Madhu Knits and Cooks

Baked Buffalo Cauliflower - Wow, A Great Homemade Bar Snack

If you can't go to the bar or restaurant, try your favorites at home - volume 2.  This latest effort features a healthier version of one of my bar/restaurant favorites, buffalo cauliflower, which I found I couldn't order on any of our local restaurant delivery apps.  

I found a few recipes online and settled on the Frank's Red Hot version because of its glowing website reviews.  I also decided to use Food Network's blue cheese dip recipe instead of a store bought dip.

While the final result was pretty good - great Frank's spicy sauce flavor offset by the tangy dip - I learned some good lessons that will help make this good dish even better the next time.

First was that I should have used two baking sheets to allow the cauliflower to really crisp up instead of steaming from the pieces being too close to each other.  Second was that I should have used the full amount of Frank's called for in the recipe - 8 tbsp. instead of the 5 tbsp. that I used.

The third and fourth lessons are related - no need to add in panko bread crumbs, which didn't make a difference.  And I will likely retain my 50% substitute of besan or chickpea flour for the all-purpose flour as I thought it added a nice, subtle flavor to the batter.

Finally, for the dip, I will add a lot more blue cheese because that flavor was far more diluted than I would have liked from the Food Network recipe.

King Arthur Flour Hot Spinach Dip - An Adaptable Solo Treat or Party Snack

If you can't go to a dinner party or bar for a hot appetizer dip, try the homemade option!  While many homemade dips feature complicated  steps and/or result in too much dip for one person to eat, the King Arthur Flour Hot Spinach Dip recipe produces a great solo or a small group snack.

The recipe has three steps - pre-heat the oven, mix the ingredients together, and bake.  Couldn't be easier, and as I found through my two attempts at halved versions, very adaptable to shifting the ingredients.

Both times I made the dip I used low fat sour cream, low fat mayonnaise and fresh mozzarella.  The first time I made this recipe, I used slightly more mozzarella in the halved dip (measured ingredients with a scale), and second time, I dramatically reduced the mayonnaise and increased the sour cream a bit.  I didn't notice either time anything I disliked about the dip, which was thick, creamy and savory from the spinach and salted ingredients.

This dip will be a winter feature in my kitchen, and I hope in yours as well!  It tastes particularly good with carrots, but also works great with bread, chips, and crackers.

Sichuan Pickled Cucumbers - Gourmet Cookbook, Who Knew?

A decade ago, I found a heavily discounted version of the Gourmet Cookbook on a bookstore shelf and immediately took it to the register, figuring that I had beat the store in realizing its mistake. 

In the years since, I have made a few recipes from the cookbook, which probably ensures the cookbook was worth what I paid for it, but it's rarely my first turn for any type of recipe.  On a whim, I changed that approach when I had a bounty of delicious summer cucumbers in my fridge.  

While I have made a few Chinese cucumber recipes in the past, this recipe intrigued me because it involved cooking the marinade before  pickling the cucumbers.  

The recipe seemed pretty easy to construct, so without much thought, I started the preparation process.  First, I cut, salted, rinsed and then drained the cucumber slices.

The pickles got a light coating of sugar and vinegar after they have drained, while I then cooked the marinade.  I used slightly less sesame oil than the recipe called for because I find sesame oil has such a strong flavor, and I also used 4 broken-in-half Indian dried red chiles.

Unfortunately, following the 3-hour pickling process, I found these pickles to be "ok."  None of the flavors were that strong, and while the hot spice flavor was there, it was more of an undertone than a main feature of each bite.  As the days went on, the pickles became spicier, but remained underwhelming.  I wish I added garlic or something else that would give these cucumbers sharper flavor. 

Oh well, at least I had an excuse to reacquaint myself with this otherwise great encyclopedia of cooking!

Lisa Fain's Austin Diner-Style Queso - Not My Favorite Queso, But Sometimes You've Got to Vary Your Melted Cheese Routine

Slowly, but surely, I am making my way through Lisa Fain's fantastic Queso! cookbook.  My latest attempt was Lisa Fain's Austin diner-style queso, which was also my first time cooking with American cheese.

This queso was great with the fresh pico stirred in.  The bright acidic chunks of tomato and onion balanced out the thick American cheese flavored dip quite well.  Some bites actually felt...healthy?  Such are the warped thoughts of a queso addict!

