Long Absence and Cheddar Onion Muffins

I know I haven't been here since November 2011. I feel bad about that, but I went through a lot of different things that made talking about food difficult. The treatment attempts for my LPR resulted in gastritis, which was misdiagnosed as an ulcer. I went through a lot of hell for awhile. Now my doctor at Mayo tells me that she thinks it's a result of sleep apnea. I have a test for that this coming weekend. However, I'm feeling much better despite the occasional problems with my voice. Since my doctor mentioned the sleep apnea, I've been dieting, but I'm still having at least one good meal a day. Many of those meals are those I've already written about in this blog. I plan on continuing to try new recipes and reporting about them here. By the way, I'm feeling really good the last couple of days. I realize I don't like to write when things aren't going well and I'm not feeling good.

In addition, my friend Mari and I had talked about starting a small business over the summer cooking meals and delivering them to families making a working mom's life a little easier. But in exploring this we realized that it would take a great deal of money and effort getting it started without really knowing if we could make a profit. However, I really liked the idea of making money with my cooking. So, I thought I might try my hand at selling baked goods at the local market. I have a killer chocolate chip cookie recipe, and I make a good pie. I'll be trying out new recipes and writing about them here in the meantime. Mari isn't as keen on the prospect of selling goods at the market like this, but she's agreed to accompany me at least the first time. If it doesn't do well, I won't got through with it.

Today's effort, Cheddar Onion Muffins wasn't the greatest success. The middle was a bit soggy, but the flavor was good. It was a knuckle buster too boot. I cut my finger on the grater...I've always hated those things. Next time I need grated onion I'll put it through the food processor. I think I'll have to find another recipe. This one came from yummly.com...I tried another after they had cooled considerably and I found this one to be much better. albeit more than I should have eaten. The cooling process made the muffin far less gooey in the center and I preferred it this way.

Ingredients
1/2 cup onion (grated)
1/4 cup parsley (minced)[I used dried because I didn't have fresh, and so I halved the amount. You should always reduce the amount when you used dried herbs, otherwise the flavor would be overwhelming]
1 cup cheddar cheese (grated)
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
2 teaspoons sugar

Preparation
1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, paprika, and sugar.
2. In another bowl, beat together the egg, milk, sour cream, and melted butter.
3. Add the egg mixture to the flour and fold together lightly.
4. Add cheese, parsley, and onion and mix in gently
5. Spoon batter into greased or paper lined muffin tins.
6. Bake for 20 minutes in a preheat 400° oven.
7. Serve warm out of the oven for the best flavor.

Makes 10 muffins.

Happy Birthday Ken

I haven't written lately because I've really been having problems with my LPR. The treatment doesn't seem to be working, and to be honest, I've been very blue. I miss cooking and exploring new foods. The food in the LPR cookbook I got just sort of disgusted me. I don't even take pleasure in the irony of a bland-food cookbook.

Today, my voice was really bad even though I have been VERY good and sticking to the diet. Today is my friend Ken's birthday, and it's been a tradition with us to go out for supper on his birthday. After cajoling him several weeks ago, he finally relented and agreed to go to La Chiesa with me. I figured what the hell, my voice is already screwed up. What would it matter if I enjoyed some good food for once.

And it was sooooo good. Ken had "Forever Roasted Pork." Apparently Jeremy roasted it for like 12 hours. It was served with pumpkin polenta and pear compote. I would have ordered that myself, but I've tried to make polenta for myself in the past, and frankly, it sucked. Well, I sampled Ken's pumpkin polenta, and it was divine!! I'm going to have to wheedle Jeremy and see if he can share some of his secrets for good polenta. I didn't sample the pork, but Ken said it was really good. And I did sample the pear compote and it was a really lovely addition.

I had the rigatoni with sautéed shrimp, Yukon potatoes, spinach, and spicy chili oil. I'm a sucker for seafood. And it had just the right flavor and warm spiciness to fill that void that's been there so long.

We wrapped it up by sharing a pumpkin Brulee. Tomorrow, I might be entirely mute, but it was so worth it. I left the restaurant feeling content and satisfied. It wasn't just the delicious food. I also fed my soul again for the first time in a long time.

We also had excellent service at La Chiesa as well. But then, I'm a bit partial. Our waitress just happened to be one of my former students, Ryanne. She steered us through the menu beautifully and it was fun catching up with her.

By the way, Ken is converted. He's already talking about going again soon. Probably for my birthday which is next month.

On Tuesday I'm seeing my otologist and I am going to see if it's possible to have the surgery that'll fix my condition. I can live with eating my meals through a straw for even a couple of a weeks, as long as I know, eventually, I can be who I am, someone who enjoys eating and cooking good interesting foods. I was apprehensive about signing up for Jeremy's Holiday cooking class on the November 20th because of my LPR...it felt futile. But when Ryanne told me that there were only 3 spots left, I jumped on it.

The Perfect Storm

This summer, I experienced a lot of health issues that seemed to revolve around my asthma. My asthma seemed to take a radical turn for the worse. My allergist was beside himself. Figuring out the cause for the problem was especially a concern for me. It seemed as though the summer was an example of a perfect storm. The long, wet winter and wet spring resulted in a lot of molds to which I'm severely allergic, and it turns out that in my attempt to get fit, I was actually making myself worse. The chemicals in the pool were affecting my breathing as well. And although we had licked most of these problems with a lot of medications (Let me tell, you prednisone is a very interesting drug.), I was still having problems with my voice.

As a teacher, you can imagine how difficult it is to teach several large classes a day when your voice is constantly failing. One minute it would get "froggy" as Mari describes it, and the next it would be fine, and in the next it would be virtually nonexistant. It's been very frustrating. Well, finally, my allergist sent me to an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor...I'm sure they have some sort of "-ist" name, but I'm not bothering to look it up. So, a couple of days ago I had a laryngoscope (a camera put down into my larynx). Nothing nasty was spotted and given the information I gave him, he diagnosed my problem as Laryngopharyngeal reflux or LPR. Basically what that means is that stomach acids get up into my larynx and cause damage there. The surprising thing is that I usually don't experience any heart burn pain.

I guess there is a surgery for worst case situations, which is, frankly, looking more and more appealing every day. The standard treatment is medication and diet, and boy, what a diet. It's so restrictive, but in ways that I'm not accustomed to being restricted. Nothing acidic: What you'd expect, oranges, pineapples, etc. but also tomatoes and onions! How can I live without tomatoes and onions?! Also, no dairy, or fried foods, or caffeine, or alcohol, or chocolate, or, or, or. Today, I learned that butter is excluded as well. Ok, I figured all along that it was out, but I was pretending to be dumb. But seriously, if you can't have anything else, how can they take away butter too.

It's been a couple of days now. I stewed all through the weekend. Yes, I'll undoubtedly lose weight, but at what cost? Part of me wants to say screw it and go around with a raspy voice forever, but then I learned that this is a condition that could lead to cancer. So before I demand the surgery, I'm going to give it the old college try. But there's no way that I can commit 100%. I'll try to make efforts to be good, and so far, except for the butter, I've done very well. I've even given up caffeine completely, which might also account for my buzzing head this weekend. I've ordered a cookbook, and I'm simply trying to figure out how to survive this thing, which by the way, is probably permanent.

Gnocchi

I'm afraid my cameras aren't really working well (of course it could be the photographer) so I stole a similar picture off the Internet. Ok, my gnocchi didn't look quite that good and I didn't put any great effort into the sauce, but still I thought it turned out quite well, but damn it took work. I remember watching Jeremy Neppl make gnocchi last spring at La Chiesa and he made it look so easy. Jeremy, if you're reading this, OMG!

Gnocchi (pronounced somewhat like neyah kee) is an Italian potato pasta. By the way, this is not a diet recipe! The gnocchi are rolled out on a little ridged board with your thumb. This allows the sauce to well in the thumb hole and catch in the outer ridges. Rolling the gnocchi out was the easiest part. It was milling or ricing the cooked potatoes that wore me out. However, I think a lot of my exhaustion is due to the cheap ass food mill I bought. Kneading the dough was fun. It was very sticky. I suspect I'll be washing potato dough off my fingers for about a week. Although I learned a tremendous amount from Jeremy, I used the recipe I found on page 56 in the September 2010 edition of Everyday Food. I didn't get Jeremy's recipe written down. I was too enthralled in watching the process.

The sauce I used was a sauce I make for homemade pizza. I just throw together onion, garlic, basil, oregano, and tomatoes in my food processor. For tonight's dish, I added a little olive oil and some salt and pepper. I heard somewhere that when you have homemade pasta, you should use less sauce, and think that held true for this evening.

I made the full recipe and froze 3/4 of it. And although I made two servings,and it was really good, but it was very filling. Half of it went into the fridge. I've heard that you can fry gnocchi. That excites me. I think I have to try it.

