Cookie Butter Crumb Muffin クッキーバターマフィン

This is a continuation of my wife’s saga about finding old forgotten chocolate covered cookies in the pantry and making muffins from them. She found this recipe on the Internet. Since this recipe calls for “cookie butter”, which she did not have, she started the whole saga by making cookie butter and then proceeded to make this interesting (in a good way) muffin. 

The recipe comes from “Bake or Break”

Ingredients:
FOR THE CRUMB TOPPING:
1/2 cup (60g) all-purpose flour
1/4 cup (50g) firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
3 tablespoons (42g) unsalted butter, cold and cut into 1/2-inch cubes

FOR THE MUFFINS:
1 3/4 cups (210g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup (57g) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup (100g) firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup (140g) cookie butter* (such as Biscoff or Trader Joe's Speculoos Cookie Butter)
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup milk

*My wife made “cookie butter” from the chocolate cookies.

Directions:
TO MAKE THE CRUMB TOPPING:
Combine the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt in a medium bowl.
Add the butter, and mix with your fingers until the mixture forms crumbs. Set aside.

TO MAKE THE MUFFINS: Preheat oven to 375°F. Line or grease a 12-cup standard muffin pan.
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
Using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat the butter, brown sugar, and cookie butter until thoroughly combined.
Add the egg and vanilla, and mix well. Add the milk and mix well.
Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and mix until fully blended.
Scoop the batter into the muffin tins using a 3 tablespoon scoop (I used the second largest ice cream scoop).
Distribute the crumb topping over the muffin batter.
Bake 20 to 25 minute, or until the muffins are lightly browned and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.Cool the muffins in the pan for 10 minutes. Then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.

I’m not sure what we expected from these muffins but they were quite good. The topping formed a crunchy crust and the muffins were very tender in texture and pleasantly sweet. Interestingly, the cookie flavor was completely nonexistent. If you were not told, you would never guess cookies were involved in the muffin. I may have detected a slight hint of chocolate but the predominant flavor was cinnamon. Amazing!

Home-made Cookie Butter クッキーバター

Some time ago, we were into chocolate covered cookies; first from GODIVA and then we found a much cheaper alternative made by a German company called Bahlsen (#1, in the composite below). But over time both these kinds of cookies were sort of forgotten and migrated to the very back of the pantry. Recently, my wife found a tin of Godiva with some chocolate cookies remaining and few boxes of Bahlsen’s. We tasted them and, surprisingly, both tasted perfectly OK despite their age. My wife remembered that some time ago while leafing through the La Brea Bakery pastry cookbook there was a reference to using stale brownies, chocolate Madeleines or chocolate cake scraps and grinding them into crumbs to use as the filling in Bobka pastries such as Russian coffee cake or chocolate armadillos. She thought, ‘why not use these cookies the same way for muffins or other baked goods’.  So she started looking on the internet for recipes using cookie crumbs in muffins. She found several. Most of them used Oreo cookies but she thought, ‘substituting chocolate covered cookies should work too.’ Then she saw that the recipe she wanted to use called for “Cookie butter”. Well she didn’t have cookie butter and thought her project was “dead-in-the-water”. Then she found a recipe on line for home-made cookie butter and she was “back-in-business”.  But, before she could make the muffin she had to make the cookie butter. Since this was a work in progress we did not take a picture of the final product but the one below is very close. Cookie butters appear to be made from different kinds of cookies such as sugar cookie, peanut butter cookie, or Oreo cookie . Since this was made from chocolate covered cookies, this must be  “chocolate cookie butter”. 

