Soup's on

It's nice to have the month of October in the rear view mirror now.

Between all of the stuff happening at work and home, I confess that I've been eating like crap for the past several weeks - a lot of processed foods and fast foods. When you're feeling stressed and pressed for time, it's easy to fall back into bad habits.

I'm still not quite back into full cooking mode, but I'm definitely on the way.

What have I been cooking from scratch lately? Recipes that take advantage of cool season vegetables like squash, spinach, potatoes, peppers, carrots, leeks, mushrooms, fennel and apples.

Local MSP foodie Kathy's A Good Appetite blog has been bringing me back from the processed foods precipice lately.

I finally set my mini-peppers free from their fridge captivity, only to sacrifice them to the cooking altar (aka the new stove) in service to Kathy's Sausage and Peppers Pasta Recipe.


These Harmony Valley Farm minis had been in the fridge for two weeks but they were still good. I love that fall vegetables can be stored for longer periods!

I also recently prepared Kathy's Pasta with Bacon, Leeks and Mushrooms recipe from this past spring, using the leeks we received in our HVF CSA box. Ya gotta love any recipe that calls for both bacon and creme fraiche. This dish is rich and satisfying comfort food, with the bonus that the recipe is exceptionally quick to prepare.

Thanks for the excellent dinner ideas, Kathy!

And I made Food Network chef Giada De Laurentiis' Caramelized Pancetta and Fennel Salad that I blogged about this summer. I guess fennel isn't so bad.

Then we've been making soups, perfect for the cool, gray, drizzly days we've been experiencing here in Minnesota lately.

Looking for some soup ideas for the seasonal ingredients available now? These soups are all part of our regular meal rotation during fall & winter.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup (Cooking Light)
This recipe calls for butternut squash, leeks & Granny Smith apples, adorned with a spice mixture consisting of curry powder,cumin, red pepper and garnished with fresh cilantro. This is one of the first recipes that convinced me to like squash.

Carrot Soup with Ginger and Lemon (Epicurious)
Got loads of local carrots on hand? This recipe is a good way to use 'em up. I made this soup when we received both orange and purple carrots in our CSA box and used the purple carrots for garnish. The puree turned out fairly thick, so when I make it again, I'll probably thin it out with some broth.

Snowy Winter Lentil Stew (Edible Twin Cities)
I first blogged about this soup last spring, and started craving it again with the return of the cool temperatures. The recipe uses spinach, potatoes, and carrots, among other things.

Minnesota Chicken Wild Rice Soup (Green Your Plate)
An extremely simple recipe that you can throw together in the slow cooker and forget about, I've made this recipe in the past with fresh mushrooms, carrots, leeks, parsnips and celeraic. While you can certainly add in any extra seasonal items that you like, you should add extra liquid to compensate. The most recent time I made this recipe, I stuck exactly to the original directions and there was a better liquid to solids ratio.

It's the frosting, stupid!

Baking a cake from scratch can be pretty easy for the most part. But it's the frosting that will get you every time.

Some frosting recipes need to be prepared just so, otherwise they can fall flat on their faces, or flat on the cake as it were. Witness the Chocolate Frosting that I made for the recent birthday parties.

By this past weekend, I was completely sick of cake. But the issue of the Fluffy Chocolate Frosting That Wasn't kept nagging my brain and wouldn't leave. I thought I had pinpointed what was going wrong with the recipe and wanted to test my hypothesis.

And you can't make frosting without having something to put it on, right? So I made one last mini-cake on Friday since it was my daughter's official birthday that day.

In a search for more cake recipes for 6-inch diameter cake pans online, one person suggested that you can just halve a regular cake recipe, and that's enough for a 6 inch 2 layer cake. Could it be that easy? No complex math involved?

I set out to see if this was the case - whether 1 full cake recipe could be made into two mini-cakes. First, I measured how much batter there is in a full-size cake recipe; it turned out there was about 1 1/2 quarts in the recipe I prepared.