Although the gnocchi was easy to roll out, I did have problems with the size of my pastry mat and my counter. It says to divide the dough into 8 portions and to roll out. I should have divided it into 16. I had to reroll some of them to get them closer to the proper proportions.

By the way, my kitchen is a disaster area, and I'll have to clean it up pronto. Tomorrow my friend Ken is coming over for lunch and I'm trying something different. I'm going to grill split chicken breasts, but I've already poached them first, so I won't have to cook them so long that they'll dry out on the grill. I don't know why I keep subjecting Ken to these new things. He isn't fond of culinary experimentation.

The gnocchi recipe is as follows:

Ingredients
2.5 pounds russet potatoes (about 5 small) (I used my dad's home grown Kennebec potatoes)
coarse salt
1.75 cups of all-purpose flour plus more for dusting (a lot for dusting!!!)
1 large egg

Preparation
1. In a large pot, bring potatoes to a boil in salted water(I think Jeremy baked his); reduce to a rapid simmer and cook until potatoes are tender when pierced with a knife, 35 to 40 minutes. Lightly dust two parchment-lined rimmed baking sheets with flour; set aside. Drain potatoes and peel while still hot with a paring knife (use a think, dry kitchen towel or pot holder to hold them). Immediately pass potatoes through a ricer onto a work surface. Let cool completely.
2. Sprinkle potatoes with flour and 2 teaspoons salt, then top with egg. With your hands, work flour and egg into a dough.
3. Knead dough until smooth but not elastic, dusting with flour if it becomes too sticky, 4 minutes. Do not overwork dough.
4. Divide dough into 8 portions. Roll each portion into a rope (.5 inch thick and 24 inches long). Cut each rope into .5-inch pieces.
5. Gently roll each dough piece against the back of a fork to make ridges(I think the gnocchi board was a lot slicker and it only cost $5), then arrange in a single layer on prepared baking sheets.
6. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. In batches, add a few handfuls of gnocchi and cook until most have floated top, 2 minutes. With a wire mesh spider or a slotted spoon, transfer gnocchi immediately to the sauce.

Makes 8 servings. I'm not even going to bother with the calorie count etc.

One Stewed Chicken

The men in my family and a few good friends would cry if they knew how I misused good bourbon this weekend. I tried to smoke a chicken that was brined in a Jack Daniels laced concoction. I said "tried" because I don't think I quite smoked it as much as baked it on the grill. I had a hell of a time maintaining the lower temperature that was called for. And despite that, the chicken was wonderful. There were just enough hints of the Jack Daniels and smoke. I could still detect these flavors tonight when I made chicken noodle soup for myself with what was left over.

I decided to try this daring epicurean feat (at least it was for me) after reading how you can smoke foods on small charcoal grills in the August 2011 edition of Cooking Light The recipe that captured my imagination was Fantastic Bourbon Smoked Chicken on page 124. I learned that the tricky part is keeping the temperature in the grill low, around 275°. Most of the time I had the temperature at around 350°, and it really wanted to be in the 400° range. I think a big part of the problem was that I was impatient. I put the chicken on far too early. I should have let the coals burn down further instead.

What had happened was that I had planned on smoking the chicken Sunday night. But I've been fighting a respiratory infection for a while, and it got much worse Sunday morning. I barely had the energy to get out of bed, much less tackle this extravaganza. (I'm a terrible baby when I'm sick.) So, we (my friend Ken and I) decided to put it off until Monday evening. Which meant the chicken was kept in the brine about 36 hours rather than the minimum 18. Anyway, I also had an all day workshop on Monday so I couldn't start smoking until after 4:00. I didn't want to be cooking until 9:00, so I put the chicken on too early. By the way, the chicken is supposed to smoke for about 2 hours.

How it's done is that you pile the hot coals on one side of the grill and have a pan of water under the chicken on the other side. The smoking happens when you put different wood chips that have been soaked in water on to the coals. In this case you use apple wood. So, in theory it's easy enough. I do think I'll be able to pull this off eventually, but there's definitely a learning curve.

