28 oz Wine Glass

Spring Rolls

2011-05-29T19:46:00.009-05:00

Two posts in one day after months without a peep? Yes! I am prone to my particular excesses.

Spring rolls are amazing in the summer. I am not going to call these "easy," as there is a modicum of skill and some deep prep involved in assembling the mise en place. But they are a good project for a weekend afternoon, if you are crazy like me and enjoy the meditation of preparing many little components just so.

Ingredients:
- spring roll wrappers
- rice vermicelli, cooked, drained and chilled (I used the thinnest I could find, but this would actually be more authentic with the next size up)
- shredded chicken
- carrots, julienned and quick-pickled (a splash of vinegar and 1 Tbsp sugar, add water to cover)
- basil leaves
- mint leaves

Dry spring roll wrappers are discs of rice paper.

Soak them in water for about 15 seconds per side. Too long and they will get waterlogged and slippery and won't stick properly when you go to roll them.

Then transfer to another surface for assembly (a slightly moistened cookie sheet, in my case)

Plop the noodles on the round wrapper, slightly off center. You want them to be on the side that is closer to you.

Add all the other fillings.

Now start rolling. Always roll away from yourself, as this makes it easier to get a nice compact package instead of a floppy roll.

Do this a bunch of times. Your first few will probably be floppy and ugly. Eat them immediately to destroy the evidence of your failure. I usually eat at least 2 while making them because being a one-woman operation means I have to conduct my own QC audits.

Peanut dipping sauce:
- 1 Tbsp peanut butter
- 1 tsp soy sauce
- a splash of sesame oil
- a splash of rice wine vinegar
- minced garlic, or garlic powder
- chili paste, or red pepper flakes
- 3+ Tbsp water to thin

Basil Limeade

2011-05-29T16:30:00.004-05:00

It is summer. My basil planter is full to bursting, and I've had to harvest 2x weekly to keep up. I didn't have anything planned for this weekend's harvest, so I came up with basil limeade.

Ingredients:
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
3 limes
1 lemon
fistful of basil
Club soda

Heat the water and sugar until the sugar is all dissolved. Zest all the citrus and add it and the juice to the hot syrup. Chop the basil leaves and add them to the mix.
If you are patient, chill the syrup in the fridge before proceeding. If not, fill a glass with ice and pour 3-4 oz. syrup over ice. Top off with club soda. Enjoy your summer.

Scattered

2011-04-05T19:44:00.004-05:00

So. Yeah. That's brussels sprouts, rosemary potatoes and fish masala. on my camera phone because I'm tired.

and I got a little distracted.

but THIS FISH MASALA IS DELICIOUS. My kingdom for some cilantro though. This is inspired by a dish at Himalaya that I love.

Start by sweating a medium sliced onion in a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil. Add a couple of slices of ginger toss around for a few minutes, the onion will still be pretty sturdy. add two cloves of chopped up garlic. Add a tablespoon of garam masala, pinch of cinnamon, pinch of fenugreek, pinch of coriander and as much spice as you like. Stir to combine. add a 14 oz can of tomatoes. simmer for 10 minutes. Place fish in mixture and poach for about ten minutes or until done? I used barramundi, but any mild white fish will work well.

serve with addled side dishes. or you know. rice.

Chicken Adobo

2011-02-04T11:55:00.005-06:00

Ok, so I've made my friend Mike's pork adobo before and it is addicting and porky and salty and sweet and all the bad things for you in life. I'm actually making it right now using the excuse that the oven will help keep the house warm in this unseasonable Texan cold snap.

But the NY Times posts this article about the ADOBO WARS and publishes a chicken adobo recipe. This recipe is amazing. It winds up tasting like a clean curry. The sugar caramelizes slightly on the chicken skin. I just poured the left over sauce on leftover rice and ate it alone, but it also goes well with other meats. If it makes it that far.

So I took one camera phone picture of my bowl before I devoured it and most of the rest of the chicken. I made this recipe with a whole butchered chicken (thighs, drums, tenderloins, breast, wings) and it worked fine. It's not going to be as sinful as an all dark meat version, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Served with stir fried bok choy.

Also yes. This is the only pretty set of bowls in the house. Stephanie bought them for me years ago and they are still trucking as the happy part of my odds and ends plate collection.

Fried Rice

2011-01-24T19:40:00.008-06:00

I'm sorry. I haven't been around. I've let this fallow. BUT. On this day, where I am the most tired, I am going to show you what I cook when I am the most tired and have to deal with fridge leftovers and have just enough energy to cut an onion and sausage and stuff into pieces.

It took me more time to import pictures, half heartedly tweak, upload, write, than it did to make this.

And it's all thanks to this stuff. Which was on sale in two giant packages for 8.88. This is hilarious. Trust me. It's this sweet concentrated dried Chinese sausage which is all garlicky and I don't know, it's crack man. The best part is that it lasts forfreakingever in your pantry and is perfect for omigodtired days like this. But feel free to use any protein you like. Tofu. Chicken bits. There is a fine tradition of making fried rice with cheap hot dogs.

So I had an eighth of a week old cabbage, half an onion, CRACKSAUSAGE, garlic, some sad carrots and half a thing of rice that was a couple of days old from the last time I made this (emergency food for our group of friends after a showing of "Handmade Nation")

Chop about as finely as you feel like. I didn't really feel like.

order was oil hot, sausage hot, onions carrots cabbage, shove around for five minutes, crumble rice into pan.

My sad little rice pot.

Oh eggs. Shove everything to a side. leave a bit of space. crack eggs into space. You can scramble them if you want ahead of time. I like the different colors. also I don't want to wash another bowl.

And then remembered there was some leftover cooked chard in the fridge.

Yay green things.

Really anything goes here. I mean. After this I splashed in some chinese wine, a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, a splash of fish sauce and a little white pepper and sesame oil. And tossed it around on high heat for a while. the burny crunchies on the bottom are a bonus and not a failure.

Yay and there's enough for tomorrow for when I also don't feel like making dinner.

I got home at 7:00 pm. I let the dog out (who. who who. who who) and fed the cat. And then embarked on this quest. It is 8:00 and I am eating this food and posting this debacle of a blog post. See, I love you. I could have been depressingly watching Hoarders.

FRIED RICE

ingredients:
day old rice
onion
garlic
carrots
stuff from your fridge
asian product (soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, hoisin, white pepper, whatever you have handy)
eggs

heat up pot. Add protein of choice, lightly brown. Add onions and and garlic and carrots and whatever raw vegetable matter you have chopped up. stir around for five or so minutes. crumble rice into pot with hands. wash rice off your sticky hands. mix around for a few minutes until rice is warm. shove all this stuff to one corner. crack eggs if you want into the open pan area. stir until set. mix all together.

add Asian Product by the tablespoon for flavor. Not as much soy sauce as you would think. I like a couple of tablespoons of soy, a couple of tablespoons of rice wine, a tablespoon of sesame oil, and a touch of fish sauce and seasoning with white pepper instead of black. your rice, your call.

mix together, add anything that doesn't need cooking but just needs warming up.

let sit on medium to high heat for a couple of minutes if you want a crust to form which is actually delicious. eat.

Morning

2010-10-10T13:18:00.005-05:00

Closer to noon, but who's counting.
Super strong French-press coffee, and nectarine-berry-black pepper galette.
We watched Julie & Julia last night and the Julia portions were delightful. I think this is why I woke up wanting to make something French. Emily is planning to make boef bourguignion and tarte tatin tonight in tribute.

I had a single nectarine left, and it wasn't very ripe, and I was hungry. Somehow this seemed like less work than trying to eat an underripe nectarine.

Threw a slovenly pastry dough together in my mixer bowl: 1 stick butter, ~1 cup flour, a bit of salt and enough cold water to bind together.

Breakfast. Lunch. Brunch. It's 1:20pm.

Chilled green soup

2010-08-11T18:09:00.004-05:00

a.k.a. Fridge cleaning before the veggies go bad.

It is the middle of another goddamn Houston summer so most nights I want the coldest, simplest food possible. Inspired by this NPR article on the subject, I set out to salvage a few items of produce that were getting kind of old:

1. 2 zucchini
2. 1 bunch parsley
3. 1 head roasted garlic

Shown here still in the pot, cuz I'm lazy. With lazy chunks of homemade bread.

Chunked everything up and boiled directly (adding parsley at the very end of cooking), didn't brown the veggies or use lemon as per the article's directives.
Once cooked, the pot of boiled veggies actually sat in my fridge for a few days before I got around to blending and seasoning...I waited to add salt until after I'd tasted the cold version, as cold tends to blunt flavors and you typically need more seasoning to get your point across. Also added a touch of half-and-half (aka remnants of cream and a glug of milk) while blending to round out the salt+green flavor.

It tastes really fresh (huge bunch of parsley). And cold. mmmm.

Shrimp and Garlic Chive Flowers

2010-08-09T21:32:00.004-05:00

Had leftover shrimp from making spring rolls and bought chive flowers at the market.

Shrimp:

marinate in chopped garlic, grated ginger, a little salt and about a tablespoon or two of corn starch. I also added the bottoms of the chive flowers chopped up fine and a tablespoon of chinese cooking wine and a little white pepper. mix together, should be a little ooblicky. Basically this sits around while you cook the chive flowers or whatever veggies you're having that day. Stir fry for about 7 minutes or until pink on the outside.

Chive flowers:

Chop into manageable strips - 2 inches? um. Stir fry all but the tops. salt. pepper. uhhh until tender. 5...minutes? add tops and cook about two minutes more. om nom.

Nostalgia Dinner

2010-08-08T23:09:00.007-05:00

Apparently I get the urge to make Hong Shao Rou about once a year. This time I fried up the pork belly in caramelized sugar and oil and it really brought out the color and sweetness I remembered.

So along with the pot of porky coronary failure are the little side dishes.

Chinese broccoli. Steamed for about five minutes with a little garlic and then topped with oyster sauce. They have delicious crunchy stems and well. Sometimes you need veggies.

Braised eggs. Softboil eggs, peel carefully, and then tuck into the braising liquid of the pork. They get all brown and porky and delicious, and if you keep the braising temperature low enough, they don't get all chalky in the middle.

Bao! Because sometimes you need something to dip into the pork belly sauce or make a pork belly sammich.

I think the recipe I used was

1/2 c warm water
1 packet's equivalent of yeast
about a tablespoon of lump sugar
3/4 c milk
1 T butter
3 c flour (or enough flour to make a smooth dough)

combine warm water, yeast, sugar milk and butter. Let sit for 10 minutes. Mix in flour. Knead until smooth. Let rest for an hour and a half. Punch down. Let rise another hour. Form into little buns. place in steamer. Let proof for 15 minutes. Steam for 10 minutes. Eat.

I lay down moist paper towel and spray with pam in the steamer. Helps with the release. traditionally napa cabbage is used, but I didn't have any on hand.

Now have lunch for a few days, a little vat of cooking fat, and HI I THINK WE'RE BACK.

2010-07-18T18:37:00.001-05:00

http://www.culinaryescapade.com/?p=450

but we left out half a cup of sugar and substituted half of the heavy cream with coconut milk and 2 cups of all purpose flour and one cup of cake flour.

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt
1 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
4 eggs
1 tbsp grated lime zest
1 cup heavy cream (35%)
3/4 cup dark rum (Tortuga if you can get it, if not any good dark rum will do)

Hot Pot pt 1 (broth)

2010-02-18T23:20:00.003-06:00

Okay. Tonight I am starting the hot pot broth and I will kick myself later if I don't write this down right as I'm doing it. In this bigass pot I have

1 lb pork soup bones (lots of knuckles and neck)
2 large fat carrots cut into diagonal chunks(4 or 5 normal sized ones, these were the freak asian market ones)
1 lemon grass stem cut into diagonal chunks
2 inches of galangal root sliced thick
a half dollar sized knob of ginger sliced thick
half a head of garlic
1 tomato, sliced into wedges
2 stalks of celery
1 onion sliced into half moons
1 Tb Szechwan peppercorns
2 Tb salt
1 Tb sesame oil
2 Tb chinese cooking wine
water to the top of the pot

let simmer overnight and reevaluate.

This morning I added another large knob of galangal, more salt, an extra lemongrass stem and another inch or two of ginger.

Asian slaw

2010-01-17T14:32:00.005-06:00

uh. hi. Yeah I know I've been bad. But I've been trying to cut down on dishes that are bad for me and cream heavy and meat heavy and I finally made something delicious that boys will eat that is also delicious.

I hated cole slaw. Forever. I mean. It was just scary. Turns out, more mayo issues! So we had this at our friend's parent's house and it was delicious and I made a version out of whtaever leftovers we had.

Essentially, if you ever feel like slicing things up really thin

Or just grating things for a while. make this.

I used half a cabbage, a large carrot, 4 sprigs of green onion, two crimini mushrooms and a handful of peanuts for the slaw itself. And the shredded leftovers of a roast chicken from earlier in the week, but this can be omitted to make this a vegetarian dish.

For the dressing i used 1 garlic clove, 1 tablespoon of sesame oil, a teaspoon of black vinegar, a tablespoon of rice wine, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and blended it all together. I'm going to have to play around with these ratios, but it should make enough to toss the slaw in. you can also vary ratios to taste. I tend to like things a little soy saucey and a little tangy. Ginger is good if you have it and a little black pepper. You can add a touch of sugar if you want, but i think the vegetables work well for sweetness on their own.

Other things you can add if you have it: cilantro, mint, bean sprouts, sriracha, citrus juice.

Toss all together. can sit around let the flavors meld but man I just ate it two minutes after I was done mixing it and it's way too tasty for raw cabbage.

