Sauerbraten, day one

I know, I know, I should be flogged for the lack of posts. I'm going to try to make up for it by taking three days to make sauerbraten.

I didn't even know I really needed to make sauerbraten. However, as I was sitting here Thursday night watching Good Eats, I realized that Alton Brown's sauerbraten was an absolutely essential project for the weekend.

Friday after work, I went in search of the one ingredient I anticipated having problems finding: juniper berries. My first instinct was to check at the natural market, and I was happy to see the berries hiding out in the bulk spice area, along with the mustard seeds and whole cloves that I needed.


I figured I'd see how much of the rest of the ingredient list I could cross off while there. Most of their products there are organic, but not too pricey. I managed to find everything I needed except the beef and gingersnaps, so there was a quick stop off at Giant to get those. I found a nice Angus 2.5 lb bottom round roast, which is a good size for a roast when it's just me. I'll have plenty of leftovers.

This morning, I gathered everything up and made the marinade:


After browning the beef, I poured the marinade over it and put it in the refrigerator. There it'll stay until Tuesday, when I stick it in a pot, put it in the oven, and forget all about it for 4 hours. Gotta love recipes like this: 20 minutes of work and let time do the rest. :D

Stay tuned...

Monkey Bread

This was the most "wizard" looking baked good I could think of to bring in for our mondo Hogwarts extravaganza day...



Monkey Bread from The Bread Bible, tweaked a little bit to cut down on the sticky/gooey factor. Sticky doesn't work well in a library. I didn't use all of the brown sugar/butter mixture, and I left out the raisins, pecans, and glaze entirely. Still turned out tasty and moist, but not so sweet that it was cloying. This is a nice thing to make for a large group of people; it's already portioned and everyone can just tear off however much they want.

No angel food pan here, so I made it in two standard loaf pans instead. It took about 45 minutes to bake.

I had been intending to dye the dough 4 or 5 different colors so that the individual dough balls would be different colors. Good in theory, but I ended up not having time to do it. I dyed some of the dough pink, and wound up with a nice pink swirled dough in some places.

Kettle corn

I had kettle corn for the first time earlier this year. Yes, you heard that right... Up until a few months ago, I didn't know what it was, and had no idea how it was different from regular buttered popcorn. I assure you, I'm appropriately ashamed. A coworker had brought in three different kinds of microwave popcorn for a program she was doing, and one of these was a microwave kettle corn made with Splenda. Even with the artificial sweetener, I really liked it. And when I finally had the real stuff a couple of months later... I was hooked.

The problem is, what do you do for it when you're not at a fair or similar event? I'm sure you can buy it in bags somewhere, but I have this thing about bagged popcorn ever since my dad chipped a tooth on bagged popcorn on two separate occasions. All righty, this means I have to make my own.

A quick aside here. If you're a snack junkie like me, go get yourself a supply of popcorn--not microwave popcorn, but the real deal. A 2 lb bag has between 30-40 servings, and will cost about the same as what you'd pay for a large bag of potato chips. It's a whole grain food, is naturally pretty healthy unless you're absolutely drowning it in butter and salt... and it explodes on purpose, so there's a nice "violent fun" factor.

I looked on the internet for kettle corn recipes, and they all said the same thing. "Add the sugar to the pan before the popcorn starts popping, and just shake and cross your fingers." Riiiight...I tried this approach, and ended up with burnt, scorched caramel corn. Just barely edible, and definitely not what I was thinking of as kettle corn.

So, here's my approach. It may be a bit inauthentic, but it turns out a VERY tasty end result without any worries about setting off a smoke detector.



2 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
1/4 cup of unpopped popcorn
1-3 tablespoons sugar
Salt to taste

Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet (one that has a lid) over medium high heat. Add three kernels of popcorn, cover, and wait for all three to pop--this will let you know when your pan is hot enough. Once those three kernels have popped, add the rest of the popcorn and cover the pan. Once you start to hear popping, begin shaking the pan every 10-20 seconds. When the popping slows down, peek in the pan to see how much is still unpopped. If there are still a large number of unpopped kernels, continue cooking.

Once you have almost no unpopped kernels left, turn off the heat, uncover, and immediately sprinkle sugar over the top. If you want just a bit of sweetness, go for 1 tablespoon of sugar. If you want it to be caramel-corn-sweet, use three. The residual heat in the pan and in the popcorn will be enough to just barely melt the sugar, so it will adhere to the popcorn without being sticky. Stir the popcorn to evenly distribute the sugar, add salt, and enjoy.

Makes 2 cups of popped popcorn, enough for one serving. For more than one serving, you won't need to proportionally increase the oil. Another tablespoon per 1/4 cup of popcorn would be more than enough.

Chicken with Black Pepper-Maple Sauce

If you're like me, you probably wish you could put maple syrup on everything. However, you probably also recognize that you'd get some weird looks if you hauled out the syrup bottle to use on grilled chicken...

Epicurious to the rescue! I took a stab at the Chicken with Black Pepper-Maple Sauce tonight, and it's absolutely a winner. The sauce is sweet from the syrup, spicy from the cracked pepper, tart from the vinegar--an excellent "grown-up" way to put syrup on one's dinner. :)



I did a few things differently than the recipe says. First off, I didn't feel like spatchcocking a chicken, so I grilled some boneless skinless breasts instead. Since I grilled these, I didn't have a pan that needed to be deglazed, so I just added the vinegar directly to the syrup mixture and let it reduce for another 10 minutes. It was a thin sauce; I probably could have reduced it further, but with all the sugar from the syrup, I didn't want to risk scorching it.

Braised chicken with balsamic vinegar

I had to wait a little whle until the painful stupidity of what I did with this had faded a little bit.

I decided to make a braised chicken-and-potatoes dish. It was done entirely on the stovetop, which is nice during the summer when one doesn't want to turn on her oven more than is absolutely necessary.

It serves 4, and there's just one of me. I loaded up all of my leftovers to take with me to work for lunch for the week... and left the container sitting next to my front door. After 9 hours of it sitting out at room temperature, I wasn't taking any chances, so I only had one meal from this. Luckily, it was a very tasty meal.



3 bacon slices, cut crosswise into 1/4" strips
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 medium onion, thinly sliced (Vidalia, if you can find one)
1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled, or 12-15 whole peeled garlic cloves
1 can (14.5 oz) low sodium chicken stock
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 lb waxy potatoes, halved lengthwise and cut into 1/2" wide half-moons (peeling not necessary)

Cook bacon in a deep 12-inch skillet over moderately low heat, stirring, until crisp, about 8 minutes. Transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain, reserving the bacon fat in skillet.

Season chicken with salt and pepper. Brown the chicken (in 2 batches if necessary) in bacon fat over moderately high heat, turning once, about 10 minutes. Transfer the browned chicken to a plate, cover loosely with aluminum foil, and pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat from skillet.

Add the potatoes to the skillet and cook over medium heat until starting to brown, 8-10 minutes. Add the sliced onion. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are soft and slightly translucent, about 10 minutes.

Add the garlic cloves and chicken broth to the skillet, and bring to a boil for 1 minute.

Return chicken to skillet, nestling the chicken down into the sauce. Gently simmer, covered, until chicken is cooked through and potatoes are tender, about 30 minutes.

Transfer the chicken to a serving dish. Add the balsamic vinegar to the sauce and boil, uncovered, mashing the garlic cloves with the back of a spoon, until the sauce is slightly thickened. Serve chicken and potatoes together, sprinkled with crumbled bacon.