I have a refrigerator magnet in my line of site from where I'm sitting right now that I got from Penzey's Spices that reads Love People, Cook Them Tasty Food. I really like that, and I enjoy cooking, which some people find it weird for a guy to say. So what. It started with an addiction to Good Eats, then progressed to America's Test Kitchen before they foolishly fired their founder, Christopher Kimball. It's always risky incorporating, but sometimes you have to lose some control in order to fund growth. Now he's founded Milk Street and I'm sure will be cannibalizing and gutting ATK over the next few years.
Cooking-wise, I didn't really delve in to many new recipes as my old standards are just fine. I did learn that you don't need to pick the leaves off cilantro - just chop up the stems after a good wash, but remove any yucky leaves/stems before doing so. HUGE time-saver, so I expect to make chicken tacos throughout the year rather than saving them for the New Years Eve taco bar.
I did some taco experimentation this year with existing tacos, experimenting with my ground beef recipe. I made it with ground pork, chicken, and turkey, and all configurations work just fine and all taste great. But more importantly, I pulled over a component from my pork tacos and REALLY pumped up my beef tacos (regardless of what meat that I use).
The beef tacos are very straight forward: onions & garlic, cooking liquid, spices. The chicken tacos are quite a bit more complicated and unique, I won't get in to them. The pork tacos are unique in two ways. Aside from chili powder, the spice base is cinnamon and cloves, so it's a very different flavor profile. Quite good, my wife loves them. But they have one other very unique thing: toasted slivered almonds and chopped up raisins. I only use golden raisins as I really don't like the taste of the other types, I chop up 3-4 tbs fine and they go in with the cooking liquid to simmer. The almonds are toasted as the first cooking step, but they're not added until after the cooking is over to preserve their crunch as much as possible.
I started adding the almonds and raisins to the beef tacos. Words cannot describe how much I like this addition. Now, when I do the NYE taco bar, I don't do this to keep a stronger delineation between the three preparations, but at home: raisins and almonds every time.
The other recipe that I did for the first time is Ysabette's mango ham, which was crazy easy. Build a sweet mango puree basting sauce spice mix, apply said mango puree to ham, tent it, throw it in the oven. Baste every hour. Cook to temperature. MUCH easier prep than my normal ham prep, Alton Brown's City Ham, which I'll continue making occasionally and is crazy good. But it's nice to have more than one ham recipe in your repertoire.
I would like to experiment this year with making enchiladas, but also with making my own enchilada sauce. We shall see if I get around to this.
Baking-wise, I did a fair amount in the last couple of months of the year. Our local diner has an amazing pie. Sadly, it's amazing for its design and concept, not for its taste. It's a flourless chocolate cake covered by a chocolate mousse. In their implementation it also has a layer of whipped cream, but do you really need to add empty calories to what should be fabulous chocolate? Gilding the lily.
I knew my mousse was leagues better, and I was confident that I could do a better chocolate cake, so I did. Successfully made two of them with a recipe from a recently acquired revised edition of the Joy of Cooking. Nice and easy recipe, which is one of my criteria of recipe selection, though not a deal beaker. After having made it twice and knowing that I wasn't going to add a layer of mousse to an 8" round, 2" thick cake, I bought a 6" cake pan and successfully reduced the recipe to produce a 6"x1". I was going to do the mousse the next day, it took me two days, yet eventually we had my final product.
And it was good.
I've since made the 8" cake, sans mousse, one more time for the observatory for the Christmas dinner, but the Double Death By Chocolate (DDBC) (tm pending) is reserved for special occasions. One thing that I learned was that if you're going to do the flourless chocolate cake inside a chocolate Oreo pie crust, that you should probably smear a thin layer of mousse where the cake will go to ensure a good bonding between the two. And the next time that I make one, this I shall do.
When I make the straight flourless chocolate cake, I grease the pan, then I crush up a chocolate Oreo pie crust and press it in to the bottom of said cake pan to give it a nice bottom layer. I think it's a good touch. My next step in this concoction may be to acquire a
PushPan and work on a cylindrical version of the DDBC. There's also another recipe or two that I'd like to try for flourless chocolate cakes, and then I have to try and reduce them to 6"x1" in order to make a DDBC. So I have some work ahead of me on this one.
I've also made one other alteration to flourless chocolate cakes that I expect to carry forward. The recipe calls for one pound of bittersweet chocolate. That's what I did the first time that I made it, and it was good. I'm a literalist when I make things the first time, adhering as closely as possible to the original recipe. If it comes out great once and we like it, then I'll start tinkering. While the cake was good, it was a bit too bitter for my taste. The second time that I made it we were in Phoenix at my parents for Thanksgiving, and I went about 60:40 bittersweet to semisweet chocolate, of course it was Ghirardelli. And I thought it was a tremendous improvement. So that's what I'll be doing with these going forward.
I made one minor alteration to my chocolate mousse. I had always thought that I had not yet reached the fabled Maximum Chocolate Point yet, and I might have done it. I couldn't add more chocolate chips to the melted chocolate as then I'd have to increase the amount of whipped eggs and whipped cream, which would increase the overall volume. And I didn't want that. So what if I sidestepped that a bit? The cooking process for making a chocolate mousse pie is really simple. Melt chocolate and heavy cream together over a double boiler (large glass bowl over boiling water). Whip egg whites in to stiff peaks. Whip more heavy cream in to stiff peaks. Fold together. Pour in to chocolate Oreo crust (Keebler chocolate crust is not as good IMO), refrigerate for 3-4 hours, done. Pretty simple. But if you increase the volume of the pie, you're going to overflow the volume capacity of the pie shell! So I tried adding a tablespoon of cocoa powder WHEN I WHIPPED THE HEAVY CREAM! And it worked. Interestingly, it whipped to stiff peaks more quickly, but with a lower volume. I'd already tweaked this recipe by reducing the number of egg whites from 3 to 2 to reduce the volume of the pie and increase its density, and thus its chocolate concentration. This chocolaty whipped cream adds more chocolate flavor and further increases density by reducing the volume a little bit more!
I may have achieved Maximum Chocolate Point. It was VERY good.
In other baking areas, I've normally only made one cookie: my Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Macadamia Nut cookie. It is amazing, if I do say so myself. I've been tweaking this recipe for over 30 years, and I made another tweak over a year ago: add a tablespoon of molasses! I came across a recipe in Milk Street Magazine for an "adult" chocolate chip cookie, and the recipe didn't interest me but the inclusion of molasses intrigued me. And adding a tablespoon had an amazing effect on my cookie: it added another dimension of flavor and also made them a bit more chewy. A definite hit.
But this isn't about my cookie. This year I made three more cookies that I'd never made before. Two were eggnog cookies, a white cookie and a chocolate cookie. I had issues with both initially with temperature and cooking times, but I sorted those out quickly. And the white eggnog cookie just doesn't make the grade with me: not enough eggnog flavor, and doesn't hold my attention overall. But the chocolate eggnog cookie? That's a killer! When I was researching eggnog cookie recipes before I started baking, I found one by King Arthur Flour that contained no eggnog! It used their King Arthur Flour Eggnog Extract for their eggnog flavor, which I thought was a bit of a cheat and was definitely not what I wanted. But the base chocolate eggnog flavor, while tasting much better than the white eggnog still didn't have enough eggnog flavor - so I ordered a bottle of the eggnog extract! And it is good.
The chocolate eggnog cookies have a distinguishing characteristic: you dust them with cocoa powder before putting them in the oven. Fortunately I had an empty Penzey's bottle that was easily pressed in to service for this duty. And this brought to mind something that the white eggnog cookie did do well: before those went in to the oven, you dusted them with a little nutmeg. So what if I also put nutmeg on the chocolate eggnog cookies? BINGO! And another killer cookie was born.
The problem is, now the stores no longer have Southern Comfort Eggnog, so I can't make any more or experiment with other tweaks, which I don't think any more are needed. Still.... Well, next weekend is a three day weekend with the federal holiday, so I'm going to start trying to make eggnog! I've been researching recipes, and it's not really difficult. There is a fine line where you risk curdling the eggs, but that's a matter of refining technique. I've identified three or four recipes that look to be worth trying, so it should be fun. And best of all: they don't use a lot of milk products, so you're not wasting a lot if the end product doesn't taste very good! A common theme is that the taste improves as they sit in the fridge, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to let them mature if I'm planning on using them for baking. We shall see.
I also want to perfect my technique for making peanut butter cookies! I have a great recipe: one cup of peanut butter, one egg, one cup of sugar. That's it. As I said, I like simple recipes. The first time that I made them, they tasted fine, but they were overdone and pushing burned. It's going to take some experimenting to get the temperature/time down right. Then perhaps I'll experiment with the recipe a bit, like possibly adding some chocolate chips to them. After all, isn't everything better with chocolate? My wife has a PhD, and she'd certainly agree.
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