Pull-Aparts

Today, Christmas Eve, we are spending time with Pricklypear's family, watching movies, making weird food, and making our favorite -- pullaparts. We call them pull-aparts because they you pull them apart to eat them. Pretty clever name, eh? This is the only food tradition that we really have at Christmas and we eat them on Christmas morning. This year we ate them on Christmas Eve for dessert.

making the pull-aparts

Raw pull-aparts after rising for 30 minutes, see the cinnamon coating splitting?

There isn’t really a recipe. Motherdear always just used leftover bread dough of her whole wheat bread and dipped blobs of it in melted butter and cinnamon and sugar. I think the best ratio of cinnamon to sugar is 1:3, so 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to 1 tablespoon of sugar. The batch size we made today needed a cup and a half of sugar, which would need half a cup of cinnamon.

Baked pull-aparts, so yummy!!

This Christmas, I am very glad to be able to come see my family and eat fun food with them. I love them so much! Happy Holidays to everyone!

More on Persimmons

My attempt at persimmon jam was pretty unsuccessful. My one week's worth of experience with persimmons failed to prepare me for how much they would not act like other fruits that I have canned in the past. Here is what the jars looked like, and yes, I know I could turn them upside down to mix them together more, but I want you to see how little fruit there is compared to gelled sugar. Pretty much the whole bottom half is sugar/pectin.

Here are some things I learned from this experiment:

1) Use very very ripe persimmons---I used some that were quite firm still, but they should be mushy so that if the skin is punctured the innards want to come spilling out (what a description!) and you can easily peel and mash the innards with very little effort. If they aren't ripe enough the jam will not be juicy enough and you will have half of it be gelled sugar without any fruit to speak of in it, like mine. Also the flavor of the less ripe persimmons is quite delicate and cooks right away in the 5 or so minutes it takes to get the mixture cooked enough for the pectin to set up. This is really hard because for most fruits, if they are this ripe you throw them away because they are rotting. This is why it would be nice to have previous experience with persimmons, to know how they act at different stages of maturity.

2) Add a fair amount of something acidic-like lemon or lime juice, or even citric acid powder-because the persimmons themselves aren't acidic enough to preserve correctly without it. I used lime juice and a little zest, and at the end that was all I could taste in the jam. Next time I will do citric acid, I'll just have to figure out how much.

3) Start with one batch, don't commit to more than one until you have fine-tuned the recipe, or until I fine-tune it for you :)

Today I found some extra mushy persimmons at the market and I rushed home to taste them. They are a strange fruit, they taste delicious this way, but they have an extra weird texture. Kind of slippery, like raw fish. Now I understand why they are typically turned into pudding instead of eaten raw and fresh. The texture is just wrong for eating this way. But I saw a couple of recipes briefly at the library today, one for ice cream and one for quick bread, and a reference to a fresh persimmon pie, that sounds delightful. I think I'll be experimenting with these lovely mushy ones. The one on the right is not ripe yet, and I think you can see the difference. And you can see the insides, all shiny and soft.

Snow Day in Wyoming

I'm in Wyoming, visiting the Motherdear. We got a lot of snow in the last two days, this is how it looked on the first day of snowing, and there is even more snow coming tomorrow.

It was a great time to work on making pies for Thanksgiving, an apple and a cherry lattice pie, aren't they pretty? The cherry filling is from a can, to make it easy, and I'm pretty impressed with the vents I cut in the top crust of the apple, usually they don't look as neat or as well-centered.

I made extra apple filling, but not enough for a whole pie, so I made a cute rustic tart sort of thing that I didn't get a picture of before we demolished it, but maybe in the next picture of the half that is left you can see how flaky and delicious the crust is and how melty the apples look. And of course, the remainder is going to be breakfast tomorrow. My favorite! And if you want to see the other projects that were good to work on for a snow day, go to www.flickr.com/sizzle04. 

Persimmons and Privacy

Last night I had this terrible dream that someone had found old information including pictures of myself and my husband from years ago from this blog and from blogs of old friends and they started writing their own little blog, dissecting our home life based on very little evidence, and they somehow hacked into my account to put up links to it from this blog to make sure that I and everyone I know saw it. It was very distressing, I had a hard time getting to sleep again. I decided to take it as a warning, and now I will be using nicknames for myself and my husband and anyone else I know to protect the privacy of everyone. From now on, my husband will be called Lovemuffin (heehee!) and I will be called Pricklypear and if you want your own nickname, let me know (privately, of course) and we will go from there.

