The Food:
We broke in our new grill tonight. Below Xiaoxi reads while supervising the open flames.


The meal in its entirety included grilled corn, barbecue chicken , two bean salad, root vegetable fries and a garden salad.


Here is a close-up of the fries that David made. He used sweet potatoes, beets and potatoes to form an addictive blend.

Here is a close up of the two bean salad. To make it rinse a can a red beans and a can of cannellini beans (the juice in the can is very gaseous) and add them to a big bowl. To the beans add an herb of choice (we chose dill), 2 tablespoons of oil (we used 1 tbs. grapeseed and 1 tbs. olive) as well as some salt and pepper. This dish benefits from being made in advance and having the different components take on each other's flavor as you sit.


The People Who Ate It:

David Baranger enthusiastically munches on some grilled corn

Sam Schilit getting barbecue inspired bunny ears from Avi

Sarah and Avi model our new benches


Xiaoxi, Franni and Emily

fun with addition

Last night my housemates and I had each invited someone over to cook dinner which meant that by about 7:00 our kitchen was full of 6 people preparing 3 separate meals. Sarah was making pasta. I was roasting veggies. Olivia was putting things together for a cold barley salad. Aliza was preparing to cook some tempeh. Avi and Emily hadn't even started and we had a storm of people chopping, sauteing and mixing. The counters and tables were littered with spices and Brussels sprout ends and dirty bowls and utensils. Things were kind of crazy, when someone had a brilliant idea - - we could combine all of our efforts into one meal for 6. All of the food got combined into 2 delicious dishes that didn't go together that well but were excellent on their own.
Dish # 1 - a barley/rice and veggie salad
What went in:
- Olivia made a base of tomatoes and artichoke hearts
- Olivia had also made some barley. We thought it was going to take too long to cook though so I also started some brown rice which was mixed in as well.
- I roasted some brussels sprouts and green beans
-I also picked some cilantro from our garden and mixed it in
- Avi made a delicious vinaigrette using grapeseed oil infused with orange, rice vinegar, a bit of mustard and some other mysterious ingredients. It was a delicious dressing and its too bad that we don't know exactly what went in it.
- This was all tossed together....yum!


Dish # 2 - Penne with tempeh and cranberries in a brie sauce
- Sarah made some penne
- Emily brought some red onion and chopped it up
- Aliza made Tempeh using the onion, some sherry, dried cranberries and some mysterious add-ins by Avi (Avi, you should comment on the post or edit if you can fill in any of these ingredients. I would love to duplicate this dish)
- Avi made a brie sauce. At the last minute we threw in some cranberries and curry powder.
- Once again this was all mixed together for another amazing dish!

We took our food outside and sat down as a merry group of six. What an excellent last minute dinner party!
-

LobstaFest 09

Last night's meal had been months in the making. I had never had lobster before, and when I mentioned the idea everyone was really excited. Due to the price, and also our cooking adventurism, we decided that it would be fun to have a lobster boil. We wanted to wait till it got nice outside, which thankfully finally happened.

We went to go meet our lobsters at stop and shop a couple of hours before dinner time. I was a little bit freaked out, since I don't think I had ever seen the exact animal I was about to eat while it was still alive (except for some fish) and the idea that they needed to be cooked alive seemed a bit strange to me. The meat can't go bad that quickly, can it?

Anyway, we decided to go the steaming route, since a couple websites said the meat would come out tastier, and then we wouldn't have to wait as long for the water to boil. We kept the condiments pretty simple, some melted clarified butter and lemon wedges.

Lobsters coming out of the pot:

On the side we had some coleslaw and corn on the cob which is finally starting to be in season, Yay!


Here are the people who at them minus me:


and the remains of what we ate:

Yorkshire Pudding\ Popovers

Sarah Jeffrey's birthday was last week, and to celebrate we made her many of her favorite foods.(hence the crack pretzel post before this) On the list was Yorkshire Pudding\Popovers, which I had never made before, nor realized were basically the same thing. I also have no idea why Yorkshire pudding is called a pudding. Its not liquidy like an American pudding, and its not even sweet. The word supposedly comes from the French Boudin- meaning small sausage, which I guess used to be placed inside of puddings in Medieval times. This makes sense in terms of Yorkshire pudding, but doesn't really explain how it came to be a term used for dessert as well.

Anyway..

I was excited to try to make it because on the British version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay often gets mad at people for their inability to make a good Yorkshire Pudding. I was therefore also nervous that the recipe would be more difficult than I had expected. They ended up being really easy to make, and delicious. The recipe we used was from Sarah's grandmother.

For 12 Yorkshire Puddings\popovers you'll need
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups milk - we used whole
3 eggs
around 1/2 tbsp salt
a little less than a stick of butter

Preheat your over to 450 degrees, and place the muffin tin in the oven. Mix together all of the batter ingredients- not the butter. Remove the muffin tin from the oven once hot, and generously coat the cups with melted butter. It will probably start bubbling. Immediately pour the batter in the cups, and place back in the oven for around 20 minutes, they should begin to puff up after a couple of minutes. After the 20 minutes are up, turn the oven down to 375, and leave in for another 20 minutes or until the puddings are fully cooked and golden brown. For us this ended up being significantly less that 20 minutes, but we think are oven temperate is usually 10-20 degrees hotter than what it says.



Eat immediately with butter, or jam, or whatever else you'd like.

You can see that our oven temperature problems also meant they got a bit overcooked on top.

Crack Pretzels

Sarah receives random care packages from her family containing all different kinds of sweets and other foods. One of her (our) favorites are these pretzels which are seasoned in such a way that you can't eat less than a pound at a time. They're really easy to make, but be warned that they will disappear immediately.



Here's what you'll need:
1 lb unflavored pretzel nuggets (we used Snyder's brand)
1 package Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing (not dip!) mix
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tbsp dried dill weed
2/3 cup canola oil.


Preheat the over to 250 degrees. In a bowl, mix together the dressing mix, garlic powder, dill weed and oil. Pour in the pretzels, and stir until all the pretzels are evenly coated. Spread out the pretzels on a baking sheet, and stick in the oven for 15 minutes, mixing them around once halfway through baking time.

Burrito Night

Inspired by the amazing bright yellow stuff on my scallops at Ibiza, and by the increasingly overripe mangoes from the veggie co-op a few weeks ago, I decided tonight was a good night to make mango salsa. Basically, if you give me a mango, I will either wait for it to get brown on the inside and throw it out, or I will make mango salsa with it. I don't really like mangoes plain-- when I was little I was convinced that mangoes had a fishy taste, and I've never really gotten over it-- and I am not creative enough to come up with other preparations. Besides, I think they taste best when paired with a little acid, and salsa is stupid easy.

So: mangoes cut up as best you can (slightly mangled is okay-- and unavoidable if you're me), red onion, cilantro (lots!), lime juice, and if you want, some peeled diced cucumber (I wouldn't have bothered with this addition except that we had a rapidly aging co-op cuke in the fridge that was looking pretty sad). Mush it up in a bowl and add some salt and pepper to taste so you can feel like you're actually cooking something.


Incidentally, today I learned that my camera's macro feature does not necessarily make all food look tastier:

Eww. Slimy.

The burritos themselves were not particularly interesting to photograph (picture a rolled up tortilla and you've got the idea), but contained white rice, black beans, some sauteed red onion, cheese, the salsa, hot sauce, guacamole, and sour cream. They went excellently with beer.

The only drawback is that I now find myself in a situation I encounter every time I use cilantro. I have at least half a bunch left and no idea what to do with it. I absolutely love cilantro, to the point where I'll sometimes snatch a few leaves at Weshop instead of stealing the bulk candy. But I can never ever use it up. Why can't you buy fresh herbs by the sprig? Any suggestions on how to avoid watching my lovely cilantro slowly wilt and go gross in the fridge?

simply delicious

There were a lot of influences pushing me towards a simple homemade breakfast this morning. I had spent the day yesterday - which was incidentally earth day - hanging out at a farmers market. I also attended a discussion session with one of our vendors, a Wesleyan professor who teaches a class on the American Pastoral, and a senior who wrote her thesis on farmland preservation. Adding to all of that wholesomeness, I am also reading a book called "Real Food: What to Eat and Why" by Nina Planck. If that wasn't enough, Olivia gave me Alice Waters's "The Art of Simple Food" which I spent much of my morning perusing. Basically, it was like the world was convening to tell me to put time into making a delicious and wholesome breakfast. Luckily my Thursday mornings aren't that busy so I was able to follow the impulse....

Last night Avi and I prepared some olive oil bread dough. At Christmas I was given a book called "How to make Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day" and for awhile we were happily munching on fresh bread. When life got busy, we had fallen behind in our efforts so it was nice to get back to it. The first thing I did when I woke up was preheat the oven and shape a small roll out of the dough.
Next, I ventured outside to dead head my pansies and harvest some fresh parsley. I was so excited to use some of our herbs. I have been chomping at the bit to start using the herbs since I planted them, but all of the information I have read says to wait a week. I made it about 5 days before needing to do the harvest.

When I got back in, I put my roll into the oven and started on the eggs. I checked "The Art of Simple Food" to see what Alice had to say. Her most useful piece of advice was that you should barely mix the eggs because stirring them too much causes the eggs to lose body. I put two eggs, chopped parsley, salt, pepper and a bit of chevre into the bowl and mixed with restraint. When my pan was properly heated, I added a bit of butter and then the eggs. Since I didn't over mix, instead of homogenous yellow blobs, my eggs were very pretty. Some pieces were shiny and white, some were a vibrant yellow, and all shades in between were represented. The tang of the goat cheese and the brightness of the parsley made it an excellent dish.

By the time the eggs were done my bread had a crispy crust and was smelling delicious. You can't beat the smell of baking bread in the kitchen.

I cut the bread in half when it was still steaming and topped it with Farmer's market goodies. On one half I put blood orange marmalade and the other half was topped with maple butter.

La Ibiza

Its restaurant week in New Haven, meaning that restaurants are offering special menus for cheap prices. Sounds good huh? That's what Avi and I thought when we saw a commercial for it on TV...we immediately turned off our program and whipped out our laptops to check out the website. After checking out all of the available menus we decided on La Ibiza which was described as "creative Spanish". What really swayed us was Mark Bittman's review in which he described La Ibiza was some of the best Spanish food he has had in the States. Here is what we had and what we thought of it.

The Atmosphere:
- You could tell it was a classy place from the table settings and the fact that they filled your water glass obsessively throughout the meal
- The waiters mumbled a bit and didn't make us feel special (although this could be the fact that we were college students!)
- The restaurant could use a bit more ambiance, it felt very sterile and antisepticish. That said, they could have been attempting the minimalist aesthetic and in that case they did pretty well.

Appetizers:

Raviolis de Cordero - braised baby lamb crispy raviolis, cauliflower foamy emulsion, black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and a scallion vinaigrette

" The meat was very tender and cooked well" Avi

"I think it is less like ravioli and more like a sophisticated spring roll...they need to work on naming things" Xiaoxi

"I thought the dish was perfect. Simple enough for all of the flavors to sing, but presented in such a way that you felt very special for getting to eat it" Sarah

"The olives made the dish; the tanginess helped out so much" Avi

Vieras - Grilled sea scallops, corn flour cake, passion fruit-mango vinaigrette

"I was not a fan of the dish in terms of its texture, but the salsa was good. The scallops on top of the corn cake made the dish too mushy - two mushy things stacked o top of each other. That said, the salsa made it really good." Julia

" The polenta was good on its own; creamy, but firm enough to hold together" Avi

Entrees:

Costilla - Baby back ribs marinated with herbs and honey, smoked bacon potato puree, barbecue sauce aioli.

" They were yummy" Julia

"I really loved the sauce. There was something in that sauce that really made it" Xiaoxi

"The aioli was overpowering" Xiaoxi and Julia. To counter, I loved the aioli and thought it balanced the dish very well.

" The bacon in the potatoes made it a pork overload" Julia

" The potatoes wrapped in cabbage were fantastic" Xiaoxi

Salmon - Grilled Atlantic salmon, potato confit, sauteed spinach and pistachio vinaigrette

"The fish was cooked very well. It had a nice crust, but it was a little too done for my personal preference. I also thought the portion was too small" Avi

"The pistachio vinaigrette was really good, but the pistachio flavor should have been more pronounced. The potatoes were nothing special" Julia

"The dish really showed off the salmon" Avi

Dessert:
Crema Catalana - Traditional Catalan custard

This dish ended up looking and tasting a lot like a creme brulee, which none of us expected. We had assumed we were getting something like a flan.

Comparing it to our prior experiences with creme brulee influenced how we interpreted the dish.

" It tasted like an overcooked creme brulee" Xiaoxi

" The texture was weird, it was thicker than creme brulee and tasted a bit whipped" Avi

Since the experience we have done some research and it turns out that a Crema Catalana is different from creme brulee. The two countries (Spain and France) debate which version came first and inspired the other. The Spanish version is cooked on a stove top and is stirred throughout its cooking time and the French version is cooked in the oven. This is what lends to the difference in texture.

Torrija - Bread pudding, cinnamon ice cream, and coffee cream

"The bread was basically, little croutons that were a bit too crispy...the dish should have been more custardy" Julia

"The cinnamon ice cream was very good and refreshing. It was kind of icy and you could really taste the cinnamon" Julia

" They shouldn't have called the cinnamon ice cream ice cream. It was really more of a sorbet" Xiaoxi

" The coffee sauce was good. The pudding got better the longer it sat in it. The only problem was that it was too literal a coffee sauce. It needed another subtle flavor to complete and balance it" Avi

Overall we gave our experience a 3.5/5. The wine pairings and the appetizers were what bumped it up that extra half point from 3. The normal menu looks very intriguing. We wonder if it would have been better when it wasn't restaurant week.

Tacopalooza

While browsing through Weshop, Emily and I decided that tacos would make a good summery dinner. We did them pretty basic: refried beans, tofu, roasted veggies (onions, red pepper and squash), shredded cheddar, medium salsa, avocado, and sour cream. It was so good and so easy - a perfect meal to eat on the porch at the end of a beautiful day.


Over the course of dinner, Emily commented that she tends to remake the same simple meal templates over and over without considering other basic template options. The standby that she, and I, and many of our friends go for is roasted veggies + protein + some interesting spice combo + a whole grain (usually brown rice). When we were eating our tacos we realized that it just a simple to prepare and that there infinite directions we could take it. There is no set taco template, but here are some basic components and how they might be varied. I am strapping in for Tacopalooza...now that I have thought of all the variations, I know I am going to be coming back for more!
Tortilla - flour, whole wheat, corn, or you could take a full departure and go for any sort of a wrap (or go without and mix up the fillers as a salad- although you then depart taco-dom)
Protein - chicken, beef, shrimp, fish, tofu, eggs, pork, turkey, beans...
Cheese - the sky is the limit!
Veggies - Ditto. What wouldn't taste good in a tortilla
Salsa - don't be limited by the classic tomato salsa. You can make peach salsa, mango salsa, and probably a whole lot of other salsas given a bit of creativity and enough time to avoid needing the canned convenience
Flavor - lime juice, cilantro and cumin OR ancho chile powder, garlic and salt OR coconut, lime, and cardamom...really there is no end to the possibilities

Happy taco-ing!
Sarah

Breakfast al Fresco

Sometimes a picture speaks 1,000 words. I know no other way to convey how pleasant my breakfast was!

The food: Scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes, coffee from our new french press and some farmer's market maple syrup.

The People: The legs in jeans belong to Ms. Worby and the bare foot is mine!

Thor also joined us. Spring is certainly a time to be outside!

Its Spring! Get Down and Dirty

Like nice weather? Fresh food? The satisfaction of hands-on work? Its spring folks - time to start a garden. Being a perfectionist, I have held off of gardening for awhile because I didn't have enough space to do it right. This Friday though, I was driving around with my sunroof up and just loving spring when I passed a greenhouse. I impulsively turned in and got out. Today was the day I would start a garden, even if it had to be small. 
Where does this interact with food? In a space no bigger than 2 square feet I was able to plant mint, sweet basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, parsley and cilantro.  I filled the rest of the space with daises and pansies.  Even better, it was easy just a few hours later (I had to dig up some grass to make the bed) I had an attractive garden and a massive sense of accomplishment.

Even better, we can now finish our dishes with some sun-warmed herbs - - the perfect way to celebrate spring!

milk and cereal

This morning, for reasons unknown - even to me, I woke up wondering about the history of cereal. While cereal isn't my favorite breakfast, it is a reliably easy and satisfying start to a day. According to a 1995 poll done for Good Morning America, cereal is the most commonly eaten breakfast food in our country.
Among the most likely to eat cereal: women (35% choose it, compared to 27% of men who incidentally favor bacon and eggs), and people from the northeast (39% of people eat cereal here...it is much less popular in the south).
I researched cereal history for quite awhile this morning, but this set of youtube videos says it better than I ever could. Enjoy!

This first one is a visual history of cereal. The song is gets old, but it is very interesting to see all the old box designs!



The next video is an actual history of cereal. Pretty interesting...



and finally, an old Rice Krispies commercial that was too cute to leave out.



Final bit of trivia: the most popular cereal in 2008 was Cheerios. I am curious about whether this will hold true for our blog readers. Please leave a comment about which is your favorite cereal!

Beet and Shrimp Fritters

Fritters are one of my favorite foods of all time because they're quick, fried, and can be made with almost any ingredients.

For these I used approximately:
1 cup chopped precooked shrimp (damn you Weshop!)
1 beet, washed, peeled and shredded
1/4 cup shredded cauliflower
3 eggs ( I wouldn't add this many if it wasn't Passover and I could use flour to bind then together)
1/4 cup matza meal (I'd usually use flour, but the matza meal ended up working pretty well)
1/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste

This made seven decent sized fritters

Mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl, and let sit for 5 minutes. Take a small handful of the mixture and squeeze into a patty. If it doesn't easily stick together, add more matza meal ( or flour)

Heat around half an inch of oil in a pan. I recommend something like canola or peanut oil. Place one patty into the oil. Its always important to do a test patty when you're making up you're own recipe in order to make sure it sticks together. Assuming it does, add as many and can fit, and cook for around 5 minutes on each side. I don't usually check the temperature of the oil, but it should be hot enough to form a nice crust, but not burn the outside during the 5 minutes its submerged.




I made a dipping sauce out of mayo, mustard, and relish

Machu Picchu Matza Pizza Part 2

One of my favorite and least favorite things about Passover is kosher for Passover (K for P) food made to resemble non-K for P food (things like K for P cake, matzaroni and cheese, potato egg noodles etc.). On the one hand, there are so many K for P options that don't pretend to be something they're not - and that we would happily eat during the rest of the year - that it seems unnecessary to make these often mediocre Passover substitutes. These foods also feel like a cop out. Sure, they're still kosher for passover, but the purpose of the laws forcing us to eat unleavened products (and limiting the cooking and preparing time for wheat) seems lost when we find ways to eat wheat-based cookies on Passover.

On the other hand, it's always fun to figure out new things to do with matza farfelle, matza meal, matza cake meal, and all those other things that are basically matza ground down to different degrees. Passover forces us to think and be more creative when we cook since our ingredient options are limited (especially for Ashkenazi Jews). Its also fun to see how versatile matza can be, and non-Jews always love seeing the crazy concoctions we come up with.


Last night for dinner I made one of my favorites - Matza Pizza. But not the take-a-slice-of-matza-and-slather-on-some-KforP-tomato-sauce-and-Mozzarella kind. I find this variety to be somewhat digusting.


To make this matza pizza, you'll need:
-around 12 sheets matza broken into pieces, or a big can or 2 of matza farfalle (the coarsest of the ground matzas)
-5 or 6 eggs
-tomato sauce ( please God not the prepackaged K for P stuff!!)
-vegetables
-cheese- preferably mozzarella, but during passover just use what you can get.
- olive oil
- salt and pepper

Take your ground matza and soak it it water for around 5 minutes. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl. Drain the matza, and add the eggs, along with a bit of salt and a dash of olive oil. Mix it all together; the matza should be completely covered in egg, but there should not be a lot of liquid pooling at the bottom of the bowl. Press the mixture into a greased baking sheet, pushing some up on the edges of the pan for a crust. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees.


Now, you may be asking yourself "what should I use for sauce since the K for P ones are so gross?" The answer is make your own!! Another thing that I like about Passover is that we learn how many prepackaged food products, even the ones that we would never expect have some kind chametz in them. This gives us a great oppotunity to make them from scratch. Not only will they taste better than the K for P varieties, but they'll probably be better than the stuff you have the rest of the year. So take a minute to go to allrecipes.com or a similar site and find yourself a tomato sauce recipe. They can be really simple, and who knows, maybe you'll be converted to making fresh sauces during the rest of the year as well.

