my favorite fregetable

My friend, Hannah, brought me these delicious tomatoes* from her parents’ garden in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

To prepare them for their destiny, I cut most in half, and left a few whole  for aesthetics. This process also proved to be a great litmus test for whether or not some were overripe.

Here is A Tale of Two Salads.

Part I: Insalata Caprese Success

Caprese is fancy, Italian, delicious, and foolproof. This was the first time I’d made it with small tomatoes and small cheeses. Just in case you’ve never tried, here’s how it goes:

• cherry tomatoes cut in half, salted and peppered
• mozzarella ciliegine  (meaning, the little kind) cut in half
• combine, add more S & P (I use sea salt and fresh ground black pepper)
• fresh basil tear it up, throw it in, mix it up
• balsamic vinegar sprinkle it on last minute

SO GOOD. Traditional caprese has olive oil instead of bals vin, I think.

I do realize that tomatoes are categorized as fruit, but that doesn’t set well with me. Does that mean that when you eat a pizza, it has a fruit sauce on it? Like jelly? See, it just doesn’t work.

Another thing about tomatoes, and this is really very super TRULY IMPORTANT. Don’t refrigerate them. You lose a lot of the flavor that way.

Part II: Tomato/Cucumber Salad FAIL

I appreciate that some of my favorite things are so simple, like these salads. However, I can’t tell you that this salad is also foolproof. It should be easy, right? Tomato, cucumber, red onion, garlic, S & P, a little sugar. Then you can either do a lime juice/cilantro combo, or a lemon juice/tarragon combo, or a sherry vinegar/parsley combo. My brother recently talked me through all the right steps to make this delicious, and my first attempt with lime and cilantro yielded righteous results. The second should’ve been, at least, just as good. Right? RIGHT?

Wrong. During the construction phase, my tired, tired brain temporarily replaced the word tarragon with thyme. I was about to cook some brussel sprouts, too, and the thyme was right there, and I just totally fouled it all up. I’ve been eating the results as I type this and my tongue is tingling, zinging actually, in a rather unpleasant way. Thyme absolutely does not work in this salad.

As I reflect on my attempts at the making of edible things, quite a few other failures come to mind. Following are a few highlights:

• I baked my first cake when I was four. It was a heart-shaped chocolate cake surprise for my dad. My mom gave me a slightly wet dish towel to use when pulling the cake out of the oven; thus, I burned my hand and dropped the cake on the floor.
• When I was maybe ten years old, I made this GIANT marble cake with buttercream icing for a church potluck. You ice the cake with a tip that makes the icing come out in all these little strings, and then I don’t remember how we made the “meatballs,” but you get the point that it’s a spaghetti and meatballs cake. I left the sugar out of the cake part. Uh huh. So I iced it anyway, served it as it was, and hoped no one would notice.
• Just a few years ago, while broiling a hamburger, my house inexplicably filled with smoke. I opened the broiler and nothing was on fire–oh wait. Once I had the sense to check the main part of the oven, I saw my leather mary-janes  roasting, smoking, and dripping away. I’d forgotten I set them in there a few days before so they’d dry out from a dash in the rain. The burger was like, rubber smoke flavored. The oven was never quite the same, emitting the same rubber smoke odor with each use. And I ruined an $80 pair of shoes.
• About a year ago, when doubling my favorite brownie recipe so as to feed an army of brownie-hungry zombies**, I absentmindedly doubled everything but the sugar, so they rose a bunch more than they should, looking and tasting like slightly bitter chocolate cakes. I bought a tub of icing, citing that trick from when I was ten, and proceeded to let people think they were fancy, bitter-chocolate cupcakes, just slightly beyond their palates.
• Also at the approximate age of four, I asked my mom for some orange juice and was denied, with the lame excuse that there was no more. Sooner than later, I spied with my little eye, an orange juice container on the stovetop. Quickly, because my mom had already said no and I knew I was doing wrong, I stretched my chubby arms straight up to the carton and tipped it toward my face. I enjoyed not only a mouthful, but a face and dress full of warm bacon grease. Yummy. Kids, you should listen to your parents.

