Blueberry Bread

This is my favorite kind of stupid-easy recipe. Not only is it truly stupid-easy, but it’s handed-down stupid-easy. It’s stupid-easy with history, People, and that’s the best kind!

I was given this recipe by my adopted grandmother. This woman is truly the embodiment of grandmotherly loveliness, and she’s a practiced hand in the kitchen. She makes this recipe a lot - as do I - because it’s both easy and versatile. One doesn’t need blueberries - one can use pretty much ANY yummy filler - or none at all; one can make a cake or a loaf or cupcakes; one can eat this as dessert or a snack or breakfast. Truly, it’s culinary acrobatics at its finest, and here’s how you do it:

Set your oven to 350° and either grease and flour your pans or line cupcake tins with papers and set aside. Cream together a stick of butter with one egg and a cup of sugar and set aside. Sift together 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt, then pour, into a separate container (I use my Pyrex measuring cup), one cup of milk with a good blop of vanilla extract (the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon, but I’m SURE I use more than that; I never measure it and I have a particular affinity for vanilla). Bring the butter mixture back and add the flour and milk alternately until all the ingredients are combined. Fold in about 2 and 1/2 cups of blueberries (or whatever mix-in you’re adding) and turn the batter into whatever cooking vessel you’ve prepared. Sprinkle the top with sugar, if you’re into that sort of thing - and bake in the center of the oven for about 30 minutes for the loaf pan; your baking time will be decidedly less - only about 11 minutes or so - if you’re baking in a cake pan or cupcakes, so keep an eye on them. They are done with the toothpick test.

I make this most often with blueberries, but I’ve also had fantastical luck with cinnamon and brown sugar swirled through, chunks of peaches, strawberries, and even rhubarb and raspberries. It is a consistent winner, and I hope you enjoy it half as much as we do.

Summer Chicken

You want stupid-easy? Have I got a recipe for you!

This is our favorite way to make chicken on the grill when it’s too hot to even think about cooking indoors. Here’s what you do:

Get yourself a big bowl or a glass baking dish and slap in as much chicken as you want (we go boneless-skinless breasts, but you can certainly go with any variety of chicken pieces you want; I’m not bossy). Over this, pour enough lemon juice to get a good soak (I use the bottled stuff, but if you’re fussy enough to squeeze it fresh, be my guest), drizzle in a tiny bit of olive oil (truth be told, I often skip the oil; I don’t find it makes that much of a flavor or cooking difference), a big helping of minced garlic (again, mine comes from a bottle because, while I almost always HAVE fresh garlic around, my family isn’t as wild about it as I am. The jar of minced garlic I get at the market is just zippy enough for flavor, but tame enough to not raise noisy objections from my dinner companions), and a sprinkling of oregano. Cover the dish and let this soak anywhere from a half hour to a full day (don’t be alarmed if you leave the chicken to soak overnight and it looks weird when you come back to it. The acid in the lemon juice will actually start to “cook” the meat - despite how it looks, it’ll be super-yummy, believe me).

Heat up your grill - gas or charcoal, makes no difference - and cook the chicken until the internal temperature registers at least 160. You can eat this any way you want, but our favorite treatment is to slice the meat on a diagonal and spread it over a huge plate of greens, drizzled with O’Mama’s too-yummy salad dressing (the recipe for which can be found here).

*I’ll post a picture the next time we make this - we’re doing burgers tonight…*

YUM!

Boston Cream Pie

Mr. Chili’s favorite birthday cake is Boston Cream Pie. I believe it’s true that I’ve made him one every May 30th for the last three years in a row. While the recipe for Boston Cream Pie is a little fussy, it still qualifies as stupid-easy, so here we go.

For starters, I’ve yet to find a yellow cake recipe that I like as well as what I can get out of a box. Judge me not, my friends; I have no problem whipping up a scratch chocolate cake, but there’s something about that dense, heady vanilla flavor of a box yellow cake that I haven’t been able to adequately recreate, so Betty Crocker it is. I make two layers according to the package directions, then set them out to cool while I get on with the filling and the glaze.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with custard; I love to eat it, but I hate to make it. Well, let me amend that - I don’t HATE to make it, but it took me a long time to learn the technique of good custard-making (I failed it in home ec. classes in high school and had more than my fair share of split custards in my adulthood, too). I figured it out, though; here’s how you do it:

In a small bowl, beat two egg yolks together and set them aside. Combine 1/3 cup of sugar (I use a little more), 2 tablespoons of cornstarch (I sift the cornstarch through a little mesh strainer first, just to be sure there are no lumps that might give me trouble later in the process) and a pinch of salt in a sauce pan and stir in 1 1/2 cups of milk. Heat these over medium, stirring often, until the mixture comes just to a boil, then temporarily remove the pan from the heat (keep the burner on).

Scoop out a little of the hot mixture and, whisking constantly, drizzle it into the egg yolks. Then, scoop out a little more and repeat this process. When you’ve worked in about 1/3 of the hot stuff into the yolks, scrape them back into the saucepan and cook the whole thing together for about two and a half minutes - it should be thick and bubbly.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour the custard through a strainer into a bowl (you’ll have to coax the stuff through the mesh - it should be pretty thick by now). I stir in a little vanilla or, even better, vanilla paste at this point, then I put a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the custard and stash the bowl in the fridge to chill while I get on with the glaze.

Boston cream pie is covered with a simple ganache; and when I say “simple,” I mean it. Put one cup of milk or cream in the microwave or, if you don’t have a microwave - don’t snicker; I know a LOT of people who don’t - heat it on the stove just until it’s good and hot but not boiling (three minutes in the zapper works for me, or about five minutes on the stove). In the meantime, chop up about 12 ounces of good chocolate (or, alternately, about a cup and a half of chocolate chips). Pour the milk over the chocolate and let it sit for a moment or two, then start stirring; pretty soon, the whole mixture should be smooth and glossy. Set it aside to cool (sometimes I’ll put this in the fridge, but not often; getting it to room temperature is usually sufficient).

Put one of the cake layers on a plate, dump all of the cooled custard in a pile in the center, then put the other layer on top and gently press until the custard starts to ooze out the sides. Pour the ganache over, stick in some candles, and make a wish!

The only thing you should be aware of is that once this cake is cut, it’s photogenic days are over. The top of the cake WILL slide off the bottom if given a chance (we came downstairs the next morning to find this had happened) and because the custard is made with egg yolks, it’ll go bad pretty quickly if not kept refrigerated. I don’t think this will be a problem, though; it probably won’t last that long, anyway.

YUM!

Kwee-Chee *Edited Again*

Otherwise known as quiche.

The dictionary defines quiche as a pie-like dish consisting of an unsweetened pastry shell filled with a custard and usually containing cheese and other ingredients, as vegetables, seafood, or ham. Pretty much all of my cookbooks say about the same thing.

Since Organic Mama bought WAY more eggs than she needed for the fixings for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, she needs some good, egg-intensive dishes. For her, I’m posting my favorite quiche recipe.

I don’t fuss with crust. I find that I can never get both the quiche and the crust done quite to my liking, so I skip the crust part altogether. I make up for this by serving my quiche with some sort of hearty bread - usually a crusty French bread accompanied by a little too much butter.

If you DO want to have a crusted quiche, make (or buy) enough pie dough for a 9-inch pan. Dock the pastry (poke it full of little holes with a fork), weight it down with pie weights or dried beans, and pre-bake it in a 375° oven for about 30 minutes. Remove the crust and allow it to cool completely, and turn the oven down to 300°.

If you choose NOT to fuss with crust, butter a 9-inch pie plate and set it aside. Beat together 4 eggs with 2 cups of light cream (the dairy you use can be varied to your liking and/or what happens to be in your fridge at the moment). To this, stir in a pinch of salt and a grind or two of pepper and set aside.

In the bottom of your pie plate (or, alternately, in your pre-baked and cooled crust), put whatever extras you’d like to have in your quiche. My personal favorites are stewed tomatoes, onion and bacon (both the onion and the bacon having been cooked together over medium heat until soft and crisp, respectively), then a little too much grated sharp Cheddar cheese. Really, though, the possibilities are just about endless: spinach and goat cheese or feta, asparagus and gruyere, ham and swiss- really, let your imagination go. Here, for example, we have tonight’s offering; turkey ham, diced red onion, and chopped asparagus with Cheddar:

I sometimes use quiche as a “fridge-purge” dish; I’ll root around in my refrigerator and come up with all kinds of interesting combinations. As far as quantities for the extras go, use your best judgment. About a half cup of each (maybe a little heavier on the cheese) for a 9 inch pie pan would probably do it.

On top of your extras, gently pour over the egg and cream, sprinkle over more of your cheese (if you have any left over), and bake in the center of a pre-heated 300° oven and bake 30-45 minutes, or until the quiche is slightly browned and set (if you’re using a crust and it starts to brown too much, as it’s likely to do, make a little ring of tin foil to shield it). How long it takes will depend on how deep the pie plate is and the accuracy of your oven’s thermostat. I do a doneness test by poking the center of the quiche with a knife; if the knife comes out mostly clean, we’re in business.

Let the quiche cool for about 10 minutes - it’ll slice more cooperatively that way - and serve hot or cold. Honestly, I tend to at least double this recipe and make the quiche in a buttered, rectangular glass cake pan - one little pie never seems sufficient, especially since it fridges so well and makes for a fantastic next-day lunch.

Our favorite accompaniment to quiche is a dark green salad tossed with some sort of zingy vinaigrette, but that’s just us.

YUM!

*I changed the cooking directions from the original suggestion.  Cooking a custard too fast will cause it to split - you’ll end up with what amounts to essentially scrambled eggs floating in a puddle of water.  Low and slow is the way to go with custards.  Your patience will be rewarded, Grasshopper…*