28 posts tagged “food”
So about this time last year I was first trimester pregnant. We'd just moved into a new apartment two weeks before and basically I'd spent most of the time wrapped in a comforter sitting on a chair trying not to hurl, weakly telling everyone where to put things in my kitchen. Then we went to a friend's wedding and our flight was delayed so I think our annual corned beef and cabbage dinner wasn't a big deal. I don't even remember if I made it? I know I didn't do it the day of. I didn't care. I felt like crap.
This year I have a six month old baby. You'd think that might curb any plans we'd make for a big St Patrick's Day. Ha! No one ever said I was smart! If I were, that would make these entries a lot less funny to read. Hey, remember when she made the Guinness pie and sprayed beer all over the kitchen? Ha! Awesome! Anyway, this year's preparations have been a lot less disastrous, surprisingly.
First on the menu is the usual corned beef and cabbage, using the Tyler Florence brine and a head of cabbage, a packet of baby carrots and a whole white onion. Putting that together went surprisingly well, other than I discovered someone had put my container of allspice berries away instead of recycling it so I used the ground stuff. Hopefully that won't make much difference. bringing it last night went smoothly and putting it in the crock pot also not a big deal. I had visions of losing a finger while chopping up the veg but thankfully that one didn't happen. When I was home for lunch it smelled lovely.
Next up are the roasted potatoes. This is a Rachael Ray recipe I make where basically you chunk up the potatoes, toss them with olive oil, salt and rosemary, then roast them. I'm a-thinking these won't be a problem. They usually aren't.
It isn't St Pat's if I don't make a Guinness recipe, and this year there are two. First up, Guinness chocolate cupcakes, found here. I did some searching for recipes that didn't include sour cream, because I didn't remember having any, but a quick check of the fridge proved me wrong so all systems go! Things went together without me spraying my kitchen with Guinness- of course, now that my kitchen's got dark wood cabinets, sigh- and they went into the cupcake cups. The recipe said makes two dozen. I figured that mean two dozen if you're stingy and fill the cups halfway so I set out 18 cups. Imagine my surprise when I filled those 18 cups. I mean filled, like when I'd set the cup down- I should probably mention I have silicone cupcake cups here so you're not confused- it would leak a little. Huh. I filled the other six cups and... still had enough to fill two little pot pie tins. Wow. That actually was a blessing in disguise because the recipe calls for cream cheese frosting and last night when the husband was trying to get the baby to sleep we ate one of them and tried to decide how to frost them. Cream cheese was quickly discarded. Just putting whipped cream on them became the decision, but this morning I thought hmmm, what about chocolate whipped cream? That became "How about I make whipped cream with a shot of mint Bailey's?" Ding ding ding! That, I do believe, is our winner. of course, we'll see when I get to that point how tired I am.
Recipe number two is this one for Guinness bread with molasses. It went together easily while I was home, it came out looking nice, we'll see how it tastes. After all, the Irish soda bread looked nice too... Oh well, we have two loaves of rye from a deli here in town in case of epic fail.
This year's fun story was the Protestant orange jello. Since having the baby, my work schedule has changed and the husband finds himself, more often than not, making (or, more to the point, buying) dinner. Because of that, my idea of what's in our pantry is a little fuzzy. That's why I thought we had vodka in the freezer, but when I pulled it out after pouring the hot water in the jello, I discovered we had vanilla vodka. Ah well, it looks like we'll be having Protestant dreamsicle jello.
More details later, after dinner's been eaten.
Uh yeah. It's been a while since the last post. I kinda gave up on the book a month challenge because February and March kicked my ass, personally. Many of you know that I've started a new craft project, aka "getting knocked up" and that's slowed me down and killed my concentration. Add to that getting the flu in February, followed by moving not long after and really, I haven't been able to do much.
Moving while pregnant was a humbling experience. There was very little I could do, between the exhaustion and the chemicals involved in cleaning up, so there were days where my friends would come in, tuck me into bed or a chair and say "Tell us what to do." While I greatly appreciate our friends and family, because moving wouldn't have happened without them, the aftermath has been a little awkward.
Take our kitchen, for example. The prevailing attitude when we moved in was "I'll just put this wherever and you can sort it out later." Things were placed approximately where they should go and left at that. As such I'm still not sure where half our things are and some of our cupboards make a game of Jenga look like a piece of cake. We're working on this slowly but surely, and I'd like to go over a plan we have.
In the old house we had a corner cabinet where we stored food. It was really deep and had a shelf in the middle. On each layer was a lazy susan. Every so often I would go through the lazy susan and inventory what was on there so I'd know what I was working with, because I had a tendency to think if I couldn't see it we didn't have it. It helped a lot, but I often lamented that it was limited to being in the house and wouldn't it be nice if I had a palm pilot to keep track of what we had? Well, in organizing the freezer portion of the fridge I decided that hey, maybe it could do with an inventory too while I was sorting. What to do with it, though?