Ok, that last story’s not even really about cooking, but I had to include it because it’s another example of me being “graceless” in the kitchen. Plus, I find it to be totally hilarious.

And you know what? I treasure my screw up stories. It was unfun to eat that thyme/tom/cuc salad. It was even less fun to kinda sorta admit what I had done to my genius chef brother. But I’ve created a pretty lasting taste memory of uncooked thyme.

I’m not really winding down to the punchy last line or twist like I thought I would here. I guess my point is one we already know. Success is great for recipes,  but failure is great for stories.

*also pictured: my reflection

**some details may have been embellished to keep things interesting

al a mode

Fyi, I am in the process of editing past blogs to include all of the recipes I’ve used. I wasn’t doing this at first because I was nervous about copyright stuff, and very much wanted to respect the culinary creativity that went into crafting the original recipes.

However, after much deliberation and the encouragement of a few friends, I decided my blog will be more useful if I actually include the recipes in the posts. I am still giving credit where credit is due. I’m also including my modifications either in italics or colored type, to show that I have kind of made the recipes mine in some way.

What do you think? Is it okay to post other people’s recipes? It seems especially fine if they are on the internet, but what if they are from a cookbook?

superhappyfuntimegirlsonlypotlucksleepover

On Saturday:

It is a strange feeling, indeed, to simultaneously experience ab soreness from working out and stomach pains from overindulging in cookie dough. I’m not sure exactly why, but I absolutely adore cookie dough and think it is probably the answer to all life’s question, including why we exist. Salmonella be damned. I will eat cookie dough as long as I have  strength to lift the spoon to my mouth. Or dig my fingers in the mixing bowl, depending on who’s watching.

So my friend Lynn, who is an extremely talented vocalist and very possibly the sexiest woman in Memphis, is hosting a sleepover tonight, and actually mailed out invitations. My friend Karen does this, too. But in the days of Facebook and Evites, my socks are still kinda blown off when I get something in the mail. The invites to this event were in code, too.

NY Times Choco Chip Cookies also pictured.

Darling. We need more stuff like this in life.

All nine invitees were asked to bring different things. Those who are not known for their cooking skills were assigned to bring booze, and I, of course, was assigned dessert. I’m getting a reputation, which I am totally psyched about. While mulling over what would be appropriate sleepover food, all I could come up with from junior high days were things like Twizzlers and Reeses Pieces. Then it hit me.

It seems like the cut and bake cookie thing started around the time I was in my sleepover prime. By the time we were ready for dessert, our moms had gone to bed and couldn’t discourage us from eating raw eggs. Hence, it is very possible that my affair with eating cookie dough actually first sparked at some such sleepover.

So. What would be more fitting for a sleepover than chocolate chip cookies? But an adult sleepover should have cookies for an adult palate; hence, I used a recipe from the New York Times that calls for bread flour, cake flour, and sea salt, just to name a few ingredients. To be completely fair, I found the article and the recipe though Orangette.

One of the sleepover attendees, Vanessa, is vegan, so I hit up Vegan With a Vengeance again for a recipe, and decided to try Coconut Cupcakes. They are actually baking right now as I start this blog. The batter, like the cookie dough, was delicious, and tasted a lot like rice pudding somehow. But I did restrain myself enough to sample a mere finger full, since the recipe only makes 12 cupcakes. The use of coconut milk as both flavor and binding agent is absolutely genius. So simple and obvious, yet I wouldn’t have thought of it myself. I want to try it with other non-coconut themed recipes and see how it goes.

I’ve never written a blog while I was involved in the baking process. I kind of like doing it this way, but can’t imagine that I will have the luxury very often.

And now it is Wednesday:

The cookies were amazing. Totally worth the effort and almost as good as the dough.

The cupcakes, also, were great. And really, extremely, very sweet. But in a good way.

