Pepitas Two Ways: Brittle and Pesto

So, this post may be a little too early, in the sense that pepitas, which are hulled pumpkin seeds, are not really in season yet, but I have an excuse.  I bought a bag of roasted, salted pepitas at Trader Joe's back in January when I was in the States, with no particular plan in mind for them.  I brought them back to Jakarta, set them on the counter, and there they sat for six months...  I felt like I needed to use them or lose them, so here we are.  I've got two fall recipes for you...

Pepita Brittle: sweety, salty, crunchy, awesome.  I was a little bit worried about candy making in a humid environment (see: weepy marshmallows, January 2012), but this recipe from Smitten Kitchen was pretty foolproof. 

A spicy pepita pesto, with basil and cilantro, pepitas in the place of pine nuts, lime instead of lemon juice and a chili for heat... served on pasta with roasted squash (I used kabocha squash, but you could do pumpkin, butternut, what have you...):

Stove-top Naan

Tim and I went to our favorite Indian restaurant last weekend for lunch.  We love the food there, but it's not somewhere we could feasibly go on a weekday, as we could be stuck in Jakarta traffic for 2 hours there and 2 hours back, possibly.  As such, I decided to also order some of my favorite dishes (chana masala and saag paneer) to go (dibungkus, which means wrapped up, a useful phrase to know) to eat later in the week.  

I was planning to make rice to accompany the leftovers, but honestly, we're a little sick of rice.  Naan it is, then!  I made this recipe from Aarti Sequeira, which is a simple stove-top version made in a cast iron pan and then brushed with butter at the end.  Pretty good! The dough is ridiculously sticky and I knew trying to use my rolling pin would be a disaster, so I shaped the loaves with my hands.  They're probably not as thin as they could be, but still quite awesome.

Leftover Cranberry Sauce?

Got leftover cranberry sauce?  If so, make these cranberry crumble bars.  Super easy and quite a big hit at the Thanksgiving party we went to in Jakarta...  they went slowly at first, but at the end of the party, as we were leaving, I had at least 6 people pull me over and tell me they were awesome.  Pretty ringing endorsement.

I used this cranberry crumble bar recipe from the November issue of Martha Stewart Living, which conveniently arrived here in Jakarta the day before Thanksgiving.  The recipe looked pretty easy and delicious, but I had to make a few changes out of necessity:

• First, a 9"x13" pan doesn't fit in my mini oven, so I decided to switch up the pans.  I went with my removeable bottom tart pan so I would end up with pie-shaped bars... I split the dough recipe into 2 and made 2 tarts, each cooked for 30 minutes. 
• I probably used 1 and a half cans of cranberry sauce between the 2 tarts, though.  
• Also, I substituted toasted, slivered almonds for the walnuts, which I couldn't find for some reason (the Real Martha thinks there is a walnut shortage of some sort this year- she says prices of walnuts have skyrocketed of late).

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you have a good holiday!

Tim and I got a head start on the festivities by cooking a turkey and mini-Thanksgiving meal this past Sunday to ensure that we had leftovers.  We've also got a pot-luck party coming up on Thanksgiving itself with a bunch of folks we met here in Jakarta. 

Here's how we did our turkey... it was a bit of free wheelin', so bear with me:

• cleaned the bird up, salt and peppered the cavity
• stuffed it with half an onion (cubed), half a head of garlic (cut in half), half a lemon, a carrot (rough cut), a handful of fresh thyme, rosemary and sage
• rubbed it and stuffed the skin with a compound butter made with minced rosemary, sage and garlic, lemon zest, salt and pepper
• tied up the legs with a strip of foil, tucked the wings in
• put it in our pre-heated mini oven (adopted from Ben and Erin), which was at approximately 375 F, give or take
• let it brown a bit, then loosely covered it in foil
• let it cook for about 3 hours, taking off the foil again towards the end to brown it up again
• let it rest for 20 minutes while 

It came out pretty tasty!  Definitely not overcooked, definitely moist, definitely delicious.

We also had some great leftovers concoctions:

1. The most delicious leftovers sandwich ever: toasted bread spread with mayo on one side, cranberry sauce on the other, a thin layer of stuffing, mixed white and dark meat turkey, lots of lettuce and two pieces of bacon.  Awesome.  Like a Thanksgiving turkey club.

