Creamy spinach salmon packed with rich flavor! Better than restaurant quality!

Hey friends, welcome back to Markelle farm. We are in the kitchen again And it's that time of year where i'm gonna do my christmas candy that we give out to family And I like to do it early in the month So people aren't burnt out on sweets yet because you know towards christmas they're getting little gift packages from everybody And you kind of get burnt out. So I like to hit up everybody early in the month With my christmas candy so they gobble it up and they're not sweeted out yet So we make three different recipes and We package it up in little christmas tin Containers and deliver it to our family So i'm going to make all three recipes here. I usually make three batches of each recipe but for Sake of doing the video i'm going to make one batch of each So we're going to start out with the hardest. It's not that hard. We're going to be making our english toffee And it sort of tastes like almond roca if you've ever had that And this recipe goes back years since I was a little little kid My dad's employer his mother dorothy Um, she used to make this every year and she passed it down to her kids and such But dorothy would give us a package of this every december right around christmas And it was the highlight of our christmas dad would take that package And I remember he used to hide it in our big walk their big walk-in closet In their bedroom, so it didn't all get gobbled up because he loved this stuff So we've Acquired that recipe over the years and i've been making it every year since because I just absolutely love it It's a great memory from my childhood So we're going to get started So to begin with on the almond or the english toffee is we get our almonds And back in california all we all call them almonds All my farmer friends grow almonds And the tale is their almonds tell you knock the l out of them to get them out of the tree and then they're ammons Just a little joke they do out there But we have to chop these two different ways and I just use the ninja chopper here that we have And you don't have to do them separately. What happens is you'll chop them Some will get more chopped and some will get less chopped And what I use is our little spider thing here that we have for deep frying I sift it with this So all the small bits go into this bowl and then I dump all the big bits into this bowl because we need both This is going to go into the toffee itself along with some of this And then half a cup of this is going to go as a topping when we're done The fine ground almonds are going to go on top So you're going to need a cup of these Which is going to be split in half You need a half a cup of these so we'll add a half a cup of this to a half a cup of that And that actually goes inside the toffee mix All right. We've got our almonds separated out We got the half a cup of finely chopped and then we have the half a cup of fine and the half a cup, of course mixed in here and I wanted to tell you if you have bulk almonds like this it's cost you a fortune to get this in the store, but I luckily have Almond farmers that are good friends of mine that I get these from These are from the 2020 season Which is last year But if you keep these in the freezer, they don't get rancid on you. They stay fresh So always make sure your nuts if you have them in bulk Stay in the freezer So let's get on to our next step All right. The next thing on our agenda Is we have four cubes of margarine And yes, I said margarine anybody knows me knows i'd rather use butter And you can use butter but you take the chance of the butter separating and your toffee mixture is going to get nasty oily weird so The original recipe called for margarine And i've tried to use butter before with some success, but i've also had problems with it. So I just stick with the margarine Um got to do it And to the four sticks of margarine we added two cups of sugar So it's basically half and half you got two cups of margarine and two cups of sugar. I've got this on low So it starts to melt um I'm gonna bring this up slow. Anybody that's ever made like candy Knows if you do this too fast, you'll go way past your your target temperature And you'll get the wrong texture with your toffee Now we have our half sheet pan at the ready And we have our nut mixture at the ready, which we will dump in when we reach target temperature and stir it real well um Other thing you want to watch out for is crystallization So we're going to put a lid on this pan And what that's going to do is as the moisture starts to cook out of the mix The lid will trap the moisture and run it back down the sides And that's going to moisten and dissolve any stray sugar crystals that may be on the side of the pan The reason you want to avoid stray sugar crystals because once this gets going if a sugar crystal gets in there Um that hasn't been melted down it will crystallize the whole mix and you'll end up with a mess So there's some technique involved in this so we're going to get a lid and put it on here And then we'll come back when this thing starts to boil it All right, we've got our lid on and I bumped our heat up to medium since we're ready to roll I have my heat proof spatula ready to go. I have my candy thermometer ready to go And we got this mixture going Now a lot of people when they put the butter and the sugar in there will want to get stir in this thing real early Don't do that Just let the butter melt Let the sugar start melting and as it boils it'll kind of stir itself You don't want to get any stray sugar crystals on your spatula If you insist on stirring it early Use a different spatula later. Don't use the same one again. We don't want this to crystallize, but this thing will stir itself So don't worry about that So when it starts to boil We'll come back and our target temperature is just under the hard crack stage Which is a little above 300, but we're going to stop it at 290 Which is above the soft crack And below the hard crack stage if you know what that is That basically has to do with cooking sugar And those stages will be listed on your candy thermometer. You can see hard crack soft crack hard ball soft ball firm ball All that and that's what they're talking about at the