use real butter

The word brittle conjures up so many meanings. Brittle bones, brittle failure (okay, that’s a term in mechanics, but important for all sorts of materials studies), brittle personality. I’ll admit that when I hear the word brittle my mind immediately turns to brittle-ductile transition zones in the Earth’s crust. And yet my favorite meaning of brittle is the confection of a delicious nut meat suspended in the matrix of a caramelized sugary goodness, broken into delightfully dangerous shards that melt and crunch in your mouth. Swoon.

There are two camps of people when it comes to caramelized sugar. Those who love it and those who hate/fear it. I’ve been in both camps - twice. It was pretty easy to master at sea level although I did brick my fair share of pots of hot crystallized sugar when I got a little too cocky (read careless). What a bleeping mess. But in general it was a cinch to make. Then I moved up here, as in several thousand feet up. Caramelizing sugar became a little more finicky and I fell into the hate/fear camp. My pastry course at CSR helped with my “issues”. The introduction of acids like cream of tartar or lemon juice, and the addition of corn syrup helped to stabilize the mixture as it boiled to amber loveliness. Back into the love camp.

orange zest adds a subtle floral overtone

This recipe originally calls for the use of hazelnuts. I adore hazelnuts. I hate skinning them. It is a royal pain in the ass because you can never get all of the skins removed. If I were Martha Stewart, I would have my lackeys do it, but my lackey is me. I’ll save my hazelnuts for something else. I decided to go with another highly prized, but easy to peel (read: already peeled) nut - macadamia nuts. I read somewhere that mac nuts are poisonous for dogs, so I’m careful not to let those bubs roll off the counter during chopping because Kaweah is always standing vigilant nearby.

rough chopped mac nuts and zest

One of the nice tricks I learned from our chef was that he covers the pot with the sugar, water, and corn syrup with the lid and lets it boil until steam is coming out from under the lid. Let it boil for a while to ensure that all of the sugar has dissolved. He said the steam condenses on the lid and then runs down the sides “washing” the sugar crystals down. When the sugar is dissolved, you can remove the lid. We don’t want crystals in this mixture if we can avoid it. Because when this stuff starts to boil, the water is boiling off and the concentration of sugar increases and the temperature rises which eventually takes your sugar through the various stages ending up with a gorgeous amber candy. If you have a crystal in there or if one forms (by disrupting it with air for instance), then it will seed the rest of your batch and the whole thing will turn into a dry and very hot brick of sugar. It’s depressing. You want to avoid this and allow the sugar to transform into liquid caramelized sugar. That’s why folks playing with caramelized sugar suffer all sorts of random burns - the stuff is HOT and it STICKS to you. Ouch.

stirring in the nuts and zest

Watch your sugar carefully because when it begins to turn amber, it changes quickly and you don’t want it too burnt. Remove from heat and let it cool for a minute. Stir in the other ingredients carefully. You don’t want to introduce too much air because the caramel can still seed and crystallize (this happened to another group in our class). Quickly and smoothly pour it out onto a silpat or a greased baking sheet and spread it evenly into a continuous blob. Be warned, the baking sheet will get very hot. When the brittle cools, break it up with your hands.

hence the name

If you add butter or cream to a brittle recipe, it becomes toffee. Mmmm, toffee… You can also vary the recipe and use peanuts with ground cinnamon or just play around with it. The brittle can also be ground up in a food processor (I’ve never done this) and pressed on the sides of cakes or sprinkled on a scoop of ice cream.

great for gifts or snacking

Macadamia Orange Brittle

4 oz water
14 oz sugar
4 tbsp light corn syrup
1 cup macadamia nuts, roughly chopped (originally calls for hazelnuts, skinned and toasted)
1/2 tsp orange zest

Line a half sheet pan with silpat or parchment. Grease or lightly butter. Combine the water, sugar, and corn syrup in a saucepan and gently stir them together with clean fingers to remove pockets of dry sugar in the pan. Cover the saucepan and bring to a boil. Once steam is escaping from under the lid, let boil for a minute then remove the lid. Don’t stir the mixture. Cook until the sugar reaches an amber color (about 315F). Remove from heat and let bubles subside for a minute. Stir in the nuts and zest with a warm spoon (so the sugar doesn’t react to the cold). Make sure the ingredients are evenly distributed. Pour mixture onto sheet pan and spread to a thickness of about 1/4 to 1/2 inch. If it cools too fast and becomes too hard to spread, put it in a 350F oven for a couple of minutes to heat it up and make it spread. Let it cool completely and then break it into pieces.

