Serious thought from the last day of 2009

I have been secretly worried about the Earth for some time now. But like most people, there's the conscious, but not knowing what can I do to help.

For a start I am suggesting you to see the film The Age of Stupid to get your mind set. There is also another motivating film In Transition 1.0 that gives you clear examples how people are genuinely worried and trying to get us out of this mess.

But nothing gets done if 0.1% people are involved. And lets face it most people are not even aware of the climate change issue. All they hear from the news is that government is introducing tax on CO emission and average (stupid) mind feels upset and thinks that all they do is increase taxes, how can I buy that new plasma tv now!

If that average person would take a proactive approach on climate warming and think about the little things they can do by sustainable living perhaps then there wouldn't be needed to have a tax on CO2 emission. Is it too much to ask from people to think?

Bottom line. I could make a big speech, but I won't and I'll let you do the searching. The main thing is to find ways to greener future. No one is going to knock on your door and tell you what you need to do next. Maybe in some places they are, but think how much money they are spending on it, by running a campaign to explain common sense. Simply start from this:

1) Please see these films.

2) Stop consuming!!! You don't need all those THINGS!

3) Eat local foods.

Good Bye 2009!

The day that the sun never came out

Another lazy morning where the entertainment options aren't that fun. So I Stick to home duties and hang on in here 'cos the afternoon is already on.

With the nasty weather outside the least thing I can think of is to go out for food shopping.

A quick pick in the freezer and voila! I have chicken breast as pretty much the only option on the menu... how exciting is that?

Chicken breasts aren't the most tasty or fun meal to cook, so what a heck do I do with this?

Google it!

In 0.23 sec google gave me 14,900,000 results with the key "chicken breast tasty"...

Obviously no-one in their perfect mind would go through nearly 5 million of results, so I don't know why

they even bother...

Anyway, in the first page I found the so popular top 10 of chicken breast recipes.

The draw gave me the marvelous:

"Blood orange chicken salad"

As mentioned above chicken breast was one of the few things in the fridge so all the rest was pretty

much made up, but

anyway I mention the recipe just as a reference.

So here's the improved recipe:

1 - Prepare the Vinaigrette: In a small bowl, whisk the juice of one orange, 1/2 red onion chopped, 3 soupspoons of olive oil, 1 soupspoon of vinegar, 2 teaspoons of mustard, 1 teaspoon of orange zest, salt and pepper to taste;

2 - Marinate the chicken breast with a couple of tablespoons of the vinagrette for 20 minutes.

3 - Throw the breast in the oven (200C), adding salt and pepper. 5 minutes on each side.

4 - Boil the Pasta;

5 - Boil the veggie medley! A salad can also be used alternatively.

7 - Cut the chicken breasts in eatable pieces;

8 - Cube a nice chunk of cheese;

6 - Mix everything in a large bowl - Chicken, pasta, veggies, cheese and the rest of the vinaigrette.

And enjoy your new tasty and exquisite chicken salad...

(Presentation suggestion)

The Baker gets some rest and the Cook is taking over

What does that mean now?

It means that I am replacing Daring Bakers challenge with Daring Cooks challenge for 2010. Daring Cook is basically all the salty dishes. Let's see maybe I stick to it, maybe get back to baking...

Since Joao hasn't proved himself as a great cake and pastry eater I will give it a try with salty dishes. You see this whole thing has a practical side. When its baked it needs to be eaten. So next post is going to be a salty meal. Stay tuned!

Daring Bakers Gingerbread House for Christmas

Little Gingerbread House

The December 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers' everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I must admit that I was lucky enough to grow up with a mother who was making gingerbread cookies on every single Christmas and some of the years we got more wild and built the gingerbread house. I remember that one year there was an accident with the house though, there was a little elf standing in front of the house holding a candle in the hand and when we weren't looking he set the house on fire. Anyway, we forgave him and continued our Christmas dinner.

I went with the Scandinavian recipe for the dough, since it's more from my side of the town. Yes, I did experience the same problem as everyone else that the dough seemed too dry, but I decided to ignore it. Since it was going to sit in the fridge for overnight, I thought that hopefully its better the next day. I was right! Dough was joined together much better, however it was quite difficult to work the cold dough, I had to put all my strength into the game. I did my own templates and designed my house rather smallish, taking account the fact that its only two of us consuming it, if any. I cheated a little bit and instead of sugar syrup I used melted chocolate to glue the bricks together.

Building in process

Scandinavian Gingerbread from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas

226g butter, room temperature

220g brown sugar

2 tablespoons cinnamon

4 teaspoons ground ginger

3 teaspoons ground cloves

2 teaspoons baking soda

100 ml boiling water

875g all-purpose flour

1. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until blended. Add cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Mix the baking soda with the boiling water and add the dough along with the flour. Mix to make a stiff dough. If necessary add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Chill 2 hours or overnight.

2. Roll the dough on a floured surface, cut required shapes and transfer these to the baking sheet.

3. Preheat the oven to 190'C. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until the cookie dough feels firm.

Leave cooling on flat surface to maintain the perfect shapes.

Christmas in Ireland celebrated with Pixies

In deed here we are back to the jolly season of christmas where all the beggars look cute and overweight baby Jesus will come to visit us.

I must confess I've been naughty but I still hope on my luck to get some candy in my sock.

To celebrate the holy holiday once again we're holding a little dinner/tea to the lonely souls of Dublin emigrants (3 in total). Of course there are other reasons involved, mostly the satisfaction of our stomachs with an unreasonable sized meal. I don't know how can I still consider having a feast, after being in Portugal for 10 days eating like a true swine, but I guess it's in my culture.

The preparations started quite ahead of the happening and for a change we're on schedule this time.

For this years menu we have Presunto with Melon (Yes, we found a melon in December! Go Carbon Footprint!) and a selection of filled (enchidos) and cheese. For the main meal we are having a pheasant stew with roasted potatoes and veggies. Aire is also intending to eat Sauerkraut, but not me! Blerg! (go and see in wikipedia).

Appetiser: chourico (sem cedilha), melon, presunto,cheese

Sauerkraut

Main meal: wild pheasant, roasted potatoes and veggies, sauerkraut

For dessert we're counting on an industrial tiramisu, which tastes much better than it sounds.

Industrial tiramisu, but still very good judging by the leftovers...

A selection of Portuguese pastries is still available for the strongest stomachs.

Pasteis de nata and Brendeiras de Natal

All this will go side by side with good wine brought all the way from home inside the ultra protective surfing booties!

No image available

With the christmas lights on, some candles here and there and a nice smell of cooking in the house, Merry Christmas everyone! Um Feliz Natal para todos! Häid jõule kõigile!

Enjoy yourselves, wherever and whoever you are...

Roasted veggie dinner

5 star dinner

Its winter here and we need to get our vitamins and minerals from somewhere, so I shuffled some veggies like baby potatoes, turnip, carrots, beetroots and green beans on the pan and in the oven they went with some olive oil and mixed herbs for 40 min or so. For a final touch I served it with some feta cheese cubes to give it a kick.

Cacamoons ( Macaroons )

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Ingredients

Confectioners’ (Icing) sugar: 2 ¼ cups (225 g, 8 oz.)

Almond flour: 2 cups (190 g, 6.7 oz.)

Granulated sugar: 2 tablespoons (25 g , .88 oz.)

Egg whites: 5 (Have at room temperature)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°F (93°C). Combine the confectioners’ sugar and almond flour in a medium bowl. If grinding your own nuts, combine nuts and a cup of confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a food processor and grind until nuts are very fine and powdery.

2. Beat the egg whites in the clean dry bowl of a stand mixer until they hold soft peaks. Slowly add the granulated sugar and beat until the mixture holds stiff peaks.

3. Sift a third of the almond flour mixture into the meringue and fold gently to combine. If you are planning on adding zest or other flavorings to the batter, now is the time. Sift in the remaining almond flour in two batches. Be gentle! Don’t overfold, but fully incorporate your ingredients.

4. Spoon the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch tip (Ateco #806). You can also use a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off. It’s easiest to fill your bag if you stand it up in a tall glass and fold the top down before spooning in the batter.

5. Pipe one-inch-sized (2.5 cm) mounds of batter onto baking sheets lined with nonstick liners (or parchment paper).

6. Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F (190°C). Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.

7. Cool on a rack before filling.

Excited I was to see the recipe for October challenge, Macaroons! I started to bake it and colored the dough lovely baby pink. Piped the biscuits on a try and off to the oven they went for 5 minutes. Took them out to heat the oven to 190 C degrees and no feet grew for my biscuits. Disappointed I was indeed. I wonder if the dough was too thick, although I did use the exact measurements. Also, the biscuits started to gain some color on top but later I discovered that the inside was completely uncooked and moist. Being disappointed with a result and all I didnt bother with fancy filling, just melted some milk chocolate with little bit of cream.

Daring Bakers Vols-au-Vent

The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

What a lovely challange! Well chosen! I couldnt see myself even on craziest baking times baking Vols-au-Vent. I must say that it was a second time for me to make puff pastry and I stayed 50-50 satisfied. Something was not right. I imagined that the dough would rise a bit more. I seemed as if it collapsed a bit as I took them out of the oven. Perhaps the industrial one has baking powder in it for staying so well structured. Oh well..

For the filling I chose something salty. Joao had his say here this time. He suggested mushroom, spinach and cheese filling. I added garlic from my side. I fried the mushrooms on the pan with garlic, added spinach, gave it a little toss. Sprinkled some flour on it for thickener, then some milk, to form nice sauce. When it all became nice and saucy then grated some mild cheddar in it. Came out pretty yummy.

So this is how these babies looked when coming straight from the oven. Bon Appetit!

Infamous Milan Cookies

After considering to renounce this months challenge, due to a very busy schedule, the portuguese little helper offered himself to bake it. As usual his initiave was rather... errr... compromised by all the external distractions offered by a day off. So in the end I was still very involved in the baking process.

I don't feel very possessive about the daring baking's chalenges, however I still feel responsible for their outcome and I just couldn't leave it to an overconfident and easily distracted Portuguese baker.

To make things easy we decided to bake only the milan cookies, since the timeframe was rather small. However it turns out that they dind't come out exactly like on the reference pictures. The dough was to liquidy and in the end it was quite complicated to give some thickness to the cookies. After the first attempt becoming a whole tray cookie, the following were kept to a minimum size in other to maintain their... individuallity??

Anyway, it was a challenge alright but in the end we made something similar to what was intended.

Here follow the intructions:

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

Milan Cookies
Recipe courtesy Gale Gand, from Food Network website

Prep Time: 20 min
Inactive Prep Time: 0 min
Cook Time: 1 hr 0 min
Serves: about 3 dozen cookies

• 12 tablespoons (170grams/ 6 oz) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 1/2 cups (312.5 grams/ 11.02 oz) powdered sugar
• 7/8 cup egg whites (from about 6 eggs)
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons lemon extract
• 1 1/2 cups (187.5grams/ 6.61 oz) all purpose flour
• Cookie filling, recipe follows

Cookie filling:
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
• 1 orange, zested

1. In a mixer with paddle attachment cream the butter and the sugar.
2. Add the egg whites gradually and then mix in the vanilla and lemon extracts.
3. Add the flour and mix until just well mixed.
4. With a small (1/4-inch) plain tip, pipe 1-inch sections of batter onto a parchment-lined sheet pan, spacing them 2 inches apart as they spread.
5. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 10 minutes or until light golden brown around the edges. Let cool on the pan.
6. While waiting for the cookies to cool, in a small saucepan over medium flame, scald cream.
7. Pour hot cream over chocolate in a bowl, whisk to melt chocolate, add zest and blend well.
8. Set aside to cool (the mixture will thicken as it cools).
9. Spread a thin amount of the filling onto the flat side of a cookie while the filling is still soft and press the flat side of a second cookie on top.
10. Repeat with the remainder of the cookies.

The best picture from the best possible angle from the Milan Cookies.