I’ve seen people raving about the flavors before, but I never understood till kitchen curiosity made me stick a couple of unopened cans of sweetened condensed milk, submerged under water, in my pressure cooker for 2 hours.

The resulting concoction is pure bliss. Thick sweet caramel full of fruity tropical flavors (pineapple, I swear!). It’s a rounder more complex flavor than your standard caramel. The longer you cook the sweetened condensed milk the darker the dulce de leche will be. I took a can to three hours in the pressure cooker and now have a sample that is full of coffee-like bittersweet roasted sweet flavors.

The sandwiched Alfajores a la Adam cookies at Matt Bites inspired me to spread my dulce de leche on chocolate shortbread, which I then topped with a sprinkle of chunky crunchy hawaiian salt.

What else can you do with this sweet stuff? I’ve been using my dulce de leche in place of sugar in several dessert recipes:

• to sweeten whipped cream
• in cream cheese frosting
• in a homemade pudding recipe
• whisked into hot milk for a special hot dulce de leche drink (perfect with a splash of rum)

Admittedly, lingering on a mouth loved spoon is my most frequent dulce de leche use so far.

More Dulce de Leche Ideas

• Brownie Points Blog, Dulce de Leche Shortbread: Dipping the tip of my spoon into the thickened surface yielded a milky sweet concoction that hearkens to the primeval yearning of all mammals. Yes, this cues up my limbic system
• Cream Puffs in Venice, Mascarpone Cheesecake with Candied Pecans and Dulce de Leche Sauce: we sing the praises of dairy. We sing the praises of mascarpone. We sing the praises of Mascarpone Cheesecake with Candied Pecans and Dulce de Leche Sauce
• Seattle Bon Vivant, Dulce De Leche Flapjacks: After the flapjacks were ready he topped his with dulce while I rolled mine. They were both quite delicious
• the scent of green bananas, dulce de leche and white chocolate cheesecake: the cheesecake filling melts on your tongue in a flash, and disappears down your throat like a magic elixir
• foodie nyc, Dulce de Frozen Grapes: frozen grapes covered liberally with Dulche de Leche from Argentina. The sweet, rich creaminess works perfectly with the frozen grape
• Tartelette, Dulce de Leche Brioche Rolls: thinking pecan sticky buns, or cinnamon rolls but then again I wanted creamy and caramel so I filled them with cream cheese and homemade dulce de leche, parked them in the fridge overnight and baked them on sunday morning

This first batch I added green onion and garlic, and now can’t wait to make a rosemary parmesan batch.These crackers are light, snappy, and have a slightly sweet toasted corn flavor. They are easy to load up with flavor by adding your favorite spices to the cooking polenta. The polenta mush is spread out thin on a baking sheet and cooked to a toasty crispy brown. After one day the crackers temporarily lost their snap, however they can be easily revived back to their crispiness if popped in a 350F oven for 5 minutes.

These crackers served as the inspiration to pull out a somewhat underused cookbook from my collection, the Professional Chef’s CIA’s Techniques of Healthy Cooking. The recipes in this book are aimed at providing flavors to a low fat, good carb loving chef. Each gives precise serving amounts and nutritional info.

This recipe for White Bean Purée is a great building block recipe. It served as an introduction to the power of cooking beans with a sachet to infuse flavor. The smokiness of the bacon permeates the beans without actual bacon pieces being present in the dip. Creamy smooth, garlicky (I love that word!) with hints of smokey bacon and chile spice, I imagine this dip would serve well as an concentrate for instant soup too.

White Bean Purée

In a cheesecloth bundle, gather together the following ingredients for a sachet:

• 1.5 ounces chopped onion
• 1 ounce chopped bacon
• 0.5 ounce chopped carrot
• 0.5 ounce chopped celery
• 1/2 tsp whole peppercorns
• 3 cloves crushed garlic
• 1 rosemary sprig
• 1 thyme sprig
• 1 bay leaf

Add 6 ounces of dried great northern beans and the sachet to a pressure cooker. Cover with water and cook at pressure for 40 minutes.

Drain the beans reserving the cooking liquid. Puree till smooth adjusting the texture with the bean liquid as neccessary. Season with

• 1/2 Tbs chopped garlic
• 1/2 Tbs lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp tabasco sauce
• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 1/4 tsp ground pepper

Makes 1 Lb: 16 one oz servings
Nutritional Information per serving:
calories: 50; total fat 2g; saturated fat 0g; cholesteral 0g; sodium 75mg; total carbohydrates 6g; dietary fiber 2g; sugars 1g; protein 3g.

However, my taste buds have grown up and have come around to this staple dish. Dhal is very much like curry, an algamation of many spices coming together in a myriad of tasty ways.

