RogueChef
“It IS all about the TASTE”
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Meatless Monday – Baked Potato
Recently, I was asked, “What is the PROPER way to bake a potato?”. To my dismay, I could not lay out the specifics on how to do this. Even worse when I went to look it up here, I had not posted about this most basic of foods, prepared in the most basic of ways..
I am looking for a nice fluffy, creamy flesh, a crisp skin, with a hint of salt.
The loyal fan club can “Sit Down, and Shut up”, or I will spend the next week perfecting my vegetarian chili recipe. “Beans, lots and lots and lots of Beans, and Yes… Tofu!!“
A baked potato is the edible result of baking a potato. When well cooked, a baked potato has a fluffy interior and a crispy skin. It may be served with fillings and condiments such as butter, cheese, ham, or chicken. Potatoes can be baked in a convection oven, a microwave oven, on a barbecue grill, or on/in an open fire.
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Coconut Cake with Lemon Icing
It is sooo hot, but I sooo want cake, and I am NOT buying the chemical laden garbage one finds in the local mega mart. Besides, I want something that tastes better than the wrapper… I suppose I’ll need to brave the slings and arrows of my stove…
Cake is a form of food, typically a sweet, baked dessert. Cakes normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid and leavening agents. Flavorful ingredients like fruit purées, nuts or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces, iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.
I love fruit based cakes, with mashed / crushed cherry, banana, hard fruit sauce, (apple, pear, etc), but one serious favorite is coconut cake. Most people just add coconut flakes to a white cake and call it a day, but I am the rogue chef.
What if, for a liquid I used coconut milk, and added replaced 1/2 the vanilla extract with coconut extract, then just for extravagant indulgence, added a lemon sour cream drizzle for icing.
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Peach Cobbler, Grunt or Buckle
As I’ve said before:
I love my green grocer, I hate my green grocer, they know exactly what I am trying to do , even when I don’t.
As an example, my last trip in I was shown some very peaches, I am a huge fan of these, but was unwilling to consider possibilities, at least until the temperatures come down, until the proprietor started talking about peach cobbler…
Cobblers:
Deep-dish fruit desserts in which sweetened fruits (fresh berries or apples are the traditional choices) are topped with a biscuit dough before baking.
A subvarity of cobbler is the buckle or grunt
Varieties of cobbler include the Betty, the Grunt, the Slump, and the Buckle. Grunts, Pandowdy, and Slumps are a New England variety of cobbler, typically cooked on the stove-top or cooker in an iron skillet or pan with the dough on top in the shape of dumplings—they reportedly take their name from the grunting sound they make while cooking. A Buckle is made with yellow batter (like cake batter), with the filling mixed in with the batter.
Crisps:
In a crisp, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.
All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.
As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another early summer fruit.
When early summer fruit starts arriving, I have to make a buckle. It is a simple and rustic dessert recipe, you can use any kind of fruit that is around, the ingredients are pantry staples and it freezes fabulously. When I make buckles, I usually make two, one to serve and one to keep in the freezer for a quick thaw and serve desert. Blueberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, all are delicious in a buckle.
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Quiche, The English Method
As we all know, I have been on assignment in the U.K. for the last week.
During that time several things have struck me…
Any dairy product in the U.K. is 100% superior to what we get. The entire industry, make that the entire country, tends towards small family farms, with quality produce, absolutely glorious meats and cheeses, the selections of beers, wines and ports are astounding, as as to whiskeys, they invented the stuff….
With that level of dairy, eggs and produce, the quiches there were beyond my wildest expectations. There is a hotel / restaurant called “The Wolseley”, that produces the most amazing omelet, where there is a nice skin that covers eggs so light and fluffy, they would classify as frozen smoke… The quiches were of the same quality…. (They have guards protecting the chefs from being besieged by food bloggers….)
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Cold Weather Comfort Food – Cherry Dump Cake
As I have stated prior :
BAH!!!! More wet and cold crap… BAH!!! I am SOO tired of this.. The weather is playing me like a fiddle, one or two days of sun and I let my guard down, now a week of crap weather…. I want to crawl into bed and hibernate.
Between the cold, the damp and the lack of sunlight, I want comfort food, rich stews, hearty cibatta, and sumptuous deserts.
I did the hearty stew yesterday, I was out in the cold all day going from place to place, and had a great dinner of Sashimi, but I want something to go with my last coffee. I want sweet, I want easy, I want tasty…. Maybe a cake, but I don’t want to bother getting out the mixer and cleaning up.. Maybe a dump cake.
If you are wondering, a dump cake is where dump all the ingredients in a pan, and bake. No mixing, no measuring, no thinking, just pure pleasure at the result. Since it is February, and just after “Washington’s Birthday”, maybe a cherry dump cake…
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Cold Weather Comfort Food – Multi Stew
BAH!!!! More wet and cold crap… BAH!!! I am SOO tired of this.. The weather is playing me like a fiddle, one or two days of sun and I let my guard down, now a week of crap weather…. I want to crawl into bed and hibernate.
Between the cold, the damp and the lack of sunlight, I want comfort food, rich stews, hearty cibatta, and sumptuous deserts.
Maybe a multi-meat style stew to use some of the odds and ends of meat, and veggies. Slow cooked to generate a rich meat gravy with tender veggies to serve over noddles, rice, baked potato, or bread.
Add a side salad, maybe a dab of sour cream, and a cold beer, and I am ready to brave the elements…. (tomorrow morning, that is)
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Oven Potato Rounds
As part of my St. Valentine’s day dinner for the She Wolf, I made a side dish of oven fried potato rounds. These were enough of a hit that my daughter asked for the recipe. (Oh, my ….)
With that type of accolade, this item must be shared…
Simply potato rounds are potatoes sliced vertically and cooked in some fashion. I tend to cut the potatoes on a fairly thick slice, toss in a butter olive oil and seasoning mixture, spread on single layer and bake until crispy on the exterior and creamy on the interior.
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Decadent Pumpkin Cheese Cake
It is Friday and soon I will be on my way to the mountain top retreat, and will be cooking dinner for the She Wolf. This weekend is also St. Valentine’s Day, and nothing says love like a sweet. I’ve asked a number of times what the Mrs. would like me to cook as a desert for the weekend and she has consistently replied, “Suprise me”, so I suppose I will..
One of here favorite flavors is pumpkin, and another is ginger snap, so I’ll find a way to work them into this as well…
Background
Cheesecake is a dessert formed of a topping made with soft, fresh cheese upon a base made from biscuit, pastry or sponge.New York-style cheesecake relies upon heavy cream. Usually, cheesecake is made from cream cheese, eggs and egg yolks to add a richness and a smooth consistency. It is baked in a special tall springform pan in many restaurants.
Almost all modern cheesecakes in the United States use cream cheese; in Italy, cheesecakes use ricotta; Germany and Poland use quark cheese.
The type of cheese affects not only the texture and taste, but also the ability to incorporate certain types of ingredients. When cheesecake batter is too thin, many cheesecakes will not be structurally sound and fall apart at the table. One way to get around this is to use unflavored gelatin or a little cornstarch beaten with the eggs.
A common difficulty with baking cheesecakes is its tendency to “crack” when cooled. This is due to the coagulation of the beaten eggs in its batter. There are various methods to prevent this. One method is to bake the cheesecake in a hot water bath to ensure even heating. Other methods include blending a little cornstarch into the batter or baking the cheesecake at a lower temperature and slow cooling it in the oven, turned off, with the door ajar.
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