How to Make Roasted Tomato Sauce

3 – Perfection

1 – Ready for the Oven

2 – Roasted till Carmelized

I am constantly on the look out for something to do with fresh Oregon ripe tomatoes. I always grow more than we can eat fresh, so we can them; dry them; use them in salsa; make spaghetti sauce and can it; etc.

Right now I have an abundance of Roma’s. They are not as big as last years crop, but they are as plentiful and as full of flavor. We have eaten them raw; in salads; dried some and made a batch of salsa. Janet struck on the idea of roasting them and trying to make a richer more caramelized kind of tomato sauce than we have made before. Great idea, the brain wheels begin to turn, and Sunday morning, September 1st, 2013 while I was prepping for our Cousins Picnic, I sliced in half a bunch of Romas and put them in bowl. I then added about a half cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil, salt, fresh cracked black pepper, a generous amount of Italian Seasoning; a dash of onion powder; and two shakes of garlic powder. I mixed the bowl of ingredients together and laid them out on a lipped cookie sheet and spread them so that each tomato had exposure top and bottom.

I put the pan in the oven at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, or just until the tomatoes begin to caramelize. Don’t let them get blackened or the burnt taste will ruin the tomato flavor. Once the tomatoes are cool, put them in the Vitamix (any ordinary blender will do, but the Vitamix is my tool of choice) and blend, adding a half cup of EVOO as you are blending. Once the tomatoes are fully blended into a sauce remove from the blender and store.

This sauce is a sort of concentrate, to be used in a sauce with red wine, chicken stock, or even tomato juice added. Add to the sauce as much as you want to achieve the consistency you desire, then add whatever other ingredients suit your fancy. Spice it up with some hot pepper and shrimp and make a Shrimp Diablo to serve over pasta. Go pedantic and serve it over spaghetti as a side dish. Our first attempt will be to pull some of the Italian sausage we made, and make an Italian pasta dish. Use your imagination. This is a great flavored sauce. Full of tomatoey goodness.

How to Make Fresh Tomato Salsa

Combine the chopped tomato wth the processed peppers and onions

The nearly finished product

Slicing the tomato

Process the veggies to chucks

Red Serrano with membrane and seeds removed

Red Serrano ready to be cleaned

My raw ingredients

Add the thickener back into the Salsa

Mix removed liquied with tomato paste to create a thickener

Removing the liquid

add lime and garlic

My Salsa seasonings

I have been making my own salsa ever since I have been gardening. In fact my garden each year is tailored so that I grow all the ingredients (except spices) that I put in the Salsa. This makes my Salsa really special, and I am very proud of the end result.

In past years we have had Salsa parties. We invited folks to bring their own recipe and then we all made our various kinds of Salsa, with a taste off at the end. Each of the Salsa dishes are set out with an accompanying empty bowl. Each guest has one red, one white and one blue poker chip. The guest tastes the Salsa and gives the red chip to their favorite Salsa, the white chip to their second favorite and the blue chip to their third favorite. The chips have value of 3,2 and 1 points, and the chips awarded to each Salsa are totaled at the end, and the Salsa with the most points wins. Now they don’t really win anything but bragging rights, but a win is a win in any event!!! It is a very fun evening, and a way to broaden your horizons for Salsa making. In various years we have had sweet Salsa like mango and peach, some that used roasted tomatoes, or roasted peppers, etc. All good and all interesting. Once you perfect your Salsa making skills, then you should share with others, and have your own Salsa Party!!!!!!!!! I have even produced a Salsa cookbook with all the recipes we have made or tasted over the years.

Now here is how I make my favorite Salsa. By the way, this recipe won the party competition one year – now that may have been only because I was the host and got gratuity points, but as I said, a win is still a win.

As with most traditional Salsa, you have to start with fresh tomatoes (preferably from your garden, but in season is a must for the best result – the kind of tomato is not as important, but the meatier varieties work the best). This recipe uses 2 quarts of sliced tomatoes. As noted below, the ratio of tomato to pepper is a personal decision and can be modified to suit your tastes.

2 large Walla Walla Sweet Onions
1 Green Bell pepper
1 Red Bell pepper
12 Jalapeno peppers
6 red Serrano peppers
2 small Banana peppers
2 Italian Roaster peppers
2 bunches of fresh Cilantro
2 small cans of tomato paste

On all the peppers, cut in half, and remove the seeds and white membrane. See note below about increasing the heat of your salsa by leaving in more of the seed and membrane. Oh by the way, you should use gloves when working with peppers, as the pepper oil is intrusive and once on your hands, it then gets on your face, on your nose and in your ears and all over, and is very hard to get washed off. Be sure not to go to the bathroom with pepper oil on your hands. Yikes!!!!!!!!

Process the onion and peppers in a food processor. Just use the pulse feature as you want your veggies chunky and not turned into a paste. When the onions and peppers are processed, put in a large covered bowl.

Slice the tomatoes in small chunks. My style is to first slice the cleaned tomato in half, then I lay the flat surface on the cutting board. I then slice slabs about one quarter inch wide, trying to keep the tomato together with my fingers. I then rotate the tomato and slice again the other direction. If your tomato is large, an additional cut will probably be necessary. As you slice up your tomatoes, add them to the bowl of onions and peppers. I leave the skins on, but if you are skin averse, then blanch the tomato for 30 seconds in boiling water, then move to an ice bath to remove the skins, then proceed as normal. I promise not to call you a sissy if you take the skins off.

Once you are done with the tomato slicing and the onion and pepper processing. Combine. Then add in Cilantro. You will need to cut off the stems of the Cilantro, as all you want in your salsa are the leaves. This is my most dreaded part of Salsa making, as it is time consuming and tedious. Once you have the stems removed, then chop up the Cilantro. A rough chop is ok.

Once the Salsa is prepared, but before any seasonings are added, make a large hole in the middle of your Salsa mixture. Using a ladle or cup measurement, press down to remove as much water from the dish as you can. Retain the water in a separate mixing bowl. Allow the Salsa to set and repeat, the goal to get all the liquid off the Salsa that you can. Add the tomato paste to the removed salsa water, and mix thoroughly. This mixture should end up looking like a real thick ketchup. Add this mixture back into the Salsa. This mixture will give the Salsa a smooth rich creaminess that will allow it to stick to chips.

This recipe is a tomato dominant recipe. You can adjust the ratio of tomato to pepper/onion to suit your tastes. Also if you like your salsa hotter, leave in some pepper seeds and some of the pepper membrane as they possess the heat.

Now it is time to add the seasoning. My recipe includes

4 cloves of garlic (press in with a garlic press)
3 limes (press out the juice with a squeezer)
¼ cup of Red Wine Vinegar
4 tbs of Trappey’s Red Pepper Sauce (Tabasco can be substituted)
¼ cup of EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)
salt and pepper to taste
2 tbs of Wally’s Mexican Seasoning – See below

Put all the ingredients in a large covered bowl, mix well and refrigerate for 24 hours to allow the flavors to marry. If you don’t have a large covered bowl, but sure to put plastic wrap over the bowl. It is important to keep the bowl sealed tight.

