funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund a gourmet meal for two featuring a perfectly proportioned standing rib roast crisp salad gigantic popovers in a very Scandinavian dessert delicious recipes for a memorable meal for two I'm Bo Joe kangas cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen well the next one was the gourmet cooking for two which I it was sort of an idea that came off the top of my head but it was because we we couldn't afford to go out and eat even when we were in California we we you know there are all these wonderful restaurants around but we didn't have money to go out I mean with students and so I when we would do is I would plan a a meal and usually when we were at the Sun said it was leftovers from the kitchen and they were really really great and so I tell the kids all right you know you can have anything you want for dinner you can eat anywhere you want you can have a picnic under the table and sometimes they did and then dick and I would have a nice little dinner for two I'd set up the a card table with as fancy of a tablecloth as I could find and and the fanciest dishes I could find and and we would and then we buy a half bottle or a little tip what did they call it a split a Cabernet Sauvignon you know and have that with our meal and and anyway so that was sort of a nugget of the idea for for gourmet cooking for two I thought like okay why can't we have a lot of menus for for two because a lot of people needed that and so that was a and I wrote to crown and they oh yeah that's a good idea so we published that book but I devised this method of taking one rib of a standing rib roast and then I froze it and then propped it up between two baked potatoes two potatoes that would bake and and bake the potatoes and the rib roast from the frozen state all at the same time and it all turned out perfectly well and so that was one of my an article I wrote for the magazine as well as something that we enjoyed for Garnett codeine for dope so I want to show you how we how I prepared the one rib now actually last week I went and asked the butcher to cut one rib and you'll see that the one that we put in the oven is a little thicker than the one I have right here but these ribs are on sale now so it's it's a good deal we put we have about a tablespoon of butter and we're going to add 1 1 crushed clove of garlic and about 1/2 a teaspoon of salt and we're going to add freshly ground pepper that goes into it then we'll mix it all up and then I have the 1 rib here and I did try out a single rib like this and it works pretty well especially when you do it the way I'll show you turn that over and put the other half of the butter on the other side of the rib like so and that'll be nicely flavored then we're going to take the rib and wrap it up in foil in a nice butcher wrap and freeze it that's why we can make it taste like a rib roast because it will stand up in the oven and it'll cook on both sides okay this goes into the freezer this one was in the freezer overnight it'll actually freeze in one or two hours if you really are you know wanting to to speed up this process and here we are and this is the nice frozen one rib that we're going to we're going to roast and the trick to making it stand up is to take this foil and make a little prep for the for the meat so that it will stay upright in the oven we don't want it to follow any or the other actually the thinner steaks will like flop over but yeah they just go in there with a pair of tongs and straighten it up okay so now this goes into my roasting pan like that and as long as we're roasting and we've got room well why not why not roast a couple of potatoes at the same time so I will these potatoes I scrubbed these earlier and you know olive oil is good for your hands too and then we're going to sprinkle them with a little bit of lemon pepper because I like that flavor and we'll just rub it all over all that feels so good all right now Oh before we I put them into the oven I do feel like I should poke the potatoes so that they don't explode I've had them explode on me and it's not too much fun well next on the agenda we're going to put together the dough for or the batter for popovers which is very same the very same pet batter as what we would use for Yorkshire puddings and to make the popovers we need to have milk flour eggs and then I'm adding a little bit of rosemary to the flavor to add flavor and we need to mix it in blender this is the secret to getting the popovers to really pop well so we're going to pour the milk and add it looks like a very small amount but it makes two nice sized popovers and we're going to add two eggs and we're gonna add the flour and we're gonna add a couple of hefty pinches of rosemary to give a nice flavor now another secret to making the popovers really pop well is to let the dough sit for a couple of hours at least or maybe even overnight and this makes exactly one cup of popover batter now what I did was sprayed with cooking spray two of the Jumbo sized muffin muffin cups and I'll pour half into each one and because the other muffin cups are going to be empty I will fill them with water because I don't want to have my muffin tins warp at all this is kind of true whenever you're making cupcakes or anything and you've got an empty muffin cap or cupcake tin put some water in it just to save your tin okay now we go to the oven I've got the oven preheated to 400 degrees in goes our one rib and in goes our popovers the biggest challenge I faced was trying to figure out what I could do that was as much fun as working at Sunset magazine back to me was my dream job I would have stayed there I'd be there yet today we came back to Duluth and then I I tried to figure out what I could do that would be as much fun before I left the the people of the editors that sons that were really really nice to me and they said well you know you could do you look up there's a there's a man by the name of something like gene Apollo Cheney in Duluth and maybe you can find a job there he had Chungking at the time I was hired to be a food product developer to come up with new food ideas I work freelance and I got this called one day to say I said well you know it wasn't from it was from the one of the new product development guys can you come up with this many feelings as you can think of to fill what we call egg rolls you know it doesn't have to be Chinese you can put anything in them and so I came up with all kinds of ideas for fillings for egg rolls like everything from from cheeseburger to Reuben feelings to even peanut butter and jelly because I knew he liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then ii6 of the Phil and five or six of the fillings that I came up with who had a pizza flavoring I put pizza flavors in and that brought you know fix these up and put them in the freezer and and I had two weeks to finish this project and I'm like 55 different fillings and he was picked up by the pilot of this personal plane and we flew to keep to lake capital gamma where he had this gorgeous layout of a looked like a beautiful resort we landed on the lake I had this cooler full of frozen egg rolls and went into the kitchen and started heating these up and made labels and sent them out they were tasting everything and jabbering as they went along and then when I sent the pizza flavoured ones out all the talking stopped it was totally quiet and she knows his pizza rolls we were making Gino's pizza rolls that was it that was there was the beginning finally sold the the pizza rolls to Totino's which Pillsbury for I know it was more than a hundred million now the next thing we're going to do is make a cake that the same cake that I made with Martha Stewart it's the Claude berry cake and I will because call berries aren't always available I'll show you what you can use instead and but I want to go through all the little details of making the cake that make it simpler once you get once you get the cake baked we're going to line the 8-inch pans with parchment paper and how do we do that well first of all we need to cut forms of the parchment paper I'll cut cut it out cut out rounds and we'll put the rounds inside the pans like silk and once we get that we'll have to cut we'll have to cut the paper so that it fits some people do this a smart way by folding the folding paper in half and I'll do that with the second one but you'll you'll be able to see that these are eight inch pans and here with this one I'll just taken fold it in half and then in quarters and we'll get the round cut out so that it will stay in the bottom of the pan I'm going to spray the pan with a little bit of cooking spray because the the otherwise the paper tends to want to to come out and then it will be easier to remove the cake afterwards too after its baked so now we've got our pans prepared ready for the batter and so the next thing we're going to do is make our batter we start out with now this is a cake that I learned to make from a girl who stayed with us she was from Finland and one day she came home from school she was at going to school in Duluth here and she came home she said my friend is having a birthday tomorrow and I'd like to make a cake for her and so I said great you know and I showed her where everything was where all the measuring ingredients were and everything else and she goes to the cupboard and she pulls out three tumblers identical tumblers and she cracks six eggs into one of the tumblers and then she fills the other two tumblers one with sugar and one with flour so they're all equal amounts well what I've done here is I cracked eggs into a measuring cup and measured a cup and a third of eggs we start out with the eggs and they need to be at room temperature because eggs will will absorb the moisture or the the heat from the room and if the eggs are really cold they won't whip as well so we put them into the mixer we'll add a little pinch of salt and then we're going to add about a teaspoon of lemon juice and then we'll add the sugar very gradually vanilla now we can we concern the mixer down just below it doesn't have sound good and we're going to add a cup and a third of flour 1 cup and 1/3 cup I did this with Martha Stewart was really really fun because she she needs makes similar cakes I saw one on TV the other day and it's real similar but this is this is even easier this is so simple because it's only like three ingredients now we take this fluffy batter and we divide it between two our two cake pans and I like to use a nice big spatula for scraping the bowl clean and I always try to divide it evenly but I don't always make manage to do that now this goes into a 350 oven for approximately half an