Crepes, both a meal and a dessert

Okay, I will admit I have made crepes before, but never on my own. The one time I attempted the recipe occurred in Culinary class last year, and I had the assistance of 4 group mates and the experience of the Chef. I don't really count that as cooking crepes since I didn't even cook half of the recipe. This time I got the full experience and realized just how careful you have to be when cooking crepes. The first few crepes i made, well they did not exactly turn out to well. It took me a while to perfect the whole "quickly spread the crepe batter around the pan" part of the instructions, but I eventually caught on, as the picture shows. I like challenges, and those tricky little crepes gave me one! At least flipping them over to the other side to cook was slightly easier than originally putting the batter on the pan. (The time I made crepes in culinary class, my partner Amy cooked the crepes, i helped make the dough and stir the caramelized apples.) Making the caramelized apples was definitely the easier task, though the recipe I used this time did not create the same product as the one Chef gave my group to use last year. The ingredients and amounts must have been different. After I finished cooking the apples, I used them to fill the crepes(as shown in the picture). Before I actually ate my crepe though I made sure I added some whipped cream, it makes everything taste better. To my surprise, I successfully--after a few trials and errors that is--created a dish that could be served both as a food and a desert!

When I think of crepes I think of French food...
When I decided on making crepes, I thought they were strictly a French food, it did not occur to me that other countries across Europe also have their own variations. When I further researched crepes, I noticed the name Suzette appearing frequently and I did not understand why. Eventually, I realized that Suzette crepes are the most famous form of French dessert crepes. While all across the country side, farmers and noblemen had frequently enjoyed crepes as an after supper dessert, crepes officially gained their fame with the creation of the Suzette crepe. As the story goes, the Prince of Whales arrived at a restaurant with a young lady named Suzette. After finishing his meal, the Prince ordered a crepe and the cook, a Mr. Henry Charpentier hurriedly created a crepe with an orange sauce flambe, naming it after the lovely lady in the Prince's company. The crepe I made obviously is not the Suzette, but i decided to make one of my favorite types of crepes instead, caramelized apple.

Other Apple Treats in American history...
As I looked through two different cookbooks pertaining to America's history (one about the Colonial period, the other about the Civil War) one fruit appeared in both dessert sections, the apple. One, a recipe for an apple pie, the other a recipe for Skillet-Fried apples. Both books portray sweet desserts as a luxury, because for the colonists the ingredients were not plentiful and Civil War soldiers did not have the time or the opportunity to make desserts. Though when the soldiers had the opportunity, they would dry apples to prevent them from going bad and save them as a treat in the later months when fruits were even more scarce. Not only did apples provide a good treat for the soldiers after days and days of marching, the dried apples also provided health benefits such as vitamin C which helped keep the warriors healthy. I guess the saying "an apple a day keeps the doctor away has some truth to it." American colonists though, did not eat apples for their health benefits. Apples were one of the many fruits that filled pies in the colonies when a special occasion called for a special dessert, since, like I said earlier, the ingredients were hard to come by. Both the Colonists and the soldiers took advantage of what desserts they could create, often using the apple as a filler.

The recipe...
Go to this link if you want to use the same recipe i did to create my lovely crepes!
http://www.ihavenet.com/recipes/Caramelized-Apple-Crepes-Recipe-Emma-Christensen.html

My Vovo's Portuguese Soup

I am half Portuguese, and like any American out there, my diet is scattered with foods that pertain to my heritage, Portuguese soup being one of them. Whenever I used to go over to my Vovo's apartment, she would stuff us with all sorts of foods making sure that we ate our fill. My favorite food that she used to make was the Portuguese soup, a perfect mixture of chourico, potatoes, kale, and a pea soup base. My sister always used to call the soup a perfectly balanced meal, because there are vegetables, meat and wheat if its served with bread.

Cooking the soup turned out to be relatively easy, the process takes a while to complete though. I guess patience really is a virtue. First I had to make the pea soup, which means waiting for peas to dissolve in hot water, but the peas did not all dissolve so I had to fish out a few of the undissolved ones with a spoon. Then you let the chourico soak in the pea soup for flavor along with the kale and potatoes. Before I served the soup to my family I took out the chourico, cut it into pieces (like in the picture), and stirred it back into the mixture. For creating a whole meal, instead of just a desert for once, I found this actually pretty easy.

