Bruschetta

I learned something today - bruschetta refers to bread rubbed with garlic and olive oil, not just the tomato topping that I've thought it was. Apparently there's been a bit of a linguistic shift, and now both the bread and the topping can and are referred to as bruschetta, but purists would say it's just the bread part. But definitions aside, here is one heck of an appetizer, or at least my version of it.

Bread (any kind of good crusty bread/baguette will do - it works good with bread that's just a touch stale)
olive oil
fresh tomatoes
garlic
fresh basil
touch of salt

Slice the bread about 1/4 inch thick or so, brush it with olive oil and broil it for just a minute or so on each side in an oven or toaster oven until it's all browned and toasty.

Chop the tomatoes, add a glug of olive oil, some minced garlic, freshly chopped basil, and just a little bit of salt (I did like two turns or so of the salt grinder). Let the mixture sit for a bit to let all the flavors really meld, and then scoop it onto the bread and eat it.

Thyme

Gooey and Delicious Cinnamon Rolls

I never considered myself one who was big on hoarding recipes. I fancied myself quite generous actually, but suddenly I find I am reluctant to divulge my secrets...mostly just because they aren't really secrets at all and I will now be exposed as a person who can simply follow a recipe. But, that is the price we pay for having fantastic recipes around, and this is one of them. It comes from the "A Treasury of Top Secret Recipes" by Todd Wilbur, it is his recreation of the Cinnabon Cinnamon Roll. Here is what you do:

For the Rolls:

1 1/4 oz package active dry yeast (since I'm not sure exactly what that is I throw in about 2 TBS)
1 cup warm milk
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup margarine (I like butter better) melted
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
4 cups all-purpose flour

Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk in a large bowl. Throw in everything else but the flour and mix it well. Then slowly add the flour and start getting your elbows good and dirty kneading it (this is the best part, get out all those frustrations grrr)

Put the dough into a bowl, cover and let it rise for about an hour or until it is doubled in size. Once it is you can take it out, plop it on a floured surface and roll it out to about a quarter of an inch thick. Melt or soften some butter and spread it all over then sprinkle on some brown sugar (the recipe says about a cup), and some cinnamon (about 2 1/2 TBS). I like to throw in a hint of nutmeg too.




Roll it up and using some handy dandy floss cut it into about 1-2 inch chunks. place them on a pan and let them raise another 1/2 hour or so. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes. Just until thy are beautifully golden brown. mmmm, making myself hungry!




Now for the BEST part. The icing.

8 TBSP margarine or butter
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup (2 oz) cream cheese
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/8 tsp salt

Throw them all together and mix it good. When the cinnamon rolls come out let them cool slightly and then slather this rich goodness all over the top. You won't regret it. I promise.



Cayenne

Our new favorite way to eat yellow squash

Sorry, no pictures. Mostly because these have been mid-week meals, which means it's all about just getting it on the table and in our mouths. Anyway, we've gotten several yellow squash in our deliveries of late, and this is the surefire way for all of us to enjoy it.

Slice up the squash, fry it up in some butter (either the real stuff, or olive oil, I don't think margarine would give as good a flavor), toss in a chopped tomato, some basil and garlic. Add a little bit of the pasta water (you know, the water that the pasta has been cooking in) to help make it into more of a sauce. Serve it with pasta (we've liked it with the whole wheat rotini pasta) and lots of parmesan. Quick, simple, nutritious (mostly) and highly adaptable.

Thyme

Dill pickles

Okay, I don't actually like pickles. None of those weird pregnancy pickle cravings for me, thank you very much. However, we got an plethora of cucumbers from our farm delivery a couple of weeks in a row, so I had to do something. Luckily my husband and many of our friends do, so I made some pickles. These are just the refrigerator kind - I'm still trying to work up the courage to actually can something. Also, I sort of doubled the recipe, but think I put too much salt in (at least the verdict was that they were a bit too salty).

Kosher dill pickles

2 lbs cucumbers, halved or quartered
1 large bunch of dill
5 cloves or so garlic (the recipe called for whole smashed clovers, I just had the pre-minced stuff on hand)
1/3 cup kosher salt
1 c. water

Boil the water, add the salt and stir until it dissolves. Put the dill, garlic, and cucumbers in a large bowl. Pour the brine (that would be just the salt and water mixture) over the other ingredients. Add more water until it's all covered. Put a plate with some kind of weight on top of it over this, so that it keeps all the cucumbers submerged (as seen in the picture). Let it sit out on the countertop for a day or so. You can start checking for taste about four hours after you do it, but it'll take up to 48 hours for them to really be pickled. Refrigerate them in the brine, and they'll keep for a week or so (honestly, we've had them in there longer, but my sources say they're still good).

Thyme

Cinnamon Peach Frozen Yogurt

Okay, so I actually made this like a month ago. But it took me that long to get around to downloading the picture, so...my bad? Anyway, I'm pretty sure I still remember how I did it. Here goes:

Cinnamon Peach Frozen Yogurt

1 pureed peach
2 cups plain yogurt
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla, if desired
cinnamon to taste

Mix all of that together, chill it for a bit, put in the ice cream maker - yummmmmm.

Thyme

Fruit Soup and Vanilla ice Cream

There's a Spanish restaurant around here that we love and it has this incredible dessert. It's a fruit soup with scoop of cheese ice cream, sprigs of mint, and fresh berries. Well, since we have a bunch of fruit hanging around and a brand-new ice cream maker that's still crying out to be used, I decided to experiment.

Fruit Soup

1 peach
2 small red plums
1 apricot
cherries (1 c. or so)
strawberries (maybe 1/2 cup?)
blueberries (probably around 1 or 2 cups)
freshly ground nutmeg (probably came to around 1 tsp)
fresh ginger (1/2 an inch or so)
sugar
water

I had some of the medium syrup left over from trying strawberry sorbet and watermelon yogurt ice a week or so before, so I just used that, but it probably would have been about 1/2 c. sugar and a cup or so of water. Anyway, peel, core and slice the fruit (you can use this particular combination of fruit, or whatever similar ones you have on hand) as necessary and put it in the pot with the sugar, water, and spices (feel free to adjust the spices as you desire and use ground/dried if you don't have fresh stuff). Simmer for 15 or 20 minutes until the fruit has fallen apart and practically dissolved. Puree it, then strain it through a sieve. The soup from the restaurant is more like a broth - they obviously just used the strained juices, but we tossed some of the pureed fruit back in for texture (and because I only have a very tiny strainer and stuff fell over the sides). Put in the fridge to cool.

Vanilla Ice Cream

2 c. half and half or milk
1/2 c. sugar
6 egg yolks
1 c. heavy cream, more milk, or half and half
1-2 tsp vanilla

I'd found a recipe for chocolate ice cream, and basically left out the chocolate, and I'd been reading several other ice cream recipes, so I kind of mentally combined them all to make this.

Combine dairy product (we ended up using about 1 1/2 cups each of whole milk and half and half total in the recipe) of your choosing, with 1/2 c. sugar in saucepan. Heat until steam is coming off the milk but it's not boiling yet. Remove from heat.

With a whisk or mixer, combine the egg yolks with the other 1/4 c of sugar until it's all yellowy and frothy (the recipe said 2-4 minutes, but I did it just a bit longer). Temper the eggs by adding about 1/2 cup of the warm half and half slowly while mixing it up. Add the tempered eggs to the rest of the milk, and cook it over medium-low heat until it's a bit thicker. Don't boil it!

Strain it into a bowl, add the last cup of dairy product. Add more sugar if you want, and this is when I added the vanilla. Chill it in the fridge, then make it into ice cream using your ice cream machine!

Once we finally got the ice cream to freeze (I'm not sure whether our ice cream machine bowl wasn't cold enough, it was too hot, or the ice cream mixture wasn't cool enough, but it didn't set up at all the first time we tried it, so we gave it another shot the next day after everything went back into the fridge/freezer), we served it up and it was yummy! Not adding the pureed fruit back in would make it much smoother obviously, but it was good this way, too. All in all, a success!

Sorry no pictures - I would have taken one of the finished, dished-up product but my stinker of a son was having a bad night.

Thyme (Formerly known as A - see, it only took me like a month to pick a spicy nickname)

Grilled beets and yellow squash

Okay, so we did this for the fourth of July, which as you might be able to tell from the date I post this, was over a week ago. I just got around to uploading the pictures - my bad. Anyway, in addition to gobs of other good food, we grilled these veggies and they were yummy.

Grilled beets
Sliced fresh beets (about 1/4 inch thick) - I had three or four medium ones
olive oil
rosemary



Cut up the beets, coat them in olive oil, add rosemary, grill. They sat in the fridge for an hour or so before we grilled them, but that was just for time management purposes, not because they need to sit or anything. We grilled them on a piece of aluminum foil since they were kind of small and we didn't want them falling through the grill rack.

Grilled yellow squash
Four medium yellow squash - quartered (you could slice them too, if you wanted)
lemon juice
olive oil
fresh chives
fresh basil
minced garlic



I whisked together about equal parts lemon juice and olive oil, added the cut up fresh herbs and garlic, and then coated the squash in it. Let it marinate for a while (more than fifteen minutes, but probably not more than overnight - ours sat in the fridge for a couple of hours). Grill. You could do smaller chunks and put them on skewers (we did that last year with zucchini and yellow squash) but this time we just quartered them and put them directly on the grill.

End result:

Yummy and colorful!

A (I'll pick a better nickname eventually)