2. Turkey and white bean chili, made loosely based on this Martha Stewart recipe, with the addition of 2 chipotles in adobo, 2 cloves of garlic, and a handful of leftover stuffing to thicken it up.  I also left out the water because it looked far too liquidy already.  Pretty good, though!

Crisp Cheddar Cheese Crackers

Also known as fancy homemade Cheez-its!  

I saw this recipe on Joy the Baker a few weeks ago and had a hankering that would not subside until I made them.  Cheez-its: another one of those things that I rarely bought in the U.S., but since I can't get them in Jakarta, I inexplicably crave them regularly.  I could probably get some sort of cheezy cracker here, but a lot of the crunchy cheese snacks made around here are just... not quite right.  And they have MSG in them, which gives them a weird after taste.

Flakey, cheesy, a little bit buttery... these rule.  They would be awesome with beers for happy hour.

And easy!  They literally have 5 ingredients: cheese, butter, flour, salt and pepper.  Mix, chill, roll, cut, bake, snack.

Pretzel Toffee

Omg.  This pretzel toffee stuff is addictive.  Pretzels.  Butter.  Sugar.  Chocolate.  Salt.

It's pretty hard to go wrong with those ingredients...  salty and sweet, crunchy and chocolatey.

Although, go wrong I did, but it turned out ok in the end.  I followed Smitten Kitchen's recipe, except I substituted the matzoh crackers with pretzels (a la this interpretation).  For some reason, though, my caramel went wonky, causing the butter and sugar to separate, which I didn't realize until after I had poured it over the pretzels.  Once hardened, it didn't seem to make much of a difference as far as taste or consistency, which is why there are only 2 pieces remaining for this photo shoot.  Addictive, indeed.

New Favorite Thanksgiving Dish: Pineapple Ritz Casserole

Erin cooked my new favorite, shamefully delicious Thanksgiving dish this year: pineapple Ritz cracker casserole.  

It's a total throwback, Americana dish in the same vein as, say, green bean casserole with crispy onions on top: butter, cheese, crushed Ritz cracker, canned pineapple.   It's sooooooo good- salty, sweet, buttery, crunchy.  I couldn't get enough (and my stomach is not happy about that).  

My new favorite dish... just above the turkey.  Not much to look at, but tastes so good.

I'm not sure exactly which recipe she used, but there are a million out there and they all seem to use the same basic ingredients.  Give it a try!

Shrimp Scampi

Tim cooked a lovely shrimp scampi the other night... buttery, garlicy, lemony. Mmm.

Buttermilk Biscuits!

I went to the beach (Sandbridge Beach, a low-key part of Virginia Beach) Labor Day weekend for some beaching, relaxing, drinking, eating and makin' memories (yes, our house was aptly named "Makin' Memories") with about 13 other people. Generally unscathed by Earl, we cooked massive meals, got sunburnt, drank more beer than you can imagine, and gave all of your favorite board and party games a bad name.

Some of my fellow beachers had requested biscuits for breakfast. I knew that biscuits from a can would be super easy, but I also knew they just wouldn't taste very good compared to flaky, light homemade biscuits, so I decided to make the biscuits myself. Not knowing what sort of equipment and ingredients Makin' Memories would have, I brought the dry ingredients for these awesome biscuits with me and mixed up the dough on-site. I chose this recipe, a) because it was high up on the Google hit list for buttermilk biscuits and b) because it used cake flour, which I had in abundance after making angel food cake a couple months ago. This recipe is awesome- I think the cake flour gives it an airy lightness. The recipe is so delicious that I couldn't snap a photo in time. But Nicole of Pinch My Salt fame has plenty, so take a look at hers and try not to drool.

Note: This recipe doesn't make a ton of biscuits. For 14 people, I made 3 batches of biscuits, which was a good amount.

Spinach "Meat" Balls and Simple Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

I had a ridiculous amount of CSA spinach to use up and thought making some spinach "meatballs" might be a fun change of pace. Chuck and Tim liked them, but I thought they were a little bread-y for me. But that may also have been because the recipe called for frozen spinach and I used fresh- it was hard to judge exactly how much to use.

The sauce was this super simple tomato, butter and onion sauce from Marcella Hazan that everyone on the internets has been raving about. I figured it was worth a try! Outrageously simple (cut union in half, unwrap butter, open tomato can, throw it all into a pan to simmer), yet has an addictive rich flavor.

Crack Pie!!

So, the internets are all atwitter about the tasty baked goods from Momofuku Milk Bar in NYC, particularly their Crack pie (no, not named for a particularly craggy appearance or anything, but because it's addictive like crack). The LA Times had an article about the Crack Pie and posted a recipe, and since then, many a blogger has tried their hand at manufacturing this crack in pie form.The recipe has several steps, but none of them are particularly difficult. Basically you bake a giant oatmeal cookie, then crumble it with sugar, butter and salt to make the tasty crust, and finally fill it with a ton of sin (melted butter, egg yolks, brown and white sugar, and some vanilla) and bake.

The end result is a gooey, sweet, salty, delicious mess. I brought it to a BBQ and it was gone in seconds as people basically inhaled it straight from the pie plate. It was like hyenas fighting over freshly killed wildebeest or something.

The recipe makes 2 pies- I did one in a pie plate and the other in a removable bottom tart pan. The tart pan made it a little easier to get the slices out.

Artichokes Steamed in White Wine and Lemon

We haven't had fresh artichokes in years for some reason, but when I stopped by Trader Joe's this weekend, the artichokes jumped off the shelf at me. I thought this recipe looked good: artichokes steamed in a white wine, lemon, garlic and thyme broth... it was super easy and really good.

However, as we learned listening to Tim as he ate his artichoke: fresh artichokes are not for the lazy man. Tim complained, "This seems like a lot of effort." He also added "My arms hurt," which I am assuming is from doing push-ups, not lifting oh-so-heavy artichoke leaves from the lemon butter dip to his mouth... but you never know with Tim.

Chicken Scaloppini

Martha is in town and she's craving pasta. We had the majority of the ingredients for this chicken scalopini recipe with artichokes, mushrooms, capers and pancetta, so we decided to give it a try.

This was really tasty. Since it's a Paula Deen recipe, it requires an entire pound of butter in the lemon sauce... don't go there. We made it with a quarter of that and it was still rich and delicious. Even Martha, who would eat a butter ice cream cone if she could, thought it was great with just one stick of butter.

Baked Shrimp Scampi

This baked shrimp scampi is a pretty reliable Ina Garten recipe that I've made several times. However, I think this time I squished the shrimp too close together in the dish, because it took waaaaaay too long to cook the shrimp in the center. Perhaps next time I'll do these in individual dishes.Anyway, it's garlicky, buttery and delicious- good with some bread to dip in the sauce! We took the tails off for ease of eating, but they do make the presentation a little bit fancier.

Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream

The first time I heard of David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel ice cream, I had to wipe the drool off my chin. I've been waiting a while to make this ice cream, though, since I was a little bit intimidated by the caramel aspect of the recipe. I had visions of burnt sugar permanently stuck to all of my pots and pans...

Turns out making caramel is not that hard! You have to keep an eye on it, for sure, and you have to be careful not to give in to temptation and stick a spoonful of the liquid caramel in your mouth since it's searing hot, but otherwise, not as difficult as I'd imagined!

This ice cream is to die for. Super rich, buttery, and awesome. I had a little trouble getting it to freeze correctly in the ice cream maker for some reason, but even a little runny, it still tasted amazing. Nothing much too look at, but, as I said, a taste to die for.

Lemony Shrimp Scampi

So my CSA is only delivering every two weeks this winter (which is fine since they are mostly selling root/storage types crops right now in the dead of winter), and last week it slipped my mind that I had to put in my order. So for the first time in a while our meals are not determined by the CSA box contents. I took this opportunity to attempt to do some eating down of our fridge and freezer contents...

We had a couple bags of frozen shrimp in the freezer, a bag of lemons in the fridge, some parsley on the roof, and some pasta in the pantry, so I decided a buttery, garlicky, lemony shrimp scampi was in order (plus a simple salad using the last of some lettuce we bought last week).
I used a combination of a couple Ina Garten recipes... her linguine with shrimp scampi and her lemon pasta with roasted shrimp. I roasted the peeled shrimp in olive oil and S&P, and then added them to the butter/garlic/red pepper flake/lemon juice/lemon zest mixture. Tossed with whole wheat spaghetti and sprinkled with parsley and a little bit of grated parmesan. Yum.

Butter-braised Turnips = Double Meh

I thought that the method of preparation might make up for the fact that I'm not enamored of turnips thus far... butter-braised? Seemed like a winner, but again, no dice. Meh. I just think I just plain don't like turnips, officially.