One of my favorite campus lunch spots, Holy Cow, offers a dhal and rice bowl with a scoop of coconut chutney. Inspired I set about to recreate their goodness infused with my favorite flavor notes: butternut squash and tamarind. Great on top of chewy brown rice, we also enjoy this with a baked cut up Morningstar Chik Patty…

Butternut Squash Dhal with Coconut Chutney

My dhal recipe makes use of my trusty pressure cooker. If you are without such a fortunate tool, simply extend the cooking time and replensh liquids as needed.

In a pressure cooker saute:

• 1/2 of a large onion, chopped

When the onions turn translucent, add:

• 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 Tbs yellow curry paste
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp clove
• 1/4 tsp tumeric

Stir and cook briefly, about 1 minute.

Add:

• 1 cup of lentils
• 10 oz of chopped butternut squash
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
• 1/2 cup coconut milk

Lid, and bring pressure cooker up to pressure. Cook over low heat, maintaining pressure for 20 minutes or until lentils are soft and cooked through. Season with salt and pepper, a Tbs of vinegar and the following tamarind liquid. Serve atop rice with a scoop of chutney and garnish with cilantro.

Tamarind Seasoning Liquid
This is a favorite top note to add to dhal and curries. Tamarind is quite tart, but lends a surprising perfect touch to many dishes.

Using tamarind paste sold in a compact brick, break off a 1 inch piece. Break up into 1 cup of water and heat. Stir to faciliate the tamarind paste breaking up into a sauce. Continue to heat and stir till the pulp is broken up. Use this resulting liquid as a finishing season to the dhal, stirring in 1/2 – 3/4 cup. Additionally the liquid may be drizzle on each dish individually.

Coconut Chutney
Is chutney a respite from spiciness? A hit of chili? A salve for the burn? I’m not entirely sure. I use it as a little of all of the above. Mainly I think its another layer of flavor with which one may individually alter their dish. For families cooking for both kids and adults, chutney may serve as a way to individually spice up a dish, while allowing the main meal to remain on a kid appropriate spice level.

In a food processor puree thoroughly:

• 1 cup unsweetened coconut
• 1/2 cup of onion
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 tsp ginger
• 2 tsp jalapeno
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp peanut butter
• 1 Tbs coconut milk
• 2 Tbs mandarin orange juice
• several mandarin orange slices, no seeds

The next night I made this great inpromtu Butternut Squash soup that was very speedy, thanks to my pressure cooker. We devoured our soup with a loaf of Eugene City Bakery Emmenthaler with red Onion Sourdough.

Our beloved neighborhood bakery has brought out their schedule for specialty breads, many of which have been successfully tested by us for their soup worthyness. The Multigrain Sourdough wowed us this weekend when we brought it over to our friends’ house for soup. Thick, nutty, chewy, it was perfect when just slightly toasted and then dunked into our salmon soup. I have my eye on the Chocolate Cherry Sourdough, as this recipe has been calling me from Nancy Silverton’s bread book on my shelf.

Eugene City Bakery’s Specialty Bread Schedule

1607 East 19th St. 334-6906
Monday – Friday 6:30 am-6 pm, Saturday 7 am-5 pm, Sunday 7 am-4 pm

Monday

• Multigrain Sourdough
• Walnut Campagne

Tuesday

• Emmenthaler with Red Onion Sourdough
• Walnut Red Onion Campagne

Wednesday

• Sweet Potato Pecan Sourdough
• Walnut Campagne

Thursday

• Potato with Red Onion Sourdough
• Walnut Red Onion Campagne

Friday

• Sour French Rye
• Sour French Rye with Pecans and Cranberries
• Grafton Village Cheddar Sourdough
• Walnut Campagne

Saturday

• Pane Siciliano
• Sesame Semolina
• Walnut Campagne
• Multigraine Sourdough
• Chocolate Cherry Sourdough

Sunday

• Sweet Potato Pecan Sourdough
• Apricot Pecan Campagne

Butternut Squash Soup with Apple and Roasted Hazlenuts

Hazlenut Oil
This is a nutty oil to drizzle across the surface of the soup. While entirely optional, it lends a nice roasted flavor to the squash and apples.

In a shallow pan, roast 2 Tbs of hazlenuts in a 350F oven until the nuts are a toasted tan color and aromatic. Add the nuts to a blender and cover with olive oil and a pinch of salt. Leaving the skin on the nuts lends a darker color to the oil, and slight dark flecks. Blend thoroughly till the nuts are pulverized in the olive oil. The aim is to make hazlenut flavored oil, as opposed to a nut butter. More oil may need to be added to the blender to make this pourable. Decant the flavored oil to a new container.