While I am in between X-ray and heart scan, I’m making good use of the wireless network in this part of the hospital. Oooh, someone in medical imaging just gave me a meal voucher! I love this hospital, people are so friendly and upbeat. Unfortunately I can’t eat anything for the next 3 hours, but hopefully I won’t be feeling nauseous when I’m done so I might get myself a sammy.

This blog revolves around food and so does my life. I’m sure I think about food and what I’m going to prepare and eat much more than the average bear. Probably not too much more than the average food blogger :) One thing I wasn’t expecting over the next several months is that I would have to make a few adjustments to my diet. The main kicker: no sushi. *gasp* Honestly, I can forgo anything if necessary. I am not so inflexible.

What better reason to go and enjoy a nice sushi lunch with my sweetheart? There are a lot of places in Boulder to have sushi considering the landlocked status of the state. I haven’t lived here long enough to accept the prices for the quality compared to what I got in So Cal. Okay, but there is one place that has excellent quality and a price tag to match: Sushi Tora.

best sushi bet in boulder

We hadn’t eaten anything all day. We spent the morning taking our house apart and moving that brick of a treadmill upstairs. By 2 pm, we were famished. Let’s start with something from the kitchen:

seaweed salad

agedashi tofu

It’s a nice way to whet your appetite while perusing the menu. We sort of went nuts on the ordering because we were hungry and we knew it would be a while before we could enjoy this together (well, Jeremy is free to sushi on his own, but knowing him, he won’t).

sashimi assortment

toro (fatty tuna): gdddddgdgdgdgdgdg

I was satisfied after the toro. It was sooooooo good. One of those foods that transports you to Someplace Else. I think it’s on par with sex. I mean on par with good sex, not just any old sex. It’s the kind of toro you think about several times a day, for a couple of days after the meal. That kind of toro. I said I was satisfied, but… maki is so fun to eat.

spider roll

toro no maki: salmon, avocado, tobiko, unagi

The rolls were good. In hindsight I might have preferred ordering more toro sashimi instead, but I do love the subtle combination of sushi rice and seaweed and all of those lovely fishy things. And to top it all off - what I call dessert:

wasabi tobiko with quail egg

I think my love of tobiko with quail egg is based on 25% flavor and 75% texture. The creamy, buttery smoothness of the yolk oozing all over my mouth while the little tobiko crunch and pop their salty flavor pairs with the slight acidity of the seasoned sushi rice and the refreshing flavor of the nori. The rice lends a hefty chew and I won’t even get into the punch of the wasabi. I know most sushi chefs are mortified when Chinese come to dine on their fine creations, dousing them in wasabi as thick as paste and requesting, “more spicy” versions. We are, in their eyes, barbarians. Well, I’ve never been known for my subtlety.

After the meal, Jeremy had to roll me out the door. No worries though. That treadmill is in place and it rocks! The treadmill (when it’s running) scares the hell out of the poor dog. Check it.

to make up for those extra maki

Congratulations to Reema T. Bhakta! You’ve won the Menu for Hope raffle for the prize offered here on Use Real Butter! If you are Reema, you need to send me an email so we can discuss your choice of prize and where the heck you are so I can ship it to your hot little hands pronto! Thanks to everyone else who bid for such a terrific cause. If you really had your heart set on a print, drop me a line and we can make arrangements.

This morning a kind, portly dude knocked on the door at 7:55. I was in my bike shorts, ready to ride for an hour because these guys weren’t scheduled to arrive until 10 am to 2 pm. But here they were, not necessarily bright-eyed and bushy-tailed either. It was snowing, and the fellows in Denver aren’t too keen on the lovely mountain weather I cherish.

from my office perch - the snow conditions

The package is a new treadmill I’ve been contemplating for several years now. We found a great deal on a heavy duty model because I can’t stand those little flimsy wimpy home-version treadmills that fall apart the minute you hit a decent clip. I want to run, not jog on my treadmill. I’m a big fan of the commercial treadmills at gyms, but my doc advised me to keep away from public gyms for a while. So this is what we have. It rounds out my personal gym nicely. I call it my gym because Jeremy’s too tall for my bike frame and he’s rowed all of 15 minutes on my rower, ever. He tells me he will run on the treadmill. Yeah, whatever ;)

floor plan

Pardon the mess. Not sure where to put the bike. I like to look out the window when I ride because we don’t own a brain rot box (tv). The beauty of the rower and the treadmill is that they can both be folded and moved. Anyway, the treadmill is downstairs because the delivery guys looked scared when I said I planned to put it on the second floor. I let them off the hook and told them Jeremy and I would move it ourselves - all 280 pounds of it. They were like, “you?”. Yeah guys, me - strong as a horse. I’m so stoked! Now I can enjoy my favorite season AND run, bike, row, which ice, wind, and freezing temps render practically impossible outside.

It really is soup weather here and I finally got around to making a soup I love. There is no good reason why I haven’t cooked much with lentils other than I never knew what lentils were until I went to college. Lately, I’ve seen pictures of lentil dishes and I find myself craving lentils. What’s up with that?

green lentils, green french lentils

I am lentil stupid, as in I have never gone and bought them from the bulk section. I knew I needed green lentils. I found lentils that looked green. Turns out those were green French lentils and I’m not sure if there is much difference between those and the regular green lentils, but I went back and got the proper kind. I was also unaware that they had to soak overnight (sort of like the time I decided to make Panettone at 11 pm and didn’t read that it had to rise, three times). What does it mean to pick over lentils, anyway? I found nothing that shouldn’t have been there…

soaked green lentils

Once the lentils were ready (the next day) I was jazzed to get going. There is a terrific Lebanese restaurant in Alhambra, California, Wahib’s Middle East Restaurant, that we used to frequent. This soup was one of my favorite ways to start a meal. I found a recipe for it in Christine Osborne’s Middle Eastern Cooking.

sauté onions in butter

add the drained lentils

Once the lentils are added, seasonings and broth go into the pot. The recipe calls for homemade beef broth. Homemade beef broth is amazing and nothing like the store bought versions, but I just don’t have that on hand (chicken broth is another story entirely - I always have homemade chicken broth in my freezer). I used Better than Bouillon beef stock concentrate paste and it didn’t detract from the end product. Now since my pal, Liz, just got a crock pot, this is when you could crock pot the whole ordeal until soft, or if you’re impatient like me, cook on the stove top for 1.5 hours at a simmer. When the lentils were soft I scooped about 2 cups’ worth into my food processor.

ready to purée

The recipe says to wait until the soup cools before blending the lentils - and she blends them all, but… I didn’t wait. I don’t think it hurt the soup. You can blend it to a fine paste or a chunky paste, whatever you like. This gets stirred back into the soup to create a thicker body. Next time I might should blend 3-4 cups, but I still like having whole lentils swimming in my soup.

pour and blend into the soup

add lemon juice and olive oil

Once blended, I was supposed to reheat the soup, but mine was still hot. I stirred in lemon juice and olive oil, then ladled it into a bowl. Serve it up with a garnish of croutons and chopped parsley. I love this soup.

soup to warm the heart and soul (and tummy)

Lentil Soup
Middle Eastern Cooking by Christine Osborne

1 onion, finely chopped
4 tbsp butter
1 cup lentils, soaked overnight and drained
5 cups homemade beef stock
1 tsp ground cumin
salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 slices white bread, crusts removed, diced
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp lemon juice
finely chopped parsley, to garnish

Melt half of the butter in a soup pot and sauté the onions until soft. Add lentils and stir until glazed with butter. Add stock, cumin, salt and pepper. Simmer until lentils have almost disintegrated, about 1.5 to 2 hours. Test lentils to ensure they are tender. Let cool. Purée the mixture in a blender or food processor. Fry diced bread in remaining butter with crushed garlic to make croutons. Return soup to pan, reheat to a gentle boil. Let stand for a few minutes before serving. Stir in oil, lemon juice, and croutons. Garnish with a little parsley.