Author: Kristen

Quiche Florentine

John made a fantastically delicious Quiche Florentine the other day – it’s lucky I took a photo before we started eating it because it didn’t last long!

quiche florentine

He made a homemade crust, and then, to the best of his recollection, the quiche was a mixture of 5 or 6 eggs, a carmelized onion, chopped spinach, sharp and monterey jack cheese, tiny chopped pieces of about half of a small ham steak, parsley, a bit of milk, and maybe a little pepper. Sorry we can’t give any specific measurements, but he just eyeballed most of it when he was putting it all together. He does remember baking it for 45 minutes at 350 though -LOL! (Toothpick method for determining doneness works well since mostly you have to make sure the eggs are set.)

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$3 Off Our Aprons Through November 10!

For the next few days, through November 10, all of our Food Follies Aprons are $3 off! We have aprons for every state that say “I don’t care how they do things here, I’m from “, a great way to show others how proud you are of your home cooking when you’re not home!

We also have a number of humorous designs as well as a holiday favorite for when you’re baking up those Christmas cookies:

Our aprons come in white, khaki, and vivid yellow, and make an original gift for the chef or baker in your life – click here to check out all of our aprons and browse through our other cool stuff in our Food Follies shop too – thanks!

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Peppino’s Family Pizzeria in Rosendale, NY

Peppino’s Family Pizzeria and Restaurant has recently opened it’s doors in Rosendale, NY (Mid-Hudson Valley area, just south of Kingston and north of New Paltz) – it’s on route 32, just north of the Rosendale bridge. (They have at least one other pre-existing location in Callicoon, NY,  hence the ‘Est. 1990’ in the awning below.)

As you can see from the picture, on the outside, it’s a rather unassuming place in a rather unassuming plaza, but the charm in this restaurant lies inside, in the tasty, tasty food!

First off, let’s discuss the pizza. The thin-crust pizza is the perfect blend of firm, yet thin and crispy. They say they have a secret to what makes the crust so light (rather than thick and doughy and overly filling) but they wouldn’t tell me what it is when I asked – drat! Their red sauce is, to me, just the perfect mix of sweet tomato and Italian spices that sets the stage perfectly for whatever you want on it or under it. Our latest favorite is a cheese pizza with sausage and fresh sliced tomatoes, with the sausage coming in easy to chomp strips instead of chunky coins or ‘pebbles’ like a lot of chain pizza restaurants use. The perfection in the dough carries over into their other items like their calzones as well (which are usually too big to eat in one sitting unless you really want to stuff yourself!) – crispy and all melty with really creamy ricotta and melted mozzarella. Doesn’t get much better than that!

(Probably not the best photo – and it’s so hard to really photograph food well – but you get the idea.)

Another favorite we have (although it’s only opened recently, we’ve been there a LOT, can you tell?) are the subs. John likes to order the 12″ eggplant parmigiana sub sandwich. They get their sub rolls from one special place because of the great quality – excellent taste, supportive of the heavier sandwich fillings, but also light and crispy on the outside. They also make great panini’s, and even great burgers if you’re with a group that wants pizza but you just feel like something different sometimes.

The staff is always friendly too. And although the walls could use a few more decorations, and it’s certainly not a fancy linen-tablecloth type place, they’ve got cozy booths and tables big enough for large families too.

So if you’re in the area, we highly recommend Peppino’s. As we said, they’re at 1157 Rt. 32 in Rosendale, NY, in the same plaza with 32 Lunch. (Their number is 845-658-8887 if you want to call for specific directions.)

Note: Unfortunately, Peppinos has now closed. We’ll keep the tasty memories forever though!

Blueberry Swirl Ice Cream

Upstate New York is having a great blueberry season, and having picked up a lovely pint of local blueberries, I decided to make some blueberry swirl ice cream!

First, I washed all the blueberries and tossed them into the blender. I added about a 1/2 cup of sugar and a few tablespoons of lemon juice, and hit puree. Then I poured the puree into a saucepan and cooked it down for a while to make a concentrated reduction sauce. After that, I poured it into a bowl with a lid and cooled it down in the fridge.

The ice cream itself was just a basic vanilla I made in my ice cream maker. When I’d churned and frozen it until it was soft serve consistency, I poured half of it in the bottom of the storage container, then poured half the blueberry puree over it, then more ice cream, and then puree to finish it off. I ran a knife through the mixture to swirl the blueberry into the ice cream, enough to create a good swirl mix, but not enough so it blended in too much. Then, froze it all overnight so it would solidify.

Next day, we had this:

And let me tell you, it was fan-tastic! The blueberries were SO sweet and flavorful, and even in the colder temperatures of the ice cream they were delicious and well, vibrant seems to be a good word for it.

Oh, I also took a photo of the blueberries before they were pureed….

There’s always seems to be at least ONE blueberry that wants to be purple instead of blue, isn’t there. I’m reminded of the Far Side cartoon with a ton of penguins and one is jumping up in the middle and shouting, “I gotta be me!” *grin*

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Wine Catch Up (Not Ketchup)

Over the last few months (probably about four) we’ve sampled a few bottles of wine: a 2009 Lancatay Cabernet Sauvignon (Argentina), a 2008 Henry Lagarde Malbec (Argentina), and a 2008 Umbria Pinot Grigio (Italy).

wine

Both of the Argentina reds were excellent, had tasty, bold flavor, and packed a bit of a punch alcohol-wise too. The Italian Pinot Grigio was actually a bit too mild in flavor for either of us. The bottle we had seemed a bit on the light side taste-wise.

Sorry I can’t be more specific – next time I’ll try to post about the wine within a week of having tried it, instead of months, when I can’t remember many details! In any case, we’d both recommend either or both of the Argentina wines if you’re up for some robust reds.

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Apple Streusel Muffins

It’s funny the way the mind works. This morning before breakfast I thought about the nice bag of MacIntosh apples that we’d bought a day or so ago, then remembered that we still had two Granny Smith apples in the fridge from even earlier, at which point my brain just interrupted itself to yell “Apple Streusel Muffins!” So, not wanting to cause any internal conflicts so early in the day by struggling with that thought, I found a recipe online and dashed to the kitchen.

I made some adjustments to the original recipe which I think worked out well – here’s the final Apple Streusel Muffins recipe (below) that I worked from. Came out looking and tasting delicious, if I do say so myself. Of course, the other samplers I had on hand also seemed to like them, so there’s more than just my opinion, if you were worried – LOL.

apple streusel muffins

Apple Streusel Muffins

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chopped apples
1 1/2 cups shredded apples

Topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon butter, softened

In mixing bowl, mix flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and set aside.

In large mixing bowl mix butter and sugars until creamy. Add eggs and mix. Mix in shredded and chopped apples and vanilla. Gradually stir in flour mixture until well mixed. Batter will be thick.

To mix topping, combine brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and butter in a small bowl and mix with a fork to get smallish crumbly chunks.

Grease regular-sized muffin tins (or use paper liners) and fill each space with muffin batter. Then, sprinkle about a half teaspoon of streusel topping on each muffin.

Bake at 375F for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the muffin comes out clean. Makes about 16 muffins.

Adjustments on Half-Moon Cookie Recipe

In the New York City area they are called Black & Whites and have chocolate and vanilla icing on them, but in upstate New York, where I am from, they are called Half Moon Cookies and have more of a traditional frosting than a hard icing.

Anyway, I’ve adjusted the recipe we have on our site, which originally came from the New York CookBook. Basically, the changes are… instead of 2.5 cups of cake flour and 2.5 cups of all purpose flour, I found that 4 cups of cake flour and 1 cup of all purpose flour make for a much lighter cookie, but still with excellent consistency. They were just too dense and heavy before with so much of the regular flour.

Also, instead of the 20-30 minutes of cooking time, I suggest 12-15 minutes MAX. I don’t even know where they got 20-30 minutes – if I left them in that long at the suggested temperature they’d be dark and crispy, and not in a good way. 12 minutes at 375 in our oven works just fine.

Here’s the recipe:

Half Moon Cookies

1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
4 large eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon lemon extract
4 cups cake flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 375. Butter two baking sheets and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the sugar and butter and mix by machine or hand until fluffy. Add the eggs, milk, and vanilla and lemon extracts and mix until smooth.

In a medium bowl, combine the flours, baking powder and salt and stir until mixed. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches, stirring well to combine. Using a soup spoon, drop spoonfuls of the dough 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until the edges begin to brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Allow to cool completely.

Note: Frost flat side of cookie, half in chocolate, half in vanilla – can use your favorite frosting recipes, although some prefer more of a glaze or icing than a frosting.

Oh, and that photo of the Half Moon Cookies up there is an older photo. I did make a successful batch a day ago, but just as I was mixing all the dry ingredients we lost power for a few hours. It was after 8 p.m. when we got power back, and by the time the cookies were mixed and baked and ready for frosting I was really tired so I only did chocolate frosting on them – LOL – making them, effectively, just new moon cookies, I suppose. So that’s why I didn’t take new photos – but they came out just perfect with the recipe adjustments – deliciousness!

Chocolate Ganache – Easier Than I Thought

A while ago, I had an impulse to try making chocolate ganache. For a long time I’d thought ganache to be this tremendously tricky thing (probably because the word ‘ganache’ SOUNDS complicated, although apparently it comes from the French word ‘jowl’, which makes sense, but suddenly makes it seem NOT so exotic anymore – heh), but when I found a recipe, I was pleasantly surprised and thought, “Hey, even *I* could make this!”

I used the chocolate ganache recipe from allrecipes.com (minus the rum – that just leaves heavy cream and chocolate chips), and poured the finished product over a single layer of a chocolate mayonnaise cake that I had made earlier just for this experiment.

It is recommended pouring the ganache on top of the cake when the cake’s on a baking rack so it doesn’t pool and the sides look smooth, but I did it right on the plate because I didn’t feel like messing with the rack, but in the future, I’d recommend the rack method. (You can see a bit of the pooling in the image above.)

Anyway, it came out nicely, I think. Next time, however, I’m going to add a touch more chocolate than is recommended and wait a tad longer for the ganache to cool, as it was a little thin when I poured it on the cake.

Also, if you whip the ganache in a mixer for about 5 minutes I hear you’ll get fantastic frosting, although I haven’t tried this myself yet.

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