photo credit: tibbygirl

I was in the grocery store earlier today after a trip through Crystal. Along the road every restaurant that I passed seemed to have suddenly added corned beef and cabbage to their menus or managed to dig out the big ol' bottle of green food coloring and started dumping it into every water-soluble substance in their kitchen.

Once in the store, the same trend was magnified. Half of the end-caps were covered in shamrocks and a significant portion of the pastries found themselves coated in green goo.

The thing is. There's lots of really good Irish food that I'm seriously looking forward to taking part in from the source when we are in Ireland in July.

Wanting to get a taste in advance of that trip, I headed to my new favorite food/recipe site: Recipezaar. I've got quite a few food sites in the list I go to when it's time to whip something up. Recipezaar isn't exactly the Web 2.0 poster child. There are plenty of other recipe sites that "feel" better. I mean I really like the look of Open Source Food.

However, Open Source Food, despite the gorgeous photography and things like tagging, when it comes down to it, a site like Recipezaar delivers on the actual task at hand. See, I use a site like these to find food worth making. And, on those features that matter, Recipezaar delivers.

If you're looking to move beyond corned beef and cabbage or want some Irish food that is more than just a cliche, it's worth digging through some of the related recipe lists they've got. I usually sort everything by rating, which brings out some really good commentary on how good or bad the recipes actually are.

St. Patrick's Day Recipes

General Irish Recipes

Recipes Containing Guiness

Once you find some that you like (I'm thinking Irish Pub Stew and Soda Bread sound good to me or maybe some Irish Cod Pie), one of the features of Recipezaar really shines. Their printable format is really one of the best of all of the recipe sites out there. You need to register for a free account to hide the stuff that shows at the top of the page and then you get nice, clean layouts with nutrition information, original comments by the submitter and a quick URL for looking it up again at a later date. Nearly every recipe I've gotten from them fit on a single side of a single sheet of paper.

Combine these nice printer-friendly layouts with a default PDF printer and you've got an easy way to save recipes for later printing or review.

When I mentioned over the holidays that the croutons on our Christmas salad were actually homemade (in response to a question on the brand), I was met with more surprise than I expected. Unfortunately, that response is something I've heard from lots of other people who actually make their own stuff, from food to robots.

The last 100 years of manufacturing, particularly the last 60 or so, have rendered the bulk of several generations incapable of seeing certain items as anything other than the result of factory production.

For food, that means that really simple items like croutons and whipped cream, when made instead of bought generate incredulity. It's as though those items have been moved from the class of things you can make yourself into the class of things you pay $3 for in the grocery store in a hermetically sealed container that's been on the shelf or in the refrigerator for 6 weeks or 6 months.

Fortunately, the whole "Maker" movement is helping to rectify some of this problem. Lots of people are taking these matters back into their own hands and discovering the joy of having made this stuff yourself as well as products that end up at a higher quality standard than the stuff plopping off the end of the Kraft factory line.

Anyway, last night, the homemade crouton supply was running low, so I made up another batch. I had the small digital camera in my pocket, so I took a few shots while I made them and strung them together early this morning into a quick slideshow and put the video up.

The croutons themselves look a little dark in the photos, but they taste great.

Today was stressful and went longer than I wanted, resulting in a trip home right at 5:15. Given that it's road construction season here in Minnesota and the bonding bill went through (meaning more money to *do* road construction), that was the worst possible time to go home.

So, I sat on Hwy 100, staring at a proud parent of an honor student who was also the owner of an exceptionally long middle finger and a strongly held belief that sharing it with the Ford Taurus in front of her would clear out the 15 miles of non-moving cars in front of her.

As I sat there, I developed a craving for pizza. This was the kind of craving that can't be explained, but MUST be obeyed. However, I didn't want crappy frozen pizza as the craving wouldn't be pacified with that. However, as it was going to be nearly 6:30 by the time I got home, I knew that ordering for delivery was just going to put me in another long line, quite likely with some of my companions on the road.

Since I had to stop at Target anyway on the way home, I thought I'd buy one of their deli pizzas as a possible solution. I put one in the cart and walked over to the deli meats to buy stuff for grilled cheese sandwiches tomorrow night. For the last month or so, Shelly's been doing a lot of traveling and I usually just eat a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner on those nights.

Anyway, as I was standing in front of the counter, waiting for the meat to be sliced, I saw fresh mozzarella (the stuff that's packed in water). In that moment, I decided that even the deli pizza wouldn't suffice. No, I was determined to have homemade pizza for one, within 45 minutes.

I succeeded and it was delicious. In case you are interested, here's how it goes:
Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Alexia

While June is nearly over, it's still worth noting that June is National Iced Tea Month. I didn't know that a few weeks ago when I started my quest for better iced tea (or I would have written this up sooner).

Personally, my quest started from a different set of motivations.

• I like tea, but 200°F beverages and 90°F temperatures don't really mix well.
• I enjoy a good meal, but can't stand wine and don't drink alcohol. The complexities in fine tea offer the possibilities of matching high quality tea to food in the same ways that wine usually is matched. In short, I think it can offer a way to have a more sophisticated beverage with my meals than soda, water or milk while staying away from alcohol.
• Nearly every iced tea "recipe" I find pretty much disqualifies itself from contributing to the conversation by using Lipton tea bags as their gold standard against which "good" iced tea should be measured. Given that fans of coffee don't hold Folgers up as a benchmark, or $2 wine or McDonald's as the pinnacle of hamburger cuisine, the pulverized bits of tea that are in Lipton bags are the starting point, not the end.

So, I've started on a journey to come up with better iced teas for myself. Like I said, I started with the standard "Lipton recipe" and process, which goes something like this:

1. Boil 4 cups of water.
2. Put a couple of tea bags into it and let them brew for about twice as long as "normal".
3. Pour that into a 2 quart pitcher.
4. Fill the pitcher with ice.
5. Pour into glass with ice.

Sweet tea adds anywhere from 1/2 to a cup of sugar to step 3. I generally do like my tea sweetened, but often, the sugar is pumped too high because the tea is really astringent and needs the sweetening in order to smooth over that flavor.

I dropped into my local tea shop and they actually had a little flyer making recommendations of varieties that make good iced tea. Taking that as a good starting point, I bought half a dozen varieties, some from the list and some I just wanted to try and have been drinking the resulting teas over the last couple of weeks. I'll be buying more from the list as I get through the first batch.

I bought:

• Hunan Black
• Formosa Choicest Oolong (which I drink regularly as a hot tea)
• Mauritius Black, which has a lovely vanilla note to it.
• China Black Special, which might be a bit too smoky for me.
• Big Red Robe Oolong
• Longevity Oolong

Along with messing with the starting teas, I've been trying varying levels of sugar and using other sweeteners as well. It's clear that some teas need far less sweetening, even to taste like "sweet tea", like the Mauritius, for which 3/4 cup was so overly sweet it made me want to gag. It was much better when I dialed the sugar way back.

The downside to iced tea as wine substitute is that iced tea doesn't keep very well. A day or so later, it's pretty nasty, but you can make a fresh pitcher really quickly, so I don't have a problem with that. The fact that this is true when iced tea is made from scratch, is why bottled iced tea kind of creeps me out. Exactly what stabilizing chemicals and preservatives are necessary to keep it in exactly the same state for months on end?

At any rate, I know that there are a lot of people out there who either stay away from alcohol for ethical reasons, personal reasons, or just for taste reasons, but really want to have a nice drink with their meals. Between Seven Cups, The Tea Source and Adagio Teas alone, there are hundreds of different varieties worth trying out as part of my quest. From deep earthy puerh's to light white teas, there's surely as much rich complexity there as there is in wine and iced tea can be elevated from just another nozzle on the soda fountain to a beverage suitable as part of any gourmet meal.

Last weekend, my family had its "Christmas" celebration. My sister had been out of the country since November. Since we already usually have that celebration on New Year's Day to completely sidestep all of the extended family bickering that can come when everyone wants to have theirs during the same time slots, it wasn't that weird to have it later.

Besides, it's much colder in February this time around than December was, so it actually felt more like Christmas anyway. And, without the gigantic pressure of an entire retail industry shoving the day down our throats, it had a more natural family feel anyway.

So, last week, I got a call *from* my sister asking if I'd be willing to make a key lime pie and bring it along. I made one 2 years before (along with butterscotch cream pie and chocolate cream pie) and she'd been thinking about during much of her stay, working in a Jamaican orphanage on the top of a mountain. Figuring that you can't really turn down a sister that you love, much less someone who was willing to do 2 months of charity work in less than ideal conditions, I made it.

Actually, I made 3.

See, I mentioned at work that I was going to the grocery store after work to pick up limes and that I hoped they were decent this time of year. One thing led to another and someone said that it'd be tasty if I brought one in to work too. So, I figured, why not? I'll make 2. Then, I got back to work and Shelly called and said that I should probably make 2 because she remembered it going quickly last time. But, because she didn't know about pie #2 yet, hers was actually pie #3.

The thing is, though, that key lime pie is one of the easiest pies to make "from scratch" and is an easy way to impress people when you're asked to bring a dessert. So, I thought I'd share.


Key Lime Pie - Serves 8 slices

Optional:
1/2 cup bottled lime or key lime juice


The bottled lime juice is in case you don't want to spend the time extracting and straining that much juice out of the 4 limes. And, the graham cracker crust could be made by hand, but I don't bother. What I do to the crust makes it work and it tastes fine. Much of the complaint about the store-bought crusts is because they use vegetable shortening instead of butter, which I remedy in the pursuit of a more firm, crunchy crust.

At any rate, preheat the oven to 325°F.

Take the eggs and seperate 4 of the yolks off in a bowl. The remaining whole egg and the egg whites go into another bowl and get beaten.

Melt the butter in the microwave and get a pastry brush. I prefer the silicon ones as you tend to waste less getting stuck in the brush.

Brush a coating of butter into the crust, followed by a coating of the beaten egg wash. You want the butter to cover completely and the egg wash to be as thin as you can get it without missing anywhere.

Put the crust in the oven for 15-20 minutes. What you're after is golden toasting and you'll smell it when that happens.

In the mean time, you need to scrape the zest off of the limes into the bowl with the egg yolks. You only want the green part of the peel, not the white pith underneath. The smaller the bits are the better.

Beat the zest and the egg yolks together for a couple of minutes.

Then, scrape the sweetened condensed milk out of the can and into the egg mixture and beat *that* until it's blended.

If you're using the fresh lime juice, you need to end up with 1/2 cup of squeezed and strained juice, otherwise, use the limes in your Diet Coke and use 1/2 cup of bottled juice. Put the lime juice into the bowl and mix until blended.

Let this sit for about 20 minutes at room temperature. The lime juice will work on the eggs and the whole mixture will thicken.

To completely set it up, though, we'll bake it for about 15 minutes in a 300°F oven, until it still moves when you shake it, but it's completely set.

Let it cool and refrigerate it for 3 hours before topping and serving.

The easy way to top it is with Cool Whip or canned whipped cream. If you want to make your own whipped cream:


3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla


Put that in your electric mixer (or prepare to earn your stripes doing it by hand) and beat it until it is at the "stiff peaks" level. That's when you can pull the whisk out of the mixture, turn it upside-down and the mixture will stand up on its own without tipping over.

Spread the whipped cream across the pie, cut and serve.

Oh, and in case it isn't obvious, this pie is generally more suitable for adults than kids. I wouldn't try serving it to a room full of 8 year olds.