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April 1, 2010

All Natural Beautiful Easter Eggs

Are you or someone in your family allergic to or senstive to food dyes? Or maybe you prefer to avoid the artificial colors usually used to dye Easter eggs. Well, you can still have beautifully dyed Easter eggs. The ingredients are simple and you probably have many of them in your cupboard and refrigerator. This activity will take a little longer than dying eggs with an egg dying kit, but it’s worth the extra time to make naturally dyed eggs.

It’s a good idea to wear gloves when you make any of these dyes. Unless you also want to dye your hands. And don’t use your favorite towels to clean up; use old rags and paper towels.

Yellow Dye: Turmeric, is a spice best known for being an ingredient used to make curry, is the perfect dye for yellow Easter eggs. To make yellow turmeric dye, bring 1 quart of water to a boil, add 1 tablespoons white vinegar, stir in 3 tablespoons turmeric. Simmer 5 minutes, stirring to dissolve the turmeric. Remove from heat. Let cool until you’re ready to use it.

These deep yellow eggs were soaked in the turmeric dye for a few hours.

Red Dye: Beets are used to make red dye. If you’ve ever cooked beets, you know about how they stain. You can use fresh or canned beets. You need 1-2 beets, about 3/4 pound. Roughly chop your beets, and place the the beets, 1 quart of water and 1 tablespoon of white vinegar in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain out the beets and cool the dye liquid until you are ready to use it.

Blue Dye: When you boil red cabbage, the resulting purple liquid will dye your eggs blue. It seems odd, but it works! So for your blue dye, you need 1 pound of shredded red cabbage. Add the cabbage, 1 quart of water, and 1 tablespoon of white vinegar to a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain out the cabbage and cool your liquid dye until you are ready to use it.

Here’s the red cabbage dye before the cabbage has been strained out.

Cooking Your Eggs: While you are making your dyes, you should also cook your eggs. For the best colors, be sure to use white eggs. Everyone has their own method for hard-cooked eggs. The first thing that you might notice is that I'm calling them hard-cooked eggs rather than hard-boiled eggs because I don't boil the eggs; boiling the eggs often results in rubbery whites, green tinged yolks, and shells that are impossible to remove.

Here’s my method. Place the eggs in a saucepan, fill the pan with water to cover the eggs by 1 inch of water, add 1 tablespoon of salt to the water (don’t worry, your eggs will not taste salty), bring the water to a boil, immediately remove the pan from the heat, cover the pan, and let the eggs sit in the pan for 16 minutes (for large eggs). But you’re not done there, you want your eggs to be easy to peel. My secrets to easy-to-peel hard-cooked eggs are twofold: salting the water and immediately plunging the cooked eggs into an ice bath (equal parts cold water and ice). Let the eggs sit in the ice bath for 5 minutes.

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Posted April 1, 2010 10:55 PM | Comments (2)

February 7, 2010

Quick Tip: Oven-Poaching Boneless Chicken Breasts

Oven-poaching is a fool-proof way to poach chicken breasts for chicken salads and other recipes. What I like about this method is that it is essentially hands-free. Once the chicken is in the oven, there's no adjusting the temperature to make sure the temperature is not too high or too low.

This video uses bay leaves, peppercorns, and lemon slices, but you can change the seasoning to match your dish. For example, when I am poaching chicken for a southwestern dish, I'll add peppercorns, chili powder, and lime slices. For a Thai dish, I add ginger, garlic, and kaffir lime leaves.

The next time you need poached chicken, try this method.

Posted February 7, 2010 2:08 PM | Comments (3)

November 6, 2009

Essential tool: the whisk

Whisks are one of the workhorse tools in my kitchen. I use whisks for making gravy, smoothing out a sauce, mixing up the dry ingredients when baking, scrambling eggs, making cornstarch/water slurries for thickening, beating eggs, incorporating wet ingredients into dry ingredients when baking, and so much more. A whisk is a simple tool, but it is one that I always reach for when I am cooking.

If you've ever wondered how whisks are made, wonder no more. This video from Cooking Up a Story takes you on a tour of the Best Manufacturers plant to get the inside scoop on how whisks are made.

Posted November 6, 2009 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

February 6, 2009

How come I never thought of this?

I'm a traditionalist when it comes to pizza, no pineapple, ham, bacon, or broccoli on my pizza please. Today I discovered a new pizza topping that is sure to make a repeat performance. This morning I was at the deli buying prosciutto for a recipe I am testing. While I was chatting with Kelly, my favorite deli gal, about how much we both love prosciutto, she mentioned putting it on pizza. Boy that sounded good. How come I never thought of that?

Tonight's pizza was a Boboli mini crust, topped with tomato, cheese, and prosciutto. Simple and delicious. If you haven't topped your pizza with prosciutto, you must try it.

Posted February 6, 2009 9:26 PM | Comments (1)

February 1, 2009

Gluten Alert: Heinz says that their organic ketchup IS NOT gluten-free

Given the recent news about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) containing mercury, if you are a Heinz ketchup user, you might have switched to Heinz Organic Ketchup to avoid HFCS. I just learned that unlike Heinz original ketchup, Heinz organic ketchup is not gluten-free. So if you need to be gluten-free, stay away from this HFCS-free ketchup.

Posted February 1, 2009 6:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2009

Leftover Makeover: Baked Potato Croquettes

Remember me? I'm back after a very long absence. My last update was before Thanksgiving. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is always busy, add in the NH ice store that took away our power for 8.5 days, we got power back 4.5 days before Christmas. And then there was Christmas, and New Years. You know how it goes.

Today I made potato croquettes for the first time. My mother used to make fried potato cakes from leftover mashed potatoes when I was a kid. In fact, they were the only way that I ate mashed potatoes. I wasn't a fan of mashed potatoes the first time around, but I loved my mom's potato cakes made from leftover mashed potatoes.

I had some leftover mashed potatoes with corn and chives in the fridge, so I decided to make baked potato croquettes from them. I looked up a few recipes on the web and found a few that baked, rather than fried the croquettes. All of them added egg to the potato. I started out with potatoes that I had mashed with sour cream, then stirred in fresh minced chives and defrosted frozen corn kernels. (I served them with a southwestern meatloaf earlier in the week.). I had about 4 cups of potatoes left. I mixed in 3 eggs and some chili powder. I wasn't sure how many eggs to add, the mixture was a little too loose, so I added in a small handful ot panko. Two eggs would have been perfect.

To form the croquettes, I used a 1/2-cup measuring cup to scoop up the potatoes, then formed them into a large, flat patty. Some of the recipes I saw called for forming the patties, then refrigerating them before rolling them in bread or cracker crumbs. My patties were holding together well and I'm impatient, so I seasoned some panko with sweet hungarian paprika and coated the patties with the panko mixture.

To bake the croquettes, I lined a sheet pan with nonstick foil (I love this stuff for oven frying), sprayed the foil with olive oil spray and placed the croquettes on the foil. After spraying the tops with more olive oil spray, I baked them in a preheated 400 oven for 25 minutes. The panko coating is golden and crispy and the potato centers are nice and creamy.

This is a great way to use leftover mashed potatoes. They are forgiving and the seasoning can easily be adapted to complement whatever you are serving them with. I bet they would be great with some cheese. Or how about curried potato croquettes or cumin-scented croquettes?

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Posted January 10, 2009 6:04 PM | Comments (5)

July 24, 2008

I'm a Y-peeler person

On Tuesday, I went to use my trusty Y-peeler to peel some potatoes and it was broken. I'm not sure what happened to it, but it wouldn't peel. My gear gets banged around and I've been treating it harshly for 5 years, so it's no wonder it broke. I rummaged through my client's utensil drawer and found a red Zyliss swivel-peeler. It had nice serrated teeth on the peeling blade. But I'm so used to a Y-peeler, that I had a lot of trouble peeling my potatoes. It took me twice as long to peel the potatoes. I made a mental note to put my broken peeler in my clipboard case so that I would find it when I emptied my case at home and I could grab another one from my stash of them. Yes, I have a stash of them. Of course I forgot to do that and on Wednesday when I needed to peel carrots, I found the broken Y-peeler in my utensil box. I immediately put my broken peeler in my clipboard case. Wednesday's client had a Oxo swivel peeler, which I struggled with to get two pounds of carrots peeled. I decided that there are two types of peelers and I'm a Y-peeler through and through.

Posted July 24, 2008 10:31 PM | Comments (2)

March 23, 2008

Crispy Potato Cakes Revisited

Back in September, I posted this recipe for Crispy Potato Cakes. This is an updated version of that recipe. The original recipe called for grating potatoes, soaking them in water, squeezing them dry, then mixing with cornstarch, green onions, and seasoning. I've done some Cooks Illustrated-style experimenting with the recipe because I wanted to see if could find a faster way to make these without affecting the quality. To me, the changes are an improvement. They take less time to make and I like the new potato cakes even better.

Test 1: Break out the food processor -- My first experiment was to shred the potatoes using the food processor. The comments for the original recipe warned not to use the food processor to grate the potatoes, but rules were meant to be broken, so I pulled out the food processor and shredded my potatoes. Boy, did that make quick work of shredding the potatoes. And no threat of grated knuckles. That's the only change I made for this version. I didn't notice any difference in the results when I used potatoes shredded with the food processor. The second time I made them with potatoes shredded in the food processor, I decided to lower the temperature from 475F to 425F because at 475F, the edges of the potato cakes had a tendency to burn. The potato cakes cooked more evenly at the lower temperature. I increased the cooking time by 5 minutes. No burnt edges!

Test 2: Frozen Hashed Browns -- Since shredding the potatoes in the food processor worked so well, I decided to try using frozen hashed brown potatoes. I used Alexia Foods Organic Hashed Browns. To defrost the potatoes, I simply opened the bags and spread the potatoes out on a baking sheet and let them sit at room temperature for 1/2 hour. The defrosted potatoes didn't have very much moisture in them, so I decided to skip the soaking and squeezing steps. I tossed the defrosted potatoes with the cornstarch, scallions, and spices. This time, I also experimenting with forming the potato cakes freehand. I filled the measuring cup with 1/2 cup of potatoes and tipped the cup over onto the foil-lined baking sheet. I found that I didn't really need the 3-inch ring to form the potato cakes. The potatoes are moist enough to hold together. I pressed them lightly to slightly flatten them. Eliminating the ring saves a little bit of time. These were baked at 425F for 20 minutes, then flipped and baked for 15 minutes longer. They weren't quite crispy enough after 15 minutes, so I baked them for five more minutes. Ultimately, the baking time depends on how crispy you like them. The potato cakes made using the frozen hashed browns were delicious and took significantly less time to make. This method is the winner in my book.

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Posted March 23, 2008 7:05 PM | Comments (3)

January 11, 2008

Have you ever spatchcocked a chicken?

Or maybe you call it butterflying a chicken. Either way, if you haven't done it, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to do and how quickly and evenly your chicken will cook. When you spatchcock (or butterfly) a chicken, you are removing the backbone and keel bone of the chicken so that it lays flat. Once spatchcocked, the chicken is perfect for quickly roasting or grilling.

Here's a video that shows you how to spatchcock a chicken. It's really easy. All you need is a pair of kitchen shears and your fingers. I use Chicago Cutlery Insignia Kitchen Shears.

Here's my spatchcocked chicken. I rubbed Herbes de Provence under and over the skin. You'll notice that my cutting board is sitting in a rimmed baking sheet. This is a trick that I use to contain the juices from chicken when I cut it. I do the same thing once the chicken is ready to carve.

spatchcocked chicken

Forty five minutes later, we had a beautiful and succulent chicken.

roasted spatchcocked chicken

Posted January 11, 2008 9:15 PM | Comments (1)

November 27, 2007

My Post-Thanksgiving Turkey

I grew up in Plymouth, MA and my family still lives there. If you grew up in the land of the first Thanksgiving, that is where you go for Thanksgiving. My mom cooks the turkey and most of the dinner. That means we don't get a lot of luscious turkey leftovers. So this year, rather than raiding mom's turkey leftovers, I roasted a turkey breast a few days after Thanksgiving.

My friend Kris shared this Herb-Roasted Turkey Breast with Pan Gravy that she had made for her Thanksgiving dinner and gave it rave reviews. Ah, I found the starting point for my turkey breast.

The recipe from Rachael Ray calls for boned turkey breast halves. I decided to skip splitting and boning my whole turkey breast. I added a bit of garlic to the herb rub. And I used a few more bay leaves, and since I didn't have any apple cider, I decided to use white wine and turkey broth in the gravy. I wanted lots of gravy, so I also added 1 cup of white wine to the roasting pan.

I also made some Stuffing Muffins, but I don't have a recipe for them because stuffing is something that I make by adding this and that. The base for the stuffing muffins is whole wheat bread that I dried in the oven. They have celery, onion, sage, sweet Italian sausage, turkey broth, butter, and white wine, but I have no idea how much of each.

Speaking of turkey broth, I use Savory Choice Turkey Broth Concentrate.I love this broth concentrate.

Herb-Roasted Turkey Breast and Stuffing Muffins

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Posted November 27, 2007 9:37 AM

October 21, 2007

Oven-Baked Brown Rice

Last week I had a client menu that had a lot of stovetop dishes, including brown and wild rice. The oven wasn't very busy that day, so I decided to try oven-baked brown rice. I've read about it, but have never tried it. I went to the Cook's Illustrated web site to see what they had to say about baking brown rice. Their recipe was simple and turned out perfectly.

During the week, I like to have cooked brown rice and other grains in the refrigerator so that I can just grab them and use them for our dinners. I'll be making a pan of oven-baked brown rice and wild rice every weekend to use during the week. It takes an hour to cook, but once it is in the oven, you don't have to pay any attention to it.

Rice isn't very photogenic, but here it is.

Oven-Baked Brown and Wild Rice