The rumors of our disappearance are greatly exaggerated. We just had the start of term to deal with, so we have not been posting much that was not school related. Both the wife and I do have some posts. We did a few fun cooking things for the New Year, though not much since. The one I want to tell you today is the infamous orange marmalade cake.

Now, before we get to the cake proper I have two, connected, stories to tell. The first I got second hand from Coowee, Valah’s mother. This is the story of the New Year’s Eve cake. You see, ever since I started dating Valah and attending her family functions one of their New Year’s traditions is that they bake a cake, usually a box mix in a sheet pan, and everyone writes their name in frosting on the cake. The size of your name is the size piece you get cut after midnight. So I asked Coowee this year how that got started. So, when Valah was in middle school her cousin Karisa and Karisa’s best friend Pickles (of course it is a nick name!) decided one New Year’s that they wanted to bake a cake. As I understand it, they did not know much about that process, but gave it a go. I of course was not there, but you can imagine a pair of middle school aged girls attempting to make a cake. From that spur of the moment impulse the New Year’s Eve cake was born. Along with this, in Valah’s family, the assembled play board games, or put together puzzles and then make a lot of noise at midnight.

My family never really had a specific tradition. Some years we went to friends’ houses and enjoyed the company of others, some we stayed home. During my time with the TV station I spend most of my New Year’s Eves working, including New Year’s 2000. That was actually quite a fun adventure, even if I did literally clock 24.5 hours that day. After attending Valah’s family get-togethers I can understand why she always wants to be there.

The second story took place last year, and I was involved. So, last year we traveled to Oregon to be with families over the holidays. My family is in Southern Oregon, Valah’s in Portland. Often one family gets us for Christmas eve/day and the other for New Year’s eve/day. Last year we were with Valah’s family for New Year’s. We were in fact staying with her aunt Sandy, who usually hosts New Year’s. Earlier in the day we visited Powel’s City of Books, a pilgrimage we make every time we go to Portland. Valah found a cookbook, the Mitford Cookbook to be exact. Mitford is the name of a fictional town that is the focus of a book series that she, her mother, and Sandy have read. They detail the life of the local priest and his interactions with his parishioners. I have been told the books would not really appeal to me.

Valah decided to get the book for Sandy, as she is a big Mitford fan. The first thing Sandy did was to look and see s if there was a recipe for Esther’s famous orange marmalade cake. This cake is famous in the books. It seems almost its own character. The cookbook has an excerpt from one of the novels as the local ladies are desperately trying to get the recipe from Esther for a local bake sale as she fell and broke her jaw, so cannot tell them how to make the cake. The ladies worry without her cake, they will not be able to sell anything. All in all, it is pretty funny.

Somehow, and I am not sure how this all came about, but I agreed to make this cake for the New Year’s cake. We needed comes ingredients which Valah and I nipped out and got, when we returned we got to work on this cake. Karisa was there with her three kids. Her two oldest, who were 4 and 3 I believe, helped out some. Both were quite mesmerized watching me add ingredients to the bowl on the stand mixer. They also both did a great job rolling the oranges so I could juice them. The cake turned out to be a success, so this year there could be no other cake for us to make.

Sandy had made me a copy of the recipe, but I am not sure where I put it, so I looked around online and found it here. The instructions are pretty strait forward, and it is not that hard of a cake to make. It does call for cake flour, which is a softer flour that has been ground finer then your average AP flour. Once the batter was assembled and in the pans we had some time kill. I think we were watching some football, but I do not quite remember. Valah did make dinner that night, but that is another blog post.

Gotta have the cake flour

Assembled batter ingredients

ready for the oven

When we were getting the oranges for the recipe I noticed they had blood oranges, which are my second favorite orange. My favorite is a green orange I had while I was in Costa Rica. I have never seen anything like that here unfortunately. Both the green one, sweet orange flavor. Blood oranges get their name from their blood red pulp and are pretty much the standard orange in Italy. So the juice it makes up is of course red. This meant that it left a pink color on the cake after the soaking step.

Orange on the outside

Red on the inside!

