Archive for December, 2011
How to Make Chocolate Truffles
Posted by castironidaho in Handmade, Recipes on December 27, 2011
Here’s what we’ve been cooking up for the holidays….chocolate truffles! We wanted some homemade, edible gifts for family and friends, and although there is a bit of a learning curve to figuring out how to make these, they worked out perfectly. For a moderate investment in time and money, we were able to deliver a lot of holiday gifts with a real “wow, for me?!” impact. In an age of rushed holidays and excessive mall spending, more than one recipient commented on the lack of edible homemade gifts these days.
We had so much fun making these that we’re thinking of taking orders for Valentine’s Day. Anybody interested?
I’d never made truffles before, so perused the internet and several cookbooks for recipes. As usual, most of the info we needed was in the Joy of Cooking. I’ll give you the basics and then the many variations that we tried.
First, you make the basic truffle filling. We did a trial run and decided on this:
- 1 cup heavy cream
- ½ stick butter
- 2 packages dark chocolate chips (we used Ghiardelli’s 60%, the best.)
Heat the cream in a saucepan over medium to low heat. Add the butter, cut in small pieces, and let it melt. Be careful not to overheat it. As soon as the butter is melted, add all of the chocolate and stir until the milk and chocolate combine, and the mixture becomes creamy. As soon as this magic happens, take it off the heat. This is much like making ganache.
At this point, we divided the chocolate into two or four different bowls, and added different flavorings to each one, see recipes below. Refrigerate for about 2 to 2 1/2 hours, until the chocolate is firm enough to easily roll into balls, not too sticky and not too hard. Joy suggests not using the freezer to expedite this process.
You could also add the flavoring when you heat the milk. This may make the flavors stronger, and you’d need less flavoring. We didn’t try this, we’re still experimenting.
We tried making ganache with dark, milk, and white chocolate. The dark was by far the easiest to work with. The white worked pretty well, although the balls were softer and therefore harder to coat, and the white chocolate burns the most easily, so be careful when heating it. The milk chocolate didn’t work very well at all. It turned more into caramel than ganache. These were messier, but we still coated some of them and they turned out more like chocolate coated caramels.
When the chocolate is firm enough, roll into balls. (If you refrigerate it too long, you’ll have to let it warm up a bit first.)
There are two ways to coat your truffles. The easy way is to roll the balls in crushed nuts or cocoa powder. The more difficult way is to coat them with chocolate.
To make the chocolate coating, we melted more chocolate chips. Joy of Cooking suggests doing this in a double boiler, which I didn’t have, so made my own out of two pots. For this to work, the filling and the coating need to be as close to the same temperature as possible. The filling should be at room temperature. Melt ¾ of your chocolate chips, remove from heat and put in a different, cool bowl. Then add the remaining chocolate chips, which will cool the mixture as they melt. If your coating is too hot, it will melt the filling. If the filling is too cold, the coating won’t stick.
I tried dipping the balls into the coating, which worked okay, but the Joy of Cooking method worked best. Partially dip each chocolate ball, then roll with a small amount of chocolate in the palm of your hand to coat the rest. Carefully move from your hand onto waxed paper to dry. If you want to decorate them, do it while the chocolate coating is still wet. You have to work pretty quickly.
Here are some of the flavors we tried. I didn’t write down measurements, just tasted each one til it seemed good. The flavors to tend to get stronger as they sit.
A lot of the recipes we saw included alcoholic elements like rum or different liquors, but since we’re not drinking these days and wanted to limit expense, we skipped that in favor of several extracts available at Freddy’s for $2. If you already have a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the liquor option might be tasty. Rum, Limoncello, Kahlua, and Orange Liquor were some suggestions.
Raspberry Truffles
- Dark chocolate ganache
- Raspberry extract
- Chopped dried raspberries from City Gardens
- Dark chocolate coating
- Decorated with a dried raspberry
Mint truffles
- Dark chocolate ganache
- Peppermint extract
- Milk chocolate coating
- Decorated with crushed candy canes
Fig truffles
- Dark Chocolate ganache
- Chopped dried figs
- Milk chocolate coating
- Decorated with a dried fig piece
Orange truffles
- Dark chocolate ganache
- Orange extract
- Orange zest
- Rolled in crushed almonds
- Plain chocolate truffles
- Dark chocolate ganache
- Rolled in cocoa powder
Lemon Coconut Truffles (My favorite one)
- White chocolate ganache
- Unsweetened coconut flakes
- Coconut extract
- Lemon extract
- Lemon zest
- Coated in milk or dark chocolate
- Sprinkled with dried coconut
You could also roll balls in coconut flakes, but our white chocolate balls were a little too soft.
Almond Truffles
- White Chocolate Ganache
- Almond extract
- Coat in dark chocolate and sprinkle with crushed almonds.
Ancho pepper truffles (My other favorite one.)
- 1 dried ancho pepper
- 1 whole star anise
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1/2 tsp black peppercorns
- 3 cloves
Roast these in the oven until they smell fragrant. Grind finely in a coffee grinder. I got the spice mix recipe from this recipe and added it to our truffles.
Add to dark chocolate ganache a little at a time until you get the flavor you want.
Coat with milk or dark chocolate and sprinkle with cinnamon or a red pepper flake or two.
We used the remaining spice mix to coat a venison steak, yummy.
Maple truffles
- Milk or dark chocolate ganache
- Maple syrup
- Coat in milk or dark chocolate
Ginger truffles
- Milk or dark chocolate ganache
- Ground ginger and/or finely chopped crystallized ginger
- Coat in milk or dark chocolate
- Decorate with a small piece of crystallized ginger
– Katie
Front Yard Gardens, from our readers!
Posted by castironidaho in Farm and Garden on December 21, 2011
Wow, we got some good responses to our last post, including a posting over at Northwest Food News! Reader Casey O’Leary sent these photos of her front yard garden.
These are hops growing up the side of Casey’s house. Hops, obviously, are used in brewing beer, and Casey does brew her own. Other vine options for using vertical space beside a house or a fence include grapes, though they take a few years to get going, and pole beans, which last just one year. Hops are a perennial, so will return year after year. If you’re luck enough to live somewhere warm (sigh, Florida), my absolute favorite is passion fruit. It’s viney similar to grapes but grows faster and makes a gorgeous flower, and the juice from the fruit is wonderful. Casey also says that vines are nice for shading the sunny side of a house.
Here’s Casey’s front yard and pathway. She has a mix of flowers, herbs, and edibles. The best place for an herb garden is, of course, as close as possible to your kitchen, since they are best snipped fresh when you are ready to use them. Casey also makes these gorgeous garden walkways using recycled materials and is available to help you make one, or plan and install your own front yard garden. Casey and Marty used to be farming partners when they first started out, and Casey now runs Earthly Delights, a CSA farm and sustainable landscaping business. You can get info about both at her website, earthlydelightsfarm.com.
Thanks for the photos, Casey!
– Katie
NIMFY (Not in My Front Yard) Gardening
Posted by castironidaho in Farm and Garden on December 19, 2011
Farmer Marty always says that winter is the best time for gardening. Everything is perfect in your head, the possibilities are endless, and there’s not a bug or a weed to be found. So, let’s get thinking about the gorgeous home garden you are going to have next year. The most important thing that your garden will need is FULL SUN. No, really. If there’s a tree above your garden, you will need to cut it down. Or….find a sunnier spot, even if it’s in (GASP!) your FRONT yard.
My mama is a great gardener. I learned my first gardening skills from her, in the large backyard of the house I grew up in. After tending that lovely garden for many years, she and my dad moved to a different house with a much smaller yard, and my mom put in a much smaller backyard garden. But alas, nearby trees and a shed thwarted her efforts, and for several years, she had a very mediocre garden, due to her NIMFY attitude. Finally, about two years ago, I was home in Maryland for a visit and decided to spearhead a new and improved garden for my mom, not exactly in front but on the side of the house, visible from the road and on a slight hill. To level out the hill, we built raised beds and filled them with dead leaves and compost. If I remember right, we bought 4X4 pieces of lumber from Home Depot, and cut them to the lengths we needed. We basically made a 3 sided bed, with the hillside forming the 4th side, and the two shorter sides tapering off to meet the hill. There was a lot of grumbling from my dad, about “ruining the lawn.”
This is actually a perfect fall/winter project, because if you build your beds now and fill them with compost, leaves, manure, whatever, they have all winter to decompose, settle in, attract worms, and kill that ugly green grass underneath.
Since we built my mom’s garden, I’ve noticed more and more front yard gardens popping up around my neighborhood, and started photographing them for you, our dear readers. I LOVE the trend toward front yard edible gardens. I actually met my neighbor Alisha Scholer on account of her garden, since it required her to spend a lot of time in her front yard. She says she’s met a lot of neighbors this way. She has a few small raised beds and a lovely pole bean teepee, which overflow with bounty all summer long. Her garden is pictured at the top of this blog.
Others go so far as to remove their front lawns altogether, as my friends Tara Wolfson and Nathaniel Hoffman did, rather than build raised beds. You can remove the sod with a sod cutter, or start in the fall (or right now!) to sheet mulch with cardboard covered by a layer of leaves, manure, and compost. Their garden is HUGE. Here’s a photo.
