Pineapple Pie

Yesterday was my boss's last day of work before retirement, so Wednesday all of at work decided to throw him a party.  Since there was no way we'd be able to get him to go out anywhere after work, we had a potluck lunch (actually more like an all-day feast).  He likes pineapple pie, and was, in fact, the one who gave me this recipe, so I decided to bring that.  For the pie crust you'll need 2 3/4 C flour; 1 tsp salt; 1 C cold shortening; 6-8 Tbs cold water; one large egg white; and 1 tsp sugar.  For the filling you'll need 1 1-lb, 4-oz can crushed pineapple; 1 8-oz can crushed pineapple; 1/2 C sugar; 3 Tbsp cornstarch; 1/4 tsp salt; 4 Tbsp butter (cut into little chunks); 1 1/2 tsp grated lemon zest; 3/4 tsp grated orange zest; and 1 Tbsp lemon juice.

Make your pie crust by combining the flour, salt, and shortening in a large bowl with a pastry blender.  Using a fork, stir in the water a little bit at a time until the dough sticks together.  Form it into two balls, one a little larger than the other (the bigger one is for the bottom crust), and put them in the refrigerator for about an hour.

While that's chilling, start making your filling.  First off, get your lemon and orange zest.  I really recommend using a microplane.  It's one of those kitchen utensils that I don't really use that often, but I'm always glad I have it for the few times I need it.  You can use a box grater, too, but the microplane is waaaaaay easier.  You may as well go ahead and measure out your lemon juice at this time, too, and just set it aside.  Now, put a strainer over a bowl and drain the crushed pineapple, saving as much juice as you can.  Ideally you'll want 1 1/3 C of pineapple juice.  Set the pineapple and the juice aside and in a large pan, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt.  Slowly whisk in the pineapple juice until it's smooth and bring it all to a boil over medium heat, until it's thickened and smooth.

It'll look rather like this.

Take it off the heat and stir in the pineapple, the butter, the lemon and orange zests, and lemon juice.  Keep stirring until the butter is all melted.

You're going to want to let this cool, so, while that's happening, it's time to roll out the pie crust.  At this time, you should turn on your oven to 400 degrees to preheat.  Roll out the bigger dough ball, put it in a 9" pie plate, and brush with beaten egg white mixed with 1 tsp water. 

Fill the pie shell with your tasty tasty pineapple filling, smoothing it out on top.

Now roll out the other dough ball and put it on top.  Brush with more egg white, sprinkle with sugar, and cut ventilation slits in the top of the pie.  Bake it for 35-40 minutes, or until the pie is nice and golden brown.  I've only made a couple of pies before, so mine isn't exactly the prettiest in the world.  Hopefully yours will look a little nicer.

Might not win any beauty contests, but it's tasty!

And you're done!  Just let this cool for a few hours before eating or bringing to your hungry coworkers.

I totally snuck away with the last piece. Om nom nom.

Chicken Stroganoff Pot Pie

One of the best things I ever bought for my kitchen is my slow cooker.  Unfortunately, I don't use it nearly as often as I'd like since it requires me to plan out what I want for dinner more than an hour ahead and most of my decisions great and small tend to be made randomly and on very short notice.  Today seemed like a good slow cooker day, though, since I flipped through my Betty Crocker cookbook early enough to decide what I wanted and get the ingredients from the store and actually have it cooked at a normal dinner time.

For the chicken stroganoff pot pie, you'll need 1 envelope of chicken gravy mix; 1 10.5 oz can of chicken broth; 1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts; 1 16 oz bag frozen stew vegetables (carrots, onions, potatoes, and celery), thawed; 1 4.5 oz jar sliced mushrooms; 1/2 C sour cream; 1 Tbsp flour; 1 1/2 C Bisquick; 4 green onions, chopped; 1/2 C milk.  The cookbook recipe also calls for 1 C frozen peas, thawed, but I left them out.  Who likes peas?  Not me!

I like that Farm Fresh very clearly labels them "stew vegetables" so there's no confusion.

Cut up the chicken so it's in nice little bite-sized pieces, about an inch long or thereabouts.

Mmmmm....salmonella....

In your slow cooker, whisk together the gravy mix and the chicken broth.  Then add in the chicken, stew vegetables, and mushrooms. 

Put on the cover, set your cooker to "low" and sit there watching it for the next 4-5 hours.  Or go do something else, like your taxes, cleaning your apartment, catching up on Downton Abbey, and/or saving the Capitol Wasteland from super mutants and the Enclave.  Whatever floats your boat.  When the time's up, mix the sour cream and flour together and then stir into the chicken mix.

Put the cover back on and turn up the cooker to "high".  This time it's only going to cook for 20 minutes.  In the meantime, chop up your green onions and, in a medium bowl, combine them with your Bisquick (and the, ugh, peas if you're so inclined).  Stir in the milk.  Once the 20 minutes is up, drop spoonfuls of the dough on top of the chicken.

No peas here!

Put the cover back on and continue to cook on "high" for another 45-50 minutes, or until you can put a toothpick in your dumplings and it comes out clean.  And that's it!  You've got yourself a nice hearty dinner full of (non-pea) vegetables, so it counts as "healthy" in my book.  It also warms up pretty well, so if you're a lonely shell of a human being like myself who only has themselves to cook for, you've got plenty of leftovers!  Awesome!

I've been smelling this cook all day and let me tell you, it was worth the wait!

Crab-Stuffed Flounder

I am currently on vacation in southwestern Florida, so I'm not cooking dinner for myself this week.  However, since I'm visiting my parents, Mom is cooking dinner for me!  (Actually, I'm going to be making porkchops for us for dinner later this week, but you've already seen that recipe).  She was kind enough to cook some delicious crab-stuffed flounder fillets for me and Dad. 

For this recipe, you'll need: 2-2 1/2 lbs flounder fillets (the recipe calls for fresh, but the frozen ones seem to work just fine), 1/4 C chopped shallot (I now know that that is!), 1/4 C melted butter, 7 oz can crab meat (drained), 1/2 C crushed saltine crackers, 2 tsp Old Bay seasoning, 1/2 tsp salt, dash of pepper, cheddar cheese sauce (3 Tbsp butter, 3 tsp flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 1/2 C milk, 1 C grated cheddar cheese).

The thing on top of the crab meat is a shallot!

 Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and grease a 2 quart casserole dish.  In a bowl, combine the shallot, butter, Old Bay, salt, pepper, crab meat, and crackers.

Take your flounder fillets, put a little bit of the crab mixture in the middle, and roll them up, securing with a toothpick if you need to.

 Do this with all of your fillets and put them in your dish.

Bake them, uncovered, for 25 minutes.  While they're in the oven, make your cheddar sauce.  In a saucepan, melt 3 Tbsp of butter and stir in 3 tsp of flour and 1/4 tsp salt.  Stir that until it's smooth and add in 1 1/2 C milk, stirring until it's thickened.  Add in 1 C grated cheddar cheese and stir it until it's all melted.  After the 25 minutes are up on the fish, take them out of the oven, pour the cheese sauce over them, and put them back in the oven for 5 more minutes.

And they're done!  And if you're trying to figure out what to serve with the fish, I recommend rice and roasted asparagus.

Yum!

Quick Chili

Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything all that fancy for dinner.  You'd be perfectly happy just making a peanut butter sandwich, but you decided that this year you'd try and make something at least once a week and the second weekend in January seems a little early to drop that idea.  So this week, we're going with an old standby: quick chili.  This won't appeal to chili purists, but for people who don't feel like putting more than fifteen minutes into dinner, this is pretty great.

You'll need a pound of ground beef, a can of dark red kidney beans, a jar of pasta sauce, some chili powder, and some red pepper flakes.  You can put whatever else you want in, too, but these are all the ingredients I usually bother with.

All you need for a lazy person's dinner!

First off, brown the ground beef in a large skillet.  You can still have some red left, just get it mostly done.

This'll do.

Now, dump in the beans (don't bother draining them, just dump in the can) and the pasta sauce.  I use an entire 14-oz. jar, but put in more or less to your taste (I remember one time my Grammie complaining to Mom that she always put too much tomato in her chili.  Of course, it was the exact same way Mom always made it and she never seemed to have a problem with it before.  Oh Grammie, I miss your crazy ways.)  Mix them in really well and have the heat around medium.

Finally, mix in some chili powder and red pepper flakes.  I'd start with around 2 Tbsp of chili powder and 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes and go from there.  Once everything is nice and hot and mixed well, you're done!  This is something that also works really well for leftovers and, I think, actually tastes better the next day.

Dinner!  And lunch!  And dinner again!

Pork Chops and Apples

I don't really do a lot of cooking.  Sure, I do plenty of baking, but that's not really the same thing.  In an effort to improve my repertoire, I've decided I'm going to try cooking something (that doesn't come out of a box) for dinner at least once a week.  After flipping through the cookbook How to Cook Everything: The Basics by Mark Bittman (a really great cookbook; you should check it out), I decided to try my hand at pork chops with apples.

For this recipe you need four pork chops (about an inch thick and with the bone in them--they're tastier than boneless), 2 Tbsp of olive oil, salt and pepper, 1/2 C beer (you can also use dry white wine, but I don't like dry wines, hence the beer instead), 2 Tbsp chopped green onion (the book says shallot, but I think they're the same thing), 3 apples peeled, cored, and sliced, 1 onion sliced, 1/2 C chicken broth, 1 Tbsp lemon juice, and 1 Tbsp butter.

All this!  Plus chicken broth, which I forgot about.

Before you do anything else, you might want to go ahead and slice up your apples, onion, and green onion.  You don't want to still be doing this when it's time to add them to the pan.  Also, 2 tablespoons of green onion wound up being around two green onions, so you can just chop up two of those and not worry about having to measure it.

All ready to go!

In a large skillet, heat up the oil over medium heat.  Once the oil is hot, turn the heat up to high and add your pork chops.  Sprinkle some salt and pepper on them.

Use a really big pan.

