Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Jasmine Lychee Green Tea Shortbread

Tea is not just for drinking anymore. It makes a great flavoring for baked goods of any kind and goes exceptionally well in shortbread cookies. Buttery shortbread flavored with jasmine lychee green tea is the perfect accompaniment to a hot cup of tea.



As I flew from Dubai to Boston on Saturday, I walked the cabin of that 777, looking at the faces of my fellow passengers, many asleep in the usual awkward way we sleep on long haul flights, in the back of the plane. And I choked up. All these people, people like many I know and love: With families and friends and dreams and lives to lead. What must it have been like to be on that MAS flight that went missing? Did they cling together, those strangers? Did they pray or cry or scream in fear? Did they know what was happening?

As I walked the aisle, I prayed for them, for their families, for answers and closure, and row by row, I prayed for my own fellow passengers, that they would have safety and God’s protection, all the way to their final destinations. It was a very emotional experience, 35,000 feet in the air, being held aloft by the laws of physics and, I firmly believe, the angels around us. If you don’t believe in angels, I hope you at least believe that we can be that for each other, supporting and uplifting, bringing joy and light whenever and wherever we can.

As I mentioned yesterday, this week I am visiting an old friend in Michigan., someone who has been a source of inspiration and unabashed giggling for many years. We met in Malaysia back in 2001 and she is one of my closest friends in all the world. Naszreen was raised in her home country of Sri Lanka, then Saudi Arabia, finally finishing her education at boarding school in the UK. She married an American and has two wonderful children. Together we have been through years of PTA work, including two exhausting years on the executive committee, chaired two fundraising galas for the American Association of Malaysia, braved through and won a vigorous fight for her health.

These days she is fulfilling a dream she has had for many years, with the opening of a teashop in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods. I am inspired by her courage, the way she has worked steadily and with purpose to make her dream come true. She’d deny it forever but she is one of those angels I mentioned, for me.

Today’s cookie is flavored with one of the hundreds of teas she sells. As I browsed her little shop (If you'd like to see some photos, scroll to the bottom of this post.) yesterday, opening bulk tins and reading labels and inhaling the fragrance of everything, she regaled me with her wealth of knowledge about the various teas, their properties and uses. I finally settled on a flavored green tea because it smelled so fabulous. The shortbread turned out wonderfully as well.  Bake a batch for someone you want to lift up.

This recipe was adapted from Food Network.

Jasmine Lychee Green Tea Shortbread

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
2 tablespoons loose tea leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup or 95g powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup or 225g butter, at room temperature

Method
In a food processor, pulse together the flour, tea, and salt, until the tea is chopped up fairly small and it's well distributed throughout.



Add in the sugar, vanilla, and butter and pulse again until a soft dough forms.




Pour your dough out in a line on a big sheet of cling film. Roll the dough into sausage and wrap it tightly in the cling film.


Put the dough into the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes to chill. I left mine overnight and it was lovely and firm.

When you are ready to bake, preheat oven to 375°F or 190°C.

Use a sharp knife to slice the log into circles. If you prefer a thicker, soft cookie, cut them about 1/2 inch or a little thicker than 1 cm. For a crispier cookie, cut them about 1/3 inch or 8mm thick. Line your baking pan with parchment paper and place the dough slices about two inches or five centimeters apart.





Bake in your preheated oven until the edges are just brown, about 9 or 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and let the cookies cool in the pan for several minutes.

Use a spatula to remove them to a serving plate.



Enjoy!




The Creative Cookie Exchange challenge this month was to create a cookie using tea or coffee for flavoring and the group has some great recipes to share. Many thanks to our host this month, Laura of The Spiced Life.

If you are looking for inspiration to get in the kitchen and start baking, check out what all of the hosting bloggers have made:
If you are a blogger who would like to join us for future Creative Cookie Challenges, send an email to Laura (at) thespicedlife (dot) com with your blog URL and she will add you to our private Facebook group where all the planning and logistics take place.

You are also invited to follow our Pinterest board where you will find links to loads of Creative Cookie recipes from all of our members and Like our public Facebook page.   Happy baking!

The store front. Isn't it adorable? You can like her Facebook page here. Thanks! 

Tea on offer.

Teaware on offer.

Tea in wooden boxes and personally branded tea mixtures.

Black teas with fruit.

More teaware.



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Monday, March 17, 2014

Matcha Muffins #MuffinMonday

These tender muffins are made with matcha or green tea powder, which can make muffins dry, but the buttermilk and butter add all the moisture needed to ensure great muffins.  

Happy Muffin Monday and happy St. Patrick’s Day from chilly Michigan! I’m visiting a dear friend who recently realized her life's dream of opening a beautiful tea shop, so it is most appropriate that today I offer you a muffin made with green tea powder, also known as matcha. I had the wonderful idea that the matcha would make green muffins so they would also be appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day, but no such luck. (Thank goodness I also decided to add some colored sugar sprinkles or there wouldn’t be any green at all.) But green tea powder is supposed to be good for you and the muffins are delicious, so let’s focus on that.

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup or 100g light brown sugar
2 teaspoons matcha powder
1/2 cup or 115g butter, melted then cooled
1 egg
1 cup or 240ml buttermilk

For decorating: 3-4 tablespoons green sugar sprinkles

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and either grease your 12-cup muffin tin or line it with paper liners.

In one big bowl, mix your dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, matcha powder and salt.



In small mixing bowl, whisk the melted butter and buttermilk with your egg.



Fold the liquids into the dry mixture, stopping when they are just mixed.


Divide the batter between your prepared muffins cups.


Sprinkle a generous amount of green sugar on the top of each cup of batter.



Bake in your preheated oven for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.



Remove from the muffin tin and finish cooling on a rack.


Enjoy!


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Sunday, March 16, 2014

Smothered Cabbage with Pork

Pork pan-fried until the edges are crunchy and caramelized, smothered with plenty of onions and cabbage, seasoned with chilies and freshly ground black pepper is home cooking at its Louisiana best.

In southern Louisiana, we like to smother things. My mother says that growing up, she never had a crunchy vegetable. Green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, okra, eggplant, you name it, it was cooked till soft and mushy. Now when she’s making maque choux, she cuts the fresh corn off the cob and barely introduces it to the heat and calls it done. I’m really not sure what my grandmother would think. We all think it’s very tasty.

My maternal grandmother has been mentioned on these “pages” before. She was a woman who had it all, before we even knew what that looked like. She ran her own business with my grandfather, raised three girls, kept a tidy house and cooked a full meal for dinner (what she called the midday meal) every day of the week, with an extra full menu on Sunday. Their major appliance store was on Center St. in a small town and their house was right behind it. She’d nip away to get dinner started and leave a pot roast or round steak, smothered with onions, simmering on the stove while she attended to customers and answered the phones. She and my grandfather would close the store for dinner and open again after they had eaten and they had watched their stories, which is what they called the soap operas. The characters on The Guiding Light  and As the World Turns were part of daily life and their adventures were discussed as if they were neighbors. They had been watching those characters live their lives for almost 20 years so by the mid-1970s, when I started eavesdropping, the conversations were candid and, frankly, a little bit alarming. John Dixon’s wife Kim wants to divorce him! He forced himself on her. Is it rape since he’s still her husband? This was pretty radical stuff for daytime television. Even my grandfather was hooked.  If I sat quietly on the periphery, the grownups never even noticed me there, with my wide eyes and bigger ears.

Anyway, the point of all this is that dishes that could simmer, covered, were easy favorites for a woman trying to run a store, cook a meal, and keep up with her stories, and this cabbage with pork was no exception. It’s still one of our favorite dishes so, when I make it, I make a BIG pot. We can eat this for days!

