Tag Archives: food

Sweet and Spicy Popcorn

8 Nov

A couple of summers ago, we happened upon a summer festival in the small coastal town where we were vacationing.  Though we were delighted by the showcase of old (and still functioning) steam engine trains, the thing that piqued my interest the most was the huge man with the even huger beard making old-fashioned kettle corn over a roaring pile of burning logs.

The kettle being stirred by the man was enormous, I swear you could have fit both me and my son inside of it and still had room for some popcorn.  When the fellow first dropped some handfuls of popcorn and sugar into the kettle, he kept the lid on top, flipping his stir stick around inside as best he could while still making certain to hold the lid close enough to the top of the kettle so the sizzling hot kernels of popcorn wouldn’t jump out and singe him.  As the pile of popped corn began to grow, the man dispensed with the lid all together, stirring the contents of the kettle as they grew taller and fluffier, the popped kernels on top keeping the actively popping kernels on the bottom from leaping out of the kettle.

Call me naïve, but this process had me enraptured.  Not because it seemed intoxicatingly complex, mind you (though that raging fire burning beneath the popcorn kettle presented many a challenge, I am sure), but rather because the opposite was very quickly becoming clear to me.  I could totally make that at home, I thought, and as soon as we get home, I am so going to do it.

Cut to over a year later, and we get to the part of the story where I realize that, though I have certainly contemplated the making of kettle corn ever since I saw it being made right before my eyes, I never actually got around to tackling the experiment.  Interestingly enough, in the intervening months of thinking about kettle corn, I had actually started to wonder if I could dress up the snack a bit, give it a bit more kick to offset the basic components of popcorn, oil, and sugar.  Kettle corn was all right, but somehow all those months of thinking about making it had made me realize that what I really wanted to make was something still related to kettle corn, but stepped up a tad.

So, please allow me to introduce you to my new friend, kettle corn’s cousin, sweet and spicy popcorn.  A tiny bit of cinnamon and nutmeg add a warm and savory touch to the taste of the lightly sweet and buttery popcorn, while the chipotle powder creeps in with a small punch of heat to keep every bite interesting.  The flavor profile of this popcorn is simply a delight.  There is a little bit of everything going at once, but not so much that it overwhelms your palette and exhausts your taste buds.  Sometimes, because I am nothing if not super classy (what now?), I’ll pair this popcorn with a nice, crisp glass of white wine.  And sometimes, because I am also a small child passing as an adult, I will eat this very combination of foods for dinner.  Oops.  I think I just killed the classy part.

Sweet and Spicy Popcorn

If you are making this treat for children or people who do not enjoy spicy food, feel free to omit the chipotle powder from the cooking process.  You can, as I do when eating this with my son, keep some chipotle powder handy and sprinkle it on your own individual portion, leaving the master batch unspicy.

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon chipotle powder or hot chili powder, adjusted according to your preference for spicy foods

pinch nutmeg

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 tablespoon butter

½ cup popcorn kernels

½ teaspoon sea salt

Combine cinnamon, chipotle powder, nutmeg, and sugar in a small bowl and set aside.  In a large pot, heat butter and oil over medium low heat until the butter has melted.  Add popcorn and sugar/spice mixture to the hot oil and butter, stir to combine, then place a lid on top of the pot.

Wearing oven mitts so as not to run the risk of burning yourself, gently shake and swirl the pot on top of the stove to keep the kernels moving around in the hot oil and butter.  When the kernels begin to pop, continue to gently shake the pot until you can hear the popping subside.  Immediately empty the popped corn into a large bowl, then sprinkle with salt.

Makes one very large bowl of popcorn.

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Ranchero Sauce and Mexican Rice

3 Nov

If you haven’t already discovered it for yourself, I can offer nothing but the highest of praises for the Tamra Davis Cooking Show.  Tamra Davis is a film and television director based in both New York and California.  She is a mother of two, an avid home cook, and she just so happens to be married to Mike D, of the Beastie Boys.  Davis is a great originator of recipes, and a couple of years ago she self-published a cookbook called Make Me Something Good to Eat.  The cookbook is a great source of not only recipes, but also meal plans and cooking strategies for making delicious, creative, healthy meals that will satisfy both children and adults.

And Tamra Davis is serious about getting people to eat real, healthy food.  She’s led cooking classes at local food banks, and a few years ago she started the FIVE for Kids program, designed to teach kids—and their parents—about the importance of eating a natural, balanced diet that follows the simple guidelines of the food pyramid.  The FIVE for Kids program not only outlines the basic nutritional composition of common foods, but it allows kids to learn about where their food comes from, how different foods benefit their bodies and minds, and how making good food choices can have a positive effect on a person’s general well-being.  By the end of the program, the kids have been taught how to make 25 different healthy, affordable meals and snacks for themselves and their families.  You want to see someone walk their talk?  Tamra Davis is your woman.

