The Dutch national soccer team had a big welcome party in Amsterdam today. half a million rowdy provincials came to town and yelled and screamed and were drinking beer before noon. The team took a boat tour through the canals, and one of the canals they went through was not even 50 yards from my office. Lots of screaming, yelling and vuvuzela’s were heard. And some nutcase started (and got a whole crowd of people to join in) singing ‘We are the champions of the world’, I’m assuming he hasn’t watched the final OR seen any news in the last few days.
The stupid festivities (which other country throws a humongous party for people who DIDN’T win) caused public transport to quit riding in in the city center. After work this meant I had to walk 35 minutes to the nearest tram stop. It’s usually a half a minute walk.
Next to all the craziness, it was crazy warm in our condo when I got home. Our condo is very well insulated, not only because of the windows and walls, but mostly because there are 8 layers above us. This means that it takes forever for our house to actually get warm in summer. But once it has, there’s no way to get the heat out of the place until the end of summer. Sure, you can get it comfortable as soon as you open windows and/or doors, but it’ll be hot when you enter.
Coming home this way lead me to crave burgers. Don’t ask me why, but it did. I wanted bacon burgers, but I only had cubed bacon. The solution, adding cubed bacon into my burgers.
Yes, these burgers were a little out of the ordinary, but absolutely amazing. With bacon and cream cheese, fresh ground very lean beef, nice seasonings and lettuce, tomatoes and grilled sweet onions on top. You wouldn’t believe how easy they are to make, if you own a meat grinder. And -don’t run away- they are relatively low-fat!**
After eating these burgers, all was better in the world. I didn’t even put ketchup or mustard on them, they didn’t need it, they had all the flavor in the world and then some.
[print_this]Amazing Bacon Burgers (recipe makes 2)
- 250 grams of cubed beef (I use poulet, which is odd sized leftover steak and top round pieces, usually sold to make soup)
- about 20 to 50 grams of uncooked bacon bits
- a generous amount of fresh ground pepper
- 2 pinches of pink himalayan salt
- a generous amount of ground dried garlic
- a generous amount of dried herbes de provence
- a good sprinkle of Pikes Peak Butcher Rub (or your favorite steak seasoning)
- 1 tbsp (heaping) of cream cheese**
Combine the beef and bacon bits and grind them together coarsely. Add the cream cheese and all the seasonings and mix it very very well unless you have a homogenous mass of meat and cheese (And you don’t see blobs of cheese anymore).
I love the use of the word homogenous… can’t help it!
Form 2 burgers by kneading the meat for a little (it becomes a little stickier that way and stays together even though you’re using amazingly lean beef), the rolling a ball and flattening it. Grill to your desired doneness.
Serve on hamburger buns with lettuce, grilled sweet onions and tomato, or any other veggies you’d like with it.[/print_this]
This burger has an amazingly distinct, yet subtle (yes that’s possible!) bacon flavor. You don’t really taste the cheese, but it does seem to pull everything together, flavorwise. I can’t really explain it, this just works. It’s just so dang tasty!
**I accidentally only had ‘light’ cream cheese in the fridge, which works fine, so all in all this isn’t high in fat, there’s only a tiny bit of bacon compared to the beef and lettuce and tomatoes aren’t really known for their fat-content either. So you can totally eat this without your conscience playing up!
So yeah, I’ve talked about loving cinnamon rolls before, right? And I’ve given you the quick-and-dirty-and easy version. Well since I woke up early this morning on the count of having to use the bathroom and it being 928363839 degrees in our bedroom, I decided to make cinnamon rolls.
It’s funny how the mind works.
This weekend is filled with eating out. Tonight we have a ‘trailer trash’ themed bbq party, which means no cooking dinner. Tomorrow my mom-in-law is celebrating her birthday, which means we’ll travel to Tilburg and have dinner there. With it being the World Cup final and Holland being in the race for World Champion, it will likely be quiet on the road. Which is good by me. Very good! I don’t care for soccer much, or anything at all. I do however love being able to drive without any traffic on the road.
Anyways, this weekend won’t be filled with cooking exciting dinners, as I’d usually like on weekends, so I guess cooking breakfasts that takes actual work, will do.
Often our breakfast is something quick and easy, I just buy a can of croissants, roll them and pop them in the oven. I might add some chocolate, cheese or almonds to them, but essentially, they’ll just be the quick canned things.
Other standard, quick breakfasts include focaccia (half-baked, bought from the store), or just bacon and eggs, maybe toast, or just a slice of bread with a boiled egg, or cold meats and cheeses. So it’s not THAT often that I actually cook or bake something. And if I do, it’s usually something quick, like biscuits from my pre-made-mix.
But today, with waking up because of the 2927363 degrees in our bedroom, I’m actually baking. Combining dough, milk, yeast, sugar, cinnamon and some other stuff to make wonderful cinnamon rolls that actually, truly, no lie, totally rival Cinnabon™. Seriously, if you have time on your hands regularly, or a really big freezer. Make these, and never buy them anymore. You’ll save tons and tons of cash and you’ll save yourself from eating stuff you can’t pronounce, or don’t want to pronounce. To those of you who have a secret love affair with cinnamon rolls (shhh, I won’t tell anyone!), but don’t want to stuff their body with (high fructose) corn syrup, or artificial coloring, or artificial flavoring (why, it’s got cinnamon, it doesn’t need artificial stuff!), here’s your recipe.
Now credit where credit is due, I altered this recipe from Allrecipes, I didn’t come up with it all by myself. However I did improve them myself.
I’ve got to warn you. This is not a non-caloric dish. Not at all. It uses butter -real butter, don’t use margarine- and sugar, lots and lots of sugar, and obviously flour. So if you’re an Atkins-diet-fan wo doesn’t believe in indulging, stay away from this recipe. Though, for the sake of this recipe and 99 percent of everything on this blog, I urge you to reconsider Atkins. Trying to lose weight can never, never ever be more important than eating carbolicious foods, especially these rolls! Just so ya know, they’re THAT good!
The best cinnamon rolls in the world (recipe yields 4 large rolls)
For the dough
- 1/3 cup warm milk
- 1 small or medium sized egg (more egg won’t hurt it)
- a scant 2 tbsp melted butter
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp and 2 tsp white sugar
- 3/4 tsp instant or dry active yeast
- 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
For the filling
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- 2 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- soft butter
For the icing
- 1/3 package cream cheese
- 1 cup powdered sugar (1 heaping tsp replaced by home made vanilla sugar)
- 1 tbsp and 1 tsp soft butter
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (only if you don’t have the home-made vanilla sugar)
Start with the dough. Add the (warm, not hot)milk, yeast and sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer. Wait a couple of minutes to give it the chance to get active, add the salt and the egg and stir the mixture (using your dough hook). Add in the flour, knead it with your dough hook until it comes together, then knead another minute or 2 (still using the dough hook, it’s okay to be lazy, the cinnamon rolls will immediately forgive you.)
Place a moist kitchen towel over the bowl and place the bowl in a warmish, non-drafty place and let it rise for at least an hour (Placing it in your oven with just the light on will work wonderfully.)
In the last minutes of your dough rising, prepare the cinnamon/sugar mixture.
Turn out the dough, then roll the dough out into a rectangle. As soon as it’s fairly thin and an acceptable shape, slather a generous layer of softened butter over the dough. Make sure everything is covered.
Now sprinkle the cinnamon/sugar mixture over the butter, all the way to the edges. Don’t worry about losing some, you’ll just sprinkle that over their tops once they’re in the baking dish. Roll up the dough, starting on the narrower side. Then cut the roll in 4 even pieces and place them in a baking dish that fits your rolls as snug as possible.
Start pre-heating the oven (200 celsius, 400 F) and let the rolls stand in a non-drafty place to rise for another 15 to 30 minutes, they’ll be visibly bigger.
Now bake them in your pre-heated oven until they’re done, nice and brown on top and fully cooked on the inside, about 20 to 30 minutes. As soon as they’re brown, take them out of the oven and invert them in the pan, so the melted cinnamon/sugar mix that’s moved down, will be evenly distributed. Pull apart the rolls, if you see they’re not fully cooked in the middle (where the 4 attach), just place them back in the oven for 10 more minutes or so.
During the last minutes of baking, beat the cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla sugar and butter together to create the icing. Spread on top and enjoy these warm out of the oven. Yummmm
Notes about this recipe:
Brown sugar: in Holland they sell dark and light brown sugar. The color is determined by the amount of molasses still present in the sugar. I like to go halfsies on light and dark, but either will work fine. Just try to avoid plain white sugar.
Regarding the dough-rolling: I like to use pastry cloth for all my dough handling. You don’t have to keep sprinkling flour, and it never sticks. I love using pastry cloth.
About the baking dish: My smallest baking dish is still a little on the large size for just 4 rolls, so I use this handy-dandy little trick, I place 2 little cups (or a ramekin, or whatever oven safe smaller thingie you have that fills the gap) inside the dish. The thing is, you want to keep them upright and close together to get maximum gooeyness going on in that pan.
About the cinnamon: Using good quality cinnamon really is the key to making great cinnamon rolls. I used Vietnamese Saigon Cinnamon which, if I don’t store it in an airtight container, smells up the entire house. So fragrant, so cinnamonny. That’s what you want. If you can’t clearly smell your cinnamon, don’t bother using it as no smell means no flavor and cinnamon rolls without cinnamon flavor is just sad!
I made spaghetti alla carbonara tonight. It was very tasty, though a little on the cheesy side. This due to the fact that I only had parmigiano and no pecorino. Even though pecorino is cheese as well, it does add a different (And therefor less overly cheesy) taste.
It was still very very very good though. So good in fact, that this is the best picture I have available.
Recipe will follow the next time I make it, when I actually get pictures done!
Sometimes, when it’s too hot out, you just completely space out in the supermarket. You want to linger near the open refrigerators, walk around there for hours, until they kick you out stating ‘we’re closed now lady, and why the heck did you spend 5 hours here if all you’re buying is a head of lettuce’.
Well okay, that didn’t really happen, it could’ve though.
As I was spacing out and cooling off, I tried to figure out what to make for dinner. I’d already grabbed a bad of leftover frozen lime-cilantro rice, so I needed something to go with it.
I decided on lettuce wraps. I have no idea why I did that, but I did.
And while I was spacing out in the coolness of the refrigerators, I grabbed some simple steaks and a head of lettuce.
I got the rest of the groceries, went home and eventually started cooking. I marinated the meat, which turned out awesome. So awesome in fact, that I wish I’d measured out and written down the exact ingredients.
Then I grilled my stips of steak, and some onion and pepper, and grabbed my lettuce to assemble the whole thing, only to find out that there was no way or assembling nice looking wraps. In my ‘oh-I-love-the-cold-so-much’ state of mind, I’d grabbed iceberg lettuce. NowI love the crispyness of iceberg, but HOW ON EARTH, was I going to assemble ROLLS from crispy stuff???
Needless to say, that wasn’t going to happen. I ended up just dumping all of the ingredients on a leaf of iceberg and folded it close in a feable attempt to still make something wrap-like. They ended up, as you can see, as big, giant ugly non-wraps. They did taste great, so I’m not complaining too much. But I surely won’t be serving this to company any time soon (or at least not before I try it out with other non-crispy lettuce!
[print_this]Mole inspired marinade (all the ingredients to taste)
- vegetable oil
- ground chili peppers
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- a pinch of salt
- some mexican chocolate (powdered)
- some pre-made powdered mole mix
- lime juice
Combine everything in a bowl, mix well, dunk your steak in it, let it marinade for a minimum of 15 minutes, or a couple of hours, in the fridge. Grill the steak, Enjoy!
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Yesterday it was hot out here. So hot my boss decided we all could leave the office at 3. This did or did not have anything to do with a soccer world cup quarter final that my country was or was not competing in at 4. I didn’t really care what the reason was, I was happy to get out of my stinky, sweaty, way too hot office. I really need to buy a fan.
So I went home, poured myself a big cold diet coke and decided I’d much prefer frozen coke. Then I figured, hey, I have an ice cream maker, I bet it can make frozen coke too. So I turned the machine on, poured half my bottle of diet coke in there and figured the churning-freezing thing would give me the delicious summer drink I love to have on hot Colorado days.
I don’t know if it was the fact that the coke was diet, and that there’s sugar needed to make it work. Or that an ice cream maker just churns too slowly, but it was an epic, epic FAIL. The diet coke froze to the botten and sides instead of moving around and somewhat freezing throughout. my ice cream maker started making a funny sound, so I went and looked and it was moving, but in shocks splashing diet coke everywhere. It just kept getting cought on the pieces of solid frozen diet coke on the bottom and sides.
I wonder if it just needs to move around faster to prevent it from sticking, if it needs to be more sugary, or that frozen coke is just chemically altered so that I actually don’t want to drink it anymore. Anyways, I’ll just go back to my old method of placing the coke in a shallow bowl in the freezer and scraping a fork through it every 20 minutes, much like you’d make a granita.
What does work in an ice cream maker, is ice cream. All kinds of ice cream, or sherbet or whatever is not coke that splashes around. Anything that can deal with a slow churn and doesn’t freeze to the sides in an instant, works wonderfully.
2 weekends ago I mentioned that I was going to make ice cream in my then brand-spanking-new ice cream maker. And I did. And I will give you the recipe and you will ooooohhh and aaaaahhh over the deliciousness and simplicity of the whole deal. Really, making ice cream is sooo much easier and more fun than I ever imagined. And this time L actually took a whole lot of photos of the process. Which is good. You can see all the stages toward deliciousness.
I truly truly love making ice cream and wonder why I hadn’t done it before. The only thing is egg whites. What to do with all the leftover egg whites. I still have a dozen angel food cupcakes in my freezer, so I don’t really want to make more of that. I don’t really like egg white omelets, I just miss the yolk too much. What do you do with your leftover egg-whites. Just tossing them seems like too much of a waste.
Today I think I’ll make gelato alla nocciola, or hazelnut ice cream. Hazelnut is without doubt my very favorite ice cream flavor. Sure I love, love, love me some Baskin Robbins pralines and cream, and Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough, or plain old cookies and cream, or Haagen Dasz vanilla swiss almond, but if I could pick anything in the world, I’d go for italian gelato, nocciola flavor.
I found a recipe, in Italian, from an Italian website, that actually uses whole eggs (separated, but still yolk and white) for gelato alla nocciola. I will try that. If it’s not wonderful, I’ll try one of the other millions of recipes you can find, and I’ll go back to saving tons of egg whites. But for now I’ll try this. And I’ll let you know how it works out!
[print_this]Candy bar ice cream (recipe for about 1 quart or so)
- 1 1/2 candy bars (Mars, snickers, or some generic chocolate-caramel thing)
- 2/3 cup milk
- 3 egg yolks
- 1 1/3 cup heavy cream
- 1/2 cup caster sugar
- a pinch of pink himalayan salt
Combine the milk, sugar, salt and about half a candy far in a pan. Stir until all the candy bar has malted and it comes to a slow boil. Turn off the heat and let it cool off a slight bit while separating the eggs and putting the egg yolks in a bowl (I actually used a big measuring cup from which I could easily pour.)
Once the egg yolks have been beaten in their bowl very slowly pour the milk/candy bar mixture into your yolks while whisking feverishly. You want to go very very slow to prevent the yolks from cooking and you ending up with egg-piece-chocolate-ice-cream!Once all the milk has been incorporated into the egg yolks, pour the mixture back into your pan, turn on the heat very very low and stir constantly to make the custard. Make sure you scrape the bottom and sides so you don’t get lumps. Once the custard has thickened take it off the heat. Pour the heavy cream into the same bowl or measuring cup you’ve used before and slowly whisk in your custard. Make sure you scrape the pan and make sure you whisk so all is incorporated. Place the bowl in the fridge to cool off completely before churning it.
While it’s cooling, cut your leftover candy bar into little pieces.Assemble your ice cream maker, start it and pour your ice cream base in. Once it’s been churning for 5 to 10 minutes, slowly dump in your candy bar pieces. Keep churning for a total of 30 to 40 minutes until the ice cream has reached soft serve state. Serve yourself a bowl of the deliciousness, then put the rest into a freezer container and let it firm up completely in the freezer. Enjoy!!!
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