Stop! Don’t Tell Me the Ingredients!

April 27, 2013

The Ranting Chef Breakfast, Cheese, Eggs, Lunch, Pork breakfast, cooking, dinner, eggs, food, Gourmet, italian, lasagna, lunch, pasta, pork, postaday, recipe, recipes 9 Comments

I tend to engage in quite a few conversations about food. I’m sure I have passed beyond boring my friends, family and co-workers but I find it an endlessly fascinating topic.

In a recent conversation, someone I was speaking with mentioned they had seen a recipe online for Breakfast Lasagna. I instantly blurted “STOP!”

I loved the idea but didn’t want to hear how someone else did it. I felt the creative juices flowing and started putting together what I would want in such a dish. I knew I had to substitute items from standard lasagna to make it work.

The sauce: This was the first that came to mind. Out with the tomato based sauce and in would be sausage gravy. What sauce says breakfast more?
The meat: I knew the hamburger or Italian sausage would need to go but debated if I should use chorizo. In the end, I used crumbled breakfast sausage.
The cheese: I thought about cream cheese in place of the ricotta and mozzarella but wasn’t sure it would go with the rest, so I settled on shredded cheddar.
Filling: I decided to add some hash browns to add a bit more heft to the dish. I thought about adding onions and peppers and might in future iterations.
Noodles: Wow. This was a tough choice. Pasta was out. In its place was one of two options. The first was pancakes. I thought about making thin pancakes for the layers and almost went with this option all the way until the end. Pancakes would offer the structure but just didn’t seem to fit flavor wise. Option two, which I went with, was crepes. This added the egg portion of breakfast.

This was awesome!

I used two packages of gravy and the crepe recipe from Manicotti Crepes.

Other than the sausage gravy, I cooked each item first (including making the crepes) and then like lasagna put it all together.

I cooked the hash browns first.

Frying up the sausage.

I made the crepes thicker than I would normally and layered them together to help build structure.

I layered first with gravy.

Crepes.

Hash browns.

Sausage.

Cheese.

Repeat, then top with more crepes, gravy and a layer of cheese. Bake at 350 for 12 minutes.

This was an instant hit with the family and will definitely make the rotation. Next time I will add onions and peppers into the mix.

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Pop Tart Family

April 13, 2013

The Ranting Chef Baking, Breakfast, Dessert, Fruit, Kosher, Snack, Vegetarian baking, breakfast, brunch, cooking, dessert, food, fruit, Gourmet, Kosher, Pop Tart, postaday, recipe, recipes, Snack, vegetarian 17 Comments

We are a Pop Tart family.

Over the Christmas holidays, we ended up playing a family game with a group of relatives that was focused on products and brands. My boys were on a team with a third person and a card came up that had to do with cereal. I knew they would be at a loss as the only one in our house that will touch cereal is me.

When my wife and I were first living together I found that she had the same breakfast every day: one package of unfrosted strawberry pop tarts. Me, I needed variety, but she was perfectly fine having that same breakfast every day for years.

Those years went by and after making a conscious decision to eat healthier came, the pop tarts were replaced, but by that time my kids were hooked. They liked a variety of pop tarts, but still wanted those rectangular pastries for breakfast. They still do today, unless I force an outage and drive them to other items.

I came across this recipe a while back and saved it until just recently. These were pretty straightforward to make.

The recipe called for grape but it will work just as easy with any flavor.

Making the dough.

Resting in the fridge.

Rolled out and cut. Use a ruler.

After I started making the tarts I realized I had just used up all the parchment paper in the house with another recipe. As a consequence and not wanting to burn the tarts, I baked them on a baking stone. Unfortunately the stone does not have a lip to it and as some of the jelly ran out during baking, I made a mess in the oven.

Photo Dec 29, 5 16 48 PM

Noticed the edges crimped via fork? Fancy….

Making the glaze.

The glaze had a distinct orange flavor (I did add the optional orange liqueur). I think next time, I would choose a less sticky choice and go with a standard glaze.

Grape Jelly Breakfast Tarts

Prep Time: 1 hours 30 minutes | Cook Time: 0 hours 30 minutes | Makes: 5 tarts | Difficulty: Intermediate

Ingredients:

For the Tarts:

3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons cold shortening, cut into small pieces
2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup grape jelly
1 large egg, beaten
1/3 cup milk

For the Glaze:

1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Juice of 2 oranges
2 tablespoons orange liqueur (optional)
3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
Grated orange zest, for topping

Directions:

Make the tarts: Pulse the flour, granulated sugar and salt in a food processor until combined. Add the shortening and about one-quarter of the butter and pulse until they disappear into the flour, about 30 seconds. Add the remaining butter and pulse a few times, until the mixture looks like coarse meal with pea-size bits of butter. Add 1/2 cup ice water and pulse once or twice, until the dough just comes together. Turn the dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap, form into a disk and wrap tightly; chill at least 1 hour and up to 1 day. (For quicker tarts, use refrigerated pie dough and skip this step.)

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough into a 10-by-14-inch rectangle, about 1/8 inch thick. Cut out ten 4-by-3-inch rectangles using a toaster pastry press or a paring knife. Transfer to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Chill at least 15 minutes.

