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!

Super Foods

Oh boy, I survived the Superbowl.  Actually, it was a delight, we had twenty people in our apartment, we made food, people brought food, we had beer, people brought beer...it was amazing, all of my friends are awesome and I love them and I almost wish there wasn't a super kick-ass football game to watch so I could have hung out more with all my peeps.  

I had a tough time deciding what to make for this Superbowl.  I go through phases of being really psyched about cooking and baking, and then some days, when I'm not feeling up to it, the whole idea gives me a headache and I just want to eat soup from a can.  Or serve chips.  You get my point.

I didn't go over board and only made two items; one was a family recipe, comforting and delicious, and the other was something new and different that I had only just thought of.  I made my mom's (and I'm sure EVERYONE'S mom or aunt's) recipe for cheesy sausage on rye.  I bought two 16oz. tubes of Jimmy Dean sausage (one hot, one regular), one packet of dry onion soup mix, and a two-pound block of Velveeta.  When buying the Velveeta at the store, I spent 10 minutes looking in all of the places one would look for cheese, and finally I asked a shopgirl where they kept this darn Velveeta, because I'd be damned if they were 'sold out' of Velveeta.  She told me it was in aisle 4 so I thanked her and headed that way.  I get to aisle 4 and it starts off with cookies.  A few feet later it's crackers.  I'm worried now, thinking she's pointed me in the wrong direction, thinking that I wanted cheese crackers or something.  I kept going, and half way down the aisle, on a higher shelf, is the Velveeta.  It's not refrigerated, it's not even chilled, in fact it's just chillin' next to any other non perishable item at room temperature.  And I'm going to serve this to my friends.

Despite the disturbing shelf life of my cheese, come Superbowl Sunday I browned the sausage, sprinkled in the onion soup mix, and then cut in the Velveeta until it was a gooey, cheesy mix.  I scooped spoonfuls onto party rye squares and popped them in the oven for 10 minutes to get just a little crusty on top.  They came out perfect, but in truth, they're hard to screw up.

My second dish was almond cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting.  I hadn't ever made them before, but I knew there would be other chocolate-y desserts so I wanted to do something sweet, but lighter.  After I frosted them I sprinkled extra loose coconut on top and the cupcakes just seemed ridiculously happy.  They made me smile; I think that's ideal for a cupcake-they should make you smile when you see them-because how can the prospect of eating something so cute and delicious not seem like a terrific idea?

Short and sweet (and savory)

Well, I had a whirlwind weekend in Nueva York with my Bestie and Hetero-life mate. Whew. I had a crazy-early flight on Friday following a company holiday party, so by the time I boarded the bus from Newark to Times Square...I was already beat like a high school drum.



ANYway, the weekend was awesome, more on that later, but it refreshed me for getting back into the kitchen. Tonight is meatloaf night. It's cold, it's winter, it seems like there's no end in sight, (Come on Global Warming!) so it's time to glob some ground beef and turkey together with spices and egg and crumbs and onion, throw it into a loaf pan and into the oven. Of course, it will be more nuanced than that, but the general idea is that it's comfort food and heavy and warm and delicious.



Sometimes I like to go through my cabinets and see what I can use and what the least amount of additional ingredients I need to buy is. Tonight I scored big, and would have been all set to go had I not thought the frozen red wine chicken sausage in my freezer was actually ground turkey. Boo to that. So I'll stop at the store on the way home, grab a pound of lean, and then get to mixing all my ingredients.



Detour Thought- which is sort of on the way with this post- I have started the habit of not letting my boyfriend see what goes into my recipes, the reason being that he'll see something HE thinks is weird, and then go, 'You're putting okra in that? Really?' etc., or something to that effect. He's never not liked something I've made -and I make him be honest with me- but he'll get squirmy or doubtfull about some of my ingedients when he really has no idea how they're going to add to the flavor.



SO, tonight's meatloaf is getting a shot of bacon from Paulina St Meat Market, a place I love to go, and some ginger, corn bread, worchesetershire sauce, brown sugar, and maybe even some rosemary. The bacon is something I purchased before my NYC excursion and then froze. The ginger root I bought randomly at Trader Joe's because I like to have things like that on hand...just in case. Corn meal is something else I have in the cupboard, along with everything else I mentioned. I might even have a leek hanging around I could chop in. I have sweet potatoes I'll slice thinly and bake in the oven with the meatloaf. I think I'll toss them in grapeseed oil, parmesan, salt, pepper, and this great smoked paprika I got from The Spice House on Wells before they go under the broiler. Pics will come once everything is made! YUM.

New Blog!

But I'm at work, so no 'real' entry yet. I'm currently hungry and dreaming of all the delicious things I could make with the contents of my cupboards...