Amnesty Bread

After a post about World Peace Cookies, it only seems appropriate to follow up with a post on Amnesty Bread. The idea for the name came from David Lebovitz's Amnesty Cookies, which are really Compost Cookies. But the theory is that you declare a day of amnesty for your fridge and pantry and just throw everything you want to get rid of into this bread. I had a zucchini, a pear, and two bananas from my Boston Organics delivery that needed to be used up plus some leftover dried cranberries and walnuts. If I had had carrots I would've grated those up and thrown them in here, too. Raisins, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and other types of nuts would certainly have worked just as well in here. If you make any substitutions, I'd recommend trying to keep it a total of 2 cups of grated veggies or fruits and 1 cup total of dried fruits, nuts, or chocolate.

Amnesty Bread
makes 2 loaves or 24 muffins

3 eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 zucchini, grated
1 pear, peeled, cored, and grated
2 bananas, mashed
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour, divided
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease and flour two 8"x4" bread loaf pans, a 10" tube pan, or line 24 muffin tins.

In a large bowl, beat eggs until light yellow and frothy. Add oil, brown sugar, white sugar, grated zucchini, pear, bananas, and vanilla; blend together until well combined. Stir in 2 3/4 cups of the flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Toss the remaining 1/4 cup flour with the cranberries and nuts and mix in with the rest of the batter. Divide the batter evenly between the two prepared loaf pans or muffin tins.

Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 50 minutes for the loaf pans and tube pan and 35 minutes for the muffins.

It's not the prettiest of breads or muffins, but it certainly does its job, which is to use up all those ingredients in a yummy way. It's quite moist, thanks to all the zucchini and fruits, but also a sturdy enough bread that you could slice and toast it and serve it with some butter.

Red Wine and Pear Sorbet

I made this a while ago before this blog was born and really liked it so when my stash of pears from Boston Organics started building up, I thought it was high time to make this again. The original recipe from Martha Stewart has directions for how to make this without an ice cream maker, but seeing as how I have one, it seemed silly not to use it.

Red Wine and Pear Sorbet (adapted from Everyday Food)
makes about 1 quart

1 cup dry red wine

3/4 cup sugar

1 pound ripe pears, peeled, cored, and cut into 1-inch pieces (2 cups)

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Coarse salt

In a medium saucepan, bring wine, 1 1/4 cups water, and sugar to a boil over medium heat, stirring often, until sugar dissolves. Add pears; reduce heat, and simmer until tender.

Stir in lemon juice and a pinch of salt; cool completely. Transfer to a blender or use an immersion blender to puree the mixture. Chill thoroughly in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.

Once chilled, churn in your ice cream machine according to the manufacturer's directions. Transfer to a container, cover, and freeze overnight or for several hours to harden.

Although the original recipe said it would only take 5-10 minutes, I ended up having to cook the pears for over 20 minutes before they were tender. This may have been because I used one Bartlett pear and one green pear instead of just Bartlett pears like the original recipe said. Because I was cooking the mixture for that long, I figured I would have boiled off most of the alcohol, but there was still enough left to make this a pretty soft sorbet. It's also kind of gritty in the way that pears are naturally gritty. Not a bad thing, but if you don't like the texture of pears, you might want to pass on this recipe. But if you like poached pears, you definitely need to try this out. It tastes elegant and sophisticated, like something that should be served in a goblet vs. a normal dessert bowl. I would totally serve this as a palate cleanser or at the end of a heavy dinner of say, steak.

Pear Bread

Faced with a surfeit of pears from Boston Organics, I decided to make Smitten Kitchen's Pear Bread. I'd never eaten pear bread before, but after trying it, I'd describe it as banana bread, only without the bananas. I don't taste the pears at all, but the fruit does add a lot of moistness to the cake along with just the tiniest bit of the gritty pear texture. I actually substituted 1/2 cup of the all-purpose flour with 1/2 cup of white whole wheat flour since I'm trying to use up the sack I bought by accident.

Pear Bread (from Smitten Kitchen)
makes 2 loaves or one tube cake

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups sugar
2 to 4 pears firm, ripe pears, depending on size (you’ll need 2 grated cups total, but don’t grate them until you are about to use them so that they don’t brown)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Heat your oven to 350°F and lightly grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans.

Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl, and stir with a fork to mix everything well. If you’re using nuts, scoop out about 1/4 cup of the flour mixture and combine it in a small bowl with the chopped walnuts, stirring and tossing to coat the nuts with the flour.

Peel and core pears, then grate them. You’ll want two grated cups total; set them briefly aside. In a medium bowl, combine the butter or oil, eggs, sugar, grated pear, nuts (if using), and vanilla, and stir to mix everything well. Scrape the pear mixture into the flour mixture and stir just until the flour disappears and the batter is evenly moistened.

Quickly scrape the batter into the prepared pans and bake at 350°F for 60 to 70 minutes, or until the bread is handsomely browned and firm on top and a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

I ended up not adding the sprinkle of confectioner's sugar or glaze that Deb suggests because it was sweet enough as is. It's also pretty crumbly, so I didn't want to have to deal with another potential factor for messiness. I think if I were to make this again, I might add some chocolate chips to it (giving them the same flour coating treatment as the nuts so that they don't sink). Deb says in her post that the bread got better day after day. I'm not sure if I'd agree, although it certainly doesn't get worse. I'd say that it remains a good, homey slice of comfort. And if I wanted to be super decadent, I'd toast this and spread some honey butter on top.

Edited to Add (on 1/26/10): I take back what I said about this bread not getting better. I just had some for breakfast 3 days after I baked it, and I don't know what happened between yesterday and today, but it is definitely better today. It seems like the baking soda and salt are standing out a bit more leaving this tang on my tongue that demands more pear bread. I can't stop eating it!

One year ago:  Luo Buo Gao (Chinese Turnip Cake)

Apple and Pear Cake FAIL

I needed to use up some more apples and pears from my Boston Organics delivery, so I decided to try Smitten Kitchen's Mom's Apple Cake. Except I didn't have a tube pan. Or a bundt pan. And I only had 2 apples and 2 pears. And I accidentally bought white whole wheat flour instead of my usual unbleached all-purpose flour. A normal person might have decided these reasons were enough to stop, but oh no, I had to go ahead and try to make the cake anyways.

First conversion: I figured I could multiple all the ingredients by 3/4 to account for the fact that I only had 4 pieces of fruit instead of the 6 required for the recipe.

First fail: You know how people say baking is like chemistry and that everything needs to be measured precisely? Well, I had to adjust some of the calculated measurements just so I could measure them. And I ended up with a really, really, really thick batter. Like closer to cookie dough than cake batter. I don't think that's right.

Second conversion: Instead of using a tube pan, I used a normal square pan. In the original post, Deb says that you can probably make the cake in a 9"x13" cake pan if you don't have a tube pan. I figured since I was reducing the quantities in the recipe, I could get away with a 9" square pan.

Second fail: I think the reason this cake calls for a tube pan is because it take a long time for the middle to bake. And maybe longer because I had that ridiculously thick batter. The original recipe says to bake for 1.5 hours or until a tester comes out clean. Um, at 1.5 hours, the middle of the cake was just barely starting to set, and the edges were all getting burnt.

(By the way, The Kitchn just posted a hack on what to do if you don't have a tube pan!)

Third conversion: I only had 1/4 cup all-purpose flour left, so I used that and then used whole wheat flour for the rest of the flour. I figured, it's a cake with fruit so it's already slightly healthy anyways. Can't make that much of a difference right? Um, yeah. Don't ever do what I did, okay? Unless you like eat really dense cardboard.

But, I was still able to get some decent pictures of the thing. And I still did eat it. At least, the top half of it. The bottom half was unsalvageable. Hmmm, I should've taken a picture of what was leftover in the pan.

Anyways, instead of posting the fail recipe, I'm just going to link over to Smitten Kitchen again. Because she has the correct recipe AND gorgeous pictures.

ETA:  Three years later, I finally conquered this recipe by using the right ingredients and baking pan.

One year ago:  Maracons - A Lesson in Humility

Apple-Pear-Cranberry Crisp

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! What are you thankful for this year? Me, I'm thankful that I got to travel to a lot of different countries (Czech Republic, Bolivia, Aruba, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt!), for new friends that I've made, and that my brother got married to a wonderful girl!

I almost always staying in Boston for Thanksgiving since my home in Ohio is really too far away to drive to and too expensive to fly to for such a short break. But it's become tradition to celebrate with other Thanksgiving "orphans", and this year I went over to Oeimae, Yumi (thanks for the invite!), and Judy's apartment in Brookline for yet another potluck. This time, I wanted to use up the two pears and two apples I had gotten in my Boston Organics delivery, so I decided to make a apple-pear crisp. But just those 4 fruits didn't seem to be enough for the 9"x13" pan, so I bought a bag of fresh cranberries to add to the mix for some color and tartness.

Apple-Pear-Cranberry Crisp
makes 24 servings

2 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced (I used Fuji apples)
2 pears, peeled, cored, and sliced (I used one Bosc and one Concord pear)
1 bag fresh cranberries
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg
1 1/2 cups flour and 1 tablespoon flour, divided
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups oats
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cups butter, cut into pieces

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Toss the apple and pear slices with the cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon flour. Add the cranberries and sugar. Toss to mix. Place in a 9"x13" baking dish.

In a large bowl, add the remaining ingredients and cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it resembles a coarse meal. You can also use a food processor to do this, but I enjoy doing it with my hands.

Spread the topping evenly over the fruit. Bake for 45 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream!

That last part of the recipe is key. Even though there's a whole cup of sugar in the fruit filling, the fresh cranberries are really quite tart. Eating this crisp with ice cream mellows out the fruit so that the sum is much greater than its parts.

This recipe can be adapted to other fruits as well. You can omit the cranberries and use more of the apples or pears. A peach or cherry crisp is another possibility, but you'd have to adjust the amount of sugar since those fruits are already quite sweet.

Panna Cotta, Take 2

This is my second attempt at a panna cotta version of the traditional Chinese dessert, almond tofu. As you may recall, last time the major issue was that the panna cotta barely jelled. As a minor issue, I didn't like the way the white wine reduction turned out because I had been hoping the dried cherries would have pureed more to thicken the reduction. Instead it ended up being a muddy reddish-brownish liquid that the pears ended up being immersed in on top of the panna cotta. Not terribly pretty to look at, but fortunately still rather tasty.

I basically used the same recipe as before, except I only had 1 1/3 cups milk and a little more than 1 cup of heavy cream. Since my issue last time was that the panna cotta didn't set enough, I figured I'd try using the same 1 tablespoon of gelatin and hope it wouldn't get too hard. And after seeing Tartelette's beautiful panna cottas, I figured I'd try something a little different for the pears.

Red Wine Poached Pears Puree
makes enough for 6 panna cotta servings

1/2 vanilla bean
Zest from one orange
1 cup red wine (it was all I had left)
1/2 cup sugar
2 D'anjou pears

Split the vanilla bean lengthwise in half with a knife and scrape out the seeds.

Add the vanilla seeds and pod and orange zest to the red wine and sugar in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Reduce to a simmer.

Peel the pears, leaving the stem intact. Slice off the bottom 1/8" of each pear to create a flat, stable base.

Add the pears to the simmering poaching liquid, laying them on their sides. Cook, turning pears occasionally so they become saturated on all sides, until they are just tender when pierced with a fork, about 7 minutes.

Allow pears to cool completely in their poaching liquid.

After the pears have cooled, remove the core and stem and roughly chop the pear. Add just enough braising liquid to cover and let sit until the pear reaches the desired color. (I only gave it about 15 minutes.) Drain as much of the liquid as possible and reserve.

Using an immersion blender or regular blender, puree the pears.

To assemble the panna cotta, I divided the pear puree equally between 6 ramekins (oh what I wouldn't give for the cute glasses that Tartelette uses!).

Carefully pour the panna cotta mixture (after the gelatin has been added to it) through a sieve on top of the puree. I was not so careful on my first attempt and pretty much lost the bottom layer.

The other ramekins fared a little better.

There was still some of the puree that ended up floating on top of the panna cotta mixture, but I wasn't too worried because there was going to be a third layer. But before that, let the panna cotta sit in the fridge for at least 3 hours, until firm. In the meantime, heat the red wine braising liquid (you didn't throw it out, did you?) in a small saucepan and reduce to about 1/3 cup volume.

Once the panna cotta has set, spoon the wine reduction on top. For a final touch, place a peeled mandarin orange section on top as garnish.