Then I took roughly half of the batter and divided it between two cake pans, which illustrated that you only need to fill the cake pans about 1/4 full for a 2 inch cake pan (this translates to about a 1/2 inch deep of cake batter).


I baked the first cake, let it cool for about 10 minutes, then baked the second cake. (I guess it's okay for the batter to sit around for a little while. It baked up fine.)

The cake layers turned out a little unevenly sized,

but I countered that by slicing the top off the bigger layer and using that layer for the cake bottom; slicing off the domed part left a nice flat surface on which to put the second layer.

Now, on to the frosting challenge. First, I sifted the powdered sugar.

This removes any lumps that have formed in the stored sugar and provides an even texture. The cookbook talked about the importance of this step and I can cofirm this; in the past when I've been too impatient with frosting recipes, I've just thrown in the sugar and the final frosting has turned out lumpy.

Then, the recipe called for "waking up" the cocoa powder by pouring boiling water over it. Supposedly, this releases a richer flavor from the cocoa. You stir the cocoa together with the water so that it forms a soft mass. Then you blend room-temperature butter into the moistened cocoa.

The potential problems with this method are two-fold. First, it's very easy to put too much water in, which can result in general runniness.

And the boiling water leaves the cocoa pretty hot for a while afterward. So if you put the butter in right away, it's just going to melt. And no amount of mixing afterward can make melted butter turn fluffy.

I think that I ran into both of these problems the first couple of times I made this frosting recipe and that's what turned it into a glaze rather than a fluffy consistency.

When I made it again on Friday, I was very careful about how much water I poured over the chocolate (WAKE UP COCOA!!!), and then I let it rest for a few minutes (shhh, little cocoa, go back to sleep) before I continued with the recipe.


These small changes were enough to turn the frosting corner. The finished frosting looked completely different than the other times - a thicker texture and lighter color.

FINALLY I had conquered this frosting. It only took me four attempts making the recipe to get it right.- Sigh-

Check out the photos of the finished cakes to see the difference a few tweaks can make. The frosting doesn't even look like the same recipe, but it is:

First attempt:

Last attempt:


Fluffy Chocolate Frosting
Adapted from the Chocolate Cake Mix Doctor

This recipe makes 1 1/2 cups, enough to frost a 2-layer 6 inch diameter mini-cake.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 T. boiling water
4 T. (1/2 stick) butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Pour the boiling water over the cocoa powder and stir it together to combine. Let the mixture sit for a couple of minutes to cool down, then add the butter and mix on low speed until it is combined (this takes less than a minute).

Then, add the powdered sugar and vanilla and mix on low speed for another minute so that the powdered sugar is incorporated into the mixture. Turn the speed up to medium and beat the frosting for a couple more minutes until the mixture lightens in color and turns fluffy. The longer you beat it, the lighter it will get.

***

Well, we had our cake and ate it too,
and that was enough for us to do.
The second cake went into the freezer,
so that I could be a future people pleaser,
And I was keeping it cool, keeping it cool...

Now that I know the tricks
to get my mini-cake fix
I'll get my kicks
taking licks
At other cake recipes, other cake recipes.

A piece of cake

With one party down and one to go, I was all charged up to bake again on Sunday morning.

First off was the white frosting for the cupcakes. The frosting I used on the cupcakes comes from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. In that cookbook, it's used for the Coconut Layer Cake (which, by the way, is completely decadent and delicious).

I used it for the cupcakes because this frosting is just gorgeous, with a satiny gloss and luscious curves. The perfect backdrop for Halloween-themed cupcakes -it's Casper gone uptown.

This frosting is best made and eaten the same day - it starts to break down after several hours. Still, while it's at its peak, it is a glorious, marshmallow-y confection.

White Frosting
From the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook


Ingredients:
3 egg whites
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 cup cold water
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 plus 1/8 tsp. cream of tartar

First, some notes on the eggs. This cookbook notes that eggs beat up better when at room temperature, so take them out of the fridge about an hour before making the recipe.