Once the salsa has fully married, then adjust the seasonings to suit your taste. Don’t add any more tomatoes or peppers at this point, but the seasonings can be adjusted to taste before jarring the salsa.

I use wide mouth pint jars to store my salsa. One pint seems to be the perfect size, and the wide mouth makes getting the salsa in and out much easier. Make sure your jars are clean and hot. I keep mine in hot water in the sink until they are ready to be filled. I then remove the jars, dry them, fill and seal with a canning ring and lid. The filled jars then go immediately into the refer. The Salsa will last 3 – 4 months. Don’t use the white plastic temporary storage lids, as they do not seal well enough to withstand more than a week or so in the refer, but the canning lids will get a good enough seal to keep your Salsa through Christmas or beyond.

This recipe will make 12-13 pints of Salsa.

For years I used the McCormick’s brand Mexican Seasoning in my Salsa. For some reason, in the summer of 2007, this blend came off the shelf, and I haven’t seen any Mexican seasoning blend since. I was therefore forced to create my own blend. After much experimentation, I found what I believe to be the best Mexican blend for my kind of cooking. It is hot, so watch out!!

Wally’s Mexican Seasoning:

2 tbs Hot Chili Powder
3 tbs Ground Cumin Seed
4 tbs Red Pepper Flakes
2 tbs Ground Cayenne Pepper
1 tbs onion powder
1 tbs garlic powder

This is enough to fill a ziplock bag, and can be used to season any Mexican dish. Keep the bag sealed and in your spice drawer. It should last upwards to a year.

How to Make Rustic Pork Pate

This is the bacon wrapped Pate, much paler in color

Supplies needed to start your own Pate

The kind of base pork I used for my pate

Chicken Livers are a primary ingredient

A few Pistachios are a must in Pate

I added sun dried Roma tomatoes from my garden

Finely chopped onion and garlic

This is the Cognac I used

This is the Proscuito I used

Chop up your meat to small cubes for processing

Meat as processed to the texture desired

Process the meat to a whipped texture

Combining remaining ingredients

If you use bacon as liner be sure to pound it out

Lining the pate pan – this one with proscuitto

Add pate to lined pan

Fold ends of wrapper over the Pate to seal

Finished Pate with Bacon wrapping

This is the Pate that was wrapped in Proscuito

Various sizes of Pate Pans

This blog post is dedicated to my oldest friend Steve, who professes to love pate more than I do, and that is really saying something. Between the two of us, we can devour a brick of pate long before the salads arrive. We enjoy all kinds of pate, the creamy kind as well as the rustic. Pate made from duck, chicken, pork or any combinations thereof. It is a rich hearty flavor that allows the meat to be complimented with various and sundry other ingredients to add specific notes to the dish. The key ingredient in any pate seems to be the Cognac. The better the Cognac, the better the pate. While the cooking process eliminates the alcohol, the Cognac flavor persists in the dish and provides a unique flavor that says you have a really nice pate.

In keeping with my curiosity and desire to become a better cook and engage in more diversified dishes, and as a compliment to my recent meat successes (hamburger, meatballs, sausage need I say more??????), I embarked on a quest to learn how to make pate. Now I have some nice tools to work with. We have the industrial grade food processor and mixer, but even that is not capable of rendering the meat to a creamy puree, so we settled for rustic pate. The difference here is that the meat is not as highly processed and remains in a loaf and is not creamy at all, but a sophisticated kind of meatloaf texture. I say I settled on the rustic style, but in truth I really do love the rustic style better – not much better – but just a little better.

My learning curve involved two separate sessions. The first session was several months ago, and the outcome was delightful, altho the preparation was a bit cumbersome – which I guess goes along with the first time attempt at the dish. I did not have pate pans then, so I found myself using a bread pan and producing a pate so big that it would challenge even Steve and I to eat it in one setting. I quickly learned that the richness of the pate is such that smaller pans are much better. The next time we were at T.J. Maxx I found the medium size pate pans and bought a set of four. Less than $10 for the set. Later I found the small petite size pate pans at Cost Plus, and I think they were 99 cents each. I again bought a set of four. The petite pans are perfect for an intimate dinner for two, and the medium size works for a small dinner party to set out as an appetizer. Janet is the presenter in the family and she always decorates the pate plate with cornichons, and cherry/Roma/grape tomato if in season, a pickled onion, or something uniquely similar. Of course a sprig of parsley is always a nice touch. Pate can be eaten by itself, and I love it that way. But, the normal condiment to serve with pate is mustard. A stone ground mustard works great, a sweet mustard is really good and Monastery Mustard is to die for, especially on the Rustic Pate I am making here.

I have found that making pate is much easier than I would have thought. After that one practice round a couple of months ago, I felt ready to go. I didn’t use a recipe this time, choosing to select some special ingredients I love and that came from my garden. The beauty of pate is in its versatility, you can modify the ingredients and come out with a different flavor to suit your particular tastes, or the ingredients you have available to use.

This is the rustic pork pate that I made Saturday, August 31, 2013. Feel free to modify as you see fit, however you must keep the liver and Cognac or else you have meatloaf and not pate!!! So here goes:

2.64 lbs of Boneless Pork Country Ribs, altho pork roast, or any slab of pork that you can grind up will work. The weight is what my particular package of pork was.

6 slices of thick sliced bacon

.79 lbs of Chicken Livers. This weight is also what my particular package of liver was. Note that chicken liver comes in tubs (like butter tubs) and generally is in the cooler near the chickens. Some stores you will have to ask the butcher for it.

The ratio of meat is what is important, not the exact quantity. These weights are what I used, but basically you can figure 4:1 pork to liver with the bacon being included on the pork side ratio.

Chop up the meat into small chunks that can be processed in a food processor. Set aside while you assemble your other ingredients.

¼ cup of raw onion very finely chopped
¼ cup of garlic very finely chopped
2 eggs
½ cup of Cognac
¼ cup of sun dried tomatoes, finely diced
¼ cup of pistachios, rough chopped
1 tbs salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp Thyme
1 ts[ Rosemary
1 tbs All Spice

Run the meat, onion, garlic and sun dried tomatoes through the food processor until the ingredients are fully integrated and the meat has a whipped texture. Remove from the food processor and put in a large bowl. With the quantities I used here, I had to do two separate spins in the processor, half per spin, then put all of it together in a large mixing bowl.

Add the remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. Set aside in the refer as you prepare your pate pans.

Select the size of pate pan to use. Spray the pan with non stick spray and set aside.

The next step is to line the pan with a sealer. Normally I would use bacon as my sealer, and I think that is well accepted as the traditional style, where pure fat is not available (or desired!!). To use bacon, you need to stretch and beat it so that it is very thin and elongated. A regular slice of bacon should nearly double in width and length when pulled and stretched and pounded (be sure to use plastic wrap for your pounding and to use a swiping kind of pound and not just straight down hammer kind of pounding). Once the bacon is thinned, then line the pate pan, leaving enough length outside the pan to fold over the pate once it is added. The idea is that the bacon surrounds the pate to form a fatty shell of flavor and sealer for the pate. Once your bacon is laid in, add the pate mixture, but do not fill to the top, leave a little extra room at the top. Use a knife (or you finger) to poke the pate down to make sure there are no air pockets. Once the pate is inserted, then fold the remaining bacon over the top to cover the pate.

Janet is a little put off by the pale color of the bacon after cooking, and she wanted me to explore alternative ways to address the visual of the pale bacon. I struck on the idea of proscuitto. It is already thinly sliced, and has a rich color. The only draw back is that it does not have the fat flavor content of bacon, but I gave it a shot and it turned out wonderfully. The color of the pate is a rich reddish meat color, and we did not notice any drop off in flavor. If you want to use proscuitto, line the pate pan in the same way you would with the bacon as described above. Note the difference in color in the photographs between the prosciuto wrapped pate and the paler bacon wrapped pate.

Pate should be cooked in the ban marie style (place the pate pan in a large baking pan and fill the larger pan about half full of water). Go 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, but remember the length of cooking will vary greatly depending on the size of your pate pan. The smaller pans are done in 30 minutes or less, the larger ones may take up to an hour to cook.

Once the pate is cooked, and while it is still warm out of the oven, you must press it to get rid of all the excess grease and to compress the pate to a tight texture. Pour off the pan all of the liquid, then press (hard) to squeeze out any excess grease. If you have stacking pate pans, stack them one on top of the other and leave them for an hour or so and then remove any excess grease. Once you have the grease removed, flip the pan onto a cooling rack. There will be some excess grease left which you need to wipe off the pate loaf with a paper towel. The pate then is ready to serve and should present wonderfully with the bacon or proscuitto wrapping.

This recipe made 4 small pans, 4 medium pans and the 1 large covered dish of pate. Please enjoy this pate. It is rich and full of flavor, and when paired with a fine mustard, it is just a delightful appetizer.

I must say if my Mom saw me eating pate, let alone making it, she would be shocked. Chicken livers? No way. I treated them like the plague when I was a kid. Didn’t matter how they were presented, if the word liver (didn’t matter whose liver it was!) was mentioned, I refused to eat it. I literally went 50 years depriving myself of this dish. I guess I am trying to make up for all those lost years now with my lust for pate and everything Charcuterie.

How to Make Your Own Sausage

7 – The sausage ground and ready to be stuffed

6 – Even More Meat

5 – More meat

4 – the meat

3 – the ingredients

2 – the Kitchen Aide ready to go

1 – The stuffer attachment

20 – The finished product ready for the freezer

19 – The Roll

18a – Sausage in the pan

18 – the finished product ready for curing

17 – Sausages to the tray

16 – Toms Twist

15 – Sample Sausage

14 – Stuffing Masters at work

13 – Tom at work

12 – Wally at work

10 – stuffing process

9 – stuffing process

8 – stuffing process

7a – Fry baby to season to taste

Do you love sausage? Hot dogs, brats, Kielbasa, any mashed up meat in a hog gut wrapper? Well I do. Give it to me in any flavor or form and I am all in. For breakfast? Yes please, little pigs as we called them as kids. For lunch? Oh yeah – hot dogs with mustard and mayo and a little relish. Dinner? Certainly. A plate of those lovely sausages with kraut, or potato salad!! Yummy.

So what does a curious old guy do when he likes something? Experiment with making it, of course. You might recall, I have been playing around with the meat grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aide. Was very successful with hamburger. Incredibly successful with grinding up a blend for making meatballs. So the next experiment had to be sausage. The only piece of equipment I didn’t have was the sausage stuffer attachment for the Kitchen Aide. Easily solved with a ten dollar bill and a trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The evolution of sausage making goes back to a dinner at Carrie and Ron Wong’s house, with Tom and Cheryl Clark. A beautiful dinner I might add. We had such a good time we decided to do a dinner rotation to the three houses. Once every 3-4 months we decided one of the couples would host the dinner party. During the course of appetizers and cocktails, the meal and wine, and dessert and aperitifs, the topic of food came up. Well actually we talked about little else! Anyway, I was talking up my new found skills with the meat grinder and the fun I was having doing this, and that I wanted to move on to making my own sausage. It was not too long before the group was concocting a sausage making party that would be our next dinner. Which then brings me to our grand experiment.

Carrie is a wonderful chef, with access to ingredients we mortals don’t have. Suffice it to say that you can not just run down to Safeway and pick up 100 feet of sausage casing!!!! Carrie on the other hand has a “guy”. So we were set. Now sausage casing is not for the faint of heart. I don’t think I spoil any secrets when I tell you that it is nothing more than pig intestines. I do believe that some commercial grade hot dogs and plastic sausage come in some sort of manmade wrapper, but those are not big boy sausages! Our goal was to make a good quality, hearty, old school sausage, so pig guts it was!

We gathered on a Sunday late morning at our house, 2 mixers with meat grinder and sausage stuffer attachments and 6 able bodies. No one had ever actually made or stuffed sausage before mind you, but we were too stupid to be intimidated. We plunged in head first.

Carrie brought 60 lbs of meat, all cubed and partially frozen, and perfect for grinding. I went to the garden and prepped onions, 5 different kinds of peppers, garlic, Rosemary, Thyme, Sage, Parsley, and Carrie brought along 20 different packets of exotic spices, some of which I had never heard of before. I will tell you that 60 lbs of meat is a lot. We ground up that meat all day and worked it and seasoned it and stuffed it till we were blue (opps that should be red) in the face. I am tired just thinking about that project.

Our goal was to make up 6 different recipes of sausage, stuff the sausage, then vacuum seal packets to freeze for later use. We actually ended up with 7 recipes, the last our very own and the most fun. I will tell you that 60 lbs of meat is a lot. I guess I already said that, but it is a lot. It is so much that after 6 people worked it over during the course of 9 hours, it turned into 180 sausages, 60 per couple. Along the way we ate and sampled, and we had a few blow outs as well that probably would have brought the total to 190 or more. 180 sausages is a lot of sausage. I suppose that goes without saying, but I am saying it anyway.

We started the day focusing on lamb sausages. We had two recipes, distinctly different. One was a lamb pork mix, the other was straight up lamb. The meat grinding was pretty straight forward. I feel like the grinder king after perfecting hamburger and meatballs with my grinder, and with this expertise, I became the dedicated grinder for the day. If you want to learn more about grinding, go look at the other posts – I been there and done that and don’t plan to repeat it here!!!

As with hamburger, you do a course grind, then a fine grind, add your spices and aromatics in between grinds. Be sure to add ice cubes to keep the fat from going gooey on you. Once you have the finish grind, then do a fry baby and taste the sausage. Adjust seasonings to taste, remix and then begin the stuffing process.

