Chickpea stew

I did a Google search the other day for vegetable stew because I was in a “stew” kind of mood since it was chilly out, and I found a great recipe for a Middle Eastern-inspired chickpea stew. Of course I added to the recipe and changed a few things, but overall it turned out wonderful served over couscous. This is supposed to be a hearty stew, so don’t chop the vegetables too fine. I stuck to a medium dice on most of the vegetables and cut the carrots into half-moons about 1/4 inch thick, and everything turned out to be about the size of the chickpeas and cooked evenly. I bet cashews would be excellent in this dish, too…

2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 white or Spanish onion, coarsely chopped
1 green bell pepper, diced
3 celery ribs, diced
2-4 carrots (depending on their size), cut into 1/2 inch thick half-moons
2 medium sweet potatoes, diced
1 32oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 16oz can diced tomatoes (recommended: Hunts)
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1/4 cup raisins
2 cups vegetable stock
1/2 teaspoon cardamom*
1 teaspoon cinnamon*
1/2 teaspoon allspice*
1 tablespoon paprika*

*spices were added to taste, so these are approximate measurements

Saute garlic and onion until translucent. Add bell pepper, celery, carrots, and sweet potatoes. Season with salt and pepper, and saute for another 5 minutes. Add chickpeas, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, vegetable stock, and spices; stir. Simmer for about 30 minutes or until vegetables are tender. If too thick, add water or vegetable stock as needed; if too thin, add tomato paste as needed. Before serving, add raisins and simmer for an additional 5 minutes. Serve over a bed of couscous or rice, if desired.

Four Foods On Friday #98

1. How many cookbooks do you have? (1-10, 11-20, 20+)
Oh man, probably more than 20. (Speaking of, I’ve been looking for my Bon Appetit cookbook – the newer one with the orange cover, I think it’s a 25th anniversary edition or something – but I can’t find it. I think it’s in a box somewhere from when we moved, and I never unpacked it.)

2. Where do you keep your large utensils (such as slotted spoons, spatulas, etc)?
In drawers. I had my drawers neatly organized and arranged, but they are in complete chaos right now.

3. What is your countertop made of?
Not sure. Formica, I think.

4. Do you use canisters in your kitchen?
I have big Tupperware tubs for things like flour, sugar, etc. but I’d love to buy some nicer-looking ceramic or acrylic plastic canisters with hinges one of these days.

Four Foods on Friday

Chocolate Truffles: Phase Two

And so we have more food porn, brought to you by yours truly for Fuchsia-Revolver.org. We return to the subject of chocolate truffles for phase two: rolling and dipping. This part can be a little messy, but oh so worth it in the end because phase three… well, that involves savoring and will be documented by sexy pictures of erotic truffle consumption… (Maybe. If you’re lucky.) If you missed phase one, go back and catch yourself up on the fun; there are pictures for you to gawk at while wishing you were here right now and wondering how you could quickly become my best friend.

For this part of the recipe, the following ingredients and tools required include:

• Melted chocolate
• Cocoa powder
• A melon baller
• A few pairs of powder-free latex gloves
• One or two baking sheets lined with parchment or waxed paper

As you can see, the chocolate has now firmed up from being in the refridgerator for an hour or two, and it can now be scooped and rolled into truffles.

Use a melon baller, or a small dasher, to scoop the chocolate, and roll between your hands to form balls. Place rolled truffles on a flat baking sheet lined with wax or parchment paper. I strongly suggest using powder-free latex gloves for this process.

Truffles shouldn’t be too big or too small; a one inch ball is nice, although sometimes they just turn out bigger or smaller from scooping too much or too little. It happens. There are aren’t any pictures of the scooping and rolling process because, again, it is extremely messy; just ask the six pairs of chocolate-covered latex gloves that are in my trash can right now.

Since the truffles were a little soft from being rolled between my hands, I stashed the sheet pans in the freezer for about twenty minutes or so until they were firmed up again. You don’t have to, but it makes it easier if you want to roll the truffles in cocoa powder or dip them in melted chocolate to form a “shell” as I was planning on doing. If I was covering the truffles in nuts or coconut, I might not have put them in the freezer and just coated them while the chocolate was tacky and the stuff could adhere.

After the truffles were slightly firm again, I removed them from the freezer and they are ready to be rolled in cocoa powder or dipped into melted chocolate.

I was planning on dipping all of the truffles in melted chocolate, but that turned out to be a grand pain in the ass so only the Chambord ones ended up chocolate covered. For the chocolate coating, simply melt chocolate (Alton Brown suggests using a heating pad, but I didn’t want to fuss with that and instead chose the microwave option from before), take a truffle, and roll or dip it in the chocolate to coat. Again, there aren’t many pictures because this process was extremely messy, but the final result is shown.

Again, dipping was a little difficult so I gave up on it. I tried using a fondue fork, but the tacky chocolate stuck to it and wouldn’t come off of easily without destroying the round shape of the truffle – so I resorted to getting my hands dirty (latex gloves again recommended) and using my hands to cover the truffle in chocolate, thus having a textured shell instead of a smooth one that the dipping would have created; you can tell the difference between ones that were dipped and ones that were rolled. Whatever, they all taste good anyway.

The cayenne truffles were covered in cocoa powder. This is a faster and easier, much easier, alternative to dipping in chocolate: simply dump some cocoa powder on a plate, throw some truffles on the plate, and roll them around in the cocoa powder until coated.

And here you can see both of them, cocoa powdered bittersweet chocolate cayenne truffles on the left and the chocolate-dipped dark chocolate Chambord truffles on the right.

And that’s… how you make chocolate truffles. Extremely easy, fun to make, and nummy to eat. They might not look as beautiful as some of the commercially produced chocolates you can buy from a store, but they are truly made with time and effort – and, most importantly, love…

Even if it is just love for yourself, because you don’t have a fucking Valentine. Bah.

The end.

Chocolate Truffles: Phase One

So it’s Valentine’s Day, a Hallmark holiday seemingly created for the sole purpose of making singles feel miserable about their lives (especially, say, if you were dumped the week of Valentine’s Day, or perhaps the night before… you know, not like I would know from an experience last night or anything…) and men feel obligated to buy their ladies flowers and chocolates. Well, you know what made me feel better about today? Chocolate fucking truffles, that’s what. More specifically, dark chocolate Chambord truffles and semi-sweet chocolate cayenne truffles. Oh yes. And since I’m feeling so jovial right now, waiting for the sexy chocolate goodness to chill in the fridge so I can roll and dip these sweet babies in even more chocolate, I am going to share a little two-part photo log with you, detailing the process.

A few of the beginning steps were cut out for two reasons. One, they are simple enough; a picture to describe how to open the bag of chocolate chips with your kitchen shears and empty chocolate contents into a glass bowl, in my opinion, is hardly necessary. Two, it was after I started the recipe that I realized, hey, this would make a good photo blog, so some steps were already completed; I couldn’t easily un-melt the butter and chocolate for the sake of taking a damn picture.

I should note that I am following Alton Brown’s chocolate truffles recipe from the Food Network website. I chose this recipe because I wanted to make rolled-and-dipped truffles with a soft center and a hard chocolate shell (think of the ones you can get at Godiva; the chocolate exterior softly cracks when you bite into it and gives way to a luscious center) and not just rolled truffles (we had these at Hickory Farms when I worked there; they are more akin to fudge, I think.) The difference between the two is basically the final step: you dip the formed chocolate balls into melted chocolate, roll them in a coating (optional), and allow them to cool to form the shell, or you don’t dip them in chocolate and just roll them in a coating. The choice is yours, both are chocolate and tasty.

For what I am deeming as phase one of this recipe, the ingredients required include:

• one 12oz bag of chocolate chips (or the equivalent if you are using chocolate cut from a bar or chunk, but chips are easier to deal with)
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• ½ cup of heavy cream
• 1 tablespoon of light corn syrup
• a flavoring of some kind (in my case, I am using cayenne pepper for this batch, added to taste)

The first step is to melt the chocolate. There are a few ways to do this, but the microwave option is the easiest; why screw around with a double boiler, or a glass-bowl-over-simmering-pot-of-water substitute, when you don’t have to? Using the microwave is a wonderful, easy way to melt chocolate – so get over it, food snobs. To melt chocolate in a microwave, you don’t want to put it on a million minutes and let it go. Put it on for thirty seconds at a time, stir, and repeat until the chocolate has melted nicely and there are few, if any, lumps.

As you can see, I melted the chocolate together with the butter until it was a smooth, uniform mixture. I used one 12oz bag of Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate chips (in the other truffle recipe I made and flavored with Chambord, I used the Hershey’s Special Dark chips) and three tablespoons of unsalted butter, which had been cut into cubes.

Next step is to heat ½ cup of heavy cream and one tablespoon of light corn syrup over medium heat until gently simmering.

Pour the heavy cream and corn syrup mixture over the melted chocolate and let sit about a minute or two.

Stir cream and chocolate until incorporated into a smooth mixture that should, well, look like a bowl of melted chocolate again and not a bowl of chocolate with cream on top of it.

At this point in time, although it can be done earlier and added to the cream mixture on the stove top if you are using a flavoring other than alcohol, I added cayenne pepper to the chocolate mixture to taste. I was looking for the “feel it at the back of your throat” effect.

I threw some cinnamon in there, too, because cinnamon and chocolate… don’t get me started.

After the chocolate mixture has been flavored to taste, it is covered and stashed it in the fridge for about an hour (could take longer) so the mixture can set up and be easily shaped into balls of chocolatey goodness.

Now we wait. Phase is two coming by the end of the day. It involves more waiting, sure, when the truffles have to be chilled after dipping, but phase three is oh-so worth it.

Key Ingredient

Are you in need of a good Food Recipe website? When it comes to finding and storing food recipes online, there are many websites that come to my mind. Two I have used and still use from time to time are the Food TV Network website and All Recipes, but there are many, many more out there on the internet that can offer new, fresh recipes and variations to traditional favourites. I was made aware of a new website for storing and browsing through recipes. The website is called Key Ingredient.

The splash page of Key Ingredient includes a simple search box that you can use to browse for recipes and a few additional links, such as information about creating a cookbook with stored recipes. Upon clicking the Key Ingredient logo (which, along with the website name and slogan, features a cute illustration of an orange pot that I thought was reminiscent of a cast iron Le Cruset round oven), you can visit the main page of the website.

The layout on the main page of Key Ingredient is a clean design that is easy on the eyes and very easy to navigate. Non-members are welcome to look at and browse for recipes on the “Home” page, but I found that I was directed to a join page when I tried to view the “Meet,” “Collect,” and “Shop” links. I am assuming those pages are only accessible when logged in as a member. Membership is free, however, and it is easy to join the website.

If you decide to visit Key Ingredient’s website, be sure to submit some recipes to help the site grow and definitely check out the weblog. There are some really tasty-looking recipes featured on there and, again, the design is nice. The flash “recipe cards” that hold the actual recipes are pretty cool. Here is how they look and the recipe I submitted: