all gone!

Last night was the Fifth Annual Casserole Crazy Party hosted by Emily Farris, author of the book Casserole Crazy: Hot Stuff for Your Oven!. Rob and I cooked up a mac and cheese creation that didn’t place in the competition but received an even higher honor – several people came to us and said that ours, more than anyone’s, captured the spirit of a casserole: comforting, cheesy, and just a little bit trashy.

We wanted to make a “man food” casserole and ended up calling it a Sooper Bowl Casserole (Because Super Bowl is trademarked!). I was envisioning a potato and cheese something, but last minute scrapped the potato idea entirely and wrote a new recipe. Late in the afternoon I had the inspiration to infuse it with beer, and last second Rob said, “Bacon would be awesome in this”. Since we keep kosher up in here he ran out and grabbed some Bacos (which are vegan) and we sprinkled them in.

Casseroles aren’t a usual part of my repertoire, but I think they should be. They’re a great mix of cooking and baking and a fantastic way to get rid of leftovers or disguise veggies for picky eaters – everything rocks when it’s smothered in cheese. I’m converted, and I’m going to be making more in the future. Friends, you have been warned.

Here is Emily’s recap on the competition and there are more photos over here at MetroMix New York, which is where I pulled the above photo of me holding up my empty casserole dish.

The recipe is below. I suggest you half it if you aren’t feeding a ton of people – this filled two 13×9″ dishes.

Sooper Bowl Casserole

1 small white onion
2 lbs. medium shell pasta, al dente
2 sticks butter + some for onion
12 tbs. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. paprika
3 cups milk
12 oz. lager, sipped once or twice
6 cups shredded cheese
1/4 cup Bacos
potato chips

Cook and drain pasta. Chop onion into bits and then simmer in butter until caramelized. Preheat oven to 350 F. In large sauce pan, melt butter on low heat. Whisk in flour, salt and paprika. Cook until smooth and bubbling. Add milk, incorporate, and add beer. Cook for 10 minutes on medium heat, whisking slowly, occasionally. Add onions and cheese, cook to melting. Remove from heat, stir in Bacos. Mix with pasta and pour into greased dish. Top with crushed potato chips. Bake 25 minutes covered in foil, bake 5 minutes uncovered, until crushed potato chips are golden.

Beer – Brooklyn Brewery lager Cheeses – sharp cheddar, goat and gouda.

I rarely make cake from scratch; like brownies, the box mix for cake is usually just as good as, or better than, the results of slaving over the stove and measuring ingredients.  Purest bakers will disagree. They can bite me.

Still, I was feeling adventurous when I made some vanilla cupcakes from scratch for the Cupcakes for Charity event, and they were a success! I was going to try a new recipe for frosting, too, but I ended up making my tried and true Damn Frosting. It was an excellent combo. Anna, one of the fabulous event organizers, demanded the recipe for my cupcakes, so lady, this one’s for you.

I’m 90% sure I dug up this recipe up from the bowels of 52cupcakes and promptly lost again forever. It’s specifically a cupcake recipe, and I have no idea if that makes a difference in full sized cakes. If you try it for a sheet or round cake, let me know how it goes.

Vanilla Cupcakes

3 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking posder
3/4 tsp. salt
1 12 sticks unsalted, room temp. butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/4 cups milk

Heat your oven to 350* F. Cream together the butter and sugar until it’s fluffy (about 4 minutes). Meanwhile, in medium bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the eggs to the batter one at a time. Beat in the vanilla. Add the flour mixture and milk alternatively, beginning and ending with the flour. Bake on the center rack of the oven for 20 minutes, and cool the cupcakes on a wire rack.

Happy baking.

It’s warmer, and I make damn good iced coffee, so here is my recipe.

Start with quality beans. There is a saying that says, “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”.  I don’t think that applies to everything, but it certainly does to coffee.  Iced especially.

Mine is whole bean, organic, shade-grown and fair trade, because I’m “like that”.

Make coffee as you normally would, but do it double-strength. 1 standard coffee scoop equals 2 tablespoons, and one scoop of the ground beans makes 2 cups of coffee. Simply – a tablespoon of coffee grounds per cup for normal joe, and so two tablespoons per cup for iced.

This is as good a time as any to give you my two cents about coffee-making methods. French presses rule. Coffee pots take up huge amounts of space and don’t make coffee nearly as well.

I recommend only doing a day or two’s worth of coffee at a time. Day-old ice coffee isn’t horrible like day-old regular coffee, but if it sits too long, even in the fridge, it’s just as gross.

While your coffee is brewing (or steeping), put as much sugar as you’d like in the bottom of a clean glass jar. (The glass jar trick is something I got from my grandmother – the Italian one.) The glass holds up to the heat better than a plastic pitcher would, and, of course, if you use an old sauce jar like I did, you’re recycling, and woo hoo for that!

Pour the hot coffee on the sugar and stir it to dissolve. Alternatively, you can make simple syrup so that people who don’t want sugar in their iced coffee can drink this along with people who do.  If you think that’ll be the case, though, it’s simpler to make two jars and label them sweet and non.  But I give you options.

Screw on the lid and move the jar carefully to the fridge. It’s really hot (I burned myself). It will also look like swamp water in a jar in your fridge. Warn your family you haven’t lost your mind bottling pond scum; it’s just coffee.

Don’t add milk; wait until it’s being served to do that, or it will taste off.

THE NEXT MORNING:

Pack plenty of ice in your cup. Brewing the coffee double-strength is what helps it stand up to being watered down by ice melting.

Pour the coffee over the ice. I probably didn’t have to tell you that, but I had a picture for this step. It was pretty tricky snapping photos with one hand while pouring with the other, and I managed to do it without spilling or dropping the camera. So just appreciate this pouring photo, even if you don’t need it, ok? Thanks. You’re awesome.

Add your milk, stick in a straw if you want one (I like mine bendy, and with pretty red stripes as you can see), and enjoy!

Happy summery mornings to you!