Apple Crisp, plus Apple Crisp Bento

Apple crisp has always been one of my favourite desserts.

It's not the prettiest thing going, so it doesn't suggest you need to wait for some sort of special occasion, and it's not a lot of work, unless you're afraid of peeling a few apples. It doesn't have tricky pastry, or challenging timing issues. It can be eaten hot or cold, plain or garnished with ice cream, for dessert or even for breakfast, really, since it contains both fruit and rolled oats and can therefore be classed as health food. You can make them any size you like, but more on that later.

Somewhere in my house (I think), lies a recipe card with my mother's Apple Crisp recipe (serves eight). It didn't get put back in its box one day, and has been missing in action ever since. There's a reasonable probability that it got swept up with some recycling, and will never be seen again. This makes me quite sad.

Fortunately, it's not a terribly complicated recipe, and I've been scaling it back to four servings for years, and tweaking the spicing and toying with adding almonds or dried cranberries or whatnot, so I didn't really need my mother's recipe, although I'll be very happy if it turns up again next time I sort through the cooking bookcase.

Anyway, I've attempted to recreate the basic recipe here. It turned out exactly as I wanted, so I'm feeling pretty pleased about the whole thing.


Apple Crisp

Fruit Layer
4 to 5 medium apples (I like to use Galas)
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Crisp Layer
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup brown sugar (lightly packed)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 cup butter, melted (or: 3 tablespoons butter, melted, plus 1 tablespoon cut into tiny pieces)

Peel and core the apples, and chop them into bite-sized chunks - I make them about the size of the end-joint of my thumb, but however you like (just not too small, or they will mush up). Toss with sugar and cinnamon, and pat them evenly into a lightly canola-spritzed baking dish A 1.5 quart cube-shaped baking dish works really well for this.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients of the topping with a fork. Add the melted butter all at once, and stir like mad to ensure that the oat mixture gets thoroughly coated with the butter. There should be no dry or floury-looking bits, so keep stirring until it all comes together. If you absolutely have to, add another tablespoon of butter (you shouldn't need to). If you press a bit of the topping between your fingers, it should clump in a crumbly sort of way.

Scrape the topping out of the bowl onto the apples. Spread it out to evenly cover all of the apples, and press lightly with your fingers to help create a surface-crust when it bakes. Don't press too hard, or you'll compact the topping into a dense wodge that is tasty, but less texturally pleasing. Note that you can fill your dish right up to the edge, since the apple crisp will "settle" a little as it bakes.

Bake uncovered at 375℉ for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the topping is a dark golden hue and has sunk down in the dish slightly. It might be a bit darker on the edges - that's okay. Allow to cool at least a few minutes before serving (but it is plenty delicious at room temperature, or chilled, too). Serve on its own, or with ice cream (or whipped cream) or coconut yoghurt. Totally up to you.

In other good news, as touched on above, you can make these pretty much any size you like. You'll want to adjust the oven time somewhat, especially if you have an extra small or extra big one. I made a little, bento-sized one in a silicone baking cup along side the larger one, just to see how it would turn out. I pulled it from the oven at 30 minutes, and it was just right. Here's a closeup:


I didn't really have a bento planned to go with it, so I made an ad hoc bento that I thought turned out pretty well: a Shichimi tōgarashi onigiri from the freezer (microwaved for one minute to revive it); some fresh-cut radishes and cucumber half-moons; ham-wrapped cheddar batons, and a snowpea salad with ginger & rice vinegar dressing (the red bits are bell peppers). And, of course, the mini apple crisp! There was supposed to be a few frozen blueberries tucked in around the apple crisp, in true bento-stuffing tradition where empty space is anathema, but I was running out of time and shrugged it off.


This looks like it might not be a lot of food, but in fact it was quite filling. More importantly, it was an absolute delight to have a little, guilt-free dessert at lunch time. Most importantly, I suppose, from bento standards, everyone who saw it thought it was the most adorable thing ever. I was pleased that the apples had not completely mushed out (in part a function of the type of apple I used), and I was really quite thrilled that making individual sized apple crisps really didn't take more effort than a single larger one. This makes the apple crisp a dessert more suitable to dinner parties than I had previously expected.

As a final note, I want to mention a delicious variation on apple crisp which I first made a number of years ago, and which is incredibly simple. All you need to do is shake a handful of frozen cranberries into the apple mixture, and give it a good stir. Instant holiday fare!

Challah and Challah Swirl

I don't bake bread as often as I used to. Some of that is because I usually choose low-glycemic breads for everyday consumption, and I haven't really got the patience for making flourless breads or sourdough breads myself, or at least not on any sort of regular basis. Challah is really more of a special occasion bread to me, enriched with oil and eggs as it is; not being Jewish, I feel free to take liberties with challah which might or might not be acceptable to some. At any rate, it had been quite a while since I made any, and I felt it was high time.

My challah loaves are usually done in the traditional free-form braid (sometimes, as a smaller braid stacked on top of a larger braid, if I'm feeling fancy, or have a housewarming to go to). This time, however, I felt like making something that would easily fit into my toaster for breakfast during the week, so I crammed my braid into a loaf pan, and split the difference, as it were.

For the second loaf, I wanted something fun. I had contemplated making it into a set of nine cinnamon buns, but laziness won the day, and I settled on rolling it up into a log, and putting that into a second loaf pan.


As you can see, my rolling/shaping skillz are far from "mad". I am rather grievously out of practice, and should probably submit myself to some sort of remedial practice regime until the results are fit to photograph. This one managed to have the swirl quite uneven, as well as rising higher on one end than the other, because I was sloppy about making sure the rolled out dough was even. Quite lopsided. Hmph! Perhaps it was simply depressed by the rather ratty-looking pan that I used for it, next to the pristine loaf pan for the regular challah.

No matter, both loaves were delicious. The swirl was effected by mixing brown sugar with equal parts cinnamon and ground cardamom, a combination which I highly recommend, and which will be repeated the next time I feel the urge to get fancy with my bread. The swirl loaf also toasted up beautifully. I am partial to a slice of strong cheddar on toasted spiced and/or raisined breads, and this combination didn't disappoint at all.

I may have to make it again soon...just for the practice, of course!

The recipe that I use is from Claudia Roden's wonderful The Book of Jewish Food. I note that she spells it "Hallah", another common spelling, but one I cannot get used to. Her recipe makes four medium-sized loaves, so I cut it in half here, for two loaves or one stacked braid:

Challah
Adapted from the Hallah recipe in The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden

1 tablespoon dry yeast
1 cup 2 tablespoons warm water
1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten, plus 1 egg for glazing
1/2 tablespoon kosher salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 to 5 cups all-purpose flour
Optionally, sesame seeds or poppy seeds for garnish

Proof the yeast in the warm water with a pinch of the sugar, in a large mixing bowl. Let it stand until it foams. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine the rest of the sugar, the salt, the eggs and oil and beat well. When the yeast is foamy, add the egg mixture and stir well.

To the wet mixture, add a cup and a half of flour and beat for approximately 100 strokes in the same direction. The batter will be thin and should become lump free during the process. Add another cup of flour and beat that in, too. Add the rest of the flour gradually, as needed, until the dough becomes a soft, slightly sticky dough. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter, and knead for about ten minutes by hand, until the dough becomes shiny, supple, and doesn't stick to your hands too much. You can add a little more flour as needed to prevent the sticking enough to be able to knead the dough.

Place the bread dough in a large, lightly oiled bowl, turning the dough so that the top has a thin film of oil over it, and cover it lightly with a sheet of plastic wrap. Place in a warm, draft-free spot, such as the inside of an unlit oven with the light turned on. Let it rise for 2 to 3 hours, or until it doubles in size.

Squeeze the air out of the dough (also called "punching down", but you don't need to be that rough), and shape the bread as you wish, into two loaves or a single, stacked loaf. Place on a greased baking sheet or in a loaf pan, as you will, and allow to rise until just about double, about an hour.

Use a pastry brush to gently brush the beaten egg glaze over the exposed surfaces of the bread. If you want to add seeds, sprinkle them on top of the glaze, so they will stick. Do not skip the glaze - this is what gives the lovely burnished golden brown colour. Your loaves will be pale and incomplete looking without it.

Bake at 350℉ for 30 - 40 minutes for two loaves, 40 - 50 minutes for a big stacked braid. Test them for doneness by tapping the bottom - they should sound hollow.

Coconut Pancakes

In the novel City of Bones (by Cassandra Clare), Clary Fry orders coconut pancakes at a diner in New York. It was a minor detail in a scene, and not relevant to the storyline, but the idea struck me hard as a good one. Why had I never had coconut pancakes before? I had to make some.

I looked online, but didn't find any recipes that really caught my fancy - many of them being more crepe-like or using coconut flour, which I didn't have on hand. I decided to simply modify several existing pancake recipes that I already make.

Coconut Pancakes

Makes: 10 - 12 fluffy pancakes (4" diameter)
Total Prep & Cooking Time: 45 minutes

1 1/4 cups unbleached flour
1/4 cup fine unsweetened coconut
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons melted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut milk
3/4 cup 1% milk
1 egg, beaten

In a medium mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients, mixing well with a fork. In a separate bowl, or large measuring cup, combine the wet ingredients (start with the 3/4 cup of milk amount), beating well until smooth.

Make a well in the middle of the dry mixture and pour in the wet ingredients all at once. Stir rapidly with a fork to combine. The batter will be quite thick, but if it starts looking more like biscuit dough, add extra milk, 1/4 cup at a time. Continue to stir with a fork until all dry bits are integrated. Don't try to make it totally lump-free - a few small lumps in the batter are normal, and you don't want to overmix it. Plus, the coconut makes it look lumpier than it really is. Let the batter stand for about 15 minutes.

Spritz a large, non-stick skillet with canola oil, and allow it to heat over medium-high heat until you can flick a drop of water on the surface, and it dances. You can use a teaspoon to make a "tester" pancake if you like. Use a large, shallow serving spoon to scoop batter into the pan - I can fit three pancakes in my 12-inch skillet. Allow them to cook until the edges start to look a little dry, and little bubbles are rising to the surface in the middle of the pancake (about two minutes, but check underneath as needed), then flip the pancakes and cook for another minute or so.

Transfer finished pancakes to a rack in a warm oven to hold until all of the pancakes are ready. You probably won't need to re-spray the skillet before ladling the next set of pancakes in, but it's a good idea to aim for the empty spaces between where the previous pancakes cooked, just to help preserve the pan's non-stick surface.

Serve with any of your favourite pancake toppings. We had ours with whisky syrup (and some with orange-flower honey). I bet Nutella would be terrific, with or without bananas...

Leftover pancakes re-heat beautifully in the toaster for a quick weekday breakfast.

Tomato Tarragon Bisque

It's definitely soup weather. In fact, not only was my last post also soup, I am also making soup right now. However, the one that is currently on the stove is my trusty ol' Beef Barley Soup, which I have already told you about. I noticed the recipe doesn't contain bay leaves, so I added some, and I'm also using fresh thyme, but otherwise, no change. It looks exactly like the picture through the link.

Today, instead, I'm going to tell you about a soup that I made a few weeks ago, the last of which I pulled from the freezer and defrosted for lunch earlier this week. Tomato Tarragon Bisque.

I've been using tarragon a lot since my sister brought me a seedling. Turns out, the seedling really, really enjoyed the plant food I gave it, and has been growing fairly abundantly. I've had to cut it back just to keep it off the floor. Now, tarragon likes a couple of things in this world, and two of them are cream and mushrooms. So, there've been a few dinners involving sauteed chicken with mushrooms and tarragon cream sauce, and the like, but that's a whole other post.

Since I can't eat creamy things every day (or I will need to buy a larger wardrobe), I started thinking about things that I could make with tarragon that weren't fundamentally based on dairy. I remembered, long ago, a Manhattan-style clam chowder recipe that I made (in an attempt to impress someone, actually) that had tarragon, and I think that was the first time that I had ever used the herb. That recipe (and the relationship) and I parted ways twenty years ago, and I don't really like clams, so that was out. It did lead me to thinking about tomato-based soups, though, and so that is ultimately what I decided to do.

I started with my Simple Tomato Soup recipe (expired link removed, please see recipe in the comments section below), which is a wonderfully all-purpose soup that can be switched up in a lot of ways. Ultimately, I did very little to change it. I added some drained, diced tomatoes (peel them if using fresh) after the puree stage, and about a half-cup of finely chopped tarragon leaves, stirred right in at the end. I didn't add the allspice, because I wasn't making "that" soup.

The brightness of the fresh tarragon and nice, bite-sized chunks of tomato interrupt the smooth, thick texture texture of the soup made it hearty enough that it didn't really need a sandwich on the side (although a chunk of bread didn't go amiss). Overall, a pleasantly light lunch or part (as they say) of a nutritious dinner...

Definitely on the repeat list.

Golden Borscht

Oh. Hi there. I didn't mean to leave you all alone for so long, but time seems to have gotten away from me. Sit down, have some soup.

I love borscht. To me, it is an extremely comforting combination of flavours, even though it wasn't really a staple of my childhood. I have had success with a number of styles and types of borscht, but I confess that my favourite is meatless (although I don't mind some chicken stock) and beautifully magenta with beets. In that vein, I have had excellent luck with the recipe from Diane Forley's The Anatomy of a Dish, which has been previously featured on this blog.

This version, as you can clearly tell, is a little different. Not, however by all that much. I've been toying with the idea of making a golden borscht since eyeing the beautiful golden beets that turn up from time to time in our local farmer's markets, and finally got around to making it. I followed the exact same recipe (including tweaks) as in the link above to the ruby-coloured borscht (although I omitted the potato entirely, as I don't care for its texture in the soup) and subbed out all of the red ingredients for their yellow/white counterparts. So, golden beets for red, white wine for red wine, white wine vinegar for red wine vinegar, and white (well, green technically) cabbage instead of red.

As you can see, it turned out beautifully golden, just as I had hoped. Interestingly, though, once the soup was complete, the beet chunks themselves had lost most of their colour to the surrounding liquid, making for a beautiful gold broth, but leaving the beet pieces a little anemic looking. Still, the flavour was dead on, that tart-sweet combination, and hearty, mouth-filling texture that makes it feel like a substantial meal all by itself (although, with bread is better).

This borscht is very, very strongly flavoured, and very, very tangy. If you like a milder (but still noticeable) tang, I suggest using half the amount of wine and vinegar, and making up the difference with either water or broth.

Taco Pizza

If you think we eat a lot of pizza at our house, you'd be right.

When I left home at eighteen, I made leftovers into soup. In my twenties, I learned that I could make pizza out of almost any kind of leftover imaginable, and I did; my rampage through leftover chile con carne, curry, flank steak and mushrooms, baked bean and cheese, and whatever-was-in-the-crisper eventually led to the now-legendary Lapin Dijon Pizza of 1996 (sadly, no photo).

In my thirties, I relegated leftovers to quesadillas (including the surprisingly tasty Aloo Gobi quesadilla), and pursued more classic (ahem) forms of the pizza, that is, if you can include "cheeseburger" as a classic pizza option.

Nowadays, I just make pizza whenever I want pizza, and I still make it sometimes to use up ingredients. Sometimes, it takes on strange new territory (there was a mushroom-sauced roast beef pizza a couple of weeks ago that I completely forgot to take pictures of), the trendy (buffalo wing pizza with blue cheese sauce) or the time-honoured traditional (pepperoni from the deli counter, maybe mushrooms, maybe peppers, tomato sauce, cheese).

Pizza is a go-to dinner for a few of reasons:
1) It can be on the plate in an hour, even making the crust from scratch.
2) I almost always have the ingredients for making crust, some manner of sauce, and cheese
3) It can help me use up whatever is lurking in the fridge.

The leftover factor might be subtle, it needs to be said. The Taco pizza above was constructed out of a need to use up some black olives and a red pepper that wasn't going to put up with much more fridge time. Since I had some ground buffalo in the freezer (and I usually do), it was pretty easy to fry up the meat, season it up as if I were making tacos (chiles, onions, garlic, cumin - loads of cumin!) and spread it over the pressed-out crust.

For the crust, I substituted about a quarter of a cup of the flour with yellow cornmeal, just to give it a complementary flavour, a slight corniness, you might say. I also use cornmeal for dusting the pizza pan, to make sure the crust comes away nicely, so I already had the cornmeal out. (Expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe).

In this, somewhat rare incidence, I didn't use any sort of sauce at all, but made sure that the taco meat was fairly "saucy" or wet before spreading it in an even layer on the unbaked crust. Top with olives, confetti of red pepper, and cheddar cheese, and you have yourself a taco-flavoured pizza. Serve with a little drizzle of sour cream, if you like, or a side of guacamole.

International Bento (France): Terrine

It's bento time again! This time, in the manner of a fairly classic French picnic.

Palle made this terrine from veal and pork, lining the exterior with swirls of pancetta, although I rather tragically failed to show off the pretty edge to the slice when I was packing my bento (although you can see it in the photo below). Clearly I need more practice in making the bento show off the attractiveness of the ingredients. To be fair, it was a hasty assembly, and upon review I should have put the piccalilli relish (in the small container) into an even smaller cup and wedged it in with the lentils, which only come half-way up the side of their section of the container.

The lentils were braised in wine (and, I believe some chicken stock), and contain finely diced onion, celery and carrot (sauteed in olive oil), as well as some seasonings that I do not quite recall (again, Palle made this dish, along with the Piccalilli, which used cornichons as a foundation), but may have included both bayleaves and fresh thyme. They were excellent hot for dinner on the first night, and equally good cold the next day in my picnic.

Finally, one of my favourite-ever crunchy vegetables, the radish. No fancy carvings into roses or toadstools today, just a rushed quartering and cramming them into the bento.

This is one of the few bentos which I actually ate at cool-room temperature. Most of what I take in my bentos is refrigerated, and then removed to microwave-safe crockery to be re-heated, but this particular bento really didn't need re-heating at all. Perfect for taking one's lunch to the park, or the library steps, instead of staying cooped up in the office.

Note the wine below - while a nice Côtes du Rhone was the perfect accompaniment to the dinner the night before, I only drink wine at work for special occasions, such as when the boss is buying lunch, so just water for me for this bento!

Beans with Bacon

I'm a big fan of beans, and possibly a bigger fan of bacon. Fortunately, they need not be mutually exclusive.

I grew up eating Boston-style baked beans - sometimes the canned kind, but if we were lucky, the kind made from scratch, soaking the beans overnight and baking them slowly in the oven in a specially designed bean pot. Sweet and savory, hearty and comforting. Something that you wait for, and are rewarded for your patience.

I still like to make beans from scratch. Aside from the classic baked version, I developed a Stovetop version that only takes a couple of hours. It's not as good as the original, which takes about nine hours, but clocking in at under two hours, it's easier to wedge into my schedule (and it's still better than the canned kind).

The beans above, however, are not the "Boston" kind at all. They're a simple pot of pinto beans and bacon, with the flavour supplemented by onions and garlic, cooked with bayleaf and salt. It's a sort of foundation recipe, good on toast for a light supper, or to be seasoned up in the manner of your own choosing. I took inspiration from the Mexican dish called "thick beans", served as a protein/starch side dish, and often cooked with lots of lard. The lard in this recipe is only a little of the rendered bacon fat, but I've left the chunks of bacon in.

The thing that really elevated this dish was the quality of the bacon. My friend Rodney smokes his own bacon, and is extremely generous in sharing the bounty. I cut the bacon into thick lardons, and seared it quickly to render enough of the fat to saute some onions and garlic. Then I added the dried (washed) pinto beans, the bayleaf, and enough water to cover the beans generously, brought the whole thing to a simmer, and let it cook, covered over the lowest temperature on my stove until the onions and garlic dissolved, and the beans became tender. I checked on them periodically, topping up the water level as necessary as the beans absorbed the liquid.

The final stage was to add a little salt, and then mash up some of the beans and stir them back into the pot, thickening the gravy and cushioning the rest of the beans.

The beans were exactly what I wanted them to be (although I'm now contemplating making a spicy version, which would also be good). Even more, as the leftovers were turned into a delicious bean and bacon soup, which, on its own is a fine reason to cook up a big pot of beans.

International Bento (Japan): Tonkatsu Bento

As promised, a bento which ventures into Japanese content. In this case, the bento is an exact redux of the dinner from the night before (see below): tonkatsu, Japanese rice, miso-glazed carrots, and gingered daikon salad. The vegetable content was a little light, as I intended to combine the carrots with lotus root slices (very pretty together!) but failed to acquire the lotus root on my way home. Next time, I mean to do a combination of carrot, lotus, and burdock (gobo). The preparation is much like a kinpira, but with a little red miso mixed with water and sesame oil added in and reduced until it glazes the vegetable pieces. An extra vegetable, maybe something green to balance out the meal, too - perhaps a little finely chopped snow-pea "coleslaw", made in a vaguely sunomono-like fashion, would be a good addition here.

I'm very fond of tonkatsu, a breaded, shallow-fried pork cutlet, in this case made from a slightly pounded pork sirloin chop. The conventional flour/ dip in egg / dredge in crumbs is employed, using panko, the airy, coarse style of breadcrumb that gives Japanese breaded foods a delightfully fuzzy appearance. For the recipe, I refer you to Maki's excellent site Just Hungry, the sister site to Just Bento, which is a favourite resource for my forays into Japanese cuisine.

The little fish-shaped sauce bottle in the bento is filled with a Tonkatsu sauce which Palle assembled after perusing various recipes online and taking the best of them to form a hybrid (his favourite way to cook). I don't think he noted it down, though, so the next iteration might be quite different, depending on how well he remembers what he did. The little fish-bottle is one of a veritable school of fish bottles I got in a little box from a Japanese dollar-type store here in Vancouver. They are generally used for soy sauce, or other smooth and not-too-thick sauces that can be loaded by suction through the fish's "mouth". A bargain at two dollars for a box of them (if one doesn't make it home, I'm not too broken up by it).

If you recall my Fear of Frying post, you will know that this involves more oil and temperature control issues than I am strictly comfortable with, so making the Tonkatsu also helped me push my boundaries and further develop my frying skills. To be fair, I made a crash decision to shallow-fry the cutlets instead, using about an inch of oil in a large skillet, based on a different recipe that I found in a cookbook. The first two of the four cutlets I cooked were beautiful, but I had my predictable troubles controlling the heat for the second batch. The cutlets were all delicious, but the second batch were considerably less attractive.

More practice is clearly in order, but I was really happy with how well this turned out.

Jamaican Buffalo Pie

I don't get nearly enough pie in my life. One of the problems is that I am rather picky about the crust, and the leathery, greasy offerings of many of the pre-fab pies available are discouraging. Also, as is fairly well documented, I am quite lazy, so it is difficult to rouse myself up to make a double-crust pie on the spur of the moment. It can be done, however. It just takes a little craving.

My world is run by food cravings. It always has been, even at some fairly inopportune times. I am lucky to be able to indulge most of them. So, when an enormous craving for a savory pie hit pretty much juxtaposed with a wish for a Jamaican patty, I decided to combine the two: voilà, one double-crust pie, filled with a spicy, Jamaican patty-inspired filling, and less actual work than making a bunch of smaller patties.

I used ground buffalo meat, since that is what I had on hand, but a good quality beef would work as well, of course. I browned the buffalo with rather a lot of sliced green onions (white and green parts), seasoned it heavily with black pepper and allspice and lightly with hot curry powder and salt, added some chopped hot chiles and a generous slug of Matouk's Calypso sauce (I didn't have habaneros on hand, but the pie still had a big ol' kick). I thickened it with a flour-based slurry, but was careful to keep the amount of liquid really low, so it would act as a binder without sogging things out too badly. The seasoning was essentially just taste-and-tweak, so I'm afraid I can't impart the precise amounts.

Finally, since pies look more lovely with a shiny golden crust, I gave it a quick swipe of egg-wash, and loaded it into the oven on the middle rack at 375℉ for about 45 minutes.

Because this was done on a weeknight (and, see above re: lazy), there's a big flaw in the surface of the top crust (upper right quadrant) that I didn't bother to fix, but we successfully managed to ignore that and devoured the pie anyway, with coleslaw on the side.


I took a well-wrapped quarter pie to work the next day, to give to a co-worker friend whom I generally torture with descriptions of what I am cooking. It was received with great appreciation, and apparently re-heated splendidly.