It’s the two weeks before Pi Day (3/14, also celebrated as Einstein’s birthday by nerds around the world). I have a lovely Pi plate (courtesy of Grandpa Susie and Grandpa Bernie), as well as other pi-making accoutrements: pi baking dish with crust protector, glass pi baking dish, and a baking pan to make a set of 4 tartlets.

Pi Plate

The goal had been to bake at least 3 pis a week for the 22 days (3.14 weeks) before the big day.

However, that’s not going to happen. A pipe burst in our kitchen and a-larger-than-R2D2-sized dehumidifier and its mini microban mate have been sucking the wet out of our subfloor until (hopefully) today. There were 4 more downstairs, but only 1 remains, in the wreck of the bathroom beneath the subfloor.

Kitchen and Lower Bath, deconstructed

But I do have some baking plans for Pi Day that WILL NOT be derailed!

2 meals: Chicken Pot Pi and Shepherd’s Pi

3 desserts: Apple Pi, Ice Cream Pi, and either some evil chocolatey pie or tartlettes.

I will let you know what happens as I reinstate myself of queen of that kitchen and the pis come together.

Further, my birthday is coming up, and I had planned to make a smaller version of my grandmother’s spectacular Nusstorte, a pecan cake with whipped cream filling and dark chocolate ganache icing. Maybe I’ll put that off for another celebration. We’ll see. My parents (or, at least, my mother) will be visiting that weekend, so maybe I’ll do some baking with/for them.

This year, I made three things for a friend’s small Super Bowl gathering. I made a lot because we weren’t sure how small it would be. It wound up being just five of us (our two couples and a friend), but I didn’t mind having left-overs (although not as much as I’d expected). Plus, I’d been wanting an excuse to try making a Buffalo chicken dip, and I couldn’t not make cookies. And I couldn’t let cutting my finger keep me down.

The dip was pretty successful. My husband’s from Buffalo. For years after moving to Maryland, he’d bemoan the dearth of real Buffalo chicken wings. He said it was good but after eating it for a while, you might get a little too much blue cheese of the blue cheese taste. That sounded good to me – it meant a person might want to eat it for a while, which sounds like a large amount of snacking for a dip. I got the recipe from the Brown-Eyed Baker, and cross-checked it with recipes from Allrecipes.com. Eventually, I just switched ranch dressing for low fat blue cheese dressing and, because low fat dairy products can often be too watery, only substituted half of the cream cheese for Neufchâtel (also known as in some areas as farmer’s cheese). Next time, I’ll use an extra half-pound of chicken breast and 4 oz of Neufchâtel, to yield the recipe below.

Buffalo Dip, single serving garnished with celery rose

The next morning, I made Citrus Butter Thumbprint cookies with fig preserves and raspberry preserves, my own recipe Frankensteined from butter cookie recipes and one I found from Betty Crocker on allrecipes.com. The raspberry preserves seemed to have enough tartness to offset the sweet butter cookies, but fig was very good too.

Citrus Butter Thumbprints, with fig and raspberry preserves

Then, I created my own chocolate peanut butter cookies with semi-sweet chocolate chips and peanut butter chips, Frankensteined from a bunch of different cookies I’ve tried and found from allrecipes.com. These were just how I like my cookies: soft, chewy, and chocolatey but not over-sweet. The peanut butter added a saltiness that I loved and our friends keeping a bunch and the rest being snapped up by my husband’s coworkers first thing in the morning.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie

RECIPES:

Buffalo Chicken Dip

Yield: About 12 servings

Prep Time: About 20 minutes

Cook Time: 20-30 minutes plus 30-40 minutes

Ingredients:

• 2.5 lbs chicken breasts or tenderloins (about 4 breast halves)
• 12 oz. bottle of hot sauce (not to be confused with Buffalo wing sauce or barbeque sauce)
• 16 oz. bottle of Blue Cheese Dressing (light or low-fat)
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 12 oz. Neufchâtel cheese (1½ 8oz. packages)

Directions:

1. Remove the cream cheese, the Neufchâtel, and the blue cheese dressing from the refrigerator so they can warm to room temperature.
2. Put the chicken breasts in a saucepan with enough water to complete submerge them. Put on medium-high heat until boiling, then reduce to simmer for twenty to thirty minutes. Then cut the chicken breasts into bite-size-long pieces and shred.
3. Put the shredded chicken breast in a 3 quart baking dish (a shallow 9″x13″ dish may be preferable to a taller dish, for dipping leverage) and pour the hot sauce on top of as much of the chicken as possible.
4. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F. While you’re waiting, combine the cream cheese, the Neufchâtel, and the blue cheese dressing in a saucepan over low heat. Mix until the cream cheese is completely melted and smooth, then pour the mixture evenly over the chicken.
5. Bake uncovered for 30 to 40 minutes.
6. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving. If you wait and reheat it, use an oven. Serve with celery sticks (and/or other vegetables), tortilla chips or crackers.

Note: Many people may enjoy adding 2 cups of Mexican-combo, cheddar, or M cheese before baking (which yields a hard crust on top) and/or afterwards.

(adapted from recipe given by the Brown-Eyed Baker)

Citrus Butter Thumbprint Cookies

Yield: 3 dozen cookies

Ingredients:

• 2¾ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup butter, VERY mushily softened
• 1½ cups white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1½  teaspoon grated lemon peel
• ½ teaspoon orange juice
• 1/3  cup fig or raspberry preserves

Directions:

1. In a small bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, Splenda Brown Sugar Blend, and Splenda Sugar Blend until smooth.
3. Beat in egg, vanilla extract, lemon peel, and orange juice.
4. Gradually blend in the dry ingredients.
5. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C) and prepare ungreased cookie sheets with parchment paper, if desired.
6. Roll dough into 1-inch balls; place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Using thumb or handle of wooden spoon, make indentation in center of each cookie. Spoon about 1/4 teaspoon preserves into each indentation.
7. Bake 7 to 9 minutes or until edges are light golden brown. Cool 2 minutes; remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely. Store tightly covered at room temperature.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

Yield: 24 cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup chopped semisweet chocolate
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup peanut butter chips
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup butter, softened
• ½ cup peanut butter
• ½ cup Splenda Brown Sugar Blend
• ¼ cup Splenda Sugar Blend
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons water
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C).
2. Melt 1 cup semisweet chocolate. Let cool to room temp.
3. In a medium bowl, combine flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
4. In a large bowl, cream together butter, peanut butter, Splenda Brown Sugar Blend, and Splenda Sugar Blend.
5. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
6. Stir in corn syrup, water, and vanilla.
7. Stir the flour mixture into the peanut butter mixture.
8. Fold in chocolate chunks.
9. Drop, by double-tablespoonfuls, 3 inches apart onto ungreased baking sheets.
10. Bake for 12 to 14 minutes in the preheated oven, or until edges are golden. Allow cookies to cool for 1 minute on the cookie sheet before removing to wire racks to cool completely.

When my husband and I first moved in together (gasp, yes, we moved in together before we married, even in this day and age!) and I was starting the summer session of graduate school, I made attempts to cook and the results were pretty good. Then again, two years later when we married and bought our first home, I made more attempts at cooking. Then I worked my butt into exhaustion, we moved to Maryland, I got sick, and I let my husband take over more and more of the cooking duties.

Now I have been feeling better. So after my first forays into baking in December, I decided that my husband could do with some home cooking. The thing is, he grew up with parents who made short-cut from-the-back-of-the-can/box dinners, which are also the kind of thing we’ve subsisted on for nearly a decade. I grew up on meals in which the prepackaged parts were the pasta or spaghetti sauce, but otherwise I get a lot of recipes from my mother that involve adding “some” of this, until it starts to look right, a shake or two of that seasoning, a whole lot of garlic, mostly because the volume grew a lot as my baby brother got older and we still wanted some leftovers and then shrank back a bit. My maternal grandmother’s recipes were some of my favorites growing up. Unfortunately, my grandmother had severe enough Alzheimer’s by the time I was in college that my husband never met her and she was unable to communicate the recipes to me directly. My mother was recently able to scan most of the recipes my grandmother had written down, but most are in varying combinations of English, Czech, and even some German.

So my first attempts to cook were with my mother’s recipes. But now I wanted to try my hand at those recipes I’d wait weeks to taste again, until Babi came to visit (babička is Czech for grandmother; her name was Mila, but as our only Czech grandmother, we called her simply Babi). So, until they are translated, I’ve been utilizing the power of the internet to find the recipes of Czech expatriates or the progeny of Czechs. Like everything else, I did a great deal of comparing and contrasting and trying to determine what seemed familiar and what seemed authentic.

My first meal was my absolute favorite as a child: chicken paprikash (kuře na paprice). It’s a Hungarian favorite, but it also is very very Czech. It turned out very well – the meat was tender, the sauce a nice combination of mild flavor and bland smoothness, but I hadn’t warmed up the sour cream enough or lowered the temp of the sauce so the sauce wasn’t consistent.

The short version of the recipe is to chop up half an onion and saute it in a bit of olive oil until glassy, then take a chicken cut into pieces (breasts, thighs, drumsticks, etc.) or just several thighs, bone-in with the skin still attached (but some of the fat beneath removed), shake paprika all over it (both sides) and brown it on all sides. Then put in enough chicken stock to cover it and bring the stock to a boil, then simmer it for a few (3 to 4?) hours. Remove the chicken, let the sauce cool a little and thicken it up with sour cream you have brought to room temperature (otherwise, it looks a little chunky). Then add the chicken again and shake a little more paprika over it all, and serve over egg noodles.

Chicken Paprikash (Kuře Na Paprice)

The second meal I made was another favorite, but rarely made: roast pork loin (vepřová pečeně) with bread dumplings (houskove knedlíky). I really enjoyed it when my parents took my baby brother and me to Prague when I was a teenager. It was super-easy to make. However, I am not a beer person, nor did I know that beer brings out the saltiness of food. I just read that no traditional Czech meal was complete without a good beer like Pilsner Urquell. I may have had too much salt or the beer might have been a poor addition. Either way, less salt next time.

For pork loin, here is another short-version recipe. Get a 3lb bone-in pork loin, or just a pork tenderloin that is well-marbled with fat or at least has a thick ridge of fat on top. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Make a rub out of two or three cloves of minced garlic, half of a minced onion, a teaspoon of caraway seeds, and a tablespoon of olive oil, then rub that rub all over the loin. Place into a roasting or baking pan with 1 cup of water. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake in a preheated oven for 3 to 6 hours (longer makes it more tender). For the last half-hour or so, remove the foil. Serve with bread, bread dumplings (the recipe for knedlíky is below), or pan-roasted potatoes.

Czech-Style Roast Pork Loin (Vepřová Pečeně)

The third meal was Czech-style goulash (guláš), which is more like a thick stew, whereas Hungarian goulash is more like a soup (gulyás, in the hungarian sense, is known as gulášová polévka, or goulash soup, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia). It was okay (not extremely flavorful). I really enjoyed it for a few meals, but my husband only ate it once for dinner.  I’ll definitely make it again, but with potatoes for my very American husband rather than knedlíky). The recipe I used was from Czechmate Diary, as well as her recipe for a smaller batch of knedlíky, which tasted very much like the recipe I used the week before to go with the pork loin.

Czech-Style Goulash (Guláš) with Bread Dumplings (Houskove Knedlíky)

Houskove Knedlíky (Bread Dumplings)

Yields: 8 servings

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1  to 3 cups milk
• 4 cups stale rye bread cubes

Directions:

1. Bring a large pot of very lightly salted water to a boil.
2. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.
3. Make a well in the center, and pour in the eggs and ½ cup of milk. Mix it all together until smooth and soft/doughy but still holding its shape (add additional milk as needed – I used just under 2 cups).
4. Fold in rye bread cubes.
5. Use wet hands to form the dough into 3 loaves about 5” long and roll in a cheesecloth, tying the ends.
6. Gently lower into water, and gently simmer for 30 minutes, rolling about 3-4 times while cooking. Remove from the water and unwrap.
7. Cut with a bread knife into half-inch-width pieces.

adapted from a recipe on allrecipes.com

Note: If left to sit for more than 10 minutes, it may get stale.

Houskove Knedlíky (Bread Dumplings), before and after cooking