What have we been upto?

Now, that is a good question to begin with no? Especially because we've been wondering ourselves! For people who are on my Twitter or Facebook, you know I've been doing time pass :P My in laws left earlier than scheduled thanks to a family emergency, but the 2 weeks they stayed with us was being in food heaven. I'm still paying for my excesses on the treadmill.

The last two months have been relaxing. No experiments with food, no pics taken, no awkward poses standing on chairs, no fighting about who took the best pic ( Ya, we do that and I win :D) Sorry, make that better pic. Anyway, in the name of food blogging and in the name of being a young (me only!), fun ( me!) and hip ( me again! ) couple, we'd forgotten to cook/eat some regular food. It'd been ages since I made a simple Rasam in my house or simple Roti sabzi. We had to deal with the bookmark demon no? So, its not our fault. Come mother in law - I woke up early like the good daughter in law and made Indian breakfasts for A (who acted like he didn't know me for about 2 weeks) kept food hot for him and didn't roll my eyes and ask him to eat cereal :P But then I didn't need to. His mom took care of him and me. Our routine was simple :P Get up, make bfast for A, pack his lunch (which used to be tortilla with leftover sabzi/curry/pickle) or whatever was leftover from previous night :D. Now, A had a 3 course meal for lunch. Fresh Rotis with leftover sabzi (given with a heavy heart), yogurt, a fruit - all cut up and in a small box, a snack or bhakshanam ( read Murukku) and a dessert. And he didn't put on an ounce!!!

My routine was simple too. Get up, eat bfast. No one else eats bfast but me. So, like a queen, I'd gobble the dosas, wait for the clock to strike 12 for lunch. Hot steaming food again. Eat, relax, complain about Atlanta's heat, talk about what's going to be cooked for dinner, think of making something special for in laws and quickly chuck the idea off the head lest anyone finds out, watch Clint Eastwood movies (my Father in law is a huge fan) and doze off when he starts shooting. Get up at 3, exclaim about napping, make chai or coffee, eat with snacks (only me!) and gossip and plan evening dinner again, and shopping. Cook dinner - fight with mother in law about who wants to make rotis for A. Let her win :D and eat dinner. Eat hot laddu every night watching TV or playing a board game. Now tell me, would you want to come back to cook for yourself, take pics, blog, and work at all? Be honest, please!

That is why it took so long for us to come back. A is still in wonderland dreaming of his mom's next visit. But as always, being the sensible one, I've come back to reality. I saw the Reader. I cannot even count to how many items I have unread. Tough life mine is. So, I decided to rejuvenate myself by going berry picking. I swear I will not buy a berry again. I hate strawberries. Sorry, 'hated.' After eating the ones I picked and the ice cream made by the farmer (!), I'm a convert. Here are some pics! And if you recognize either of us on the street, please do not come and say hi to A. He will freak out and die. Say hi to me and we can act like old friends. I can break the news that I posted our pics on the Internet to him slowly.

Okay this post was for time pass again :D We are getting back to the BBA challenge, the DC challenge and more after this weekend! Oh, this weekend is A's bday too. He turns really old :D So, he is the old man married to a really pretty, young wife. So, I'm celebrating it. By making him spend money on a big breakfast for me and then baking something with his help and cooking more stuff with his help. Since he's helping me, I have a long, ambitious menu. And some gifts - that I wanted myself :D and I sure am expecting a return gift from him.

Sigh, where would I be without venting all my frustrations to all you guys eh? Be back soon ok?

P.S. - Can you all comment on suggestions for return gift? Oh! I almost forgot. Please suggest to him to give me a KitchenAid Stand Mixer as return gift. Thanks for your co-operation, really :D

Family's here!

My in laws are here for a visit and so, we're taking a break from blogging for a short while. We may post occasionally, but its proving to be tough even with 2 bloggers in the house!

And no, its not like we've not been cooking! We've been cooking up a storm thanks to guests and family around 24/7. Wait for sometime for us and we'll be back!

Miss us, will ya?

- N

The Greek Celebration Bread - Christopsomos

Its back to breaking some bread with all of you :) The second bread in the book is the Greek Celebration Bread. You can find it here.This bread, as many of our fellow bread bakers declared is the best so far!! It is beautiful to look at, very easy to make and more importantly, is a lesson in making poolish.




We tried the Christopsomos bread in the Greek Celebration bread list. And we weren't disappointed. The spices added a new dimension to this bread. Did I mention that this is a perfect bread for breakfast? Just a warm slice with some butter or with a chocolate dipping sauce, or with a fruity preserve or even as French Toast. This bread works beautifully without being overtly sweet. While, personally, I like my sweet bread sweet, the glaze did the job for me. There were a lot of discussions on the online forum about the use of glaze. A lot of people didn't try it, while a couple of others swore by it.




Our thumb rule for this challenge is to learn and do the best we can and go the whole hog with the ingredients. We used poolish instead of barm, skipped the cloves and used lemon extract instead of almond extract. We also decided to give the sesame seeds a miss and we certainly didn't miss it! :D




Do try this bread for a weekend brunch and you will be delighted at the results!

Tangy Chinese curry/gravy with POM Juice!

We got six bottles of POM juice recently from POM who wanted us to try the juice. While we love to drink it as a juice, inspiration hit us right on our creative bone and we decided to make it into a savory gravy sauce. The only cuisine that seemed to go great with such a ridiculous idea was Chinese. The all forgiving stir fry which was suddenly going to be bathed for the first time in a tangy red sauce. We had this with tons of fresh vegetables and with some steamed rice, and it was such a satisfying, yet indulgent meal. For a person like me who loves tangy food, this was pure delight! Here is the recipe.

Ingredients

For the sauce:

16 oz POM juice
1/3 cup Tomato sauce
2.5 tsp dark Soy Sauce
5 tsp Cayenne Pepper
1 tsp Chopped Ginger
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp Red Wine vinegar
1 tsp corn starch
Salt to taste

Vegetables:

1 medium broccoli, cut and stems diced
1/2 cup sugar snap peas with pod
1/2 cup carrots, sliced lengthwise,
1/3 cup spring onions, chopped
1/3 cup green bell peppers, chopped or sliced lengthwise
1/2 tsp garlic, finely chopped
2/3 cup tofu cubed
3 tsp vegetable oil
1/2 tsp sesame oil
Salt to taste

1. First, use half the oil from the 'Vegetables' section to fry tofu. We just add some oil on our tava/skillet and let the tofu become crisp. Keep aside.

2. For the vegetables, cook the broccoli in the microwave for about 5 mins and keep aside. Cook carrots similarly.

3. Meanwhile, add all the sauce ingredients, make sure there are no lumps and bring it to a boil. Let this sauce reduce and thicken on medium heat for about 15 mins.

4. Heat the rest of the oil from the 'Vegetable' section and add scallion and garlic, sugar snap peas and cook for 3-4 mins. Then, add bell peppers and let cook for a good 3-4 mins. Add the carrots and the broccoli and toss around with salt for 2 mins. Once they are crunchy and half-cooked, add the vegetables into the sauce and close. Cook for about 7-10 mins until the vegetables absorb the flavours of the POM sauce gravy!

5. Serve hot with steamed rice.

I must admit I was quite skeptical of A's idea. So, I ended up drinking 2-3 bottles of the 6 bottles of POM juice after my morning run in about a week's time. It is super tasty and I must say, very natural! It boosted my weekday mornings. And it is a must buy if you are buying your juices for summer. We have it in the refrigerator now and is great even just as a juice! But then, well, A had other ideas :|

He very smartly hid the last 2 bottles and the day I spent searching for the juice, he made this sauce for dinner while a very skeptical me kept aside a small quantity of veggies aside, just in case :P However, all this changed and I threw in the veggies quickly into the POM sauce and had it along with steamed rice. If you don't like tangy food, then this isn't for you, but then, who doesn't right? :)

Ricotta Gnocchi - Daring Cooks!