Rugelach

2010-01-09T17:10:00.005-06:00

Ruuuuugelach. Rugelach rugelach rugelach.

regular rugelach (apricot-walnut-raisin):

chocolate-walnut-nutella rugelach:

how to ruge your lach:

RUUUUGELAAAACH

Recipe courtesy of Epicurious.com Modified to chocolate version by me. I recommend using less filling than stated in the original recipe, as it oozed everywhere while baking.

The flavor trip

2009-12-28T14:28:00.003-06:00

Yeah, yeah, we didn't do an update on our Thanksgiving or Christmas feasts, get over it. There was turkey, porchetta, potatoes, all that stuff. Free range organic turkeys are totally worth it.

This post is not really about Thanksgiving, though. This post is about our Christmas evening flavor trip.

Lauren is a gifting mastermind. I had no idea what she meant when she said I was going to be a co-conspirator "the experience" of Emily's gift. Also: best gift reveal ever. First out of the bag was a container of sour cherry syrup, followed by random fruits, then a packet of chocolate, a jar of salsa verde accompanied by a bag of tortilla chips, and a box of sour candies...and finally at the bottom of the bag were the Miracle Berry tablets. Surprise, flavor trip time! Kept us guessing to the end.

So we set up shop on the living room floor and proceeded to flavor trip. We followed the instructions on the box of Miracle Berry tablets (dissolve 1 tablet in mouth, coat tongue all over). We each picked up a slice of lemon and I swear we collectively held our breath before I bit into mine.

I think I said "Holy shit." (Merry Christmas)

And then I proceeded to devour the lemon wedge and sample everything else we had. We all dug in. It was by far the trippiest thing I've ever experienced. I will attempt to tabulate a list.

Super Awesome

Lemons - taste sweet and tart and lemony like the most delicious lemonade. Mind-blowingly good. You can still feel the acid on your lips so it's kind of like sticking your tongue to a battery.
Limes - likewise. There seemed to be a saturation point beyond which additional acid was able to overcome the effects of the miracle berry.
Mandarins - taste like CANDY
Sour cherry syrup - became tart instead of puckeringly sour; deep, rich cherry flavors came forward.
Cranberries - taste like cranberry jelly

Good but Weird

Granny Smith apples - without their tartness, they turn into boring regular apple flavor
Pink Lady apples - not much different, just sweet.
Grapefruit - not as sour
Blackberries - closer to what wild blackberries are like, kind of hard to tell since they weren't in season.
Salsa verde - bizarrely sweet, like a mango or pineapple salsa. Really weird.
Roma tomato - became peach-like, but with the tomato's herbal notes. Also really weird.
Shockers candy - not horribly sour!

Not so Good

Guinness - the edge is gone, thus negating the point of drinking Guinness.
100% cacao chocolate pastilles - still horribly bitter!

I went back for seconds on the lemon and lime, they were so tasty. The effects seemed to wear off around the 30-minute mark, which was fine by us. The Miracle Berry package said it might last up to one hour, but we were eating throughout so that probably stripped the compound from our tongues faster.
We had antacid on hand to neutralize the obscene amounts of acid we were consuming; I recommend that approach to any who want to follow in our footsteps.

You're Old

2009-12-04T20:56:00.003-06:00

I made a croquembouche for Emily's birthday. The candles were supplied by friend Lauren. I made 2 flavors of pastry cream filling: Turkish coffee and vanilla + orange blossom. This was my first time doing such intensive sugar work, and let me tell you spun sugar is very messy and fiddly, but so pretty in the end.

Emily is not actually old. Yet.

Making chinese bbq pork buns

2009-11-22T12:38:00.003-06:00

Okay. For years. I have not been able to replicate how the hell my mother made these completely delicious pork buns. I've looked up recipes online, I've experimented, I keep winding up with passable, but not great buns.

I called her today and finally asked.

Okay. For context. The usual recipe is this:

Warm water 1 cup
Active dry yeast 1 (1/4-ounce) package
Flour 1 cup
Sugar 1/4 cup
Shortening or oil 2 T
Water 1/2 cup
Salt 1 1/2 teaspoons
Flour 3 to 3 1/2 cups

Right?

My mother, instead of oil or water - uses butter and milk. And adds an egg.

My mother has been putting bbq pork into steamed brioche for years.

Pictures and recipe to follow. I have some weirdass mashup of French Quarter Redneck pulled pork bbq buns going on here.

Sometimes you have to move cakes

2009-11-21T10:40:00.002-06:00

And if you're me, you don't own anything that actually encloses or protects a cake or keep it from moving.

But you sure do have packing materials from a tv.

28 oz Wine Glass 40 oz Whisky Shot

2009-11-18T18:45:00.008-06:00

A Very Special guest post by Ender

Hey, look at this, it’s an update! And one by a sane person at that! (Ed.--At this time we have not received documentation of the author's sanity from any licensed medical or psychiatric professional.) This post contains no ham cakes, cake hams, spatchcocks, or Chinese rocks that appear to be meat but are in fact rocks. This post is about ribs and beer. Specifically, the combining of the two into Guinness braised ribs. Do I have your attention there? I thought so. Let us begin the lesson.

What do you need for this party? Ribs and Guinness obviously, but you need a bit more than that. Let’s try:

- 4 lbs of ribs (I used boneless pork ribs because they were cheap)
- 1 Guinness bottle (drink the rest while waiting for it to cook or while eating)
- 1 cup low sodium beef broth
- Plenty of kosher sea salt
- Plenty of fresh ground pepper
- 2 diced carrots
- 2 diced celery stalks
- 1 diced onion (I used yellow)
- 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
- 2 teaspoons dried thyme
- 1 overloaded tablespoon of tomato paste
- 4 cloves worth of minced garlic (or spoonfuls to taste if using pre-minced stuf)
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 bay leaf

Crank your oven to 325 F and we’ll get started cooking.

First up is the meat.

I got a pretty decent cut of it here, but the nice thing about the recipe is that you can swap out the meat with other kinds and just adjust cooking time accordingly. Take it, cut it into manageable pieces and thoroughly coat it in ground pepper and kosher sea salt

Now I know what you are thinking- why kosher salt if you are using pork ribs? The answer is a religious joke that I’m pretty sure they won’t let me get away with on their blog. (Ed.--Probably not, but we'd enjoy hearing it for ourselves.) So let’s go with a scientific explanation.

Salt is hygroscopic, that is it attracts water molecules. This is why it used to be used as a desiccant. For our purposes here we want that, it draws out the water molecules from the meat. This is why it is kosher incidentally; it was used to draw out blood in the act of koshering meat. Thanks for the history lesson Dan, but how does this relate to cooking me delicious ribs? Well now that the water has been drawn out, osmosis will bring it back in, along with it some of the dissolved salt. The salt denatures the protein, making the meat extra tender, and leaving behind any additional minerals brought in giving it a bit of flavor, hence why we used sea salt. Now you have established a low level fluid flow in the meat. If you were doing anything else you would want to wipe off the salt now, but this stuff is going to be submerged shortly so don’t worry about it. You want the process to continue to really inject the flavor into the meat and the low sodium beef broth will ensure the end result isn’t too salty.

This concludes the unnecessary detour. Hopefully you didn’t waste time and coated the rest of your meat while reading this. Take the meat and set it to the side.

Now get out a large pot and put the olive oil in it. Get it hot and put the meat in.

Thoroughly brown the meat on all sides.

Once you’ve gotten it all browned, take the meat out and set it to the side. Toss your diced carots, celery and onion in the same pot with the hot and now flavored olive oil and sauté them until they are soft. This should take maybe 10 minutes depending on your stove and heat.

Add the garlic, rosemary, and thyme, continue to sauté until the garlic is mixed in (you can tell because the garlic smell overpowers the others)

Now add the tomato paste, and mix it thoroughly. I sent with about a tablespoon here, but adding more will increase the richness, color, and thickness of the final sauce. This could be desirable depending on your personal tastes. In the future I’m personally going to go with more.

In goes 1 cup of beef broth, 1 bay leaf, and finally…

1 cup of Guinness. Drink the rest of it you wasteful savage.

This should be your sauce. Mix well over low heat, then add in the ribs.

While stirring to keep the meat coated, bring it all to a boil. Look at it boil:

Now at this point I made an error. The pot I had been working in had plastic coated handles, so it couldn’t go into the oven. That was mistake #1. I transferred it to a large disposable foil tray, which was mistake #2. In the future, I will use something with a smaller surface area and greater volume. That way the meat is more immersed in the sauce and there is less chance of it drying out. They still ended up really juicy, but they could have been even better. Take your pan/oven safe pot full of boiling ribs and sauce and cover it and put it in the oven:

Braising gives you some leeway in cook time, I just kept checking with a meat thermometer until it was done. I’d estimate it took about 90 minutes though.

Boomshakalaka

Serve with the sauce drenched on it like gravy. It goes well with mashed potatoes or rolls to sop up the extra juice. And more Guinness to drink .

Enjoy!

It's FALL

2009-11-04T15:02:00.002-06:00

I'm so excited. I am much more comfortable with fall foods - the squashes and the potatoes and the soups and stews and braises and GREENS that are growing again (oh Houston). Brussels sprouts and kale are back - I just sowed a new batch of kale and a batch of spinach.

Last night we made chicken pot pie soup and biscuits. We've also had an influx of cream - which we have been making into CREAMFEST TWO - oh my god we need the join gyms. Clotted cream, cream scones, creme brulee, aforementioned soup and bisques oh my.

and the PUMPKINING. Yes there will be pumpkining. One of my goals is to get a sugar pumpkin and process it down into pumpkin goo just to see how it's done. Pumpkin gnocchi and more brown butter than we should ever be allowed.

Cheese rinds and beets

2009-10-11T19:48:00.003-05:00

The Whole Foods down the street sells these little plastic-wrapped bundles of Parmesan rinds for super cheap and I just can't resist. So I've accumulated this small stockpile of cheese rinds and finally decided to do something with them: make cheese stock. Rinds + pot of water + a few hours of simmering = smells amazing, and awesome stock for risotto making.

I had a butternut squash from the farmer's market so I cut that open and roasted it, and added it to the risotto to give it more body. The starchy squash partially disintegrated into the rice, which was nice.

Also: roasted beets for the first time. I paired them with herbed goat cheese, salad greens, and pine nuts. Interesting.

Oh yeah, and I folded sauteed beet greens into the risotto because the internet said they were also edible.

Dulce de leche, buerre noisette, sea salt.

2009-10-04T01:25:00.008-05:00

Putting this here to remind myself to do it again:

Was making cinnamon rolls and decided to do a caramel topping. I found some leftover homemade dulce de leche in the fridge so that was the base. (Aside: I make dulce de leche by simmering an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of water for an hour, then putting it back in the pantry, forgetting about it for a year and then opening it by accident when I actually need sweetened condensed milk.)

I browned 3/4 stick of butter, stirred in 3/4 can of dulce de leche, and added 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt to make a saucelike goo. Dan says it is "alternate universe caramel with a goatee because it's evil" and he wants to know if I can replicate this in a solid caramel form.

If you've ever had salted caramel, it's like that, but in sauce form, and with more toasty flavor. And if you haven't had salted caramel, try some, because salt brings out the flavors in sweets.

Ham candy

2009-10-01T18:18:00.007-05:00

Fallout from the Ham Cake/Cake Ham/Ham-shaped-like-a-cake:

Candied ham.

I had a chunk of ham left over from trimming all the rectangles to go on Reverse Ham Cake, so I diced the lean portion of it and decided to candy it, because that seemed more exciting than just eating cold leftover ham.

In the pot, in no particular order: grade B maple syrup, brown sugar, salt (to balance the sugar and bring back the "ham" ness), fennel seed, garlic powder, cinnamon, coriander, clove, dijon mustard, orange juice.

I couldn't find my candy thermometer and the volume of the solution was too low besides, so I used the original drop-in-cold-water trick to determine the stages of the sugar solution. By the time it reached soft ball bordering on hard crack, the ham was starting to get a little toasty, so I stopped it at that point and used chopsticks to pick out the individual pieces and cool them on parchment paper.

End result is tasty! And somewhat confusing. It reminds me of the sweet-spicy moist Chinese beef jerky I grew up with.

Of note: this is the second time I've attempted to combine pork products and candymaking technique, the first being bacon toffee.

And now for something completely different.

2009-09-27T16:27:00.008-05:00

Remember the ham cake? I made another one, but in reverse. It's a ham shaped like a cake, instead of cake shaped like a ham, because Matt requested it for his birthday.

I bought a ham and baked it according to the package instructions, with a little Grade B maple syrup and water in the bottom of the baking dish.

Then I hacked it to bits.

I trimmed the biggest ham steaks into rectangles roughly the same size. There was some patchwork involved.

Behold, my tower of ham.

Potatoes were set to boil.

Glaze. Those pre-glazed spiral-sliced hams annoy me because the inside of the ham doesn't get glazed, just the outside. So I decided to do something about it by glazing the entire cut face of each layer of ham.

Contents of glaze: grade B maple syrup, ketchup, brown mustard, brown sugar, mushroom salt, balsamic vinegar, paprika, ginger, garlic granules, and possibly some other stuff.

Glazed.

Put under the broiler for a few minutes:

It turned out all runny and juicy. I was going more for a creme brulee type crust, so next time I will pat the meat dry and use a completely dry phase glaze mix. If there is ever a next time.

Mashed potatoes, made with heavy cream and cream cheese instead of milk and butter. I thought to myself, "how can I make the potatoes stiff enough to support ham slices, but still creamy?" This is how. We are all going to die of fattiness because of those potatoes.