After the crust has baked for ten minutes, drizzle a little olive oil on the crust, and put on your toppings. ( I usually precook my vegetables for a bit, but its up to you) Place the pizza back in the oven, and bake for another 10 minutes or so, until the cheese has melted and has started to brown.



And the ever popular close up shot



We also made this exact replica of Machu Picchu out of matza pizza with leftover batter



Here are the people who ate it


Read the previous entry for a more scholarly discussion of Machu Picchu Matza Pizza


EDIT: So for lunch yesterday I cut into the Machu Picchu Matza Pizza


Which kind of reminded me of this


- A cross section of skin under a microscope

Machu Picchu Matza Pizza (MPMP)

Feelings On:
Sarah W - tomatoes, matza, mountainous, Christmas, cheese, tasty,

Aliza - Machu Pichu Matza Pizza
I wanna eat you, I wanna eat ya
Eggs as glue and tomatoes will feed ya
My belly is full don't you know that I need ya


Avi - The interesting thing about MPMP is kind of like a return to slavery as well as a departure from it because it is using matza which is what the Jews ate when they were leaving Egypt and slavery and they stopped building and we are using it to create more buildings (aka the matza machu picchu) Aliza comments: :"will the Master's tools ever dismantle the Master's house?" (Audrey Lorde) Josh: an ax is an ax, why does it matter. Sarah: if the metaphor doesn't work then you can't use it as a metaphor. Are the tools only useable by the master or can they be used by anyone. Hmmm....very sophisticated for a post-dinner conversation on Matza.

David - MPMP Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. For the Incan Jew at heart. It makes great art.

Kara: I think that the creation of a blog about MPMP as a dinnertime activity is the best thing about small schools.

Josh - A brilliant reimagining of a "traditional American" food. Yumzz.

Ruby - The truth that we were originally talking about doing a spinach pesto sauce which would have been grass on the mountains. When I saw Avi pour the tomato sauce go on to it I saw it as the blood of the people who were colonized.

Sarah - It was amazing how pizza-y this MPMP really was.

Shrimp and Gnocci and Spinach, Oh My!

The People Who Ate It:

Every once in awhile I like to schedule one-on-ones with my friends so that we can put all the group dynamics aside and legitimately catch up. Tonight was my date with Grace! Unfortunately, the odds have been stacked against this meeting...we had already rescheduled once and then tonight we only had about an hour of mutual free time. Why are we all so busy? The answer to that question is far beyond the scope of this blog and will probably take years and years of therapy to get down to the bottom of. For now, lets just say that I am happy that my date with Grace worked out.


The Food:
Because of the aforementioned time crunch, we had a very quick dinner. It it is proof that the taste of a bunch of things thrown together is greater than the sum of their parts. The stuff that was thrown in were some prepackaged basil gnocci, shrimp, and a French variety of spinach that is a brilliant purple color. Grace dressed the whole thing up with a marinade made from honey, sumac, chili powder and some other things (Grace, if you see this you should add a clarifying comment to this post!) before we stuck the shrimp and spinach in a 450 degree oven together. Sure it would have been better if we had made the gnocci and all, but it was a perfect meal to catch up over.
We ended the meal with a marvelous chocolate cake that Grace made. More on that later.

Mismatched dinner, or why menu planning is extremely difficult for me

Tonight, Kait turns 21. To celebrate, I made her Ina Garten's pumpkin roulade with ginger buttercream. Weshop didn't have mascarpone, so I substituted by mixing cream cheese, heavy cream, and butter. It's not going to fool anyone, but it's still pretty good. For dinner we made pizza margherita. The courses didn't exactly match... After dinner I briefly read Ina Garten's tips on menu planning "I don't have to think about it, I just know it will be delicious", and it dawned on me that we inhabit completely different taste-universes.
I was reared on a particular set of flavors that doesn't seem to apply to the food I cook now. A lot of cooks emphasize putting together dishes and flavors that go together (like lamb and mint, pork and apple), and I never understood what they meant. I think a lot of it has to do with cultural differences--because I didn't grow up eating lamb with mint, I never understood why people think lamb and mint match. In my mind, lamb and cumin is the more natural pairing. Same thing with pork and apple. When I think pork, I think cabbage. I love lamb and mint, and I really like pork and apple. However, a lot of people take those combinations for granted. Ina Garten says that certain foods just have a "natural affinity" for one another. I think she's just a little ethnocentric. Ina, it would be so much more useful if you could explain why you think certain foods just go togehter, instead of just telling me to do it intuitively. My intuition is completely different from yours. Afterall, this is the girl that wanted Jamaican beef patties with sushi for the reception after my opera, which was orchestrated for western instruments and gamelan, and featured a paper mache dinosaur painted like a De Kooning.

Anyway, I really liked the pumpkin roulade. Although the cream cheese really just made it into carrot cake with pumpkin. The only tricky part was inverting the cake from the pan, but I managed. It also doesn't look too professional, but I blame our lack of space (I assembled the cake on a chair because we didn't have counter space), and the fact that we don't have a fine sieve for confectioner's sugar.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar: An Investigation

Awhile back, Xiaoxi and I had a little spat about this book, which apparently was not a part of her young life in China. A travesty, I say. She thinks otherwise. She thinks, in fact, that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is not a story. Her claim: All caterpillars are hungry. A caterpillar who eats through stuff and becomes a butterfly, therefore, is just a caterpillar, because that is what caterpillars do. In fact, she cried angrily, "That is NOT A STORY!"

This entry will not address the implications this might have for what defines a plot or what the necessary components of a story are. You can all decide that for yourself. My concern here is with just how hungry this caterpillar was. Was his hunger exceptional? Was he, in fact, very hungry, or was he simply doing what any old caterpillar would do to steel himself for two weeks of cocoon napping? (This entry also will not address the inaccuracy here: Eric Carle is aware of the fact that most caterpillars actually pupate in a chrysalis, not a cocoon. I refer you here for his explanations.)

According to my research, most caterpillars are herbivorous, and many chomp down only upon one species of plant. So yes, they eat leaves and not salami and ice cream, but how many leaves? Google (and Google Scholar) searches have yet to yield any helpful information regarding the quantity of food your average caterpillar consumes each day. I'm pretty disappointed, but apparently I have other work to do.

This begs another question, though: Should the book be retitled The Very Confused Caterpillar? Or The Caterpillar with an Exceptionally Sophisticated Palate? Come to think of it, the idea of a caterpillar eating salami is just weird. It makes me kind of uncomfortable. What is in salami anyway? A question for another day, I suppose.

So maybe Xiaoxi wins. Maybe this caterpillar, though his taste in food was rather strange considering his species, was not all that hungry. After all, as someone pointed out to me, he didn't eat EVERYTHING--he just ate HOLES in everything. He being so small and all. How does one even calculate the sustenance derived from a hole in an apple, a hole in an ice cream, a hole in a salami... clearly, the research I intended to do here was a bit over my head. I'm an English major, not a caterpillar expert, and I certainly don't have the time before graduation to follow a caterpillar around all day and see how much it eats.

Instead, I will leave you with three interesting and well-researched facts.*

1) The original title of the book was A Week With Willi Worm. Nothing to do with hunger! And also, probably, no plot.

2) The author was inspired by a hole puncher. He explains: "One day I was punching holes with a hole puncher into a stack of paper, and I thought of a bookworm and so I created a story called 'A Week with Willi the Worm'. Then my editor suggested a caterpillar instead and I said 'Butterfly!' That's how it began."

Aha! Maybe, then, all this hunger stuff is just a misread metaphor. The caterpillar is a bookworm! It's not really lollipops and Swiss cheese that he wants. He is hungry for Lit-tra-ture! That must be it.**

...and finally, and perhaps most importantly (though in no way related to the rest of the content of this post):
3) In 1999, the talented reader George W. Bush called the The Very Hungry Caterpillar one of his childhood favorites. Which is sweet, really, until you consider that he was 23 years old when the book came out. Who am I to judge? Far be it from me to determine when Mr. Bush's childhood ended, if ever it did.

And now we're all hungry and distraught, but full of food... for thought! HAH! Oh god I'm sorry. I'm going to go eat a hole and then crawl in it now.


*from the book's Wikipedia page, obviously
**I told you I'm an English major. Deal with it.

disney princess cake

For Grace's birthday last year, Emily (the chef who does not blog so I do it for her) baked a turtle cake. It took us a while to figure out how to top that this year, but we finally decided on a princess cake in the shape of a castle. We started collecting ingredients weeks in advance: pink ice cream cones for the towers, pastry tips to make flowers, and princess figurines. The only problem was all the princess figurines we found at stores were ugly and expensive. So we resolved to make our own. Then a few days before the big project Emily started making flowers with decorator's frosting so that they would dry out and harden in time for assembly, and on Friday night (the eve of Grace's triumphant return to campus) we baked the cake. With all the components in place, we started working Saturday morning. It took us all day.

The cake was a simple birthday cake recipe we found on the Williams-Sonoma website, with a thick buttercream frosting (I don't like frosting normally, but I do like butter, and I liked this frosting. It was pretty much just creamed butter). Anyone can bake a cake, and the recipe was certainly not what made this cake exciting. As the Flemish used to say in the early-Rennaisance, "God is in the details."

Emily's flowers were made from a special crisco-based deocrater's frosting (not very good to eat, but better-tasting than the premade flower decorations at the store). This was the most difficult part of the whole process: we didn't have a pastry bag, and the tips that we got wouldn't stay put. We tried parchment/wax paper/ziploc, and nothing worked very well, but Emily perservered and came out with rather nice flowers in the end.

For the towers (the main architectural detail of this cake), we put a marshmallow inside a cone, smoothed out with frosting inside another cone, and stuck a princess cut-out through the marshmallow. I cut crenellations for the cone towers with an exacto knife. How are we ever going to top this?!?

p.s. This post was made by Xiaoxi, but when I changed its date, it made me the poster!

pros and cons of Ina Garten

For dinner with Sarah tonight I made Ina Garten's French Apple Tart from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics. It turned out very well (more on that later). 

 Garten is one of the few Food Network chefs that I actually like (Rachel Ray is obnoxious, Alton Brown tries too hard, and Paula Deen is too peppy for comfort... though admittedly, they all have some great recipes). She has a relaxed style, and her recipes are all fantastic. She's really good at balancing flavors and creating food that's both subtle and powerful. Furthermore, while she appreciates and encourages simple food, she's not obsessed with speedy shortcuts the way so many cooking shows are. However, her philosophy and processes are just not very well suited to college, or, as a girl from rural South Carolina-- anyone else I know. 

For example, 80% of her recipes call for some kind of expensive, exotic booze. In a section called "how to cook like a pro," Ina advises the novice cook to buy the best possible cookware, (like Le Creuset), and the best possible ingredients. For entertaining, Ina stresses the importance of making flower arrangements a day in advance, and ironing napkins. Ina doesn't trust oven dials -- she gets an oven thermometer to get the oven at the precise temperature. On her show, Ina doesn't break a sweat-- she has so many fancy appliances she barely chops or mixes anything by hand. 

That's all nice and great, and don't get me wrong, I would like a set of Le Creuset cookware as much as the next girl, and good ingredients can certainly make all the difference, but a cheap pot in the hands of a good cook is a million times better than an idiot with a Kitchenaid. If someone asked me to make a list called "how to cook like a pro," being OCD about oven temperatures and buying expensive stuff are the last things I would think of. 

Finally, the thing that bothers me the most about Ina is that she's extremely wasteful. When Ina makes biscuits, she cuts out biscuits from a large sheet of dough with a cookie cutter, and then she throws away the rest. Why not reassemble the scraps and re-cut with the cookie cutter? Good home cooks do this (I know for a fact that Deb at Smitten Kitchen does). If you're worried about the biscuits turning out a bit lumpy (which is just a cosmetic difference, it doesn't affect taste at all), just cut pieces with a knife and have square biscuits. Duh. 

So yes, today I used an Ina Garten recipe, but I did it in our crappy oven with a crappy sheet pan and cheap rum instead of apple Calvados. Instead of using a food processor, I opted for easier cleanup and mixed the dough by hand in a bowl, which only took me two more minutes than if I'd used the Cuisinart. I also used raspberry preserves instead of apricot jelly, because that's what we had on hand. And after I cut the edges from the pastry, I stuck the remaining dough together and created a smaller, irregularly-shaped tart on the side (which didn't taste any different than the square ones). Most importantly: It was delicious! 

Recipe Here.