Loins of Fire!

Crikey. I took the Red Eye Virtual Kitchen Stadium Cook-off down to the wire last night. After spending all day at work thinking about cooking with tamarind, after 5pm I actually got to do it. I grabbed some pods from the New Whole Foods on Kingsbury, which I totally wanted to explore more, but I was a woman on a mission and in a hurry, so I paid for my pods and biked like a mad woman home. From then on it was non-stop cooking until about 7:20pm. I simmered rice, I made a marinade and sat my pork loin in it, I chopped, I picked cilantro from my herb garden, I diced, and I seared. My phone was buzzing with people wanting to know when they could come over to eat, and I ignored it.

After 8pm I got to breathe for a few minutes before friends arrived to devour the goodness. I spooned up more black bean cakes, and I put the other pork loin in the oven. I've got to admit, it got so down to the wire that I wish my presentation was a bit better, but, it is what it is. The way I cook is very fluid,

I would say, in the fact that I look at a recipe, get the overall idea, and then go from there. So writing down exactly what I did was way more painstaking that I imagined. I think I even left out several ingredients. Oops. I have awesome dishes and baked goods that I've made once or twice and STILL haven't written out the recipe. I'll have a 1/2 sheet of paper with a title on it and some basic brush strokes about what goes in it, but the rest is up to my memory and maybe my tongue, to adjust things accordingly. So basically, time crunch, and I think I may suffer for it. We'll see tomorrow. If I DO advance to the next cook-off round, I am definitely taking a half day at work, that is for certain.

But I had a great time doing it and it was fun getting all my friends involved in the eating and the voting. Too bad I couldn't have paired one of my Contest Winning Cupcakes from the night previous at Iron Cupcakes Chicago. Alas, no tamarind in there.

Check back for contest details! Rick Bayless (Mr. Bayless? Would I call him Rick if I met him face-to-face?) will announce his winners at 11am tomorrow on twitter.

I'll have 4ths

Woooo-ee, it's been a busy weekend! Sure the 4th is great and should be relaxing, filled with tanning, etc., but mine certainly wasn't. Well, it could have been, if the weather was nice and I wasn't running around to the meat market, the supermarket, and trying to make a pie, test out several cupcake recipes, and grill multiple times. But I like being busy, and the weekend was a gigantic success.

I have to say again that I love Paulina St. Market for all things meat. Going into that shop is the only time my mind will ever see encased meats and think, "how can I get several of those in my belly?" Seriously. And the dudes are so old school and prompt and good at what they do. We actually saw a lady behind there and my

bf was almost aghast that they let that happen, until he heard he talk in her thick German accent, and then he was ok with it.

On Saturday I literally stuffed my family with cupcakes. I made 14 cupcakes of all different cake and frosting combinations and made them give me their opinion on them for which to chose for the cupcake challenge. 4 people. 14 cupcakes. They were troopers.

Sunday was pie baking day for the Pie Fest with Hugh Amano, chef and creator of foodonthedole.blogspot.com that I check religiously. Hugh had organized a pot luck at his home a few months back and now it was pie at the beach. Things kept on getting better and better. I had to have my pie in the oven by noon to be mostly cool at 5pm and the bf was making his own pie, too. I gave him shit because he was making a chocolate chip cookie crust with a pudding-y filling, which in my opinion is barely a pie. But to be fair, he made everything from scratch and his custard was quite good. And people loved it, which is the most important part.

Pie at the beach was great; there were some dudes with steel drums and

maracas near us getting down, and there was so much pie. So much pie. I sampled 50-60% of the pies, which were savory, sweet, tarts, and 'deconstructed pies' (read: berries in a bag). I left really full but happy, and I had had some great conversations with interesting new people I can only hope to see at the next event, which just may be a bbq blitz.

The cupcake competition was tonight and I won, which I am thrilled about! I was hoping, like you do when you enter a competition, and so happy to win. All the cupcakes were unique and tropical and creative. I can't wait for the August competition.

