Chicken Lu'au

I tried this recipe out after we decided to have a Hawaiian Feast for Christmas. It didn't make the cut, but it was a great dish. I think it's the only dish I've made out of my Sam Choy cookbook, but I've marked so many pages I'd like to try. The photos in the book are absolutely mouthwatering! We may have to have a Hawaiian week here. I'll use Sam and my Maui Taco book as well.....Here I come Hibachi Miso Chicken with Peanut Butter!

What I liked most about this dish was that it had spinach in it. I too often turn to my 'staple' vegetables (peas, corn, carrots) and forget about the rest. I haven't had the interest and passion for cooking lately that I used to have and it's been reflecting in my dinner menus.

The recipe in the book calls for young taro leaves, which are to be boiled first, but notes that fresh spinach can be used instead.

Chicken Lu'au

from Sam Choy's Cooking

1 pound spinach

3/4 lb skinless boneless chicken breast, cubed

2 Tb butter

1/2 medium onion, chopped

1 cup chicken stock

1 cup coconut milk

1/2 tsp salt

In a large saucepan heat butter and saute onions until translucent. Add chicken and cook 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Add chicken stock, coconut milk, spinach and salt. Simmer 20 minutes or until chicken is cooked.

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Braised chicory with Roquefort

Having spent the last 10 days in France it's struck me again what a mystery it is that you can't order more vegetable-based dishes in French restaurants. It's not that they don't have the produce. Down in the Languedoc they have gorgeous leeks right now and great bagfuls of chicory which is something you rarely find in the UK - or not at a reasonable price. Yet the only greenery most restaurants seem to offer - and have done for the past umpteen years - is salade de chèvre chaud (grilled goats' cheese salad).

Anyway I took advantage of some very good prices (about €2.50 a kilo) to buy 5 heads of chicory to make a side dish to go with yesterday's roast chicken. This is roughly the recipe.

Braised chicory with Roquefort
Serves 4-6
5-6 heads of chicory
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp olive oil
20g butter
About 125ml chicken or vegetable stock
50g Roquefort or other blue cheese. Or almost any leftover cheese for that matter - Comté would be good.

Cut the heads of chicory in half lengthwise and remove any damaged outer leaves. Fill a large shallow pan with water, bring to the boil and add the lemon juice to stop the chicory discolouring. Add the chicory, reduce to a simmer and cook for 4-5 minutes then remove with a slotted spoon.

Discard the water from the pan, add the oil and then the butter. Once melted lay the halved chicory heads in the pan and fry until well browned, turning them carefully halfway through so as not to break them up. Lay them cut side upwards in a shallow baking dish, pour over the stock and crumble over the cheese. Cook alongside whatever roast you're cooking for another 10-15 minutes until the cheese is lightly browned and the stock pretty well evaporated.

I also made a dish of leeks vinaigrette for which I posted a recipe on the blog a couple of years ago. Good to be reminded how good it is though and leeks are very tasty at the moment.

Cleaning up spilled oils

Dropping a glass bottle of oil can be quite messy to clean. Most of us usually wipe it off with a cloth, and wash with water and detergent, but still, the grease is always there.

There's another way to clean the oil slicked floor.
1. Sprinkle a generous amount of flour over the area and wait for the flour to absorb the oil.
2. If there are any glass bits, use brush, if not, a paper towel will do the work. Move the flour around the area to make sure that all the oil has been absorbed.
3. Sweep with a broom and dustpan.
4. Use a window cleaner to wipe away the last traces of oil and flour. 

Chef Osama  

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Baby Shower Desserts Part 1 - Cabbage Patch Chocolates

You don't need a recipe to make cabbage patch chocolates - just a technique guide to show you the way.  To begin you'll need quite a bit of equipment and ingredients.  There are two sites that I like for supplies - each one has its shortfalls.  The one with the biggest selection is http://www.sugarcraft.com/.  The drawbacks with using sugarcraft are that they are very impersonal - there is no phone number if you have a problem, and if you don't have your order number, you are completely out of luck - they cannot tell you anything about your order without it.  In addition, they are very slow - no inquiries until at least 10 days, and that's when they ship.  From this site, you also cannot order a small quantity of candy eyes, unless you take whatever color they give you (and some of the colors are very funky and not suitable for baby dolls).  They do, however, have a huge selection with photos which makes it easy to see what to buy.  The site that I actually bought the supplies from is: http://www.chocomolds.com/.  They are very personal and friendly, shipped quickly and had a package of 48 eyes.  It is hard to use their site, however, because they don't have any pictures, so you need to know what you want.

Here is what you need:

Baby Face Lolly Chocolate Mold (3 per mold)

Mercken's Peach Wafers (this is very delicious tasting coating- Do not buy Wilton wafers which are yucchy).  If you are filling the molds completely with this, you need 2 ounces per face (you won't use that much but you lose some to hardening on utensils and bowls).  

Dark Chocolate, if filling the centers with it - about 1-1/2 ounce per face.  I used chocolate chips because they were cheaper (Ghirardelli).  If I were making fewer and spending only my money, I would have used bar chocolate.  Bar chocolate tastes better (to me) and is easier to work with because it melts into a thinner state than chocolate chips.

Instant-read thermometer - if you plan on tempering the chocolate

Mercken's Cocoa Dark Wafers (ok tasting - I use it for decorating only) - 1 bag  if you want to paint on dark hair.  You can also paint the hair with real chocolate, but if you don't temper it, it might turn whitish or rainbow-colored.  If you want light brown hair, add brown food color to the peach wafers.  If you want blond, you will need to buy 1 bag of Mercken's Yellow or White Wafers(not super white) and add food coloring to these.  You might also need Paramount Crystals to get the yellow coating to melt ( I didn't need it for the peach wafers).

Candy Eyes - each small package has 48 eyes. Don't forget that you need 2 per face!  You can make your own eyes, but you will need fondant and food coloring to do that.

4-1/2-inch sucker sticks

Petal Dust or something like that in a pink color to brush on the cheeks - I think I bought mine at Michael's, but any place that sells gumpaste supplies will have some. 

Assorted brushes - you'll need some good quality brushes so that the hairs don't come off in the chocolate,

and one cheap, bushy  brush for putting on blush.  The pointy one I use for attaching the eyes and the one on the right I use for brushing blush.  The pointy one was part of a set  of more expensive brushes
by Loew-Cornell. There are two nice pointy brushes in the set.  #1 and #4 370 round and 370 liner.  You'll have to do an Internet search as I don't know where I bought them.

This is also from the Loew-Cornell set. 370 Shader #8.  It's useful if you need to brush on chocolate to spots that you missed.  Also good for fixing errors (more on this later).

Heating Pad  for keeping the chocolate and chocolate wafers melted and at the right temperature.

Small cake decorating spatula - I like the one that is angled (I got mine at Michael's - it's manufactured by the The Ace of Cakes guy, Duff).  It looks larger in the photo, but the blade before it bends is actually only 3-1/2 inches long.

 Tweezers that you use only for food prep.  I bought a special pair from a gumpaste supplier, but you could use regular tweezers as long as they stay in the kitchen!

Full-size muffin papers in various colors - one for each head

Tissue paper for the clothing - about a 5 or 6-inch square for each head

Ribbon - at least 6-inches for each, or more if you want to tie bows

Waxed paper

INSTRUCTIONS

Wrap the heating pad with a dishtowel, and turn it on to low.

 Place no more than 1 pound of the Merckens peach wafers in a microwave-safe bowl ( use a bowl that doesn't retain heat, such as a pyrex dish or a plastic container).  Heat on medium power (5) for 1 minute.  Stir, and continue to heat and stir in 30 second increments on power 5, until the wafers are melted (don't let the coating get hotter than 120 degrees F.).  Set the bowl on the heating pad.

If you're going to fill the entire mold with the coating, do that now, filling each mold right up to the top.  Set the molds in the refrigerator to chill until the coating is completely set- anywhere between 5 -15 minutes.

If you plan to fill the centers with chocolate, you'll need to coat each mold with the peach coating.  There are two methods for coating the mold with chocolate.  I prefer  to spoon in about 1-1/2 teaspoons of the peach coating into each of the 3 holes and then to swirl the chocolate around inside of the molds until they are completely coated.  You'll be doing all three at once.  I like this method best because it spreads the coating evenly and is much faster than painting each cup.

