Monthly Archives: October 2018

dressings, Food

Home made dressing: blue cheese

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When you live out here in Buffalo, you learn to love blue cheese dressing: on carrot and celery sticks, on wings, on cold pizza. And what is sent with your pizza and wings is normally decent quality stuff. The stuff in the bottle in the store, not so much. Instead of buying the decent quality dressing some supermarkets keep in their fridge section, and hope you use it before it goes bad, it’s simpler to purchase a pack of crumbles which stays good for months, and make it when you need it.

Which for us is now, for lunch. Last night’s wings got hotter, like they do, and our son is going to learn to make the dressing. So I may as well post it.

Except for the cheese, I bet you have everything in your pantry right now. Put 1 cup mayo in a 2 cup measuring cup (or any mixing bowl, this just saves me washing).

Add 3 tablespoons of buttermilk (regular milk is fine, it’s there to keep it pouring well), 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of minced onion, 2tsp sugar, 1/4 teaspoon each salt, dry mustard and Worcestershire and 4 ounces blue cheese crumbles. I am adding 5 because that’s what Aldi’s sells. Well, minus the bits I ate. With a pear.

Obviously, the benefit of taking five minutes to make your own dressing is that you get to alter the recipe to your taste. Soon, you’ll have a ‘house blue cheese’ that is perfect for you.

That’s it. And that is one of the most complicated ones I make.

I’ll be making wings and fingers soon to finish it up. If the teenager doesn’t eat it all before then.

Food

Shrimp de Jonghe

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I don’t know about you, but shrimp is a favorite protein here, at least for our son (it doesn’t sit well with me). On my ‘to make’ pile is a generic recipe for an old favorite we’ve never tried, which is basically shrimp in a butter bread crumbs topping. So, here I go.

Instead of getting raw shrimp and cooking it, I bought pre cooked frozen shrimp. I was in a rush, so I didn’t thaw them or remove the tails- I will next time to both reduce the water and make it easier to eat.

But here is 12 ounces of shrimp divided in six cute little oven ramekins we bought when we got married, but just started using.

Now to the topping, a buttery boozy stuffing. Half a cup of melted butter was the perfect amount. I added three sliced garlic cloves and two sliced scallions, which was more than the recipes called for and I will be doubling those and adding some garlic powder as well. I used all the dry Sherry in the house, 1/4 cup. Then two tablespoons parsley and 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper. And 1 and 1/2 cups plain breadcrumbs.

And topped with about 2 tablespoons of the basically boozy stuffing to be baked until warmed through.

Baking.

Served, with buttered pasta and buttered spinach. A lot of butter in this meal. 🙂 I can’t remember how long they baked for, but it wasn’t more than 20 minutes.

They were a hit. I certainly think they need a little more flavor, but they did feel very festive and elegant. I would be happy to throw these together for a dinner party.

And I’d probably throw just a bit of Worchestershire sauce in the butter. Just a bit. But this was a keeper.

Baking, Uncategorized

Buttermilk chocolate pound cake.

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So, I hurt myself last month and had to take a break from cooking. But I am slowly getting back to myself, and today I am baking with some help to use up the buttermilk that was being stockpiled while I couldn’t cook. We normally go through a lot of buttermilk.

So, here we go with a ‘triple chocolate buttermilk pound cake’. I grabbed it off a web site just to use buttermilk. This is the buttermilk, vanilla and [amazon_textlink asin=’B00DTR9R9Q’ text=’espresso powder’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’002′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d0ba76d2-ca52-11e8-bedb-595448e40aa8′] ( not instant, but plain old normal. It’s powdered- it dissolves.).

This is the butter, eggs and sugar.

And the flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder, which they say to wisk, not sift, which is easier. And seemed to work ok. Since we no longer need to sift  to remove bugs, but to put air into it, this actually worked well.

Then there were chocolate chips— that was 2 types of chocolate.

And now, before a stint in the oven…

Almost done! Smells so good!

Done! That’s an actually bit of broom corn from a broom class we took. It’s what people used to use to check cakes. You can see it came out clean. [amazon_link asins=’B0743B496X’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’002′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’b548546b-ca54-11e8-92f1-531b2aeea62b’]

And then there were two glazes, a buttermilk glaze and a chocolate glaze. Neither was remarkable, but both were serviceable. But I didn’t get a photo of it before being cut because company came and we served it right away. It was a decent cake, and really moist. Company liked it, but It’s not one of the best chocolate cakes I have made for the amount of work that went into it.  So, not a keeper. Two people had 3 pieces each though, so it was certainly not a bad cake. 🙂


I am going to say something about the pan. A lot of comments on the recipe was about how hard it was to get out of the pan. In 1991, I needed to stock a new apartment, and I went to the now defunct McCrory’s that was across from the University I went to. I purchased a few items, including a springform bundt/flat pan. On the way home, I dropped that bag and dented the round part. I pounded it out and it worked fine. I got it out specifically to use it fro this, but the cake plopped right out easily.
I love this pan and would recommend it to anyone. I have more expensive and newer pans, but I will never stop loving this first one. This is basically it, only way higher quality.
[amazon_link asins=’B00004RFPR’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’002′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’6c88ac5f-ca54-11e8-a4d4-d3c4cde2a13a’]