Chocolate Souffles

Yes I do drink red wine with chocolate.

On my birthday weekend, I was allowed to go wild with chocolate. So, in addition to having Ben make me a very dense chocolate birthday cake (a Reine de Saba, aka "Queen of Sheba") I made these intensely bittersweet chocolate souffles from Alice Medrich's book Bittersweet which I recently bought due to a nice 40% off coupon from Borders. Thanks to Alice for giving me my chocolate fix this weekend and many to come. My new Le Creuset heart shaped stoneware ramekins my parents sent me for my birthday arrived just in time and inspired the souffles since I had been wanting a set of ramekins for just this purpose for quite a while. Here they are!

All good things start with a large block of chocolate.

Ben caught me with the butter. I swear I was just buttering the ramekins.

Folding whipped egg whites into the chocolate batter.

Filled ramekins.

Baked and ready to eat.

Valentine's Cookies

Almost every year I make cutout cookies for Valentine's day and take them to school/work/lab with me. It's amazing how people go crazy for frosted cookies with sprinkles. They are quite festive, don't you think?

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Are you horrified at the price of vanilla extract? Me too. I really go through the stuff sometimes, and I am horrified at a $5 (or more) price tag for a measly 2 oz bottle that I could use up in one recipe. So to remedy this dire situation I have decided to make my own.

I ordered some vanilla beans - a few Mexican and a few Ugandan (randomly chosen just to compare). The process is so easy, I don't know why I didn't do this long ago. All you need is some moderately strong alcohol of your choice - vodka, rum, bourbon, etc - nothing fancy or expensive please, the vanilla is going to do the flavoring, so cheap booze is fine. Cut several vanilla beans in half to splay them open then place in about 8 oz of alcohol - or put more beans in a bitter bottle. I made them right in the bottles I bought the alcohol in. Mexican beans in gold rum and ugandan beans in vodka. Place in a dark cool location in a cabinet and forget about it for a while. Just give it a shake now and then when you think about it. Ideally this should sit for about 8 weeks to reach good potency to use for cooking. Mine have been going about 4 weeks now, I open them up and smell once in a while.

The beautiful thing is that you can continue to replenish your vanilla stock with this method. Don't take the beans out, and continue to top off your bottle with more alcohol now and then. If you use vanilla beans in cooking, don't throw them out, you can put the spent pods right in the bottle as they have more flavor to give and the alcohol will extract it.

The cost:
vanilla beans are about $1 each (cheaper if you buy in bulk) and can be found at many stores nowthe alcohol cost me about $4 for an 8 oz bottle

So I had a total cost of about $7 for 8oz, which I can continue to replenish as needed. I'm sure I could go much cheaper with the alcohol too if I bought bigger bottles from a discount store.

Vanilla Day 1

Vanilla Week 4

Chocolate Tasting Lab!

Inspired by America's Test Kitchen, I decided to do my own chocolate tasting to pick my own favorite dark chocolate. These are the brands I tasted:

1) Ghirardelli 60% Cacao bittersweet chocolate
2) Ghirardelli Semisweet Chocolate baking bar (percentage unmarked)
3) Lindt Swiss bittersweet fine dark chocolate (percentage unmarked)
4) Callebaut bittersweet 60% cocoa solids
5) Callebaut bittersweet 70% cocoa solids
6) El Rey Extra bittersweet Gran saman chocolate 65% cocoa solids
7) Valrhona Guanaja 70% cocoa bittersweet chocolate

And the winner is: Callebaut bittersweet - either 60% or 70% is great for nibbling and wonderful to bake with. Even at 70% cocoa solids, this chocolate is not bitter tasting and has a nice, smooth, nutty flavor. Yum! Callebaut sells this chocolate in 11 lb blocks, but I find it broken in small chunks at Whole Foods at a great price (cheaper than buying the small wrapped bars you usually see).

Honorable mention: Valrhona, LIndt and the Ghirardelli 60% were also quite tasty to nibble, but didn't have quite as perfect a flavor as Callebaut. The Lindt and Ghirardelli are readily available, sold in nicely wrapped, easy to deal with 3-4 oz bars in most any grocery store's baking or chocolate section. These are a bit easier to handle than the Callebaut for nibbling.

Homemade Pasta

I decided to try my hand at homemade pasta, and I made this simple egg pasta recipe into long wide noodles. No pasta machine required, just mix by hand, roll and cut. I made a sauce with browned butter, sage, roasted sweet potatoes and prosciutto to go with it. Delicious!

Cheese Souffle

I wanted to make something new for dinner tonight, and so the first course was the cheese souffle from Julia Child's cookbook. It is very easy and came out perfectly. Eggs are amazing. That is a bottle of Artezin Carignan from Mendocino County (one of our Hess wine club wines) posing with the souffle.

Garlic So Cute

This is Le Creuset's petite garlic casserole and I used it for roasting whole garlic cloves. It was amazing - they were sweet, succulent, and did not even think of burning or drying out. I just drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled salt and pepper over the top. Isn't this the cutest piece of cookware you could imagine having?

French Style Chicken in a Pot

Inspired by this week's episode of America's Test Kitchen, I made the French Chicken in a Pot. It was every bit as good as they made it look. So easy to make and this is easily the moistest chicken preparation I have had in a long time. I don't usually make chicken very often, but this may change my mind. Happily, I also had leftovers for two more nights and made chicken quesadillas and lemon chicken pasta.