For me, simpler is better when it comes to tools for baking. You can buy an egg separator gadget, but really, the easiest thing is to break the egg and let the whites run through your fingers into the mixing bowl. Take care not to let the yolk break at all.

Combine the egg whites and vanilla in your mixing bowl and let them sit while you prepare a sugar mixture on the stovetop.

In a saucepan, stir together the sugar, water and cream of tartar

and heat on a medium-high setting until it comes to a rolling boil (the liquid will turn from opaque to translucent at this point); remove it immediately from the heat.


Beat the egg whites and vanilla with a mixer on a medium-high setting until foamy, about 1 minute. Then, gradually pour in the sugar mixture in a thin, steady stream while continuing to beat the egg whites.

Once you've added all of the sugar liquid, continue beating the mixture on medium-high

until stiff peaks form but the frosting still appears moist and shiny (this'll take about 5 minutes)

Frost your cake or cupcakes immediately.


Now for a few Halloween sprinkles to see what it'll look like when the kids decorate them at the party. Nice! That'll do.


After the cupcakes were frosted, I set about making the mini-cakes for each of the kids (at the party, these were for the kids to blow out candles, then the parents ate the cakes, while the kids ate the cupcakes {lest you think I let them each eat a whole cake by themselves :) } ).

For the kids cakes, I baked the Baby Cakes recipe which appears in the cookbook, Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from Celebrated Bakers. This is a two-layer cake baked in 6 inch cake pans. You can find 6 inch pans at specialty cooking stores or online.

I love this recipe, because the size is so cute, plus it's nice for serving a small number of people, or small people, or both.

I wish I could find more recipes tailored specifically for this size of cake, because it's perfect to accompany a family meal or intimate dinner party. Alas, this is the only one I've found. When I've wanted other flavors, I've resorted to using box mixes and just guess how much to fill the pan, with sometimes freakish results as seen in my previous post.

Oh, I know I could probably scale down scratch recipes to fit these pans, but that would require using math, wouldn't it?

Anyway, on to the recipe:

Baby Cakes
A Flo Braker recipe from Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from Celebrated Bakers


Ingredients:
1 cup cake flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks) at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with the oven rack in the lower third of the oven, and butter and flour the cake pans. Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt.

Cream the butter with a mixer on medium speed until it's soft and creamy. Add the sugar and beat until fluffy. Then, beat in the eggs one by one. Add the vanilla, then shift the speed to low and add the dry ingredients, mixing until blended.

Divide the batter among the two cake pans and bake for about 30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in comes out clean. Let cool for about 10 minutes in the pan, then remove from pans and cook completely on a wire rack. Frost when cool.

***

I made the Fluffy Chocolate Frosting recipe yet again from the Chocolate Cake Mix Doctor cookbook, this time convinced that using the stand mixer with its oomph-atic power would be just the trick to make the frosting fluffy.

What's that saying about insanity? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Well, I mixed...

and mixed....

and still it was no fluffier than the previous day. In fact, it was worse. Very, very runny.

Screw it, it will have to do.

And it did do; it was fine, along with the cupcakes.

Because, really, in the end, who cares about baking perfection? All you need is to please the ones you love.

My mixer goes to 11

I am sooooooo done with cake.

I mentioned earlier that both of my kids' birthdays fall during October; well, they're only 9 days apart, right at the end of the month.

This last part of the month is like my version of Super Bowl week, only times two. There's official birthday number one, then a family birthday party (where we also celebrate my niece's October birthday), then a kids birthday party, then the official birthday number two. Then Halloween. It's all enough to drive a person batty, or into a sugar-induced coma, or both.

The seismic birthday activity peaked this past weekend, with two parties scheduled, one with family on Saturday and one with kids on Sunday.

For these two birthday extravaganzas, over the course of the weekend, I baked a total of 5 two-layer mini-cakes and 2 dozen cupcakes. Yes, why not dive right in from non-cooking to full-throttle cooking? It's the way of Amy.