If you want to reach back to your Portuguese roots or just try this recipe...

• Wash and rinse a bag of split peas
• add the peas to 3quarts of water and let simmer for an hour
• add two chourico sticks and let simmer for another hour.
• add potatoes that are cut in small 1/4 size pieces and continue to simmer
• add 6 cups of fresh chopped Kale

The source of this recipe is my mom, who got it from my Vovo.

Cheesecake...or is it a pie?

I love cheesecake, original cheesecake. So when I searched through the various cookbooks in my house for a cheesecake recipe I made sure I chose one that did not have extra toppings, like walnuts or strawberries. The one I ended up using had the option of adding pie filling as a topping, but I did not add it. Now, making this cheesecake was an interesting process. First off, my mom has never made a cheesecake before, therefore I did not have the benefit of her experience in making sure the mixture looked right, and to top it all off my Vovo (a.k.a. my great-grandmother) told my mom over the phone that a cheesecake was too difficult for me to bake. What an encouraging start... Despite my lack of confidence in how the dessert would turn out in the end, I began the recipe. The crust came first. Not only was the crust more sticky than the Irish soda bread dough, it probably took me a half an hour to attempt to evenly spread it around the whole pan. Finally I moved onto actually making the filling of the cheesecake. I followed the instructions and ended up with a white almost liquid batter. Both my mom and I believed I had followed the recipe wrong, but after double checking a couple times I realized i had not made a mistake. After pouring the batter into the crust, I had to place the dessert in the oven. In order to do that, I had to walk all the way across my kitchen with a 9inX13inX2in pan practically full with a liquid like mixture. Barely making it to the oven, I slowly and carefully entered the cheesecake into the oven. Now I just had to sit and wait 50 minutes. 50 minutes became 55, which became an hour and 5 minutes, because I had no idea how to tell if the cheesecake had finished cooking; the dessert still jiggled a little in the middle when I attempted to take it out of the oven instead of remaining firm. Eventually, after 15 extra minutes of cooking, I discovered the cheesecake was indeed cooked and I could let it cool. Hey, the cheesecake turned out okay and I really enjoyed baking it so I must have done something right.

History...
As early as 9000BC, human populations have known about cheese, a food created from the milk of an animal. The first time historians have found evidence of cheese in a cake like form was in the 5th century BC in Ancient Greece. As a treat for behaving, children sometimes would receive cheese-cakes--a mixture of cheese, flour, and honey. Today cheesecakes alter greatly from their original roots, instead of real cheese, cream cheese often becomes the major ingredient in the dessert. Honey, also, no longer sweetens the cakes, instead cooks use sugar and other modern sweeteners. Even though the recipe for cheesecakes has changed greatly over the span of time it has existed, the fact that a form of the dessert existed in ancient Greece amazes me. Some little kid from centuries and centuries ago could of had the same favorite dessert as me.

American Agricultural Fairs and Some Rhubarb Custard Pie

Recipes, such as for a Rhubarb Custard Pie, truly demonstrates the importance of a balance of flavors within a dish. Rhubarb by itself has a very bitter flavor to be able to eat it somewhat plain, I dip the rhubarb in sugar before each bite. Therefore the object of the cooks that created the rhubarb custard pie recipe must make the custard sweet enough in order to create a balance.

Usually, we never make just a plain rhubarb pie, the majority of the time strawberries are also a key ingredient, but I wanted to try something a little different than what my mother usually makes. I will admit right now that I did not make the pie crust, my mom and I bought some when we went to the store to buy ingredients. After I laid out the pie crust in the dish and removed any excess, I began mixing what will soon be the filling and then poured it into the dish. This recipe taught me something new I had never known before. Before placing the second pie crust over the top of the pie, I had to "dot the pie with two tablespoons of butter." I had no idea what that entailed until my mom so graciously told me that means to space small chunks of butter throughout the whole pie. Once I finished making the pie, I put it in the oven to cook. When I went to clean up my mess, I was pleasantly surprised to find left over pie crust dough. As a tradition in my household, extra pie crust dough is used to make one of my favorite pastries, a butterhorn.

History...

For this entry I will not tell you the origins of rhubarb pie, instead I will share with you a piece of American cultural that originated in small rural farming towns all throughout the nation, a celebration that revolves around culinary and husbandry skills, Agricultural Fairs. Once a year in the summer months, small rural towns devote days and sometimes even weeks to festivities. At these fairs, farmers show of their prized crops in different forms including pickled and canned fruits and vegetables. Pastries, such as cakes, pies and cookies, as well as jams are also popular on the fair grounds. Throughout the course of the fair, contests take place, judging who made the best pie, or who grew the best vegetables, or who raised the best pigs. By the end of the fair, the judges choose a winner in all the categories that exist and they take home the blue ribbon! Agricultural fairs in American have always been run in this fashion, though today the fairs main purpose is to commemorate the life of the farmer in rural America before the introduction of supermarkets, in a simpler era of the United States. Agricultural fairs remember a time when woman could stay at home and cook, keep house, and assist their husbands instead of being forced to acquire jobs in town, a time when people prized their best vegetables and the balance of flavors they could create in pies such as a rhubarb custard pie.

My Portuguese Sloppy Joes

Like every other American kid out there, I've had a sloppy joe. For an easy meal, my mom would through together some hamburger, tomato sauce, and chopped onions and peppers. Sometimes for supper, we would also have chourico and peppers, which is slices of chourice and chopped peppers. My mom decided to combine the two recipes, giving birth to the Portuguese sloppy joe. Instead of just hamburger, the recipe calls for ground chourico and gives the option of putting in chourico slices as well. When I made the dish, I only included the ground chourico. Like the Portuguese soup, I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy making chourico and hamburger sloppy joes are. And yet again making the sloppy joes did take time. I had to patiently wait for hours, as the mixture I created slowly cooked in the crock pot, making sure to stir it every 20 minutes or so, so the filling evenly cooked. After letting the meat mixture cool, my family and I ate it before heading off to see Grease, the play.

Did a guy named Joe invent the sloppy Joe?

According to my research (foodtimeline.org), sloppy joes are not named after a guy named Joe, the sandwich name originates from the fact that 1) it is messy and 2) it is made for all those average Americans out there--also known as average joes. Though food historians believe the inspiration for the dish goes further back than 1934--the first time the recipe was recorded in a cookbook. Filling, meat sandwiches have existed throughout history though; meat sandwiches that resemble the sloppy joe. For example medieval minced meat pies and the English shepherd's pie. Basically, the sloppy joe was an economical way to have a filling meat meal during the great depression, inspired by older chopped meat dishes, that grew popular and found its way into the twenty first century.

A side thought...

By cooking recipes like Portuguese soup and sloppy joes, I have discovered that cooking for myself and others actually isn't as difficult as I though it would be. Of course I am not cooking meals that take hours and hours of focus and dedication and I do not have the pressure of others expecting me to make supper every single night. Before I began cooking for this project, I hardly ever helped my mom make supper or cook meals in general, I stuck to making desserts, my favorite to cook. But after this project, I think I will help out in the kitchen more, learning how to cook real meals because not only did I discover the importance of being able to prepare meals for myself, I also discovered I enjoy cooking meals. Thanks to my independent project, I discovered not only do I enjoy eating, I enjoy cooking too!

Brownies, a classic but delicious desert.

I really had no choice; when I decided upon cooking as my independent project I knew I had to bake brownies. The dessert is easy enough to make, melt some chocolate and butter and add some sugar, flour, and eggs, yet I do not believe I have ever made brownies from scratch. Buying a box of Betty Crocker Mix and adding some water, oil, and maybe an egg or two just seemed so much less time consuming. Looking back on it, I really do not understand why I never took the time to bake from scratch one of my favorite desserts. I bet some of you out there are guilty of the very same thing! But just like the quote at the top of my blog states: be fearless and have fun, try cooking something you have not before.

