Feasting Friday- Just a Quickie

Things got a little awayfrom me this week, work to do, social and book obligations, and a little bit of the "Oh Crap it's Fall" scatteredness.

Also, I have been desperately trying to book airline tickets for a wonderful vacation for myself and Charming Suitor for the last three months which is making me batty.  Want to see a little animated movie I made about it?



If the movie doesn't play for you here, you can see it HERE
Anyhoo, with all of this I haven't really had time to focus on a fully realized post for you today.  But sometimes, all you need is a quickie!

For example, tonight we are going to dinner at a friend's house.  Big John loves dessert.  I once brought, at his request, a chocolate cake with milk chocolate frosting and halfway through his second piece he said, not directly to any of us, but more to the universe "I wuv cake." in the way only a 6'4" gentle giant can say.

I also found myself in possession of half a loaf of brioche from the local Boulangerie, ust a day off from being sandwich worthy.  And if you have stale bread, milk half and half or cream, eggs and sugar, you have bread pudding.  Five minutes prep, twenty five minutes in the oven, and the most comforting, soul soothing dessert ever.  Have some chocolate chips?  Toss them in, I did.  Nuts?  Sure, why not?  Dried cherries, cranberries or raisins.  Chopped apples or pears, sliced bananas or fresh berries.  Little bits of crystallized ginger.  Really, you can tart it up however you like.  But even at its most basic, it is delish.

So here you are, just between us.  A little quickie in the afternoon.  I won't tell anyone!

Basic Bread Pudding

1/2-3/4 loaf of day old bread
4 eggs
2 c whole milk, half and half, cream, or a combo
1 c sugar (white for mild, brown for a more caramelly richness)
2 t vanilla
4 T butter, grated (more on this below)

Preheat oven to 350.  Cut bread into large cubes.  Blend eggs, milk, sugar and vanilla into a custard and pour over the bread cubes.  Let soak in for a few minutes, up to a couple of hours.  Add up to 1 c total of any add-ins you like- chocolate chips or shavings, nuts, fruit, whatever!  Pour into buttered casserole pan.  Sprinkle grated butter evenly over the top.  Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a knife slid into the middle comes out clean.

Serve warm, cold, or room temp.  Add hot fudge, caramel sauce, or berry coulis.  Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.  Or just eat it as is!

Grated Butter

When I first discovered that my microplane grater and sticks of butter could be friends, it changed my cooking.

Forget "dotting the top with butter" making a mess, not to mention only little parts getting that buttery goodness.  Grated butter can bespread perfectly over an entire casserole like a light dusting of snow. 

Want the fluffiest omelets and scrambled eggs ever?  Grate your butter directly into your beaten eggs, where it will slowly melt and emulsify as you cook the eggs, keeping them ethereal and never greasy or rubbery, even if you have to hold them for a few minutes before serving. 

Hate that your hard butter turns your morning toast into crumbs or mashes down your bagel into a bagel chip?  Grate your butter over the top and it will soften and be spreadable in a flash.

Want to butter rice or cous cous or something that can get gummy easily with too much fussing?  Grated butter will fluff in with a couple of forks in no time.  And your mashed potatoes will never be the same after you blend in grated butter instead of big chunks or pre-melted.

I use my Microplane for this, for ultimate fineness, but your box grater should work fine.  Just make sure your butter is either very cold or frozen, or you will have a gloopy mess on your hands.

Do you have a quickie tip or recipe to share with the class?

Yours in Good Taste,
The Polymath

The Polymath Visits the Country, Part Seven

The book needed to get done, so I secluded myself out at the Farm. The Farm is my family’s weekend place, about an hour and fifteen minutes outside Chicago. We've had it for over 30 years and it is one of my favorite places on the planet. It is a lovely place at the end of a long gravel road, with beautiful woods and lots of room and trees and quiet. There is a pool for the summer and a fireplace for the winter, and cable tv, because it isn't exactly about roughing it! When I need to have real peace and quiet and to focus, it is my sanctuary. So with my deadline positively LOOMING, I packed up myself and headed out there to limit distractions.

And then I got bored, so I called my favorite distraction, Jen, and begged her to come visit.

Lying on floats in the pool and discussing our mutual love of procrastination, and the things we do when we should be writing books, and pondering why there were about fifty tiny little baby frogs the size of a thumbnail in the pool with us, I mentioned the recipe contests.

“Oh my god, how are you not gaining weight eating all that food?” She asked me incredulous that I had not doubled in girth.

“Well, good lord, I’m not cooking any of it! I’m just submitting the recipes.” Which is logic that makes sense to me, if not to anyone else.

“You aren’t cooking the recipes?”

“Are you kidding? Can you imagine me making forty butters? I’d be a house!” Instead of my current size, which I think of as more ‘condo’.

“So how do you know they work?”

“Well, I’m a good cook, I know what proportions should be like, I read cookbooks like they’re novels, I subscribe to every cooking magazine known to man, I just make them up.”

“So you’re not really entering cooking contests, you are entering WRITING contests!”

I think about this. “Well, I guess, if you want to be a stickler about it!”

Jen begins to laugh. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! Don’t people like spend a whole year making their families taste eight-six different versions of things before they enter? And you are just like, la di da, I’ll just make some stuff up and send it in!”

“Well, I have to actually cook the 7up stuff!” I’m feeling a little sheepish with her mocking, and want to defend myself.

“What 7up stuff?”

I explain about my holy grail, the $70,000 7up grand prize.

“Why start cooking now?” Jen snorts. “Why not just make it up!”

“Well…” I hesitate.

“Well?”

“They need a picture of the food.” I admit, knowing full well that if they didn’t, in a million years I wouldn’t bother to test those recipes either. That’s that whole laziness thing again.

Jen stops laughing out a lung just long enough to point out “Dude, you are totally insane, and you have a mini-frog on your neck.”

“You’ll see.” I say, removing the wayward amphibian.

“Yeah, I’ll see allright, when the truckload of Butter Bells shows up at your door!”

I had, in fact, already considered that in addition to the grand prize I might win up to thirty-nine ceramic butter bells, and had made up a list of people to whom I would give them for holiday gifts this year.

I did not mention this to Jen, who was still laughing at me, and mentally crossed her name off the list of possible Christmas butter bell recipients.

NEXT: The Polymath Cooks with 7Up

The Polymath Finds the Holy Grail, Part Six

It was on the first day of the second week of my new habit that I found the mother-lode.

7up.

7up was looking for the best entrée using 7up, and was paying SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for the grand prize. This would be the best one ever! I blocked off the dates for the Miami finalist cook-off in the old calendar, and went to the 7up website. I conveniently ignored the fact that I don't actually like 7up, and when craving something citrus, I prefer Fresca, Sprite or Squirt.

I noticed that the contest was called the Receta contest, that the instructions were in Spanish, that the sponsor was Telemundo Television, and that the celebrity judge was Carlos from Top Chef season 3. But there was a place to click to get the instructions in English, so I paid it no mind.

The rules were simple. It had to be an entrée serving at least 4 people, and it had to include a minimum of 1 cup of 7up. And the entry had to have a photo accompanying it.

This would be a challenge.

For this is where I admit that I wasn’t actually cooking any of the recipes I was submitting.

I was just taking recipes I had developed along the years and tweaking them to fit contest rules. After all, I’m a great cook, remember? I know how much cheese to put in my mac and cheese, and how much ground mustard powder to put in the marinade for my Mustard Grilled Chicken Thighs. I didn’t need to start pre-spending any of my future winnings on groceries, and for sure I didn’t need to gain ten pounds by having to taste forty different types of butter.

The book?

Thanks for asking, it was going verrrry slowly, as every third hour I felt the need to track down a new contest, or submit an additional recipe to one I had already entered. I started waking up with butter blends fully formed in my head, like Paul McCartney did with “Yesterday”, only for me it was “smoked sea salt maple butter for pork tenderloin” or “anchovy parmesan butter for foccacia”.

It became a part of my routine.

Get up. Brush teeth. Shower. Dress. Check e-mail. Enter Plugra Butter Blend Contest.

Think about book. Enter recipe contest.

Make lunch. Get inspired by lunch and Enter Plugra Butter Blend Contest.

Take nap. Awake with new idea and Enter Plugra Butter Contest.

Check website for new recipe contests. Work on book. Eat dinner. Watch TV. See something on tv which inspires new recipe for contest, and enter new recipe in contest.

Go to bed. Dream of butter. Repeat.

MMMMMmmmmmmmm. Butter.

NEXT: The Polymath Visits the Country

The Polymath Ponders Making Money From Home, Part Four

After watching not only the chicken contest, but every other competition I can find on the Food Network for a couple of days, I can’t take it anymore. In the middle of trying to flesh out a chapter, I click over from Microsoft Word (finish the book finish the book finish the book) to Explorer, and type into Google “Recipe Contests”. I immediately find that there are whole websites devoted to archiving info on such contests, and that there are literally dozens in every possible arena. Forget the chicken, there are contests for pork and pizza and Prosecco. There are contests for cheese and chili and chocolate. Contests for cooking with kids, cooking with grandma, and cooking with Kraft products. I’m hesitant. Where to look, where to click first? I see one that catches my eye. Plugra European Butter contest.

I use Plugra.

It is my favorite daily-use butter.

I click. A form pops up on my screen.

Plugra European Butter is looking for your best butter blend. Grand prize $5000, and a trip for two to New York, and appearance on a local New York television show, plus Plugra may use your recipe in a blended butter for sale. Fifty honorable mention prizes of special ceramic butter bells for storing your Plugra.

All they need is basic info, the recipe for the butter, with Plugra being the primary ingredient, and serving suggestions. I think about the carefully crafted herb butter I have developed for use in my Thanksgiving Turkey recipe.
It is flawless.

I fill in the form in less than two minutes and press send. It thanks me for entering and encourages me to enter again as often as I like.

As often as I like turns out to be over forty butter recipes during the next two weeks.

Apparently butter is very inspiring to me.

There is brown sugar, cinnamon, pecan butter for use on baked sweet potatoes. Strawberry balsamic butter for putting on scones or biscuits. Feta oregano kalamata olive butter for your lamb chops. Dijon caramelized shallot thyme butter for chicken, and BBQ butter for pork chops. Chocolate hazelnut butter, cheddar chive butter, orange nutmeg butter and lemon rosemary garlic butter. Tomato basil butter, and pesto butter, and sweet pea butter with mint.

And my favorite:

Honey bacon butter for your waffles and pancakes.

Yep.

Bacon.

In butter.

Shut up. I am a genius.

NEXT: The Polymath Goes Postal