Saturday, December 18, 2010

Linden: Apple crumble

Two weeks ago, I was invited to a Thai food party, and told I could bring dessert. Since I wasn't about to take the time to make a Thai dessert, I went with apple crumble, after some annoying negotiations. I actually made this with the help of my Canadian friend Alia, who has featured on this blog before, in photo form. She helped with the peeling and apple preparation, and got my floor sticky by dropping tons of peels. In a good way! We just picked up the peels. And she did the worst part, which was carrying a baking dish through the middle of town (while I was at a carol service).

So we had a delicious and complete crumble. Unfortunately, no pictures were taken at that time, so you get the strangely angled sad leftovers sent off to Kathleen.


Now if you leave out the apple peeling, or enjoy peeling apples, or can do it while watching tv, which is my usual strategy (but you must be careful not to watch something to engrossing or you will end up peeling more than the apples, and no one likes that); other than the apple peeling, crumble pretty much tops the effort-to-impressiveness dessert scale. Here's what you do:

2 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 1/2 cups (packed) golden brown sugar
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup (2 sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

4 pounds large Granny Smith apples, peeled, halved, cored, each half cut into 6 slices
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

So, first you peel your apples, throw them in a bowl, and toss them with the lemon juice and cinnamon. Put them into your baking dish. Combine your oats, brown sugar and flour, and cut your cold butter into small pieces. (I suggest taking a knife, running it under hot water, and cutting. When the butter starts sticking to the knife, run it under hot water again.) Use your hands to mix the butter into the dry ingredients. (I feel that in this situation, temperature is much less important than in pie crust, so hands it is.)

Put it in the oven at 375ish for something like an hour, and give it a couple minutes to cool.

Now crumble is an infinitely experimentable dessert. This recipe results in quite a lot of crumble (like, the stuff you put on top), but crumble stores pretty well, so you can just save it for your next crumble. Some people like raisins, I used slightly less butter than directed, etc etc.

Linden: Emptying the Pantry, Part One

I have been shamefully remiss in posting up my food adventures here, but so has everyone else. Last night, though, I was on my own for the first time in ages, and I made myself a little feast. I have a bit of a problem in that when I went shopping two weeks ago, I didn't realize I would be spending four days in London and Brighton, and thus bought more food than I can really eat in this time period. So I am eating cooked meals for every meal from now until I leave, in the hopes that all my onions and potatoes and sweet potatoes and garlic and vegetables can get consumed.

Last night, I was working on potatoes and the green beans that froze in my fridge. (Our fridge is currently having some temperature confusion, but we are working through it.)


I did potato wedges, with just a bit of salt and pepper (and some olive oil), put in the oven at around 400F for around 30 minutes, flipped halfway through. (Just in case anyone in the family doesn't yet know how to make potato wedges.) Because of the sad shape of the green beans, I popped them in some boiling water, and then put a little balsamic vinegar and pepper on them. And then I pan-cooked some paprika-coated chicken with lots of garlic, put it all on a plate, and watched tv while I ate it. Delicious!

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Xan: Marshrooms and more

And now back to our regular programming.  The kitchen was out of order again after Thanksgiving, but we're back in action.  On the menu today: Thanksgiving leftovers!  Specifically, we still had some uneaten turkey bits.

Now, I know what you're thinking.  And before you go there, the answer is no, we have not had turkey sitting in our fridge for the last several weeks. That would be ridiculous! Who do you think I am, my father?  No, unlike him, my fridge does not contain a bajillion acres of deep shelf space for "dry aging" leftovers, as he would say.  My fridge is a normal size, which means we can't afford to leave anything in there for weeks.  The space is too precious.  Therefore I kept my turkey bits under my desk.

*

I am talking, of course, about the marshmallows that propped up the tails of the turkey cupcakes from Thanskgiving.  That's right: turkey butts.  There were a lot of leftovers, even despite the fact that Catherine recently discovered their hiding place.

To use them up, I went ahead and Invented these marshrooms:



I don't know if Liz would be excited, or disappointed that they aren't really mushrooms.


Bottoms up!  Ready to grab.

Indeed, this may well be my most complex and groundbreaking invention to date.  Or not.  It probably depends on your ability to detect sarcasm in the written word.  There comes a time when we all must look ourselves in the mirror and ask: Am I, in fact, Tammy Zooo?  And if you are the type of person who answers no solely due to your own inadequate spelling ability, then I will remind you that no matter how many layers you may claim to have, I am very, very good at chopping onions.  Seriously, I have a lot of practice.  Do you know how many onions come through our doors every week? (Answer: MANY, though technically the kitchen has just one door).  There is literally nothing that makes Catherine happier than a well-chopped onion.  (Incidentally, it used to be that nothing brought more tears to my eyes.  But then she bought me onion goggles.)

