Time Warp

The last month and change has been a busy one for me.  I got to take a trip out to the West Coast, my job has picked up in pace, and I started interning at a bakery two mornings a week.  Every Tuesday now I get up between 3-3:30am and I pack my stuff for the day and help an awesome woman make batters and cakes and frostings, croissants, etc.  I love it.  Once 8am rolls around I take off my apron and head to my day job with a quite satisfied feeling.  I go into the bakery on Saturday mornings as well.  The way I see it is that I like baking and cooking enough that I want to incorporate it substantially into my daily life, and if I can learn techniques and skills I wouldn't normally have access to, without a culinary study program, in a great environment with beliefs I share, then I am over the moon.

This seems unnecessary to point out, but because of all this, I am Le Tired most of the time.  I look forward to Thursday nights when I go to a friend's house to chill and have an 'Office Party' to watch The Office and 30 Rock and get  a little stupid and relax with friends.  Every other night during the week I am either going to sleep early or at the gym or trying to find a month's worth of laundry that has piled up.  I know the situation has become dire when I start forgoing underwear with certain outfits.

Anyway, so baking at home has become 'strategic' in nature.  If I can whip up a frosting while I'm making dinner I will.  If I can find 15 minutes to get  cake batter ready and pop it in the oven, I had have the next 45min to get something else done, and so on.  I baked a green tea cake for my friend's birthday strategically over 2 days, cut it in half and frosted it two different ways; One half had royal icing with marzipan shapes I rolled and cut out and colored and the other half had cream cheese frosting topped with toasted coconut.  I had just enough time to jump on a bus and deliver them to the Beat Kitchen where she was celebrating that night.

On the whole, life is really Super Good right now.  I am doing and learning awesome things right now, I'm experimenting and writing and doing a ton of stuff I've said I've wanted to so for years.  The ball is rolling.  The next major hurdle on my list is surf camp, but that's harder to carve time away from baking for.

Bacon for your Thoughts

I've been trying to backtrack on all the significant items I've made in the last few weeks and I've happily realized that I've kept a pretty decent pace of baking given my current schedule. The weekend after Vals I went up to my family's house in the suburbs. Sometimes it's nice to get away from the city, be on 'suburb time' as my friends and I call it (when everything is closed by 8pm and you are wrecked, tired, and ready for bed by 10pm...even though it feels like 3 in the morning) and revel in the perks of home. Even better was that my parents were on vacation so we had the house to ourselves.

Knowing that there would be a treasure trove of ingredients for me to sift through and work with, I planned on baking something while I was home. I ended up making two types of brownies, one the basic 'so-good-I'll-hit-you-in-the-head-with-a-hammer-to-get-the-last-one' type, and the other a more exploratory wander into the realm of unusual; peanut butter-bacon brownies. I tried several of the pbb variety to really get a handle on the flavor. I fried the bacon until it was quite crispy, but still the experience of encountering something salty, smoky, and chewy in a brownie can throw you for a loop. I liked it. I think the saltiness balanced out the uber-chocolateness of the brownies.  

Bacon has had quite a resurgence in popularity in 2008 and I can only see it continuing as we grow deeper into 2009.  Chocolate with bacon, bread with bacon, peanut butter with bacon, the list goes on.  I'd like to think my approach is novel - as does everyone, I'm sure - but my grandfather, 'Grampie,' who lived with my family and my grandmother until they both passed when I was in junior high and high school, had a consistent regimen of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches (on buttered white bread, no less) at least once a week.  At the time I thought it was a disgusting combination, but now I see that he and my grandmother were on to something.  Perhaps it was the influence of the depression era that flavored the foods they learned to love; making the best, tastiest dish with what they had available and through that finding flavor combinations that were previously uncharted, but logical once given a chance.

So give those avant garde bakers and chefs a chance.  Try their mustard doughnuts and tomato frostings and onion cakes.  Eat a sandwich you think might have emerged from the imagination of a 5 year old.  And try my brownies; you'll be surprised.

Sweets for VD

Valentine's Day (see?  I told you I was backed up!) gets a bad rap and for the right reasons.  I'm a logical, sane girl, but as Valentine's Day approached, I wanted something whimsical and silly and special for the day.  I'm dating someone this year, as opposed to the majority of my previous V-Days, so without trying to, I think Vals got put under the microscope a little bit this year.  I was taken out to drinks and dinner and got a few really lovely, sweet surprises.  It was a great day.  I thought a fair way to reciprocate, in addition to a little present here and there, would be to make dessert to cap the evening.

