Family Favorite: Corny Cracker Casserole

I've made this a bunch of times for Thanksgiving and Christmas because I keep getting requests for it!  All the better because it's so easy that it's perfect for those busier times of year, plus you can prepare the whole thing a day ahead of time and just pop it in the oven when you need it.  It serves about 12 people, depending on appetites and how many other dishes are on the table. 

Here's the recipe, adapted from one my sister Laura gave me years ago.  Her version is a little healthier, but mine's tastier!  We only eat it on holidays, after all.  It's not supposed to be health food!  Besides, it has broccoli in it, so that makes it healthy.  Right?

Corny Cracker Casserole
3 (10-ounce) packages frozen whole kernal corn, thawed and drained
1 (10-ounce) package frozen chopped broccoli, thawed and drained
1 cup coarsely crushed rich round crackers (aka Ritz)
1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (about 6 ounces)
1 cup whipping cream or half & half
2 eggs, beaten
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, cut into small pieces
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Topping
1 cup coarsely crushed rich round crackers
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, melted

Note: All amounts should be considered "more or less"--this is a forgiving recipe so don't go crazy with the measuring!  Pretty sure I usually up the amount of crushed crackers (both in the casserole and the topping) since I have to buy a big box to make this anyway.

To crush crackers without pulverizing them into crumbs, I put them into a plastic bag (to avoid a big mess) and lightly press on them with my meat tenderizer, but there are many ways to crush a cracker.

The key word is coarsely. Coarse pieces, like this, add a pleasing texture to the dish.

I like to shred my own cheese, too.  It's cheaper, and did you know they put cellulose in pre-shredded cheese to keep it from clumping?  Cellulose is basically sawdust, and who wants to eat that?  Plus, I got this nifty grater that collects the shreds in a measuring cup as you go.  I love using it!  Thanks, Mom!  (She gave it to me in the wishing well at my bridal shower.)

Place the broccoli and corn in a large bowl.

 
Add the rest of the ingredients (except the ones for the topping, of course). 

Mix them up good and pour the mixture into a casserole dish (sorry I don't know how many quarts the casserole dish should hold.  I just use "the big one").

Top it with the rest of the crushed crackers, then drizzle the whole thing with melted butter.

At this point, you can cover it and put it in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.  Gotta love that!

When you're ready to bake, pop the casserole in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes, or until the edges are bubbly.  I keep it covered for half the time, then uncover it for the rest of the baking time. 

And there you have it!  A superbly simple holiday side that the whole family will enjoy. 

The Vegeggie Burger!

The Vegeggie Burger

For an extra shot of protein the other night, Jim added a fried egg to his veggie burger and a new dish was born: The Vegeggie Burger!  Isn't it just so much fun to say?  The verdict: yummy (and healthy).

The Best Spritz Cookies (filled with Nutella!)

Nutella-Filled Spritz Cookies

I'm basically incapable of refraining from baking during the holiday season.  So, even though this year there was absolutely no reason to bake spritz cookies (that's what those cookie press cookies are actually called), I went ahead and did it anyway.  I mean, it's not like they'd go to waste, plus I had a brand-new cookie press that had just been sitting there unopened for months.  I'm so glad I decided to make them, because it led to my discovery of the best spritz cookie recipe I've found (after a couple of tiny tweaks).

In the past when I've made this type of cookie, the dough simply didn't want to cooperate. The cookies ultimately turned out fine, but they were just a little messy and difficult.  Let me tell you, the allrecipes recipe I used (see link above) is amazing!  And oddly, the secret is yeast (and butter, of course).

Yeast in a regular old Christmas cookie, with no rising required?  I'd never heard of such a thing.  But the reviews were good so I gave it a shot.  And I guess something about the yeast makes this cookie dough a baker's dream.  So easy to work with!

So, first you take your little packet of active dry yeast and dissolve it an a couple of tablespoons of warm water, to get it activated.  The dry yeast looks like this:

As soon as you add the warm water, it starts to bubble up and activate like this:

It's alive!  For real.  After a few more minutes it gets a little creamy looking, like this:

So, while the yeast is waking up from a long deep slumber, take four sticks of softened butter and cream it with a cup of granulated sugar until it's nice and fluffy.  And don't skimp here and try to get by with margarine or shortening.  Only butter will do, at least if you want the very best-tasting cookies!  Not to toot my own horn, but I tried at least three other spritz cookie variations this holiday season, and these took the cake.  I think using all real butter had a lot to do with it.  Here's what nicely creamed butter and sugar looks like:

Then add 2 egg yolks and a teaspoon of vanilla extract (not in the original recipe) along with the yeast mixture:

Beat that together, then begin adding four cups of all-purpose flour, in increments.  I added half a teaspoon of table salt to the flour (also not in original recipe) because I think it's important to include a little salt in pretty much anything I cook.  It's a miracle mineral — even sweets benefit from the addition of a little salt!  Tip: Don't start your mixer on high when you add the flour, or you may wind up wearing most of it.  Start the mixer on low and gradually up the speed.

