Food. Science. Religion. And the places where they meet each other.

more lemony things

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:38:58 -0500

I’ve had a real taste for lemons lately. I put lemons in my water a lot, and have been thinking of things to make using lemons. Over the past few weeks I’ve made sweet and sour lemon chicken, a quinoa salad with lemon dressing, pasta primavera with lemon, lemon-raspberry napoleons, and a lemon pasta recipe I found at the Pioneer Woman’s blog.

The quinoa salad was good (yummy ingredients pictured above).
I got the recipe from the second comment on this blog post.

For the pasta primavera, I used my normal recipe, which is to
steam an assortment of vegetables in chicken broth and thyme
and then toss with pasta and Parmesan. But I first tossed the
pasta with lemon juice and a little olive oil. The lemon flavor
didn’t really come through much, so I’d consider that experiment
not unsuccessful (the pasta was still good), but nothing wonderful
either.

The least successful lemon recipe was the Pioneer Woman’s
recipe for grilled chicken with lemon basil pasta. I actually liked
it quite a bit. The pasta is in a cream sauce with lots of lemony
flavor. But my husband, who doesn’t like Parm that much, thought it tasted
like p-u-k-e in combination with lemon. And my son thought it was too sour. So I won’t be making that again.

For a lemon dessert, I thought I’d see what happened when I added
lemon to pastry cream and made lemon-raspberry napoleons. I
added 2 Tbs of lemon zest and 1/3 cup lemon juice to my normal
pastry cream recipe, and it worked fine. It had lots of lemony flavor,
but I didn’t care for it that much in the napoleons. There just wasn’t
enough of the other things to balance the lemony pastry cream.
I think it would make an excellent filling for a yellow layer cake,
though, and I’m planning to try that later this summer. I think it
would be fine if I cut the lemon juice down to 1/4 cup.

The most successful lemon recipe was the sweet and sour lemon
chicken - a recipe from a Betty Crocker cookbook I tried 10 years
ago when I was a newlywed. I like to serve it with coconut rice, and
it was a good meal. My son made me take off the lemon coating, but
the rest of the family enjoyed it. From among the many not-so-great recipes in that cookbook, this one is golden, I think. Here’s the recipe:

For the chicken:
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, pounded thin
1 egg white with a little water
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

Coat the chicken in egg white, then in a mixture of flour, baking soda, and cayenne. Bake at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until done. While hot, pour the lemon sauce over each piece of chicken. Garnish with sliced green onion if desired.

Lemon sauce:
1/3 cup chicken broth
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp lemon zest
3 Tbs lemon juice
2 Tbs rice vinegar
1/2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp corn starch
2 tsp cold water

Heat everything except the corn starch and water over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Mix together the corn starch and water, and cook, stirring, for about 30 seconds or until thickened.

For the coconut rice, just cook white rice like you normally would, but with 3 parts coconut milk and 1 part water. I served mine with some pineapple slices as well.

lemon bars

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:54:34 -0500

Sadly, without pictures.

But they were really, really good.

I wanted to make some cookies to pack for our road trip last weekend, but my pantry was fairly empty and I realized I only had the ingredients to make snickerdoodles or some kind of shortbread, neither of which were appealing to me. Then I remembered the bag of lemons in my fridge, and thought, lemon bars! Then I reconsidered because I thought they’d be time consuming or difficult. They were neither.

I looked for a recipe online and found that the ingredients varied wildly from recipe to recipe. Which I thought meant one of two things: some of these recipes are practical jokes, or else lemon bars are virtually impossible to mess up. I hoped for the latter, taking an average of what the various recipes called for. Anything between 1.5 - 3 cups sugar? I’ll take 2. 2-6 eggs? I’ll use 4. 1/3 - 1 cups lemon juice? Use 1/2 cup. 6 tbsp - 1 cup flour? Try 1/2 cup. One thing they all agreed on was to use fresh lemon juice, not bottled. Check.

So here’s the recipe I used. They turned out perfect. Crisp shortbread crust, perfectly set but not dry filling. Lemony but not too tart. They also freeze well - I tried it.

Lemon Bars

Crust:
1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1/8 tsp salt

Filling:
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp lemon zest (yellow part only - the white part, or pith, is bitter)
1/2 cup flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar for the crust. Beat in the flour and salt until you have a uniform, crumbly dough, then press into the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch pan. Bake 15 mins.

For the filling, beat together the lemon juice, zest, and sugar. Add the eggs, then the flour. Pour over the hot crust and return to the oven for 20-25 minutes more. Cool completely, then dust with powdered sugar.

patriotism and god

Sat, 3 Jul 2010 07:49:12 -0500

New post at patheos here.

blogging at patheos

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:15:01 -0500

An acquaintance of mine (Ben) writes for an interfaith website called patheos - it’s purpose, as far as I can tell, is to be an online gathering place for people of different faiths to learn about each other. There is a “portal” for each religion, and Ben asked if I’d like to do a guest post on the Mormon patheos blog, called “One Eternal Round.”

So he posted my “Giving Up Magical Thinking” story, and then asked if I’d like to do some more blogging for them. I was flattered to be asked and agreed to try to post there once a week.

So because I can’t possibly come up with enough ideas to write about religion both here and there, I’m going to post there and provide links to my posts here.

Here is this week’s post, titled “The First and Great Commandment.” It’s based on a talk I gave in Sacrament Meeting last week.