I have wanted to make marshmallows for a long 

time and finally the stars aligned when I found a recipe AND had all of those ingredients in my cupboard at my disposal.  Victory!  I always try to limit my buying for a recipe to about 30% of it, unless it's something I know just HAS to be made, and I don't usually have fresh tenderloin rolling around my fridge.  Ditto for sumac powder.  There are two basic recipes for marshmallows, one is the French way and it includes egg whites, sugar, etc.  The second way, the way I chose, includes gelatin and three-yes, three!- types of sweetener: sugar, honey, and corn syrup.  I also added a scraped vanilla bean and orange zest to complement the orange blossom honey I used.  Boiling, pouring, frothing and whipping ensues and the batter gets poured into a pan to set at room temperature overnight.  Mine turned out a little settled on the bottom, making that part more gummy-jiggly than marsh

mallowy.  I'm sure that resulted from me not whipping enough or properly.  The batter should expand to 3x it's size when the hot syrup is poured into the bowl and whipped.  Mine got to 2x, 2.4x, tops.

So marshmallows are taken care of, they just have to sit and look pretty. 

 I moved onto making two types of mousse- one peanut butter 'cuz my baby likes the PB, and the other a chocolate mousse.  I went through the steps of making custard, which I now think I could do with my eyes closed, and added the flavors, PB or Chocolate, and folded in whipped heavy cream.  I did not have any fun, fancy glasses to pour them into, so I settled on my mostly clear juice glasses and alternated layers of the mousses.  This resulted in quite large portions of mousse, but the bf is a big boy and I was sure this would be more appreciated than frowned upon.

The dessert ended up getting eaten the next day because after a night of drinks (we went to The Violet Hour, along with a slew of other people thinking they had an awesome idea for Vals Day) and a dinner of sushi and saki, the last thing we wanted was more food in our drunken, celebratory state.  As a warning, I wouldn't recommend that anyone devour 8oz. of extremely rich mousse and sugary marshmallows right after playing a game of basketball.  The bf did to ill affect.  I broke my juice glass serving into 3 nights of nibbling and savored every morsel.

Next year we agreed to order a pizza, drink beer, and watch a horror movie, and I think that'll be just fine.

BACK in the Saddle (Kitchen) Again!

Wow, it's been over a month since I posted anything.  I have surely been cooking and baking...I just keep forgetting to take pictures and espouse upon my adventures in the kitchen.

Hmm...let's see...I made an onion soup in the last month- a prolific amount of it, too.  Half of it is hanging out in my freezer right now, despite my valiant efforts of eating it every night for dinner for 4 days or so.  Don't get me wrong, I looked forward to, nay, craved that soup at work everyday.  My onion soup had about 7 different types of onions in it, beef stock AND chicken stock that I had made from a previous roasted chicken (which was used for old-fashioned chicken pot pie; good lord, Marie Calendar, thank you for keeping pot pie in my mind, it was amazing to make) ...do you s

ee how all this stuff gets linked together?  I love it.  In my perfect world all the food I eat would be spawned from a previous meal or something I've also created.  It's like food recycling, or since that doesn't sound appealing, how about Meal Merging?  I'll work on it.   Another example of Meal Merge is this: I bought sugar pumpkins in the fall from an orchard out in Woodstock.  My bf and I went superlatively cheesy and apple-picked and went to a fall festival, where I got the pumpkins.  It was an incredibly fun, brisk day, but ANYway- The pumpkin turned into pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup and a side dish to another dinner.  Later on I made gingersnap cookies.  The few that were

 left rattling around the cookie tin were pounded into crumbs for the crust of my family traditional Black Bottom Pie.  I'm big on making things myself, growing them, caring for them.  If I could have a pumpkin patch, too, it would be like completing the Homemade Derby.  And use my own compost, of course.

God, back to the onion soup!  French Onion or not, I shredded a little Gruyere into the soup, lathered it with pepper, and stuck two squares of the rye bread I had left from my Superbowl cheesy-sausage squares in to the soup.  Rye transforms this kind of soup from good to 'GOD, that was delicious!'  I try not to eat a lot of bread, personally, just for the 'puffy factor' I feel when I do, but there are always exceptions, like rye in soup, buttery pizza crust, San Fran sourdough, and beer bread.  Those last two are for another blog; I have a lot of catching up to do!