posted on July 22, 2011 by Merry-Jennifer
The beautiful blue waters and the white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico are calling my name. The call has gotten louder every day this week, and today that’s all I’m hearing.
Every summer we travel to the coastline of the Florida panhandle for a week of family vacation with the kids. This all started when our daughter was around 8 months old and my husband and I were desperate for a real vacation, somewhere we could take a baby and still relax and have fun in between diaper changes. We found exactly what we were looking for in the beaches along county road 30A in South Walton County. We spent that first summer in a rental cottage in Seaside and it was heaven. Every year since, with the exception of once, we spend a summer week either at Seaside or Rosemary Beach.
Next week is that week.
So, when posting is scarce next week, you’ll know it’s because my freshly-painted red toes are buried deep in the sugary white sand, far away from my laptop. I may even have a mojito. In fact, I’d say the mojito forcast is looking pretty darn good.
There may be some other cocktails showing up on our beach vacation menu. Here are some that have piqued my interest:
Ingredients:
Mint Simple Syrup:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
5 sprigs fresh mint
Mojito:
12 mint leaves, plus a sprig of mint for garnish
Juice of 1/2 lime
1 1/2 ounces mint simple syrup
2 ounces light rum
4 ounces of sparkling water
Directions:
Make simple syrup: In a small saucepan, bring sugar, water, and mint just to a boil, stirring until sugar is fully dissolved. Remove from heat, strain out and discard the mint, and let cool.
In a tall cocktail glass, place mint leaves and lime juice. Crush gently with a muddler or the back of a spoon. Add mint simple syrup. Fill tall glass with ice, add rum, and top with the sparkling water. Garnish with a sprig of mint. Sip slowly and relax.
posted on July 19, 2011 by Merry-Jennifer
Cheesecake and I have slowly made friends over the last five years or so. One of my husband’s favorite desserts, I make it only on rare occasions. Even though I’ve done it before, I have cheesecake-anxiety for a good week before I plan to make it. I worry about whether it will set up properly and bake without drying out. I worry about how my recipe modifications – because I always make modifications – will play out. I worry about whether the cake will come out of the springform pan cleanly, without pulling off any of the crust or sides of the cake. I worry about getting a crack in the top of an otherwise beautiful dessert.
Stupid, right? It is exactly these perfectionistic tendencies and anxieties that kept me out of the kitchen for so many years, worried I would somehow screw up a dish and not get the expected result.
We were invited to a dinner last Saturday night, and I volunteered to bring dessert. About a week prior to the dinner party, I was flipping through recipes and came across this mascarpone cheesecake from Gourmet. Deciding on the dessert well in advance allowed some planning time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with the recipe, but it also allowed plenty of time to obsess over making it properly. I asked plenty of questions on Twitter, gathering many varied opinions on how to keep the cheesecake from cracking, use of a water bath or no water bath, and how to effectively transfer the cheesecake off the springform pan bottom without breaking the crust.
After collecting opinions and mentally preparing for a few days – even giving myself pep talks at pivotal points in the cheesecake-making process – I crossed my fingers, said some prayers, and got baking.
Somehow, thanks to all of the above, I managed to turn out a beautiful cheesecake, unmarred by cracks. Sure, the top isn’t baby-bottom smooth, but did you see that there are no cracks? That’s right. No cracks.
The crust is made of Biscoff cookies – those little cookies in the red package that Delta hands out if you’ve been a good passenger. I’m hooked on those cookies, and when I spotted an entire package of them in our grocery store, I bought two packages – one for the cheesecake and one for, well, me. Along with a couple of other tweaks, I added some orange zest and orange juice to the cheesecake and I was pretty happy with the end result.
Roasted cherries are an ideal accompaniment to this cheesecake, complementing the subtle orange flavor in the cake. Plus, they are like heaven in a bowl. If you’ve never made them, go do it. Now.
Orange Mascarpone Cheesecake with Roasted Cherries
Waterbaths can be tricky, but if you wrap the bottom of the springform pan well, no water will seep in during the baking process. The extra-wide aluminum foil - the heavy duty kind - is key. I placed two layers on the counter, set the pan in the center of the foil, and then pulled the edges of the foil up around the springform pan. Baking at a lower temperature for a longer period of time and leaving the cheesecake in the oven for a bit of time after the baking is complete also helps.
The roasted cherries are great served alongside this cheesecake, but they're also a wonderful topping for vanilla ice cream or a good poundcake.
Ingredients:
For Crust:
8.8 ounces Biscoff cookies, finely ground in food processor
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
For Cheesecake:
24 ounces cream cheese (3 eight-ounce packages), softened
8 ounces mascarpone cheese, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla
Zest from one orange (approximately 1 tablespoon)
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
For Roasted Cherries:
3 cups pitted and halved fresh cherries
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
Directions:
Make crust:
1. Place rack in the middle of oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter the sides and bottom of a 9-inch springform pan. Place a round of parchment in the bottom of the pan and butter the parchment.
2. Stir together the finely ground cookies and melted butter in a bowl until well combined. Wrap your fingers in plastic wrap and press the crumbs onto the bottom and approx 1 1/2 inches up the sides of springform pan.
3. Bake for 10 minutes, then cool completely on a rack. Once cooled, place on a large sheet of heavy duty aluminum foil and wrap sides of pan in preparation for baking in a water bath. Set aside.
Make filling:
1. Decrease oven temperature to 325 degrees. Place a kettle or pot of water on to boil.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer (or using a large bowl and an electric mixer) beat cream cheese, mascarpone, and sugar at medium high speed, 3 to 5 minutes, until fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each egg addition. Scrape down sides of bowl as necessary. Add vanilla, orange zest, orange juice, and salt, and beat at low speed until smooth. Pour into cooled crust.
3. Place foil-wrapped filled springform pan into a roasting pan. Carefully pour the hot water into the roasting pan and around the wrapped springform pan, taking care not to splash the cheesecake. Place roasting pan in oven and bake for about 1 hour, until the cake is puffy around edges but still trembles slightly in the middle when pan is shaken gently. Turn off oven, crack oven door, and let the cheesecake sit in oven for about 1 hour. Remove pan from oven, carefully lift out of waterbath, and let cool completely on a rack.
4. Chill, loosely covered, at least 8 hours prior to serving. When ready to serve, run a blunt knife around edge of cheesecake to loosen it from springform pan and remove sides of pan. Serve with roasted cherries.
Make roasted cherries:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a 9-inch square baking dish, combine cherries, sugar, balsamic vinegar, and cornstarch. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until juices are thickened and bubbly, stirring every 15 minutes. Let cool completely and then chill until ready to serve.
posted on July 14, 2011 by Merry-Jennifer
My mother wasn’t enthusiastic about cooking when I was a kid. I always had the sense that it was just another one of her chores that she had to accomplish before night fell. The fact that cooking ended up in dirty dishes that she would then have to hand wash and dry only made it worse.
We didn’t have a dishwasher back then. We also didn’t have a clothes dryer, air conditioning, or central heat. We lived in a drafty early-1900s farmhouse with one bathroom with a clawfoot tub, a small kitchen, but with acres of outdoor space for my brother and me to explore for hours on end.
Beside my father’s studio, just to the west of the house, was an old grapevine with gnarly roots that produced gallons of muscadine grapes every summer. My brother and I played underneath that grapevine, a shady and cool vine-covered cave. When the grapes ripened, turning a purple so dark it was almost black, we harvested them for our mom to make jelly with. I recall my mother standing at the electric stove, stirring a pot of hot grapes, and straining the sweet purple liquid through cheesecloth into hot glass jelly jars. Her recollection is of sweating in the stifling heat, of working over a hot stove with the kitchen windows thrown open, but barely a breeze coming through.
A colleague at work brought me a huge bucket of brown turkey figs from his 16-year old fig tree. Thinking back to those years that my mom was into canning her own grape jelly, I decided to give it a try myself with the figs. After eating a pound or two of fresh figs, I turned the remaining four pounds of soft, ripe figs into eight jars of gorgeous jam.
I was inspired by this recipe for Drunken Fig Jam in Bon Appétit. The flavor profile of the figs seemed to go nicely with oranges, so I swapped out the lemon the original recipe called for with some juice and zest of a navel orange. A small amount of Cointreau and a dash of cinnamon rounded out the depth of the preserved figs, giving a the jam a full-bodied flavor.
This jam, with soft bits of fig in each spoonful, served with crackers and small wedge of brie has become my new favorite snack. And, wrong or right, I’m hoarding those jars.
Yield: approx 8 1/2 pint jars
Orange-Scented Fig Jam
Ingredients:
4 pounds ripe figs, stemmed, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
Zest of 1 large orange
2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
4 cups sugar
1/3 cup Cointreau
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Directions:
Combine figs, orange zest, orange juice, sugar, Cointreau, cinnamon, and salt in a large heavy saucepan (or dutch oven); let stand at room temperature for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Bring fig mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Reduce heat to medium and continue to boil, stirring frequently and occasionally mashing larger fig pieces, until the jam thickens and is reduced to approximately 6 cups, 30-35 minutes. Remove from heat.
Ladle mixture into 6 hot sterilized 1/2 pint glass canning jars, leaving 1/4 inch space at top of jars. Remove any air bubbles. Wipe jar threads and rims with a clean damp kitchen towel. Cover with hot lids and apply screw bands. Process jars in a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes. Remove jars carefully to cool on a kitchen towel. Cool jars completely and store in a cool dark place for up to one year.
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