The recipe is from  the “Beautiful Mess” website with some modifications. (As always)

Ingredients:
2 cups cookie crumbs (we used a chocolate covered cookie from Bhalsen called “Afrika”) (#1)
½ stick butter
½ cup condensed milk sweetened
¼ cup milk evaporated
water as needed

Directions:
Place the cookies in a Ziploc bag, seal, and crush them using a meat pounder. (#2) (We found the food processor couldn’t handle the cookies whole…it’s demonstration of displeasure with the situation was quite impressive!) Place the crumbled cookies into the food processor and pulse until it forms a very fine powder (#3).
In a small saucepan, heat the butter over low heat until melted, and then stir in the sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk until it’s all melted together (#4).
Starting with 1/2 cup of the liquid, pour it into your cookie crumbs and mix together with a spoon.
Keep adding small amounts of the liquid until the cookie butter is just wet enough to stay together (the first picture).

(The below are direct quote from the original recipe)
“Once your cookie butter is blended, allow it to cool in the fridge for an hour or two. If you want to, you can actually stop at this point, and it will taste delicious. But if you want to make the cookie butter smoother and easier to dip things in, then remove the cookie butter from the fridge and stir very small amounts of water (start with 1/8 teaspoon) into the dough. At first it will look like the water is separating from the dough, but just keep stirring and mashing. You should start to notice that the cookie butter loosens up a bit as you stir in more water. Keep adding and stirring until you get to a consistency you like and refrigerate the mixture again.  Store your cookie butter in the fridge and it should be good for at least a week or two.”




In any case, we have not used the cookie butter as a spread yet but it tasted rather good. We found out that our regular grocery store carries “Lotus Biscoff” cookie butter. We ordered it and will compare it with the one my wife just made. 

This just in: The“Lotus Biscoff” cookie butter arrived and we tasted it. As you can see in the picture above that it looks like peanut butter but tastes like….wait for it….a butter cookie!!

Four Salad Lunch 4種類サラダランチ

I made 4 different salads (not all on the same day) and had the 4 salads for lunch with a cold asparagus soup. We also had a small piece of “Not no-knead bread made with dried fruit”. We feel good about the fact that all salads, soup and bread were home-made. In the center of the four salads, I served snap peas which were blanched and then soaked in Japanese salt broth.

The picture below shows Israeli couscous with artichoke hearts and garbanzo beans with a nice lemony and dill dressing.

The pic below shows a celery, mushroom, and navy bean salad with feta cheese. The mushrooms make the salad. They gave an almost meaty texture and flavor.

The next is a curry flavored sous vide chicken salad. Since we had a nice ripe Champagne mango, I added small cubes of mango which went very well with this salad.

I made this udon noodle salad since I had left-over cooked udon noodles.  The dressing is sesame-flavored. I do make several versions of the sesame dressing (for example, using Japanese “nerigoma” ねりごま sesame paste or peanut butter) but this time I used Tahini with dry roasted white sesame seeds which I ground in a Japanese “suribachi” すり鉢 mortar. Other seasonings included soy sauce, sugar, and rice vinegar.

This was a surprisingly filling lunch. Beans, udon noodles, and couscous all contribute to this and, at the same time, we enjoyed so many different flavors and textures. We just have to make sure we finish all these salads before they go bad.

Lamb Tenderloin for Easter 子羊のテンダーローイン

Tenderloin of lamb is not a usual cut but we got several of them from D’Artagnan. We decided to try it for Easter dinner. I did not follow any recipes. I made a pan-sauce with red wine and balsamic vinegar.

I sort of did a reverse searing. After cooking it in the toaster oven, I seared it with sprigs of fresh rosemary which I kept in the frying pan during the searing and while I made a red wine sauce.

As sides, we served pencil asparagus and shiitake mushroom stir fry  (left) and Israeli couscous salad with marinated artichoke hearts (right). To mop up the sauce, we also served a slice of  (mini) baguette I baked.

I have never cook lamb tenderloins before. I decided to cook two of them in the toaster oven at 350F for 10 minutes and then reverse seared them in a pan with rosemary. It sort of worked but the lamb was a bit overcooked. The entire dinner was really good and for the occasion, we opened a bottle of 2014 Insignia from Joseph Phelps. Despite some age on the bottle, it was really fresh with a nice fruit flavor. It was a perfect wine for this dinner.

Ingredients (makes about 4 servings)
x2 Lamb tenderloins thawed, salted and kept in the refrigerator for 6 hours uncovered (to dry them a bit)
2 springs of fresh rosemary
2 tbs olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

for the pan sauce
1/4 cup red wine (Not Insignia; a much more reasonably priced CA wine I already had open)
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbs of cold butter, cut into thin pats
Salt and pepper

Directions:
I seasoned the lamb with pepper (no salt; it was already salted). I roasted it at 350F in the toaster oven on convection mode for 10 minutes.
I then pan-seared it with olive oil and the rosemary for 1 minute on each side.
I set aside the lamb covered loosely with an aluminum foil, leaving the rosemary in the pan.
(I was aiming for an internal temperature of 130-135F for the lamb to be medium rare but in the end, the temperature went over)
I added the red wine and balsamic vinegar to the pan and reduced it to the point that it was just coating the bottom of the pan.
I added several pats of cold butter one by one until it reached a saucy consistency.
I seasoned with salt and pepper

I sliced the lamb tenderloin and spooned on the wine sauce then topped the dish with the rosemary sprig.

The couscous salad, asparagus with mushroom and baguette all worked well together with the lamb.  Of course, the wine made this dinner a bit special.

Israeli (Pearl) Couscous Salad イスラエルクスクスサラダ

The other day, we were taking inventory of our pantry and found boxes of couscous (classic and Israeli or pearled) as well as tabouleh all of which were way pass their BUB (best-used-by) date. We sniffed and did not detect any rancid oil odor so we cooked the classic couscous and the tabouleh. But once they were cooked, it was clear that in these cases the BUB date had some meaning—they tasted terrible. So we discarded those boxes and bought new ones. We decided to go ahead and try cooking the Israeli couscous* and it turned out to be OK. So we decided to use it to make a salad. We looked up recipes on the web and essentailly combined two recipes omitting some of the ingredients called for in the recipe while adding others not mentioned.

*Digression alert: While we were looking up recipes, we found that Israeli or pearl couscous was invented by an Israeli company as a substitute for rice in 1959 since there was a rice shortage at that time.In any case, the end result was a quite nice filling salad. The vinaigrette had a nice lemony flavor with dill which made this salad very refreshing.

Ingredietns:

For Couscous
1 1/2 cup (250gram or 8oz) Israel couscous
1 garlic clove, minced (I used three)
1/2 small onion, finely mince (I used one small onion)
2 tbs olive oil
1 1/2 chicken broth (I used our ususal low sodium Swanson)
1 cup water (we did not add the water. The couscous was fully cooked and the liquid was completely absorbed but although it was not scorched, the couscous stuck to the bottom of the pan. So next time we will try it with the additional water.)

For the salad
5 Campari tomatoes, skinned and cut into quarters
2 tbs dill, finely chopped
6 marinated artichoke hearts, cut into half length wise
1 can (15.5 oz) garbanzo beans, drained and skin removed (optional, but my wife insist on removing the skin)

Other items could be olives, cucumber and other greens.

For dressing
Zest and juice from one lemon
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp honey
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: {For couscous)
Add the oil in a pan, sauté the onion and garlic for 3-4 minutes, add the couscous and sauté another minute
Add the chicken broth and simmer for 10 minutes
Fluff it up with a fork and let it cool to the room temperature

Mix all the ingredients and the dressing.

Although we forgot to add one cup of water, the couscous was nicely cooked without. The lemony dressing really worked.

Simmered Sable Fish 銀鱈の煮付け

We got frozen “Chilean sea bass” or “Patagonian toothfish” from Vital Choice. We also found they had “sable fish” or black cod. The sable fish is called “Gindara” 銀鱈 in Japanese and is considered one of the best fish. (Actually we had this fish at Yuzu some years ago as a part of “Omakase” and we really liked it). So, we got the sable fish as well. Chilean sea bass and sable fish have some similarity in that they are both white meat fish and are very moist and succulent. At Yuzu, it was served miso-marinated and grilled with meat-miso sauce. After some thought, I decided to make it simmered in a soy sauce based sauce or “nitsuke” 煮付け. I added “Gobou” burdock root and Tokyo scallion.

