Mommy Cooks

Äppelformar

In honor of Thanksgiving, Laura's second-grade class is doing a unit on immigrant ancestors this month.  This morning they are having an "immigrant banquet" in which they share foods of their ancestors, and Laura decided to bring something Swedish.  This has been a favorite recipe of mine for some years, discovered in the old Time-Life Scandinavian Cooking book. Äppelformar -- "apple shapes" or "forms" -- are little apple-filled pastries, like a little muffin-shaped pastry.  You can also make the filling with applesauce -- during those long, dark, Swedish winters, perhaps, when there are no fresh apples to be had -- but I like the fresh ones in combination with the light tartness of the jam and the crunchy almonds.

Äppelformar

12 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature (divided use)
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 tart cooking apples
3/4 cup apricot preserves
slivered almonds
confectioners' sugar

For the pastry, cream 10 tablespoons butter and the sugar together until light and fluffy.  Beat in the eggs.  Sift the flour and baking powder together and add to the butter mixture, blending well.  Shape the dough, wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper, and chill for 1 hour or more.

For the filling, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan over moderate heat.  While the butter is melting, peel, core, and finely dice the apples.  Add the apples to the butter, and cook 1 or 2 minutes, shaking the pan to coat the apples with the butter.  Remove from the heat and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350° F.  Lightly oil or butter 12 muffin tins.  Cut off 1/3 of the dough, roll it out about 1/4 inch thick, and using a 2- or 2-1/2 inch cookie cutter, cut out 12 circles.  Work the dough scraps back into the remaining dough, divide into 12 pieces, and press each piece into the bottom and sides of the muffing cups, extending the dough slightly above the rim of the cup.  Divide the filling between the lined muffin cups.  Top each with about 1 tablespoon of the apricot preserves and a sprinkling of almonds.  Cover the apple filling with the dough rounds, folding the edges down over the tops to seal.

Bake for 40 minutes or until lightly golden.  Loosen gently with a knife, and let cool in the tin.  Lift out with a narrow spatula or knife.  Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar just before serving.

Makes 12 äppelformar.  Active work time, about 30 minutes; total preparation time, about 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Rocky Road

We volunteered to bring something for the bake sale at school this year, and so -- since the more we bring, the more tickets we get for the game booths! -- I made two things, Peanut Butter Squares and this Rocky Road, both from Nigella Lawson's scrumptious How to Be a Domestic Goddess.  They are both very simple and quick, very easy for the girls to help with, and went over very well with everyone who snitched -- I mean tested -- them.

I've adapted this recipe somewhat, feeling that real rocky road uses almonds, or in a pinch cashews (which is what I had in the cupboard this afternoon), and doubling it so that I could fill our quota of a dozen with two in a bag.

Rocky Road

14 oz. milk chocolate
2 oz. bittersweet chocolate
6 oz. cashews or whole almonds
2/3 cup miniature marshmallows

Line a baking sheet or tray with wax paper.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave until smooth.  Roughly chop the nuts, and mix them into the chocolate with the marshmallows.

Drop by heaping teaspoons onto the lined baking sheet, and leave to cool, preferably not in the refrigerator.  (The cold of the refrigerator will take away some of the gleam of the chocolate.)

Makes 24 sweets.  Active work time, about 10 minutes.

Simple Tomato Sauce

Every time we go out into the garden now, we come back with tomatoes.  The two cherry varieties are about three times the size of the other two, and producing enormous quantities.  The San Marzano is slow but steady, and I have gotten a grand total of two ripe tomatoes so far from the Big Rainbow -- beautiful and fascinating things, yellow mottled with orange, huge and weighty -- but both had been bored by insects enough that I was not willing to taste them. (Eeeuw).  The Black Cherry and the Sweet Chelsea are racing, I think, to see which can produce more. 

Yesterday David and the girls went out in the evening and gathered a colander-full, five pounds, mostly of the Sweet Chelseas, and this morning I made sauce.  This recipe is adapted from one in "Martha Stewart Living", and really is simple, as well as tomatoey.

You can use any kind of tomato in this sauce with good results.  I found that it was a bit thicker when made with only Romas, as the cherries have less meat in them, but then David likes runnier sauces, so that's not a problem.  Using a variety of tomatoes in each batch will give you more consistency of flavor between batches, but I think it's interesting to have a hint of, say, Black Cherry now and then.

Use a really good olive oil, as with only four ingredients a dreary oil will make a dreary sauce.  I also use the fancy Mediterranean sea salt in this.

If you use a blender to purée the sauce, be sure to remove the center insert from the lid, then cover the lid with a kitchen towel, before turning on the blender.  I don't even want to think about how many times I've wiped soup off of the undersides of the kitchen cupboards before somebody told me to do this!  The hot air and liquid inside the blender expands at a fantastic rate, and will push off the lid the moment the power goes on.  Removing the center insert will allow the hot air to escape more-or-less harmlessly, and holding a kitchen towel on top of the open part will keep splashes inside.  You can certainly leave the sauce chunky, but it has such a wonderful creamy consistency when puréed that I always make it that way now.

This recipe gives quantities per pound of tomatoes, and is quite easy to increase.  I've done it with one pound -- which makes enough sauce for about a half-pound of pasta, for our dinner that night, and takes about half an hour -- and with yesterday's five pounds.  The only thing you need to change is the size of the pan, and possibly the simmering time.

Simple Tomato Sauce

2 tablespoons good-quality extra-virgin olive oil
1 heaping teaspoon chopped garlic
1 pound ripe tomatoes, cored if necessary, and coarsely chopped
scant 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt, plus more to taste

Heat the oil in a pan over medium-high heat.  Add the garlic, and stir for 20 seconds -- do not let it brown.  Stir in the tomatoes and salt, raise the heat, and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer vigorously, stirring often, until the sauce has reduced and thickened slightly, 15 to 25 minutes.

Carefully purée the sauce, in batches, in a blender or food processor, and season with more salt if desired.  Serve immediately, or let cool.

Store the sauce in airtight containers in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, or in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Makes about 1 1/2 cups per pound of tomatoes.  Active work time, about 30 minutes.

German Pancakes

The other day we made a German pancake for lunch -- also called Dutch baby pancake, "Dutch" probably being a corruption of "Deutsch".  It's a cross between a Yorkshire pudding and an omelet made with a bit of flour -- it's not like the usual cakey pancakes, but instead rather dense and eggy.  Laura said, "It looks really weird, but it tastes great!"

Regardless of its origin, it's very tasty and easy to prepare.  This version was printed in the Orange County Register a while back, and touted as a lookalike for the German Pancakes served at the Original Pancake House -- we've made them a number of times since, and it's rapidly becoming a family favorite.  I would never have thought of mixing maple syrup and lemon wedges, but it's absolutely delicious.

It swells up rather alarmingly in the oven, then when you take it out it falls faster than you can say "ausgezeichnet" -- faster than I can say it, at any rate.  Quite fun.

German Pancakes

3 large eggs
1/3 cup whole milk
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon butter, melted
powdered sugar, for garnish
maple syrup and lemon wedges, if desired

Preheat oven to 475° F.

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with an electric mixer, or whisk by hand.  Mix in the milk, cream, sugar, salt, and vanilla, until the sugar is dissolved.  Sift in the flour and mix until smooth.  Let the batter stand about 10 minutes.

Coat the bottom of a 9- or 10-inch oven safe skillet with the melted butter.  Pour the batter into this pan, and bake 15 minutes or until golden brown on top and dark around the edges.  The pancake will rise dramatically during baking.

Remove the pan from the oven and let cool about 1 minute; it will collapse as it cools.  Loosen the edges of the pancake with a spatula, then slide it from the pan onto a plate.  Dust with powdered sugar. 

Serve promptly, with maple syrup and lemon wedges.

Makes 2 to 4 servings.  Preparation time, 15 minutes; total time, 30 minutes.

Coconut Sherbet Sundae

I first tasted this little treat at Trader Joe's, where they were giving them away -- just giving them away! -- in little paper cups from the samples bar at the end of one aisle.  I don't usually care for coconut, myself, but this one had me at hello, to coin a phrase.  Mmm!

A pint of sherbet makes just enough to serve four people, as a summery after-dinner treat.  I loved it with roasted and salted slivered almonds -- the salty nuts contrast wonderfully with the sweet coconut and chocolate -- but of course you can use unsalted if you like.

And it's so easy, the kids can put it together themselves!

Coconut Sherbet Sundae

1 pint coconut sherbet
chocolate syrup, such as Trader Joe's "Midnight Moo"
slivered or sliced almonds

Divide the sherbet between 4 serving bowls or cups.  Drizzle chocolate syrup over the sherbet, and top with the almonds.

Makes 4 servings.  Active work time, about 2 minutes.

Melody Glasses

Now that summer vacation is here, I asked Laura to look through her Brownie book and choose a few Try-Its (the Brownie version of merit badges) to do this summer.  I wanted to let her decide which ones to work on at home (instead of me picking ones I thought she could handle and would be interested in, as we've done before), but I did designate this as "The Summer of the 'Point-Down' Try-Its"! -- the various Try-Its are supposed to fit together on a girl's vest or sash in a solid line, as in the examples here, but since it turns out that at least two-thirds of the Try-Its are point-up, Laura has earned many more of those, leaving a number of empty triangles on her vest -- even though I did turn a rather ambiguous one on its side!

We all three snuggled on my bed the other night and debated the point-down choices, but Laura's eyes had lit up so many times when she saw the illustration of "melody glasses" in the "Making Music" Try-It, that I said, "Well, let's do it right now!"

The hard part was finding enough glasses -- we had to use a variety of sizes and shapes, which made tuning quite a challenge!

You fill glasses with various levels of water -- the more water in the glass, the lower the tone produced -- and then tap the glasses gently in turn to play simple songs.  It's probably easiest to have identical glasses -- although, curiously, I did find that one of ours, despite being apparently exactly the same as the others, always rang an F no matter how much water was in it.  You need only six glasses to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," but of course a full eight-tone scale gives you more scope.  Have a towel handy, as re-tuning can make for a wet countertop!

(There is a typo in the 2000 edition of the Brownie Try-Its book on this page -- "so high" should be 3 and 2, not 2 and 1, and the same with "the sky.")

I highly recommend using a wooden spoon, not a metal one, by the way, judging by how enthusiastically the girls played "Twinkle, Twinkle"!

Mrs. Hall's Orange-Walnut Pie

It's the first week of our summer membership in a local orange farmers' co-op -- we got 2 five-pound bags of Valencias, sweet-tangy and deliciously juicy!  That's rather a lot of oranges to eat out of hand in a week, and it seems a shame to just juice them all, and so I am gathering up recipes for cooking with oranges as well.

This recipe, which was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times some ten years ago, was the third-prize winner for Mrs. C.C. Hall of Hollywood in a 1908 Times recipe contest.  Walnuts had been a Southern California crop since the 1870s, and of course citrus had been here even before that.  (An interesting Sunset Magazine article on the orange industry -- with recipes! -- can be found here.) 

It's nice to think of walnuts and oranges being "exotic," as they must have been to newcomers to California in the 1900s -- "and most residents were newcomers in 1908," notes The Times.  Walnuts and orange are a delicious combination, and I also love the contrast between the chewy-crunchy filling and the airy meringue.

I increased the ingredients of this pie by a half, as Mrs. Hall must have had a rather small pie plate -- it made a thin pie, I must admit -- or just as likely she knew that meringue is best on the day it's made, so her version made enough pie for her family's dessert that evening with nothing left.  You can certainly leave off the meringue, and make something resembling a pecan pie.  Today I used Martha Stewart's pâte sucrée (the double-crust version in the book), and so I had two extra egg whites, and added them to the meringue -- it makes a rather more enthusiastic pie meringue than I usually do, but it's for a birthday dinner, so that's all right!

Orange-Walnut Pie

3 eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, divided use
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 large orange
1 1/2 cups walnuts, minced or broken into pieces
1 pie crust, unbaked

Preheat the oven to 375° F.

Grate the zest from the orange, and squeeze the juice.

Cream the egg yolks and 3/4 cup sugar in a small saucepan by whisking until the mixture is smooth and pale yellow in color.  Add the lemon juice, orange juice, and zest, and whisk until smooth.  Add the walnuts and cook over medium heat until the mixture thickens, about 10 minutes.

Pour the walnut mixture into the prepared pie crust.  Bake for about 30 minutes.  Remove the pie from the oven temporarily.

Beat the egg whites until stiff, adding 2 tablespoons of sugar near the end.  Spread the egg whites over the walnut filling, and return the pie to the oven until the meringue browns, about 8 minutes.

Makes 1 pie.  Active work time, about 20 minutes; total preparation time, 1 hour.

Bookworms in the Pantry

Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry is doing a weekly feature called "Bookworms in the Pantry", highlighting books about food -- and of course books and food are some of our favorite things chez Mommy Cooks!  We were delighted to submit five of our top choices, all great for reading aloud --

In How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman, the intrepid narrator, when faced with a closed market and no possibility of buying the ingredients for apple pie, sets out on a whirlwind world tour to collect those ingredients herself.  First stop, Italy, to gather semolina wheat!  Whimsical and lively illustrations and matter-of-fact text combine for a gentle lesson in geography and determination -- and of course, how to make an apple pie.

We were surprised but not very much that so many "foody" books for kids have to do with fussy eaters.  Mary Ann Hoberman's and Marla Frazee's The Seven Silly Eaters has not one but seven fussy eaters, the children of an increasingly frazzled but always loving mother who does her best to accommodate seven, count 'em, seven, different food quirks.  The children's good intentions on their mother's birthday lead to an unexpected but happy solution for all.  Hoberman's clever rhymes (which remind me of Garrison Keillor's songs) and Frazee's energetic and amazingly detailed illustrations are a perfect match.

In I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child, the irrepressible Lola, who has a very long list of things she will not eat, is persuaded by her brother Charlie to try something "new".  Charlie's inventive solution to the problem of Lola's pickiness has become a standard at our table, even though Moon Squirters are actually one of our girls' favorite things.

In Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco, a little girl who is terrified of thunderstorms is distracted from her fears by her grandmother, as they gather the ingredients -- milk from mean old Kick Cow, eggs from Nelly Peck Hen, flour from the dark and scary dry shed -- for a cake that can only be made before the thunderstorm strikes.  Atmospheric illustrations are complemented by Grandma's gentle words and comforting presence.

Probably the most famous picky eater in children's literature is the narrator of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, who refuses to try Sam-I-Am's green eggs and ham, despite Sam's ever-more-absurd temptations -- "will you try them with a fox? will you try them in a box?"  Eventually, of course, the narrator relents and discovers that something new might not be so bad after all.

Bon appétit!

Fruit Shakes

"Mom, can we have another snack?"

So we made the Fruity Morning Shakes from our "Cookbook of the Month" this afternoon, when hunger momentarily drove the girls out of their little pool we'd set up in honor of the suddenly-summery weather.

This is one of the starred recipes in The Kid's Cookbook, those noted as being "super-easy!", and it sure is -- quick, too.  We had some strawberries in the freezer (about 2 cups' worth), so we used those instead of fresh fruit -- I thawed the fruit only partially, so the shakes were extra-cold. 

Laura was even brave enough to run the blender herself!

Fruity Morning Shakes

8 oz. vanilla yogurt
2 teaspoons sugar
6 strawberries OR 1 small ripe peach OR 1 cup blueberries

Wash the fruit.  Hull the strawberries, if using, or remove the peach pit and cut the fruit into small chunks.

Put the yogurt and sugar into the blender, and add the fruit. 
Cover, and blend until smooth.

Serve over ice, if you like, or as it is.

Makes 1 or 2 servings (about 16 oz.).  Total preparation time, less than 5 minutes.

Recipe adapted from The Kid's Cookbook by Abigail Johnson Dodge (Oxmoor House, c2000).

Nutty Jumbles

Julia and I make the Nutty Jumbles from our April "Cookbook of the Month", The Kid's Cookbook, this afternoon.  These are a very simple snack to make, with a hint of brown sugar but not too sweet -- excellent with a glass of milk.  They firm up a bit as they cool, but are nicely chewy.

The foil is probably a good idea, as the freshly-baked jumbles are quite sticky, even with the butter and non-stick baking sheets.  You don't need to scrape up all of the egg white mixture to add to the mounds on the baking sheet, as the extra bits will just spread out from underneath as the sugar melts, instead of helping to hold everything together.

Obviously, different nuts can be substituted!  I was thinking cashews, myself --

Nutty Jumbles

1 tablespoon soft butter, for greasing the baking sheets
2 egg whites
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a pinch of salt
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup pecan pieces
1 cup walnut pieces

Preheat the oven to 350° F.  Line 2 baking sheets with foil, and lightly grease the foil with the butter.

In a mixing bowl, combine the egg whites, brown sugar, vanilla, and salt, and beat lightly with a fork until frothy and smooth.  Add the nuts, and mix until the nuts are thoroughly coated with the egg mixture.

Drop heaping tablespoonsful of the nut mixture onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 2 inches apart.

Flatten the mounds slightly, and bake about 15 minutes, or until the nuts are browned.  Set the baking sheets on a rack to cool completely.  Carefully peel the cooled jumbles from the foil.

Store in an airtight container at room temperature, for up to 1 week.

Makes 24 jumbles.  Preparation time, 10 minutes; total time, 25 minutes.

Recipe adapted from The Kid's Cookbook by Abigail Johnson Dodge (Oxmoor House, c2000).