Canned Tuna Improvisations

I haven't been able to post nearly as much as I'd like to lately. This mostly has to do with the fact that I'm working out again, mostly running and yoga with some other activities thrown in. As much as I love kicking the crap out of myself with a good workout, it takes away at least an hour from my evening, and usually I'm drained enough afterwards that I find myself incapable of cooking, cleaning, writing, and being generally productive. Even worse, my already fast metabolism goes bonkers when I work out, and I'm almost always hungry, and my newfound desire to not eat so much processed food is not jiving well with my need to eat something marginally tasty every two hours.

I've been trying to balance my time properly and not eat like crap (the last time I was working out a lot I ate a lot of fried eggs and ramen), so I've been improvising a bit lately with a giant pack of canned tuna I got from Costco. I had one meal of canned tuna with cheddar cheese melted on top, and that wasn't so hot. I wanted to make a tuna melt, but well... no bread. I stopped buying bread when I realized how cheap it is to make it, but with the aforementioned busy-ness, I obviously haven't made any bread.

The time after that, I tried to make tuna salad, but I had no mayo. I had what I needed to make mayo, but wasn't exactly motivated enough to do so (I'd just run five miles), so I looked in Joyand it suggested whisking some extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice together instead, which I promptly did. Their tuna salad recipe just has that, a can of tuna, and some celery in it. I added some scallions from Z's garden and it was still mighty bland, so I threw in some salt and pepper and hot sauce and god knows what else until it was somewhat edible. Oh, and pasta. For carbs. I need carbs. But still, not so great.

That meal prompted me to go out and buy a four-pound jar of mayonnaise from Costco. I wasn't going to originally because it was "Best Foods" mayo, and I only like Hellman's, but then I found out they're actually the same thing (thanks, internet). Also purchased on that trip to Costco: four lbs of grapes and four lbs of pretzels for healthy snacking (so I don't go eat a bag of pork rinds before a run like I did last week), 3.5 lbs of mahi-mahi (since Costco's frozen salmon is farm-raised Atlantic - uck), 3 lbs of organic ground beef (!), 3 lbs of walnuts for baking, some cereal, organic chicken stock, 5 lbs of organic frozen corn (snack food), and 2.5 lbs of mushrooms (I don't know what the hell I bought these for).

So armed with 4 lbs of mayo and some canned tuna, I made tuna-pasta salad again tonight. And it was actually pretty good! Here's what I did: Make some pasta (something with small shapes like ziti or rigatoni or elbows - no spaghetti). While you're waiting for the pasta to cook, take a can of tuna and flake it with a fork and throw it in a big bowl. Chop up two ribs of celery and put that in your bowl. When your pasta is done, rinse it off with cold water and let it drain well. Throw the pasta in the bowl, then put two big spoonfuls or however much mayo you think is necessary into your bowl, and mix everything up. Add some freshly ground black pepper and some glugs of tabasco sauce, and you've got a pretty quick (however long it takes the pasta to cook), somewhat healthy fast meal. You could make it healthier by putting in that olive oil & lemon juice mix instead of the mayo, or by using whole wheat pasta if you wanted. Hell, you could probably throw some other vegetables and maybe even some fruit in it too. Maybe I'll try that next week.

Cheesecake Brownies

I love cheesecake. I love brownies. I really love cheesecake brownies, which I was first introduced to in the college dining hall. My school had pretty heinous cafeteria food, but for some reason they had some outstanding desserts, including the chocolate death cake, the chocolate devil's food cake roll, and their cheesecake brownies, which were made with a pleasant looking swirl and were normally served on chicken finger day (which was also spring roll and hot and sour soup day, for some reason).

I was planning on making some brownies for the guys at work, since random acts of baked goods are always appreciated (and, uhm, it's review time) when I saw the 3-lb brick of cream cheese I bought at Costco a while back. Now, being somewhat devoted to responsible financial habits lately, I've restrained myself from buying a springform pan (even though the one I want is a mere $12) in lieu of going snowboarding, since the stuff is all going to melt soon with this warm weather we've been having. Anywho, soon-expiring 3-lbs of cream cheese and no springform pan? Cheesecake brownies. Gotta use it or else I'll lose it. Recipe: Joycomes to the rescue as always, except theirs doesn't include the happy swirl. I generally followed the recipe exactly, except I creamed the butter and sugar first, since that seems to give me a brownie density that I like.

Apparently, a lot of people have never had cheesecake brownies before. The work guys (I'm a programmer... I work with guys) were slightly befuddled, but like most people, they love cheesecake and they love brownies and consequently, they loved cheesecake brownies. Three-quarters of them were gone before lunch, and the rest disappeared shortly thereafter. They are extremely fudgey and chewy on the bottom, and the cheesecake is light and fluffy and a good contrast.

In experimentation news (aka "must use this damn cream cheese" news), these are also excellent if you substitute the vanilla extract in the cheesecake with some mint extract instead, making mint cheesecake brownies. They are kind of liked the baked-good equivalent of York Peppermint Patties.

More Lentil Soup, Now with Heavy Cream

Remember how much I loved the lentil soup with bacon from JoyI made a few weeks ago? I found another soup lentil soup recipe to love: the Cream of Lentil soup from the Daily Soupcookbook. I might even like this soup better, as a good creamy soup on a cold winter's day (well, as cold as it gets in Phoenix - I went running yesterday in shorts and a tank top) ranks way up there on the comfort list. The soup doesn't involve any complicated cooking procedures and is really quite easy; even the fact that I was short a full cup of heavy cream (due to an awesome inability to fully read recipes sometimes) didn't detract from the soup's goodness (and might be a useful thing to know if you're trying to watch your weight).

Why all the lentils lately? They're cheap - a pound of normal lentils will never run you more than a dollar, even at Whole Foods (I think...). I'm frugal. They're really easy to cook in that they don't require any soaking, and cook in less than an hour. They're good for you with plenty of protein and no fat and are high in fiber (as the package of lentils I got from Fresh & Easy boldly proclaimed). They have a long shelf life. They don't make me fart. They might not make you fart. Lentils are good!

Heads Up: New Recipe Search Engine

Thanks to a tip from The Simple Dollar, I discovered my new favorite food site, which is simply a very well-designed (yes, it has a lot of Web 2.0 Ajaxy goodness) recipe search engine: supercook. You could probably figure out how to use it in the time it would take me to write a description, which I'm about to do anyway so you actually click the link and try it: it lets you list everything in your pantry, refrigerator, storage cabinets, larders (I just like that word), etc in a box. Then it polls a bunch of recipe repositories like allrecipes, epicurious, and recipezaar and links to a bunch of recipes you can make with what you already have at home, or what you can make with a select few extra ingredients. This is fantastic for when you're too lazy to go out to the store or just need to find something to whip up quickly. My favorite use for it is having it figure out what I can make with vegetables or meat that's about to expire. It's kind of like the webtender except with food instead of alcohol... and an interface that was built in this century.

I wish supercook had a feature where I could tell it to exclude recipes from certain websites (well, basically almost everything but epicurious), since I have something of a weird complex where I don't trust user-posted recipes from most big repository sites (this mostly has to do with being unable to check them off on a list, which I'll blog about later - yes, weird. mostly just OCD and a bad case of completism), even though they have multitudes of positive reviews.

The other night, supercook pointed me over to a Salmon Fillet with Soy Glaze recipe that I made since it was so mind-bogglingly easy. I simmered equal parts soy sauce and maple syrup (and tossed in some minced garlic and cayenne pepper for good measure), brushed it onto some salmon I got at Trader Joe's a while ago (finally a use for those pastry brushes I picked up for $2 at Target months ago), let it sit for five minutes, brushed it again, and stuck it in the oven for 12 minutes. I nuked a side of Trader Joe's soycatash that had been in my freezer since who knows when, dropped some butter in it. Dinner was done, and it was good.

Fast Food Review: Burger King's Firecracker Tendercrisp

I'll say it right now: I have a soft spot for fast food in all of its greasy, salty, meat-and-vegetable byproduct glory. I know full well that it's not for good me, the environment, the cows, my wallet, the chickens, etc. I make no apologies for eating it when a craving strikes, mostly because I'll down a giant box of chicken nuggets or a quadruple burger or something and then realize I'm hungry half an hour later because there was no actual nutritive value to what I was eating, then feel massively ripped off and avoid doing it again for a month or two, until I smell that awesomely alluring greasiness from a gas station parking lot and go do it again.

That said, Z and I were coming back from a weekend of skiing (well, he was skiing and I was faceplanting down the mountain with a snowboard attached to my feet) at Sunrise and we were hungry. Donger Needed Food because that $3.25 hot dog from the lodge was exactly how you'd expect a $3.25 hot dog from a ski lodge to be - a pathetic little weiner on a bun that couldn't even hold itself together for a pathetic little weiner (I'll go for the Indian fry bread next time - caaaarbs!). Aside from the rather good Fiesta Mexicana, the Show Low area doesn't have any food that we've found to be worth stopping for, and at 4pm we weren't in the mood for a full-blown sit-down meal anyway. Hence: fast food.

We stopped at a Burger King since Z likes to get a Whopper every now and then. The Burger King in Show Low had the words WE HAVE FIRECRACKER TENDERCRISP on its signboard, and not being someone who watches much television or pays attention to fast food advertising, I was completely confused and amused because it's got such a ridiculous ring to it (in part because of the grammatical awkwardness of the statement), spurring a "WTF? Is it food?" reaction. Sure enough, the drive-thru signs clarified to me that it was basically a spicy, breaded chicken sandwich. Cool, I like those. Wendy's is pretty decent. I got one, in value meal form.