Now that the official business is out the way, I have to tell you how excited I am for these crazy fruits! I knew they existed, I think my Grandma made a persimmon pudding one time, but until 3 days ago I had never eaten a fresh persimmon. They are super cheap at a produce stand in downtown PG, so I bought about 10 pounds, and I'm going to do some experimenting. I'm thinking I'll make a persimmon pudding on Sunday to feed some guests that we'll be having over, and today I'll try to make some jam. Why is there a banana in this picture? I'm trying to get them to ripen faster, to make sure that they'll have the correct amount of natural pectin. I have never seen persimmon jam, I'm not sure if it's possible, but I found a few recipes online that seem interesting. I will let you know how it turns out.

Peanut Butter Caramel Cookies

These cookies are awesome. I stole the recipe from my mom's recipe book, I think she got the recipe from someone from church a long time ago. We only made them a couple of times, and they were unbelievably delicious every time. They look like boring drop cookies on the outside, but when you open them up, there is a delicious ooey-gooey treat in the middle.

Here is the original recipe as written by someone named Marlo Carter:
Peanut Butter Caramel Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
24 Rolo candies

Cream together butter, peanut butter, white and brown sugars, add egg and vanilla, beat until smooth. Mix in remaining ingredients. Chill dough at least 15-20 minutes before forming. This will give you time to unwrap the rolos and preheat the oven to 375.
Roll a tablespoon of dough around one Rolo, shape into a ball completely enclosing the candy, roll in white sugar if desired. Bake at 375 for 7-10 minutes. Makes 24 cookies.

Here's the amounts I used today to make a double batch:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
approx 1/8 cup milk
approx 50 Rolo candies
And I baked them for 11 minutes.

As you can see, I did not double the amount of butter, which is why I use a little milk - a trick I also borrowed from my mom. Add just barely enough milk to make it the correct consistency. The smidge less butter as well as the wheat flour are there to make you feel a smidge better about eating them, because you will eat a lot of these right out of the oven.
As I was forming the cookies, I was wondering if there is another way to form these, instead of wrapping it up entirely with dough, but then one of the cookies leaked while it was baking and I was glad that I did not experiment with different styles of cookie formation with a whole pan full.

Here's some more pictures to make you want to get door-bell ditched by me this Halloween.

Crepe Party

I made some crepes the other night, my crepe pan is well seasoned now and I have the technique down, so it was kind of a party. The savory crepes for dinner were delightful and surprisingly filling. I used the recipe for blintzes from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" and they were very sturdy and hefty, as you can see in this picture. You can use any tried and true crepe or blintz recipe.

Savory Crepes For Dinner

1 onion, finely chopped

about 10 mushrooms, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 10 oz. package frozen spinach, thawed and drained

3-4 oz. mozzerella cheese, shredded or diced

2.5 oz. parmesan cheese

salt and pepper to taste

10-12 crepes or blintzes, already cooked

Saute onion, mushrooms and garlic till soft, let cool somewhat. Mix with well drained spinach, cheese and spices. Place about 1/4 cup of filling on the crepe and roll it up burrito style. Place all of the rolled crepes in a casserole pan in a 350 F oven for 10-15 minutes, until the cheese is melty, then serve. Or you can just keep the filling very hot when you prepare it and everyone can roll up their own.

And I made sweet crepes for dessert/breakfast the next day with cottage cheese and berries and a dash of sugar. You don't really need a recipe for this one.

Pumpkin Bread

I made this pumpkin bread from Nancy Silverton's book "Bread from the La Brea Bakery." The book is very cool because all of the recipes use a sourdough starter, and that is just what I need. I will probably be purchasing this book, so I have more resources for keeping my starter, Harriet, occupied. Anyway, I thought I would share the pictures because it turned out so great. I don't think I can share the recipe, because that might be a copyright issue because I did not alter it at all, I'm not sure what the rules are. You can see the pumpkin seeds in it, and the lovely orange color of the mashed yams, and the way I even managed to score the top of the loaf in the manner indicated in the recipe. I don't usually follow the recipe this closely, so I'm quite pleased with myself.