Easy Cheese Danish

After thinking about it for a good month or more, I finally got off the fence and made the Barefoot Contessa Easy Cheese Danishes. They were pretty good and certainly easy to make.

First, you cream together cream cheese and sugar...then add in a bit of salt, vanilla, and in my case, a teeny tiny bit of almond extract. The recipe calls for ricotto and lemon. I didn't have ricotta on hand and didn't want to buy a whole tub just for 2 tbsp. And those who know me know my hatred of lemon in places where it doesn't belong - like danishes and cheesecakes.

Then two egg yolks...

Which leave you with a more yellowy filling. Ok, filling done (I said it was easy)


I took two sheets of defrosted puff pastry and rolled them out a bit - mainly enough to get rid of the fold creases. Cut each sheet into four large squares, put a heaping tablespoon blob of filling in the middle, then fold over the corners, sealing with egg wash. Then I brushed the whole top with egg wash.


20 minutes in a 400 degree oven later, voila.


These were quite tasty. Things I might change in the future - add a dusting of powdered sugar to the top or a very simply plain white sweet glaze. I may also add in a tbsp or two of sour cream to bump up the "tangy" factor. But regardless, this was a terrifically easy recipe with tasty results.

Eggs benedict

So, Mr. R roundly enjoys eggs benedict. Since we had a long weekend, I decided to try my hand at this dish, even though Hollandaise does little for me and I have egg issues anyway. I made the Hollandaise first (well, and by "made" I mean, failed at making).

First, I melted a stick of butter on the stove. Easy enough.

Meanwhile, I mixed what I thought was 1 1/2 egg yolks, some salt and pepper, in the blender. Gave it a little whirl. Then poured in the hot butter in a thin stream while blending. Then added a squirt of lemon.


The whole measuring eggs things came back to bite me - the sauce was too thin, too lemony, and just plain gross. Mr. R tried some on his eggs and didn't have a great report. Oh well.


Meanwhile, these are my first-ever poached eggs. Not too shabby?


I could only handle one egg at a time, maybe two, so the eggs that were cooked earlier went back into the water to heat up a tiny bit.


And the Canadian bacon and English muffins toasted in the oven (wow, a very international breakfast, no?)


Buttered muffin topped with bacon


and there's the eggs on top (with potatoes on the side). This was really quite tasty. Not my favorite breakfast ever (apart from the potatoes, those are always a favorite) but not too bad for a first effort.

Muffins

I had frozen berries to use, so I went ahead and made another delicious batch of the Barefoot Contessa Blueberry Coffee Cake muffins. Super delicious. I heart them. Half the batch went to Mr. & Mrs. Elle and half stayed home with me. To devour. A lot of them.

For example, with a large mug of coffee when I was home by myself on Friday morning:


See the berry goodness??

Breakfast for dinner

Mr. R was in a decidedly cranky mood this week, so I decided to lighten his spirits with a lovely breakfast for dinner night - and an excellent one at that. No namby-pamby pancakes for us! Only sausage gravy and potatoes will do! Puts hair on your chest!

First, I baked off several red potatoes while I was baking zucchini bread. Meanwhile, I got the sausage going:


Here are the 90% cooked potatoes, all chopped up and ready for a skillet:

Once the sausage was just shy of being fully browned, I added in 1/4 flour (this was too much for a "small" batch of gravy, just fyi - will use a bit less next time):


And stirred and stirred until the flour was cooked, then added in a hefty splash of milk:

Then Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper:


And then the thickening occurred...


Meanwhile, I'd sauteed some onions in a bit of olive oil, and tossed the potatoes in to crisp up a bit:


Mr. R prepared some eggs for himself, and then fixed his plate of glory - potatoes, biscuits, sausage gravy, and eggs. It was a fab dinner.

Pancake goodness

After seeing this post on Smitten Kitchen, I'd been craving blueberry pancakes. I knew that they would be my Sunday breakfast treat. I must confess, however, to NOT making a batter from scratch. I know it is super easy and better than mixed, but we have a backlog of various pancake mixes to use up, so I cheated. Flog me, if you must. That being said, I really kind of like this Krusteaz buttermilk mix. It has a lot of good flavor.

Anyways, here's the mix. Very boring in a shockingly matchy-matchy bowl.


1/4 c pancakes onto the griddle, then frozen blueberries were added on top (making them this way prevents the blueberries from getting smooshed)


Flip!