You can see a bit of the pink hue after the soak

Now, frosting cakes is something I am not too good at. Nor is it a skill I am working to develop much, as I really do not make cakes all that much. Normally Valah is the baker and I am the cook. Still, somehow this cake is my cake to make. Thankfully the sour cream frosting that this cake calls for hid my assembly crimes well. I had purchased a bit of green gel frosting for writing names. We did Kelly’s name as he was already in bed. That is what comes from working a morning shift on New Year’s day. The cake was good; I quite liked it with the blood orange over the normal orange. I do plan on making this cake sometime with lemons and lemon curd over oranges, just to see. I might even try limes once, if the lemons work. That was not all the New Year’s cooking we did. As I mentioned, Valah cooked dinner, and I did something special for the first breakfast of 2017. Stay tuned!

One layer

Two layers!

Frosted!

Tagged

Sorry this is a little late. I spend Christmas relaxing after making dinner, and Boxing Day doing pretty much the same thing. I love making this kind of dinner, but it can be quite taxing. I think my favorite part about Boxing Day is that, aside from breakfast, I did no cooking. We just reheated leftovers! Breakfast on Hogswatch was the lovely cranberry coffeecake Valah made the night before. As we were enjoying that we opened gifts and chatted with family over the phones. Valah baked up a nice loaf of Dutch-oven bread she had set out the night before. This was specifically for the potted shrimp. The shrimp were interesting, rich, but tasty. I did serve them wrong, I should have let them come to room temperature before we ate them. Instead we had them right out of the fridge. We did catch on and nuke them for a bit to soften the butter. After that was done, it was time for me to occupy the kitchen.

I started with the goose, as it would take the longest (about 20 min per kg, which worked out to be 1 hour 45 min for our bird). I used this recipe here. It seemed pretty simple, and did not require a lot of fiddling, which some of the goose recipes I looked at did. My zester makes long curls of zest, which does not work all that well for a spice rub, so I had to chop them up fine. I added a bit more salt than the recipe called for to help season the meat a bit better. I then let the spice rub sit as I dealt with the goose. Along with the usual giblets—heart, liver, gizzard, neck—there was a large amount of fat just inside the cavity that I cut off. This was a delightful surprise, but more on that later. The next step was scoring the skin. The trick is to cut the skin, but not any deeper so you can release the fat. I used our bird-bill knife for this as it has a sharp point (I plan on blogging about my knives a bit later).

Zesty!

Spices all mixed

giblets

scored skin

A short rant before continuing. What the hell is with non-stick baking pans? We have three sheet trays and a roasting pan that are “non-stick.” Seems to me all that means is they get that nasty yellow film on it after you bake something with any oil, meaning a roasting pan never looks clean. After the first use their non-stick factor is effectively over. I had to take half an hour to try and clean out some crap on our big roasting pan. The only non-stick I have ever used that to me was worth the money are our ceramic coated egg pans. These also lose their non-stick over time. Our smaller steel roasting pan looks brand new, while our fancy Kitchen-aid one looks a decade old or more. Give me bare steel for things I will be baking and roasting on, or better yet cast iron thank you. Ok, rant over.

After cleaning out the pan, and the bird, I rubbed the zest/spice mix all over, and into the cavity. Then stuffed the bird as instructed. With a goose you leave the legs and wings free, no trussing. Then it was into the oven to roast. While that was happening, I rendered out the fat from the cavity. Nearly every recipe, and my good friend Mark, were adamant that you have to save goose fat to cook with.  This is pretty much the same for roasting a duck. Rendering fresh fat requires boiling the fat in water. The water pulls the fat out, but keeps it from burning. Once the fat is pulled out you let the water boil off. I then pulled out the cracklings left over (the dogs enjoyed those) and strained it through a coffee filter. I had over half a pint of fat from that rendering. I do not know exactly how much as some of it went into the potatoes before I poured it into a mason jar. Rendering the fat was time consuming, and a bit boring by itself, so while the fat rendered I started cutting veg.

goose ready to cook

fat to render

fat rendering

fat rendered

fat sieved

cut veggies

All three vegetable recipes are my own creation based on many previous dishes. Only the potatoes went into the oven, the rest were on the cook top. I will describe each a bit more below. After getting the veg cut, I then made the pigs in a blanket following this recipe, save I only made 12, not 24. After all this I had some time to kill, as the bird was not yet cooked, and I did not want to have everything else cooked and getting mushy while waiting, so I headed outside for a little. We had snow all day, and well into the night. Come Boxing Day morning we had 18” to 2 feet in places where the snow drifted. We get snow every year here in South Eastern Idaho, but as long as Valah and I have been living here we have never that this much. It made for a really white Christmas.

prepping for pigs in a blanket

looking out our front door

the fairy garden

With about half an hour left on the goose I took a peek to see the skin nice and brown (from the honey I drizzled over it right before it went into the over). Just to see I took the temperature of the breast and thigh, and low and behold the bird was done. Any longer and we would have an overcooked goose. Goose you should eat medium rare, they say. One of the best meals I have ever eaten was a rare duck breast in Lucca Italy, so I can attest, at least on duck, it is worth it, and so I assumed it would be good on goose as well. I tented the goose and started the other four dishes.

