Bet you haven't seen this one before...

For my next trick, I've turned a boring old dinnerish food into a very intriguing dessert.

I found this recipe for Pumpkin Tart with Chocolate in the November 2009 issue of Portland Monthly Magazine and it has been stuck to the front of my fridge ever since.  I'm not exactly sure what about it snagged my interest; though it must have been my love of both chocolate and squash I suppose...

I was especially excited to try this thing out this Christmas as it was my first attempt at pie (or tart) crust and it turned out to be much easier than most people tend to lead you to believe.

Tart Crust
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold. cut into 1/2 inch pieces
4 tablespoons sweet white wine, cold (I used Chateau Ste. Michelle Reisling)

Filling
3 pounds pumpkin (or squash, I used butternut. I suppose you could use canned if you wanted to...
   but fresh is classier)
1 1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup dark rum
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
confectioners sugar to sprinkle on top

It's important before you start to make sure you have the proper bake ware, the recipe calls for a 9" tart pan, but you could probably do it in a pie pan as well.  Needless to say,  we ended up running to Kitchen Kaboodle at quarter till 5 on Christmas Eve. 15 minutes till closing, the clerks were a bit bitchy.

Start out by roasting the pumpkin (whole) at 375 deg until it collapses on itself, about an hour or so.  Pull it out and let it cool.  Remove the seeds and skin, then cut the thing into chunks, mine were between 1/2 to 1 inch.
Preheat the oven to 450 deg.  Mix the dry crust ingredients in a food processor with a few pulses.  Add the cold butter, and pulse it about 10 times or until it takes on a granulated texture.  You can also do the the old-fashioned way with a pastry cutter (funny "D" shaped whisk thing). Then, with the machine running, slowly add the cold wine.  Once the dough is mixed, form it into a 1 inch disc and refrigerate it for 30 minutes.  Roll the disc out and place it in your tart pan.  And freeze it for at least another 30 minutes, or until you are ready to bake.  This is pretty important, I think my crust thawed a little much before I baked it, causing the crust to settle away from the edges so the crust was pretty much just on the bottom of the tart.
Heat the sugar in a small saucepan until it caramelizes (if you have a candy thermometer, USE IT).  When the color is deep, remove from heat and carefully add butter.  Carefully because the butter sizzles pretty well when you add it and you don't want it splattering on you.  You really want the color to be pretty deep because you're looking for caramel and not toffee, I don't think I heated mine long enough so when I added it to the pumpkin, it cooled hard and crunchy and didn't mix well.
With the butter in, pour the mixture over your pumpkin and mix coarsely, not so much that you blend the pumpkin, just mixed.  Add the rum. Cool to room temperature.
Turn the oven down to 400 deg, wrap the frozen dough in foil and bake for 15 minutes.  Remove the foil and bake for another 5 minutes until dry and slightly golden (this is where my crust slumped down into the bottom of the pan).
Chop the chocolate (again coarsely, the idea is for there to be distinct chunks of pumpkin and chocolate and not a blend like your usual pumpkin pie) and add to the pumpkin.
Pour the filling into the shell; bake for 25 minutes at 350 deg.
Voila! When the thing is golden brown, pull it out, let it cool a bit and dig in! Sprinkle a little powdered sugar on top for aesthetic appeal and you've crafted yourself a gorgeous little dessert.

Baby, it's cold outside, or "the song pandora played most often while i soaked tiny birds in salty water"

Well, at least I've gotten that out of my way very early in my blogging experience; I just accidentally deleted an entire post at the exact moment the thing decided to auto-save, so it's gone.  So this post my second, bitter, attempt.

For Christmas Eve dinner this year, I decided to try a second attempt at brining birds. The first time I'd tried brining was this past Thanksgiving's turkey, which turned out AMAZING.  This time around I thought I'd go for cornish game hens (or tiny chickens).

For those of you that are unfamiliar with it, brining is a magical process wherein you soak meat (or vegetables in the case of pickling) in a salty solution along with herbs and seasoning.  The difference in salt concentration between the solution and the moisture in the meat's cells leads to a phenomenon that could only be comprehended by the highest caliber of chemist; widely referred to as osmosis.  During this alchemical process, the salty solution passes into the meat cells carrying with it any flavors you have added to the brine.  Did you catch that? The flavor literally gets into the meat.   The end effect of this whole thing is that the resulting bird is extra juicy and flavorful.

The brine recipe I have comes from what is probably my absolute favorite food book (as I have mentioned before) Charcuterie (Ruhlman and Polcyn):

1 gallon water
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 bunch fresh tarragon (about 1 ounce)
1 bunch fresh parsley (about 1 ounce)
2 bay leaves
1 head of garlic, halved horizontally
1 onion, sliced
3 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 lemons, halved

Basically you just throw all this stuff together in a large pot (and I mean large, I just expected to use my largest pot which turned out to only hold exactly 1 gallon so it was a little overflow-y) and then bring it to a boil and simmer it until the sugar and salt are dissolved.  The convenient thing about chopping all this stuff is that, you don't have to worry about the skin or peel or whatever; this stuff is just for flavor so it all goes in.  I usually just quarter the onion and don't even bother cutting the parsley or tarragon at all.  A trick I learned for using black peppercorns is that, wherever you use them, toss them in a frying pan and give them a quick roast, it brings out the flavor a little better.  Give the lemon halves a good squeeze before tossing them in.  It is important that you make sure you will be making enough brine to cover whatever you are brining and also that you have a container in which the bird fits without too much extra room.  A good way of checking this is to put the still frozen bird(s) in your container and then add water with a measuring cup until the bird is completely submerged.  If you need more than a gallon, just multiply the recipe.  I had to do this with the turkey (2.5 gallons) and didn't have more than the originally called for herbs and it came out fine.

Once you've dissolved the salt, allow the brine to cool to room temperature and then chill it in the fridge.

Next you are ready for the bird. I should note that on both occasions I've done this, I made the brine several days in advance to no ill effect.  I like to rinse the bird before placing it in the brine, but I'm not sure that's necessary. Once the bird is in the brine, weight it down with a plate or something so that it doesn't float, it's really important that it stays completely submerged during brining.  Then stick the whole thing in the fridge (or garage or shed or other cold place) for the proscribed time.

Charcuterie has a simple chart for figuring out brining times for various amounts of meat but I also found one here. The 15 lb turkey I did for 24 hrs, the two 22 oz game hens I stuck in the same container for 3h hrs. (over brining can lead to excessively salty meat)

Once the time has come, remove the bird from the brine and rinse it well. Pat the thing dry and stick it, uncovered, back in the fridge for 2 to 24 hours depending on the size of the creature.  This resting period gives the saltiness a chance to work its way throughout the rest of the bird.

Finally, finally we get to cook the thing.  The recipe for turkey in Charcuterie says to go for 450 deg F. So far the wrappings on most birds I've seen say 350.  A mantra I've heard many times in reference to meat is "low and slow" so I tend to go for 350-400 which just takes a little longer.  I also start the roasting with the bird breast-side down which supposedly makes for a more moist bird as well. Then, when the bottom side is nice a browned, I flip the bird right-side up and finish roasting.  The USDA recommends an final internal temperature for poultry at 165 deg F.  The best way to measure this temp. is to stick the thermometer in the meatiest part of whatever you're cooking.  The even better best way is to go find yourself a digital alarm thermometer (about $20 wherever kitchen gadgets are sold) which has a probe you leave in the meat while roasting and an alarm that goes off when it reaches whatever temperature you've set it to. A brilliant piece of technology.

Once you've hit your internal temp; the thing is done! Pull it out, stick dessert in the oven and let the bird rest for another 20 minutes or so before serving, then enjoy the most flavorful, juicy bird you've ever roasted.

You really shouldn't ever read the 1st post, it's usually boring...

Well, here goes... I figured the day before Christmas Eve (and the first of three days straight of cooking) would be as good a day as any to start writing this thing. Time will tell how long I stick to it...

Today began the prep for Christmas Eve dinner. After a long, exhausting visit to the grocery store to stock up for the coming marathon weekend in the kitchen (3 holiday meals in a row) and a few hours distraction watching a terrible, but pretty, movie; I set to work...
The eventual goal for the meal is to have brined, roasted cornish game hens with sliced, baked potato things and some sort of greenery. (here's where this thing gets educational)
The brine recipe I have comes from the book Charcuterie  by Micheal Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, and let me tell you; if you love meat, particularly of the salty, cured variety, and want to be able to craft this meat yourself; you need this book! It's brilliant and chock full o' yum.
Anyway, among various aromatic things like tarragon and onions and lemons and of course lots of salt, the recipe calls for 1 gallon of water. Well that seems easy enough; bring 1 gallon of water to a simmer and fill it with the flavor-y things. So I get out my largest pot and start measuring out a gallon of water (using the blender container because it goes to 6 cups and my measuring cup goes only to 2). Turns out my largest pot holds just over 1 gallon.  Until you add an onion, a head of garlic, and 2 lemons... Then there's a lot of steaming and sizzling and all sorts of unpleasantness.  But at least now my house smells wonderful and I have brine ready for my hens tomorrow.

The only sad part has now been re-reading this and realizing that I am desperately out of practice at writing in a way that is interesting to read. Or maybe I was never that good to begin with, but I'll keep at it.