Friday, December 30, 2011

Catherine, Lauren, Xan: Panda Bears cupcakes!

Our friend Lauren T was in towne and we made these panda bear cupcakes:



Donut hole heads and oreo arms and chocolate cheerio ears...what's not to love?  We even got a bit of Lauren channeling Tammy:


What happy little pandas.  Eat me...eat me...that's what they're saying.  And so we did.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Xan: The cucumber sushi story

I will now tell you the story of Catherine's cucumber sushi.

The time and place: night before Thanksgiving at our apartment
In attendance: Me, Catherine, Pete and Anne, and Chariseeeeee.

I was ordering food from Noodles, Etc.  Allow me to recount the relevant portion of the phone conversation:
Me: ...oh and could we get an order of cucumber avocado rolls?
Them: We don't have those...
Me: I know, but in the past you were happy to leave the crab out of the California roll, and that's a cucumber-avocado roll.  Would that be possible?
Them: Let me talk to the chef.
Them: Unfortunately we're out of avocado tonight...
Me: Well then could we just have a cucumber roll?
Them: OK let me talk to the chef.
Them: ...OK, that's fine, it will be $2.50, is that alright?
Me: Great, thanks!
In my head I was thinking, wonderful, they are even being so kind as to charge me less for sushi that doesn't have any expensive ingredients.  But when the delivery arrived...
.
.
.
.
.
.
...what we found was...
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hint: not sushi.

Yes.  A 22' cucumber.  We ordered a cucumber roll and they literally gave us a cucumber.  In fairness it does roll, and they were kind enough to peel it for us, although it's questionable whether the length is truly 22 feet.

I think we would have been pretty upset if it wasn't so hysterical.  Also Catherine did technically eat the cucumber.  In any case, through our collective memory we were able to recall the ordering conversation and trace the source of the confusion back to:
Me: Well then could we just have a cucumber roll?
which must have been misheard as "Well then could we just have a cucumber whole?"

Of course this makes absolutely no sense in the context of the conversation.  There was a clear logical progression from sushi-with-cucumber-avocado-crab to sushi-with-cucumber-avocado to sushi-with-cucumber.  But evidently something got lost in translation.

In the future, we will be specifying that we want our sushi with rice and nori when ordering from Noodles. (But not just rice and nori).

Xan: Saffron rice pudding!

I'm posting this because it was interesting and colorful.  Made this rice pudding a few months ago:


I don't have the recipe in front of me, but it wasn't complicated.  I made it because (a) I wanted to try out the saffron I just got, and (b) no milk.  The little colorful bits you see are chopped pistachios, except the orange ones which are saffron threads.  There's no food coloring, just the incredible ability of saffron to turn everything bright yellow!

I love the smell and taste of saffron but Catherine apparently likes neither of these things.  Oh well, at least I got the pudding all to myself.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Linden's Green Curry Pasta

You know, when I first arrived in England and started cooking with English people, (yeah, English people like my boyfriend) I concluded that there are some really deplorable things about English cooking. I mean, for the older generation, there's the fact that pasta seems foreign. It's potatoes all the way. For the younger one, it's the use of butternut squash in Indian curries, and tuna with tomato sauce on pasta (the latter, I admit, is probably a combination of studential status and terrible cooking skills, which we can't entirely blame on the citizenship, I remember the not-too-distant past when Xan's meal de force was fried eggs).  And then there's the fact that every pub in the country seems to have the same ten things on their menu, maybe with one "asian" dish to set them apart, which tends to be an indian or thai "fusion" curry - which is to say, served with pasta.




And originally I seriously objected to the idea on the grounds that Asia meant its food to be served with rice, and we should eat it the way it was meant to be eaten, but now, I sometimes find myself with leftover curry on hand, and no rice, and leftover pasta, and I think, "maybe just this once, I don't have to tell anyone about it..."

But I have decided to be honest with myself and own up to my non-snooty ways. I really like green curry with bowties. It's also pretty good with spaghetti.



I am not even going to try to justify this.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Xan: Lahmacun!

I made these "lahmacun" from Best Recipes in the World.  Thank you Mark Bittman, they were good!


Lahmacun=turkish meat pizzas.  I am just going to go ahead and assume that lahmacun refers to all the ground lahm, as lamb is called in whatever language it is they speak in Turkey.

I'm being facetious of course, pretending not to know the official language of Turkey.  Some languages don't sound anything like the country they're spoken in, but this one has a pretty obvious connection.  In Turkey they speak  gobbledegook.  Gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble.  Other than a few isolated words like lahm, that's pretty much all they say.  Structurally it's a lot like Norse code.  For example, "Gobblegobblegobble.  Gobble, gobble, gobble.  Gobblegobblegobble!!!" means "Help I'm being eaten!"

Anyway, gobbledegook is inefficient but delicious. Just like these meat pizzas.  I can't actually remember what was in them, other than lahm and acun, oh and I put an egg on one because why not:


Gobbled it down.

Reminder: Alternative views

I posted about this a while back, but the question came up again: how do you see Vongsafood in those fancy new formats?

From here you can access all the different formats:
http://vongsafood.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

Some of these are really nice for picture-based blogs like Vongsafood.  Unfortunately though, you can't see our new logo!  From there, if you want to return to vongsafood.blogspot.com proper, you can always click the big "Vongsafood" on the upper left.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Linden's quiches, crusty or crustless

Good try, Xan, but you're going to have to wake up earlier than that to fool me! I've watched Ratatouille and No Reservations, so I think I know what happens in a proper chef's kitchen.


A proper chef's kitchen.


Of course these, days, it's just me cooking so I can't put any of that into practice. I know, you're thinking, "maybe she needs a pet!" but we have one, and far from helping me cook, he steals my food. One time, I put a scone out on my desk and went to make tea, and by the time I had, the cat had snuck into my room, a No Cat Zone, and jumped up on my desk and stolen my scone! I caught him walking out of my room with the whole thing hanging out of his mouth. So I'm not taking the risk of a pet, and I'll just keep cooking on my own for a little while longer.

But before I start all my cooking for the day I'm going to try and work through some of my backlog. This one is about quiche, which I know people don't really like for a variety of reasons, but I do, and it is super easy to make, so it happens a lot here.



Alas, the most delicious quiches involve bacon, which is solidly in the no-eat-zone, and while I can justify a little bit of it occassionally, I can't excuse a whole week of constant baconing (it's the nitrates, you can't trust them).

So instead, broccoli, which is much healthier, and vegetablarianer, than bacon. Swap in skim milk for the cream, add lots of cheddar to that, and delicious whole-wheat pie crust and you have a super-delicious weekful of lunches.

Plus, with the leftover pie crust, you can make proper pie! (Mm, look at all that rustic whole-wheat pie crust. (Don't be fooled by it's slightly darker color, that is not overcooking but wheaty goodness!))

If you are feeling lazy, you can leave out the pie crust entirely, and just have the delicious eggy cheesy bit. (This was a more recent go, the result of my lazy weeknightness and a leftover head of broccoli that wanted eating.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Xan, Catherine, Brendan: Mango sushi and chicken teriyaki!

Continuing to work my way through the Great Backlog. Our friend Brendan came to visit us, oh let's see, that was...almost four months ago.  I'm really behind, shut up.  Anyway, other than seeing Patrick Stewart and LeVar Burton at a blues bar, the coolest thing we did was probably this cucumber, avocado and mango sushi. Behold the genius of Brendan B!



By the way, how does everyone like the new Vongsafood logo?
We used these bamboo place mats to roll up the sushi:


I used to really complain about these mats because while they looked nice, they failed utterly at the other half of their job, namely keeping crumbs and other foodstuffs off the table.  But now they only fail utterly at a third of their job, and I have accordingly reduced my complaining by 33%.

Now, let's have a little etymology lesson.  Normally we avoid pretension on Vongsafood, but a little vocab can go a long way toward confusing people into thinking you're a good cook.  Here's the sushi chef, or sous chef as they're called in Japan, together with his, umm, cucumber slicer person:


Now, you might think that sous comes from the Japanese word for sushi, but it is actually derived from the English word souse.  As you know, souse means to get wet, which is exactly how you make the nori (seaweed) stick to itself.  It seems odd, but according to my research souse made its way into the Japanese vernacular way back in the Edo Period of the early 1800s, coinciding with the introduction and subsequent popularity of such American woodblock prints as The Great Souse.  For whatever reason, the word stuck, and to this day it means to submerge in Japan.

[By the way, did you know that nori is a good source of iron?  I mention this because the digestive process by which the body extracts the iron is quite fascinating.  After you swallow a sheet of nori, the stomach literally flips the nori around until it turns into iron.  It may seem weird at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense if you think through the process in a backwards sort of way.]

Under the supervision of the master chef, I did a little sousing myself:

The bowl at the bottom contains the sousing liquid.
You can tell those are my hands because they are spindly.  

Besides the sousing, I also filled the role of sous vide chef, which is Japanese for "submerged cooking."  This is how the Japanese make their world famous Chicken of the Sea teriyaki.  I've posted about sous vide before, but this time I got a really good picture of my makeshift rice cooker sous vide setup:


As you can see, the chicken breasts have been placed in Ziploc bags with the air removed.  This is an important part of the method too, but unfortunately the Japanese don't have a word for "under vacuum," so if we wanted to include it in the name, we would probably have to borrow words from some other more pretentious language.  Nobody wants that, so this style of cooking is commonly referred to simply as sous vide.