In any case, whoever may stare back at you when you look into the mirror, one thing is for certain.  You, yes you, are currently reading this blog.  That makes you special, and at Vongsafood, specialness does not go unnoticed, or unrewarded.  And so, just as a special treat, I have decided to let you in on how I came up with this special treat.  Attention!  Below you may find some real insights into my creative cooking process.

Xan's Marshrooms:


Ingredients:

  • 15 leftover turkey butts
  • 4 squares of leftover unsweetened baking chocolate you bought one time by accident
  • several handfuls of powdered sugar
  • Leftover coconut sugar coating from Sweet Potato Balls recipe (see below)

Instructions:

  • Put the butts on a plate in the freezer.  Completely forget about them until at least an hour later.
  • Meanwhile, melt the chocolate in the microwave, heating repeatedly for 15 second intervals.  When the chocolate is bubbling and lumpy from overcooking, you are done.  Grab a few handfuls of powdered sugar directly from the bag*. Mix the sugar into the chocolate to cancel out the unreasonable bitterness of completely unsweetened chocolate (this will not actually work for any feasible amount of sugar, but imagine how bad it would be if you didn't do anything).
  • Remember that you left something in the freezer, like, over an hour ago.  Congratulations people, your butts are now rock hard and you didn't even have to go to the all night gym. Unfortunately, as is often the case, quick-gotten gains turn into even quicker-gotten losses.  In just 20 minutes, the butts will be mostly restored to their former softness. 
  • Dip the cold butts into the melted chocolate and then dredge in the coconut mixture.  Put back on the plate and serve to your delighted guests**.


*Portioning by hand is a bad idea for some ingredients, but you should really give it a try with powdered sugar.  You absolutely will not make a mess all over your counter and any surface within a 10 foot radius.  Trust me, it works!
**The only person who will actually like these is Tammy, for reasons that are surely obvious to you by now, provided your name isn't actually Tammy.  This was empirically verified tonight when she gave them two thumbs up.  Needless to say, this rating was at least twice as high as any of our other raters.


Now, I know you're eager to make yourselves some marshrooms.  But as is evident from the recipe, you will first have to make these sweet potato balls which, incidentally, also require leftover turkey:


Crispy coconut sweet potato shell on the outside, gooey marshmallow center.


Disclaimer:  Turkey butts have been known to expand to astounding diameters when subjected to high heat.  The sweet potato shells that housed them were at least three sizes too small.  Here's a more representative picture:




To be honest, I wasn't particularly impressed with the tastiness of these guys.  Too much nutmeg, for sure.  I don't know if I would make them again, but I think we can all agree that the concept, at least, is fantastic.

In any case, it's good to be back in action!

Monday, December 6, 2010

Linden's potatoes au gratin

Last night, instead of doing my statistics assignment, I made dinner. It looked like this.





It tasted okay, although if anyone has any tips on the chicken, they would be welcome!

The potatoes are potatoes au gratin, which loosely translated means potatoes that smell like cheese, and are made, unsurprisingly given the name, with potatoes and cheese, and a bit of milk thrown in for good measure. The chicken was salted, peppered, thymed, and floured, then cooked in a bit of oil, which spattered everywhere and I had to protect myself with a frying pan. It reminded me of that time Papa fought a bear with a tin bowl. The veggies were all I had, and were cooked a la Vongsathorn, which translates as to the wagons!.

I had the leftovers today for lunch.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Linden's Late Carrot Cake

My cooking habits have devolved in the last two weeks, in that I couldn't make the effort or take the time to cook fancy dinners or fancy cupcakes full of food coloring. I also haven't taken the time to post here, because I am Disciplined and don't procrastinate papers by doing things on the Intramanets. So belatedly, last weekend I made carrot cake (mostly because I needed to use up some carrots). Because of my sadly low-tech kitchen, this involved shredding carrots and nutmeg by hand (which resulted in a wonderful-smelling kitchen and orange tilted hands), and whipping icing by hand (so even though I have been remiss in doing all of my wrist exercises, they are still getting a bit of a workout).


(My strategy is to take advantage of the fact that I live sandwiched between a graveyard and the Magdalen deer park, and include them in my pictures of cakes cooling on windowsills. That in the background would be the long wall that goes around the deer park. Also in the deer park at the moment are huge balls of mistletoe in trees, which is awesome.)

So the main problem with carrot cake is that the icing recipes expect you to want to eat about half the icing sans cake, or put an inch of icing on the whole thing. I compromised by putting half an inch on, licking my fingers, and then putting the remaining the icing in the fridge and planning on doing another carrot cake this weekend. However! The good thing about it is that you get to feel slightly virtuous, because it is full of goodness, like carrots and walnuts.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Xan: Going overboard...

The Jews have their Xanukah (read: Chanukah), the Christians have their Xmas (Xanmas).  Liz has Shark Week, which I thoroughly approve of, even despite the fact that it isn't a deliberate homage to me.  In fact I think it should be more of a Ramadan-length affair.  I guess then a case could be made for calling it Shark Weex, or even Sharx Weex.  Which would be glorious.

In any case, Liz does not constrain her celebration of sharx to 1 week of the year like everyone else.  And would you know, this year Thanksgiving also happened to be her birthday.  So, we decided to take things into dangerous territory.  We went overboard, and you just won't believe what we found there...

Aren't those the balloons we just gave the birthday girl?  Hey...where'd she go? 
Don't worry, we brought ourselves a shark cage.  Now, at some point in your life, you have probably observed the mild humor in the fact that a "shark cage" is actually a cage for people.  Well, at XCKD Enterprises, things are different.  At XCKD Enterprises, our cages are for sharks.  At XCKD Enterprises, we have black belts* in topology**, so we know that by stepping into the cage and simply declaring ourselves to be on the outside, we can catch all the sharks in the world.  And you know what, that's exactly what we did.  And as a bonus, in the process we also netted ourselves some schools of swedish fish!  Who knew applied math*** could be so delicious?
Liz has now extinguished as many fires in our apartment as Tammy has started.


Jaws.
Happy birthday, Liz.

*But please, understand this in the modern karate sense of "black belt."  Remember that there are puntable 6-year-old children walking around with black belts these days.  It is hardly the universal standard of awesomeness it once was.
**remember, we both wrote our theses on topology.  Mine was titled "Nonrealizable Automorphisms of Complete Bipartite Sharks."
***Take that, Trevor.  Don't tell me I never get my hands dirty.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Linden: Jonathan.

Hey! Just the other day I did the same thing, although with fewer ingredients:


Mine is a bit cross-eyed.

I named him Jonathan, long for either Johnny or Jack, depending on your interpretation.

Xan: Thanksgiving!

We had an epic thanksgiving this year.  In attendance: me, Catherine, mom, dad, Matt L, Tammy Z, and Liz F dropped by too.

Where to begin?  With the turkeys, of course!  Thanksgiving just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without turkey.  I mean, imagine if you showed up to the table and found it bereft of the old gobble-gobble.  And you know what else would be a total mood-killer?  What if you showed up to the table and no one knew where they were supposed to sit?  Like, it would just be a bunch of people wandering around helplessly with nowhere to eat.  Tragic, right?  Tragic like having no turkey.

Well, as exactly one-half of Xan and Catherine, Kitchen Duo (xckd), I am pleased to report that we have successfully planned and executed a groundbreaking strategy for killing two turkeys with one stone.  Behold:




You get the idea.  That's right, turkey cupcake name tags.  Astute readers will recognize the exact likeness of dad's signature in that last one.  Now, since we had 12 people's worth of cupcakes, donut holes and candy corn, we went ahead and made a few extra for the ones who couldn't be here this time:





These are pumpkin cupcakes with gingerbread cookie tails and donut holes for heads.  Seating information has never been so delicious.  By the way, is it just me, or do these turkeys look kinda clueless?  Kinda ignorant of their impending doom?  I guess some of them had longer to live than others.  It was good to be Catherine's turkey this year.  Mom's, not so much.  Tammy's survived/suffered a long time, really no end in sight, probably something to do with the blindness that tends to occur when a turkey is forcibly deprived of its pupils.  In economics, we would say that Tammy Zioux has revealed a preference for animal cruelty.  Yes Tammy, for googlability purposes, it's probably a good thing that I don't agree with you on how your name is spelled.

Anyways, you may be wondering why killing two turkeys with one stone was really necessary, since we were going to have a regular turkey anyways.  The answer is that at xckd enterprises, we don't do turkey.  We do Turbacon:


This method, which I believe originates in some form from grandma, is pretty darn awesome.  This may look like turkey to the uninitiated, but actually it is a sophisticated bacon delivery mechanism.  There is no basting or tenting with foil or white meat overcooking here; no, at xkcd enterprises we have engineered the next generation of superturkey, with bacon seamlessly biointegrated directly into the skin.  I hope I don't need to tell you that this is delicious.

Also on the menu was stuffing, twice-baked potatoes, sweet potato biscuits, cranberry-sauce-from-a-can, herb bread, hot apple cider, brussels sprouts, carrots, corn, gravy, sweet potato fries, apple pie (tammy), and oreo truffles (matt).


Why yes, that is bacon fused to the skin!
 Dessert:



I leave you with this:
At Vongsafood, playing with your food is encouraged.



Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and welcome to the holiday season!

Xan: Warming up with an afternoon snack

We'll get to Thanksgiving proper, but first, I wanted to share a new recipe.  Yesterday we took a short break from our feast preparations to enjoy some Pumpkin Pie Mini-Churros (I would add "of Great Deliciousness"  but it's obviously redundant).  I adapted this from a regular churro recipe by adding canned pumpkin puree to the batter and putting pumpkin pie spice into the sugar mixture, but you could just as easily leave the pumpkin out and use cinnamon instead of pumpkin pie spice.



I make mini-churro spirals. Why mini? Because I only have a tiny star icing nozzle, not a giant churro-sized one.  Also, mini-churros take very little oil.  But, you can make these any size you want; regular churros would be awesome! (They will require more like 5-10 minutes to cook).  If you don’t have any nozzles, or for that matter icing bags, just use a Ziploc bag and cut a hole in a corner. 
Oh yes, and why spirals? Because mini-churros are so thin, spirals are a nice way of making each churro more substantial for the eater.  Also, the compactness of the spirals speeds up the process considerably.  If your goal was just to cook all the batter as fast as possible, you would start in the center of the pan and squeeze out a single tight spiral that took up the whole surface area of the oil.  Besides the perfectly-solved packing problem, there is a fixed cost component to each churro (terminating it and restarting a new one takes time, which adds up), and this way you’d only have to pay it once per batch.  But…don’t try to make one big spiral.  Not a good idea.  Mini-spirals walk the line between efficiency and feasibility.  Plus, they’re pretty.

But you can do it however you want.



Xan’s Pumpkin Pie Mini-Churros
Adapted from regular churros recipe in Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World (p 655).



Ingredients
Oil for frying
1 tsp Pumpkin Pie Spice
1/2 cup sugar plus 1 TBS sugar
1 stick butter
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup flour
3 eggs
1/2 cup canned pumpkin (or…mashed sweet potatoes?)

Instructions:
1.      Put about 2/3rds inches of oil in a cast iron skillet and heat to about 350 F (the temperature is not critical and I don’t actually measure it).  Mix the spice and sugar together on a large plate.
2.      Combine the remaining sugar, butter, salt, and 1 cup water in a saucepan over high heat and bring to a boil.  Turn the heat to low and add the flour all at once.  Stir constantly until the mixture forms a ball, about 30 seconds.  Remove from the heat and beat in the eggs one at a time, stirring until smooth after each addition.  Mix in the pumpkin pie filling.
3.      Spoon the dough into a pastry bag with a star tip.  Squeeze dough into the hot oil in tight spirals, using a fork to cut off the stream at the end of each spiral.  Cook as many as will fit comfortably at once, turning as they brown, for a total of 1-3 minutes each. (They are done when brown as in the picture).
4.      Remove the churros from the oil and drain them on paper towels, then immediately roll them in the sugar mixture.  Serve immediately!

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Linden's Thanksgiving

I expect that sometime in the next day or two Xan will be putting up quite a lot of pictures. Sadly, I have nothing to show for myself, because it is 7th week and I am getting ready to do an interview (which I'm sure you've all heard about, except maybe Papa, because sometimes we like to protect him from the unpleasant truths of reality). And so, I am doing nothing for Thanksgiving except being incredibly thankful to my friends, who did this for me:



(There is a story behind the cornmeal. Perhaps I will tell you it when I use the cornmeal!) Just in case this isn't awesome enough on its own, some of the gingerbread men were decorated as Special Characters from America's Past:

As you can see, we have a red-coat, a turkey, and Abraham Lincoln.

Admittedly, this post has absolutely no cooking in it (unless you count decorating the gingerbread men) but I am wiggling the rules on this one, because examples of the food I've been eating the last few days, which mostly consists of toast-with-something-on-it are not really worth putting up here. However! I am wiggling the rules a little today, because it is Thanksgiving.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Xan: Here's my excuse

I haven't done much cooking recently, because my kitchen is currently being renovated.  It was in bad shape; in fact, let me tell you about it

The old kitchen suffered primarily from what I call the Few Inches problem.  But don't be fooled by the name, for it was no small problem.  For one, the floor was so high that we couldn't open the back door more than a Few Inches.  Furthermore, a high velocity fan blade smashed into a certain cabinet door whenever it was opened more than a Few Inches.  Also, the dishwasher, which was supposed to be attached to the countertop, was simply sitting loose between the cabinets, meaning that when the door was closed with enough force to actually seal it -- so as to prevent leakage and all -- the entire machine was pushed back under the counter a Few Inches, which apparently caused it not to drain, which apparently caused leakage. Indeed, once you have absorbed this much, you will hardly be surprised to hear that the wobbly fridge was off the level by a Few Inches, that we had only a Few Inches of counter space, or that the cabinets had been assembled so poorly that several shelves would not stay up because the cabinet walls were a Few Inches too far apart.  

Now, say what you will about the idiot who put this place together, but I think we can all agree that he was definitely not worried about compensating for something.  I haven't the slightest idea what he was thinking, but at least we can rule that one out.

Anyways, despite its shortcomings, the old kitchen did get the job done, as long as you didn't mind the constant risk of death-by-detached-fan-blade-hurtling-through-the-air, or your bread never rising enough by a few inches.  I was actually okay with it, personally.  But my parents (who claim to deeply enjoy this sort of work) were hell-bent on righting all the wrongs that lay therein.  They're part of the rebel alliance, you see.  And at this point it should come as no surprise that they did ultimately manage to exploit a weakness in the structure of the cabinets/walls/counters/flooring.  Force was involved.  Also, power tools.  In short, they blew the whole thing up.

Here are the guilty parties, wanted in at least 3 states and possibly England:

Study these faces well.  You never know when you might see them standing next to you in line.  If the man in front of you has just talked the cashier into giving him $600 worth of stuff for $12.09, there is no need to check the face.  You are advised to contact the authorities immediately upon any contact.  Under no circumstances should you attempt to apprehend any of these subjects yourself.   


Fastforward to the present.  We now have black galaxy.  That's no moonstone, mind you.  It's a counterspace workstation specially geared both literally and figuratively towards our future conquest of the culinary galaxy.  And even though the kitchen is only half-finished, appearing yet as a skeleton of its future glory, I'll let you in on a little secret.  Thanksgiving thinks it can creep up on us, catch us by surprise while we're still vulnerable...well, it has another thing coming, heh heh heh.  Wait for it...wait for iiiiiiitt....That's Right, come Turkey Day, you will witness the firepower of this Fully Armed and Operational Kitchen*

Yes, you, dear reader of this blog.  Great things are coming.  And if you don't believe me, then...I find your lack of faith disturbing**.  There, I said it.

The moral of this post: If it doesn't make sense you to, you're probably missing something.  I don't claim that the inverse holds, but I would be comfortable asserting that if your name is Linden, then you are not missing anything.

* No?  I know, that line wasn't in the book anyways.
**Still no?  You have seen Star Trek***, haven't you?
***Intentional.  Someone actually asked me this.

Xan: Sweet potato fries!

Once upon a time, Catherine did not like sweet potatoes.  As a stand-alone fact, mind you, this does not trouble me.  Economists are not in the business of telling people what their basic preferences should be; to the contrary, we are some of the more accepting people out there.

But combined with some other facts, I start to become troubled.  For one, I believe -- and Catherine would surely agree -- that adding "sweet" in front of a food makes it more delicious.  And for another, Catherine likes potatoes.  Yes, I think we can see where this is going, ah, deeply troubling indeed.  If Catherine likes potatoes, and she prefers sweet X to X, then she has revealed a preference for sweet potatoes.  She should like sweet potatoes even more than she likes regular potatoes*!

Thus reasoning, I knew that she must simply have missed some important information about the deliciousness of sweet potatoes.  And so I gave it to her, in the form of Lin's Sweet Potato Discs.  The recipe is super easy:

Preheat oven to 400**.  
Peel and slice a sweet potato into quarter-inch-thick discs. 
Spread some olive oil on a baking pan, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, lay down the potatoes in a layer.
Cook for 20 min, flip and cook for another 20, done.

There.  Simple, right?  And in my case, it turned out to be enough for the required conversion.  But indeed, from this simple starting point, one is driven to ask: How might I alter the recipe? How can I take it a little farther?

Here's my problem: I haven't mastered spices, and I mean really haven't mastered...in fact I hardly know what's going on there at all.  In most recipes, there are lots of ingredients -- often including several spices -- and it's usually hard to tell what's contributing what to the final product.  By contrast, this recipe is simple.  It provides a nice jumping-off point from which to experiment.  I can try things and see what happens.  It's easy and delicious pretty much no matter what I do.  So, slowly I'm figuring my way around.

 
I started cutting the sweet potatoes like fries, coating them in olive oil, and then mixing the salt/pepper/whatever spices in a bowl before laying them in the pan.  I have also found that a small amount of sugar works well (sweeter potatoes, anyone?).  So far the results have been pretty yummy:



Maybe one day when I have gravitated to something really awesome, I will post the recipe.  But if you are like now-me and you want to be like future-me, then for now...just experiment!  Cut them however you want. Put whatever you want on them.  Smaller things should be cooked at a higher temperature for less time (e.g. fries at say 450 for 25-30 min).  Just keep an eye on them, and have fun.  And deliciousness.  Your tummy will thank you.  So will everyone else's.