temperature And it has to do with the amount of moisture that's boiled out of the mix The more moisture you boil out the hotter the mix gets Okay, now that we've got a decent boil going and i've seen the moisture coming down the sides and going down the sides of the pan That's going to take care of any stray sugar crystals that were on the side of that pan. So now we can remove the lid So the moisture can actually escape And at this point i'm going to take these almonds And stir them into the mix we're going to cook them in the mix and then we're going to place the candy thermometer also in the mix Okay, you can see the mixture is kind of stirring itself as it boils and that's what we're looking for We're up to about 240 degrees We want to be between 280 and 300 And then we'll know it we're at 290 But it's looking really good. We're not going to disturb it Now if you don't have a candy thermometer people have done this just by the look of it for years It's going to turn like a dark colored peanut butter And that's what you're looking for And you'll almost see little wisps of smoke coming out It's like just on the borderline of burning Probably is where this is almost done But we'll set up the tripod And we'll show you the process as we move forward Okay, we just hit 280 degrees we're approaching 290 And we're almost there Okay, we just hit 290. So we're going to take our Candy thermometer out of here And we're going to pour it Into the sheet pan I want to make sure this spreads out real good Nice flat surface works. Well Had to do a wardrobe change. It was getting warm in here in the kitchen But that's what she looks like poured into the pan We have uh, just a little bit of the oil separated out in the corner, but that's okay Not going to be a problem And you can see all the nuts and the bits in there So we're going to wait till this just starts to set up to where the top starts getting firm But it's still warm before we do our next step While everything's still nice and warm you want to get that pot get some water in it kind of deglazes the bottom of the pot And that water will melt that sugar and everything will be a lot easier to clean All right. It's looking real good. It's starting to set up Um, I wanted to mention if you do get a little oil separation Just take a little paper towel and just wick it right off the top. It won't hurt anything What you're worried about is if you have some big crazy oily mess But this is looking real good, so We're going to grab some chocolate chips Okay, while your mixture is still good and warm You want to sprinkle the top of this? With semi-sweet chocolate chips the ones you use for your favorite cookies Make sure they're the semi-sweet. I guess you could use milk chocolate But I don't think it would taste the same. It wouldn't bring back the same memories that That I have of my childhood So spread them out as evenly as you can And try to keep them all in one layer And this warm mixture in the pan Is going to start melting These chocolate chips is why you want them in one layer So look through And anything that's stacked up a little tall Just kind of knock it down To where you got one layer And then you'll see these chips will start to get shiny they'll change color And once they do that we can spread them out All right, as you can see our chocolate chips have turned a shiny darker color So get yourself an offset spatula The reason why you want an offset spatula is too hard to get a flat one In here, you won't be able to get down to the edges of the pan So we're going to start Just working this around the pan I go one way And then we'll turn and go the other way to make sure we get good coverage All the way across the pan So i'll turn it around now so I can get this back edge So we've gone one way I need to push a little down into that corner So then we'll start going the other way To where we got the chocolate worked into all the areas of the pan Tilting your blade to keep from it keep it from digging in To your chocolate Just kind of let it ride kind of like if you're finishing concrete so You concrete layers have a big future in the baking business if you ever want to switch occupations Comes in pretty handy your concrete finishing skills So pretty much got it i'm just going to take down like any high spots that I see Cover any areas that aren't covered. We got a little bit over here in this corner Put some over there Make sure I don't have too much along the edges But that's what we're looking for right there And if my granddaughter Ramona was here She could clean that spatula for me pretty quick But since she's not that's my job Oh, that's yummy so While this chocolate is still kind of in a soft liquid state we want to put on our finely chopped almonds And I do that with my hand Just go And just evenly distribute those across the top And we are almost done folks I'm gonna have to make a pan of this just for me, I think Because it's that little taste of the semi-sweet chocolate Puts it over the top A lot of reasons we do this video because this is a you know, a cherished recipe from way back And my grand granddaughter doesn't live local And so I can't show her a lot of stuff I mean I can when she gets older and coming here for the summers and god forbid i'm still alive I can show her some stuff but for some reason With my health issues or whatever that I die early These recipes will still be around for her. So If i'm gone Ramona, I love you And I do most of this stuff for you And if I have other grandkids in the future, i'm not excluding you. You're just not around yet But I would love you just as much And hopefully I get to see you Before my time is up So I just kind of tap those almonds down into the chocolate lightly You can clean that off that spatula and do it too but that makes those almonds stick And they don't fall off so much When you're starting to break this up, so i'm going to clean that spatula and get in here do this a little bit better If you don't do this that all that stuff wants to fly off once you start breaking this up Now you probably noticed we did not Grease or oil this pan Before we used it, but there's enough oil in that toffee mix to where it doesn't stick to the pan and once this cools I probably won't fuss with it till late tonight Because it's going to take a while to cool down and we keep our house about 63 degrees so it won't take forever But we'll start Breaking all this up And it'll all stay together and it'll all come up off the pan So that's that recipe Believe me, you will not be disappointed if you try that recipe And once you nail it to where you get it, right every time It's becoming going to become one of your favorites, too Uh really love dorothy She was like another grandma to me. I remember on the first time I had a birthday When she was around Uh, she gave me a shoe box full of 100 pennies. There was a bunch of tissue paper in there And boy, I thought i'd hit the jackpot because back then you could get One piece of bazooka bubble gum for a penny at the store In fact at one point they were half pennies so you could get two pieces with one penny But uh, I thought I was in hog heaven that all I could see was 100 pieces of bubble gum with those 100 pennies So that's one of our recipes. We're going to start the next one now That's even easier as we go. These recipes are going to get easier. This was the hardest one and it's not that hard so let's start our We used to call it oh henry bars, but It's kind of a version of a rocky road. It's really good Okay, the next recipe super easy and the one after that is even easier this recipe my girls No fail every christmas Say can you send me that recipe? So now i'm going to tell them. Hey watch the video Uh, probably send it to them anyway, but they try to make it every year, too So in a microwave safe bowl We are going to start With some reese's peanut butter chips. I'm going to get a knife Help me cut these open So in with the whole bag All right and then we're going to go with a another bag of the semi-sweet chocolate chips This is the cheaper version because they didn't have enough of the name brand version I usually buy but They're going to be just fine And then a whole bag of butterscotch chip And that goes in the bowl The bigger bowl you can get that'll work in the microwave the better Because once you start mixing this stuff up It uh, the bowl gets a little thick or a little little full So we're just going to stir these chips up So they have a good mixture even before we melt them So we don't have to combine as much when they come out of the microwave And yes, I said microwave simple simple simple recipe so Three minutes on high in the microwave All right That was three minutes in the microwave be careful your bowl is going to be a little bit warm So now we're going to come in here and stir this up Now that it's mixed or melted Until we get one solid color Scraping the side of the bowl just a little bit make sure everything's mixed up If you don't have a microwave by chance, you can melt this in a double boiler on the stove You never want to put chocolate directly over the heat Because it'll separate on you And you'll make a mess. So always over a double boiler so you get Really slow even heat All right, we got one solid color now So we're going to let this mixture sit for three minutes And that's going to let it cool just a little bit so we don't melt our marshmallows and then we'll continue from there We're waiting for that mixture to cool so we can mix it together. We have another sheet pan on the ready over here We put a pre-cut piece of parchment. I can't say enough about those If you do a lot of baking get your pre-cut parchment, it's fantastic And then we have another piece of parchment here to help us smash down the top which you'll see Us doing a little bit and then I use a sheet pan to put on top of that Just to make sure it's nice and flat now What we're going to mix into the mix Is two cups of plain rice krispies and a small 12 ounce bag of marshmallows but these uh Guys are trying to mess with the consumers again. They're go going to 10 ounces like we talked about before Even this off-brand of chocolate chips is now 10 ounces. They're supposed to be 12 ounces so fleecing the public again So three minutes has elapsed We're going to dump in our two cups of rice krispies And our bag of the mini marshmallows You can see why we need a big bowl So we're going to stir this up now slowly and carefully because Otherwise you'll make a mess all over your counter but just kind of fold everything in and When you get all done You won't be able to see any of the white of the marshmallows. They'll continue folding and stirring Until the white of the marshmallows goes away So i'm scraping the bottom of the bowl getting some of that Chocolate mixture up off the bottom It's a really tasty recipe kelly calls this stuff christmas crack Because you once you start eating it, you just can't stop. So It's not a good idea to leave a lot of this laying around Because it'll get ugly folks. You'll be stopping by that little Pan of goodies every time you pass it eating one So you see how the the white of the Marshmallows is now gone and we want to work pretty quick with this So we'll go over to our sheet pan And we want to dump all this out While it's still workable Get as much out of that Bowl as you can. It's pretty sticky stuff Good idea to use a spatula. I love these little spatulas from pampered chef. We got like Eight of these darn things because we love them Otherwise the dishwasher would always be They'd always be in the dishwasher. We never get to use one So then you're going to spread this stuff out kind of hold your parchment as you do it because the parchment's going to want to move around in the pan and unlike The english toffee we did We just want to get close to rectangular with this. You don't have to get crazy I'm gonna put my finger on the other side now so I can go this way And you're just flattening it out You get kind of the same thickness all the way across Get a little extra there So once we get close to rectangular Is when we're gonna Give it the old smash And that's going to smooth out the top now. You could leave it like this if you like the rustic Texture to it Wouldn't hurt it a bit But I like a little flatter. It's easier to handle And ramona i'm going to clean that off too But that's going to be in a minute so we put our other parchment over the top Get our other sheet pan And then we just smash it down And you can see that giving us