Playing with Strawberry Jam

I didn’t want to title this post just “Strawberry Jam” because someone might assume I was posting about MAKING strawberry jam … and that’s not happening. Ever.

When buying jam, raspberry and apricot are neck and neck for first choice for me. A couple of weeks ago, I visited Freshco and saw that the Smucker’s brand was on sale. I decided to switch things up a bit and picked up a jar of strawberry jam instead. It was a nice treat and besides spreading it on my toasted sourdough bread and using it to fill crepes, I used it in the desserts below.

Strawberry Pop-Tarts – I used my friend Ann’s pie crust recipe for the tarts and read a number of blogs for assembly and baking instructions. The ‘recipe’ posted below is a combination of the best elements gleaned from my readings.

The results were very tasty, though I had some leftover pastry so I know I could have rolled the pastry a bit thinner and made three pop-tarts, not just two, with the pastry I had.

Glazed pop-tarts – I wasn’t sure how much icing I wanted to use so I played

Strawberry Pop-Tarts – makes 3

pie crust pastry, enough to make one 9 inch pie base
3-4 tbsp strawberry jam
1 egg white, beaten with a bit of water (use the egg yolk for the Jammie Dodgers recipe below)
1/4 cup icing sugar
enough milk to make a glaze
red or pink food colouring, if desired

Cut out a 3 1/2 inch by 5 1/2 inch piece of stiff cardboard to use as a template.

Roll out the pie crust pastry into an 11 by 12 inch rectangle, about 1/8 inch thick. Cut SIX rectangles out of the pastry using the template above.

Preheat the oven to 350 deg F.

Line a baking sheet with a sheet of parchment paper.

Place THREE of the pastry rectangles cut above onto the baking sheet. Brush a 1/2 inch strip of beaten egg white around all four edges of each rectangle. Place a heaping tablespoon of jam in the middle of the pastry rectangles and gently spread out, to where the egg white strip begins, with a small off-set spatula or the back of a small teaspoon. Place the tops onto each pastry and press down gently on the edges to seal. Use the tines of a fork to press down and seal the edges fully. With the prongs of the fork or a sharp skewer or toothpick, make vent holes across the top of the pastry.

Bake for 30 minutes or until the tops of the pastries are golden brown. Cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes and then use a spatula to transfer each pastry to a wire cooling rack to cool completely.

Make a glaze for the pastry tops by adding milk, a teaspoon at a time, to the icing sugar in a small bowl. You may add a drop or two of food colouring to the icing sugar before adding the milk.

Jammie Dodgers -This is the third most popular biscuit in the UK, according to a survey taken last December. By the way, I’ve made the number one pick, chocolate digestive biscuits, and it IS a winner. The recipe I included below is a rewritten version of the one I used, and includes vanilla extract, which that one did not. I had to extend the baking time to accommodate my oven’s idiosyncrasies.

PS: I’m not pointing fingers but the Jammie Dodgers look very similar to Linzer cookies, an Austrian rolled Christmas cookie.

Jammie Dodgers – makes about a dozen 3 inch/8 cm cookies

250 g plain/ all purpose flour*
200 g salted butter**
100 g icing sugar
1 egg yolk, from the pop-tarts recipe above
1 tsp vanilla extract
strawberry jam, to fill the cookies
additional icing sugar, for dusting

* The pastry was so soft I couldn’t pick it up without it ripping, even when I heavily dusted more flour on my work surface and over the pastry. I tried working more flour in … still too soft. I even tried freezing the pastry for half an hour with minimal benefit. Still, I persisted, and managed to get almost a dozen Jammie Dodgers baked.

** I was short on butter so I used margarine. This may have contributed to the soft pastry above but further reading suggested that a short bread type pastry dough, like this one, should have 3 pts flour: 2 pts butter: 1 pt sugar. This means that I should have used 300 g of flour. So that’s what I’ll do next time.

Preheat the to 350 deg F/170 deg C and line a baking sheet with a sheet of parchment paper.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour and icing sugar.

Add the butter (or margarine) to the bowl and, with a pastry blender, cut it in until your mixture resembles bread crumbs.

Make a well in the center of the dry mixture and add the egg yolk and the vanilla extract. With a fork, incorporate the dry mixture into the wet. Gather the pastry into a ball and wrap it with plastic food wrap. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Turn the pastry out onto a floured surface and roll out to around 1/4 of an inch/6 mm thickness. Cut your biscuits out into 3 inch/8 cm circles and, from half the biscuits, cut out an additional shape from the middle.

Place your cookies onto the baking sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes, until the cookies are a light golden colour around the edges.

