Culinary Crow

Caramelizing Allium, or just onions

2011-07-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

The Allium family of plants responds very well to caramelizing. This is not limited to just onions and garlic, but leeks, shallots, scallions, and chives too. Caramelized garlic sounds so good right now...

Caramelized onions can go great in a lot of things. They're perfect for hot sandwiches, topping baked or mashed potatoes, mixed in alfredo sauce, casseroles, or just alone. You can change their flavor by what seasonings you add during the cooking process to suit the dish you want them for.

Anyway, here's the way I like to caramelize onions. You can use this basic process with any allium member, as long as you keep it on low heat and watch it.

Heat 2 T of olive oil or butter, or 1 T of each in a large saucepan. Stainless steel would work best for this purpose. While that heats up on a medium to low heat go ahead and slice an onion however you like. I find that sweet yellow onions work best, but try whatever you have!

Place the onion slices in the pan in one layer. If you can fit the whole onion, don't worry you can add them later. Then sprinkle some salt over the onion, it helps extract the water from the onion so it can absorb the goodness in the pan and, well, caramelize.

For this stage, keep it on a very low heat. You want the onions to sweat slowly. Stir them around every couple of minutes and raise the heat so that you can hear only the slightest of sizzling. If it's already sizzling, just leave 'em be.

Once they've softened down you can add what's left over of the onion and repeat that process, or we can move on. From here is the fun part. Adding what flavor you want to your onions. I generally like to add almost a tablespoon of honey and some chopped up ginger. I chopped up about a one inch portion of the ginger root which gave me a noticeable but not very potent ginger flavor to the finished onions. You can also add pepper, other herbs, or even maple syrup. Just be careful when working with sugar that you keep an eye so that it doesn't burn.

After adding your delicious optional ingredients, or not adding them, cook the onions at a medium-low heat for... quite some time. Depending on how brown you like it, it'll be between 10-30 minutes. I got mine to a dark honey color with some brown bits and edges, that took about 20 minutes. Be sure to stir it up!

Enjoy.

Whats coming next?

2011-07-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

Hey,

So I've started off the blog with a few recipes of mine. I also have linked to some other websites if you check out the slideshow above me!

I've included an awesome recipe for Watermelon Rind Preserves. There's also a link about the different varieties of tomatoes, one of my favorites.

Coming up i'm going to add my famous Thai Fried Rice recipe. I'm also going to post something about caramelizing onions, after I go caramelize some.

Perhaps i'll even post some herbal recipes here and there...

Zucchini Bread

2011-07-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure whether to put this under desserts or bread. This bread is very much like a dense, moist cake and is so good for breakfast with some butter, put some cream cheese on its for a snack, spread some jam on it for dessert, or just eat it plain!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. While your at it, grease and flour two loaf pans. By the time you get the batter prepped, you won't wanna wait another second to get this in and out of the oven to eat it.

3 eggs
1 T vanilla
2 cup sugar
1 cup oil
2 cup flour
2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 medium zucchini, grated

First beat the eggs in a large bowl until they get a bit frothy. Then add sugar, oil, and vanilla until the mysterious liquid begins to resemble something thick and lemon colored.

When this is all over, you can sift in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix that around a while and then you can work in the grated zucchini.

Hungry yet? Glad you greased those pans? Well pour the batter in those babies and pop them in the oven! In about one hour you'll have delicious steamy zucchini bread.

Did someone say Snickerdoodles?

2011-07-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

This is probably my favorite cookie EVER. Even against the rich chocolate cookie encased peanut butter cookie. Yes you read that right.

Before you read any further, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. If you have parchment paper... I would coat the cookie sheets with that. If not, the cookie will cook fine. You'll just have to scrub the cookie sheets a bit harder than usual.

2 3/4 cups flour
1/2 t salt
2 t baking powder
1 cup butter, melted or room temperature
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
1 t vanilla

Separate to coat cookies later:

1/3 cup (66 grams) granulated white sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Anyway, in a large bowl you wanna cream the butter and sugar together. Be sure to beat it well, your going to put the eggs in next which tend to re-cool the butter. Go ahead and put in the teaspoon of vanilla with the eggs and mix it really well.

Once you're done with that, throw in (not literally) the flour, salt, and baking powder.

When that is mixed together, prepare to bake the cookie! In a small bowl, mix together the 1/3 cup of sugar and 2 teaspoons of cinnamon to coat the cookie in. In order to do that, you want to take chunks of the cookie dough, roll it into 1 inch balls, and then roll that ball in the sugary coating. Then you can put those on the cookie sheet, pop it in the oven for 8-10 minutes... and Voila! Goodness on a pan.

If you're not using parchment paper by the way, immediately remove cookies from the sheet. OR they will stick.

Lemon Balm Cookies

2011-07-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

These make surprisingly good crunchy cookies! I'm normally a fan of chewy, cakey, and soft cookies but found myself craving one after another after I had one of these. What intrigued me is putting Lemon Balm, an aromatic herb that looks and grows like spearmint. The flavor is nothing alike though! It smells and tastes like sweet lemons, minus the tangy citrus.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, especially if your oven takes as long as mine to preheat.

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla
1 1/4 flour
2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1/4 cup finely chopped lemon balm

I got out a stick of butter, stuck it in the microwave to melt while I measured out a cup of sugar. In a large bowl I combined these to make the basis of almost all cookie making: melted buttery sugar cream goodness. When it's creamed to your satisfaction, go ahead... take a finger lick of it, you know you want to.

Then when your done licking your chops, add an egg and a teaspoon of vanilla. For those of you like me who love vanilla, this is my adjustment which is double what this recipe "should" call for. Now beat it again, beat it real good. The lighter and more velvety it can get, the better. In fact, when your done it should be about a lemon color. This is the time to add the dry stuff.

Put in 1 1/4 cup flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt and mix it up nice. The dough will be pretty oily because of all that butter. But it shouldn't really stick to your hands. At this point you can add lemon balm, but if you don't have it don't worry. You can also use lemon verbena or lemon mint for this! Or, just substitute the vanilla with lemon extract if you really want that lemon kick. If that's the case, I would put in 1/2 tsp of Lemon extract.

Red Pepper Pasta with Tofurkey

2011-07-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Opening my fridge for lunch today I came across a container of leftover pasta. I thought to myself, this'll do just fine, I'll just drizzle some olive oil. Wrong! I noticed I also had some pesto. Hmm, I have something going here.

So I heat up a cast iron skillet, throw in a clove of roughly diced garlic in some olive oil and let that sizzle a bit. Then I realized, I have some red bell pepper that needs to be used ASAP! While getting that pepper, I grabbed some Tofurkey (the sun-dried tomato kind) just for the heck of it.

I quickly chop of the pepper into 1 inch strips and slice the tofu sausage stuff, throw it in the skillet. Now it's smelling good! I let that brown a little so the tofurkey can be crispy (that's when its best IMO) and then throw the leftover pasta on top. Pasta in a skillet? I think so. The crazy wonderful part? I added dried peppermint. Odd, but wonderful.

1 1/2 cup loosely packed pasta (cooked)
1/4 of a large red bell pepper, sliced in 1" strips
1/2 a Tofurkey sausage, sliced
1clove garlic, diced
1 T (tbsp) of pesto
1 t (tsp) of dried peppermint, finely ground (optional)