Sasha's Kitchen: Pumpkin Flan

I made caramel! That's right, I made real caramel, without burning it or having it harden into a rock.  I'm so proud of myself that I finally got it right, and it wasn't that hard either.  This opens up new avenues for me - maybe I'll try making caramel candies sometime.  This time I made caramel as the top portion of a flan and I was absolutely thrilled with how well this dessert turned out for the first time making either caramel or flan.  To be honest, the dessert is made a bit like creme brulee (minus the blow torch), but for the separate caramel layer that is required. Next week, I am going to try my own recipe for a blueberry flan, but for the first time I used an established recipe I found in Bon Appetit magazine for Thanksgiving.  I enjoyed reading all the great Thanksgiving recipes and decided to try this one out.  Gosh, I really want to make a big turkey - but sadly we can't host Thanksgiving this year like we did last year. Oh well.  But I can still make a killer pumpkin flan!  This was a great Friday night dessert to top off the green apple risotto my husband made for dinner.

Pumpkin Flan (adapted from this recipe, cut in half below) - makes 6
3 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
3 whole cloves
1/2 tsp orange zest (I omitted)
2 star anise
1 cinnamon stick
scant 1/4 tsp cardamom or one cracked cardamom pod
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 of a 15 oz can of pumpkin puree
1/2 cup sugar (for the caramel)
1/6 cup heavy cream (for the caramel)

Whisk together the eggs, egg yolks and 1/3 cup of sugar.  Set aside.  In a saucepan, bring 1 cup of the heavy cream, the milk and the cloves, star anise, cinnamon and cardamom to a simmer. Slowly then whisk in the egg mixture.  Allow to steep for thirty minutes.  The  strain.  Whisk in the vanilla and pumpkin, and if you like a half tsp of orange zest (which I omitted) and allow to chill for an hour and a half.  Note: the original recipe says three hours but I found an hour and a half to be sufficient and it worked out just fine. Towards the end of the chilling period, prepare the caramel.

Heat the 1/2 cup sugar with an eighth of a cup of water in a small saucepan over low heat until the sugar dissolves.  Increase the heat and boil without stirring until the syrup is deep amber in color.  Brush down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush and swirl the pan occasionally.  This takes about ten minutes.  The stir in the 1/6 cup heavy cream and the caramel will boil vigorously.  Divide the carmel among six ramekins and allow to sit until it sets into caramel, which won't take long.  Divide the custard op top of the caramel in the six ramekins.

Place remakins in a large pan and add hot water to the baking pan to come halfway up the sides, just like for creme brulee.  Bake at 350 for 25 minutes until the center is just set.  Child for about 45 minutes before inverting to serve on plates.

Sasha's Kitchen: Pumpkin Flan

Sasha's Kitchen: The Use Of A Molcajete In Preparing Guacamole

This post perhaps comes a bit late.  I am not the biggest football fan, and this year my husband (who is) and I watched the Superbowl from home, with our pug Dakota on the couch by our side.  I did, however, prepare my classic guacamole for us for the Superbowl, using a molcajete.  A molcajete is basically a mortar and pestle made out of volcanic rock, and is an essential kitchen tool for making high quality guacamole.  The molcajete was first used by the ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures (and might even go back further than that in different forms), and is most commonly used today (primarily in Mexican and South American cooking) to grind spices, and prepare salsas and guacamole.  It works because the basalt (the volcanic rock) provides an excellent porous grinding surface,  Basically, the guacamole acquires the perfect texture by grinding the avocado into the basalt.  You can get one at either Crate & Barrel (where I got mine as a wedding registry gift a few years back) or William Sonoma.

The guacamole was the perfect Superbowl dish as we watched the Saints bring the Lombardi Trophy to the City of New Orleans.  Here's how I make my signature guacamole:

2 medium sized avocados
1 tomato, diced with the seeds removed
1/4 of a small to medium sized onion, diced
2 T lime juice
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (this is not an especially spicy guacamole, if you prefer more heat, add more red pepper flakes or use cayenne pepper)

First, mash and grind the avocados using the texture of the molcajete.  Let the air bubbles in the volcanic rock do the work.

Dice the tomato and onion and mix both of those ingredients in the mix.  The season with salt and pepper, and add the red pepper flakes or cayenne pepper to add the desired heat.  Finally, my secret ingredient here, cumin, is actually an Indian spice - I always add about half a teaspoon.  This may sound strange with guacamole, but let me assure you that it tastes amazing and is well worth trying out.  I prefer my guacamole without cilantro (although I love cilantro in salsa).

Enjoy, for the next big game.  For Eric's chicken fajitas with guacamole, click here.  If you are reveling in the Saints victory and are ready for Mardi Gras to start early this year, check out my recipe for New Orleans beignets (creole doughnuts), or Matt's recipe for Cajun Jambalaya.

Sasha's Kitchen: The Use Of A Molcajete In Preparing Guacamole

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos

Introduction to My Kitchen

Hi from Seattle! I was all set to write my recipe for today, but as I thought about it I realized my cooking style needs a bit of an introduction:

I'm a lazy cook. I don’t want to plan my grocery shopping way ahead so that I can follow a recipe, and I don’t want to wash a mountain of bowls and measuring implements when I’m done.

I have a diverse background of food influences and I like trying new foods. My refrigerator door is full of Asian condiments, I have over 20 types of sweetener, and I’ll buy unfamiliar items because they sound interesting. But a home kitchen can only stock so much, and many items only stay fresh for so long, so I don’t count on having on hand standard recipe items like parsley and chicken breast.

I love understanding how techniques and ingredients work and what they do for a dish--what to put together and how to do it. In most cases I’m happier doing something on my own than following a recipe.

What this all adds up to is that my cooking tends to be thrown together based on what I have and what I feel like eating. Sometimes what I make works and sometimes it doesn’t, and I hope that as I develop my cooking sense, I’ll make fewer mistakes and more great meals! Today's post is one experiment that worked.

Oxtail Tacos

This afternoon I took the bus to Pike Place Market, one of my favorite places to find unexpected ingredients, and spent several hours wandering through the maze of little shops. By the time my feet hurt, my bag was full of chocolate bars, fresh corn tortillas, little bags of ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, a palmier, a jar of brined lemons, Turkish delight, ground chipotle and pasilla peppers, piloncillo, and a new-to-me hot sauce.

When I got home I was starving, and I figured I should start in on the huge stack of tortillas. I decided to combine them with the oxtails I’d been thawing in the fridge, and while I’d never cooked oxtails before, I had been told to go with braising, which was also perfect for chilly late fall. I know relatively little about Mexican cooking and even less about Latin America’s wide variety of peppers, so the pasilla was also an experiment. As usual, I put what I had on hand into the braising liquid. The combination and cooking method might not be authentic, but I chose flavors that would complement each other and taste good reduced into a rich, savory sauce.

Here’s the basic recipe; measurements are guesstimates.

Ingredients

3 oxtails

1 leek, cut into big chunks

2 or 3 cloves garlic, sliced

1/4 c rice vinegar

1 T ground pasilla pepper

1 T ground chipotle pepper

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. salt

Corn tortillas

Directions

1. Stand oxtails on their ends in a medium-sized pot/saucepan with a lid and put all other ingredients except tortillas into the spaces around them.
2. Pour water into pot until it reaches halfway up the sides of the oxtails.
3. Place on heat and bring to boil, then turn heat down to low and cover pot.
4. Come back every so often to make sure water hasn’t all boiled out and to turn the oxtails over once or twice during cooking.
5. After two or three hours (this recipe involves minimal work but a lot of waiting), the meat should be tender enough that you can push it off the bones into the reduced liquid.
6. Spoon chunks of meat into tortilla. Dip each bite into a vinegary, spicy hot sauce to cut the richness and add heat. So good.

 Serves two.

Notes on the Ingredients

• Vinegar: There wasn’t enough flavor initially, so, inspired by adobo, I added the vinegar. I’m sure it would be fine with a different type of vinegar or without any at all, but I wanted tang without extra flavors, and rice vinegar was the mildest I had in my pantry.
• Pepper: At first I used only the pasilla, but I found it too mild so I added the chipotle for heat and smokiness. I’m sure other pepper varieties or Latin-American-inspired spices would taste great, just different.
• Leeks: I had leeks on hand, but onions would probably serve just as well.
• Cinnamon: I had just bought the cinnamon and remembered it from other Mexican dishes so I thought I’d throw it in, though I can’t tell if the amount I used made any difference.
• Corn tortillas: I love flour tortillas, but I suspect they’d be a bit bland and doughy next to the deeply flavored oxtails. Also, I understand that there are several ways to soften tortillas, and I went with steaming because it was convenient. We ate our tacos over the still-simmering pot of oxtails, so I softened each tortilla one at a time by laying it over the little tripod of oxtail bones and covering the pot. Depending how much steam there was, the tortilla was tender but not yet gummy after anywhere between 30 seconds and a couple minutes. (This is also why there are no photos of the finished, plated dish--there were no plates!)

Notes on the Final Result:

• The oxtails turned out great. The braising liquid reduced into an incredibly rich and savory sauce for the chunks of meat.
• The best surprise was that the leeks totally collapsed into the richness of the sauce. I’ve never been a huge fan of leeks, but each time I picked one out of the sauce it felt like a treat.
• The fat and long simmer really tamed the heat of the pepper, so the final product was way less spicy than when I tasted it earlier in the cooking process.
• This recipe serves two, but it doesn’t make a lot of meat. Because it’s so rich you only need a couple tablespoons of meat per tortilla.

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos