Peanut Butter, Sambal, Lime, Cilantro Toast

For the better part of a year, I’ve been nattering on about how I’ve become addicted to a Bon Appetit recipe for toast.

Yes, toast. Though, also yes, Bon Appetit.

I’ve tweeted about it, told friends they have to try it and posted it (more than once) on Instagram.

Peanut Butter-Cilantro-Sambel Olek Toast I

I think Bon Appetit just posted a photo and description to their Twitter account and at the time I sort of thought, huh, and then carried on. I guess it stuck with me? Because at some point after that, I realized I had all the ingredients to make it: good bread, peanut butter, cilantro, lime and sriracha. (Actually, I now make it with sambal oelek, which I prefer to sriracha as it has a more well-rounded spicy kick than sriracha. The only real downside to this is you can’t squiggle sambal the way you can with sriracha. A minor disappointment.) So, I made it. I toasted a thick slice of Sidewalk Citizen sourdough, slathered on peanut butter (not even a fancy one), squeezed over some lime and then spread out a blob of sambal oelek and sprinkled roughly chopped cilantro on top.

Oh. My. God.

Peanut Butter-Cilantro-Sambel Olek Toast II

This is definitely one of those things that is far greater than the sum of its parts. And yet, it’s really good because each ingredient shines through, that tangy lime, rich peanut butter, hit of chile heat and brightness from cilantro – which also adds requisite colour.

After a year of making it, I’ve learned a few things.

This is not the place for wimpy white bread. You need something with heft, with significant crisp, crunch and chew to stand up to the flavours. I’ve tried it with all sorts of bread and find that a good loaf of sourdough, or its equivalent, is best. Trust me. A basic loaf of white bread just leads to sadness in this case.

Don’t underestimate the amount of lime to make it right. A quarter wedge is about right.

Also, it’s just not the same without cilantro. (I used to hate the stuff. I am completely baffled as to how I’ve come around on this herb. I understand I’m an anomaly on this front. For those who find it tastes like soap, I’m sorry, I haven’t yet experimented with other herbs. Maybe Thai basil would work?)

Peanut Butter-Cilantro-Sambel Olek Toast III

I’ve tried with both crunchy and smooth peanut butter and admittedly prefer smooth. But it’s worth experimenting.

So, this has been added to my toast rotation, along with tomatoes (few things are finer than a really good toasted tomato sandwich, I would suggest) and avocado (trend be damned).

That’s saying a lot because, frankly, I’ve been eating a lot of toast lately.

Toast is delicious, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Except it’s not really a sustainable way of eating.

The truth is, I’ve lost some of my passion for cooking. I know it’ll come back eventually, but for now it’s a lot of salads and toast and charcuterie plates. (I know, it’s sometimes really awesome to live alone so you can have any of those, or cereal, for dinner.)

So, forgive me for talking about toast for a minute?

Summer is the best time for toasted tomato sandwiches as tomatoes actually have flavour and come in some many lovely shapes and colours and sizes. I sometimes like to slice up a variety to put on my buttered toast as it looks so beautiful and because each of the varieties does have a variation in flavour.

Orange tomatoes

Heirloom tomato

For a full sandwich, I like a nice homestyle white bread, toasted – even though my family would argue I actually like “warm bread” – to a deep gold. But for open-face sandwiches, it’s sourdough all the way. Sidewalk Citizen bread is an excellent vehicle for open-faced tomato sandwiches. Sturdy enough to not let a little tomato juice wilt it and with lots of nooks and crannies for melted butter to seep. That is, of course, if you have enough of a loaf left after getting it home from the bakery. I am surprised at how often I manage to resist just tearing into the loaf with bare hands and slathering on some nicely salted butter. Ahem.

Tomato Toast I

Tomato Toast II

As for avocado toast, I don’t think the Internet needs any more words spent on it, so I’ll only add a few.

No, I don’t make it into roses. Yes, sometimes I kind of mash it into the toast. But most of the time I like it just in slices overtop.

Avocado Toast II

I’ve experimented with squeezing over a bit of lime and a dusting of cilantro, if I have it. That’s quite nice, though not entirely necessary. Salt and pepper, though, are required. I found some lemon-infused salt once and that’s absolutely fantastic on avocado – though I would never suggest buying a salt just for this. (I have a weirdly large salt collection; most of them I bought on travels – I do love a food souvenir.)

Speaking of salt, if you ever come across a bottle of Jane’s Krazy Mixed-up Salt (known in my family simply as Crazy Jane’s), snap it up. It is the best on tomatoes and avocados.

Krazy Jane's

Tomatoes and avocados have been my toast go-tos for some time. And now I’ve added this peanut butter one.

Just on Saturday, I woke up and realized that I had some cilantro hanging out in my fridge.

(Aside: Did you know the best way to keep it? Put it in a glass filled with water, like a bouquet, with the fringed leaves poking out the top, and then cover loosely with a plastic bag. Boom. That cilantro has lasted without browning or wilting for more than a week.)

I cannot quite explain how delighted I was when I made that realization and knew some peanut butter-lime-sambal-cilantro toast was in my future.

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One-Cup Cookies

I’m not sure if these are a Prairie phenomenon or if it’s coincidence that I had never heard of them before moving to Calgary.

But they showed up in the newsroom one day, courtesy of a fellow reporter, and I was intrigued. Not quite oatmeal, not quite chocolate chip, not quite peanut butter, these One-Cup Cookies are like the best combination of cookies. The baker offered up a pair of recipes to try, but they essentially boil down to the simplest of formulas: one cup of everything. (OK, obviously not the leaveners.)

Stack of One-Cup Cookies

The main difference between the two recipes is the amount of peanut butter. One calls for a cup of the stuff, the other only 3/4 of a cup. After trying both (several times), I’ve decided I like the one with less peanut butter. The taste is barely noticeable, but adds just another dimension to these cookies.

The best thing about this recipe is that it’s infinitely adaptable. Add nuts, seeds, raisins as you see fit. Don’t like cranberries? Don’t add them. Don’t want your kids hopped up on chocolate? Omit the chips. And so on.

I love the addition of cranberries, though. The play of sweet chocolate against the tang of the slightly tart of the dried fruit is really nice.

Like all cookies, the trick to keeping these chewy is to pull them out of the oven, while they’re still slightly puffed and gooey looking in just the centre. They’ll keep cooking from the residual heat even after you pull them out, but won’t get overly crisp.

Chips and Coconut

The ingredient trio

One-Cup Cookie Dough

One-Cup Cookies

  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 3/4 cup peanut butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup rolled outs
  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 cup coconut
  • 1 cup dried cranberries
  • 1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350. Cream butter and sugars, then beat in the eggs. Add peanut butter, then dry ingredients. Drop spoonfuls onto cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes, until edges are golden but middles are still slightly gooey looking. Let rest on cookie sheet for a few minutes before cooling on a wire rack.

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Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing

Most smart bakers know to make sure everything is ready to go in advance of getting started. I am, apparently, not a smart baker.

Chocolate cupcake with peanut butter icing

We were celebrating a (much belated) birthday for a good friend. Some wiggling around with the schedule had the celebration moved from brunch to Sunday night dinner and I volunteered (most willingly — any excuse to bake) to bring the birthday dessert. All week I Googled for moist, rich chocolate cake recipes and then sat there trying to decide which would be better: mayo-based or buttermilk; white icing or chocolate; cupcakes or layer cake. Finally, when I shared my dilemma with a friend, she queried why I wasn’t using a Barefoot Contessa recipe. Indeed! Why wasn’t I?

She has two recipes in her books and one online at Food & Wine. Since I already bought the books, I figured I may as well try one of those and, at last, settled on the Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing. My love of this combination knows no bounds, so I’m kind of surprised I didn’t think of this recipe immediately.

Initially, it was all going very well. I ran out to the store to buy sour cream, buttermilk and coffee, along with whipping cream for the icing, then returned to begin. There was butter to soften and dry ingredients to sift (and, boy did I sift those. I learned my lesson from the Red Velvet cake when not sifting the cocoa with the flour led to brown swirls through the cake.) and, of course, photos to take to document my progress.

Cakes still make me a bit nervous. I’m worried I’ll overmix and make a tough cake and that is not eased by the fact most recipes have this whole “mix in thirds” step. What if it’s not exactly thirds? Also, I think a lot of recipes these days assume people have stand mixers, which makes this step (among others) much easier, then when trying to hold the mixer while pouring in a third of the dry mixture and not end up covered in cocoa and flour dust.

Butter and sugar and eggs, oh my!

The batter trifecta

Chocolate cupcake better

Chocolate cupcakes ready to bake.

But, for the most part, it all went really well. The batter seemed incredibly light at the end (Okay, and, yes, it did taste good.) and I was all ready to put the batter into the tins. I pulled out my cupcake liners and found I only had five left. Gah! Thankfully, there’s a grocery store a little over a block away, so I turned off the oven and bolted down there where I bought some liners and then raced back. I was really worried that extra time would ruin the batter somehow.

In the end, it was only a 15-minute delay and I don’t think it affected the cupcakes. They baked up perfectly, though for less time than the recipe suggested owing, I suspect, to the fact that my muffin tins are more shallow and took less batter to fill. (I used a 1/8 cup scoop, which worked perfectly. No spillage.)

Chocolate Cupcakes

Solo chocolate cupcake

The cupcakes are not overly sweet, which was a nice counterpoint to the rich peanut butter icing.

Peanut butter icing

Row of cupcakes

This recipe is from Barefoot Contessa at Home.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing

  • 12 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature (that’s 3/4 cup for those of us that don’t use sticks of butter)
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 2/3 cup light brown sugar, packed
  • 2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
  • 2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
  • 1 cup buttermilk, shaken, at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup sour cream, at room temperature
  • 2 tbsp. brewed coffee (Full disclosure: I don’t drink coffee. I made a cup of instant and it tasted awful to me, so I only threw in less than a tablespoon. I suspect good coffee may be a great addition.)
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup good cocoa powder
  • 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and two sugars on high speed until light and fluffy, approximately five minutes. (For those of us without a stand mixer, a handheld is just fine. It just makes it a bit trickier when mixing in the wet and dry ingredients.) Lower the speed to medium, add the eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla and mix well. In a separate bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, sour cream and coffee. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. On low speed, add the buttermilk mixture and the flour mixture alternately in thirds to the mixer bowl, beginning with the buttermilk mixture and ending with the flour mixture. Mix only until blended. Fold the batter with a rubber spatula to be sure it’s completely blended.

Divide the batter among the cupcake pans (one rounded standard ice cream scoop per cup is the right amount). Bake in the middle of the oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes, remove from the pans, and allow to cool completely before frosting.

Frost each cupcake with peanut butter icing and sprinkle with chopped peanuts, if desired.

Kathleen’s Peanut Butter Icing

  • 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 1 cup creamy peanut butter
  • 5 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • 3/4 tsp. pure vanilla extract
  • 1/4 tsp. kosher salt
  • 1/3 cup heavy cream (I used whipping cream)

Place the confectioners’ sugar, peanut butter, butter, vanilla and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on medium-low speed until creamy, scraping down the bowl with a rubber spatula as you work. Add the cream and beat on high speed until the mixture is light and smooth.

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