Quarantine Post
So I know that I haven’t posted in over a year and thought that the quarantine would be the perfect time to catch you all up on what I’ve been cooking and baking. Despite there being no posts, I have continued to bake and cook (and I’ve continued to grow my cookbook collection!). Here’s a few things I’ve made and have documented in the last month during my time stuck inside and at home.
Starting with my most recent bake, I made praline bars from The Cookies and Cups Cookbook by Shelly Jaronsky. They have a buttery cookie base, a topping that is similar to pralines from New Orleans and sprinkled with pecans. They are really rich but so good and the perfect comfort treat on this gray and cloudy day 25 of quarantining. I think I looked through 6 of my dessert cookbooks before deciding on these. I also made them with ingredients that I already had on hand as I didn’t want to go to the grocery store just to pick up special baking ingredients.
Last week my partner made steak with compound blue cheese butter and crab-stuffed baked potatoes. I saw both recipes on an episode of The Kitchen and requested that my partner make them. It’s a great system that we have…I pick out recipes and my partner makes them! We used filets instead of rib eyes and only used the compound butter part, not the rub too. We both agreed that the steak didn’t need the butter and is better with just a little blue cheese melted on top. But the potato was incredible! The baked potato with the combination of warm crab meat and cold creme fraiche was amazing (we did not add caviar on top like the recipe recommends). The recipe made 4 potatoes so we had leftover potatoes the next night with roasted veggies (because you know, healthy) and potatoes were still incredible. And since we had extra crab left, I requested crab cakes like the Chart House in Boston makes. That is, mostly crab, not drenched in breadcrumbs and pan-fried, not deep fried. He found a super simple crab cake recipe, and we left out the celery (which I would not have wanted in there anyway) and the parsley (because we didn’t have any have). These were almost identical, at least in my memory, to the Chart House ones. Squeeze on a little lemon at the end to add even more flavor! I think I will request these for my 40th birthday which is coming up later this month while we are still quarantined.
A few weeks before that I made Irish soda bread and oatmeal, pecan, chocolate chip cookies with green sprinkles for St. Patrick’s Day. My partner and I celebrated at our house with our good friends and neighbors (while social distancing) rather than our usual pub crawl around Indy. Turns out, I’m glad we were planning on celebrating at home and had stocked up on Irish beverages and foods because Indy closed down bars and restaurants starting March 17th. The soda bread recipe came from a cookbook I got while I was in Ireland this past summer simply called Irish Cooking by Biddy White Lennon. The soda bread needed to be kneaded a little longer, but they said not to over-knead it or it will be tough. So it doesn’t look picture perfect but still tasted good. And my cookies were decorated using my Christmas and spring sprinkle collection picking out just the green sprinkles with very clean hands.
And the weekend before all this got real, I made Cheesy Cauliflower Rarebit Slab Pie from Pie Squared by Cathy Barrow. I had wanted to tackle pie crust for awhile and had some free time (I didn’t realize yet that I was about to have a lot free time). There was some trouble because I couldn’t get the bottom and top crust to pinch close all the way around so the filling came out over the crust on the bottom. Despite this, the crust still came out flaky, and I don’t think it had a soggy bottom. The cookbook talked about soggy bottom in particular, and Cathy said that she fixed that by accident by baking the crust in a sheet pan directly on top of a hot pizza stone. This allows for more direct heat which keeps your crust flaky. So there’s a tip from Cathy from me to you!
What have you been baking or cooking during the quarantine?