Butternut Squash Soup with Apple

In a pressure cooker, saute 3/4 of an onion with a generous sprinkling of dried thyme and 1/4 tsp of salt.

When the onions have cooked through, add a splash of a white wine, one chopped apple, 11 oz of chopped butternut squash (the size of bag of frozen chopped butternut squash I had in my freezer), and enough chicken or vegetable stock to cover.

Lid the cooker, bringing to pressure and cook on low for 25 minutes.

When time has elapsed, (the contents are soft and break down easily), allow to cool slightly and then puree in a blender. Season with salt, pepper and your favorite flavored vinegar.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a drizzle of the hazlenut oil, and enjoy while curled up next to a rainy window.

I quitely took in the mole challenge and went sleuthing online to look at recipes, since I don’t have a Latino grandmother. I was excited to find right off the bat, that Dagoba chocolates has a mole recipe on their website that uses their Eclipse 87% chocolate. I printed out the recipe and set Sweets to the local Latino market to buy chiles and tomatillas. Thirty minutes into the trip I get a phone call asking about chile substitutions. It turns out we stumpted our local experts, drats! No chihuacle or mulatto chiles.

Sweets came home quickly and unloaded his bounty from the motorcycle. It was then I began to have my first suspicions about the recipe I had chosen. He had bags and bags and bags of chiles! The recipe called for 1 lb of dried cascabels, and an additional lb of other chiles. It was only at this moment did I realize the volume of one pound of dried chiles. And aren’t the short round cascabels hot? Sweets had fun retelling his adventures in asking the store for chile help. They thought he was from a restaurant (because of his request for a lb of cascabels!), and he was gleaming in white boy cred at getting cool ingredients. He gathered all the best things- 2 lbs of chiles, a tub of fresh lard, tomatillas, and a bonus present for me: a 5 pound bag of fresh masa dough! I think he even impressed the cashiers with this catch.

Going back to the Dagoba recipe I found more “issues”. The list of ingredients didn’t match what was mentioned in the cooking instructions. I quickly emailed Dagoba who apologized and set me a corrected version (which they still haven’t put up on their website). But still that huge pile of chiles sitting on my kitchen table taunted me. Oddly, it didn’t seem to be a typo in the recipe.

I set into the prep of deseeding the chiles when I broke down and chickened out. This Dagoba Mole recipe must be an accident, I thought as I calculated how long simply deseeding 2 pounds of dried chiles would take. Oh wait… I got it: A chocolate competitor, a mole (heh), snuck into the Dagoba company and gave them this bogus mole recipe to kill off their customers. The thoughts in my head won out, and I put the chiles down. Sure, you can be killed by chiles.

A week goes by, my pile of chiles taunting me the whole time, and I notice a call for prune entries on David Lebovitz’s website. I could work the mole into this! If I found a recipe that didn’t want to kill me that is. Fortunately I found one at epicurious’s website that sounded really similar to the Dagoba recipe, except that it called for way less chiles (18 rather than 2 lbs), less chocolate (6 oz rather than one lb) but the same amount of spices.

I substituted prunes instead of the called for raisins, and used a pressure cooker and way less stock and no thickeners. I can practically hear the grandmothers turning in their graves at this silly girl who makes mole in less than a night. The original recipes suggest a timeline of several days to account for ingredient aquiring and prep. Because we had all the ingredients on hand, I was able to make this sauce all in one night, and let it age for a day before eating it.

The result is dark, slightly spicy, chocolately, nutty, roasted and sweet! As we speak, I am baking up a pan of mole based Chilaqueas made with the fresh masa dough.

Now what to do with all those leftover chiles?

the Mole that Almost Won

adapted from PUEBLA-STYLE FIESTA TURKEY IN MOLE SAUCE , found at epicurious

Remove the seeds, membranes and stems from:

• 6 dried cascabels
• 6 dried pasilla chiles
• 5 dried ancho chile

If you wear contacts, like to pick your nose, or are around babies and other small dependent things, wear gloves for this process (unless you like that numbing chile oil tingle, you kinky person you).

Tear the chiles into pieces and quickly fry in 1/2 cup of hot lard. Fry the chiles briefly, only enough to blister the skin (20-30 seconds). Strain each batch into a pressure cooker and cover the chiles with enough stock to cover. Cook in the pressure cooker for 15-20 minutes until the chiles are soft. Pour the stock and chiles into a blender and puree until smooth. Add enough stock to bring the volume to 4 cups. Strain this chile puree discarding the chile strands left behind.

In another large pan (not the pressure cooker) with 1/2 cup of hot smoking lard, cook the chile puree until thick and leaves a pan revealing trail when a spoon is dragged through. Remove from the heat to wait for the additonal ingredients.

