croutons, small cubes of delight

To me croutons are, more than anything else, a way of preventing food waste. Take old, stale bread (not molding, just stale) and cut it up into small pieces to remake it into something that you would want to eat. Throwing away bread is such a shame.

The other thing that’s nice about croutons is that, since they are fully dried, they have a long shelf-life if you store them in an airtight container. The other route you could go with stale bread is to make breadcrumbs, but I’ll cover that some other time. Basically you just throw it in a blender. Like I said though, I'll cover it later.

You can flavor these any way you want, and it’s a great opportunity to use up some of those dry herbs you’ve had lying around since you got them in that gift set five years ago. The method I show here is the baking method, but actually you can successfully make croutons in a frying pan if you don’t have the time to bake them off. If you’re storing them for a long time, however, I prefer baking them because it more evenly dries out all of the moisture from inside.

 
Like I said in the video, croutons are great with soups and salads, but that’s news to exactly zero people out there. Here’re some other ideas that you may not have considered – toppings for chicken bakes, gratins, and casseroles. Bread puddings. Pie toppings (replace the herbs and spices with sugar!). Snacks for dip. The list goes on, and I’m sure you can come up with many more. I’d love to here about your creative ideas for croutons, too, so give this one a try!

bacon explosion – mini coupe version

And afterwards, you might consider eating a salad

First of all, credit where credit is due. The original Bacon Explosion recipe comes from two barbecue geniuses: Jason Day and Aaron Chronister, writers of BBQ MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER - the title is literally in all-caps even on the book - and creators of the site BBQ Addicts. Apparently, you can even order ready-to-eat versions of the Bacon Explosion at their site now. The only problem I have is that the recipe is massive, about the size of a football, and I wanted to come up with an individual portion scale-down. Thus the birth of the mini coupe version. The ingredients, as well as the process, are largely the same as in the official version.

thick-cut slices of bacon (short, you can cut normal slices in half)
sausage meat (preferably Italian)
bbq sauce
bbq rub*

*If you are making a rub, there’s lots of ways but basically these ingredients:

5 paprika

4 brown sugar

3 sea salt

2 black pepper

1 cayenne pepper

1/2 dry mustard

The numbers indicate ratios that I recommend, but everyone’s tastes are different. I like this one because it’s sort of a descending scale – if using teaspoons, use 5 teaspoons of paprika and so on; if using tablespoons, likewise.

1. Reserve a couple slices of bacon, and weave the rest into a square lattice (think apple pie). So you need equal amounts of bacon for the X and Y axis of the lattice. If you don't have at least 4x4 it's a no go.

2. Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Fry the bacon you saved in a frying pan and cook until crisp. Sprinkle latticed bacon with bbq rub. Remove sausage meat from its casings (if you couldn’t buy it as just meat). Evenly spread the sausage meat on top of the bacon lattice. You want enough to cover to the outer edges.

3. Crumble fried bacon into pieces and sprinkle on top of the sausage meat. Drizzle some bbq sauce on that and sprinkle with some more bbq rub.

4. Separate the front edge of the sausage layer from the bacon weave and roll the sausage away from you. The bacon weave should stay where it is. Press sausage roll to remove any air pockets and pinch together.

5. Roll toward you, this time with the bacon as well, until it is completely wrapped. Turn it so that the seam faces down. Sprinkle with a bit more bbq rub.

6. Place the roll on a baking sheet into the oven. Cook until internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F, about 1 hour for each inch of thickness. When done, glaze the roll with more sauce. Like the original recipe, I recommend serving in slices.

 
This is a taste-splosion of flavor, so keep your dose low. I did notice, however, that it's much lighter feeling in this mini version, probably because the juices don't have all the time and space to move around in the center of the roll.

bluffin' with my muffins

I wouldn’t usually talk about baking. Not that I don’t bake. Baking just seems to be more common knowledge to a lot of people, and there is lots of good information on cakes, cookies, pies and the like already - it makes me feel that adding my two cents won’t amount to much (although I guess it’s been a while since two cents amounted to much). Still, the mood strikes me every once and a while. Muffins!

Muffins are like sandwiches, or cookies, or bread itself – there are so many styles and types that it’s more of a category than it is a specific thing. What I want to share here is a simple – but effective – recipe that I’ve been using for a while as a base for other recipes. It’s crumby, soft, and buttery - somewhere in between a muffin, a cupcake, and a pound cake:

so crumbly

250g flour

150g sugar

1 egg

110g butter (melted)

lemon zest

200ml milk

1 tsp vanilla

Bakes 15 to 20 minutes at 190 C. Get a good bit of lemon zest. That really gives a fresh, delicious punch to the finished product. Also, consider other citrus for unique flavors: orange, grapefruit, lime. 

It’s fairly simple to leave it at that, but it’s the upgrade from a simple morning muffin into something approaching a dessert that will make this feel decadent – and we are going for decadence here. I mean come on, it’s a dessert. There’s no diet dessert in my book - the very fact that you’re eating dessert should jump you past worrying about calories (yeah, diet soda, I’m talking to you too).

If we slathered icing on top it would feel like a cupcake. We don’t want that: the post title clearly says “muffins”. Let’s attack it from the inside. Making some kind of pastry cream filling is not too difficult a task. Whipped cream is another easy substitute. This time though, we’ll do a mascarpone blueberry jam filling - because on top of managing to sound inspiringly fancy, it’s a breeze to make. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can always use the old cutting-a-corner-off-a-Ziploc-bag approach:

2 parts mascarpone cheese (you could use cream cheese)

1 part jam (went with blueberry this time)

Combine in a bowl until it's one cohesive color. Couldn’t be simpler. You could bulk it out with whipped cream if you need more (and don’t want to pay for the mascarpone). Pipe that in either through the top or bottom of the muffin, and enjoy!