Why did I choose to bake the cakes myself rather than buy them? It's a question my husband tactfully posed to me and one that I also tend to ask myself midway through the process each year (as in, what the hell was I thinking?).

But then, the next year, the mental slate is wiped clean and I rationalize it to myself saying, well, I like to bake. They're easy to make. They're cheaper than buying cakes from the store. And, since the kids birthdays are so close together, they inevitably share parties. The least I can do is to give them each their own cake, right? Riiiight.

To preserve my stamina and sanity, I had to prepare these in stages.

• On Friday, I made the three cakes for Saturday's family party - two devils food cakes and one yellow cake.
• On Saturday, I frosted the three cakes, and baked the cupcakes for Sunday's kid party.
• On Sunday, I frosted the cupcakes, baked two more cakes and frosted them too.
  

In the process, I went through four cake mixes, over a bottle of vanilla, a bag and a half of powdered sugar and over two cups of cocoa powder. That's a personal record.

The first set of cakes went pretty well, with a few stumbles along the way. I bought a new oven thermometer to gauge the calibration of our new range and, even though the oven dial was set to 350 degrees, the thermometer read 450. I filled the pans too full, so the layers were freakishly tall.

(I cut back the bottom layer to make it flat and more stable for the second layer, but didn't think to shorten the top layer too. Isn't frosting great camouflage?)

And the Fluffy Chocolate Frosting that I made didn't live up to its name. I've made this recipe several times now and it tends to be floppy rather than fluffy. It's not the most elegant looking frosting, but I continue to make it because of its fudgy taste.

Whatever. In the end, the cakes turned out pretty cute, the guests lavished praise on them (who wouldn't, free cake!), and all was well in Petersonland.

But I knew I could do better.

I took the boxed mix shortcut just because I had so many cakes to make at once; I really do prefer scratch cakes. There's a big texture difference between cake mix cakes and cakes made from scratch; using cake flour produces a finer, more tender crumb. Also, I think cakes made with butter simply taste better than the vegetable oil-based cakes.

So I decided to make the cakes from scratch for Sunday's party.

Frosting is one of those things that always should be made from scratch too. The kids were going to decorate cupcakes at the kids birthday party, so I planned to make a cooked seven-minute style white frosting. Plus I wanted to take another go at the chocolate frosting and see if I could get it to fluff up more this time.

My hand mixer only had three settings, but I knew I needed more power. Time to break out the big guns and use the stand mixer.

A lot of bakers, their mixers only go to 10. But where can you go from there? NOWHERE. My mixer goes to 11.



Recipes to follow in tomorrow's post...

AdSense nonsense

I'm in the midst of a 48 hour kids birthday-a-thon this weekend, but I must pause for a brief technical note:

Several readers have pointed out to me that in some blog readers or on their blog rolls, Green Your Plate is not appearing correctly; instead the feed for Google's AdSense appears in its place.

The irony of this situation is that I don't even have any advertising on my blog, let alone AdSense. I'm not sure why this is happening, and I tried to post a question about it on Google's help board but the question became LOST..IN..CYBERSPACE.

If any of you Blogger bloggers have any technical advice on how to fix this, I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, a potential work-around that I found was to input my feedburner address instead:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/GreenYourPlate

When Harmony Valley Farm tried to add me to their blog roll, they were seeing AdSense, but when they listed this as my address, it started correctly displaying my blog posts.

Let me know if the work-around does the trick.

Now, back to obsessing about birthday cakes...

Practicing the art of non-cooking

Mea culpa, I've been MIA from the kitchen during the month of October.

In yoga, there's talk about just being and practicing the art of non-doing. Well, for me lately, I've been practicing non-cooking. I think I'm getting it down to its own art form.

It all started with heading out of town to the North Shore at the end of September. Being away from the kitchen got me out of the cooking groove. As I awoke from my seasonal cooking trance and returned home, I realized that my house had become a PIT. It was truly in a state of disarray.

Worst of all was the kitchen. The kitchen was covered by a thin layer of cooking grime that had settled over everything. Our teeny tiny apartment-sized appliances were in decrepit shape - they were both at least 15 years (maybe 20 years?) old, and the range was hanging onto its useful life by a mere thread. The oven handle had broken off, and the gas burners would sometimes only spring to life if you hit the stovetop a couple of times. The fridge rattled on and on; it never seemed to shut off because the seals were so poor.

We had been holding off making such major purchases for as long as possible because of the uncertain economy, but something in me snapped this month and my husband and I decided to bite the bullet and make the purchases.

You know how one thing leads to another. Since we were getting new appliances, we thought the kitchen walls really should be repainted. This meant that our kitchen was largely unavailable for anything other than the most basic of cooking tasks for almost a week, as we scrambled to repair wall cracks and paint a couple of coats of paint in the evenings after work so that it would all be pristine for when the appliances were delivered.

(Were you wondering what happened to my last CSA share? It arrived during this period and immediately got shoved into the fridge and forgotten.)

Finally, the walls were finished and the appliances installed. Were we satisfied now? Did we sit down and take a well-earned rest? Well, no.

Suddenly, the dull wood floor stuck out like a sore thumb. It really needed to be refinished. So multiple contractor visits ensued to procure estimates, not just for the kitchen floor, but our entire first floor. It turns out, floor refinishing is NOT CHEAP to say the least. I think this project's gonna have to wait till after the holidays.

Once we took care of the kitchen, we decided we needed to tackle some other home projects that have been languishing on the back burner in the seven years we've lived in our house - decluttering, painting, and making repairs, major and minor, left and right.

I have impeccable timing for these things. Only I would choose to take on all of this work in the middle of one of my traditionally busiest months, both at work and home. My husband and I have multiple major work deadlines to meet this month, both of my kids' birthdays are at the end of October, plus Halloween. Oh, and throw in trying to potty train a very independent-minded almost 3 year old who is not the least bit interested in getting out of diapers.

Suffice it to say, after all of these projects, it's left us precious little energy to cook at all. Mostly, each night, we tumble into bed completely exhausted. It's only during the middle of the night that I hear the tiny shrieks of forgotten mini-peppers calling out from the obscurity of the crisper drawer.

Locavorus North Shoreus

Let's ignore the fact that it is totally snowing here in Minnesota today, and pretend it's still autumn, shall we?

Just a few short weeks ago, my husband and I headed up to the North Shore to take in the fall colors and celebrate our anniversary.

When you seek out local foods on Minnesota's North Shore, what do you find? Wild rice, lake trout and herring, all easily washed down by the hometown beer, Lake Superior, brewed in Duluth, Minnesota.

Wild Rice

Wild rice appears everywhere on the menu at North Shore restaurants, which is not surprising because it grows in lakes and rivers across northern Minnesota.

On our way up to our hotel, we stopped in Duluth and ate lunch at Hell's Kitchen. After reading about the Mahnomin porridge from Hell's Kitchen on local blogger Tracey Paska's Tangled Noodle blog, here was an opportunity to try it in person.

The porridge didn't disappoint. It was rich, white and creamy, the chewy wild rice concoction dotted with tender bits of dried blueberries and crunchy hazelnuts.

The next day we went in to Two Harbors to catch the Vikings-49ers game, and during half-time I wandered over to Buddy's Rice to check out the wild rice selections.

Last time I was up here, I was overwhelmed by the several varieties being sold. How does one choose?

But after listening to Scott Burns' Fresh and Local radio interview and meeting him in person at the Minneapolis Farmers Market in September, I knew a little bit more about wild rice than last year.

So I was a little disappointed to discover that they didn't carry any hand-harvested Minnesota wild rice. The varieties carried were Canadian hand-harvested and hand parched, Canadian air boat harvested, and Minnesota cultivated.

I bought bags of the Canadian air boat harvested and Minnesota cultivated wild rices to taste test them at home against the Scenic Waters wild rice that I bought recently. We'll see what all the fuss is about.

It rained for a good part of the afternoon on Sunday, and so we ended up drinking wine and playing table shuffleboard out in the Fish House at Cove Point Lodge.

We got to talking with some other guests about food (of course!) and a couple who stays on the North Shore every year recommended a little local spot, the Lemon Wolf Cafe, which was up the road from our hotel. It sounded like just the thing we needed, a place that we could bike to instead of driving.

Almost all of the menu items had wild rice as one of the ingredients - Swedish wild rice meatballs, spaghetti with wild rice meatballs, lake trout served atop wild rice, scallops served atop wild rice, shrimp served atop wild rice; you get the picture.

My husband and I both ordered the Swedish meatballs. Our plate arrived and I was transported back to dinners at my grandma's home in Willmar, Minnesota, where nearly everything on the table was white - white turkey, white mashed potatoes, white dinner rolls, white lefsa.

This dish was similar to those meals, in that the wild rice meatballs sat atop white mashed potatoes and were smothered with a white gravy.

Despite looking bland, the dish was homey, satisfying and obviously made from scratch. The wild rice lent a chewy, toothsome texture to the meatballs.

In competition for the White Award of this meal was our dessert - a towering slice of fluffy coconut cream pie, flecked with golden toasted coconut throughout the creamy mass. The coconut edifice was supported by a foundation of butter pecan crust. Little fluffy clouds of sheer heaven!

Lake Trout

Another white food we kept seeing on restaurant menus was lake trout.

Our first evening, after arriving in Beaver Bay, we doubled back the way we came to have dinner at the restaurant Nokomis.

I ordered lake trout for dinner there (you can see a photo of the same dish in Heavy Table's recent article about Nokomis). It was a massive slab of fish, must have been 8 ounces or so, served over a bed of black trumpet mushrooms, butternut squash, and fingerling potatoes.

The dish smelled very earthy from the black mushrooms, which contrasted nicely with the ultra-fresh, clean tasting trout. It was a filling meal, yet light enough to leave some room for the delectable goat cheese cheesecake with candied cherries that I had for dessert.

Herring

Who knew herring was such a local delicacy?

Growing up, herring was something that just appeared on the table at holiday meals. The pale, grey fish sat limply in a pool of brackish looking liquid. Just looking at it grossed me out, so I never tried it.

The place where we stayed this past weekend, Cove Point Lodge, offered a complimentary Scandinavian breakfast buffet which included among other things pickled herring, pickled beets, and dilled cucumber.

The first morning I shied away from the herring. Later that day, though, I learned that the herring is caught fresh along the shoreline adjacent to the hotel.

And apparently, in short supply from Lake Superior this summer with the cool season that we had. But fortunately(?) for us, the herring were back in town when we were there - fall is the peak season for catching this fish in Lake Superior.

I decided to force myself to try some pickled herring the next morning.

Does this look appealing to you first thing in the morning?


Especially with a side of pickled beets (you know that beets are my favorite). And rye crackers, can't forget the rye (another flavor I don't really like).

Well, millions of Swedish people eat this, it's part of their culture, so there must be something to it. Even a crusty Norwegian like me can learn to walk on the Swedish wild side.

When I bit into the herring, it was firmer than I expected which surprised me a little; it even had a nice little tang from the pickling. I ate a couple of pieces of it. Then I got even crazier, and had a few bites of pickled beets and cucumbers. Pile this all on top of a rye cracker and you've got...a semi-edible breakfast.

While still not my favorite, I can say now that I've gotten over the herring hump.

***

What is the deal with Minnesota and white foods, anyway? It's like the snow is not enough white for us, we need white to be in everything we eat too.

Even so, we were like white on rice with the local food at the North Shore. Now if only beets could come in white...