Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalHomemade Hearty Cabbage Rolls Recipe
Here's another one of those recipes where there are a million variations depending on where the recipe comes from, where it moved to, and who's house you're visiting! Cabbage rolls are a very regional thing and can be radically different between regions. Recipes from Hungary will differ greatly from recipes out of Croatia, for instance. This recipe is adapted from several regional recipes sort of smashed together into something tasty, and feel free to experiment!
This recipe is a bit of a multi-threaded process. You have a few things going on at the same time that you need to track. Making the filling, making the sauce, roasting the garlic, blanching the cabbage leaves, etc... so just make sure that your cooking temperatures are correct and you're keeping an eye on everything and giving it an occasional stir to make sure nothing's sticking or burning. Also, the spice mix can definitely be switched up if you want to add some warm spice to the filling like nutmeg or cinnamon, and you can also add a little dash of cayenne or even Tabasco to the sauce if you want to give it a little zing.
Potatoes Duchesse Video
This week we go a little old fashioned! This sort of potato dish was popular with caterers and such Back In The Day, but actually turns out to be delicious and pretty easy to do, as well! You're going to start off with mashed potatoes, but the recipe will be a little different. No milk or cream to get started, just butter and then an egg yolk. This will help make it a little more solid before you give it the egg wash and then pop them into the oven. Make sure to chill it a bit before that egg wash!
You can change the flavour profile however you like. Ours was very bare-bones and simple with just a whisper of nutmeg. You could spice this up with a little curry powder, or some Tabasco instead of vermouth in the mash. Lots of different ways to adjust the flavour to your liking or to match what you're serving. Traditionally, these would have been piped with a big star tip piping bag, which gives you those nice even ridges to get crispy and brown, but you can also do as we did and spoon it out into mounds and just rough them up a little with a fork.
Bacon Scallop Corn Fritters Recipe
A bit of a hodgepodge this week! This is a sort of hybrid recipe that hubby thought up based on the shrimp fritters we did recently crossed with a hushpuppy. So, we've taken the fritter recipe and added some corn meal and corn flour for texture and flavour! It came out really delicious, too.
A few tricks to keep in mind for this one. If you're not going to use sparkling water, please at least use very cold water in your batter and try to keep it as cold as possible before it hits the oil. This will help keep things light and crispy. Also, do not overcook the bacon before adding it to the batter. You just want a little bit of colour, and you don't want it to be crispy, because it's going to get cooked again inside the fritter. Also also, make sure that the bacon is not super hot before you add it to your batter, otherwise it will start cooking it before it hits the oil, so drain and set your bacon aside to cool before you make the batter. Once the batter has come together, you want to get moving quickly, and get it in the hot oil right away.
You could definitely add other things to this. Some chopped green onions or chives would be great (we were out!), and you could replace the parsley with mitsuba or cilantro if you wanted. A little lemon or lime zest might be an interesting addition too, to add a bit of a citrusy zing.
Homemade Individual Serving Beef Wellington Recipe
Last year around this time we did a video about making blitz puff pastry. The thumbnail for that video was a beef wellington that we had made, but we haven't done a video on the wellingtons until today. So here it is! We made a couple of small errors on this. We rolled the dough very slightly too thin, and they could have used just a tiny bit more time in the oven to get a more uniform browning, but they were still crispy and flaky and really delicious.
The real trick here is the Duxelles: The mushroom/onion/shallot combination that is cooked down to a paste. Most people undercook this part. You really want to cook it down a lot. This is your chance to add a lot of very concentrated mushroom flavour. You don't even have to use fancy mushrooms like porcini or morels to get a really intense earthy mushroom flavour from this dish. Regular button mushrooms or cremini will work just fine. And of course we always recommend deglazing your mushrooms with a little splash of cognac or vermouth for a more nuanced flavour. The foie gras is just adding an intense richness to the overall recipe.
Texas Pecan Pie Recipe - No Corn Syrup!
We've been seeing a few recipes for pecan pie showing up online lately, and people are starting to do pecan pie recipes that do not include a ton of corn syrup, so we wanted to try it as well! Hubby went back to the family vault in Houston to look up some recipes that were syrup-free, and this is the recipe he got. We adapted it a little, because it still had a ton of sugar, and we cut the sugar basically in half for this recipe. It was still plenty sweet, but amazingly it taste like pecans and not just syrup!
Do make sure you put this over a baking sheet, because it does puff up a great deal in the oven while it's cooking. It will settle a lot as it cools, though. We don't have much of a sweet tooth, but if you like things sweeter, you could easily increase the sugar in this recipe. The original recipe called for 1 1/2c of brown sugar and 1/2c of granulated sugar. We cut that in half and just used 1c of brown sugar. If you want it sweeter, you could just ad 1/2c of granulated and it would increase the sweetness by a lot.
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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: 3,280
