Pancakes for Dinner + Strawberry Shortcake

Image by Merelymel13 via Flickr

Since it has been an unseasonably cool and very rainy week, keeping us stuck indoors, it has also been a week of treats. Last night, I made silver dollar pancakes and bacon for dinner. I don’t know what is so sinful about transferring a Sunday-morning meal to a Wednesday evening, but it certainly brightened up everyone’s week.

It being strawberry season, I had all the things to make strawberry shortcake on hand, which was my project Monday afternoon when the rain poured down like Armageddon outside.

Strawberry shortcake is, of course, absurdly easy to make. It has three components:

• Strawberries, hulled and quartered, and mixed with a small amount of sugar; the riper they are, the less sugar they need. Let them macerate a while to produce some juices.
• Shortcakes, made from your favorite biscuit recipe with a little more sugar added. I like to make biscuits with half-and-half or cream for dessert recipes. I brush the tops with egg white and sprinkle with sugar to get deeper browning when baking and add a touch more sweetness.
• Whipped cream (see below).

To assemble, bake the biscuits, let cool and split. Spoon some strawberries in the center and top with whipped cream. This treat brings spring to a dreary day.

How to Whip Cream

Chill a mixing bowl and the mixer beaters in the freezer for about 20 minutes. Add 1 cup heavy cream, 1 tbsp. sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla (optional) to the bowl. Start beating on the lowest speed until bubbles start to appear, about 30 seconds. Switch to medium speed until the cream starts to thicken, another 30 seconds. Switch to high speed and beat until peaks appear, about 20 seconds more for soft peaks and 30 seconds more for stiff peaks.

Store covered in the fridge for several hours. Here’s a guide to whipping cream with pictures of soft and stiff peaks.

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Valentines’ Day Food Massacre

As I said in a recent roundup, I’ve set myself a personal challenge of cooking a fun theme menu once a week. This week, it wasn’t difficult to decide what to choose for the theme: l’amour, natch. But I didn’t want to go with the tried-and-trite for my menu: aphrodisiacs, red foods, chocolate…

So I thought about what I wanted to evoke for Valentine’s Day with my partner, and what I came up with was fun and sensuality. I wanted to make interactive food — something spicy, yummy, a little messy. Two courses of Asian-style finger-food favorites seemed to fit the bill. As for dessert, I had a carton of strawberries left over from the previous weekend that I knew had to be consumed somehow. My hubby doesn’t like strawberries, but he had leftover cupcakes, so I didn’t concern myself too much with him.

My Valentine’s Day menu was therefore to be:

• Mushroom Spring Rolls with Peanut Dipping Sauce — recipe from Simple to Spectacular, by Mark Bittman and Jean-Georges Vongerichten
• Chicken Lettuce Wraps – recipe culled from various places and, as it turned out, partially made up as I went along
• Red Wine-Strawberry Sorbet – okay, I did cave and do something brilliantly, ruthlessly, dynamically red, but it was worth it; recipe also from Simple to Spectacular

The menu sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the results were … ahem … less than spectacular. So this Valentine’s Day was truly meaningful, since I got to watch my husband scarf down everything I made and declare it fabulous even so, because that’s how much he loves me.

Here’s the blow-by-blow:

The Mushroom Spring Rolls were actually pretty good, and the dipping sauce that went with them — made from toasted, chopped peanuts, chiles, coconut milk and soy sauce — was fantastic. My husband even remarked that he had noticed that I was cooking mushrooms much better these days; all I had changed was the cooking time, since I had learned that I needed to cook mushrooms over medium-high heat until the liquid released and then evaporated, and then take them off the heat. This ensures that they are brown and meaty, not too liquidy. I was taking them off too soon before. You don’t always expect the eater in the family to notice these little things, so I was secretly gratified.

The problem with the Spring Rolls was that the recipe called for phyllo dough to evoke the crispiness of a spring roll without the necessity of deep-frying. A good idea in theory, but in practice, it didn’t quite work for me. The phyllo was too light and crispy, and didn’t have enough substance. Besides, it reminded me of a mushroom spanakopita, which didn’t go at all with the Southeast Asian-style dipping sauce. So the recipe wasn’t a keeper for me.

Chicken Lettuce Wraps was the main course, in which I was hoping to re-create one of our favorite Chinese restaurant appetizers. Once I started the base recipe, however, I realized that there were a few things wrong with it. For instance, it tried to combine lemongrass and fish sauce and teriyaki sauce and soy sauce all in one thing — it was kind of a mess. Also, it was too thick and pasty. So I started rapidly adapting, trying instead for a more straightforward black bean sauce lightened with chicken stock. It actually was very tasty — if a bit salty and still a little too thick from too much fermented black bean paste — and it did taste a lot like what we were used to from the restaurant.

The problem was that I had cooked the cabbage in the sauce, and it turned this blue-green-gray color — very unappetizing. It brought home again the lesson that food needs to look good as well as taste good. But I did achieve the goal of making something very messy; I got sauce and chicken all over the place. My husband, who is usually as big a slob as I am, managed somehow to hardly even dirty his plate. I guess he’s more adroit at wrapping things in lettuce leaves than I am.

On to dessert… The sorbet was the winner of the night and of the week. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how selfish you are when it comes to homemade sorbet — I was the only person who ate it. With a little forethought, it is possible to make sorbet on a weeknight, a handy tip to keep in mind. And since the recipe is so simple and so delicious, I will pass it on to you, crediting Simple to Spectacular.

Strawberry-Red Wine Sorbet for Your Valentine

Combine:

• 2 cups strawberries, quartered
• ½ cup good-quality red wine
• 1 cup sugar
• the seeds of 1 vanilla bean
• 2 tbsp. lemon juice

1. Let the mixture sit for about 1 hour
2. Puree the mixture in a blender
3. Freeze in an ice cream maker — you do have an ice cream maker, don’t you?
4. If you have the time, firm up in the freezer for a few hours before serving