Corduroy Orange

I just made a batch of cookies last night, and so was reminded of the many variations on the theme that are possible.  And, as it’s getting to be cookie baking time of year again, I thought I’d share a couple of my favorites.

• The type of sugar you use is negotiable.  The recipe on the back of the chocolate chips calls for 1/2 granulated and 1/2 brown, but as long as you keep your total sugar to the guidelines (1 1/2 cups per batch of cookies or thereabouts), you can use dark brown, light brown, turbinado, maple sugar, or whatever else you enjoy.
• Add finely grated orange zest into the mix.  If you happen to have a microplane zester, it’s very easy to get the zest from the orange.  Otherwise, try putting some plastic wrap over the thing on the side of your cheese grater, so that it comes between the grater and the orange.  It’ll catch the zest and make it a lot easier for you to gather it.  The zest of one orange is about right for one batch of cookies.
• Don’t feel obligated to use vanilla extract for the ‘vanilla extract’ slot on the recipe.  Switch it up by adding the equivalent amount of your favorite liqueur.
• Add some spices.  Cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg all work well with most desserts, including chocolate chip cookies.  If you’re feeling spicy, add a little bit of chili powder–but not too much.  You want it to serve as an accent in the background, not the defining taste of the cookie.
• Switch it up a bit with the nuts.  I used cashews in the batch that I made last night, and they are tasty!
• Quick oats are another great inclusion for cookies.  Use about a cup of quick oats for one batch of cookies.
• I’ve heard that some people add coconut to their cookies.  That’s not really my thing, but if you like coconut, give it a shot and you’ll probably enjoy it.
• Aurora says that she’s heard of people putting sunflower seeds or dried cranberries in their cookies.  These aren’t variations I’m familiar with, but they sound like they might be interesting.

How do you usually make your cookies?  Let me know what you do differently than the recipe says and I’ll put together a bar graph that charts the popularity of any particular twist on the old favorite.

For several months now, Aurora and I have made all of our cupcakes and muffins with the same cupcake cups, washed and used repeatedly. No, we haven’t figured out a way to re-use the aluminum ones—we’ve been using individual silicone cups. When we celebrated an early Christmas over Thanksgiving with my parents, we received a second option to reuse: a silicone muffin tray.

Both options are rated to 500F, make a dozen standard-sized muffins or cupcakes, and are cleaned using soap and water. The ridges in the muffin cups make them slightly more difficult to clean than the smooth-sided muffin tray, but on the other hand the muffin cups store in a smaller space. Either is a terrific way to work on eliminating “disposable” from your kitchen vocabulary.

The food in progress in the photo above is my pumpkin/cranberry cupcake, shown below iced and decorated with cranberries in homemade cranberry sauce.

Top Photo: Johanna Sharrard

It has come to my attention that the recipe for the pumpkin-cranberry cupcakes that I posted yesterday may seem at first blush to be complicated; mainly because of the prepared winter squash–a step that turns the recipe into something one might feel they couldn’t prepare without making special arrangements beforehand. “Why am I going to go through the trouble to roast and mash pumpkins?” is, perhaps, a somewhat common reaction. Or, “What, like I’m just going to have that on hand?”

Neither question is, to my sensibilities, reasonable. The answer to the former is, “for the same reason you ought to go to the trouble to make your own applesauce, because the stuff that comes out of a can sucks!” (a line perhaps best delivered while wearing a curly, red-haired wig); and to the latter, “Well, why not? It’s easy to do in bulk, it freezes well, and once you have it there’s so much you can do with it: muffins or cupcakes, pies, ice cream, custard, cookies, soup, souffles, fritters….” Squash is extremely versatile, tastes good, and is high in both potassium and vitamin A. If you don’t like peeling it first, you don’t necessarily have to. And here’s another way to cook it down.

If you spend one day cutting and cooking down a large amount of squash, you can reward yourself with pumpkin-based treats the whole year: there’s no better reason than that.

The more I cook, the more I realize that the best results follow from understanding the concepts, methods, and ingredients, and applying that knowledge; as opposed to using exact recipes every time.

