Not so with the books I shoot. I make the hell out of those recipes. It starts because I need to make the recipe for a shot, but inevitably goes beyond that. I often fall in love with those dishes. My husband once accused me of never making the same dish twice; after shooting Dishing Up Washington, that’s about to change. Because now I know how to glaze braised meat.

To be fair, I’ve been braising meat for a while, and I always considered myself pretty successful with it. The meat was delicious and tender. But it never quite had that gorgeous glaze that I’d get in a restaurant. Now I know how, and I’m putting it to pretty amazing use, like with this glazed, braised lamb shank… a little play on Jess’s Beef Bourginon and Glazed Goat Shank recipes from the cookbook. I borrowed a little from one recipe, a little from another, for a dinner that is pretty darn awe inspiring if I do say so myself.

If you are braising, be sure to give yourself plenty of time. It’s not a process you want to rush any part of. You can also do most of the “work” on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and then wrap it all up to finish off just before dinner later in the week, if time is going to be tight.

Start with a really good lamb shank. You aren’t going to get a good braise if your meat isn’t fantastic.

I was lucky enough to be doing a little shoot in New Season’s Market for the Online Food Photography & Styling class that I’m currently teaching, and picked up a hefty shank from Umpqua Valley Lamb Farm in Riddle, Oregon. Umpqua’s lamb is sustainably grown, grass-fed and pasture raised by small farms in oregon. Rumor has it, they even feed their lambs tasty bits like broccoli! This is a farm I’d love to go visit sometime!

Anyway, back to the braising.

Salt and pepper it all over while you get a deep pot heating over medium-high heat with a healthy splash of oil on the stove top. You need a pot, with a lid, that is large enough to allow the shank to lay flat. But you also don’t want a pot that is too big… you need the shank to be submerge in the braising liquid. Trust me on this, find the right sized pot for your braise; it is well worth the trouble.

Once the pot is hot, place the shank in (any side down is fine), and give it a good sear. Leave it in that pot, untouched for a good 2 minutes at least. Then turn it to the next side. Sear all the sides this way. If the meat is still stuck to the pan, give it another minute before trying to turn it. When the meat is braised all over, take it out of the pot, and set it aside on a plate.

Now, you’ll want to add your aromatics & veggies. You can add what you like, but I like the simple combination of onion, garlic, celery and carrot. Pearl onions, leeks or shallots would be good in place of or in addition to the onion. A few sprigs of thyme are a nice addition, or a few stalks of Italian parsley (stems and all). Maybe a bay leaf if you like. It’s not fussy. Just cut some stuff up and toss it in the hot pan that has all the meat drippings (add a bit more oil if there is none on the pan), and turn the heat down to low so all the good stuff slowly cooks and doesn’t burn. Let it go until it’s kind of soft but not mushy. Onions will be translucent and golden rather than brown. Stir often. This will take around 10 minutes.

Get your oven preheating to 325F.

Now add your liquid to the pot and turn the heat back up to medium high. I like to start with wine. About 1/2 cup will usually do it. For lamb you can go with either red or white (I used white this time, but I might try with red, or even a nice dry sherry next go around). When that has reduced, it’s time to add the stock. This can be veggie, chicken or beef broth (home made is best, but the store bought stuff is fine too), depending on how rich you want your braise to be. Add enough to your pot that your lamb shank will be mostly submerged, with just the top 1/4 sticking out the top. The size of your pan will determine the amount, but it’s usually between a pint and 1 quart. Still on the stove top, bring the mixture to a very gentle boil. Once simmering, slide in the meat, and any juices that are on the plate, into the liquid and at top the veggies. Cover, and move the whole pot to the hot oven. Your work for now is done… go find something to do for 2 hours (or a little less, perhaps if you have a really small piece of meat).

When you come back, your meat should be done. It will have contracted and pulled itself off of its bone, and then relaxed again into melty goodness. I always thought braising ended here. In the past, I’d just grab the meat, and the braising liquid as is and serve. I did not know all about glazing. And the glazing is the magic.

So, here’s what you do. You take that meat shank (carefully now because it will be very tender), and set it aside on a plate and cover it with foil.

Then, you run the braising liquid through a fine sieve (careful it’s hot), retaining all the yummy juices and discarding the solids. They are just mush at this point anyway. Put the liquid back in the pot and over medium low heat, start to reduce it. You want it to reduce by a lot, until it starts to have this lovely sheen. This will probably take 10 to 15 minutes. Keep a close eye on it because it’s easy for it to suddenly get nice and glossy and then move past that point the moment you walk over to the other side of the house because nothing is happening. Once the glaze is done, you can put the meat back in, give it a turn to coat, and warm it back up over low heat while you finish preparing the rest of your meal.

You can also wrap up the whole thing at this point for dinner another night. When you serve, pour the glaze all over the meat, or place the glaze in a gravy dish and let folks glaze their own. Delicious!

The United Berries of Cobbler

I had fun making this two berry cobbler look like a flag, but there really is no need to separate the berries in this dish. The juices all run together anyway and the flavors meld beautifully. And, speaking of juices, this is a very juicy cobbler. If you like yours a bit thicker, feel free to increase the thickener a bit. But as it is the berry juices have a lovely velvety mouthfeel even though they run all over the plate.

This recipe comes in two parts. The first is the biscuit, which I swapped out with my favorite scone recipe instead. Scones topped cobbler? Yes please. The added bonus here is that I mixed in a few more blueberries into the scone batter for a beautiful look as well as added flavor. Anyway, make the scone batter up until the point that you are going to roll it out, and then set aside while you prep the berries.

Take clean and de-stemmed berries and place them into your baking dish so that it mostly fills it up. Then, take the berries back out of the pan, and stir in a couple of tablespoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, and about 2 teaspoons of the thickener of your choice (I used cornstarch). You’ll need to use your judgement on the amounts here, since your pan and berry size may vary. I used about 1 1/2 pints of smallish strawberries and about a pint of blueberries with those quantities. If you like, splash in some vanilla.

Place the berries in the baking dish, and then sprinkle with another tablespoon of sugar and the zest of 1 lemon. Then, drop on the scone batter. You can form them into small scones if you want and place them, or simply drop rough dollops, about 1/4 cup each.

Brush with melted butter, and bake for about 30 minutes at 375F until the scones are lightly brown and the fruit is fiercely bubbling. Let cool slightly before serving.

Happy Independence Day folks!

Not that doughnuts aren’t worth celebrating on their own right, but as it turns out, there’s a little more to this holiday than that. The first US National Doughnut Day was celebrated in 1938, by the Salvation Army, as a way to honor the women who served doughnuts to soldiers and to raise money to help those in dire circumstances at home during the Great Depression. According to Wikipedia (and, of course if it is on a wiki, it must be true… right, right?):

“About 250 Salvation Army volunteers went to France. Because of the difficulties of providing freshly baked goods from huts established in abandoned buildings near to the front lines, two Salvation Army volunteers (Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purvian) came up with the idea of providing doughnuts. These are reported to have been an “instant hit”, and “soon many soldiers were visiting Salvation Army huts”. Margaret Sheldon wrote of one busy day “Today I made 22 pies, 300 doughnuts, 700 cups of coffee.”

Well, that seems worth celebrating. How about some Fresh Cherry Cake Drop Doughnuts?

To make your own, simply follow a basic cake doughnut recipe (like the Basic Cake doughnut recipe in Doughnuts), and mix about 10 pitted and chopped fresh cherries into the dry flour mixture before adding the butter, the proceed as normal with the rest of the recipe. For the light pink glaze, I simply squeezed some juice from a handful of cherries and used it in place of the liquid in the standard glaze recipe. A teensy pinch of salt will help bring out the cherry flavor in the glaze.

]]> http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/06/03/fresh-cherry-cake-doughnuts/feed/ 22 http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/23/spring-pea-vine-salad/ http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/23/spring-pea-vine-salad/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 00:04:54 +0000 L http://www.laraferroni.com/2011/05/23/spring-pea-vine-salad/ In my garden right now I have about 1,000 pea vines. They aren’t sweet eating peas. They are a cover crop of Austrian winter peas in one of my garden beds (worked back into the soil, they infuse nitrogen back into the soil). They also make tasty (if maybe not the most tender) pea vines that I feel no guilt in plucking for fear of diminishing my sweet pea harvest. And, it’s nice to have a little something to pick now other than herbs and rhubarb.

So, for lunch today, a little spring take on a salad nicoise… no tuna, but plenty of potatoes, an egg, pea vines, and some fresh spring peas with the simplest vinaigrette.

If your pea vines are a little tough, you could lightly blanch them first; I just used mine raw.

When I was writing Doughnuts and developing my baked cake doughnut recipe, there was one little thing that I never quite got. The baked doughnuts bake up in a doughnut pan, that is doughnut shaped. No holes. Now, if you were a kid growing up with Dunkin Donuts Munchkins, you know that the holes are the very best part. I tried mini muffin pans. They were almost right. The taste was fine, but they weren’t round.

Last week, while looking for popsicle molds*, I stumbled across these little silicone half spheres. Genius! The perfect baked doughnut hole pan! The tops would puff up to a nice round, and the bottoms would be round too. I one-clicked away.

Today, I gave my brilliant find a shot, with strawberry baked doughnut batter. And they worked. Almost. See, the thing about cake doughnuts is you want them to be just the right amount of dense. Too light and fluffy, and you just have a cupcake. So, they puffed, but not to the perfect sphere I had imagines. No, really, they didn’t puff up much at all. I got lovely little half spheres. Perhaps a little tweak to the recipe will get a better puff, but they were really delicious as they were. Just not quite the right shape, once again.

But then I had another thought. I have a tray full of perfect little 1/2 spheres. Why not fill them and make them a whole! So, a little strawberry “kreme” later, and a little fun with sticks (because everything is more fun On a Stick! Cheers for Matt and his beautiful book!), and I have almost baked doughnut holes once again.

To make the strawberry baked doughnuts, just follow the standard baked doughnut recipe but toss in chopped strawberries into the flour/butter mixture before you add the wet ingredients. Use about 1 strawberry for every 3 doughnut holes.

Strawberry Doughnut Kreme

There is no cream in Kreme… leave out the strawberry and you have a pretty good approximation of Oreo “stuff” with this recipe…

You can make your own Strawberry syrup (strawberries, sugar, heat, time), but I used Schuh Farm’s Strawberry Syrup which is mighty fine.

1 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons butter or softened coconut oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 to 5 teaspoons Strawberry syrup, to desired thickness

Mix the powdered sugar, butter and vanilla until smooth. Drizzle in the strawberry syrup, a little at a time, until you get the flavor/consistency and color you want.

*If anyone knows where to find aluminum kulfi molds online, let me know! They are perfect for an upcoming shoot, but I haven’t been able to find any online anywhere that would ship to the US.

You get the texture of a tea cake and the flavor of a doughnut. Drizzle with doughnut glaze and slather on some rhubarb orange compote. The perfect weekend treat.

Ever since I started telling people that I was going to write a cookbook on doughnuts, I’ve gotten questions about whether it was going to include any savory recipes. Like me, many of you out there love your doughnuts, but also tend to crave salty over sweet. I’ve been promising some savory doughnut recipes ever since, and I must say, I wish I had gotten around to it much, much sooner.

Since I basically started my whole doughnut obsession around Cinco de Mayo with margarita doughnuts, what better way to jump into savory doughnuts than this: green chile and chicken doughnuts! Oh, sure, it’s more of a New Mexican flavor combination than a true Mexican one, but then again, it seems that it is the US that has turned the 5th of May into a new reason to party. And really, can you ever go wrong with green chile?

You can do these doughnuts a couple of ways. If you want easy, just make raised doughnuts as usual (either with  one of the recipes in Doughnuts or one of the ones on the site), but use 1/2 of the sugar and twice the salt. I subbed in 25% whole wheat flour in these, and loved it. Cut them out as doughnuts (they’ll just fry easier that way!) And then, load up a couple with warmed up green chile with shredded chicken, a little diced onion, maybe some cilantro, definitely a fried egg, a sprinkle of cojita, and a good dollop of sour cream. Oh my. Breakfast fit for a Donut King.

Or, you can get fancy. And by fancy I mean stuffed. Roll out your dough a bit thinner than normal and cut out rounds (without holes), and then place a bit of the shredded chicken, green chile, cojita, onion and whatever else you like in the center. Be careful not to overfill though… you want it to be less than 2 tablespoons all in. Then, top with another round, and crimp closed (I use the same cutter, which trims off any extra and pinches the edges together well). Proof, fry and you have what I will call with no shame an Empanut. Sort of like a doughnut, sort of like an empanada, all kinds of delicious. You could, of course, then proceed as above and smother in more green chile and cojita. Or, you can simply take a bite.

Or, if you really want to get crazy… cut out a ton of holes, fry them up, and use them in place of the chips in your favorite chilaqueles recipe.

Oh savory doughnuts… what in the world took me so long!

