Salted Caramel & Chocolate Rice Crispy Squares

April 7, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 10 Comments

Salted Caramel & Chocolate Rice Crispy Squares | Korena in the Kitchen

Two weekends ago I went on a canoeing/camping trip in the Gulf Islands, where I was specifically tasked with bringing dessert for one of the evenings. My plan was to make “campfire fondue”, which consists of melting a handful of chocolate chips in a little package of foil beside a campfire, and then dipping fruit (oranges and banana chips in this case), squares of pound cake, and toasted marshmallows in it. Alas, we ended up waiting out high winds for two nights on Portland Island where fires are not allowed, and then had to cut the trip short by a day because the wind was only supposed to get worse (it was a very exciting journey home!), so unfortunately my campfire dessert never happened. Which meant that I had a whole bunch of marshmallows and chocolate chips on my hands after the trip.

Salted Caramel & Chocolate Rice Crispy Squares | Korena in the Kitchen …

Daring Bakers: Nougat Torrone

March 27, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

Nougat Torrone with Almonds, Pistachios and Cocoa Nibs | Korena in the Kitchen

The March 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Rebecca of BakeNQuilt. She challenged us to learn to make classic nougat and to make it our own with our choice of flavors and add-ins.

Nougat is not something I’d ever contemplated making before this month – the only real experience I’ve ever had eating it is inside a Toblerone bar, so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was in for. Nougat is, in our host Rebecca’s words, “an aerated candy made from sugar, honey, egg whites, and nuts”, which can range in texture from “chewy, soft, and tender to hard and brittle”. It’s a mostly European confection (nougat torrone is the Italian kind), although it seems similar to divinity or divinity fudge in the Southern US, and if you’ve ever eaten a Mars or Snickers bar, you’ve had the watered-down industrial production version. When soft and chewy, traditional nougat is sort of like gourmet marshmallow for grown-ups. When hard and brittle, it’s rock-solid enough to break a tooth on but still very satisfying when chiseled into small bits to savor (and it would be so good mixed into chocolate, à la Toblerone!).

Nougat Torrone with Almonds, Pistachios and Cocoa Nibs | Korena in the Kitchen

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{Sourdough} Irish Soda Bread

March 20, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 20 Comments

I’m not so good with the holiday themed recipes here – the only things I manage to post about with any seasonal timeliness and regularity are Christmas cookies and hot cross buns – so it didn’t even occur to me until a week ago that the Irish soda bread chosen for this month’s Sourdough Surprises coincides with St Patrick’s Day. I know it’s a few days late, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious.

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Samuel Adams Winter Lager Roasted Chicken with Orange, Fennel, and Chili

March 13, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 10 Comments

Nothing says comfort food like roast chicken, and although we are finally crawling out of the depths of winter (it felt like this one lasted forever), comfort is still what I’m after. I’ve seen lots of recipes for roast chicken with wine, but I’m more of a beer girl myself so I wanted to experiment with a beer roasted chicken (similar to beer-can chicken, but classier!).

One good thing about winter is the variety of seasonal brews available, often with a slightly spicy character. I used Samuel Adams Winter Lager, which is a hoppy, bock-style beer with notes of orange, cinnamon, and ginger, although any slightly hoppy beer with citrus flavours could be used. (Samuel Adams is available in Canada at the LCBO or The Beer Store in Ontario, BCLDB in British Columbia or Liquor Depot in Alberta. I only wish I’d been able to find this Samuel Adams beer!). To compliment the beer, I smeared a flavoured butter of orange zest, fennel seeds, and chili flakes under the the skin of the chicken, stuffed the cavity with orange and a clove of garlic, and basted it with beer while it roasted. The pan juices, full of flavoured butter and slightly reduced caramelized beer, were turned into a delicious, drunken gravy with a little extra beer and a squeeze of orange juice.

