Sunday, January 10, 2010

Herbed Spelt Popovers


These little lovelies are from the "Herbed Spelt Popovers" recipe in this book.

Don't know why I had popovers on the brain, but I did. But I wasn't at all convinced they are the kind of food item that can be duplicated using any kind of whole grain flour.

But apparently they can be. I actually followed the recipe almost entirely exactly. The only change I made was that it calls for either whole grain spelt flour or whole wheat pastry flour (and a small amount of AP). I'd planned ahead and put spelt flour on my shopping list, but when I got home from the health food store and reread the recipe I realized that no way was my white and fluffy spelt flour from the bulk bin "whole grain." So I mixed 3/4 cup each WW pastry and spelt flour and added 1/4 C AP and hoped for the best.

I also used whatever dried herbs I had on hand, and about 2 TB of pecorino-romano cheese. The batter was so thin I couldn't imagine I'd get anything other than eggy hocky-pucks from it. The recipe made exactly 3 cups of batter according to the marks on the side of my blender so I used a 1/4 cup measure to fill my buttered 12-muffin tin. Each "cup" was way more than the half-full recommended, which then had me worried that instead of remaining hocky pucks the batter would puff too quickly and I'd end up with baked-on and burnt popover batter all over the floor of my oven.

But my fears were needless. These puffed up gloriously, did not leak and overflow in the oven, and are delicious. Unfortunately, most of them de-puffed significantly as they cooled, so by the time I snapped this pic they were no longer at their most magnificent. I suspect this means they are slightly undercooked, and will bake them a few minutes longer next time. Fortunately, the yum factor is unaffected by deflation and once pulled open they perform admirably as what popovers of any kind really are, which is a delivery vehicle for butter.

We enjoyed these warm from the oven with soup for dinner on Friday night, and yesterday I used one cold from the fridge to make a chicken-avocado-sprout sandwich for lunch. Which was quite good, but the popover was not at its best cold. So for Saturday dinner I sliced a couple open and ran them through the toaster on a light setting. Yum again. There are still a couple left, and in a few minutes I'm going to make myself another chix-avo sandwich, but this time I'm going to toast the popover first. (A microwave oven would probably reheat them nicely, too, but then you'd be microwaving your food, which I don't do for reasons I'll maybe get into some other time and which will reveal my nutjob side.)

Seeing as how it's Sunday, which is "dessert night" in this house, after lunch I am going to make some kind of cupcake (carrot, maybe?) to hold up the leftover lemon frosting I took out of the freezer this morning.

And then I'm going to get serious about slimming down.

No comments: