Sephy’s Platzish

While I’m obviously talented in a lot of things, shopping for liquors is not one of them. In fact, I’d never bought any prior to this Sunday, when I had to get some wine for a recipe I was making. Fortunately, the person in the liquor department at the grocery store knew where to find the product I was looking for and found one that was $3.59 for a 750mL bottle.

Unfortunately, it’s not an Aussie wine, rather a California Burgundy called Inglenook - the winemaker’s comments are that it is actually a mix of different flavors and not just red grapes. It has a bit of a bitter scent, but the reason for this purchase was not to drink it, rather to use it in a recipe.

A couple of weeks ago, Snoskred and I had a bit of a discussion about cooking with wine. I didn’t believe in it, thinking that adding the wine would do nothing to the food (I knew that the alcohol would cook out), however, the old line is “don’t knock it until you try it.” I’ve tried it and I am now convinced of its worthiness.

However, all did not go as planned, requiring some adjustments when the end product was already cooled and ready for reheating. The recipe that I made was one that I was given by Snos - Crock Pot Chicken Cacciatore.

I did everything as it was written - including mixing the ingredients other than the chicken and onions in a separate bowl. The only thing I didn’t stick to perfectly was the amount of tomatoes with chiles - the recipe calls for an 8oz can, but I used a 14oz can, and I left the juice in with the tomatoes.

I chucked it all into the slow cooker, set it on high and let it go. After about 4 hours of cooking, it was time to take it all out.

As you can see, it was a bit, well, thin. However, it had a wonderful smell; the aroma of the wine mixed with the tomatoes and vegies practically permeating the whole house. The recipe suggests serving it along with some pasta, and I chose to be basic and made up some spaghetti, which took a long time to cook because I used the wrong pan on our “new” (we’ve had it in our garage for 2 years after we picked it up for nothing) flat-top stove.

You might not be able to tell it, but I took the picture without flash, and have managed to take a lot of the extra red caused by the lighting out of the picture.

It was fantastic to have, but there was that niggling problem of it being just too thin. I mentioned that to Snos, and said that I had an idea - reduce it over the stove for a while to thicken the sauce.

On Monday, I did just that. I put it in the pan for a little over an hour and it thickened right up (you’ll see that I put the leftover spaghetti into the cacciatore), and provided a great base for some more pasta.

I also decided to cut up the chicken into strips instead of having it left as whole breasts and that worked well, the chicken winding up a lot moister than it was in the first time.

That was the last photo I took of the chicken cacciatore, however, it served as meal for me for four days - dinner on Sunday, and lunch on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Each day it was the same, but a little different - on Monday and Wednesday, I had it over spaghetti, and on Tuesday, I did it over macaroni; either way wound up great.

If you’ve got a slow cooker, I definitely recommend that you take this recipe for a go; however, do know that you should probably drain the diced tomatoes and you may need to cook it in a pan for a while to thicken it up a little bit.

When I woke up this morning, I got a slight hint as to something that I was being, well, told to do (it wasn’t on my to-do list, but I am getting the stuff that is on there done, so it’s not impacting my time too badly).

Here is the hint that I had -

That’s a pretty blatant way to get the message across, I have to say. The hint, of course, was to make chocolate chip cookies, and I’ve obliged by making them. The only difference between the recipe I was suggested to make and the one I did wind up making was that I used a different brand of chips to the one that is in the picture. The recipe on the package I used is the exact same one as on the other one.

I don’t know about you, but I think that Toll House should consider suing Hershey’s for stealing their recipe.

Anyway, it went together in the usual fashion - cream 2 sticks of butter with 3/4 cup each of white and brown sugars and 1 teaspoon of vanilla, then adding 2 eggs and mixing that until it’s combined. Next is beating in 2¼ cups of flour, ½ teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of baking soda (mixed together in a separate bowl), then adding in the package of chocolate chips.

Here’s what the bowl looked like when I was mixing it all together -

One thing that we’ve always done when making chocolate chip cookies is to mix the chips in using a wooden spoon, and it always comes out good. Here are the cookies before they went into the 375°F oven for 10-11 minutes -

Just a note about this pan, it is one of those “air cushion” pans - we’ve used it for many, many years now, and we have not burnt a single thing on it. They’re relatively inexpensive and I heartily recommend you using it.

It took a little over an hour to get all the cookies done; even after having some of the dough (bad, I know! ;)), the final yield was 49 cookies, because there were four batches of 9 and a batch of 13; here they all are on the cooling rack -

So, I got the hint and came through with it, and there won’t be any complaints about not doing what I wasn’t asked to do, just what I was hinted at doing.

After making the Zucchini Bread last week, there was still an appreciable amount of shredded zucchini left. In fact, it almost completely filled up this container in the fridge -

That means only one thing - I have to find more things to do with the zucchini, other than just putting it into a shape that looks like bread. As it also happened, my mother took one of the loaves of bread into her work, and on Monday I received a thank you card from the person who’s in charge of the office she works at.

The best thing about the card is that the reason it was sent was that they liked the bread and were apparently sending a message of “More, please” for me to make some more stuff to be brought in.

My latest experiment was to make the same recipe that I used for the bread, but I made the decision to halve the recipe because I wasn’t totally sure on how it would work to use the bread recipe for muffins. Fortunately, almost everything converted neatly for halving - the only “oddball” measurement was the milk - 1/6th cup; no half eggs needed either.