While I prefer the flavor of cheddar to American cheese, my husband - an apparent American cheese lover - loved this dip.  And a major bonus is how easy this queso is to construct.

I halved the recipe, substituted 2% milk for whole, and used 0.63 pounds of American cheese instead of 0.5 pounds.  Apart from those minor changes, I followed the recipe as is.

Like many of Fain's recipes, this recipe involved a roux, which came together pretty easily.

Super easy - cut some vegetables, make a simple roux, and melt in the cheese.  Yum!

No-Knead High-Gluten Flour Sesame Bread - Saving This Flour for Bagels

During the great (but brief) flour shortage of 2020, I ordered any flour that was available from King Arthur Flour's website.  Some of the new flour types I purchased were fantastic - the Pizza Flour Blend in particular - but others, I've struggled with.  The High-Gluten Flour falls into that category.  The pizza dough I made with it was just ok, and King Arthur's No-Knead Everything Bread, which seems adapted to this flour in particular, also was just ok.  

I initially thought the issue may be my continued use of a large Dutch oven to bake high-hydration no-knead doughs instead of a smaller bread pot which would allow the bread to rise more than spread.  This problem plagued me with Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread recipe. The fridge-rise, less-hydration Jeff Hertzberg approach and its variants generally produce must better loafs.  However, I tried this flour with the King Arthur-version of Hertzberg's approach and also ended up with a slightly (but not that much) lower rise bread.

So the issue seems to be the flour or more likely, my unfamiliarity with it.  In any case, this recipe, which I halved and used just sesame seeds instead of an everything spice blend, will probably not be a repeat. 

While the bread dough was easy to prepare, as all no-kneads are, I really don't like handling gooey, non-fridge rise doughs like this.   

These doughs are just far messier to shape and transfer to a baking pot.

The upside of this bread is that it tasted wonderful - yeasty, slightly crusty on the outside, and soft in the middle.  It was gone within the day!

Lemon Almond Pound Cake - Star of a Future Brunch Party

I've had my eye on the Milk Street Lemon Almond Pound Cake ever since I saw it featured on one of their PBS episodes.  This cake not only looked gorgeous, but also seemed like a great way to use up my leftover almond flour that doesn't have a long shelf life.

When I finally made the cake, it turned out fabulously well.  The lemon flavor was subtle through the cake, but quite sharp under the top surface, where a lemon-sugar glaze had sunk in.  The cake was dense and moist, with the sliced almonds on the top providing a light crunch.  

The only downside of this cake is how big it is.  This is a recipe for a party, not a household of two.  But we soldiered through, eating the entire cake within 3 days.  And we did enjoy all of the slices!

I followed the recipe as is, except that I didn't have the right loaf pan size (used a 10 x 7 Le Creuset instead of a standard 9 x 5) and I used unsalted butter, so threw in a bit more kosher salt to compensate.

The batter began with mixing together the sugar and lemon zest until the sugar absorbed the citrus smell.

I then added the rest of the dry ingredients.

Then the wet ingredients.

I baked the cake for approximately 42 - 45 minutes, about 10 minutes longer than called for by the recipe, to get a toothpick to come out clean from the middle of the cake.  Thankfully, the cake didn't seem overly baked after it cooled slightly and I coaxed it out of the pan to fully cool.

The last step was glazing the cake with a lemon-sugar glaze I made while the cake was in the oven.  Very easy to brush on.  The cake then cooled for another hour or two before we served it.  Yum!

Improvised (Simplified) Curtido - A Salvadoran Coleslaw

Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian continues to be my go-to cookbook for leftover vegetable and beans, so I immediately knew where to turn for some leftover green cabbage from an Indian stir fry.  

I settled on the book's curtido recipe, a Salvadoran-style coleslaw that I thought could work despite my lack of iceberg lettuce and carrots, which were included in Jaffrey's version.  A good approximation of Jaffrey's recipe can be found on Serious Eats.

Given that the cabbage I had on hand didn't fit Jaffrey's proportions, I didn't bother to measure the remaining ingredients.  I just added them to taste - red wine vinegar, oregano, cayenne, and olive oil.  