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How to Eat Popcorn Like a Salt Springer

March 10, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 33 Comments

The Salt Spring Island movie theatre opened when I was about ten – I remember because one of the first films shown was the digitally re-mastered, re-released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was probably only the third film I’d ever seen in a theatre. [Edit: Apparently my memory is faulty, because Nate remembers the movie theatre being open waaaaaay earlier, and unfortunately for me, it turns out he’s right. It changed hands in the early 1990s so I must be remembering the re-opening, because I swear I never saw any movies there when I was really young…! Anyway, back to the story.] Community hall by day and movie theatre by night, when I was twelve it was also the scene of my very first ever date with a boy (I wasn’t allowed to see Dangerous Minds so we watched Babe), where we sat on folding chairs because only the first few rows were proper theatre seats. Instead of the celebrity gossip and pop culture “entertainment” that precedes movies these days, they would show slide shows featuring community events, and more often than not you’d see yourself or someone you knew on the screen while you waited in line at the concession, which brings me to the best part of the Salt Spring movie theatre: the popcorn. Real popcorn with real butter instead of a coating of yellow “butter flavour”, it only cost a few dollars a bag rather than upwards of $15 for popcorn and a drink. And to season it, instead of dill pickle or cheese flavouring, there were big shakers of nutritional yeast – because on Salt Spring, we eat our popcorn yeasted. And it’s delicious.

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Daring Bakers: Beautiful Bread

February 27, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 27 Comments

Beauty surrounded the Daring Bakers this month as our host, Sawsan, of chef in disguise, challenged us to make beautiful, filled breads. Who knew breads could look as great as they taste?

This month’s posting date snuck right up on me so I’ll keep this brief! I was delighted with my friend Sawsan’s challenge this month to make beautiful twisty bread in the style of the very talented bread artist Valentina Zurkan. I’ve made sticky buns similar to this before filled with lemon and rosemary, so I opted for a savoury pizza bread version and a slightly more complicated shape this time.

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Fudgy Cocoa-Quinoa Brownies

February 25, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 20 Comments

If I told you that some of the best brownies I’ve ever made were gluten-free and didn’t actually contain any chocolate, would you believe me? (I wouldn’t lie about something like this, I promise.)

Let me explain. A few weeks ago, I came across Alice Medrich’s Cocoa Brownies on Food52, which are made with a hefty dose of cocoa powder rather than chocolate – helpful because if there is chocolate in the house, I usually eat it before I can bake with it, whereas cocoa powder is much less pleasant to eat straight. Then I saw Christina’s red wine cupcake version of that dynamite quinoa chocolate cake (seriously, if you haven’t made it yet, what are you waiting for?), and I started wondering if you could make brownies with quinoa, being that it makes such a rad chocolate cake. I turned to the Google machine and found that yes, it’s been done, but that all the recipes very closely resemble the quinoa chocolate cake rather than a true brownie, and while the quinoa chocolate cake is an awesome cake in its own right, it’s not a brownie. So I set off to experiment with Alice’s cocoa brownie recipe and some cooked quinoa to come up with my own formula.

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Sourdough Sticky Lemon Pull-Apart Loaf

February 20, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 34 Comments

Fair warning: February is turning into a carb-heavy month around here. I personally have no problem with this – when it’s this cold and disgusting outside, I want all the comfort food I can get, and this winter I’m putting those calories to good use with some good ol’ strength training as per this idea. I guess you could say my personal fitness philosophy at the moment is eat the bread, lift the weights. For me, they balance each other out. Although when you’re baking a lemon-scented pull-apart loaf with cream cheese drizzle that’s made with sourdough to boot, the bread might have the upper-hand…

None of this is to say that all I eat is bread and carby baked goods. OK, I eat my fair share, as evidenced here, but the rest of my diet is mostly from scratch (just like the baking) and includes a good balance of leafy greens, fruit, veg, and protein – just so we’re clear about why I don’t weigh 300 pounds. 😉

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Baklava Sticky Buns

February 17, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

I often get a craving for baklava, but very rarely does it actually get satisfied. Unless you are in the vicinity of a decent Greek restaurant or willing to make it yourself, good baklava is hard to come by. Honestly, I think the last time I had some was when I made it with homemade phyllo (which was a project-and-a-half, let me tell you!) so it is long overdue. I made these sticky buns to serve along with the Montreal bagels I made for brunch last month, and as I couldn’t get baklava out of my head, I made them according to that flavour profile: a finely chopped nut filling of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios, and a sticky honey goo flavoured with cinnamon, cloves, and orange zest. These sticky buns might be missing the crunchy phyllo element, but they really do taste like baklava!

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Buckwheat Dutch Baby with Brown Butter Pears

February 14, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

On rushed weekday mornings, breakfast is by necessity a simple affair consisting of whatever takes less than five minutes to throw together that I can wolf down before rushing out the door to work. So on weekends, I take advantage of those long, lazy mornings to make things like pancakes, waffles, bacon, eggs, or homemade bagels. Conveniently, those long, lazy mornings also have good light for photos, which is more than I can say for the dark, early, winter afternoons that currently follow…

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