I cooked my goose!

The pigs in a blanket just needed to go in to bake. I arranged them in my favorite cast iron pan (as it was the best size). Next to it went the potatoes. Those were some small fingerling style with white, red, and two purple potatoes. I cut them all in half. To them, in another cast iron, I added 2 cloves minced garlic, about a tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary, salt, pepper and some of the goose fat, enough to coat all the potatoes after stirring them. Those two dishes needed about the same amount of time, half an hour, so in they went.

potatoes and pigs in a blanket ready to bake

So, I did not grow up eating Brussel sprouts. Dad did not like them, or so I was told. I think I first had them at some buffet, boiled to oblivion. I was not a fan. For a while Valah and I belonged to a program here called Bountiful baskets. For about $15 we could pick up a basket of fresh veg and fruits. The catch was you never knew what you would get. So while we were part of this we got to experiment with new vegetables, including collard greens, celery root, and, at least for me, sprouts. Researching how to cook them, other then boiling, I can across a method using a hot cast iron. We tried it and loved it, so that is my usually method, with some variation on additions. For this one I started with chopped thick cut pepper bacon. I rendered the fat out of those, then pulled the bacon out, leaving the fat. I had cut the sprouts in half, so I laid them all in the hot pan flat side down. The key here is to get nice browning on the sprouts. After they brown that way, the original recipe had you flip each one, but I find it easier, and just as good, to just stir them and keep them moving. At this point I added a clove of chopped garlic and kept on browning. Once they looked done, soft but not mushy, I seasoned with salt and pepper, added the bacon back in and took it off the heat.

Mmmm, bacon

sprouts finished

For the carrot and parsnip dish, I sliced both vegies thin and tossed them into a cast iron with some hot avocado oil (this is the only dish that did not have some kind of animal fat in it). I let them soften, as well as get a bit of browning. While that was going on I warmed up the bread sauce. I also poured all the goose fat from the roasting pan into a large sieve lied with paper towels to recover as much of that fat as I could. After the carrots and parsnips were ready, meaning soft but not mushy, I added some salt and pepper and about half a jar of my pepper jelly. Last year’s batch remained a bit syrupy, so it makes a great glaze on things. Usually I use it on chicken or pork, but though it would work well with the sweet carrots and parsnips.

carrots and parsnips

plated and looking good

As I was finishing up the carrots and parsnips the timer went off for the bird. I asked Valah to carve it for me. She has had a lot more experience dealing with whole birds as she took a cooking class in college, and worked as a sue chef for a few summers at Glacier National Park. I can carve a bird, bit it looks a bit rough. Then we plated things up, and had dinner. I enjoyed mine with a nice black lager.

Valah carving the goose

yum!

roasted poatoes

piggies still sizzling

Me and my meal ready to eat

The goose was good, a bit chewy, but flavorful; it was especially good with the bread sauce. The potatoes were luxurious with all that goose fat, and the vegies were excellent. I think, though, my favorite were the pigs in a blanket made with our homemade chipolata sausages. They were just divine, so full of flavor. Coowee liked them with the bread sauce.

Yum yum!

Just before we plated up I put the Christmas pud back into the pot to boil, this time only an hour just to heat the pudding. It ended up boiling for 2 hours as we were not hungry an hour after dinner. Flaming the brandy for the pudding was interesting. The instructions I had read said to light the brandy in a ladle, which did not work. So, we poured the brandy over the pud and lit that, as it vaporized the alcohol. It burned a nice blue color. We then had wedges covered in the hard sauce, and I had some brandy as well. It was good, like a fruitcake, but not as sweet. It was also boozy with the brandy soaked fruit, the brandy we poured over, and the bourbon in the hard sauce. All in all it was a successful meal. We will probably not do a goose again for a long time. At $6 a pound our 11 pound bird ran us $65. We can get three good sized ducks for that. If we end up somewhere where we have more access we might to the goose again, but I think for the foreseeable future duck will be our Hogswatch bird of choice. As for the rest, I think I want to do a Christmas pud next year, and make it on stirring-up-day to let it have a month to set. The sausages will be a staple, I have a feeling. I am considering making up a batch before New Year’s. Finally, we ended up with nearly 2.5 pints of goose fat, which I am sure you will see again soon on this blog. I do have a goose carcass and giblets to use sometime soon after all.

pudding out of the mold

fire!

