We sent Gren ahead of us to Ottawa a week before we moved, so he wouldn’t get stressed out during the chaos of moving. But in the days following his departure, we kept finding ourselves looking for him, or expecting him to suddenly appear. We kept having to remind ourselves we would see him shortly, but it was still sad. Anyway, you all know that we feed Gren pumpkin regularly to keep him, well, regular. After he left, I had almost a full can sitting around, so we decided to use up the last of our flour and whip ourselves up some pumpkin pancakes for breakfast one day. Not very seasonal for August, but they were darned tasty anyway.
Turn your oven on to 250°F and chuck in a heatsafe dish (this will keep your cooked pancakes warm until it’s time to eat).
In a bowl, whisk together 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour (or a gluten-free equivalent), 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice, and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves. If you have pumpkin pie spice on hand, that will do instead of measuring out all the other spices. If you’re feeling lazy. I also added in 1/4 cup sweetened desiccated coconut, for texture.
In another bowl, whisk together 1 1/2 cups milk, 3/4 cup pumpkin purée, 2 tablespoons melted butter, 1 egg, and a drop each of vanilla extract and coconut extract (optional).
Mix the dry ingredients with the wet ones. The batter will be pretty thick.
Scoop about 1/3 cup of the batter into a heated pan and cook for however long it takes for you to be happy with the consistency of your pancakes. These ones are pretty thick so it took a while at medium heat. The batter makes about 12 pancakes.
Serve with butter and maple syrup, or whatever else floats your boat. LIKE BACON.
Yesterday the Pie turned 31, which he wasn’t really looking forward to, because now for the rest of the year he can’t tell everyone who will listen that I’m older than he is (BY FOUR MEASLY MONTHS). Honestly, the next time someone calls me a “cradle robber” I’m going to punch him or her in the ear. With my ring hand.
I was originally just going to make him a wee cake (because it’s just the two of us and we’re moving shortly) but then Fussellette, who will use any excuse to have a barbecue, made an occasion of the thing and so a bunch of us went downstairs and ate grilled food and drank beverages and had cake — so obviously I had to make a slightly bigger cake.
Gren also likes Nerds.
The Pie loves all things vanilla, so I decided on a sour cream pound cake, a traditional dish I hadn’t tried before. I’m used to the regular ol’ normal pound cake. Now, this recipe will yield two loaf pans’ worth of pound cake, or one ~10″ Bundt or tube pan worth. I’m going with the loaf pan, so I can freeze the other half of this cake for when we celebrate with my parents in a few weeks (also, I packed my Bundt pans). As always when making cakes, it’s a good idea to butter your pans and line them with parchment paper (if possible) to ensure that you don’t get anything stuck. With a Bundt or tube pan it’s good practice to butter the thing and then dust it with flour. Also, for a nice fluffy cake, allow all your ingredients to come to room temperature before you make this sucker.
So. Butter and paper and butter your pans and preheat your oven to 325°F.
Sift together 1/4 teaspoon baking soda with 3 cups cake and pastry flour (which I didn’t have, so I substituted 2 tablespoons flour in each cup with 2 tablespoons corn starch).
And actually I didn’t sift this, either, because I packed my sifter. Anyway, set that aside for now.
Using an electric mixer (or very powerful and fast-moving arms), beat 1 cup butter together with 2 cups granulated sugar until the mixture is pale and fluffy.
Add 6 eggs, one at a time, to the butter/sugar mixture, beating until each one is combined, and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add in 1 tablespoon vanilla extract.
Now, tip in half your flour mixture and stir that until combined.
Then dump in 1 cup (full fat) sour cream and stir that in, too.
And now the rest of your flour. Combine that carefully.
Try not to flick batter everywhere. Evidently, I failed.
Spoon this very thick batter into your pan and smooth the top. You’re going to want to bake this for at least an hour, probably more if you’ve done it in one pan. Go for 60 minutes at first, and then check it every 5 minutes after that until a tester inserted in the centre comes out clean.
When the cake is done, let it cool completely on a wire rack before tipping it out of the pan. Tipping out a hot cake is a good way to get yourself a broken cake.
So there’s your cake. If you wish, you can leave it at that. But this is a birthday cake! I took one of them and wrapped it up for freezing.
So we’re going to make some icing. Our standard cream cheese frosting is a perennial favourite, and it’s very simple.
Beat together 1 cup butter with 1 250g (8oz) package plain cream cheese (room temperature) until fully combined.
Beat in as well 1 tablespoon vanilla (or any other flavouring you wish). Then carefully stir in at least 2 cups icing sugar (you will probably want a bit more to get the consistency you like).
Then I sliced the cake in half horizontally.
I filled the gap with a raspberry jam.
Then I iced it, but only the sides at first. Why? Because I was going to do THIS. But instead of sprinkles, because sprinkles are gross, I’m going to use Nerds.
If you’ve never heard of Nerds, they’re basically small crystals of sugar coated with a sour neon candy crust. They come in wee rectangular boxes and are a childhood favourite of pretty much everyone in my generation, because you used to be able to buy two boxes for fifty cents at the corner store.
Fortunately for us, in the Super Size Me generation, you can now buy Nerds in giant boxes. I wasn’t sure how many Nerds I would need for this, so I bought two boxes. I can always rot my teeth on the other box if it isn’t needed.
So. Spread your Nerds out in a flat rimmed dish (like a baking sheet or a dinner plate) with enough room to lay your whole cake.
Pick your cake up and hold it by the bottom and the top (the unfrosted ends) and, working one side at a time, press the sides into the Nerds to make them stick to the frosting.
Set the cake back down and frost the top, being careful not to disturb the sides. Now I should have refrigerated my cake between frosting it and nerdifying it, so that’s why it’s all squishy and demented. Make sure you do that. Also, I discovered that my wee hands were no match for the size of this cake, so that may have added to the dementedness.
Sprinkle the top with Nerds until it’s evenly coated. Press them down a bit to make sure they stick.
Chill the cake until serving. Even slightly demented, it was still mighty tasty!
Okay. So. I’m cleaning out my freezers. This means that sometimes I come up with odd things to eat. Today’s experiment resulted from the discovery of half a package of puff pastry and a plastic container filled with leftover cupcake frosting. And so it begins.
Now, I’m not putting up this recipe specifically because I think it’s something you should make yourself. It all depends on what you have hanging around your house. This is more to show you that you can use your imagination when it comes to throwing a few ingredients together.
Anyway, here’s what I did. Preheat your oven to 375°F and haul out a large pie plate.
I had a small plastic tub full of what looked to be about 2-3 cups cream cheese frosting leftover from various adventures. Basically it amounts to cream cheese, butter, icing sugar, and vanilla, and it’s fantastic. It freezes really well, too.
So I dumped that in a bowl and added 3 eggs to it, for cohesion.
Then I finely chopped up 4 apples (three Red Delicious, one Granny Smith, for tartness). Chuck those into the frosting mix.
I also managed to cleanly slice off most of my thumbnail, but don’t worry, it didn’t make it into the dish.
Gave it a stir. The apples and the frosting, not my thumb. Obviously.
Took my half package puff pastry and set it out on a floured surface.
Rolled it out thin enough to fit in my pie plate with some overlap.
Filled it most of the way with my apple filling.
Gathered the corners together.
It kind of sort of looks like I did it on purpose, no?
I had extra filling so that went into a casserole dish.
Then I baked them for an hour, until the mess in the casserole dish was cooked through in the centre.
And the puff pastry was crackly and brown.
We ate this warm with a bit of ice cream, like it was a pie, but you could eat it like a pudding, too.
What do you do when you are moving and you have too many cans of tomatoes in your pantry, and your husband has left an open can of tomato paste in your refrigerator?
I think we all know the answer to this. It’s in the title after all. Besides, nothing says summer in Newfoundland like a big bowl of hot soup. And I’m not even kidding. I haven’t seen the sun in a while and as I write this it is raining and 7°C. Now you can use fresh tomatoes in this soup, and I’m sure there’s a good argument for doing so, because the taste is so much better and whatever. Personally, if I have a nice fresh tomato in my hands, I’m going to want to eat it as is, not simmer it in a soup. But to each his own.
If you do decide to use fresh tomatoes, I recommend blanching them first to get the skins off. Put a put of water on the boil and when it’s a-rollin’, submerge your tomatoes in the water for about a minute and a half, until the skins start to split.
Remove the tomatoes from the pot and plunge them into a bowl of cold water (to stop the tomatoes from cooking and going mushy).
Then you can just peel them easy as you please.
Take a few carrots, peel them, and chop them up.
Do the same with a large sweet onion.
You know when you are reading real estate listings and you have to sort of translate them to understand what the sellers are trying to tell you? Like, “cozy” means “small”, “quaint” means that none of the doors are level and won’t shut properly, and “rustic” means “broken”. I think you can apply almost the same principle to food. At least in terms of soups. When I read that a soup is “hearty” that tells me that there’s more stuff in it than liquid. And when I read “rustic” I understand that the creators were just too lazy to cut everything up extra small. So by that logic pretty much everything I ever make is “rustic.”
Sauté the onions in a large saucepan with a gob of vegetable oil until they are soft and transparent.
Now you can huck in your spices. I used some minced garlic, smoked paprika, and then some powdered chicken stock. Give that a good stir.
Now you can add in your tomatoes (I used 2 cans plus the 2 fresh ones I blanched) and your carrots. I didn’t drain my canned tomatoes because I wanted the liquid. If you’re using fresh tomatoes you may want to add in a bit of water. Plop in a can of tomato paste as well, to thicken it up.
Simmer that for a while until the carrots are soft. Now you can leave this in its hearty, rustic state, or you can give it a whaz with your handy immersion blender and mix it up.
I chose the latter, obviously.
Then I took a can of evaporated milk that Mrs. Nice had purchased for undisclosed reasons and poured that in. Uh, don’t, you know, confuse evaporated milk with condensed milk. I don’t think that would end well.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
I would have loved to serve it with fresh basil but dried had to do. Yum!
Ando made this for Thidz’ birthday last week and it went down so well that he suggested I put it on the blog. So here it is, adapted to his standards. While the whole thing takes a little while to prepare, it’s all easy stuff that you can do in stages. I ended up having most of it ready in the morning and then just chucked it together at the end and baked it. But we’ll work from the bottom up on this layered casserole. Also, the recipe says it serves 8, but really it serves 4 because you are going to want seconds.
BOTTOM:
Preheat your oven to 425°F and spray a 9″ springform pan with cooking spray. My pan was a little wider, but that’s fine.
In a teeny bowl, mix together 1 teaspoon smoked paprika, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/2 teaspoon chili powder, and some salt and ground black pepper to taste.
Peel 2 medium sweet potatoes. I only had large ones, so I opted to just do one, but I could have used both and it would have been fine.
Use a mandoline to shave off super thin slices.
Chuck those pieces in a bowl, drizzle with a few tablespoons vegetable oil, and add in your spice mix. Toss with your hands until the oil and spices evenly coat all the potato pieces.
Layer the sweet potato slices evenly in the bottom of the pan.
Bake for 15-20 minutes until they are softened and starting to brown. Ando wanted to bake them longer to make them more crisp, so I tried that, but I found that once you piled the rest of the ingredients on top they went soft again anyway, so don’t worry too much about that. The Pie hoped for a thicker layer of sweet potatoes (because I only used the one potato and my pan was wider), so next time I would go for two.
MIDDLE:
Grab yourself some pork tenderloin. I had a boneless pork loin rib here that was on stupid sale so I used that.
You’ll need 2lbs pork, cut into 2″ chunks. If I did this again, I would cut the chunks larger, just so your pulled pork strings end up being decently long.
Bring a large saucepan of water to a boil and add in the meat. It goes gray almost immediately, which is kind of gross. Reduce to a simmer and leave that on the go for about an hour.
Drain the pork and use 2 forks to shred it into little pieces.
Then you’re going to need some barbecue sauce. Ando expressed concern that the sauce tended to overpower the more delicate flavours of the macaroni and cheese on top, so we picked out a milder apple butter sauce and it worked out fantastically. The sweetness of the apple really worked well with the pork.
So you pour 14oz barbecue sauce all over your pork and mix it in.
Then you add in 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar and stir that in as well, then set the whole thing aside.
TOP:
Bring another saucepan of water to a boil and add a pinch or two of salt. When it’s boiling, add in 8oz elbow pasta (MACARONI) and cook according to your package instructions. When it’s ready, drain the water, saving about 1/4 cup of it. Add the water back to the pasta in the pot.
Add to the pasta 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese (I think the sharper the better), 1/2 cup grated Gruyere (we used Jarlsberg), and 1/4 cup creme fraiche (which is next to impossible to find in Newfoundland, so we used sour cream instead). Because Ando suggested boosting the flavour of the mac, I added a few crumbles of blue cheese (Rochefort) as well.
Stir that up until it’s all melted, then add a few drops of hot sauce (we used Tabasco) to taste.
Season it with salt and pepper and set it aside.
CRUST:
Melt 1/4 cup butter and stir it up with 1/2 cup parmesan cheese and 1 cup panko breadcrumbs.
ASSEMBLY:
Smooth the pulled pork over the sweet potatoes.
Dollop the macaroni on top of that and flatten it down a bit.
Sprinkle the bread crumb mixture on top of that to completely cover the macaroni.
Bake for 15 minutes, until the casserole is hot through and the bread crumbs are browned.
DISASSEMBLY:
Ideally you should be able to pop open the springform pan and cut this puppy like a cake. My pork ended up being supremely saucy and thus too slithery to be architecturally sound in terms of casserole structure. Meaning I tried to pop off the frame and then the whole thing went sideways — literally and figuratively. So we just scooped it out with spoons, hence the lack of presentation. Didn’t matter. Ate it anyway. And it was awesome. Thanks Ando!
I love taking classic dishes and putting a little something extra in them to add just that little bit more to their perfection. And there is nothing more perfect than the classic BLT (that’s a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, for those few of you uninitiated). But is that actually true? No. Because you can always add. There’s the BELT, for instance: bacon, egg, lettuce, tomato (on a biscuit, no less). And a variation of the grilled cheese that we like around these parts, the BTC (bacon, tomato, cheese).
As I have learned, adding avocado makes pretty much ANYTHING better. In fact, I think I’m going to make a decree here for the Avocado Rule, which parallels the Pie’s Banana Rule, wherein adding a banana to anything (shakes, smoothies, pies) makes it better. So this one is the same rule, but, you know, with avocados. So we’re making a BALT (bacon-avocado-lettuce-tomato).
We don’t do a lot of sandwiches here at Ali Does It, but with the Pie away for the weekend it’s all I can really muster up the energy for. This sandwich is at the high end of my give-a-crap level for the next few days. So stand back in awe.
First you take a nice ripe avocado. And you cut it open. And you get rid of the pit.
And you empty it into a bowl. I know, this is heady stuff.
And you mash it up with some garlic and some lime juice.
Until you have a marvellous guacamole. I would use a whole avocado for one sandwich but the Pie doesn’t let me so I would recommend one avocado for TWO sandwiches. Leave that alone for a bit.
Then you take a couple teaspoons of mayonnaise (whatever kind you want, it’s your sammich), and add a sprinkle or two of chipotle seasoning. Give that a stir. Tada. Now you have chipotle mayo. CAN YOU EVEN HANDLE IT? Me neither.
Slice up a tomato while you’re at it. And wash and dry some lettuce.
Now you need some bacon. However much you want, cooked however you like it. I would recommend at least two slices of bacon per sandwich, but you can do what you want. I’m not your mother.
Slice up some bread of your choosing. This is a simple ciabatta. Regular sandwich bread is standard. What is the total BEST though is a nice fresh croissant (it might be my favourite thing ever, especially if you add some gooey Brie to your BALT). Like the BEST.
Now you put it together! Smear on some spicy mayo and soothing guacamole, then layer on your bacon, lettuce, and tomato and you’re good to go.
Did you need a DIY on how to make a sandwich? Perhaps not. But I don’t care. Because now I get to eat this. With a salad that is mostly comprised of exactly the same ingredients: lettuce, tomatoes, bacon, and bread. Oh well.
Remember when I made that lovely rigatoni casserole and I forgot the ricotta? Well I still have it, and so I’m trying to figure out what to do with it, other than slap together the regular ol’ lasagna or cannelloni. How about something sweeter? How about breakfast? Sold! This recipe is adapted from Canadian Living.
So. In a large bowl, whisk together 1 1/2 cups flour, 3 tablespoons granulated sugar, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder.
Melt 1/4 cup butter, and chuck that in a smaller bowl together with 1 egg, 1 cup milk, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, and 3/4 cup extra smooth ricotta cheese. The recipe also called for lemon rind, but we don’t have such fancy things here in Newfoundland. Well, we do — I just don’t have any at the moment.
Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and stir it up.
Stir in 1 cup fresh blueberries. If you use frozen ones (I did), just keep in mind that the the ice is going to make your pancakes a little runnier.
Heat a frying pan on medium and dollop in some pancake batter. Because the pan is still heating our first pancakes never come out as well as we planned so we always make them a bit on the small side.
Cook your pancake until the bubbles that form on the top pop but don’t disappear, leaving little craters in your batter.
Then flip and cook for another minute or so. Not long.
And that’s it, really. Serve with whatever you like. We kept it simple with butter and maple syrup, and that was good.