The stuffer attachment is pretty cool, it uses the hopper and auger from the meat grinder attachment, and has two sizes of tubes. We selected the larger size tube – of course!!!!!!! There never ever was really any question about that. The casings are a completely other topic. They need to soak for at least an hour. Then you have to keep them in water in order for them to be pliable enough to be able to be stuffed. Some of our casings were doubled, with one casing inside of another. A nightmare that drove some of our group batty with frustration. Some of the casings – I think I shall say all of the casings were twisted around, and the casings are so delicate it is hard to see that. But, we marched forward working on technique and style to see how to best get those casings in line to be stuffed. Tom Wright became the stuffing king. He will be forever hereafter known affectionately as the Sausage Stuffing Superman. Tom figured out that once you get the end of the casing onto the stuffer tube, then you work the casing up the tube with one hand while keeping a little pressure on the casing and taking the twists out with the other. This technique allowed him to load the tube with 25 feet of casing in a matter of minutes.

Once we had the casing loaded onto the tube, the next trick is to begin the stuffing process. Do not immediately tie off the end of the casing, as you will end up with phallic looking balloon to begin with as the air in the tube is pushed into the casing ahead of the first showing of sausage. I know this happens because we did that right out of the chute. If that happens to you – and it shouldn’t after you have read this blog – but if it does, get a needle and puncture the casing balloon and slide the casing back up on the tube.

Stuffing is a two person job and coordinated rhythm is critical. One person has to load the hopper with sausage and then evenly push it through the tube to avoid air pockets and to keep an even flow of sausage coming out of the tube. That ended up being my job. The other person is in charge of the stuffing, and working the meat into the casing, getting the right thickness of the sausage (do this by creating back pressure on the tube – think blowing up a balloon) – and then to measure the length of the sausage desired. We went for 6″ lengths, and Tom was so meticulous that of the 140 plus sausages he and I made there wasn’t a quarter of an inch of difference in the lengths of the sausages. Once he hit the required length of sausage, then he had to twist the casing to seal the sausage. One sausage gets twisted to the right, the next sausage gets twisted to the left, and so on and so forth (Opps, that’s a Big Brother TV show inside joke – and not a very good one). It is important that there is very little fall from the tube to the tray holding the sausage. We have a raised bar that is part of our kitchen, so Ron came up with the brilliant idea of turning the mixer around when it came time to do the stuffing, which effectively made the difference in height between the end of the tube and the storage tray at a couple of inches. If you don’t have that, use a bowl of other riser to raise your storage tray to near the height of where the stuffing is taking place.

Blow outs can and do occur. We had a few. I think 3 or 4 over the course of 140 sausages. They are inevitable given the delicate nature of the casing, but we were surprised at how few blow outs we had and how easy it was to deal with them. We simply stopped, cut off the casing at the blow out, returned the sausage to the hopper and tied off the end and started up again. A quick word about the tie off. The casings are slick and are covered with water. You are using rubber gloves to protect the innocent. Wet and greasy sausage covered gloves. The two don’t make for an easy grip to tie any sort of knot. Being two creative gentlemen, Tom and I determined that a pair of needle nose pliers would do the trick, and sure enough it made tying off a quick and easy process. Might be sure to run the pliers under hot water to get the WD40 off of it first, but that is up to you!!!

Once the sausages were stuffed, they needed to cool and cure for about an hour. We put our trays of finished sausage in the wine cellar, as we moved on to the next recipe. Once the sausage was cured, we had the packing station set up. We vacuum sealed the sausage using our Seal A Meal, so we had to cut bags to the appropriate size, determine how many of that particular kind of sausage were to go in each bag so that each couple got an equal portion, then bag and seal them. Once sealed, the label with the name of the sausage and the date was affixed and the bag went to the freezer. Janet and Cheryl became our stalwarts at the sealing station.

So that is the process. It was a long day, and a hard days work, but it was also fun and exciting and productive, and great to share with new friends. Although we snacked and had a short lunch break, effectively we worked constantly from 11 am until 8pm. We topped off the day with fresh peach crepes and fresh peach ice cream. Delicious and cool and refreshing. Did I say that Sunday was one of the hottest days of the year and that we all decided the next time we do this project in the dead of winter!!!

Recipes were interesting. I found http://www.spiceysausage.com to be a wonderful site for stuffing techniques and tips and for basic recipes for just about any kind of sausage you can imagine. We used some of their recipes with a little tweaking, and others were found on other sites, and several we concocted all on our own. Here are the recipes we used in the order we made the sausages.

Recipe #1 – Carrie’s – Lamb and Pork Sausage

3 lbs lamb
1 lb pork
1 lb pork fat
¼ cup gin
¼ cup red wine
2 tbs kosher salt
6 cloves fresh garlic sauteed
1 tbs ground black pepper
1tbs ground dried Porcini mushroom
2 tsp Za’atar (which is a combination of Sumac, Sesame Seeds and Salt)
3 tbs minced fresh sage

Recipe #2 – Wally’s – Aussie Lamb Sausage

3 lbs lamb
2 sun dried tomatoes, finely chopped
9 oz feta cheese (we substituted 4 oz of a hard European cheese and ½ lb of pork fat)
3 tbs fresh basil, finely chopped
1 tbs fresh Rosemary, finely chopped
1 tbs minced garlic
1 tbs salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Recipe #3 – Carrie’s – Hot Italian Sausage

10 lbs pork
1 tbs salt
2 tbs garlic
1 tbs dry oregano
1 tbs ground black pepper
¼ cup ground paprika
2 tbs smoked paprika
½ vegetable oil
2 tsp anise seed
2 tsp fennel seed
2 tbs red pepper flakes

Recipe #4 – Wally’s – Sweet Italian Sausage

10 lbs pork
4 tbs salt
2 cups ice water
1 tbs cracked fennel seed
2 tsp coarse black paper
2 tbs brown sugar
1 tsp caraway seeds
1tbs coriander
3 tsp crushed hot peppers (Fresh Serrano is what we used)

Recipe #5 – Wally’s – Polksa Kielbasa

10 lbs of pork
½ cup cold water
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
4 tbs salt
2 tbs ground black pepper
2 tbs Marjoram
2 tbs Smoked Paprika

Recipe #6 – Spiceysausage.com – English Bangers

10 lbs pork
2 tsp ground white pepper
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp sage
1 tsp Mace (we substituted 3/4 tsp Allspice and ¼ tsp Nutmeg)
6 tbs salt
6 oz of breadcrumbs

Recipe #7 – Sausage Crew’s Secret Recipe

If we told you, we would have to kill you. Then again if we told you that would mean that we actually knew what we put in it and in what quantities, which we don’t – so no worries. Suffice it to say that it is a beef based sausage, with sauteed onions, Jalapeno peppers, Serrano peppers, garlic, olive oil and a variety of spices.

