Catching up - Spatchcock edition

We spatchcocked a chicken a few days ago. Spatchcocked it good.

Spatchcock: short for "dispatching the cock" is an old technique for quickly cooking a chicken by forcing it to be as flat as possible. Steph says it was used by hunters in the field because it cooks faster so you didn't have to keep the fires going so long. Lets you cook a chicken in about 20 minutes if you do it right. Also requires a pan and not an oven.

Cut lengthwise through the backbone of a chicken; butterflying it. Steph coated this one in salt for three days and stuffed it with preserved limes before it was laid open.

So. First we took the dutch oven and heated it up in the oven at 425. And threw the butterflied chicken in the hot pan. And proceeded to wicked witch of the west the offending fowl.


And since we're insane, there's sweet potatoes and sage and olive oil inside the dutch oven.


Flip after about ten minutes. and squish it again.

TA-DAH


The overly long salt rub and cooking the chicken from both sides really quickly resulted in a very very juicy chicken. (The three day salt cure was basically because um. We kept meaning to eat the chicken but got very distracted.)

Note for this St. Paddy's day

Car Bomb Cupcakes the newest meme from Smitten Kitchen.  Except it's me and these really just need to be doused in Jameson so I can get sloshed off of cupcakes.

And since we're talking about alcohol ANYWAY, tonight's project was fill an old vanilla extract bottle with leftover rum (see last week) and vodka dregs and a vanilla bean. Theoretically this can hang out for a few weeks and make vanilla extract BUT WE SHALL SEE.

Curry Horns/Pies/Turnovers

Steph and I were sitting here watching Avatar and eating a Key Lime Pie trying to figure out what the hell this thing is called.  It's this half moon pie thing that's all shiny and braided around the edges filled with a ground beef slightly sweet potatoy curry.  

Finally found some pointers on the Internets.

http://www.recipelink.com/cookbooks/2000/0688163009_2.html

and the braiding technique

http://www.xanga.com/joyosity/686394215/curry-turnovers-or-curry-puffs-or-curry-meat-pies/

We'll probably wind up doing something between the pie crust recipe in the first and mucking around with the filling recipe and learning how to fold using the second link.  And then finding people to feed them to.  And trying to figure out how to batch this considering my oven is about the size of my cat.

NEWS FLASH:  everything we've ever eaten and are trying to figure out how to make is here http://www.xanga.com/joyosity including the correct way to make Chun Yo Bin (i suck at making chinese into english)

Other things to do with a $16 bottle of rum

We have this book that tells us what to do.  I picked it up on a whim (and apparently, for a song) from our local Half Price Books one day, thinking I would inflict it upon Emily for Christmas as a semi-gag gift.  (She's paranoid about preserved foods, and thus has never experienced the joy of jam or delicious pickles.)

It's a great book written by two British food dorks with a good sense of humor and a solid knowledge of drying, smoking, curing, canning, infusing, freezing, fermenting, and a few other mind-boggling things like how to suspend baby octopus in aspic.

Turns out the book has a section on alcohol.

We had actually bought the rum for the primary purpose of making a recipe from the book.  The fact that we were making bananas foster the same night simply provided impetus for the trek to Costco.

The recipe is called "Lai's Fruits of the Forest Rum" and the basic premise is as such:  Put frozen mixed berries into a bottle, add some sugar, and top it off with rum.  Seriously, who needs to measure?  So we didn't.

Mise-en-place, lacking sugar.  Ignore the flour.  The rainbowcake likes to watch.

Rum strata.

I'm so glad we bought this funnel.

Once we had filled our various bottles, we sealed them and wrapped them in foil to keep out the light, then stashed them somewhere dark.  The instructions said to let them sit for a year, so maybe in a year we will get really drunk on it and report back on the status of rum n' berries.

Epilogue:  We had about a cup of berries left, so I made two tiny cobblers in ramekins.  They were delicious.

Challah part 2: breakfast for dinner

Okay so here's what we did to one of the challahs.  The other was savagely ripped apart while we were waiting for the final season of Lost to start.

