Everyday Dorie: Spatchcocked Chicken
December 24, 2021 at 3:09 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, other savory, savory things | 1 CommentTags: chicken, everyday dorie, savory
It’s been a while since I’ve cooked a whole bird, but this Spatchcocked Chicken was a good excuse to haul out the roasting pan. Spatchcocking is a technique that involves cutting out the chicken’s backbone and flattening down the breastbone a bit so it roasts more evenly and quickly. I’m not the most nimble butcher, but it’s not really too gruesome a task (I used heavy kitchen shears to get the job done), and you can save that backbone to add to your future stockpot. Dorie had us rub up the chicken with butter and Middle Eastern spices (although you can take the flavorings whichever way you choose) and add some veggies to the pan before it all went in the oven. It came out pretty seductively bronzed and moist, and was a good reminder to make a roast chicken dinner more often.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Hot-and-Spicy Togarashi Meringues
December 21, 2021 at 10:01 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, savory things, snacks, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, cookies, savory, snacks
It’s been a while since we’ve done a savory “cocktail cookie,” and these Hot-and-Spicy Togarashi Meringues sound like just the thing to pair with a frosty beer or cup of sake on ramen night. A little sweet and a little spicy, these meringues are flavored with shichimi togarashi, a ground chili pepper sprinkle mix that also includes sesame seeds, orange peel and seaweed. I have a little jar of straight-up togarashi powder, meaning it’s not the blend, just the ground chili pepper. It packs a pretty big heat punch, but I’m still on condiment lock-down at home and far too lazy to get out my spice grinder to pulverize the missing ingredients myself, so I just went with it.
I had a vision of making my meringues into Ottolenghi-like swoopy poofs, so I scooped them nice and big, rather than piping out small kisses. They totally went flat in the oven! I don’t know what that was all about, although I have to say, I think the ones in the book photo also look a bit “settled.” Although they tasted fine, dissolving away while leaving a burn, I was pretty disappointed in their looks. I still used them as part of a little snack spread for a Japanese-themed happy hour at home, and that was fun, but I’m not sure I’d make these again. If I do, I’ll try using a Swiss or Italian meringue and see if I get a puffier baked result.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (it’s also here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us anytime!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Mulled Wine Jammers
December 21, 2021 at 9:54 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 2 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
Baking with TWD, I’ve made Dorie’s jammers every which way over the years, once even as a galette. No matter the variation in flavor or shape, the formula is the same: a sweet and sandy sablé base is topped with jam and ringed with sweet streusel. Mulled Wine Jammers are the winter holiday edition of the classic fave. A semi-homemade mulled wine filling, made by jazzing up shop-bought cherry jam with red wine, spices and dried fruit, is the star of the show here.
Dorie forms these jammers in the usual round fashion, as cookies baked in a muffin tin…but I remembered seeing Joy the Baker make her own version of the recipe baked as bar cookies a couple of years ago, and I never got that good idea out of my head. I knew I wanted to give it a shot when the recipe finally rolled around for us. (Shall I say I’d been “mulling” it over for some time?) I only wanted to make half a recipe, so I pressed the crust into a 6-inch square pan, and proceeded like normal. Baking them off as bars took out a bit of the fiddly work needed to form them individually, but they are delicious, however you make them!
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Paper-Thin Roasted Potatoes
December 10, 2021 at 9:55 am | Posted in breakfast things, cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, other savory, savory things, veggies | 4 CommentsTags: everyday dorie, savory, vegetables
Paper-Thin Roasted Potatoes aren’t your typical roasties. If you have a mandolin hiding in a drawer, now’s the time to pull it out. Also get out the guard…fingertips are not part of the ingredient list here. Thinly sliced, oiled and seasoned potatoes and onions (or leeks in my case) are shingled down a sheet tray. They bake up crispy-curly-edged and, as Dorie says, like hot potato chips. I scaled back the recipe and set up just a half sheet pan of potatoes and leeks. I had some slices leftover, so I arranged them into a little cast iron skillet, which I just par-baked so I could easily finish it off the next morning for breakfast with some smoked salmon and an (unpictured) egg. I know my sheet tray is also unpictured (although I do have a few horrendously-lit nighttime photos on my phone), but I did take Dorie’s suggestion to add little bloops of sour cream here and there, along with a flurry of chopped scallions and cilantro, roasted red pepper bits and dashes of green Tobasco. So basically I turned a very elegant side dish into sheet pan potato chip nachos for Sunday night football, and they were awesome!
