à la keittiö !

Recipes from Chez Santanen

Browsing à la keittiö ! blog archives for September, 2010.

Daring Cooks: Pear and Apple Butter

The Sep­tem­ber 2010 Dar­ing Cooks’ chal­lenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to chal­lenge The Dar­ing Cooks to learn about food preser­va­tion, mainly in the form of can­ning and freez­ing. He chal­lenged every­one to make a recipe and pre­serve it. John’s source for food preser­va­tion infor­ma­tion was from The National Cen­ter for Home Food Preservation.

This was my first month as a Dar­ing Cook­ing, and I have to say that I am glad I joined. The pur­pose of me finally bit­ing the bul­let and join­ing the masses of other food blog­ging cooks to the Dar­ing Kitchen was to be inspired to cook things I wouldn’t nor­mally think to make. Apple but­ter is def­i­nitely one of those things.

Where I grew up, we didn’t have apples grow­ing around us. It doesn’t really get cold enough in Louisiana for those sweet domes­ti­cated vari­eties to grow, and if you’ve ever tasted a crab-apple, well … No amount of sugar (in my opin­ion) can help those tart lit­tle bug­gers out. So, to say the least, I didn’t expe­ri­ence much apple but­ter dur­ing my childhood.

But this expe­ri­ence was a good one. I was sur­prised to find out just how easy water bath can­ning really is and I am now look­ing for­ward to next year’s har­vest­ing of my gar­den to give can­ning a go.

For my apple but­ter, I decided to change things up a lit­tle bit from the orig­i­nal recipe given. The great thing about apple but­ter, how­ever, is that it is FLEXIBLE. Play with it. Have fun. For Mon­sieur B and me, I decided to use half Granny Smith apples and half Bartlett pears, sweet­en­ing the but­ter with agave nec­tar and honey instead of sugar, and using car­damom and gin­ger as my pri­mary spices with only a mere touch of cin­na­mon. It was a hit, and my co-workers were very sad that I didn’t have enough jars to give away.

This was some­thing that brought back some child­hood mem­o­ries for Mon­sieur B, who grew up in the North­east US. It was good enough that I think pear and apple but­ter may have to become a yearly tra­di­tion for us.

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14 September 2010 | Condiments, Desserts | No Comments |

The Famous Beer Bread

Years back, I dated a bloke who I nick­named “The Yan­kee”. This nick­name stuck so well that friends and fam­ily often for­got his real name and I would have to say, “You know, THE YANKEE.” And they would reply, “Oh, oh yeah!” He took it all in stride though, because let’s face it — he was and still is a Yan­kee. He may be a Yan­kee that enjoys good food (you have to love good food if you move to Louisiana and want to get any­where with the locals), but he’s still a Yan­kee nonetheless.

More often than not, he would call the meals I cooked “weird” or “exotic” — never bad, per se, but not exactly what he would order if he went out to a restau­rant. Once I recall mak­ing the French soupe à l’ail, or gar­lic soup, and I thought he was going to die. The Yan­kee didn’t like such a strong gar­lic flavour, and always picked on me for the fact that I put gar­lic into just about EVERYTHING I made. If my gar­lic press was dirty, I wasn’t cook­ing! Hon­estly, though, he could live off of mac and cheese for the rest of his days if his waist­line could han­dle it. Mac and cheese … and beer bread.

Beer bread in our house became a bar­gain­ing tool. If I wanted some­thing out of him, beer bread was my cur­rency of choice. And it never failed me. While it’s a sim­ple recipe, it’s once I held closely guarded — I couldn’t just give my lever­age away, willy-nilly!

But that was sev­eral years ago, and we’ve both moved on in our lives. He’s now mar­ried to a local girl (in Louisiana) and I’ve hopped my way north­ward (and hope to go even fur­ther still until I find a place that sings to my heart) and snagged a wanderlust-stricken soul just like myself along the way. And he loves gar­lic prob­a­bly even more than I do.

So, in mem­ory of those good times and the fact I no longer need edi­ble cur­rency against The Yan­kee, I’m shar­ing this recipe today. It’s mostly for him — I’ve been say­ing I’d give it to him for some time now so that his wife could make it for him, but I’ve had trou­ble let­ting go. The first step, how­ever, is always the hardest!

Now, before you just leap on in and make this sim­ple, deli­cious, hearty bread, I’m going to give you a few words of advice. The first is: SIFT YOUR FLOUR! I don’t care if that bag says it’s “pre-sifted”, SIFT IT! Not sift­ing the flour will yield you a beer bread log, not a beer bread loaf.

The sec­ond word of advice is to use a beer you like. The same actu­ally applies when­ever you cook with wine. Play with it, exper­i­ment. When I made this for The Yan­kee, I almost always used Killian’s Irish Red, since that was his favourite, and it was good. He loved it. But once I used Mich­e­lob Honey Lager and I loved it. Again, USE A BEER YOU LOVE. Don’t just go buy­ing that cheap swill that no sane per­son would touch — buy some­thing good, some­thing you’ll enjoy drink­ing while you have a slice of hot bread lath­ered in butter.

Another vari­a­tion I like to some­times do (that is not included in the recipe itself) is to mix in some honey with the melted but­ter that you pour on the top. Some­times I also mix honey into the actual bread. But then again, I like sweet things and I love the taste of honey. This is entirely an optional choice.

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do, and I hope it becomes a favourite in your homes like it was in mine back when I was with The Yan­kee. (For the record, I have no edi­ble cur­rency with Mon­sieur B, as he will eat just about any­thing I cook and loves all of it. This is both a bless­ing and a curse.)

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9 September 2010 | Bread | No Comments |