Stroganoff-stuffed baked bell peppers & Tomatoes

This was actually the first time I made the stuffed-tomato dishes as I also served on Christmas. Served it with some rosemary-garlic-balsamic marinated chicken legs that I then roasted in the oven till the skin got crispy. Made for a great meal :-)

A few steps in the making:
1) made a semi-enriched dough, scooped out the tomato innards, and made the mushroom-chicken stroganoff and let it cool a tad before stuffing it into the tomato
Filled the tomatos, then wrapped the dough around, making seams on the overlap and trimming off the excess, folding down the tops to look cute:

For reference, I did the stroganoff by sauteing some chopped onions in olive oil while boiling the sliced mushrooms in saltwater for about 5 minutes then straining them, then finely chopping a chicken breast, cooking that in with the onions, then adding a tidbit more olive oil, then flour, and stirring that till the flour is all mixed in and cooks for a bit, also adding some oregano and thyme, pepper and boullion for the salt, then slowly adding and stirring in some reduced-fat milk until it reaches a nice thick cream, then adding the mushrooms, and adjusting the creaminess to be the right final consistency. Turns out great each time :-)

Dinner on the 25th

I was lucky to have both my sisters in town for Christmas, and cooked up a celebratory 4-course meal for the occasion :-)

Menu:

Vichyssoise (Potato & leek pureed soup), served with mini cherry-tomato quiches

Lemon-dill Salmon and herb-cream pangasius filets with asparagus seared with roasted garlic

Chicken-mushroom stroganoff stuffed tomato baked in a soft bread, with a sundried-tomato roasted-bell pepper sauce and sweet potato cakes on the side


Raspberry mousse served in white-and-dark chocolate bowls

Whole wheat Tortillas

My first tortilla:

I made some tortillas for the first time this month--just using a standard flour-water-salt recipe out of The Joy of Cooking. :) They turned out great! A lot of work when doing them alone, having to hand-press each then cook it in the skillet. But they were so great for some mexican bean-and-rice burritos, busting out my last jar of tomatillo salsa from the US. :)
My sisters came and visited soon afterwards, and we made them again, which went a heck of a lot faster with 6 hands!

I'll definitely do them again, and maybe with cornmeal/masa to try out making corn tortillas, too.

Artisan Breadbaking

Inspired by my friend Bling Bling's account of baking breads from a Peter Reinhart bread book, I decided to follow a recipe from my own Peter Reinhart bread book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" --really great book by the way! So I liked the sound of this meat-cheese-bread recipe, called "casatiello", so I followed that recipe (except it called for a lot of butter-- 2/3 cup of butter or so in the loaf, so I used half of that of extra virgin olive oil, and I think it had zero detrimental impacts on texture or flavor), and also instead of using pork sausages as the meat, I used a type of turkey thick-hot-dog-like sausage they sell here instead. And my choice of cheese to use inside was a sharp emmenteller (which was following the recipe as he suggested swiss cheese, or another flavorful meltable cheese).
It turned out great in the end! haha and it looks just like in the picture in the book :) Really delicious bread, of course pretty rich, being that it contains meat cheese and oil in the dough. One loaf was really quite large, too, and I ate it nearly all myself, but by the third day of eating it, it was getting pretty dry unfortunately. But fresh, it was really extremely soft, flavorful, delicious... will totally do it again (just when I have company to help me eat it!)

Awesome DOUGH!!

Now this dough was something....


This dough had the most unusual texture I'd ever worked with-- completely un-sticky, but incredibly soft, stretchy, pliable, and drippy... haha reminiscent of Dali's melting clocks!

I think one of the keys to it's texture was a new pretty high-glutin flour I was using-- Urdinkel-flour. I had made the same dough (contains some sugar, oil, eggs) using other flours before and didn't nearly get the same effect after similar kneading times. I am eager to try this one out for pizza crusts in the future--could give a really awesome stretchy-thin crust!

... and it made a really delicious batch of cinnamon rolls!

I baked half of them immediately, then with the second half was experimenting with freezing the un-risen dough spirals, as I was curious how well the dough really rises after being frozen, and it did really well! Just required sufficient thaw-time in a warm room, and then puffed up nicely! Good to know for future batches that I can keep myself from eating a dozen, by freezing the rest into one-evening portions to bake fresh :)

A selection of random dinners during the week...

For fun, here's just a random sampling of some casual dinners I made during a the week :) Every other day I'll cook up something "bigger", otherwise it's often some sort of vegetable soup, cause those are fun and easy after a long day of work. But here are the non-soup ones. Honestly, soup pictures are a bit harder, without dishing them up in nice bowls, and having garnishes, they can often look really un-photogenic! I'll work on making good soup pictures in the future.
I was really excited to find Stubb's BBQ sauce in the grocery store here--happy they started carrying a *real* one! So I celebrated that evening with buying one of the expensive bottles, for some bbq chicken skewers, with some roasted nuts on the side.

Then felt like something 'lighter' like sushi--so had this shrimp and salmon sushi rolls... I made a ton of rolls that time! So had leftovers for work which is always nice!

And some slipper lobster pasta carbonera, with multi-flavored noodles. That might not look like it from the picture but it was a ridiculous mountain of food!
We honestly daily eat far too much in the evenings. I'm sure I'm the one to blame for that!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Sometimes I buy my pumpkins more for making the roasted seeds than for the pumpkin soup or pie or whatever I do with the actual pumpkin. Just love these!Only magic ingredient is a nice seasoning salt. I make this one, which has been a family favorite seasoning salt for decades:
~1/3-1/2 salt, then the second half of the seasoning made of these spices, in order of decreasing volume: onion powder, garlic powder, celery salt, paprika, very crushed parsley leaves, chili powder.

Spätzli !!

Quick notes on one of my swiss favorites, Spätzli!

Here is a pic of my favorite store-bought one, which also adds a fair amount of vegetables to the eggy bizarre noodles.I recently found in the classic awesome book "The Joy of Cooking" that they actually have a recipe for making Spätzli, which I tried out twice. The basic recipe for Spätzli is just:
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp double-acting baking powder
you beat them all together, then boil small tubes of it in boiling saltwater.
The first time was pretty funny, because I was not aware of just how much it would poof up when boiling (due to the baking powder), so my normal-sized noodles I piped into the water ended up being bloated dumpling monstrosities.
One normally would use what's called a "Spätzli -cutter" which squirts them out in the right sizes, but I just did a pastry-bag type version of piping them into the boiling saltwater.

Still, the dumplings tasted good! :) I had also flavored mine with a bit of garlic powder and chili powder in the batter for fun. btu they were definitley weird amorphous dumplings.
So the second time I made them the appropriate size, and they looked great, until I needed to strain them out of the boiling water, then they really stuck to gether badly, and were a tad too soft to keep their form if trying to toss them in some olive oil or sauce to get them to separate again.
Overall, still working on perfecting a homemade recipe!