make something he can eat that looks like bread and sort of tastes like bread. As Gary stands over my shoulder, he mentions that he would “kill” for a real chocolate croissant. When he’s traveled with us in Europe, he/we were amazed to find GF more available than in the U.S. (because the condition is more common in the Mediterranean and Northern Med area – approx. 1% of population suffer from it). He was able to buy a French loaf in France that gave him very big smiles morning and night! Alas, such loaves aren’t available anywhere here in the U.S. that he can find.

So, back to pumpkin cornbread muffins. Make it with flour if you’re not wheat intolerant. But, if you need GF, this is for you. And thanks to Erika for the idea of mixing in the pumpkin!
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A view of one of the arbors at the Huntington

The day after Christmas my cousin Gary and I drove up to L.A. (to San Marino, near Pasadena) to visit the Huntington. Here in Southern California when people say “the Huntington,” it can only mean the gorgeous Library and Gardens. It’s a large estate opened to the public (for a fee, of course), with a rose garden, a succulent garden, a Japanese garden, etc. It also has a tea house, well known for its afternoon and luncheon teas, a huge sculpture garden, several art exhibits, and the very famous Huntington Library. Only researchers and qualified people really get to use the library, but it’s housed in a stately old building worthy of its multi-million dollar archives. This visit there was a Darwin exhibit in one end of the building. Gainsborough’s famous “Blue Boy” lives at the Huntington.

It was a cold, cold day when we went. The sun was shining, but the wind was blowing, and only those people who had bundled up really well, were comfortable outside. Anyway, I snapped the picture above while I was out meandering the paths.

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Until a few months ago I’d never even HEARD of Alabama White Sauce. I read about it over at the Blue Kitchen blog, but the sauce recipe comes from some fella called Big Bob Gibson, dating back to 1925. I’ve had the Blue Kitchen recipe in my to-try pile for awhile, but just needed the right group of diners here at home to make it. After sleuthing on the internet about Alabama white sauce, they all have somewhat similar ingredients (mayo, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, hot pepper of some kind and horseradish) although some recipes I found didn’t have horseradish or lemon juice. It seems that slathering it on chicken is the most popular use, but I’ll tell you that when I served the leftovers with some hot steamed baby broccoli, I also drizzled just a tad of the sauce on the vegetable. Oh my was that good.

Here’s what you do – grill some chicken – brown it over direct heat/fire, then cook it on indirect heat until it reaches 165° F. Then slather the sauce on both sides, continue cooking for about 5 minutes, slathering it again. It should be done, or nearly so. Remove from the grill, loosely cover with foil and let it sit for about 5 minutes and serve with another dollop of the sauce on top of each piece. And maybe on any vegetables you happen to be serving with it. L-o-v-e-d it. Even l-o-v-e-d it better with the leftovers, I think. The sauce had time to sink into the meat a bit more and I just reheated the chicken pieces in the microwave.
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Back about a month ago I’d read a recipe over at Heidi Swanson’s blog, 101 cookbooks. She’d had an idea in mind for awhile to revamp the ubiquitous Lipton’s onion soup dip to something more healthy, probably with less sodium too. And obviously NOT using the Lipton soup mix at all. She did it! I had printed out the recipe and was just waiting for the opportunity to make it.

The ingredients are quite simple – the only hitch was the hour-long cooking (caramelizing) of the onions. And after going back to look at Heidi’s photos, I think maybe I didn’t quite caramelize my onions enough. But the dip was great. Very onion-y, and a good texture made with Greek yogurt (plain) and low-fat sour cream. The dip has onion powder in it – and Heidi indicated you need to taste it as you make it, to be certain it’s has enough onion flavor (make sure you don’t use onion salt). I added more than the recipe suggested, but maybe not quite double the amount. Maybe onion powder varies by producer? She also suggested using dehydrated onion pieces, finely ground, if you don’t have the powder. That would work too. What you want is more prominent onion flavor, and that’s what the powder provides. Heidi also served it with 2/3 of the onions IN the dip and the other third on top – so everyone will know this is not Lipton’s. I served it with toasted baguette slices, but it could be done with crackers, or even the ever-popular Fritos. I also added some parsley on top, just to make it look pretty. Heidi also suggested that firm tofu could be substituted for some of the dairy in this.
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My cousin Gary, from Northern California, is visiting for the holidays. He’s retired now after a career at Hewlett-Packard, and divides his time between active membership in Mensa (maintaining his local Mensa website) and being a mentor to high school competitive robotics teams through First Robotics, a U.S.-based non-profit organization encouraging science, technology, engineering and math education. If you’re interested, there may be teams in your area who need mentors too, he has encouraged me to write. Go check it out. Gary was a programmer by profession, and gets a huge charge out of helping kids program a robot. Each season these high school teams must construct and program a robot to perform different actions on a tennis-court-sized field, and do it in a very tight time schedule. He also mentors teams around the country via email when they need help. And, he always helps me reconfigure electronic things around our house (we stayed up until 1 am last night while he moved a Tivo from one part of the house to another, and a cable box to my setup in my upstairs office.) Bless him!

As a bachelor, he’s never done all that much cooking, since he ate out a lot. But he just got tired of restaurant food. He’s somewhat famous in some of his social circles for his chili. Every time he serves it at potlucks or whatnot, he’s asked for the recipe. So given the opportunity, I asked him if he’d make his chili for our family for dinner. “Sure,” he said. So the ingredients were purchased and with me as his sous-chef, we made his chili.

So, how many chili recipes can one person have, I ask? Never too many is the right answer. Gary’s chili is delicious. A soupy kind of chili with all the usual things in it. But, there are two things that are a bit unique: (1) he adds big chunky slices of black olives to the mixture; and  (2) he uses an unusual method for cooking the turkey. When he was making this chili one time, he had forgotten to defrost the ground turkey. So he put the frozen turkey chunk (the rectangular chunk, not the tube type) in a pot, added a bit of water, brought it to a bare boil, then allowed it to simmer/steam for about 15-20 minutes until the meat was no longer pink. But you DON’T STIR IT. So when it’s cooked through, it’s still sitting in this kind of loaf shape. He chops it a bit with a spatula to give off small bite-sized pieces. That way the turkey has a lot more form than little tiny crumbles you usually get cooking it like ground beef.

Add whatever you might prefer for seasonings – his calls for chili powder, cumin and cayenne.  We added a bit more of the cumin to our batch, but the recipe you see below uses his normal seasonings. Note that there is no added salt. The juice from the olives generally contains plenty of sodium. It’s enough, actually. Thanks, cousin, for sharing your recipe. After cooking for several hours in my well-equipped kitchen he’s decided he needs to buy an alligator chopper (dices onions, peppers, etc.), a pair of onion goggles, a kitchen scraper (to pick up big piles of cut-up stuff), maybe a ceramic knife (I have just one of those), and also a new large pot of some kind. I’m going to recommend he look at buying one of the big Le Crueset pots. I gave him a short culinary lesson about garlic (removing the green sprout in the middle, and about how to smash it easily), about only cooking it a short time in the frying process, about different kinds of peppers (including chipotle and ancho), and why you’d use one type vs. another, and about letting soups/stews sit overnight to “meld” the flavors.
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A day or two ago I mentioned I’d made a flourless chocolate cake for Christmas Day. It was really wonderful. I made it on the 25th, and it came out of the oven mere moments before we had to put it in the car to drive to a family get-together.

The recipe came from a Sunset Magazine article – a reader recipe. Trisha Kruse, from Eagle, Idaho, submitted the recipe and said “Guests always ask for the recipe and beg to bring home leftovers.” The cake is made with ground almonds (I used the almond meal from Trader Joe’s), chocolate of course, butter and eggs, which would be normal for a flourless chocolate cake. But what makes this one different is the orange and lemon flavors. The recipe called for orange juice (the juice from the fresh orange you use for the zest). And although I could have used the fresh juice, I made up a concoction of half orange juice concentrate and half water. Gave the cake a bit more zing, perhaps, than the developer planned. It also calls for some lemon zest also, so you get a double-whammy of citrus.

As I explained above, I made this just an hour or two before it was served. We did have leftovers, but I must admit, I think the cake tasted better the day it was made. It certainly wasn’t “bad” the next day, but there was something a bit more tender about it when it was freshly cooled, with a big, healthy dollop of whipped cream. The recipe calls for a dusting of cocoa, but knowing such a cake is rich, I decided to give it a little whipped cream side. Delish. Recommended.
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My cousin Gary has come to visit us for the holidays. He’s very much into photography – has a rather large SLR (single lens reflex) Canon camera and a very sturdy tripod. We took side by side pictures, and oh-my-goodness, is there a difference. Guess I’m going to have to save up to buy an SLR. My little good quality Canon point and shoot (which is fabulous for traveling because it will fit in my purse or pocket) takes good pictures, but nothing like his. So the photo above is one he took. Couldn’t you just dive right into that bowl? Something I noticed right off the bat is the depth of color. My photo I enhanced some, but it still doesn’t have the color of his. I like the bit of fuzzy in the foreground and the background. That’s one of the things that’s hard to do with my smaller Canon. My cuz says it’s a lot to do with “white balance.” Below is MY photograph. Notice the difference in the color.

The yam and carrot mixture was very simple to make, although it’s not exactly like just whipping up the yams. You have to shred/grate/food process the ginger, add a few other things (a splash of soy sauce, salt and pepper, butter, and I added a bit of milk). The ginger is elusive. People couldn’t figure out what it was – thought it was citrus. It does add a hot zestiness to the dish that might not be to everyone’s liking, particularly if people are sensitive to heat. Reduce the amount of ginger if you’re at all concerned. My opinion is that the ginger is what makes it, so certainly don’t eliminate the ginger altogether. This came from an ancient photocopy from my local paper, the Orange County Register. Definitely a good side. Can be made ahead. Is easy. Bake or heat in the microwave, either one. Simple, huh?
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Files: MasterCook 5+ and MasterCook 14 (click link to open in MC – 14 includes photo)

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Does this look luscious, or what? It was. What you can’t see is the heap of Creme Anglaise on the top, and a full cloud of whipped cream. But I thought this shot of the trifle bowl was more interesting. What you see is nothing but bananas, cubes of pound cake, fruit cocktail pieces and the cranberry gelatin mixture.

Regularly I read the blog Al Dente. I’ve mentioned it before – it’s a compendium of individual recipes provided by well-known chefs who have cookbooks at Amazon. They spotlight one recipe at a time, offered up in a blog format, from the books of these authors. So you get a little glimmer of what the cookbook is all about.

So anyway, I was looking at Robert Irvine’s recipe for a Raspberry Porter Trifle with Chocolate Ganache and Whipped Cream. His was designed to be layered in individual wine or parfait glasses, but since I was serving this at someone else’s home I didn’t want to transport them. So, I made it in my tall trifle bowl instead. I didn’t have raspberry gelatin on hand, but I did have cranberry, and since it ’tis the season, cranberry seemed more suitable anyway.

There are several things different about this trifle: (1) it’s softer than others I’ve made, i.e., more like a pudding consistency; (2) it doesn’t contain sherry, but does contain porter, a British ale; (3) the creme anglaise was more like a sauce and was poured on TOP of the trifle, not in the layers as is more traditional; and (4) the gelatin is in liquid form when it’s spooned into the bowl, to firm up somewhat in the refrigerator after it’s soaked into the cake.

