Jalapeno Mac & Cheese

I love mac & cheese. It is the best dinner in the world, whether you're making homemade with a time-consuming white sauce as the base, or Food Lion brand from a box. It's tried many variations, looking for the perfect version for a hurried mid-week meal. I've found that any version that takes less than twenty minutes of active time and thirty minutes of baking is perfect. Mac & cheese (so far) is impossible to mess up.

I discovered this recipe for jalapeno mac & cheese in the Washington Post in 2002 or 2003. I remember it called for a mix of cheddar and queso fresco. Since at the time they didn't carry queso fresco in my nearest grocery store, I improvised. I've continued improvising over the years and even lost the recipe during a fit of cleaning. By this point, I consider the recipe my own, but inspired by that original one. Here it is:

3/4 lb. of small pasta shapes, I prefer spiral shapes, but had penne on hand for these photos
1 medium onion
1 15 oz. can of diced tomatoes
2-3 jalapeno peppers, can use canned or fresh but fresh will be hotter
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar
2 cups shredded Monterey jack
1 egg
1/2-1 cup milk
garlic
salt and pepper
hot sauce


While doing prep work, cook the pasta. Chop the onion and saute in olive oil with the tomatoes, garlic, and jalapenos for 5-10 minutes, until hot and juicy.

Mix the onions with 3/4 of your cheese. Reserve one cup of the mixed cheeses. When the pasta is done, drain and mix it with the cheese and spoon into a lightly greased baking dish.

Beat the egg into the milk, adding enough milk to get the whole dish wet. This will bind the mac & cheese. Add salt, pepper, and hot sauce to your taste. Pour the milk mixture all over the mac & cheese. Place in a pre-heated 350-degree oven for about 20-25 minutes.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese on the mac, then place back in the oven for about 5 minutes, until the cheese melts and forms a nice crust. Cheezalicious!

A Quicky: Spinach Quiche

Tonight I'm incredibly excited. I made my first recipe ever from Julia Child's (et al) Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I've loved Julia Child since I became interested in cooking, but never had any of her cookbooks. Then Darren's school began renovations, and, as all schools do during renovations or relocations, threw away library books. Along with far too many novels, Darren brought home a 1966 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, before there was even a Volume 2. Yay! So tonight I made a spinach quiche, or a quicky, as Darren likes to call them.
To make the quiche, I made a pate brisee (short crust) pp. 139-141, frozen spinach pp. 575-576, and the quiche itself, p. 153. I would have used fresh spinach, but you can't find fresh, non-bagged, non-baby spinach around here for love or money. Luckily, the book has great tips for using frozen vegetables.

I can't explain the whole quiche recipe here, because of copyright laws, but I definitely recommend the Art of French Cooking recipe. The only problem with using Mastering the Art of French Cooking, at least an older version, is that it is written for the tastes of at least thirty or forty years ago. That means everything will have more fat, more butter, and more salt than you would normally use. After eating two small pieces of quiche, Darren and I felt like bloated seals. Next time I make this, I'm going to cut down on butter and salt.

But putting first things first, you've got to make the crust. I made it in the food processor, then chilled in the freezer for an hour. Then I baked it blind, which does not involve handkerchiefs, but instead rice and aluminum foil. You pre-bake a crust weighted down with rice, beans, or actual pie weights, then let it cool slightly before filling.

Then comes the spinach. Julia et al. give a technique which I love, but Darren dislikes. Try is and see. Defrost your spinach (don't use chopped) slightly, then chop up the square of spinach. Then cook it up. If following Art's recipe, you'll cook it with lots of butter. By chopping the frozen spinach, it becomes chopped spinach but doesn't fall apart and cooks much more quickly than a big frozen chunk. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and anything else you think tastes good.

With your partially baked crust and butter spinach, you've almost got a quiche. According to the recipe, mix up cream or milk, eggs, and maybe some Swiss or Gruyere cheese. Mix together with the spinach and spoon into the crust. I like to use a tart pan with a removable bottom, as it's easier to put the quiche on a platter. Make sure to butter the pan well, or it will stick.

Often, your pie or tart pan will be too small to contain all the filling. In that dire situation, make timbales. We baked the spinach-egg mixture with a little more cheese and then reheated them the next morning for breakfast with a little crusty bread. Bon appetit!

Spicy Chocolate

When you get tired of hot cider, a wonderful, comforting substitute is hot chocolate. Even better than traditional hot chocolate is spiced chocolate. This recipe comes Bon Appetit via Kim O'Donnel's Washington Post food blog, which is a featured link on this site. Now, granted, this hot chocolate takes more time, effort, and ingredients than the typical powdered mix, but is worth it as a winter treat. I made it for the first time last weekend, and it was wonderful. My husband and I had been craving ice cream, and were on the verge of going out to get a pint. After drinking our spicy hot chocolate, we forgot about ice cream completely.

The longest step is simmering all the spices together with the milk, and trying to keep a skim from forming. I used 2% milk instead of whole, and found the hot chocolate didn't feel thin at all.

After adding the cocoa and sugar, nothing was left to do but drink the chocolate. Unfortunately, we didn't actually feel like it a few nights ago. So I strained it and put it in the fridge. On Sunday morning, Darren and I reheated the chocolate, adding a little more milk to get any chocolate out which had coagulated on the bottom of the bowl.

The hot chocolate took only a short time to reheat, and still tasted great. The hot pepper flavor was a little more pronounced, so I recommend cutting down on that if you plan to save the hot chocolate for later. Altogether the tastes of cinnamon, star anise, and cardamom make a wonderful hot beverage that is perfect for customizing to your own preferences.

The Problems of Blogging and Cooking

Beginning to blog is pretty difficult for me. I think it's because of the cooking issue. Since my last posting, I've made a few cool things that would be great to post. I've made my first recipe from The Joy of Cooking, yummy panko crusted pork chops with a tomato sauce my husband made, and the best ever hot chocolate last night. It's a recipe for spiced hot chocolate that I found on the Washington Post's site and have been wanting to make for about a month. Darren and I were craving ice cream, and the hot chocolate totally sated that desire, and gave us both a lot of calcium. But I can't post an entry about them. Why? I keep forgetting to take pictures. The camera is in the kitchen, but I just cook and lose track of the blogging necessities. I'll try tonight.

Hot Spiced Cider

Now that winter is finally here after the glorious weeks of warm, sunny weather, I crave warmth. I've been drinking a lot of tea, but after a certain point, a woman needs something else. That's when her husband steps in and makes hot spiced apple cider. At least, he does this if he's a good man.
Darren began making spiced apple cider and wine when we received a pack of mulling spices from a first-grade student, via my mother, the first-grade teacher. After we used up the spices, Darren developed his own recipe for mulling spices and I like it even better than the pre-mixed stuff. Nothing beats hot spiced wine or cider on a freezing cold evening like the ones we've been having on the East Coast recently. He made some cider to go with the oatmeal cookies, but it's great with biscotti or just on its own.
Making hot spiced cider is great, because you can change it to suit your mood and preferences. Here is what Darren does:

Ingredients
2 cups unsweetened apple juice
1/4 cup triple sec (or orange juice)
1 Tb. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
a pinch of nutmeg

Combine everything in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer lightly for about a half hour. When pouring, do so carefully to avoid getting all the spices in your mug.

Starts with C: Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I discovered this recipe for low(er) fat oatmeal cookies in a roundabout way, a cooking blog on the Washington Post's website that linked to awesome pastry chef and expat David Lebovitz's blog. This recipe is David's adaptation of a recipe from Nick Malgieri's Perfect Light Desserts, and available under recipes on his blog, to which there is a link on the main page. But no matter how many twists and turns this recipe took on its way to my kitchen, one this is for sure: these cookies are delicious.
The first time I made these cookies, I was in a situation much like David's; I had two small apples going soft and no plans to make a pie. My finding the recipe was serendipitous. I knew that I would want to make the cookies again, so I bought the small go-packs of all natural, no sugar apple sauce. While the cookies were definitely better with my own applesauce, they are still terrific with store bought. I recommend adding a few spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice if you are using store bought applesauce. Just play around with the combination until you have it right. I'm mostly into cinnamon, so that's what I'll be using in the future.

I have always had problems with cookies. No matter how much I paid attention and hovered near the oven, they were always burnt or raw. Moving and having different ovens made no difference, but then I had a brilliant idea. My husband had turned me onto using baking stones for bread. They spread the heat and you never get a burnt bottom. So, I used the baking stone for these cookies. It worked perfectly. What you do is this: preheat the stone in the oven, and only take it out when you're ready to use it. Yes, the stone and its handles will be incredibly hot and it is sometimes tricky to maneuver sticky dough. My husband uses the pizza peel (the wooden paddle no one uses that comes along with the pizza stone), but I prefer to just slap the dough down. Sprinkle the stone with cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking, and then get it ready. I find that, using the stone, I don't have to worry about burning unless I totally forget about the oven. Also, if the recipe calls for turning the baking sheet, as this one does, you usually don't have to do that. When the cookies come out, you will have to scrape them off. Remember to use a thin metal spatula. Some cookie residue will be on the stone, but it came off easily with hot water and a plastic scrubber. Remember, no soap on the stone, or your baked good will taste like soap! I'd say that and the round shape are the only drawbacks to using a pizza stone. But I've got my eye on a rectangular baking stone and with any luck, will have one soon.
The post-baking process was an interesting one for these cookies. When I took them off the stone, they were incredibly soft. After cooling on the rack, they were pretty crispy. Though there were still delicious, I doubted the recipe's name. After a few hours though, the cookies were soft and chewy, a perfect texture and weight. These are my oatmeal cookies. I hope they become yours.