All of our sausages fell into the rustic variety, as we didn’t want to take the time and didn’t really have the equipment to pulverize the meat to get that smooth consistency you find in commercial hot dogs. We did learn the key to a good sausage is a goodly amount of inserted fat. If your meat is not fatty, then add fat. Make it in the form of cheese, or even just go with olive oil. Fatten up that mixture so that your sausage is juicy and moist when cooked. We also made each couple a round of sausage. This is a continuous sausage without the twisting and separation, and it looks incredible. Better have a gang around to serve it to though.

By the end of the day we were all exhausted. Our joints and backs hurt. Our bunions were boiling, and our kitchen looked like a slaughterhouse on Saturday night. But, we were very proud and amazed that our sausage turned out so good. It was perfect in every way – something we never thought a bunch of novices could ever achieve. I think there were several strained muscles from patting each other on the back.

If you like sausage, try making your own. You will know what goes into it, and that guarantees you have it to your taste and with the best and freshest possible ingredients. And, it is cheap too. We figured the total cost was less than $1 per sausage, an incredible value for that quality of product. So put on your plastic apron, get out your Kitchen Aide and get to work. You will be glad you did!!!

I want to leave you will a great quote I found on the Simply Recipes website:

“Good sausage is all about balance. Balance of salt and savory, balance of meat and fat, balance of spices and herbs within the whole. Knowing a proper ratio of salt to meat (and fat) is essential, but once you understand it you can adjust to your own perception of saltiness, which varies wildly among people. Some sort of liquid helps tighten the bind when you mix the sausage meat; and without this bind you have hamburger, not sausage. You also need a proper amount of fat, at least 20 percent –– I have not yet met a low-fat sausage worth eating.”

Amen brother!

Fresh Peach Crepes with Peach Ice Cream

Fresh Peach Crepes with Fresh Peach Ice Cream

1 – Crepe Batter

2 – Crepe Making Supplies

3 – Melt Butter and bring to heat

4 – Add batter

5 – Swirl batter

6 – Full crepe on first side

7 – Fill Crepe and watch

8 – Remove crepe to cool

9 – Filling ingredients

10 – Crush peaches

11 – Add fresh peach to Marscapone

12 – Begin with crepe on plate

13 – Add filling

14 – Add peach slices

15 – first fold

16 – Second fold and seal with ice cream

17 – Your Finished Product

When peaches are in season the world is right. I love peaches. Used to pick them off the tree when I was a kid and peel the skin back and eat them like apples. Nowadays I buy them fresh from Aspinwall’s road side produce stand on Highway 22, and peel them with the alligator peeler (a new fangled serrated blade peeler that is designed especially for soft fruits such as peaches, and my oh my does it work well – certainly worth the $7 on Amazon.com).

Two new creations this year with regard to the wonderful fresh peach. Peach ice cream and peach crepes. Put together – with peach ice cream on top of the peach crepe – presents the most marvelous seasonal dessert you can imagine.

First the peach ice cream. No big deal here. Make vanilla ice cream (we have the clean kind where you freeze the bowl then place in the machine – Janet’s preference – and then we have the old style – my preference – where you lug in the wooden slated bucket and strap on an electric motor and fill with ice and rock salt and plug it in) Either way, once the vanilla ice cream is nearly done, have your fresh peaches diced and ready and then place them in the churn. About 2 cups per half gallon of vanilla works well. I then add about a teaspoon of yellow food coloring to give the ice cream a nice peachy look to it. Continue churning for a few minutes to incorporate the fruit and to ensure the coloration process is complete. Then remove from the churn and allow the ice cream to cure in the freezer. You will end up with a wonderful peach flavored ice cream that is delicious to eat and marvelous to look at.

Next is the peach crepe. This is a little more complicated and intimidating to begin with, but after you have gotten into the rhythm of it, the process is fun and the result exciting. Start by making the crepe itself. This is nothing but a fancy thin French style pancake, so don’t be intimidated. If I can do it, so can you. That is my Old Guy’s motto anyway. The recipe that I like to use is pretty simple. Combine the following ingredients in a blender and mix thoroughly. Then place the mixture in the refer for an hour or so to allow it to set up.

1 cup milk
4 eggs
1 cup flour
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons of melted butter
1 teaspoon of vanilla

Remove the blender from the refer and pour about ¼ cup of the batter into a medium sized sauce pan that is coated with melted butter and is on medium heat and up to temperature when you add the batter. Once you have added the batter lift the pan from the stove and rock and roll it around so that the entire base of the pan is coated with batter, then return to the heat. Monitor the batter carefully, shaking the pan occasionally to ensure the crepe that is forming is not sticking. It takes about 2minutes or so for the crepe to be done. When done it appears to be dry on the side you are looking at. Shake the pan and slip your spatula under the crepe and with a combination of upwards movements between the pan in one hand and the spatula in the other, flip the crepe over. Since it will be dry and almost done, if you turn under a corner, just use your spatula and perhaps your fingers to flip it around so that the crepe is full and flat again. The second side goes quick, so don’t go off to the bathroom or anything. About 15 – 20 seconds is all you need on the second side. When that short time has passed, again shaking your pan, bring the crepe off the stove and place it on a cooling rack. Have staged a series of wax paper sheets and a small pizza stone, or round flat platter. Allow one crepe to cool as you cook the next one. When you have two crepes on the cooling rack then begin rotating from the rack to the wax paper. Each stored crepe should be cool and be stored with wax paper on the top and bottom. Repeat the process until the batter is gone. This recipe makes about 12 crepes that are about 9′ round. Once you have your crepes stacked and waxed up, then refrigerate until use. Crepes should last several days if properly waxed up, but remember the quality of the crepe decreases with time, so eat them soon! That is what you made them for after all!

While the crepes are cooling and curing in the refer, make your filling. The recipe I created, and find delightful with the peach ice cream is:

1/2 cup of sugar
8 oz of Marscapone
2 tablespoons of peach juice
½ cup of crushed peaches
1 teaspoon almond extract

Add all of the ingredients to a bowl (preferably one that has a lid) and combine completely. Place the filling in the refer covered (hence the use of the lid!!) until ready to use. If you want a little stiffer filling add 1 teaspoon of cornstarch. But, remember that the batter will stiffen by itself in the refer, and you will need to spread it on the delicate crepe, so you don’t want it to be like peanut butter, more like honey.

OK, now the fun part. Some assembly required!!! Lay the crepe out on the serving plate. I prefer a square plate as it makes the best final presentation. Have fresh thin sliced peaches ready to go. Place the filling in the middle of the crepe in a rectangular shape. Use as much or as little filling as you want. Tailor it to your tastes, or the tastes of those you are serving. Be sure to leave lots of room all around the crepe for folding. Place a row of the thin sliced fresh peaches on top of the filling. Next comes the folding. The traditional French crepe is folded from each corner to the middle making a square shape of the final crepe, then the ice cream is placed in the center of the crepe. This is nice, but not the way I do it. Mine? Rectangular! The reason? Two scoops of ice cream instead of one of course! To go rectangular, fold each side over to the middle, then fold each end over the top (only allow a couple of inches on the ends). Place one scoop of ice cream at each end to cover the fold. Sprinkle with just a little dusting of powdered sugar and serve.

