Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook
Sitemap ·
Our Recipe Book ·
Steven's Recipe Book ·
Ann's Recipe Book ·
Meal Ideas ·
Copied Recipes
Random ·
Random Links
posts/2018/12
All sub pages for /posts/2018/12
Meredith had made this a few times. It is based on The Kitchn's Quiche. She sautés a few big handfuls of tomatoes and then, when they cool, she adds that to the custard. She then adds a big squeeze of basil paste (from the supermarket) and uses mozzarella as the cheese.
This is always popular and really good!
Chanukah Happy Hour -- back to top
We had a Chanukah Happy Hour with some friends, including my Dad (it was his last night in ABQ). We went low key and only made a few things. My dad took care of the latkes and Meredith and I made sufganiyot (Jelly donuts).
My dad made the latkes with his baked latke recipe in two batches. The first one, he replaced the butternut squash with zucchini (a la zucchini fritters) though the didn't drain it well. The second batch was normal except, because it had to sit while waiting for the others, a lot of water drained out. It still tasted great but he had to trim the parts off!
Meredith found this sufganiyot recipe (LOCAL) so we went with that. This was actually my first time deep frying anything and I think it went well. I heated the oil in the enameled dutch oven (which is good since it hold the heat). Getting the temp was a bit hard since my Instant Read thermometer only goes to 300° and the candy/fry one didn't sit well. I kind of guessed and it worked out well.
Meredith had halved the biscuits so they were a reasonable size (and they grew!). After they were done and had sat on paper towel, Meredith tossed them in a bag with granulated sugar. We used the piping gun to fill a few but then decided to let people spread whatever they wanted on them.
They were really good! I think I should get a thermometer gun though if I am going to fry things again!
Chocolate Hazelnut and Lemon Poppy seed Biscotti -- back to top
This is part one. See part two. I’m making more next week. They are all based on my dad's recipe
This is as much a post-mortem as it is a description. The plan was the use some Nutella. The main changes were to:
Well, the dough came out super, super thick. It was hard to work with but was also extra sticky. I was able to easily spread it and form it and it barely spread! As it was mixing, I added an extra tbsp of oil when it was mixing but that didn't help much.
I also opted to not chop of the hazelnuts since they are super round and I didn't want them to roll around. Well, I think that also made it harder to cut through. They got torn as I was trying to cut them.
And cutting them was extra hard because they weren't cooked enough on the first bake! You can really see in the pictures that they needed more time. So, in the end, I also had to cut them really thick. (I hadn't yet changed cutting strategies as noted in Lemon Poppy seed below).
And I did the toast step for longer (and upped the temp later). I think this was fine though they are pretty hard and pretty dense! (They didn't spread much in the first bake...)
I think they were pretty flavor though. You couldn't taste much in the batter but the final cookies had more flavor.
I think, between this and the pumpkin biscotti experiment, I should not mess with the amount of fat regardless of what I add!
I made the noted change on the recipe to double (or more!) the lemon zest and juice. I ended up using the zest of four (small) lemons and the juice from 2.5 of them. It came together nicely (and the extra time mixing that we added to the recipe helped).
The real thing I discovered was that I do not like the serrated knife for cutting. I had much better luck with a sharp Santoku. I would still slide the knife to get an initial cut and then I could press down. This worked especially well for these ones since they do not have cherries or nuts to also cut through.
I used my dad's air-bake cookie trays for the first time with this. I liked that I didn't have to worry about them burning and I really liked that I could slide the loaves off the tray. Since I had only two trays and was planning two batches at a time, I always used one of the trays for either the loaves or the bottom tray when toasting. When I was in "batch mode", I baked the loves in the single upper-oven and toasted in the bottom!
Brussel Sprouts with Bacon -- back to top
Meredith made use Brussel Sprout hash with bacon (see A and B). It came out pretty good as usual.
Part II of holiday biscotti using my dad's recipe. The traditional ones are cherries and pistachios. I went heavy on the cherries since my dad did that for Thanksgiving 2018 and it was well received.
I also tried to make Rocky Road. I do not recall everything I did now since I am writing this nearly a month later, but I used the chocolate variant with walnuts and added marshmallows. The marshmallows sounded like a good idea but in reality, they just melted... Also, despite still using the same amount of oil, they were very hard to cut leaving big, very tough cookies! Maybe I need to cook them longer on the first bake so that they are easier to cut? I really don't know but I am very frustrated with the chocolate varieties this year!
-- back to top