*I hope this doesn't have to be said, but no, I am not being particularly serious right now.
**Here you have an option.  Fahrenheit if you like your sweet potatoes soft in the center but browned on the outside, Celsius if crispy is more your thing.  Try it both ways, see what works for you!

Friday, November 19, 2010

what's your excuse? or, cauliflower and caramelized onion tart

So I recognize that Kathleen is busy enjoying herself in San Francisco (although if she went with the misconception that California is sunny and warm all year round, she is probably also busy being disappointed about the fog and rain). And Mama and Papa are tearing up cabinets and are too busy to talk on the phone (weep weep), let alone make delicious dinners. And Xan is probably ... wait. What is Xan doing right now?

Nevertheless! I shall soldier on alone, keeping this little blog gasping like a goldfish whose bowl is being cleaned until you all get your act together and make some meals.

Last night I made a cauliflower and caramelized onion tart. There is a story behind this meal! I've been planning to cook this for about a week, and every time I was in town for something I would pop into a store that sells cooking equipment and search for a pastry blender. Nowhere, alas, nowhere had a pastry blender. I concluded (logically) that people here do not make pie dough with a pastry blender, so I asked Chris (my English expert on English ways) how English people make pie crusts. He did not know.

However! He has a mother, as so many do, and he phoned her up for pie crust instructions. And she told me that she uses her fingers to mix the butter and flour together. (Which results, for the unpiesavvy among us, in a less flaky crust. You see, the trick to getting flaky crusts in pastry is to keep the butter cold, and not fully mix it in. When rolling out the dough, you will ideally have little flakes of butter speckled throughout. Using your fingers to mix your dough warms the butter and thus the unflaky crust.) When I related this to Mama, she suggested that this is perhaps the source of her and Papa's disagreements about what constitutes a good pie crust. And then she left to do some shopping or put holes in a wall or something.

But back to the matter at hand! Unfortunately, I am still working out my oven, so the pie crust did not bake properly. (I think it either wasn't hot enough or the heat didn't transfer properly, because all the butter melted before the crust had baked, just like with my cinnamon buns, and it didn't go crispy, just sort of floppy. Tragic!) However, it was still delicious, as evidenced by my friend digging in voraciously.


(Or possibly saying, "no no please don't make me eat this I'll do anything", but I prefer the first interpretation.) We should all be grateful to her though, because it wasn't until she reminded me of the blog halfway through eating that I remembered to take pictures.

Sadly, this isn't an all-family recipe, because it is heavy on the cheese. The recipe gave the option of swiss, gruyere, or comte, and knowing nothing about any of these things I asked one of my friends, who is strongly opinionated about cheeses, and he proclaimed gruyere was clearly the best option. So this has a cup of gruyere, a third a cup of parmesan, and a half cup of milk (it was supposed to be cream, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.) . It also has an entire roast cauliflower and an onion. (and those are full of goodness!)

I must now work out how I'm going to use up an obscene amount of carrots. And also, you know, maybe do a big pile of reading about the neighborhood effect.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Linden's banana bread bonanza

Dear family, normally I don't bake during the week because I have like, classwork and stuff, and baking is a bit gratuitous. But I had some very ripe bananas to eat up, and I can only eat so many bananas, and the situation was getting brown and spotty. Baking needed to be done. The only alternative was to go out and buy some rum, and that would have probably taken longer.

This turned out surprisingly well, although there were no walnuts in the store over the weekend so it is sadly unnutty.



This is Erica's secret recipe which I am not allowed to share with the world or I think with my family, but which is very delicious. (In the best tradition of our friendship, I had to threaten to withhold my pumpkin muffin recipe and also throw a nintendo controller at her face in order to get it out of her.)

Does anyone have good tricks for cutting breads? Other than, you know, using a bread knife? The loaf keeps trying to dissociate when I cut it.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Xan: Brussels sprouts???

I've been waiting for a while to cook brussels sprouts.  Catherine really doesn't like brussels sprouts, and as you may or may not know, I am currently on a crusade to expand her palate.  Now, this is no war of attrition; the plan emphatically does not involve cooking the same food over and over again until victory is attained or I go broke.  (Empirically speaking, that strategy simply doesn't work -- sorry dad, but mom will never like squash, even though they are so good for you).  No, mine is a slow, deliberate campaign that recognizes and elevates one critical fact above all else: People do not bite into foods of negative expected value, and first impressions matter more than anything else in setting their future expectations.  This is one of a class of problems where the order of experience matters*.  So it will not do to start low and end high, no!  If one of my foods develops a bad reputation early on, I will not be allowed to cook it at all (the expectation of continuing being negative), or in the event that I am allowed, the mind will be particularly closed to embracing it.