Once the cookies are cool enough to handle, dust the tops with a little icing sugar. Spread about a teaspoon of jam over the bases and sandwich the tops and bases together.

NOTE: For an even prettier presentation, using a tiny spoon, fill the cut out in the middle with a bit more jam so that it comes to the same level as the top cookie.

“Jammie Hearts” – the cutouts make bite sized cookies

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Strawberry “Cheesecake” Crepes with Strawberry Sauce

Thanks go to Eva of “Kitchen Inspirations” for posting her strawberry sauce recipe (link posted below) and inspiring this ‘amazing’ crepe dessert. The finished dessert itself was based on a recipe from the Allrecipe website. I happily ‘borrow’ ideas and components for dishes from wherever I find them. I used my mom’s recipe for the sweetened crepes.

I scaled down and adjusted the recipe to serve two people generously and posted the revised recipe below so that the construction of the recipe was in one place.

Strawberry Cheesecake Crepes – enough filling for 4 9 inch crepes, serves 2

4 9 inch sweetened crepes

Cream cheese filling

2 oz cream cheese, softened
6 tbsp (1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp) sifted icing sugar
1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/2 tsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup whipping cream, whipped (add 2 tbsp of icing sugar after the whipped cream has formed soft peaks)
4-5 large strawberries, rinsed, hulled and chopped for garnish

Strawberry sauce (location of the recipe)

In a medium sized bowl, whip together the cream cheese, 1/4 cup icing sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice and vanilla extract. Gently fold in the sweetened whipped cream.

Divide the filling among the crepes, reserving about 1 tbsp for garnishing the finished crepes.  Add about a tablespoon of strawberry sauce on top of the cream cheese filling and some of the diced fresh strawberries.

Roll up the crepes and top with a small dollop of the cream cheese filling, a few more chunks of diced fresh strawberries and some more of the strawberry sauce.

Dig in.

Raisin and Ricotta Cheese Blintzes

My livejournal was started years before I thought of writing a blog. There are lots of fun recipes there that I’d like to share here, but rather than rewriting them from scratch, I’m going to copy and paste a few of my favourites with minimal changes, interspersed with new material. My tamales post(s) was the first time I did so. I’ll also share recipes that I posted before I had a camera.

A basic crepe recipe can be modified in many ways to produce savoury and sweet dishes like the meat-filled Hungarian dish, Hortobágyi palacsinta, or Italian crepe manicotti, like this spinach and mushroom version.

This breakfast item, however, makes a great dessert.

My mom worked in the kitchen of a Jewish deli for over 20 yrs. In that time, she learned to make a LOT of Jewish dishes. She even cooked some of them for us. 🙂 But she never made these cheese blintzes, even though she obviously knew how to make amazing crepes.

You can use cottage cheese and cream cheese/mascarpone in the filling, but I went with an Italian ricotta cheese, as well as raisins.

Because blintzes are pan-fried in unsalted butter (or vegetable oil) before being served, the crepes are often only cooked on one side. You put the filling on the cooked side, wrap it up and then, when you fry the outside, it doesn’t get too brown. It also makes the crepes easier to roll, as they’re more flexible if only cooked on one side.

Raisin and Ricotta Cheese Blintzes – makes 10 blintzes

10 9-inch sweetened crepes, cooked on only one side
475 gm (~1 pound) ricotta cheese, well drained
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp lemon zest
1 egg
1 cup raisins (omit if you don’t like them)
1-2 tbsp unsalted butter

Garnish: powdered sugar, fruit sauce or sour cream

NOTE: I only added 1/2 tsp vanilla and 1 tsp sugar to the basic crepe recipe.

In a small bowl, add raisins and pour 1 cup boiling water over them. Let sit for 15 minutes, then drain well (pat dry in a double thickness paper towel, if you wish) and let cool to room temperature.

Combine ricotta cheese, brown sugar, lemon zest and egg. Stir in raisins and refrigerate until ready to fill the crepes.

Divide the cottage cheese filling evenly among the crepes. You’ll probably use 3-4 tbsp for each one.

To assemble, spoon the filling in a rectangular block, in the central third of your crepe. Fold the bottom third up and over the filling. Fold in both the sides like you’re making an envelope and then fold the top third of the crepe down over the filling.

Assembly – Step 1

Assembly – Step 2

Assembly – Step 3

Assembly – Step 4

In a 9-10 inch non-stick pan, melt 1 tbsp of unsalted butter over medium-low heat.

