Spaghetti Carbonara*
Okay, everyone single should be able to cook at least one thing, because it is such a great way to seduce people. This is also a recipe for people who don't cook. You don't have to be cheap and busy to appreciate this recipe, but it might help.
You can fancy it up with some creative shopping but every basic component can be the kind of thing that keeps forever - especially if you're using jarred pesto and skipping the ricotta. (The eggs ought to be fresh too, but I suppose you could substitute shelf-stable-forever EggBeaters. If you're camping or something. Or you could use two tablespoons of water mixed with a tsp of flax seed if you're vegan** or super grossed out by EggBeaters (I am). But fresh eggs are best.)
3/4 lb of pasta
2 egg yolks
fresh ricotta
1 tbsp pesto, or more if you prefer.
2 tbsp butter
fresh parmesan
pinch of nutmeg
ground pepper
4 tbsp white wine or vegetable stock
100 grams/3 oz cubed pancetta, about 1 cm x 1 cm. Bacon is fine too.
Put the pasta water on in a big pot to boil. The water for pasta should be "as salty as the Mediterranean", whatever.
Cut up the pancetta. Dump it in another large pot with one tbsp of the butter. Cook until the pancetta has started to brown a little and then add the wine or stock. Cook until the liquid has reduced to about 2 tbsp.
If the pasta water has started boiling yet, put it in and set a timer for the cooking time on the box or just cook it until it's the texture you like. I always use the timer because I can't be bothered to keep testing the pasta.
While the pancetta is browning, you can start the egg sauce. In a smallish bowl, beat the eggs with the cheeses. If you aren't using the ricotta, add a couple of extra tablespoons of cream/milk/stock/pasta water. Remember to check on the pasta, by the way. Don't let the pancetta stick and burn, either. Add the nutmeg to the egg sauce. (If you are like me, you got a microplane from your sister for christmas and you will become childishly happy at the prospect of using the microplane to grate the cheese right onto the eggs and then using the exact same microplane to grate the nutmeg in right after. But I think I'm the only one like me.) Grate some pepper over the sauce. The Parmesan and the pancetta are both pretty salty, so you probably won't need salt.
Turn off the heat under the pancetta. Add the other tbsp of butter and the pesto. If you're using electric burners, that's too bad, and it also means that you're going to need to remove the pancetta pot from that entire burner. Turn the drained pasta back into the pancetta pot and toss it around a little, enough to get the pasta pretty well coated all over with the delicious salty bacony grease. Add the egg sauce. Stir well until it has all amalgamated into a deliciously sticky, heart-stoppingly delicious blaze of creamy sauce-bacon-pasta glory. Weep for your arteries. Be so fucking glad that you aren't a vegetarian.
*This recipe is actually so far from the original spaghetti carbonara that I am probably justified in renaming it Pasta Carabonara except that seems like the kind of silly pun an editor would make.
** Did you know bacon bits are vegan?
Vegan Substitutions
For the ricotta I would probably substitute plain soy milk into which you've warmed and steeped a dried porcini, crumbled into tiny bits. If you have advance notice for this meal you could also buy some fresh mushrooms - whatever kind you like - and saute those in olive oil lieu of the pancetta.
When you drain the pasta, reserve a bit of the cooking water.
Right before you put the pasta back in, add another slug of oil and a pinch or two of flour - maybe a teaspoon or so. Push it around in the pan until the flour is golden brown or doesn't taste raw, whichever way you want to judge it. The mushrooms will make everything look brown so you might want to go by taste.
Add the wine and cook most of the booze off. Then add the bacon bits. Those little motherfuckers are salty so you probably won't need to add salt. Add the pesto. Add the soy-porcini stuff. Stir until you've got a sauce that has the texture you like. Technically you made a roux, which is another way of saying gravy, when you added the flour to the fat, and rouxes are magical creatures that allow you to marry fat with water-based liquid in a smooth sauce, as opposed to something lumpy that separates and looks curdled. If the sauce doesn't look liquidy enough, you can add some of the reserved cooking water (or soy milk or vegetable stock or ... water) tablespoon by tablespoon.
Once the sauce is done, put the drained pasta back in the pot and stir it to get things pretty well distributed. Serve, garnished with fresh basil if you're feeling froggy.
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
03 January 2011
01 December 2010
The Empress of Cat Food
FrankenMouse
So far the raw diet experiment is going pretty well. The cats all loooooove it. And their poops smell a lot less! I would write about all the reasons that I'm finding it to be a good idea and how I am NOT AT ALL CRAZY to do it, except I'm too busy making the cat food itself.
I tell you what, though, I would totally start my own business making this shit, except I wouldn't make the frozen kind (shipping and storage costs would make it prohibitively expensive, I think) but the pressure canned kind which is shelf stable at room temp. It would be so easy. You would source your meat suppliers (seek out ethical ones) and get your permits together. Call your company FrankenMouse, because the food is basically trying to re-engineer a mouse and mice are the perfect food. (Or call the company something less stupid. Please don't think that the kind of marketing that I do is the kind that involves naming start-ups.)
Christ, you could start production out of your own kitchen. Pressure can all the food, then you can ship it at ground rates. Once business ramps up, look for a commercial kitchen. After that's outgrown itself, move to a farm and raise your own rabbits and chickens locally. Organically. It would cut down on production costs hugely. Raise their feed on the farm as well, natch. Get vets to consult on special needs lines. Do actual research on actual cats. Eat your own cat food, literally - something like a video of me eating the raw cat food would totally go viral on YouTube. Holy shit, right? I should make that video just to see if there's a market. (Also that would be BADASS.) Invest in a sustainable salmon fishery. Make corporate donatations to salmon research. Sell excess produce to local restaurants, because the kicker is that not only is the cat food human-grade, you're raising the chickens and rabbits and salmon on human-grade food.
You could market it as not only the best cat food nutritionally, but also the cheapest and most ethical choice possible. You could get Whole Foods to distribute it, first some local in-store testing and then nationally. You could build an empire.
24 October 2010
Shoes and ships and sailing wax
Sorry to leave you all hanging. I have a good excuse though. My new job is excellent. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far so good. I am SO glad to be working with some of the best litigators in the country! Man, do they know how to go after bad people who do bad things!
Also Dave has been out of the house a lot; one of his bands will be recording a new album (an LP? What the hell is the difference these days?) out in LA. They have been working very diligently, so diligently that Dave got bronchitis on top of a cold. This is sort of funny since I had an unrelated cold which progressed to bronchitis a week before. I think I was in denial about being sick because I decided not to take anything to reduce my fever in the hopes that a high fever would burn the virus out quicker.
It turned out not to be such a great idea. I planned to monitor my temperature and take something if my temperature went up past 102F, but when I wasn't paying attention it shot up to 103 and I spent a very uncomfortable night in a wringing wet bed. If I had known my fever was that high I would have taken something for it but it turns out you can't read a thermometer when your brain is busy cooking itself. It's like being on recreational drugs without the recreational aspect. My temp dropped by itself overnight to a mere 101, which is when I discovered the results of the previous evening's failed attempt to read the thermometer.
Oh well. I called in sick for a second day in a row and went to the doctor, who diagnosed bronchitis and gave me a z-pack and a note for work. (Then when I got into work no one would take the note from me because they all believed me. So I tucked it in between the pages of my employee handbook, because I didn't know what else to do with it.) I'm probably dumb enough to avoid going to the doctor even after that fever, but I am a nonsmoker and therefore when my insides became coated in gray gunk it seemed like there was more to the story. I was pretty relieved not to have pneumonia actually. According to the doctor bronchitis vs. pneumonia is really a matter of the location, location, location of your bacterial infection. How gross is that thought, by the way? At least as gross as gray mucus.
The cats were all pretty happy to have me home though. Obviously - I was toasty warm and slept for 20 hours a day. It's a cat's dream come true. And Bob showed me how there is now not a single surface in the house that he cannot reach. He is the giantest asshole I have ever met, and I have met some bad cats in my day. I think the assholery is the pigheadedness of really superior cat who is trying to figure out his place in the world.
.JPG)
Nibbles is no slouch either - she has figured out how to open drawers and I am pretty sure she opened the kitchen cabinet on her own the other day. But Nibbles is lazier and prettier than Bob, and she's friendlier too. She generally overcomes visitors by putting her paw in their chest and looking deep into their eyes. She did this with my landlord the other day, which was extra useful since he had stopped by because the rent was late. (He was super nice about it actually, and perhaps a little distracted by Nibbles climbing up his chest onto his head while purring ecstatically.)
All the cats seem to have been super naughty lately. I'm attributing this to switching them all to wet food (in preparation for a transition to a raw diet). Apparently dry food is like crack for cats, and almost as bad for them. Or they could just be energetic because we haven't been around very much. Whatever - the little fuckers want to party all the time.
We tried them with raw meat for the first time last night, actually, and four out of the five went for it with gusto. The holdout was Pip, who has also been the slowest to get excited about eating wet food. Pip is actually what prompted the switch to a raw diet (which, I *know*, is totally a crazy cat lady thing to do). He had a bladder "blockage" which cost $1700 and a trip to the veterinary ER to unblock. It was caused by him eating dry food and not drinking enough water. If he had been eating wet food, it's extremely unlikely that this would have happened. I was searching online to find out more about the bladder blockage and found Lisa Pierson's extremely authoritative site about the benefits of a raw diet. She is not only a vet but she talks about a groundbreaking study (which I can't find right now, argh) done by a vet which compared several generations of cats who were fed dry food only vs. a natural diet - within a couple of generations the dry-only cats had developed some serious problems.)
Besides it being a pain in the ass to deal with raw food, my reservation about a raw diet was how much it would cost and whether or not it would be okay for Lucky (who is diabetic) and Pip to eat instead of their presciption food. I couldn't work out how the cost compares to prescription canned food because I didn't know how much cats eat a day. It's based on their body weight, but most cats are around the 5 ounces/day mark. (The equivalent of five mice! This is unreasonably interesting to me. For our cats to support themselves they would need 25 mice per day between them!@ Holy shit!) But Lisa Pierson actually crunches the numbers and works out the cost (.64/cat/day) - which is cheaper than Pip's prescription canned food. A 6 pound bag of dry Rx for Lucky costs about thirty five bucks, or sick bucks a pound, That's a lot more expensive than the raw diet, which is about two bucks a pound. (Science Diet is like .18 cents a pounds, which is really kind of scary when you think about it.)
So there have turned out to be a surprising number of side benefits which I didn't expect just from the switch to canned food. It's easier to feed them - they all have two meals a day, all at the same time, and then we can clean the counters completely between meals. (In fact, we are almost at a point where we will be able to feed them all on the floor instead of having to keep dry kibble available at all times on the counters for Pip, Wiggles (aka Nibbles) and Little Bobby Dickface. Yes! Having a bowl of food on the counter has grossed me out for years!)
Also the litter boxes smell less terrible. I don't know what they put into the dry food, but it's pretty awful when it comes out the other end. Supposedly a raw diet will render the poops odorless, or almost odorless. If this is true, it's worth switching only for that reason. My goal in housekeeping is to have a house where you would never know that we had cats if the cats themselves didn't come out to say hello. This means cleaning the litterboxes a LOT and vacuuming a LOT. (I wish I had a good way to pick up pet hair on soft furnishings.) If the litterboxes are less grody, it's a little easier for me to deal with cleaning them when I come in the door after work. Cook's Illustrated recently reviewed robot vacuums. I've wanted one for a while but I don't know anyone who has one and could tell me how well they really work; however, if CI says they're worth the money then I trust them. (Apparently there is even a robot which will mop the floor! I love this idea since mopping the kitchen floor is one of my least favorite tasks.)
Another funny thing: I said that all the cats liked the raw chicken except for Pip; the PigBear loved the chicken but actually stopped eating it when she was full. I have never before seen her stop eating of her own volition. I'm hopeful that we might be able to help her lose weight with the raw diet (it's really easy to calculate how many calories she'll need based on her weight.) We just need a vet scale, and thanks - again - to Lisa Pierson, I know where to buy one online.
Lucky in particular went for the raw chicken with gusto. We don't know the history of his first three years; Dave's friend adopted him because her cleaning lady found him hanging around outside a dumpster, so I wonder if he went for the meat because he has had experience living rough? (on the other hand, I know Bob and Nibbles never hunted outside and they liked it, so who knows.)
One other happy thing about the raw diet: since I'm buying decent meat for the cats this means that we'll probably have more meat around, which bodes well for the humans. In a post which I can't find right now, Jennifer Reese of the Tipsy Baker observes that cooking vegetarian requires a lot more work than cooking meat. (I am super envious of her pet goat having, chicken keeping lifestyle. I hate plain eggs but they'd be handy to feed the cats.) I gave the cats one chicken breast last night and Dave and I had the other two for our dinner. When we ate dinner, none of the cats begged for food. ... because they were full? Because cats find raw meat infinitely more delicious than cooked? A fluke? Only time will tell.
It was the easiest and most delicious thing I have made in a while. Dave is still feeling kind of punky from his illness so it was a comfort food kind of night. I read Nigel Slater for inspiration (he is such a good food writer, and what's more, I don't think I have ever made any of his recipes and had it turn out badly. Probably in part because his recipes are super flexible.)
I sauteed a chicken breast in 1 tbl butter (yes - just butter) and then deglazed the pan with some vegetable stock (Slater calls for white wine, which would have been better but I had none), then added some buttermilk (Slater says yoghurt or creme fraiche, but again I had neither.) I let it all bubble away for a while, reducing and concentrating the flavor. The heat made the buttermilk split into tiny, unattractive white globules (this would not have happened if I'd used creme fraiche) so while the sauce was reducing I made a quick roux (browned the 1 tbsp flour on one side of a nonstick pan while 2 tbls of butter melted on the other side, then combined the two and added the dregs of some vegetable stock) and stirred it into the sauce, which thickened it up a bit and, more importantly, camouflaged the split buttermilk. Then I added the juice from a leftover half a lemon, tasted the sauce, decided it needed capers, and added a tablespoon or so of those plus a little brine from the jar. (I would not have needed a roux at all had I used yoghurt or creme fraiche, and the sauce would have reduced more quickly too.) Once the sauce had thickened up to my liking I threw in about a half a cup of basil leaves from the plant which has been yellowing sadly on top of the fridge ever since the weather turned cold and I brought it indoors.
While all this was happening I had a spaghetti squash roasting in a 450F oven. (I split it in half, scooped out the seeds and strings, salted and peppered it and put it face down in a glass baking dish for about half an hour. I suspect I left it in there longer than that, but overcooking spaghetti squash wasn't a big risk, and in fact, it was fine.) Once the chicken and its sauce were ready, I piled the spaghetti-like squash innards (not an appealing simile, sorry) into shallow pasta bowls and put the chicken breasts on top and then poured the sauce on top of everything. Apart from the use of spaghetti squash instead of angel hair pasta, this is the Italian restaurant comfort food of my childhood. (Well, as a kid I would have ordered veal instead of chicken, but who's counting?)
Also, despite the use of butter, it was incredibly healthy. Three tablespoons of butter isn't much (about 300 calories) when the rest of the meal is boneless skinless chicken breasts and squash - I didn't set out to make a diet meal but apparently that's what happened. I also didn't have to fuck around chopping and sauteing onion and garlic for a soffrito (aka mirepoix if you're feeling froggy), which is something I almost always have to make when I am cooking vegetarian in order to get some depth of flavor. Meat is so much easier to build a meal around and it provides a flavor that vegetables, delicious in their own right, can't produce. And that's why I will never be vegetarian. But I do want ethically treated meat, i.e. animals that have good lives right up until the day they are killed so that I can eat them. (If I lived in a place where I could get excellent produce year round, I think vegetarianism would be a lot easier. But I live in Boston where the growing season is four months long, hence the almost perpetual need for a soffrito.)
And that's all she wrote for now. Don't forget to tune in for another episode about really dowdy and unfashionable ways to spend your time.
Also Dave has been out of the house a lot; one of his bands will be recording a new album (an LP? What the hell is the difference these days?) out in LA. They have been working very diligently, so diligently that Dave got bronchitis on top of a cold. This is sort of funny since I had an unrelated cold which progressed to bronchitis a week before. I think I was in denial about being sick because I decided not to take anything to reduce my fever in the hopes that a high fever would burn the virus out quicker.
It turned out not to be such a great idea. I planned to monitor my temperature and take something if my temperature went up past 102F, but when I wasn't paying attention it shot up to 103 and I spent a very uncomfortable night in a wringing wet bed. If I had known my fever was that high I would have taken something for it but it turns out you can't read a thermometer when your brain is busy cooking itself. It's like being on recreational drugs without the recreational aspect. My temp dropped by itself overnight to a mere 101, which is when I discovered the results of the previous evening's failed attempt to read the thermometer.
Oh well. I called in sick for a second day in a row and went to the doctor, who diagnosed bronchitis and gave me a z-pack and a note for work. (Then when I got into work no one would take the note from me because they all believed me. So I tucked it in between the pages of my employee handbook, because I didn't know what else to do with it.) I'm probably dumb enough to avoid going to the doctor even after that fever, but I am a nonsmoker and therefore when my insides became coated in gray gunk it seemed like there was more to the story. I was pretty relieved not to have pneumonia actually. According to the doctor bronchitis vs. pneumonia is really a matter of the location, location, location of your bacterial infection. How gross is that thought, by the way? At least as gross as gray mucus.
The cats were all pretty happy to have me home though. Obviously - I was toasty warm and slept for 20 hours a day. It's a cat's dream come true. And Bob showed me how there is now not a single surface in the house that he cannot reach. He is the giantest asshole I have ever met, and I have met some bad cats in my day. I think the assholery is the pigheadedness of really superior cat who is trying to figure out his place in the world.
.JPG)
Nibbles is no slouch either - she has figured out how to open drawers and I am pretty sure she opened the kitchen cabinet on her own the other day. But Nibbles is lazier and prettier than Bob, and she's friendlier too. She generally overcomes visitors by putting her paw in their chest and looking deep into their eyes. She did this with my landlord the other day, which was extra useful since he had stopped by because the rent was late. (He was super nice about it actually, and perhaps a little distracted by Nibbles climbing up his chest onto his head while purring ecstatically.)
All the cats seem to have been super naughty lately. I'm attributing this to switching them all to wet food (in preparation for a transition to a raw diet). Apparently dry food is like crack for cats, and almost as bad for them. Or they could just be energetic because we haven't been around very much. Whatever - the little fuckers want to party all the time.
We tried them with raw meat for the first time last night, actually, and four out of the five went for it with gusto. The holdout was Pip, who has also been the slowest to get excited about eating wet food. Pip is actually what prompted the switch to a raw diet (which, I *know*, is totally a crazy cat lady thing to do). He had a bladder "blockage" which cost $1700 and a trip to the veterinary ER to unblock. It was caused by him eating dry food and not drinking enough water. If he had been eating wet food, it's extremely unlikely that this would have happened. I was searching online to find out more about the bladder blockage and found Lisa Pierson's extremely authoritative site about the benefits of a raw diet. She is not only a vet but she talks about a groundbreaking study (which I can't find right now, argh) done by a vet which compared several generations of cats who were fed dry food only vs. a natural diet - within a couple of generations the dry-only cats had developed some serious problems.)
Besides it being a pain in the ass to deal with raw food, my reservation about a raw diet was how much it would cost and whether or not it would be okay for Lucky (who is diabetic) and Pip to eat instead of their presciption food. I couldn't work out how the cost compares to prescription canned food because I didn't know how much cats eat a day. It's based on their body weight, but most cats are around the 5 ounces/day mark. (The equivalent of five mice! This is unreasonably interesting to me. For our cats to support themselves they would need 25 mice per day between them!@ Holy shit!) But Lisa Pierson actually crunches the numbers and works out the cost (.64/cat/day) - which is cheaper than Pip's prescription canned food. A 6 pound bag of dry Rx for Lucky costs about thirty five bucks, or sick bucks a pound, That's a lot more expensive than the raw diet, which is about two bucks a pound. (Science Diet is like .18 cents a pounds, which is really kind of scary when you think about it.)
So there have turned out to be a surprising number of side benefits which I didn't expect just from the switch to canned food. It's easier to feed them - they all have two meals a day, all at the same time, and then we can clean the counters completely between meals. (In fact, we are almost at a point where we will be able to feed them all on the floor instead of having to keep dry kibble available at all times on the counters for Pip, Wiggles (aka Nibbles) and Little Bobby Dickface. Yes! Having a bowl of food on the counter has grossed me out for years!)
Also the litter boxes smell less terrible. I don't know what they put into the dry food, but it's pretty awful when it comes out the other end. Supposedly a raw diet will render the poops odorless, or almost odorless. If this is true, it's worth switching only for that reason. My goal in housekeeping is to have a house where you would never know that we had cats if the cats themselves didn't come out to say hello. This means cleaning the litterboxes a LOT and vacuuming a LOT. (I wish I had a good way to pick up pet hair on soft furnishings.) If the litterboxes are less grody, it's a little easier for me to deal with cleaning them when I come in the door after work. Cook's Illustrated recently reviewed robot vacuums. I've wanted one for a while but I don't know anyone who has one and could tell me how well they really work; however, if CI says they're worth the money then I trust them. (Apparently there is even a robot which will mop the floor! I love this idea since mopping the kitchen floor is one of my least favorite tasks.)
Another funny thing: I said that all the cats liked the raw chicken except for Pip; the PigBear loved the chicken but actually stopped eating it when she was full. I have never before seen her stop eating of her own volition. I'm hopeful that we might be able to help her lose weight with the raw diet (it's really easy to calculate how many calories she'll need based on her weight.) We just need a vet scale, and thanks - again - to Lisa Pierson, I know where to buy one online.
Lucky in particular went for the raw chicken with gusto. We don't know the history of his first three years; Dave's friend adopted him because her cleaning lady found him hanging around outside a dumpster, so I wonder if he went for the meat because he has had experience living rough? (on the other hand, I know Bob and Nibbles never hunted outside and they liked it, so who knows.)
One other happy thing about the raw diet: since I'm buying decent meat for the cats this means that we'll probably have more meat around, which bodes well for the humans. In a post which I can't find right now, Jennifer Reese of the Tipsy Baker observes that cooking vegetarian requires a lot more work than cooking meat. (I am super envious of her pet goat having, chicken keeping lifestyle. I hate plain eggs but they'd be handy to feed the cats.) I gave the cats one chicken breast last night and Dave and I had the other two for our dinner. When we ate dinner, none of the cats begged for food. ... because they were full? Because cats find raw meat infinitely more delicious than cooked? A fluke? Only time will tell.
It was the easiest and most delicious thing I have made in a while. Dave is still feeling kind of punky from his illness so it was a comfort food kind of night. I read Nigel Slater for inspiration (he is such a good food writer, and what's more, I don't think I have ever made any of his recipes and had it turn out badly. Probably in part because his recipes are super flexible.)
I sauteed a chicken breast in 1 tbl butter (yes - just butter) and then deglazed the pan with some vegetable stock (Slater calls for white wine, which would have been better but I had none), then added some buttermilk (Slater says yoghurt or creme fraiche, but again I had neither.) I let it all bubble away for a while, reducing and concentrating the flavor. The heat made the buttermilk split into tiny, unattractive white globules (this would not have happened if I'd used creme fraiche) so while the sauce was reducing I made a quick roux (browned the 1 tbsp flour on one side of a nonstick pan while 2 tbls of butter melted on the other side, then combined the two and added the dregs of some vegetable stock) and stirred it into the sauce, which thickened it up a bit and, more importantly, camouflaged the split buttermilk. Then I added the juice from a leftover half a lemon, tasted the sauce, decided it needed capers, and added a tablespoon or so of those plus a little brine from the jar. (I would not have needed a roux at all had I used yoghurt or creme fraiche, and the sauce would have reduced more quickly too.) Once the sauce had thickened up to my liking I threw in about a half a cup of basil leaves from the plant which has been yellowing sadly on top of the fridge ever since the weather turned cold and I brought it indoors.
While all this was happening I had a spaghetti squash roasting in a 450F oven. (I split it in half, scooped out the seeds and strings, salted and peppered it and put it face down in a glass baking dish for about half an hour. I suspect I left it in there longer than that, but overcooking spaghetti squash wasn't a big risk, and in fact, it was fine.) Once the chicken and its sauce were ready, I piled the spaghetti-like squash innards (not an appealing simile, sorry) into shallow pasta bowls and put the chicken breasts on top and then poured the sauce on top of everything. Apart from the use of spaghetti squash instead of angel hair pasta, this is the Italian restaurant comfort food of my childhood. (Well, as a kid I would have ordered veal instead of chicken, but who's counting?)
Also, despite the use of butter, it was incredibly healthy. Three tablespoons of butter isn't much (about 300 calories) when the rest of the meal is boneless skinless chicken breasts and squash - I didn't set out to make a diet meal but apparently that's what happened. I also didn't have to fuck around chopping and sauteing onion and garlic for a soffrito (aka mirepoix if you're feeling froggy), which is something I almost always have to make when I am cooking vegetarian in order to get some depth of flavor. Meat is so much easier to build a meal around and it provides a flavor that vegetables, delicious in their own right, can't produce. And that's why I will never be vegetarian. But I do want ethically treated meat, i.e. animals that have good lives right up until the day they are killed so that I can eat them. (If I lived in a place where I could get excellent produce year round, I think vegetarianism would be a lot easier. But I live in Boston where the growing season is four months long, hence the almost perpetual need for a soffrito.)
And that's all she wrote for now. Don't forget to tune in for another episode about really dowdy and unfashionable ways to spend your time.
21 September 2010
concord grapes *must* have a lot of umami
the odor that the concord grape produces while in the superheated grasp of the reproductive urge creates an almost palpable miasma - musky and and densely sweet.
11 September 2010
Last jar
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Guess it's time for another batch. Marmalade is so easy to make that I usually tend to overdo it and make enough to last three years, but this time I got it right.
10 August 2010
In Which I Combine Three Major Talents
A Not-At-All Exhaustive List of Things I am Good At:
1. Analyzing the crap out of things
2. Baking yeast bread
3. Writing
Now I will try not to bore the socks off you while I do all three things at once. Feel free to judge me in the comments section.
Since I am STILL looking for work (I can't even get arrested in this town right now), I'm obviously broke. Broke enough that I started to wonder if it was worth the effort of making my own bread. I know my bread is better, but is it cheaper? (Let's pretend my time is worth nothing in this scenario, which is what a lot of employers seem to think right now anyway, so in a way it's true.)
A loaf at Market Basket costs $1.99. What about the raw materials for my bread? They have to make a profit, so I'll guess that it costs them a dollar or less to produce each loaf of bread, but they also have access to economies of scale - so I'll stick with the $1.99.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I feel like if I'm going to the trouble of making homemade bread, it should be cheaper than commercially produced versions - as well as taste better and be free of suspect shelf-stabilizing chemicals. Think of homemade tomato sauce - a tin of tomatoes, a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil, salt, pepper, and onion and garlic - those are all inexpensive ingredients and I can make enough pasta sauce for dinner for two about a buck. (Add the pasta and you're talking about two dollars to feed two people for dinner - cheaper, tastes better and it's healthier.)
So I crunched the numbers. It turns out that those economies of scale make a crucial difference. My homemade bread cost $2.11 to make, while I can buy a loaf of bread for $1.99. Ounce per ounce, the homemade bread is 20% more expensive. (That link is to a Google doc version of my spreadsheet.)
But is supermarket bread really a better deal? I was still hoping that somehow homemade bread would turn out to be cheaper, so I looked at cost per calorie efficiency (thinking back to chemistry class and my lightbulb moment when I realized that a calorie was a way to measure energy ... and we eat to keep going ... so calories is probably a more effective unit of measurement here).
Calorie per calorie, homemade bread is 15% cheaper than supermarket bread. This is a good thing to know when you are trying to figure out, as all poor people do, what food will give you the most calories for the least money. Plus, with homemade bread I get to feel all superior about using high-quality ingredients like honey and molasses instead of the dreaded HFCS.
Recipe notes: I omitted the salt from the recipe because I used salted butter in the recipe. I find Beard is sometimes heavy-handed with the salt and the sweet in writing his recipes (probably why they taste so damn good.) I also subbed rice milk for dairy (we just don't keep fresh milk around any more).
Cracked Wheat Bread, from James Beard's Beard on Bread
* 1/2 cup cracked wheat -- fine
* 1 1/2 cups boiling water
* 1 package active dry yeast
* 1/3 cup warm water -- 100-110 deg.
* 1/4 cup butter -- softened
* 1 1/2 tablespoons salt
* 2 tablespoons molasses
* 2 tablespoons honey
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup whole-wheat flour
* 4 cups all-purpose flour
Cook the cracked wheat in the boiling water about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking until all the water is absorbed. Dissolve the yeast in the 1/3 cup lukewarm water in a large mixing bowl and let proof. Stir the butter, salt, molasses, honey, and milk into the cooked cracked wheat. Cool to lukewarm, then add to the yeast mixture. With a large spoon or with one hand, start stirring in the flours, 1 cup at a time.
When the dough is stiff enough to work, turn out on a floured board and knead a good 10 to 12 minutes, working in a little of the remaining flour as necessary. When smooth and elastic, shape into a ball and put in a buttered bowl, turning to coat with butter. Cover, place in a warm, draft-free spot, and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.
Punch down and shape into two loaves.
Put in well-buttered 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pans, cover, and let rise again until doubled in bulk, or until the dough reaches the tops of the pans.
Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven 30 to 35 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped on top and bottom. Cool on racks. Makes 2 loaves.
That's right, bitches. Quarter cup of butter. I said my bread was better.
1. Analyzing the crap out of things
2. Baking yeast bread
3. Writing
Now I will try not to bore the socks off you while I do all three things at once. Feel free to judge me in the comments section.
Since I am STILL looking for work (I can't even get arrested in this town right now), I'm obviously broke. Broke enough that I started to wonder if it was worth the effort of making my own bread. I know my bread is better, but is it cheaper? (Let's pretend my time is worth nothing in this scenario, which is what a lot of employers seem to think right now anyway, so in a way it's true.)
A loaf at Market Basket costs $1.99. What about the raw materials for my bread? They have to make a profit, so I'll guess that it costs them a dollar or less to produce each loaf of bread, but they also have access to economies of scale - so I'll stick with the $1.99.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I feel like if I'm going to the trouble of making homemade bread, it should be cheaper than commercially produced versions - as well as taste better and be free of suspect shelf-stabilizing chemicals. Think of homemade tomato sauce - a tin of tomatoes, a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil, salt, pepper, and onion and garlic - those are all inexpensive ingredients and I can make enough pasta sauce for dinner for two about a buck. (Add the pasta and you're talking about two dollars to feed two people for dinner - cheaper, tastes better and it's healthier.)
So I crunched the numbers. It turns out that those economies of scale make a crucial difference. My homemade bread cost $2.11 to make, while I can buy a loaf of bread for $1.99. Ounce per ounce, the homemade bread is 20% more expensive. (That link is to a Google doc version of my spreadsheet.)
But is supermarket bread really a better deal? I was still hoping that somehow homemade bread would turn out to be cheaper, so I looked at cost per calorie efficiency (thinking back to chemistry class and my lightbulb moment when I realized that a calorie was a way to measure energy ... and we eat to keep going ... so calories is probably a more effective unit of measurement here).
Calorie per calorie, homemade bread is 15% cheaper than supermarket bread. This is a good thing to know when you are trying to figure out, as all poor people do, what food will give you the most calories for the least money. Plus, with homemade bread I get to feel all superior about using high-quality ingredients like honey and molasses instead of the dreaded HFCS.
Recipe notes: I omitted the salt from the recipe because I used salted butter in the recipe. I find Beard is sometimes heavy-handed with the salt and the sweet in writing his recipes (probably why they taste so damn good.) I also subbed rice milk for dairy (we just don't keep fresh milk around any more).
Cracked Wheat Bread, from James Beard's Beard on Bread
* 1/2 cup cracked wheat -- fine
* 1 1/2 cups boiling water
* 1 package active dry yeast
* 1/3 cup warm water -- 100-110 deg.
* 1/4 cup butter -- softened
* 1 1/2 tablespoons salt
* 2 tablespoons molasses
* 2 tablespoons honey
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup whole-wheat flour
* 4 cups all-purpose flour
Cook the cracked wheat in the boiling water about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking until all the water is absorbed. Dissolve the yeast in the 1/3 cup lukewarm water in a large mixing bowl and let proof. Stir the butter, salt, molasses, honey, and milk into the cooked cracked wheat. Cool to lukewarm, then add to the yeast mixture. With a large spoon or with one hand, start stirring in the flours, 1 cup at a time.
When the dough is stiff enough to work, turn out on a floured board and knead a good 10 to 12 minutes, working in a little of the remaining flour as necessary. When smooth and elastic, shape into a ball and put in a buttered bowl, turning to coat with butter. Cover, place in a warm, draft-free spot, and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.
Punch down and shape into two loaves.
Put in well-buttered 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pans, cover, and let rise again until doubled in bulk, or until the dough reaches the tops of the pans.
Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven 30 to 35 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped on top and bottom. Cool on racks. Makes 2 loaves.
That's right, bitches. Quarter cup of butter. I said my bread was better.
15 June 2010
chocolate chocolate peanut butter peanut butter ice cream
I made triple chocolate ice cream the other day and it was reeeeaaally good. I used a David Lebovitz recipe and it worked almost perfectly. The texture was a little, uh, dense - a bit more so than normal for even home-made ice cream. It didn't quite freeze in the machine because I did two stupid things. I got impatient and cooled down the custard in the freezer, AND I didn't let the melted chocolate chips cool enough. (Melted chocolate chips aren't specified in this recipe but every ice cream that I make is stracciatella. It's a compulsion.) So next time I'll avoid that particular scenario, because it was confidence-wrecking to look at my churned ice cream reverting back to custard as fast as it could. Also I might throw a little aged dark rum in there to help prevent it from getting quite so hard; now that I've tasted the chocolate, I think it'll go well with rum. (I wasn't in *that* much doubt about the rum but I've never before met a chocolate ice cream that I actually liked - they all seem to have a little bit of a rough edge to their taste.) Speaking of taste, this is the best ice cream I have ever made (although I usually say that about each new recipe.) But there's no edge to the chocolate flavour at all - it tastes exactly like good chocolate mixed with good cream and rich egg yolks ought to taste. It's an excellent recipe, although kind of a pain in the ass.
However. David Lebovitz's recipe is not a recipe which requires a lot of faffing about. You don't have to bother with separating eggs and cooking very cautiously over very low heat while you wonder what coating the back of the spoon means, really. Just throw some dairy and sugar and cocoa into a pan, bring to a boil, dump in some peanut butter and you're almost done. But of course I'm unsatisfied with a simple recipe like that - something deep at the bottom of my soul cries out in pain until I've turned every recipe into a huge, time-consuming project.* So I've marked up the recipe with the changes I would make. Truthfully, the chocolate ice cream base isn't good enough to stand on its own, but I'm also not up for making the triple chocolate thing that I talked about at the beginning of the post just so that I can dunk some Skippy into it. That triple chocolate number deserves respect, and Skippy is just not a respectful ingredient. So my suggestions are bolded. (To make me feel important!)
Ice Cream:
Ingredients:
* 2 cups half and half [I went ahead and used a 2:1 mixture of whipping cream and whole milk. The extra fat means it won't freeze quite so hard. Also more fat means more deliciousness for me.]
* ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* ½ cup sugar
* Pinch of salt
* ½ cup smooth peanut butter [Don't even both trying to use Teddy or some "healthy" hippie brand. What you want here is Jif or Skippy, with all the added salt and sugar and stabilizers.]
[I'd add 1/4 tsp of instant espresso to the cream mixture - I find that a little bit of coffee underneath chocolate flavor can make the chocolate flavor seem stronger and more complex without being identifiable on its own as coffee.]
[I'd also throw in a slug of dark rum at the end to try to lighten up the texture of the end product.]
Recipe:
1. Whisk together the cream, milk, cocoa powder, sugar, and salt in a large saucepan. Heat the mixture, whisking frequently, until it comes to a full, rolling boil (it will start to foam up). Remove from the heat and whisk in the peanut butter, stirring until thoroughly blended.
2. Chill the mixture thoroughly, then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. [It's the easiest ice cream I've ever churned - the peanut butter gives it body and stiffness so it's really easy to transfer into the container you'll freeze it in without making a big mess. It's actually so nice, texturally, that it makes me think peanut butter is a really underrated ingredient.]
[3. At the last minute of churning, I added 2 ounces of melted cooled chocolate chips to the "batter" - it's the easiest way to add chocolate chips ever, and you avoid having too-large, rock-hard lumps of chocolate which threaten your crowns when you bite down unwarily.]
Peanut Butter Chunks
Ingredients:
* 6 tablespoons peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
* 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
[Next time I am going to add some salt to these guys - maybe 1/2 or 1 tsp of kosher salt, just to see what that's like. I am a salty-sweet person.]
Recipe:
Mix together the peanut butter and sugar in a small bowl. Line a dinner plate with plastic wrap. Pinch off small pieces of the peanut butter mixture, about ½ teaspoon each, and drop them onto the dinner plate. [It would be a bigger pain in the ass, but next time I'd go for smaller chunks, like 1/4 of a tablespoon, so that you got smaller bites of the chunks more often.] Once you’ve used all of the mixture, freeze the chunks. [It occurred to me that once frozen, you could dip the chocolate balls into melted chocolate to make them extra irresistible. But again, you're almost talking project at that point when all you're really trying to do is make yourself a fucking bowl of ice cream already. So maybe not.]
Mixing them in: Fold the Peanut Butter Chunks into 1 quart of ice cream as you remove it from the machine.
If you do decide to make this recipe, I assure you it will be delicious even if you slavishly follow David Lebovitz's instructions to the letter and disregard my chatty commentary.
Also, no pictures because the only pictures I can ever manage of chocolate ice cream are the kinds of pictures that make you think, "That dog was sick!".
*Ice cream, by the way, is pretty simple to make, especially if you make "philadelphia" style ice creams which don't involve an egg custard. Ice cream should not be a Cook's Illustrated-style project with twenty seven ingredients and an active cooking time of four hours. That I need to make ice cream harder for myself says a lot about me - none of it good. If you were keeping track, I suggested seven modifications to the recipe, and none of them were shortcuts. The life of a perfectionist is not all wine and roses, you know!
However. David Lebovitz's recipe is not a recipe which requires a lot of faffing about. You don't have to bother with separating eggs and cooking very cautiously over very low heat while you wonder what coating the back of the spoon means, really. Just throw some dairy and sugar and cocoa into a pan, bring to a boil, dump in some peanut butter and you're almost done. But of course I'm unsatisfied with a simple recipe like that - something deep at the bottom of my soul cries out in pain until I've turned every recipe into a huge, time-consuming project.* So I've marked up the recipe with the changes I would make. Truthfully, the chocolate ice cream base isn't good enough to stand on its own, but I'm also not up for making the triple chocolate thing that I talked about at the beginning of the post just so that I can dunk some Skippy into it. That triple chocolate number deserves respect, and Skippy is just not a respectful ingredient. So my suggestions are bolded. (To make me feel important!)
Ice Cream:
Ingredients:
* 2 cups half and half [I went ahead and used a 2:1 mixture of whipping cream and whole milk. The extra fat means it won't freeze quite so hard. Also more fat means more deliciousness for me.]
* ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* ½ cup sugar
* Pinch of salt
* ½ cup smooth peanut butter [Don't even both trying to use Teddy or some "healthy" hippie brand. What you want here is Jif or Skippy, with all the added salt and sugar and stabilizers.]
[I'd add 1/4 tsp of instant espresso to the cream mixture - I find that a little bit of coffee underneath chocolate flavor can make the chocolate flavor seem stronger and more complex without being identifiable on its own as coffee.]
[I'd also throw in a slug of dark rum at the end to try to lighten up the texture of the end product.]
Recipe:
1. Whisk together the cream, milk, cocoa powder, sugar, and salt in a large saucepan. Heat the mixture, whisking frequently, until it comes to a full, rolling boil (it will start to foam up). Remove from the heat and whisk in the peanut butter, stirring until thoroughly blended.
2. Chill the mixture thoroughly, then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. [It's the easiest ice cream I've ever churned - the peanut butter gives it body and stiffness so it's really easy to transfer into the container you'll freeze it in without making a big mess. It's actually so nice, texturally, that it makes me think peanut butter is a really underrated ingredient.]
[3. At the last minute of churning, I added 2 ounces of melted cooled chocolate chips to the "batter" - it's the easiest way to add chocolate chips ever, and you avoid having too-large, rock-hard lumps of chocolate which threaten your crowns when you bite down unwarily.]
Peanut Butter Chunks
Ingredients:
* 6 tablespoons peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
* 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
[Next time I am going to add some salt to these guys - maybe 1/2 or 1 tsp of kosher salt, just to see what that's like. I am a salty-sweet person.]
Recipe:
Mix together the peanut butter and sugar in a small bowl. Line a dinner plate with plastic wrap. Pinch off small pieces of the peanut butter mixture, about ½ teaspoon each, and drop them onto the dinner plate. [It would be a bigger pain in the ass, but next time I'd go for smaller chunks, like 1/4 of a tablespoon, so that you got smaller bites of the chunks more often.] Once you’ve used all of the mixture, freeze the chunks. [It occurred to me that once frozen, you could dip the chocolate balls into melted chocolate to make them extra irresistible. But again, you're almost talking project at that point when all you're really trying to do is make yourself a fucking bowl of ice cream already. So maybe not.]
Mixing them in: Fold the Peanut Butter Chunks into 1 quart of ice cream as you remove it from the machine.
If you do decide to make this recipe, I assure you it will be delicious even if you slavishly follow David Lebovitz's instructions to the letter and disregard my chatty commentary.
Also, no pictures because the only pictures I can ever manage of chocolate ice cream are the kinds of pictures that make you think, "That dog was sick!".
*Ice cream, by the way, is pretty simple to make, especially if you make "philadelphia" style ice creams which don't involve an egg custard. Ice cream should not be a Cook's Illustrated-style project with twenty seven ingredients and an active cooking time of four hours. That I need to make ice cream harder for myself says a lot about me - none of it good. If you were keeping track, I suggested seven modifications to the recipe, and none of them were shortcuts. The life of a perfectionist is not all wine and roses, you know!
10 January 2010
21 September 2009
Rambly
I have the day off and it's gorgeous fall weather. I took today off because we went to New York this weekend. New York was great. It sort of breaks my heart a little every time I go because there is just so MUCH available. It helps that we always either stay with my sister or friends, so that is like a built-in guarantee of a worthwhile trip. I would move there in a heartbeat IF the cost of living wasn't so high and IF I didn't already really like my life in Somerville. I mean, I know I bitch about cat barf and being tired a lot, but apart from being so damned busy it's a pretty good life. (Inty barfed on my laptop keyboard while we were gone, by the way.)
Anyway, whenever I go on any kind of trip, even if it's only an overnight in New York, I like to take the day off after I get back to get caught up on things. I usually just end up with a migraine from the stress if I don't take the day off anyway, so planning for it is better.
So instead of having a migraine and feeling bad about missing work, I'm guilt-free and ready to do some yardwork (gotta start getting the garden ready for winter), baking (a James Beard fresh fruit pie and some espresso-chocolate shortbread cookies - that's a Dorie Greenspan recipe adapted by Smitten Kitchen. The James Beard recipe is from his American Cookery, a copy of which was given to me by my wonderful friend Lysne, and I'm going to be making some of my own modifications to it.) And other stuff - grocery shopping, laundry, vacuuming, catching up on some stuff for work. Dave took the day off too so I bet he will help with the yardwork and the shopping.
Maybe I'll take the camera out and try to get some pictures in the pretty september light. I haven't made much progress lately on the photography front, technically - don't think I have time for that today but we'll see. I'd better tear myself away from the Wire soon if I'm going to get any of that done, though. (I really like the Wire, but I wonder how accurate it is. Most of the time when I'm walking around in bad neighborhoods, there aren't millions of cops around like there are in the show. That's partly what makes it a bad neighborhood - no cops.)
Anyway, whenever I go on any kind of trip, even if it's only an overnight in New York, I like to take the day off after I get back to get caught up on things. I usually just end up with a migraine from the stress if I don't take the day off anyway, so planning for it is better.
So instead of having a migraine and feeling bad about missing work, I'm guilt-free and ready to do some yardwork (gotta start getting the garden ready for winter), baking (a James Beard fresh fruit pie and some espresso-chocolate shortbread cookies - that's a Dorie Greenspan recipe adapted by Smitten Kitchen. The James Beard recipe is from his American Cookery, a copy of which was given to me by my wonderful friend Lysne, and I'm going to be making some of my own modifications to it.) And other stuff - grocery shopping, laundry, vacuuming, catching up on some stuff for work. Dave took the day off too so I bet he will help with the yardwork and the shopping.
Maybe I'll take the camera out and try to get some pictures in the pretty september light. I haven't made much progress lately on the photography front, technically - don't think I have time for that today but we'll see. I'd better tear myself away from the Wire soon if I'm going to get any of that done, though. (I really like the Wire, but I wonder how accurate it is. Most of the time when I'm walking around in bad neighborhoods, there aren't millions of cops around like there are in the show. That's partly what makes it a bad neighborhood - no cops.)
31 August 2009
domestic goddess
So sometimes I get a wild hair up my ass and turn into what I think is some kind of superwoman. Today was one of those days. I worked from 9 until 5:45 (technically leaving early, but whatever), went to the chiropractor, cooked dinner (teriyaki turkey tips with a big salad with homegrown tomatoes. I love having a gas grill and the tomatoes were totally worth the trouble. I put them in giant containers, the biggest I could find, and next year I'll stake them better but it just worked perfectly.
I also got a loaf of cornmeal bread underway (I love having a Kitchen Aid), made the bed, put away some dishes (I love having a dishwasher) and cleaned up the kitchen.
And before I got to bed I'll have folded a load of laundry, taken the bread out of the oven and cleaned the litterboxes. I wish I had time to get some embroidery done, but unless I want to stay up until midnight there's not time for that. I am also not going to get around to my mail pile tonight, which I totally don't mind missing.
But for right now, I'm totally going to take an ice cream break and watch A&E's Hoarders. Fascinating! Mental illness! Makes me feel better about my life!
Also I was a little overconfident in trying to get everything done and left the bread on top of the stove, which got super hot from the oven preheating beneath it and kind of cooked a little. I pulled off the weird crusty edges and punched it down and am letting it rise as usual; I think it'll be okay, just slightly smaller loaves than usual. So as a superwoman, I still need some work.
I also got a loaf of cornmeal bread underway (I love having a Kitchen Aid), made the bed, put away some dishes (I love having a dishwasher) and cleaned up the kitchen.
And before I got to bed I'll have folded a load of laundry, taken the bread out of the oven and cleaned the litterboxes. I wish I had time to get some embroidery done, but unless I want to stay up until midnight there's not time for that. I am also not going to get around to my mail pile tonight, which I totally don't mind missing.
But for right now, I'm totally going to take an ice cream break and watch A&E's Hoarders. Fascinating! Mental illness! Makes me feel better about my life!
Also I was a little overconfident in trying to get everything done and left the bread on top of the stove, which got super hot from the oven preheating beneath it and kind of cooked a little. I pulled off the weird crusty edges and punched it down and am letting it rise as usual; I think it'll be okay, just slightly smaller loaves than usual. So as a superwoman, I still need some work.
02 July 2009
This is why I can't be trusted with sharp things
So, it turns out rubber bands start to melt if you bake them at 375F for half an hour. It took me a while to figure out why the cherry-nectarine buckle didn't smell as good as I expected. For those of you who are in the dark, a buckle is basically a streusel-topped coffee cake with fresh fruit in the cake part. I messed with the recipe a little, but I didn't expect anything crazy to happen. (I used cherries instead of blueberries - by the way, pitting a bunch of fresh cherries and peeling nectarines are a huge pain in the ass, in case you wondered.) Then the house started to smell really weird.
Good thing I checked on the cake, because the rubber band that I put around the end of the springform cake tin had snapped and was starting to melt onto the oven rack. Chalk that one up to "it seemed like a good idea at the time." We're theoretically going to a friend's backyard barbeque tomorrow and I thought it would be good to bring something. Theoretically because if they don't have a covered area of their backyard, I'm not going. They're good cooks and all, but I'm totally not down with standing in the rain for hours for the sake of two beers and a damp-bunned hamburger.
Just in case the barbeque occurs, I decided to be all smart and forward-thinking and bake the cake in a pan lined with parchment paper for easy removal. But the parchment was kind of refusing to stay in place and I didn't have the cake batter ready yet to weigh it down, so I stuck a rubber band around the outside of the springform pan and that kept the parchment paper in place pretty nicely. However, I failed to take off the rubber band when I put the cake in the oven. It's like I thought the rubber would be impervious to heat or something. Why don't I ever learn? Tire fires are a running joke on Simpsons! The entire MBTA system smells like burning rubber! Putting rubber bands in a really hot oven is probably not a good idea.
Anyway, I hope it turns out okay despite the burning rubber thing. The french chocolate silk pie for Dave's birthday came out really well. We ate pie all weekend. I think it's the best birthday dessert I've made for him yet. I guess I'll find out if he requests it again next year.
Good thing I checked on the cake, because the rubber band that I put around the end of the springform cake tin had snapped and was starting to melt onto the oven rack. Chalk that one up to "it seemed like a good idea at the time." We're theoretically going to a friend's backyard barbeque tomorrow and I thought it would be good to bring something. Theoretically because if they don't have a covered area of their backyard, I'm not going. They're good cooks and all, but I'm totally not down with standing in the rain for hours for the sake of two beers and a damp-bunned hamburger.
Just in case the barbeque occurs, I decided to be all smart and forward-thinking and bake the cake in a pan lined with parchment paper for easy removal. But the parchment was kind of refusing to stay in place and I didn't have the cake batter ready yet to weigh it down, so I stuck a rubber band around the outside of the springform pan and that kept the parchment paper in place pretty nicely. However, I failed to take off the rubber band when I put the cake in the oven. It's like I thought the rubber would be impervious to heat or something. Why don't I ever learn? Tire fires are a running joke on Simpsons! The entire MBTA system smells like burning rubber! Putting rubber bands in a really hot oven is probably not a good idea.
Anyway, I hope it turns out okay despite the burning rubber thing. The french chocolate silk pie for Dave's birthday came out really well. We ate pie all weekend. I think it's the best birthday dessert I've made for him yet. I guess I'll find out if he requests it again next year.
25 June 2009
For Annie Lennox
I have spent most of the evening picking up shards of glass off the kitchen floor. With my bare feet. One of the cats (probably Pip the asshole) knocked the butter dish onto the floor and it shattered into a thousand tiny, greasy pieces. All the cats wanted to lick butter off of the broken glass.
It was worth it, though. It was in service of a french silk chocolate pie for Dave's birthday, which is tomorrow. I hope it sets properly, because when I licked the bowl it was pretty good. I will be bummed if all I have managed to make is a big puddle of pudding inside a pie shell, although I suspect that even if this happens, I can just freeze the pie and that's probably going to be super good too. Maybe we should freeze the leftovers even if it sets. (That is, if there are any leftovers. Apparently Dave ate a whole cheesecake once. I can only hope to tempt him to such heights of gluttony tomorrow. I'll let you know how it all shakes out.)
Claire Danes is the only Juliet I've ever seen who isn't hugely whiny. Even Olivia Hussey, although I love the Zeffirelli version. Also, this song makes me nostalgic for the good parts of being sixteen.
Enjoy your fridays, kids. I know I'll enjoy mine.
It was worth it, though. It was in service of a french silk chocolate pie for Dave's birthday, which is tomorrow. I hope it sets properly, because when I licked the bowl it was pretty good. I will be bummed if all I have managed to make is a big puddle of pudding inside a pie shell, although I suspect that even if this happens, I can just freeze the pie and that's probably going to be super good too. Maybe we should freeze the leftovers even if it sets. (That is, if there are any leftovers. Apparently Dave ate a whole cheesecake once. I can only hope to tempt him to such heights of gluttony tomorrow. I'll let you know how it all shakes out.)
Claire Danes is the only Juliet I've ever seen who isn't hugely whiny. Even Olivia Hussey, although I love the Zeffirelli version. Also, this song makes me nostalgic for the good parts of being sixteen.
Enjoy your fridays, kids. I know I'll enjoy mine.
09 June 2009
rush
worked late, home even later (around 8) because I allowed some poor Irish girl standing on the street corner in the rain to talk to me about the charity she was hawking. twenty minutes later something called "children international" has my credit card details and will be taking $22/month to give to impoverished girls in India.
Guess I had sucker on my forehead tonight because on the T some I allowed some rando to strike up a conversation with me, all because I said, "fuck!" when the train stopped and the lights went out. The rando accompanied me all the way to the Harvard square T stop, interrogating me about my job and telling me about his life history. Judging from his pinpoint pupils, he was on drugs of some kind, but totally harmless. Plus he was so tiny I could have snapped him in two with ease.
am writing this hurriedly while the water for my polenta comes to a boil. bet I will find typos galore when I re-read. More than usual, I mean, since I never proof before posting. i'm slack like that.
anyway, so here is a nice picture of me and Dave taken at some gig somewhere, sometime in the last couple of months.
I think we must have been sitting down, since I am not usually taller than him.
update: I think I must be sitting on his lap here.
Guess I had sucker on my forehead tonight because on the T some I allowed some rando to strike up a conversation with me, all because I said, "fuck!" when the train stopped and the lights went out. The rando accompanied me all the way to the Harvard square T stop, interrogating me about my job and telling me about his life history. Judging from his pinpoint pupils, he was on drugs of some kind, but totally harmless. Plus he was so tiny I could have snapped him in two with ease.
am writing this hurriedly while the water for my polenta comes to a boil. bet I will find typos galore when I re-read. More than usual, I mean, since I never proof before posting. i'm slack like that.
anyway, so here is a nice picture of me and Dave taken at some gig somewhere, sometime in the last couple of months.
I think we must have been sitting down, since I am not usually taller than him.
update: I think I must be sitting on his lap here.
07 June 2009
gardening etc
We spent most of this sunny weekend outside. Well, got a good chunk of time outside, anyway. We ran a bunch of errands yesterday, including a trip to the the hardware store for a serious pair of pruning scissors, the kind that can take down live wood with a two inch diameter. These things could take your hand off at the wrist.
I was trying to think of a non-boring way to describe how much crap we took down, but I'll just tell you that the resulting brush pile is about the size and shape of a sedan. Something like a Ford Taurus. I think we're going to have to rent a woodchipper to get rid of it. (Speaking of woodchippers, the closest I have ever been to one is the movie Fargo, which we watched last week. It's held up well.)
When I got one particularly big branch, the old guys sitting on the porch across the street clapped for me. Then one yelled, "Don't hurt yourself!" which was a little late since I'd already been hit in the head several times with falling branches. Eventually I learned to get out of the way.
Then today was more errands and yoga, and then we both fell asleep in the afternoon. I took the extended version of the nap while he got up and went for a bike ride. Then I played with the flowers - we have hanging baskets with scarlet verbena and pink petunias and I spent a while deadheading those and the baskets of impatiens.
I also went after the aphids that infest my tomatoes and roses with a "natural" organic pesticide. In a couple of weeks, I think I'll have roses and tomatoes should start being ready a few weeks after that. When the current batch of insecticide runs out, I think I'm going to make my own from dishwashing liquid, mineral oil and water.
I'm really excited about the gardening stuff this year for some reason. I've made various attempts before at container gardening, but I've always proven to have a black thumb. Hopefully this year will be better, because I really like flowers and homegrown tomatoes.
For dinner tonight we grilled some steak tips (just the Whole Foods "santa fe" marinated steak tips) and some veggies (videlia onion, summer squash and zucchini tossed in a mixture of olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper.) I love my new gas grill - means the grill is ready to go in ten minutes - and the nonstick grill pan I used for the vegetables. We had sweetcorn, too. I love early summer corn.
All in all it was a pretty restful weekend. A good break from the work week (although actually I should be catching up on some work stuff rather than sitting on the couch blogging and catching up on other blogs. Oh well. I so need to make this rhubarb-berry jam soon. Although I originally went to David Lebovitz's site because summer has got me wanting to start making ice cream again. I'm dying to make this Salted Butter Caramel icecream, which I think will be delicious but looks like a pain in the ass since you make 2 kinds of caramel as well as the custard for the base. Bet it will be worth it, though.)
I was trying to think of a non-boring way to describe how much crap we took down, but I'll just tell you that the resulting brush pile is about the size and shape of a sedan. Something like a Ford Taurus. I think we're going to have to rent a woodchipper to get rid of it. (Speaking of woodchippers, the closest I have ever been to one is the movie Fargo, which we watched last week. It's held up well.)
When I got one particularly big branch, the old guys sitting on the porch across the street clapped for me. Then one yelled, "Don't hurt yourself!" which was a little late since I'd already been hit in the head several times with falling branches. Eventually I learned to get out of the way.
Then today was more errands and yoga, and then we both fell asleep in the afternoon. I took the extended version of the nap while he got up and went for a bike ride. Then I played with the flowers - we have hanging baskets with scarlet verbena and pink petunias and I spent a while deadheading those and the baskets of impatiens.
I also went after the aphids that infest my tomatoes and roses with a "natural" organic pesticide. In a couple of weeks, I think I'll have roses and tomatoes should start being ready a few weeks after that. When the current batch of insecticide runs out, I think I'm going to make my own from dishwashing liquid, mineral oil and water.
I'm really excited about the gardening stuff this year for some reason. I've made various attempts before at container gardening, but I've always proven to have a black thumb. Hopefully this year will be better, because I really like flowers and homegrown tomatoes.
For dinner tonight we grilled some steak tips (just the Whole Foods "santa fe" marinated steak tips) and some veggies (videlia onion, summer squash and zucchini tossed in a mixture of olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper.) I love my new gas grill - means the grill is ready to go in ten minutes - and the nonstick grill pan I used for the vegetables. We had sweetcorn, too. I love early summer corn.
All in all it was a pretty restful weekend. A good break from the work week (although actually I should be catching up on some work stuff rather than sitting on the couch blogging and catching up on other blogs. Oh well. I so need to make this rhubarb-berry jam soon. Although I originally went to David Lebovitz's site because summer has got me wanting to start making ice cream again. I'm dying to make this Salted Butter Caramel icecream, which I think will be delicious but looks like a pain in the ass since you make 2 kinds of caramel as well as the custard for the base. Bet it will be worth it, though.)
03 June 2009
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah
So Dave brought home flowers for me last night, which was a nice (and timely) surprise, given The Night Of The Candles.
I love flowers, and it's not that I'm glad Zoe is dead or anything, but I totally don't miss her habit of eating all flowers that were brought into the house and then barfing up piles of gaily colored petals right underneath the dining room table. None of the other four seem interested in eating flowers, so yay - more flowers for me!
After work tonight I made dinner (one of those desperation meals that ends up being surprisingly good. This was a lentil-chickpea-tomato thing with a bunch of fresh coriander I clipped a couple of days ago from the "garden", aka a couple of containers of tomatoes.
Roar! T-Rex cooks dinner!
Check out my vintage apron. I fucking love that thing. I bought it from a htrift store in outside of Buffalo on one of our trips there to visit his family. I used to wear the apron as a wraparound skirt the summer after I'd had mono and had lost twenty pounds. It was very short and very breezy. Perfect for hot days!
Mono is no fucking joke when you're a grownup. Most people can't just take two weeks off work or whatever the way a kid who's in high school or college can. Anyway, I certainly didn't have that much sick leave or enough job security and didn't feel like I could take the time off to get well. Plus my mono went undiagnosed for about two months, which gave it time to get really bad. I kept going to the doctor and telling them my throat hurt and I was really tired and feverish all the time, and they just kept diagnosing me with strep throat and giving me antibiotics. I did have a whole bunch of strep infections but they were a side effect from the mono, which knocks out your immune system. I got really terrible colds during this period too, the kind with a big fever which throws your ass on the floor. At one point I thought I was actually going to get fired because I'd taken all my sick time and all my vacation time.
But then Mom suggested I get tested for mono, so I asked the doctor to do that along with the usual strep test, and it turned out I did have mono. Then at least it made sense why I was falling asleep in traffic and at my desk at work and any time I sat still for more than 30 seconds. The way I knew I was finally getting better was that my insomnia started up again. Then I knew I was done with the mono. But that didn't happen until I'd been sick for about 9 months, and I'd gotten reaaaaal thin.
I overexposed the crap out of this photo so you can see how scrawny I'd gotten.
I can't say I miss the mono - it sucked, I didn't see any friends for the whole time because I couldn't stay awake long enough to leave the house - but that flat stomach was nice. Oh well. My boobs are bigger now. You win some, you lose some.
And just 'cause, here's a sneak peek at my first embroidery project. I am, by the way, totally loving the ability to do a little photo tweaking in picnik from within flickr. Now, Yahoo, if you could get this right, why can't you make your search engine better?
It's an apron, of course, because I am that freak who collects aprons. Some day I should do an apron round-up post. That would probably be the most boring blog post ever, but that's what the internet is for, right? Saving toenail clippings and showing off your aprons?
I love flowers, and it's not that I'm glad Zoe is dead or anything, but I totally don't miss her habit of eating all flowers that were brought into the house and then barfing up piles of gaily colored petals right underneath the dining room table. None of the other four seem interested in eating flowers, so yay - more flowers for me!
After work tonight I made dinner (one of those desperation meals that ends up being surprisingly good. This was a lentil-chickpea-tomato thing with a bunch of fresh coriander I clipped a couple of days ago from the "garden", aka a couple of containers of tomatoes.
Roar! T-Rex cooks dinner!
Check out my vintage apron. I fucking love that thing. I bought it from a htrift store in outside of Buffalo on one of our trips there to visit his family. I used to wear the apron as a wraparound skirt the summer after I'd had mono and had lost twenty pounds. It was very short and very breezy. Perfect for hot days!
Mono is no fucking joke when you're a grownup. Most people can't just take two weeks off work or whatever the way a kid who's in high school or college can. Anyway, I certainly didn't have that much sick leave or enough job security and didn't feel like I could take the time off to get well. Plus my mono went undiagnosed for about two months, which gave it time to get really bad. I kept going to the doctor and telling them my throat hurt and I was really tired and feverish all the time, and they just kept diagnosing me with strep throat and giving me antibiotics. I did have a whole bunch of strep infections but they were a side effect from the mono, which knocks out your immune system. I got really terrible colds during this period too, the kind with a big fever which throws your ass on the floor. At one point I thought I was actually going to get fired because I'd taken all my sick time and all my vacation time.
But then Mom suggested I get tested for mono, so I asked the doctor to do that along with the usual strep test, and it turned out I did have mono. Then at least it made sense why I was falling asleep in traffic and at my desk at work and any time I sat still for more than 30 seconds. The way I knew I was finally getting better was that my insomnia started up again. Then I knew I was done with the mono. But that didn't happen until I'd been sick for about 9 months, and I'd gotten reaaaaal thin.
I overexposed the crap out of this photo so you can see how scrawny I'd gotten.
I can't say I miss the mono - it sucked, I didn't see any friends for the whole time because I couldn't stay awake long enough to leave the house - but that flat stomach was nice. Oh well. My boobs are bigger now. You win some, you lose some.
And just 'cause, here's a sneak peek at my first embroidery project. I am, by the way, totally loving the ability to do a little photo tweaking in picnik from within flickr. Now, Yahoo, if you could get this right, why can't you make your search engine better?
It's an apron, of course, because I am that freak who collects aprons. Some day I should do an apron round-up post. That would probably be the most boring blog post ever, but that's what the internet is for, right? Saving toenail clippings and showing off your aprons?
30 November 2008
Monday looms
But not yet! I still have a few hours. We spent most of this weekend completely unplugged and it was glorious. I love the internet, but it's also my job, so it was good to have some time offline.
I got some reading done.
See if you can spot all four cats!
