Naturally we are right-thinking people and build this around Alton Brown’s Buttermilk Pancake recipe, found over yonder at the Food TV site.  I grew up on the Bisquick variety, so the conversion to this one is extra-welcome, and definitely worth the very minor extra steps (composing your own mix, acquiring buttermilk, separating the eggs).

Some notes:

• Served ‘em up with sausage links. We already do bacon in the oven, and recently converted over to doing sausage in the oven as well. It’s very effective and, with a little foil used, cleans up right quick. Highly recommended.
• Vermont Grade B Maple Syrup. Accept no substitutes. It’s like the bold complex red wine of syrups.  We serve ours in one of those plastic “ketchup bottle” dispensers — every kitchen should have, like, twelve of those things, because there’s all sorts of stuff that’s not ketchup or mustard that works really well with them.
• My wife mixes the chocolate chips into the batter. While there’s a risk that they’ll sink to the bottom, this means the chips are coated with the batter and less likely to burn onto your griddle.
• Use actual buttermilk.  I hear folks get “just fine” results using milk and lemon juice as a substitute (the juice provides the acid that the buttermilk normally does, key for activating the ingredients in the mix), but it can cause the pancakes to turn out a bit thinner than you might want.

And some pictures.

First up is my new favorite dinner. It is not healthy, but it is good: Chicken Lazone.

Here’s the recipe – http://www.recipezaar.com/Chicken-Lazone-65768

Read it. It’ll take you about a minute, because it’s that easy.  It’s also ridiculously tasty, in a way that you wouldn’t expect just from reading the ingredients, especially for those who love Cajun food.

At the risk of repeating my tweets, some quick notes:

• Your choice of chili powder makes a difference. We use Penzey’s, medium hot.  If that doesn’t supply enough heat for you, toss in as much cayenne as you care to endure.
• Depending on the amount of chicken, we often increase — even double — the spice mixture. The key is to make sure that the spices are COATING each piece of chicken.  You’ll see some of that in the images below.
• We also increase the amount of cream proportionately to the spices in the interests of making a proper amount of sauce with the flavor all suffused and whatnot.
• My wife says you could leave out half the butter if you wanted to, but why would you do this?

Now, the food porn.

So! Scratch the rewriting, then. Instead, you get the illustrations the previous edition lacked. Enjoy.

Our morning started with a trip to Mayorga Coffee down in south Silver Spring. Christie had gone there a few times as part of one of her moms’ groups, and had nothing but good things to say about it.

Hm, make that almost nothing but good things. The bad thing was that it’s shutting down at the end of the year. Judging by the reactions I got to mentioning this on Twitter (and Facebook by proxy) few people were aware of it. It’s a real pity, too — it has an incredible amount of space, and reportedly did a good job of supporting the local arts and so on. (I also heard through Twitter that there had been an occasional Wits & Wagers gathering there.)

But then construction happened. It took a while to happen and rerouted a nearby road that provided the place with a bunch of its traffic. With that traffic gone and (I suspect, given the big rental banner on it) the nearby apartment building slow to fill with occupants after it finally opened, they just couldn’t keep it going. The silver lining in all of this (which you already know if you followed the earlier link) is that they’re opening a new location in Takoma Park to replace this one. So that’s something. (And better yet, its new location will be right across from the spiffy Takoma Park Co-Op.)

I’d never known about it until Christie started talking about it, and I’m sad to see it go, but glad I managed to visit at least once at this location before the end of the year.

We spent some time there sipping hot chocolate, nibbling on muffins, and sorting through our prodigious number of Christmas photos (more on those some other time). But the kitchen was permanently closed, so we found ourselves casting about when lunch-time came. We headed towards Downtown Silver Spring without much of a plan, but really that’s the glory of DSS — plenty of options for the indecisive.

We settled on trying out zPizza, a place I’d learned about while reading an article on the wall at a local Five Guys but didn’t really know much about. This turned out to be a roaring success, and as Christie put it, zPizza has definitely “gone into our rotation”. We split a small Tuscan pizza (I really enjoyed it, and Christie did too but asked for some marinara sauce to dip it in) and a ZBQ salad (which Christie rightly noted as having me written all over it). Very satisfying for a quick, small lunch, and within line of sight of the Majestic Theater, so it’s something to keep in mind whenever we manage to make it out to the movies next (you know, in 2013 or so).

And as she proved over Thanksgiving and Christmas, Evie remains a ridiculously easy baby to take on outings and bring into unfamiliar locations. She doesn’t fuss much, and spends most of her time alternating between joyful and solemn concentration.  Good, good kid.  We’re very lucky.

All in all exactly the sort of lazy Sunday I was looking for, without realizing that this was how to make it happen.

Gigantic Popovers

The Hardware

In Chez Hicks we have a popover pan from Williams Sonoma, but the popovers of my youth were made with a cookie sheet and 6 glass custard cups. Take your pick.  I’m using my Mom’s recipe here, so it’ll proceed on the assumption of the custard cup approach.

The Software

The Lubricant

• 4 teaspoons of shortening (though we use ghee for the job — adds to the butteryness and avoids any “shortening taste” that might emerge, but thanks to being clarified butter behaves more like shortening with regards to the whole not-burning thing)

The Dry Stuff

• 1 cup of sifted flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt

The Wet Stuff

• 1 cup of milk
• 2 eggs

The Process

1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F.

2. Grease 6 custard cups (or 8 if you’re doing medium-sized popovers instead of big’uns) using a little additional shortening/ghee. Divide the 4 teaspoons of shortening/ghee mostly even-sized globs and drop one into each of the cups.

3. Put the cups on a cookie sheet (or jelly-roll pan) — you can skip the cookie sheet if you have a pre-built popover pan — and heat in oven 5-10 minutes.

4. While the shortening and cups are melting/heating in the oven, sift the Dry Stuff into a bowl.

5. Add wet ingredients and beat just until smooth (don’t overmix).

6. Remove the pan-with-cups from the oven.  Watching your fingers and avoiding splatter, pour about a third of a cup (or a quarter cup if using the 8 cup approach) of the batter into each cup — this should just about half-fill each receptacle.

7. Put back in the oven and bake at 425 degrees F for 25 minutes.

The Result

What comes out the other side of this should be brown and golden and freaking delicious.

When you remove them, I recommend twisting each out of the cup (it should slide free with little force if the cup greasing was done well) and then gouging each one with a knife to let the steam out. If you don’t let the steam out, they tend to deflate and lose some of the outer crisp and inner fluffiness.

I like mine with butter and strawberry preserves that I get from the farm up the road.

You can look at the original recipe if you like at the link above, but I’m going to supply my take on it here, embellished by the experience of making it several times.  Takes between 1 and 2 hours to get to the result, depending on how slow you are (I tend to be a bit slow). Enjoy!

The Hardware

• A big soup pot (mine is 10 quarts, but for a single batch you could probably do 6)
• Large nonstick skillet
• Knife
• Cutting board
• A wide shallow bowl or two and some other bowls (3-ish) to store the prepped components as you work
• Wooden spoon
• A stick blender unless you really love messes and hassles

The Software

(I’m dividing some of these into groups, because their yield can be put together in one storage solution as you’re doing your prep. I’m also trying to order ingredients in order of procedural need. I’m being OCD. Bear with me.)

• 8 cups of chicken broth (or vegetable broth, but I’ve only done chicken)

Group A

• 8 ears of corn, as fresh as possible
• 5 medium idaho russet potatoes, cut into one inch cubes (approximate)

Group B

• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 1 large red onion, chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped (you can add a second for extra color)
• 1 orange bell pepper, chopped

Group C

• 2 poblano peppers, seeded and chopped into small pieces (providing milder heat and some flavor)
• 4 cloves of garlic, smashed and chopped

Group D (I put group D in a small glass bowl, apart from the other stuff

• 2 chipotle chiles in adobo (they come in a can); I like the spicy, so I chop these up somewhat finely, but you can leave them whole and fish ‘em out later if you’re lightweight on spicy
• approximately 2 tablespoons of adobo sauce from the can (avoid this if you’re one of the aforementioned lightweights)

Group E

• 1 cup of cream
• 8 ounces of monterey jack (low-fat if for some crazy reason you’re worried about that, but why, god, why) or mexican queso fresco (haven’t used this latter option, but it’s intriguing). I use the pre-shredded stuff as it melts most easily, but if you’re not, you can probably get away with cutting this into small cubes.
• cilantro, for garnish

The Process

1. Remove the kernels of corn from the cobs with a knife.  I like to do this in a wide, low bowl so I can easily maneuver the knife but contain the corn kernels as they shoot off when cut.   When the bowl gets full, transfer the kernels into a larger more general purpose bowl (where you’ll be storing the cubed potatoes as well).  Once you’ve cut off all of the kernels — and there will be a lot — take about a cup of them and set that aside. DO NOT TOUCH that set-aside cup until much later (step 14).

2. Toss the stripped cobs into your giant soup pot and pour in the chicken broth. Boil them together for 15-20 minutes.  While things are a-boilin’, continue with the prep.  (When the time’s up, you’ll remove the pot from the heat — see step #7)

3. Cut up the potatoes and store them with the kernels of corn. (At the end of this you’ll be wielding a stick blender at the results, so don’t worry too much about getting perfect one inch cubes. Hack away!)

4. If you haven’t yet, get your onion and bell peppers cut up and put into one bowl. Chop up your poblano peppers and garlic and put those in another bowl. Again, remember that there’s a blender on the far side of this stuff, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time making sure you’re cutting evenly sized pieces here.

5. Melt the butter in your nonstick skillet, then saute the chopped onions and bell peppers (group “B”) until just tender. For me, this takes 5-10 minutes and rides right alongside the cob-boiling.

6. Add the garlic and poblanos (group “C”) into the skillet along with the stuff that’s already in there, and let that go for another 5-10 minutes to tenderize as well.

7. By or before this point, your broth should have boiled enough.  When that timer goes off, remove the cobs from the pot (onto a plate or back into one of the vacated bowls) and let them cool.  Move your broth off of the heat and let it rest for a bit while the rest of the stuff above catches up.

8. When the cobs are cool enough to handle, use a butter knife or spoon to scrape the remaining bits of corn off the cobs, into a bowl (again: wide, short), and then empty that into the broth.  This massively ramps up the corn flavor, but it’s a bit of a pain; the pain is worth it.

9. Dump the onion/pepper/garlic mixture into the broth pot.  Add in the chipotles and the adobo sauce in whatever configuration you’ve decided on (group D).

10. Put the pot back on the heat and bring it all to a boil. Once it boils, reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

11. Add the potatoes and the corn (but NOT the cup of corn you set aside) and continue simmering for 20-30 minutes, until the potatoes are just past al dente (keeping their shape, but mashing easily with pressure from a spoon).

12. Turn off heat, remove pot. Add the cream.

13. If you are a right-thinking cook and have a stick blender, blend away, mixing the cheese in. Once around each location of the pot should do most of the trick.  You want to pulverize lots of the big chunks, but still leave plenty of texture and the occasional larger piece. If you’re stuck without a stick blender … buy a stick blender. But I’m told by the original recipe that you can ladle half or so of the soup into a blender, which you’ll probably have to do in batches, and go to town that way. I prefer my method by a country mile.

14. With the cheese all melted in and everything blenderized, now stir that cup of corn kernels in.  They’ll warm up, but they won’t quite cook, giving you lovely fresh-corn bursts of flavor as you eat the soup.  America’s Test Kitchen recommended this to me once with another soup, and I’ve never looked back. I use the technique whenever it makes sense.

15. Don’t forget that you have cilantro for garnish (I usually forget, then regret, but hey, I make quarts and quarts of the stuff, and it freezes up real good). If everyone likes cilantro, just add a nice torn-up handful to the pot and stir.

16. Call everyone to dinner.

17. Receive praise.

Variants include throwing in a cup of ditalini or macaroni pasta half an hour before it’s done, which can soak up liquid when the chili is being especially wet.  The presence of the pasta can also mitigate the feeling of “denseness”.

Hardware

• Slow cooker (high capacity if you have it)
• Measuring spoons and cup

Software

• Ground beef (1-2 lbs depending on “meatiness” desired), browned and drained separately
• 1 jar of medium salsa
• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 1 6oz can of tomato paste
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 yellow pepper, diced
• 1 green pepper, diced
• 1-2 onions, chopped
• 1 can of (dark) red kidney beans
• 2-4 cloves minced garlic
• 2 teaspoons white sugar
• 1/4-1/2 cup tequila (proportional to beef)
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 1/2 tablespoons ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1 tablespoon dried basil
• 2 tablespoons dried oregano
• 1 tablespoon (saigon) cinnamon

Procedure

Brown ground beef separately, draining off the fat. Combine with other ingredients in a hot pot. Cook High for 3-4 (you can double this and go low, but the flavors blend almost too much, and our experience with it is that the high method works best, keeping the flavors more distinct and “bright”). Serve, eat.

I love these “cow to cone” guys, but they’re local to Ohio, and while I do consider them reason enough to travel to Origins, it only happens once a year.  So we’ve taken to making the occasional delivery order — affordable within their closest delivery area, at least, as you can get 9 pints packed in dry ice shipped to you for all of a $10 charge, making each pint cost between $9 and $10. That might sound pricey, but Jeni’s quality is completely worth it.  That’s not to say that every flavor is an instant hit for me, but the quality and craftsmanship of each one is undeniable. This is the sort of ice-cream that I like to shallowly skim with a spoon, so I can put just the right amount on my tongue to melt before going to the next. Jeni’s flavors lends themselves to savoring.

Here’s a quick tour of the flavors I’ve tried from the two shipments we’ve had so far.  I’ll include their descriptions, then my comments.

The Seasonals

These are the seasonal flavors that Jeni’s was offering at the time of our second shipment.  They may or may not be currently available, but it’s usually well worth it to dip your toe into the seasonals for part of your order.

Saigon Cinnamon

“The rich flavor of cream mellows out the heat without interfering with the complex flavors of the cinnamon.”

This is a new one for us with our most recent shipment. It’s really nice if you’re a cinnamon fan (and I am), like a rich, creamy cinnamon-inflected horchata.  Recommended.

Heirloom Pumpkin 5-Spice

“A modern classic – rich pumpkin blends perfectly with exotic spices. A light finish with a pleasant tingle of 5-spice.”

Christie is much more of a pumpkin pie fan than I am.  I had a few spoonfuls; it definitely delivers on the complex spice flavor of a good pumpkin pie, though Christie notes that it’s so successful with this that you can only eat a little at a time.

Red Hot Apple Cider (Sorbet)

“An intriguing blend of aromas greets you – the red hot hits lightly at first and then the cider shows through. The finish is clean with just a tingle of cinnamon.”

This one definitely has the flavor of a milder version of “red hots” candies, backed up somewhat distantly for me by the apple cider taste.  It’s sort of like Apple Jacks cereal, with the cinnamon/heat dialed up a bit.  Not necessarily a repeater for me, but I’m still very happy to have had it.

The Signatures

The signature flavors are where it’s really at for me with Jeni’s.  We absolutely should have tried more of the seasonal ones, but when it came right down to it we had a number of must-haves from the signature flavor list and that left us with limited space for ‘em.  And with good reason.

Salty Caramel

“Initial notes of burnt sugar give way to mouth-watering saltiness. A perfect salty sweet balance.”

Really hits a good balance of salty/sweet.  The salty isn’t assertive — it’s mainly there as a taste-bud activator (after all, homemade hot chocolate recipes insist on a pinch of salt for the same reason), and activate it does. I love this one, but we didn’t repeat it on our second order in the interests of hitting our core favorites and making a little room for experimenting.

Gravel Road

“Savory and smoky hits of almonds first, rounded out with salty notes for a satisfying finish.”

Not a repeater for us, but if you like smoked almonds, definitely grab this one: it’s basically the Salty Caramel with smoked almonds mixed in.  One to try if you’re looking to really explore the idea of savory ice cream.

Queen City Cayenne

“Rich chocolate slowly reveals hints of spice. Finish is pleasantly tingly.”

I’m not so sure about “hints” of spice here.  The rich chocolate base supports a light touch of cinnamon and a less light hit of cayenne pepper.  We’re nuts for the whole spicy chocolate thing, so this one is on our definitely-always-repeat list.  Just don’t go in thinking you’ll get just the lightest of cayenne hits (though it is light enough that you still have room to enjoy the other components of the flavor).

Pistachio

“Pure and true pistachio flavor; very lightly sweetened for a savory finish.”

I have tried a lot of pistachio ice creams over the years.  Pistachio in all things is something of a signature flavor for me and my family.  We gift bags of pistachios during the holidays. Pistachio ice cream is nearly always the first flavor I’ll try at a new creamery.  So that’s my background here when I tell you this.

Jeni’s pistachio ice cream is the best I have ever tried, by several miles.  While they list this as pistachio on the website, the label on the pint reads “pistachio and honey”.  The honey flavor doesn’t really express itself identifiably, I think, but it gives the sweetness in this ice cream a richer, stranger complexity than the norm.  They don’t put whole pistachios in here (whole pistachios often go gummy in ice cream, honestly), instead grinding them up and blending them throughout the ice cream.  Really, this one leaves all the other flavors in the dust for us; our second order included two pints of this, and honestly we could have been happy making it all nine.  The thinnest spoon-slice off the top can sit on my tongue and give me an outright afterglow as it melts.

Crazy. Good.

Thai Chili

“Complex flavors of hot, salty, savory, and sweet melt to provide a satisfying treat. Spicy finish lingers.”

This was in our first order, and we didn’t repeat it, in part because it was almost too much flavor.  I’m also not a huge coconut fan, so the little shredded bits of it in the ice cream didn’t work for me.  But holy moley, what heat!  This is a super spicy one, a mix of coconut milk, peanuts, and thai chili peppers.  By “super spicy” I mean “leaves the heat of Queen City Cayenne in the dust”. If you like spicy thai curries, this is something to explore.

Black Coffee

“True strong coffee flavor with absolutely no bitterness; captures and translates the aroma of coffee perfectly.”

That description is incredibly, incredibly accurate.  This NOT your typical oversweet coffee ice cream. It tastes like coffee smells.  It’s not bitter, but the sweetness is a background element here.  This is a repeater for us, showing up on both orders.

Bourbon Buttered Pecan

“Subtle corn mash notes come first, followed by rich and savory pecans; a charming hit of Bourbon finishes.”

This is a really interesting one, a new venture for us, showing up on our second order.  I think their description fits, and while I’m not a bourbon guy, the bourbon aspect of it intrigues.  Don’t know if we’ll be repeating this one yet, but I’d recommend it to anyone intrigued by the description.

Dark Chocolate

“Mouth-filling, palate-gripping, intense chocolate flavor with a fudge-like texture. Pleasingly dry finish.”

An incredible dark chocolate ice cream.  Goes as dark as you can go without getting bitter; it’s chocolate as delivered by the “less sweet, more flavorful” Jeni’s agenda.  This is on our repeater list.

Riesling Poached Pear (Sorbet)

“A surprisingly rich sorbet; pure pear flavor with unique pear texture; sweet Riesling notes shine on the finish.”

This one we got on our first order largely for my wife.  She loved it, but we left it off the order this time in the interest of getting that second pint of pistachio.  The riesling flavor is present, but not assertive, and marries well with the pear.

Lemon Yogurt

“Pure tart lemon, true tangy yogurt, perfectly balanced and not too sweet. Jeni’s favorite!”

Man, if you love lemon desserts like I do, this one deserves a try.  It’s tart and expansive in the mouth, but finishes with a distinct and unmistakable yogurt tang.  When tart dessert is the zone you’re angling for, this one totally delivers.  One of our repeaters.