Let them cook for about two minutes, or until they start to brown up and you can turn them over easily.  Flip them over, put some more salt and pepper on them, and cook that side until it's browned.  Now it's time to turn the heat down to medium and add the beer or wine and the green onion.

Let that cook until most of the beer has evaporated, turning the pork chops once or twice.  Take the pork chops out of the pan and onto a plate and add the apples and onion to the pan.  The cookbook says that you're supposed to stir them until the apples start to stick (1-2 minutes), but my apples never did stick, so just go with two minutes or so. 

Stir in the chicken broth and put the pork chops back in the pan.  Bring the whole thing to a boil, reduce the heat so it simmers, and cover.  Cook for another 5-10 minutes (or so), turning the pork chops a couple times, until the pork chops are cooked through and the apples and onion are soft.  Stir in the lemon juice and butter.  And you're done!

This ended up being fairly easy to make and wound up being pretty tasty.  Hopefully the leftovers will be just as good!

Nutella Truffles + Reading Failure

This post is going to be a little different from my other recipe posts since it's a recipe off of someone else's blog and I managed to screw it up.  For the actual recipe, just follow this link. 

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a link to the blog A Beautiful Mess, specifically the post on Nutella Truffles, and said that I should try making those.  I read through the recipe and said "this doesn't sound too bad" so I went to the store and got all the ingredients together and that's when the trouble began.

The wording on the box of Baker's chocolate is covered up, but if you do much baking with chocolate, you might already know that the orange box is not bittersweet chocolate--it's unsweetened.  I realized that I had made a critical reading error AFTER I had everything all melted together.  But really, how bad could it be?  The answer is: very.  So it was time to deploy emergency confectioners' sugar!  But that just made it too thick.  Add more cream!  But now it doesn't taste very Nutella-y.  Add more Nutella!  But now it's too thick again.  More cream! 

Well, eventually I got it tasting alright again and poured into a bowl to chill in the fridge for a while.  But I think it was still probably a little thick.

Success?

After a couple hours, it was time to roll out the little truffle balls.  I'm pretty good at this part, what with all the practice from making Oreo truffles and buttercreams, so I think that went fairly well.

Success!

Back to the refrigerator they went!  It was now time for dipping them in white chocolate.  This should be easy, right?  *sigh*  I'm thinking it just was not a day I was meant to make anything.  Melting the white chocolate started out just fine, but actually dipping the truffles was another matter.  They tended to each melt a bit when I dipped them, turning the chocolate a little less white with each one that went in.  Then the chocolate decided it didn't want to stay very melty anymore and began to thicken.  They all got dipped, though!

Success...?

But that didn't look good enough for me, oh no!  I had leftover white chocolate chips, so I melted those and sent them through again!  And had the exact same problem, only worse.  But they all got dipped a second time, no matter how clumpy the chocolate got!

I am fairly certain this is not what success looks like.

So how did I manage to salvage these abominations?  Easy!  I put them in a tub so no one could actually see them and brought them to a party that had a whoooole lot of alcohol!

SUCCESS!!!!

Actually, despite their looks, these did turn out to be really tasty.  And it helps illustrate an important lesson: just because you screw up a recipe pretty badly, it doesn't mean you can't salvage what you've got and still wind up with something great (if horrifyingly ugly).

Turnovers

I got my fondness for baking from my Grammie.  She always encouraged my efforts and was the one who found that great cheesecake recipe that I still use.  Grammie used to make a lot of pies, and when she did, she'd also make some turnovers or tarts with extra dough.  I didn't feel like putting the effort into making a pie today, though, so it's just going to be turnovers for now.  To make them, you'll need 1 1/2 C flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 C cold shortening, 1/4 C cold water, and jam of whatever flavor you like (I used triple berry jam).

This is all you need!

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  In a large bowl, combine your flour and salt and add in the cold shortening in chunks.  Cut the shortening into the flour using a pastry blender, a couple of knives, or, if you're feeling particularly ambitious, your hands.  When you're done, it should look kind of like little pebbles.  Using a fork, stir in your cold water a little bit at a time until the dough kind of sticks together.  Form the dough into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and stick in the fridge for about a half hour or so.  Once it's chilled for a while, take it back out and roll the dough pretty thin, on a floured surface or between a couple sheets of parchment paper or waxed paper.  Using a biscuit cutter, cut out as many circles as you can.  I managed to get nine (well, eight and one vaguely roundish one from the last bit of dough).

Now put a couple of teaspoons of jam in the center of each circle.  Fold the circle in half and seal up the edges with a fork.  Also cut some slits in the top for ventilation.  I always put a little too much jam in so it squooshes out the side.  It's not really a problem, though.

Sprinkle a little bit of sugar on top if you want and put these guys on a cookie sheet and into the oven.  Bake them at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes, then turn your oven down to 350.  Bake for another 15 minutes or so, or until they turn golden brown.  Make sure to let them cool for a while before you eat them.  Sure, they may seem like they're only a little warm on the outside, but that jam stays pretty hot for a while!

Tasty jammy goodness!