Parsnip Muffins

I forgot to get a picture before shredding the
 parsnips so here is one from the internet

This recipe comes from an episode of Good Eats entitled "Undercover Veggies" and gives a few recipes to hide parsnips in everyday baked items. Vegetables can get a bad wrap with kids and many adults so sometimes the chef has to do a little sneaking around to make sure everyone gets all the nutrition they need. I will admit I have done this but it is for the greater good. And now to parsnips, like many ingredients featured on this blog, I had never encountered a parsnip before. They look sort of like a carrot but are beige in colour and have a flavour that is well... hard to describe. I took a bite of one raw just to get a sense of the flavour (they are usually eaten cooked) and it tastes a lot like a carrot but there is something a little different about it. Parsnips can apparently get very sweet, although the ones I had were not particularly sweet. The sweetness is at its maximum when in the ground over the winter. Parsnips store energy as starch which is converted into simple sugars in a process called respiration. In cold weather (below 50 F) respiration slows and the sugar builds up in the cells, this prevents ice crystals from forming. Therefore the parsnip does not freeze and the build up of sugars taste make the parsnip taste sweeter.

Slivered and roasted almonds on top

The muffin recipe was pretty standard except for the addition of plain yogurt and the parsnips of course. I am not sure what difference the yogurt made as a posed to something like milk to moisten the batter. Like the parsnip itself the muffins had a certain je ne sais quoi (French for "I don't know what"), but overall was similar in flavour to a carrot muffin. This recipe only called for nutmeg but if you added the other typical carrot muffin spices I think it would be very hard to distinguish a carrot muffin and a parsnip muffin in a blind taste test. No doubt it was a good muffin but I think I prefer the classic carrot muffin to the parsnip version. Although I would very much like to try roasting parsnips. Something for another day.

Parsnip Muffin Recipe

Chicken Fried Steak

Today we are talking about cube steak. A cube steak is a tough cut of beef that is tenderized by perforation. The perforation cuts through the connective tissue that makes certain cuts tough. Tough cuts come from parts of the animal that do a lot of work, legs and the like. The more central on the animal you go the more tender and expensive the meat gets. Hence the price and tenderness of beef tenderloin, its about as far from either leg as you can get. Like many things in life though there is a trade-off the tougher cuts have more beefy flavour and a much cheaper price tag. Usually a piece of bottom round cooked quickly in a hot pan would be shoe leather, but perforate that same piece of meat into cube steak and it can be cooked quickly without getting to tough. If you are from Canada, like I am, you may find cube steak labelled as minute steak.

The biscuit was not part of the recipe but I thought it was a nice
addition

This episode had recipes for the two most popular cube steak dishes. The first is known by many different names: country style steak, Salisbury steak, Swiss steak etc. All of them are basically a floured and seared cube steak slow cooked in a brown sauce. This looked pretty good but I went for the Texas staple: chicken fried steak. I remember hearing about this mystery meat when I was younger. Is it steak? Or chicken? Or some kind of mutant chicken-cow hybrid? As cool as a feathered cow would be chicken fried steak is cube steak done has if it is fried chicken. That means breaded and pan fried so it gets a crispy brown crust just like fried chicken. It is usually served with a peppery white gravy, called sawmill gravy. Why it was named after a sawmill I am not sure. Apparently Texans are served up over 800,000 chicken fried steaks per day and I can see why they are pretty darn delicious. My only problem was the gravy was a little bland. I think there was not nearly enough brown bits left in the pan to flavour the gravy. I fixed this with lots of salt and pepper and it actually turned out pretty good. Again I will be honest about my deviations from the recipe, Alton Brown bought a roast, cut steaks and perforated them himself. His reasoning was that in lower quality cube steaks many different pieces of meat can be sticked together. Personally I am not all that bothered my this possibility and it didn't want to go and by the tenderizing thing that he used. Cubing your own cube steaks is a possibility and you may save a little money but I will take my chances with the store bought variety.

Chicken Fried Steak Recipe

Macerated Strawberry Pudding

Coca-Cola Product Placement

This week we get two recipes for the price of one! One of them I was pleasantly surprised about, the other sadly somewhat disappointed. Let's start with the good news, the first recipe and necessary to make the second recipe was macerated strawberries. Macerating is just soaking a food in a liquid to both soften the food and allow it to absorb some flavour. Macerating is very similar to marinading and the definition, as with a lot of things in the culinary world, can get a little bit fuzzy. Macerating usually involves fruit and a sweetened liquid, usually some kind of alcohol, where marinating is primarily done to meats (vegetables are often marinated as well) and involves an acidic liquid. To macerate my strawberries I used red wine, honey, sugar and lemon zest. I am not much of a wine fan, in fact I couldn't even tell you what kind of wine I used besides red. I found half a bottle in the fridge, I think it was left over from Christmas. Despite my aversion to the flavour of wine, the sugar and especially the lemon zest was an excellent combination with the flavour of the strawberries. This would be perfect for ice cream or yogurt or just right out of the container. Also the longer it sits the better it tastes!

Un-openable Can

Now for the bad news. The second recipe used the macerated strawberries to make a sort of no-bake bread pudding. The can with the pop can sticking out of the top of it is the rig used to create this dish. Rounds of stale bread are layered in the can with strawberries and the macerating liquid in between. The pop can is used as a weight to compress the pudding for the 8 hours it needs to sit in the fridge. The first problem with was that it was really hard to find a can (at least in my kitchen) that was openable at both ends and the right size for the loaf of bread. Most of the cans had bottoms like the picture to the left, that you can't use a can opener on or were way too big. Once I found a can assembly went smoothly, although I would recommend cutting the rounds and then letting the bread stale instead of the other way around. I was hoping for a creamy smooth texture when I pulled the can off but I guess there was not enough liquid for the bread to absorb. This left some tough and crunchy parts. Maybe with more liquid this would have been more successful (I did only make one after all) but the comments on foodnetwork.com said this recipe was hard to get right. This is not for the kids; there is no cooking involved so all the alcohol is still there.

And now in closing a few tidbits about strawberries:
- Strawberries get there name from the straw that is used to keep there vines from rotting when in direct contact with the ground
- A single strawberry contains about 200 fruits. The seeds are technically the fruit and the fleshy part is just there to hold them

I forgot to mention this recipe is from Good Eats: The Early Years and here is the link Macerated Strawberry Pudding.