Home for Christmas

It was so nice to be home for Christmas. Being on the other side of the county for most of the year makes seeing family all that more special when I do. That being said, it was a whirlwind of a trip.

My sister and I happen to be two of those lucky people that have a birthday during the holiday season (December 30th, for me; 12/18 for her). So we all went out to dinner for our birthdays - and brought wine. Notice the date on that bottle? It's 1984 - the year I was born. My parents bought 2 cases of wine to be served at my rehearsal dinner for my wedding (a tradition my grandfather started by making wine the year each of his daughters were born for their weddings). My mom was 19 when she got married, this year I'll be 29 - good thing the wine was stored correctly!! Since I turned 21, we have been breaking out the wine every year on my birthday, just to make sure it's still good (of course). This was sooo yummy! Still good!

Another Christmas tradition in my family are a drink called Tom and Jerrys. This is basically eggnog on steroids. It consists of brandy and rum, topped with whipped eggs (the whites and yolks are whipped separately with sugar and then folded together), hot milk and nutmeg. It's an old German tradition to make these drinks. My mom tells a great story that every year, on Christmas Eve, the men would claim that they had to stay home from church to whip the eggs for the batter (since it had to be done by hand). So the women and children went to church and by the time they got back, the batter was whipped but so were all the guys! Totally schnockered. We usually serve them for our annual holiday church party and our philosophy is you get one once a year, whether you need it or not!

This is a pear coffee cake my mom made for dessert the first night I was back. She taught me to cook and I get my cooking ways from her. When we had it for dessert, she also made poached pears and a pear sauce. This was because she happened to be a Costco and got her pears there...this is so totally something I would do!! It was delicious as dessert and great for breakfast the next day. This recipe was in the most recent issue of Food and Wine magazine. I'm not sure what all was in the sauce, but it was awesome!

Here's a yule log my aunt made for Christmas Eve dinner. German chocolate theme - chocolate and coconut.

This is our Christmas Eve drink - Aperol Gin Punch. It packed a punch, that's for sure! It had Yellow Chartreuse in it - not something I've had before. It's from France and has a proprietary recipe. When we tasted it straight, it was herby with an anise forward flavor. On the sweeter side, would be great with tonic (then, I think everything would taste good with tonic). And, it claims to be the only liquor that a color is named after it.

This is my mom's dog, Romeo. She bought him a knight to ride him as one of his Christmas presents. He was happier with his new squeaky ball, I think.

What a great trip home! But I now need a vacation from my vacation...

Christmas Candy Making

It was soo nice to be home!! The trip was too short, as always, but it was jam packed! I come from a family of cooks, so of course, we cooked when I was home. My Aunt recently moved to Reno to be with my mom and my grandma, so this year, she decided we should make candy. Everyone has ways they get into the holiday spirit, usually I make cookies - but being so far from family, it's somewhat hard to get in the mood to make them. Also, I really don't know much about candy making, so I was excited. One of the things my mom and I were interested in was making fondant - you know, that stuff that covers fancy cakes? Apparently it also is the covering for chocolate covered cherries and the center of peppermint patties. Well it starts out like this:

Cook sugar, butter and corn syrup until soft ball stage. Pour onto a buttered sheet pan to cool.

Once the sugar is cool enough to the touch, it needs to be worked....a lot. Through agitation and mixing of air, there is a chemical reaction where the sugar crystallizes from a gooey mess to an opaque, mold-able candy. You can feel it happening - it turns really hot all of a sudden - so an exothermic reaction.

Next, on to make those chocolate covered cherries. First you start with a mess of maraschino cherries.

Then you cover each cherry with some fondant. You have to make sure that you cover the whole cherry, to seal in the juices.

Let the fondant on the cherries dry - or lose the tackiness.

While we were waiting for the cherries to dry, we made peppermint patties with the other batch of fondant.

Once everything is dry, it's time to dip in chocolate! With the cherries, make sure you cover the stem up a good way to seal in all the juices.

A tray of finished cherries. So I was not aware that the cream the surrounds the cherry starts as fondant. When I asked my aunt how long it takes for the fondant to liquefy, she said "I don't know, they have never lasted that long!!" Oh family.

We had tons of things to dip! It was a great day, with 3 generations of Hoper girls learning a lost art.

We put everything out in the garage for the chocolate to set.

Now what to do with all those candies? Why give them away of course! We ended up making chocolate covered orange cremes, chocolate covered chocolate mint cremes, peppermint patties, chocolate covered caramels, peanut-cranberry clusters, divinity, and chocolate covered cherries. What a great day!

Tonic Syrup

Sorry for the hiatus. Time has just gotten away from me. I still have been cooking and taking pictures! During this time, I was making Tonic Syrup. I decided to make this because I found my favorite drink to make with my limoncello is a mix of tonic, bitters and limoncello. Now I made the bitters and the limoncello, so all I needed to do was make tonic! I happened to come across this recipe a while back and squirreled it away for the future. Guess the future has come. 

According to the recipe, I had most of the ingredients from making bitters. The main ingredient in bitters is cinchona bark, from Peru. It is a natural source of quinine - what is used to treat malaria. There's your factoid for the day. The lavender was a gift from my friend Lori. I did have to order citric acid from amazon. I couldn't find fresh lemongrass but had dried from my travels to Bali.

Basically take all the ingredients, put in a pan with water and boil. Cool, then put in a jar in the fridge for a week.

Strain out the solids. Put the strained liquid in another jar and put in fridge for a week.

Then strain off liquid. There's a muddy brown sludge at the bottom of the jar, you don't want that. Then add rich syrup in equal measure to the liquid. Rich syrup is 2x sugar to water. You can use turbinado sugar to make your syrup or regular sugar. I used regular sugar. 

I found that you can add a few ounces to a liter of sparkling water (I use a Soda Stream) and that's enough. Very tasty but not really like tonic. There are a lot of complex flavors going on and it ended up being too sweet when added to the limoncello. When making this again, if my goal was to add it to something sweet like limoncello, I would use only regular simple syrup not rich syrup. But that doesn't mean I can't find something to drink this with...I found that mixed with bourbon it was delightful.

Now, not to waste the citrus that I zested, I juiced them (with carrots):

That day, I also happened to be in a waste not, want not type of mood. So I found a recipe to use the pulp from the juicer. Will let you know what I did with that at a later date...

Parmesan Honey Pork Roast

It has been a gross weather weekend. Last night I looked outside to see that the wind was blowing so hard, snow was flying sideways. I'm pretty sure the wind blew all night and has proceeded to blow all day today too. The wind blew so hard, it even blew in one of my window panes! Good thing there was a chair there or the glass would have broken! Makes me not want to go outside.

So I got out a pork roast from the freezer and looked through my recipes to find one I can make with what I had on hand. So I found a recipe I found on Pinterest called Slow Cooker Parmesan Honey Pork Roast.

1 (2-3 lb) pork roast
2/3 c grated parmesan cheese
1/2 c honey
3 T soy sauce
2 T Italian seasoning
2 T minced garlic
2 T olive oil
1/2 t salt
2 T corn starch
1/4 c water

Spray inside of crock pot with cooking spray. Put roast in crock pot. Combine parmesan, honey, soy, Italian seasoning, garlic, oil and salt in a bowl and pour over roast. Cook on low for 6-7 hours or until roast is 160 degrees. Take roast out of slow cooker, strain juices. Pour liquids into a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Mix corn starch and water in a jar and shake to make a slurry. Add slurry to boiling pan drippings and cook until thickened, about 2 min.

Very tasty - the soy added a nice dark color to the sauce. I even put the pork the in the slow cooker mostly frozen and it cooked up well. This is not the long cooking roast that you shred up with forks so it might not be the best recipe to do when you have to do to work for 8 hours. Looking forward to making some tasty sandwiches with that pork and gravy!! Nom nom nom.

Finally settling in

It's taken a while, as it always does when you move, to finally feel like you are settling in.

This is a shelf I put in the kitchen to hold my kitchen nick nacks. In my old place, most of this stuff went above the cabinets.

But as you can see I don't have space above my cabinets. So I hung pictures on the wall anyway.

More pictures on the walls. And yes, that is a sewing machine table in my TV room...I'm hoping this will stimulate me to finish that last quilt!

This is my front room, notice the cats! A big thank you to my friend Patty and her husband, Tim for helping put all of the pictures up. Tim was a trooper!!!

Vegan Cheese?

You know how you hear about something and you can't stop thinking about it? It was that way when I was listening to the Alton Browncast. He was interviewing Bob Taylor, a guy that makes guitars (really look at this marble cake ebony) and has recently become a vegan. That lead to talking about finding a substitute for cheese and he started talking about how he made "cheese" with cashews. Now I LOVE my cheese and have recently been thinking that due to this love, I have been eating way too much of it lately. So if this was any good, it might be a good substitute.

After some internet research, I found that to make the "cheese" you first need to start with making something called rejuvelac. This is a fermented liquid that comes from sprouted grains. You can use quinoa, rye or wheat. Apparently the quinoa version takes the least amount of time because the grain itsself is smaller. You first wash the grain until it starts to sprout then you let it sit and ferment for a day or so until it's cloudy. You drain off the liquid and can make a second batch.

Soaking the grain.

Look, it sprouted!

Finished product.

Once you have this fermented liquid, then you make the "cheese". I found this recipe for roasted garlic and sundried tomato vegan cheese. It sounded great and even if there were off flavors, that would be covered up by the deliciousness.

First cover raw cashews with water and soak for 12ish hours.

Drain and rinse nuts, see how they have softened and plumped?

Put in a blender or food processor and add your fermented liquid. The recipe called for a measily 1/2 cup, but I found that I needed a full cup for the nuts to blend smoothly.

Then put puree in a cheesecloth lined sieve and let sit overnight.

In the morning, squeeze roasted garlic into a bowl (get recipe here).

Add chopped sundried tomatoes.

Here's what the "cheese" looks like after it has drained overnight.

Now, all mixed together with added yumminess. Then put in fridge for 12-24 hours.

 After being in the fridge, the "cheese" has firmed up.

But it's still pretty spreadable. Overall pretty tasty - doesn't taste like cashews but doesn't taste like cheese either. It would be nice for the holidays as part of an appetizer plate, but I don't know if I would continue to call it cheese. Looks like there a lot of recipes out there to make different "cheeses", including more aged cheese that is firmer. I might keep experimenting, more to come...

Using Homemade Jam and Jelly

Well now that we went to all that trouble to make jams and jellies last week, Patty and I just couldn't wait to use them! Sorry family and friends, you may not be getting any of this batch... Since we made two batches of strawberry jam, I had a need to make PB&J Thumbprint cookies. After searching all over the internet for the perfect recipe, I settled on this one because you put the jam in before you bake the cookies and homemade jam tends to be on the runny side. After reading the comments, I decided against rolling the cookies in sugar before adding the jam as most of the comments said they would not do that if they were to make the recipe again.

Other comments from the readers was that the cookies don't spread much when cooking, which is a bonus. I'm not sure what makes a cookie spread or not - the overall structure of the dough has to do with it I'm sure but the temperature of the dough counts too. But PB is darn sticky so I guess that might be why it didn't spread either. BTW, that's the strawberry vanilla jam in those cookies.

Yum, yum, yum!! Tastes just like a PB&J sammie and made Patty a believer (she says she's not a PB fan, I see 3 jars of PB in your pantry that beg to differ...)

Next was something savory to go with the Rose wine and Pink Peppercorn Jelly - pork seemed like a good option for that and Porchetta was the first thing that came to mind. I have to take a side bar here and tell you all that I LOVE porchetta - which is an italian pork roast with garlic and herbs. Every time I think about porchetta, I think about my semester in Italy and the market that was daily in our piazza and the porchetta man. Yup, porchetta man. This guy had a food truck-like van and sold pork products - sausages and porchetta. We could just run down the stairs of our building and across the street to the porchetta man for a sandwich and life was good.... Well needless to say, with all that nostalgia, I have yet to make porchetta. Since we have some dietary issues with garlic in Patty's household, I tried to look for a recipe that was lower on the garlic factor but still high in the flavor department. I stumbled upon this recipe from Esquire magazine in the "Man Food" section...it's pork, stuffed with pork!!

First brown a sliced fennel bulb. Add pork sausage and fennel fronds (and some other stuff, Patty made this while I was making cookies...read the recipe if you wanna know the specifics). Let filling cool to room temp.

Patty flirted with the butcher at the store to have him so expertly butterfly out the pork shoulder roast. Fill with stuffing and roll like a jelly roll.

Secure with butchers twine (also procured by flirtation).

Now for the record, Patty wants me to tell y'all that she did the running suture on the pork roll on the left and I did the measly 3 knots on the right... In my defense - she's a nurse, I'm a pharmacist...I never learned how to suture and she works at urgent care on the side...it was no contest!!

 Place your rolls of goodness on top of sliced onions and bake at 350 degrees for 2.5 hours.

When you slice them, they look like this! Fabulous with the pink peppercorn jelly and the apple-pear sauce we made. Yum, yum, yum. This is what Sunday cooking is like for us all the time...well not really - but maybe it should be.

The cooking continued and I made Squash bread based on a recipe from America's Test Kitchen. Love America's Test Kitchen. If you have never heard of them, look on PBS for their show. They test recipes over and over tweaking as they go to make the best recipe for anything. They also use ingredients you can find in the regular grocery store. They also have a great magazine and I recently stumbled upon their podcast - all great things.

What I liked about this recipe is that you cook the pumpkin on the stove first. They did it to get the "can" taste out of the canned pumpkin, I thought it would work well with the hook squash I cooked last week because it was a little on the watery side, so this helped concentrate those flavors. You add the spices as well. Once the squash has cooked down, you add cream cheese.

Add the other ingredients once the mixture has cooled down a bit and add the topping...

Yay, squash bread! And a delicious breakfast it makes too!

Phew! What a day of cooking. What I didn't take pictures of was a lasagna we made with the tomato sauce I made last week....we are stocked with delicious goodies for the rest of the week! Although I hear there is a refrigerator monster at Patty's house.

After all that work, a glass of wine was well deserved, especially in these cute glasses Patty got from a glass blower while she was on vacation in North Carolina. Love the colors.