Orange-lemon poppy seed muffins

I wasn't planning on making a post about this but I ended up making so many changes to the recipe I started with just fixing it up that I ended up with something entirely different. Even though it didn't turn out the best muffins I've ever had, it still seemed worth talking about.

I don't know about you, but I like to keep my muffins fairly austere. Not to the self-flagellant extremity of bran muffins, but I don't want a recipe packed with sour cream, yogurt or cream cheese either. If I wanted cupcakes, I'd make cupcakes. On the other hand, I'm not making health food here either, just something I don't feel entirely ridiculous eating for breakfast.

Ingredients for 12 muffins:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 teaspoons baking powder (down from the original full Tablespoon. But given the under-risen results, maybe I'd use all of it next time despite the math saying it's too much.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon poppy seeds
zest of 1 lemon
--
1/2 cup butter, melted and slightly cooled
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/6 cup orange juice (all lemon juice in the original, but I thought a little orange would round out the flavor.)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
--
three handfuls streusel topping (I keep a bag pre-mixed in the pantry. It's flour, rolled oats, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, some chopped walnuts.)
1 Tablespoon softened butter

0. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. Mix the dry ingredients in the first ingredients section in a large bowl. I included the zest and seeds with the dry so they'd get coated in flour and stay evenly distributed in the batter.

2. Mix the wet ingredients in the second section in a smaller bowl. The sugar is with the wet because you want it dissolved.

3. Mix the streusel topping with the butter using your fingers until it gets knobbly.

4. Form a well in the dry mix and pour the wet mix in. Stir just enough to moisten. Lumps are fine, whole layers of dry flour probably not.

5. Butter a muffin tin or use non-stick. Evenly distribute the batter using an ice-cream or coffee scoop. Top each with a sprinkle of the streusel. Pat it down a little so it sticks.

6. Open the oven door and leave it open for a moment for the heating cycle to click on. You want the muffins to start with a burst of heat to help them rise. Put in the muffin tin and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, turning halfway through.

7. You want them golden brown on top, dry in the middle, but not crusty crisp around the bottom. At 18 minutes, mine are a little over-baked.
When they look done, turn them out onto a dish towel. Alton Brown says to leave them upside down for better volume. I flipped them right side up for the picture and my volume wasn't a good as I had hoped so maybe he's right.

But they still look pretty good. Let's look inside...


Not too bad. Looks cakey and crumbly. And let's have a taste...

Huh, tastes kind of like cornbread. I wonder how that happened. The lemon is aromatic, but not tart. The crumb is soft and buttery--just a bit dry and with a little crunch from the poppy seeds. Just a little sweet. I think I hit the target I was aiming at in terms of richness, but the flavor is--let's put it charitably--subtle. There is a lot going on with the citrus, the whole wheat, the butter, the poppy seed and all the flavors in the streusel, but they're understated. A little dull on its own, but a spoonful of apricot jam sets things aright. Overall I'm happy, but next time I'm adding some flavor extracts or spices to boost the flavors.

White sapote ice cream

Here are the white sapotes I got last week finally ripe (minus one that I ate just to see what they tasted like a bit earlier). As you can see, they've collapsed pretty sadly there.


Even more sadly, that liquid outer layer is nastily bitter. I understand that some varieties don't have that problem; this one has it in spades. I had to carefully wash off all that gunk while trying to retain as much of the inner flesh as possible. One was gunk all the way through. Then I had to remove the quite large seeds leaving only around a half cup of usable fruit and around two cups of waste. No wonder these haven't been commercialized.

Still, a half cup is enough for ice cream if I bolster the fruit with supporting flavors. The sapotes taste of lemon and vanilla with perfumy honeysuckle notes so it should be easy enough to work with.

The sapote pulp went into the blender with:
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup thick coconut milk
1/2 cup slightly-brown sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 large pinch salt
1 Tablespoon agave nectar

The result is nicely thickened right out of the blender which is a pretty good sign. The flavor is a lovely lemon custard, but mild so I added another Tablespoon of sugar to bolster it for the freeze. Actually there may have been a bit more sugar and agave nectar than that; I didn't measure. I'm not sure about the vanilla either. And, yes, the results taste of lemon, vanilla and agave, but I could tell there was something more in there. I'm not sure if anyone else will be able to after churning, though.


The churning itself didn't go as well as I had hoped. I think it's time to start moving the churn from my hot kitchen into my cool living room before using it. I don't think there's anything chemical in this mix keeping it from thickening up, unless there's something weird in white sapote that I don't know about so it's probably just the heat.

The mix did get cold enough for a smooth texture even if I wasn't able to churn in much air. That just means it's got that super-premium density. It might freeze up kind of hard. Guess I'll find out tomorrow...