Another garden that I loved in my neighborhood took advantage of the median strip between the sidewalk and the street. They grew quite a lot of food in raised beds, with low-maintenance rocks in between, and probably took advantage of the sunniest part of their yard. I don’t know who owned this garden (let me know if you do!), I think it was around 24th and Bannock or so. In the photo you can see how they covered one bed with bendable PVC and row cover for frost protection.
Another lovely raised-bed, front yard garden was constructed by my friend Katie Hartman. Raised beds have their advantages and disadvantages, with the main disadvantage, in my opinion, being expense. It takes a lot more soil to fill them than you will think. But often if you want just a little gardening, in a relatively neat and compact space, they can be a good option. Katie is starting a business to help folks install custom home gardens, see her sign to the right.
Boise is not, thank goodness, one of those urban metropolitan areas where you can hardly find a patch of dirt between the concrete to plant a seed. But for those who live in other places, I’ve always been amazed at the resourcefulness of some of the very urban gardeners I’ve met. Check out my friend Elizabeth’s balcony garden at her Maryland apartment, on her blog, The Bare Midriff.
Recently I visited the city of San Diego for a conference for work, and toured this urban garden, on a parking lot. So, all of the soil you see was brought in, and is only as deep as the raised beds. The gardener had his larger, deeper rooted plants like tomatoes and peppers, in pots, but the beds are sufficient for growing greens. He also had an awesome composting setup in back, to create soil right on site rather than having to bring it in. This was a for-profit urban farm, owned an operated by a Mexican immigrant. Most of his sales were in potted plant starts, and, lucky him, in San Diego’s climate you can grow practically anything.
Finally, I will leave you with this front-yard-madness photo that was emailed to me by a colleague some months back.
Apparently, the thing this young man missed most during his tour in Iraq was a grassy front lawn to walk on, so had his wife mail him soil and grass seed, so he could have some grass and some American soil in front of his tent. (Likely this is not legal, importing seeds and soil is usually restricted to prevent the spread of disease and insects.) But he got away with it, proving that the American front lawn is THIS culturally ingrained, but also proving that you can grow practically anything, anywhere. With enough inputs, that is. But if you’re going to go through the trouble, why not grow something you can eat, or at least some beautiful flowers? Even though you CAN grow a green lawn in a desert, apparently any desert, why? So many more interesting plants are waiting for you to discover.
Got a great front yard garden? Send us a photo!
– Katie
How to Make a Pie Crust
Posted by castironidaho in Recipes on December 16, 2011
Finally, I bring you the pie crust recipe to go with our pumpkin pie recipe. The following photos are from my Thanksgiving pies, and I’d hoped to get this posted sooner, but fortunately we have more pie-eating holidays coming up. I find it so extremely satisfying to make a pie crust from scratch, even though it takes some time. You can buy pretty good premade ones, including locally made ones, available frozen at the coop. But if you want to try a basic, easy, pie crust recipe, this one is pretty tried and true.
Baking pies always reminds me of my grandmother, Lottie Painter. She and my grandfather were the proprietors of a small restaurant for years, where she baked some very popular pies. The restaurant had already been sold by the time I was a child, but I have wonderful memories of trying to learn to duplicate my grandmother’s pie crusts. To be fair, this wasn’t her original recipe. She used lard, which is a little harder to pull off, but delicious. But the technique is hers. In her later years, she too used pre-made crusts sometimes. When I was a graduate student in Florida, I used to drive down to her Gulf Coast condo to visit her, and she would often serve me a meal of entirely pie: a meat and potato filled pie for dinner, and apple pie for dessert. This is us in 2009.
The basic pie crust recipe I use is as follows. It’s much more about the technique than the recipe though, so check the photos.
- 4.5 c flour
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 ¾ c Crisco
- ½ c cold water
- 1 egg
- 1tbsp vinegar.
Mix flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Add Crisco and mix until crumbly. I recommend using a pastry cutter, makes it much easier, but you can also use a fork or your hands. At this point, you can’t overmix and want the Crisco to be completely worked in.
Next, mix the water, eggs, and vinegar in a separate bowl. Make a well in the center of your flour/Crisco mixture and pour your wet ingredients in. At this point, it’s very easy to STIR TOO MUCH. So, carefully blend the dry into the wet, I usually use a fork. You want to get it to the consistency just where it will stick together, then make four relatively equal sized balls with your hands. There will be some scraps of flour left in the bottom, don’t worry about these and don’t try to force them to stick to the balls.
Wrap the balls in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for at least half an hour, until firm enough to roll out with a rolling pin. You can use the freezer if you’re in a hurry, but don’t let them freeze too hard. At this stage you can freeze them for later use, but they’re best used right away.
When they’re ready, you will roll them out on a clean, dry surface covered with flour. I like to start with a lot of flour underneath my ball of dough, because you can’t add more to the bottom later, and it tends to stick to your rolling out surface if you don’t use enough. First use your hands to flatten the ball into a pancake shape. Using a rolling pin, roll from the center toward the sides, and allow the dough to slowly stretch. Add more flour on top or on the rolling pin as needed.
Next, get a flat spatula and carefully loosen the crust from the rolling surface. Fold it in thirds. This makes it easy to get it into your pie shell, where you can unfold it again.
On this day I was making just a one-crust pie, so I crimped the edges with my fingers and then trimmed off the extra. (You can use this extra to patch a hole or crack if needed). For a two crust pie, fill the pie, place the second crust on top, then crimp them both together with your fingers or a fork. Some of our favorite pies are pumpkin, apple, and peach. What’s your favorite?
– Katie
Like this:
Pumpkin Pie from a Real Pumpkin
Posted by castironidaho in Farm and Garden, Recipes on December 2, 2011
We were fairly successful at growing pumpkins this year. Sometimes they’re hit or miss, mainly because the squash bugs in Idaho really like them, and also because you have to plant them early enough to get a good harvest, which is sometimes tricky with our cold, slow springs. I do not grow jack-o-lantern pumpkins; just don’t see much sense in growing something you can’t eat. We even managed to grow a few of the gorgeous Cinderella pumpkins, pictured above. One refugee farmer had one vine, which yielded 3 or 4 of these amazing pumpkins. They are not only huge and gorgeous, but make the best pumpkin pulp I’ve ever cooked with: lovely orange, not too stringy, and very flavorful. I do recommend this variety for the home gardeners out there!
Most recipes for pumpkin pie, bread, etc., call for canned pumpkin. But I’ve got a mountain of fresh pumpkins here, so why eat something out of a can? When I want to cook with a real pumpkin, or a winter squash, I take the whole thing, seeds and all, and put it in the oven and bake at 350 degrees until soft. Supposedly baking it with the seeds inside enriches the taste of the pumpkin, and it eliminates the need to cut, seed, or peel a very hard pumpkin or squash, which can be dangerous! When it’s done, take it out and let it cool. Then it will be easy to cut and remove the seeds and peel.
At this point you’ll have a pile of pumpkin goop. It will be stringy and somewhat wetter than the pumpkin that comes out of a can. Next put it in a food processor to eliminate the stringiness and get a consistently textured pulp. You can probably use a blender if you don’t have a food processor. Now your pumpkin is ready to use in a recipe. Pumpkins vary a lot, but if yours is very wet, you might want to reduce some of the other liquid in the recipe. In this recipe, I reduce the milk from the original.
Pumpkin Pie
- 3 cups pumpkin puree
- 1 ½ cups brown sugar
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp each of ginger, cloves, and nutmeg
- 2 Tbsp molasses
- 4 eggs
- 2 ½ cups milk (use 3 cups if cooking with canned pumpkin)
- 2 unbaked pie crusts (Pie Crust Post, coming soon)
Puree your pumpkin in the food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients to the food processor. I add the milk last, and be careful, because at least with my food processor, it usually overflows a little bit. Pour the filling into the crusts and bake at 400 for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 for another 30 to 40 minutes. (If you forget to reduce the heat your crusts may burn. You can probably just bake it at 350 for a longer time, if you think you will forget.)
Gluten-free and/or healthier version: Skip the crust and cook just the filling in a pie plate or in smaller ramekins, for a gorgeous pumpkin custard. Marty just can’t get enough of this pie, so to make it a little healthier, I sometimes make it crustless, eliminating the fat and flour in the crust. As you may have noticed, other than the cup and a half of sugar, the rest of the filling ingredients are fairly healthy.
Another gluten-free option: I tried this recipe with a nut crust, for a party where the hostess was a gluten-free person. It’s getting pretty common these days, so it’s good to work out some options. I did a nut crust: 1 cup finely chopped walnuts, 2 Tbsp softened butter, 2 Tbsp sugar. The recipe said to bake the crust before filling because it would stay together better and be easier to remove from the pan. However, since the pumpkin filling takes so long to bake, the crust ended up a bit burnt. Fail. If you do want to try it, skip baking the crust first. Another website I checked suggests freezing the nuts first for a better consistency crust. Let me know if you try something that works!
– Katie
