April 08, 2015

Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

April 08, 2015/ Blair Cowan

Did you make a giant loaf of Easter bread last week AND a full-size batch of hot cross buns? Do you now have more raisin-studded bread than you know what to do with, filling your kitchen and threatening to overpower you and your family if you eat anything that isn't a sandwich?

I have a solution for you!

Bread pudding gets such a bum wrap. If you can find it on the menu at a restaurant, it's inevitably pitted against such hard-to-resist sweets as flourless chocolate tortes, vanilla crème brulée, lemon panna cotta, or raspberry sorbet-- all lovely in their own right, and far more exciting then bread pudding sounds. But really, what could be better on a rainy spring night than a steamy teacup full of warm spiced bread pudding, straight from the oven? Spiced with cinnamon and raisins with a creamy, custard-like texture, this is the perfect comfort food, and a total upcycle at that.

There are a lot of recipes like this in the box: dishes that feature ingredients you'd have to throw away otherwise. These are the recipes that Eleanor saved and used over and over because they helped prevent unnecessary waste (including a recipe for mock apple pie that contains... you guessed it! No apples). Since the box was started during WWII when even the most basic foods were being rationed, I guess she became good at stretching her dollars-- and her pantry. Written in what I assume is Eleanor's own hand, the original recipe card for this includes the notation “(good)” at the top, underlined twice-- so you know it was a winner for her, too.

So don't throw away your next loaf of stale bread; get creative and make yourself a bread pudding. It's the perfect dessert for this time of year when the weather vacillates between warm and freezing (cold out? Serve this hot! Warm outside? Serve it chilled!), and it's versatile enough to be appropriate for breakfast or dessert (scoop a dollop of yoghurt on it for breakfast, or serve it with cream as a dessert!) Seriously, what are you waiting for?

This is the perfect recipe on which to use up the remnants of a sweet bread you have laying around (Hawaiian bread would be an absolute dream here!), but the original actually calls for plain sandwich bread, so that would work fine, too. I've included two different amounts of sugar below, depending on how sweet your bread is to start with.

The verdict:

4 spoons out of five. I'd give it five, but by the time I made this, I was so tired of bread that it was hard to muster up as much enthusiasm as this deserved.

The recipe:

Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

The ingredients:

6 slices stale bread (white or your choice of sweet breads)
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp cinnamon
Scant ½ c sugar (if using plain bread, add an additional 2 tbsp sugar)
½ c raisins (optional, but recommended as they definitely improve the texture and flavour)
4 eggs
2 c milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Grease an 8x8 (or 1 ½ quart) baking dish and set aside.
Cut crusts from bread and brush remaining bread with melted butter.
Sprinkle with cinnamon (and 2 tbsp sugar if you're using plain bread).
Cut bread into quarters (mine were more like cubes because my slices were thicker).
Arrange in layers in prepared dish, sprinkling each layer with raisins as you go.
In a separate bowl, beat eggs just until combined.
Add scant ½ c sugar, milk, and vanilla to eggs and stir until sugar is dissolved.
Pour egg mixture over bread.
Set dish in pan of 1 inch hot water and place in oven.
Bake 55-60 minutes until “silver knife inserted ½ inch into pudding comes out clean.”

This post also listed over at #InspireMe Wednesdays!

April 07, 2015

Sweet & Sour Beef Kebabs

April 07, 2015/ Blair Cowan

Shish Kebabs, to me, are the quintessential food of the 1970s. More than fondue, more than Watergate Salad, more than stuffed peppers or anything else I can think of, shish kebabs just seem like a 1970s party waiting to happen... and so it makes sense that I found a recipe for “Sweet and Sour Beef Kebabs” in the box without much searching.

I've never made a kebab (fun fact: when I was a kid, I thought I hated all food on sticks just because I happened to hate onions and peppers... and it never occurred to me that I could just eat the other things on the stick and avoid those ones), and I've never seen skewers in the store here in Scotland. This is the weird thing about living in a different country that I don't think people always understand: we've been here a year and a half, but, at least twice a month there is still something we need to buy or do that we can't figure out how to purchase or accomplish. For instance: bamboo skewers are readily available at every grocery store in the US that I've ever been to, and even more readily available at every Wal-Mart and Target. But here in Edinburgh, the grocery stores are much smaller (ours doesn't carry pie filling, gelatin, or marshmallows), so I knew getting skewers there would be a non-starter. So I headed down to a hardware store in our neighbourhood-- the same place I bought our kitchen scale, copper cleaner for our pots, soda crystals to clean our washing machine, and a whole lot of other random gadgets that no one else in town carries. Most of the times I've been there looking for a really specific thing, they've looked at me like I was crazy, but this time they came to the rescue and I am now the owner of a large bag of (very small) bamboo skewers and a set of 4 (even smaller) metal ones.

I like to imagine Eleanor smoking a cigarette, wearing a polyester dress with a loud psychedelic pattern, and mixing up a pitcher of lemonade while my grandpa Wilbur grilled up these kebabs in their backyard, but I can hear Eleanor's voice in my head, even as I type this, reminding me that it's too hot to grill outside for 90% of the year in Florida, so maybe I'm wrong about that one.

We don't have a grill here in Edinburgh (it's pretty much the only thing I miss from our house in Atlanta), so I had to make these in the kitchen... though I might bust this recipe out when it gets a little warmer: we live across the street from the largest park in Edinburgh and in the summer it's full of groups of people grilling out on tiny disposable grills they sell at all the grocery stores. This is an easy, tasty recipe that is intended as an appetiser, but we ate it as a main course one night for dinner and I REGRET NOTHING.

Some words of advice: the cut of the meat actually does matter on this one, despite the fact that it's marinated for ages in a briny mix. I accidentally bought “stew meat” the first time and it was noticeably, terribly tough. Get yourself some sirloin and you won't regret it. Also, the longer this marinates, the better-- if you can get it into the marinade in the morning, it'll be totally worth it when dinner rolls around, I promise. Any kind of onion should work, but the sweeter, the better-- if you have Vidalias, use them here! And finally: these kebabs don't reheat particularly well, so aim to make as close to the actual amount that you need as possible.

And special thanks today go to my mom, who sent this bottle of maple syrup to us as an anniversary gift because it's so hard to find over here. We think of you each Saturday when we eat crepes.

The Verdict:

4 spoons out of five. They're delicious, easy, and seriously, they come on a stick. Does it get any better?

The Recipe:

Sweet and Sour Beef Shish Kebabs

The Ingredients:

1 ½ lb boneless sirloin, cut into ¾-inch cubes
½ c soy sauce
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp scallions, spring onions, or chives
½ tsp garlic powder
2 large sweet onions, cut in chunks
Skewers

THE DIRECTIONS:

Place beef cubes in a large bowl.
Pour in other ingredients, stir well to coat.
Cover and place in refrigerator at least one hour or up to all day.
Remove cubes from marinade and thread on skewers, alternating as desired with onion chunks.
Broil or grill for 5 minutes or until browned on all sides but still pink inside.
rrange on platter and serve as hors d'oeuvres, or have them as a main course with a giant green salad, like we did.

April 03, 2015

Hot Cross Buns

April 03, 2015/ Blair Cowan

Easter 2012 was the first married holiday that Judson and I celebrated. It was barely a month into our marriage, and less than two weeks since we had returned from our honeymoon, and we were excited. I had never really heard of hot cross buns before that spring, except for as the first song I learned to play on both the recorder and the clarinet, and I definitely didn't know they were an Easter treat until the portion of our honeymoon that we spent in the UK. I guess it was close enough to Easter that all the cafes and coffeeshops we passed on the street seemed to be advertising them, and I was fascinated, as I tend to be by anything that's covered in frosting.

So when we returned to the US and were invited to an Easter brunch, I knew exactly what we would make. Hot cross buns! We'd be so domestic! We'd be the envy of the party! People would finally stop teasing Judson about having an empty fridge throughout his bachelorhood! We'd be so adorable when we arrived with a cloth-covered basket full of steaming rolls, people would fall all over themselves just to be friends with us. I'd dole out advice like Martha Stewart on complicated topics like proofing yeast and the best type of dried fruit to use when making Easter desserts, and it would be the official beginning of our grown-up lives together!

So Easter weekend came, and we stayed in on Saturday night to make the buns. I found an authentic recipe on a British website, we made the dough on Saturday evening and set it aside to rise all night. Sunday morning I sneaked out of bed early to punch down the dough and set it up for a second rise, then preheated the oven and jumped in the shower. Judson awoke sometime while I was in the shower, and attempted to put the buns in the preheated oven... but when he opened the oven, it was ice cold.

He came to tell me the news, and I panicked. Dripping wet out of the shower, we stood in the middle of the kitchen panicking. In general, I pride myself on keeping calm when cooking disasters happen-- I mean, unless you've lit something on fire that wasn't supposed to be on fire, the worst that can happen is that you order takeout and have a good story to tell later. But this was our first married holiday, and we were going to spend it with new friends and their friends, who we had never met, and everyone there was married and had kids except for us, and we wanted so badly to not have everything screwed up, but, there we were.

It turned out our oven, which we had not yet used (I moved into the house the week before we got married, Judson moved in after our honeymoon, and we had only been home for a week), was non-functional. I hesitate to say “broken” because I'm not sure it actually ever worked. We had a terrible landlord who didn't really care much about the condition of the house, and I was irate that we now had no oven, and when we called to tell him about it, he said he'd get us a new one in “a week or two.”

But it ended up being the first (albeit minor) catastrophe we had to navigate as husband and wife: Judson dealt with our landlord (this was already not the first major issue we had with the place) while I mixed up frosting, formed the dough into buns, and texted our hostess to see if she could spare some space in the oven. (Huge faux pas, I know, but what were we gonna do? We lived in Atlanta, it's not like there were grocery stores where we could go buy store-brand hot cross buns on Easter morning).

This is the only piece of Eleanor's Pyrex Collection that still exists, and I wish I had more of it. At least if only one piece survived, it was the biggest mixing bowl ever.

So, slightly worse for wear but still alive and kicking, we showed up at our first married function with a tray full of raw dough and a bowl of glaze, which I cooked side-by-side with the Easter ham, thanks to the flexibility of our adorable hosts, who never made me feel bad about it. Keeping track of the oven when you're cooking two things at once is tricky at best, though, and the buns turned out a little browner than they should have been, and a little too chewy from being transported across town, but all in all they were still mostly edible. But I've had my eye on hot cross buns ever since-- I've got unfinished business with them and always knew I'd have to cross that bridge again, this time with a fully functional kitchen.

Oh, and that oven? The landlord replaced it with one he bought from a junkyard, which didn't bother us because it was in good shape and appeared to be new. We tested it to make sure it worked before our landlord left the building after he installed it, and everything seemed to be in order... until the first time we tried to use it to cook a frozen pizza, preheated it as normal, opened it to put in the pizza, and realised that it had no racks. A seemingly small detail, but without it you can't use an oven. So we were back to square one. The landlord raced over with, I kid you not, a cooling rack and two bricks wrapped in aluminum foil and tried to convince us to use that contraption instead of forcing him to buy yet another oven. And I fell in love with Judson just a little bit more when he put his foot down and refused, forcing the landlord to purchase us a new oven (from a real store, no less!), so that, by the time we had been married 6 weeks, we had already gone through three ovens-- more, I think, than my Eleanor and Wilbur probably went through in their entire marriage.

So without further ado, here is the recipe for hot cross buns that I found in Eleanor's recipe box. You should make these this weekend. People will be impressed, and if you're in doubt, just look at it this way: it's impossible for you to have a worse time making these than I did three Easters ago.