Tag: cinnamon

Doughnuts...must make doughnuts. A Winchell's like cake doughnut. This is what I woke up thinking yesterday morning. I don't even know why, but I had to do it. Now, since I didn't plan this thing out I wanted a fast easy recipe. And so the internet search began. I kept thinking I had found the recipe, then I would scroll down to the bottom and find that it needed 1 to 4 hours in the fridge before making it.

Argg! I want doughnuts now, not in 4 hours. (Yes, I was a little impatient. Sometimes instant gratification is a good thing.)

Well, the search continued until I found this recipe for Cake Doughnuts. I set to work right away. This recipe is so easy to make and the flavor of the doughnuts plain is great. After frying and cooling for a bit I coated half of the doughnuts with powdered sugar and the other half with cinnamon sugar (3/4 to 1 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon cinnamon).

The recipe makes 2 dozen doughnuts which meant we had a lot of leftovers. After the extra doughnuts cooled I put them away in an airtight container. This morning I ate one and I am not sure, but I think they are even better today then they were yesterday. Either way, this is a super easy recipe with great flavor and I will be using it in the future. Happy doughnutting!

Well, as Tele has previously posted, the other night we went to Kobe. I think its a fine little sushi bar, and I must say that while I was there I fell in love with Red Snapper. That's some awesome fish, I tell you what.

The problem, however, is as much as I love sushi, I can almost never eat enough of it. I can eat .. well.. quite a bit more than I logically should be able to eat, and I fear that it's my voracious appetite that will condemn me to a) not eat enough at a sushi bar, b) eat so much at a sushi bar that the itamae and I have to battle in hand to hand combat because they have nothing left in the restaurant to eat, or c) I've eaten so much sushi that the Pacific ocean is declared devoid of life. A good example, is what I had to eat today. I had the following to eat:

• 4 cups of coffee
• 1 cup of tea
• 5 bottles of water (16 oz)
• 4 sandwiches
• 1 cup cheese popcorn
• 2 truffles
• 1 pear
• 1 stuffed pork chop
• 1 baked potato
• 1 bowl of cinnamon apples
• 1 bowl of coffee icecream

At the sushi place, if I recall correctly, I had:

• 5 pc cucumber roll
• 5 pc philadelphia roll
• 4 hamachi (yellow tail)
• 2 red snapper
• 2 crab roll
• 3 cups green tea
• 1 16oz sake

and we went out for frozen yogurt afterwards, in which I had a 16oz plain with pomegranate seeds.

I think I have a tapeworm. He and I understand each other.

Due to Tele falling ill this week, I was in charge of the Thanksgiving meal. I had no choice but to step up and accomplish the task. So, I did. I made the whole meal.

I forgot to take pre-eating pictures of the Thanksgiving table, but I did get you the after pics.

The left side of the table in clockwise order: mashed potatoes, Praline Yams, Whole Cranberry Sauce, Cranberry Relish, StoveTop Cornbread Stuffing, and HoneyBaked Ham.

The right side of the table starting from the back of the table and moving forward: Dutch Apple Pie with Never-Fail Pie Crust, Sweet Corn Muffins, Cranberry Salad, CornBread, Honey Maid Cinnamon Sticks and Bees for the fluff, Fluff with fresh strawberries, PineCone Spread with Original Triscuits.

Not pictured but included in the food lineup of the evening: Corn on the cob roasted under the broiler and Chatham Village Cranberry Herb Stuffing.

The only thing I didn't get to make was my grandma's Pumpkin Cookies. But the apple pie was so yummy it was okay that the cookies were missing.

This is my Grandmother's recipe. I don't know where she got it from, but she is the only person I ever knew that made Pumpkin Cookies. This is one of only a few recipes that I have of hers so it is one I treasure. Maybe it will become your signature cookie as it was hers.

Pumpkin Cookies

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup vegetable shortening
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup walnuts

Cream sugar and egg, pumpkin, vanilla, and shortening. Add dry ingredients. Stir in raisins and walnuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls on greased baking sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

Alright, now we come to the final recipe that I contributed to Greek Night. I waited to make these until I had arrived at the EU kitchen of the evening.

