Today was the last day both of us were in New York before we leave for sleepaway camp AND it was raining so we decided that we were going to bake a lot of stuff. On the baking menu: Lemon Bars, Short Cakes, and Blueberry Crisp. I (Max) decided to make the lemon bars because I love lemon curd pie but I wanted something a little easier to eat. I (Alex) decided to make short cakes because we love Joe’s Short Cakes (available at Thompson Finch Farm) with strawberries and I wanted to try to replicate them. We both decided to make blueberry crisp because blueberries were on sale for $1 a pint and mom bought 5 pints…so we had to do something with them. Plus we love it!
Lemon Bars
For the lemon bars, first you make a sweet crust base, which includes sugar, butter, flour and baking powder. You press that into a pan and bake until golden brown.
Meanwhile you make the lemon filling: shredded lemon peel, lemon juice, eggs and a little bit of flour and baking powder. Once the crust is baked, you pour the lemon mix directly on top and cook for about 15 minutes more. Delicious: both sweet and tart.
Shortcakes
We can’t tell you the recipe (THANKS JOE) but we can tell you that there is flour, butter, sugar, eggs and some other ingredients in it. And while these shortcakes are great just by themselves, they are even better with fresh strawberries and a dollop of whipped cream.
Blueberry Crisp
Sorry we didn’t take photos of the process, but we were getting tired by the time we got to this. The key to a good crisp (besides great fruit, of course), is a good crisp and we love this one. First you combine butter and sugar (cream it together like you are making cookies), then you add baking powder, rolled oats and flour and squeeze it all together till it forms clumps. If you want to be gluten free, use finely chopped walnuts instead.
For the fruit: you need 6 cups of blueberries, sugar, a little lemon juice and a tablespoon of either flour or cornstarch. We also added some chopped apples. So then you put the berry mix in a 8 inch square baking dish, cover with the crisp topping and cook till crisp is grown and berries are bubbling. You can use the same crisp topping for peach crisp or apple crisp, you may just want to adjust how much sugar you use depending on the sweetness of the peaches or apples.
For this meal I (Alex) wanted to cook something I knew the whole family would love so I grilled lamb chops, made a big kale salad and for dessert made a chocolate mousse cake.
These lamb chops are one of our favorite meals and takes us back to the late night walks along the beach in Greece two summers ago. With just a little bit of effort (and some salt & pepper) slabs of meat can become a wonderful meal. The kale salad was kale and every vegetable in the fridge (and leftover vegetableI could find–like corn-on-the cob) with a little grated mozarella. Last but definitely not least, the chocolate mousse cake is anther big favorite in the Koster family. It’s simple, but delicious and it only contains FOUR basic ingredents that you can find at any food store: eggs, butter, semi-sweet chocolate and vanilla. Raspberries and powdered sugar are optional.
The few steps to make this spendid cake are:
Today we wanted to make something we had never made before and we were inspired by an article we saw in The New York Times on June 21, 2017 about a Kenya dish called Kuku Paka (Chicken with Coconut). It’s a traditional Kenyan dish that apparently “invites tinkering” according to the NYT so it sounded perfect for us. Here is the before and after:
First we trimmed the fat of chicken thighs, wings and legs. Then we cut scores into the chicken pieces so the marinade we were about to make could sink in better.
Then we made a marinade. We chopped up onions, ginger, tomatoes, garlic and added cumin, salt and coriander. The recipe called for serrano chiles but we forgot to buy those so we added some chili powder. Then we blended it in a blender and spread 1 cup of it over the chicken. We let that marinade for about 5 hours and saved the rest of the marinade.
After about 5 hours, we started making the sauce. We combined the rest of the marinade with coconut oil and coconut milk and let simmer for about 20 minutes. It turned a really cool orange.
Meanwhile we grilled the chicken. When the chicken was cooked through, we added it to the sauce and let simmer some more.
It smelled so good! Finally we served it over couscous along with an arugula/tomato/burrata salad. Some of the “tinkering” we did included garnishing the dish with basil instead of parsley (which was what the recipe called for.) We also added corn to the dish. It was delicious–creamy and very sweet. The coconut added sweetness to the sauce and kept me constantly returning to the kitchen for more.
Summer Update from KidsCookDinner: Get out and go berry picking! And what do you do when you pick 20 pounds of beautiful organic strawberries? (from the wonderful Thompson Finch Farm in Ancram, NY). Well of course you eat a bunch, then you make strawberry pie!!! And if for some reason you don’t have time to bake anything, pick up some Joe’s ShortCakes. They are available at Thompson Finch Farm and are some of the best short cakes we have every had…somewhere between a scone and a biscuit. Flakier and lighter than a scone but sweeter than a biscuit.
Strawberry Pie: The first step to make the pie is to cut all off the green leaves and stems of about 6 cups of strawberries. The second step is to put half of the berries in a pre-baked pie crust. We love our pie with a ton of strawberries so we tried to fit as much as we could in the small pie crust.
Third, you create a sauce: you mash the other half of the strawberries and sugar to form a kind of chunky paste, then put the strawberries in a pot and heat on the stove. When the mixture starts to boil, add your thickener (water and corn starch) to the mashed strawberries. You then stir constantly for ten minutes until thick.
Forth, you pour the strawberry glaze pour over the strawberries in the pie crust. We put a plate under the pie crust in case some of the glaze spills over.
Finally the hardest step: you have to wait 3 hours until the pie is set. So hard to do! Luckily there was some extra strawberry glaze that we snacked on. To find out why we started this blog and to read more yummy recipes. Read on!
For this meal, I (Max) wanted to make something big. Something special. Unique. Something that my family would remember for weeks to come. I found the perfect meal – Beef Wellington. I decided to make one, huge Beef Wellington, because it was less complicated than making four individual ones. Here is the before and after:
I started off the meal by cutting off the ends of the a large filet we had and then cutting that in half. Then, I cut of the any fat I saw and took of as much of the thin membrane as I could. I tied up the meat, dividing it into five parts.
Then I salted and peppered one side of the meat and placed it on medium heat in a pan with olive oil. As it was cooking, I roughly cut up an assortment of mushrooms (cremini, shitake and white button mushrooms), along with a shallot and a clove of garlic. Then we placed them in our cuisinart blender and let the magic work.
After that, we switched the sides of the meat, and let a saucepan heat up with butter and olive oil. When warm, we put the chopped mushrooms in and cooked them until there was no more moisture. We let the meat cool after giving both sides a good sear.
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Then, we let both the meat and the mushrooms cool off for ten minutes. After that, we spooned the mushrooms on the top, along with the sides of our log-like structure of meat. I almost forgot to cut the strings before I put the mushrooms on top but remembered at the last minute. Then we wrapped it up in clear wrap and put in the fridge to cool. (The wrap and cool off time is so the meat remains in the same shape while it cooks.) The recipe also calls for wrapping the meat in proscuitto, but we tried that when we made individual wellingtons a while back and did not like it. Weird taste combo (ham/mushroom/fillet).
We rolled out our puff pastry, removed the clear wrap and gently placed the meat on the pastry and folded up the pastry over it. To keep the pastry around the meat and most of the juices in the pastry, we used eggwash from one egg and sealed it with our pastry brush.
Coating it with eggwash will also make the pastry appear brown. Then, we made three slits diagonal on top of the meat to allow steam to escape the meat. Then we placed it in the oven. We baked for 45 minutes, until the pastry was golden brown and the heat had an internal temperature of 125 degrees. (The slits make it easy to put a meat thermometer in without breaking the pastry) After taking it out of the oven, we let it rest for 15 minutes.
For sides I made a fresh green salad with aspargus (slightly steamed), raw (shelled) peas, spinach, argula and avocado. I also had extra aspargus so I serve that with grated cheese.
I (Alex) was in charge of dinner tonight but I also had soccer practice so I wanted to make something pretty quick. I decided to make spice-marinated skirt steak, kale salad and corn-on-the-cob. As soon as I got home from school, I mixed up our favorite Texas spice rub, which includes onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt, pepper and a few other secret ingredients, and rubbed it into two pounds of skirt steak. I covered it with plastic and let it marinate in the fridge. I also washed and rough chopped the kale and prepped the corn for when I got back.
When I got back from soccer, I started the water boiling for corn and combined the kale with shredded brussel sprouts (note we bought them already shredded which made things a lot faster), chopped almonds and pecorino cheese. When the water was boiling, I added the corn and started cooking the steak: searing it at high heat and then finishing in the oven (I had so much steak I had to do it in batches). Mom helped by making a mustard viniagrette and mixing up the salad. To serve, you slice the steak against the grain. All in all it was pretty fast, which was good considering I had soccer and homework!
One of dad’s favorite desserts is black and white cookies so for Father’s Day, we decided to make home made black and white cookies for him. The batter is a mix between a cookie and a cake batter. You use cake flour along with regular flour and four eggs so the “cookies” are much lighter than your normal cookie: they even puff up a little. Frosting is super easy: just powdered sugar and boiling water. Then for the chocolate half, you melt unsweetened chocolate into half the vanilla mix. Frosting them is a little messy but the clean up is delicious.
The batter starts like any other batter: cream butter and sugar but then there are more eggs and cake flour than in regular cookies.
Frosting is super simple: powdered sugar and boiling water. If it gets too thick, you add a little more water. If too thin, add some more powdered sugar. And to make the chocolate frosting, split the vanilla frosting in half and put half in a double boiler over hot water. Add unsweetened chocolate and voila: chocolate frosting!
For Memorial Day, we decided to make barbecue brisket, corn-on-the-cob, kale salad and roasted, honeyed pears. Russ & Erica came over for dinner and they brought corn bread and cabbage slaw so we had a feast!
For the brisket, we started the day before and let it cook in our secret homemade barbecue sauce all night in the slow cooker. Another secret is that we rub the brisket with a spicy dry rub before we put it in the barbecue sauce. Then when it’s really tender, we take it out and pull it apart with 2 forks and put it back in the barbecue sauce to absorb even more of sauce.
For the kale salad, we just chopped and chopped kale and brussel sprouts, added almonds and grated parmesan cheese and topped it with a mustard dijon dressing. We made this ahead of time as well. We just didn’t add the almonds/cheese and dressing till it was time to eat.
For the roasted pears, we combined pears, honey, cinnamon, butter and a little rum and roasted for about 60 minutes at 350 degrees. The recipe calls for cutting pears in half and placing them cut size down, which we did for the first 30 minutes, but we flipped them over for the second 30 minutes. Also the recipe called for 30-35 minutes, but that definitely wasn’t enough. Even after 45 minutes the pears were hard so we cooked them another 15 minutes. We are not sure if it was the pears that were too hard to begin with or if the recipe was wrong but ultimately they were still delicious! Especially with fresh whipped cream.
The corn-on-the-cob was pretty simple: just oil water and add corn. And Russ and Erica brought a great coleslaw and cornbread–so it made a really pretty (and tasty) plate
Mom found fresh morels at the farmer’s market and we decided to cook them with some authentic Ticinese polenta that we had gotten back during the summer in Switzerland (in Lugano). The hardest part of the polenta was that the instructions were in German! Google translate was needed. Along with the polenta and morels, we also sauteed some kale.
Wild morels look pretty weird but mom said they tasted great (she was right). The hardest part of cooking morels was cleaning them. We soaked them in water, dried them and then sliced before cooking them olive oil and adding butter.
Besides that, we had a Roast Chicken from Whole Foods. Along with a fresh loaf of bread, the meal was amazing.
Final Dinner:
(This is without the chicken.)
What do you do after you see the musical Waitress? (It’s about an amazing pie-baking waitress…played by Sara Bareilles! so good. Go see it now!!) Anyway what do you do after you see it? You bake pies. So far we have made three:lemon curd, blueberry and pumpkin. Trying to think of a new one.
The first pie we made after seeing Waitress was Lemon Curd Pie with a sweet crust: this was the first time we made a pie crust in the cuisinart…pretty fast and easy. Then we just pushed it down into the baking pan (no rolling out), pre-baked till light brown and filled with delicious lemon curd. No need for meringue topping for this one.
And here’s our next pie: This time I, Alex, made a blueberry pie. I made a simple pie crust and for the filling combined fresh and frozen (but thawed) blueberries, along with sugar, corn starch and a little lemon juice. Then I cut pastry into strips and wove a lattice top on the top.
It was delicious!!! We had a litte extra pie dough so I made cinnamon pastries (also known as cinnamon snails), which are just pie dough rolled up around cinnamon-sugar and butter. They are delicious.
Our latest pie was a traditional pumpkin pie. Even though it’s almost summer (and not Thanksgiving), we were craving pumpkin pie so we made it!