The batter all came together quickly this time, and I had some fun with the bowl while waiting for the oven to heat up - manually taking the spatula and creating a bit of centrifugal force causing the batter to go up the sides of the bowl.

Then I put the batter into a couple of muffin tins, chucked it into the oven for about 15 minutes, after which time it was all done. The half-recipe yielded 12 larger muffins and 9 mini muffins which made a nice pile when it was all done. Amazingly, we still have most of the muffins - one is enough for a nice snack.

Here are a couple more pictures -

The mini muffins ready for the oven

All the muffins made, piled up and ready to eat.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve been changing up what we grow in our garden here. It used to be that we’d grow the staples - potatoes, onions, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, peas, carrots, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli and a couple of rows of sweetcorn.

Then, we decided to have a go with starting our own seeds, along with planting some different vegetables. One of the vegies that we planted were zucchini. Prior to growing our own zucchinis, I hadn’t tried it, and thought the idea of zucchini bread was bizarre - I mean, vegetable-based bread? You can’t be serious.

However, we planted a couple of them, and they came up. We then got one recipe for bread with chocolate chips - that turned out really good and we’ve already made two loaves this year of that (the recipe makes 2 loaves). Even after that, we still have loads more shredded zucchini. Since it was up to me to shred it up, I wasn’t totally sure on how to shred it, so I did some searching and came across this recipe which was a result of the person having fifteen cups of shredded zucchini.

As you can see, it does call for some interesting ingredients, including lemon or orange zest (which I did skip since we don’t have any oranges or lemons around), and an interesting quartet of spices - cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice. I knew that we didn’t have allspice, and wasn’t totally sure about the ginger, yet the whole thing worked thanks to a miracle product: Pumpkin pie spice!

Yep, pumpkin pie spice has cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice (along with an anti-caking agent). As the recipe calls for a variety of amounts of the individual spices, I decided to go on my own with the measuring and went with 1 teaspoon of pie spice, along with 1 teaspoon of cinnamon (since it was 2 tsp. of cinnamon for the recipe). I also skipped the raisins and only put in about a half cup of walnuts.

By far the coolest thing was making oat flour by putting a cup of Quaker Rolled Oats and processing it in the food processor for a couple of minutes.

I could have gotten three slightly-smaller loaves out of the recipe, but I decided to make two larger loaves. Fifty-five minutes later, it was done; so I let it cool for about an hour or so before taking it out of the pans. Before I took a picture, I had sampled a piece of the bread and it was fantastic.

And, of course, here’s the bread, minus a smallish sample :

Last week, we heard of a sale of salmon at one of the local grocery stores - they were selling whole fish at $1.99 per pound. These weren’t your farm-raised Alaskan or Chilean salmon, but came in fresh from Lake Michigan in the back of a truck.

The only processing that was done before they came to the store was that they were gutted and had the scales removed. The folks they had there gave everyone the option of having fillets, steaks or a combination of both. We opted to go for the half-and-half option of steaks and fillets.

When we got home, we cut the fillets down further to cuts of about 1-inch or so, perfect for a single serve of fish. We also packaged each of the five steaks separately, freezing everything but two of the steaks. It was then my time to go in search of a recipe to make.

The one that I found - Grilled Salmon Steak - is a recipe that is easy to make; the only change that we made was substituting black pepper for white (after seeing that the white pepper was $3.59 for a small container). I went along with the instructions; one orange, and two limes and lemons were all that was needed to get the 1/4 cup amounts. I wasn’t sure if they meant to cut the actual rind out from the flesh of the fruit, so I just put little slices of each item in there in place.

On the side, we had gotten some asparagus (also on sale $2.99 per pound), so I made that, along with a small zucchini picked fresh from the garden, using olive oil, lime juice, kosher salt, black pepper, thyme and garlic as the marinade for that.

As you may already know, we’ve switched from charcoal to gas for our grill, and I have to say that I’m now getting accustomed to the different flavor that you get from a gas grill. It’s also so much easier to use compared to the charcoal - no need to worry about getting the paper lit for the coals, and there’s hardly any waiting necessary for the grill to either heat up or cool down. I can totally understand now why gas is preferred to charcoal now.

So, it was a quick 10-minute warmup for the grill, after which I put the salmon on to the grates, and put the vegies on a piece of aluminum foil over the other side of the grill.

After about 12 minutes or so of grilling, it was all done, and the salmon was nice and flaky. It was interesting trying to take the steaks off the grill with a pair of tongs - they fell apart, but luckily nothing fell between the grates. The vegies were also nice and tender, with some charring on them, but not a lot.

It all tasted excellent, though in hindsight, I would have just left the lime juice out of the asparagus and zucchini; we’ve always had it without, and it added a bit of unusual flavor to them, though it wasn’t that bad.

Of course, here are the pictures, clicking on them will make them bigger -

The salmon, sitting in its marinade after an hour in the fridge.

The vegies in their marinade.

The salmon, just after putting it onto the grill; the white specks you see are the “grated” onions.

Just after flipping the salmon, you can see the wonderful grill marks on the fish

Here’s everything, just before being taken off of the grill and into the house.