Real Life Cooking

Chocolate Butterscotch Cracker Cookies * how to make butterscotch

Chocolate Butterscotch Cracker Cookies

* saltine crackers

* 1 c butter, unsalted

* 1 c light brown sugar

* 1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips (12 oz, or about 2 cups)

* 1 c M&M candies (optional)

* 1 c chopped nuts (optional)

* sprinkles (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil and grease. Place crackers all over it in a single layer, touching. In a medium saucepan, melt butter and brown sugar over medium heat, stirring constantly. Bring to a boil and stir constantly while boiling for about four minutes. Pour evenly over the crackers. Bake 7 minutes.

Remove from oven and pour chocolate chips evenly over the pan. Allow them to sit for a minute or two to melt, then spread with a knife. Sprinkle with M&M candies, chopped nuts, decorative sprinkles, etc., as desired.

Allow to cool for several hours or until the chocolate hardens, then break apart and serve.

The butter and sugar melted together (left) and boiling (right):

Spread the butterscotch as evenly as possible over the crackers:

Just after decorating (left) and after they’re completely cooled and broken apart (right):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chocolate butterscotch cookies. I don’t actually know what else to call them. The butterscotch does not taste like butterscotch flavoring, fortunately. It’s much, much better. [It may actually be toffee by the time it gets out of the oven, now that I think about it. Toffee is just butterscotch that’s been cooked longer.]

This is the recipe you make when you remember late at night that you promised to bring cookies for the office meeting the next day. You don’t have time to do anything fancy or run to the grocery store, but you want something everyone will like.

This recipe only really needs four ingredients: saltine crackers, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips. That’s it. You can put these together in half an hour, literally. The only drawback is that they need to cool completely before you can break them apart, which takes at least two hours. But they’re just fine sitting out overnight while they cool and while you sleep, and in the morning you just grab them and go.

For this recipe, you need a baking sheet and a pot. That’s it. No mixing bowls to wash. You don’t even really need to measure out anything but the brown sugar.

First, line your largest baking sheet with tinfoil and grease the foil. This is one time when it really is easiest to use the spray stuff, but you can also grease it with just a bit of vegetable oil, shortening, or butter. As soon as you’ve done that, get the saltine crackers out. Yes, just ordinary saltines that you eat with soup or chili.

You’re going to need at least one sleeve of crackers, depending on the size of your baking sheet. Mine fits 48 crackers. Place them on the tinfoil in a single layer so that they’re all touching on all sides. If you have the kind of crackers that are joined together in pairs, you can either keep them in pairs or snap them apart, it doesn’t really matter. Once you have the baking sheet covered, set it aside, but make sure it’s somewhere you can get to easily.

Next, turn the oven on to preheat. Then put two sticks of butter and a cup of light brown sugar into a pot. The recipe says saucepan, but that’s basically just a fancy word for a pot. Remember to pack the brown sugar firmly into the measuring cup. You don’t need to soften the butter before using it, because you’re about to boil the heck out of it with the brown sugar to make butterscotch.

Butterscotch is related to caramel and toffee, but it’s richer than caramel and softer than toffee. But don’t be nervous—you don’t need a candy thermometer or anything...

Sugar Cookies * coloring dough * rolling out and cutting cookie dough * coloring sugar

Sugar Cookies

* 1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

* 1/2 tsp baking powder

* 1/4 tsp salt

* 1/2 c. butter

* 3/4 c. sugar

* 1 egg

* 1 tsp vanilla

* food coloring (optional)

* cinnamon candies (optional)

* sparkle sugar (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar, then add egg and vanilla and blend well. Add a generous squirt of food coloring to the butter mixture and blend it in well. It should be really green (or whatever color). Add flour mixture to butter mixture. Divide dough, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least half an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease two cookie sheets. Roll out chilled dough on a lightly floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on cookie sheets and decorate with sparkle sugar and cinnamon candies (if desired). Bake for 9-11 minutes. Makes about two dozen.

The butter mixture with food coloring (left), the dough after flour is mixed in (middle), and the dough wrapped up to put in the fridge (right):

 

The dough before and after baking (left), showing the difference in color; cookies rolled too thin, where the red hots have melted from touching the pan (middle); and cookies showing increasing evidence of wrinkling, caused by putting the dough on a pan that has not cooled completely:

 

All done! (These were actually a little overbaked because I rolled them too thin):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sugar cookies! This is hands down the best sugar cookie recipe I’ve tried, and my family has made it for many, many years. We call them holly cookies because we use food coloring to dye the dough green, then cut them out in holly leaf shapes and decorate the tops with green crystal sugar and cinnamon candies like holly berries. I’ve included all the steps to make holly cookies, but if you don’t have a cookie cutter shaped like a holly leaf, you can use any shapes you like or just cut them out round.

For this recipe, you’ll need a large mixing bowl, a medium mixing bowl, a surface where you can roll out the dough and something to roll the dough out with, and at least one cookie cutter in a shape you like.

If you want to make holly cookies the way I do, you’ll also need some cinnamon candies, and that can be a problem. These are the small round pieces of red candy that are cinnamon flavored, usually called cinnamon imperials or red hots. You can get them specifically for baking, but those are actually not very good for this recipe. The best red hots you can find are sold by Brach’s, but they can be hard to track down. I was going to order them online this year and actually went to the Brach’s website to find them, but when I followed their link to buy, it took me to an Amazon page that said they were sold out. In the end, I lucked out and found them in a small grocery store I almost never go to. Brach’s are better than the ones sold for baking because they’re much cheaper, but also because they’re flattened instead of round. Those big round baking ones tend to just melt into goo in the oven. But you can use any kind you can get your hands on, or, of course, you can leave them out. But they do really contribute to the overall flavor of the cookie.

A few hours before you start the recipe, it’s a good idea to get the butter out of the fridge and let it warm up to room temperature. You can do the same with the eggs too. If you forget, though, no problem.

These cookies follow the same basic method for most cookies, including the chocolate chip cookie recipe from our very first episode. If you haven’t listened to that one, you might go back and do so for basics about measuring flour and mixing dough.

First,

Cranberry relish * cooking cranberries

Cranberry Relish (small amount)

* 1/2 c. orange juice (or apple juice)

* 1/2 c. brown sugar

* 2 c. fresh cranberries

* 1/4 tsp allspice

Combine ingredients in a saucepan and heat to a boil. Turn heat down to medium low and simmer for 15 minutes. The sauce will thicken as it cools.

Cranberry Relish (large amount)

* 1 c. orange juice

* 1/2 c. white sugar

* 1/2 c. brown sugar

* 1/4 tsp cinnamon

* 12 oz fresh cranberries

Dissolve sugars and cinnamon in juice over medium heat. Stir in cranberries and simmer 10-20 minutes. The sauce will thicken as it cools.

Just putting the cranberries on to cook:

The cranberries after cooking for a while:

The finished relish after cooling to room temperature:

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make cranberry relish, also called cranberry sauce, just in time for Thanksgiving.

I know many of us grew up with the cranberry relish that comes in a can, and which comes out of the can can-shaped, at which point an aunt or somebody slices it carefully into thin discs and arranges it on a plate, where it looks festive on the table and almost no one eats it. But you can make your own cranberry relish very easily from fresh cranberries that’s not only delicious, but it looks lovely in a glass compote if you own such a thing. It also takes very little time to make and can be done ahead.

I’ve included two recipes in the show notes, because I have two recipes that are very similar but make different amounts. You can also half or double the recipe you prefer or just tweak it to fit your own taste.

First, you’ll need fresh cranberries. These show up in the produce section of the grocery store right before Thanksgiving and they’re pretty cheap, two dollars for a 12 ounce bag in my local Walmart this year. You can sometimes get them on sale. Keep them in the fridge until you’re ready to cook them. Before you start the recipe, pour the cranberries into a colander and give them a good rinse, and pick out any berries that are under- or over-ripe. Sometimes a bit of leaf or stem makes its way into the bag and you obviously want to remove that too. Fresh cranberries should be a nice red color and should be firm to the touch. If you cut one open, you’ll see that it’s mostly empty inside except for thin membranes that separate little round seeds.

For this recipe, you’ll need a saucepan. That’s it.

Start by deciding whether you need a lot of cranberry relish or just a little. The recipe that makes a lot uses the whole 12 ounce bag of cranberries, the recipe that makes a little uses two cups of fresh cranberries, which is half the bag. If you don’t have any use for the remaining half a bag, go ahead and make the larger recipe.

Measure the orange juice into the pot and add the sugar or sugars along with the cinnamon or allspice. One note about how much sugar these recipes call for: I think you can half it. I didn’t this time, but when I tasted the finished relish it was just so super sweet that I wished I had. Then again, as you know, I have been trying to eat a lot less sugar so everything tastes sweet right now. Also, one recipe calls for allspice and the other calls for cinnamon, but it doesn’t matter which you use. They’re both good. I think the allspice has a richer, more complex flavor, but cinnamon is always a winner.

Turn the heat up to about medium high and stir the orange juice and sugar as it heats, until the sugar has mostly dissolved into the orange juice and the mixture is starting to boil. Then turn the heat down to about medium and add the cranberries. Set the timer for fifteen minutes and let it cook, stirring occasionally. The liquid shouldn’t be at a full boil but at a brisk, energetic simmer.

Mashed potatoes * Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes * what “water to cover” means * parboiling

Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes

* 2 ½ lbs baking potatoes, peeled and quartered

* 4 oz cream cheese, softened

* 1 stick salted butter, softened

* 1 ½ tsp sugar

* ½ tsp garlic powder

* ½ tsp salt

* 1 tsp pepper

* about 1/4 c. milk

Boil potatoes until tender. Drain. Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Add all other ingredients to the potatoes and beat until fluffy. Add the milk last so you can adjust the amount; the milk is just for consistency. The potatoes should be creamy enough that they won’t dry out in the oven.

Grease a 9×9 baking dish and spoon in the potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes or until heated through.

Mashing the boiled potatoes with a fork:

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make honest-to-goodness mashed potatoes from scratch. They won’t be lumpy, I promise.

Instant mashed potatoes are pretty good and they’re definitely fast, but homemade mashed potatoes are really easy to make. All you need is a few ingredients and some time. And a pot big enough to hold the potato pieces.

First, you need some potatoes. This is when you want to buy a bag of potatoes. White or yellow-fleshed potatoes are fine, but if you have red potatoes those will work too. Basically any potato will do. You can usually get a three or five pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars, and definitely go for what’s cheap. Don’t buy those individually wrapped potatoes meant for baking. They’re overpriced. Just buy a bag of cheap potatoes.

Bagged potatoes are usually pretty small, but you’re going to chop them up and then mash them anyway so it doesn’t matter. Generally, grab two small to medium potatoes per person to make mashed potatoes. If you ended up with big potatoes, more the size of ones you’d expect to get if you ordered a baked potato in a restaurant, then one per person will do. When I’m making mashed potatoes just for myself, I’ll usually use four small potatoes, since that gives me plenty for leftovers.

You need to peel the potatoes first. You can do this with a paring knife if you don’t have a potato peeler, but really, a potato peeler only costs a buck or so and will literally last you your entire life, so it’s worth buying one. That said, I did go through a phase when I was in my late teens where I wanted to feel rustic, so I peeled potatoes with a knife. It’s not hard, and you can pretend to be a pioneer woman or Cinderella or a captive of pirates who have put you to work in the galley, only the pirate captain is secretly a kind man who falls for your honest beauty and your cooking skills, and eventually you become a pirate too, but you only steal from bad people. Also, the pirate captain is super handsome.

Anyway, peel the potatoes using your method of choice. It’s easiest to peel them over a trash can or bowl so you can just let the peels fall without worrying about clean-up later. If you’re using a knife, you can go ahead and trim off any bruised or rotten places while you work. If you’re using a peeler, you’ll need to trim the potatoes once you’re done and have switched to a knife to cut them up.

