Jumbo Empanadas

I realize I've been slack on the entries lately, but that's because I've been trying to move my blog to a different site that I can do more with.  This has led to much frustration on my part and instead of making progress on making the new site I would usually get angry and shut off my computer.  It's hard to get anywhere when the computer is turned off.  Anyways, I think I've got things sorted out now, so here's the new website:

More entries will follow shortly....

Anyone who has ever grown zucchini will know that once they get started, there’s no stopping them.  They will grow a foot overnight.  Where just yesterday you had 1 zucchini, today there will be 5.  People will start avoiding you so that you can’t pawn off your extra zucchini on them.  It gets to the point where you have to start leaving them anonymously on neighbour’s doorsteps just to get rid of them.  That being said, there is a lot that you can do with zucchini and in the winter I resent having to pay for them at the grocery store when just months earlier I could have built a house out of zucchini.

 

When your neighbours figure out who’s responsible for the zucchinis and start throwing them back at your house there’s nothing you can do but head into the kitchen are start figuring out some new ways to use this abundant vegetable.  Should you ever find yourself in this position, here are some suggestions that I’ve attempted in the past week, or will be attempting in the coming weeks:

• Chop it up and add zucchini to stir frys.
• Slice the zucchini in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds and stuff it with whatever you’d like.  Rice, other veggies and cheese works well.  Bake it in the oven or grill it.
• Make a zucchini “lasagna”, replacing the noodles with strips of zucchini.
• Grill slices of zucchini with other vegetables, and layer them onto a baguette with hummus for a different take on a sandwich.
• Make chocolate and zucchini cakes or muffins, (one batter can be turned into pretty much any shape you want).  Yes, this actually works quite well and for anyone who is unsure of this I’m fairly certain I could feed you a chocolate chip zucchini muffin without telling you what was in it and you’d be none the wiser.  You can’t actually taste the zucchini as a vegetable, but it adds moisture.  If it works for carrot cake, it can work for zucchini.
• Instead of scalloped potatoes, make scalloped zucchini.  It’s the same concept as the lasagna, just replace the potato with zucchini, or use both in the same dish.  Any kind of zucchini ‘au gratin’ works well.
• Make a zucchini quiche, using zucchini as the crust.  Grilling it first is advisable.
• Add zucchini to omelets.
• Mashed zucchini instead of mashed potatoes, add some pepper, garlic, scallions and butter.
• Deep fried zucchini.  You can eat zucchini flower blossoms as well, deep frying them or stuffing them, all on their own they make nice garnish.
• Make savoury zucchini pancakes with fresh herbs and sour cream.

        Like I said, you’ve got to start being creative and you’ve got to start disguising the zucchini or you may experience a revolt among those who are repeatedly being served zucchini dishes.  The chocolate zucchini cake is definitely a good choice here, you can add nuts and chocolate chips too.  If you make mass quantities of these and distribute them to your neighbours, (without telling them the mystery ingredient) you may win back some of them, who, just days earlier, were hurling zucchinis at your house and muttering threats.  Good luck.

My brother, sister in law and nephew have been visiting for the week so I’ve been fairly busy, but still cooking.  Or maybe lazy, but still cooking would be more accurate, I’m not really ever that busy, am I?  Potato, pot-ah-to.  We decided to have an Asian inspired dinner one night, the Quiggies were invited too.  Everyone got in on the cooking for this meal.  Appetizers were pork and shrimp dumplings from the Quiggies and cold rolls courtesy of me because Dad likes those.  I had debated making sushi because I hadn’t done that in a while, but you can’t get good ingredients for that here.  There’s definitely no sashimi grade fish in my grocery store, so cold rolls it was they never disappoint.  Main dishes included spicy shrimp stir fry, chicken chow mein, ginger beans, bbq ribs and honey and soy glazed chicken wings.  My mom, sister in law and I started chopping up all the veggies and organizing each dish so that it would be ready to go when we wanted to cook it.  We were going to the beach before dinner so we wanted to have everything ready for when we came back.  Dad and my brother were in charge of the bbq, all they had to do before dinner was grill some chicken for the chicken chow mein.  Well, they got as far as putting the chicken on the bbq and then we left for the beach.  Without removing the chicken from the bbq.  Blackened chicken was not on the menu.  That chicken was tossed when we finally returned home a couple hours later and they started over with a fresh piece.  The second time around garnered much better results.  The spicy shrimp stir fry was originally supposed to be chicken but considering the fate of the first chicken, shrimp was definitely the way to go.  The chicken chow mein ended up being good despite the slow start, we added in shiitake mushrooms from the mushroom man, (we also picked up some Lion’s Mane mushies and pink oysters while we were there, we’re frying those up with some bbq’d steak tonight).  Ginger beans weren’t part of the original plan, but we had a whole lot of them, so there you go.  The honey and soy glazed chicken wings were popular, but I’m losing my love of chicken wings, ribs are more substantial.  And these ribs were high quality.  I added a habanero pepper to the marinade so they had some nice heat to them.  Dad and I are already planning a strictly ribs night in the near future.  For some reason Dad was fretting about not having enough food, maybe we should make a fried rice dish he said.  Clearly that was not even a possibility as we will be eating leftovers for days and an extra dish would have been overkill.  Dad relented and accepted that we wouldn’t be making anything else only because 1- Mom said he would have to make it, (thus relinquishing his roll as bbq master) and 2- The bbq, oven, and all 4 stove burners were already in use.  For dessert I made coconut ice cream which my sister in law diligently churned for me every ten minutes after I put it in the freezer.  I always forget to churn the ice cream and it ends up with the paddle frozen in place and I have to hack away at it to free the paddle which is a largely frustrating ordeal and I don’t like it.  With her help it turned out very well.  The coconut ice cream turned out rich, very rich, but there were no complaints, (except from my sister in law, who complained my brother was stealing all of her ice cream).  I would have liked to add ginger and lime to my ice cream, but decided plain was more of a surefire success when feeding a crowd.  All in all, the whole meal was well received and I’ve decided I need to figure out how to get on the new TLC show Dinner Takes All, best dinner party each week wins a thousand bucks, who doesn’t love that?

 

Besides the Asian inspired dinner, here’s a random rundown of some other dishes I’ve been up to in the past week:

 

Corn chowder- because Dad bought a dozen corn and then bought another dozen before finishing the first one.  I searched epicurious.com for a recipe and ended up combining 3 of theirs to create one of my own because I didn’t have all of the ingredients for any single recipe and I didn’t particular like any one of their methods used.  Luckily the chowder was especially good (bacon and sweet potato contributed their best assets) and I’ve made it twice now.

 

Pizza grilled on the bbq- because if it can’t be done on the bbq, why do it at all?  I made the dough, (remembering to put in the yeast this time, pure genius), and then grilled one side of the dough, flipped it over, put all of the sauce, toppings and cheese on the grilled side, and then put it back on the bbq to finish it off.  I highly recommend it.  I suspect I’ll try smoking a pizza sooner or later.

 

Quiche- because I had a leftover pie shell after making a peach, blueberry and gooseberry pie, and I didn’t feel like making another one so I made quiche for lunch one day.  The original recipe was for a straight cheese quiche, but I decided I would add veggies.  Of course, I didn’t account for all the extra space that onions, zucchini (the garden is exploding with them) and peppers would take up.  This meant that I had extra egg, cream, cheese and milk mixture that wouldn’t fit in the pie shell.  The whole point of making the quiche was to use up leftovers, not create more of them.  I decided to make a second, smaller, quiche to avoid another leftover situation.  I tore up some stale bread (getting rid of more excess) and covered the bottom of a small pie plate with it to make a crust of sorts and then filled it up with the dairy mixture.  It worked out fairly well as a lighter and faster version of quiche.  It was also a decent way to use up the ends of bread loaves that accumulate on the counter because Dad always buys and starts a new loaf before finishing the old one.

 

Gelato- because… well no reason really, I just like gelato.  This one was peach, apricot, lime and ginger, (if I couldn’t put it in the coconut ice cream, it was going somewhere!).  The peaches were fresh from Niagara.  You can’t really go wrong with gelato… of course I forgot to churn it, but these things happen to the best of us.

 

In other news my new favourite drink is Jamaican ginger beer.  I love it.  It’s especially good with fresh squeezed lime and dark rum.  There’s that lime and ginger combination again, lately I want to put it in everything.  Eventually I’ll run this flavour into the ground and get hooked on something else… Until that time it will be lime and ginger for everyone!

 

Today's pictures are cold rolls, the quiches, a chocolate cheesecake with raspberry and mango topping (made for Dad on the day the sailboat went in the water), and a black forest cake with chocolate ganache and cherry ice cream for Mom's birthday.

 I've been playing around with ice cream making lately.  I was motivated to do this on a  particularly hot day when I remembered making homemade ice cream many moons ago, (around 4380 moons if you want a number, our ice cream machine hasn’t been used in at least a decade and I’m gauging even more than that).  I remember it tasting completely different from anything I'd ever had from the store.  It was creamier, richer and it had depth.  We used to keep fresh made ice cream (while it lasted) in an old margarine container and I would sneak spoonfuls of it from the freezer when no one else was around.  Unfortunately, the ice cream maker seemed to be a novelty item that quickly fell into disuse in my house.  The freezing tub took up too much space in the freezer and the whole thing was eventually packed into its box, not to be opened again until years later.  It was never thrown out though and survived the move to a new house.  Up until a couple weeks ago it remained in its first landing spot- the basement, gathering dust on a shelf with a variety of other items, (extra kitchen tiles, pieces of a water bed that never got reassembled after the move, a foot spa, a coleman lantern, some old ski boots...).  After having picked a flat of strawberries and being unsure of what to turn them into, I resurrected the ice cream maker for some good old fashioned strawberry ice cream.  I was delighted to find that all of the pieces were in the box and even more delighted that the machine could still turn out a damn good spot of ice cream, just like when I was a kid.  It was good, but not perfect.  I didn’t churn the ice cream enough so it wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be, but the flavour of the fresh strawberries more than made up for any inconsistencies in texture.  After getting off to such a great start, I was eager to make more ice cream.  I decided to stick to the basics and make chocolate.  I had bought some Mexican chocolate, but it turned out not to be the kind that I had been looking for (with cinnamon in it) and I made the ill-fated decision to use it in my ice cream.  Not only was this chocolate not what I was looking for, but it was grainy, not really chocolately at all, and basically tasted like granulated sugar mixed with a little cocoa powder for colour.  I don’t know why I thought this sub-par chocolate could be improved by turning it into ice cream.  It could not.  The ice cream turned out just like the chocolate from whence it came, grainy and decidedly lacking in chocolate flavour.  This didn’t mean the end of my ice cream making though, I was learning valuable lessons: churn more often, don’t use inferior ingredients.  My third and most recent foray into ice cream making has been the most successful.  At the Farmer’s Market last week Dad and I bought some white peaches.  They seem to be a trend lately as we’d been hearing about them on quite a few cooking shows.  August’s issue of Bon Appetit is also full of peach recipes so I had no shortage of ideas on what to do with them.  I ended up not using any of the recipes I had already seen and instead invented some gelato.  We were all out of cream and I had no intentions of going anywhere to buy some, (in my battle against making superfluous trips to town, I think I’m finally starting to win) so gelato was an easy choice as we had plenty of milk in the fridge.  The peaches became quite ripe before I had gotten around to doing anything with them and I realized that if I didn’t use them almost immediately I would lose my chance.  Into the blender went the peaches (pitted and peeled), with some milk, sugar, fresh picked raspberries, (I had gone berry picking with Mom) and grated ginger for a nice kick.  From the blender the mixture went into the ice cream machine and then the freezer.  I remembered to churn this one often and the results were great.  The gelato is a rich raspberry colour and each of the flavours are easily distinguishable while at the same time complementary.  Forget the normal flavours, experimenting with new flavours is where it’s at.  I’m coming up with all sorts of ideas for future flavours, (and am open to suggestions) but my next ice cream will have to be cherry because it will be for Mom’s birthday.  After that, all bets are off.

I decided to make foccacia tonight.  I had been thinking about it for a while and when I was at the Farmer’s market on Tuesday I got some feta and roasted red pepper spread that I thought would be a suitable topping.  The recipe I found was for the bread machine.  It was a garlic foccacia, and that sounded good to me except I decided to substitute one cup of whole wheat flour for one of the cups of white flour.  This usually isn’t that big of a deal.  However, I have a reoccurring problem with our bread machine- All of the recipes I find for bread machines generally conclude with “add ingredients as per manufacturer’s instructions”.  That’s all well and good for someone who still has the manufacturer’s instructions or for someone who read them at some point, but neither of those describe my current situation.  This means that every time I use the bread machine I wonder if things are going to turn out the way I want them to.  In general, they haven’t and I’m beginning to suspect that I should do some searching for the bread machine manual or just resume making bread the old fashioned way, without a machine.  Some mistakes however, are not due to a faulty recipe or a lack of manufacturer’s instructions but just straight up human error.  I threw all of the ingredients in the bread machine on the dough cycle and hoped for the best.  When the machine beeped at the end of the dough cycle, I took it out, put it on a floured surface, as I had been instructed to do and attempted to shape it into two rectangles.  I was supposed to then let the dough rise and bake it on a stone in the oven.  When I turned it out my dough seemed a little dense, there didn’t appear to be enough of it to form two rectangles.  This was a little odd, but stranger things have happened, I decided shapes didn’t matter and formed one big circle then put it on a pizza tray to rise.  I returned to my dough some time later, expecting it to have risen and to be ready to pop into the oven.  It was sitting on the tray, just as flat as I’d left it.  Hmm.  Not impressed.  Maybe it was the substitution of whole wheat flour that was the problem, sometimes whole wheat flour takes longer to rise.  I decided to leave it a little while longer.  When I came back to check on my dough, this time determined to put it in the long ago pre-heated oven, it was still flat as a pancake.  Maybe it would rise in the oven?  I put it in.  When the buzzer went off I looked in at my slightly inflated, (though by no means risen) “foccacia,” it was still pale and didn’t seem to have any colour to it.  I decided it wasn’t done and left it in.  I did this two more times before deciding that I was just going to garnish it the way it was, hopefully the addition of feta spread and olives would save it.  I was so annoyed with the thing at this point that I didn’t even want to try it.  Mom eventually took care of that for me and sliced into the flat bread.  It was dense and chewy, the opposite of foccacia.  I still couldn’t figure out what exactly the problem had been but was beginning to think that it couldn’t possibly be me, it must be the lack of manufacturer’s instructions.  I thought that I must be missing one key piece of information.  Dad walked into the kitchen and provided me with that missing piece of information.  He took one look at my flattened foccacia and announced “There’s no yeast in that.”  Sure enough, Dad was right.  I’m an idiot and forgot to add the yeast.  Sometimes you just can’t win.