Blackberry Grunt


This is my first recipe from Good Eats 2: The Middle Years. The episode this recipe is from is all about cobblers and there many varieties. Ever wonder what the difference is between a sonker and a brown Betty? Probably not, but I'm going to tell you anyways. Lets start with some definitions, a key to cobbler classification if you will:

Cobbler - a fruit dessert made with some kind of dough be it biscuit like or pie like dough. The origin of the name has two possible roots, one being that the cooked dough often resembles the unevenness of cobblestone streets and the second being that the ingredients are just "cobbled" together.

The many subclasses of cobbler:
Brown Betty - fruit layered with buttered bread crumbs and baked

Buckle - a generic cake batter with fruit stirred into it. The cake batter "buckles" under the weight of the fruit during cooking

Crisp (crumble in England) - fruit baked with a topping of sugar, butter, flour and oats or nuts

Pandowny - the dough is pressed down into fruit and then baked

Sonker - high fruit to dough ratio, from a small area in North Carolina

and last but not least...

Grunt - fruit cooked on the stove top with biscuit dough creating dumplings. Named for the sound it makes when cooking

I must give credit to Alton Brown for all of this culinary insight.

With all that out of the way down to business, the blackberry grunt. I am a big fan of this recipe although there area few tweaks that could make a little better in my opinion. I had never cooked with blackberries before and although they were tasty I would have preferred a more familiar fruit like blueberries or strawberries. I was going to use blueberries but as luck would have it blackberries were on sale this week! The dumplings were delicious, soft and sweet from the fruits' juices. The recipe broke from tradition and put the grunt in the oven to brown the tops of the dumplings. Next time I think I would stick to tradition and just put a lid on it and let it cook on the stovetop. This would produce a soft dumpling all the way through instead of dumplings that are soft on the bottom and golden brown  on top. To each there own.

Recipe link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/blackberry-grunt-recipe/index.html

Caesar Salad
This is the first of the recipes from the randomly generated list as well as my first recipe for Good Eats: The Early Years. I was somewhat skeptical about this recipe, I just couldn't see the ingredients comingling into the Caesar salad I was used to. This was true to some degree, I wouldn't say the recipe is flawed it just produces a dressing that is much more subtly flavoured then your average grocery store brand. It could be that this recipe is closer to what Caesar created back in the 20's. Legend has it that on July 4th 1924 Caesar Cardini created his namesake salad at his restaurant in Mexico. I wonder what he would think of the salad now a days? Anyways, I would encourage anyone who is culinarily curious to give this recipe a try you may never look at a Caesar salad the same way again.

The recipe calls for raw eggs which I was a little skeptical about at first, but there where no ill effects. Besides the chances of getting salmonella from eggs is about 1 in 10,000. For me the best part of the recipe was the croutons, crispy, garlicky and delicious. Bacon was also a nice touch but somewhat deviant of the original recipe.

Here is a link to the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/good-eats/hail-caesar-salad-recipe/index.html (Link is now fixed)

The recipe said use a bowl that was twice as big as
you think you need, excellent advice

Beef Bourguignon
This recipe I had to make due to name by Grandmother (Gran) gave it, she calls it "beef bugger off." Besides the colourful name this dish had a lot of potential, starting off with bacon, and anything that starts with bacon is amazing. There were other ingredients besides that bacon, turns out beef bourguignon is just a fancy name for a pretty standard beef stew that is flavoured with red wine.

The recipe, from the Joy of Cooking, starts off with a marinade for the stewing beef, based on red wine and some of the usual suspects for stew making (carrots, onions etc). Thyme and parsley add a little bit of green to the party and subtle flavour. The wine doesn't really need to be anything fancy just I bought a $10 bottle from Loblaws. I didn't care for it much to drink but its flavour was considerably mellowed out in the stew. After marinading the beef overnight in the fridge, brown the bacon, then brown the other ingredients in the bacon fat, pour in the red wine marinade and slap a lid on it. In an hour or so throw in some mushrooms and parsley and wait another half an hour or so. Your patience will be rewarded, trust me.

I don't really have anything negative to say about this recipe it turned out great! A nice hearty stew with a very nice body and mouth feel. I like my stews pretty thick so I added a little corn starch slurry to thicken it up a little more but other than that I hardly deviated for the recipe. The only thing now is what am I going to do with all of this left over parsley?

Stew in a dutch oven

The wine I used

Introduction

Upon receiving four cookbooks for Christmas I decided that I should challenge myself to make as many recipes from these books as possible. My ultimate goal is to expand my culinary repertoire and actually follow recipes since I mostly experiment with my own creations at the moment. The four books I will be drawing from are: The Joy of Cooking by: Rombauer et al, Good Eats: the Early Years, Good Eats: the Middle Years and Good Eats: the Later Years, all by Alton Brown.

The Rules

At first I was just going to open each book to a random page but I thought I would become bias to certain sections once I got to know the book. As it seems to often in my day to day life Excel came to the rescue. I created a spreadsheet with randomized page numbers, this way there would be no favouritism towards sections of the books. I allowed myself +/- one page in the Joy of Cooking and +/- one episode in Good Eats so I don't have to make anything too crazy or buy really expensive ingredients (I'm kind of cheap, I am a student after all). I will try to make at least one recipe per week and share photos and feedback on how it turned out.

I must disclose that the first few recipes are not following the rules. One of the first recipes I opened to when I first got the book happened to be beef tongue. I was intrigued by it and am now committed to make it, I am just waiting for it to appear at the grocery store. I also really want to make beef bourguignon because of the colourful name my Grandma (Gran) has given it, "Beef Bugger Off."After these two, and the bread pudding below, I will be using randomly (or as close to random as Excel can get) selected recipes.

Bread Pudding

I made a loaf of cinnamon rasin bread over the holidays but for some reason it did not raise as I expected. I think the house may have been to cold for the yeast to work effectively. I baked it anyway and had myself a pretty dense loaf of bread that wasn't terrible but certainly wasn't something I would be lining up to eat. I think this is a time for new phrase, the lemon one is getting kind of tired. "When life gives you stale/old/dense bread make bread pudding." I turned to the Joy of Cooking for a recipe for this classic dessert. Overall I would say the recipe is effective, giving the bread a nice custardy consistency. It could have used more than the 3/4 cup of sugar that was called for but besides that I can't complain. One thing that the recipe says and I kind of ignored (oops!) was to remove the crusts. The crusts are far too though compared to the smooth consistency of the rest of the bread.

Here's the recipe http://www.thejoykitchen.com/recipe.lasso?recipe=1152&menu=one. The one I used was exactly the same minus the whiskey sauce.