Apple date turnovers

I´ve had these pretty little granny smith apples looking at me for a few days now, calling my name. So I made two dozen beautiful apple turnovers to freeze and to send to my dear friend. I´ll tell you how I made these fancy treats. First I finely chopped about 10 dates and peeled, cored, and sliced four granny smith apples sprinkled with lemon juice. In a large skillet, I melted 3 tbsp butter, 1/2 c. sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, and a pinch of salt, then added my fruit. I let the bottom caramelize and turned over my fruit to caramelize some more, then added water to simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring every now and then. My fruit began to cook down and looked like this....







I had set out some frozen puff pastry to defrost and laid it out with some flour to be rolled flat. I still have not found a rolling pin that I like. So, I use a bottle filled with ice cold water. For a cookie cutter I use a wide mouth glass or bowl.
I rolled out the dough to make it thinner with my ¨rolling pin¨ and began cutting my shapes.
Next came filling the circles, brushed with beaten egg and sealing them up. I crimped the edges with a fork and brushed the tops with more egg wash. I didn´t bake these because they will be frozen and are ready to place in the oven whenever. This recipe made two dozen pastries.

rghaif

My cooking challenge this week was to make something called rghaif (the first bunch of syllables is pronounced like a cross between a French R and the sound a cat makes when they ¨mgrrrrow¨). It´s a very common treat that people eat for breakfast or with afteroon tea, made with very simple ingredients, only water, salt, flour, semolina, butter, and oil. They are flat, square crepes (but can be round in different recipes), although crepes does not describe them well, because there are many thin layers folded over each other with semolina and butter where the air gets trapped while cooking. This adds a very unique, chewy, slightly crispy on the outside texture. They are truly amazing spreaded with Laughing Cow cheese and honey with a hot cup of tea.
There´s only one place in town that sells them. A lady makes about 20 of them in her home each morning and then takes them to the butcher shop to sell. Each one sells for 1,80 and a normal serving for one person would be two to three. Each time I would buy them, I´d spend about 10 euros on something that would cost me 50 cents or less to make at home. I wanted to make these special treats so badly because I figure I can do whatever I want, right?

I saw so many recipes online for them because they are a very popular treat and foreigners who have tried them quickly become addicted to their exquisite texture. To make a long story short, I tried several recipes and ended up failing three times before I got it right. The secret to these beautiful treats is the kneading, which I always wanted-but-never-knew-how to do. The dough needs to be sticky and worked without little flour until it is very elastic-y and not webby. Here to the left is what my dough looked like on one of my failed attempts. I stopped kneading here, thinking I was done because it was ¨elastic-y¨ but it still was webby and not smooth and satiny. They turned out ok but weren´t chewy, but rather crispy and the thin layers tasted like buttered baked filo dough, it was tasty, but not rghaif. On the right, is what the dough should look like. See how its texture is like one solid mass and isn´t grainy or webby? The fourth time was the charm and they turned out very nicely.

When the dough is ready, it should be kneaded into a ball and coated with oil so that you can squeeze off smaller dough balls, cat-head style. Then the dough should be covered and left to rest for 20 minutes. After twenty minutes, the fun part comes in.... spreading the dough with lots of melted butter and semolina and forming the rghaif. The super-elastic dough is thinly stretched into a large circle, sprinkled with semolina, and folded into a square the way you fold a towel.

Once all your dough balls have been spread and shaped into squares, let them rest an additional 30 minutes. They should be sprinkled with semolina to give them a nice texture, kind of like how corn meal is used on the bottom of pizza dough. After 30 minutes are up, heat a skillet, but if you have one, a flat cast iron griddle is ideal. Don´t oil your cooking surface because the rghaif are already oiled. Now that you have your squares, you will be spreading them out (without flattening). You want to cook them on medium high heat quickly. They should be slightly browned, but still flexible and definitely not hard.

