From my kitchen

This is the world’s easiest frosting.   It’s super tasty, not too sweet, doesn’t use refined sugar, and goes well with carrot cake, gingerbread, banana cake, or any spice cake, including Apple Sauce Cranberry Cake.

Take the word of these two experts – it’s beyond delicious. 

Larksong’s Honey Cream Cheese Frosting

1 stick unsalted butter, softened

1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup honey (I used local, organic lavender honey)

1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

Directions: In your Kitchenaid stand mixer, with the whisk attachment, beat cream cheese and butter until whipped and fluffy.  Beat in honey and vanilla until fully combined and fluffy.  Makes enough to spread one two-layer 8-9 inch cake (middle and top only, not sides). 

 If the kitchen is warm, or you are taking the cake to a warm place, I recommend chilling the frosted cake in the fridge until ready to serve.

I’m a big fan of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks (her vindaloo paste is one of the best recipes I’ve ever tried - just heavenly).   We tend to cook a lot of Indian food around here.  On Thursday, I had planned to make a Madhur red lentil/spinach dish and a side dish of spicy tomatoes/eggplants and I assumed I’d make a pot of basmati rice to go with it.  Agh!  We were out of rice!  No problem, I’d whip up some naan instead.  I check my fridge and what do you know – no yogurt!!  Real naan has to be made with yogurt, so we scrapped that idea and decided to try something new – chapati bread.

The recipe couldn’t be any more simple – chapatis are an Indian unleavened bread, sort of like a tortilla.

You’ll need – 1 cup whole wheat flour, sifted, and 1 cup white flour, sifted (Sifting is important, otherwise you end up with an overly dense and tough chapati – alternately, you could use a specialty chapati flour from an Indian grocer). 

Combine these with 1 tsp salt and enough water (close to 6 oz) water to make a soft dough.  Turn out and knead for 6-8 minutes until dough is smooth.  Cover and let rest 30 min. 

 After 30 min, knead the dough a few more times.  Divide into 16 pieces and roll each piece into a ball.  Cover all pieces, removing only 1 at a time to cook.  Heat a heavy skillet on high heat until quite hot, and then reduce the heat to low. 

Roll out the chapati until very very thin.  Firecracker, who is 4, was actually really good at this – she rolled out all of the dough without any help – the pieces were small enough for her to handle, and the dough wasn’t delicate at all.  We had a little assembly line going – Little Hen handed the dough balls to Firecracker, who rolled them out and passed them to me, who cooked them.   

Cook on the skillet for 1 min on one side, and flip, cooking 30 seconds on the other.  Then set directly on the burner to brown (Yes, this works best on a gas range, but I haven’t got one, so I make do). The chapati will puff up and brown in spots.  Remove and cover with a towel until ready to serve.

The final result – dinner for 4 plus more than enough for Hubby to take for lunch the next day - vegan, not so local (except the onions, garlic, spinach, tomato), but I estimate it cost about $4 total.  Biggest bonus – the girls loved it and ate it all up with compliments to the chefs.

I roasted a Butternut Squash one morning this week in order to make flax-seed meal squash bread (tastes much better than it sounds!).  It was doubly nice, because it  warmed the chilly house and the smell of roasting squash was so yummy. 

The bread only takes 1 3/4 cup squash, so i had quite a bit leftover.  My mom had told me how much she and dad liked the butternut squash gnocchi recipe from a recent issue of our favorite magazine (below).  So, I thought I’d give it a try. 

 

The gnocchi were easy to make (and less fiddly than Martha’s recipe).  Firecracker and I whipped up a batch really quickly (while Tum-Tum slept and Little Hen did watercolor painting).  We made a little bit of a floury mess, but the results were delicious!  I made it a one-dish vegetarian meal by serving the gnocchi with sauteed shallots, walnuts, and peas – all tossed in melted butter and loads of fresh-grated parmesean.

Others who are enjoying the squashy goodness of fall – Soule Mama…you?  If you’re loving the abundance of squash this fall and have a good recipe, please share it!  I am always looking for recipes to use up the pile of winter squash under my kitchen table!

Edit – A couple of folks requested the recipe.  Here it is:

2 cups roasted butternut squash (or check out Sunset’s website for info on microwaving a squash)

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp each white pepper and nutmeg

3- 3 1/2 C unbleached flour

3 tbsp melted butter

1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan

freshly ground black pepper

Directions: Combine squash, salt, pepper, nutmeg.  Stir in flour, 1 cup at a time, until soft dough forms.  Turn out and knead 10-12 times, adding more flour if it’s too sticky. 

Divide dough in 4 pieces, and roll each out into 3/4 inch thick rope.  Cut into 1/2 inch slices, and set aside on a floured baking sheet.

Heat a pot of salted water to a boil.  Boil gnocchi until they float to the surface (about 4 minutes), and then cook another 30 seconds.  Remove from the water and toss with melted butter, cheese and black pepper [Here is where I added the sauteed shallots and walnuts. I blanched the peas in the cooking water, and added them as well – maybe two handfuls of peas and one handful of nuts.]

This recipe is copyright Sunset Magazine 2008.

Earlier this week, I got around to making my Caramel Spice Pear Butter with some of the pears from our Hood River trip.  I’ve been fiddling with the recipe for years, and think i finally got it perfect this year – the right balance of homemade caramel, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice.  One batch uses 22 pears, so our stash is significantly reduced.  The rest will be eaten fresh, go into vanilla pear pie or pear-gingerbread cake (This recipe is so scrumptious, and I make it for Thanksgiving especially, but can’t take the credit for it, it’s all Martha) .

 

I love the luminosity of pear butter.  It has a glow that you don’t get from apple butter.  Not to mention the wonderfully slightly grainy texture that I like so much.  As soon as we’d finished canning the jars and they cooled, we popped one open and had gobs on fresh banana bread.   It’s also delicious between gingersnaps, on pumpkin bread, or to glaze a roast chicken or pork roast. 

Hope you have a peaceful, blessed Sunday.

Two friends recently had babies (both big healthy boys 9lb 9oz, and 10 lb 14 oz!) and I signed up to bring them dinners.  Wednesday was a marathon of baking – black bean and carrot stew with brown rice for both, beer bread and ginger chew cookies with plum jam filling for one family, and olive oil bread and apple crumble pie for the other (one family had an egg allergy, so i had to make no-egg bread and dessert for them)

 I forgot to soak the beans overnight, so I did a quick soak at 8 am, and was cooking all day until i left to deliver dinners at 5:15pm!  Needless to say, the next night I made spaghetti, opened a jar of homemade sauce, and a jar of homemade applesauce, and that was dinner!

SouleMama,  Domesticali, Big and Little, Little Faces Looking Up, Rose Garden, Smitten Kitchen, PleasantViewSchoolhouse, and Red Dirt Mother have also been baking yummy things with apples recently. In case you’d like it, here’s my apple pie recipe (makes two 8-inch pies):

Angelas Apple Crumble Pie

2 crust pie dough, rolled out, and put in the pie tins, and returned to the fridge to chill. (I use 2 cups flour, 2/3 cups lard, 1tsp salt, and enough ice water to make a nice dough.  You could use butter or shortening to make it veggie or vegan, respectively, but lard makes the flakiest, best crust)

10 granny smith apples, peeled, cored, and sliced thinly

1/3 cup flour

1/2 cup sugar (if apples are less tart, you can reduce this amount)

for the crumble:

1 cup oats

1 cup brown sugar, packed

1 cup flour

2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg (I use Penzey’s East Indian, which is quite strong, so you may want more if you use another brand)

1/8 tsp cloves, ground

1 stick butter, cold, and cut into small cubes

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 F.  Toss the apples with the 1/3 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar.  Set aside.  In a medium size bowl, combine the oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, spices, and butter, using hands to cut the butter into the mixture until small pea sized pieces.

Divide the apples in half, putting half into each pie shell. Next, divide the crumble mixture in half and packed into the top of each pie. Bake in preheated oven until top is browned and apples are soft, about 40-50 minutes (you may need to cover the crumble with foil at the end to prevent over-browning.)

In the front yard of our old house we had a very productive Italian prune plum tree.  The girls would eat several every day, and I would make tarts and pies.  Now we have moved back to the city, and I miss my plum tree and its bounty.  So, when my husband’s coworker gave us a bowl full of Italian prune plums from her tree yesterday, I knew exactly what I’d do with them this morning – country plum galette.  We glazed it with some black plum jam that Firecracker and I made in August.  There were even enough left for the girls to make their own mini-pie.

Country Plum Galette

One batch one-crust pie dough, chilled (I use the old Betty Crocker – 1 cup unbleached flour, 1/3 cup lard, 1 tsp salt, 2-4 tbsp ice water.  Cut lard into flour and salt, add water until dough forms)

6 tbsp brown sugar, divided

1 tbsp cornstarch

1 tbsp flour

Pinch salt

10-12 Italian prune plums, sliced into 6ths

½ tsp vanilla extract

½ cup homemade seedless blackberry plum jam (or storebought plum jam)

1 egg white

Granulated sugar, for sprinkling on crust

Directions

1. preheat oven to 425 F.  Roll pie crust out until into a rectangle (I like a rustic look, so I don’t trim the edges).  Transfer to a parchment lined jelly roll pan (to catch drips – somehow it always drips!)
2. combine 3 tbsp brown sugar, flour and cornstarch.  Sprinkle over the center of the crust, leaving a 1-2 inch border.
3. toss plums with the remaining brown sugar and vanilla.  Lay in the center of the crust.  Fold over edges, brush with egg white and sprinkle with white sugar.
4. bake 15 min, then reduce heat to 400 until plums are soft and bubbly, about 20-30 minutes more.
5. remove from oven and brush with warmed plum jam.  Serve with vanilla ice cream.