a nice flat top to that I got a little chocolate on my sheet pan. I gotta wipe up So we're gonna let this cool just like the other recipe and this parchment will peel right off the top And the parchment off the bottom same way. It'll it'll come right off of that parchment All right. That is another recipe down. We've got that put out to cool, too So on to the next recipe First thing we're going to roast some almonds or some almonds. I'm starting to say almonds now that I don't live out there But a single layer of almonds on a sheet And they're going to go in the oven at 325 for 15 minutes These are whole Raw almonds And you'll find that when you roast them, you'll get a lot nuttier crispier flavor to them Back in the day when we were harvesting almonds in the field when I was farming We would get the almonds that fell down onto the motor of the pickup machine At the end of the day and we would crack those out and eat them and those were roasted Almonds, they're really good do yourself a favor folks wash your dishes and utensils as you go don't turn a holiday baking experience into a nightmare by Having a heaping sink full of dishes to have to do when you're done Believe me that spoils all the fun All right, our almonds are toasted and they smell really nutty toasty It smells so good in this kitchen right now with all the chocolates and the nuts and all that smell Fantastic Now for the next recipe you don't have to wait for these to cool because we're going to be melting chocolate anyway And we can mix it together and while these are warm They'll kind of keep the chocolate In a melted state. They won't cool off the chocolate really quick So let's get the chocolate going And homie, if you're watching I need more almonds So we've got one bag of the milk chocolate chips And we've got them in a little bit smaller bowl because we want to try to concentrate Everything in the middle without spreading out all over the place So one minute in the microwave for these And you'll find when you're cooking in microwaves If you're cooking an item and it says to cook it for one minute If you cook two of those items, it's generally going to take two minutes Three of those items it'll take three minutes So you remember we cooked three bags of those earlier took three minutes So kind of rule of thumb when you're using microwaves Our chocolate wasn't quite melted enough. So we put it in for another 15 seconds And we'll keep checking it stirring it up until we get the right melt that we want but don't go more than about 15 seconds at a whack because You don't want to hit this stuff too hard because it'll separate as if you had it on the stove And then once it gets close once you give it a quick stir It'll kind of even out the heat and the rest of whatever's not melted will melt. So our chocolate is sufficiently melted now And we may have to re-melt as we go If it starts setting up too much and hard too hard to work with we can pop it in for another 15 seconds But now we're going to start incorporating some of our almonds And I don't pour them all in at a time I put a little bit in at a time because I really didn't measure these almonds So I want to make sure I don't overload the chocolate to where they don't get coated So i'll come back when I have the right amount of Nuts in the bowl here So just like when we were stirring up the rocky road mix. You just want to stir until all the almonds are coated And if you get to where you get more chocolate than almonds later on down the bottom of the bowl You just take some more almonds throw them in there almonds Throw them in there and mix them up So now we're going what we're going to do is we're going to take like a little teaspoon And we're going to pick up three to four almonds on a spoon And we're going to drop them onto our parchment papers And make little nut clusters out of these This is a good sit-down job where you can sit down at the table Have your kids help you the kids will have a blast So we'll get some of these onto the cookie sheet So we're going to get in here in our mix pick up Three to four nuts on a spoon And then we'll put them Right here on the parchment and you want to kind of make sure they stay together You don't want to spread them out. Otherwise, they won't stick together when they cool Just like that It could not get any simpler And these are fantastic You can do these with any nut you can do it with peanuts or cashews, whatever you got walnuts You can get creative with it too you can add other stuff to the mix they You wanted to make a batch of that toffee with just the toffee itself And then break it up later into little pieces Then maybe mix that into the mix have little toffee pieces in it but get creative and Make stuff your own when you're doing this kind of stuff But this is going to fill this sheet up and you don't have to use a cookie sheet for this You could just lay the parchment out on the table, too. It works. It's fine but A little more time consuming than the other recipes And you can use your other finger to get in there Lay that stuff out make you a little bit faster, but then you'll have Dirty finger So we're going to continue to do this. I'm not going to bore you with the whole darn sheet And we'll come back when we're done All right, folks, uh the nut clusters we ended up with a pan and a half of those So we got all three of our recipes made if you remember we're going to make two more batches of everything But this will get me started on my gift boxes I got to do some finish up some painting on the on the chicken coop today. I want to go out and do that now It's warmed up outside So hope you enjoy these recipes make some time with your family schedule a day and do your holiday baking together with your kids and get grandma involved and make it a tradition where you get together with family and Make this stuff to give out to your friends and family I even play christmas music while i'm doing this to kind of get me in the mood but I hope you enjoyed the video and We're going to get this stuff packaged up tonight We'll see you on the next video So stay safe. Stay healthy. We love you guys And as we used to say it works, so we didn't offend anybody Merry happy hana kwanzaa That includes everybody. I think Love you guys. Bye