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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

Linden's Baked Oatmeal

Well, it's been a while since I posted anything here. This is in part because while at home for six weeks, I fell into the easy (and sometimes very rewarding) habit of letting Papapapa cook, despite my best intentions to take advantage of the free time and deep fryer to experiment. (Well, the other half of that was that it was a time of darkness and allergy testing, which meant I couldn't really experiment.)

But now I am living in Cambridge, and working a standard workweek, and I have returned to my habits of cooking for myself. Now, it's important to recognise that this is a massive endeavor, mostly because of the things no one ever thinks about. I can't have your standard cereal for breakfast, so I have to make my own. I can't eat store-bought bread, so I either have to make my own, or not eat bread (usually the latter) which means that I can't just pack a sandwich for lunch. And, even on the nights I get home late and exhausted, I can't just open a tin of soup or put some pasta on the stove and add ready-made sauce. And store-bought lunches or dinners are right out.

But I have adjusted, and I plan and prepare. It means lots of cooking on the weekends, like Sunday: on the slate was baked oatmeal, and a big vegetable baked ziti (most of which I put into individual lunch-sized containers and froze. Currently in my freezer are ziti, risotto, and quiche, because variety is important).
Let me tell you about baked oatmeal. I had never even heard of it until a few weeks ago, when I came across it during a late-night browse through cooking blogs, which is the sort of thing I do, and it seemed like a reasonable thing to try (partly because it doesn't require expensive nuts and dried fruit). It is super delicious, easy to make, and comes out steaming and photogenic. Also, it survives microwaving very well, which means it does well for breakfasts all week long.

And look how delicious it looks, with it's oatmealy top and gooey fruity bottom.

I am including the recipe here because I think others involved might benefit from this recipe, others in this case meaning everyone. Borrowed from sevenspoons, changed a bit by me.

Ingredients
slightly more than 2 cups large flake rolled oats (not instant)
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
slightly less than 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
slightly less than 1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups milk
2 large eggs
1 tablespoons oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon pure maple syrup or honey
2 medium bananas, sliced
1/2 cup blueberries (unthawed frozen or fresh)
Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Get out your 8" round baking dish (around 2 quart capacity) and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix together the oats, brown sugar, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, baking powder, spices and salt. Set aside.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, egg, oil, vanilla and maple syrup. Set aside.

In the prepared baking dish, spread the sliced bananas in an even layer, then scatter the blueberries over top. Pile the oat mixture to cover the fruit, but do not pack too tightly. Carefully pour the wet milk mixture over the oats; it will look as if there is too much liquid, but not to worry, it will be absorbed during baking. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the oatmeal is puffed and set, with a golden brown top.

Remove from the oven, allow to cool for a few minutes, then enjoy.

Makes about 4 hearty servings.

Kathleen: Owls

This is my first baking endeavour in quite some times. Little owls, which took absolutely ages but were so worth it. And yummy besides.




The small ones.


Close-up.


And the big ones.


All together!

Xan and Catherine: Monarchs!

Check out these monarch cupcakes!  Their annual fall migration from Canada to Mexico passes straight through our kitchen in Chicago:

Not all will complete the arduous 3000 mile journey.  Many will be eaten along the way, even despite the fact that they are loaded with toxins.  You see, these monarchs sport bright colors to warn would-be predators that they contain milk products.  (Monarch cupcakepillars feed on evil lactose-rich milkweed, toxifying them for life).

Anyway, the butterflies were made by melting "candy melting wafers," using an icing bag to form the wing and antenna shapes, and then resolidifying them for a few minutes in the freezer.  Cool, huh?

Linden's Turkey Meatballs

The last six months have been a bit splurgey for me, foodwise. After the time of darkness last winter (when I acquired a taste for lentils, brown rice, and cauliflower) while I was trying to identify my new allergy (methinks it's soy, but further tests to come this fall), I was in need of a little weight gain. Hence the abundance of cakes, chocolate, cheeesy lasagnas and deep dish pizzi, and savory tarts in my history.

However, this summer my fastwalks through Oxford (to lectures, seminars, and choir) have been replaced by sitting in a chair writing my thesis and moaning to everyone who will listen, which only exercises my hands and mouth (alas, not the bits that keep your tummy trim). So I am slowly trying to edge out the delicious-by-means-of-butter-and-cheese and edge in the not-as-delicious-but-makes-me-feel-virtuous.

