Spring Rolls for Venzas and Vietnam

 

Ah the Spring roll… the egg roll’s healthier Vietnamese cousin, also known as “Summer rolls” when unfried.  We can’t resist these as an appetizer, but sometimes they can be pretty bland.  Luckily there’s always peanut sauce to the rescue!  We watched an ACTUAL cooking show on the Food Network (yes, they still have those… mostly in the mornings) and we thought that this recipe looked super simple!

Part of the fun of making a recipe like this (and generally the fun of making this blog) is that we get to go find scary specialty ingredients.  For this recipe, we went to Central Market to get:

Spring Roll Skin.  That doesn’t sound unappetizing at all.  There are a million of these guys in one container (which is good, cause we’ll be making them again).

These are essentially “rice paper,” and I have no idea how they’re made or why they have this handsome pattern all across them.

We also got vermicelli noodles.  These are easy enough to find in the grocery store.  You just soak them in hot water for 10 minutes and then drain.  Super easy.

Now, we decided to make shrimp spring rolls.  Luckily this recipe effectively layers flavor into every step, because we were not in the mood for boring, bland shrimp!  We don’t really have any pictures of this, but we poached the shrimp in water, wine, lime juice, and bay.   We also tossed in some leftover lemongrass. 

THEN we cooked the vermicelli noodles in the shrimp broth.

THEN we used that broth to soak the rice paper.  So every cooked ingredient in the spring roll has had a chance to absorb good shrimp flavor. 

The other key to great tasting spring rolls is fresh produce and herbs.

We used cucumber, shredded carrot, jalapeno, bell pepper, cilantro, and mint.  Onto the assembly!

Apologies for the blurry photo, but this part is important.  The rice paper doesn’t need much soaking. Hold it like a steering wheel, with the bottom part in the broth, and spin it until its just moistened. 

 

Just two little shrimp go into each roll.  Then we added crispy veggies that had been soaked in rice wine vinegar and soy sauce.

 

Then some mint, cilantro, and the vermicelli.

And then you have the carefully wrap it up like a little burrito.  The paper is pretty sticky, so once you start rolling it just sticks to itself.  After you do a couple of these, you get the hang of it!

The peanut sauce was easy enough to make…  Yup.  Pretty Darn easy.   

 

What, you were expecting more?  Sheesh.

 

Now you can impress all your friends with this easy appetizer that looks super complicated!  Ok, it was a little complicated, but it was fun and quite tasty!

Brûléed Bourbon-Maple Pumpkin Pie

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  We were recently listening to a piece on NPR about “what’s trending in food magazines” (way to go NPR for reaching your target audience!).  According to The Bitten Word, brûléed pumpkin pies is totally in this year.  We like to stay on top of trendy things, so we decided to take the bait and join the party.  Plus, we’ve been dying for an excuse to buy a kitchen blowtorch.  Can you blame us?

We decided to go with Bon Appétit’s Brûléed Bourbon-Maple Pumpkin Pie (our other choices would have been Martha Stewart Living or Saveur magazine, but we wanted to support the publication we actually subscribe to).

This recipe calls for a chocolate crust.  I mean, c’mon.  How can you turn that down?  Alas, Pilsbury does not make a chocolate dough, we had to make it ourselves.  We bought a fancy rare red Dutch processed cocoa powder from the store. 

Cocoa powder, sugar, salt, flour, butter, and shortening are blended in a food processer and then mixed with an egg to form a dough.

The dough was the hardest part of this recipe.  It turned out just fine, but it’s complicated to get it to stick together. 

But apparently I did a good enough job because I got it to look like this.  Pretty, eh? 

The crust is pre-baked for about 20 minutes.  I don’t have any pie weights, so I used dried beans.  The beans help keep the crust in place so that it holds it shape.  Can you reuse the beans after they’ve been baked like this?  Find out here. 

Now for the filling.  It’s pretty standard stuff:  canned pumpkin puree, sour cream, eggs, cinnamon,  ginger, nutmeg, allspice.

Plus some nonstandard stuff:  bourbon, maple syrup, vanilla bean (these suckers are pricey!).

 

The maple syrup and vanilla bean are heated up on the stove until bubbly.  Then heavy cream is slowly added. I was expected it to get all hot and bothered when I added the cold cream, but not much happened.  Maybe I didn’t do it right.  Check out those vanilla specs though!

 

The maple syrup mixture is added to the pumpkin mixture and then poured into the crust.  I made a little mini pie on the side in order to test it out (sneaky, huh?  I mean, I couldn’t serve my guests a sub-standard pie without tasting it first, now could I?).

After it cooled down, it got a big ol’ crack in it.  Drats!  Well never mind that, because now we’re going to cover it in sugar and torch it! 

Fun with fire.  This was actually more painstaking than we thought it would be.  Takes a while to get the sugar to melt and turn brown.

Well, it could be prettier, but it was still tasty.  It is best to let the sugar crust cool down a bit before you try to slice it.  A great twist on a classic pumpkin pie!  It was even better the next day when we ate it cold out of the fridge, though the brulee crust apparently gets absorbed into the pie after a while. 

So you can torch it up again!

To Garlic, With Love

We have a couple of simple rules around here:  (1) there is no substitute for Tabasco (2) always double the red pepper flake (3) don’t skimp on the garlic!  We dedicate this post to our love affair with garlic.  We present:  GARLIC SOUP.  There’s no better way to sate our insatiable appetite for this most fragrant and stinky gem of the onion family than by making it the star of the show!  Move over condiments….it’s time for garlic.

The recipe comes from Cook’s Illustrated and features 4 (four!) heads of garlic.  The first step is to smash them to smithereens.  Ok….not quite that much.  To make it less messy, the recipe suggests putting them in a Ziploc bag and then beating them mercilessly with your weapon of choice (we chose a meat tenderizer).  Let me tell you……..it smelled amazing when we finally opened the bag. 

You don’t have to spend too much time removing the skins….we took out the big bits, but the recipe said it was ok to leave some of the skins in there because it was all going to get strained out later.

So, we poached the smashed garlic in some olive oil and chicken stock.  This simmered for about 35 minutes to get all of that delicious garlic flavor out of there.  I then mashed it a little bit more to squeeze out just a little bit more of that good flavor!

Meanwhile, we also boiled 6 cups of chicken stock with some water, parsley, thyme, and the rind of parmesan.  Apparently using the parmesan rind for flavoring soups is fairly common.  I however, found it a rather uncommon ingredient at HEB (for the record, Central Market carries it).  I ended up having to buy a bunch of parmesan that I didn’t want, but I’m sure we’ll use it at some point…  Onward! 

The stock simmered for about 30 minutes in order to get good and concentrated.

Meanwhile, we made garlic croutons.  We just sliced some bread, toasted it in the oven for about 10 minutes, rubbed a garlic clove on it, and then cut it into pieces.  Easy!

 

When the garlic was good and ready, we combined it with the chicken stock and let it simmer for another 10 minutes.  Then we strained it, smashing up the garlic as much as we could to extract every last bit of flavor.

Now comes the somewhat weird part.  We beat 2 eggs and added some grated parmesan and red pepper flake.  Then we whisked this into the hot soup.  This purportedly added richness and flavor.

 

Truth be told, this was a rich, savory, flavorful bowl of garlicy soup. 

 

Dear Garlic:
We love you.
Love,
Chez Venza

Happy Berry Birthday

 

Time for a berry-tastic, berry-delicious, straw-baby bday cake!

Don’t be fooled by how delightfully pink this cake is.  It’s manly on the inside.

The first step was for my sous-chef and I to gather all of the ingredients for this recipe from Southern Living.  Don’t worry, all he did was sit around and supervise.  Sheesh!  There were lots of berries in this cake, but I think the main differences from your standard cake was the use of cake flour (ooh, fancy) and egg whites instead of whole eggs.  Luckily I had some frozen egg whites in the freezer, so I didn’t have to throw any of the yolks at my sous-chef.

  

Have I mentioned this trick before about butter?  When the recipe calls for “softened” butter, but all you have is cold butter and you don’t have time to wait (because it’s 8pm and you’re only just now getting around to baking)…you can smash it with a rolling pin, and it works just as well.  Neat trick!

 

Butter and sugar go into the blender.  Then the egg whites are added slowly and whipped for a couple of minutes.  It’s not the same as whipping them like you would for a meringue.  I think you’re just whipping them enough to get a little air in there.

This mixture is poured into 2 cake pans and then into the oven.

Next up:  berries.  These bad boys are going to get blitzed in a minute.

   

Half the berries went into the blender with a little sugar.  Then it went into a saucepan to get hot and bubbly.  We’re making a straw-baby mousse…this will go in between the cake layers. 

Then I had some fun by adding gelatin to the berry mixture.  This is unflavored gelatin with a little water.  It’s pretty odd looking at this stage.  I didn’t take any more pictures of this because there isn’t much to see.  The gelatin is mixed into the berry sauce and then it goes into the fridge to cool down.  It thickens up a little bit, but not much (it will thicken more after a couple hours).

The cooled strawberry gelatin is then mixed with some whipped cream.  I have to say, the strawberries were smelling really good at this point!

That’s some pink mousse!

 

The cakes have cooled, and I managed to get them out of the pans.  That was rather tricky.  Next time I’ll put parchment paper down on the bottom to make it easier to get them out.  Meanwhile, some of the cake bits were still left in the pan and I was able to steal a taste (shhh!).

The last step was making the icing.  More straw-babies were cut up into tiny bits and then mixed with butter and powdered sugar.  I actually went overboard on the berries, so the icing came out a bit runny.  I guess it’s possible to have too much of a good thing :-(

Time to assemble!  Cake, straw-baby mousse, then more cake.  Sous-chef Oscar says I missed a spot.  This actually has to go back into the fridge for a couple of hours in order for the mousse to set.  Otherwise you’d have a sloppy cake running all over the place.

The next day, I topped it off with icing and decorated with sliced berries.  Sometimes getting older is totally worth it!