Memories...
As a child, I always helped my mom mix together the brownie mix and at the end I always remember begging her to lick the spoon. Sometimes, if I was particularly lucky that day, she would comply, and I would spend the next five minutes making sure not a drop of chocolate batter remained. For the next half hour or so, I would wait impatiently on a stool in the kitchen that I placed in front of the stove, checking every two seconds how much longer the brownies needed to cook, and always disappointed so little time had gone by. Finally after patiently--or rather impatiently--waiting for the dessert to finish cooking, the timer would beep and my mother would rush over to the oven, removing the hot brownies and unleashing their delicious smell. Now came the most torturous part of the process, having to wait 5 whole minutes while the brownies cooled down to a temperature that I could eat them at. Eating brownies for a 5 year old me was not a simple process. My best friend Brittany and I used to take a small chunk of our brownie and roll it up into a little round ball and then eat it. Now, when I look back on it, I never understand how I could have eaten a brownie that way, but 5 year olds do like to play with food.

Actually cooking the brownies...
I am going to apologize in advance for not taking a picture of the brownies I made. To tell you the truth I was kind of embarrassed about how they ended up looking. If I make brownies again in the future, I'll post a picture, promise. Back to actually baking the brownies... In order to create the batter, I had to melt butter and chocolate together, one of my favorite cooking tasks, melting things like butter and chocolate. After that, all I had to do was add in and mix together all the other ingredients. I really don't know where I went wrong to make the brownies look the way they did when I finished. For one, a huge air bubble formed on the top while the dessert cooked. Oh well, the brownies still tasted delicious, especially the batter.

Easter Traditions and Irish Influences

Traditionally for Easter supper, my family and I have honey ham, mashed potatoes, salad, Easter bread, and various cookie danishes that my aunt loves to bake, but this year we went against tradition. For Easter, my two sisters, mom, and I prepared a traditional Irish breakfast black and white sausage and all. Now just to set the record straight, I am not the tiniest bit Irish, the desire to cook an Irish breakfast for our family came from my eldest sister whom had just spent her junior year in collage abroad in Ireland. Personally for this Irish Easter brunch, I baked two loaves of traditional Irish Soda Bread, cooked the chocolate chip pancakes, and prepared the potato farls to be fried. In all the Irish craziness, my family did stand true to one tradition, hard boiling and coloring Easter eggs.


EASTER EGGS
Family History...
Every Easter since I can remember my family and I have made hard boiled eggs, decorating them by creating designs on their shells with a couple crayons and dieing them different colors. Through the years the artwork has grown better and at times the quantity of eggs created has gone from a dozen to 4 dozen. One year, my mother volunteered to bring in 4 dozen hard boiled eggs for an Easter breakfast at church, and all 48 of these eggs had to be uniquely decorated and colored. Naturally, my mom believed such a task was perfect for Jackie, Steve, Rach, and I to complete. Afterwards I never wanted to see a hard boiled egg again... But the annoyance did not last long, because by the time the next year rolled around, there I was sitting at the table with my 3 siblings. a dozen or so eggs, crayons, and food coloring ready to keep the tradition alive.

Recipe (more like directions actually)...
Hard boil however many eggs you wish to have for the occasion.
Color the eggs using crayons. Do not press down to hard or else the shell of the egg will break.
Finally mix the 10 drops of food coloring with 2 tablespoons of vinegar and half a cup of boiling water.


Potato Farls
One of my two Irish cooking experiments...
When making this dish I referred to a recipe similar to the one on the website: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Irish-Potato-Farls/Detail.aspx.

Is all dough sticky? I had quite an experience when making the potato farls, first off the dough was almost impossible to mix, so impossible I gave up on using a spoon and instead mixed the batter with my hands. After attempting to rub all the dough off my fingers, I put out a piece of wax paper and sprinkled a whole ton of flour onto it, i did not want the dough to stick to me, the table, the roller, or maybe even the floor. Taking a fistful of the potato dough, I rolled out a quarter inch circle-ish potato farl and carefully handed it to my sister, Jackie who was in charge of frying them. Attempting to keep all the circular--actually not so circular--potato farls together, took a couple tries and the realization that I could not make the farls so big. Since we were making an Irish breakfast everything, and I mean everything either contained or was fried in Irish butter, including the potato farls. Finally, the breakfast food entered the refrigerator, awaiting the arrival of my family.

