Plantains 

Banana, plantain comparison. Plantain is on top

First of all I cheated a little, the page I was supposed to pick a recipe from in the Joy of Cooking contained the most average sandwiches that don't really require a recipe (BLT etc.). This shows that the Joy of Cooking really does have a recipe for everything that you could ever want to cook but if you were new to North American cuisine you may want to start with the basics I suppose. Anyways I decided to move on to the next recipe on my list, plantains. I had been curious for a while about the differences between a banana and a plantain, they certainly look similar. In their raw state a ripe plantain tastes like a banana but much more subtly flavoured and far less sweet. From what I have read plantains are almost never eaten raw. The raw taste wasn't bad it was just very bland. The recipe was really simple, just cut the plantains into rounds and saute them. The pieces really like to stick together so I would suggest placing them in the pan instead of just dumping them in, like I did. This will ensure more even cooking and less burning. Cooking the plantains really distinguishes them from bananas. The inside of the slices had a consistency more like a cooked potato and according to the Joy of Cooking green plantains can cooked like a potato. After cooking the recipe suggested salt and pepper which was good but I also tried some powdered sugar, which I much preferred.

Certainly looks like a banana

Plantians are grown in most tropical climates from the Caribbean to Asia, with Uganda, Ghana and Colombia being the top producers. Plantains are consumed in many different types of dishes around the world but the common theme is that they are cooked like a potato, usually boiled or fried. It is a little strange looking at what is on your plate and thinking okay that looks like a banana but then eating it and realizing it is more like a potato. This ingredient has certainly sparked my curiosity and I would definitely buy them again.

Green Bean Casserole

Doesn't look like much but it was really good

I used to be a green bean hater but I have been slowly coming around to like them, if I had only had this casserole sooner! Its no wonder that this has become a classic dish but usually made from the recipe on the back of a soup can. Although the soup can version is pretty good the from scratch version is way better.  But speaking of the soup can version this leads nicely into green bean casserole history.

In Good Eats 3: The Later Years Alton Brown brings up an interesting point. American cuisine was only really coming into its own in the past century or so while most of cuisines have existed for many hundreds of years. At the turn of the 20th century home cooks began to look for connivence products made possible by the industrial revolution. In 1897 Dr. John T. Dorrance was working for the Campbell Preserve Company when he discovered a way to condense soups. 32 oz of soup in a 10 oz can, sounded like a winning idea. It was such a hit that the Campbell Preserve Company became just Campbell's Soup. They began to publish recipes that would incorporate the condensed soups and many classic dishes followed. It was not until 1955 that Dorcas Reilly of Campbell's Soup first concocted the green bean casserole (she was inducted into the inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for the green bean casserole).

Even without the soup cans this casserole is still really easy to make. Cook the green beans as you would have to even for the soup can version and then it is as simple as sauteing some mushrooms and adding stock and cream. The onions on top are just coated in flour and breadcrumbs and baked for about 20 minutes.


Green Bean Cassarole

Stone Fruit Pouch

Before Cooking

This week's recipe is from an episode of Good Eats all about cooking in pouches. Pouches can be made from many common kitchen items like aluminum foil (good for the grill) or parchment paper which I had never really thought of using. Since parchment paper will not crimp like aluminum foil will, Alton Brown used staples to hold the pouches together. I was a little dubious about putting staples in the oven but they stood up pretty well even at 500 F. Parchment paper is also great because unlike aluminum foil it will not react with acidic foods and can be reheated in the microwave (the staples would need to be removed of course).

Cooking in this manor far predates the silicon impregnated parchment paper we have today. For centuries 

tamales have been cooked in pouches made of either corn husks or plantain leaves. Across the Atlantic there is a whole family of dishes, called dolma, that use grape leaves to hold a variety of fillings, from meats to grains. Dolma is most popular in the area of the former Ottoman Empire, southeastern Europe to northern Africa. Further east, in India banana leaves are used in a similar fashion. 

After Cooking

Now for my recipe. The first two in the episode were for fish and I was not really in the mood for that kind of endeavor, so I opted for the dessert option (dessert is always a better choice anyways). This pouch consisted of ginger cookies, I had some mini gingerbread men, apricots, plums, lime juice and sugar. Put all that in the oven, wrapped in parchment and in 12 minutes you have an amazing ice cream topping. Sour but sweet at the same time, with fruit that is perfectly tender and the cookies become almost like pudding. This is a favourite for sure. 

On Ice Cream 

Stone Fruit Pouch Recipe

Stuffed Peppers and Caramel Sauce


Don't be alarmed, the caramel sauce is not on top of the peppers or anything I just decided to do two recipes for this entry. Since there is not a terrible amount of interesting information on stuffed peppers I thought I would add the next recipe on my list to this entry.

Stuffed peppers are exactly what they sound like. I had only ever had them at the university cafeteria, and they were okay, nothing too special. Mine weren't really all that exciting either, but still pretty good. Since I am doing my best to follow the recipes I had to make a choice between cheese and rice for the filling or ground beef and vegetables. I went with the rice and cheese version although I really would have liked to do a combination of the two recipes. Something for next time I guess. One thing I would recommend, that I think the cafeteria may have skipped on, is steaming the peppers for 10 minutes before putting them in the oven. This way they are tender instead of hard and crunchy. One last note for fans of this blog yes that is another gratin on top of the peppers, they seem to be popping up everywhere.

I have committed to full disclosure on this blog so I will come out and say it... my caramel sauce was a disaster. I had made caramel a couple of times before without a recipe and I had no problems, so I was surprised this didn't work out. First a little about the recipe, basically caramel is sugar and water but this recipe from Good Eats: The Early Years had two other ingredients in the main caramel. The addition of cream of tartar and corn syrup is to prevent re-crystallization. WARNING this may bring back nightmares from high school chemistry. Dissolving the sugar, which is almost pure sucrose, into the water creates a solution. A given amount of water can only dissolve a certain amount of sugar, when a solution reaches this point it is saturated. When heated though the solution can dissolve more sugar, becoming supersaturated, but at a price. Any sudden movements can send the sucrose out of solution and you have to start again. This kind of thing does happen to supersaturated solutions as I found out in high school chemistry when I spilled a supersaturated solution on my pants. It definitely re-crystallizes, but that's another story. Adding the cream of tartar, an acid, breaks down some of the sucrose into its base parts glucose and fructose. These other sugars get in the way of the sucrose reforming into crystals. The corn syrup does the same thing because it is mostly glucose. When I had made caramel before I had never run into problems with crystallization, so these extra ingredients may not be necessary.

"Finished" sauce

Weird separated caramel sauce

Since I don't have a candy thermometer I just had to guess my caramel's temperature. Ideally it should be between 320 and 360 fahrenheit. Its basically a game of chicken between you and the molten sugar. Add the cream to cool it off too early and you lose lots of caramel flavour but go to long and it will burn. Had I added the cream to mine about 5 seconds earlier it probably would have been okay; it was only slightly burned. It you have ever burned something (I think we can all say that we have) a little bit of burnt flavour goes a long way! To had to the list of problems when I added the cream to the caramel it curdled, leaving a very rough texture. Once cooled it even separated from the rest of the caramel. This is bizarre, the recipe said to just dump all the cream in at once which is what I did. I can't figure out what went wrong. I will have to try this again sometime and not burn it before I can really make a judgement on the recipe.

Caramel Sauce Recipe

Orange Marmalade 


Well I'm finally back, now that exams are done and I am home for the summer. I hope to keep the entries rolling out at least once a week.

This week we are dealing with oranges and orange marmalade to be exact. Here we are at another cross roads in culinary classification, what constitutes a jam or a jelly or marmalade? Here is the quick version: jam has both fruit pieces and fruit juice, jelly is translucent and made from only sweetened fruit juice and as for marmalade its definition is a little fuzzy. Marmalade usually contains the peel of the fruit, like an orange, but marmalades can also be made from things like onions which obviously do not have a peel like an orange. Moreover, in North America we like our marmalades sweet while across the pond in the UK they prefer a more bitter taste. All of the above have two things in common, they fall into the fruit preserves category along with many other spreads (compotes, chutneys, fruit curds, etc.) and they are jelled with pectin. Pectin is a substance that is naturally occurring to varying degrees in fruits and it is activated by sugars and acids. Pectin is a big topic so I will give it its due in another blog.

Boiling Oranges

Orange marmalade is typically associated with England but it was actually a Scottish invention. Marmalade like substances, called Quince jelly, first arrived in England as far back as 1495 onboard Portuguese ships. About 300 years later a Scotsmen by the name of James Keeler took his Spanish oranges to market but could not sell any of them because they were so bitter. Keeler's wife did not want to waste the oranges so she cooked them in sugar and water and the rest is history.



As for my marmalade, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I am not the biggest fan or oranges so I was not really looking much forward to this recipe. It turned out to my liking though and is great on bread and crackers. It is really simple recipe, which you can find below, hasn't changed much from Mrs. Keeler's method. Slice up some oranges boil them and add sugar, instant (about an hour total cooking time) breakfast sensation. I might say to hold back a little of the sugar mine was a little sweet, but don't hold back to much or the pectin won't be able to do its job. I only made half the recipe because I don't have the 8 quart pot the recipe called for but it all turned out okay. Since I was not making an industrial size quantity I also skipped the preserving part, if you do the same make sure the go in the fridge.

This recipe is from Good Eats 3: The Later Years Orange Marmalade

Beet Green Gratin 

This weeks random recipe landed me on page 30 of Good Eats 2: The Middle Years and the episode dealing with beets. I had never really eaten beets before and I was not all that keen on it. I think beets have got a bad rap over the years. The chapter offered to recipes: one for pickled beets and one for a dish with beet greens. Since I didn't want to wait a whole week for the beets to become pickles I opted for the less adventurous beet green dish.

So what is a gratin? I asked myself the same question. It sounds pretty fancy but it is really a very simple technique that is common to many dishes. All a gratin is is some kind of toasted crust on the top of a casserole like dish. If the crust is made of bread crumbs (usually buttered), cheese or in this recipes case, Ritz crackers, they all fall under the gratin category. The macaroni from the last entry could also be classified as a gratin. So that's the meaning behind the fancy name but it doesn't really say much about the actual dish. Basically it was just a quiche, without a crust. Eggs, some cheese, mushrooms and the beet greens all baked in the oven, nothing to complicated. I will say that the beet greens, which were Swiss chard by the way, were not my favourite green. I would have much preferred spinach for this application. I think the Swiss chard was a little too earthy for my liking. I'm not really sure what "earthy" really means but they throw it around on the food network all the time. Does it mean that earthy foods taste like dirt? Not really sure but I think it fits with the Swiss chard's flavour (I'm not saying they taste like dirt though). Now that we are all throughly confused, try out this dish and see if you can describe Swiss chard's flavour better.


Recipe: Beet Green Gratin

Macaroni and Cheese


Another classic recipe from Good Eats: The Early Years. Rumor has it that Thomas Jefferson's household were the inventors of macaroni and cheese, although this is debatable, he did serve macaroni and cheese at at least one state dinner. Jefferson tired to have the signature noodle made at his home but they did not live up to expectations so he ended up importing them from Italy along with multiple cheeses. The general population was introduced to this dish in 1937 when Kraft introduced their signature product. Due to its low cost it became a favourite for depression and World War II era cooks.

Slightly brunt macaroni

Before reading up on this dish I had totally the wrong idea about what macaroni was. I had always thought macaroni refered to the shape of the pasta, but it really means the pasta was made with only semolina flour, from durham wheat, and water, no eggs. The shape of traditional noodles for mac and cheese are called elbow and there are hundreds of other shapes and sizes that fall under the title macaroni. While we are talking about ingredients I found a few interesting tidbits about cheddar cheese. Cheddar is a popular choice for macaroni (I'm still going to call the dish just macaroni even though we all now know that is a very ambiguous term) with its sharp flavour. Once a curds are created from cow's milk they are staked one on top of the other. The weight of all the cheese curd pushes the moisture out of the cheese giving cheddar its texture. This process is called "cheddaring," and is named for a village in the south of England where the cheese was first made. Without additives cheddar is a pale yellow colour not its signature orange. The addition of annatto seeds don't do much for flavour but give the cheese the colour we all know and love.

As for the actual execution it was going great up until the very end, the macaroni and cheese had been in the oven for the prescribed half and hour but the cheese on the top had not reached that glorious golden brown colour. I decided to crank up the broiler, I'm sure you can see where this is going, I got distracted... making a salad of all things. When I remembered it was too late, the top was already starting to smoke. The damage turned out to be not that bad, once the burned parts were mixed in with the rest they weren't that noticeable. Despite the burntness it was delicious! My pervious experience with homemade macaroni I found most of the sauces to be somewhat bland. This sauce certainly did not fall in that category, the addition of dry mustard and paprika really boosted the flavour! I would highly recommend this recipe.

Mac and Cheese Recipe