The Husband and I have decided we're going to create a Google doc for our pantry inventory. That way it'll be easy for both of us to access and edit, and should we decide at work "This is what we're having for dinner!" then we can look at the doc and see what we'll need to pick up at the store, instead of going home to figure it out and losing momentum. It'll take some work, and we'll really have to keep on it, but hopefully it'll work for us and help us out. Stay tuned to find out if we're making it work or not.
I should be writing about the book I read for the Book a Month group I joined. I read the book and finished it last weekend. Instead, I'm going to talk about last night's dinner.
Chili is a personal thing, I think. Everyone had their own recipe and there's so much debate about what goes in there- beans? No beans? Peppers? Cheese? Even in my family, my gran has one chili recipe, my mother has another and I even have my own. My gran's is actually my grandfather's, it's a recipe he brought home from the army. There's even two secret ingredients and if I told you, she'd kill me. One, though, I'm pretty sure she came up with because I'm guessing the army didn't have them back then. I don't know. My mother's chili recipe came from a lady type magazine, either Good Housekeeping or BH&G, I'm a thinking. I remember being in college when my mother tried it and we all loved it so that's the one she stuck with. When I moved away I missed my mother's chili so she sent me the recipe. It's great, I printed off the e-mail and it's quirky, just like my mom. I love it. I thought about making it last night when I made chili for dinner but, you know, the Husband loves my chili so that's what I went with.
My chili recipe came from a recipe group I was in back in grad school. It's called Autumn Afternoon Chili and the recipe looks something like this:
1 lb hamburger
2 small shallots
1/2 t crushed red pepper
16 oz can tomato sauce
salt
pepper
chili powder
2 t chives
basil to taste
garlic or garlic salt
2 C grated cheese
However, over years of evolution it now looks like this:
2 lbs hamburger (because this recipe makes nowhere near enough)
one palmful dried minced onion (apparently I am Rachael Ray, with the palmful there)
two shakes of cayenne pepper (I hate crushed red pepper. Cayenne gives it a better kick)
2 16 oz cans of tomato sauce and one can of diced tomatoes (we just added the diced tomatoes last night because I decided it needed more texture)
kosher salt
pepper
a palmful of chili powder (the original recipe said "to taste". A palmful is my taste)
a palmful of basil, plus a couple shakes later
a couple shakes of garlic salt
just throw cheese in until it looks right. Note: this depends on the cheese.
The procedure is pretty much the same as the original recipe calls for, brown the ground beef with the salt, pepper, minced onion and basil, then drain the grease off. Dump in the tomato products and give it a stir. Add the remaining spices and stir some more. The cheese part gets a bit tricky. We never seem to have the same cheese in our fridge twice, so this part always changes. The cheese they recommend is Swiss and I will say, Swiss cheese does give it a good taste. It's good for giving a bit of bulk to the chili. Tastewise it's okay. Mozzarella is also super good and bulks the chili up a lot. Last night we had neither, so we threw in the last two fistfuls of a bag of taco cheese and that was okay.
Usually when there's chili there's one of three things- texas toast, cheddar biscuits or cornbread. We didn't have any texas toast in the freezer (whose house is this? There's pretty much always texas toast in the freezer at my house!) and I was too lazy to make cheddar biscuits (the Red Lobster kind, mmmmm!) so cornbread it was. Made from Jiffy mix. Brings back memories of being a kid and my mom making it after school for a snack. Last night's dinner tasted so good, and it was perfect for the cold windy night it turned out to be.
In response to bookishbiker's comment about wine from my last post...
So, wine. I wasn't always a wine person. When I started drinking I was too busy hitting the gin, or beer if I was feeling poor, to explore other options. After all, you needed to know something about wine to drink it. I did not want to put that much thought into getting my drinky drink on, so tom collinses it was! Flash forward about ten years to the recent past. Scene: Trader Joe's. The Husband and I are walking through the wine section and I am looking for interesting things in the center island, because if something were to catch my eye it would have to come home with me. I was dismayed because while they had interesting wines like Vinho Verde and the Honey Moon Viognier, there were a lot of bottles of white zin and chardonnay and merlot for cheap. I go off on a rant about how really, wines like that are the opiate of the masses and people who drink cheap white zin or chardonnay are really people who have no imagination and aren't adventurous and just want people to think they're sophisticated because oooh, I'm drinking wine, aren't I a hipster/it girl? After I stopped to take a breath the Husband pointed out that two wines over, some girl picked up a bottle of chardonnay, heard my screed and put down the bottle and slunk away. Then again, for that story there's also the time I stood there in Trader Joe's for fifteen minutes helping some guy pick out a bottle of wine that would go with his dinner. How did I get from college Drinky McDrunkerson to Wine Snob? Let me tell you.
Honestly, I am not knowledgeable about wine in the slightest. My tastes developed by trial and error and mostly were influenced by Trader Joe's, their fliers and in store wine tastings. I guess it started out from a love of spumante. It's sweet, it's bubbly and it goes with brunch, my favorite meal. My brunch enabling friend A (she who introduced me to the joy of bacon crack) got me hooked on Prosecco at brunch. Prosecco is a lot like spumante, sweet and bubbly. She got it at Trader Joe's. Normally when I got the Trader Joe's ad I went through and circled what looked interesting, so I'd remember to take a look at it in the store. When I looked I usually skipped the wine but after that I started looking and adding wines to the list. After all, TJ's is inexpensive enough that you can experiment with wine and not have to drop a bunch of money. Remember the movie Sideways? I had to try merlot because of the whole "I'm not drinking merlot!" bit. After trying a couple different varieties (Purple Moon comes to mind) I agreed- merlot is out. I finally hit a point where if I liked what I tried, I'd buy a couple bottles because it wasn't always in season. Then I started noticing TJ's had wine tastings, so I'd try to manipulate our trips so that we were there while they were going on. I asked a lot of questions of their wine guy- who was a really great guy and I really do have to credit him with my love of wine, too. Had he been a jerk I think my wine experimenting wouldn't quite have flourished and I wouldn't know the drop in the bucket of wine knowledge I have right now- and gradually learned a few things other than just what I like.
Rather than babble, let's go over what's in the wine rack right now.
* 1 bottle of Charles Shaw Merlot- okay, I know I said I was a wine snob, but Two Buck Chuck (which isn't two bucks in Ohio) makes for good mulled wine for our holiday party.
* A bottle of 2005 Menguante Garnacha, which was a gift from the aforementioned holiday party. I have no idea how it is, we haven't opened it yet, but it does say Carinena, which I have no idea what that means but I've had some great wines that say carinena, so I have high hopes for this one.
* A bottle of Bear's Lair Viognier. I really like viognier. Sweet but not too, crisp but not dry, it's a great light white wine. This isn't my usual viognier, I'm trying something new.
* A bottle of 2004 Charles Krug Cabernet Sauvignon. Also a holiday party gift. I like cabs, I'm a fan of full bodied reds, and a friend of ours who also loves wine invited me to bring it over so we could drink it, so I'm guessing this is going to be a good one.
* A bottle of Vinho Verde. I pretty much always have a bottle of this around. While at TJ's, my friend S and her husband J asked "Vinho Verde? As in, green wine?" Yes. The wine has a really green, grapey taste to it. It's a great non-sweet white wine and it's rather inexpensive. While at Jungle Jim's I saw a couple different vinho verdes and wondered how they compared to mine, but held off from buying half a dozen bottles to conduct research.
* A bottle of 2005 Abrazo del Toro that says Carinena on it. I bought this after tasting it at TJ's. It's a good red.
* A bottle of Tabor Hill Red Arrow Red table wine. Holiday party gift.
* A bottle of Conti Neri Valpolicella Classico. Another full bodied red I tasted at TJ's and loved.
Our open bottles: Black Mountain Malbec, which is one of my favorite wines, hands down. It's a read and it goes well with so much- steaks, chili, burgers, Mexican food, and best of all, chocolate. In fact, the day I tasted it at TJ's the wine guy was telling me what it went with and we lucked out because dinner was enchiladas and TJ's tiny chocolate cupcakes. It went well with everything and tastes great. In the fridge is a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Can't tell you which, I'm too lazy to get up and look. I will tell you that I am not so much a pinot grigio drinker because to me it's too dry, but TJ's had some thins summer I tried that was sparkling- normally pinot grigio isn't? Anyway, it was sparkling and that cut some of the dryness for me and I loved it. There's also an open bottle of Schmittsohne Reisling, because I like rieslings as well.
So there you go. Not an educated viewpoint, but at least the voice of trial and error.
There is a food mecca about two hours from our house, and that food mecca is Jungle Jim's. We have been talking about going there for a long time but never managed to make it down. There isn't a lot in that direction to see- although that's about to change, because they put an Ikea about 5 minutes from Jungle Jim's so we'll be down there all the time now- so we hadn't made it down there before now, but since we had the day off yesterday and I got paid last Friday we decided to make the trek down.
We met friends of ours, Q and B, for lunch at a nice Italian place called The Spinning Fork for lunch- tasty manicotti. I am truly a cheese whore. We refused dessert because come on, JJ's has to have samples, right? It's magic happy super food land! Other than a cinnamon apple walnut spread, we were sadly mistaken. Anyway, in preparation for our visit, we wiped the camera's memory card so we could take pictures as we ooohed and ahhhed over things. Headed in the door, the first thing we saw? A sign that said no pictures. Damn! I was tempted to draw pictures to go with this entry, but I am not that talented.