Ingredients (for 2 servings):
2 (4oz about 115 grams) filets of “gin-dara” sable fish, thawed
half stalk of Tokyo scallion or “Nihon-negi” 日本ネギ, cut into 4 two inch segments (new item purchased from Weee).
3-4 inch of gobou ごぼう, skin scraped off (using the back of the knife), cut into 4 segments lengthwise (I soaked in acidulated water for 2-3 minutes and precooked for 5 minutes)

Simmering liquid*:
15 gram sugar
30 ml soy sauce
30 ml mirin
60ml sake
60ml water

*Many Japanese recipes talk about the “golden ratio” of “nitsuke” seasonings. There appears to be some variations. I used the ratio of 1:2:2:4 sugar:soy sauce:mirin:sake and added water in the same amount as the sake. I thought this ratio was too sweet to our taste, however, and I may reduce the sugar by half (ie 7 grams as in the simmering liquid ingredients listed above).

Directions:
Mix all ingredients of the simmering liquid in a pan and simmer to dissolve the sugar and evaporate the alcohol from the sake and mirin.
In a frying pan, just large enough to fit the fish and vegetables, add the simmering liquid. When it starts simmering add, the fish (skin side up) and the vegetables. Put on the lid and simmer for 6-7 minutes.

Remove the lid, increase the flame and baste the fish with the simmering liquid until the liquid is reduced in half.
Serve the fish with some simmering liquid and a side of white rice.

This fish is really great. The simmering liquid is perfect for plain white rice. Unfortunately, the gobou was a bit too fibrous.

Broccoli Balls ブロッコリボール

Since we are getting home grocery delivery, the amount of broccoli we get per order is out of our control. For some reason they are extremely generous with the amount they provide; we get three large heads of broccoli in one order. I usually, wash and separate the broccoli into small florets and steam them. Afterwords, I divide the steamed broccoli into small batches and freeze them for later use leaving a few days worth in the refrigerator. In addition, sometimes we get free-be cookbooks with the grocery delivery. My wife was purusing one of these little cookbooks called “from Freezer to Table” and came across a broccoli-centric recipe. This combined with seeing the abundant supply of broccoli we had just received led to a conjunction of the recipe/ingredients planets and my wife decided to make her own version of this recipe.  The original recipe (as would be expected coming from a cookbook about frozen food) used frozen “riced” broccoli and cauliflower. While we had the broccoli (non-frozen, of course) we did not have the cauliflower so my wife used mashed potatoes instead…(don’t ask). In any case, this made a quite good small appetizer that also heat up nicely in the toaster oven.

Ingredients:
1 cup steamed broccoli chopped in the small food processor
1 cup shredded Mozzarella cheese (any cheese would work)

1 cup shredded smoked gouda cheese
1 cup mashed potatoes
1 cup Panko bread crumbs
2 eggs
1/4 to 1/2 tsp onion powder (to taste)
1/4 to 1/2 tsp garlic powder (to taste)
1/8 tsp cayenne
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp salt (optional)

Directions:
Combine all the ingredients (#1). Using medium ice cream scoop drop scoop fulls into small muffin cups lined with muffin papers (#2). Bake in a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes or until golden brown (#3 and #4).

These were very flavorful, crispy bites perfect for appetizers. The garlic, onion and herb flavors were very rich and satisfying. The potatoes added a slightly creamy texture inside the crispness of the outside shell. One word of advice, go light on the salt. The cheese is salty. I used 1 tsp of salt and that was too much. I reduced it in this version of the recipe. These really crisp up nicely the toaster oven.