Potatoes, of course, are roots of the potato plant that grow underground. That means they’re dirty. Don’t worry that your hand holding the potato gets all grotty and the potato gets covered in muddy handprints. Once you’ve finished peeling, take your naked potatoes to the sink and rinse them and your hands. Then cut the potatoes into pieces. The pieces shouldn’t be too small. You want chunks about the size of, I don’t know, an egg—several inches across, don’t dice them up tiny.

Drop the pieces into your empty pot as you cut them. Once all the potatoes are cut up and in the pot, add enough water to just cover the potatoes.

Roasted carrots and parsnips * how to prepare parsnips * Shepherd’s Pie

Roasted carrots and parsnips

* About 1 lb each carrots and parsnips, scraped and cut into sticks about 2” long

* Olive oil

* Salt

* pepper

Preheat oven to 425. Pour olive oil in a 9×13 pan to just barely cover the bottom, then add carrot and parsnip pieces. Drizzle another Tbsp of olive oil over the vegetables and add salt and pepper. Stir with a spatula and turn over the vegetables until they’re coated with oil. Add more salt and pepper. Cook for 20 minutes, remove and stir. Return to oven and cook for another 15 or 20 minutes or until tender.

Shepherd’s Pie

* Leftover vegetables

* Leftover meat

* Leftover gravy

* Leftover mashed potatoes

Preheat oven to 350. Place the vegetables in a 9×9” pan with the meat on top (in bite-sized pieces). Pour about one cup of gravy into the dish and top with mashed potatoes. Bake for about 30 minutes or until heated through and the potatoes are starting to brown.

Parsnips unpeeled and peeled:

Parsnips and carrots before roasting and after:

Shepherd’s pie, yum! Add ALL the mashed potatoes!

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to cook parsnips. Specifically, we’re going to learn how to roast parsnips and carrots, which go well together and which make a fantastic accompaniment for turkey. Then we’re also going to learn how to make shepherd’s pie to use up your Thanksgiving leftovers.

Parsnips look sort of like pale yellow-white carrots, and they taste slightly sweet like carrots too but with a little more zing and a chewier texture that I really like. They also pair well with carrots. You peel them just like carrots, then slice the tops off just like carrots, and for this recipe you cut them into little sticks just like you do carrots. Parsnips often have much bigger tops than carrots of the same length do, though, which taper to a much thinner end.

For this recipe, all you need is a 9×13 pan with sides. Pour enough olive oil into the pan to just cover the bottom with a thin layer when you tilt it around, then set it aside.

Next, clean and cut up about a pound each of carrots and parsnips. You can cut these into sticks or pennies, but I think you get a better texture and flavor from the sticks. You can start with baby carrots, but you still need to slice them up. You want the pieces to be thin so they’ll cook faster. I typically cut the baby carrots in half lengthways, and cut the parsnips into pieces about the same size. This takes a while, but it’s not difficult and you can listen to a podcast or some music while you work.

When you’re about halfway done cutting the vegetables up, turn the oven on to preheat to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time you finish the oven will be hot.

Once you’ve got the carrots and parsnips cut up, put them into the pan and drizzle more olive oil over them—not a lot, maybe about a Tablespoonful. Sprinkle salt and pepper over them, then use a spatula to carefully stir them around and turn them over until they’re pretty well coated with oil. Then sprinkle more salt and pepper over them and put them in the oven.

Set the timer for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, take the pan out of the oven. You need to really give those vegetables a good stir and that’s hard to do while they’re still in the oven. Make sure to close the oven door so heat doesn’t escape while you’re working. Use the spatula to turn the vegetables over again and stir them around. They’ll still be hard at this point.

Put the pan back in the oven when you’re done and set the timer for 15 minutes this time. When the timer goes off, use a fork to test a few of the pieces. They’re probably not fully softened yet but they may be, depending on how thin you cut them.

