Honey Cake

honey cake!
honey cake!

I’ve had a cold for the past few days (probably picked up some gunk on the plane ride back), so we pushed our Rosh Hashanah celebratory meal to tonight. A little Braisin’ History—I made honey cake for the first time in 2012, from a recipe on smitten kitchen. It tuned out well that year, but I had moved by the time Rosh Hashanah rolled around in 2013, and I was not yet familiar with how my new oven worked—or rather, how it didn’t. That apartment had a terrible oven. It was at least 75 degrees off, and it would shut off whenever it felt it was approaching a workable temperature. So I baked the cake for the specified amount of time, and then it was raw. As I attempted to get it to a less-gooey state, I managed to burn the edges. I took the failure into work the next day in the hopes that someone would eat it. I ended up throwing most of it away at lunch.

This is not that honey cake, however! This turned out lovely! This is a new recipe I got from the New York Times. It calls for a lot of red wine, olive oil, and (of course) honey. The plum and thyme garnish is really something. I altered a couple things slightly from Melissa Clark’s recipe.

Cake:
2 1/2 cups AP flour (300 grams)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp table salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp ground ginger
3 large eggs
1 cup white sugar
1 1/4 cups olive oil
1 cup honey
3/4 cup red wine
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
Baker’s Joy or nonstick spray+flour, to prep the bundt pan

Garnish:
3 plums
2 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
pinch lemon zest

Heat oven to 350, and prep the bundt pan with Baker’s Joy or grease+flour combo.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices.

In another large bowl, whisk eggs until frothy. Whisk in sugar, oil, honey, wine, and the fresh ginger until well combined. Stir in dry ingredients and mix until just combined (no pockets of flour remaining, but don’t overwork the batter).

Pour batter into pan and bake until springy to the touch and a cake tester comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Transfer pan to a wire rack to cool for about 20 minutes, then unmold the cake (be brave!) and let cool completely.

While the cake is cooling, make the garnish. Chop up the plums and mix with the honey, thyme, and lemon zest. Macerate for at least 30 minutes.

Slice cake, top with garnish.

Netherlandish Proverbs in Action

What are you doing you massive weirdo

A photo posted by sarah (@braisinhussy) on

This bizarre little carving adorns the choir screen at the Church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem (not to be confused with Saint Bavo Cathedral, also in Haarlem). I thought it was just an artist’s whimsy. Nope! There’s more meaning than that.

After the church, we went to the Frans Hals Museum. One of the non-Frans Hals (and non-pickled-herring-related) things we saw there was this painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. It was a copy of his father’s work, Netherlandish Proverbs.

28019-Pieter Brueghel-Spreekwoorden

 

There are about a billion different adages illustrated in the painting (check the Wikipedia page). The bit we’re interested is down in the lower left. Comparing it to the toothy fellow up top chewing on the church, we can see that he is a “pillar biter,” or religious hypocrite. Probably not a concept you’d see showcased in a Catholic church at the time, but certainly in a Protestant one.

Looking at that list, I’m pretty amused by “the herring does not fry here,” meaning “this is not going according to plan.” And “He who eats fire, craps sparks” is so much more evocative than simply “playing with fire.” Which is your favorite?

State of the Garden 2016

Picked my first tomato of the year! A 6.5oz Big Beef.

A photo posted by sarah (@braisinhussy) on

I didn’t do a blog-along this year documenting my garden progress, so now, at the end of the growing season, I shall attempt to recount all of it.

February 2016: started 25 seedlings. They are pretty successful.

March 2016: seedlings go in the ground. I leave on a 3-week trip.

April 2016: return to find everything got eaten by snails except for some San Marzano tomato plants and nasturtiums. The survivors are straggly. I buy four tomato plants (Green Zebra, Black from Tula, Sunset Falls, and Big Beef), a six-pack of cherry tomatoes, a six-pack of bell peppers, one chili pepper, and some chives and basil. I make seven hanging baskets and four pots. Two of the tomato plants go in the ground.

June 2016: tomatoes start to have ripe fruit! Basket and pot tomatoes, that is. Ground tomatoes are doing nothing. Peppers being slowpokes. Lydia gives me some shiso seedlings.

July 2016: more tomatoes! Still nothing from the ground. Peppers getting with the program.

August 2016: more tomatoes! Basket peppers are finished. Potted peppers begin going nuts. I start some cucumber seedlings for the hell of it. I rip out the San Marzanos because I am over watching them do NOTHING.

September 2016: the Sunset Falls tomatoes, which were marked “determinate,” start producing more fruit. Cucumber plants start producing flowers. I leave for two weeks.

