Category Archives: food and cooking

Irish Apple Cake with Custard

food and cooking, ,

apple cake 3Sue posted this recipe for Irish Apple Cake on her blog The View from Great Island, and I put one together tonight as I was making dinner and ducking out of the kitchen every few minutes to watch our San Francisco Giants win the first game of the National League playoffs – yay! It’s a wonder I didn’t burn something; as it was, it took me until bedtime to get the last pot, bowl and springform pan washed.

< (After you spreaapple cake 1d the cake batter in the bottom of the pan, you make a layer of the sliced apples.)

The only thing I changed was the custard sauce, for which I cut the sugar by a third, and it was very nice. The whole cake is rich and very appley without being overly sweet, so that the streusel topping, for example, can be enjoyed in all its buttery crunchiness and you don’t feel that you are eating a caapple cake 2ndy bar.

(A streusel topping covers the apples as the final layer.) >

I used some Gala apples because I find the recommended Granny Smith to have a one-note sour taste; but the Galas were kind of blah so I added the juice of a lemon to brighten them up. I wouldn’t cut back on the amount of apple – in fact, I’d like to experiment and add one more apple, but next time I will go out of my way to find more flavorful fruit. Other than the barest hint of cinnamon there is not a lot of intense flavor to the cake, so the taste of the fruit is important.

My springform pan was 10″ in diameter instead of the 9″ that was called for, but the cake turned out lovely. It was ready about the time the baseball game was over, and we were in a good mood then and felt celebratory. Mr. Glad liked the cake very well.

apple cake 5

Tea and Tomatoes

food and cooking, friends, my garden, , ,

Turkish tea fr Kate 9-2014Kate brought me the most amazing tea from Istanbul. I keep sniffing it and trying to discern what all those exotic smells are — no label tells me anything about it. And I’m kind of afraid to make a pot of tea and end up disappointed, because you know how herbal teas often don’t taste as good as their dry aromas lead you to expect? It  Well, what do I expect, after all that watering down…

P1110230 new mugBut when I do take the plunge, I will drink it out of this new mug I gifted myself with. Big mugs, preferably those that hold a pint, are my favorites, but they usually aren’t so girly looking. When I saw this big and flowery one, there was little deliberating.

Today Mr. and Mrs. C. came over. The guys then went to Starbucks to drink tea and talk, and we “girls” worked in the garden. It reminded me of when I was in Turkey lo these many years ago, and in the villages the men would sit in the café and drink tea and play tavla (backgammon) while the women were out in the olive groves harvesting the fruit.tomatoes peeling 9-14

But today really wasn’t much like that – we also spent quite a while looking at pictures of Kate’s wedding for which Mrs. C. had arranged the flowers, and we talked to the man who delivered a cord of firewood on to our driveway. He is 83 and still does all his own busintomatoes peeled 9-14ess.

Mrs. C. is always glad to take cuttings from my garden to experiment with. This time I sent her home with some wayward sprouts of my mystery salvia, and some succulents. Also some of our lovely Yellow Brandywines. But we still have more tomatoes than we can use fresh, so I scalded and peeled a bunch last week and made tomato pudding.

tomatoes peeling ice

Custard Show

food and cooking

3 custards Sept 14

Mr. Glad did love the flan I made, but turned down my offer to make more right away, because by his way of thinking the caramel part made them too sweet to enjoy often. I took up the challenge to make something just as yummy but less intense that way, and while I was at it I made variations on the theme with pumpkin and chocolate. Too experimental to tell about in detail, but it was easy, and they are certainly easy to eat.

Chicken Adobo

food and cooking, ,

I couldn’t find my old Sunset Magazine recipe for (Filipino) chicken adobo, so I researched online and discovered that quite a bit of controversy persists over the proper method and proportion of ingredients. It seems to depend on what region of the Philippines you or your mother came from, whether you will use equal portions of soy sauce and vinegar, or will include tomatoes — and more variables than that. Cooking is folk art, isn’t it?

P1110258
chicken thighs after marinating 18 hrs

Eventually I settled on this recipe from The Splendid Table, created by two women who don’t appear to be Filipinas themselves, but I liked that they authoritatively state: “One of the cooking techniques that sets Filipino adobo apart is that you brown the meat after it is cooked, not before. That aroma of a browning, marinade-saturated chicken can drive you crazy.” Theirs was the only version I found that included this instruction. By the way, in Spain when they talk about adobo they refer more generally to a marinade, and not to this particular dish.

P1110262
reducing the marinade for sauce

Even I tweaked the recipe a bit. I used a little less vinegar and more soy sauce, and I fried the onions separately and threw them on the rice at the end.

However you adjust your ingredients — and unless your mother insists that you make it her way, you should feel a great deal of freedom to experiment — the essential flavors that make adobo are vinegar, soy sauce, black pepper, bay leaf, and garlic. Pork and beef liver are commonly used instead of or in combination with chicken. This version called for 10 large cloves of garlic, and mine were actually gigantic.

The whole dish was quite piquant and delectable; I was glad that I did saute the chicken at the end because the skins got nice and crispy-tasty. I served white rice to soak up some of that garlicky sauce, and a vegetable, and we feasted.

P1110266