Roasting a turkey

The seasoned turkey ready to put in the oven (left), the tented turkey resting after roasting (middle), and the finished turkey ready to carve (right):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to roast a turkey!

This year (2020) has been endless and horrible, but somehow we are finally approaching the winter holiday season. In the United States we’re nearing Thanksgiving, a feast day celebrated with family and friends. The traditional main course for Thanksgiving is turkey, but a lot of people don’t know how to roast a turkey without drying it out. Hopefully this episode will help you roast your turkey perfectly every time.

As soon as turkeys start showing up in the stores in October I usually buy one and cook it for myself, because I love turkey. I always buy the very smallest one I can find, of course, because I am just one person and while I do have an astonishing capacity for eating turkey, I have my limits.

Don’t forget you need to have something to cook a turkey in, because even a small one is too big for ordinary pans. You can buy those heavy-duty foil roasting pans, but while they make clean-up easy, they’re also not great. You have to put a pan under them because otherwise you can’t safely move the roasting pan once the turkey is in it, because heavy-duty or not, no aluminum foil can stand up to the weight of even a small turkey. But since the roasting pan is also bigger than a typical cookie sheet, it’s still really hard to move safely. If you have room to store it, though, you can usually find inexpensive steel roasting pans this time of year. I spent less than ten bucks for mine and I’ve had it five or six years now, so I figure it’s paid for itself.

It doesn’t matter what brand of turkey you buy. They’re all pretty good. The cheaper ones sometimes have surprise bags of premade gravy tucked in the cavity, which you just paid for and they’re mostly water, but I can never feel too upset because it’s actually pretty good gravy.

Unless you’re cooking for a huge crowd, you’ll probably want to get a smaller turkey. Thirteen pounds is actually on the small side, but you can usually find turkeys that are a bit under ten pounds when you have a big selection to choose from. If you get a turkey that small on sale, it can cost less than a four-pound chicken.

So let’s assume you have acquired a frozen turkey and a roasting pan big enough to hold it. Four or five days before you plan to cook the turkey, put it in the fridge. It takes at least four days to thaw, or a day or two longer for bigger turkeys. If there’s even a slight chance you’ll forget to move it to the fridge from the freezer, put a reminder in your phone. Don’t thaw it on the counter, put it in the fridge to thaw.

Okay, the big day has arrived. It’s time to cook that turkey. People sometimes say that you cook a turkey for 20 minutes per pound, but that’s actually too long. It’s more like 15 minutes per pound, maybe even a little less. For a small turkey, up to about eleven pounds in weight, you can count on it cooking in about two and a half hours or just a bit more at 350 degrees F. My 13-pound turkey needed more like three hours. So if you like to have Thanksgiving dinner early, remember you’re going to have to get that turkey in the oven early. You also need at least an hour to prepare before the turkey goes in the oven, and at least half an hour afterwards. That’s why your grandmother was always up at dawn on Thanksgiving.

The first thing to do is clean out the sink. Wash any dishes sitting in it and give it a quick scrub or at least wipe it out with a sponge. Then set your roasting pan out so you can get to it easily. If it comes with a rack, you can use the rack. Otherwise, you’ll set the turkey directly on the bottom of the pan. I line my pan with foil because it’s a cheap pan with cheap nonstick coating,

Carrot-Banana Bread * how to grate carrots * how to choose bananas for baking

Carrot-Banana Bread

* 2 very ripe bananas, mashed

* 2 carrots, grated

* 1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour

* 2 tsp baking powder

* 1 tsp salt

* 1 tsp cinnamon

* 1/3 c. shortening

* 1/2 to 2/3 c. sugar

* 2 eggs

* 1 tsp vanilla extract

Grease a loaf pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix the mashed banana and grated carrots. In a large bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. In another large bowl cream together shortening and sugar, then add eggs and vanilla. Mix well, then add flour mixture alternately with banana and carrot mixture. Batter will be thick.

Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes.