Assembly was your standard stack-and-frost affair, which proceeded smoothly after an emergency run to the store to get MORE POTATOES. I got a can of French's fried onions to use as "nuts" on the sides of the cake (which worked well to disguise the rough frosting job on the sides). I used a sandwich bag with the corner cut off to write a message using the leftover ham glaze. I am pretty darn proud of my piping job.

Aaaand the money shot:

Pumpkin ravioli in sage browned butter

2009-09-18T01:02:00.005-05:00

Still feeling pretty good from last night's hand-cut pasta dish, tonight I decided to use up half a can of pumpkin puree by making ravioli. After a quick googling for ravioli-assembling instructions, I was ready to go.

No eggs this time, just flour, water, a pinch of salt, and a bit of olive oil:

Really unphotogenic filling:

Contains: pumpkin puree, minced garlic, mixed dried mushrooms (crushed fine and rehydrated), grated really old parmesan, shredded cheddar&jack cheese mix, plain yogurt, a bit of brown sugar, and salt/pepper/herbes de provence/paprika/coriander. It tasted pretty flat in the beginning which is why yogurt and sugar and prepack cheese mix got in there. But afterward it was tasty! Go team improvisation.

After some finagling with rolling out and dolloping and cutting and sealing and boiling and tossing in sage browned butter and some simultaneous making of honey-lemon-ginger glazed carrots, I picked the prettiest ravioli and sage leaflets and put them on a plate to show you.

Pine nuts were added for textural contrast.

Go team pantry cleaning!

Pasta carbonara

2009-09-16T23:47:00.004-05:00

They say adding constraints to a creative process will keep the creative spark alive, and apparently this principle totally applies to my relationship with food.
Tonight's dinner exists because we have no milk, no onions, no bread, no greens, and we are tired of bean soup (I made a very mediocre soup). What we did have were: really good farmer's market bacon, frozen green peas, two eggs, and pasta.

Or I thought we had pasta.

Since we didn't, I had to make some. By hand. Because kneading dough is a great way to blow off steam, and because by then I was set on having pasta carbonara for dinner.

My previous attempts at homemade pasta have been pretty poor. Learning to handle dough (thanks to bread-baking) made the outcome a whole lot better this time around. The real secret to getting lovely smooth fresh pasta dough is giving it multiple rests throughout the mixing, kneading, and rolling out processes. Five minutes after mixing for gluten formation and starch hydration, then a good 5+ minutes of kneading (it's a stiff dough), then a few 1-2 minute rests while rolling out to counteract the dough's inherent elasticity.

I started out with the Italian grandmother method: cracking an egg into a little well made in a mound of flour. I wound up adding another egg's worth of water to the dough to extend it, since one egg doesn't make for very much dough.

Rolled out, floured well, rolled up, and sliced like (rustic) fettucine:

I had to unroll the noodles and dust them with more flour immediately after cutting to keep the cut edges from sticking.

BACON. Bacon which we got from a charming meat and pork sausage vendor who said his family was Jewish.

Would have used onions. Instead you get minced garlic.

GREEN THINGS. And salt & black pepper were added at some point.

I prepared the remaining egg to use as the carbonara "sauce" by beating it with a pinch of salt and some water (so I wouldn't wind up with an accidental omelette)

Shortly after this point, I gave the noodles a quick tumble in boiling water too cook (they just need a minute) and added them to the pan. More salt to taste, a few grinds of black pepper once plated, and a generous grating of Parmesan followed:

I'm eager to try making fresh pasta again and possibly freezing little pasta nests for future use, because fresh pasta is fucking amazing.

I did a bad bad thing

2009-09-02T22:54:00.003-05:00

I've had this idea kicking around in my head. It's one of those things you're not supposed to listen to lest you wind up committed or at least with some kind of mark on your person that warns other people "this person is not well".

So you know scotch eggs right? Take a hard boiled egg, coat it in sausage, deep fry it. It's fairly horrifying.

Well, why not make a dessert version of it.

WHY NOT

Ikeaaaa meatballs, tasty

2009-08-22T23:31:00.002-05:00

Steph and I made our quarterly trip to Ikea to check out the new catalog stuff and wander the store and pretty much be terrible people. I'm trying to outfit an office out of a spare room and wanted to test drive their sofa bed stuff.

ANYWAY, these trips always wind up with us taking home a bag of meatballs.

I suck, once more, at the picture taking before devouring food - but this recipe is for the cream gravy. Not the packet from Ikea.

You need:

1 tablespoon of oil
1 bag of Ikea Meatballs
1 onion - chopped
garlic - however much you like. start with two cloves minced
1 T butter
1/2 cup of flour
2 or so cups of milk
beef bouillon cubes to taste, start with one or two
1 T dill
pinch coriander
salt pepper

Take large pan. Add a tablespoon of oil. Heat. Add meatballs, frozen is okay. Brown.

As they brown, juices come out. Add a chopped up onion.

Add a few chopped up cloves of garlic. Fry till onion translucent.

Add a tablespoon of butter and half a cup of flour.

stir until everything is pretty much covered in buttery flour.

Add two cups of milk. Maybe 2 and a half. depending on how thick you like your gravy. Sometimes I want gravy. Sometimes I want sauce. Stir and bring just to a boil

I add a couple of beef bouillon cubes and a tablespoon of dill and salt and pepper and a little coriander.

simmer until everyone's ready to eat. Honestly, you can just kind of let this one sit around a bit and the sauce gets beefier. Serve over pasta or rice or with potatoes or you know. Whatever. And of course you can do this with homemade meatballs, but it's Ikea day.

Maybe I will take a picture of the leftovers if I remember before I eat them.

Breakfast for dinner

2009-08-20T19:18:00.004-05:00

It was just one of those days.

Charoses sausage (Pork, apple, walnut, cinnamon and sweet red wine) from this really lovely man at the farmer's market in midtown. 2 egg omelette Julia Child style (beaten eggs with a little salt and pepper and milk, poured into a hot nonstick pan and shaken like a polaroid picture) (shake it. shake. ..ok I'm done) The how to is here! And cut up sweet potato from the CSA.

I browned the sausage, and then dumped the chunked sweet potato in the fats and juices of the sausage. The sweet potato chunks get caramelized and then the whole mess gets covered. It steams in the juice of the sausages and the small chunks cook quickly. It all finishes at about the same time.

A new ...leaf?

2009-08-14T20:25:00.005-05:00

A friend commented that we should post our more vegetarian friendly recipes - it's true. Our more grand food schemes tend to involve meat. And I tend to lean on cheeses a LOT.

Challenge for today was a vegany dish with not very much prep time and well. Not much in the fridge. BUT, I did have a CSA box that came with a bunch of nummies including a few organic lemons and a bunch of parsley. Also, it's Houston and it's flipping hot.

Took half an onion and a few carrots and cooked them on high until they were all nice and brown. While those did their dansen I boiled a couple of cups of israeli couscous.

Here's the trick. after draining the hot couscous, add one pressed/minced/beaten to death clove of garlic while still hot. dump the hot carrots and onions in there too. That'll take the edge off the garlic.

Added a couple of glugs of olive oil and the juice and zest of a lemon, a little salt and pepper and a generous chopped handful of parsley.

It's tasty and tangy and if you have good parsley, green. Really good cold too. I wish I had time to soak beans because chickpeas would go really well with this too in order to make it a more complete dish.

And you know what. After a few bites, I remembered I had some chevre from The Blue Heron Farm and added a chunk to the salad. I am a failure at the veganism, but man. Those happy pampered goats and their mom make some incredible cheese.

@#(&*@#

2009-07-31T09:41:00.000-05:00

PIE POPS

Chicken Kentuckily Fried

2009-07-28T22:00:00.007-05:00

It all started with this article which is very charmingly British about the entire concept of deep fried chicken. But it also has the breakdown of the ELEVEN SECRET HERBS AND SPICES

"1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)"

MSG is not an herb. nor a spice. But okay whatever.

For perspective's sake, when I make fried chicken, I marinate in buttermilk for 24 hours, I salt and pepper the flour, and if I'm feeling REALLY WILD I add a tablespoon of paprika. But like, hoo, I'd have to sit down after that.

So for this project I quested and procured these SECRET HERBS AND SPICES.

Please note the giant mound of MSG. This is probably the dirtiest thing I've done in a while.

Ground it all up and you get this

Which I mixed with two cups of flour. Then realized it was still REALLY FFING SALTY. And added another cup of flour.

The chicken strips have been patiently bathing in buttermilk, a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar and some pepper.

They've been there for about a day, but as long as they marinate for a couple of hours, you're good. It's small strips of meat, they absorb flavor quickly.

Highly recommend double dipping these. Straight out of the buttermilk into the flour, back in buttermilk, flour. Deep fry.

Incredibly sinful. The buttermilk makes them tangy, tender and juicy. The msg makes them a shock to the system. Like the article states, it's like the crystal meth of chicken. And granted, I'm not convinced that the exact herb and spice combination make that huge of a difference. The biggest difference is that if you fry properly, you get a good shattering crust without the crazy flour tumors that come with commercial KFC. Eaten with Bob's cornbread recipe.

If I were to make the recipe again, I'd add more paprika and some coriander and reduce the msg to a teaspoon if not eliminating it all together. Though, granted, if you're eating fried chicken, there's not really a reason to not make it completely naughty.

This slaw.

2009-07-28T15:23:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I made a vaguely Southwestern slaw on a whim to go with KFC for Bad Decisions Night (tm). Except this was a good decision and I want to eat this delicious slaw forever. No pics because I was too busy om-nom-nom-ing.

Here's how:
- 1/2 head red cabbage, shredded
- 1/2 red onion, chopped fine and quick-pickled in apple cider vinegar + salt
- shredded carrot
- sweet corn kernels
- large diced avocado
- lime juice (2 limes) + buttermilk + salt + pepper

It's got all the elements of an addictive snack food: crunchy, savory, sweet (from the carrots and corn), creamy (from the avocado). But it's made of vegetables.

Today I filled a tupperware container with it and had it for lunch and it was still awesome.

Chili

2009-07-27T21:51:00.008-05:00

The power of suggestion is exponentially so for me when it comes to food. Sometimes it's that Sonic commercial with the chili cheese tater tots that just sound like a really good idea at 2 in the morning. For me, it's usually something I've read - the stews and breads in the accursed Wheel of Time Series, butter or candy making from Little House or the Thai food and such from every damn chapter of Time Traveler's Wife. The point to this, is that I never really cared for or really wanted to make chili until I read this:

Laura made a great chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pinch of fresh dill, and finally, measure out and add her chili powders."
- American Gods, Neil Gaiman

It goes on, but I think that's about the limits of fair use. And it's basically a passage that is burned into my mind and my ideas of making chili all derive from that one paragraph.

So here's the gist of my chili. I'm a spice wimp, but I love the flavors of different peppers. I refuse to thicken with anything but tomato paste and ground meat. I prefer a deep and smokey but slightly sweet chili. I prefer beans, but I make them separately and add them in to my own dish since there's the GREAT CHILI DEBATE and I'm motherflippin Roger Sherman.

Both ground meat and cubed meat. I used lamb and ground beef and some leftover pot roast chuck cut into quarter inch pieces. The cubed meat is for chewing and the ground meat is to add texture and thickness. Yes, you're thickening the tomato meat stew with more meat. Brown the cubed meat first, remove it, and then cook the ground meat in the released fat. Drain ground meat and set aside with the cubed.

Peppers. I used poblanos and fresnos. I seed these and put the seeds aside for those who can eat a much spicier chili than I can.

The poblanos and one of the bell peppers get roasted at 450 degrees while the meat cooks, or about 20 minutes. They should look like this when done

Back to the meat pot. Mirepoix time!

Have you had enough pictures of mirepoix to get the point? I used two onions, three stalks of celery and two large carrots. Sweat for about 10 minutes. To this you add the seeded and diced fresnos (or whatever you want to use), the poblanos and bell peppers.

And then this.

No. This ALL goes in the chili. Don't balk, it's delicious. Chop roughly and add to the sweating mess. Salt a little here to help release moisture.

Add the meat back to the vegetable mixture. Add two 14 oz cans of tomatoes, juice and all, and a beer. I use Shiner Bock, but use any beer you like to drink. Because I add a beer and a splash and proceed to drink the rest.

Then the seasonings. Teaspoon of cumin, coriander, hot paprika, oregano, touch of dill, chipotle and red chili, salt and pepper and a little bay. Let this simmer for a bit, the peppers in the chili will start integrating and the liquids will keep releasing and it will get very meaty. Taste again after half an hour and adjust your spices accordingly.

At this point, I thicken with tomato paste. And then taste again. And again. And again. Right before serving, I add the juice of a small lemon to brighten the flavor.

As with all things, use the peppers you like the flavors of. I'm not a huge fan of jalapenos, so I tend to avoid them and my wimpy spice tolerance prevents me from using more robust peppers. Same with chili powders. I obviously trend towards the smoky and the sweet, but there's a whole wide world of tasty out there.

Ham cake recipe

2009-07-27T19:59:00.004-05:00

Here's the recipes I used, in case you wanted to make a ham cake of your very own:

Red Velvet Cake

2.5 c. sifted cake flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. cocoa powder
2 oz. red food coloring (2 Tbsp.)
1.5 c. sugar
1/2 c. unsalted butter, softened
2 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. white vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter and flour a 9x13 pan, two 9" rounds, or three 8" rounds.
2. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a small bowl, mix food coloring and cocoa powder to form a paste without lumps; set aside (adding a small amount of white sugar helps make cocoa powder dissolve)
3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then add vanilla and red cocoa paste. Scrape bowl down to ensure even mixing. Add flour mixture in thirds, alternating with buttermilk and ending with a final addition of flour. Beat until well combined, scraping bowl with spatula.
4. Add vinegar and mix well to combine. Pour batter (or spread, it's rather thick) into pan(s) and bake for 25-30 minutes (a few minutes longer for 9x13 pan) or until cake passes the toothpick test.
5. Cool cake in its pan until it is warm enough to handle, then de-pan onto a plate or wire rack. Allow to cool completely before frosting (or better yet, put it in the fridge so it's cold)

Boiled Milk Frosting

1 cup whole milk
3 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
1 c. unsalted butter
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Whisk flour into milk and place over medium in a small saucepan. Cook mixture until thickened (when it barely comes to a simmer); remove from heat and add salt, then set aside to cool slightly.
2. In a stand mixer, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla.
3. Add still-warm milk mixture a spoonful at a time to the creamed butter mixture while the stand mixer is running at medium speed (I switched from the leaf paddle to a whisk attachment at this point, to incorporate more air). An emulsion will slowly form. Be sure to scrape the bowl down for even mixing!
4. You should wind up with an extremely fluffy, light, and buttery frosting when completed.

2009-07-27T14:18:00.002-05:00

Hello, I am alive too. Long story, computer stolen, finally replaced, more photos to be uploaded and a backlog to go through.

I can't remember if I posted camping chili or not.

HAM CAKE

2009-07-26T21:51:00.009-05:00

So. Friend Lauren dislikes ham due to having an overabundance of it in her childhood. Upon hearing this, I immediately decided to be an ass about it and told her that I would make her a cake shaped like a ham for her birthday.

I am a man of my word. A figurative man.

Months went by and I didn't think much about how to make ham cake a reality. Then I drew up a schematic two weeks before the birthday and then didn't use the schematic at all. Just as Michelangelo saw an angel in the block of marble and used his chisel to free it, I saw a ham in the pile of cake and used a bread knife. Yeah what, I just compared myself to Renaissance master, whatcha gonna do?

The cake itself was red velvet cake, which I baked the night before assembling (so the cake would be cold and easier to work with).
Red velvet cake is a buttermilk cake that has a little cocoa powder and a ton of red food coloring in it. I used up all of Emily's red food coloring which she had bought for making fake blood for zombie movies a few years ago. We do not anticipate needing a lot of fake blood for zombie movies anytime soon.

I had originally planned on making a full-size ham cake, but then I realized that is a shit ton of cake and we don't have enough people to eat it all. So instead I made a half-size one using a half-sheet of cake (one 9x13 pan's worth).

First, I cut the rectangle of cake in half, then split the layers.

Never done that before. I like the way split-layer cakes look when cut, though, because the insides are that much more intricate.

Protip: Whenever you frost a cake, always lay down strips of wax paper or foil around the perimeter of the plate, then stack the cake on top of it. The foil will catch all that frosting you smear around and after you're done, you pull the strips out from under the cake and get a pristine presentation plate.

Boiled milk frosting(aka butter roux frosting):

The internet told me this is the traditional frosting for a red velvet cake. The process intrigued me so I gave it a shot, and now I am in love with this frosting. It's very light, silky smooth like a buttercream but not as oily, and easier to make.

I proceeded to cut the split half-rectangles into rough triangles, and stacked up a roughly triangular shape that got smaller higher up.

Then I took my really big bread knife and roughed out a ham shape.

It looks very pointy from the back.

Then came time for the crumb coat. Doing a crumb coat greatly improves the appearance of a frosted cake. Prior to doing your final coat of frosting, you smear on a thin layer that covers every square inch and seals in all the cake crumbs that would otherwise mar the outer surface if you tried frosting it in one go. You put the cake in the fridge for 30 minutes so the crumb coat sets up, then you do the real decorating.

At this point I had to go to Emily's to get my gel icing colors and run back and color the frosting. By then the crumb coat had set up, and I was ready to frost the outside for reals. I probably should have colored the frosting initially and had the whole crumb coat be colored too, because white frosting started peeking out when I spread the colored stuff too thin.

I don't have pictures of the rough job, but I do have pics of the cake after hot-knifing.

Hot knifing is when you take a metal spatula (or butter knife), dip it in hot/boiling water, wipe it on a clean towel and then use the hot knife to smooth out frosting. It gets rid of all the spatula marks that usually come from frosting a cake, and makes an uncanny smooth fondant-like finish.

Like this.

It's lucky that I used some cocoa powder to deepen the frosting color, because I'm pretty sure that's why there's so much depth to the color after hot-knifing. It really resembled the browning patterns you get from roasted meat.

I used dental floss to make the crosshatch pattern, then piped on tiny cloves with a ziploc bag with the corner snipped off.

Emily had the brilliant idea of styling the cake with some broccoli:

The inside:

Lauren almost didn't want to cut into the cake, it looked so good. But it was made of cake and it was meant to be eaten.

Discovering ice cream

2009-07-05T13:22:00.004-05:00

Ed.--I wrote this post right after the July 4th weekend but we just got around to uploading photos today, so here you go.

Danimo brought his ice cream maker (rock salt + ice with electric churning blade) to the huge party so we tried our hand at making ice cream.
Guys. Ice cream is ridiculously easy to make. I am so going to buy myself/ask for a KitchenAid ice cream attachment the next time there are gift-giving holidays.

Creative solutions.

This is how we made nectarine-strawberry frozen yogurt ice cream. There's yogurt in it because we didn't have milk. Heavily mangled and adapted from David Leibovitz's vanilla ice cream recipe, and filtered through a highly subjective memory.

2 c. heavy cream
1.5 c. plain yogurt (lowfat if anyone cares)
1 tsp. salt
4 egg yolks
1 c. sugar + more to taste
2 nectarines, pureed
1.5 c. strawberries, pureed
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Heat cream on medium heat in a saucepan. Beat egg yolks and salt with sugar and add to warm cream, then continue heating until mixture thickens slightly (should coat back of a spoon)
Stickblend remaining ingredients into custard mixture, then chill in fridge until cold. Dump into ice cream maker and make ice cream.

Oh man it is so tasty.

Anyways once the strawberry-nectarine mix was done churning and we scooped out this delicious concoction and realized how easy ice cream is to make, we looked at each other, said "Holy shit this is amazing" and quite literally scrambled to make another batch of ice cream before our ice-salt mixture melted. The next batch was an eggless cream & milk base with cinnamon, and we threw it together so fast I don't recall what the proportions were.

Pulled pork

2009-07-05T13:08:00.008-05:00

Ed.--I wrote this post right after the July 4th weekend but we just got around to uploading photos today, so here you go.

Pulled pork recipe is lost to the madness that is the kitchen counter. I wrote it on the back of some piece of paper and now I can't find it amongst the chip bags and empty beer cans.

Two pork shoulders

But off the top of my head, here are the things that went into 15 lbs. of pork shoulder this weekend:

Dry rub
salt
brown sugar
paprika
black pepper
cinnamon
garlic powder
ground thyme
ground bay leaf
ground ginger
ground mustard

Dry rub

Dry rub after overnight rest

The meat got rubbed down, sat in the fridge overnight, then was put into roasting pans with 1" of apple cider/juice, sealed tightly with foil, and put in a 225F oven the next morning. 8 hours later, deliciousness happened.

Juices.

Pulling pork.

We pulled the meat out to cool, drained off all the juices and shredded the meat (awesome stress-relief exercise, that).

More pulling.

And then we made the sauce.

Sauce
Skim most of the fat off and reduce the meat juices in a wide-mouthed saucepan until it's about half the original volume or so (estimated around 3 cups final for 15 lbs. meat). Dump in 1 small can of tomato paste, mix/stickblend well and then add the following to taste (more important ingredients first, random-ass crap from the pantry further down the list)

Brown sugar
cider vinegar
garlic powder
paprika
ground ginger
black pepper
brown mustard
apple cider
smoked salt
Shiner smokehouse
random herbs and shit

Blend well, taste, add more stuff, taste again, pour over shredded pork and let the ravenous hordes loose upon it.

Sauced

Plated.

I guess I should tell you the potato salad in the above photo was also delicious. Here's how you make it: Take a bunch of fingerling potatoes, boil them in heavily salted water, drain but do not rinse off the salt. Refrigerate overnight. This allows the salt to get absorbed into the potatoes through the skin and make everything tastier.

Dice potatoes the next day and mix with the following:

quick-pickled red onion - fine dice, put in bowl with balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, salt and leave 20+ minutes to get rid of the burning effect from raw onion.
salted radish - get a bunch of radishes, slice them into thin rounds and lightly salt them in a bowl. Let sit about 5-10 minutes to release water, then rinse well and drain.
sour cream
a bunch of dill
minced scallions
dijon mustard
salt & pepper to taste.

If you have time, let it sit a few hours in the fridge for the flavors to meld. It's way better that way.

Pasta and Pie

2009-06-19T20:06:00.002-05:00

I'm aliiiiiive
And I have pasta

And berry pie

This is what happens when you can't ever find your camera while you're cooking, and you're too busy making it up as you go along to take photos anyway.

I did manage one "before" shot of the pie:

Made the pie by the seat of my pants. It was also my first attempt at a lattice-top. Kind of fun! No recipe for filling or pastry, just kind of went by feel. The crust probably suffered a bit from this (not super awesomely flaky), but at the end of the day it was still pie and we ate the shit out of it.

The pasta was a bit of a step outside my comfort zone when it comes to quick weeknight meals--it uses absorption cooking methods and the final sauce contains a novel ingredient: plain yogurt. Also pictured: pieces of Italian sausage, parsley from the container garden, thin-sliced lemon rounds, green peas, herbs de provence.

By the way--these photos? Like, a month old. Better late than never?

Creamfest 2009 epilogue, and bacon toffee.

2009-05-14T13:52:00.006-05:00

We've been busy ignoring this blog but now I am back to report the final outcome of Creamfest 2009:

- The mascarpone was incorporated into a lemon chiffon cake with strawberry & mascarpone filling, of which Emily has photos. It was my first time making a chiffon style cake and it turned out awesome, and I want to flavor more things with lemon zest because of how delicious it was.

- The remaining 2 gallons of cream went south shortly thereafter and were rendered into cultured butter. It took pretty much a whole weekend and my freezer is so full of butter, you have no idea.

Now, bacon toffee:

I stayed home sick today after waking up to the third straight day of a migraine. Being a neurotically industrious person (no really), I decided to do stuff in the kitchen in my less-than-coherent state.

First I caramelized some onions, because I felt like I should make them and save them for later or something:

Then I set to work on the toffee:

Mise en splat

Toffee is pretty much the worst thing you could eat, ever. It's butter and sugar melted together with a pinch of salt and vanilla, then allowed to recrystallize. Hence the gross picture of butter & sugar melting in the pot.

In case you forgot what bacon looked like, or if you thought we hadn't posted enough pictures of the horrible things we do to bacon.

Butter & sugar boiling

The ensuing steps in the process happened rather quickly, and my alternate photographer was sleeping on the couch, so I don't have pictures of me stirring the crumbled bacon and vanilla extract into a pot of 300F bubbling sugar and fat. You'll just have to imagine it as being rather warm and dangerous.

I poured the mix onto parchment paper on a baking sheet:

After it cooled (and I broke off bits of the edges that cooled first for quality control), I punched it some and put the pieces in a ziploc bag to keep humidity from making it soft and sticky.

Mmmm, shards of death.

Verdict: Tasty and kind of weird. Mostly tastes like a medium-to-dark caramelized toffee, and the bacon flavor only surfaces upon encountering a piece embedded in the candy.
Definitely a novelty, and I'm trying to figure out who I can get to help eat this batch, because a pound of toffee is a lot of candy.

MascarpOWNED

2009-04-10T19:51:00.002-05:00

This was going to be a back to back double-feature post, but then Emily ruined it by discovering that her laptop has a built-in SD card reader which made it easier to process her photos before I could finish typing everything up. I'm still laughing though, because she went three months not knowing about it and transferring pictures with a cable.

This is the story of mascarpone, the second-fattiest food you can make from cream, besides pure butter. I used instructions found here, but scaled up drastically due to my...bountiful...situation.

The first step was to heat the cream to 180F, which I did with one modification: I used a heavy-bottomed frying pan as an additional heat defuser because I'm paranoid and dairy is vulnerable to scorching. I couldn't find the candy thermometer, so I used our digital probe thermometer instead.

I prepped a mesh colander set over a bowl and lined it with gauze cloth:

That cream of tartar sure got measured!

After the cream hit 180F, I stirred in the acid, stirred some more, then poured into big bowls to cool in the fridge.

The next morning, a little liquid had managed to strain through the cloth, and scraping the gauze off with a spoon produced little clots of proto-mascarpone.

Which I then put on my toast for breakfast.

Here is where I learned that cream is really thick for a liquid, and it takes a long time for the watery part to strain out from the fatty part. It took several more days of scraping

and straining, and waiting...

Until I had something closer to the semi-solid that is mascarpone. At this point, it resembled Greek yogurt, and I called it done because I was tired of scraping that stuff twice a day, and do you know how crusty gauze cloth gets when you leave it in the fridge for a week? It's gross.

All in all, an interesting experiment was had and guess what, I have to do it all AGAIN because what you just saw was one quart of cream being processed, because that's all I could fit in the colander at once. I still have the other quart from the initial boiling, waiting to be strained! Hurrah! Ugh.

LIVEBLOGGING

2009-04-10T19:43:00.003-05:00

or you know, blogging in the middle of the meal. WHAT

So tonight is trying out this Foodie label Chardonnay.

It's. really. um. Fruity. Not buttery. Little acidic. Not a lot of character but I imagine that it's supposed to be accessible, cheap and to pair with food? WHATEVER. It keeps me company while I cook.