hour here's the baked cake it didn't rise much in the out in the oven just a little bit just enough to give it a nice texture you can always make these ahead wrap them up put them in the freezer and use them another day but I did these early and I'm going to loosen the cake from the pan then we need to whip some cream and I'm going to take about a cup and a half of cream and we'll whip that and will gradually add some powdered sugar about a half a cup and we've put about a teaspoon of vanilla into the whipping cream I want to make four layers out of this so I'll cut this right in half and we'll take our rum and moisten the cake a little bit with some rum like soul and then we'll take some of the cloudberry preserves and like I said you could use apricot preserves or you can alternate you could put apricot on one layer and called airy on the other so that makes a nice dessert and then we'll take some of the whipping cream and spread that in okay and then it'll take the cake and layer and put it on top a little bit more rum like so I started out with about four tablespoons of rum and let's switch over and use the apricot preserves you see they're just about the same texture okay next comes our rum and then a little bit of cloudberry this would be the piece de resistance on the finish or a Swedish coffee table now I'm going to finish off the cake by putting the rest of the whipping cream over the top and I kind of know I'll see I might have too much here but I kind of like to just leave the layers showing so I can have a nice thick layer of whipping cream on top this can go into the refrigerator over you know for a few hours I'll put a little bit over the edge here because it kind of looks nice that way I think and of course in the summertime when we have raspberries or strawberries I just decorate the top with more berries and fruit so here we are we've got our dessert when we moved to Duluth we thought boy Duluth needs a good Scandinavian restaurant and we started looking around we had friends who decided they would like to be in on it and that would be that would be a good idea to start a restaurant and they looked around they found this place called the Royal Inn at Mont Royal and we decided well I went up there and I looked in the kitchen that was all they had was a grill a small refrigerator and we decided okay we're gonna give this a try so I went home and wrote 36 recipes for dinner burgers and those were that was our menu and but then and I we were trying these out and I was serving them to their friends around the table and missing what should we call this restaurant we had all kinds of ideas the iron skillet this that the other thing the black bear yeah but then someone said you know the problem with that building is it looks like somebody's house hey that's a great idea so we named it somebody's house and it turned out to be a good idea because we didn't have any money for advertising and when the you-know-what word spread that there's a restaurant called somebody's house and people would say well we're gonna go out to eat at somebody's house well whose house you know so that was how it would well the next thing we're going to do is make a very very very very simple salad when we're only making a salad for two people and so I don't want to mess up too many dishes and I just do the salad dressing a vinaigrette right in the salad bowl itself so I'll take a little bit of mustard and a bit of balsamic vinegar this is espresso flavored balsamic vinegar which is kind of fun a little bit in there and then we'll drip in some olive oil so that until it gets mixed in pretty well this is uh rather I mean it's it's some kind of a simple salad but it's what you could do it so easily and you can vary the flavors all you want and I'm going to put a little bit of honey into this just to counterbalance the tartness of the vinegar just a tiny bit and we're going to add salt and we're gonna add some pepper I like pepper okay and we mix that in really well then in the summertime I would go out to the garden and pick fresh fresh variety of greens or go out the farmers market and get a variety of greens found some really good ones there but these are fine because they're they're all ready to serve they're washed and ready to go you really you know once you get these things you have to be sure you use them within a couple of days because they tend to they tend to get all soft and mushy and then we're gonna mix that in with the green the vinaigrette the greens with the vinaigrette and so that makes a really nice salad right there it tastes that and see hmm I like that that's good and that's all we need for two people we've got the potatoes that are done we'll put the potato on the plate and then unwrap the standing rib roast we have for two people and that's had a chance to cool off already and then we're going to simply cut it into slices oh it's beautiful I'll see the inside of that I like it rare or what they call a medium rare and if one size a little bit bigger than the other I give that bigger side to dick Bon Appetit next time we'll master the basics with perfectly roasted chicken and garden vegetables savory garlic aioli and crisp french bread from scratch there is always something delicious cooking in my kitchen I'm Bo Joe Kangas see you next time funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund