sopa de ajo

Sopa de ajo con huevos (garlic soup with eggs) is a traditional Spanish soup. It's a hearty soup good for cold drizzly days. It's also a good way to use stale bread if you don't feel like making bread pudding. I recommend the recipe from 1080 Recipes by Simone and Ines Ortega, although I use about three times as much garlic as the recipe calls for.


To make sopa de ajo, start with about 5 oz. sliced stale bread. Fry the bread and then drain on paper towels:


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a cast iron pan, cook a chopped onion and 5-15 cloves of garlic for about five minutes. Stir in 1 teaspoon paprika. Remove from heat and layer the fried bread in the frying pan with the onion-garlic-paprika mixture. Pour in 6 1/4 cups of boiling water. Bring to a boil on the stove, then simmer 5 minutes. Take frying pan off stove and bake in oven about 5 minutes. Crack 4 eggs onto soup and return to oven until eggs are cooked. Serve in bowls.

Bowl of sopa de ajo

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fiddlehead tart with ricotta

The local markets are full of ostrich fern fiddleheads that area foragers have collected. People often says that fiddleheads taste like asparagus, so we decided to take a recipe for an asparagus tart an substitute fiddleheads. It tastes fantastic! The original recipe is from Vegetarian: the best ever recipe collection by Linda Fraser.

Fiddlehead tart with ricotta

• raw dough for a single piecrust or tart crust (use your favorite recipe)
• 8 oz. fiddleheads, cleaned and rinsed
  
• 2 beaten eggs
• 8 oz ricotta
• 2 Tb plain yogurt
• 1 1/2 oz grated Parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper
  

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Roll out the dough and put into a pie pan or tart pan. Prick crust with a fork, fill with pie weights (or dry beans), and blind bake the crust until half-baked, 10-15 minutes. Remove from oven and reduce temperature to 350 degrees.
   
3. Meanwhile, put fiddleheads in ample boiling water and cook until just tender, about 5 minutes. Drain.
4. Beat together eggs, ricotta, yogurt, parmesan, salt and pepper. Stir in fiddleheads.
5. Pour filling into crust. Bake 35-40 minutes. Serve warm.
   

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piecrust cookies

I ended up with some unusually large pie crust scraps last time I made a quiche. I took out the cookie cutters and made some linzer-inspired pie crust cookies: after the crust pieces were baked, I put raspberry jam on the bottom circular piece. They actually tasted very good. The jam is sweet enough that it worked as a dessert even though the crust pieces had no sugar.

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asparagus soup with orange creme fraiche

This was our Easter appetizer. It's a delicious recipe from the Fields of Greens cookbook by Annie Somerville. We used thick Greek yogurt instead of creme fraiche, and it worked well. The topping was tangy and the fresh orange flavor added a lot to the (already very good) soup.

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peanut brittle

We were given a large bag of raw peanuts and have been gradually using them up. At first we did a few batches of honey roasted peanuts. But then we discovered peanut brittle, which is not too hard to make and tastes great.

You can make peanut brittle using roasted peanuts, or you can add raw peanuts to the candy while it cooks. I made a batch each way and didn't see any difference in flavor. You just have to be sure to put the raw peanuts in at the right time so they are cooked when the candy is done.


Peanut Brittle

• 2 c. sugar
• 1 cup light-color corn syrup
• 1/2 c. water
• 1/4 c. salted butter
• 2 1/2 c. whole raw peanuts
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a saucepan, heat sugar, corn syrup, butter, and water until it boils.
3. Reduce heat and boil gently about 30 minutes, until candy reaches soft-crack stage (275 degrees)
4. Add nuts and cook another 15 to 20 minutes, stirring often, until candy is at hard-crack stage (295 degrees).
5. Remove saucepan from heat. Pour in baking soda, stirring constantly. The candy will froth up and become filled with air. Immediately pour over baking sheet.
6. As candy cools, use two forks to stretch it out.
7. Once cooled completely, break peanut brittle into pieces.

We are still having problems with out candy thermometer, so we do not cook the candy by temperature. It works well to drop small pieces of candy into icy water every few minutes to test what stage the candy has reached.

Peanut brittle before being broken

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