Sidenote: I think I like Burger King's fries better than all the other fast food fries. Important main part of this review and blog post: the Firecracker Tendercrisp is really, really fucking spicy. Not just spicy for fast food, but spicy on the level of spicy Thai food (which I eat all the time, with no problems, and I can qualify the fact that it is actually spicy because I am Asian and they give me Asian-person spicy when I want spicy food). I don't know if the sauce is premixed or if the folks at the Burger King in Show Low like freaking their customers out, but this was actually a really great chicken sandwich. The sauce is like ranch dressing with a massive thai red curry-esque kick to it, and the chicken is breaded white meat and actually holds the sauce well. I actually got some good crunchy lettuce on it, and the bun didn't fall apart, and everything melded together really well. And the kicker: I wasn't hungry for a whole three hours after I ate it, which is how long a normal good meal tides the Donger over.

I want to try another one to see if the sandwich was a fluke, but I haven't craved it (possibly because I am still terrified at how spicy it was) and will thus avoid stepping foot into a Burger King for the greater good of chickens everywhere. For now.

Gingersnaps for Tracy

Traveling was always an ordeal for my younger sister Tracy in our prepubescent days. Car rides were pure treachery for all of us: would she puke? Would she get out of the car in time? Could we get to our destination before we had to stop so she could run out of the car and vomit on the side of the road? Oh shit, a bump! She doesn't look so good.

At some point, my parents, either too cheap or too skeptical for the dramamine and other drugs, decided the best way to calm Tracy's stomach was by force-feeding her gingersnaps. Ginger is well-known to be good for stomach ailments, and the only way they could get it into the kid's system was via cookies. From then on, travel days began with a box of gingersnaps on the kitchen table, and we couldn't leave until she'd eaten about a quarter of the box. The rest were toted along as puke insurance of sorts, and the moment she started looking queasy Mom would start stuffing them down Tracy's throat while she sat there with one eye closed (another "trick" for helping motion sickness). I don't know if it actually helped or not - you'll have to ask her, but she's off cavorting around eastern Europe right now.

I'd have been happy to never eat or see gingersnaps again, but there I was, all ready to make chocolate chip cookies, when I realized I had no chocolate chips. There's a deterrent if I ever had one. I started poking through Joyand realized I had everything I needed to make gingersnaps; given Tracy was leaving for Prague the next day, I figured I'd make some in her honor. They turned out a bit cakier than I'd have liked, but I still ate them for breakfast for the next few days.

There's 2.5 Pounds of Fungus Among Us

I love mushrooms. I love mushrooms so much that, as alluded to in my introductory post, my perfect meal at a previous point in my life would have included a bowl of cream of mushroom soup. Hell, it still might, but it probably wouldn't be that Campbell's slop I ate all the time as a kid. There's just something awesome about how they can sop up all the flavors around them and retain their own meaty earthiness. I'm also entertained by how some people I know are completely terrified by them since they grow in the dark! I guess mushrooms growing from some forgotten spilled beer in a closet would give me the heebie-jeebies too though. Maybe.

The Mushroom Barley Soup recipe from the Daily Soup Cookbookcalls for 2.5 lbs of mixed wild mushrooms. The thought of buying that much shroomage seemed a bit daunting to me, but I went off to Whole Foods and stood in front of their mushroom section for an inordinately long time, trying to decide what would be the most tasty and cost-effective mushroom combination, since I'm a cheap bastard who is now in debt again with a car loan (we'll talk finances another day). I ended up with a pound of regular white button mushrooms, about 3/4 lb criminis, and then a few oyster mushrooms and two portabellas, which I guess don't properly fall into the wild mushroom category for some reason but hell, I like 'em.

Hacking off the stems and then slicing all the mushrooms took a fair amount of time. The stems went to making mushroom stock, and then the rest of the recipe was pretty basic - the usual mirepoix and aromatics, then dump everything in the pot and let it hang out for a while for Maximum Flavor Infusion. The pearl barley kind of scared me since I've never used it before, and they were tiny, but after about an hour or so they became the fluffy barley things I'm used to, and they lended a nice grainy flavor to the soup.

Overall, it was pretty good but I think I'd not use the portabellas again - they were a bit too meaty for me in the soup. Also, using lots of parsley makes for some nice green colors in pictures but doesn't actually taste that great. Woops. I thought the soup could have been a little richer than it was - maybe a touch of butter at the end might help, or maybe adding... something to the mushroom stock. Maybe I should just take out the barley and dump heavy cream in it, which seems to always make things better if I'm going to eat something. I'll have to think about that one.

Real Coffee, Please

A sample packet of On the Go Sugar Free Vanilla Lattemysteriously showed up with my last order from amazon. Now, normally they throw in a few crappy ad flyers and nothing more (save for that plastic mailer to send an old cellphone to the troops, which I might actually do), so this was a new thing. I like coffee, and I like free things, so my curiousity was peaked. I do not, however, generally enjoy substitutions for things that are perfectly good and relatively harmless in their normal form, like sugar, and this little packet proudly proclaimed itself sugar-free. The latte mix was especially suspect because it contained all manners of artificial-sounding components, and I generally try to avoid that stuff because it's just creepy ingesting things you can't pronounce.

I wanted to trash the thing, but I figured that would be wasteful, so I kept it and decided to try it. I am a sucker for free samples and I have trouble throwing anything useable away. I probably should have tried to give it away to someone, but then I wouldn't have been able to give you this awesome review of it.

I poured the packet into a hot cup of water at work. I'm not sure if this was the correct order of events (was I supposed to put boiling water on the mix?), as there were no instructions on the packet (I suppose instant drink-mix making is supposedly idiot-proof, but they didn't account for me), but it made this wickedly odd crackling noise as the surface erupted into a thick foam. My cube was filled with this sickly sweet coffee-esque smell. I took a sip and instantaneously thought about how angry my dentist was going to be when I walked in with a mouthful of new cavities, but then remembered it was sugar-free and that I was just going to end up with cancer instead from whatever awesome chemical they used instead of sugar. I drank the whole thing. It was sort of like hot melted coffee ice cream... not horrible, not coffee.

I spent a lot of time in the bathroom for the rest of the day. I'm just going to keep drinking my coffee black... like my soooouuuul.

Make Bread, Not Buns

That is a "loaf" of Fast White Bread from the Joy of Cookingthat is obviously not quite a loaf. You see, I've never actually made yeasted bread that wasn't the infamous No Knead Bread, being slightly overwhelmed by the kneading process. Now that I have a powerful mixer with an enormous dough hook, it's less intimidating. Nevertheless, I apparently didn't understand that Bread Dough Does Not Act Like Cake Dough. It doesn't melt down and even out in the oven. No sir. It comes out looking like butt cheeks. Like butt cheeks though, I was able to sandwich things between it. Well, slices of it. Okay, I'm just going to stop writing now. I'm "learning" about wine. Yep.

Beans and Greens, Good for Your Heart

When I was vegetarian, Progresso Lentil Soup was one of my dietary staples. It wasn't that expensive (as far as filling processed food meals go), and it was tasty, mostly due to its high salt content. I've tried making lentil soup a few times before, and it never matched up to the Progresso, probably because if I couldn't actually bring myself to put that much salt in the pot as I cooked it. It's like how cooking scrambled eggs was for me for a long time - it wasn't until Joytold me a few scrambled eggs used a quarter stick of butter to taste the way I liked that I got brave enough to use it all. Yikes.

Still, salt is a different animal than butter (which makes everything better), and I still hesitate to go crazy with it. Going back to Joyyielded a great idea to spruce up my soup: bacon. Bacon makes everything better (like butter)! I actually had some leftover bacon in my fridge from the incident, so I chopped it up and threw it in my soup. An hour later, I was slurping up wonderously salty, smoky, tasty lentil soup, and I didn't even have to put much salt in myself. I was a little worried that I forgot to rinse my lentils, but I don't think any rocks or weird grit got through. The recipe yielded something like eight monstrous bowls of soup, and given the cost of the materials, it's way cheaper (and possibly better) than the Progresso of lore.

The lovely spinach on top came from Z's garden, which is growing spinach faster than we can eat it. I'm going to have to do something with it soon before it all dies or gets eaten by insects.

I wonder if the bacon in my soup negates the truthfulness of my title. Hrm.

My Corkd Reviews

I don't know much about wine. It used to give me headaches, but I think I drank enough of it to build up my natural resistance to the sulfites (or maybe the alcohol, who knows) so that I can imbibe in peace. Normally when I go out I'll trust Z to make my wine selection (and there is only one per meal, as I'm a lightweight who can't build an alcohol tolerance), as he knows my tastes when it comes to the stuff better than I do; even so, oftentimes I'll just go with beer as it's familiar and predictable and I generally know what's good and what's not.

I decided at some point I wanted to learn about wine, and this has been going on for a while now, except I haven't learned anything aside from which wines in the $3-5 range are happily drinkable (you want Bull's Blood from Trader Joe's and the Big Kahuna from Fresh & Easy... if you're in search of whites, you're on your own), which while important in many ways doesn't quite qualify me as anything close to a connoisseur. I love port and swear by Warres Warrior as my favorite affordable port (Morgado from Trader Joe's is great as a cheaper alternative); I had a 40-yr old Graham's once and it really was fantastic. Otherwise, everything else falls into the drinkable and icky categories, and I've never actually had a wine experience worth remembering. I want to figure out what the fuss is about, so I'm trying to build up the rudimentary knowledge to get there. I want to be able to choose my own red wine to drink with my steak.

