I have no heating in my apartment.  But you live in the south of Spain!  you may exclaim.  You don’t need it!  So, so wrong.  The cold here isn’t that bad if you are outside.  No snow, no hail, temperate cold. But  it’s a humid kind of cold that soaks inexorably through your coat, and more pertinently, into the stone walls of your apartment building.  Add in single paned windows full of chinks and you’ve a recipe for living in a damp fridge.  I now pick my restaurants and bars based on the quality of their heating systems and insulation instead of the quality of the food and drink. Right now it’s 11 AM, a beautiful day outside, high fifties Fahrenheit.  My nail beds are blue.  No joke.  Well, maybe it’s more purple than blue.  But anyways.  We’ve got a space heater that we share around, but with the price of utilities here is straight up hairy and those things are electricity hogs.  So now you know why I sleep in Andalucía under flannel sheets, a down comforter, and then a folded quilt on top of that.  With my hot water bottle kitty.  And my face slowly freezes at night.

But why all this bitching about the poor state of my core body temperature on a food blog?  Well, I have found a cheaper solution to central heating.  Mulled wine.  It gives you a false feeling of warmth from the alcohol dilating your blood vessels and is actually warm from you know…boiling it on the stove.  Just drink it quick before the apartment leeches all of its heat away!

Mulled Wine

2 c red wine

1 c orange juice

1 or 2 Tbsp packed brown sugar, depending on your tastes and how dry your red wine is

1 cinnamon stick

4 cloves

2 allspice berries (if you have them)

Lemon peel – no white stuff! Bitter is bad in this particular case.

A quick plug for one great thing about living in the south of Spain after moaning about the cold: oranges.  I picked these oranges off of a tree out in the countryside, in December.  They are the best oranges I’ve ever eaten.  The idea of freshly squeezed orange juice in December seems…strange.  But it’s the best thing that could happen to all of us cold-prone weaklings.  So in my mulled wine, it’s fresh squeezed wonder juice.

Toss everything into a pot.

Bring to a boil.  Turn it down immediately after to low and let it barely simmer for twenty minutes.  Strain into mugs.  Drink.  Sigh with pleasure because for once, you feel warm.

One and a half kilos of butter combined with only one lonely and hardworking cookie sheet can produce a shocking amount of cookies with enough time and patience.  And arm strength, since I still don’t have a stand mixer here in Spain – and probably never will since those cost upwards of 500 euros each.  I.e. most of my monthly salary.  We ended up with about 450 cookies: two batches of spritz, one batch of gingerbread, two batches of chocolate chip, two batches of oatmeal raisin (right off the top of the Quaker Oats lid, though my oats were bought from my miracle workers at the herbistoría), and of course, two batches of Swedish teacakes.

Swedish teacakes aka Russian teacakes aka Mexican Wedding cookies, cousin to pecan puffs (according to Dan) drive Spaniards cookie crazy.  They are the cookie that best matches the Spanish palate for sweets.  Here they are all olive oil based, sweet, and crumbly.  The flavor profile is generally honey, almond, and anise.  The teacake first the bill by being crumbly and almondriffic, but has the richness and tenderness that comes with an obscene amount of butter.

Now these aren’t just for Spanish people – my old roommate Gabrielle is absolutely crazy about these, and they are the only cookie my grandpa eats.  But they earn their multicultural stripes by their name and the fact that this obsession has crossed borders; they are the only cookie my friend Sergio will deign to eat.  I had to twist his arm into trying the first one but now whenever there is a special event he drops a leaden hint that maybe it would be a good time to whip up a batch.  when I left for the summer, there was a group insistence that I make them one more time.  They were the first thing I made when I got back to Sevilla, too.  They were the tipping point in my angling to get a ride to the beach.  Yep.  we ate teacakes on the beach in October.  Go figure.

So to honor my long personal history of cookie bribery and to honor Spain’s favorite cookie, I’ll walk you through it.  Oh, and then go check out this awesome webcomic that uses them as a delightful side plot.

Swedish Teacakes

Recipe from my mom’s battered, yellow 1970s Pillsbury cookbook

1 c butter, softened

1/2 c powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla

2 c flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 c finely chopped almonds

More powdered sugar for rolling

Quick note before we get going.  I actually like to roll my teacakes in superfine sugar.  It was a happy accident born of frustration.  I needed to make an emergency batch of consolation teacakes on a Saturday afternoon and the only store that sold powdered sugar in my neighborhood was closed.  So I decided to make it by processing regular sugar for quite awhile.  Unfortunately, our food processor is weak so I gave up halfway through, when it was at the superfine stage.  You can buy it premade, usually in the bartender’s supplies area, but it’s expensive and simple to make.  Blenders can also make it up in a jiffy.  Ok.

Preheat the oven to 325 F. Cream the butter, sugar, and vanilla. It’ll look different than other cookie bases due to the powdered sugar.  Have no fear.

Blend in flour, salt, and almonds.

Roll the dough into little balls, about one inch.  If you have a melon baller and you don’t like getting your hands dirty, that would be about right.  I’m a firm believer that the hand tool is the best tool, but hey.  To each his own.

Place the cookies an inch or two apart on a cookie sheet and bake for fifteen to twenty minutes until set, but not brown.  They shouldn’t even be golden, really.

They aren’t leavened, so they won’t really expand, just flatten out a little.  Roll them immediately in powdered sugar (or superfine if you are cool).

Set them on a rack to cool, then roll them again in your sugar of choice after the first layer melts in a little. Eat.

They are buttery and crumbly and not too sweet and delicious and I’m going to go eat one right now.

Oh!  And a spritz cameo.  Because my brother John bought me the coolest cookie cutters in Japan.  Then carried them from Tokyo to Yokohama because the earthquake killed the train.

Merry Christmas!

To me, fall conjures up a special scent of wind nibbling at the tips of your ears and nose, carrying the scent of crispy leaves (which soon become soggy).  It’s the paler, gentler sunlight that soon gives up and lets night take over.  It’s scarves and heavier coats, styling sweaters, and general coziness.  I love fall.  In terms of food, fall is less the bright yellows, greens, and reds of fresh fruit and vegetables, and more earthiness – oranges and browns in stews and casseroles.  Thick cakes and cookies nudge away delicate pastries and citrus fillings.  Coffee loses its ice.  You know where I’m going.  You just looked at the picture.  I’m talking pumpkin spice lattes and banana bread.

Having lived in Seattle for several years, I got used to judging the commercial seasons by the seasonal flavors at Starbucks.  I don’t usually drink them, but as it is with most things in life, the moment that something is taken away, the sharp desire stabs you right in the homesickness center of your heart. Probably the left ventricle area.  So there was only one thing to be done.  Make my own.  Because yes.  I tweaked it to my own tastes, so go ahead and continue tweaking yourself. Which sounds wrong, somehow. Shush and go make coffee.

Pumpkin Spice Latte

Recipe adapted from sweethappylife.com. Makes two servings.

2 Tbsp pumpkin puree

1 1/4 c milk

1/2 Tbsp brown sugar

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/8 tsp nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground cloves

3/4 tsp vanilla

2 c coffee, or your normal espresso intake for a small/tall coffee

Sugar and whipped cream optional – I didn’t use either.

Brew your coffee.

I.e. Brew the coffee you brought as a present for your roommate from Seattle.

In a saucepan, whisk together the pumpkin, spices, sugar, and vanilla.

Cook for a minute or two, until the scent of the spices floats up to kiss your face.  Add milk.

Cook over low heat, whisking, until milk is warm and beginning to froth. Remove from heat.  Add coffee to sauce pan, pour out into mugs.  If need be, add more sugar, but please taste beforehand!  Garnish as your little heart desires.

Now for the pastry part of our experience.  My roommate loves bananas, but he always seems to forget that last, sad banana.  So I save them in the freezer and after a few weeks of bananabandon, I have what I need to make banana bread, or pan de plátano.  This pleases me because it is alliterative in two languages.

Freezer bananas are not pretty. And please let them thaw. Peeling frozen bananas is impossible and makes your fingers burn sooo cold.

Banana Bread

Adapted from the Food Network

1 c light brown sugar

1 stick butter, softened

2 large eggs

3 ripe bananas (and I mean overripe.  Otherwise, just eat them!)

1 Tbsp milk

1 tsp cinnamon

2 c flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 325 F.  Grease a 9x5x3 loaf pan, 8×8 casserole dish, or an 8 in cake pan.

Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating the in entirely.

Ok, so I don't always follow my own advice.

In a separate bowl, mix all dry ingredients. Mash the bananas into the sugar mixture along with the milk.  Stir until all is incorporated.  Add the dry ingredients and only mix until the flour is fully incorporated.  We don’t want to overactivate the gluten – this is cake, not bread.  Pour your batter into your pans and bake for an hour – but actually until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Cool completely before slicing, if you can wait that long. Now your house smells like love.

Hand out banana bread to everyone like a madman and make new friends.

I talked last year about some of the challenges that I’ve run into trying to put together a traditional Thanksgiving meal here in Spain, especially in trying to find the ingredients.  This year the stickler was the pecan pie – no one has ever even heard of pecans here so in a fit of frustrated determination to make the damn pie no matter how I had to change the recipe (this is a recurring theme with me here in Spain) so I mixed walnuts and almonds.  Then I couldn’t find corn syrup so I mixed rice syrup with molasses and called it good.  It all turned out well, so who cares?

This year we were 17 people, all told, and I prepped it all, charging for admission, two weeks early.  It was the easiest way to wrangle it all, since it was the last free weekend I had before my Master’s and I didn’t have to push my papers aside to make room for the pie plate. Honestly it’s nice knowing that I can successfully cook alone for 17 people and have there be leftovers.  I’ve also learned I don’t really want to do it again.  I missed having my family and friends around me while the pies are baking and the chickens are sizzling.  It was a good lesson – Thanksgiving is about being together, from the first celery stalk chopped to the last plate washed. It was a beautiful meal, though, and everyone left with smiles on their faces.  Yet again it we had the miracle of everyone in the gang actually under one roof – which has only ever occurred once.  Last year, at Thanksgiving.  Three Americans, one Italian, and a whole mess of Spaniards make a great party.  So let’s talk food.

