3 New Recipes

Farce de Porc (Pork and Herb Stuffing, Vol. 1, Page 336)
This stuffing was originally intended to be placed in lamb and rolled up and placed inside of a lamb roast. Well, I can’t afford lamb so I served this on the side along with some egg noodles to accompany lamb chops. I can say, this is stuff is good!
It called for a cup of fresh white bread crumbs (French or homemade-type bread), I only make homemade-type bread when I make Sausage Bread. Luckily, I had some bread crumbs in the freezer that started their life as biscuits made from Jiffy Mix. This type of bread worked out very well for this recipe. I am so very glad I chose not to use can bread crumbs as I see that it is important to use ”fresh-real” bread crumbs.

Before I go any further, I need to say something about portion sizes. I have started serving dinner on smaller plates. Why you ask? Well, because the portions of food that we are served at restaurants are just way too large. That is why you can’t eat the appetizer, entrée and then the dessert. So, I am trying to reduce the portions we have and we can enjoy more food. Which now means… I am going to talk about desserts!!!!

I checked out The Lady & Sons, Just Desserts from the library last week when I got Vol.1 & Vol.2. Joey was the first to choose a dessert from this cookbook. He chose Chocolate Cream Cheese Pound Cake, page 27. I made this Saturday evening. I didn’t care too much for it, but the kids liked it. They described the taste as “like a chocolate pop tart”.

Tonight, I was looking for a new dessert and all the ones that we kept picking out of Just Desserts, I didn’t have all the ingredients for. So, feeling defeated I pulled The Cake Mix Doctor off the shelf and hoped I had the ingredients of a recipe that I have been longing to try but kept being shy of one ingredient: Peanut Butter. But tonight, I had EVERYTHING! So, I made Chocolate Sheet Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting, pages 52 & 427. This was incredible and lived up to what I hoped. The only change I will make to this will be that I will make it as a layer cake so I can have the peanut butter frosting on the top and in the middle!

Bifleck Haché à la Lyonnaise, Tomates à la Provençale & Risotto

So we took a trip to France for dinner this evening. The journey was courtesy of Julia Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.
Bifleck Haché à la Lyonnaise or Ground Beef with Onions & Herbs was really nice. It is a pretty good take on what we consider Hamburger Steaks, but has a reduction sauce for the top of it that is pretty darned good. Must have something to do with all the butter in it! Page 301 is the location of this new family favorite.
So for one of the side dishes, I choose to make Tomates à la Provençale or Tomatoes Stuffed with Bread Crumbs, Herbs & Onions. Emma and Michael were the only two who enjoyed this. It had a weird zingy taste according to Joey’s description. Michael says it was more of a tart tingle not the sweet tingle you think it is going to be. Page 507 can show you how to make this if you choose.
For the other side I attempted to make Risotto. I couldn’t find the raw rice the recipe calls for, but I found this Italian Rice that is apparently the same thing at Harris Teeter. The Risotto was delish! I used beef broth as the liquid since I was making beef for the main dish. We will add the recipe from page 533 to our menu rotation.
For these recipes I used a stick & a half of butter! The flavor that butter gives is worth the $2.99/lb plus it isn’t made out of plastic like margarine is! Why you ask??? Cause it’s all butter baby!!!!

Le Quatre Quarts with Creme du Citron

A delicious Pound Cake with a lemon- or orange-cream filling from JC’S MtAoFC Vol. 2 (pages 482-485).

This pound cake or as my oldest son calls it: LEMON CAKE, is a great light tasting cake with a simple sweet glaze.

It’s like sunshine in your mouth. I often imagine those little gnomes in “The Sunshine Makers” making this pound cake and singing their song while putting a bottle of sunshine it the batter. It’s a happy thought of mine while baking. :D

(Yes, The Borden Company originally commissioned The Sunshine Makers as a 1935 theatrical "advertising" film, with subtle suggestions that drinking Borden's Milk would make ANYONE feel "sunshine" within themselves....)