Important, somewhat telling confession: I was straightedge for 21 years and vegetarian for six. Yep.

Anyway, after reading a lot of not-quite-useful information, I figured my best plan of attack would be to just keep drinking stuff, except I would keep a log of what I drank so that a) I could remember if it was good or bad; b) I would pay more attention while drinking. I've started a log at corkd (and I have another one at wine log but the interface isn't as pretty), so feel free to check it out and see what I've been tasting. This is probably going to be slow-going, as I have trouble spending more than $10 (sometimes it's hard to even spend $5, which is funny because I will easily spend that much on a 12 oz bottle of good beer) on a bottle, and I don't start a new bottle until the one I've been drinking before has gone bad (since I can't finish a whole bottle before it goes bad - how pathetic is that?).

Cheers!

Sally Lunn Bread and the Dangers of Overmixing

While poking through my Joy of Cookinglooking for something to bake (and an excuse to use my new mixer) with limited ingredients on hand, I came across a recipe for Sally Lunn Bread, which contains nothing more than sugar, fat, flour, eggs, milk, and a pinch of salt: things I try to have in my pantry at all times. It actually sounded really bland, but two and a half years ago I actually was in Bath, home of the apparently famous Sally Lunn's, which I seem to recall being toted as the "oldest house in Bath" or something. We were escorted to some frou-frou, overcrowded tea room and ordered the standard afternoon tea meal-esque thing - tea and a Sally Lunn Bun, served with tea and Devonshire clotted cream (which I still crave every now and then) and cinnamon butter. In all honestly I have no recollection of how good or not good this thing was, so I'm guessing it was just something that made me less hungry for maybe two hours or so.

Anyway, I tried making this at my house and I learned a few things. First, if you're going to make sweetened butter (yes, I tried making cinnamon butter), you're going to want to sift your sugar or else it's going to be all lumpy and ugmo-spreading. I never sift anything, somewhat because I'm a lazy bastard about that, but mostly because I don't actually own a sifter. I think that would stop you from sifting too, but if you have a sifter, you should sift your powdered sugar before you make sweetened butter.

Second, don't walk away from your mixer while it's mixing a cake (or muffins, or anything really) to go have an IM conversation with someone. Overmixing is bad. It makes things un-fluffy and dense and unappetizing. Overmixing is hard to do when you don't have a mixer - you just combine everything until there's not dots of flour left and then you STOP.

So my Sally Lunn cake ended up slightly bricklike, and the cinnamon butter is still sitting in my fridge waiting for me to sledge it on to something, and I ate the cake with some butter smudged onto it for breakfast for a few days but Ralph-dog got about half of it. He digs the overmixing, but I swore to him, and I'm swearing to you, dear readers, that I am going to use my mixer more conscientiously from now on.

Oven Fire

Yes, there was an actual FIRE in my oven. No, I didn't do it. Yes, all the alarms in my apartment went off. No, the dogs did not shit themselves. Yes, there was smoke everywhere. No, I didn't eat all that bacon by myself.

I apparently need to buy some rimmed baking sheets.

For what it's worth: Simple Green, some dish soap, some baking soda work, and good old elbow grease works wonders for getting crud off your oven floor.

The Mixer Test

I tested out my fancypants new mixer(thanks again, Z) for the first time by making a batch of a classic - basic brownies. I got the recipe out of the Kitchen Aid Great Baking and Morebook that Z's mom got me for Christmas (it was actually a happy coincidence), which details step-by-step exactly at what speed and for how long to run your Kitchenaid mixer while baking things (apparently, they're convinced their mixers take half the time of other mixers and whatnot). Being the sort of person who's a stickler for such exact instructions, I followed them to the letter and they turned out the best brownies I've ever made. I wonder if letting the machine decimate the eggs and butter and sugar into fluffy goodness really makes that big of a difference... and now I'm never going to know otherwise because I'm convinced these Kitchenaid folks do not screw around! Super-fudgey, awesome chewy brownies. Okay, they were actually a bit sweet for me, but I now know how to achieve my favorite brownie texture in the universe. I gave them away to avoid getting cavities (I might already have some, as I haven't been to the dentist in three years or so, but that's another story). More mixer experiments are sure to come.

To test out Z's brand new food processor(I have the same one without the nifty wide-mouth feed tube), we made a batch of latkes. Well, mostly, I made a batch of latkes because Z was helping a touring Japanese cyclist who hadn't had a tune-up since he started his trip with a new bike in Canada three months ago. Yosuke, best of luck and we hope you make it to Tierra del Fuego in one piece and well-fed! Frying latkes is a lot of fun, though I forgot how fast potatoes turn a sickly pink color after you shred them.