I wanted to make this a good, super traditional meal for my fellow Americans.  It was Erin’s first time away from her family for Thanksgiving, and Dan was homesick for potatoes au gratin.  So here’s the menu:

4 chickens – the turkey would have been too big to fit in the oven

Stuffing

Mashed potatoes

Gravy

Potatoes au gratin

Roasted carrots

Green bean casserole

Cranberry sauce

Faux pecan pie

Pumpkin pie

Apple pie

Fresh whipped cream

The cranberry sauce was actually cranberry jam that I paid an arm and a leg for, mixed with dried cranberries that I re-hydrated in orange juice over night, along with some cinnamon and ginger. It actually was worth the effort, and turned out a lot better than my accidental cranberry jello from last year.  The recipes I’d like to share with you guys this time are actually for the green beans and the pumpkin pie.  Again, I was going super traditional, so I wanted to have the trite green bean casserole – mushroom soup and crunchy french onion bits.  But I hate the dried envelopes of cream of mushroom soup they sell here and the fried onion bits are excruciatingly rare.  I turned to Alton Brown for help.

Alton Brown’s Green Bean Casserole  from the Food Network website

I doubled this for my dinner.

Onion topping:

2 onions, thinly sliced

1/4 c flour

2 Tbsp bread crumbs

1 tsp salt

Sauce:

2 Tbsp butter

12 oz mushrooms washed, trimmed, and cut into 1/2 in pieces

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 tsp nutmeg

2 Tbsp flour

1 c chicken broth

1 c half and half

1 lb fresh green beans, rinsed and trimmed

Preheat the oven to 475 F, i.e. all the way up.  Slice the onions very thinly.  I used a mandolin and worshipped my mother for sending it to me as I had been cooking for thirteen hours by the time I got to this stage.  Then I wept big fat onion-drama tears just in time for my roommate to get home and catch me.

Mix the onions, flour, panko, and salt in a large bowl and spread the onions on a greased baking sheet.

Bake for 30 minutes, tossing the onions at least every ten minutes to prevent burning.  This can be done at the beginning of your day and then set aside.

You need to blanch the green beans.  Alton suggests doing so while the onions are crisping up in the oven, but I completely rearranged the order.  Do it whenever you’d like.  Just bring a gallon of water to a boil, well salted, then cook the green beans for five minutes, drain, then cool with an ice bath or cold water to stop the cooking process.  Remember, they are going into the oven later.

Ok.  Soup.  I did it the week before and froze it, with no harm done.  That’s the tupperware container you see above.

This bowl got used a lot. And washed a lot. Then used again.

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat.  Throw in the mushrooms, salt, and pepper and then stir and cook until the mushrooms give in and start releasing their liquid.  Add the garlic and nutmeg and cook for another minute or two.

Sprinkle the flour over the top and stir to make a roux. Cook for a minute to get rid of the raw flour taste, then add the broth.  Simmer for a minute or two until the flour has completely dissolved, then add the half and half.  Cook until the mixture thickens, about 6-8 minutes. Or more, if you get distracted by pie preparations needing attention, like what happened to me.

When you are ready to finish your casserole, mix the green beans, the soup, and 1/4 of the onions.  Sprinkle the rest of the onions on top and bake at 400 F for 15 minutes.  Serve hot.

To continue in a traditional vein, one must have pumpkin pie.  But that whole canned pumpkin thing?  Difficult if nigh on impossible.  So I confused the hell out of my neighborhood fruit and veggie stand by buying everything that went by the name of pumpkin/squash in the store.  After all, I needed to make one pie for my Thanksgiving, one pie for someone else’s Thanksgiving on the actual day, and have some left over to make pumpkin spice lattes. That’s right.

When you process pumpkin for pumpkin pie, you have to cook it down to chase out the water, so the amount that you initially have is going to shrink.  Better to overshoot and have pumpkin on hand in the freezer than have to do the process more than once.  Trust me. Because I ended up having to do it twice.  Rosa confused the veggie puree I made her with my reduced pumpkin and dished herself up a hearty bowl, knocking out one pie’s filling.  That was a horrifying moment, three hours into my prep.  Since they had more pumpkins at the store, it ended up being funny, but I learned not to make two identical soupy things at the same time. So.  Let’s start.

Peel your pumpkins and scrape out all the seeds and membrane.  This would be a great moment to make roasted pumpkin seeds, but since I was making fifty million other things at the same time, I didn’t have the patience left over.

To make the pie you are going to need 2 cups of puree.  To get that, use at least 4 cups of cubed pumpkin flesh.  You can also opt for roasting the pumpkin, but my oven is rather temperamental and I wasn’t in the mood for babysitting.  So, cube the pumpkin and cover with water in a large pot.  Boil until tender.