The Tamra Davis Cooking Show is, in itself, a delight.  Each episode is only a few minutes long, but they never lack for substance.  Several shows feature not only cooking, but also meal planning, grocery shopping, and play breaks.  It’s a true representation of real life and how the process of nurturing and feeding a family is rarely as straightforward as just going into the kitchen and calmly placing things in the oven.  And this is more of a side note, but the different music choices featured as a soundtrack to each episode?  Top notch.

One episode of the Tamra Davis Cooking Show involves a trip to Mexico.  The shots of the incredible Mexico coastline are beautiful, and the recipes in this particular show are extra mouthwatering.  Davis’ family rents a vacation house that happens to come with a chef, and nearly everyday the chef ends up making a slightly different version of ranchero sauce, an incredibly versatile sauce that can be used for enchiladas, chilaquiles, and anything else you can think up.  Using Davis’ posted recipe, I’ve made this sauce several times now, and I can attest to the fact that it is not only super delicious, but it is also supremely simple to make.  The fact that the sauce is so willing to be changed up makes it a dream to work with.  You can change the type of chilies you use, you can brown the garlic in the pan with the onions, you can puree the sauce smooth or you can leave it slightly chunky—whatever you do to this sauce, it’s tough to make it taste bad. Sometimes we just sit back and dip tortilla chips into the sauce, never bothering to add it to anything because we are too busy depositing it into our tummies.

My favorite use for the sauce right now is as a flavoring for Mexican rice.  We eat a fair bit of beans and rice around here (a simple and healthy meal that goes a long way towards satisfying the nutritional needs of a small child), and I am always looking for ways to dress up the dish and make it a bit more welcome to the fatigued palettes of the adults in this house.

Cooking plain white rice in a mixture of ranchero sauce and vegetable broth produces a fluffy, flavorful rice dish that is a welcome addition to our table.  And since this ranchero sauce is made entirely of vegetables, cooking it into your rice adds a good dose of vegetables to each serving you dish up.  If you can get yourself to stop eating a batch of ranchero sauce like it’s a main dish on its own (no, really—it’s that good), I recommend you pour some into a pan of rice and get to simmering.

My son’s dinner plate.

Ranchero Sauce

From the Tamra Davis Cooking Show

Cooking show episode can be seen here.

You can adjust the spiciness of this recipe to your liking.  When I make this sauce to put in a dish for my child, I use only half of a jalapeno pepper with all of the seeds and ribs removed.  When I make it with adults in mind, I use 1 or 2 whole chilies, and I leave in the seeds and ribs.  You can really make the sauce wicked hot this way, so err on the side of caution when judging your level of spiciness.

5 medium tomatoes

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 or 2 chilies of your choice (I often use fresh jalapenos in this recipe, but any type of dried chile pepper will also work.  I’ll bet habaneros would be great in this.)

½ onion, sliced

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ teaspoon Mexican oregano

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon powdered vegetable stock (I generally leave this out because I do not have powdered vegetable stock, but if I have a bit of vegetable stock laying around, sometimes I’ll throw in a splash or two)

Boil tomatoes in 4 cups of water with garlic and chilies.  Cook for 20 minutes at a low boil.  The skins of the tomato should start to peel off.  While the tomatoes are cooking, sauté the onion in the vegetable oil until soft.  When the tomatoes, garlic, and chilies are done cooking, drain them, reserving a bit of the cooking water to add to the sauce.  Peel the skins from the tomatoes, and put the tomatoes into a blender or food processor, along with the garlic and chilies.  Add the sautéed onion, Mexican oregano, salt, and stock (if using).  Blend on high until the sauce is smooth.  Add a bit of the reserved cooking water if the sauce appears too thick.

Pour the sauce back into the pot you used to cook the tomatoes.  Cook the sauce over low heat for an additional 15-20 minutes.  Use as a sauce for any number of Mexican dishes, or use as a flavoring for Mexican rice (recipe below).

Makes about 1 ½ cups of sauce.

Mexican Rice

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 cup long grain rice

½ teaspoon cumin

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ cup chopped onion

1 cup ranchero sauce

1 ½ cups vegetable or chicken broth

Heat oil over medium heat.  Add rice and cook, stirring frequently, until rice is puffed and golden.  Sprinkle with cumin and salt, then add the chopped onions.  Continue to sauté the rice and onions until the onions are tender, 3-5 minutes.  Carefully stir in ranchero sauce and broth (the liquid will sputter quite a bit as it hits the hot oil in the pan).  Bring to a boil, then cover the rice and lower the heat to a simmer.  Cook the rice at a low simmer for 20-25 minutes, until rice is tender.  Fluff the rice with a fork to fully integrate ingredients without smashing rice.

