Peanut Butter Twigs

When I was a little girl, my very favorite candy bar was Peanut Butter Twix.  Over the years they’ve disappeared repeatedly from store shelves, only to reemerge in new packaging or with a new spin.  At one point, you even had to buy them on the cookie isle.  Their latest rendition, Twix PB, is simply an abomination.  The idea sounds good, changing the cookies to chocolate, but it’s not.  On the down side, this means I can no longer get my favorite childhood treat.  On the upside, the lack thereof is what inspired me to recreate the original, but on my terms.  No artificial crap, no hydrogenated whatever, and no mystery, can’t pronounce it, ingredients.  Oh… and no dipping, because quite frankly, dipping is a pain in the ass, and we already covered that here.

Here’s what you’ll need: (minus salt and vanilla.  D'oh!)

Crust:
½ cup (1 stick) butter
½ cup Powdered Sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour

Peanut butter layer:
1 cup Peanut butter (organic or all natural)
1 ¼ cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
3 Tablespoons half and half

Chocolate ganache:
1 cups milk chocolate chips
2 Tablespoons half and half

First things first.  Preheat your oven to 300° and line a square 8x8 pan with parchment, leaving plenty of excess for ‘handles’.  If you butter the pan first, the parchment will stay in place better. 

Let’s start with the crust.  In a mixing bowl, beat together a stick of butter and a teaspoon of vanilla until it looks like this:

Sift in the powdered sugar (that’s icing sugar for you non-Americans).  I know I’m starting to sound like a nag, but yes, you really do need to sift it. 

Keep mixing until it becomes the consistency of icing. 

Now add the flour and mix some more.  When it looks like this, you’re going to think I’ve led you astray.

But keep mixing.  It will eventually come together to form a dough.  When it does, dump it into your pan.

Press it evenly into the bottom of the pan.  If it sticks to your fingers, just flour them a bit.  When it’s mostly even, prick the dough all over with a fork. 

This is called docking.  It allows steam to escape during the cooking process, which keeps bubbles from forming in the crust and keeps it flat.  Bake the crust for 35 minutes, or until it’s golden around the edges and just beginning to turn on top.  Allow it to rest in the pan for 5 minutes or so, and then remove it to a cooling rack. 

When the crust has cooled, it’s time to start on the filling… topping?  Whatever.  Peanut butter and chocolate goodness.  In your mixing bowl… you did wash your mixing bowl while the crust was cooling, right?  Do it now, I’ll wait.  *whistling the theme song from Jeopardy*  Ok, now that it’s clean and dry, throw in the peanut butter, butter, salt, and vanilla and mix until it looks like this:

Sift in the powdered sugar (there I go with the sifting again) and continue mixing.  When it looks like this:

It’s time for the half and half.  3 Tablespoons will make a world of difference.  It should come together into a smooth, dough like consistency.  Scoop it onto your crust.

Time for pressing again.  At first, I thought I’d just spread it with an offset spatula.  Um, no.  Fingers are definitely the tool of choice here. 

And now it’s finally time for the chocolate.  As I said before, we’re not dipping.  We’re just going to spread a nice layer of chocolate ganache on top.  In a glass container (I like to just use my measuring cup) add 1 cup of chocolate chips and 2 Tablespoons of half and half. 

Microwave for 30 seconds, then stir, stir, stir, and keep stirring.  Until it becomes a smooth, fudgy icing.  Then, spread that over the peanut butter layer. 

Refrigerate for at least an hour to allow everything to firm up before cutting.  Run a knife along the pan edges to loosen the chocolate and peanut butter layers, then pull the whole thing out and place it on a cutting board.  Pressing straight down with your knife, cut the whole thing in half, and then cut each half into long fingers. 

These are more delicious than any store bought candy bar could be.  Even if Twix decides to reincarnate the original, I think I’ll stick with my twigs.

So, what was your favorite childhood treat?   

Noodle Fu!

I learned to make this Cantonese dish when I worked in a small town Chinese restaurant. It's amazingly simple to make, but it really doesn't taste simple. It's 3 of the 4 food groups in one dish, so it's healthy, and it uses a relatively cheap cut of beef (and the other ingredients cost virtually pennies) so it's a great budget dinner. And it's fast. From start to finish you can be eating in probably about 20 minutes.

The trick to the fast cooking is a hot pan. You're going to have to be ready for it. Crunch time can create the feeling that multi-tasking is the best way to go, but this, you really need to just take a breath and do all the chopping first before you start putting things in the pan. Besides, there isn't much chopping and 5 minutes of doing one thing only won't kill you. It might kill me, but you should be fine. 

Chow fun noodles, the namesake of this dish, are wide flat rice noodles. You (well, I) buy them fresh in the deli part of the grocery store. They're usually near the tofu, so if yours keeps tofu near the veggies, that's where they might be, but mine keeps all the asian foods next to the sushi stand which is near the deli...

Anyway.

Beef Chow Fun

What you need (you need to take the freaking coffee pot of the counter when you're taking pictures of dinner):

1/2 lb flank steak, or some other not expensive cut of lean beef
2 tsp peanut oil
1 tsp sesame oil
1 inch chunk of ginger, minced or grated
a few cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, sliced
1 pkg noodles (separate them by hand a bit before you toss them in)
soy sauce
few handfuls of beansprouts
2 green onions, chopped,
handful of cilantro, chopped
lime juice (optional)

What you gotta do:

Since you need to have everything chopped and ready to go before you start cooking, do the fresh stuff first, then the veggies you're going to cook, then the meat. You'll end up needing (and having to wash) only one cutting board that way, and still manage to avoid cross contamination. 

If you're using the lime, chop it in half. Chop the cilantro, and the green onions. Set these aside on a clean plate to keep them away from the raw meat. 

Mince the garlic and ginger. If you have lemongrass, and feel like using it, mince about a tablespoon of it. I had lemongrass, so I used it.

I also had a few lemongrass stalks that I'd put in water a while ago... they've got roots!

Cut the onion in half and then slice each half into widths similar to your noodles. Noodle widths will vary but are usually about half an inch (or 1 cm if you are anywhere in the world other than the US).

If your onions are freakishly strong and your eyes water just looking at them, cover them with a wet paper towel. Onions contain sulphur compounds that combine with the water in your eyes to make sulphuric acid. (Inorite! Ouch!) The water in the towel will absorb the compounds and prevent it from getting into your eyes. And yes, it's safe to touch, it's not strong acid or anything, it's just that the amount it takes to irritate eyes is ridiculously miniscule.

Slice the beef into thin strips, going against the grain of the meat.

Now that you've got everything chopped and ready (see, took no time at all) heat half the peanut oil in a wide flat pan (or a wok if you have one) over medium high heat. Add half the sesame oil, half of the ginger, half of the garlic, and all the beef.

Stir fry until the beef is mostly browned, just a few minutes, and then remove it from the pan.

Add the rest of the peanut oil to the pan, and once it's hot, the rest of sesame oil, the rest of the ginger and garlic, and all the onions.

Give them a minute or so of being shoved around in the hot oil before you add the noodles and soy sauce. All you're really doing to the noodles is heating them until they separate from each other. Breaking them up by hand a bit before you add them helps, as does a minute with a cover on the pan.

Once the noodles have softened and separated, put the beef back in the pan, add the beansprouts, cilantro, green onion and lime juice. Toss until it's all combined and heated.

This makes dinner for two and a bit of leftovers for lunch the next day.

Chopped peanuts probably wouldn't be out of place in this dish, but they didn't add them at the restaurant so I don't.

I love noodles. It's really hard to get anything decent in Winnipeg that's got good noodles in it. For some reason, chow mein here means stir fried cabbage with deep fried egg noodles on top as a garnish. No, I have no clue why; it makes no sense to me at all. It just means that I never go out for Chinese here. Why would I? I can make it myself. And it's only one pan to wash! ;)

What's your favourite noodle dish?