The rghaif was a success and everyone was impressed.

banana bread to white trash

After a lovely weekend, it´s Monday again and so I´m whippin´up some new fixins. I´ve got four beeeeyoutiful ripe bananas and I am itching to make some banana nut bread with my California walnuts I got at the specialty store. I don´t know of any good recipes out there, nor do I trust any of them, cause I always used the River Road version from the Junior League. I was hoping to find a recipe posted on the internet from the cookbook which brought me to the Amazon webpage. When you look at a book online they have suggestions for what other readers bought and I saw titles like Talk about Good, and then I saw something else that caught my eye-White Trash Cookin´. Yes it was a real book. I got to look inside and saw some of the recipe for down home favorites like Fried Squirrel, Uncle Willie´s Swamp Stew, Butt´s Alligator Tail, Betty Sue´s Fried Okra, Betty Sue´s Sister in Law´s Fried Eggplant, and Mrs. Arnold´s Saturday Night Shrimps. No lie. I got a big kick out of this.

.....Which led me to another book..... ¨Ruby Ann´s Down Home Trailer Park Cookbook¨ I thought I was going to have an accident reading this it was so funny. She says, ¨Back home in Arkansas we don´t have shrimp like that, so I tell you what I do- I shape up some spam like shrimps and put a little fish oil on that- you talk about GOOOOD!¨ CLICK HERE!!! She´s a trailer park woman, a mobile home princess. She has a webpage. Y´all should check it out. http://www.myspace.com/rubyannboxcar

I finally got my banana bread recipe and here´s how it turned out. I made two batches.

Vegetables, Corning, Cakes

It´s Saturday, which means tomorrow I´ll be getting up early to go to the mercadillo or market. I always look forward to these trips because I love the sights and sounds and hustle and bustle of the market. I almost always find something interesting and unique that isn´t sold in stores. Last week I found some great vegetables and fruits and tomorrow I will be looking for more.
Here´s a picture of the pumpkin I bought last week. I plan on making pumpkin bread, pumpkin soufflé, and pumpkin pie with it.

I researched in season crops that are grown in Spain and commonly found and I saw that something called berza is in season. I translated berza and they´re collard greens! Yay!
So tomorrow I´ll know what to ask for. I´m also looking for something called achicoria, which grows almost like a weed here. We know it as chicory and I plan on roasting to roots to grind for a New Orleans style cafe au lait and use the greens for a salad- they are basically endives. I also want to find more acelgas or swiss chard because I absolutely loved that and ate them all up from last weeks trip. I´ll also be bringing back some sweet potatoes for roasting. I eat them plain- no sugar or butter because the variety here is so flavorful and completely smooth.
For some reason, vegetables here are so much richer tasting. I think it is because they have less travel between the field and the consumer (in the states we get most produce from California or the midwest) and because of this, crops are harvested when they are more mature and ready to be picked.
Also, in the US lots of fertilizers are used and foods are genetically modified to boost growth and shorten time between seeding and maturity. Alot of the agricultural practices are different and follow traditional methods that farmers have used for generations and so the vegetables are really products of the earth. I absolutely love vegetables now and often eat vegetarian now for health reasons. I think I´ve always had kind of a high susceptibility to getting infections and I really want to boost my immune system this winter by eating lots of leafy greens and other natural healthy things. I get kinda excited about it when I think about how well I´m taking care of myself!
I had tonsilitis in September and I really don´t want to get sick, so I´m going to be ¨proactive instead of reactive¨ (that´s teacher speak right there).
Let´s move on to the next order of business. So, the reason I started talking about vegetables was to talk about corned beef. I had bought boucoup cabbage and Irish potatoes because I had wanted to make corned beef. So I went to my butcher and asked for a pound of brisket- it´s callled falda, which means skirt (I wonder if it´s the same as skirt steak). I was looking around at all the stuff, they had skinned and cleaned rabbits with the heads still on them in the butcher shop, ew, and when I got home I realized the butcher had done me a favor and cut up my brisket into chunks. Bless his heart. I didn´t ask him this time, but I usually ask him to cut my beef in chunks for stews and soups and such and I guess he just wanted to be nice- they´re good people, it´s a family business.... ok anyway, back to the story.
So I got online looking for corned beef recipes thinking that I was going to make it for the next day´s meal. Well, duh, corned is like cured, which I didn´t realize. So I pulled up Alton Brown´s video on youtube for how to make corned beef and found out it takes 10 days of curing in a pickling mixture before you cook it. Well, I pulled together all kinds of spices to make a very aromatic brine and sealed my meat in it. This is how it looked this morning. Only nine more days to go till cabbage and potato time.

It looks very unappetizing with the fat on there, but this dish never was a very pretty one on the outside, but it sure is tasty.

On a sweeter note, I made another chocolate ganache cake and some cupcakes. The cake is to take to a friend tomorrow, and the cupcakes are staying here.

Bstela- My new favorite food ever

I had read about Bstela (also spelled bstella, pastilla, bastilla, ¨tomato, tomahto?¨) in guidebooks for tourists while in the US before arriving to Spain for the first time. What I read about this Moroccan dish did not impress me in the least, for traditionally it was- I guess in some places still is- made with pidgeon meat. And that kinda grossed me out. I started thinking about Mary Poppins and tuppence to ¨feed the birds¨, except now it´s ¨eat the birds¨.
So now you are officially turned off by the prospect of this national dish. So was I, until I found out that it is almost always made with chicken or cornish hens (sigh of relief).
Bstela is made up of several layers, the first being deboned chicken that was sauteed in a mix of parsely, onion, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, s/p, then an egg mixture which is just beaten eggs incoporated in the sauce from the chicken, and the top layer is made of toasted or fried almonds that have been chopped with cinnamon, orange blossom water, and confectioner´s sugar. The fillings are layered between sheets of thin pastry called warka, but most people who can´t find it use fillo dough. The pastry layers are brushed with butter and wrapped up into a nice shape, then placed in the oven till golden brown. The final step is decorating the bstela with powdered sugar and cinnamon in a pretty, traditional design.
I never had the ocasion to try this dish in any of the Moroccan restaraunts in Granada, I guess I was busy. And even when my friend Rachel and I went for a two day trip across the pond to Morocco, we didn´t try it either. It is a dish ¨for royalty¨ reserved for special celebrations, weddings, feasts, and eids (religious holidays). However, I guess you can make it whenever you like, but it requires a good deal of patience and time, as well as the right ingredients and an open mind. Time passed and here I am two and a half years later, I still haven´t tried it. But a few weeks ago, a very sweet friend brought me a very sweet treat- bstela and several types of traditional sweets!
I was so excited to finally try this treat I had heard so much about and I was very pleasantly surprised. I was expecting something weird by the combination of chicken with with powdered sugar and cinnamon, but it really has a unique and amazing flavor and range of textures. I was officially a fan.
Bstela (left) and Moroccan cookies (right)


I became very interested all over again and began looking up recipes for Moroccan cuisine on the internet and came across a Moroccan girl´s youtube channel. She lives in the US and her video recipes are in English, she is adorable and her way of explaining how she cooks things is very easy to understand. Here is the link to her video recipe for bstela. This is a very good recipe. I have made several of her recipes and they all turned out very well.
Well, today, I got up the gumption to make bstela myself. So I gussied myself up in my polka dot apron, rolled up my sleeves, and got cookin´. It took me a while to do, about two hours of prep and cook time altogether. Everything went well and smooth, except I burned the first batch of almonds cause I left the room and forgot- ooops! I didn´t find it difficult to do, just time consuming. But it was completely worth it. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes to try new things- trust me, it´s not weird tasting at all- I come from a place where people eat frog legs, mudbugs, and raw oysters- this is a piece of cake, literally.
You may even want to try it with some of your left over turkey after Thanksgiving, although you probably won´t get quite as rich of a stock- maybe add in chicken stock instead of water. All I know is, you definitely need to try it. Mine turned out to be out of this world, and even better than my Moroccan friend´s version (don´t tell her I said that!)

I managed to hold myself back and snapped a quick photo before devouring my delicious masterpiece. It didn´t look like this for very long- we loved it. Here it is......