When you use the swirl method, the coating might swirl slightly out of the mold cup.  This is actually good.  It ensures that the entire mold is coated.  Simply wipe off the excess coating with a paper towel or rag.   If you want an extra thin shell, you can hold the mold upside down over a piece of waxed paper and let the excess coating drip out of the mold.

If you have trouble with this method, you can paint each cup individually.  Start by putting in the 1-1/2 teaspoons of coating and then use the 370 Shader #8 brush to paint from this pool of coating.  After you get the whole thing coated, you might have to go back and daub on more chocolate on the spots you missed - you can see a few in the photo below.

 In the below photo you can see that I have missed some spots at the top, too.  These will be especially problematic if you don't notice them, as the dark chocolate and coating might not adhere well and you might get some separation when you try to unmold the chocolates (more on this later).

Make sure that the space where the stick goes is clear of chocolate, as the sticks won't be properly set into the chocolate if there is hardened coating in the stick space.

Place the molds in the refrigerator for no more than 3 minutes to set the shells.  Now you have to decide if you want to temper your chocolate or not.  Untempered chocolate will take much longer to set, will never be as firm as tempered chocolate, and can turn white or streaky when dry.  Since the chocolate will be encased in the coating, the white or streaky color won't show but you'll have to wait a lot longer for each one to set. 

If you do want to temper the chocolate, place about 9 ounces (chips or finely chopped bar chocolate) in a microwave-safe bowl.  Finely chop another 3 ounces of chocolate or set aside another 3 ounces of chips.  Microwave the chocolate on power 5 for 1 minute.  Stir and then reheat the chocolate in 30 second increments on power 3, stirring between each. Use an instant-read thermometer to make sure that the temperature is in the 90-110-degrees F. range.  When all of the chocolate is melted, add the remaining 3 ounces of chocolate and stir and rest until all of the chocolate is melted and the temperature comes down to 84 degrees, but not lower.  Place the bowl back in the microwave and heat for 10 seconds on power 2 to bring the temperature to between 88-90-degrees F.  If the temperature goes about 91 degrees, you have to let it cool back down to 84-degrees, and try again ( you can add more chopped chocolate to get the temperature down a little faster).  If the temperature drops below 84 degrees, you repeat the entire process.  Once you have successfully tempered the chocolate, place the bowl on the heating pad to keep it at the right temperature.  Stir and check the temperature often.

Spoon about 1 to 1-1/2 teaspoons of chocolate into each cup ( I use 3 molds at a time to make 9 babies, and then repeat the whole process, but you can do whatever will fit your refrigerator and counter space), so that the chocolate comes to within 1/16 inch of the top.  Set the lolly sticks in the stick holes. You might need to press down on them to make sure that they are all the way into the space provided for them.

 Place the molds in the refrigerator to set the chocolate.  This will take about 5 minutes if the chocolate has been tempered and 15-25 minutes if the chocolate was not tempered.

Cover the top of the chocolate with 1 final layer of coating.  I find it's easiest to just spread it with a teaspoon.  Make sure that the molds are completely filled up, and then set them back into the refrigerator for about 3 minutes to set the coating.

Let the molds stand at room temperature for a minute before you try to unmold them.  If the coating and chocolate are too cold, the coating will crack when you try and flex the mold to get the chocolate out.  Place a piece of waxed paper on the counter or in a pan onto which you'll unmold the chocolate.  To get them out of the molds, press on the noses of the babies.  If the chocolate don't pop out, let them rest a little more and then try again.  They should pop out of the molds pretty easily.

If you haven't done a good job in sealing in the chocolate, or if they were too cold when you tried to pop them out, part of the shell might stick to the pan and separate from the chocolate.  Don't despair - it can be fixed!

 Just use the decorating spatula (metal) or brush to add a glob of coating  to the chocolate.

 Then heat the spatula in the flame of a gas stove or over the coil of an electric, just for a few seconds to get the spatula warm.  Press the spatula on the glob of chocolate and smooth it out.  You can use your finger to do the final smoothing.

Another problem you can have when the chocolates pop out, is that there is excess chocolate around the edge of each form because you put just a bit too much coating into the mold.

This also gets fixed with a warm spatula - if you look at the photo of the spatula, above, you'll see that's exactly what I'm doing.  Just run the warm spatula around the edge of the form and the little excess tails of coating will melt away.  Again, your finger is the perfect finishing smoother.

You're now ready to do the hair.  You can use that nice tempered chocolate you have warmed on the heating pad, or you can melt some of the cocoa wafers for dark hair, or use one of the other combinations mentioned above, for other colors of hair.  Use the fine pointed brush, above, to brush chocolate onto the curl that is molded into each chocolate.  You can then use your imagination to do other hair styles.  For fine, wispy hair, use an almost dry brush.  If you want some spiky hair sticking out, you will need to let some of the chocolate or dark wafers to start to cool and thicken, otherwise it will be too thin to stand up.

For the eyes, use a fine pointed brush to dot a small glob of melted peach coating in the socket of each eye.  Use tweezers to set the eyes into the sockets, and then press lightly so that the eye will adhere to the melted chocolate.

If you want to make your own eyes, I think it is much easier to use fondant than to pipe royal icing eyes.  Roll fondant into small round balls - they should be smaller than the sockets.  Into the center

of each ball, press in a small colored ball. For the iris, use black food coloring.  Eyes will look more natural if the iris is slightly cut off at the bottom of the eye (not as shown here), so that it gives the suggestion of a lower eye lid.

The last thing to do is to give the cheeks a little blush.  Use the petal or luster dust in a pretty pink color.  Don't put too much on the brush at once.  The dust has a little bit of a glittery effect, but if you put it on sparingly, and brush off any excess, it really gives the babies depth and personality!

For the bonnets, use scizzors to make a slit in the side edge of the muffin papers, and then set the heads into

the bonnets.  You can do the bonnets or the sleep sacks first.

To make the sleep sacks, set the tissue paper square either under the lower third of the head or at the neck.

 Fold in the two sides.

and then tie the ribbon around the top. 

You can also make a wider bottom, so that they look more like sleep sacks.

Voila!  You have now made some of the cutest looking chocolate lollypops in the world!

Filled Fudge Cookies Revisited

I originally published this recipe in December 2010, and recently cooked them again, with a friend. Just for experience, she made them at her house before our baking session, and found that she had some difficulties with the dough.  I could tell immediately that she had overcooked the cookies, but when she described how dry her dough was, I knew that there was probably another problem.  We made them again, using the ingredients she had brought and found that the dough was way too dry.  The culprit seemed to be the flour.  The recipe called for unbleached flour, and that is what she had brought, but it was Gold Metal - Better For Bread, unbleached, and this flour has too much protein in it  for the dough to work (we know this because we made them again with Pillsbury unbleached and it worked fine).  I have changed the recipe to reflect this - it now calls for all-purpose flour - either unbleached or bleached will work fine, and will be less confusing to those who can only find unbleached bread flour.  The other issue was with the 1/2 can of condensed milk.  I, of course, did this by weight, using 7 ounces of the condensed milk - which actually turns out to be more than half of the can - even though the can says that it is 14 ounces.  The recipe now has a more precise measurement for this.  Lastly, we wanted the cookies to look more elegant so we drizzled them with dark and white chocolate.  I don't have a picture of the result, but they really looked wonderful.

This recipe is based upon a 1995 $50,000 Pillsbury Bake-off winner called Fudgy Bonbons.  It was a really good  confection, but not a great one, because the dough was kind of greasy and the filling bland.  The original recipe called for using chocolate chips, which got melted together with some butter and then mixed together with condensed milk and flour.  Because there was not a very large amount of butter, every time I made the cookies, the chocolate mixture seized - that is, it got stiff and grainy very quickly.  The quick fix to this was to melt the chocolate and butter separately, and then to combine the chocolate with the very large quantity of condensed milk, which worked beautifully (as long as the milk is at room temperature!).  I also thought that the dough would be smoother  and less greasy with less butter in it.  In addition to these problems, the original recipe called for using milk chocolate kisses in the center.  So here you had a rather sweet wrapping around a mediocre piece of chocolate candy, rather than having a contrast between the two and a superb chocolate candy center.  The last problem with the bon bons was that, although they tasted good the first day, after that the candy center hardened and then it was more like eating a wrapped candy, rather than a cookie.  All of these objections were easy to fix as you'll see in the following recipe.  In my opinion, I've turned a $50,000 bonbon into a $100,000 cookie!  Love to have your opinions!