We are back! Can you tell? Can you tell that I'm posting this in a hurry? This time, the cooks got an opportunity to get daring, and you know how Daring A and I are :P, so we signed up and didn't really regret it. Oh, my waist did, but then what is that treadmill for, and husbands for, if not for venting it out. Right?

Okay, I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you what we did for Daring Cooks. I'm sure you've seen on all other Daring Cooks' blogs, the fabulous Ricotta Gnocchi. Well, we did the same, only some of ours weren't firm enough thanks to inexperience, some arguments in the kitchen and sheer exhaustion. I promise we will do better next time! We made our own Ricotta and halved the recipe. This recipe is from the famous Zuni Cafe.

Ingredients

1 cup fresh Ricotta
1large cold egg, lightly beaten
1/2 tbsp Butter, melted
A couple of Sage leaves/1/2 tsp Dry Sage
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
1/8 cup Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
1/8 tsp Salt
All-Purpose Flour for rolling the Gnocchi

We made our own Ricotta and let it strain overnight and for half a day. In spite of this, there was still some moisture left. Sigh.

Anyway, we decided to pucker up and do our best on this recipe and make the Gnocchi. Here are the steps we followed.

1. Mash the ricotta well to form a smooth paste like mix. You may mash it with a spatula and make sure to rub it across the dish to make sure there are solid curd like formations.

2. Add the lightly beaten egg to the mashed ricotta.

3. Melt the tablespoon of butter. As it melts, add in the sage if you’re using it. If not, just melt the butter and add it to the ricotta mixture.

4. Add in any flavouring that you’re using (i.e., nutmeg, lemon zest, etc.). If you’re not using any particular flavouring, that’s fine.

5. Add the Parmigiano-Reggiano and the salt.

6. Beat all the ingredients together very well. You should end up with a soft and fluffy batter with no streaks (everything should be mixed in very well).

To form the Gnocchi:

7. In a large, shallow baking dish or on a sheet pan, make a bed of all-purpose flour that’s ½ an inch deep. Meanwhile, fill a small pot with water and bring to a boil. When it boils, salt the water generously and keep it at a simmer. You will use this water to test the first Gnocchi that you make to ensure that it holds together and that your Gnocchi batter isn’t too damp.

8. Using a tablespoon, scoop up about 2 to 3 teaspoons of batter and then holding the spoon at an angle, use your finger tip to gently push the ball of dough from the spoon into the bed of flour.

9. At this point you can either shake the dish or pan gently to ensure that the flour covers the Gnocchi or use your fingers to very gently dust the Gnocchi with flour. Gently pick up the Gnocchi and cradle it in your hand rolling it to form it in an oval as best as you can, at no point should you squeeze it. What you’re looking for is an oval lump of sorts that’s dusted in flour and plump.

10. Gently place your Gnocchi in the simmering water. It will sink and then bob to the top. From the time that it bobs to the surface, you want to cook the Gnocchi until it’s just firm. This could take 3 to 5 minutes.

Have a sheet pan ready to rest the formed Gnocchi on. Line the sheet pan with wax or parchment paper and dust it with flour.

For the sauce:

5-6 tbsp Red pepper, finely chopped
1 tsp Sage or any herbs you may want
1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper/paprika

We stuck to a simple sauce. We tossed some finely chopped red peppers and some sage in some butter and accentuated our already rich Gnocchi with some colour ;)

The recipe recommended that we make the Gnocchi, test one or two and then refrigerate the rest for an hour or so. We highly recommend this step. If it wasn't for this resting time, our Gnocchi would have surely crumbled in the water.