This is probably the best photo from the evening (notice how Amy and Diana are posing like the girls on the box):

NY Times Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted by Orangette from The New York Times, David Leite, and Jacques Torres

2 cups minus 2 Tbsp. (8 ½ oz.) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 ½ oz.) bread flour
1 ¼ tsp. baking soda
1 ½ tsp. baking powder

1 ½ tsp. course salt, such as
kosher (definitely use kosher salt in this one)
2 ½ sticks (1 ¼ cups; 10 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
1 ¼ cups (10 oz.) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp. (8 oz.) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ¼ pounds bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks, preferably about 60% cacao content, such as Ghirardelli (I went for the Ghirardelli chips and was very pleased)

Sea salt, such as Maldon (any sea salt will do)

Combine flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Whisk well; then set aside.

Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars until very light and fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Reduce the mixer speed to low; then add dry ingredients, and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate chips, and mix briefly to incorporate. Press plastic wrap against the dough, and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. The dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours. I refrigerated mine for about 48 hours, then let the dough sit out for about 2 hours before I baked.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F. Remove the bowl of dough from the refrigerator, and allow it to soften slightly. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat.

Using a standard-size ice cream scoop–I just used a big tablespoon–scoop six mounds of dough onto the baking sheet, making sure to space them evenly. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt, and bake until golden brown but still soft, 15 to 20 minutes. It took closer to 20 minutes in my oven. Transfer the baking sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then transfer the cookies onto the rack to cool a bit more.

Repeat with remaining dough.

Makes about 24 (5-inch) cookies, if you don’t eat half the dough first.

Vegan Coconut Cupcakes

recipe forthcoming

Mardi Gras consolation prize brunch

After dodging a sinus infection for about a month, it finally hit me last week. On Wednesday night, cold medicine + anxiousness over field agency day rendered me unable to sleep. So I got up in the middle of the night and made a brunch menu according to recent cravings and an inventory of supplies on hand.

By the weekend I was feeling much better but I did the adult thing and opted out of a trip to NOLA so I could fully recover. Instead I utilized my brunch menu on Saturday morning and had a few friends over, despite the fact that it felt weird to have brunch on a Saturday. This makes me wonder: why do most restaurants in Memphis only offer brunch on Sunday? I don’t think this is the case in other cities.

My quest to make good banana bread is followed closely by a quest to make good zucchini bread. The coffee shop in my neighborhood sells awesome zucchini bread, but at $2.75/slice, I’m better off making my own. I’ve made it before, but it was more of a quick bread, whereas I was looking for something a bit more solid. This time I used a recipe from epicurious that had a bunch of mixed reviews, but it turned out great, and was more of a dense, breakfast-y dessert with coffee kind of thing. I didn’t modify the recipe, but followed it exactly, making sure to beat the heck out of the wet ingredients before I mixed in the dry ones. I had a little trouble turning the loaves out of the pans, I think because I waited only ten minutes after taking them out of the oven as the recipe said. Next time I would wait until they were mostly cool. Otherwise, I would highly recommend trying the recipe. Both loaves were fully consumed in about 24 hours. My-mom-the-seasoned-and-amazing-baker’s comment was that it was “sophisticated.”

Here’s the full brunch menu:

omelet with fresh mozz, sauteed yellow onion and garlic, and either portobello mushrooms or fresh spinach (my roommate, Court, doesn’t like mushrooms)

turkey sausage with horseradish cheddar

baked rosemary sweet potato “home fries”

fresh fruit salad

zucchini walnut bread

And a picture of the table:

Of course, beverages included the standard coffee, mimosas, and bloody Marys. Diana makes bloody Marys with garlic powder, in addition to all of the traditional spices, which I thought was a very tasty trick.

adaptation wars: Towelhead v. Shopaholic

Ok, so there’s not really any competition. Towelhead and Confessions of a Shopaholic absolutely cannot be compared, nor could they fight each other in a book/movie version of Celebrity Deathmatch. But, in the interest of evaluating the art of [/tragedy of] adaptation, I’m writing about both in the same post.

First off, I shall say that the movie is virtually never as good as or better than the book. Two exceptions are Shopgirl and Fight Club. Aside from these rare flicks, the best a movie adaptation can hope for is catching the spirit of the book and making the story into another art form–something visual, albeit watered down. Maybe it is my preference for reading, but in my opinion, books tend to make stronger impressions than movies.

So. About a month ago, after getting Hannah to read it, too, we rented the freshly released on dvd movie adaptation of Alicia Erian’s Towelhead. The book, while cleanly and smartly written, is tough to get through. Jasira, the main character, is a barely pubescent target for all kinds of sexual ownership and predatorship. Even worse, it seems she has never experienced real love from anyone, parents especially.

The movie, however, was, how do I put this? Funny. Still shocking, but definitely humorous. The adaptation was very true to the events of the book, but was ultimately a hollow echo of the spirit of the book. What a disappointment. Even though at a couple points I had to put the novel down, with concerns that I may not be able to pick it back up, I was rewarded by its blunt confrontation of how shitty, and how unexpectedly lovely, people can be. The movie made too much light of the many many complex societal problems in the book. I expected a little more from Alan Ball, but maybe I am being unfairly harsh. Maybe a movie that accurately caught and portrayed the spirit of this particular book would be too hard to watch.

An opposite experience in seventyeleven ways, I saw the movie adaptation of Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic in theatres this past Sunday. The spirit of the book and Shopaholic series was certainly reflected in this silly movie. But, good lord, the details were completely mutilated. The setting was moved from London to NYC, which sucked out the fun element of all the British slang peppering the book. The movie makes Becky Bloomwood, the main character, a little too successful and charming. The emphasis on Becky’s flaws is really what makes the books so winning and hilarious. In brief, Hollywood took Kinsella’s somehow fresh take on genre fiction and fit it into the blockbuster slapstickchickflickromacomedy mold. Which is to be expected and is ultimately ok. But again, I found myself a bit disappointed.

Also related to adaptation, whatever happened to the movie version of The Time-Traveler’s Wife?

it’s your party and I’ll cry if I want to

Anna, Hannah, and Liz’s big triple bday party was another occasion wherein I baked two things in one day and made myself crazy late to the event itself. Oops. I need to work on my timing.

First off, I discovered my hatred for zesting lemons with a grater when making vegan lemon cupcakes from Vegan with a Vengeance, a very accessible vegan cookbook with totally respectable desserts. Hannah’s lovely boyfriend Drew is vegan, and I’ve finally stopped apologizing for baking stuff with eggs and butter and started experimenting with vegan recipes.

They turned out phenomenal. Drew told me he had five. I believe he also said they made him cry. I love getting a sincere reaction.

The very non-vegan cake was a crumbly cocoa-buttermilk cake with chocolate malt icing. And lemme tell ya, no where that I could find in the city of Memphis sells malt powder. I guess I could’ve checked at a Steak and Shake, but it takes a lot to get me out to the suburbs. I ended up getting some malt crisps at Mary Carter Paints, so I ground the hell out of them with a food processor to add the malt flavor to the icing. Still unsatisfied with the malt flavor saturation level, I added malt crisps to the top of the cake, which fortunately added a festive air.

This recipe is also from Dorrie Greenspan’s Baking book. People need to start reminding me to take photos of the sliced cake!

The cake was extremely crumbly, which makes me unsure of whether or not I overbaked it a bit.

And here are the beautiful birthday girls, just after blowing out the candles.

substitutions allowed

I have done a LOT of baking in the past month. A boat load.

The last occasion I baked for is now safely over a week past, so I feel I can regroup and make a little time to blog about all this baking.

The last event was Anna and Sean’s baby shower, aka, shower for Baby Boy George. It nearly killed me. I baked all day. In addition to the more formal dessert, I made my favorite brownies as a sort of secondary dessert/plan B if I effed up the cake.

The cake was the “Perfect Party Cake” from Dorrie Greenspan’s book, which I received for my birthday and have been making good use of. She generally describes things really clearly, and in great detail, although she left a couple of steps out on this one. As did I. So it’s not completely Dorrie’s fault.

Basically, baking the two lemon cakes was pretty simple, though I detest zesting lemons and still don’t own a lemon zester. I was really nervous about cutting the cakes lengthwise to get the four layers, but even that wasn’t so bad. The trial was in the frosting.

