the SIMMER blog

t minus one!

Sorry it's been quiet around here lately -- ironically, it's because there's too much happening! Tomorrow is a big day here, with The Kitchen Daughter coming out in paperback and my e-short story Croquembouche also launching. And having just moved Chez Simmer to a new home, I can now turn my attention back to all matters delicious.

First things first. I made some cookies.

Russian Teacakes are one of the must-do McHenry Christmas cookies every year. They're a wonderful nutty shortbread, rolled in powdered sugar while they're still warm to form a sweet, sweet coating. If you've seen Mexican Wedding Cakes, they're very similar, but because the Betty Crocker Cooky Book calls them Russian Teacakes, that's what we call them around here.

And they're delicious. Messy to eat, but delicious.

(If somewhat imperfectly captured by my iPhone camera. Hey, everything's in boxes. It's a small miracle I could even find the baking sheets!)

ate, wrote, retreated

So I recently spent three days in Ashevile, North Carolina, and I came back STUFFED. Ahhh, what incredible food. And I should have expected it -- I was there with the Eat Write Retreat folks, and knowing how very very full I was after their event last May, I should've known we'd be indulging in the same way for this event too.

Oh, how we indulged.

This was a butternut squash "cannelloni" stuffed with goat cheese, part of an extensive chef's tasting we enjoyed at Biltmore Estate as our very first event. We then took a quick tour through the Tiffany exhibit on the grounds, and headed back to the Bistro for dinner. So we started out with overindulgence, and continued straight on through the weekend in the same way.

Next morning, we met up at Early Girl Eatery for breakfast and a discussion of good photography principles -- but don't judge the workshop based on my results here. I was experimenting with my brand-new iPhone camera. Point and click with very little nuance, here.

But man, those were some seriously good pancakes.

I also got to meet individually with each blogger in attendance -- I'd evaluated their blogs in advance and given them each a printout of what I considered the strengths and weaknesses of their writing, as well as a writing assignment for the weekend. They were all receptive and interested in stretching their skills. What a great group.

Then, we actually went to see some things that weren't food! Yet.

 

apricot and cherry kaiserschmarrn

Okay, so, before stumbling across this recipe in Food & Wine, I had never in my life heard the word kaiserschmarrn. But it sounded pretty tasty, and stone fruit is very much in season, and I thought it'd go pretty well with the sweet corn ice cream I had planned, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Of course the market dictated a few changes -- the apricots looked better than the peaches, and ditto the cherries over the blackberries -- and a lot of this had to be done at the last minute, making it not an ideal choice for dinner. Then again, it serves at least six people (we served it to eight) so it's a bit much if you don't have a big group over.

And how pretty are these little guys?

 

Cook the apricots in butter, sugar and lemon juice just until they soften:

 

Ditto with the cherries:

corn dinner part 1: sweet corn ice cream

Yes, it's telling the whole story out of order to talk first about the last course of a dinner -- but, to be fair, I did make the ice cream first. I usually do. Which is one of the most awesome things about making ice cream for a dinner party. Get it done and out of the way the day before (which leaves you plenty of time to sweat about the other things.)

So I used this great recipe from Always Order Dessert, just as written. Unfortunately, I didn't get gorgeous pictures of the finished product like Alexandra did, but here are a couple of process photos.

Corn steeping in milk and cream:

 

Slicing the steeped corn off the cob afterward:

 

 

Straining the liquid to take out all the solid bits:

 

Verdict: delicious stuff. Next time I might try doing a custard-based ice cream, as this one wasn't quite as rich as my favorites, but it certainly went well with its pairing partner, an apricot and cherry pancake called a kaiserschmarrn. (About which more tomorrow.)

 

 

5-course corn dinner

This was one of those weekends that just flew by! Mainly because I spent most of it shopping and prepping for a dinner for eight friends, building a theme around one of my favorite foods.

Corn.

 

More detail soon, but in the meantime, here are the five courses I made (with links to some recipes I drew from):

• Smoked Salmon on Corn Blini
• Esquites
• Corn Vichysoisse (from the Union Square Cafe cookbook)
• Gnudi with Corn and Almonds (gnudi from another Union Square Cafe cookbook, sauce improvised)
• Tomato Panzanella (improvised)
• Kaiserschmarrn with sweet corn ice cream

(All so very delicious.)

life is a this

 

(Things are wonderful around here but oh so busy; I pitted this pound of cherries around 1 a.m. last night. And I haven't even started packing for Eat, Write, Retreat. Eek! But at least life is like the picture above and not the picture below!)

