Individual Sticky Toffee Pudding Cakes (776)

This was a really fun, weird recipe, and I'd like to do it again.  You make the cakes in the food processor, mostly.  There is a surprising amount of dates in them--some ground for flavor and some sliced and rehydrated for texture.  You steam/bake the cakes in the oven under a tightly wrapped tinfoil cover.  Then you take them out, let them cool.  Meanwhile, you prepare the caramel, then poke 25 holes in the top of each cake with a toothpick.  Pour the caramel sauce.  Let it soak in.  Flip and dump the cakes into a plate and pour MORE caramel over the top.  Obviously, it's not a healthy choice, but it was lovely and moist and (as the name suggests) very sticky.

Blueberry Scones (pg 520)

Lessons learned from the blueberry scones recipe:
1. When in doubt, use the food processor.
2. When dealing with pastry, the freezer can be the most important tool in your kitchen.
3. Try rolling and folding, rather than molding pastry doughs.  It creates fluffy layers that make nice visible swirls (see above).  But, more importantly, the layers puff and separate in baking.
4. Scones freeze well.

Baked Manicotti (pg 152)

Valuable lesson learned from this recipe: pasta is pasta.  Shape is fun, but not necessarily important.  Rather than killing myself stuffing manicotti shells without tearing them, the recipe just had me do roll-ups with lasagna noodles.  It worked fine. 

I did everything pretty much right for this one, but I didn't end up liking it very much.  It was so heavy that I ended up with an instant guilt trip whenever I ate it.  Having it sit in my fridge for a week, making me feel depressed whenever I ate it made me reconsider the plan a bit.  Either I need to make dramatically reduced portions of the heavier foods or I need to skip them altogether.  It turned out okay, I guess, but the cheese+starch, barely adulterated with tomato sauce (which was good, by the way) made me think that this is not a dish for people who aren't spending the day tending goats and eating grapes, or whatever it is they do in Tuscany.

Why this isn't working

Realization:  I wouldn't read this.  It's just ruminations about recipes I can't share because they're copyrighted.  So instead of giving details and making it vaguely instructive, I'm just going to put up a picture of the finished product and my notes.  That will make it a lot easier, and make it more likely that I'll continue doing it.

Paella: Page 385

Last weekend, I cooked up a storm, with generally pretty good results.  On Friday night, I took it easy, but Saturday I made my first real paella.  Well, it was real by my standards, but according to the rules, it isn't real until you use a paella pan.  I didn't know how it was going to turn out, so I broke in my All-Clad 5-quart stainless sauté pan, instead. 


I think Ryan would have liked it, if only because it has four meats: chicken thighs, shrimp, mussels, and chorizo.  I like it because it cooks up well in just one pan, though it did take some labor. 

Paella is a little picky when it comes to ingredients.  It's important to have Arborio or similar rice, rather than white or brown, because it puffs up and softens--more like pasta.  I went with a Spanish-style chorizo as recommended.  It had great paprika flavor, but it didn't soften well, so I might go with another sausage next time.  I included mussels, but couldn't find raw for a reasonable price, so I picked up some cooked ones on the half shell from the freezer section at the commissary.  I meant to get raw shrimp, but accidentally picked up cooked, so I shortened the bake time at the end of the process.  Still, the seafood part of the dish was a little rubbery.  I am tempted to think that I hate mussels, but I can't be sure until I cook them the way I'm directed, instead of winging it the way I have in the past.  Still, I might leave them out of the next dish.  They cost too much for something I don't particularly enjoy.

I've noticed that most recipes in this book use at least one little twist of cooking technique.  For this one, it was moving the paella from the stove top to the oven to cook the rice.  It's more typical to complete the process completely on the stove.  Because I cooked it in the oven, the crispy bottom rice, called "socarrat" (some people's favorite part of paella) was missing.  To replace this missing element, I turned an eye of the stove on medium high, and gave it 1/4 turn every several minutes to brown the bottom.  It wasn't perfect, but it was okay.

The finished product (complete with iPhone blur)

Knitting to True Crime

So what have I been doing with all this free time, really?  Most of it has been spent sitting on the loveseat with Winston, knitting and watching endless episodes of true crime programming on Netflix.  It's starting to feel like a true addiction because I feel drawn to it, even though I know it's wrong.  Right now I'm into "Lt. Joe Kenda: HOMICIDE HUNTER."  I've sucked down 4 episodes already today.  Here's some stuff I've made while my brain has been rotting:

 

Selfish project alert:  I got halfway through this pattern called Sherlocked, but when it said to change from the honeycomb to the cable pattern, it looked bad, so I picked out all the cabling and just finished it in the same stitch, but with a color change midway through.  It took four skeins, which took forever, but I think it looks nice.

 

After that, I took on a new knitting challenge: colorwork.  The only colorwork I had done before this was stripes (which are stupid easy).  This time, I took on a technique called intarsia, which allowed me to make pictures in my knitting.  Even though it was more difficult than some other projects, I went with a dog sweater, because I figured that Winston wouldn't give a damn if it turned out terrible. 

 

You can't see the pattern of the dog sweater very well in this picture, but it has 2 rows of hearts and bones--one across the shoulder and one across the rump.  As I'm sure you can tell by Winston's face, he loves it.

Bits and Pieces

I may not have been on the blogging wagon, lately, but I have done some cooking.  This is a collection of things that don't necessarily deserve a whole post, but that I happened to photograph and thought I should throw in.

I keep trying to make soups in the Vitamix with limited success.  This was an especially gagworthy cabbage one.  I talked about it with Kathy, a coworker, and we both think that Vitamix soup recipes usually have far too much onion, and heating it in the blender container doesn't temper the raw oniony flavor.  Another failed recipe was a carroty ginger one that used milk as a fluid base.  Problem: milk foams when blended.  The milk turned to bubbles.  Eating bubbles isn't much fun.

 

But my Vitamix attempts aren't all bad.  I've been doing smoothies as simple, high-fiber dinners.  It takes about 10 minutes to put one together, and it always makes me feel full.

While Mom was visiting, I got some peaches from a friend, Kristen.  They were getting too ripe, so we cut them up, sprinkled them with Splenda, and made an impromptu crumble with oatmeal/brown sugar topping.  I got to make it in my vintage cast iron 8" Le Creuset gratin dish.

I had a 50% coupon on my first Taste Trunk subscription box.  I have a subscription box fetish, and love getting surprises each month, but it can get pricey for things you know you don't actually need.  The coupon brought the price down to around $20 for 5-8 gourmet food products, which I could justify.

It was pretty cool.  The box was beautifully wrapped, and each of the ingredients came with a recipe--almost like a challenge.  This is the result of one of the recipes.  It's a southwest pizza with chipotle dip as a sauce.  The crust made of refrigerated crescent rolls, patted out into a sheet.  It was super easy and pretty darn good.  This is only a half batch, so half #2 is coming, and I look forward to it.

Sniff Your Ingredients: The Case of the Ruined Curry

Flashback: I tried to impress my mom by making this elaborate vegetable curry from the project.  It took me about an hour of constant work, mostly because I had to carefully brown the potatoes, which I find pretty darn difficult.  (I wrote about why, but that entry got deleted, and I don't feel like writing it again). 

Probably the most interesting touch from the recipe was that I toasted the spices.  It dramatically enhanced the smell and, I imagine, the flavor (foreshadowing). 

Mom has commented that it smells great and comes in to get a closer sniff as I add the finishing touch: a quarter cup of coconut milk that I had saved in the fridge from a previous recipe.  I dump it in, then stir.  A second or two later, the pleasant, spicy aroma in the kitchen has shifted.  It smells like...Dawn dish detergent?  Mom said it smelled like a camper does when it's been shut up for winter.  A belated sniff at the coconut milk container in the sink reveals the culprit.  It smelled nothing like spoiled dairy, but it definitely didn't smell good.  Briefly, I thought about choking it down, but my mom's sad expression changed my mind.  A good 3-4 quarts of curry blub-blubbed down the garbage disposal, and we ate leftovers.

After Mom returned to Georgia, I took another crack at the curry, knowing that I wanted to do it for this project.  It turned out okay, but I'm convinced that it would have been better if I hadn't ruined it the first time around.

Fermentation: The Trials and Tribulations

A few months ago, I got really into the concept of fermented food.  I even read The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.  

Lots of cultures prize ferments for their flavor and health value.  It's kefir in the Caucauses.  It's Kimchi in Korea.  It's yogurt in Greece.  

It's a pretty easy process, and it's great for gut health.  In a healthy human body, bacteria outnumber DNA-carrying cells 10 to 1, and they're genuinely needed for healthy digestive function.  There are suggestions that getting more live cultures from fermented foods can help with IBS, lactose and gluten intolerance, and yeast infections.  I bought kefir grains online, but that's another story.

The day before Ryan left, to keep myself busy, I put together 5 different ferments in Fido jars: spicy pickled green beans, saeurkraut, Asian slaw, pickled limes, and beet kvass. 