You can't really tell from the picture, but the texture turned out quite well--smooth, creamy and resistant to melting. All without a custard or cornstarch. That's interesting. I think the coconut milk is more important to this effect than the sapote, but I'll have to do a test to be sure. (What I ought to do is make batches of a simple vanilla Philadelphia-style ice cream substituting in increasing amounts of coconut milk for the dairy to see how it affects the texture. A shame I don't work at an agricultural college; I could get funding for that.) There are some unpleasant fibrous shards in there unfortunately. I must have missed a bit of seed when I was cleaning the fruit.

The flavor is more intense than it was in the unfrozen mix which is also unusual. Like I said earlier, there are notes of vanilla and lemon, but the fruit is in there too with a richer underlying flavor tying them together. There are malty notes and some banana in there. Maybe a bit of custard too, although I think the name custard apple comes more from the texture than the flavor. It's complex and it shifts over the course of a mouthful from round fruit flavors up front to more citrusy notes at the end. Really very nice; it went over quite well at the office. This is no particular surprise, though. Ice cream is a standard use for white sapote and lemon and vanilla common flavors to pair it with. New to me, though.

Chicken in curdled milk

Curdled on purpose; you were wondering, right?

This is a Jaime Oliver recipe that got a fabulous review on the thekitchn blog. Thekitchn's kind of a mixed bag for me. I could do without (most of) the Cooking-101-level posts, the reviews of farmers markets places I'm not and the kitchen design stuff, but they also put up some interesting but simple recipes that are just the sort of thing I like for weeknight cooking. This one I've got to admit I was skeptical of, but they liked it a lot so I took a chance.

Here's the original version from Oliver's website. You'll notice he leaves the "curdled" out of the title. I'm for truth in advertising myself.

"chicken in milk
serves 4
A slightly odd, but really fantastic combination that must be tried.

ingredients
• 1 x 1.5k/ 3½lb organic chicken [Publix Greenwise will do]
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 115g/4oz or ½ a pack of butter
• olive oil
• 1/2 cinnamon stick
• 1 good handful of fresh sage, leaves picked
• zest of 2 lemons
• 10 cloves of garlic, skin left on
• 565ml/1 pint milk

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas 5, and find a snug-fitting pot for the chicken. Season it generously all over, and fry it in the butter and a little olive oil, turning the chicken to get an even colour all over, until golden. Remove from the heat, put the chicken on a plate, and throw away the oil and butter left in the pot. [Or save it for frying something later.] This will leave you with tasty sticky goodness at the bottom of the pan which will give you a lovely caramelly flavour later on.

Put your chicken back in the pot with the rest of the ingredients, and cook in the preheated oven for 1½ hours. Baste with the cooking juice when you remember. The lemon zest will sort of split the milk, making a sauce which is absolutely fantastic.

To serve, pull the meat off the bones and divide it on to your plates. Spoon over plenty of juice and the little curds. Serve with wilted spinach or greens and some mashed potato."

Mine actually looks a little better than the picture on his website. He seems to have burned his a little bit. You can't see it while it's still in the pot, but it turns out kind of weird with lovely crisp skin on top and soggy soaked skin on the bottom.


I followed his direction all the way down to the side dishes so I have some lovely smashed red potatoes and braised Swiss chard I had saved in the freezer. Be carefully defrosting chard; I ended up with a big puddle of bright red juices on the cutting board and dripping onto the floor. But, back to the main dish: the meat is falling off the bone as advertised throughout, but on the top it's the overcooked sort of falling off the bone. Not extraordinarily juicy on the bottom, either. Not compared to a brined bird, anyway. A good bit of flavor infused, more in the bottom half than the top, but the combination of garlic, sage, cinnamon and lemon isn't something I would have picked out if I wasn't following a recipe.

The sauce thinned out as the milk solids bunched up leaving the remaining liquid to just about turn into chicken stock. I would have liked it to cook down a little, but the chicken juices formed a film on top keeping evaporation low. It's definitely not an elegant presentation with the watery sauce with the curdy bits floating around. The flavors are in there, though, if somewhat diffuse. I may cook it down a bit later. I was worried about the curdling, but I'm actually finding the broken milk less off-putting than the big pieces of sage and scraps of garlic paper floating around in there. On the plus side, I fished out a couple of the garlic cloves, squeezed them out of their pods and mashed them into the potatoes. Now that's the stuff.

Overall, a decent roast chicken variation. Not the best I've made; not the worst either. Some points for the novelty factor, but I don't know where the raves TheKitchn gave it come from. I'm going to go back and take a look...Oh, I see. They accidentally put the lid on the pot so the chicken steamed. I'd miss the crisp skin I suppose, but I can see how that would infuse more flavor and keep the chicken moist as it cooked. If you're going to try it, keep the lid on for the first hour and then take it off. That might be enough time for the skin to dry out and the meat not to.

CSA week nine - Chicken tagine with olives and preserved lemons

and also large bunches of parsley and cilantro.

This is a recipe from North African Cooking by Hilaire Walden. It's not the one I mentioned on Saturday, but this one uses more parsley and cilantro than that one plus some other interesting flavors so I thought I'd give it a try. I've modified it a bit and probably screwed it up since I couldn't get the right sorts of olives or preserved lemons. Well, that's the way of things; I'll just have to hope for the best.

Ingredients:
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves
3/4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 large pinch saffron threads, crushed
salt and pepper

1 chicken weighing about 3 1/2 pounds (Mine was a bit bigger so I was generous on all the spices and used a large onion.)
3 cups chicken broth or water

1/2 cup greeny-brown Moroccan olives, rinsed or kalamata olives, roughly chopped
1 large bunch of cilantro, finely chopped (I used about half my share. There's large and then there's large.)
1 large bunch of parsley, finely chopped
1 preserved lemon in salt (The lemons I found were pickled, but so are the olives so I figure I'm probably OK. They were also kind of small so I used two.), chopped

0. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a dutch oven just big enough to fit the chicken. Add onions and fry until golden brown.

2. Meanwhile, crush garlic in a mortar with a pinch of salt. Work in the ginger, cinnamon, saffron and a bit of pepper. Add to onions and cook until fragrant. Remove to a bowl.

3. Let the spice mix cool a bit and then mash it up into a smoother paste.
Or just run it through the food processor. Spread it all over the chicken including in the body cavity.

4. Put chicken in the dutch oven (which you're glad you used because you didn't lose all the flavor from the spice mix you couldn't entirely scrape out) and add broth. Bring to a simmer and cover.

The original recipe goes on to simmer on the stovetop for 1 1/4 hours, but instead I put it into the oven for omni-directional heat. 350 works for stews but wanted to keep the sauce simmering here so I want a little higher temperature. Technically that means this is a braise not a tagine, I think. The recipe called for flipping the chicken a few times which still seemed like a good idea so I went ahead and did that.

I'm not sure about the timing since I started at 350, changed my mind, tried 375 and then 400. I just cooked until my probe thermometer got a reading of 165 degrees. I've been having trouble getting reliable readings so the chicken ended up a bit overcooked, but the sauce kept it from drying out so it wasn't a disaster.

5. When the thermometer reaches 160 degrees add the chopped olives, lemon, cilantro and parsley, turn the oven down to 350 degrees and cook for 15 minutes more.

6. When the chicken is done, remove it to a cutting board to cool and put the sauce on the stove to cook down if it looks like it needs it. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning now. When the chicken is cool enough to work with, portion it out and serve with the sauce. If you can figure how to skim the chicken fat from the sauce, you probably should.


I also had a side dish: Fried peppers with capers and garlic

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons olive oil
3/4 pound red peppers, cut into strips
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1/2 Tablespoon salt-packed capers (don't substitute the pickled capers; the flavors are quite different)
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar (go ahead and substitute plain white vinegar)
salt and pepper

1. Heat the oil on high heat in a cast iron pan until nearly smoking. Add the peppers. Fry, stirring frequently but not constantly, until they've charred around the edges.

2. Add the capers and garlic. Cook until they sizzle and the garlic starts to brown.

3. Stir in the vinegar which will evaporate too fast to do any real damage to the seasoning on your cast iron pan. Still, you'll want to clean the pan promptly after dinner.

4. Serve hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.


And I made couscous too.

I'm fairly happy with how the tagine turned out. There's a lot of good flavor in the sauce, but you can tell the right olives and lemon would match with the herbs and spices a bit better. As usual when I neglect to brine the chicken is flavorful on the outside but the actual meat is kind of bland. Even this free-range, organic blah-blah-blah chicken doesn't have a whole lot of flavor. Not compared to olives and preserved lemons, anyway. I suppose the overcooking was no help here either. But still, not bad and the sauce is quite nice with the couscous.

The peppers are sweet, salty and tangy. Very different from the chicken and a nice accompaniment. The recipe doesn't actually specify sweet bell peppers so I wonder how it would be using a pepper with a little heat.

Now I could really go for some baclava for dessert.

CSA - Lemon basil avocado sorbet

After my failure with last week's avocado sherbet I wanted to jump back on the horse, but a) other than the problems with the lavender I was happy with the results in general and I wasn't interested in doing it again immediately and b) I didn't have quite enough avocado left. So instead I decided to add a bit of avocado to lemon sorbet to see what happens. I've never made a citrus sorbet before so that was interesting in itself as well.

My initial research turned up lots of different lemon sorbet recipes on-line which varied surprisingly widely on how much lemon and how much sugar to use. With the variation in lemons' size and flavor and not having tried this before I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop hasn't let me down yet so that seemed a safe starting point. He was one of the few recipe authors who described the resulting flavor--"tangy"--plus his was the only recipe that specified mixing in the lemon juice at the last minute. I don't know how that would be important, but it shows he's been thinking, anyway.

So I started with 1/2 cup of water, a cup of sugar and the zest from one really big lemon. I heated that up until the sugar was dissolved. Then I poured that into a blender along with about 3/4 cup of avocado and enough more water to bring the volume up to 2 1/2 cups.

After blending, I was a bit surprised to see that the mix wasn't letting go of its air bubbles. That uneven reflection you can see in the picture is from the knobbly bubbly surface of the mix. I had no idea avocado was a foam stabilizer. This was a good sign.

While that was chilling, it was time to get a cup of juice. Or it would be if I hadn't decided that I wanted all the pulp too. Most sorbets get some additional texture from the solid bits of the fruit and I wanted to add that here if I could. So I ended up doing some careful microsurgery to peel a few lemons and either peel away the connective membranes or cut supremes. Once I had a cup I decided not to run it through the blender as I had originally planned. I liked the idea of little packets of pure lemon juice mixed in with the sweetened sorbet around it. So I just mushed up lemon bits to release about half the juice but leave the rest encapsulated. And that got chilled too.

The next day they got mixed and into the churn. This is when I got an inkling that I may have made a mistake. The freezing process, usually so elegant for sorbets, was ugly and clumpy. Who really wants texture in a sorbet anyway? Well, too late to back out now.

To add a bit more interest to the flavor, just before the mix was done churning I added a quarter cup of chopped fresh basil. Visually, the flecks of green are quite nice, but it's more to chew on which, again, might not have been the best idea. But too late now.

After churning, I ripened it in the freezer and here's the results. I still like the look, but, yeah, the texture isn't great. There is nice smooth sorbet, but it's got chunks of frozen lemon, bits of loose pulp and little leaves floating in it. I'm of half a mind to melt it down, run it through the blender and churn it again.
...
Now I'm of a full mind to do it.








So, before:








after:









and afterer:










and even afterer:


The texture is much improved with that perfect creaminess that I'm still amazed that sorbet can achieve. Maybe it's frozen up a little more solidly than your average sorbet. There wasn't any alcohol included so that hurt it but maybe the avocado helped? Further investigation is required.

The basil flavor is now well distributed and maybe there's a hint of avocado there too. You can tell that straight lemon sorbet would be like a piece of hard candy: just citrus and sweet melting on the tongue. The basil makes it significantly more interesting. The flavors aren't blended into anything synergistic--the lemon and basil are clearly distinguishable--but they go well together and take the edge off each other. Italian sweet basil would probably have worked better than the Thai basil I've got. Lemon basil would probably have worked better still. But I've got what I've got and what I've got is certainly plenty nice on a hot Miami day. I may revisit this when the CSA supplies some Italian basil. Maybe I'll use lime instead. ...Argh, I just did a quick Google and found that Jaime Oliver does a basil lime sorbet and Emeril does a basil lemon. OK, I've been saving a perfectly unique ice cream idea and it's going up next in the line-up. Watch this space.

CSA - Tastes like soap

Really fancy soap, sure, but still not what I was hoping for. I'm talking about my latest sherbet here and looking at the ingredients I really shouldn't be surprised: avocado, lemon, honey, lavender and thyme. But avocado ice cream isn't all that unusual (as unusual ice creams go) and it's usually paired with lemon. Honey--avocado honey from a previous CSA delivery--is a natural addition. It's where I started getting creative with the flavorings that things went wrong. I'm not going to say lavender and thyme were bad ideas; both go well with the other flavors involved here and straight out of the blender the sherbet base had a lovely rich, sweet and slowly blooming herbal mix of flavors. The problem only came after churning; the low temperatures damped all the flavors down except the lavender. That actually seems to have intensified into a nasty astringent long-lingering chemical tang. So, a teaspoon of lavender extract is way too much. So noted.

On the other hand, the texture is as smooth and creamy as you might ask for, albeit recognizably with the particular smoothness of avocado, the color is lovely (you'll have to trust me on that one. My phone-camera's white balance can't capture the reality of its pale green) and, like I said before, the flavors work if I can get the balance right. I'm going to try this again when some avocados show up in the CSA and I'll give a proper recipe then.