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
TWD DC Rewind: Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels
November 30, 2021 at 8:46 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
I pulled what now seems to be my signature move on these Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels: I baked them on time and then totally didn’t feel like writing a post about them. I guess now I easily have something to post for Rewind week. Please don’t think that means I didn’t like these. Not so– I actually liked them a lot! A cooked down dried cherry and walnut paste is rolled up inside Dorie’s Do-Almost-Anything Chocolate Dough. What’s not to like? They even held their shape (a fear of mine with pinwheels, and slice and bake cookies in general)! I decided to decorate them with the optional white chocolate drizzle, but it sort of hides the spiral of goodies going on. These have kind of a fruit cake vibe, and I think they would make great holiday cookies.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Roasted Butternut Squash Soup
November 26, 2021 at 4:55 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, savory things, soups | 7 CommentsTags: everyday dorie, savory, soup
I feel like I’ve made squash soup every which way I can think of, but this Roasted Butternut Squash Soup has some flavorings that I, in fact, had not thought of before. The squash, along with onions, carrots and garlic are coated in a mix containing maple, cayenne and soy before roasting, and then later they’re all simmered in a gingery broth and pureed. The soup is spiced with cinnamon and star anise…since I don’t have any anise, I subbed these spices for Chinese five-spice. This was good and warming, and I loved these flavors with the squash. I tried to compliment them with my garnishes of scallions, chile crisp and toasted squash seeds.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: English Muffins
November 24, 2021 at 8:53 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 7 CommentsTags: baking, bread
It’s Thanksgiving week and I can’t get enough carbs..homemade English Muffins will do quite nicely for breakfast. This is actually the second batch of English muffins I’ve made in the past week. The first was a different recipe (and slightly different technique) that I had to make for work. This recipe of Dorie’s is pretty straight forward. A quick-to-make, sticky dough gets a long chill (I went overnight) and is then shaped into rounds and griddled up free-form. After chilling, the dough wasn’t hard to work with and I think my muffins retained a fairly nice shape without using rings. Dorie stops short of cooking the muffins all the way through on the stovetop (the other recipe I made finished them off in the oven for about 10 minutes after griddling them to the desired color). She reasons that toasting the muffins becomes the final step in their cooking process. While this is true, my muffins were still a bit doughy inside when I forked them in half to toast them, and I do think a little dense as a result. Still delicious, though, and I will enjoy every last one, but next time I may think about cooking them a little longer, either in the oven at the end, or keeping them on the griddle a few minutes more if they aren’t getting too browned.
With two English muffin successes under my belt this week, I’m feeling pretty good about applying for that management position at Thomas’. If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, you can test drive this English Muffin recipe here. But get the book and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Coco-Almond Thumbprints
November 16, 2021 at 9:25 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
One candy bar that I would never trade away in my Halloween stash was always the Almond Joy, and these Coco-Almond Thumbprints are pretty much the homemade cookie version. Dorie originally concocted these gluten-free sweets to be a Passover dessert, and you can see (and taste) the resemblance to macaroons. They are so easy to make that they can be a year-round anytime treat: just whiz coconut, almonds, sugar, a pinch of salt if you’d like and egg whites in the food processor. Roll that mix into balls, give ’em the thumbprint press and stick ’em in the oven. Once baked they get a generous spoonful of chocolate ganache to fill their bellies.
These were so good…the cookies stayed chewy like a macaroon and the ganache never set completely firm. I would have been happy to childishly hoard them for myself in the back of my closet (which is where I used to hide my Halloween candy pumpkin so my brother wouldn’t raid it), but some dude who seems to never go to the office anymore was on to the fact that I was baking cookies, so I was forced to share.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Chicken and Winter Squash Tagine
November 12, 2021 at 8:21 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, other savory, savory things | 7 CommentsTags: chicken, everyday dorie, savory
When the weather turns chilly, it’s nice to have a fragrant, braised meat and veg dish simmering away on the stove. This Chicken and Winter Squash Tagine is just that. Spiced with ras el hanout, this tagine is Dorie’s pantry version of a North African stew. Not that I have made so many tagines in my life, but I usually think of them as one-pot meals, so I turned her recipe into one. Rather than cooking down onions and browning off chicken in separate pots, I browned the chicken in my Dutch oven first. Then I removed it to cook down the onions…once they were melty-soft and spiced up, I added the chicken back into the pot along with slices of acorn squash to simmer until completely tender.
I had some homemade preserved lemon, so I swapped that in for the fresh zest and juice in the recipe. Because I love them in a tagine, some green olives went into mine as well, and next time, in order to thicken the sauce up a bit (which Dorie does warn us will be thin), I’ll probably add some chickpeas and a few spoonfuls of their starchy liquid near the end of cooking. All in all though, this was warming and tasty, and while Dorie says it’s best freshly made, I thought it was even more flavorful the next day.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Apple Pandowdy
November 9, 2021 at 2:07 pm | Posted in BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 23 CommentsTags: baking, fruit
We’re already onto our second recipe from Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple! I was going to do the English Muffins this week, but then you know how it goes. I didn’t get around to making the dough, and apparently English muffins don’t make themselves…but I did have a round of homemade rough puff pastry in the freezer, so Apple Pandowdy it was!
A pandowdy is one of those olde-fashioned desserts I’ve never actually made before. Likely invented to use off-cuts and scraps of pie pastry (an idea I like very much, btw since I never throw out my trimmings), it is assembled like a pot pie, with a fruit filling underneath a top crust. You can spice up your fruit any way you like, but this one has just a simple filling of sliced apples, sugar, lemon and a little butter. My apples let out a lot of juice, but once the pandowdy had cooled, it was actually quite a nice sauce-like consistency. A sprinkle of flour in the filling would probably help bind that up a bit next time.
Even though I was using brand-new dough and not scraps here, I assembled my crust higgledy-piggledy from randomly-sized overlapping triangles and squiggles, as Dorie suggests. Because I used puff pastry, my pieces got very poofy in the oven, and probably didn’t quite conform to the shape of the cooked down apples quite as much as if I’d used a pie dough. I guess it’s still cute in it’s own dowdy way.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, you can test drive this Apple Pandowdy recipe here. But get the book and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
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