laura k – Page 27 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Christmas Dinner with Eunice: Cornish Game Hens, Cream-braised Brussel Sprouts, and Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Cream-braised brussels are goooood

Ah, the orphan Christmas dinner: what happens when you live 3000+ miles away from your family. This year, Eunice are decided to have Christmas dinner together since we were both going to be stranded in Boston while everyone else went away, and I spent weeks and weeks pondering how to cook a fancy Christmas dinner for two. When Will suggested cornish game hens, it made perfect sense. Then I saw this recipe from Orangette for brussel sprouts, and found out Eunice loves mashed potatoes as much as I do, and the meal was rounded out.

Cream-braised brussel sprouts seems a little over the top, I know. I mean, wasn’t bacon bad enough? But they just sounded so incredible I had to try them. Besides, after Christmas I’m going to have to halve my intake of butter and cream, or risk doubling my arse size, so why not go out with a bang?

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Orange Cocoa Apple Bread

appley apple bread

Perhaps it is not particularly wise of me to experiment with bread baking before my first cup of coffee, but I’m just a wild risk taker. Danger girl, that’s me. Of course, my non-coffee-wakened mind just misread the butter wrapper and thought that 1/3 of a cup of butter was marked as the equivalent of a little more than a tablespoon. There I am, trying to cream together a tablespoon of butter with a cup of sugar, wondering how on earth it’s going to be creamy, when it finally occurs to me that 1/3 of a cup of butter should look like a lot more than that.

After the apple pie making on Friday, I had about a cup left of pie filling, and decided to make some kind of apple bread this morning. Not having an apple bread recipe, I decided to pretty much make something up, after reading a few recipes online. This could be disastrous, people.

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Fake Christmas Eve, continued: Apple Tarts with Brandy Caramel Pecan Sauce

Apple Tartlets and Cookies

The inspiration: the The Blue Owl Levee-High pie. Obviously, a 13-pound pie would be a little ridiculous, but the idea of using a caramel sauce instead of fucking around with pie crust seemed ideal for an already busy cooking day. And the idea to miniaturize them pretty much came in the store, when I saw the mini graham cracker crusts: Who doesn’t like small desserts?

Obviously the apple pie filling was crazy easy, but the topping was a little more complicated than I bargained for. All of the sugar-boiling madness was worth it, though–they were excellent.

Continue reading Fake Christmas Eve, continued: Apple Tarts with Brandy Caramel Pecan Sauce

Fake Christmas Eve! Beer Cheese Soup and Good Times

Beer Cheese Soup

I look forward to Beer Cheese Soup all year. My family has been eating Beer Cheese Soup on Christmas Eve as long as I can remember, and it is a deceptively delicious concoction. By deceptively, I mean that when I tell people about Beer Cheese Soup, they look at me like I might be a little bit crazy, but when they taste it, they realize it is like god in soup form. By deceptively I also mean that, visually, it’s not the most impressive soup in the world. It was maddeningly difficult to get a good picture of The Soup. By deceptively I ALSO mean that it is very, very easy.

I probably could eat Beer Cheese Soup all year round. I’m not normally much of a traditionalist (or maybe I am and I just don’t know it yet), but for some reason, this soup feels like Christmas to me, and I can’t have it any other time of year. This means that I very infrequently get to share it with other people, since, you know, I’m usually with my family, who already understand the magic that is this soup.

This year, I decided to buck tradition, at least a little bit, and celebrate Christmas Eve two nights early, with all my Boston friends, before they leave to enjoy (or insert a more appropriate word here) their own family traditions. And let me tell you, everyone in that room loved this soup, and good times were most certainly had.

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Friday Cookies: Breaking the Rules Like Crazy

Russian Teacake

I wasn’t even sure that I was going to do cookies today. Especially when I saw that Slashfood’s Cookies of the Week were vanilla cut-out cookies. I don’t like cut-out cookies. I don’t have cookie cutters. I don’t like icing them, and decorating them. Call me Scrooge if you will. Knowing that I had so much other stuff to do, and that I didn’t like those cookies anyway, almost made it too easy for me to cop out on cookies altogether.

But then I remembered Russian Teacakes. These are my favorite Christmas cookies. They are a family tradition, and considering that I was already going the family tradition route tonight with the dinner party, I knew I would have to make them. The good news is that they’re very easy.

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No food ’til Friday?

There hasn’t been a ton of food cooking happening in my kitchen this week, due to the somehow suddenly extreme stress of Christmas-related things. How did it get stressful? I don’t know! But the stove has been silent…well, except for Crystal’s Extreme Truffle Making. (I wanted to document tnat process, but alas, I mostly missed it. However our kitchen had a heavenly chocolate smell for awhile.)

But don’t fear because tomorrow will be the Pseudo-Christmas Eve dinner extravaganza. Well, extravaganza might be laying it on a bit thick, but there will be food, yet again. I’ll be making up my family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a few nights early for friends who will be leaving town to visit their own families and whatnot.

What is this traditional Christmas Eve dinner, you ask? That would be the near-infamous Beer Cheese Soup, with summer sausage, lovely cheese, crispy bread, perhaps some salad, and for dessert? Well, that I haven’t decided yet. I guess you’ll just have to wait until Friday…

Menu for Hope

This year my parents refused to tell me what they wanted for Christmas. “Just donate to a charity,” my mom suggested, and I scoffed at the computer (we pretty much only communicate through email). No packages to open? No pretty shiny baubles to send through the mails? Charity? Bah.

Of course, my first thought was to donate to Planned Parenthood, as the raging pro-choice feminist that I am, but somehow I felt that donating in my parents’ name to Planned Parenthood just wouldn’t give the right message.

Then, I remembered the food bloggers’ charity: A Menu for Hope, and I want to tell all of you about it, too. This year, A Menu for Hope is raising money for the UN World Food Programme, and so far have raised over $36,000, which is pretty freaking amazing.

You can donate in increments of $10, and each $10 also gets you a raffle ticket in a drawing for all kinds of interesting food-related prizes.

The donation window closes this Friday, so get to it while you can and give some money to a worthy cause.

Potato Cauliflower Gratin with Roasted Red Pepper Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Some Chicken and Some Cheese

I have been plotting a gratin for weeks now, and finally found the time to put it together. Not that it was particularly time consuming, but it’s been a busy month. Actually, it was much easier than I would have thought and deliciously heart-attack inducing. I basically cobbled together a Cauliflower Gratin recipe from Ina Garten, and a few different Potato Gratin recipes from Epicurious, to put together this Gruyere-filled melty treat. It’s almost entirely Ina Garten’s recipe, but with added fat. Because I’m crazy like that.

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Bacon and Egg pie

Bacon and Egg Pie

Vegetarian Times featured this cool egg recipe in their January 2007 issue (which I can’t get online yet) and I immediately wanted to try it. Of course, I had to add bacon, thus rendering it inedible for actual vegetarians, but whatever.

Their version involved using tiny ramekins, and breaking an egg, unscrambled, into each ramekin, but Mr. X only has one big ramekin, so I had to improvise a bit. Plus, I didn’t have the recipe with me, so I had to reconstruct it from memory. In future, I think there are a few small changes I would make, but otherwise this was totally easy and awesome. I cooked it up with some sliced fingerling potatoes for a twist on a traditional Sunday morning breakfast.

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Monday: Cursed for Cookies?, or Laura tries to make Cranberry Cheddar Biscuity Cookies

Cranberry Cheddar Biscuity cookies

I know Monday isn’t cookie day, but I thought I could get away with it, because these aren’t really cookies, exactly, technically. They seemed more like a cross between biscuits and shortbread. Lex Culinaria posted them back in November, and they looked inspired. And delicious. But I think I may have done something wrong…

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