Anyway, the first thing that hit us were the carts. You know how most grocery carts are wire grid like things? Well, these carts were like SUVs. Like Target carts on steroids. The handles looked like they were designed by a team made up of people from Jeep and Oxo, they were thick and bumpy. I let the Husband push the cart while we wandered. Poor man. The first thing inside that we hit was the cheese section. There's a huge provlone that looks to be the size of a telephone pole in it's own glass case that they're aging. They had the cheese arranged by type, like cheddar and jack and swiss, but then they also had them arranged by country, France, Italy, Germany. There were cheeses I'd heard of, but never ever seen. You will probably see that phrase multiple times. We ended up with a smoked gouda cheese ball and some baby swiss for the Husband.
Next to the cheese was a stand full of butter. Oh wow. Tons of butter. Not Land o Lakes, but Presidente and fancy European butters. I was kind of surprised to not see Plugra, but hey.
After the butter we wandered the wine section. I am a picky wine ho and I have to say, I had to use all my strength to not come home with a case. Again, they were broken up by region with some sections of specific types. I was pleased to see they had some wines that we had at home. It made me feel like we were doing something right.
Next to the wine was the bakery. Oh my bakery. The fun thing was they had cakes and pies and things for sale by the piece, so the Husband went home with a piece of chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick. Yes. I debated what was in the case, and thought about bringing some of the fabulous looking fancy cakes home to put in the freezer until my birthday, but ended up with some whoopie pies, both chocolate and oatmeal. I love whoopie pies, but they're a pain to make so this was a super treat. The Husband also got a baguette, because he lurves baguettes. Next to the bakery was a little stage where an animatronic lion was dressed as Elvis giving musical performances. Um, yeah.
After the bakery we hit the meat department where it was like being on Top Chef. Duck? Check. Alligator? Check. Turducken? Check, and ew. They had a super sale on ground beef (boring, I know, but we need it) so I got some, as well as the boneless beef short ribs to make my cousin's chianti braised short rib recipe. We hadn't been able to find boneless ones anywhere here in town- everyone had bone in except for Whole Foods, who only had a small package and didn't have any more. Amazing, the amount of meat they had.
I think after meat we took a turn into the produce section- which, actually, I'd been wondering when we were going to get to that. Usually that's the first thing you pass when you're in the grocery store- and they had long aisles of stuff. Standard fare, really, but that didn't matter. We were entranced. I've been on a fruit kick lately so I picked a bunch of stuff up. One thing we got that made us laugh? Satsumas. Real satsumas, a la Doctor Who. Lovely.
The produce kind of spilled into the International section, because they put the fresh international produce next to the other produce and walking that aisle was, again, like being on Top Chef. Things I'd only heard of but never seen. Amazing. I should have taken notes.
I should mention, Q and B were doing their regular grocery shopping there so they set off on their own but periodically we would see them, like in the wine section where we peeked into each other's carts to see what the other might have missed, like the smoked gouda cheeseball or the chocolate covered cheesecake or the random blue soda. That was fun and led to a lot of back tracking.
Next to the international section was the seafood area, and so we detoured. In the center of the seafood area they have live fish aquariums. Not only for crab and lobster, but if I so desired I could have had my own fresh catch of tilapia or catfish or flounder. At first it was really cool, watching the tank of fish going nuts, but they kind of swarmed and freaked me out so we moved on. They also had a shellfish bar with, again, things I'd only seen on Top Chef.
We went back to the international food section to wander some more and found a bunch of cool stuff. Smarties for our friend who studied abroad for a semester and fell in love, Mexican Coke for the Husband, who loves Coke and was interested when he discovered in other countries they don't have a rule for what sugar you put in, so this Coke was made with cane sugar and it came in a bottle, and a crazy Mexican religious candle for our friend's crazy Mexican religious candle collection. We laughed about the little rooms to the side with various country themes- we called the Swedish room Little Ikea and B wanted to get a pair of the big fuzzy wooden shoe slippers in the Holland room. About that time, we were starting to think maybe we'd wandered enough, so even though we missed out on the frozen food section and I hadn't seen a durian yet, we checked out.
The check out was an experience in itself. Q and B got bacon and their check out person was of a faith that didn't allow them to handle pork. Never fear, she had paper towels for just such an occasion. The Husband had put our groceries on the belt indiscriminately, so I worried they wouldn't get bagged well but the checker, bless her, bagged everything the way I would have without my needing to say anything. Awesome!
All in all, it was a really great trip. It was totally worth it to see all the "mythical" food items that we'd never seen before. We're totally going to again when they have the Ikea open.
The Husband and I like hanging out with other married couples. We've sort of fallen into the habit of having dinner with our friends K and J once a month, either at our place or theirs. This month was our turn, so we had them over and I made chicken paprikash. K has a very Polish background and I grew up in a super Polish/Ukranian town, so we both know from hearty peasant food and have a great time talking about pierogis or kielbasa or other tasty things, so when I decided to make paprikash I was really playing to him. Especially when you consider J hates mushrooms.
The recipe I used was from a local food blogger. I'd made it once before and the Husband loved it. It's hearty, it makes a lot and it calls for a pint of sour cream. How can you go wrong with that? Ha ha ha. As has been mentioned before, I should have READ AHEAD!!! tattooed on my forearm. While I had made the recipe before, I totally forgot the "Let cook for one hour" step. Heh. When we got home from work I though oh, we have an hour, no problem. I had the Husband start with the mushroom, onion and garlic cooking and I cut up the chicken and tossed it with the flour and spices. I don't know why, but whenever I put something through a flour dredge it takes me twice as much flour as the recipe calls for and I never remember that so halfway through the dredging I had the obligatory "put more flour in the dish" moment while the Husband browned the chicken pieces. Somewhere in the middle of all that K and J showed up, so I informed them my lack of forethought meant they were going to have to wait for dinner.
Once dinner was simmering on the stove I did have my only moment of forward thinking and started on dessert. Dessert was chocolate cupcakes with melty centers, recipe taken from my page a day cupcake calendar. The recipe had you melt the chocolate and butter together, then let it cool. The cupcakes needed to cook for 20 minutes, then sit for five, then be served immediately, so I did the figuring and got everything ready to put them in the over when we sat down to dinner. That actually worked out well, and the Husband made the noodles to go with dinner while I was doing that, so we were just about ready to sit down to dinner when I realized I forgot the vegetables. Argh! I can not be organized!
Dinner went well. J picked out the mushrooms and handed them around to everyone. Everyone loved the paprikash and had second helpings, so I figure it was a success. J made a comment I hadn't even considered- chicken paprikash is a lot like beef stroganoff. There's a sour cream based sauce, chunks of meat, mushrooms, you eat it with noodles, relatively slow cooked, huh. Around the end of dinner the timer for the cupcakes went off so I opened the over door. They didn't look done so I muttered "stupid oven" and let them go for a few more minutes. About three minutes later, I realized oh! They're not supposed to be done! Crap! The cupcakes that were on the edges of the tray didn't have the melty centers, but the ones more toward the middle did. It didn't matter, everyone seemed happy and ate a bunch.
All in all, it was a nice dinner with friends. Right now I am debating adapting the recipe for the crock pot. That wouldn't be too hard, right? Ha! You know me!
I was shocked to see it's been two months since I updated this. Whoops! Well, I have high speed internet at home now, so maybe I'll be posting a little more now. After all, we're coming up on the holiday season, so that means plenty of crafty opportunities and hopefully plenty of posting.
Anyway, to ease back into it, tonight I made a pork roast. I had decided to do the 100 things in 1001 days, only I'm doing a mini version of it, 10 things in 101 days. One of the things on the list was to roast two for the following- a beef roast, a pork roast or a chicken. We happen to have all three in our freezer and I've been talking about doing a monthly roast, so I figured this was a great way of getting into it.
What I really wanted was a flavorful roast. I had a couple ideas in mind, like the Hawaiian pork roast my mom made when I was a kid, or maybe a nice herb crust, or maybe a cranberry orange pork roast. The Husband thought that maybe we'd been eating a lot of sweet things lately, so he suggested a different recipe from one of our usual suspects, Cooking Light, for mustard herb crusted pork. The original recipe called for a tenderloin and we had a top center loin roast, but we could work with that, right? This is usually where things go wrong for me.
Okay, so if the recipe was for a one pound pork tenderloin and we had a 2.1 pound pork roast, then I should double the coating part of the recipe, right? Well, it worked well for the mustard part of the recipe. That part was easy, coating the roast with a mixture of mustard, fennel and minced garlic. I don't think I really needed to double the bread crumb/parmesan part of the coating, though. I ended up getting rid of a lot of bread crumbs and I think the original recipe would have worked just fine. That was the easy part. The hard part was how the hell do I cook this roast? Obviously I can't cook a 2.1 pound roast like a 1 pound tenderloin, so what to do?
I'm a librarian. I did what I do best- research. How do you cook a pork roast? According to the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook- and, as an aside, you learn in library school that when you give someone an answer to a reference question, you should always begin your answer with "According to _source_ ..." and then give your answer. That lets the person asking the question know where you got your answer from and it may or may not be the absolute correct final answer, but it is what that particular authority says is the answer, so take that information and make what you will of it. Anyway, BH&G said that you should cook most pork at 325 until it reaches the internal temperature dictated by the cut of meat, which in this case was 155. The Rombauers disagreed. They said for my particular cut of pork, it was a good idea to start it at 450 for 10-15 minutes so that the roast would brown, then turn it all the way down to 250 and let it cook until it hit 155. Huh. I think I was looking for "Cook it this way" from cookbook number 1, then "Yeah, they're right. Cook it that way," from cookbook number two. The Gourmet cookbook refused to give me a definite answer and Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" gave me a headache- we have the first printing of the book, which has something wrong with it- there's a shadow printing type problem in the roast section, making it hard to read. Anyway, I figured the Rombauers wouldn't steer us wrong, right? Right? It helped that their method was similar to what I could read of Alton Brown, so that's the method I picked.
