little feet, big sky

This year, the spouse-unit and I have been indulging in more desserts than we did last year. I put the blame for this squarly on my aunt in the U.K., as we spent the holiday wtih her and my uncle and cousin are quite taken with their “puddings”. The holidays were laden with everything from fruit pies drenched in custard to profiteroles and Christmas cake with cheese. Rather than recovering from this, I seem to following a “hair of the dog” theory and have started adding cooked desserts to our evening menu at least a couple of times a week. 

A regular favorite is the left-over fruit crumble. Here, I take any slightly-less-than-glowingly-fresh fruit and peel, chop, or otherwise prepare it into roughly 1” pieces and put it in a pie dish. I then make the following mixture: 

• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oat
• 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/3 cup butter, softened 

Spread the crumble mixture over the fruit and bake for 35 minutes in a 375° oven. While it’s quite good on it’s own, the spouse-unit likes his with creme fraiche, and I prefer mine swimming in not-too-sweet custard. 

Good fruit choices include apples, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, pears and mangoes.

Fan of the Secret? Or just trying to thinking more positively in your life? Gratitude Journal is a nifty little iPhone app that asks to write a few things you’re grateful for each day. You can rate your day up to 5 stars and add a picture to your daily entry. Simple, quick and just using it for a week has given me so many reminders of what’s good. :-) The main feature it’s missing is the ability to snap a pic form within the app itself; you can only add pictures that have already been taken. Other than that, I think it’s a neat addition to my daily iPhone usage.

[iPhone] Shopper, $.99 – Going shopping with Spice is almost a chore, and with postpartum brain, I find myself coming home with mustard instead of milk and Tampax instead of Twinkies. No more! If you’re the house-spouse, this app is a steal at $1. Yes, it’s a shopping list, but it’s a shopping list on steroids. Support for multiple lists (ie. stores, recipes) and an existing database of common items is nifty, but many apps have that. Shopper takes it a step further with notes, photos, prices, taxes, organizing by aisles AND custom templates for lists of lists of lists.. well, you get the idea. I hate any extra keystrokes, and this app makes it possible to add items in seconds. Which makes it much more likely I’ll remember the milk.

Baby’s got big plans.

Nothing says winter like pies, whether it’s sweet dessert pies, like apple or rhubarb, or savory pies like a quiche. What gets me though is the rolling of dough. Few things are more abhorrent than dragging out the plastic mat to put over our uneven tiled countertops, dusting flour, rolling out dough and then trying to transfer the dratted thing to it’s final baking destination. Of course, once I found out that you can make a half-decent pie crust without rolling anything in about 5 minutes, I now happily make all kinds of pies an quiches quite regularly. Especially quiches, as they are an excellent way to use up leftovers and those veggies hiding in the bottom of the fridge.

There are several no-roll pie crusts with varying ingredients, and I’ll start with my favorite. This natural no-roll pie crust is super simple and doesn’t use shortening, which I never have in the house. Perhaps that’s its only downside. See, as I understand it, what makes a pastry flaky is that solid fat against flour, right up until baking. This is why you typically have to crumble the butter with your fingers in the flour to make a mixture that looks like cornmeal, and why you have to keep pastry doughs so cold while prepping, rolling, etc. This is also why people use lard or shortening, since it’s still mostly solid at room temperature. If you’re up for it, a lard pie crust would probably turn out a little lighter or flakier and more flavorful. 

If you have the time or are aiming for something a little fancier, you can always stash a box of phyllo dough in your freezer. These paper-thin sheets of dough bake up into those perfect crispy layers, but you have baste each sheet in oil or butter and stack them before you can add your filling. Personally, I find the no-roll doughs to be faster, but my aunt can prep the phyllo sheets in her sleep. 

At some point, I’ll have to get over my fear of rolling. There are some things that just have to be rolled, like oatcakes. And it’s my dream to make perfect little fruit and nut oakcakes just like the Nairn’s ones, since they’re so darned expensive. 

The spouse-unit is taking off on a business trip; I feel so 60’s housewife.

Recently, I’ve been moving more and more to cast-iron cookware. It started when the spouse-unit bought two Lodge Logic skillets off Amazon a few years back, a 8-inch and a 10-inch. The 8” was for me to cook meat in, and the larger one a general purpose skillet. I didn’t use mine for much other than collard greens and bacon until recently when my mother left some curry reheating in my 10” Calphalon non-stick wok and ruined the coating.

I know it was a wok, but I loved that thing and used it for cooking virtually everything: fried eggs, curries, soup noodles, tossed pasta, you name it. I knew I wanted another one, but should I go non-stick again? Keeping a non-stick coating immaculate is a pain in the arse, and all it takes is one random scratch to being the ruining process. Maybe I should get one of those classic Asian iron or steel ones, like they have back in Malaysia. Anyhow, while I was trying to decide, I started using our cast-iron pans more. 

Needless to say, I’m hooked. My “little pan” has built up pretty good seasoning, probably from all the bacon. Seasoning is what makes a cast-iron pan non-stick. You can quick season a pan by coating the inside with some kind of neutral fat (canola/sunflower/coconut oils, lard, shortening, etc.) and placing it upside down in a 400 degree oven. (Don’t forget foil or a tray underneath to catch drips.) Leave it for an hour and the oil will have baked a coating onto your pan. It’s ideal to treat this coating as you would non-stick; stick to gentle utensils like wooden spoons and silicone spatulas, if you can afford them. Of course, if your seasoning gets scratched up and food starts to stick, you can just re-season it in the oven. Take that, Teflon! The routine is this: use, wash with gentle scrub brush and hot water. If something minor sticks, scrub it out with a salt and oil. Wipe dry. For that extra loving touch, I often extra-dry my pans on the stove on low for a few minutes, rub in a little more oil with a rag and heat again on low for a few more minutes. This really makes them look beautiful and ready to use. Since they can be a bit on the heavy side, we keep ours stacked on a back burner of the stove, with a paper towel between them.

My favorite cast-iron pans are from Lodge Logic. They’re well-sized, cheap, and come pre-seasoned, though the spouse-unit tends to season them again for good measure. (If you’re really on a budget, look to buy one used from garage sale or thrift stores; if it’s rusty, but not cracked, you can scour the rust off with steel wool and season away.) We have the 8” skillet ($13), the 10” skillet ($17), the 11” grill pan ($27) & grill press ($25), the 3-quart dutch oven and an aebleskiver pan ($32). On my mental wishlist is the 20×10” griddle/grill – perfect for everything from pancakes and chapatis to dosas, as well as a wok, pie dish and bread pan. 

You can really cook just about anything in cast iron, but if you need a little help getting started, I can recommend the Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook. It has some great recipes, including the super-fast Dutch Baby, as well as as a brief section on how to use and care for your cast iron. My clafouti didn’t quite come out right, but I deviated from the recipe so it might have been me. 

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