Either in an oven or in a dry skillet separately toast till golden:

• 1/2 cup whole almonds
• 1/4 cup pecans (or walnuts)
• 1 tablespoon unsalted roasted peanuts (or peanut butter)
• 1/4 cup shelled pepitas
• 3 tablespoons sesame seeds

Set aside and allow to cool.

In the pressure cooker saute over medium heat til the onions are translucent:

• one large onion, chopped
• 1/2 pound of tomatillas, husked, rinsed and roughly chopped

Add to the onions and tomatillas:

• 6 cloves of garlic, crushed
• one 28 oz can of roasted tomatos
• 3/4 cup of chopped and pitted prunes
• one cup of stock

Lid up and cook in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes. When done, allow to cool slightly, and process in a blender with the toasted seeds and nuts that have been cooling. Add the pureed nut-tomato mixture to the chile mixture and bring to a gentle simmer.

In a dry skillet, toast separately:

• 5 whole cloves (or 1/2 tsp ground)
• 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
• 5 whole allspice berries (or 1/2 tsp ground)
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

Grind the cooled whole spices in a coffee grinder, and add to the simmering mixture. Also add:

• 1/2 teaspoon aniseed
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 6 ounces of dark chocolate, chopped
• 1/2 cup of piloncillo or brown sugar

Stir and simmer for 1/2 hour or more to allow the flavors to develop.
If your sauce is rather thick and paste like, thin out with the additon of stock.
If your sauce is too thin, thicken by blending with tortilla chips (a handful at a time) or stale bread (a slice at a time).

Enjoy!

Our last meal at Saigon Kitchen featured a favorite of mine- tilapia done up with their special house sauce. They batter and fry the fish whole and then dress it in a sweet spicy soy ginger sauce with peas and carrots. It’s definitly a dish to pick at with your fingers!

We packed up our fish carcass along with our leftover curry this time because I had pressure cooker plans. Adding the fish bones, sauce, and skin in the pressure cooker with enough water to cover resulted in an amazingly rich, spicy and sweet fish stock perfect for all sort of meals I am sure. Grabbing the rest of our Arborio rice I put that stock to good use.

Pressure cookers are great for making up a flavorful stock. What do you have lurking in your refrigerator that needs help getting out?

Remember how to make risotto? Here’s a good memory refresher. Just substitute the stock of your choice. If making stock out of leftover stirfry, consider adding toasted nuts to your finished risotto, or roasted vegetables.

Sweets (aka WebMonkey) has a serious hankering for chili. I would love to file it into that category of boy food, like instant ramen and a dinner of chips and salsa but alas, I love our chili too. Urged in large part by his love of chili (I suspect), Sweets got me a pressure cooker for Christmas. And I’ll be darned if this isn’t one of the most fun things. However, having been raised Catholic, I am still dealing with guilt issues surrounding my pressure cooker. I always thought that long slow cooking was the secret ingredient that made certain recipes sing… but this new toy reduces my cooking time to nothing, and now I’m left wondering what my new secret ingredient should be.

To make WebMonkey Pressure Cooker Chili, follow Alton Brown’s recipe except:

• add a tbs of honey to all the precooked goodness,
• use boneless country style pork ribs cut in chunks for the meat,
• increase the pressure cook time to 45 minutes to make your meat shred itself,
• and depending on the salsa you used, stir in one tbs of vinegar at the end.

Happy Eating!

Using a variation of my onion jam recipe, I’ve been enjoying the ease of homemade instant soup. The general idea is to make a highly flavored concentrate that is stired into stock on a per serving basis. These concentrates keep for a week in the refrigerator or can be frozen in ice cube trays for single serving portions.

Sweet Onion Soup Concentrate
To a sauce pan over low heat add:

• one Tbs olive oil
• smidge of butter
• 3 thinly sliced small red onions
• 3 tsp thyme
• 1 Tbs sugar
• a good glug of red wine, 1 cup
• and a good seasoning of salt and pepper

Slowly simmer this on low with a lid on for 30-45 minutes.
Pressure cooker variation: add ingredients to pressure cooker and cook for 40 minutes to break down the onions.

Then remove lid and evaporate liquid off by stirring frequently over medium- medium high heat. This step adds alot of color to the onion mixture and thickens it into a jam like paste. To finish off the cooking of the onion concentrate season with:

• 2 Tbs balsamic vinegar or sherry vinegar

Allow onion concentrate to cool completely and either store in the refrigerator for up to one week or freeze.

To Make Into One Serving of Soup:

Bring to a simmer:

• one cup of stock

Stir in:

• 1-2 Tbs of Onion Soup Concentrate

, and allow to simmer approximately 2 minutes. Possible garnishes: horseradish cream, lemon zest, sour cream, or fresh ricotta.