Bourbon Glazed Carrots

This elegant side dish is delicious, easy to prepare, and could stand on it’s own as a first course or appetizer. Plus, you get to set stuff on fire.

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Grilled Chicken Thighs; Summer Salad; Jalapeño Green Goddess Dressing

This dish is a celebration of the very best flavors of deep summer. Make it soon – grilling season is almost at an end, and the ingredients which imbue a bright, earthy flavor to each bite are in prime season

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Rustic White Bread

Unlike the Basic Artisan Bread which is a no-knead version that takes 24 hours to rise, this version takes about 4 hours start to finish.

Ingredients:

1. 16oz All-Purpose flour (about 3 cups), plus perhaps another 1/2 cup for work surface kneading

2. 2 teaspoons Kosher salt

3. 3/4 teaspoon active dry or instant yeast

4. 1.5 cups warm (not hot) water

Instructions:

1. In a large mixing bowl, add flour, salt and yeast; stir or whisk to combine thoroughly.

2. Add water, and using a spatula or wooden spoon, mix well until a shaggy dough forms and no dry flour remains.

3. Onto a clean work surface, sprinkle two tablespoons(ish) of additional flour and spread out.

4. Turn dough out onto work surface. Sprinkle another 2 tablespoons on top of dough. Press down on dough and fold in half. Keep pressing and folding, sprinkling more flour onto the work surface and top of dough if it starts to stick to your hand or the work surface. Continue this process for about five minutes.

5. Form dough into a ball. Transfer to a lightly greased bowl (cooking spray works great here), and cover with a clean, lightly dampened cloth. Allow to rest in a warm place undisturbed for 1 hour.

6. After 1 hour, turn dough back out onto clean, lightly floured work surface. Flatten dough out and fold it back over itself in thirds (like a letter), then in half one more time to make it squareish.

7. Return to greased bowl and cover, let rest 1 more hour.

8. 1 hour and 15 minutes before you want to eat your bread, place a dutch oven or other oven safe casserole dish with a lid, deep enough to allow the dough to double in size, onto the center rack of your oven. Preheat oven to 450° with the dish inside it.

9. When oven is up to temp, remove dutch oven and lid. Spray with cooking spray. Turn dough out into dutch oven (it may sizzle a little bit), and place the lid on top. Return to the oven and bake, covered, for 30 minutes.

10. After 30 minutes, carefully remove loaf from dutch oven and return to the center rack. Allow to bake directly on the wire rack for another 15 minutes. (If you have a convection setting and like your bread super crispy, you can set it for convection in the last 4 minutes).

11. After 15 minutes, remove from oven and allow to rest, uncovered, for at least 15 minutes before eating.

Killer Garlic Bread with Roasted Garlic

This garlic bread is so good that it’s easy to eat it in place of eating dinner by mistake (my wife did this last night).  For whatever reason, it is highly addictive.  Also, it’s guaranteed to keep the vampires away but won’t leave you feeling like a giant bulb of garlic due to the fact that its primary garlicky-ness comes from roasted, not raw, garlic.

Roasting garlic is not difficult; it takes about an hour and will fill your house the the maddeningly enticing aroma of sweet-savory garlic.  Roast multiple bulbs at a time and store leftovers in the freezer.  It lasts months in the freezer and softens up in the microwave in about 15 seconds (simply put a half head or so on a paper towel and microwave until soft).  A few cloves of roasted garlic add depth to any dish and will leave eaters wondering why whatever they’re eating is so good.  For example, adding a few cloves of roasted garlic to Classic Caesar Dressing along with a couple cloves of fresh minced garlic will change your Caesar dressing game forever.

Note that many recipes for roasted garlic call for cutting the tops off the heads of garlic to expose the cloves and roasting them in a 400°F oven for about 40 minutes.  In my mind, this method creates three problems:  First, you waste the little triangles of garlic from the tops of the cloves.  Second, all cloves will not be evenly exposed, which means when it comes time to pick them out of the bulb some might get stuck.  Third, it creates a harder husk around the clove which then makes it more difficult to incorporate the cloves into a recipe.  Slicing the garlic cloves in half and then roasting them at a lower temperature for a long period of time reduces waste and makes it easier to use the garlic for many recipes.

Without further ado; here’s how to do it:

Ingredients

For the Roasted Garlic

  1. 4 heads of garlic.  Look for garlic that is mostly uniform in size and shape.
  2. Approximately 1/4 cup olive oil
  3. Kosher Salt

For the Garlic Bread

  1. 1/2 to 1 whole head (yeah, you read that right – head – of garlic), depending on size.  Don’t worry, roasted garlic behaves quite differently from raw
  2. 1/4 cup butter, room temperature (you could sub olive oil here if you wanted to)
  3. 1/4 cup mayonnaise (don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it; trust me)
  4. 1/4 cup finely grated Parmesan, Asiago, Romano or Cotija cheese
  5. 2-3 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced or pressed
  6. 2-3 tablespoons minced cilantro or parsley
  7. Kosher salt to taste, probably about a tablespoon
  8. 1 loaf of bread, halved lengthwise

Instructions

For the Roasted Garlic

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F
  2. Snip any long tops off the top of the garlic cloves.  When you flip them over you want them to stand up with cloves exposed as much as possible.
  3. Slice the garlic heads in half lengthwise using a serrated or bread knife.  Place the garlic head halves face up (cloves exposed) into a small (9×9 works great here) roasting pan.
  4. Drizzle all the cloves with olive oil.  Flip a few times if necessary to insure even coating.  Season with kosher salt.
  5. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and roast for about 1 hour.  Begin checking after 50 minutes; insert a cake-tester or toothpick into one of the cloves; it should be very soft (like the consistency of a well-cooked potato) when done.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool, covered, for 30 minutes.

For the Garlic Bread

  1. Mix ingredients 1-7 together using a spatula or spoon until well incorporated into a nice paste.  Use immediately, or cover and reserve at room temperature for up to 1 hour – do not refrigerate because it will harden and become impossible to spread.
  2. Spread mixture all over both halves of bread (don’t neglect the corners or edges!)
  3. Place the bread on a baking sheet and pop them under the broiler, set on low and about 6 inches away, and broil until golden brown and bubbly.  (Note, don’t broil on high heat or too close, because then the surface will be golden brown and bubbly and the rest will be raw.)

Serve and enjoy.  And make sure Count Dracula isn’t on your guest list.