Dutch Babies (aka German Pancakes in a muffin tin)

These are one of my favorite breakfast foods ever.
No, really, they really are.
Above French toast.
Above eggs.
Above bacon... well, that might be taking it a bit too far. There really isn't much above bacon.

But these little breakfast things are really good. I'm not completely sure how to describe them... if you have had yorkshire pudding, they are kind of like a sweet version of yorkshire pudding. But I don't know very many Americans who have had yorkshire pudding. They are kind of dense, eggy, salty, and sweet, very buttery, and delicious with fruit on top.What they actually are is Dutch or German pancakes, but made in muffin tins instead of a skillet, so they are little.  Just make them, and then you will know how good they are and I won't have to explain it!


I got this recipe, and adapted it a very little, from this blog.

Dutch Babies

6Tb melted butter
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
4 eggs

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Then, mix together all your ingredients EXCEPT the butter... you can mix the dry ingredients and then add the wet ingredients if you want, or you can do it the other way around, or you can just dump all the ingredients in a bowl together and stir... I really don't care, it all works. The goal is to get it all mixed together, by whatever way makes you the most comfortable.

Add two tablespoons of the butter into the batter.
Now, take the rest of the butter (that is 4 tablespoons), and use it to grease a 12-muffin muffin tin. Use all the butter. there will be little pools of lovely warm golden butter on the bottom of every muffin tin. You want that. You want lots of butter. Butter is good.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins, but don't fill the tins too full. You want them to be about half  to three-quarters full, actually, with plenty of room to puff up to their full, delicious, puffy, butter glory.

Bake for 12-14 minutes, until they are all puffed up and the edges are golden. They will puff pretty high.

Pull them out of the oven, and let them cool a bit before pulling them out of the muffin tin and serving them with fruit on top... or jelly... or lemon juice and sugar... or berries... or whatsoever you desire to serve with these little pillows of deliciousness.

The centers will fall down, leaving the edges puffy, giving you a lovely little cup in which to hold the topping of your choosing.

You can make a large portion of the batter and then keep it in the fridge and cook only as many dutch babies as you want at the time... the batter keeps well in the fridge for at least a week. I'm not sure if it lasts longer... I usually use it all up within a week, and if I don't use it up in that time it's usually because I've forgotten about it, in which case I will continue to forget about it until it is far too late.

Happy Dutch Baby eating!

Sherman

Well, school is finally out for the year. I know, you didn't have any idea I was in school, right, since I kept posting just as frequently during the semester as normal.... yeah right. Twenty hours of classes nommed my life. But it's over now! Happy day.

In other news, we got a puppy! Hence the adorable picture. Sherman is about 9 weeks old, and he is what we refer to in proper terms as a "mutt." He is 1/4 blood hound, 1/4 blue heeler, 1/4 beagle, and 1/4 terrier. Basically, he is a mutt of hound dog leanings. But boy is he cute! And he has blue eyes. Which makes him even cuter.

We've had Sherman for about a week, and so far he has learned his name, that he has to sit down before coming inside, and to look very, very guilty if he has an accident in the house. So, we'll call that progress.

He also snores when he's asleep, likes to chew on potatoes, hates the garbage truck, and can't completely control all of his legs at the same time when running.

He likes to crawl under the couch and fall asleep under there, but frequently forgets where he fell asleep, and bonks his head on the couch when he wakes up and tries to lift his head. I never, ever laugh when this happens. ... ok maybe I do just a little.

Also, we went for a picnic recently and got some very pretty pictures of flowers which I will now share with you.

I'm quite happy to be out of school for the summer, and able to cook more and post more blog posts. Yay food, blog posts, summer, flowers, and puppies! 

Buttermilk Biscuits

Well, it has been quite a while since I have posted on here... since before school started back up, actually.
You can blame school for the lack of postings. Turns out, 20 hours is actually quite the load of work. Keeps me kind of busy, most of the time.

In any case, I finally had a free-ish Saturday afternoon and was making biscuits and so I thought I'd take some pictures. And, I mean, once you take pictures you really do need to post them, right? Of course right.

I have been for quite some time now trying to find a perfect biscuit recipe. I love biscuits. LOVE them. But my homemade biscuits always have left a little something to be desired.
This recipe doesn't rise enough.
This one is too dense.
This one is too bitter (that is a problem with a lot of them. The baking powder makes them bitter.)
 My sourdough starter hates me, and I forget that it exists until it is so far past "sour" that it really isn't funny.
No, it isn't.
It's nasty.
But finally, recently, I found Biscuit Utopia. Beautiful Buttermilk Biscuits. They are not bitter. They rise like little puffy pillows of biscuity goodness. They are flaky and pull-apart-and-load-with-butter-able. (that is a very important biscuit characteristic). And they are easy to make. And I'm going to show YOU how to make them!!! Aren't you lucky.

I found and adapted this recipe from http://simplyrecipes.com/ which has lots and lots of wonderful noms.

Like all good biscuity recipes, you first mix together the dry ingredients. And then you ADD BUTTER. Or margarine. Margarine is cheaper. But butter is nommier. Is nommier a word?

Then you chop that butter all to pieces with your handy dandy butter chopper.
I use my butter-chopper a lot. That's why it's all bendy.
Bendy Butter-Choppers don't work as well as you might wish them to.
I need a new non-bendy butter-chopper. 

Now, don't chop the butter into too fine of pieces. You want that butter to be in big enough chunks that those chunks can turn into flaky bits of goodness later on. Chunks about the size of... medium-size chunks.
Maybe ranging from pea-size to thumb-size. Yeah, that's about right.
Then you add buttermilk!

Now, before this recipe I had never used real cultured buttermilk before. I found this on sale at Crest for 99 cents per half-gallon and I thought I'd try it. I really like it! I think that the buttermilk might be the secret of these biscuits' extreme goodness. I read online that you can make cultured buttermilk by mixing some store-bought cultured buttermilk with some regular milk and letting it sit out for a while, so I'm going to try that and we'll see if it works. I'll let you know. If I remember...

Anyway, moving on. You mix the buttermilk in, but don't over mix it! It will be very crumbly. This is good. Too much liquid makes the flour release gluten, which makes things chewy and will make your biscuits un-flaky and tough. Don't add too much, and don't mix too much.

Now, you are going to make flakes in your biscuits. Dust the counter with flour and dump your clumpy dough on the counter. It will try to fall apart. You are going to gently corral those clumps and press them lightly together and down into a sheet of crumbly goodness about two inches high.

Now, fold (I use the term loosely... more like, flop) the dough in half, and press gently down again to the same height. Do this about three or four times, until the dough starts to stick together better. This will make flakes in your biscuits. You are about done when the dough looks like this:

Remember, you aren't kneading the dough. You are gently flaking it. On the last turn, put some flour on the top of the dough before you fold it, and press it down to half the height you have been. Then fold it for the last time and just barely press it together. This last fold will create the half-way flaky point so that when you pull apart your fresh, warm biscuits, they will fall beautifully in half and await buttery goodness and honey and jam.

Now, cut out the biscuits. Press firmly straight down on your biscuit cutter (in my kitchen, that means "drinking glass that I use to cut biscuits with"). Don't twist the cutter or you will seal the edges of your biscuits, and they won't rise to full flaky glory. Set the biscuits on an ungreased cookie tray. Don't worry if they want to fall apart in half. Just stack those halves on top of each other and pretend like they are behaving.

Bake these at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes, or until the tops are crispy golden brown.
Use a spatula to scrape them off the pan.
Add butter. Or jam. Or both. And honey.
And eat them all.
Or share.
Your choice. 

Buttermilk Biscuits

2 1/2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
2 tsp sugar
3/4 tsp salt
8Tb butter or margarine
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mix the flour, baking power, sugar, and salt.
Add the butter or margarine, and cut in until crumbly.
Add buttermilk. Mix until the dough clumps.
Turn out on floured counter, and press into 2-inch high sheet.
Fold and press, repeating until dough sticks together.
Fold one last time, pressing lightly together.
Cut out biscuits, place on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 15- 20 minutes, or until tops are crispy golden brown.
Enjoy!

Send My Friend to China!

This is Courtney.
You should help her get to China.

Not that I don't want her here or anything like that.
I mean, I like her being here...
Hence, she's my friend.
You know, someone I don't want around wouldn't really be my friend...
And she's my friend, so I like her being around...
Because she is happy and fun and makes life better....

So that's not why I'm saying you should send her to China.
yeah.
Actually, it's because she wants to go to China.
To teach English to cute children at a summer camp.
Which is a worthy cause, you know?
Besides, she's cute.
Look at her thinking of China.

Anyway, she is saving and trying to raise money to go this next summer, so I took photos of her this afternoon to make prayer cards with and stuff. And so I had these photos and thought I'd introduce you to her in case you want to help her by giving her money, or by telling other people about her, or by praying for her lots and lots.
(because in my opinion, praying is even better than moneys. Strange, I know.)

She even has a blog of her own so that you can hear straight from her what she is doing and why! Here it is:
http://sendmetochina.blogspot.com/

So go read it, and love her, and pray for her, and send her to China!!!

Curry Chicken

As most of you know, I spent a fair portion of my childhood in an Indian community in Fiji. Now, what you may not know, is that from these Indian people comes pretty much the best food in the entire world.
Curry really should be its own food group. The one at the bottom of the pyramid, that you need the most of.
Also, I must warn you that the "curry" I grew up with and am giving you the recipe for here is very, very different from "curry chicken" that is made here in the States, which has a creamy sauce and is served with raisins and coconut and that stuff. That curry much more closely resembles curries from the more upper-class food of India, using cream or yoghurt. It is quite delicious itself, but it is not the curry I grew up eating, and which I make at home.

This particular recipe I got from a friend from Fiji, who is now living in the States.
While it does not take too many "exotic" spices, it does call for a few. I'm not sure if Walmart carries this stuff... I get them from my local Indian grocery store. Probably a spice store or an herb store might carry them? I'm not sure...

Ingredients
About 2-3 pounds of chicken, cubed
 1 chopped onion
2 curry leaves
2 cinnamon sticks, or about a teaspoon of cinnamon
chili powder to taste (depending on how hot you like your food)
salt to taste
1 tsp tumeric
2 tsp curry powder
4 tsp meat masala
cooking oil
cilantro (optional... I don't usually have it on hand, so I don't usually put it in)
thumb-sized piece of ginger (best if fresh, but you can used 1/4 tsp powdered)
8-10 cloves of garlic (yes, that much)
serrano peppers (also to taste, depending on how hot you like your food. I actually usually just omit them)
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp mustard seed


Method:
Crush together ginger, garlic, peppers, cumin, and mustard seed.
Heat just enough oil to cover the bottom of your pot.
Add onion and curry leaves, and brown.  
Add crushed spices, and brown.
Add all the rest of the spices and the cinnamon sticks, keep stirring so this does not burn. You will have a spicy, yummy smelling paste.
Add chicken and salt. Stir to just cook the outside of the chicken, then add enough water to cover the chicken about 3/4 the way.
Cover with a lid and cook on low to medium, checking on it and stirring occasionally until done. The chicken will be done and the liquid will have cooked down to about half of what it was.
Taste and add salt if needed. 
Add cilantro and let cook just a little.
Turn off heat and serve with rice, roti, and chutney.
(If you like. Or just eat it with a spoon, from the pan. I might have done that before.)  

Roti is the flat bread, somewhat similar to a tortilla, that is normally eaten with curry. You actually can use the roti instead of silverware to eat the curry (it tastes better that way, promise). You tear off a little piece of roti and use it to pick up your curry and rice. How do you make roti, you might ask? Well, it's very simple, here let me help you:

In a large bowl, mix flour and a little bit of salt. I also add some garlic powder, just for extra flavour and because I like garlic. Add boiling (or very very hot) water, enough to make a somewhat stiff dough, and stir together. Knead for a very, very long time until it is soft and elastic. Pinch off small balls of dough and roll out with flour to keep them from sticking to the counter. You want basically the size and shape of a tortilla.
Heat a non-stick pan to medium heat, and put a roti on it. (I cook them without oil, I find they cook better that way for me.) Cook until both sides are done (some brown spots, but not burnt). I usually flip them three times, that seems to work well. They should puff up as they cook. Pop them and squish the bubbles, or they can get kind of crispy, which is not what we are going for. When the roti is done, place it in a pan and brush some melted butter on it. I put some garlic in the butter, too. Brush melted butter on each roti as they come off the pan. This keeps them soft and yummy. And buttery.

There you go!
This is pretty much about my favorite meal of all time, and I am giving you the recipe.
I know, I'm awesome.  
Thanks.