The roast cooked pretty much like it was supposed to- after about an hour I put the thermometer in and it read 146 and it took about ten, fifteen more minutes to get up to temperature, so I pulled it out and that's where I hit dilemma number two. Because I'd coated it so nicely, it didn't drip. We had maybe a quarter teaspoon of pan drippings. Crap. What now? Well, because I'm lazy, we had pork roast without sauce. I made my mother's "Double secret probation rice", which is really just minute rice with butter, boullion, minced onion and mushrooms, and some mixed vegetables. The Husband and I liked how the pork came out. It was juicy. It wasn't overly tender, but it wasn't horribly chewy either. What surprised me was how much you could taste the fennel, and how not so much you could taste the mustard. Fennel always reminds me of cheap frozen pizzas of my youth, because the sausage on those pizzas always had fennel in it, so that was a bit disconcerting. All in all, I think it ended up nicely and we're both looking forward to having pork sandwiches this week.
Last night I was going to make pumpkin gorgonzola pasta but we were out of evaporated milk. It's been cooler outside lately, so I was in a pasta mood. Tuna noodle casserole? Nope, we're out of tuna. (How could we be out of tuna?) What DID we have? We had the makings for orecchiette with pancetta and peas.
This recipe intrigued me, probably because it called for saffron. The only thing I knew about saffron was that it was a very expensive spice that turned things orange and I think they use it in Spanish cooking? Looking it up online, I understand why it's so expensive. Saffron threads come from crocuses (croci?). Each crocus has a couple of the red saffron threads and it takes about 150 crocuses to yield one gram of saffron. Wow. Now I know why it's so expensive. Not at Trader Joe's, apparently, because I think I was expecting to pay an arm and a leg and my 1 gram bottle wasn't that expensive.
Now that I'm thinking about it, most of the makings for dinner came from Trader Joe's- the alfredo sauce, the pancetta and the saffron. You'd think the orecchiette would have come from there too, but I had to do some searching for that and found it at Mal*Wart, of all places. The peas? Grocery store.
This was another of those "5 ingredients or less, 15 minutes or less" meals and again, they didn't lie. While waiting for the water to boil I chopped the pancetta, then cooked it with the saffron while the pasta boiled. Normally when I drain pasta, I have one of those little hand drainer things that you hold against the pot, but every time I'd tip the pot and shake it, I'd get more water out. I ended up having to go and get the colander out because some of the orecchiette, which is shaped like little ears (hence the name), suctioned itself to the sides of the pot. I'm used to shells, which you can shake the water out of with no problem. I'm not entirely certain why you had to fry the saffron with the pancetta, but it did dye the alfredo sauce a pale yellow when I added it.
Normally when you add the sauce to the pancetta, you would add the peas, but the Husband hates peas so I did those in the steamer and just added them to mine. I tasted the pasta, sauce and pancetta, then I tasted the finished product with peas added in. I think it was better with the peas- the peas not only gave it a bit of color, but their sweetness cut through the almost too salty pancetta. That made me worry. How would the Husband just like the sauce, meat and noodles without that buffer there? Unfortunately, for him it's a texture issue, so no dice getting him to eat them. I had my dinner with a glass of viognier- Saint someone from Trader Joe's, and in case you're curious yes, I do buy all my wine there- and it went pretty well. The first time I had a glass of the wine I thought it had a little too much of an afterbite but it went really well with this dish. I think I need to take a wine class, though, because when I looked up viognier it said that it goes well with spicy dishes, strong flavors and fresh fruit. Well, maybe the pancetta gave dinner a strong flavor?
When the Husband got home I explained what dinner was. He was enthusiastic about it, mainly because the kitchen smelled like cooked pancetta. I warned him that I thought dinner needed the peas to balance the flavor. He enjoyed dinner, but agreed that it was really salty. His thought was that maybe next time I make it, I add some pearl onions to his. Interesting thought. I think they'd probably do what the peas did for me, except for giving it color. Hm.
Final say- we'll be doing this one again. It'll be interesting to try adding pearl onions and see what the Husband thinks of how it effects the taste. Recipe number three gets a thumbs up.
First off, hello everyone who's joining us because I made the This Is Good! Imagine my surprise at that one! Very cool! Hopefully I'll get to reply to everyone's comments soon. And now, the continuation of Hell's Kitchen. Okay, not really, but here's what happened the third week of cake class.
As mentioned before, D and I were a bit apprehensive about making clowns. First off, that's a LOT of frosting. Who in their right mind feeds a kid that much frosting? Second, clowns are creepy. While we were discussing the clown class, D kept bringing up "famous" clowns from history- Stephen King's It, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald, Shakes the Clown- and saying there was no way she was going to make a clown. I was a little concerned because I was taking the cake in to work and the day after cake class we were having a reception for our new coworker, who is getting married on Saturday. What better way to say "Yay! You're getting married!" than a cake with freaky freaky clowns on it? This was not looking good.
D came over to my house Tuesday night with her cakes- unbroken this time, she'd made them Monday night and bought the huge storage bags to carry them in- and we had dinner. No drinking this time. Well, okay, I had a glass of wine while I made frosting, but that was it. We looked at the class requirements while eating dinner and discovered that all we needed to make was one batch of thin frosting to cover a cake. How did we get that lucky? Well, this might squick some of you out, but our cake class teacher told us that if you make buttercream frosting with water, it'll last in the fridge a long time. By long time, we're talking probably the month's worth of classes. So last week after we frosted our cakes, we combined the leftovers and discovered we had just about the required amount to frost a cake. Rock star! We also needed some medium consistency frosting, which we again had from last week, and we'd need a little bit of thin, which we skimmed from the leftover frosting after D frosted her cake with the fresh stuff. Good deal. Cake frosting went well this time around, although I'm not sure what D is doing wrong. Her cake had bald patches again. Actually, I think I have an idea of what D is doing wrong. The teacher told us that when we frost, we should cover the top of the cake with frosting, then the sides of the bottom layer, then the sides of the top layer. Then you take the frosting knife and hold it against the side of the cake and slowly spin it on the turntable, periodically stopping to wipe the frosting off your knife. Once that's done, hold the knife on the cake and again turn the turntable, smoothing out the top. This is what I do. I'm not sure what D does, I think it's a random variation on this, but when she gets done it looks like she's just slapped frosting on the cake and tried to smooth it out. There were still spots where you could see cake through the frosting. I don't know what to tell her.
Anyway, we showed up to cake class Wednesday night and learned that it wasn't going to be all scary clowns, we were also going to learn a couple flowers and some leaves as well. We learned shell borders and big stars, and how to twist your wrist while making big stars to give you pretty flowers. I wasn't happy with my shells. In the picture, they show you these shells with a nice tapering point at the end. Mine looked like their back ends exploded. The teacher said they looked good, though, and pointed out that if I was making a border those ends would get covered up anyway. After those, we put on the dot tips and made big dots- for faces- and small dots. I totally would have made a bunch of grapes, but we couldn't get the tub of purple coloring open. Seriously. No one could get the tub of purple coloring open. This could possibly have been because D and I both tried after we'd been practicing frosting techniques, so we had frosting hands, and we probably greased it up good for everyone with clean hands. Oh well. Cake covered in grapes, I will make you, mark my words. We also learned how to take the big dot and turn it into a heart, although most of our hearts looked a little odd and our teacher said it actually worked a little better to turn the hearts into shamrocks. D pointed out that her hearts looked more like women with big thighs crossing their legs. Again I have to ask, how the hell do you get the points at the ends of these things? I swear, the people taking pictures for the decorating books get in there and fix the hell out of those things so they're all perfect, because there's no way one person is that perfect. We also strapped on the leaf tip and did leaves, and the teacher announced I had the touch for leaves. It's still really weird to her her say "Lorelai has the leaf touch, those look great!" and realize oh yeah, that's me!
After we'd done that, the teacher had us gather around her so she could show us how to make clowns. I have to say, it wasn't as bad as we'd been expecting. The worst part really is their creepy heads on spikes. You use the big star tip to make a stack of frosting for the body, then you squirt two legs out of the bottom and arms off the sides of the top. It was at this point that I realized that what she was making sort of looked like a rabbit, so I decided no scary clown for me. The teacher finished the clown, spiked the body with the head and sent us off to make our own clowns. I started mine, but instead of finishing it like a clown, I tried to make a bunny. Logistics failed me on this, as one of the arms didn't want to stay attached to the body and kept sliding off and my round blob of frosting wouldn't hold the ears. I think my problem was that I wanted the ears to stand up. I should have made a long eared bunny, so that the ears could spill down the back and therefore wouldn't have to defy gravity. Once my bunny was done, I moved on to putting flowers on my cake- so pretty! Let's take a look.
You're probably thinking we've reached the end of this entry and where does Brokeback Clowntain fit in? Well. D and I had been discussing how really the only way we'd feel okay making clowns would be if we did CSI: Clown College and had them all broken and jacked up and made our clown cakes look like a crime scene/horror movie. Since I'd turned my clown into a bunny, I didn't worry about doing that but D was all about going with our original idea. She made her clown's body and tried to attach one of the arms, but ran into the same problem I did, where one of the arms didn't want to stay attached. When it fell off, inspiration struck. She left it lying there, dismembered on the practice board, and made one regular leg for her clown and one broken one, then stuck the head in at a bizarre angle and piped "Ouch!" in front of it. It looked like this-
Next week is the final class, I believe. This is the class where we learn to make roses. There have been instructions in all the lessons and I think we were supposed to be learning it step by step, but our teacher thought it made more sense to learn everything all at once. So, next week will be Cake Class: The Rose Ceremony. I'm really excited about that. I mean, come on. Who doesn't like frosting roses? Other than my diabetic mother? Or dentists? Or people who don't like frosting in general? Hopefully it'll be really easy so I can be like that woman in that old commercial. "Oh! I worked so hard! No need to thank me, really!"
