Jumbalaya!

Just in case you missed it, Mardi Gras was last week. I didn't celebrate, but I did jump on the Cajun/Creole bandwagon. I've never actually had jumbalaya, so I don't know if I did it right. It seems like an excessive amount of rice. The bread in the picture is from the wheat bread disaster.

Cookies!!

I made them, they are mine. All 5 dozen. 5 dozen. Let that be a lesson to you. Be really careful when you're cooking from a restaurant cookbook. Over at Frog, I'm convinced they make cookies by the gross. I don't actually need 5 dozen cookies. I don't need anywhere near that many. Life is hard.

In all seriousness, this recipe is very odd to make. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, normally with walnuts, but I used peanuts instead. You make a basic cookie batter, and then you add over a cup of oatmeal, 2 cups of chocolate chips, and 1.5 cups of peanuts. At then end of all this, you don't really have cookie batter anymore. You have oatmeal and peanuts and chocolate chips with a batter coating. They just barely hold together. This is a flat, crunchy cookie.

Pad Thai

A few weeks ago, I came across a pad thai tutorial, and I've been patiently waiting for an opportunity to make it ever since. It took me a little while to gather ingredients but last night Chris and I were finally in a position to give it a shot.

Pim, author of this tutorial, has much more experience cooking Thai than I ever will, so it's pointless for me to post a recipe, especially since mine didn't really work. However, I will mention a few things that I thought were missing from her instructions.

On fish sauce: This is easily acquired in your local grocery store. It looks a lot like soy sauce, and I believe that it serves a very similar purpose, which is to add salt to a dish. When you start to prepare the pad thai sauce, you will diligently reach for your fish sauce, intending to measure out the half cup required. If you, like me, have never worked with fish sauce before, you will, upon opening the bottle, be confronted with the foulest, most vile odor of your life. At this point, you should plan on a 5 minute recovery period. Use this time to convince yourself that fish sauce probably doesn't go bad, and therefore this smell is a good thing. This will take a strength of character you've probably never needed before. Fortunately, time is not crucial at this point, so use as much as you need to regain your composure. And you get an extra weapon which I didn't have: the smell will go away once you simmer the sauce. I had to take this on faith, but you all can be guaranteed that as soon as you heat the sauce, the smell will disappear and be replaced by the smell of tamarind, which is far more pleasant.

Rice Sticks: These are the noodles that go into pad thai. I've always seen pad thai made with linguine shaped noodles, aka flat, and judging by her photos, Pim is in favor of this. I could only find very thin, round rice noodles, and I couldn't get these to soften completely. I ended up adding about 1/4c of water into the noodles as soon as they went into the pan, and this did the trick, but I don't know if that would be necessary with the right noodles.

Adding Cold Things to Hot Oil: I don't deep fry, so I've never had the chance to get a handle on using lots of really hot oil. But based on what happened last night and all the deep fried turkey horror stories I read around Thanksgiving, I suspect that it's really important to make sure the chicken is fully thawed and dry before it goes into the wok. Just a theory, really, and if you aren't too attached to your arm hair to begin with, you can probably ignore this.

A Note To The Underprivileged...

When I was growing up, my parents had what I now know to be the rare habit of keeping bread in the oven. There wasn't any real reason for this beyond the fact that we had nowhere else to put it. I didn't usually think much of it, although it did elicit some comment from friends who came over.

It also created a very amusing trial-by-fire situation for our babysitters, whom my mom would inevitably forget to inform of the bread situation. It became a fairly common occurrence for my parents to return home from a night on the town to find the house smelling of burnt plastic and a sheepish babysitter with a small, sad little pile of ziplock bags painstakingly filled with the remains of the bread stash.

Interjection: One of my housemates has confirmed that his family used to do the bread-in-the-oven trick as well. So it wasn't just us.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it taught me a very important lesson, which that you always, always check the oven before you turn it on. Basic kitchen safety 101, in my book.

These memories all came back last week. We are not renewing the lease on our house and our landlord has started setting up showings. In preparation for one of these, I was cleaning up the kitchen and running out of time. I was confronted with a bunch of heavy, dirty dishes under the purview of one of my housemates, as well as the remains of an angel food cake. In a desperate attempt to get out of the house before the landlord showed up, I shoved everything dirty into the oven and left.

I didn't hear about this until this morning, when the guilty party mentioned that he had disposed of the rest of the angel food cake "because it got baked twice." He followed this up with a very proud and self-satisfied, "I don't check the oven before I preheat it." I can only conclude that he was deprived as a child, as his parents must not have booby trapped their kitchen when he was growing up. (This was also the day he left the stove on. Another big no-no. In our house, that would have meant a pile of mail going up in flames.)

If you are the victim of kitchen theatrics neglect, help is available. It may be too late to adopt the trademark cavalier attitude towards alternative storage methods so common among the privileged, but with dedication and practice, you too can learn the art of safely using an oven.

Battle Scars: Sweet Potato Mousse

I have discovered a new kitchen demon. It appeared while I was blithely steaming sweet potatoes, and I call it Scary Black Stuff.

I don't really know what happened. I was steaming sweet potatoes. The pot was probably too small, and at one point I ran out of water and had to add more. At the end, I had a house full of charred smell and Scary Black Stuff all over my steaming basket and the bottom of my steaming pan. And it took steel wool to get it off.

I was trying to combine my pumpkin mousse recipe with a vanilla sweet potato recipe. It shows promise, but the flavor isn't right yet. I cut the sugar in half and it's still the predominant flavor. The sweet potatoes are barely noticeable. When I get something more useful, I'll post a recipe.

Bread.

I have a lot of posts to catch up on, so there will be a bunch in quick succession this weekend.

I've mentioned before that most of the time I prefer home cooking to restaurant food, and this sentiment was strengthened last night when I remembered just how terrible bad take out can be. However, I've generally been content to buy some things premade from the grocery store. I look upon these as staples, and I keep them in my pantry with the flour and the sugar. They include things like pasta sauce and granola bars and until recently, bread.

I've never been much of a bread connoisseur. I tend to buy the artisan stuff from the bakery section, but it's not great bread and I know that and I don't care. It just needs to go with pasta and maybe support some garlic.

Then, last weekend, I really screwed up. I was baking a loaf of bread, and also trying to get ready for a fondue party we were having. I was in the middle of cleaning the house when I started the sponge, so I wasn't paying attention when I used wheat flour instead of bread flour. Then, I didn't pay attention to the timing very well and I ended up spending some of the party kneading bread and bench proofing and baking in an already quite cluttered kitchen, because I was also making 2 types of fondue.

I baked the bread in a pyrex pan. I didn't have anything else. I didn't have a pan of warm water in the oven during the baking, because normally I use my pyrex pan for that, and I needed it to hold the actual loaf of bread.

In the end, the pan wasn't big enough for the bread, and one side was square-ish. This was the least of my concerns when I took the bread out of the oven. I don't know what happened, but my normal baking time was far too long. The bread came out scorched. Almost blackened in some parts. And then it stuck to the pyrex and I ripped off half the bottom trying to get it out. The crust was so dried out that it was almost impossible to cut. It was a total disaster from a baking perspective. But it was still better than all the store-bought stuff.

Basic Wheat Bread (adapted from Alton Brown's Very Basic Bread)

Ingredients
5 oz wheat flour
11 oz bread flour, plus extra for shaping
1 tsp rapid rise yeast
2 tsp honey
10 oz bottled/filtered water
2 tsp kosher salt
hot water for rising
vegetable oil or cooking spray for greasing the rising container
a dusting of cornmeal, for bench proofing
1/3 c water
1 Tbsp cornstarch

For the sponge: Combine wheat flour, 1/4 tsp yeast, all bottled water, and the honey. Cover loosely and refrigerate for 8 to 12 hours. This develops the flavor of the bread.

Mix the sponge, bread flour, remaining yeast, and salt. If you have a stand mixer, knead with the dough hook on low for 2 or 3 minutes until dough comes together. If you're doing this by hand, do it by hand. Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and allow to rest for 20 minutes.

Knead the dough until it can be pulled into a sheet thin enough that light can pass through it. If you're kneading by hand, continue kneading for a few minutes after that. Until it feels good, I guess. The dough will be somewhat sticky.

Put hot water in a shallow pan in the oven. Grease a large container and place the dough inside. Allow to rise in the oven until doubled in size. This will happen after 1 or 2 hours.

Punch down the dough twice, cover with a kitchen towel, and allow to rest for 10 minutes.

Shape the dough into a ball and turn over. Squeeze the bottom of the dough ball so that the surface is smooth. Roll the dough between your hands to shape. Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal and place the dough ball on top. Cover and bench proof for 1 hour.

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Combine cornstarch and 1/3 c water and lightly brush the top of the dough ball. Slash the top of the dough in a few places, 1/3 to 1/2 inch deep. Add more water to the shallow pan in the oven if needed. It will stay in the oven during the cooking process. Cook for 50 to 60 minutes. Allow to sit 30 minutes before slicing.

At this point, a bit of background is probably necessary. Why the cooking, why this blog, etc.

The cooking first. I had 2 studio classes that required semester long projects. I was brainstorming ideas, and none of them were really very interesting to me. They all sounded like things that would get boring at about week 3. Cooking sounded a lot more fun. And it sounded like a way to ensure that I got a halfway decent dinner every night. Really, I just wanted to see what would happen if I cooked that much. There were some vague thoughts of the big picture: the obesity epidemic, and the foodie craze going on right now. But this project isn't about that.

The blog is my way of documenting my process. I use it for convenience more than anything else.

I've only been at this about a week and a half, but already, I've got thoughts on the matter of cooking. First of all, cooking shows lie. A lot. They perpetuate the myth that by watching a cooking show, someone who has never touched a stove in their life could have a full home cooked dinner on the table in half an hour. This is not true. It's certainly possible to cook a good meal in 30 minutes, but not if you don't know what you're doing. It takes practice, just like anything else.

My attitude toward cooking dinner has changed. I used to have a system that involved making one large meal at the beginning of the week and eating leftovers until I went shopping again. It's not that I didn't have time to cook dinner, but I wasn't motivated to do so. Simmering a soup for 30 minutes was too much. Now, I have no problems taking a little extra time to make dinner interesting. I don't eat the same food for 3 nights in a row. Now, ironically, I could easily get a meal on the table in 30 minutes. But I don't really care to. I don't need to.

Truffle Update

I forgot to add that the extra 4 oz of chocolate made everything better. I confronted the ganache while the soup was simmering. This time it was plenty stiff enough to scoop. So stiff that it bent the melon baller and didn't want to ball.

I scooped out ball sized chunks, coated them with cocoa powder, and shaped them with my hands. They turned out fine.

Ingredients
15 oz dark chocolate
6 oz heavy cream
3 tbsp caramel syrup (Joy of Cooking)
1/4c very very strong coffee
cocoa powder, for coating

Finely chop the chocolate and put in a heat resistant mixing bowl. Add the coffee and caramel. Over low heat, bring the heavy cream to a simmer and pour over the chocolate. Stir until chocolate is fully melted. Refrigerate until firm.

Scoop 2 tsp of ganache and coat with cocoa. Roll between hands to shape into a ball. The cocoa should keep the chocolate from melting to your hands. Store at cool room temperature in an airtight container.

Soup!

I don't have a photo for this one, which is a shame because it was amazing. But even if I did, you wouldn't be able to smell it so it's a moot point.

Until now, I've always done grocery shopping in a very planned and methodical way. I'd figure out what I wanted to eat for the week, and then I'd buy exactly those components I needed. Generally, I didn't have anything left over, which was ok because chances were it wouldn't get used.

This philosophy does not work with potatoes. They come in 5 lb bags, and who in their right mind is going to use 5 pounds of potatoes in one meal? Or even in a week? That's a lot of potatoes.

I had a few left over and it was cold last night, and I wanted soup. I really love potato soup. It's one of my favorite soups, but I've never made it. I started looking up recipes, and mostly I found potato leek soup. I'm sure it's incredible, but I didn't have any leeks. I had scallions though. And cheese. And garlic.

Ingredients
2-3 potatoes thinly sliced (not baking potatoes and not new potatoes. The ones that fall in the middle of those)
6 cloves of garlic, chopped
3 tbsp butter
2 scallions, chopped
1/2 - 3/4c shredded cheddar cheese
salt to taste
ground pepper to taste
2/3c heavy cream, half and half, or something lighter (I used heavy cream because I had some lying around)
3c of some combination of water and low sodium chicken broth. I used 2 1/3 c water, and 2/3c chicken broth. More broth means less salt later, so adjust accordingly.

Over very low heat, melt the butter and saute the garlic until it just starts to brown. Add the chicken broth, water, and potatoes. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer until tender. Joy of Cooking says this should be about 30 minutes, but mine were ready to go after 15.

Puree the soup in a blender. Do not over blend, or you will have glue. If you want a chunkier soup, you could probably hand mash the potatoes here. Return soup to a low heat. Add scallions, cheese, and cream. Stir until the cheese is melted. Add salt and pepper. Serve hot.

Advanced: Fry up some bacon and garnish with bacon chunks.

Fighting the Good Fight

I came across a very detailed truffle recipe late last week. It seemed easy enough, and I was somewhat curious, so I added it to the ToDo list. Then, over the weekend, I was cleaning out our pantry and I found a graveyard of chocolate nubbins.

My grocery store carries quite a few lines of gourmet chocolate, and I make a habit of buying a different bar every few weeks for research purposes. They get thrown in my pantry and sampled randomly, usually while I'm doing homework. And apparently, they get eventually forgotten, until I'm rooting through the cabinets looking for pizza sauce and I end up sitting in a pile of half eaten chocolate bars.

The most embarrassing part of all this is that during my most recent foraging expedition, I came across not just bar remnants, but a brick of Ghiradelli dark(?) that my mom had given me a good long while ago. Ghiradelli wins taste tests against Scharffenberger & co. hands down, and I decided that something must be done.

I spent Monday morning making a bread sponge and melting chocolate. The truffle recipe calls for a ratio of 2:1 chocolate to liquid, and that's about where I started. 11oz chocolate and 5 or 6 oz of heavy cream. But as I was digging through the fridge for the cream, I found some caramel syrup I'd made a week previously as a mousse topping. And then there was about a 1/4c of coffee left over from breakfast. I thought caramel mocha truffles sounded really good.

No matter how much coffee or caramel I added, I couldn't get the flavor of either to cut through the chocolate. I used the 1/4c of coffee, and when that wasn't enough, I mixed up a few tablespoons of really strong instant and threw it in. And then that didn't help.

By this point, I'd given up on the flavor elements, because the chocolate by itself was pretty incredible. I put the ganache in the fridge to set up so that I could shape truffles later. But it didn't want to set. It thickened, but it never got hard enough to scoop. I figured I needed to add more chocolate to balance out the additional liquid, but I didn't have any more chocolate to use.

Monday night, however, I was rooting around in another cupboard for chicken broth (the pot sticker event) and I found 3 unopened boxes of unsweetened baker's chocolate.

These weren't my fault. I don't know where they came from, though my guess is they belonged to a former housemate. But they looked like good truffle material.

This morning, I woke up to a lot of snow and ice and decided that making truffles was a better plan than trying to walk to school, so I melted the chocolate with some sugar, mixed it into the ganache and threw it in the fridge. And now, I'm waiting to see if it will work. I added 4 oz of pure chocolate to the ganache. It occurs to me now that that might not have been enough. We'll see.

I win!

Finally, something worked! Two things, actually. We had pot stickers and bread last night. And now we have lots of snow.

Bring it on, Phil

So much for the prognostication abilities of rodents. We're going to get something 6 to 10 inches of snow over the next few days. And it wasn't supposed to start for another 6 hours, but I'm looking out the window and I see flakes.

Hearkening back to a long standing family tradition, the bread dough is rising in the oven.

Don't Try This At Home

This post, and the previous entry about my failed potato spoon bread, have been something of a departure from the traditional food blog format. For some reason, people feel that anything less than perfect isn't worth blogging about. They don't make mention of their mistakes or of how many times they had to make the same recipe before they got it right. And I get it. No one really wants to cook a recipe that almost works. What's the point, when generally, much better, more reliable versions are available at blog down the street?

But it's false advertising. Cooking takes work, and blogging takes work, and if I have to cook everything 3 or 4 times before I get a blog entry out of it, I'm going to waste a lot of time, money, and food. I'll revisit recipes that didn't work the first time, but I'm not going to spend the weekend making 5 loaves of bread so that on Monday morning, I can claim perfection. For now, "almost" is just fine with me.

This almost worked. It was a great plan in theory. Make a savory pate a choux, fill with sandwich stuff, and have cute little tea sandwiches for dinner. "Almost" covers a lot of ground. I almost got the pate a choux right. But then they didn't puff in the oven, and they didn't have the big pocket in the center that characterizes a good pate a choux. I almost came up with a great marinated beef sandwich filling. Then I grilled it a bit too long and it dried out. I almost had some amazing grilled marinated veggies to go along with the beef, but I ran out of room on the grill, threw them in a pan on the stove, and watched them drown in their own moisture as they steamed to death, instead of picking up the proper char I was looking for. I almost had a really great sandwich concept, but the pate a choux dough, which I've never had before, has some serious egg overtones that I hadn't counted on.

But the principle is sound.

On the off chance that you've neglected your pastry studies, pate a choux is a very strange pastry dough that starts out by being boiled, and turns into cream puffs, eclairs, and theoretically some savory dishes of which I've only heard rumors (I've heard rumors that savory dishes with pate a choux exist. I have no idea what they actually might be.). This dough is characterized by its texture: instead of having small bubbles dispersed throughout, it ends up with one big center bubble, which is usually filled with stuff of your choice. It also has no yeast or baking soda. The size increase is due solely to the expansion of water vapor that occurs during cooking.

I wanted to try pate a choux because it's the only pastry I've ever heard of that is piped through an icing bag. I did my research here, at the repository of "Good Eats" transcripts, where there is a whole show devoted to pate a choux. I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter, except I mixed by hand instead of with a stand mixer. Also, the recipe doesn't mention it, but when you're piping out the dough, I think you're supposed to use the circular non-froufrou tip that you might or might not own. And failing that, I believe the next best thing is piping without a tip entirely and not using the widest florette tip you have. The florette tip doesn't allow enough dough throughput. I theorize that the ratio of dough volume to cookie sheet surface area is important. My cream puffs, which were taller than my eclairs, seemed to turn out really well, where as the eclair shells remained mostly flat.

I'm not really going to talk about the filling much, because I know where that all went wrong. No big mystery there. Moving on.

Like I said, this recipe almost works, from a perfectionist food blog perspective. In practice, it was a really good dinner. Also, in practice, the pate a choux tastes a lot better as a pumpkin mousse-filled cream puff.

Grilled Beef and Vegetable Pate a Choux Pockets

Ingredients:
4 savory pate a choux shells, recipe here
1/2 zucchini, cut into 1/2 inch strips
1/2 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1/2 green bell pepper, cut into strips
1 lb beef steak, for braising, cut into strips
--
Marinade: makes 3 cups
1 1/2 c. vegetable oil
1/2 c. soy sauce
1/4 c. Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp. dry mustard
1/2 c. red wine vinegar
1/3 c. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp. freshly ground pepper

Combine all marinade ingredients, and blend or whisk vigorously until thoroughly incorporated. Divide the marinade in half. Marinate beef strips as long as you can, in half the marinade. Ideally, 4 hours is a good number. In practice, if you can only do 30 minutes, it will still work out. Just baste the beef with extra marinade during cooking. About 30 minutes before cooking, drop the veggies in the other half of the marinade.

If you've got a grill, now would be a good time to pull it out. I use a counter top model with no temperature settings, so I can't give cooking instructions. If you're in the same boat, cook the beef and veggies for about 5 minutes. You might go a bit longer with the beef if you want well done. Or, sear the vegetables on the stove over high heat until they char a bit.

If you are actually looking for practical sandwich advice, cut the pate a choux shells lengthwise like a hoagie roll. If you want cute tea sandwiches, cut them widthwise. Fill with beef and vegetables. Serve hot.

Moving On...

To kick things off, I thought I'd start with a recipe specifically for getting rid of mashed potatoes. It's called Cheesy Potato Spoon Bread and it sounded good. And then it came out of the oven and it looked really good. It smelled amazing. This feeling of excitement was further bolstered by my discovery of non-fat cream cheese. I was only slightly anxious about a little part of the recipe -- a niggling little detail, really -- which left the vast majority of cheese completely unaccounted for. I didn't know where it was supposed to go. So I guessed.


See all that gloppy white stuff? It's cream cheese. Solid cream cheese goo. This stuff sits like mud on a plate and a brick in your stomach. My housemates assure me that it tastes wonderful, but I think improvements could be made. Or maybe I just don't appreciate spoon bread.

New Home

Here it is. My new home for the next couple months. I gave in to my inner foodie and now I'm doing semester long cooking projects for two of my art classes. This means approximately 20 hours of cooking and blogging every week.

Stay tuned.