Clam Chowder

A slow cooker clam chowder recipe, slightly modified from this one, and annotated. 

Ingredients:
4 slices bacon
2 medium white onions
4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup flour
3 6.5 ounce cans chopped clams
2.5 cups white wine for cooking
3 medium-large white potatoes
2 teaspoons instant chicken bouillon
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp marjoram
1/2 tsp basil
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
3 cups half and half
1 cup cream

1. Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks (half inch to one inch cubes).  Set aside.

2. Chop onions.  Cut bacon into 1/2 inch pieces.  Mince the garlic or squeeze it through a garlic press.  Open the cans of clams, drain clam juice into a measuring cup, set clams aside (refrigerate).

3. In a wok or large skillet fry the bacon until it greases the pan.  Add onion, sautee until onion is soft.  Add garlic, sautee until the garlic smells nice.

4. Reduce heat to medium or so and slowly stir in the flour.  Fry until everything is coated.

5. Pour in clam juice and wine.  Stir until everything is blended.

6. Pour all this into the slow cooker.  Add the potatoes, chicken bouillon, marjoram, celery seed, and pepper.  Stir.

7. Cook on low for 7 hours.

8. Add clams, half and half, and cream. 

9. Cook on high for another 30 minutes.

Most slow cooker clam chowder recipes I've seen call for cream of mushroom soup.  The Boston snob in me is shocked.  This tastes more like what we remember.  The wine especially adds a wonderful tang to the taste.  This went perfectly with oyster crackers (natch) and a crusty sourdough bread. 

Notes:  Of course fresh clams would probably taste better than canned;  in that case you'd want to buy bottled clam juice to use, and I unfortunately don't know how much because I forgot to notice how much juice was in 3 cans of clams.  Also, a fourth can of clams wouldn't go amiss.  As for the wine, the cooking wine we used had salt added;  if you're using a normal white wine (i.e., made for drinking) you'll want to add salt to the recipe to compensate.  Finally, next time we might try reducing the liquid to make the broth just a little thicker - but what to cut back on?  Clam juice?  Wine?  Half and half? 

Coconut gouda

Okay, okay, I'm not dead either. Just swamped with school. And unlike T, I haven't been cooking much lately. We've gotten to know our local takeout/delivery places even better in the last month or so than we did before - which is saying something.

But one good cheese recommendation deserves another. Especially since it doesn't look like we'll be able to get a hold of that Monocacy delicacy without heading East. But this one is widely distributed, it looks like: Kokos Coconut Cheese. It's actually a gouda, if you can wrap your head around that. Made in Holland and everything. If you're like me, you read that and went, huh?, but then immediately went, hmm...

It's awesome stuff. Has the heaviness, the thickness, the chewiness of a gouda, but instead of the creaminess coming from butter it comes from coconut. It's not an overpowering coconut taste, but it's unmistakeable, and it's perfectly balanced with the gouda-ness. Just a wonderfully weird but tasty cheese.

Dilled Veal Stew

Yeah, it's veal stew, but veal is expensive and mean so I used stewing pork instead. But either way it was really creamy and good and totally worth the effort.

First You Need:
2 Tbs all-purpose flour
1 Tbs paprika
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

mix all these together in a little bowl and set them aside.

Then You Need:
3 Tbs butter, divided
2 lbs stewing veal (by which I mean pork), cut into 1-inch cubes and patted dry
2 onions, chopped
2 large carrots, chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup white wine (or more chicken broth)

Heat a big pan on medium and melt 2 Tbs butter. Cook the meat 3 or 4 minutes, then sprinkle your flour mixture over it. Stir it up and add to crockpot. Then use the pan to soften up the veggies for 5 to 7 minutes. Add the chicken stock and wine and bring it to a boil, then add to crockpot.
Cook on high 4 or 5 hours or low for 8 to 10, until the meat is nice and tender.

Last You Need:
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup chopped fresh dill (or a generous sprinkling of dried)

Stir these in and serve. We ate it plain but I think it would be good with some rice or orzo to add some texture and starchy goodness. You could probably skip softening the veggies and just add them straight to the crockpot but I don't really know if you could do that with the meat-and-flour mixture. If anyone tries that let me know how it works.

After a long, long hiatus!