And this Gnocchi is WORTH it all. It was so light and so, so, so good that my mouth salivates even now as I write this post. Some of our Gnocchi was not firm while the rest withstood the hot water test pretty well ;) Frankly, we were too tired to take too many pics. So, I leave you with few pics, but this is a must try at least once. I've tried the potato Gnocchi (which I thought was tough) but found the Ricotta Gnocchi needs a lot more patience and yeah, make sure that Ricotta was drained properly. I'm sure if we'd let it strain for another day, our Gnocchis would have been firmer.

At the end of it all, we loved doing this challenge. We've always wanted to try Ricotta Gnocchi, just not had the courage so far. This challenge pushed us and we are looking forward to doing more with the Daring Cooks!

The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge - Anadama Bread

2 weeks ago, two people huddled and whispered sweet nothings in each other's ears. They argued, they cajoled each other and finally were convinced by the other to do it. They did something they've been wanting to do for a long time, but worried about whether the deed will be done in vain. The deed we are referring to is the buying of our first bread book The two people were A and I, who huddled at Borders Book Store at the Culinary section. He argued that we were novice bakers and that bread was still going to be challenging, I cajoled saying that nothing could teach us how to bake bread if not constant trial with the help of a celebrated book. The book was 'The Bread Baker's Apprentice' by Peter Reinhart.

2 days later, they excitedly click on Pinch My Salt, a popular blog and a huge favourite of N's repertoire of blogs only to find that Nicole had very benevolently thought of people like us and invited her readers/fellow bloggers/bakers for a challenge like never before. Bake every single bread in the book. Yes, the same book that we'd argued over. N said a million times 'I told you so,' while A went on to fill up the form, join the Google Group and read up the book like it was the Bible. Well, it is indeed a novice baker's Bible!

Yes, we are among the 200 mad people who've signed up for this challenge and exchange eager tweets/about a 100 emails a day :D and tons of inquisitive questions with amazingly researched, knowledgeable answers given in minutes. People like us have been inactive in the group in terms of any knowledge shared (coz we have none with regards to bread baking) but have gone through each and every email with wonder. Thanks to each and every one of you for making this bread baking process such a fun activity and its unbelievable how much we've learned in these last few weeks!

This is the original recipe by Peter Reinhart. We halved the recipe to make just one loaf since we are going to try baking a bread every week from this book. That makes it 4 loaves for a month, and we certainly didn't want to bake too much of the same thing!

In A's handwriting:

We also made some changes with the ingredients and were quite happy with what the results! We cannot post the full recipe here thanks to copyright issues, however, the link given above is from Google Books and does have the recipe. We've given the list of ingredients (with our measurements for one loaf) here with the changes we made given in italics.

Ingredients

Soaker:

1/2 cup cornmeal, preferably coarse grind (called polenta, sometimes or corn grits) -
1/2 cup water at room temperature

The soaker has to be prepared the previous day. The day before you want to bake the bread, prepare the soaker by mixing the cornmeal with the water and cover with a plastic wrap. This needs to sit overnight.

The bread dough:

2.25 cups Unbleached Bread flour -

We used bleached AP flour thanks to a stupid mistake we made by picking up the wrong bag at Costco! However, we also had to add a 1/4 cup of flour more than this because the dough was still sticky at the end of kneading.

1 1/4 tsp Instant yeast

We used Active Dry Yeast instead of Instant yeast because that is what we had. Reinhart mentions in his book that when one uses Active Dry Yeast instead of Instant yeast, we may need to use 25% more than the prescribed amount of instant yeast. We did just that and it worked out great.

1/2 cup Water, lukewarm (around 90-100F)
3/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp molasses

We didn't have any molasses and our one month shopping rule doesn't let us go grocery shopping for anything else apart from milk, eggs and fruits through the month. So, we added brown sugar instead of molasses, and yes, molasses is on the next month's list :D just in case!

1 tbsp shortening or unsalted butter at room temperature

We used butter and not shortening.

Cornmeal for dusting

Optional, according to Peter Reinhart, a MUST according to us!