History...

One of the most famous famines of all time was the potato famine that occurred in Ireland in 1845, one that lead to an influx of Irish immigrants into the United States. By the 1800s the Irish, especially the poor relied heavily on the potato harvest for food, making different assortments of dishes including farls. Even when the wheat had a bad season, the potato could always be relied on, until 1845 in Ireland when their staple crop did not produce enough to sustain the population. Over a million people died, and over a million people left the shores of their homeland in search of a stable food source. Ironically enough, in the 1600s potatoes were considered animal food and a backup source of food just in case wheat had a bad year, but as time progressed potatoes entered into the homes of the very poor as a cheap source of substance and into the homes of the rich as a delicacy. Eventually the potato grew and popularity throughout all classes in many countries throughout Europe, especially Ireland. Ireland, a country that still adores the potato crop even though it experienced such a set back in the nineteenth century and a country that created statues of famine people and placed them throughout Dublin, Ireland to remind the people of Ireland the suffering that occurred over a century and a half ago.

Traditional Irish Soda Bread

After baking this Irish breakfast, I would definitely say the bread was the most difficult. In culinary class last year, I had the opportunity to make bread and pie dough multiple times throughout the course of the semester with the help of my 4 group mates and a bench mixer. I never realized how difficult making a simple loaf of bread could be! First of all, the directions gave both metric and English system measurements; a recipe with extra numbers, abbreviations, and measurements can become a confusing sight. Eventually, I had to knead the dough... I never knew how handy a bench mixer really was until then. I never thought I would be able to remove all the dough from my fingers! As the picture above shows, I added extra flour, a lot of extra flower, in an attempt to create a ball of dough and put it into a pan. When I was making the second loaf, I learned a little from my previous 'experience' and immediately began creating a ball out of the dough. At the end of the directions, it says to cut a cross into the top of the uncooked loaf... That did not end up going as planned, the sticky dough would not allow me to make the shape, but finally the dough did enter the oven and two finished loaves came out just in time for our Easter brunch.

Recipe...
(credit for this recipe goes to the back of a brown bread mix bag)
You will need:

• 350mL/ 12fl oz of Cold Water
• Flat Baking Sheet or 18cm/7'' Round Cake tin

Method:

1. Measure 500g/1lb of bread mix into a bowl.
2. Add approximately 350ml/12fl.oz of water and mix to a soft dough.
3. Knead the dough a little on a floured baord and turn the smooth side up.
4. Cut a cross over the the top and place in a floured 7"/18cm cake tin or place on a floured baking sheet.
5. Bake in a preheated oven at 400ºF, 200ºC, for approximately 40 minutes.
6. Cool on a wire tray. A tea towel wrapped over the bread at this stage helps give a softer crust.

About this blog...

For a person to live on their own and sustain their selves, he or she must learn how to cook, unless the adult plans on living on hot pockets their whole life. This idea, along with the movie Julie & Julia lead me to the idea behind my independent project. I have created this blog for a project assigned to me in English, a project that requires me to explore coming of age in some aspect of life; I chose cooking. Throughout the course of this project, I will explore cooking in two ways: 1) how it pertains to my life through my family traditions and recipes as well as my 'coming of age' and being able to cook for myself and 2) how history has influenced foods or made certain dishes significant. Actually this project has allowed me to see history in a new light. The discovery of agriculture and farming, lead to the creation of permanent settlements. Before people knew how to grow crops and domesticate animals they traveled where the food source went as a nomadic people. Food lead us to civilization. One of the most effective war strategies involves a blockade of ports, in other words cutting off the food supply from hungry troops. Food won wars. Think of every social event you have ever been to, food was present, was it not? Throughout history, food has brought people together social through feasts, fairs, and parties. Food created culture. Food has brought opportunities to the people of the world.