Blintzes ready to fry – See how pale they are? They won’t be that way for long. 🙂

Put 2-3 filled blintzes, or as many as will fit comfortably, in the pan. You want to leave at least an inch between the blintzes so that you can flip them with a spatula. The crepes themselves are fragile, and the filling will be soft, so they may open and the filling will spill during flipping, if you’re too forceful.

Fry on each side, about 1 1/2-2 minutes, or until golden brown and the filling is cooked through. (If you’re concerned that the filling may not be set, since it’s still quite soft while hot out of the pan, place the finished blintzes on a microwave safe plate and cook for 1 minute on high. If feeding a crowd, you can arrange all of the pan fried blintzes on a baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350 deg F oven, for 8-10 minutes.)

Fried blintzes

You may serve these blintzes warm out of the frying pan, or at room temperature, with icing sugar sifted over the top.

I like a spoonful or two of fruit topping over my blintzes, like this mixed berry sauce, but there are people who prefer sour cream

Hot and Cooking Boring Stuff

No recipes … just lots of pictures. If you want recipes for something, let me know.

It’s been really warm and humid, and the A/C is labouring to deal with it all,  so I have been doing minimal cooking.

In fact, I bought a giant (28 piece) cheese and pepperoni shreds pizza and have been eating 2-4 pieces for lunch or dinner over the last week, while playing with some aspect of tried and true recipes.

Like trying a substitute for chicken stock in the form of a jar of “Better than Bouillon low sodium organic chicken base” and then using it to make egg drop/flower soup. The pinch of turmeric didn’t make the soup appreciably more ‘yellow’ than my usual recipe even though it’s supposedly a Chinese restaurant trick.

And then there was the boneless chicken breast that I sliced in half horizontally, pounded thin, and panko-breaded. I ended up with a cutlet and some chicken fingers which I baked. The twist was combining the egg/flour breading steps into a batter flavoured with mayo and mustard. The end result was super crunchy.

Chicken Finger/Cutlet Batter

1 egg
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 1/2 tbsp dijon mustard (or any other mustard of choice)
2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp salt
Black pepper

Place the Batter ingredients in a bowl and whisk with a fork until combined.

I pounded a boneless pork chop thin and treated it in the same manner.

I also made a batch of crepes (must remember to re-season my cast iron frying pan cause there’s a sticky spot), a dozen cream puffs and a half recipe of pastry cream. Instead of baking the cream puffs at the usual temperature (350 deg F) I tried the high/low combo that the classic recipe calls for. They looked great but about half the tray fell and I can’t account for it.

NEON PASTA ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, finally, I attempted the classic Italian pasta dish egg-yolk ravioli (Uova da Raviolo). I used beet pasta from the freezer, cause I didn’t want to bother making a fresh batch of plain pasta dough. I rolled the dough a bit too thin and, while I was cooking the ravioli, the fragile pasta tore open. I managed to salvage the 2 ravioli (that’s all I made) and, after dressing them up with a browned butter-bacon-sage sauce, ate a delicious dish with a perfectly cooked egg yolk.

The effort is worth the fuss. I used the rest of the ricotta-Grana Padano cheese filling to make some regular ravioli which I froze away.

I kneaded a bit more flour into the pasta from the trimmings used above for these ravioli giving me a paler colour.

All in all, it’s been a fun week. 🙂

Happy Easter!

After a modest meatless Good Friday meal, Easter is a celebratory occasion and this meal reflects that.

Soup was re-purposed from the salted cod, cannellini bean dip with the addition of egg noodles and ham broth.

Ham glazed with a plum balsamic reduction, mashed potatoes and peas with cherries jubilee

Washed down with strawberry lemonade.

I made a batch of crepes and paired them with the cherries jubilee sauce.

And drunken strawberries (strawberries macerated in sugar and Cointreau) over crepes with French vanilla ice cream.

And then, cause I had some cream puffs in the freezer and fresh strawberries, I sliced half open and filled them with sliced strawberries and sweetened whipped cream. I made a chocolate glaze to finish the presentation. Pretty but a bit messy to eat.

So, I piped the whipped cream into the rest of the cream puffs and served them with chocolate dipped strawberries.

Pick the one you want or eat one … or 2 of each.

Good Friday Meal – Pan fried Panko breaded sole fillets, sauteed kale and a re-purposed white cannellini bean dip over dried salted cod. (No recipe cause I’m still working on getting it as good as my dad’s. After last year’s under-seasoned dish, this year, I didn’t soak the cod long enough and the dip needed to be baked longer as it was a bit too watery from the moisture in the cod. Eaten with the semolina sourdough bread, however, the saltiness was reduced somewhat. I started the meal with clam chowder.