I should add, D didn't decorate her cake last week so this week she was determined to make it look like something, and here's how it turned out.
Our local craft store was offering "Enroll in cake class and we'll tell you that your friend comes free, but really we'll just charge you both half price, which is still a pretty sweet deal," so D talked me into enrolling with her. We were both pretty excited. I mean, we're in cake class! We're going to learn how to decorate cakes and that's just a few steps away from meeting Duff and being on Ace of Cakes and winning the love of Geoff, right?
One thing we didn't realize- cake class is really expensive! Even with the half price admission, you still have to buy the book and the box of started stuff and meringue powder and butter flavor and a sweet ass cake garrote and a turn table that will cause you and your friend to be all "I got two turn tables and a cake garrote, Where it's at!" in the middle of the store. Then you have to stock up on cake mix and go to your local bulk foods place and get a six pound tub of shortening (shudder) and what you and your husband refer to as "a baby" of powdered sugar because that thing is seven pounds and squirmy when you try to hold it. All in all, that's a lot of stuff, even using your shopper coupons from the craft store for a discount.
The first class was interesting. Apparently there were two D's and two Me's, so D and I picked cake class names. Because we're dorks, she became Sookie and I became Lorelai. Ah, Gilmore Girls. During class one, which was held in the middle of the store with a lot of loud people and children wandering around, the teacher showed us how to make buttercream frosting and frost a cake, then told us that at the next class we'd need to bring in our own cake, preferably looking like the one she just frosted. No problem, right?
Since I had all the frosting makings, I told D to come over with her cake the night before class and we'd go take care of business. Thanks to my two mixer bowls (Thanks mom!) I made me some frosting and D some frosting and we both set out to frost our cakes. I had made my cakes the night before and done like the teacher suggested, which would be bake it just a little under, then let it sit on the counter until you can touch the pans with your hands, then flip the cakes out onto a rack and stick the rack in a garbage bag. I shite thee nay, that really does make a tasty, moist cake. Then we were supposed to let the cakes rest and frost them the next day. D had made her cake that afternoon and put them in storage bags. Layer #1 got a chunk taken out of it when she tried to pull it out of the bag. Layer #2 broke in half. Not a problem, right? We can always frost it together. Except not so much.
While D had been waiting for me to finish making frosting, she was drinking a bottle of Arbor Mist sangria and watching my husband play the rabbit game on our wii. It took a while to make the frosting and she couldn't remember how to frost a cake because she'd been distracted by all the people in the store, so she waited for me to be ready to frost the cake. By the time I was ready, she'd had the whole bottle of sangria. Whoops! Her cake was a hot mess. I tried to help fix it and I thought it looked okay but the next day at cake class you could see that she'd taken off more frosting than she needed. Her cake had a few bare spots and you could see the crack down the center. Mine, on the other hand, looked like this-
We had to come with a design we wanted to put on the cake and frosting in colors for our design, as well as frosting to practice writing and star making. Then we spent half an hour making stars and making clusters of stars, which you use for character cakes, as well as long wavy lines and tight up and down swirly lines. We also learned writing, and my cake writing looks a lot nicer than my handwriting. That could quite possibly be because I was tracing what they wanted us to do.
After practicing, the teacher showed us how to make cones out of parchment triangles (which, I swear, I only achieved mine through witchcraft and sorcery. I have no idea how, I am not that spatially oriented) that we filled with piping gel, and then we traced our designs on wax paper and transferred them onto the cake. We had to fill in the designs with frosting using the techniques we'd learned in class. How did mine turn out?
This week's class will feature the freaky clown heads we originally refused to buy because, come on, clowns. Ew. I think we're going to learn more writing and more design work this week as well. Hopefully on Thursday I'll remember to write about it, instead of waiting forever.
Oh, and I took the cake in to work on Thursday. By the time the day was over, all that was left was one rather largeish piece that the Husband and I split at home. Everyone said it was good cake. Good deal. I hope they like this week's. I may have to turn it into CSI: Clown College to keep from being squicked out. We'll see.
I should throw in, I'm really enjoying cake class. I think I'll keep it up. The next level is flower making and I think you make a basket cake in one of the classes, which I think is cool and I've always wanted to try, and then after that it's fondant and gum paste, which is what they use a lot on those Food Network cake challenges and which sounds really exciting. I may go broke doing this.