Let me say this is my favorite “go to” cake, majority of the time I have the items on hand to make this and it is quite effortless with my Kitchen Aid Stand mixer. Now, if I had to beat my butter into a mayonnaise-like cream by hand, I wouldn’t be making that often, but the way the butter beaten is the key to this simple recipe. Of all the times I have made it, I fail to take a picture of it before it’s all gone. So once again I have “borrowed” a picture off the internet of a similar looking pound cake.

Ingredient wise all you need is:

1 ½ sticks butter, 3 large eggs (2/3 cup), 1 cup sugar, grated rind of 1 lemon or orange and 1 ¼ cup cake flour for the batter.

The filling requires:

1 cup powdered sugar, 1 Tbsp lemon or orange juice, the grate of one lemon or orange, 1 Tbsp hot water, 1 egg, 2 Tbsp butter, 1 Tbsp cornstarch, an additional 3-6 tbsp of unsalted butter, and a pinch of salt

Very simple ingredients produce this moist and lush Le Quatre Quarts, meaning “Four Quarters” from the original proportions.

I will be making this very cake in celebration of my husband, children and I being together again as a family and our cross country move from NC to Kansas.

Crepes

Crepes…so after reading a post on Our Best Bites, I decided to hunt down a JC Crepe recipe. In her book, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom there is a recipe for her Master Crepe Batter. This can be used for savory or sweet creeps. In Vol. 1 & 2 she has a crepe recipe as well, but since I do not have those, I had to search the internet where someone had re-typed it.

I macerated some frozen strawberries in plain white sugar while I looked for the recipe and then I began. I can definitely understand where they say the practice comes in with making these.

The first ones that we tried were with just the strawberries. They were good but we decided they needed chocolate and whip cream. Emma then wanted one with Swiss cheese, which she said was really yummy. So, then I made me one with Cheddar. It was pretty good. It would have been AWESOME with ham and pineapple. Emma then asked for another one, so I suggested Swiss & Leeks. This is it below. She said it was awesome. I lost count on how many crepes Emma ate. Joey had 2 with some Italian blend shredded cheese and then one huge one with powdered sugar and syrup. He liked the last one best.

Will I make these again????? I really don’t know. Maybe if I had some ham & pineapple or chocolate & whip cream but I don’t really plan on going out & getting the stuff to make them on purpose like that unless requested by one of the kids.

On a side note, Emma is going to be our family’s food photographer for my post. The one of the Swiss & Leeks Crepe is her first. Thanks for your job well done, Em!

Cheesecake, Potatoes & Leeks, Oh My!

On New Year’s Eve I finally bought a spring-form pan. I found a very nice one @ Marshall’s for $6. Another $3 and I could have had one that said Cuisnart on it. Considering both pans were identical besides the name, I bought the $6 one. Jamey loves cheesecake and in our 15 ¾ years of marriage I have never made anything more than the one that comes in the box. I have purchased him several of the ones that are the “fancier” cheesecakes while choking on the price tag. So, with new pan in hand, I had Nikki Google me a recipe and found one at Food Network. This is the cheesecake that I made. I didn’t like the way the “topper” was added at the end and ended up raking the top part off the next morning. The citrus flavor mixed in with the 2 pounds of cream cheese is nice and I will only reduce the amount of orange zest the next time I make it. It is taking us 5 days to eat this and there are 3 teens in my house and I have given several slices away, but I think I have found a new “special” desert to make. My only disappointment in this process was that I was hoping to make a cheesecake from Julia Child but there isn’t one in her books.
Sunday evening we wanted soup for dinner and I decided to make Julia’s Potato & Leek Soup. It’s the first recipe out of Vol.1 but here is it online. I made the boys Chicken Noodle Soup (from a can) because they weren’t as jazzed about trying the Potato & Leek Soup as Emma was. I used butter instead of the cream because I ALWAYS have butter on hand, and it made it easier since I didn’t have to find another recipe to use the cream in. I also didn’t care for the fresh parsley in it, so next time I make it, I won’t use the parsley at the end. It was a very filling soup. I served it with some French bread I sliced up from the deli. Joey, Emma & Michael liked it as well as I did, but Jamey didn’t care for it.

But you know what? It’s all butter!!!!!