Sweet Potato Fries

Way simple, but also very good.

Sweet Potato Fries

2 large sweet potatoes
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 tbsp nutmeg
1/2 tbsp paprika

Preheat your oven to 425F.

Wash and slice the potatoes into fries, about 1/2 inch on each side. Mix all ingredients together in a gallon plastic bag, tossing well to coat the potatoes.

Cover a baking sheet with tin foil (you may need two sheets depending on the size of the potatoes). Spread the fries on the baking sheet in a single layer. Cook for 30 minutes, turning every 10 min so they brown evenly. Serve immediately.

Servings: 4

Gobs

Gobs are a chocolate cookie that my grandmother usually makes and freezes around Christmas time. They're one of my favorite cookies in the whole world: a thin white layer of crispy, sugary icing sandwiched between two soft chocolate cookies. Sometimes I eat them layer by layer: gnawing the cookies off until only the layer of icing remains. Sometimes I just eat them like a normal person. when I'm really feeling decadent, I dip them in hot cocoa. Any way I've tasted them, they're reliably fantastic, and sure to please family members of all ages.

The other amazing property of these cookies is that they freeze amazingly well, and can be kept for several months that way. Give them fifteen minutes or so to unfreeze, and you can have amazing chocolaty goodness for quite a while. We usually eat them all before the freezing time is a consideration, though! I've never seen a batch last for longer than a week. Usually if we're freezing them, we've made two or three batches at a time. Their name is appropriate because once you've tasted one, you just want gobs and gobs!

Gobs

2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (regular, not dutch process)
2 tsp salt
1 cup soured milk (Yes, you read that right. Leave a cup of regular milk out at room temperature for an hour or so.)
2 tsp baking soda
Vanilla icing (you can use store-bought, but I prefer to make my own with a simple vanilla icing recipe)

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Combine the sugar, butter, and beaten eggs in a large mixing bowl and mix thoroughly. Stir the flour, cocoa, and salt together in a smaller bowl, then add the dry ingredients to the wet ones in the large bowl, alternating with the sour milk. Add the baking soda to the dough, then mix until everything is combined.

Drop spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet (try to get them all a similar size, since you'll be making sandwiches) and bake for 10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack, then form sandwiches by spreading a thin layer of icing between two cookies.

Martha Washingtons

After a banner month of October I was a BAD food blogger. I posted nothing in November. I am ashamed.

But in December, I will redeem myself. This is the first of several posts worth of Christmas traditions. For many families, Christmas food means fruit cakes. For mine, it mean cookies and candies galore. Chocolate sandwich cookies, date-nut cookies, peppermint cookies shaped like swirls and candy canes, sugar cookies powdered snowy white. Candies covered in chocolate, candies covered in chocolate and powdered suger, truffles, nut brittles. Christmas around here means a veritable landslide of sugar.

These little candies are one of our most treasured traditions. On the outside, they look like glossy chocolate bon-bons, about the size and shape of truffles. On the inside, they're velvetty nougat, chock full of pecans. Absolutely delicious, from my family to yours.

Martha Washington Candy

2 boxes confectioners sugar
1 stick butter
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 cups chopped pecans
1 package (1/2 lb) bitter chocolate squares
1 block paraffin
toothpicks

Cream the sugar, butter, condensed milk, and vanilla together in a mixer. Add the nuts, and let that get mixed until homogenous. Roll the nougat mixture into balls the size of walnuts (or a little smaller). Use extra powdered sugar to dip your hands in so that it doesn't stick to your palms as you roll.

Melt the chocolate and paraffin together in a double boiler over low heat, stirring to mix. Dip the nougat balls into this mixture, one at a time, by sticking a toothpick in the top of the ball and swirling it around in the chocolate. Deposit the coated balls on a sheet of waxed paper to cool and harden, and refrigerate after they've set for an hour or so. These stay fresh for several weeks in a fridge, so make them ahead of time to eat throughout the holiday.

Servings: 75-100 pieces of candy

Pumpkin Cheesecake

I am a cheesecake fiend. I love it dearly, in (almost) all its varieties. I will eat cheesecake for breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, twosies, afternoon tea, dinner, and as a midnight snack.

Strangely, for someone so obsessed with cheesecake, I'd never tried to make my own until a few days ago. This one was made for a party, and it disappeared so quickly that I was reminded once again of the singular magic of a well-made cheesecake: it vanishes like no other dessert you'll ever meet.

Anyway, I think that for a first effort at cheesecake, this was a more than respectable effort. I'll probably come back to it at Thanksgiving, for an alternative to (or, ooh, alongside) pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

For the crust:

3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs, crushed
3/4 cup ginger snap crumbs, crushed
5 tbsp butter, melted

For the filling:

1 cup sugar
3 (8 oz) packages of softened cream cheese (Avoid the low fat stuff. It's cheesecake; it's a dessert. You're eating it for the taste, not for the low calorie count. So ditch the diet and get the stuff that tastes good)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp whiskey or bourbon
1 cup canned pumpkin (NOT sweetened, NOT spiced, just regular pumpkin with no additives)
3 eggs
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ground ginger

Begin by preheating the oven to 350F.

Make the crust by combining the graham cracker and ginger snap crumbs with the melted butter in a medium bowl. Stir them until they're all coated with the butter, in crumbly little bits. Locate the springform pan or pie dish that you're using to bake the cheesecake in. The springform is optimal in theory, but I don't own one, so I used a deep pie dish, which turned out fine. Press the crumbs evenly into your dish. They shouldn't reach all the way up the sides, this is to be expected. Aim for a crust that ends 2/3 of the way up the sides of your dish. Bake the crust in the oven for 5 minutes, then remove it and set aside until the filling is ready.

In a large mixing bowl combine the cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, and whiskey, and beat them with an electric mixer until smooth. Add the pumpkin, the eggs, and all the spices, and continue beating. This is the important part: turn the mixer up to its second or third highest setting, the one for cake icing or some similarly thick substance. Let it run on this high setting for 2 full minutes. Why? Because this inflates the eggs and will make your cheesecake light and fluffy. Once you've properly mixed your filling, pour it immediately into the pan with the crust and get the whole thing into the oven as quickly and gently as possible (you don't want to agitate out the air bubbles).

Bake for 60-70 minutes. The key to proper cheesecake is to reove it from the oven BEFORE the center is completely set. There should still be a reasonable jiggle to the middle of the cheesecake when you remove it from the oven, though the sides should be set. This is key to the texture. Let your cheesecake sit out to cool to room temperature, then refridgerate it for at least 4 hours before serving. Overnight is best, but if you're like me you don't plan that far ahead.

Serve alone, or use a pint of fresh whipping cream and some sugar to make homemade whipped cream to put on top. Don't bother with the storebought stuff (the texture is all wrong, and the taste always seemed faintly chemical to me), but if you're willing to put in three minutes of elbow grease, the silky-heavy texture of the homemade stuff is a good complement to the cheesecake.

Servings: 8-10

Cabbage Soup

I'm catching up on stuff I've made over the past week or so, hence the number of recipe posts tonight.

I still have half a pot of this soup in the fridge, because it makes a big pot of soup. And I used to hate cabbage, so you'd think I wouldn't be too thrilled at the idea of a giant pot of cabbage soup in my fridge. But I couldn't be happier. I think cabbage soup has had a rough time of it. Some evil diet company seized on the idea way back when, and ever since people have associated it with self-torture, when in reality it's anything but. Cabbage soup originally started out as a way to make the tough cabbage stems into something tender and wonderful, and it still suits that purpose remarkably well.