Here is the second tray waiting to go into the oven.

I wanted to make this recipe version as it has the absolute best-looking cookies of any of the recipes that I looked at, also Tele loved the name of the chef that made it, "Yiayia". Editor's Note: Haha. Yiayia. It still cracks me up.

However, it requires cinnamon oil and for some reason that seems to be about impossible to find in the entire Greater Las Vegas Valley. Luckily, I am the queen of procrastination, so if I had thought of finding this ingredient earlier (I have known since July 11th that I was making these!) then I would have known how hard it was to locate and would have ordered it online from Amazon. Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking that far ahead. Anyhow, I will be trying this version as soon as I get a hold of the cinnamon oil.

That being said I went with a different version of the recipe that I had located on my original recipe search. It has some variations and doesn't include the cinnamon oil, which for now is a good thing. So we were off to making Greek Butter Cookies.

This cookie is easy enough to make. It follows the basics of all cookie making and can be whipped out in about 20 minutes total. I did learn not to skimp on the flour though. This dough does need to be pretty stiff to hold it's shape. I didn't add in the last 3/4 cups of flour and I should have as my cookies sort of mushed down rather than holding the pretty shape of the cinnamon oil recipe's pics. But hey that is what this site is about, what did we learn while we made these recipes and how can we help you to have success with the same/similar recipe.

I was satisfied with the outcome of these cookies, but something tells me that Yiayia's cookies are probably better. Also I think I made them a bit large, but they were yummy and that is all that matters.

So it all began something like this via instant message...
June 26th

• Tele: So Savory wants to do Asian night
• me: Asian night? What would we be eating on Asian night?
• Tele: I don't know. He just wanted Asian food.
• me: I don't know any Asian dishes though.
• Tele: Stickybuns!
• me: Stickybuns are Asian? (Thinking to myself-"A stickybun is something warm and gooey with cinnamon and sometimes covered in a thick frosting and nuts. You get that at a bakery. This is so not Asian. What is my husband speaking of?")
• Tele:Char Siu Bao
• me: Stickybuns & porkbuns are so not the same thing.
• Tele: sticky pork buns
  

June 27th

• Savory: Has Tele talked you into making Cha Siu Bao for Sunday yet?
• me: He sent me a recipe link yesterday. I didn't realize that was his way of asking me to make. Then he came home and said that you were both thinking of asking me to make the pork buns.
• Savory: lol

And so be began my journey. I have never eaten a pork bun. I have never seen a pork bun. I have never been to Dim Sum. So I had to do research. No time to go eat this Asain food so the research must all be done on the internet and via further chats with Tele and Savory. I found that Savory prefered his steamed with a little honey baked in. Tele prefered his baked. Well alright, we are off to a start. Baked, I can do baked (I worked at a pretzel shop for 3 years). Steamed, I do not know a thing about steaming. (Tele apparantly did. Whew, one less thing I have to worry about. He can teach me on cooking day.)

I ended up combining 3 seperate recipes to make my one dish. I found a food blog with a recipe that I felt would work well, but I needed a dough that could be seamed and baked. I was not sure that her dough recipe would work well both ways however she had other elements that I would definately use. Her site was extremely detailed and that was a bonus (remember I do not know what this item is that I am making). I do believe that she made her life a little more complicated than necessary by cutting out individual little wax paper squares to set the buns on, I chose to just set mine on one large wax paper sheet. I used her site for the details and the filling as well as how to bake the Pork Buns. She didn't have a recipe for how to roast the meat either as she bought hers pre-roasted. The next order of business was to find a versatile dough recipe that would work well both steamed and baked. I found just such a dough recipe. This recipe ended up being an extreamly simple recipe to make. The dough did work well both steamed and baked. The dough was sweet to the smell, but not to the taste. I then found the Chinese barbeque pork recipe on the same site as the dough.

This dish came out very well. Tele and Savory seemed to enjoy them very much. I absolutely loved them. Both the steamed ones and the baked ones were excellent. My 1 year old baby loved the roasted meat and was eating as I was shredding it! There were a lot of seperate steps to get the dish done, but over all it was actually all very simple to do. You must think ahead however as the meat needs to marinate over night first, then get roasted, cool, shredded and then heated on the stove with the rest of the filling ingredients. I felt like the dish was well worth the work put into it and am glad that these two silly guys talked me into making it.

Because this was all a bit confusing, here is a list of the links I used for the different parts.

• Roasted Meat I did not use any variations, just the Basic Steps 1-5 replacing 6 with shredding the meat rather than cutting into bite sized pieces. I did end up using Pork Tenderloin because it was all my Sam's Club had available 30 minutes before closing.
• Dough and How to Steam Buns
• Meat Filling and How to Bake Buns

You already know that Tele owned up to cheating by making Egg Drop Soup (Thank you, it was excellent!). But what you didn't know is that Savory made Stir Fry (Also, thank you. It was tasty). So now what I want to know is how did I end up cooking for 2 days while they ended up cooking for 15 minutes! I think I shall be much more suspicious next time they "assign" me a dish to cook.

Happy Thanksgiving and related holy days from Edible Unknown! My particular Thanksgiving opened my eyes to the wonders of allspice, a Carribean ingredient named by the English, who thought that it included the flavors of cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon, among others.

You see, I was making dinner, and in lieu of turkey (which I bloody well hate, no matter what Ben Franklin thought) we had this honey-cured ham. Not being in my normal kitchen, I searched around the spice cabinet, which had unfortunately been through a bit of a downsizing (as no-longer fresh spices were removed). So I did what any good person faced with a ham might do- I took a slice, started dumping spices on my hand, and took several taste tests until I came up with a combination I could do well with.

This was a bit of a shotgun Thanksgiving in the sense that the shopping had already been done, and I had not enough time to make anything representing a marinade. After using foil paper, a well-sized crockery, and some water to build a punk-rock dutch oven for the ham, I patted every inch I could with a mixture of allspice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, then combined more of this in some melted butter (for drenching it halfway through the cooking process).

Another hurdle to overcome was the organic sweet potatoes, which turned out not to be the ordinary orange tubers we are all used to, but instead a starchy, thin, white-flesh job. Starchy as they were, I didn't think straight baking would be enough, so I dismantled some potatoes and put them into a casserole with some water, baked until soft, mashed, then mixed with orange juice, cloves, black pepper, butter, and brown sugar. When the ham was out and the oven set to broil (to roast some corn on the cob), I sprinkled brown sugar across the top of the casserole and let it caramelize.

It wasn't particularly bad, but as often happens with experimental dishes, it was much better once the flavors had time to set. Or so I heard, the next day.

Here's to holiday adventure! See you later, when I'll be discussing how best to cook relatives who overstay their welcome.

You know what I'm talking about. Big Easy, someone with no idea what that phrase means may have mistakenly referred to it once. I'm talking about the poor man's mirepoix, replacing onions and celery with more geometrically-correct peas and corn.

You can get this stuff after a mere thirty minutes of panhandling, pickpocketing, or rolling drunks in an alley. [Note: I mean with money, from the store. Don't take a drunk man's last bag of mixed vegetables.]

The key behind mixed vegetables, besides conserving valuable hobo calories by avoiding the cutting board, is that you can use them for anything. After all, plain old mixed vegetables have the bland and somehow demeaning taste of grade-school cafeteria hot dogs. That taste that makes you think of crying and stripping for your uncle as soon as your fishing boat is out of sight of the rest of your family.

After cooking the vegetables to the desired tenderness, I mix in a healthy amount of butter/margarine (to tell the truth, I never measure). This is to pump my body full of wholesome and nourishing polyunsaturated fats and lecithin. Some black pepper, salt, and perhaps a spice duo (I'm weird; I like cayenne and a tiny bit of cinnamon) and I have instantaneous nourishment for the modern tramp, even if I pass out from hunger before I can actually get any of it in my mouth.

Sometimes I pretend I'm a Rockefeller and use my uncashable paychecks as napkins.