Turkey Breast

So last week our chest freezer died. I figured it out on the way out the door to work so I called Jonathan and asked him to check it out. For some reason the freezer wouldn't get any colder than about 34. So Jonathan did a bunch of reorganizing and managed to get nearly all the food either in the freezer in the house or in his little frig/freezer that can run off the car batter. But a few things he had to leave in the chest freezer. Mostly it was just nuts and some blueberries that I was trying to freeze but one thing was the turkey breast I had just bought. It had totally thawed and I was worried if it would last until we replaced the freezer. We found one this weekend and it's supposed to be delivered on Wednesday. Anyway, I was stressed about the turkey breast getting ruined. So for dinner on Saturday I decided to cook it.

It turned out so well I had to blog about it so I know how to make it again.



I used the convection setting on my oven and set it at 300 F. I cooked it for an hour on a rack in a cookie sheet (I really need to get a broiler pan!) and then basted it in the mix below (half of it). After 30 minutes I dumped the rest of the mix on it. It took another 20 minutes to get to almost 160 F. It's supposed to cook until 165 but I knew it would keep climbing while it rested. It was a 9 lb breast and I let it rest for over a half hour. I was in the middle of making the dough for some bread, so I wasn't ready to finish dinner.

It was so juicy and flavorful! A real success...

Basting Liquid:

1/2 cup melted butter
1-1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp salt
1 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp garlic powder

Blender Ice Cream

So I bought this fancy blender a few weeks ago - a Vitamix, professional series. It was expensive ($500) but part of what sold me on it is it's supposed to replace a juicer, ice cream maker, food processor and your blender. So this weekend I used it to make chocolate ice cream.

The ingredients are simple: whole milk, sugar, chocolate milk mix (Quik), non-fat milk powder, vanilla & ice.



Funny story about the mix in the blender in the picture above. I measured out all the ingredients and added them to my mixer in order as the recipe said. Then I put it on the blender and got it started... I used the accelerator to push the ingredients down but it didn't seem right. There wasn't anything to push really, there was so little of the ingredients. Plus it never seemed to be getting any thicker or do any of the other things the recipe said. So I looked at the recipe again and realized that I had mis-read it. It called for 4 cups of ice not 4 ice cubes! Funny. So I had to start over.

Once I had the right amount of ice it took about 60 seconds for the blender to grind down the ice and turn the whole thing into Ice Cream!



It made about 5 cups and it was a bit icy but for less than 3 minutes of work it was pretty tasty!



Jonathan and I were good and didn't eat it all that night. So I froze the leftover and we had that tonight. It was still icy rather than creamy and now the chocolate flavor was off. It's probably because I didn't realize it but my Quik was low sugar. I'd think you could make it creamier by using more of the milk powder and the chocolate flavor would be better if you made your own chocolate mix with dutch processed cocoa and sugar. Maybe I'll have to experiment a bit. If only it was good for me or zero calories. Since it's not I'll probably not make it again. I like to spend my sweet calorie allotment on new sweets. :)

Bake 52 Week 23 - Coconut Macaroons

I'm not much of a fan of coconut but the whole idea of the baking group is to try things that you wouldn't normally bake. Plus the recipe is really simple so it wasn't a big deal to make these. This cookie is basically just coconut with some egg whites to hold it together.

The first step was to weigh out the coconut.



Next I mixed it in my food processor to get smaller pieces (the key to the best texture according to the cookbook).



The next step was to move the coconut to a bowl so I could use the processor to mix up the sugar and the egg whites.



Does this look light and foamy to you?



It looked right to me but when I dumped it into the coconut there was actually a lot of sugar left in the bottom of the bowl. So it didn't get mixed in with the eggs. Hmmm... hopefully it won't matter once I mix everything together.

After a half hour in the fridge I got the oven heating and lined two cookie sheets with parchment paper. I was a bit anal with the parchment paper, spending some time trimming it down to just fit the pans.



Since I'm a huge fan of chocolate and don't really believe something can be considered a dessert or cookie without chocolate, I choose to make the chocolate dipped macaroons. Which meant that I was supposed to form the cookies into haystacks instead of rolling it into balls. The cocount mix didn't hold together very well. I think it would have been better if I'd rolled the mix into a ball and then just flattened out the bottom.



The top row is after I've pushed the pile into a "haystack". The second row is how it came out when I dropped a heaping tablespoon full on the cookie sheet. I never really did get much of a haystack. I mostly was glad if the coconunt all held together so it would hopefully be a single cookie. Even that took more fussing then I really wanted... The piles (oops! I mean cookies) looked pretty big but the recipe indicates that it only makes 24 cookies. So I only made 24 - I'm so obedient.

Here they are all ready to go in the oven!



After 14 minutes with a rotation at 7 minutes the cookies looked browned but not as dark as the book. So I gave them a couple more minutes. The tops still didn't look as dark as they should but the bases were getting pretty dark so I pulled them out.



After they had cooled on the cookie sheet for an hour it was time to dip them in chocolate. The first ones got a lot more chocolate then the later ones. I pretty much ran out with about three cookies to go.



I let them sit for a while to let the chocolate set up. But it was still a bit soft even a couple of hours later when I decided it was time to try one.

My verdict - very good for a coconut cookie, but still a coconut cookie. I wasn't even tempted to have a second cookie. So not much of a dessert in that sense. But I'd have to say the book was right about getting the coconut down to smaller pieces. The texture was very good.

For the full recipe see Emily's blog. If you decide to go with the chocolate dipped ones you just need to melt 6 oz of semi-sweet chocolate. But to get a more even coverage I'd suggest you use a spatula or something to scrape of the excess so you don't run out.

Strawberry Freezer Jam

This weekend Jonathan and I decided to try our hand at Strawberry freezer jam.  Jonathan loves the jam his mom makes but she's on a mission right now so he's out his supplier.  Him mom assured him that it was incredibly simple to make so... 



I started to core the strawberries and realized I should wash them.  So I dumped them all in a colander to wash.  I had just gotten a Vitamix blender.  Jonathan doesn't like lumps in his jam (or salsa or marinara sauce, etc) so our plan was to use the blender to puree the strawberries, rather than crush them with a potato masher.  To my surprise the 4 cups of pureed strawberries was less than 4 lbs by a pound or more.  I measured out the strawberries and the sugar.



Can you believe that the recipe calls for twice as much sugar as fruit!  That's a lot of sugar!!!

We decided to use the blender to mix the sugar and strawberries.  At first it didn't look like it would all fit



But after mixing the first of the sugar I was able to add the rest.  It made for a very, very full blender.  I got the pectin going on the stove and even managed to fit that into the blender.  As soon as everything was all blended together we started loading up the jam in our little containers.  To my surprise the jam wouldn't pour out of the blender.  It had already set up to the consistency of Jell-O.  Jonathan had to use a ladel to scoop the jam out of the blender into the containers. 



We made a double batch and loaded it up into 8 containers.  We left it sitting out 24 hours and now it's in our freezer.  We stuck one container in the frig.  It's really firm jam!  But it tastes great and spreads well.

Bake 52 Week 22 - Rustic Caramelized Onion Tarts

Here's my first recipe with this baking group. I decided to make the pizza crust from scratch. If I'm going to bake it doesn't make sense to buy a pizza dough, right??

This was the first time I've used my food processor for a dough recipe. It seemed to come together really well and very quickly. I let it rest for the two minutes the recipe requires and then blended it for 30 seconds as called for in the recipe. I don't know what that did since it just seemed to spin around and made my food processor just about vibrate off the counter.

I had some flour left in the bowl of my processor but the dough wasn't sticky at all so I didn't worry about it. I was supposed to let it double in size before using and the cookbook said it would take 1 - 1.5 hours to do that. I have had terrible luck with dough rising as expected so I was worried it wouldn't be ready in time to finish my recipe before I had to leave for church. The house was 70 degrees and to my amazement and hour and a half later...

It was double in size!!! About a half hour before it was supposed to be ready I started getting the rest of the ingredients ready for the tart. The dough was looking good so I figured it would be ready and for once my timing was spot on.

I started with cutting the new potatoes (1 lb) with my mandolin. I was worried they would go brown while I was working on the rest of the ingredients so I put them in water.

I almost forgot to cook them but luckily I caught that part of the recipe just before I had to assemble the tart. But then I burned my fingers (not bad) trying to assemble the tart because I didn't have time to wait for them to cool down. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I started out cutting the onions with a knife because I thought my mandolin would cut the to thin but after cutting one and my eyes starting to water I decided whatever thickness I got from the mandolin was good enough.

That's a big bowl of onions!

My oil never did seem to shimmer but it had been heating for a while so I dumped all the onions in. After the 10 minutes of cooking them covered I had no idea if they had "released their juices" but most of them seemed pretty soft so I cranked up the heat and worked on getting them brown, which took longer than the recipe said. But I think that's because my stove is electric and it takes a bit to get hot.

They look pretty good right??


Now I was ready to assemble the tart. I rolled half the dough out and tried to make it into an oval, not much luck there but then I spread the olive oil on the dough, seasoned it with pepper and then spread on half the onions. I topped the onions with the cooked potatoes, rosemary and feta cheese. I was supposed to use goat cheese but I'm not a big fan of stinky, smelly cheeses which is why I picked the potato, rosemary, goat cheese option because the original recipe called for blue cheese - yuck!

The final assembled product.

It was pretty good but I couldn't taste the onions very well, which was a bummer. I think using the whole wheat crust obscured some of the onion flavor. Plus there were too many potatoes. I followed the recipe there but it ended up covering the whole tart in at least one to two layers of potato. So the flavor of the onions was buried under the flavor of potato. But I had some leftovers (cold) for breakfast this morning and it was actually better. Go figure...

So probably not something I'll make again but I'm sure going to be looking for an excuse to use carmalized onions!


Check out Michelle's blog for the full recipe. If you want to make the potato version it just took 1# of new potatoes (but I'd decrease that), 1 cup of cheese (goat according to the recipe) and 1/2 tsp of chopped rosemary. You just split all that between the two tarts.

Test Recipe

So this last weekend I wanted to make a treat for the guy that sold us our house. He was incredibly sweet and generous and let us move in five days before we actually closed. Since I'm planning on joining this baking group when I get back from Utah I thought I'd try out taking some pictures as I baked so I could do a blog post about the recipe. Well, I didn't do so well. I forgot to take any pictures until the brownie batter was mixed up and in the pan ready to cook...

Luckily this is a layered brownie recipe so there was more to do and take pictures of after the brownies cooked. So my inspiration for this dish is a combination of a couple of recipes from Mel's Kitchen. She has a section on her blog where she puts her "best of" recipes. I wanted to make her best classic brownie recipe but I also really liked her layered brownie recipe. This is a typical problem for me - I love sweets and want to try every conceivable variation of them (especially chocolate ones!). But since I don't want to be the size of a house and I have very limited self-control when it comes to sweets I try and minimize my exposure to them. My latest method is to limit myself to one sweet per weekend and I have to bake it. But then the leftovers go to work on Monday where they typically disappear by lunch. Well, I figured why not have the best brownie as the base for the best layered brownie?! So that was my plan. The recipe is for a 13 x 9" pan but Jonathan wanted a big batch of dessert because the guy who sold us our house is also the owner of the Ace Hardware store in town. Jonathan's plan was to take the treats to him at work, so he wanted to make sure there were plenty for everyone that works there. So my original plan was to make the recipe in a half sheet pan. I've done this with 13x9" recipes in the past and it works pretty good. The brownies are thinner (obviously) and it's always a bit of a guess how long you should cook it, but you get a lot of servings and since brownies are so rich anyway the thinness is a bit of a benefit. Well, when I was shopping I couldn't find a disposable half sheet pan in either of the two stores I went to. I've bought them before so this was really frustrating but I wasn't going to go all over town for this either. So I settled on a edged cookie sheet and figured I'd use one of my own pans for any excess batter. I followed the recipe for the brownies exactly. I'm an engineer so when I say exactly that's what I mean. I used the parchment paper instead of foil. I poured the batter into the cookie sheet until it just filled it. The rest of the batter I placed in a 8x8" pan. It filled it to about the same level as the cookie sheet. I got them both in the oven on the same rack and cooked them for 20 minutes. I couldn't check the doneness with a toothpick because I haven't found them yet but it looked done. I figured how undercooked could they be...

I let the brownies cool for a little while and then helped myself to one out of the 8x8" pan. I had to try them just as a brownie. I think they probably should have cooked 5 minutes longer - they were very fudgy. I don't know if they would have become cake like with more time but I think they would have been better. After letting the brownies cool for an hour and a half I started on the brown butter frosting. This time I tried to take more pictures...

While the butter started melting at low heat I assembled the rest of the ingredients. The butter was supposed to go in the bowl first but I forgot and put in one cup of the sugar before I remembered.

The recipe said it would take about 15 minutes for the butter to brown. Typically I would set a timer in that kind of situation so I know when it should be done. But I forgot. When I did remember I figured it had been about 5 minutes. When the timer went off 10 minutes later the butter still looked the same as when it first melted. So I set the timer for another 10 minutes. Still yellow... Ten more minutes and I finally start to see some brown. It's just the butter fat so you can hardly see the brown in the picture I took but it was good enough for me.

I mixed all the frosting ingredients together but I had forgotten to buy heavy cream so I had to use milk (1%). It was really runny

so I added about another 1/4 of a cup of powdered sugar. I probably should have added more but I was worried it would overwhelm the browned butter flavor. The one thing I failed to take into account with the larger pan was that I'd need more frosting to cover the brownies. I would have been fine if I realized that right off the bat and just frosted the cookie sheet but I'd already put some frosting on the 8x8" pan so the frosting is a little thin.

I thought about making more frosting but I was running out of time to finish the brownies before church. The last step was a chocolate glaze.

It was just semi-sweet chocolate and butter. I melted it on the stove top because I didn't want to get another dish dirty. I finished just before church.

I was so rushed to get the brownies finished I missed the step to chill the brownies and that they taste best chilled. I waited until after dinner to have my brownie. It was worth the wait!

Well, I can't get this to put in any paragraph breaks in this and the pictures didn't end up positioned where I expected but I'm tired and don't have the patience or energy to try and figure out how to get the formatting the way I want. It's annoying. I'm going to have to find someone to give me a blogger tutorial.

First Post...

So I'm thinking of joining a baking group. In order to be in that baking group I have to have a blog. So today at lunch I thought I'd play around with it a bit. Next thing I know I've created one. I figured I'd better throw a test post out there while I was at the "start blogging" page. Here's hoping I can figure out how to get back here when I actually join the baking group!