 

shortbread shortcut

One of the earliest recipes in The Kitchen Daughter is Grandma Damson's Scottish Shortbread. There are a kajillion recipes for shortbread, most of which work fine, but I made this one very simple on purpose. Two cups of flour, two sticks of butter, and a half-cup of sugar. That's all. Ginny does it the old-fashioned way, working the butter into the sugar by hand, and that's the way I'd usually done it as well.

Until last week.

 

Yep, that's a food processor. I was in a rush to crank out some cookies for book club, which I was hosting, and so I decided to use my stand mixer -- except in the close quarters of my kitchen, the stand mixer is currently behind the food processor, so I thought, Eh, I've heard people sometimes use the food processor for doughs and crusts, I guess I'll give it a shot.

Wow. What a shot it was.

 

I made only a half-batch -- so first I creamed a stick of cold butter (salted) with a quarter-cup of granulated sugar, then blitzed in a cup of flour, until the mixture resembled coarse crumbs.

 

Time elapsed? Like, nothing. Maybe literally two minutes. And then there was another time-saving discovery to make: if I patted the crust out on my synthetic cutting board and only rolled it lightly, instead of flouring a wooden board and rolling it thin, I didn't have to worry about the butter melting and making the dough hard to work. It came together in a flash. Pat pat pat:

how to make a georgia peach

New feature on the Simmer blog today: video! The fabulous crew at Simon and Schuster worked with me on a couple of cooking videos for recipes from The Kitchen Daughter, and here's the first: how to make a Georgia Peach.

 

Enjoy!

alfajores plus

So yesterday I told you about making alfajores, and today, a coda: while alfajores are (by definition) made with dulce de leche, I couldn't help making some of my little shortbread sandwiches with an alternate filling.

 
After my homemade dulce de leche disaster, I went out in search of the pre-made product. At my local Morton Williams, I didn't find dulce, but I did find guava jelly, so I thought: why not? Lots of Latin American desserts use guava. And I always like to give people options.

In addition to the general praise at the party I took the alfajores to, there was one other thing that really tickled me: one partygoer discovered that the guava and the dulce versions tasted great together, so he would twist a guava sandwich open like an Oreo, then attach the top and bottom to a dulce sandwich, almost like a club-sandwich version of the cookie. I'll try that myself next time!

The shortbread cookies were very, very delicate, so I made sure to package them carefully. I love the rectangular Tupperware I bought for ice cream containers, and they worked for cookies as well:

 

With napkins underneath, on both sides, at each end, and between. You can never be too careful with these things.

 

all about alfajores

So I took these cookies to a Peruvian dinner at a friend's house, at which the host turned out dish after dish of INSANELY good, classic Peruvian dishes -- yuca frita, ceviche, aji de gallina, lomo saltado, arroz con pollo, and more -- every bite even better than the last. I'd offered to bring dessert before I knew quite how incredible the feast would be, so with every knock-it-out-of-the-park dish, I got more and more worried about serving my alfajores at the end. I mean, you never want the host of a dinner party to feel bad that they allowed you to bring something, and you don't want to disappoint all your new friends. Thank goodness, the alfajores were a hit.

We had to leave about 15 minutes after dessert was served, and when one of our new friends asked "Oh no, are you leaving already?", I apologized, and said we really had to. He quickly followed up with "You're not taking THE COOKIES, are you?" I assured him that no, the cookies would remain. He was very relieved.

I found my alfajores recipe the way I always find new recipes for ethnic dishes these days (see also lamb keema, chiles en nogada). I Googled for recipes and asked for suggestions on Twitter, read through about a dozen options, and decided on the one I thought sounded best. In this case, it was from Big World, Small Kitchen, and it was shortbread-like, with cornstarch and a little brandy.

 

Now, I'm not going to tell you this is an easy dough. This is a dough where temperature matters. If you don't chill where the recipe says chill, and work quickly to cut out the circles and put them on your baking sheet, you will in fact be sorry. Warmed up, the dough gets all mushy and sticky and very hard to work with. You also need a lot of flour on the cutting board to prevent sticking, but the more flour you use on the board, the tougher the cookies will get when you re-roll scraps. So, it's a delicate dance. But... an even more delicate cookie, and thoroughly worth it.

The chilled dough: