The Boastful Baker | because every cook praises her own broth

A year of fearless cooking.

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Melissa | 2 Comments | baking, cookies, cooking, dessert, dinner, food, recipes

Chocolate Macarons

For the first time in a while, I got to spend all of last weekend at home with no real plans. I love weekends like this every now and again as they’re usually the weekends when I get to cook and bake a lot. Last weekend did not disappoint. In addition to cooking some foods that we eat frequently, I made two things that I had never made before: potato gnocchi and French macarons.

I’d eaten them both multiple times, but I’d never made them from scratch myself until this weekend. Something about making homemade pasta seemed daunting and the macarons seemed completely impossible to me despite my baking skills.

Successfully making gnocchi and macarons over the course of a weekend has made me think about all sorts of other foods I’ve always wanted to make but never have. Some foods I haven’t made because they’re expensive. Others I haven’t made because they appear to take forever to prepare. Some I just haven’t ever gotten around to trying. And others just plain scare me.

As a result of my bravery last weekend, I’ve decided to go ahead and make 2012 the year of fearless cooking. I shall not let a long, laborious recipe hinder my cooking. Nor shall I let warnings of how difficult it is to make an item hold me back. I may, however, let prohibitive costs get in my way every now and again. This year when I want to cook something and think it’s too difficult, I need to remind myself that I’ve made several wedding cakes. And gnocchi!

I made macarons!

I’ve started a list, shown below, of what I want to cook or bake this year that I’ve never made before (or haven’t made on my own in my adult life as I don’t remember all of the things I may have helped my mom make as a kid). I’ll continue to add to the list as I think of more items to make and as suggestions roll in from Twitter and Facebook friends.

In addition, please feel free to suggest any foods that you’ve always wanted to make but were afraid to attempt for one reason or another.

In 2012, I will fearlessly prepare the following items in my kitchen:

~~Gnocchi~~
~~French macaron cookies~~
Marshmallows
Crêpes
Cream puffs
Fried chicken
Pressure canned foods, like canned green beans
Caramels – the candy, not the sauce
Puff pastry
Lobster
Chocolate soufflé
Hollandaise sauce
Gougères
Beef Wellington
Fresh pasta – maybe linguine or fettuccine
Boston cream pie
Charlotte – I can make the ladyfingers, but assembly is my roadblock
Ricotta cheese
Flour tortillas
Duck confit
Baklava
Baked Alaska
Crown pork roast
Madeleines

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I loved Tartine.

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Melissa | 4 Comments | baking, cookies, food, photography, restaurants, vacation

Tartine Bakery Window

While looking at the admin page for my website just now, I noticed a few blog posts about my honeymoon that I started months and months ago and never posted. These posts were all intended to be photo heavy, so I think I’m going to go ahead and post them anyway. Please ignore the fact that my honeymoon was more than 9 months ago.

A Twitter friend told me that I had to go to Tartine Bakery when we were in San Francisco. So, on our last full day in town, we made a special trip there for lunch. It was well worth the confusing subway ride there and I can’t wait to eat there again the next time I find myself in San Francisco. I liked Tartine enough that I’ve since bought both of their cookbooks in the hopes of recreating something vaguely resembling their baked goods at home.

Anyway, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves here. The light in the window where we ate lunch was pretty fabulous, so I got some great pictures.

A bakery case full of deliciousness.

Croque Monsieur

Turkey Sandwich

Peppered turkey and broccoli rabe sandwich

Frangipane croissant

Mexican wedding cookie

Tartine croissant

Frangipane croissant

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The biscuits of my youth.

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Melissa | Leave a comment | baking, cookbook, cooking, dinner, food, recipes

Homemade Biscuits and Peach Butter

Hello. It’s been a while, but here I am ready to write about food cooked in a new kitchen in a new home in a new city (that we like a lot thus far). More about that later. And by later, I mean another day.

All I want to do tonight is share a biscuit recipe with you. I was craving bread tonight, but I didn’t feel like leaving the warm house to buy some and I didn’t feel like waiting 3 hours for a loaf of homemade bread. So I made biscuits. They’re easy and ready to eat in less than half an hour from start to finish.

Once the idea of biscuits was in my head, I remembered that I bought a copy of James Beard’s American Cookery a while ago just for his biscuit recipes. I made a lot of biscuits with my mom as a child and the biscuits were almost always from my parents’ well-loved James Beard cookbook. My claim is that I was making biscuits on my own at age 5, but my husband doubts the truth of this statement. Maybe I wasn’t really 5, but I was young. And I made a lot of biscuits.

So, the biscuits I made tonight are the biscuits of my youth and they were as good as I remembered them to be. When I was a kid, we often made these with buttermilk or recently spoiled milk. And when we had it in the house, we often mixed in a little bit of strawberry cream cheese. It might sound weird, but it was actually quite wonderful. Tonight I had a bit of heavy cream that I needed to use, so I threw that into the dough instead of regular milk…but normally I’ll use 2% milk.

Since biscuits need jam, I cracked open a jar of peach butter that I made last summer. If you’ve got a jar of homemade preserves at home, you should use some of it on these biscuits.

Baking Powder Biscuits

Recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery

Ingredients

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup shortening
3/4 cup milk (I used heavy cream this time, but normally I’ll use 2% milk.)
1 tablespoon sugar (Optional, but I used it.)

Directions

Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar (if used) into a bowl.
Cut in the shortening (butter, lard, vegetable shortening, chicken fat – what you will). The pieces of fat should be quite fine.
Add the milk and stir quickly until the dough clings together.
Turn out on a floured board, knead a few times, and pat or roll out to 1/4 to 1/2 inch thickness.
Cut into rounds with a floured cutter 1 to 2 inches in diameter.
Place on a buttered cookie sheet, or, if you like biscuits crisp on top and bottom and soft in the center, place in a buttered 9 x 9 inch pan.
Bake at 450 degrees 12 to 15 minutes, or until light and brown.

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Heading towards the mountains.

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Melissa | 1 Comment | food, random, restaurants

Mountain bound.

After spending the bulk of my adult life living in or around Williamsburg, I’m leaving. My husband, Joel, got a great job offer from UVA and we decided that he should take it. So we’re moving to Charlottesville in early December!

Even though Charlottesville is a mere two hour drive from Williamsburg, it will be the farthest I’ve ever lived from the tiny town I grew up in on the Chesapeake Bay. The nearby mountains will probably take me a little while to get used to since I grew up practically below sea level.

I’m super excited about Charlottesville for lots of reasons (including the just mentioned mountains). Unlike Williamsburg, it’s a bit of a real town. Although it’s not as close to my parents as Williamsburg is, it’s the same distance from my sisters and much closer to almost all of Joel’s family.

And then there’s the food! Charlottesville has a lot of fantastic restaurants (we already have a contender for a favorite nice restaurant) and loads of nearby wineries, farms and orchards and good, healthy local meat. I’ve also heard that their farmer’s market is wonderful and if I’m lucky, I’ll still have a little piece of dirt for a vegetable garden next spring. Plus, for the first time ever, I’ll live close to a Whole Foods!

With the move so close, we’ve got a lot to do. There’s a house to sell and I need to think about gainful employment for myself. Plus we have to actually move (that’s the part I’m not looking forward to at all). So, I’m not expecting to be around the blog much until then. But stick around as I’ll be back with new things to share and hopefully lots of pretty mountain pictures!

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The cake made me cry.

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Melissa | 1 Comment | baking, cake, cooking, photography, wedding

Our wedding cake!

It seems silly to write posts about my wedding five months after the fact, but I still have so many details to share. My wedding cake is one of the most important of these details. Look at it! Wouldn’t you want to brag about it if it were your wedding cake?

When we got engaged and started making wedding plans, the cake was one of the first things we discussed. Since I’m not insane, I chose not to make my own cake. And if I wasn’t going to make my own wedding cake, there was only one option for us: Charlie Little of Cakes by Charlie. Both Joel and I had the pleasure of working with Charlie before he started baking wedding cakes full time and the man’s desserts are incredible. They’re both pretty to look at and absurdly delicious. His baking talent is beyond words.

Once our wedding date was chosen, Charlie was immediately contacted as we didn’t want to miss out on his cake for our wedding. Plus we wanted him to be a guest at the wedding, so we didn’t want him to book two cakes on our wedding day or anything crazy like that.

As the wedding drew closer, we decided on the style we wanted from his vast album of cakes (and we chose our cake flavors as well). Our choice was relatively simple – just a tiered cake decorated with a single budding forsythia branch to match the yellow and green theme of our wedding.

Charlie was confident forsythia would still be blooming on our wedding day. Mother Nature apparently had some other thoughts about this and a huge storm a week or so before the wedding destroyed what was left of the blooming forsythia in our area.

So Charlie improvised. He called us to inform us about the dearth of forsythia and we calmly told him that whatever he needed or wanted to do for the cake was fine with us. We knew it would taste good and we knew that the man is practically a magician in the kitchen, so anything he came up with would be wonderful.

Little did we know how wonderful it would be. Since there was no blooming forsythia around, Charlie made some himself out of gum paste and a naked branch. But he didn’t stop there. Since he knew daffodils were our flowers, he made some of those as well. Along with an assortment of other spring blooms including dogwoods.

Before the ceremony, the bridal party hid out in the building where the reception was held. When I arrived, Charlie and the cake were there and the cake literally made me cry (see me in one of the photos below – you can tell that I’ve been crying). It was that breathtakingly beautiful.

I knew the cake would look and taste good, but the finished product completely and totally exceeded all of my expectations. I truly think my wedding cake is one of the loveliest cakes I’ve ever seen.

If you happen to live anywhere near Williamsburg, VA, and need a wedding cake, y0u should contact Charlie. Just make sure to call him way in advance as he’s in high demand around here.

Wedding cake!

Admiring my cake with my sister Tasha and Charlie

Every single bloom and blossom was made by hand!

Most fantastic cake ever.

Intricate handmade flowers.

Made by Charlie Little of Cakes by Charlie.

Could I have had a prettier cake? I think not!

Cutting the cake required great concentration.

Just in case you’re wondering the cake flavors were: chocolate with mocha buttercream, carrot cake with caramel buttercream and amaretto cake with raspberry filling and vanilla buttercream.

These photos are all mixed up and I don’t remember which ones were taken by our photographer and which ones were taken by my family. So, the photos are by Stephen Salpukas, Tasha McKelvey and Donald McKelvey. But now that I think about it, it’s possible that I took one or two of them as well as I think I borrowed my dad’s camera for a few cake shots before the ceremony. The food photographer in me couldn’t resist…not even on my wedding day.

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Simple summer supper

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Melissa | 7 Comments | cooking, dinner, food, gardening, photography, recipes

Early last week I found a giant heirloom tomato in my garden that should have been picked a few days sooner. If I didn’t want it to go to waste, I needed an immediate use for it. Since we had a guest coming over that night for snacks and drinks, I had to think of something immediate AND easy to prepare. Bruschetta was the first thing that popped into my head since we had a loaf of roasted garlic bread on hand already.

A quick search for bruschetta on Pinterest (which is the first place I search for cooking ideas these days) led me to the bruschetta with tomato and basil recipe on Simply Recipes. I had everything the recipe called for on hand and was able to have this bruschetta topping ready for the roasted garlic bread just a few minutes after our guest arrived.

This bruschetta was so good that I’ve made it for dinner thrice more in the last six days. This bruschetta is good enough that I don’t think we’ll tire of it this summer. I’m confident that nearly every ripe tomato I pull out of the garden for the rest of the summer is going to be turned into a bruschetta topping. It’s easy to make (especially on hot August weeknights when I’m tired and don’t really want to cook) and the only ingredient I don’t always have on hand is a loaf of fresh bread.

I made very few changes to the recipe from Simply Recipes. I have been substituting heirloom tomatoes from my garden for the plum tomatoes. Since heirlooms are a lot juicier than plum tomatoes, I’ve taken to chopping the tomatoes and letting them drain for about 10 minutes in a small colander set over a bowl. I haven’t been scooping out the seeds from my tomatoes as we don’t mind them in a dish like this. The only other real alteration to the recipe I’ve made is adding a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes to each batch for a little hint of spice.

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It’s August. It’s hot. Make yourself some ice cream sandwiches.

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Melissa | Leave a comment | baking, cookbook, cookies, cooking, dessert, food, photography, recipes

It’s August in the United States and it’s hot just about everywhere. My solution for beating the August heat? Ice cream sandwiches. Preferably with homemade ice cream and homemade chocolate chip cookies. But if you don’t bake or don’t make your own ice cream, store bought cookies and ice cream will certainly suffice.

My ice cream sandwiches were made with my very favorite chocolate chip cookies, a recipe from Everyday Food magazine that I shared here a while ago. They’re soft and slightly salty and absolutely perfect.

For the ice cream, I whipped up a couple of batches of Salty Caramel ice cream from the recently published Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home cookbook. If you’re not already familiar with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, you should be. Salty Caramel is one of the company’s signature flavors and the recipe for it alone is worth the price of the cookbook…especially for people like me who can’t buy Jeni’s ice cream very easily.

The Salty Caramel ice cream was an amazingly perfect companion for the chocolate chip cookies, so if you’re up for the work of homemade ice cream and cookies, you should make your own ice cream sandwiches just like these. And if you’re not up for the work, buy a package of your favorite cookies and a pint of your favorite ice cream. Either way, all you have to do to assemble these is to gently squish two cookies together with some slightly softened ice cream and freeze until firm.

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Added to the roster.

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Melissa | 4 Comments | cooking, dinner, food, photography, recipes

I like pasta. Not as much as some people but I do like it. Yet I rarely make pasta at home as I’m usually not satisfied with the finished dish. Sometimes the sauce isn’t right or the pasta is overcooked. Sometimes the accompaniments to the pasta lack the flavor I was hoping for and sometimes the plate of pasta just isn’t that good despite my efforts. (Lasagna is an exclusion but I don’t make lasagna very often.)

When I got the August 2011 issue of Martha Stewart Living in the mail a couple of Friday evenings ago, I flipped through it and was immediately captivated by the Campanelle with Corn, Scallions and Arugula recipe featured in the issue’s “Simple Summer Pastas” article.

Because I’m never happy with the pasta dishes I make at home, I’m always on the prowl for a new and perfect pasta recipe to try. Rarely do I actually find one. Yet this Martha Stewart pasta recipe grabbed me, shook me and made me promise to make it the very next night.

Because it was described in the magazine as “part corn chowder and part pasta salad,” I had a feeling this could be a pasta recipe I’d be happy with in the end. The recipe called for large quantities of fresh corn, something I can’t seem to get enough of this summer. It also called for bacon, something I can’t get enough of ever.

The original recipe included arugula. While the arugula probably would have been good when the dish was fresh, I didn’t like the idea of slimy arugula in my leftovers. So I left it out and didn’t miss it a bit. The recipe also called for campanelle pasta but I couldn’t find that at my local grocery store, so I used orecchiette instead as it was a recommended substitution for the campanelle.

The entire dish came together pretty quickly (45 minutes or so including prep time) as long as you’re adept at slicing fresh corn off the cob. Leftovers of this were awesome and I can proudly say that this is one pasta recipe I will be making over and over again. It’s been added to the roster of just a couple of pasta dishes that I think I prepare well.

Orecchiette with Corn, Scallions and Bacon

Recipe ever so slightly adapted from the August 2011 Martha Stewart Living magazine

Serves 8

Ingredients

4 cups fresh corn (from 5-6 ears)
1/2 cup low sodium chicken broth
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 slices smoked bacon, chopped (I probably used 6 slices as I really like bacon.)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound orecchiette pasta (other shell-shaped pasta could be used), cooked until al dente with 1 cup of cooking water reserved
3 scallions, white and pale-green parts only, thinly sliced (I used 5 scallions as I really like them too!)
Parmesan cheese, shaved or finely grated

Directions

Purée 1 cup corn and the chicken stock in a blender or food processor.
Heat olive oil in a large skillet (yes, a large one!) over medium heat. Cook bacon in skillet until crisp.
Add the corn purée, remaining 3 cups of corn kernels, 2 tablespoons butter and the jalapeno pepper. Season with salt and pepper. Cook until corn is soft, about 5 minutes.
Toss in the cooked paste, reserved cooking water and remaining 2 tablespoons butter.
Cook until sauce is creamy, about 3 minutes.
Toss in scallions.
Garnish with cheese.

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Green with (garden) envy.

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Melissa | Leave a comment | gardening, photography, vacation, wedding

The French Laundry

Just because I didn’t eat a meal at The French Laundry doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to see it up close. So we walked down the streets of Yountville, CA, and took a peek.

The outside of the restaurant wasn’t overly imposing and didn’t really stand out too much on the street. What did stand out was The French Laundry garden, located literally across the street. The whole plot of land was probably not much more than 2 acres but it looked huge and was full of every imaginable edible plant (and probably some you didn’t imagine). Did any of you even know that they had their own ginormous garden?

The entire garden was impeccably manicured and each type of plant was beautifully labeled. As a woman with a small vegetable garden, this garden made me literally green with envy. I know that it’s a garden for several restaurants, but I would still love to have that much land to work with and the ability to grow a wider variety of vegetables and herbs than I can now (and while I’m at it, I’ll take the gardening staff for the land, t00).

I’ll let the garden speak for itself in the images below. And if you’re ever in the Napa Valley and driving through Yountville, you should take a look at the garden in real life!

Huge tracts of land. (Okay, not really. Just wanted to throw in a Monty Python line.)

So many rows of future gourmet food.

So well kept.

Huge greenhouse

Even the signs make me jealous.

Just a space this large would make me happy.

Salsify

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Intro to Canning

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Melissa | 8 Comments | canning, cooking, food, gardening, photography

Last year's sea of canning jars

As you already know, I like to cook and bake a lot. It’s one of my most favorite things to do with my free time. But did you know that last summer I added canning to my kitchen repertoire?

And when I say added, I really mean that I became obsessed with canning last summer. Prior to last June, I’d only made a couple of batches of jam with fruit I’d picked. Then last summer, I was hit with an urge to can fruits and vegetables ALL the time.

I made all sorts of jams, sauces, relishes, pickles and more. The vegetables in my garden were canned, as were any good fruits and veggies I found at the farmer’s market and any berries I picked at local farms. I even dragged several pounds of cheap tomatillos back from Philadelphia last September just to make homemade salsa verde. I had to run to the store for more jars every weekend (and I feel like I spent a small fortune in doing so) and I spent many late nights standing over a boiling pot of liquid. By the end of the summer, I had canned well over 200 half pint jars of food. We ate lots of it ourselves but I think I gave just as much of it away to family and friends throughout the last year.

Dilly Beans

This summer is shaping up to be just as productive as last year. I started canning earlier this year, I have more canning cookbooks on hand than last year and I actually broke down and bought a legitimate canning pot as I was tired of my 12 quart Calphalon stock pot boiling over every time I canned anything. I’ve already got quite a stash of 2011 jams and relishes and the summer is barely half over.

I did learn a few lessons in the last year about what I do and don’t want to can. This summer is far more concentrated on an assortment of fruit jams. People like jam. No one will turn down a jar of jam if you try to give it to them. I also learned that I don’t like pickles that don’t crunch. This year I’m sticking to just refrigerator pickles and the pickled dilly beans shown here. Dilly beans still snap when you eat them. Unlike the soggy garlic dill pickles I canned last summer and eventually threw away last month.

Mmm...pickled beans

If you like pickles, dilly beans would be a great first venture into canning. They’re zesty, spicy and crunchy. Perfect for eating straight out of the jar (I can do that as I’m the only person in my house who likes pickled things).

I used the recipe posted on Food in Jars, one of my very favorite food websites. If I’m looking for a canning recipe for a particular type of food, Food in Jars is always my first stop. This year alone, I’ve used the recipes on the site to make garlic dill pickles, blueberry butter, pickled jalapenos and these dilly beans. Food in Jars is written and maintained by Marisa McClellan and if you’re at all interested in learning to can, both Marisa and the site are great resources. Marisa’s hard at work on a Food in Jars cookbook that I can’t wait to get my hands on once it’s in print.

I’m not going to post the recipe here because you should visit Food in Jars yourself. I made no changes to Marisa’s recipe other than to cut back the quantity of cayenne pepper just a touch as I’m a little bit of a wuss about spicy food.

Now that I’ve introduced my little canning obsession, I’ll be back with more canning photos and recipes soon!

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A year of fearless cooking.

I loved Tartine.

The biscuits of my youth.

Baking Powder Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

Heading towards the mountains.

The cake made me cry.

Simple summer supper

It’s August. It’s hot. Make yourself some ice cream sandwiches.

Added to the roster.

Orecchiette with Corn, Scallions and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Green with (garden) envy.

Intro to Canning

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