We made a mistake by taking out the bread a little early and not letting it cool thanks to uber excitement! Also, the dough seemed to be slightly too much for a loaf. We still stuffed it though :P However, we loved what we had! The bread had a sweet tinge to it, and was crunchy thanks to the cornmeal and absolutely lovely even on the next day. We made French Toast with the bread the next day and the texture was the same. This sure is a keeper of a recipe.

On the flip side, like I mentioned earlier, we had to use bleached AP flour thanks to our stupidity at Costco. We picked the wrong bag of flour :| This was the first time we were picking up flour from Costco and didn't notice that it was bleached! Anyway, it didn't seem to affect the bread baking process as much. We'd love to try this again with whole grains and make this a regular at home.

This experience has been more than a learning experience. Some emails have left us rolling on the floor with laughter. Some avid bakers have named their Starters and its hilarious to listen to them talk about their 'babies' or the starter's kids :)

And check our fellow mad bread bakers at Nicole's blog here! Do visit this page also to see the bread bakers' map on Google Maps. People from all over the world, passionate about bread baking are doing this and its a marvelous effort! Go ahead and leave Nicole a comment about how much you'd have loved to be a part of this ;) It will make her day for sure!

P.S. - Peter Reinhart himself responded to Nicole's challenge and has promised to keep an eye out for us, mad bakers! Yay!

Sour Cherry Cake

Spring is in the air, so says Meeta and so, we listened. A is ever-ready to bake. Always. Every night. And when I mentioned that Meeta had an event and we had to bake a cake. A sprang (no pun intended :D) upon the idea and raided the Farmer's Market for berries. While we went looking for berries, we came back with some cherries. We initially thought of baking Mahanandi's Chocolate Cherry cake- a winner of a recipe which has been tried and eaten umpteen number of times by me. A, very obviously, wanted to try out something else and also use our hardly used bundt/tube cake pan (I'm not even sure if that is what it is!)

The cake was moist, speckled with cherries, made for a great dessert after an Enchilada meal :D Here is the recipe. Its as easy as a cake can be!

Ingredients

1 c AP flour (set aside 2 tbsp separately to coat the cherries)
1/2 c chopped cherries
1/2 c + 2 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
1/4 c sour cream
1/4 c milk
5 tbsp butter
1/4 tsp b.soda
1/2 tsp b.powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 F

2. Melt the butter and allow it to cool. In a separate bowl, toss the cherries with 2 tbsp of flour.

3. In the meantime, beat the eggs, one at a time with an electric beater. After adding the third egg, add the sugar gradually and beat well at medium speed until creamy.

4. Add the melted butter slowly. Beat for another two minutes.

5. Whisk the sour cream and milk in a bowl. Sift the leavening agents and the flour alternately with sour cream/milk. If you still see lumps, take a whisk and beat the batter until they disappear.

6. Fold in the cherries gently. Do not beat.

7. Pour the batter into the fluted pan and bake for about 25 mins. or until a skewer comes out clean. Take it out of the oven immediately. Invert it on to a flat plate and let it cool completely.

8. Run a knife along the edges and try to pry it if it doesn't want to come out. This is exactly what happened with ours as the cherries sank to the bottom. But well, it still tasted good ;)

However, we had a couple of problems. One, the cake was REALLY soft and was tough to take out without breaking it! And two, though we dusted the cherries with flour per popular baking advice, they still sank to the bottom. There were a few in the middle of the cake too, but nothing on the top! We do realize that the more liquidy the batter is, the more the cherries sink. And thicker the batter, lesser they sink. But, still, we'd like to know if we should know something else about sinking berries or cherries!

Oh, like we mentioned, this goes to Meeta of What's for Lunch, Honey? for Monthly Mingle # 32. This month, we are celebrating the season's offerings! And this cake is a great cake for any and all sorts of berries. Do let us know if you try it! And hey, try it!