I found that this time the panna cotta was actually a little firmer than I wanted. I also noticed that when I was straining the mixture into the ramekins that there was a fair amount of gelatin left in the strainer. According to Tartelette's recipe, she strains the mixture before adding the gelatin, so maybe the first time I made the recipe the reason it wasn't set enough was because I was leaving too much gelatin in the strainer. At the same time, I don't really want heterogeneous bits of hard gelatin settling at the bottom of the panna cotta. I guess next time I make this (yes, there will be a next time!) I will try dissolving the gelatin in a bit of reheated cream mixture before adding it to the rest of the cooled mixture.

Panna Cotta, Take 1

I think I had panna cotta for the first time 2 years ago when Karen made it for the Soul Food volunteers training dinner. She had made an orange version, and I couldn't stop consuming it. It was perfectly creamy, sweet, and tangy, and the texture was similar to tofu pudding--the silkiest, softest phase something could be while still remaining a solid. I've been meaning to make it ever since but never got around to it until this week.

I'd been playing around with the idea of makind an almond-flavored panna cotta, kind of like an upscale version of almond tofu. And instead of fruit cocktail, I'd add poached pears. This was my first time making both, so I did a little research. I did ask Karen for her panna cotta recipe, but it didn't say how many it served (I should have just asked her) so I tried this one instead. Since I wanted to serve 6, I multiplied the ingredients by 1.5, although I did end up adding a full teaspoon of almond extract because when I tasted the mixture with only 3/4 teaspoons it didn't have as much almond flavor as I wanted it to have.

Almond Panna Cotta (based on this recipe)
makes 6 small servings

1 1/2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon powdered unflavored gelatin bloomed in 3 tablespoons water

In a small saucepan over medium-high, combine milk, cream, and sugar; bring to a boil. Stir in the almond extract. Remove from heat, and let stand for 20 minutes.

Microwave the gelatin and water for 8 seconds and stir it in the cream mixture. Pass the mixture through a sieve and divide evenly among 6 small ramekins or other servings dishes. Cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours.

Even after chilling the it overnight, the panna cotta still looked suspiciously jiggly, and it was definitely softer than I wanted it. I'm not sure if the answer is to add more gelatin because I don't really want the stiffness that's associated with Jell-O Jigglers. I think next time I make this I will try boiling the milk and cream mixture longer to reduce it a bit as instructed in Karen's recipe.

For the pears I found these two recipes for vanilla poached pears which were pretty different from each other, so I decided to try a amalgam of the two. I also wanted to add cherries, but the only ones I could find were dried, tart cherries, so I tried to reconstitute them in the poaching liquid, which didn't work too well.

Vanilla Poached Pears with Dried Cherries
makes 2 pears

1/2 vanilla bean
2 cups white wine
1/2 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 Bosc pears
12 dried tart cherries

Split the vanilla bean lengthwise in half with a knife and scrape out the seeds.

Add the vanilla seeds and pod to the white wine, water, and sugar in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Reduce to a simmer.

Peel the pears, leaving the stem intact. Slice off the bottom 1/8" of each pear to create a flat, stable base.

Add the pears to the simmering poaching liquid, laying them on their sides so they are almost completely submerged. Cook, turning pears occasionally so they become saturated on all sides, until they are just tender when pierced with a fork, about 7 minutes.

Allow pears to cool completely in their poaching liquid. Add dried cherries to the poaching liquid.

Once cool, transfer 1 cup of poaching liquid plus cherries to a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook for about 10 minutes to reduce the liquid. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Use an immersion blender to (try to) puree the cherries. Strain and set aside.

Cut each pear into thirds lengthwise, removing the core. Make vertical cuts into each section so you get very thin slices. Fan the slices out and carefully transfer to the top of panna cotta. Drizzle with cherry liquid mixture.

As you can probably tell from the pictures above, my attempts at incorporating the cherries into the poaching liquid did not turn out too well. And because the panna cotta was so soft, the pears kind of sank into it instead of nicely resting on top. But I really liked the taste of the whole dish. The almond was definitely noticeable in the panna cotta, and the texture of the pears was akin to the canned pears in fruit cocktail but the flavor was a whole lot more sophisticated. Definitely a recipe I want to try again and perfect.