Note also that the living room is trashed. I cleaned it yesterday but it's pretty much ruined again by now. We didn't really go out much, although we did have Thanksgiving at my sister's house, with my nephews and my other sister in attendance. My sister can really put down a thanksgiving spread. I was grateful not to have to cook the whole meal, although I made rolls and a fresh cranberry bread and that was our contribution to the feast.
Besides the normal weekend housework projects, I had time to do some mending which I'd been meaning to get to for roughly six months.
You can see I'm a lousy seamstress. I was originally working with white on white - at least then I don't have to look at my mistakes - but it was really fucking hard to see. So I switched to blue, which is fine since the stitching is on the inside of a pillowcase and won't be seen. I am a slacker. The only reason I mend sheets instead of throwing them out and buying new is that they're really heavy cotton and high thread count, plus since they're old they're really soft and silky. And also new sheets are expensive.
I also got the cats all fucked up on catnip and took pictures.
See if you can spot Pip's need to be neutered! He has no idea.
And now, back to the weekday grind again. Le sigh. I do feel better after the slow, four day weekend, though. Plus I made lasagna tonight (used the recipe from Cover and Bake, with a few modifications. Cover and Bake is done by the obsessive Cook's Illustrated people, so you know that the recipes will always work and be delicious, just as you know the recipe will take forever. And it did take forever, and it was delicious. And I made flavored basil oil, and also some chutney. So at least I have good leftovers to nosh on during the week.
I got some reading done.
See if you can spot all four cats!
Note also that the living room is trashed. I cleaned it yesterday but it's pretty much ruined again by now. We didn't really go out much, although we did have Thanksgiving at my sister's house, with my nephews and my other sister in attendance. My sister can really put down a thanksgiving spread. I was grateful not to have to cook the whole meal, although I made rolls and a fresh cranberry bread and that was our contribution to the feast.
Besides the normal weekend housework projects, I had time to do some mending which I'd been meaning to get to for roughly six months.
You can see I'm a lousy seamstress. I was originally working with white on white - at least then I don't have to look at my mistakes - but it was really fucking hard to see. So I switched to blue, which is fine since the stitching is on the inside of a pillowcase and won't be seen. I am a slacker. The only reason I mend sheets instead of throwing them out and buying new is that they're really heavy cotton and high thread count, plus since they're old they're really soft and silky. And also new sheets are expensive.
I also got the cats all fucked up on catnip and took pictures.
See if you can spot Pip's need to be neutered! He has no idea.
And now, back to the weekday grind again. Le sigh. I do feel better after the slow, four day weekend, though. Plus I made lasagna tonight (used the recipe from Cover and Bake, with a few modifications. Cover and Bake is done by the obsessive Cook's Illustrated people, so you know that the recipes will always work and be delicious, just as you know the recipe will take forever. And it did take forever, and it was delicious. And I made flavored basil oil, and also some chutney. So at least I have good leftovers to nosh on during the week.
19 October 2008
blah blah blah about nothing in general
Oh man. I have been on fire this weekend, let me tell you. I did a pile of ironing yesterday and made black bread with wacky ingredients like instant coffee and cocoa powder. The bread was kind of fucked up, like tiny little doorstopping loaves of great density. I think I allowed the yeast to over proof, if that can happen. Oh well, shit happens. Then we went out for drinks and then bowling and then burgers and fries for dinner around midnight. It was pretty fun.
We overslept this morning (no surprise there) and skipped the early a.m. run to HellBasket, choosing instead to pay the Stop & Shop convenience tax, where you get the same amount of food but it costs 20% more to buy it in a store with wide, spacious aisles and ample parking. So after yoga and Stop & Shop I started cooking, namely a pot roast with root vegetables, a gingerly-star-anise-y plum chutney and a sauce made from the cooking liquid. Dave just needs to get home now so I can eat it already. I even got wine and lit candles and put a tablecloth on the table, it's all fancy-like. Oh yeah - while I was in the kitchen I also made tomato sauce for a lasagne planned for later this week. And I did the usual boring weekend things like laundry and dishes and catboxes, and now that I'm sitting down I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to get up again. Oof. Plus Zoe is sitting on my lap.
Among other things I didn't mean to do this weekend was misplace my phone. So if anyone is expecting a call from me, sorry and I will catch up with you next week. (Squinting santa fe-wards.)
We overslept this morning (no surprise there) and skipped the early a.m. run to HellBasket, choosing instead to pay the Stop & Shop convenience tax, where you get the same amount of food but it costs 20% more to buy it in a store with wide, spacious aisles and ample parking. So after yoga and Stop & Shop I started cooking, namely a pot roast with root vegetables, a gingerly-star-anise-y plum chutney and a sauce made from the cooking liquid. Dave just needs to get home now so I can eat it already. I even got wine and lit candles and put a tablecloth on the table, it's all fancy-like. Oh yeah - while I was in the kitchen I also made tomato sauce for a lasagne planned for later this week. And I did the usual boring weekend things like laundry and dishes and catboxes, and now that I'm sitting down I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to get up again. Oof. Plus Zoe is sitting on my lap.
Among other things I didn't mean to do this weekend was misplace my phone. So if anyone is expecting a call from me, sorry and I will catch up with you next week. (Squinting santa fe-wards.)
21 September 2008
I thig I'b gettig a code
So I skipped yoga today, in favor of a nap, hoping that if I baby myself I can prevent the cold from becoming full blown. Although what I ended up doing was a ton of housework in the morning - litterbox, vacuuming, cleaning someone's shitty paw prints off the couch, starting laundry, changing the sheets, yadda yadda. And I drank like a gallon of orange juice, for the vitamin C. Now I'm all full of juice and sloshing around.
Then after the chores in the morning I napped, and if there's anything nicer than snuggling under a quilt for a nap on a Sunday afternoon with a clean conscience, clean sheets, sunlight streaming in through the windows and a purring cat, I don't know what it is. Dave was at band practice so I had total peace and quiet. Woke up around 5:30, showered and started some bread. Man, I love that KitchenAid so much. Thank you again, Mr. and Mrs. Lynch. The dough came together in about 5 minutes.
I adapted a James Beard recipe (which is itself an adaptation of a Jane Grigson recipe) to suit the ingredients I had on hand. In a funny coincidence, I own the Jane Grigson book that Beard talks about, too. There were so many good people writing cookbooks in the 50s and 60s - James Beard, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson - that that's what my cookbook collection is based on. I have Julia Child but I confess I've never cooked out of her. The modern writers I turn to most are Mark Bittman, Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson. Oh, and my friend Anne Bramley's Eat Feed Autumn Winter arrived from Amazon yesterday and I've already read most of it (I inhaled it like a novel) and given my mother a recipe from it (for roasted vegetables.) It has actually made me excited about the squash and root vegetables that I know we'll soon be inundated with from Boston Organics, our CSA.
Anyway, the bread is in the oven now so I can't report yet on whether it's good or not, but so far it seems to be acting normally. I've never made so many drastic alterations to a recipe so I'm a little nervous about the outcome. I will update this post if it turns out gross, otherwise you can assume it was delicious.
Here's Beard's original recipe:
5 cups of all-purpose flour (preferably unbleached)
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
2 pkgs active dry yeast
2 c. warm milk
1/2 c. walnut oil or 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
1/2 c walnuts, roughly chopped
3/4 c. onions, finely chopped
Sift flour, salt and sugar into a warm bowl. Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 c. warm milk and pour into the middle of the flour, together with the walnut oil (or butter) and the rest of the milk. Knead well until the dough is firm and blended into a smooth, springy ball (about 10 minutes.) Leave in a warm place to rise for two hours (or in a cool place overnight.) Punch down the dough, mix in the walnuts and onion, shape into 4 rounds and leave on a greased baking tray to rise for 45 minutes. Bake at 400F for 45 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped underneath.
Here's what I made:
Pesto Bread
5 cups of all-purpose flour
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
4 1/2 tsp. bread machine yeast (bought the wrong yeast by mistake)
2 c. warm milk, between 120F and 130F
about 1/4 c. pesto topped off with 1/4 c. olive oil (to keep the right proportion of fat.)
I put all the dry ingredients together in the bowl of the kitchen aid and gave it a few stirs. Then I added the milk (apparently bread machine yeast requires a higher temperature than regular yeast, or so the sides of the jar say. Anyway the higher temp thing was handy since I accidentally let the milk get a little hotter than I planned and I didn't have to wait too long for it to cool enough.) Once the milk was in, I dumped in the pesto and olive oil and let the whole thing come together. I stuck a towel over the bread dough just as it was, in the kitchen aid bowl, and let it rise on the stove top (where it got a bunch of residual heat from the pre-heating oven.) Technically I should have washed and greased another bowl and turned the bread to oil it all over and let the bread rise in that, since mine stuck a little. But who cares when you're skipping a whole pain-in-the-ass step? The sides of the bread machine yeast jar said to let the dough rise for 10 minutes, but I waited until it doubled in size and that took about 30 minutes, which is still faster than the two hours in the original recipe.
Then I peeled it off the sides of the bowl - like I said, it stuck a bit but not terribly - and punched it down and shaped it into two loaves on a non-stick cookie sheet (instead of 4 loaves like in the original recipe. That would have made four elf-sized loaves.) I've made this bread before and not only were the walnuts and onions a pain in the ass to incorporate at that stage, I didn't think they added that much to the bread - not like essential moisture or anything - so I didn't even add pine nuts (though that would probably have been pretty good.) I did brush it with olive oil to prevent it from cracking as it rose, which I guess worked since it didn't crack. I nearly sprinkled it with coarse salt at that point, thinking of foccacia, but decided that salty bread might be strange in sandwiches, which is probably the fate of this bread. My hope was for it to be tasty enough that just smearing cream cheese in between slices would make a good, and easy, lunch.
Once it was shaped into loaves, I let it rise again until it was doubled in size, which seemed to take about half an hour - the kitchen was pretty warm by this time, which I think helped the bread's rise along - and then stuck it in the oven. I set the timer for 45 minutes, figuring that if anything, it would take longer than the original recipe but either my oven timer is messed up (possible) or the bread machine yeast does something crazy, because it was only in there 25 minutes (according to the oven timer) before it was all brown and hollow-sounding when rapped on the bottom. I dunno. I think it's the oven timer, because bread usually takes more than 25 minutes to bake. I didn't look at my watch, either, which means we'll have to wait until it's cool to cut in and see if it's raw in the middle or anything horrible like that. Oh, the suspense! I really know how to live, huh? Probably no pictures even if I do update this post because I still don't have the right memory for the new camera and I don't really want another dachshund fetus incident.
update three seconds later: it is delicious. Om nom nom. The milk made it super fluffy and light, and you get just the right amount of pesto taste, distinct but not overwhelming
Then after the chores in the morning I napped, and if there's anything nicer than snuggling under a quilt for a nap on a Sunday afternoon with a clean conscience, clean sheets, sunlight streaming in through the windows and a purring cat, I don't know what it is. Dave was at band practice so I had total peace and quiet. Woke up around 5:30, showered and started some bread. Man, I love that KitchenAid so much. Thank you again, Mr. and Mrs. Lynch. The dough came together in about 5 minutes.
