Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Halloween is less than a week away - have you carved your pumpkin yet? If you’re looking for ideas, check out Martha Stewart’s “Pumpkin Personality” quiz!

Boo! Little Scarlet is an “elaborately designed pumpkin”, according to Martha Stewart’s quiz, but this goofy-grinner won LS over!

One of my favorite things about carving pumpkins is roasting the seeds afterward.  Here's a quick, simple recipe you can use to make sure your roasted pumpkin seeds turn out eerily good!

Directions:

1. As you carve the pumpkin, preheat the oven to 350º F.
2. Scoop out the pumpkin seeds into a bowl. Do not wash the pith off of the seeds, but do clear off any major chunks of pumpkin.
3. Toss pumpkin seeds with 1-2 teaspoons of oil (olive oil or canola oil work well here). Spread seeds in a single layer on a tin foil-lined baking sheet.
4. Top with kosher salt or Old Bay seasoning, and bake for about 10 minutes, with a watchful eye to prevent burning.

Let these seeds cool just long enough so that you don’t burn your fingers - these pair perfectly with your favorite scary movie!

Hungarian Goulash

Hungarian goulash is probably the country’s most famous and popular dish to be prepared outside of Hungary, but no two families cook it exactly the same way. My grandmother has her version, my mother has her own (which always came with spätzle), and I have my own. True, authentic Hungarian goulash is a beef dish somewhere between a soup and a stew, made with paprika (lots of it!), potatoes, and onions. But for my version, spätzle are more work to make than I typically feel like investing, so I’ve taken an easy way out with extra-wide egg noodles, covered in butter and caraway seeds.

Hungarian goulash, topped with sour cream

Directions:
3 lbs beef chuck, cut into 1-inch pieces
½ cup Hungarian sweet paprika or Hungarian hot paprika (or a mixture of both)
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions, chopped
2 large russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 14 ½-ounce can pure pumpkin
4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 bay leaves
Extra-wide egg noodles
Butter and caraway seeds, to taste

1. Place chuck, paprika, salt, and pepper in large Ziplock bag; seal bag and shake.
2. Heat oil in large pot over medium-high heat. Remove meat from spice mixture, reserving spice mixture for Step 3. Add meat to pot and brown, cooking about 5 minutes.
3. Place onions and potatoes in bag with spice mixture, and seal, shaking to coat. Add paprika-coated vegetables to pot; cook 5 minutes, turning occasionally.
4. Add broth, pumpkin, garlic, and bay leaves. Bring to boil, then reduce heat; cover and simmer until potatoes begin to fall apart, about 1 hour. Add additional salt and pepper to taste.
5. Meanwhile, cook extra-wide egg noodles in boiling salted water, stirring occasionally.
6. Drain noodles; return to pot and toss with butter and caraway seeds.
7. Top noodles with goulash, and sour cream.

Be advised, too much hot paprika can make this dish flammable, so it’s a good idea to start out with a high sweet-to-hot paprika ratio. Cayenne pepper can be used to punch up the spice later on, if needed.

Poll of the Week - 10.19.2009

The weather around here has gotten decidedly colder, windier, and rainier during the past week or so.  This is awful for wanting to spend time outside, but it’s fantastic for another autumnal tradition - stew!  I’ll take any excuse I can to eat long-simmered meat and potatoes, but summer is just too hot for that kind of food, so I get very excited when it’s finally cold enough to find a lazy weekend, dust off those cookbooks, and let the stove do all of the work.

This week’s “Poll of the Week” asks what is your favorite kind of stew?


I just made one of these stews this past weekend - look for the recipe to come later this week.  And as always, please let me know in the Comments section if your favorite isn’t listed!

“Best Cocoa Brownies”

A painful tooth sensitivity to sugar seriously limits the number of desserts that appear on Little Scarlet, but a lazy afternoon and a craving for brownies created the perfect opportunity to post a new recipe. I grew up in a house of “fake bake” - light, airy cupcakes made from a box mix with just eggs, oil, and water added - which I loved. While Duncan Hines makes delicious brownies, I figured that, with the right guidance, Little Scarlet could post something just as great, but made from scratch.

I can be pretty careless when it comes to baking - I frequently misread baking amounts and directions, often execute steps incorrectly, and generally make a big mess of things whenever I try to bake something other than cookies (remember the key lime pie disasters? and yes, that’s plural disasters). I tried to be painstakingly careful while making these cocoa brownies, but when they had been baking for 20 minutes and had about a half inch of butter bubbling above the brownie mixture, I was convinced I had somehow managed to completely ruin them! I baked them for an extra ten minutes, and then turned off the oven, thinking I’d let them cool off before throwing them away and cleaning the pan. Apparently, the “butter layer” didn’t do any damage, and the recipe turned out beautifully, with the richest, most dense brownies I’ve ever had.

They’re very sweet, but the Dutch cocoa powder gives them a pleasant bitterness. The crust on top has a candy-like crackle to it, and the interior is closer to fudge than the cake-like brownies of Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker. Eating them over the course of the last week, I wonder if it might be possible to use a little bit less butter - maybe it could be reduced by 1/4 stick without altering the outcome too significantly. If anyone tries it with less butter than what’s posted below, please let me know how it turns out!


Directions (modified from Alice Medrich’s BitterSweet):
10 tablespoons (1 ¼ sticks) unsalted butter
1 ¼ cups sugar
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (natural or Dutch-process)*
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup walnut pieces (optional)

*recommend using the best quality cocoa available, but these turn out divinely even with a no-name generic brand cocoa!

1. Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F. Line the bottom and sides of the baking pan with parchment paper or foil, leaving an overhang on two opposite sides.
2. Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water. Stir from time to time until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and hot enough that you want to remove your finger fairly quickly after dipping it in to test. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is only warm, not hot.
3. Stir in the vanilla with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each one. When the batter looks thick, shiny, and well blended, add the flour and stir until you cannot see it any longer, then beat vigorously for 40 strokes with the wooden spoon or a rubber spatula. Spread evenly in the lined pan, and sprinkle walnuts on top. Walnuts can also be incorporated into the batter, if desired, after it has been beaten for those 40 strokes.
4. Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes (25-30 if using a gas oven). Let cool completely on a rack.
5. Lift up the ends of the parchment or foil liner, and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Cut into squares.

In Medrich’s BitterSweet, she explains that, “cocoa brownies have the softest center and chewiest candylike top ‘crust’ of all because all of the fat in the recipe (except for a small amount of cocoa butter in the cocoa) is butter, and all of the sugar is granulated sugar rather than the finely milled sugar used in chocolate.”

I hope you give these a try - I promise, they’re well worth the effort!

Sigiri Sri Lanka – 6th St & 1st Ave

Sigiri Sri Lanka
$
*
212.614.9333
91 1st Ave.
http://www.sigirinyc.com/

Sigiri Sri Lanka, one of the few Sri Lankan restaurants in Manhattan, is nestled in between two Indian restaurants just off the East Village’s Curry Row. Sri Lankan cCurries and biriyanis bear a resemblance to familiar Indian dishes, but Sri Lanka’s culinary identity is found in dishes like Pork Black Curry, Chicken Lamprais, and String Hopper Kotthu. The menu descriptions of these items (found below the jump) sound promising, but are ultimately disappointingly bland and completely forgettable.

Dim lighting can be effective in certain settings, but being able to see food is an important part of tasting it, particularly so when trying food from a new country. Sigiri Sri Lanka is incredibly dark, and when eating the Chicken Lamprais, it is hard to tell if your fork had found a piece of chicken, fish, or plantain (sadly, a larger slight to the food than to the lighting).

Sri Lankan food is rumored to be spicier than Indian food, which I find hard to believe based on my experiences here and with Indian food, but if this is true, it is not artfully done at Sigiri Sri Lanka. It is difficult to discern individual spice elements within a dish and also across the different dishes - the overall impression is of an amalgamation of spices dumped into the pot with too heavy a hand, and with no attention to balance.

Sigiri Sri Lanka has received popular reviews for their food on websites like FoodieView and Citysearch, but there is a bevy of similarly priced restaurants in the area that serve better food. I don’t know if Sigiri Sri Lanka was having an off night or if I just don’t like Sri Lankan food, but I doubt I’ll give the bland darkness of this restaurant and its food a second chance.