Dutch Baby

I’m not sure exactly when it dawned on me, but I know it was sometime in the last couple of years...a dutch baby is just a giant, slightly sweet Yorkshire pudding. Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t like Yorkshire pudding or Dutch babies? I haven’t. I love the way they have soft bits and crispy bits, the way they puff up sky high in the oven and even the way they begin to fall in on themselves as they cool.  The way they are eggy but not too eggy and chewy but not too chewy. Did you know that they couldn’t be easier to make? Whoever came up with them was a genius.  

I promised the kids a special “Birthday Breakfast” in advance of their joint birthday party last weekend.  Because I knew it would be hard enough to get everyone out the door in time to pick up the cake and be there when our guests started to arrive, I decided to do the easiest thing possible and make a big, family-sized dutch baby. I made the batter the night before so that once we woke up it was just a matter of turning the oven on, preheating the pan and pouring in the batter.  

I implore you to try this at home.

Seriously.

Emmett loved watching it rise in the oven. Science at its best.  After about 15 minutes, our Dutch baby was ready.  I sprinkled it with powdered sugar, tore a piece off for each plate and let everyone apply their own toppings.  Yogurt, berries, almonds and maple syrup for me, mini m&m’s, marshmallows and yogurt chips for the littles. Even baby Eve was able to partake (I love that she’s getting to the age where she can eat table food).

To make the batter for these I simply used this Yorkshire pudding recipe and added a tablespoon of sugar, 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract and a big pinch of cinnamon.  Alternatively, you could add sugar, vanilla and cinnamon to a box of Yorkshire pudding mix (available at the Irish Boutique).  

To make a 12-inch Dutch baby I followed this process:

Place a 12” cast iron pan in oven. Preheat oven to 450F.

Once it is hot, remove pan and put 2 tablespoons of butter in the pan.  

Put the pan back in the oven for a couple of minutes until butter has melted.  

Remove pan from oven and swirl butter in the pan to coat the bottom of the pan evenly.

Pour your batter in the pan and turn the oven down to 425F.

Cook for 15 minutes or until Dutch baby is cooked through but still soft in the center and puffy all over. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve.

It was hard to explain the term Dutch baby to Emmett so I told him it was called “Puffy Pancake”. That made a lot more sense. 

Irish Beef & Guinness Stew

TGIF! We have a big weekend planned with a double birthday party for Emmett (4) and Isla (2) and some cooking to take the pressure off the week ahead. I'm also hoping for some downtime to finish reading "Tread Softly on my Dreams" by Gretta Curran Browne.  I'm enjoying this book so much. It is the life story of Robert Emmet and couldn't be more fascinating if it was fiction. I'm so glad that it's Part 1 of a Trilogy so that I can read them all.

Reading about Ireland and Irish history over the last week put me in the mood to cook something Irish.  It doesn't get more Irish than Guinness.  And I love beef stew.  In fact, other than stuffing, the dish that I remember being most excited about when I was a kid was my mom’s beef stew.  It was and still is the best. I’ve tried to make her version of beef stew a few times but I feel like I’m now old enough and wise enough to leave well enough alone.  It never really tastes like hers. Even if it did, I probably wouldn’t perceive it that way.  So these days I do different variations, knowing that I will feel more successful if I’m not trying to make it taste like a favorite food memory.

I’m surprised that I have never made beef stew with Guinness before. I thought it was delicious. Very hearty and savory with the Guinness giving it the subtle complexity in flavor that a makes a dish like this one shine.  Paul asked me if it had bbq sauce in it which left me equal parts confused and insulted - though I’m sure he meant it in the best way since he LOVES bbq sauce (and managed to polish off quite a lot of this stew). Maybe it was the brown sugar? We ate this with some horseradish sauce made by mixing sour cream with scallions, prepared horseradish, lemon juice and salt and pepper. 

If you aren't planning on making corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick's Day you might want to make this. Next time, if I'm feeling ambitious, I may try to adapt this recipe to make a beef and Guinness pie. Or hand pies. Yum. 

Irish Beef & Guinness Stew

1 ½ lbs lean beef stew meat, cut into 1” cubes

salt and pepper

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 onions, roughly chopped

1 Tbsp tomato paste

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup all purpose flour

4 cups chicken broth, low salt

1 1/4 cup Guinness draft

1 1/2 Tbsp brown sugar, firmly packed

1 Tsp minced fresh thyme

1 lb yukon gold potatoes, cut into 1" pieces

1 lb carrots, cut into 1" pieces

2 Tbsp fresh minced parsley

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 325 degrees. Season beef with salt and pepper. Heat oil in Dutch oven over medium-high heat until shimmering. 

Remove beef from Dutch oven.  Plate Dutch oven back on the stovetop over medium heat.

Add onions and ¼ teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until well browned, 8 to 10 minutes.

Add tomato paste and garlic and cook until rust-colored and fragrant, about 2 minutes. Stir in flour and cook for 1 minute.

Whisk in broth, ¾ cup Guinness, sugar, and thyme, scraping up any browned bits. Bring to simmer and cook until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes.

Stir in beef and return to simmer. Transfer to oven and cook, uncovered, for 60 minutes, stirring halfway through cooking.

Stir in potatoes and carrots and continue cooking until beef and vegetables are tender, about 90 minutes longer, stirring halfway through cooking. Stir in remaining ½ cup Guinness and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

The best thing about this dish is that it gets better with time, making it a great option for cooking on the weekend and eating later in the week.

A New Kitchen and Roast Chicken

The other day when I went to pick Emmett up from school one of his teachers asked me if we were remodeling our kitchen.  I must have looked confused because she said “Emmett keeps telling me that you are building a new kitchen.” Of course he meant a TOY kitchen, the one that my parents bought his sister for her birthday. I had been assembling it over the course of a couple of evenings this week. She laughed when I told her what he was talking about and said that he was very, very excited about it.

For awhile I was not quite on board with a toy kitchen.  I wondered why the kids couldn’t just cook in the real kitchen, with me. But as they grow older and I see how much they enjoy pretend play, I realize that they can have fun doing both. And honestly, sometimes they don’t have the patience to enjoy doing all of the real kitchen tasks, including waiting 20 minutes for something to come out of the oven or stopping every time something is too hot or sharp for little hands to be trusted.  Sometimes they would rather just pretend. Having a toy kitchen, as it turns out, is great for getting them more involved in the real kitchen.  They can help me with a discrete job like kneading dough or mixing or stirring something and then pretend to do all of the other steps in their own kitchen.

So what are we “pretending” to cook today? Roast chicken, because I think that everyone should have a go-to roast chicken recipe. It’s so easy and relatively inexpensive to do. Plus, everyone seems to like a good roast chicken. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.  I actually made this two days in a row because we couldn’t get enough.

My cooking method is based on the America’s Test Kitchen technique which I have summarized below.

Perfect Roast Chicken

1 whole chicken about 3-3.5 lbs

1-2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced

1-2 teaspoons fresh thyme, minced

zest of one lemon, plus the lemon

1 tablespoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon smoked paprika

cinnamon, just a small pinch

½ teaspoon powdered garlic

1 tablespoon vegetable oil*

*I use vegetable oil over butter or olive oil because it has a higher smoke point. I'm not sure that it makes a difference, but I'm cooking the bird at a high temperature and don’t want to set off the smoke alarm.

1. Arrange your oven racks so that you can put the chicken roughly in the middle of the oven. Place a large cast iron pan in the oven and preheat the oven to 450F.  

2. Combine the herbs, lemon zest, salt and pepper, spices and oil and rub all over the chicken both on top and under the skin. Cut lemon in half and place in the cavity. Tie the legs together with kitchen twine. I don’t even worry about the wings.

3. Once the oven has come to temperature, take out your cast iron pan (carefully, it’s hot) and place your chicken in the center.

4. Put the pan back in the oven for 30 minutes.

5. After 30 minutes, turn the oven off. That’s right. O-F-F.  

6. Leave your chicken in for another 25-30 minutes or until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 160F and the juices run clear.

A bunch of good stuff about to be slathered on the bird. 

Oh no! I ripped the skin - slathered it too vigorously I guess. I'm a vigorous slatherer. Believe it or not, everything was still ok. Once it was cooked, I carved this baby up and no one even knew about the skin mishap. Until now. 

Sometimes I make a simple pan sauce on the stove with the brown bits left in the skillet.  I just add a little water or chicken broth to the pan, turn up the heat, scrape up the brown bits that are stuck on the bottom of the pan, season it and well, sauce. 

The last time I made this, I made some mushroom risotto to go with it and found that if I start cooking the risotto around the time I turn the oven off, everything is done at the same time. So, the chicken takes approximately 1 hour: I used the first 30 minutes to prep the ingredients for the risotto, make a salad and clean up; and the second 30 to cook the risotto.  Voila, semi-fancy Sunday dinner in an hour. I would totally make it for company.  

After we picked all the meat from the bird, I put everything that was left in my slow cooker with some water and roughly chopped vegetables for about 12 hours to make stock. I used that to make chicken soup that I blended into a puree for Eve. Nothing went to waste and she loved it!

We must have all been hungry because I didn't take a single "cooked chicken" photo.  I resumed photographing the next day while making baby food for Eve. 

Pureed version of the chicken soup pictured above. 

It's going to be a busy year in this kitchen. Oh yeah, in case you were worried, Isla never opens the oven without her oven mitts on.