Seasonal Cooking

I've been thinking lately about how different food is from season to season. Not only are different types of produce available, but cooking techniques also change. Baking and braising in the winter are replaced by sauteeing and grilling in the summer. I assume the rationale for this would be that one wishes to generate as little heat as possible in the kitchen during the hot days of summer, but do these seasonal cooking patterns apply to areas of the world where it is hot or cold year round?

My oven really does miss me though, and my stomach misses the plethora of baked goods that I would normally churn up in the winter. Cookies, brownies, bread... something about the cold winter months makes me want to fire up the oven and pull out my KitchenAid. Perhaps this weekend I'll make some bread. The NY Times no knead bread recipe is always satisfying, perhaps even more so because of the limited amount of work that goes into making it! I've also been craving popovers since tasting the hot, cheesy deliciousness that preceded our meal at BLT Steak a few weeks ago. I wonder if they would be as good in a muffin tin instead of a popover pan? Here's the recipe BLT Steak provided for their gruyere popovers:

BLT Steak Popovers (makes 12)

Ingredients:
4 cups milk, warmed
8 eggs
4 cups flour
1 1/2 heaping tbsp salt
2 1/4 cups grated gruyere cheese
Popover pan

Preparation:
Place the popover pan in the oven. Heat the oven and the pan to 350 degrees.
Gently warm the milk over low heat and set aside.
Whisk the eggs until frothy and slowly whisk in the milk (so as not to cook the eggs). Set the mixture aside.
Sift the flour with the salt. Slowly add this dry mixture to the wet mixture and gently combine until mostly smooth.
Once combined, remove the popover pan from the oven and spray with nonstick vegetable spray. While the batter is still slightly warm or room temperature (definitely not cool), fill each popover cup 3/4 full.
Top each popover with approximately 2 1/2 tbsp of the grated gruyere.
Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes, rotating pan half a turn after 15 minutes of baking.
Remove from the oven, remove from the pan and serve immediately.

The Trials of Baking

Original posting date: January 12, 2007

Ever since mid-December, when my coworker Kate gave me her old, unwanted Kitchenaid mixer, I have had the biggest urge to bake. To date, I have used the mixer a handful of times to make cranberry and chocolate scones, butterscotch blondies, chocolate mousse, pate sucree (pastry dough), and maybe one or two other things that I have now forgotten.

After work today, I decided to make both sweet and savory foods using my mixer. For Christmas, Annie gave me a gorgeous red tin of sugar cookie mix from Williams Sonoma, so I mixed up a batch of sugar cookie dough which looks good enough to eat already but must be refrigerated for four hours before being rolled out. I also tried out the dough hook attachment for the first time, using it to knead a dough for pull-apart garlic bread. I'm rather disappointed though - I forgot to add 3 tablespoons of sugar, which may prevent the yeast from doing its full duty. In addition, the dough seemed a bit dry and did not roll into a ball easily, so I'm skeptical as to its outcome.

Results: As usual, Tom and I made too much food for dinner so we didn't have room for the sugar cookies. Good thing the dough can stay in the fridge for up to 3 days. We'll roll it out into cute shapes tomorrow and drizzle them with melted chocolate when they're done. As for the bread, I was a little worried when it came out feeling quite hard, but the middle was still soft and chewy and it had a fairly decent savory flavor. The sugar may have helped give it more depth but it still wasn't bad for my first attempt at bread-making!

More results: I made the sugar cookies the day after whipping up the batch of dough. After letting it rest for half an hour on the counter, I rolled it out to about a 1/4" thickness, cut it into circles with a small water glass, and cut delightful little shapes out of the centers using mini-cookie cutters that Annie got me along with the sugar cookie mix. Baking at 325F for 12 minutes resulted in slightly too-crisp cookies that I let cool and drizzled with melted chocolate/milk. Next time I think I'll make them a little thicker and bake them for less time. Oh well, lessons learned!