I’ve intended to post for the last several days. Clearly I got sidetracked somewhere along the line…

Pictured above are some wheat dinner rolls I made last week. They’re an adaptation of Baking Illustrated‘s Parker House Rolls recipe. I’ll get the recipe for these on this site soon. I think I’m going to spend a bit of time tonight catching up on recipe stuff both in the database program and on this site.

Anyway, these turned out fantastic. While making these, I did something I’ve never done before but will be doing again. I marked up my cookbook with pencil. I made a couple of changes to the ingredients and realized that writing in my cookbook was the easiest way to write down my alterations. I felt a little guilty doing it.

Now to catch up on some of my other cooking…

This is one of the cherry almond tarts I made last week. I soaked the cherries in amaretto and baked them in an almond shortbread crust with more of the crust crumbled on top.

Campton Place Coffee Cake from Desserts by the Yard…the first coffee cake I’ve ever made that I was genuinely happy with in the end. I’ll post this recipe soon as well. I keep saying that, huh?

These are vegan carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream frosting. These are also my first for-profit baked goods. A coworker asked me if I could bake a batch of cupcakes for his newly-vegan ex-girlfriend. So I did…and I made myself a batch as well. I wanted to make caramel buttercream frosting but vegan caramel sauce isn’t so easy to make…I tried and failed and opted for the orange buttercream.

This is my S’mores Tart. I came up with this one on my own after toasting marshmallow around the campfire last month. It has a very buttery graham cracker crust, a chocolate chess pie filling and is topped with a marshmallow fluff meringue that I hand torched. Rich and decadent. The boyfriend got a little testy because I gave 3 pieces of it away…recipe forthcoming.

Other than the cooking, life is pretty boring. Work is good. We’re busy…which means I make money. That’s always good.

The boyfriend and I went to Charlottesville to visit friends (the boyfriend’s friends from high school and one of their boyfriends) last weekend. We spent the afternoon at a wine festival in the country outside of Charlottesville. None of us consumed too much wine so there aren’t any fun stories to tell…

…but here are some of us laughing at a very drunk woman after she decided to ride on the children’s wagon thing that circled the festival.

So that I’m not leaving anyone out of my blog entry, here’s a picture of Krista and I…Krista took all the other pictures at the festival so this is the only one she’s actually in…

At the festival, I learned that I kind of like some Virginia chardonnays…as long as they’re void of any oaky taste. This surprised me as I really don’t like chardonnays in general. They’re my least favorite white by a long shot. My hatred for Virginia red wine was reiterated by numerous tastings of yucky cabernet francs. I bought no wine but I did get some fantastic bacon and garlic cheese at the festival…that I forgot was in the fridge until just this second. I chose the bacon and garlic flavor over the other excellent choices because it was the one the boyfriend was least likely to devour in a day or two.

The rest of the trip to Charlottesville was good…I got to play on a Wii for the first time. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would and was pretty decent at it right away. This kind of shocked me. If I were to buy a gaming system (which I wouldn’t), I’d want a Wii. We also walked around UVA for a while…which I’d never really done before…and after the walk, I don’t really understand why people want to live in the rooms on the Lawn. They’re kind of dumpy…but I guess people live there for the honor of doing so…not for the walk to the bathrooms. Other than that, we did a fair amount of playing games and sitting in bars…fun and lazy!

Let’s see…other things to talk about?

The boyfriend’s house is still in slow progress. They didn’t do much in the last couple of weeks but apparently started the framing yesterday.

I’m pretty excited about my Flickr stats…I’ve had 50,000 individual views to my photos. I get excited about the little things, huh?

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Fig Bars

I made these a little over a week ago…I’m a little behind with the posts. I’ve got a lot of recipes I want to post but I just haven’t gotten around to it…I’ll post again soon.

But here’s the recipe for these…they’re from the cookbook “Desserts by the Yard” by Sherry Yard. I didn’t alter the recipe much at all so I’m posting the recipe pretty much as it was in the cookbook.

My notes for the recipe are in italics below!

Here’s the recipe:

Filling:
1 cup finely chopped dried Black Mission figs
1 1/2 cups water
1 cup apple juice (I used a little more apple juice and a little less water)
1/4 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon grated orange zest

Cookie Dough:
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon grated orange zest
1 large egg white
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

(If I were you, I’d make a batch and a half of dough to go with a single batch of filling…otherwise, you’re going to have leftover filling…which you could use as a spread…kind of similar to apple butter…but with figs.)

1. Make the filling: Combine the figs, water, apple juice and sugar in a medium sauceapan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook at a bare simmer for 1-2 hours until the figs are so soft that they’re spreadable.

2. Transfer to a food processor or blender, add the orange zest and process until smooth. Remove from the food processor and allow to cool. (I made it the night before.)

3. Make the dough: Cream together the butter, sugar and orange zest in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, for 2-3 minutes on medium speed. Scrape down the bowl and paddle. Add the egg white and vanilla and beat in. Scrape down the bowl and paddle again. Add the flour and beat on low speed until the dough comes together. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours. (I refrigerated it overnight…it was easier to work with that way!)

4. Place racks in middle and lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

5. On a floured surface, roll the dough out to a 12 x 16 rectangle. Cut into 4 equal strips, each 12 x 4 inches. Spoon a line of filling down the center of each strip. Fold the dough over the filling and pinch the edges together. Place on the parchment-lined baking sheets, seam side down. (Don’t roll the dough into a rectangle this large if you want your job to be easy…I rolled the dough a little smaller and a little thicker and it worked great!)

6. Using a serrated knife, slice each log on the diagonal into 10 cookies. (I popped them in the freezer for 10 minutes before slicing them.) Bake, rotating the baking sheets from top to bottom and front to back halfway through, for 12-15 minutes, until golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a rack.

These tasted fantastic a day or two later…they were a little crunchy on the first day but softened by the second day. They really did taste like Fig Newtons.

More from me soon…maybe another recipe. Maybe an entry about non-baking stuff…

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Sausage and 17 Bean Soup, originally uploaded by meliass.

With lots of sausage. Lots and lots of sausage.

Despite it being 75 degrees outside on Friday, I chose to make bean soup. I had the beans in the pantry and had bought some Surry sausage for no known reason the day before…so bean and sausage soup seemed like an obvious choice.

That and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to go to the grocery store to buy dinner ingredients. I’m actually not allowed to go to the grocery store very often as of this month. In my monthly budget, I have $150 allocated to groceries. Last month, I spent $300 on groceries…the extra $150 coming from my “everything else” fund. Needless to say, I didn’t buy much other than groceries last month.

So…for the month of April, we decided to experiment. I gave the boyfriend $120 of my $150 grocery budget money (which he combines with his own budgeted grocery money) and he’s in charge of the shopping. I make ridiculously elaborate grocery lists for him and he buys most (but not all) of the things on my list. So far it seems to be working out.

I will still go to the grocery store on occasion…mostly if I’m cooking something I didn’t plan in advance and find that I need an ingredient that neither of us have. He also refuses to go to Ukrop’s or The Fresh Market for me since they’re the two most expensive grocery stores in town…but I still need to go to them on occasion for some specialty items. And that’s okay…as long as I only get what I went for in the first place. That’s the challenge. That’s also how I ended up with the Surry sausage for my soup.

With luck, this new plan for me to avoid the grocery store as much as possible will save lots of money in the long run. The boyfriend won’t buy name brand items as much as I will…he’s even threatened to buy generic things like cranberry juice and refill my Ocean Spray bottle with the generic juice.

I’ll post more food stuff soon. I still have lots of recipes to blog. And pictures to take of a very delicious looking coffee cake that just came out of the oven. I’m also making cherry tarts tonight. Look forward to the pictures…

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Individual Quiche, originally uploaded by meliass.

Really, I do. I made a big quiche and three little baby quiche. I think the plural of quiche is quiche. Quiches just seems odd…

I made my pie crust too crumbly…but it still tasted delicious. The quiche here was made with bacon, mushrooms, sweet onions and green onions…as well as Monterey jack, cheddar and Parmesan cheeses.

Wow, I like that the blog posting tool with Flickr just made me capitalize “Monterey” and “Parmesan”…it’s pretty smart. Smarter than Microsoft Word is about “Parmesan”.

I have lots of food related blog entries to write. I”ll get a few done on Sunday…with luck. I need to post the S’mores Tart recipe. There are also pictures of carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream frosting and homemade Fig Newtons. Maybe I’ll wait to blog about those until I have time to post the recipes with the pictures.

My waffle picture from my last blog entry was the Slashfood Food Porn Daily picture on Monday. I managed to get two pictures on that blog in two weeks. I’m pretty impressed with myself for that.

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Raspberry Waffles

I promised the boyfriend I’d make waffles for breakfast this weekend. When I woke up yesterday, I fully intended to make them and then I remembered that we only had one egg between us. I needed three. So the waffles had to wait.

Waffles were a McKelvey family staple in my childhood. We were big fans of having breakfast for dinner and waffles were the go-to food whenever we were lazy and/or didn’t have much in the pantry or refridgerator.

We ate them so often that on my sister’s birthday one year, she asked if she could never eat waffles again as a gift from my parents. They agreed and she really didn’t eat them for quite a while. I think she’s okay with them now.

Anyway, these are normal waffles made with the addition of raspberries. Raspberries were chosen because I had them in the freezer…I’ll make them this way again as I liked them better than blueberry waffles.

Here’s my dad’s waffle recipe. I kind of think it was adapted from a James Beard recipe but I’m not positive. Dad has made these hundreds of times so I’m not sure he’d remember where the recipe was from either. My copy of the recipe was recited to me over the phone a number of years ago.

Dad’s Waffles:

1 3/4 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
touch of salt
3 tablespoons sugar
6 tablespoons oil
3 eggs
1 3/4 cups milk

Mix ingredients together until fairly smooth. Don’t overmix! Cook them in your waffle iron according to the waffle iron manufacturer’s instructions.

Today I lightly folded in about 1 1/2 cups of frozen raspberries. But you could add blueberries. Or nuts. Or both. Or something else.

We ate them with butter and real maple syrup. I don’t recognize fake maple syrup as food. My maple syrup is dutifully provided by my father. He still makes waffles often enough to need lots of syrup and he buys by the gallon (or more?) online. He then supplies all of his daughters with maple syrup whenever we need it. I put in a call for more this afternoon.

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Honey Glazed Cornbread, originally uploaded by meliass.

The recipe for this cornbread is found in the cookbook Desserts by the Yard by Sherry Yard. The actual full name for the recipe is Honey-Glazed Spago Corn Bread.

I’m adding the recipe below with the slight alterations I made to the original recipe. When I made the cornbread, I made a slight change to the recipe and substituted 1/4 cup honey for 1/4 cup of the sugar in the recipe. I wanted my cornbread to have a little more honey flavor. It worked. I also didn’t use the cake flour or buttermilk called for in the original recipe.

Cornbread Ingredients:

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 large eggs, at room temperature
3/4 stick unsalted butter
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups milk

Glaze Ingredients:

3/4 stick unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1/3 cup water

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place oven rack in middle of oven. Line a 9×13 inch baking pan with aluminum foil and spray the foil with cooking spray.

2. Whisk together the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs. Melt the butter and immediately whisk into the eggs in a slow stream. Whisk in the oil, milk and honey. Whisk in the dry ingredients until just combined.

4. Scrape the batter into the pan and bake for 30 minutes. Rotate the pan from front to back and bake for 10 additional minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

5. Make the glaze: While the cornbread is baking, melt the butter. Add the honey and water and whisk until blended.

6. When the cornbread is done, remove from the oven and poke holes all over the bread, about 1/2 inch apart, with a toothpick. Brush with the glaze and allow to cool.

The cornbread kept well for several days in an airtight container. It tasted great at room temperature and even better lightly reheated in the oven.

The only thing I might change when I make it again is to use a little less water in the glaze so that the top of the cornbread doesn’t get quite so squishy. Other than that, it was pretty perfect.

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