I then immediately started eating the curtido before letting the remainder rest in the fridge for another hour or so. 

While the freshness of the cabbage, combined with the sharpness of the vinegar, made it a tasty, crunchy snack, the oregano and other flavors weren't that compelling to have us keep returning to it.  Instead, we quickly lost interest in the curtido after the first day and ended up throwing away the leftovers :-(  So this might be a good vegan side to a larger summertime meal, but not a dish to stand on it's own.

Super Moist Rich Chocolate Cake - Variant on a Favorite

Having declared "Cake Flour Forever!" a few months ago, I have been steadily making my way through my box of King Arthur Flour Cake Flour, a newly scarce item in the times we find ourselves in.  I recently made a slight variant of my go-to fluffy Chocolate Cake with a KAF Moist Chocolate Cake recipe that substitutes milk for some of the water / brewed coffee.

The resulting cake was definitely denser and more moist than the fluffier, lighter version of the cake, and the chocolate flavor also seemed slightly deeper, perhaps from just the interplay of the denser texture with the same amount of cocoa powder.  This cake tasted more like a complete dessert than the lighter, non-milk "snack" version.

I followed the recipe as is except that I substituted soy milk and I halved the recipe as I generally do with the lighter version of the cake as well.  

I also didn't frost the cake, which I found the cake didn't seem to need given its density and deep chocolate flavor.

This recipe was so good that it may be a repeat this week!

Same Day Neapolitan Style Pizza - Good for Pizza in a Pinch

With lots of King Arthur Flour's 00 equivalent flour in my cupboard, and my homemade pasta-making efforts long-stalled, what to do?  This was a question I asked myself for many months without resolution.  Well, sometime the answer is the most obvious - go to the King Arthur Flour website for suggestions.  

I opened several tabs on my browser for KAF-recommended options, and ultimately settled on the Thin-Crust Pizza recipe because it largely had the ingredients available in my pantry and it fit my fancy for what I wanted that day.

While this pizza dough can largely be made in the time it takes to pre-heat a pizza stone, I ended up doing two slightly longer rises for the dough - about 75 minutes for the first rise and about 1 hour for the second, covered rise.

I had a bit of a tough time rolling out the dough between a sheet of parchment and wax paper as I completely ignored the instructions to grease the sheets first.  Oops!  And I omitted the suggested KAF easy-roll dough improver, which also probably had an effect. But thankfully the dough sticking was rectified by slow peeling and scraping it from the wax paper.

For the second covered rise of the dough, because I didn't grease the wax paper and was worried about re-sticking, I decided to just flip over the dough mixing bowl to cover the dough.  It actually worked totally fine!

I baked the dough for approx. 7 minutes on a pizza stone in a 450 degree oven, then added toppings before baking an additional 5 minutes or so.

The baked pizza definitely tasted like an olive oil bread, like a focaccia.  That felt evident in the dry and airy texture, as well as the flavor.  The bottom of the pizza was nicely browned, but as I was eating it, I continued to feel like I was eating a dressed up focaccia rather than a pizza. 

While that experience was fine, I think it ultimately means this won't be a go-to pizza recipe, rather a go-to-quick-fix pizza recipe.

My First Olive Oil Cake - Very Easy, Very Dense and Very Subtle Sweet Flavors

My first olive oil cake (inspired by my friend Tessie - thank you!) was very easy to make, forgiving with my ingredient substitutions, and even survived my slight over-baking (46 minutes) to be a hit at the party it was served.

I have been attracted to this type of cake because I have some wonderful flavored Williams Sonoma olive oils from my friends Michael and Sahar.  One of the flavors, blood orange, seemed like it would be perfect in this citrus-scented cake, and thankfully it was.  The infused olive oil didn't overwhelm the cake at all, instead left a slight pleasant orange flavor.

My substitution of brown sugar for 1.65 oz of the white sugar (I ran out) and for sprinkling on top also didn't affect the cake in any sort of noticeable way (except for the brown specks on top of the cake), which was great. 

Finally, I substituted 2% milk for whole milk, also fine as the cake wasn't overly dry and still felt moist, dense and rich.

And the cake was easy to prepare, a standard wet ingredient / dry ingredient approach, with a mixer thrown in for more emulsification I assume?