In a way, this is one of my 'trash' soups: made of a little of this and a little of that, just whatever I had lying around in the fridge when I went to make soup. But in other ways, it's a very converted effort at a particular purpose. Because I don't ordinarily have cabbage sitting around my my fridge (remember how I said I hated it?). I had to buy cabbage especially for this soup, and I was glad I did. It's a very green soup, very fresh, and perfect for fall. It's warm and comforting, without being heavy or tough to digest. Best of all, it turned cabbage from something slimy and gross into something delicate and sweet, something that practically melts on your tongue and dances beautifully with the peppery undertone in the broth here. I love cabbage like this, and that's something I never thought I'd say.

Cabbage Soup

1 medium or large napa cabbage, washed
4 medium sized leeks, washed
1 bunch celery
1 large sweet onion (Videlia or mayan sweet)
1 1/2 tbsp unsalted butter
80 oz chicken stock or chicken broth
1 1/2 tbsp Better Than Boullion
Pepper
Salt

Begin by chopping the onion and adding it to a very large soup pot, along with the butter. Turn the pot on over medium heat, and let the butter melt and begin to caramelize the onion. While this is happening, chop your leeks. When the onion achieves a light brown color and smells sweet and tender, add the leeks and stir to coat them in the butter. Let the leeks soften and wilt while you chop the celery. Add the celery one stem at a time as you get it chopped, and let it be softening as you go.

Once the celery is all chopped and has had a chance to soften just a little with the other veggies, add your broth or stock to the pot. Chop your cabbage into quarters, then chop each quarter into thin ribbons and add these to the soup. Finish by adding the Better Than Boullion, and a generous dash of pepper. Tasting the soup is the best guide to how much pepper, but I tend to go heavy on this, because the pepper amps up the vegetable-y flavours in the soup and adds pizzazz. Bring the whole pot to a boil (it's probably a very full pot after all this, so keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't bubble over), then cover it, turn it down to a simmer, and let it cook for a hour or so. Once the cabbage is melting-soft and the flavours have had a chance to meld and get to know each other, dish it out into serving bowls and eat.

Servings: 10-12, maybe more

Hash Browns

I had these for supper tonight.

Sometimes I just want starch. I posted my easy potato chip recipe when I was on one of these starch binges, and now I'm posting one of my other favorite things to do to an innocent potato. I just can't leave well enough alone.

The thing about hash browns is that they're addictive. They're also kind of ubiquitous: appropriate for breakfast, lunch, supper, or a midnight snack. They go well with cheese, sour cream, even yogurt. Sometime I'll crack an egg on top of them as they finish cooking, to better imitate the throw-it-all-together-and-fry aesthetic of the greasy spoon diners of my youth. Because that's what hash browns are, at their heart: they're a throwback to the days when I was very little, and my dad would take me to breakfast bars run by ancient old short-order cooks who knew all the customers' names by heart, and who knew what you were ordering before you'd sat down at your regular stool. They remind me of giant flat-top griddles with a coffee-pot that lived on one corner of them, a row of hamburger molds across the back for shaping the fried eggs, and a trough across the front for all the scraps and scrapings, so someone could take them home to their pigs at the end of the morning shift.

Hash browns are meant to be greasy, crispy, and satisfying, and these are. Almost. I generally try not to murder my arteries, so I cut out most of the grease by using non-stick pans. They aren't made on a flat-top griddle, because all I've got it my home stove, but they are crispy and satisfying. I'm no ancient short-order cook, so I haven't quite mastered the authentic je ne sais quoi that comes with wielding a spatula for fifty years in front of one of those griddles. But they're still damn good, and they're fast comfort food for me.

Hash Browns

1 russett potato
1/2 tsp olive oil
Cheddar cheese
Salt
Pepper
Optional: Eggs for frying

Use the food processor to grate the potato. Take the potato-bits, and press them between two layers of paper towels to dry them out a bit. If your towels are soaked and the potato still seems really wet, you may want to repeat this process a few times.

Once you've dried your potato appropriately, set a large saute pan over a burner on medium high. Add the potato gratings in piles (I usually do four or five medium-sized piles per potato). Depending on the size of your pan, you may not be able to do the whole thing at once: the goal is to keep the piles pretty well separate from each other, so that they don't steam each other as they cook. Use a spatula to smoosh the piles flat, into hash brown shaped pancakes. Salt these to taste. Let them cook for about two minutes, then add the olive oil and swirl the pan to get it under all the hash browns. Let the hash browns continue to cook, smushing them to the pan occasionally to help them sear, until the pan-side of the hash browns is a deep golden color. By this time you should be able to flip them without them falling apart, so flip them each, and cook the other side in the same manner until it too is deep crispy brown.

Remove the hash browns to a plate, and grate cheddar cheese on top of them to finish them off.

Alternate way to finish off hash browns: once you've completely crisped both sides of your hash brown, crack an egg over the top of it and fry the egg on and into the hash brown. You get an egg that's really satisfyingly crunchy, and if you add cheese on top of the egg, it's kind of the perfect breakfast all in one little pile.

Servings: 1-2, depending mostly on the size of your potato

Honey Oatmeal Bread

Okay, before you do anything else, go check your yeast. Because if you, like me, tend to neglect the use-by date on yeast packages, you, like me, may get burned with flat bread. It turns out the two-year-old yeast doesn't rise, not at all. And so the first time I made this bread, it turned out to be, well, a brick.

But the second time (this time with fresh yeast) turned out very well indeed. And so here's the recipe. It produces a light, very-faintly-sweet loaf, with a crunchy crust and gorgeous soft crumb. Plus, like all homemade breads, it smells divine while it's cooking. That might be my favorite part of breadmaking: the smell. Sure, it takes a little elbow-grease for the kneading, but when your house smells like bread for the next three days, you tend to forget the effort involved. Just remember to check on the yeast before you start.

Honey Oatmeal Bread

2 cups boiling water
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup honey
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons salt
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast (I used the extra-active variety. If you use regular, double all the rising times I give here.)
4 cups bread flour plus extra for kneading

In a large mixing bowl, combine boiling water, oats, honey, butter and salt. Let stand for 15-20 minutes, then add the extra-active yeast. Add 2 cups of flour; mix well. Stir in the remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time, beating well after each addition. When the dough has pulled together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 20 minutes. If you're like me, the dough may still be sticky at the beginning of this kneading process. Just keep adding flour as you knead until it stops sticking to everything that touches it, and achieves a proper bread-dough texture. It'll get there eventually. My loaves took anywhere from an additional 1/2 cup of flour to 1 1/2 cups.

Spray cooking spray over a large bowl, place the dough in the bowl and cover it with a damp towel. Let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in volume. I used my oven for this purpose: use turn it on to as low as it will go, and turn it off again once it hits 150F or so. It will cool down a little, and this will give you a warm dark place for your dough to do its rising in peace. My dough took about 40 minutes for this first rise.

Deflate the dough and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Use your kitchen shears to cut the dough into two equal pieces and form loaves. Place the loaves into two lightly greased 9x5 inch loaf pans. Cover them with your damp towel, stick them back in your warm place, and let rise again until they once more double in volume. Mine took 20 minutes this second time. Toward the end of this rising, go ahead and preheat oven to 375F. Obviously, you have to remove the loaves from the oven if you were using it as a rising spot to do the preheating. It won't hurt them at all, just leave them covered with the towel until you're ready to cook them.

Once they've risen, bake the bread at 375F for about 25-30 minutes or until the top is golden brown and the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Remove loaves from pans and sit them on a wire rack to cool before attempting to cut them. I know they smell tempting when they're hot, but they're rather fragile before they cool, and you risk squishing them if you try to cut them too early, so resist for another 15 minutes or so to give them a chance to firm up a little first.

Servings: 2 loaves, or about 20 slices