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

Mostly, at this time of year, the box includes some sort of salad greens and braising greens. Local apples that tend to store well. Onions are always a big part of the box. And then, there are the California fruits: oranges, a mango and kiwi. The oranges are always nice to have; the mango, just one, is perfect for a smoothie each week; and then there are the kiwis. Each week, 4 kiwis. This has been going on now for quite some time, and I’m telling you, I’m getting a bit behind on my kiwi usage. I do like kiwi fruit, but seriously, other than the occasional juicing or chopping for a salad, what are you supposed to do with them?*

Enter kiwi jelly. I’m not saying this is going to be the new lime curd. When you cook a kiwi, the bright green fades to a more olive tone; the delicate berry flavor gets a little crushed. But kiwi jelly is still a nice way to go if the kiwi fruit has started to take over your kitchen. Toss in some chopped rhubarb from the garden (especially if you have the kind that stubbornly comes up green even though it is supposed to be the bright red kind!) for some tang and to help thicken the jelly. Some juice from a lemon and a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to brighten the flavor. A pinch of salt and a few cardamom pods add just a little something special. And, suddenly you have a lovely little jelly that goes terrifically with hard cheeses, nuts and crackers. It is reminiscent of pepper jelly, without the heat.

The same goes for her new book. Between the pages of relaxed and comforting light filled photos, are recipes that call softly to you. Even before I got the book, I was dreaming of the biscuits with their thousands of flakey layers. I can’t wait to make the soba, the oat cakes, the granola, the not so potato salad. Not to mention the book contains one of the best head notes for a recipe that I’ve ever read… the turnip chips that Heidi admits are “the least perfect chips you’ll ever make.” (but, of course, they are well worth it anyway).

So enthused am I by this book, that I didn’t want to take the time to go to the store to make something from it. Nor did I need to. I had a bag of pita bread left over from a party that sorely needed to be used, and what do you know, the recipe right next to the turnip chips was a recipe for pita chips. As someone who is really not allowed to sit within 2 feet of an open bag of pita chips (or else there will no longer be a bag of pita chips), this recipe is a blessing and a curse. For now, I’m sticking with blessing. At least until I’ve gorged myself on them. This recipe is definitely going to be dangerous.

Heidi’s recipe calls for garlic, olive oil, butter and sea salt, but that’s really just to get you started with creating your own flavors. Like most of the book, the recipes are there as a framework and inspiration for you to make to suit your own tastes (like I think all good cookbooks should). Having been completely garliced out a week ago after making a very potent chimichurri sauce, I skipped the garlic and made one batch with freshly chopped cilantro and salt, and another with sumac and chile powder. I used store bought pita (the thicker, fluffier kind rather than the almost all pocket kind) for my chips, but I think next time I’ll make the pita from scratch again.

Baked up in a 350F oven 10 to 15 minutes until crisp, they are fantastic with hummus or other dip of your choice, or for that matter just on their own. Do watch carefully on the baking… there is a very fine line between crisp and a brick. I preferred the chips that were just a bit golden around the edges rather than dark throughout. Three full sized pitas make enough for 4 as a snack, unless, of course, I am in the house.

By the way, Heidi will be in Seattle at the end of April for a book signing at my studio! I hope you’ll be able to join us to celebrate this gorgeous book.

For the shoot, I made a regular square cake, but in the back of my brain, I got stuck on this idea of baking up the cakes as little pints with a whipped cream “head.”

To do this, I had to find jars that would resemble pint glasses that could also be baked. This wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do, but I finally decided on the Weck #760s and #900s. The problem was that the Weck site doesn’t say whether they are oven safe. I mailed Autumn Martin, queen of baking in jars, but she hadn’t baked in them either. But, she encouraged me to give it a go. The worst that could happen would be a bit of shattered glass and gooey chocolate all over my oven! Now, that’s the baking spirit. Of course, I gave it a go.

As it turns out, they seemed to bake fine. No exploding glass, or even any cracks. I caution you to use your best judgment with your own jars if you choose to give it a try, of course. And, bake them on a baking sheet with a rim, just in case.

To make your own, make the batter as directed (I made a 1/2 batch for 6 jars), and fill each jar half way. Bake at 325F until they are set, about 15 minutes. Be careful not to overbake or the cake will be dry. Baking times will vary based on the size of your jars. Let the baked cakes cool on a rack while you make the caramel sauce. Allow the caramel to cool slightly before topping each cake, and then dollop on whipped cream. You can serve them immediately, still a bit warm or let them cool and the flavors meld.

For more St. Patrick’s Day recipes (or really any day recipes), I also recommend the other recipes from my recent shoots:

Irish Soda Bread neatly flavored with caraway and raisins. This bread comes together in a jiffy, and tastes great, even as it ages. It’s strangely addictive. I made another batch, after I devoured the first loaf, later the same week. And another batch will soon be in the making.

Corned Beef and Cabbage with Root Veggies. I thought I hated turnips until I had them roasted in corned beef jus. How silly of me.

Can’t get enough chocolate and Guinness combinations? This Chocolate Guinness Pudding I shot for Epicurious is terrific, and maybe even better churned up with a bit more cream into a heavenly semi freddo.