We have a family member who is British (specifically, Julian is married to our daughter-in-law’s sister) and they invited us for Christmas Dinner at their home. A typical English Holiday dinner was planned, so would I make dessert? Actually I made two (because my cousin who is wheat-intolerant couldn’t eat the trifle –  the pound cake obviously has flour in it). So I also made a flourless chocolate cake which I’ll post very soon. Both desserts were sensational, so said Julian, the British host. The only comment he had was that in England bananas are hard to come by, so his family’s trifle would not have contained them.

This does need to be chilled for several hours before serving, but the bananas will begin to brown and turn to mush if you go past about 48 hours. I’m including the chocolate ganache in the recipe, but I didn’t serve it (I forgot, but also there wasn’t room in the trifle bowl for it anyway). Some folks at the dinner thought the chocolate would have made it too rich. I’d like to have tasted it just to see, but oh, well. Next time maybe. With the creme anglaise being such a soft type, as you angled the spoon down deep into the bowl, the sauce oozed down into the layers with no problem. The whipped cream did the same. Had the chocolate ganache been there, it too would have oozed everywhere.

I’ve altered the recipe to fit my trifle bowl (less pound cake only) and with notes on the couple other changes I made. If you’d like the original click on the link up above to Robert Irvine’s recipe. I doubled the recipe and had enough to serve at least 16 people. If you’d like the revised recipe to serve 8 (half of the below), email me at ctndt AT cox DOT net and I’ll email you the PDF recipe.
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About 18 months ago (when my foot was fractured in the summer of ’07 and I couldn’t cook) I posted the recipe for schnecken with no photograph. And I haven’t had any menu since then that seemed just “right” for them. As I explained in the post about schnecken, most schnecken are a sweet bread/roll (think bear claws, or something similar). This one does have some sugar in them (more than usual for a dinner roll), but they were served to me as a dinner roll, way back in the early 1960’s when I had a German neighbor who made these all the time. She and her husband were Americans of German descent and she prepared lots of German style dishes. This was just one. She kept the dough for these in the refrigerator (they’re one of those refrigerator-style yeast doughs) and just pulled out enough to make for dinner. Then she’d do it again the next day for the following night’s dinner. After about 3 of those, they’d be all gone and she’d start over.

Schnecken are butter-rich rolls. And there’s no question about it, these are sweet for dinner rolls. I cut down the sugar a little when I make them. This time I thought they’d be ideal for serving with brunch. So the day before I needed them I mixed up the dough (done by hand, not the usual method for yeast bread) and popped the bowl in the refrigerator. The photo here is of the very sticky dough. Not a normal kind of dough –  as you don’t knead it – just stir with a spoon. That’s partly why these are easier than many yeast doughs. The next morning, the morning of my brunch/breakfast, I took the bowl of dough out of the refrigerator (the dough was nearly double in size in that overnight period) and rolled it out with a rolling pin (along with some flour to control the stickiness), spread half of it with some soft butter, then folded the other half over. I cut them into round biscuit shapes and put them in a metal pan that allowed for just a bit of air around them. Then they went to a warm place to rise (takes about an hour or 90 minutes) and popped them in the oven. I had hot, hot rolls to serve with my breakfast.

You can make these all in one day and not chill overnight (you still want to refrigerate the dough, though, as it contains a lot of yeast – more than usual – and you want it to do a “cool rise” ). Once the dough is out of the refrigerator these puppies rise relatively rapidly, though. The dough will keep for a few days in the refrigerator, but not longer. Eventually the yeast dies and the dough becomes heavy and leaden, so go ahead and bake them and freeze if you can’t eat them all up soon.
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Oh, this little dog ornament is so adorable. I think one of our daughters gave us this for Christmas one year. He reminds us of our beloved Lady, the springer spaniel we had for about 13 years. We still have her ashes in a box here in our house. She was just a sweet, lovable and well-behaved dog. We do miss her still. She didn’t like to have her picture taken, can you guess?

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