Makes about 3 cups of rice.

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Chewy Ginger Thins

31 Oct

Every so often, after I have spent the better part of a day trying out recipes and washing pan after pot after bowl several times over in an effort to keep the kitchen from looking as though it suffered through some sort of highly site-specific typhoon, I start to wonder what is wrong with me.  Is it really necessary to test out five different variations of a muffin recipe just to get one that I think smells as good as it tastes (don’t even get me started on that one…it seemed really important at the time)?  Does it really matter if the squash suffers a crack on one side when roasted if it also happens to taste like a heavenly dream?  And do those positively delicious cookies really have to be the size of a quarter, just because when I pictured them in my head they were that small, but, dear lord, it turns out that making them that small will necessitate the forming of, let’s see…200 COOKIES?

That’s right.  I made a cookie recipe that yielded 200 individual cookies.  Why?  Because they were delicious.  Because making them any larger would have made them hard and crisp, and hard and crisp was not what I wanted the cookies to be.  Because eating tiny cookies makes me happy, makes the people around me happy, and, well, because I sort of began to enjoy making tiny little cookies (after the third or fourth batch) in lieu of regular sized ones.  Or, maybe it’s all because of the query I posited in the previous paragraph.  Could there be something wrong with me?

The answer is that, yes, there probably is something wrong with me.  Of course, it mustn’t be forgotten that there is generally something wrong with everybody, and rather than be upset or bewildered by that fact, I think it behooves us all to relish, rather than reject, that fact.  Mild obsession is oftentimes what fuels intense creativity, and, though I would not call my insistence on developing the best bite-sized chewy ginger cookie an incredible feat of genius or inventiveness, it does point to what I believe is an at least mildly admirable trait to possess while in the kitchen: persistence.  And not just any kind of persistence, but cookie persistence.  That’s what I have, and this is what it lead to—the chewiest, most flavorful bite-sized ginger cookie in all the land.

Chewy Ginger Thins

Adapted from Joy of Cooking 

As previously mentioned, these cookies are bite-sized.  Each cookie is formed from about ¼ to ½ teaspoon of dough.  While this may sound completely insane and like a total waste of time to make, hear me out on this.  Forming these cookies is as simple as filling a pastry bag (fitted with a large-ish star tip) with dough and then piping out simple stars of dough on your baking sheet.  It takes between 30 and 45 seconds to form roughly 35 cookies on a baking sheet (yes, I timed it), which is substantially less time than it takes to form a similar number of regular sized cookies.  Forming these cookies is simple and nearly effortless, so making such a large number of them is hardly more noticeable than forming regular-sized cookies.  Don’t have a pastry bag?  No problem.  Just scoop the dough into a large Ziploc bag, cut off the very tip of one of the bottom corners of the bag, and squeeze out your dough using the Ziploc bag as a pastry bag.  Your dough won’t come out in stars, but that’s not a problem since the dough is meant to flatten out when baked.

¾ cup (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 beaten egg

¼ cup molasses (dark or light are both fine)

1 ½ cups sifted unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground powdered ginger

pinch nutmeg

1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, egg, and molasses.  Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, powdered ginger, and nutmeg, and sift together directly onto the butter mixture.  Stir until smooth.  Add the fresh ginger, then mix to combine.

Using a pastry bag or a Ziploc bag with a bottom corner cut off, pipe or squeeze out cookies onto a parchment-lined baking sheet in approximately ¼ teaspoon portions (if your squeezes turn out marginally larger, don’t worry).  Place each cookie about 1 inch apart, lest they stick together as they spread during baking.

Bake cookies on the center rack of the oven for 7 to 8 minutes, until the edges of the cookies have just begun to appear slightly darkened and dry.  While the cookies are baking, pipe another batch of cookies onto your second prepared baking sheet.

Cool baked cookies on their parchment sheet placed on a wire rack.  When cookies have cooled on a rack for about 5 minutes are and no longer gooey, you can slip the cookies right off of the parchment and reuse the parchment for another batch of cookies.

The desired consistency for these cookies is super chewy but ever-so-slightly firm (they will be very bendy when they come out of the oven, and will become soft-firm when cooled).  If you find your cookies are persistently floppy even after having sufficiently cooled, increase the baking time of subsequent batches by 1 minute.  The size of these cookies is meant to be small, so keep in mind that making the cookies much larger than called for will substantially change their outcome.

Makes roughly 200 cookies that are the size of a quarter.

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