Therefore, my strategy emphasizes patience above all.  I hunt eternally for the best recipe, and I don't even turn on the stove until I find something with a lot of promise.  Make no mistake, in this game I am at an enormous disadvantage because I have never cooked any version of most of the foods I want to introduce.  The thing is, if your goal was just to get good at cooking, then your optimal strategy would be exactly the opposite of the one discussed above.  If your goal was to get good at cooking, you would be happy with starting low and ending high.  You would not fear initial failure.  You would not sit on your gloriously spotless hands, no -- you would get them dirty, and clean them later. Unfortunately, I have both of these as goals, and it is the tension between them that makes the optimization problem so darn complex.

As my biggest victories so far, I claim sweet potatoes (thanks, Lin! a good recipe, that one) and pork (huge success from the pages of Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World).  My most crushing defeat was definitely salmon. (sigh).

Today, I decided it was time to try brussels sprouts on Catherine.  The thing is, the rest of us already think her mom's oven-roasted brussels sprouts are amazing, and evidently Catherine does not.  Anne is a vegetarian, so you can bet she knows how to cook a good sprout.  The question is: How on earth do you compete with a vegetarian on cooking vegetables?

 
Once you put it that way, the answer is almost obvious: do something vegetarians aren't allowed to do.  That's right, I added bacon:





Yes I did.  As it happens, in a head-to-head with a vegetarian, the answer is usually to add bacon**.  And don't they look delicious?  Cooked in bits of bacon and a healthy*** amount of rendered bacon fat.  I didn't completely follow this recipe, but it's where the idea came from:
kenji's food lab bacon brussels sprouts of great awesomeness

Final score?  Catherine took a bite, declared them "fine," and didn't eat any more.  I consider this a partial victory, and not just in the sense that I got to eat more delicious bacon sprouts.  You have to understand that in this game, I am always starting with 2 strikes.  By my reckoning, I have just hit a foul tip, and that's not something to be ashamed of.   Even so, at the risk of mixing metaphors, next time I will most certainly be going all in. I do have a plan, but for now, patience.


Footnotes
*If you were a baseball player and you knew you were going to get exactly 200 hits this season, what is the best order to get them?  If you want to be deified, or even if you just prefer a higher batting average, then the answer is: all at the beginning!  Then everyone thinks you are a god for a while, and perhaps more importantly, at every point in the season your batting average is higher than it would be for any other ordering, even once you start striking out.
**Of course, this itself is just a special case of the more general principle: if a solution is not to be found inside a special case, relax some constraints, or if you are Tammy Zue, worship the field extension.
***Oh yes I did. "Healthy" in the sense of "considerable in size or amount."  Deal with it.

Linden's unexciting breakfast wrap

Dear Family,

I don't understand why sometimes I open this blog up after two days absence and there are five new foodphotos from different people, and sometimes I open it up and there is nothing but my recently deceased cookies staring sadly back at me. I am getting better at remembering to photograph my food though - tonight, I remembered as I almost finished eating.

I am in the process of preparing for something sort of exciting (although it will probably have to wait until Thursday or Friday night), but it means that the fridge is sort of full of my food, and in fear of my roommate's wrath I decided I had better use up some leftovers. Thus, I had scrambled eggs with green beans and onion (and salt and pepper and chili powder) in a wrap with some cheddar cheese, which was then heated up until it was crispy instead of stale.


Because that is rather high on cheeeese (which I admittedly enjoy, but also make me sleepy and unproductive), I rounded it out with an apple and a pear. (I had some help with the pear.)

Family, I have realised two things: (1) cooking every night takes a lot of spare creativity (2) nonstick pans are god. (I have neither creativity to spare, nor a nonstick pan. But I shall soldier on!)

ps - a sidenote: there are these things called labels which make life better later on. consider it!

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Linden's last cookies

Last weekend I mixed up a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and froze some of the dough for a rainy day. (A metaphorical rainy day - otherwise they would not have lasted a week in the freezer. I have been given a song by a British musician entitled, "Why does it always rain on me" and the answer is not that he lied when he was seventeen, but simply that he lives in Scotland. And for the technically challenged among us, if you click on the name of that song it will take you to youtube where you can hear this song for yourself.)

No, the real reason was that Chris was a bit nervous about doing his radio show, so I baked them as pregame distraction. Unfortunately, this means that there were only four left when I went to photograph them last night.



(When I take them off the sheet I flip them upside down to help them retain their chips. This is because my oven is temperamental and I haven't worked out the proper cookie heat yet. Especially for frozen dough.)


Post radio-show, Chris repaid the favor by bringing home a tin of Cadbury Roses (because they were, alas, shockingly out of Quality Streets at 11pm on a Saturday) for me and Tina. I had a caramel swirl.

You will all be surprised to hear that I am not gaining weight.

Last night I also made dinner - penne with tomato sauce, zucchini (I am resisting the Britishizing pressure to call them courgettes, you see) and Italian chicken - but I forgot to photograph it. So you will only get to see the sad leftovers that make up my lunch today.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Kathleen's Avocado Black Bean Burritos



This was tonight's cooking endeavour. Black beans with onion, cumin seeds, and chipotle chilis, and then coriander and spring onions folded in, and an avocado salsa. Not bad.

Quesadilla



Another recipe from my Easy Hot and Spicy cookbook: vegetarian quesadillas! I've never made them before, but I've struck a new and excellent meal. It's really easy, too. I just chopped up the following:

Avocado
tomatoes
pitted olives
pickled jalapenos
chilis
courgette
refried beans
cumin

...And some other stuff. I can't remember what, plus there were more ingredients on the list that I didn't add. They basically said choose four or five things, but I didn't read that part so well, and I chopped up lots and mixed it together. It made an absolutely delicious mixture, which you can see on the right.

Then, I put some corn oil in a frying pan, put a wholewheat tortilla down, spread some shredded cheddar, and a part of my mixture, patted down another tortilla, and then fried it until golden on either side. Who knew that a wholewheat burrito wrap could be so delicious and flaky with a bit of corn oil fried on?

Anyway, it was magic.

Xan: No Knead Bread

Today's lesson: No knead bread is both impossibly easy and awesome, so the only thing that could be keeping you from it is that you don't know today's lesson.

These pics are from my very first attempt a couple weeks ago.  As you can see, it came out perfect.  And not because I have skills, because...I don't.



I have tried a few recipes and I like this one:
http://flyfishohio.us/nokneadbread.htm

fyi it calls for a 3.5+ quart pot but I used a 2.5 quart casserole dish and it was fine.  It seems like it's not going to work, but it does...just like everything else about this bread.  Despite my best efforts, I have not yet found a way to screw it up.

Catherine's Rum Cake!

Well, technically I am the one who makes it, but Catherine always takes ownership, at least insofar as we own the contents of our own stomachs.  So, it is Catherine's rum cake.  Don't expect her to save you any, but at least you can enjoy the photos...





LEFTOVERS

From Paul:

Left overs week. This is pretty much what we've been eating since fleeing from Bed Bug City. I had cooked a massive batch of pork chops, chicken, onions, apples, and an asparagus, peppers, and mushroom medley for the trip so that's what we've been working on. The squash is a butternut that has so much meat, it makes me suspicious of whether it was not so much grown as decanted. In the background is a small hubbard I found in Indiana -it's on deck. Even though it was small, at first it did not look like I was going to be allowed to bring it home, but then Mama found a couple of hummingbird feeders on the seasonal clearance shelves. Oh, the pesto was left behind by Linden a few weeks ago. Phew! -glad I remembered that.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Pecan Pie



This is the last quarter of the pecan pie I made with my friend Cassie on Sunday evening. I'll admit, it doesn't look too appetizing, and of course we couldn't wait hours for it to solidify after we made it, so our first slices made all the goo run.

Pecan pie was always delicious, but I'm not recommending this one. I made it out of Joy of Cooking, and I think that it was just too sickly sweet. I'm probably better off sticking with an already converted recipe. I especially didn't like the pat-in crust. It was very easy, which was great, but it had too much salt and the texture was just too flaky. I need a good pie crust recipe!

Still, I had another slice last night (I'm rationing it out, because I gave half the pie to Cassie, since she made it while I cooked our dinner), and it was very delicious. Minus the burnt crust at the end.

Vegetarian Burritos



I made this recipe on Saturday, from my 'Easy Hot and Spicy' cookbook that I recently got at Waterstones. The first time I made it, it was incredibly delicious. This time, it didn't go quite so well.

There are several key components in this burrito. One is the tomato sauce. You put a can of tomatoes in, with some tomato puree and fried up peppers, and then season it with chili powder. I put a little too much puree in, and the chili powder couldn't make up for the odd taste. When I did it right, though, it had this lovely earthy taste to it, which was delicious.

The salsa is especially interesting, with tomato, red onion, mint, chili, and lime juice. The mint is delicious--not what you'd expect!

I tried it with and without sour cream. Sour cream and creme fraiche aren't really my thing, and I definitely prefer it without. But it is a nice flavor accent for those who do enjoy that substance.


The only things I've missed out in this description are the refried beans and freshly chopped coriander!