Summer Corn Chowder

Ok, so I jumped the gun a bit on the summer part of this recipe. With winter almost behind us, I'm eagerly looking forward to the end of April and the opening of our local farmer's market. Truth is, living in San Diego all those years and having fresh produce year round had me spoiled. Since I don't garden or can vegetables, I've had a lesson in how dear fresh produce can seem during the long winter months. What you can find in the stores is often outrageously expensive and sometimes rather tasteless. Our weather is warming and planting season has begun, so bring on all those lovely fresh farmer crops!

I did come across a stand of corn recently and decided to see if the kernels would be summer time sweet. They were and that's what prompted making this bowl of between season yummyness. Soup for the chill still in the air and corn for the coming of all things fresh and home grown.

One small non-cooking note on this recipe - cutting off kernels of corn takes a little bit of time, as compared to dumping out a can of corn. While I'm not sure if there would be a truly noticeable taste difference between fresh and frozen or canned, I absolutely love the process of using a knife to make those fleshy little kernels separate from the cob, landing in a pleasing pile of yellow. Every time I do this to a cob of corn, I'm reminded of Maw and Paw Simmons. I watched my grandmother cut the corn kernels for her husband countless times as a child and, later, my mom and I did the same thing for him. It's funny how these smallest and most mundane of tasks can instantly bring back memories of long gone times. Decades after their deaths, I can still experience a moment of remembrance and sweet bonding with my grandparents, via the humble corn kernel.


Summer Corn Chowder

Ingredients:
8 ears fresh sweet yellow corn, husked and silks removed and kernels cut from cob
3 Tbsp butter
5 slices bacon, cut into 1/4 to 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium yellow onion chopped (1 1/2 cups)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 clove garlic, minced
5 cups water
1 lb Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup half and half
1 Tbsp honey
2 - 3 Tbsp chopped fresh chives
Shredded cheddar cheese, for serving (optional)

Directions:
Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and bacon and cook, stirring frequently, until onion has softened and just starting to brown around edges, about 8 - 10 minutes. Add in the flour and garlic and cook 1 1/2 minutes. While whisking, slowly pour in 5 cups water. Bring mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, then stir in corn kernels and potatoes. Add in thyme and bay leaf and season with salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a light boil, then reduce heat to medium-low and allow to simmer, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.
Remove bay leave then transfer 2 1/2 cups of the chowder to a blender and blend until smooth. Stir the mixture back into the pot then stir in half and half and honey. Sprinkle each serving with chives and optional cheddar.

Chocolate Fudge Cake Donuts

Martin was out of town all of last week, which meant me time in the kitchen. Last time he was gone, I think I ate cereal every night for dinner - just because I could. This time, I decided to go a bit healthier with a big pot of corn and potato chowder. Once that was prepared and waiting for dinner every night, I realized I also wanted to indulge in some kind of treat. You can't go wrong with chocolate so why not cook up a batch of donuts? Really intensely chocolate donuts.  Mine didn't come out as perfect looking as the King Arthur ones but they sure did taste great with a big glass of cold milk. Corn chowder for dinner and a donut every morning for breakfast. Not a bad way to pass the week.

There's nothing remarkable about making up this recipe. The batter comes out dense. So much so that you can't really pour it into the donut pan wells - the process is more like dumping a bit into an opening and then using your finger to spread it evenly around the circle.

The only other thing to note is the "dutch process cocoa" ingredient listing. Every time I come across this specification of dutch process, I find myself having to google which cocoas are and which aren't. This time I stumbled on a quote that will probably stick with me in the future - one way to tell if your cocoa is dutch process or not is the price. Nestle's isn't. A lot of the brands in the store aren't. When you find the box that's considerably pricier than the others around it, that's likely to be the dutch process. For me, it was Droste - not surprising given the dutch name, and the $2 surcharge for the fancy dutch processing.

Chocolate Fudge Cake Donuts
Recipe from King Arthur Flour

Ingredients:
2/3 cup Dutch-process cocoa
1 3/4 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon espresso powder, optional
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips
2 large eggs
3/4 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons vinegar, white or cider
1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) melted butter or 1/3 cup vegetable oil

CHOCOLATE ICING, OPTIONAL (Icing optional? I think not, King Arthur)
1 cup chocolate chips
4 tablespoons milk or half & half

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease the wells of two standard doughnut pans. If you don't have two pans, simply bake the batter in two batches.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cocoa, flour, sugar, baking powder, espresso powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips. Set aside.
In a large measuring cup or medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, vanilla, and vinegar. You may notice some curdling of the milk; that?s OK.
Add the wet ingredients, along with the melted butter or vegetable oil, to the dry ingredients, stirring to blend; there's no need to beat the batter, just make sure everything is well-combined.
Spoon the batter into the prepared pan(s), filling them between 3/4 and full.
Bake the doughnuts for 12 to 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of one comes out clean.
Remove the doughnuts from the oven, and after 30 seconds or so, loosen their edges, turn the pan upside down over a rack, and gently let the doughnuts fall onto the rack.
For sugar-coated doughnuts, immediately shake the doughnuts in 1 tablespoon granulated sugar; add 1/2 teaspoon cocoa powder to the sugar for an additional touch of chocolate.
If you want to ice the doughnuts rather than shake them in sugar, allow them to cool completely before icing.
To make the icing: Combine the chocolate chips and milk or half & half in a microwave-safe bowl or measuring cup. Heat until the half & half is steaming and starting to bubble.
Remove from the microwave, and stir until the chips have melted and the icing is smooth.
Dip the top of each doughnut in the icing; or spread icing on the doughnuts.
Yield: 12 doughnuts.

Three Cheese Chicken Penne Pasta Bake

There's something new going on in my kitchen these days - I have a sous chef and his name is Martin.

As it's a known fact that my hubby is somewhat selective on what he likes to eat, I've decided he should pick some dishes he'd like to eat - and then he should help cook them up. When I first requested that he go online and find a few main dishes of his choosing, he seemed a bit confused. Or obstinate. Whichever one it was, he didn't follow through on my request until I issued a second perhaps more direct command that he come up with some recipes. 

This is one of three that he picked.  Interestingly enough, it's not something I would've ever chosen to make. I'm not always big on pasta in general and something about the spinach might've knocked me off picking this particular pasta dish. As we continue on with this experiment, I'm realizing I may get a bit of an education myself. While I think I'm always cooking with Martin in mind, letting him choose recipes has already shown me that he has his own surprising ideas about what tastes good and what he'd like to see on his dinner plate. In addition to the bonding time spent over pots and pans, we may each find out some new things about each other  - and how great is that? 35 years into a marriage and still on a path of discovery about who we are as individuals. Who knew cooking could be so revealing? 

Like the true overprotective and controlling mom I can be, I did a lot of the prepping before my not-so-young apprentice joined me in the kitchen. By the time he showed up, all the ingredients were measured and waiting for him to turn into our dinner. Maybe I'll leave more for him to do next time. As it was, my kitchen aide was heard exclaiming that parts of the cooking process were just as exciting as watching paint dry. Probably true, except if you fail to keep watch on the paint, it won't boil over and burn. 

Next time HE makes this dish,  I'll suggest a little more seasoning and cutting the chicken pieces a bit smaller. Otherwise, it was a fun first night of cooking together.

Three Cheese Chicken Penne Pasta bake

Ingredients:
1-1/2 cups multi-grain penne pasta, uncooked
1 pkg. (9 oz.) fresh spinach leaves
1 lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
1 tsp. dried basil leaves
1 can (14-1/2 oz.) diced tomatoes, drained
1-3/4 cups CLASSICO FAMILY FAVORITES Traditional Pasta Sauce
2 oz. (1/4 of 8-oz. pkg.) PHILADELPHIA Neufchatel Cheese, cubed (If you can't find Neufchatel cheese, I was told that 1/3 less fat Philadelphia cream cheese is the same thing)
1 cup KRAFT 2% Milk Shredded Mozzarella Cheese, divided
2 Tbsp. KRAFT Grated Parmesan Cheese

Directions:
Heat oven to 375ºF.
Cook pasta in large saucepan as directed on package, omitting salt and adding spinach to the boiling water for the last minute.
Meanwhile, cook and stir chicken and basil in large nonstick skillet on medium-high heat 3 min. Stir in tomatoes and pasta sauce; bring to boil. Simmer on medium-low heat 3 min. or until chicken is done, stirring occasionally. Add Neufchatel; cook and stir 1 to 2 min. or until completely melted.
Drain pasta mixture; return to pan. Stir in chicken mixture and 1/2 cup mozzarella; spoon into 2-qt. casserole sprayed with cooking spray.
Bake 20 min. or until heated through; top with remaining cheeses. Bake 3 min. or until mozzarella is melted.

Strawberry Pretzel Salad

This is another dish I took to Millie's for Easter dinner. My big surprise was coming to this blog to look up the ingredients needed and realizing I've never written the recipe up on here. I've been making this for years and assumed that, at some point, I would've recorded it on my cooking blog but, for whatever reason, it's been left off - until now.

Salad is somewhat of a misnomer since this comes out tasting a whole lot like a dessert. However you want to classify it, I love the taste of this dish. It's one of those recipes you can google on the internet and come up with many sites where home cooks have written up their version of how it should be made but the recipe I've always used comes from my friend, Pam.


Strawberry Pretzel "Salad" (wink, wink)

Ingredients:
2 cups crushed pretzels (I put my pretzels in a gallon ziplock baggie and then use a rolling pin to crush them.)
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) melted butter
3 Tablespoons plus 3/4 cup sugar
8 oz. package cream cheese
8 oz. carton Cool Whip
2  3 oz. packages strawberry gelatin dessert mix (strawberry gelatin dessert mix? haha...JELLO!)
2 cups boiling water
2  10 oz. packages frozen strawberries
1 small can crushed pineapple

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. For the crust, mix the pretzels, butter, and 3 tablespoons sugar. Press this mixture into a 9 x 13 pan. Bake for 7 minutes and set aside to cool. Beat together the cream cheese and 3/4 cup sugar. Fold in the Cool Whip and spread over the cooled crust. Refrigerate until well chilled. Dissolve the JELLO in the boiling water; cool slightly. Add the strawberries and pineapple, and pour over the cream cheese mixture. Refrigerate until serving time.

(I tried something new this time, with results still to be evaluated. We left Millie's with enough of the salad left over for Martin and I to have one future helping apiece. Using all my Emily Rules for Careful Freezing, I put those two portions in the freezer to see if they can be defrosted well at a later date. )

Italian Love Cake

My friend Millie and I were recently planning the Easter meal our families would enjoy together. I love this figuring out what you're going to serve part of holiday planning and I am especially grateful to have a friend to share the planning with. Martin's a great guy, but let's get real - Easter dinner with two people isn't nearly as fun as sitting down to a table ringed with guests from 4 months old on up to we old folks.

And, since I'm derailing a bit, I have to tell on Millie. First of all, her mother-in-law died on the Wednesday before Easter Sunday so I assumed she wouldn't be up to having guests just a few days later...but not so. She and Barry talked it over and decided to go ahead with their plans. As Millie put it to me, they both realized the choice would be to sit home alone and mope or keep the day as it was and be surrounded by family and friends. I think they made the right choice. 

When Martin and I came in to their home, bearing all kinds of foods, I had to laugh. Millie's dining room is elegantly beautiful and she had her table set in a manner worthy of a Southern Living photo shoot. As I was taking in the composed beauty of her Easter table, my eye happened to wander over to the corner of that lovely dining room where a big box sat - with a label saying "MY URN". I told Millie it was kind of appropriate, in some twisted and funny way, that her mother-in-law's urn joined us for a Resurrection Sunday dinner. 

Now, back to the planning stages for this meal. Millie decided she would have to provide banana pudding, as that is their family favorite so I offered to bring carrot cake, just because it has an Eastery feel to it. Later, however, it hit me that there would be no chocolate for the meal. Say what? That couldn't happen! With Millie's approval, carrot cake suddenly became an Italian Love Cake and the chance to try a recipe I've been eying for awhile. 

Mind you, I didn't have any high aspirations for this cake - I just wanted something chocolate. And edible, since it would be served to Millie's family.  What came out was a cake that was downright fun to make and tasted great. It's a little hard to describe but the finished product is more like a very light cheesecake topped with cakecake. But with a cake layer that comes out spongy but not soggy. I give up - you just have to try this cake to see what I mean!

CHOCOLATE ITALIAN LOVE CAKE  

(I've seen this attributed to both Paula Deen and Valerie Bertinelli)

Ingredients: 

1 package chocolate cake mix and the ingredients needed to make the cake, according to the package. (Usually eggs, oil, and water) * The recipe I found online recommended using Becky Crocker brand and I went with this. Mostly because that directive agreed with what my friend Iris always told me - if you're going to do a mix, may as well go with Betty because a woman is always going to have a better product in the kitchen. Duncan Who?????

2 lbs.  ricotta cheese

4 eggs

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1 (5.1 oz) package instant chocolate pudding mix

1 cup cold milk

8 oz. Cool Whip

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and spray a 9 x13 pan with nonstick spray. 

2. In a large bowl, mix together your cake mix, according to the directions on the box. Set aside.

3. In another bowl, using a hand mixer, beat together the ricotta cheese, eggs, sugar, and vanilla until smooth. 

*NOTE: THE FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS ARE CORRECT. THE LAYERS SWITCH DURING BAKING TIME.  (And how fun is that????)

4. Pour the cake batter into the prepared baking dish. Spread to fill the pan evenly. 

5. Once the cake batter is in place, spread the cheese mixture evenly over the top of the cake batter. Spread to cover the cake batter as best you can. (*And we all know, with that kind of instruction, the ricotta is not going to perfectly cover the batter. It doesn't, so just do the best you can.)

6. Bake the cake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely before frosting. (I got a little worried that my now topside cake had a crack down the middle but, when I looked at pictures online, every single blogger's cake I found had the same fault line!)

7. Once the cake is cool, stir the pudding mix and milk together with a whisk until combined. Carefully, fold the Cool Whip into the pudding mix until combined. 

Spread the pudding mixture on top of the completely cooled cake. Cover the cake and refrigerate at least 6 hours before serving. This is one of those cakes that taste even better the next day. And the day after that.  Matter of fact, it's now Friday after Easter and I've had a small piece every morning with my coffee. 

Fresh Apple Cake

I often associate apples with fall, saving recipes like this for when the air is crisp and leaves are dropping from the trees. There's nothing exclusively autumn about granny smith apples, however, and our temperatures have certainly been cold enough to warrant a warm, hearty cake such as this one.

It was my turn to bring a treat for the Wednesday morning Bible study. Last year, I attended all through the spring semester without ever having to bake anything, as I arrived in Parkville after the sign-up sheet had gone around. Then came fall and a new sign-up to bring treats...except I was still in San Diego so I missed that round of volunteering too! Finally, we came to January and the spring semester's worth of a whole new set of dates for treats. And this time, I couldn't worm out of my baking duties.

It's a funny thing about baking for a new group, for the first time. I found myself very nervous about the prospect of picking and preparing a dish that, hopefully, the ladies in my study would enjoy. When you cook, you do present some small aspect of who you are to others and, along with that expression, can come worry that your gift will be soundly rejected.

After a lot of going back and forth on what to make, I decided on the apple cake recipe that Elgie often brought to our small group in San Diego. Elgie is another of those navy wives who can, when called on, whip up foods that always please their intended audience. I've eaten her version of this recipe many times and always loved the moistness of the cake, as well as that sweet tang of apples.

Cutting up those granny smiths takes a little bit of time but the cake is, otherwise, easy to put together. My rendition went straight from the oven to church, arriving still warm as the sweet ladies of PHBC cut into it. Just as our small group in San Diego looked forward to Elgie showing up with her version, so the Bible Study ladies raved over warm apple cake on a very cold February morning.

Fresh Apple Cake

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1  1/4 cups canola oil or cooking oil
2 tsp. vanilla
3 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled and chopped (3 cups)
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted
sweetened whipped cream (optional)
apple slices (optional)

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9x13x2 baking pan and set aside. In a very large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon; make a well in the center of the mixture and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, combine eggs, oil, and vanilla: stir in the apples and nuts. Add egg mixture in the well in flour mixture, stirring just until moistened. (Batter will be thick). Spread batter in the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack for at least 1 hour. Serve lightly warm or at room temperature. If desired, top each serving with sweetened whipped cream and an apple slice.

Cooking Failure Two

Today I took a notion to make baked donuts. I've made them in the past with a great degree of success, so there was no reason to think that I'd encounter any difficulties in today's funfetti donut making session.

Funfetti is a birthday theme in this household, owing to Martin's years of making funfetti cakes for my birthday. Even though there are portions of THREE different birthday cakes still in the house from my big day on Saturday, I took a notion to whip up the donuts. Maybe I've been so conditioned to baking on Mondays that I can't stop myself! Or maybe I'm just that addicted to birthday funfetti.

I'll admit to having some qualms about using those colorful sprinkles in my donut dough. When you buy funfetti cake mixes, the jimmies they provide are always very hard, presumably so they can stand up to being baked. Even so, the blogger pictorial record of funfetti donuts showed a container of sprinkles exactly like the ones I found at Price Chopper, with close-ups clearly featuring beautiful, pristine dough interspersed with cheerful bits of bright colors. 

I followed every direction to the letter. Really. So why did my dough wind up muddied into an ugly murky green/grey color as those sprinkles bled into the donut mixture????? Oh, and as long as we're pondering mysteries of the universe, how come when I filled my donut wells to the exact same level shown in one of the many pictures of Blogger Lady's donut making experience, hers came out perfectly shaped while mine oozed over the wells, turning each donut into a rather amorphous blob. A dark, discolored and very unappetizing blob. 

Oh, the disappointment! Ironically, from the few tasting bites I took before dumping my donuts in the trash, they were absolutely delicious, assuming you could look beyond their unappealing and fairly unrecognizable as donuts appearance. 

So, the challenge is on. I must create a perfect funfetti donut. Right after I figure out how to make churros that don't look like turds.