We sliced our remaining challah loaf into thick 1-1.5" pieces and violated them like so:

Cutting a pocket

Stuffed with mascarpone + honey (used ghetto ziploc bag with corner cut off piping method)

Soaked in french toast custard (eggs + half&half) and put on new-to-us griddle pan.

While Emily took over the griddling, I prepped bananas foster:

banana-nana-fo-fana

Melting butter into cream and sugar, because y'know...it needed more fat.

Sadly there were no good pictures of me setting it on fire, but know this:  I mixed about a tablespoon of Everclear (the dregs from limoncello-making adventure) with some rum to make damn sure it caught.  Oh, such glorious flames.

Bow down before your god!

That sucker was $16 at Costco.  They got some alcohols for scary cheap.

There was bacon also

but not for long.

The mascarpone sort of melted into the bread, making it kind of bread-puddingy in the middle which was nice.  Next time (next time?) we will make the pockets in fresh pliable challah instead of semi-stale crumbly challah, and maybe also soak the bread longer in the custard.

We still have half a tub of mascarpone leftover.

Challah

Challah is delicious and no other justification is needed.  If you have not consumed challah in the past, you have been missing out and you should run to the nearest challah store and get some, or if you are a bit more patient, you should make it yourself.

Here is the recipe for delicious challah that you should make.

The best part about making bread, any bread, is that you can abuse the dough to fit your schedule.  Don't have all day to wait around for multiple risings?  Throw the dough in the fridge overnight after the first rise, then let it finish the next day.  

The same can be done with shaped loaves before proofing (the final rise).  It's awesome.  You can be lazy and still have awesome bread that amazes people.

These loaves in particular had one rise initially, were punched down, and put in the fridge overnight, then taken out the next morning for a second rise, then shaped, proofed, and baked.

Here is what it looked like when I did it for the third time in 2 months.  I suspect this is why everyone likes having me around.

So many lumps.

It was a two-step process to roll the dough into ropes, since the gluten structure was fairly developed.  I rolled each piece into a short cylinder, let it rest for a few minutes so the gluten would relax, then rolled them all into ropes for braiding.

It looks like a doughy octopus.

Braided...

And baked.

Next post I will relate to you the delicious fate of the challahs.

Rainbow Cake!

So here's how you make rainbow cake.

You start with a really good recipe for delicious cake, sink some dollars into some good quality gel food coloring (found in the cake decorating aisle of your local craft store, not the supermarket), and use all the bowls and stirring implements in the kitchen.

We had cheap aluminum 9" round pans so I buttered and floured them beforehand. (the flouring makes all the difference in de-panning, trust me).  

I've started saving discarded butter wrappers in the fridge for expressly this purpose.

Then I made a batch of buttermilk cake batter and split it into 6 roughly equal parts:

Here are the colors.  I just dipped the tip of a butter knife into the gel color and mixed that into the batter really well.  Purple was kind of hard to get right because the batter was yellowish.

Once you have all the colors, start pouring them into the pans in rainbow sequence like so:  Use a bunch of the red, like nearly all of it except for a tablespoon or two, for the first layer of the first cake.  Then follow with almost as much of the orange (but reserve a bit more), and so on with the rest of the colors.  When you reach purple, you should only be putting a dollop of batter in the center and reserving the rest.

For the second cake, repeat the pouring process but in reverse order (all the purple first, etc.)

You will wind up with one bulls-eye rainbow with red on the outside,  and one bulls-eye rainbow with purple on the outside.

Bake the cakes as per the usual and layer and frost with delicious whipped cream cheese frosting.

Then eat it.

Buttermilk cake recipe:

2 1/2 cups flour 
1 cup granulated sugar 
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup butter, softened
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla 

Cream butter and sugars together, then beat in eggs one at a time and add vanilla.  Sift in the rest of the dry ingredients, alternating with the buttermilk, and beat well until batter is smooth.  Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out dry.

Whipped cream cheese frosting

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, room temperature

1 1/2 c. heavy cream

1 c. sugar

Whip the cream and half the sugar together until they form soft peaks, then transfer to another bowl for temporary storage.  Whip the cream cheese and the rest of the sugar together until the sugar has completely dissolved and the mixture is no longer grainy.  Gently fold in whipped cream and mix to combine (the paddle attachment at low speed works fine).