In a final meal recommendation, the Broccoli Soup with Cheddar from Epicurious is really good. You might want to cut the stock a little. I have this 2-lb block of Tillamook sharp cheddar (yes, from Costco), and broccoli was on sale at Whole Foods, and I really wanted ONE of my cookbooks to have some directions for me to mix it together to make some cream-laden cheesy soup, but alas - I had to turn to the internet.

Next up: adventures in herb growing (culinary herbs, silly), more mixer fun, and more complaining about trying to cook through all of my cookbooks.

Holiday Food

Christmas came and went, and nary a blog entry was written, even though I finished shopping the night after I wrote my procrastination post predicting gloom and doom. To prepare for that night of furious internet shopping, I made Dduk Bok-kee with a recipe from Slashfood. Now, to be honest, I've been buying these little rice cake things for almost two years now, though I never called them anything but "rice cakes" (even though they bear no resemblance to the styrofoamy nightmares of my grade-school lunches), and I've always cooked them the same way - either dumped in soup or fried in some peanut oil with soy sauce with a healthy few squirts of sriracha or chili-garlic sauce. Although pretty tasteless on their own, they are awesomely chewy with a smooth, meaty texture and easily take on the flavors of whatever you're cooking them in. I had no idea of their place or origin in culinary world, and decided to do some investigating last week since I didn't feel like making soup or my generic fry-dish.

Apparently, in Korean, these rice cakey things are called duk, or dduk (the "dd"sound is one that is beyond my comprehension level, so don't ask me). Us Chinese folks apparently eat them too, but I didn't find a name that I could remember. Lots of Asian-folk eat them around the new year, and in Korea they're served as comfort food in dishes like Dduk Bok-kee, which is what I made. Spicy, sweet, chewy - how can you go wrong? You can go find dduk in the refrigerated section of your local Asian market. I'm itching to make some with fish balls instead of beef, which is apparently another traditional way of serving them.

In other news, I made my grandma biscotti for Christmas, using a recipe from Joy of Cooking(apparently she hasn't touched any of the presents we've bought for her in the last five years or so, so a perishable favorite food seemed like a wiser investment). They turned out surprisingly well, though I found that Joy's recommended bake time of 10 minutes on each side after the initial slicing was waaaay too much, as my little dudes started burning.

A few nights ago I made Cream of Spinach soup from Joy and found it to be pretty lacking. Admittedly, I used frozen spinach and I didn't puree it all the way since I'm not a fan of totally pureed soups (and I wanted to test out the cheap immersion blender I found in my cabinet and it wasn't very... efficient). However, after letting it sit for a few days and then sprinkling a pile of parmesan on it, I have to say it's actually pretty good.

In Christmas news, my family must think I'm an alcoholic because I got wine stoppers and a cocktail shaker. My youngest sister got me a book about cooking seafood, I kidnapped another cookbook from my mom's dollar-bin books cabinet (don't ask), Z's mom got me silicone baking sheets and two more cookbooks, and Z got me The Mixer. I have the best boyfriend ever. Lots of baking to come in 2008!

Last Week's Projects

I'm a terrible procrastinator. It's T-minus seven days until Christmas, and I currently have in my possession half of a present for one person on my list. My list is ten people long. I have a package coming in the mail on Thursday which will take care of two more people on the list, so officially I have a quarter of my Christmas shopping done with seven days to go. Every year, this last week or so before Christmas becomes a completely stressful time that I could have easily avoided were I not such a terrible procrastinator. Last year I got Amazon Prime a week before Christmas to get everything where it needed to be on time; this year, I'm trying to figure out how to get $100 worth of stuff from a site so that I can qualify my order for free two-day shipping (somehow, Amazon does not have everything I need).

What the hell am I doing writing a blog entry, you ask? Procrastinating, of course. What was I doing yesterday? Falling down a mountain repeatedly on a snowboard. The day before? Oh, playing video games and cleaning my apartment. I'm awful. We're going to keep this one short, so I can actually attempt to do some internet shopping and place some orders because I am terrified of going anywhere near a mall this time of year. My desperate last minute shopping will be done in private to preserve my own sanity, thank you very much.

A short sidenote which will surely become a more lengthy blog entry in the future: I've figured out I have this problem. I have a bad case of completism. If you give me a cookbook, I get this awesomely stupid idea that I want to cook everything in it. This is why I keep making things from Joy of Cooking even though I have a pile of other cookbooks, which I didn't even want to buy because I haven't cooked everything from all of the cookbooks I have. I have a lot of problems.

Anyway, I made a Kale and Potato Gratin from Joy on Monday night, which didn't turn out so well. I'm not sure what happened but the potatoes on top of it never cooked through, even after an hour in the oven. I gave those to Ralphy and ate the rest of it and it was all right. No pictures, because I also found out my camera was dead. Oops.