True, when it comes to baking, much has to be measured precisely.  But even then, it’s the ratios of basic ingredients that must remain constant, with wide variations possible based on additions or changes to flavoring ingredients.  Such was the case with the gingerbread waffles I made today.  I took a basic waffle recipe and added a good bit of cinnamon to it—perhaps a couple of teaspoons; about 1/8 as much each cardamom, ginger, and allspice; plus a shaving of nutmeg and a good shake of maple sugar–probably a couple teaspoons of that, too.

While I was cooking my waffles and putting them in a 200F oven to keep warm, I heated up some of the sweet butternut squash, apples, and cranberries I had made last night.  To make it, I sauteed half of a butternut squash (diced) in about 1/3 cup of butter.  When the squash was starting to soften, I added three peeled and diced apples, a good cup of cranberries, and about a half cup of brown sugar.  I let the mixture simmer until the cranberries were soft and starting to pop.

We had it as a slightly sweet side dish with our dinner, and saved the leftovers.  Upon reheating, the mixture seemed to be a bit too dry to serve as waffle topping, so I added maple syrup until it had a good flow to it, and spooned it over waffles for service.

Combine a tasty autumnal breakfast with an extra hour of sleep and a game of backgammon over breakfast, and you’ve got the start to a happy day.

My daughter is in Africa with the Peace Corps and is looking for recipes that she can cook over an open fire (no ovens, electricity, running water etc..) Right now she is looking for a recipe for butternut squash. Can anyone help?

Not knowing what other resources she has available apart from butternut squash and an open fire, it’s tough for me to give any sort of recipe advice. However, I can recommend that the easiest way to cook a butternut squash with an open flame would be to submerge the whole squash in hot coals (how I usually get coals are by building a fire up and then letting it die down so that the coals are hot but there’s not a flame) and letting it roast inside its own skin. Turn it occasionally, and when it’s easily pierced, it’s done and can be easily broken open and eaten. The seeds and skin are also edible and may also be eaten, or discarded if she so desires.

Depending on what else she has available, the squash is quite tasty mashed with butter, sugar, and or sweet spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg. But, like I said, not knowing what the sum total of her available resources is, it’s tough to give specific recommendations beyond cooking method.

I made perhaps the best cup of iced coffee ever this morning, thanks to some prep I did yesterday afternoon.

First off, it’s important to know some of the background behind iced coffee.  You can’t make it the same way you make iced tea, by simply pouring hot tea over ice.  When you do that with a cuppa joe, the result is a weak, tepid cuppa crap.  Some people (coffee shops, especially) get around this by doing a cold-brewed coffee.  I get around it by making coffee in advance and letting it chill in the refrigerator overnight.

By itself, though, that’s not enough for a fantabulous iced coffee.  Additionally, you have to take sweetening into account.  I like my hot coffee black, but my cold coffee requires some sweetening and some milk.  Sugar does not dissolve well into iced coffee.  Some people use artificial sweetener instead, because it does dissolve well.  I have no patience for this imitation sugar and its displeasurable aftertaste, so I stubbornly use real sugar, or, if I’m on my game, make a simple syrup to use in my coffee.  Even with a sugar syrup, though, you’re still not quite to fantabulous.

I reached fantabulous by making a coffee syrup for my coffee.  I took 1 1/2 cups from a full pot of coffee, mixed it with about 1 1/2 cups of sugar, and brought it to a boil.  As it heated,  added a couple of shakes of cinnamon and a few runs across the grater of nutmeg.  I let the syrup simmer for about ten minutes, poured it into its own pyrex container to cool, then added it back in with the regular coffee and put it in the fridge overnight.

This morning, I poured a cup of the sweet, cold coffee over a few ice cubes and a bit of milk.  The result is a sweet, subtly spiced iced coffee the likes of which are not available at any coffee shop I know.  Nice guy that I am, I’ve decided to share my secret with the (small portion of the) world (who reads this blog).  Take advantage of my generosity and make yourself a fantabulous iced coffee.  You’ll be glad you did!

I asked my wife to whisk something for me last night as we were making dinner and she complained that she didn’t want to; she didn’t like to whisk. After seeing the way she was holding the whisk, it’s no wonder. She had her wrist turned at a funny angle and her finger pointed down the handle–it looked incredibly awkward.

Hold the whisk like a pencil. It’s much easier. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife–she took my suggestion to heart and her technique was immediately transformed from awkwardness to proficiency.

One of my favorite ways to cook is to go at it with barely a plan in mind: pull things out from the refrigerator and figure out how they go together; how to make them into a well-balanced meal. Such was the case tonight as I set out to make dinner for Aurora and me. Wednesday is CSA pick-up day, so we had lots of fresh produce available. Somewhat more importantly, though, we had a fair amount of produce from last week that needed to be used up.

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It’s hard to believe but today marks one year that I’ve been writing Corduroy Orange. During the past year, I’ve uploaded 210 posts (counting this one) and have received 132,583 page views from 36,417 unique IP addresses; since December, I’ve been averaging more than 10,000 page views a month. It’s a lot more attention than I expected I’d be getting—thank you for reading!

I think the portion of the content that I’m particularly fond of is the knife skills instructional section. I’ve said it hundreds of times, and I’ll say it thousands more: the knife is the most important tool in the kitchen. A good, sharp knife, and the knowledge of how to use it will cut your preparation time for every meal significantly. A good, sharp knife used incorrectly can sever a fingertip. It’s worth your time and attention to learn how to use your knives in a safe and efficient manner.

Not only that, but once you are to the point where you’re cutting your vegetables to consistent sizes, the quality of your cooking will go up as a result, because every piece in your pan will cook at an identical rate, as opposed to the small pieces burning while the larger pieces are still half-raw. So, if you haven’t already looked at it, check out my knife skills table of contents and follow the links for a step-by-step guide to using your knives in the best manner possible. Then, look at my vegetable cookery crib sheet to see what order you should put your well-cut vegetables into the pan so that the vegetables that take the longest to cook get the most time. If you’d like some further assistance learning better knife skills and cooking techniques, private instruction is available in the Pittsburgh area on a limited basis. Email me for more information.

As long as I’m giving plugs for the oldies-but-goodies that are stashed in the site’s vaults, I think it’s also worth mentioning my zucchini muffins, especially as we’re entering the time of year when zucchini abounds. They are the best zucchini muffins I’ve ever eaten. For a special treat, pair them with my sweet caramelized red onion marmalade, which is really quite good. I can see you making a face; it’s the same one my sister made when I told her we’d be having zucchini muffins and red onion marmalade. Know what she did? Asked for thirds. And fourths, if I remember correctly. The cooking technique of caramelizing the onions brings out their natural sweetness, which is then accentuated with the addition of liberal amounts of pure maple syrup and/or honey.

So, thanks for stopping by on occasion to kill some time and learn about cooking. Remember to support your local farmers. If you’re not sure who they are, you can search for them by zip code at www.localharvest.org. Once you’ve found them, call them up, visit them, buy their food… they’ll be glad to meet you and tell you all about what they do. Learn your knife skills! And save the liver!

Lots of instructions that I have read about how to grill corn have you waste your time and effort going through steps like peeling back the husks, removing the silk, replacing the husks, tying the corn shut, and soaking them in water. Or, peeling the corn on the cob entirely and wrapping each cob in foil.

There’s no need! The corn silks provide all the moisture you need to roast your corn atop hot charcoals, so why remove them and then soak the corn in water? The husks provide all the protection your corn needs not to burn, so why remove them and wrap the corn in foil?  It makes no sense.

Take your fresh, locally grown corn from the bag and place it on the grill above hot coals. Turn it when the outer husk looks charred. The corn is done when it’s been cooked on all sides. Let it cool briefly (several minutes, or until you can handle peeling it without dropping the hot ear of corn), then peel it by pulling down on the silks that are exposed at the top of the ear. They come cleanly away from the corn, leaving no annoying strands behind to get caught in your teeth. It’s the most hassle-free way to cook anything that I know.