Spread 5 of the dough rectangles with a heaping tablespoonful of jelly each, leaving a 1/2-inch border all around. Brush the edges with the beaten egg, then cover with the remaining 5 dough rectangles. Crimp the edges with a fork or use the toaster pastry press to seal. Chill at least 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Bake the tarts until flaky and golden, 20 to 25 minutes, brushing with the milk after 10 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool.

Meanwhile, make the glaze: Bring the granulated sugar, orange juice and liqueur (if using) to a simmer in a large skillet over low heat; cook until reduced by half, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the confectioners’ sugar until smooth. Let cool. Brush the glaze on the tarts, sprinkle with the orange zest and let set, 5 minutes.

Source: http://m.foodnetwork.com/recipes/recipe/560315

Guest Post: German Pancake Bowls

April 12, 2013

The Ranting Chef Baking, Breakfast, Eggs, Fruit, German, Kosher, Recipes, Vegetarian baking, breakfast, brunch, cooking, dinner, food, fruit, German, Gourmet, Kosher, postaday, recipe, recipes, vegetarian 15 Comments

Today we have another guest post from Diana at Food n Thought Peddler. Unlike Diana, I am a morning person. It is rare that I am not awake and up before my alarm goes off as equally rare that I’m not in bed before 11PM. Take a look at Food n Thought Peddler and Diana’s post below…

I don’t know how about you, but I’m not a morning person, at all. When I was very young and had to get up early, my mom would always say “you’ll get used to it as you grow older”. Nope, mom, decades later, and I’m still not there. Maybe I should give myself another 10-20 years, right when insomnia settles in. Though knowing me, I’d probably be even grumpier, that I didn’t sleep well AND had to get up early.

Plus some people are able to get up as soon as their alarm goes off. Nope, not me. I need another 15 minutes in bed to even pry my eyes open, and then at least an hour to get ready as the first 20 minutes are usually spent on a customary morning meltdown that I had to get up in the first place. So by the time I’m finally at work and sitting down to have breakfast, a couple of hours have passed, and I’m feeling more human. Mornings really should start sometime around noon!

And I guess it’s no wonder that I happened to create a child who is not a morning person either (that on top of the usual pleasantries you’d get from a teenager), so some early weekday hours are really charged and full of sparks flying. It’s better to just spend them in silence I think, or you may lose the last drop of sanity even before the workday has begun.

Weekends then become our “moderation” days, to sleep in, have a leisurely breakfast along with some civilized conversations. Yes, it does help that it’s all happening around noon. And no matter what, a nice breakfast food is usually making its appearance to lure the sleepy teenager out of bed. The dish below has been “an eye opener” on weekend mornings these past couple of months, it’s pretty quick and fairly versatile to satisfy many moods and make any morning a good one indeed.

German Pancake “Bowls”

Makes 18 pancake bowls:

1 cup of milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
1 cup of flour (I used Cup4Cup gluten free mix)
4 Tbspoons of butter, melted
6 eggs
1 tspoon of vanilla
1 tspoon of orange zest
1/2 tspoon of sea salt
Berries or other cut up fruit or jam
Powdered sugar and mint for garnish

Combine all ingredients except melted butter in a blender gradually adding flour to make sure that no clumps are left. Then blend in butter a little at a time to temper the eggs. The mix will resemble a bit thinner pancake batter.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter the muffin pans really well to make sure the pancakes won’t stick, fill them just about half full.

Bake for about 15 minutes or until the tops are golden and look puffy. Once you remove them from the oven, they deflate a bit or you can gently push the tops in to make them look like a bowl.

Remove them from the pans and fill in with berries, cut up fruit or jam, sprinkle with powdered sugar and garnish with chopped mint leaves.
And you can play with other possible toppings since the pancakes are not sweet, like chopped tomato and bacon crumble topped with shredded mozzarella or salmon roe and scallions.

And since the pancakes are kind of hollow inside and resemble cream puffs, I think it’d be fun to inject them with jelly or the actual cream. That could be my next morning project!

The Foodie Smash

March 7, 2013

The Ranting Chef Baking, Breakfast, Kosher, Lunch, Recipes, Side Dish, Snack, Vegan, Vegetable, Vegetarian Appetizer, baking, breakfast, brunch, cooking, dinner, food, Kosher, lunch, postaday, recipe, recipes, side dish, Snack, Vegan, vegetable, vegetarian 14 Comments

Food is a great way to connect with others. Most people like to talk about food (what their favorites are, what they had last night, etc…) and often times you can find some shared experience around food. While I realized this long ago, once I started writing the blog it has become a much more common occurrence for me to have food discussions with friends, family and co-workers.

Recently, while I was waiting for a meeting to start, I struck up a conversation with a former boss of mine. She is quite the foodie herself and we quickly went to recently made items. One of her recent menu items, Smashed Roasted Potatoes, intrigued me. I not only hadn’t had them before,I don’t think I’d heard of them. She walked me through the (very easy) recipe and after I got home, I found the recipe online.

These were so easy and sooooo good.

The standard recipe is pretty straightforward in its limited ingredients. I think in the future I may play around a bit with additional spices, or maybe even throw some shredded cheese over them at the end.

You have to cook the potatoes first. A key is the smashing. You want to get the potatoes as thin as possible as long as you retain enough integrity that they hold together. The thinner they are, the quicker they will crisp up.

I like how the colors of the broken skin look on the potatoes.