Sunday, February 19, 2012

Stuffed Red Peppers


What You Will Need:

2-4 large red peppers, adjust recipe accordingly.
1/2 pound ground beef  (I used Pat LaFrieda's Original Blend)
3/4 cup white rice (I used Teximati)
1 egg
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 garlic clove chopped
1/2 tablespoon dried parsley flakes
1 teaspoon dried basil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
8-12 ounces of tomato sauce
1/4 cup chicken broth
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar or Worcestershire sauce (depending on your taste, some may even like to use soy sauce)
4 tablespoons grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

What To Do First:

Use the tomato sauce you learned to make here: http://couplesfoodtherapy.blogspot.com/2010/04/infamous-sauce-recipe.html

Cook your ground beef (we prefer Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors) Drain and set aside, still juicy is good.

Cook your favorite white or brown rice al dente. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Cut off pepper tops around stems, save some of the tops to chop up and add to your stuffing mixture. Scoop seeds from pepper cavities. Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onions, parsley, garlic, black pepper and salt with the chopped pepper pieces. Sauté mixture until onions soften and a wonderful aroma fills the kitchen. Transfer to large bowl. Mix in cooked rice, the rest of your spices, 1/2 cup tomato sauce, the ground beef and 1 egg.

What To Do Next:

I like to pre-roast my peppers in the oven for 10 minutes before filling them. Coat the insides with a little oil and salt mixture to season and draw out the moisture. Drain before filling.
Then...
Fill pepper cavities with the beef and herb rice mix.

Stand filled peppers in a casserole dish with enough space around them to bathe in more of the tomato sauce
Cover with foil and bake for 25 to 35 minutes. Remove the foil and spoon the juice from bottom of the casserole over the top of the peppers. Bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes.
Let cool for a few minutes, then enjoy!

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

German Chocolat Cake - without the german




Yesterday was my birthday and with some teamwork and a trip to the local bar, we baked a delicious German chocolate cake. The recipe comes from the famous Magnolia Bakery and I have to say it is not only quite fool proof, but a solid recipe. I'm going to write out the original and then follow it up with some tips and comments that I feel they left out... Maybe on purpose!

First let's start out with what German chocolate is. It actually has nothing to do with Germany. It is in fact named after an American whose last name was German. He developed a recipe for a dark baking chocolate for the American Baker's Chocolate Company. The product was eventually named after Sam German. So in reality, the cake is actually called German's Chocolate Cake. In the end though, none of this matters but the fact that it's freaking delicious so, on to the recipe!

For the Cake:
4 ounces Baker's German Chocolate Cake
1/2 cup of Water
2 Cups AP Flour
1 1/2 teaspoons Baking Soda
1/2 teaspoon Salt
4 large eggs, separated (Room Temperature)
1 Cup unsalted butter (Room Temperature)
2 Cups + 2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Buttermilk

First thing, turn your oven to 350F. Grease three 9x2- inch cake pans, then line with parchment and make sure your ingredients are at room temperature.

In a small sauce pan add the chocolate and water and warm on low heat. Allow the chocolate to melt and then remove from the heat and allow to cool.

In a large bowl, cream the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. This all can be done in a stand mixer on medium.

While this is working sift together the salt, flour and baking soda.

Add the egg yolks to the creamed mixture one at a time, allowing each one to incorporate fully before adding the next.

Next add the cooled chocolate and water mixture and the vanilla extract.

Now add the dry ingredients in thirds, alternating with the buttermilk, beating after each addition until smooth.

In a separate bowl, whip the remaining egg whites and 2 tbsp sugar until soft peaks.

Combine the batter and egg whites by folding the whites into the batter.

Divide among the prepared pans and bake for 25Y-30 minutes or until a cake tester inserted into the center of a cake comes out clean. Be careful not to overbake, as this cake has a different, lighter texture than most.

Let the cake cool for ten minutes in the pan, remove and place on cooling racks and allow to cool completely.

For the Icing:
18 ounces evaporated Milk
6 egg yolks
2 Cups Sugar
1 Cup unsalted Butter, cut into small pieces
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups sweetened, shredded coconut
2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

In a large sauce pan combine the evaporated milk and egg yolks. Stir in the sugar, butter and vanilla extract. Stir over medium heat about 15-18 minutes or until thickened, bubbly and golden in color. Remove from heat and stir in the coconut and chopped pecans. Transfer to a large bowl and cool until room temperature and of good spreading consistency.

When cake has cooled spread frosting between layers and over the top of the cake.

As for the tips, I lied and incorporated them into the recipe.

I added sugar to the egg-whites in the cake because it makes them a little more stable when whipping them. Ours were a little warm and had no sugar and despite the fact that we were able to whip them to soft peaks they weren't very stable.

The filling also says to place on medium heat and hold there for 15 minutes. I look at this as a cooked custard more or less. There is 2 cups of sugar which raises the coagulation temperature of the egg yolk proteins, but I feel you are better off working on and off the heat until the mixture thickens up. In fact, I havent tried it yet, but I would probably cook the milk and sugar until close to the right color then temper the egg yolks in and allow the mixture to thicken slowly on and off the heat. I'll try that the next time I make it. Ours came out just fine with their method but you can tell that the eggs curdled slightly. When the mixture cooled you couldn't see it at all and you couldn't taste scrambled eggs either.

I would also increase the icing recipe by 50% as ours just barely covered the cake. I would much rather have extra frosting than too little. If anyone makes the cake. please let us know how it comes out.

DOWN WITH  BOX CAKES!

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Joys of Marmite.

I was born in England and therefore raised on a certain savory spread called marmite as all properly brought up British children are. When my family brought me over to America, I became the weird one in school with marmite & cream cheese sandwiches instead of PB&J. Bad for my social life, excellent for my health!
It's a staple in most households in Britain and I for one still get panicky as soon as the jar is getting low. I had a problem finding it in grocery stores on Long Island, NY but happily found is was abundant in New York City where Dan & I work and play now. I bought the extra large 500 grams jar at an indian food store called "Goods of India next door to Kalustyans on Lexington Ave.

Marmite is simply yeast extract and a by-product of beer brewing. It looks like a thick dark brown syrup but is a salty almost tangy taste, vegan friendly and full of B vitamins and folic acid (very important for women). Apparantly, a 4g serving will give you 35.6% of your daily Niacin, 16.6% Thiamin, 17.5% Riboflavin, 60% B12 and 50% Folic acid intake of the day. Sold.
The original company producing it as its main product was started in 1902 and a similar version of it from Australia and New Zealand was developed called Vegemite. It seems to not be a taste most Americans enjoy, although they should because its delicious and nutritious and I'm writing this to hopefully change that.

Contrary to stereotypical belief, marmite does not solely have to be enjoyed on a crumpet *delicious! or on a piece of buttered toast with a pot of tea (although I highly recommend both of these). That's why I decided to do some research and blog for you some interesting things to do with marmite and different techniques to try. My goal is to convert at least one person out there into a marmite believer!

Drink it!
Marmite can be made into a hearty & low calorie drink just by adding hot water to however many teaspoonfuls you'd like to consume. A little goes a long way! This is especially good for the cold winter months or if you're home in bed with the flu. All the B vitamins will boost your immune system.

Grill it!
For dinner tonight you can make a marmite marinade for those boring chicken breasts! Completely cover the chicken in a mix of 3 tablespoons plain yogurt like Fage, 4 teaspoons of Marmite & half a lemon squeezed and blended well. Marinate chicken in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours or overnight. Grill chicken on a cast iron grill (about 10 minutes).

Spread it!
Cream cheese, cucumber and marmite on whole wheat bread sandwiches. Just trust me on this one.
If the cream cheese is too weird for you try slices of cheddar or white american, and tomato optional. Also delicious.

Mix it!
You can use marmite as a flavor booster and salt substitute for things like scrambled eggs that need a little kick. Think: soups, stews, stir-frys, meatloaf, gravies and cassaroles. Really anything you'd use beef broth or beef extract in try marmite instead. Voila! your new favorite secret ingredient.




A couple favorite recipes using Marmite from All Recipes.com:

Marmite Mince: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/marmite-mince/Detail.aspx
Marmite Fried Rice: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/fried-rice-with-marmite/Detail.aspx

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Shoutout to St. James Healthcare's Art Therapy Interns!

In this very exciting (for us) post I'd like to share how many special ways food can be used as therapy, touching lives and bringing people together from different generations. I am a Creative Arts Therapist at a geriatric nursing facility and am lucky enough to always have amazing interns throughout the year. Recently as one of them approaches the end of her internship she had the very bright idea of cooking a goodbye meal with the residents she has worked with because cooking has meant so much to them in their lives. Because they are of Italian descent they decided on spaghetti and meatballs with homemade sauce and guess who's recipe they decided to follow!!

We couldn't be more proud! Here are some pictures that highlight their process:













Some pointers that came up during their cooking therapy group were:
-If the sauce looks pasty and thick, add a cup of water and let the steam boil off as it's slowly cooking on low heat.
-When forming your meatballs try to physically handle them as little as possible. The more theyre handled the chewier theyll be.
-For a sweeter sauce don't use salt pork and add a 1/2 cup of sugar. Ours is more meaty & savory.
-Because we were cooking in a healthcare facility we had to be extra careful with the raw meat. Make sure not to handle anything else once youve touched raw meat, and thoroughly disinfect any area where the raw meat touched.
-Prebake the meatballs in the oven or pan fry them before adding them to the sauce, just to make sure they're cooked through.

Everyone in the building smelled the meatballs and sauce and came running! It was a truly successful and beautiful therapy group to watch and we are so honored to be a part of it.

See original "Tomato Sauce" recipe post here:  http://couplesfoodtherapy.blogspot.com/2010/04/infamous-sauce-recipe.html

And For "Meatballs" here:
http://couplesfoodtherapy.blogspot.com/2010/04/meatballs-spaghetti-andsauce-recipe.html

Friday, October 15, 2010

Pizza Part 2


This is going to be the first video blog of I'm sure many to come. It was my first time editing with premier and adding an audio track over muted video so cut me some slack! It gets the point across but unfortunately I lost some footage at the end on how I dressed the pie for eating so it was described. Please do me a favor and comment and let me know what you guys think and something you may want me to add or change.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Pizza! Part 1



So, basically a common theme among friends is that no one quite knows how to make homemade pizza. Here's a little secret, it's super easy, it's super cheap and it's actually pretty quick. The whole process takes about 24 hours, but it is really only about 15-20 minutes worth of work. The following recipe is provided by Peter Reinhart, a bread teacher at Johnson and Wales. I'll give you three measurements for each ingredient; volume, weight in ounces and weight in grams. I recommend weight in grams because it is the most accurate however you can "kind of" get away with volume.

Dough:
4.5 Unbleached Bread Flour, chilled     (20.25 ounces or 574 grams)
1.75 t Kosher Salt                                (.44 ounces or 13 grams)
1 t Instant Yeast *see notes below*      (.11 ounces or 3 grams)
1.75 Cups Ice Water
.75 Cups Olive Oil                                (Optional)

Instant Yeast vs Active Dry vs Fresh Yeast
All three of these have different potency, meaning you need different amounts of each for the same rise. Instant yeast is sometimes called rapid rise. I recommend you get Instant SAF Yeast from Trader Joes or Whole Foods. If I recall correctly, the conversion is 100% - 40-50% - 33%   fresh - active dry - instant. This means that if a recipe calls for 10 ounces of fresh yeast you can use about 4.5 ounces of active yeast for the same rise or 3.3 ounces of instant for the same rise. Get it ?

Olive Oil or Canola Oil:
Oil, or fat basically, in a dough will cause it to be come more tender and chewy and less crisp. If you want a nice flat bread almost cracker crust no fat is your friend.

Building the Dough:
Combine the yeast, salt and flour in a work bowl, preferably a kitchen aid with the dough hook attachment. Mix on low speed until thoroughly combined.

Add the ice water and oil slowly. it may not take all of the water so put in about 85% and slowly add the rest as the dough calls for it. It should be slightly tacky and pull away from the walls of the bowl but ever so slightly stick to the bottom. Turn the speed up to medium and let it knead in the work bowl for 5-7 minutes. If you are doing it by hand combine all the ingredients and knead by hand for about 10 minutes on a floured work surface. Try not to over flour while working the dough by hand.

Remove the dough from the work bowl onto a floured surface and roughly shape into one piece. Weigh the dough and cut into whatever size you are looking for. I use 10 ounce portions for a home pizza stone size pizza. If you are making a pan pizza you will need to experiment a little. After cutting, perform the following:


This roughly shapes the dough into the correct size. After creating these shaped dough balls place them in a lightly oiled bowl top side down and swirl to coat, flip them over and coat the bottom and then cover with plastic wrap. Let these rest in a refrigerator over night. This entire process can take as little as 15 minutes.



Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Food Rules

The following is taken directly from a Michael Pollan article posted in the New York Times Magazine. The article is written incredibly well and brings great light to a situation that obviously needs to change. To read the entire article, which I highly recommend you do please visit:

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/

If you have any specific questions in reference to items mentioned please feel free to ask and I will explain them. I also recommend watching Food, Inc. in conjunction with this article. They play off each other very well. Now without further ado...

Michael Pollan

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.




2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.



3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.



4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.



5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costsmore, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.



”Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. ”Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called ”Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the ”eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.



6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less ”energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (”flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.



7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.



8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.



9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of ”health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.