When done, drain off the water and return the cooked pumpkin to the pot.  Puree with an immersion blender, hand mixer, real blender, whatever you have on hand.

Cook the pumpkin on low for several hours, stirring from time to time.  This will chase out the excess water. It should take on a rich, orange color and get thicker.  Let cool, then freeze for later or make your pie right then and there.  I measured them out into two cup sections to have them on hand for pie baking in the next few weeks.

NOW we are ready to actually, you know, make the pie.

Pumpkin Pie – from Scratch!

From Simply Recipes

2 c cooked pumpkin puree

1 12 oz can evaporated milk (Leche Ideal here in Spain)

1/2 packed dark brown sugar (or 1/2 c white sugar with 1/2 Tbsp molasses)

1/3 c white sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs and 1 extra egg yolk

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground clovers

1/4 ground cardamom

1/2 tsp lemon zest

1 pie crust

Preheat your oven to 425 F.  Roll out your pie crust, line your pie shell, trim and shape the edges.  Save the scraps if you’d like for decorations. Put the pie shell in the fridge or freezer to firm up while you prep the filling.

These and the pie shell were my Thanksgiving presents last year. How well my father knows me.

Mix the dry ingredients together (sugars, spices, lemon zest). This would be the moment where I cursed myself for rejecting the gift of a mortar and pestle because my roommate has regular snitfits about the amount of accessories in our kitchen. My cardamom and cloves had to be crushed between my fingers.  At least I smelled good.

The cardamom resisted all attempts at assimilation.

Beat the eggs, add them to bowl, then the pumpkin, then finally the evaporated milk.  European cans have a little more than 12 ozs in them, but it tastes fabulous in coffee.

Ever so carefully pour the filling into the chilled pie shell.  Pumpkin pie is the sloshiest of them all, and is ever eager to decorate your oven.

Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350 F.  Bake for 30 to 40 more minutes, rotating halfway through because almost all of us have ovens that bake unevenly.  When a knife inserted into the center comes out clean, your pie is done.

If you want to add little cutouts to your pie, the best time to do it is when you reduce the temperature on your pie.  The filling will have produced a skin, so they won’t sink, but most of your baking time is still available to crisp them up.  I used the extra egg white to put a nice gloss on them.

And that was my second expat Thanksgiving!  I hope yours was as good as mine, with fewer hiccups.  You know when you did it right when all the leftover pie fits nicely in the fridge.  And doesn’t stay there long.

I called up my friend Erin and told her my plan and she started chipping in with her own sighs. The desire of her heart? A sandwich: the Tribeca Turkey from Manhattan Bagels.  The plan coalesced: we were going to make this sandwich and failure was not an option.

The Tribeca Turkey is actually a focaccia-based sandwich, but I had bagels on the brain.  Focaccia, your day is coming.  To pull if off, first we’d need two sauces – a chipotle mayo and pesto to flavor the bagels.  I also wanted cinnamon raisin because I had a stubborn mental image in mind: breakfast on the terrace.  Cinnamon raisin was the mental flavor that slotted in correctly, to play off my almond cafe con leche. So let’s get the sauces out of the way first.

Chipotle Mayo

Manhattan Bagel uses what they term a mild mayo, but since Erin is from Southern California and also has repeated Tex Mex cravings, I decided to keep it spicier.  I poked around on the internet for awhile, but didn’t find a recipe that piqued my interest.  I had Subway’s sauce on the brain, so I knew I wanted something both spicy and sweet.  This is what I came up with.

1 cup mayonnaise

4 small chipotle peppers – from the can in adobo, not dried.  Rehydrate if dried.

1 Tbsp chopped onion

1 medium clove garlic

1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

2 tsp honey

In a food processor, grind the peppers, onion, garlic, and lemon juice.

Add honey and mayonnaise and blend again until smooth. Stick in the fridge.  I tone mine down with  more mayonnaise, but Erin is quite content.  It has a bit of a kick.  Just don’t be an idiot and lean over the pepper mixture to smell and taste for spice level.  You will get a nice coughing fit for your pains.  Add the mayo, then adjust to taste.  Isn’t that why we read food blogs? To avoid the mistakes of others? Don’t be me in this instance.

Pesto

I found a lovely blog entry here about making pesto from scratch, the way it should be. I would really encourage you all to jaunt over there and read her entry as it’s very well written.  Her pesto is made slowly and with love.  Unfortunately, I was running out of energy by this time and I did not follow her dictates very well.  By this time I had already gone to work and back, done to loads of laundry, and wandered around my neighborhood looking desperately for yeast.  More on that later down the page.  I figured that by this time, I could take a few shortcuts and still keep my food blogger dignity intact.  But I want you to know that I agonized as I brought the food processor out again.

Recipe from 101 Cookbooks

1 large bunch of fresh basil

3 medium cloves of garlic

1 small handful raw pinenuts

3/4 c freshly grated Parmesan

A few Tbsp olive oil

Desa’s food crimes in this post: I couldn’t find Parmesan at the grocery store I hit by my Metro stop.  Well, I did, but it was that dried Kraft powder.  Deal with it.  Also, I used a food processor instead of a big ole sharp knife.  My apology? I used fresh basil!

