Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Ingredients:

Filling:
1 cup walnuts, finely chopped
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp ground cinnamon

Batter:
8 tbsp (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup sour cream
Confectioners' sugar for dusting (optional)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter and flour a 10-inch Bundt pan.

Make the filling: in a small bowl, mix together the walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon.

Make the batter: in a mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until the mixture is pale and creamy using an electric mixer. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until fully incorporated.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the batter in two additions, alternating with the sour cream, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Mix until the batter is smooth.

Spoon one-third of the batter into the prepared pan and smooth it. Sprinkle the batter with half of the walnut filling. Next, cover the filling with another third of the batter and smooth it. Top with the remaining filling. Spoon the remaining batter on top and smooth it.

Bake until the top of the cake is golden brown and a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out dry, 40 to 45 minutes. Let the cake cool slightly in the pan. Remove it from the pan by inverting it onto a wire cooling rack. When completely cool, dust with confectioners' sugar.

Personal Note: I never dust with sugar, myself. Yum yum yum. Now that I've finally, after like a decade, figured out how to properly cream butter and sugar, cakes come out better. Sheepish! This is from that Jewish cookbook I mentioned earlier. My aunt and grandma used to make sour cream coffee cakes and kuchen...makes me miss them. And it really is the perfect partner for coffee--as a treaty breakfast it's sublime.

Potato Kugel

3 large onions
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 pounds (about 5 medium) russet potatoes, peeled
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup matzo meal
2 teaspoons salt
Freshly ground black pepper

1. Thinly slice 2 of the onions.

2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Add the sliced onions and cook, stirring often, until lightly caramelized, about 30 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

3. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a 13-by-9-inch baking dish.

4. Grate the potatoes and the remaining onion in a food processor equipped with a shredding disk or by hand. Transfer them in a large bowl. Stir in the remaining 5 tablespoons of oil, the caramelized onions, eggs, and matzo meal, and season with the salt and pepper. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish and smooth the top.

5. Bake until the kugel is well browned on top, about 55 minutes. Let cool slightly. Serve warm.

Personal Note: This comes from a Jewish cookbook I grabbed on a whim this summer at a blowout book sale out east. It has an entire section on kugel, including an apple kugel that stews in kirsch! It cracks me up too, because the kugel section randomly references Henry James and then out of nowhere connects a quote of his to, um, kugel. It's all so very Animal Crossing, if ya know what I mean...

But anyway. This is great, because it's so freaking easy. The key to the entire dish is well caramelized onions. Other than that, it's pretty much latkes baked into a big casserole instead of fried--which is great for me, because I love making latkes with my parents but am a wimp and won't deep fry on my own! So this is a handy substitute.

Made it for "German Potluck Part 2" at Gary and Rachel's last night. Fun.

Chicken Tagine in Flat Bread

Chicken Tagine in Flat Bread

From The New York Times Jewish Cookbook edited by Linda Amster (2003).
From Sam Gugino.

Yield: 4 servings

3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups boneless chicken dark meat (about 4 large boneless thighs), cut/torn into 1/2-inch cubes/pieces
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1/8 teaspoon saffron threads crushed into 1/2 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup small pitted green olives, halved
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1/3 cup toasted sliced almonds
4 pieces pocketless pita bread or similar flat bread, each about 5-7 inches in diameter
1/2 cilantro leaves

1. Put 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Season the chicken with cumin and salt and pepper. Cook the chicken for 5 minutes, stirring so that it browns evenly.
2. Add the onion, garlic, and ginger and cook for 3-4 minutes, until the onion softens and turns light brown. Add the saffron stock, olives, and lemon rind and bring to a simmer. Cook for 10 minutes.
3. Preheat the broiler.
4. Adjust the salt and pepper for the tagine if needed, stir in the almonds and reduce further so only a few tablespoons of liquid remain. Remove from the heat.
5. Brush one side of the bread with the remaining olive oil. Broil for a few minutes until it is lightly browned and slightly crisp.
6. Put each pita, crisp side down, on a 12-by-12-inch sheet of foil. Divide the chicken tagine among the 4 pieces of bread and sprinkle with cilantro leaves. Roll into a cone and secure the bottom by twisting the foil. Fold the top back to expose the top of the roll.

Personal Note: This is the first dish from this cookbook we've tried and we tried it tonight for dinner. Good sign! I think with this dish alone the book paid for itself in spades. This may well be the hands down most delicious thing I've ever made. No lie. Eat this and have a gastronomic orgasm. Seriously. It's extremely layered, with lots of subtle flowering on your palate of different undertones. And when you make it be prepared to have an incredible smelling kitchen; between the cumin-seasoned browning of the meat to the minced ginger to the lemon zest to the toasting of the almonds to the typical wonderful smell of that always-foundational step of cooking onions, your kitchen will smell better than anything you've ever known.

Like usual, the best way to get the most flavor out of the meat while browning it--a step that makes or breaks the flavor of most recipes that require it--is to get the cast iron really sizzling hot and then to cook the meat briefly (but at a very high temperature!). So take the recipe's first step with a grain of salt and brown the chicken the best way possible--hot (but not charred) and fast.

We used oval/rectangular sheets of naan and instead of broiling them we brushed them with oil as it says to and then put them two at a time on a flat cast iron griddle pan over moderately high heat to toast them. Then we each scooped some of what was in the deeper cast iron pan used to do the full dish onto our separate plates of naan and ate it with our hands (kind of scooping the contents up with the bread). If I was serving company then the recipe's directions for foil wrapping the rolls would make sense and I'd follow it faithfully.

It was SO GOOD. Yeah, likely the best thing I've ever made. So good I want to share it with everyone I meet, ha.

Labor intensively, we used the really good green olives from the market--the ones with pits in them. Only because they were what we had available leftover in the fridge. Yes, it was a huge pain to halve and pit each one, but I didn't really mind 'cause this recipe is tons o' prep work anyway and I'm the kind of person who loves that part of cooking (much more than the actual cooking, i.e., splatters and heat source step). Oh, and we omitted the cilantro 'cause yeah, I am not a fan. And used homemade stock (the recipe cites the guidelines for homemade stock elsewhere in the book) because yeah, we always have it on hand and it does make a big difference.

Yes saffron is expensive, but we are lucky and a downtown Indian grocery sells little bottles of it for surprisingly cheap (of course, it's likely not very high grade, and it comes from Spain. But we don't care, 'cause that's better than not having any at all :).

Latkes or Jewish Potato Pancakes

Latkes

Recipe courtesy of Marc Silverstein for Food Network Kitchens (December 1999).

2 pounds russet potatoes, grated fine
1 medium to large onion, grated fine
2 large eggs, beaten
1/4 cup matzo meal
Salt and pepper, to taste
Vegetable oil, for frying
Sour cream and apple sauce, as accompaniments

Personal Note: The ingredients list is from Silverstein, but the rest of the recipe was for some reason never retrieved (read: printed fully out) and the online version is long gone. So the method below might be his, but might not be; it works well for us. The part salvaged from the incomplete recipe that is vital is the drying part. A relatively dry potato-onion "batter" makes all the difference (we've made latkes for years but they only really became joygasmic at our house once we found Silverstein's version).

Peel the potatoes and rough chop (into thirds or so) so they're in chunks large enough to feed through the food processor. Do the same for the onion. Grate both into the food processor using the rough-grate blade disc (not the fine one) and feeding the chunks into the processor (empty the processor bowl as needed and continue until everything is grated into rough short strings, kind of like homemade pasta). Using a kitchen towel, dry the grated potatoes and onions thoroughly (this is important). Put them in a large bowl (we use the largest widest mouthed one we have; a silver salad tossing bowl). Add the beaten eggs and matzo meal and mix with your hands until it's the correct consistency. Add the salt and pepper and mix a bit more. We then heat up just enough vegetable oil in the large fryer-sized cast iron skillet. Using a spatula and a spoon, we place a lump of the potato mixture onto the spatula, flatten it with the spoon, and slide it into the oil (we do 3 pancakes at a time). When the edges begin to get crispy and golden brown, check to flip sides. As each pancake finishes cooking (we like them golden brown, not too dark but crispy through the whole exterior) place them on a rack above an old cookie sheet. If you wish to keep them warm as you fry, place this rack/sheet in a semi-warm oven (we had ours at about 145 F) and keep taking it out and in as more pancakes finish and become ready to place on the rack.

I cooked all of dinner tonight kind of on a casual whim and I was surprised at how easy and good it turned out. I made some ad-libbed apple sauce with leftover empire apples (some of our older apples were too soft to be enticing as eating apples but fine for other purposes), freshly grated nutmeg, cinnamon, a little bit of brown sugar (I don't normally add this but tonight the apples seemed a bit too tart even for my taste) and a bit of lemon juice (spruces up apples always) and water. Just stuck it all in a deep saucepan and cooked it down at medium heat. Turned out well. As it was cooking I prepared the latke mixture (something I've done before). I'd say tonight I used 2 1/2 pounds of russets, 2 1/2 large onions (they were huge onions, and one was one of those that you find after peeling has a small side onion attached to it)--I always make ours a little more onion-y than called for--and the rest of the ingredients. I wasn't sure at first that there was enough binding agent, but the latkes came out just fine. And the applesauce was still tart and warm when we began eating. Yum.