TONIGHT. Our meal will be Israeli couscous and chicken and whatever the hell was big enough to pick in my garden.

You poor bastards. Made the mistake of growing up big and tall and now I will eat you. It's some chard, oregano, english peas, snap peas and thyme.

Thing is, you're supposed to pick often to encourage fruiting, but at the beginning, there's just not very much. Hence the mishmash of tonight.

,
So, there's defrosted chicken thighs, leftover chicken broth from a previous experiment and the israeli couscous.

First toast the couscous in oil.

It's pearly and kind of weird to see, but I think it's sorta neat.

Then cook the chicken.

This cat thinks she's getting chicken. Um. No.

Chicken cooks with some onion, some garlic and gets deglazed with a little of the wine. Add the couscous back and the chickenstock - two cups to every cup of couscous. And a can of tomatoes.

It looks like a mess but I'm going to let it cook uncovered for a bit. Plans are to let it cook up and add all the green things at the very end. People just called and confirmed they were coming over for dinner so i just threw in more couscous and hoped for the best. MORE SOON

Browned butter

2009-04-09T11:11:00.005-05:00

Or beurre noisette, if you want to sound fancy.

Creamfest 2009 is in full swing over here. Since the last post, I've made two more batches of butter (one cultured, one plain), a giant pot of chicken fettucine alfredo, and I'm in the process of making mascarpone.

The mascarpone is taking forever to drain, so I will tell you the tale of browned butter instead.

The first batch of butter had way too much water in it, so much that it squished faintly when being scooped out of the tub. The only way to get the water out was to heat the butter and clarify it, so that is what I did.

I started out with the giant mass of butter in a heavy bottomed frying pan on low heat, thinking to separate out the butterfat without damaging the milk proteins with excess heat. But when I saw the sheer amount of water that was separating out, I decided to go with browned butter and switched to high heat.

Boiling off the water took a long-ass time.

I stirred and continually skimmed off the foam. Butter is weird. There were three separate stages of foaming-up along the way.

Also, did I mention that this process makes the kitchen smell like butter? Ridiculously so.

As the mixture reduced, I turned the heat to medium to avoid scorching and spattering, and just kept stirring and waiting.

Eventually all the water was boiled away and I was left with milk proteins and butterfat. That was also disturbing, because I was frying butter solids in butter.

I let the milk proteins caramelize to a golden-tan color before removing the pan from heat and letting them finish browning from residual heat (heavy bottomed pan = heat reservoir). Carryover is your friend.

After skimming off all the foam that was left:

We went and hung out at a friend's place and watched LOST and when we returned many hours later, the butter was semi-solid. All the delicious browned bits were still at the bottom of the pan, so I stirred them through the butter evenly and poured it into the tub:

Damn, there was a lot of water in there. And probably air from the whipping. Fixed now!

Now it smells like toffee and it tastes deliciously browned and nutty.

The More You Know: If you separate the clear butterfat from the browned solids, you wind up with ghee, aka clarified butter, which is used in Indian cooking. But why would you abandon those deliciously browned solids?

Windfall

2009-04-04T15:08:00.009-05:00

What to do when your SO comes home with a crate full of marked-out cream from the local coffee shop?

You introduce it to your little friend the buttermilk (lucky I had some on hand)

And make cultured butter!

Cultured butter is like regular butter but with FLAVOR. Instead of just tasting like delicious fat, it tastes like deliciouser fat. Seriously, if you've never had it, find some and try it (fancy food stores will have it), or make your own.

Dan came home at 10pm with a literal crate full of marked-out heavy cream, so after boggling at this surplus of dairy I poured a quart of it into a mixing bowl and added some buttermilk (about 1/2 cup) and left it out overnight with a cover on it.

This is what it looked like at noon the next day:

It tasted kind of weird when I tried it.

I then whipped it until it held stiff peaks

And then I turned the mixer speed to LOW because when whipped cream turns into butter it goes GLOP and seizes up and if your mixer is going too fast it will throw buttermilk everywhere.

This is what you want.

Mmmm, curdly.

I drained off the liquid into another bowl. This is true buttermilk, the liquid left over from churning butter. Modern-day buttermilk from the store is more like a pourable yogurt.

I still haven't decided what to do with the liquid.

What I was left with:

Tastes more like butter at this point.

You're supposed to wash the butter until the water runs clear. This gets rid of residual milk proteins that might spoil and turn the butter rancid. Most recipes say to knead it by hand under running water, but I like technology so I ran the mixer with some water poured in with the butter.

I decided to salt this batch as insurance against rancidity (salt inhibits spoilage somewhat), so I threw in a tablespoon of kosher salt as the water/butter mixture was churning.

After several water changes, and a mixing paddle change (the butter was getting stuck inside the wire whisk head):

I drained the last of the water and whipped the butter up, then stuffed it into an empty yogurt tub:

Dan got the residual butter off the beater and he was very, very happy.

Just seven more jugs to go!

Figgy

2009-04-01T19:30:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I still had leftover potato water for additional breadmaking endeavors and I had some under-utilized dried figs in my pantry. So those two things plus lots of flour and some soft butter, small handfuls of flaxseed, wheat germ, shakes of cinnamon/clove/nutmeg and a small heap of brown sugar equals:

Breakfast for the next few days!

I am really liking the King Arthur flour I bought (unbleached white whole wheat). It was something of an impulse purchase but I think I may buy it again in the future. It behaves a lot more like white flour than a whole wheat flour and you can't really pick out the wheat germ particules because of the finer grind. I've been cutting it with some store-brand all-purpose flour as a way to make my 5-lb. bag last longer.

The thing I like about baking bread

2009-03-31T19:46:00.003-05:00

The thing I like about baking bread is, after enough practice you can mess around with no recipe at all and still produce something tasty. Bread is stupid easy, which I guess is why humans have been making and eating it for millenia.

This is kind of like ciabatta in that it was a very wet dough that produced a very flat loaf with a rather open internal structure, but seeing as how I have never taken the time to read a recipe for real ciabatta, I shall call it fauxbatta.

I made colcannon last night, so I saved the water left over from boiling the potatoes and used some of it to make this bread. The water was already salted from potato-boiling, so I didn't add any salt to the bread dough.

The dough was mixed and kneaded and put in the fridge overnight, taken out in the morning and punched down, and then shaped, proofed, and baked after I got home from work.

I think I shall use it to soak up bits of stew.

St. Patrick's Day Part II

2009-03-18T02:15:00.006-05:00

True to my/our word, I made Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes tonight so I could try getting buzzed off of cake.
In the course of gathering ingredients and such, I discovered I am a squirrel yet again:

On the left: the existing cupcake liners in my pantry.

On the right: the package of cupcake liners I bought today because I couldn't remember if I had any.

My cupcake pan is AWOL so I just put the foil liners on a baking sheet:

Right. On to assembly!

The first thing you do is stir a cup of Guinness and a cup of butter together in a pan which is kind of weird but okay.

Looks scary.

Then you measure out cocoa powder

And add it to the simmering fatty-Guinness:

And you whisk it until it looks like pudding, which it almost is:

I have no pictures of the rest of the batter assembly but you basically beat eggs and sour cream, add the fatty-chocolate-Guinness mixture to make what is essentially Guinness chocolate pudding (minus the sugar), then add flour and sugar and baking soda and suddenly it's not scary chocolate beer pudding anymore, it's cake batter.

The one thing I did differently from the smitten kitchen recipe was to decrease the sugar from 2 cups to 1 2/3 cups, because seeing "2 cups flour" and "2 cups sugar" together in a cake recipe is terrifying.

Anyway this is what the cupcakes looked like naked:

I used a clean cheapass vegetable peeler to core the cupcakes:

You can see clear down to the bottom!

There were 24 cupcakes, but only 23 made it to this stage. One got kind of smushed during the transfer to cooling racks. Sad.

Here are all their guts. I ate them, as it was my perogative.

I was expecting the cupcakes to be quite dense and rich due to the heaviness of the beer and all, but the texture turned out to be light and fluffy, and they all had perfect lightly crisp tops. They were quite chocolatey without being too rich, because the Guinness added body and flavor. I didn't miss the 1/3 cup of sugar I left out (but then again, I like semi-sweet chocolate so your mileage may vary). I would totally make these again any day of the year (except maybe tomorrow).

But enough about the cupcakes themselves, let's keep violating them!
In order to do it properly, I needed whiskey and dark chocolate ganache. Here is a picture of Nick's bottle of whiskey that I borrowed:

Here is a picture of a lovely tempered chocolate ganache with cream and butter and Jameson in it. It's about half Valrhona, half Toll House, because I was too lazy/cheap to run out to a fancy food store to make up the difference in nice chocolate.

Nick thinks "ganache" sounds like an STD. Say it out loud.

The resulting pile of reamed cupcakes, filled with ganache. Ewww.

Foreground: the large freezer bag I sacrificed in the name of ghetto piping technique.

Alas, I have no pictures of the finished cupcakes, since final assembly was done at Emily's. It's easier to transport a bowl of frosting + tray of unfrosted cupcakes than it is to wrangle 2 dozen frosted cupcakes into a car without making a mess.

I am hoping Emily took a photo, but for now, just imagine the cupcakes topped with a thin layer of white buttercream with a shot of Irish Cream in it, because that's exactly what they looked like before we ate them.

The ganache was quite alcoholic and I think I got buzzed from eating two.

TAKE HOME LESSON: Pastries are a prime vector for alcohol delivery, if you are a wimp like me who can't metabolize alcohol.

St Patrick's Day

2009-03-17T21:56:00.004-05:00

Yeah that guy. Sweet. I am the opposite of Irish but you know what. An excuse for this

Makes me happy.

Ok. SO. On Saturday we bought a giant piece of beef and parcelled it into three chunks and marinated it in a solution of sugar salt and random pickling spices that I think are cloves allspice cinnamon and mustard and stuff. I guess you can nitrate it. but. yes

to this three days later

And one got braised in

and one got baked

It is dotted with cloves and has dijon mustard spread on it and then covered in brown sugar. The whole mess is bundled up in foil and baked at 350 for a couple of hour. and then uncovered and broiled until the sugar bubbles up.

And to go with the corned beef is colcannon! Which is my favoritest thing to eat. Because it's um. Mashed potatoes. With bacon and sauteed cabbage. all mixed together. it's what irish second graders eat. oh and a stick of butter. that usually helps.

CABBAGE

Cabbage cooked with bacon and a little salt!

And then you take potatoes

And you mash them and you put the bacon and the cabbage in them and get this mushy stuff that's awesome

And now I am tired and blowing a .05 so it's time to sleep I think. Carbomb cupcakes from Steph later. OH OM NOM

Happy Excuse to Make Food Day!

2009-03-17T19:06:00.002-05:00

Mmmmm. Yes. Excuses to make food. This is a preview post since I made corned beef two ways and one of the ways involved braising in Guinness but I didn't need the entire can in the actual braise soooo the rest is an offering to the cook. Who is me. Yes.

PICTURES IN A FEW.

It's not a need, but...

2009-03-13T10:48:00.006-05:00

I just discovered that one of the authors responsible for writing That book that tells us what to do has written a book that tells us what to do with animals to turn them into meat, and then tells us what to do with the meat:
The River Cottage Meat Book.

I kind of want it.

The thing about cookbooks is, I don't use 90% of mine because they're about processes I am already familiar with, plus I have a zillion bookmarks to more interesting recipes on my computer, and I am far too lazy to go dig through a pile of books when I could just search the tags in my RSS reader.

But this is not a cookbook, it says it is a Meat Book.

Curried Roasted Cauliflower

2009-03-10T20:40:00.004-05:00

I feel a little guilty about all our meat posts, so I've started a "veggies" tag and I will try to fill it with delicious.

For starters, this is possibly the most delicious preparation for cauliflower that I know of, and it's quick to throw together on a weeknight if you're roasting something else as well.

Curried Roasted Cauliflower

1 head of cauliflower (fresh!)

curry powder

olive oil

salt

Preheat oven to 375 F. Wash and hack up the cauliflower into florets, then toss with a drizzle of olive oil. Sprinkle with curry powder and turn to coat. You don't have to get the coating completely even, but make sure every chunk has contact with the curry powder.

Throw the mixture into a baking dish and put it in the oven for 20-30 minutes, or until just tender.

Season lightly with salt (use a coarse salt to get nice little bursts of salty flavor).

Parsley root

2009-03-08T14:02:00.005-05:00

The result of some gardening:

Parsley root is supposed to have a nutty flavor, like a parsnip/carrot/celery. I took a cue from iheartkale tried their recipe for parsley root potage, but in miniature because my parsley roots are barely finger-sized. Also, I didn't so much try their recipe as just mess around in the spirit of the recipe, because I hate following directions.

I started with a knob of butter and some garlic:

The purest form of love.

Mise en place looks fancier from above.

Parsley roots, chopped...

...and thrown in the pot.

I tasted a bit of parsley root. Indeed, it tasted like something between a parsnip, a carrot, and celery.

I tasted a bit of the garlic. It was garlicky.

I would eat a whole bowl of this.

I poured some chicken stock in the pot to cover the solids,

And while that was simmering I turned my attention to the parsley greens.

Picking the leaves off the stems is boring.

Rough chopped:

And plopped in the soup.

I must pause now to thank Dan for rearranging our small kitchen so that the blender is set up in the kitchen and not on the dining table like it was before. I am gonna blend SO MUCH MORE STUFF now that I don't have to walk an extra 8 steps to the blender.

Blorp.

I threw some cornstarch in the blender to thicken the soup. Just 1/2 a teaspoon or so, since this was essentially a single-serving preparation.

So very green.

How'd it taste?

Green, nutty, sweet, earthy, on a creamy base of garlic and butter. The big gobs of parsley leaves make it taste fresh, while at the same time the texture is perfect for winter comfort food. Given that parsley root is pretty much unavailable at most grocers, I would totally do this again using parsnips.

Adventures in Sourdough Day 1

2009-03-03T22:55:00.004-06:00

Meet Pistol

Inside this jar is a cup of warm water and a cup of all purpose flour. We're going to see what it does.

The bubbles aren't anything but air bubbles. I mixed it fairly vigorously in a vain attempt to incorporate as much oxygen as possible into the mixture. For now it's covered with a paper towel over the top and a rubberband.

I guess we'll see where this goes.

Poor neglected blog

2009-03-03T14:33:00.002-06:00

I'm sorry blog. I will take care of you better in the future. I got eated by the work monster and have just not been very attentive to your needs.

I really want to make a sourdough pet. I think I will start that tonight.

Bacon Sausage

2009-02-23T21:35:00.003-06:00

Got a food grinder accessory for the kitchenaid today. So what do you do to break in a food grinder?

So now I've got a pile of ground up bacon. Which smells ...very very bacony.

Welp.

This is your heart.

This is your heart on a lot of bacon.

At this point I feel pretty sick. But Nick tried them.

and is delighted. It's very intensely bacony, with a crisp outside and a chewy inside. I would not eat these on a regular basis. If ever again.

I think we're going to mix the ground bacon into hamburger meat. my other idea is to mix with a touch of maple syrup and cook these into thin disks and put them in the middle of pancakes.

I kind of want to die now.

Bacon Mac and Cheese, Brussels Sprouts and Cornbread

2009-02-19T20:08:00.005-06:00

We're kind of addicted to Costco. I mean. It's a lot of food for not much money and we sure do go through a lot of food. And they have giant packs of 4 of bacon.

And I kind of had a bunch of leftover cheeses from adventures in the snippins bucket at Whole Foods (where they have a bucket of the tiny bits of leftover cheese and sell them for buck or two or three each. great way to sample cheese!)

I have no idea what kinds of cheeses these are anymore. I know one was a goat gouda. I don't remember much else.

And...these noodles.

OK. I got a rotary grater for Christmas and there was much gratage. And a pile of cheese to show for it.

Aaaand then we chopped up four or so strips of bacon into little pieces and fried them up and Steph got mad at me because I didn't think it was enough fat and there needed to be a little dairy fat soooo BUTTER!

Yup. That's bacon fat and butter. Mmmm. Add a few tablespoons of flour to make roux.

That consistency. Let that cook for a couple of minutes. And then add a cup and a half of milk and stir. And then dump in the cheese and let it melt. Ours was grated very fine so it didn't take long at all. (Edited, thanks Mike!) And it'll thicken. Steph likes to add a little mustard at this stage - it adds a little to the sharpness.

In the meantime boil the noodles to just short of al dente, drain, dump into 13x9 pan and pour the sauce over and shake the pan a bit to distribute. This gets baked at 350 for about 20-30 minutes until brown on top. By the time I got to the pan after it was pulled out, it was too late.

And Steph made these totally tasty lemony Brussels Sprouts and then there was dinner.

AND. with the bacon grease leftover from another dish: we made the Coleman family recipe for cornbread. I will let Bob explain.

"This is Coleman Family Cornbread.

2 cups white corn meal, Half cup flour, 1tsp baking soda, one fourth tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups buttermilk, 2 tbs bacon grease. The only thing you need is a well seasoned skillet outside of those ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 450, mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Put the skillet and heat it on the stove. While it's heating, add the eggs and buttermilk to the dry ingredients, and mix it all together till it's nice and liquidy. Then put your bacon grease in the skillet, enough to cover the bottom of the skillet, but no more than that.

When the grease starts to smoke, pick up the skillet, pour the grease into the bowl, mix it for a second, then pour it all back into the skillet, and put it into the oven for 28-30 minutes. It ought to come out and you can just turn it over and delicious, yummy, amazing cornbread comes out and you butter it up and eat it."

And you know. It did and it was awesome!

Making up dinner

2009-02-19T19:59:00.003-06:00

Dinner tonight was kind of on the fly: there was a request for the use of shrimp and I do have a giant bag of rice that needs to be somewhat used up. This is the thought process once I get home:

Do dishes. Find cutting board. Ooh bacon grease in the fridge. Throw into pan. cut up and onion and some garlic and fry up. Meanwhile go wash rice and throw that into the pan too and let it fry a little. Um. Shit. is this going to be asiany or... not. UHHHH. LEMON PEPPER? paprika? dried chives? ... OH. I HAVE SHERRY VINEGAR. UHHHH. *toss* *saffron* *shrimp* lemon goes with... big pile of spinach!

Et voila, makeshift paella that I didn't know existed yet.

Things I want to make

2009-02-19T14:10:00.002-06:00

Bread bowls
Pain d'Epi
Savory Bread Pudding
Kettle Corn

Ready, set, go!

Previews of coming attractions

2009-02-17T15:03:00.004-06:00

From yesterday's baconfest - an unphotographed Quiche Lorraine, a violated pound of bacon, brussels sprouts with lemon and NO bacon and Macaroni and Cheese with Bacon but with a twist.

Things I want to make THANKS BITTMAN - Fondant Potatoes

Clementine Cake

2009-02-12T23:26:00.007-06:00

Apparently we all have a crush on Smitten Kitchen's clementine cake, because it's been making the rounds on the blogs.

Being as susceptible to suggestion as we are (when it comes to food), we went and bought a bag of clementines one Saturday and totally forgot about them for a whole week.

Then we boiled the clementines, as per the first step in the recipe. The weirdest thing was they smelled like cake while they were boiling. So anyway, the boiled clementines went into the fridge for four days because nobody had time to make this goddamn cake (but we all wanted to eat it). Then I made it, or something like it.

The Beater+ paddle makes a sort of squeaky noise when it scrapes.

Due to dietary considerations, I wanted to adapt the recipe to be nut-free, which is kind of a tall order when the entire body of the cake consists of ground almonds. I still wanted to have a dense cake, with a similar nutty flavor, so here's what I came up with.

Top to bottom: brown rice flour, ground flaxseed, all-purpose flour

A note on grinding flaxseed: If you screw an empty pasta sauce jar into the base of your blender, you get an awesome way to grind stuff up without having to clean a giant pitcher! I am so going to make pesto this way from now on.

Looks kind of like ground-up almonds.

I added butter just because, you know. Butter.

Blarf.

I buttered and floured a springform pan, then poured in the batter and hoped for the best:

This here is a photo testimony to why you should butter and flour everything before you bake in it. Look at that beautiful clean release. Even plain nonstick doesn't do it this well unless it's brand-spanking-new.

It's done! Looks a little naked, though.
Oh hey I sure do have a Meyer lemon in my fridge that needs using up, and a lot of eggs, and some butter and sugar...

LEMON CURD-ed!

It was delicious. Mellow, sweet, and a little orangey. Texturally, it resembled a dense banana-nut bread, and I am happy to say that there was a bit of nutty flavor from the flaxseed. The lemon curd provided just enough acidity to cut the sweet richness of the cake.

It's even better on the second day.

Clementine Cake
adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Nigella Lawson, who is totally cute.

4 to 5 clementines (about 375grams/slightly less than 1 pound total weight)
6 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons room temperature butter
3/4 cup ground flaxseed
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder

1. Put the clementines in a pot with enough cold water to cover; bring to a boil and cook for 2 hours. Drain and let cool, then cut them in half and remove any seeds. Chop the whole fruit finely in a food processor/blender/by hand.

2. Preheat oven to 375 F. Butter and flour an 8" round springform pan.

3. Beat the eggs, then add sugar and dry ingredients and butter. Add chopped clementines and mix well.

4. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake at 375 F for about 35-40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Meyer Lemon Curd
something I half-assed, with help from the Internet.

2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
1/4-1/3 cup lemon juice (How tart do you want it? Meyer lemons are sweeter, so if you use regular lemons then I'd say do 1/4 cup juice.)
1 Tablespoon freshly grated lemon zest
1/2 cup sugar
4 Tablespoons room temperature butter, cut into pieces

1. In a stainless steel bowl set over a pot of simmering water, whisk the eggs, sugar, and lemon juice. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture becomes thick like sour cream or mayonnaise (about 10 minutes). You can also use a Pyrex bowl if you don't have stainless, but it will take a lot longer to get everything up to the right temperature.

2. Remove from heat immediately and stir in zest, then whisk in pieces of butter gradually until they have been incorporated.

3. Try to let it cool down a bit before you eat it all.

Butter Chicken/Chicken Tikka Masala

2009-02-12T22:27:00.002-06:00

I'm going to be a bad food anthropologist here and tell you I have no flipping idea what the difference is between the two. To my uneducated and ungoogled mind, I'm not really sure - because to me it's all a British-based tomatoey/creamy/curryish dish involving tangy chicken. And that I cannot get enough of this and Saag Paneer and once we really needed to figure out how to start making these dishes or be doomed to lifetime indentured servitude to the 12 dollar lunch buffet at Bombay Brasserie or the slightly less doomy trip to Himalaya. (though who am I kidding, all my om noms belong to them)

Thanks to some lovely forumites, I present to you Catbert's Butter Chicken recipe (as modified by me who can't leave well enough alone)!

For marinade the night before
4 Boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 cup Yogurt
1 tablespoon Garam Masala
--
optional
1 tablespoon grated garlic
juice of half a lemon
1 tablespoon grated ginger
cilantro
salt
pepper
pinch of sugar

For the sauce the day of
1 large onion, chopped finely
1/3 cup butter
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons crushed ginger
1 teaspoon chopped green chile pepper
1 teaspoon coriander
1 tablespoon curry powder

1/2 small can tomato paste (7 oz?)
1 small can diced tomatoes (14.5 oz?)
1 teapoon salt
1 cup whipping cream

chopped fresh cilantro

Night before - chop your chicken into 1.5 inch cubes. In a container that can fit all that chicken and a mess of yogurt and spices - add your chicken and the yogurt and all that tasty goodness. This will make your chicken tender and tangy and your best friend.

Pre bath

bath! and what the container of garam masala looks like. But I am pretty sure you can make your own.

Overnight.

Ok. Now I'm going to be perfectly honest. I didn't remember to photograph anything until everything was done and plated. So it's imagination time!

In front of you is a vivid picture of the usual yellow dutch oven with a nob of melted butter and diced onions that are now slightly translucent with a brownish tone from the curry/garam masala. There are bits of garlic in there as well. Here, if I had ginger and green chilis, they would also be frying in the white bottom of the pan.

In this picture, you see the entire mess of yogurt and chicken added. It looks hopeless. There will be no dinner, only a yogurty mess!

The yogurty mess is cooked until the meat looks unevil and nicely cooked on the outside. There is a picture of this to prove that there is indeed hope for dinner.

In go the tomatoes. Stir well to ensure that all the tomato paste is incorporated. It's going to look a little grainy cause yogurt gets sort of unhappy especially when it meets tomatoes. But trust me, they eventually figure out their differences.

Add the cream and stir. Cover and simmer until you figure out your side dishes; remembering to check on this frequently and make sure the sauce is good.

There is a picture of a spoon covered in sauce and it is the color of a good tomato bisque only there's a bitemark out of it. Over time the level of the sauce will go down a bit due to the diligence of the cook ensuring the sauce is perfect.

it's really good sauce.

While this is simmering - make the rice. White basmati rice is appropriate. I heat up a couple of tablespoons of oil first and toast a couple of cardamom pods and a small cinnamon stick before I add half a chopped onion and a little garlic. After that gets hot again, I add the rice - 1 cup of rice to one cup of water for as much as you're making that day. stir up, cover, put your heat on medium and leave it alone for 20 minutes. after 20 minutes, cut the heat, fluff the rice and serve with the curry.

The side dish is some leftover cauliflower lightly blanched with chickpeas tossed in warm olive oil with a little curry powder and garlic and parsley.

Dinner tonight

2009-02-09T20:42:00.002-06:00

OK. Don't really have pictures of this, but I wanted to share:

This is part of the Mark Bittman does Italy article from Men's Health - Bryan first told me about this article and then brought the magazine over which led to a pretty bitter hostage exchange over the holidays - But I make and freeze various variations of the soup for lunches and make the chicken when I need something easy, light tasting and comforting.

Braised Chicken - per Mark Bittman
Chicken parts - I like to use thighs since they are cheap and braise well and are extremely plentiful. But if you're a white meat person that works as well.

1 cup white wine

a few cloves of garlic, smashed and chopped fine

tablespoon of rosemary

a lemon

Personally I skin the chicken parts and let them sit in the pot for a while until all the fat comes out. Then I skim and save the fat save for a couple of tablespoons to fry the chicken in. Otherwise use olive oil.

Brown the chicken parts. Be patient.

Remove the browned chicken parts and set aside. Fry up the garlic and rosemary in the remaining fat, then deglaze the pan with the white wine. (see below. I also deglaze myself) I also like to add lemon and the zest at this stage.

Return the chicken parts to the pan, turn in the juices, cover and turn to low. Leave for 20-30 minutes to whenever you feel like coming back to dinner. if you let it sit for long enough it will fall off the bone. Serve with the braising liquid and whatever vegetables and starches you like.

Seriously, I love braising things. takes very little effort, is pretty much still magic to me and lets me do the dishes or watch The Wire while I wait for dinner to finish.

Leftovers soup

2009-02-09T19:57:00.006-06:00

Ok. First of all. It's been one of those days. up at 3 am, work is work and I picked up some things at the store to make dinner.

Yes I needed that ok. Wait.

Ok better.

Incidentally. That's the 28 oz wineglass. We saw it at Crate and Barrel one day and Stephanie loves me enough to buy things for me that she knows are a terrible idea.

Ok. By the way. The bottle is GONE. Granted there was a generous glass in dinner (not documented tonight, but I will eventually because it's delicious and simple as well) and a generous glass to Matt, but the rest of it is a 28 oz wine glass to me.

ANYWAY.

Leftovers soup. This is what happens when it's Sunday and everyone has wilty veggies from the week before and it's time to improvise.

I bought two bundles of kale the week before and steph had some sprouting potatoes and some wilting spinach. I also had some very pathetic carrots and emo celery and onions on the verge of going off. Oh and a quarter pound of bacon that I'm pretty sure we last used in the french toast experiment. TIME TO DIE.

Chunked up the bacon into about thumbsized pieces. Fried those up while peeling and chopping up the carrots, onion and celery. When all the delicious is extracted (there is a puddle of grease and crispy bacon. I took off some of the grease and saved it. because I'm one of those people. leave enough grease to coat the bottom of the pan) let the onion join the party. then the celery after about three minutes. and then the carrots. add a little salt, stir and scrape that awesome fond in, and cover. Before you cover it, it looks like this!

Yeah. Oh baby. hello. How you doin.

Ok if yesterday, if alone, if single and halfway into the bottle of wine the way I am now? This would be my blushing bride and I would teach it the ways of the world. But thats not where we are right now. And there are many things to come.

WHILE you are being very patient and letting that all hang out in the pot at medium heat, you are being productive and peeling and cubing potatoes, about half an inch on each side. And then you toss those in the mess, WHICH, if properly treated, will have let loose all the delicious liquid of flavor. Seriously, this is how you should always make soup.

Then kale. I chop off the ends and cut the leaves into strips and then jam them on top of the craziness in the pot then cover.

It eventually shrinks down. Promise. Threw the spinach in there too.

now that's fairly thick. I added a couple of cups of water, about a quarter cup of chicken broth powder and a small can of tomato paste. And a little cream. cause. you know. It was there. Thicken or thin to taste. I like to thicken either with a slurry of flour and water or if you're really decadent about it, a mash of flour and butter. Which is not only delicious, but keeps your soup from lumping.

SOUP.

And it was delicious. The acidity of the tomatoes cuts that gross sandpaper tooth feeling spinach can give sometimes and the kale was a little wilty and sweet and good even for kale. And it really never fails - no matter what we have on hand,I always wind up with exactly a pot of soup - which feeds 6 and then provides generous leftovers for two for the next day for lunch.

Those Curry Horns

2009-02-08T10:46:00.003-06:00

My pictures of the making of are miserable - so you just get the baking phase.

Filling!

pound of beef
large onion chopped up
few cloves of garlic
cubed and boiled potatoes
peas - if you like them
tablespoon of garam masala
tablespoon or so of curry powder
teaspoon of Sriracha (My spices are a bit old and needed some zing)

Brown the beef. Drain a little, but it won't hurt to have extra fat in this to bind it as it cools (gross, i know). Add the onions and let them cook for about five minutes before you throw in the garlic. toss in the spices - the whole mess should take on a yellow tinge.

Meanwhile, you are boiling cubed potatoes until just soft and rounded around the edges.

We threw the beef mixture and the drained potatoes into the kitchenaid and beat it for a while on the paddle attachment until it was mushy then added the peas and threw it in the fridge to cool.

crust! (from here but we can't leave anything alone.
2 cups of pastry flour
2/3rds cup of a fat (we used butter. until the second batch. then we used my reserve of bacon fat. i'm. that person)
1 egg
a few tablespoons of cold water (or buttermilk if you're us and have buttermilk)

blend the pastry flour and the fat until it looks like rough breadcrumbs. Then add the egg and slowly add the cold liquid while mixing until the mess just holds together in a ball when pressure is applied. PIE CRUST RULES. wrap the ball in plastic wrap or whatever and fridge for an hour while watching battlestar galactica.

Steph rolled out the dough to what, 1/8th inch thickness? And then cut circles about six inches across or whatever the diameter of the bottom of my food processor bowl is.

and then insert wrap and fold! (per wrapping instructions of Joy.

Eggwash and Tadah!

Baked these at 400 for 20 minutes

TADAH

They keep well in the fridge, can be eaten cold or nuked in the microwave. Very tasty little snacks. Hell, you can put anything in the little pocket and make pasties or hot pocket type snacks. But we almost never have leftover dough.

Carrot soup

2009-02-05T19:27:00.006-06:00

It turns out I am a squirrel when it comes to produce, because I've managed to stockpile 3 bags of carrots, in various stages of consumption. My subconscious is very concerned about maintaining adequate carrot reserves.

What to do with a glut of carrots? Puree them into soup!

One onion, some chicken stock, an errant yam, some half and half, and a bit too much curry powder also made it into the soup. The pine nuts make for tasty garnish.

While I waited for the soup to cook, I made fennel oil following the suggestion of that book that tells us what to do. I pulsed the everloving fuck out of fennel seeds in my food processor, then stuck em in a jar with olive oil.

The fennel oil views you with indifference.

I am supposed to let the oil infuse for a week or so, then filter and bottle and probably use in salad dressing or on pork. If the fennel-seed paste has any remaining flavor, I may make a facsimile of Italian sausage.

Donut pudding.

2009-02-04T22:36:00.007-06:00

You heard right, I said DONUT pudding.
It's what you do when you have a lot of leftover donuts going stale, and you don't want to eat stale donuts, and bread pudding sounds tasty because you haven't had that in a while.

Inspiration found here, although you were right to figure I wasn't going to follow the recipe as-is. For one, I didn't have that many donuts.

Just two giant apple fritters and two glazed.

Bread pudding is basically really messy French toast done in the oven. You tear up stale bread and soak it in an egg custard and then you bake it.
I did not add any sugar to the custard, as the donuts were already glazed and that was plenty sweet enough.

These were the eggs Dan brought home. They are labeled "JUMBO." They are the biggest damn eggs I've ever seen.
So. I tore up the donuts and put them in a pan, beat 4 eggs with enough half and half to make 6 cups' worth, and then poured it over the donuts:

At this point I felt a little sad that there wasn't any jelly in my donut pudding, so I added gobs of seedless blackberry jelly.

I didn't say it was going to be pretty. Messy French toast, okay?

The pan went into a 325F oven for about 30 minutes, after which I turned the oven off and let it sit inside while we ate dinner and watched Lost. Then this happened:

I also made a whiskey sauce upon request, since apparently that is the traditional accompaniment to bread pudding. But this is DONUT PUDDING, so there.

Nostalgia

2009-02-04T15:09:00.003-06:00

We seem to be on a Chinese food kick lately. Namely, Chinese food that we grew up eating (and were therefore thoroughly sick of once we moved out). I've spent the past few years teaching myself to cook Western food, but now it looks like the pendulum is swinging back the other way. It took 6 years for me to want to eat this again:

Ma po tofu

This + a bowl of steamed rice is a tasty dinner.

Catching up - Spatchcock edition

2009-01-31T19:28:00.004-06:00

We spatchcocked a chicken a few days ago. Spatchcocked it good.

Spatchcock: short for "dispatching the cock" is an old technique for quickly cooking a chicken by forcing it to be as flat as possible. Steph says it was used by hunters in the field because it cooks faster so you didn't have to keep the fires going so long. Lets you cook a chicken in about 20 minutes if you do it right. Also requires a pan and not an oven.

Cut lengthwise through the backbone of a chicken; butterflying it. Steph coated this one in salt for three days and stuffed it with preserved limes before it was laid open.

So. First we took the dutch oven and heated it up in the oven at 425. And threw the butterflied chicken in the hot pan. And proceeded to wicked witch of the west the offending fowl.

And since we're insane, there's sweet potatoes and sage and olive oil inside the dutch oven.

Flip after about ten minutes. and squish it again.

TA-DAH

The overly long salt rub and cooking the chicken from both sides really quickly resulted in a very very juicy chicken. (The three day salt cure was basically because um. We kept meaning to eat the chicken but got very distracted.)

Note for this St. Paddy's day

2009-01-30T22:28:00.003-06:00

Car Bomb Cupcakes the newest meme from Smitten Kitchen. Except it's me and these really just need to be doused in Jameson so I can get sloshed off of cupcakes.

And since we're talking about alcohol ANYWAY, tonight's project was fill an old vanilla extract bottle with leftover rum (see last week) and vodka dregs and a vanilla bean. Theoretically this can hang out for a few weeks and make vanilla extract BUT WE SHALL SEE.

Curry Horns/Pies/Turnovers

2009-01-30T22:12:00.004-06:00

Steph and I were sitting here watching Avatar and eating a Key Lime Pie trying to figure out what the hell this thing is called. It's this half moon pie thing that's all shiny and braided around the edges filled with a ground beef slightly sweet potatoy curry.

Finally found some pointers on the Internets.

http://www.recipelink.com/cookbooks/2000/0688163009_2.html

and the braiding technique

http://www.xanga.com/joyosity/686394215/curry-turnovers-or-curry-puffs-or-curry-meat-pies/

We'll probably wind up doing something between the pie crust recipe in the first and mucking around with the filling recipe and learning how to fold using the second link. And then finding people to feed them to. And trying to figure out how to batch this considering my oven is about the size of my cat.

NEWS FLASH: everything we've ever eaten and are trying to figure out how to make is here http://www.xanga.com/joyosity including the correct way to make Chun Yo Bin (i suck at making chinese into english)

Other things to do with a $16 bottle of rum

2009-01-28T21:43:00.007-06:00

We have this book that tells us what to do. I picked it up on a whim (and apparently, for a song) from our local Half Price Books one day, thinking I would inflict it upon Emily for Christmas as a semi-gag gift. (She's paranoid about preserved foods, and thus has never experienced the joy of jam or delicious pickles.)

It's a great book written by two British food dorks with a good sense of humor and a solid knowledge of drying, smoking, curing, canning, infusing, freezing, fermenting, and a few other mind-boggling things like how to suspend baby octopus in aspic.

Turns out the book has a section on alcohol.

We had actually bought the rum for the primary purpose of making a recipe from the book. The fact that we were making bananas foster the same night simply provided impetus for the trek to Costco.

The recipe is called "Lai's Fruits of the Forest Rum" and the basic premise is as such: Put frozen mixed berries into a bottle, add some sugar, and top it off with rum. Seriously, who needs to measure? So we didn't.

Mise-en-place, lacking sugar. Ignore the flour. The rainbowcake likes to watch.

Rum strata.

I'm so glad we bought this funnel.

Once we had filled our various bottles, we sealed them and wrapped them in foil to keep out the light, then stashed them somewhere dark. The instructions said to let them sit for a year, so maybe in a year we will get really drunk on it and report back on the status of rum n' berries.

Epilogue: We had about a cup of berries left, so I made two tiny cobblers in ramekins. They were delicious.

Challah part 2: breakfast for dinner

2009-01-28T21:23:00.011-06:00

Okay so here's what we did to one of the challahs. The other was savagely ripped apart while we were waiting for the final season of Lost to start.

We sliced our remaining challah loaf into thick 1-1.5" pieces and violated them like so:

Cutting a pocket

Stuffed with mascarpone + honey (used ghetto ziploc bag with corner cut off piping method)

Soaked in french toast custard (eggs + half&half) and put on new-to-us griddle pan.

While Emily took over the griddling, I prepped bananas foster:

banana-nana-fo-fana

Melting butter into cream and sugar, because y'know...it needed more fat.

Sadly there were no good pictures of me setting it on fire, but know this: I mixed about a tablespoon of Everclear (the dregs from limoncello-making adventure) with some rum to make damn sure it caught. Oh, such glorious flames.

Bow down before your god!

That sucker was $16 at Costco. They got some alcohols for scary cheap.

There was bacon also

but not for long.

The mascarpone sort of melted into the bread, making it kind of bread-puddingy in the middle which was nice. Next time (next time?) we will make the pockets in fresh pliable challah instead of semi-stale crumbly challah, and maybe also soak the bread longer in the custard.

We still have half a tub of mascarpone leftover.

Challah

2009-01-25T02:11:00.008-06:00

Challah is delicious and no other justification is needed. If you have not consumed challah in the past, you have been missing out and you should run to the nearest challah store and get some, or if you are a bit more patient, you should make it yourself.

Here is the recipe for delicious challah that you should make.

The best part about making bread, any bread, is that you can abuse the dough to fit your schedule. Don't have all day to wait around for multiple risings? Throw the dough in the fridge overnight after the first rise, then let it finish the next day.

The same can be done with shaped loaves before proofing (the final rise). It's awesome. You can be lazy and still have awesome bread that amazes people.

These loaves in particular had one rise initially, were punched down, and put in the fridge overnight, then taken out the next morning for a second rise, then shaped, proofed, and baked.

Here is what it looked like when I did it for the third time in 2 months. I suspect this is why everyone likes having me around.

So many lumps.

It was a two-step process to roll the dough into ropes, since the gluten structure was fairly developed. I rolled each piece into a short cylinder, let it rest for a few minutes so the gluten would relax, then rolled them all into ropes for braiding.

It looks like a doughy octopus.

Braided...

And baked.

Next post I will relate to you the delicious fate of the challahs.

Rainbow Cake!

2009-01-25T01:42:00.007-06:00

So here's how you make rainbow cake.

You start with a really good recipe for delicious cake, sink some dollars into some good quality gel food coloring (found in the cake decorating aisle of your local craft store, not the supermarket), and use all the bowls and stirring implements in the kitchen.

We had cheap aluminum 9" round pans so I buttered and floured them beforehand. (the flouring makes all the difference in de-panning, trust me).

I've started saving discarded butter wrappers in the fridge for expressly this purpose.

Then I made a batch of buttermilk cake batter and split it into 6 roughly equal parts:

Here are the colors. I just dipped the tip of a butter knife into the gel color and mixed that into the batter really well. Purple was kind of hard to get right because the batter was yellowish.

Once you have all the colors, start pouring them into the pans in rainbow sequence like so: Use a bunch of the red, like nearly all of it except for a tablespoon or two, for the first layer of the first cake. Then follow with almost as much of the orange (but reserve a bit more), and so on with the rest of the colors. When you reach purple, you should only be putting a dollop of batter in the center and reserving the rest.

For the second cake, repeat the pouring process but in reverse order (all the purple first, etc.)

You will wind up with one bulls-eye rainbow with red on the outside, and one bulls-eye rainbow with purple on the outside.

Bake the cakes as per the usual and layer and frost with delicious whipped cream cheese frosting.

Then eat it.

Buttermilk cake recipe:

2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup butter, softened
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla

Cream butter and sugars together, then beat in eggs one at a time and add vanilla. Sift in the rest of the dry ingredients, alternating with the buttermilk, and beat well until batter is smooth. Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out dry.

Whipped cream cheese frosting

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, room temperature

1 1/2 c. heavy cream

1 c. sugar

Whip the cream and half the sugar together until they form soft peaks, then transfer to another bowl for temporary storage. Whip the cream cheese and the rest of the sugar together until the sugar has completely dissolved and the mixture is no longer grainy. Gently fold in whipped cream and mix to combine (the paddle attachment at low speed works fine).

Stewed Pork Belly! Part two!

2009-01-25T00:22:00.004-06:00

OK! So. Here's the cut of meat. Pork Belly. Proto-Bacon. I got mine from the Chinese supermarket.

You also need a fair knob of ginger, some garlic and some star anise.

The ginger and the garlic get chopped up and thrown in some heating oil with the anise. Anise gets left whole, but will eventually break down. You just want it to remain as whole as possible so you don't bite into it later.

While waiting for the flavors to infuse into the oil, I chop up the belleh.

I think I would cut it a big larger next time as it shrinks down a lot as the fat renders. (...yeah. There's. a lot of fat. Proto-bacon!)

Brown the pork in the gingery garlicky oil.

This is the wrong kind of cooking wine. You want Chinese cooking wine or shaoxing or something like that. Usually comes in squarish containers. I. was impatient and had run out. You want about half a cup of that, half a cup of dark soy and a few tablespoons of oyster sauce. and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Brown rock sugar is proper, but I don't usually have that around. Adjust to taste.

Add this to the pork. Add water until just to the top of the pork.

I threw this into the oven at 225 and did some gardening. Three or four hours later I came back and put it on the stove to reduce down for another couple of hours. You wind up with this.

So shiny. So bad for you. It should be rich, not fatty tasting, and a little sweet. The fat should have pretty much come out on top and leaves behind all the ... stuff that's not fat. Now if you want to do this the long way, you can put this in the fridge, chip off the fat, and warm it up to eat. But if you're us, and impatient, you skim off the fat, put it in the freezer, chip off the fat and add the gelled sauce back into the rest of the pot. The fat is pretty solid.

We made congee, or rice soup. It became kind of a nail soup situation where Dan brought leftover tilapia, I snipped garlic scapes from the garden and we threw in some dried shitake mushrooms and leftover chicken stock. The basic deal is just take leftover rice, boil it with water until it becomes a thick soup.

Also fried up some premade turnip cake and chive flowers from the market and had a nice traditional dinner.

Dude

2009-01-23T13:23:00.003-06:00

Homemade fried gluten!

I think it's time for a Congee party.

also I have pictures of the Braised Pork Bellyfest and just have been too tired/lazy/busy to upload. I did get the recipe from Mom and it was delicious indeed and definitely replicatable. Just takes a lot of time to cook. Initial setup is pretty easy.

Stewed Pork Belly

2009-01-18T08:35:00.009-06:00

Before you read this stream of obsessiveness below: please note that food is such a big friggen deal to Chinese people that national treasures aren't crowns or jewelry, but rocks that look like meat.

I'm on the search for this family recipe. Well, I know it's not just my family's. All I knew was that we would go to Grandma's and she would make these dark glossy fatty pork cubes and it was so bad for you, but delicious . It was only in the last couple of years that I figured out this crazy mystery meat was pork belly. I don't remember much else other than ginger and anise is involved. Somehow. Only because accidentally biting into ginger and an anise star is disgusting and mindscarring. You know. at six.

Things to know about Grandma. She's a scientist from Shanghai who was a daughter of a businessman in a time when being a businessman was kind of not a good thing. She didn't really mess around in the kitchen a lot, so she didn't cook many things, she didn't get fancy, she just made food when we visited and because she had to. And didn't want people around her while she did it. Which is great when you're six, but not so much when you're obsessing over the mechanics of a dish you last ate 10 years ago.

I've asked my mom a few times what this crazy meat dish is and how to make it, and I've never gotten a straight answer. We can't even decide what kind of meat it is let alone what it's called and what other spices are involved. Grandma is in Shanghai right now and probably thinks I'm insane for getting all down into the details of this.

I've narrowed it down to a few possibilities and then I'm going to try calling mom again.

Hong Shao Ro

Tung Po

Braised Pork

Problem is - these preparations all have basically the same gist but way different executions. I know there's anise in there. I know it's a little sweet. But some of these seem way too ..weirdly ingrediented and complicated. Like Cinnamon and Honey? That's a little fusiony for NaiNai. Did she caramelize sugar? Can I even imagine her doing that? Did she boil the pork first? Am I going for authenticity here or something different that I would want to eat as well? What's paramount - nostalgia or technique?

I know. Edge of your seat.

But no worries Planeteers, I have a pork belly sitting in my fridge now and SUMTHIN'S gonna be made from it family recipe or not.

Lamb Fight Night

2009-01-16T23:07:00.001-06:00

Hallo. This is the Lamb. It would like to meet you. It is covered in salt, pepper, rosemary, brown sugar and LOVE. It waited for many hours for this opportunity. Please say hello.

These are the kales. They have been friends with the pork jowl bacon and garlic for a little bit. Please say hello as well

We are brussels sprouts. People do not like us very much. But we will teach you how we can also be delicious. This is us.

We are rather lonely. Sometimes we also like bacon and garlic.

HELLO WE ARE BACON AND GARLIC WE MAKE MANY PARTIES QUITE FUN. AND DELICIOUS.

ok pork jowl bacon is pretty damn chewy and awesome. it's like the fucking Stride gum of baconness. You will not argue this and you will get you and your bad self down to your nearest ethnic food source and expand your bacony horizons and you will THANK ME for introducing you to this. Actually you will thank Stephanie as she has brought this into my humble home and I did not have to go anywhere.

YOU WILL DO THIS. AND YOU WILL GET PRETTY LITTLE CHUNKS LIKE THIS

We cook and we become brussels sprouts tastiness and have a beautiful crust that only happens when you allow us to chill out in a pan for a while and fufill our potential. DO NOT DOUBT. EAT SPROUTS. THEY ARE GOOD FOR YOU

Lamb is done. We use Magic Food Pot for this. It take about 50 minutes. Magic Food Pot also known as Big Daddy Oilless Fryer and it is not expensive and will give you much joy in your life as it has in mine. It produces a pile of meat as such.

The meat is delicous, tender and medium rare as I choose to enjoy it. Well many people want to enjoy it.

Dan says hello. Dan. Say hello.

I do not think he has enough wine. HELLO

Ok. See. That worked. Then a Dan went flop.

Apparently this is pretty damn good wine.

Limoncello, part 3

2009-01-12T15:53:00.001-06:00

The bottling setup. Note the matches.

It burned for waaay too long at first, so we added more sugar water.

The ladle was heavy and my arm got tired after the first two bottles.

Now all that's left is to leave them in a dark place for at least another 3 months to mellow out. I may stuff them in my closet so Emily doesn't get any premature ideas...

Limoncello - part 2

2009-01-12T13:28:00.000-06:00

After about 1 month of steeping in a dark closet, the alcohol looks to be a darker yellow and the citron slices have become less buoyant.

Tonight we filtered the alcohol, added a TON of simple syrup to it, and got it down to around 100 proof. At various stages we would put a little bit in a shot glass and try to light it...after the first sugar addition it still burned for a good 2 minutes in the shot glass.

Once we were fairly confident it wasn't going to kill/blind anyone, we bottled it in pretty swivel-top bottles (and a small glass flask that previously held maple syrup). Emily has those pictures.

In the steeping jar now: another handle of Everclear + all the husks of the juiced limes from yesterday.

Recipe for Buche de Noel

2008-12-24T13:33:00.000-06:00

If anyone is so inclined (mainly in case I lose the paper I wrote it down on):

Buche de Noel
sourced from several places on the internets

Sponge cake (Genoise):

6 large eggs, separated
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
12 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 cup cake flour, sifted
2 Tbsp. cocoa powder, sifted

1. Beat egg yolks with 6 Tbsp. sugar until thickened and pale
2. Whip egg whites with 6 Tbsp. sugar and the cream of tartar until stiff peaks are formed.
3. Gradually fold egg whites into egg yolks until combined.
4. Sift flour and cocoa powder onto egg mixture and fold in to combine.
5. Spread batter into a 15x11" jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper. Bake for 12-15 minutes at 400 F. Remove and let cool.

Coffee Buttercream:

4 large egg whites
1 cup sugar
24 Tbsp. room-temperature unsalted butter (3 sticks, cut into 1-Tbsp. pieces)
2 Tbsp. espresso powder (I used 3 Tbsp. instant mexican coffee granules)
2 Tbsp. rum or brandy

1. Whisk sugar and egg whites together in a bowl set over simmering water until sugar is dissolved (test w/finger for grittiness) and egg reaches 110F (lukewarm).
2. Remove bowl from heat and whip egg whites until cooled (soft peaks stage).
3. Fit mixer with paddle attachment and beat in softened butter one tablespoon at a time until smooth. Turn up the speed if the emulsion starts to appear grainy.
4. Dissolve espresso powder in liquor and beat into the buttercream.

Meringue mushrooms

1/2 cup egg whites (approx. 3 large ones)
1 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar

Note: This recipe makes a ton of meringue, so plan on piping out meringue cookies or something once you get bored making mushroom parts.

1. Whisk sugar and egg whites together in a bowl set over simmering water until sugar is dissolved (test w/finger for grittiness) and egg reaches 110F (lukewarm).
2. Remove from heat and whip until stiff peak stage.
3. Pipe out small mounds (1/2" to 3/4") for mushroom caps and 1" high stems onto parchment paper. Using a moistened fingertip, push down/smooth out any "tails" that are stick out from the mushroom caps before baking.
4. Bake 45 minutes at 200 F, then 30 minutes at 175 F to dry out completely.
5. Dried meringue shapes can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for several days.

Assembly

Peel parchment paper off sponge cake and place the cake back on the sheet of paper. Spread buttercream over top of cake, leaving 1" bare along the long side of the cake. Using the parchment paper as a support, start rolling from the un-frosted long edge of the cake and form a tight roll. Place cake seam side down and refrigerate 30 minutes to set before proceeding.

Cut "branches" from the ends of the main log and arrange them on either side. Spread dark chocolate ganache over the cake and use a fork to texturize (make swirly knots for extra interest).

Assembling meringue mushrooms: Use a paring knife (I used the tip of a steak knife), make small divots in the base of a mushroom cap, brush the underside with ganache, and insert the stem. Let set upside down/lying down.

Arrange meringue mushrooms in clusters along the top of the log (also anchor some on the plate with a dab of ganache for interest). Dust the tops of the mushrooms with cocoa powder, then dust the entire cake with powdered sugar "snow."

BOOSH de Noel

2008-12-23T13:30:00.000-06:00

So many eggs went into this. I think I knocked our egg inventory down by a dozen or so.

Parchment paper is my friend, and it should be your friend, too, if you ever attempt something this crazy. Also, I have beaten egg whites and folded them into other things so many times now that it no longer fazes me.

Meringues are so fun. I just piped these with a giant ziploc freezer bag with a corner cut off.

Coffee buttercream. This was the first time I'd done a classic buttercream frosting (egg whites heated with sugar, then whisked and butter beaten in one tablespoon at a time), and OH MY GOD THERE WAS SO MUCH BUTTER.

I rolled the cake last night, wrapped and stashed it in the fridge, then finished decorating today. The perfectionist/OCD part of me loooooves pastry work.

Topping is dark chocolate ganache. I must admit, the two main things that compelled me to make this cake were 1. cute meringue mushrooms, and 2. coffee filling.

Limoncello - part 1

2008-12-12T13:16:00.000-06:00

Step 1 completed:

- 1 handle of Everclear
- 1 Buddha hand citron, washed and thinly sliced
- Zest of 2 lemons
- Giant glass jar

It felt really, really wrong to pour the entire jug of Everclear into the jar.

The alcohol started turning yellow within about 15 minutes because we used a microplane to zest the lemons. Luckily, the Buddha hand didn't need zesting, as its pith was sweet rather than bitter like that of lemons. Zesting a Cthulhu citrus would have been a pain in the ass.

Now comes the waiting. Most recipes say the initial steeping time is about a month (until the peels turn white, indicating all aromatics have been extracted). I'm keeping it in my closet so Emily isn't tempted to keep poking/sampling it.