How to Make the Perfect Meatball

1 – Swedish Meatballs ready to cook

4 – Italian meatballs baked off and cooling

2 – Swedish meatballs with mushroom gravy over mashed potatoes

3 – Italian meatballs ready to be baked

I did so enjoy my burger grinding adventure, that I wanted to see about perfecting my technique, but we just couldn’t stomach another burger. Meatballs however, were a different story. These we could play with two different kinds of meatballs, and also experiment with beef/pork blends. So off to the used meat (Uncle John’s classification for meat from the clearance bin) department I went to see what kind of great deals could be had and turned into food gold.

We do a lot of our shopping at Safeway, and they have a used meat section that generally gets filled on Sunday. I happened to be there just as the butcher was moving meat from the regular case to the used meat case, and she had 4 packages of beef chuck roast, perfect for grinding, and with the used meat discount, it came in at under $2.50 per lb. There also was some pork and beef rib cuts there that I grabbed up.

It was Sunday, and getting late, and I really didn’t want to do the grinding right then. Janet suggested that we cube up the meat now and make our blends using the kitchen scale and then refrigerate overnight and after work on Monday we could move directly to grinding. We decided on two different blends, and still had more beef than was needed, so that one package of beef chuck went directly to the freezer along with the beef bones for later stock making.

Our first blend was basically a one to one beef to pork with a half portion of the beef rib. This bag was marked and put in the freezer for later grinding. The other blend was to be our Monday grinding experiment. This meat blend is:

32 oz of pork shoulder blade roast
10 oz of beef shoulder rib
60 oz of beef chuck pot roast
12 oz of ice cubes

Using our Kitchen Aide meat grinder, we created our meat blend. For more info on grinding meat see my Perfect Hamburger post. We did use Carrie Wong’s perfect chef trick of adding ice cubes, which worked very well, except for a few times my grinder didn’t like the ice cube and needed a little persuasion.

We love anything Italian, so obviously we needed to make some Italian meatballs for spaghetti and other Italian dishes. We also love Swedish meatballs, sometimes with mushroom gravy over mashed potatoes, and sometimes in a tomato sauce over boiled potatoes. We partitioned our meat 2/3 for Italian and 1/3 for Swedish.

Just a side note about those Swedes. I spent 60 years of my life proclaiming my pure Norwegian heritage. Fed to me by my parents and grandmother and uncles as a youngster, our family motto was “10,000 Swedes run thru the weeds looking for but one Norwegian.” All this said, I never could quite understand why my father’s brother whose name was Wayne, was always known as Uncle Swede, and cousin Arnie was known by most as Swede as well. I should have smelled a Swede in the woodshed!!!! A couple of years ago, cousin Barb, who is a genius at genealogy, discovered immigration documents from the 1880’s where my grandmother Lien entered the country as a baby. Those document show her parents as full blood Swedes. Now Grandma Lien always joined in the Norwegian talk, and never once admitted her pure Swedish heritage. After all those years of being Norwegian, now I am just Scandinavian I guess!!!!

But I digress even a bit further. During the course of our adventure, Janet reminded me that the mushroom gravy style Swedish meatballs was her family’s addition to our normal menu. I grew up on the tomato sauce version, but loved the MacInnes version from the first time Janet made it for me. We talked a little further and I said the top three things I got from the MacInnes family were these meatballs, the green bean, bacon and tomato side dish, and their youngest daughter, not in that order!!

Anyway, enough of that blather. Our seasoning for the Italian meatballs is pretty straight forward. We add to the meat blend: diced onion, diced green pepper, diced garlic, two eggs, and a filler (I used crackers crumbled in the food processor and then soaked in milk just before adding to meat mixture – if you soak them too soon you will end up with cracker paste – not good – I know from experience). To this mixture we added the following spices: salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, dried thyme, fresh diced Sage, dried Rosemary, and dried Marjoram, following by a dash of Worcestershire Sauce.

For our Swedish meatballs we added to the meat blend: diced onion, shredded carrots, diced garlic, one egg and the same soaked filler. To this mixture we added the following spices: salt, pepper, fresh Sage, dried Thyme and shaved Nutmeg.

Once you have the meat blend thoroughly mixed up – yes use those hands and get in there. If you don’t like the feel on your hands use rubber gloves. Your hands are the best kitchen tools you have, and they are the best way to get this mixture blended.

A trick we learned recently was to double check your seasoning. The best way to do this is to get a pan heated on the stove and take a small bite of your mix and cook it on the stove then taste it. This way you get the real flavor of the meatball, and can adjust your mixture accordingly. We actually had to adjust both styles of meatballs twice before we got that taste hit we were looking for.

To cook off the meatballs, you can certainly fry them, but we prefer baking them. So get out the old cookie sheet. If you have the sheet with the grate use that so that any grease will fall in the sheet. We have discovered that with our own blend the meat is so lean that we hardly have any grease from the meat in cooking. Spray the pan with a cooking spray. Janet is a big advocate of using ice cream scoops for meatball creation. She actually has at least 4 different sizes of the old style lever action scoop. For the Italian we like a larger meatball so we used the inch and a half scoop, but a little smaller for the Swedish meatball so we used the one inch scoop there. The thing about the scoop is that you get a nice uniform ball and the size of the meatballs are all the same so they will all cook the same.

Once the meatballs are ready, place the sheets in a pre-heated convection oven at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes or until done.

Like squirrels putting away nuts for winter, when we make meatballs, especially now as we are grinding our own blend, we like to make a gigantic bowl, then freeze the left overs for later use. We have a sealer, so after the meatballs were baked off, and after we had a dinner with some of the Swedish meatballs, we settled in to seal and freeze. We decided that 10-12 meatballs were the right size for a package. With our sealer we cut the bag to fit then seal the bottom, fill with the product and then seal. After it is sealed, we write the product on it and the date and put it in the freezer. With this particular adventure, we kept out about one third of the Swedish meatballs with dinner that night, which also made dinner the following night and one lunch for me at work, and sealed and froze the rest (apx 20). Our Italian meatballs turned out nearly 40 finished meatballs.

It was a fun adventure, that went well. We had fun with the experiment and ended up with a great meal, and lots of good quick eats to come in the months ahead.

How to Make Your Own Perfect Hamburger

16 – Insert butter in patty to moisten the burger

17 – Butter in the patty

14 – Let them rest

15 – Put cheese on while resting

7 – Finished Product

13 – Turn only once

6 – Final Grind

5 – Moving to 2d grind

4 – Course 1st Grind

12 – Grill on high heat

11 – Be at Room Temperature

3 – Simple Grinder Setup

10 – Divot in top of patty

9 – Loose pat into patties

2 – Freeze Cubes for 1 hour

8 – form into balls

1 – Cube meat

For several years now I have been in search of the perfect hamburger. Have read many blogs and websites on the subject, but it wasn’t until I read a feature on burgers in the Oregonian Food Day Section that I finally took up the cause to engage myself in the process of creating a perfect hamburger at home. Not sure I have made it yet after only one attempt, but I do think I am on to something – at least enough to share what I have learned so far.

The first key issue is the blend of meat. Since you are grinding the meat yourself you have the opportunity to play with different combinations of cuts. The key appears to be getting enough fat in your cuts to make the burger juicy and not dry. Most experts seem to imply that an 85% to 90% lean burger is the most ideal. Generally super market burgers come in 80%, and you pay lots extra to get into the 90% territory. I also agree with those that say to shop the “Used Meat” bin – my brother John’s label for the clearance area where good values on chuck roast and other cuts can be found, which can lower the overall price of your burger – just be sure to grind and cook shortly after pulling the “used meat”.

We didn’t find any “used meat” in our foray to the store, so we settled on some sale meat, still not the value that one can have by waiting for really good bargains. Our blend became 2lbs of a boned chuck roast, and 1 lb of sirloin steak. I removed the meat from the bone on the chuck roast and made a nice beef stock with the bone (just add water, a little salt and pepper and a bay leaf and simmer for an hour, then strain and chill in the refer till the fat coagulates then remove the fat and freeze the stock for later use in soups or sauces).

The process of grinding the meat is apparently hard on the fat in the meat and we are told that it can break down and cause issues with the burger. To avoid this potential problem, I cut the meat into chunks about an inch square and placed them on a cookie sheet. The meat then went into the freezer for an hour. This didn’t freeze the meat, but kept it firm and allowed it to go through the grinder with the fat nicely in tact.

It turned out that our burgers did not have the fat content that I think the experts were looking for. We were probably at 95% lean, undoubtedly due to the quality of sirloin we added. There simply was not much marbling in the sirloin so almost no fat there. A more fatty second cut of meat would provide a juicier burger.

Once you take the meat out of the freezer, then you start the grinding process. We are fortunate enough to have a Kitchen Aide mixer with all sorts of attachments, including the meat grinder. Have the grinder all set up and firmly locked into position. Use the larger hole blade first in order to begin the process of blending the cuts of meat and to put the meat in a position to go thru the fine finished blade.

I put my mixer on high speed and began feeding the meat through the grinder, keeping the tamper going to make sure the meat was fed through properly. The meat is loose once it comes out of this first grind. Toss the meat just a little to again assist in the blending of the cuts, then change to the fine course finished blade and repeat the process. This time the meat comes out pretty much stuck together and looking like real hamburger – the kind you get from the butcher. Bright red and fresh. Incredibly different from store bought hamburger – very surprising to me the amount of difference involved in home grinding. Once you are complete through the second grind, your hamburger is ready for seasoning and formation into patties.

Just a little salt and pepper is needed, and then only right before you begin your patty making. Don’t over season, as you will add seasoning to taste as you grill the burgers. One trick I read about was to make a baby tester burger to grill with your regular burgers. This tester burger should be the same thickness as the regular burger, just not as big a round. Use the tester burger to check doneness and seasoning – plus is makes a nice cook’s treat to eat as you are cooking.

There is a little trick to forming patties with this home ground hamburger. The looser the meat the better. Tightly packed meat will result in a tough and chewy burger, so never mash that patty down in the formation or when cooking (forcing all the great flavor juice out of the burger and into the flame – losing quality in the burger and often causing flare up of flame to char the outside of the burger). First make a loose ball of you meat. The size of the ball is dictated by the size of the burger you want. Be sure that the size of each ball is the same, so that they will all cook evenly and at the same time. Gently form the ball into a flat patty and gently keep the edges smooth with one hand as you lightly press down with the other. Once the patty is formed, then you need to make a slight divot in the top of the burger, just a little indentation that will counter the rise in the burger when cooking and will leave you with a flat burger that cooks evenly, and works much better on the bun than one that is rounded on the top.

Cooking the burger is not rocket science, but there are a couple of things to remember. First is to use high heat. Make that burger sizzle when it hits the grill. The second is to turn the patty only once. The more you move and flip the burger the tougher it gets. To borrow a phrase from huckster Ron Popeil, “set it and forget it” – well don’t really forget it. Leave it on the grill for about 5 minutes for a medium burger, then flip it once and leave it for another 4 minutes. Leave longer for well done burgers or short for less done burgers. Do not ever press down on the top of the burger, as that forces out the juices – oh I already said that – but it is important and bares repeating. Using the baby tester burger check doneness and seasoning and adjust accordingly.

If you like cheese, don’t put the cheese on the meat while it is cooking. The burger should rest for a few minutes after it is done cooking. Put the cheese on it during the resting period. Cheese is a dairy product and it is a little delicate to cook with. Better not to risk your burger with the melting process on heat, and as long as the cheese is thin sliced, it should melt enough during the rest.

Our burgers turned out great. A couple of lessons I learned was the seasoning adjustment. I forgot to use the baby tester for seasoning, and the finished burgers needed more salt and pepper. I also got caught up doing a few other things in the kitchen and our burgers went a couple of minutes longer on each side than I would have liked, making them well done when I was going for medium. The extra cooking time and the lean meat we grinded made our burgers just a little dry – not overly so, but not juicy like I was going for. With a higher fat content in our grind and hitting the medium scale and with just a little more attention to seasoning, and I think I can attain that perfect burger.

I would be remiss in not mentioning all the variations that the burger can take on. One of my favorites is what we call the “Paula Dean trick”. Stick a pat of butter in the middle of your ball of meat. As the meat cooks that butter will add flavor and moisture to the burger and enhanced the flavor. A variation on that theme is cheese. Put the cheese in the middle of the ball and you have a very kind of cheeseburger. If you like onion or pepper, stick one of those in the middle, it is always a nice surprise to find something inside your burger. It is like having “burger jacks” with a prize in every package!!!

Personally, I enjoy a Salisbury steak. Take the meat you just ground, add diced onion and pepper (bell, plus Jalapeno or Serrano if you want to add heat to the patty), salt and pepper and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, then proceed as you would with any other burger. Delicious.

I found this burger making process to be fun and rewarding. It took longer than peeling back the plastic wrap and slapping the burgers on the stove, but the quality of the end result was well worth the effort. My process make 3lb of hamburger. It took me 15 to cube the meat, including getting it off the bone and placing the cubes appropriately on the cookie sheet. It took 60 minutes in the freezer, down time I used to get the grinder ready, to make the beef stock and to prepare condiments for the burgers. It then took 15 minutes to do the actual grinding of the meat through both steps. So about 90 minutes in all from start to finish. Not too bad an investment for the rewards gained.

We used store bought sesame buns for our burgers, however I do have a recipe for whole wheat buns that I want to try. More on that later – after I experiment and have something to say on the subject. Can’t wait to perfect the burger and place it on a bun of my own making and eat to my heart’s delight.

Making Beignets From a Mix

I love New Orleans, and had a great time at Mardi Gras years ago. One of my favorite things was having Cafe Au Lait and Beignets at Cafe du Monde every morning. Every opportunity I have had since on Mardi Gras I try to put on the beads and make beignets.