On Wednesday night I made Snickerdoodles, also from Joy. I think I left them in the oven a little too long. Also, when they say to space those things 2.5-inches or so apart on the sheet, they are not fucking around! I had a batch of hexagonal cookies. They had so much butter in them that I calculated the per-cookie butter amount, which was 1/18 stick of butter per cookie, so a breakfast of four cookies (yes, I eat cookies for breakfast sometimes [and the rest of the time I eat organic omega-3 poop-city fiber cereal]) is 2/9 of a stick of butter, which is kind of a lot, I think.


On Thursday I made fried rice (yes, I followed the recipe from Joy, that's how incompetent I am at being Chinese, plus I have the aforementioned completism problem) with leftover rice from the Keema Alu. It was kind of gross (partially because I didn't use enough scallions, since I was picking them out of Z's garden and he doesn't have very many so I didn't want to pick them all), so I doused it with soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and sriracha, and it was marginally better but still gross. I guess I need to work on that one.

This week, I'm not letting myself cook until I'm done with my Christmas shopping. At this rate, you might not hear from me again until next year.

Pumpkin Pecan Sour Cream Muffins

I'd first heard of sour cream muffins about a year ago while flipping through Z's recipe file, a hand-scrawled collection of xerox copies he made when someone was paying him to bake food many years back. Sour cream mixed with baked goods sounded pretty awful to me, though Z assured me you couldn't taste the sour at all in the finished product and all it did was provide a wonderfully fluffy texture. He tried making me a batch so I could see how awesome they were, but in some awesome ironic twist he forgot to put the sour cream in and we ended up with a pile of bricked muffins that we threw at the dogs.

Fast forward to a few days ago: the 3-lb vat of sour cream from Costco was still unopened and taking up space in my fridge, and I decided to try out this sour cream muffin idea. My good old Joy of Cookinghad a recipe for them, and while I was thinking of what else I could put in my muffins my eyes scanned over to the pumpkin muffins in the next column. I had canned pumpkin puree and the optional pecans... and voila, muffin idea. It was a basic add-wet-to-dry baking process after that (except I failed to see that the batter made 16 normal-sized muffins and instead ended up with 12 giant ones), and 20 minutes later, I pulled some orangey muffins out of the oven.

Taste-wise they could have been a bit more wiley - a bit of extra cinnamon would have easily done the trick. Texturally they were most definitely fluffy, at which point I realized I actually like denser muffins. Who would have thunk it?

As an additional baking note, they start tasting weird after about four days when left unrefrigerated. I made them Thursday night and the one I had this afternoon was kind of off tasting, so I gave the rest to Ralph. He's a pretty well-fed dog. Maybe I'll give him the rest of the sour cream too.

Keema Alu

I'm not quite sure how, but I almost lost an eye eating this dish. I was sitting at my table, flipping through the Joy of Cooking looking for some dessert possibilities, when my right eye got a little allergy-related itch, as is pretty usual for this time of year when the brown cloud of dust and doom settles over Phoenix. I took off my glasses to rub my eye and was greeted with a searing pain which caused me to immediately tear uncontrollably, and I stupidly kept rubbing my eye a little more before sprinting five feet over to the skin and splasing the coldest water you can get from a Phoenix tap into my puffy-feeling eyeball. This made it feel worse, and I couldn't even open my eye enough to see out of it (you take all the vision you can get when you're almost legally blind without glasses), so I washed my hands with soap and water to hopefully get whatever jalapeno pepper remnants were on my hands off while shutting my eye as tightly as I could, and continued splashing. My shirt sleeves were soaked at this point, so I took off my shirt and stuck my whole head in the sink, trying to run the water directly into my eye. I've known people who've had pepper-related issues (mostly genitalia-related, but there were some eye problems) before so I wasn't afraid of going blind or anything, but holy motherfucker! It hurt! The running water didn't seem to do much, so I went to the freezer, got an ice cube, and jammed that onto my eye, which actually did seem to make it burn less. After alternating that with the running water for five minutes, I returned to my now-lukewarm meal and finished eating.

Lesson learned: wash your hands really well after you deal with hot peppers. I thought I had, but apparently I missed a spot. I guess it takes this sort of accident to make someone an obsessive-compulsive hand washing freak.

The keema alu (hey! look at the cool Indian food glossary here! It means ground meat and potatoes) was the second Indian dish I've made from Joy of Cooking and while it's not quite as good as the Cauliflower and Potato Curry, it's definitely an easy, solid midweek meal. The only problem I ran into was the liquid never cooking off like the recipe said it should; I don't know if I put in too much tomato juice or if the beef was simply more fatty than it should have been. I used 15% ground beef from Whole Foods since it was on sale for $3.49/lb; the 7% ground beef was considerably more expensive at $7.99/lb (ow! half the fat, twice the price!). Anyhow, I fished it all out of the pot with a slotted spoon and that was that. The other minor problem was not opening the ziplock bag for my giant 20-lb bag of rice correctly... it doesn't have a functioning zip-lock anymore and is held closed by painter's tape. Oops. And finally, I only got rid of 3/4 lb of potatoes. I still have a crapload of potatoes to figure out how to use. Maybe I should just make a potato gun.

