Easter
Easter pierogi have become a tradition for us on parr with Cadbury eggs, Easter Parade, and the butter lamb (more on him later.) For the last several years we've tackled our beloved Martha's pierogi recipe with varying degrees of success. This year, I'm proud to say, was the best yet! We busted out the old standards- potato and potato with cheese, but also went for some new varieties. We tried to recreate the famous arugula and goat cheese pierogis from Veselka, and tackled another Martha favorite- blueberry.
Martha's recipe can be found here, and we followed it exactly to make the dough.
We sort of winged it with the fillings, but used Martha's potato filling as a jumping off point. For the potato cheese, we just added a liberal amount of a good quality cheddar to the already completed potato mix. We improvised completely with the arugula goat cheese filling, which probably explains why they came out less than perfect. We had plans to get a schmancy goat cheese, however we forgot to pick it up and were left with our local grocery store's “herbed goat cheese blend.” The “herbed” flavor was definitely too overwhelming for the pierogi. Additionally, we probably should have thrown the arugula goat cheese mixture into the food processor to make a smoother filling. Oh well, there's always next year!
Our other experiment, blueberry, came out much better. Neither of us had ever eaten a sweet pierogi before, but we were pleasantly surprised with the results. We took our inspiration from Martha's recipe again, but made a much smaller batch since we weren't sure how they would turn out. We sort of threw some blueberries in a bowl, mushed up half, and then added sugar until it was sweet enough. Voila, blueberry pierogi! Next Easter we will be making a full batch for sure.
But back to the dough. We ran into trouble last time around because we were afraid of over-flouring the dough and making it tough. This year, we flour-ed to our heart's content and had a much better result. We used a metal tumbler to cut out the circles (another Martha trick- damn she's good!) and then added a spoonful of filling. Then we just folded them over and sealed with a fork.
We cooked them up on the flat top with a liberal amount of butter provided by our fallen butter lamb.
Which brings us to the butter lamb. If you've never seen a butter lamb, it is just what it sounds like - a lamb made of butter. Butter lambs are a polish Easter tradition, especially popular in Western New York. Anyone who has visited the Broadway Market can attest to their popularity at the Easter table. I purchased a traditional hand carved wooden mold this year with the intention of making a butter lamb to beat all butter lambs. Unfortunately he didn't quite make it out of the freezer in one piece.
I'm going to do a few practice rounds next Easter so you can look out for the prettiest butter lamb you've ever seen next holiday season!
The final meal included some quickly sauteed asparagus, carmelized onions, and some sour cream.
A (vaguely) Irish meal
Ok, so, we're back. It's been a while since we last posted. Not because we haven't been cooking, but because in addition to cooking, we've had to make plans and travel to my sister's wedding in London. We even got a chance to visit Paris and eat some bread that had olives in it, but that's a story for another post. After getting over our sleep deprivation from the trip and getting our heads back around everything else we needed catching up on, we discovered that it was St. Patrick's Day. Neither of us is particularly Irish, but a holiday is always a good excuse to cook, and we needed an excuse to get back into the swing of things.
The decided upon meal was Irish Soda Bread and Zucchini Enchiladas. What that's you say? Enchiladas aren't very Irish? Well, for one, by the time we realized it was St. Patrick's Day, it was far too late to cure (pickle?) our own corned beef, and second, zucchini is green, and that's the main requirement for an Irish theme, thank you very much. Recipes will be at the end of the post.
Soda bread is a strange thing. Making it reminded me a bit of making corn bread, but switching out the corn meal and replacing it with margarine and buttermilk. The taste is also like cornbread, but it tastes like it has been buttered for you. All of the expected ingredients go into a bowl together: flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, salt. Then you add margarine, an egg and buttermilk.
This mixture gets stirred all together, although "stir" may not really be the right word. It's a bit dense, so it sort of gets mashed together, then turned out onto counter and kneaded together until satisfactorily hydrated. The dough is then painted with a mixture of melted butter and buttermilk. It bakes until a toothpick comes out clean. Roughly an hour for us, but you should start checking at about 45 minutes.
While the bread baked, we set about putting together our (very Irish) enchiladas. Like most enchiladas, these are surprisingly simple and delicious. We're all about zucchini, so these were a hit.
The enchilada sauce is straightforward. It starts with tomato sauce, which is simmered with the standard Mexican spice trio of garlic, chili powder and cumin. The recipe we were working from started by sauteing a minced clove of garlic to get the flavor, but we added some garlic powder at the end as one clove wasn't quite garlicky enough. This recipe also added chipotle chilies in adobo and some vegetable broth, which added an interesting bit of flavor.
The filling is also pretty basic. Its starts sauteing garlic and scallions for a few minutes by themselves, then adding in grated zucchini for a few more. Once everything is cooked, you remove from the heat and finish the mix with about a half cup of grated cheddar and jack cheese. The taste is different than your standard enchilada, but it isn't an unpleasant difference.
From there, the mixture is rolled in flour tortillas (mircowave them for twenty seconds or heat in a dry pan for a few seconds to make rolling easy), then topped with some of the sauce and cheese and baked for twenty minutes.
And don't forget to take out your bread. Ours finished next to the enchiladas.
Recipes
Soda Bread (adapted from allrecipes.com)
4 cups flour
4 tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup margarine softened
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1/4 cup melted butter mixed with 1/4 cup buttermilk
Heat oven to 375°, mix all everything together in a both until well hydrated, then turn out onto a clean counter, knead a bit and form into a ball shape. Place ball on a greased baking sheet, cut a cross in the top and brush on butter and buttermilk mixture. Bake 45 minutes to an hour, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Enchilada Sauce
8 oz tomato sauce
1 tbsp chipotle chilis in adobo sauce, minced
1 clove garlic, minced (add garlic powder to taste)
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 cup vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste
Sautee garlic in olive oil until fragrant, about a minute, then add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 5 to ten minutes. Taste and add spices to preference. This is really depends on your taste.
Zucchini Enchiladas (adapted from skinnytaste.com)
2 cloves garlic, rough chopped
2 scallions, chopped
2 zucchini, grated
1 cup grated cheddar and jack cheese
1 package medium flour tortillas, warmed up
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 400°. Sautee the garlic and scallions for roughly 3 minutes. Add the zucchini, some salt and pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in 1/2 of the grated cheese. Roll mixture up in tortillas and put into a lightly greased baking pan. Top with sauce and the rest of the cheese and bake for 20 minutes.
You win some, you lose some
While it is our preference to write about recipes that come out awesome, the reality of cooking is that some of the things you try don't work as nicely as you would like. Part of our idea for this blog was to document some of our culinary losses alongside the wins. Also, we got some pretty nice pictures of this recipe, and it would be a shame not to post them.
We aren't really going to go into the recipe details, just going to go over the why things didn't really pan out. But for reference, we adapted our recipe from one on thekitchn.com. We picked it because it involved a few things that we're fans of, butternut squash and bitter greens.
Where things went wrong for us was when we modified a couple parts of the lasagna. Thyme was swapped with sage, since we recently had a bad experience with overdoing thyme, and because sage and squash usually work well together. Additionally, we took away the cheese in a noble attempt to cut down our dairy intake. The only real win was adding some panko breadcrumbs to the top and sticking the whole thing under the broiler to make things crispy.
Why? By omitting the cheese, we lost some salt and a lot of savory flavor that probably would have done wonders for balancing the sweetness. More chard could have helped too. The unmodified dish would have savory, sweet and a bit of bitter all in balance. We almost completely removed the savory (the noodles gave a bit there), and didn't include enough chard, so the bitter didn't really com through either. The result was a sickly sweet delicious appearing lasagna. Basically, a trap.
We may not have done so hot, but in the future, we'll probably try again, lessons learned in hand. And what did we learn? When you change a recipe, you really need to consider your changes carefully. Experimenting doesn't lead to bad when cooking as often as baking, but there is a balance to recipes that needs to be thought through. Knowing your ingredients and the flavors they bring can go a long way.
However, the evening wasn't a total wash. We grilled some sourdough to make garlic bread to go with the lasagna. That came out awesome.