My poor basil plant got the everliving snot kicked out of by a windstorm the other day,  now that fall has started in earnest here in Sevilla.  It will be coming to live inside very soon. It has now got a lovely little yarn thread to fix its scoliosis and its own box of tinfoil to live in in my bedroom. My parsley and mint are much happier, being much shorter.

The only problem with using my own basil plant is that the definition of a ‘big bunch of basil’ gets a little tricky to measure.  So I denuded my plant, pruning out the most bruised leaves and ended up with this:

So.  Add the garlic to the food processor and give it a whir for 3 seconds.  One of the stern critiques from the other blog of food processor pesto is that it has no texture; that it becomes soupy.  My solution?  Don’t overprocess.

Add the basil in and repeat. Don’t make it into a puree, because there is more whirring of blades in its future.

Add in the pine nuts, blend.  Add the Parmesan, blend. Turn it out into a bowl and pack down lightly.

Just cover the dry mixture with olive oil, then go ahead and store in the fridge for when you need it. Try not to make it to far ahead of time, because it will start to lose its vibrancy after a couple of days.

I knew there was a reason I saved the jam jar.

Phew!  Sauces done.  Now I can go to bed -  Oh wait!  False. One more prep step that I hope you all can avoid:

This is yeast.  It took me four stores and a whole lot of chatting to strangers to get my hands on it. If you are here in Sevilla, the best place to find it is El Polvillo, a bakery chain.  My herb store guy who ended my search for sage last year gave me the tip, though he says he also has seen it in Mercadona.  El Corte Inglés does not have it.  The minor problem was that the words for yeast and for baking powder are one and the same – leavening.  By explaining in a roundabout way that I wanted leavening for bread, yah know, the biological kind, the little bugs, not the powder, I was redirected once and again.  Eventually I was given this beautiful phrase by my herb store guy:

Yep.  There’s a special word that has captured my imagination: breadification. The only problem is that I have never in my  life worked with cake yeast.  I dinked around online until I found what I suspected – if you are going to use cake yeast, you must be sure to work out your conversions.  Dry quick rise yeast is a different weight and volume.  And I had to laugh again when they said that cake yeasts come in packets of 2 or 0.6 ounces.  Mine came in a 500 gram brick.  That’s about 17 and a half ounces, by the way.  So I slowly shaved off what I needed after doing some cooking arithmetic and stuck it in the fridge to come slowly up to temperature.  Cake yeast is much more temperamental and will throw a tantrum and refuse to work if you don’t treat it just right. Avoid it.  I can’t because no one here makes bread – when you can walk 2 minutes away from your house for fresh delicious bread cheap why the heck would you?  BECAUSE THERE ARE NO BAGELS HERE.

Oh, and for the love of god, don’t get distracted and lick your fingers while working with yeast.  It tastes absolutely awful. How it smells, but stronger and more…organic.  What’s worse?  This is not the first time I’ve done that.  You could say that every damn time I accidentally end up eating yeast.  Just…don’t.

We thought the yeast looked a lot like tuna. Erin referred to it as a waiting beast, ready to spring to life at any moment. I think Yeast Beast would be a catchy cookbook title.

Pesto Bagels and Cinnamon Raisin Bagels (highly adapted and frequently ignored from this source)

Makes 8 bagels

4 1/2 – 5 c flour (I used 1 c whole wheat flour to up the gluten content because my herb store was out of straight up gluten)

1 Tbsp brown sugar

2 Tbsp white sugar

1 tsp salt

1/4 oz fast rising yeast OR .6 oz cake yeast

1 1/2 c hot water

For the pesto bagels: 1/4  c pesto for 4 bagels. Multiply accordingly.

For the cinnamon raisin bagels: 1/3 c raisins and 3 Tbsp cinnamon sugar (very cinnamony) for 4 bagels.

The brown sugar variation was lifted from one of ten bagel recipes I read, to improve flavor. It was easier than hunting for malt extract.

First, proof the yeast.  Mix the hot water with the sugars until it dissolves, then add in the yeast.  Let stand ten minutes. Get hungry.  Try out the pesto.

Mix in 2 cups of flour and beat for 2 minutes.  A mixer would be awesome, but as we have discussed frequently before, my kitchen is a little low on the handy dandy kitchen machinery.  I used the hand tool as my dough hook.  Erin took all pictures that my hands are in.

Add in enough of the flour to make a soft dough and then turn out onto the counter to knead the rest of the flour in.

Knead for 6 minutes.  The dough should be rather stiff.

For those of you who have not kneaded bread, fold the bread in half towards you and use the heel of your hand to press down, in, and forward. Give the dough a quarter turn and repeat. Ad nauseum.

We are not done kneading, but we need to break off to add in our flavors. We cut the dough in half to make two flavors.

Whenever cutting dough use a sharp nonserrated blade to cut the least amount of gluten possible

Spread the pesto on half of the dough and knead for two more minutes.

Knead in the raisins little by little and on the last few turns, spread the cinnamon sugar on top and bottom. The kneading process will give it a set of interesting swirls.

Put the dough into greased bowls and cover with a slightly damp cloth.  Let rise in a warm place for twenty minutes.  I used the boiling water in the oven trick that I learned from the gluten-free bagels. Especially since there is no central heating in my apartment and now that the crisp weather has arrived…there is no warm place in the apartment.

After twenty minutes, punch them down and cut into 8 bagels.  Form them into balls, then poke your thumb through the middle and expand the hole a little.  Set them on a greased cookie sheet, cover with a damp cloth and let rise again for another 20 minutes.  After ten minutes has passed, set a large pot of water to boil on the stove.

Ok.  Set your oven to 375 F (190 C I finally remembered this time).  For it to be a true bagel, it must be boiled.  Each bagel must be boiled for 3 or 4 minutes.  You want them to float up at the end.  For the last minute, flip the bagel so it is boiled evenly. Let them drain on a clean dish towel for a few minutes before baking.

Postbath

Bake them for 25 minutes, flipping them upside down after 15 minutes. Now for the hard part – you must let them cool for an hour before eating them otherwise the texture will be gluey and unfortunate.  Curse them for smelling so good, because by this time you are starving.

Breakfast the next day?

But first…

Tribeca Turkey Bagel

Pesto bagel

Chipotle mayo

Lettuce

Thinly sliced red onion

Turkey

Toast the bagel, add the mayo, layer accordingly.  We unfortunately only had ham because for some reason the lunchmeat case had ham-only based products.  It was…bizarre.  But what else can you expect from a store called El Jamón? But guess what?

It was still awesome. Go forth and make one yourself.

This blog is not the healthiest of food blogs.  Do not come here if you want to lose weight.  It is filled with pies.  And I like it that way.  I’m a pie enabler.  Don’t you want to be enabled?  At least the pictures in and of themselves are not fattening.  But even I eat something besides jamón and cookies every once and awhile, and so we’re going to take a pastry break to eat some veggies.

I don’t even know if you could call this a recipe.  Really, it’s just a preparation.  It’s something that my host mother whipped up every once and awhile after a long day of work.  Now that I’ve spent a few years working and studying longer hours, I appreciate the genius of dishes like this that are both tasty and easy enough that the idea of preparing them doesn’t suck the last bit of energy out of your soul.  The best part is that it has all of five ingredients, none of them particularly strange or offbeat.

María’s Artichokes

Artichoke hearts – one can.

Mushrooms – four or five large ones.

Garlic – one or two cloves depending on your taste.

Jamón – a half packet of taquitos.  This would be about three tablespoons of chopped up ham, the saltiest you can find.

Olive oil – well duh, this recipe is from Spain.  Just enough to sauté, a generous tablespoon.

When she had more time, María would actually prepare this with fresh artichokes, since the ones you can buy here are tiny, tender little things.  But that goes against the quickie spirit of this recipe.  So.  Do whatever you really want.  Moving on.

Slice the mushrooms – not too thinly.  You want them to feel meaty against your teeth, but get cooked all the way through.  Sauté them with the garlic in the olive oil.  Meanwhile, slice the artichokes in half so that they’ll actually fit in your mouth. When they are starting to take on a golden brown color, toss in the artichokes.  Add the jamón and let it just heat through.  We’re done!

Serve as a side dish for pork cutlets or by itself with rice.  María would often use leftovers the next day to make a tortilla.  This is a good plan.  Learn from the Spanish woman.  And as always, enjoy.  Both the prep and the eating.

Meet the Pepito.  It is the Serranito‘s beef montadito cousin. For those who aren’t here in Spain or don’t recall the earlier posts, montadito’s are mini sandwiches for snacking and tapearing.

Yes, I’ve done this before.  But as I said before, this is really one of my favorite sandwiches, so I’m going to go ahead and dedicate my time (and yours since you are reading this sentence) to gushing about it before. In life, I usually try to eat only things that I like to, but as I work and have frequent attacks of laziness, I often have cereal for dinner.  I am not perfect, I do not claim to be.  Heck, I just discovered that my desk that I’ve been using for six months has a pull out keyboard section by slamming my knee into it.  Twice.  It is very filthy.  Not every aspect of my life is pulled together, I just only show you guys photos of that part of my culinary life.

But the pepito (yes yes, and the serranito, I have not abandoned it, there is space in my heart for all) has so infiltrated my personal gastronomy that I will come home from teaching middle schoolers and elementary school kids, after riding the metro for an hour and a half, walking an hour, and taking the train for an hour total – Monday sucks – and there comes a whisper from my gut that says heeeeey…comfort food time.  And it is not meatloaf that has its tentacles threaded through my subconscious.  The pepito sings its multilayered siren’s air and convinces me to wash the city grime off my face and hands and get to roasting peppers, because everything will be ok afterwards, even if I do have to somehow memorize all the rivers in Europe well enough to bluff expertise the next day at 9 AM.

So we repeat. If you don’t like it, stuff it and stop reading.  Otherwise, let’s all enjoy pictures of tastiness together.

Oops, side note.  This sandwich was put together in the kitchen of my friend, Erin, because her piso’s kitchen is literally three times the size of mine.  Jealousy.

I was not kidding or exagerrating. They even have a dishwasher. So many, many roommate fights avoided.

El Pepito

Bread – baguette style

Alioli

Thinly sliced fillets of beef

Semi-cured sheep’s milk cheese

Jamón serrano (again, you may use prosciutto since it’s easier to find in the states)

Green Italian peppers (see below for photo for reference)

First, roast the peppers.  Slice them lengthwise, remove the stems and all the seeds, toss lightly in olive oil and salt.

Roast in a hot oven for about 20 minutes or until they start to blacken. I tossed in a pan of oven fries as well, to take advantage of the hot oven.

Meanwhile, slice your cheese.  This is a common cheese here in Spain, called semi curado.  It’s softer and not as sharply flavored as Manchego, and melts quite nicely.  Curado would come closer to Manchego in consistency, but it’s a cheese for eating alone – adding it to a sandwich or dish would just overpower every other flavor.

Ok another side  note.  Let’s take a closer look at the rind.  Most Spanish cheese are quite easy to spot.  Next time you are in a grocery store with a generous cheese selection, look for this pattern:

If you look, it has a hard waxy rind, usually brownish yellow in color, with a fine criss-cross pattern.  This usually denotes a cured (or semi cured!) sheep’s milk cheese from Spain. Buy it.  Tasty. Moving on.

Salt and pepper your fillets.

Give them a quick fry in a little olive oil and set aside.  Slice the bread and shmear it with alioli.  Lovingly drape a slice of jamon on top, then tile on triangles of cheese.  Place a fillet on top to melt the cheese and don’t forget the peppers.

Add french fries.  Eat.  Sigh with pleasure.

I may be a little biased, but it’s awesome. It’s easy to learn but I’m somewhat backward and am still stuck on the fourth level.  My roommate is doing much better than I am.  I’m not surprised.   But what the hell does an iPhone app half to do with a food blog?  Truthfully, if you’re asking that question you haven’t spent that much time on the internet.  We be baking us a cake.

This is Fruzz.  Or rather, one of the Fruzzes.  He’s a little fuzzballl, and the cute face of Pop the Ball.  Sergio and Fran form the development team the Walking Dev, and have been working their butts off (with help from others) to get the game out and we were all excited to see them come back to life, socially, when it finally got off the ground.  Unfortunately for us as their friends, but fortunately for the world, they are currently working on a special iPad version with more levels and higher quality graphics.  To egg them on and to keep their spirits from flagging after almost a full year of constant work, it was time for some celebrating.  Let’s cake it.

Let’s start with the cake interior.

Fruzz Cake

Yellow cake with raspberry jam filling (because it’s my favorite)

Recipe adapted from about.com

2 c cake flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 c butter, softened

1 c sugar

3 large eggs at room temperature

2 tsp vanilla

3/4 c milk

Preheat the oven to 350 F, 175 C.  Grease and flour your cake pans – when to the hardware store that very morning to pick some up.

They strike me as lumberjacky.

Mix the flour, salt, and leavening together with a whisk, or sift.  Whatever gets you going. I used a bag of cake flour with the leavening already in it because I sent my roommate to the store for me and you don’t turn up your nose at someone with a car doing the heavy lifting.

Cream the butter and sugar.

Stupid immersion blender whisk attachment wants to spray sugary butter all over the kitchen.

Mix the eggs in one at a time and add the vanilla.

Mix in the flour mix, alternating with the milk. Half the batter in one pan, half in the other. And in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes, and then cool completely.

This cake is on the dry side.  But that’s actually a good thing for me, as I’m going to have to mess about with its shape, and moist crumbly cake is not going to be the best thing.  So.  We have cake rounds.  Now what?

Decapitate your cake.  Carve off the top of the bottom layer so that the second layer will lie flat.  Otherwise, your top layer will gap and crack and it’s awful.  I speak from experience.  Now, spread with jam!

I love love love raspberry filling in my cakes, and usually I make it from scratch to get the right consistency and flavor, but I can’t find raspberries here so oh well.  La Vieja Fábrica has really great, fruity jams that are sold in the grocery store at the end of the street, so I’m not going to be picky.

Note: Push the toothpicks aaaall the way down into the cake. This is just the placement shot.

Put on the top layer, and secure with toothpicks or skewers.  This will keep your layers from slipping around on each other. Let’s talk frosting.  In the past I’ve explained that I am a rather crappy cake decorator.  My buttercreams are historically iffy and honestly, the weather here was not going to allow that kind of cake to keep very well.  We’re in mid-October, but it’s in the mid to high 80s F in the late afternoon.  I also do not have a stand mixer, so I started thinking a littler farther afield.  I have never tried fondant which is the fallback for funky cake ideas so I wasn’t about to try it in my closet kitchen in the heat with a weak whisk and a distaste for the flavor of fondant.  What’s left?  Chocolate.

Fruzz is basically three colors: brown, black, and white.  In my head this automatically translates into milk, dark, and white chocolate.  If I just used chocolate, then I wouldn’t have serious frosting melting problems in our indian summer (or St. Martin’s summerette as some say here), nor would I have to tackle any serious debut frosting issues while trying to carve for the first time.

I am also not an artist, so I pulled up the picture of Fruzz on my laptop and tried to draw with a knife in chocolate. That did not work.  I quickly gave in to my inner child and started…finger painting.

I had to exaggerate his hairstyle a little so it would come out in chocolate.  Cake is not the most subtle of media in my hands. Then, take a serrated knife to it and start taking out the white space.  Easy does it.

Now.  Let’s cover that cake.

I got to to do this three times. Melt, spread, wash. Melt, spread, wash.

If you can, please use buttercream.  It took me forever to cover up all the cake crumbs with straight up melted chocolate.  A ganache would work as well, but again with the heat issue.  A lovely Skype date with Michelle and lots of decorating myself with chocolate later?

Yes, that is my laptop framing the top of the picture.

I left a lot of knife tracks in the chocolate on purpose.  He’s supposed to be a furball, so thie was the best way I could cheatingly get some texture that reflects that.  I then traced out his eyes and mouth with a butter knife to guide my piping (ziplock bags, of course). Let the chocolate cool to room temperature and solidify (mine had to go in the fridge) and then have a party!

I’m happy with the results.  It’s definitely homemade looking, but as my first off-the-wall cake?  I’m pleased.  And definitely proud to be part of the journey with these guys.

Ok, this part was a little sad. But it was delicious. So there.

]]> http://desasdishes.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/pop-the-ball-celebration-fruzz-cake/feed/ 3 desasdishes pop the ball screen shot Fruzz fruzz-13 fruzz-3 fruzz-1 fruzz-2 fruzz-4 fruzz-6 fruzz-7 fruzz-8 fruzz-9 fruzz-10 fruzz-11 fruzz-12 fruzz-14 fruzz-15 fruzz-16 http://desasdishes.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/megatea-cold-smackdown/ http://desasdishes.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/megatea-cold-smackdown/#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:43:39 +0000 desasdishes http://desasdishes.wordpress.com/?p=906 ]]> For the most part, I have been warmly welcomed here in Spain.  I have a good group of friends, supportive coworkers, and several adoptive families.  But there is one segment of Spanish society that has declared out and out war on me – viruses.  Last year I had three debilitating colds in two months and here I am again, two weeks into my second year  laid low.  Great. It’s as if Spain has thrown down the gauntlet – if you can survive the anti-foreign body security measure of their collection of viruses with your foreigner’s immune system, you are worthy of residency in the country.  Challenge accepted with lethargy. And hey, it gives me a chance to play such games as Fever or Not?  as I yell at the Celsius thermometer.

When I get sick, I get a super impressive cough that usually leads to me losing my voice and sounding like a very creepy man.   When we lived together, Gabrielle used to have me make threatening phone calls to all our friends.  Rosa just calls me Manolo the truck driver.  The real problem is that I’m an assistant teacher, so losing my voice is a big deal.  I got sent home from work one day because listening to me made my coworkers wince.

What does all this whining have to do with my food blog?  Well.  In the midst of those three colds last winter, I got increasingly shacknasty and desperate and started soliciting cough remedies from pretty much everyone I knew.  Herbal tea, hot water with lemon, tea with honey, hot water with ginger, and from my parents – hot whiskey.  Anything that would soothe my throat and help me stop coughing so I could sleep and drag my butt through my commute and back.

In my cold medicine addled state a brilliant idea came to me.  What if I were to combine all of these ideas into ONE?  It would be like the Power Rangers or even Captain Planet – a MegaTea!

First, make your tea. Mine is a mix of lime blossom, orange blossom, lemongrass, and lemon balm, so if you can find a nice citrusy or floral herbal tea, that would be your best bet.  No caffeine, because this is a nighttime tea – it’ll knock you out it’s so relaxing.

When the tea has steeped for a few minutes, remove the tea bag.  Add about a 1/4 tsp of ginger.  Fresh if you have it.

Squeeze a large lemon wedge into your tea.  Be generous, because hey, it’s vitamin C.

Now add two spoonfuls of honey.  I really don’t care much for honey, but it’s the perfect thing for this tea.  It’s soothing and the flavor meshes well.

And for the final touch, a half shot of whiskey.  That’s right.

Now this sounds weird, doesn’t it?  The color is strange, and it doesn’t even smell wonderful.  But it tastes awesome.  After three days without a voice, half a cup of this restored me to the correct gender.  My cough was silenced.  I felt human.  It’s not a permanent fix – obviously you need to take your cold medicine and rest up, but if you need that little extra push, then this is for you.  I’m going to go make a cup right now.  I should invent more recipes under the influence of Sudafed.

Cough Fighting MegaTea

1 herbal tea bag

1/4 tsp ginger

Big wedge of lemon

2 spoonfuls honey

1/2 shot whiskey