Hello! I am alive and still cooking :) Joanna knows this but my gmail stuff got all screwy and I lost access to the blog for a little while there. In addition to that I am crazy busy with school and tickling Veda as often as possible! This evening's discovery was too fantastic to procrastinate though so I am posting within 15 minutes of eating all of it....NEW CHEESE:

Cherry Glen Monocacy Chipotle Soft-Ripened Goat Milk Cheese

It's a local MD cheese made with "100% American Ingredients"

(Please see cheese above)

I love cheese. Cheese is a food group to me. It is a purpose for living. That being said, I have had a lot of cheese and really will eat almost any kind. I am pretty much an equal-opportunity cheese eater. This cheese however, is pretty darn remarkable for a few reasons. It's goat cheese and therefore has that familiar smokiness to it but in addition to that it has a nice chipotle heat that translates into a deeper smokiness. BUT there is a really surprising bleu quality to this cheese. Yes, it is stinky :) If you look at the picture you can see that there are two really distinct textures here: the familiar crumbliness of a goat cheese and the silky cream-texture of a brie. How awesome! The brie-like section has most of the stinkiness and has a nice oily-spreadable quality to it that yields to the creamy crumbly texture. Anyway, I am clearly waxing poetic on this cheese but it really is fan-freaking-tastic. Fellow Marylanders: go forth and eat. Westerners: find an analogue? Sigh... I don't know if you can.

German Pancakes

When I was young, one of my favorite breakfast items was something we called German pancakes. For the whole family, we used two glass pans full. In college, I mangled the recipe into something about equal parts eggs, milk, and flour, mixed in a blender until slightly thick. Then, after marrying a vegetarian and living for a few years without eggs in the house, I forgot about them.

A cookbook recently given to one of our children has a recipe for something it calls a Dutch baby pancake with buttery apples. I'm in charge of breakfast, and generally make some kind of pancakes or waffles every Saturday, so I decided one day that it sounded like fun. As the batter came together, I suddenly recognized what I was doing, and got very excited.

Sadly, the rest of my family fails to properly appreciate sautéed fruit, it's quite a bit of work, so I've left it out since that first time. Jams or jellies work just as well as a topping. I also enjoy honey or agave nectar.

• 1-2 Tbsp. butter
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tsp. vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup flour
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. cinnamon

Drop butter into a 13"×9" glass pan and place into oven. Preheat at 375°F.

In a medium bowl, beat together eggs, oil, and milk. Add remaining ingredients and beat until smooth.

When the oven is hot, remove pan, swish the butter around to coat the bottom, and pour the batter in. Bake at 425°F for 10 minutes, then at 350°F for ≈8 more minutes, until golden brown and puffy.

Slice into 6-8 pieces. Serve hot.

Split Pea Soup with Mint Cream

This is an easy slow cooker recipe with a lighter taste than your average split pea soup.

Soup:
1 cup dried split peas
1 Tbs vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
5 or 6 radishes, chopped (this is supposed to be 3 stalks celery, but I'm allergic)
2 cloves garlic, chopped (you could totally use garlic powder--you're pureeing it anyway)
4 sprigs fresh mint
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
6 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 ½ cups cooked green peas

Cream:
¼ cup whipping cream
¼ cup sour cream
2 Tbs finely chopped mint

1. Add all soup ingredients EXCEPT cooked green peas to slow cooker and cook on low about 10 hours or high for 5 hours, until everything is super tender.
2. Meanwhile, make mint cream by whisking cream in medium bowl until thick and folding in sour cream and mint. Refrigerate until ready to use.
3. Just before serving, puree soup with hand blender (or puree in batches in blender/food processor) and stir in green peas. Pour soup into bowls and add a dollop of mint cream to each.

Tag Revamp

I'm determined to get around to reorganizing all the tags on our posts. My hope is to make the tag list shorter but still useful. So I'm going to put my tentative list here and give people a day or two to suggest different tags or tell me which tags we might not need.

Beef
Cheese
Chicken
Pork
Seafood
Veggies
Baking
Dips/Sauces
Breakfast
Salads
Soups
Sweets
Slow Cooker
Indian
Japanese
New foods
Food adventures
Food Bios

Also, should we keep the list format or change it to one of those clouds of tags? Cloud form makes it easy for me to see what tags are getting used, but list is easier to scroll down. Thoughts? Feelings?