I adapted a James Beard recipe (which is itself an adaptation of a Jane Grigson recipe) to suit the ingredients I had on hand. In a funny coincidence, I own the Jane Grigson book that Beard talks about, too. There were so many good people writing cookbooks in the 50s and 60s - James Beard, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson - that that's what my cookbook collection is based on. I have Julia Child but I confess I've never cooked out of her. The modern writers I turn to most are Mark Bittman, Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson. Oh, and my friend Anne Bramley's Eat Feed Autumn Winter arrived from Amazon yesterday and I've already read most of it (I inhaled it like a novel) and given my mother a recipe from it (for roasted vegetables.) It has actually made me excited about the squash and root vegetables that I know we'll soon be inundated with from Boston Organics, our CSA.
Anyway, the bread is in the oven now so I can't report yet on whether it's good or not, but so far it seems to be acting normally. I've never made so many drastic alterations to a recipe so I'm a little nervous about the outcome. I will update this post if it turns out gross, otherwise you can assume it was delicious.
Here's Beard's original recipe:
5 cups of all-purpose flour (preferably unbleached)
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
2 pkgs active dry yeast
2 c. warm milk
1/2 c. walnut oil or 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
1/2 c walnuts, roughly chopped
3/4 c. onions, finely chopped
Sift flour, salt and sugar into a warm bowl. Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 c. warm milk and pour into the middle of the flour, together with the walnut oil (or butter) and the rest of the milk. Knead well until the dough is firm and blended into a smooth, springy ball (about 10 minutes.) Leave in a warm place to rise for two hours (or in a cool place overnight.) Punch down the dough, mix in the walnuts and onion, shape into 4 rounds and leave on a greased baking tray to rise for 45 minutes. Bake at 400F for 45 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped underneath.
Here's what I made:
Pesto Bread
5 cups of all-purpose flour
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
4 1/2 tsp. bread machine yeast (bought the wrong yeast by mistake)
2 c. warm milk, between 120F and 130F
about 1/4 c. pesto topped off with 1/4 c. olive oil (to keep the right proportion of fat.)
I put all the dry ingredients together in the bowl of the kitchen aid and gave it a few stirs. Then I added the milk (apparently bread machine yeast requires a higher temperature than regular yeast, or so the sides of the jar say. Anyway the higher temp thing was handy since I accidentally let the milk get a little hotter than I planned and I didn't have to wait too long for it to cool enough.) Once the milk was in, I dumped in the pesto and olive oil and let the whole thing come together. I stuck a towel over the bread dough just as it was, in the kitchen aid bowl, and let it rise on the stove top (where it got a bunch of residual heat from the pre-heating oven.) Technically I should have washed and greased another bowl and turned the bread to oil it all over and let the bread rise in that, since mine stuck a little. But who cares when you're skipping a whole pain-in-the-ass step? The sides of the bread machine yeast jar said to let the dough rise for 10 minutes, but I waited until it doubled in size and that took about 30 minutes, which is still faster than the two hours in the original recipe.
Then I peeled it off the sides of the bowl - like I said, it stuck a bit but not terribly - and punched it down and shaped it into two loaves on a non-stick cookie sheet (instead of 4 loaves like in the original recipe. That would have made four elf-sized loaves.) I've made this bread before and not only were the walnuts and onions a pain in the ass to incorporate at that stage, I didn't think they added that much to the bread - not like essential moisture or anything - so I didn't even add pine nuts (though that would probably have been pretty good.) I did brush it with olive oil to prevent it from cracking as it rose, which I guess worked since it didn't crack. I nearly sprinkled it with coarse salt at that point, thinking of foccacia, but decided that salty bread might be strange in sandwiches, which is probably the fate of this bread. My hope was for it to be tasty enough that just smearing cream cheese in between slices would make a good, and easy, lunch.
Once it was shaped into loaves, I let it rise again until it was doubled in size, which seemed to take about half an hour - the kitchen was pretty warm by this time, which I think helped the bread's rise along - and then stuck it in the oven. I set the timer for 45 minutes, figuring that if anything, it would take longer than the original recipe but either my oven timer is messed up (possible) or the bread machine yeast does something crazy, because it was only in there 25 minutes (according to the oven timer) before it was all brown and hollow-sounding when rapped on the bottom. I dunno. I think it's the oven timer, because bread usually takes more than 25 minutes to bake. I didn't look at my watch, either, which means we'll have to wait until it's cool to cut in and see if it's raw in the middle or anything horrible like that. Oh, the suspense! I really know how to live, huh? Probably no pictures even if I do update this post because I still don't have the right memory for the new camera and I don't really want another dachshund fetus incident.
update three seconds later: it is delicious. Om nom nom. The milk made it super fluffy and light, and you get just the right amount of pesto taste, distinct but not overwhelming
14 September 2008
Fresh Apple Cookies
I decided to make cookies yesterday, kind of on a whim (as opposed to a crumble from a couple of weeks ago that I considered a chore, since I had to make it that night or the peaches would have gone off.) I looked through a few cookbooks - really just looking for a recipe that I had all the ingredients for.
James Beard's Fresh Apple Cookies fit the bill. (From American Cookery, which Lysne kindly sent me, since she knows how much I love Beard on Bread.) I was thinking I wanted crisp and spicy and these are more tender and cake-y than crisp, but still delicious. Plus since they are crammed full of apples and raisins and pecans, I have been pretending that they are health food. Yeah fucking right - the recipe calls for a stick of butter. At least the KitchenAid makes creaming butter super easy even if you haven't bothered to let the butter sit out and soften. Next time I might mix up the spices a little with some cardamom and fresh ground black pepper, but these are pretty good as is. I'm bringing some into the office tomorrow as part of my quest to win friends and influence people.
They won't be winning any beauty pageants any time soon.
Fresh Apple Cookies
1/2 c. butter
1 1/3 c. firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 1/2 c. sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 c. apple juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, or milk
1 c. chopped, unpeeled raw apple
1/2 - 1 c. chopped walnuts, filberts, or pecans
1 c. raisins
Cream the butter, cream in the sugar, and beat in the egg. Sift the dry ingredients (I totally didn't bother, just combined the dry ingredients in a bowl and stirred 'em with a fork) and add to the creamed mixture along with the juice or milk. Stir in the apples, nuts and raisins. Push the dough from the tip of a teaspoon with the back of another onto a buttered cookie sheet (I used nonstick), leaving about 1 1/2 inches between each cookie. (I found that they didn't spread very much.) Bake in a preheated 375F degree oven for 10-12 minutes or until a light brown. Yields about 4 dozen cookies. (I had exactly 4 dozen.)
James Beard's Fresh Apple Cookies fit the bill. (From American Cookery, which Lysne kindly sent me, since she knows how much I love Beard on Bread.) I was thinking I wanted crisp and spicy and these are more tender and cake-y than crisp, but still delicious. Plus since they are crammed full of apples and raisins and pecans, I have been pretending that they are health food. Yeah fucking right - the recipe calls for a stick of butter. At least the KitchenAid makes creaming butter super easy even if you haven't bothered to let the butter sit out and soften. Next time I might mix up the spices a little with some cardamom and fresh ground black pepper, but these are pretty good as is. I'm bringing some into the office tomorrow as part of my quest to win friends and influence people.
They won't be winning any beauty pageants any time soon.
Fresh Apple Cookies
1/2 c. butter
1 1/3 c. firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 1/2 c. sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 c. apple juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, or milk
1 c. chopped, unpeeled raw apple
1/2 - 1 c. chopped walnuts, filberts, or pecans
1 c. raisins
Cream the butter, cream in the sugar, and beat in the egg. Sift the dry ingredients (I totally didn't bother, just combined the dry ingredients in a bowl and stirred 'em with a fork) and add to the creamed mixture along with the juice or milk. Stir in the apples, nuts and raisins. Push the dough from the tip of a teaspoon with the back of another onto a buttered cookie sheet (I used nonstick), leaving about 1 1/2 inches between each cookie. (I found that they didn't spread very much.) Bake in a preheated 375F degree oven for 10-12 minutes or until a light brown. Yields about 4 dozen cookies. (I had exactly 4 dozen.)
28 August 2008
listy list list
So my shrink and my best friend have both frequently expressed astonishment at how much time I spent doing housework. That's what I spent my evening on tonight, so here's a little run-down, transcribed from my to-do for tonight. (Note, I am blogging at 11:50 pm and I didn't even cook dinner, I just reheated leftovers.)
I got home at about 7:30 - which is not unusually late for me - and sat down and wrote the following list, in all its tedious, tiny-itemed glory:
THURS PM
go for walk
blog
make lemon pepper cashews
laundry (W)
use up basil to make pesto or tomato sauce (I heart my cuisinart mini-prep, it's so much easier to clean than the big guy and perfect for a small job like pesto)
eat dinner
clean catboxes
vacuum
read
go to bed early
clean fish tank (W)
prep Inty's meds for tomorrow morning
wash and refill cat food bowls
remove evidence of ravages caused by dinner, cashews and pesto from kitchen
email
refill brita
The ones with lines through them got done tonight; the (W) items are reserved for the weekend.
So I don't know - is this excessive? Because it all seems very normal to me to want to do this kind of stuff on a regular basis - this is totally regular maintenance stuff, nothing too ambitious - yet I probably won't get to sleep until well after midnight, and I need to be into work at 8 so that means getting up at 6:30 for realsies instead of hitting snooze until 7:15.
Whatever, if I'm normal or not doesn't matter, I am in serious need of the long weekend coming up. I plan to hang with our colony of cats, actually get some reading done instead of reading three pages in bed before I fall asleep ... oh, and I totally have a list of bigger projects to get done around the house this weekend, of course. Because long weekends are made for domestic puttering and naps and drinking beers with lunch. I hope the weather is nice.
I got home at about 7:30 - which is not unusually late for me - and sat down and wrote the following list, in all its tedious, tiny-itemed glory:
THURS PM
laundry (W)
read
go to bed early
clean fish tank (W)
The ones with lines through them got done tonight; the (W) items are reserved for the weekend.
So I don't know - is this excessive? Because it all seems very normal to me to want to do this kind of stuff on a regular basis - this is totally regular maintenance stuff, nothing too ambitious - yet I probably won't get to sleep until well after midnight, and I need to be into work at 8 so that means getting up at 6:30 for realsies instead of hitting snooze until 7:15.
Whatever, if I'm normal or not doesn't matter, I am in serious need of the long weekend coming up. I plan to hang with our colony of cats, actually get some reading done instead of reading three pages in bed before I fall asleep ... oh, and I totally have a list of bigger projects to get done around the house this weekend, of course. Because long weekends are made for domestic puttering and naps and drinking beers with lunch. I hope the weather is nice.
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