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Saturday, January 31, 2004
Warm, chocolately goodness, part two
Posted
9:17 AM by Mike
Kristi Wallace Knight is a FoodDork visitor who found us by way of the amazing Chocolate & Zucchini food blog. She saw my post about hot chocolate (scroll down a little bit) and was kind enough to share her own recipe. She writes:
"You may not like my recipe much -- it calls for pre-sweetened chocolate -- but, for what it's worth, here's the how and why. First, the why: I love a rich, creamy and very chocolately hot chocolate. Most recipes are far too sweet for me, so I tone it down and deepen it with unsweetened cocoa. I'm about to begin experimenting with flavored oil -- almond, peppermint, whatever suits my fancy. If there's such a thing as cinnamon extract, I'll find it, because I haven't been happy with the results of ground cinnamon in my hot chocoate. I never thought of vanilla, but I'll try that now, too.
"Without further ado --
"8 oz. milk (I usually have 1% in the house)
2 oz. half and half
2 heaping Tablespoons Ghirardelli Sweet Ground Chocolate and Cocoa
1 heaping Tablespoon Ghiarardelli Unsweetened Cocoa
"Put milk and half and half in a heavy saucepan, turn heat to about medium, and add chocolate and cocoa. Stir or whisk until most of the chocolate is incorporated into the milk. Heat until steaming, stirring often (or constantly, to be on the safe side.) Pour into a large mug. Serves 1."
That sounds great, Kristi, and I can't wait to try it. Thanks very much for sharing it with us.
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
High Tech and Low Tech
Posted
8:04 PM by Rick
Give me tech, period, high or low. That is, give me the tools that help make cooking easier and more fun.
Combining the Christmas money I received this past season with the money I was going to spend on my wife, I bought us both a very expensive skillet. It is amazing. Nothing sticks, the even heating means it's actually difficult to burn food and the extra handle on the other end makes carrying food a snap. My latest attempt was "Waikiki Meatballs," a version of sweet-and-sour meatballs, that was a great, and easy, success. The new skillet is worth every penny!
But just when I was getting ready to sing the spend-big-bucks cantata - are cantatas sung or played?? - I remembered my plastic Ulu knife. It is a large semi-circle of plastic used to cut pizza into slices. For a couple of bucks, it is one of the most clever and useful gadgets I own. So perhaps it doesn't take big bucks to cook well: just an eye for the useful.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Lesson learned
Posted
11:23 AM by Mike
My earliest spaghetti sauces (isn't that the stereotypical "guy's first recipe"?) were based on canned tomato sauce, although they always had healthy amounts of chopped veggies, including onions, green pepper and mushrooms. Then, entering my FoodDork, no-kit-cooking phase, I moved away from canned sauces to canned whole tomatoes. Sometimes I would chop them up and roast them under the broiler, sometimes I would just chop 'em up and toss them in the pot. I also began using stocks -- mostly chicken but sometimes beef -- to add volume, and then tomato paste if it needed thickening. These whole-tomato-based sauces were my most successful.
The other night, however, I succumbed to the demands of speed and grabbed a couple cans of prepared tomato sauce at the store on the way home. I still chopped veggies, but let the sauce do most of the work of taking up volume; in other words, no stock.
The family could taste the difference and asked me what was up. I 'fessed up to the canned sauce gambit and decided that the couple of minutes that I saved by using canned tomato sauce wasn't worth the change to a flavor that the family considered not as satisfying.
Addendum No. 1: So as not to incur the wrath of the makers and lovers of canned tomato sauce, I must admit that I probably expected the canned sauce to do too much of the work in my recipe the other night (in other words, I lapsed back into the mindset of kit cooking) and didn't use it properly. In other words, if the spaghetti sauce wasn't that good, it was more than likely the chef's fault, and not the canned sauce's.
Addendum No. 2: Because the family didn't care that much for the sauce, we didn't eat as much of it that night, leaving plenty to be used in a lasagna later in the weekend. In the lasagna, mixed with all the cheese and pasta, it was more of a success. (And didn't go to waste!)
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Warm, chocolatey goodness
Posted
8:54 AM by Mike
Here it is, midway through the first month of the year, and this is the first chance I've had to post in 2004. A new job at work has kept me busy and away from other endeavors, including cooking and blogging. Meals at home have been just quick things I've thrown together (don't worry, no kits involved), mostly egg meals like omelets and frittatas and quickie spaghetti sauces and tacos.
But I've kept up with recipes and food trends, and because it's getting into the really cold months (remember, I'm in northern Florida; it takes a little longer to get really cold here), many of the recipes I've encountered on TV and in magazines have dealt with warmth, such as stews and chilis and pot roasts and the like.
What has really caught my attention, however, are all the recipes I've encountered about hot chocolate, one of my favorite beverages. Now, I have to admit that when it comes to hot cocoa I'm often a packet man (you know, rip open a packet of Swiss Miss and dump it in the mug with hot water). But I've been intrigued by the number of from-scratch recipes I've read, most of which claim to make "perfect hot chocolate."
Now, on FoodDork we don't post recipes unless they're original or we've made substantial modifications to them, but it seems to me that almost all of the "perfect" hot chocolate recipes I've seen have these ingredients in common: cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla flavoring, water and milk. (It's interesting to me: Almost all of the "perfect" recipes call for a combination of water and milk, the milk adding richness, but none go all the way and call for milk only.)
The combinations of these ingredients, of course, vary from recipe to recipe. Some recipes say you can alter the amounts as long as you keep to certain ratios, like three parts cocoa powder to one part sugar, or something like that.
I say just gather those five ingredients together with a saucepan and a stove and start experimenting.
Along with the recipes themselves, however, I've also been casually cataloguing the various methods used to make hot chocolate. The goal, with all of these, is to make the liquid frothy. Martha Stewart (I think) says just put it in a blender. Others call for rapid whisking. On one of his shows, Jamie Oliver's "perfect" recipe calls for heating the milk on a stove, pouring it into a small plastic bottle and shaking it vigorously before pouring it into the mug (come to think of it, his was a milk-only recipe).
I tend to go with the whisk, as I don't want to pull out my blender for just a mug of hot cocoa, nor do I want to have to keep a small plastic bottle around only to have more stuff to clean afterward.
My wife gave me gourmet cocoa powder for Christmas, which came in a cow-motif bottle with a tiny whisk and a recipe card attached. Unfortunately the whisk was too small for my mugs (I had to whisk-up a couple of sizes), but the powder makes interesting hot chocolate, and there's plenty there with which to experiment.
I hope, if you have a favorite hot chocolate recipe, that you'll and allow us to pass it along to the FoodDork readership.
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