Fire in the dark!

dessert!

rendered goose fat (the one on the right is in a purple tinted jar).

The point today was to prep a few things to limit, to some degree, the amount of work on Hogswatch proper. Today I made three items, hard sauce, bread sauce, and potted shrimp. Each dish was pretty simple, only had a few steps, when compared to things like the Hogswatch pie or of the sausages.

First I made the easiest, hard sauce. For those who are not “in the know,” hard sauce is basically butter with sugar and booze. I used good Irish butter for this, as it would make for a better flavor. I had intended to use the remaining brandy that I decanted off of the dried fruit, but looking at the recipe and the amount of sugar, I opted to use bourbon instead, as it would not be as sweet. After blending up the batch and tasting, I thought it could use a bit more bourbon, so mine has probably 3 tablespoons. It is a potent sauce, but it is a sauce to be used on a pudding.

Butter and powdered sugar waiting for the booze

The last of my bourbon

Hard sauce!

The next dish was the bread sauce. I used more of the Irish butter, as well as all the herbs and spices that the recipe called for. I had to stand close as I did not want to milk to scald, but I started working on the shrimp as I simmered the milk. The sauce made up well, though I find it a bit under spiced. I did season it with salt and pepper, but the flavor of the herbs and spices is weak. Perhaps after 24 hours chilled the flavor will mature. We shall see.

Herbs ready for the simmer

herbs simmering

bread sauce

The potted shrimp is an interesting recipe. It calls for cooked shrimp that you cover with a spiced butter. Seems originally the butter acted to preserve the food underneath. Now, it is simply a technique to create an interesting dish. Well, as with a lot of British ingredients, we cannot get brown shrimp here, so I got some of our usual shrimp and sauteed them up in some butter and garlic for flavor. Like simmering the milk for the bread sauce, there was a long wait to melt the butter down and let the water boil out. Then came straining the butter to make clarified butter. I have not seen anchovy paste around the stores here, but I did have some anchovies left over from a salad some time ago. I minced one up to substitute for the paste. The spiced butter had a nice flavor. Valah is making a rustic bread for the toast that this dish needs. She is also making a cranberry cake for breakfast tomorrow, though I am not sure if that is before or after stockings.

cooked shrimp

The ingredients for the spiced butter

straining the milk solids out of the butter

clarified butter

potted shrimp

Hogswatch Dinner Part 3 Addendum: Hogswatch eve

For dinner tonight we had the Hogswatch pie. It was well chilled when I pulled it out of the “walk in.” So I headed the oven on warm and tossed it in to bring it up a bit while I made a quick napa cabbage salad to go with it. This is not traditional, but we all felt like we wanted some fresh veg as we have not had it in a while, and the napa cabbage was all we had. IT sliced well, as you can see below. We all had small slices, as some of the websites mentioned it was heavy, and rich. In fact, while it is a meaty dish, we all really liked it and had a second slice. I sipped sherry while eating the pie and watching The Hogfather. We have decided this should be an annual tradition.

un-molded pie

If you have read The Hogfather, or any of Pratchett’s Diskworld books that deal with Hogswatch you know that a pork pie with a glass of sherry is what children leave out for the Hogfather on Hogswatch even. So, in addition to the goose dinner on Hogswatch, we need a pork pie on Hogswatch eve. I was planning on making that tomorrow, and today I was planning on a few other parts of the Hogswatch meal that can be made ahead, then I read the recipe, the most authentic possible as it was written by Nanny Ogg herself.

Well, turns out the pie needs to cool overnight, so we had to make it today. This is the first time I have done a raised pie using a hot water crust.  This is also the first time I have made a meat pie designed to be eaten cold. Overall this was not to hard of a pie to make, but I ran into some issues. The first was that we just do not have a raised pie mold. I did some calculations and decided out 9 inch spring-form pan would do pretty well. So we were off to the races.

I ground the pork just like last night, and chopped the ham. Add in the onion and some spices, and you have half the filling. As the other half was just cocktail sausages, I moved to the water crust next. The crust came together pretty well. It is far more forgiving then the usual sort crust we use here in America. I have never been good with traditional pie crust, but this one worked out well. I rolled it out and fitted it into the pan. The recipe has you layer the sausages between the pork mix. We they ran into the second problem, the pan was just a bit big, so the filling did not come up to the top. So we cut a top and folded over the sides a bit like a galette.I decorated it with a few stars, sausages and a pig’s nose (I am not exactly a dough artist).

Then it was into the oven for an hour and a half. We had a lot of the crust left over, so I did a hand raised pear pie. I literally just tossed this thing together. I tossed in about 3/4 of a pear, about 3 table spoons of sugar which I dissolved into a shot of apple brandy with a bit of chopped crystallized ginger. I tossed that in with the pork pie. The last part of the pork pie called for a port/broth mix with gelatin. Remember where I mentioned reading the recipe above? Well somehow I missed that that was the last step and had made the broth mixture before putting the pie in, so we kept that on the stove to keep it from gelling. I poured it in the pie. It is now chilling in our walk-in (our unheated garage).

The pear pie did leak a bit, but looked nice. I think I could use this water crust to make individual meat pies for a dinner or something in the future. We cut the little pear pie up and had it for dessert, I had it with a glass of sherry. It was quite good for a recipe I tossed together in half an hour.

I mentioned in the first installment of this series that I had a way to deal with the fact we cannot get chipolata sausages here in Pocatello, and that it would be arriving Wednesday, well it did. What arrived, along with knitting needles for Coowee were sausage casings, but hog and sheep. The two together were only 3 dollars more than the sheep, so I figured why not. By now the truth should be clear, we plan on making our own chipolata sausage for the pigs in a blanket. As I have done only a little sausage making, I chose to use a recipe, specifically this one here.

First thing we had to do is soak the casings. They come packed in salt to keep them fresh. I pulled out three 6 foot long sections. The recipe called for 12, but who knows. I left them to soak and started assembling the ingredients, or the best I could. We could not find pork shoulder (or at least not labeled as such) so we used some pork loin. I was just about 5 grams short on the pork, so I added 5 grams of the pork belly to compensate. Then came the spices. Normally I like recipes that deal in weight over volume, but with the spices it was a bit difficult, in part due to the fact our scale only does grams, not tenths of. I had to approximate to get the 1.5 grams of sage and thyme. Well I would have, save we had no thyme. The wife had used the last of it a few weeks ago, and I forgot. I ended up using an herb mix we have that had thyme, but also sage, rosemary, marjoram, mustard seed, and savory. The one spice we did have, that is not common is mace. Well we have blade mace, not ground mace. Mace comes from the lacy membrane that surrounds a nutmeg seed. I have it to make garam masala for chai tea. As I needed it ground I used my trusty mortar and pestle to achieve this.  I did not take pictures of the onion or bread crumbs as I figured you all know what those look like.

A few years back Valah got me both the food grinder and the sausage stuffer attachments for our Kitchen aid stand mixer (I also have three pasta rollers for it). I do not use it often, as I do not often need to grind meat or veggies, but it does come in handy for some things, like making chipolata sausages. After grinding I mixed everything together to make a not exactly attractive looking paste.

Then came the part I was afraid of, the stuffing. I am not a big fan of fiddly things, even if I do make fiddly recipes (the first time I made ravioli using my new pasta rollers I chose a kind that has a raw egg yolk in the center. It was fiddly, but good). I am a big guy and not all that good with finesse, and several sites I looked at made it clear that sheep casings were fiddly and delicate compared to the hog. I did have some issues just trying to get them open to run water through. In the end, though, getting the casings on the tube and stuffing them worked rather well with no issues in fact. Valah helped, just making sure the sausage coiled as I pushed the meat mix into the machine. I had one issue with the twisting, that area was a bit over full and burst through the casing. I cut those off and started again with great success. I had one other with a hole that, once they were all twisted, I cut out of the chain. This left me with three links that were not quite perfect. So, that was a good time to fry them up and try them.

We all agree these are some killer sausages. I am glad the recipe makes a large amount, we will be having these for breakfast tomorrow. If other homemade sausage recipes are as good as this, we have debated making a batch of sausage once a month or so. We are not certain on that, but sometime in the new year I plan on making some bangers, getting some back bacon and ordering proper English baked beans and some HP sauce to do a full English one morning,