From left to right: You can use these bananas for baking (but probably throw that black one away); a grated carrot (I added more after I took this picture); grated carrots and mashed bananas contain a lot of moisture:

The finished bread. Yummy with coffee or tea:

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make carrot banana bread.

The weather here in East Tennessee is rainy and cool as I record, which has made me want to bake. But I’ve also been trying to cut back as much as possible on sugar. So I pulled out this recipe and tinkered with it to see if I could make it slightly more healthy. I like the results, so let’s get started.

First, of course, you’ll need some bananas that are getting over-ripe. They don’t have to be completely black, but they can’t have any green left on the skins. I’m not a huge fan of bananas, but I do eat them from time to time, and I like them very ripe. The two I had on the counter were to the point where they were perfect for eating, to my mind, and when I peeled them there were no places where they were getting gross. That’s ideal for banana bread too, personally, but if you have some that are getting really over-ripe, they’ll work just fine.

As for the carrots, peel and cut off the tops just like you would for any other recipe. Then you’ll need to grate them. I feel like we’ve talked about grating carrots before but if so, I can’t remember which recipe it was for. Possibly I’m remembering the zucchini pineapple bread recipe, where you have to grate zucchini. But let’s go over it briefly here.

Once your carrots are cleaned and ready to use, get out your grater. My cheese grater is just a piece of metal with holes punched in it that I set across a medium mixing bowl. If you have the kind that’s like a little metal house, you’ll just stand it on a clean surface.

Hold the grater steady with your off hand. Then just start grating the carrots against the smallest holes in your grater. It actually goes pretty quickly. It’s easiest to hold the carrot perpendicular to the grater so that you’re grating the end of it right across, not grating it at a slant which will be awkward to hold as the carrot gets shorter and shorter. It doesn’t matter if you start grating at the thin end or the thick end.

Eventually you’ll get down to a little carrot nub that’s too small to hold without risking grating your fingers too. Just pop that little piece of carrot in your mouth and eat it. It’s a healthy snack.

As you grate, you’ll need to occasionally knock down the pile of grated carrot you’re creating, because you don’t want it getting so high that it touches the grater. Just shake the bowl. If you’re using a standing-up grater, stop occasionally to remove the grated carrot into the bowl you set out.

Okay, so that’s that. I kind of got ahead of myself so let’s start at the beginning and catch up.

You’ll need a loaf pan for this recipe and three mixing bowls, one of them medium-sized and the others larger. Use the medium-sized bowl for the grated carrot and mashed banan...

Khuushuur (Mongolian fried meat dumplings) * basics of kneading dough

Khuushuur (Mongolian fried meat dumplings)

Filling:

* about 1 lb. minced meat (beef or mutton is traditional)

* small onion, diced small

* several garlic cloves, minced

* Pepper and/or paprika

* Cumin

* 1 Tbsp or more salt

* a little water

* oil for frying

Dumpling dough:

* about 3 c. flour

* about 1 c. warm water

Mix the meat, onion, and garlic and add plenty of spices. Mix a generous amount of salt with a small amount of warm water and add to the meat mixture, and mix it in well.

Make a well in the flour in a large bowl and slowly add water, mixing with your hand until the dough has a pliable but firm texture thicker than biscuit dough. Knead the dough a few times if you have trouble getting all the flour combined. Let the dough rest, covered, for 15 minutes before working.

Cut the dough into quarters or thick slices. Work with one piece at a time and keep the others covered so they won’t dry out. Roll into a rope and slice off pieces about two inches thick. Roll these pieces into balls, then flatten and roll out into little round pastries, ideally about 4” across. Roll only one or two at a time, since they become harder to work with as they dry.

Place a spoonful of the meat mixture onto the piece of flattened dough. Fold the pastry over and pinch the edges closed to seal them. This is traditionally done with a pretty pattern that makes the edge look braided. Gently flatten the filled pastry so that it resembles a taco that just ate too many tacos.

Place dough pockets into hot oil and fry until golden brown on both sides. Eat hot, out of hand. Makes about 25-30. This recipe can be halved.

“Hu’s in the Kitchen” #14

The Hu “Wolf Totem” official video

The Hu “Yuve Yuve Yu” official video

Interview with The Hu about their Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order soundtrack song (you get to see Gala and his wonderful smile a lot in this one)

The green in my meat mixture is green pepper; the green in the Hu’s meat mixture is onions:

My dough wasn’t as nice-looking (this was from my first attempt, with too much water; you can see I’d tried to pull apart my pieces, not cut them, and they resisted) but I also didn’t have a bunch of bandmates to help me:

 

Well, I cannot fold right with or without gloves:

Again, this picture is from my first attempt and the khuushuur are a little overdone:

This batch was my fourth or fifth attempt, and they look a lot better:

 

Gala (right) laughing, omg my heart:

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make khuushuur, a traditional Mongolian dish that’s basically a deep-fried meat and onion pie, or fried dumpling. Hopefully I’m pronouncing the word right, since it’s 100% of all the Mongolian I know. I’ve seen it spelled different ways, sometimes with just an H at the beginning, more commonly with a KH. The sound seems to be a soft H that’s sounded in the back of the throat.

I learned about khuushuur because I’m currently obsessed with a Mongolian folk metal band called the Hu. Their music is amazing and I was supposed to see them live in May, but they had to cancel the rest of their tour because of Covid-19. I follow the band on social media and knew they had spent at least a while quarantined in Australia before they were able to return home to Mongolia.

Roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon * how to prepare Brussels sprouts

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

* about 1 or 1.5 lb Brussels sprouts, cut in half

* 2 Tbsp olive oil

* 1-2 Tbsp honey or maple syrup

* 1 tsp salt

* about 1/2 tsp pepper

* 5 slices of bacon (uncooked)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rinse, cut off stems, and slice Brussels sprouts in half. Place in a large mixing bowl and drizzle with olive oil and honey or maple syrup, then toss to coat. Add salt and pepper, mix well, and spread onto a greased baking sheet in a single layer. Cut up uncooked bacon into very small pieces and drop onto the sprouts evenly. Sprinkle with more pepper.

Place in oven and roast for 20 to 25 minutes, until bacon is cooked, stirring carefully halfway through.

Preparing the sprouts (left) and cooked and ready to eat sprouts (right):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Brussels sprouts that you won’t hate. I promise.

I have hated Brussels sprouts for my entire life until last year when my uncle made them and they were actually good. It turns out that everyone has been cooking those things wrong all this time, so here’s how to do it right.

Brussels sprouts are little round green things that look like teeny cabbages, and they are related to cabbage. They taste like cabbage too. And it’s funny, because I will happily cook and eat cabbage in certain recipes, like corned beef and cabbage which one day I might cover on the podcast, and spring rolls which as I understand are mostly stuffed with cabbage. But Brussels sprouts, ew.

But instead of boiling Brussels sprouts, which makes them mushy and bitter, we’re going to roast them. We’re going to roast them WITH BACON. I’m not one of those bacon maniacs but it is hard to dispute that bacon tastes really good and imparts its flavor to any food it’s cooked with.

So, for this recipe you’re going to need a large mixing bowl and a baking sheet, preferably one with edges instead of the totally flat baking sheets. You’re dealing with little round things that roll easily and you need to turn them over while they’re in the oven, so having edges on your baking sheet will help keep the Brussels sprouts from burning to the bottom of your oven.

The first thing you need to do is prepare the sprouts. Throw them in a colander or run water directly into the plastic bag they’re in, and give them a good rinse. Then you’ll need to trim the stubby stem off and remove any outer leaves that look gross. Generally these leaves will come off by themselves when you cut the sprouts in half, which is the last step. Then toss the halved sprouts into the mixing bowl. Do this for all the sprouts, which actually doesn’t take too long once you get into the rhythm. You can also get them ready ahead of time, then cover the bowl of sprouts and refrigerate them for a few hours until you’re ready to cook them.

You can add other vegetables to the sprouts if you like, as long as they’re vegetables that can stand up to cooking at high temperatures, like broccoli.

Once your sprouts are ready and waiting in the bowl, turn the oven on to 400 F to preheat, and grease your baking sheet. You can use vegetable oil or shortening or the spray stuff. I have found, by the way, that using shortening to grease a pan that you then put in the oven at a high temperature, like 400 or higher, will cause the shortening to become super sticky and impossible to remove, and may discolor your baking sheet.

Next, pour two Tbsp of olive oil over the sprouts, then two Tbsp of honey or maple syrup. If you measure the olive oil out first, when you measure the honey or syrup with the same spoon it will just pour off the spoon without leaving any behind, just like magic.

Mix the sprouts around well so that they’re all coated with a thin laye...

Drop Biscuits * how to fry bacon * using bacon grease * what “make a well” means in a recipe

Drop Biscuits with Bacon and/or Cheese

* 2 c. all-purpose flour

* 1/2 tsp salt

* 2 tsp baking powder

* 4 Tbsp shortening

* 1 c. milk

* 1 c. shredded Cheddar (or other cheese) (optional)

* 5-7 slices cooked bacon, cut up small (optional)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Cut shortening into dry ingredients. Add cheese and/or bacon pieces. Add milk and drop in large spoonfuls on a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 12-14 minutes. For rolled out biscuits decrease the milk to 2/3 cup. If you leave out both the cheese and bacon, increase the salt to one teaspoon.

Well-cooked bacon:

The biscuits (inside and out):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make drop biscuits, with or without cheese and/or bacon!

I’d like to say this is an old family recipe passed down through generations of women, but in fact I got it from an old cookbook called Good Recipes for Hard Times that I owned in my 20s. I’ve regretted for years selling it in a yard sale but through the magic of the internet I just ordered a paperback copy. Maybe it’ll turn out to be the same copy! Actually, my copy was hardback and would be worth a whole lot today, although by the time I sold it, it was pretty battered. Like, literally battered because there was batter on some of the pages. *rimshot*

Okay, so, we’ve talked about biscuits once or twice in past episodes, but we’ve never actually featured a biscuit recipe. This recipe doesn’t make the most delicious biscuit, but it is the easiest and most adaptable recipe I’ve found. I primarily use it for making bacon and cheese biscuits, or sometimes just cheese biscuits. We’re also not going to bother to roll these biscuits out. This is a recipe you can whip up quickly when you need something filling and cheap. I will warn you that if you leave the cheese and/or bacon out, the biscuits sort of taste like glue. But put enough butter and jam on them and they’re fine.

For the purposes of this episode I’m going to assume that you want to make cheese and bacon biscuits. That means we need to talk about how to cook bacon before we do anything else, because you need cooked bacon for this recipe.

First, of course, you need the bacon. It doesn’t matter what kind you buy, but thick cut bacon takes forever to cook. I tend to shop by price so I get the cheapest, fattiest bacon I can find—but I don’t buy bacon often these days, maybe just a few times a year. I’m also trying to cut back on the amount of sugar I eat, so this time I bought bacon that was cured without sugar, honey, or any other sweetener. It tasted fine. It tasted like bacon.

Cooking bacon is messy, so when I do cook it I typically make the whole package at once. In this particular case I didn’t since I needed five strips raw for a different recipe that we’ll talk about soon. You’ll need a large, heavy skillet and make sure to either wear an old shirt or put an apron on to protect your clothes from grease.

Heat the skillet to about medium low. Place the strips of bacon in the skillet while it’s still warming up, and try to position them so that as much of the bacon as possible contacts the bottom of the pan. If you’re cooking the whole package of bacon, though, you won’t have enough room, so once I fill up the bottom of the pan I just layer the rest of the bacon over the first layer but facing the other direction, so I have a criss-cross pattern of bacon. I’m not sure that makes sense. Don’t stress about it. Just separate the slices and lay them out as flat as possible.

As the skillet heats, the bacon begins to cook, and as it does it releases a lot of grease and begins to shrink and curl up. After a few minutes use a spatula to loosen the bacon from the bottom,