Apple Crisp

After a week of eating nothing but turkey, stuffing, squash, mashed potatoes, and pecan pie I'm back to having to cook, which I'm actually glad about since there's only so much eating-related repetition a girl can handle. I think I also wanted to give the kitchen a break since the untimely death of my food processor deserved a moratorium of sorts; yes, I actually was depressed about it all week, especially since I'd lost my voice and couldn't call Kitchenaid's technical support department without rasping and coughing uncontrollably. I decided to give the bowl a last washing in the dishwasher and put it back on the motor unit until I could get a new bowl (the food processor sits on the countertop, since it's by far my favorite appliance and all), and this morning when I put it on again, the locking mechanism in the handle happily snapped back into what resembled the right place. I gingerly pressed the "pulse" button and off it went whirring happily.

Yes, time to start cooking again. Thank you, food gods. Other gods: yes, I love inanimate objects more than most of my fellow human beings.

A previous entry details my, uhm, issues with shopping at Costco, and in a wild, child-shoving, cart-ramming pre-Thanksgiving Costco bonanza, I "somehow" acquired a whopping 20 lbs of potatoes (of which I have 15 left), a dozen "transitional" Granny Smith apples (of which I have six left), a brick of cream cheese, and a huge tub of sour cream. These things have defined shelf lives, and while I don't like to waste, I also am a cheap bastard fascinated with being able to buy 3 lbs of cream cheese for under $5.

Today's use objective was the apples. I used four for my Thanksgiving stuffing, and then I tried to use them as work breakfast food but after two attempts with their unbelievably tough, waxy skin (which resulted in some awesomely bloody gums, which probably signals a need to go to the dentist, but let's not talk about that), I decided they'd be better served as baking apples. A look through my trusty Joy of Cooking while on the shitter this morning (I'm more than ten posts into this blog now and now feel exposed enough to give you such wonderfully revealing facts about my meal-planning methods) gave me a recipe for Apple Crisp, which looked easy enough and would use up all of my remaining apples.

Apple crisp is a pretty straightforward endeavor according to Joy - it involves peeling and chopping up about 2.5 lbs of apples, putting some cinnamony pastry dough on top of it (happily made in the food processor), then throwing the whole thing in the oven. I thought the dough would flatten out a little but it ends up as little crumby things; I took it out after the recommended 50 min of baking (my apple juices were bubbling), let it cool down a little, and found out my apples had been reduced to applesauce. Oops.

It's still pretty tasty.

The Pie We Did Not Eat for Thanksgiving

I had a long entry written about all the food we made for Thanksgiving, as well as a list of all the injuries, casualties (the work bowl for my beloved Kitchenaid food processor), and arrests (yes, someone spent in a jail due to citations for "dog at large" and petting a horse) incurred in making our feast, but the computer crashed while I was writing the entry, and it wasn't saved because I wasn't using the Blogger entry form because of shoddy networking problems here. As someone who works with technology (I almost wrote "this shit") for a living, I should know better, but alas. I'm not writing it again.

I'm sick, tired, and a bit disgruntled right now. The (pictured) pecan pie I made that we didn't eat for Thanksgiving had a filling that looked like oozy brains. The crust was the last thing my food processor made before the bowl-locking mechanism on the bowl handle broke, thus rendering the entire machine inoperable without extreme hackery. It was, however, the first pie crust I ever made, and quite good aside from its uhm... "rustic" (aka I had NO IDEA what I was doing - it was a push-into-the-pan dough) appearance up top. We had the pie that Z's boss's neighbor (get that?) made, which was another pecan pie that had better filling but my crust tasted better and had a better texture. Or so I thought.

Thanksgiving wasn't bad by any means. The Butternut Squash and Creamed Spinach Gratin is on the must-make-again list even though it's a prep nightmare, and Morningstar's vegetarian breakfast sausage patties are a fantastic replacement for the real thing as far as stuffing with sausage and apples is concerned. Z brined the turkey overnight and it turned out moist and tasty. There are a lot of leftovers, which is a good thing because I don't actually feel like cooking for another few days, mostly because I can't really taste food or smell anything right now due to being sick.

All right, back to drinking tea and wallowing in my season-changing misery. It finally dropped to a reasonable fall temperature in Phoenix (it's a crisp 65 degrees right now) and my body is taking its sweet time to adapt. Sigh.