Linden's steak and rolls and, and as they say in England, veg, and chocolate!

When I'm at school, I rarely have red meat. (Although in fairness, I did have both chili and tacos last week...) But mostly, my diet consists of chicken, sometimes fish, the occassional pork chop, and wegetables (and sometimes shocking things like lentils, which I acquired a taste for during my days of darkness, when I acquired a taste for almost everything I was allowed to eat.) . And then I wake up one morning and think, enough of this stuff, I want some red meat. Red meat! And then about a week later I actually get around to cooking some.

And sometimes, I miss all the delicious home dinners, so I try and steal one. Here, is steak, caramelized onions, mushrooms, and my own addition of zucchini, and homemade dinner rolls. Here, you see Steak! In the poorly-lit constraints of student living.

 Steak! In the glaring flash-lit overcompensations needed in studetn living..

And then, I made a chocolate volcano for dessert. (So called, by me , because as soon as you dip a spoon into the middle to serve a piece, all this chocolate sauce bubbles up from below.) It's like brownies with their own warm chocolate sauce. Served best with ice cream, although I was ice creamless and thus compensated with strawberries.

Linden's Dessert Dump

I have been very quite the last month, and I will continue to be quite, for I am revising! Which is the English word for studying. But I thought I would regale you with some of my past desserts. We have:

Strawberry-rhubarb muffins

oddly-rotated earl gray tea cookies

Banana bread cobbler with pecan crumble and rum.

I have also been making delicious meals, but they are going to have to wait until all this revising calms down.

Linden's First Pizza

I think pizza is one of the more delicious foods in the world. And since I don't really go out much, I decided to learn to do it myself. (This also may have to do with the fact that Epicurious did a pizza roundup a few weeks ago, and I have been craving it for a while but am currently super resistant to eating out.) But, there is this idea in my head that pizza is very difficult and time-consuming to make, possibly because I have a vague memory of Mama making it once or twice and then saying, "never again!" or at least never repeating the experiment. So I didn't want to do it in the middle of hardworking.

Fortunately, I took a week off (during which I went to Newbury, London, Lyme Regis and Brighton) but I was home for two days in the middle, so I spent a day reading up on my pizza techniques and making one. It was very easy! Slightly time-consuming - the dough needs two hours to rise, so planning must be planned - and other than the initial ten minutes of dough-mixing, it's about an hour's work and ten minutes cooking in the oven. (So, more time-consuming than my normal 30-minute dinners, but not as bad as I was expecting.)

I went traditional, with tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil, and a little bit of parmesan flaked on top.

And then, I cooked it! It was super good. The next day, I made garlic knots with the leftover dough, but alas forgot to take pictures.

I made another round of pizzas while the parents were staying in my room, and they said they were delicious and that I have now beaten Xan, no matter what he cooks.

Linden's Vegetable Lunch

So I'm slowly eating my way through all the vegetables that need consuming, but they're not nearly finished yet! My shelf in the fridge is extremely green. This also means I'm trying out new recipes for green things, which is always good. Yesterday for lunch, I finally finished off the quiche (today, I am going to kill two birds with one lunch and use the remainders of the quiche crust and zucchini to make a small galette), with a salad of roast asparagus, green beans, and homemade croutons.

So this is my lazy cheater's version of fake Panzanella (I think the only thing it has in common with traditional panzanella is the bread, honestly). I think there was supposed to be some parmesan sprinkled on top, but I figured there was enough cheese in the quiche and I didn't need to dehealthify the salad even more than it already was. I believe this salad is supposed to have peas in it, but I don't like having peas in this sort of thing because they are impossible to eat. You end up spending twenty minutes chasing peas around with your spoon, or if you're using fork they might get accidentally catapulted across the table. It just makes for an overall stressful munching experience. So, no peas! It's also supposed to be made with whole wheat bread, but that is not what I had. I had semi-stale sourdough (which is, you know, more delicious anyways.) But the salad on the whole is a good way to mix it up when you're just eating vegetamables.

Also, for dinner, I was ovening a sweet potato, and I added some brown sugar. (Well, demerara sugar, actually. One time, I sent two non-bakers to the store on a quest for brown sugar, and they came back with demerara. I have had a devil of a time using it up, until I realized it went well with sweet potatoes, and serves as a passable substitute for palm sugar.) The result was slightly caramelized sweet potatoes which was a delicious variation on the regular kind.

Linden's Coconut Bread

So months and months ago, I bought some coconut thinking, "I love coconut! Coconut is wonderful! This will get used up in a jiffy." And it has spent months and months in my cabinet (under the sink. for this is the only cabinet I have in my room, and thus many of my bits and bats get put here.  Why yes, this does include my socks and underwear.

I also have a box, entitled the Box of Shame, wherein get put all of the things I have discovered I cannot eat, like chocolate and biscuits and flavored teas and things of this nature. It lurks under my desk.)

However! The things in the Box of Shame shouldn't really be used up by me, but the things in my sink cupboard should. And this week, I thought to myself, it is time to use up this coconut! It has been here for months, and It Must Go.

So in my recipe dredging this week, I kept my eye out for coconut recipes. This one looked quick and easy, which is what I go for during the week, and thus it got done.

Sadly, because I was in a bit of a rush, and have become lackadaisical in baking, I added 1/4 cup too much milk, and didn't realize until I'd mixed everything together and it was a very watery batter. "Self," I thought to myself, "Something is not right!" (Fortunately, I didn't turn into a French nun.) So I added some more flour to balance it back out, but alas this meant my batter got overmixed and proportions weren't quite right, but it turned out okay anyways, as these things so often do.

Now I currently have a problem when I bake, because all my friends have left and there are fewer people to inflict things on. So sometimes, I wander the halls with baked goods in hand, hoping to find some unsuspecting acquaintance to force cookies and breads onto. Last night I got lucky, for my friend Nicole had lured Griff, who hails from my hometown, to the Annexe for dinner and I came upon them in the hallway! And gave them some bread. Which was a relief because their powers combined with my flatmates got it down to a manageable amount.

And now, I am going to clean my desk and get started on work for the day! For I am virtuous like that.

Linden: Zucchini Carrot Bread

Before explaining my cookings, I would like to say that I have pulled even with Xan in the number of times our name tags have been used. Now looking through, I realized that he used mine once or twice when he wanted to show me my bespectacled turkey, I thought I had better return the favor before pulling ahead with the dinner I made. Now I have been wanting to make zucchini bread, for I was curious how it would taste. And, because I wanted to shred a zucchini. It is fun! Much more fun than shredding carrots, for zucchini is soft and shreds with less pressure. However, a little less than one smallish zucchini makes 1.5 cups shredded.



It turned out well! In the bread arena, I have finally managed to cook something almost at the proper heat for the proper length of time. (Although this one took forever, more than an hour. It did smell very good cooking, though!) I cut the initial recipe's sugar in half, and I think I might use slightly less oil next time. Additionally, it was missing something, perhaps cloves or nutmeg. But overall, very tasty!

Also, and this is the best part, the bread looks very nice because of the orange and green flakes in it. Much better than the strange purpley stuff you get in banana bread. (Additionally good is the English equivalent of the name, which goes: Carrot and Courgette Bread. Rolls right off the tongue.)

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.

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.

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.

Blast off!

 At long last, a place to display our Vongsafood.

Happy eating,
Xan