So, here's the recipe:

Ingredients
2 quarts water
9 tablespoons bourbon, divided
1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons kosher salt
2 quarts ice water
1 tablespoon black pepper corns
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
3 bay leaves
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 small onion quartered
1 small Fuji apple, cored and quartered
1 lemon, quartered
1 (4-pound) whole chicken
1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
Cooking spray
1 tablespoon butter, melted

Preparation
1. Combine 2 quarts water, 1/2 cup bourbon, sugar, and kosher salt in a large Dutch oven, and bring to a boil, stirring until the salt and sugar dissolve. Ad ice water and next ingredients (through lemon), and cool to room temperature. Add chicken to brine; cover and refrigerate 18 hours, turning chicken occasionally.
2. Soak wood chips in water for 1 hour; drain.
3. Remove the chicken from brine; pat chicken dry with paper towels. Strain brine through a sieve; discard brine and reserve 2 apple quarters, 2 lemon quarters, 2 onion quarters, and garlic. Discard remaining solids. Sprinkle chicken cavity with pepper; add reserved solids to chicken cavity. Lift wing tips up and over back; tuck under chicken. Tie legs.
4. Remove the grill rack, and set aside. prepare the grill for indirect grilling, heating one side to high and leaving side with no heat. [....] Place [a] disposable aluminum foil pan [...] on unheated side of grill. Pour 2 cups of water in pan. Let chips stand for 15 minutes or until smoking; reduce heat to medium-low. Maintain temperature at 275°.
5. Coat the grill rack with cooking spray; place on grill. Place chicken, breast side up, on grill rack over foil pan on unheated side. Combine the remaining 1 tablespoon bourbon and butter; baste chicken with the bourbon mixture. Close lid, and cook for 2 hours at 275° or until thermometer inserted into meaty part of thigh registers 165°. Add remaining 1 cup wood chips halfway through cooking time. Place chicken on a platter; cover with foil. Let stand for 15 minutes. Discard the skin before serving.

Bacon-Corn Chowder with Shrimp

Today, it's too hot to do anything. I'm staying indoors with the A/C, reading, watching movies, and knitting or crocheting...oh, I'll probably do some laundry too. Stay cool and dry.

I wasn't terribly pleased with the recipe I tried last night. The chowder didn't turn out nearly as creamy as I'd hoped. Perhaps, if rather than following the recipe if I had creamed the portion of the chowder with the half-and-half rather than adding it later it might have come out with a better texture. Actually, I think it might have turned out better without the bacon. The bacon seemed to overwhelm the corn and shrimp flavors. Oh well, when you're trying out new recipes, your going to end up with a few losers. This came from the August 2011 issue of Cooking Light, which sort of surprises me because they almost always have great recipes.

So, if you'd like to try the Bacon-Corn Chowder with Shrimp yourself, here's the recipe.

Ingredients

6 slices center-cut bacon chopped
1 cup prechopped onion
1/2 cup prechopped celery
1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
1 garlic clove, minced
4 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels, thawed
2 cups fat-free, lower-sodium chicken broth
3/4 pound peeled and deveined medium shrimp
1/3 cup half-and-half
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon salt

Preparation
1. Heat a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add bacon to pan; sauté 4 minutes or until the bacon begins to brown. Remove 2 slices bacon. Drain on paper towels. Add onion and next 3 ingredients (through minced garlic) to pan, and sauté for 2 minutes. Add corn, and cook 2 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add broth; bring to a boil, and cook for 4 minutes.

2. Place 2 cups of corn mixture in a blender. Removed the center piece of of blender lid (to allow steam to escape), and secure lid on blender. Place a clean towel over opening in the blender lid (to avoid splatters). Blend until smooth. Return pureed corn mixture to pan. Stir in shrimp; cook 2 minutes or until shrimp are done. Stir in half-and-half, pepper and salt. Crumble reserved bacon over soup. Yield: 4 servings (serving size: about 1 2/3 cups).

Calories 294; Fat 7grams; Protein 26.8 grams; Carbs 34.8 grams; Fiber 4.3 grams;

Time Swimming by

I'm sorry that I haven't written for months and months. To be honest, I haven't been cooking that much either. I have been doing a lot of swimming this summer. I try to swim at least 4 times a week an hour at a time. I've also been working on some other projects. I've been knitting and crocheting, and I've been working on a longer piece of fiction. It's been a busy though not especially remarkable summer. My garden is doing well, and I'm really looking forward to a lot of fresh garden tomatoes.

Once the weather cools off and my schedule gets back to normal, I'm sure I'll get back to trying new recipes and getting back on the blog on a more regular basis. It may not be every day or even once a week, but I don't think so many months will pass before I get back to it. Actually, I think I'll try a new recipe tonight, but I won't write about it until tomorrow.

Sorry for the long absence.