Bog Heaven

Every turkey needs the perfect cranberry sauce, and this one did not disappoint.  If you're taking on the task of making the entire Thanksgiving meal, this is one dish you can make in advance.  In fact, it tastes better if you make it a couple days in advance because it allows all the flavors to really develop as they mix and meld together.

For each bag of cranberries, you'll want 1 cup of red wine and 1 cup of sugar.  We had 2 bags of cranberries, so we started with 2 cups of wine and 2 cups of sugar.  You can use any kind of wine you like.  If you want sweeter cranberries use a sweeter wine.  If you want to highlight the tartness, use something more tannic. We just happened to have some cranberry wine on hand, which really added a cranberry punch to our sauce.  Let it simmer and reduce on the stove until you end up with a thin syrup.

Once it's syrupy, add in your cranberries.  I like my cranberry sauce to still have some whole cranberries, while Justin likes them to really cook down, so we compromised.  We added about 3/4 of our cranberries to the sauce initially, and let them cook down.  Then we added the rest towards the end, just so they could soften, but still stay whole.  If you want them to all cook down, add them all at once.  If you want them to be more whole, just cook them less.

Give your berries a good toss in your syrup, and just let them sit on the stove and simmer away.  You'll start to hear them pop as they cook.  Then you'll want to add in a liberal amount of black pepper, and just a tiny dash of salt to help cut the sweetness, along with some chopped mint, and orange zest. Fresh herbs and a little citrus help balance the dish and make for a more complex flavor profile.

Once you have your desired consistency, you can pull it off the stove, and transfer it to your serving dish. Just remember to pull it out of the fridge about 30 minutes before you're ready to serve it, just to take the chill off it.  Garnish with a sprig of mint, and voila, a delicious side dish, fresh out of the bog.

Strawberry Shortcake

When it comes to desserts, I'm much more apt to choose a fruit-based dessert over some decadent chocolate delight.  For one, chocolate, especially rich, dark chocolate, makes me sneeze.  And I just prefer a lighter, less sweet dessert.  So what better way to use our quart of strawberries, than to make a strawberry shortcake?

It was perfect timing because Justin received an email from Food & Wine with their 20 top strawberry recipes, which included a shortcake recipe.  It came together pretty quickly, and in no time, we were chowing down on dessert.

Justin took care of the strawberries, slicing them in half, and macerating them with some sugar, orange zest, and grated ginger.  The orange and ginger were our added twists, and added some brightness to our strawberries.

As for the shortcakes, mix the cake flour, baking powder, and salt together.  Using your fingers (or a pastry blender if you have one), mix in the cold butter.  Once the butter is incorporated, add in your cream, and mix with a knife until the dough clumps together.

At this point, the recipe has you pat the dough into a round cake pan, but we decided to make individual little shortcakes.  Once you form them to your desired size, place them on a baking sheet, brush on a bit of cream, and sprinkle a little sugar on top.  Then just pop 'em in the oven at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, or until they're golden brown on top.

While your shortcakes are cooking, you can make your whipped cream.  In a bowl you'll need your cream, some vanilla, and some sugar.  If you want a good arm workout, you can whip it by hand, but we opted for the hand mixer.  In less than 5 minutes, we had some delicious, homemade whipped cream.

Once the shortcakes have cooled a bit, slice them in half horizontally, spoon on some strawberries and whipped cream, and top with your shortcake cap.  We also added a bit or orange zest to garnish.

It was so easy, and so delicious.  It's the perfect summer dessert!  The hardest part was waiting for the shortcakes to cool!

Cleaning Out the Fridge

With the holidays approaching and both of us heading out of town soon, we need to clear out the fridge and try to eat our remaining CSA goodies.  We haven't been cooking as much this past week between holiday parties, pop-up tacos (more to come on this soon), and birthday celebrations, so we have quite a bit of food to get through.  So I turned to my trusty friend, Gojee, to see what kinds of recipes he had to offer.

If you haven't heard me say it before, you'll hear it now...I LOVE this website.  You can type in what ingredients you have, things you don't like, things you crave, etc., and it will spit out a slideshow of recipes that meet your criteria.  The main veggies we need to use up are the kale and potatoes.  In those ingredients went into the "I Have" field, and out came 100 recipes.  Since we also have onion (white and green) from the CSA, and some eggs in the fridge, we settled on the Spansh tortilla with kale.

First things first...slice the potatoes.  Here's where I realized having a mandoline would really come in handy. But the box grater worked fine enough.  Once sliced, we layered them into the pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper, to get nice and crispy and brown.

While those were cooking, I sliced half of the white onion, and a few green onions.  We also deribbed the kale.  Is deribbed a word?  If not, it should be.  Once the potatoes were golden brown, we tossed in the onions to sweat them out a bit.  The kale followed shortly thereafter.

While that was all cooking, I beat the eggs...all 3 of them.  Yeah...here's where I should've checked how many eggs we had left before we started cooking.  Lesson learned.  Once the kale was wilted down, we dumped in our eggs, trying to distribute them throughout the big pan.  It only took a few minutes for them to cook up, and we were ready to eat.

To top it off, we threw a dollop of chipotle sour cream on top.  This was leftover from last week's sweet potato latkes.

And since I had a couple oranges, we decided to make a little orange crush cocktail.  I flexed my muscles a bit and squeezed the juice from the 2 oranges.

To that, we added some Aperol, vodka, and fresh mint.

If you like cocktails, and don't have stainless steel straws, you need to get some.  Thank you, Tiffany, for sending me some.  They get so icy cold in your drink, and just enhance your cocktail sipping experience.  Although we were lacking about 4 eggs, it was still a tasty, filling meal.