Perhaps overly proud of myself for making a perfect-looking swiss meringue buttercream, I cavalierly began slathering the raspberry jam layer over the first cleanly vivisected cake layer. Oops. I had black raspberry jam instead of the normal raspberry, so the dark color was a bit shocking. Then, after plunking a generous dollop of buttercream on top, I realized that there seemed to be no chance of keeping the jam and the buttercream nicely layered like in the picture, and that everything was going to mix up and look runny and weird.

When things like this happen to me while making food, little memory ghosts poke my brain in uncomfortable places. I know my mom has lectured me on all this stuff, including how not to get crumbs in the icing when frosting, but all I get are the memory ghost pokes (that’s what she said) but no actual memory of instructions. When this occurs, sometimes I call my mom for help and sometimes I suck it up and see if I can make something that feels really wrong work out anyway.

After barely making the rest of the buttercream stretch around the outside of the assembled cake, I was totally late to the shower. And. I realized I had forgotten to include both the vanilla and the lemon juice in the buttercream.

After a mild freak-out and the inevitable phone call to mom, I made a glaze out of the lemon juice and just poured it all over the cake.  It worked out great, but since I had to rush to the shower and didn’t have a container that sealed, I got glaze all over my jeans from holding the cake on my lap in the car. I was a lovely sight when I walked into the very crowded, co-ed party.

Here is an ok picture of the cake before cut. You can see what I mean about the glaze. You can also see a brownie in the lower right-hand corner, which many are wont to call cupcakes because of their shape.

I am sosuperbummed that I did not take a picture of it sliced, because it did look quite nice, even though I mixed the jam and the buttercream a bit. It tasted amazing, too. Expensive almost. The best part was that the entire cake was gone in approximately five minutes from the time I began cutting it.

Bananas!

When your roommate throws away your old bananas, God opens a window. What I mean to say is, I think it’s a good thing that I had time to think this over.

Any attempt I make at baking or cooking guarantees laboring in the shadow of my genius baker/cake decorator mother and fabulous chef brother. I’m generally ok with that, but thoughts of mom and Jonathan do cause me to be extremely critical of whatever comes out of the oven or skillet.

Previous attempts at both banana and zucchini bread have been mediocre at best, so when my roommate Bo offered me some old bananas, I was ready to try again. I looked up a recipe, got some stuff together, procrastinated a couple of days, and lo and behold, the bananas were gone. I seriously considered going through my trash for them, but had an unexpected moment wherein I drew the line.

Upon conversation with Court, my other roommate, I discovered that he had kindly attempted to dispose of what he thought was waste. This was a blessing since I had time to really research the recipe and meditate on the process while the replacement bananas got to the right state.* Well, maybe that’s exaggerating just a bit.

BUT. I did make the best banana bread I’ve ever made. Totally delicious and [part of] the reason I am on a diet this week. What has been eluding me in previous attempts was the heavy quality that really great bb normally has. Mine, however, turned out more springy than heavy, but not airy at all. I am actually more pleased by this result than if I had gotten a heavy bread.

The recipe I used is thanks to epicurious. My substitutions are as follows:

1 cup pure cane suger, 1 cup light brown sugar

1 full tsp. cinnamon

1/2 cup veg. oil, 1/2 cup applesauce

1/4 cup light sour cream instead of crème fraîche

nix the walnuts

add 1 and 1/2 cups bourbon soaked raisins** last

top unbaked muffins or bread with pecan pieces

I made muffins instead of loaves. They were perfect in a 350° oven for 25 minutes.

*It is a misconception that bananas should be black or rotten to make good banana bread. The goal is very ripe bananas without them being totally mooshy.  I also prefer to use fresh bananas rather than freezing and using later.

**Put raisins in a microwaveable container and add a couple ounces of bourbon. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and microwave until bourbon is bubbling. Remove container, leaving plastic wrap. Remove plastic wrap after several minutes, when most of the bourbon has absorbed into the raisins. The plastic wrap will have sunk pretty far into the container. Be warned, this all smells kind of gross, even to a bourbon lover such as I.