Book: Cooking with Booze
December 20th, 2007
Ah, a book after my own heart: Cooking with Booze. We all know how to cook with wine by now, and thankfully Cooking with Booze focuses more energy on spirits, beer, and hard cider. Even better, whiskey gets the biggest section of all.
The recipes in Cooking with Booze lean towards traditional English fare, with a few adventurous side trips abroad. Some recipes that piqued my interest were Potato Salad with Beer Dressing, Whisky Pancakes, Brandy-baked Brie, and Roast Pork with Apple Stuffing and Cider Sauce.
You can buy the book (obligatory Amazon.com link), or you can view it in it’s entirety online, with the occasional video.
Balsamic Glazed Almonds
Coconut and Lime has a delicious-looking recipe for Balsamic Glazed Almonds. Haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but honestly if you glazed cardboard with balsamic I’d happily eat it.
NY Times 101 Simple Appetizers, and a Brief Treatise on Olives
December 19th, 2007
The New York Times has posted a great list of 101 Simple Appetizers that can be prepared in under 20 minutes for you holiday parties.
Quite a few of the recipes call for olives — which you should never, ever buy at the grocery store, unless your store has a particularly good olive bar and you’re short on time. Buying canned or jarred olives at the grocery store is somewhere below putting your money into a little pile and burning it for warmth on the scale of fiscal sanity. Any moderately-sized community will have at least one Greek or Mediterranean specialty store, and any respectable Greek or Mediterranean store will sell gallon jars of good-quality olives for under $20. Compare that to the $8 you’ll spend on a 8 or 12 oz jar at the grocery store. Do the math — I’ll wait. Mmmhmm….convinced?
Pretzel Praline
Just in time for the holidays, Ideas in Food is featuring a delicious-looking, easy to make Pretzel Praline recipe. Anything that combines sweet, salty, and yeasty cannot possibly be bad.
No Knead Bread, Revisited
December 6th, 2007
As one of the billions of people now enjoying New York Times’ (in)famous No Knead Bread on a semi-regular basis, Cook’s Illustrated’s recent revisions piqued my interest. If you don’t have a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, you can get a rundown of the changes here.
No Knead Bread, photo licensed under CC courtesy of Taryn Domingos.
Essentially, Cook’s Illustrated addresses the major issues people were having — namely, the dough falling during transfer to the pan, and lack of flavor. Additional salt seems to help address the latter, but the article suggests substituting small amounts of vinegar and beer into your liquid to give the bread some additional complexity.
They also suggest several small procedural changes, including 15 seconds of kneading. Heresy, I know.
Quick Programming Note
December 4th, 2007
We’ve just made the switch to FeedBurner for our syndication (e.g. RSS/Atom) needs. Please update your readers to http://www.impoverishedgourmet.com/feed.
We’re still happy to offer full-article feeds, ad-free. You shouldn’t notice any difference — but we’ll be able to keep track of things a bit better.
Pantry Essentials: Tubed Tomato Paste
November 30th, 2007
The easiest way to get great tomato flavor into your dishes in the winter when good, fresh tomatoes aren’t available is tomato paste. I never ended up using the canned stuff on a regular basis because it tends to be overly acidic, and because I never could use an entire can. Luckily, tomato paste is available in smaller quantity and (much) better quality in tubes — similar to travel-sized toothpaste tubes. While you end up paying more per ounce than canned paste, it’s a lot tastier, a lot more useful, and always on hand when you need it. While the tubes will probably run you $4-5 dollars at your grocery store, you can get a supply (12 tubes) at Amazon for under $25, which works out to under $2 a pop.
For a unique, flavorful, fast pizza sauce, combine tomato paste, our roasted shallot vinaigrette, and olive oil.
Balsamic Onions and Goat Cheese Quesadilla
I discovered Meghan’s blog, Tales of a Culinary Novice, through a comment she left here recently, and she’s got some super swanky recipes up. One in particular caught my eye while I was there: Balsamic Onions and Goat Cheese Quesadillas. Mmm. I’m going to go make a few of these right now.
Roasted Shallot Vinaigrette
November 27th, 2007
Home-made vinaigrettes are a great way to add a lot of flavor to a dish without a lot of cost or a lot of fat. Here, roasted shallots give the vinaigrette a great balance of sweetness and earthiness, and provide body. Although a white wine or even sherry vinegar would be a more classic choice here, the rice vinegar allows the complexity of the shallot to shine.
I paired the vinaigrette with mizuna and pear, but it would go well with a variety of salads (spinach and apple, endive and walnuts, etc) or any number of entrees (pork medallions, roasted new potatoes).
Roasted Shallot Vinaigrette with a mizuna and D’anjou pear salad
Find recipes for leftovers at LeftoverChef
Looking for a use for those 12 pounds of turkey you didn’t eat yesterday? Leftover Chef lets you search for recipes based on what you’ve got hanging around in your fridge waiting to be used. Remember kids, there’s no better way to save money than using all of your leftovers.