Marshmallows

So... I like marshmallows and was missing a fluffiness in my life. So about a month ago, I went hunting in the big stores that carry ingredients and foods from other countries. We have an amazing superstore called Carrefour, it´s French, and it´s about the size of a Sam´s store and has everything from oil changes, complete grocery store, toy store, hardware, electronics, appliances, and clothing/shoes for everyone. It´s not that it´s terribly far from where I live, but I have to catch two separate buses to make my way over there. About an 1/8 of a mile before you get to Carrefour, there is a Lidl, which I think is German. Amazingly enough I found marshmallows in both places (and pretzels too). However, I prefer unflavored or white standard marshmallows. What other kind could there be, you might ask. Well, they come in all kinds of colors like yelow and pink and white and orange and purple all in one marshmallow, and they usually carry a different flavor, like strawberry. And they are made up of spirals or quadruple helixes. Here´s a blog with a pretty picture of what people here like to do with candies, gummies, and marshmallows. http://recetasymascosas.blogspot.com/2008/04/tarta-de-nubes-y-de-pastillas-de-goma.html

I don´t know. I´m debating whether or not I like the marshmallows here. I do like the texture.

So, What I´m planning on doing is making homemade marshmallows from scratch. I´ve heard that they are way better. Also, you can control what you eat when you make it, so you don´t have do consume weird dyes, flavors, or additives. But before I get into heavy duty candy making, I want to try out a recipe for marshmallow creme. I´ve found two different recipes for it and hope it works with a simple syrup, since I don´t have access to corn syrup. I´ll post the results on how it turns out.

foiled

So I guess I´m a little disillusioned with my oven. As I was sitting there yesterday watching my cupcakes barely rise I thought about asking, ¨Is it you, or is it me?¨ Unfortunately my oven and I can´t find common ground to ¨work things out¨ like normal couples, because it´s a piece of crap.
I´m staying positive. At least I know it ¨isn´t me¨ and that I´m not a horrible baker. I feel like I´ve been deceived... what I thought was a good oven, just for more compact living spaces, actually is (I think) a... oh it hurts too much to say it- a toaster oven. sigh. Where did I ever go wrong? I read all the packaging info and was certain it couldn´t be true.
Unfortunately, I can´t refund it or exchange it. So I´m just going to put my dances of sugar plums and baking dreams on hold till I can get something better. Probably I´ll just wait till I´m in a different house, cause really, mine would make a Japanese kitchen seem like Brian McKenzie´s parent´s foyer.
No, it´s not all bad. It makes great sweet potatoes, and the toast function works well, I have made some fantastic pizzas with homemade yeast dough. Maybe I just haven´t learned how to bake cakes in it yet. My chocolate chip cookies turned out way too cripsy and hard which I attributed to only white sugar, this is true, you need brown sugar too make them chewy. And my white cupcakes were kinda hard and crunchy, too. I tried to blame that on something, I don´t remember. And then today, my chocolate sheet cake came out cracked and dry on the top. However, the ganache icing I made is TDF, thanks in part that I DIDNT have to use the confounded ¨oven¨ to make it!
I don´t know why I am complaining and going on about this, it must be PMS, cause I have been like the spitting image Little Miss Sunshine, Strawberry Shortcake, Pollyanna, and Shirley Temple all rolled into one lately.
Plus, I had the best pizza with homemade yeast dough, homemade marinara for sauce, tasty grilled chicken breast, portobello mushrooms and buffalo mozzarella. I also made an appetizer pizza with some spinach and artichoke dip I had left over, but it was really almost too rich. ¨In fin¨, I´m ready to forget about the kitchen (the door is closed shut), take my shower and relax.

i want schnitzel

We reached 28 degrees C here in Granada, which is almost 83 degrees F.
I have worked myself up into a raging hunger after a long day of shopping all over town, and as I wait for my chicken breasts to unthaw, I think my stomach is eating itself. I´m going to make schnitzel tonight or chicken parmesan, I can´t decide. All I know is I´m excited cause I just got more goodies to stock my cupboards. It´s like everything is getting cheaper and cheaper and I´m trying to take advantage of dried goods like beans, grains, flours and meals, nuts and dried fruits, chocolates and cocoa powder, seasonings. I´ve especially been looking for tasty fillings for cookies, cakes, and other treats which I plan on making in my oven. I´m going to make almond paste so I can make Italian and Moroccan cookies, which have many similarities.
Special finds today included marshmallows, portobello mushrooms, more cheeses, taco shells, fresh ginger, silicone muffin molds, brown sugar, and last but not least, hot pink dishwashing gloves!

good deals

Some new and exciting updates. I got a haircut and now have about 5 or 6 inches shorter. I like it. I also went to LiDl and found almost everything I needed and some more. Now I have some baking sheets, a loaf pan, a cooking thermometer (very hard to track down here), and a wonderful heat proof 1 liter glass measuring cup with metric units! I couldn´t find a cake pan or a cooling rack though....
I never realized Lidl had such a variety of products, they have a lot of German things, which is fantastic cause Germans use stuff I was raised on (oat meal, etc.) The most exciting of the German stuff I found was some really cheap baking powder, ¨vanilla sugar¨ (since there is no vanilla extract here, this helped), and I bought some wonderful German Christmas chocolates, and Stollen bread. I´m still giddy over my unusual finds. I happened to even stumble upon cheddar cheese in their dairy department (wooohooo!) although it´s authentic, which means it´s made the way they make it traditionally in England...it´s very gourmet tasting, not like the Kraft flavor I´m accustomed to, but still good. I also found some great deals on French cheeses like Brie and Camembert. I love feeling like I have superfancy gourmet ingredients in my fridge that normally I wouldn´t be able to afford in the states.
With my bakeware I made chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin pie.
I went to the Sunday market today and stocked up big time on fresh produce, it´s where I find the best deals and I like to support local growers. I found starfruit and merlitons which are called chayote here, but they were white and warty and were 1€ a piece, not such a good deal. Here´s what I picked up, 1 kilo of avocados, white grapes, oranges, plums, brocoli, guayava, tomatoes, 2 kilos of swiss chard, sweet potatoes, bananas, a bunch of parsely, a head of purple cabbage, a head of green cabbage, coliflower, a huge pumpkin. I was really excited to find such great deals- I only paid €16 for everything. I guess that´s the upside of the recession.
My house looks like a vegetable stand, so next on my list is doing a major cleaning and organizing of my fridge and pantry and storing it all cleaned and prepped for cooking. I´m excited. It´s relaxing to me to find a place for everything. Sounds like a project!
Upcoming project= washing and vacuum sealing summer wardrobe for storage until next May.

Ahoy matee

You wouldn´t believe how time consuming chocolate chip making is! I´ve been working with melted chocolate and using a knife to slowly drip and dip chips onto wax paper. I´ve only got about two cups worth so far and would like to make enough to last me the whole winter. It´s definitely worth it. Anyway nobody knows what a chocolate chip is over here. My next homemade project is homemade corn syrup substitute, it is banned in Europe, but I´m going to make a recipe with cane sugar I found on line so I can make tasty treats. My roasted butternut squash turned out very successful and I toasted the seeds with salt (way better than pumpkin seeds).
On the menu for lunch was an amazing stir fry of chicken and fresh vegetables with sesame rice. I used a potato peeler to peel carrots into thin slices and then julienned them into superfine strips. The results were fantastic. I barely cooked my veggies and they had a very fresh taste.
I´m delaying my trip out to no-man´s land, or the lower end of the Zaidin, where the Carrefour and Lidl stores are, until tomorrow to buy my ovenware because tomorrow they start selling Christmas items at Lidl and I plan on buying a pannetone and some German Stollen bread as well as holiday cookie cutters. I am so excited I can finally begin enjoying baking now that I have my oven at last!!! I found the joyofbaking.com website which will be very helpful for making gingerbread men and other such delights.
There is nothing like cold weather to set the mood for a lovely season of baking.

Cooking

I wanted to make a blog to record all the interesting things I have been making in my kitchen, some of them old favorites, and others first time feats. In the last week, I´ve made homemade yogurt, labenah (yogurt cheese), farmer´s cheese, neufchatel, mysost (Norwegian whey cheese), homemade evaporated milk (it´s hard to find and expensive here!). I loved making my cheeses and eating them with something called harcha that I made- it´s like cornbread, only made with semolina. I even made tiropitas with a mix my homemade cheeses and feta (yes, I finally found filo, after months of searching). Which brings me to my next question- how did I make tiropitas without an oven? Well, I finally got one and I love it. I´m going to roast a halved butternut squash today in it to use in a ¨pumpkin-pie¨. Tomorrow I´m going out to buy pie plates, a roaster, cake pan, etc. for my oven. I better go. I forgot I have some chocolate on the stove that I´ve melted to make homemade chocolate chips. Sounds like chocolate chip cookies are comin´to town!