Linden's Wintery Chocolate Hazelnut Bites

So a month ago, before that whole "holidays" thing came and swallowed three weeks of my life (in a good way, but now I am reaping the consequences and leaving for work in a little while (on a Saturday)) I made cookies. This is in part because I have some ingredients obtained last year that I never used up, and given my impending complete lack of life stability caused by the end of internship and absence of boyfriend and absence of future job and absence of tough-cookieness, I am trying to use some things up for when I have to relocate all of my belongings once again.

So, cookies! Now, most cookies don't really involve rare and unusual ingredients, but these do! They call for three bars of dark chocolate, ground hazelnuts, and rum. Which, you know, on its own should make you think they're delicious. But then, they require you to roll them in powdered sugar. And then, once they're cooked, to do it again. They are small, so you don't even have to feel guilty about eating more than one.

And, they are super delicious! Fortunately, the recipe made heaps. Maybe around 50?

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...

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...what we found was...

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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.