Baklava

I recently made my first proper spanakopita, which went over so well that I immediately bought more phyllo, with the goal of making another one the very next week, while my ricotta, fresh dill, etc. were still good. But for whatever reason Chris kept talking me out of it...and suddenly I had phyllo sitting in my fridge which had been there for three days. Something had to be done. I had everything I needed for spanakopita, but I had promised myself after the hortopita I made a few posts back, that my next foray into phyllo would be a sweet recipe. My friend Kate prides herself on her baklava and has always claimed it was easy...and all I'd need was honey and walnuts. What was there to lose?

Well ok, I knew I wanted to use honey in the syrup, but I knew that I would need some inspiration, if not instruction, so I did a search of the posts I'd read/saved in my Google Reader, and came across the perfect recipe over at Elly Says Opa's blog, which I combined with some elements from Joumana's recipe at Taste of Beirut.

Greek baklava (with an Eastern twist)
~1 lb. walnuts
1.5 heaping tsp. cinnamon (next time I'd add a bit more)
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. ground cloves (I used 1/2 tsp., but I'd add more, I like my nut mix well-spiced)
1 (16 oz.) package phyllo dough, thawed (I used Sobey's brand)
salted butter, melted in the microwave - I took out a stick of butter and melted it a bit at a time as I needed it, not sure of the exact amount.

Syrup
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 cup honey
1 cinnamon stick
dash of lemon juice
dash of orange blossom water (at the end)
dash of rose water (at the end)

Combine your water, sugar, honey, lemon juice and cinnamon stick, and bring to a low boil, then turn down to simmer for 10-15 minutes.

While you are waiting for the syrup, toast the walnuts pieces in a dry frying pan. I forgot about this step until I'd already sat them in the food processor and added sugar and cinnamon to them - it wasn't a problem, but you do run the risk of burning the sugar when you toast the nuts. Did make the whole kitchen smell like cinnamon though, that was a plus.

Put your walnuts in a food processor along with the cinnamon and cloves, and pulse until there aren't any big chunks left.

Once the syrup is ready, add your orange blossom and rose water - if you don't have these don't worry, they're optional, but you can buy them at Scoop and Save in Fredericton if you want to try something exotic. Stir for a few seconds, then take it off the heat. Once it's lukewarm, pour it into something (I used my 4c. liquid measuring cup) and put it in the fridge.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Grease a (9×13) pan (I don't remember what size mine is, but you can trim your phyllo down to fit), and slowwwwwwly and carefully unroll your phyllo leaves. You can handle phyllo, just don't be rough with it. Cover it with a damp kitchen towel when you're not using it so it won't dry out and become a huge pain to work with! Now, count your phyllo leaves - I found that the Superstore brand phyllo had less leaves than the Sobeys brand package did. I think I had 22, some of those got damaged while baking. Just flip through one of the corners.

Having decided how many sheets you have to work with, place your pan on top of the phyllo and cut away the excess with kitchen shears, and place one layer of phyllo at the bottom of your pan. Brush the phyllo with the melted butter, and then add another layer of phyllo, and brush with more butter. I stopped when I had gotten to 5 sheets, where I added what I like to think of as a "rubble" layer, like putting rubble fill inside a wall - cheap, easy, ugly, but when you put a nice top layer on no one will know! I got this idea from Joumana's post above so for pictures, check hers out. Basically you take your phyllo trimmings, and scrunch them up like tissue paper and make a layer of that, drench it with butter, then cover it up with a nice smooth phyllo sheet. I find it gives me a thicker bottom without using more sheets, and it's quick, too!

So, smooth your phyllo down (this would be sheet 6) on top of your rubble/rag layer, butter it, maybe put one more layer if you want, then start dumping out your nut filling. Elly calls for 1/4, because she does four layers of walnuts - I didn't have enough sheets and my tray was big, so I only did two. You'll have to judge what you want to do based on how many leaves you have, how much filling you have, etc. Anyhow, dump out 1/4-1/2 of your mix and then pick your pan up and gently shake it from side to side, which will give you a nice, even layer of nuts. You might have to push a few into the corners, but it works like a charm.

Add another 5 layers of phyllo, buttering between each one (or every two sheets, if you're lazy!). Dump the rest of your filling if you're doing half and half, if not keep alternating 5 sheets of phyllo with nut mix. Top with 7 sheets of phyllo, like on the bottom

Take a dull butter knife or spatula and gently go around the edge of the baklava, tucking the edges down in. Choose a long, sharp knife (I used the "slicer" in my knife block) and cut your baklava into diamonds or triangles. I'm not any good at diamonds, and I usually cut things into squares, but triangles aren't much harder: cut your baklava into three columns and four rows, then cut each square in half diagonally for triangles (baklava isn't exactly good for you, so triangles are a nice way to halve a portion). You have to cut your baklava before you cook it, otherwise the phyllo will just shatter when you try after pulling it out of the oven.

Speaking of ovens, it's time to bake our baklava! Into the oven it goes. Elly recommends 50 minutes @ 350F, and Joumana 45 minutes, but I set my oven timer for 40 minutes and really, it was only like 30-35 minutes and it was golden brown. So set it low, and keep and eye on it! I happened to smell it and thought, "I should check on it in case it's starting to burn", but I caught it in a state of perfection.

Once it's cooked, pull it out and sit it on a trivet on the counter, and fetch that lovely syrup from the fridge! It won't be cold, but cool enough. Pour it over the hot baklava and watch as it hisses and bubbles and soaks into every nook and cranny! Why the cold syrup though, you might ask? Well, one element has to be cool and one hot for the pastry to absorb the syrup - you can bake the baklava first and then pour hot syrup on it once it's cooled, but I found it easier to cook the syrup first while I was prepping. It's up to you, really.

Now the longer this sits, the better it will be, but it's worth having at least one piece warm and fresh, once it's cooled. Oh! One more thing! If you put this in the fridge, or even leave it out on the counter, don't cover it up! Phyllo-based dishes need to be left uncovered for the phyllo to stay crispy. Trust me, nobody likes soggy phyllo...

Enjoy with a glass of milk, or a cup of Greek coffee if you're so inclined!

Καλη όρεξη! Bon appétit!

- Σ

Hi!

I just wanted to drop by and mention that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, I've just been very busy with school (doing my student teaching placement), and I lost my camera for a while (!), but I'm almost done the student teaching and I found my camera the other day, so keep your eyes peeled for posts from me in the near future!

Φιλάκια!
- Σ

Christmas Baking, part III

Ok, so the other thing I made over the holidays as melomakarona. I had been waiting foreeeeever to have some, and I finally got around to it on New Years Eve...I had to wait till New Years' Day to soak them in syrup, but I was ok with that.

Now, normally I would post a recipe, but since these didn't turn out I won't bother. They tasted fine plain - I liked the subtle hint of orange peel in them - but the syrup-soaking was a disaster. I had even bought a candy thermometer, to prevent any issues with the temperature of the syrup, and I still managed to mess it up. Instead of cold cookies/warm syrup, I'll do cold syrup/warm cookies, because the syrup kind of turned into taffy by the end! It was soooo hard to get them apart to eat afterwards, and the syrup all just sat on the surface rather than soaking in. We ate them all, but they weren't at all what I wanted.

Christmas baking, part II

So I've been a bit remiss in my posts lately (sorry about that), but now that school is back in session I've got assignments and group projects flying at me willy-nilly. But I have been taking pictures of things, and now that they've started to pile up I figured I should post something! First up: kourabiedes (part II) and melomakarona!

These kourabiedes are made with the same recipe as the first batch, but I made them bigger and rounder, added almonds, and added some rose water to them before I dusted them with sugar. They were much better, if only because they weren't burnt!

Kourabiedes! (Christmas Baking, part I)

So I've been student teaching at a middle school where I teach social studies to sixth and eight graders. I've been talking to the sixth graders about holidays around the world at Christmas time - first in a general sense (Christmas, but also Hannukah, Eid al-Adha, Diwali, and Bodhi day because that was the only winter Buddhist holiday I could find!). Then we narrowed our focus on Christmas around the world - Sweden, France, India, Brasil, etc. And I promised them that I'd make them some Greek Christmas cookies. Well...I came through!

Since I wanted to make enough for everybody (there are 22 students, plus I know the 16 kids in my homeroom class would want some...and I'd like to give some to the English-language grade 6 classes...plus my fellow teachers will want some...) so I needed a larger-volume recipe than the one I have in a recipe book, so I used one that Maria V. used in a post of her own, from Stephie's "Can You Cook" blog. This used imperial measurements (easier for me than metric, even though we officially adopted the metric system before I was born!), was double the volume of my usual recipe, was nut-optional and didn't include any alcohol (many recipes call for brandy or other liquors). I had to run to the store to buy orange juice (!), but it all worked out in the end...hours later!

I made one or two tweaks to the recipe - I can't have any nuts in the recipe because we have students with nut allergies at school, so instead of the almond extract that Stephie suggests, I added vanilla extract...I think it worked.

ΚΟΥΡΑΜΠΙΕΔΕΣ

2c. unsalted butter, softened
1/2 c. icing sugar, sifted
2 egg yolks, slightly beaten
1 tbs. vanilla extract
1/3 c. orange juice
1 tsp. baking powder
4 1/2 c. flour, sifted.

Preheat oven to 400 F. Cream butter till fluffy, add sugar and beat well. Add wet ingredients and mix.Combine flour & baking powder, sift and add to wet ingredients. Mix by hand, form into flattened crescents. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack, then place on a plate with a layer of icing sugar and dust each cookie. Enjoy!

Roast lamb and beer bread!

A week or so ago, Chris and I wanted to cook a roast on the weekend, so we got a venison roast out of the back of the freezer and tried to defrost it, but in the process it got a little warm so we decided to be safe, rather than sorry, and threw it out. Fortunately we had a boneless lamb roast sitting in the freezer too, so I started defrosting it on Friday, and Chris took over that part of supper. He used a sauce that he had cooked a venison roast in last year - Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, onion soup mix powder, worcestershire sauce, etc. It end up making a very tasty gravy, very easily. He also stuffed the roast with slivers of garlic, which is never a bad thing! This was all added to a crock pot and slow-cooked all day. At the end he took the meat out, added some Greek red wine (Kouros brand) to the crock to lift the fond and add a little more flavour, and made a gravy with the help of a little corn starch. Along with this he made some delicious garlicky whipped potatoes, and cooked up the last of the asparagus (a little too long, admittedly, and it was cold by the time supper was served, but it was still good...I just plain love asparagus).

Well meanwhile I did laundry all day (from 11am until...3?) - eight loads all told. Don't look at me like that, I haven't done laundry in two weeks, it's not that we make an inordinate amount of laundry! Anyways, when I was bringing the last load up it occurred to me that it would be awesome to have some nice crispy bread to sop the gravy up with. It was a little late in the game to whip the bread maker out, but there was just enough time to go to Sobey's before it closed and get a foccacia which I could crisp up in the oven. Well, I came in, hung up my laundry, and relaxed by grabbing my laptop and checking Facebook (there's three flights of stairs between me and the laundry room!) Anyways I saw that Heather had posted a link to a recipe for beer bread from Ezra Pound Cake. I was curious, because 1) I had a bottle of beer in the fridge, 2) I wanted to make some quick bread, and 3) I'd had beer bread before, and was fairly sure I liked it.

Well, it turns out beer bread is a "quick" bread which doesn't require yeast, which is fine by me! It is definitely closer to a biscuit than a bread though, so keep that in mind. Also, it doesn't taste much like beer - I used a locally-produced (Moncton NB) Pumphouse Scotch Ale, which, ironically, was the beer I was drinking at the Pumphouse while I was trying beer bread for the first time! It's really quite tasty and smooth - a little bit sweet, a little bit bitter, and a little bit smokey, I thought it would be a perfect candidate for this experiment (although next time I might try something heavier).

Here's the recipe, from Ezra Pound Cake .com!

Beer Bread
From Rebecca Crump (EzraPoundCake.com)
Makes 1 loaf

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 bottle (12 ounces) beer
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted (Note: Feel free to reduce to 1/4 cup.)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9-x-5-x-3-inch loaf pan.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
3. Using a wooden spoon, stir the beer into the dry ingredients until just mixed.
4. Pour half the melted butter into the loaf pan. Then spoon the batter into the pan, and pour the rest of the butter on top of the batter.
5. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until golden brown. Serve immediately.



Ok, so there's the beer fizzing away on top of the dry ingredients...I maybe should have had a slightly bigger bowl? I also had a hard time getting all of the flour to mix in, I felt the mixture was a bit dry.

My other concern was the amount of butter. I used a frozen stick of President's Choice organic unsalted butter which I melted in the microwave, but it wasn't a full stick - it was like, 4/5s of a stick. And once I poured half of it on the bottom, I was thinking "this is probably too much butter"; by the time I was pouring it over the top I was thinking "Holy sh*t, this is WAY too much butter...it will either be crispy and delicious, or a soupy mess".


So...do you see what I mean about the excessive amount of butter (the oregano and freshly-ground black pepper were my own special touches)? I just found out about 2 minutes ago that Heather used the 1/4c. of butter, and I think next time that's what I'll do. The one step I don't have pictures of is the FIRE! Yes, that's right, as the bread was rising and the butter was sizzling, the butter was flowing out of the loaf pan and drizzling onto the element below...and started to catch fire! Flames, in my oven! Eeek! Chris had the good sense to snuff the fire out with a cookie sheet, and took it out. I suggested that maybe the pan could sit on the cookie sheet so it could catch the drips...and it worked! No more flames! Of course, this wasn't as impressive as the time someone I know opened up a toaster oven and a foot-long flame shot out, but still, a little scary!

Fifty minutes later I finally got to meet my bouncing baby beer bread! And it wasn't swimming in butter! Yay! I thought it was tasty-looking and crispy, but I still didn't know what the texture was going to be like - the beer bread at the Pumphouse was fairly bready, as far as I could recall...when I tried this, it was more like a homemade biscuit, which was and wasn't dissapointing at the same time. I like biscuits, and this is the closest I've ever come to making them, but it's not what I was expecting. Still, I'd do it again, just...with less butter next time. Speaking of butter, I noticed something interesting when we turned the loaf out to cut it...




OMG LOOK AT THAT CRUST!!! It's like somebody deep-fried it...which they pretty much did. Chris told me that he could feel butter oozing out of it...I believe him!

Also, next time I'm going to put some herbs and spices into it, just to give it another taste dimension...cumin might be nice?

Anyways I'm looking forward to snacking on some of this tomorrow morning for breakfast...maybe I'll warm it up and spread a little goat cheese on it? ;)

Thai green curry with pork and green beans over rice vermicelli

I made this curry a week or two ago and haven't had a chance to post it, but I wanted to make a point to, if only to remind myself that:

1) Yes, there is such a thing as "too much fish sauce". I kind of went from "hmm, kind of bland" to "flavour overload" fairly quickly.

2) If you have enough sauce in the pan, you can rehydrate rice noodles in it and they will taste AMAZING.

This is made from two pork chops I deboned, frozen green and yellow string beans, store-bought green curry paste, coconut milk, fish sauce and Vietnamese rice vermacelli noodles. I would definitely make it again but next time, I would maybe add more paste, not more fish sauce....