Now there are two ways to do this. The first is to make the dry ingredients from scratch. Easy enough, just go onto almost any website and download the recipe. I have done it that way, and it is good and quick. This time however, I am using the box!!!! Not just any box mix, but the original Cafe du Monde box mix shipped to me directly from New Orleans. A guilty pleasure for sure.

For those who have not encountered this wonderful treat before, it is basically a french powdered sugar donut. No hole and much more dense with a more complex flavor, but basically a powdered sugar donut nonetheless.

To make beignets the simple way, open the box and follow the directions. Oh yeah – 2 cups mix and 7 oz of water. Yep, that is it. Use a small spatual and mix together, then lay the dough out on a floured counter or board and using your hands press the dough out into a rectangle. Do not roll it, the idea is to leave it fairly thick and rustic. Use plenty of flour. Once you have a nice rectangle then cut 2 inch squares of the dough. (I like the dough in more of a rectangle, so I go 2 inches wide, but more like 2.5 inches long as you will see in the pix).

In a pan, put about 2 inches of vegetable oil and bring up to a temperature that will fizz up nicely when you put in the dough – test it by cutting off a small piece of dough and use it as a tester.

Once you have the dough cut into its pieces, dust off the excess flour and place the dough in the hot oil. It only takes about a minute on each side. You want the dough to puff up and brown, then turn for about another minute or so.

Remove the cooked dough from the fryer and drain on a paper towel. I use tongs for dealing with the dough in the oil. I put the dough in with my hands, then turn the dough and remove it from the oil using the tongs. Works very well, and is easier to clean than a strainer.

Allow the cooked dough to drain for about a minute, then turn for another minute to allow the oil to come off both sides of the dough. Remove the dough from the paper towel and place on your serving plate. Once you have a nice layer of cooked dough on the plate then sift a generous amount of powdered sugar over the dough. Turn the dough and sift more powdered sugar on the other side. Once you have powdered both sides, that cooked dough is transformed into a beignet.

Serve the beignets as warm as you can, and with Chickery Coffee, or milk. If you don’t have Chickery Coffee, regular coffee will suffice (I strongly prefer any coffee from Costa Rica, illy or stumptown coffees – but then again that is just me!!!).

Put on some Mardi Gras beads and enjoy this delicious New Orleans staple.

How to Make Irish Soda Bread

A couple of years ago for St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to make a traditional Irish meal. Along with the Irish Stew, I had to have Irish Soda Bread. A classic pairing. I searched around the internet for some ideas and recipes and was amazed at how easy and quick making this “bread” really was. In addition, the flavors in the bread are wonderful as is the dense texture. We have made it many times since, and often toasted in the morning with a slice of Irish Butter.

Try this recipe and see what you think. To show you how easy it is I have included 15 pix taken by my granddaughter, Katherine A. Lien, who is now my official Blog videographer. My first shot at one of these “how to” posts, so let me know if it is at all helpful.

First, assemble all your ingredients and tools. Not much is required, and as you can see from pix #1 it all fits in one photograph!!!.

Next, in a large bowl mix together the dry ingredients, which includes 4 cups of all purpose flour; 2 Tablespoons of sugar; 1 Teaspoon of salt; and 1 Teaspoon of baking soda. Using a medium size whisk, mix these dry ingredients well.

On a cutting board, take 4 Tablespoons of butter and slice into 8 slices. Then cut those 8 slices into 4 smaller bits, so you end up with 32 small pieces of firm butter. Add these bits to the dry mixture, and with a wooden spoon, mix in the butter until the dry ingredients become mealy.

To this mixture add 1 large egg that you have lightly beaten, and 1 3/4 cups of buttermilk. Several of the recipes I looked at recommend making a well in the center of your bowl, and placing the wet ingredients into that well and then begin mixing. It was a cute idea, which I incorporated here. Not sure it really made the mixing all that much easier, but it was fun and made for a cute picture. During the mixing process, add 1 cup of raisins. Many recipes I saw use red currents instead of raisins, but my preference is raisins. Your call on that choice. Mix these combined ingredients until the dough is stiff and flaky.

At this point, dig in with your hands and knead the dough for a couple of minutes, and as you do so end up with a nice round ball of dough. If you prefer 1 large loaf, then just move this ball to a greased (or sprayed) cookie sheet and form the ball into a loaf by gently pushing down on the top. Once the loaf is formed, using a sharp knife, make a large X on the top of the loaf to facilitate heat distribution during baking. If you prefer 2 smaller loafs (which cook a little better incidently), then cut your dough ball in half, and reform into 2 balls. Repeat the above process for loaf formation and scoring of the top.

Bake the bread at 400 to 425 degrees for 40-45 minutes until lightly browned. Adjust the time and temperature if you have 2 smaller loaves. Remove from the heat and place on a cooling rack for 15 minutes. Then butter and enjoy!!! Best when warm, and it toasts up great or can be warmed in the microwave.

This bread doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to put together, then with baking and cooling time, you are ready to eat it in an hour. Quick, easy and very tasty. Enjoy.

Duchess Potatoes

I learned about Duchess Potatoes for the first time a couple of days ago.  I watch food tv and OPB during lunch as background while I eat, and out of the corner of my eye I heard the discussion about the earliest known potato recipes, some dating back to cookbooks from the 1860’s.  The show was attempting to recreate and modernize these old recipes, and were focusing on Duchess Potatoes. 

Now, I still have probably 40 pounds of potatoes from my garden just hanging out in the wine cellar, and I am always looking for new ways to experiment with those potatoes.  When I heard Duchess Potatoes, it got my attention.  Well who wouldn’t be intrigued by such a lovely name????

The recipe looked incredibly easy, and the result very lovely in appearance.  I couldn’t taste the end result from the tv, but with baked potatoes, butter, cheese, cream, eggs and some seasoning how could it be anything but delicious???? 

Essentially, you are making these fancy twice baked potatoes.  The key in getting the creamy texture necessary for this dish is using a ricer on the cooked potatoes (after they are baked, spoon out the potato into the ricer and discard the skin).  Gently fold in the other ingredients.  The finished mixture is cooled, then placed into a piping bag with serrated tip of about 1/2″.  The potato mixture is then piped onto a cookie sheet in a  circle (apx 2-3″ depending on how large you want each serving) and round and round in progressively smaller circles to make a pyramid shaped potato dish.  The pyramids of potatoes are then either sprayed with butter spray or are brushed with butter and put in a hot oven (450) for about 15 minutes to brown the tops of the pyramids.  The resulting pyramid potato dish is served standing alone, and is absolutely gorgeous.

I think I can make this from memory, but will probably take a look a couple of recipes online to refresh my brain.  Will post some pix and first hand recital of the taste in the next couple of days as I try to make Duchess Potatoes.  If anyone wants me to provide the recipe I use, just post a comment  asking for it and I will keep track of things as I experiment with this new potato dish.  Can’t wait to try it, and to share this new experiment with you.