Now you'll have a lovely dough to load up the cookie press with:

And you get to lick the beater now!  (Unless you're one of those types who shies away from anything with raw egg in it.  I like to live dangerously, I guess.)

Now the fun part is coming up.  Take your cookie press and choose your disk of choice.  I love these things!  Thanks to my mom-in-law Donna who gave it to me for my birthday this year.  Cookie press cookies are so much simpler than cut-out cookies, and just as festive and yummy.  Since it was Christmas, I chose tree and wreath shapes, along with a disk I thought looked rather like a star:

Fill up the barrel and you're ready to roll!

I lined my baking pans with Silpats (well, one with a Silpat, the other with a knockoff.  Not as good — if you happen to be an avid baker, the real thing is worth the money) and started "shooting."  These would be fine right on the pan, too, though.  Just don't grease the baking sheets, or the dough won't stay on them.

I added some green sprinkles before baking to up the festivity factor:

Then put them in a 400 degree oven for 7–9 minutes, until the bottoms were lightly browned (the cookies themselves won't really brown at all.  If they do they're overdone, so watch closely).  Perfect spritz cookie bottoms look like this:

I only have three baking sheets so I had to keep rotating batches.  This recipe makes a lot of cookies!

You'd think that many cookies would last quite a while, but you'd think wrong.  They're addictively simple little bites of sweet buttery goodness.  Like potato chips, it's impossible to eat just one.  Just for fun, I sandwiched Nutella between some of them for a little wow-factor, but left most of them plain.  They're just so good as-is.  A holiday hit!

We enjoyed them thoroughly before our annual Christmas light viewing tradition.  These cookies are definitely going to become tradition, too!

And if you're interested in some non-food related pics, here's some highlights from this year's Christmas lights outing.  Happy Holidays and all the best for 2012!

How to Make Perfect Chicken Noodle Soup

Ahhh, a bowl full of comfort.  This chicken noodle soup has been feeding the two of us all week, and there was even some to spare for one of Jim's bachelor coworkers.  You know how when you eat the same thing day after day you start to get sick of it?  Well, that didn't happen.  It's so good that I'm still looking forward to it every day at lunchtime.  And it's healthy and cheap, too!  Win-win-win.

So, naturally for chicken soup, you start with a chicken.  We got a whole cut-up one, but if I had a cleaver I'd hack it up more so the bones could release even more flavor.  (I guess no one wanted to get us the cleaver off of our wedding registry–can't really blame 'em!)  I love cooking with bones–they add a real depth, and roasting or browning them really brings it out.

So, first, and this was my husband's smart recommendation so I should give him credit here, to get the richest, most chicken-flavored broth, you should start by browning that chicken in a big soup pot or Dutch oven.  Be patient–it takes a while to make a great chicken soup.  Get them good and browned, like this:

Then set the chicken aside.  Then, if you're so inclined, brown the vegetables, too: a big quartered onion (you don't have to peel it, since the broth gets strained anyway), a couple of peeled, halved carrots, a couple of halved stalks of celery, a whole clove or two of unpeeled garlic.  You can simply add these in the next step rather than brown them, but I like that roasty toasty veggie flavor. Set those aside with the chicken.

Look in your pot, and you're likely to see a big mess:

But don't despair.  You won't have to scrub that out of the pot.  That stuck-on mess is called fond, which is a French term for "what makes sauces and soups delicious."  OK, I don't really know how to translate it, but that's what it does!  Turn up the heat and add enough water to cover the bottom of the pot by about an inch or so (for me it was about 2 cups).  Then let it bubble away while you scrape and mix the fond into the hot water.  See this?  This is pure flavor:

Now put your chicken back in there, along with the vegetables, a bay leaf, five peppercorns, a couple sprigs of thyme, some parsley sprigs, and about a teaspoon of salt.  If you don't have thyme or parsley sprigs I wouldn't sweat it, but I had them so I added them.  Now cover everything with water.  I used about 10 cups.  Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat, partially cover the pot and simmer (that means low, slow bubbling) for at least 2 hours (mine went for 3 hours).  The chicken meat should be falling off the bone when you turn off the heat.  Be sure to walk in your kitchen from time to time to enjoy those amazing aromas wafting from the soup pot.  Our windows were steaming up with all that goodness–there's something just so cozy about a pot bubbling away on the stove with something wonderful being created inside of it, don't you think?

