Happy New Year.

2011 was quite a year. New job, new city, new house, new state, new foods. We're further from some friends and closer to others. And our New Year's tradition of cooking with Dr. Ricky was broken, however we still managed to have a good feed. This year, I cooked 10 dishes, focusing on dishes that were relatively simple to prepare while cooking solo.

I started the evening with a riff on a margarita, the mandarin margarita, rimmed with a mixture of white and black salts to add contrast.



We quickly moved into an old classic, feta with honey and peppercorns. The salty, sweet, peppery goodness, contrasts with the crispness of the cracker, and is a nice, light way to start a large meal.



Our good friends in Maine brought fresh scallops and lobsters with them. We think scallops require very little work to make them delicious, so I seared them in sesame oil and served them with fishy sauce.



We followed this with my favourite soup of all time. Lobster bisque (I'll be writing this one up as a separate post soon). I love this stuff, it makes the house smell heavenly.



Next up, quick roasted dates, stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in bacon.



In the interest of being healthy, we had a vegetable course. Brussel sprouts with garlic, roasted after being drizzled with lard, and seasoned with parmesan. Yummy.



Before we moved into the grilled courses, we cleansed our palates with a lime-basil sorbet.



I grilled a cheese sandwich using no-knead bread, caramelized onions and a mixture of fontina, Danish blue and monterey jack cheeses. Grilled over hot charcoal, it picked up a hint of smoke flavour. Yum.



Finally we grilled pork belly (holy flaring fat fire, batman!), and served it with a miso-garlic dipping sauce. I barely got a shot of this before it was devoured.



And for dessert, broiled blackberries with sabayon.



Not a bad 5 hour feed. At midnight, our local Boston friends served up grasshopper ice cream cocktails, and because I was off the clock I forgot to take a picture. A rich and decadent end to a lard-fueled evening.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had as much fun as I did for your own New Year's Eves, and that 2012 brings you good things to eat.

By Bbq Dude

Portzelky

Happy New Year. These days, we celebrate New Year's Eve with a multi-course extravaganza. But as a child, New Year's Day meant one thing in our house. The Mennonite dish portzelky (pronounced por-tzell-chè - roll the r).

This dish is all about deep-fried, doughy goodness.  Yes, nothing says "I'm going to lose weight this year" quite like deep-fried raisiny goodness. But really, I had you at deep-fried, didn't I?

This recipe is one quarter of the recipe my mother gave me. This recipe gave enough portzelky for my wife, my son, my mum and I, and gave me another 10 portzelky I could bring in to work the next day.  What can I say, Mennonites are used to cooking for 15 young farm workers who know how to eat.

1 ½ tsp yeast softened in 1 cup warm water and a little sugar
½ cups milk, scalded and cooled
¼ cup cream, scalded and cooled.
2 eggs, well-beaten
¹⁄₈ cup sugar
pinch of salt
2 tbsp butter
½ lb. raisins
2 ½ cup flour enough to make a stiff batter
enough vegetable oil to deep-fry

Wake up the yeast in the warm water/sugar mixture for five to ten minutes.  Mix in the other liquids, and the well-beaten eggs. Mix the rest of the ingredients, except the raisins, until you have a thick batter.

Beat with a paddle mixer for five to seven minutes, you want to build up the gluten. Then add the raisins.



Cover and let rise for two hours at room temperature.



Heat up a pot of oil to 350°F.



Scoop up a large soup spoon's worth of dough into the hot oil. You don't want too big a chunk of dough, or you won't get a properly crispy exterior to go with the cooked tasty interior.

Remember two things: 1) How much oil you heat up determines how many portzelky you can cook at a time. You don't want the dough to cool down the oil, so make sure the dough chunks are floating separately. 2) Remember, if you're acting scared that you're goinng to burn yourself, you're going to drop the dough from a high height and you're going to burn yourself. Be bold and lower the dough into the hot oil from near the oil.



Turn the dough in the oil as it browns.



You want a nice golden brown, crispy exterior.



Remove when golden brown. Serve with a bit of golden syrup, or a dusting of icing sugar.

These crispy, yeast-dough fritters are a tasty way to bring in the New Year. Happy New Year.

Chocolate-lover's angel food cake

Happy Holidays. We're well into holiday mode here in the Dude household. We just had our holiday party, complete with eggnog and dumplings.

A common dessert we serve this time of year, and a perennial favourite of Mrs. Dude is the chocolate-lover's angel food cake from Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible. So here it is. Mrs. Dude's favourite cake, a fluffy light mix leavened entirely by fluffy egg whites:

¼ cup + 1 tbsp unsweetened, Dutch-processed cocoa
¼ cup boiling water
2 tsp vanilla
1 ¾ cup sugar
1 cup sifted cake flour
¼ tsp salt
16 large egg whites
2 tsp cream of tartar

Pre-heat your oven to 350°F.

Mix the boiling water and cocoa. Whisk until smooth and paste-ish. Whisk in the vanilla and set aside.

Meanwhile, mix ¾ cup of sugar, flour and salt together.

Finally, in a large mixing bowl, mix the egg whites at low speed.



When they're unwhipped, they're all splashy and splorshy.



As they build body, turn up the speed on the mixer.



As they yield soft peaks, whisk in the cream of tartar. Soft peaks are ones that may drop a bit when you remove the beater. The cream of tartar drops the pH of the egg whites, stabilizing the peaks.

Gradually add the remaining sugar to the egg whites, while beating.



Continue beating until the egg whites have increased to a ridiculous volume, and created stiff peaks. Stiff peaks don't move even a tiny bit as you pull your beaters out of the eggs.

Remove about 1 cup of egg white, and mix well with the cocoa mixture.





Then, gently fold in the flour into the remaining egg whites, ¼ cup at a time. I like to use a flat whisk. The book recommends using a "balloon whisk", but even the mighty power of the Googles doesn't return a result for that. A flat whisk works well.



Now, mix the cocoa/egg white mixture into the batter, very gently.



Mrs. Dude likes a bit of swirl to the cake. The trick is to stop when you think it has the right amount of swirl.





Pour the batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan. Stab the batter with a knife a bunch of times to remove holes in the batter. Plus, you know, cake-stabbing.



Place pan in the oven. Bake for 40ish minutes, or until you stab it with a toothpick and the toothpick comes out clean (often as much as 50 minutes when I bake it).



Remove the ridiculously large cake from the oven, and invert in a way that it can be supported on the top of the tube, without crushing the cake.



I've constructed pretty ridiculous structures to get this to work. The one I show here is a ¼ cup measuring cup inverted on top of an upside-down KitchenAid bowl. I've seen wine bottles recommended, but they don't fit my tube pans. Good luck.

Cool the cake completely, then cut it out of the pan, running the knife around the outside of the pan, and the outside of the tube.



Invert onto a plate, gently shake, and... tada!



Serve with whipping cream and fruit.



Delicious.

By Bbq Dude

Catfish sandwiches

Mrs. Dude recently had another lovely birthday. She is more ravishing today than the day that I met her.

On her birthday, she can pick whatever she wants to eat. Some years it is complicated. Some years it is simple.

On this year, our year of moving, packing, unpacking, job-changing, settling in to a new city and all the excitement that has entailed, Mrs. Dude chose simple. She chose catfish sandwiches, bless her heart, a recipe that I first cooked for her in the late 1990s.

3/4 cup mayonnaise
3 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
1 ½ tablespoons drained bottled capers, chopped fine
1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, or to taste
a pinch of cayenne
1 tablespoon bottled cocktail sauce, or to taste

Mix the ingredients above to make the sauce.



For the sandwich:

all-purpose flour seasoned with salt and pepper for dredging the fish
2 large eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne
cornmeal for dredging the fish
four ½-pound catfish fillets, halved crosswise
vegetable oil for deep-frying the fish
8 soft sandwich rolls, split
soft-leafed lettuce for the sandwiches
2 tomatoes, sliced thin
16 slices of lean bacon, cooked

Slice the tomatoes.



Fry the bacon until crispy. Set aside the bacon on paper towels until ready to serve.

Make several trays. One with flour. One with the beaten eggs. One with the cornmeal.

Dredge the catfish through the flour, until thoroughly coated. Then dredge through the eggs. Again, thoroughly coat. Finally dredge through the cornmeal. You'll have a nice, layered catfish fillet at this point.



Put 2 inches of oil in a deep pot. Heat the oil in the pot to 350°F.



Set the fish gently into the hot oil. The trick with screaming hot oil is to not be afraid of it. If you drop the fish in from a height, you'll splash and burn yourself. Set the fish gently into the oil and you won't splash and won't burn. Really.



Cook a few minutes (1-3) per side, until nicely browned.



Remove from the oil after you've cooked on both sides. Set on a paper towel to drain.

Assemble the sandwich with a nice bread, sauce, lettuce, tomato, catfish and bacon. Mmmmmmmmm.... bacon...



Served with:



Happy birthday, beautiful.
By Bbq Dude