Cooking In General

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@ Ragusa - I think that the best recipies come out of experimentation. Some may not taste good, but some of them are really astounding.

I've never actually tried making cake with wine but I add it to a lot of other things when I have it on hand. Your recipe intrigues me.

 

Dragonfly ,
nice to hear that In fact, I'm still working on these muffins. I'm not completely satisfied, not only because I burnt them If anyone tries them, keep an eye on them. They might be ready earlier, depending on how thick you made them.
And then I feel that something was missing. Red wine and dark chocolate have a very characteristic taste, and the white chocolate and white wine alone cannot function a surrogate, thus the lemons. I'll make half the quantity of dough some day before christmas and play around ... my first try have been 'proof of concept muffins', next round will be 'prototype muffins'

Likely changes ... ... raisins in rum come to my mind. And I think two lemon skins would be good I feel, the lemon aroma was IMO too subtle, yet it somewhat overshadowed the wine aroma. Lemon juice and wine compete. If I take too much lemon juice I wouldn't taste out the wine anymore. For that reason I might skip the lemon juice completely. And maybe I add some bitter almond aroma.

I had ravioli in bolognese sauce this evening As I made it with half a pound of minced meat it was a little much for me - which means I'll have warm lunch tomorrow at work (fortunately we have a microwave there)

 

Thanks for the info about freezing bread dough revmaf. I'll be giving it a try in the new year.

Right now I'm splat in the middle of christmas baking. I made some shortbread yesterday and I gave it a chocolate top today. I also made a beautiful batch of chocolate/cherry/pecan fudge that is almost too good to give away. The only thing I hate about making fudge is having to stir it by hand for 1/2 hour so it gets to the right consistancy.

[ December 17, 2006, 06:34: Message edited by: Dragonfly ]

 

My in-laws recently bought an espresso maker, so our Hanukkah gift to them is going to be a cookie jar filled with different flavors of biscotti. I'm thinking cranberry-pistachio, hazelnut-chocolate chip, and one more...

 

Dragonfly, you are a saint to make fudge. I must be too ADD to do it. Only tried it once and never will again.

I am 35 loaves into the baking cycle, doing 12 today - it's 35 and not 36 because I dropped one putting it into the oven and was too fastidious to scrape the dough off the floor and use it anyway .

 

Speaking of fudge - The first batch I made was wonderful so I decided to make some more... Although I thought I had repeated the recipe exactly the darn thing never set. I must have stirred the damn stuff for an hour and 1/2 before giving up.

@revmaf - I'm sure the person who would have received that 36'th loaf would be very grateful that you didn't make it if they knew.

 

A friend of the family made that one time and we liked it so much we had her make more. We called it sludge, and she sent it to our house for years at Christmas time.

 

Oh Man...and I threw mine out. I wish I had known that some people like it that way and then I could have still given some for Christmas. I actually tasted really good. I think I could package sludge nicely with some bows the next time I make that mistake.

 

Ambrosia:

My family has a holiday tradition of serving a fruit salad consisting of carefully peeled orange sections (so all the skin is off them - this is very tedious) mixed with sweetened shredded coconut. Don't know the proportions - I suspect this is one where my sister eyeballs it and decides it looks right! We call it ambrosia. I have seen it done with maraschino cherries added but we disdain such adulteration of a traditional dish.

Why a holiday dish? I suspect it's because people often give oranges by the box at Christmas, so you need to do SOMETHING with them, and we don't do it at other times because it takes too much time to prepare.

Generally we don't add any additional sweetener because the coconut is already sweet enough.

 

The ambrosia salad I'm familiar with has orange slices, coconut, dreamwhip, and mini marshmallows. Its pretty good but dream whip isn't my favorite.

 

Oh, goodness, not dreamwhip. Well, my grandmother's spinning in her grave.

 

Dreamwhip?

 

Yes, what is Dreamwhip? Sounds pretty dodgy.

 

I think is a substitute for whipped-cream.

Google brings this up here

 

Euh. Sounds gross.

 

Actually, sour cream might work - not sure. But, yeah, dreamwhip, which I think is a pantry item, is fairly awful There's also cool whip, which comes in a tub in the freezer and is made of various artificial ingredients designed to resemble whipped cream.

The minimalist ambrosia of my family has only the orange juice as dressing - as the cook peels the oranges over a bowl the juice is caught and added to the finished product.

I think the common denominators of all ambrosia recipes are oranges and coconut. And that's all we use.

BTW, I was at the country fruit stand in our little village yesterday and overheard an old-timer (yes, older than me, even, by quite a bit) reminiscing about how in his youth Christmas always involved getting a whole coconut - you picked it out by shaking it to see if the coconut milk sloshed in it. I wonder if that old Southern mountain tradition had something to do with the invention of the ambrosia my family eats. Christmas was also the only time most people in this area got an orange or two to eat, at least until the 50's or 60's or even later.

 

Dreamwhip and Coolwhip are both a disgusting waste of calories, IMO.

The chocolate chip and coffee-hazelnut biscotti are done, and the canister for my in-laws is almost full! I guess I'll have to take a few out to make space for the cranberry-pistachio that I'll be making tonight.