The green beans were terrible.  They had the texture of raw beans and were much too spicy.  I threw those out.  Kvass is this weird, Eastern European beet drink.  It's mashed beets, oranges, spices, water, and salt.  After 3-4 weeks, I strained it, and the resulting red liquid is kvass.  This is what the rest looked like:

The salt ended up being the problem.  It was pretty terrible, but I choked it down for the sake of health.  It was a little bit sweet, but mostly salty.  Katz said that the taste grows on you, but I don't particularly want to let it.  However, the recipe makes two batches.  You just add water and let it ferment again.  We shall see if the taste has grown on me by the time the next batch matures.

  

Almond Biscotti

The cooking project was stalled for a while when my Mom visited for 2.5 weeks in July, and fell into a state of malaise throughout most of August.  I've cooked, but not in a concentrated, purposeful way.  This week was the nadir of my food consumption.  I've been scrounging for crumbs and falling back on smoothies of questionable flavor.  If I don't go to the grocery store today or tomorrow, I will be reduced to eating cabbage and naked pasta. 

This is my mom standing in front of a moose at the Anchorage Zoo, by the way.


I made a couple of things during the long, silent stretch, though.  First was Almond Biscotti (Cookies Chapter, page 604), intended to impress my mother.  I wouldn't call her reaction impressed, exactly, but she did think they were good, and they did get eaten.  I even took a few over to Ryan's new commanding officer, who lives a few doors down on our street.

But the Biscotti.  First note: purposeful cooking means purposeful grocery.  The Commissary is, without a doubt, the most cost-effective grocery option.  Unfortunately, it's also a good 20 minutes out of my way and often crowded with harried parents, screaming children, and indecisive retirees.  It's one of few places (along with the base hospital) that makes me conscious of my own rising blood pressure.  So in order to cook purposefully, rather than just throwing together odds and ends, I have to make my list and gird my loins for grocery battle.  This is what a triumphant cart looks like.


Probably my favorite thing about this recipe is that it come together in the food processor.  Mine is a 12-Cup Cuisinart Elite model that I bought for myself right before Christmas Ryan bought for me for Christmas last year.  I actually got it because I like the Cooks' Illustrated recipes, which work under the assumption that you own a food processor.  I don't use it every day, but for big jobs, it does most of the things I hate to do by hand: grating, chopping, slicing, and blending.  With the mean machine, the biscotti dough came together in about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, after it had come together, I realized that I had pushed aside chopped almonds that were meant to be worked into the dough.  Evidently, I need to pay a little more attention to the pictures. By that point, what was a girl to do?  Things would just have to be a little less almondy.

The recipe calls the output a "batter," but I think that "dough" is more accurate.  I had to take these buttery clumps and squeeze them into a ball.  Then, I split the balls in half and patted them into loaves on a waxed paper-lined cookie sheet.

 I thought it was interesting how Cooks' Illustrated corrected one of the problems with biscotti.  Because of uneven "loaf" size, the cookies would cook unevenly, resulting in varying levels of crunchiness.  To correct this, the recipe had me use a ruler to draw 8" by 3" on the waxed paper, then pat loaves flat to fit inside of the rectangle.  That     way, they're evenly sized and will come out more uniform.  Ingenious!

 

You spray the loaves with PAM, brush with egg wash, then bake until they're golden.  Then you set the loaves aside and let them cool completely.

Here comes the part that sets biscotti apart from other cookies and makes them dunkable.  You use a long, serrated knife to slice the loaves at a slight bias, then you bake the slices again, flipping them midway through baking.

Confession: I screwed up twice during this recipe--first by leaving out some of the almonds, and second during the baking of the slices.  Cook's Illustrated is careful to say that the slices should be baked atop a wire rack to create even air circulation and help with browning.  My only wire rack is so large that I can't fit it in the oven (see above).  Rather than halting the process for sake of perfectionism, I did without the rack.  The cookies might not have been perfect, but they were good enough for me.

Almond Biscotti, Page 606: Accomplished.

America's Test Kitchen Cooking School

One of my goals for the time Ryan is deployed is to become a better cook.  I want to do it by working through America's Test Kitchen's Cooking School cookbook.

Post #1

Let's see if this one sticks.

I've probably attempted four or five blogs now.  I think that honestly, the likelihood of hitting it big blogging is a thing of the early 2000s, but I do like the idea of a semi-secret online diary.  So here goes.  Number five...or six.

Day 3 of Husband's deployment.  So far, I'm sticking to my goals.  I made a nice little list of things to work on while he's gone.  I want to:

Use Myfitnesspal every day.

Eat healthy, planned meals.

Get 30 minutes of exercise a day.

Walk Winston every day.

Build a kitchen island.

Finish knitting my cowl.

Make a quilt top.

Complete one sewn garment.

Read a book a month.

Outline a novel.

Work my way through the Cooks Illustrated Cooking School Cookbook.