Cranberry Chipotle Brie

This recipe is barely a recipe since it uses prebought or premade ingredients. But it gives me a good opportunity to wish you all a happy new year … and to share a couple of holiday photos.

Both Truffle

and Ruby

had a lovely holiday season. Miss Ruby in particular was taken with our small but sturdy Christmas tree since she hadn’t seen one before. Luckily, the tree was in my sunroom (separated from the rest of the apartment by a handy door) so she didn't manage to dismantle it.

Leigh and David, my sister-in-law and brother, invited me to a New Year’s Eve party. I decided to try to replicate a baked brie with cranberries I had purchased earlier in the season at Whole Foods Market. I mixed up the flavors a bit by using my cranberry-chipotle sauce for the filling, adding a little zing to the rich brie.

Leigh and my nephew Michael helped me cut the puff pastry for the brie, and we baked it at their house so it would be warm for the guests.

Now that the new year has struck, of course, I’ll be eating more healthily. So I have a feeling that combining sugar and carbs and fat as I did here will be rare.

Still, the brie makes a lovely memory.

Happy 2012 to all……

Here Leigh puts the egg wash on the wrapped brie.

Baked Brie en Croûte with Cranberry Chipotle Sauce


Ingredients:

1 egg
1 tablespoon cold water
1 thawed puff pastry sheet (I used Pepperidge Farm; feel free to make your own if you like, but that is beyond my skill set!)
1 8-ounce round of brie (keep the rind!)
1/4 cup cranberry chipotle sauce, plus additional sauce for serving

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a small bowl whisk together the egg and water.

On a floured board roll the puff pastry sheet out until there is enough of it to wrap around the brie. Cut off the corners to make assembly easier. Use the corners to make small decorative pieces of pastry to lay on top of our brie. (We used snowflakes)

Slice the brie in half horizontally. Lay the first round half on the puff pastry, rind-side down.

Spread the 1/4 cup of sauce on the cheese. Top with the other half of the cheese, rind side up.

Wrap the pastry around the cheese, sealing the creases with the egg wash.

Turn the cheese over. Lay the decorative pastry on top, and brush the whole thing with egg wash.

Place the cheese, seam side down, on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicone mat.

Bake the brie until it turns golden brown (about 15 to 20 minutes). Let it cool for a few minutes before serving.

Serve on crackers and/or fruit with additional chipotle sauce in a side dish. Serve 6 generously.

My mother loved to tell a story about her introduction to olives.

Her mother brought a jar of the things home from the grocery store. Little Janice asked what they were.

“Olives,” said her mother. “Try one and see whether you like it.”

Janice tried one. She wasn’t sure. So she tried another. She still wasn’t sure. She kept trying. After a few minutes she still wasn’t officially sure that she liked olives. But she had eaten the whole jar.

That’s more or less the way I felt about this hummus. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I LOVE asparagus. If it were in season year round, I believe I would eat it every day. Now that it is in season I work on new ways to try it every day.

The other day I looked at some hummus and looked at some asparagus spears and thought, “Let’s put these together.”

I tasted the resulting concoction. I wasn’t sure what I thought. It was a lovely green. (It would have been even prettier if I had saved some pieces of asparagus to decorate the top!) It didn’t taste quite as asparagus-y as I had expected, however.

So I sampled it again. Like my mother before me, I was soon very full and out of my test food.

In the end I decided I’d publish the recipe. If you want more asparagus flavor, add more asparagus, or cut back on the tahini and water.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably eat the whole thing as it is….

Green Hummus

Ingredients:

1 bunch asparagus, trimmed and cut into small pieces (about 2 cups)
2 large cloves garlic
1 can (15.5 ounces) chickpeas, drained
1/4 cup sesame tahini
2 tablespoons water
lemon juice to taste (I used about 1-1/2 large lemons)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more oil as needed
1 teaspoon salt

Instructions:

Boil the asparagus pieces until just barely soft. Drain and rinse with cool water and/or ice. Set aside.

In a food processor puree the chickpeas and tahini briefly; then add the asparagus, water, and lemon juice and puree again.

Add the oil and salt and puree briefly. Taste to adjust seasonings; then refrigerate the mixture for at least an hour. Stir in a dab of additional oil just before serving.

Serve with pita chips. Makes about 2 cups.

Cooking with Love (Again)

The secret of good cooking is to cook with love—or so my mother taught me when I was a little girl. We should love the creative act of cooking. We should love and respect the ingredients we use. And we should love those for whom we cook.

Most of the time all this love comes naturally to me. If I didn’t find the act of cooking fulfilling, I wouldn’t be a food writer. I enjoy watching different foods ebb and flow in farm stands and grocery stores as the seasons shift. And I get great satisfaction from cooking for, and eating with, my family and friends. Food is part of our communal life.

Last week, however, was NOT my most loving time in the kitchen. We’ve all had so-called bad hair days. I had a bad food week.

It took me a while to realize what the problem was. All I knew was that just about everything I made (including recipes I was testing for publication) turned out somewhere between barely adequate and (shudder!) pretty awful. Usually, the range is from tasty to fabulous.

Friday afternoon I suddenly observed that the joy had gone out of my kitchen. I was viewing cooking as a task instead of a pleasure.

The problem wasn’t with cooking, of course. It was with me. I think my frazzled state might have been induced in part by the time of year. We have more sunshine now than we did in February—and the air is definitely warmer. Nevertheless, spring hasn’t quite hit the ground running yet. And summer seems a long way off.

To tackle the problem I turned off the stove and the computer and made myself a list. (I love lists!) The list was a bit of a hodgepodge because it had a dual purpose: to make me feel better in general and to help me return to work and cooking with a more cheerful and loving heart.

Here is my list. Obviously, this list won’t work for everyone. It might inspire others, however.



1. Take the dog (or the child or the cat or the ferret or whatever you have) for a long walk. Even on rainy days at this time of year one can smell spring in the air! And it’s good to get the body exercising as well as the brain.

2. Do something to cheer up someone else. When I got back from the walk I took my mother for a drive (she’s not in shape yet to go walking with Truffle and me). Making her happy made me happier.

3. Listen to–or better yet make!–some music. It’s the food of love, so it’s bound to help restore the love of food.

4. Buy hair dye. (I told you the list was idiosyncratic.) When I was 26 I suddenly noticed a gray patch in my bangs, a patch that has only gotten larger and more obvious with the passage of time. The woman who cuts my hair may say it’s distinguished to have a highlight in the front of my hairdo as much as she likes. We all know “distinguished” is a code word for “old.”

5. Simplify tasks. I knew I had to return to the kitchen. So I vowed that my next few recipes would be easy ones that took advantage of ingredients I already had in the house or could get very easily. Making cooking easy was the first step toward making it a joyful and loving experience again.

I may not be ready to make a soufflé or a cassoulet at this point, but I’m back to cooking with enthusiasm and making meals that I and others can enjoy. Here is one of the simple recipes that helped me get there.

It’s perfect for this time of year since we’re still in maple month…… Remember, spring is a time of renewal!

Maple Candied Sausage

This three-ingredient appetizer recipe comes from a delightful cookbook titled Fry Bacon. Add Onions: The Valentine Family & Friends Cookbook. A new edition of this book by Kathleen Valentine of Gloucester has just been published by the Parlez-Moi Press.

I enjoy the way Kathleen weaves reminiscences, photos of family and friends, and recipes into an attractive volume that shares her family’s life and many of its loves. She comes of Pennsylvania Dutch stock so the book features many of my favorite sweet-and-sour combinations.

Tammy Hicks of Charlemont, Massachusetts, gave me a similar recipe last year using grape jelly and barbecue sauce. Sweet and saucy, both recipes make excellent finger food (toothpick food, actually) for large parties.

I know there are those of you out there who will find this overly sweet—but kids and old folks love it! Serve it with a little sauerkraut to offset the sugar. (Kathleen’s book offers a number of recipes from which you can choose.)

Ingredients:

1 pound smoked sausage, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/3 cup brown sugar
2-1/2 tablespoons maple syrup

Instructions:

Brown the sausage pieces lightly in a frying pan. Transfer them to a 1-1/2 quart saucepan, and stir in the brown sugar and maple syrup. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring constantly; then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 1 hour, stirring from time to time. Serves 8 as an appetizer.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider taking out an email subscription to my blog. Just click on the link below!

Subscribe to In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens by Email