And serve - I opted for some powdered sugar (which got a little messy) and Mr. R had syrup. They were super tasty - like having little pockets of hot blueberry jam right inside the pancake!

The Foods of Ladies Weekend

So, another Ladies Weekend has come and gone. And what did we eat??

Well, first off, a large batch (actually 2) of sangria was made

We also revisited the jalapeno-bacon wraps. Delicious.


Miss K made these delicious English muffin crab cheesy puff things. I want more.


An insane cheeseboard - thanks in part to Grandpa's Cheesebarn.

On Saturday, we hit up the Irish Harp pub in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We had burgers:


Shepherd's pie:


And a steak and Guinness pie:


Oh, and beer and cider:


Then we hit up some local wineries:

Sunday morning, Miss M fed us well - including an asparagus and potato tart:



with fruit and a grapefruit zabaglione


And corned beef, cheese, and rye scones, which were quite tasty


We ate lots of other stuff too....but I don't want us to come across as TOO piggy after all...

Copycat sticky buns

So, Miss M called me and asked a question about what type of flour to use for sticky buns. She and Miss K had seem something on Throwdown with Bobby Flay re: sticky buns and were prompted to make them. After talking with her on the phone, I set down my book and turned on the TV, and lo and behold, the same episode of Throwdown was on. I was bored at home (Mr. R being away and all) and decided to make the sticky buns with a few modifications (since I didn't want to go out for any ingredients).

Now - I've blogged about my own cinnamon buns before. And those are pretty good cinnamon buns. But I was interested in trying a true "sticky bun" recipe - a breakfast concoction dripping with sugar and caramely goodness.

Since I didn't have any high-gluten flour on hand, I decided to search for another brioche recipe. That was how Joanne Chang was referring to the bread base for the sticky buns in her recipe. I remembered that Ina Garten included a homemade brioche recipe in Barefoot in Paris, so I modified that recipe slightly (upped the sugar, slightly upped the flour, lowered the salt just a bit). I prepared the brioche dough and let it rise overnight in the fridge.

This dough was interesting - it was very very soft and eggy. Here I am being proper and putting in eggs, one at a time:Knead dough, KNEAD
Hello my good friends - toss, in chunks, two sticks of butter into the dough as it whips around on the dough hook
Prepare a bowl to receive the dough - nothing bad ever came out of a buttered bowl
And our extremely sticky dough mass goes into said buttered bowl for a chilly night in the fridge
Here is the brioche dough after a solid 14 hours of rising in the fridge and coming to room temp
I prepared a very sandy cinnamon/white sugar/brown sugar mixture to fill the dough later on. The recipe calls for only brown sugar - but I decided to be anti-authority and put in a mixture of white and brown.
Now it is time to prepare the GOO - Melt the brown sugar and the butter
Then, off the heat, add the honey, cream, and some water. Hello Mr. Bear - give me your honey
Meanwhile, over on the island, the dough had to be rolled out to 1/4 inch thickness. I was close
And sprinkled with the sandy mixture. It was like playing at the beach.
I sprinkled some nuts over the sandy mixture - a mixture of pecans and walnuts mostly, but also some almonds on about 1/3 of the rolls, just for kicks. And rolled 'r up - a bit tricky given the delicacy of this dough, but I got it. After the rolling, this log of doughy goodness was sliced into 1"/1 1/2" slices.
Prepare the pans with "Goo"
Then nestle the naked buns in said Goo
Put the pans back in a warm place to rise for another 2-3 hours - this was at the 2 hour mark
Then bake at 350 degrees until browned. NOTE - Maybe it is due to using the lower-gluten AP flour, or my oven, or a combination of the two, but these buns were ready WELL ahead of the 45 minute mark in the recipe - more like 30 minutes. So keep an eye on them! As you can see, I need larger baking pans to prevent the evil triangle sticky bun.Let them cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto the serving platter to behold the gooeyness:These were definitely tasty - a departure from my standard cinnamon bun. If I make them again, I will definitely up the cinnamon. The recipe only called for 1 tsp, and I just really wanted more cinnamon flavor. These weren't particularly tricky to make - but you do have to allow a lot of time to make them. It would be a pain to try to make for, say, a gathering of friends at your house at 9 am on a Saturday morning. And I'm not 100% sure the buns would be well served to do a slow rise in the fridge, sitting in the goo, overnight. Will have to experiment more in the future!