So now that I'm home and (temporarily) done with cupcakes, it's time to narrow in on the RedEye Virtual Kitchen Cook-Off that goes down tomorrow! I'll know the secret ingredient at 10am tomorrow, and you can, too, @redeyemunchtime, or at chicagonow.com/blogs/redeye/munchtime for the latest info on the competition. I love cooking as much as baking, so I'm ready to get my creative juices flowing for this one! Check back for those pictures tomorrow!

Eye of the Tiger (Shrimp)

So here I am, working, cooking, trying to get my crap in order, and now, amidst pie and cupcake contests- blam- I'm a part of the RedEye Virtual Kitchen Cook-off, judged by Rick Bayless, no less. I'm feeling pretty good about it, and it totally helps that I'm in the 2nd round, so I get a little preview before it's my turn to whip up the culinary masterpieces that I do. :)

I'll be posting pictures and thoughts here for the challenge, along with viral spamming of facebook and twitter and youtube, should I decide to post a video. Follow all the action by checking @redeyemunchtime on twitter or chicagonow.com/blogs/redeye/munch-time/ Long enough for you?

ALSO, next Tuesday, whomever wants to come over and eat my delicious meal after all my documenting is totally welcome...provided you do some social networking about it :) Muhahahaha...evil laugh...but seriously, help a sister out.

Break Room Surprise

I am the pantry MacGyver. Seriously. I could walk into an abandoned apartment with only a can or two of left-for-dead ingredients (pickled beets and such) and some random condiments rattling around a fridge and whip you up something delightfully nuanced and tasty. My latest scavenge was lunch at work while in the midst of a terrible cold. From our break room I managed to create a yummy soup, perfect for colds or lighter meals.

Here’s what I did: First I took a chicken bouillon cube and added hot water; less than the cup required – I wanted it stronger. I popped a can of V8 and poured 2/3 of it into the broth. We have a giant cylinder of instant oatmeal near the coffee machine, so I sprinkled about 2-3 tablespoons of that into the mix, too. This starts a tangent, but the options for savory oatmeal just recently invaded my mind-space and I am fixated on all of the possibilities that it includes for me. Imagine a door –opened-, just next to that of dried fruits and honeys and bananas, cinnamon and cream, with all (or even more!) of the equally intense and satisfying oatmealiness of it’s sweet counterpart.

But back to the soup. So I’ve mixed Chicken bouillon, V8, and oatmeal at this point. Next to add are the crushed pepper flakes lingering on our snack counter. Then salt and pepper, to taste, of course. The final ingredients are raw asparagus and carrot stalks that I brought in the day before but didn’t eat. I chopped those up, put them in the soup, and put my constantly-improving Tupperware into the microwave to just heat the veggies through. The result was an ever-satisfying thin soup with a more complex taste that you would imagine.

Limey

A lot's been happening in the last month, but what else is new? The job is as busy as ever with both the Bulls and Hawks in the playoffs, and I've been baking, of course. I've been remiss about posting little updates on here, and I think my solution is more, shorter posts. There doesn't need to be a big tome written about each thing I do, even though some are more important to me than others.

I'm still working from behind in all that I've made, but let's just say that a few weeks ago I spotted key limes at the market and HAD to have them. I made a key lime pie, which is my favorite pie of all time, I think. For two straight years growing up I chose to have key lime pie for my birthday cake instead of real cake, that's how much I love it. After that was devoured by myself, the roommates, and other friends who were ambushed by me all-of-the-sudden putting pie on the literal table, I still had enough limes left over to make a key lime cheesecake, topped with whipped cream and fresh mango slices.

I always like to experiment with one or two little ramekins of extra crust and filling, so with the key lime pie I experimented with a chocolate crust which was good, but for me personally, it's hard to stray from the classic recipe. I also added a layer of goat cheese to the crust of another ramekin, which worked okay, but I would have preferred to experiment with marscapone, which I thought I still had in my fridge. With the cheesecake I added chili powder to my 'test pot' crust, and I think it worked well; there was a definite kick, but I may work on mellowing out the flavor with brown sugar or a little straight cream cheese layered over it.

So, more to come, but I wanted to share my love of everything key lime. I plan on making lime curd in the near future, too. :)

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.