Filled Fudge Cookies
7 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped ( I used Ghirardelli)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
7 ounces (2/3cup) sweetened condensed milk, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup (130 grams) all-purpose flour, measured by fluffing, scooping and levelling

30 Dove Promise candies, Caramel or Peanut Butter (or solid)

2 ounces semisweet chocolate, for decorating
2 ounces white chocolate, optional (to get it to melt thinly, you need  white chocolate with more than 31% cocoa butter (more than 15g/40g chocolate)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. with a rack in the center of the oven.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Place the chocolate in a large microwave-safe bowl, and heat it on medium power (5) for 1-1/2 minutes.  If the chocolate isn't yet melting, heat it for another 30 seconds.  Stir, and see if the mixture needs more heating or if it can rest and continue melting on its own.  Continue, heating, stirring and resting until the chocolate is melted and smooth.  Set aside to cool briefly.

Meanwhile, place the butter in a small microwave-safe bowl and heat it on 10 seconds to melt the butter.  Stir the condensed milk and vanilla into the chocolate and  then stir in the melted butter.

Add the flour and stir, and then knead the dough until all of the flour has been incorporated.

     

Keep the dough covered as you are making the cookies, and if it starts to crack a lot as you are making the cookies, drizzle  and knead in a little more condensed milk.

To make the cookies, pull off a small ball of dough, and flatten it in the palm of your hand or on a board until it is a scant 1/8-inch thick.  There are a few different shapes that you can make, and I use them to differentiate cookies that have different fillings.  This time, I used round shapes for cookies filled with solid chocolate ( I didn't like those for the reasons mentioned above), square shapes for the caramel filled cookies and triangles for the peanut butter filled cookies. 

For round or square shapes, set the Dove Promise square in the center of the dough you have just flattened, and then bring the sides up over the dough to encase the chocolate.



Once the dough is encased, you can squeeze and pat it in our hand and use your thumb and forefinger to shape the round.

 

For square shapes, tamp the cookie on its ends.

For triangles, I like to cut the Dove Promises in half.  If using the caramel filled ones, they will need to be frozen first.  I usually start with the same piece of dough as in the above examples, but I square it up on the work board and then turn it so that the pointed side is up.  I put the piece of candy in, wrap the top edges around the candy, estimate the amount of dough needed to finish the wrap, and then cut off the excess dough at the bottom. (When I try to cut it into the triangle shape first, I always seem to end up with too little dough, but you can do it anyway that gets the job done). 

The last thing to do is to seal the final edge, and I usually do that with a decorative rim.

Set the cookies on the prepared cookie sheet and bake them for 4-6 minutes.  DO NOT OVERBAKE. Cookies will be soft and appear shiny, but the bottoms will just be showing signs of being cooked and will look like barely-cooked brownies. Slide the parchment onto a cooling rack and let the cookies cool.  

The cookies aren't that attractive without some sort of decoration, and cookies that don't look great won't be perceived as great, even if they are! I usually just melt the 2 ounces of semisweet chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl for about 1 minute on power 5 or until melted.  I then make a little cone out of a plastic bag, snip off the tip and pipe some horizontal lines on the top to cover up the cookie blemishes. You can repeat the process with the white chocolate.

How long to let the cookies cool is definitely a matter of preference. After about 2 hours, the cookies will be cool, but the centers will still be totally liquid .  I prefer them after about 6 hours when the chocolate has firmed up a bit, but isn't yet hard.  By the next day, the centers will have firmed back to their original state.  You can put them back onto a cookie sheet and set them in a 100 or 200 degree oven for a minute or two to re-soften the centers slightly.

The cookies do freeze, although they are always much better when freshly made. Set the frozen cookies in a 300 degree oven for 5 minutes to defrost the dough and soften the centers.

Makes about 30 cookies