Jim absolutely hates breakfast for dinner in any shape or form. He just doesn’t seem to understand it, but it was a favorite treat when I was a kid and my mother made us swedish pancakes for dinner. It’s something that Jim moans and groans about so much that I’ve learned to save it for when he’s away, or the kids will ask for it on their birthdays since they have their choice for dinner then with no arguments. I do serve it with either bacon or sausage, just to make it a well-rounded sort or breakfast/dinner. When Jim was away skiing with his brother in February I took the opportunity to make beignets (pronounced “ben-YAYS”) for dinner one night. The small, light, donuts made famous in the French Quarter of New Orleans by Café du Monde.
This was a lovely dough to work with, and I’m going to try it the next time I make regular donuts and see how it works with an icing or glaze.
Angel-Light Beignets
Ingredients:
- 2/3 cup warm water (115°F)
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 2-1/2 tsp. (1 package) active dry yeast
- 3 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup heavy cream
- 1 egg, lightly beaten
- Peanut oil for deep-frying
- Confectioners’ sugar for dusting
Directions:
In a 2-cup measuring cup, combine the water, granulated sugar, salt and yeast. Let stand until frothy, about 10 minutes.
Measure out 3-1/2 cups of the flour into a food processor. With the motor running, slowly add the yeast mixture, processing until fully absorbed. Add the cream and egg and process to form a soft dough. Add more flour, 1 Tbs. at a time, until the dough cleans the sides of the work bowl and is no longer sticky. Continue processing for 1 minute to knead. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight.
Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and punch it down to eliminate air pockets. Using a floured rolling pin, roll out the dough into an 8-inch square about 3/4 inch thick. Using a sharp knife, square off the corners. Cut the dough into sixteen 2-inch squares, then cut the squares in half on the diagonal to form 32 triangles. Brush off flour with a dry pastry brush and transfer to a lightly floured baking sheet and let rise, uncovered, until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.
In a heavy saucepan or deep fryer, pour in oil to a depth of 4 inches and heat to 375°F on a deep-frying thermometer. Add the pieces of dough, a few at a time, and deep-fry, turning as needed, until golden, about 1 minute. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to paper towels to drain.
Sprinkle generously with confectioners’ sugar and serve hot.
Serve immediately while still hot and just after you've dusted with powdered sugar.
French Crullers
My kids have been bugging me lately to make fresh donuts again, since I haven’t made any in months. For a while I was on a roll, making glazed, chocolate & strawberry frosted donuts, Dinner Party Donut Holes, and New Orlean’s Style Beignets. I really wanted to try and make French crullers. I’m not generally a huge donut fan, but a good cruller is so light that it’s hard to feel too guilty about eating one.
I found two promising recipes on the internet for them. Both were based on a basic pate a choux recipe, but one had orange zest and used shortening rather than butter in it. While generally I would opt for the butter over shortening, the shortening recipe seemed to be rated higher, so I decided to go with that one. The one thing I did take away from the other recipe that did seem important, was to freeze the donuts once they were piped out for 30 minutes. I tried this recipe twice; once without freezing and once with, and the freezing is key to keeping the soft batter from completely losing it’s shape when trying to transfer them into the fryer.
French Crullers
Original recipes from AllRecipes.com and Foodnetwork.com. Adapted and combined by Crafty Farm Girl, September, 2011.
INGREDIENTS:
4 tablespoons white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon orange zest
4 tablespoons shortening
1 cup hot water
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 eggs
1 1/2 tablespoons shortening
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
3 tablespoons cream
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
DIRECTIONS:
Put 4 tablespoons sugar, salt, shortening and orange rind in saucepan with 1 cup hot water. Bring to a boil. Mix in 1 cup of flour. Reduce heat to low and, with a wooden spoon, stir in the flour until the mixture forms a ball, working out any lumps of flour from dough as you go. Remove from heat, and cool slightly.
Beat in one egg at a time, beating each one in thoroughly before adding another. Working the eggs into pate a choux dough is a good arm workout, but doing it by hand, and always with a wooden spoon, is the way I grew up making it. You can transfer the dough to a heavy-duty mixer at this point and work the eggs in, still one at a time, with the beater attachment, working each egg into the batter individually and just until combined.
Using a star tip, press dough through pastry bag, in desired shape, onto a well-greased square of heavy paper. (Note: I used parchment paper, and next time I will try cutting up a brown grocery bag and greasing that, as I think it might release the donut batter into the oil easier than the parchment did.) Place the piped donut batter into the freezer for 30 minutes.
The donut batter in the pastry bag ready to pipe.
pipe into circles on squares of greased heavy paper and freeze for 30 minutes.
While your donuts are in the freezer you can bring your oil up to the proper temperature. Turn paper upside down and let crullers drop into deep, hot fat (375 degrees F – 190 degrees C). Fry until well puffed up and golden brown in color, about 6 to 7 minutes. Drain on unglazed paper. Ice with confectioners’ frosting.
Using a knife, carefully scrape the batter off of the paper and into the hot oil.
Fry until well puffed and golden brown on each side.
When brown on both sides, remove with tongs or a slotted spoon and drain on unglazed paper.
Prepare icing and drizzle on with a spoon or smear on with a knife.
To Make Frosting: Cream 1 1/2 tablespoons shortening and continue creaming while slowly adding sugar. Add cream, salt, and vanilla and mix smooth.
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Crispy Corn Fritters with Fresh Cilantro
My oldest daughter has always loved Southern food, which may have contributed to her decision to go to college in Kentucky. I’ve got a trip planned to go down to Lexington to see her at the end of the month, and in typical fashion our plans are all revolving around the new restaurants she wants me to come try with her. There’s Alfafa’s that has the most delicious pancakes I have ever eaten along with cheese grits and country ham. I love to eat at Doodles, (which stole my idea of opening a place in an old garage) and serves “comfort food with a conscience”, serving local organic food whenever possible. They’ve got a terrific assortment of delicious offerings including Pigs and Puffs; four pieces of crisp bacon resting on top of four fluffy New Orlean’s style beignets. Yumm! Eating these inspired me to make my own, and you’ll find that post here.
I think I made fritters for the first time when I was in my teens. I made small donut-hole sized apple fritters. I loved them and they were so much better than the enormous fritters I found in stores around here. With local corn season in full swing here we’ve been eating some really great ears. I thought this recipe for corn fritters would be a good way to highlight this season’s corn. I got the recipe from a great cookbook I have by Williams Sonoma called Breakfast Comforts. The only thing I changed was to add a little more onion and cilantro. Isn’t everything better with more cilantro in it?
Crispy Corn Fritters with Fresh Cilantro
Makes about 24 fritters
Canola oil for deep-frying
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup whole milk
2 large eggs, beaten
1 cup fresh (or frozen) corn kernels
3 tablespoons minced yellow onion
3 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro
Pour oil to a depth of at least 3 inches into a large, heavy saucepan, preferably cast iton, and heat over high heat to 350 degrees F on a deep-frying thermometer. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees F. Place a wire rack over a rimmed baking sheet and place near the stove.
While the oil is heating, in a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Make a well in the center of the flour mixture. In a separate bowl, whisk together the milk and eggs and pour into the well in the flour mixture.
Stir just until combined.
Gently fold in the corn, onion, and cilantro.
3. In batches to avoid crowding, add tablespoonfulls of the batter to the hot oil.
Deep-fry the fritters until golden brown, turning once at the halfway point, about 3 minutes.
Using a wire skimmer or a metal slotted spoon, transfer to the rack and keep warm in the oven while you fry the remaining fritters.
Serve at once.
The original recipe called for serving the fritters with maple syrup, but we found barbeque sauce was a really great dipping sauce with them.
What I Did This Weekend
I’m not one to normally post something as mundane as “what I did this weekend”, but the truth is I’ve been so busy making things that I don’t have enough time to post things.
On Friday night I went to see one of my favorite authors, David Sedaris, speak at a local theatre with two girlfriends. My kids spent the night at my parents house which they hadn’t done in quite awhile and they were excited about that. I was excited about dinner and being out with my friends; a rare treat for me. I didn’t quite know what to expect from a show by an author, but he was hysterically funny, reading some new stories and from his diary and we all had a great time.
My husband has been away skiing with his brother since Thursday morning, so not having him around changed the dynamic a little bit. It allows me the freedom to do things like make homemade beignets with sausage and bacon for dinner on Saturday night, which we ate while watching a movie.
While I was busy making the beignets and cooking the rest of dinner I was also trying to help the kids with our “Collage” art class. I think they found the concept of collage a bit more challenging to the mind than some of our other art classes. I know I found it challenging myself. I’ve been working on my collage for a few days now and find that I keep going back to it with different ideas. The fun part about collage though is that’s exactly what it’s all about – layers. It was another successful art class.
I’ve been working on turning some of my photographs into collage postcards, cards, and framed pieces. This has been a lot of fun and another one of those things that I find myself coming back to with different ideas and concepts.
This morning Evan discovered why my egg count has been down this past week – we’ve got hoarders under the chicken coop!
The chickens have been stockpiling the eggs – probably for a broody chicken to sit on once they had a full clutch of them. They were oh so sneaky though for small-brained birds and laid them under the coop. As we were inspecting this little hoarding stockpile I looked further back underneath the coop and there was one of my little bantams sitting on eggs! Another hoarder! It’s so sad to me that they don’t understand that without a rooster their eggs will never hatch. Evan took two bantam eggs out of the incubator I’ve got going right now and tried to add them to her eggs, but she didn’t stay on them. She may not have even been doing anything more than adding to another clutch under there.
I’m mentoring a girl for a high school project and we worked this afternoon for a few hours. We are making an outfit our of recycled and repurposed materials. An under-shirt of duct tape with an over-shirt of large paperclips together with a skirt of pink and clear bubble wrap. We’ve even made wooden shoes with leather straps from a suede hat I bought off eBay. I cannot wait to show you the finished product. It’s not anything fit for Project Runway or anything, but it’s been a really fun project for me and Claire to work on. Something to get excited about.
This afternoon I also managed to put together a new recipe of chicken scarpariello which was my dinner tonight and will be everyone’s dinner tomorrow.
I’ll end tonight by showing you how quickly the chicks are growing. They are already getting their wing feathers!
The point I’m trying to make here is that I’ve got lots of things to show you. Hopefully this week I can stop doing for a day or two so I can show you all of these things in more detail. I hope you had a wonderful weekend too!