Recipes Collection: like

Showing posts with label like. Show all posts

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Fresh Peach Tartlet Its Like a Peach Tart Only Smaller

Here is the peach tartlet video recipe I promised the other day. Its a Julia Child recipe from one of the cookbooks she did with Jacques Pepin. I was going to do this delicious dessert for the Julie & Julia post, but decided to go with the more substantial roast chicken recipe.

This is about the easiest "looks hard" pastry technique I know. You can make the pie crust dough if you want (Ive also posted my mothers key lime pie video below so you can see how easy pie crust is), or you can grab a package of the Pillsbury pie crust that is in just about every store these days.

I usually dont give brand names, but in this case I will since Ive tried a couple brands and the Pillsbury is by far the best. It actually has lard in the ingredients, and as any pie maker will tell you, when it comes to delicious, flaky crust, lard kicks ass.

This recipe features the unusual and exotic Chinese 5-spice powder. Peaches are a natural with the aromatic blend of anise, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, fennel seed, star anise and Szechuan peppercorns, which usually make up this thousand-year-old spice.

By the way, by watching and mastering this technique, you just learned like 12 different tartlet recipes. This works equally well with apples, pears, plums, etc. Just adjust the caramelizing time based on the density of the fruit so it will be perfectly cooked in the 15 minutes it sits on the tartlet. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 8 tartlets:
2 tbsp butter
3 large peaches, halved, pitted, each half cut into 4 pieces (24 slices total)
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp Chinese 5-spice
1 box (15-oz) ready-to-use piecrust (2 sheets)
1 egg, beaten plus 1 tsp water

How To Make Pie and Tart Crust:

Friday, March 7, 2014

Sufferin Succotash More Like Succulent and Super Interesting Succotash!

When most of you hear the word, "succotash," you probably dont think of a delicious vegetable side dish, you probably think of Warner Brothers Sylvester the cats catchphrase, "Sufferin succotash!" But succotash really is a great, and very underrated recipe.

As I say in the video, this may be Americas oldest vegetable recipe, coming from the Narragansett Indian word, "msíckquatash," which according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary means "boiled corn kernels."

You can see from the photo, this is much more than that, combining an array of vegetables including corn, beans, and squash. These three ingredients were such an important source of nutrition for the Native Americans they were referred to as "The Three Sisters."

The way they cultivated these three plants together was sheer genius. The corns stalks were perfect for the climbing vines of the bean plants. In turn, the beans roots captured nitrogen from the air, enriching the soil, producing larger crops. But it was the third sister that really made the system so brilliant.

Squash sends out long, winding vines with large leaves that stay close to the ground. This acts as an edible ground cover, which not only kept the weeds away, but also provided shade for the corns shallow roots. It also kept the ground moist, which helped the beans grow, which helped the corn grow higher, which made for longer bean vines/yields, etc., and so on. Who knew succotash could be so fascinating?!

Anyway, I hope you give this easy and nutritious vegetable side dish recipe a try. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoons butter
1/2 yellow onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 jalapeno or other small hot chili pepper, sliced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup diced tomatoes
4 oz green beans, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen corn
1 cup frozen baby lima beans, thawed
2 green zucchini, cubed
1/2 tsp ground cumin
pinch of cayenne
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste