Pear Mince Streusel Bars

Pear Mince Streusel Bars

This is ridiculous -- over two months since I've posted?! But I've been baking like crazy. At least once a week, I bake something to bring to the construction crew at our house-under-construction for our weekly Friday jobsite meetings.

I tried this recipe in my quest to solve The Peach Challenge: how to bake with peaches in such a way that can be easily cut up, given away, and consumed with just hands? Most peach-baking is pies and cobblers, strictly plate-and fork affairs.

From my now all-time favorite baking book, "Cookies for Christmas" by Jennifer Darling, this Pear Mince Streusel bar recipe looked like it could be adapted for fruit other than pears. Thanks to my CSA fruit subscription, I had an excess of peaches, plums and pluots, and couldn't bear to throw them away when they got too ripe to eat in hand. So I thought I'd substitute them for pears.

It took me a few tries to get the "bar" concept. You bake a crust first, to give structure to what's really more like a cookie than a cake, and then add filling and topping and bake it again. The filling for this recipe is terrific, and flexible also, using orange juice or brandy, and raisins or currants. I've tossed cranberries in there as well, though anything larger than a currant is supposed to be snipped. As it's cooking, the fruit, brown sugar and brandy fills the house with Christmas-y sorts of scents, it's great.

I had a willing helper who thought snipping raisins was a fine idea.


It took me a try or two to get my oven temperature to cooperate, but I did succeed in making cuttable, holdable, distinct bars. The result has been universally popular, and is an attractive and fun thing to bring to a gathering.

I'm looking forward to trying this with pears!

Grilled Portobello Mushrooms

Grilled Portobello Mushrooms

Among the various offerings inside a grilled veggie sandwich at a reasonable Italian restaurant I had one day, my favorite was the portobello mushroom. Mild flavor, consistent smooth texture...mm! So when I saw a package of portobello mushrooms at Trader Joe's that afternoon, they were instantly mine. With access to an outdoor gas grill in our rental house, I look for any excuse to grill.

But what recipe? I quickly searched allrecipes.com and found one that called for marinating in a balsamic vinegar mixture. Perfect! I'm into balsamic these days. The recipe called for onion, but I did it with some red onion I had handy anyway. Mix it up, pop it on the grill...sounds easy!

Sure, if you know what you're doing. The recipe called for gill-side-up for grilling the portobellos, making for a little reservoir for the marinade. Leave it on or off? I decided to leave it on and not flip the mushroom.

There's a lot of margin for error in grilling portobellos, I think, because they're perfectly edible uncooked. As much as I love balsamic flavor, the balsamic overwhelmed the mild mushroom flavor, rendering the portobello a mere vehicle for the strong vinegar. But that wasn't so bad.

I really liked this, but it's hard to go wrong with portobellos anyway. As is so often the case, I was the only one in my family who'd even try it. Fine, because I only had two caps anyway.

I need a lot more practice before I dare present this to mushroom aficianados, but I'm looking forward to that.

Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce

Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce
Ah, TJ's...a never-ending source of inspiration. I try not to buy ingredients without having a basic plan for it, but this Wild Ahi looked too good to pass up. Even if a small package was ten bucks.

This new thing about actually having heat in my temporary kitchen opens all sorts of doors. I've seared fish before, with rubbery results, but with some serious firepower under the pan now, it was worth trying again.

I found this recipe for Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce on allrecipes.com. Like most reviewers, I didn't happen to have blood oranges, let alone enough to squeeze out a cup, so plain-old store-bought OJ would have to do. I heeded the advice that the recipe calls for far too much cook time, with one reviewer accurately quipping "more than a few minutes, then you might as well open a can of tuna and call it a day."

The sauce was easy to make, and the fish easy enough to cook. The tricky part was: how long? It became immediately clear that the quality of the ingredients, and skill or luck of the cook would make or break it. Well, I managed to cook it in range, despite my lack of familiarity with my hot new cooktop, but another 20 seconds and I'd have gone over. The fish itself was really outstanding to begin with, so it was really mine to mess up.

I loved this. The sauce was light and a little sweet, not overpowering, and a perfect complement to perfectly (well, almost) lightly cooked fish. I will certainly make this again, but only if I find the right fish to begin with.

Bonus: my husband liked it and my sons wouldn't try it! All the more for me!

Endive, Pear, and Roquefort Salad

Endive, Pear, and Roquefort Salad

Yet another little gem from my all-time favorite Barefoot Contessa episode, "French Made Easy." I'm not sure how French this recipe really is, but it sure sounds French when you say "on-DEEV" instead of "en-dIve."

I made this salad in the most intimidating of circumstances: not in my own kitchen, in a rural area in Pennsylvania without access to a Whole Foods, and for a large group of people that included a genuine professional chef -- and my mother. I didn't have Roquefort cheese or champagne vinegar, so ordinary bleu cheese (see, it's French if you write "bleu" instead of "blue"), and very ordinary white wine vinegar would have to do.

I'd never made an emulsified dressing before, but as soon as you put fresh fruit in a salad, I'm willing to try anything. The dressing was actually simple to make, despite needing some actual technique of whisking up the olive oil at the end. Fortunately I was able to find some appropriate pears, Bartletts, and at the right ripeness.

As always, I over-toasted the walnuts and ended up liking them better that way. I don't know if that's a shared sentiment though.

I've had endives in salads before and liked them, so I was surprised when my sister said she found them bitter. And now that I made a whole salad based on endives, I had to agree. In fact, the only thing I didn't like much about this salad, other than the dull cheese, was the endive base itself. They make for a nice presentation, but I think a different "green" would taste better. Maybe radicchio?


Fortunately for me, I'm still in the stage of cooking that everyone wants to encourage me instead of offering genuine criticism (sort of like you always tell your 4-year-old that the picture he drew was great), so reviews all around were good. Still, I think there's much room for improvement the next time -- and there will be a next time, as this simple combination is exactly the sort of twist on basic ingredients that I love.

Grandma's Banana Bread

Grandma's Banana Bread

I haven't posted in a while, but I have a good excuse. Behold my kitchen.

We've moved to a rental house while my miserable old kitchen is being...well, vaporized. That's brought me into the modern age with a cooktop and oven in our rental house that actually work, and it's throwing me for a loop. I haven't boiled water like this for years!

One casualty of our move is my beloved cookbooks, including a (paper!) scrapbook I keep of recipes I find, print, and make notes on. They're still buried in a box somewhere, as was my printer's power cord until recently. So how can I find or follow a recipe? And here I am with some uber-ripe bananas were just crying to be made into banana bread!

The answer sprang out as I struggled to fit baking ingredients onto a shelf...there it was on a bottle of molasses: "Grandma's Banana Bread." Really, just like that, right there. The karma was too strong to resist.

This was a good test of my temporary kitchen setup. Mixing bowls, measures, ingredients, muffin pan...it didn't exactly flow, but things did come together enough for me to actually mix and bake this simple recipe. There's more batter than fits in my Williams-Sonoma 24-well mini-muffin pan (in the medium-sized box under a pile of bath linens), so the overflow went to my Wilton 12-well mini-muffin tin (in the big box of trays and cutting boards in the garage), made from a material that's not as heavy.

And my temporary oven, a perfectly competent Kenmore, actually fits both muffin pans side-by-side!

This is significant, because the muffins baked in the smaller lighter pan had a crust to them, making this sticky recipe a little easier to handle. The muffins in the heavier tin were moister and tastier though. The recipe didn't have baking times for muffins, but with a new oven I had to wing it anyway.

Overall, this recipe is cakier than bready, and the molasses gives it an odd bite that I think is too much. My eats-everything 4-year-old said much the same thing, in kid terms: "Mmm, a little funny-tasting, Mommy." I like banana bread with bigger crumbles, with some semblance of banana remaining in appearance and taste. The orange zest suggestion sounded great, but it too was obliterated by the molasses.

I'm a ways off from being back in business though...in addition to absent cookbooks and strangely arranged utensils, all my usual haunts for foofy ingredients aren't very convenient anymore! Well, if The Next Food Network Star can combine fish and froot loops, then I guess I can shop at Safeway.

Cranberry Pockets

Cranberry Pockets

Another gem from Cookies for Christmas by Jennifer Darling. By the time Christmas comes around, I'll have made every cookie in this book!

As soon as I saw port in the ingredient list, I waited anxiously for a grown-up event as excuse to make these. Now there's a fun ingredient to dab your fingers into! And I happened to have some "cooking" port, designated for a lamb recipe I still haven't tried.

These cookies required a lot of steps. First, the filling. The recipe calls for dried cranberries, and if I'd had more time to experiment with consistency, I'd have tried fresh cranberries. It seemed like a small amount of filling, but the quantity came out just right. The cranberries, port and sugar actually made more a more subtle filling than I expected. It could have been tarter, but that's really being picky.

The dough was easy enough to make and roll out. I don't know if I'm violating any cookie-rolling statutes, but I chill my dough in a fat disk shape instead of a ball. It's so much easier to roll out that way, and it chills faster. I've also started rolling it on a piece of floured wax paper, using the same plastic wrap I chilled it in on top, to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin. This works really well to keep pieces of dough from getting pulled up on the rolling pin, and spares me frequent flouring. I don't think this negatively affects the dough.

Incredibly, I had a 3" cookie cutter -- really, a biscuit cutter. That $2.95 item will justify at least $500 worth of future "you neeeever know when you might need this!" purchases.

Cutting them out, filling and folding -- no problem. As the recipe suggested, I used a fork to seal and flute the edges. More work than drop cookies for sure, but this was so much fun. I'm easily amused when it comes to cookies.

Then, the fun part -- the icing. The recipe calls for "port glaze" and icing, even though the port glaze is also icing of drizzling consistency. It's just confectioner's sugar moistened with port -- mm! Inexplicably, the recipe suggests coloring it, but the port will give it color anyway. I made just port icing, put it in a plastic zipper bag, snipped off a tiny corner, and drizzled away. This is a messy process; the icing always comes out the top of the bag and gets all over your hands. Mm, too bad.



If I had it to do over, and I will, I'd try to make the dough thinner, and put more filling in. Handling 1/8" thick circles of dough is outside my expertise right now, but I sure am going to enjoy learning how. I can't wait for Christmas!

Broccolini and Balsamic Vinaigrette

Broccolini and Balsamic Vinaigrette
My husband and I went out to a nice restaurant (yes, it does happen from time to time) a few weeks back, and a dish he ordered included broccolini. He'd never heard of it before, and I knowingly explained it was a variety of broccoli. Or immature broccoli. Or is it overgrown broccoli? OK, OK, so I don't really know either. Of course nowadays, we're all one Google away from knowing too.

But I did remember having seen my unknowing mentor, Ina Garten, make a sophisticated broccolini dish. Some judicious searching on Food Network's web site turned up this recipe.

Broccolini itself is fairly bitter, but this straightforward balsamic vinaigrette is strong enough to overcome that. It really could be used as a salad dressing too, though cautiously. I thought it was a great way to dress up this vegetable, which is half flowers and half dark leafy greens -- the holy grail of nutrition.

I didn't dream of giving this to my sons, who are quite happy with ordinary buttered broccoli, and what mom is going to mess with that? My husband isn't big on vinaigrettes, and found the broccolini itself hard to chew.

Naturally, I liked it, and don't mind using a knife to cut the tougher stems, but I don't count for squat around here. So this will get added to my fast-filling shelf of recipes to save for other grownups!