October 2016: the cucumber plants are going crazy! The peppers are giant! The tomatoes are giving everything they can in a last hurrah!

Gosh I’m looking forward to pickling season! Hopefully the first frost is still a ways off (last year it didn’t come until Thanksgiving) so I have time for more ripe veggies.

So what have I learned this year? Mostly that the soil/sun situation in our backyard is TERRIBLE and if I want to grow anything it’s going to have to be in pots or beds. The baskets are nice, but doing the top+bottom load means that neither one gets enough soil or resources.

I’m thinking about joining the community garden next year. I have a LOT of seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library—Lydia and I both bought a ton from their overstock sale, and then we shared them with each other. I have at least ten different kinds of tomatoes as well as a bunch of other stuff. The community garden has a lot more sunlight than my backyard, and hopefully more bees as well. And hey, community! Maybe I’ll make friends.

First #cucumber off my plant! Got another dozen or so on their way. #nationalpicklingcucumber #gardening

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Pickled Herring

By Judith Leyster - http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/SK-A-1685, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34313991
By Judith Leyster – http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/SK-A-1685, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34313991

During my trip to Amsterdam, Zed and I visited the Frans Hals Museum in the nearby town of Haarlem. (Haarlem, by the way, super cute place.) This painting is not by Hals, but was originally attributed to him. It’s by Judith Leyster, a contemporary. The audio tour had this kind of adorable drinking song playing in the background for this painting.

It’s about how pickled herring is so good and salty and makes you drink a lot. So a few days later we had to get some.

The Dutchiest of lunches: pickled herring.

A photo posted by sarah (@braisinhussy) on

It was pretty damn good.

Blogtober 2016

Well, another October has rolled around in another year where I’ve been just awful about writing. I haven’t written anything since my layout broke back in April. So I thought I’d give the ol’ Blogtober challenge another try. I went back and read through my entries from last year. Obviously it’s not great writing, but there’s some fun stuff in there. I probably won’t extend it into November this time, since I’m going to the East Coast mid-month for a combined wedding and Thanksgiving trip. I won’t have my laptop with me and I am not a fan of typing on a tablet.

I am currently MASSIVELY jetlagged from a trip to Amsterdam. I was there for two weeks, just got back on the 29th. I decided to try and tackle the jetlag this year by leaning in and just going with it. Sleep when I’m sleepy and be awake when I’m awake. Of course, that has meant that today I slept from 3pm to 8pm. Last night I woke up at 11:30pm and made a curry at 2am. It’s been a wild ride. I’ll probably go back to bed as soon as I post this.

(It was this curry, btw. Over the summer I froze leftover buttermilk and then forgot I had it in storage so I bought more. So I have far too much in the freezer. I am slowly working my way through the backlog. I think I have about four cups left. Thing is, frozen buttermilk tends to separate, so the resulting curries have been a little less than superlative in texture. They’re still tasty, but I wouldn’t serve them to a guest. More for me!)

Unlike last year, I haven’t really thought about this ahead of time, so I don’t have a list of topics already planned out. I’ve gone on two trips to Europe this year (Italy in March, the Netherlands in September), so those will hopefully yield decent content. I may just be reposting my Instagram photos and providing more backstory. I guess what I’m saying is that there may be more soap-quality posts this year.

Something broke

I need to figure out what happened to my search. Ever since I updated the database I’ve been getting errors. I may switch themes around a bit to try and fix it.

Please be patient. Apologies!

ETA: This layout seems to have fixed it. Now I have to decide whether I like it. Hmmmm.

Mujaddara

[image: bowl of mujaddara]
[image: bowl of mujaddara]

This is a follow-up to my mujaddara post from last year. I think I’ve found a version I like. I found out that I was sort of wrong about the original dish from Mediterranean Grill House. I took a look at the menu on their website, and it’s listed there as “Mujaddarah – Kushari.”

Kushari is an Egyptian dish which, like mujaddara, involves rice, lentils, and onions. However, it also contains macaroni, which was the mystery addition in MGH’s dish. So it’s more like a combination of the two? No vinegary tomato sauce, though (but I always dumped a ton of their hot sauce on top). The bright yellow I haven’t really found in any variation of either recipe. I added some turmeric to mine, but I think in order to get it the right shade, I’d need to add a bunch more to the rice as it’s cooking, and not just in the spiced oil.

(This is not a traditional recipe, just FYI. Also this particular method uses way too many dishes.)

1.5 cups long-grain white rice (I like jasmine)
1 cup brown lentils
2 onions, sliced into half-moons
vegetable oil
kosher salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground coriander
plain greek yogurt or sour cream, to serve
lemon juice, to serve

Cook the rice using your preferred method—stovetop, rice cooker, whatever. But for me, it’s the oven. In a 8×8 baking dish rubbed with a skosh of butter or oil, put 1.5 cups of rice, 1 tsp kosher salt, and 2 1/3 cup boiling water. Stir, cover tightly with aluminum foil, and bake for 1 hour at 375. Remove from oven, fluff with a fork, and set aside while other things are finishing.

(p.s. this method is amazing for brown rice and farro)

Cook the lentils on the stovetop in 4 cups of water until tender, 20–25 minutes.

In a pot that will be large enough to hold all the ingredients eventually, splash a bit of oil and add the onions and some salt. Over medium-low to medium heat, caramelize the onions. This will take a while. Add a sprinkle of sugar if you get impatient.

In a little pot, heat 2 tablespoons of oil. Add the cumin, turmeric, paprika, allspice, cayenne, cinnamon, coriander, and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt. Stir to combine over medium-low heat. Once the smell gets really potent and the oil starts to bubble around the edges a bit, remove from heat.

Stir the oil into the onions. Add the lentils and rice and mix everything together.

Serve with yogurt or sour cream, lemon juice, and an extra little sprinkle of salt. (If you want to make this vegan, just leave out the dairy garnish.)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

[image: heart-shaped cardamom butter cookies]
[image: heart-shaped cardamom butter cookies]

I don’t really do pretty cookies. I’m all for cookies that just taste good, regardless of their appearance. So it’s mainly drop cookies for me. However, for Valentine’s Day, I wanted to send some holiday-appropriate cookies to my nephews, so I unearthed a rolled cookie recipe and found a heart-shaped cookie cutter.

The recipe for Cardamom Butter Cookies has you rest the dough for a half hour in the fridge. This is supposed to take the dough from a pile of crumbs into a cohesive mass that can then be rolled. Well, it wasn’t happening. Maybe it was too dry here that day, maybe I hadn’t let the butter warm enough, but—I was panicking, basically. Suddenly I remembered a tip from America’s Test Kitchen (or Good Eats or one of the many cooking shows I had been watching during the aughts). It was a tip for pie crust, to use a bit of vodka when you needed moisture in the dough without adding water (which would make the crust tough). I put my crumbled dough back in the mixer and added two tablespoons of vodka, one at a time, until the dough came together as needed. I was then able to roll and cut it as I wished. I think I could probably skip the whole resting stage entirely next time, to be honest.

And the cookies were great! Happy Valentine’s, everybody!

Dill Pickles

[image: back of an envelope with the recipe scrawled on it]
[image: back of an envelope with the ingredients scrawled on it]

I don’t have a photo of the pickles because we ate them too quickly for me to get them into a nice jar (they were DAMN GOOD). So enjoy this scrawled ingredient list on the back of an envelope. It’s how many of my kitchen antics are recorded.

I’ve made three different kinds of pickles over the last few weeks. My folks had half a head of fennel that they weren’t going to use, so I found this recipe for Pickled Fennel with Orange on Serious Eats. I guess the only change I made was that I used the stalks of fennel as well as the bulb I had, to try and approximate “three small fennel bulbs.” (I wish they’d had a weight measurement instead.) The other thing which was recommended in the comments was to rinse the fennel after salting it.

I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but after like a week of flavor development I really got into it. It was good out of the jar, but my preferred application was on sandwiches. Toasted rye, cheddar cheese, grilled chicken, and fennel/orange pickle.

The second pickle is the dill cucumber pickles, recipe below. These were so good that I’m going to attempt cucumbers this year in my garden. But that is for a different post!

After we hoovered up the cucumber pickles, I decided to reuse the brine on some leftover asparagus spears. Reusing brine is NOT recommended if you’re canning, but it’s fine for refrigerator pickles. Asparagus has to be blanched first before putting into the briny deep. They’ve been in there for 48 hours; I tried a spear today but they weren’t ready yet. I’ll wait a few more days.

1 cup distilled white vinegar
1 cup water
1 Tbsp kosher salt
2 tsp dill seeds
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
4 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf
24 cucumber spears (I had 1.5 large cucumbers—sliced in half across, then each half into eighths)

Place the dill seeds, peppercorns, garlic, red pepper flakes, and bay leafs in the bottom of your pickling container of choice (I use cleaned 32-oz. yogurt containers). Wedge the cucumber spears into the container atop the spices.

In a small pot, bring the vinegar, water, and salt to a boil. Carefully pour into the container. Refrigerate for a week before eating. (If you are not using a jar and therefore find that the end of your spears are bobbing over the surface of the brine, rotate them top to bottom every other day.)