Confused? Remember, that means I am a good cook.

Anyway, the nice thing about this method for something like chicken teriyaki is that it has to marinate for a while anyway, so why not let it do that as it's slowly coming up to temperature over the couple hours it takes to cook?  It seems to work.  Results:

Juicy and delicious!

So, that was yummy.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Xan: Cinnamon Sugar Pizza!

This was an obvious one: Spread some melted butter over the dough and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.



The sugar melts and starts to caramelize, forming a sort of hard coating pocked with holes.  Easy and yummy.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Well, I think I am willing to concede the the deboning of a chicken is a win for Xan in the "Impressive" category.

Now, on to more important things, like me. I spent, as I often do on Sundays (well, actually I usually do it on Friday nights or Saturdays, but this week I was in the lab all day and evening Friday and Saturday, so it got delayed until this morning), a little while trying to decide what I was going to cook for dinner and leftovers lunches for the week. I was initially thinking beouf bourgignon (or however they spell that, how many letters do they need?), but wasn't really up for all that meat, so I pingponged between different cuisines and meats and recipe sources, until I came upon one that sounded really good: Butternut squash and caramelized onion pie with biscuit base.



Perfect, for it is turning slightly colder and more than slightly damper (also today, I demolded my room), and because it will feel healthy and virtuous all week long (Papa initially didn't believe me, for it had biscuit crust, but I triumphantly informed him that my biscuit crust is made with milk instead of butter, which makes this dinner practically fat free, aside from the gruyere sprinkled on the top.

And it may seem like a lot of cheese, but my pie dish (le creuset, $16 on sale, I am occassionally an awesome shopper) is about two inches deep, so there's a lot of squash under that little layer of cheese:



It turned out surprisingly delicious; next time, I will probably change a few things, but I think Butternut Squash will likely be on the menu more in the coming months (especially given how inexpensive it is during the winter.) Now, I'm going to go to bed so that I can wake up early tomorrow morning and go into work and get more done.


Xan: Experiments with Chicken

Q: If a spineless person is a chicken, what do you call a spineless chicken?
A: Dinner for four.

I've butterflied quite a few chickens lately (cutting out the backbone with kitchen shears, squashing flat).  If you stick the legs out toward the edge of the roasting pan where it's hotter, they will cook in about the same time as the white meat.  Seems to work.  This guy's name is Colin:

A little olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme.

Easily cut into serving pieces.
Seen here with some focaccia bread from Cook's Illustrated's The New Best Recipes which, frankly, didn't come out well enough to justify the effort:



Butterflying has been my go-to method for roasting chicken. But yesterday I tried something different.  I ran into this awesome video for how to debone a chicken (while leaving it all in one piece) and I had to try it:



By the way, I may have to make an exception to my anti-French bias for Jacques Pepin, because this is just too awesome.  He certainly makes it look easy, huh?  Careful, the wishbone is very pwinted!

Somehow, some way, I will master this skill.  I will probably never be able to do this in a minute, but if I could get under 5 that would be pretty awesome.  My first attempt took closer to half an hour, of course...but I did it! (and obviously that's a lot of figuring-it-out time).  Here's my boneless chicken in its birthday suit tuxedo...I think we should name him Bones:

"Bones?  Whaddayamean, Bones?!? Dammit Jim, I'm a chicken, not a doctor!" 
Now, we also wanted to try this farro stuff that Anne got us the other day.  "What is this farro stuff, anyway?" we wondered.  Well, when life gives you stuff, make stuffing-ade!  Or at least stuffing.

So with Bones in hand, I created an impromptu stuffing: a mixture of farro, diced fire roasted tomatoes, onions, and a small army of spices in approximately (and I stress approximately) the ratios of ras el hanout.  And smoked paprika.  Yes.  Lots of smoked paprika.


I then rolled Bones up and tied everything together with some string all fancy-like:


And here are the results!
"lollipops," yum


"Looking tanned, Bones!"

Hmm, Bones is missing something besides his bones. Quick, what do you call a leg that runs away?

Leg of lam!
Farro=good!  Needless to say, I was pretty stuffed after stuffing myself with chicken stuffed with stuffing with all the stuff in it.  And Catherine liked it too, because she's knife-impaired and bones trouble her.

Xan and Catherine: Sunflowers!

I just transferred 5 months worth of food photos to my computer.  Quite a backlog!

We made these sunflower cupcakes...a while ago.  Catherine did the petals and I did the ladybugs :)


"let's be friends"