Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalEasy Delicious Homemade Beignet Recipe (video)
Beignet has a bunch of meanings depending on where you are. In France, a beignet refers to a fried choux pastry, and in some West African countries that were colonized by the French, it refers to a deep fried dough made from millet! But these beignets are the classic New Orleans style leavened dough deep fried and covered in powdered sugar. Probably most famous from the Cafe du Monde.
It's a super simple recipe. We used instant yeast, which doesn't need to bloom before you add it to the recipe, but if you have active dry yeast, you may wish you bloom it in the water with some of the sugar before you start. We dusted these in powdered sugar at the end, but you can also mix in some Dutch process cocoa or a little bit of cinnamon to the powdered sugar! Both are delicious, though the classic N'awlins beignet is just dusted in plain powdered sugar.
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Coconut Chia Barley Tea Recipe (video)
This recipe was inspired by a drink I had at a Vietnamese restaurant recently. It was a roasted tea with milk and chia seeds and grass jelly. It was delicious, and had some great phantom flavours of chocolate! When we got home, hubby thought it would be a good mix with the homemade barley tea he frequently drinks, some chia seeds, and some coconut milk. Turns out, he was right!
This is a super simple recipe, and delicious. The chia does take some time to bloom, and ideally you'd want to let it sit in the barley tea for a couple of days in the fridge before drinking. They sort of act as tiny bubble tea tapioca pearls, and you can drink them up with a bubble tea straw, or just sip it. Also, you can make drink these either cold or warm (we microwave them briefly to warm them up). If you wanted to sweeten this, you could add a little dollop of maple syrup or even date syrup!
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Simple Wilted Spinach in Lemon Cream Sauce Recipe (video)
This is a super simple side dish that comes together very quickly. It's easy and delicious, with enough richness that it's satisfying, but enough lightness from the green of the spinach and the acid of the lemon juice that it will nicely accompany a rich meal like fried chicken, pork chops, or a steak. Do make sure that you are using heavy cream or whipping cream (35% m.f.) because with all of the acidity in the lemon juice and white wine, anything with a lower fat percentage (like half and half or table cream) will break and curdle, leaving you with a pretty unpleasant look and texture.
We used a very nice sauvignon blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand. Make sure you're cooking with a wine you would happily drink. If the wine you're cooking with doesn't taste good enough for you to enjoy on its own, you won't enjoy it in the dish, either! You can make this recipe with regular spinach or baby spinach, though baby spinach will definitely wilt a bit faster, so you'll need to keep an eye on it.
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Easy Light and Fluffy Lemon Cookies Recipe (video)
I love lemon. It is easily one of my favourite flavours, and we got some really great fresh lemons recently and decided to find something interesting to do with them! We researched a few lemon cookies to come to this recipe, but for our final recipe, we ended up cutting the sugar in half from just about all of the recipes we found. They are still plenty sweet, but you get a great bright lemon flavour from them. I can't imagine how sweet the other recipes are!
Most of the lemon aroma comes from the lemon oil in the zest included in this recipe. The juice adds a little bit of acidity to the flavour, but you definitely don't want to skimp on the zest for that amazing lemon zing. We use vanilla paste for this, but lemon extract will work just fine for these. Once formed into balls and gently squished, you can freeze the cookies on a sheet pan and keep them in the freezer for a couple of months and take a couple out to bake from frozen when you want fresh cookies!
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Homemade Crispy Red Lentil Patties Recipe (video)
This week we did these lovely and quite easy lentil patties. A lot of people don't like lentils, and I think it's for the same reason that a lot of people don't like quinoa, and that's because they need to be washed. Both lentils and quinoa have chemicals on them called saponins that give them a bitter and slightly soapy flavour. When we wash our lentils in this video, you can easily see how cloudy the water is, and also the slight sudsing you see. You need to keep rinsing them until the water is clear and there's almost no sudsing up any more. We usually find it takes three good rinses to get them clean.
We thought that we could blend these with our stick blender, but we ended up having to put everything into the food processor. Lentils tend to absolutely soak up flavour because they are fairly bland on their own, so you do want to make sure that you give them enough seasoning. Even with the entire dried chipotle pepper in there, these were not hot at all. You can change the flavour profile however you prefer. We sould have preferred to have shallots instead of onion, but honestly, however you want to do them will work. You could give these an Indian curry flavour, or even a pumpkin spice flavour if you want.
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Fermented Twice-Fried French Fries Recipe (video)
This week's video is based on a Tiktok food hack that actually works! We found this through the talented and excellent food YouTuber Joshua Weissman, and it's about fermented french fries! It's a long way to go for great fries, but the results are excellent. They come out super crispy and they are fluffy inside with a slightly enhanced potato flavour. We let ours sit around for about five days at room temperature, and they fermented quite a bit, but you could do this for a shorter period for sure. A couple days at room temp and then into the fridge until you're ready to use it.
The fermentation uses some of the starches and sugars at the surface of the fries, which allows for a crispier finish once they're fried. One thing to note, though: The sugars are what give you that dark golden colour on the outside of the fries when cooked, so these ones will look a little pale when they're done. There is a distinct fermented smell in the water, but the final product does not really have any of that fermented funk. We did notice that they were very richly potato-ey, but was that because of the fermentation, or because we splurged on some really nice potatoes? Hard to tell. Still, they were delicious.
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Quick Tangy Avocado Salsa Recipe (video)
Whoops! Forgot to make this one live this morning. Too many things happening at once. So, here is the avocado salsa we made to go with the mushroom flautas that we made last week. The recipe is super simple, you just pop all the ingredients into a blender cup (or a blender) and blitz them together! You can definitely adjust the flavours as you go, and switch things up a little.
We used crème fraîche because we had it on hand, but more traditional would be Mexican crema. If you don't like cilantro, you could replace it with flat leaf (Italian) parsley, but it will have a very different flavour. It's also not very important to get this salsa very smooth. We like having a bit of texture in it. If you want to make it super smooth, you may need to blend it a bit longer and then run it through a strainer. This really isn't necessary.
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Homemade Crispy Mushroom Flautas Recipe (video)
Sorry, we missed a few weeks while hubby was dealing with some family stuff, but we're back! This week we made these amazing crispy mushroom flautas. They're easy and delicious. They're vegetarian, but they could be made vegan if you use a vegan cheese and use a neutral oil instead of butter to sauté the veggies. You can totally switch up the flavour profile in this dish with other fillings as well.
If you want things a little spicier, you can replace the poblano pepper with a jalapeno, or mix them together. You can use any number of different kinds of mushrooms in this recipe as well. We had some criminy mushrooms available, so that's what we used, but it would be excellent with something like oyster mushrooms or even shiitake if that's what you've got on hand. Make sure to let your mushrooms get a little bit of colour before you assemble your flautas!
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Sweet Crispy Date Pecan Doughnut Bao Recipe (video)
It's a little hard to describe exactly what these deep-fried dessert dumplings really are. They're kind of like a doughnut, but we use our bao dough to make them. They're stuffed with dates, pecans, and feta cheese, so they have a very Mediterranean sort of flavour profile. The feta is completely optional, and if you leave it out, these are vegan. They are really delicious and have a great contrast between the fluffy pilloughy fry dough and the dense and sweet date and pecan filling.
If you wanted to dust these with some powdered sugar or roll them in granulated sugar as they come out of the fryer, you certainly could (if you have more of a sweet tooth than we do). We found they really didn't need the extra sweetness, but if you want them a bit sweeter, go ahead. You want to chop the pecans up a bit, but you don't want them too fine. A little bit of crunch really makes the texture much nicer.
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Homemade Buttery Sourdough Naan Recipe (video)
Sorry, I forgot to post this yesterday! I'm a little under the weather, so I spent most of yesterday in bed. We got some really great sourdough starter from a friend of ours, so we've been playing around with various sourdough bread recipes, including this one for naan! The final result is very much like the naan you can get at nice Indian restaurants, but you don't need to stick it to the inside of your oven. A cast iron skillet or even stainless steel skillet will work just fine for this, and between the butter and the naan releasing as it cooks, it shouldn't stick.
You could definitely use more interesting butter for this if you wanted. We used unsalted cultured butter, but you could use garlic butter or even something like the chive blossom butter we made a video about a while back. If you don't have sourdough starter, you can replace it with an equivalent amount (by weight) of equal parts flour and water plus two teaspoons of instant yeast or active dry yeast. So, to replace 215g of starter, you'd want to add about 55g of flour, 55g of water, and 2tsp of instant yeast.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,282