This week’s Sunday Supper theme is Eat Your Greens in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Our host with the most is DB from Crazy Foodie Stunts and we have a great round up of green dishes and drinks for you.  Make sure to scroll on down for the link list.

Ingredients - for six to eight servings
4 thick pork chops, bone in (Approximate weight 2 lb 10 oz or 1200g)
White vinegar (just a few tablespoons)
Sea salt flakes
Black pepper
Cayenne
Monosodium glutamate (optional) – my grandmother used something called Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. But I use MSG since none of us have a sensitivity to it.
2 heads cabbage – I used one normal cabbage and one Savoy – total weight 7 3/4 bs or 3500g
1- 3 small red chilies – This is my addition. My grandmother would have seasoned this dish with cayenne and black pepper so if I don’t have fresh hot chilies, I do that instead.
2 large onions (Approximate weight 1 lb or 500g)
11 1/4 oz or 320g smoked slab bacon
Olive oil

Method
Cut the bone off the pork chops, leaving a little meat for those who like to chew the bones, by which I mean me.  Cut the meat into small chunks and sprinkle the bones and chunks with some plain white vinegar. (I keep one bottle with a lid that has holes cut into it for easy sprinkling.)

The vinegar helps tenderize the meat as it marinates.
Season the meat liberally with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, cayenne and, if desired, MSG.

Put the pork into a bowl and toss it around so that all the pieces are well seasoned. Cover with cling film and set aside to marinate.

Cut the bacon into similarly sized chunks.



Core your cabbage and then slice it into thin pieces. Set aside a couple of handfuls of the very greenest pieces for adding to the pot right at the end. Smothered cabbage may taste delicious but it’s not the prettiest dish. Adding some bright green at the end helps with this.



Peel and slice your onions thinly. Split the red chilies down the middle then mince them finely.



In a big pot, big enough to hold all your ingredients, and that has a tightly fitting lid, heat a good drizzle of olive oil and start to pan fry the pork, including the bacon, a few pieces at a time.

As they brown, remove them to a plate and keep pan frying until all the pork is wonderfully browned and caramelized. Add a little more olive oil along the way, if necessary.



Once all the pork is browned, you should have some lovely sticky stuff left in the bottom of the pot too. Add another drizzle of olive oil then the sliced onions and chilies.



Pop the lid on and let the onions sweat for a few minutes.  Use a wooden spoon or spatula to scrape all the delicious brown bits off the pot.


When the onions are translucent, add the pork back into the pot, making sure to scrape in any juice that pooled in the bottom of your plate.


Right here I need to tell that my grandmother would have cut the cabbage into larger pieces and put it all in at once and cooked till it was smothered down and completely soft. So feel free to use her method if that appeals to you. I add mine in a bit at a time so that when the pork is cooked and tender, there is cabbage of varying degrees of doneness in the one pot, all the way from melted into almost nothing to still just a bit crunchy.

So here it goes, my way. Add about one third of the cabbage to the pot and put the lid back on. No need to stir yet. Simmer over a medium low heat until the cabbage is wilted and soft, about 20-25 minutes.



Remove the lid and give the whole thing a good stir.  Add in another third of the cabbage and put the lid back on. Simmer for another 20-25 minutes before removing the lid and stirring the pot. The second batch of cabbage should be wilted now too.

Finally, add in all but the couple of handfuls of the greenest cabbage leaves and put the lid back on again. Simmer, covered, for another 20-25 minutes.





Stir the pot and season with salt and black pepper to taste. Finally, add in the last green handfuls of cabbage and stir. Cook for just a few more minutes until those greens are slightly wilted but still a little crunchy.

These were the outer leaves of the Savoy cabbage. I saved them because they are a much brighter green than the normal cabbage. 


Enjoy!


Eat Your Greens this week! Now you have no excuse not to!

Green Light Appetizers and Sides
Getting Greens Through Salads
Entreés That Will Leave You Green With Envy
Desserts and Beverages That Will Make Others Turn Green



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