So, because quitting cold turkey (hah!) would be too much to endure in the weeks before my thesis is due, I am taking the middle road. Last night, I made delicious spaghetti and meatballs, but instead of the traditional beef and veal and pork, I went for healthy turkey.

In my way, I combined two recipes from the internets, and opted for baking the meatballs rather than frying them (see? look at that healthy alternativing!) For the last five minutes of pasta cooking, I moved the meatballs into the sauce to absorb some delicious sauciness. Then, a bowlfull of pasta and zucchini (it may not look like much, but that is because this is Chris' plate, which is always slightly less green than mine, which we will put down to my jealous vegatative nature.).

 

The recipes:
http://thekitchensinkrecipes.com/2008/05/08/try-it-youll-like-it/
http://www.dinneralovestory.com/great-grandma-turano%E2%80%99s-meatballs/

Linden's Panang Curry

If you go to www.oed.com - that would be the Oxford English Dictionary's website, for those of you not in the know - and search "potato effect", you will find three entries. The first is spelling-related, pertaining to the 'e' introduced when pluralizing the word. The second has to do with Ireland, and thus is of little interest here, as their cuisine is not predominantly what you would call photogenic. Our family has a historic, if tense, relationship with the third.

When Papa cooks plain baked potatoes, his thoughts go something like this: There are five of us, and these are big baking potatoes, so reckon 3/4 each (maybe a whole one for me), better make four and hope someone isn't hungry. There are usually two left.

When he roasts potatoes, he can cook the same amount and only have one or two little potatoe eighths remaining (the runts of the litter). When he makes french fries - which, I would like to point out, he hasn't done in years, a major failing of his kitchining - he uses the same number and we all complain that he didn't cook enough.

His response is always to retaliate with baked potatoes, and then complain that we aren't eating them. He says, "I don't know how you expect me to estimate how many potatoes people will eat when one night you want more than a whole one each and the next all of you together barely manage one", and feels very righteous about his own consistent intake.

However, this is easily explained by what is commonly known as the potato effect, which refers to the phenomenomenon whereby delicious food is less filling.

I have found that chicken experiences the potato effect when cooked in the form of Panang Curry. I will cook enough raw chicken that I expect enough leftovers for another full meal, and there will be absolutely nothing left, or maybe enough for a small snack the following day. Unlike Papa, however, I am an adapter. I just double my quantities.

Linden's Delicious Vengeful Desserts

Well, I was certainly not happy to hear that the entire family Conspired Against Me regarding the pizza at the beach (except for Papa, who shows his love in other ways).

So I guess it's time to bring out pictures of my delicious cakes. Of all the desserts I make, these are the most requested and most delicious.

The first has its roots in the humble American coffee cake - a confusing name in this country, since all of their cakes tend to have the dryness which distinguishes coffee cakes from other cakes and makes it good for tea time. But this one adds rhubarb, and lots of cinnamon and a hint of ginger, and makes a not too dry, not too dense, not too sweet, but very delicious cake. Topped with big crumbs of cinnamon and brown sugar and butter. Then, while the cake is in the oven, the cakey bit rises up over the crumbs, subsuming them and making a lava-field looking top, which results in what you might think of as Cake Surprise. When you fork off another bite, you don't know whether it will contain a chunk of rhubarb, a buried big crumb, or both!

The second cake is even more delicious, and much richer. It is a torte, made by whipping eggs for half of eternity until they get light and fluffy and ten times their original size, and then browning butter over the stove, for a nice round nutty flavor. Then, to top it off, there's large chunks of chocolate and pears. It is  delicious, and by the time I got my camera, two thirds of it was gone.  Not a great picture, but if you look at the sides you can see chunks of pear and chocolate hiding inside the delicious moist dense cakiness.

 

(Oh, am I making those of you on diets want some? I'm sorry, maybe you should have thought about that before you Conspired.)

And you know what else, because I'm feeling a little vindictive about the Lies, we're not going to stop with cakes. Here are my delicious raspberry-topped lemon muffins, an excellent balance between sweet and lemon, with raspberries perched on top for some extra zing.

Oh and in all of my hard work on my thesis, I almost forgot my double dark chocolate chunk muffins, which are deliciously moist and densely chocolatey, with big chunks of chocolate lurking inside, just waiting to attack you with deliciousness. Some even say they are the best chocolate muffins they have ever had, and I am tempted to agree.

There, I'm feeling a bit better now. Back to work.