While this was going on I cooked a pound of Pennsylvania Dutch egg noodles (my favorite brand) in some chicken broth (I saved some of the cooking liquid to add to my soup base later).  Normally I'd just cook the noodles in the soup itself, but since we made this for the week ahead I didn't want to let the noodles sit in there, absorbing broth all the while and turning mushy.  So, cook up some noodles, drain them, then toss with a little oil so they won't clump together.  That would be bad.  Store the noodles in a big zip-top baggie and they'll be ready to add to your soup in individual portions when you're ready to eat (or the morning of the same day you're going to eat it).

OK, so now strain out the chicken and vegetables.  No big deal—just put a strainer over your biggest bowl and dump the pot out into it.  You can fish most of the chicken out first, which makes it easier.  Keep the chicken and discard the veggies.  Don't feel bad–all their flavor and goodness has leached into that gorgeous broth, so you're not wasting them!

Cover your broth and put it in the fridge overnight.  (This is optional but makes a huge difference.  More on that a little further down.)  Set your chicken aside until it's cool enough to handle while you do something else.  Or, wait till tomorrow since you have to wait for the broth anyhow.

Now it's time to pick that chicken clean!  Discard the skin and bones and any nasty bits you don't want in your soup.  If you want a really hearty soup, use all of it.  Otherwise, you can save some of that chicken for whatever you desire.

Take your broth out of the fridge.  See that layer on top?  That's fat!  Normally fat is good for flavor, but in this case the amount of fat would make the broth too greasy and not as yummy.  So that's why you refrigerate it overnight–the fat will congeal on the surface, making it easy to skim off and throw away.  Good news for your taste buds and your waistline–a rarity indeed!

Thinly slice some peeled carrots and celery ribs (I used four each) and chop an onion and a couple cloves of garlic. Saute those for a few minutes in a little olive oil until the onion begins to turn translucent.  Then pour in your lovely homemade chicken broth.  Bring it up to a simmer and season with salt and pepper to taste.  I added a Knorr bouillon cube, too, just like my mom would. Mom always knows best, right?  Simmer till the vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes, then add your chicken meat and heat for about 8 minutes, till it's heated through. 

Ours was so chock-full of chicken (and flavorful goodness) we were able to add 2 additional quarts of store-bought chicken broth to stretch it further without sacrificing taste.

And here it is, the final product–a big beautiful bowl of real homemade chicken noodle soup:

It's well worth the time!  While most of my coworkers were eating overpriced New York City lunches, I was enjoying this wonderful soup for a fraction of the price.  Gotta love that something so good is so economical, too.

First Married Blog Post! Courtesy of Jim's Sweet Potatoes Anna

The other night we tried out the brand new Oxo mandoline I was lucky enough to receive at my bridal shower back in July (now that wedding planning is over we finally have time to use all the great gifts we got!) and this was the perfect dish for it: Sweet Potatoes Anna.  An old favorite of Jim's from when his mom used to make it for him, he wanted to give cooking it himself a try.  


The recipe itself is really simple (provided you have a great slicer — the hardest part would be thinly slicing the potatoes otherwise so if you don't have one, make sure your knife is sharp and your cutting board is stable!).  Just peel and thinly slice your sweet potatoes, then layer them in a greased baking dish, overlapping slightly.  Brush each layer of potatoes with melted butter (the original recipe calls for quite a bit of butter, but it came out great using just enough to coat the layers), then sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and season with salt and pepper.  Keep layering till you use up all your potatoes — at least one sweet potato per serving should suffice, depending on your appetite, but leftovers are yummy, so you might as well plan on two potatoes per person to be safe.  


Top the last layer with more melted butter, Parmesan, salt and pepper, then cover with foil and bake at around 425°F for about an hour or until the potatoes are tender when you stick a knife in the middle of the baking dish.  For a crusty top (which is essential for optimum deliciousness), remove the foil during the last twenty minutes or so of baking.  When everything is cooked through and the cheese is browned on top, take it out of the oven and let it settle for several minutes.  Simple as that!  It was really, really delicious.


I think Jim has to cook more often.